Yacouba abruptly seemed to cave in on himself. “All right, Mr. Cort. I will come the rest of the way with you. As you put it, I have no choice. But please promise me that we will not stay long. You will look, you will see that I told the truth of this place, and then we will leave, oui?”
“Sure.” With a dramatic flourish, Cort stepped to one side. “After you, Yacouba—M’sieur.”
His expression grim, their guide resumed the trek forward.
He was as true as his word. They did not have much farther to go. One moment, they were completely surrounded by high trees and thickets of denser brush, and the next . . .
“Well, what the Bingham do you think of that?” Cort halted to marvel. Coming up beside him, Shelly futilely dragged a glistening forearm across her perspiring brow and pushed back her hat as she joined him in staring.
“This is what we hiked two days through the jungle to see? A bunch of rocks?” She was exceptionally bummed.
“Not just rocks.” Cort’s eyes traveled slowly over the structure that rose before them. “They’re walls. Real walls.” He glanced over at the visibly apprehensive Yacouba. “You were telling the truth about that much, at least.”
“Yes, walls. The castle walls.” Fearless in the face of nocturnal prowling leopards and hordes of driver ants, their guide was now unashamedly on edge. “We can go now, oui, M’sieur Cort?”
Cort studied the wall before them. “I don’t see any weeping. I guess we just have to wait for tonight’s full moon.”
It was amusing to see how big the guide’s eyes became. “No! We leave now, M’sieur. Cort. Please. You have seen. It is enough.”
“It is not enough.” Cort was adamant. “Besides, as you so correctly pointed out, it’ll be dark soon. Might as well make camp right here. And while you’re setting up the tents and starting dinner, Shelly and I will have a look around. Or are you afraid the rocks will eat us?”
“No. No, not afraid of that,” Yacouba muttered. Without elaboration and with obvious reluctance, he swung the heavy pack off his back.
“Shelly?” Cort eyed his companion. She shrugged.
“Might as well sweat while walking as sweat while standing.”
“Not quite the investigative spirit I was hoping for,” Cort said as he started forward.
“You want to see spirit?” She cocked a jaundiced eye at him. “Show me a spa and a salon, I’ll show you some spirit.”
“In Libreville,” he told her. “In a few days. Don’t I always keep my promises?” She threw him a look but said nothing.
Though the walls confronting them were formidable, the structure did not resemble a castle in the historical European sense. Fashioned of blocks of neatly cut gray stone that had once been covered by white plaster, the inward-sloping ramparts were now carpeted in green moss so dark, it was almost black. Opportunistic fungi thrust stark white caps and beige tubes from cracks where the binding mortar had crumbled away. Crusted with old rust, the protruding cylinders of heavy cannon jutted priapically from bastions at each corner of the impressive fortification. Eying them, Cort marveled at the effort and labor that must have been required to haul the massive weapons up a river and then overland to this remote site.
Of the heavy double wooden gate that had once barred entry into the inner courtyard, only nails and clasps of failing black iron remained, fallen to the ground where they had been enveloped by eager vines and the questing roots of small trees. The wood itself had long since rotted away, consumed by the voracious, ever-opportunistic jungle. Kneeling to examine the ragged tongues of rusting metal, Cort lamented that he was not historian enough to date them. He would have to query Yacouba later. To his untrained eye, they looked plenty old. Certainly not twentieth century, he assured himself. Heedless of national laws that forbade the taking of antiquities, he thoughtfully pocketed a few of the smaller nails as he scanned the twilit courtyard in front of him. He had not hiked all this way for nails, even if they did qualify as antiques.
Enclosed by forbidding stone walls three stories high, the courtyard boasted several equally overgrown freestanding stone structures. One clearly had contained living quarters while another was just as self-evidently an old stable. They found evidence of a large communal kitchen, storerooms, a meeting hall of some sort, and a church. As Cort and an increasingly disinterested Shelly explored the ruins’ interiors, they found remnants of glazed pottery, furniture, and even a few disintegrating, moldy books. The writing in the latter reminded Cort of Dutch, but the pages were so filthy and worm-eaten, he could not be sure. Any potentially valuable artifacts were notable only by their absence. The nearest to anything of worth they uncovered were a scattering of badly corroded silver spoons and knives. As he continued to pull out and ransack drawers in the kitchen, Cort methodically shoved old silverware into a pocket.
