Human

by Hayley Camille

  Ivy bristled in spite of the danger around her.

  “You took it from me, didn’t you? That stone was mine.” Although the silver chain was gone, the amulet was most certainly hers. He must have been watching me, touching me even, while I lay unconscious. It felt like a violation.

  “No,” he said. “My people carried this stone for many lifetimes, waiting for you to arrive.” The man hesitated, narrowing his eyes. For a long moment, he just stood there, watching her. Ivy shivered. Around them, the whispers started again. Slowly, as if summoning trust he didn’t have, the old man pulled the leather strip over his head and knotted it around Ivy's wrist. “But it is yours again, Hiranah. It always was.”

  Ivy pulled her hand away. Many lifetimes? Apart from the leather, the stone looked identical to the last time she’d seen it. Even her initials, or rather, those of Iris Chapman, were still engraved on the face.

  The man gestured and Ivy reluctantly sat back down, clutching Kyah. The bonobo cried anxiously in Ivy’s lap, twitching her head sharply.

  “Oh, honey,” Ivy soothed, “It’s okay. I’ve got you.” Ivy gently held the bonobo’s chin and pulled her face close.

  “Sharp- sticks- Kyah- hurt-” the bonobo signed. Ivy dragged her fingers through Kyah’s hair, down the side of her face, hushing her.

  “I won’t let them hurt you.” But Ivy’s own vulnerability burned in her gut.

  The old man curled his hand around Ivy’s wrist, covering the stone and forcing the reconnection between them.

  “We shouldn’t be here,” Ivy whispered. She reflexively used her free hand to pull the bonobo's fingers from the scar on her chest.

  The old man noticed. “We won’t hurt her,” he said.

  “You stole her,” Ivy accused.

  “We called you, Hiranah.” The man lifted his jaw defiantly. “This one fell too. We did not call her. Only you.”

  “You stole me?!”

  The man’s eyes hardened and his chest drew wider.

  “You should be here, Hiranah. You must be here. You may not know it yet, but you chose to come.”

  “I chose to save Kyah!”

  Something about that statement made the old man’s eyes soften.

  “Of course you did.”

  Ivy didn’t know how to respond.

  “Who are you?” she asked instead.

  “My name is Gihn.” He gestured to the hobbits that pressed in around her, listening intently. “We saw you fall so we came to find you.”

  “I fell? From where?”

  “The sky.”

  Ivy scoffed, looking beyond the hobbits to the darkening sky outside the cave. The sky.

  Gihn tilted his head to the side. “Close your eyes, Hiranah. I will try to show you.”

  Ivy narrowed her eyes and looked sideways to the spears still held by the hunters that had led her here. The man just stood, waiting. Reluctantly, Ivy closed her eyes. For a moment, there was nothing.

  Then an image melted from shadow to relief behind her lids, slowly, like a watercolour taking form.

  “What is this?” Ivy whispered.

  “A memory,” Gihn replied.

  She was standing at the cave mouth at dusk, slightly off centre, facing towards the South-East. Silhouetting the crest of the mountain behind her, the sun was a burning glow. To her left, a perfect white moon was rising.

  The hobbits were around her, pressed close, all oriented at the same obscure direction she herself was. I’m one of them. No - I’m him. Ivy was seeing the tribe through Gihn’s eyes. More so, she somehow, felt them there, familiar and comforting. Each silhouette in the dusk light held her heart. I love them. No, I don’t, Ivy corrected herself. He loves them.

  All were standing except for a few bodies hidden in shadowed pockets where they lay curled, surrounded by feet. An aching rush of sadness swept through her as she looked down at the shape of someone lying nearby. Something’s wrong. The pain was all too familiar. Loss… Grief… Ivy tried to push the memory away but the grip on her wrist tightened.

  Somewhere in the centre of the tribe a resonant hum picked up. It spread slowly, organically. Each voice brought a single note to complement the others, weaving through the night, like the most beautiful instrument. It pulsed down the valley rifts and echoed from the cave walls, warming her body.

  From the mountain they were hidden in, across the grasslands and to the jungle below, the encroaching night stilled. The ears of the forest pricked toward them. Twisted roots and leaves shined iridescent against the backdrop of the sinking sun and rising moon.

