A Feast Unknown (21 page)

I had wondered at first why the Nine had placed us so far apart. The area was so vast, we could have looked for a year for each other without success. The Nine, of course, did not expect us to do this. I was not going to waste time searching for Caliban while Clio was in danger in England. Caliban would know that, too. He was probably heading for the nearest air strip now, or had got into touch with his two old colleagues and had them radio for a plane. If this happened, he would outstrip me in the race by four or five days.

I set off. It was a half hour past dawn. A brightly feathered kingfisher swooped down and ahead of me and then soared back up. The native blacks and The Folk would have taken this as a good omen, but I had long ago given up the idea of a higher being who was interested in me. Nevertheless, on seeing the kingfisher, I felt heartened. Perhaps, down there, where the childhood treasures are, I still believed.

I knew this area well. Some years ago, I had built a tree house here not too dissimilar to that shown in those bad and lying movies made about me. In fact, I got the idea from the movies. It was as comfortable as a house can be in the thin-air water-heavy atmosphere of the high mountain rain forest. Clio lived there with me for a while. The absence of a number of people to talk to, the silence, the cold, and the wet got to her nerves. After two months, she insisted that I take her back to the Kenyan plantation. Of the sixty days, three had been idyllic.

That day and part of the night, I climbed two mountains. The next day, I was only half a mile from my old tree house. I could not afford the time, but I detoured to see it anyway. I always have a nostalgia for any place in which I have lived any time at all, except for the town house in London, which is surrounded by too many people, too much noise, and too many unpleasant odors.

In the thickness, the air was not moving. When I smelled the dead body of a human adult male who had not been dead more than an hour, I knew he had to be close. A few steps this way and that showed me the direction to go.

My biographer has stated many times that I have nostrils as sensitive as an animal’s. He described this as due to my upbringing in the jungle. This was nonsense, and he knew it. No amount of practice will increase the sensitivity of the human nose. My nose is, however, not normal. I am a mutant, as I have said in previous volumes, and I have described my several mutations in detail in Volume IV. My sense of smell is equivalent to a bloodhound’s. This has its advantages. It also has its disadvantages. You humans have no idea of what the odor of gasoline fumes does to me.

Inside a minute, I came across broken bushes, plants stepped upon and just rising, squashed insects, and other evidences of a struggle. A leopard-skin loincloth was under a bush. Beyond it, the body of a male Caucasian lay on its side. He was about six feet six inches in height and must have weighed 300 pounds. He was very muscular but also fat and big-paunched. He was clean-shaven. His black hair was cut in bangs just above the eyes, and it grew shoulder-length behind. A leopard-skin band went around his head. The left side of his skull was bloody and caved in. His eyes were dark gray. His right arm, which had been torn off his body, was not in sight. Neither were his penis
and testicles, which had been ripped off.

A trail of blood led from his body. I followed it and came across a big knife, much like my uncle’s knife before long usage had worn it stiletto-thin. I deduced that the killer had knocked this out of the man’s hand with the club which I found ten feet further on. Its end bore much blood.

When I came across two sets of tracks in some soft earth, my heart beat faster. I felt choked with a sense of homecoming and of love. They were the prints of two Folk, a female and male adult.

I hurried to catch up with them. Tears ran down my cheeks. I had thought that all The Folk were dead, their kind gone forever.

The trail led to the tree house so directly that I was sure the two were deliberately heading for it. Other tracks showed that the dead man had come from its direction less than sixty minutes ago.

When I was just outside the small clearing, in the center of which was the great tree with my house, I stopped. I looked through a break in the green wall and saw the female sitting with her back against a tree. She was holding an infant not quite a year old. I was close enough to smell them, and the infant was sweating the scent of near-death. Its eyes were closed, it was breathing shallowly and rapidly, and its lungs bubbled. Its body was wet.

The mother was stinking of grief and hopelessness. Her dull gaze was fixed on the male and the female under him by the big tree.

I was surprised when I saw what he was doing. In the first place, ferocious as a male of The Folk can be under some circumstances, he is shy when humans are in the area. If not
cornered, he will run. But it was evident that this male had killed the man and at once gone to the tree house with his present activity in mind. I don’t know what made this male behave so unusually. Perhaps, as I later speculated, his abnormal behavior was caused by a combination of long isolation from his tribe (all dead), the sickness of the infant and the female’s concern for it and refusal to mate with him, and the lust aroused by observing the man’s rapings of his woman prisoner.

Also, there was the sudden madness which sometimes grips the older adult males of The Folk. This results in their running amok, however. I have never seen the temporary insanity cause any kind of sexual behavior; it always causes a desire to kill all within reach. And this male was not trying to kill the woman unless it was with his cock.

If that was his intent, it was a failure. The woman was paralyzed with terror, but otherwise she was not being hurt. The largest erect penis I’ve ever seen among The Folk was two inches long and three-eighths of an inch thick (estimated). If she had been a virgin, she would probably have remained one (technically so) no matter how many times he banged her.

He was on top of her and giving a short subdued scream and his body was shaking. A moment later, he renewed his thrustings.

