The Howling Man

by Beaumont, Charles

  Beyond the dancing woman, Austin could see the crowd, squatted and standing, swaying; over a thousand of them--surely every native in the village!

  A clot of brown skin and bright white paint and brilliant feathers, hunched in the firelight.

  An inner line of men sat over drums and hollow logs, beating these with their palms and with short sticks of wood. The sounds blended strangely into one--the one Austin had been hearing, it seemed, all his life.

  He watched, fascinated, even though he had witnessed Bantu ceremonies countless times in the past, even though he was perfectly familiar with the symbols. The little leather bags of hex-magic: nail-filings, photographs, specks of flesh; the rubbing boards stained with fruit-skins; the piles of bones at the feet of the men--old bones, very brittle and dry and old.

  Then he looked beyond the natives to the sensible clean crystal walls that rose majestically, cupping the area, giving it form.

  It sent a chill over him.

  He walked into the open.

  The throng quieted, instantly, like a scream cut off. The dancers caught their balance, blinked, drew in breath. The others lifted their heads, stared.

  All were turned to dark, unmoving wax.

  Austin went past the gauntlet of eyes, to one of the painted men.

  "Where is Bokawah?" he said loudly, in precise Swahili. His voice regained its accustomed authority. "Bokawah. Take me to him."

  No one moved. Hands lay on the air inches above drums, petrified.

  "I have come to talk!"

  From the corner of his eyes, Austin felt the slight disturbance. He waited a moment, then turned.

  A figured crouched beside him. A man, unbelievably old and tiny, sharp little bones jutting into loose flesh like pins, skin cross-hatched with a pattern of white paint, chalky as the substance some widows of the tribes wore for a year after the death of their mates. His mouth was pulled into a shape not quite a smile, but resembling a smile. It revealed hardened toothless gums.

  The old men laughed, suddenly. The amulet around his chicken-neck bobbled. Then he stopped laughing and stared at Austin.

  "We have been waiting," he said, softly. Austin started at the perfect English. He had not heard English for a long time; and now, coming from the little man . . . Perhaps Bokawah had learned it. Why not? "Walk with me, Mr. Austin."

  He followed the ancient shaman, dumbly, not having the slightest idea why he was doing so, to a square of moist soil. It was surrounded by natives.

  Bokawah looked once at Austin, then reached down and dipped his hands into the soil. The horny fingers scratched away the top-dirt, burrowed in like thin, nervous animals, and emerged, finally, holding something.

  Austin gasped. It was a doll.

  It was Mag.

  He wanted to laugh, but it caught in his throat. He knew how primitives would try to inflict evil upon an enemy by burying his effigy. As the effigy rotted symbolically, so would . . .

  He snatched the doll away from the old man. It crumbled in his hands.

  "Mr. Austin," Bokawah said, "I'm very sorry you did not come for this talk long ago." The old man's lips did not move. The voice was his and yet not his.

  Austin knew, suddenly, that he had not come to this place of his own accord. He had been summoned.

  The old man held a hyena's tail in his right hand. He waved this and a slight wind seemed to come up, throwing the flames of the fire into a neurotic dance.

  "You are not convinced, even now, Mr. Austin. Aiii. You have seen suffering and death, but you are not convinced," Bokawah sighed. "I will try one last time." He squatted on the smooth floor, "When you first came to our country, and spoke your plans, I told you--even then--what must happen. I told you that this city must not be. I told you that my people would fight, as your people would fight if we were to come to your land and build jungles. But you understood nothing of what I said," He did not accuse; the voice was expressionless. "Now Mbarara lies silent and dead beneath you and still you do not wish to understand. What must we do, Mr. Austin? How shall we go about proving to you that this Mbarara of yours will always be silent and dead, that your people will never walk through it?"

  Austin thought of his old college friend Barney--and of what Barney had once told him. Staring at Bokawah, at this scrawny, painted savage, he saw the big Texan clearly and he remembered his wild undergraduate theories--exhuming the antique view of primitives and their religions, their magics.

