The Green grave

CHAPTER 1

EMERALD IN THE BLACK SELVA

"...Last night, at a private dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria, Mr. Arthur Blackwood presented investors with the syndicate’s final plan for the development of the Amazon Basin. The Madeira — Mamoré Railroad project is designed to connect the rubber plantations with world ports. State-of-the-art American locomotives, advanced engineering methods, and the finest specialists from Boston guarantee the triumph of civilization over savagery. Mr. Blackwood personally assured the press that steel rails would pass through the selva with mathematical precision, ushering in a new era of progress…”

— From the financial chronicle of the New York Telegraph, June.

The plank barracks stood on stilts, driven deep into the red clay at the edge of the camp. Here, the mainline rails ran flush against the wall of century-old selva. The builders called this place “Thirteenth Mile” — thirteen miles from the river port, though the exact count had long been lost to the damp. A year ago, a lopsided wooden sign had been hammered into the ground at the entrance. One of the engineers had painted on it in oil: “13th Mile. Hope Dies Here.” The rains had nearly washed the letters away. Black paint had run, mingled with mildew, until only a sticky, truncated remnant remained: “es.”

Outside, through the thin cracks in the walls, the jungle breathed. The forest advanced by the hour, reclaiming the embankment. Hairy lianas as thick as a man’s wrist had wound around the lower logs of the buildings, clinging with small, slick roots. Beneath the bark, the wood of the stilts had rotted into a sodden, damp pulp. From deep within the thicket, howler monkeys shrieked. Their voices broke into dry, human-like laughter — grotesque and monotonous. Above the canopy hung a leaden sky. Heavy, without a single break, it resembled a cloudy cataract. The sun could not pierce that dome, but the tropical heat melted the air, turning it into a warm, thick suspension. Breathing was possible only in shallow gasps, through clenched teeth — a deep inhalation would seize the throat with a dry spasm at once.

Catarina Clayton sat at a heavy oak table that had been shipped from Boston three years earlier. Carved legs, marquetry along the edges — the furniture looked absurd amid the damp, unplaned walls. On the table lay an open architectural catalogue of New England mansions. The pages had swollen from perpetual condensation, the heavy paper had warped, and the printer’s ink stuck to her fingers. Cat stared at an illustration of a drawing room with a fireplace. Directly across the image of the white façade, a large tropical cockroach with oily antennae crawled lazily. Cat did not move. With indifference, without disgust, she lowered her hand and pressed the heavy edge of the catalogue down on the insect. A dry crunch of chitin. On the glossy picture of the house, a damp brown smear remained.

The corset beneath her emerald silk dress pressed against her ribs, making even a short exhalation difficult. The metal hooks on her back had grown hot in the suffocating steam and burned the skin between her shoulder blades. Her shoulders had darkened with sweat, and the long formal hem was thickly caked with dried clay. Cat let her gaze drift over her plate. Beside a piece of coarse gray bread stood a tin of anchovies. Cat had opened it herself, mercilessly breaking a nail on her thumb against the jagged edge of the metal. Fish oil mingled with the smell of dripping wax, sour sweat, and rotting river silt.

Cat looked at her palms. The skin on her fingers was dotted with purple bites from gnats and small dry sores from the sun. The local moisture seeped deep into her pores, like lye. Her hand trembled faintly. Cat raised a crystal glass to her lips. The champagne was warm, flat. Large, sluggish bubbles burst on her tongue without a sound, leaving the taste of sour grapes. This was the last bottle from the trunks they had carried across the ocean. The last trace of Boston, where mornings smelled of hot bread and colonial tea — not of the rotting decay of fallen leaves.

“Did you seriously put that dress on?” Rick did not look up from his chair.

He was squatting in front of an old fan. The gray paint had long since peeled from the blades, and the rusty safety cage creaked at the slightest touch. Rick was fruitlessly trying to turn a stripped screw with a screwdriver.

“You know this isn’t Massachusetts.”

Cat drew the air in noisily, through her nostrils, exhaling through her mouth. The corset was too tight, constricting her ribs.

“I know where I am, Rick. The monkeys outside remind me at five in the morning instead of a maid’s bell. And instead of croissants on my table, I have these tins. But today is our fourth anniversary. I want to feel like a human being. Just one day.”

