Eye of the Forest (24 page)

“The Incas made it out of solid gold when they were still planning Machu Picchu. I guess you could say that it’s an architect’s model for how the finished thing was supposed to turn out. Nice, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” said Sicky. “I like all sculpture and stuff like that.”

“The Spaniards got to hear about the so-called city of gold, El Dorado. Only this was it. They never did figure out that the city of gold was just a model. A very valuable model, but a model nonetheless.”

“No wonder they could never find it.”

Nicnax grinned happily. “It’s our biggest secret.”

Sicky thought for a moment.

“You sure you don’t want the job yourself, Nicnax?”

“I’m no leader,” said Nicnax.

“Me, I’m just a jungle guide,” said Sicky.

“That’s a kind of leader, isn’t it?”

“I never thought of it like that. But you’re right. Okay, I’ll do it. But only after I finish guiding the y
anqui
children
and the Englishmen. I must get back to them as soon as this battle is over.”

Sicky looked down at the raging battle. Pizarro’s men had fallen back and regrouped while the mummified Inca kings were already beginning to pursue the harried Spaniards. But it was clear from the number of heads and arms and legs on the ground that this particular battle was only going to be over when both sides had completely annihilated each other.

“Whenever that might be.”

W
hen the great escapologist Harry Houdini died in 1926, it was said that his secrets would only be revealed to the world in 1976, after the passage of fifty years. In fact, all of his papers went to the Library of Congress, in Washington, D.C., where they remain to this day.

As a young student at Georgetown University (also in Washington, D.C.), Edward Gaunt was fascinated with the life of Houdini and, before becoming an investment banker, had even contemplated a career as a cabaret magician. To this end Mr. Gaunt had read all of Houdini’s papers and learned quite a few of his escape secrets.

There had been a time when Mr. Gaunt had helped pay for his studies by performing cabaret escape tricks. But this was many years ago, and he guessed he was now a little out of practice. But his opportunities for even attempting an escape were limited by the fact that the three peculiar Englishmen guarding him took shifts to watch the cage in which he had
been locked. And many nights had passed before the routine they had established of watching their wealthy prisoner turned to mind-numbing tedium and Mr. Gaunt finally found the right opportunity to put his old skills to the test. Mr. Haddo, who appeared to be in charge of his three kidnappers, was asleep. And quite unaware that his own wife was downstairs in Molloy’s Warehouse, Mr. Gaunt lassoed the end of the screw in the old-style cuffs with his shoelace, and yanked the bolt back. Almost miraculously the cuffs sprang open, which only left Mr. Gaunt with the task of now unlocking the cage itself.

That was more difficult. It was fortunate that like his hero, Harry Houdini, Mr. Gaunt was small, and agile, too. And he was almost able to squeeze through the bars. Almost, but not quite. He was not as small as he used to be. He might have reached the keys to the cage if these had been on Mr. Haddo’s belt, which was where he sometimes kept them. But this time they were on a hook on the back of the door.

Now in many ways Mr. Gaunt was an eccentric man for whom old habits died hard. And, during his long fascination with Houdini, it had been his peculiar habit to copy his boyhood hero and always to travel with an unfolded paper clip concealed in the thick layer of skin that grew upon the soles of his feet — so that he might pick the lock to his own front door if ever he managed to lock himself out of his own house. Which, indeed, had happened, for Mr. Gaunt usually had so much business going on inside his head that apparently trivial details like house keys and cash and credit cards often
slipped his mind. Denizens of East 77th Street were not unused to the sight of the multimillionaire banker sitting on his stoop and pulling off his socks and shoes so that he might extract his emergency paper clip. As far as local residents were concerned it was just one of many strange things that happened in or out of number 7.

It had been several years since Mr. Gaunt had seen a chiropodist and the skin on his feet was as thick and hard and yellow as a piece of smoked haddock and while this is unpleasant, it is also important to remember that this did not make him a bad person. With skin on his feet that was this thick and hard, it took poor Mr. Gaunt almost two whole minutes to extract the long thin paper clip that had lain concealed in there, untouched, like a neglected mousetrap, for several months. But it was the work of only a few seconds for him to pick the small padlock on the door of his cage.

Now all he had to do was open the door without it squeaking. The tray containing the remains of Mr. Gaunt’s dinner lay on the floor of his cage. He had to admit that they had fed him quite well. But he’d never much cared for salad, and the ingredients of its dressing — olive oil and balsamic vinegar — were quickly put to good use lubricating the hinges of the cage door.

