Waltz
By Alekto
Chapter 3: 'Tis the eye of childhood that fears a painted devil.
I dreamed of ghosts.
White figures, no more corporeal than wafting steam drifted between the moss-covered trees, moving with inhuman grace and preternatural silence.
Were they truly ghosts?
I couldn't say, but I had the oddest feeling that I was floating with them.
I dreamed of unblinking eyes watching me from the shadows, watching and measuring. In their stygian depths a flame danced.
"Who are you?" I asked in a voice somehow not my own yet nonetheless familiar.
Silence stretched out as my focus narrowed to nothing more than those eyes, blazing in the darkness. I felt as if I was tumbling toward them, being pulled inexorably down as if by a whirlpool.
"Mit latsz?" I heard whispered from all around, the words rippling with arrogant amusement. I had the brief sense of a spider at the centre of its web, waiting. Always waiting with endless patience. "Mit latsz?" it repeated, waiting for an answer I couldn't give.
"I-- I don't understand," I was obliged to admit unwillingly.
"Felsz-e?" breathed the voice, so close by now that I was sure if I was to reach out I could touch the speaker, only I didn't dare move. I was frozen, in that instant suddenly feeling the panicked terror that a deer caught in a hunter's snare.
A hand from behind grabbed my shoulder, shattering my immobility. I spun around, hauling my fist back ready to throw a punch, only for that to be grabbed as well. My heart pounded with desperate urgency, the sense of panic rose again and I struggled frantically against the restraint.
"NO! No, John! Roxton, dammit man, it's us. Snap out of it!"
"Challenger?" I gasped, panting for air as breathless as if I'd been running. Challenger's pale, wary face swam into focus before me. The hands that had been clenched around my wrist cautiously relaxed their hold, and I glanced around to see equal wariness mirrored on his face - wariness of me - before I looked back at Challenger. "Oh, God, what the hell's going on?"
"I can honestly say I have absolutely no idea," he admitted tersely, unable or just not bothering to hide his chagrin at, for once, being as ignorant as the rest of us.
I looked around, trying to get some sort of handle on the situation. We were prisoners in a wooden cage in the centre of what appeared to be a long deserted village that the jungle was already beginning to reclaim as its own. The huts around us were uniformly decrepit: part collapsed, roofs fallen in, sagging to one side. I gave the timbers of the cage an experimental if optimistic shake. They didn't give. The village might have been decrepit, but the cage certainly wasn't.
"Have you seen anyone since you woke up?" I asked to a general negative response from the others. "Odd. The last thing I remember is Veronica saying something about ghosts..?" I commented with careful nonchalance, raising the question despite my innate unwillingness to offer credence to the supernatural. I hoped they wouldn't ask why I was so concerned about such things: my nightmares were my own business.
"Ah yes," replied Challenger slipping into his lecturing voice. "Ghosts. The Kothoga. On my previous expedition, back when I found Maple White and his journal some of the tribes in the villages below the plateau had stories about a tribe they called the Kothoga. I ignored them at the time as little more than superstition."
I tried -unsuccessfully it seemed- to hide my impulse to smirk at the idea of George Challenger rubbishing some legends and stories given his willingness to believe some of the other stuff he had heard about. His credulity was certainly very selective, but if it gave him concern, I couldn't see it in his expression. He merely raised his eyebrows, looking at us as if our opinions of what he chose to believe and what not to believe were below his notice. "Sorry, George," I muttered with mock contrition. "You were saying..? About the Kothoga..?
He gave me a measured look with the barest hint of a frown before continuing on with his dissertation. "Yes... The Kothoga. As you know, many of the tribes indigenous to this part of the Amazon basin have good relations to white men, and carry on varying degrees of trade with white traders, as well as other tribes. There are a few, however, who have taken a more reactionary stance to outside interference in the territories they claim as their own. In the region directly below the plateau I am aware of three such tribes, who, despite their small size, are viewed with considerable fear by the other tribes."
