Beat Not the Bones

by Charlotte Jay

  He did not answer her and suddenly she understood. ‘It was here that Sereva died.’

  He nodded.

  ‘Is he buried here?’

  ‘Yes.’ He looked wildly around. He could not see the grave and had no idea now where it was. That night he had been almost as dazed and frightened as he was now.

  ‘I see.’ Her face had grown sombre.

  He had hoped that if he told her enough she would not want to go further. ‘We camped the night here,’ he said, ‘after we left Eola. And it was here he died. Poor Warwick, he was heartbroken …’ Stella started to move on. He ran after her and caught hold of her arm. ‘What’s the good of going on?’ he blurted out. ‘There’s nothing to see. It’s just a village, just like any other.’

  Her eyes regarded him, but she said nothing. She shook his fingers from her arm and moved on. When we get back, he thought, I will kill her for this. But another part of him yearned for her understanding. There was nothing for him to do but follow her. They walked on down the overgrown path into a more watchful silence.

  The path was too narrow for them to walk abreast, so Stella led the way. Washington was almost treading on her heels. Only the front of his body, covered by hers, was in any way sheltered. He had a sense of something drawing in closer and closer behind him. He did not visualise it as a man but as a collection of images. Sometimes he saw it as a slimy substance crawling along the path at his heels. Sometimes the substance was grey, amorphous, writhing; sometimes it had only a hole for a mouth; sometimes a pair of round, lidless eyes. There was never a whole man, only parts: a disembodied arm that clutched forward, or a branch that clawed like a hand, a leafy spray infused with malignant humanity. Sometimes there was nothing, only a sense of collected, clotted wind that breathed on the back of his neck. He thought he could smell a faint pungent odour in his nostrils that hung in the air from no source. This was the most dreadful of all.

  He could no longer resist the impulse to look back. There was nothing there, but he had a sense of having turned round just too late, at the end of movement. Something seemed to have flashed out of sight. Leaves, now almost still, vibrated with the agitation of something just gone.

  ‘Do you know where we are?’ said Stella.

  She had stopped again. He put a hand on her shoulder. Now that they had stopped, walking was preferable. He looked around him. They might be anywhere. There were the same tall fig trees and tangled undergrowth struggling forwards to devour the path. Then he heard the river.

  He thought at first that it was only the silence, a little nearer, rushing a little louder, or the hungry growth of the jungle, the roots clutching the mud and the sap swelling the flat broad leaves. But it was the river, over on the right through the trees. He could see the glimmer of water. They were no more than a quarter of a mile from the village.

  ‘Stop!’ he cried.

  She was moving on and he reached out and clawed her back towards him. His hands, brutal with frenzy, clamped on her shoulders. ‘You can’t go!’

  With strength equal to his own, she shook herself free and backed away from him. Her eyes, hard, cautious and pitiless, did not move from his face.

  His arms were extended now in helpless yearning. ‘Don’t go. Don’t leave me here alone!’

  ‘You’ll not come,’ she said tonelessly.

  He could not go on, he could not kill her, he could not remain here alone. He could do nothing. He could only repeat. ‘Don’t go!’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You’re nearly there.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I’ve got the gold,’ he babbled, ‘I’ve got it. You can have half of it! You can have it all if you want it! You can have it! It’s yours anyway. You have a right to it … I should have given it to you before …’

  ‘You and David came to Eola and robbed these people of their gold. Is that it?’ she said quietly.

  ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘That’s it.’

  ‘You came here with that deliberate intention.’ She had turned her back on the path ahead and faced him directly. It seemed to Washington that she had rejected the village and a faint hope rekindled in his heart.

