Goat Mother and Others: The Collected Mythos Fiction of Pierre Comtois (34 page)

Unbidden came the vision of such wind descending upon a small farming community, stripping horses, oxen, men, and women of sanity, flesh, and life. Although escape had certainly been attempted, none had been possible.

The thousands of eyes whirled round him now in an ever-tightening spiral. Each unearthly stare was at once a threat and a promise of joy. They awakened in Judson an impossible, alien yearning for the wild, free sky and for the spaces beyond it. His soul ached to join itself with that of the Wind-Being, and to roar and scream and laugh and moan among the crags of Earth’s highest peaks, and to brush the stars in his eternal flight. As he stepped forward toward the circling eyes, primal instinct asserted itself. Without knowing, he raised his shotgun into the vortex of eyes where it vanished together with his arm up to the elbow into the side of the funnel. He must have pulled the trigger, at least he couldn’t think of anything else he might have done to result in the action that followed. The wind thing seemed to dissipate at bit, to evanesce, to become more transparent and so, weakened; Judson pulled his arm from the side of the funnel only to find a blackened stump where his forearm used to be.

After that, he remembered nothing and he couldn’t say with any conviction that the memories he had of stumbling wildly through the darkening forest were real, or simply what he thought should be real. In any case, they told him that he was found, ragged and dirty and unconscious for loss of blood, on the side of the interstate by a passing motorist who collected him and brought him here, the nearest hospital.

The doctors and nurses at the country hospital had been very kind to him and had hoped that he would be able to tell them how his arm had been severed and its stump cauterized, but Judson had professed complete ignorance, unable himself to decide as to the reality of the terrible images which still groped and tugged at his mind.

He raised his arm and looked at its bandaged stump. That wasn’t a dream. But how could he expect anyone to believe his fantastic story if he himself couldn’t believe it? He felt his head and realized that it too was bandaged. Maybe a board fell on it while he investigated one of those old houses and he only imagined all the rest?

At last, the doctor who’d been treating him entered the room along with a male orderly and two nurses. They chatted amiably for a few minutes as they arranged their instruments on tables about his bed and one of the nurses adjusted the elevation of his bed to a more comfortable position. Soon they were ready and the doctor asked Judson to lay his damaged arm on the table extension that jutted over the side of his bed. He did so, and the doctor reached over to a tray held by a nurse close to Judson. He plucked a pair of small scissors and began snipping carefully at the bandages around Judson’s right arm. Little by little the bandages began to fall away until at last, the limb lay exposed, its skin grafts still newly-pink and the scars still…then Judson caught sight of something at the end. He gently pulled his arm from the doctor’s grip and looked more closely at the stump. The scar tissue began to move and weave and from amid its wrinkles emerged a conglomeration of eyes, hungry eyes that seemed to be devouring his flesh even as he watched. He screamed once, frightening the nurse nearest him into dropping her tray of utensils, the others stiffened in shock. Then, faster than anyone could anticipate, he grabbed a scalpel from where it had fallen on the bedside and thrust it downward toward his throat that had turned raw with the force of his continuing screams. But to his mounting terror and panic, the orderly stopped his arm at the very moment of his self-destruction while a wind seemed to come up out of nowhere. His screams turned from simple terror then, to sheer, mind-snapping pain…

he canoe moved easily along on the water’s glassy surface, pulled by invisible, unseen currents. The only evidence of movement was trailing off in a broad fan from the prow of the boat, the trailing wash becoming less violent as the river widened until, in the far distance, the level of the water rose and fell undulantly at its banks. There, a forest of great trees crowded the land down to the water’s edge, trailing to ones and twos growing out from the river. There, the trees stood engulfed, surrounded by the muddy water; some standing proudly, their upper branches raised above the surface while others lay half reclining in tilts and leanings that suggested old men drowning in thick molasses.

The native paddlers, their dark skins shining in the baking heat of the tropics, dipped their short but serviceable oars into the water only infrequently to correct the canoe’s direction of drift, allowing the energies built up in the moving water to propel them to their goal, miles downstream. Sometimes Dr. Lee felt he was the only white man around for thousands of miles. But he knew that despite appearances, thousands of Americans were gathered not forty miles away on the eastern coast of Panama. The city of Colon was to be the eastern terminus of the new Panama Railroad being built across the isthmus and due to be completed in 1870. It was just his luck to be stationed at San Francisco when the word came down from staff headquarters to proceed to Colon, located in the northernmost province of Colombia. A regular trip by sea from the Pacific would take weeks and cover over forty-five hundred sea-miles, so it was deemed by his superiors quicker for him to disembark at Panama City on the west coast of the isthmus and travel cross-country the fifty or so miles to Colon on the opposite side. But it became increasingly obvious to Lee that his superiors had not the slightest notion of what that meant.

Poisonous snakes, spiders, scorpions, ants, malarial swamps, the intolerable heat, torrential downpours that struck without warning, and the flying, buzzing, crawling insects, especially the mosquitoes, conspired to make the night a nightmare with the days scarcely better. And the stink of rotting vegetation, the noxious fumes and gasses that rose miasmically from stagnant swamps and inland salt flats did not make things any better. Barely half way, his clothing had been worn to mere strips of cloth, his leather boots eaten and perforated with jungle rot and the feedings of the voracious jungle insects. And though he had contracted malaria once before while serving in the southwest, he had still managed to catch it again almost as soon as he landed in Panama City, so that now he seemed unable to shake a constant shiver and the occasional attack of chills. It was also a good thing that his guides had proven trustworthy, because his pistol had long since rusted into a lump of oxidized iron. He chuckled to himself as he thought of what a spectacle he would be when he finally presented himself to the officer in charge at Colon, and Dr. Jonas whom he would eventually report to.

