on the edge of Port Harcourt that Isaac had put in an anonymous call to the police, in a dialect that wasn't his. He'd done that for Alan, to make sure their search wasn't hindered. 'You mustn't give up,' he'd told Alan. 'You must fight their influence or it will destroy you. It will never wear off of its own accord.' That had been Alan's secret hope, so secret he hadn't admitted it to himself: that the influence would leave him in time, that he would be able to go home, himself again – but Isaac must know what was best, however unwelcome it was. Alan had been too stunned by Ogunbe's death in the warehouse to do anything but follow Isaac. He hadn't realized how shaken Isaac was until they were nearly home and Isaac had stumbled to a tree and held on, shaking and retching, getting it over with so that his wife and daughters wouldn't see.
Looking back and watching the jungle swallow up the station, Alan remembered the first time he'd ridden a roller coaster, that moment when he'd realized that he couldn't get off, that he had to ride the nightmare all the way. This train ride felt like that – except that the station wouldn't have saved him from the nightmare. He looked away from the jungle as it thickened around him, trees shutting out the horizon and most of the sky. He looked at the goat which was gazing up at him with large moist scared eyes
– but not for long; the sight reminded him too much of? Joseph, of what Joseph had done. Thinking of Liz and? Anna couldn't wipe out those memories; the memories? merged in ways he didn't dare to face. He could only think? of the days he'd spent at Isaac's home, the last time he had? felt at all peaceful.
He'd stayed while Isaac pored over maps, planning their route. The house was bright and spotless, and the gentle waves and the yachts on the lagoon had soothed him. Isaac's pretty wife and their two bright-eyed teenage daughters had looked after him, though Isaac had told them nothing. It showed how deeply Isaac trusted him or believed he would be cured that he'd let him in the same house as his daughters. Yet all this had only filled him with grief that he couldn't go home, go back to his home that had once been like this. He'd yearned to phone Liz, but what could he have said? He could only gaze at the lagoon
– that at least had spared him the agony of thinking.? One evening he'd been sitting on a garden chair, brooding, watching the water grow dark, when the younger daughter had taken his hand to lead him in to dinner, and all at once he'd started sobbing, wordlessly and uncontrollably. He couldn't tell how long the child had stayed with him, squeezing his hand, but eventually Isaac's wife had been gripping his shoulders too, and the two girls had held his hands while he wept there in the sudden night. That time had given him back some sense of worth. Someone had cared for him, even as he was now.
'It is a waste of time worrying over what is behind us,' Isaac said, over the uproar of the train and its passengers, bringing Alan back to himself with a lurch, to the inexorable journey into the engulfing jungle. 'If anyone had meant to harm us they would have done so in the warehouse.'
That seemed reasonable. Ogunbe had already been reluctant to talk to them; perhaps he'd asked the advice of someone who'd known his father – someone who'd sewn him up to silence him and as a warning to them. 'I'll be ail right,' Alan said, remembering the children clinging to his hands, Isaac's wife gripping his shoulders as if by doing so she could literally hold him together.
'You're willing to go on?'
'Yes, we must.' Alan couldn't see any way to turn back now, but in any case, he was regaining strength. Remembering Isaac's family, he'd realized something else, too: in a sense, Isaac was risking his own home and family in order to help. If Isaac was prepared to go on, how could Alan hesitate? He'd come so far from home that he had nothing to lose and his own family to gain. He'd go wherever Isaac led; he wouldn't be turned back by horrors, even by the face in the flashlight beam, the hands recoiling in agony as they groped to pick out the stitches…
'Perhaps this'U be the lead we're looking for,' he said, as much to encourage Isaac as himself. He could hardly believe they'd find whoever had given the claw to Marlowe; they'd need some other break. But as the train groaned onward into the jungle, twilight closing about him like steam, he was growing more determined; he would face whatever he had to face. If Isaac could on his behalf, then he must too. Yet it wasn't long before he was remembering that journey as the last chance he'd had to turn back.
