The Curious Quests of Brigadier Ffellowes Read online

  "Suddenly, sooner than I had hoped, the house was before us. We tore into it, through the open back door, and into the dark living room. Here I caught her by the arm. The hue and cry was a bit further back now, and I had an idea. I have mentioned that there were kerosene lamps about on the tables.

  "I struck a match and grabbed one, which looked full.

  I lighted it and quickly looked for more. 'Kerosene,' I gasped, 'pour it about as fast as you can.'

  "She got the idea finally and began sloshing the lamp contents over the room as fast as I. I smashed the one lighted lamp into the biggest pile of papers I could see, some of her late husband's unpublished discoveries, I expect, and serve him right. The house was full of bamboo stuff, and even in this damp climate that would burn. Also, the house itself was only wet on the outside and had had time to dry out a lot since the months in which it had first been built. The room went up like a bonfire behind us, and I shoved her out the frontdoor and onto the veranda. With any luck, this blaze should delay our pursuers for a moment, and that might be enough. At the very least, they would have to take the other track around, the one that came in higher up the hill.

  "We had got halfway across the path which ran between the sinkpools when I saw we were going to need all the luck we could get. All the islanders were not behind us. Clearly visible in the light from the burning house behind us, there now stood one of what I shall call for want of a better word, the 'elders.' He was waiting for us on a narrow place between two of the boggy patches, and his whole attitude was more than plain. As we caught sight of him, I pushed Mrs. S. behind me.

  "The creature, for it hardly looked human any longer, stood, crooked arms outstretched, his eyes glittering in the light. His visible skin was cracked and leathery, almost like dun-colored scales, and the neck was obscenely long and twisting. He was hairless, and his ears had shrunk or rotted to mere stubs, while the shining dome of his back rose far up behind his shoulders. It seemed to me also that the feet and fingers had nails of extraordinary length and sharpness, but I may have been mistaken in this. He was quite nude, not even the island wraparound, and his whole body looked damp in the firelight. As I advanced slowly, the mouth opened, and I saw that the disease had caused him to lose his teeth as well. There was an uncanny resemblance to the monster I had dealt with up on the higher reaches. No doubt why they called the thing the 'Father.' No doubt.

  "At ten paces, I fired. I shot steadily, and I could see the awful body shake from the impact of the heavy bullets. But though it staggered, it still came on. I shot carefully, for the midbody, not trying out anything fancy. The blank dark eyes never changed expression, though that toothless mouth opened and closed.

  "Behind me, I could hear Mrs. Strudwick whimpering. Couldn't say I blamed her.

  "At the fourth, and last, shot, I dropped the gun, pulled out my knife and waited. Incredible though it may sound, the man, or perhaps what had once been a man, lurched on and closed with me. The fetid breath of that ghastly mouth came into mine, as I drove the knife home again and again, meeting a queer resistance, as if the skin were actually a sort of armor or something similar.

  "But it was dying. There was no strength to its grapple, only a kind of post-mortem will, as if the big nerve centers were actuating the body even after the brain had died. I hurled it aside, and it slid into the nearest muck pool, much as its giant forerunner had a few minutes earlier.

  "We could hear the cry of the pack behind us somewhere, even over the roaring of the flames from the house. This was now totally ablaze and sending sparks over the landscape. Curiously, the only physical harm I got on the whole happening (unless you count a possible something I'll get to later) came from one of these, which caught, unnoticed, in my shirt back and gave me a nasty burn.

  "Again we ran downhill, this time through the village, which, I am happy to say, was deserted. I was perfectly prepared to swim out to the prau, if necessary, towing my lady friend in my wake. The peril of sharks never entered my head, not after what we had just been through, and I feel certain she felt the same way.

  "But it was not necessary. The shots and the blaze had got to old Ali, and though I am not sure he actually would have come ashore, he had fought down his fears and at least bully-damned some of his crew of family thugs to bring the small boat in to the landing place. There they were, armed to the teeth, and looking half petrified with fright. No more unsavory lot ever looked better to me. After the good folk of Pulau Tuntong, a squad of Waffen SS would have looked reassuring.

