The Glass-Sided Ants' Nest Read online

“Oh God,” said Eve. She crossed the room to sit where he had first seen her, on the sofa, and settled into stillness, as still as a stuffed bird in a glass case.

  VI

  There was something horrible about the priest. Eve was frightened of him from the moment she saw him.

  She came out of the school after her first lesson, hot and embarrassed with anger. Daddy had teased her, gently but obviously, in front of all the Kus because of her ignorance of their language and life, and they’d all bayed with happy laughter. Honestly, how could she be expected to know the silly savages would have a special grammar for talking to women with? She was as eager to leave the class, when it was over, as the Kus were to stay. So she came out alone.

  He was wringing the neck of a black chicken. He sat cross-legged exactly in the middle of the circle of beaten earth in front of his hut. There was a fire beside him. His elbows stuck out and made rhythmic jerks as he slowly twisted the bird’s neck; its wings flapped convulsively, unheeded; he was not looking at what he was doing, but stared with a blind man’s stare across the clearing.

  The thing that made him horrible was his flesh. It hadn’t the black, smooth, slightly oiled roundness of the other Kus, which made her think of slow waves moving under wharves; instead it looked as if it had been puddled together by someone trying to model in too sloppy clay. His outline was lumpy, irresolute, the lifeless surface obliterating the underlying curves of muscle and the sharp certainties of bone. Eve assumed he had some beastly disease, like the poor girl who had sat near her in the class.

  The school had been built directly opposite the priest’s hut, so that his stare seemed fixed on Eve. And because whatever he was doing to the chicken was not the logical way of killing a bird—the clean half twist and jerk that gets it all over in a second—Eve was sure that he was performing some ritual, a malevolent magic aimed at her. She felt that his uncouth jungly powers had summoned her out of school at that moment to undergo his attack. She wanted to go back into school but was ashamed to; she wanted to walk up the clearing to their own hut, and Mummy, but was afraid to; so she stood and stared back, feeling sick.

  “I wish he wouldn’t do that,” said Daddy, behind her shoulder. “Don’t be frightened of him, Eve—he’s not as bad as he looks. Come with me and I’ll ask him to be kindly disposed toward you. Walk a little behind me and don’t stand on my shadow. He does his little magics with leaves and his big ones with drums, but he’s almost given up the drums now. He has to do this business with the chicken every new moon, to renew his powers. We’ll wait here till he’s finished; it won’t be long now. You mustn’t make the mistake of thinking he’s a fraud or a hypocrite—he does know a lot about the medicinal properties of plants, for one thing—and he lives a very austere life; there’s not many in the Kirk could match it. But the main thing is he really believes in his powers. And remember he’s had a gruesome training; the wonder is he’s stayed as sane as he has—don’t look now.”

  Eve did look. The priest put the bird’s head into his mouth and bit through the neck. Then he placed the body, wings still flapping, on the center of the fire; the burning feathers reeked and crackled. Then he picked up a small pot from the ground beside him and spat the head into it. Then he put the lid on. Then he picked up two sticks and with these lifted another pot from the ashes at the edge of the fire; this had some sort of wax in it, with which he sealed the lid down. Then he threw the sticks and a handful of dried leaves on top of the chicken’s body, where they burned with a heavy, herby smell.

  Daddy moved forward again and spoke, and the priest replied in the same words; Eve knew two or three of them. The two men began a long ritual of talk.

  Close up, Eve saw that the priest was not diseased; instead the whole surface of his skin—face, neck, chest, waist, arms, thighs, shins, and even the backs of his hands and fingers—was covered with a deliberate pattern of scars: old scars made, perhaps when he was almost a child, by shallow sloping cuts which left flaps of skin and flesh loose above them. These had not healed back precisely into place (had not been allowed to, perhaps) and had thus left the surface of the skin alternately puckered and stretched. It must have hurt like mad when it was done, but pity didn’t make him seem any less horrible. His eyes, above the wealed cheeks, looked wicked and dangerous. His thin lips barely moved as he spoke. (Ventriloquism was probably one of his “little magics.”)

