by Donald Tyson
“Why are there no skulls in the pile?”
“The skull is given to the mate or first-born child of the dead, to keep as a vessel of memories.”
The purpose of the skull in my sleeping place became clear. I spoke of it to Gor.
“Would it not be best for the skull to be given to the nearest kin of the dead ghoul?”
He nodded with an expression of approval, and called over the female who had stood beside the last of the four corpses. He spoke to her in their own language, and a look of happiness entered her face. She nodded to me, grinning until her yellowed teeth were exposed. Her breasts hung so low they rested on the dome of her rounded belly, and her large nipples appeared purple in the dimness.
“This is Kall, sister of the ghoul whose cave you took. The skull of his father was overlooked in the sorrow of his death. It is right that it be given to her.”
I nodded while meeting her eyes to show her that I understood, and she went away trembling with happiness.
We watched as the bones of the fleshless corpses were separated from each other and transferred to the bone pile. The skulls were stripped of their skin, flesh, and tongues by the near relatives of the dead, who used their teeth, holding the heads between their claws while they peeled them. A wooden hook that resembled a curled spoon, specially fashioned for the purpose, was employed to pull the brain out through the hole in the base of the skull, and to extract the eyeballs. Everything was eaten, and the blood-smeared skulls were carried reverently from the cave.
“One more secret I must show you,” Gor said, beckoning for me to follow.
He made his way through the irregular ledges of stone to the rear of the cave, where the bones were being carefully piled. Without pausing he ducked his head and entered the small passage beside the bones. I followed, blinking and widening my eyes in the deeper gloom. For a moment I wished that I had eaten the white spiders, even though I did not think it was good for my body to consume them every morning, so potent was their effect. More by sound than sight I followed Gor with my hands raised to protect my face from sharp rocks that might hang from the ceiling. My feet told me that the passage led steeply downward, but it was so narrow and twisted there was little risk of stumbling.
The way ahead began to lighten with a soft glow almost too faint to see, yet it was enough to show the moving outline of the ghoul as he walked in front of me. As we followed the convoluted passage, it grew brighter, until at last we emerged on a ledge in the side of a vast chamber many times larger than the cave of the dead. Its walls shone with a natural gray light, though what caused this radiance was not evident—it seemed to emanate from the very surface of the rock. Dimly, high above, the roof of the chamber was a blur of shadow, but the chamber had no floor. Leaning over the end of the ledge to gaze downward, I could see only deepening blackness, as the distance itself defeated the light from the walls.
A staircase descended from the ledge around the curving side of the chamber, cut into the solid rock. The steps were unnaturally large, as though made for the legs of giants, and wide enough to have accommodated three or four men walking side by side. In their centers a deep trench was worn by the feet of countless users over the span of eons. As they spiraled ever deeper, they dimmed and were at last lost to sight in the blackness of the depths.
“No clan of ghouls carved this stair,” I murmured.
The vastness of what I looked upon, so obviously made for the use of creatures with dimensions greater than the human body, awoke within me a vague terror that hushed my voice.
“It has always been here,” Gor spoke in a whisper. “No one knows who made it.”
“Where does the stair lead?”
He looked at me, and I saw in his eyes something I had not seen there before. Fear.
“No one knows.”
I tried to force a smile on my lips, but it felt false and I let it fade.
“Has no ghoul ever descended the steps?”
“Many have descended. None has ever returned.”
It is the work of the Old Ones.
“The chaklah in my head says it was cut by the Old Ones,” I told Gor.
“So it may be. No one knows.”
I stared down in wonder at the spiral of the stair. Never had I imagined such a creation. Only a race of gods could fashion such steps.
“This stair is the greatest marvel in the world, surely,” I said.
Gor laughed, a hollow choking deep in his chest. He pointed with a claw at the side of the chamber, near the ledge where we stood. I looked, wondering what he wished me to see. Then at once I did see, and the blood left my head. Had he not grasped my shoulder, I would have fallen from the ledge. My knees shook with a terror so primal it had no source.
From within the darkness of the bottomless pit a groan arose, deep enough in pitch that it made my chest vibrate, but whether it was from the movement of stone on stone in the bowels of the earth, or the cry of some vast living thing, I could not tell, for it was unlike any sound I had ever heard.
“What is that?”
Gor shrugged, but the shadow of fear did not leave his eyes.
“My father said it was the voice of the earth itself, beckoning us to our deaths. He was the bravest of our clan, but he never went down the stair.”
I gazed again at the stone wall, letting my eyes trace it downward below the level of the ledge where we stood. All along its surface were the marks of tools, where the stone had been cut and shaped. As far as the eye could distinguish above, below, and on either side of the ledge in the chill gray glow were the same marks.