  ‘Yes, we planned it all. Nobody knew about it, you see. We only had to refuse Jobe his claim and nobody would come out here for years. We needed the money – I needed it. I didn’t get my promotion. I should have had it … I was the only one, but Trevor was scared to give it to me. He promised me something better. But I wasn’t going to take it, I was going to walk out and start something of my own. I had to get out, I had to get away from him. He blocked everything I did. He prefers fools he can shove around, people he can bully and frighten like his poor idiot wife. And David needed it too. He owed Trevor money, a lot of money, and suddenly Trevor started pressing for payment. So we all put our heads together. Decided to come out here and have a look, then take what we could and put in an official report that there wasn’t any.’

  ‘And was there?’

  Mistaking the glow in her face for greed, he nodded. ‘More than we could carry back. We put it in the boxes we had brought the presents in. That’s why we took so much and so many carriers. Warwick, Sereva and me. We only had to bring it here where the carriers were waiting. It’s buried underneath my hut. We can’t get it out of the country. That’s the snag, getting it out and converting it. But we’ll find a way.’

  There was a long silence. Her eyes searched his face. He met her glance eagerly.

  ‘Who killed David?’ she said.

  The hope died away. He started to cry. ‘He killed himself,’ he sobbed.

  ‘Why?’ But Washington, sobbing into outspread hands, could not answer her, and she went on, ‘Because it was beyond him? Because he was too good for it and saw this – afterwards? Yes, I can see now. He would have to kill himself.’

  He nodded over his hands. ‘It’s not so much,’ he said in a stifled voice. He had forgotten her now and spoke to a presence within him that had waited these long weeks, patient but insistent, for his defence. ‘It’s no worse than the things we do every day. It’s not so bad as giving them money they can’t spend, or stopping their festivals, or telling them they can’t dance. It’s not as bad as giving them shirts that get wet and give them pneumonia or teaching them to value valueless things. We do it all day, not only here but all over the world. We teach them to gamble and drink. We give them tools and spoil their craftsmanship. We take away their capacity for happiness. We give them our diseases …’ He paused and dropped his hands. ‘We’re shocked by their head hunting and blow them up in our wars. Whenever you have an advanced culture in contact with primitive peoples the same thing happens. They perish. Look at Anthony Nyall. He tried to help them and he killed them. We wipe out whole villages with tuberculosis and whooping cough!’ His eyes glittered and his face was knotted with excitement.

  ‘That’s half the picture,’ said Stella. ‘Good comes out of it … or it will, one day.’

  ‘One day!’ he said.

  She was still watching him intently, but he would not meet her eye. ‘How did you get the gold?’ she said. ‘It’s difficult, isn’t it, to get into a village long house?’

  ‘We frightened them,’ he muttered.

  ‘How?’

  ‘With magic. We pretended we knew powerful magic. We told them the gold was bad magic, that it would hurt them if they didn’t give it away.’

  She turned and looked on down the path in the direction of the village.

  ‘You can’t go!’ He broke out again, ‘You can’t go. It didn’t turn out right. They’ll kill you. They’ll kill us both! We must go back quickly now, before they find us.’

  Not looking at him, she shook her head. ‘That’s not what you’re afraid of,’ she said.

  He saw it was hopeless.

  ‘Wait for me here,’ she said. Her voice was flat. He felt that she had surrendered her will, that she was as powerless to stay as he was powerless to go. She could not look at him, and without turning her head we
nt on down the path.

  Washington held out his hands. ‘Come back! Don’t leave me alone!’

  But the path ahead had turned, and Stella had gone. His voice died away and silence began.

  CHAPTER 19

  ‘Don’t go! Don’t go! Come back!’

  The high, quavering voice, pitched almost to a scream, raved on and on, growing fainter and fainter, and then abruptly stopped.

  Stella, walking on deliberately, held sensation away from her, pressing it back as you press on a door that threatens to burst open and let in a battalion of enemies.

