Part XII : Curse of the ancient skull
“...The true definition of an educated person is one who knows the extent of his ignorance. Or in the form of an earth maxim: ‘wise is he who knows what he does not know’” the vagabond was saying
Superfly scooped out a smudge of his earwax and examined it on the tip of his forefinger.
The Vagabond prattled on:
“I don’t regard myself as someone who knows much; in fact I am given to feel acute psychological fear over my ignorance. I try to alleviate this by reading feverishly; skimming through literature in crazed fits; attempting to soak up the deep juicy bits of books and leaving the skin on the floor. I find that most books don’t resemble an orange but rather a pomegranate – when you finish what flesh are you left with in the end? What do you remember? Not much”
Superfly was still busy examining his earwax. It was of a different colour and consistency to usual. Normally it was pea-green, but a year spent on earth, had rendered it with a yellowish countenance.
“Mmm…” he said looking at it. He put his finger in his mouth and sucked it. “Mmm, proteins" he said satisfactorily. “My earwax is full of proteins”
The Vagabond continued to prattle on:
“…but, what I find beguiling (and perhaps symptomatic of some sort of mental illness) is when I meet people who are not bothered about their ignorance. I have often wondered why this is, because it is clear that some of these people that I have met have never read a book in their lives! Good heavens! Nor have they ever sat down and thought deeply about anything. They seem to have swallowed what other people have already chewed. I’m not sure about you but I like to do my chewing myself”
Superfly was getting extremely bored now. It was too early in the day for heavy thinking, and there being no beer to drink, made it doubly difficult to concentrate on the Vagabonds monologue. It was during his student days in Andromeda that Superfly had discovered that beer had a beguiling effect on him: it helped him concentrate and focus. Usually, beer depresses concentration but Superfly found it stimulating. Thus he started attending lectures in a state of quasi-drunkenness. To his lecturers’ surprise (and to the chagrin of the other hard working students) this had no adverse affect on his grades. This was mainly because Superfly had a prodigious memory. Everything he read stuck. Stuck like stick-on-notes. His brain was covered in stick on notes of weird facts and figures. These roamed inside his head like dead skeletons and could, in times of stress, reveal themselves to the outside world in fits of verbal premature ejaculation. In fact when Superfly panicked he had the habit of suddenly blurting out some obscure fact or piece of knowledge to whoever was listening. This could be embarrassing. It was like an involuntary reflex.
This had an interesting affect when it came to girls though. Early on Superfly had figured out that the quickest path to a girls’ knickers lay not through her brain but through her heart - girls, being fickle creatures, don’t usually go for nerds. So he went out of his way to shun nerd-em. Oh yes, he skipped lessons, hung out with loafers, wore a leather jacket, and dressed like a degenerate rock-star. He even endeavoured to get into trouble to showcase his ‘dangerous guy to know’ image. This didn’t affect his grades because during exams he could summon at will the 'knowledgeable nerdy' side of his brain. These abilities and his wayward nature caught the attention of the ladies, who perhaps out of some compunction to civilize this brute, went out with him. During these dates he made it a policy to avoid ‘heavy’ academic conversation. There was always the risk that his ‘knowledgeable nerdy’ side might creep into view by way of some idle remark, so he said little during the date and spoke only when being spoken to. It was a spectacular success! His laconic muteness and insouciance, was mistook by the girls for maturity, strength and thoughtfulness.
But like most charades you can only keep them up for so long. After a while his dates were left empty and drained. The girls were convinced there was something ‘missing’ and they knew not what. It was during one particular date when the girl in question showed clear signs of leaving him, that he panicked, and the ‘knowledgeable nerdy’ side of his brain rove into view and he, quite spontaneously, began blurting out some random facts about tapeworms. Most embarrassing. This panicked him even further so that what followed next was a little poetry. Even more embarassing. It was a decadent little passage of rhyming stanzas; in couplet. I won’t repeat it here for sake of sanity.
