Eternity and Other Stories

by Lucius Shepard

  “Business as usual,” I said, more brusquely than I’d intended. “What’s on your mind?”

  A pause, burst of static along the long-distance wire, after which Rawley’s voice seemed tinier, flatter, less human. “Actually, Michael, I’ve some work to toss your way…if you’re interested. But if this is a bad time…”

  I apologized for being short with him, told him I’d had a rough couple of nights.

  “Not to worry,” he said, and laughed. “My fault for calling so early. I should have remembered you’re a bit of a cunt before you’ve had your coffee.”

  I asked what kind of work he was talking about, and there was another pause. A radio was switched on in the adjoining apartment; a soukous tune blasted forth, lilting guitars and Sam Mangwana chiding an unfaithful lover. From the street came the spicy smell of roasting meat; I was tempted to look out the window and see if a vendor had set up shop below, but the brightness hurt my eyes, and I closed the blinds instead.

  “I’ve been put in charge of a rather curious case,” Rawley said. “It’s quite troubling, really. We’ve had some murders up in Bandundu Province that have been attributed to sorcery. Crocodile men, to be specific.”

  “That’s hardly unusual.”

  “No, no, of course it isn’t. Not a year goes by we don’t have similar reports. Sorcerers changing into various animals and doing murder. Although this year there’ve been considerably more. Dozens of them. Hang on a second, will you?”

  I heard him speaking to someone in his office, and I pictured him as I had seen him three months before—blond Aryan youth grown into a beefy, smug, thirtyish ex-swimmer given to hearty backslapping and beery excess. Or, as a remittance man of our mutual acquaintance had described him, “Halfway through a transformation from beautiful boy to bloated alcoholic.”

  “Michael?” Patience stood in the kitchen doorway; the room behind her was wreathed in smoke.

  “The bread won’t come out the slots.” She said this sadly, her head tilted down, gazing up at me through her lashes—an attitude that suggested both penitence and sexual promise.

  “I’ll be there in a minute,” I told her. “Just pull the plug out of the wall.”

  “Sorry about that, Michael.” Rawley was back, his manner more energized, as if he’d received encouraging news. “This particular case I mentioned. We have a witness who’s identified three men and two women he claims turned into monsters. Half man, half croc. He says he saw them kill and eat several people.”

  I started to speak, but he cut me off.

  “I know, I know. That’s not unusual, either. But this fellow’s testimony was compelling. Described the beasties in great detail. Human from the waist up, croc from the hips down. Skin in tatters, as if they were undergoing a change. That sort of thing. At any rate, arrests have been made. Four of them deny everything. As you might expect. Under ordinary circumstances, I’d let them go. Despite the superstition rampant in these parts, prosecuting a case based entirely on an accusation of sorcery would be a ludicrous exercise. But in this instance, one of the accused has confessed.”

  I had been stretching the phone cord to its full extension, peering around the corner of the doorway to see how Patience was doing with the toaster cord. Now Rawley had won my complete attention.

  “He confessed to killing and eating people?”

  “Not only that. He confessed to killing them while in the form of half man, half crocodile.”

  I took a moment to consider this, then said, “The police must have tortured him.”

  “I don’t believe so. I’ve spoken with him in the jail at Mogado, and he’s not in the least intimidated. On the contrary, I have the sense he’s laughing at us. He seems amused that anyone would doubt him.”

  “Then he must be insane.”

  “The thought did occur. Naturally I had him examined by a psychiatrist. Clean bill of health. Of course, I’m not altogether sure of either my psychiatrist’s competency or his motives. His credentials are not of the highest quality, and there’s a great deal of political pressure being exerted to have the case brought to trial. The big boys in Kinshasa don’t enjoy the notion that someone out in the provinces might be practicing more effective juju than they themselves.”

  “It all sounds intriguing,” I said. “But I don’t understand how I can help.”

  “I want someone I trust to have a look at this fellow. A practiced observer. Someone with expertise in the field.”

