“Who?” I asked.
“The hyena woman’s people,” Shadow said. “They hear her. They have come.”
At the tracker’s words, Doc broke the breach of his gun, dumped a pair of asparagus-long brass cartridges into the twin chambers, and snapped it shut. Shadow looked at him and shook his head, then placed his fingers to his lips.
Outside, we heard a light footfall and a quiet scuffling, as if someone were searching for a way beneath the canvas wall of the tent. I snatched my .375 Holland and Holland Magnum from the floor and dug three of the big solids out of a box of cartridges I found beside the cot. I crammed them into the magazine as fast as my fingers could work, then slid the bolt back and fed one into the chamber. I took another handful of cartridges and laid them on top of a nearby trunk withiin easy reach. Meanwhile, Doc silently slid the safety catch on his own rifle and raised it to a ready position.
His eyes narrowed, and I noticed a sharp inward bulge in one wall of the canvas, outlining a huge, dog-like snout. Doc nodded at me, making sure that I had seen it, and then took aim. I held my breath, waiting for the cannon-like explosion from his huge .577, while my own gun shook in my hands.
But suddenly, he spun round, and the gun exploded as he staggered back. A huge, mottled hyena, its underbelly wet from the dew-soaked high grass outside the camp, lunged into the tent and clamped its teeth onto his right arm. For one stunned moment, I watched the thing chew his arm into hamburger while it tried to drag him from the tent. Then I raised my rifle and fired.
With a yelp, the creature released his arm and leaped backwards out of the tent. Doc collapsed beside my wife, who had not moved. I stepped to the doorway, working a fresh cartridge into the chamber, and fired at one of a pair of shadows I saw slinking near the fire. It rolled over and came up already moving in an ungainly, crouch-legged lope toward the tall grass at the edge of the camp. I fired again, rolling it over again, and this time it didn’t rise.
I turned and handed the rifle to Shadow, who was already passing Doc’s big gun to me. “Our bullets are no good against this magic, eh,” I laughed as I took the gun from him. Over his shoulder, I saw the canvas wall split as through cut by a knife, and a huge, misshapen head pushed through, fanged jowls slavering and rheumy yellow eyes burning like fire. I pushed the muzzle of Doc’s big gun against the side of its head and pulled the trigger.
The recoil of the weapon took me by surprise. I had never before fired such a massive gun. Its power was brutal. It was a wonder the trigger guard didn’t rip my finger off as the weapon bucked wildly from my hand. As it was, the recoiling barrel struck me a glancing blow across the side of my face. I fell to one knee, staggered, with the index finger of my right hand bending back at an unnatural angle, dislocated and broken. Of the hyena whose head I had surely obliterated, there was no sign. Not even any blood, just a clean, burnt-edge hole in the canvas about as big around as my thumb.
By this time, Doc had recovered somewhat. With Shadow’s help, he was able to make use of his Westley Richards. Propping the heavy double-barreled rifle on Shadow’s shoulder, he stood in the doorway of the tent, firing at anything that moved outside (and no doubt permanently deafening his tracker in the process), while shouting to the staff to stay in the trees if they didn’t want to be shot. When he had used up all his own cartridges, he switched to my .375, awkwardly pushing the bolt back with his undamaged off hand while his good arm hung at his side, sheeting thick red blood onto the sandy ground.
Eventually, I was able to stand and take the gun from him, but by that time, he had used up all my cartridges as well. I looked out into the open space of our camp and found it littered with low, dark humped shapes. The old man leaned against a table, his face deathly white from loss of blood, his whole body alive with nerves. Shadow knelt beside him, patiently wrapping his shredded arm in a sheet.
My wife had not moved throughout this deafening naval barrage, save to tilt her head heavenward. Her eyes were open but rolled back, revealing only the whites, while her lips continued to writhe in whispered chant. Shadow had noticed this as well, and we knew without his saying so that there were more Fisi out there in the dark, waiting for us.
