“They’ve taken Ann!” Driscoll called.
The captain saw Denham on the deck, clutching his damned camera as though it were a much loved child. The director’s assistant, Preston, was approaching. At Driscoll’s words, Denham turned and shoved the camera into Preston’s hands and started for the wheelhouse, eyes locked with Englehorn’s.
A terrible weight crushed down upon the captain, then. He glanced back at the island, feeling as though it still had him in its grip, even though the ship had been freed from the rocks. They were away from the reef, but they were not loose of this strange trap. Not yet.
On the island, he could see the orange glow of firelight emanating from the native village.
Ann’s throat burned with sea water. Her eyes stung. She tried to breathe and swallowed another mouthful of ocean. The edges of her vision were black and she knew that she was drowning by inches.
The islander’s powerful arms were wrapped around her. He had attacked her in her cabin, a terrifying figure with spikes of sharpened bone pierced through his chin, nostrils, and the bridge of his nose, and with a pattern of ritual scars on his forehead. In that first instant, she had thought him some kind of demon. Her scream was cut off quickly as he grabbed her with strength that belied his thin, bony frame. He had slung her over his shoulder and leaped from the deck of the ship, splashing into the stormy seas below. Maybe she was about to die, she would be dashed against the rocks and disappear beneath the surf.
Then the islander had grabbed hold of her again, tugging her through the water, and she had given up struggling, thinking that he was her only chance of survival. Somehow he had gotten his hands on a waiting rope in the water, and only then did she realize that her abduction had been far better planned than she imagined.
They were dragged along in fits and starts. Waves crashed over her. Ann tried to hold her breath but the sea pulled at her, exhausting her, and she could not help gasping. The ship was barely visible in the swell of the ocean and the spray of waves crashing around her.
Then she and her abductor were being dragged up onto the shore by a gathering of other islanders, hauling on the rope.
Ann choked, some of the water she’d swallowed spurting from her mouth. But it was not being half drowned that defeated her. It was despair. Their hands fell upon her and she did not even have the strength to scream.
Hayes surveyed the faces of the crew, there in the darkness of the deck. To a man, they were horrified. Ann was not merely a woman to them, not just an actress in Denham’s film. She had become a member of the crew, and more than that, she was a bit of laughter and beauty on a dreary voyage. Precious to each and every man aboard.
All of the men were looking to Englehorn, waiting for the order. Doubt flickered on the captain’s weathered face.
Hayes frowned. “Captain?” he quietly prodded.
Englehorn gave him a hard look. He hesitated only a moment and then, at last, he gave the nod.
“All hands going ashore report to stations!” Hayes shouted at the gathered sailors. “Jump to it!”
Then they were in motion. The panic that had ensued while trying to get the ship off the rocks had been replaced by grim, quiet determination. The entire Venture crew was mobilizing for the rescue effort, though only a handful would actually be sent ashore. The two whalers were swung out and lowered to the water. Equipment and rifles were loaded onto them.
Hayes scowled and pointed down at the men in the whaler. “What the hell are you doing? You want that boat to sink? Stow those rifles midships—come on, hurry it up!”
The rifles would help, but they had other resources as well. Even now, Lumpy and Choy would be in Englehorn’s cabin, pulling the cushions up from the captain’s window seat to get to the secret compartment below. Inside, there were the weapons they weren’t supposed to be carrying. Thompson sub-machine guns.
Hayes had no idea if they’d need the Tommy guns, but he was glad to have them.
He spotted Denham and Preston attempting to be inconspicuous as they boarded the whaler. Hayes considered having at the man right then, finally giving him a beating he so richly deserved for causing this entire mess, but he had seen the expression on Denham’s face when the director learned that Ann had been taken. For all of his faults, all of his ambition, it was clear that Denham had been truly shaken and afraid for her, and that bought him a reprieve. For now.