  “I’m scarcely an expert in human behavior. Certainly not by any academic standard.”

  “True enough,” said Rawley. “But you do know a thing or two about crocodiles. Don’t you?”

  This startled me. “I suppose…though I haven’t kept up with the literature. Snakes are my thing. But what possible use can you have for an expert on crocodiles?”

  Again Rawley fell silent. I had another peek in at Patience. She was sitting by the table, staring glumly out the window, the black toaster plug protruding from her clasped hands—like a child holding a dead flower. She did not turn, but her eyes cut toward me and held my gaze—the effect was disconcerting, like the way a zombie might glance at you. Or a lizard.

  “I realize this may sound mad,” Rawley said, “but Buma…That’s the man’s name. Gilbert Buma. He’s an impressive sort. Impressive in a way I can’t put into words. He has the most extraordinary effect on people. I—” He made a frustrated noise. “Christ, Michael! I need you to come and have a look at him. I can get you a nice consulting fee. We’ll fly you into Kinshasa, pay all expenses. Believe it or not, there’s a decent hotel in Mogado. A relic of empire. You’ll be very comfortable, and I’ll stand for the drinks. It shouldn’t take more than a week.” I heard the click of a cigarette lighter, the sound of Rawley exhaling. “C’mon, man. Say you’ll do it. It makes an excellent excuse for a visit if nothing else. I’ve missed you, you old bastard.”

  “All right. I’ll come. But I’m still not sure what exactly it is you want from me.”

  “I’m not entirely clear on the subject myself,” said Rawley. “But for the sake of the conversation, let’s just say I’d like you to give me your considered opinion as to whether or not Buma might be telling the truth.”

  • • •

  Patience wept when I left. We had only been together a few days, and our relationship had acquired no more than a gloss of emotional depth; yet judging by her display of tearful affection, you might have thought we were newlyweds torn apart in the midst of a honeymoon. I gave her enough money to last a couple of weeks and instructed her in the use of the apartment. Frankly, I didn’t believe I would see her again; I assumed that I would return home to find the place trashed, and myself in need of a new toaster. The tears, I suspected, were the product of her fear at being left alone in the city, a situation she would address the minute I was out the door. But despite this cynical view, I was moved, and tried to reassure her that everything would be fine. I told her I would call from Mogado and gave her Rawley’s office number. Nothing served to placate her. As I rattled about in the cab on the way to the airport, peering out at dusty slums through the mosaic of decals and fetishes that almost obscured the rear window, I felt a twinge of remorse at leaving her so bereft, and I wondered if by conditioning myself to expect the worst of people, I had also blinded myself to their potentials. Perhaps, I told myself, Patience was something other than the typical village girl driven from home by poverty, on her way to death by knife or beating or STD; perhaps she was offering more than I had taken the trouble to notice. But the sentimentality of this idea was off-putting. I pushed it aside and turned my thoughts to what lay ahead, to Mogado and Gilbert Buma, and to Rawley.

  My friendship with James Rawley had been launched under the banner of political correctness. Though not so obnoxiously pervasive as it had become in the States, the politically correct mentality was nonetheless in vogue during my year at Oxford, and I believe Rawley perceived that friendship with a black American would effect a moral cre
dential that would immunize him against the stereotyping reserved for white Africans, thereby assisting his student career—and it was for him a career in the purest sense of the word, a carefully crafted accretion of connections and influence. I doubt he was aware of this choice; it was more a byproduct of natural craftiness than of any conscious scheme. But I also doubt he would have denied the fact, had I brought it to his attention—he had an intuitive self-knowledge and blunt honesty that made it difficult for him to harbor illusions regarding his motives. For my part, it was not so different. Rawley’s acceptance helped to ease my path at Oxford, and though the artificial character of the relationship was always a shadow between us, we never discussed the subject; we had sufficient affinities and commonalties of interest to allow us to finesse this potential problem.

