The Best New Horror 7

by Stephen Jones

  Her eyes were an unreflecting black, and her hair as flowing and shimmering a hue as the mountain streams.

  When he did not reply, she said, “I have followed your work to you, to see if the artist is as beautiful and worthy.” She reached over and placed a hand on his shoulder. The touch scorched his nerve ends. Fear, he told himself. It was fear and the temptation of the woman before him.

  He fingered a bone sculpture on the table next to them.

  “I shall play for you,” she said, and put the serunai to her lips.

  She played the sensual music of the Mekong, music which followed the river’s sinuous curves, lined its banks with treble notes and deep clefs. She played of the fisher folk and the clay silt which enriched the farmers’ fields. She played of the mongoose and tiger, come to the water’s edge to drink, and to stare. Then the music changed, became slower, more thoughtful: soft, introspective notes that told Sajit Xuan-Ti, I saw your work in the courts and I followed the trail left by your work – the scenes of love and of hate, the perfection and the artful lines – until I could see only that the man who produced such work must be a great lover, a wise man, a man with whom I could join.

  The serunai spoke of her craft’s loneliness, how for her craft to have meaning, she must have union with another. She sang of the wonder of the conjoining of the two crafts, the serunai and the bone-carving. How, together, they could make art more powerful, more elegant, than any before or since.

  Sajit heard all of these things in the gentle pressure of her mouth on the serunai. His ears buzzed and his mouth felt dry. Sajit stared into the eyes of his bone sculpture, an elegant woman with willowy legs, and could not meet Prei Chen’s gaze.

  “Sajit Xuan-Ti?” Prei Chen’s voice quavered. “Sajit Xuan-Ti, look at me.”

  His name, said with such hope. Fear settled over him.

  “You are not beautiful,” he said, staring at his bone maiden. “You are not beautiful as this sculpture is beautiful. You are not as beautiful as the bones.” His heart clattered and his hands felt icy and his breath came shallow and quick, as if he was dying then, there, in that place.

  When he looked into her face, drawn by his own awful curiosity, he saw that her eyes were like dead stars, all the energy coiled within, but not a mote of brightness escaping. Her body had become rigid and her mouth had drawn tight, the lips trembling only slightly.

  “You are not as beautiful as your art, Sajit Xuan-Ti,” she said and turned and ran to the door. “You are ugly.”

  The monsoons came, and with them moist, orange skies. The Mekong overflowed its banks, disgorging yellow silt from upriver and, for those who drank from it, the yellow-green sores of the sleeping disease. The Khmer Emperors grew desperate in their struggle against the Kings of Siam and did not wait out the rains. Battles raged on ground that had turned to mud.

  But Sajit Xuan-Ti continued in his work. He loved the monsoons, for he could remain in his workshop for many hours, the air cool and the rain a reminder of the creativity which fueled his efforts. Raindrops needled his rooftop, fell upon the small bones of otter and deer which filled the gaps in the whale’s rib-cage. The voices of the animals rose in a hush-hush-sussurah in his awareness.

  His bone carvings were now so beautiful that they no longer took the form of people or animals, but only suggested the lines of people or animals, so that the purchaser must guess the meaning behind each sculpture.

  Jen Jen teased him (or taunted – he could not tell which) with updates on Prei Chen gleaned from the Four Fishers for Gossip, but only when she was mad at him, if he had failed to comment on the sarong she had woven, or the splendid meal of prawns she had prepared.

  “In the courts of the Thai vassals, Prei Chen plays the song of a young woman rejected by a man she loved.”

  “Hmmm,” he would reply, pretending not to hear her. “The prawns were delicious, Jen Jen.”

  “Thank you Sajit,” she would say, and he would hear disappointment in her voice, as if he had missed something – a subtle inference, perhaps, a nuance of speech that had proven quite beyond him.

  This game continued until the day, two months after the monsoons had begun, when Jen Jen came to his house crying, dressed in the stark white of mourning. The stark white of bone, he could not help thinking.

  “What is wrong?” He took Jen Jen by the arm and led her to a chair. “What is the matter?”

  “Prei Chen is dead.”

  “Dead?”

