Dark Memory
Jonathan Latimer
MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM
CHAPTER 1
IN THE AFTERNOON a white mist came down from the mountains to the plateau, veiling the scrub timber and the underbrush and the road. It was a thick mist, and cold, and it put a film on the windshield of the Citroën truck, like breath on a window in zero weather. The road ran half on the plateau and half in the mountains, and it had many steep grades with hairpin turns. The surface was slippery from the mist, and this and the mist itself and the film on the Citroën’s windshield made driving very difficult.
When the fog came they found the windshield wiper wouldn’t work. It was jammed in some way. They tried to keep the windshield clean with a cloth, but the film formed too quickly. Then Bill tried riding with his head out the right-hand window, watching the road and from time to time calling directions to Jay, who was driving. This wasn’t too good, and once they narrowly missed an old woman with a goat, but it had worked so far. They were not happy, though. This part of the country was somber and gloomy. The Spanish moss hung damp from the trees and the leaves were black and the brown grass was tangled. They could not see the mountains at all. The cold mist came into the truck, wetting their faces and hands. It was very melancholy.
“Half turn left,” Bill said suddenly.
Jay pulled the steering wheel over and they went on for a few seconds. “More,” Bill said. Jay gave the steering wheel another turn and presently Bill said, “All right.” Jay turned the wheel back to where it had been. They were going about six miles an hour.
Jay thought, this is lousy. His face was numb with cold.
The headlights were no help. They made yellow patches in the fog, but these were as hard to see through as the unlighted mist. Jay kept the lights on because it seemed safer to be driving with them, even though he knew it didn’t make any difference. It was quite a lot like driving in a dream, he thought. He had an impression of tangled grass and shoots and scrub trees and bushes passing steadily and half seen through the fog, but they didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. They just came to more grass and shoots and trees. The motor sounded queer and remote, as though it didn’t belong to the truck.
Once he asked, “Can you hear the other truck?”
“No,” Bill said.
The road crossed a hill and descended a ravine. It went down in a series of turns, some very abrupt. Halfway down the mist thinned and Jay saw below a green jungle of bamboo and tangled underbrush. There was also, at this moment, a curve to avoid a drop of a thousand feet, and he hastily swung the wheel to turn the truck. The tires slid on the slime for a small space, giving them the impression they were going over the edge, and then the tread took hold and they rounded the curve. The fog closed in again.
“The hell with this,” Jay said. “Let’s stop.”
“What will Cable say?” Bill asked.
“The hell with him.”
“I’ll drive,” Bill said.
“No.”
As they went up the other side of the ravine, Jay thought about Lewis Cable. He had been thinking a lot about him lately. He had decided he didn’t like him. This was too bad because Cable was officially second to Professor Jarvis Huntley in command of the expedition. Actually he was in command because Professor Jarvis Huntley was not a very practical man. This did not mean he forgot to put on shoes when dressing, but his mind was quite easily turned from immediate problems to scientific speculation. He was apt to happen upon a strange lizard or a new geologic formation and miss a train. Lew Cable caught the trains for the expedition and bought the supplies and checked passports and watched the equipment and kept everyone in order. He had been an all-American guard at Georgia or Alabama or one of those Southern schools with fine football teams, Jay knew, and when he left college he had gone to work for a brokerage house. He had not done badly until 1929 when the crash came, and even that did not make much difference to him. In 1929 he had married into a very rich New York family and so he simply retired from business, which was what a lot of others did, only not to estates on Long Island with thirty-five-room houses, swimming pools and yacht basins. Since then Lew Cable had not worked, although he was on the boards of several charities and had become a trustee of the Columbian Museum, which was sponsoring the expedition. He had also become well known at the Stork Club, El Morocco, Larue’s and other fashionable night clubs, often being seen with minor actresses, radio singers and unmarried post-debutantes. He had knocked out a number of drunks in these and other clubs in short, one-sided brawls. Once he knocked out a bouncer at the 21 Club. Winchell had the story in his column. He was big and in good condition, and had the reputation of being a dangerous man, especially when he had been drinking. Jay did not know what his wife was like. He had heard she was much older.
