the drums were creepy , true enough , reminding him of a hundred low-budget jungle epics ( mostly watched on tv with henry by his side and a bowl of popcorn between them ) where the fabulous lost cities the explorers had come looking for were in ruins and the natives had degen-erated into tribes of blood-thirsty cannibals , but eddie found it impossible to believe something like that could have happened in a city that looked , at least from a distance , so much like new york .