From the supernatural novel “KAMARANG”

By Michael A. Jordan

THE two cops came about an hour after Sealey entered the Jaguar’s Den.

The older man was a police sergeant named Calvin Caesar, who had been stationed at Kamarang for about three years. The younger man looked familiar, too.

They were in plainclothes, but both had black notebooks. Sealey saw now, too, that their shoes and trouser bottoms were stained with mud and moss. These men had just come from the jungle.

Alvin Benn, the Jaguar’s Den proprietor, stared curiously at them. “Something happen, Calvin?”

Caesar wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “We just come from over the river. We find a dead child in the jungle. The whole flippin stomach tear out.”

“Christ,” Benn whispered. “Jaguar?”

“Dunno yet.” Caesar glanced across at Sealey. “Is one of ole Perez great-grandsons.”

Sealey suddenly felt cold. He pressed out his half-smoked cigarette and hurried down to the river. A boy in a corial took him to the other side. He stepped ashore, and took the track that led to the Amerindian village, and to Perez’s hut. Sealey followed the boy down a path that led to an area about fifty yards from the huts, where Sealey saw a small gathering of men with shotguns. Sealey saw Perez and one of his sons within the circle of men. They were standing around a sort of wooden platform. On it, wrapped in a piece of canvas, was a bundle with the unmistakable shape of a child.

Sealey edged his way to Perez, who was staring at the bundle. The old man glanced up.
“You heard.”

Sealey nodded.

Perez turned back to the wrapped-up form. “My youngest great-grandson,” he said.
A sigh went up from the circle of men as the body was bared to their view. The child was naked. If you looked at his face, you might have thought him asleep, except there was a gaping hole where his stomach should have been. Something had scooped it out clean. Sealey could see the edges of a few broken ribs.

Perez stared at the child for a moment. He plucked a dry leaf off the boy’s chest, then ran his fingers gently though his hair. “My youngest great-grandchild,” he said again, looking into the boy’s face, as if speaking to him. He touched the wrapped-up form once more, then stepped back into the crowd.

“What did this?” Sealey asked. His voice sounded hoarse and far away.

“We not sure yet…” he sensed something evasive in his friend’s voice.

“How it happened?”

It seemed that the boy and some of the other children had been playing hide-and-seek on the outskirts of the village. It was only when dusk fell and they were leaving for home that the others realised that he wasn’t with them. They found him this morning in the forest, in an area about an hour’s walk from the settlement.

“You saw anything in the area to tell you what happened? Like animal tracks?”

In answer, Perez touched Sealey lightly on the shoulder then began to shift away from the crowd. His two sons, with their shotguns, and a middle-aged hunter with two skinny dogs followed, until they came to a small trail that led into the forest. Perez and his two sons checked their shotguns. The hunter glanced at the trail. He spoke to Perez quickly in the Akawaio dialect, while gesticulating at the trail. Perez answered him in the dialect. He pointed angrily at the trail with his shotgun.

The hunter fumbled in his pouch and took out some crushed leaves. He passed some to Perez and his two sons, and, after a moment’s hesitation, to Sealey, who watched as the men put the leaves into their mouths. Sealey followed suit, almost too puzzled to notice the pungent taste. He knew of the binas Amerindians used to give them good luck on the hunt. There was the one where you rubbed ginger into cuts on your hands. There was the one where you put slime from a frog’s skin up your nostrils. But these crushed leaves were not a hunting bina. This was supposed to be a powerful charm to protect persons walking through the forest alone, and to protect them during sleep, and against evil.

What evil did Perez think awaited them in the jungle?

Now the men spat out the chewed-up leaves. They muttered something again. Then Perez nodded, checked his shotgun again, and stepped into the trail…l.

As they went further, silence enveloped them, save for the panting dogs and the sound of their progress. Suddenly, Perez signalled, and they turned off the track into another trail; the ground soft beneath their boots and thick with decaying leaves. Sealey could see where the earth had been churned by the clumsy feet of the policemen who had gone before them.

As Sealey stepped into the trail, leaves from a stray branch brushed his face. Their touch stirred some buried memory and he suddenly thought, with surprise, I have been here before! For a moment, even the feel of the rotting leaves beneath his boots seemed disturbingly familiar. But he shook off the feeling of déjà vu and continued down the trail.

And now Sealey sensed that the men had grown more alert. The dogs, pulling on their leashes, made occasional, yipping sounds. Perez’s pace had increased. His sweat-soaked cotton jersey stuck to his back, but he was almost loping along like a youngster.

Suddenly Perez stopped and said, “Here.”

They had reached a semi-clearing in the forest. Perez pointed to a spot to the left of the trail. The grass here was pressed down, as if something had been lying there. There were splotches of blood on the ground.

And now the dogs erupted into hysterical barking; crouching low, noises pointing to the crushed grass, tails locked between their legs. The men looked around hastily, squinting in the semi-darkness, shotguns pointing to and fro. After a while, the hunter murmured to the dogs and the barking subsided.

Perez peered into the forest a few moments more. Eventually, he lowered his shotgun and squatted to the forest floor. “This is where we find the little one,” he said, his voice a half-whisper. He looked at Sealey, who had squatted besides him. “You notice anything strange?”
Sealey scanned the spot where the body had been found then said: “Not much blood.”
Perez nodded in agreement.

“Maybe it feed somewhere else.”

“And then bring the body here?” Perez shook his head. “No blood anywhere else. We checked.”

He squinted at Sealey. “Notice anything else?”

A faint, rankish smell that he couldn’t quite place. He sniffed the air. There it was again…
“You smell it too,” Perez said. “Not jaguar smell. And the boy’s body. No scratches. You know how jaguar eats.”

Sealey nodded. A jaguar would have held the body down with one paw while it tore at the body with its teeth. The body should have had scratches made by the big cat’s paws.

“One more thing,” Perez said. “Look.” … Perez picked up a twig and pointed to the spot where the body had lain. And now that Perez had shown him, Sealey saw the faintest of footprints.
Sealey stared at the footprint, feeling more unsettled by it than by anything he had seen so far. What could it mean?

As if Perez had read Sealey’s mind, he said: “We don’t think that the little one was killed by a jaguar. We think he was murdered.”

“What?” Sealey heard the shock and dread in his own voice.

Perez nodded. “He killed by something more dangerous than jaguar.” Perez paused, then ended: “I think he was killed by a bush dai dai.”

Michael Jordan,  is also the author of The Girl In The Pink Pleated Skirt, which won The Guyana Prize For Literature 2023 Best Book of Fiction. Kamarang is available on Amazon in Kindle and paperback.

(Illustration for this excerpt by Harold Bascom)