The Western Lands Read online

  His eyes were of an opaque, cataract gray, continually darting about in agitation, and never raised to our faces. He kept fidgeting in a very unpleasant, spastic manner, as if his hands and feet were moving of their own volition. I made the introductions, and at each name he simply nodded and said nothing.

  "We are from the Peabody Museum, here to study the local centipedes and take specimens."

  He started at the word "centipede," and his mustache twitched.

  "We have been told that you can help us."

  "I know nothing," he said, very rudely. "My study is butterflies. I think centipedes are to be found in another part of the island ... to the west." He gestured with his fingers outstretched.

  "Oh, well, in that case we will not take up any more of your time." I had at this moment a vivid picture of what his face would look like if hit by a charge of number six shot. I rather expected he would ooze some disgusting white fluid instead of blood.

  We turned and walked away.

  "Muy malo recibido," observed José.

  The island of Esmeraldas fades in Hall's mind. For several nights he can go no further, until one morning he awakens from a dream of the Place of Dead Roads:

  For days they have been floating down a wide river, a mile across and getting wider, the banks a distant green smudge, or invisible in the morning mist. The boat is an outrigger, with two covered dugout canoes as pontoons and a deck of split bamboo.

  The two masts for sails to catch the little dawn wind also serve to support a tarpaulin cover to protect them from sun and rain. They usually tie up at night.

  The Guide seeks out a faster current near the middle of the river, then picks up turn-off currents leading toward the shore, like exits from a freeway. Occasionally they pass farms, the buildings unfinished and already dilapidated, small areas cleared for banana and yucca, the ubiquitous tuber on every tin plate in the Amazon area.

  Slowly the channel narrows and they pick up speed. The Guide is alert now, shifting from one current to another like a surfer, as trees and sand banks flash by.

  "Coming to the pass!"

  A silent rush of water as they skim through a narrow opening. Neferti can see grass just under the surface; must have flooded over recently. A solid wall of green ahead, but they make it through a narrow chute out into a vast lake, still riding the fast current. They are soon out of sight of land.

  Suddenly the current dies and they are drifting in aimless calm, slower and slower, and finally motionless.

  "As idle as a painted ship/Upon a painted ocean."

  The water is clear as limpid air. They can see the tops of great boulders a hundred feet down, shading to the inky blackness that spreads beneath them like a velvet tapestry, shifting occasionally as forms move under it. No fish are visible in the clear areas near the surface, and their presence can be inferred only by movements and ripples of darkness at the margin of vision.

  The lake spreads to the sky in every direction, a vast round blue mirror with a line of red as the sun touches the water. A light shock wave from the black depths, indicating the passage of some large creature, rocks the boat gently.

  The Guide consults his map, which opens like an accordion. The map is brightly colored, depicting unusual beings. Some of them are growing upside down into the ground, shoots sprouting from their legs.

  "Nearest current three hundred miles," he announces, the words sagging from his mouth. "We can row."

  "We can row?" Neferti points to the sun, which hasn't moved in the past minute.

  Wilson, the Guide, who lost his license as a White Hunter for shooting rhino with a bazooka, now turns on Neferti those cold blue eyes that always seem to be looking down a gun barrel.

  "All we need is push, you know. No friction in the water." He passes his hand quickly through the water. A black shadow streaks up and teeth snap just behind his fingers. "See how long you'd last in the bloody water? No friction . . . the darkroom fish can move at a speed you'd better believe."

  "Couldn't we just blow from the stern?"

  "No good. No friction in the bloody air either. We have to get a push without the air or the water. Hmmm . . ." His eyes light up like burning sulphur. "We used to hold jack-off contests at Eton . . . you know, speed and distance. The speed boys all gravitated to small arms and shotguns, whereas the distance shooters went for long-range, kills at six hundred yards. Maybe if both of us stand in the stern and let fly, like . . . now, I make you for speed, right?"

  "Right. About twenty seconds when I'm in the mood."

  "Well, you bloody well better be moody and randy. Metabolism will start to freeze in an hour . . . fifty minutes now, so we have to look sharp. Differential pressure should jar us out of freeze coordinates. . . ."

  Neferti nods as he sheds his loincloth and drops it absently behind him, as if to abandon it forever. His long green-yellow snake's eyes narrow, the way a snake freezes and gathers himself into silent intention as he feels the nearness of prey. His nipples and ears and nose turn a bright, pulsing red.

  Wilson stands perfect and immobile as a statue, except for his seeking, throbbing phallus, his cold blue eyes searching the horizon for a distant target. There it is . . . sights lining up . . . his nuts tighten. He starts to squeeze the trigger. It is coming up from his long, prehensile toes and feet. His lean body glistens like fish scales. It gathers in a knot at Neferti's One Point, two inches below where his navel would be, if he had one. A raging, snarling animal, goat-cat-deer, is rearing out of him. He screams in exquisite agony as horns wrench through his skull and blood spurts from his nose.

  Wilson squeezes it off. The target falls from his sights. The boat is moving, slowly at first, then faster and faster.

