The Gatekeeper

by Nuraliah Norasid

  Some days, not even Barani seemed to see her, as the older woman stood in a corner of the home they shared and smoked her way to lung disease. It was as if a wall had been erected between her sister and herself, every brick of it made by a statue from her stone garden.

  In that garden, there were scouts, deserters, guerrillas looking for hideouts, the squads that sought to capture her alive. All manifestations of what Cikgu had said to her before the she’d left for Jankett Town: “Uram’gur nees ru(eis) uram’gur”. Her expression had been pained as she let a strand of Ria’s hair slowly slide from her open palm, as if she was already seeing something she loved being destroyed. “Protect what you can protect,” it meant. And Ria could, so she had let none of the soldiers find her sister’s home, Kak Manyari and her child, or what food they could procure through the black market and had to protect gram by measly gram.

  Ria tried not to remember the soldiers’ faces but, unlike her eyes, her memory was not one used to blinding. When she remembered, she remembered with terrifying clarity: the darkness of the tunnels, the smell of sweat on the bodies clad in serge, the sounds of footsteps crushing down on the bone-scattered floor, every tug and pull of her hair in adrenaline-rushed moments of fighting and survival. Every gasp and look of horror.

  Two of these faces were wont to jump at her—in the sudden flare of a struck match, or in the moving shadows along orange, dead filled walls and enclaves.

  There was the talkative airman, delirious from jungle fever, who wanted her to deliver a pack of letters to a woman named Rafidah. “You see,” he’d said as he drew them out from his breast pocket. “Give these to her, ‘Dik. Tell her I am sorry. I am sorry.” Men sob in ugly ways, she had thought at the time as she stood over him. “I am sorry. I didn’t—I didn’t say how I lo—” Slurring, pallid and shaking. She had started to leave him. He would not survive the night. But something had made her turn back. She had taken the letters and petrified him in one fell swoop. She still had not read the letters. After all these years, the papers were likely brittle and the faded words meant for someone else.

  There was also the one to whom she had lost a snakehead. He had come out of the dark. Unlike the others, she had not heard him until he was nearly on top of her. On sleepless nights, she still remembered the cold of the floor, the uncomfortable stabs from the bones and the small squeal from some animal startled out of its life. More than anything, she remembered the face in the shadows: a Human face, but too pale, too livid, too monstrous. And he—no, it—had a hand on her thigh, claws dug so deep she still had the scars to show for it to this day. Her young mind had not known what it wanted to do with her, but every fibre of her being called for her to fight, to survive; told her that it was not an encounter she was going to get out of easily with her gaze.

  It had been too dark: the one limitation of her ability was that one had to be able to see her and she the other just as well, in order for the petrifaction to take effect. She had smelt the creature’s breath when it brought its face in close. The saliva had been steeped in bloodlust. Then a snake, the one that was always basking on her left shoulder, had lashed out. It spat venom into the creature’s eyes before sinking fangs into the side of its neck. The creature drew away, clawing at its eyes and screaming in pain. Ria had taken the chance then to squirm out from under it. She needed to get to the keramat. So she could see. So that the creature would die. She was about to get back on her feet when the creature took hold of the snake that bit it. In the struggle to get free, Ria could not tell what exactly took place, but she registered a sharp tug on her scalp, followed by a wave of excruciating pain that shot through her head. She’d cried out and something about the sound of her cry had caused the creature to stop, blinking at her, its hand gripping the severed head of the snake.

  Ria must have got up then and run to the main chamber, for she remembered bursting into its light and coming to a skidding collision with a pillar overgrown with creepers and ferns. She was crying in heaving sobs and her heart felt as if it was beating its last and was going to go all out about it. She could hear the creature clattering through the tunnels behind her. Yet it had been a man standing in the entrance when she turned—Manticurean Human by all appearances; unkempt and ragged, wearing nothing but dirty shorts that hung on his emaciated frame. His chest displayed a prior wound that was green and purple around the edges. The area where the snake had bitten him was swelling up and spreading black with alarming speed. Any lesser creature would have been in agony by then.

  A crashing wave of fury had overwhelmed her then. She hated, and she thoroughly hated, everything that she thought the surface stood for: force and its concealment, farce and its creation. She gritted her teeth and ground them. She was incomprehensible, tears streaming from her eyes and her mouth frothing as she rushed up to the man. The Human face was begging then. She wouldn’t see. She was straddling him, grasping roughly at his face, and then she turned him too.

  All that remained of that Changer now were bits of rubble in the threshold to her statue museum. She had broken him right after she’d petrified him, throwing all the rage and sorrow she felt into destroying the statue until she’d broken every bone in her hands. And when all emotion calmed and ceased, she had looked down at her hands and thought with morbid bemusement, “So much for admirers, ‘Bang.”

  5116 CE

  Mirrored Shield

  The figure down the stretch of dim corridor resembled a ghost-child in a smudged white dress. The thick mop of black hair over her face moved of its own accord in the dim light. Eedric kept himself very still.

