Spring-heeled Jack and the President's Ring

Chapter 14 ~ Magnetron Meets Mangaliku

"'I did not have the luxury of feeling compassionate toward my growling attacker, and I in fact mounted a vigorous defense against his pummeling."

Compost was an Englishman by birth, lost in the African jungle as a mere infant on one of his anthropologist parents' scholarly junkets to the Dark Continent.  Found and raised by African tribesman, he became one of them, learning their language and customs and enjoying his primitive way of life as a full member of the tribe.  At the age of thirteen, he was found by German hunters who plucked him from his African family and returned him to England against his will.  After a brief carnival tour as "The Wild Boy of Tanganyika," he was purchased by Sylvester Compost, the childless whaling tycoon, who embarked on a campaign to civilize the untamed youth and make him his heir.

The boy had a troubled adolescence, although he was quite bright.  He learned to speak English and excelled at school but exhibited an extremely misanthropic demeanor, especially toward his adoptive parents.  After seven distressing years, the elder Compost gave up and disowned the rebellious young man.  Eldridge Compost reemerged shortly thereafter, posing as a high-minded Utopian social planner, and hoodwinking soft-headed British lords and ladies into funding his quixotic endeavors.

When I had first met Compost years before, I had been transfixed by his fervent rhetoric, and I came to think of him as a principled intellectual.  I did not know at the time that I was the object of an artful inveiglement by a master chicaner.

I believe Compost was sincere in his stated belief that the White Man's social structure is inferior to that of the Black Man.  He advocated a social order he called Frolicking Neo-Primitivism as a remedy to "the depraved and unethical Euro-American Technomorphic Hegemony."  Though he moved in civilized circles and was clearly held in high esteem by the intelligentsia among English society, he found them repulsive, and derived an extra measure of perverse satisfaction from the belief that their vile mammon would ultimately fund their own destruction.  Compost yearned not to reform modern society, but to dismantle it as punishment for its excesses.  He desired not only to stanch the encroachment of white civilization into the African continent, but to reverse the tide.

This desire became a kind of madness.  The systematic annihilation of modern society became for him an end in its own right, and any philosophical purity that may have once driven the man was gone, replaced with a mindless hatred for all of our beloved conventions and revered icons.  That he had taken leave of his alleged principles was amply confirmed by the ill-fed and nearly naked Negro man imprisoned in his cellar.  At Compost's order, the wretched soul attacked me as any abused creature might, flailing out in fear and misplaced obedience to a cruel and ruthless master.  At that moment, I did not have the luxury of feeling compassion toward my growling attacker, and I in fact mounted a vigorous defense against his pummeling.

Evidently, Compost had not intended this violent outburst.  He commenced what appeared to be a strenuous admonishment, slapping the poor devil repeatedly on the top of his head and shouting, "nongo, Mangaliku, nongo," until the assault ceased abruptly.  The lean African fellow backed away from me and Compost, trembling with fear.

"Mangaliku! Poohana tamba chuka! Nanga chupa!" said Compost.  Evidently, there had been a miscommunication of some kind, and Compost bellowed out further instructions with careful enunciation.

Boileau stirred slightly on the heap of wooden masks, but remained insensible.

Mangaliku nodded and grew quiet and somber.  Breathing deeply, he reached into a large leopard-skin pouch and extracted a brightly painted gourd, which had been dried, hollowed, and filled with pebbles.  He held the rattle over me, shaking it at me and intoning in the same incomprehensible tongue with which he had been addressed.  I realized now that I was now in the presence of the medicine man who had put Anders under his peculiar spell, but there was little I could do.

I was beginning to lose consciousness.