Hell's Gate

by Bill Schutt

  Yet just as he was about to turn his back on the village, he stopped.

  Something’s wrong.

  MacCready scanned the area again.

  No people. No dogs. No fire. No movement at all.

  With my luck, the remnants of a Xavante raid. He drew his Colt .45 from its holster, then stepped out of the brush and into the open.

  The silence was strange and unnerving. Even the insects were quiet.

  “Bom dia,” he said, softly. “Hello.”

  There was no reply.

  The forest seemed to have crept in closer and the light was going fast.

  He checked his watch. It’ll be pitch black in ten minutes, he thought. And that’s gonna be fun.

  Back home, darkness came in stages. But in the tropics, MacCready knew, twilight was fleeting, almost momentary. Something told him to find the damned road before it was too late, but instead he approached the nearest hut. Sheets of dirty fabric hung like dead skin across a large screenless window flanking one side of the doorway. The entrance seemed to be gathering shadows.

  Seeing that he would need to maneuver up a wooden ladder to enter the hut, he holstered his pistol, then silently, carefully, he began to climb. A faint odor was wafting from within, almost sweet, and he recognized it as the last stage of extreme decomposition. MacCready poked his head over the top rung, and into the hut.

  Are those—?

  Suddenly, something hugged his face, like a veil, vibrating wildly. MacCready stepped back and fell halfway down the ladder, bruising both knees as he released his grip to claw at a membranous shroud that clung to his cheeks and brow.

  MacCready felt something buzzing and pulsating in his hair and he batted at his own head for several seconds before regaining his composure. Looking down at his hand, he saw several silk-entrapped creatures. Insects . . . flies. It’s a spiderweb, he thought, shaking his head. A spiderweb and I’m pitchin’ a goddamned fit.

  But it wasn’t the spiderweb and the flies that were the real problem. It was something else. Something else inside this h—

  As if on cue, from within the dwelling came more buzzing, rising in volume like radio static. And before MacCready could move, a thick cloud of flies rose from the floor, swirled through the doorway, and engulfed him.

  “Shit,” he cried in disgust, swinging his arms wildly. More insects became entrapped in the remains of the organic veil still clinging to his face—more and more of them. A half dozen found their way into his mouth, tasting faintly of their last meal. MacCready tore at the webbing, spitting and coughing.

  Several minutes later, his pack at his side, his lips wiped clean of webbing and flies, R. J. MacCready stared up at the doorway. Well, that could have gone better.

  I should be on that road by now, he thought. But there was something about this hut—for starters, the flies and the smell—which told him, You’re not going anywhere just yet.

  “Let’s hold the flies this time, huh?” MacCready announced, hauling himself back up the ladder, this time using a flashlight.

  The first thing he saw was the body of a man, sitting with its back against the far wall. MacCready was reminded of a balloon that had lost most of its air—and he also knew that this was not far from the truth. He had once seen a water buffalo collapse and die in the tropical heat. For whatever the reason, rather than removing the huge carcass, the villagers merely stepped around it, most of them giving the putrefying meat pile an increasingly wide berth as the days passed. Some of them, however, had not paid attention and one day the water buffalo paid them back—with interest. After swelling with internal gases for seven days, the buffalo exploded like a bomb, spraying several horrified villagers with a slurry of liquefied flesh. In the tropics, the special effects of death were often more than even a biologist could bear. MacCready knew that something similar had occurred in the hut. The man’s torso, inflated by bacterial gasses, had popped. About a week ago, MacCready guessed. The explosion phase was over, thankfully. These days, the Balloon Man was sinking quietly into himself.

  He peered into the man’s mouth, locked now into a silent scream—gums drawn back, teeth blackened from an eruption of blood that appeared to have gushed onto his chest. The scientist knew that the Balloon Man’s mouth had taken on a new role—as a convenient portal for the insects that came and went and laid their eggs.

  Ten days. Definitely.