Chapter 7
The approach of summer was unwelcome to the Black Spring Clan. We depended on the caravans for our meat, and as the days grew hotter, the caravans became fewer. In the extremity of starvation, a ghoul will feed upon the carrion of beasts, and even upon fresh meat, but no ghoul can remain in good health without the putrefying flesh of human corpses. Animal flesh, which their stomachs have great difficulty digesting, contains little nourishment for a ghoul. The people of the dwindling caravans grew wary, since it was not uncommon for a man to wander out of the glow of the campfires to relieve himself, never to be seen again.
It was around the time of the solstice, by my rough reckoning of the heavens, when the entire clan followed a ragged caravan for three days and nights in the hope of a death, either of man or beast; but though the camels staggered as they walked and the men were thinner than the ghouls who stalked them, no one died. I hunted during the day, while the clan sought shelter from the sun, keeping a constant watch for anyone who wandered away from the wagons while the caravan was on the move. At night the clan caught up with me, and I slept for several hours while the caravan made camp and the mature ghouls hunted just outside the glow of the fires. The men kept guard with uncommon vigilance. At least four of them remained awake all night, armed with swords and bows, and wearing armor. No one ever left the fires alone.
“The light would blind us,” Gor murmured as we lay together on our bellies on the crest of a dune, gazing down at the encampment. “If we attacked, we could not see to fight, and they would slaughter us with their bows.”
He spoke in his own tongue. I had acquired the language of the ghouls, although I could not yet speak it perfectly.
“I will try to steal into a wagon and kill a woman. Maybe I can drag her corpse away without being seen.”
Gor shook his head.
“They watch too closely. Someone must have warned them at the last well.”
“We need meat,” I reminded him.
He made a clucking sound with his tongue.
“This part of the year is always hard. There will be better hunting when the days grow cooler.”
“The caravan road is dying. What will you do when the camels cease to pass through the land of the Black Spring C
lan?”
“Who can say? Perhaps we will hunt the villages that lie to the north.”
“They are owned by the Red Hill Clan. There will be war.”
“There has always been war between our clans.”
“If I had a bow, I could kill a man from here. They would have to bury him and leave him behind.”
“You do not have a bow, Alhazred.”
“Why do the ghouls never use bows, or swords?”
He thought for a few moments in silence.
“They are the things of men. We are not men. It is not our way.”
“Such weapons could help you in the hunt.”
“It is not our way,” he repeated.
I did not pursue the argument. There was a fatalism in the nature of the ghouls that could not be moved by any rational demonstration. They lived as they had always lived. They could not imagine change.
“We need meat,” I repeated after a while.
Gor merely grunted.
I will hunt for you, Sashi said in my mind.
“You?” I told the djinn in a scornful tone. “What can you do? You have no strength.”
Gor looked at me.
“The chaklah talks to me in my head.”
His black eyes widened slightly, but he said nothing.
I can stop the breath of a man. It is our way of hunting.
“Yes, when you hunt in packs. A man would cast you off if you hunted alone.”
A woman, then.
“A woman would cast you off, also.”
An idea came into my head. I turned to Gor, who watched me with an indulgent expression, as though observing the antics of a mad relative.
“Last night, did one of the clan say he had seen a child in the white wagon?”
“Two children,” Gor said. “They keep them in the wagon. My ghoul only caught a glimpse of them just before dawn, when the wagon curtains were opened.”
“How old are they?”
Gor slid down the dune and walked to a hollow where a group of male ghouls crouched on their flanks, talking amongst themselves. He spoke to one of the ghouls, then returned.
“The boy is perhaps seven years. The girl is younger, five or four years.”
Hope surged in my heart. Sashi felt it and began to hum with happiness within me.
“Hunt the girl first. If you are successful, then try the boy.”
She had never left my body from the time of her entry inside my skin. There was a stirring within my chest and bowels that raised a sickly sensation and made me swallow my spittle. My skin expanded as though all my limbs were filled with air, and suddenly the pressure vanished. I had not eaten the white spiders, so I could not see her.
“Is she outside of me?”
Gor nodded, grinning at an empty patch of the night air.
A gentle touch brushed my cheek, and I realized that Sashi had kissed me.
The wait seemed long, but could not have been more than a quarter of an hour. Hope raised impatience in my heart. After three days and nights of frustration, at last something was being tried.
“The chaklah returns,” Gor murmured.
A tingling covered my skin, and with an inward pressure pierced it like a thousand fine needles. It was not painful, merely strange. I closed my eyes and saw Sashi’s smiling face. She nodded in delight.
Both are dead. The boy struggled, but became tangled in his sleeping blanket. I sealed their mouths and noses and cut off their breath.
I conveyed this good news to Gor, who closed his eyes and released a long puff of wind between his lips.
“The meat will not be much,” I reminded him. “They are scarce more than infants.”
“It will be enough.”
The alarm came before dawn. Within the white wagon a woman began to shriek. The men guarding the camp ran to the wagon babbling their confusion, and the shrieks of the woman, who must have been the mother, gave way to long wails that rose and fell on the desert air.
