The Valley of Despair Read online

mountains and savannah - never to be heard from again.

  In the last several months, after receiving notice of his mother’s untimely demise, the young pilot had volunteered for every dangerous mission coming available. He and his parents had always been close, they being all each had in the world. His mother had been the last of his people with his father having passed away two years earlier. His father had grown up an orphan in Austria and so had no extended family, while his mother’s kinfolk had all died out years before his father had the good fortune to meet her. Erik felt quite alone in the world.

  His father had risen from poverty to become an officer of the Imperial German Army, having fought in the Abushiri Revolt in East Africa, and later in the Second Samoan Civil war, earning merits in both conflicts for bravery and from being wounded in action. He’d met Erik’s mother while on holiday in Crete in 1890, whilst convalescing after Abushiri. After marrying, he’d moved his beautiful new wife to Hamburg.

  Until he was about fifteen Erik lived on military bases all over, including Africa, where the boy came of age, having grown up around fighting men his entire life. He was accustomed to listening to war stories and was no stranger in the use of swords and small arms – his father had seen to that.

  But great as became his skill at arms, to those who knew him his mastery of hand to hand fighting seemed nigh miraculous. He learned much from his father, but most of his fighting technique came from a grizzled old sergeant who had emigrated from Macedonia as a boy. The old man served in both Boer wars and fought tooth and nail in the trenches of France in the early years of the Great War until being wounded and ending up in the German colonies of Tanzania.

  He took a liking to the young Erik and for the last year had schooled him in the fine art of slaying his fellow man. With rifle butt and trench knife the lad’s skills became little short of uncanny.

  Aside from the grim arts of slaughter, however, his mother had ensured he learned fine arts as well, to which she felt a civilized man should be no stranger. He’d learned his mother’s native Hellenic tongue at an early age, and later was tutored in Latin, French, English and Spanish. He could, with equal ease, quote Goethe, Plato, Caesar, and Shakespeare in each’s native tongue.

  When he turned sixteen his mother announced she and his father had arrived at the decision to send him to an institution of higher learning. Although loathe to do so he then spent the next three years in Berlin attending university.

  Before his graduation his father retired to a small hamlet in southern Germany near the Austrian border. But life in a small village seemed too stale and domestic for Erik’s untamed nature. He joined the newly formed Fliegertruppen des deutschen Kaiserreiches, or the Imperial German Flying Corps, and had been flying aeröplanes ever since.

  Now, at the ripe age of twenty-five, he found himself atop an African mountain range probably a thousand kilometers from civilization having only a few meager supplies recovered from his wrecked plane which included a knife and a C96 Mauser – the pistol a gift from his father after graduating from the military academy.

  From his plane’s wreckage Erik had also salvaged a single-shot rifle he had long been accustomed to carry with him on flights. Later he was immensely grateful the simple arm survived the wreck after he used it successfully to fight off examples of the largest carnivora he’d ever seen.

  Prior to his encounter with the giant apes he chanced upon a serpent he guessed to be fully twelve to fifteen meters in length, drooping over a game trail he’d been following. Sweat beaded his brow at how close he’d come to walking unwittingly beneath the behemoth. He took it with a single shot to the head and watched, fascinated, as it slowly unwound to gradually fall into an immense, coiling pile directly in his path upon the game trail he followed. He would later admit it was an eerie sensation to step gingerly amidst the still coils of the snake’s remains as he sought to continue his way.

  Remaining to him now were but a dozen or so cartridges for the rifle, he having expended several rounds in his defense against others of the likes of these, as well as lions and the hoard of vicious baboons of unknown, humungous variety from whose clutches he counted himself blessed to have escaped.

  It had been the unnerving and incessant pursuit of these beasts that steeled his nerves to scale the cliffs, hoping thereby to escape their deadly embraces. After a shot or two into the face of the most persistent of these they eventually gave off the chase while their prey continued his way up the vertical face.

