The Shoot Lamp

“Pim” Short Story:

By Martin Mackinlay

rpHE night bad been the darkest ever X experienced in the valley. Not merely the darkness that*" comes with moonlessness and rain—and there had been that as well—but a total eclipse of all light. Even the night creatures of the jungle, that usually rasp and hoot from sun-down to sun-up, had been still. Their silence had added depth to the blackness.

But, as the first light trickled down over the mountain top, and the mists lifted sufficiently to reveal the huddle of thatched huts on the terrace thirty feet above the river, two natives rounded the bend of the stream. There was nothing strange in that, of itself; at dawn the labourers on the claim came up the river to the main house to receive their rice issue and their instructions for the day, from Tom Davis.

But, usually, they came in a long, straggling line of half-sleepy automatons, rubbing the light into their eyes with grimy knuckles, and huddled into flannel shirts and extra lay-lays against the faint chill of the tropical dawn.

On this morning, only the two boys appeared, and they at the double. Neither were their eyes dulled from long hours in the smoky labour houses, almost hermetically sealed against the evil machinations of local tambarans, masalis and other assorted devils. They were, on the contrary, bright with some emotion and their faces were the pale, sickly fawn of the Melanesian who has had a soul shattering shock.

They took the long flight of earth and sapling steps that led to the camp above, two at a time; and instead of approaching the master’s house with traditional deference and announcing their presence with a series of polite coughs in rising crescendo, they ran swiftly across the split-palm floor of the verandah and came breathlessly to a halt in front of the doorless doorway of Master Tom’s bedroom.

The occupant of the crude bush bed. roused by the unusually hasty pattering

of feet over the yielding palm-wood floor and the consequent trembling of the rest of the flimsy establishment, stuck his tousled head out from under the mos quito-net and demanded with some irritation: “God-dammit— what name something?”

“Master—Master!” Apparently their news was of such magnitude that the boys’ thoughts boggled there, and only after half a minute of gulping, eye-rolling and pointing dramatically in the direction from which they had just come were they able to continue, in duet: “More better you come quicktime. Master Mick ’e fall down along water. More better ——•”

“Master Mick!” The xjvhite man was out of his bunk in one supple movement, “What name water?”

“Close-to. Me t’ink ’e die-finis.”

“Die-finis? You must be crazy!” Paus ing only long enough to haul on a pair of boots, Davis set off, led by the two boys, who ran ahead like anxious pups, He followed them round the bend and up a flight of rough steps, longer than that which led to his own camp. At the top they crossed a small, level piece of ground in front of a number of labour houses, to where the Test of the labourers stood in a silent, scared knot, looking anxiously down into a deep gulch, where, when it rained heavily in the mountains, a turbulent creek rushed out to join the river lower down, fpHE group parted to let Davis through.

X Below the sheer rock wall, on the far side of the gulch, the figure of a man in blue pyjama trousers and a cotton singlet sprawled grotesquely, the head half hidden among the rocks. There was no doubt about it: it was Mick Lonegan.

Davis swung himself over the rim of the cliff and, holding firm to roots and bushes, gingerly eased himself down the sloping side.

One look at Lonegan was sufficient to convince him that the man was very

dead. One side of his head, where it had come in contact with the rocks, was covered with congealed blood. Davis glanced at the cliff above, where stones and vegetation had been dislodged by the fall; evidently death had been instan taneous.

But how had it happened? The creek alone separated Lonegan’s claim from his own, but the only means of communi cation was via the main stream. Lone

]]/[ICK LONEGAN’S death was another unsolved mystery.

When Davis found his body at the bottom of a cliff he thought of Lonegan’s labourers and wondered if it could be murder.

Actually, Lonegan’s death was caused by the combination of a very dark night, a very long imagination—and a very human 1 failing on the part of a certain Brown Brother.

gan’s house was out of sight, on part of the same river terrace on which stood Davis’ own labour-houses, but separated from them by the deep gulch and the stream at the bottom. There was no path down Lonegan’s cliff, although there might have been a track from his house to the edge of it, where Lonegan’s boys could come to converse with the boys on the opposite side.

Did Lonegan sleep-walk? In the course of years in the same part of the New Guinea bush, they had many times shared the same rest-house and Lonegan had not appeared to have had any such fail ing.

What then had caused him to rise in the middle of the night and wander a good hundred yards through scrub and fallen trees and then fall over a cliff of whose existence he had been well aware?

The previous night had been unpre cedentedly dark; but, even so, one rarely moved in that locality without a flash lamp.

Lonegan was a bit of a fool, as evi denced by his conversation the previous day. But could it be —murder?

