by Greg James
“Yes, sir.”
“On the double, man. Get weaving!”
“Sir!”
Busy with his saddle, Tom did not see the Lieutenant turn away. His superior coughed hard into his leather-gloved palm and, opening his mouth, drew out a clot of dead, corpse-grey flies, robed in blood and saliva.
With a heavy heart, Tom left the comfort of Mena Camp behind. A strangeness was following him, choosing its moments to make itself known, selecting times when he was alone. That was why he had been hanging around the horse lines -- the safe closeness of so many animal bodies made a fortress of muscle and mane against whatever was after him. But orders were orders and not to be disobeyed, so he had to leave security behind in favour of a fool’s errand.
Finding the Colonel was going to be no easy task. Most likely an impossible one, out here in the ever-changing hills of the desert criss-crossed by a hundred hoof-beaten highways. The sentries had nothing to tell him about the Colonel’s whereabouts, it was down to Tom and Old Duty. Not the kind of one-man mission he had imagined himself undertaking when he first joined up. Old Duty padded on, blinking away the sand flurries raised by his hooves.
The afternoon dragged on and the sun beat down with no sign of the Colonel. Tom and Old Duty passed through the emerald depths of the palm grove and out again. From the crest of a low knoll, he peered in vain for the shades of the Colonel and the Major. There was nothing to be seen, no sign of them at all. Turning his steed, Tom began to head back to Mena Camp, he needed his tea and Old Duty needed water and a nosebag.
But where was the camp?
He could not see it.
The desert could move when she wanted to, true, changing the landscape out of recognition whilst your back was turned but, for that, a strong wind was needed and the wind had dropped off sharply over the course of the afternoon, falling away to no more than a whisper, a murmur. Tom did not recognise the land onto which he now looked; Old Duty neighed, snorted and shook his head.
Tom wondered if the horse was equally as confused.
Why not?
Just because animals don’t speak doesn’t mean they’re inferior, considering the shit some people talk, Tom thought. He wondered if it in fact made them superior. Scratching at an itch he dismissed his tangent of thought, the rights of animal and man could be reasoned out another day. Right now, he was more concerned with getting himself back to Mena Camp, to lose oneself in the desert on a simple search-and-find job was not something he wanted to get around the camp. He giddied Old Duty up and they trotted on, hoping for a signpost marking the way home.
Afternoon gave way to evening; bright white, yellow and blue dissipating into augurous shades. The camp was nowhere in sight but he should come to one of the villages soon.
Yes, no doubt about it, that had to be right.
Soon, very soon.
It was evening and the moon overhead burned with a mouldering light. Tom mopped sweat from his forehead and the nape of his neck. His palms were clammy, his stomach was sore, and he was feeling a rush of sickness passing through him not dissimilar to the time he had seen that strange flare of colour outside of the tent. Closing his eyes, he let himself slump forward against Old Duty’s broad neck, letting the horse be his support. He could smell feed and manure on the warm hide of his mount as the world drifted away into a drowsy fuzz.
Old Duty stopped with a jolt and a snuffle of disquiet. Tom snapped upright into his saddle, awake, alert, taking in his surroundings. It was dark, too dark, the air was cool but not fresh, mouldy and ripe instead. Old Duty pawed the ground with a hoof. Tom listened to it striking on a hard surface, not sand, beneath them.
They were underground.
Looking back over his shoulder, Tom saw a wide shaft of moonlight illuminating the slope that Old Duty must have descended.
What could be down here?
His eyes slowly adjusted. He could make out a curving, crumbled ceiling. There was no stir to the air, no sound or sign of life, why was it then that Tom did not feel alone down here? Unwatched?
A spidery crawling nagged away at the nape of his neck. He scratched at it. A voice from nowhere was sounding inside his skull and he found that his hands were urging Old Duty onwards. The impulse was one with the beat of his heart, the flow of blood through his veins, he could feel it, so intense, a black, churning gravity. Something was calling, something was waiting, something old that should have been dead long ago.
