The Mystery of Yamashita's Map

by James McKenzie

  He also hated what he was being asked to do. He knew that Lisa would never forgive him, and why should she? It was a poor way to show the woman you love what you felt about her. It was a strange way to declare your feelings for someone. He told himself, however, that it was not his fault. He was being made to do these things, he had no choice – his hands were tied. He doused the fire with some water from the bucket, hoping that this would stop him feeling quite so low. Perhaps if he could not see their faces it meant he was not as guilty, perhaps . . .

  Outside he heard the sound of the village preparing itself for sleep. The occasional child let a cry go out that shook the jungle and caused it a moment’s panic but eventually all was quiet. Joe got on his bed and lay there looking at the ceiling. He laughed to himself and thought what he would have made of this situation a month ago. It would, perhaps, have been the one thing he wished for, but meeting Lisa had changed him. He no longer felt as if he was alone, no longer felt the need to fight. He just wanted to see her, to be able to touch her, to be with her.

  He closed his eyes. Perhaps if he could fall asleep they would never come. They would pass by his door on the way to the professor’s or to Fraser’s. The irony of the situation crashed in on him as he rolled over and stared into the darkness. He heard a sound outside his hut that he assumed was his first ‘wife’. It was a nervous shuffling, as if eager to get in but afraid to do so. Joe rolled over to face the door but it was too dark to see. He called out but there was no reply. Slowly, the feet moved inside the hut; Joe steadied himself. He thought perhaps he could communicate with her, try and get her to say that they had done what was asked of them. After all, Joe thought, he was sure it was equally as uncomfortable for her. The shape in the darkness closed the door and moved over to his bed.

  ‘Look,’ Joe said to it. ‘I think you are very nice and everything but I just don’t think it’s right for me to be doing this. I’ve been thinking a lot about someone else lately and I am sure that anything we could do might get in the way of that. I mean, I know it doesn’t mean anything between us and that if I don’t do whatever it is we are about to do, I’ll get a bullet, but I think that maybe it’s worth it. I mean, I have been a rogue in my life, phew, yeah, I have been with some women, but she’s something else, you know? Pure and innocent, like no one else I have met and I don’t want to ruin things. You see what I mean, don’t you? Don’t you?’

  A hand slowly reached out in the darkness and touched Joe’s lips, quietening them for a second. He began to lie back on the bed. ‘Well, I think we should stop this, before it . . . er . . . starts.’

  Joe felt a face next to his. It was soft and warm and he thought to himself that he should just close his eyes and think about Lisa, pretend it was Lisa. After all, she was a strong girl with a good head, she would understand the position he was in. He could tell her the next day that he had been thinking about her that would be sure to make things better. He did not know if his reasoning was correct but it was all he had.

  He felt a pair of lips kissing his ear and a voice began to speak. ‘Quiet,’ it said. Joe recognised it as Lisa’s. ‘I haven’t got much time. I understand. We must keep Winthrope happy in order to get out, to find the gold. Do as he wants.’

  Joe stammered a reply but was cut short by a kiss on his lips that seemed to take every breath he could ever have out of his body. He wanted this moment to go on forever, to never get dim and die. He made himself fully aware of everything that was happening, every sound he could hear, every feeling he was experiencing, every taste. Everything, so that in years to come he would be able to recall this moment exactly as it was.

  Lisa drew back and passed a hand across Joe’s face. Joe took it and held it to his lips. It felt so smooth and inviting. He just wanted to be near her now, to be with her.

  ‘I have to go,’ Lisa said with a giggle. ‘Your first wife will be here any minute.’

  There was a nervous laugh between the two for a moment, Joe went to speak but thought better of it; there would be time enough later, he thought, to tell her everything that was on his mind.

  Joe was woken by the sound of screaming. Something was happening in the village. He rubbed his eyes and realised that it was still dark, but he could hear the sound of shouts and feet running outside his hut. Quickly he dressed and stuck his head out of the door. In the dim light of the village he saw flames being carried this way and that, and women waving their arms and screaming as if trying to chase an animal away. Joe realised that something terrible and strange was happening. The looks on the women’s faces as they passed his door were as if they had seen the devil himself and they ran as if they were being driven from hell. Every now and then a shot from the village’s only gun would sound in the night, sending the animals of the jungle into a panic and waking everything and everyone within a five mile radius. Joe ventured out of his hut and joined a moving group of women as they shuffled to a hut on the furthest outskirts of the village.

  There was a strange low murmuring and shuffling as the women made their way over the hard dry dirt to the hut that was clearly illuminated now by a number of torches, all of which jutted out of the walls. Joe was surrounded by women chanting and moaning gently to themselves. In the distance he saw others running and patting their heads in frustration. He didn’t know what was going on but he knew that something was wrong – something was horrifically wrong. Suddenly he saw Winthrope in the throng standing by the door of the hut. Joe pushed his way through the crowd and grabbed him by the arm. ‘What the hell’s going on?’ Joe asked, and Winthrope turned. Joe had never seen a man so white. His face had been completely drained of blood and his eyes stared like those of a madman. Joe shook him. ‘What’s the matter? What’s happening?’