  He sat down in his chair, hands upturned in his lap, eyes staring at the floor. He felt as though his bones had been ripped out of him, that he was a body without a skeleton.

  “How?” he asked, not daring to look into her eyes, afraid that if he did he might lose control, his mask of a face crumble. Why couldn’t he breathe?

  “There was a battle at Angkor Thom, near – ”

  “I know what it is near.”

  “– a battle at Angkor Thom. The Khmer and the Thai fought for three days and three nights until finally, finally . . .”

  His vision blurred.

  “Jen Jen,” he said and held her hand. “Tell me. Simply and slowly.”

  “Finally, the Khmer killed the Thai king and the Thai fled the battlefield. Prei Chen and several other artisans are among the bodies of the slain. She had been entertaining at the Thai court. All of Go Oc Eo is mourning her death.”

  His hands and legs shook and his mouth kept trying to widen in a rictus of grief, but he would not let it. He felt Jen Jen’s eyes upon him then, and set his jaw and clenched his hands against what he felt inside.

  “Can you say nothing, Sajit? Can you say nothing at all? Do you feel for anything except your precious bones?”

  The tightness in his body became unbearable and in one furious, desperate motion he rose to his feet and shouted at her, “Get out! Get out! Leave me be! I have work to finish . . .”

  Jen Jen’s mouth quivered. She looked at him strangely, hesitated, then bowed and said, “I am gone, Sajit Xuan-Ti. I am leaving.”

  The rains tapped and tormented Sajit’s roof ever more and he would stir restlessly in his sleep, hearing the whisper of the serunai, hearing the ghosts of the bones. Wake up, they insisted. No. Wake up. No. But, finally, when they said to him, in Prei Chen’s voice, “You are ugly,” he would wake, drenched in sweat and swatting at mosquitoes. “Jen Jen?” His voice sounded fragile in the dark. “Jen Jen, are you there?”

  Every night now, Sajit walked the black sand beach. The music of Prei Chen’s serunai filled his ears, so he could not hear the rush and withdrawal of the waves as they plunged against the coast. He envisioned her bones buried in a grave in the God-city of Angkor Thom and sometimes he would wake from the thought to find himself thrashing in the surf, spittle clinging to his lips.

  The bones he worked with became unfamiliar to him – vaguely threatening, the skulls those of gibbering beasts, the claws and the fangs out of some harrowing Hindu demonology. It seemed that his hands were lending themselves to his own destruction.

  He thought often, as he had not thought for years, of his father’s butchershop and his youth spent toiling behind the counter, amongst the blood and the offal and the shards of bone. How the carcasses, dangling from the roof beams, bled onto the floor. There was such calm on his father’s creased face as he gutted them, slowly, methodically. At night, the green light from the lanterns turned the blood dark, almost purple, and his father’s knees, whorled with wrinkles, took on that same sheen.

  The towering height of the counter, the light beyond, and the customers’ faces, looming. The scree and clack of another time and place.

  Once, deep in his heart, he had wondered if there could be anything else to the world beyond blood and bone and lantern light.

  Then, one evening, the moon spoke to him. He looked up at its shining face and his father stared down at him.

  The moon said, Sajit Xuan-Ti, think of the bones lying wasted in Angkor Thom. Think of the bones of the finest serunai player in t
he land. The delicacy, the lightness of them. Would they not be more perfect, more pure, more beautiful than anything you have ever carved before? Do they not tempt you more than the woman tempted you in life? Do you not long for the bones of Prei Chen, lying buried under the eyes of the Gods in Angkor Thom? The question curled in his mind like a finger, beckoning him into the heartlands of war.

  “Yes,” Sajit said. “Yes.”

  There was no reply.

  Just the moon, bright as a perfectly rounded and smoothed bone. Just the waves lashing the beach, and the sky, already dark, become black: a squall, blowing across the peninsula.

  “The bones,” he muttered to himself, looking at his hands as if for the first time. His fingers were thin and long, but rough, calloused: the hands of a bone-carver and nothing else.

