The Select and The Orphan

“He is returning it,” Musa said in Malay, his voice trembling. “He knows what happened to Grendel.”

The leather strap was frayed and wet with monkey saliva. Nonetheless, I tied it around my neck, to honor our fallen comrade. I felt pity for his awful fate, but fear for our own. What manner of beast had killed him—and what if it came for us?

Ahead of us, Father seemed oblivious. He knelt by a rock formation, tearing vines from its surface. “Come!” he called. “Help me, Burt!”

My fingers shook as I helped him, but soon I became lost in the wonder of our discovery. It was a pile of ancient stone tablets—dozens!—etched with intricately carved images and symbols. Winged beasts with bodies like a lion. Giant warthoglike things. Flying monkeys. A complex round design that resembled a labyrinth. The etched symbols were tiny and impossibly neat, like hieroglyphics.

Father looked ecstatic. “This is it, Burt. All my life I’ve hoped these existed, and here they are! Look at these runes—influenced by ancient Egyptian … exhibiting elements of Asian pictographs and flourishes like a crude prototype of—”

“Altaic and Cyrillic script …” I said.

“We will camp here,” he said, taking a pencil and pad from his pack.

“Here, Father?” I said, unable to control my astonishment.

“I must make copies before we continue,” he replied. “Later you can help me decode these, Burt.”

As I translated, Musa glowered in astonishment. “He expects us to go all the way up the mountain—and he wastes time with old rocks?”

I did not want to be caught in Musa’s fury. I knew that trying to change Father’s mind would be useless. But worse yet, my headache had begun to flare with renewed fury. It wasn’t just caused by the monkey chatter and Musa’s temper. No—like the distant hum of bees, the strange music had begun again. The music no one else seemed to hear: It pulsed with the jungle noises. Lights flashed behind my closed eyelids. I sat, hobbled by the pain.

Alarmed, Musa called for Father.

“Be right there,” Father replied, hunched over the tablets.

“Father, I don’t feel well …” It hurt to speak. My voice sounded high-pitched and feeble. Musa looked at me with concern.

Father mumbled something about taking a drink of water. I tried to answer him. I tried to get his attention away from his archaeology. But the music was growing louder, drowning out the monkeys, drowning out everything. Tendrils of sound pierced my brain like roots through soil.

I tried to stand up. I opened my mouth to cry out.

The last image I saw was the outstretched arms of Musa, trying to catch me as I passed out.

I gasped and awoke from a horrific nightmare. In it, I was in a place much like this cursed island, chased by all manner of beasts—giant, slavering warthogs; flying raptors.

It was a relief to see Father’s face.

Musa was building a fire at the edge of a clearing. He seemed withdrawn, angry. The sun had begun its descent into evening. The monkeys had quieted, but the music persisted in my head, as it had through my nightmare.

I struggled to sit up, my head still pounding. A thick blanket had been placed below me. I noticed that Father had piled the tablets around himself. His notebook was now filled with jottings, which he had clearly been working on while I was unconscious. He glanced at me distractedly and smiled, then looked back.

I was not expecting that. But something he’d said was stuck in my mind.

This is it, Burt. All my life I’ve hoped these existed.

It occurred to me, in a wave of revulsion, that this place had been our goal all along. We had reached the X on Father’s map. And it was indeed a “most unimaginable hell.”

Wenders the genius. Wenders the Great Discoverer. Wenders who stopped at nothing to get the great artifact.

“Is this why we are here?” I blurted out.

“Pardon?” Father said, momentarily distracted from his work.

“We rushed into a voyage without proper preparation, equipment, or personnel,” I barreled on. “We sacrificed an entire ship’s crew. Is this the price for your archaeology?”

Musa came closer, curious.

“There is a reason for this,” Father said. “A good one. You will have to trust me, Burt.”

“Trust you?” I said. “After you led us to a place your own map warned you away from? I sit here, ill with tropical fever. I don’t want to die on this island! Why couldn’t you have left me at home?”

Father turned away. When he faced me again, his eyes were rimmed with tears. “It’s not tropical fever, Burt.”

I braced my back against a tree. This was not the reaction I had expected. “Then tell me, what is it?”

“Something else,” Father replied. “It matters not, Burt. I do not want to stir fear—”

“I am already afraid!” I protested. “You raised me to be honest, Father. Can I no longer expect the same from you?”

Father replied in a halting voice, barely audible. “You have a rare disease, described in ancient texts. Those who suffer it bear an unmistakable physical marking on the back of the head. No one has survived past a very young age.”

“Is there no medicine?” I asked, my voice dry with shock.

“There is no cure for this, Burt,” Father said. “Except that which is in the texts. And as you know, there is a fine line between history and myth. The texts speak of an ancient healing power on a sacred island. Several of them corroborate the same location. And that location matches the place on the map.”

I shook my head, hoping that this was some bizarre dream. Hoping that I could shake away the monkeys and the deadly green-acid-blood creatures and the infernal music … “A sacred island? Ancient healing power? This is not science,” I said. “These are stories, Father. When I was a child you taught me the difference!”

“Power traveling through wires, glass bulbs that transmit light, conversations carried across continents—these were once stories, too,” Father replied. “The first requirement for any scientist, Burt, is an open mind.”

I wanted to protest. I wanted to translate for Musa. To have him share my outrage and confusion. But Father took me by the shoulders and gently laid me down on the blanket. “You must sleep to regain your strength. Musa and I will protect you through the night. I will explain more in the morning, and we will continue.”