  The ticktock talk ended, and Daddy picked his notebook and pencil out of his breast pocket. The priest reached behind him without looking and found a roll of cloth, which he opened; inside were a series of cloth compartments. He held these to his nose and worked along the line, sniffing at each and grunting and chuckling between sniffs. Three times he stopped and took a leaf out. Then he rolled up the cloth, put the three leaves in a row in front of him, scooped a handful of ash from the edge of the fire, and dribbled it in an elaborate pattern around the leaves. As the ash fell, he sang in a shrill, metallic monotone. When the pattern was finished, he picked the leaves from the middle of it, still singing, and erased his work with a stick.

  “Come forward now,” said Daddy. “Kneel down and cup your hands, where he can reach you.”

  The priest dropped the three leaves into her hands, making a formal speech about each. Eve didn’t understand a word.

  “You can stand up now,” said Daddy. He was still writing the instructions in his book when Eve turned her back, at last, on the priest.

  That night Daddy made her go through the prescribed rigmarole, burning one leaf and smelling the smoke, boiling the other two and drinking the infusions. He explained that the priest might well be able to tell from her behavior whether she had obeyed him, and if he thought she had not she would have a difficult enemy. The burned leaf smelled of resin. One of the infusions was sickly, the other tasteless. Eve slept for fourteen hours and dreamed, as far as she could remember, of nothing at all.

  After breakfast she went out to look for the priest and found him sitting in front of his hut again, not doing anything. He was still horrible, still terrifying. The only improvement was that he no longer seemed to be looking straight at her.

  VII

  Eve came out of her catalepsy almost as soon as she had sunk into it—not more than twenty seconds.

  “May I ask you to ask Robin first?” she said. “If he won’t tell you, then I will.”

  “You’re keen on who tells, aren’t you?” said Pibble. “I suppose that was why it had to be Rebecca who explained about the penny this morning.”

  “Yes.”

  “Now, just to save me nipping all over the place, would you tell me if Aaron would have approved of what was going on in the men’s hut?”

  “Less than anyone.”

  “He was a very ardent convert?”

  “I take it you’ve seen the picture in his room.”

  “I think it’s very good.”

  “Paul won’t talk about it.”

  Pibble nodded at the canvases of the heron and the bowler-hatted gent on his right.

  “Will he talk about those?” he said.

  “Yes. He’s excited about them while he’s doing them and talks to himself if I’m not there. Afterward he’s cynical and tells me exactly how bad they are.”

  “What about the one he did for me this morning? Would he talk about that?”

  “Yes, he’s done it several times before—that’s why he could do it so fast. It preys on him, you realize, as it does on me; only he can work it off. He got the idea from a Christmas card my nanny sent me, one of the expensive ones, a Brueghel ‘Massacre of the Innocents.’ She has a genius for the tactless gesture.”

  “Had the others seen it before?” asked Pibble. “Or Aaron?”

  “I don’t think so. He always burns them like that; then he talks about them afterward, about the technical difficulties. But he did the picture in Aaron’s room in one go, and he has never said a word a
bout it.”

  Pibble thought about the scattering of smelly and inadequate deities in the men’s hut; the contrasting openness and cleanness of the women’s hut; the old men retreating down the stairs from Paul’s blazing Crucifixion.

  “Would Aaron go into the men’s hut much?” he asked.

  “No, not at all.” Eve changed gear into the quick recitative of a scholar rattling through known facts. “In effect, the men’s hut is essentially a democratic device, to prevent the chief acquiring too much power. It is analogous, in an elementary way, with a Jacobean Parliament. This is a commonplace among primitive peoples, though it has usually been formalized to such an extent that the people themselves do not recognize its function for what it is; then, in the majority of cases, the appearance of a series of strong chiefs has caused the formality to swallow up the function and the democratic element has ceased to be recognizable as such. Among us, however, largely because the chieftainship is elective (the hereditary system does not root easily in a matrilineal society), the men’s hut retains a counterbalancing power against the autocracy of the chief, and this relationship is formalized by a tabu against his entry onto the actual premises. Most of the adult Kus would recognize the basic function of this arrangement without actually formulating it into words, but at the same time they would observe the tabu with a strong sense of awe.”