  Winthrope could only raise an arm and point at the hut in a manner that seemed all the more terrifying for its restraint, and Joe made his way to the door. Pushing through the crowd, Joe looked into the hut, and the sight that met his eyes made him gasp. He had seen a few things in the back streets of Hong Kong. He had seen his fair share of death and blood before – some of it had even been his – but as his eyes adjusted to the dim light of the hut and he began to make out the shapes in the darkness he could not believe that what he was witnessing could have been human once.

  Blood stained the walls of the hut and sparkled slightly as more torches were brought in to illuminate the scene. Now Joe could quite clearly see the body of a young girl, no more than sixteen, lying on the floor, completely covered in blood and lying beside her what looked like a mass of intestines and organs. Her face, eyes wide open, stared at the ceiling as one of the other women knelt beside her cradling the foetus of an unborn child that could have been of no more than three months’ gestation. The kneeling woman rocked gently and wiped the blood from the dead baby’s face, kissed its head and passed a hand along the shoulder of its mother, who was alive but dying. The hut smelt of iron and bodily fluids or like the abattoir that Joe had visited once on the docks in Hong Kong. No animal has ever died in such pain or fear as the woman who lay on the floor in front of Joe, he could tell that from her face as she looked at him one last time, closed her eyes and breathed a deep sigh. Her chest stopped rising and falling and her arm by her side fell slightly as she died.

  The kneeling woman began to cry, a loud wailing cry that sent shivers down the spine of every living thing in the area. In the quiet of the night the wail seemed to speak for everyone who had lost and who had known death, and Joe too wanted to cry, not perhaps for the girl or for her baby but for the sheer inhumanity of a life that had ended in this way. He staggered out of the doorway and grasped Winthrope by the arm. ‘What the hell happened in there?’ he asked, barely able to catch his breath. The blood had returned to Winthrope’s face and the two sat down under the warm glow of the torches. ‘The manananggal,’ Winthrope said. ‘The villagers talk about it but I have never seen it until tonight. They come out at night and only when there is a pregnant woman near the perimeter of
the village. Usually this girl sleeps with me, in my hut, but because of Lisa . . . well . . . she slept here. It starts with the sound, the flapping of wings, the others say they heard it over an hour ago, going from hut to hut looking for victims.’ ‘Is it an aswang?’ ‘A variety, yes. A shape shifter. Most of the time it resembles a woman, like a vampire and flies like the wind.’

  Joe thought back to his vision of the aswang a few days earlier. He remembered how it had flown around the group, encircling them, paying special attention to Lisa.

  ‘It has a long tube like tongue,’ Winthrope continued, ‘it uses it to enter the stomach of its victim and suck out the intestines and the foetus of the unborn child. It is an angry demon that does not stop until it gets what it wants. It drinks the blood and then eats the flesh if it is not driven off in time.’

  Winthrope pushed a hand through his hair and Joe thought he saw what looked like blood on the sleeve of his shirt. ‘Rumour has it that it can only be killed if you find its lower half, and put salt or garlic on it to stop it re-joining, but that’s virtually impossible. You saw the power of the thing. You saw what it can do.’

  Winthrope’s head fell onto his knees and he began to weep silently. Joe noticed how the blood on Winthrope’s shirt had stained only the underside of the arms. He wondered whether he perhaps he had been one of the first to examine the girl and had picked up the stains then – but why only the underside? Why so little blood anywhere else?

  ‘If only I could have been near her,’ Winthrope moaned. ‘If only I could have saved her. She was my wife, after all.’

  Joe placed a hand on Winthrope’s shoulder and tried to comfort him the best he could. Beside him, the women of the village began to disperse, each one casting suspicious glances at Winthrope and Joe.

  Winthrope began to pull himself together. He wiped his nose with his sleeve and realised that it was stained with blood. He quickly lowered his arm to his side and began to wipe it on the side of the hut that he sat against.

  ‘You believe in the manananggal?’ Joe asked.

  ‘Of course. Do you think you could not believe after tonight? You have to believe. We all have to believe after tonight.’

  ‘But most of all, these people believe?’ Joe said, and Winthrope knew exactly what he was implying.

  ‘Yes, they believe, why wouldn’t they? They believe, their mothers did, their fathers did and their children will.’

  ‘Yes, their children, they believe for their children.’

  Winthrope was silent. Joe sensed a change in the balance of the world – suddenly everything was a little stranger, suddenly things were not as they seemed. As much as he told himself that the blood on Winthrope’s shirt was from the woman as she lay dying, as much as he told himself that the spirits of the jungle really had killed her and taken her baby, and as much as he told himself that the village treated Winthrope as a god because he offered them wisdom and not fear, he still could not rid himself of the feeling that this was not the first time the aswang had visited this village at a time of crisis. How many unborn children were being sucked from their mother’s womb? Is this the reason why Winthrope wants to populate the village? The answers were too horrific for him to comprehend. He decided however to keep quiet, for the moment anyway. There was the gold to consider and Lisa and the rest of the party. He would watch, though, and listen, and see how things panned out.