  Even the scent of death had become more subtle—a cloying mixture of decayed meat and vegetables that the zoologist hated more than any other smell. And yet, beneath this stench, there was something else—something familiar.

  It smells like flowers, and he was momentarily reminded of his mother’s favorite scent, a perfume called Field of Gardenias.

  MacCready aimed his flashlight away from the corpse, but the rest of the room looked no better. The man’s entire family lay dead on woven pallets. No sign of struggle. Killed in their sleep? Is someone experimenting with poison gas?

  But the bodies were lying in pools of black, tarry matter. Glued to the floor in their own dried blood. No. Not poison gas. Something else.

  MacCready shivered. “Is this bad ju-ju, or what?”

  He was answered by a barely perceptible rustle, like parchment, fluttering in a breeze. He glanced up at the nearest “curtains.” There was no breeze.

  The rustling ceased, and there came to him a grim certainty that the sound had come from the far end of the hut. From the dark. Instinct told him that if he aimed his flashlight there, whatever it was would be gone. Would that be so bad? The scientist resisted the urge to stare, an ineffective means of viewing objects in the dark. Instead, he watched from the corner of his eye—the closest thing to “night vision” that humans possessed.

  Something moved: a shape barely discernible from shadow, accompanied by a dry scuttle across the wooden floor. Then silence.

  Now MacCready did aim his flashlight. The beam partially illuminated a wall of simple bamboo shelves tucked into a recessed corner. Too small for a hiding place but still, an inner voice screamed, “Ambush!”

  MacCready backed slowly out of the doorway and down the ladder.

  I’m being watched.

  On the ground, he kept the light aimed at the doorway and slowly lowered one hand toward the holstered Colt.

  The moment his hand touched the gun butt, something shot through his body—a vibration. An energy burst, MacCready thought, even as an adrenaline rush prepared him to face a threat—whether real or imagined.

  GO, something told him. An unstoppable message that spread through his nervous system like a wave.

  MacCready backed away from the hut, aiming his pistol alternately at each of its two openings, pausing just long enough to pick up his pack, just long enough to—

  GO!

  He tightened his grip on the strap and ran—dangerously fast if he wasn’t careful. But in those seconds, his only concerns lay in obeying the GO command and in putting the greatest possible distance between himself and whatever had been watching from the hut.

  GO. The word repeated itself again. Is it only in my mind, or is this real?

  The forest was a maze of shadows, and he strode quickly over fallen trees and through thorny scrub that clutched at his pants as he went. Yet something drew his gaze upward. Watch the canopy, he told himself.

  MacCready shook his head. Yeah, and fall on my ass. But the feeling would not go away. There’s something up there—watching me.

  Once, when he stopped for a sip from his canteen, he did look up—and swore that there were shapes peering back at him. He even drew his flashlight and turned the beam upward—but whatever had been there was gone.

  An hour later, he still had not found the road to Chapada but he stumbled into a smaller clearing—a tree-fall gap. No huts. No bodies.

  MacCready went down on one knee and tried to catch his breath. What the fuck was that all about? he thought. First the spiderweb, then a mad dash through the forest. The scientist realized that he had lost
control—twice.

  Is this how it starts? Madness?

  “Shit,” he said, quietly.

  Then, as he had done on hundreds of other nights, R. J. MacCready lit a small fire. Yet on this night, for the first time, he sat awake beside it until sunrise with his pistol drawn. And he did not look up.

  Outside Chapada dos Guimarães, Central Brazil

  JANUARY 21, 1944

  * * *

  After bushwhacking for the better part of a day, MacCready climbed a muddy embankment on all fours and stood atop what was clearly a raised dirt road. The fact that it looked more like a raised streambed than a road didn’t bother him at all—relieved as he was to be standing in the open, and in sunlight.

