Authors: Tom Knox
She declined.
‘My apartment is near.’
‘
D’accord
. This is a sad day.’ He glanced up at the weeping sky. ‘And now it is raining.
Il pleure dans mon Coeur, Comme il pleut sur la ville
.’
Julia nodded. ‘It rains in my heart like it rains in the city? I know that line . . . Rimbaud?’
‘Ah no. It is in Verlaine, in the works of Verlaine.’
His smile was good natured and sad; it was obvious he really wanted to leave. But she risked one more question. She had so many questions, but there was one question she needed to ask now, she felt it was important, she didn’t know why.
‘Monsieur Rouvier –’
He was actually walking away; but he turned.
‘
Oui
?’
‘You said Ghislaine’s grandfather was a famous scientist. What was he famous for?’
The officer was standing beneath a streetlight; rain tinselled in the glow as he pondered the question. Then he smiled faintly, his face illuminated by an answer:
‘I might be wrong, but I think it was breeding. Yes, something
audacious
. He had a bold theory, about cross-breeding . . . between men and animals? OK, Miss Kerrigan,
au revoir
.’
She watched him disappear across the badly lit car park. Then she began the walk to her flat, through the biting cold of the rain. Her own footsteps were a soft backbeat to her thoughts, her deep deep thoughts. Puddles on the grey pavement reflected the Mende streetlights, they reflected her pensive face; and the revelation was the reflection of a sudden moon, emerging from behind the clouds, large and startling.
In Verlaine, that’s what Rouvier had said.
In Verlaine.
And that’s what Ghislaine had said, in his own way.
You’ll find it in Prunier.
The same way Rouvier had said
in Verlaine
.
You’ll find it in
Prunier!
Could this be the answer? To the puzzle? Was this why she was stymied?
She had presumed when Ghislaine had said ‘in Prunier’ he meant ‘in Prunier, the village in north Lozère’; and last week she had visited the place, and found nothing.
But maybe when Ghislaine had spoken that day on the Cham he meant his phrase in the same way an academic might say ‘in Shakespeare’, or ‘in Darwin’. Ghislaine’s meaning must have been: you’ll find it
in the works
of Prunier
the scholar.
Yes!
Quickly, she collected her chastened wits. Prunier or Prunieres was a not entirely uncommon surname. It belonged to no scholar she knew, but this was evidently an obscure corner of French science. Maybe a local man? Or someone very dead, from very long ago.
Ten minutes’ brisk walk to her apartment and two hours in front of her laptop screen, laboriously translating the most obscure and recherché French websites, finally gave her the answer.
Pierre Barthelemey
Prunieres.
She was right.
It turned out he was an antiquarian who flourished in the mid nineteenth century. Pierre Barthelemy Prunieres did much research in Lozère; and he came from Marvejols. Long forgotten, he was once, the website said, known for his research in osteo-archaeology: skulls and skeletons he unearthed in the caves and dolmens of his native region, like ‘
baumes chaudes’
in the Tarn. And near Saint Pierre de Tripier – in ‘
le grotte de l’homme mort’
.
Le grotte de l’homme mort?
The cave of the dead man.
She wrote down the phrase in a pad, circled it, stared at it. The name was poetic, but it meant nothing in itself. She circled the name again, then returned to her computer. And ten more minutes on the laptop brought her a much more sincere frisson, a real buzz, a frightening revelation.
The world pulsed on the screen:
trépanation.
Trepanned.
It seemed this man Prunieres had unearthed precisely the same kind of remains as Julia. A hundred and fifty years before.
Trepanned skulls
. Horribly wounded; deliberately drilled.
Julia stood, dry mouthed, and walked to her rain-scribbled window. The grey slate roofs of Mende were framed by the dark hills beyond: the Causses and the Cham, and the wild and empty Margeride.
Rising from the bed Jake slowly approached the door. Hanging from the hook was a terrible
thing.
What was it? A tiny dead monkey? A dried fruit bat?
What the fuck was this?
A brown leathery mammalian corpse just hanging here? Surely it couldn’t be worse, surely it couldn’t be what he most of all feared?
His revulsion mixed with his furious curiosity. He walked closer. And then his stomach surged, with the bile, of confirmed disgust.