  "Go on, pal, laugh at their tabus," Barney, who was an anthropologist, used to be fond of saying, "sneer, while you throw salt over your shoulder. Laugh at their manas, while you blab about our own 'geniuses'!"

  He had even gone beyond the point of believing that magic was important because it held together the fabric of culture among these natives, because it--and their religious superstitions--gave them a rule for behavior, therefore, in most cases, happiness. He had even come to believe that native magic was just another method of arriving at physical truths.

  Of course, it was all semantic nonsense, It suggested that primitive magic could lift a ship into space or destroy disease or . . .

  That had been the trouble with Barney. You could never tell when he was serious. Even a social anthropologist wouldn't go so far as to think there was more than one law of gravity.

  "Mr. Austin, we have brought you here for a purpose. Do you know what that purpose is?"

  "I don't know and I don't--"

  "Have you wondered why you, alone, of all your people, have been spared? Then--listen to me, very carefully. Because if you do not, then what has happened in your new city is merely the beginning. The winds of death will blow over Mbarara and it will be far more awful than what has been." The medicine man stared down at the scattered piles of bones. Panther bones, Austin knew--a divination device. Their position on the ground told Bokawah much about the white people.

  "Go back to your chiefs. Tell them that they must forget this city. Tell them that death walks here and that it will always walk, and that their magic is powerful but not powerful enough. It cannot stand against the spirits from time who have been summoned to fight. Go and talk to your chiefs and tell them these things. Make them believe you. Force them to understand that if they come to Mbarara, they will die, in ways they never dreamed, of sickness, in pain, slowly. Forever."

  The old man's eyes were closed. His mouth did not move at all and the voice was mechanical.

  "Tell them, Mr. Austin, that at first you thought it was a strange new disease that struck the workers. But then remind them that your greatest doctors were powerless against the contagion, that it spread and was not conquered. Say these things. And, perhaps, they will believe you. And be saved."

  Bokawah studied the panther bones carefully, tracing their arrangement.

  Austin's voice was mechanical, also. "You are forgetting something," he said. He refused to let the thoughts creep in. He refused to wonder about the voice that came through closed lips, about where the natives could have found soil or fresh panther bones or. . - "No one," he said to the old man, "has fought back--yet."

  "But why would you do that, Mr. Austin, since you do not believe in the existence of your enemy? Whom shall you fight?" Bokawah smiled.

  The crowd of natives remained quiet, unmoving, in the dying firelight.

  "The only fear you hold for us," Austin said, "is the fear that you may prove psychologically harmful." He looked at the crushed doll at his feet. The face was whole; otherwise, it lay hideously disfigured.

  "Yes?"

  "Right now, Bokawah, my government is sending men. They will arrive soon. When they do, they will study what has happened. If it is agreed that your rites-- however harmless in themselves--cause currents of fear--are in any way responsible for the disease--you will be given the opportunity to go elsewhere or--"

  "Or, Mr. Austin?"

  "--you will be eliminated."

  "Then people will come to Mbarara. Despite the warnings and the death, they will come?"

&
nbsp; "Your magic sticks aren't going to scare away five hundred thousand men and women."

  "Five hundred thousand ..." The old man looked at the bones, sighed, nodded his head. "You know your people very well," he murmured.

  Austin smiled. "Yes, I do."

  "Then I think there is little left for us to talk about."

  Austin wanted to say, No, you're wrong. We must talk about Mag! She's dying and I want to keep her from dying. But he knew what these words would mean. They would sketch his real feelings, his fears and doubts. And everything would be lost. He could not admit that the doll was anything more than a doll. He must not!

  The old man picked up a calabash and ran water over his hands. "I am sorry," he said, "that you must learn the way you must,"

  A slow chant rose from the natives. It sounded to Austin like Swahili, yet it was indistinct. He could recognize none of the words, except gonga and bagana. Medicine? The man with the medicine? It was a litany, not unlike the Gregorian chants he had once heard, full of overpowering melancholy. Calm and ethereal, and sad as only the human voice can be sad. It rode on the stale air, swelling, diminishing, cutting through the stench of decay and rot with profound dignity.