  The music gripped Ivy’s heart like fire. She felt disembodied, a voyeur on a sacred rite, compelled to watch but ashamed for needing to. It was beautiful. She could not bring herself to open her eyes and lose it all. Ivy was suddenly desperate to stay part of this memory and to hear the transcendent notes that seemed to make all things alive.

  Then suddenly, the dusk-song broke. A brilliant flash of white ruptured the sky, pulsing iridescent blue at the centre of the tear. The blue light splintered into three parts and fell into the jungle, far to the west.

  Where they found me…

  Ivy shuddered as she opened her eyes. The spears now seemed of no consequence in the face of a far greater danger.

  “Gihn,” she began hesitantly, “I need to know something. This is very important.” Ivy searched the man’s eyes desperately. “Are there others like me here? Tall people?”

  Gihn’s eyes grew hard. “Only the karathah.”

  Her heart beat harder. “Karathah?”

  “The karathah are tall. But their skin is dark and their spears are deadly -”

  Ivy slumped in relief and let out a breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding. The karathah are tall… Gihn could only mean Homo sapiens, native Floresians living in villages near the coast. If she could get there, she could get a bus to Labuan Bajo, a plane to Bali. Oh, thank god. She ran her shaking hand along the seam of her jeans. Their skin is dark and their spears are deadly… spears?

  “These tall people - these karathah people,” Ivy said slowly, “They live in houses don’t they? I mean…shelters made of wood and stones? With - ships and planes and cars and…”

  Gihn was shaking his head, looking confused. “The karathah live in the north caves at the edge of the sea. They are…trouble.”

  Caves. Modern Floresians didn’t live in caves. Nor did they need long spears. They had agriculture now and tourist trade.

  No! Ivy scrambled to her feet, pushing Kyah away. She bent down, grabbing her satchel from the dirt and rummaged through it. A spray of papers fell to the cave floor as she pulled out her journal and began frantically leafing through the pages. No. No no no. This isn’t happening. It’s not possible. Ivy stared at the excavation map of Liang Bua that she had sketched not more than a week ago. Beside it was a copied photograph of the cave itself, still held in place with a paperclip.

  Ivy looked up. Her stomach felt like lead and her hands trembled. Liang Bua cave was eerily familiar. But not quite right. Where were the picks and trowels? There were no piles of sediment. No signs of excavation. The cave mouth looked taller than that in the photograph she held. The massive stalactites that she had seen so many times they were committed to memory, still hung from the domed roof. But now they were shaped oddly and at least two meters higher than they should be. Ivy spun around, searching for better landmarks in the afternoon dim.

  The ash!

  She ran to the entrance wall and dropped her journal to the ground. Using broken rocks and her bare hands, Ivy started digging. She scraped and pulled the hard dirt from the floor, leaving her knuckles bloody and fingernails black. No. This isn’t real. It can’t be. The stratigraphic layers of Liang Bua were as clear in her memory as on the pages of her journal. Ivy grew more desperate as the pit got deeper. But no matter how far she dug, she couldn’t find the layer of white tuffaceous silts that she was so desperately searching for. It was the single geological fingerprint that could as
sure Ivy that she was still on the civilised side of the fine, white volcanic ash that had suffocated so many species on the island twelve thousand years before archaeologists dug them up again. But the layer wasn’t there. Ivy covered her mouth with a filthy hand. Her nausea was almost overwhelming. Because those volcanic eruptions hadn’t happened yet. Extinction, by whatever hand, hadn’t happened yet.

  But these - Ivy ran her trembling fingers down the inside wall of the make-shift excavation pit. Even in the fading light, subtle differences in the colours and texture of the stratigraphic layers screamed their individuality to her. These layers, these living floors of Liang Bua cave past, belonged to the time far before volcanos had suffocated the island. They belonged fifty thousand years ago.

  Ivy had landed on the knife edge of extinction in a volatile land.