Rick set the screwdriver down on the greasy floor. The metal clinked against the planks. The engineer rose, wiping his palms on his thighs. His gray eyes, with red veins burst from sleeplessness, settled on his wife. He looked at her for a long time, catching the changes with his gaze. The soft Boston roundness of her cheeks had vanished. Her cheekbones were drawn tight over dry skin; dark, bluish shadows lay beneath her eyes. Cat’s fingers clenched the stem of her glass convulsively, and her broken nail oozed watery blood.

Rick averted his eyes to the corner of the barracks, thrust his hand into his trouser pocket, and began mechanically rolling a greasy nut between his fingers.

“Forgive me,” his voice came out hollow. “I don’t know how to stay human in this steam bath. I’ve been fiddling with this tin can for three hours. With no luck. The rubber gaskets turned to sticky mush in a week, and the bearings were eaten by rust. In Boston, I assembled bridge spans. Here, I’m helpless against a room fan.”

He clenched his right fist with effort. His knuckles responded with a dry, bony crack. Cat knew that sound. Over two years of marriage, she had learned that this crack replaced cursing for Rick — it meant the highest degree of helplessness, when blueprints and formulas ceased to work.

“You’ll fix it,” Cat ran her finger along the moist stem of the crystal glass. “You always find a solution.”

“Iron is helpless, Catarina. Here, metal gives out faster than we can notice. People give out the same way.”

Rick lowered the fan to the greasy floor. The blades jerked with a strained, rusty squeak, wobbled, and stopped. The immobile, gray air settled back into the barracks.

Hoarse voices drifted from the embankment. Portuguese curses from the firemen mixed with the talk of local day laborers. A couple of hundred yards from the barracks, lumberjacks were methodically felling deadwood — the dull, heavy thuds of axes reverberated through the floorboards beneath Cat’s feet. Through the gaps in the planks came the smell of smoke. Rotten sleepers and trash were burning in bonfires. This smoke mixed with the odor of stagnant swamp water, iron heated all day, and the sweet, suffocating fragrance of wild orchids. The flowers sent thin, slick tendrils straight through the gaps in the walls, turning the damp wood of the barracks into nutritious rot for their roots.

“Do you remember our first anniversary?” Cat took a sip. The champagne had finally warmed, hinting at acetic acid. “In Boston, at Parker’s. We ordered oysters, and outside the windows, clean, dry snow was falling. Rick, you promised then…”

“I promised to travel the world,” Rick interrupted her thoughtfully, staring into the dark corner. “I called the Amazon the greatest adventure of our lives.”

“You said these rivers and forests would keep us young,” Cat corrected.

Rick gave a bitter laugh. The corner of his mouth twitched convulsively.

“I was a fool. We’re just pieces of meat in the giant warm stomach of this earth.”

He shoved his hand into his trouser pocket, produced a rusty nut with stripped threads, and began rolling it monotonously between his calloused fingers. The metal slid habitually from his thumb to his forefinger, then to his middle finger. Rick got stuck in this rhythm, staring at the floorboards.

“I don’t want to die here, Rick,” Cat’s voice dropped to a venomous, cutting whisper. “I don’t want my body to rot on this mainline, where even the rails glow green at night, like rotting bones.”

“Steel doesn’t glow on its own, Catarina. It’s static electricity before a storm front. Ordinary physics.”

“Physics,” Cat gave a short, bitter laugh. Her nostrils flared convulsively as they caught the suffocating scent of orchids. “You cling to your formulas every time you’re afraid to admit the obvious. You can’t measure this wilderness with a ruler.”

The door bolt slid back with a strained creak. Through the gap, a broad forehead with heavy cheekbones appeared. The Indian Manolo, hired by the Claytons three months earlier at the lower dock, froze on the threshold. He wore a dirty gray canvas shirt, soaked through on the shoulders to dark patches. His bare, wide feet were covered with a crust of dried red clay and deep, weeping cracks from walking constantly on the gravel embankment. Manolo left damp, muddy prints on the clean boards of the floor. In his hands, he held a rough wooden tray.

“Señor, señora,” his guttural voice was more like a ragged rasp. “Time to clear. Night has come.”

