The Cannibals (20 page)

As he brought out the tongs and the bucket, I scrambled to the front of the boat. I could see nothing but leaves all around us. But when I leaned over the bow and pushed the ferns apart, I found a huge fallen tree lying across the stream. It was so close that I could nearly touch the bark. Had the water been a little higher, or our speed a little greater, we would have smashed ourselves right into that tree.

I was pleased to think how well hidden we were. When the fire was out, and the smoke stopped rising, the boat would never be found unless the savages blundered right up the stream. It was jammed so tightly in place that I saw no need to tie it to the trees.

We listened for canoes, but all I heard was the river spilling over the falls. Its steady rumble was loud enough to mask the approach of a dozen canoes, but every time I heard the splash of paddles, it turned out to be only the churning of the water.

“We can't just sit here,” I said. “There's nothing gained by that.”

“Then what do we do?” asked Boggis.

“We have to go to the village,” I said. “Or at least
I
have to go.”

But how? In the twists and branches of the river I had lost all sense of direction. I was afraid I would go into the jungle and never come out. And I was too scared of crocodiles, and even of the brown water itself, to go swimming and wading into the river. I wondered if we could wait for darkness and let the currents drift the steamboat down to the bay. But the thought of what might lurk on those banks was even more terrifying.

How many hours of daylight were left? Whatever I did, I wanted to have it finished by nightfall.

As I wrestled with the choices, a rain began falling. It beat on the trees and dripped on the boat, becoming increasingly heavy. In the heat of the jungle, it was more misery than relief. Midgely raised his parasol, and the drops clinked off the metal of the engine.

Then I heard a howling in the trees. It was an unearthly, terrible sound, not human at all, and with it came a loud rustle of branches and leaves.

“Holy jumping mother of Moses. What's that?” asked Midgely.

I found it easier to go and look, for it was a horror to sit where I was and only imagine. I went to the bow of the boat. I pushed aside the ferns again. I looked up. And there, moving across the jungle top, was a man all covered in orange hair. His arms and legs were unnaturally long, his face flat and brown. Another moved behind it, swinging from branch to branch. Then more appeared, all traveling through the world at the roof of the forest. Their hands were huge, with hairy backs and leathery palms, much like those of the little monkey that had befriended Mr. Mullock. But these creatures weren't quite monkeys, and they weren't quite men. They were part of each, wildmen of the jungle.

The rain became nearly solid. I had to shield my eyes and peer between my fingers. The first of the wildmen stopped, nearly right above me, and squatted on a thick branch. One of his hands reached out and broke off an enormous leaf. He held it above his head like an umbrella, and all the others—the whole tribe of wildmen—did the same. They settled in the crooks of branches, each with his own umbrella, and sat quiet and hunched, with looks of gloom on their strange faces.

One chattered, and another answered. Then, all together, they turned and looked down. And out from the jungle stepped a man—a savage in a loincloth. He was bent under a heavy weight.

The savage carried one end of a pole. It rested on his shoulder as he stepped quickly from the trees and up to the log that lay right before me. I knew that if he glanced to the side he would see me. But he kept his head down, with the rain splattering on his hair, and I heard the padding sounds of his feet on the wood. I saw water ooze from the bark where his weight pressed down.

Trussed to the pole was a man with no head. I knew at once he'd been a sailor. He wore tarpaulin trousers and a sailor's jacket. He dangled from the pole with his legs and arms crossed above it.

A second savage carried the other end of the pole. A third bore the head by its hair. It swung from his hand, turning slowly left and slowly right. For a moment it seemed to stare
at me. With open eyes, and a mouth showing white teeth, it wore a look of utter terror. I shivered from the shock of this, for I had known the man. It was Willy Bede, my father's steward.

The savages trotted on, over the log and into the jungle again, watched by the wildmen above. I drew back into the steamboat. Boggis gasped. “Why, you look like you seen a ghost,” he said.

I was shaking from head to toe as I sat beside Midgely. The head of Willy Bede still swung before my mind's eye, all etched so clearly that I thought I would never forget the ragged flesh at its neck, and the man's awful look.

