Carl stared forlornly at the wreckage of the camera, which lay smashed and broken on the chasm floor. A thin, shiny thread of black film trailed from the smashed Bell & Howell body like spilled innards. Carl reached out and touched the exposed film, his dreams destroyed.
Motion out of the corner of his eye caught Jack’s attention. A huge slug-like thing, like some sort of giant maggot, was squirming from a hole in the ground. It was as long as Jack himself was tall, and crawling toward Lumpy and Choy.
“Look out!”
He snatched up a long stick and put himself between Lumpy and the maggot, using it like a spear to fend the creature off. Lumpy began to drag Choy’s body away, trying to get it somewhere it wouldn’t be disturbed, but the entire cavern floor came alive with life. From beneath rotted stumps and fallen trees, from under rocks and out of burrowed holes, the insects came.
Not merely insects, these. Monsters. A pair of creatures the size of dogs set after Lumpy and Choy. A giant thing that seemed a cross between crab and spider scuttled toward Jack and he jabbed it with his makeshift spear. Even as he tried to save his own life, he heard Lumpy screaming, heard the terrible sounds of flesh being rent by pincers and mandibles. When he forced the crab-spider back a step, he saw Lumpy and Choy’s body being consumed by the nightmarish bugs.
Jack looked wildly around for Denham.
With a roar, Carl ran at the bugs. Something had given way inside of him and now he wielded a short stick like a club, smashing huge insectile monsters in a psychotic explosion of rage, pulverizing their bodies into the dirt.
Jack shouted his name, but too late. A blind, probing thing like some kind of hideous worm slithered out of a hole and bit Carl’s leg. Denham smashed it to pieces even as dozens of other insect things descended on him. Jack desperately swung at the creatures with the stick, batting at them and stabbing them. All around them, monstrous freaks of nature emerged from dank burrows and crawled toward Jack and Carl, huge insectile mutants that seemed twisted combinations of spiders, crabs, mantises, and centipedes.
They were surrounded. No escape.
The chasm erupted with gunfire.
Around Jack and Carl, giant insects were blown apart. Chitinous shells shattered and legs were shot off. Jack spun around, confused, and then tracked the shots upward.
Bruce Baxter swung down from above, clinging to a vine, Tommy gun rat-tatting in his hand. Giant spiders swarmed out of holes in the cliff face. Again bullets ripped the air and tore them apart, but these shots didn’t come from Bruce. Up on the lip of the chasm, Englehorn and a couple of sailors fired down into the gap.
Agile and strong, Bruce dropped to the bottom of the chasm and swung the barrel of the Tommy gun in an arc.
“Nobody get in my way! I’m an actor with a gun and I haven’t been paid!” He pulled the trigger and laid waste to the bizarre creatures, bullets blasting apart crab-spiders and giant centipedes and flying things, giant dragonfly things with tails like wasps.
Those not blasted apart scurried away back into the darkness.
As Jack stared at Bruce in amazement, a length of rope landed beside him with a thud.
“Up here!” called a voice.
It was Preston, clinging to a crumbled ledge twenty feet above them.
“Grab it!” he said.
Jack grabbed Jimmy and pushed him to the rope. The kid was in shock but he grabbed hold and began to climb. Jack turned to Carl, but the man didn’t move. His gaze was distant, lost. Jack was about to say something, to urge him on, when Carl began to quietly speak.
“Just as you go down, for the third and final time, as your head disappears beneath the waves and your lungs fill with water…do you know what happens in those last precious seconds before you drown?”
The man was raving. Jack let him speak for a moment, then started tying the rope around Denham’s waist.
“Get out of here, Carl. Grab the rope.”
Denham frowned. “Your whole life passes before your eyes. But if you lived as a true American…you get to watch it all in color.”
His smile was sublime.
