Doctor Who_ Combat Rock - Mick Lewis [81]
This was where he came to repent for all his sins, he thought gloomily. And there’d been enough of those, he supposed. He briefly pondered taking out his recorder to cheer them all up, and quickly decided better of it. Things were bad enough as they were.
The tree-house was in a large clearing, erected on top of four smooth tree trunks, and it had to be at least forty feet above the ground. Jamie and Santi were pushed towards it, having waded through swamps for the last half hour or so to reach it.
The tribesmen had said nothing to them as they guided them through the jungle, apart from chortling now and again at Jamie’s attire. Jamie had tried to convince Santi that they might not be responsible for the bone shrine in the glade, and even if they were, they might have just arranged the missionary’s bones there, and not necessarily have eaten him as well. Santi was having none of it. ‘Are you stupid? They cannibal, man!’ being her only response.
Jamie gazed up at the hut perched on top of the branchless trunks; it was made of thatch and wicker, patched with holes and hardly substantial looking. A series of notches were carved into the surface of one of the tree trunks supporting it; obviously the ‘ladder’ they were to use to gain access to the
‘house’. As he continued to stare upwards, something emerged from the opening that was the door; a head dwarfed by distance, old and wrinkly, peering back down at them with the kind of stoicism that extreme old age and a lifetime spent in the most unexplored of jungles will instil in your average cannibal.
A bone knife nudged Jamie’s backside, right where he’d been clawed by the Kassowark. He winced and turned to face the uncompromising glare of a tribesman. The meaning of the gesture was obvious.
‘Okay. Better follow me up.’ Jamie said, rubbing his hands together in preparation. He clasped his hands around the trunk and placed his right boot on the first notch.
Three yards up, he looked down and smiled encouragingly at Santi. ‘It’s easy!’
She didn’t look so convinced, but was following him up anyway.
Jamie had the impression he was climbing out of the jungle itself. He was rising up to the level of many of the tree tops fringing the clearing, and behind the tree-house he was now scaling, he could see another identical one, and that gave him some idea as to how high up he was. A burst of dizziness threatened to peel him from the trunk. He blinked a few times, focusing on the smoke issuing lazily from a hole in the grass roof of the neighbouring tree-house.
He looked up towards the doorway again, and the inquisitive head had vanished. Then he was level with the opening, and stepping onto the bamboo poles strung together that formed the porch. He risked a glance inside the hut, but could only make out the glow of a fire and a huddle of shapes slumped around it. Didn’t look very inviting. He reached down to pull Santi the rest of the way up and clung to her, reluctant to enter the tree house.
One of the natives below jabbered something incomprehensible to Jamie; although the meaning was clear.
‘They want us go in,’ Santi said.
‘Yeah, I guessed that much’
He held her hand and together they crouched under the low opening and entered the hut.
He’d loved her.
It was that simple, and that brutal. She’d been able to quiet the storm, quell the rage in his head, bring warmth to the coldness. All the clichés, yeah, but all the cliches that stopped him killing.
She had never seen him kill before. She’d known he wasn’t a saint, of course; she’d known him long enough. But when he was with her he was always calm, could contain the urges, the little psychopathies, as his skull-doctor had told him, while he was still at school. He remembered that freak, yeah, with his glib diagnoses and glibber phrases. Done him one night when the prick was mincing away from school, after another day of dosing out cleversounding little nothings. Pan had been on leave from one of the system trawlers,