by Gemma Files
“Have no fear, Lieutenant,” I murmured. “For you may count yourself assured that, even if no else does, I will take care to always award you a place in my memory.”
Grammar blinked, his eyes already red-lined and darkening, as the cilia slowly haemorrhaged. His mouth worked, but words failed him. I brought mine closer, in case a final sentence might yet be forthcoming.
Then he gave a gushing whoop, and laughed out loud, spattering our mutual visage with liquid viscera.
Whereupon—with no regrets to speak of—I bit the mad bastard in half.
And so at last we come to you, o my beloved—little raggamuffin, would-be tourist district date rapist. You, with your fresh-cut fade and precious Apache Indian concert tickets, with barely enough real Hindi under your belt to tell the demure Calcutta girl you once thought I was—when first we met, you all swagger and chatter, spinning yourself a man-sized noose of lies as you steered me towards this oh-so-deserted alley—a dirty joke. Here in this bright, drunken, filthy place, so full of neon and flies, this overhanging crush of shacks where one open window lets slip a lick of the latest Bollywood duet, another the drone of Johnny Cash falling down, down, down. The ring of fire, the endless Wheel, spinning.
You thought me merely a bumpkin to be robbed of her virginity, and yourself the true synthesis of Anglo-Indian culture, post-British Occupation. But I believe you now know better.
The Mutiny of 1857 marked one whole turn of the Wheel for India and Britain alike, replacing up most firmly with down; it gave the British (via the East India Company) a perfect excuse to stay in India, to seize control, to cut down the guilty and the “loyal” as well in their lust for gain. They imposed their own system of values on everything they met: Breaking apart clans, ransacking treasuries, erasing whole villages, disinheriting heirs because they were adopted rather than biological, and deeding the lands involved to a plump little Queen, more concerned with the state of her marriage than with exactly whose bleeding hands all these exotic gifts had been ripped from.
Soon enough, Army replaced Company—but nothing really changed. The British swept in like a tide of cockroaches, mating and killing as they willed, forcing themselves in at the top of our caste system in order to escape their own. They stayed until they had outworn their welcome a thousand times over, until those brought up in India—but still calling an England they had never even seen “Home”—were immune to even its most enticing charms. They maintained their stiff spines upright against heat and dust, forgetfulness, sensual excess and nonviolent protest, clinging to their Indian holdings even as the rest of their duskless Empire crumbled—slowly but surely—from within, until their provisional government here was nothing but a skeleton at the feast, last guest left at a singularly unpopular party, still busily stuffing food down its denuded jaws and protesting all the while (whining like a spoiled child, even as the bouncers edge it towards the door) that it is not sleepy, that it has hours yet to revel, wishes yet to make, and room for much, much more.
At last, however, the British did leave—freeing us to return to the long-postponed business of slaughtering each other over differences of race, creed, history. The Wheel had turned again, as it always will.
Yes, it burns, burns, burns, this ring of fire. It keeps on spinning. And I hope you find it hot enough for your liking, o my beloved, just as the Lieutenant and I do—and have, ever since that night in 1857, when his mad appetites mingled so very surely with my own immortal ones, along with his stringy white meat. That night, when I bit through him at one swallow—rind to pulp, red juice spurting, like an overripe piece of fruit—only to have the taste of him linger not only in my mouth but in every other part of me as well: Infected, infectious, infecting.
Before that night, I had no “true shape” to speak of. It was my curse, and my strength—this restless formlessness; this unstinting, innate empathy pulling me forward through the centuries, making every new thing I touched my potential refuge. This much, at least, has never altered. I can still be anything I choose, if I choose.
But now, whenever I relax my hold, I flow back—relentlessly—into him.