  “So Aaron might well not have known what was going on. If anything.”

  “Oh, he would have known almost at once,” said Eve. “And recently he would have heard the drums.”

  “Billy Youbegood’s clanging and banging, you mean. Wouldn’t they be doing that anyway? And wouldn’t the women have heard?”

  “They couldn’t use the drums without Robin. There isn’t anyone else. The old priest was his mother’s brother. And I have noticed, now I realize what it means, that the men have been missing during certain television programs which they would normally have watched.”

  “Who would have started all this off?” said Pibble.

  “I cannot think. They’re all—well—reasonable, sane, balanced. They are as concerned as I am about the continuance of the tribe as an entity, and they must know this would make it impossible. The women would be outraged. Paul and I … Oh, I cannot understand it.”

  Paul and I what? Outraged, too? Betrayed? Dad betrayed?

  “And,” said Pibble, “once Aaron was sure this relapse had taken place he would try to do something about it?”

  “Certainly. But probably not at once—he liked to mull round problems, for months sometimes.”

  “It looks as if this whatever-it-is has been going on for months, though; even if it has only just come to a head. Do you think his desire to go back to New Guinea could have anything to do with it?”

  “I don’t see what.”

  “Well, do you think the old men would be prepared to kill him if he’d found a way of stopping them from doing whatever it was?”

  Eve looked defeated, with all her special knowledge and drearily acquired scholarship in disarray, useless.

  “I can’t guess,” she said. “Yes. If they’d gone as far as to start scarifying Robin, they might do anything. But that really is only a guess, Superintendent. We’ve been working very slowly in the other direction all these years, and I have no experience of going back. Poor child. No wonder he preferred not to go to school.”

  “I’d better talk to him now,” said Pibble.

  “You’ll probably find him in the J.C.R. or the S.C.R.—downstairs on either side of the front door.”

  One of the younger women was in the J.C.R., knitting and watching a small girl who sat in the middle of the floor and tore a pamphlet from the Citizens’ Advice Bureau into careful strips, which she used to make a nest for a battered pig from a Noah’s ark. Paul was reading Time in the S.C.R. and said Robin had gone down to the basement.

  Pibble found him in the men’s kitchen, alone. What he was doing seemed very extraordinary. He sat at the deal table with a plate of stew in front of him and lapped it up like a dog; one hand clasped the other wrist behind his back. Surprised by the noise of the door, he looked around over his shoulder, making no attempt to wipe the congealed stew off his nose and chin. Pibble went to the stove and felt the stew-pot; it was not quite cold but distinctly less than blood heat. Robin returned defiantly to lapping.

  “Why are you doing that?” said Pibble.

  “It’s part of the job,” said Robin. “I hear you’ve found my shirt, and I suppose you’ve been to Eve and he’s told you what it’s all about.”

  “Dr. Ku asked me to talk to you first.”

  “That’s right,” said Robin, “only I didn’t think he would.”

  “By ‘part of the job,’ I suppose you mean playing the drums.”

  “Sort of.”

  “Did it hurt a lot when they cut your back?”

  “I took four aspirins and they did it with a razor. They used to do it with a stone knife in the valley, Melchizedek says.”

  “Who did it?”

  “Ishmael and Daniel. It had to be them because … Oh, it’s too complicated to explain. Daniel didn’t want to, but I talked him into it. But they’re all happy about it now. I wowed them with the drums last night, I really did. You know what? I’m the greatest.”

  “I’d like to hear you.”

  “Come tonight, man. I’ll wow you.”

  “I will if I can. Is it because you’re going to play the drums with your hands that you can’t use them for eating?”