  There was light enough for him to see the snakes—a whole nest of them, black and hooded with grey underbellies and white eye like markings on the backs of their heads. Beads of eyes lay nestled somewhere in the gleaming arrangement of scales, heads raised to stare and flick their tongues in his direction. He glimpsed the petals of a tattoo on the inside of her bare arm near the elbow, then the blooming blood spots of a floral pattern on her white dress. Looking back up to her face, as if inexplicably drawn to all things dangerous, he made out alarming eyes, brightly-hued, large wide set half-moons winging out from her nose towards the edges of her small face and offset by very dark, bushy brows. Staring at him, she appeared as transfixed as he felt.

  He recalled a photograph of a medusa, of another medusa from Manticura’s pre-independence history: the one of the infamous Anten Demaria of the Dinya Uk’rh, who had stirred country to fight for independence when she assassinated the puppet leader appointed by the F’herak Imperative. There were many dates and details students needed to memorise and regurgitate, of course, but the only thing that stood the test of his memory was the picture of the medusa with her blindfold on, moments before her execution. There was the executioner’s spread-legged stance and the gleaming curve of the blade held aloft. Her story was the classroom lesson in staying true to your word and of the power of the media: if you said you’re going to give someone the firing squad, give that person the firing squad. And if you’re going to fuck it up anyway, make sure it’s not caught on camera. After independence in ‘66, the authorities had said that Anten’s head was buried with the rest of her, with the proper rites observed and all her deserved honours. The conspiracy buffs in his old class, however, believed her head was kept somewhere in the Palaçade as clearly as her likeness was displayed on the shield of Manticura’s current coat-of-arms. A medusa’s head was said to be eternal, though no one knew for sure if the gaze still worked when the creature was no longer alive.

  He could not say if any of it was true, but he did know that medusas were treated by governments almost as if they were an endangered species of animal—a dangerous species of animal. They were rare and elusive and no two were said to look the same, like the finger prints of Humans and facial scale patterns of Scereans and Tuyuns. So far, none were known to be living among people. Those were the facts anyone would get if they were to run an Internet search of the beings. That, and pictures of wannab
es in extreme street culture with plastic hair extensions and scalp implants. The most widely circulated evidence of what a medusa could do was the legend dated 70 years back, in which every single person of a refugee camp, some three thousand strong, had been turned to stone, eyes staring and mouths opened in the immortalisation of silent screams—a resultant tragedy from the biggest refugee crisis the world had ever known. From another time, another country.

  His limbs’ own lack of feeling at that moment terrified him. He couldn’t see much of himself in the shadows, couldn’t see if the petrifaction was spreading from wherever it was supposed to begin. He still sensed, still felt the heaving of his chest, but no part of him moved. Perhaps the curse of a medusa’s gaze was really an eternity of staring out from within a statue, body given in to the state against the protests of a working mind.

  Then, he couldn’t see any more, couldn’t focus on anything but those glazed eyes which beheld his without expression and, he swore, without blinking. And the beat of his pulse was building up to such a deafening level in his head that he felt riled by it. The surroundings crescendoed into an indistinguishable buzz and in that world of noise the medusa stood in sudden, and perfect, clarity. In spite of the dark, he saw her scars: a few small ones cut diagonally across her lips and a large tear over her entire left eye. One of her snake heads had been cut off, the remaining body a limp stump over her shoulder. He saw her stare widen right before she thrust her head forward, teeth bared, head of snakes a halo around her face as a cloud came over her eyes.

  Yet, instead of backing down, he lunged forward, slamming her into the adjacent wall in an eruption of bones that clattered to the floor. She let out a cry and turned her face away, eyes squeezed tightly shut. Her snakes drew back to coil close to her head with a quickness that resembled a sea anemone retreating into its body. Above her sudden shout he heard a low growl rumble in his ears, resonating from somewhere within himself. The hands that pinned her down weren’t his own. Too many veins ran along them in raised expressways embossed in his skin. His fingernails were dark and sharp where they dug into the exposed skin of her upper arms, drawing blood.

  Eedric had never been good with blood. The metallic smell of it pervaded his senses making his stomach roil and on top of that his horror was itself a venom that froze him in place for a second time. He noticed then how he loomed over her, body bent, spine elongated and arched in an in-Human manner, his skin stretched far too tightly over his frame. His laboured breaths had the texture of gravel. His mouth didn’t feel right—too stretched and gaping with no control. He could feel her shaking beneath him as she held herself very still, her eyes continuing to shut him out. He saw an image of himself reflected in her face; saw that the skin he wore was the same one Mama had inhabited in her time of illness.

  He made a sound, trying to utter some word, only to rasp incoherent letters. In his mind he was apologising; in the slew of everything else that followed he was trying to make her understand: “I didn’t mean for this to happen. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  She snapped her eyes open as if suddenly awakened from a bad dream and started to pull herself out from under him. He saw that she was determined to get free even if it meant ripping the skin off of her bones to accomplish it, so he let her go, teetering for a moment, as if he’d been at the end of a taut line that had suddenly gone slack. And then he ran, not for the surface but down another corridor, passing through intermittent light and dark.

  Running felt like swimming through not water, but viscous mud that seemed bent on pulling him down.

