The Bedlam Detective

by Stephen Gallagher

  He saw it now, he said. We had ventured into the midst of a land where creatures roamed unseen, where all the things that threatened us had forms and names but stayed beyond human perception.

  “So …,” I said. “What exactly did you see?”

  “Nothing!” he said excitedly. “Because they’re only there when you don’t look!”

  I told him that he was making no sense.

  “They’re waiting,” he insisted. “When my guard’s down, that’s when they’ll strike.”

  His wife and child slipped away that afternoon, within half an hour of each other. The first I knew of it was when Sir Owain closed up the tent and went to sit by the river. His hunting rifle was in his hand. He stood it upright with the stock against the ground and the barrel pointing up at the sky.

  Everyone looked to me. I entered the tent and checked both bodies for life. When I came out, the others were watching and the news must have been written on my face. I sensed a ripple pass through the camp. Not of sorrow, but of relief. It was done. Now we could leave.

  I walked over and sat by Sir Owain. I eyed the gun and tried to judge his mood. He was gazing out at the spot where the two rivers met, where turbulence had capsized his vessel. I said nothing. It was minutes before he spoke.

  He said, “Were they in any pain? Do you think?”

  “You saw them,” I said. “They were sleeping.” And then: “We need to think about moving on.”

  “One of the boats can serve as a funeral barge,” he said. “This must be done with all possible dignity.”

  It took me a moment to register what he was saying.

  “No, Owain,” I said then. “You can’t take them with you. We’re not yet halfway home. There’s no dignity in what a few days in this heat on the river will make of them. Do I need to explain?”

  “What’s my alternative?”

  “You’ll have to bury them here.”

  “No!”

  “If the very idea is too painful then you can leave it to others.”

  “I won’t leave them in the dirt of some foreign land.”

  “Then they’ll rot in your arms. Is that what they’d want?”

  It was harsh, but it did the trick. He closed his eyes, and all the fight seemed to go out of him.

  “No,” he said. “I can’t leave it to others. This is my family. I shall be the one to deal with it.”

  He got to his feet. He took a deep breath and he straightened his back. Then he turned and walked back toward the camp, calling everyone together.

  He stood before us all, and made a speech.

  “I’ve decided that we shall continue downriver,” he said, “as soon as my wife and child have received a fit and proper burial, as befits good Christians in a heathen land. I trust no one considers this unreasonable.”

  All eyed the way that he hefted his hunting rifle, and agreed that, despite dwindling supplies, creeping sickness, uncharted hazards, and invisible beasts, this was not at all unreasonable.

  “Good,” he said. “I shall begin my design for the tomb.”

  He had the surveyors looking for the best site. He had it cleared of vegetation, and set our camaradas to dig the hole. Wherever they dug, after a foot or two the hole would fill up with water. The second choice of site was no better. The men worked, wanting to be done with this and on their way.

  Meanwhile, Sir Owain had our Indians hauling flat stones out of the river, including one so heavy that it took all of them working together. Once it was on the bank, he had them hammer in wedges to split it. With a charcoal stick, he drew his funereal designs on each flat surface and set them to chipping away at the rock, flaking it down so that his designs slowly rose up in relief.

  I managed to catch him alone for a moment. I said, “Owain, I’m concerned. Someone’s moved our supplies.”

  He seemed unworried. “No one’s taking more than his share,” he said. “I’ve made sure of that.”

  “It was you?”

  He’d a gleam in his eye when he looked at me.

  “If they can’t find the food,” he said, “they can’t desert me. I hired these men fair and square. In the time that I’m paying for, I expect them to do whatever I require of them.”

  I watched in dismay as, over the next few days, order steadily broke down. A few hours for a funeral was one matter; the construction of some mockery of a Highgate-style sepulchre, with control of the food supply as a means to compel obedience, was something else altogether.

