Smoking Poppy by Graham Joyce (the read aloud family .txt) 📕

it seemed bad luck to have imported such a temperamental machine into the jungle, when ninety-nine in a hundred of these motors would tick along happily for years. I lifted off the cover plate to check where I’d been before. It was when I ran my fingers along the plug lead that I realised the problem was not mechanical after all.

The insulation around the lead had peeled away and the circuit was shorting out. There was no way I could have missed this the day before. Somebody had been in there and had deliberately stripped it with a knife. I thought back to the previous faults and saw how they had each been ‘assisted’: the missing cap, the leafy gunk, the stripped wire. All disguised sabotage.

I chopped out the exposed bit of cable and simply shortened the lead. The generator started up again and ticked over nicely. I kept the bit of vandalised cable and put it in my pocket. As I emerged from the hut Nabao was standing in the shadows of her doorway. She stroked her chin very slowly with her hand, and then repeated the gesture before dissolving into the darkness of her hut.

A signal.

When I got back to our hut, Khiem was busy outside it. He had three clay pots, each of which was smoking with some kind of jungle incense. He wanted Mick, Phil and I to take the three pots inside. He directed us to position the smoking jars under the places where we’d found the photographs.

‘Jack doesn’t know,’ I whispered to Mick as we carried the pots inside. ‘And that fucker with the beard: he’s sabotaging the generator.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Nabao told me.’

‘We’ve got to get out of this place before that body gets turned up,’ Mick said, fingering the spot where his amulet would have been and wafting incense from under his nose.

‘We’ve arrived in hell,’ said Phil. ‘Have you noticed how red the earth is here? How red it is. It’s not easy to get out of hell. No, not easy at all. Did any of you know that?’

33

Jack’s face was impassive as he surveyed the obscenities, but his eyes dripped venom. The defaced photographs were spread out on the table, cluttering a jungle map he’d been studying when Khiem led me into his hut.

After he’d finished lighting incense and candles around the hut Khiem had persuaded me to take the matter to Jack. The old man had accomplished strange rituals, walking backwards around the hut and placing near the door a ‘spirit-house’, a miniature version of a village hut in which he placed tiny bamboo figures of birds and fish and animals. Then he’d persuaded me what to do by the simple expedient of gently taking my hand and whispering Jack’s name over and over.

At first I resisted. For obvious reasons I wanted as little contact with Jack as possible. But then it seemed that by pushing my problems under his nose I might appear less likely to be involved in his nephew’s disappearance.

By their actions I suspected that Jack’s cohort was busy with jungle business, converting raw opium into morphine for transportation. It was Charlie who had told me that the secondary translation of morphine into heroin was a much more sophisticated operation, requiring serious scientific equipment at labs across the border in Myanmar or Laos, or even near Chiang Mai. I figured Jack was getting ready to transport a major haul and that I’d disturbed him in the planning of his route.

He was transfixed by the ugly spirit photographs.

‘There’s another thing I have to tell you,’ I said, anxious to break his unnerving silence. I laid before him the example of stripped wiring I’d brought from the generator. ‘There’s nothing wrong with the generator engine. One of your men is sabotaging it.’

Jack turned his head away from me and stared fiercely at the bamboo wall. Nothing was said, but I felt afraid. His lean body was utterly rigid, but he leaked an odour like iron and smoke.

‘Three times I fixed it and each time the engine had been tampered with. At first I thought—’

He cut me short. ‘Return to your hut. Stay there. Go.’

My hands trembling, I did as I was told. Khiem remained behind.

Mick sat outside the hut, playing with a couple of children. He’d had them hunting for his amulet without success, and now he was teaching them how to play fivestones. This time there was no golden light. I could see black lines of care striping his brow. I knew he would have calculated the danger to himself, and the real possibility that Phil might sacrifice him to spare the rest of us.

After all, there was no love lost between them. It was without doubt that in Phil’s eyes Mick had committed the ultimate unforgivable act. Unforgivable before man and God. If the body was uncovered then Phil might conclude that Mick could be made to pay the penalty. The finger would be pointed. I knew Mick would have figured this out already.

A dozen candles flickered on the porch, and the pungent smell of incense from inside thickened the air. Mick scrambled to his feet, wanting to know what had happened. I told him all there was to tell and then I went inside to see Charlie. In the shadows of the hut a dozen more star-like candles burned. After a brief, pig-like snort, Charlie snoozed on. Phil squatted at the foot of the bed, reading, by the dim light, from his pocket Bible. I squatted with him, and I soon found myself stroking Charlie’s foot just as before. I sat watching her as I did when she was an infant, looking for that cherubic beauty in her night-time flight across clouds seeded with gold and velvet dark. Now I had no idea what resinous nightmares she crossed in her sleep. But I sat and watched all the same.

‘Didn’t I love you enough, Phil? You and Charlie? Is that why things worked