The Valley of the Flame

CHAPTER I. FACE OF A GIRL

FAR OFF IN the jungle an animal screamed. A river-moth flapped against the screen, nearly as large as a fruit-bat: And very far away, subsensory, almost, Brian Raft could hear the low pulsing of drums. Not unusual, drums on the Jutahy, in the great valley of Amazonas. But these were no signal messages.

Raft wasn't an imaginative man. He left all that to Dan Craddock, with his Welsh ghosts and his shadow-people of the lost centuries. Still, Raft was a doctor, and when those drums throbbed in the jungle something curious happened here in his little hospital of plastic shacks, smelling of antiseptic. Something he couldn't ignore.

When a sick man's blood beats in rhythm with the distant drums, slow or fast as the far-off echoes set the pace, a doctor has reason to wonder….

The great moth beat softly against the screen. Craddock bent over a sterilizer, steam clouding up around his white head so that he looked like a necromancer stooping over a cauldron. The drums throbbed on. Raft could feel his own heart answering to their rhythm.

He glanced at Craddock again and tried not to remember what the older man had been telling him about his a wild Welsh ancestors and the things they had believed. Sometimes he thought Craddock believed them too, or half believed, at least when he had been drinking.

He'd got to know Craddock pretty well in the months they had worked together, but he realized that even yet he knew only the surface Craddock, that another man entirely lived in abeyance behind the companionable front which the Welshman showed him, a man with memories he never spoke of, and stories he never told.

This experimental station, far up the Jutahy, was a curious contrast, with its asepsis and its plastics and its glitter of new instruments, to the jungle hemming it in. They were on assignment just now to find a specific for atypical malaria.

In the forty years since the end of World War II, nothing yet had been discovered any safer than the old quinine and atabrine treatment, and Raft was sifting the jungle lore now to make sure there might not be some truth in the old Indio knowledge, hidden behind masks of devil-worship and magic.

He had hunted down virus diseases in Tibet, Indo-China, Madagascar, and he had learned to respect much that the witchdoctors knew. Some of their treatments were based on very sound theories.

But he wished the drums would stop. He turned irritably from the window and glanced once more at Craddock, who was humming a Welsh ballad under his breath. A ballad full of wild, skirling music about ghosts and fighting.

Craddock had talked a lot lately—since the drums began—about ghosts and fighting. He said he smelled danger. In the old days in Wales men could always scent trouble in the wind, and they'd drink quarts of uisquebaugh and go out brandishing swords, ready for anything. All Raft could smell was the reek of disinfectant that filled the little hospital.

And all the wind brought to him was the sound of drums.

"In the old days," Craddock said suddenly, looking up from the sterilizer and blinking through steam, "there'd be a whisper in the air from Tralee or Cobh, and we knew the Irish were coming over the water to raid. Or maybe there'd be something from the south, and we'd get ready for the men of Cornwall. But we'd know. We'd know."

"Rot!" Raft said.

"Okay. But I felt something like this once before." Craddock sucked in his breath, a curious look of fright and incredulity on his wrinkled brown face. He turned back to the steam-cloud, and Raft watched him in puzzled wonder.

There was a mystery about Craddock. He was a biologist, and a good one, but for thirty years or more he had hung around the Jutahy country, never venturing farther away than Manaos, living precariously as a sort of jungle general practitioner.

Raft had added him to the party on impulse, since Craddock knew the country and the natives. He hadn't expected too much of the Welshman in the laboratory, for something had happened to Craddock's hands—they were badly maimed. But he was pleasantly disappointed on that score.

Raft watched the mutilated hands working with hypodermics, twisting plunger from tube, deftly pulling the hollow needles free. Craddock had three fingers on one hand, and the other was a claw, with oddly stained and textured skin. He never spoke of what had happened. His injuries didn't look like the scars of acid burns or animal teeth. Still, he was surprisingly deft, even when liquor was heavy on his breath.

It was heavy now, and Raft thought the man must be deliberately timing his motions to the rhythms of the drums. Or perhaps not. Raft himself had to pause consciously and break step with the beat. And some of the sick men in the ward were alive, he thought, solely because the drum-beats would not let their hearts stop pumping.

"A week now," Craddock said, with that rather annoying habit he had of catching another man's thought, or seeming to. "Have you noticed the charts?"

Raft ran a nervous forefinger along the lean line of his jaw. "That's my job," he grunted.

Craddock sighed.

"You haven't lived in Brazil as long as I have, Brian. It's the things you don't usually notice that count. Up to a week ago, this plague was killing off the Indians fast. The vitality level's gone up a lot in the last seven days."

