“Stop!” he whispered in the shadow, his eye catching the pale glint of light upon the knife.
But dark imaginings now overwhelmed his mind. Violation and bloody murder cut into the perfect flesh of Lilly Quarrie and sundered the not-so-prim Miss James.
He squinted at the gleam of light upon his flashing blade as he slashed at the air around him.
“Joseph!” he wept the word, but it did not stop a tide of ugliness that reduced him to tears.
He was a scientist—a trained biologist—all but impossible to shock with the truth, but the carnal images and depraved acts that flooded his mind colored him to the hairline—made him ashamed to call himself the name of civilized man.
Van Resen raised his free hand quivering and brought it hard against his sweat-streaked cheek. Again he did this, and again, until he staggered back!
So he struck himself again, and still again!
Until his mind reformed around the stinging pain, and with his returning self control the polluting images shattered and drained away as a black torrent to pool at his feet with the fog.
He was left standing with heart pounding in the shadowed grove.
“Remarkable,” he whimpered, setting his teeth before peering around, seeking the way he had come in. A thrill of terror went through him.
He could not see any path or the clearing beyond. Nothing looked familiar there. Nothing but the shadow, and the strange flickering light that had returned with the stink of decay.
Until a sudden breeze blew from somewhere outside the grove, and with a woody click and knock of high dead branches a tangle of limbs shifted aside momentarily to show the lambent field within the many angled openings formed by the action.
“And yet, the path I took was straight,” Van Resen said aloud, which contradicted the sight he now beheld.
The scientist oriented himself to face the center of the forest and groaned to see that it was darker there—that the fog lay deep among the oldest trees; and just as he considered time itself deforming within the murky wood, a flicker of blue-green light and then another floated up over first one and then more distant trees.
These glimmerings diminished as they came near the heights, but those that followed were brighter, and some larger, all of them growing more human in shape as shadows or spirits.
“A trick of the eye, Joseph,” he warned himself, before pausing to peer down into the dark fog at his feet.
He gasped, for through the misty black he could see his shoes, but twisted within the swollen tangles of gray roots beneath them were yellow bones broken and split, and the skeletons they’d once comprised had been torn to pieces and were all but impossible to identify other than by the broad stroke as classification: one round and sharp toothed, the skull of a carnivorous beast; another long and hoofed, the leg of a gazelle; and still another was narrow and bowed, the arching rib of a shuffling beast unknown—a diseased man or ape.
All of this he saw as the fog grew more agitated, and its touch more chill. Like the ghost of a pond was it becoming, sloshing at his knees as he moved forward pushing spectral white rivulets and waves aside that crested and washed the greasy tree trunks as it churned.
And as this fog thickened, so too had the trees grown older, their trunks broader and scabrous bark more decayed; until ahead he saw standing center to the whirling tide of shadow the largest moringa tree, its sickly bark shining with disease and slime, and running with yellow corruption like pus.
The old trees closest leaned out from its trunk, forming angles around a central depression, and about this washed the sickly fog.
Girding his courage with denials of what stood plainly there before his eyes, Van Resen hurried forward through the ghostly lake, his feet plunking heavily as he moved.
The blade of his butcher knife had gone gray in the dark. He seemed to be going blind—no more tricks.
And then beneath his feet many bones shone dully with an inner light, but they required no more illumination for the doctor to identify. Human bones by the thousands were sunk there at his feet, and yet his boots passed through them.
Forward Van Resen struggled, until he drew near the greatest moringa. There the mist stank of a hundred corpses where it smothered the deep tree roots. Climbing over the closest buttress, the scientist found himself crouched in the freezing mist, his feet going numb with cold, but he could not move.
Something was there beneath the phantom waters—a narrow span some two feet long made of worn steel squares decorated with faded enamel.
Slipping his knife away, Van Resen dropped to his knees by the thing, and pulled it from the murk to gaze upon it unobstructed. Framed in rusted metal this armored sheet was pierced by a grated vent with ornate dials to either side that opened and closed the dampers.
Dials that had been worked into a familiar shape.
The scientist shouted in terror as the pieces of the puzzle fell into position in his mind, and arranged themselves in place. The truth began to take shape in his brain and its character filled him with horror.
“Impossible!” the scientist cried over the marker in his hands. “It cannot be!”
CHAPTER 26 – Death and Dreams
“So the River Demon is dead!” Capan Seetree barked in his hybrid Bakwaniri dialect, doing his best to master the fearful quaver in his voice. Even dead, the hideous thing held a dread fascination for those who looked upon it, or so he had been assured by the ship’s sir-jon.
Seetree certainly felt it.
The Johnnies had hung the severed head up from lines on the mainmast for all to see. Its single eye was open and unnerved any that its lifeless gaze fell upon, especially the capan. His dreams had been getting worse of late. About his daughter they were and the thing that ate her coming for him.
All that thinking of vengeance had put Seetree in the middle of it, and there were few nights he could sleep through without a belly full of grog.
