Suddenly his head turned, and he scanned the forest. It was still eerily quiet. Eden knew his attention was focused elsewhere, yet she had a sense he had missed nothing, including her movements. The man threw his head back and let out a roar, the same roar that had sent Cash’s Ugandan men running for the hills. They had known the danger of whoever this man was.
She asked him if he spoke Swahili. “Unaongea Kiswahili?” Unfortunately, she didn’t know enough of the language to truly have a conversation.
Her savior shot her another distracted look before he grunted again at the forest and whistled sharply. There was an answering whistle far to her left. The man turned her way, and with lightning-quick reflexes, he grabbed her.
Eden screamed, but a second later the air was knocked from her lungs as he threw her over his shoulder. He began to run, dodging through the trees and leaping over the taller bushes and vegetation like an Olympic hurdler. The impact of his feet jarred her and sent a punch to her stomach. She was going to throw up if he kept this up much longer.
Where was he going? What was he going to do to her? Why didn’t he communicate? He acted . . . well, he acted more like an animal than a person. A wild man. It made no sense.
Eventually he stopped running. He rolled her off his shoulder and onto the ground. She couldn’t stop it—her stomach emptied its contents, and she lay gasping on the ground at the base of a particularly thick-rooted hagenia tree. She clawed at the ground, trying to catch her breath and stop the shaking of her arms and legs.
Her head spun, and she gazed up at the distant light, barely able to make it out through the trees above. She saw something jutting from the base of the tree, going all the way up. Small pieces of wood, like tiny steps in the trunk, created a path all the way up the tree. The wild man grasped her hand and pulled her to her feet. He then gestured for her to climb onto his back. Was he kidding?
She shook her head violently. “No, no, I’m not—”
He lunged for her, and she shrieked, holding up her hands.
“Okay!”
He pointed at his back, and he faced the tree, waiting patiently.
It was weird climbing onto this stranger’s back, but she did it. He used the wooden steps the way a mountain climber would use footholds. She nearly closed her eyes as they reached ten feet and kept on going. The tops of the trees looked to be another ten or fifteen feet away.
As they reached the heavy foliage above, the man pushed upward, and the foliage moved away in a nearly perfect square shape, just large enough to accommodate their two bodies. He continued to climb, and Eden gasped.
The tree went up another fifteen feet, through a hole in the roof that was sealed with mud. All around them was wood—chopped timbers worn smooth into planks, forming a structure around her and the man like a tree house.
A tree house? Here?
He crawled across the floor and tapped her legs. She slowly let go and touched her feet down. The wooden floor was as solid as a rock. Eden stared around at the tree house. It had to have been built nearly twenty feet off the ground. The bottom of it was completely camouflaged from below.
“What is this place?” she asked, mostly to herself. She saw a wooden door with a simple flipped latch made with thick rope. A small window-like opening allowed for some minimal light.
The man grunted at her and pointed to a corner of the little structure. Eden saw nothing there. The man moved toward her, and she immediately backed into the corner he pointed to. She fell back, landing on her bottom, and he held up a palm and made that soft chuffing noise again. Did he want her to stay there? He opened the trapdoor and started to climb down the way they had come up.
“Wait! Where are you going?” She started to move, but he grunted and huffed at her, and she halted. He pointed to the corner, and she shifted back to the corner wall, clutching her camera to her chest. He gazed at her a long moment, those blue eyes solid and inscrutable as he watched her. Then he disappeared from view, pulling the trapdoor down behind him.
Eden wasn’t sure how long she sat there staring at the door. After what felt like forever, her muscles relaxed and the tension in her body slowed and seeped out of her. She slumped onto the floor on her side. Her body trembled, and a rush of tears came hard. She cried as the recent events all came back to her. The dead faces of the men and women who’d traveled deep into the impenetrable forest with her. Everyone eager for the experience of a lifetime.
Sweet Maggie, humorous Harold, and all the others whom she’d formed a bond with in so short a time. All dead. Their lives had been snuffed out because they had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
And what about her? She was alive, but was she ever going to get out of the jungle? And who was the beast of the forest who’d saved her? Who was the pale ghost?
1
Twenty-two years ago
Amelia Haywood sat in the small Cessna, her tiny son, Thorne, in the seat beside her.
She grinned and pointed at the dense miles of spreading Ugandan forest far below them. “See? Look at the jungle.” Thorne squirmed and stretched up in his seat to peer out the oval window. Amelia stroked a hand down his dark hair. It was silky as a baby’s, even though Thorne was three years old as of last week.
Thorne pointed a tiny finger at the window. “Mummy!”
“Yes, Thorne, that’s the jungle.”
“Monkey!” He looked down at the child’s picture book in his lap, where it said, M is for monkey. Then he focused back on the window.
“Jacob, how much farther is it?” Amelia asked her husband.
Jacob turned to face her from the seat next to the pilot. His dark hair and vivid blue eyes were a mirror image of their son’s. Thorne looked like her a little too, around the mouth, especially when he smiled. That pleased Amelia, because Jacob always said it was her smile that he dreamed about whenever he closed his eyes. Amelia had never imagined she could love someone as much as her husband, but she did. Jacob and Thorne were her entire world.
“We’ve got about another hour until we get to the airstrip,” Jacob guessed.
Charlie, their hired pilot, nodded. “He’s right, about an hour.”
“Tomorrow we’ll see the monkeys,” Amelia said to her son. She turned the book’s pages until she got to the letter G. A picture of a gorilla was below the letter.
“Gorilla.” She spoke the word slowly and clearly.
Thorne planted his palm on the picture and said loudly, “Monkey!”
“Gorilla,” she said again.
The child turned serious eyes to hers and then said, “Go-willa.”
“Close enough.” Amelia chuckled and reached up to finger the necklace at her throat. It was a small gold chain with a gold ginkgo leaf. Jacob had given it to her on the night he proposed. She’d gotten a ring, of course, a lovely princess cut diamond that was a family heirloom, but Jacob had said he wanted to give her a gift that was special, and this most certainly was.
From the beginning she and Jacob had been a perfect match, both in love with wildlife and conservation. Because of his family’s wealth, they had been able to build a center near Bwindi Impenetrable Forest for park guides and guests to rest and relax before making the trek into the woods to see the gorillas.
They had also donated a large sum of money to support anti-deforestation efforts and a police force to protect the shrinking population of mountain gorillas. For the first time since she had been pregnant with Thorne, they were able to return to Africa, the cradle of civilization.