  "Get forward!" Wilson yells.

  Holding onto the seats, they can barely keep the boat from doing a tail-walk like a hooked marlin. They turn into a twenty-mile-an-hour current.

  Wilson points: "Pede Island."

  They smell it fifty yards out, a black insect stink that gets in your clothes and your hair. You feel like centipedes are crawling all over you.

  "Easy, Laddy buck. Gets 'em all, at first."

  As they step onto the limestone pier, a group of officials in filthy uniforms, the guns rusted into their rotting holsters, crowd around them like beggars, holding out their hands.

  "Documentes, señores. Por favor. . . pasaportes," they whine.

  Wilson waves them aside with the back of his hand and they fall on their backs, struggling to right themselves, like overturned beetles.

  "We'll head for the Explorers Club. Decent steak there and cold beer."

  The streets are dark, lit only by kerosene lanterns here and there in the kiosks. No one stops to buy the merchandise: old post cards and magazines, moldy pork pies in cellophane wrappers, stale candy bars. No one stops.

  All around them silent, milling crowds of half-naked people with the dead eyes of basic famine.

  "Gotta keep moving, you understand. Blighters have no place to kip. Once they stop, they fall down and they've bloody 'ad it, like that lot back there. Here we are."

  The building seems to have been transplanted from St. James's Square and replanted in this area of vacant lots, garbage and open sewer ditches. The edges of the masonry are even and regular, but now grown over with moss and vines covered with yellow-green flowers that give off a horrible reek of excrement and whorehouse perfume. A dim, yellow light inside flickers ominously.

  "Another power cut," Wilson explains over his shoulder.

  A man in a moldy uniform with slugs crawling on it sidles out from the reception desk and blocks their way.

  "Are you a member, sir?" He glares imperiously.

  Wilson pushes him with one finger and the man falls to the floor, making galvanized movements with his back and waving his legs feebly in the air.

  "Wouldn't step on him if I were you," Wilson cautions. "Bloody revolting." He leads the way up a marble staircase to the bar.

  "What's this, George? A
dead one at the door?"

  "I'm sorry, sir. Deeply sorry. But we simply can't get live help these days . . . and he did keep out some riffraff from the Delegations. You know what I mean, sir."

  "Scotch on the rocks, George, and . . . ?"

  "Pernod."

  "Pernod, it is, sir. Beauty of it is, few of them last till payday." He leans forward. "Why, only three days ago a drunken navvy knocked the head clean off our last one. Right shook up, 'e was."

  "I daresay. You have rooms, George?"

  "The Club is empty, sir. Take any room you want, but I'd appreciate it if you'd take a room on this floor. Save me going upstairs with me back, sir."

  "Well, George, I'd hate to see you go upstairs without it. And can you have the kitchen send along two steaks with cold beer. We'll be in No. 18, just down the hall."

  George laughs. "You will have your joke, Mr. Wilson. . I'll cook the steaks and bring them along."

  The room smells of disuse, like a resort hotel off-season. George is laying out dirty, greasy plates for them on a table.

  "George, this gentleman is from the National Geographic, here to study conditions."

  George looks at Neferti grimly. "I can't imagine why, sir. The less said the better, is my way of looking at it."

  "George, there was a Spanish professor, an authority on the subject . . . a member of the Club."

  "Ah, yes, I remember him. A foreigner, sir. He hasn't been in for some time, but we do have an address for him."

  "Good, you can leave it in Mr. Neferti's shoes in the morning. Tell me, is the University still operating?"

  "I couldn't say, sir. If you ask me, that's where the trouble all started . . . with the student riots, sir."

  "I think it runs a bit deeper than that, George."

  "Yes, sir. Things often do, sir. Will that be all, sir? Good night, sir."

  We set out next morning, after a good English breakfast. Bit of a walk. The only taxi in the Zone is requisitioned round the clock by the Delegations. It's an area of rubble and vacant lots and half-finished buildings, now falling in ruins. Some were obviously intended to be apartments, with ten stories of concrete and rusty iron girders. Arab families are camping in the levels with their goats and chickens.

  "Is it true there's a monster centipede here?"

  "It is. Seen it with my own eyes . . . bloody revolting. Stink will knock a man on his bloody arse."

  "And it is fed by human sacrifice?"

  "Well, yes, you could say that."

  A solid line of buildings, none over three stories, made of mud or concrete blocks, joined arbitrarily, in many cases blocking the roadway, which then goes over the buildings by ramps or tunnels under them. The whole thing looks like a giant nest spit out by insects deprived of their symmetry by some mind-altering drug.

  "Have to pick your street... some of them is blocked solid. And God knows how many is stinking dead in their filthy warrens."

  "What happened here?"

  "Well, the stock market crashed." Wilson gestures to the milling crowds. He can calculate their shifts and move through them almost as fast as if he and Neferti had the streets to themselves.

