The Isle of Blood (Monstrumologist)

by Rick Yancey

  “It is… what? What are my poems? Rinçures—leavings, the dregs. The poet is dead. He died many years ago—drowned, at Bab-el-Mandeb, the Gate of Tears—and I took his body up into those mountains behind us, to the Tower of Silence in Crater, where I left it for the carrion, lest his corruption poison what little was left of my soul.”

  He smiled tightly, quite pleased with himself. Poets never die, I thought. They just fail in the end.

  “Now what is this business that brings you to Aden?” demanded Rimbaud brusquely. “I am a very busy man, as you can see.”

  The doctor, his high spirits dampened by Rimbaud’s dismissive attitude—the shoe being on the other foot, for once—explained our purpose in disturbing Rimbaud’s important midmorning absinthian chore.

  “I am sorry,” Rimbaud interrupted him. “But you say you are desiring to go where?”

  “Socotra.”

  “Socotra! Oh, you can’t go to Socotra now.”

  “Why can’t I?”

  “Well, you could, but it would be the last place you’d want to go.”

  “And why is that, if I may ask, Monsieur Rimbaud?” The doctor waited nervously for the reply. Had word of the magnificum reached Aden?

  “Because the monsoons have come. No sane person tries it now. You must wait till October.”

  “October!” The monstrumologist shook his head sharply, as if he were trying to clear his ears. “That is unacceptable, Monsieur Rimbaud.”

  Rimbaud shrugged. “I do not control the weather, Dr. Warthrop. Bring your complaint up with God.”

  Of course the monstrumologist, like the monster Rurick, was not one to give up so easily. He pressed Rimbaud. He pleaded with Rimbaud. He came just short of threatening Rimbaud. Rimbaud absorbed it all with a bemused expression. Perhaps he was thinking, This Warthrop, he is so very American! In the end, and after two more absinthes, the poet relented, saying, “Oh, very well. I can’t stop you from committing suicide any more than I could stop you from writing poetry. Here.” He scribbled an address on the back of his business card. “Give this to a gharry-wallah; he will know where it is. Ask for Monsieur Bardey. Tell him what you have told me, and if he doesn’t laugh you out the door, you may get lucky.”

  Warthrop thanked him, rose, and beckoned me to rise, and then Rimbaud stood up and said, “But where are you going?”

  “To see Monsieur Bardey,” the doctor replied, puzzled.

  “But it is not even ten thirty. He wo. I c7;t be in yet. Sit. You haven’t finished your tea.”

  “The address is in Crater, yes? By the time I get there…”

  “Oh, very well, but don’t expect to be back anytime soon.” He looked at me. “And you should not take the boy.”

  Warthrop stiffened and then told a lie—perhaps an inadvertent one, but it was still a lie. “I always take the boy.”

  “It is not a good part of town. There are men in Crater who would kill him for his fine shoes alone—or that very nice jacket, which is very fashionable but not very practical here in Aden. You should leave him with me.”

  “With you?” The doctor was thinking it over; I was shocked.

  “I want to come with you, sir,” I said.

  “I would not advise it,” Rimbaud cautioned. “But what business is it of mine? Do what you wish.”

  “Dr. Warthrop…,” I began. And finished weakly: “Please, sir.”

  “Rimbaud is right. You should stay here,” the doctor decided. He drew me to one side and whispered, “It will be all right, Will Henry. I should be back well before sunset, and you will be safer here at the hotel. I don’t know what I will find in town, and we still do not know the final disposition of Rurick and Plešec.”

  “I don’t care. I swore I would never leave you again, Dr. Warthrop.”

  “Well, you aren’t. I am leaving you. And Monsieur Rimbaud is being very generous in his offer to look after you.” He lifted my chin with his forefinger and looked deeply into my eyes. “You came for me in England, Will Henry. I give you my word that I will come for you.”

  And with that, he left.

  Rimbaud ordered another absinthe. I ordered another ginger ale. We drank and sweated. The air was breathless, the heat intense. Steamers pulled up to the quay. Others pulled out. The tambourines of the coal workers jangled faintly in the shimmerin

  g air. The boy came up and asked if we wanted anything for lunch. Rimbaud ordered a bowl of saltah and another absinthe. I said I wasn’t hungry. Rimbaud shrugged and held up two fingers. The boy left.