“There’s only one thing for it, old boy,” Doc said in a quivering voice as Shadow lit a cigarette and placed it between Doc’s lips. I didn’t respond, dreading what he was about to say. He nodded to his tracker. I stepped between Shadow and my wife, eyeing the panga knife protruding from a fold in the native’s toga.
But Shadow turned, and still kneeling, began to draw a circle in the sandy, blood-soaked soil with his finger. “The hyena people are led by their queen and their magic is woman’s magic. But the lion people are led by a king, and they are the blood enemies of the hyena people. Lion magic is men’s magic,” Shadow said as he removed a pouch from beneath his greasy toga. “I am not a sorcerer like the old man from the village. There is nothing I can do against the magic of this monkey skin cloak. But the claws of the lion may give us some protection.”
“The cloak? Are you saying that ratty old fur is part of this?” I asked.
Shadow nodded, blinking his heavy lids. “I would not have let Msabu keep it,” he said.
“Why didn’t you say something, then?” I asked angrily.
“Would you have believed me?” he said.
“He’s got you there, old boy,” Doc laughed weakly.
“But what are you suggesting...”
Sensing my fear, Doc shook his head. “No, it’s not Msabu’s fault. The cloak’s the key – we’re going to have to destroy it. We’re going to have to give it to the fire.”
Shadow opened the bag he had taken from his toga. “This is men’s magic of my people. It has things to protect a man from the magic of women and from witches like this hyena queen,” he said as he upending the bag into the circle he had drawn in the soil. “There are lion’s claws and whiskers, hair of...” his voice ended in a hiss and he recoiled involuntarily, his eyes wide with awe.
Among the various oddments from his medicine bag lay two cartridges – one a .577 Nitro, the other a .375 Magnum. Both cartridges had been painted with weird, white and red geometric shapes, with a jagged green line like a lightning bolt running from blunt tip to brass firing pin. I saw nothing to fear from them, but Shadow seemed genuinely frightened, where I had never before seen him afraid of anything, not even of a charging lion.
I picked up the cartridges and looked at them. “This looks like one of mine, Doc. It’s my brand.” I handed the longer cartridge to him.
“This is one of mine. I can tell by the load. I have them specially ordered,” Doc said after examining it. “Shadow, did you take these?”
“No, Bwana,” the tracker answered fearfully. “I have never seen these cartridges before. I do not know how they came to be here.”
“Maybe that old sorcerer slipped them into your bag while you weren’t looking,” I said. “We did lend him a couple of cartridges tonight. Maybe...”
Doc looked at Shadow for a moment, then shook his head. “Let’s not look a gift horse in the mouth, eh?” He passed me the .375 and I fed it into the chamber of my gun. It fit reluctantly because of the native’s paint. Doc loaded his own weapon, then told Shadow to take the monkey skin cloak from my wife’s back. Still, she didn’t move.
“You stay here and cover me from the tent,” Doc said. “Protect her, and don’t let anything get to her.” I nodded. Doc looked at Shadow for a moment, unspoken words passing between them in the silent language that had grown through their years of shared danger.
Then, without a backward glance, they moved out into the camp. Shadow drew his panga knife and held it at the ready, while Doc covered the shadows with his Westley Richards. Because of his injuries, he was forced to carry the heavy gun left-handed, with the barrels clutched awkwardly in the crook of his mangled right arm. He would be lucky to get off a shot if something attacked, and it would be a miracle if he hit what he aimed at. He gripped the seedy green monkey skin cloak in his teeth, having no other hands to spare. Maybe it helped to keep his teeth from chattering.
They were halfway to the fire when it came. I saw a dark blur to my left, emerging swiftly from the tall grass at the edge of the camp. I swung my rifle up, but the thing moved with supernatural speed, crossing the clearing in three bounds. Though obviously a hyena, it was many times larger than the spotted hyena I had occasionally seen loping through the scrub miombo we had hunted for the past month. It was like some primordial hyena, man-tall at the shoulder, transported from an age when men hunted these plains with flint and bone and fire.
