The Claw

Thirty-nine

The jeep lurched to a stop. The forest was closing in, and so was the thick moist green twilight beneath the trees. 'We shall have to walk from here,' Isaac said.

Alan stared about him in the desperate hope that the lurch of the jeep might have woken him up. Of course it was an absurd hope. He was already wide awake, and neurotically alert. He wasn't dreaming, though the forest resembled a dream. It resembled the forest he had dreamed of, which suggested that he was close to the dreadful thing he had been told he must do.

How could he distinguish this place from any other part of the forest? He and Isaac had been in here for so long that it seemed strange to think of the open sky, of any sky that wasn't composed of countless overlays of green. Nothing distinguished this place: great sweaty limbs of trees reached up through the green twilight to the green ceiling, young trees grew in the spaces between them, thin stalks tipped with a few pale leaves. Yet he felt as if this place led to his dream, as if one of the paths between the trees led there – as if this place had been the start of his dream, which he couldn't remember. As he sat there in the passenger seat his body was stiffening, his innards felt like bile.

Isaac took the pistol from under the dashboard and thrust it into his belt, then he came round the jeep to Alan. His eyes were sympathetic and encouraging. 'Come on,' he said, clasping Alan's shoulder for a moment. 'Perhaps we haven't far to go now.'

Of course that was what Alan feared. Isaac laid one hand on the pistol. 'I will help you all I can.'

Even if he was undertaking to kill the Leopard Man, that still left the worst for Alan. Perhaps the chief in the village of beehive huts had been wrong after all, yet it seemed horribly logical: cannibals ate their victims in order to ingest their power, therefore in order to consume the power of a cannibal cult for ever one would have to… He swallowed, choking, desperate to believe he was dreaming, but the last time he'd slept was last night in the jeep, baboons swinging down from the dark overhead to scratch and scream at the windows, huge shadows lumbering past beyond the reach of the headlights. It wasn't a dream, nor could he tame what was happening to him by thinking how he might write about it one day; that no longer worked. It was happening now, and it was all he could do for Liz and Anna. Though his legs felt heavy as concrete, he climbed out of the jeep. 'All right,' he said through his stiff cumbersome lips.

He strode out at once. If he had hesitated now, he would never have been able to go on. The ground between the trees was springy with leaf-mould; it yielded underfoot, an oddly intimate sensation – he felt as if the forest were accepting him. He was striding so determinedly that Isaac had to hurry to catch up. 'This way, you think?' Isaac said, and it was only then that Alan realized that he was acting as if he knew.

He glared about. He couldn't know, there was nothing to recognize, it was all the same: the moist green velvet light, the looming juicy green of vegetation, screams and leaping overhead, snakes like liberated vines. Fruit bats dangled, furry blotches in the dimness; they hadn't been in his dreams. He was walking in the direction the jeep had been going, that was all. 'It's as good a way as any,' he muttered. He mustn't stop, he mustn't falter; above all, he mustn't think about what he'd done in his dream.

The trees went on for ever. The world had turned into forest. The darkening path felt warm and soft as fur. A whirring overhead made him glance up. He'd thought it was a flock of bats, but it was a helicopter, invisible above the mass of foliage. It seemed a promise of help, until he realized that it could never land in the forest. The sound was already fading away to his left, away from the path he had to follow.

He couldn't know that; there was nothing to show that it was. His dream meant nothing, he mustn't trust a dream. But there was one thing he couldn't ignore: that long before his meeting with the chief, he'd already dreamed of doing what the chief had told him he must do. His innards were struggling now, rebelling. Just because the path was darkening, that didn't necessarily mean he was near his goal – but he would be there eventually, he had no choice but to act out his dream. He felt as if he weren't so much walking now as stumbling forward under the weight of that thought.

Isaac halted him. The translator was gazing about, holding up one hand for quiet. He stood for a while, then he shook his head. It had only been the helicopter. 'We should be stealthy now,' he whispered, 'in case we are near.'

Alan found his own voice was too shaky to control. 'Do you think we are?'

'I don't know. But we ought to be careful.' Isaac was gazing at him as if to discover how Alan would face what lay ahead. 'I told you that they may hunt in packs – if they are the last traces of the original Ju-ju.'

But now it was Alan who was gesturing for silence. He'd been staring ahead between the trees, where the path darkened progressively. Now he saw why. A quarter of a mile or so further on, the foliage closed in, a tangle of young trees and creepers and vines. There was no longer a path.