Cat tried to nod, but her facial muscles cramped from feverish heat. The throbbing vein at her left temple beat faster.

“Take it, Manolo.”

The Indian began collecting the plates, clumsily gripping the thin edges of the Boston china with his fingers. His wide, calloused palms clutched the silver forks with evident apprehension, as if the metal might bite. He glanced askance at the Claytons’ crystal glasses with a savage, superstitious fear. The servant reeked of sour sweat, boiled maize, and raw river silt.

While gathering the dishes, Manolo carefully, trying to be unobtrusive, pressed an empty anchovy tin with jagged edges against his side with his elbow. For him, that discarded metal was worth more than all the Boston silver.

Manolo turned and left. His bare feet left wet clay prints on the clean boards — dark, damp imprints of toes that instantly dried, turning into brown flakes. Cat stared at those spots. Civilization in these parts sloughed off a person like scales, and the habit of sweeping floors in the morning was the first to disappear.

“He looks at us like we’re gods,” Rick jerked his head toward the threshold. “Fool.”

“Manolo is at home here,” Cat did not turn her head. “We are strangers. We are nothing here.”

A dense silence settled in the barracks. The candle wicks smoked, the flames stretched upward into thin blue needles — static tension in the air building before a storm front. Cat felt the fine hairs on her forearms lift and stand on end from the electrical discharges in the atmosphere. She walked over to the fogged mirror in the corner. The glass was covered with a layer of gray, damp dust.

The reflection was frighteningly false. Her hair, tangled from the damp, smelled of river silt and stuck out like harsh tow. On her pale neck, large red welts from insect bites burned. Cat noticed that her pupils had dilated, almost filling the iris, and her mouth held the persistent taste of dry chalk. She licked her cracked, salty lips. The dull vein in her left temple beat harder, marking the first hours of malarial fever.

At that moment, the candle flames flared abruptly blue, hissed, and died. The barracks plunged into an oily darkness. Cat cried out, clutching the edge of the table.

“Rick!”

The engineer stepped silently to the window and with a strained screech wrenched the heavy wooden shutters open. Outside, directly in front of their doorstep, two perfectly straight lines receded into the darkness. The rails of the unfinished mainline glowed in the dark with a ghostly, dense phosphorescent green light. Two luminous neon lines cut through the Black Selva and vanished into the mist.

Someone pounded on the door. Heavy, panicked blows shook the flimsy planks. Rick jerked the bolt, and Doctor Hale stumbled into the room, almost falling onto Cat’s back. His eyes glittered wildly in the greenish half-light from the window, his shirt collar was torn, and a bottle neck protruded from his coat pocket. The doctor breathed heavily, whistling, smearing the doorframe with oily fingers.

“Blackwood is bankrupt, Clayton,” Hale spat a brown wad of tobacco saliva on the floor and gave a hoarse laugh. “His financial syndicate burst this morning in New York. The stationmaster put a bullet in his mouth half an hour ago — I personally wiped his brains off his desk. The safe is empty! The telegraph wire in the jungle was cut by marauders! No supply ships! We are officially dead to the world!”

The doctor fell silent, pressing the bottle to his lips. Rick slowly shifted his gaze from the glowing green rails to his wife’s pale face.

“We’ll rot here, Rick.”

Cat said this into the cloudy gray glass of the mirror, barely moving her dry, salty lips.

“Don’t say that.”

Rick stepped out of the dark corner and placed his hands on her shoulders. The engineer’s heavy, rough fingers, covered with dry calluses from wrenches, dug into the emerald silk of her dress. Through the fabric, Cat felt their familiar, oppressive warmth.

“We’ll get out. I’ll get that little train running, Catarina. I’ll take us out along the embankment. Formulas don’t lie — I’ll find some solution.”

She turned. Rick’s gray eyes were fixed. Cat searched them for the old Boston light — the one that had ignited three years ago at the ball celebrating the opening of New England’s new rail line. He had stood by the marble column then, stooped, awkward, with a drawing tube under his arm, enthusiastically talking about material strength and bridge spans.

“You always find a solution,” Cat covered the spasm in her throat with an angry, haughty smirk. “But what if Blackwood’s blueprints are a dead end? What if this lowland is a vast trap of mud, and there’s no way out?”