"Which is crazy," Raft told him. "It's accidental—just a cycle. There's no reason. The drums have nothing to do with it."

"Did I mention drums?"

Raft glared.

Craddock put the hypos in the sterilizer and closed the lid.

"The drums aren't talking, though. It's not Western Union. It's just rhythm. And it means something."

"What?"

The Welshman hesitated. His face was in shadow, and his white hair gleamed like a fluffy halo in the overhead light. "I think, maybe, there's a visitor in the forest. I wonder now. Have you ever heard of Curupuri?"

Raft's face was a mask.

"Curupuri? What's that?"

"A name. The natives have been talking about Curupuri. Or maybe you haven't been listening."

"I seem to miss a lot around here," Raft said with heavy irony. "I haven't seen a ghost for months."

"Maybe you will." Craddock turned to stare toward the window. "Thirty years. It's a long time. I—I've heard of Curupuri before, though. I even—"

He stopped, and Raft breathed deeply. He'd heard too, but he didn't want to admit it. Superstition is apt to be psychologically dangerous in the jungle, and Raft knew that Curupuri was a widespread belief among the Indios. He'd encountered it ten years ago, when he was younger and more impressionable. And yet, he thought, it's the only possible god for the Amazon Basin.

For Curupuri was the Unknown. He was the blind, ravening, terrible life-force that the Indios think is the spirit of the jungle. A savage, primeval Pan, lairing in the darkness. But nothing so concrete as Pan.

Curupuri moved along the Amazon as vast and inchoate and yet as tangible as life itself. Here in the jungle one realizes, after a while, that a god of life can be far more terrible than a god of death. The Amazonas is too alive. Too enormous for the mind to comprehend, a great green living thing sprawled across a continent, blind, senseless, ravenously alive.

Yes, Raft could understand why the Indios had personified Curupuri. He could almost see him as they did, a monstrous shapeless creature, neither beast nor man, stirring enormously in the breathing fertility of the jungle.

"The devil with it," Raft said, and drew deeply on his cigarette. It was one of his last cigarettes. He moved to Craddock's side and stared out the window, drawing smoke gratefully into his lungs and savoring the second-hand taste of civilization.

That was all they'd had for a year—second-hand civilization. It wasn't too bad. Madagascar had been worse. But there was quite a contrast between the sleek modern architecture of the home base, the Mallard Pathological Institute overlooking the Hudson, and this plastic-walled collection of shacks, staffed by a few Institute men and some native helpers.

Three white men, Raft, Craddock, and Bill Merriday, were here. Merriday was plodding but a good research pathologist, and the three of them had worked well together.

Now the work was ready to be wound up, and presently Raft knew he'd be in New York again, rushing by air-taxi from roof night-club to club, cramming the excitement of civilization into as short a time as possible. Then a little later, he realized, he'd be feeling a familiar itch again, and would be heading for Tasmania or Ceylon or—somewhere. There were always new jobs to be tackled.

The drums were still throbbing faintly, far off in the dark. After a while Raft left Craddock in the lighted lab and wandered outside, down to the river, trying not to listen to the distant pulse of sound….

A full moon rode up from the Atlantic, brightening the great pleasure-city of Rio, swinging up the Amazon to the backlands, a huge yellow disc against a starry backdrop. But across the Jutahy was the jungle, black towering walls of it, creeping and swarming with a vitality that was incredible even to a scientist. It was the fecund womb of the world.

Hot countries mean growth, but in the Amazonas is growth gone wild. Its rich alluvial soil, washed down for ages along the rivers, is literally alive; the ground beneath your feet moves and stirs with vitality. There is something unhealthy about such abnormal rioting life, unhealthy as the flaming Brazilian orchids that batten on rottenness and blaze in the green gloom like goblin corpse-lights….

Raft thought of Craddock. Odd! That inexplicable mixture of incredulity and fear that Raft thought he sensed in the Welshman was puzzling. There was something else, too. He frowned, trying to analyze a vague shadow, and at length nodded, satisfied. Craddock was repelled by the drums but he was also drawn, attracted by them in some strange way. Well, Craddock had lived in this part of the forest for a long time. He was nearly Indio in many ways.

Something moving out on the surface of the river, sheet-silver under the moon, roused Raft from uncomfortable thoughts. In a moment he could see the outlines of a small boat, and two heads silhouetted against the silvery water. The men were pulling in toward shore and the hospital's lighted window.

"Luiz!" Raft called sharply. "Manoel! We've got visitors."

A feeble hail came across the water, and he saw the two outlines slump down, as if the last efforts of exhaustion had brought them to the landing. Then came excitement—the boys running with lights and shouts, everybody who could walk swarming to the doors and windows to watch. Raft helped beach the boat and superintended as the two almost unconscious men were carried up to the hospital.

