Merian C. Cooper's King Kong

by Joe DeVito

  “Think it’s him?” Denham asked.

  “Let’s find out!” Driscoll returned, and he raced ahead.

  He reached the water’s edge ahead of the others and stepped into a depression that proved to be a fresh footprint. He looked down and saw water seeping into the print from the sodden ground, bubbling up as though coming from an underground spring. “Fresh track,” Driscoll said as Denham and the others caught up to him. “Kong must have rested around here, and he crossed the river here.” He waved toward the streambed.

  “Sure has widened out,” Jimmy said. “Nearly a lake here. I can’t even see the far side.”

  “We’ll have to swim it,” Driscoll told them.

  Denham grabbed his arm, as if afraid the first mate was about to leap into the water. “That’s out. We can’t swim, not with our bombs and guns.”

  Driscoll looked left and right in frustration, and his eye fell on a tangle of tree trunks and branches washed up on a curving line of beach during some recent flood. “All right, then, we’ll do better. We’ll build a raft.”

  “Good!” Denham agreed.

  Driscoll supervised as the sailors chose the likeliest logs and lashed them together with lianas ripped from the trees lining the waterway. As they worked, he briefly told them about the conclusions he and Denham had reached. He wound up, “The long and short of it is that we don’t know what kind of monsters we may run into. You volunteered for this, but if any man wants to turn back now, this is your chance.”

  One of the sailors looked up from his task of lashing the raft together and gave Driscoll a tobacco-stained grin. “Hell, sir, way I figure, we’re far enough out that we got just as much chance gettin’ killed going backward as we do moving forward.”

  “I’m in,” Jimmy said, not even looking around, to a general chorus of agreement.

  Denham clapped Jimmy on the back. “That’s the spirit, boys! I still say that an armed party has nothing to be afraid of. Especially if it’s armed with my gas bombs!”

  Driscoll nodded, pleased that the crew was sticking with him. He knew that he would rescue Ann or die trying, alone or with an army. Still, something nagged at him, some false touch about Denham’s tone, something he could not put his finger on just yet.

  12

  SKULL ISLAND

  MARCH 13, 1933

  Driscoll burned with the urge to resume the chase, though the business of lashing together the logs didn’t take long. By the time the sailors had finished their work, the craft looked sturdy enough. Jimmy and a couple of others cut long saplings they could use to pole their way across the water, and together the party shoved the raft down the slope, launched it on what looked like a river of fog, and climbed aboard. It was a tight fit, and Denham carefully made sure that Jimmy stowed the crate of gas bombs in the center. “Don’t get the guns wet, whatever you do,” he warned.

  “Shove off!” Driscoll ordered, and the men leaned on their poles. The log raft moved with a jerk and a clumsy roll that made the men at the rear stagger.

  Denham gave Driscoll a sardonic sideways look. “This is your first independent command. Guess I’ll have to call you Captain Driscoll from now on.”

  “Stow it,” Driscoll said, but not sharply. “Say, this really is wider than I thought. It’s not a river here. More like a lake or a lagoon. I still can’t see the far side.” Driscoll carefully balanced himself, not daring to give in to the uncertain feeling of floating inside a choking fog. He wondered about the nerve of the crew. The dinosaur’s attack had shaken them, no question, but none of them had given up. Driscoll recognized their forced jocularity as the response of men under pressure. Building the raft had steadied them, but he knew they all sensed the danger was just beginning.

  He knew they cared for Ann, maybe not as much as he did, but to a man they felt protective of the most beautiful woman they had ever seen. He hoped he could call on that devotion if things became rough. Meanwhile, he had other worries. The raft proved a hard craft to manage, and the men grumbled at each other as it dipped and tried to spin. “Easy,” Driscoll warned them. “We’ve got to be careful of the balance. Keep those strokes easy.”

  The men leaned into their poles—poles that now were more than two-thirds their length underwater at every stroke—and as some of them stuck in the muck at the bottom of the lagoon, the leading edge of the raft bit into the water and a wave washed over Driscoll’s ankles.

  One edge of the raft went awash. “Close in,” he said. “Keep your weight well toward center.”

  “Gonna have to paddle soon,” one of the sailors said. He practically had to kneel to find a purchase with his pole.

