The Western Lands (10 page)

In Mexico City, Kim finds work in a weapon store and devises variations on the Maquahuitl. This is the only effective Aztec weapon, consisting of obsidian chips set in wood, the usual shape being rather like a cricket bat. The sharp edges of broken glass with the weight of the hardwood handle, and an advanced warrior, a Blood Glutton or an Armed Scorpion, could cut both feet from under his opponent with a single swipe of his Maq.  . . . Kim made Maquahuitls of many shapes, some in the form of long whips of flexible wood . . . or slotted into an arc of wood with a crosspiece to fit the hand . . . can be kept concealed . . . one blow to the throat . . . and flails with obsidian chips sewed into leather thongs that can be dipped in poison.

Kim liked to lose himself in the market, floating along with the crowd. The blood lust, evil and cruelty that rises from the poisoned soil is exhilarating . . . the smell of pulque and urine, open sewage ditches, peppers, tortillas and roasting meat, faces of a vast somber dream . . . faces of burnished copper, eyes blazing with fierce savage innocence . . . coffee-colored flesh smelling of vanilla, a gardenia behind his ear, faces vile and brutish, swollen with cold dead malevolence, an armless beggar catches a disdainfully flicked crust of bread in his teeth.

The young noble moves on, surrounded by his retinue of bodyguards and flute players . . . the crowd eddies into circles around performers and musicians . . . a juggler throws flint knives into the air . . . a mime troupe does a sacrifice act. They set up a pyramid of wooden boxes. Now the prisoner is brought in. He goes through a vile pantomime of abject fear. He is dragged to the altar. A priest plunges in the knife and blood gushes out. The onlookers snort and bray with laughter sharp as flint knives in sunlight.

As he walks Kim keeps his mind blank as a mirror with nothing to reflect. He gives no one reason to see him. Suddenly raw hot fear rises from the ground and flares out of booths. He knows what has happened. He has carried emptiness to the breaking point. He has been seen. A man stops directly in his path and stares. Others stop, pointing and shouting a word he does not understand:
"Dindin!"

Eyes converge, flaring with red waves of hate and loathing.

With his hand Maquahuitl, Kim throws a straight punch at the man in front of him and cuts his throat to the spine. He sprints up an alley. A man grabs his arm. He lashes back, feeling the tendons snap under the glass . . . over a wall . . . into a garden . . . through a doorway. He can hear the pursuers fanning out on both sides. Kim pulls a shawl from his shoulderbag over his head and smears his hand in dog excrement. As pursuers round the corner he crouches by a mud wall, holding out his stained hands.

"Baksheesh! Baksheesh, Reverent Speakers!"

One man spits on him as they race by. Kim waits, holding out his stinking hand. The mob is trooping back, passes him muttering the Word. The Word he cannot understand . . . dark mindless faces pointing bray with laughter. 

"Smell the roses, Dindin."

Faces flaring sulphurous malevolence . . . scorpion disease knowing staring his way now.

"Seen!"

A straight punch over a wall . . . stops under a cypress by the canal. He washes his dogshit hand first then the blood from his clothes and then his faithful Maq. He is pleased to find some throat gristle clinging to the black chips. They cut and break on bone and every break is a new cut, a new edge.

Kim, feeling eyes on his back like any old John Wayne cowboy, turns without haste, hand slipping into his obsidian glove.

A little green man is standing there. Smooth marbly green, his jade eyes slit sideways like a cat. He gives off a green smell of worn stone.

"Must leave at once.
Seen.
Follow."

Over a bridge smooth glide tilting the ground falling forward through maize fields frogs croaking reached a river high and muddy over the banks. The guide parts bushes at the water's edge to reveal a craft, a light raft lashed to two canoes. They get in the boat and push off into the muddy current.

4

Kim knows he is dead. But he isn't in the Western Lands or any approximation.

He receives a summons from the District Supervisor.

"So how come I'm not the Supervisor? After all, I
wrote
the Supervisor."

