Vanishing acts, p.6
Vanishing Acts, page 6
And so no one was armed except for him. He had brought his ex-army Wembley 45. He hoped upon hope he wouldn’t have to use it. That his luck would hold.
5. Amy Burton
“At least we can get some work done,” Alex Wilson said sotto voce to Amy the next morning, as the two parts of the expedition got ready, one to descend further, the other to retrieve ropes from higher up. A sentiment which managed to shock her even though she had already decided that, this side of snake oil sellers, dieticians and shampoo manufacturers, Wilson was quite the most amoral person masquerading as a scientist she’d ever come across. A man had gone missing, for God’s sake; he might be dead. Well, perhaps she shouldn’t be surprised. It was common gossip that Wilson’s Ph.D. was nothing of the sort, merely an honorary doctorate from a Midwest college dazzled by his series of lost world TV documentaries, and it seemed to Amy that he was both horribly arrogant and desperately insecure. She’d kept away from him as much as possible, given that he kept trying to pick fights with her on specious grounds, and fortunately he’d spent more and more time arguing with the cameraman, who proposed following the new lead team rather than filming Wilson searching for his bird.
Meanwhile, Ralph Read sat on his throne of rope bags saying nothing yet trying to look as if he was still in command. He was pale under his tan, sweating heavily, and massaging his bandaged knee when he thought no one was looking. When Amy saw him take a swig of something from a silver flask, she assumed her best no-nonsense voice and told him she’d take a look at that knee, and he gave in after a token protest.
“I’ve no objection to be administered to by a comely young woman,” he said.
“Bullshit,” Amy said, for she harbored no illusions about herself—she was a dumpy, pear-shaped thirty-five, a handmaiden to science with a poor career profile because she loved field expeditions far more than the publication mill or the petty rivalries of university departmental politics. Her father had worked for the CIA in Central America in the sixties, when half the governments had been in the pay of the United Fruit Company, and although she was irredeemably left wing in the classic pattern of anti-parental rebellion, she loved her father for the camping expeditions on which he’d taken her and her brother—it was where she had developed her passion for botany, and where her life had been shaped.
She got rid of the poorly knotted bandages by using her Swiss Army knife; Read winced as she probed his knee with expert fingers. It was in bad shape, misshapen and swollen with internal bleeding, the skin a shiny black. She treated it with Novocaine cream and splinted it, and told Read that he should really be taken back up.
“The expedition needs me,” he said. “I’m quite comfortable, and I’m sure the radio will work better down here. Thank you,” he added. “It does feel better.”
“In this climate it’ll get gangrenous if you don’t get proper treatment,” she warned him.
“Oh, a little gangrene is nothing,” he said, with a ghost of his usual braggadocio. “I lost two toes on my first assault on K2.”
Before they left, Amy had two of the climbers rig up a sunshade for the silly, vain old man, and then the expedition divided with noisy banter. The Danes got up from where they had been squatting and drifted into the forest—a strange secretive bunch, but Amy quite liked them, despite Ken’s aggressive assertion of his one-eighth Aboriginal ancestry. Ty Brown went down the cliff with the lead party; Alex Wilson ascended with the rope scavengers to search for his bird where Ty had seen it yesterday. Amy shouldered her backpack and made herself scarce before the old man tried to persuade her to stay and keep him company rather than wandering off into a dangerous forest by herself.
Amy didn’t think the forest dangerous at all, although it was spectacularly strange. With cycads as the primary growth, it really was the kind of place where you expected to be confronted by a dinosaur, and she was certain that several of the species she saw were new to science—either relic species or genuinely unknown. If she could have her way, the expedition would abandon all efforts to get to the bottom and concentrate on doing some real science, but there was no chance of that while Read was still its leader. He was interested in nothing but climbing. He’d even called this place a rift for God’s sake, when it was nothing at all like a rift valley: it was a canyon, probably formed on a fault line and deepened by irregular uplift and water erosion, perhaps even the collapse of an underground water course.