This was no monkey. This was unmistakeably
not
animal.
It was a human embryo.
A human foetus, somehow dried or mummified, was hanging by its own umbilical cord from the coathook on the door.
The foetus stared at him. Its blank open eyes were milky white.
He heard a scream.
He stared.
The scream didn’t register; it was like a distant car alarm, not really meant for him, he was so transfixed by the sight of those eyes, dead eyes rolled back, like his sister, no, don’t think this way, but he couldn’t help it: slowly he pulled on his jeans and a shirt and all the time he kept staring at the baby, the dead foetus, the milky white eyes, like his sister’s, lying in the road; until he realized it was Chemda. Screaming.
Chemda!
He kicked open his door and the scream was still loud in his ears – her room was next to his. Shunting through her door, he found her, sitting on her bed, panting and gasping, her face wrought with fear. She was pointing at something, wordless and terrorized.
He didn’t have to guess. Hanging by its umbilical cord, from the rafters of the timbered room, was another foetus.
‘Chemda.
Come on
–’
She was naked, wrapped in sheets. She didn’t move.
‘Chemda. Please.
Now!
’
He walked over to her, took her damp hand; her eyes looked beyond him, through him, at some fearful horizon. Then a lucidity reappeared; she nodded, dumbly, he turned away as she slipped on a dress. Before they could open the door a maid was in the room; the maid also screamed. Jake grabbed Chemda’s hand once more and they fled into the garden.
He was agitated for an hour; it took Chemda two hours to calm down. Madame Marconnet brought tea and a blanket and the maid hovered, distraught; and Chemda stared at the river and the boats and the algae nets and the singing fisher men and for a hundred minutes she said nothing, rocking backwards and forwards. And then, finally, she spoke.
‘Talismans. They are talismans.’
‘What?’
‘In Khmer –
koh krohen
. . . or
kun krak
.’
Once more she fell silent.
They were alone again, in the secluded riverside garden of the Gauguin. Madame Marconnet had withdrawn, the maids had gone back to work – to clean the rooms, and take away those horrible
things.
The garden was beautiful. In front of them the milk-chocolate waters of the river Mekong communed with the dark chocolate waters of the river Nam Khan. But all Jake could think about was those cold and dead and horrible milky eyes. Above them the leaves of the tamarinds tinkled and whispered, yet Chemda was still shivering with fright.
He needed to know.
‘Talismans. What kind of talismans. How?’
She looked his way; she was visibly struggling to master her emotions. ‘It will all sound insane. But you must know the Khmers are very superstitious. Ah. For instance, you see the little spirit houses everywhere in Cambodia, to trap evil ghosts, the
neak ta
? Right? And gangsters with sacred tattoos, to ward off bullets, Phnom Penh is full of them.’
Jake nodded. He had seen these tiny sinister shrines. And yes the tattooed gangsters were everywhere, draped with blessed amulets.
‘I’ve seen all that. But why here, us, why those
things?
’
‘The belief in spirits goes deep in my culture Jake.’ She shuddered again. ‘Very deep. Even the Khmer Rouge, for all their atheism, were the same: animist and superstitious. And it’s not just Khmers who believe in the power of Khmer voodoo.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Khmer voodoo, Khmer black magic, is feared right across Southeast Asia. The Lao hate it, the Thais fear it, the Malays, the Burmese, the Chinese all pay homage. The Thai prime minister is thought, by Thais, to use Khmer talismans, the
kratha.
’
Down by the pier fishermen were hauling in nets, a meagre catch of little silvery fish. Pungent and flapping.
‘So what exactly are these talismans in our room? You called them something. Just now.’
‘
Koh krohen
. They could be
koh krohen
. Ah. Dead babies. Embalmed.’
He shook his head, revolted and disgusted, watching the watermen on the river speeding past in their longtail boats, churning the chocomilk water.
‘They are miscarried foetuses.
Mummified
?’
‘Yes. But, sometimes they can be worse than that. I suspect the
kratha
in our rooms are even
more
evil.’
‘Worse?? How could they be any fucking worse?’