  The brief respite and sips of water invigorated the young man. A refreshing breeze drifted over the cliff tops, drying his sweat-soaked locks, and cooling his face. He tucked his log book back into his haversack, stood and dusted himself off, and prepared to descend the other side of the precipitous range.

  Walking away from the edge he soon arrived at the opposite side where once again he found a precipitous drop, causing him to curse. From his location he could see the cliffs eventually vanishing in the haze of distance but appearing nearby as an immense wall over the top edge of which he traipsed. The cliffs ran in both directions for kilometers while a similar feature was visible on the opposite side of the valley beckoning below.

  “Hopefully it opens up to the north,” he muttered to himself. “No matter. There’s certainly neither food nor water up here.”

  He cinched his belt and adjusted his equipment where it would not impede his descent.

  Glancing down into the depths of the valley on the inside of the barrier wall he estimated the foot of the cliff to be anywhere from two to three hundred meters less in elevation as compared to the rocky face on the side he’d already scaled. Weary, he welcomed the news, realizing he did not have quite as far to descend as he’d climbed to gain this vantage point.

  He anticipated reaching the bottom in short order where he hoped to be able to quickly locate water and game, providing he didn’t meet with any impassable locations in the descent which would require he move further north or south to make additional attempts to descend into the valley.

  02: A Bizarre Valley

  Prior to putting his plane down in the forest Erik had never before been in a situation where he’d gone so long without food and so was learning only now how quickly lack of nourishment might sap one’s strength.

  When he stretched forth a hand to grasp a piece of fruit he stumbled on he discovered his hand shaking tremulously. Hungrily, he devoured the ripe, life-saving viand, the sweet juice running to drip from a chin grizzled with two and a half days growth of stubble.

  It had taken him nearly half a day to reach the bottom of the cliffs on the inside of the valley, he having chosen the worse possible point from which to begin his descension. After many false starts, and finding himself at too many impasses to count, his flyer’s boots finally sank into the soft loam at the foot of the cliffs, his limbs shaking with the fatigue of his climb.

  Many times he’d found himself hanging by his hands with, if he was lucky, a foot crammed in a crevice as he sought in vain with the other for purchase further down and with several hundred meters of free fall below him. Being a pilot he was certainly no stranger to heights. But he found there to be a distinct difference in flying several thousand feet above the ground in an aeröplane as compared to clinging to a cliff by one’s fingernails above a perpendicular drop.

  Devouring his fill of fruit he now required water, having finished off hours before what little remained in his canteen. The forest before him was dense and dark – one might even say ominous in appearance. But he knew he must move on. To pause here would be to invite death. Shouldering his rifle he started into the thicket, the heavy brush of the forest floor scratching his arms and face, and swallowing him from view of the cliffs as he pursued his way along his chosen path.

  He never knew at what point he sensed eyes upon him. One moment his only concern was in finding a stream or other source of water to slake a thirst that had by now become maddening. Moments later the hackles on t
he back of his neck were screaming at him that someone, or something, was watching him. He paused in mid stride, only then realizing what an enormous amount of racket he’d been making as he tromped through the dense undergrowth when he at last heard the silence of his lonely surrounds.

  Seeing nothing untoward he was about to write the feelings of suspicion off as simply the overwrought nerves of one who suffered deprivation. Perhaps his previous encounters had made him jumpy; the snakes and baboons with which he’d tangled had certainly been the right mixture to cause the onset of deep paranoia at the slightest sound. He detected movement behind him and turning, found himself staring at the stuff of nightmares.

  It is an odd thing that occurs in the brain of mankind when he is confronted with something of the supernatural or the unknown that, being unable to categorize and process it, he will with almost predictable regularity do one of two things. It might be he goes mad, screaming in fright and horror as he flees with utter disregard to his surroundings until he is ran down from behind by the very thing he seeks to escape. Or again, it might be his brain shuts down his fear center and it is with the coldly calculating mind of a machine that he fights that which has shocked his senses.

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