‘You should pride yourself on having evaded my clutches so long,’ he said as he trudged, red-faced, breathless with exertion.
I sneered.
‘Why? It wasn’t difficult.’
Elliot let go my feet, stood with his palms in the small of his back, stretched out his crooked spine. Then he spat in the dust, stepped forward, kicked me in the head. All went black.
While out, I had an uncanny vision. In it, I perched on the top step of a large marble staircase that jutted bizarre from a barren grey waste girded round by sawtooth mountains. Dark clouds scudded across the sky, away to the west, as if driven before a gale, though I couldn’t feel a breath of wind. Rents in the rack gave glimpses of a pale winter sun. A brass handrail, supported by marble balusters, ran down each side of the staircase. The lower ends were ornamented with intricate clockwork orreries whose planets and moons described eccentric orbits.
A lone horseman was crossing the plain towards me from the west, slumped forward in the saddle. With a knife far too large for the task, he was paring an apple, dried, withered, worm-eaten, mould-flecked. He wore a suit, a long wool overcoat, and a hat with a wide floppy brim, which he’d pulled down low over his eyes. He and his mount, a skittish starveling stallion, were so greyed by dust thrown up by the horse’s splayed and bloody hooves, they seemed moulded from the stuff of the waste they passed through.
On reaching the staircase, the rider dismounted, tethered his horse by its reins to one of the orreries, put his knife into a pannier slung over the animal’s flank, and sat down on one of the lower steps. Then he bit into the bad apple. I watched as he ate the fruit slowly, painstakingly, all of it, even the blackened core.
Then, getting to his feet, he crossed over to the stallion again, reached into the pannier, rummaged around, drew something out, concealed it in his coat. He turned, began climbing the stairs. As he did, he raised his head to look up at me under his hat brim. I saw it was the young chieftain whose act of kindness towards me had cost him his life. But his face was that of the severed head on the spike, not the living man, resembled the apple he’d just eaten, its skin puckered, rot-speckled, flesh-grub pocked, its orbits, hollow pits.
It was only when he reached the top of the stairs and stood over me, I realized how tall he was; he towered over me, blotted out the stars. I stood up, came only to his knees. He took out the thing he’d hidden in the folds of his coat. A fish of a kind I didn’t recognize: big lumpy skull, flat wide tail, droopy barbels. It was putrid, reeked. Hunkering down, the chieftain shook it in my face, spattering me with stinking gleet from its mouth.
‘I wanted to show you this,’ he then said. ‘Look here.’
He pointed out four appendages hanging, limp, from the dead fish.
‘These are vestigial limbs, not inchoate ones. Do you see!’ Suddenly he was shouting, and I was bowed over backwards, a sapling in the teeth of a storm. ‘The creatures of the land are returning to the sea. Creation is in disarray!’
‘What?’ I asked. ‘Isn’t this the end of the world, anyway?’
He shook his head slowly.
‘You don’t understand,’ he said, quiet once more. ‘It was too much to hope you would, I suppose.’
He shook his head, weary, went back down to his horse, unhitched it, clambered into the saddle, rode off. I watched him crossing the plain, back the way he’d come. The sun hung low over the mountains in the west, and he and his mount cast a long scraggy shadow behind them, the shadow of some spindly monstrosity. Then the orb impaled itself on the peaks to the west, went down gushing blood, and the light grew dim, then gloomy, then dark. I stood, mute and motionless as a stone, in that utter black.
Then I was riding a tiger loping swift through the air, flat grey ocean below. I clung on with a fierce grip, hands buried in the beast’s fur. Looking ahead, I saw we approached a range of vapour like a limitless cataract rolling silently into the sea from some immense and far-distant rampart in the heaven. When we were almost on this pallid veil, I came to. Just before, I saw a giant shrouded human form looming in the mist…
I found myself lying on my back, on dank earth, pain making an uproar in my skull, a glaring ray falling across my eyes. I turned my head out of the dazzle, looked about. I was in a circular cell with stone walls: the roundhouse. All was gloom save the bright sunlight spearing in through a gap where the door had been left ajar. Gyves were chained to the walls, and though they were new, gleamed, it occurred to me the place was probably originally built, at a time long past, as a lock-up.
