"What the h.e.l.l are you grinning at?" Covey snapped.

The guide held out an astonishingly clean hand. "You forget our contract, my friend. One-third when we start, another when we turn back, the last when I set you down, all nice and refreshed again, in your fancy hotel in Port Douglas."

Covey gaped at him, blinking painful drizzle from his eyes. "You want money now now? Here?"

Schneemann twitched slightly. "It is the contract, yes?"

"s.h.i.t," Covey mumbled. He dragged out his shrinking packet of traveler's checks and signed several over. Schneemann fanned them like a poker hand and frowned.

"I know you are a writer, Michael Covey, and not an accountant. This is a little short. One hundred US dollars short."

Covey took a step backward. "That was going to be your bonus if we found the women. We didn't find them."

"I say I take you to where they live." He made a sweeping gesture with his free hand. "This is where they live."

Covey pursed his lower lip. "I don't see no women-mate."

The German's expression darkened. "Don't joke with me, herr herr writer. Especially about money, don't joke with me." writer. Especially about money, don't joke with me."

"Believe me, humor's the last thing on my mind. You've spent a week dragging me through G.o.d's own puke-green s.h.i.thouse and you've enjoyed every minute of it." He smiled nastily. "Now it's my turn to enjoy something."

Schneemann took a step forward, halted. "I could make you sign another check, ya ya. But maybe you bring charges. All writers are crazy like that. So have it your way, my friend. Maybe I see you again in Port Douglas. Maybe not."

Without another word he whirled and started off, ascending without effort the slope they had only recently clambered down.

Covey yelled imprecations in his wake. "Yeah, that's right, go on and leave me here, jerkoff! I can find my own way back, you Teutonic a.s.shole! You think I can't? You think I can't? Just watch me, man!"

Schneemann did not reply. In a very few minutes the forest had swallowed him up.

It began to rain harder.

Screw him, Covey thought furiously. It was more downhill than up all the way back. Just keep heading east and eventually he would hit the road and then the ocean. He had a week's worth of supplies in his pack and he wasn't sorry to see the departure of the sauna-like tent. What the h.e.l.l, he was soaked through anyway. His light sleeping bag would do him. And he was ahead a hundred bucks, maybe more.

As for inspiration, he couldn't wait to get home and write down an account of his crazy experiences. His agent would be intrigued. A horror novel would be an interesting departure for his client. He could call it A Stroll Through the Green h.e.l.l A Stroll Through the Green h.e.l.l-or had that already been used?

He had learned that when the sun went down behind the rain it got dark fast in the rain forest. Selecting a spot between the meandering roots of a ma.s.sive tree, he tore down some broad panda.n.u.s leaves and improvised a roof. Highly satisfied in his righteous anger, he settled down to await the arrival of the dawn.

It took him two days to admit that he was lost. He was reasonably certain he was still traveling east, but it might have been northwest, or southwest. Or maybe not. The permanent, oppressive cloud cover and constant rain made it difficult to guess direction. Everything looked the same: every tree, every slope, every mocking, crystal-clear rivulet and stream. Sometimes he would find himself confronting a sheer drop-off or impenetrable vegetation and have to backtrack. There were no landmarks; only rocks, mud, and claustrophobic verdure.

So far he had managed to avoid the stinging trees, but between the inevitable slips and falls and the occasional inimical thorn bush he was pretty well torn up. In the dank confines of the forest, several of the cuts were already beginning to fester. There was a warm wet soreness under his heels where several blisters had popped. Yesterday he'd found a leech on his right ankle and in a paroxysm of disgust had unthinkingly and unwisely pulled it off. Despite his best efforts, the bite continued to bleed.

His hat was gone and so was much of his food. Several times exhaustion and desperation had overcome his pride and he had shouted out the guide's name. If Schneemann was secretly d.o.g.g.i.ng his footsteps, waiting for his client to admit defeat, the German was taking his time about it. Surely the guide wouldn't simply abandon an outsider to fend for himself in dangerous country like this? No reasonable professional would do such a thing.

But a crazy man might.

There was a slight break in the trees ahead, barely visible through the rain. Covey angled toward it, hoping to find a stream that flowed east toward the sea. Perspiration blended with rainwater stung his eyes. His damp breathing came in long, labored wheezes now.

