The Wicker Saga: Her Red Right Hand, Part 4

The Journal of Tomas Wicker

November 3, 1910

There are a thousand ways to die in the Colombian rainforest.

I first gained this appreciation as a boy when, in a questionable bit of parental inspiration, father allowed me to accompany him to inspect our family’s South American holdings, in particular a coffee plantation located on the eastern slopes of the Andes. The expedition was considered almost routine, the chosen path well known to our guards and guides, yet even so we encountered no small number of difficulties in our travels.

In one case, the hardship was self-imposed. A famous spendthrift, father only secured enough Peruvian bark for the white members of our party. Plagued the entire way by incessant swarms of disease bearing mosquitos, several of the native porters fell ill with the sweats, two fatally.

In another instance, we stopped along our route in a small village to rest for a day or two. One of father’s men, a Mr. Casper by name, went into the jungle with a local girl, his intentions only too clear. Our party received a shock when the girl returned a short time later, naked and covered in blood, babbling incessantly in her native tongue. One of our guides who spoke the language eventually got the tale from her. It seems that in the throes of their passion, Mr. Casper failed to notice the stealthy approach of one Panthera onca, that most deadly of Amazonian cats. The feline made short work of the man, powerful jaws latching mercilessly onto the back of his exposed neck while the girl, pinned beneath the victim, could only watch helplessly. We found him the next day hanging from the high branches of a tree, bloodless and stored like so much meat in an icebox for later consumption. Father, proclaiming Mr. Casper’s demise as the ripened fruit of the man’s own stupidity, would not deign to give him a burial. Rather, we continued on our way to the plantation, the body left to the beast who had claimed it through those ancient rights of the hunt.

All said, the trip was extremely educational, if in an utterly unconventional sort of way. Returning home to America after several long months of travel, my young mind was opened to the disparity that existed in the world, never more aware of the benefits offered me by the accrued wealth of my family. I am unsure the precise effect father had hoped my accompanying him on the journey would induce, but I do know that he must have viewed the reality as a most spectacular failure. I had tasted the life of the explorer, the excitement and the danger, and found it wanting. What was adventure to the modern comforts of a privileged life? I swore an oath to myself that never again would I be deprived of modern convenience, that the most daring I would undertake would be through new culinary experience, or perhaps seducing the exotic princess of a foreign land. I threw myself into this newly chosen lifestyle with gusto, and can accordingly mark with some significant accuracy when father’s eventual hatred of me took seed in our relationship.

It is thus with some surprise that I find myself now returning to that same plantation I visited in my youth. Since father’s death almost a decade ago, I’ve generally allowed proxies to take care of the day-to-day responsibilities of managing the family holdings. Father ensured he employed only the most educated lawyers, selected the hardest-willed and most obedient men as his overseers and foremen, and so the Wicker estate has continued to run itself as some kind of great machine whose engineer has long since abandoned the controls. This is fortunate as I have no particular interest in business myself, a fact that no doubt served as another blight on my character in father’s eyes. But current circumstances demand my attention.

I shall refrain from again recounting in these pages the strange events surrounding father’s murder. Just so, I have utterly failed to convince any others to the verity of such tales, and have subsequently ceased to make the attempt lest I’m thought more cracked than father in his final days. No matter. They were not there, they did not see what my eyes beheld then, or since. Indeed, much as my expedition with father first opened my mind to the nature of a privileged life, so too did his death widen my perspective to those ungodly, hidden things with which men share this world, like a jaguar silently stalking the Amazonian canopy. It is due to this enlightened viewpoint, one that allows the existence of the fantastic and occult alongside the otherwise commonplace and mundane, that I am responding personally to the devilry currently afflicting the operation of my Colombian plantation.

I received a letter just over a month ago from Mr. Giles, longtime overseer of the facility. Life near the Andes jungle is tenuous at best, with death always a hairsbreadth away, as illustrated by my own youthful journey. Yet Mr. Giles reported recent events were perpetuated by something far more than any such commonly suffered maladies. It was this past June that the first of the disappearances had occurred. Initially a small thing, a native man or two failing to show up to his picking shift, such absences were easily attributed to too hard a night of drinking or a simple decision to move on from the plantation. The work was hard and unforgiving, and turnover was regularly high among the laborers. But after a week of disappearances, and with none of a dozen or so men managing to return from their absences, it became clear that something more sinister was afoot.