  His entire body ached, and he thought about how sometimes, out in the wilderness, no matter how beaten up his body might feel, he actually enjoyed the aches and pains that came with fieldwork. Clearly, though, this was not one of those times. It wasn’t fatigue, nor was it the insect bites, ticks, and thorns—it was what had happened in that village. And surprisingly, it wasn’t the image of the flyblown bodies or even the taste of the flies themselves that kept coming back to him. It was the deep, interior shriek—a command to get away from there. Too loud, too powerful, to be his own imagination. Something had come from outside of his own mind.

  GO

  Have I inherited my mother’s illness? Does schizophrenia really begin like this?

  “All right, next!” MacCready said out loud, forcing himself to concentrate on something else—anything else.

  Bob Thorne is alive, he thought, and gave a small laugh. He was still getting used to that one. MacCready pulled a hunk of rapedura out of his pocket and began munching on the toffeelike sugarcane product. As he ate, he thought back to Thorne’s sudden departure from the States. Only a few weeks later, word had arrived about his disappearance. Missing and presumed dead.

  What do I tell him if he starts asking about things back home? MacCready shook his head. He had to admit, after five years, he still didn’t know what had sparked the shit storm at Manhattan’s Atlantic Tech.

  MacCready tucked away his snack and recalculated his bearings. He had always viewed being lost (which he reluctantly admitted was now the case) as a puzzle, one that could be easily solved. In this instance, Bob’s town was somewhere in the vicinity, and soon it would reveal itself through human activity. He could see for miles across a rocky vista to remote blue cliffs. Terrain-wise, the region was as different from the Amazonian rainforest as the rainforest was from midtown Manhattan. It definitely reminded him of the American Southwest, except that here, towering rock sentinels formed natural shelters for a variety of microclimates. Without climbing more than a hundred feet, he could move between the stunted and gnarled trees of the drier flatland, the Cerrado, into a patch of stratified forest thick with ferns and broad-leaved evergreens.

  Then there were the birds. They seemed to be everywhere, toucans and parrots of every size and color. And he’d never seen so many raptors.

  Yeah, plenty of birds, he thought, as a flock of emerald-green parakeets burst from the trees calling to one another. As he watched them land at a new gathering place down the road, he noticed a thin plume of smoke in the distance.

  “Ta-da!” MacCready said, quietly. That must be the place.

  He took a few unsteady steps in the direction of the smoke, which appeared to be about five miles away; but then he stopped. The last of another day’s sunlight was going, and MacCready felt as if someone had arc-welded his vertebrae together. Too tired to head in there now, he told himself. And no sense getting everybody riled up.

  MacCready found a patch of flat ground on the overlook that faced the blue cliffs, started a small fire, and spread out his blanket. Within minutes, he was drifting off toward sleep beneath the first starlight.

  When he opened his eyes, there were a million stars overhead.

  MacCready had never believed in ghosts. But just the same, he was, this night, afraid that he no longer entirely disbelieved in them, either.

  “Go!” MacCready said to the night.

  But there were only the stars, and the forest—only the hunters and the hunted . . . And the living.

  And the dead.

  And madness.

  CHAPTER 5

  Reunion

  The doors of Heaven and Hell are adjacent and identical.

  —NIKOS KAZANTZAKIS

  Maybe this world is another planet’s Hell.

  —ALDOUS HUXLEY

  Chapada dos Guimarães, Brazil

  January 22, 1944

  The first thing MacCready noticed about Chapada dos Guimarães was the stone archway, from which hung a pair of severed human legs. Two boys, who appeared to be about eight years old, were taking turns shooting arrows at the legs with a small bow. They stopped as MacCready approached, then turned to face him—silently.

  MacCready forced a smile and purposely avoided looking at the legs. “Bom dia. Meu nome é MacCready. Alguem fala ingles?”

  The children said nothing. Then one of them dropped his bow and they both bolted under the arch, disappearing into the dusty plaza.

  “Muito obrigado,” MacCready called after them with a wave. Don’t forget to put your legs away, kids, he thought of adding, but knew that he’d never come close to working out the Portuguese translation.

