Alexander Key
The Black Orchid

    Red-headed young Senor Robert Rollins, late of Maryland, stared through the split-palm flooring of the Rollins’ headquarters at Remate de Males. Three feet beneath him he could see the turbid flood of the Rio Amazonas slipping past. The morning rain drummed against the bamboo hut; from the palmetto thatch came vague rustlings of other occupants disturbed by the downpour.
    Bob put down the camera he was repairing and his fingers closed cautiously over his revolver. Shuddering, he sent six staccato shots at the thing creeping on the floor, then hurled the empty weapon across the room. But the movements of his would-be victim were quicker than sight. A spider that could have spanned a dinner plate flicked sideways, and stood malevolently watching... waiting for the next missile which El Senor Robert would choose to fling at him. It was a great game. The spider always won.
    There was a commotion outside, voices, then a slim, half-naked youth slipped through the door. “It is bad luck, my friend,” came Asa’s quiet voice, “to shoot at a spider... and miss.” He held out a grimy envelope. “Here’s something for you which the trading launch just brought.”
    “A letter?” Bob tore it open. “No, a cablegram from New York, and it was sent a month ago!”
    “You forget,” Asa reminded him, “that Remate de Males is five days north of where the steamers travel. The Amazon has many channels.”
    As he read, Bob felt his fingers beginning to shake. He dashed out to the veranda, running an eye over the little rows of gourds hanging from the rafters. There were bright flowers growing in some; others held strange ferns and crawling air-plants which his father had gathered from the surrounding jungle. But three of the gourds were empty, and the one he sought was gone.
    “That... that funny looking bulb you found; where is it?”
    Asa pulled meditatively at his dark hair, bobbed like an Indian’s, and his strange green eyes swept the row of gourds.
    "You mean the one with the black bloom... the one that grows only in the Mangeroma country? Ah! The time I had getting it! But I guess the Coto monkey we caught must have thrown it away.”
    “Thown it away! An orchid worth five thousand dollars!” Bob sat down heavily on a luggage case.
    “Somebody is bewitched,” murmured Asa. “You should have killed the spider. As long as he is alive....”
    “Oh, shut up!” Bob snapped. “I took a picture of that orchid and sent it to a collector in New York. His cable in reply, offers me five thousand apiece for bulbs like it. Says it’s absolutely unknown, and now, when his message at last reaches this pestiferous, spider-ridden joint, the thing’s lost! Remate de Males! ‘Culmination of Evils’! The name fits.”
    “What would you want with five thousand dollars?” Asa asked naively.
    “Want with it!” Bob stared incredulously at the other, then frowned. The Rollins Exploration Company could very well use extra funds. But what was the use of explaining such things to a jungle-bred pagan like Asa Lantier, who differed little from an Indian, and who had lived all his life in the unexplored Napo country. He was white, but had never been any nearer civilization than this cluster of dirty huts squatting on stilts, two thousand miles up the river from Para.
    * * *
    The lanky Senor Robert had encountered many strange things since leaving home, but Asa, the orphan of an English refugee from Ecuador, was probably the most puzzling.
    Suddenly he jumped to his feet, his mouth hard. He kicked the luggage case to the door and jerked open the lid. “Come on. Let’s pack the dugout and get out of here. If somebody back home wants to pay five thousand for an infernal looking plant with black flowers, I’m going to turn Brazil upside down to find one. The Mangeroma country can’t be any worse than this!”
    For a moment Asa's face shone with eagerness, then it clouded. “But the professor... he told us to stay till he got back. I...”
    “Aw, Dad won’t be returning for weeks. It’s a long way to Manaos.”
    “Just the same, we promised him...”
    “Forget it! I'll take the blame if anything happens to the equipment while we’re gone. The end of the wet season will soon be here. You know what that means.” Asa nodded. The Mangeroma country lay beyond an unmapped morass to the north. During the dry season, when the waters of the Amazon dropped seventy feet or more, that section became a vast, impassable bog, a hothouse of matted, creeping vegetation and stagnant pools where death crawled and swam and flew. But during the wet weather a clear path of water reached to the land where the black orchids bloomed.
    “Very well,” Asa said slowly. “I’m willing. Let us go.”