"So, what you're saying is that one of these are the Kothoga?" asked Malone.
"Not exactly," Challenger continued. "Just as most of the local Indians fear and avoid these three tribes, so there's another tribe that they themselves fear as much, if not more. Those are the Kothoga. Over the past fifty or so years, it seems that a number of anthropological expeditions have attempted to locate and study the Kothoga, all without success. No trace of such a tribe has ever been found."
"Because they were here!" Veronica cut in with excitement. "This has to be where the Kothoga ended up. They must have found a way up to the plateau years ago, so all that was left in the jungle below were stories."
"That may be so," agreed Malone. "But where does this whole ghost idea come from? You're not seriously suggesting that we were ambushed and brought here by ghosts, are you?"
"All I'm going on is the little I remember reading in my Father's journal," Veronica replied. "He wrote that other tribes avoided the Kothoga because they believed that their shamans and witch doctors had access to strange powers that amongst other things they could call on the spirits of the dead to do their bidding. Look, I'm not saying that's true, but no one can deny that we *were* attacked and brought here to a village that hasn't been lived in for years. Look, I really do hope that someone has a better explanation than ghosts, because that's something I'd far rather not have to deal with."
No one said anything, the silence a tacit acknowledgement of Veronica's words. Normally I wouldn't have given the idea of ghosts a second thought. I could only guess that the weirdness of the past few days was getting to me: disappearing apemen, disappearing Marguerite, not to mention my still unexplained three day slumber which was oh-so-conveniently timed to stop me- - us from going after Marguerite immediately.
Hours passed by unremarked on. There was no sign of movement anywhere in the village: no people, no animals, no birds. Even the swarms of biting insects seemed in short supply. Drifts of swirling mist floated casually between the huts while we could do nothing but watch and sit and sweat. Whoever had left us in the cage had taken our weapons and left us neither food nor water.
The sun began to dip toward the horizon, but that made little change to the torrid air. The others had to have been as thirsty as I, but we'd arrived at some sort of unspoken agreement not to mention it. We all knew, though, that without water we couldn't last long in such heat, so we just sat slumped listlessly against the walls of the cage conserving energy.
*********
With nightfall came slight if welcome relief from the terrible heat. It seemed so much hotter here than elsewhere on the plateau, more like the depths of the jungle below or the depths of the Congo than the usually fresher atmosphere we'd become used to on the plateau.
High above I could see the faint luminescence of the moon diffused through the layers of mist and low cloud. As the daylight had faded, so the colours had leeched from the jungle as it became painted in shades of black and grey. Somehow it suited the deserted village better than rich colours of day. In my mind's eye, the collapsed huts began to resemble more the silhouettes of headstones scattered the kind of abandon I had once seen in Highgate Cemetery.
I snorted in self deprecatory amusement at how morbid my thoughts were getting, then even that fragile glimmer of humour was swept away by my overriding concern for Marguerite. I looked back at the silhouettes, which were once again no more than huts, only to see amongst them a flicker of pale movement between the darker grey.
The surge of adrenaline brought me back to wakefulness in a rush. "Wake up!" I hissed urgently to the others. "Look! Do you see that?" I asked, pointing to what looked once again like nothing more than a hut.
"What did you see?" asked Malone. "Ghosts?" he added, only half-joking if the tremor in his tone was anything to go by.
Beside me I sensed more than saw Veronica scanning the village. "No, he's right. There *is* something out there. I feel it too," she added softly.
"*Feel* it? Not *see* it? Veronica--" Malone's voice trailed off uncomfortably, as if not wanting to acknowledge what she might have been implying.
"Is it just my imagination or does it feel suddenly cooler?" enquired Challenger thoughtfully. "I wonder what could cause such an apparently rapid drop in temperature, unless it's a purely subjective phenomenon... Perhaps it could relate back to the drug we were dosed with, or maybe it's regional in nature: maybe even a factor in why there's no local fauna and the reason behind the abandonment of this village..." He looked over and saw me watching him. In the dark I could just about make out his wry smile. "Deuce take it, I do so dislike theorising on such limited data."
