And so, overturning all portents, we seem to have found some repose.
Epilogue
A few things remain to be told, then my tale will be complete. Though they concern events whose protagonist was Rashmi, and not I, she’s said she can’t write of them herself; telling them once was harrowing enough and dredging them up a second time, in committing them to paper, would be too much, would be agony. And she says, and I think she’s right, that setting something down is more gut-wringing than just saying it, for, while the spoken word is fleeting, the written, endures.
But she insists on my describing these happenings here. In part, this is because she believes when she reads my third-person accounts she’ll be able to convince herself their main player was not her but another and put them behind her (I hope this proves true). She also has a further, much stranger reason, as will become clear.
One cold night, during our trek to the Himalayas, out on the great plains of central Europe, Rashmi and I were sat warming ourselves at a fire. We’d eaten a good dinner of venison stew and were swigging from a gourd of firewater we’d traded for cured buffalo with a tribe of nomads a few days before. A touch drunk, I asked Rashmi about some things I’d been burning to learn of, but which I’d not before brought up for fear of galling sores.
In response to my probing, she told me she’d been cast out by the tribe for killing a senior tribesman. This grizzled elder, who’d been leering lewd at her some weeks, entered her tent one night, soused on a potation brewed up from beetroot, staggering, cock in hand, and threw himself down, sprawled, writhed on her. Waking terrified, she grabbed her blade, held it to his neck, meaning to warn him off. But he flinched, and then his throat was cut, and the tribe, roused by his death rattle, finding Rashmi blood-drenched, went to attack her. So she fled, was just able to outpace them.
It was sheer chance she came across me the next day while I was bathing, she didn’t even know I was alive, let alone nearby. Having spotted the Ark before, thought it might make a good place to hide, she’d come to look it over. She recognized me straight away, though she wondered, at first, if it mightn’t perhaps be Elliot in my guise. But she decided to take the chance, thinking there could perhaps be safety in numbers, and, besides, unable to come up with any reason why he take on my appearance, supposed it unlikely. That I didn’t attack her, and, after, let her go, all but confirmed it. That I seemed not to remember her, bemused, but she surmised my memory had simply fared worse than hers. Deciding it was best not to disclose who she was, she played the frightened native woman. That I was obtuse and misinterpreted her, irked. And she reckoned, after all, it might be dangerous for us to remain together. So she ran away, she hid in a spinney not far off. But when the natives discovered and bolted her, later that day, she made for the hulk once more, doubting there was anywhere else nearby she could hole up. She thought, vaguely, she might be able to drive me off. But she wasn’t fleet enough, the natives caught up with her, and, as I’ve told, set about her. After I rescued her from the beating, she warmed to me, wondered whether we mightn’t be better off together after all, decided to stay with me, but to continue shamming the tribeswoman.
That evening as we sat toping by the campfire on the plains, I also asked Rashmi about her later treatment at the hands of the clan, after Elliot left her to them. She told me it hadn’t been much of an ordeal, the tribesfolk had been angry, but their ire had cooled, and they’d largely felt pity for her. If it hadn’t been for their terror of Elliot, they’d have released her, she thought. She said they just beat her about a bit, then tied her up. While she was bound, some days, she was given water and fed. Occasionally one of her captors would kick her, but not hard; it was clear their hearts weren’t in it.
She looked at me.
‘There was some kind of terrible revel during that time, wasn’t there?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I didn’t see it, but I heard.’ I shuddered. ‘That was enough.’
Then, Rashmi went on, they decided to end it, dragged her out to the mud flats. There, the chieftain stabbed her in the heart with a ceremonial flint knife, and they threw her in a deep pit. She lay prone, while they buried her, then burrowed back to air, a long gruelling toil. When she finally rose out of the sludge, she spotted, by the faint glow of a fire, the natives’ camp nearby, went to them to spook them; they fled howling into the night.
Then, after another gulp of the firewater, I asked Rashmi about the thing I had been most wary of broaching, but also was most curious over: the ruse her twin had contrived that took Elliot in. She sat quiet a moment, then shook her head, said, ‘I didn’t have a twin. Or any brothers or sisters at all. Was an only child.’