Elliot hunkered in the dark near the door, breathing hard, glaring ireful. Seeing me stir, he grinned.
‘Well, finally got you. The most cunning of all. Much more resourceful than you seemed. I thought you so unworldly.’
‘But what of…the young man, the smoker?’ I’d almost called him William. ‘He held out nearly as long.’
‘No. I found him centuries ago. Holed up beneath the ruins of London. In ancient sewage tunnels. I thought he might be my last remaining beguilement, so I toyed with him a good while before killing him.’ Elliot smirked. ‘I wondered if I’d been mistaken about you, thought perhaps eternity hadn’t been wakened in your breast. If you hadn’t come back here, I mightn’t have ever realized you were still living.’
I cursed bitterly. Elliot cackled.
‘Yearning for home wax too strong, did it?’
I cast him a sullen glance.
‘Where’ve you been hiding all this time?’
I turned my head away from him, spat.
‘No matter. Soon you’ll be telling me everything for just an eyeblink free of pain.’
I was rattled, but shammed bravery, laughed, taunted him.
‘You aren’t frightening, you know. More…Ridiculous.’
His face clouded. He crossed over, taking a stubby knife with a wooden handle from a sheath hanging at his belt. I guessed it was the Tartarean blade he’d spoken of that night in the Nightingale, and hoped, enraged, he’d plunge it in me, finish me. But that wasn’t to be, he was in command of his temper. Instead he used the knife to cut through my bonds, then, twisting his fingers in my hair, hauled me to my feet. I stood there tottering, reeling, queasy.
‘Come on, you poltroon, you pigeon-hearted prick!’ he bellowed.
I set my teeth, steeled myself. I’d provoke, stand still, unresisting, take the beating as well as I could, choke groans, whimpers. Elliot sparred at me a little, but then, realizing I wasn’t going to put up a fight, belying the infirmity he’d shown before, picked me bodily up, hurled me to the floor. The air was driven from my lungs, I bit my tongue. Cowering away, I crawled backwards till I struck the wall, then slumped against it, struggled to get my breath back, the salt tang of blood in my mouth.
‘Nowhere to run now, rat.’
He capered towards me, warbling a ditty in Punch’s cracked, tuneless voice.
Right foll de riddle loll,
I know a craven soul.
He hid like a rat,
But I found him out,
And dragged him from his hole!
I lay down on my side, drew my knees to my chest, wrapped my head in my arms. Elliot vented his wrath. He pummelled, kicked, stomped.
‘Hee, hee, hee. Weakling. You’re pitiful!’
I drifted away once more.
When I came to this time, I found Elliot had clapped me in the roundhouse’s manacles, wrists and ankles. The iron chafed, bit. I lay on the floor, up against the wall. The door was shut, but it wasn’t too dark, chinks between the slates overhead and the stones of the walls let in slender blades of sunlight. These put me in mind of the ever-popular sword-cabinet illusion, which I’ve seen a number of conjurors perform in my time. If you don’t know it, my reader, it’s as it sounds: a cabinet, containing an assistant or volunteer, is run through with rapiers; the assistant or volunteer remains, of course, ‘magically’ unharmed. This recollection caused me to mull the nature of memory generally. It struck me that its ability to dr
aw such apt analogies, the basis, I’d hazard, of all invention, swells with its hoard of reminiscences. Thinking this, a clammy dread threw its coils round me, for I realized, given the aeons he’s lived for, even though his recall isn’t suited to eternity, Elliot is doubtless horribly creative, is unlikely to fail to dream up some awful torment for me.
As I lay there, pondering my fate, the door opened, and Elliot entered, now in the guise he’d adopted for the gathering at the Nightingale, that genial old man. I wondered if this was his true or habitual form. I’d thought it would solace me for him to abandon the form of Punch, but I actually found this aspect even more disquieting, for it suggested benignity. Though it had hinted at a weakness alien to the stuff of Elliot’s being, the hooknose’s loathsome phizog had been truer to his antic evil.
Elliot was followed by a tribesman who carried a bulging sack. Elliot gestured and the tribesman emptied it out on the mud, left. I looked over at the heap: the tribeswoman’s and my meagre things.
