Jane (32 page)

She loved the boy so. Knew him to be fine and strong and clever. She had meant to save him today, he, never knowing himself to be the child who had once saved her.

“
Busso,
Kala,
busso
!” the boy cried out to her. Flee, Mother, flee! But she did not flee. He watched in helpless horror as Kala reached out one furred arm in his direction. Her warm brown eyes found his and held them steady … steady … steady as the stout club arched above her head, swinging down with a force and fury that crushed her beautiful face to bloody pulp.

The long fingers that had once guided his mouth to the sweetness of her milk loosened, and she fell arm over leg with the gracelessness of violent death, meeting the ground with a dry thud.

In that moment, Tarzan lost all reason. Became, in fact, as mad a creature as the one he now pursued. With a flight across an impossible void and with a mangled cry of agony, he leaped full upon Kerchak and sliced with the blade a great gash across the monster’s face.

Kerchak roared with pain, dropping the death-dealing club. It mattered not. He wanted nothing but the blade. Kerchak grasped for the knife as the boy pummeled with his feet, seizing every moment to sink the sharp tip into flesh. Once he managed a hard blow to the heart, but the armor of Kerchak’s chest hide was impenetrable.

It was then that Kerchak grasped the small white wrist with his massive hand, and with a menacing snarl moved with his other to relieve the
tar-zan
of his weapon.

The boy stared into the eyes of obscene wickedness and with a more easy movement than any he had in his young life made simply opened his fingers and let the blade fall, end over end to the forest floor.

Roaring with rage at this final bit of trickery, and caring less for the runt’s death than possession of the weapon, Kerchak began a swift descent, arm over arm, limb running, nest crashing, his eyes always fixed on the glinting prize below.

The attack from above, therefore, was quite unexpected. The puny one had jumped on his back and was tearing at his face. Fingers found the knife’s gash and pulled it painfully apart. Kerchak inflicted punishment with teeth on the boy’s arms and legs, scratching and tearing flesh and pulling muscle from bone.

Then came a searing pain the likes of which Kerchak had never before felt. A bony finger was pushing and gouging at his eyeball. So great was the agony that momentarily his arms could do nothing but flail helplessly. By the time he’d regained his faculties and before he could reach the small hand, he heard a great sucking noise and felt the eye plucked from its socket. The viscous globe now hung by sinew down upon Kerchak’s bloody cheek. Engorged with a fury so consuming it could raze the forest itself, with both hands he reached above him and found the slender white torso of the
tar-zan.
He raised the boy high overhead and, turning on his feet, set his one remaining eye on the boundary of the bower. He wished the son of Kala to be gone forever from the Mangani, the Clan of Kerchak. He knew that alone and without the protection of his band the boy was as good as dead. He would be torn limb from limb by lions or leopards or trampled underfoot by elephants. And so, with all the force that his massive arms could muster, and with knowledge that he had been dealt a disgrace that even the
tar-zan
’s death would never mend, he threw the puny one far out into the forest.

Tarzan’s fall was broken by many limbs, but those limbs broke him as well. He crashed finally to the ground, more dead than alive, blood flowing from a dozen gashes, and an arm that felt no longer attached to his shoulder. He was beyond pain, but he retained sense enough to know that on the floor of the forest he was easy prey. So gathering all the strength of his spirit and remembering the sacrifice of Kala, he crawled, battered and broken, his dimmed eyes searching for a tree, any tree with hand- and footholds that he could somehow climb

And then he remembered nothing.

When the boy awoke, his eyes swollen shut, the pain that he had evaded in his flight from the Mangani bower had found him and was tearing and burning every fiber of his body. Yet there was some comfort here. His head and shoulders rested not upon the hard bark of the tree. There was softness beneath him. He struggled to open his eyes, and in the slitted view above him, he saw his sister, Jai.