  Common logic told him that the best thing to do was wait around until someone else showed up, but the severed legs, which dangled from bands of rough leather cord, were giving him a serious case of the creeps. So he decided to enter the plaza and look for Thorne, or maybe some breakfast—making certain not to walk under the fermenting limbs.

  In the center of the plaza, a magnificently dusty old church stood in faded elegance. Jesuits had built the Igreja de Senhora Sant’ Ana in 1779 with the help of local Indians. These days, it appeared that the congregation had dwindled to a couple of dejected dogs and some scrawny chickens, scratching around in the courtyard. Most of the buildings surrounding the square weren’t much more than huts, and the town exhibited the same casual squalor to which MacCready had become accustomed in the tropics. In fact, he’d come to like the peace of such places. But the silence of Chapada was unusual, and would have been unnerving even without the legs, and the slow circuit of vultures that rode the thermal currents far above the stone arch.

  Mac climbed the steps to the church, shrugged off an odd feeling that he’d been through this sort of thing before, and stepped inside. The daylight streaming through the glassless windows fell obliquely onto wooden pews. There was no one inside—the only movement was from the dust that swirled into and out of the light—a shaft of motes. MacCready turned to leave but stopped, after one of the statues caught his eye. It was Joseph, his face appropriately benevolent. Oddly, though, the carpenter from Nazareth was wearing a pair of heavy modern work boots.

  Suddenly there were voices calling from the courtyard and MacCready quickly moved toward the door and peered outside. A group of about ten serious-looking locals strode purposefully in his direction, followed by the two squirts he’d seen earlier. What alarmed him most, initially, were the children, who seemed too hyperactively gleeful as they danced behind the advancing adults. Simultaneously his eyes were drawn to the glint of finely honed metal being carried by some of the members of what was apparently his welcoming party.

  While the sympathetic division of R. J. MacCready’s autonomic nervous system had already begun the chemical preparations for “fight or flight,” the tiny sliver of his brain that dealt with concepts related to “optimism” valiantly tried to offer up alternatives: Maybe all these guys just happened to be working with machetes when they got word of a visitor—in which case, in their haste to greet their guest, they’ve simply forgotten to put their tools away. MacCready’s decidedly reptilian midbrain responded with the electrochemical equivalent of Not fucking likely! The response was so definitive in fact that all other positive alternatives (Maybe they always bring machetes to
church?) were neurochemically circumvented. As adrenaline and tunnel vision began to hold sway, MacCready could sense something else about these men—from their body language and from the way they kept themselves bunched together. These guys aren’t just pissed-off—they’re scared shitless. And fear made them even more dangerous. Especially, MacCready thought, if you happened to be a stranger attached to a fresh set of legs.

  “Bom dia. Meu nome é MacCready. Alguem fala ingles?” MacCready repeated, stepping into open daylight, moving slowly and showing both empty hands.

  “Vá embora!” one of men shouted angrily.

  “Nao entendo,” MacCready replied. I have no idea what you just said.

  “Vá embora!” the man repeated.

  Oh, right: This time I understand, MacCready thought, as he shook his head and raised his palms upward in what he hoped was the universal sign for “peaceful guy.” But as MacCready again saw the metallic flash of sharpened steel, he started thinking less about peace and more about the .45-caliber Colt strapped to his right hip.

  Damn, I’m gonna have to shoot somebody.

  “This mook is requesting, and with no little emphasis, that you make tracks immediately.”

  The Brooklyn accent was unmistakable. Bob Thorne. He seemed to have stepped out of nowhere, between MacCready and the arriving mob. His hair was longer—a lot longer, and even though the killing might start at any second, MacCready could not help laughing at his friend’s hair. A ponytail!

  Thorne spoke in rapid-fire Portuguese to the one who looked like the point man. Although this particular local seemed to be vibrating at a slightly lower frequency than the other members of what MacCready would later refer to as the Chapada Dismemberment Commission, it was apparent, through the language barrier, that the only decisions left to be made at the moment of Thorne’s arrival were where they were going to hang MacCready’s carcass and who was going to do the prep work.