The Codex

by Douglas Preston

  At times their way was blocked with hanging vines and aerial roots that grew down from above, forming thick curtains of vegetation that hung to the very surface of the water. Pingo remained in front, hacking them down with his machete while Chori poled from the back. Every blow of the machete dislodged tree frogs, insects, and other creatures that dropped into the water, providing a feast for the piranhas below, which thrashed and boiled around every hapless animal. Pingo, his great back muscles working, slashed left, right, then left, flicking most of the vines and hanging flowers into the water. In one particularly narrow channel, while Pingo was slashing away, he suddenly gave a cry, “Heculu!”

  “Avispa! Wasps!” Don Alfonso cried, crouching down and putting his hat over his head. “Do not move!”

  A compact, boiling cloud of black came racing out of the hanging vegetation, and Tom, crouching and protecting his head, immediately felt a tattoo of fiery stings on his back.

  “Don’t slap them,” Don Alfonso cried. “It will make them madder!”

  They could do nothing but wait until the wasps had finished stinging them. The wasps left as quickly as they had come, and Sally doctored the stings with more sap from the gumbo-limbo tree. They pushed on.

  Around noon, a strange sound developed in the canopy above them. It sounded like a thousand smacking, gurgling noises, like a crowd of children sucking on candies, only much louder, accompanied by a rustling in the branches that grew in volume until it was like a sudden wind. There was the flashing of black shapes, just seen through the leaves.

  Chori shipped his paddle, and instantly a small bow and arrow was in his hand and pointed skyward, tensed and ready to go.

  “Mono chucuto,” Don Alfonso whispered to Tom.

  Before Tom could say anything, Chori had loosed his arrow. There was a sudden commotion above and a black monkey came falling out of the branches, still half alive, grasping and clutching and sliding through the foliage as it fell, finally landing in the water five feet from the dugout. Chori leapt up and snatched the bundle of black fur out of the water, just before a large swirl from underneath indicated something else had the same idea.

  “Ehi! Ehi!” he said with a vast grin. “Uakaris! Mmmm.”

  “There are two!” said Don Alfonso, in a high state of excitement. “This was a very lucky strike, Tomasito. It is a mother and her baby.”

  The baby monkey was still clinging to the mother, squealing in terror.

  “A monkey? You shot a monkey?” Sally said, her voice high.

  “Yes, Curandera, are we not lucky?”

  “Lucky? This is awful!”

  Don Alfonso’s face fell. “You do not like monkey? The brains of this monkey are truly a delicacy when roasted lightly in the skull.”

  “We can’t eat a monkey!”

  “Why not?”

  “Why, it’s ... it’s practically cannibalism.” She rounded on Tom. “I can’t believe you let him shoot a monkey!”

  “I didn’t let him shoot anything.”

  Chori, understanding nothing and still grinning proudly, dumped the monkey on the floor of the boat in front of them. It stared up at them, eyes filming over, tongue halfway out. The baby leapt off the dead body of its mother and crouched in terror, hands over its head, making a high-pitched scream.

  “Ehi! Ehi!” Chori said, reaching to grab the baby monkey with one hand while raising the machete with the other, ready to deliver the coup de grace.

  “No!” Tom snatched the little black monkey up into his arms. It nestled down and stopped screaming. Chori, his machete half raised, stared in surprise.

  Don Alfonso leaned forward. “I do not understand. What is this about cannibalism?”

  “Don Alfonso,” Tom said, “we consider monkeys to be almost human.”

  Don Alfonso said something sharply to Chori, whose grin vanished in a look of disappointment. Don Alfonso turned back to them. “I did not know monkeys were sacred to North Americans. And it is true they are almost human, except that God put hands on their feet. I am sorry. If I had known, I would not have allowed it to be killed.” He said something sharply to Chori and the boat moved on. Then he picked up the mother’s body and tossed it into the water; there was a swirl and it was gone.

