Chapter 2
He sprang into visibility as a flashlight in Dalton's hand went on. A squat, swarthy man with rugged features, a _caboclo_, of white and Indian blood. He blinked expressionlessly at the light.
"Where is the American scientist?" demanded Dalton in Portuguese.
"_Quem sabe? Foi-se._"
"Which way did he go?"
"_Nao importa. O doutor é doido; nao ha-de-voltar_," said the man suddenly. "It doesn't matter. The doctor is crazy--he won't come back."
"Answer me, damn it! Which way?"
The _caboclo_ jerked his shoulders nervously and pointed.
"Come on!" said Dalton and scrambled ashore even as Joao was stopping the motor and making the boat fast beside the other. "He's gone in after it!"
The forest was a black labyrinth. Its tangled darkness seemed to drink up the beam of the powerful flashlight Dalton had brought, its uneasy rustlings and animal-noises pressed in to swallow the sound of human movements for which he strained his ears, fearing to call out. He pushed forward recklessly, carried on by a sort of inertia of determination; behind him Joao followed, though he moved woodenly and muttered prayers under his breath.
Then somewhere very near a great voice croaked briefly and was silent--so close that it poured a wave of faintness over the hearer, seemed to send numbing electricity tingling along his motor nerves.
Joao dropped to his knees and flung both arms about a tree-bole. His brown face when the light fell on it was shiny with sweat, his eyes dilated and blind-looking. Dalton slammed the heel of his hand against the man's shoulder and got no response save for a tightening of the grip on the treetrunk, and a pitiful whimper, "_Assombra-me_--it overshadows me!"
Dalton swung the flashlight beam ahead and saw nothing. Then all at once, not fifty yards away, a single glowing eye sprang out of the darkness, arched through the air and hit the ground to blaze into searing brilliance and white smoke. The clearing in which it burned grew bright as day, and Dalton saw a silhouetted figure clutching a rifle and turning its head from side to side.
He plunged headlong toward the light of the flare, shouting, "Thwaite, you idiot! You can't--"
And then the _currupira_ spoke.
Its bellowing seemed to come from all around, from the ground, the trees, the air. It smote like a blow in the stomach that drives out wind and fight. And it roared on, lashing at the wills of those who heard it, beating and stamping them out like sparks of a scattered fire.
Dalton groped with one hand for his pocket but his hand kept slipping away into a matterless void as his vision threatened to slip into blindness. Dimly he saw Thwaite, a stone's throw ahead of him, start to lift his weapon and then stand frozen, swaying a little on his feet as if buffeted by waves of sound.
Already the second theme was coming in--the insidious obbligato of invitation to death, wheedling that _this way ... this way ..._ was the path from the torment and terror that the monstrous voice flooded over them.
Thwaite took a stiff step, then another and another, toward the black wall of the _mato_ that rose beyond the clearing. With an indescribable shudder Dalton realized that he too had moved an involuntary step forward. The _currupira's_ voice rose triumphantly.
With a mighty effort of will Dalton closed fingers he could not feel on the object in his pocket. Like a man lifting a mountain he lifted it to his lips.
A high sweet note cut like a knife through the roll of nightmare drums. With terrible concentration Dalton shifted his fingers and blew and blew....
Piercing and lingering, the tones of the pipes flowed into his veins, tingling, warring with the numbing poison of the _currupira's_ song.
Dalton was no musician but it seemed to him then that an ancestral instinct was with him, guiding his breath and his fingers. The powers of the monster were darkness and cold and weariness of living, the death-urge recoiling from life into nothingness.
But the powers of the pipes were life and light and warmth, life returning when the winter is gone, greenness and laughter and love. Life was in them, life of men dead these thousand generations, life even of the craftsmen on an alien planet who had preserved their form and their meaning for this moment.
Dalton advanced of his own will until he stood beside Thwaite--but the other remained unstirring and Dalton did not dare pause for a moment, while the monster yet bellowed in the blackness before them. The light of the flare was reddening, dying....
After a seeming eternity he saw motion, saw the rifle muzzle swing up. The shot was deafening in his ear, but it was an immeasurable relief. As it echoed the _currupira's_ voice was abruptly silent. In the bushes ahead there was a rending of branches, a frantic slithering movement of a huge body.
They followed the noises in a sort of frenzy, plunging toward them heedless of thorns and whipping branches. The flashlight stabbed and revealed nothing. Out of the shadows a bass croaking came again, and Thwaite fired twice at the sound and there was silence save for a renewed flurry of cracking twigs.
Along the water's edge, obscured by the trees between, moved something black and huge, that shone wetly. Thwaite dropped to one knee and began firing at it, emptying the magazine.
They pressed forward to the margin of the slough, feet squishing in the deep muck. Dalton played his flashlight on the water's surface and the still-moving ripples seemed to reflect redly.
Thwaite was first to break the silence. He said grimly, "Damned lucky for me you got here when you did. It--_had_ me."
Dalton nodded without speaking.
"But how did you know what to do?" Thwaite asked.
"It wasn't my discovery," said the linguist soberly. "Our remote ancestors met this threat and invented a weapon against it. Otherwise man might not have survived. I learned the details from the Martian records when I succeeded in translating them. Fortunately the Martians also preserved a specimen of the weapon our ancestors invented."
He held up the little reed flute and the archeologist's eyes widened with recognition.
Dalton looked out across the dark swamp-water, where the ripples were fading out. "In the beginning there was the voice of evil--but there was also the music of good, created to combat it. Thank God that in mankind's makeup there's more than one fundamental note!"
End of Project Gutenberg's The Record of Currupira, by Robert Abernathy