  “You have to eat,” Rimbaud said matter-of-factly, his first words since the doctor had left. “In this climate if you don’t eat—almost as bad as not drinking. Do you like Aden?”

  I replied that I had not seen enough to form an opinion either way.

  “I hate it,” he said. “I despise it. I have always despised it. Aden is a rock, a terrible rock without a single blade of grass or drop of good water. Half the tanks up in Crater stand empty. Have you seen the tanks?”

  “Tanks?”

  “Yes, the Tawila Tanks up above Crater, gied if we wisterns to capture water—very old, very deep, very dramatic. They keep the town from flooding, built around the time of King Solomon—or so they say. The British dug them out, polished them up, a very British thing to do, but they still don’t keep the place from flooding. The local children go swimming up there in the summer and come back down with cholera. They cool off, and then they die.”

  He looked away. The sea was bluer than his eyes. Lilly’s eyes were closer to the color of the sea, but hers were more beautiful. I wondered why Lilly had suddenly popped into my head.

  “What is on Socotra?” he asked.

  I nearly blurted it out: Typhoeus magnificum. I sipped my warm ginger ale to stall for time, frantically—or as frantically as I could in the horrendous heat—trying to think of an answer. Finally I said the only thing I could remember from the doctor’s lecture in the hansom. “Dragon’s Blood.”

  “Dragon’s Blood? You mean the tree?”

  I nodded. The ginger ale was flat, but it was wet and my mouth was very dry. “Dr. Warthrop is a botanist.”

  “Is he?”

  “He is.” I tried to sound firm.

  “And if he is a botanist, what are you?”

  “I am his… I am a junior botanist.”

  “Are you?”

  “I am.”

  “Hmmm. And I am a poet.”

  The boy returned with two steaming bowls of stew and a plate of flatbread, called khamira, for us to use as a kind of edible spoon, Rimbaud explained. I looked at the brown, oily surface of the saltah and apologized; I had no appetite.

  “Don’t apologize to me,” Rimbaud said with a shrug. He dove into the stew, his jaw grimly set. Perhaps he hated saltah like he hated Aden.

  “If you despise it here, why don’t you leave?” I asked him.

  “Where would I go?”

  “I don’t know. Someplace else.”

  “That is very easy to say. And so ironic. That kind of thinking landed me here!”

  He tore off a piece of khamira and stuffed it into his mouth, chomping with his mouth open, as if he wanted to inflict as much suffering as possible upon the incognizant staple of the land he despised.

  “A junior botanist,” he said. “Is that what happened to your hand? You were holding a tree limb and his axe slipped?”

  I tore my eyes away from his disconcerting gaze. “Something like that.”

  “‘Something like that.’ I like it! I think I shall use it the next time someone asks what happened to my wrist. ‘Something like that.’” He was smiling expectantly, waiting for me to ask. I didn’t ask. He went on. “It happens. C’est la vie. So, would you like to see them?”

  “See what?”

  “The tanks! I will take you there.”

  “The doctor expects me to be here.”

  “The doctor expects you to be with me. If I go to the tanks, you cannot stay here.”

  �
��I’ve seen cisterns before.”

  “You haven’t seen cisterns like these.”

  “I don’t want to see them.”

  “You do not trust me? I won’t push you in, I promise.” He pushed his bowl away, mopped his lips with a piece of bread, and downed the last of his lime green drink. He stood up.

  “Come. It will be worth the trip. I promise.”

  He strode off, going into the dining room without a backward glance—another man who assumed others would follow. I watched the terns fishing just beyond the surf and the ships passing Flint Island. I could hear someone singing, a woman or perhaps a young boy; I could not make out the words. If I was gone when he returned, the doctor would not be pleased, to put it mildly. I could picture the fury in his eyes—and that reminded me of another’s eyes, the one who shared that ancient, cold fire, and I finished my ginger ale and went to find Monsieur Rimbaud.