The poem had a startling effect. The girl was mesmerised. She found the poem funny and it had a quirky rhyming pattern that snagged in the mind (like a song that won't go away). She looked at him good and hard in a thoughtful way. In the end the poetry won. The relationship was revitalised and the girl was more then happy to have his children and marry him. Wow! He soon discovered that he could summon these wonderfully fetid lines of poetry at will. It was so easy like plucking feathers from an invisible chicken that no one else could see. The girls loved this seeming dichotomy in his character and he exploited it by bedding as many of them as he could. The poetry flowed from his tongue and mingled in the sheets between the cries and moans.
The sex was good but the clingy-feely stuff stifled him. So, that's why he got the job at the Lonely Galaxy Guide. It would enable him to travel thus satisfying his brain which craved knowledge and facts, and he would no doubt meet lots of exotic female specimens thus satisfying his more lascivious dimensions. The arrangement was a path to happiness and contentment.
At this particular moment in time Superfly was not feeling happy or content. He was stranded on a dull-as-dishwater planet called earth, and he was bored, and he needed a girl and he hadn’t had sex for months - well not since that girl in Lahore anyway. Suddenly he started feeling frisky.
“You got any porn?” Superfly asked
The Vagabond was in the middle of a lengthy treatise on the benefits of compulsory sterilisation of lower class plebeian scum, and the request for porn took him rather by surprise. No, he did not have any porn, but he did have a Sir David Attenborough wildlife documentary on copulating Bonobo monkeys - if that would suffice?
“Monkeys?” repeated Superfly
“Yes, Monkeys. Not very different from humans”
“OK”
So the two savants sat watching a wildlife documentary on shagging Bonobo monkeys. It featured an alpha male with large red testicles, who presided over his harem of females with the air of a sexual conqueror. But it didn’t have the intended affect on Superfly.
“No I need something more hard-core” he said “And something less educational and something featuring humanoids; preferably blonde's and that male voice in the background is annoying”
“That’s the presenter’s voice”
It was as he was contemplating jerking-off to one of the books lying around the flat titled ‘The fascinating sex lives of river sponges’ that he remembered the crates.
“Hey man, what’s in these wooden crates? You said you were going to tell me?”
“Ah yes, the crates” The Vagabond had totally forgotten about the crates and he was only too happy to talk about them. It was a long story so he went in the kitchen to make some tea. Returning now with two steaming cups he commenced the telling of his strange little tale:
“It’s rather a fabulous tale you know. A glorious find! I’ll tell you the story from the beginning shall I?’
The Vagabond didn’t wait for an answer:
“Six months ago I got an email from a friend of mine; Trey Reedkin, a geologist friend doing some field work on the Island of Krakatoa in the Sunda Straits, near Java in Indonesia. Actually, at the time I was languishing in Nong Khai in northern Thailand. Great place you should visit. Anyway, I was in my hotel room, hot day, fan whirring, no air-con, sweating like a pig, the sludgy-muddy Mekong outside my window torturing me with its boredom, and I was thinking that I really need to get out of this shit hole. I received the email that evening and as it happens it was kind of fortunate because I was thinking of where to go next. I’d had enough of Thailand, the food and the women. Actually, I have a hard copy of the email here. Let me get it out and show it to you”
The vagabond ferreted out a copy of the email and gave it to Superfly to read:
Email
To: duluxdreams@hotmail.com
Date 07-03-2008
Hey V,
Where are you? Rang your mum she said you were in Thailand. What the fuck you doing in Thailand? Tasting pussy or something! Listen up dude. Something’s definitely coming down here in the Sunda Straits man and it ain’t my diarrhea. As you know I’m doing research for my PhD on ‘Island Colonization Dynamics’. Yeah, tell me about it - sounds fascinating don’t it? :-). Let me tell you a little about it: when new life takes over a previously barren island you can predict mathematically how it’s going to happen. You can predict who’s going to come in first: first it’s the lower plants like mosses and ferns, then grasses, then plants that reproduce asexually, then flowering plants that reproduce sexually and then trees. On the animal side first you get little insects, then spiders and than the larger stuff like lizards and snakes and wild pigs. Anyway, I hired a boat to take me to the island of Krakatoa from the Javanese port of Bantam.
