Hell's Gate(19)

His entire body ached, and he thought about how sometimes, out in the wilderness, no matter how beaten up his body might feel, he actually enjoyed the aches and pains that came with fieldwork. Clearly, though, this was not one of those times. It wasn’t fatigue, nor was it the insect bites, ticks, and thorns—it was what had happened in that village. And surprisingly, it wasn’t the image of the flyblown bodies or even the taste of the flies themselves that kept coming back to him. It was the deep, interior shriek—a command to get away from there. Too loud, too powerful, to be his own imagination. Something had come from outside of his own mind.

GO

Have I inherited my mother’s illness? Does schizophrenia really begin like this?

“All right, next!” MacCready said out loud, forcing himself to concentrate on something else—anything else.

Bob Thorne is alive, he thought, and gave a small laugh. He was still getting used to that one. MacCready pulled a hunk of rapedura out of his pocket and began munching on the toffeelike sugarcane product. As he ate, he thought back to Thorne’s sudden departure from the States. Only a few weeks later, word had arrived about his disappearance. Missing and presumed dead.

What do I tell him if he starts asking about things back home? MacCready shook his head. He had to admit, after five years, he still didn’t know what had sparked the shit storm at Manhattan’s Atlantic Tech.

MacCready tucked away his snack and recalculated his bearings. He had always viewed being lost (which he reluctantly admitted was now the case) as a puzzle, one that could be easily solved. In this instance, Bob’s town was somewhere in the vicinity, and soon it would reveal itself through human activity. He could see for miles across a rocky vista to remote blue cliffs. Terrain-wise, the region was as different from the Amazonian rainforest as the rainforest was from midtown Manhattan. It definitely reminded him of the American Southwest, except that here, towering rock sentinels formed natural shelters for a variety of microclimates. Without climbing more than a hundred feet, he could move between the stunted and gnarled trees of the drier flatland, the Cerrado, into a patch of stratified forest thick with ferns and broad-leaved evergreens.

Then there were the birds. They seemed to be everywhere, toucans and parrots of every size and color. And he’d never seen so many raptors.

Yeah, plenty of birds, he thought, as a flock of emerald-green parakeets burst from the trees calling to one another. As he watched them land at a new gathering place down the road, he noticed a thin plume of smoke in the distance.

“Ta-da!” MacCready said, quietly. That must be the place.

He took a few unsteady steps in the direction of the smoke, which appeared to be about five miles away; but then he stopped. The last of another day’s sunlight was going, and MacCready felt as if someone had arc-welded his vertebrae together. Too tired to head in there now, he told himself. And no sense getting everybody riled up.

MacCready found a patch of flat ground on the overlook that faced the blue cliffs, started a small fire, and spread out his blanket. Within minutes, he was drifting off toward sleep beneath the first starlight.

When he opened his eyes, there were a million stars overhead.

MacCready had never believed in ghosts. But just the same, he was, this night, afraid that he no longer entirely disbelieved in them, either.

“Go!” MacCready said to the night.

But there were only the stars, and the forest—only the hunters and the hunted . . . And the living.

And the dead.

And madness.





CHAPTER 5





Reunion


The doors of Heaven and Hell are adjacent and identical.

—NIKOS KAZANTZAKIS

Maybe this world is another planet’s Hell.

—ALDOUS HUXLEY

Chapada dos Guimar?es, Brazil

January 22, 1944

The first thing MacCready noticed about Chapada dos Guimar?es was the stone archway, from which hung a pair of severed human legs. Two boys, who appeared to be about eight years old, were taking turns shooting arrows at the legs with a small bow. They stopped as MacCready approached, then turned to face him—silently.

MacCready forced a smile and purposely avoided looking at the legs. “Bom dia. Meu nome é MacCready. Alguem fala ingles?”

The children said nothing. Then one of them dropped his bow and they both bolted under the arch, disappearing into the dusty plaza.

“Muito obrigado,” MacCready called after them with a wave. Don’t forget to put your legs away, kids, he thought of adding, but knew that he’d never come close to working out the Portuguese translation.

Common logic told him that the best thing to do was wait around until someone else showed up, but the severed legs, which dangled from bands of rough leather cord, were giving him a serious case of the creeps. So he decided to enter the plaza and look for Thorne, or maybe some breakfast—making certain not to walk under the fermenting limbs.

In the center of the plaza, a magnificently dusty old church stood in faded elegance. Jesuits had built the Igreja de Senhora Sant’ Ana in 1779 with the help of local Indians. These days, it appeared that the congregation had dwindled to a couple of dejected dogs and some scrawny chickens, scratching around in the courtyard. Most of the buildings surrounding the square weren’t much more than huts, and the town exhibited the same casual squalor to which MacCready had become accustomed in the tropics. In fact, he’d come to like the peace of such places. But the silence of Chapada was unusual, and would have been unnerving even without the legs, and the slow circuit of vultures that rode the thermal currents far above the stone arch.