Namesake to namesake: The mask and the mirror. Desbarrats Grammar usurped my title, so I made him my prey; I consumed his flesh, and it engulfed me. What was an accidental mislabeling has become a complex truth. Here in the ring of fire, Lieutenant Grammar and I twine tight as mating heartworms, joined at the supernatural equivalent of DNA—the Mutiny that walks like whatever it chooses to. We catch and claw. And at last, almost two hundred years later—as the Wheel, in our case, fails to turn—between the two of us, each only half-there to begin with, something has finally evolved resembling a coordinated whole. Sub lal hogea hai, with a vengeance; so much so that neither of us—former occupier or former occupied—can truthfully tell where we once began, or where we now end.
For were we ever so very different, really?
Liars both. Madmen, cannibals. And monsters.
Ah, but I see you yet stir in my embrace—so slowly, so feebly. Your lips move. Do you wish to refute my words? To confirm them, perhaps?
Lean closer, then, o my beloved. Do not be shy, but do choose your side wisely. Lean closer, closer. And speak up, I pray thee—for I am still quite deaf in this one ear.
The Guided Tour
Hell eats its tourists.
—Andrew Vachss
SIX CARS HAD ALREADY passed me by without a second glance when Lester P. Budgell’s green Oldsmobile finally lurched, hesitated and ground to a halt. Its passenger-side door opened to reveal a balding, paunchy man with a black string tie and a red and yellow checkered shirt. He had Elvis-length sideburns and tarnished silver caps on the wings of his collar. But I was tired. I had been walking along the highway since dawn. And I am also not as young as I used to be.
“Thank you,” I said, taking his sweaty palm in my cold one.
“No problem, ma’am.”
And then we were off, our tires spraying the blanched dust with dried tar.
As the scenery blurred and the sun sank below the rim of the windshield, torn by advancing clumps of cacti, he became talkative. I might have reminded him of his mother—it has happened before. He told me about his wife, his children and his job running a neighbourhood Piggly-Wiggly store in Arkansas, much of which flowed straight over me. I closed my eyes, took care to nod in the right places, and let my mind wander—something I find increasingly easy to do.
I went inside my head.
Inside my head is a beach that stretches farther than the eye can see in all directions but one. Beside the beach runs the sea. It is always night there, in my house made of driftwood by the cold sea’s side. And sometimes, if I am not careful, the sea begins to rise. It rushes in through all the doors and windows of my house, filling its rooms with little silver fish and the bones of drowned men. Green, and slow, and dark, and deep. I sleep there, under the water, and I am at peace.
“Ma’am?”
I pulled myself back with a jerk. “I am sorry,” I said.
“No problem,” he repeated. “Just wondered what you were doing way out here all by yourself in the first place. Car break down?”
I shook my head. “No, a bus.”
“Seniors’ safari?”
“Excuse me?”
He blushed. “You know—trip for older folks, kinda a package deal? The, uh, guided tour?”
I smiled. He matched it, eager to make amends.
“The guided tour,” I said. “Yes. Exactly.”
Americans have a phrase for everything, as I have often noticed, though few of them ever fit. This particular one amused me. It was neat, easy, and—to a point—accurate. Too simple, of course.
Just like everything else.
“So your bus broke down, and then—?”
“They sent for a tow truck, but I could not afford to wait. So I asked for a refund.” I smiled again, remembering. �
��They did not want to let me go, not out here, in the middle of the desert. But I can be—persuasive.”
“I’ll bet,” he said, so softly he thought I couldn’t hear him.
There was obviously more to him than met the eye. Whether it merited a closer examination, however, had yet to be decided.
“Why, hell,” he exclaimed. “I clean forgot to introduce myself. Les Budgell, ma’am.”
He waited.
“Vassila.”
He frowned. “That’s Russian, ain’t it?”
Give or take a few miles, I thought. But I gave him the old lie, for convenience’s sake: “Ukrainian. I still have relatives there.”
And I might. Anything is possible.
Thankfully, he let it go at that.
Minutes passed. Another road sign flashed by, all white light like an empty mirror set to catch the moon, its words smeared to one big blur.
