by Sakiv Koch
The driver swerved the coach sharply to the left as a desperate measure, bringing his vehicle to the brink of the canal. Chunks of the earthen bank broke and fell into the shallow water. The wheels on the left side of the coach sagged in, tilting the vehicle precariously. The right-hand side fore-wheel struck the rear left corner of the still-turning wagon at the same time. The coach’s wheel shattered with the impact.
The two vehicles entangled with screeches of stressed wood and warped metal mixed with screams of wounded humans and terrified beasts. The drawbars of the wagon jerked forward, chafing the oxen. The forced arrest of their momentum jolted the horses, pulling them up short violently.
The coach’s driver tumbled from his seat and fell headlong onto the road, between his horses’ hind legs. But the man slid out from under the coach and got back to his feet with a remarkable speed, evincing no concern for his animals’ or his own state of health. He swayed a little as he got fully upright, but he hobbled around to the right-hand side door of his coach with a sense of life-and-death urgency.
The door opened before he could raise his hand to its handle. The coach’s lamps still functioned to keep some light alive in that dark place. Sunder and Illya ran out to the road, followed closely by Nadya, Akilina, and Shyam. Nadya saw that the coachman was a white man, probably a Britisher. Two young white women alighted from the carriage. They were identical, exceedingly lovely, and exceedingly terrified.
They had no sooner set their feet down on earth than they began moving, going for the woods at a pace falling between a brisk walk and a slow jog. The driver drew out a pistol from a holster concealed by his coat before following his ex-passengers into the trees. None of the people from the coach had spoken a single word amongst themselves or to the people from the stranded wagon.
The explanation for their apparent incivility and strong anxiety came in the form of an ominous sound—that of numerous fast-moving horses. With her old heart beating more wildly, more painfully, than it had ever labored before, Akilina grabbed Nadya’s arm and they ran back into the woods they had exited just a minute ago. Sunder, Illya, and Shyam were close behind them. The English women and their companion were a few feet ahead. In spite of being surrounded by so many people, Akilina felt completely unprotected, extremely vulnerable, utterly alone. A blood-cry tore out of the depths of her soul. For a bleak, unbearable moment, she felt as though Nadya’s arm had vanished out of her clammy grip.
“Don’t worry, old mom,” Nadya whispered in her ear. Nadya felt more apprehensive for the twins fleeing ahead of her than for herself. The look of terror she had seen on their faces even in that sparse light spoke of specific, systematic persecution and pursuit.
The Englishman held up a hand and gestured for the sisters to stop. Another sign from him made the young women disappear from Nadya’s view, whereafter the man also concealed himself somewhere. Hiding behind trees or bushes didn’t feel like a very sound strategy of evasion to Nadya, but it was certainly better than running in a straight line when you couldn’t outrun your opponents.
The horse-riders, who had been drawing nearer at a furious pace until now, stopped suddenly; they had obviously reached the accidental barricades thrown up by the wagon and the coach. It couldn’t have been hard for the mounted men to guess as to where their intended-prey had gone. They poured into the woods, overtaking Nadya and her party in a minute, fanning out in a wide circle whose perimeter enclosed the area in which the Englishman and the two women were hiding.
The group comprised eight or nine European men, a half of which carried storm lanterns in their hands. They were all armed to the teeth. They paid little attention to the terrified peasants they associated with the wagon stalled in the road.
“Why don’t you come out of your hidey-hole on your own, Smith?” one man bellowed. “We shall be very angry if we have to find and drag —”
The night erupted with the flash and bang of a gunshot. The speaker toppled from his saddle with a grunt of surprise. A moment of incredulous stillness hung in the air before half a dozen fury-maddened men swore and then fired blindly at the spot marked by the muzzle flash of the first shot.
Nadya and the others immediately threw themselves to the ground. Answering shots came from two different points on the compass, hitting two riders almost on the same spot on their respective heads.
