The Talents

Danny Foxworth was the first to die. He was young, very young, and very, very inexperienced. So inexperienced, in fact, that none of us could quite understand how he’d gotten into field work—he must’ve been some officer’s cousin’s brother-in-law’s son, and been assigned to the expedition as an act of familial courtesy. He was charming, and funny, and utterly irresponsible. We weren’t surprised when he died.

We figured he must’ve eaten something, some poisonous fruit, perhaps, or more likely one of the candy-bright mushrooms that grew in such abundance along the karst. We found him a few hundred metres from his tent, completely naked, with dark, putty-like splotches of blood coagulating about his eyes, and his lips stiffened in a final scream. It was Dr. Lippincott who suggested the mushroom theory—she was a botanist from Cambridge, and knew about such things. There are certain toxic compounds, she explained, found in several species of mountain fungus, that are capable of producing powerful hallucinations, while at the same time causing a complete disintegration of neural tissue. ‘What about his tent?’ Helbrandt asked, when he had caught up with us—he was the oldest member of our little group at sixty-five, and had a bad foot besides from an unfortunate encounter with a sandbiter.

‘What about it?’

‘Well, it’s all torn up. Could’ve been a bear, I suppose.’

Neefs, our surveyor, a prim little Dutchman, scoffed at this suggestion, for in performing our makeshift autopsy, we had found not a single wound upon Foxworth. He added that for a bear to strip Foxworth whilst leaving his body untouched would be rather like peeling the foil off a chocolate bar, and then tossing the chocolate aside.

We all thought this was rather callous, and Thompson remarked that the least Neefs could do was have a little respect for the dead.

‘And anyway,’ Bakthu, our guide, said, ‘there are no bears this far north. They’re lazy. They don’t like climbing.’

We buried Foxworth without further speculation. Konashyevech, as a religious man, fashioned a little cross out of some spare tent stakes, and drove it into the dry red dirt over the grave. Lippincott gave a cautionary lecture, which we had all heard at least twenty times over since leaving the village, on the importance of scavenging only food that we could verify was safe and wholesome to eat. Then we had a late breakfast, and struck out again upon the trail. There didn’t seem to be anything else to do, except move on.

That was the morning of the thirteenth day, and two days later we reached the Eagle’s Head Pass. Here the craggy black rock of the karst gave way, at last, to what had once been the basin of a riverbed, a wide, flat canyon scarred with salt pits, and bristling with clumps of scrubby red pine. The Pass was marked, on our maps, as the last point of civilisation we would reach upon the trail, and Neefs declared that the land was level enough for him to set up his equipment. We all tried to dissuade him, for we had pushed ourselves some forty-odd kilometres that day, and we were exhausted, and hungry, and in foul spirits. But Neefs insisted upon taking a reading, and even convinced Bakthu to help him clean the telescopes. And so the rest of us pitched our camp at the crooked lip of an old dam, ate a hurried dinner, and then crawled, grumbling at Neefs’s relentless efficiency, into our tents.

We were awakened at about half past twelve by the sound of Lippincott screaming. Then Helbrandt burst into our tents and declared that Neefs was outside, banging his head against the rocks.

There was nothing we could do to save him. Konashyevech and Thompson, the two strongest members of our party, tried to pin him down, but he clawed and kicked at us with the fury of a madman, and very nearly bit one of Bakthu’s fingers off during the struggle. We didn’t have the strength or the will to stop him when he broke away from us, though Lippincott did try shooting at him with a little rubber pellet gun we used for hunting quail. The bullets had absolutely no effect on him, and he sprinted wildly to the top of a fifty-foot ridge that ran alongside the old dam. We stood and watched him, for one terrible moment, as a great shudder passed through his body, contorting his limbs in the most uncanny and violent manner. Then he dashed himself into the maw of bedrock below.

We gathered up the bits of him that we could find, and buried him, piecemeal, in one of the sandpits. Konashyevech gave a sermon of sorts. Lippincott threw up two or three times. Helbrandt drank a good deal. Bakthu pointed out a wake of vultures picking at the nearby rotting carcass of a hare, and eyeing us hungrily throughout the proceedings.

‘I wonder how you explain that one, then, Doctor,’ Helbrandt said, as we listlessly packed up our tents.

‘There are…there are certain types of mushroom…’ Lippincott faltered. But she could convince nobody, much less herself, of this theory for a second time. Neefs, unlike Foxworth, had more than a modicum of common sense about him, and we all knew that he had been as fastidious in his dining habits as Foxworth had been reckless and nonchalant in his. It was simply impossible to conceive of Neefs accidentally ingesting a deadly substance; and as soon as we had established this, a horrifying thought occurred to all of us, though nobody voiced it aloud.

One of us was a killer.