Mr. Haddo let out a snore and shifted in his chair, as silently the door swung open. It was then that Mr. Gaunt dropped his paper clip. In the silence of that room it sounded like an iron bar falling onto the bare wooden floor. Haddo shifted again, rolled his head on his shoulders, yawned,
stretched his arms above his head, and then opened his eyes. The now-empty cage was the last thing he saw for several minutes because Mr. Gaunt picked up the large skillet in which his supper had been cooked earlier on, and fairly clobbered Mr. Haddo on the back of the head with a sound like a dinner gong. Haddo returned to his unconscious state with a half-witted, crinkle-cut smile on his ugly face.

Mr. Gaunt put down the skillet and, collecting his shoes and socks off the floor of his cage, as well as the olive oil, he tiptoed toward the door. Having lubricated the door hinges — for these were no less squeaky than the ones on the cage — he paused several seconds to allow the oil to take effect and then, turning the door handle, he stepped outside.

He found himself standing on a landing at the top of a dilapidated flight of stairs, which he started running down immediately, pausing only to collect an old brass poker that stood by an empty fireplace. He wasn’t about to be recaptured without a fight.

“Help me, Edward. Help me.”

At the bottom of the stairs, he stopped and listened again for the tiny, quavering bat-squeak voice he thought he had heard. A terrified voice that raised the hairs on the back of his neck and sent a long shiver down his spine. Had he imagined it?

Meanwhile, an odd scene presented itself to Mr. Gaunt’s tired eyes. In another empty fireplace stood a stuffed dog, and on the heavily cobwebbed wall behind the door was a large antique engraving of what looked like a bare church
wall. But this was not what made the scene odd. It was the atmosphere. The room at the foot of the stairs was charged with a powerful sense of conflict, as if something had disturbed the very air that surrounded him. As if the voice had been real.

For a moment he held his breath and put all of his effort into listening.

“Is there anyone there?” he whispered fearfully.

After a while, he shook his head. All he could hear was his own heartbeat. “I must be hearing things,” he said. But something invisible kept him rooted to the spot.

“Help me, Edward.”

There. He
had
heard it. Not only that but he was certain he recognized the voice.

“Layla? Is that you? Where are you?”

The next second something terrible happened.

For a split second it was as if his human spirit had been cut in two with a very sharp and invisible knife and made him yell with fright. And being cut into two wasn’t so very far from the truth.

As she desperately tried to pull away from the horrible thing that threatened to suck her into oblivion, Layla and the exorbere had actually passed right through Edward Gaunt’s physical body. It was, he reflected later, a most peculiar sensation. In that same instant Edward Gaunt saw a fleeting image of his wife’s horrible predicament. Felt it, too. She was wrestling for her life with a repellent creature that seemed to be half man and half spider. With a horrible
slurping noise, like someone drinking hot soup from a large spoon, the exorbere was trying to draw Layla’s disembodied djinn spirit into its hideous, trunklike mouth part. If he didn’t do something to help her she was going to die. He knew that as a matter of fact. Simultaneously, Edward heard his wife’s desperate voice cry out inside him.

“Help me, Edward,”
she cried.
“Help me, please, or I shall die.”
And then,
“You must destroy the picture. Destroy the picture, Edward, before it’s too late.”

Mr. Gaunt hardly needed to be told twice, and advancing rapidly on the antique engraving that hung on the wall behind the door, he dealt it a savage blow with the poker, and then another. Even as he hit the picture again and again, the crawling creature reappeared on the surface, as if summoned to defend itself. But it was too late. Mr. Gaunt struck the exorbere on the head and on the back, poking holes through the thick antique paper until a deep, black, and unendingly hellish void lay visible beyond. There was a terrible shriek and then the paper started to burn. Instinctively Mr. Gaunt knew that whatever it was had been destroyed.

At least he thought this particular knowledge had been instinctive. But when he looked around to find his wife, he found that Layla was already inside his body, and that what little he now knew about the exorbere had originated in his wife’s powerful mind.

“Thank goodness, Edward.”

Her thoughts were in his head and, for several moments he struggled to make his own thoughts the dominant ones.
Which felt strange because, after all, it was Mr. Gaunt’s head. But quite soon he gave up trying to make himself heard. That was quite common where his own wife was concerned.

“Here I am come to rescue you, Edward dear, and I find it’s me who needs to be rescued. That horrible thing was about to absorb me. Like Mr. Rakshasas. You remember him, dear? He got absorbed by one of those terra-cotta warriors in the Metropolitan Museum. The children were terribly upset about it. Anyway, I’m sorry to invade your body like this, Edward, but I left my own body outside in the car. I thought to take the precaution of coming in here invisibly, but, as you can see, it looks like Virgil McCreeby was prepared for something like that. I don’t think you’ve met him. You’d remember if you had. He’s English. Bit of a creep. Only more of a magician — a real magician, not the stuff you used to do when you were in college — than I’d given him credit for. Still, that was clever of you to get out of that cage. With a shoelace and a paper clip. Just like Houdini, yes. And there are three of them upstairs, yes? And they’re English, too? I see. Well, I don’t care where they came from. They’re about to find out what it’s like to cross a djinn like me.”