    Provisioned for a month’s journey, the dugout swung downstream, hugging the crowded wall of ceibas on the north shore. As the seven huts of Remate de Males vanished behind them, Asa stripped off his trousers... his one concession to civilization, and tied a strip of skin around his waist. “Worthless clothes,” he growled. “I never wore them until I came to live in a white man’s city.”
    Omitting the insects, Remate de Males had twenty-nine inhabitants!
    The rain stopped. Steam rose from the jungle. Three miles downstream, Asa thrust deep with his paddle and the dugout shot into an almost hidden opening on the left. Rank foliage closed over their heads. In front of them was a twisting lane of water leading through the flooded forest.
    Bob glanced over his shoulder. Small spots of sunlight dabbled the lithe brown figure in the stern. There was a long knife at Asa’s hip, and lying across the thwart in front of him was his snakewood bow and a score of arrows in a tapir-hide case. They were entering dangerous country, and from now on the success of their venture... and possibly life itself... would rest principally upon Asa’s shrewd judgment.
    As they paddled farther away from the main body of the Amazon, the sunlight was blotted out, and they advanced in a gray-green twilight... an eerie, unbelievable world of aerial roots hanging like curtains overhead, of snake-like lianas, and monstrous leaves bigger than a man. Vegetation fought for existence, the trees, vines and plants sucking, strangling and smothering the life out of each other. Somewhere ahead was the thing they sought: a black flower aptly symbolizing the region where it grew. This was the Matto Grasso... the Forest of Death.
    * * *
    For three days they paddled steadily, Asa seeming to feel his way ahead by some instinct beyond Robert’s understanding. When night came... the black, abysmal Amazon night spotted with weird moving lights from gigantic fireflies... they would pull a mosquito netting over the gunwales and sleep in the bottom of the dugout. During that time Bob heard and saw little, but he felt the presence of living things that hid silently in the shadows, watching.
    It was on the morning of the fourth day that the jungle delivered its warning. Asa had suddenly ceased paddling, his eyes green slits in his narrow face. The dugout slipped behind a huge tree trunk and stopped. Bob swung around, questioning, but his companion hissed for quiet.
    Then Asa’s voice, loud in a monosyllabic chattering, cut the silence. And he was answered. Similar chattering sounds were directed at them from somewhere in the tree tops.
    Bob stared upward, feeling the flesh crawling on the back of his neck, but in that dense tangle of vegetation he could see nothing. “Holy smoke,” he whispered, “what was that?”
    “It was the little people... the little wild men of the trees. They are urging us to turn back.”
    “But why?”
    “The little people are my friends... and they arc afraid of what may happen if we go farther. We are on the edge of the Mangeroma country; the water is high this year, and the Mangeromas have been driven from their mandioca fields. The river god is angry. It will take the hearts of a hundred enemies...
    “Are the Mangcromas head-hunters?”
    “No. Cannibals. You should have killed that spider. I knew bad luck would follow. Do you wish to turn back?”
    “Turn back... now? When there’s a fortune just ahead of us? You and your superstitions! If you’re afraid, I’ll leave you here and go on by myself!”
    Asa’s eyes glittered, and his knuckles whitened upon the paddle. But he said nothing. Bob stabbed viciously at the water and the dugout darted ahead.
    Throughout the rest of the morning they exchanged hardly a word. At noon, suddenly, the sun beat down again like a scorching weight and a million stinging insects clouded about them. The forest was left behind and the dugout wound through the channels of a quaking, steaming marsh filled with patches of bamboo and a rank grass higher than their paddles could reach. The grass rustled as unseen things scurried away at their approach. Black shadows whipped through the water under them.
    Bob knew what they were. Eels... six-foot fiends whose slimy bodies were electrically charged. He’d heard of men who had been electrocuted by them. He shuddered and slapped at the insects sucking at his forehead.
    The long shape of a crocodile slid past the bow, and Bob tugged at his revolver. A shot would be a pleasant sound: it might break that deathly spell tightening around him like an invisible hand, but the sharp blade of a paddle knocked the weapon to the floor. “You fool!” Asa muttered. “Would you tell them we are here?”
    Bob turned angrily, then ducked as the dugout slid under a matted mass of vines. It touched something solid and stopped. Asa crawled forward, bow in hand.