  The Indians responded by feeding themselves. They cut open flowering bamboo stalks and ate the grubs to be found inside. Work all but stopped on the stone carving after that, as the Indians lay around and were of little use. I guessed that there was more in the grubs than mere nourishment.

  The camaradas roasted monkeys when they could get them and eyed Sir Owain murderously, but made no direct approach to him. He was armed at all times, and, more intimidating to our Portuguese-speaking labor force, he showed repeated signs of an increasing mental unbalance.

  The bodies of his wife and son remained in the tent, sewn into canvas but getting riper and riper. At night, when he wasn’t searching for beasts, Sir Owain sat with them, a handkerchief tied to cover his mouth and nose. I could hear him talking to them. Well, not so much talking. Raving.

  The next morning, we found that one of the boats was missing. Five of the men had taken to the river and gone, taking their chances without any food, no doubt hoping for more plentiful and less wary monkeys downriver. There was almost a rebellion after the discovery was made, with Sir Owain firing into the air to restore order.

  The European contingent held a secretive meeting and tried to persuade me to distract Sir Owain while they seized his gun and restrained him. They seemed to think I was the only person in the company that he trusted. I could not imagine how they’d reached this conclusion.

  I agreed that grief and duress had affected his reason, but argued that we faced enough dangers without adding to them.

  At the end of that day, we found that Sir Owain had somehow hidden the remaining boats.

  Sir Owain asked me to perform a burial service. The tomb had been completed late that afternoon, and sunset approached. By now there was good reason not to keep the bodies from their final resting place for one hour longer than was necessary. I borrowed a Bible, chose a few readings, and concocted a service of sorts. I’d thought that it might be difficult to find bearers to fetch the bodies from the tent, but there was no shortage of volunteers. The sooner it was done, the sooner we’d be on our way.

  The tomb-what can I say about the tomb? Think of those great stone monuments of our Victorian fathers. Picture the most Gothic of them, and then strain it rough-hewn through a madman’s nightmare. It had four solid sides and a great slab to top it. But its angles were all wrong, its proportions strange, its decoration of urns and columns a strange mix of the primitive and the classical. A temple of skulls and bones, a pirate’s tomb. And yet, entirely recognizable as what it was meant to be.

  After my piece we sang “Abide with Me” and the Indians hummed and Sir Owain made a rambling, but touching speech. Mad though he was, his heart was truly breaking. He ended with a promise that our journey would resume in the morning, and revealed where he’d hidden the food. The daylight was all but gone as the camaradas dragged the top slab into place and we all dispersed.

  Sir Owain sat alone in his empty tent, by the flickering light of a monkey-fat candle. I let him be for a while and then-cautiously, for he’d not set down his hunting rifle at any point during the service-made my way in to join him.

  He acknowledged my presence. I produced my rum flask. Even a madman deserves a wake.

  I said, “A sad day in a week of sad days. My condolences, Owain.” I unscrewed the cap and offered the flask.

  He looked at the ground, and sighed. Then he accepted the flask and took a hefty swig. He made a face as the rum went down. “You were right to be hard on me,” he said, offering it back. “I
should never have brought them here. What was I thinking?”

  “You were thinking that all the world must be tameable,” I said, waving the flask away, “because you’d already succeeded in taming so much of what you could reach.”

  “No,” he said. “I truly believe there’s a malevolence at work. They were taken. This jungle took them.”

  “Yes, Owain,” I said, because there’s no arguing with the deluded. “And nothing can bring them back. So now we have to look to the welfare of the survivors. Tell me. How did you manage to hide the boats?”

  “I didn’t,” he said.

  “Oh, come on,” I said. “For boats that aren’t hidden, you concealed them very well. Some of the men have been sneaking off and scouring the riverbank for as far as they could walk. Not one of them’s found a sign.”

  Sir Owain just sat there looking at me, and offered no explanation. Suddenly I understood. Or believed I did.

  “You sank them, didn’t you?” I said. “They’re sitting out there on the riverbed waiting to be raised and refloated. You crafty dog.”