  "Well, that was that. We got out to the ship, up-anchored and were gone, despite night, reefs and all, in less than twenty minutes. By the time dawn came, Pulau Tuntong was not even in sight. I was barely able to note this fact, because I was burning up with a curious fever. Mrs. Strudwick was not only feverish, but totally unconscious in my cabin, shock no doubt playing some part in the matter.

  "We made port in the Sulas next day and my old Norwegian trader behaved like a saint. He took us in and nursed us both tenderly, as well as a woman could, that hard-handed old swab. I was well enough to leave in a couple of days, but Mrs. Strudwick was a very sick woman. The old man promised to see that she was shipped to the Celebes in his own vessel, and turned over to the Dutch authorities, for transfer eventually to the States. Looking at her, I was not sure she would make it, since she was out of her head half the time and raving senselessly. I told the old man that she and her husband had provoked a native uprising, which in a certain sense you'll agree was true. I also told him to stop sending any boat whatever to Pulau Tuntong, since the people there were far better utterly avoided. I would file my own (discreetly edited) report with the Dutch. He agreed, and told me that though he had tried to find native women to help us, none would do so, not when they had heard whence we came. He had done wonders, and I sent him a fattish check when I got back to Singapore, along with a gold watch I thought he might fancy. I know he got it because he wrote. Mrs. Strudwick had been shipped out also, and I never heard of her again.

  "Now, before you fellows bombard me with questions, let me try to make a few things plain. First, I have never gone back there or checked up on the place, nor even bothered. I had too many other things on my mind until 1945. Never since met anyone who knew the area well enough to put a sensible question to, either. If anyone, either Jap or Allied ever landed there, I never heard of it. You are all welcome to inquire if you care to.

  "As to what I ran into, in all its implications, I warned you, in the beginning, it was full of loose ends and unanswered questions. Most of the major things in life are, I find. But I have one thought that I will share, or rather some related thoughts.

  "In 1940, beyond knowing vaguely that Madame Curie had died of radium poisoning, while doing experiments, the word 'radioactivity' meant literally nothing to me. Am I clear? Hiroshima, of course, changed all that. My current thought is this: the whole island, and especially around those seeps and sulfur springs, could, I think, have been rich in uranium or some such article. I say 'could,' since I know nothing of these matters, beyond what one reads in the tabloids.

  "So, consider a possibility, nothing more. Consider an inbred, isolated fragment of humanity, constantly soaked in this stuff. Would it eventually not cause a mutation among those who survived and managed to breed? I don't know, nor I expect will anyone else, at least for a long time. Only a thought, mind you, and not clear in my own mind. But the turtles, now, according to Strudwick, who may have been loathsome morally, but was at least a good scientist the turtles were an extraordinarily odd mix, all sorts or strange breeds on one tiny island, to use his words. Another matter is my strange fever, not like malaria at all. And I lost a lot of hair, though it later grew back. Radioactivity? It gives one to think.

  "Thus we come to the village 'elders.' They looked awful, but may, just may have been on the road to something new, a new breed, if a most unpleasing one to our eyes. Remember, I saw no children. Could the race have been dying out? Again, I have no idea, n
o real answers.

  "And finally, I suppose you want my ideas on the creature they called the 'Father.' My first thought, and one I clung to for a longish while, was simply that it was an enormous, deformed and very aged turtle, changed perhaps by the radioactive bath in which it had soaked and indeed may have done so for ages, for all that I know."

  He paused, then rose and stood behind his chair, staring blankly at the mantelpiece.

  Then he turned to leave, but his voice floated back as he went "There are, naturally, many other possibilities. The eyes, you know, were utterly human in their expression. Many other possibilities." We heard his feet on the stairs.