Davis shook his head to clear the clutching mists of doubt and shock from his brain and glanced swiftly up to where his own boys sat round the cliff edge, gazing down with scared, nervous faces. Did they know something? There was no telling with the inexplicable Melanesian, one or two generations re moved from the Stone-age, which way his mind would leap in some unexpected contingency.

No telling, either—to such an extent was the tradition of independence sedu lously maintained and respected among European residents —precisely what went on during the unknown three-quarters of a neighbour’s life —even such a near neighbour, on New Guinea standards, as Lonegan had been.

And, if it came to that, where the devil were Lonegan’s boys? Until that moment it had escaped his notifce that it had been his boys who had brought news of the accident —if accident it were. * * * AT mid-afternoon, on the previous day* Lonegan had met Davis in the river near his camp.

“Come up and have a drink,” Lonegan said. “I need one—trouble with my boys,.”

Davis had looked at the man. Lonegan was drawing on his cigarette in obvious excitement. He was shaking a little, and his knuckles were bloodied.

“The wrong type for the New Guinea

bush.” The thought came unbidden to Davis’ mind. “Unstable, and needing the sane influence of others about him.”

Lonegan’s boys were notoriously the worst-behaved in the district. They deserted with almost fixe& regularity, or “made court”- against their master with enthusiasm. Lonegan received both sets back into his because he found it hard to recruit boys in the first place—but carried on a perpetual feud with them, for the most part, verbally.

In private, his boys called him “Master Big-mouth.”

“Perhaps it’s the Irish in him; or just the ordinary cussedness of his nature,”

Davis reflected, as he turned his foot steps in the direction of Lonegan’s camp.

Aloud, he contented himself with saying: “What’s wrong this time?”

“Two big Sepiks jumped me just now, down on the claim. I had to show them who was boss. It’s always the same way with Sepiks. They always try you out sooner or later, and you’ve got to show them.”

“I’ve had Sepik boys for over ten years,” remarked Davis dryly, “and I’ve never had to show them who was boss, that way. But they seem to know all right.”

“You’re lucky in your boys; mine are a lot of .” They climbed the steep path to the terrace above and entered an untidy, thatched house. “Wangi!

Wangi!” bawled Lonegan. “Where in hell is that boy?”

At the last bellow, a brown figure de tached itself from the adjacent cook house, and, stretching and yawning, made a slow entry. “Makim tea,” ordered Lonegan. The boy received the order in sullen silence and was about to depart, presumably to execute it, when Lonegan bawled again. “Wangi—you hear ’im good?”

The boy half turned and reluctantly answered: “Yessir.”

“You see,” said Lonegan going to a packing-case cupboard and removing a bottle of whisky and two smudgy tum blers, “that’s what I have to put up with all the time. Just plain, damned in solence.” He splashed the whisky into the tumblers, shoved one across to Davis and tossed off the contents of the other in two gulps. He refilled his glass and made a move to add more to Davis’ drink.

“Hey, hold on.” Davis covered his drink with his hand. “I’ll wait for tea.”

He reflected a moment. “You want to take a pull, Mike. You’re letting things get on your nerves.”

“Yeah. I know. I’m fed up with the whole blasted place. I reckon I’ll get out for a spell soon—it is getting on my nerves. Too much fever too, lately, and quinine plays up with my eyes. Nearly went blind a couple of years ago after an overdose. I get the wind up every

time my eyes get dicky again. Well, what the hell —here’s luck.”

When Davis left, the coming darkness was already beginning to show itself in long inky shadows that reached out, making themselves one with the over bearing jungle. The whisky bottle was down to the last half-inch and Lonegan’s moods were alternating between maudlin remorse at his mis-spent life and tru culence at the raw deal Fate had dealt him.

“Fever’s coming on again,” he mut tered, as Davis got up to go. He weaved an unsteady course to a shelf, shook two five-grain capsules of quinine from a bottle and washed them down with the remains of the spirits.

“You want to ease up on both whisky and quinine,” Davis told him, “Your fever is a bottle-fed baby this time. Ease up, or you’ll leave your bones here, Mike.”

“Aw—don’t give me that. It’s fever a’right. Hell, surely t’God a man knows when he’s got fever.” * * * WHEN the last of the dishes had been removed from the table to be washed by the cookhouse monkey, Wangi placed a large cup of coffee and the quinine bottle before his master, as •had been impressed upon him so to do.

Then he went back to the cookhouse, picked up an old, battered electric torch, inexpertly unscrewed the end so that the batteries slid out into his brown paw and returned to the house.

Lonegan still sat, sunk in deep melan choly, stirring slowly at the black coffee.

