Shadow of the Jaguar

by Steven Savile

  “Bairstow talked about a cat-like creature,” Abby offered.

  “Right,” Cutter agreed. “That could also account for the repetition of the El Chupacabra myth at every turn. There’s a grain of truth in every great lie, remember the saying? Myths are just lies we want to believe, so what’s the grain of truth in El Chupacabra? Sheep and goat attacks are a matter of public record, the carcasses bearing puncture marks that are almost vampiric in nature. The bodies are bled through small incisions until they’re empty. Hence the name, which translates as ‘goat sucker.’ He’s your South American Dracula, basically.

  “So, bite wounds, blood drinking, what non-cryptoid solution would account for that?”

  “Prehistoric big cats?” Abby suggested.

  Cutter nodded thoughtfully.

  “That would be a reasonable assumption wouldn’t it? Every culture has its devil dogs and black cats. Back home we have the Beast of Bodmin and the Baskerville hound, and, as the good detective was fond of saying, ‘Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’

  “What if this creature has appeared elsewhere? Now that we’ve admitted to the possibility, it could explain a great deal. Anubis, the Egyptian guardian of the portal to the underworld, bears a striking resemblance to a big black predatory cat. The same iconography works its way into a dozen faiths across the world, and keeps on recurring throughout history and the collective consciousness. Now if we take science as a starting point for mythology, we’re definitely talking about a predatory cat. The South American pampas were ruled by a unique group of marsupials during the Miocene.”

  “Borhyaenids?” Abby said, following his reasoning.

  “Very possible, and certainly the introduction of such a predator would have a severe impact, wouldn’t you say?”

  “It would almost certainly drive the existing species into hiding.”

  “Exactly. And what do we know about the borhyaenids, Connor?”

  “Those bad boys ruled the woodlands of the Amazon for close on 30 million years before becoming extinct. They have no known ancestors or descendants.”

  “Text book answer, Mr Temple, very good. We need to talk to Bairstow more than ever. He’s seen this thing, whatever it is. He’s the key.”

  “If he isn’t dead already,” Stark said ominously.

  Cutter ignored him.

  “Connor, can you pull some images of our black cats for Jenny to show Bairstow?”

  “Will do.”

  “Great. Now this is what we’re going to do today: I’m going to get in touch with Nando, I’ve got some questions I want to run by him. I’m assuming our watchers will return this morning, so the rest of you, I want you to play the perfect tourists for the morning. There are plenty of sights to see. Stephen, you’ve been itching to try out that new wing-suit of yours, I think this is the perfect time. You’ve got one job — make sure you are seen out and about.

  “We’ll rendezvous here for a siesta around one p.m., okay?”

  SEVEN

  Stephen collected a small backpack from the room, and went down to reception to see about organising transport up into the hills.

  Truth to tell, he was excited about getting out and jumping. It was one thing to base jump from Brighton Cove and Beachy Head, out into the sea, and quite another to fly.

  A lama stood in the hotel doorway, craning its neck to watch him as he crossed the foyer. It was by far the most peculiar moment of the trip so far. It tilted its head, as curious about him as he was about it.

  The receptionist smiled one of those bland smiles offered by hoteliers the world over, and it said I’m at your service, but I’m not actually listening to you. As he stepped up to the counter, her eyes were focused over his shoulder at a flat-screen television that stood in the corner.

  Sadly, he was going to have to interrupt her morning dose of soap opera.

  “Hi, there,” he said cheerfully. “Can you help me hire a driver for the morning?”

  “You want a white taxi cab?” she asked, cocking her head slightly. The movement mirrored the lama’s curiosity so perfectly that he almost laughed at the absurdity of it all. She was, he had to admit, considerably easier on the eye, though.

  “I was rather hoping you might be able to put me in touch with some-one who would be interested in renting their car out for the entire morning,” Stephen explained. “I want to go up into the hills to try out the thermals. It might be a bit pricey if a taxi has its meter running for five or six hours.”