  For a long while, I considered the friendship abnormal, and I suppose it was to a degree, since from its onset it had not been informed by real affection; but as I grew older, I came to recognize that friends, like lovers, have their honeymoons, and that affection, like passion, lasts only for a season unless sustained by concerns of mutual advantage. Rawley and I had manufactured a friendship based on those concerns without the attendant warmth; yet over the years, our orbits continued to intersect, and a genuine warmth evolved between us. It was as if, because we had never bought into the illusion of friendship, because we had initiated our bond on the basest of levels, an enduring and dynamic friendship became possible. Whenever I stopped to analyze the relationship, I couldn’t be certain that I even liked Rawley; yet time and experience had inextricably woven together the threads of our lives, and our dependency on one another for counsel, money, a shoulder to cry on, and so forth had grown so deep-seated, we might have been an old married couple.

  • • •

  Though I had never been to Mogado, I knew what to expect. All African provincial capitals are much the same, both in essence and particulars, and Mogado’s downtown area of dusty, potholed streets, a scattering of leafless, skeletal trees, and shabby buildings with cracked stucco facades, was not in any wise distinctive. Just enough people about to give the impression of squatters in a ghost town: a barefoot woman in a faded dress peering from a dark doorway; three skinny kids squatting in the dirt, tormenting a captive mouse snake; a toothless old man sitting at a window, gazing blankly into the past. Everyone else hiding from the heat. In the central square, dominated by a plaster fountain decorated with faces from which all features had eroded, a pariah dog with a pelt the color of blanched almonds was poking about for bugs in a patch of sere grass. When my car passed close to him, he skittered away sideways, dragging behind him a shadow as thin as a wire animal.

  The street sign on the corner nearest the jail was dented and weathered, almost unreadable. Peering closely, I saw it was inscribed with a date; I could just make out the month, November, and the slightest suggestion of a numeral—doubtless commemorating some brilliant revolutionary passage whose spirit had suffered a comparable erosion of clarity. The jail itself occupied the basement and ground floor of the provincial offices, which were housed in a four-story edifice of pastel green stucco. A potbellied Congolese policeman with blue-black skin, a presidential air of self-importance, and a wen under his left eye sat in the anteroom behind a flyspecked desk, reading a French-language newspaper whose headline proclaimed a ferry disaster on the Kilombo River, the same muddy watercourse that flowed past Mogado. The crack-webbed wall at his back was figured by a large rectangle paler by several degrees than the remainder of its dingy surface; I took this to be the space where for three decades a portrait of the late unlamented dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, had hung. A ceiling fan stirred the air, but the faint breeze it created served merely to make me more aware of the humidity and the acrid stench of cleaning agents mixed in with a mustier scent, one I imagined to be that of blood and urine and sweat, the smell of old sufferings.

  Rawley, the policeman told me, had been detained; he would join me that evening at the hotel. However, I could see the prisoner now if I wished.

  I had presumed that Rawley would want to speak to me before my initial meeting with Buma; but now I suspected that his absence was by design, that he preferred to have my first impressions of the man be untainted by any further briefing on the case. I was tired from the flight and the drive, but I decided there was no point in putting things off.

  A second policeman accompanied me down the stairs to a freshly whitewashed interrogation room at the rear of the building, furnished with a rough wooden table and two folding chairs. As I waited for Buma, I picked at the whitewash with my fingernails and succeeded in scraping away a sizable flake, revealing a dark undercoat dappled with rust-colored spots that were almost certainly dried blood. It would be nice, I thought, if Mobutu were doing time someplace a touch more tropical than Mogado, capering madly about in a red-hot iron cell, with snakes’ heads protruding from his eyes and rats playing tug-of-war with bloody strips of his tongue.

