by Bill Schutt
Demeter. Shit. Hadn’t there been a fictional ship with the same name. And why would they rename—?
“Karl!”
Above, in the tree, Private Becker had reached the level where the camera hung, an arm’s length away. “Will you shine that light up here, for Christ’s sake.”
Resembling a giant mechanical eye, the nose cone swung gently from a tangle of braided cotton.
“Looks like this thing held together,” Becker called down.
“Well, that’s good news,” came the reply. Neither man wanted to tell Dr. Sänger that they couldn’t find his precious movie camera, or that it had been smashed to bits upon landing.
Below the canopy, Fuchs was becoming more and more uneasy. The forest had come suddenly alive with night sounds—layer upon layer of chirps, buzzes, and clicks, all of them set against the incessant drone of mosquitoes. Just once, Fuchs thought he felt a vibration brushing over his spine and ribs, barely perceptible. But the feeling passed as quickly as it had come, so he shrugged it off and tried to think about something else, anything else.
When he first came ashore, Fuchs had sought to calm his fears by trying to identify the night sounds. Unfortunately, his effort to make familiar what he could not understand had left him with nothing but a serving of crow for breakfast. His mistake was a suggestion that the mechanical toc-toc-toc they had all heard while on patrol might have been produced by a woodpecker.
“Fuchs, whoever heard of a woodpecker at night?” Sergeant Vogt had said mockingly. The SS sergeant made a point of waiting until there were several other sentries gathered round. “That was a frog, you ass.”
The private had shrugged his shoulders, his face reddening. “Sounded like a woodpecker, Sergeant.”
Several of the others present also thought they’d heard woodpeckers, but they’d decided to follow Vogt’s lead, and they feigned disappointment at Fuchs for such an obvious mistake.
A sudden return of the toc-toc-toc, impersonal and jarring, brought Private Fuchs back to the reality of tonight’s sounds. The mist seemed to have settled a bit lower than it had been just minutes before.
“Toc-toc-toc,” Fuchs called to the dark, shining his light into the fog.
“Toc-toc-toc,” he called again, not caring if Willy heard him and mocked him again.
He stopped for a moment, wiping a sweaty brow with his forearm.
And then the forest called back to him.
Fuchs stiffened. His toc-toc-toc had been returned by a series of musical tones—almost metallic but unlike anything he had heard before. Yet “heard” was the wrong word. It was as if the sounds had passed through his body, more felt than heard.
What . . . Where did that come from? He whirled around and the flashlight beam swung into the trees, shadows shifting in the tangled foliage.
“You imagined that,” Fuchs told himself. Without thinking, he quickly called out into the dark again. “Toc-toc-toc.”
But this time there were only night sounds and the intermittent patter of rain that had begun to fall. He pointed the beam upward but now the light did not reach the canopy. The settling mist seemed even more dense than usual.
“Willy, did you hear that?” he called up into the tree, nervously. “It sounded like . . .”
“Don’t tell me—woodpeckers,” came Becker’s voice. “Never mind that. I’ve got Sänger’s camera. I’ll lower it down to you.”
“All right, then. Hurry up,” Fuchs called back.
From above, there came the sound of a branch shaking—Willy, finally freeing the camera, Fuchs thought, more than happy to finish their chore and get back to camp.
A single leaf spun down and landed on his shoulder.
Suddenly, he heard a loud crack, and something was falling out of the tree—seemingly aimed straight at his head. Fuchs jumped back just in time to avoid having his skull fractured by the falling camera—which came down in separate pieces, the larger one trailing a streamer of exposed film.
“Jesus Christ, Willy, you’ve broken it!” Fuchs cried, staring down at the shattered camera. “Who’s going to explain this to Sänger and the colonel? Not me!”
There was no reply.
“Willy?”
Fuchs realized that the forest had gone silent—as if the encroaching mist were swallowing every sound. Even the hum of mosquitoes had ceased abruptly, as had the rain; and yet somehow, this was as startling as a grenade blast.
The private shivered and grabbed his machine gun, clipping the flashlight onto the barrel of the MP-43. With trembling hands he flicked off the safety and squinted upward. “Willy? Willy, get down here right now!”
Silence.
An almost imperceptible rustle from behind caused the private to swing the gun barrel toward the sound. The flashlight was of no use. If it was possible, the mist was growing even thicker—reflecting everything back at him. From only five meters away, the world was a shapeless glare.
“Who goes there?”
Dead air.
“God damn it Willy,” he called again, his voice high-pitched and cracking.
Backing up against the tree trunk, Fuchs flinched as something thorny pinched him below the left shoulder blade.
What do I do now? he thought, but before he could come up with an answer, the dead air was broken by a vibration. It penetrated his chest and rippled outward to his limbs and head. For an instant, his teeth buzzed and he felt as if someone had just peered deep inside of him. The piercing filled him with fear—a dread such as he had never known.
He was probed again, this time more strongly and from two directions at once. The thought that gripped Fuchs was instinctive, and unbreakable. You are not imagining this.
Get away from here, he thought. But what held him in place was a third piercing, this one from a new direction.