“What did you see?” asked Midgely.

He paled when I told him. So did the giant Boggis, who looked frightfully small just then. “We came too late,” he said. “They's all dead, ain't they?”

“Don't say that,” I told him. “I don't believe they're all dead, and I'm going to the village to look. That path must lead there.”

“I want to go with you,” said Midgely.

“Well, you can't,” I told him. “I won't take you.”

“Then Gaskin will,” said Midge.

But Boggis shook his head. “I ain't going to the village, am I, Tom?”

“No, you don't have to,” I said.

I was disappointed, though, until he nodded and said to Midge, “I'll be looking in them hills, you see. There might be others hiding in the hills.”

We left Midgely sitting under his parasol, with a circle of water dripping all around him. Boggis and I climbed to the
log, with the wildmen peering down upon us. They looked wise, somehow, as though wondering why men weren't as peaceful as beasts.

“We'll meet back here,” I said to Boggis. “If I haven't returned by morning, you'll know that…” I couldn't say it. “You'll have to take the boat yourself. You and Midge. Will you see he's safe?”

He nodded. “I will, Tom.”

I went at a run, and despite the rain I sweated in the jungle heat. My breaths burned in my throat and lungs. The path went nearly straight, uphill and down, and at every stream was a log for a bridge.

I ran a mile and walked a mile, afraid I'd overtake the savages. I passed through jungle and swamp, then down a long hill to the sea, all the time hearing the whistle of birds, the chirp of cicadas. When the path veered close to the shore, where it started out along the spit, I heard drumming begin in the village. Voices rose in shouts and shrieks. I jogged along the trail until I came to the first hut. Then I took to the jungle, creeping from tree to tree, and came to the clearing where the savages feasted.

The man who had carried Willy Bede's severed head was dancing with his trophy. Round and round he went, leaping, spinning, twirling in a flash of bones and feathers. A great crowd swarmed around him, and he danced through the middle of it. He held the swinging head high, then held it low, then whooped and shook the thing. He thrust it here, then thrust it there, then danced it round behind the drummers, down between the fires that crackled and raged at the center. Through the rain and smoke he spun with the head. Then the
drums beat faster, and the crowd closed round him, and I saw the head rise up above them all, now speared on the end of a wooden stake.

With a shout and a cheer, the dance went on. Women clapped their hands and shook their hips; children ran shrieking through the crowd. Then the stake was mounted in a row of others, at the front of the largest hut. Four heads, with grisly grins, looked out above the village and its wild celebration. I recognized one as a helmsman I'd liked, another as the carpenter who had fixed the longboat what seemed like years before.

The crowd fell apart, and I saw a fire that had been knocked down to coals and embers. Turning above it was the body of poor Willy Bede, still trussed to the stick like a pig. At either end was a savage to turn it, and that ghastly thing flopped over and over again.

I turned away, sickened and scared. So even my father hadn't known of all the dangers. Or he hadn't told us that there were headhunters who were cannibals too. I slipped silently into the jungle, and didn't emerge again till dusk.

The celebration was still going on. I judged by the heaps of charcoal, and by the pile of long bones, that it was already many days old. Strangely, I found hope in that, for I imagined it would never stop as long as a sailor was alive on the island.

The trussed body still hung from its stick, and every savage from the village seemed to be gathered round the fires. Most were seated on mats, though half a dozen worked at a pile of broad leaves, in a cloud of steam or smoke that swirled from the fronds. They poked long sticks right
through them, into a hole dug underneath, a pit that I guessed was an oven cooking the remains of another slaughtered sailor.

I crawled from the trees, then dashed to the nearest hut, slipping into the darkness among its stilts.

It was a poor hiding place. The boards above me creaked as someone walked across the floor. I stole through the shadows to the next hut, threaded round the pilings, then crossed to the third, the largest of any.

Near its back was a hole in the floor, a pool of dim light. On the ground lay ashes and chunks of burnt wood, as though sweepings from a fire had been dropped down the hole. I moved toward it. I stood on the ashes, and peered up.