  He could tell by the way her focus shifted that she hadn’t really understood what he wanted.

  “A white taxi will cost you maybe five soles for the ride to the mountains, the same to come back. It is a standard fair, two soles anywhere within the city, five soles to travel outside.”

  “That’s great, but how much to wait?”

  “You would have to negotiate with the driver. You should fix a price before you get into the taxi.”

  Ten or twenty soles was nothing, really, but the simple expedient of having his own driver for the morning made so much more sense.

  The lama bumped its head on the glass door causing him to jump. He hadn’t realised quite how skittish the whole being-followed-and-burgled episodes had got him. He quickly gathered his wits.

  “Do you have a friend perhaps who has his own car, and would like to earn some extra money?”

  She understood him well enough then, and after a moment of thought, she nodded.

  “My brother Eloy owns a car.”

  “Perfect. How much do you think it would cost for me to hire him to drive me around for the morning?”

  “Eloy has no permit to be a taxi driver, but I will check with him.” She nodded toward the phone on the reception desk. Stephen nodded in return. She made the call, firing off a staccato string of words in a language that wasn’t quite Spanish, nodded a lot even though the voice on the other end of the line obviously could not see her, and hung up.

  “My brother says he will do it for twenty-five soles.”

  Stephen ran the calculation in his head; one sole was roughly ten pence, so that meant he would have to spend all of two pounds fifty for his own personal driver.

  “Perfect. Um, stupid question, but does your brother speak English?”

  “He grew up on MTV and James Dean films,” she assured him.

  A short while later brother Eloy blasted the horn to summon Stephen.

  Wearing a baseball cap pulled down to shade his eyes from the glaring sunlight, Stephen grabbed both of his bags, opened the lobby door, and side-stepped the lama which was doing its best to graze on the stones of the pavement. The sheer intensity of the heat hit him hard. The sky above was crystal blue, like an Italian stream. There wasn’t a cloud in sight, which meant no relief from the harsh caress of the sun as the day wore on.

  A grinning face peered up at him through the rolled-down window of a battered red and white 1955 Ford Fairlane that looked like something out of just about every gangster movie ever made.

  He wouldn’t have marked the family resemblance if he hadn’t been told the driver was the receptionist’s brother. Though not exactly night and day, the pair were at least dawn and dusk to each other, variants on a genetic theme. Eloy sat hunched over the steering wheel, knuckles white where he gripped the leather. Stephen couldn’t help but grin appreciatively at the Fairlane stripe that made the car look like a Liverpudlian Batmobile.

  The engine purred like an asthmatic kitten as Eloy revved it.

  “Mr Stephen?” he asked cheerfully.

  Stephen nodded. “Eloy?”

  “That is me,” the driver said in his thickly accented English. “Hop in.”

  Stephen threw the bags into the back and clambered into the passenger seat. The leather burned uncomfortably against his back. Apart from the radio, it looked as though nothing in the car had been modernised or refurbished since it rolled off the production line. The leather was worn through to the foam
in places, the dashboard trim shiny where the veneer had rubbed down to a thin patina of nothing. For all that, it was undoubtedly a classic — and so much more fun to ride in than one of those soulless new SUVs. The Fairlane was the epitome of a muscle car.

  “Nice wheels,” Stephen said appreciatively.

  “I love my car like my sister,” Eloy said, setting up a dozen in-appropriate jokes for a punch line Stephen had no intention of deliver-ing. “Where to, Mr Stephen?”

  “Just Stephen, and I was hoping you would know somewhere. I want to go flying.”

  “You want I take you to the airport?”

  “No, no,” Stephen reached into the back for his bag, and pulled out his birthday present from Andy Mangels. The wingsuit had come along with a note saying, “If you insist on trying to kill yourself, at least look sharp when you’re doing it.” He tried to explain that he had a suit that would enable him to fly like Superman, and it wasn’t the easiest conversation to have with a man who barely understood English. But Eloy kept nodding and saying, “Yes, yes,” as though everything he heard made perfect sense. After Stephen was done, the driver sat in silent thought for a moment, then grinned broadly.