  She picked up the discarded journal with trembling hands. The black and white pages stared back at her. Archaeological records, maps, photos complete with stratigraphic lines, theodolites, researchers and their tools. But the once thrilling images now felt displaced and entirely academic. The bare ground of those photographs were soulless compared to where she stood now. Or rather, when she stood.

  A wave of nausea rushed through her again. Ivy ran to the entrance of the cave. She collapsed down to her knees and vomited into the dirt until her stomach ached.

  She knew they were behind her, still watching, but she didn’t care. The realization of knowing not where she was, but when she was, was devastating.

  Ivy had known from the moment she recognised the cave that she was in Flores. How she came to be there was anyone’s guess. But then, the hobbits found her. A lone, surviving tribe of ancient hominid, hidden from the modern world. An archaeologist’s dream, however unlikely.

  But this cruel reality was no dream.

  This Flores was primitive, wild and untouched by civilisation. The humans that surrounded her had been extinct for 50,000 years. Fifty thousand years.

  The realisation that she had been somehow displaced was absolute. Ivy was far removed from civilisation, both in space and time. The earliest stirrings of art were only just ghosting the globe. Homo sapiens were still far from the infancy of agriculture. Bands of hunter-gatherers were finally weaving their way across Asia toward Australia. Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons were competing for food in the glacial plains of Europe where the last ice age wouldn’t begin to retreat for another 20,000 years. The great pharaohs of Egypt, the Roman Empire, the first Xia dynasty of China – were forty thousand years ahead.

  Ivy was numb.

  She twisted around and looked at Gihn, who was watching her every move. He stepped forward; his eyes level with hers, even as she crouched in the dirt. Ivy held her wrist to him.

  “What do you want from me?” she asked hoarsely.

  “My people are dying, Hiranah.”

  “Yes,” she said. Of course they are.

  “We need you to save us,” Gihn said.

  “Save you?” Ivy repeated blankly.

  “You must save us,” Gihn pressed.

  “I must save you?” Ivy could hardly process his absurdly simple words for the weight of the task they carried. She clenched her jaw. A spark of anger flickered, catching heat in her chest. “You stole me!” she said. “You want to use me to save yourselves, but my own life means nothing!”

  A rush of adrenaline charged through her body. Ivy pulled Kyah onto her lap, clinging to the warmth and comfort of the only creature to whom her survival did matter. Ivy felt like a tool, a hostage. The blue and white light that had torn through the sky now tore through her mind and she steadied herself against Kyah’s warmth, on the verge of vomiting again.

  Concern shrouded Gihn's eyes, but there was no apology.

  “You don’t understand yet, Hiranah. You chose this. You chose to save us! We cannot survive without you.”

  Ivy tugged her wrist from his grip, breaking the connection. You cannot survive at all. Her lips trembled. She covered her eyes with her hands, trying to just breathe. After a minute, Ivy took both the amulet and his hand in hers again.

  “This was no choice,” she hissed.

  “It was yours,” Gihn insisted.

  “No it wasn’t! I need to go back.”

  This time it was Gihn who snapped his hand from the amulet. He looked hurt, betrayed almost. Then scared. For a long moment neither of them moved. Then Gihn’s eyes seemed to harden with resolution of whatever thought he was hiding through disconnection. When he finally clasped the amulet on Ivy's wrist again, his voice was impassive.

  “There is no way back, Hiranah.”

  Ivy’s heart sank. She looked away. As the sun disappeared entirely and the moon grew high, she stared unseeing into the darkness.

  Her anger was gone. Everything was gone. Her life. Her work. Orrin. She, herself, was gone.

  She sat for a long time, staring but unseeing. At some point, Ivy heard shuffling and whispers as her audience moved back into their cave, though she was barely aware of them.

  Eventually, Kyah’s warmth brought her back. Ivy blinked, surprised to find Gihn still beside her in the dark with his hand curled around her wrist.

  “What is it you were calling me?” Ivy asked quietly. “Hiranah. What does that mean, anyway?”

  A smile touched the man’s face. He reached a weathered hand to touch Ivy’s cascading red hair.

  “Hiranah is the colour of fire. Perhaps, Hiranah, you came to us from the sun.”

