Originally published in Adam magazine November 1960 by Paul Fitzsimmons
Harry was considered a thrill-seeker and fancy-minded fellow. A globe-trotting wastrel with inherited monies he had not one-tenth the talent needed to amass on his own.
He was thought of and broadly regarded as a gentleman-adventurer. This was a part he played so fully and with such a flair that few could sensibly dispute it. For, it was his custom on returning from Borneo, Bedouin land or the Brazilian wilds to toss the silliest sort of soirees at his country house; curious, exotic or avant-garde goings on tuned to his latest travels. For example, upon his return from the latest excavations on Crete his guests came in goatskins, drank lots of wine from little stone jugs that he provided and, becoming lubricious, made further obeisance to Bacchus in the bushes. After his sojourn to Java, little bells were affixed every nook and cranny. The summer breeze jangled them sweetly and made the suspended cymbals clash like the hand-clapping of a hundred metallic imps. Balinese dances were done on the patio and impudent dares accommodated by the more handsomely endowed of the ladies present.
Still, Harry himself provided the most memorable touches to these affairs. Once, home from Hyderabad, it was a baby elephant browsing in the shrubbery. Another time, back from the green jungles of the Matto Grosso, dartboards and bamboo blowpipes were the rage of a riotous evening, and the first prize of the affair was a shrunken head, gruesome with skewered nose and lips like burned rubber. As notable was the night after months in India when he dramatically overturned the huge charcoal brazier upon the flagstone patio and proceeded to prance barefoot upon the blazing coals.
Eventually Harry went to New Guinea for two years and two months. Half his acquaintances had forgotten him and half given up hopes for him when invitations began to arrive from Brisbane saying, “- come as a cannibal.”
Five weeks later the first guests, looking but not feeling ridiculous, barefooted about the lawns ooh-ing and aww-ing at the trenched spits, the thatched huts, and the long house on stilts in which the wired lanterns shone on shiny skull-tops, stone hatchets and highly polished primitive masks.
Here it was that Harry pouted a bit.
"Not a decent looking cannibal among you," he chided puristically.
The men frowned, the ladies made easy remarks. Brown-stained, bare as possible, costumed in rags, tags, leaves and loincloths they had gone as native as possible. And after all, really, how did one go "cannibal?"
One, he noticed, had not even bothered to try. She wore a white silk "sack" of simplest line.
She saw his disapproving look and, by way of apology, she made a face at him. He affected to be unimpressed. Before everyone she came over to him, stood on tip-toe, as he bent expecting a whisper, bit sharply on the lobe of his left ear.
"There!" she declared saucily, "doesn't that make me authentic?"
They were the last to leave the long house. "I have your mark," he noted, fingering his ear. "Now I must have your name."
She smiled at his humor. "Felice. I came with the Chamberlains."
"No escort of your own?"
"No."
"Well, you have one now."
They went side by side for a long walk. They sat side by side at dinner. They were still side by side as Harry regaled his guests with a chilling, if not revolting, account of his twenty month stay among the Anaks.
Much liquor had been served by then but no one drowsed. And when Harry spoke of a "surprise" those who had not yet hied themselves to the huts on the lawn were eagerly distracted.
Harry left the house, hurried to the stables and called "Natey" to the shadow in the straw-lot.
Natey was behind him in the gloom of the vestibule as he announced from the archway, "I’ve brought back a real honest-to-god cannibal. His name is Natey and he's a sub-chieftain of the Chakans, a family of the Anaks. I was supposed to have brought him directly to the anthropology people at the Geographic Institute, but I needed a guest of honor."
At this point, Harry was happy to note, all eyes were focused beyond him except Felice's. Her pale eyelids, he thought, were ineffective chaperones to her passionate eyes.
"You'll have to excuse Natey's appearance," he continued. "The Chakans worship the sun and consider it a sacrilege to cover themselves. And, although I can't say how many people he's eaten, I can personally vouch for parts of at least eleven. Now, don't be afraid. He won't bite."
He ushered "Natey" in.
The squat savage stood in the light like a reminder of all that was dark. His splayed-toes curled atavistically into the crush of the carpet; his front teeth, filed to points, bared in a frightening grin; his grayish-wool hair kinked in a monkish bowl across his bony bulging brow.
Harry sensed a lull in the lilt of things. His perception was quickly confirmed. Mady Downes gasped, gurgled, made a vain effort to swallow and spewed a splendid dinner over the splendid rug. Two men muttered and left the room. Alice, who drank sparingly, swooned. Rita, who was something of a weirdy herself, walked right up to Natey and started a shoving grind saying, "you gorgeous thing."
Ernest Chamberlain grabbed his wife and bolted for the door. Passing Harry he snarled, "You rotten clod!"
In a flash the party was a flop, but Harry took heart in Felice's interested gaze. The hell with the rest of them, he thought, herding them homeward.
"Tak pa 'u," he told Natey. "Go above." The cannibal moved to the vestibule.
"I'll be right back," he told Felice. He ran out on the patio and across the lawn tipping over the little thatched huts and kicking and cursing at the naked couples who grabbed at their grass clothes, ran for the driveway and scurried into their Cadillacs. In five minutes the estate was empty. He came back to a silent house and a sweet Felice still in the corner of the divan.
Her look was deep, her eyes dark with exotic interest.
The rage went out of him, desire came desperately in. He felt an extreme titillation at the soft swell of small bosom against the covering silk, seeing almost bowls of white cream with strawberries floating atop them.
Hungrily he reflected on how long it was since he had really had a woman.
"Natey!" he called in a loud comradely tone as he sat down next to Felice. In a moment he felt her tremble strangely as he nibbled delicately on her dainty ear. His appetite surged greedily then. She had begun to struggle.