From the Heart of Darkness (25 page)

“The papyrus shuddered and I caught a glimpse of the jimpegwe through the tufted bracts: a great, broad head of gray-green, cocked so that the one red eye glittered full on me. The beast dropped back almost at once, with a loud splash that rocked the mat again. The brute had managed to heave itself up onto the pad for only a moment before its weight tore through. The flash I had seen told me only one thing about the jimpegwe: it stood higher than the papyrus bracts, fifteen feet in the air.

“Though there was too little time for running, it seemed far too long to wait. My eight-bore was ready, as it had been all day. After slipping the noses of the next two bullets between the fingers of my left hand, I had nothing to do but to stand with my rifle ported, trusting the beast would rise again when it was close enough for a shot. If it came low through the stalks at me, there would be no chance of placing a bullet. By then, I was under no illusions of being able to stop the jimpegwe with anything but a perfect shot.

“At scarcely fifty yards distance, the jimpegwe pitched upright a second time. I leveled at the head, but again the appearance was only momentary. The sloping skull bave little hope for penetration at that angle. Even so, I could see that the jimpegwe was reptilian. The head was not unlike that of a monitor lizard save in size, though it joined the neck at right angles as if the beast went two-legged much of the time.

“The reeds were bucking like a ship's deck now as the jimpegwe ripped through the last few yards of matted vegetation separating us. The screams of my boys, still floundering on the path behind me, were drowned by the sound of the beast's approach as it frothed reeds and water alike into the air. I watched the whipping stalks, waiting for a patch of gray-green hide to flash among them. I was afraid to chance a shot, more afraid of being pulped without firing. I even considered loosing at the blank, swaying mass before me and then trying to follow my boys.

“When it was within twenty feet—and I still had no fair sight of the beast—the jimpegwe made a wheezing sound and lurched into full view. Its forefeet were upraised. I could see each webbed foot was armed with a horny spike where a man's thumb would be. I squeezed the front trigger when my muzzle steadied a hand's breadth behind that glaring eye, then followed with the left barrel into the red-wattled throat.

“Even as the head snapped back, I broke the rifle. Strange. I remember clearly that one of the empty cases clinked against the stock when it ejected, while the other fell to the reeds without a sound. The swamp had stilled momentarily at the blast of my shots. Now it thundered with bellows and splashing as the jimpegwe thrashed just out of sight. When it raised again, broad-side to me as its mouth spewed rage and black blood, I slammed both shots high into its neck. One bullet must have broken the spine, for the jimpegwe arched like a bow and hurtled backwards into the water. A great hind leg clawed at the sky, but the beast was down for good.”

Randall had stood entranced beside the fireplace all the time the older man was speaking. Now he said, “That's wonderful, Uncle John! But why did you keep it a secret? It's been almost fifteen years.”

The hunter's lips tightened. “The scientific chaps have their own notions as to what can be real in Africa, lad,” he said. “Remember how many kinds of fool they called Harry Johnston when all he wanted them to believe in was an okapi, a stunted giraffe in the Ituri Forest? And what sort of proof could I have brought out of that swamp alone?”

Snorting, Sir John walked over to a writing desk. After rumaging among a litter of papers, he handed an object to the boy. “There. D'ye know what that is?”

Randall handled the object gingerly. It was a cone of black horn about a foot long. At the base clung wrinkled shreds of skin that might have been reptilian.

“The thumb spike!” he boy blurted. “You cut it off the jimpegwe!”

“Between the two of us, lad, that's just what I did,” the old man said. “But when I showed this to a very clever chap at Cambridge, he told me it was the horn from a deformed antelope—and he's the one people will believe, you know.”

But for all the bitterness of his words, the hunter's face had the look of a man whose life has found fulfillment.

THE DANCER IN THE FLAMES

The flames writhing out of the ashtray were an eyeball-licking orange. For an instant Lt Schaydin was sure that the image dancing in them was that of the girl he had burned alive in Cambodia, six months before. But no, not quite; though the other's face had been of Gallic cast too.