Someone jabbed a white-hot fishhook into his right forearm.

He howled and looked down at himself. Two narrow lengths of vine lay snugged against his bare, wet flesh. When he tried to pull away, they clung to him like green steel. Forcing himself to stand absolutely motionless, he contemplated the growth that had trapped him.

It wasn't a stinging tree, thank G.o.d. Inspecting his arm, he made out two parallel sets of backward-curving thorns running along the underside of each vine. These natural hooks were deeply embedded in his skin. Little bubbles of blood rose from the spot where each thorn had penetrated. They continued to swell until rain washed them away.

To his horror the vines seemed to contract around his arm even as he was studying the phenomenon.

"Don't move."

The voice startled him and he jerked involuntarily, sending fresh agony ripping through his flesh. Trembling slightly from the pain, he forced himself to stand motionless.

She glistened in the rain, naked and supple as a cream-colored seal. Her auburn hair was neatly combed and unmatted, though the rain made it stick to her exposed skin. She had deep, dark eyes and a slim, though mature, body. Her mouth was small and moist, and her leonine muscularity reminded him of slow-motion film he had seen of professional marathon runners.

Transfixed by both pain and surprise, he stared as she gently disengaged first one vine, then the other, from the meat of his upper arm. She offered him a half smile.

"Wait-a-while." Gripping it carefully by the edges, she held up one vine for closer inspection. He flinched away. "See? The thorns are barbed. Once you're hooked, the only way to free yourself is by backing up slowly. Move in any other direction and the barbs only dig in deeper." Her smile widened. "It's also called lawyer's cane."

A shaken Covey sat down and felt gingerly of his injured arm.

She eyed him with palpable curiosity. "What are you doing out here?"

He tried not to stare at the raindrops slithering down through her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and crotch. "I was looking for you."

Her smile vanished and she peered around anxiously. "Why?"

He managed a filthy grin of his own. "I'm a writer. I was looking for inspiration for a new book." When he lifted his arm, pain lanced through him and he winced. "I think I should've stuck to rewriting my old ones. My name's Covey. Mike Covey."

She was watching him closely. "No one told you my name, then?" He shook his head, momentarily too tired and too full of self-pity to care about much of anything else. "I'm Annabelle." She looked to her right. "That's my daughter, Leea. Leea, come say h.e.l.lo."

The girl was a slightly taller version of her mother, only blue-eyed and with hair that verged on the color of night. When her mother called to her, she was sitting in a nearby tree, her legs dangling from a thick lower branch. As an exhausted Covey looked on, she lowered herself to the ground with an effortless grace and agility that was breathtaking.

Had she been there all along? he wondered. Would she have watched in silence as he'd torn his arm to pieces trying to free himself? She slowed as she approached, while the mother regarded him with a strange mixture of curiosity and sadness.

"Where's your home?" he asked. "Do you have a lean-to or a cabin out here, or something?"

"We build shelters when and where we need them. We move around a lot. Is this how you find your inspiration, by asking questions?"

"I can't say, not having found any yet."

Shading her eyes, she tilted her head back. "Soon the afternoon rain will begin. The Big Wet is coming. If you don't get out of the forest before it starts, you'll be stuck in here till March."

As he sat and watched, the two women quickly and without a single tool cobbled together a pa.s.sable shelter out of the forest material at hand. When Annabelle directed him to crawl inside, he did not object. He was too worn out to object to anything. Then they left.

Just as he had decided they didn't intend to come back and he would never see either of them again, they returned bearing armfuls of fruit. There were also large, white, fat insect grubs the taste of which, despite his hunger, he felt obliged to decline. Using fingernails and teeth, they peeled the various fruits as deftly as any monkey.

Later, with his belly full and feeling considerably better, he lay back against the gray rock that formed the rear of the shelter and gazed out at the monotonous scree of falling rain. As always there was no need for a fire. To make conversation he asked the woman about the rain forest. She had an answer or explanation for everything. Sensibly he did not try to inquire about her past or how she came to be in her present situation.

"I need to find certain plants to treat your wounds," she told him the next morning, "or you're going to develop some severe infections. A couple have already started to ulcerate." Crawling to the shelter's opening, she glanced back in at him. "Don't try to go anywhere."

"Fat chance of that," he murmured.

