by Kit Cox
‘There is always someone watching,’ she said in perfect English with a strange lilt to her voice as if she was quoting someone rather than choosing the words herself.
Ben’s breath was returning. He did not know what had happened or why his mother had been able to deal with a beast in such calm and precise manner.
Suddenly he was dazzled by a ray of light from the still-spinning lamp as it finally struck a jutting rock, and gave a final, farewell blaze. He turned from the intense beam to be faced by the lifeless body of his mother, still upright but hanging like a puppet, two arm-shaped spears of twisted wood piercing her tattered clothes, blood ran along their length to the talon-like fingers before it dripped on to the hard, unforgiving soil that seemed to drink of it deeply like a garden deprived of water. This time the scream was caught in his throat as the body of his mother was tossed aside and the headless creature that now stood in her place examined him for a long time with eyes that could no longer be seen. Young Ben could take no more and fainted away, collapsing in the blood-red soil before him.
It was the workers who found him the next day, still beside the body of his mother, separated only by a path of pure white stones now alarmingly tinged red with her blood. The young lad was silent and shivering from the cold, and could not be raised to his senses by even the kindest of voices.
It was suggested the mother and boy had come up to investigate a light that other villagers had also seen and that they had been attacked by a thief whom they had disturbed as he tried to steal the premium crop under the cover of night.
The British officers down at the hospital did not tell the real reason why the boy was up on the hill that night or even that they had watched the angry mother storm off like a fury when she had heard where her son had gone. They kept their guilt hidden and made amends by ensuring that the hospital cared for the young lad.
Ben remained almost senseless for over a year, eating the barest minimum to survive and speaking not one word. Soon none of the guilty soldiers remained at the hospital, until no one was left to champion the silent boy’s cause. It was said that he should be moved to a local hospital in town, where his own people could look after him. But when it became apparent that he had English blood running in his veins and should therefore be entitled to stay in the British hospital, the upset and argument this one fact caused led to a discussion in the boy’s room between a high-ranking officer and an Indian doctor of the hospital. As they argued as to whether the boy should remain in the British hospital or a Ceylon hospital the officer blurted: ‘He wouldn’t have this trouble in England, we’d just look after him.’ Both men were surprised when the young lad spoke for the first time in over a year. His voice was quiet but determined as he simply said: ‘Send me to England.’
The First Step
A year indeed had passed since Ben had ventured up on to that hill. He had to live in its shadow every day and not know the answers to the many questions it posed, whilst at the same time not being able to find the voice to raise the questions to others.
What was the twisted, wooden creature on the hill and did it still reside there looking down on the mixed-race boy in the British hospital with its headless body, if it was indeed still headless? Why had it tried to kill him with such determination but chose instead to take his beautiful mother? And if she had been an obstacle only, why, after it had murdered her, had it simply departed and left him to be claimed by the night?
Ben had so many questions and every day in his head he raised even more, as he sat alone in the now sterile, empty room that had once been the family home. As he didn’t talk he had very little to do but sleep and with sleep came the nightmares. The nightmares, however, were the only place that he found his voice returned. The slowly moving sun would bring the shadow of the hill creeping into his room and in turn his mind. He would find himself walking through the vast night, stars all around, above and below, just the great emptiness of space until the creature came, grown in size until it was as big as the fear he felt for it. Quaking with terror, he would just stand defenceless before the monstrous beast, his protective mother gone for ever, and the beast would watch as tears filled the young boy’s eyes then ran across his cheeks to splash in the darkness and add more stars to the gloom. The silence was absolute as the creature would turn the sculpted wooden head and stare at him with star-lit eyes. Ben would open his mouth and shout his questions until they overlapped in a wind of sound that came with such force that the words became solid and every one tore through the creature, until finally it was turned into a shower of dried leaves and all that remained was just Ben and the endless night.
He would often awake from the dreams in a bed wet with his own sweat and fear. Sometimes, unable to sleep, he would get up and change the sheets, hoping to avoid the embarrassing questions of the hospital’s nurses, at all times keeping his eyes turned from the trunks of his mother possessions that still lay in one corner of the room. They had been tidied away to save him pain before being carelessly stored in the same room because often people don’t think beyond their first act of kindness. On top of one of the boxes was the book of Grimm tales that his mother had read to him just left out in plain sight. Ben would lie silent and study its cover, wishing that his mother’s delicate hand would come into view and turn through the pages, reading the wonderful stories within until his eyes felt heavy and he drifted off to sleep. The cover was so familiar to him. It was made of a hard red board that over the years of travel and use had become scuffed, sun-bleached and bent. Framing the book’s title, embossed in a suitably gothic font, was a border of stylised interlinked wolves and hunting dogs who chased one another in a never-ending hunt.