The catacombs were like nothing on earth he had seen or heard of; slabs of stone onto which hieroglyphic designs had been painted were cracked, worn away by the unceasing caresses of erosion. The high vaults were on the scale of a cathedral. The masonry was a honeycomb of opaque and transparent heptagons that filtered an incandescent web of moonlight. The luminous walls seemed to flicker and pulsate with designed tongues of black flame. Old Duty made his way around piles of glittering rubble, blocks of shattered, cyclopean stone that had fallen into state centuries ago, Tom could see the edges smoothed away by the passage of time. There were no more inclines, slopes or any visible signs of descent but Tom could feel that they were going down. The geometry of the place was slightly off. The glowing surfaces distorting his form and that of Old Duty's, shifting perspectives in a way that hurt his eyes, a constant rate of deviations that ended up leading down, down, down and deeper down through prisms that were vast memorials to decay, a glacial moon-silver rabbit warren cut into the Earth’s crust - by whom, by what?
“They'd have to be big fucking rabbits, that's for sure.”
A hand closed over his shoulder, ice-cold. He looked around. No-one there. It had felt like a woman’s hand, he had not imagined that touch, its tightness. He was sure of it. He shivered. Old Duty trotted on, further in. Tom made no move to stop his mount's progress, he could not though he willed his hands to do so. Perhaps, the horse heard the call too and was following it, the voice from nowhere, the words it said, over and over.
“...all hail the Grey Dawn...”
They went deeper, much, much deeper.
The sloping passage before them became slithering black stone, a slick and shining trail. Tom could taste disease down here, at the back of his throat, it was the acridity of manure and it was not the leavings of a horse. His forehead was breaking out in cold oily rivers. He did not want to but he had to go on. He jerked the reins, Old Duty descended towards the lightless portal that was waiting for them. Behind them, there were sounds gathering, following, so hungry, starved for so long, aching to feed on life, on blood, on dreams and nightmare once more.
The blackness burst open before him, forming a crude hole, swallowing the last of the light. Another step, then another, echoes oscillating and reverberating away. Tom could see, but only just, through the sepulchral gloom. The chamber was circular and hewn by hand from the rock, by hands Tom had never seen the likeness of. There were no religious markings here; no altar, no idols, no ornamentation, but there was an atmosphere, something had happened here, there was a taste of it in the dead air, soiled, unripe and rancid. At regular junctures around the singular wall were mirrors; cracked, crusty and unpolished, casting dirty black ghosts of the man and his horse who were disturbing the silence and the sleep of buried ages. The chamber was as neglected as the rest of the catacombs but it felt more alive. There was a subtle caustic electricity that made Tom grind his teeth. The mirrors were ovals of shimmering Grey; their surfaces, underneath the filth coating them, were not still but alive and writhing, seeming to hunger, making themselves ugly with consuming shapes and mist.
Old Duty whinnied.
Tom could hear the voice clearly now. It was the sound of seized vocal cords grinding crustily against each other. It was the Grey in the mirrors chuckling to itself. The dirty glass strobed, gushing black light and white darkness. He watched black and white dance and fight whilst the Grey swept in, overcoming him, flowing over everything, endlessly awful in its configurations. Someone, somewhere close, was laughing, and somewhere else, further o
ut, very far away, a bell was tolling out dismay as Thomas Potter was shown what was to come. He saw himself, old, despairing and alone. The sad, heavy eyes of the reflection bored into his - telling him everything, all that he did not want, nor need to know.
Old Duty reared up, crashing a hoof hard against the ground, shaking Tom free from his reverie. He fell back into his saddle. What the hell had he just seen? Something happened, he remembered, these horrible things came crawling out from some black hole, called by the war, the blood and the screams.
Things called Vetala.
A high-pitched wailing sounded in his ears, then it broke apart, becoming a fractured cry, shaking the structure of the chamber, sending down a thick, scattering rain of dust and chattering pebbles. The chamber shook again. There was a rumbling, deep and resonant, coming in thunderous shockwaves from the mirrors. They were trembling in their hewn frames, making nodules of gooseflesh rise along Tom's spine.