  I found him standing just outside the front doors. A gharry was pulled up in front of the hotel, and we ducked inside the cab, out of the sun but still very much in the heat, and Rimbaud told the Somali gharry-wallah where we were going, and we rattled toward the quay, riding on top of our shadow.

  The road ran through a small fishing village of thatched-roof huts clustered along the shore, then turned inland and began to rise. Before us loomed a chaos of bare rocks and towering cliffs, the remnants of a volcano whose cataclysmic explosion had created the deep sea port of Aden—though the peninsula did not remind one so much of creation as it did its opposite. There were no trees, no shrubs, no flowers, no life to speak of anywhere, if you discounted donkeys and humans and carrion, or the occasional rat. The colors of Aden were gray and a brownish, rusty red—gray the rocky bones of the violated earth; red the hardened lava that had bled from it.

  This was Aden, the land of blood and bones, a great, cauterized wound in the earth where the fist of God had slammed down, thrusting skyward heaps of shattered rock to make the mountains that brooded over the ruined landscape, sullen and lifeless and emptied of all color, except the gray of Gaia’s broken bones and the rusty red of her dried blood.

  Crater was the oldest and most populated settlement on the peninsula. Described by one writer as “the Devil’s Punch Bowl,” it wasn’t just called Crater; it was a crater, the hollowed-out center of an extinct volcano, surrounded on three sides by jagged mountains. Camp Aden, the British garrison, was located here, along with a sizeable population of Arabs, Parsi, Somalis, Jews, Malaysians, an Indonesians.

  It took more than an hour to cross the old Arab quarter of town. The narrow streets were crowded with donkey carts and gharries and villagers on foot—though there was none of the hustle and bustle that one finds in New York or London. In Crater there is much activity but little motion, for the town bakes in its punch bowl in the afternoon, when the sun fills the sky directly overhead and the shadows disappear, pinned down beneath your feet. The buildings were as drab as the surrounding countryside, tired-looking, even the newer colonial ones, slumping, it seemed to my eye, like painted gourds rotting in the sun.

  We bounced along the hot, dusty street until the hot, dusty street came to an abrupt dead end. We had come to the head of Wadi Tawila, the Tawila Valley, where the volcanic heaps of hardened lava and ash reared high their bald heads toward the unforgiving sky. It was the end of civilization and of our gharry ride; we would hike up to the tanks along stone steps that snaked through a mountain defile. Our gharry-wallah said something to Rimbaud in French; I caught the word “l’eau.” Rimbaud shook his head and murmured, “Nous serons bien. Merci.”

  “You see the problem,” he gasped over his shoulder as I followed him up the steps. “Look behind you. Spread out below in all her infertile glory is the town of Crater. Aden can’t get more than three inches of rainfall a year, but when it rains, it pours! The tanks were built to stop flooding, and to give the British something to do a thousand years later. Almost there.… Around this next bend…”

  He stepped nimbly around an outcropping, stopped abruptly, and pointed down. We were standing on the lip of a large cone-shaped hole excavated from solid rock, fifty feet across at the top and at least as deep, shining brightly, like marble in the sun.

  “Well, what do you think?” he asked. His face glistened with sweat, his shirtfront was soaked with it, and his cheeks were ablaze with either excitement or exertion.

  “It’s a hole.”

  “No, it’s a very big hole. And a very old hole. See how it shines like marble? That is not marble, though; it’s stucco.”

  “It’s dry.”

  “It’s the desert.”

  “I mean, there’s no water in it.”

  “This is just one of them. There are dozens all around these hills.”

  “Are you going to show me all of them?”

  He stared at me for a moment. In the sunlight his eyes appeared to have no color at all.

  “Would you like to see my favorite spot in Aden?” he asked.

  “Is it in the shade?”

  “It isn’t far, about two hundred meters, and there might be some shade.”

  “Shouldn’t we be getting back to the hotel? The doctor will be worried about us.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he expects to find us there.”

  “Are you afraid of him?”

  “No.”

  “Does he beat you?”

  “No. Never.”

  “I see. He just cuts off your fingers.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You said something like that.”