It must be the sisters fighting back, Nadya thought, with a stirring of admiration for the imperiled women. I wish I had a weapon, too. I could have helped them then. Oh God, please keep my daughter safe…
The crossfire was intensifying now. A dead man’s lantern shattered on the forest floor and set the underbrush on fire. The hunters had become the hunted. The riders, who had been arrogantly complacent of their power and superiority, almost fell off their horses in their panic to dismount and find cover.
A tongue of fire raced toward the bush behind which Nadya, Runa, and Akilina lay, forcing them to move to another point in that interstice of flying bullets and hungry flames. An unmanned horse suddenly took fright and bolted in the crawling women’s direction, its feet hammering the earth with enough force to pulverize bones, its prancing hulk flying straight at Nadya.
She sprang to her feet with an athlete’s reflexes and leaped away like an acrobat, never loosening her hold on her child for a moment. The runaway horse rushed by, missing the mother-daughter duo by an inch. But something else caught and spun Nadya in midair before she could land back on her feet.
A rogue bullet tore into her back, just beneath her left shoulder, mangling her loving, forgiving, ever-warm heart before making an exit through her breast.
Chapter 15: A Monstrous Tenant
I tied Peter up with his rope, gagged him with his handkerchief, and stowed him in the back seat of his car. And then I took a leak. My hands shook with fear, shaking the stream of my water. The dark path ahead felt like the gaping maw of a malevolent demon.
The night oozed a silence as intense as its icy darkness. I could hear someone screaming; it was a real enough sound without being produced by any living entity, the kind of mental noise that further distorts a terrified man’s warped reality.
My fear paralyzed my will to act, to move forward. Self-doubt throttled me like a pair of hands squeezing my throat, while an urgency to do something right now, without wasting another moment, propelled me forward as palpably as a crowd of men shoving me physically.
I rocked back and forth on my feet. I moaned. I felt on the brink of an implosion. Why had I come here, to this menacing remoteness, all alone? Why hadn’t I taken Peter to the police, after all? I had considered doing it when I could still do it and decided against it, but what was I thinking of achieving with my suicidal crawl up a dark and desolate road in a dark and desolate jungle?
By not going to the authorities, by Quixotically believing myself capable of not only taking on but also defeating unknown, impossible odds, hadn’t I undone the slight chance of survival Sanjay might otherwise have had?
A spasm in my calf caused me to take a couple of hopping steps. Grinning Gun’s Colt Peacemaker almost slipped from my sweaty grip. My palm melded with it in the same instant. Hot skin and cold metal fused to become one. And then the pain-driven hop became a rage-driven walk, and the walk sped into a run.
The knowledge that I could run half a mile without breaking a sweat, that I always gave back a large portion of whatever I took (what I gave back, in terms of beatings, mostly dwarfed what I received), that I had just come out on top in a highly unfair contest with Peter and his fancy friends, put a lid of steel on my billowing, boiling fear.
The dirt lane opened into a clearing with a dilapidated, crumbling structure sitting in its middle. The square carved out of the surrounding forest was slowly being reclaimed by mother nature through unabashed undergrowth, several scraggly trees, and myriad creepers hugging most surfaces in suffocating green embraces.
The front porch of the building was tilted at a drunk angle. A couple of skeletal automob
iles stood decaying on cinder blocks. Windows were widowed by the deaths of their glass panes, some of whose bodies had completely vanished while the others stood broken and jagged in their frames.
The place didn’t look as though anyone had come that way in a long time. But something told me that Peter hadn’t deceived me in bringing me here. I somehow had implicit faith in the sincerity of that deceitful man.
I moved a little farther into the choking clearing, toward a clump of elms. A large tire hung from a stout branch. A ghost swung the tire back and forth. There was decidedly no breeze strong enough to sway it the way it was moving.
Other than that swing, nothing else stirred — the place appeared as lifeless as the little slice of moon overhead. I went down on the hard ground and crawled forward, encountering puddles, shards of the glass missing from the window frames, crooked saw-blades, and rusted hatchets without handles.
