“This maniac will be caught soon,” she said. “He obviously can’t control himself. Someone is bound to notice him behaving abnormally.”
“Praise the Lord!” I exclaimed.
“I’d wait until he’s dangling in a noose before you do that.”
“No! This!” I waved the letter. “We’ve been given our marching orders. The Society is sending us to Papua New Guinea—we’re to depart next week!”
Clarissa put the newspaper aside. “Good! Good! I’ll tell you something, Aiden: you’re not the same man upon whose door I knocked when I was at my lowest ebb. That Tanner girl and the horrors of London and the Ripper have demolished you. You needn’t tell me how traumatic it’s been; I’ve seen it in your face and manner. But this—” She pointed at the letter in my hand. “This marks the commencement of your rehabilitation. Soon you’ll see that the malevolence you’ve experienced and witnessed is not endemic. The world is a wonderful place. It will rebuild you, and you’ll be a better person for it.”
“Perhaps
so,” I mumbled.
I was eager to be off but felt little enthusiasm for the task that now lay before us. My missionary training had been desultory and inadequate. It was obvious that a prospective evangelist required little more than a thorough grasp of the Bible, a modicum of zeal, and the ability to endure the worst possible conditions. The first, I had. Zeal, I feigned. Endurance, well, where could be worse than Whitechapel?
It was a question I asked again five days later when the Society provided me with a Webley-Pr
yse revolver. Holding the thing gingerly, I showed it to Clarissa. “They told me the life of a
missionary is sometimes perilous.”
“It’s an undeveloped land, Aiden. They are right. Who knows what we might encounter?”
So it was that I abandoned London, leaving it in the demonic grip of Jack the Ripper, and sailed away, a faithless priest with a faithful hunchbacked woman at his side.
Three different ships took us in a roundabout manner to Australia. The initial ten days at sea saw me confined to my cabin, my skin a bilious shade of green and my stomach squirming in my throat. Thankfully, I then gained my sea legs and, for the remainder of the voyage, the fresh winds and far horizons did much to dispel the miasmatic dread that had enshrouded me since August. By the time we reached Sydney—a little over two months later—my face and forearms were a deep brown and my blond hair had been bleached almost white. This weathering hardly made me a “man of the world,” though. On the morning we sailed into the harbour, when I examined my visage in a shaving mirror, I saw the same gaunt features and the same guileless pale blue eyes—the same dolt that Alice Tanner had so callously mocked. Yet I also noticed something different. The veneer of intellectualism that had for so long disguised my emptiness was gone. There was a new sort of honesty in my eyes, and it was terrible, for it made a blatant display of my deficiencies. I couldn’t hide. I was exposed for all to see.
After a week’s layover in Sydney, Clarissa and I sailed in a clipper to the Melanesian Islands and landed at Port Moresby. It was our intention to establish a Christian mission in one of the more remote regions of Papua New Guinea, as instructed by the Society, but within days of our arrival the German authorities disallowed the project. We twiddled our thumbs well into the new year while awaiting fresh instructions from London. They finally arrived in the second week of February, and directed us to instead establish a station on Koluwai, a humid hump that bulges out of the sea a thousand miles or so to the southeast of the principal island. Scarcely two hundred square miles in area, swathed in dripping jungle, and prone to particularly vicious seasonal storms, we found that it boasted one coastal town—Kutumakau—and a great many tiny villages, which, with an insane disregard for lightning strikes, were built in the treetops.
“It hardly seems worth the effort,” I commented as we unloaded our baggage and trunks from the little steamer that had transported us there, “but the Church insists that God’s work be done, even in far-flung corners such as this. What will the islanders make of us, Clarissa?”
“We shall be a novelty, at least,” she responded.