  The poles were no good as paddles, but Driscoll had thought of that and had thrown a few curved fragments of rotted trunks aboard. He passed these out, and four men knelt to paddle. “Won’t be for long,” he said. “I think I can see weeds ahead, and we’ll find bottom again.”

  “What’s that?” one of the sailors asked in a panicky voice, and Driscoll turned in time to see something dark dip beneath the water, not far away.

  The raft grated on something under the surface—a sandbar, Driscoll wondered briefly, or the upward-jutting end of a water-soaked log?

  And at that moment, a muffled bellow rolled from just astern. Driscoll felt the raft pitch, rise, and fall. He heard yelps of alarm as some of the men toppled into the lagoon, and then, astern, he saw something rise dripping, a scaly head, with an elephantine trunk writhing, trumpeting eerie blasts. The head rose higher and higher, on a thick, impossibly long neck, and then a mountainous body broke the surface yards beyond it.

  “Dinosaur!” Denham exploded in a tone that mingled consternation, triumphant discovery, and awe. “By God, another dinosaur!”

  The sailors helped the three men who had fallen overboard, and then they all leaned on their poles, finding bottom again and pushing for their lives. The raft leaped forward, causing Driscoll to lose his chance to fire the rifle he had raised. He lowered the weapon and stared in astonishment at this new threat. The creature’s head, vast enough, looked small compared with the rest of the body. It towered above the fog, then bent to sweep the surface of the water in a huge arc. It curved in a curiously swanlike movement and vanished beneath the fog-shrouded water, and a moment later its broad, scaly body sank as well.

  “Push!” Driscoll ordered swiftly. “I think it’s trying to throw us into the lake! Push, men! Heave! Heave!”

  The men bent their backs, but though the raft had glided to within a stone’s throw of shore, the creature was faster. Driscoll felt a vibrating thud through the soles of his boots, and the raft pitched wildly.

  “The bombs!” shouted Denham, “Save ’em, Jim—”

  The world tilted madly, and Driscoll pitched into the water—his last clear impression was of the raft being shattered to its component logs as though by an explosion. Astern, one of the flailing seamen raised a frantic cry in a froth of gargled water and shrieks. Something pulled him under, and he did not reappear. The others struggled toward shore like scattering sheep.

  Driscoll struck out at a fast crawl, Denham near him. The raft, overturned from behind, had thrown them both near the shore, and in a moment they were floundering, getting to their feet in knee-deep water. Denham offered a hand to the struggling Jimmy, now free of the weight he had carried.

  Driscoll staggered ashore, then turned to see. The half-emerging dinosaur lurched among the fragments of the raft, darting its head to bite at anything that bobbed in the roiling water. Men had reached the shore along a thirty-foot arc, but in the confusion Driscoll could not even count them. Most had survived, anyway, and they were scrambling up the slope when the dinosaur surged forward. It had caught sight of one man, who ran desperately away from shore. The dinosaur heaved itself onto shore and gave chase with elephantine strides.

  “Come on, boys,” Driscoll yelled. “This way!” He led them on a curving flight up the slope, climbing free of the mist and up onto the humped crest of a long r
idge. There he paused, looking ahead to where the terrain sloped down again to a wide morass, a soft, blackish expanse, with areas here and there where the surface had hardened under the sun and cracked into great slabs.

  “Hold it, Jack!” Denham yelled, staggering up beside him. “I know what that stuff is—asphalt! There’s something like that in California, a pit of tar full of prehistoric bones. This one looks like it’s been there since the dawn of time. I’ll bet it holds thousands of carcasses, and we don’t want to join them. We have to find a safe passage across.”

  Driscoll nodded. “Before we do anything, let’s check our losses. Come on, men! Form up!” Looking back from the crest of the bridge, he had the impression that his men were emerging from a cloud. He could see nothing of the lake below but soft, billowing mist, lit by the morning sun. The scene lay deceptively peaceful, except for the terrified faces of the men who struggled up to join Driscoll and Denham. “Who’d it get?” Driscoll asked as the last of the men made it.

  “Jackson,” one of the sailors gasped. “He never had a chance.”

