The Curious Quests of Brigadier Ffellowes (32 page)

             
"Lucas shortly found the place he wanted, but he told me he had been on the watch for such a site for two hours past I checked my compass and got rough bearings, using the map, the setting sun and my own skill. We were about 16-1/2 degrees North and maybe 88-2/3 West
.
This certainly put us in the Maya Mountains, all totally unmarked territory.

             
"Lucas' find for a campsite was another notch in a cliff, with bare or mossy rock behind and no big trees close. It was only a gap and about ten feet square. The rock walls for it arced out on each side, went up into darkness and there were no vines running down them. In front we had a clear view in daylight of 30 feet of open space, being rock slabs and shale with nothing higher than low bunches of grass. It made us all feel better when we got in and faced out
.

             
"If any of you know the Tropics, you know there is no real 'evening
'
. The dark fell like a cloud and we could hardly see one another save with our flashes, which we were careful not to use at more than three feet
.

             
"The usual night noises rang out as we quietly used our
Sterno
and did not talk as we ate. Lots of bird calls, an insect vibrato and now and then the cry of some mammal. I heard a distant scream once and nudged Lucas. He nudged back and muttered Tigre under his breath. It had been a jaguar after all. There must have been a stream in the gully below us and to our left for the chorus of frog voices grew steadily louder during our meal, until it had almost blanketed the
birds and the bugs through sheer volume.

             
"Suddenly, as we sat silent and listening, the batrachian calls stopped. It was an instant cut-off. So did the birds and even the insects seemed muted. In this silence came a new sound. It was not near or seemed not near but, oh how it carried! It was a strange cross between a moan and a roar. It gave the impression of immense volume somehow and more, for intermingled was a savagery, a terrible wild and forsaken anger, which rather chilled the blood. Quite unconsciously, I found myself huddling close to young Hooper, who sat to my left
.
His great body was trembling like a leaf and I could smell his sweat as no doubt he could smell mine.

             
"Finally that appalling sound died away in a series of rumbling grunts whose volume was
not lessened much from that of the roaring wail which had begun the whole thing. There was silence and then the frogs took up their chorus again, with new members joining in until the night was once more echoing with croaks and trills in which insect
stridulation
was mixed again.

             
"The voice of Lucas
Peyrefitte
struck George and myself, though it was soft, so that we started and almost jumped away from one another. 'Not too
clost
,' it came. 'Jus' set still now an' don't talk nor move.' He said no more for a second, and then continued. 'Someone far off, he think that that noise come from them
Howly
Monkey. But it don', not that. This come from
somethin
' much bigger and meaner.'

             
"I had forgot, d'you fellows know, that Howler Monkeys were found in these parts. Never heard a Howler and I understand they can make a good, loud racket but I never thought they'd give one a chill to the marrow.

             
"Mind you, as some of you know, I'm not exactly inexperienced in living in the Tropics. I've heard leopards cough and grunt many times and the same with tigers and lions roaring. I'd picked up that jaguar scream back earlier and identified it by an educated guess. This was something I'd never heard before or wanted to hear again.

             
"Then Lucas spoke once more before falling silent
.
'Set still and use your ear an' your nose till I say it OK. And keep you pistol handy too.' I got my Webley cautiously in my grip and could feel George Hooper doing the same. Then we simply obeyed orders and sat listening. I'd forgot part of the order until I heard George sniffing deeply at intervals. I did the same without even thinking about it
.
And, deep in my subconscious memory, an alarm was triggered. Had there not been something about 'smells' or 'stinks' in that weird report signed by the man I call 'Jones'? In fact, in the very report that had got me here in this wilderness in the first place?

             
"Well,
gentlemen
, God knows how long we three sat there, as relaxed as possible but more than alert
.
I checked my luminous watch hand at intervals and at least one hour had passed when something else began to happen.

             
"I'd given up sniffing the jungle air which was lovely but so full of bugs that I'd inhaled several gnats without meaning to. But the other two were tougher and they had not I heard and almost felt my neighbor George increase his sniffs and I started to do so too. One deep breath was enough.

             
"It was a most unpleasant odor that now wafted our way. It was wild, feral if you like, but mainly a sort of concentrated garbage sort of reek. There was none of the ammonia smell of the big cats; what you can get in any zoo, though I've had it close to in the bush myself. Oh no, this was another new one for me. Mix a filthy athletic locker room with the stench of
uncleaned
dog kennels and add rotten garbage. That's the best I can do to describe it
.

             
"And with this foul effluvium there was something else. This was more of a feeling than anything else. We were under intent and malign observation, that was it
.
Someone or something was looking at us and it was the look of a predator. You'll recall that Lucas and I'd had a conversation on this point before we started. Well, as any real hunter knows, one
can feel this sort
of thing, if one's lucky that is. Not very pleasant in that hot, damp dark, to feel that some 'presence
'
, something deadly and predatory had one under observation!

