Roosevelt's Beast

by Louis Bayard

  “Show yourself,” he whispered.

  The campfire surged up once more, and, in the shock of light, the figure shone forth. Against the backdrop of the jungle stood Elliott.

  * * *

  UNCLE ELLIOTT.

  In his top hat and riding coat, leaning against a white porcelain café table.

  “Good evening!” he drawled.

  For the first time, Kermit was able to get a fix on the accent: rigid Locust Valley vowels, softened by a hint of Grandma Mittie’s Georgia cadences.

  “Care for a snort?” he asked, holding out a tumbler of amber liquor, clouded with mint leaves and orange peels. “Brandy smash. I mixed it myself; just the thing for tropical climes. Oh, but what are you waiting for, my lad? Down the hatch!”

  The brandy passed through Kermit so quickly, there was nothing to hang on to.

  “Thank you,” he managed to say.

  “You’re quite welcome.” (His smile a less explosive version of the Colonel’s.) “Come along, now.”

  The tails of his coat fluttered behind him as he strolled toward the jungle. When Kermit declined to follow, Elliott wheeled back and, in a tone of friendly exasperation, added:

  “We don’t have all night.”

  “But where are we going?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “Are we going to kill the Beast?”

  “I shouldn’t wonder.”

  With a long guttering wheeze, the jungle parted before them: vines and trunks and branches feathering apart into a combed furrow, as dry and white as a scalp.

  “Time to get a move on,” said Elliott.

  A swarm of fireflies materialized before them. Tiny blue and yellow orbs flicking on and off at random.

  “Keep up,” said Elliott. He walked with an easy stride, swinging a riding crop. “My,” he added, “how cold it’s grown.”

  Kermit was just beginning to decode the information of his senses: the chapped nose, the water vapor condensing around his head. The jungle’s great soaring palms had turned arid and brittle, as though a slow cold fire had been smoldering inside. The vines were dry as paper. The leaves shattered into fragments beneath his feet.

  “Any minute now,” said Elliott.

  But they kept on walking, the minutes piling atop one another. It was Kermit who began to falter. His feet ached. His skin chafed with old bites. His stomach had become a cobblestone. Yet every time he opened his mouth to protest, the same thought rushed in: Father wouldn’t like it. And so he held his tongue and watched Elliott’s slender, elegant figure grow smaller and smaller in the distance.

  At length, after climbing to the crest of a steep rise, Elliott came to a stop.

  “Here we are!” he cried.

  Kermit looked up. Looked all around. Nothing.

  With a polite clearing of throat, Elliott pointed down. There, welling from the forest floor, was a hole, no more than three feet wide.

  “It’s here?” asked Kermit.

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Down there, you mean?”

  “Naturally.” Elliott giggled. “As if you didn’t know.”

  With numbed hands, Kermit swung his rifle toward the hole.

  “Oh, come, now,” said his uncle, catching him by the wrist. “A hunter looks before he shoots.”

  “But it’s dark.”

  “Ah! So it is.” Softly abashed, Elliott reached into his vest pocket and drew out an old-fashioned phosphorus match, some nine inches in length. He swiped it on the sole of his boot, and an eye of blue flame blossomed forth.

  “Go on.”

  Taking the match, Kermit knelt and bent toward the hole until his head had disappeared inside it. The darkness flooded around him, but the light drove it back. He realized that he was staring down a tunnel, eight or nine feet deep. Nothing there. Not a moth, not a bat, not even a pool of water. The only thing that seemed alive was the air itself, clammy and cold, sharp with sulfur.

  “Dear boy,” he heard Elliott say. “We haven’t got all night.”

  Irked, Kermit swung the match toward his uncle’s voice—and then stopped as a counter-pulse of light surged from the rock. From that light there resolved a face, inches from his own, conjured up from the granite and studying him with an inscrutable intent.

  Kermit jerked back, but the face followed him, sliding up the rock wall. What a sight it was! Bestial and gnarled, livid and cruel. White worms crawled out of its craggy brow. Beetles swarmed from its matted hair. Maggots spilled from its nostrils.

