The Black Book

by George Shadow

  Chapter 10: A New Father & His Strange Cargo

  INTO the jungle he waded, quickly hiding the black book in his shirt as he looked back now and then to see whether he was being followed. His fear of capture so blinded his reasoning that he ran on despite the fact that none of his pursuers had chased him into the wild. And since he was watching his back as he pressed forward, he didn’t notice the English man who came out from the thicket to stand on the nonexistent path he was taking until he almost ran into outstretched arms.

  “Andrew, you’re alive,” the man exclaimed in disbelief as he reached out to seize Matthew. “My son is alive.”

  “I am not your son,” Matthew protested as he struggled to free himself. “I am not Andrew.” He realized that men with guns were all hiding behind the man and this increased his anxiety.

  “My God, what have they done to you?” the man asked with concern, the boy’s left arm strongly gripped to discourage any idea of escape.

  The book in Matthew’s shirt felt very cold on his skin.

  “Those natives deserve the king’s wrath, if you ask me, John,” another man said beside the boy. “They must have bewitched him and the others with their magic.”

  “Those scoundrels,” Matthew’s purported father snapped. “We will burn their village before we leave these shores.”

  “No,” Matthew protested, glaring at them. “My friends are in there.”

  At first, the two men said nothing, staring at the boy with stupefaction, then they both roared with laughter and Matthew took his time to study them.

  They wore a funny-looking safari suit and had on a hat of the same material. The men around them looked like seamen, but their uniform and guns could have come out of an old movie. “Who are you people?” Matthew demanded with heightened curiosity. “Why are you doing this?”

  The two men ignored the question, stopped laughing and handed him to a sailor. “You must be tired and hungry, my boy,” his new father said. “Gordon will take you back to the ship, and perhaps your hallucinations will be a thing of the past.” And the man moved forward with his men before the boy could muster the courage to say another word.

  The sailor Matthew was handed to didn’t look at all friendly.

  “Second Mate Gordon at your service, Master Andrew,” he snarled, turning in the opposite direction from the others while dragging Matthew with him. “We must leave this cursed place, me ol’ mate, else the big cats will slaughter us and suffer the depths of the forest to swallow our bones when they’re done with our flesh.”

  “Where are you taking me?” Matthew asked him.

  “Your father said back to the ship! Shouldn’t have any ideas if I was you.” They passed some dead lions the men had earlier killed and the sight of these lifeless creatures did nothing to cushion the sudden effect their imposing bodies had on the boy. “Right you are to be scared, my friend,” the sailor said sarcastically. “Wait till you meet a live one.”

  He led Matthew out of the forest and onto a sandy beach. One ship lay out in deep water, while what looked like the burnt skeleton of another lay on its side and very close to their present position on the coast. The dead bodies of some of her former occupants surrounded this second ship and Matthew was shocked to see that women and children were amongst these corpses. “Gross,” he bemoaned, looking away as they passed.

  “Those natives did it, alright,” Gordon told the boy. “Hacked ‘em to death they did. And in the middle o’ the night.”

  Anderson!

  Matthew boiled.

  He was taken by a small boat to the ship berthing offshore and helped up to its quarterdeck by Gordon, who came up the rope ladder behind him. Several minutes later, gunshots were heard from land.

  “No, Master Andrew,” Gordon protested when the lad tried to jump overboard. He pushed the boy back in. “It is not safe to do that.”

  “I must save my sisters,” Matthew shouted, kicking away. “They must not die like this.”

  “Why, Master Andrew,” the sailor remarked. “What did they do to you? You’re an only son.”

  The gunshots lasted for a long time and Matthew sat on deck through it all, despondent and annoyed with himself. Stephanie’s blood must be on his hands if she was killed, and Nora’s. And Anderson’s, even though he didn’t know who his former friend had turned into. As chief, the African-American boy must have led the attack on that ship.

  “They’re coming back,” someone shouted on deck and Matthew stood up in earnest to see this. The ship’s boats had set off to bring the English explorers from shore, but there were some prisoners with them as well and Matthew frowned unconsciously when he saw Anderson in their midst.

  “Stephanie,” he spotted with joy, leaning forward on the rail as the first boat came in, but his adopted sister looked confused by this. “Stephanie,” he yelled in frustration, causing some heads to turn towards him.

  “I forbid you to be calling Shirlia other names, Andrew,” his ‘father’ told him, coming up to the ship’s quarterdeck.

  Matthew was dumbfounded, but there was nothing he could do. Half-heartedly, he also discovered that Nora was nowhere to be found in the midst of those rescued and his joy at seeing Stephanie vanished. Maybe she was amongst those earlier attacked by the tribe, or had been devoured by the lions! This idea wasn’t pleasant at all! “Who is Shirlia?” he asked a sailor working near him.