‘There’s nothing there that’ll interest you,’ I croaked.
But Elliot ignored me, began to go through the pile. He first spent some time scrutinizing the typewriter, turning it about in his hands. Then exclaimed, ‘Ah!’, nodded to himself, put it down, and began looking through the remaining stuff. It wasn’t long before he came across this document. He riffled through its pages, looked perplexed, scratched his head. Then he arched his eyebrows, grinned, giggled nastily, put the document down, rubbed his hands together in glee.
I ranted then, begged him not to destroy my work. He turned to me, said, ‘We’ll see,’ then took up my papers again, left the roundhouse, sniggering.
He left me alone some time. At first I lay still, tried to sleep, but the ground was too hard, the gyves strained, so I squirmed, sat up, leant against the wall. This took some time, fettered as I was. I was then a little easier in my body, and my mind was free to wander, and I was afflicted by terrible anxiety, terrified Elliot had taken my memoir away to burn it.
But, when he later returned, it appeared I’d been granted a reprieve; he held my tale in his hand.
‘This isn’t all that bad,’ he said. ‘I found it quite gripping, am dying to know how it ends.’
He chuckled.
‘The tone is overwrought, though, and some of the writing stilted, mannered.’
I lifted my head from my chest, where it lolled, went to spit, but my mouth was too parched.
‘Just a little constructive criticism,’ he jeered. ‘Anyway, don’t worry, I’m not going to destroy it, much as it would hurt you, and give me pleasure. I’ve devised a more apt torture. I know you won’t be able to resist continuing your narrative, whatever you have to suffer. Besides I’m itching to read your account of all that’s happened today. You can get on with it straight away.’
‘But I’m too weak to write now,’ I said.
‘Well then, you’ll have something to drink and to eat. That should get your strength up.’
And that’s why I’ve spent the last few hours in the roundhouse, seated at a small rickety wooden desk, composing the foregoing story of my capture. After Elliot had brought in the desk and chair, placed the things that clutter its surface there – my typewriter, an oil lamp to see by, a tin mug filled with water, and a dish containing salty scraps of bacon rind and stale crusts of bread – unlocked the shackles, and sat me down, he told me to write it as swiftly as I could, to call out for him once I was done. I’d no need to bring things to a fitting end, he said, as there’d be more to set down.
Then, before leaving, he tore my nails from the quick and flayed my fingers to the knuckles with a rusty paring knife. Typing is agony. But as he surmised, I’ve been driven to write on in spite of the pain. The typewriter is gory, I worry its mechanisms might become clotted, and these pages are covered with gruesome smears.12 Yet, to me, the blood I’ve shed is the blood of a birthing, for as my life draws near its end, so inevitably does this tale, which is a record of it, and I feel proud I, whose aeonial existence has been so barren, will leave something entire behind me, that, despite its many faults, will endure, perhaps, and this is my greatest hope, to find a reader other than my murderer.
XII
When I’d finished writing the foregoing chapter, I called out as told, and Elliot came, took the pages and the oil lamp away, put me back in manacles.
Sat there in the gloom, I must have drifted asleep, for the next thing I knew, I woke with a start to a din. It was still dark, but whether I’d not drowsed long and it was the same night, or had slept the day away and it was the next, I’ve no way of knowing. The row was coming from outside. Exultant howling, drumming, the pounding of dancing feet. Through the chinks in the roundhouse walls, I could see fitful flaring.
A dread revel by firelight.
The raucous spree went on a time, then Elliot barked, and all fell silent. He yelled a bit in the natives’ tongue, then there was the sound of a struggle, followed by a horrid shriek, a low terrified groan, a moan of pleasure from Elliot. I gagged on a foul stink. Then came rending, cracking, gasps, a blood reek. Then hammering, pleas, Elliot laughing. Followed by splintering wood, panicked flight, footfalls dying away. A lone whimpering. A wet thud and it ceased.
Then Elliot called out, ‘I do love a good party, don’t you?’
I kept quiet and still.
‘These primitives really should thank me, you know. The things I’m showing them.’
Then the mewling came again.