  Kermit couldn’t bear to look—or to look away. He waited—for what he couldn’t have said—until, with a leering smile, the thing screwed its mouth into a kiss.

  Kiss wasn’t adequate to describing the oily motion of the tongue, the skeletal retraction of the surrounding skin. Those lips—greasy with life—pushing so hard against the rock’s membrane that the saliva bled through to the other side and ran down the tunnel walls in long viscous stripes.

  “No!”

  Panting and groaning, Kermit drew his head from the hole. Rolled onto his back.

  Elliott was looking down at him.

  “Well, Kermit. What did you find?”

  “Nothing,” he said.

  Such an obvious lie, he almost felt the need to apologize. He saw a seraphic smile spread across his uncle’s face.

  “Exactly.” Bending down on one knee, Elliott lowered his face toward his nephew’s. “We’re alike, aren’t we? You and I. Brothers under the skin.”

  “Brothers…”

  “Oh, that reminds me! If you see your old man, tell him from me: I never minded about the sanatorium.”

  “Sanatorium…”

  “The one in Purkersdorf. He was right to do it. I’d have done the same.”

  Before Kermit could even guess what this meant, he felt himself sliding away—down the very hole he had just escaped. Through the cloud of dirt and rubble that billowed up after him, one thing shone clear: Elliott’s smiling face.

  23

  Kermit’s eyes trembled open to a lemon sky.

  It was morning: sudden, unexplainable. A shaft of light had broken through a canopy of trees and was sparking against everything it touched—a spray of golden allamanda, a cluster of scarlet tacsonia. A light breeze was blowing at his back; mosquitoes were warming up like violinists. It was morning.

  But it might have been the end of the longest day ever, so sore were his muscles, so sluggish his breathing. Something thick and greasy lay over his pores. Where was he? How had he gotten here?

  Groggily, he assembled his coordinates. Water. He was standing in water. On either side of him stretched a blackish-green pond, necklaced with foam. Yes. Yes, he knew this place. It was the lagoon he’d first seen yesterday—where Luz used to take Thiago to watch the moon.

  But why was he here?

  He just needed to orient himself, that was all. And having done that, he would return to the village and reassure Father and pay his last respects to the Cinta Larga, and within hours he would be standing before Cherrie and Rondon and the other expeditioners. In a few short weeks, he would be holding Belle in his arms.

  The rest of his days were awaiting. He had only to move.

  But no matter how hard he tried to drive his leg forward, the water caught hold. He looked down, thinking he had entangled himself in kelp or wedged himself under a rock. It was some other barrier, though: as solid as rock, nearly granitic in the dawn light, but with the contours of a human being. Drawing up his right leg with all the power he had left, Kermit watched the object rise and swell and then, shockingly, flip over.

  He was staring at the remnants of a face.

  A face that had once belonged to the chief of the Cinta Larga. A body, too. Torn apart, hollowed out.

  No. Kermit gave his head a shake. There’s some mistake.

  The chief wasn’t really dead. Any second now he would rise up and, with a scornful flick of his wrist, stride back to the village, to his rightful throne.

  Bu
t he didn’t rise up. Death, lacking any respect for the great leader’s station, had subjected him to the greatest possible indignity—and revealed him for what he was: a small thing, barely five feet, with vein-stitched skin and a corded neck, floating in the water like a swath of bark.

  How appallingly silent it was! Even the mosquitoes had gone mum. The only sound left was a strange hollow jeering: a fly, buzzing for all it was worth. On and on went the sound, neither tuning nor falling out of tune. Kermit covered his ears, closed his eyes, tried to find the one part of his mind that the buzzing couldn’t reach.

  Speak, he commanded himself. Say what you know.

  “My name is Kermit Roosevelt. I am twenty-four years of age. I am a graduate of Groton and Harvard. My father is Theodore Roosevelt, formerly president. My mother is Edith Roosevelt, née Carow. My fiancée is Belle Wyatt Willard, soon to be…”

  He drew his hands away. The buzzing had gone. A new sound, though, had welled up in its place. Feet—human feet—plashing through water and sand. A single spare figure was approaching him.