He had studied that cover for months and then one day, despite himself, he casually flipped the book open. The title page was a simple woodcut engraving, black on the yellowed page. The sight of it, however, had Ben scrambling back to his bed, whispering a prayer to himself and closing his eyes so tight that he could see specks of coloured light appear across his retina. His breathing took a long time to become calm as he fought within himself – surely he could not have seen the awful creature from the hill in the book? He would have remembered – his mother and he had read it so many times! Ben told himself to be brave it was, after all, only a picture. He turned his gaze slowly back to the wood print and his heart ceased pounding. The picture was not of his phantom but simply of Hansel and Gretel, the boy and girl hand in hand walking through the wood, the witch watching them from among the trees. He picked up the book and studied the picture. It had once, to his young eyes, been a fantasy but now the watching horror became all too real and he was reminded how his mother had neither been surprised nor ill-footed by the creature on the hill, as if she knew what it was and therefore it had lost its horror through familiarity. Had she known of the creature or simply read of its presence? After all, Ben had never seen a cougar on the plantation but he had read of them in books and knew how to react on being confronted by one.
Ben took to reading the book for clues. He read the stories again and again, trying to see what they were telling him or what was hiding in their fantastical plots and elaborate, gothic illustrations. Then he remembered the other book, The Arabian Nights, translated by Sir Richard Burton, and he quickly opened boxes to find it. The carefully packed memories of his mother stopped his progress for a moment as his eyes prickled with tears, but he forged on and pushed the emotions down inside. With strong resolve he found the treasured book and pulled it free of the packaging. This book had a green binding and was second hand because the book had a dedication on its title page that was neither to Ben nor his mother. It simply read: ‘To Jack, Embrace the madness. Richard.’ Ben had always wondered who these two men were and hoped that Richard was in fact the author/translator handing his work to a friend or grateful child but he always realised the chances of that were slim as who would give away a book if it had been so well presented and personalised by the author. Monsters hid in the pages of The Arabi
an Nights as well but there were no answers about the creature that had slaughtered his mother. It was at that moment that he heard voices outside. He grabbed both books, hid them beneath his pillows and jumped back into his bed. It was an officer and a doctor arguing about whether he should be sent to a Sinhalese hospital. The officer was insisting that the he should go – his fellow officers didn’t need a sickly child in the way – while the doctor was insisting that Ben’s British blood meant that he had a right to stay. The officer simply stated that, in that case, he should go home to Britain!
Ben heard the conversation with increasing interest, and as the hardness of the books pressed beneath his head he had a sudden thought. What if he did go to England? Might he not have a better chance of discovering the truth there? If he was ever to face this creature and avenge his mother, he needed to be as calm as she was and that meant finding out more from books and they were few and far between in a hospital in Ceylon. He couldn’t stop the words coming, the first of many that would help him defeat his demons:
‘Send me to England.’
The next few months had pretty much been a rush as people hurried to organise the next few years of Ben’s life as if they were but a trifle. Everyone it seemed, including the doctors, was happy to see the boy move on and out of their lives; he had become something of a millstone around their necks and, as much as they hated to admit it, passing the boy off to other carers was a prayer they had all made at one time or another.
He was to be sent to live in an orphanage in the county of Kent. The problem, of course, was getting him there, as there was no money for his passage. However, Ben was to be thirteen in a very short time and that meant he could work his passage home.
The journey from Noralia was actually quite a simple one as the many tea plantations of the area sent carts laden with sealed crates of dried leaves regularly down to the ports. Ben was to be going with a shipment that would be sailing from the port of Colombo.
The port was to be Ben’s first true taste of the British Empire. He had, of course, grown up in the British hospital surrounded by officers and had become accustomed to their ways, but he only needed to journey beyond the gates of its well-maintained gardens to be back into what was a very traditional Sinhalese town, with mud roads and hastily erected but comfortable huts and houses. Many merchants were simply selling the fruits picked directly from the trees or the meat that had been caught or fished for the previous day so that a trader rarely had the same product for more than a season. Very few people spoke English in the village and animals were free to wander as unmolested through the streets as any man. Merchants sold fruit and vegetables directly on the streets and there were numerous shrines to gods and goddesses garlanded with flowers and laden with edible offerings, watched over by the silent, smiling priests who tended them. In short, it was a colourful and rich environment that seemed a part of the landscape around it. Colombo, however, was not such a place and had already lost Ceylon’s native magic.
The port at Colombo was protected from the sea by a giant block wall and the town beyond had grown to match the tastes of the many British and European merchants who had found it their temporary, maybe permanent, home and place of business. Empire builders, being what they were, wanted the rest of the world to know exactly what they did, as they would do the same activity whether the goods were in season or not. It was this egotism that had the warehouses of the Colombo port gaily painted with large signs announcing to all the owner’s name and the product in which they dealt. The gaily painted warehouses belonged mostly to tea merchants but there were spice merchants, rubber manufacturers, shipwrights and coal merchants as well. Tall-sailed ships, smoking paddle steamers and fast tea clippers thronged the busy harbour, loading and unloading their cargo and passengers.