"No you didn't. You
discovered
the Supervisor. Or rather, you found out where the Supervisor is written and read it back. Writers don't write, they read and transcribe something already written. So you read orders, which are then conveyed through your spokesman, the Supervisor. The Imam. The Old Man."

"So I am the man for a very important and, you may add, very dangerous assignment?"

The D.S. permitted himself a narrow smile.

"I thought my last assignment was of the same category."

"It was, and a proper hash you made of it. Your job now is to find the Western Lands. Find out how the Western Lands are created. Where the Egyptians went wrong and bogged down in their stinking mummies. Why they needed to preserve the physical body."

Kim gives him the textbook answer: "Because they had not solved the equation imposed by a parasitic female Other Half who needs a physical body to exist, being parasitic on other bodies. So to maintain the Other Half in the style to which she has for a million years been accustomed, they turn to the reprehensible and ill-advised expedient of vampirism.

"If, on the other hand, the Western Lands are reached by the contact of two males, the myth of duality is exploded and the initiates can realize their natural state. The Western Lands is the natural, uncorrupted state of all male humans. We have been seduced from our biologic and spiritual destiny by the Sex Enemy."

The D.S. turns to a Russian Commissar. "You see the man is well instructed."

"Straight thinking," grates a five-star general.

Tony Outwaite pokes at the fire with effeminate discontent. He picks up a pair of fire tongs, selects a coal no bigger than a walnut and moves it to another spot in the fire. "We are interested in very specific considerations—technical data, something that
works
—not these vague, vapid blatherings. We want the Western Land
blueprints.
Needless to say, they are closely guarded, perhaps the most closely guarded secret on the planet, the ultimate biologic and spiritual weapon that undercuts all other weapons. Paradise to the people . . . or at least to those who are capable of accepting paradise and paying the price. Have to pay the Piper, you know. Or you may find he'll pipe to another fashion."

The D.S. handed Kim a piece of deerskin with a picture on it. Kim felt the horror and disgust rising from the parchment.

"Fragment of an ancient Mayan codex. Much earlier than the Dresden."

The drawing was crudely done in reds and yellows that looked like a faded tattoo: a man strapped to a couch. A huge centipede, six feet in length, is curling over the bound figure.

"The Centipede God. At one time these monster centipedes existed and were fed on human flesh. Your job is to return to this period and—"

"Do a Moses in the bulrushes?"

"Yes. You see, the monsters were created by exposing normal-size centipedes to certain radiations. It could happen again ... in fact will happen, unless your mission succeeds."

June 13, 1982. Sunday. At the Stone House. Looking out through the pane of glass by the front door at the weeds and trees and bushes, I can see quite clearly a high stone wall overgrown with vines, more green than white, and an ancient stone building, also overgrown. It is a simple structure of one story, about twenty feet wide, with a slanting roof.

It is physically painful to enter the medium where I can see this, a strain, a dislocation. The building looks the way this stone farmhouse could look after five hundred years without any human presence ... a dead silent green, menacing and oppressive.

What happened here?

Well, I reckon it all started in Hill City. Population 173 . . . 172. Don't matter. It's the 173rd, Old Man Potter, that matters—not that he lived right in Hill City, God forbid. He lived about four miles out and another half mile off the county road in a little stone house he made himself, been out there twenty years they say. Nobody knows where he come from. He used to come into town once a month to get supplies and we all thought that was once a month too often.

Now Mars Hardy runs the general store and a nicer, kinder man never lived. He's nice to the black people, the Indians and the Chinese railroad workers, but he just couldn't be nice to old man Potter. Nobody could.

"Anything else, Mr. Potter?" he'd ask, and he'd be thinking, I just want him out of my store as quick as possible.

And Old Man Potter would just duck his head and
scuttle
out—that was another thing about him nobody could stand, the way he moved, very quick and silent. Winter and summer he wore a long black coat, it was like the coat just sort of scuttled along with him inside it.