  “The cook’s daughter, of course,” the man replied, giving him a long stare. “You should do well not to start any pranks, Master Andrew. Now, hop along.”

  Matthew left the man’s side without another word and walked towards the incoming prisoners being herded in by the armed sailors.

  “We will surely recoup our losses from this lot, John,” the man he’d seen before with his so-called father said. “We will sell them as slaves to the Portuguese when we get to Sierra Leone.”

  This revelation unnerved Matthew and he saw Anderson walk past him with a heavy chain linking his neck to those of the other prisoners. The African-American boy was crying and Matthew instantly forgave him his deeds and resolved to save him, bumping into Stephanie as he followed them trance-like below deck.

  “Evening, Master . . . Andrew,” the little girl stuttered, looking away in embarrassment.

  Matthew couldn’t say a word, but reached out his hand in surprise, and before he could touch her, she turned and fled, blushing. Shirlia liked him.

  “You must go and clean up now, Andrew,” his ‘father’ said behind him and he started. The man was the reason for Shirlia’s retreat and that was unsettling. “You are to change to something more presentable and meet me in the dining hall for some . . . food.”

  “Yes, Father,” Matthew replied with a slightly different tone of voice. How would he find his room?

  A good maid showed him when he told her he was feeling dizzy from the exertions of his adventure that day and he quickly found some clothes and put them on without bothering to take a bath.

  The book was slightly warmer when he brought it out and opened it to his own page. The only name glowing here was Anderson’s. He returned to the first page and discovered that his name and Stephanie’s were both glowing as well. Nora’s name was not glowing, so he reasoned she may not be there as he had thought after all. He prayed this was so.

  The prisoners were kept deep down in the hold. This Matthew discovered when the kind maid was leading him to the ship’s kitchen for his food. A lone trapdoor was open on their path and as they passed it, Matthew saw Gordon pushing the chained, African men into it. He couldn’t imagine what his ‘father’ had done to the many women and children he saw in the village sometime ago, but he knew that that village must have been razed to the ground.

  The ship’s kitchen was cozy and Stephanie’s new mother had an amicable air around her. “Good evening, Master Krowel,” she began as soon as Matthew stepped into her domain. “Your father says he’s calling off your little meeting in the dining hall, so you will have to eat here.”<
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  Matthew couldn’t tell when last he’d eaten, although that might’ve been a few moments ago and without his knowledge, but the food he saw on the table looked very inviting and he really wanted to get near the person sitting on the opposite side of the table and digging into her own plate.

  As providence would have it, the cook left with a tray on which several plates of food were arranged just as the boy was settling down to his meal of chopped lamb and chicken soup, and he gladly looked up to the girl whose cheeks were quite red opposite him. “Stephanie! Stephanie,” he whispered conspiratorially and she turned redder, refusing to look at him. “We must go now.”

  “You forget too quickly, Master Andrew,” Stephanie blurted out, “but my name is not that which you now call me.”

  “I don’t care who you think you are,” Matthew said, reaching out to touch her hand, which she dared not move away from him. “Anderson is down there, and we must find a way to save him with the book and escape now. You must trust me.”

  At that very moment, Matthew realized that his companion was blankly looking into her soup and inquisitively lifted up her chin without any protest from her. The pupils of her eyes seemed to have disappeared and she just sat there as still as a statue and as dumb as Nora. Alarmed, he reached over the table and shook her. “Stephanie, wake up,” he urged, shaking her some more. What if she’d swallowed a chicken bone, which got stuck in her throat? “Stephanie.”

  “Matthew?” she suddenly said, looking at him in amazement.

  “How did you . . . ?” Matthew began, oddly looking at his hands. “That’s it,” he suddenly snapped, coming round the table to pull her out of her chair. “We’re getting out of here.”

  “Where are we?” Stephanie asked him in that familiar voice he knew too well. “Where are the Germans?”

  “All wiped out,” Matthew replied.

  “By a bomb?”

  “No, by the book.”

  They came out onto the corridor and Matthew quickly pushed his sister back as Gordon climbed out through the trapdoor and walked past.

  “Is he German?” Stephanie whispered with a dreadful voice.

  “I don’t know,” Matthew said and hurriedly took her to the trapdoor. Without another word, she went down after him despite the darkness that swiftly enveloped them. “There must be a candle somewhere,” he whispered to her, groping around in the dark. The light from the deck above was not enough to help him, but he luckily came across a lantern. “We need to light it,” he muttered, searching for matches around its base. He only found an empty matchbox. “We need a match.”

  “I have loads in my pocket,” Stephanie volunteered, handing her foster brother one in the dark.

  Quietly, Matthew thanked Shirlia as he proceeded to chase away the darkness with light.

  The lantern worked perfectly well, but what it revealed to both kids in that hold was beyond the comprehensive abilities of their young minds. Stretched as far as their eyes could see where rows and rows of closely packed African men and women who were sitting, standing or lying on their backs in-between their mates!