"If it's any consolation, I agree that it feels cooler," I said. "And before you ask - no, I can't even begin to work out why. Theories are your domain."
"There! Look, over there! I saw something move!" called Veronica in hushed excitement. "Something pale, moving between those shadows."
"A ghost?" muttered Malone.
"Not funny, Ned," she replied in the kind of dry, acerbic tone that I was sure she must have picked up from Marguerite. For myself I wasn't entirely sure that Malone's comment had been fully intended as humorous, however Veronica had chosen to take it.
We waited a while longer, senses reaching out for the slightest hint of anything out in the village. Any discussion about what might or might not have been out there soon faded. The fact of none of us having had anything to drink for so long made it uncomfortable to speak, the simple action of talking drying mouths and throats that were already uncomfortably dry.
Nothing more was seen. Watchfulness flagged as we sank back into restless sleep.
*********
Dawn and the return of the heat of the day was scarcely a cause for rejoicing. The air felt uncomfortably close, the mist heavier than before, draped over the village and the surrounding trees like a soft grey blanket. Drops of water slowly condensed on the cooler timbers of the cage and ran down to be eagerly lapped up. It might not have been much, and it was certainly neither civilised nor dignified, but I don't think at that point in time any of us cared. All that mattered was that it was water, and even those few mouthfuls would keep us alive a little longer.
The timbers warmed quickly, and any water was soon gone so we sat back to wait, sure that whoever had caught us would come back. Perhaps it was a certainty born of the fact that if no one came back, we would most likely die. The cage was too well built to escape from unaided. Waiting was all we could do.
"Marguerite?" I was wrenched abruptly from my doze by Malone disbelieving exclamation, and turned quickly to follow the direction of his stunned gaze.
It *was* Marguerite. She was standing not twenty feet from us, utterly motionless, her blank stare encompassing the cage but focused elsewhere. She was dressed as she had been when she had left the tree house days before, her clothes torn and dirtied from her trek through the jungle. Her hair might have been dishevelled, her face pale and blotched with dirt, but all I could think was that she was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.
"Marguerite?" I murmured gently, then more insistently "Marguerite?"
She didn't move. It was as if neither Malone nor I had spoken, as if to her neither of us really existed.
"She appears to be in some sort of a trance," breathed Challenger with unashamed fascination. I shot him an angry glare, disgusted by his detached analysis before reason caught up with my emotions and I considered how useful and relevant Challenger's deductions and perception might prove to be.
"Marguerite," I went on, forcing a lightness of tone into my voice. "Can you hear us? It's me, Roxton. Challenger's here, Ned and Veronica too. We came to find you, to take you home." Her expression remained blank, unmoving. I wasn't getting through to her. Maybe Challenger was right and she was in some kind of trance.
"Look!" whispered Veronica. "On her temple - where the apeman hit her. There's no sign of a wound, not even a scar. There's no way an injury that severe could have healed in only four days. It's just not possible."
I looked at her head where I'd seen the apeman strike her. Veronica was right on both counts: I had to agree that so much that had apparently occurred in the past few days wasn't possible.
"Are we sure that's really Marguerite?" argued Malone. "I don't know about the rest of you, but I had some fairly bizarre dreams while I was out. Maybe this is some kind of hallucination, an after-effect of whatever was on those darts we were shot with."
"A shared hallucination," Challenger mused thoughtfully. "I'd think that highly unlikely. The drug may have induced some measure of suggestion, however, given Malone's less than subtle earlier exclamation of Marguerite's name, but that doesn't explain--"
"MARGUERITE!" I bellowed as loudly as I could. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the others start in surprise, but I kept my attention fixed on Marguerite.
She lowered her gaze and looked at me through hooded eyes, an expression as unlike hers as I had ever seen creeping over her face. "Felsz-e?" she grated harshly, and her mouth twisted into a bitter, knowing smile.
Dear God. Marguerite...?