    “From now on we must walk,” he whispered. “Take only your gun and machete, and a few tins of tomatoes rolled up in your hammock. Examine carefully where the dugout is hidden. You may have to come back... alone.”
    * * *
    Noiselessly they crept through a tangle of great ferns growing head high, until they reached a spur of open ground. Asa halted, listening.
    “The orchid grows in the trees with the green bark. There should be lots of them, but they are hard to find. Keep behind me, and don’t make any noise. We are on an island, and if they see us...
    The place seemed perfectly peaceful, and there was no sign to indicate that any human being had ever been there. A howling monkey screamed somewhere in the distance; near by a flock of parrots set up a raucous squawking and flew over their heads. Bob doubted that Asa’s fears were well founded.
    Suddenly, he was staring at a green-barked tree in front of him, half smothered by lianas. There within easy reach of his hand, was a great bulb with a mass of aerial roots hanging downward. On the end of its short vine was one malignant flower with black petals. And near by was another, and another....
    Asa and the brooding jungle were forgotten. Bob cried out, reached the tree in a bound, and his hand shot upward for the nearest bulb. Here was a fortune!
    Abruptly a sinewy arm circled his waist and he was jerked violently backward. “Down!” Asa hissed. “Down! I think they’ve seen us!”
    Bob struggled to rise, but Asa’s strength was greater than his own. He fought back the harsh retort lie wanted to make and lay still, listening. There was not the slightest sound save for the droning of the insects, the rustle of a breeze overhead. The forest seemed lifeless, at peace.
    “You crazy coot! There’s nothing...” Asa’s hand clamped over Bob’s mouth, holding him to silence, as, catlike, he rose to a stooping posture and urged his companion back the way they had come. Bob protested, but a vise-like grip hold his arm and pulled him through the ferns. Suddenly he realized it was growing dark; and with the deepening shadows, a dull fear took the place of anger.
    A half hour later they wormed their way beneath a mass of lianas and slipped into the hole of a hollow tree. Hot, burning with innumerable bites of insects, they lay motionless on the dank, rotting floor of the cavern, waiting for night.
    “What was it you saw back there?” Bob asked.
    “Nothing human,” Asa answered.
    “I suppose,” Bob flung back at him, “you’ll be saying next the spider’s up to his old tricks, and bad luck will be hopping down our throats in a minute.”
    “There is nothing to laugh at, my friend. A Mangeroma dart missed your hand by inches when you were reaching for the orchid, If I hadn’t pulled you away just then...
    “You’re crazy! I didn’t see anything and I don’t believe you did either. I bet there’s not an Indian for miles around. And now, after coining all this distance and getting my hands almost on the thing, you kept me from taking it! I’ll not go back without one of those bulbs!”
    “Forget the orchid,” snapped Asa. “They grow only in that grove behind us. We could never reach the spot again and come out alive. Well be lucky to find the dug-out in the dark and get away from here.”
    Bob leaned back, exasperated. Suddenly he crawled to the opening and peered out. “Before I believe in bogies,” he said, “you’ve got to show me one. You can stay here if you want to and lie low, but I’m going back for that bulb. It’s not quite dark yet, and I have a flashlight.”
    Asa pulled him to the ground again. “Is the orchid so valuable to you, my friend?”
    “If it weren’t, I wouldn’t be breaking my neck trying to find one. What’s money to you? You think it’s something to punch holes in and wear around your neck!”
    Angrily, Asa thrust him aside. “You are a fool! If it wasn’t for the professor, I’d let you go. But I promised him to keep you out of trouble, so I’ll take the chance myself. Stay here for an hour. If I’m not back then, crawl down to the dugout and start paddling – but don’t use your light. Adios.” Soundlessly, Asa was gone.
    * * *
    Fuming, Bob kicked at the decayed mass beneath his feet, then sat down to reflect. Certainly, Asa was wrong. If there were Indians near, he would have heard their signals – the rattling of gourds, the thumping of log drums.
    What was that about the dart? He stiffened, his mind suddenly alert as he thought of it. Had something brushed by him as he reached upward – a long needle with a tuft of down on the end? He’d been excited at the time, had not noticed. But if it had been a dart, tipped with that deadly curare....