Just what was so wrong about Old Man Potter? Well, none of us could say. I couldn't stand to have him near me, and the sheriff said, "I'd rather kill him than touch him."

We weren't even curious about him, that is, not until young Tim arrived with one small suitcase. His mother and father had died of scarlet fever and young Tim came to live with the Parkers, who were relatives, and that boy was into everything. So when Old Man Potter rode into town, Tim went out to the house and looked around inside.

"Funny house," he reported to the Parkers. "Niches instead of windows, must get cold in the winter. And there's another building, always locked, about eighteen by twenty, with windows in it, but the blinds are always drawn."

Tim could see no signs that Potter had ever done any farming, not even a vegetable garden. But Potter always paid in cash, so he must have brought a pot of money with him. Tim was not interested in theft. He was interested in data. He sent away for burglars' tools, and one day he picked the lock on the outbuilding and got in.

He couldn't see at first, because of the drawn blinds, so he went around and let them up. And what he saw then sent him running back down the hill.

"My God, you know what he's got up there? Cases full of
centipedes,
some of them two foot long like!"

"Well, when he finds the blinds up he'll know someone was in there and saw it," said Mr. Parker.

"So much the better," says the sheriff. "Maybe he'll just clear off."

"And leave all those critters up there to get loose?"

"What are we waiting for?"

We was on our horses and on the road in half an hour with cans of industrial alcohol and some dynamite. We intended to burn the place out, would have been glad to throw Old Man Potter into the fire 'cept none of us could bear to touch him, so we'll shoot him and then burn the carcass.

But we are too late. Old Man Potter must have sensed something, doubled back and turned his centipedes loose.

We get off our horses, advancing cautiously, guns at the ready, when Mr. Hardy lets out a yell.

"My God, somethin' bit me!"

And there on his leg is a six-inch centipede covered with hair, looked like it was growing into him. We had to pull it off in pieces and he is half out of his mind screaming he is burning and beating his head against the ground. Well, he dies, and we hightail it out of there. Gallagher got bitten too, and only the four of us made it back to town.

The centipedes spread throughout the area. There was no antidote for the poison, but one victim with a very light dose recovered and said it was like being in a white-hot oven, torn to pieces by giant centipedes. You could tell just by watching it was the most horrible death anyone could suffer. The 'pedes spread further and further, cases turning up in Michigan, Minnesota, Illinois, Ohio, Nebraska. Seemed it would never stop, but it did sorta level off in certain areas, which nobody could understand—maybe they are all dead in there.

And they finally built the Quarantine Wall, way ahead of the centipedes—they hope—after teams with protective clothing checked it out. The wall is considered impossible to get over. There are electrical barriers, toxic barriers, glue barriers. Of course they dropped tons of pesticide over the area, but you could never get them all.

Lots of talk now. Some say it's all a hoax to starve the poor and keep the best land for themselves. Yep, there's talk of moving in and building behind the Wall.

The island of Esmeraldas is known for its large centipedes, said to attain, on occasion, the incredible length of fifteen inches. There is considerable disagreement as to the danger to humans from a centipede bite, and to the best of my knowledge no precise analysis or classification of the venom has been carried out. We have all heard the story that centipedes carry venomous spines in each leg, leaving a trail of rotten, gangrenous flesh behind them. I think we can dismiss this as mythology. The bite of a centipede is inflicted by a pair of forcipules that grow from the first trunk segment, and not by the legs.

However, there is some factual basis for this lurid story. A doctor with a practice in Puerto Rico told me he had treated centipede bites. The bite produces a localized necrosis which, if untreated, can lead to gangrene. The remedy is surgical excision of the affected area, and washing out the cavity with a disinfectant solution. Then a light, porous dressing is applied. He surmised that the centipede venom may be related to the poison of the brown recluse spider, common throughout the midwestern and southern United States. Fatalities are rare, and usually occasioned by secondary infection of necrotic tissue.

