‘If you don’t stop, someone is going to ring the police,’ Gerry hissed in her ear.

Klaus stooped to pick up the carton. ‘These are mine, Julia—photos from before we were married, before I knew you. That’s all I want, the rest is yours. I can do without the memories.’

He walked toward his car. Julia twisted in Gerry’s arms.

‘Don’t go! We can talk! Klaus!’

He turned. ‘Get some help, Julia.’

She broke away from Gerry and ran full pelt towards Klaus. Weeping now, she clutched at his arm. He pushed her to the pavement. As his car sped away, the trees, the street and the sky seemed to come crashing down upon her.

38

Mayfair, 1861

THE PHOTOGRAPH WAS OF THE Colonel, with tribal elders standing either side of him clad in painted wooden masks large enough to conceal their heads and shoulders. Long strands of dried grass were attached to the masks and ran down to the ground, completely hiding their bodies and any other indication that they were human. The painted faces of the mythological creatures—dark forehead, a streak of white from brow to chin, a simple oval symbolising a mouth, circles or curved streaks for the cheeks—stared back at the viewer, sinister, not of this world.

Hamish gazed at the Colonel’s figure dwarfing the tribesmen, his eyes blazing as he stared beyond the camera lens, beyond the known world. The young student, soporific from dinner, imagined how the ritual might have been—the gyrating natives, the masks swaying mesmerically in the flickering fire.

‘The day before, we had all fasted to purify our bodies to prepare them for the Spirits,’ Huntington explained. ‘Gilo, my guide, who also worked as my translator, sat with me in a clearing they had made especially on a riverbank. The shaman was a man of about forty years, which is old indeed for the Bakairi. He stood only four foot eleven inches in height but had a ferocious nature. He was a true statesman. He promised me that I would see my Spirit, the gods of my people. At the beginning of the ceremony, we all performed a dance to cleanse the air of evil and to entice the spirits to come up from the river and enter the masks that the twenty-one shamans wore. Campbell, you should have seen how the young boys’ dancing swept up the red dust, stirring up a cloud in which shadow became spirit became man became shadow again. It was extraordinary. Then, after the drumming stopped and all the jungle birds filled the clearing with their shrill screeches, the chief shaman stepped forward. “I am the embodiment of Evaki, I am her page!” he chanted. “You, white ghost! I will dance your past, I will dance your future!”’

The Colonel paused, the memory transforming his expression. Outside, a coach and horses rattled past, creating an avalanche of hoof-falls that hung for a moment then faded.

‘And did he?’ Hamish leaned forward eagerly.

The Colonel hesitated; whenever he had related this experience before, he had always censored it. Why did he now feel the need to confess to this youth? Was it the desire to be unburdened? To admit to an epiphany that he, a self-declared atheist, regarded as spiritual? Perhaps he was looking for absolution…but to be absolved by an apprentice, a novice half his age?

Could he really trust him? He studied the youth; the look in Hamish Campbell’s eyes, the open enthusiasm that played across his features again reminded him of his younger self. The Colonel decided to continue without expurgation.

‘In a manner, I think I experienced both my future and my death there. As the shaman began to mimic my walk, my slightly hunched shoulders, the perplexed knot of my forehead, the swing of my travelling stick clearing the foliage, I could see myself: prejudiced, burdened by all the preconceived notions I had carried into the jungle six months before. Then, suddenly, I saw myself at ten, alone, fearful; then at sixteen, bursting with all the arrogance of youth; and then, like ripples across one’s reflection in water, I saw my own death mask. I tried to flee but I was fastened to the ground as firmly as an insect to a specimen glass. I could not tell you whether I stood there for hours or days, but I can tell you I saw their goddess of death, Calounger, with her skull head and burning eyes. I saw their gods, Campbell, I swear it. This scientific rationalist witnessed the very fabric of another culture’s belief. I tell you, there is not one truth but many.’

There was a beat. The Colonel, embarrassed at having sounded so youthfully impassioned, set the mask down and waited. He must believe I have lost my sanity, he thought. What an idiot I have been to endanger my reputation. Finally the student spoke up.

‘What I’d give for such an experience—to throw off the shackles of the conventional world, to see into another sensibility!’

Relief flooded the Colonel’s body. He felt intoxicated, inspired by his companion’s obvious enthralment.

‘What would you give?’ It was a rhetorical question. The Colonel had sensed already what Campbell would offer.

Hamish glanced at Huntington. The man’s tone was brazen, and yet it was a delicate moment: to presume wrongly would be certain social suicide.

‘I think that as an anthropologist it must be considered an essential part of one’s training. To experience such a profound insight through a single ritual—’

‘And a little ayahuasca,’ the Colonel interjected, smiling slightly.

‘—and under the guiding hand of a mentor, to understand that the known world can be so easily usurped—for something far more exhilarating and dangerous…’

‘Indeed.’

The two men laughed, a deliberate ploy to break the suddenly charged atmosphere. Each felt a nervousness not unpleasantly laced with elation and erotic desire. As the Colonel leaned forward, his knee brushed Campbell’s flannelled leg, an almost imperceptible contact that both were excruciatingly aware of.

‘I can make it happen,’ he said softly and quickly, before he had time to regret the words.

‘And that could only be a source of both pleasure and delight,’ Hamish replied unflinchingly.

The carriage pulled in behind the mews. It was past midnight but Lavinia could see lights still burning in the windows of James’s study. Aloysius helped her out of the coach. She stood for a moment in the moon-drenched courtyard, the cold air suspending all reflection. She looked as if the wind might flatten her like a paper doll, the coachman marvelled. He wondered at the conversation that had passed between the curious boy-whore and his mistress. Then, anxious she might catch a chill, he stepped forward.

‘Madam?’

Tags: Tobsha Learner Fiction
Source: readsnovelonline.net