When Hayes went to supervise the loading of the other whaler, he saw that Jack Driscoll had joined the crew and was helping out just as though he was one of them. The first mate nodded in approval. He’d never have imagined the writer to be much of a scrapper, but Driscoll was tougher than he looked. The man was loading a box of ammunition, but paused a moment to look toward the island. Hayes followed suit and saw what had distracted him.
On the island, the fires were still burning. If anything, the flames were higher now, smoke swirling away into the night.
Seconds later, the two whalers were being rowed away from the Venture, packed with sailors. Denham, Preston, the actor fellow Baxter, and the gent with the artificial leg were on board one of the lifeboats, and Driscoll was in the other. Hayes knew the director and writer were friends, and he wondered if this separation was coincidental, or if Miss Darrow’s abduction had driven a wedge between them.
It was only a passing thought. The truth was, he didn’t much care, as long as it didn’t interfere with getting Ann back on board and getting the hell away from Skull Island.
Hayes hurried to round up Lumpy and the others to get the next boat off toward shore. The captain had taken the first group to get there quickly. Hayes would be bringing the reinforcements—both men and firepower.
He hoped to God they would make it in time.
15
DESPITE THE TORRENTIAL DOWNPOUR, the top of the wall was hellishly ablaze with torches when they dragged Ann into the village. She hung in their grasp for several seconds at a time and then struggled for a few moments, but it did no good. Even if she could wrest herself free of their grasp, where could she run?
The men who held her captive were silent, but all of the other villagers around her were far from it. They were a frenzied throng gathered at the base of the wall. Many of them were chanting in the same language she had heard the old sha-woman speak in before. Sometimes the words were punctuated by that one syllable, the one that seemed so heavy with fear and dread.
Kong.
But there were those among the villagers who were not chanting, not lighting torches, not surrounding her as they dragged her toward the wall. Instead, they wailed and beat at the ground, wide-eyed with terror, as though the end of the world was at hand. Others shook their fists at her with anguish and fury.
Ann’s throat was still raw from swallowing sea water and from screaming. Her legs were weak and her whole body felt shaky, from being dragged through the ocean and out of fear. At first she’d thought that her heart would burst and she would fall dead of fright in the midst of her captors, and then when she realized that she would not, she began to wish it were so. Whatever fate they had in mind for her, a heart attack would be far more merciful.
Shock was setting in, she presumed, and found that even that only made her feel more hollow.
Eyes wide, staring around at the hideous painted faces of the islanders, it was almost as though she had stepped outside her body. Her mind swirled with horrid images of rape and mutilation, of torture and depravity, as she tried to imagine what they had in store for her, but in time Ann closed off such thoughts.
It was best to be numb. That way, perhaps there was a chance she would see some opportunity to run. Surely by now Jack and the others on the Venture would have noticed her missing. They wouldn’t just leave her here. They’d come for her. And if it looked as though things were going to turn even uglier, that they were about to kill her, then she’d fight—anything to stay alive until they came for her.
They will come, she told herself. Someone will come.
If Ann
couldn’t hang on to that belief, her last bit of sanity would go with it.
She looked at the villagers surrounding her, screaming and chanting and wailing in fear. A fear that was directed at the wall. But it wasn’t the wall itself, of course—they were afraid of whatever was behind it, whatever it was the wall had been built to keep out.
She stared at the wall, that towering structure of stone, and the latticework of wood that had been built around it, with spears jutting out all around. It was breathtaking, hundreds of feet high, and as far as she could tell it cut all the way across the island.
What are you? she thought, as though she could touch the mind of the thing that had answered her screams, that had been summoned by her. What kind of creature exists in the world that requires a barrier such as this to keep it out?
The question alone was enough to make her tremble again. But then the men who were dragging her toward the wall stopped and part of the chanting throng parted. A withered old crone—it might have been the one she’d seen earlier, but she couldn’t tell—came forward. Her eyes were red and glazed as though she was drugged. As she threw her head back, rain pouring on her face, all of the bone jewelry she wore rattled as she shook her whole body and began to speak in a guttural language that seemed different, even, than that of the islanders.