One of them, he saw, wore an aviator's helmet and clothing; he was beyond speech. The other, a slender, bearded man, rather startlingly graceful even in this extremity, lurched toward the door.

"Senhor, senhor," he murmured, in a soft voice.

Craddock came out to help. He stopped dead still on the threshold, though crowding bodies hid the two arrivals from sight. Raft saw a look of absolute panic come over the Welshman's face. Then Craddock turned and retreated, and there was the nervous clinking of a bottle.

Bill Merriday's stolid, intent features were comfortingly normal by contrast. But as Merriday, bending over the aviator, was stripping off the man's shirt, he suddenly paused.

"I'll be hanged," he said. "I know this chap, Brian. Thomas, wait a minute. I'll have it. Da something… da Fonseca, that's it! I told you about that mapping expedition that flew in a couple of months ago, when you were in the jungle. Da Fonseca was piloting."

"Crack-up," Raft said. "What about the other man?"

Merriday glanced over his shoulder.

"I never saw him before."

The thermometer read eighty-six, far below normal.

"Shock and exhaustion," Raft surmised. "We'll run a stat C.B.C., just in case. Look at his eyes." He pulled back a lid. The pupils were pin-points.

"I'll take a look at the other man," Merriday said, turning. Raft scowled down at da Fonseca, a little uncomfortable, though he could not have said exactly why. Something seemed to have entered the room with the two men, and it was nothing that could be felt tangibly. But it could be sensed.

Frowning, Raft watched Luiz milk a specimen from the patient's finger. The overhead light fell yellow and unsteady on da Fonseca, upon a glitter of sudden brilliance from something that hung on a chain about his neck. Raft had thought it a religious medal, but now he saw that it was a tiny mirror, no larger than a half-dollar. He picked it up.

The glass was convex, lenticular, and made of a dark, bluish material less like glass than plastic. Raft glimpsed the cloudy, shapeless motion of shadows beneath its surface.

A little shock went through him. The mirror did not reflect his face, though he was staring directly into it. Instead he saw turbulent motion, though there was no such motion in the room. He thought of storm-clouds boiling and driving before a gale. He had the curious, inexplicable feeling of something familiar, an impression, an inchoate mental pattern.

Thomas da Fonseca. He caught the extraordinary impression, for a flashing, brilliant moment, that he was looking into da Fonseca's eyes. The—the personality of the man was there, suddenly. It was as though the two men were briefly en rapport.

Yet all Raft saw was the driving, cloudy motion in the mirror.

Then the storm-swirl rifted and was driven apart. From the tiny lens in his hand a vibration ran up the nerves of his arm, striking into his brain. He stared down.

Now that the clouds had cleared away, it was not a mirror, but a portrait. A portrait? Then a living portrait, for the face within it moved….

A mirror, after all, then. But no—for that was certainly not his own face that looked back at him out of the small oval.

It was a girl's face, seen against a background of incredible richness and strangeness that vanished as he looked, because she leaned forward as if into the very mirror itself, her herd blotting out the remarkable background. And it was no painted picture. She moved, she saw—Raft. He drew his breath in sharply.

There was never such a face before. He had no time to see her very clearly, for the whole unbelievable glimpse was gone in an instant. But he would have known her out of a thousand faces if they ever met again.

The look of delicate gayety and wickedness in the small, prim curve of her mouth, the enormous translucent eyes, colored like aquamarines, that looked, for a moment, into his very solemnly above the sweet, malicious, smiling mouth.

There could be no other face like it in the world.

Then the mists rolled between them as they stared. Raft remembered later that he shook the lens passionately in a childish attempt to call her back, shook it as if his own hands could part those clouds again and let him see that brilliantly alive little face, so gay and solemn, so wicked and so sweet.

But she was gone. It had all happened almost between one breath and the next, and he was left standing there staring down at the lens and remembering the tantalizing—oddness—of that face.

An oddness seen too briefly to understand except as something curiously wrong about the girl who had looked into his eyes for one fraction of a second. Her hair had been—odd.

The eyes themselves were almost round, but subtly slanted at the corners, and with a blackness ringing them that was not wholly the black of thick lashes, for a prolonged dark streak had run up from their outer comers a little way, accentuating their slant, and giving a faint Egyptian exoticism to the round, soft, dainty face with its rounded chin. So soft—he remembered that impression clearly. Incredibly soft, she had looked, and fastidious.

And wrong. Racially wrong.

The mirror was blank again, and filled with the trembling fogs. But, very briefly, it had opened upon another world.