    There was a sound outside. He crawled to his knees, gun ready, and as he peered through the opening he gasped in astonishment.
    A ghastly, bluish flame was shimmering out there in the darkness. It grew larger, sped over the ground like a live thing, touched a tree and instantly enveloped it in a veil of dancing light. Other flames swept upward; the forest was lit with an eerie glow, as- from supernatural lights.
    Gone was the security Bob had felt a moment ago. The thing was unearthly, could not be. Yet... He clenched his gun, stared again. Suddenly a deadly fear shook him, for there, standing only twenty paces away, was the motionless figure of a savage!
    The light vanished. It was black dark again. For a long time Bob did not move. Then he rubbed his eyes with a hand that trembled. There was something his father said about the Mangeromas; the words came back to him now like the stab of a knife point. “Ah, yes, my son: they are cannibals – and fiends. I’ve heard they prefer human flesh taken from a live enemy.”
    Another sound from the night whipped his strained nerves to keen alertness. A leaf rustled, something grunted; immediately there was the thud of falling bodies and a quick threshing. Silence.
    “My friend....” Asa slipped through the opening, sank heavily beside Bob. His voice was slow, as if drugged. “Here... here is the thing you wanted....” Bob felt Asa’s wiry form sway against him.
    “Heaven forgive me I” Bob exclaimed in a whisper as he snatched up the flashlight and bent over Asa. The boy’s knife dripped red, but there was no blood on his back, none on his chest. Suddenly Bob saw a dart sticking like a long needle in Asa’s arm. He jerked it away, squeezed the wound, tried to suck out the poison.
    After a few minutes he stopped, realizing it was useless. Asa seemed to have gone to sleep, yet there was a faint movement of the pulse. That was the way curare worked... his father had said it did something to the lungs... paralyzed them. You drifted away and could not wake up, unless....
    Instantly he whirled Asa face down on the mold, knelt astride him, and pressed his hands inward below the ribs. A dose of curare was like drowning. Sometimes artificial respiration would...
    It must have been hours later when he fell to one side, exhausted. It was no use. Loneliness and despair overwhelmed him.
    * * *
    He was aroused by a hand shaking him, and sat up, dazed. Who was this that moved, spoke? Asa! Then his efforts had not been vain. Heaven be praised ! lie realized vaguely that it would soon be morning; a dim green glow suffused the jungle outside. “I – I’m a fool, Asa... I didn’t realize....”
    “Sh-li! We’ve got to get out of here!” Asa whispered. He seemed all right now. The poison must have worn off... possibly it had not been a full dose. “They’ll be looking for that warrior who went after me last night, and when they find him.... ” He crawled to tire opening and squatted there listening.
    Then he nodded, and flat on the ground, began squirming noiselessly toward the nearest clump of ferns. Quickly Bob caught the orchid in a fold of his hammock, knotted it about his waist, and followed Asa.
    He had no idea in what direction the dugout lay, but trailed Asa blindly, trying to piece together in his mind what had happened the evening before.
    Suddenly he was shaken by a swift, dreadful conviction. With the water so high, this must he the only dry land left for many miles. All the game of the surrounding country would have flocked here, and distant Indians would have come also, to hunt. The Mangeromas were at war. They’d be watching every trail, every lane of water, on the lookout for victims which they would try to take alive.... The place was a trap!
    No wonder there had been no distant signal of drums, or even the slightest sign that the place was inhabited. The Mangeromas were man-hunting; and Bob understood now why Asa had not died. The curare on the dart was undoubtedly diluted, made just strong enough to render a man unconscious. The Mangeromas wanted live victims.
    Asa’s shadowy form suddenly became still. Bob sensed that something was wrong. The forest had brightened, but it was still some time before dawn. He turned slightly, looked back and froze as if iron bands had been clamped upon him.
    There was a brief movement beyond the ferns ten paces away. His eye traveled upward, wavered an instant. Gasping, he hurled himself sideways, just as a dart fanned his face!
    Dropping his machete, Bob fumbled wildly for his revolver; but before he found it, there was a sharp twang and Asa’s arrow accounted for the swiftly leaping sentinel. He saw the man reel, his hideous, amber-skinned face contorted with fury. But the arrow in his throat held him soundless.