Doc turned, though the creature had made no sound that I could hear. But before he could fire, it bowled into him, flinging him across the clearing like a child struck by a careening lorry. With dizzying speed, the monster reversed direction and leaped at Shadow, who was even then raising his panga for a beheading slash. But even the native tracker, long trained in the hunt, was too slow to match the monster’s quickness. In lunged beneath his slashing blade and caught him by the throat. Blood spurted from Shadow’s lips as he cried sharply in surprise, then his scream was cut short as the monster’s teeth sheared through muscle, tendon and bone, severing his head in one rending crunch. Shadow’s body fell like a sack before it, his head still gripped in those awful fangs. With a quick toss, the hyena gulped it down, swallowing heavily. I saw the lump pass slowly down its throat. Then its yellow eyes locked on mine.
Slowly, I lifted the rifle to my shoulder. My mind screamed for speed, but my body seemed frozen, my arms like wood and the gun nightmarishly heavy. Closing one eye, I peered down the gun barrel at the dark form hurtling toward me, jaws agape, four ivory parentheses of death grouping a mottled pink tongue dripping with gore. The warthog ivory bead of the foresights danced like a moth across its snout, forehead, chest, never seeming to remain in the same place for longer than half a blink, until finally it settled like a roulette ball into the V of the rear sights. I aimed at the plunging, low-sloping head for a heartbeat, then dropped my aim a touch and squeezed the trigger. My dislocated and broken finger screamed with pain against the heavy pull. As the gun exploded, I closed my eyes, waiting for the blow that never fell.
At the sound of a stumbling step and a muttered curse, I opened my eyes. I found Doc, amazingly still alive, standing at the door of the tent, his big gun gripped by the end of the barrels and dragging the ground behind him. Between us lay, not a huge, primeval monster, but a man. And a white man, at that. He was naked as the day he was born, his broad, sun-burned back hairy as an ape’s. He lay on his stomach, head turned to the side and eyes glazing, one outstretched hand almost touching my foot. A grapefruit-sized hole between his shoulder blades quietly oozed blood into the sand.
Doc stood over him, shaking his head in amazement.
“What the hell is going on, Doc?” I asked, still not sure of what I was seeing. “Who is this, and how did he get here?”
“His name is Robert Bell-Warren, a good friend of mine. He was a bloody fine white hunter, one of the best, until he walked into the bush one night and was never seen again. His servants said he was bewitched, but the authorities in Nairobi didn’t believe it and hanged the lot of them for murder.” Doc shuffled around the body, his eyes never leaving it. “As for where he came from, you shot him, so you should know.”
“I shot a hyena,” I protested.
“I know that. I saw it with my own eyes. But where the hyena fell, there lies Robert Bell-Warren with a bullet hole in his chest big enough to stop an elephant. I don’t know how we are going to explain this. Likely, they’ll put us all away for good.” He moved past me into the tent, and after glancing for a moment at Stanci, who still sat entranced, he lowered himself onto our cot. Gritting his teeth against the pain of movement, he dragged his gun into his lap and checked the bore for obstructions.
I looked at the dead man’s body again, noticing a curious pattern of scars that covered his shoulders, arms, back, and neck. Also, someone had woven a fair quantity of colored beads and copper wire into his shaggy black hair and beard. The evenness of his sunburn showed that he had been living naked in the bush for quite some time. “I wonder if we don’t all need putting away,” I said. “This is insane. It can’t be real.”
“Bloody Africa, old boy,” Doc coughed wearily. He snapped shut the breach of his Westley Richards. “And there is still one thing to do,” he said.
I looked at my wife, who still sat naked on the floor of the tent, her head thrown back, eyes rolled up, lips muttering. “The cloak,” I finished for him.
