attraction, a wax figure on a disused station. She felt like wax – melting wax. Three youths in denim stared at her for a while before swaggering toward the beach. 'Don't miss your bus,' one shouted, which she thought especially pointless.
She went to the end of the platform and stared along the tracks. She'd never seen them looking so disused. Surely the train ought to be here by now. Suppose it had been cancelled? These trains sometimes were. If only there were someone to ask… Then she heard footsteps in the booking hall, three steps on the hollow boards; three were all it took to cross the hall. She turned as he emerged onto the sunlit platform. It was Jimmy.
'What do you think you're waiting for?' he said.
'Would a train be too much to hope for?'
'I'm afraid it would,' he said, and her innards lurched. 'Surely you heard? There's an unofficial strike to try and stop them closing the line. No trains until further notice.'
'Oh no,' Liz said, more for Anna's sake than because of any disappointment of her own.
'Where were you wanting to go?'
'I wasn't going anywhere. I was sending Anna to stay with my parents,' Liz said, hugging the child in a bid to console her. 'We'd been getting on each other's nerves, hadn't we, Anna? Something had to be done. We'll just have to get on with each other, that's all.'
It sounded false even to her, especially since Anna had pulled away. 'What brings you to the village?' Liz said, for the sake of something to say.
'Mostly keeping out of the way. Mrs Marshall's in a foul mood. She's had a cancellation for the next seven days, and she's got no chance of filling it now.'
'Perhaps I'll call in and commiserate later.' For a moment, until she realized what she was thinking, Liz thought of taking up the cancelled booking, just to get them out of the house. Was she mad? No – she was letting Anna confuse her again, that was all. It was Anna's fault, just like everything else. Why had she let the child get to her so badly? What tales would Anna have told her parents about her? Anna could just stay with her, where she belonged – and she'd better behave herself; she'd made Liz waste enough time as it was. Liz took Anna's elbow and the case, and strode toward the road. She wasn't going to be distracted again. She still had to decide how to retrieve the claw.
Thirty-nine
The jeep lurched to a stop. The forest was closing in, and so was the thick moist green twilight beneath the trees. 'We shall have to walk from here,' Isaac said.
Alan stared about him in the desperate hope that the lurch of the jeep might have woken him up. Of course it was an absurd hope. He was already wide awake, and neurotically alert. He wasn't dreaming, though the forest resembled a dream. It resembled the forest he had dreamed of, which suggested that he was close to the dreadful thing he had been told he must do.
How could he distinguish this place from any other part of the forest? He and Isaac had been in here for so long that it seemed strange to think of the open sky, of any sky that wasn't composed of countless overlays of green. Nothing distinguished this place: great sweaty limbs of trees reached up through the green twilight to the green ceiling, young trees grew in the spaces between them, thin stalks tipped with a few pale leaves. Yet he felt as if this place led to his dream, as if one of the paths between the trees led there – as if this place had been the start of his dream, which he couldn't remember. As he sat there in the passenger seat his body was stiffening, his innards felt like bile.
Isaac took the pistol from under the dashboard and thrust it into his belt, then he came round the jeep to Alan. His eyes were sympathetic and encouraging. 'Come on,' he said, clasping Alan's shoulder for a moment. 'Perhaps we haven't far to go now.'
Of course that was what Alan feared. Isaac laid one hand on the pistol. 'I will help you all I can.'
Even if he was undertaking to kill the Leopard Man, that still left the worst for Alan. Perhaps the chief in the village of beehive huts had been wrong after all, yet it seemed horribly logical: cannibals ate their victims in order to ingest their power, therefore in order to consume the power of a cannibal cult for ever one would have to… He swallowed, choking, desperate to believe he was dreaming, but the last time he'd slept was last night in the jeep, baboons swinging down from the dark overhead to scratch and scream at the windows, huge shadows lumbering past beyond the reach of the headlights. It wasn't a dream, nor could he tame what was happening to him by thinking how he might write about it one day; that no longer worked. It was happening now, and it was all he could do for Liz and Anna. Though his legs felt heavy as concrete, he climbed out of the jeep. 'All right,' he said through his stiff cumbersome lips.
He strode out at once. If he had hesitated now, he would never have been able to go on. The ground between the trees was springy with leaf-mould; it yielded underfoot, an oddly intimate sensation – he felt as if the forest were accepting him. He was striding so determinedly that Isaac had to hurry to catch up. 'This way, you think?' Isaac said, and it was only then that Alan realized that he was acting as if he knew.
He glared about. He couldn't know, there was nothing to recognize, it was all the same: the moist green velvet light, the looming juicy green of vegetation, screams and leaping overhead, snakes like liberated vines. Fruit bats dangled, furry blotches in the dimness; they hadn't been in his dreams. He was walking in the direction the jeep had been going, that was all. 'It's as good a way as any,' he muttered. He mustn't stop, he mustn't falter; above all, he mustn't think about what he'd done in his dream.
The trees went on for ever. The world had turned into forest. The darkening path felt warm and soft as fur. A whirring overhead made him glance up. He'd thought it was a flock of bats, but it was a helicopter, invisible above the mass of foliage. It seemed a promise of help, until he realized that it could never land in the forest. The sound was already fading away to his left, away from the path he had to follow.
He couldn't know that; there was nothing to show that it was. His dream meant nothing, he mustn't trust a dream. But there was one thing he couldn't ignore: that long before his meeting with the chief, he'd already dreamed of doing what the chief had told him he must do. His innards were struggling now, rebelling. Just because the path was darkening, that didn't necessarily mean he was near his goal – but he would be there eventually, he had no choice but to act out his dream. He felt as if he weren't so much walking now as stumbling forward under the weight of that thought.
Isaac halted him. The translator was gazing about, holding up one hand for quiet. He stood for a while, then he shook his head. It had only been the helicopter. 'We should be stealthy now,' he whispered, 'in case we are near.'
Alan found his own voice was too shaky to control. 'Do you think we are?'
'I don't know. But we ought to be careful.' Isaac was gazing at him as if to discover how Alan would face what lay ahead. 'I told you that they may hunt in packs – if they are the last traces of the original Ju-ju.'
But now it was Alan who was gesturing for silence. He'd been staring ahead between the trees, where the path darkened progressively. Now he saw why. A quarter of a mile or so further on, the foliage closed in, a tangle of young trees and creepers and vines. There was no longer a path.
He knew what that meant. In these last days in the forest, such places had been the only signs of humanity they had found: deserted native farms, cleared areas where plants and small trees had taken over. Why did the sight of this latest one make his throat grow dry and burning?
He was stumbling forward before he knew it, hardly aware of the leaf-mould beneath his feet, hushing his footsteps. As he approached the tangle of vegetation, not only dimness but silence closed in, as if the green wall could soak up sound as well as light. After the incessant clamour of monkeys and birds, the silence was suffocating. He could hear his heart, which sounded large, juicy, very soft. He felt intensely vulnerable and, despite Isaac, quite alone.
But the faint track was turning. It bypassed the impenetrable confusion of trees and undergrowth. For a moment he felt as if he'd been reprieved, as if he wouldn't have to do what his dreams and the chief and Isaac had all told him he must. He glimpsed dim conical shapes through chinks in the foliage.
'It's just another deserted village,' Isaac said.
Did he sound relieved? Nevertheless he was still whispering. 'Abandoned,' Alan corrected him, and halted,