  The path turned slowly left towards the river and grew wider as she advanced. But it had not been cleared as much as the entrances to the other villages they had passed through. On both sides of the path the undergrowth pressed forward, and the creepers interlacing the trees trailed down ahead, so that she had to step around them or hold them aside and stoop beneath them. It was steamy and hot, for the sun was finding its way through the thinning trees. Mosquitoes and flies with long, fine legs steamed up from the undergrowth and settled on her face and hands. The path turned again and widened still further. On either side were huge, scarlet crotons and clumps of palms with spiky grey leaves. Ahead was the village.

  Stella halted. At first glance it did not look remarkable. It was built on a flat, cleared space facing the river – a collection of raised huts made from timber, cane, woven leaves and grasses. In the centre was the men’s long house, its huge slanting roof thatched in soft grey leaf like the plumage of a gigantic bird. It faced the river, its swooping prow lifting up high above the roofs of the other houses.

  Sunlight bathed the scene. There was a steamy thickness in the air that hung over the far bank of trees. There was so much about the place that was like other Bava River villages that a few moments passed before she realised that there was no sign of any living creature. When this understanding came on her she shrank back into the trees, and panic seemed to strain and shift the organs of her body.

  She felt that the whole village had known of her coming for hours, perhaps for days and weeks, and had slunk away into their houses leaving the jungle and the village empty, and waited now in the dark doorways, turning upon her their watchful, revenging eyes. They would be capable of anything. Two white men had stolen their treasures.

  There was nothing here, Washington had said. Was he right? What good would it do to step out from the trees, a target for Eola spears? The days of such deeds were not long past, and this was unpatrolled country. The arguments of fear were lucid and reasonable, but Stella could not obey them. To turn back now was unthinkable. She could not stop in the very act of completion. Anthony Nyall had seen in her ability to act some sort of salvation, and she felt vaguely that his future well-being in some way depended on her concluding what she had begun, that her own well-being depended on it too. It was bad enough to be as he was, incapable of the beginnings of action. Not to finish was unthinkable. The tears of Sylvia, the wild, mad hands of Philip clutching out for mercy would freeze into unforgettable memories if she could not raise above them the compensation of having arrived at her destination.

  She took a quiet, halting step forward, but started back into cover once more. The red crotons beside her had sprung to life. They shuddered into a wild convulsed rustling. She stared in terror at the shaking, shivering shrubs. Something slid out on to the path ahead. It paused, looked sharply around and scuttled out into the sunlight. It was a fat, grey jungle rat.

  She stood watching it. It was gross, obese like the sea slug and ran with a disgusting waddle. It was the only living thing visible, and she could not take her eyes off it; her skin was damp with loathing. It had reached the open clearing and the village houses. Here it paused again and looked around. It was confident, leisurely, unafraid.

  Suddenly she thought, Not only are there no human beings, there are no pigs or dogs either. You could hide a man or a woman, or even a child, but it would be difficult to hide a dog unless you killed it.

  The rat waddled on. It had reached the long house. Beyond were three large huts built in a row. Their doorways, with short wooden steps leading off the ground, faced directly across to where Stella stood. They were built close up against the trees behind and a long blanket of creeper with yellow flowers had fallen over the roof of one of the huts and trailed down across the open doorway. The house looked deserted, the thatch was damp, ragged and mouldy, and the creeper draping its door did not fall with the flowery lightness of garden decoration but like a shroud of cobweb fastened round an empty house that no one enters and no one leaves. In the very moment that this thought entered her mind the jungle rat scuttled up the steps and disappeared through the front door.

  It was then that she knew what had happened at Eola; why Philip Washington dreaded to return and what had killed her husband. She stepped out into the jungle and followed in the tracks of the jungle rat. She was calm. She knew now that there was nothing to fear, and walked confidently. The only danger was in allowing the horror that was in Eola, that draped the village and inhabited the huts, that crawled and rotted on the ground, to invade her own body and mind. But some protective force that guards human beings at such times paralysed her senses and held her mind at a dumb, frozen level of consciousness.