‘What?’
She smiled, wan.
‘Perhaps, it’s time for you to hear, at last, my story, the one I went to the pub that night, so long ago, to tell. It doesn’t give any answers itself, but…Well, you’ll see.’
And so it was, sat by a fire, amid rolling plains, drunk on rotgut, with a bright sickle moon cutting swathes through the hazy cloud overhead, and large animals, perhaps buffalo, or bears, moving about in the girding darkness, I finally heard Rashmi’s tale.
It was a weird tale, close kin to those told on that long-ago evening. Rashmi described how the year before the gathering in the Nightingale had been very hard for her. It had started well; she’d got a secretarial position at a successful firm of solicitors, found her own flat, moved, finally, out of her parents’ house. But then it had turned ill. Her mother, who’d never been kind and was very traditional, was angered by her new independence, arranged a marriage for her to a friend of the family who lived in India, a much older man. Rashmi refused the match. There was weeping, yelling, handwringing. Rashmi was told she was bringing shame on the family. But she stood her ground. In the end, her mother and aunts disowned her.
Her father, though, supported her, took her side. But this caused a rift between her parents. There were some bad rows. Then her father died, a stroke. At his funeral there was a scene, and Rashmi was thrown out.
After that, Rashmi started going out a lot, drinking heavily, drugging, sleeping little. She stumbled blearily through those days. She didn’t then, pick up it was odd, when, a few months later, she was called on her mobile one Saturday, by an old man, who gave his name as Joseph Curwen (like the rest in this text, this name is made up; Rashmi, having forgotten it, asked me to provide a fitting invention), who claimed to be a client of her firm. He said he’d been given her number by one of the partners, her boss. She didn’t think it was strange, when, explaining he was housebound, following a fall, and needed to draft his will, he asked her to come, that afternoon, to his cottage, in the Trossachs, north of Glasgow, to witness it, deliver it back to the office. He said he’d cleared it with her boss. She didn’t realize it bizarre he’d offer her a fair amount of money. Didn’t notice the urging in his tone. Didn’t think to ask her boss about it. He’d have told her he’d never heard of any Joseph Curwen, that he’d never give out her personal phone number, that he’d never have asked her to do something like that. Just thought of the fee Curwen had promised. Hoped she might also receive a cup of tea and a slice of cake for her trouble.
She did feel jitters when she drove out and found Curwen’s cottage was isolated and set amid a large tract of pine forest, but she quelled them with a swig of gin after parking up.
She received the tea and cake she’d hankered after, but they were laced with a soporific. When she awoke from the blank slumbers the drug had cast her into, she found herself in a small dank chamber, the cottage’s cellar, it turned out, bound to a stake, a pentagram chalked round her on the flagstones, black wax candles guttering at each of its five points. She’d been stripped of her clothes, and strange sigils had been daubed in red blood on her brown breasts, belly, and limbs. Snakes’ skeletons, strung along lengths of string, swagged the walls, the bones phosphorus dipped and glowing eerily.
At first Rashmi thought the cellar otherwise empty, b
ut then, her eyes adjusting to the dim light of the candles, she noticed, in a dark alcove on the other side of the chamber, a looming gaunt form. She took it, at first, for a statue, perhaps an idol, but then heard it moan, desolate and low, realized it was a living creature of some kind. She stifled a gasp. And, lurching from the nook, tottering upright, the beast burst into the fitful light, loped towards her. She glimpsed a rawboned demon, pallid cankered flesh, spindly limbs, a maw drivelling slobber, then the length of iron chain tethering it, attached to a studded leather collar round its neck, arrested its dart, choked and felled it. Yowling, it scrabbled back into its niche on all fours, back arched, spine jutting, the chain clattering on the flags. Rashmi’s nostrils were mobbed by the fetor of rot.
