AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The air and water - the whole jungle - began to change. "Keep ... moving!" came a choked cry from Hurwood. "Get ... out from under!"
"Oh, good luck," rasped Davies bitterly, nevertheless hauling desperately on the oars.
The water was shaking like a jelly now, and the air was steamy and full of wet bits of vegetation that were evidently being shaken out of the trees. The structure of the boat seemed to be changing under Shandy, becoming more flexible, and when he glanced down at the floorboards he saw that they were untrimmed branches, sprouting gleaming green leaves. They were moving, growing as he watched - he could feel them heaving under his boots. There was a clump of wet waterweed on his bared forearm; when he tried to brush it off it clung by one end, and, when he grabbed the free end and pulled, he saw that he was simply pulling more of it out of a hole in his arm, and he could feel the internal tug of it all the way up to his shoulder. He let go instantly, and then saw the tiny green shoots that were poking out painfully from under his fingernails. He looked back at Davies; the back of the pirate's head was a mass of flowers, and his hat was being pushed askew by new ones opening up as Shandy watched. In Davies' shadow he could see Beth heaving in the grip of the vegetative metamorphosis, but he shuddered and looked beyond her, toward the third boat.
"Throw him ... someone," howled Hurwood as green stalks began unrolling up out of his throat.
"Bonnett," croaked Friend. His fat hands were now just elbow-lumps in the tree trunks that extended from his shoulders, through the oarlocks, and out sideways into the water. "Give the thing Bonnett.";Damn," muttered Hurwood when the voice stopped. "It doesn't know that right now."
Shandy saw Friend shrug. "We can wait for a while."
"We'll wait until it knows, and has told me," said Hurwood firmly.
"Who's this it?" asked Blackbeard.
"The ... personality we were questioning," said Hurwood, "though the pronoun 'who' overstates the case." He sighed, apparently at the hopelessness of trying to explain, but then his professorial reflexes seemed to take over. "Newton's laws of mechanics are entirely useful in describing the world we know - for every action there's an equal but opposite reaction, and a uniformly moving object will continue to move uniformly unless acted upon by some force - but if you get very particular about very small-scale events, if you deal with them in such specific, needlessly obsessive detail as to almost qualify you for a lunatic asylum ... you find that Newton's mechanical description of reality is only mostly correct. In tiny extents of space or time there's an element of indecisiveness, postponement of definition, and you can catch truth as loose as an underdone egg. In our normal world this isn't a big factor because the ... odds, I guess you'd say ... are pretty consistent from place to place, and overwhelmingly strong in favor of Newton. But here they're not consistent. They're polarized here, though the overall net values are the same. There is no elasticity in this ground, no uncertainty, and so there's a lot out here in the air. What we were questioning was a ... tendency toward personality; the likelihood of an awareness."
Blackbeard snorted. "What language was that, that likelihoods speak?"
"The oldest one," said Hurwood imperturbably.
"Is that," Shandy found himself asking, "why the thing is so hard to locate?"
"Yes," said Hurwood, "and don't try. It isn't any where - where is as inappropriate to this phenomenon as who. If you watch for it you're watching for a what, at some particular where and when - and on that basis you may find many things, but you won't find. He finished the sentence with a vague wave and a fading whistle.
For at least a full minute they all stood there shivering in that cold dark valley, while Hurwood patiently called some unintelligible phrase over and over again. Shandy looked around to see how Beth was enduring, but Hurwood sharply told him to keep his gaze steady.
Finally Blackbeard said, "This delay wasn't part of our bargain."
"Fine," said Hurwood. He sent his strange sentence out once again; and then he added, to Blackbeard, "Go, if you like. Good luck getting back to the jungle."
Blackbeard swore, but stayed where he was. "Your ghost-thing is looking something up for you, hey?"
"No. It will eventually manifest itself again, but it won't be the same personality as before; though at the same time it won't be a different personality either. 'Same' and 'different' are far too specific. And it won't have learned what I want to know. It will simply happen to know it this time. Or, if not this time, it will know it some time. It's like waiting for two or twelve to come up in a game of dice."
More time went by, and finally one of Hurwood's patient calls was answered. Beth's father conversed with the unlocated voice for another minute or so, and then Shandy heard him plodding heavily across the mud.
"You can all look anywhere you please now," Hurwood said.
Shandy watched Hurwood, and he wasn't reassured to see the narrowed eyes and the hardened jaw-muscles of the ex-Oxford don.
"Leo," Hurwood said tensely, "hold Elizabeth."
Friend was wheezingly happy to obey. Beth still seemed to be in a stunned daze, though Shandy noticed that she was breathing very rapidly now.
Hurwood reached down and untied the wooden box from his belt; he loosened the wooden lid with his teeth and shook it off. Shandy couldn't see what was inside. Then Hurwood shuffled over to Beth and held it, open end up, under her right hand.
"Cut her hand, Leo," the old man said.
Shandy started forward, but long before he could get there Friend reached down with his hairpin and, his lips wet and his eyes half-closed, drove the pin into Beth Hurwood's thumb.
It brought her out of her daze. She jumped and looked down at her punctured hand, and then looked past it into the box her father was holding, into which the quick drops of her blood were falling - and she shrieked and lunged away, scrambling on all fours up the muddy slope.
Shandy took off after her and caught her a few yards up, and he put his arm around her heaving shoulders and shook her gently. "It's over now, Beth," he gasped. "Your hand's cut but we're alive and I think we're headed back now. The worst is - "
"It's my mother's head!" Beth screamed. "He's got my mother's head in that box!"
Shandy couldn't help looking back in horror. Hurwood was sitting down in the mud to slide the wooden lid back onto the box, an expression of almost imbecilic satisfaction lighting up his old face, while Friend just looked hungrily at Beth, his hands still raised in the position they'd been in when he was holding her - but Davies, and even Blackbeard, were staring at the one-armed man with astonishment and loathing.
