The sense of a huge and attentive—but silent—entity out in the darkness became more and more oppressive. Finally Shandy looked up in fear, and though he could see the moonlight-silvered interweaving of branches overhead, he knew that a thing was bending down invisibly above them, a thing that belonged here, that owned—perhaps largely consisted of—these repellently fecund swamps and pools and vines and small amphibian lives.
The others obviously felt it too. Friend scrambled heavily to his feet and then nearly extinguished his boat's torch by dumping a double fistful of the black herb onto it; the flame guttered low, but a couple of seconds later flared up again, sending a billowing cloud of the harsh smoke unfolding upward toward the branches that roofed the river.
A scream out of the sky shook blossoms from the trees and raised ripples in the water so tight and steady that for a moment the boats seemed to be sitting on a pane of extra-ridgy bull's-eye glass. The sound rang away through the jungle, and then there was just the cawing of frightened birds, and, after they subsided, just the whispering of the fungus pods.
Shandy glanced at the nearest cluster of the pods, and he saw that the fungus lumps were definitely faces now, and from the way their eyelids twitched he was unhappily sure that soon he'd be meeting the gaze of eyes when he looked at them.
Behind him Davies was swearing steadily in a weary monotone.
"Don't tell me," Shandy said in a fairly even voice, "that was one of those brown-and-white birds that eat the goddamned water snails."
Davies barked one syllable of a laugh, but didn't reply. Shandy could hear Beth weeping quietly.
"Ah, my dear Margaret," said old Benjamin Hurwood in a choked but throbbing voice, "may these tears of joy be the only sort you ever shed again! And now indulge, please, a sentimental old Oxford don. On this, our wedding day, I'd like to recite to you a sonnet I've composed." He cleared his throat. The invisible swamp-presence was still a psychic weight on the foul air, and the insteps of Shandy's feet were getting uncomfortably hot in spite of the thick leather between the boot buckles and his skin.
"Margaret!" Benjamin Hurwood began, "I require a Dante's muse … "
"We're aground," came Blackbeard's call from ahead. "Stop pushing 'em. From here, we move on foot."
Christ, thought Shandy. "Is he … kidding?" he asked, not very hopefully. Instead of answering, Davies laid his oar in the boat and climbed over the stern and lowered himself into the black water. It proved to be about hip deep.
" … Fitly to sing my joy after that day," Hurwood crooned on. Shandy looked ahead. Blackbeard had taken his boat's torch out of its bracket, and he and his disquieting boatman were both already in the water and wading toward the nearest bank. Shadows shifted as they moved, and new clusters of the fungus heads became visible.
"Mr. Hurwood," Leo Friend was hissing, shaking the one-armed man. "Mr. Hurwood! Wake up, damn you!"
"When," Hurwood continued reciting, "in my life's mid-point, God let me choose … to leave the gloomy wood—"
Shandy could see Beth's shoulders shaking. Bonnett was sitting as stiffly motionless as a mannikin. Blackbeard and his boatman had climbed up onto the bank, and, ignoring the twitching, whispering white globes at their feet, were hanging on to dangling wild grapevines to keep their footing on the mud and the arching wet roots. "We need him alert," called Blackbeard to Friend. "Slap him—hard. If that doesn't do it I'll come over there and … do something to him myself." Friend smiled nervously, drew back a pudgy hand and then cracked it across Hurwood's simpering face.
Hurwood let go a yell that was almost a sob, then blinked around at the boats, once again aware of his real surroundings.
"Not much farther now," Blackbeard told him patiently, "but we leave the boats here." Hurwood peered for almost a minute at the water and the mud bank. Finally, he said, "We'll have to carry the girl."
"I'll help carry her," called Shandy.
Friend gave Shandy a venomous glare, but Hurwood didn't even look around. "No," the old man said,
"Friend and Bonnett and I can manage."
"Right," said Blackbeard. "The rest of us will be busy chopping us a passage through this jungle." Shandy sighed and put down his oar. He rocked the boat's torch free of its bracket, handed it and the packet of black herb to Davies, and then climbed out of the boat. At least his boots leaked, and the relatively cool swamp water soothed his hot feet.
Chapter Twelve
For half an hour the odd company splashed, plodded and stumbled through one claustrophobic tangle of vegetation after another; Shandy's knife-wielding arm was shaking with fatigue from chopping vines and tree branches, but he drove doggedly on, climbing up out of pools he blundered into, and forcing himself to breathe the harsh air, and always being terribly careful not to let the torch he carried in his other hand be extinguished, or burn off all its charge of the black herb. Hurwood, Bonnett and Friend lurched along behind, stopping every few yards to arrange a new way to carry their own torch, Hurwood's boxes, and Beth, and twice Shandy heard a calamitous multiple splash, followed by renewed sobbing from Beth and a burst of almost incomprehensibly shrill cursing from her father.
Shortly after the eight of them had set foot on the first mud bank, the fungus heads had begun sneezing, and a grainy powder like spores or pollen puffed out of the flappy mouths; but the thick, low-hanging torch smoke repelled the dust as if each torch were the source of a powerful wind that only the powder could feel.
"Inhaling that dust," panted Hurwood at one point when several of the things sneezed at once, "is what … gave you ghosts, Thatch."
Blackbeard laughed as he chopped a young tree aside with a swipe of his cutlass. "Clouds of ghost eggs, eh?"
Shandy, glancing back for a moment, saw Hurwood's pout of scholarly dissatisfaction. "Well, roughly," the old man said as he hunched to get his daughter's legs more comfortably arranged on his shoulders.
Shandy turned back to his task. He'd been trying all along to stay away from Blackbeard's boatman, who, blank-faced, was swinging his cutlass so metronomically that he reminded Shandy of one of the water-powered figures in the Tivoli Gardens in Italy, and as a result Shandy found himself working, more often than not, between Davies and Blackbeard.
The sense of a vast, invisible presence was intensifying again, and again Shandy could feel the thing bending down out of the sky over them, glaring with alien outrage at these eight intruders. Sticking his knife into a tree for a moment, Shandy opened the oilskin bag and dumped a handful of the black stuff onto the torch. After a moment a thick eruption of smoke billowed up and nearly blinded him as he recovered his knife; but this time when the smoke cloud disappeared into the tangled jungle canopy, the forest shook with a low roaring—a boot-shaking rumble that clearly expressed anger, and, just as clearly, emanated from no organic throat.