Englehorn clenched his jaw as he reached down to pull Denham up the last stretch of the rope. The voice in the back of his head was screaming at him, telling him what a fool he was for not leaving when he’d said. He never should have come into the jungle to search for them. But there had been too many of his own men on that expedition. If it had just been Denham and his foolhardy foot soldiers, perhaps he would have left them behind, somehow convinced himself that Ann Darrow was already dead so he could sleep at night knowing he’d left her to the predations of this savage land.
But in his heart he’d known he wouldn’t be able to go, and he cursed himself for it. Particularly now that he saw how few had survived. Of the members of his crew that had followed Jack Driscoll into the jungle, only the boy, Jimmy, was still alive.
Baxter and Preston were sprawled on the ground nearby with Jimmy. Denham fell to his knees at the top of the chasm, gasping from exertion.
“That’s the thing about cockroaches,” the captain said, glaring down at him. “No matter how many times you flush them down the toilet, they always crawl back up the bowl.”
Englehorn turned away in disgust as Denham stood.
“Hey, buddy!” the director called, voice brittle and on edge. “I’m outta the bowl! I’m drying off my wings and trekking across the lid!”
“The pity of it is, you didn’t die with the others,” the captain said through clenched teeth.
He turned toward Denham to continue, but then he spotted Driscoll. The madman was climbing toward the top of the chasm on the other side.
“Driscoll, don’t be a fool! It’s useless! Give it up!” he called.
But as he reached the top and stood on the opposite edge of the chasm, the writer turned and raised his hand.
“I’ll be seeing you.”
Englehorn gave him a hard look. “She’s dead.”
Beside him, he heard Denham speak softly, as if to himself. “She’s not dead. Jack’s gonna bring her back.”
The captain turned to glare at him, but Denham had an almost beatific look upon his face that gave Englehorn pause.
“And the ape will be hard on his heels,” Denham went on. “We can still come out of this thing okay, if we put aside our differences. More than okay.”
Englehorn looked at Denham and laughed. “You want to trap the ape?”
Denham spread his hands, as if his suggestion was the most reasonable thing in the world. “Isn’t that what you do? Live capture? You’ve got a hold full of chloroform we could put to good use.”
The captain stared at him. “I don’t think so.”
“Don’t tell me you’re afraid. I heard you were the best.”
Denham rose and turned to look across at the solitary figure on the opposite side of the chasm. Driscoll stood there, bloodied and torn.
“Jack!” Denham raised a hand in salute. “Look after yourself!”
“Keep the gate open,” Driscoll replied, voice echoing down in the chasm.
“Sure thing, buddy!” Denham called. “Good luck!”
Driscoll turned to go.
“Jack…”
Driscoll looked back over his shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” Denham said.
Jack looks puzzled by this, Englehorn thought. But the man said nothing more as he turned and disappeared into a dark tunnel formed by the collapse of ancient ruins in the midst of the jungle.
Kong moved swiftly and powerfully through the jungle with Ann held close against his chest. Before he had carried her like an object or a toy, but now he was more gentle and protective. The blood from his wounds was already drying and he moved with such determination that he gave no sign of having been injured. Ann looked up at him, studying his face, and for the first time she saw a kind of dignity there instead of pure ferocity. The tension went out of her body and she relaxed in his grip. Strange as it was under the circumstances, for t
he first time since coming to Skull Island, she felt safe. She had chosen to remain with him for her own protection and while that meant she was not free, at least she knew Kong would not harm her…and that he would keep her from harm.
From what she could see of the route he was taking, both the path on the ground and the way certain tree limbs had been broken off, she thought he had passed this way many times before. Ann could only presume he was taking her to his lair.
She let out a tiny noise of surprise when Kong clutched her a bit more tighter and launched himself across a narrow chasm. With his free hand he reached out to grab thick vines that hung on the other side, but the vines gave way, tearing, and Kong fell backward, Ann still clinging to his chest.
The giant gorilla landed hard, impact shaking the ground. Ann was rocked by the fall, her head snapping forward, teeth clacking together. She shook it off even as Kong scrambled to his feet, growling. He placed Ann on the ground, pushing her protectively behind him. She tried to peer around him, confused, wondering what had set him off.