“We’ll have another look around tomorrow,” he told his companion. “It’s getting dark and I don’t want to step in a hole or something. This wouldn’t be a good place to sprain an ankle.” As he started toward the doorway that led out of the kitchen, he was careful to step over the labyrinth of roots that coiled their way across the stone floor.
Following close behind, Shelly paused to pick up half a broken plate. It was white with blue designs. “I hope Yacouba has dinner going. I’m starving.”
“He’d better,” Cort snapped. “I’m not paying him to sit around and pick his toes. I don’t like his attitude lately, either.” He shoved a chair aside. Largely intact, it might have been worth something if not for the dozens of wormholes that riddled the intricately carved back.
She ran a hand through the blond hair she’d deliberately had cropped short for the trip. “Are you going to pay him in full now that he’s brought us to this place?”
Cort kicked aside a tin ewer. It clanged noisily as it bounced across the floor. “He certainly thinks so. We’ll work it out when we get back to the train station at Ivindo. I’m sure we’ll come to an arrangement.” He smiled. “Not that he has much choice in what I finally do decide to pay him. Or any leverage.”
Out in the courtyard, night overtook the forest like a quiet apocalypse. Here at the equator, the sun did not so much set as plummet below the horizon. Same time every day, day in and day out. To someone used to the gradual sunsets of temperate climes, the sudden descent into darkness could be disconcerting. Cort had a small flashlight on the chain he kept in one pocket, but he knew they wouldn’t need it. Yacouba had been ordered to set up camp just outside the main gate. Cort had no doubt that regardless of his superstitious fears, the guide would do as he had been told. The man had too much money at stake to do otherwise.
So, Cort didn’t insist they keep going when Shelly declared that she wanted to take a quick look inside one of the portals that beckoned from the inner wall of the fortifications. Several such arching openings formed dark ovals within the overgrown stone. Though clearly intended to allow entrance, they had low lintels just like the doorways in the courtyard buildings. People today were taller, Cort knew, than those who had gone before. The opening she chose stood out because of the elaborate gate that hung half-open on massive, bent iron hinges. The heavy black grate looked strong enough to stop a charging rhino.
“Go ahead and have a look,” he told her, “but don’t linger. I don’t know what you think you’ll find in there that we didn’t see inside the main buildings. And watch out for snakes.”
She smiled reassuringly at him, alluring in the deepening twilight despite the perspiration that streaked her face. “I won’t be long, I promise. But we came all this way. Maybe there are some diamonds. Or some antique jewelry. Something like that would almost make it worth coming all this way.” She gestured skyward. “Anyway, the light’s fading. I won’t go any farther than I can see. And I’ll be careful.”
While she bent low to pass under the opening’s lintel, he occupied himself examining the ground. The courtyard was paved with large blocks of the same finely cut stone as the outer walls and
interior buildings. Someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to erect this imposing fortress here in the middle of the equatorial jungle. Europeans, certainly. Yacouba had been right about that much. Cort had seen pictures of the walls at Great Zimbabwe, and this looked nothing like them.
The rationale for the fort’s construction remained as much a mystery as ever. If its builders had found gold here, or diamonds, the establishment of such a commanding facility would make sense. Or maybe the driving force had been ivory, he told himself. There were still a lot of elephants in this part of central Africa. He could be standing in the middle of an important ivory trading center whose history had been swallowed up by time and the jungle.
Perhaps he ought to have another, more thorough look at the buildings he and Shelly had just walked through. An ivory storeroom might be situated underground, or otherwise carefully hidden. So far, their cursory search had revealed very little in the way of artifacts. It was possible that everything of value had been carried off by various tribes. But, he reminded himself, Yacouba was insistent that locals didn’t come here.