  Tom felt the monkey nestling more vigorously into the crook of his arm, whimpering and trying to burrow into the warmth. He looked down. A little black face peeped back up at him, eyes wide, and a tiny hand reached out. The monkey was small—no more than eight inches long and weighing no more than three or four pounds. His hair was soft and short, and he had large brown eyes, a tiny pink nose, little human ears, and four miniature hands with delicate fingers as slender as toothpicks.

  Tom found Sally looking at him with a smile on her face.

  “What?”

  “Looks like you’ve made a new friend.”

  “Oh no.”

  “Oh yes.”

  The little monkey had recovered from its terror. It crawled out on Tom’s arm and began poking around his chest. Its little black hands went scurrying and plucking into the folds of his clothing while it made a smacking sound with its lips.

  “He’s grooming you,” said Sally. “Looking for lice.”

  “I hope he’s disappointed.”

  “Look, Tomás,” said Don Alfonso, “he thinks you are his mother.”

  “How could you eat this beautiful creature?” Sally asked.

  Don Alfonso shrugged. “All the creatures of the forest are beautiful, Curandera.”

  Tom could feel the monkey combing and picking through his shirt. The monkey crept about, using his buttons as handholds, and lifted up the flap of his giant, explorer-style vest pocket. He rummaged in there with a hand, made a smacking noise, and then climbed in it and wriggled himself into place. He sat there, his arms folded, peering around, his nose slightly elevated.

  Sally clapped her hands together and laughed. “Oh, Tom, he really likes you now.”

  “What do they eat?” Tom asked Don Alfonso.

  “Everything. Insects, leaves, grubs. You will not have any trouble feeding your new friend.”

  “Who says he’s my responsibility?”

  “Because he chose you, Tomasito. You belong to him now.”

  Tom looked down at the monkey, who was now peering around like a miniature lord surveying his domain.

  “He’s a hairy little bugger,” said Sally in English.

  “Hairy Bugger. That’s what we’ll call him.”

  That afternoon, at one particularly convoluted maze of channels, Don Alfonso stopped the boat and spent more than ten minutes examining the water, tasting it, dropping spitballs into it and watching them drift to the bottom. Finally he sat up.

  “There is a problem.”

  “Are we lost?” Tom asked.

  “No. They are lost.”

  “Who?”

  “One of your brothers. They took that channel to the left, which leads to the Plaza Negra, the Black Place, the rotten heart of the swamp where the demons live.”

  The channel wound between enormous tree trunks and clumps of hanging vines, a layer of greenish mist hanging just above the black surface of the water. It looked like a watery pathway to hell.

  It must be Vernon, Tom thought. Vernon was always getting lost, literally and figuratively. “How long ago?”

  “At least a week.”

  “Is there a place to camp near here?”

  “There is a small island a quarter mile further.”

  “We’ll stop there and unload,” said Tom. “We’ll leave Pingo and Sally in camp, while you and I and Chori take the dugout on a search for my brother. We’ve no time to lose.”

  They landed on a sodden mud-island while a rain of such intensity that it was more like a waterfall poured down on them. Don Alfonso gestured and shouted, supervising the unloading and then reprovisioning of the boat, holding back the supplies they would need for their journey.

  “We may be gone for two or three days,” Don Alfonso said. �
�We must prepare to spend several nights in the dugout. There might be rain.”

  “No kidding,” said Sally.

  Tom handed Sally the monkey. “Take care of him while I’m gone, okay?”

  “Of course.”

  The boat pulled away. Tom watched her in the pouring rain, a dim figure growing dimmer. “Tom, please take care of yourself,” she called, just as her figure vanished.

  Chori poled strongly down the channel, the unburdened boat moving swiftly. Five minutes later Tom heard a screeching noise in the branches above the boat, and a little black ball came bouncing from branch to branch and finally shot out of an overhead tree and landed on his head, shrieking like a lost soul. It was Hairy Bugger.

  “You rascal, you didn’t wait long to escape,” said Tom, taking the tiny monkey back into his pocket, where he snuggled down and instantly fell silent.

  The dugout pushed deeper into the rain-rotten swamp.