Mr. Gaunt tried and failed once more to gain the mastery of his head and thought processes. To that extent it was just like being back home in East 77th Street, with his wife very much in charge. The only difference was that he couldn’t flee to the sanctuary of his own den and read quietly or just watch television. In fact, he couldn’t even sit down to put on his own socks and shoes, which was what he’d have liked to
have done. That and get the heck out of that place. Layla was already marching his own body back up the stairs he’d just come down.

“It’s all right, Edward.” Her thoughts came at him in a stream of consciousness that was as fast and powerful as a white-water rafting trip down the Colorado River. He felt overwhelmed. Swamped by the strength of her presence. “You’re perfectly safe now I’m in here with you. We’ll deal with them and then we’ll be on our way home back to East 77th Street. I’m sure you’re anxious to get home and have a nice hot bath. It’s not that far. We’re in Brooklyn. Right under the bridge.”

Mr. Gaunt found himself at the top of the stairs, where he threw open the door, and stepped, more than a little reluctantly into the room he had just vacated, where Mr. Haddo was rubbing his head and picking himself up off the floor.

With his sharp teeth and elongated nose he reminded Layla of a species of rat or shrew.

“I certainly didn’t expect to see you again,” Mr. Haddo told Mr. Gaunt. “But now that you are here, I can tell you this. You’re going to regret it. No one hits me on the head and gets away with it. And don’t tell me you’re married to a genie with a temper, mate. I just don’t care.” Mr. Haddo opened a drawer and took out a small blackjack. Evidently, he intended on hitting Mr. Gaunt with it.

“Well, you ought to care.” Mr. Gaunt heard his own voice but hardly recognized the words as his own. “Because they’re
the last words you’ll ever hear with human ears.” The next word was certainly not his own and though he’d heard it before, the word was not a word he’d ever been able to — or for that matter had ever dared to — pronounce. He did know the meaning of the word, however. The word had been coined by a Greek playwright named Aristophanes and meant “Cloud-Cuckoo Land,” which is to say, a place where everything was perfect: in other words, somewhere that doesn’t exist. It was Layla’s focus word: “NEPHELOCKOKKYGIA!”

And there was anger in it, too. The strong smell of sulfur in the air that accompanied the utterance of Layla’s focus word told him that much. Cloud-Cuckoo Land had probably never sounded so real and powerful as it did in Layla’s mouth.

With a loud bang Mr. Haddo vanished in a puff of smoke, and in his place now stood a rather bemused-looking creature that Mr. Gaunt momentarily took for a somewhat loathsome-looking species of giant brown rat with an extremely elongated snout.

“It’s not a rat.” Layla was already explaining what it was. “It’s a Cuban solenodon, also known as the almiqui, and it’s almost extinct, even in Cuba. You can see why, I think. It’s incredibly ugly. This is why I chose it, of course. And because he reminded of me of one. Incidentally, the solenodon is not just unusually ugly. It’s unusually dangerous. Its saliva is venomous.”

The loud noise summoned the other two kidnappers from a back room. One of them had unusually hairy ears while the other had an unusually hairy nose.

“How did you get out?” asked the one with the hairy nose.

“Where’s Haddo?” asked the one with the hairy ears.

“What’s that smell?” asked Hairy Nose.

“And what’s that hideous-looking animal?” asked Hairy Ears.

“It’s your friend Haddo.” Mr. Gaunt’s voice sounded menacing. “Or at least it used to be. Now it’s a rare Cuban shrew or soricomorph.”

“A sorry what?”

“No, it’s not sorry,” said Mr. Gaunt’s voice. “But you will be. NEPHELOCKOKKYGIA!”

This time Layla chose a different animal, although one no less rare or ugly than the Cuban solenodon: a northern hairy-nosed wombat. The second kidnapper — whose hairy nose had put her in mind of a hairy-nosed wombat — disappeared with a loud bang and in a large puff of smoke. This made the third scream with fright and run for the door. He didn’t get very far.

“NEPHELOCKOKKYGIA!”

She might even have turned both of the two remaining kidnappers into wombats except that by now there was a method in Layla’s — and by extension, her husband’s — mind. The third kidnapper disappeared like the second and the first before him, and in his place the hairy-eared dwarf lemur he had reminded her of now sat on the floor chattering
like a monkey. A second or two later, the hairy-nosed wombat chased it up onto the mantelpiece above the fireplace.