She was stuffing
m’wah wa-usha
into her mouth and dutifully chewing the bitter blue leaves. From her mouth she took the paste, and as she applied it to a gash on his shoulder, she saw that he was back in the world with her.

Her expression was unreadable to the boy. She did not speak. There was not, he realized, a single thing that could be said. As she worked the
wa-usha
paste into his wounds, he tried not to cry out or wince. He wished above all to be brave before his sister, Jai Kala—daughter of Kala—in their mother’s honor.

Then he saw a twinkle in her eye, the same as he had seen in the moments before she had tricked him onto his back while wrestling.

“Jai,” he managed to whisper and questioned her with what expression was left in his battered face.

She reached behind her and held something in her fist above his head.

It was the blade.

The boy smiled and closed his eyes.

*   *   *

I was speechless, shaken to the core. Tarzan stood then.

“Come inside,” he said and gave me his hand to help me up. In the dark he led me to the bed and drew me down with him, curling around my body as he had done so many nights in his nest. Now I felt that the protective and comforting gesture was as much for his own benefit as for mine. I did not hear Tarzan’s breathing slow or feel his muscles twitch as they always did as he was falling to sleep. He was wide awake, remembering, reliving the terrors and the pain of his darkest memories.

How had he managed to grow into such a fine, remarkable man? To escape profound damage to his innermost being? By what subconscious means had he melded the noblest of human qualities with the strongest primal instincts of the Mangani?

I pondered these questions for hours, occasionally recalling the horrors that had taken place in this room, unaware that I had finally fallen asleep. When I opened my eyes at dawn’s light, I found Tarzan sitting in Alice Clayton’s too-small writing chair gazing down at the open journal on the table. I could see he was not reading the handwritten script, just staring blindly at the hateful words. He looked up at me finally with an expression both resigned and confused.

Gathering my courage, I picked up where I had left off in John Clayton’s journal.

It was an ape … but not an ape, covered head to foot in fur and as large as a gorilla. But this was the strange thing: It was too upright and humanlike to be one. Humanlike? What am I saying! At first I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me, for the creature disappeared from where it had been standing on the boundary of the beach and the mangroves behind. Perhaps, I thought, I had been a castaway too long and my contented life was naught but the delusions of insanity.

Then Johnnie came out from the hut and wrapped himself around my leg asking for a swim in the sea, and I knew that this life was all too real. My son and wife were real, and as if to prove this reality, the beast emerged once again from the mangroves, this time farther away yet altogether recognizable. It stood very still, staring at the baobab.

“Go inside,” I told Johnnie, unsure if he had seen it. “We will swim later.” I reached around and took up my rifle, closing the door after him. I aimed, knowing very well the thing was too distant for a kill shot. I was not, however, sure I would have wanted to kill it, for it did have the aspect of a man … and would that have been murder?

I fired, and the gunshot’s effect was gratifyingly instantaneous. Unhurt, the creature bolted into the mangrove swamp and did not reappear. Alice was by my side a moment later. What had I shot at? she inquired. She well knew my reluctance to waste even a single bullet, for when our stores of ammunition were gone we would be quite helpless against wild animals, however infrequently they might visit our home.

I thought to spare Alice news of the ape-man (which is how I had come to think of it) but thought better of keeping it to myself. I needed every iota of tact and diplomacy I had learned in my service to the Crown to describe the brute so that I would not frighten her unduly, yet frighten her enough so that she would be wary herself and take special care of our son. So I told her, but I fear I succeeded too well in comforting her, or perhaps it is merely my unfounded belief that I am capable of protecting them from all eventualities. That I can scare it away with the Winchester if it returns or dispatch it if it comes too close.

She has, however, promised me that she and Johnnie will stay close to the hut unless I am there with them armed with my rifle.