As Wangi entered Lonegan’s hand went out automatically to the bottle of quinine, shook out two capsules and washed them down.

“Master,” demanded Wangi with the calm effrontery of those who are used to asking, even if they receive not, “Keo belong shoot-lamp belong me, ’e die finis. More better you give ’im new fella.”

Lonegan bestirred himself. “Oh, ’e die finis, eh? More better me give ’im new fella? That’s all you blasted coons ever think about—give ’im new fella!” His voice rose to a roar. “Get to hell out of here. Go work ’im bed.”

“Yessifi.” Unimpressed by Lonegan’s roar, which was usual; and disappointed but by no means abashed by his refusal to come across with the highly-prized torch batteries, Wangi sauntered into the partitioned-off portion of the house which sheltered Lonegan’s bed. He hung a small hurricane lantern on a con venient nail above the bed, arranged the mosquito-net and turned back the one lightweight blanket.

Then he espied, coyly half-hidden by Lonegan’s pillow, Lonegan’s own new torch —a thing of gleaming, silver beauty.

He stretched out his brown hand and quietly picked it up, sliding the switch forward eagerly. A steady, golden beam flashed out, concentrating in a pool of light at Wangi’s feet. “This fella keo ’e alright,” he muttered; and, after a second of hesitation his long fingers almost automatically began to undo the cap. It was the work of a moment to slide the three goods “keos out, and replace them with the worn batteries from his own torch.

His own “shoot-lamp” would now pro vide the comforting light to guide him down the stream, so full of darkness and innumerable, silent and unnamed horrors, to the labour-houses below. To-morrow the master might be cross. On the other hand, the master was still slightly crazy from the effects of the water in the mysterious bottle and, in the morning, it might well be that he would have for gotten Wangi’s request and believe that his own shoot-lamp had ceased to func

tion through nothing more unusual than the passage of time.

Wangi replaced Lonegan’s torch be neath the pillow and silently withdrew. * ♦ * IT must have been late when Lonegan woke. He lay in the darkness with his head throbbing, trying to get his bearings: Tom Davis had been there that after noon; and he, Lonegan, had polished off a bottle of whisky, almost unaided. Davis said he hadn’t had fever. As though Davis knew what he had. He must have had fever —he hazily remembered taking k double dose of quinine for it —10 grains.

Naturally, he must have had fever.

Suddenly then his bemused brain switched to another scene: a brown arm placing a cup of coffee on the table and his own arm going out again to the quinine bottle. Of course. That was it —he had taken two double doses of quinine; 20 grains within a couple of hours, instead of the daily five. He surely was a fool; his eyes would play up again, as the Doc had warned. He might go blind, as he almost had two years ago.

A feeling of panic swept up from the region of his toes to his bursting head.

Perhaps the damage, even now, was already done. Perhaps he was blind.

Cautiously, with his heart beating fast, he allowed his eyelids to roll up from his tingling eyeballs. Darkness rewarded him. He put out his hand to the mos quito-net. He could feel it but could not see its grimy whiteness. With sudden terror pounding in his overburdened, drug filled brain his sat up and, as he bent forward, his eyes boring into the dark ness that pressed in upon him, his flash light rolled down from beneath his pillow, the cold steel touching the hot flesh of his arm. “The torch! That will prove it. If I can’t see that light, then this is it. I am blind.”

Feverishly his fingers sought the switch and, fumblingly, his muscles scarcely obeying the urgent messages of his brain, he pushed it forward.

Darkness still mocked him.

He shook the torch; jiggling the switch, now muttering, incoherent with the horror that descended upon him.

Panic took possession of Lonegan then.

He stumbled out of bed, spilling the torch upon the floor, dragging the mos quito-net down with him. Driven only by some desperate instinct to escape, he stumbled out of the house, searching what he knew must be the sky for some glimmer of light.

But there was no light, not even a

lessening of the darkness where the sky met the rim of the deep valley. No stars twinkled; no trees stood out in sil houette; but a mist of rain fell upon him unnoticed.

He tottered and ran, caught by scrub and fallen trees ahd trailing creepers. He fell ■ and picked himself up, only to fall again. Finally, he came to rest against a large tree trunk, exhausted, panting and weak with his fright.

He must pull himself together; that’s what Davis had said. He must be calm.

Even if it were blindness, it might again pass. He had lost his bearings and all sense of direction, but he must try to find his way back to the house, there to await the coming of morning and his boys. He must walk calmly—like this—slowly It was then Lonegan came to the cliff edge, not knowing it, and made his fatal plunge forward, down on to the rocks.