Ivory held up well over time. He and Shelly couldn’t carry off a hoard of tusks, of course, but if they discovered anything substantial, it might be worthwhile to come back with porters (who would no doubt have to be paid handsomely to convince them to come here). If its age could be verified, old ivory was something for which he might be able to obtain a legitimate export permit. If that was the case, he knew paying off local officials wouldn’t be much—
Shelly’s horrific high-pitched scream split the thick, inert evening air, and he forgot all about any possible profit that might be gained from the teeth of long-dead elephants.
She was still screaming as he raced out of the central building, the piercing quaver testing the upper register of what the human voice was capable of. It stopped cold by the time he reached the portal she had entered.
A snake, he thought. Sweat made his shirt stick clammily to his back. She had seen a snake. Or, he worried, she’d been bitten by one. Or maybe she had encountered nothing more than a big spider. Except—her screams had not been screams of fright. Those throaty, bladed trills had been full of pain. Something had hurt her.
By now, the corridor inside the wall had filled up with darkness the way a barrel fills with oil. Had she tripped and knocked herself unconscious, Cort wondered? A place like this was likely to be peppered with unmarked cavities. Old open wells, for example. Despite the confidence she had expressed, he realized now he should have insisted that she take the little flashlight.
“Shelly! Shelly?” One hand rested on the corner of the dark portal, the stone damp and cold against his palm, as he tried to peer inside. The inner depths were impenetrable, black as the inside of a cave. Extracting the small emergency light from his pocket, he squeezed it to life.
The beam the twin LEDs cast was narrow but bright. He could not see very far ahead, but he could see clearly. Certainly clearly enough to avoid something as obvious as an uncovered well. Unexpectedly, the path he was following inclined downward. The uneven pavement underfoot was slick with moisture.
It was plain what had happened, he told himself. In the gathering darkness, she had lost her footing on the slick cobblestones, slipped, and hit her head. That was why she was not answering his calls. It was a hypothesis that explained her present silence—but not the preceding screams. One scream, yes. Multiple screams . . .
The corridor widened, turned a sharp corner, and continued to descend. Soon, it had widened enough to accommodate two-way traffic. Heavy iron sconces bolted to the walls showed where torches and later oil lamps had once blazed to illuminate the subterranean maze. Like fossilized flames, sooty streaks rose above each one.
She’s crazy, he told himself. Wandering down into a place like this at sunset. What could have driven her to keep going beyond where the fading sunlight reached? Darkness pressed in tight around him while fingers of damp wormed their way beneath his shirt. Without the flashlight, it would have been impossible to see anything.
An iron grate in the ceiling allowed the first hint of intensifying moonlight to illuminate a tiny portion of floor. Until that moment, he had not realized how far he had descended. The grate was at least thirty feet overhead.
Where was he? Despite the twists and turns he had taken, he was certain he was still somewhere within the castle perimeter. Tilting back his head, he found that he could almost see the rising moon. Still gazing upward, he took a step forward and stumbled on something.
“Dammit!” Lowering the beam of his flashlight revealed the chain he had tripped over. It lay on the floor in a haphazard heap, as if it had been dropped or fallen from a cart. The links were pitted and heavy. In the feeble light from overhead, the iron had a peculiar greasy sheen.
As he continued onward, he encountered more of the chains. Many were attached to iron rings that were bolted to the walls, but a fair number lay scattered across the floor itself.
Shifting the beam from side to side as he slowly made his way forward, he was relieved when the flashlight finally picked out the pale brown of his companion’s pants. He barely had time to register the fact that the pockets were too high and were facing the wrong way. He didn’t scream, but that was because he inhaled so sharply, he temporarily stopped breathing. Just as he stopped moving.
Shelly was hanging from the ceiling, her legs spread wide. Too wide. A worn, rusted, but still unbreakable iron shackle was clamped tightly around each of her bare ankles. As she swung slowly back and forth, blood flowed copiously down her front and back, soaking her shirt, staining her blonde hair dark, completely covering her face with the same slick sheen as oil on glass. Her eyes were wide open and staring. The left one bulged halfway out of its socket from the sheer force of her screaming.