The two enlisted men had turned at the sound of the officer brushing back the poncho curtain which divided his tent from the rear compartment of the command track. Radios were built into the right wall of the vehicle above a narrow counter. On that counter rested the CQ's clipboard and a cheap glass ashtray, full of flame. The men within—Skip Sloane, who drove the command track and was now Charge of Quarters, and the medic Evens—had been watching the fire when Schaydin looked in. It was to that ten-inch flame which the lieutenant's eyes were drawn as well.

He stared at her calves and up the swell of the hips which tucked in at a waist that thrust toward him. She looked straight at Schaydin then and her mouth pursed to call. Above the image hung the black ripples of smoke which were her hair. Abruptly the flame shrank to a wavering needle and blinked out. The compartment was lighted only by the instrument dials, pitch dark after the orange glare. The air was sharp with the residue of the flame; but more than that caused Schaydin's chest to constrict. He remembered he had called out some joke as he touched the flamethrower's trigger and sent a loop of napalm through the window of the hooch they were supposed to destroy. The Cambodian girl must have been hiding in the thatch or among the bags of rice. She had been all ablaze as she leaped into the open, shrieking and twisting like a dervish until she died. But this tiny image had not screamed, it had really spoken. It/She had said—

“How did you do that?” Schaydin gasped.

The enlisted men glanced at each other, but their commander did not seem angry, only—strange. Sloane held up a 20-ounce block of C-4, plastic explosive. Sweat rolled down the driver's chest and beer gut. He wore no shirt since the radios heated the command vehicle even in the relative coolness of the Vietnamese night. “You take a bit of C-4, sir,” Sloane said. His hairy thumb and forefinger gouged out an acorn-sized chunk of the white explosive. Another piece had already been removed. “It takes a shock to make it blow up. If you just touch a match to it in the open, it burns. Like that.”

Sloane handed the pellet to Schaydin, who stood with a dazed look on his face. The C-4 had the consistency of nougat, but it was much denser. “We ought 'a air the place out, though,” the driver continued. “The fumes don't do anybody much good.”

“But how did you get it to look like a woman?” Schaydin demanded. “I could see her right there, her face, her eyes … and she was saying.…”

Evens reached past the lieutenant and flapped the poncho curtain to stir the dissipating tendrils of smoke. “C-4 makes a pretty flame,” the stocky medic said, “but you don't want to get the stuff in your system. We used to have a mascot, a little puppy. She ate part of a block and went pure-ass crazy. Seeing things. She'd back into a corner and snap and bark like a bear was after her.… Middle of that afternoon she went haring out over the berm, yapping to beat Hell. We never did see her again.”

The medic looked away from his CO, then added, “Don't think you ought to breathe the fumes, either. Hard to tell what it might make you see. Don't think I want to burn any more C-4, even if it does make the damnedest shadows I ever hope to see.”

The lieutenant opened his mouth to protest, to insist that he had seen the image the instant he pushed the curtain aside; but he caught his men's expressions. His mind seemed to be working normally again. “You guys just saw a—fire?”

“That's all there was to see,” said Evens. “Look, it's late, I better go rack out.” Sloane nodded, tossing him the part block of explosive. The medic edged past Schaydin, into the tent and the still night beyond.

“Time for a guard check,” Sloane said awkwardly and reseated himself before the microphone. One by one the heavy-set man began calling the vehicles sited around the circular berm. The tracks replied with the quiet negative reports that showed someone was awake in each turret. The CQ did not look up at his commander, but when Schaydin stepped back from the compartment and turned away, he heard a rustle. Sloane had pulled the poncho closed.

Schaydin sat down on the edge of his bunk, staring at the morsel of explosive. He saw instead the girl he had glimpsed in the flame. She had danced with her body, writhing sinuously like a belly dancer as her breasts heaved against the fire's translucence. Schaydin couldn't have been mistaken, the girl had been as real as—the Cambodian girl he had burned. And this girl's expression was so alive, her fire-bright eyes glinting with arrogant demand.
What had the Cambodian girl been crying? But her eyes were dulled by the clinging napalm.…

The pellet of C-4 came into focus as Schaydin's fingers rotated it. All right, there was a simple way to see whether his mind had been playing tricks on him.