Speaking in tongues—that was what Ann thought of. It was as though the woman was possessed by some spirit, or perhaps by the ghosts of the ancients who had carved the statues that were in ruins all around, and who had constructed the wall that kept out the monster.
The old woman continued to rave, red eyes locked on Ann.
The men who’d abducted her forced Ann to her knees and abruptly the mad woman lunged at her, splashing some kind of foul liquid in her face. Ann recoiled in disgust, the stink of it up her nose, the rancid taste upon her lips. Several younger village women came forward and tied bracelets to her wrists and hung a necklace of bones and other trinkets around her head, and only then did she understand that the filthy liquid had been splashed upon her as some kind of anointment.
Ann was being prepared for some kind of ceremony, some ritual.
When they grabbed hold of her again, she tried to fight but it was useless. Her captors herded her like an animal up a long walkway and up steps that took her to the top of the wall. Even then it was not enough. They dragged her to its very highest point, and there they bound her by her wrists to a pair of upright bamboo posts, facing into the night-black, mist-shrouded jungle from which those horrible roars had come.
Ann ignored them all after that, was numb to every indignity. All that consumed her mind was the jungle and the memory of that roaring. She peered into the darkness, into the trees and the mist, searching for some sign of what it was that awaited her there. The flames of the thousands of torches along the top of the wall flickered into the darkness, but the light did not penetrate deep enough to reveal the jungle’s secrets.
Her heart ached with every beat, a fist pounding her chest from the inside, as she stared out at the dark tree tops.
The chanting and screaming continued and now several of the islanders carried fiery torches to pools of oil that had been poured into channels cut into the stone of the wall. With a touch of fire, those pools ignited and flames raced along those channels, brightening the area around the wall as though some midnight sun had just risen.
For the first time, Ann could see clearly below her. The wall was sheer and its vertical drop ended in a rocky grotto that spread out from its base toward the tangled jungle of Skull Island.
The flames surrounding her seemed to dance to the frenzied, ritual beating of drums.
Villagers stepped forward and knocked away wooden plugs that had kept the burning oil confined to the channels atop the wall. Now liquid fire sluiced down other channels roughly hewn into the wall itself, like the gutters of some great cathedral, racing along those chutes into pools carved in the walls of the grotto far below. The grotto lit up with dancing fire, illuminating chambers at the base that were carved with the faces of ancient gods.
The jungle was a hellish nightmare of shadows and dancing firelight. She could see the tops of distant trees tremble, the canopy of the jungle swaying as if pushed by some unseen force. Her legs weakened and she sagged against the bonds that held her to the bamboo poles.
Horror grew in her like rising mercury until she could stand it no longer. No longer numb, Ann began to struggle against her bonds, trying desperately to free herself. Her wrists chafed raw on the ropes, but it was useless.
An islander painted and adorned with bones began to beat a new rhythm on a log drum. Off to one side Ann saw the old sha-woman, arms out, chanting wildly, her red eyes rolled back in her head. All along the top of the wall, villagers fell to their knees, a moaning wail rising from them in unison, even as the drumming grew frenzied as though building to a climax.
And it suddenly ceased.
In that moment Ann felt herself dragged forward. Panic seized her and she froze as though paralyzed. The posts she had been tied to were moving, pulling her toward the edge of the wall, toward that sheer vertical drop down to the fiery grotto below.
Her mind screamed. This was it—if she didn’t get free somehow, she would surely die. She dug her heels in and tried to hold back, but was now pulled forward, not strong enough against the force of those posts. Ann was dragged over the side of the wall…
Into thin air.
Screaming, she fought against the flaxen rope, but then she let herself hang free, realizing that the rope was the only thing keeping her from falling to her death. Her arms felt as though they would be torn from the sockets; the bones in her wrists shifted and the skin burned as all of her weight dangled from those bonds.