The Folk have buttocks, which no true apes have, and hips constructed more like those of homo sapiens than of the gorilla, just as their feet are more hominoid than simian. (Like a Neanderthal’s, I should say.)

The woman’s arms were behind and under her, by which I deduced that they were tied. Her ankles had been tied together. Someone had untied them, although one end of the rope was around an ankle and the other end tied to a bush. Her legs had been forced open and up over the shoulders of the male. The Folk normally use this position, unlike the apes, who usually favor the rear approach.

The skin of the woman had the peculiar beautiful bronze hue of Doctor Caliban, and the long hair spread out on the ground behind her was his dark metallic red-bronze. Her face was not visible.

I moved around the edge of the clearing until I could see that the male was kissing her. (This way of showing affection or sexual desire is customary among The Folk.)

This probably horrified her far more than the relatively innocuous rape. That great half-apish face had been thrust against hers, and those chimpanzee-thin lips had slobbered all over her face.

It was this that made me think he must be half-mad with sexual frustration. To one of The Folk, a human is a very ugly and repulsive creature. Only a perverted Folk would want to kiss a human.

I scouted around carefully, making sure that no one else was in the area. Then I stepped out of the bushes, seeing at the same time the arm of the dead man under a bush where the male had thrown it. The genitals had probably been eaten.

I gave a soft cry,
“Krhgh!”

The male stiffened and came up off the woman so violently that her legs were thrown forward and she was momentarily jack-knifed. He whirled to face me.

28

He was one of the largest I’d ever seen. He was at least six feet two inches tall and weighed about three hundred and fifty pounds. He did not look as nearly gorilloid as my biographer has described The Folk. (As I have fully explained in Volume I, my biographer wrote his first story about me before he knew me. He got all his facts—and misinformation—from records and from a man who had known one of the persons who found me when I was eighteen. Using mainly his imagination, he described The Folk as much more apish than they are. By the time he knew the truth, he could not describe them correctly and maintain consistency in his novels.)

His arms, almost as thick with muscles as a gorilla’s, were as short in proportion to his trunk as a man’s. The legs were shorter, however, and bowed. The body was covered with thick straight rusty-red hair which formed a covering not as thick as a chimpanzee’s. The skin was as black as a bush Negro’s. The bones were approximately two-and-a-half times as thick as a man’s,
thus giving a broad attachment for the massive muscles.

(My own bones are almost twice as thick as a modern man’s. I could pass for a Cro-Magnon.)

The head was large and long and had a sagittal crest, like a gorilla’s, for the attachment of the massive jaw muscles. The jaws were quite prognathous, and the canine teeth were as large as a gorilla’s. The teeth had a “simian gap” for the accommodation of the tips of the lower canines. The Folk are primarily vegetarians, though they eat small animals frequently and the meat of large animals when they get a chance. The chin was absent. The supraorbital ridges were massive, and the forehead was very low. (The average adult male cranium capacity is 800 cubic centimeters, an estimate based on my study of four skulls.)

The eyes were deep sunk and a russet red, although most of The Folk have dark or light brown eyes.

Under the lower jaw was a sac which swelled out when the male challenged another, or a predator, or just wanted to howl at the moon.

The male was sweating, although not as heavily as he would have if he had been a man. The Folk have always been forest dwellers and share a paucity of sweat glands with most forest animals.

All in all, he looked like a giant variety of Zinjanthropus, and he may have been a descendant of this supposedly extinct australopithecine.

The clearing seemed to crackle and to spark, like a cat’s fur rubbed the wrong way. His hairs bristled; his eyes became even redder; his open mouth showed the thick yellow teeth and sharp
canines and incisors, a red tongue, and the black pit of a throat. The sac on his neck swelled out.

The back of my neck felt as if my hairs were also bristling. I automatically adopted the stiff-legged sidewise walk of belligerency as I circled him. As soon as I became aware of it, I broke the stance, bent my knees, and opened my left hand. My right hand was empty, because I did not want to threaten him with the knife I had found in the grass. He might be talked into cooperation if I did not scare him with the bright human weapon.

The male growled and then said,
“Yh shttb
.” That is, “I am Leopard-Breaker.”

I replied in the same whispering speech of The Folk,
“Yh tlhs
.” That is, “I am Worm.”

The speech of The Folk does contain some voiced consonants, mostly back-of-the-throat sounds, but the majority of words consist of unvoiced consonants. They have only one vowel, similar to the sound of
u
in the English
cut
or of
o
in
done,
and this vowel is not often used.

Worm is the literal translation of my name. My biographer used a euphemistic translation, one which reflected his pigmentation orientation. The Folk, however, considered degrees of hairiness to be more important than color. I also had other names: Bird Nose, Big Cock, Smart Ass, Bright Eyes, Fat Mouth, and Monkey Shit. But I was generally known as
tlhs
or Worm. This name is not as derogatory as humans might think; The Folk consider the worm to be a beautiful creature and very tasty and nutritious. I could have taken a more dignified and impressive name after I came of age and killed the chief of our tribe, but I preferred Worm. To me, it meant the worm that turned.

He howled at me, “I am Leopard-Breaker!”

“I am Worm!” I shouted. “Leave the female alone. Or I will kill you.”