  “That’s a bit of it, but really I have to do all sorts of things the wrong way, just to show I’m not an ordinary man like the others. Did you see me make a different sign when I went into the hut this morning? Well, this is like that. It would be easier if I were a monkey and could eat with my toes. Sometimes I think it’s not worth it, and I’m not going to go on with it, but that’s nonsense.”

  “How did it start?”

  “I wanted to play the drums—like Ringo, you know—and they wanted a priest, so I borrowed a book from Eve to see what it meant. Did you know about Eve? He was dead scared of the drumming man in the valley, before the Japs came, so his dad tried to get him over it by making him study everything my uncle did and putting it in a book. That’s what he got his doctorate with. Joke. Well, when I’d read it, I knew that was what I wanted to do—it all seemed so right. I’ve had to make up a lot, of course; you can’t get the right leaves and sticks over here, for one thing. What were they burning in the death lamp this morning? You know, in the wake room?”

  “Rubber cable and rosemary were the only things I recognized.”

  “Not bad. They’ve got to make a stink, you know, to stop the old man’s spirit wanting to come back. You see, it’s much harder for me than for the others really to belong; I don’t look like them, do I? And being priest will make me really belong. They won’t be able to do without me.”

  “You sound as though you belong quite enough already,” said Pibble. “Do you really think of Dr. Ku as a man?”

  “Of course. It’s the way I was taught. There’s a fat little dolly in my school called Eve, and I still think it’s funny she’s got a man’s name.”

  “What are you going to do about eating at school?”

  “Oh, that’s all right. Outside the house, I’m Robin Ku. It’s only inside I’m the priest. It’s going to be tricky when I’ve got to have the scars on my hands and face, but that’s a long time yet.”

  “Is it you who’s been getting out on the roof in the evening?”

  “How did you know? They’re all asleep.”

  “Billy Youbegood told me. Why aren’t you asleep?”

  “I don’t like beer.”

  “Will you show me where you get out? It might be important.”

  “Sure, as soon as I’ve finished this mess.”

  Crippen, thought Pibble
, what am I going to do about this crazy bit of subplot? N.S.P.C.C., I suppose, though I don’t know if they’d take it on. He watched Robin lapping away, quite efficiently. When he’d finished, the boy took two twigs out of his pocket, picked up the plate with them, carried it over to the sink, and ran water over it, tilting it this way and that with the twigs. Satisfied that it was reasonably clean, he lifted it onto a drying rag. Then he went to the hot-water boiler, an elderly coke-burning affair, and threw the twigs into the fire.

  “We’ll have to get Elijah to let us in,” said Robin.

  “It shouldn’t be locked now.”

  “Oh. What have you done with the stuff in the bowl?”

  “It’s gone to the laboratories for analysis.”

  “I say! That’s a nuisance. I suppose it wasn’t your fault, but … Never mind. I’ll think of something.”

  Fernham was standing at the open door of the hut, bored but used to it. Robin’s bed was the pile of blankets in a special little sanctuary over in the farthest corner on the right, beyond the drums. Robin pulled at a piece of painted screening made from an old tea chest, and it slid quietly along the floor; behind it, the wall was only about three feet high under the pitch of the roof, and in the corner was a small door which opened outward into darkness. Robin crawled through; Pibble followed and found himself in a black tunnel; there was a scraping noise ahead, then light; Robin had opened a trap door onto the roof. The tunnel was triangular in section and presumably ran right along that side of the attics between the three-foot inner wall and the actual wall of the house where the roof beams came to floor level. One of these main roof beams, a whopping great thing typical of Flagg, narrowed the triangle of tunnel between Pibble and the trap door, leaving a space he could only just wriggle through.

  Outside were the crenelations; they did not look quite so larky close up, being solid and uncrumbled by the sulphurous London air. The stone was granite, not the pitted limestone Pibble would have expected; old Flagg must have imported it specially, probably from Edinburgh at ludicrous expense. Each crenelation was as carefully detailed inside as out. Pibble picked his way along the narrow strip of lead between the sloping slates and the brickwork, peeking out every few steps to get his bearings on the street below, until he was immediately above the porch and (therefore) the stair windows.