Chapter 21: No Rest for the Weary
He only realized he’d lost his shoes when his big toe slammed into the gnarled root curling away into the undergrowth. An explosion ricocheted through his head as his knees gave out and he fell to the ground face-first, skidding through the mud and grass. He lay there motionless, blinded by the mud for several minutes, waiting for the pain to subside. The sun had fallen until its light hung in the trees like an oily cloth drenched and dripping all around him. He had no idea how long he’d been running but the rasping tear of breath and his pounding heart was proof it had been a good while. Finally, when the pain eased off enough for him to sit up, his skin immediately began bitching about the multitude of slashes that criss-crossed his body and oozed dark blood from beneath the mud that covered them.
He took several moments trying to knock the dirt and mud off, grimacing through the pain. Then he pushed himself away from the slick spot he’d cut in the wire grass, around to the dry side of a crooked cypress that pointed like a thin finger toward a break in the canopy, letting through just a whisper of light. Even so, there was too little light left to distinguish much in the murk where he’d fallen. Already the voracious insects had found him in the gloom.
He crouched down low, drawing up his knees, willing himself acute to every nuance, every minute creak in the brush. He still had a hard time justifying the reason for his flight, and fought the internal voice that told him incessantly now that he’d gone around the bend. Was this how it felt?
He could actually sense his mind working, and from the best resources of his memory and faculties, he felt sane. Regardless, there was one huge problem: he was utterly lost, shivering like a baby, completely alone, fighting every step of the way against a thing he’d only considered possible in nightmares. He kept waiting for the punch line to this hideous joke, or the light to come through his bedroom window at home. He practically prayed for the moment he’d come violently awake in his own bed in Thibodaux, these events and terrors merely figments of a nightmare that would dissipate with the first cup of coffee and cigarette of the morning. The only problem was morning was not coming. He was somehow lost in the blackness of a hell he’d never imagined. He actually worried that he might be dead already and reaping the benefits of his riotous life. The memory of the Gook village (the one that had hidden itself so well for so long) had come back in all its lethal glory, and now Frederick expected no quarter. As if an old room had been discovered in the ruin of his mind. He could still see the little girl rocking the head right before he’d pulled the trigger. And why? It didn’t matter. For him there would be no redemption.
He shook his head. This was no nightmare and hell was real. The fatigue was real. The heaviness of his backpack was real. The bugs and heat were real. He pulled his bleeding, bare feet out of the mud and stared at them. They were real.
That, perhaps, was the worst thing of all.
Even if everything else could be explained away in some completely rational (or even irrational) way, the fact that he was bootless brought everything home. He was here, now, and this was real. Barefoot in the motherfucking jungle. A death sentence. If he was going crazy (and all arrows seemed to point in that general direction), then it appeared the time for backtracking and repossessing his soul was long past. Whatever had prompted him into the mad scramble away from the lagoon (whether it was real or simply a manifestation of his growing insanity) had left him stranded with only the slightest protection. While another question nagged at him.
Did sitting lost in a jungle, shivering and bootless, on the run from drug dealers, rogue Indians, and a fucking zombie of all things necessitate a mind that was no longer in control? Probably. Unless all this shit was true. But it couldn’t be. Somewhere along the line you went south, my man, and you’re sitting here spinning your wheels trying to convince yourself you’re still sane. Because that is the great paradox of insanity. Even completely fucking nuts, you still manage to believe you’re logical. You’re sane. He stretched out his hand, flexing his fingers as he stared in silence. Real.
He let the hand drop loosely to his side as he stared off into the gloom. Night was not far off, was never far off. “No,” he said. “I’ve got to be fucking loony tunes. Something’s happened to me, malaria, something.” He whistled briefly and stopped when the hair on his neck stood on end.
Something was moving in the underbrush.
He pushed to his feet with a great heave, a branch catching his backpack and pulling it down his backs. He strained to see through the undergrowth. And make no mistake: this was no clearing whatsoever. He was as tightly packed in here as a can of sardines. The air held hostage, the ground covered with a multitude of shrubs and other brush, growing in clustered humps of black and deeper black. Like a goddamn cage.
The sound again, but he could see no movement. The light was now nearly gone and Frederick suddenly realized how ultimately dark the area would be in no time at all.
Then, there again, a shuffling scrape, followed by what must have been a lurch forward, then a splash. Even in the dream-like sponge of his surroundings, Frederick could tell that whatever approached was coming from the same direction he’d just come from.
A certain blinding terror began deep down in the pit of his stomach, radiating outward. He tasted bile at the base of his throat but could produce no spit to clear it away. His pulse began to race as the last, thin vestiges of bravado filtered away like smoke, and it was then that a portion of his mind did slip, beginning the inevitable true slide. He hunched over at first and quickly broke into the humid, stinking darkness; anything to be away from the leaking shadow that crawled ever after him.
Because that eye had found him out again.
He ran in the blurring tailwind of terror, his pack now lost, his broken toe hardly slowing him at all. He tripped over a root (the snap of his left ankle like a gunshot), threw out his hands as he fell forward. He bounced off the side of a thickly vined tree trunk and went down in a muddy spray, his mouth full of mud.
