The Glass-Sided Ants' Nest Read online

  The huts were burning, with crazy, stylized flames. In front of them, the innocents were being massacred. All but two of the innocents were black, the murderers orange. In the foreground, the leader of the orange men watched with his hands in his pockets while two of his soldiers tightened a cord around the neck of a ginger-bearded European in Livingstone-style explorer’s kit—puttees, plus-twos, linen Norfolk jacket. A big floppy linen hat lay on the ground and beyond it another orange soldier clawed at the jodhpurs of a woman held supine for him by two of his fellows. Both scenes, uncomplicated by European dress, were echoed several times in the middle distance. Two laughing orange soldiers sprayed a group of running graybeards with their tommy guns. Another was walking stolidly toward the altar, a black baby dangling by the heels from either hand. The spaces between the scenes of action were scattered with an openwork pattern of black bodies, formalized but still agonized. You could see, from the shapes they lay in, that they were dead. Underneath the picture was written in capitals, “IF YOU DO NOT KNOW THIS, YOU KNOW NOTHING OF US.”

  Pibble stared at the picture, a bit of him saying silently, “Um, yes, I see now”; another bit chilly with shock; and another bit saying, “It really is pretty good stuff by any standards—I wonder what it would fetch.” Then he stood up and took the picture back to Paul.

  “Thank you.”

  “Thank you.”

  Paul opened a drawer, took out a lighter, and flicked it into flame. The gray paper caught at a corner, and the frontier of flame began its invasion across the whole sheet. In the silence, Pibble could hear its tiny roaring. Paul walked to the window and threw the sash up. He held his burning horror out in the open air until the flames closed around his fist. When he let go, an updraft took the last fragment, still flaming, upward past the shorn sycamores and out of sight. Pibble remembered Eve.

  She was sitting on the sofa beside Robin, who was beginning to fidget. In a couple of minutes, Pibble realized, he’d think of some way of drawing attention to himself. Eve was as still as ever, except for the huge, slow breaths she was taking. Her face was bloodless, her soft lips blue. She might have been a medium in a trance.

  IV

  Goodbye, Mummy. Goodbye, Daddy. Take care of yourselves and don’t do anything I wouldn’t like.”

  “Do be careful, darling.”

  Typical of Mummy to talk as if a month in the jungle with a brood of savages and a sick airman were an enterprise similar to crossing Princes Street. Eve looked hard at her parents, knowing how unobservant and untrustworthy her memory was. Not that she’d ever make a mistake about Daddy’s loopy clothes, but in a month she might easily get his face wrong. Very thin, with an absurdly goatlike straggle of ginger beard; the small nose peeling, as always; Wedgwood eyes set rather close, which, with the craning stoop of the scholar-priest, made him look as if he’d just mislaid his pince-nez. All that was easy. Eve tried to learn by rote the high curve of his cheekbones, with a little rubbery muscle just above them; his mouth soft and small. For the first time in her life, she paid attention to his ears, decided they were nondescript, and felt cheated in a way that she did not feel about her failure to fix his huge, elusive personality. That was a long-accepted mystery.

  Mummy was easier and harder. No secret about what she was like, a sister of Writers to the Signet doing her duty by God and Scotland under uncouth skies. A beauty still, if a little yellow with quinine, but not an unusual beauty; it was only the context and her half-mannish garb, topee and shirts and jodhpurs, that made her spectacular. In Edinburgh, in her own circle, there must be a dozen like her, each coping with making two ounces of butter last a week with the same poise as Mummy had shown last night when Bob got drunk. How was she different, really different, from them? Eve gave up and just stared hard at her in an attempt to use her eye and brain as a camera, even finishing with a fierce blink to copy the closing of the lens shutter.

  Daddy said, “One moment,” and went back into the hut. He returned with a book.

  “I think you might find this useful.”

  “Oh, Daddy, I will take care of it.”

