The Mammoth Book of Frankenstein (Mammoth Books) (87 page)

I finished my coffee.

“One last drink before you leave?” Gardiner asked.

“Not now, thanks. Will you be here?”

“Undoubtedly.”

I turned to leave and Jones came walking down the bar. He was wearing a purple sports shirt and smiling. His hangover seemed to have been effectively reduced by drowning.

“Hello there, Brookes. Have a drink?”

“I can’t just now. I have some business to attend to.”

He looked disappointed. He had a very American friendliness, and was probably lonely. I introduced him to Gardiner and MacPherson and he shook hands eagerly.

“You fellas live here? Quite a place, this.”

Jones bought drinks and merged easily into the group. I felt
obliged to wait for a few minutes and not leave him with strangers, but it proved unnecessary. He was perfectly suited to the situation. When I left, Gardiner was telling him how the Explotadora company used to virtually rule the territory and give the governor his orders, and Jones was agreeing that government by private enterprise was vastly superior to Democrats and communism.

I walked out beyond the town.

The wind was stronger here, without the shelter of the sturdy buildings of the town. A
pasajero
rode past me, leading a pack horse burdened with all his possessions and trailed by a pack of mangy mongrels. There were shacks on both sides of the road, hideously bright and clattering metallically. Indians sat huddled in the doorways and on the crooked steps. Men of ancient leather and twisted cord, their eyes turned listlessly after me, not really interested but simply following a motion, the same way that they watched a ragged newspaper tumble before the wind; sullen and listless and uncomprehending, perhaps sensing their lives were changed and unnatural, but not recognizing their defeat. A few sheep grazed behind the shacks, facing away from the wind with splendid unconcern, placid and eternal, and forming perhaps the only bridge between the present and the past.

Gregorio was sitting on a gnarled log beside his door, smoking a hand-made pipe. God knows what he was smoking in it. He wore a poncho with a hood roughly sewn on and shadowing his eyes. His hands were strangely delicate, despite the horny calluses, the fingers long and mobile. He peered at me suspiciously. He’d had enough experience of civilization to be wary, unlike the Indians who had watched me walk past.

“Are you Gregorio?” I asked.

The head nodded under the hood.

“You speak English?”

He nodded again.

I squatted down beside him.

“My name is Brookes. I’d like to speak with you for a few moments if you can spare the time.”

There was no reaction.

“I’ll gladly pay you for your time.”

He nodded again I began to wonder if he actually did speak English.

“It’s about the creature you claim . . . the creature that you saw in the mountains.”

Gregorio rustled within the poncho and the hood fell back from his head. He had hair like black wire and a face like a Cornish
farmhouse, sombre, grey and grim. But his eyes were bright with intelligence and perhaps something else – perhaps it was fear.

“
Bestia hombre
,” he said. His voice rasped. I felt certain then, looking into his face, that this man was not faking or pretending. He had seen something and that something was very terrible indeed.

I took a small bank note from my pocket and offered it to him. He took it without looking at it, with a vestige of pride long vanquished by necessity. He held it crumpled in his palm.

“Tell me what you saw.”

He hesitated.

“Is that enough?”

He motioned with the hand holding the note, a scornful gesture. “It is enough,” he said. His English was surprisingly clear, with a faint North American intonation. “It is not a good memory, Señor.” He puffed on his pipe, his lean cheeks sinking inwards. I felt he was gathering more than his thoughts, and waited anxiously.

“When I tell them, they do not believe me,” he said, turning his eyes toward the town. “They laugh. They think I see things that are not there.”

“I believe you.”

His eyes shifted back to me.

“I’ve come all the way from London to speak with you, and to find what you saw.”

“You will look for this thing?” he said, incredulously. He couldn’t believe that anyone would voluntarily seek the creature he had seen – or thought he’d seen. A curious mixture of disbelief and respect moved his expression.

“Yes. And I will find it, if you help me.”

“Help you?”

“Tell me all you can remember.”

“I will tell you, yes.”

“When was it that you saw this thing?”

“It was some weeks ago.” He shrugged. “I have no calendar.”

“You were in the mountains?”