She had been pulled apart, split like a chicken wing, her pelvis cracked and one leg wrenched almost completely out of its socket. The brief but intense screams he had heard echoed through him, repeating in his head like a bad heavy metal track, refusing to go away. In the heat and humidity and the cloying, cramping darkness, he found himself shivering. Something had, something had . . .
He spun in a panicked circle, the beam of his tiny light catching slashing, brief pictures of walls, chains, ceiling, floor. Within the subterranean chamber, nothing moved. Shafting silently down through the iron grate overhead, cold moonlight etched a crisscross pattern on the stone floor. There was no sound save for the steady drip, drip of blood onto the cold rock.
Then he heard it: the slightest of scraping noises. Something moving over the stone. Sliding impatiently across the same pavement on which he stood. A rough, unyielding, inorganic sound. Not footsteps. Not an animal. There was no soft flesh to muffle the noise.
He brought his light around sharply to seek the source, and saw the chain coming for him.
Advancing like an iron serpent, it was slithering across the floor toward him of its own apparent volition. No one was pulling on it; no one was pushing it. Neither was it truly sliding, since it could not slide uphill. In place of a snake head there was a circular shackle of heavy black cast iron. A single bolt held the hinged halves together. Fixed in the beam of Cort’s flashlight it rose, cobra-like, to regard him. Ancient caked blood lined the inside of the shackle. The bolt unscrewed and the two halves of the shackle parted, opening like jaws.
What the fuck is that? His eyes widened.
He might have made a sound. In any case, there was no one around to take note of it except the unfortunate Shelly, who was beyond hearing. He stumbled backward, staggering uphill. Something struck at his right calf and a sharp pain shot through his lower leg. Twisting wildly, he looked down to see a second chain starting to wrap itself around his upper ankle. Uttering an inarticulate cry, he wrenched free of the encircling metal and turned to run back the way he had come.
All around him now, the sloping subterranean passageway was alive with the brassy clink and clank of awakening metal. Chains scraped and rattl
ed, jangled and clattered as one serpentine shackle after another shook itself to horrid, metallic life. Cort ran as he had never run, trying to keep to the middle of the corridor and away from the walls, dodging the mamba-like strikes of chains heavy and light, flailing madly at those that lashed out as they tried to wrap themselves around his legs, his torso, his thrashing arms.
Somehow, he made it out without falling, without being dragged down. Though distant and indifferent, the brightening light of the ascending full moon was as welcome a sight to his wild eyes as the flash and flare of the signs in Times Square on a Saturday night. Behind him, the deep, damp corridor that pierced the ground like a junkie’s cracked syringe was alive with a rising metallic cackle. Looking back as he struggled to catch his breath in the superheated, cloying air, he saw to his horror that the hideously animate metal Shelly—and now he—had disturbed would not be satisfied with trying to trap him in the stone catacombs below.
It was coming out after him.
Dozens, hundreds of lengths of chain large and small; some with shackles attached, others adorned with draperies of dried blood, came heaving, writhing, and humping like a horde of gray-black worms out of the arched opening, as if a truckload of giant leeches had been dumped into the courtyard. With a cry, Cort rushed toward the main gate, howling frantically for Yacouba as he ran. What the guide could possibly do he could not imagine, but if nothing else, the presence of another potential victim might at least divert some of the attention of the horror that was tracking him. Risking a glance backward, he saw that the metal coils still pursued him across the open stone courtyard.
He shouldn’t have looked back.
As a result, he did not see the root that tripped him. It was not animate and did not reach up to grab at his feet, but it might as well have. He went down hard just inside the beckoning gateway. Losing the flashlight as he threw out his hands to protect his face, he managed to break his fall as he slammed forward into the corner of wall where a massive gate had once hung. Slumping to the ground, he grimaced as he rolled over onto his back. The liquid that filled his mouth was syrup and salt. Raising his hands, he saw where he had scraped them against the eroded rock. Both palms were bloody. His lower lip had caught the edge of the entrance and was bleeding as well.
What the #@&% Is That? Page 34
