The Ephemera (18 page)

"Joshua, what do you think of evil?" I said.

I felt the slow burn of his scrutiny, then he said, "People do bad things, Andras. You were a soldier. You've seen what goes on. You need to ask about evil?" He paused before adding, "Srebrenica, for example?"

I remembered: watching through field glasses, cold November sun flaring off the windshield of a VW van crawling out of the town at the head of a column of refugees. Had it been on its own the van might have evaded the ambush fire from the new large calibre machine gun we had just delivered. But I doubt it. Ten minutes later, in an atmosphere of clattering after-echoes, the Serb officer smiled, saying to me in clear English, 'a good demonstration.' And I returned his smile, shook his hand and drove away without giving the affair a second thought. A deal done.

As usual, Joshua had hit the mark. I thought about embarking on a 'morality is subjective' stance but I recognised how absurd that would sound and let the conversation die there. I needed him with me in this and didn't want to stretch his credibility in me any further. I focussed on the even sound of his breathing and tried to push from my mind the crowding darkness of the jungle around us, and found myself wondering again about evil. I considered myself world-wise, but in truth I did not know the first thing about it.

~

We set out again at first light. It had rained during the night and the jungle was fresh and vibrant. Our progress was marked by echoing cries and hoots, sometimes in the distance, sometimes—it seemed—right in front of us, but for hours we saw nothing.

Then we came upon the monkeys. Cresting a rise Joshua stopped, motioned for silence. I crept forward to join him, peering through a fan of foliage. A splashing waterfall pooled in the hollow before us. Gathered around the pool were at least four different species of monkeys. They were grooming each other, drinking from the pool, splashing playfully. Then one ambled forward, cupping a large folded leaf which it laid on the ground. It dipped its fingers inside, then withdrew them coated in some kind of black powder. Baring its gums the animal rubbed its fingers around the inside of its mouth. Taking its lead, the others approached in twos and threes, almost reverently taking a finger of the powder and retiring to put it to their mouths.

"What are they doing?" I said to my companion. It had been intended as a whisper but the sound carried. As one the monkeys looked directly up at us and started jumping up and down with a furious whooping and screaming. Their eyes glared intelligently and their bared teeth blazed white. The instant they rushed the slope, the thundercrack of Joshua's pistol sounded beside me. By the time the reverberations had died away, the hollow had been long emptied. My ears ached.

~

It was another two hours before we discovered the plane. A twin prop passenger crate, its white paint work assuming a slow organic camouflage as it accumulated layers of animal and vegetable secretions. Furthermore, though the plane had evidently crashed here some time ago, it was relatively intact. It was as if the jungle itself had cushioned its fall, and then, in saving the occupants, had condemned them to a slower death as they discovered themselves unable to escape its sinewy boughs, its suffocating humidity.

Nevertheless, I interpreted this latest encounter as good news. Although I did not see how they could be connected, after the boat and the monkeys, this new discovery felt like another marker along our journey. A sign that we were getting closer.

While Joshua explored the cockpit, I circled around—and stopped, amazed. Finger-painted onto the fuselage in some dirty, yellowish substance was a pictogram. I recognised it immediately as a variation of the tower and circle motif. Even incomplete, my studies led me to believe that this pictogram represented an opening within the tower; with a fan of straight lines linking the circle above the tower to the apex. Possibly, I had guessed, representing the rays of the sun or the moon.

There was an open hatch along the side of the plane. Even more curious now, I stuck my head inside. In the dimness I heard rather than saw movement, and something struck me hard across the temple. Soundlessly, I fell backward, blinking in shock. On my back on the jungle floor, I looked up at the canopy, eyesight swimming. A shape moved into view above me, a shape with matted red fur.

Groggily, I realised I had disturbed a juvenile orang-utan who had been exploring the wreck. It leaned over me, peering into my eyes with perfectly evident intelligence. Its own eyes gleamed like polished black marbles, and, making soft noises, it reached out and gently brushed my face with fingers thick with some tacky substance. Then, in my dazed state, I imagined its lips formed a clear word, gently spoken but in an ugly language that I recognised instantly but had never thought I would hear. I wished I hadn't. Reading it was bad enough.