Staring at the recess, every sinew taut with terror, Rashmi saw the creature’s gnarled skull jut slowly, warily, as it craned its neck to peer at her. Most of its face was cast in shade by the pillar, but light fell on its right eye, a portion of tallowy forehead. It gazed at her for a long time, stock still. That eye was graven on Rashmi’s mind. It was filled with terrible malice, had a palsied, drooping, upper lid, a white, jaundiced and laced with skeins of blood, like the smear of a pulped fecundated egg, and, set in this mess, a pitchy, speckled iris, a coal seam, glistering flecks of mica, with, at its heart, a sliver of pupil, blacker still, an abyssal fissure.
After a time, Rashmi, helpless with terror, pissed down her legs, and the thing nodded its head, gurgled mirthful, lewd, then ducked back into the alcove, was still, silent again.
Once Rashmi had recovered from the bad shock, she tested her bonds. She found that, though they held firm, they’d not been tied quite tight enough, and, after several hours struggling, she was able to wriggle free. During this time the creature didn’t come forth from the nook again. She heard shuffling and the clanking of chain every so often, though.
Then, when Curwen came in to sacrifice her, clutching a curved dagger and a grimoire, she, frantic, half-crazed, overpowered him, ran into the night, fled the gloom of the pines. A farmer, up early to milk his herd, saw her scampering, naked, across his field, caught up with her, gave her his coat, and took her back to his house to be looked after by his wife. When Rashmi had recovered a little, she told the couple her tale, leaving nothing out, though she painted the thing in the nook as a filthy starveling bestial man, for fear they might think her deranged. They were inclined to believe her, for there were rumours about eerie noises coming from the hermit’s cottage and strange flickering lights seen in its windows at night, so called the police immediately. A WPC came to take Rashmi’s statement, while officers were sent to investigate the old man’s property. But, by the time they arrived at the cottage, he’d fled. The weird scene in the cellar confirmed Rashmi’s account, though. Of course, the demon, or whatever it was, was also gone. When the police scoured the property after, they discovered human bone fragments mixed into the earth in the kitchen garden. The hermit had apparently ground up the bodies of many victims, perhaps, it was speculated, used the meal to feed the soil he grew his herbs in. And it was a strange lot of herbs.
By the time Rashmi finished telling me her story, she was shaking. I reached out to hold her, but she pushed me, gently, away.
‘It’s fine,’ she said, hugging herself. ‘It was a very long time ago. It’s just, well, I’ve not thought about that night in millennia.’
She shuddered.
‘I didn’t want to relive it now, but…’
She paused, scratched her nose.
‘But I think, somehow, if you record it, it’ll warn me. So you must set it down, just as told.’
Drunk, I merely nodded absently. Then, reaching for the firewater, I stopped, my hand halfway to the gourd.
‘Warn you?’
‘Oh, I don’t know.’
She picked up the gourd herself, took a draught from it, then held it arm’s length, squinted at it.
‘We’re going to feel horrible in the morning, you know.’
‘I know.’
She passed the drink to me, then sat silent a time, biting her lip.
‘Well?’ I prompted.
‘I’m not really sure. All I know is, Elliot was convinced he saw me die. I think your narrative somehow, well…’
‘What?’
‘Hmm. I’ll try my best to explain.’
She then told me that, throughout the terrifying night tied up in the cellar, she’d had a tenuous memory of having before read an account of the things she was undergoing. At the time, she gave it scant thought. And afterwards, when she pondered it, she put it down to that uncanny sense of having lived through something before, which isn’t uncommon.
But when she looked over my typescript, after I’d taken her aboard the Ark, she’d had a strong recollection of having, some weeks prior to her horrific encounter with the evil diabolist, found it in a second-hand bookshop in London, during a trip she’d made to the capital, having bought it, the same typescript, though bound in cloth covers, having read it, closely, cover to cover. Yet, weirdly, at the same time she also felt certain she’d never seen it before.