  But I saw nothing in Sir Owain’s eyes.

  “Well?” I prompted.

  He said, “I untied the lines, and shoved the boats out into the river where they were carried off.”

  Was he joking? Surely he was joking.

  He was not.

  “They’re gone?” I said.

  He shrugged. “I wish I’d thought of your bottom-of-the-river trick,” he said, and tilted his head back with the flask tipped high, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he downed the rum like so much water.

  I persisted.

  “So we have no boats,” I said.

  “No,” he said.

  When I awoke the next morning, it was to find our campfire extinguished and our camp deserted. Europeans, Indians, camaradas … all were gone. They had taken what remained of the supplies, and abandoned us.

  Over in his tent Sir Owain slept on, snoring in a noisy rum coma, much as I’d left him the night before. After a sleepless week, the liquor had kicked away his supports and he’d fallen hard.

  Now this. Our situation was bleak. I contemplated my own with dismay. The others had seen me as Sir Owain’s man, to be abandoned along with him. Such were the consequences of my caution and sympathy. I picked my way around what remained of our camp, looking for anything useful that the others might have left behind. When I came to the grave site, an appalling spectacle awaited me.

  The stone tomb, so carefully and solidly built, had been pushed over by some terrible force. How had I slept through this? The slab had tipped and its walls had fallen, and the rotted bodies had been dragged out onto open ground and mauled.

  At least, I believe they’d been mauled. I am no expert in the work of explosive decay.

  Their canvas shrouds had been ripped head to toe. Surely the others had not done this out of spite before they left? Although as an explanation, it did occur to me before any other. But the force of it, and the fury.…

  I felt helpless. What was I to do? Take my own chances in the jungle, and leave Sir Owain to make this discovery alone?

  I had intended to walk away. My alternative was to stick with a madman, which would mean facing the odds with an added handicap. I’d be like a conjoined twin in a drowning pool, with the weight of a dead brother pulling him down.

  Then from behind me I heard, “Holy mother of all mercy,” and I knew that my opportunity to choose had already gone.

  Sir Owain had risen, and came to stand beside me now. He did not blink or look away; he bore the unbearable.

  We could not think of restoring the tomb. Between us we had not the necessary strength, and besides, it was irreparable. One of the side slabs was cracked, and the other completely broken. We remade the shrouds as best we could and dragged the bodies back to their hole. We placed flowers in the grave all around them and then piled on every one of the stones that we could move, plus a few more from the river. This time there was no service, no ceremony.

  After that, with only the clothes we stood up in, we set off to follow the river onward as best we could and eventually, God willing, to walk out of the jungle.

  We knew of only one reliable food source. Like our Indians, we were reduced to cutting into flowering bamboo and eating the grubs we found inside. Though trained in botany and able to identify some of the more extreme poisons, I had little useful knowledge that I could apply to living off the land. Disgusting though the bugs were-and we ate them alive-they sustained us and did us no harm. Whereas our one experiment with berries left us violently sick and shaking for most of a day.

  Though some of the time he’d walk along for hours in an introspective silence, at his worst Sir Owain was a raving companion. At night, he would pick out sounds and identify them with total certainty as the cries of beasts that were calling to one another, plotting to capture us. By day he’d point to their traces, which I actually believe to have been made by some of our former companions moving ahead of us. It seemed only logical to assume that they would be following the river, as we were.

  One time, as we rested in exhaustion after a hazardous descent beside a waterfall, Sir Owain suddenly gripped my arm and pointed across the river, saying, “See. There one goes.”

  All I could see was the fog of spray at the base of the falls, and the rainbow that it made.

  “I see nothing,” I said.

  “I see the spaces where they’ve been,” he said. “The space retains the shape. Until it fades.”

  Make of that what you can.