The narrow belt of forest stretched for more than a mile to either side of the camp, slashed by smooth rock flood channels. It was like the cliff forests which had been discovered in Canada, a refuge for dozens of species which could obtain precarious footholds in its diverse range of microhabitats; and it was also an island population, its environment both geographically isolated and physically distinct from the rain forests around the massif which the Rift bisected, an evolutionary laboratory where species could explosively radiate to fill empty niches.
Amy passed through the forest which had been searched yesterday, descended a long gentle grade of tumbled rocks, an old rockfall overgrown by creepers and ferns and moss, and rambled on through the unexplored lower terrace of the forest. She sketched and took meticulous photographs with a scale always in the foreground, took samples of leaves and cones and flowers and placed them in plastic bags with a dusting of camphor powder to kill bugs, carefully documented each photograph and specimen. She took species counts of gridded areas too, and assessed growth habits as best she could.
And always she was filled with wonder at the treasure house through which she wandered, a last wilderness that even now was being despoiled by the expedition. Wilson was right about the bird, of course; if it was a living fossil, a close relative of the ancestral species of modern birds, surviving as coelacanths had survived in the deep waters off East Africa before they had been fished out, then it really was a fantastically important scientific discovery. Yet the forests were important too, although he couldn’t see it—that was the problem with zoologists. They were so focused on their big mammal star species—pandas or tigers or blue whales—that they often didn’t see the importance of the infrastructure of plants and fungi and insects and even bacteria which made up the habitats where the mammals lived. The primary mistake of zoos and many conservation bodies was to believe that by saving a rare animal they had somehow preserved the most important member of a vanishing habitat, but without the thousands of unacknowledged species which coexisted with it, it was no more than a trophy living out the last of its days in sterile captivity. More enlightened programs held that everything in a habitat was important; they took cores or sweep samples, tried to calculate and define biodiversity. That was why Amy’s work was so important.
In this way, the day passed quickly, until she discovered the standing stone.
In fact, she walked right past it without really seeing it. It was only when she was taking a photograph a little way off that she really saw what it was, and went back with her heart hammering, suddenly full of apprehension.
It was a columnar piece of native granite a dozen feet high, perhaps originally flaked from the cliff by weathering, but someone had set it upright in the thin laterite soil and shaped its base into the crude likeness of a pregnant woman. It reminded Amy of the ancient clay figures discovered in prehistoric cave dwellings. She walked around it, noting brown, wilted flowers at the base, and a pile of rotten figs, and started to take photographs, the click of the camera shutter and the whine of the motor suddenly very loud and obtrusive in the watchful green of the forest. She was just putting the camera back in her pack when she heard a faint crackle far off, as if someone had stepped on one of the dried cycad fronds which everywhere littered the ground. Heart in mouth, she lifted the pack and backed into a stand of feathery mimosa, settling down on her haunches, her eyes skittering back and forth as they tried to distinguish movement in the green shadows.
There! A tall figure drifting silently down the path she had followed. Amy almost burst out laughing, for she saw at once who it was. He was quite naked, and carried something before him—a bright wreath of orchids, which he placed with awkward yet touching reverence at the foot of the standing stone.
When Amy stood up and stepped from her hiding place, he jumped almost a foot in the air and then she did laugh, and after a few seconds he did, too.
“Well, you caught me I guess,” Sky Dane said, with a rueful grin.
“I didn’t mean to.” Amy wanted to ask where his parents where, and where his clothes were, too (although he was so unselfconsciously naked that he was clad, as it were, in his dignity). Instead, she asked him about the standing stone, and who might have carved it.
“I mean,” she said, “no Indian tribes would work something like this in stone. It isn’t in their tradition.”
“Not in their tradition, I guess, no.”
“But there is a tribe living here.”
“Sort of.”
“And you know about them, you and your parents.”