  Austin felt the heaviness of his clothes. The broken machines had stopped pumping fresh breezes, so the air was like oil, opening the pores of his body, running coldly down his arms and legs.

  Bokawah made a motion with his hand and sank back onto the smooth floor. He breathed wrackingly, and groaned as if in pain. Then he straightened and looked at Austin and hobbled quickly away.

  The drums began. Movement eased back into the throng and soon the dancers were up, working themselves back into their possessed states,

  Austin turned and walked quickly away from the ceremony. When he reached the shadows, he ran. He did not stop running until he had reached the lift, even while his muscles, long dormant, unaccustomed to the activity, turned to stone, numb and throbbing stone.

  He stabbed the button and closed his eyes, while his heart pumped and roared sound into his ears and colored fire into his mind. The platform descended slowly, unemotional and calm as its parts.

  Austin ran out and fell against a building, where he tried to push away the image of the black magic ceremony, and what he had felt there,

  He swallowed needles of pain into his parched throat,

  And the fear mounted and mounted, strangling him slowly -

  The towers of Mbarara loomed, suddenly, to Austin, more unreal and anachronistic than the tribal rites from which he had just come. Stalagmites of crystal pushing up to the night sky that bent above them; little squares and diamonds and circles of metal and stone. Office buildings; apartments; housing units; hat stores and machine factories and restaurants; and, cobwebbing among them, all these blind and empty shells, the walkways, like colored ribbons, like infinitely long reptiles, sleeping now, dead, still.

  Or, were they only waiting, as he wanted to believe?

  Of course they're waiting, he thought. People who know the answers will come to Mbarara tomorrow. Clear-headed scientists who have not been terrorized by a tribe of beaten primitives. And the scientists will find out what killed the workers, correct it, and people will follow. Five hundred thousand people, from all over the closetcrowded world, happy to have air to breathe once more--air that hasn't had to travel down two-hundred feet--happy to know the Earth can yet sustain them. No more talk, then, of "population decreases"--murder was a better word--; no more government warnings screaming "depopulation" at you . - -

  The dream would come true, Austin told himself. Because it must. Because he'd promised Mag, and they'd lived it all together, endless years, hoped and planned and fought for the city. With Mbarara, it would begin: the dark age of a sardine can world would end, and life would begin. It would be many years before the worry would begin all over--for half the earth lay fallow, wasted. Australia, Greenland, Iceland, Africa, the Poles. . . And perhaps then the population graph would change, as it had always changed before, And men would come out of their caverns and rat-holes and live as men.

  Yes. But only if Mbarara worked. If he could show them his success here ...

  Austin cursed the men who had gone back and screamed the story of what had happened to the other engineers. God knew there were few enough available, few who had been odd enough to study a field for which there seemed little further use.

  lf they'd only kept still about the disease! Then others would have come and . . .

  Died. The word came out instantly, uncalled, and vanished.

  Austin passed the Emperor, the playhouse he had thought of that night with Mag, ten years before. As he passed, he tried to visualize the foyer jammed with people in soup-and-fish and jeweled gowns, talking of whether the play had meat or not. Now, its marbled front putting out yellow glow, it looked foolish and pathetic. The placard case shone through newly gathered dust, empty.

  Austin tried to think of what had been on this spot originally. Thick jungle growth alone. Or had there been a native village--with monkeys climbing the trees and swinging on vines and white widows mourning under straw roofs?

  Now playing: JULIUS CAESAR. Admission: Three coconuts.

  Be still. You've stayed together all this time, he thought, you can hold out until tomorrow. Tcheletchew will be here, sputtering under his beard, and they'll fly Mag to a hospital and make her well and clear up this nonsense in a hurry.