Doc started to rise, his face blanching white with the effort. I put my hand on his shoulder. “This time you cover me, old boy,” I said.
He nodded wearily, settling back and resting the gun across his lap. I looked around the tent for some kind of weapon, a spear, anything. Finally, I saw the butt of Doc’s double-barreled Greener sticking out from under an overturned table. I snatched it up, checked the breech to make sure it was still loaded, and snapped it shut. Doc handed me a pair of triple-aught buckshot shells. “Choose your target,” he lectured slowly, as though each breath was a labor. “Don’t shoot from the hip. Pick a target and follow through. Make sure of your shot, and don’t shoot until you are sure. It’s better to be right than fast.”
“I know, old man,” I said. “I know all this from before.”
“You’ve only got four shots, so make them count,” he finished.
“And you’ve only got one,” I responded with a smile. “Don’t waste it. And for God’s sake, don’t miss.”
“I won’t,” he answered.
We looked at one another for an infinitely long moment, he sitting on the cot with his tattered, blood-soaked clothes, me standing there naked, an unfamiliar gun gripped in my sweating hands. He nodded once, his bloodshot eyes assuring me that I could do this.
I turned, facing the dark empty space between the tent and the dying fire. The false dawn was just beginning to gray the sky, but down here beneath the trees and the scrub hills of the African vlei, it was still as black as a mamba’s soulless eyes. I looked around and saw the trees filled with terrified Africans, all staring down in mute witness to the insane comedy playing out beneath them. Beyond the perimeter of the fire, there was no light, no green reflection of eyes, no shadow, only a true Stygian blackness of mythic dimensions, and a silence as though this were the only place in the world.
I leaned forward onto the balls of my naked feet and drifted out of the tent, covering the dozen yards to Shadow’s headless corpse in less than two heartbeats. I slowed, staring in fascinated awe at the body that only moments before had been electric with life. Now it was only so much meat for the jackals and ants. He didn’t look real. He looked like a scarecrow carved of mahogany that had lost its pumpkin head. And then I remembered that that pumpkin head had been swallowed whole by the white man now lying dead in my tent. I moved on.
Casting about, I soon located the monkey skin cloak where Doc had dropped it when he was attacked. It lay in the dust a few yards from the fire. I knelt quickly beside it, but now a strange revulsion to touch it came over me. That some simple inanimate object, sewn together from the flayed hides of a score or so verdant monkeys, should be the source of such horrors as I had witnessed, seemed not only impossible, but the very embodiment of nightmare-wrought madness. A queer impression that I might indeed be insane and hallucinating took hold of me and overcame all other considerations, denying even the truth of my own senses – the bodies littering the camp, the reek of blood and death, the coppery taste of fear flooding my mouth.
I looked at the cloak and said to myself, if I pick that thing up and fling it on the fire, it will be the last step into total madness. It’s only a tattered old cloak. This nightmare is not real, it is the product of heat stroke or malaria or some undigested bit of bloody Africa. If I accept this as reality, I will never escape it. So I refuse to accept it. I refuse to destroy this cloak, for if I do, I destroy myself with it.
I turned back to the tent.
Dark and beautiful as the clouds skimming before the moon, limned in silver, tinkling with bells, she stepped out of the tall grass beyond the tent like some black Aphrodite emerging from the foam. And indeed, the grass seemed to withdraw from around her like the surf. She writhed with life, like a flame given flesh yet retaining its insatiable destructive hunger. Her naked body glowed with lust, her small breasts, like two halves of a pear, glistened and swelled. I smelled the unrequited ache of her loins; her odor struck me like a thunderclap, dizzying my senses. I felt my own member swelling, hardening into a stone that would never be eased until it fleshed itself inside her like a hungry spear.