Now the truck was going into another ravine. It came to a stone bridge. The mist was not so thick here and it was possible to see the road several yards ahead. On both sides of the ravine were bamboo forests and tall undergrowth. A stream ran under the bridge, the water a slate color where it was deep and silver near the shore. The stream made a quiet rushing noise, like a wind in pine trees. They could hear it as they coasted across the bridge. On the stalks of bamboo were white drops of mist. Jay saw and avoided a cone-shaped pile of dung in the road. Gray smoke rose from the pile and from others along the road.
“Elephants!” Bill said excitedly.
They did not see the elephants, and higher the mist thickened, and they could not even see the bamboo. The fog hung low, like damp-wood smoke. It was full of the green smells of a forest, the smells of moss and young leaves and bark and leaf mold. They were on a long grade and the engine worked hard, but the sound was smothered by the trees and the smoky fog. Jay put the Citroën in second gear. It was fine going uphill, but he did not look forward to the next drop. Although it probably wasn’t dangerous, moving as slowly as they were, it seemed foolish to risk the equipment when there was no hurry. You didn’t come ten thousand miles, or whatever it was, he thought, to dump yourself into a ravine in a Citroën truck. In any truck, for that matter.
“Slow down,” Bill said. “There they are.”
“Good.”
“You’d better stop,” Bill said.
Jay stopped the truck and turned off the ignition and got out. His eyes hurt and he rubbed them with the back of his hand. His skin was wet. The silence was strange after the noise of the truck. Around them, through the fog, came the sound of water dripping irregularly. The fog had formed in drops on the leaves and these were falling to the ground. It was the only sound they could hear.
“Spooky,” Bill said.
Jay followed him to the other truck. On the right, in a clearing, were two tents and a fire. They could see the Somali cook getting dinner ready on the portable stove. Lew Cable was sitting on the truck’s running board, looking at a map.
“The Boy Scouts arrive,” he said.
He had a heavy voice. He was a big man, deep through the chest, with wide, sloping shoulders. He had a black mustache, and a scar on his forehead made a white line on his brown skin. He wore boots and riding breeches and a shirt open at the neck.
“Some fog,” Bill said.
“I thought your friend, Mr. Second-class Scout Nichols, could drive,” Cable said.
“He can,” Bill said.
“Why doesn’t he then?”
“I made him take it easy.”
“You’d been in a hell of a fix if you hadn’t caught us before dark.”
Bill said, “I didn’t think of that.”
“I suppose not.” Cable looked at Jay. “Put the truck back of ours, Mr. Second-class Nichols.”
Jay parked the truck behind the other Citroën. There was nothing much he could d
o about Lew Cable. He’d been hired to drive and take photographs and do odd jobs on the expedition. He was a hired hand. Lew Cable was a rich man. He was financing the expedition. He could call a hired hand Mr. Second-class Nichols if he wanted. It was a form of humor. Lew Cable had a very well developed sense of humor along certain lines. Jay had found that out on the boat from England. His size and his boxing ability permitted its development. It was necessary to appreciate it or be knocked out.
Jay grinned as he shut off the truck’s engine. He didn’t want to be knocked out. He would learn to love Cable’s humor. He got out of the truck and went over to Bill and the white hunter, Mr. Palmer, by the larger tent. There wasn’t anything to do. Mr. Palmer’s Somali boys had set up cots in the tents and now they were bringing firewood for the night. The Somali cook was plucking a chicken.
“Touch of fog, eh?” Mr. Palmer said to Jay.
“Is it usually like this?” Jay asked.
“Don’t know.” Mr. Palmer shook his head. “Not my country, you know.”