On that arduous, horizontal, injury-prone journey of thirty feet, my greatest challenge was to carry my revolver in an uncompromised position from which I could shoot instantaneously and accurately without fumbling or dropping the weapon. My clothes were sodden, and a chill pervaded my entire being. I crept right up to the edge of the building. It was about twenty feet away from the tipsy porch.
A row of windows sunk into the ground looked in upon the building’s basement. I peered in. The hall was absolutely dark and utterly silent, accentuating the feeling of ghosts glaring back at me from the subterranean blackness.
I slid along the wall until I found the steps leading down into the basement. The door looked formidable, but its lock was an old contraption that couldn’t have held its own against my escape artist’s fingers for long.
I always carried a little, custom-made pocket case (given to me by Father when I was very little, when he was sure I would grow up to be the greatest escape artist since Harry Houdini!) containing a tension wrench and an assortment of picks. This toolkit was as essential a part of my outfit as my undergarments; always with me, just like the extraordinary flexibility my contortionist mother had imbued into my limbs was always with me.
But I didn’t pick the lock. That door’s hinges would have creaked loud enough to be heard a mile away! I inched my way back to the bank of daylight windows leading into the basement. My right shoe carried out an exploration until I found a frame completely devoid of glass.
The floor was at least six feet below the windowsill’s level. I stared at the faintly visible tract of my landing strip for a few moments, until I was reasonably sure it was free of any objects that might jeopardize my ankles and my balance.
My drop into the building’s belly could be likened to a cat’s leap — clean, smooth, fairly silent. I came out of my crouch and sprang away from the window’s revelatory proximity with a feline speed.
It didn’t take my eyes long to adjust to the significantly richer darkness of that enclosed place. I moved toward the staircase leading above to the ground level after making sure, as best as I could, that I was alone in that space.
I ascended the stairs extremely carefully, testing each step for solidity (or lack thereof) before entrusting my weight to it. The fourth step from the top felt prone to squeaking. I bypassed it, favoring the one above it, which proved to be no less voluble than its downward neighbor! Perched on the fifth step, I extended my right foot over the two ‘screechers’ to reach the second step, testing which wouldn’t have made any difference one way or another.
I had to climb to it, or go all the way back to the bottom, and out the basement window to search for a new point of entry. The banister was such a shaky thing I couldn’t use it in any way to reach my macabre destination at the top.
I took my giant step of desperate faith. The second tread squeaked like something with good vocal cords expressing its displeasure at my intrusion. I glued my back to the wall behind me. The sound of my rushing blood filled my head. I raised my Colt and prepared to shoot whichever person would open the door that stood a couple of feet above me.
Time inched along, nay, mill-metered along, slower than I had crawled outside the building a few minutes ago. An eternity passed, during which my heart beat so loud and so fast it felt like a jet engine trapped in my chest.
Drops of sweat pattered onto my shoes. Or it might have been teardrops. I didn’t check. I didn’t stir from my place. My gun hand didn’t waver with the strain that was building in it. A beam of light took birth somewhere above, reaching me in unwelcome waves from under and around the door, growing in luminosity as the source of the light (a hand-held flashlight, in my estimation) approached nearer.
And then a grating, squeaky, harsh noise stabbed the building’s silence once again. It was the universal sound of a long-shut door opening on its grumpy hinges. It was my door — the one I stood close enough to touch, the one I had worked so hard to reach — producing that acoustic horror. Someone was pulling it open from the other side, snatching away the blanket of darkness from my place of concealment. I shot the person point blank. The elbow-spraining recoil and the deafening report of the big revolver made me wince.
The man I had shot toppled back, producing a ground-shaking crash when he hit the floor. His flashlight clattered away without dying, so that an oval of light danced upon the walls in ever-shrinking oscillations.
He wasn’t the first man to die at my hand. I was no longer the naive, innocent boy, who, when compelled to kill, had himself died in a great measure. Guilt and remorse didn’t arise to slow me down. The only emotion common to the fourteen-year-old Mother Night and this night was my terror-tinged-fury.