There was nothing else for the men of the caravan to do but bury the corpses near the road and move on. After the clan retreated beneath the earth from the sun, I watched at a distance as the graves were dug and two small shrouds were lowered into their hungry mouths. A woman in black threw herself on the larger of the two corpses, and had to be pulled away screaming. Her boshiya came loose from her face, and I saw by the blue dots and crosses and stars tattooed on her chin and the lower part of her cheeks that she had been born a Bedouin, for it is only the wandering desert tribes that tattoo their women, in defiance of the laws of the Prophet. A man held her in the circle of his arms, and stared around at the hills that lined both sides of the road, as though seeking an enemy he could slay with his eyes. The harsh expression on his sun-darkened face was a blend of frustration and fury.
He knows.
“Yes, Sashi, he knows,” I agreed. “The knowledge does him no good.”
The caravan moved on in mid-morning. When it was certain that no archers remained behind to watch over the graves, I came down from the hills and unearthed the bodies from between the marker stones at their head and foot. It was an easy matter to carry them a safe distance from the road, since they weighed little. My knife cut through the bindings of the cotton shrouds. Their flesh had not begun to darken. The face of the girl was angelic in its purity. Never have I seen a more beautiful child. By contrast, the expression of the boy was distorted by a remnant of the terror that had gripped his heart in death.
I stripped the bodies and set them naked on the sand for the sun to ripen, then sat in the shade of a boulder and watched over them to ensure that no jackals or vultures tried to steal the prizes.
After sunset, the ghouls began to arrive. They danced and sang in their rough voices, so great was their joy. Starvation for the entire clan had not been more than a few days away, or at most a week. The body of one child would not have been enough to feed the clan, but two made a satisfying meal.
Gor gave me the honor of eating first. I used my dagger to slice a piece of meat from the inside of the girl’s thigh, having a care not to take too much. My belly was as empty as all the rest, but a human can endure hunger better than a ghoul, and can go longer without food before becoming too weak to hunt.
I chewed the tender meat while the rest of the ghouls clustered around the corpses and tore off their portions. Nothing would be wasted, not even the marrow of the bones.
Gor squatted on his haunches beside me, a happy grin on his black lips, his chin and curved teeth stained with blood. He licked his lips with relish.
“We must go into the land of the Red Hill Clan,” he said. “There is no more hunting here until the season changes.”
“I agree. We must hunt in one of the villages in the north.”
“The Red Hill Clan will not be happy to share their land.”
I grinned back at him, still chewing.
“If they attack, we will kill them all.”
He laughed his choking laugh and nodded.
There was a curious bitterness on my tongue as I swallowed. I rolled my tongue around in my mouth and examined the flavor. It was not like anything I had tasted before.
“How was the meat?” I asked Gor.
“Good. Good meat. Bitter, but good.”
I remembered the face of the father, staring up at the crests of the hills as he clasped his screaming wife, how his dark eyes had glittered like the eyes of a serpent poised to strike. Horror swept through me. Leaning over, I vomited and spat repeatedly.
“Are you mad?” asked Gor, watching my performance with incomprehension.
“The meat is poison,” I gasped.
Drawing forth my water skin, I rinsed my mouth and spat again, but the bitterness remained on my tongue. Indeed, it grew stronger with each
passing moment.
“You must throw up the meat,” I told him. “It was poisoned to kill us.”
He stared into my eyes, comprehension at last dawning in his mind. Other ghouls paused in their feast to watch curiously.
“You cannot be sure. The meat may be good.”
“It is too great a risk. The bitterness is unnatural. You must vomit it up. Everyone must vomit.”
He laughed his choking laugh and looked at me with sadness in his eyes, and something more, a kind of love.
“If we cast off the meat, we will starve.”
“No. I will follow the caravan and kill a man. Tomorrow night you will feast again.”
“They would be watching,” Gor said, and I knew he spoke the truth. “They would kill you, and we would still starve.”
In the extremity of my concern, I grabbed his wrist. He did not pull away.
“I tell you, the meat is poisoned. You must vomit it forth.”
“Alhazred, you know so little of us.”
“What is there to know that concerns this poison?”
He smiled sadly, watching me.
“Ghouls cannot vomit.”
I fell back on the sand as though struck and released his arm. He patted my knee in a comforting way.
“Perhaps it is not poisoned. We will see.”
In an hour, the cramps began. I felt them in my stomach, clenching and relaxing, like a fist closed and opened. They moved down into my bowels, all the way down to my anus. My throat and tongue became numb. The younger ghouls began to murmur their distress. Gor had talked to the elders, and they remained silent as they squatted on the sand around the bones and remaining flesh of the two corpses and endured the discomfort that soon turned to pain, and then to agony. They hugged each other in their arms as though chilled, even though the night was hot, and shivered together.
I held Gor in my arms as he died. The tight, knowing smile never left him. He seemed almost to enjoy the joke the men had played on his clan.
“You are one of us,” he told me after his sight failed him. He clutched my arm and drew blood with his talons, but I let him grip my flesh.