Looming up at the edge of the chasm was a huge statue of a gorilla, a fierce, powerful figure that might have been some ancestor to Kong. Ann stared at it a moment, her fear giving way to comprehension. She stepped out from behind Kong and moved nearer to get a better look at the towering statue, another remnant left behind by that ancient civilization.
As she passed him, Kong gave a low, warning growl.
“It’s all right,” she said, glancing up at him. “It’s okay.”
Ann reached the statue and began to pull away more vines and creepers. The statue had been eroded by weather and entropy, but it was quite lifelike. If not for the scars and the jutting tooth, it might have been the very likeness of Kong.
Excited, she turned and smiled at Kong. “Look, it’s you. Kong,” she said, pointing at the statue and then at him. “See? You. Kong? This is you.”
Kong looked from Ann to the huge statue. He took a step back, glancing between her and the giant stone carving, and Ann saw that he was troubled by the comparison. She was dwarfed by the stone monolith, and it seemed to her that he did understand, that he had seen the carved figure as a threat to her, and now that he realized it was an image of himself, on some fundamental level he realized that to her, he was monstrous.
Kong looked down at his hands as if he was seeing his gnarled, leathery fingers for the first time. Ann moved toward Kong and when he looked at her she was certain that she saw fear and sadness in his eyes.
It was a full minute before he reached his hand down to pick her up once more, and when he did she climbed into his grasp willingly, wishing she could communicate with him. He cradled her gently as he started off through the jungle again.
The daylight was fading toward dusk as they arrived at a tall mountain Ann had noticed many times during their odyssey. Kong reached up and began to climb the steep, craggy face, higher and higher toward that vertiginous peak, carefully cradling Ann in his hand. A sudden flap of wings and a flickering of shadows came from the twilit caves in the cliff face, and Kong pulled her close to his chest. From the darkness lunged a huge flying creature whose upper body was batlike, but whose torso, legs, and tail reminded her of drawings she’d seen of mangy jackals. Its wingspan must have been eight feet from tip to tip, and its feet had sharp, wicked talons. The creatures were scavengers of some sort, hovering in the skies around the mountain like vultures.
Protected in Kong’s grasp, she was safe from the bat-thing.
Into the shadows he carried her, through an opening in the mountain face and into a vast, rounded cavern whose depths she could not see in the last traces of daylight. At the mouth of the cave was a broad ledge that jutted out high above the jungle.
Kong carried Ann out onto the ledge and she looked across the vastness of Skull Island and marveled at its beauty, struck by the irony that such a terrifying and brutal place could be so magnificent. Over the ledge was a dizzying drop of at least a thousand feet down to the jungle floor. In the dying of the light she could see the Venture moored off the tip of the island. Despite the distance they’d traveled to get here, the ship seemed no more than three miles away. Whatever route they’d taken, with all of the terrors that had impeded their progress, must have been circuitous, for surely they’d traveled farther than that.
No matter, three miles or three hundred, it was a lifetime and a world away from her now. Her hope of survival was in the hands of her captor.
Kong gently placed Ann on the ground, then moved away and sat to one side of the ledge. The horizon was a fiery orange as the last of the sun went down, silhouetting the massive figure of Kong against the light.
Ann gazed at him a moment and then looked around at her strange surroundings. It took a few seconds for her eyes to adjust to the deepening shadows. Then, in the recesses of the cave, she saw something that made her catch her breath. Far to one side there lay a giant gorilla skull and the skeleton of a creature that would, in life, have been at least as large as Kong himself.
So much made sense to her now. He truly was alone. Here on the cave floor were the bones of his ancestors. Kong had not always been alone. But it was clear he had been by himself for a very long time, without any family at all. And now, suddenly, that had changed. He had protected her. Ann had always made a family of those around her, from vaudeville to the Venture, but this was not like anything she had ever imagined. She felt oddly touched, and somehow, no longer afraid.
A sudden flutter came from the dark recesses of the lair, a sinister sound. Ann glanced worriedly into the shadows and hurried back out onto the ledge to join Kong.