  She did not shirk her inspection. She made sure. She walked across in front of the men’s house, looking up at the tall peak of the roof, and then on to the group of houses on the other side. She mounted the wooden ladder on to the verandah and, parting the creepers with her hands, looked into the dark room within.

  Three people had died there. Their white bones shone in the gloom. She could not see the grey rat but could hear its feet rustling on the floor and the scratch and crackle of insects feeding in the thatch.

  The owner of the next house had died outside. He lay under the house on his back with his arms outstretched. A tight, moving patch of ants formed a black smear on the side of his skull. She thought how white and delicate were the bones of his hands. But his feet had gone.

  She looked into the next house. It was empty, did not even house a pile of bones. But under the house she found a tin. It was the type that opens by the lid peeling back round a key. It was rusty and the label had gone. She turned it over with her foot. It was empty.

  She left the houses and turned back into the centre of the village. Here in front of the long house were gruesome offerings of skulls and bones, sometimes complete, sometimes robbed by jungle scavengers, and some way from it was a rough open shelter and stone ovens that showed the scorch marks of flames. Scattered about among them were more tins, one still circled by the ragged remains of the red label of a tin of bully beef.

  She walked on among the empty fireplaces. Some still contained bowls of ash that had not yet blown away and clung in the crevices of the stones. She found the bones of a child and a dog, and then a tin that had not been opened. She picked it up and turned it over in her hand. She noticed two small black holes – puncture marks – in the bottom.

  Still holding the tin, she looked around her. There was no movement. The leaves of the trees hung limp in the stagnant air. A piece of thatch dropped from the roof of the shelter to her feet. There was no sound, but she fancied she could hear the village rotting around her – ants boring their tunnels in dry wood, the drip of thatch from the decaying ceilings and the crumble of ash in the stone ovens. The process of decay had been so swift the village almost appeared in a state of visible movement and change. She half expected it to crumble into dust before her eyes. Only the human beings, who had been the first to rot, were at peace.

  She stood there, the tin in her hand. She did not move. This was her husband’s murderer. Yet it was strange that at this moment she did not think of his death, but of her father’s, and her eyes filled with tears.

  He killed my father too, she thought. He thought me too young and innocent to face up to what he did, and so he killed my father. She dropped the tin on the ground and her heart was filled with b
itterness towards him.

  The force that had urged her on to this spot had abandoned her. She must move now of her own will or not at all. She felt the horror around her slide slowly nearer. She still did not move but her body was clutched and shaken with dread. A circle of insubstantial hands, from which the flesh dripped away, had reached out and touched her.

  Then came a scream.

  At first she thought the cry was her own, till it came again, sounding from the jungle behind her. It was a terrified sound, only just recognisable as human.

  She turned and ran. She had reached the long house when the silence split and cracked. When she reached the jungle there was a second shot.

  Caution did not occur to her. She knew the second shot was final. But she wasn’t surprised. She understood now that when she left Washington she had not expected to see him alive again.

  I killed him, she thought as she ran. I killed Washington. So many murderers. Washington, David, Anthony and I are all murderers. Trevor is the worst of all, because he never saw his victims.

  Then she stopped. The path had swerved away from the river and opened into the small glade where she had left her companion. He lay sprawled across the path. But he was not alone. A boy was crouched over him.

  In Marapai she had seen boys from outlying villages who had come in on their canoes, wandered painted and ornamented about the streets, dog-teeth necklaces round their throats, beads in their ears and flowers and leaves stuffed into the bands round their arms and calves. But she had never seen anyone so strangely and gorgeously daubed and festooned as this.

  He was a brown man, slim, lithe and not very tall, naked except for a thin strip of bark wound round his waist and drawn between his legs. His body was streaked with brown and white and his face painted in a dramatic design. There was a splash of yellow down the bridge of his nose, white lines sprayed out from the corners of his mouth and curled down to converge in a beak on his chin. His arms and hair were decked with green and yellow croton leaves. He carried bow and arrows and looked more like a bird than a man.