  The door creaked back, and the policeman, wearing an agitated expression, ushered an elderly white-haired man into the room and locked the door behind him. The man was dressed in a tattered shirt and trousers of flour sacking, his arms and legs in manacles. His head was down, and he did not look at me. He stepped behind the chair opposite, repositioned it so that it was sideways to the table, and sat, affording me a view of his left profile. Only then did he dart his eyes toward me, engaging my stare for a few beats before fixing his gaze on the wall. He smiled, showing a sliver of discolored teeth—or perhaps it was not a true smile, for the expression held, as if this were the natural relaxed position of his jaws. His skin was coffee-colored, so crisscrossed with wrinkles that I initially assumed him to be in his eighties; but his musculature gave the lie to this impression. His forearms and biceps were those of someone who had thrived on a lifetime of physical labor, and his features were firmly fleshed and strong. It seemed that age had merely laid a patina upon him, and that if you could erase the wrinkles, you would be face to face with a man of hale middle age.

  “Mr. Buma,” I said. “My name is Michael Mosely. I’d like to ask you some questions.”

  He was slow to respond, but at length, as if it had taken several seconds for my words to penetrate his cerebral cortex, several more for the brain to interpret them, he said in a baritone of such resonance he might have been speaking through a wooden tube: “They tell me you are another doctor.”

  “Yes,” I said. “But not the same sort of doctor who interviewed you previously. My discipline is herpetology. The study of snakes. To be precise, I’m an ethologist specializing in the behavior of pythons.”

  This appeared to interest him. He turned the full force of his liverish eyes on me—when I say “force,” I am being literal, for I could have sworn I felt a sudden cold pressure on the skin of my face. That and his thin, false smile combined to instill in me a sense of unease.

  “Pythons,” he said, and gave an amused grunt. “You will learn nothing about pythons from me.”

  “As you probably know,” I said, “that’s not the subject of my inquiry.”

  He lifted his large head a few degrees and appeared to be studying something in the corner of the ceiling. The most interesting thing about him to this juncture, I thought, was his stillness. After each movement, he seemed to freeze, not a muscle or a nerve twitching, and I wondered if this might not be the symptom of some pathology.

  “Where were you born?” I asked.

  “Along the river. A few days from here.”

  “What’s the name of your village?”

  “It no longer exists,” he said. “It has no name.”

  Mobutu, I thought. Under Mobutu, many things in the Congo had ceased to exist.

  “I’m going to assume,” I said, “you committed the murders you’ve been accused of. If that’s the case, why did you confess?”

  He lowered his gaze to the wall. “Because I wished to announce myself. Because I am not afraid of what may follow.”

&nb
sp; From his answer, I thought I understood him. Either he had participated in the murders, or else they had been done by someone else, and he had seen them as an opportunity. He was a witch man. A member of a crocodile cult. He wanted an acknowledgment of his power; once that acknowledgment had been made, and the cult’s authority affirmed, he believed that no Congolese court would have the courage to convict him—they would be intimidated by the threat posed by his sorcery. The entire process of accusation and confession had in effect been a public relations stunt designed to elevate the cult from a bush-league operation, so to speak, to a place of honor in the complicated hierarchy of witches and sorcerers that had always flourished in the country, no matter what political regime occupied the halls of power. While Mobutu was in office, this sort of stratagem would have been met with swift violence—no one was permitted to practice greater juju than the president-for-life; but now, with lesser monsters in control, it stood a chance of success. What I didn’t understand, however, was whether he was a con man or if he actually believed his own bullshit.

  “Would you mind telling me how you acquired the ability to transform yourself?” I asked.

  He seemed not to have heard me, continuing to stare at the wall.

  I found this intriguing—it was my experience that most witch men would leap at an opportunity to present their magical credentials, to boast of their connections with various gods and elementals, to go on and on about the trials they had endured in their spiritual quests.

  “The killings,” I said. “Were they somehow related to the ritual that permitted you to transform yourself? Or were they merely…coincidental?”

  He let out a heavy sigh, and his mouth remained open, as if it had been a last breath; but then he blinked, and his eyes cut toward me again.

  “These questions,” he said, “they hide another question. The thing you truly wish to know is whether I am a liar or a fool. If I were a fool, I would have no answer. If I were a liar, I would not tell you the truth.”