Rick did not answer. From the embankment, cutting through the dense hum of the Amazon, came the first guttural shouts. Someone was running heavily through the liquid slop of the road, splashing through puddles. Spanish curses from the firemen broke into shrill falsetto — the words were indistinguishable. Cat flinched, her shoulder blades pressing against the cloudy mirror.

Rick had already slipped to the door. He pushed it open. There, beyond the awnings of the coal sheds, in the crimson twilight of the dawning day, dirty human shadows darted about. “Thirteenth Mile,” consisting of two dozen plank barracks, repair shops, and dynamite depots, had turned into a stirred-up anthill. The cries multiplied, taking on a steady, animal tone of panic.

“Stay inside,” Rick said shortly, without turning around. “Bolt the door.”

The door slammed shut. Cat was left alone amid the smoking blue wicks and the cloying smell of spilled anchovy oil. She stepped to the window and tore back the cloth curtain. On the muddy road, lit by sparse kerosene lamps, people raged. Laborers, lumberjacks, firemen — Cat saw their angry, frightened faces, their brows gleaming with sticky sweat. From all sides, canvas sacks were dragged from the supply depot. Two Portuguese carpenters methodically, without haste, smashed a barrel of industrial alcohol with the heavy head of an axe. The wood cracked with a splintering sound. A dark, pungent puddle spread over the red clay, and the air was instantly saturated with the fusel, acrid smell of alcohol.

Through the window opening, Cat caught sight of the tracks. The steel threads of the rails stretched into the thicket, toward an abandoned bridge span. They glowed with an even, phosphorescent green light. The violet belly of storm clouds rolled over the treetops. The wind hurled a dense wave of ozone into the barracks.

Cat wrapped her arms around her shoulders. Her skin was instantly covered with a fine cold chill, though the air under the ceiling was like a hot bath.

“Steel doesn’t burn with phosphorus,” Cat squeezed her eyes shut, trying to burn the glow from her memory. “Scientists in Boston would call this static discharge before a storm or the glow of putrefactive mold. But scientists sit in dry offices. Here, in the stuffy darkness, this green fire seems like a neon line drawn by nature between us and the rest of the world. The mainline itself lights the way for its new passengers.”

“We were promised the greatest triumph of progress,” Hale interrupted, resting his chin on his torn collar. Cheap alcohol wafted from his mouth. “I remember that New York drivel. A bridge to the future. But the bridge collapsed into the swamp, Catarina. Blackwood bought these lands at auction, locking property rights in leather folders. Fool. You can’t buy this thicket — you can only borrow it from death itself, paying with the lives of firemen. Every mile of track is laid on the bones of laborers whose names Blackwood didn’t even record in his ledgers. His bank burst. No supply ships. We’ve been crossed off the list of the living.”

“What do we do?” Cat asked quietly, her voice breaking into shortness of breath from the oppressive corset. “Rick, what now?”

Hale turned the glass over, wiping his lips with the back of his hand, stained with carbolic acid. The crystal clinked as he set it down on the oak marquetry of the table. The doctor fixed his gaze on the emerald silk of Cat’s dress, registering the dark bluish circles under her eyes. His yellowed whites were motionless.

“We need a plan,” Rick spun around abruptly, pulling his hand from his pocket. “In the western dead end, on the abandoned track, stands the Black Maria. A small switching engine. The metal there is sound. If we restore the boiler and weld the car with steel plates, we can break through back to the port.”

From deep within the overgrown clearing, miles from the camp, a new sound came. A heavy, metallic blow on a rail. Single, clear, it rolled along the steel track, vibrating through the floorboards. As if someone in the impenetrable night thicket was testing the gauge with a track hammer. There could be no construction workers in the forest. The mainline had stalled in the dead end of bankruptcy, but the metal hummed. The vibration reached the barracks, and the skin on Cat’s neck instantly prickled with fine cold goosebumps. In the phosphorescent green half-light of the window, the faces of Rick and Hale looked gray, carved from limestone. The green corridor of track waited for its passengers.