He nodded and looked westward. The land rose steadily away from us and the clouds seemed to tilt down to meet the far mountains. Gregorio stared into the distance. And, without looking at me, he began to speak. His voice moved musically over the foreign English words, but it was music without gaiety, a tragic overture introducing his sombre theme.

“I was looking for work on the sheep ranches. I had the horse and two dogs.” He stabbed the stem of his pipe toward the green tin shack. “That is the horse. The dogs – ” he hesitated, his face still turned away from me, and I saw the cords knot in his neck. “The
dogs were running after me. They were happy to be away from this town, in the mountains. They were good dogs. One especially, a dog of great courage and strength. El Rojo he was called. His breeding one does not know, but his loyalty was firm. He was mine many years, although I had been offered much money for him.” He paused again. His hands were restless. Then he seemed to shrug, although his shoulders did not actually move.

“We rode on a narrow trail through trees. The trees there lean and turn because of the great wind. The wind was very loud then, and the horse made great noise on the rock. It was becoming night. I do not know what hour, I have no clock. But it was time that I make camp, and I looked for a place. I went from the trail and was among dark trees. And then there was no noise. It was like a storm about to break, that silence. But there was no storm, the sky was clear. It was something else. I knew it was not good. The dogs also knew. The little dog cried and El Rojo had stiff hair over his neck. I felt the horse tremble between my knees. All up my legs I feel this, and the eyes are white, the nostrils wide. I kicked at the horse with my heels, but it did not walk.”

Gregorio turned to face me then. His face was terrible. He was reliving those moments vividly, and perhaps this was how his face had appeared then. He seemed scarcely aware of me, his eyes turned on the past.

“Then I heard the sound of this thing. It was a snarl. Not like a dog. A warning, perhaps a challenge. I am not sure what it was. I turned to the sound and then I saw it. It was in a thicket, but I saw it plainly. I looked at it, and it looked at me. We regarded one another. I was unable to move and my throat would not work. My backbone was of ice.

“It was not tall. It bent forwards with long arms. Its chest was huge and shoulders heavy. There was much thick hair, and where there was not hair the skin was dark. For some time we do nothing, and it made the sound again. The hindquarters raise, as if it is stiffening its tail. But it has no tail. Something was beneath it. A sheep, I think. It was woolly and red with blood, and this thing was red at the mouth. Blood dropped heavily from the teeth. But they were teeth. They were not fangs of a beast, they were teeth. And the eyes are on me all this time. It has the eyes of a man . . .”

He was staring into my eyes as he said this. His pipe had burned out, but his teeth were clamped on the stem. I didn’t move, afraid to break the memory that held him, and the belief that gripped me.

“I wished to run from this thing, but the horse was filled with fear. It would not run. And I, too, am frozen. Only El Rojo has sufficient courage. He feared nothing, that dog. He moved toward the thing.
The other dog was not so brave. It ran. The movement makes the horse able to run, also, and he followed after the dog. The horse ran faster than he could run. Faster than I think any horse can run. I am a horseman. All my life I have ridden horses, and I knew this horse well. But Señor, I could no more stop this horse than stop the wind. And I did not want to.”

He was aware of me again, and I thought the story was finished. But he lowered his face and spoke again, more softly.

“But I looked back,” he said. “I could not look away from this thing. I saw the dog make a circle on stiff legs. The dog is snarling with bare fangs, and then the thing moved to the dog. The dog was not fast enough. Or the thing is too fast. They are together on the ground then, and I could see no more. But I can hear what happens. I can hear the cry of the dog, the sound of pain and death. It is loud, then it is not so loud, and when I can hear the dog no longer I hear the sound of this thing. It is not like before. It is more terrible. It is the worst sound a man has ever heard. There was nothing I could do. I could not stop the horse for a long ways, and when finally I did I was trembling more than the horse. I thought of the dog. I loved that dog. But I did not go back.”

Gregorio lapsed into silence. He seemed sad and exhausted. The note was still clasped in his hand. I waited for several moments before he raised his head.

“That is what happened,” he said.

“Do you have any idea what it was?”

He shrugged.

“Could it have been some animal? Some animal you have never seen before?”

“It was a man.”

“It was dark you said . . .”

“The light was sufficient.”

“A man then. An Indian?”

He shook his head patiently.

“A man and a beast,” he said. “A beast-man. A man like no man ever was.”

