A vast tree stood in his wav: a ceiba or silkv-tree: immense: the trail became two trails and branched around it, Limekiller, pausing- only to consider if it mattered which branch he took, nevertheless paused. Something moved. There was no beautiful birdsong now. Now and then something gave an ugly croak. Maybe a frog. Maybe not. Something moved. Another flash.
There was a break in the bush, a thinning of the foliage as well as the trees, and he could see it now, plainly; it was a yellowhead parrot, and, as local lore said that the yellowhead parrot was the aptest to learn speech, Limekiller might not have been surprised when the bird began to speak. If speak was indeed the word. It had been just doing bird things, preening and grooming and contemplating. Humboldt, a hundred and fifty years earlier, had told the terrible story of encountering up the Amazon a parrot kept by an Indian tribe; bootv from a raid on another Indian tribe. All those latter Indians had been wiped out (no, the Old World did not invent genocide; it merely invented Writing, and wrote its crimes down); the parrot Humboldt told of could and did speak. But no one could understand what it spoke. the language of the defeated Indians had been confined to that one small tribe, there in its own green heart of darkness, and that tribe and its culture and its traditions were extinct. and only some few phrases of its lost language survived. and survived on the grey tongue of a single bird.
But surely this was no human speech which turned Limekiller’s heated skin so cold, so suddenly. The voice, if “voice” it was, was like that of no living thing which Limekiller had ever heard… or ever heard of… it was a mutter, and a nightmare mutter at that.
And, as he knew that parrots have no nightmares, and that this bird was wide awake, he could only realize that the bird was and had to be imitating some living, speaking thing. thing?
Which might not even be very far off, either.
It was not far off at all.
It was here, in another moment only, it was there: on the trail; there: the trail’s other, farther branch.
Farther.
Thank God.
For this time there had been no flash: he simply saw it. It had not been there, it could not have been there, it could not be there now, as he melted against the side of the vast tree, no such thing could be, there was no such thing; he lay still asleep somewhere and if he only could force himself to, in a second he would be awake; he could not force himself to: it was the jumby. The jumby paused. It moved on a moment more; again it paused. He now heard it sniff. And mutter. His legs melted too, now, fortunately quite slowly, and so now, besides the silkv-tree, there was a shrub between him and it. It, with its head reminiscent of the Things in one of Goya’s madtime paintings: had Goya gone mad? Had Goya seen… it…?
Limekiller saw the head move, even as he shuddered at the sound of that sniff. and of the frightful mutter which the parrot had mimicked. “indescribable?” by no means — one would not wish it described too well. The jumby muttered and the jumby sniffed. What had it smelled? — what was it trying to smell? And the sudden sullen thought that it might be trying to smell him… his own body. arm-pits, rump-crack, crotch, and all his eternally odorous human body howevermuch washed. did him (John Limekiller was his body’s name) no good at all.
The head, so human if bestial, so bestial if human, so. something else as well. the head moved. The nostrils, if that was what they were, sank into the sunken snout… if that is what it was. or nose. had it been like that, so, or anything like so, in life… or was it the sunken snout of decay, of death, of.
If it were not smelling for him, for what was it smelling? it had been smelling for him. Could it smell him, then, he, himself, himself alone? or his sw eat, his glands, microdrops of his urine and traces remnant of his stool? could it even, now, and was it even now trying to, smell Bathsheba on him as well? the tobacco he sometimes smoked and that other herb he sometimes smoked? the Indians said the beasts of venery could smell not only tobacco but that other venery; hence perhaps why they burned copal-gum before beginning to spoor… no copal here, too late for that, too late for any and for all — could it smell Bathsheba on him as well? Iniquity, transgression, and sin. Bathsheba’s boughten perfume, God knows how cheap, but use it she would. smell her body. on his? and was he here and now to pay by the wrath of some god or some facet or the one One God, for any act of unhallowed copulation which had left its traces though at the latest two days old, or three, One God in Three, traces left upon and onto him like as letters of and in fire: could it smell his sperm? his rum? his -
Limekiller smelled it now, and, ah God that was something, how it smelled! But even as he crouched and tried to contain every single one of his body’s contents, he relished (of a sudden) the faint it was faint, but it was. oh! — notice of the jumby’s stench. more now, he relished it than the, if only in memory, so-called perfume, perfume unbought in bottles, of a woman’s flesh. not invariably such a sweet perfume (was his? his own fierce flesh, though since, yes, washed) and not always a purchased perfume; oh he relished this horrid, however-faint, odor more than the sweetest scent he had ever smelled: for he knew that if he could smell the jumbv, then the faint breeze came from the other side of the jumby: hence the jumby could not smell him.
Was he then or had he ever been a Roman Catholic he might have risk or not then crossed himself. Crouching in the alien bush he regretted every single regret he had ever had about Canada, would have buried himself forever in the freezv winter mantle of Our Lady of the Snows. and ah God how he would have given anything. anything?. almost anything. his testicles?. one testicle: at least… to be back there now, at its worst. what was its worst compared to here and now and this? He would face up to, and with penitence or joy, every life lost that day upon the Plains of Abraham: to be back there, there. and not here. here.
The jumby’s bestial head moved slightly toward Limekiller’s direction, he felt his left hand jerk slightly, saw some faint rictus (as he crouched behind the immense silkv-tree) move that horrid bias- phemy of a face, saw that face turn away with a jerk of its own.
The jumby moved slowly along the trail with that gait or walk not like that of anyone or anything which Limekiller had ever seen. It did not lurch, though almost; and neither did it shamble, and vet — Flow? no, of course not that smoothlv — Odd the wav its hands held halfway up the body and slowly moving up and down and away — It moved slowly along the trail and now and then he could see its legs and the mud-caked hairs on the immense muscles of them; were its eyes deep-sunken and dim, were they glazed or was that a trick of the light or had they a translucent membrane, or -
It had been moving.
It was not moving now.
Something was moving.
Something else.
Limekiller heard it before he saw it, an odd and, dragging sound, but. somehow. not one all that unnatural. and he smelled it, too, before he saw it, and it had a stench of rot on and above its mere animal rankness: yet, stinking though this was, it was (this) no such utterly alien stench as the jumbv’s: What?