made their kill.
The legend says he cannot die. He is doomed to wait to be fed every time the talisman makes a kill.'
'Which talisman?'
'The one Marlowe gave you.'
Night pressed against the windows, black and moist as the earth Alan could smell. It felt almost like being buried alive, though he couid hear some animal snarling in the distance. 'You're saying that was the original?'
'So he believed.'
'But how could a piece of metal do all this?'
'Do you believe things have souls? We believe everything has. The talisman has an evil soul.' As Alan looked skeptical, Isaac went on, 'David came to believe that the originator of the talisman would try to influence whoever held it to use it. The legend says that he would appear in the form of a naked man covered with the blood of all his feasts.'
Alan felt as if he was on the edge of a precipice of belief where nothing was familiar, yet everything was. 'What can I do?' he cried.
'That is the other legend. It must be as true for you as David thought it would be for him.'
His voice was grave. 'Tell me the worst,' Alan said.
'Simply this. There is a legend told throughout Africa that the last Leopard Man will come from a far land and destroy the power of the claw.'
Alan couldn't quite shrug that off, as all his Englishness demanded he should; it was as though he had already known. 'That's all?'
'Not at all. David traced variations as far as Kenya. They must have been among the papers he destroyed, but he told me most of them, I think. All the legends say that he will confront the giver of the claw and take his power to destroy it for ever. Once they come face to face in the jungle the legend will tell itself.'
Alan thought of his dream of the jungle, of the scrawny feral figure that rose to meet him. 'My God,' he said, shuddering less with terror than with realization, and then he thought he perceived a flaw. 'Why wasn't it Marlowe? Why didn't it work for him?'
'Because he was no longer capable of doing what had to be done by the time he found out what it was.' Isaac gave him a long sympathetic look. 'You have one great advantage. You've put an ocean between yourself and your child.'
So that was why he'd insisted that Alan come to Nigeria to learn what he must do. If this was reassurance it was appalling, and yet it made Alan so furious with himself he could hardly sit still. 'What am I supposed to do?' he demanded.
'Most versions say that the giver of the claw must die in order for the power to be consumed. David was convinced that meant the giver must be killed.' He sat forward and looked ready to clasp Alan's hands. 'Whatever happens, I shall be with you. You won't have to do this by yourself.'
Alan blurted out his question in order to deal with his flood of emotion: gratitude, fury with himself, anticipatory fear. 'Why are you doing all this for me?'
'Because of what I wished upon you.' He held up one pink palm as Alan made to speak. 'No matter that I didn't realize I was doing so. I want to help destroy what destroyed my friend David Marlowe.'
Alan reached out impulsively and grasped Isaac's hands. 'We will. By God, we will.'
'Now we must try to retrace David's steps,' Isaac said, 'to the man who gave him the claw.'
Twenty-one
They seemed to have been trudging through the shanty town for hours, peering out from beneath their umbrellas as they picked their way through the narrow makeshift random lanes, when Isaac halted suddenly. Rain shrilled on the corrugated tin roofs and awnings, water rushed down the open sewer channel which cut through the mud of the lane, and he had to shout to be heard. 'You ought to know this,' he said, and took Alan's hand. 'It may help.'
For a moment Alan thought he was going to give him a charm. But Isaac was shaking his hand, running a second finger across Alan's palm as he did so, and rolling his eyes. Here they were, standing in the maze of rickety shacks and propped-up shelters of tin and cloth, ankle-deep in the sucking mud and shaking hands like freemasons, blocking the way of three women with sodden cartons balanced on their heads. Beyond the shacks, palm trees nodded in the rain. Alan wondered if both he and Isaac were mad. But Isaac leaned his head close to Alan's beneath the umbrellas while the women grumbled past. 'That is the secret sign of the Leopard Men,' he said.
One handshake and the Leopard Men would take him for one of them, Alan thought sardonically – at least, if he hadn't died of pneumonia by then. Warm mud squeezed between his toes as he stumbled after Isaac, shoes in one hand, umbrella in the other. Each leaning shelter seemed more ramshackle than the last. An overpowering smell of marijuana drifted through the rain. He didn't blame them for smoking, whoever they were. How on earth could people live like this? They had crowded onto Lagos Island from the farms, lured by the big city, only to be cleared onto the mainland. It was their choice to live here, and
God knows, he had worries enough of his own – but then he saw the child. She was gazing out of a shelter through a gap in the hanging canvas that served as a front door, which was so sodden that it was impossible to see what colour it had originally been. She was brushing away flies automatically, as a horse flicks its tail, and gazing at him with great brown eyes. She couldn't have been more than eight years old. All at once he felt his eyes moisten and he was unable to move.
'Nearly there,' Isaac said, then he saw where Alan was looking. 'Don't worry,' he said. 'We'll have you back with your family if it's within my power.'
Isaac obviously assumed that he was just homesick and yearning for his own child. Nevertheless, as they squelched onward, Alan heard the child coughing, dryly and painfully, and his own muddy discomfort suddenly seemed shamefully trivial, especially now that Isaac seemed to feel the need to state a limit on how much he could help.
Just then Isaac stepped delicately aside into yet another lane of mud, and halted almost at once. 'Ah, I thought I'd come the right way,' he said. 'Here we are.'
At least the building in front of which he'd halted had four walls and a front door, though the door had obviously been made for a larger frame. The window-panes were cellophane, billowing in the downpour. 'Perhaps it will be best if you wait while I speak to them,' Isaac said, and stepped onto the plank which served as a bridge across the overflowing channel.
Before Isaac pounded on the front door, Alan saw a black smudge peer out through cellophane. Isaac knocked several times and eventually the door was opened by a large woman in a dress and matching head-dress, bright as parrots. Alan could see that she recognized Isaac from when Marlowe had brought him along to translate. Was that why she stood in his way and wouldn't let him inside?
Finally, after a prolonged discussion, a man appeared in the doorway and gestured Isaac within. Alan watched the door being heaved back into place, and then he waited in the rain, with the water and waste streaming past his feet. He stared dully into the channel, watching the edges crumble.
Suddenly the door of the house laboured open, and Isaac stood there. 'All right,' he said, with a grimace that meant it had been a struggle. Alan strode across the plank, which bowed in the middle until it was touching the miniature flood, its ends sinking in the mud and threatening to make him slip – 'and into the house. One step inside, and he halted, dismayed.
There was only one room, and it was full of children and basins and crippled furniture. He had to peer, because the room was dim with steaming clothes, spread over ropes strung between the walls. Basins were everywhere, catching drips from the roof, ringing like beggars' cups – one dud coin after another. The few chairs looked as if they had been rescued from a dump and repaired with bent nails. At the foot of the large lumpy bed stood several wooden boxes containing scraps of blankets. For pets, Alan thought – but how could there be room for animals? With a shock he realized that the boxes served as beds for some of the children. All the children, five of them, were staring at him.