*

We passed another week without incident. We had, by this time, left the canyon far behind us, and the black fingers of the karst were once again clutching at the delicate pink throat of the skyline. It was abominably hot every day, and torrentially rainy every night, and we had nothing to eat but quail and tinned oranges, and nothing to do except march, and eat, and sleep, and take notes, according to our respective specialties, on the unremarkable, unbearable sameness of the wildlife and the scenery and the weather. We began to despair of ever finding the meteorite. It was, so we had been told, a vast, silvery-blue mass of rock that throbbed with a tangible energy, as though some great life force were trapped inside. Lippincott had said, at the start of the expedition, that she didn’t expect we would find anything at all—that the subject of all our toil and years of research would turn out to be nothing more than a myth, or at best a scholarly fabrication. Foxworth, of course, had been a believer, and Neefs was paid handsomely, so he hadn’t cared one way or the other. Helbrandt took the middle ground, both sceptical and hopeful, and Thompson remained silent on his own opinion. ‘Seek,’ Konashyevech said, ‘and ye shall find,’ although he grew more doubtful with every passing day. Bakthu had the advantage on all of us, for he had grown up in the country, and so had a lifetime of stories to rely on.

It was, in fact, this incident of Bakthu’s nationality that first made Lippincott suspicious of him. We noticed her behaviour growing increasingly erratic—she began to communicate solely by whispers and glances whenever he was about, and she refused to eat anything that was cooked at the communal fire. One evening, Thompson later recounted, as we were pitching camp, she drew him aside, and confided in him her fears. ‘It’s that boy, I know it’s the boy,’ she hissed, and gripped Thompson’s arm with all the ferocity of her conviction. ‘At first I thought it was the Polack,’ she continued, feverishly, ‘but I’ve been watching him and my God, the man prays his beads three times a day—it couldn’t possibly be him. And it isn’t Helbrandt either—I’ve been watching him carefully, too, you know, and he’s an old fool and a drunkard, but he isn’t a murderer.’

‘Why couldn’t it be me?’ Thompson asked her, steadily. ‘Why couldn’t it be you?’

She scoffed at the idea. ‘First of all, you’re too stupid,’ she said. ‘And as for me—what could possibly be my motive? But listen, listen—Bakthu is a native, and these native types, you know, are devilishly cunning. He could be picking us off, one by one. He knows these mountains, and the trail, and the mushrooms—the goddamn mushrooms!—he knows it all by heart, the shifty little bugger, and he’s leading us to our death.’

‘For what purpose?’

‘For any purpose! Listen to me—we’re the enemy to him, don’t you understand? We are the great white menace, and there could be hundreds more like him lurking about—waiting to lure us away and then murder us in our sleep—’

She was babbling hysterically by now, so Thompson broke away when he could, and left the doctor a sobbing, sweaty heap of paranoia. He spoke cautiously of the incident, and warned Bakthu to be on his guard. The boy laughed, and thanked him, and said he wondered whether it was Lippincott’s time of the month.

There was another storm that night, more severe than the many ones that had come before it. The roar of the wind and the rain was nearly deafening, and the sky quaked with thunder. I don’t believe any of us slept—except perhaps for Helbrandt, who, I think, was passed out in a stupor—and a few hours before dawn, Konashyevech called to us from his tent, and asked if we had heard a cry. We had not. Our ears were numb, and plugged with cotton.

We slept late, once the storm had finally exhausted itself, and awoke around eight. Helbrandt was the first to venture forth from his tent. He cried out to us, as we were pulling on our boots, that Bakthu’s tent was empty, and Lippincott nowhere to be seen.

We spread out to find them, and Konashyevech was successful within a matter of some minutes. Bakthu was lying in a swollen basin of rainwater at the bottom of a ravine. We fished him out and found a bullet lodged in his left ribcage. The wound, Helbrandt said, with the grim expertise of a man who has served in half a dozen wars, was certainly not severe enough to have killed him, but he had probably stumbled into the ravine, passed out, and drowned in the downpour. He was sixteen years old.

Lippincott was thirty-eight, and Helbrandt swore that he would kill her, for he wept openly at the death of the boy, and was convinced that Lippincott had shot him. We did, in fact, find one of the pistols upon her body, but there was nothing for Helbrandt to expend his wrath on, as the doctor was already quite dead. There was no blood about her eyes, but there was a great deal of it soaked into her clothes. Upon examination, we discovered that her breasts and labia had been torn clean off, and that the wounds were raised and blackened at the edges, as though cauterised.

We sat there, in horrified silence, for quite some time. Then Konashyevech, driven perhaps by a sense of modesty, gingerly replaced Lippincott’s trousers, and refastened the buttons upon her shirt. ‘The boy,’ he said, ‘must’ve been wrong about the bears.’

