I break his nose with the heel of my hand. A quick red crack. Blood in the air, suspended droplets. He roars, and the fingers are gone from my throat. I drag air in once like a bellows, then I’m off.
Tom’s outside the study door, white and questioning.
I can’t speak and I can’t see for tears.
Tom looks at me for a heartbeat, then he takes my hand, and we run. The quick, heavy steps of the stranger behind us.
Running, running through Rawblood, Tom pulling me—my arm stretches like rubber about to break, he’s pulling me so hard. Fingers squeak on doorknobs, panicked hands slap the corners, corridors seem to narrow as we go. The stranger just behind, breathing like a furnace.
We explode into the great sunlit hall. The riding habit falls through my treacherous fingers; I can’t catch it up again, and it drags soggy behind me, catching in cracks, leaving a shining wake, slowing me. It is all the dreams I’ve ever had of being chased. I run from the darkness; it’s close on my heels. The stranger’s breath hacks and rattles, sounds like battlements, stone grinding against stone. A great shadow looms like a turret at my back.
My foot catches in my skirt. I fall. It’s endless. Something heavy hits me, knocks me into the earth with a cracking of ribs. I hit out with both fists. I still hold the needle in one hand. I’d forgotten. It punctures flesh somewhere with an abrupt sound. Glass splinters. There’s blood in many little streams all over my hands, running red in all directions into the dark.
Cool flags under my cheek. The hall is barred with sun. It falls everywhere in broken stripes. A messy, shining trail across the stone. Halfway across the hall, the trail becomes mingled with glutinous red. It is obscene, like the path of a great, injured worm. I sit up.
By my feet, the black shape. A pile of cloth and strange, pale flesh. The blood runs everywhere, pools, shines in little runnels between the flagstones. It runs over the shattered glass that lies everywhere in the warm light. The broken hypodermic needle protrudes from Papa’s chest, moves gently with his shallow breath, shining. Air twitters through his punctured lung.
Tom’s small, curled in the corner by the fireplace, back turned. His head bobs. A grinding noise comes from him.
Papa puts forth a slippery red hand. “Iris,” he says. “This.” He twists the ring from his slick finger. Slow.
It slides into my palm like a little stone.
“Yours now,” my father says. “Dear heart.”
“Papa,” I say. The dark clown mouth spreads outward on the gray of his waistcoat. “Papa,” I say. “I understand now. I did not believe… I am sorry, so sorry…”
My father says, “I know.” Or perhaps it is “No.” He starts, staring at me or something behind me.
A cold finger runs down my spine. I whip around.
There’s nothing but Rawblood, warm in the afternoon.
My father reaches for me. His eyes are fixed and wide, brown pools. “I see,” he says, “her.”
His bloodied hand is light on my head, and then he goes. Cloth and cold flesh are left. Dead.
Sounds come as if through water. Wind whistling through a window somewhere. Blood hitting the floor sounds like tick tick tick. I press my face to the face that was his. It’s cool India rubber. The bright air turns, a carousel.
Tom stirs in the corner, white. I think about him, about what Shakes thinks of him, about what other people might think… I think of her, and my being goes cold. I saw nothing, nothing but Papa’s dark shadow, his blood. But she was here. He saw her; she took his life. Where is she now?
“Tom,” I say.
He raises a gray face. Something clings to the corner of his mouth.
“Take it,” I say.
The ring gleams white and red in Tom’s warm, trembling palm.
“Take it. From me to you,” I say. “Now leave. Go now. Run.” When Tom doesn’t move, I shout it over his protests. I slap his hands away; he tries to hold me. Go, I say. Go, go, go. Until he goes.
When he’s gone, I sit. I am small and dry inside. The tears that stream down my face are nothing to do with me. My habit, wet again, this time with blood. The scent of it is heavy in the air. It seems an age since this morning, an age since the rock, the sunshine, the air. Did it happen? It’s impossible. Nothing has ever happened or will ever happen again; I have always sat here with the sticky wet red drying on me, clutching the cooling corpse.