Written with trepidation from a beach in Gabon,

John Clayton

1 March 1889

I have seen it, seen the creature! Some months have passed since John’s first sighting of it, and I (ashamedly) had grown complacent. I think that part of me had chosen to believe that the story of the “ape-man” was a misperception or a wild fantasm brought on by my husband’s compulsion to keep Johnnie and me from all harm. But my eyes were not deceiving me when I walked out my door in the morning and saw the enormous furred monster standing in plain sight on the beach not two hundred feet away, its eyes fixed on the hut.

I quelled the instinct to shriek but quietly called for John to come with the rifle and shut Johnnie in. He was there at my side in a trice, but his appearance caused the agile creature to bolt for the swamp, and John’s shot missed it. Our boy pounded excitedly from the door calling, “What did you shoot, Papa?” John pushed me inside, requesting that I ready all the Winchester shells that we owned and load the pistol as well.

It is dark now and I write by the light of a candle, one of the last left in our stores. We spotted the creature twice more this day, farther down the beach, peeking out from the mangroves. John shot both times and it disappeared at last just after sunset. He stands sentry now outside the door, unsure if the thing will return again. Tomorrow he will fashion a lock, a luxury he deemed unnecessary before, from the hardware of the
Fuwalda
’s wreckage. Tomorrow as well, he will teach me the use of a pistol, for there will come a time when he must sleep, and someone must hold back the night.

Johnnie, the ever-cheerful child, now whimpers in his sleep. We have not told him there is a monster outside the door. Yet he knows his world has changed. His lighthearted mother and hale, undaunted father are strained and speak in terse, worried phrases.

How foolish was my optimism! This is no sweet dream of paradise. There is no rescue. No vaunted homecoming with stories of adventure to tell. No royal garter from the Queen for John’s unswerving service. There is only this dark beach and stinking mangrove swamp out of which come nightmare creatures to stalk us. The idyllic years are shattered like Venetian glass, never to be whole or beautiful again.

I am so afraid.

Written tremblingly in the black of a moonless night,

Alice Clayton

7 July 1889

I can barely keep my hand from shaking or my wits intact for in the hut in the dead of night I hear the weeping of my wife and child huddled ball-like in bed, outside the palm leaves swishing and flapping in the tropic winds, a sound until this day I found a comfort. Now it is a sinister noise, a frond falling on the roof enough to make Alice cry out as though struck.

The events of the week past have been worse than the mutiny and our abandonment on this shore. Worse by far. The creature returned and with him brought a tribe of his hideous brethren. They ARE ape-men! They stand upright and yet bear the face of a monkey. Having come in numbers, they grew bold, day by day drawing closer to our shelter. I had always thought it strong, and in truth, it weathers the fiercest of storms. But will it withstand the attack of an army of monsters? Few of them walk in plain sight on the sand, but from our porch where I’ve stood every nightmarish day, I can see dozens in the mangroves, swinging by sinuous arms and calling not in hoots and howls but in WORDS AND PHRASES OF WORDS, incomprehensible to me but a language known to them!

I have fired and fired my weapons. Shot and killed them, but still more come, besieging us, urged on by the giant who first came here last year in July. This abomination leads them as surely as a general leads his troops. Admittedly I find it as horrible as I do touching that they drag their dead away as humans on a battlefield do. My skin crawls at the memory.

I am so tired. I have not slept for days. How could I? For a time my brave Alice stood beside me on the porch firing the pistol as I did my Winchester. Then all at once the giant emerged from the swamp just before the door and I, forced to reload, watched as he fixed her with his terrible black eyes and, pounding his massive chest and clutching his erect masculinity, roared his animal lust to possess her. I froze in horror, unable to pull the trigger. By the time I took aim, he had fled again to the swamp, and Alice collapsed weeping into my arms.

We are all but spent of our ammunition. I have locked us in, barricaded the door with our trunks and extra wood hammered across the entry. Alice begs me to keep a candle lit for she so dreads the darkness, and so by our last candle I write. She is wild with fear, clutching our child, and I am altogether helpless, have no words of comfort. I am sorry, Alice, I wish to say. Sorry, John, my son, for I have failed you.