He couldn't meet their eyes. He felt accused, as though it was Anna who was staring. So he'd thought he could write about Nigeria on the basis of a tourist's visit, had he? He felt utterly fake. If he ever returned home, he would tear his Nigerian plot to bits. But the children's father blocked his view and stretched out his upturned hand.
Alan pulled out a wad of brown ten-naira notes. Ten, twenty, thirty, fifty – divide by two and you had pounds. Thirty pounds, forty, and the hand was still outstretched. By the time it closed on the notes, Alan felt he had paid a good deal, but wasn't Anna's safety worth infinitely more? The man was stuffing the notes into a Coca-Cola bottle, which already looked almost full. Perhaps in time he'd be able to buy his family's way out of all this. Alan hoped so.
He screwed the cap into the bottle and dragged the bed aside, then he lifted a floorboard and hid the bottle in the mud beneath the floor. Still frowning, he beckoned Alan and Isaac to follow him out of the house. One of the children scampered after them, but he gestured her back, shouting, 'I told you to stay away from him.'
He led them around the house to the back, walking with exaggerated dignity, ignoring the mud and the downpour, even though his outsize multicoloured shirt immediately grew darker with rain. Behind the house was a hut like a large privy, fashioned out of corrugated metal. There were a few footprints in the mud outside the door, but not many. The man wrenched back the bolt, and Alan saw the old man who was shut in there, lying on a camp bed.
He oughtn't to be shocked. If it weren't for the Nigerian respect for the family, the old man would probably be dead. The frowning man could hardly be blamed for locking his father away from the grandchildren, under the circumstances – and anyway he was housing him as close to the family as he possibly could. At least the hut looked watertight, and the old man had a flashlight by the bed and a couple of basins for washing and relieving himself. Alan forced himself to step into the hut, to see exactly what a Leopard Man looked like.
He looked very much like a withered old black man who was waiting to die. He couldn't have been active for years. He was stirring, gripping both sides of the mattress with his skinny hands and sitting himself up in a series of jerks, tiny timid movements that showed how fragile he felt. His face and bald head were covered with wrinkles,. like fingertips that had been soaking for hours. Isaac stepped forward to question him.
The son followed, and there no longer seemed to be room in the hut for light. The old man groped for the flashlight and switched it on, but its glow was so feeble that it merely oudined a few glimpses: the old man's broken yellow nails, his fleshless arm, his glistening toothless gums, his dimming eyes. If he meant to direct the glow at his visitors, he was too weak; the flashlight rolled out of his hand, onto the blanket. Alan wished he had let Isaac come here by himself: their only purpose in coming was to find out the name the old man had given Marlowe, which Isaac had forgotten. But he mustn't allow himself to feel qualms at this early stage, for there would be worse than the old man to be faced. All the same, nothing could have induced Alan to give the handshake to the old man; nothing could have made him touch him.
Isaac was speaking. The old man's son stood close to him, a warder at visiting time. The old eyes glimmered at Isaac, the dry lips gaped and closed and gaped. Alan could hear flies buzzing in the hut; they were either large or numerous, or both. He felt lost and helpless; he couldn't understand a word Isaac was saying.
He mustn't feel like that. Isaac was helping him, he could trust Isaac; Isaac knew what he was doing. All the same, standing there uselessly gave Alan far too much time to think, to realize how far he was from Liz and Anna, how long it had been since he'd spoken to them, let alone seen them. His eyes were growing used to the dimness; he could see the flies, or some of them. They were crawling on the old man, whose son made no move to brush them off.
Isaac was asking a question; that much was clear from the tone of his voice. That must mean he was nearly finished – there was only one question he needed to ask. But the old man gazed emptily at him and pressed his lips together. Perhaps he felt that having answered once was enough. The buzzing of flies seemed so loud that Alan felt as if they were crawling inside his skull.
Isaac stooped to the old man and repeated his question. He looked ready to pick up the old man and shake him. The son stepped forward, and Alan wondered if he was going to drag Isaac away from his father. Certainly violence was in the air. The toothless mouth was opening, down there in the dark. Perhaps the old man would answer after all.
Then Alan shuddered and turned away. Isaac or the son must have jarred the bed, for the flashlight moved and flared. The light glistened on a large fly swelling like a boil on the old man's cheek. But that wasn't why Alan stumbled out of the hut. As the flashlight beam lit up the old man's eyes, they had been gazing straight at him.
He stood in the downpour, mud hissing all around him, as if it were full of snakes. Rain flooded down corrugated walls, clattered on roofs. Isaac emerged from the hut almost at once, and Alan hurried toward the marshy street. As he glanced back at the hut, he saw the son ramming the bolt into its socket with immense force, as if to make sure the door would never open again. Alan turned his face up to the rain. After the suffocating hut, even the downpour seemed refreshing.
'We must go to Port Harcourt,' Isaac said. 'I know where now.' Of course, he'd only needed reminding. He sounded triumphant, Alan wished he could share his optimism, but he was still seeing the eyes of the old man in the hut and remembering what lay ahead. As the old man had gazed at him, Alan had glimpsed in those eyes something hungry and inhuman, something that was far older and more dangerous than the old man himself. They had looked very much like the spidery eyes in his dream.
Twenty-two
Port Harcourt was a ghost town surrounded by flames. There wasn't a soul in the streets down by the docks. Alan felt as if he were walking through residential streets that had become deserted overnight, an urban Marie Celeste. Those windows that weren't bricked up gleamed darkly, lifelessly. Long straight streets, glossy with rain, led into the town, where presumably there was life, but nothing moved on them except the flames of the oil refineries beyond the town. Giant cranes laboured up and down the nearby wharf, carrying crates and sacks and steel drums from the dazzling, floodlit ships, but they were the only sign of activity in the maze of docks and warehouses.
The houses had used to be lived in before the trading companies took them over, that was all. He was exhausted and shaken up by the journey – three hundred miles or so from Lagos, and forty miles inland. His whole body felt parched, thirsty even for the tropical rain, his eyes prickly and hot. No wonder he felt on edge – except that he knew that these weren't the reasons at all.
Isaac had brought a flashlight and a map, neither of which seemed much help in the shadowy streets. As he peered at the map, the flames of the refineries sent huge vague shadows of the warehouses staggering toward the two men. 'Don't worry,' Isaac said, his voice low as if he, too, was affected by the strangeness of the place, 'we'll find it.'
Alan was hardly reassured. They'd have more to worry about when they did find it. So far he'd let Isaac lead, but sooner or later he wouldn't be able to hide behind him any longer. Isaac was invaluable because he could speak all the languages and for many other reasons, yet by helping, he was putting off the moment when Alan would have to act for himself. The eyes of the old man in the hut had told Alan that his nightmare of the jungle glade was real, and waiting for him.
Isaac sensed his mood, but mistook its cause. 'We'll find out what we want to know,' he said. 'We mustn't take no for an answer, that's all.'
'I can't see what we can da if he refuses to help. It's not as if he was ever a Leopard Man.'
'His father was.'
'That's no reason why he should know anything, though, is it?'
'I think he does. I'm convinced that David learned something from him.'
A shadow as tall as the warehouses crept over a building, and it took Alan a moment before he was sure it was the shadow of a crane. 'But you said he sounded scared when you told him we were coming.'
'Then we should be able to scare him into talking.'
It seemed grotesque to Alan – himself and a University man, stalking along the rain-blackened crime-movie