Without doubt, this is my doing. The great, great depths of my stupidity are revealed. My arrant carelessness, my arrogance. I’d thought the Rules didn’t apply to me. Papa told me; he warned, but I didn’t believe. I didn’t believe in her. I thought I could do what I wished, and the cost is beyond bearing.
I close the eyelids over his dull, staring eyes. It’s not easy. They want to stay open. I sit. I move beyond feeling. Grief, loss—what do these strange, weak words have to do with the jagged tear, the rent that goes right through the heart of me? My father is dead, and I killed him. It should have been me. I should have known that it would come to this.
Perhaps I cannot see her, but I understand now what Papa was trying to say. She is in everything. She’s all the sickness of the world. But also our own particular plague, just for us, the Villarcas.
I speak to her in my mind. I ask her to come. I beg her to take me—I plead. I, who am now the last of us.
Too late. In the distance, the keening of oak. A door. Someone is coming now.
CHARLES DANFORTH
11 October 1881
More tissue samples today. Alonso and I take it in turns now. Why should we both suffer?
The cellar was quiet. I did not turn on that ghastly electric light but carried my own lamp.
The rabbits lie, panting and still, bound tight about their midriffs with white linen. There is the smell, not unpleasant, of basilicum powder and carbolic. With their heads on their paws, in their human bandaging, they have the appearance of a conceit, dreamt of by some satirical illustrator. (The Field Hospital, perhaps.)
I did what was necessary. As I moved about the room, their gazes followed me, bright, showing me back myself in each dark, nutlike eye. I did not like the sounds they produced before—much like an eagle’s scream—but I am tempted to say that I like their silence less.
As I came to the end of the row, I saw that the old buck—I forget the absurd name Alonso has bestowed upon him—had escaped his dressings. The rabbit had pressed himself into the corner of his box, small and furred and brown. At his throat, the bandage hung slack from his neck where a neat rusty mark betrayed the tracheal incision. The mess of white linen and cheesecloth lay in the corner of the cage, brown and yellow-stained, much clawed as if he had attempted to bury them. I opened the door and made to take him, forgetting in that instant.
He turned to flee, laying bare his other side, and showed me my mistake. I saw our handiwork full well. He is an anatomy lesson. Along his left flank, the hide and flesh are neatly reflected back and excised. The anterior ribs are sawn away and blunt. Beyond them, there is a warm cavity through which can be seen the pulsing, the inner workings. The gentle rise and fall of the exposed lungs. Pink they are, and pretty, looking like soft crepe for a party. The network of blue vessels runs through his exposed landscape. As he shifted, there was a glimpse of the spleen, protruding deep red like the tip of a tongue. The blackened areas scattered here and there show where we have taken tissue and cauterized with the hot iron. A loose swag of purple bowel hung plump by his hind leg.
All this, I have seen before. And I had my own part in its doing. But in that moment… Well.
As I wrapped him, taking care not to touch with my fingers the exposed parts, he began to make a sound, which I had not thought possible. It was very like a tin whistle, but mournful. I soon saw that it was merely my handling, which produced a compression of the lungs, sending air through the puncture in his throat, his larynx. The so
und acted upon me, however. It was ineffable, and I cannot say I am yet recovered.
Afterward, I went up to the kitchen and, after some hunting, found an onion. I brought it down and left it inside the door of his cage. He did not look at it or me. I do not know if he will eat it, or if it will do him harm, or if rabbits are partial to such food. Now, I am half inclined to go and take it away again. I do not know what to do. Oh, God—I am tired.
12 October
We go on, we go on. The days are long, and the nights are wordless. Exhaustion takes us both to its bosom at dusk. There is no sound at the board but each man’s private consumption. Afterward, we slump in our dusty chairs and drink, deep and long; eventually, I take myself to my rest, uncertain of my steps and with a thick head, only to rise the next morning, cursing, to begin it all over again.
