Hell's Gate(14)

But as they emerged from the humid belly of the Nostromo, Fuchs saw the other men, officers and those they commanded, standing motionless and silent. Twenty meters away, and appearing to surround the boat on all sides, loomed the forest. Occasional breaks in the fog revealed dense stands of trees, and Fuchs’s image of butterflies dissolved into a vision of dark-hooded sentinels, their dead skeletal branches reaching out through the mist, crowding in on what had suddenly become a tiny patch of deck.

Fuchs thought it couldn’t get any worse than the bad air and cramped quarters of the submarine. By then, of course, their sister boat had run aground. To say that anything felt more confining than the inside of the Nostromo was saying a lot, especially after the double jam-up of crew spaces they’d suffered through after the grounding of Demeter. But somehow, this fog-cloaked wilderness was even more claustrophobic, with the rotten egg scent of swamp gas (methane, he was informed) adding to the displeasure.

Demeter. Shit. Hadn’t there been a fictional ship with the same name. And why would they rename—?

“Karl!”

Above, in the tree, Private Becker had reached the level where the camera hung, an arm’s length away. “Will you shine that light up here, for Christ’s sake.”

Resembling a giant mechanical eye, the nose cone swung gently from a tangle of braided cotton.

“Looks like this thing held together,” Becker called down.

“Well, that’s good news,” came the reply. Neither man wanted to tell Dr. S?nger that they couldn’t find his precious movie camera, or that it had been smashed to bits upon landing.

Below the canopy, Fuchs was becoming more and more uneasy. The forest had come suddenly alive with night sounds—layer upon layer of chirps, buzzes, and clicks, all of them set against the incessant drone of mosquitoes. Just once, Fuchs thought he felt a vibration brushing over his spine and ribs, barely perceptible. But the feeling passed as quickly as it had come, so he shrugged it off and tried to think about something else, anything else.

When he first came ashore, Fuchs had sought to calm his fears by trying to identify the night sounds. Unfortunately, his effort to make familiar what he could not understand had left him with nothing but a serving of crow for breakfast. His mistake was a suggestion that the mechanical toc-toc-toc they had all heard while on patrol might have been produced by a woodpecker.

“Fuchs, whoever heard of a woodpecker at night?” Sergeant Vogt had said mockingly. The SS sergeant made a point of waiting until there were several other sentries gathered round. “That was a frog, you ass.”

The private had shrugged his shoulders, his face reddening. “Sounded like a woodpecker, Sergeant.”

Several of the others present also thought they’d heard woodpeckers, but they’d decided to follow Vogt’s lead, and they feigned disappointment at Fuchs for such an obvious mistake.

A sudden return of the toc-toc-toc, impersonal and jarring, brought Private Fuchs back to the reality of tonight’s sounds. The mist seemed to have settled a bit lower than it had been just minutes before.

“Toc-toc-toc,” Fuchs called to the dark, shining his light into the fog.

“Toc-toc-toc,” he called again, not caring if Willy heard him and mocked him again.

He stopped for a moment, wiping a sweaty brow with his forearm.

And then the forest called back to him.

Fuchs stiffened. His toc-toc-toc had been returned by a series of musical tones—almost metallic but unlike anything he had heard before. Yet “heard” was the wrong word. It was as if the sounds had passed through his body, more felt than heard.

What . . . Where did that come from? He whirled around and the flashlight beam swung into the trees, shadows shifting in the tangled foliage.

“You imagined that,” Fuchs told himself. Without thinking, he quickly called out into the dark again. “Toc-toc-toc.”

But this time there were only night sounds and the intermittent patter of rain that had begun to fall. He pointed the beam upward but now the light did not reach the canopy. The settling mist seemed even more dense than usual.

“Willy, did you hear that?” he called up into the tree, nervously. “It sounded like . . .”

“Don’t tell me—woodpeckers,” came Becker’s voice. “Never mind that. I’ve got S?nger’s camera. I’ll lower it down to you.”

“All right, then. Hurry up,” Fuchs called back.

From above, there came the sound of a branch shaking—Willy, finally freeing the camera, Fuchs thought, more than happy to finish their chore and get back to camp.

A single leaf spun down and landed on his shoulder.

Suddenly, he heard a loud crack, and something was falling out of the tree—seemingly aimed straight at his head. Fuchs jumped back just in time to avoid having his skull fractured by the falling camera—which came down in separate pieces, the larger one trailing a streamer of exposed film.

“Jesus Christ, Willy, you’ve broken it!” Fuchs cried, staring down at the shattered camera. “Who’s going to explain this to S?nger and the colonel? Not me!”

There was no reply.

“Willy?”

Fuchs realized that the forest had gone silent—as if the encroaching mist were swallowing every sound. Even the hum of mosquitoes had ceased abruptly, as had the rain; and yet somehow, this was as startling as a grenade blast.