When Elliot described watching her age and die, she’d had a sudden realization: she must, at some point, have split into two separate selves whose paths had forked. Therefore, while she’d agreed to go out to the diabolist’s cottage, endured the terrors of his cellar, responded to my classified, attended the gathering in the Nightingale, and so on, her fetch, who’d read my account, had refused, never saw the horror beneath the mundane surface of things, lived out a normal life.
‘I envy her so,’ she said, shaking her head.
‘I’m glad things have turned out as they have, though,’ I said, hoping to cheer her.
‘You know what bewilders me now?’ she asked, ignoring me.
I shook my head.
‘Well, you see, if I’d never read your story, I wouldn’t have become immortal, couldn’t have saved you from Elliot. But had I not rescued you, even allowing for Elliot’s not, for some reason of his own, burning your typescript, and it slipping backwards through time so I could read it, you’d have never recorded my tale. Perhaps it’s that very paradox that divided me.’
We both sat quiet awhile. My brain reeled.
‘Anyhow,’ Rashmi went on, eventually. ‘I lied to Elliot, told him I’d had a twin because I didn’t want him to suspect any of this. Not that I can make any sense of it.’
‘I can’t either. Though it isn’t any stranger than anything else that’s befallen us, is it?’
At that we fell silent, stared into the fire, lost in our thoughts. But, before long, our reveries were disturbed. One of the beasts whose lumbering in the dark we’d been hearing all evening blundered into our camp. It was not a bear or buffalo after all, but a huge primeval armadillo, with bone barding and a spiked club at the end of its tail. We leapt to our feet, seized up brands from the fire, backed away. But it meant us no harm, just cocked its lumpish skull to peer blearily at us with one moist yellow eye, then wrinkled its nose, waddled ponderously off.
We stared at each other a moment.
‘Yes,’ I said, peering off into the night. ‘Creation is in disarray.’
Rashmi laughed.
‘What?’ I asked
‘You! So serious.’
I squinted at her, started to open my mouth, but she leaned over, silenced me with a kiss.
And here, I bid you farewell, my reader. This is the end of my tale; against all odds, it’s a mostly happy one.
Afterword
This will be hard going. It’s been a very long time since I last used this typewriter. I have though, meanwhile, taken care of it, kept its mechanisms in good order: protected it from dust, grime, and damp with a cover made from the stomach membrane of a yak, a fine but impermeable stuff; kept it oiled; wiped it fairly often with a soft cloth. I felt sure, you see, I’d have cause to use it again, that some portentous event would compel me to again set its typebars clattering, jostling its ribbon against a s
heet of paper clamped in its jaws. So what will make writing this afterword slow, laborious, is that my fingers, out of the habit of typing, are clumsy, halting, and my brain, long unused to composition, struggles to find the words needful. The inspiring prospect from the mouth of this cave, Rashmi’s and my home a long time now, should help, though: we’re in deep midwinter, so the steeps are swathed in unsullied snow, the tarn, frozen, glister, and the swathes of darkling pine are mottled with white. And, overhead, a grey canopy is breaking up to reveal a wan sun and sliver of moon hung in a sky strewn with bright motley stars, a sublime sight, for all it’s an ill omen.
The end of things has been much longer coming than I thought; the signs I noted while writing the tale this will serve as an afterword to, were merely tokens of the onset of a drawn-out decay, not of looming havoc, the end of things; Rashmi and I have dwelt many centuries in the Himalayas since then. They’ve been mostly happy and peaceful. We’ve had only one real sorrow: though I soon overcame my impotence, it seems, whether for reasons eldritch or prosaic, I can’t say, no children can come of our couplings. But I’m sure the last days are really upon us now, for the sun, after waxing till, several hundred years ago, it was a blazing ball of fire, forcing us to shelter in our cave some decades, has dwindled, is now sickly, faint, no brighter than the moon once was, and things grow cold and dark. So, soon, our long, long lives will cease (and we won’t try, my reader, if you were wondering, to escape the Earth’s end by running into that dread realm Elliot was so fond of; we’ve pledged never to enter it, though we now know how to, feel that to do so would be to forfeit something we’re not prepared to give up.)
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