  Neil Crawford pulled his aching arm close to his body as he trudged through the undergrowth. So far the redheaded woman had eluded him. He’d tracked her for three days now, fury mounting with each step. She was the only link to both the physics lab and this godforsaken green death trap he’d fallen into.

  This was hard. Harder than he wanted to admit. As a younger man, Neil had always conquered any situation he was thrown into; in fact, he’d relished the challenge of proving himself. But nothing could have prepared him for this. The jungle was an unwelcome detox and the humidity was drawing alcohol from his pores in rivulets of sweat. His head ached and his hands tremored. His heart pounded. Neil ached for alcohol. At this point, anything would do.

  The precipice had been his first victory. His dilated pupils found the fine rocky dust layering the cliff edge, her shoe prints glaringly obvious. Sweeps of disturbance marked where she’d sat, staring across the horizon. In an instant, he’d guessed the river in the distance would be her first point of call. His own mouth had been aching with thirst. Despite his failing body, Neil had thrown his head back and laughed. I’m on the right track; she can’t be too far ahead.

  He’d found the durian tree she had feasted on. There was still half-eaten fruit all over the ground with human bite marks, most of it further attacked by bats in the night. He’d found the tree she had slept under, wet leaves and mulch tellingly piled into a raised bed. A few times Neil had become lost, doubling back to scour for signs of her on the forest floor.

  God knows what’s happened to the lunar energy field by now.

  Three nights and Neil still had no contact with the outside world. He’d eaten rats, snakes and fruit that smelled like vomit. His cigarette lighter had become his talisman, the polished silver spun over and over in his fingers as he walked. A nautical helm had been engraved on it long ago and had rubbed almost smooth. There was also a much newer engraving, a name; Benjamin. His memory found a young boy in a hospital bed. Blinking lights, nasal tube, no hair. Neil swore at the rush of anger that caught him and shoved the memory back down.

  He pocketed the lighter with a scowl. At least he didn’t have to eat raw.

  Neil turned his mind briefly to his ex-wife. They rarely spoke these days, so Francine wouldn’t have missed him. She’d grown distant years ago, resenting his travel and work commitments after her unplanned pregnancy. He’d never wanted kids, she’d known that.

  She’d changed though, as women always do, when it happens. And she’d tried to change him too. It was Francin
e who had engraved the boy’s name on his lighter, as a constant reminder. But the kid, well…. it was bad timing really, when Neil was at such a crucial stage of his career. He refused to throw it all away to settle down and play Daddy. His own father had had little time for him as a boy. You suck it up, become a man. Life goes on.

  A phantom scent of disinfectant thrust the child back into his memory. Maybe life doesn’t go on. Anger flared again in his chest. There’s nothing I can do. Francine already martyred herself by the hospital bed. He wasn’t needed. He pushed the memory back under.

  For years now, Francine had found comfort elsewhere. It made no difference to him. He’d been left with empty rooms, which had held little of his love to begin with. Whether she had been aware or not of his frequent indiscretions during their marriage mattered little to him. It was only now that he was lost in this green shithole, that Neil wished that she would notice him gone, and show interest enough to do something about it.

  Surely Cassandra and Dimitri, as useless as they are, have reported me missing. They knew I was heading to the university. They knew what was at stake. If they ever want to work again, they’d better be raising hell.

  Great, my last cigarette. Fucking bastards. Neil threw the empty packet into the trees angrily. His black Armani suit was covered in filth with the jacket wrapped around his waist in the stifling air. His tie had become an effective sling for his dislocated shoulder during the first two days, but now it was screwed up in his pocket.

  Neil pulled his mobile phone from his back pocket and turned it on. The battery was precious so he used it sparingly. There was still no reception which simply confirmed that he really was in the middle of nowhere. Worse, the GPS signal was non-existent. This bothered him more. The energy field must have peaked by now. So, they’ve taken out the satellites.

  Neil flicked the screen with his finger, avoiding the cracked glass along the top. The only useful operation left was the virtual compass programmed into the software. The image of a needle swung across the screen, locating magnetic north. She’s still heading North-East. With a sharp stick he scratched a deep arrow into the nearest tree face. If he had to, he knew he could get back to where he started.