He knew what that meant. In these last days in the forest, such places had been the only signs of humanity they had found: deserted native farms, cleared areas where plants and small trees had taken over. Why did the sight of this latest one make his throat grow dry and burning?

He was stumbling forward before he knew it, hardly aware of the leaf-mould beneath his feet, hushing his footsteps. As he approached the tangle of vegetation, not only dimness but silence closed in, as if the green wall could soak up sound as well as light. After the incessant clamour of monkeys and birds, the silence was suffocating. He could hear his heart, which sounded large, juicy, very soft. He felt intensely vulnerable and, despite Isaac, quite alone.

But the faint track was turning. It bypassed the impenetrable confusion of trees and undergrowth. For a moment he felt as if he'd been reprieved, as if he wouldn't have to do what his dreams and the chief and Isaac had all told him he must. He glimpsed dim conical shapes through chinks in the foliage.

'It's just another deserted village,' Isaac said.

Did he sound relieved? Nevertheless he was still whispering. 'Abandoned,' Alan corrected him, and halted, legs suddenly trembling. He had seen a gap in the tangle, a way through.

It took him a long time to step forward. He could see that it was the hidden entrance to a path. It had been made since the perimeter of the village had become overgrown – since the village had been abandoned. The place was not deserted.

As he took one stumbling step forward, more to keep his balance than out of any wish to go on, a fragment of the undergrowth scuttled away from him. It was a chameleon that was turning into jungle. The shock brought him back to himself: he no longer felt he was sleepwalking. Isaac was fully aware of what he was doing, coming all this way for Alan, away from his wife and his bright-eyed daughters. If he could do so much for Alan, surely Alan could do what he must for his own family? Perhaps he could if he didn't think about it. He stepped forward and squeezed between the fat moist trunks of the trees that formed the gap.

They felt like sweaty flesh. Thick rubbery leaves stroked him, cold wet caresses. A mass of flies buzzed out of the knee-high undergrowth and crawled over his face and arms. Though the path was short, he was ready to tear his way through before he'd struggled to the end, to splinter the trees, anything to fight the silence, the congealing dimness, the flies that he hadn't room to beat off. By the time he reached the end of the path he was so desperate for freedom that he almost fell.

It was even dimmer here, and more oppressive. Though the trees and the undergrowth had been cut back, branches and dense foliage stooped overhead. He had to stand on the squelching grass while his eyes adjusted, and then he stood gazing. If he let himself feel anything, it would be relief. Thank God, this wasn't like his dream at all.

There were perhaps a dozen huts in the clearing, squat conical buildings, little more than a roof and a circular wall with an open doorway that faced into the compound. Some of the roofs had collapsed. As the huts took shape from the dimness they made him think of giant mushrooms, swollen by the climate, or by magic. They were grey with dimness and moisture, and seemed to glisten like snails. They looked as if they hadn't been lived in for years.

In that case, why was he afraid to go forward? It was only a primitive village, the trees were nothing but trees… Yet he already felt as if they were creeping forward to surround him. What was that clutter of thin whitish sticks in one hut? Were they bones? If he stepped forward he might see, but he felt as if something was waiting for him to move.

He mustn't be afraid, not now. There wasn't even a reason for him to be. Good God, what would he be like when there was? Fury made him step forward, a fury that left no room for thought, lie stopped halfway between the huts and the way through the trees, his head twisting back and forth as if he were a beast in a cage.

He was still trying to decide what the whitish sticks were when a sound behind him made him swing round, his empty hand snatching at the air as he realized that he had no weapon. The sound had only been Isaac, but as Alan turned, he saw what was wrong with the trees. A red shape had been painted on the trunk on each side of the gap.

He had to peer before he could make it out, and yet he felt as if he knew it. It was a thin crouching shape, the shape of a man – or almost a man. It had been painted in blood, which looked fresh. A man composed of blood, or covered in it – where had he encountered that before? He was struggling to think when Isaac whispered 'That's it. That is what they believed would hunt with them.'

Alan couldn't think. His inability to think, combined with the thickening gloom, maddened him. As he peered at one of the bloody paintings, he realized that the crouching shape was stirring, ready to leap at him. No, a mass of flies was crawling on it; that was why its limbs were squirming. He turned to Isaac to ask him to explain what he'd said. But Isaac was gazing beyond the huts. He was gazing as if he couldn't look away.

