* * * * *
Dalton pulled a rickety chair toward him and sat down straddling it.
"I don't know," he said slowly. "_It_ was very likely a creature of
the last interglacial period. The ice may have finished its kind."
"The ice never touched these equatorial forests." Thwaite smiled
unpleasantly. "And the Indians and old settlers down here have
stories--about a thing that calls in the _mato_, that can paralyze a
man with fear. _Currupira_ is their name for it.
"When I remembered those stories they fell into place alongside a lot
of others from different countries and times--the Sirens, for
instance, and the Lorelei. Those legends are ancient. But perhaps here
in the Amazon basin, in the forests that have never been cut and the
swamps that have never been drained, the _currupira_ is still real and
alive. I _hope_ so!"
"Why?"
"I want to meet it. I want to show it that men can destroy it with all
its unholy power." Thwaite bore down viciously on the file and the
bright flakes of lead glittered to the floor beside his feet.
Dalton watched him with eyes of compassion. He heard the frog music
swelling outside, a harrowing reminder of ultimate blasphemous insult,
and he felt the futility of argument.
"Remember, I heard it too," Dalton said. "And I sensed what you did.
That voice or some combination of frequencies or overtones within it,
is resonant to the essence of evil--the fundamental life-hating
self-destroying evil in man--even to have glimpsed it, to have heard
the brainless beast mocking, was an outrage to humanity that a man
must...."
Dalton paused, got a grip on himself. "But, consider--the outrage was
wiped out, humanity won its victory over the monster a long time ago.
What if it isn't quite extinct? That record was fifty thousand years
old."
"What did you do with the record?" Thwaite looked up sharply.
"I obliterated that--the voice and the pictures that went with it from
the film before I returned it to the Museum."
Thwaite sighed deeply. "Good. I was damning myself for not doing that
before I left."
The linguist said, "I think it answered my question as much as I want
it answered. The origin of speech--lies in the will to power, the lust
to dominate other men by preying on the weakness or evil in them.
"Those first men didn't just guess that such power existed--they
_knew_ because the beast had taught them and they tried to imitate
it--the mystagogues and tyrants through the ages, with voices, with
tomtoms and bull-roarers and trumpets. What makes the memory of that
voice so hard to live with is just knowing that what it called to is a
part of man--isn't that it?"
Thwaite didn't answer. He had taken the heavy rifle across his knees
and was methodically testing the movement of the well-oiled breech
mechanism.
Dalton stood up wearily and picked up his suitcase. "I'll check into
the hotel. Suppose we talk this over some more in the morning. Maybe
things'll look different by daylight."
But in the morning Thwaite was gone--upriver with a hired boatman,
said the natives. The note he had left said only, _Sorry. But it's no
use talking about humanity--this is personal._
Dalton crushed the note angrily, muttering under his breath, "The
fool! Didn't he realize I'd go with him?" He hurled the crumpled paper
aside and stalked out to look for a guide.
* * * * *
They chugged slowly westward up the forest-walled river, an obscure
tributary that flowed somewhere into the Xingu. After four days, they
had hopes of being close on the others' track. The brown-faced guide,
Joao, who held the tiller now, was a magician. He had conjured up an
ancient outboard motor for the scow-like boat Dalton had bought from a
fisherman.
The sun was setting murkily and the sluggish swell of the water ahead
was the color of witch's blood. Under its opaque surface _a mae
dagua_, the Mother of Water, ruled over creatures slimy and
razor-toothed. In the blackness beneath the great trees, where it was
dark even at noon, other beings had their kingdom.
Out of the forest came the crying grunting hooting voices of its life
that woke at nightfall, fiercer and more feverish than that of the
daytime. To the man from the north there seemed something indecent in
the fertile febrile swarming of life here. Compared to a temperate
woodland the _mato_ was like a metropolis against a sleepy village.
"What's that?" Dalton demanded sharply as a particularly hideous
squawk floated across the water.
"_Nao e nada. A bicharia agitase._" Joao shrugged. "The menagerie
agitates itself." His manner indicated that some _bichinho_ beneath
notice had made the noise.
But moments later the little brown man became rigid. He half rose to
his feet in the boat's stern, then stooped and shut off the popping
motor. In the relative silence the other heard what he had--far off
and indistinct, muttering deep in the black _mato_, a voice that
croaked of ravenous hunger in accents abominably known to him.
"_Currupira_," said Joao tensely. "_Currupira sai a cacada da noite._"
He watched the foreigner with eyes that gleamed in the fading light
like polished onyx.
"_Avante!_" snapped Dalton. "See if it comes closer to the river this
time."
It was not the first time they had heard that voice calling since they
had ventured deep into the unpeopled swampland about which the
downriver settlements had fearful stories to whisper.
Silently the guide spun the engine. The boat sputtered on. Dalton
strained his eyes, watching the darkening shore as he had watched
fruitlessly for so many miles.
But now, as they rounded a gentle bend, he glimpsed a small reddish
spark near the bank. Then, by the last glimmer of the swiftly fading
twilight, he made out a boat pulled up under gnarled tree-roots. That
was all he could see but the movement of the red spark told him a man
was sitting in the boat, smoking a cigarette.
"In there," he ordered in a low voice but Joao had seen already and
was steering toward the shore.
The cigarette arched into the water and hissed out and they heard a
scuffling and lap of water as the other boat swayed, which meant that
the man in it had stood up.
He sprang into visibility as a flashlight in Dalton's hand went on. A
squat, swarthy man with rugged features, a _caboclo_, of white and
Indian blood. He blinked expressionlessly at the light.