RELAX
Instantly, the private felt calmer. Something had begun vibrating through his skull, deeply like an X-ray, as if somehow that mysterious . . . something, was systematically turning on and off specific regions of his brain—which, in fact, it was.
GENTLE
“Who’s . . .
RELAX
“. . . there?”
In a brain-soaking release of endorphins so calming that it all but paralyzed him, Fuchs’s mind formed a picture of his mother. She was basting a fat Christmas goose and turned to him, smiling.
“Where . . . where are you?” he called into the mist.
GENTLE, his mother seemed to say, her reassurance vibrating through his body like a song—a lullaby.
Inhuman. The thought reached up from Fuchs’s subconscious, and his heart rate spiked. “What do you want?”
GENTLE, came the reply from within, and Fuchs felt the muscles in his left shoulder relax. The bite there had been painless enough to be mistaken for a mere thorn prick.
It’s all right now, he thought. I will see my family again. I will make it home. He tried to smile but only the right side of his upper lip moved—drawing upward, then freezing in place.
Now his mouth seemed to be filling quickly. Filling with . . .
Fuchs reclined against the tree trunk, and began to slump. Everything is all right.
Time was getting away from him.
The machine gun fell from the private’s wet hands and he reached to retrieve it, but it seemed too slippery to hold. He fumbled for the tiny silver crucifix he kept in his tunic pocket, and his fingers entwined around the chain, by accident.
His head lolled to one side and his body followed it down. The MP-43 seemed to fade out of focus.
“Mother?” he whispered—although anyone else present would have heard something very different.
GENTLE, came the reply.
Then one last time. RELAX.
Fuchs responded with a whimper that turned into a choking wet cough. From what seemed very far away, he thought he could hear a wet thump as something hit the ground. Private Becker had returned.
But that did not matter now for there wer
e new signals. And there was nothing gentle or relaxing about them.
HUNGRY
HUNGRY
BE STILL
Fuchs tried to raise his arms, and he discovered that his limbs did not respond, could not respond.
His scream started as a gargle but rose in volume even as he felt hot breath on his face. In response, the creatures stopped feeding and stepped back to listen—cocking their heads sideways. One of them seemed momentarily distracted by the small silvery object that had fallen into the mud.
Fuchs could see their faces now—their curiosity, eyes like glistening black marbles. One of the creatures hissed at him. Then, for a moment, the private’s scream became strong and clear, spiraling up, and up, and up into the night, until it was lost in the mist.
CHAPTER 4
Someone to Watch Over Me
I know of no part of South America about which so little authentic information is available as this central plateau.
—COMMANDER GEORGE M. DYOTT
Leader of the 1928 expedition (unsuccessful) to find Colonel Percy H. Fawcett
Northern outskirts of the Pantanal, Central Brazil
Sixteen hours later, January 20, 1944
The ancient kapok tree was dead now, but its lower half was still anchored to the thin tropical soil by four giant buttress roots, radiating from its base like triangular fins. Assailed by fungi and wood-boring insects, what remained was a hollow shell. Gray and skeletal, it had resisted rain and wind to stand fifty feet above the forest floor. But no birds flew near this kapok anymore and even the insects seemed to avoid it. The sentinel stood silent against the approaching fall of night, its interior blacker than a mine shaft. Yet deep within the dead tree, the darkness had begun to shift.
Several miles away and at an altitude some five hundred feet above the hollow tree, R. J. MacCready gripped the parachute’s static-line hook in his left hand. His right hand lay across the chest pack of his reserve chute.
A red light went on above the jump door.
“Hook up, Captain,” Richards called, reemerging from his cubbyhole. This was the first Mac had heard from the radio engineer since the order to “gear up for drop,” and it was the first he’d seen of him since their refueling and leg-stretching stopover. “Sixty seconds to go.”
MacCready rose from the bench seat and attached the metal clip to a steel cable that ran the length of the aisle just below the ceiling of the plane. He shuffled toward the jump door feeling like an eighty-year-old man under the weight of his gear and the bulky T-5 parachute. Why couldn’t he be like other academics, content to spend their lives among mountains of library books and museum specimens rather than mountains of trouble? Three times before, he had resolved, “This is the last time I will jump out of an airplane that is not on fire or coming apart at the seams.”
And yet here he was again.
This time, though, the forest canopy below was whipping by too fast and too close. High pucker factor, he thought, squinting against a warm blast of air. A green mat of trees stretched, unbroken, to the horizon. “Where’s Chapada?” he shouted back to Richards.
“Forty-five seconds, Captain.” Either the man hadn’t heard the question or he’d chosen to ignore it.
MacCready tried again. “Where’s the town? Major Hendry said I was getting dropped just outside Chapada.”
Richards shook his head and moved up to stand behind him. “Captain, we can’t very well drop ya right into the town.” MacCready could feel the man conducting a final check of his main parachute. “Wrong person gets a look at this plane or you jumpin’ out of it—who knows what could happen?”
Richards had a point, but MacCready gave him only the slightest of nods as he scanned the terrain below. “Well, where are you dropping me, then?”