  Patting Winthrope on the back, Joe made his way back to his hut, opened the door and flopped down the bed. Every time he closed his eyes all he saw was the face of the woman staring at him as if she were imploring him to realise something, as if she were asking him one final question. He told himself that he had heard her, had understood what she was saying. The night was going to be long now and the morning seemed far off.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Dawn came fast in the jungle and life began early in the day. Joe was awoken by the sound of the village waking up and going about its everyday business, preparing bread, feeding children, watering animals and seeing to the myriad daily chores. His last ‘wife’ had left some hours before and Joe lay on his bed smiling to himself, thinking about the few brief moments he had spent alone with Lisa. There was a knock on the door and it burst open revealing Winthrope, smiling and holding a jug of water. ‘How’s my fine bull this morning?’ he shouted, to which Joe smiled, saying nothing.

  Winthrope acted as if the night before had not happened. In fact, as he woke up and felt the sunlight on his face, Joe wondered if it had.

  ‘Here, have some water. The sun is up and breakfast is being prepared. We can go as soon as we’re ready.’

  Joe took the water and poured himself some into a cup as Winthrope exited. Through the muffled noises of the village Joe heard Winthrope knocking on the door of a hut he assumed to be either Fraser’s or the professor’s, for he heard the same jaunty greeting being given to another ‘fine bull’. There was something about Winthrope that Joe did not like. It wasn’t the threats or the sudden changes of mood that disturbed him or even the strange look that came over his face whenever he talked about his plan for a new Eden in the jungles of the island – it was something subtler, a hunch that just would not go away. He had met men like Winthrope before, men who had been given too much power, who had taken more than they were due and did not realise that, eventually, everything has to be paid for. Men like Winthrope always had one more card to play, always one more surprise to give.

  He drank more of the water – it felt good and cold against the back of his throat – and, then, Lisa appeared at the door. The sunlight caused a halo of gold to be formed around her. She smiled a knowing smile that seemed half regretful.

  ‘Thanks for last night,’ Joe said. Lisa hung her head demurely.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ she replied. ‘Did you have a good time?’

  Joe shrugged his shoulders. He hadn’t. He felt lower than the bed he sat on but he wasn’t going to bleat about it now; why change the habit of a lifetime and, after all, Lisa would never believe him anyway.

  ‘What was all the noise about?’ Lisa asked.

  ‘I don’t know, I stayed in the hut,’ Joe lied. ‘I guess there was some animal loose in the village or something. What time are we going?’

  Lisa shrugged. ‘Don’t know, when everyone is ready, I guess. I just saw Winthrope going into my uncle’s hut.’ Lisa let out a sudden giggle. ‘I think he may be in need of more than water this morning.’

  Joe liked to see Lisa laugh. It made him feel good inside, as if the world was how it should be. He put an arm around her and she nestled her head on his shoulder. Just the feel of her allowed him to forget the events of the night before. As he closed his eyes and breathed in her smell he realised that he was not thinking about the face of the poor woman who lay in the hut but Lisa, in a better place than this, in Hong Kong or one of the other islands, laughing and smiling.

  ‘I think . . .’ he began, but Lisa put a finger to his lips. ‘Let’s just sit for a while,’ she said.

  In his hut Fraser was getting himself ready while his third ‘wife’ sat on the bed combing her hair. He looked around for his belt and could find it nowhere. He searched under the bed, in the small wooden box by the door, under his shirt, but it was missing. When he had almost given up, the girl on the bed shifted her thigh and produced it from beneath her leg, smiling. Fraser laughed and took it. It was still warm. He realised how comfortable he felt here, how he liked the women’s sense of easy pleasure and fun. He had been pretty straight-laced most of life but here – here was different. There was nothing to hold you back, no conventions, no discernible regulations; nothing to stop you from doing what you felt was right, intrinsically, inside.

  He took the comb from the girl, sat behind her and began to comb her hair. She was a little surprised at first; this was the first time any male had combed her hair, but after a while she seemed to get used to it. She leaned back into Fraser’s lap and lay there for what seemed like hours although it was in reality only
a matter of minutes.

  For his part, in his hut, the professor was grilling Winthrope as to the whereabouts of the gold. ‘You say you know this place?’ he asked, to which Winthrope nodded and said that he did but he could not be sure until he got there.

  The professor nodded sagely. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I see, I am like that in Hong Kong. I know it so well and yet only by sight. Once I get my bearings I am fine. You say we can go this morning.’

  ‘Yes, when everyone is ready.’

  There was an awkward silence for a moment.

  ‘So how was your night?’ Winthrope asked, whereupon the professor’s face turned a brilliant shade of scarlet and he began to mumble and stutter.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I think . . . er . . . I think it was . . . oh dear . . . well, nice.’

  Winthrope laughed a loud and hearty laugh, then slapped the professor on the back.

  ‘Well, a few more nights of this and you’ll get the hang of it, professor.’

  The professor looked at Winthrope. ‘A few more nights?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I thought, I thought that was it.’