“Where were you in such a hurry to get to, though?”
I closed my eyes again. I find conversation wearying at the best of times, and this one was fast becoming like having someone rummaging inexpertly around in the back of your mind while he thought you weren’t looking.
“Oh, everywhere,” I said. “And nowhere. I am taking a—working holiday, so to speak. I want to see it all.”
“What all?”
I shrugged. “America.”
He laughed. “That might take some time, ma’am.”
“It already has.”
Being a nomad by nature, it took me many years of painstaking research to finally decide which country I wanted to become a citizen of. After all that rootless freedom, the idea of pledging my allegiance to any kind of flag was intoxicating. I came to America open-handed, all other options exhausted, like a true immigrant. Prepared for anything. Expecting it, in fact.
So far, I have not been too disappointed.
We were approaching the midpoint of our journey, that barren stretch where the bedrock breaks the soil and the houses fall away like a shed skin. Lights got further and further apart. Here and there, on the hills, I saw the fallen stars of night-blooming flowers twist towards the moonlight. Their scent was faint, but bitter.
And Lester P. Budgell began to look at me more often, with a kind of wistfulness.
At last, he cleared his throat.
“Older lady like you,” he began, testing the ground for pitfalls. “Maybe you need someone looking out for you, all alone on a holiday trip. Your kids, maybe.”
“I have no children.”
“Husband, then? Friends?”
“All dead.”
He liked that. Hunger jumped in his eyes, a fact he tried to conceal by immediately transferring his attention to the steering wheel.
“Road’s a dangerous place, ma’am,” he said.
“Oh yes,” I replied. Almost as softly as he had. “I know.”
With that, we reached either an impasse or an understanding. He stared out through the windshield at the dangerous road ahead, reduced by the night to a pair of headlights crawling over the asphalt miles. The car sped on, unhindered by questions, black tar unravelling under our wheels like a spool of funereal ribbon. And the moon looked down.
I shut my eyes one final time, and slept.
* * *
There was a distant explosion.
Some time later, I resurfaced to the dull thud and scrape of a shovel’s blade on sand.
I lay in the back of the car. The hatch was up, obstructing the rear window. I stretched, rose, and stepped out for a better look, pausing only to check myself in the car door mirror.
As I thought. A neat bullet hole bisected my forehead.
Poor Lester. He had his routine down so pat—the “aw shucks, ma’am” country boy spiel was quite believable, and he obviously knew his territory and weaponry inside out. He had had practice. It would be interesting, in an academic kind of way, to try and spot how many similar graves dotted the surrounding hills. Not a lot of imagination to go with his initiative, however. He’d just fallen over a sweet deal and run with it ever since, because it worked too well to risk variation.
And here he was now, down on his polyester knees in the dirt, scratching out a shallow hole big enough for a large child. Or a small woman. His breath came in wheezy gasps as he threw each shovelful aside.
I stood and watched attentively for a few minutes before I tapped him on the shoulder.
“Hello, Mr. Budgell.”
He shrieked and jumped to his feet, dropping the shovel.
“You’re dead,” he said.
“True,” I conceded. “But you cannot really take credit for that.”
He drew the gun without thinking about it, and shot me six times in the chest. Point-blank range. He kept shooting, even after he ran out of bullets.
I yawned.
Then I broke down the door to his head with a single blow, and went inside.
Lester P. Budgell’s house took up his entire inner landscape, although a thicket of blasted trees moped around the front windows, shutting out the light. The house itself had many rooms, most filled with the leavings of his childhood—Playboy playmates whose faces had been erased with exacto-knives, a cat’s head on a spindle set amongst a circle of pastel birthday candles, his older sister Alice’s brassiere. As the upper levels grew gradually more modern, the souvenirs he kept there grew correspondingly more vocal. Some chambers had been sealed for years, and their inhabitants were extremely grateful when I let them go.