  Relentlessly, night after night, in a torrent, the moon voice spoke to him – in the whisper of the webs the gonchai spider wove to catch its prey, through the chorus of the barking tree frog, through the slats in his house, the flashes and scintillations of the sea forming Sanskrit before his eyes. “The bones,” the moon said. “Think of the bones . . .”

  When the rains were at their most ferocious, the encroaching jungle a wall of green which seemed to have no end, Sajit slipped out from between the leviathan’s ribs, taking only a sack of carvings with him, and disappeared from the sight of Go Oc Eo for ever.

  Sajit Xuan-Ti Traveled by night and hid by day. In the darkness, he could gauge the direction and distance of the warring armies: where they fought, the sky erupted in funnels of fires, watch towers ablaze. The horizon was a red scar which bled into the darkness. He could hear the screams of wounded battle elephants and he thought of the hundreds of Buddhas he might still carve from their bones.

  Refugees fled from the lights. They brushed against him moth-like in their rags, their shoeless feet churning the mud, their progress pitifully slow. When they saw him, walking toward Angkor Thom, they often stared at him blankly, the joke taking time to settle into the mud, and through the mud into their souls. Then: laughter. As if he were a clown. Or mad.

  “Look! Look!” an old man shouted. And: “Look!” again, as if moved by the absurdity of Sajit’s destination to repeat no other word, but to announce the bone-carver’s presence with the insistence of a minah bird.

  He did not reply to such taunts. Surely, he told himself, it was not so bad. Surely not. He ignored the tangled limbs of corpses, their slack mouths, the way shadow traced their faces as if with charcoal.

  But he could not ignore the ground under his feet. A hole had opened in his left sandal and through this hole came all the mud, the water, the blood, the excrement, upon which he walked. Slowly, his left leg became sensitized to the hole, until he trembled with each step, for each step brought with it a premonition of the land’s pain. The pain spread through his bones until each seemed alive with agony. He felt his face twisting in discomfort, so that his grin was like the cockeyed reflection of a slit moon in the sea – curving up one side and down the other. The refugees began to run from the man he knew he had become: emaciated and rag-clad, with a leer that leapt across his face in time to the flinching limp with which he negotiated the ground. His hands dangled from the soaked cuffs of his shirt like the roots of a long-dead ginger plant.

  In places where the armies had not slashed and burned, the road reverted to jungle, for without the civil authorities to cut it back, the trees spread where they pleased, their roots firmly entrenched, even in the mud. The constant rain – which, like a ringing in his ears, became an annoyance, then a presence to be ignored, and finally a dismal fact he could not escape and therefore resigned himself to – this rain fed the roots, the branches, the leaves, until by the seventh day, he could see only a wall of trees ahead, broken by a few scattered tiles.

  On the ninth day, the skies were clear and, early in the morning, an enormous face stared down at Sajit through the wall of green: the visage of Emperor Jayavarman, carved into the sharply triangular temple tops of Angkor Thom. Under the gaze of Jayavarman’s languorous eyes, the firm but caring mouth, Sajit should have felt at ease, protected, but the sweetness of corrupted flesh and the brusque, choking sour smell of burning bones dispelled any such illusion. He came out from the forest onto a wide plain, upon which lay the city-shrine Angkor Thom. Ahead of him, two lines of statues, cut from solid stone and connected at the arms and legs, formed a passage to the gateway, which rose one hundred fifty meters high. From every tower, Jayavarman’s visage peered down, until it seemed to Sajit that a giant audience had gathered to watch him.

  He shuddered, whispered “Namo kuanshiyihuan Bodhissattiva mahasattva.” Jen Jen had said he knew nothing except his art, but here that would help him, for the corpses would not bother him if he could think of them as bone.

  It was not until he had almost passed by the rows of fire blackened statues that he felt, from his left, the eyes of one following him.

  Sajit stopped walking. The silence of the city struck him then and fear twisted in his belly. He did not turn to face his watcher. That a statue should watch him didn’t seem odd, for hadn’t the moon with his father’s face spoken to him?