I knew I could not slumber. I had to know more. I had to translate for Musa, who was tending the fire and trying to look unconcerned with our conversation.

But then my head touched the blanket, and I was fast asleep.

I woke several hours later, with a start.

Had I heard something?

I sat up. My head was no longer pounding. My body, drenched in sweat, felt cool. The illness had broken.

The jungle seemed eerily silent. Gone were the chatterings and hootings that had filled our day. Gone, too, was the buzzing, murmuring music. It was as if the night itself held its breath.

Musa’s fire had burned to coals. I could see him in the dim glow, dozing, curled up on the ground. I glanced around and made out Father’s silhouette at the opposite rim of the clearing. He was clutching his revolver, his back propped against a tree.

Snoring.

“Father!” I called out.

He muttered something, his head lolling to the other side. They were both exhausted.

For our own safety, I would have to take the night shift. As I rose, intending to take the gun from Father, I spotted a movement in the woods behind him. Not so much a solid thing as a shift of blackness.

I heard a stick snap to my right. A high-pitched “eeeee.”

Behind me, Musa let out a brief yell. I spun around.

He wasn’t where he had been. In the dim light of the coals, I saw his legs sliding into the black jungle.

I called his name, running after him. But I stopped at the edge, where the darkness began. Entering it would be a colossal mistake. I needed the gun, now. I leaped toward Father. I saw him awake with a start.

My shirt suddenly went taut, pulled from above. My feet left the ground, and I rose swiftly into the trees as if on marionette strings. The silence erupted into a chorus of earsplitting screams. I felt sharp, furry fingers closing around my arms and legs. The monkeys! They were pulling me, turning me around. I fought to free myself, but their strength was astounding. More swung toward me from the surrounding trees as if summoned—dozens of them. Below me, Father shouted in horror.

In the red light of the waning fire, I could see them exchanging palm fronds, twigs, ropelike vines. They jabbered to one another, eyes flashing, as they braided, twisted, and tied knots with speed and dexterity. Before I could understand what they were doing, they let their creation drop from the branch.

Then they pushed me over.

I screamed as I landed in the taut mesh they’d just woven. It was a carrying net, which they passed from monkey to monkey like relay racers as they swung from the branches. In jerking fits I glided over the jungle, rising higher and higher into the blackness. Father’s anguished shouts soon faded, and I could see the gibbous moon peeking through the tree canopy.

In the dim light, the black mountain loomed nearer. The little creatures were tossing me now. Cackling. Playing. I tried to tear my way through the net, but it had been twisted into an impossibly tight mesh. I swung like a pendulum, smacking into trunks and branches. The monkeys’ cries seemed to grow more excited now, rising in pitch and intensity as if in argument.

Finally I saw one monkey leap from a tree and sink its teeth into the arm of another who was holding me. The whole troupe quickly joined in, screeching and beating at one another.

They were fighting for my possession.

I curled into a ball and prayed.

The chanting came as a relief.

I had been swung and dropped, slung over shoulders, tossed like a ball. I did not know where they’d carried me, as it occurred in nearly complete darkness. Through the mesh I had seen only fur and occasional eyes and teeth.

When the net was removed, I was sitting on a smooth rock surface at the edge of a large hole. The monkeys quickly dismantled their sack, then used the vines to tie my arms behind my back. The air was quite a bit cooler here, and I could hear languid drips fall into the blackness below. Rock walls rose all around me, their crags seeming to shift and dance with the reflected flicker of candlelight.

Across the hole was a doorway into another chamber, cut into the wall. People were chanting in there, their shadows moving in the light. I heard the strange music, too.

The voices were chanting in harmony to it.

“Hello?” I called out across the hole.

My voice boomed out, echoing off the walls. I looked up into a rock ceiling high above. I was in an enclosed place, some sort of cavern. I had been so smothered by the monkeys and the net that I had no idea how I’d gotten there.

In reply, a wizened man appeared in the cave opening. His cragged face seemed to have been hewn out of the rock itself, and his wispy white hair hung down to a silken robe. A gold-filigreed sash hung over the man’s shoulder with an intricately embroidered sun symbol. Under any other circumstance, I would have complimented his wardrobe. But the one-eyed monkey sat on the sash, grinning at me sassily.

The man’s eyes rolled back into his head as he doddered toward me, and he held high a chalice so heavy that I was afraid it would break his frail arms. Behind him followed six other men, also chanting. The second carried an elaborately carved black sword on an embroidered cushion. I expected an orchestra to follow them, but their little cave appeared to be empty. The music, as always, was coming from nowhere.

And everywhere.

The old men circled the hole. The third in line had a small basket, from which the monkey pulled little stone tokens and dropped them into the hole. Each token landed with a loud, watery plop. So—a well.

“Who are you?” I pleaded, but they ignored me.

I edged away. Despite the horrific trip there, I felt oddly strong. The music, louder than ever, no longer hurt my head. In fact, for the first time in days my head did not ache at all.

As I listened to the strange guttural chant, the words seemed to arrange themselves inside my brain. Like the ingredients to a complex recipe, they flew through filters of grammar, structure, context, relationships. I was certain this was no language I’d ever heard before, but to my utter astonishment, I was beginning to understand it. Some of the words were obviously names—Qalani, Karai, Massarym—but I picked out “long-awaited visitor” … “select” … “sacrifice” … and something that sounded like the Greek letter lambda.

As they drew closer, I yanked at the bonds around my wrists. Yes. I felt a certain give. Talented as the monkeys were, they were better at weaving nets than binding wrists.

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