Instead, Mac lived now with rage and regret, guilt and solitude. For him there seemed nothing left to think about except the death of the innocent, the death of a mother and child.
If only the telegram had found me sooner.
If only Mom had been just a little bit stronger.
In the end, they had given Mom shock therapy. “The most effective treatment for nervous breakdowns and schizophrenia,” the doctors had said, though none of them could agree on a diagnosis.
“Experimental quackery!” MacCready called it, after he first read about it in a telegram from home, a month after it had been sent.
If only I’d been there to stop it.
If only.
In Mac’s current dream, his mother’s face screamed and screamed until it shifted into something grotesque and strange—which revealed itself to be a hideous hand puppet pushing toward him, snapping and biting, at the end of his little sister’s arm.
Brigitte, Mom—I’m sorry. So sorry!
MacCready awoke on the verge of a shout, willed it to stay inside, then looked around the cabin. However uneasy his dreams, he had not been loud enough to stir Richards from his compartment. It was a very small blessing, but he’d take it.
He looked out the tiny window for a few seconds, then dozed off to face the next round of nightmares. On the world below, an immense carpet of trees spread from horizon to horizon.
CHAPTER 3
The Hidden
I ran to the rock to hide my face,
But the rock cried out, “No hiding place!
“No hiding place down here!”
—“NO HIDING PLACE DOWN HERE” (AFRICAN-AMERICAN SPIRITUAL)
Port?o do Inferno, Central Brazil
January 19, 1944
In the forests of the night, nothing existed except life and death in nature’s extinction lottery.
Nothing more.
And nothing less.
A half-billion years of scurrying monstrosities—of entire empires hidden underfoot—had led, here and there, to thoughtless existence. The mind of a tarantula was as close to nothing as anything could be and still be something. The spider, poised to strike at a cricket, was no more thoughtful than a bundle of mechanized neurological responses, no more aware of itself than the digi-comp machines that the Allies were using to break Axis codes. The arachnid had come this far, and not a step closer to sentience. But this was enough. Her kind had been walking across the planet five hundred million years before the first human footprints entered the fossil record; and they would still be here five hundred million years after the pyramids had turned to dust.
Down on the forest floor, even when something enormous moved suddenly into the spider’s field of vision, there was only an instantaneous summoning of limbs and fangs to a defensive posture. The intruder descended with astonishing rapidity, but there was nothing in the predator-turned-prey that could have been called either astonishment or horror.
For the coati, however, there was something that might have been called a sense of self. He was a leaner, sleeker rendition of the American raccoon, and although he’d lived these past three years alone, he felt nothing like regret. An arthritic hip had begun to slow him down, but even the fastest responses of a spider were all too predictable. The coati’s meal reared up on four hind limbs, projected its fangs, and waved its forearms menacingly.
In five ticks of a stopwatch, confrontation flared and died. Feinting with his right paw, the coati distracted the spider just long enough to blindside it with a crushing blow from the left. To the coati, tarantulas were a rare and satisfying delicacy—as fine in texture as the yolk of a freshly broken egg.
In the forest surrounding the little clearing, something watched, and waited.