The sun was up, already hot. David tried to get a grasp of his own fear, his own terror.
Why? Why was Miguel even there? Always he kept finding them. It was like they were being hunted by Death itself: sleek, brutal and merciless. Otsoko. The Wolf. Relentless.
He thought of the smell of his own clothes burning. He was silent. Amy clutched his arm. Also silent.
An hour of river driving ended – Angus ordered a change of direction; David nodded, and spun the wheel hard to the right – and they growled up onto proper dry land. Rocks and sand. They drove on, and on. No one spoke.
They were driving due south. There wasn’t any road. The relative lushness of the Damara riverlands was devolving into pure and tormented aridity. Sand dunes rose on either side.
Angus was the first to properly speak. It felt like a day since anyone had really spoken.
‘We’re in the Namib Naukluft,’ he said. ‘We’re back in real desert. This stuff goes on for hundreds of miles.’
David gazed out at the enormousness of the wasteland. Great dunes, almost ice-creamy in consistency, were skirling dust from their soft and orangey crests; between them were flat dusty saltpans burned into eerie whiteness; and then, stark and black, the spars of dead trees. They looked like trees in a very bad dream.
Enough. David shivered himself out of his reverie. The bad images crowding his mind were too awful to bear. And yet, amidst the cacophony of horror, something was rhyming: there was a harmony here, a frightening but authentic harmony.
He pieced together the images in his mind: Miguel eating the flesh of Alphonse. Old man Garovillo’s stuttering confession in the Cagot House: ‘Miguel bears the true shame of the Cagots.’ And then the horror of the body liquor in the cellars beneath the house.
What if the ancient, now liquified corpses had been sealed in an airtight vault, not to prevent infection, but…to store them?
As food?
Taking a sip of water, he asked the scientist. Straight.
‘Angus, were the Cagots…’
‘What?’
‘Were they…cannibals?’
Amy stared across the car, white and horrified.
39
For a kilometre or more, Angus was silent. David tried again. More silence. For the third time, David asked the question. This time Angus cleared his throat and said, with an uncharacteristic tinge of nerves in his voice, like he was choked on desert dust:
‘What makes you say that?’
David didn’t want to say: I saw Miguel cutting up your boyfriend. But he felt he had no choice. Prefacing his answer with a warning, he told the Scotsman. About Miguel in the night. And then the events in the Cagot House. The body liquor of the stored and decomposed bodies.
Angus stared out of the car window, at the desolation of the great Namib. Then he said, without turning:
‘Yes, of course. And that’s why the smoke trick worked.’
Amy interrupted.
‘Sorry? What?’
‘It seems…somehow cruel. Discussing it. The Cagots are almost dead. Why heap this ordure on their grave?’
‘But –’
‘But now you’ve guessed. Now you’ve actually…witnessed…I might as well be fucking honest. Yes it’s true. Miguel is cannibalistic. Because he’s a Cagot. Part of their cursed genetic inheritance.’ He leaned forward. ‘The Cagots were cannibals.’
Amy shook her head.
‘Please…please explain.’
‘They were accused in early medieval times of eating human flesh, and the reputation stuck. Of course it could have been nonsense, like the Jewish blood libel – yet it was true. They really were…the Serpent Seed, the Curse of Cain. A race apart, a breed of cursed people. All of it true.’
‘How? I don’t get it!’ Amy was pale with anger; her white face framed by the yellow sands of the Naukluft, through the window. ‘Eloise? She is no madwoman. And she never said any of this?’
‘Well, she wouldn’t, would she?’ Angus spat out his sarcasm. ‘It’s the great wild shame of the Cagots, not something you mention to the neighbours – why don’t you pop round for a dinner, bring a fat friend –’
‘But what’s the science?’ David steered the car between two dead and spiky trees. ‘Cannibalism? How the hell does that…evolve?’
Angus frowned. ‘It’s because of the inbred isolated nature of the Cagots. Take their syndactyly, webbed toes and feet. This is typical of mountain peoples, with small gene pools. Syndactyly is associated with many chromosomal disorders. Some of them lead to psychoses, violence, strange sexual urges – who knows – you see?’
Any flashed a glance at David, then at Angus.
‘Miguel was highly…sexual.’
‘Excess libido, yep.’ Angus was actually smiling. ‘Hypersexuality, satyriasis. And the hypersomnia.’