She crossed the space between us with nightmarish slowness. The swelling throb of desire became unbearable, a pain like being stretched on a rack – I felt I might come completely out of my skin. She seemed not to walk but to float in a lazy, wanton teasing dance. All the civilized restraints were stripped from me by her coiling movements. I wanted only to crush her to me, to impale her mercilessly, to eat of her flesh and feed her my own flesh, to take and take again, to obey an irresistible need, a profound and primal urge to spread my seed as far and wide as I could before swift death took me.
Finally, she twined her long, supple arms around my head and brushed my cheek with her full lips. She drew back from my sudden kisses, gazing at me with her dark, inscrutable eyes. Her hard nipples, like two halves of a walnut shell, pressed painfully into my chest. I sank to them, searching hungrily with my mouth, but she twisted her body away from my questing lips. The wiry furze of her loins brushed my swollen member, sending a jolt through me that weakened my legs, and slowly she sank before me, her lips brushing my shoulder, nipple, belly. Her fingers raked down the sensitive flesh of my ribs, raising deliciously painful welts. I felt her teeth sink into my swollen head, then scrape down the length of my member, tearing my flesh. I staggered in ecstasy, drawing free of her voracious mouth.
She stood up before me, rising imperiously, a look of triumph and lust on her face. Her bloodstained lips drew back in a ferocious smile of sharp, ivory fangs. She growled lustily as she swirled the monkey skin cloak up and over her shoulders, fastening it about her neck by two claw-like clasps.
Then she stepped toward me again, mouth parted hungrily. Her clawlike hands gripped my shoulders and her nails, hard as horn, dug into my skin. She pressed me down, down the length of her body, past the dark round flat of her belly, and my weakened legs buckled. I fell to my knees with my eyes locked on the curly, dew-speckled hair of her loins. The smell of her sex sang across the nerves, heightening my lust to almost unbearable levels.
I gazed up at her, wanting to witness her pleasure as I took her. For a moment, she smiled down at me, lips parted to reveal her dripping canines. Then, her face dissolved into a red and gray haze. Gore splashed across my upraised face. She jerked once and fell backward. I sat back in the dust, staring at the hyena thrashing out the last moments of its life before me, its head a mass of blood, brains, teeth and shattered bone. The echo of Doc’s gun rang in my ears. I turned, half dazed and blinking through the blood, to see my wife, pale and naked and alone before our tent. She dropped the heavy rifle and folded like a lifeless marionette to the ground.
*
Ndaro draped a blanket over my shoulders and pressed a tall glass of pure, pale Highland single malt into my fist. I sucked at it greedily, feeling the warm burn light me up from the inside out. Esa stirred up the fire and added sticks to get a blaze going, while the other camp staff dragged the bodies out into the tall grass. Although the sun had crawled less than a handspan above the red horizon, vultures already circled overhead.
Doc limped past me, dragging something. He flung it on the fire, and I smelled the sharp, bitter odor of burning fur.
He slumped heavily into a folding canvas chair that someone had set out for him. Ndaro poured him a large belt into a battered tin cup. Doc thanked him, then tossed it back with hardly a shiver. He dropped the empty cup to the ground.
Ndaro bent beside the old man and retrieved the cup, poured another round. He stood holding the cup, his malarial yellow eyes staring into the distance. “Msabu asks if we are leaving today,” he said. Then he drained the cup in a single gulp.
“Bloody hell yes,” Doc said. “You bastards had better get me to hospital before septicemia sets in, otherwise it’s going to be a long, smelly ride to Nairobi.”
“Tell her we are leaving soon. Tell her we are leaving now,” I said. The old gunbearer nodded, turned, and strode away, the bottle of whiskey clutched protectively to his chest.
“How is she?” Doc asked me.
“She seems fine,” I said.
“Does she remember anything?” he asked.
“She says she doesn’t remember a thing,” I answered.
Doc glanced away, looking out over the tall grass toward the river. After a few moments, he said, “But you don’t believe her, do you?”
I stared into the crystalline amber depths of my whiskey glass, no longer sure what I believed.
©2006-2008 Jeff Crook
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