As he followed Isaac's gaze, Alan felt the nightmare closing in. He was scarcely aware that he was moving forward, and he couldn't have halted himself; there is no controlling a nightmare. He'd moved before he could even see what Isaac saw.

The first thing he saw through a gap between the huts was a cooking pot, a grey bulge in the dimness. It took him a few moments to realize what it was, from the pinkish glow of the fire smouldering beneath it. As he peered at the glow, a shape loomed at the edge of his vision, a thin shape against the trees at the far side of the clearing. He looked up and met the eyes that were watching him.

The dream had him now – the dream in which time was suspended, and from which he would never wake. He had seen that figure before, the thin crouching figure wrapped in its own limbs like a dried-up spider. Now he saw that its head was disproportionately small, which made it look even less human. The air about it seemed darker, swarming, and he thought of flies.

He was only peripherally aware of all this. All he could see were the eyes. If the body looked almost wasted away, the eyes were unnaturally bright with a kind of insane senile brightness. He could read their dreadful hunger all the way across the clearing. They were insatiable, and they were waiting for him.

He had forgotten Isaac until the translator took hold of his arm. 'He's alone,' Isaac murmured, as if that mattered. 'The others must be hunting. Stay here.'

He stepped forward, drawing the pistol. Perhaps he meant to give himself no time for second thoughts about what he had to do, but then it would be Alan's turn. At least the spidery eyes were watching Isaac now. That might give Alan a chance to prepare himself, but that thought was appalling too.

Now he could see more of the dried-up figure that was squatting amid its tangle of limbs. Its skin was like a mummy's, leathery and ancient; its mouth was a skull's mouth – too large for the head. It looked as if it had no right to be alive, and yet the eyes looked older than the body, the life in them did.

Isaac was moving more slowly. Perhaps he'd seen exactly what he was approaching. Alan had a sudden inkling that Isaac couldn't stop himself. The silence was a stagnant fluid in which they were drowning. It dragged at their limbs, it suffocated time. Isaac might take forever to reach the thing that was watching them – and then Alan realized that Isaac had found he couldn't shoot. Now that it came to the moment, he couldn't kill another human being, however nominal its humanity was, in cold blood.

Alan was suddenly afraid for him. He opened his mouth to call him back, but sourness choked his throat. He went after Isaac just as the crouching figure opened its enormous mouth, baring pointed brownish teeth. Even at that distance Alan could smell its breath, which stank of stale blood.

He made a grab for Isaac, but wasn't quick enough. Isaac must have seen what was coming, for he halted. Nevertheless neither of them could have believed that anything so old and withered could move with such speed.

Before Alan could reach Isaac, or Isaac could step back, the fleshless creature sprang from its crouch and came scuttling at Isaac on all fours.

Isaac stumbled backward, almost tripping himself. It wasn't enough. The dried-up man had the swiftness of a spider, and the method too. Before Isaac could kick out or retreat further the creature seized him, grabbing his ankles and swarming up him, wrapping its legs around his. As Isaac struggled desperately to free himself from the thing that was grinning mirthlessly up at him, he lost his balance and fell on his back in the squelching grass.

His arms were flailing helplessly. All the breath had been knocked out of him. The pistol had jerked from his hand and was trapped under his body. As he screamed, the fleshless man climbed onto his chest and crouched there, the wizened head darting to his throat.

Alan rushed at the creature to drag it away from Isaac, but the long brownish claws were already at Isaac's throat. They ripped open the jugular vein, releasing an appalling rush of blood. Isaac's convulsion uncovered the gun, and Alan snatched it up. Before he could use it Isaac's screams had choked off as the enormous mouth fastened on him and tore out a mouthful of his throat.

Isaac's outstretched hands clawed at the muddy earth, then they relaxed. He was dead. Alan's only thought was that he had brought Isaac here to his death. He was staring, dazed and unable to move, at Isaac's inverted face and blank eyes when the scrawny thing on Isaac's chest looked up, exposing the raw ruin of Isaac's throat. The ancient eyes gazed brightly at him until he understood what their expression meant. It was an invitation – an invitation to feast. He lifted the gun with a hand that was all at once steady and fired once, twice, blowing out those unbearable eyes.