This Green Hell

ended with a little quiver. He swallowed and tried again. ‘Excuseme, senor.’

This time the naked figure looked up. Francisco gasped as he recognised the face: the priest.

The man’s long colourless face, the stark eyes, could have been a carnival mask floating in the torch beams. Blood and viscera coated his arms to the elbows and also his beard, as if he had pushed his entire head into the corpse he held. As Francisco’s gaze fell on the carcass in the priest’s hands, he recognised it as that of a human being.

Bile rose in his throat as he recalled the desecration of flesh that had once been the American soldiers. So this is our jaguar, he thought as he opened his eyes once more on the terrible scene. Santa Madre de Dios, he whispered and crossed himself with a shaking hand.

The lifted lanterns also served to illuminate the forest behind the bloody figure. Several carcasses dangled from branches, their ankles bound and throats crushed. The faces of some were bloated and darkened by settling blood, indicating they had been hung upside down while they still lived. With others, it was impossible to tell, as the skin had been ripped from their bodies and flung into higher branches to hang there like drying garments after washing day.

‘We have been waiting for you.’ The voice seemed to well up from deep within the man, as though his vocal cords had receded into his core. He smiled, showing row upon row of needle-like teeth, still coated with flesh and gristle from the feast he had been enjoying. He turned his head to look at the bodies hung behind him and smiled again. ‘Yes, we took them all…we needed them.’

He turned back and his eyes bored into Francisco. ‘As we need you. As we need all of you.’

Francisco could smell the acrid tang of sour sweat and urine among the men he stood with. This is what fear smells like, he thought, as two of the men holding lanterns fled back into the jungle. He would have liked to run as well, but his legs refused to do anything more than shake.

There was a roar like thunder that shook the trees around them and made Francisco cringe and cover his ears in pain and terror. The priest vanished, and Francisco felt a breeze pass by him. He assumed Gonzalez had entered the jungle in pursuit of the men.

Without the priest’s physical presence, the spell was broken and Francisco felt his legs return to him. Just as he was contemplating his own escape, the priest reappeared, both men clasped in his hands. One hung by the ankle, moaning, his leg clearly broken, a shard of bone extruding through the flesh. The other was held by the throat, the priest’s hand compressing flesh and bone to about a quarter of its normal size. The man’s head wobbled as if held to the torso by skin alone.

Gonzalez dropped the men onto the pile of human debris at his feet. ‘I am sated now,’ he said. ‘They will be for later.’ He looked at the hanging bodies again. ‘All are needed; all will join with us by being consumed.’

Alfraedo lifted his gun and fired five shots. Despite the close range, he only managed three hits; the bullets making a damp thwacking sound as they struck the priest’s chest. Gonzalez made no move to dodge them; it was as if he welcomed them, Francisco thought; as though he wanted to test his body against them — and found himself to be superior.

Gonzalez opened his mouth and roared again. It was an inhuman sound that conjured images of hell and cold and darkness, and made Francisco’s bowels loosen in terror. In a blur, the priest was in front of Alfraedo, his hand around the large man’s throat. He lifted him in one hand, and Francisco heard squeaking noises come from the mining manager’s nose and mouth.

Francisco was weeping with dread now. He retched, bile spilling onto his silver goatee. The men with him had fallen to their knees; they looked as though they were praying to the priest, even though he was now something very different. Gonzalez brought Alfraedo’s face close to his own and smiled, his needle-sharp teeth glistening red in the moonlight. He dug his taloned fingers into the meat of Alfraedo’s neck and ripped away a large flap of skin from the front of his throat. Arterial blood spurted over the priest’s face and shoulders. He opened his mouth, wider than seemed humanly possible, and the red fountain sprayed into its black cavity. Even before the body was drained, Gonzalez opened his hand and let Alfraedo flop to the ground, his legs and arms still twitching as though being touched by an electrical current.

Francisco was running — he didn’t know how — his legs must have just taken over. He hadn’t even thought of reaching for his gun; it remained in its holster, forgotten. He had dropped his flashlight — he couldn’t remember when or where — all logic had been washed away by a tidal wave of fear, revulsion and panic. He had made it through the first barrier of ferns when he was knocked from his feet by a blow so powerful he heard the sickening crunch of the large bone in his thigh breaking before he felt it. Then the pain came and it was excruciating; mercifully, he passed out.

Consciousness returned too soon. His ankles were bound together and he was being dragged along the ground, tied to other bodies in some ghastly procession of cadavers and weakly struggling men. He didn’t bother fighting; like a small animal in the jaws of a predator, he knew he was without hope. He knew his fate: he and the others were little more than sacks of food to be consumed at leisure by something that was no priest, was no man at all really. Indeed, it was something probably older and infinitely more powerful than any mortal. Perhaps demons do exist after all, he thought in his near delirium.

The moon glowed above as they broke into another clearing. In the silvery light, Francisco could make out an enormous banyan tree and a stone building enfolded in its heavy embrace. As he and the other men were dragged up the steps and into the darkness, he smelled the charnel-house odour from inside. His body convulsed in one last desperate act of resistance and he began to yell and struggle.

The procession stopped and the priest looked back at him briefly, gave his needle-sharp smile and licked his lips. Then the movement started again, the column of writhing flesh dragged into the stone building.

Francisco wailed as they entered the pitch darkness. There would be no rescue, no merciful angels coming to save him because he had spent his life aiding his fellow humans. No, he would come to his end in a foul-smelling dungeon at the hands of an evil that was too horrible to contemplate.

Francisco finally remembered the gun still at his hip. He pulled it free and placed the barrel in his mouth. As he felt himself being tipped into a dark, acrid cavity in the floor, his last thought was that he was being pulled down into the very depths of hell.

He pulled the trigger.

THIRTEEN

Aimee sat in her cabin staring at the mobile phone and computer on her desk. Both were useless as communication devices now that the uplink to the satellite had been destroyed.

Things were unravelling quickly and she wished Francisco and Alfraedo would return. She almost hoped they hadn’t managed to find the saboteurs; there was enough tension in the camp without having to look after prisoners as well.

She switched off the lantern in her cabin and peered through the thin curtains out to the clearing. A few shapes moved about, some ambling, some darting. In the dark, the jungle itself seemed closer, thicker, more menacing and malevolent. She shuddered and dropped the curtain.

She undressed, dragged a damp T-shirt over her head and lay down on the rumpled bed. Things will be better in the morning. They always look better in the morning, she thought. She closed her eyes. A bead of perspiration tickled her temple as it ran from her forehead, her feet itched, and the still air felt like warm syrup as she dragged it into her lungs. She put one arm behind her head and immediately smelled her own sour body odour. Nice, she thought as she exhaled noisily through compressed lips.

Dawn wasn’t far away, but sleep wouldn’t come. There was something nagging at her, whispering to her in the dark, just out of focus, refusing to become clear to her fatigued mind. Aimee groaned as she pulled herself up and swung her legs over the side of her bed. She rubbed her face, and sat in silence for a few minutes holding her head. She grabbed her canteen from the table top and sipped loudly — the water tasted like plastic. She wished she had a metal container — they always made the water seem cooler. But you couldn’t use metal in the jungle; it rusted, everything rusted. The germ of a thought bloomed in her tired mind.

She stood up and felt in the darkness for her computer. She hesitated a moment at the thought of using up