A man like no man ever was? Or is?

I left him then. I said that I might wish to talk with him again and he shrugged. He was filling his pipe again, and when I looked back from the road he was slumped on the log exactly as he’d been when I came. I was profoundly affected by his tale. I believed him. He might have been mistaken, but he had not deceived me. He had seen something much too terrible to be imagined, and the emotions of his memory were far too genuine to be feigned. Somewhere in those trackless and forsaken wastes,
a creature existed. I did not know what it was, but I knew that I had to find it.

I thought of MacPherson’s advice.

I did not like the idea of carrying a gun, but I decided that I should. There was another idea that I liked considerably less . . .

I spent the next three days in Ushuaia.

It gave me the opportunity to observe these primitive people, as I’d wanted, but my interest in this pursuit had greatly waned. I regarded it now as something that had been done by others before me, interesting enough but hardly a challenge, compared to the possibilities of a new discovery. The tales I had heard from Gregorio and, to a lesser extent, MacPherson, had inflamed my imagination. I had never been a man to draw easy conclusions from incomplete data, and yet the same idea that had seemed absurd when Smyth presented it to me in his quiet, dark office, and the same statements I had passed over lightly in the objective reports that reached the museum, took on a new reality now, just as the clouded sky cast a new light over this land.

I was consumed by an impetuous urge to proceed with my investigations, and frustrated by the need to wait. But the first essential was still to locate Hodson. That was why Smyth had sent me, and it would have been foolish to follow another line of research until I’d seen him, and settled my mind one way or the other on that account. And it seemed there was no way to find Hodson until his man arrived for supplies.

I went to Graham’s every morning to inquire, and be disappointed. Graham had prepared a knapsack and saddlebags for me, and arranged with the stables down the street to have a horse ready to be hired at any time. The knapsack contained a portable stove and foodstuffs in lightweight plastic containers, along with other articles which surprised me, but which Graham thought might possibly prove handy if not essential in traversing that rugged land: a small hatchet, a folding knife, several lengths of rope and cord – things of potential value in survival, rather than in comfort. There was also a sleeping bag and groundsheet. It hadn’t occurred to me that I might be spending a night in the open, and I was grateful for Graham’s foresight, although not so pleased by several tales he told me of men who had been lost in the mountains. With his guidance, I purchased a suitable outfit of clothing for the
trek, heavy whipcord trousers, wool plaid shirt, quilted windbreaker with hood attached, and sturdy, treble-soled boots equally suited to riding and walking over broken land. I felt a certain satisfaction in being so well prepared which somewhat mollified my impatience.

In the meanwhile, I spent the days walking miles into the country on all sides. I wore my new clothing, getting accustomed to the freedom of this new manner of dress at the same time as I felt myself becoming acquainted with the land. I made no particular effort at observation, and made no entries in my notebook. Whatever I learned was simply absorbed without conscious effort, coming through the senses while my mind turned over manifold plans and possibilities. I didn’t attempt to restrict my thoughts to what I knew, or could be proved. It was out of character for me, but I was out of the world I knew, and anxious to enter the world of which Gregorio had spoken.

There were aspects of his story that fascinated me, that had the solid ring of truth, fantastic as that truth might be. These were not the things that seemed to have affected Gregorio most, however. He had seemed most impressed by the creature’s eyes, but I passed this over. Many animals have eyes that seem almost human in their intelligence, often the most loathsome creatures, rats and moray eels for instance. Gregorio could easily have been misled in this. But he claimed it had teeth, not fangs, and referred to its foreward or upper limbs as arms, not the legs he would have attributed to most animals – small points he had not pressed unduly, but which convinced me. And, more than anything else, there was the action he’d described – the raising of a non-existent tail. I have often wondered why mankind emotionally resents the tail that his forebears carried; why that is so frequently the point chosen when a man without knowledge scorns the process of evolution. For the same reason that he portrays the devil with a tail, perhaps? A feeling of superiority for the misguided reason that man has lost a useful and functional part of his anatomy. Surely a man like Gregorio would have given a tail to a figment of his imagination, or added one to a trick of light upon a superstitious nature. The tail is an integral part of bestial evil, and it seemed reasonable to assume that he would have. But he hadn’t. The thing had no tail, and moved as if it had.