But here the murdering beast was dead, and its other eye gone, with most of the face a drooling mass of decaying flesh.
As the prize had been set up for all to see, the demon’s mouth had dropped open to show long yellow fangs, and a rotten gorge that so many poor hearty maids had disappeared into.
Anger at his daughter’s fate caused the capan to growl whenever he looked at the demon’s head, but his rancor weighed slightly less than his fear.
It wasn’t any special trait to set him apart as coward, since few of his crew would go near the thing, so deeply had its bloody reign affected their minds.
“You must not touch this, Capan,” the sir-jon had warned him unnecessarily after studying it through his magical devices. “The sun will set soon and a dark spirit lingers that is hungry for your power. It is distant, but it would come for you, if it felt your presence.”
“I have taken precautions,” the capan said, pointing up to his hut where a figure stood on the overhanging porch. “The fust has returned to station, and so he will remain while there is danger.”
“Aye, Capan,” the sir-jon said, somewhat haltingly, casting a glance at the fly-covered demon head. “It is wise.”
The maggots at work beneath the thing’s flesh caused the skin around its remaining eye to twitch and Seetree almost cried out, of a certain he took a step back.
“The demon is dead?” the startled capan pressed his wizard, cold sweat trickling between his narrow shoulder blades.
“Its flesh is dead,” the sir-jon reassured, standing erect and holding his trembling hands high. “But creatures like this die slower than what comes of earth like you and me.”
“The River Demon is dead!” Capan Seetree shouted again the rallying cry to his crew, and to bolster his own courage with a bit of verbal froth and ballyhoo. Since the first announcement that morning, drums and flutes had been playing while singers chanted and roared.
Being already well into his own cups, Seetree set his fists upon his hips with elbows wide and danced merrily with the Johnnies and Hearties that formed a
ring to pass the mainmast round as they’d done at intervals all day.
And the capan laughed heartily, though some that heard his laugh heard also the madness beneath it.
It had not come too soon this bit of fortune, and while he had yet to cipher how the hunting party had killed the River Demon and who had cast the killing blow, he was very pleased to finally put the curse into his wake.
For of late, the crew had been grumbling over his oath to kill the demon, and he’d come to having daily chatter with Johnnies who felt his search for the beast wasted lives and did nothing more—and so should go overboard. Crewmen were dying and disappearing on the hunt—some of the best with bow and spear—gone and never to return, and for what?
So the capan could avenge his daughter Meelana.
And instead of daughters, the River Demon could eat sons?
It was true that at first, the arms of vengeance had gathered many into its embrace, for the demon had killed the daughters of most families on the ship.
But as the years-long hunt began to take its toll, so did wisdom start to speak over the cry for blood. If the River Demon had not continued to eat Bakwaniri maids and had the beast not shifted its attention to the Johnnies on the hunt; then the desire for its blood could have kept the whole crew thirsty.
But it had only grown more dangerous as the crew struck deeper into the forbidden lands on the west for other Forest Demons came as the first fathers had said. A white one and a black with burning eyes and a taste for Bakwaniri flesh, these came to catch the hunters within those tangled forests.
Of course, survivors had laughed like brave and drunk darlings, but those same Johnnies whispered and connived together, and built up their doubts about the quest to kill the River Demon and the capan who longed for its head.
So at their last great feast and palaver the angry crew had gathered round to challenge Seetree, though none was certain of a new man to take his place; and just as talk of change and hanging had gusted up, the ship’s sir-jon had come forward to speak in the capan’s favor.
He said the River Demon had only summoned its allies because the Bakwaniri hunters would soon slay it, for what other than weakness could force this once powerful creature to need any aid.
And as the sir-jon steered the crew’s anger back toward the beast, Capan Seetree had rummaged through his mind for an answer.
True it was. The hunting parties had crossed the river before, but the many deaths that stalked them kept those Johnnies from probing far and wide once there.
With a great army, they could...
That was a problem that required more men to fix, and such a fickle resource had been running low. There were too few Johnnies left strong of arm and brave enough to challenge the forest across the river while still leaving men in place to protect the ship.
And the crew was hungry.
In the five years of the killing quest so many hunters had failed to return that few of the healthy slaves in the ship could be put upon the plate, busy as they were at all the chores.
The hunting parties still found slaves in their search for the River Demon, but of recent they had been commanded to bring the very old and young to answer the grumbling crew’s appetite.
It seemed that there was but one solution.
There were still enough men to form the greatest hunting party that had ever challenged the River Demon’s land, and if successful they could kill the beast, and bring home new meat and slaves—though the ship would be poorly defended for a time.
But Hearties, children and crippled old men could fire arrows and thrust spears.
Great pressure had been building on Capan Seetree, and while the ship was still defended, it had only been a matter of time before these Johnnies would return and declare their mission a failure—then would come the vote and Seetree would swing with the sir-jon.
So he had felt the press of their anger like the heat of a cook fire, as did the wizard, and with neither man wishing to go to the butcher block, the capan had seized upon the sir-jon’s warning to order a final glorious charge toward the sea.