To be continued....
By Alekto
Chapter 3: 'Tis the eye of childhood that fears a painted devil.
I dreamed of ghosts.
White figures, no more corporeal than wafting steam drifted between the moss-covered trees, moving with inhuman grace and preternatural silence.
Were they truly ghosts?
I couldn't say, but I had the oddest feeling that I was floating with them.
I dreamed of unblinking eyes watching me from the shadows, watching and measuring. In their stygian depths a flame danced.
"Who are you?" I asked in a voice somehow not my own yet nonetheless familiar.
Silence stretched out as my focus narrowed to nothing more than those eyes, blazing in the darkness. I felt as if I was tumbling toward them, being pulled inexorably down as if by a whirlpool.
"Mit latsz?" I heard whispered from all around, the words rippling with arrogant amusement. I had the brief sense of a spider at the centre of its web, waiting. Always waiting with endless patience. "Mit latsz?" it repeated, waiting for an answer I couldn't give.
"I-- I don't understand," I was obliged to admit unwillingly.
"Felsz-e?" breathed the voice, so close by now that I was sure if I was to reach out I could touch the speaker, only I didn't dare move. I was frozen, in that instant suddenly feeling the panicked terror that a deer caught in a hunter's snare.
A hand from behind grabbed my shoulder, shattering my immobility. I spun around, hauling my fist back ready to throw a punch, only for that to be grabbed as well. My heart pounded with desperate urgency, the sense of panic rose again and I struggled frantically against the restraint.
"NO! No, John! Roxton, dammit man, it's us. Snap out of it!"
"Challenger?" I gasped, panting for air as breathless as if I'd been running. Challenger's pale, wary face swam into focus before me. The hands that had been clenched around my wrist cautiously relaxed their hold, and I glanced around to see equal wariness mirrored on his face - wariness of me - before I looked back at Challenger. "Oh, God, what the hell's going on?"
"I can honestly say I have absolutely no idea," he admitted tersely, unable or just not bothering to hide his chagrin at, for once, being as ignorant as the rest of us.
I looked around, trying to get some sort of handle on the situation. We were prisoners in a wooden cage in the centre of what appeared to be a long deserted village that the jungle was already beginning to reclaim as its own. The huts around us were uniformly decrepit: part collapsed, roofs fallen in, sagging to one side. I gave the timbers of the cage an experimental if optimistic shake. They didn't give. The village might have been decrepit, but the cage certainly wasn't.
"Have you seen anyone since you woke up?" I asked to a general negative response from the others. "Odd. The last thing I remember is Veronica saying something about ghosts..?" I commented with careful nonchalance, raising the question despite my innate unwillingness to offer credence to the supernatural. I hoped they wouldn't ask why I was so concerned about such things: my nightmares were my own business.
"Ah yes," replied Challenger slipping into his lecturing voice. "Ghosts. The Kothoga. On my previous expedition, back when I found Maple White and his journal some of the tribes in the villages below the plateau had stories about a tribe they called the Kothoga. I ignored them at the time as little more than superstition."
I tried -unsuccessfully it seemed- to hide my impulse to smirk at the idea of George Challenger rubbishing some legends and stories given his willingness to believe some of the other stuff he had heard about. His credulity was certainly very selective, but if it gave him concern, I couldn't see it in his expression. He merely raised his eyebrows, looking at us as if our opinions of what he chose to believe and what not to believe were below his notice. "Sorry, George," I muttered with mock contrition. "You were saying..? About the Kothoga..?
He gave me a measured look with the barest hint of a frown before continuing on with his dissertation. "Yes... The Kothoga. As you know, many of the tribes indigenous to this part of the Amazon basin have good relations to white men, and carry on varying degrees of trade with white traders, as well as other tribes. There are a few, however, who have taken a more reactionary stance to outside interference in the territories they claim as their own. In the region directly below the plateau I am aware of three such tribes, who, despite their small size, are viewed with considerable fear by the other tribes."
