He didn’t dare look down. He didn’t want to look across, or behind him, or anywhere. He could feel the silt, or maybe something less acceptable, between his toes. A persistent cold breeze froze into him. Moonlight sheened the waveless water, silhouetting the black dead trees against the deadening silver.
The Butcher’s Lake. They were a third of the way across; already it was long past midnight.
“Here.”
He reached out a hand for Chemda. She had slipped in the rotting mud.
“Thanks.”
Jake hauled her up onto a kind of island, with its one requisite black spar of dead tree. A large white night bird, alarmed by their arrival, flapped away into the depths of sky, toward the silent tropical stars. The whiteness of the beating wings dwindled into dark.
Rittisak glanced back at his charges as they squatted on the mud bank, regaining some energy. His dark face was fathomless in the gloomy moonlight.
“It’s taken us two hours already,” Jake said to the Khmer, who shrugged. “How much longer?”
Jake pointed to his wrist, where a watch might be if he hadn’t taken it off. “I said…”
But he said nothing: he gave up. He turned to Chemda to translate. She was barefoot and smeared with mud to the knee—but they were all barefoot and smeared with mud, indeed Jake was muddy to the shoulder. He had already slipped over once as they tried to ford the expanse of water, nearly collapsing into deeper grayness, splashing noisily, making the night birds clack and disperse in agitation, making Rittisak frown and whisper and put an urgent finger to his elegant Khmer lips: shhhhh!
At Jake’s request, Chemda translated. Rittisak answered. She translated again.
“Just another three hours, ah, more or less. He says the next bit is the worst … then it should get easier, shallower, I think.”
They rose and slid down the mud of the islet shore, and Jake girded himself for his near-submersion. The cold cringed into his ankles with a sensation of sickliness, like sudden gangrene. He wasn’t sure if he was imagining it, this definite feeling of viscosity to the water, this cold and unpalatable oiliness. Perhaps he was just spooked by those stories of bodies dumped here, drowned here, the Butcher’s thousands, cached underwater, like Ta Mok had been some kind of human crocodile, storing food.
The tiredness washed over him as they followed Rittisak’s delicate path, picking the shallowest route through the deceptive waters, the chilling wide swamps. He gazed, half-dreaming, at these strange black-and-white night birds, raptors, vulturesque, posed on so many trees. Did they feed off the corpses? Was that why they roosted here?
Chemda slipped again, and he reached out to steady her. He wondered if he loved her.
The trudge continued. It was a hypnotically repetitive process: wait for Rittisak to seek his path through the quagmire, then follow his footsteps exactly, then lean against a poisoned tree, then turn and make sure Chemda was OK.
Then repeat.
They were halfway across now. When he leaned against the next dead tree, Jake looked behind and squinted in the moon-tarnished darkness; he could see Ta Mok’s house, back there, on the dry ground. What must the Butcher have felt? Sitting there in his concrete villa with the stupid paintings, looking at this reservoir of death that he had decreed? Where the ospreys fed on the fish and the flesh, carrying the carrion of his victims to the distant kapoks on the Dangrek Escarpment? A sliver of wind goosefleshed the water around him. Another bird streaked the bleak whiteness of the moon, then disappeared.
It was three or four a. m. But was it really? How long to dawn? Was that the first skein of silvery blue on the far horizon? Maybe it was just some dismal Cambodian town staining the sky with its naked lights hung on stark concrete poles.
Rittisak was talking and pointing. Chemda came up close and held Jake’s muddy hand as she listened. She explained:
“Says it’s, ah, the last kilometer, we go that way, then we can climb the hills—some of this is deep—we need to be careful. But we are nearly there.”
Nearly there, they had nearly made it. Jake’s spirits surged with hope as they waded the greasy cold water. Soon they would be climbing up the hills, then they could rest in the dry, warm shelter of the forest, then it was an easy slip across the border, and then: safety! After all the terrors came Thailand. And trains and telephones and a talk with Tyrone. Jake yearned to be in Thailand, to be in a country that was not haunted by two million ghosts, a country that wasn’t one giant neak ta, one giant spirit house, with more specters than citizens.
The waters oiled between his legs, making a silver-and-rainbow coil in the moonshine. Jake stared down, absorbed.
A face was staring up at him.
He lurched, swayed. And reached out a hand for a branch of black wood.
“Are you OK?”
“I’m fine.”
He lied. He was sure he’d seen a face, a kind of face, a skull, a skull with flesh on it, bobbing momentarily. Or had he? Jake had no time to sort the nightmares from reality. It was all a nightmare. Now he could hear a fat sudden noise behind him. A splashing angry noise, coming close. The trees were denser here, the moon was partly clouded, the light was so poor: Was it someone pursuing them, or some animal?
He didn’t know who panicked first. Chemda maybe, maybe even Rittisak. But they panicked, all three of them. From the obedient procession of the last four hours, suddenly they were all running, or trying to run, wading the waters of a childhood nightmare, unable to progress, yet still running, slipping, gasping.
“I’m stuck!”
He reached behind and grasped her hand and tugged; the ooze clutched at her, lecherously; but then the mud yielded—and she was free, and shuddering, and waving him on. The splashing behind them was louder. They struggled forward. But now, all around them, the water was roiled, like a saucepan coming to the boil.
With a scum floating on the surface.
Jake fought his urge to give up, to go back, to do anything but this. Chased by the splashing, they were wading through bodies, or at least floating bones. Shin bones. Human arms and femurs. The lake was brimming with dismembered cadavers, floating like sad and small gray logs, brought to the surface by the disturbance.
The smell was an abomination. No wonder the night birds roosted here: the shrikes and the ravens. Ospreys. Fish vultures. Butcher-birds. Despair and denial mixed with Jake’s revulsion, and his fear, but they had to keep wading, escaping whatever pursued them.
And now the moon shone down—on a tiny ripple of hope. Jake squinted, and yearned. They were nearly there: the hapless attempt at a shoreline where the artificial lake met the artificial beach. Rittisak was already up on the shore, reaching out; Jake caught the hand and was assisted onto dry land; behind him, Chemda raced up, spitting and shivering. She squatted on the black soil and she swiveled.
The moon broke the clouds, once more, revealing their pursuer: just a water buffalo. Halted angrily in the water, amid the floating bones. A gray image in the lighter grayness.
Rittisak clapped his hands. The buffalo snorted contemptuously, then turned and waded away.
For a moment they sat panting, and trembling, and rubbing the mud from their hands and feet as best they could, using leaves and ferns. They all coughed the filthy water from their mouths. Still no one spoke. Chemda seemed on the verge of tears, but as ever she strangled them at birth. Manfully.
A religious silence ruled. Total silence, omerta. Maybe, Jake thought, what they had witnessed was beyond conversation, simply too harrowing to discuss. Maybe they would never mention this again. Not to anyone, not to each other, not for as long as they breathed.
“Climb,” said Chemda. “We have to climb.”