AV

The rhythmical beating of the drums gradually increased in sound, intensity and speed and then slowed again, coming in waves with the sound beaten in time by dark-skinned men clothed only in loincloths and daubed with patterns of black and red paint. The animal skin strung bongos and tambourines shook and banged deliriously in their hands while the women danced naked and in time to their Amazonian orchestra.

The pitches of their voices raised and lowered in song chanting with the incoming and outgoing waves of sound emanating from the drove of people that danced around and around the blazing fire that leapt bright golden sparks and crackling cinders high into the night sky.

Aldous was differentiated by his tall, gangly body with a pale white face whose full mop of curly hair bobbed wildly in the moonlight. His torso was dressed only the meagre dull white loin cloth and he was painted shoulder to toe in shades of ochre, reds and blacks as the local tradition dictated. He joined the melee of bodies and copied the native tribal Indians in hand and feet synchronicity, dancing vulgarly and out of time to the indigenous tribe who had danced this rhythm so many times before.

Overtaken with nausea that filled his upper body with a sudden convulsion, Aldous left the mass of jiving bodies and dived for the surrounding circle of trees holding his jaw tight as if set in stone. Unable to contain himself any longer he projectile vomited the sour mush that he had consumed two hours before.

Bent over, stomach cramped and heaving from the exertion Aldous wiped the vile phlegm from around his mouth and shook his hand violently before leaning down to clean his hand further on the tall grass. The gentlest humming filled his ears and he spied a dark black beetle making its way through the manhandled stems parted by his dirtied hand.

The hum that filled his eardrums crackled like static, but above and separate to the background drumming cacophony a tick, tick, tick became audible and then stopped. Two seconds passed and then the tick came again. Three audible clacks.

I definitely heard it? Aldous half-questioned and settled his doubts internally.

It’s only a beetle.

He inquisitively and instinctively reached his hand toward it. As his hand neared the beetle the clacks changed rhythm.

Click-click, click-click, click-click.

Aldous retrieved his hand from the beetle’s near proximity.

Clack, clack, clack

Placing his hand closer once again the noise altered to its former repeated sound.

Click-click, click-click, click-click.

Unable to process the change automatically, Aldous, was consumed by another fit of vomiting. His body was dripping with cold sweat and the night light that emanated from the giant fire and the full moon altered its intensity before his very eyes. The colours in his retinas switched to an electric hue. Vivid colours burst in the corners of his eyes like lightning bolts shooting across his field of vision.

Aldous collapsed once again, almost fainting into a heap and then curled into a ball.

“Food. Food. Food.” Came the sound.

Aldous just listened.

“Food. Food. Food.” Came a scratchy and pulsing noise.

Where is that coming from? Aldous asked himself.

While lying on the damp ground he could see the same beetle steadfastly making its way through the undergrowth.

He raised his hand from his lying position and reached out to the large, black shiny insect.

“Danger, danger, danger.” The scratching voice was discernible.

“Whoah! I can’t believe it!” Aldous’ voice was hoarse from the sickness but still overwhelmingly joyous and childlike. His eyes were wide opened with wonder and he moved his fingers in a wave-like pattern in curiousness. Blue light left a neon trace in their wake.

His pupils were dilated like flying saucers and bloodshot, but the electric shades that filtered through his eyesight couldn’t be seen by outside observers.

“Food. Food. Food.” Came the clacks.

It must be attracted to my vomit Aldous concluded.

Aldous sat up and became aware that the night sky was filled with clicks and clacks, buzzing and chirping. He closed his eyes and opened them again.

A huge moth descended from the sky and landed on his arm.

“Zip. Zip. Zip.”

Aldous moved his head to fix on the new sensation that tickled his arm.

The night insect’s proboscis unfurled and licked the saturated skin.

“Salt. Salt. Salt.”

Aldous watched the creature as large as child’s hand feed.

“Moon. Moon. Moon.”

Now gorged, the brown-winged moth alighted into the night sky zipping its song.

A man in a bird feather headdress approached the now sitting Aldous. He bent down and spoke in faltering broken American accented English.

“The two wings, three clicks” The olive-skinned Indian was missing his two front teeth and grinned a toothless smile pulling Aldous up with his outstretched hand and leaning on his spear in the other for leverage.

“It’s amazing Rapau!” Aldous called out a greeting to the Chieftain, still in his childlike mimicked voice revelling in the hallucinogenic effects of the potion.

“Two wings, three clicks?” Aldous considered the statement transfixed by the outer body feeling and the most mind-blowing event that has ever happened to him.

“Yes, the insect,” Rapau explained.

“All of the insects repeat themselves three times,” Rapau added with a deadpan tone.

“Clicks?” Aldous laughed. He laughed until his chest pained him. He fell to the floor once again and held his belly, reaching hysteric heights.

When he finally stopped laughing from the muscle spasms that inflicted aches Aldous garbled through a frothing mouth.

“This creature is actually speaking. It is not clicking or clacking anymore.”

“It was three clicks though, wasn’t it?” Rapau replied calmly in his American lilt.

Aldous had difficulty taking this all in.