  For once in his life, Mason Williams had nothing to say, not a word. It was an occasion.

  -

  A FATHER'S TALE

  "You certainly seem to like the tropics, sir," said a younger member. It was one of the dull summer evenings in the club. The outside fetor in New York City was unbelievable. Heat, accumulated off the sidewalks, hung in the air. Manhattan was hardly a Summer Holiday, despite the claims of its mayor. It was simply New York, The City, a place one had to work in or probably die in.

  "I suppose you have a point there," Ffellowes answered. The library was air-conditioned, but all of us who recently had come in from the streets were sweating, with one exception. Our British member was utterly cool, though he had come in after most of us.

  "Heat," said Ffellowes, as he took a sip of his Scotch, "is, after all, relative, especially in my case. Relates, I should say."

  "But many of your tales, if you'll pardon me, in fact most of them, have been, well set in the tropics," the young member kept on.

  Ffellowes stared coldly at him. "I was not aware, young man, that I had told any tales."

  At this point, Mason Williams, the resident irritant, who could not let the Brigadier alone, exploded. "Hadn't told any tales! Haw-haw, haw-haw!"

  To my amazement, and, I may add, to the credit of the new election committee, this piece of rudeness was quashed at once, and by the same younger fellow who had started the whole thing.

  He turned on Williams, stared him in the eye, and said, "I don't believe you and I were speaking, sir. I was waiting for Brigadier Ffellowes to comment." Williams shut up like a clam. It was beautiful.

  Ffellowes smiled quietly. His feelings about Williams were well-known, if equally unexpressed. A man who'd been in all of Her Majesty's Forces, seemingly including all the intelligence outfits, is hardly to be thrown off gear by a type like Williams. But the defense pleased him.

  "Yes," he confessed, "I do like the tropics. Always go there when I can. But and I stress this it was a certain hereditary bias. I acquired it, one might say, in the genes. You see, my father, and for that matter his, had it as well."

  Again the young member stuck his neck out. Those of us, the old crowd, who were praying that we would get a story, simply kept on praying. Ffellowes was not mean, or petty, but he hated questions. But the boy plugged on.

  "My God, sir," he bored in, "you mean your father had some of the same kind of weird experiences you've had?"

  I don't know to this day why the brigadier, ordinarily the touchiest of men, was so offbeat this evening. But he didn't either dummy up or leave. Maybe, just maybe, he was getting so fed up with Williams he didn't want to let the young fellow down. Anyway, those of us who knew him leaned forward. Of course, Mason Williams did too. He hated Ffellowes but never enough to miss a story, which is, I suppose, an indication that he isn't completely mindless.

  "If you care to hear this particular account, gentlemen," began Ffellowes, "you will have to take it second-hand, as it were. I wasn't there myself, and all I know comes from my father. However he was there, and I may say that will strongly resent (here he did not quite look at Williams) any imputation that he spoke to me anything but the absolute truth." There was silence. Total. Williams had lost too many encounters.

  Said Ffellowes, "The whole thing started off the west coast of Sumatra. My father had been doing a spell of service with old Brooke of Sarawak, the second of the so-called White Rajahs, C.V. that would be. Anyway, Dad was on vacation, leave, or what have you. The Brookes, to whom he'd been 'seconded', as the saying goes, from the Indian Army, were most generous to those who served them. And my father wanted to see a few new areas and get about a bit. This was in the fall of 1881, mind you, when things were different.

  "So there he was, coming down the Sumatran coast, in one of Brooke's own private trading prahus, captained by old Dato Burung, picked crew and all that, when the storm hit.

  "It was a bad one, that storm, but he had a largish craft, as those things went, a big prau mayang, a sort of merchant ship of those waters. No engine, of course, but a sturdy craft, sixty feet long, well capable of taking all the local weathers, save perhaps for a real typhoon, which this was not. They all battened down to ride out the storm. They had no trouble.