Alonso’s hair seems to be dark again. It is streaked now with black, creating a strangely pleasing effect, somewhat like a badger. Could he be dyeing it? I cannot summon the courage to ask. He looks perhaps fifty now, rather than seventy. Rawblood improves him. I cannot say it does the same for me.
My visit has stretched on and on… It must end now. I have said I will return here next month, in order to be present for the next stage, where we will introduce the contaminant into the healthy host. I cannot believe it will work. I begin to doubt our thesis most seriously. Truthfully, I do not think I will come back. I can concoct some excuse, when the time comes.
It will be good to return to my life, spartan as it is. I think of my cheerless little room with some relief and find myself dwelling on Mrs. Healey’s unlovely physiognomy with something like longing. The doing of great things is all very well, but there is comfort in monotony and the performance of one’s duty. My practice no doubt suffers in my absence—I do not like Babcock, much as I try, and I was loath to leave matters in his charge. Truthfully, I think him knuckleheaded; I believe he will inflict his antiquated notions on my patients and perhaps even cup them. But enough! It does not bear thinking of. Suffice to say that I will be relieved to take up the reins again. I have told Alonso of my departure. He said little but made me a brandy flask to take below.
Drink has become necessary—for us to bear one another’s company and for the continued performance of duty. The cellar begins to smell quite noisome.
This unseasonable heat begins to wear on me—it is out of tune. There is still no rain. The countryside is restless—the autumn berries are full on the bramble, beside the trembling butterflies and the bumbles; the flowers hang heavy in their strange bloom, and the stale air is redolent of their perfume, and yet, the trees are bare. The birds do not know what to do. Everywhere are swallows and geese who should have departed, weeks past, for sunnier climes; they circle in the air, silent and attentive. There is a forced lushness and fruitfulness on the land, as if it waited for a blight.
13 October
We do not progress. I have an influenza at present, which gives me a thick head and a languor. Today, I attempted to work but found myself rapidly overcome. Everything begins to look like flesh and bone to me.
In haste
eyes like black and white wheels and a balding head. Get out get out
Good God. I shall put this diary on the other side of the room at nights.
By the by, the heat does not abate.
15 October
Do not look into her eyes. do not My God the eyes
My diary was in the drawer, which was locked. The key was in my pocket, in my coat, hanging up on the other side of the room. Yet the book was open before me, ink and pen dragging great blots across the page.
Perhaps I should tie my own hands.
18 October
I write barricaded in my room. I have understood at last the nature of my visit here. It is vengeance. My life is in peril.
I will lay out events as they happened, precisely.
Yesterday, overcome with lassitude, I strolled onto the moor—I felt in need of air. The heat is relentless. As for the work, we have not succeeded in perfectly preserving the tissue without killing the infection, and so a transfer is as far away as ever. We proceed like insatiable butchers. The cellar air is thick with rot and pain. My limbs were glad to feel their length again; my heart lifted with each stride.
When the house was well behind me, I found myself a perch behind a tumble of great stones and sat to feel the sun. It was a good thing to do. All around me was the moor, green and gray, and the little twisted rowan trees, which bend so obediently to the wind in these parts, their berries crimson darts against the dull land. It is a salutary thing, to sit and observe Nature, which cares nothing for my travails. I saw a sheep with a late lamb, newborn, I fancy, not an hour before—it made a charming picture, the lamb all disobedient legs and determined certainty and the ewe encouraging it; I watched its trials, becoming engrossed in its efforts to stand, wincing at each tumble. When it achieved uprightness and took its first unsteady steps, I found myself moved beyond reason and had to turn away.
It occurred to me that the lamb’s might be an enviable lot—to possess no intellect, or curiosity, or duty to God or to mankind. To have a purpose so simple and pure—to desire to stand, to puzzle at it, to strain, and so!—achieve it, and then walk away, into a sheep’s life, toward a sheep’s death. Alonso would say, and I can hear his tone, that this is, in short fact, exactly the manner in which the large part of humankind passes its existence.