As I looked up at the ape, it smiled at me. Then one side of the animal's face exploded, spraying me with gore. I gasped, scrambling to sit up as the corpse of the ape fell to one side. Joshua stood close by, pistol aimed steadily at the creature in case it was still alive.

"Are you alright?" he asked flatly, although I thought I detected some amusement.

I couldn't answer immediately. I felt warmth on my lips, tasted blood. Seized by a sudden desire to wash my face and neck, I got up too quickly, only to slump again.

Then I saw the heads, and was shocked into lucidity.

"What?" Joshua saw my expression and followed my gaze to the spikes driven into the ground.

He muttered something in his native tongue as he helped me to my feet. I stumbled over to the hideous display. These heads were fresh, too recent to have belonged to the crew of the plane. My gaze lurched from one decapitated skull to the next, searching pathetically for the head of my son. It was a task which demanded closer scrutiny than I could at that moment bear to give. The heads had been torn from their bodies, the faces agonised masks, like props from a horror film. Eyes were missing, noses and cheeks, torn flaps of skin. I counted, and counted again. Five heads. That left one.

I fell to the ground, helpless as I retched bile, and the last of my self-esteem, into the undergrowth.

Joshua prowled edgily while I collected my wits. At least I now knew for sure that there was more to my unnerved state than simple isolation from civilization and a guilt-fuelled imagination. We were not alone in this jungle. The plane had been completely stripped, all the instruments, seats, everything inside, gone. And the murdered men had not been killed by mere animals—the sickening presentation of their crudely removed heads proved that. My own head throbbed with the thought that we had arrived too late. If indeed these victims had made up Sandor's party, he too, surely, had been slain. Even if he had escaped the initial attack he surely could not have evaded his attackers for long. I was in no doubt that my son had encountered the cultists who had fashioned the torus, and he had been led here as a direct result of my actions. By stealing the torus, I had made this possible. That knowledge sat inside me like a glass bubble. When it broke, there would be shards of pain, the emptiness of grief, but for now it was a hard obstacle that restricted my lungs and crushed my heart.

When I was able, Joshua led me away from the grisly scene, but mindful of encountering the cultists in the gathering dusk, we did not go far. Without Joshua's support, I dropped my pack and sat, encircled by jungle. Eventually, Joshua made me eat, and, as the food brought me back to myself, I noticed him toying with something.

"What are you doing?" I asked softly. It was the first time either of us had spoken since we found the heads.

He leaned forward, his weathered features exaggerated into deep erosion in the light of our lamps.

"It's what the monkeys were—taking, earlier, by the stream."

"What?"

"The powder—" He offered me the leaf.

What impressed me at first was the simple structure the leaf had been folded into. It had been manipulated to form a secure pouch so cunningly constructed that it may even have been watertight. Not a grain of its sooty contents leaked out.

"This was not made by monkeys," I said. Further evidence of the unseen human inhabitants of the gorge.

I sniffed cautiously, and recognised the sweet odour as similar to that of the bottle I had opened back in the hut, but much stronger. Immediately my head reeled. I almost dropped the pouch.

"It's hallucinogenic," said Joshua. "Like peyote. Something like that." He rose to his feet and stared out into the trees. Then he laughed, and made three quick 'ook' sounds, like a monkey.

"My God, Joshua, have you taken some?"

He fixed my attention with his gaze. His voice was slow, carefully enunciated.

"How else would we know what it was?" He moved his hand in front of my face. The gesture left a trail of hands behind, staccato after-images.

I gasped, startled. Whereas Joshua evidently had experience, I had never explored drugs, prevented from taking such few opportunities as had come my way by the deep fear of surrendering control. But now I had been taken by surprise. As the effects began to intensify, I found them at the same time horrifying and fascinating. I could feel a creeping sensation, like movement, up the sides of my neck, under my jaw then up my face and into my scalp. There was a vague metallic sensation in my nasal cavity, the same taste, perhaps, at the back of my throat.

"Jesus!" It was like being ill, feverish, delirious, but without the lethargy and depression that accompanied such illness.