A gentle bump of the canoe as it struck something just beneath the surface of the water brought his attention back to the present. As the man in the rear of the boat stuck his oar in the water like a rudder, redirecting the craft to the correct course, Lee looked about to either side of the boat, trying to spot the object they had struck. Suddenly, a long, scaly snout poked above the surface and with a toothy yawn, the alligator submerged again only to reappear a few feet away as it glided off to the shallows along the bank of the river. Disturbed in sleep, it had little inclination or appetite to concern itself with those who had nudged it awake. As Lee’s eyes watched the reptile go, a rush of motion on the horizon caught his attention as a flock of strange birds cast off into the air in a violently-colored flurry; their long legs hanging limply beneath their slim bellies. Dimly, their strident calls reached him from across the swollen river.

For swollen the Chagres was. Normally, he was told, the river was not formidable at all, in fact it was a beautiful river that wound lazily about the cordilleras that formed the spine of Panama. But during the wet season, it grew to ten times its ordinary size and, merging here and there with the nearby sea as the Pacific reached high tide, became a raging torrent that flooded the central isthmus beneath gathered rainwater that fell savagely for days in the mountains. Such was the time of year now of course, just when Lee needed to cross the delicate land bridge. In fact the river was so high that the portion he and his companions were in the process of crossing looked more like a lake than a river in its expansive stillness. Already he knew he would never forget the sight of the trees, their tops poking above the running water like leafy hillocks, now jet black with the weight of millions of tarantulas as they sought the dry safety of the temporary islands.

It was toward a group of those trees, heavy-laden with spiders, that the lead native steered the canoe. Passing the submerged trees, Lee watched the desperately scrabbling spiders in repulsive fascination as the craft slipped easily among them to the hidden shore. Gradually, the trees grew more numerous and as the water level receded, more and more of their length was revealed until at last, the great root systems stood exposed all intertwined with each other. Then, in less time than Lee had expected, the boat nudged gently along the grassy bottom of the swollen river. In another instant, he and the guides were splashing quickly for dry land with the canoe on their shoulders, warily watching for hunting alligators.

At last, the canoe safe in a tree, the trio gathered their sparse belongings and headed inland to Colon. Watching a threatening swarm of mosquitoes, Lee decided that they could not get there fast enough to suit him.

Just as he had expected, Lee received a rather cool welcome from the commandant of the Army unit detailed to protect American citizens working on the new railroad. As an officer, even an officer of the Army Medical Corps, Lee was still expected to attire himself as an officer in the United States Army, and not to appear before his commanding officer looking like some kind of vagabond. Which, as it turned out, was the very word General Ernst had used to describe him. And though Lee had been given ample time to explain his appearance, the general still could not force himself to quite forgive him. Things just were not done that way at West Point, jungle or no damn jungle. So Lee was sent off with Corporal Jones from the chilly atmosphere of the Commandant’s office to the oppressive heat of the out-of-doors.

A few hours later, he emerged from the murky recesses of the officer’s quarters back into the blaze of the Panamanian sun. He had taken a makeshift shower and slipped into a brand new uniform, the effects of both lasted for a few seconds until the tropical heat and humidity wiped out what positive effects might have been gained from being clean. Lee soon discovered that dry clothes were an impossibility in this country; at most he could expect damp ones. The humidity being at such levels as to prevent any drying off of wet clothing.

“All set?” asked someone from behind him.

Lee looked over his shoulder and saw Corporal Jones sitting in a wicker chair, his foot braced against a railing while he tilted the chair back against the wall. Without waiting for a reply, Jones fell forward with a thump and

“The hospital’s this way, sir,” he said as he jammed his regulation Stetson on his head and descended the veranda steps. “Oh, and sir,” he said. “I’d keep the hat on if I were you; we’ve had a lot of problems here with guys who didn’t wear them and wound up flat on their backs with heat prostration.

Lee needed no prodding as he stepped into the direct sunlight and hurriedly covered his head. Already, as he and the corporal pulled away from the barracks, the structure assumed connotations of coolness with its open windows, shaded veranda and nearby trees whose branches seemed to wilt in the heat as they drooped and poured over the sloping roof of the building.

But Corporal Jones, unaware of Lee’s regret at leaving the cool protection of the barracks, had proceeded across the unit parade ground and was just entering the forbidding closeness of the surrounding jungle. Lee had to hurry along to catch up to him.

The corporal had stepped from the parade ground onto a neatly maintained trail that passed between a few other buildings before winding through a bit of jungle. Following Jones, Lee was immediately surrounded by the sights and sounds of the tropics: crying birds and exotic plant life including some species of flowers that flourished only in the dank gloom of the rain forest. The sight of hidden beauty excited his interest and he promised himself that as soon as he had the time, he would collect samples. Looking around, he was sure he could identify at least a half dozen new varieties of flora.