There the River Demon would be found, and great honor would go to the brave hunter who slew the beast. Their enemy was weak now and vulnerable to the final stroke!
Whether the crew was truly inspired by his speech, or it came in combination with the scurv that ate at their brains, the men were caught up in Seetree’s vision.
They had formed a great force and headed across the river a final time...
...only to return with the River Demon’s head.
Seetree sighed with relief, and laughed again as he left the circle dance and took from the sir-jon a skull-mug full of grog.
And he drank.
Now that the River Demon had been slain, surely its servants would be banished back to the jungle hell from whence they’d slithered, and in their place, would come the great plunder of the forbidden land by the crew who had sacrificed so much.
Capan Seetree had long dreamed his scurv-ridden dreams guided as they were by his disease and gilded by delusion. When he wasn’t stalked by the demon in his sleep, he did dream of the golden paradise to the west over which he would be capan.
A conqueror would he be and his crew would dance a merry dance upon the decks of silver ships stuffed with booty, and their slaves would be bound with gold and jewels.
With no more jungle gods to conquer, there was only an empire to make.
For now he would let his brave crew rejoice and feast upon the flesh of precious slaves, and later would he send his burnished army toward the sea from whence the first fathers had come crawling.
The crew stood thick around Seetree, gleeful smiles gleaming in painted faces and at his word, they returned to their joyful dance.
“More grog!” he roared to a pair of crewmen. “And go forward to tell the butcher we have flesh for tomorrow’s feast.”
The sir-jon had assured him that though the captive men were servants of the River Demon they were still mortal made of white meat and dark, exhausted though they were and injured.
They were too old to work as slaves, and would make stringy meals when tenderized, but what else could a capan offer his brave Johnnies with so many fellow crewmen lost in the wilds. Old or not, the meat would fall from the bone if it was cooked long enough, and would taste like child cheeks to a tongue scorched by grog.
As the capan and sir-jon shared another mug, Seetree called the hunter Billock over, the Johnnie who had been second in command of the greater group. His mask was canted back on his head to drink and glistening molars showed through a ragged hole in his face.
“You done a good job, Billock,” the capan said, with one hand gripping the man’s arm and shaking it at every other word. “You fellows killed the demon fine!”
Billock glanced at the River Demon’s head, before nodding slowly.
“But you’re up early! Your feast ain’t till tomorrow night,” the capan laughed. The surviving hunters were sleeping and resting, exhausted from their great run that had exceeded every expectation.
“I will eat and sleep again,” Billock answered happily.
“The flesh of slaves for now—a surprise for tomorrow...” Seetree bellowed at the man. “If only the others had returned to join the festival. Thrice the number of men you left going north, you say, and with Mack the first in charge?”
Billock reported: “Aye Capan, Mack the first led most of the group on a swing around to the coast to have a look-see.”
Capan Seetree was pleased to know he still had a force of men in the lands he planned to conquer. Surely, they would return with greater news, gold perhaps, and jewels. He clapped Billock on the back and sent him reeling for a mug of grog.
With the River Demon gone, all those lands were open to the capan’s will, and if there were other servants like those who would be guests of honor at the coming feast, then Mack’s greater force would make short work of them, and bring many back as slaves and meat for the table.
&nb
sp; He thought of the old captives again. Younger flesh than that, he hoped though his mouth still watered at the thought of the white man’s oysters which would be succulent despite their age.
The butcher had a way... And they would hold great power, for the Johnnies had said it took all of their clubs to bring him down.
After the River Demon...
Seetree cried out and his heart lurched suddenly, for in his distraction and growing drunkenness, he had stumbled close to the mainmast where the demon’s head hung. For a second, shredded bits of flesh had dangled close to his face—the fangs were just there.
He quickly covered his terror with a hearty roar.
CHAPTER 27 – The End Considered
Harkon the huntress was perched high in an iroko tree, weary yet eager, hopeful but unable to resist the notion that she might be coming to the end of her mission and thus her life.
She was guarding a narrow opening in the great tree trunk through which Gazda had crawled to sleep some long hours before. The sun was close to setting, and the few of its rays to penetrate the jungle cast her and the ape-man’s lair into shadow.
Harkon had managed to find a little rough comfort sitting with her back against the tree at the base of a thick branch. She’d wrapped her legs around the limb to keep from falling should she doze after a hasty meal of dried meat, nuts and water.
And she had slept fitfully as the time passed, disturbed by her dreams and the intermittent aches that came from her injured leg. True she was being carried through the jungle on Gazda’s back, but it took great strength to keep from falling off—and there had been moments of peril and strain.
Not that she would ever complain.
In truth, her vendetta against the Bakwaniri had toughened her to the point that she needed little in the way of creature comforts, and would have disdained pillows or down mattresses if such a thing had ever been available to her.
And had she known that they existed, she would have seen any reliance upon such soft things as weakness.
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