The upshot, boring as it seems, was that Lester had been picking up vagrants of both sexes and all ages along this strip of highway since he first got his real job as a travelling salesman. He would lie to them, charm them, take them out into the hills and eventually kill them. If they were female, he would shoot them in the head to preserve their attractiveness and then have sex with the bodies before he buried them. If not, he would hunt them on foot until he grew bored, shoot them in the knees and brain them with the shovel as they tried to crawl away. Two or three a trip, eight trips per year, ten years on the job And none of them had been missed yet.
“Puerile,” I muttered.
Lester sobbed at my feet. His victims’ memory-selves had found the kitchen, and were setting the house on fire. Nothing was exempt from the blaze. All that hard work, too.
It was long past time to be done with this cretin. I leaned forward.
Inside him, a wet red clock kept steady time. But inside me, a hard white clock had begun to tick again. I took his heart in mine and brought our pulses together, gradually speeding up. The buzz of gears filled his brain. A second hand spinning and spinning and spinning.
Then, as one, we struck.
* * *
The moon hid itself behind the next hill as I made my way from the grave Lester had meant for me but now filled himself, staring vacantly upwards at the starless sky. I dipped into a gully filled with nothing but dark, which refreshed me immensely. Rattlesnakes rustled as they fled the sound of my steps. They knew their place on the food-chain too well for self-deception, and I respected that. Unlike humans, they understood that when two predators meet they must both turn away at once and go in opposite directions. Or one will die.
I carried my shoes under my arm, feet bare for better traction, and the desert slipped by in even strides. Sand filled my tracks.
So, my friends. Who, or what, am I anyway?
My name, as I have said, is Vassila. When I was thirteen, I died of a sudden fever. I clearly remember the acrid smell of my own vomit dispersing, with one sharp retch, all the comfort and familiarity of the other smells in our tiny wagon, like the lard simmering in the brass lamp, or the bitter black tea they forced between my lips. I lay without crying, drenched in sweat and stale urine, my muscles pulled taut and trembling. My last memory was of my mother’s hands—one passing over my cracked lip
s in silent benediction, the other offering me a tarnished cross to kiss.
The next time I died, it was from cold and starvation. I woke underground and climbed out just in time to see snow cover the trail of my caravan. The sun dazzled my weak eyes. I stumbled over the stones of my cairn as I struggled to follow, but frost settled deeper on me with each passing hour. My shroud cracked and fell away in rigid shards. My hair froze solid. My bare feet wore smooth on the wasteland, until bone gleamed through where the skin was thinnest. After fifty days, I could go no farther, so I fell on my face and died.
Later, the wolves found me.
The third time I died, I had settled in a tiny village along the foot of the Balkans. My new parents had found me on a high plateau and taken me in. She was a seamstress, he the local blacksmith. That winter was so harsh they could only raise a quarter of their expected crops. So when spring came, the Streltzy swept in like a killing wind and burned them out for failing to meet the Tsar’s taxes. I was caught in the village square as I ran for shelter and passed from horse to horse. The last soldier to use me, sated, turned my head to the east and slit my throat. They rode over my body where it fell, dissolving into the sun.
When I could breathe again, I rose and walked away.
My education was over, at least the essential part of it. There was little, as I had discovered, that could hurt me—and nothing that could kill me. I aged, but slowly. Soon I learned to turn my enemies’ power back upon them. I wandered. It was a long road, and the years went slowly. Many years, many deaths.
In Bruges they burned me as a witch. It took several months for my charred flesh to harden and heal.
In London I caught the Plague. Buboes swelled and burst inside my knees as I knelt to pray.
In Fiorenza, I drank poison and was thrown in the river. I woke to pallid fish grazing at my face, and waded hip-deep in trash to the nearest bank.
In Bogota I was lynched. My boat overturned while crossing from Calais to Dover and no one survived, yet I alone survived. In Paris I fell from a hotel window, crushing bones that knit badly, and the limp lasted twenty years.