"So, what you're saying is that one of these are the Kothoga?" asked Malone.
"Not exactly," Challenger continued. "Just as most of the local Indians fear and avoid these three tribes, so there's another tribe that they themselves fear as much, if not more. Those are the Kothoga. Over the past fifty or so years, it seems that a number of anthropological expeditions have attempted to locate and study the Kothoga, all without success. No trace of such a tribe has ever been found."
"Because they were here!" Veronica cut in with excitement. "This has to be where the Kothoga ended up. They must have found a way up to the plateau years ago, so all that was left in the jungle below were stories."
"That may be so," agreed Malone. "But where does this whole ghost idea come from? You're not seriously suggesting that we were ambushed and brought here by ghosts, are you?"
"All I'm going on is the little I remember reading in my Father's journal," Veronica replied. "He wrote that other tribes avoided the Kothoga because they believed that their shamans and witch doctors had access to strange powers that amongst other things they could call on the spirits of the dead to do their bidding. Look, I'm not saying that's true, but no one can deny that we *were* attacked and brought here to a village that hasn't been lived in for years. Look, I really do hope that someone has a better explanation than ghosts, because that's something I'd far rather not have to deal with."
No one said anything, the silence a tacit acknowledgement of Veronica's words. Normally I wouldn't have given the idea of ghosts a second thought. I could only guess that the weirdness of the past few days was getting to me: disappearing apemen, disappearing Marguerite, not to mention my still unexplained three day slumber which was oh-so-conveniently timed to stop me- - us from going after Marguerite immediately.
Hours passed by unremarked on. There was no sign of movement anywhere in the village: no people, no animals, no birds. Even the swarms of biting insects seemed in short supply. Drifts of swirling mist floated casually between the huts while we could do nothing but watch and sit and sweat. Whoever had left us in the cage had taken our weapons and left us neither food nor water.
The sun began to dip toward the horizon, but that made little change to the torrid air. The others had to have been as thirsty as I, but we'd arrived at some sort of unspoken agreement not to mention it. We all knew, though, that without water we couldn't last long in such heat, so we just sat slumped listlessly against the walls of the cage conserving energy.
*********
With nightfall came slight if welcome relief from the terrible heat. It seemed so much hotter here than elsewhere on the plateau, more like the depths of the jungle below or the depths of the Congo than the usually fresher atmosphere we'd become used to on the plateau.
High above I could see the faint luminescence of the moon diffused through the layers of mist and low cloud. As the daylight had faded, so the colours had leeched from the jungle as it became painted in shades of black and grey. Somehow it suited the deserted village better than rich colours of day. In my mind's eye, the collapsed huts began to resemble more the silhouettes of headstones scattered the kind of abandon I had once seen in Highgate Cemetery.
I snorted in self deprecatory amusement at how morbid my thoughts were getting, then even that fragile glimmer of humour was swept away by my overriding concern for Marguerite. I looked back at the silhouettes, which were once again no more than huts, only to see amongst them a flicker of pale movement between the darker grey.
The surge of adrenaline brought me back to wakefulness in a rush. "Wake up!" I hissed urgently to the others. "Look! Do you see that?" I asked, pointing to what looked once again like nothing more than a hut.
"What did you see?" asked Malone. "Ghosts?" he added, only half-joking if the tremor in his tone was anything to go by.
Beside me I sensed more than saw Veronica scanning the village. "No, he's right. There *is* something out there. I feel it too," she added softly.
"*Feel* it? Not *see* it? Veronica--" Malone's voice trailed off uncomfortably, as if not wanting to acknowledge what she might have been implying.
"Is it just my imagination or does it feel suddenly cooler?" enquired Challenger thoughtfully. "I wonder what could cause such an apparently rapid drop in temperature, unless it's a purely subjective phenomenon... Perhaps it could relate back to the drug we were dosed with, or maybe it's regional in nature: maybe even a factor in why there's no local fauna and the reason behind the abandonment of this village..." He looked over and saw me watching him. In the dark I could just about make out his wry smile. "Deuce take it, I do so dislike theorising on such limited data."