  Driscoll counted heads. “Where’s Fredericks? Everybody else is—”

  Denham cut him off: “Look!”

  Following the line of his pointing hand, on a rise a quarter mile from their own, Driscoll caught sight of a racing figure, fleeing desperately, violently toward a grove of trees. Driscoll recognized “Dutch” Fredericks, the missing man, who must have taken the wrong direction. From the mist the dinosaur burst out in close pursuit.

  A couple of the men started downhill, but Driscoll barked a harsh order: “Stand fast! You can’t make it in time.”

  Bile rose in Driscoll’s throat as he watched the tragedy unfold. Fredericks slipped and stumbled toward the closest tree that promised any hope of refuge. By some miracle one was within reach, and with the strength of despair he quickly shimmied around and up into its lower branches, the same way a squirrel spirals up a tree to stay out of the sight of its pursuer.

  Driscoll balled his fist. If the man had enough wit, enough courage, to stay quiet, he just might have a chance. For a moment the dinosaur looked puzzled, its great neck swaying as it tried to cope with the fact that its prey had apparently vanished. The creature paused beside the tree Fredericks had climbed, moving its head from side to side as if inspecting the trunk.

  A scant few feet above that great stooped head, Fredericks moved from branch to branch, first to the left, then to the right, clearly trying to anticipate the dinosaur’s movements. The third time he guessed wrong. Driscoll groaned as he realized the sailor now peered straight into the creature’s snarling face.

  Denham had somehow hung on to his binoculars. He passed them to Driscoll. “He’s caught a break. Look at the eye.” Driscoll raised the binoculars, bringing the monstrous head into clear focus. He saw that one eye was blind, withered to a sightless milky orb, from some old encounter. The face showed a series of deep parallel scars. Fredericks had not been seen—

  But he had given himself away nonetheless. Even at this distance, Driscoll heard his scream of terror, and so did the dinosaur. Its trunklike snout struck like a cobra, and the horny tip of it, like the top half of a parrot’s beak and as big as a man’s head, ripped into Fredericks’s upper thigh. Driscoll saw the sudden crimson bloom of blood as the dinosaur seized Fredericks’s leg and dragged him from his perch. The monster threw the man to earth, out of sight, and then its head bent after him. Driscoll heard a terrible scream, cut short. The dinosaur briefly raised its head, its jaws working, blood dripping, and then bent again.

  “I can’t believe the books are that wrong,” Denham said furiously. “That thing was like a brontosaurus, a plant eater!”

  “A hippo’s a plant eater, too,” Driscoll muttered, handing the binoculars back to Denham. “And hippos kill more people than crocs. Anyway, Fredericks is dead. We can’t help him now.”

  “If I’d saved the bombs—” Jimmy said miserably.

  “No use talking,” Driscoll said. “We’ve got our knives and our wits, and that’s it. We have to use them, that’s all.”

  No one looked back at the dinosaur, though one of the sailors dropped to his knees and vomited. Driscoll heard another one muttering a prayer, over and over. “Come on,” he said. “We’ve got to get across that, somehow.” He led them down the slope, toward the asphalt morass. He had no idea how much farther they had to go, how much longer the men’s nerves would hold. Two men dead. And how many more might go before they caught up with Kong?

  13

  SKULL ISLAND

  MARCH 13, 1933

  Halfway down the slope, Denham paused and blurted in astonishment, “There he is!”

  Driscoll froze, seeing the black form in the distance. Denham was right. The beast-god they were pursuing moved near the center of the asphalt field, coming toward them. Even without the binoculars, Driscoll saw him clearly, something monstrous beyond conception, as hairy as any of the simian creatures of an African jungle. Driscoll had seen apes, though, gorillas and chimpanzees, and Kong resembled them only superficially. The great beast in the distance picked his way with a slow, almost human caution, which made him all the more incredible. “He’s walking almost like a man,” Driscoll said.

  “Not like a gorilla at all,” Denham agreed. “Look, he’s puzzled.”

  Kong dropped momentarily, putting one hand down to take his weight, but even in that pose he did not truly resemble a great ape so much as he did a primitive man, tracking some prey and momentarily dropping down to examine its spoor. Denham brought up his binoculars and said, “I see Ann!”