‘The babies in our rooms, ah, I don’t know for sure, but my guess is they aren’t just miscarried foetuses.’ She gazed away at the river, torpid and decaying; ‘I think the ones in our rooms were the worst of all. Even worse than the ghost children.’
‘Yes?’
‘What we saw, hanging from the door, was probably
Kun Krak
. Smoke babies. They are babies that have been . . .’ She blinked, twice, and then again. ‘Ripped out of a woman’s living womb, then doused in some kind of sacred oil, then they are smoked over a fire. Some call them
kuk krun
. Well done babies.’
She paused. Jake gazed between the papayas and the jackfruit, trying not to dwell on this truly appalling information. Murdered babies of a murdered woman; foetuses anointed and smoked.
‘Sweet fucking Jesus.’ His voice was choked.
Chemda’s eyes were moist, and shy. ‘The fact someone put them in . . . my room, our rooms, means someone wants us out. It is a direct and devilish threat, Jake. Designed to unnerve. And yes I am unnerved. The smoke babies. It scares me. Ah.’
He regained himself. Angrily.
‘But Chemda. You’re a Californian, right? You went to UCLA. You know it’s all bollocks. This is just, just voodoo. Juju dolls, dead chickens, zombies. It means nothing –’
‘I can’t help it. I
believe
it, Jake. Somewhere inside I do fear it, horribly; it’s part of my root culture. Maybe more than that; maybe it’s genetic. I wish I didn’t but I can’t help it. Ah. Can’t help it.’
This was the closest she had come to breaking. So far, Chemda had been relatively unfazed by the bloody death of the professor Samnang; she had been determined, and decisive, when they were fleeing the police at Jar Site 9; she had arranged their escape from the Secret City with a valiant coolness bordering on sangfroid; but a brief if chilling encounter with black magic, that had thrown her.
But if Jake was honest with himself: it had also thrown him. Like someone was taunting him with his worst fears and guilt. The little dead child, eyes rolled and white.
Trying to void his mind of the image, he looked around – Agnes Marconnet was standing, once more, at the edge of the riverside lawns, anxiously looking their way. The hotel owner had been a state of anguished nerves ever since the ghastly discovery, apologizing and speculating. Who had put these hideous things in the room.
Mais pourquoi . . . C’est pas croyable . . . Mes propres employés? Je suis vraiment désolée . . .
But as he stared, Jake also became aware, through the screen of the trees at the edge of the garden, of a police car. Parked on the road that concluded at the Gauguin. A police car? Probably it was coincidence; but certainly it was a reminder:
get out of Laos.
‘OK. Fuck this. Superstition or not, Chem, we need to go,
now
. But how?’
Chemda sighed.
‘The roads, they are so long, and so bad. Hn. It will take two or three days. I can’t face it. We cannot fly out.’
‘And we can’t even leave the hotel. Look.’
He tilted his head, significantly. Chemda squinted at the police car.
‘How long has he been there??’
‘Who knows? We need to
go
. Another way.’
Jake gazed at the longtailed boats. The sun of an idea dazzled on the Mekong’s dark ripples.
‘How about the river? Doesn’t it go to Thailand. Eventually?’
Her face brightened, a fraction.
‘It does . . . Ah yes, yes it does!’
‘So we get a boat. Right away, down there, on the pier. Hire one.
Anything!’
Chemda gestured towards the weathered old shutters of the hotel.
‘Maybe Agnes can help us. Yes! That is the best idea.
The river.’
Stepping through the long morning shadows of the trees, Chemda spoke hurriedly in French with Agnes, for several minutes. Jake stood back, feeling frustrated and monolingual. What were they saying? Would Agnes help?
At last Chemda turned.
‘Agnes knows the very place, a day upriver, upstream. She has an old friend who can take us all the way, past Pak Beng. It’s wilderness up there, after that we can just walk into Thailand. Then, at last we are out of Laos. Then we fly to PP from Chiang Rai!’
‘Let’s do it. And
quick.’
The preparations were swift: twenty minutes or less. And yet they still felt agonizingly prolonged. As Chemda packed her bag Jake lingered in the shadows of the tamarinds, staring at the police car beyond the fence. The policeman was just sitting there. Head tilted. Maybe sleeping. Maybe not.