They had been gone less than an hour when a shape returned. The daughter entered wordlessly. In the warm confines of the shelter, he could not avoid her nor did he try to. Her nipples brushed his bare arm as she sat down next to him, folding her thighs up against her chest and clasping her arms around her knees. Outside, the early-morning drizzle obscured the rest of the world.

"Tell me," she whispered in a small voice, "about the city. Mother's told me a little, most of it bad. But I don't see how any place so interesting can be all bad." Her voice overflowed with eagerness. "I want to know."

So without a moment's thought or pause, he told her, describing life not only in the cities of his own country but in those of other lands as well. He tried to impart to her some of the excitement of Chicago, the glamour of Los Angeles, the culture of New York. She listened raptly, hanging on his every word, only occasionally interrupting with a question.

Her manner of speech was devoid of guile and long words but otherwise proper and correct. Apparently her mother had not wished her to dwell entirely in ignorance green. She had been given some home, or rather forest, schooling.

Eventually he felt secure enough in her presence to ask a few questions of his own, keeping an eye on the opening in expectation of the mother's return. "Leea, how do you come to be here, to live like this in this place?"

She replied ingenuously. "I don't exactly know. I was only seven when Mother brought us to the rain forest." Her smile was as radiant and unspoiled as the rest of her, he mused. "We've been here ever since."

"Hasn't it been lonely for you without any other children to grow up with?"

"Oh no. There was always Mother and the animals. I've had every kind of pet you can imagine. Pythons, until they got too big, and c.o.c.katoos and possums and sugar gliders. I've always had playmates."

"But you'd still like to visit a city?"

She nodded thoughtfully. "I think so. I wouldn't want to live in one, though. I don't think I could, after living in the forest."

"What about-not having any clothes?"

She shrugged. "I've seen other people. I don't understand clothes. You dry off much faster without them, and it hardly ever gets cold here."

"What about people who come looking for you? Aren't you afraid they might see you like this?"

"Well, you're looking at me right now, and I'm not afraid." Here was a directness of logic he rarely encountered and could not argue with. "Besides, if we don't want to be seen by other people, we're not."

"You can't move around all the time, Leea. You can't continue to dodge the rest of the world your whole life. People will find you, eventually."

"Not if we don't want them to." There was a certainty to her claim that puzzled and intrigued him. "We just walk off into the Dreamtime."

He frowned. "I've heard of that. It's the name for the Aborigine spirit world, isn't it?"

She nodded enthusiastically. "Something like that. There are lots of Native people around here. Mostly in the Dreamtime. They've gone there to get away from this world. Modern Aussie people did bad things to them, so they left. Those who knew how. Sometimes Mother and I talk to them, and they teach us things. Like how to live in the forest. They taught us how to find the Dreamtime. There's a lot of it in the Daintree."

He shook his head impatiently. "Leea, the Dreamtime is myth. It's the collected stories of a people. They're very beautiful stories, but they're just stories."

Her smile and her eyes were full of secrets, like pearls at the bottom of a dark, dark pool. "The deeper you go into the Daintree, the closer you get to the Dreamtime, Michael. This is one of the oldest forests that has been on the Earth, one of the very first, and the Dreamtime is the first place. They're very near to each other, the Daintree and the Dreamtime. You just have to know how to look."

Girl, I've spent my whole life trying to learn how to look. Her mother has fed her this, he realized suddenly. To keep her here, away from civilization, away from other people. But why?

"When we don't want to be seen or found, we just find a piece of the Dreamtime and go into it," she was saying. "The people who are looking for us walk right past. They don't see us. They don't know how to find the Dreamtime, so they don't see it, either."

"What's it like?" He wondered what a psychologist would make of her delusions.

She lapsed into dreamy, exquisite reminiscence. "A lot of it is forest, like this, but before the loggers and highway people came. There are no cities, no airplane tracks in the sky. No white people. Only the Aborigines, and Mother and I. It's like it was when the Earth was before people."

There was movement outside. Annabelle entered, clutching a handful of leaves and stems that were oozing sap. "This won't take long." She didn't even glance in her daughter's direction.

She's crazier than Schneemann, Covey thought, isolating herself and her daughter out here like this. Warily he eyed the vegetation she had brought back.

The poultice she fashioned lessened the fire in his wounds. He was less eager to sip the tea she brewed, but did not know how to refuse. It put him to sleep almost immediately.