Data on centipede venom is scattered and often contradictory. Tables showing the precise relative potencies of snake venoms, with lethal dosages, annual fatalities and percent of recoveries are readily available, and there is considerable information on scorpion and spider venoms. But one must scrabble about for centipede data. Fortunately, I number among my friends a young man named Dean Ripa, who could have stepped from the pages of a Joseph Conrad novel.

Dean is a snake-catcher by profession, selling his reptiles to zoos and private collectors. It is very dangerous and poorly paid work. He has been bitten three times and can barely recoup the expenses of his trips to far-off places in search of the venomous snakes. On one long journey to Ghana, the big chief of the tribe died the day that Dean arrived in the village, and Dean was lucky to escape with his life. It was around the time of this trip that he wrote the following letter in answer to my inquiries concerning the venom.

   My dear Hall, in regard to your question about centipedes: there are about 3,000 species. They range from about 1cm in diameter up to about 30cm in length; from 15 pairs of legs to about 177 pairs. For prédation they possess a pair of venom glands with forcipules at the first trunk segment. They are bilaterally symmetrical, of course, metamerically segmented animals with a double ventral nerve cord, typically with a ganglion in each segment and concentrations of nervous tissue above and below the gut at the ass-end of the body. Centipedes are sexually dimorphic. Also, the external genitalia of males are often concealed within the anal segment, so that the sex may not easily be determined. Slight pressure will, however, often cause them to evert, thus allowing the sex to be determined.

  But you wanted to know about the venom. There is an extensive but scattered literature concerning the effects on Man. Instances of death from bites of scolopendrids were reported in the older literature, but recent authors are inclined not to credit the reports; since the aggressor was not actually seen, it may have been a scorpion or a snake. There is the tale of the large centipede that crawled across the abdomen and chest of a Confederate army officer, leaving a number of deep red spots forming a broad red streak. Violent, painful convulsions soon set in, accompanied by excessive swelling of the bitten areas. The man was dead two days later.

   The bite of the European
Scolopendra cingulata
causes pain, and at worst inflammation, edema and superficial necrosis, but the pain goes quickly and the symptoms disappear in a few days. A fellow named Klingel was bitten some thirty times by this type. In twenty-six cases the only symptom was pain, which disappeared in about twenty minutes. In the other four cases the pain was more severe, like a wasp's sting, and the hand and arm became numb, with some pain in the neck and chest. These symptoms abated after a day or two. Sometimes the animal bit painlessly, especially an hour after killing mealworms.

   The bite of
S. hews
is said to cause intense pain, and the animal also produces a red streak where it has crawled over the body.
S. subpinipes
produces intense pain, blistering, swelling, local inflammation, buboes and subcutaneous hemorrhage.
S. viridicornis
in South America causes pain for eight hours and small superficial necroses after twelve days. There are many more such accounts: vomiting, headache, swelling of a large area around the bite, which had a blackish center, subcutaneous bleeding, etc.

   Apparently India, Burma and Ceylon have one of the worst species; the recovery from bites is slow, sometimes as long as three months. Every case seen developed acute lymphangitis with edema, as well as inflammation of the skin and subcutaneous tissues. In most cases a local necrotic process developed at the site of the bite, and in some cases this progressed to a condition not unlike phagedenic ulceration (a rapidly spreading and sloughing ulcer).

   The most serious symptoms followed the bites of the Andaman Islands species, which can reach a length of about 33cm. Klingel found that animals that had not fed for several days could bite harmlessly and therefore the lack of poison could not be ascribed to lack of poison in the glands. Poor Klingel: I wonder if he used himself for that one too. The only well-authenticated fatality appears to be that of a child of seven years, bitten on the head by a
Scolopendra
in the Philippines.

The effects of the bite of the
Scolopendra
vary with the time of year. In winter the bite causes, at most, a small pimple that disappears in an hour. In spring, when centipedes are active, a bite causes inflammation which can last for up to three days, and a bite on the finger can cause the hand and lower half of the forearm to become swollen.