  I began to understand why our Indians had turned so lazy. The bamboo grubs, which habit made easier to stomach as the days went by, inclined us to lethargy and fueled the most strange and vivid dreams. Taken early in the day, they induced a daze that lasted for hours. One time I stepped on a sharp rock and did not realize until much later that it had split my boot and my foot was bleeding badly.

  At night, we’d pile up fronds to make a bed. Sleep came easily. Exhaustion and bamboo grubs saw to that. One morning, at daybreak, I awoke to find Sir Owain shaking me.

  “Bernard,” he said, using my given name for only the second time. “I’ve done it. I’ve killed one.”

  I blinked and yawned and raised myself. “What do you mean?”

  “I followed it and killed it. Look.”

  He showed me his hands. There was blood on them. On his hands, on his clothes, everywhere. And on my arm, where he’d touched it.

  I said, “Show me.”

  He led me down to the riverbank. I was limping. It was the start of an infection that would come close to losing me a leg.

  Sir Owain was chattering away.

  “I saw its eyes before anything else,” he said. “They were yellow. And they shone, Bernard. Lit from within. I swear to you they shone like lanterns!”

  Pain lanced up my leg from my wounded foot as I tripped over his hunting rifle. The weapon was lying in my way, discarded and undischarged. Had he fired a shot during the night, bug juice or no bug juice, I’m sure the sound of it would have woken me.

  “Owain,” I said, “look at me.”

  He stopped. I looked into those eyes and saw a man lost in madness.

  “It was there, Bernard,” he pleaded. “It was as real as you are. It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen. Please. I can prove it to you.”

  We came to a clear and level spot by the river. There we found a half-built raft, and three of our former companions. The astronomer, our cartographer, and one of the Portuguese laborers. All slaughtered. They’d been hacked down and cruelly cut about. In places their wounds were to the bone. Close by lay a machete knife. They’d been using it to build the raft and I was almost certain it was the instrument that had cut them down.

  Sir Owain wasn’t looking at the bodies. He was scanning all around behind him, looking for something else.

  I said, “Well?”

  “It was here,” he insisted.

  “So where is it now?”

 
“Others of its kind must have dragged the dead beast away,” he said. “It’s how they keep from being discovered.”

  “There’s no sign of any such thing,” I said. “Just these men. Look at them.”

  “I know,” Sir Owain said. “Torn by the beast.”

  I could get no more out of him. We took their knapsacks and dined on their rations. I washed the machete in the river and we set about completing their raft. I kept the machete by me at all times. I had begun to fear that Sir Owain himself had used it on our companions, cutting down men while in his mind he fought dragons.

  They’d made a rudder for steering the raft, and it had some slight effect on our course, but mostly we were at the river’s mercy.

  A few minutes after we’d launched, I spied a figure on the bank. It was one of our camaradas, standing out on a promontory. I might easily have missed seeing him, as he did not wave or call out. He stared at us and did not move.

  I put my hands together before my face and called out, “Don’t just stand there, man! Swim for it! We’ll pull you on board!”

  Perhaps he did not hear me over the torrent’s roar. He certainly made no move in response.

  As we drew closer I could see that he was paying me no attention at all. His gaze was fixed on Sir Owain. I leaned on the tiller in an attempt to bring our raft closer to the bank, to give him more of a chance to reach us if he swam. But the raft kept to its course, and merely began to turn around its own center. We were level with him now, and then we were passing him by.

  “What are you waiting for?” I called out. “It’s only a raft, it won’t steer. We can’t get to you!”

  If he jumped now, he’d still have a chance. We’d be ahead of him, but he’d be swept along at the same speed as ourselves. He could swim to us then.

  Without taking his eyes from Sir Owain, the man responded with something in Portuguese. Then he moved back into the jungle. Presumably to make his own way; he may have reached safety, but if he did I never got to hear of it.

  I wish that I could at least remember the sound of his words, so that I could repeat them to someone who speaks the language and perhaps find out what he said. All through this Sir Owain returned his gaze, but he made no move and showed no emotion.