“She wants us out,” Noboru said, unnecessarily.
Taking Joyce’s passport and journal, Gabriel followed Noboru out of the room. Merpati escorted them downstairs and all the way back outside, as if she didn’t trust them to leave on their own. She loudly locked the door behind them.
Night had settled over the village, barely cooling the sticky, humid air. A full moon glowed over the treetops, its round face covered briefly by a passing cloud. All around them, light seeped out of the windows of the village houses, bright and steady from those with generators, dim and flickering from the ones that used oil lamps. As Gabriel walked to the jeep, a man across the way finished hammering a post topped with a goat skull into the ground in front of his house, then spat, touched his forehead twice and went inside. The door slammed, and Gabriel heard a heavy bolt slide into place. He glanced around and noticed goat skulls had been posted in front of every house he could see. Not a great place to be a goat.
Gabriel reached into the jeep’s backseat, unzipped his suitcase and slid Joyce’s passport and journal inside.
“So now what?” Noboru asked, coming up behind him.
“They took Joyce into the jungle,” Gabriel replied. “So that’s where we’re going.”
“It’d be safer to wait until morning.”
Gabriel reached into the suitcase again and pulled out a flashlight. “For us. Not for Joyce.”
Noboru puffed out his cheeks and blew air. Then he nodded.
Gabriel reached into the suitcase again. “That knife of yours looks handy, but…” He pulled out a second revolver and passed it to Noboru. “Maybe you’d better carry one of these, too.”
Chapter 4
Noboru had his own flashlight in the glove compartment of the jeep, and together they entered the jungle at the edge of the village, twin beams of light bouncing in front of them. Moonlight filtered through the trees and glistened on the thick leaves all around. They moved forward, the blanket of undergrowth on the jungle floor clinging to their feet as they went. Where the foliage was too thickly knotted to pass, Noboru cut away the vines and creepers with his knife, swinging the keen blade machete-style, the revolver jammed in his belt.
The high whine of insects filled the night air, and the rustling of leaves; the beam of Gabriel’s flashlight revealed tree frogs and geckos clinging to the trunks and branches in their path. Mouse deer whose heads didn’t reach higher than the tops of Gabriel’s boots fled before them through the underbrush. Clicking beetles scurried away into tiny holes amid the twisted roots.
“Tell me if you see any tarantulas,” Noboru muttered.
“Why?” Gabriel asked.
“So I can get the hell away from them. I hate those damn things. Always have.”
Gabriel tilted his flashlight down to shine it along the ground. No tarantulas in sight. “Remind me sometime to tell you what happened to me in Chile.”
“Not if it involves a tarantula.”
“Not a tarantula,” Gabriel said. “A whole nest of them. Chilean flame tarantulas.”
Noboru shivered. “I never, ever want to hear that story.” He stopped suddenly and bent down, shining his flashlight at some thin branches poking out from a tree at knee level. “Hold on. Look at this.”
Gabriel came over, adding his light to Noboru’s. “What have you got?”
The branches were snapped, their bent tips all pointing in the same direction. Something heavy had passed—or been dragged—through them.
“It’s too big to be from squirrels, too high for mouse deer,” Noboru said.
“Monkeys?”
“Too low. This was done by people.”
Gabriel straightened and shone his flashlight in the direction the snapped branches pointed. The jungle seemed to stretch on forever, tree after tree, vine after vine, forming an impenetrable net of vegetation. After five days, the signs remaining of Joyce’s passage through the jungle would be few; that was more than enough time for rain and wildlife activity to conceal the trail. But there should still be some signs. It just meant they’d have to be that much more vigilant to spot them.
Gabriel started walking again, following the direction of the broken branches. Several yards farther on, his flashlight beam located something at the mossy base of a thick tree.
“There.” He hurried to the tree. More branches were snapped and bent like before, but this time there was also a piece of torn fabric stuck on the sharp end of a twig. Gabriel brushed aside a long-horned beetle that had made the cloth its bed and plucked it off the branch. It was filthy, covered in mud, but under the dirt he saw a tight weave and a blue and white pattern. It felt like cotton. “It’s clothing,” he said. “Piece of a shirt or a dress, maybe.”
“Well, I can tell you we’re definitely not the first people to pass through here,” Noboru said, his voice low. He pointed his flashlight at the ground ahead of them. Past the tree, the vegetation had been trampled flat.
They followed the trail deeper into the jungle. They passed whole tree trunks covered with swarms of ants and termites. Stick insects clung to nearby leaves and waited patiently for their chance to snatch up prey. Above their heads, an enormous tropical centipede with red mandibles and spiky legs sprouting like daggers from its segmented body crawled along a thick branch. Gabriel saw Noboru look away, disgusted, as they passed beneath it. It wasn’t just tarantulas, then. Gabriel was beginning to think the jungle was no place for him.
Ahead, Gabriel could just make out a dim orange light flickering between the leaves, growing brighter as they moved along the trail. They proceeded cautiously. The path, he saw, came to an end at the edge of a wide clearing. Just shy of the edge, while they were still hidden by a screen of trees, Gabriel dropped to the jungle floor and pulled Noboru with him. They switched off their flashlights, hid behind a low barricade of fallen branches and took in the sight before them.
Six tall wooden posts jutted from the ground around the perimeter of the clearing, forming a rough hexagon. Each post was topped with a shallow stone bowl of burning oil. These were the source of the flickering orange light they’d seen through the trees.
At the far end of the clearing was a crude but fairly large hut constructed of wood and what appeared to be scavenged pieces of metal. There were no windows in the one wall of the hut they could see, only a single door, which was currently closed.
And at the center of the clearing, directly in front of the hut, were two massive, bent tree trunks bowed in a double arch over a ten-foot-wide circular stone that rested on the ground like a giant manhole cover. He’d seen a stone cover like that once before, in the rain forest of Guatemala; there it had protected the waters of a sacred well. He wondered what this one was protecting.
But that wasn’t the main question on his mind, because of what he saw hanging above the stone, suspended from the bent tree trunks by a pair of heavy metal chains: a wooden cage.
And it looked like there was a figure lying across the bottom of the cage.
Just as he was about to stand up, movement by the side of the hut caught Gabriel’s eye. A man emerged from the shadows. As he walked out into the light from the bowls of flame, Gabriel saw he was wearing a white robe and carrying a tall metal pole. A curved sword hung from his belt. He had the robe’s hood pulled over his head and over his face he wore what looked like a clay mask in the shape of a skull.
One of Merpati’s faceless ghosts. Gabriel and Noboru exchanged glances.
The man walked under the cage and struck the end of the pole against the wooden slats. The figure inside the cage didn’t move. Gabriel couldn’t help wondering if it was Joyce—and if so, whether she was alive or dead, merely asleep or too sick or weak to move. Stopping at the edge of the circular stone slab on the ground, the man slid one end of the pole into a socket beside the slab and turned the pole until it audibly locked in place.