We knew we wouldn’t be able to make any further progress that day. We had a long, tedious time of digging the grave—Helbrandt was far too lame to be of much use, and his hands shook constantly from the drinking. We finished our bleak task in the afternoon, though Konashyevech lingered over the graves for some time afterwards, fashioning his little crosses. He was very adept at that by now.

None of us were hungry at suppertime, but we were, without exception, depressed and exhausted, and so we fell into deep and untroubled sleep an hour or so before the rain started. We slept together that night, and every night afterwards, for Konashyevech’s tent was large and durable enough to accommodate us all, and none of us wished to be alone.

Helbrandt’s alarm clock pealed us awake at six, by which time the storm had nearly subsided. Konashyevech made tea and said his morning prayers, whilst we all sat, shivering and smoking, in the tent. ‘I’m done, lads,’ Helbrandt said, at length.

‘What do you mean, you’re done?’ Thompson demanded.

‘I mean I’m not going any further. This is as far as I go. If there’s a fallen star somewhere up there, you lads are welcome to go find it and gawp at it. But I’ve had enough. I’m done.’

‘You can’t just give up,’ Konashyevech said. ‘We won’t let you.’

‘I’ve a foot full of pus and a head full of whiskey. I’ll only slow you down.’

‘Well then, you must make your way back to the village,’ Konashyevech said, stubbornly, and divided our remaining rations with the intent of leaving Helbrandt his proper share. But Helbrandt insisted that he wanted nothing save his flask and a rifle.

‘What’s the rifle for?’ Thompson asked, although we already knew the answer.

And Helbrandt, in his brusque, soldierly way, simply wished us good luck, and told us to keep a stiff upper lip.

*

The morning sun crept over us, quiet and leprous white. A red mist clotted high overhead where the stormclouds had scratched their bellies, ulcerous with rain, against the blackened nails of the karst. Another day passed, and then another, and then an endless succession of moons. We were tired and dizzy, but we no longer felt hunger or thirst, or the other baser instincts of the body. Nothing mattered anymore except the trail, and what lay at the end of it.

Konashyevech succumbed on the thirtieth day—or perhaps it was some time much later than that. Our logbooks mattered very little to us by then, and all the charts and maps and astronomical calculations which we had prepared so carefully, so many years ago, were neither useful nor important to us any longer, except perhaps as kindling, or little scraps to wipe the sweat and dung off our bodies. He collapsed upon the trail; he was not taken, suddenly, as the others were, in the dead of night. We thought of tying him down, for he was our friend, and we didn’t want to see him suffer the same grotesque fate as Neefs. But he was already far gone, and he spent the last of his bodily strength clutching at his beads, even as the blood poured from his eyes and the entrails leapt in great steaming ribbons from his stomach.

We wept for a long time, and cursed the powers that had drawn us to this place. We lay beside the body of Konashyevech that night, and many nights after—we couldn’t bring ourselves to bury him—he was the only friend we had left. We stared at each other with horrible eyes and thoughts, and the hunger returned, and the pain, the excruciating conflict of atoms warring across a bloody fabric of flesh and a desolate continuum of bone.

Another month might’ve passed, or another century—or, perhaps, it was only a matter of a few days, here and there, scattered lightly across our consciousness. Time became irrelevant. Breathe became irrelevant. Thompson’s body became excruciating, and also irrelevant, and so I disposed of it. I wandered the karst in my true form, ever hungry, ever watchful, ever yearning for the soft touch of my mistress, or a glance from the glowing forges of her eyes, a warm sigh from her fiery lips. Night passed into day, and day turned into night, and night spun itself out into the eternal reaches of space, and it was only then upon chance, when I had surrendered myself to the void, that I finally caught a glimmer of her blue and silver robes.

They had told me that she was beautiful and vast as the ocean, unerring and bright in her course as the sun, more terrible than the moon, an abyss of galaxies, a graveyard of stars. But words—these puny little utterances the poor simians blunder about with—cannot describe in any way whatsoever her true celestial splendour. And as I gazed upon her, all the pain I had endured—the many long days and the festering nights, the death of my comrades, the piloting of a little fleshy ship, destined to wreck itself upon the shores of its own mortality—all this became as nothing more than a pinprick, forgotten in a moment, and laughed at a moment later.

Konashyevech was right.

He had told me, a long time ago—in another life, that was not my own—he said that the most any man could do to achieve happiness was to love his god with his whole being, and serve him with the entirety of his will. The rest, he said, would take care of itself. Well, my friend, I have done exactly that. For I returned to my mistress sevenfold the gift that was bestowed upon me, and the sacrifice has been acceptable in her sight. I have been the good and faithful servant, and I am worthy now at last to throw myself at her feet, and be absorbed into her cosmic presence.