I took the last stair, the top step, and slithered to stand in the little alcove formed by the door-jamb’s curtain wall. Judging by their gasps and the thumps of their feet, there were at least two more people with the one I had just transformed from a person to a body. One of these men was framed in the slice of the doorway. He was moving away, but not fast enough to dodge the bullet I sent his way.
Speed was quintessential in winning this little battle, particularly before the priceless shock-factor working in my favor wore off. I was nothing if not extremely quick. I dashed out, diving low, remaining parallel to the ground and revolving on the axis of my waist mid-air. The third man comprising that unfortunate party was in the act of raising his weapon to an average man’s chest level, whereas the man he needed to shoot was flying by at his knee level.
I hit him just below his chin, felling him to lie with his expired or expiring companions. He and I measured our respective lengths on the hall’s dusty floor almost at the same time, but whereas I sprang back on my feet instantaneously (with a mighty groan, to be completely honest), my latest victim remained thrashing and gurgling where he lay.
However, there was no time to gloat over my second victory of the evening. I could hear more men rushing to the hall from its back. It was evident to me now that this particular structure wasn’t housing the king (or his remains). There must be another place, most probably behind this one, from where this seemingly endless stream of men was coming.
It occurred to me that they hadn’t initially come to investigate any sound I had made. They had probably been unaware of any armed intruder in their basement, else they would have approached the matter much more carefully. I had not been astoundingly efficient in downing three men in under a minute — I had just been lucky.
But that stroke of good fortune had run into oblivion. The men coming for me wouldn’t be taken by surprise anymore. I made a dash for the basement door once again and ran down the rickety staircase I had ascended so painstakingly such a short while ago.
My idea was to exit the building through the basement and come back to the ground level from another direction. But I heard someone moving toward the daylight windows looking into the basement!
It was a two-pronged attack. They were hemming me in, cutting off my ways out. I swiveled sharply and went underneath the staircase, which gave me the dual advantages of: a.) keeping an ear out for anybody c
oming downstairs and b.) getting out of all the lines of sights afforded by the windows.
A gentleman began descending the steps above me. He wasn’t rushing down. He was using all possible stealth. But the poor guy didn’t know I was standing directly underneath and was therefore privy to micro-creaks and pressure-points not discernible from any other point in the large room.
I waited until he got directly in line with my slightly upraised arm before squeezing the rapidly emptying Colt’s trigger (four bullets spent, only two to go). The aforementioned gentleman screamed and covered the rest of the distance sliding and bouncing off those sharp-edged mini cliffs until he came to rest at the bottom.
“You bastard!” a hate-deformed voice cried from outside. “I’ll bludgeon you into mincemeat and feed you to my dogs!”
I jerked out of my hiding place and shot at the sound, earning another scream-reward for the expense of my fifth bullet. Maybe I am an astoundingly good fighter after all. The cocky thought had barely crossed my mind, slowing down my reflexes with the toxic warmth that cockiness tends to emit in disproportionately large volumes, when something came hurtling out of the darkness with a snake’s hiss and bit my left arm, just below the shoulder.
It was a knife. Its thin, sharp blade embedded itself in almost exactly the same spot where another knife had slashed me on that other night fourteen years ago! I staggered back under the protective shelf of the staircase’s underside as more projectiles whizzed by. Extracting the knife out of my arm would have entailed letting go of my revolver for a brief moment. But violent death sneaks on you in such moments. I let the blade continue to inhabit my body like a monstrous tenant paying unmitigated agony as his rent for accommodation.
A manic laughter rang out in the basement. “That’s just a loving nick, bastard boy,” said a new, thinner voice, vastly different from the man’s who had threatened to feed me to his dogs a few seconds ago. It spoke from a relatively nearer point. “I’m gonna skin you alive before smashing all your bones with my sledgehammer.”