  Luz. Coming not as she had yesterday, with an air of assumed casualness, but on a mission.

  Like crackles of thunder, the words echoed back to him now. Her words. “If I were the Beast, it is not Anhanga who would be dead.… The chief … was the one who gave me to Anhanga … like a stick to a dog.”

  Dear God, he thought. She had all but announced her intentions. She had wrought her revenge against the chief—with joy in her heart—and she was coming back to the very scene of her crime.…

  For what purpose? Once again he felt himself enlisted in a conspiracy that remained hidden even to him. He groped half blindly for his gun—it was nowhere to be found. You’re as good as dead, he thought. But Luz’s face, as she approached, betrayed no sign of what her mission was. She was merely eliminating the distance between them.

  “Senhor,” she said, with the barest hint of wariness.

  Say something. Anything.

  He watched her eyes swerve toward the freshly devoured carcass at his feet. He saw the breath catch in her throat. It was so credible an imitation of surprise that it had the perverse effect of magnifying her crimes.

  “How could you?” he whispered.

  Her eyes, cutting back to his, showed no remorse, no rage. All she said was:

  “You must not blame yourself.”

  Oh, he thought. This is a deep game.

  “And why?” he asked, hearing the note of petulance in his voice. “Why should I blame myself?”

  “You did not mean to do it, Senhor. This is not what is in your heart.”

  “In my heart? You must be mad! You must be … trying to shield yourself, that’s what you’re doing!”

  “From what?”

  “From the … the shame—the ignominy—that is rightfully yours!” He leaned forward, his lips frothing with outrage. “It was your revenge that has been carried out, Luz! Anhanga. The chief. You wished them dead, and they are dead. Gaze on your handiwork!”

  She studied him for a long time. Then, with a voice of ineffable sweetness, she said:

  “It was not I who killed them, Senhor.”

  Unexpectedly, she reached for his face, turned his head so softly he might have been excused for thinking it was his idea, his idea alone, to stare into that black, seething water—to find, once more, his image reflected with all the definition of a daguerreotype.

  Blood.

  Blood everywhere. On his arms, on his shoulders. On his naked torso. Blood soaking from his hair, dripping from his beard, coursing down his face.

  In a series of abbreviated motions, he raised his hands until they were level with his eyes. His hands! They were the bloodiest part of him. As red as garnets.

  “No,” he whispered. “It can’t…”

  He fell to his knees. He plunged his hands into the black stream and dragged up flume after flume of water. Somewhere inside, a voice hissed:

  That’s right. Wash yourself clean.

  Only it wouldn’t wash clean. Nothing would wash clean. The blood. The bodies. The faces—the faces of Anhanga and the chief—flashing back to him now in fragments of martyrdom.

  Overriding everything else, the image of that wretched howler, locking him in its death grip. How lucky he had counted himself to emerge without a scratch! But the Beast needed nothing so plebeian as broken skin to ease its passage. It traveled soul to soul. Now Kermit understood—too late—the look of boundless sorrow in the howler’s eyes. The creature was awash in pity for him. It understood that he would be carrying the Beast to its next round of victims—and bearing the burden for all its sins.

  Poor you, the howler was saying. Poor you.

  “No!” he cried, half-gagging. “No!”

  From the firmament above, he heard Luz’s voice.

  “You are not a bad man.”

  “Not bad.”

  He began to laugh in hard diaphragmatic pulses.

  “Senhor,” she entreated. “You must listen to me. This is not your doing. Some evil spirit has gone into you, that is all. It isn’t … This is not you.”

  With a long, winding moan, he flung himself in the water, let it rise up over his head, caress his joints, wash off the last residue of blood and human tissue. Carry me away, he thought. But Luz had already wrapped her arms around his chest, and she was hauling him to the surface—her will crowning his. Before he could even lodge a protest, they were back on dry land, his head resting in her lap.

  “Não faz mal,” she cooed. “Não faz mal.”

  No, he thought. It does matter. It won’t be all right.