When he awoke, stiff and cramped but otherwise feeling better, they had both gone.

Staggering out of the shelter, he stumbled unexpectedly into full, searing sunshine. He felt himself blinded by a thousand emerald mirrors. Thick gray mist clung to treetops where unseen lorikeets fussed. The air had the clarity of a sudden vision.

"Annabelle!" He turned a slow circle as he shouted. "Leea!" Within his limited range of vision, nothing moved. There was no reply.

"Leea!"

He thought he heard a voice. Most probably it was some kind of animal, but he pursued it anyway. It was all there was.

The voices grew louder, contentious. Among them was one deeper than any he had heard in days. Eyes widening, he increased his pace, suddenly heedless of the possibility of encountering stinging trees, or worse.

He came up short, breathing hard, on the steep bank of a deep gully. Leea was there, her hands cupped over her mouth, eyes wide and staring. He could hear her m.u.f.fled screams clearly.

Boris Schneemann, his agonized face framed by his wild black mane, knelt by the drop-off. His thick, callused hands clutched the edge and he was sobbing and screaming in a berserk, unintelligible mix of German, French, and English.

Not far below him the twisted, naked form of Annabelle hung crucified in a tangled mat of wait-a-while. Where the unrelenting vines had torn her flesh, blood flowed freely in thin, viscous streamlets. Her head was bent back so far that Covey could not see her face. It rested at an angle unnatural to her shoulders.

One large vine was wrapped tightly around her neck.

The anguish that welled up unexpectedly in his throat far exceeded anything he felt in his arm or feet. Anger glazed his eyes as he rushed forward.

Leea turned to him, her ethereally beautiful unblemished face wide-eyed with shock. Schneemann rose slowly. Then he threw back his head and shook his clenched fists at whatever G.o.ds hid behind the mist-shrouded sky, screaming in guttural, uncontrollable, wretched German.

"You rotten, rotten b.a.s.t.a.r.d." Covey eyed the other man carefully as he approached. "What the f.u.c.k happened?"

Schneemann suddenly became aware of his presence. "It was an accident. She would not listen. I only wanted to talk and she would not listen. She ran from me. Toward the Dreamtime, she said. Where she would be safe. Crazy, crazy! Gott in himmel Gott in himmel. She ran and she fell." He looked down. "There." He inhaled ma.s.sively then turned and, before she could retreat, grabbed Leea's wrist.

"You. Leea. You are all that is left. You come back with me now."

The girl stared at him, half mad with terror and despair. "N-no. I don't want to go with you. I don't want to."

"You must. Now."

"No!" She dug her heels into the mud, sliding forward as he dragged her, beating at him with her free hand. He took no notice of the feeble resistance. She dug her heels into the mud, sliding forward as he dragged her, beating at him with her free hand. He took no notice of the feeble resistance.

The air went out of him when Covey tackled him around both legs.

They went down in a damp, muddy heap. Covey struck out blindly, furiously, slamming fist after fist into the German's face. With a roar like a wounded rhino, Schneemann threw him off.

Rolling over, Covey saw the guide grinning insanely back at him. The big man was back on his feet, tense as a panther, a knife clutched in his right fist. In Covey's eyes the short, thick blade loomed as large as a ceremonial sword. Reaching up, he felt blood streaming from his nose.

"So little writer wants to fight, eh?" Covey scrambled to his feet, only to find himself caught between the drop-off and his opponent. "You verdampt verdampt swine, you niggly little son-of-a-b.i.t.c.h. Ten years I spend looking for these two. Ten years of my life hacking and sweating at this stinking jungle, and you, city man, swine, you niggly little son-of-a-b.i.t.c.h. Ten years I spend looking for these two. Ten years of my life hacking and sweating at this stinking jungle, and you, city man, you you find them. And then she don't listen to me." His face contorted and he began to sob anew. find them. And then she don't listen to me." His face contorted and he began to sob anew.

"No more Anna. No more Anna! She wouldn't listen to me," he bawled. "I just wanted to talk!" The sobbing snapped like a worn tape. A rictus of gut-seated pain, the kind that twists bowels and haunts eyes, made a horrible, inhuman mask of his face. "Ten years, little writer. Ten long, terrible years tearing me to tiny pieces. Ten years in which to think too much."