    Now Asa was bounding away, his body stooped as he twisted in and out through the ferns. Bob snatched up the machete and followed. Behind him were faint sounds, a soft warbling as of talking birds, and nimble footsteps. He could hear the warbling repeated in a dozen different places. They were signaling other lookouts to be on the alert.
    Suddenly some instinct made him throw himself flat on the ground. A second later a tufted needle quivered in a tree trunk three feet overhead. He slithered crab-wise to the left, rolled to his feet beyond a mass of lianas and went tumbling down a slight incline. There was water below.
    Ferns were moving in front of him, and he could hear guttural cries. So they were growing bolder... closing in! His revolver cracked, once, twice; there was a hoarse exclamation. Momentarily the Mangeromas held their distance.
    Where was Asa? Had he broken through that deadly half circle and reached the dugout? A sharp snap sounded beside him. Fifty yards away an amber body leaped upward, fell back threshing in the undergrowth. Asa pulled Bob to the ground.
    “They’ve cut us off,” he gasped. “It’s a half mile to the dugout, and we’re on a point of the island with only swamp behind us!” He pointed. “See! Beyond the lagoon is where we landed. We wouldn’t stand a chance if we tried to crawl around to the place.”
    “Then,” said Bob shakily, “the only thing left is to cross the lagoon.”
    Asa nodded. “I’d rather face the eels than the Mangeroma witch doctors. Come on!”
    * * *
    Crawling through a tangle of young palms, they cautiously entered the water where tall reeds concealed them as they slowly pushed ahead.
    For ten minutes all was well. Then abruptly they sank knee deep in abysmal mud. Bob felt something squirm under him. He flinched, set his teeth, and kept forging onward. Now they were at the center of the lagoon, facing a lane of black, open water.
    “Easy,” cautioned Asa. “Don’t make any splash. Those devils haven’t yet found out that we’ve gone.”
    The water crept higher, touched their necks. Now they were swimming. Thus far they had met with no difficulty, but now, without warning, the first shock came. A violent, stinging pain ripped through Bob’s body and instantly the water boiled with a multitude of squirming, darting bodies.
    Bob fought to keep from screaming aloud and slashed madly at the things with his machete, but they came on, stinging, biting, clinging to his clothes, twisting about his feet.
    Both boys were in a frenzy when they touched bottom again and went splashing over the shallow water. Ahead was the dugout.
    Bob, seizing the gunwale, jerked the boat away from the tangle where it was hidden, then leaped back, aghast. Something huge lay coiled across the bow, something with a body larger than his thigh and with a great, evil head that reared whip-like over him.
    “Anaconda!” he exclaimed.
    At that moment he heard a sound far back in the jungle that sent him lunging forward in a blind fury, slashing at that wicked, darting head. The Mangeroma war drums were throbbing, and nearer, steadily nearer, sounded the cries of amber-skinned figures racing along the edge of the lagoon.
    The snake uncoiled, sprawled outward into the water. Two of Asa’s arrows were in its throat. The dugout floated free. They leaped in, seized the paddles and began working furiously. The craft slid down the channel, rounded a canebrake, and darted toward the heart of the steaming morass separating them from the black jungle of the little people.
    It was nearly noon when they relaxed and slumped down in their seats. As the dugout slipped into the shadow of a giant ceiba, Asa raised his head and sent a wild, staccato chattering into the tree tops. From far away came the answer.
    “We are safe now,” he said. “The little people are with us.”
    Bob stared down at the big bulb, still tied in the net hammock. Suddenly he loathed it. “Asa, when we get the money for this thing, it goes to you. Even then, it wouldn’t half pay you for the mess I got you into.”
    “Me... money? Ha! What would I want with money when I have the Matto Grasso? It was worth the trouble just to see the devil-fire last night. Fox fire, the professor calls it... but there are few who have seen a forest blazing with it!” Suddenly he pointed and snatched the remaining arrow from his quiver. “Diablo! A big spider!”
    It was watching them balefully from a palm a dozen yards away. The bowstring snapped and Asa pinned it neatly to the trunk.
    He turned, grinning. “The spell is broken! Come let us visit the little people. They are very shy, but they will meet my friends!”

    1935
    (The Open Road for Boys, vol. 17, #3, March, pp.8-9,26-29)

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