I was still staring at Joshua's face. He, in turn looked intently back at me.

"You're feeling it too, aren't you?" he asked. His voice was drawn out, slightly distorted.

"But I've only smelled it briefly—" His face was moving. Almost imperceptibly, oozing, breathing.

"Imagine what
I
feel like, then," he said, the sensual pulse of movement, as his face twisted, shifting into a grin. Around us the darkness of the jungle began to glow. As I turned my head, everything left a staggered trail of itself. I started to giggle, and immediately stifled it.

Joshua crouched before me.

"Take some," he said. His voice had assumed a new depth, a new breadth of sound.

"What? Are you mad?"

He grasped my wrist. The sensation of his touch was quite alien. He shook his head. "I think you should take some."

"Why? Already I feel—very strange—Joshua, I—"

He leaned close, his face, inches away, was a map of a world I had never seen, but knew of instinctively. Every feature a continent, every wrinkle a tectonic fault. His eyes were the heart of the world, a doorway to something else, to Joshua's private version of Heaven, or Hell.

I stuck two fingers into my mouth, wetting them, and pushed them into the powder.

Joshua's smile widened. "Not too much," he said, and then, bizarrely, added, "the flesh of the
Doorbringer
is powerful stuff."

The soft coating on my fingers, sparkling like black diamond dust captivated me. A night sky in my hand. Thoughts of my son dwindled like a receding star—but did not vanish entirely.

"I can't—" I said, wiping my fingers on my shorts. It seemed some vestige of my normal self remained.

"You can, Andras," Joshua said, simultaneously yanking my head back by the hair, and forcing a fingerful of the grit between my lips. I gagged as he rubbed the stuff roughly around the inside of my cheeks. My mouth rioted with the cold aromatic sweetness. When he released me I tried to spit it out but most of the powder had dissolved. All the same I emptied a water bottle in an effort to dispel the awful taste. As the liquid swirled around my mouth I fell downwards through reality.

The noises of the jungle had become all-encompassing. There was sound everywhere, and further sound within it. Dark layers of deep vibration throbbed out of the darkness, encasing feathery rustles, the movement of creatures among plants, at the edge of hearing the very growth of the plants themselves. The movement echoed the shape of a branch, underlined patches of distant night sky shining through the canopy. As I stared upwards, aware of connections between myself and my environs I had previously been ignorant to (but that somehow were not new to me, were like old friends coming home), the negative and positive inverted, the pieces of sky became the objects, the darkness of the canopy become the void. I felt doors opening all around me. I felt boundaries at the edges of my consciousness dissolve, no longer relevant. The jungle, this reality, I realised, was only a tiny fragment of existence. All things were connected in a framework above and beyond and behind our normal perception.

I got to my feet, stumbled forward, the trees moving aside to create a passage for me. I looked back. Joshua stood beside our tent, far away now. His arms were outstretched in my direction, a gesture of beseeching, and his face was a frieze of abject misery.

Had he spoken? Was that what made me turn? Yes, his lips were moving. I could not quite hear, no—Joshua spoke three syllables in that awful tongue.

Doorbringer
, in English, sounded in my mind.

The undergrowth erupted, the very jungle hurtling down from the trees, rising up from the ground, throwing itself upon him. His scream was choked by strong hands as he crumpled under a flailing storm of oddly proportioned limbs.

The attack was timeless, but must have lasted only moments. I watched without emotion as the assailants disengaged from Joshua's ruined corpse, and noticed that they were not after all crazed tribesmen, but simply more apes—perhaps seven individuals—three heavy orangs and four smaller creatures, gibbons, perhaps. Their fur shone blackly, soaked in Joshua's blood. His body lay motionless, hidden behind them. A large orang shuffled towards me, offering a severed arm. One of the gibbons busied itself at Joshua's face and popped a slick, pale sphere into its mouth. I heard it burst between bloodied fangs.

I knew my friend was dead, and that it was my fault for bringing him to this place, but in this state of unreality, it hardly seemed of consequence. It occurred to me he hadn't had time to draw his pistol, and some part of me was telling me I should draw mine, because I was surely next.