"Where is the American scientist?" demanded Dalton in Portuguese.
"_Quem sabe? Foi-se._"
"Which way did he go?"
"_Nao importa. O doutor e doido; nao ha-de-voltar_," said the man
suddenly. "It doesn't matter. The doctor is crazy--he won't come
back."
"Answer me, damn it! Which way?"
The _caboclo_ jerked his shoulders nervously and pointed.
"Come on!" said Dalton and scrambled ashore even as Joao was stopping
the motor and making the boat fast beside the other. "He's gone in
after it!"
The forest was a black labyrinth. Its tangled darkness seemed to drink
up the beam of the powerful flashlight Dalton had brought, its uneasy
rustlings and animal-noises pressed in to swallow the sound of human
movements for which he strained his ears, fearing to call out. He
pushed forward recklessly, carried on by a sort of inertia of
determination; behind him Joao followed, though he moved woodenly and
muttered prayers under his breath.
Then somewhere very near a great voice croaked briefly and was
silent--so close that it poured a wave of faintness over the hearer,
seemed to send numbing electricity tingling along his motor nerves.
Joao dropped to his knees and flung both arms about a tree-bole. His
brown face when the light fell on it was shiny with sweat, his eyes
dilated and blind-looking. Dalton slammed the heel of his hand against
the man's shoulder and got no response save for a tightening of the
grip on the treetrunk, and a pitiful whimper, "_Assombra-me_--it
overshadows me!"
Dalton swung the flashlight beam ahead and saw nothing. Then all at
once, not fifty yards away, a single glowing eye sprang out of the
darkness, arched through the air and hit the ground to blaze into
searing brilliance and white smoke. The clearing in which it burned
grew bright as day, and Dalton saw a silhouetted figure clutching a
rifle and turning its head from side to side.
He plunged headlong toward the light of the flare, shouting, "Thwaite,
you idiot! You can't--"
And then the _currupira_ spoke.
Its bellowing seemed to come from all around, from the ground, the
trees, the air. It smote like a blow in the stomach that drives out
wind and fight. And it roared on, lashing at the wills of those who
heard it, beating and stamping them out like sparks of a scattered
fire.
Dalton groped with one hand for his pocket but his hand kept slipping
away into a matterless void as his vision threatened to slip into
blindness. Dimly he saw Thwaite, a stone's throw ahead of him, start
to lift his weapon and then stand frozen, swaying a little on his feet
as if buffeted by waves of sound.
Already the second theme was coming in--the insidious obbligato of
invitation to death, wheedling that _this way ... this way ..._ was
the path from the torment and terror that the monstrous voice flooded
over them.
Thwaite took a stiff step, then another and another, toward the black
wall of the _mato_ that rose beyond the clearing. With an
indescribable shudder Dalton realized that he too had moved an
involuntary step forward. The _currupira's_ voice rose triumphantly.
With a mighty effort of will Dalton closed fingers he could not feel
on the object in his pocket. Like a man lifting a mountain he lifted
it to his lips.
A high sweet note cut like a knife through the roll of nightmare
drums. With terrible concentration Dalton shifted his fingers and blew
and blew....
Piercing and lingering, the tones of the pipes flowed into his veins,
tingling, warring with the numbing poison of the _currupira's_ song.
Dalton was no musician but it seemed to him then that an ancestral
instinct was with him, guiding his breath and his fingers. The powers
of the monster were darkness and cold and weariness of living, the
death-urge recoiling from life into nothingness.
But the powers of the pipes were life and light and warmth, life
returning when the winter is gone, greenness and laughter and love.
Life was in them, life of men dead these thousand generations, life
even of the craftsmen on an alien planet who had preserved their form
and their meaning for this moment.
Dalton advanced of his own will until he stood beside Thwaite--but the
other remained unstirring and Dalton did not dare pause for a moment,
while the monster yet bellowed in the blackness before them. The light
of the flare was reddening, dying....
After a seeming eternity he saw motion, saw the rifle muzzle swing up.
The shot was deafening in his ear, but it was an immeasurable relief.
As it echoed the _currupira's_ voice was abruptly silent. In the
bushes ahead there was a rending of branches, a frantic slithering
movement of a huge body.
They followed the noises in a sort of frenzy, plunging toward them
heedless of thorns and whipping branches. The flashlight stabbed and
revealed nothing. Out of the shadows a bass croaking came again, and
Thwaite fired twice at the sound and there was silence save for a
renewed flurry of cracking twigs.
Along the water's edge, obscured by the trees between, moved something
black and huge, that shone wetly. Thwaite dropped to one knee and
began firing at it, emptying the magazine.
They pressed forward to the margin of the slough, feet squishing in
the deep muck. Dalton played his flashlight on the water's surface and
the still-moving ripples seemed to reflect redly.
Thwaite was first to break the silence. He said grimly, "Damned lucky
for me you got here when you did. It--_had_ me."
Dalton nodded without speaking.
"But how did you know what to do?" Thwaite asked.
"It wasn't my discovery," said the linguist soberly. "Our remote
ancestors met this threat and invented a weapon against it. Otherwise
man might not have survived. I learned the details from the Martian
records when I succeeded in translating them. Fortunately the Martians
also preserved a specimen of the weapon our ancestors invented."
He held up the little reed flute and the archeologist's eyes widened
with recognition.
Dalton looked out across the dark swamp-water, where the ripples were
fading out. "In the beginning there was the voice of evil--but there
was also the music of good, created to combat it. Thank God that in
mankind's makeup there's more than one fundamental note!"