Mr. Palmer had a farm near Nairobi, but he made a living guiding rich people on safaris. Jay had heard he was one of the guides with the Prince of Wales, or maybe one of the Prince’s brothers. He was a middle-sized man of fifty with clear blue eyes and a red face. He had been a major in the war, but he didn’t like being called Major Palmer. That was over as far as he was concerned. He had been hired by cable by the trustees of the Columbian Museum to take care of the expedition. He was a friend of Carl Akeley.
Bill and Jay stood by the tent for a few minutes, feeling shy of Mr. Palmer, knowing he was shy of them, but not knowing what to do about it, and then they went back to the trucks. Lew Cable was still sitting on the running board, looking at the map and making notes. He was always making notes. Jay had decided he was going to write a book about the trip. Bill got a bottle of the German beer and two paper cups out of their truck. It was a big bottle, a liter, Bill said. He filled the cups and they drank. The beer was cold from the long day in the mountains.
“You needn’t have taken the blame for my driving,” Jay said.
“That’s all right.”
“Cable’ll get down on you.”
“Let him.” Bill filled the cups again. “Your coming was my idea.”
“That doesn’t mean you’re responsible for me.”
“Comrade,” Bill said, “haven’t I always been responsible for you?”
“Yes.”
They grinned at each other. They had been friends for a long time. They drank the beer slowly, watching the fog change color. It had been a silver gray, but it was darker now. The downgoing sun made it darker. It drifted quietly across the clearing, damp and quite dense, changing color steadily.
“Have another bottle?” Bill asked.
“Sure.”
The beer gave them a nice feeling. Things were not so important when there was beer. Later they ate dinner sitting on camp chairs by a table in front of an open fire, in their ears the hissing of the damp wood and the steady drip of water. They ate chicken and rice and green corn. Mr. Palmer’s black boys sat on the other side of the portable stove, their teeth and eyeballs gleaming in the firelight. It was dark, and a few feet from the fire the mist joined the night, and it was impossible to see the faces of the black boys at all. The chicken was stringy, but they were all hungry, and at least the rice was tender.
After dinner Mr. Palmer lit his pipe, using a piece of wood from the fire, first shaking out the flame and then touching the tobacco with the glowing wood. He was curious, he told Lew Cable, why the museum wanted more gorillas.
“Not to stuff, they said,” he said. “Akeley got all anybody wanted for that.”
“Six,” Bill said. “He got six.”
“Then why get more?”
Lew Cable tried to explain. He talked easily to Mr. Palmer. He was not shy. He had been in Africa before. Jay listened because he was not exactly clear himself why they were after gorillas. It had something to do with glands. He had joined the expedition at the last minute, when Tom Bronson couldn’t go, and so far nobody had bothered to explain much to him.
“We’re to perform an autopsy on two of them,” Cable was saying to Mr. Palmer. “Examine the heart, take a blood count, test the urine, check the acid content of the stomach, a dozen other damn complicated things.”
“But why?” Mr. Palmer persisted.
“The gorilla’s physical structure is something like ours. Yet a gorilla’s twice as big and four times as strong. We want to know why.”
An animal was moving about in the brush. Jay saw Bill look in the direction of the sound, but the others paid no attention.
“Could it be diet?” Mr. Palmer asked. “The gorilla’s a vegetarian, you know.”
“So is George Bernard Shaw,” Bill said.
Cable didn’t like being interrupted. “Suppose you explain then, Boy Scout.”
“Go ahead. You’re doing marvelously.”
Lew Cable scowled, but he went on. “It isn’t diet. We’re sure of that. It’s how the body uses the diet.”
Jay heard a hollow grunt in the timber. Some animal was out there. He listened for it.
“There’s no apparent reason for the gorilla being so big,” Cable said. “He could climb trees better if he were smaller. And he needn’t be so strong. He doesn’t kill for a living.”
“And if you do catch the why, what then?” Mr. Palmer asked.
“We’ll learn why people aren’t healthier.”
Bill asked, “What’s that noise?”
“Simba,” Cable said. “A lion.”
“He’s just curious,” Mr. Palmer said. “They’re very curious at night.”