Thirty-two
It was no dream. Bright green lizards were scuttling over a clump of tree-roots twice as tall as Alan, and he was wide awake. The jungle dimness closed in like green steam; his forehead was streaming, his clothes were sodden, the giant trunks were dripping rain. Parrots and enormous butterflies, vivid as hallucinations, darted through the greenish air; monkeys swung screaming from branch to branch two hundred feet overhead. Ahead of him, the forest ceiling dropped to the level of the oil-palms, which rattled and jerked with the rain.
A flash of lightning sent bars of shadow slicing through the undergrowth, toward the village of conical huts, green beehives three times the height of a man. Four tribesmen waited at the edge of the village, spears in their hands, their loinclothed bodies slick with rain, their skin the colour of tar. As he followed Isaac, the air felt almost as hindering as the insect-ridden vegetation underfoot. Perhaps that was his own reluctance to go on.
They'd found the lead they had been so desperate for. Leaving the train at last, they'd trudged for miles through forest, beyond the settlement the station had served, such as the settlement was. It had taken them hours of wandering, during which they realized they'd been misdirected from the settlement, before they found the village, a handful of squat square huts where tribesmen sat in the dusty compound as if they hadn't moved for years. Alan had no idea what race they belonged to. They and their chief had sat, growing dusty, while Isaac spoke to them, and Alan had wondered – rather horribly, at that – if this would be as much of a blind alley as Port Harcourt. But the chief had remembered Marlowe, and had sent them where he'd sent the anthropologist: back to the coast, east of Lagos – where the police had told Isaac that the Leopard murders were continuing. All at once the trail was coming clear, taking Alan further into the jungle, further into his dream. Now that something was happening at last, their progress seemed almost too swift. Already they were at this village on the coast, where a tribesman had been murdered by the Leopard Men.
One of the tribesmen in the rain stepped forward and held up his spear. At least this was nothing like Alan's dream of the glade, of the spidery figure and the cooking-pot, Alan thought as Isaac began to parley. He had almost to shout to make himself heard above the clamour of rain on palm-leaves and the rumble of thunder. Rain broke on the points of the spears, crawled glistening in the tribesmen's cropped black curls; Alan felt rain crawling on his own scalp like lice. In the village, the only woman he had seen was hurrying a small boy dressed in enormous baggy shorts into one of the beehive huts.
Isaac was still talking – Alan had lost all sense of time; he could have been standing in the mud for hours – when the other tribesmen stepped forward to stare at Alan's long cracked nails. They stood so close to him that he could smell their breath and see their decaying gappy teeth. Before, they'd looked stern and suspicious, their faces giving nothing away, but now they were altogether more distrustful.
They walked around him, prodding and pinching him, and then they stared into his face. The tallest of them addressed him. When he turned his head to ask Isaac what the man had said, his neck felt stiff, painfully tense. 'They want to look at your teeth,' Isaac said.
Alan could only do as he was told. He bared his teeth and tried not to look afraid; above all, they mustn't sense his fear. It was only like being at the dentist's, after all; certainly he felt as helpless. The tribesmen were thrusting their fingers into his mouth, pulling his lips wider until the skin that attached them to his gums felt as if it would tear.
The man who had been parleying with Isaac came to look. He stared expressionlessly for a while, then he nodded and turned away. As Isaac followed him, Alan stumbled after them. His legs felt so weak he was afraid of falling. No doubt the three tribesmen close behind would catch him if he did.
The village was more or less circular. Interlocking rings of huts surrounded a central compound. The thatched pyramid roofs reached almost to the ground and rose to points twenty feet overhead. They looked freshly painted with the rain that streamed down them, layer after layer. Beyond one open doorway Alan heard children whispering in the dark – many children. He wondered if they were being hidden from him.
He wasn't sure what made him peer more sharply at a hut on the other side of the compound: perhaps an inkling that the men were turning him away. The interior was dark, and a leaf that dangled from the thatch above the doorway hindered his view, but he glimpsed someone lying in the hut. As he squinted, he saw that the supine