  27

  The storm reached a climax of fury as their dugout reached the channel to the Black Place. Flashes of lightning and bursts of thunder echoed through the forest, sometimes coming only seconds apart, like an artillery barrage. The tops of the trees, two hundred feet above their heads, shook and thrashed.

  The channel soon divided into a maze of shallow waterways winding amid shivery expanses of stinking mud. Don Alfonso stopped from time to time to check for pole marks in the shallow bottom. The drenching rain never let up, and night came so imperceptibly that Tom was startled when Don Alfonso called a halt.

  “We will sleep in the dugout like savages,” Don Alfonso said. “Here is a good place to stop as there are no thick branches above us. I do not want to wake up to the rotten smell of jaguar breath. We must take care not to die here, Tomasito, for our souls would never find their way out.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  Tom bundled himself in his mosquito netting, found a place in their heap of gear, and tried to go to sleep. The rain finally ceased, but he was still soaked to the skin. The jungle was filled with the sound of dripping water, punctuated with the cries and moans and gasping shrieks of animals, some of which seemed almost human. Maybe they were human, the lost souls Don Alfonso had talked about. Tom thought of his brother Vernon, lost in this swamp, sick perhaps, maybe even dying. He remembered him as a boy who always had a hopeful, friendly, and perpetually lost look on his face. He subsided into a troubled night of dreams.

  They found the dead body the next day. It was floating in the water, a hump with red and white stripes. Chori poled toward it. The hump turned out to be a wet shirt inflated with the gases of decomposition. As the dugout approached, a cloud of angry flies rose up.

  Carefully, Chori brought the dugout alongside. A dozen dead piranhas floated around the corpse, their goggle eyes filmed over, their mouths open. The rain drizzled down.

  The hair was short and black. It was not Vernon.

  Don Alfonso said something, and Chori prodded the body with a pole. The gas escaped from under the wet shirt with a blabbering sound, and there was a foul smell. Chori placed the pole under the corpse and, using the bottom as a fulcrum point, heaved it over. The flies roared up. The water boiled and flashed with silver as the fish that had been feasting underneath the body darted away in fright.

  Tom stared with shock at the body, now face up in the water, if “face up” could even describe it. Piranhas had eaten the face off along with the entire ventral side of the body, leaving only the bones. The nose had been chewed down to a withered piece of cartilage; the lips and tongue were gone, the mouth a hole. A minnow, trapped in an eye socket, thrashed about, trying to escape. The smell of decomposition hit him like a wet rag. The water began to swirl as the fish began to work on the fresh side. Bits of cloth from the shirt floated to the surface.

  “It is one of those boys from Puerto Lempira,” said Don Alfonso. “He was bitten by a poisonous snake while clearing this brush. They left him here.”

  “How do you know he was killed by a snake?” Tom asked.

  “You see the dead piranhas? Those are the ones who ate the flesh in the area of the snakebite. They were poisoned, and the animals that eat them will also be poisoned.”

  Chori pushed the body away with the pole, and they paddled on.

  “This is not a good place to die. We must get out of here before nightfall. I do not want to meet that Lempira man’s ghost in a dream tonight, asking me for directions.”

  Tom did not answer. The sight of the corpse had left him shaken. He tried to fight down a sense of foreboding. Vernon, who was panicky and disorganized to begin with, would be a basket case. God knows, he might even be dead, too.

  “Why they do not turn around and leave this place, I cannot say. Perhaps a demon has gotten in the dugout with them and is whispering lies into their ears.”

  They continued on, making slow work of it. The swamp was endless, the boat grazing the muddy bottom and frequently getting stuck, forcing them to get out and push. Often they had to double back again and again, following tortuous channels. Toward midafternoon, Don Alfonso held up his hand, Chori stopped paddling, and they listened. Tom could hear a distant voice, distraught—someone crying hysterically for help.

  Tom leapt to his feet and cupped his hands. “Vernon!”

  There was a sudden silence.

  “Vernon! It’s me, Tom!”

  There was a burst of desperate shouting that echoed through the trees, distorted and unintelligible.

  “It’s him,” said Tom. “Hurry.”