“Sort of.” She stared at him and he did blush then, and added, “We’ve seen signs here and there. We travel fast, faster than the others suspect, so we’ve had time for a bit of exploring. We saw one or two things. There’s an old cliff dwelling half a mile up, made in a cave under an overhang. They must have lived there a fair old time because the ashes from their fires are more than ten feet deep, but my dad reckons that no one has lived there for thousands of years. We found some glyphs carved in the rocks, too, although you have to have the eye to see them.”
“Who are they? Do you think they took the climber?”
For a moment Amy had the horrible thought that perhaps the Danes had murdered him—but no, Ty Brown and Alex Wilson had been with them.
Sky said, “They killed him most like. It’s what Indians do with intruders on their patch. Look, are you going to tell about this?”
Amy said carefully, “Is it important that I don’t?”
“Not when you get back. In fact, it’s important you tell people, because of the government rules about undiscovered tribes. We can give you stuff about what we found, photos and the like. But I mean, you won’t tell the others now.”
“I don’t see why—”Amy started to say, but got no further because that was when the shots rang out in the distance.
Two shots, close-spaced, echoing off the cliff above. A third rang out just after Amy started to run, chasing after Sky’s fleet figure, his buttocks glimmering in the green gloom as he raced away from her.
It was a long run, across the old rockfall and through another mile of forest. She arrived at the camp covered in sweat and out of breath, mouth parched with fear. Sky, now wearing shorts and a T-shirt, was tending to a man who lay on the ground clutching his thigh—there was blood running between his hands, soaking his shorts. Ralph Read stood at the edge of the drop, propping himself up with a tent pole and menacing the air with a huge antique revolver.
“They ran, by God,” he shouted to Amy, fierce and exultant. “By God how they ran!”
“Here,” Amy told Sky, “let me look,” and knelt by the wounded man.
It was one of the young climbers, Matt Johnson. His face was grey, and slick with sweat. He told Amy, his voice tight with pain, “They came at us while we were hacking through forest a couple of terraces below. I don’t know where the others are.”
Amy glanced at Sky and said, “Tell me later,” and pried his fingers away from his thigh and saw the slim arrow shaft which stood up from it, fletched with dyed red feathers. She probed around it, determined that the head wasn’t in the bone, and told Matt Johnson what she was going to do. “It will hurt,” she said.
“It already hurts.”
“You had better hurry there,” Read shouted. “The buggers will be back.”
Amy twisted up her handkerchief and gave it to Matt Johnson to bite down on, then cut the shaft in half with her knife and with one quick hard motion pushed the remainder of the arrow through the meat of his thigh. Blood gushed as the arrowhead broke through the skin on the far side. Its point was flaked stone, neatly socketed in the shaft. She got a grip on blood-slick stone and drew the rest of the shaft from the wound.
Matt Johnson looked at it and shuddered and said, “Jesus fuck.”
“Don’t faint on me now,” Amy told him, hoping he wasn’t going into shock.
“It isn’t so bad.”
“You’re lucky it wasn’t poisoned,” Sky said.
Amy washed blood from the young climber’s wounds, sprinkled antibiotic powder in them and packed them, and wound a bandage tightly around his thigh. A little blood soaked through, but the arrow seemed to have missed the major vessels.
Ralph Read had been hobbling up and down at the edge of the cliff, yelling into the radio, cursing, switching frequencies and yelling some more. Now he threw the radio aside and drew his revolver and fired three times at something below the cliff edge, each shot a tremendous shocking noise. “Here they come!” he shouted into the echoing silence, and broke the revolver open and thumbed brass cartridges into its chamber, closed it, and started to fire again.
Amy reached the edge of the cliff and looked down just as the arrows started to fly up, dozens of them twinkling at the peak of their ascent and then slipping back down the air. Ralph Read began to shoot into the trees from which they came, the revolver bucking in his hand. Amy thought she saw shadows slipping through shadows beneath the cycads along the edge of the talus slope at the bottom of the cliff, and then Sky pulled her away.
“You must go!” Sky yelled, but she hardly heard him, half-deafened by the revolver and the hammering of her heart. He tried to drag her across the rock apron towards the cliff and the fixed ropes, but she pulled back.