  “Remember, our people don’t have quite the same ideas, but they do have something of the same way of thinking. Give Aaron what help you can.”

  Eve opened her rucksack and, by stuffing a shirt down the other side, cleared a slot of space into which the book would slide without squashing. Daddy was not a collector of objects, but this was one of his few valued possessions—mostly because it had helped to shape and confirm his life’s work, and only marginally for the sake of the signature scrawled across the flyleaf: “Regards, Bruno Malinowski.”

  “Goodbye, darlings.”

  She turned, the rucksack swinging heavy in her hand. Bob was waiting, looking pale but larky. He wasn’t carrying anything.

  “All set to be an egg in the other basket?” he said. “All aboard for Aaron’s Ark. Isn’t there one called Noah who could have been put in charge?”

  “I’m afraid Noah’s too old and silly,” whispered Eve.

  Bob laughed. The rest of the Ark were waiting in a silent, unhappy group, the women carrying more than the men. They filed out of the clearing. Aaron led them along imperceptible hunters’ paths. Bob and Eve seemed to be the only ones who made any noise. It was slow going, uphill all the time, and though they’d been marching most of the morning they were still just near enough to hear when the firing started. Eve thought it was a woodpecker before she realized it was an automatic weapon a long way off. Everyone stopped; then Aaron turned off the path into virgin jungle and they worked their way downhill through a screen of creepers, like ants struggling through knitting. At the foot of the slope was a stream, up whose bed Aaron led his party. As they splashed upward again, Bob said, “I hope no one down there knows where we’re going. Those Nips know a thing or two about torture.”

  Eve picked her way among the washed stones and singing water, her mind shuttered against images. She was glad the photograph had not come out.

  V

  Ah crippen, thought Pibble, do we really have to exhume this sad old misery? X bashes Y on the nut in the middle of the night, and by midday everyone is beating his breast about something that happened twenty-something years gone by. I won’t have anything to do with it! Cripes, near as a toucher said that aloud. Anyway, why didn’t they all nip off into the jungle and hide? Must ask Eve when she comes to. Meanwhile get on with sordid chore of detection.

  “Melchizedek, perhaps we could go and look through the men’s hut now?”

  “As you wish, policeman.”

  Elijah, evidently, had to come, too. They climbed with the methodical slowness of the old, but with no visible strain. Presumably Aaron had been a bit older still. Pibble could not see that they reacted in any way to the corner where he had been ambushed, or even to the chalk outline that showed the butt and very seamark of the old man’s agonized upward crawl. Why up? Wouldn’t he have gone down to Eve for help? Skip it. Odds were he didn’t know what he was doing in the blind dark, stunned and bloody and dying.

  The top landing was slap under the eaves. Only two of the five doors had handles. On one of them was painted a fierce black warrior, holding a painstakingly phallic club—the style the same as that of Paul’s big paintings but much cruder in execution. Elijah­ clawed inside his polo neck and drew out a loop of thong, which he hauled at until a leather wallet popped into view—an effect like that produced by a cormorant when it regurgitates its food for its young. The key was in the wallet. Elijah spat on his right fore­finger, drew a line with it athwart the threshold, and then unlocked the door. Pibble went in first.

  It was darker even than the stairwell, and it smelled—not the rank, damp smell which permeates the houses of the old and poor and dirty, but a brew richer and just as nasty. Beer, certainly, and a curryish kind of smell, and something else, animal and meaty.

  “Is there a light?” he said.

>   Melchizedek turned and leaned over the banisters to bellow down the stairwell.

  “Falagu kirraputi milt Ishmael.”

  Short pause, then a shout from Fernham below.

  “Says they want him up there to light the lamps, sir. Shall I let him come?”

  “Send him up.”

  After a longer pause, the fattest of the elders grunted into view. Without a word, he spat on his finger as Elijah had done, drew the line of the threshold, and went into the gloom. A match scratched and the fat man loomed black and elfish in its small flare. A softer and yellower light steadied in the room and he began to move about with some sort of taper in his hand, coaxing similar flames to light in various alcoves. Pibble went into the room and looked at the first light; it was a homemade candle which gave off yet another un-English smell.

