Then he slapped her round the face. With the flat of the matchet. It was a casual blow, with seemingly no real force behind it, but it swatted her to the ground like a left hook from a heavyweight boxer. A gasp went up right round the compound. Silence returned. He gestured, twice. Two of the tall young men stooped and pulled the reeling Celine to her feet and held her. Four others closed on Sister Faith. They dragged the struggling woman forward. As they did so, Nlong holstered the Browning. He reached out and pulled the sister’s white headdress off. Then, with the matchet hanging from its lanyard, he ripped her robe wide, revealing her plump white shoulders. He pinched her upper arm and smiled. There was enough light to see a flash of his teeth. They had been filed to points. He nodded and Anastasia froze, suddenly realizing what was going to happen next. Celine yelled something, her voice slurred, but too late.
Sister Faith was on her knees and the matchet rose and fell like a guillotine. Dancing clear of the fountain of blood with practised ease, Nlong strode over to Celine, shouting wildly. But she was sagging in a dead faint between her two captors. The general took her hair and twisted her face up towards his. Then he let her drop and spat an order to the men holding her. He raised his voice and shouted to the whole of his army. Suddenly everything was in motion. The well-armed ragamuffins sprang to life. The girls and boys from the orphanage were separated. The girls were herded into one of the dormitory huts. The boys were forced back along the wall nearest to the fire and held there under guard, where they could watch. Watch and learn. While this was going on, the two men holding Celine dragged her fainting body across the compound and up the steps into the chapel. Anastasia heard the telltale thumping and scraping immediately above her which told of a body being dropped and then tied securely. By the time the two young men came out again, the rest of the army was seated at the refectory tables as Jacob the handyman, Hope and Charity served the food that would have fed their children.
Into this strange, almost domestic, scene stepped the huge, masked figure of Ngoboi, spirit of the wild jungle.
At once the atmosphere changed. Anastasia had never felt anything like it. The monstrous apparition stared around the compound, the raffia costume covering his tall frame seeming to stir as though there was a wind, the lifeless visage of his painted ebony mask catching both light and shadow. Two helpers in masks and raffia skirts over shorts and T-shirts danced forward to help him. They carried matchets that looked even longer than the one the general had used to decapitate Sister Faith.
In the sinister silence, Ngoboi started to move around the pale bulk of the nun’s corpse. Shuffling at first, then beginning to twirl and leap in a complicated ritual dance, the strange forest devil whirled around and around the fallen woman, moving to the relentless beat of a drum he could only hear in his head. His skirted helpers capered around him, also increasingly wildly, until suddenly he gestured, mid-bound. And they fell upon Sister Faith’s corpse, their matchets rising and falling in practised sequence. Every eye in the place was riveted on the horrific performance, captivated by the terrible magic. As the matchets rose and fell above the butchered nun, first the general and then his army began to pound the tables with their fists, giving voice at last to the rhythm inside Ngoboi’s ebony and raffia head.
Anastasia put her AK down, its barrel resting on the first wooden step, then she wriggled through the gap between that and the third step, using the pale bulk of Father Antoine’s corpse and the depth of the shadow it cast. In an instant she was inside the chapel, standing with her back to the wall, the door-frame at her right shoulder, looking down to where Celine lay bound and helpless on the floor. Her eyes were wide and her lips were parted, panting with shock and horror. Three long steps took Anastasia to her side. She went down on one knee, pulling the Victorinox from her pocket and snapping out the longest blade. As she sawed at Celine’s bonds, the girl gasped, almost whimpering with terror and tension as the thunderous pounding rose and rose outside.
It took only a moment to cut Celine free, then the pair of them were side by side pressed against the wall inside the door. There was no other way out. No windows. No weaknesses in the sturdy floor — raised above the depredations of the termites that might have weakened it. Anastasia gasped and gulped an explanation of how she had got here from the riverbank. The best way back by the look of things. Their only chance of survival. Their only hope of somehow getting help and coming back for the others. ‘I’ll go first,’ she concluded. ‘Then I’ll signal the best moment for you to follow…’ Celine nodded.
Anastasia oozed out through the door on her belly like a slug, falling into Father Antoine’s shadow at once and slipping between the planks to cradle the AK like an old, dear friend. She looked along the barrel just in time to see Ngoboi straighten from a crouching position over Sister Faith. An acolyte at his shoulder straightened too. Ngoboi had no hands; the helper held Sister Faith’s heart in one fist and what looked like her liver in the other. Held the bloody trophies high as Ngoboi took off again, twirling and dancing. The rest of his helpers fell on the corpse again and Anastasia realized they were literally butchering it — cutting it into joints like a carcass in a meat shop.
Sister Faith’s organs were carried towards the general. Anastasia had very little doubt about what he was planning to do with them. Once again, every eye in the place was riveted to the gruesome spectacle. The pounding rose even higher, thundering through the jungle in a terrific tempest of sound. Anastasia thumped on the floorboards above her head, then moved the AK over out of Celine’s way, for the ex-freedom fighter was much larger than her Russian would-be rescuer. And dressed in more bulky clothing of a much lighter shade.
Anastasia blinked and shook her head, trying to clear the sweat and black mud from her eyes. When she looked again, General Nlong, standing in Father Antoine’s place of honour at the top table under the palm-roofed lean-to, was raising Sister Faith’s heart to his lips. Everyone was watching him. The drumming was fading away as the pounding fists stilled in anticipation. Such was the horrific power of the ghastly moment that the general seemed to be illuminated by an instant of the brightest white light. It flickered as his strange sharp teeth bit down, and was gone. Anastasia realized she still had not switched the selector over to automatic. Another opportunity lost.
Celine came crawling out of the chapel door then. With some difficulty — and far too slowly for Anastasia’s taste — she began to wriggle between the steps. A great sound went up. Not a cheer. Something too feral and brutal for that. The pounding started again, a hollow thundering taken up by the sky itself as the threatened storm finally arrived. But Ngoboi had stopped dancing. He was standing looking towards the chapel. Shouting. Shouting and gesturing. Fighting to make himself heard above the thunder. Fighting to make the others understand. Celine flopped in beside Anastasia.