Thirteen Phantasms (30 page)

But I was there. And, as I say, what transpired was far and away more peculiar and exotic than the activities that, some twenty years earlier, had set the machinery of fate and mystery into creaking and irreversible motion.

It was a wild and rainy Thursday, then, that day at the club. March hadn’t gone out like any lamb; it had roared right along, storming and blowing into April. We—that
is
to say, the Professor, Colonel Hasbro, Tubby Frobisher, John Priestly (the African explorer and adventurer, not the novelist), and myself, Jack Owlesby—were sitting about after a long dinner at the Explorers Club, opposite the Planetarium. Wind howled outside the casements, and rain angled past in a driving rush, now letting off, now redoubling,
whooshing in
great sheets of grey mist. It wasn’t the sort of weather to be out in, you can count on that, and none of us, of course, had any business to see to anyway. I was looking forward to pipes and cigars and a glass of this or that, maybe a bit of a snooze in the lounge and then a really first-rate supper—a veal cutlet, perhaps, or a steak and mushroom pie and a bottle of Burgundy. The afternoon and evening, in other words, held astonishing promise.

So we sipped port, poked at the bowls of our pipes, watched the fragrant smoke rise in little lazy wisps and drift off, and muttered in a satisfied way about the weather. Under those conditions, you’ll agree, it couldn’t rain hard enough. I recall even that Frobisher, who, to be fair, had been coarsened by years in the bush, called the lot of us over to the window in order to have a laugh at the expense of some poor shambling madman who hunched in the rain below, holding over his head the ruins of an umbrella that might have been serviceable twenty or thirty years earlier but had seen hard use since, and which, in its fallen state, had come to resemble a ribby-looking inverted bird with about half a dozen pipe-stem legs. As far as I could see, there was no cloth on the thing at all. He had the mannerisms correct, that much I’ll give him.
He
seemed convinced that the fossil umbrella was doing the work. Frobisher roared and shook and said that the man should be on the stage. Then he said he had half a mind to go down and give the fellow a half crown, except that it was raining and he would get soaked. “That’s well and good in the bush,” he said, “but in the city, in civilization, well…” He shook his head. “When in Rome,” he said. And he forgot about the poor bogger in the road. All of us did, for a bit.

“I’ve seen rain that makes this look like small beer,” Frobisher boasted, shaking his head. “That’s nothing but fizz-water to me. Drizzle. Heavy fog.”

“It reminds me of the time we faced down that mob in Banju Wangi,” said Priestly, nodding at St. Ives, “after you two”—referring to the Professor and Hasbro—”routed the pig men. What an adventure.”

It’s moderately likely that Priestly, who kept pretty much to himself, had little desire to tell the story of our adventures in Java, incredible though they were, which had transpired some twenty years earlier. You may have read about them, actually, for my own account was published in
The Strand
some six months after the story of the Chingford Tower fracas and the alien threat. But as I say, Priestly himself didn’t want to, as the Yanks say, spin any stretchers; he just wanted to shut Frobisher up. We’d heard nothing but “the bush” all afternoon. Frobisher had clearly been “out” in it—Australia, Brazil, India, Canton Province. There was bush enough in the world; that much was certain. We’d had enough of Frobisher’s bush, but of course none of us could say so. This was the club, after all, and Tubby, although coarsened a bit, as I say, was one of the lads.

So I leapt in on top of Priestly when I saw Frobisher point his pipe stem at St. Ives. Frobisher’s pipe stem, somehow, always gave rise to fresh accounts of the ubiquitous bush. “Banju Wangi!” I half shouted. “By golly!” I admit it was weak, but I needed a moment to think. And I said it loud enough to put Frobisher right off the scent.

“Banju Wangi,” I said to Priestly. “Remember that pack of cannibals? Inky lot of blokes, what?” Priestly nodded, but didn’t offer to carry on. He was satisfied with simply recalling the rain. And there
had been
a spectacular rain in those Javanese days, if you can call it a rain. Which you can’t, really, no more than you would call a waterfall a faucet or the sun a gas lamp. A monsoon was what it was.