  “I think I’ll go back to the hotel,” I said, turning carefully around; I didn’t want to tumble into the pit.

  “Wait. I promise it isn’t far, and we can rest there before hiking back down.”

  “What is it?”

  “A holy place.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him suspiciously, and when I did, sweat dripped into my eyes and the world melted a little.

  “A church?”

  “Did I say that? No. I said ‘a holy place.’ Come, it is not far. I promise.”

  We climbed another series of steps that ran along a low stone wall. I looked to my left and saw Crater spread out below us, the white-washed buildings undulating in the blistering heat. At the end of the wall, Rimbaud turned right, and we continued to climb up a wide dirt path that rose steeply toward the cloudless sky. The crunch of our shoes in the volcanic dust, the heaving of air in and out of our lungs—that was the only sound as we labored to the top, where the end of the path met the pale, bled-out blue of the sky. Cresting the hill, we found ourselves at the base of a small plateau five hundred feet above the extinct crater. Another series of steps led up to the top.

  “How much farther?” I asked Rimbaud.

  “We are almost there.”

  We rested for a moment after this final ascent, in the slice of shade beneath an archway cut into a six-foot-high stone wall that curved out of sight in either direction, a barrier that encircled the holy place of sun and rock and silent sentinel stone, high above the sea.

  We sat with our backs against the cool stone, and Rimbaud wrapped his lean arms around his upraised knees and stared dreamily down into the town nestled in the blasted guts of the dead volcano.

  “So what do you think?” he asked. “The best view in Aden.”

  “Is that why you brought me up here, to show me the view?” I returned. I was weak from the climb, overheated and terribly thirsty. Why had I agreed to come with him? I should have stayed at the hotel.

  “No, but I thought you’d like it,” he said. “You are at the entrance to the Tour du Silence, the Tower of Silence, called Dakhma by the Parsi. It is a holy place, as I told you, forbidden to outsiders.”

  “Then, why did you bring me here?”

  “To show it to you,” he said slowly, as if spn to oung to a simpleton.

  “But we are outsiders.”

  He stood up. “I am outside nothing.”

  There were no se
ntries posted, no guards to man the entrance or patrol the grounds of the Dakhma. Dakhma did not belong to the living; we were the interlopers here. Our approach to the tower was noted only by the crows and kite hawks and several large white birds that glided effortlessly in the updrafts of superheated air.

  “Are those eagles?” I asked.

  “They are the white buzzards of Yemen,” answered Rimbaud.

  The Dakhma occupied the far end of the compound, at the highest spot on the plateau. It was a simple structure—three massive seven-foot-thick concentric stone circles, with a pit dug inside the smallest, innermost ring, and all of it open to the sky.

  “This is the place where the Zoroastrians bring their dead,” Rimbaud said quietly. “You cannot burn them. That would pollute the fire. You cannot bury them. That would defile the earth. The dead are nasu, unclean. So you bring them here. You lay them out on the stone, the men atop the outer circle, the women on the second, the children on the last, the one closest to the center, and you leave them to rot. And when their bones have been picked clean by the birds and bleached by the sun, you bring them to the ossuary at the bottom, until they are ground by the wind to a handful of dust. It is the Dahkmanashini, the Zoroastrian burial of the dead.”

  He offered to take me inside for a look.

  “There’s no one about, and the dead won’t care.”

  “I don’t think I want to see them.”

  “You don’t think you want to see them? Now, that is interesting to me, the way you said it, like you are not sure of your own mind.”

  “I don’t want to see them.”

  A sudden breeze kissed our cheeks. The stench of death could not reach where we stood; it rose from the ledges twenty feet over our heads, swept away by the same wind that kissed our cheeks and bore the white buzzards and the kite hawks and the crows. Their shadows raced across the grassless rock.

  “Why is this place your favorite?” I asked him.

  “Because I am a wanderer, and after going to and fro on the earth and walking up and down on it, I came to this place at last, the part after which there is nothing. I came to the end, and that is why I love this place and why I despise it. There is nothing left when you reach the center of everything, just the pit of bones inside the innermost circle. This is the center of the earth, Monsieur Will Henry, and where can a man go once he’s reached the center?”