Outside, the first tropical downpour struck in heavy, large drops. From below, straight out from under the glowing embankment, came a dense, dry rustling. An enormous scaly body of a black anaconda slithered onto the green rails. Its coils caught the phosphorescent light of the track dully. The snake slowly crossed the steel, breaking orchid stems with its weight, and slid under the wooden flooring of the barracks. Cat froze, feeling through the chair legs the heavy coils of the creature rubbing against the floorboards directly beneath her feet. The creature was retreating into the crawlspace, leaving a damp, slimy trail behind.

The earth was claiming its rights to the abandoned station. Cat lowered her gaze to her hands, smeared with the swollen oil paint of the armrests. The emerald silk of the dress, Parker’s porcelain, crystal, and Boston — all had become an illusion, washed away by the tropical rain in one morning. The party was over. Only the damp barracks remained, a rusty nut in Rick’s fist, and the green phosphorescent track to nowhere.

Cat stepped from the murky mirror to her husband, fighting the feverish chill in her temples.

“I will not stay in this earth, Rick,” her voice dropped to an even, angry whisper, and for the first time a hard metallic edge appeared in it. “We will not rot here. Start welding the steel.”

Cat stared at her husband’s sullen face, smeared with oily stains. The dryness in her mouth and the taste of chalk sharpened her perception: this shared doom bound them tighter than Boston vows at the altar. Cat stepped forward, caught his hand, and squeezed his fingers until they cramped. The engineer’s knuckles responded with a short bony crack. Rick did not pull away — his fingers dug into her palm in return, breaking the skin with his calluses.

“We will get this train moving,” Rick said this into the dark window, barely moving his lips. “We’ll weld a steel box. Break through the blockages. We’ll have to smash the furniture, throw Blackwood’s blueprints and our trunks into the firebox — I’ll do it. We’ll get out of here.”

“Do we have a choice?” Cat’s breath caught, the corset constricting her ribs.

“We have the rails and the Black Selva,” Rick shrugged. “And this green glowing strip.”

Outside, the downpour poured in a solid wall. A lightning flash split the inky sky above the canopy. White electric light for a second illuminated the distant stretch of the mainline. There, amid the overgrown clearing, silent tattooed figures of savages stood motionless. They were frozen on the sleepers like stone statues, staring straight at the Claytons’ barracks. Cat stifled a cry, digging her fingers into Rick’s arm. She said nothing — Hale would have blamed it all on malarial delirium.

The phosphorescent mist of the Amazon rose from the swamps, enveloping the steel rails, drawing people into its eternal rotten bosom.

“Tomorrow,” Rick unclenched his fist — the nut in his pocket clinked dully. “At first light, we’ll start work on the boiler.”

Cat nodded silently, gasping for the sticky air. The vein at her left temple continued methodically counting the seconds until morning.

The anaconda had slithered into the darkness of the crawlspace. On the green phosphorescent rail, a wide wet trail remained, evaporating instantly from the tropical heat rising from the earth. But the distant single blow on the metal still rang in their ears. The metallic vibration faded into the planks of the walls. That sound seemed like the ghostly whistle of a locomotive not yet assembled.

They stood in the pitch darkness of the barracks, pressed against each other, listening to the whistling breath of the Black Selva. The wicks had gone out. Through the narrow gaps in the wooden shutters, pale neon bands seeped in. This green swamp light fell on the porcelain and silver of the table, like the dead, motionless gaze from beneath the damp earth. The mainline silently claimed its rights to their lives.

Cat squeezed her eyes shut tight. Her eyelids were scorched by dry feverish heat. She wanted to cry, but the muscles of her face were numb from the suffocation. There were no tears. In the Amazon, human tears evaporate from the skin faster than a dollar disappears from the pocket of a bankrupt Blackwood.

CHAPTER 2

ABANDONED STATION SYNDROME

“Newspaper, November 14, 1906. Section “Exchange & Investments’:

'...The syndicate of Mr. Arthur Blackwood guarantees full return of funds to shareholders of the Madeira — Mamoré Railroad, secured by the rubber plantations of the state of Amazonas. Progress cannot be stopped. The jungle retreats before American capital. Christian civilization enters the wild selva to the rhythm of track hammers. The engineering corps confirms: less than a year remains before the final link-up of the tracks. Tickets for the first transcontinental express are already on sale…”