  "Surely enough, the next morning was calm and clear. And off the lee side, within sight of the green west Sumatran coast, was a wreck. It wasn't much, but the remnants of another prau, a prau bedang, the local light craft used for fishing, smuggling, and what have you. Ordinarily, this much smaller vessel would have carried two modified lateen sails, or local variants, but now both masts were gone, snapped off at the deck, obviously by the previous night's storm. The fragile hulk was wallowing in the deep milky swells, which were the only trace of the earlier wind.

  "My father's ship bore down on her. He had given no orders, but a ship in trouble in these waters was fair game for anyone. Occasionally, hapless folk were even rescued. Dad stood on the quarter-deck in his whites, and that was quite enough to make sure there would be no throat cutting. Forbidding anything else would have been silly. Next to him stood his personal servant, old Umpa. This latter was a renegade Moro from the Sulus, but a wonderful man. He was at least sixty, but as lean and wiry as a boy. Whatever my father did was all right with him, and anything anyone else did was wrong, just so long as my father opposed it, mind you.

  "To his surprise, as the bigger craft wore, to come up under the wreck's lee, a hand was raised. Beaten down though the little craft had been, there was someone still left alive. Dad's vessel launched a rowing boat, and in no time the sole survivor of the wreck was helped up to the poop and placed before him. To his further amazement, it was not a Sudanese fisherman who confronted him, but a Caucasian.

  "The man was dressed quite decently, in tropical whites, and even had the remnants of a celluloid collar. Aside from the obvious ravages of the sea, it was plain that some time must have passed since the other had known any amenities of civilization. His whites, now faded, were torn at the knees, badly stained with green slime and ripped at various places. His shoes were in an equally parlous condition, almost without soles. Yet, the man still had an air about him. He was tall, a youngish man, sallow and aquiline in feature, was tall, a youngish man, sallow and aquiline in feature, with a hawk nose. Despite his rags, he bore himself as a person of consequence. His beard was only a day or two grown, 'At your service,' said my father, as this curious piece of human flotsam stared at him. 'Can I be of some service?'

  "The answer was peculiar. 'Never yet, sir, have I failed in a commission. I should not like this occasion to be the first. With your permission, we will go below.' With that, this orphan of the gale fell flat on his face, so quickly that not even my father or the ship's captain could catch him as he slumped.

  "They bent, both of them, quickly enough when the man fell. As my father reached down to take his head, the grey eyes opened.

  " 'At all costs, watch for Matilda Briggs,' said the unknown, in low and quite even tones. The lids shut and the man passed into total and complete unconsciousness. It was obvious to my father that he had only been sustaining himself by an intense effort of will. What the last piece of nonsense meant was certainly obscure. Who on earth was Matilda Briggs, and why should she be sought? As they carried the man below to my father's cabin, he had decided the chap w
as simply delirious. On the other hand, he was obviously a man of education, and his precise speech betrayed the university graduate. One can be excused of snobbery at this point. There were not so many of this type about in the backwaters of the world in those days, you know, despite what Kipling may have written on the subject. Most educated Englishmen in Southeast Asia had jobs and rather strictured ones at that. The casual drifter or 'remittance man' was a later type than one found in the 1880's, and had to wait for Willie Maugham to portray him.

  "Well, my father took his mystery man below; the crew looted the remnants of the little prau (and found nothing, I may say, including any evidence of anyone else; they told the skipper that the mad Orang Blanda must have taken her out alone); and the White Rajah's ship set sail and continued on her way down the Sumatran coast.

  "Dad looked after the chap as best he could. Westerners, Europeans, if you like, though my father would have jibbed at the phrase since he thought that sort of thing began at Calais, did this sort of thing without much thinking then. There were so few of them, you see, surrounded by the great mysterious mass of Asia. Outside the British fief, as the Old Man said, one felt A.C.I., or Asia Closing In. No doubt the feeling of the average G.I. in Viet Nam a few years ago. I know what they meant, having spent enough time out in those regions.