In that, she was correct, for most of the Koluwaians had never seen a European before, despite the proximity of German colonies—an indication, perhaps, of just how small and remote their island was. They were untouched by civilisation and had, in fact, barely emerged from the Stone Age. Their diet consisted of fruit, tubers, nuts, fish, monkeys, and wild pigs, the land animals being hunted with barbed spears. The people eschewed ornamentation and wore only loincloths, with no necklaces, rings, or beads of any sort. They did, however, practise tattooism, and from head to foot were covered with swirling patterns of deep red and pale yellow dots. In stature they were a small but plump people, averaging about five-foot-four, with coffee-coloured skin, long black hair, and unfathomable brown eyes. Their jaws and cheekbones were prominent, as is common in primitive races, and their teeth large. Most of the men filed their incisors to points, and I was disturbed to learn that this was in connection with an aspect of their diet that, for them, possessed spiritual significance.
The Koluwaians were cannibals.
They were also slavers, making frequent raids on neighbouring islands and returning with young men and women who’d be spirited away into the jungle to who knows what fate—a cooking pot, I feared.
During the first few days after our arrival, we lived in a couple of semi-derelict shacks on the outskirts of Kutumakau—the town was little more than a sprawl of similarly dilapidated huts—and close to the edge of the steaming jungle. I found it almost impossible to sleep there, not only due to the oppressive humidity, the cacophonous night storms, the mosquitoes and invasive vermin, and the ceaseless din of chirruping tree frogs, but also because, from the moment I set foot on the island, I was subject to terrifying nightmares. These always began with a heightened awareness of my own pulse. Gradually, my heartbeat would increase in volume until it pounded in my ears, then I’d envision the blood coursing through my arteries and would sink into it until I seemed to exist at a microscopic level, with red cells roaring around me. From this crimson tide, Alice Tanner emerged, shamelessly naked, floating, smiling cruelly, her eyes filled with scorn.
In every nightmare, the same conversation occurred.
“Miss Tanner! You have to go! Please, hurry!”
“But I want to look at you, Mr. Skin-and-Bones.”
“He’s coming!”
“Mr. Books-and-Bible.”
“Can’t you feel him, Alice? Can’t you sense him in my veins? He’s approaching! He’s close! Get away from here! Run! Run!”
“Mr. Thoughts-and-Theories.”
“Oh, sweet Heaven, Jack is coming! He’s coming for you!”
Something loomed behind her. A blade slid out of her belly and sawed up through her sternum.
An alleyway.
Alice, on her back, her eyes glassy, her throat slit twice through, her stomach ripped wide open.
The knife—in my hand.
Night after night, I’d jerk awake with a cry of horror, to find the atmosphere throbbing with the thunder of drums.
°
“I don’t understand it,” I said to Clarissa one morning. “It sounds like every village is drumming from midnight onward.”
“There might be a purely practical explanation,” she replied. “Maybe it’s to keep nocturnal predators away.”
Two weeks after our arrival, a wizened and uncommonly tall and thin islander named Iriputiz came to visit us. He was a grotesque individual whose dark skin was covered with scars, as if he’d suffered severe burns; whose long face radiated a malign intelligence; and whose eyes were forever restless, never settling on anything for more than a few seconds.
He was Koluwai’s witch doctor.
We introduced ourselves and invited him in.
Speaking in German, which he’d apparently learned during visits to neighbouring, more developed islands, he said, “It is the time of storms on Koluwai.”
His voice creaked like old wood.
“And very odd they are, too,” I responded, speaking the same language and waving him to a chair. “All flashes and bangs but no rain. How long does the season last?”
“We do not measure time as you do, but I have knowledge of your calendar. By that, they come maybe every fifteen months and last for three. They grow stranger and stranger, and, after the strangest of them all, finish quite suddenly. We are now a month into the season. You are a priest, yes?”
“Yes.”
“You have whisky?”
“No, but I have wine.”
“Give me some.”
Clarissa fetched a bottle and poured him a glass. He emptied it in a single swallow.
“More, and more again,” he said.
Glancing at me, my sexton gave him a refill.