  “We go to the hills, you fly like a condor!” Eloy said excitedly.

  The car lurched as they pulled away from the curb, the gearbox grinding loudly as the Peruvian forced the stick into place without de-clutching first. As they left the lama in the rear-view mirror, Eloy turned on the radio and cranked up the volume. It took Stephen a moment to recognise the scratchy sound he was hearing. The speakers could barely contain Ry Cooder’s bluesy guitar.

  It was still early, so the streets were relatively quiet. Ry Cooder was replaced by Howlin’ Wolf and then, rather incongruously, by Duran Duran’s ‘Save A Prayer’, while Eloy spent the first fifteen minutes of the trip talking about the city.

  “The old town was originally constructed to resemble a puma as it would appear when looked down on by the gods,” Eloy said, though for the life of him Stephen couldn’t imagine it visually. The streets and side-streets were a warren of squalor and false hope, moving toward a heart of spoiled tourism. There was nothing vaguely animalistic or noble about the place he had seen so far.

  “Really?” Abby said, barely keeping the scepticism from her voice as Connor explained.

  “Yep, they built the entire city in the shape of a puma.”

  “I can’t see it.”

  “Well, I’m guessing that head lice rarely see toe nails, either.”

  “Ewwww...”

  Connor scrolled down through the text on his PDA screen. He read through it as they walked, trying to take in everything at once. Mainly he was just trying to enjoy being alone with Abby.

  “Pachacuti designed the old walls,” he said, offering it like a nugget of purest gold.

  “Pachacuti?”

  “Yeah. The Incas called him Earthshaker. He was the father of the Inca nation.”

  “That’s a lot of fathering,” Abby said, grinning. He liked it when she smiled, even when it was because she was teasing him. Especially when it was because she was teasing him, if he told the truth. Encouraged, he continued.

  “Well, I’m guessing it’s hard to say what’s true and what’s just a good story. The Incas didn’t record their histories in writing — it was word of mouth, stories passed down from generation to generation. Then the Spanish came and twisted them, like so much of the Inca culture and heritage.” He paused to get his bearings. “Right, that building over there —” He pointed at the multi-coloured tiers, topped with an ornate dome, of what looked to be some sort of holy place. “That’s the Santa Domingo church. It’s built on top of what was once the Temple of the Sun. The wall around the base was the perimeter of the sacred enclosure where the Inca people would worship. The Spaniards came, bringing their god with them, and simply placed their holy church on top of the already sacred temple as though one might squash the other.”

  “It’s like Christmas day all over again,” Abby said.

  “What?”

  “Christmas day, yuletide, it was an old pagan festival and the Romans dumped their own holiday down on top of it.”

  “Oh, right. Get this, this is nuts. The sacred wall has withstood earthquakes, the lot, not a stone lost in nine hundred years. The Spaniards’ church though, keeps falling down. I think someone up there’s trying to make a point.”

  She could see the difference not only in the dark-stone foundation, but in the actual masonry of the two aspects of the building. The Incan foundation was made from some sort of slate-coloured igneous stone, while the church sat atop it was a patchwork of greys and browns that made it appear as though any and every stone to hand had been used to patch it up over the centuries.

  “You’ve really been swotting up, haven’t you?”

  “It was a long flight,” Connor said.

  “Come on then, what other cool little factoids have you got locked away in that huge brain of yours?”

  “How about this: once, they reckon, the labyrinth of walls around the city were sheathed in gold. They called it the sweat of the sun. Can you imagine a city of gold?”

  “Only in the cartoon.”

  “Hey, I’ve got a joke for you, what do you call a judge with no thumbs?”

  “Dunno?”

  “Justice fingers!”

  “Oh, that was just bad.”

  “Nooo, that was good. Okay, why did the pig cross the road?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, why did the pig cross the road?”