  "Put it like this, country simple, hayseed simple. A country is bankrupt. No gold whatsoever in the coffers, and they are issuing paper money without anything to back it up. So the bottom falls out and the money isn't even good shithouse paper. Same thing here. They were issuing fraudulent human stock. Nothing to back it up. No gold. The backup here is Sek Energy Units. They got no Sekem. At first they tried to spread it out, like—cut everybody down a few units, and they won't notice."

  "How many are there, of the monster 'pedes?"

  "Well, there was just one at first. Then he updated his tech. Must be thirty by now."

  "Does the Sek shortage affect them?"

  "Christ, no. They thrive on it. Most insects do, and some plants. It's a mammalian need. Notice there are no animals here? No cats, no squirrels?"

  "I assumed they had been eaten."

  "Oh, no. They all left. A Piper came and piped them all out."

  Wilson turns back to contemplate the milling crowds. "Obvious solution is to dig a great bloody hole and prod them down into it. They still react to stock prods." He prods a man with the sharp prods at the tip of his electric cane. The man emits an inhuman scream and runs six feet.

  "See what I mean? The rest could be up to the bulldozers. You want to see the 'pedes, do you? Well, slip on this mask."

  There is a solid wall of emaciated people ahead, many of them completely naked, with hideously deformed genitals.

  "Looks like we'll be needing our blasters."

  These are .10-caliber revolvers with a cylinder holding thirty three-inch bullets. The bullet is sharp at the point, which is hard metal, with a base of hard metal and soft metal between, that mushrooms on impact to the size of a half-dollar.

  "Wouldn't penetrate human flesh, just flatten. But it enters and spreads in insect mush. Well, might as well get on with it."

  The guns make almost no noise, like popping the cork on a bottle of half-dead champagne, but the effect is dramatic. The bodies are flying apart like rotten melons.

  "Slip on this disposable mac, Laddy buck."

  Clad in ankle-length plastic macs, they walk through the cavity opened by their blasters, the dismembered larval claws and mandibles still twitching. They drop their macs gingerly into a trash receptacle.

  Flying centipede varieties buzz about, laying eggs in the unfortunate.

  "Rum go when they hatch out . . . look there."

  A naked man tears at his flesh, screaming as centipede heads break through the skin in gushes of blood and pus. The silent crowds walk by, faces blank, catatonic. The stricken man kicks convulsively as a centipede head breaks through the crown of his penis. Another is eating its way through an eye socket. Wilson kills the man with a single shot from his H&K P-7.

  An area of narrow passages between rows of wire-mesh cubicles, six feet long, four feet deep, five feet high, four tiers. The upper cubicles are half empty, because few can climb up to them on the rope ladders and notched logs. The lower cubicles are jammed with the dead and dying, who have barely enough energy to pour their buckets of sewage into the mud paths between the warrens. The cubicles dwindle out in barren hills and ruined buildings.

  They come to a small amphitheater, with limestone seats around a circular space twenty feet in diameter, paved with smooth marble. In the middle of the circle is a stone stele, covered with tiny script composed from centipede hair and eyes and legs and claws, the signs moving in jerks and spasmodic patterns that intercross and overlap, stop and scrabble. The stone writhes with hideous life. Below the stele is a naked man, bound to a couch with leather straps. The couch is made of hardwood and the legs fit into ancient holes in the marble floor.

  The spectators are completely naked, except for exquisite centipede necklaces and bracelets in segmented gold, with opal eyes, lips parted, pestilent breath in the air, faces squirming and crawling on the skull, eyes dilated to shiny black mirrors reflecting a vile idiot hunger.

  "We feed with the 'pede."

  La jeunesse dorée of Pedeville, obviously.

  Neferti and Wilson push through to the front row. The timorous Pedes, as the natives are called, scramble out of their way.

  There is the sound of running water. When the tank is full, it raises a bronze grid on one side of the theater. The head of a monster 'pede emerges, with a stink like a vulture shat out rotten land crabs. The man on the couch begins to scream as the centipede inches out. The 'pede lifts its head now, with a seeking movement.

  Neferti stands at the head of the couch, one nonchalant hand on the stele, the other extended toward the monster 'pede, who now scuttles forward with hideous speed. Neferti's fingers are centipede legs in the air, ending in a smooth gesture of cancellation across the ancient writing that crumbles to dust under his fingers.

  The centipede shrivels to a final spasm of reddish dust in the air
, dust on the stone seats. The bound man pushes aside the leather straps, which shred into black powder.

  Mission accomplished.

  5

  Neferti is moving through the alleys of a rural slum on the outskirts of Memphis. Dead eyes broken by poverty, disease and hunger follow his passage. People turn from him and the women cover their faces, for he is a Scribe, an elite class that is feared and hated.

  Neferti had been born the son of a fisherman on the sea-coast. His family was poor, but not starving like these inland people. There is a certain crustacean—sea scorpions they are called—highly prized by the rich, and Neferti knew where to find these creatures, just as he always knew if there was a scorpion or a centipede in the house. He can feel it, the way he can feel danger. Sea scorpions gave off the same emanations, much weaker but still detectable.