  Chori paddled forward, and soon Tom could see the vague outlines of a dugout canoe in twilight of the swamp. A person was in the bow, screaming and gesturing. It was Vernon. He was hysterical, but at least he was standing.

  “Faster!” Tom cried.

  Chori pushed ahead. They reached the boat, and Tom pulled Vernon into their own.

  Vernon collapsed into his brother’s arms. “Tell me I’m not dead,” he cried.

  “You’re okay, you’re not dead. We’re here now.”

  Vernon broke down sobbing. Tom, clasping his brother, had a sudden sense of déjà vu, the memory of a time when Vernon came home one day after school, having been chased by a gang of bullies. He threw himself into Tom’s arms the same way, clutching and sobbing hysterically, his skinny body shaking. Tom had had to go out there and fight them himself—Tom, the younger brother, fighting his older brother’s fights.

  “It’s okay,” said Tom. “It’s okay. We’re here. You’re safe.”

  “Thank God. Thank God. I was sure the end had come ...” His voice trailed away into a choke.

  Tom helped Vernon sit. He was shocked at his brother’s appearance. His face and neck were swollen with bites and stings and smeared with blood from scratching. His clothes were indescribably filthy, his hair was tangled and foul, and he was even skinnier than usual.

  “Are you okay?” Tom asked.

  Vernon nodded. “Aside from being eaten alive I’m all right. Just scared.” Vernon wiped his face with a filthy sleeve that left more dirt than it removed and choked another sob.

  Tom took a moment to look at his brother. His mental state worried him even more than his physical state. As soon as they got back to camp, he would send Vernon back to civilization with Pingo.

  “Don Alfonso,” Tom said, “let’s turn the boat around and get out of here.”

  “But the Teacher,” Vernon said.

  Tom stopped. “The Teacher?”

  Vernon nodded toward the dugout. “Sick.”

  Tom leaned over and peered down. There, lying in a sodden sleeping bag in the bottom of the canoe, almost hidden among the mess of equipment and soggy supplies, was the swollen face of a man, with a wild head of white hair and a beard. He was fully conscious and stared back up at Tom with baleful blue eyes, saying nothing.

  “Who’s this?”

  “My Teacher from the Ashram.”

  “What the hell is he doing here?”

  “We’re together.”

>   The man stared up at Tom fixedly.

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “He’s got a fever. He stopped speaking two days ago.

  Tom pulled the medicine chest out of their supplies and stepped into the other dugout. The Teacher followed his every movement with his eyes. Tom bent over and felt the man’s forehead. It was burning hot; a temperature of at least 104 degrees. The pulse was thready and fast. He listened with a stethoscope: The lungs sounded clear, the heart was beating normally, albeit very fast. Tom injected him with a broad-spectrum antibiotic and an antimalarial. Without access to any kind of diagnostic tests, it was the best he could do.

  “What kind of fever does he have?” Vernon asked.

  “Impossible to know without a blood test.”

  “Is he going to die?”

  “I don’t know.” Tom switched into Spanish. “Don Alfonso, do you have any idea what disease this man has?”

  Don Alfonso climbed into the boat and bent over the man. He tapped his chest, looked into his eyes, felt his pulse, examined his hands, then looked up. “Yes, I know well this disease.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s called death.”

  “No,” said Vernon, agitated. “Don’t say that. He’s not dying.”

  Tom was sorry he had asked for Don Alfonso’s opinion. “We’ll bring him back to camp in the dugout. Chori can pole that dugout, and I’ll pole ours.” Tom turned to Vernon. “We found one dead guide back there. Where’s the other?”

  “A jaguar dropped down on him at night and dragged him up into a tree.” Vernon shuddered. “We could hear his screams and the crunching of his bones. It was ...” The sentence finished in a choking sound. “Tom, get me out of here.”

  “I will,” Tom said. “We’ll send you and your Teacher back down to Brus with Pingo.”

  They arrived back at the camp just after nightfall. Vernon put up one of their tents, and they carried the Teacher up from the boat and put him inside. He refused all food and remained silent, staring at them in the most unsettling way. Tom wondered if the man was still sane.