             
"It was Lucas's voice that broke the dead hush. And it was no whisper but a shout 'Look up,
'
he yelled, almost in my ear. 'That stink come from up, down the rock
behin
' us!'

             
"Well, the three of us whirled as one man and young Hooper, God bless him, flicked on his torch as he did. And so we weren't taken too much by surprise." The Brigadier paused for thought but there wasn't a breath expelled in the Club library. We were all
rivetted
by the imagined horror of his tale and all mentally in that black, steaming forest, long ago in an unknown land, holding our breath and with racing pulses, all desperate to find out what followed.

             
The silence grew unbearable and Ffellowes' smooth pink cheeks finally loosened and he resumed his tale.

             
"Something huge and covered with matted hair was dropping down that cliff face behind us, on what we'd all thought was the one safe side. How it found grip, I'll never know, and it was half-falling and half-climbing, I think, now.

             
"I saw its turned head in the torchlight, the great fangs and the red, glaring eyes between the mighty shoulders and the vast arms and crook-clawed hands, the huge straight legs and the claws on the toes as well. It was an instant, glaring picture of primal terror, caught as one catches a flash bulb photo, all in a split second.

             
"The oddest thoughts tend always to surface in a time of crisis. No doubt those of you who've seen combat in a war have noticed the phenomena. I had the weirdest flash then and it went like this: 'There are no reddish-blond gorillas in Central America. And its legs are much too long anyway!

             
"For the matted pelt that covered the hide of this monster was the color I've just used, a sort of reddish yellow and it was short, not like the longer hair of a gorilla or chimp you know.

             
"I had my gun drawn but frankly not
levelled
. It was Lucas, that trained hunter, who was ready, not I. His Webley .455 went off with a roar and young Hooper's was not much behind. It was I, the supposedly trained soldier and the leader of the group, who finally fired third. I will say that I fired at the demon head, just in my own defense, you know and to demonstrate to you fellows that I wasn't totally panicked. Damned lucky I finally came to, I might add.

             
"That huge, ghastly vision never let out one cough or even a grunt
.
It simply collapsed and fell, from perhaps eight feet up on that rock wall. One moment it was alive and about to leap on us, the next it was a huddled pile of reeking, bloody fur, clearly seen in the torch light for all three of us now had our flash buttons out and down. It was odd that the frog orchestra never stopped even for those three shots. The night was returned in an instant to the sounds of its normal voices while the three of us just stood frozen, staring at what we'd killed. I holstered my gun and started swatting mosquitoes without even thinking about it I felt like a moron later when I thought of what might have happened had there been more than one of those things!

             
"Now we come to more of my stupidity. It was not the trained Intelligence
wallah
who spotted the next piece of evidence but young Hooper who at this moment had both sharper eyes and quicker wits. He bent and held his light close to the
outflung
right hand, for claws, size and all, it was a hand, of the dead thing. I almost choked when I saw what he'd noticed. To prove it was a 'hand' and not a paw, it was clenched tight in a death spasm and clenched around the shaft of a weapon too. That dead grip was around the wood of a short and incredibly massive spear! A further glance along the shaft showed the glittering, broad point, which gleamed black in the torch light
.
As heavy and broad as the wood was massive, so too was the obsidian blade, sharpened by clearly-seen chipping and flaking to razor edges!

             
"Well, that chap Lucas read my mind at this point 'I
listen good,' he said, almost casually. 'Dis the
onliest
one around. Maybe more come but I think this one find us alone by himself and try kill us quick.'

             
While Lucas spoke, though I heard him clearly, I was looking hard at other things, details that fit nothing I'd ever dreamt of, let alone heard about
.
The hairy hand that retained its weapon had a thumb as long and human in shape as mine. I'm sure you men know that no ape, gorilla or other, has anything but a short peg, a stump that can't grip or even bend. That dispelled any thought of the lower primates on the spot
.
You could, I suppose, teach a trained ape to carry a weapon but you can't train him into growing a thumb!

             
"Next I carefully examined the head, which happened to lie face up so that I didn't have to move anything or touch the foul-smelling bulk. Oh, did it stink, a feral reek of everything wild, mixed with rank garbage! But I breathed through my mouth and carefully looked at that head. Oddly, the more I looked, the less horrid it got
.
Here's why.

             
"Under that curious pelt which was longer on the top just like a man's hair, was a large, but not abnormally-shaped skull. There was a big hole in it where my bullet had gone home and I hate to think what would have happened if I'd missed. One of the other shots had hit an arm and only by a narrow margin, while the third had gone high and to the right in the chest If that thing had been given a few seconds in that little rock bay with that great spear, well, I think the whole party would have lost a few guests.

             
"The head of this creature grew more interesting every second I was staring at it
.
It had a small but adequate nose. The canines were very large and pointed, easy to see since the mouth gaped open in death. But and this interested me even more, there was a
highish
forehead, a well-rounded chin, such as no ape or monkey possesses, and glimpsed through the dirty head hair, ears not unlike those of, say Parker here," and he nodded at me.