  Driscoll almost tore the instrument from his grasp. Yes, there she was, cradled in his left arm like a tiny rag doll. She looked limp, unmoving. Was she—Driscoll cut off the thought before completing it. Kong touched her carefully, lifting her dangling arm and arranging it so that it would not drag in the tarry surface. Driscoll wondered what that meant, that care for his captive. Could Kong’s primitive brain value this strange possession for reasons which it could not understand?

  Driscoll could not tell, but he was sure that something about Kong’s purposeful movements, about his expression, suggested intelligence beyond that of any normal ape. He lost the form in the binoculars, and when he lowered them, he saw that Kong had found his way again. The creature moved confidently, taking long strides over the cracked surface, evidently avoiding weak places. Now he moved away from them.

  “What are those things?” Jimmy asked.

  Driscoll turned to look. “More dinosaurs!” he said sharply. Three of them this time, armored like tanks, each of them with a gigantic hawklike beak, each with a great curved head-frill armed with three long horns. They emerged from the undergrowth on the far side of the asphalt lake and stood their ground, shaking their heads and bellowing as Kong approached them. Kong roared at the creatures and beat his chest with his free hand. The monsters shook their heads and pawed the earth, like bulls ready to defend their territory.

  “Triceratops,” Denham said. “Those horns are a couple of yards long and a foot thick at the base! Even Kong is no match for something like that! They must’ve chased him into the asphalt field, back toward us. Man oh man, if we’d only hung on to the bombs!”

  “What did you say they were?”

  “Triceratops,” Denham repeated. “I may be saying it wrong. I’ve never heard it, just seen it in books, and I’ve left the word there. Never expected to see one in person!”

  Jimmy, crouched nearby, asked, “What are they?”

  Denham shook his head. “Just another of nature’s mistakes, son. Dinosaurs. They got their names from the three horns on their heads. They developed those weapons because they had to.”

  Kong stood now on a dry mound in the center of the morass, and the three dinosaurs had stepped out toward him. Kong had put Ann down on the far side of the mound, out of sight from the ridge.

  As the trio of triceratops advanced, the one off to the left suddenly jerked and collapsed slowly
, weirdly, onto its side, bellowing in panic. It had walked upon a spot too weak to support its weight. The soft asphalt sucked it down as it struggled to climb out. The other two left it behind, advancing with the menace of gigantic rhinos. They ignored its plaintive bawlings, ignored its thrashing. The creature’s efforts made it sink all the faster.

  As the other two neared, Kong roared again, bent, and lifted a huge chunk of solid asphalt. His muscles bunched as he raised it clean over his head and hurled it at the two challengers.

  As the mass struck and shattered, Denham whistled. “No beast can be that strong! That must have weighed almost half a ton. Look, there goes another!”

  Kong had thrown another missile, and this one, though smaller, struck home, smashing off a horn. The hurt creature staggered and Kong redoubled his attack. The second attacking triceratops backed off from Kong’s projectiles, swinging grudgingly off to the flank, heading at a diagonal toward the men on the crest. Beyond it, the injured triceratops shook its head, bellowing as it tried to back away. Kong threw another accurate missile, striking it hard on the head. The creature reared onto its hind legs and fell on its side. Kong bellowed in triumph and beat his breast. The jungle reverberated with his roars.

  The wounded triceratops tried to heave itself back up. Both of its brow horns had been broken, and now as the dinosaur painfully got to its feet to face the advancing Kong, it lowered its bleeding head. Only the short horn on its snout remained undamaged, and the creature snorted loudly as it braced to meet the attack.

  But Kong had pried up another mass of hardened asphalt, the largest one yet, and he crashed his weapon onto his foe with such force that the triceratops fell to its knees as if poleaxed. Somehow, desperately, it managed to rise to meet Kong’s onslaught. Without hesitation Kong grabbed its massive skull. For a moment the two brutes stood, straining and frozen, as the ceratopsian fought with its last ounce of energy to resist Kong’s hold. Kong roared, his muscles rippling in one supreme effort as he yanked upward with such force that the other creature’s entire body shook. The pistol-shot crack of its breaking neck echoed sickeningly, making Driscoll wince.