Something moved: a shape barely discernible from shadow, accompanied by a dry scuttle across the wooden floor. Then silence.
Now MacCready did aim his flashlight. The beam partially illuminated a wall of simple bamboo shelves tucked into a recessed corner. Too small for a hiding place but still, an inner voice screamed, “Ambush!”
MacCready backed slowly out of the doorway and down the ladder.
I’m being watched.
On the ground, he kept the light aimed at the doorway and slowly lowered one hand toward the holstered Colt.
The moment his hand touched the gun butt, something shot through his body—a vibration. An energy burst, MacCready thought, even as an adrenaline rush prepared him to face a threat—whether real or imagined.
GO, something told him. An unstoppable message that spread through his nervous system like a wave.
MacCready backed away from the hut, aiming his pistol alternately at each of its two openings, pausing just long enough to pick up his pack, just long enough to—
GO!
He tightened his grip on the strap and ran—dangerously fast if he wasn’t careful. But in those seconds, his only concerns lay in obeying the GO command and in putting the greatest possible distance between himself and whatever had been watching from the hut.
GO. The word repeated itself again. Is it only in my mind, or is this real?
The forest was a maze of shadows, and he strode quickly over fallen trees and through thorny scrub that clutched at his pants as he went. Yet something drew his gaze upward. Watch the canopy, he told himself.
MacCready shook his head. Yeah, and fall on my ass. But the feeling would not go away. There’s something up there—watching me.
Once, when he stopped for a sip from his canteen, he did look up—and swore that there were shapes peering back at him. He even drew his flashlight and turned the beam upward—but whatever had been there was gone.
An hour later, he still had not found the road to Chapada but he stumbled into a smaller clearing—a tree-fall gap. No huts. No bodies.
MacCready went down on one knee and tried to catch his breath. What the fuck was that all about? he thought. First the spiderweb, then a mad dash through the forest. The scientist realized that he had lost control—twice.
Is this how it starts? Madness?
“Shit,” he said, quietly.
Then, as he had done on hundreds of other nights, R. J. MacCready lit a small fire. Yet on this night, for the first time, he sat awake beside it until sunrise with his pistol drawn. And he did not look up.
Outside Chapada dos Guimar?es, Central Brazil
JANUARY 21, 1944
* * *
After bushwhacking for the better part of a day, MacCready climbed a muddy embankment on all fours and stood atop what was clearly a raised dirt road. The fact that it looked more like a raised streambed than a road didn’t bother him at all—relieved as he was to be standing in the open, and in sunlight.
His entire body ached, and he thought about how sometimes, out in the wilderness, no matter how beaten up his body might feel, he actually enjoyed the aches and pains that came with fieldwork. Clearly, though, this was not one of those times. It wasn’t fatigue, nor was it the insect bites, ticks, and thorns—it was what had happened in that village. And surprisingly, it wasn’t the image of the flyblown bodies or even the taste of the flies themselves that kept coming back to him. It was the deep, interior shriek—a command to get away from there. Too loud, too powerful, to be his own imagination. Something had come from outside of his own mind.
GO
Have I inherited my mother’s illness? Does schizophrenia really begin like this?
“All right, next!” MacCready said out loud, forcing himself to concentrate on something else—anything else.
Bob Thorne is alive, he thought, and gave a small laugh. He was still getting used to that one. MacCready pulled a hunk of rapedura out of his pocket and began munching on the toffeelike sugarcane product. As he ate, he thought back to Thorne’s sudden departure from the States. Only a few weeks later, word had arrived about his disappearance. Missing and presumed dead.