He could see them coming.
They were approaching through the shifting depths. Trembling, unquiet limbs that bled into one another and then split apart into wiry, disjointed tendrils, their bodies were hungering fluxes of scabrous rat-skin. They were made of black pearl eyes that shone out, boils embedded in fleshy socket-nests, with dilating vortices for pupils and mouths. Many mouths were forming in their flesh; toothy chasms murmuring a mantra, black teeth grinding out darkness.
Tom kicked his mount hard in the sides, hauling sharply at the reins, making the horse cry out but the animal needed little more encouragement to flee from the mirrors when it saw the ferocious forms that were emerging there. The rest became a blur, a bare memory of sound and fury, of roaring through those windless tunnels. The beasts were at Old Duty’s back all the way; leaving bites, scratches and bruises too. The masonry of the underground temple seemed to be bleeding them; more and more black-eyed, grey-skinned ghouls, champing their teeth. Everywhere he looked Tom saw them gaining substance, then giving chase, and those same damned words seeming to burn in the silver of the walls and the sulci of Tom's racing brain.
He chanced a look behind and wished he had not. He saw them becoming one; slithering together into a shapeless, fibrous bulk that was swamping space, flowing through it, leaving no inch of surface untouched. Tom could hear their dry hides rustling as they surged after the pounding hindquarters of Old Duty, lapping and snatching at the horse’s hooves. His steed cried out as it felt the fleshy slime licking over its rear. Tom clung to Old Duty’s neck, holding on tight, banging his heels against the animal’s sides, knowing that he was hurting the animal, not caring. He had eyes only for the churning miasma of spidery blight behind them. He could feel those freezing claws raking him, tearing at his tunic, then his skin would be next, stripped bare, peeled, left to bloodily twitch, writhe and scream. It howled from its teeming mouths, almost upon them. Time to die.
Tom closed his eyes tight.
Then, they were out, on the surface, on the sand, out, out, out!
Tom laughed hard. He bayed at the beautiful moon, listening to the hissing and the cries of things born from the blackness below, defeated, outrun. The depression in the desert was swallowing itself already, something becoming nothing.
Then it was gone.
Tom let the reins fall loose from his hands.
Old Duty’s pace slackened. His panic was settling, heart and lungs no longer beating and gasping in earnest drama, he let the horse relax and breathe. The underground place was gone, a black dream drowning in the desert's sands. With it, fear was departing too, leaving animal and man to find some peace.
The animal would find it.
The man would not.
Tom and Old Duty passed into a village. Children were sporting in the dust, screaming with delight as they bested each other in their matches of wrestling and tickling. Remembering, with the same clarity as that of a drunken man why he was out in the desert, Tom called to them for help.
“Saida!”
The children stopped their games and ran up to the bedraggled man and his horse. They watched him dismount and approach them, trying to smile, extending his hands.
The man’s face was so thin, haunted and wasted, the teeth. And those eyes.
The children screamed a name.
“Vetala!”
Chapter Eight
Tom watched his reflection shimmer in the windows of the Night Bus, watched it flee before the Vetala as he had done so many years ago. So long they had let him live and why? He didn't know why or how, all he knew was that it hurt to live so long. He listened to the clatter of more passengers boarding. Then, the Bus’s engine caught-
... pokita-pokita-pokita ...
-and they were moving again. And Tom was drifting back to the place where pharaohs and older secrets were buried beneath shifting seas of silica, quartz and sand.
*
Tom made it back to Mena Camp as the sun was coming up; the desert air was cool, the sweat on both him and his steed was a shining morning dew. There was no fanfare, no celebration of his return, if a man was foolish enough to lose himself in the sands, that was his own affair.
The order had come in for them to break camp, it was time to head for the Dardanelles and the cliffs of Gallipoli. Tom felt his heart quicken at the news, not out of eagerness to join the fight but because it meant he would be away from here, he would not be sorry to leave this part of the world, its strange visions and buried labyrinths behind.