  The slope of the roof timbers did make the room very like a hut. Pibble explored, stepping over piles of bedding. There was a lot of space here, doubling back on itself around the other side of the stairwell. It was all subdivided into alcoves, or side chapels, by screens contrived from every kind of material—corrugated asbestos, tin, tea chests, hardboard, soft-board, cardboard, old doors, a deck chair, linoleum. Every paintable surface was covered with pictures in the same style as the door; mostly they showed men killing animals with spears and arrows, but some showed men dancing around a large green snake. No women were portrayed. One of the alcoves contained large earthenware pots from which the beer smell came; the biggest was plopping gently to itself. In other alcoves were what looked like shrines, with carved objects two or three feet high surrounded by what Pibble took to be offerings: a bent cigarette, a bar of chocolate, pieces of cloth, wizened apples, a fork, moldy lumps of some doughy substance, a saucer, a cross of painted sticks. The largest side chapel contained logs of old wood—no, slit-drums. Pibble only just resisted the urge to slap one and see how it sounded; instead he got out his pencil torch and made sure nothing was hidden inside the instruments. A proper room, cut off at the far end, held a shower and a lavatory and was fairly clean. At least there was daylight there; the windows in the rest of the area had all been blanked off with squares of cardboard.

  Pibble walked back toward the door between the patches of soft, useless light. He ran his pencil torch along the roof beam. Aha, there was a perfectly good socket with a cable running along the rooftree; he traced it down to a switch by the door, and went out onto the landing.

  “Fernham!” he shouted.

  “Yessir!” came the bellow from two floors down.

  “Send someone up with a couple of hundred-watt bulbs. Dr. Ku must have some to spare.”

  “Yessir!”

  After a longish pause, up scrambled Robin with the bulbs. His gesture at the door was quite different, a sort of flowing figure-of-eight movement, made as perfunctorily as the genuflection of a guide in a cathedral.

  “Can you find me a chair, please, Robin?”

  The boy skipped along the landing to the other door with a handle and came back with a light wickerwork affair, only remembering to slouch for the last few paces.

  The room looked quite different under the unshaded glare of electricity—smaller, less secret, pathetic. The ramshackle screens were like a deserted stage set. The shrines shrank and lost their meaning, becoming patterns of litter. Pibble carried the chair down the room, found another socket, and achieved another blaze of desecration. Some of the paintings retained a coarse vigor; some even gained, now that you could see how fierce and improbable the colors were, how fanciful the use of irregularities of surface, how obscene (particularly in the green-snake dances) the detail. The rolls of bedding, too, became more exotic, revealing themselves as not just collections of blankets but a giant’s scrap basket of unwanted materials: tattered old curtains, imperially colored; froths of mauve lacework; deep sea-green tablecloths; a kaross; shawls; an eczematous tiger skin. The heaps were quite neat, confined to definite territories, and each accompanied by a wicker basket full of clothes and a cardboard carton of other belongings. Apart from these containers and the mounds of cloth, there was nowhere in the room to hide anything.

  Robin had disappeared, back to his book presumably, but the three elders stood just inside the doorway. The Electricity Board had not managed to diminish their primeval blackness one jot. They stood very still, not turning their heads at all to watch him, following him with their eyes. This stillness, combined with their unnatural shortness and breadth (standing together, the three of them formed a compact rectangle of flesh, much wider than it was high), made them seem more alien than ever; not creatures of this earth at all, but invaders from Alpha Centauri. Pibble wondered whether their remoteness was the result of a conscious effort, whether they were exercising some sort of group hypnotism to shove him and his electric-light blasphemies away, out of their private world, banished. If so, he wasn’t having any of it. He strolled over.