I was thus engaged in reflection, a frown on my face and a stick in my hand, slapping at the heather (men in idle moments, I find, will always seek a stick and something to hit), when I heard a sound like a saw drawn badly across the grain of the wood. Startled, I perceived then the crabbed figure of Shakes traversing the crest of the hill, silhouetted against the moor, making his way east. His back, turned toward me, shook, perhaps with the cough that racks his frame. He had not seen me—I was seized of a sudden with mischief. I rose from my seat and followed.
I believe Shakes was acquired from a debtors’ prison somewhere. Or perhaps I invented that. He is from Devon originally, there can be no doubt—his vowels proclaim it. I cannot like the man. He hangs on Alonso. Alonso will break his pen, and before he has done more than curse at it, Shakes will be at his side with a new one or mending the old, standing very close, seeking to breathe, it seems to me, his master’s breath. And the man looks at me. This may not sound like provocation, but to be regarded in silence, from under craggy narrow brows, for minutes on end, quite puts me out. I think him overly and particularly attached to Alonso.
I followed him across the moor, stumbling a little in my haste. He moves at a sharp clip! I kept low, behind stands of heather, and darted from the cover of boulder to gorse bush. I thought at one time he was sure to turn and threw myself to the floor, anointing myself liberally with dusty, cracked earth—but he did not, and after some time, I felt it safe to stand and walk behind. Bracken and moor rose all around. The great barrow sat, amber with autumn, on its distant hill.
We crossed a clearing in the brush, which was strewn with stones. My foot struck some object, and I stumbled and nearly brained myself on another. It struck me then that the stones were not scattered on the ground but had a semblance of order: of a sudden, I perceived, as though I had walked unawares into a funeral, that we were in the confines of one of those barbarous old Briton villages that litter the hillsides. I stood within a house, a tiny dwelling place, smaller than my bedchamber at Rawblood. The floor was grass, and heather furnished the corners. My foot was on the hearthstone.
I was quite upset. No man had lived here for a thousand years. But it was still a house. I took care to make my way out of the dwelling through the door and not by hopping over the walls.
By lucky chance, there was in my coat the flask that Alonso had filled again for me with brandy; it is a mighty remedy. My despond quite lifted; I was in a holiday humor.
Shakes was singi
ng in a light baritone, unexpected and pleasing to the ear. I paused to note some of the words, for they caught my fancy. I attempt a transcription, below, from pencil notes:
She spake, and ’neath the moon, she took my heart away.
(And if I am a hollow man, who art thou to know?)
Broke and flung awry I was, a pale man at the break of day,
An’ I’ll not sing for her no more, no more for her my woe.
No more her brock bright eyes for me, no more her sateen lips,
No more with her at moonlight, a-dancin’ heel-an’-toe,
[unintelligible here] the night-tide dashin’,
Last pleasure [Something here, tasted? wasted?] long ago.
[something something] Devon lass, an’ all of Devon pleased,
(And if I am, a white bone man, who art thou to know?)
Laughing tho’ my death it fell, I went wi’ heart at ease,
A-dreamin’ arl the time o’ cheeks like early snow.
“Take my bones to crossways! Hang ’em by the moor,
[nonsense, unintelligible]
Ware the white bone man, with the white bone hand,
I’ll take you arl, as she took my heart, all them year ago.”
There was more in this vein, many verses warning of the “white bone man” and his particular modes of vengeance, but the wind took the words quickly from his lips. Shakes moved eastward at a trot. His air of purpose drew me, irresistibly, as a child draws a wooden toy behind it on a string.
I did not pay much attention to our route, and suddenly, I found that we were in a part of the moor that I did not know; we had in fact crossed Hamel Down by some circuitous means and were coming to the old post road. This road follows in its turn the old Roman way and is therefore straight and well laid, though not often used. It is turned to turf and sand and not well trod, and by hanging back, I had no trouble concealing my footfall behind Shakes’s own wandering steps. More brandy was taken by me.
The Girl from Rawblood Page 14