“No,” Bill said. “I mean the noise in the gorge.”
They listened. They heard the sound of an automobile, apparently climbing in low gear. The automobile was far away. While they were listening, the lion grunted. He was answered by a roar from the other side of the camp. Then both lions roared together. Neither Mr. Palmer nor Lew Cable paid any attention to them.
“Not too good for driving,” Mr. Palmer said.
“What damn fools!” said Cable.
The car was coming out of the gorge, the engine louder now. Mr. Palmer threw wood on the fire. “May want to stop,” he said.
The flames lifted above the fire, lighting the parked trucks and the road. They listened to the sound of the approaching motor. The lions stopped roaring. They had heard it, too. At last two yellow disks came over the crest of the hill and a Ford station wagon pulled up behind the trucks. The Ford had yellow fog lights. A man got out of the passenger’s seat and walked around the station wagon and opened the door for the driver. A woman got out, ignoring his hand, and took a few steps towards the fire.
“Professor Huntley?” she called.
Jay’s stomach moved convulsively. He stopped breathing. It was the note in her voice, husky, almost hoarse. He had never thought he would hear that husky note again. He tried to see her face, feeling sick and excited.
Lew Cable got up from his chair. “Professor Huntley isn’t here,” he said. “But this is his expedition.”
“I’m so glad to have caught you,” she said.
Jay breathed again. It was like Linda’s voice, but it wasn’t the same. Linda’s voice was as husky, but this voice was deeper. They weren’t quite the same. It was a shock, though. They were so close.
Cable and Mr. Palmer went over to the woman. They talked by the edge of the road, their voices indistinct. The man, Jay saw, was white, but he did not join the conversation. He leaned against a fender of the station wagon, lit a cigarette, took a few puffs and put the cigarette out. His movements were abrupt.
Presently Mr. Palmer came back to the fire. He knelt and lit his pipe. “Plucky gal,” he said.
He made a sucking sound with the pipe. The lions had gone away a little, but now they were roaring again. Jay felt his skin prickle. It gave him a curious feeling, knowing there were lions out there in the da
rk.
“The man’s badly spooked,” Mr. Palmer added. “She had to drive.”
Lew Cable stood by the station wagon, talking to the woman. Jay could just hear his voice, deep and hearty. He was doing most of the talking. Mr. Palmer’s boys were not curious about the woman. They were putting grass and blankets under the first Citroën. All five slept there.
“Don’t know.” Mr. Palmer was still thinking about the man and the woman. “Bad night. Might be spooked myself.” He grunted and rose to his feet. “Think I’ll turn in.”
They said good night to him. He shared the larger tent with Lew Cable. He went inside and lit a safari lantern and pulled the flap. The brown canvas glowed faintly with the light inside. The lion with the big voice roared. The blacks crawled under the Citroën. They talked for a moment and then they were silent. They had no trouble going to sleep. Lew Cable came by the fire on his way to the tent. “We push off at six tomorrow,” he said. He went on, not bothering to tell them about the woman.
The fire faded again and mist floated through the clearing. They could still see the station wagon. The woman and the man were getting ready to go to bed. The man was helping her make a bed in the back of the station wagon. Once he had a fit of coughing. Jay watched them, curious to see if they would go to bed together. It seemed important to him that they didn’t. He thought it might be because her voice sounded like Linda’s. That was no reason for not wanting her to go to bed with another man. He was relieved, however, when she got in the back of the station wagon and closed the door.
“No immorality,” Bill said.
The man sat on the running board. Jay could see his cigarette glow through the fog. He was looking at them, but he didn’t come over. He smoked the cigarette, moving his hand jerkily to and from his mouth. The big lion roared. The mist suddenly felt cold on Jay’s neck. The man coughed and got a sleeping bag from the front seat and pushed it under the car. He took off his shoes and crawled into the bag, lying completely under the car. A few minutes later the light went out in Cable’s tent.
Jay said, “I’m surprised Lew Cable didn’t go out and shoot the lions.”
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