“Well, it was more of a clack at first. Then it was a click and then.” Aldous’s voice trailed off into silence. He dramatically threw his hands around his head rapturously while returning to a ball like position, embryonic-like on the floor.

“It is different for everyone,” Rapau said quietly and calmly nonplussed, as if to himself knowing the state Aldous was in, having experienced it on numerous occasions himself. He knew that for most people insects repeated themselves 3 times in their simplistic world and in the Amazon, a lot of insects flew.

“What did it say?” Rapau questioned Aldous.

“Food three times.” Aldous couldn’t believe these words were coming from his own mouth.

Rapau nodded knowingly having hardly ever heard anything cryptic or meaningful come from the world of the invertebrates.

Finally, two wings, three clicks dawned on the unsettled, tripping and racing mind of Aldous.

“You mean to say that it is not just me. That this is just not all in my head?” Aldous’ eye’s remained fixed and then flew up following the electric lightning bolt that cracked through his vision.

“I can actually talk to animals on this stuff?” Aldous was remarkably lucid for a moment considering the circumstances.

“No, you can’t talk to animals. You can only listen!” Rapau corrected the gibbering wreck on the floor.

The chief took his arm once again and pulled him up to his wavering feet.

“Come!” He commanded and guided Aldous towards the large, central reed thatched hut where the tribal families live as a large commune.

Outside a mother sat with her child in her arms. The child had a dirty face and attached to the child on a long piece of vine string, a tiny baby capuchin monkey had pulled the vine tight and climbed on to the door frame of the mud hut.

Tugging on the string, the tiny furry large-eyed and overly cute creature chirruped from its perch.

“Stranger smell. Scary smelly. Funny look animal. Daddy, daddy!” The monkey jumped on to the shoulder chirruping to the small child anxiously.The child couldn’t make out its voice other than its normal animal chatter.

“It is like a child itself!” the amazed Aldous spoke.

“It is a baby monkey.” The Indian chief explained.

“Can you hear it too?” Aldous looked at the now sweetest and tenderest human-like animal he had ever set eyes upon.

“Like you, I have heard it, but it is not the same for you as it is for me.” Rapau tried to explain to the warped perceptions of the twisted and drugged mind.

“It is different to you but the same. We understand its feelings. We feel its emotions.”

Aldous did his best to unravel this miraculous event.

“Of course!” The lights of realisation in his mind conjoined with pulses of light before his eyes.

“We don’t speak the same language. How could we hear the same voice?”

The lightly tanned fur ball continued its chatter.

“Red. Sweet. Gooey.”

“Red, sweet and gooey yummy!” The monkey expressed its thoughts out aloud and pawed at its child owner with dark eyes forever set to implore mode.

The child ignored his pet’s constant desire for fruit and was used to the talk and jabber his companion made, but Aldous was absolutely transfixed by the transformed voice.

The voice sounded alien in character, like a sci-fi movie casting and although he could make out the words the sound was not human-like. It was otherworldly, distinct and nothing like he had ever heard before. This voice wasn’t a complex statement or profound sentence and Aldous realised that this wondrous creature had the intellect his young toddler nephew had, perhaps aged 2 he thought.

He had to find something older. He had to discover the voice of an adult animal.

Aldous now a little more gainly on his feet, wandered the small village slowly with his guide and teacher Rapau.

The potion still affected Aldous’s vision and concentric patterns and shapes appeared, flashed and travelled both in his eyeballs and outside in the shared universal earthly one, but the sweating had abated, and nausea had eased.

Rapau called out the name Lupo and a mature dog howled automatically in response to its master.

Aldous heard a deep and hoarse sound that he thought to be the word, “Hunting”

“Hunting, hunting, now. Hunting in the dark time.” Came the excited and hoarse voice.

The small, dark and thin dog bounded towards the pair, tongue lolling with sharp eyes that pierced the gloom.

“Oh, glorious one and who is this. A new master.”

It was though when the dog questioned itself there was no rise in intonation. There was no question mark to Lupo’s sentences Aldous thought.

“Strange smell. What is that. Yuk.”

Aldous realised that the dog must be smelling his deodorant or mosquito repellent. I must smell different to the others in the village Aldous quickly concluded.

His voice was made up and based on the whimpers, pants and throat noises the dog expelled. It was remarkably different to the baby monkey and this one had a much more sound and smart reasoning.

A howler monkey sounded its loud call and the dog jumped. The word, “Jaguar’ echoed around the forest in this baritone howling voice.

Aldous felt a wave of fear run through his spine. It was almost as though he felt what the dog felt for a moment. To hear its voice was enough to take on board for the moment, but to literally feel its emotions was a whole new level of puzzlement and awe.

The dog bounded and retreated in the direction it came from, trotting on its soft pads in the direction of the howler monkey and Aldous was set upon by tiredness that closed his eyes of their own accord. Aldous felt his body go weak and he crumpled to the ground, just managing to hold his hands out in self-protection from the oncoming fall.

Rapau and his fellow tribesmen carried Aldous to the main lodge and settled him into a hammock to sleep of the effects of the mind and conscious altering flower medicine that had taken him to a new level of understanding that the Western society could not begin to fathom.