He swigged it back, held his vessel out for another, swallowed that, too, then dragged his skinny wrist across his lips. “You will both go from here today. You are not good for Koluwai. We will let you stay only if you speak like us.”
“You mean we can remain if we learn the Koluwaian language?”
“Yes. Only if you do that.”
“Then we will learn.”
“You have more wine?”
“Yes.”
“Then I will teach.”
This sounded like a reasonable proposition, so we conceded, and from that day forward, Iriputiz visited us each evening and proved himself a very capable, if drunken, tutor.
The tongue of Koluwai is, I suspect, entirely unique. It doesn’t at all resemble the languages of the other Melanesian Islands and probably exists nowhere else on Earth, but it is not complex. Consisting mostly of pops, snaps and clicks, buzzes, and long drawn-out vowels, its vocabulary is extensive but its grammar almost childish, requiring only that a noun be stated twice to indicate the plural, and having just three verb tenses. However, in common with many undeveloped idioms, nuances of meaning are primarily indicated through context and tone. Accompanying gestures are also far more extravagant and important than in English; so much so that many things are communicated solely with waved hands, nods of the head, and, especially, flicks and waggles of the fingers.
Clarissa and I were already fluent in a number of languages so we made rapid progress in our lessons, the main challenge being phonetics we weren’t used to and which felt to us ill-designed for the human vocal apparatus. Many
ptahs
and
zz
’s and back-of-the-mouth “y” and “g” consonants were demanded, while vowels tended toward lengthy
oohs
and
aahs
. The “throat click” was particularly difficult. In isolation it presented no problem, but when it occurred in the middle of a word, it was hard to produce without pausing before and afterwards.
Nevertheless, it was only a few weeks before we were able to converse with the islanders, though when we did so, their reaction appeared somewhat strange to me, for no matter what the subject, our words would elicit first a nod of satisfaction, then, when we moved away, a whispered discussion, as if our progress was being assessed with reference to an agenda of which we weren’t aware.
It was exceedingly odd.
We made fast progress in creating a home for ourselves and soon moved out of the shacks, thanks to Clarissa’s remarkable skills. She positively blossomed on the island. With fairly inadequate assistance from twelve Koluwaians and despite her physical deformities, she constructed with astonishing rapidity an eight-roomed cabin, complete with a veranda, a library, a workshop, and a chemical laboratory. She then started to erect a church. These buildings, which comprised our missionary station, were located on a jungle-free hill overlooking the sea, half a mile to the south of Kutumakau.
I had never seen anyone work with such industry and unflagging energy.
“How do you do it in this tyrannical heat?” I asked one evening. “I can barely lift a finger, yet you race around carrying planks, sawing them up, knocking them together, building, building, building! You must have the endurance and strength of an ox!”
“The more engaged I am with a task, the less I feel the pain of my twisted bones,” she answered.
“Do you really suffer so, Clarissa?”
“I barely remember the days when I didn’t.”
“I’m sorry. I wish I could help.”
“You brought me here, Aiden. This is a place where everything needs doing. There’s no time for me to stop and acknowledge that I hurt. That is a splendid gift!”
While my companion worked, I set about spreading the word of Our Lord with, I must confess, very little energy and an almost complete absence of true conviction. Just as I had resented my parishioners in Theaston Vale, so I now felt the same negative emotions toward my new flock. In retrospect, I can see the real reason for my discontent: I was professing a faith I didn’t possess. It was all artifice—something learned by rote and presented as a spiritual truth. It was in my brain but had never touched my heart. It wasn’t the parishioners or the islanders I begrudged—it was Aiden Fleischer, for I knew him a fraud.
My lackadaisical approach didn’t really matter. My subjects had not one whit of interest in Christianity. Heaven, to them, was the bountiful sea, and the very idea of a single supreme deity they considered a flagrant absurdity. They had no need of my religion—they had their own, if “religion” is an appropriate word for the detestable practices and idolatry in which they indulged. Cannibalism was the least of it.