Roundabout twenty years back, then, it fell out that Priestly and I and poor Bill Kraken had, on the strength of Dr. Birdlip’s manuscript, taken ship to Java where we met, not unexpectedly, Professor St. Ives and Hasbro, themselves returning from a spate of very dangerous and mysterious space travel. The alien threat, as I said before, had been crushed, and the five of us had found ourselves deep in cannibal-infested jungles, beating our way through toward the Bali Straits in order to cross over to Penginuman where there lay, we fervently prayed, a Dutch freighter bound for home. The rain was sluicing down. It was mid-January, smack in the middle of the northwest monsoons, and we were slogging through jungles, trailed by orangutans and asps, hacking at creepers, and slowly metamorphosing into biped sponges.

On the banks of the Wangi River we stumbled upon a tribe of tiny Peewatin natives and traded them boxes of kitchen matches for a pair of long piroques. Bill Kraken gave his pocket watch to the local shaman in return for an odd bamboo umbrella with a shrunken head dangling from the handle by a brass chain. Kraken was, of course, round the bend in those days, but his purchase of the curious umbrella wasn’t an act of madness. He stayed far drier than the rest of us in the days that followed.

We set off, finally, down the Wangi beneath grey skies and a canopy of unbelievable green. The river was swollen with rain and littered with tangles of fallen tree trunks and vegetation that crumbled continually from either shore. Canoeing In a monsoon struck me as a trifle
outré
, as the Frenchman would say, but St. Ives and Priestly agreed that the very wildness of the river would serve to discourage the vast and lumbering crocodiles which, during a more placid season, splashed through the shallows In frightful abundance. And the rain itself, pouring from the sky without pause, had a month before driven most of the cannibal tribes into higher elevations.

So we paddled and bailed and bailed and paddled, St. Ives managing, through a singular and mysterious invention of his own, to keep his pipe alight in the downpour, and I anticipating, monsoon or no, the prick of a dart on the back of my neck or the sight of a toothy, arch-eyed crocodile, intent upon dinner.

Our third night on the river, very near the coast, we found what amounted to a little sandy inlet scooped into the riverside. The bank above it had been worn away, and a cavern, overhung with vines and shaded by flowering acacias and a pair of incredible teaks, opened up for some few yards. By the end of the week it would be underwater, but at present it was high and dry, and we required shelter only for the night. We pushed the piroques up onto the sand, tied them to tree trunks, and hunched into the little cavern, lighting a welcome and jolly fire.

That night was full of the cries of wild beasts, the screams of panthers and the shrill peep of winging bats. More than once great clacking-jawed crocodiles crept up out of the river and gave us the glad eye before slipping away again. Pygmy hippopotami stumbled up, to the vast surprise of the Professor, and watched us for a bit, blinking and yawning and making off again up the bank and into the undergrowth. St. Ives insisted that such beasts were indigenous only to the continent of Africa, and his observation encouraged Priestly to tell a very strange and sad tale—the story of Doctor Ignacio Narbondo. This Doctor Narbondo, it seems, practiced in London in the eighteenth century. He claimed to have developed any number of strange serums, including one which, ostensibly, would allow the breeding of unlike beasts: pigs with fishes and birds with hedgehogs. He was harried out of England as a vivisectionist, although he swore to his own innocence and to the efficacy of his serum. Three years later, after suffering the same fate in Venice, he set sail from Mombasa with a herd of pygmy hippos, determined to haul them across the Indian Ocean to the Malay Archipelago and breed them with the great hairy orangutans that flourished in the Borneo rain forests.

He was possessed, said Priestly, with the idea of one day docking at Marseilles or London and striding ashore flanked by an army of the unlikely offspring of two of the most ludicrous beasts imaginable, throwing the same fear into the civilized world that Hannibal must have produced when, with ten score of elephants, he popped in from beyond the Alps. Narbondo, however, was never seen again. He docked in Surabaja, disappeared into the jungles with his beasts, and, as they say of Captain England in Mauritius, went native. Whether Narbondo became, in the years that followed, the fabled Wildman of Borneo is speculation. Some say he did, some say he died of typhus in Bombay. His hippopotami, however, riddled with Narbondo’s serum, multiplied-within a small area of Eastern Java.