  “It’s a slave ship,” Matthew exclaimed, unconsciously drawing Stephanie to himself. The prisoners from the village were not the only ones the English men had captured! He now realized they’d been seizing many along the coast and herding them into their two ships until one of these vessels was attacked by warriors of the last village, which they were now preparing to move away from. “We must find Anderson, Steph,” he bravely insisted and his adopted sister nodded without a word. Gingerly, he stepped forward with her as many incarcerated by ropes holding their hands before and behind them glared at him. Most of the girls he passed were as young as Nora and he felt pity for them, even though some tried to reach out and attack him despite their chains and ropes.

  “Matthew,” Anderson called out to his right. “They’ll throw me overboard if I act as if dead.” The boy was surrounded by his warriors, often resting on the back of one of them. The lantern was too bright for the Africans and they covered their adjusting eyes with their crossed hands.

  “That’ll be a last resort,” Matthew told Anderson, bringing out the book. He could hear the warriors arguing amongst themselves on what his vile presence meant for their fate while pointing at the book with their heads.

  “What’s with the book?” Anderson asked him almost as if in a normal conversation. “I thought you should have come with a key?”

  “The book brought us all here,” Matthew replied with conviction. “That was what I was trying to tell you in the village, but you wouldn’t listen to me.”

  “So, what’s it gonna do for us now?”

  “It brought us all here and it must take us all back ASAP.”

  Suddenly they started rocking slowly from side to side as the ship began to move away from shore, giving greater urgency to the need to escape. Matthew opened the book to the fourth page, where only Anderson’s name still glowed, and faced the dark-skinned boy.

  “Anderson,” he shouted, but only the slaves stirred a little and grumbled much.

  “What are you doing?” Stephanie whispered behind him.

  “Trying to get us out of here?”

  “I’m scared, Matt! They’re too many,” the little girl said, her attention now diverted to the many ebony shapes lying around and about them in the glare of the lamp.

  Anderson quickly recognized Stephanie and became embarrassed. He covered his face in shame.

  “Anderson . . . how are you?” Stephanie asked him and he forced himself to smile at her.

  “Don’t worry,” Matthew told his friend when his sister looked away. “She’s not aware of the village.”

  “Which village, Matt?” Stephanie asked.

  “Um, the one we just left? It’s a very lovely place, with wild flowers and...and little goats.”

  Anderson relaxed. “Do you know the villagers laughed at my English?” he asked Matthew, who was doggedly trying to understand the inner workings of the book by staring at the African-American boy’s name. “They thought I was a mad man at first! This was before they realized I’d gone through that forest of lions unarmed and unhurt.”

  “Matthew, we must leave now,” Stephanie suddenly intruded when she turned back to both boys and her brother hushed her. The book’s edges were beginning to smolder again, giving out a kind of reddish glow amidst the lantern’s yellow light.

  The warriors near Anderson drew back with fear. They had known about the book’s powers all along, they told themselves. The tarmangani would kill them all!

  But Matthew wasn’t even thinking of them. “Give me your hands,” he told Anderson and the young chief raised his shackled hands towards the glowing book. Matthew placed Anderson’s right thumb on his name and it seemed to glow red.

  “Ah,” Anderson exclaimed, trying to take it back. “It’s hot! I think I must have . . .”

  He vanished, and his chains, ropes and loincloth dropped to the ground, to the surprise of everyone.

  “Whooooooaaa,” Stephanie admired, looking at the shaking Africans praying to their gods. “How did you do that?” she asked her brother.

  “I didn’t,” Matthew said mechanically, staring at the spot his friend once sat. “It’s called a strike of luck.” He hoped the African-American had really gone home, and didn’t do so butt-naked!

  “Hey,” Gordon shouted and both children turned with fright. He was quickly climbing down from the trapdoor. “What are you doing here with Shirlia, Master Andrew?” he demanded. “You know you are not supposed to be here, are you! I will smack you myself if I must.”

  “Hold me, Steph,” Matthew told Stephanie in earnest.

  “What?”

  “Hold me.”

  She obeyed him.

  “I will get you, you brat,” Gordon railed as he advanced towards them. “Your father will hear this, if that’s the last thing I do.” He crashed to the wooden deck and cursed those whose African legs were impeding him.

 
; Matthew turned to the book’s fourth page and looked to see if Stephanie was still holding his hand before placing his thumb on Nora’s name.

  “It’s not working,” his foster sister discovered with fright.

  Gordon was advancing again. Quickly Matthew tried another finger and still nothing happened.

  “Do something,” Stephanie wailed, breaking down.

  “I’m - I’m trying,” Matthew stammered. In succession, he placed his fingers on the name.

  Gordon was now running towards them.

  Stephanie punched her left thumb on Nora’s name.