You heard of Krakatoa right? It’s a large volcanic island, 50 miles off the Java mainland, sitting in the Sunda Strait. Krakatoa blew itself to kingdom come in 1883 in a cataclysmic volcanic eruption – the likes of which the world has never seen. Huge 150ft tsunamis followed, killed hundreds and thousands, explosion heard all over the world, dust clouds, magic sunsets for years, floating pumice – the works. A pyrotechnic extravaganza like a U2 concert. Anyway the island is amazing! Beyond my wildest expectations. It was totally demolished in the eruption of 1883 – all life on the Island gone! Bang! Extinction! The volcanic island has only recently risen from the waves, 20 years ago. It’s now swarming with life! In only twenty years! Lizards, snakes, 50ft trees, grasses, tortoises, beetles and even some fishermen who live on the island with their families and some chickens. The nearest landmass we know is 50 miles away. So the question is: where the fuck did the life come from? How did it get here? That’s my PhD! I’ve already ruled out spontaneous generation as unlikely – or impossible (!!) unless you believe Plato. This island is perfect for my project. A veritable living laboratory. This baby is my ticket to the Nobel!
Anyway, listen up that’s not what this email is about. I was chatting to the local fishermen here about the islands flora and fauna etc. One of the fishermen, perhaps seeing an opportunity to make some ready money (ching! ching!), mentioned a cave on mainland Java, south side, about 55 miles from Krakatoa. He said it contained spirits and listen to this, human bones(!). I asked him if he was sure about the bones and he said he was 100% certain. He said I could ask anyone here they’d tell me the same thing. Apparently the locals believe the bones belong to their long dead ancestors and the spirits still haunt the caves. So, you know I’m a sucker for this sort of stuff right? So I told the fisher man to take me there because, you know, I wanna check out these bones. So we haggled over price; agreed a fare (I still reckon he ripped me off – bastard). We rode in one of those motorised diesel engine canoes; left at daybreak early in the morning, sun rising from the waters in the west, the oblique rays caressing the surface, beautiful man! Calm as a cucumber. Until that is we rode out of the main Island cluster into the open water of the strait, and then the waters turned choppy. High waves battered the side of the canoe and water began seeping in over the top threatening to flood the damn boat, so we had to remove the bilge continuously with buckets.
No we didn’t sink. You wouldn’t be reading this if we had! Anyway, we got to the shore alive (sigh of relief!). The caves were about 200 ft up in the limestone cliffs. So we had to climb up there. A bit steep but easy going at first but the last bit was a fucker – had to use a rope to get to the cave entrance itself because it’s on an overhang. I figured this was good news as it meant the cave would be relatively undisturbed. The cave entrance was narrow and was basically a hole. I had a flash light so went in first – banged my head on the entrance! Ouch! When I got in I realised I could stand up without hitting my head on the roof - the cave was high enough to stand and pretty spacious. There was the distinct smell of bat droppings and animal urine lurking about. I hate bats. Went in farther until the fisherman pointed out something sticking out of the cave floor. Went closer. It was a fucking (excuse my French) jaw! Human jaw jutting out of the rock…teeth still intact. Smiling at me! Scooped away the soft soil around it and found that the skull was mainly intact (tested the soil and it’s alkaline so would have protected the bones). I figured that the cave was pretty well protected from scavenging hyenas and treasure hunters because it was so high up – hence the intact skull. Man, I’m no palaeontologist but I knew we had a major find. It looked semi- human and it was old. Very old. Hundreds and thousands of years old. But there was something unmistakeably not-human about it too. It gave me the shivers. Was definitely ancient. But that’s not the weird part. The weird part is what we found next to it…
Outside the wind continued bellowing and the rain continued beating against the window pane. Tip-tap-tip-tap-tip-tap. Inside the two figures were lost in the unfolding drama of Java, and besides them, the wooden crates containing an ancient relic, continued to moan and creak. It was almost as if the crates were 'confiding' with the tempest lurking outside.
(To be continued)