‘Well, I never…’
Elliot guffawed.
‘How is he still alive?’
There was the noise of pissing, splashing, Elliot sighing. The puling became a scream, drawn out, agonized. There was the stench of acid and burning flesh. Then peace again. I sat in the dark, shivering, harrowed. But I was so tired sleep finally overcame me.
Sunlight streaming in through the roundhouse door roused me. Elliot stood before me, wry grin on his face.
‘Sleep well?’
He was naked, his flesh daubed with dried blood. He had gory hunks of viscera on a string about his neck. Blowflies buzzed about him. In one hand held the account of my capture and, in the other, a metal bowl filled with an acrid stinking liquid, which he set on the floor before me.
‘This is good,’ he said, waving the pages in my face. ‘I really liked the bit describing your strange dreams. I wonder what gave rise to them?’
‘No idea,’ I mumbled.
‘No?’ He shrugged. ‘Out of interest, why did you name me Elliot?’
‘On a whim.’
‘Oh. I wouldn’t have chosen it for myself.’ He chuckled. ‘For some reason though, it does have a sinister ring.’
He set down the typescript, then crouched, unlocked the manacles securing my wrists.
‘Hold out your hands.’
I shook my head, kept my hands, which were raw, grisly, like things newborn, close to my chest. But Elliot grabbed my wrists, yanked, plunged my fingers into the bowl.
It was something like vitriol. Burned. Shreds of my flesh shrivelled, floated free, drifted, dissolved. Bone showed through in spots. I bit almost through my tongue, hissed.
Then Elliot let go, and I jerked my hands back.
‘Still want you to be able to type,’ he said.
‘Fuck you,’ I slurred, tongue ruined, mouth full of blood.
Elliot sneered, held his middle finger up to me. I watched as the nail lengthened, became a sharp curving talon. Then he slashed open my belly with it, hooked out my guts. Then he was Punch again, bawling ‘Sausages!’, hauling out my innards, gobbling them down.
Woken by my keening, the natives sleeping off their awful frolic perhaps thought it the wail of a bizarre beast, brought into this world from some eldritch realm by the blood rite, so little did it resemble a human cry.
I blacked out again.
When I came to it was also light, but I’d guess, at the earliest, it was two days later, for my stomach wound, my fingers, and my tongue were
nearly healed. Elliot stood over me again. He was washed and dressed, in a button-down shirt, cardigan, brown cords, tan brogues, looked benign again.
I shrank away.
‘Just kill me,’ I groaned.
Elliot smirked.
‘Don’t worry, death is coming to you, and soon. First, though, I want you to finish your tale. It wouldn’t be complete, would it, if it didn’t tell how I plan to snuff your life? And don’t you think your readers would be curious to learn how the others who met that evening in the Nightingale died?’
I shrugged. Feigned unconcern.
He smirked down at me.
‘Oh, and your tale wouldn’t be complete without it telling of the fate of the young tribeswoman.’
I groaned, strained against the irons. If I could have clapped my hands over my ears I would.
‘Well,’ Elliot went on, ignoring me, ‘last I saw of the natives, a few hours ago, they were leaving camp, dragging the woman’s broken body with them. I think they were headed for the river. They’ve not come back as yet. Not sure what they were planning to do with her, but suspect she’s dead by now. She was spared the direful sights of my ritual, left tied up outside, but I think the tribe have been taking out on her the vile things I subjected them to then.’
I sobbed. Elliot cuffed me hard on the ear.
‘Shut up!’
I choked my misery, best I could.
‘Right,’ that devil went on. ‘Shall I tell you how you’re to die first, or save that for later? Begin with the tales of how I ended the lives of those you gathered in the pub that night?’
I shrugged.
Elliot scratched his chin, pondered.
‘Hmm…Yes, I think I’ll start with them. That way you’ll be kept on tenterhooks. I won’t bother telling how the young man you’ve called William Adams died. What you inferred from the state of his body was pretty much dead right. But let me describe how I killed the other two, the butcher and the author…’
Though I was in dread of provoking him, I was perplexed, so blurted out, ‘What about the young woman, the one you didn’t let tell her story?’
The Wanderer Page 25