I heard the buzz of flies.

My mind recoiled at that sound. I remembered the trap-per's hut, and the gruesome find I had made there. Here the sound of flies was tenfold louder, such a steady drone that the whole hut might have been a hive of giant bees. There were so many flies that it was the swirl of their black bodies that made the light flicker in the hole. I saw the glint of their wings, a fire-colored cloud swirling above me.

I shinnied up one of the stilts, then held on with my knees as I reached for the lip of the hole. I got one hand on it, then the other, and pulled myself through.

With one look inside, I wished I'd stayed on the ground. From end to end, the hut was hung with human bones. Old white skulls sat on posts, on shelves and rafters. From every corner they stared back with their blank-eyed bony faces. And in a cluster, like coconuts, swayed six or seven fresh heads.

I stood up in the hut.

The flies covered the heads so completely that I couldn't see the faces. But one I didn't need to see. It was smaller than the others, and the hair was bright orange. So Carrots had been caught. Surely Weedle and Benjamin Penny had been as well. I held out my hand to chase the swarm of flies away. They came off like a thick, black skin, and the faces underneath were not whole.

More gruesome a sight I couldn't fathom. I didn't know whose heads hung there, only that none was my father's, nor Weedle's or Penny's.

I dropped back through the hole. I brushed flies from my hair, from my clothes and my feet. I ran from there—to the next hut, and the next, right down the long row until I came to the end. Then, as I slipped below the very last hut, the clearing burst into light. The fires had been fed and stirred, and now they raged in tall towers of flames. They lit the jungle all around.

In the clearing was a row of small cages. They were not more than three feet high, not even that in width, but inside each was squeezed a man. At every cage was a face, and white hands clutching the bars. In the nearest was the fiddler from my father's ship. His bush of dark hair could not be mistaken.

In another cage were two faces. I saw Walter Weedle and Benjamin Penny locked together in a space not as big as a wardrobe. With each surge and crackle from the fires, another face caught the light. I recognized some but not others, and then I saw my father.

He huddled in his cage just as the wildmen had perched
in the trees, with his legs drawn up and his hands reaching up through the roof. I couldn't sort out the thoughts that passed through my mind. There was certainly a pleasure just in seeing him again, but a horror too, and a hopeless dread that I was powerless to help him. What were the cannibals planning for these men?

I didn't have to wait to find out. Across the clearing, a savage approached. His face was painted, his arms tattooed. He wore shells and bones that clicked and rattled as he walked. He went straight to the first cage and opened a latch. The door was far smaller than the cage. He pulled it open, reached inside, and hauled out the fiddler.

Back toward the fires, the cannibal hauled the man along. He pushed him up against a stake at the center of the clearing, and others bound the fiddler to it by his hands.

The drumming had been slow and steady, but now it quickened. Warriors in their breastplates, with their shields and knives and feathered caps, began to circle the man at the stake. They passed behind him and before him, brandishing their spears. Round they went in a tightening circle. Then, one by one, they struck the man, whirled away, and—whooping—circled round again.

I couldn't see the fiddler through the rush of bodies, and I was glad for that. I saw the firelight splash on the knives of the savages, on their legs and their arms, and I heard the awful screams of the fiddler. All the while, the women danced and the children laughed, and the drums beat on.

The rain fell harder. It pounded on the huts and pounded on the clearing. It pounded on the sea with that sound that was like a running river. But the fires never faltered, and the
savages never stopped. At last the fiddler fell quiet, and I saw him—as the circle of dancers widened—slumped at the stake with his head hanging down. Then the drums beat faster than ever. There was one more flash of a knife, one more shriek, and the fiddler's head rolled away across the ground.

The tattooed savage went back to the cages. He hauled out the next sailor, who dropped to his knees and begged for mercy, his hands held up as though in prayer. I knew him then; it was the fellow who had dressed as Neptune when we'd crossed the equator. I remembered how he'd roared with laughter that day, and I looked aside now as he sprawled on the ground, screaming for help. I heard him struggle and kick as he was dragged along. Then the dancing and drumming began anew.