  Just get home. Don't think and get home, and it will be all right.

  The city was actually without formal streets. Its plan did not include the antiquated groundcars that survived here and there in old families. Therefore, Mbarara was literally a maze. A very pretty maze. Like an English estate--Austin had admired these touches of vanished gentility--the areas were sometimes framed by green stone hedges, carved into functional shapes.

  He had no difficulty finding his way. It was all too fresh, even now, the hours of planning every small curve and design, carefully leaving no artistic 'holes' or useless places. He could have walked it blindfolded.

  But when he passed the food dispensary and turned the corner, he found that it did not lead to the 'copter-park, as it should have. There were buildings there, but they were not the ones they ought to have been.

  Or else he'd turned the wrong--He retraced his steps to the point where he had gone left. The food dispensary was nowhere in sight. Instead he found himself looking at the general chemistry building.

  Austin paused and wiped his forehead, The excitement of course, It had clouded his mind for a moment, making him lose his way.

  He began walking. Warm perspiration coursed across his body, turning his suit dark-wet, staining his jacket.

  He passed the food dispensary.

  Austin clenched his fists. It was impossible that he could have made a complete circle. He had built this city, he knew it intimately. He had walked through it without even thinking of direction, in the half-stages of construction, and never taken a wrong step.

  How could he be lost?

  Nerves. Nothing strange in it. Certainly enough had happened to jar loose his sense of direction.

  Calmly, now. Calmly.

  The air hung fetid and heavy. He had to pull it into his lungs, push it out. Of course, he could go below and open the valves--at least they could be operated by hand. He could, but why? It would mean bunching down in a dark shaft--damn, should have made that shaft larger! And, there were, after all, enough openings in the sealing-bubble to keep a breathable flow of oxygen in circulation. If the air was heavy and still outside the bubble, he could scarcely expect it to be different within.

  He looked up at the half-minaretted tower that was one of the 'copter repair centers. It was located in exactly the opposite direction to the one he thought he'd taken.

  Austin sank onto a stone bench. Images floated through his mind. He was lost; precisely as lost as if he had wandered into the jungle that had stood here before the building of Mbarara, and then tried to find his way back
.

  He closed his eyes and saw a picture, startling clear, of himself, running through the matted growths of dark green foliage, stumbling across roots, bumping trees, face grotesque with fear, and screaming . . .

  He opened his eyes quickly, shook away the vision. His brain was tired; that was why he saw such a picture. He must keep his eyes open.

  The city was unchanged. The park, designed for housewives who might wish to pause and rest or chat, perhaps feed squirrels, surrounded him,

  Across the boating lake was the university.

  Behind the university was home.

  Austin rose, weakly, and made his way down the grassy slope to the edge of the artificial lake. Cultured city trees dotted the banks: the lake threw back a geometrically perfect reflection,

  He knelt and splashed water onto his face. Then he gulped some of it down and paused until the ripples spread to the center of the lake.

  He studied his image in the water carefully. White skin, smooth cheeks, ironcolored hair. Good clothes. A dolichocephalic head, evenly space, the head of a twenty-second century civilized . . .

  Above his reflection, Austin detected movement. He froze and blinked his eyes. As the water smoothed, the image of an animal appeared on the surface, wavering slightly. A small animal, something like a monkey. Like a monkey hanging from the branches of a tree.

  Austin whirled around.

  There was only the darkness, the golfing-green lawn, the cultured trees--smoothbarked, empty.

  He passed a hand through his hair. It was a trick of the lights. His subconscious fear, the shimmering water . . .

  He walked quickly to the darkened boathouse, across its floor, his footsteps ringing against the stone, echoing loudly.

  At the end of the miniature pier, he untied a small battery boat and jumped into it. He pulled a switch at the side, waited, forced himself to look back at the deserted bank.

  The boat moved slowly, with only a whisper of sound, through the water.

  Hurry, Austin thought. Hurry--Oh God, why are they so slow!