Fear and Other Stories

THE fact that the man whom he feared had died ten years earlier did
not in the least lessen Stuart McGregor's obsession of horror, of a
certain grim expectancy, every time he recalled that final scene, just
before Farragut Hutchison disappeared in the African jungle that
stood, spectrally motionless as if forged out of some blackish-green
metal, in the haggard moonlight.

As he reconstructed it, the whole scene seemed unreal, almost
oppressively, ludicrously theatrical. The pall of sodden, stygian
darkness all around; the night sounds of soft-winged, obscene things
flapping lazily overhead or brushing against the furry trees that held
the woolly heat of the tropical day like boiler pipes in a factory;
the slimy, swishy things that glided and crawled and wiggled
underfoot; the vibrant growl of a hunting lioness that began in a deep
basso and peaked to a shrill, high-pitched, ridiculously inadequate
treble; a spotted hyena's vicious, bluffing bark; the chirp and
whistle of innumerable monkeys; a warthog breaking through the
undergrowth with a clumsy, clownish crash--and somewhere, very far
away, the staccato thumping of a signal drum, and more faintly yet the
answer from the next in line.

He had seen many such drums, made from fire-hollowed palm trees and
covered with tightly stretched skin--often the skin of a human enemy.

Yes. He remembered it all. He remembered the night jungle creeping in
on their camp like a sentient, malign being--and then that ghastly,
ironic moon squinting down, just as Farragut Hutchison walked away
between the six giant, plumed, ochre-smeared Bakoto negroes, and
bringing into crass relief the tattoo mark on the man's back where the
shirt had been torn to tatters by camel thorns and wait-a-bit spikes
and sabre-shaped palm leaves.

He recalled the occasion when Farragut Hutchison had had himself
tattooed; after a crimson, drunken spree at Madam Céleste's place in
Port Said, the other side of the Red Sea traders' bazaar, to please a
half-caste Swahili dancing girl who looked like a golden madonna of
evil, familiar with all the seven sins. Doubtless the girl had gone
shares with the Levantine craftsman who had done the work--an eagle,
in bold red and blue, surmounted by a lopsided crown, and surrounded
by a wavy design. The eagle was in profile, and its single eye had a
disconcerting trick of winking sardonically whenever Farragut
Hutchison moved his back muscles or twitched his shoulder blades.

Always, in his memory, Stuart McGregor saw that tattoo mark.

Always did he see the wicked, leering squint in the eagle's eye--and
then he would scream, wherever he happened to be, in a theatre, a
Broadway restaurant, or across some good friend's mahogany and beef.

Thinking back, he remembered that, for all their bravado, for all
their showing off to each other, both he and Farragut Hutchison had
been afraid since that day, up the hinterland, when, drunk with
fermented palm wine, they had insulted the fetish of the Bakotos,
while the men were away hunting and none left to guard the village
except the women and children and a few feeble old men whose curses
and high-pitched maledictions were picturesque, but hardly effectual
enough to stop him and his partner from doing a vulgar, intoxicated
dance in front of the idol, from grinding burning cigar ends into its
squat, repulsive features, and from generally polluting the juju hut--
not to mention the thorough and profitable looting of the place.