“It’s marked on your map, sir,” the radioman replied, and MacCready could hear the impatience returning to his voice. “There’s a village down there and a road. Y’all should avoid the village and get on the road. Head north for three hours—you’re in Chapada.” Richards checked his watch. “Fifteen seconds, Captain.”
They were still flying over lowland forest but MacCready could see that there were a few patches of open ground. He probably should have reviewed the game plan in the plane, but he’d needed the sleep. Preparation is overrated, he’d reassured himself. In the distance, the terrain began to rise into a maze of soaring rock formations that would have looked at home in the American Southwest—Utah, perhaps. But there was still no sign of a village or a road, and MacCready was becoming extremely skeptical about his chances of finding either.
“I am extremely skeptical, Richards!” MacCready yelled, noticing that the red light above the jump door had gone off—replaced by a green light.
“Time to go, sir.”
MacCready braced himself in front of the jump door. “Are you sure there’s a—?”
“Knees to the breeze, Captain!” the radioman shouted.
“What?”
“Go! Go! Go!” Richards said, pointing out the door.
MacCready shot the man a final dirty look, then stepped off with his right foot into nothingness. He concentrated on keeping himself in a tight, semifetal position, which he knew would prevent him from getting in the way of the chute deployment. The blast of the slipstream spun his body toward the rear of the airplane, and a split second later the fifteen-foot-long static line reached its full extension. It seemed to MacCready as if someone were trying to jerk the parachute off his back from above. He knew this was the static line tearing away the canvas lid on the main pack.
So far, so good.
“One . . . two . . . three . . . f—” MacCready felt a tremendous jolt rip through his body—as if a giant had snapped an enormous bullwhip—with him at the end of it. Unfortunately, it also felt like the big guy was trying to yank the parachute saddle harness that looped from his crotch to his shoulders, right up through his ass.
So far, so good.
MacCready looked up and felt an instant rush of relief at the sight of the billowy, silk canopy. He checked the suspension lines. None of them appeared to be twisted.
Perfect. He pulled on his rucksack release tab and snapped into the prepare-to-land position.
But where the hell am I landing?
The opening shock had sent his body into a wide swinging arc, which made it difficult to get a good look at the ground. He’d hoped for a few seconds to scan for the village or better yet, the road, but the forest was rushing up even faster than he had expected.
Relax, he told himself. Don’t tense up. Don’t—
Before he could complete the thought, the giant was back, this time flinging him into the trees.
Can we try that again? MacCready thought, as he stared through the canopy and lengthening shadows at what was still a clear blue sky. But the only “aircraft” he would be seeing were mosquitoes, gnats, and pium flies. Richards and the C-47 were long gone.
He stood at the edge of a turgid brown stream, on a narrow tongue of silver sand—compass in one hand, and map in the other. MacCready looked at the map from four different angles, none of which provided him with the slightest information about his location.
Not far from Chapada, MacCready thought. Yeah, right. Make that miles away with two hours of sunlight left.
He used the compass and the last bright shafts of true afternoon daylight to estimate the direction to Chapada or at least the road that would supposedly lead him there. It was a frustrating task from where he stood, beneath a humid ceiling of greenery, next to a stream that no one had charted. Finally, he seemed satisfied, until he looked up from the compass to his projected path, across the stream.
“Shit,” MacCready muttered, as he waded into the murky water. It’s going to take some real thought and a whole lot of creativity to pay Hendry back for this one.
Slogging into swampy terrain, Mac tried to keep his mind from focusing too much on the impossibility of his mission. Just two weeks earlier he had been o
n leave, eating hot dogs at Nathan’s, and now he was deep in the Brazilian interior looking for a needle in a haystack—a group of Japs and Nazis who implausibly had submarined their way deep into the middle of nowhere, and whose unknown pursuits had to be a threat, in ways he and Hendry could not yet fathom. Mac hoped he would get some important clues from Bob Thorne and his native buddies. A happier thought. Bob is alive. That too seemed impossible—as impossible as his cabin mate Richard’s directions to Chapada. He checked his compass, tried out a colorful curse on the Texan, and charted a new course to hopefully bypass the mud. Maybe this route will be easier.
Two hours later, filthy, wet, and mumbling about “Conquistadors and gold-filled intestines,” MacCready pushed his way out of the dense undergrowth into a clearing. He felt like a moth that had just escaped a jam jar. He was also wondering if that young pan tuner in Trinidad needed an assistant.
Okay, everybody off, MacCready thought, certain in the knowledge that his hump through the dense brush had attracted a variety of bloodsuckers, from ticks to terrestrial leeches, each of them now swelling to hundreds of times their unfed body weight, gorging on his blood.
You guys should just drop off now and save yourselves some tr—
He froze.
At the center of the clearing lay an Indian village. There were four rectangular huts—each one a framework of poles draped with palm fronds. The huts were supported ten feet above the ground on wooden stilts. The surroundings looked fairly typical: There were pots and baskets scattered about and a rack that held several dried skins—capybara and coati, by the look of them.
“Avoid the village,” Richards had said. A little late for that, MacCready thought, but nevertheless he began to back quickly and stealthily out of the clearing. Get on the road.