"If it's any consolation, I agree that it feels cooler," I said. "And before you ask - no, I can't even begin to work out why. Theories are your domain."
"There! Look, over there! I saw something move!" called Veronica in hushed excitement. "Something pale, moving between those shadows."
"A ghost?" muttered Malone.
"Not funny, Ned," she replied in the kind of dry, acerbic tone that I was sure she must have picked up from Marguerite. For myself I wasn't entirely sure that Malone's comment had been fully intended as humorous, however Veronica had chosen to take it.
We waited a while longer, senses reaching out for the slightest hint of anything out in the village. Any discussion about what might or might not have been out there soon faded. The fact of none of us having had anything to drink for so long made it uncomfortable to speak, the simple action of talking drying mouths and throats that were already uncomfortably dry.
Nothing more was seen. Watchfulness flagged as we sank back into restless sleep.
*********
Dawn and the return of the heat of the day was scarcely a cause for rejoicing. The air felt uncomfortably close, the mist heavier than before, draped over the village and the surrounding trees like a soft grey blanket. Drops of water slowly condensed on the cooler timbers of the cage and ran down to be eagerly lapped up. It might not have been much, and it was certainly neither civilised nor dignified, but I don't think at that point in time any of us cared. All that mattered was that it was water, and even those few mouthfuls would keep us alive a little longer.
The timbers warmed quickly, and any water was soon gone so we sat back to wait, sure that whoever had caught us would come back. Perhaps it was a certainty born of the fact that if no one came back, we would most likely die. The cage was too well built to escape from unaided. Waiting was all we could do.
"Marguerite?" I was wrenched abruptly from my doze by Malone disbelieving exclamation, and turned quickly to follow the direction of his stunned gaze.
It *was* Marguerite. She was standing not twenty feet from us, utterly motionless, her blank stare encompassing the cage but focused elsewhere. She was dressed as she had been when she had left the tree house days before, her clothes torn and dirtied from her trek through the jungle. Her hair might have been dishevelled, her face pale and blotched with dirt, but all I could think was that she was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.
"Marguerite?" I murmured gently, then more insistently "Marguerite?"
She didn't move. It was as if neither Malone nor I had spoken, as if to her neither of us really existed.
"She appears to be in some sort of a trance," breathed Challenger with unashamed fascination. I shot him an angry glare, disgusted by his detached analysis before reason caught up with my emotions and I considered how useful and relevant Challenger's deductions and perception might prove to be.
"Marguerite," I went on, forcing a lightness of tone into my voice. "Can you hear us? It's me, Roxton. Challenger's here, Ned and Veronica too. We came to find you, to take you home." Her expression remained blank, unmoving. I wasn't getting through to her. Maybe Challenger was right and she was in some kind of trance.
"Look!" whispered Veronica. "On her temple - where the apeman hit her. There's no sign of a wound, not even a scar. There's no way an injury that severe could have healed in only four days. It's just not possible."
I looked at her head where I'd seen the apeman strike her. Veronica was right on both counts: I had to agree that so much that had apparently occurred in the past few days wasn't possible.
"Are we sure that's really Marguerite?" argued Malone. "I don't know about the rest of you, but I had some fairly bizarre dreams while I was out. Maybe this is some kind of hallucination, an after-effect of whatever was on those darts we were shot with."
"A shared hallucination," Challenger mused thoughtfully. "I'd think that highly unlikely. The drug may have induced some measure of suggestion, however, given Malone's less than subtle earlier exclamation of Marguerite's name, but that doesn't explain--"
"MARGUERITE!" I bellowed as loudly as I could. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the others start in surprise, but I kept my attention fixed on Marguerite.
She lowered her gaze and looked at me through hooded eyes, an expression as unlike hers as I had ever seen creeping over her face. "Felsz-e?" she grated harshly, and her mouth twisted into a bitter, knowing smile.
Dear God. Marguerite...?
To be continued....