He’d paid no mind that he was rushing along in a slick runoff, but he neither had the strength nor the presence of mind to jig left or right in an attempt to alter or stay his course. Now, head down, he flew over the lip of the pit welled deep into the ground at the end of the muddy slide. Then he plunged headlong into the pitch black emptiness of the swollen, underground cavern that awaited him below. He fell only a moment before the cold water stole his breath. Then he floated, sputtering, his ankle momentarily forgotten as he kicked desperately back to the surface for air.
In the darkness he heard the hollow, echo-filled howl of falling water. He offered up his own shouts to no avail. The broken ankle began to scream in earnest now, flapping back and forth in the water, so that he could only just keep his head above water every now and again. It took several more minutes to realize he was being carried along by a swiftly-running current.
It was also right about this time that he heard the meaty thump of something else splashing into the water not far behind him. It didn’t take a genius to figure out what it was. Then nothing but the roar of water tearing through the cavern. He pawed weakly at the surface, spinning along like a kitten cast off a country bridge in the water below.
He prepared himself for the end.
But it was as his head lolled back in the chilled water that he began to make out what appeared to be a haze in the distance. Through the pitch subterranean darkness a light suddenly appeared, grew, and his already frantic mind provided the story. He was already dead, he thought, dead and racing toward the light people had been talking about his whole life. He began to fear for his soul.
He raced along faster now in the current, speeding helplessly toward a finish line he so desperately wished to avoid. But as he got closer the haze morphed itself into a general craggy orifice of rock. And a sound like a waterfall. Of a waterfall.
He tried to spin around so that his head was pointing down current, fanned out his arms and kicked with his good leg t
o keep his head up. And it was in this parody of dog-paddling (biting his lip clean through from the pain in his ankle) that Frederick made out the dimensions of his watery labyrinth. The ceiling was the better part of fifty feet high, and the sides stretched out to half that. What he at first thought were vines hanging from the ceiling were actually roots dangling down from above. The closer he got to the light the more speed he picked up.
No farther than fifty yards from the craggy opening he caught a brilliant glimpse of moonlight. A little farther along and the yellow moon peered through into the waste of the monstrous dripping hole. In another second he was suddenly flung over the lip of the waterfall, plunging with the same graceless ballet into the opposite side of the lagoon that he’d seen across the point of the finger island, in what now seemed like another lifetime.
He didn’t fall long and when he did splash down his breath was raked away. He went under, far down, and slowly struggled back to the surface. He broke sputtering and gagging, retching into the water that pitched about his face. The noise was terrific, like a low-throated steam train pouring down a mountain, alive with blazing torrents of falling water. He worked his arms to circle him out of the zero point, fighting to find still water in the rage. He was not out of the worst of it when an unmistakable splash came from close by.
That, and a stench that burned the air.
Terrified, Frederick kicked immediately in the opposite direction. Stars, constellations, burst in front of his eyes as the force of the water ground at his broken ankle, but he kicked on regardless, his breath coming in gasping spurts. Overhead, it was a surprisingly cloudless night. Ribbons of clouds were tenuous, ephemeral. The bright moon cast down a knifing scar. But there was enough light to see the misshapen head when it broke the surface no more than thirty feet away.
The burning eye was back.
Frederick screamed. Every muscle in his face worked against the others, transforming his features into a mask of pain and bewilderment. The smell was overpowering, and even though it was impossible to concentrate, it was obvious the thing was approaching from the way his skin crawled along his bones.
Frederick quit floundering and threw his right arm around, straining to break into the swimming crawl that had not done him bad up till now. The pain in his ankle was immense--the pressure of glaciation, the filing down of mountains--and his vision faded in and out. At times he was sure he could make out a rocky bank close by, but at the next stroke he would see only blackness and fall back upon his hell theory. He believed himself now deeply mired in one horrible moment, chased by every wicked deed and intention he’d ever entertained, racing down a slide to things that would only prove worse. He thirsted now for oblivion.
It became impossible to keep his head above water, the act of holding his breath becoming weaker and weaker. When he felt the fingers clutch around his shattered ankle there was no energy left to be surprised.
He was suddenly pulled below the surface, the fight gone from his limbs. But his mind still railed on. For a moment he was a child being pulled along by the old cocker spaniel bitch, Sadie, as he pedaled his bike down the street from his parents’ house; then a corresponding sensation of walking through thick mud in both Vietnam and Colombia, for some reason unable to free his legs from their gummy prison; and then there was the human-standard chase in slow motion when the monster from nightmare finally claims you. It was inevitable. In the end the monster always got you.
As a final act Frederick opened his eyes, freeing himself of the insane nightmare his mind had become. Surely now he would wake to find himself home in Thibodaux, sleeping off a drunk with some whore by his side. Of course, it was very clear now. He would have to re-think the Franklin run. Nightmares were really nothing to mess around with. Frederick knew this now, his life had changed.
He blew out what remained of his air and opened his eyes to watery darkness and the irresistible pull from below. He tried vainly to scream himself awake, succeeding only in letting in a lung-filling gout of water, and then nothing as he went deeper and deeper.
And soon the lagoon was once again unbroken save for the continuous drumming rhythm that the waterfall played on through the night.