Me Tanner, You Jane

“But everyone has been so terrified.”

“Well, remember the watchamacallit? The Nishanti? The clowns beating bones on the ground in the cemetery?”

“Yes?”

“Well, imagine how terrifying a cult like that could be by the time the story got to be fifth or sixth hand. Or take it from another angle, imagine the story they’re telling about the corpse that walked out of its grave. Nothing like that has happened in almost two thousand years, and-”

“Evan?”

“What?”

“Shall we find your friends?”

“They’re not exactly my friends. I never met either of them before.”

“Then how will you know them?”

“They’re both tall,” I said. “And black.”

She looked at me.

“Hell,” I said. “I think we can assume that any two tall black men out here who speak English are odds-on to be Knanda Ndoro and Sam Bowman. And I’ve got a recognition signal to bounce off Bowman. He doesn’t know I exist, but when I give him the password he’ll know that he is to trust me.”

“A password. It sounds-”

“It sounds kind of Mickey Mouse,” I suggested.

“I do not understand.”

“It sounds cornball. Silly and, uh, oh, like something out of a crumby movie.”

“Mickey Mouse,” she said.

“Right.”

“I know that mouse from the movies. He can speak, but his dog ca

“Well, it’s too subtle for an African girl.”

Her hand moved quickly. “If I were Sheena,” she said, mock-savagely, “I would cut this off.”

“Don’t even talk like that.”

“But I am not Sheena,” she said, “and must think of something better to do. Help me think of something, Evan. Oh, Evan-”

Two nights later, as the sun was just dropping out of sight in the west, we came into view of the mission. We reached the top of a small rise and looked down across a few hundred yards of cleared fields to a trio of squat concrete-block buildings. The Père Julien Mission, staffed with Belgian priests and nuns and nurses. I planted my feet and looked across at the mission and felt like Balboa, silent upon a peak in Darien. Like Brigham Young, catching his first glimpse of Utah. Like Moses upon Mount Nebo. I searched for words appropriate to the occasion.

“That’s the place,” I said.

“Is that all?”

“What did you expect? Loew’s 83rd?”

“Pardon?”

“What I mean is that this isn’t so bad for the middle of the jungle. Three buildings, and they’re of pretty good size, and some plowed fields with things growing in them, and I suppose they’ve got some animals, probably chickens in that shed over on the left and maybe some goats or cows. After all, it’s been a while since we’ve seen anything you could call a building. Or anything you could call a meal, as far as that goes. I know it isn’t much when you’re used to a metropolis like Griggstown, but-”

“You are making fun of me.”

“A little bit.”

“But I did think it would be more, oh, I don’t know.”

I knew what she meant. We had been building the mission up in our minds to the point where it loomed as the end of the journey. In the course of the past two days we had run into perhaps a half dozen groups of natives, none of whom we could quite communicate with but all of whom kept pointing us toward the mission. We also managed to gather, between the grunts and ersatz-pidgin phrases, that (a) Sheena was in the area, (b) they would know of this in the mission, and (c) something very exciting was going to happen. So if they had scored the whole thing for a movie, there would have been this gradual drum roll picking up in volume and tempo until we reached that peak, and then the music would stop and the camera would move for a long shot of the mission, and there would be these three dumpy little blockhouses.

The closer we got to the mission, the more it reminded me of a movie set. I couldn’t avoid the feeling that these three buildings were false fronts with nothing behind them. The place was obviously not abandoned – a heap of weeds drying in the dying sun could not have been pulled more than a few hours ago. And yet there was a feeling of utter desolation.

“I’m afraid,” Plum said in a still small voice, changing once again from woman to child. And put her hand in mine, and held on tight.

I called out, “Hello!” I called out similar words and phrases in French and in Flemish.

There was no answer.

“Evan, perhaps they are at their prayers.”

“Perhaps.”

I started forward. Plum ’s hand stopped me. “It would not do to interrupt them, Evan.”

“Well, I’ll just see what-”

“Perhaps we should wait until morning.”

“What’s the matter with you?”

Her face was drawn, her lip trembling. “I don’t know. I don’t think we should go in there.”

“Why not?”

“I told you I don’t know.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said. I called out again in Flemish. I uncurled Plum ’s fingers and took my hand back. I trotted on to the doorway of the nearest and smallest building, calling things out as I went.

There was a buzzing sound, the droning of flies. The door was ajar. I gave it a gentle shove and it swung open. The buzzing got louder. I looked down and saw the flies swarming around the girl’s leg.

The rest of the girl was a few yards away on the right. And past her, scattered here and there around the room, were the others.

Chapter 7

Plum screamed for about three quarters of an hour, pausing intermittently to vomit. She would throw back her head and shriek and wail, eyes rolling, nails digging into palms, tears streaming down face, and then the screams would break abruptly off and she would toss her head forward like a robin bobbin’ along, and then she would throw up. Followed by more screaming.

I couldn’t blame her. I spent a while trying to calm her down, and when that proved impossible I made her as comfortable as she was likely to get while I took a look around the place and surveyed the damage, which was total. When I took a head count, and I wish I did not mean that as literally as I do, I came up with a tally of thirty-four dead, twenty-five women and nine men.

They were not merely dead. Death in itself is chilling to look upon, however inoffensive and antiseptic the form it takes. But these men and women had been torn apart. It was not always possible to tell what belonged to whom.

I had seen this sort of thing before. In war movies soldiers die neatly of invisible wounds, but when I was in Korea death was apt to be messy. I can still remember the sight of a group of fellows who had been playing cards when a shell landed among the four of them. The task of sorting and compiling their bodies for shipment home was largely arbitrary. Like the Belgian priests and nuns and nurses, they had been made a hash of.

Yet this was different. A shell, a bomb, an explosive charge – these are essentially impersonal affairs, and if they make death a messy business they do so with no special malice.

Sheena had acted with malice. The carnage in the three buildings was the work not of a single explosive charge but of uncountable blows with knife and ax and machete, so that each aspect of the outrage had a very personal stamp upon it. All of the bodies had been decapitated, and most arms and legs had been hacked off as well. The women had been separated from their breasts. In similar fashion, the men had been emasculated, but in their case the organs of which they had been deprived were nowhere to be found. Sheena seemed to have taken them along, for reasons I did not care to consider.

I didn’t get sick. I felt the way I do when I drink too much strong coffee, all tightly strung and jittery. I paced from one building to another, stopping to comfort Plum, then moving on again, and I looked at flesh and blood over and over again until it lost its impact. Then I found Plum and took hold of her. She was still hysterical. I held her chin in one hand and slapped her face with the other. She clutched me and gasped and stopped the sobbing and caught hold of herself.