She gazed at him expectantly but he would not look at her, his eyes distant, looking out at the jungle but also, somehow, at nothing.
Ann danced a few tap steps, hoping to amuse him again, to bring him back from wherever his mind had wandered. But Kong gave no response. She leaned down and picked up a stone, rolling it up and down her arm like a juggler’s ball. Still Kong did not turn to her. Ann knelt at his closed hand. There were things shifting in the cave that frightened her, but more than that, she could not escape the feeling that he was sad, and she wanted to comfort him. She tugged on one of his fingers, wanting to connect with him, but he brushed her away.
“Look at me,” she said. “Look at me.”
Slowly, he turned to meet her gaze. Kong crooked his finger, she wrapped her arms around it, and he gently pulled her to her feet. Kong held her gaze temporarily and then he turned and looked out over the jungle canopy. Ann followed his gaze, taking in the rugged landscape, bathed in last evening rays of sun.
She stared out at sea, a rain cloud casting shadows over the ocean, and she wondered if he was not sad after all, but simply at peace after a tumultuous day.
“It’s beautiful.”
Kong only sat, quietly staring out over the jungle.
“Beautiful,” she said, and he looked at her. Ann placed her hand over her heart. “Beau-ti-ful.”
Kong’s hand unfurled beside Ann. She hesitated, then climbed into his palm. Kong gently lifted her up and for a moment he just stared at her. He lifted one enormous finger and touched her hair. Cradled in Kong’s hand, she looked into his eyes without fear.
They sat there together, content in each other’s company, high above the jungle, as the last of the dusk light faded to dark.
22
FATE HAD PLAYED A hand in all of the events leading up to this moment. Jack was certain of that. So many men had died in the attempt to rescue Ann, and he felt the weight of their deaths upon his shoulders. Yet if Kong had not returned to attack them at the chasm, he wasn’t sure he would ever have been able to track the great ape back to his lair.
Instead, once he reached the other side, he had seen the broken tree limbs that lined the path the giant gorilla had taken, and soon enough he’d come to see the signs of Kong’s passing, and to realize that this was a well-trod path. Even in the failing light of day he had been able to look into the sky and
see the trail led directly toward the tallest peak on the island.
Night had fallen, but the evening sky was clear enough that above the darkness of the jungle, the mountain was still visible. Things moved in the undergrowth and in the branches above him, but they seemed almost unwilling to venture onto the path, as though afraid of incurring the wrath of Kong.
Jack had no such hesitation. All he could think of was Ann.
His thoughts felt crisp, his mind awake and alive, but he knew that was an illusion. In truth he was far past exhaustion, his muscles sluggish, his nerves on edge. Only adrenaline fed him now, and he wondered how long it could keep him going.
It seemed to take an eternity for him to climb up the cliffside to Kong’s lair. The going was not terribly difficult, the rock was craggy and provided many handholds, but it was steep, and one misstep would send him tumbling to his death.
In time, though, he reached an opening in the cliff face that led into a vast cave. Moonlight streamed into the cave and he kept to the walls, moving in silence. The chamber was huge, its ceiling so high that in the dark he could not make it out. A short distance from the opening through which he’d entered was another, that led out onto a broad ledge overlooking the jungle.
Jack froze.
Kong lay upon the ledge, asleep. The giant gorilla’s massive chest rose and fell and his breath rattled in a light snore.
Jack hurried across the stone floor to take cover behind a large rock. He scanned the cavern for any sign of Ann, but could not see her. His pulse raced, his every muscle tensed to spring if Kong so much as twitched in his sleep. The old bones of a large gorilla lay on the other side of the cave.
With no other choice, Jack moved toward Kong. He kept to the shadows of the rocks. Huge bat-things fluttered, agitated, up in the eaves of the cavern, sensing an intruder. Jack froze and looked up at them. During the day he’d seen dark things flying around this peak. Now they rustled up amidst the stalactites that hung from the roof.
King Kong Page 23