  “Melchizedek, I must search the bedding and clothes and those boxes. Is there anything that you would rather I did not touch?”

  “Search where you must, policeman.”

  Pibble worked down the room, shaking out all the bedding and carefully scanning each side. A splash of blood, unnoticed in the dark of the stairs, might have transferred itself from the murderer’s clothes to his bed. (Pibble didn’t have much faith in this idea, actually; it seemed improbable that anyone would take the risk of waking the others to sneak about in the dark murdering elderly chiefs.) The beds were neat and quite fresh. So were the clothes. The cardboard boxes all contained one very sharp knife, tobacco, and a collection of inexplicable knickknacks. It took him a good twenty minutes to work around the room, and he didn’t find anything.

  He stopped at last by the beer-smelling jars.

  “What’s this stuff, Melchizedek?” he called.

  “This is kava, policeman. We buy beer at the pub and add our own things to it. It is not the same as the kava we made in our village, but it performs what we require. First it makes us happy and then it makes us sleep.”

  “Sleep?”

  “Sleep, policeman. Our bones are old and rub on each other at the joints. Therefore we go in turn to the doctor and tell him that we cannot sleep, and he prescribes tablets for us. These we add to the kava, and sleep as we did when we were young men.”

  Pibble felt like wringing Sandy Graham’s neck. First you establish that the murderer couldn’t have come from this room because he would have waked somebody up. Then you establish that he wouldn’t wake anybody because the others were all in the arms of their barbiturate Morpheus; the murderer might even have added an extra couple of pills to the mixture, supposing the thing had been premeditated. Pibble stared at the floor as he thought. It was a good floor. Typical of whoever built the place that the boards in the attic fitted as tightly as the parquet in the drawing room. Not that one, though … Pibble knelt and scrabbled at the corner of the plank with his fingernails, then with the screwdriver gadget on his penknife. About two feet of floorboard came up. Marvelous thing, the trained eye. In the cavity were a number of pillboxes labeled “Mr. Ku: take two at bedtime”; packets and tins containing herbs, yeast, and unidentifiable powders; a jar of brown sugar and two wooden spoons.

  The trained eye then found three more such hidey holes. The first was empty; the second contained a store of do-it-yourself candles; the third, about eight feet from the door and a bit to one side of one of the shrine alcoves, held a yellow bowl with liquid in it and a cloth in the liquid. This was where the meaty smell came from. Pibble knew it well, now he was so close to it. He had last met it as strong as this in a smart little flat off Kensington High Street, where a stockjobber had gone berserk and sliced his sister-in-law into bits in the spare bedroom—about what she deserved, having been living there rent-free for two years, most of which she’d spent interfering with his life. Silly bitch, she wouldn’t have been pleased to know that her blood smelled exac
tly the same as the blood of the blackest sort of black man Pibble had ever seen.

  “What is this, Melchizedek?”

  “The bowl we use for making our kava. The rest we do not know.”

  The voice came from straight above Pibble’s head, and he looked up. Dear God, but they moved quietly. The three had closed around the hole, so that he was hemmed in by squatly foreshortened torsos which seemed to lean over him, threatening to fall and crush him like buildings in some early German film. He hurried to his feet and felt safer.

  “What you call ‘the rest,’” he said, “is a mixture of water and blood, with a shirt in it. Whose shirt is it?”

  “How should we know? We have many shirts like that.”

  True. It was a gray ex-R.A.F. job. There had been at least one like it in each of the baskets, and some of the men downstairs had been wearing others.

  “Ishmael,” said Pibble, “I must stay here. Would you be kind enough to go and tell one of the policemen that I want him?”

  The fat man strutted away.

  “Did neither of you notice the smell?” said Pibble. “I smelled it myself when I came in, and I understand that the Kus have a very keen sense of smell.”

  “We smelled it,” said Melchizedek. “When you were gone, we would have looked to see.”

  “But didn’t you smell it earlier today?”

  Pause.