He hoped Anatole was all right.
Danny sat down to pull the thorns and prickers from his clothes. The village women had provided him with two plastic basins of water for bathing, one for soaping and scrubbing, the other for rinsing. The warm water felt refreshing on his face, his neck. After stripping off his pungent socks, he rinsed his toes and soles.
The night stillness was hypnotic, and as he spread his sleeping bag and stretched out on it, he felt as if he were seeping into the cloth, into the ground, swallowed up in sleep.…
Anatole woke him up only a few moments later, shaking him and whispering harshly in his ear. Dirt, blood, and bruises covered the boy’s wiry body, and his clothes had been torn in a scuffle. He didn’t seem to care. He kept shaking Danny.
But it was already too late.
Danny sat up, blinking his eyes. Sharp pains like a bear trap ripped through his chest. A giant hand had wrapped around his torso and would squeeze until his ribs popped free of his spine.
He gasped, opening and closing his mouth, but could not give voice to his agony. He grabbed Anatole’s withered arm, but the boy struggled away, searching for something. Black spots swam in his eyes. He tried to breathe, but his chest wouldn’t let him. He began slipping, sliding down an endless cliff into blackness.
Anatole finally reached an object on the floor of the hut. He snatched it up with his good hand, tucked it firmly under his withered arm, and began to thump on it.
The drum!
As the boy rapped out a slow, steady beat, Danny felt the iron band loosen around his heart. Blood rushed into his head again, and he drew a deep breath. Dizziness continued to swim around him, but the impossible pain receded. He clutched his chest, rubbing his sternum. He uttered a breathy thanks to Anatole.
Had he just suffered a heart attack? Good God, all the fast living had decided to catch up to him while he was out in the middle of nowhere, far from any hope of medical attention!
Then he realized with a chill that the sounds from the gift drum were now rich and echoey, with the unearthly depth he remembered from the other drums. Anatole continued his slow rhythm, and suddenly Danny recognized it. A heartbeat.
What was it the boy had told him inside the sorcier’s hut—that the magical drums could steal a man’s heartbeat? “Ton coeur c’est dans ici,” Anatole said, continuing his drumming. Your heartbeat lives in here now.
Danny remembered the gaunt, shambling man in the marketplace of Garoua, obsessively tapping the drum from Kabas as if his life depended on it, until his hide-wrapped fingers were bloodied. Had that man also escaped his fate in the village, and fled south?
“You had the spirit of a drummer,” Anatole said in his pidgin French, “and now the drum has your spirit.” As if to emphasize his statement, as if he knew a White Man would be skeptical of such magic, Anatole ceased his rhythm on the drum.
The claws returned to Danny’s heart, and the vise in his chest clamped back down. His heart had stopped beating. Heart beats, drumbeats—
The boy stopped only long enough to convince Danny, then started the beat again. He looked with pleading eyes in the shadowy hut. “Je vais avec toi!” I go with you. Let me be your heartbeat. From now on.
Leaving his sleeping bag behind, Danny staggered out of the guest hut to his bicycle resting against an acacia tree. The rest of the village was dark and silent, and the next morning they would expect to find him dead and cold on his blankets; and the new drum would have the same resonant quality, the same throbbing of a captured spirit, to add to their collection. The sound of White Man’s music for Kabas.
“Allez!” Anatole whispered as Danny climbed aboard his bike. Go! What was he supposed to do now? The boy ran in front of him along the narrow track. Danny did not fear navigating the rugged trail by moonlight, with snakes and who-knows-what abroad in the grass, as much as he feared staying in Kabas and being there when the chief and the sorcier came to look at his body in the morning, and no doubt to appraise their pale new drum skin.
But how long could Anatole continue his drumming? If the beat stopped for only a moment, Danny would seize up. They would have to take turns sleeping. Would this nightmare continue after he had left the vicinity of the village? Distance had not helped the shambling man in the marketplace in Garoua.
Would this be the rest of his life?
Stricken with panic, Danny nodded to the boy, just wanting to be out of there and not knowing what else to do. Yes, I’ll take you with me. What other choice do I have? He pedaled his bike away from Kabas, crunching on the rough dirt path. Anatole jogged in front of him, tapping on the drum.
And tapping.
And tapping.
Afterword: Stories That Fired My Imagination Neil Peart
In the late ’80s, a novel called Resurrection, Inc. arrived in my mailbox, accompanied by a letter from the author, Kevin J. Anderson. He wrote that the book had been partly inspired by an album called Grace Under Pressure, which my Rush bandmates and I had released in 1984.
It took me a year or so to get around to reading Resurrection, Inc., but when I did, I was powerfully impressed, and wrote back to Kevin to tell him so. Any inspiration from Rush’s work seemed indirect, at best, but nonetheless, Kevin and I had much in common, not least a shared love since childhood for science fiction and fantasy stories.
We began to write to each other occasionally, and during Rush’s Roll