Afternoon was bleeding into sombre evening as Tom and his mates mounted up and made their way out of Mena Camp. The road to Cairo was choked with vendors, news of their departure had travelled fast so cheers and ecstatic cries sent them on their way. Hands dangling with keepsakes and medallions plucked at their ankles and thighs, as the well-wishers sought to ply a few more coins from them before they were gone for good.
Old Duty whinnied and trotted on the spot as the insistent press of money-hungry men became heavier. Tom dug in his heels and brought the horse to heel. Old Duty was still shaky from the night before, whatever had happened to them the nag was still spooked by it. Tom pushed it from his mind as best he could. They had outrun it, left it behind, and now they were leaving the desert.
After another turn in the road, the crowd thinned out, much to his relief. Taking the reins in one hand, Tom took a smoke from his top pocket and jammed it into the corner of his mouth. He squinted as he looked up ahead, watching Cairo drawing nearer; its bazaars, eating houses, markets and picture shows. He lit the cigarette with his lighter, puffing out a soothing stream of smoke. Tom daydreamed, retreating into himself, wondering how many of them were riding to their deaths? Who amongst them, horses and men, would end up rotting under the sun before it was all over?
Then, they were in the city streets of Cairo, weaving through the clamouring crush of guides, tourists, camels, donkeys, carriages and nervous touts. The countless strange and tempting smells that haunted the back alleys seeped out to see them off. Tall houses, their windows alight, frowned down on them, as bodies of all races, shades and fashions were milling through the broad thoroughfares. Men bawled at unsteady donkeys to go faster, merchants hailed the soldiers, promising them good prices on Persian carpets, charms and necklaces. Stale meat, butter and mouldering vegetables lay on slabs in the cooling shade, and from balconies, olive-faced girls called out to the soldiers, dozens of wolf-whistles and crude proposals replied until old men came out to usher the girls inside, remaining to watch the young boisterous cannon-fodder passing on its way towards the hungry, grinding teeth of the Front.
The soldiers crossed a lamp-lit bridge over the Nile, and were soon enough at the railway station, with the whistles of the waiting engines piercing the chatter.
“Halt!”
They were in a square overrun by vehicles, milling men and horses.
“Gangway!”
“Move, man! You're as useless as you are fat!”
“Out of the way, you!”
“Control your horse, mate. He nearly
had me toes off.”
“Pack it this way in, not that way, you bloody idiot!”
The train was drawn up by the platform. Officers and orderlies guiding men, horses and gun carriages to their coaches. Tom made sure that Old Duty was watered and given his nose-bag. It would be a long journey for the animal in the train. He looked into the black shells of his mount’s eyes, wondering what he was thinking.
It was late when all was ready.
“All aboard!”
Tom bustled, shoulder to shoulder, into his allocated carriage with his comrades. Through the ensuing scramble for good seats, Tom managed to claim one by the window. The lighting in the carriage was a dingy flicker that hurt his eyes. His stomach rumbled but there had been no time to acquire food before boarding though none of what he had seen on offer had been very appetising. One old vendor had been plying his trade in the station square with a tray of dry, sad-looking pastries becoming the source of loud bargaining and swearing. The train chuntered along its tracks, conversations died out, becoming mutters, then tired sighs. There were no lights now, bar the stars, visible through the grimy carriage window.
Tom yawned hard, closed his eyes a moment, opened them and saw something was different, wrong. It got dark quickly, all around, very dark, all light draining away, and he was shut inside a room where the glass of the window was wired. He could see it shining, webbing in some opaque piece of reflection; dim, smudged unreal and unclear. He held his hands up before his eyes and he saw them as shadow puppets, coming apart from the clinging stygia of the room. Moving his fingers, he watched them wriggle obligingly.
There were shapes in the room. He could not see them as more than grainy patches, absences of space registering on his retina, that strange blind awareness of air being occupied. They barked on his shins, proving their existence. A slop bucket, unemptied, fell over. He put his foot in something spongy, moist and watery.