  “To prove he wasn’t a chicken!”

  “That makes no sense at all,” Abby said, shaking her head. She was smiling though, so he plunged on, dredging his memory for more terrible jokes.

  “Two molecules are walking down the street and one starts looking around. The other asks, ‘What’s wrong?’ ‘I’ve lost my electron!’ ‘Are you sure?’ ‘I’m positive!’”

  “Please shoot me now, I think I’ve lost the will to live.”

  “Why did the policeman climb the tree? To get to his Special Branch!”

  She elbowed him in the ribs, shaking her head but laughing despite herself.

  They wandered the streets, working their way down into the area known as Puma Chupan. The jokes got worse, the laughter louder. They linked arms, not caring for a minute that everyone they passed was giving them the most peculiar looks.

  According to Connor, the Chupan was the puma’s tail, made by the convergence of two man-made canals. The buildings in this part of the city were almost opulent in comparison to those nearer the great animal’s head. It was hard to imagine that many of them were more than 800 years old.

  Connor was still playing the proud tour guide, but Abby had stopped listening. A kid sat on the street corner, making a paper frog which he set down beside him. He had a small transistor radio that played a tinny version of Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘Mrs Robinson’.

  “This was where the rich used to live, down in the puma’s tail,” Connor said.

  “Things change, huh?”

  “No kidding, I mean look at us.” He almost wished he hadn’t said it, but only almost.

  “Yeah, you used to annoy the hell out of me all the time. Now you only annoy the hell out of me some of the time.”

  “It’s part of my charm, I wear you down into submission.”

  “Right. I don’t know about you, but one building’s beginning to look very much like another to me.” At that, Connor redoubled his efforts to keep her entertained.

  “So if I’ve got this right, while the fortifications of the Sacsayhuamán temple formed the head of the puma, down here was the tail. So if you think about it, our hotel is somewhere around the great beast’s —”

  “Don’t even say it,” Abby threatened, a laugh bubbling up behind her lips.

  “Belly! I was only going to say belly. You’ve got a filthy mind, Abby Maitland. Have to admit, I rather like that.”

  “Of course you do.”

  After the
tail, they made their way back toward the ramparts of the old fortress on the outskirts of the city. Not once did Connor stop playing tour guide or telling terrible jokes. After a while Abby tuned it out, concentrating on the stunning landscape, the infinite shades of green and the too-blue sky. The hills were unlike anything she had ever seen; stone ruins sprouted from the hillside, and though the thatched roofs had long since rotted and disappeared, the pirca constructions of stone-and-mud mortar stood defiantly against the ravages of time.

  What Abby saw went beyond a few desolate walls, there was a harmony between the man-made structures and the environment that modern architecture could not hope to replicate. It was breathtaking to behold, and all the more so to imagine these hillside palaces and storehouses being built without the sophisticated tools, cranes and winches of the modern day.

  It made a mockery of skyscrapers and glass-domed cupolas.

  “This was part of the Court of Pachacuti, the Inca ruler. He had a load of houses like this scattered throughout the hills around here. The idea was that his court wasn’t tied to one building that might be attacked, which is pretty clever when you think about it.”

  “Connor, enough. I’m tired, I’m hungry, and my feet are killing me.”

  “Well, learn self defence.”

  She cuffed him across the side of the head.

  “Enough with the bad jokes!”

  Stephen was beginning to appreciate the godlike Incan ruler’s reverence for the living rock. Everything he had fashioned came from the same building blocks of the world. It was omnipresent, like any spiritual entity.

  The stark pinnacles of the Andes formed the axis of their known universe. In their more primitive theosophy they deemed the rock mystical, and believed it possessed powers of its own. It was not surprising to him that many of those long forgotten stonemasons crafted monuments that survived the Spanish depredations and the constant battering of the elements. Perhaps, of all the things that surrounded them, stone really was most worth their devotion. It did not fail, like flesh; it did not wither and fall, like the leaves.

  It endured, holding within it the memories of the planet.