Ann glanced back and saw villagers holding onto ropes, releasing them slowly, and she realized they were lowering the entire structure, topped with those bamboo posts, down over the grotto.
Over, but not into the grotto.
The whole framework swung out over the chasm with Ann dangling from it, and lowered her toward a rock promontory between grotto and jungle. The grotto seethed with heat from the burning oil and she squirmed against her bonds. But it was not the fire she feared.
As her feet alighted upon the promontory, she could see trees swaying violently ahead of her. Above the crescendo of the native drumming and chanting, terrible, familiar roars could be heard from the jungle.
The chants assaulted her senses.
Kong.
The whalers were tossed upon the raging seas. Englehorn shouted orders and the sailors tried their best to follow them, attempting to steer the lifeboats toward the narrow cove they’d found before. The little boats bounced off of rocks and statues, but they would hold. He had to believe that.
When they reached that cove and the boats were beached, the sailors dragging them up onto the rocky shore, Driscoll leaped from his perch and raced for the tunnel Denham had found earlier, for the great staircase through the burial chamber that would lead to the village and the wall high above.
They could hear the drums and the wailing and the chanting from the village, and Englehorn imagined each of them had terrible pictures in his mind of what might have become of Ann.
Driscoll might have been the first one up the stairs, but the rest of them were close on his heels, weapons at the ready.
Ann twisted her arms, still trying to tear her wrists free, but she was tied fast to the bamboo posts. The rock promontory upon which she stood was flat and she could not escape the thought that it seemed almost like an altar, upon which she had been placed as a sacrifice.
It was as if the gates of Hell had opened. Heat prickled on her skin from the fire that lit the grotto behind and on either side of her. Burning oil lit up enormous, hideous faces carved in stone, and it was as though they were the audience for her fear, and her fate.
Oily smoke from the fire billowed up around her, swept up into clouds by the breeze. Her view of those terrible faces was
obscured and even twisting round and glancing up she could only vaguely make out the shapes of the chanting villagers high atop the wall. Though she choked on the stinking smoke she found herself grateful not to have to see any more what was around her.
Then the trees began to rustle in the jungle again and all such thoughts dispersed. She squinted, heart hammering in her chest, breath coming in short gasps as she tried to see through that black, greasy smoke.
The night was filled with a loud, splintering sound.
The islanders who lined the top of the wall ceased their wailing and chanting, falling entirely silent.
Ann’s breath came in hitching gasps and she shook as she tried to see what moved through the smoke ahead of her. She caught a brief glimpse of something huge and dark moving toward her, but her vision was obscured by the smoke.
It was close enough that she could hear the bellows of its breathing.
Then all sound ceased. Through the smoke she could see a massive, dark silhouette leaping through the air. The ground shook beneath her with the force of the impact as it landed. If she hadn’t been tied to the posts she would have been thrown from her feet.
Ann could only tremble and stare in disbelief as a breeze blew up and the swirling cloud of black smoke began to dissipate. Through it she could see a gigantic, leathery foot.
Every muscle in her body was taut with terror unlike anything she had ever known. Her lips parted, but she was too scared even to scream.
A sudden gust of wind cleared the rest of the smoky veil and she looked up, gaze following from the foot and up toward the face of the monstrosity. Her mouth was agape as her mind tried to accept the impossible.
Kong.
He stood before her, a twenty-five-foot gorilla, massive upper body hunched as he rested on his fists. The thick fur on his arms ruffled in the night wind. His entire body was covered in battle scars and his face was etched with them, including a large crescent-shaped slash over his right eye that gleamed in the firelight. One fang jutted up from the right side of his lower jaw, even when his mouth closed. The huge gorilla’s barrel chest rose and fell, and he snorted, the sound like a steam engine.
King Kong Page 15