Schaydin set the ball of explosive on top of a minican, the sealed steel ammunition box prized as luggage by men in armored units. C-4 burned at over 1000 degrees, the lieutenant remembered, but it would burn briefly enough that only the paint would scorch. The flame of Schaydin's cigarette lighter wavered away from the white pellet and heated the case in his hand. Then a tiny spark and a flicker of orange winked through the yellow naphtha flare. Schaydin jerked his lighter away and shut it. Fire loomed up from the
plastique.
Its hissing filled the tent just as the roar of an incoming rocket does an encampment.

And the dancer was there again.

The engineer platoon ran a generator which powered lights all over the firebase through makeshift lines of commo wire. Left-handed and without looking at it, Schaydin jerked away the wire to his tent's lightbulb. The sputtering fire brightened in the darkness, and in it the girl's features were as sharp as if a cameo carven in ruddy stone. But the mouth moved and the dancer called to Schaydin over the fire-noise, “Viens ici! Viens a Marie!” Schaydin had studied French as an undergraduate in divinity school, enough to recognize that the tones were not quite those of modern French; but it was clear that the dancer was calling him to her. His body tensed with the impossible desire to obey. Sweat rimmed all the stark lines of his muscles.

Then the flame and the girl were gone together, though afterimages of both danced across Schaydin's eyes. The lieutenant sat in the dark for some time, oblivious to the half-movement he might have glimpsed through a chink in the poncho. The CQ turned back to his microphone, frowning at what he had watched.

*   *   *

Schaydin was more withdrawn than usual in the morning, but if any of his fellow officers noticed it, they put it down to the lieutenant's natural anxiety about his position. The next days would determine whether Schaydin would be promoted to captain and take on for the rest of his tour the slot he now held in place of the wounded Capt Fuller. Otherwise, Schaydin would have to give up the company to another officer and return to Third Platoon. Schaydin had thought of little else during his previous week of command, but today it barely occurred to him. His mind had been drifting in the unreality of South-East Asia; now it had found an anchorage somewhere else in time and space.

The thin lieutenant spent most of the day in his tent, with the orange sidewalls rolled up to make its roof an awning. The First Sergeant was stationed permanently in the Regiment's base camp at Di An, running an establishment with almost as many troops as there were in the field. In Viet Nam, even in a combat unit, a majority of the troops were non-combatants. Bellew, the Field First, was on R&R in Taiwan, so an unusual amount of the company's day-to-day affairs should have fallen on the commander himself.

Today Schaydin sloughed them, answering the most pressing questions distractedly and without particular interest. His eyes strayed often to his minican, where the paint had bubbled and cracked away in a circle the size of a fifty-cent piece.

She had seemed short, though he could not be sure since the image had been less than a foot tall when the flames leapt their highest. Not plump, exactly, for that implied fat and the dancer had been all rippling muscularity; but she had been a stocky girl, an athlete rather than a houri. And yet Schaydin had never before seen a woman so seductively passionate, so radiant with desire. Every time Schaydin thought of the dancer's eyes, his groin tightened; and he thought of her eyes almost constantly.

Come to me.… Come to Marie.…

*   *   *

The activities of the firebase went on as usual, ignoring Schaydin just as he did them. Second Platoon and some vehicles from Headquarters Company bellowed off on a Medcap to a village ten kilometers down Route 13. There the medics would dispense antibiotics and bandages to the mildly ill. The troops would also goggle at ravaged figures whom not even Johns Hopkins could have aided: a child whose legs had been amputated three years past by a directional mine; a thirty-year-old man with elephantiasis of the scrotum, walking bowlegged because of the bulk of his cantaloupe-sized testicles.…

Chinook helicopters brought in fuel and ammunition resupply in cargo nets swinging beneath their bellies. Schaydin did not notice their howling approach; the syncopated chop of their twin rotors as they hovered; the bustle of men and vehicles heading toward the steel-plank pad to pick up the goods. The lieutenant sat impassively in his tent even when the howitzer battery fired, though the hogs were lofting some of their shells to maximum range. The muzzle blasts raised doughnuts of dust that enveloped the whole base. Schaydin's mind's eye was on a dancing girl, not men in baggy green fatigues; the roar he heard was that of a crowd far away, watching the dancer … and even the dust in Schaydin's nostrils did not smell like the pulverized laterite of Tay Ninh Province.