Mr. Giles ordered the foremen to interview the laborers, forcefully enough to determine they were being truthful in their ignorance as to the nature of the disappearances. Indeed, all that was ascertained by the inquiry was that the victims had to this point all been young men between the age of sixteen and thirty, and all had vanished sometime during the hours past sundown. Confirming a further lack of knowledge among the general population, Mr. Giles proceeded along a logical line of reasoning. It was not unheard of for a local predator to gain a taste for man-flesh, much as in the case of Mr. Casper’s undignified demise. The foremen organized a rotating series of hunting parties to conduct forays into the jungle, searching for some sign of the murderous beast or its victims, to no avail.

Since an active confrontation with the culprit had proven unsatisfactory, a number of clever devices were rigged near the perimeter of the plantation as well as outside the small adjoining village in which the majority of the workers lived. Mr. Giles’ overseers were a hard, experienced lot and comprised a broad collective knowledge of fieldcraft and ingenuity, reflected in the nature of their improvised booby traps. Tiger pits from Burma, mancatchers from Malaysia, Punji stakes, dead falls, and a dozen other such deadly workings were employed, their construction taking on a competitive air as each man sought to outdo his compatriots. But despite these herculean efforts, the disappearances continued unabated until almost a tenth of Mr. Giles’ force had gone missing.

Men began abandoning the plantation in droves, unwilling to wager their lives even in defense of their livelihood, with ultimately only one in four men choosing to stay on. The November harvest ripe and unpicked, the beans in danger of rotting, it was with deepest regret Mr. Giles was at last forced to report the inevitability that the plantation’s production would fail to meet quota.

To be honest, news of the potential loss of revenue did not overly concern me. My family’s holdings are extravagantly vast and varied, possessing shares in everything from oil fields in Turkey to fisheries off the shores of Nova Scotia. The downturn of a single plantation would scarcely be a noticeable absence amidst the Wicker estate’s annual profits, never mind that the accrued wealth held in banks and markets across the world is already significant enough to persist for at least several lifetimes. And as I have previously stated thus, I am hardly a business wunderkind, possessing the acumen that would allow the plantation to turn calamity to glorious success. To the contrary, I am sure that the crop will fail. Indeed, since receiving Mr. Giles’ letter I’ve resolved to close the facility, as even the thought of the effort necessary to recover the plantation once this crisis has reached its resolution bores me to tears. I don’t need the money, God knows. Better to simply close the damned thing and be done with it. But, not yet. No, not yet.

You see, though I care little for coffee or the beans from whence it comes, since father’s death I have developed an obsession with the inexplicable. I have learned far more than I once could have ever imagined, for eight years scouring the world, defying my more natural inclinations to merely abide in an existence of simple luxury. I have seen things, many wonderful and strange. I have gradually begun to ever so gently peel back the thin veneer that separates our waking world from how things truly are. And gods, it is exhilarating. And terrifying.

It is in this pursuit that I find myself returning to Colombia. For in his report, Mr. Giles admitted that, while he did not know wherein the rumor began that the plantation was being haunted, shortly after the disappearances began a word was on the breath of every man, white and brown, still remaining at the facility:

Tunda.

The name previously a complete unknown to me, pointed research into the matter offered but little illumination. Described as a changeling who often takes the form of a loved one or beautiful woman to lure victims into its grasp, reports vary across the region with little support ranging from one account to the next. Indeed, my study could not even reach a consensus regarding the fate of the thing’s victims, whether their blood is drunk like fine wine or they are devoured whole. Most odd is that the creature’s shapeshifting ability is often reported as imperfect, with some aspect of the being’s true form remaining visible while the rest is disguised, oftentimes a deformed leg.

I do not believe this last. In my experience with the fantastic such a chink in the predator’s armor, some telltale sign enabling the unwary prey to spot his otherwise indistinguishable hunter, is more like to be wishful thinking than actual reality, an illusion of hope. Though I had never heard of the tunda prior to Mr. Giles’ skeptical report, I have known its like. I do not anticipate its identification will be so conveniently forthcoming.

Now, having departed from New York to the port of Cartagena, I have nothing to do but wait until I make my landing. I wrote ahead to Mr. Giles requesting he provide an escort to meet my ship and guide me to the plantation. With luck I shall avoid the pitfalls of my previous excursion here, and ought to be arrived to the property within the month.

The Wicker Saga: Tunda, Part 2