  No, he avoided the statue’s eyes not from fear, but because he feared he would find reflected there the same fascination and the same laughter he had seen in the refugees’ faces. Instead, he looked at the bodies sprawled across the entrance. Most were soldiers, dressed in the uniforms of a half-dozen armies. To the left, they had been stacked in patterns like lotus flower petals. The smoldering corpses sent plumes of smoke into the air; the smoke covered the face of the south tower, distorting Jayavarman’s lips into a frown. The smell filled Sajit’s nostrils and he felt a lightness in his stomach. With revulsion, he realized he was hungry.

  He turned to face the statue. A dwarf had taken the place of the stonework; some machinery of war had dislodged the statuary, leaving only the base, upon which sat the dwarf, who stared neither left nor right, but straight ahead. The left eye had given Sajit the illusion that someone watched him; made of glass, it seemed to stare directly at Sajit no matter how he moved in relation to it. He had believed the dwarf to be a statue because the man’s skin matched the fire-washed stone: a pure black sheen that marked him as South Indian.

  Sajit smiled, nodded, bowed, but the dwarf stared straight ahead. Gathering his courage, Sajit put down his bag of carvings. He stepped close enough to touch the man’s shoulder. The eyes stared straight ahead.

  The dwarf’s features itched to be carved into bone; he resembled a gnarled banyan root dark with rot. Jowls hung below his chin and folds of skin drooped over the eyes. Wrinkles creased the forehead, hidden by the same blackness which had masked him among the real statues.

  The dwarf wore a grey tunic and a matching dhoti. A karta, his only weapon, was stuck through his sash and lying beside him on the stone were a necklace of silver bells, a mask of the monkey god Hanuman, and a staff carved from sandalwood, the musk from it overlaying the rancid odor of flesh.

  “A jester!” Sajit exclaimed.

  Blood began to trickle from the right eye, following a set course amid the wrinkles, which were marked by a dark line where blood had dried days before.

  Sajit wiped at the blood with the hem of his sarong.

  “How long have you been sitting here?” he asked, not expecting a reply.

  “Four days,” the dwarf said, the good eye locking onto Sajit so swiftly that the bone-carver snatched his hand away from the tears of blood and stuttered an incoherent reply.

  “Four days,” the dwarf repeated, and smiled. Yellow teeth shone against the absolute dark of his face. “Three nights. No one has approached me until now nor could I, it seemed, move in all that time, until you touched the blood upon my face.”

  “You hid from the soldiers?”

  The dwarf shrugged. “I sat here and pretended indifference to their battles. Before, when I ran, it seemed that the very act of flight made them pursue me. So I took up my post
here, in the way of the Buddha, and have watched the blood sport of the Khmer and the Thai, and their allies, as they stalk the same ground over and over. I have opened my mouth to the sky and survived on rain water . . . Who are you to walk beneath the shadow of these gates?”

  “I am Sajit Xuan-Ti, the bone-carver.”

  The dwarf began to laugh, but put off Sajit’s questions with, “You are not he. I know Sajit Xuan-Ti well. I have bought some of his carvings and stolen more from the Khmer court, and you are not he. Everyone knows he resides in the village of Go Oc Eo where he works at his craft by the sea and knows naught of the world.”

  “And yet, I am Sajit.”

  The dwarf grunted, looked away. “I would rather you had stayed home and carved for the rest of us, who are more world weary than you ever need be – if indeed you are Sajit. My name is Tien Tievar – a jester, a clown in the court of the Khmer.”

  “Did you know the serunai player, Prei Chen? Do you know how she died?”

  The words came out swiftly, clattering one on top of the other, and he lowered his head in frustration, cupped his face with his hands.

  “Forgive me, Tievar. I have not eaten in three days. My hands shake. I cannot remember the simplest rules of bone carving. The moon has told me to seek out the bones of Prei Chen and carve them into something wondrous, something with as much beauty as her music.”

  “The moon is deceitful, Sajit,” the dwarf said, his blind eyes looking out toward the horizon. He was silent for a long time. Finally, when it seemed he might never speak again, he said, “I knew of Prei Chen. I heard her play many times in the court. How she died, I cannot tell you. I do not know. No living person knows.”

  “Where is she buried?”

  Tievar shrugged. “In Angkor Thom. Under the shadow of the Naga Queen, but where within the tangle of bodies?”

  “Will you show me?”