  But the sky was staring down at him as if nothing had happened. The jungle was as green as he had ever seen it.

  “I didn’t…”

  “Yes?”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Of course.”

  “I don’t remember. I don’t remember any of it.”

  She stroked his face. “I know, Senhor.”

  “The doing—the wanting to do it…”

  “I know.”

  Her voice was like an unguent pouring over his temples. Oh, he had no illusions. Judgment was out there—dangling even now by the slenderest of hairs. But for now there was only this sky, whitening with sun, and this fresh-scrubbed air, and a pair of flecked hazel eyes.

  “Luz,” he said. “Forgive me.”

  She hadn’t the time to answer. For in the very next instant, something erupted from the plane of her forehead.

  A speck or a blot, that was his initial impression. Then the blot took on color and depth. It burrowed down, as if an awl were being driven through the skin, straight to the bone.

  Luz shrank back, pressed her palm against the wound, but the blood came on.

  “No,” croaked Kermit, gaping into her face. “Stop…”

  But it was only starting. Within seconds, a new hole had been driven just beneath her clavicle. Another sprang up above her left breast. A jagged line crawled across her sternum. Sector by sector, she crumbled before him, blood pouring in jagged rivers.

  “Stop!” he shouted. “I do not wish this to happen!”

  He tried to stanch the flow, but the blood kept surging; it spilled through his fingers and down his forearms, it spattered his face, it stained the ground. Easier to stop the sea, he thought. With a glottal cry, Luz toppled into the sand. Her eyes sought the farthest region of sky as her skin passed by degrees into translucency. Beneath the skin, everything crowded forward. Veins, arteries. Sinews, tendons. Every muscle and bone, clamoring to be known.

  “No,” he groaned.

  He understood now. This was the Beast’s final gift to him. To be conscious of what he was doing, to be sentient each step of the way. All he could do now was watch. Watch as exquisitely deep lines engraved themselves across the canvas of Luz’s body. Watch as the vivisectionist demonstrated its art on a still-living patient.

  “No!” cried Kermit, but the harvesting went on unabated. Flesh and muscle peeled
off her breasts, her stomach, her legs, in long serrated strips, tissue vanishing as soon as it was torn and the skeleton itself climbing inch by inch to the light.

  Never once did she lose consciousness or even the capacity for speech. When virtually every organ had been gouged out of her and her jaw was no more than a hinge, a germ of consciousness yet remained and sound still bodied forth—fragments that, if he pressed his ear to her mouth, he could still hear.

  “Thiago … não se esqueça … de Thiago.…”

  Don’t forget Thiago.

  Looking back days, months, years later, this would be the greatest astonishment, the most extravagant miracle: that, after seeing all he was capable of, she would still entrust him with her richest jewel. But in the moment itself, all he could grasp, all he could feel, was her dissolution.

  The Beast, it turned out, had no need for tooth and claw; it could devour merely by looking, and its host would be as helpless as any other bystander to stop it. So when at last he reached for her, there was nothing left to save.

  “Luz…”

  Her eyes were staring now with such quiet fixity that he waited in all sincerity for one last instruction. None came. With the most exacting of care, he fingered down her eyelids. Silently, he composed her epitaph.

  So passes Luz. Daughter to a missionary. Wife to a Cinta Larga brave. Mother to …

  “Kermit!”

  * * *

  HOW PECULIARLY HORRIBLE THE Colonel looked now, laboring downstream, shining with cheer and resolve.

  “There you are, my boy! Luz told us you might be here. We’d have come sooner, but I went back for my rifle—just in case some critters showed themselves—and then you know how slowly I gad about these days. My, but aren’t these rocks treacherous? If not for my personal escort, I’d have tumbled more than once into the drink, isn’t that so, Thiago?”

  In the next second, the boy himself stepped out from the old man’s shadow, stood grinning in the sun.

  No …

  “He’s got the most amazing tracking ability, Kermit. We should hire him out on safari; he’d give those little Kenyan boys a run for their money, eh? Do you hear that, Thiago? It’s Africa for you.”

  “Send him away,” muttered Kermit.