Ralph Read was leaning on the tent pole and reloading his revolver, a wild and grim expression on his face. He glanced at them and said, “I’ll keep them off until you reach the top of the cliff. I can’t climb with this blasted knee, but you can lower a sling and get me up that way. Go on now!”
Sky said, “He’s right. I’ll stay and help him. You go. And remember to tell the authorities that there are Indians living here!”
Matt Johnson had already climbed into his harness, and now he helped Amy get into hers. She hadn’t realized how scared she was until she tried to do up the buckles, all thumbs. She said to Matt Johnson, “Can you climb?”
“I can always climb. I got back, didn’t I?”
His face was still grey with shock, and his hands were trembling, but he got her harness fastened and roped her to him and they started the climb, leaning out more or less horizontally and walking up the face of the vertical cliff of hard red-black granite. The harnesses were fixed to the ropes with jumars, metal clasps which slid up the rope but not down, and although these made the climb easier, Amy’s arms and shoulders were soon burning. There was a traverse thirty feet up, along a narrow ledge to the chimney that led up through a big overhang. Matt Johnson started to spider along it; he had to use his legs as much as his arms, and she heard his gasps of pain. Then he was at the chimney and paid out the belay rope, and it was her turn. Just as she started the traverse, her clumsy hiking boots slipping on the ledge, her hands cramping around the rope, the greasy granite an inch from her nose, something clattered beside her. An arrow. More lofted towards her, small deadly things that struck the rock on either side and dropped away. Then she was at the chimney and hauled herself up with Matt Johnson yelling encouragement. When she was lodged safely in it, rock on either side, she dared look back.
Below, Ralph Read was standing by the piled equipment in the center of the rock apron, firing first to one side and then the other. Arrow shafts stuck out from his torso. Figures were dancing at the edge of the cycads, seemingly dressed in shaggy hides. She could not see Sky. Then the belay rope tightened. Matt Johnson was climbing on and she turned and followed him and saw no more.
6. The Danes
What can you say about the Danes? They are not Danish but Australian. They are a tightly bound unit, mother and father and son. They have their own rituals, their own body language. They are bonded together so tightly that nothing can pry them apart—not Ken’s occasional infidelities, not Sky’s occasional moony girlfriends, whom he mostly ignores because he needs nothing more than his family and their way of life.
They had a long palaver after Ralph Read’s speech, realizing that they had reached the crux of their private mission. “We’ll look for this cludger,” Ken said, “but they certainly murdered him, and they don’t want us to find his body or they would have just left it.”
Sky, who loved horror movies, said, “Ate him, I reckon.” “Now we don’t know that,” Kerry said. “The evidence of cannibalism was only found in grave sites, and it was probably ritual.”
“It’s what they do in the New Hebrides,” Sky said.
“These people aren’t anything like that,” Kerry said.
“They murdered him and stuffed his body somewhere,” Ken said. “And they’ll probably kill the rest of the climbers, too. It’s a shame, but there it is. It isn’t their fault these bastards came blundering in.”
“That’s just why we should tell Read what we know,” Kerry said, but Ken vetoed that. “That bugger Wilson would chase after them,” he said, “and so would Read. The two of them went looking for Bigfoot together, remember. So we can’t let them know what’s here; the poor people would be turned into circus freaks.”
They talked some more, but it was decided. The next day they went their separate ways into the forest, and when the inevitable happened, Read’s revolver shots ringing out into the Rift and finally ceasing, they met up in a prearranged spot several miles south of the campsite.
Even when part of other expeditions, the Danes always had their own agenda. It added spice, as Ken liked to say, and spice was everything in life. He didn’t mind that people said they were hippies, relics from a lost age, that he was trying to keep his youth alive through adventure. It was all part of the cover of the half-world they inhabited. There were others like them, keeping the secrets of the world safe, a disorganized conspiracy which somehow worked most of the time.