The explanation of the existence of the hippos seemed to whet St. Ives’s curiosity. He questioned Priestly for an hour, In fact, about this mysterious Doctor Narbondo, but Priestly had merely read about the mad doctor in Ashbless’s
Account of London Madmen
(a grossly unfair appellation, at least in regard to Doctor Narbondo) and he could remember little else.

St. Ives, Hasbro, and I, of course, already knew of the existence of this Narbondo, and of his secret identity, for he was not, as Frosbinder alleged, Ignacio Narbondo, who lies frozen in a Scandanacian Tarn. He was (and still is) Ignacio Narbondo’s long lost twin brother Ivan, who had stolen his brother’s name and traded on his reputation before the name and reputation fell into disrepute. His flight from England had less to do with vivisection than with the sworn enmity of the enraged Ignacio, an enmity that is now long cooled, if you’ll allow me a moment of levity.

Half a dozen times that night I awakened to the sounds of something crashing in the forest above, and twice, blinking awake, I saw wide, hairy faces, upside down, eyes aglow, peering at us from overhead—jungle beasts, hanging from the vine-covered ledge above to watch us as we slept. Visions of the supposed Narbondo’s hippo-apes flitted through my dreams, and when daylight wandered through the following morning, I was convinced that many of the past night’s visitations had not been made merely by the creatures of dreams, but had actually been the offspring, so to speak, of the misanthropic Doctor Narbondo.

We had a brief respite from the rain that morning, and, determined to make the most of it, we loaded our gear aboard the piroques and prepared to clamber in. The sun broke through the clouds about then, and golden rays slanted through the forest ceiling, stippling the jungle floor and setting off an opera of bird cries and monkey whistling. We stood and stared at the steamy radiance of the forest, beautiful beyond accounting, then turned toward the canoes. A shout from Hasbro, however, brought us up short. He’d seen something, that much was certain, in the jungle beyond the riverside cavern.

“What ho, man?” said St. Ives, anxious to be off yet overwhelmed with scientific curiosity.

“A temple of sorts, sir,” said Hasbro, pointing away into the forest. “I believe I see some sort of stone monolith or altar, sir. Perhaps a shrine to some heathen god.”

And sure enough, bathed now in sunlight was a little clearing in the trees. In it, scattered in a circle, were half a dozen stone rectangles, one almost as large as an automobile, all crumbling and half-covered with creepers and moss.

Bill Kraken, still suffering from the poulp madness that had so befuddled him in the past months, gave out a little cry and dashed past Hasbro up the bank and into the forest. The rest of us followed at a run, fearing that Bill would come to harm. If we had known what lay ahead, we would have been a bit quicker about it even yet.

What we found in the clearing was that circle of stone monoliths, crumbling, as I’ve said, with age. Dozens of bright green asps rested in the sunshine atop the stones, watching us through lazy eyes. Four wild pigs, rooting for insects, crashed off into the vegetation, setting off the flight of a score of apes which had, hitherto, been hidden away overhead in the tree-tops. In the midst of the circle of stones sat a peculiar and indescribably eerie statue, carved, it seemed, entirely of ivory. It was old, though clearly not so old as the monoliths surrounding it, and it was minutely carven; its mouth looked as if it were ready to speak, and its jaw was square and determined and revealed just a hint of sadness. On closer inspection it clearly wasn’t ivory that it had been carved from, for the stone, whatever it was, was veined with thin blue lines.

It was uncanny. Professor St. Ives speculated at first that it was some sort of rare Malaysian marble. And very fine marble at that—marble that Michelangelo would have blathered over. More astonishing than the marble, though, were its eyes—two great rubies, faceted so minutely that they threw the rays of the tropical sun in a thousand directions. And it was those ruby eyes that not only cut short our examination of the ruined ring of altars and the peculiar idol, but which were the end of poor old Bill Kraken, a fine scientist in his own right before falling into the hands of the aliens after Birdlip’s demise.

It was the flash of sunlight from those rubies that had instigated Kraken’s charge up the slope and into the clearing. While the rest of us had gathered about commenting on the strange veined stone, Bill had stood gaping, clutching his umbrella, hypnotized by the ruby lights which, as the forest foliage swayed in the breezes overhead, now shading the jungle floor, now opening and allowing sunlight to flood in upon us, played over his face like the glints of light thrown from one of those spinning mirrored globes that dangle from the ceiling of a ballroom.