Chemda emerged from the hotel and they ran down the garden path to the little hotel pier, where Agnes stood with an old Laotian man dressed in faded denim shorts and a Manchester United shirt. His name was Pang, Agnes said; he was the pilot of this small narrow riverboat, a
pirogue.
Pang was quite silent. Everyone was quite silent. No one was talking about the smoke babies, everyone was thinking about the smoke babies, the well done babies, the ghost children, hanging from the rafters. Smiling.
It was grotesque beyond imagining. So who had hung them there? Who was doing all this, trying to frighten them away?
He was frightened; swiftly he climbed in the boat, and helped Chemda aboard. Pang was already at the engine. Agnes clutched Chemda’s hand and apologized yet again, her face wrought with concern. Then Pang yanked the outboard into life and they pushed out from the rivershore, against the slowly surging waters, constantly fleeing their own tail-plume of muddy water.
The staggered white stupas and golden wats of Luang, framed by the banana-tree-green of Mount Phousi, receded at last. Jake watched the city of incense disappear behind them. He was very glad to leave, yet he know he wasn’t really escaping. His fear and angst, they were flying alongside, like vile black birds.
The Mekong was apathetically mighty. Broad and slow and wide. For the first few miles they had the unsettling company of tourist boats drifting lazily downstream, full of western and Chinese tourists in ungainly shorts waving at them like kids; Jake cursed them and wished them away. Sometimes speedboats accelerated past, rocking them with backwash, trailing gauzy isadoras of blue diesel exhaust and making Jake think they were going to be surrounded and arrested.
But within an hour they were virtually alone. And the loneliness was possibly worse than the busyness. They were scarily alone, deep in the jungled upper reaches of the Lao Mekong.
Bamboo reeds bent in the breeze, silent red petals fell on milky brown water. Riverbirds flew overhead.
Wild lychees, night herons, silence.
Occasionally they passed a little tribal village, lost in the jungle, where naked dirty children ran down to the shoreline brandishing small carved crude wooden dolls, desperately shouting, almost hysterical.
‘Souvenirs,’ said Chemda. ‘Sometimes tourist boats get this far, and they buy crafts from the villages. Otherwise these people live on nothing. Fruit from the forest. Monkey meat. Ah. Desperate conditions.’
In another village an old tribeswoman was sitting on a log, her withered breasts quite bare: the woman looked and smiled, and Jake felt the electricity of shock.
Her mouth was full of blood.
She was smiling and her mouth was full of blood. Then he realized: she was chewing betel nuts. The woman smiled her lurid scarlet smile.
The boat slid from one empty shore to another, avoiding mudslopes and rapids, ducking under bamboo overhangs. Watersnakes slid beneath the boat, sinister sinewaves of yellow. At one point they turned a grandiose bend in the river and Jake saw a huge cave: in its dark recesses glittered a hundred or a thousand little smirking Buddhas: gold and silver statues sitting on rocks and sand. There were boats tethered here. Pilgrims?
‘Sacred caves,’ said Chemda.
The sun was wearyingly hot, an enemy, ogling them. Jake felt increasingly ill-at-ease, once again. Were they being followed? Every so often he looked back: but the torpid waters stretched to a horizon framed by banana trees and bending palms, and nothing else.
Pang the boatman was silent as the river, he was old yet tough and wiry: one of those East Asians who looked like he could never die. Smoked by age and sun. Kippered. He smiled sometimes, but said nothing.
Chemda had, it seemed, fully recovered her wits. She wanted to talk. She was trying to explain Khmer culture to Jake, its superstitions and legends.
‘Some people believe there is a particular darkness in the Khmer.’
‘Meaning?’
‘It’s difficult to explain it concisely. But here is an example: “
kum
”.’
‘OK.’
‘
Kum
is the desire to take revenge, a typically Khmer desire to do down your enemy. Ah. To crush him, over many years.’
‘Like a vendetta.’
‘Yes but also no. Vendetta is just eye for an eye, isn’t it, you kill mine and I kill yours.
Kum
is more deadly even – but no, deadly isn’t right.’ She stared at the riverbank, where an egret sat on a branch. ‘
Kum
is more . . . satanic. Kum means the desire to take, hn, disproportionate revenge.’