  He must have been about seven or eight when he had first felt that way, struggling to stay alive in a swimming pool. Each time he had tried to surface, legs kicking and arms flailing, the water would close above him, layer upon layer and seemingly thick as mud. More and more. The tiled walls and floor indicated a swimming pool. His lungs began to scream just as he tried to. A reel of images ran through his mind: simple ones, recalling his Mama and Father over and over. His body fought itself from giving over to the drowning and just as it seemed that the water was winning, the world began to slow and the blue of it showed fronds of legs languidly paddling. His body had grown light and strong, and his chest was no longer constricted in pain. In one smooth glide, he shot up and broke the surface.

  It should have felt like an accomplishment because he had finally learnt to swim after fearing the water for so long. But all around him, people were moving away from him, staring bug-eyed. A few children cried out in fear and some girl somewhere could be heard asking, “Mummy, what’s that?” The lifeguard who had been swimming towards him with a life-preserver suddenly stopped, expression shocked and mouth agape. Mama was standing by the poolside, looking like she was about to cry, both hands cupped over her mouth. And above all, Father, who had been the one to throw Eedric into the pool in the first place so that he “can learn to swim the hard way”—Father had stared at him first, and Eedric had watched as his expression transformed from one of worry to complete and utter disgust.

  That was what he felt right then, running away from the woman whom he had hurt: disgust. More than two decades down and he could still feel the stares that would only open him to a world of disdain. Except now his transformation was complete and he had fully become the creature that Mama was, and the creature that his Father feared he would be.

  Eedric was only vaguely aware of the dark hollows in the walls the further he went underground. He took sharp corners and went down still more tunnels of uneven turning paths in what seemed to be a massive labyrinth. He could hear himself panting, sharp and penetrating above the pounding of his heart. There was a strange hissing, like water being poured into a heated pan. Perhaps he was growing delirious from the previous shock and the space itself, which widened in places only to constrict again. He was practically running on all fours, bent so low he could see the rough floor streaking beneath his feet. He had the suspicion that he was going to pass out, the way he nearly had when he first ran 1.6 kilometres as a chubby kid in primary school. Yet, he could not stop, for there was nothing but the need to run away from the one he’d hurt and a need above all, perhaps, to lose himself.

  The rush of air around him began to sound like the low hum of many voices and he wondered if he was nearing people, even as the noise made the back of his neck prickle. White light burnt against the wall at the tunnel’s end. He dashed through a narrow doorway and came bursting into a large chamber, a chamber with shelves carved into its walls and the remains of bodies in repose within them. Eedric skidded and came to a sudden stop when he crashed into a hard stone form. His heart hammered. The nearby sounds—somewhere at a hundred paces, different voices speaking in incomprehensible languages, above ground the patter of running feet, water, traffic—threatened to descend into white noise. He panted hard. There was a sharp itch at the back of his ear, spreading to the rest of him in maddening waves. He tore at the itching skin, his growls growing into a frenzied shouting.

  When he managed to calm himself just enough, he looked at what had halted him: the stone sculpture of a man, the top half of him a painted sky with clouds and the other, below, rustling with grass, also painted on. The man’s horrified visage stared at him, his features highlighted by shadows in the clouds. His body was turned at the waist, facing the doorway as if his whole form was caught in the process of fleeing.

  Eedric huffed and pivoted away from the statue, crashing into another. All the statues seemed to be of soldier folk, and almost every one of them had been ravaged by either carving tools or paint. The one he stood before was of a man with raised arms broken off at the elbows. His entire chest area was carved out into the crude beginnings of breasts, mounds rough but unmistakable. These along with his head were spray-painted indigo and dotted with yellow stars. He went around it and saw that on the span of its back, someone had brushed “Ria was here” in thick red paint, with a date below that went back 30 years. Another aimed down his gun’s sight, blooming with roses against t
he pitch black background of him from his toes right to the crown of his helmet. A small figure of a woman, stone hair short, and her pretty face without expression, had the hips and legs of the man she had been carved out from. There were recognisable pieces of feet, arms and a few decapitated heads strewn on the floor, indicating the existence of more statues before.

  Of the few that remained unmolested, one was a tall, major blooded Cayanese, his figure hulking and his face characteristically wolf-life. His shoulders were hunched, two thick stone arms spread out at his sides to make him appear bigger than he already was. Instead of wearing an expression of shock or horror, he was scowling downwards at some perceived threat far smaller than him, thinking to frighten it.

  Another, in an airman’s jumpsuit, sat slumped against a far wall. Even the arm he was stretching out seemed to have no strength to it. The way his fingers were curled—thumb slightly up, index partly pointing, partly crooked—it was as if he’d held something in them once. Beneath his stone moustache, his lips were slightly parted. His brows were furrowed, eyes beseeching.

  Even in his bestial state, Eedric was arrested by the images of ruin that surrounded him, taking them all in one at a time, flitting from statue to statue, overwhelmed by the sensory overload coming over him.

  He was holding on to his head, trying to quiet it, when a figure in his peripheral vision caused him to turn. He saw the medusa standing in the entrance, a hand braced against the opening. Her snakes crowded in to form an awning, or the brim of a grotesque hat, but she never lowered her hard gaze from his face.