Ben had been sent to the port with a delivery of tea, riding in the back of a cart surrounded by crates of the fragrant cargo. The inhabitants of this strange town were as much European as they were Sinhalese and this clashing of cultures was being won by the richer merchants whose numbers were growing by the year, their clothes were drabber in colour than the merchants Ben had grown up with and the fabric was heavier and hard wearing. Many locals of Ceylon had found work in the port but the sailors who arrived daily were generally pale skinned. Ben hadn’t seen so much red and blond hair in all his life and he turned excitedly, hoping to get a glimpse of every hue and shade. Few women were present at the docks but those that were stood out like the most beautiful of birds, their clothes so much bigger and brighter than the men’s, their hair so much fuller and their skin so much paler. He found himself smiling at so many people, but every face that caught his eye turned away to be lost in the crowd.
The crowd moved as a single creature, it was so full of people. It grew thicker as it got closer to the quays where the ships were docked and the cart slowed till it was barely moving at all. Beyond the crates Ben could hear the anger of the driver rising as he constantly had to instruct people to move from his path in angry, untranslatable Sinhalese but soon they found their destination and the cart finally stopped before the warehouse of ‘The First Tea Company’, a merchant that predominantly supplied British troops with the brew that kept them going through the arduous days of battle around the globe; although from what the officers at the hospital had said, the products of the FTC were more likely to be drunk by the shirkers and objectors of the world rather than the fighters. The driver appeared before Ben to help him down on to the cobbles along with his small kit bag. This Ben had filled with his meagre belongings – the two precious books as well as some jewellery of his mother’s, carefully wrapped and accompanied by a letter of ownership, written and signed by a British officer, in case he was questioned about his possession of them. The driver was a burly Sinhalese employee of the tea plantation beside the hospital. His skin was as dark as night and his beard was full and speckled with grey. The driver sniffed the air and at once Ben was reminded how the docks smelt in comparison to the inland home in which he had grown up. Even the smell of the salt-heavy air and the churning waves of the ocean were lost behind the smells of the hot tar that was used to seal the boats and the sweat of so many hard-working dockers. The smell of soap, however, was suspiciously absent. Ben felt his nose screw up and was glad to see the driver’s do likewise – he hoped that all of the Empire did not smell like this.
His musings were interrupted by the approach of the warehouse foreman. He was very thin and well dressed, although he wore a worn green apron to protect his clothes. His features were friendly, although his facial hair had been trimmed in a way that made his face almost triangular in shape. His eyes were hidden behind simple wire-framed glasses. He glanced at a shipping list in his hand and counted the crates before stopping with his pen resting on Ben’s head.
‘And what is this?’ he said with a theatrical humour to his voice that gave Ben the impression only the man himself got the joke.
‘This is supercargo,’ said the driver, with a heavily accented voice. ‘You have received conformation, I am assured of this.’
The triangular-faced man bristled as if he was not used to being spoken to in such a way by an underling. ‘I was assuming that you also received our reply that we have no room for supercargo.’
The two men looked at the boy for a long time as the cart was emptied of crates behind them. It was the driver who spoke first. ‘I have unloaded – he is your problem now.’ And without stopping to listen to the triangular man’s protests, which were many, he remounted his cart and drove off through the crowds.
Ben looked up at the man beside him, who sighed heavily and without looking down at the boy headed back towards the warehouse gates. He paused only once when he realised the boy was not following
‘Come on then – we need to find you a boat,’ he said tiredly, beckoning Ben to follow.
The man’s office was small and one wall was completely lined from floor to ceiling with tiny square drawers all carefully labelled with the names of
different tea plantations. His desk was the loveliest piece of carved ebony and all that sat upon it was a giant ledger and a delicate bone-china tea set. The room was a nice escape from the smells and bustle of the dock. There was a distinct smell of wood and cinnamon.
The triangular-faced man sat quietly reading the ledger, the large window behind him turning his stooped form into a shadow where the reflected light of his glasses gave him round friendly eyes preventing the shadow from appearing sinister. Ben’s eyes were drawn to the view beyond the window as the masts of ships drifted by, sails billowing as they took to the ocean or jostled for space in the port. The larger steamships were being pulled from the dock by smaller boats and gave Ben the impression of small children trying to tug a reluctant father away from the tavern and home for lunch.
‘There’s a slow boat leaving tomorrow. It needs a galley lad.’ The shadow seemed to move as if Ben was now the greater object of attention rather than the shipping ledger. ‘Can you peel a potato?’
Ben focused back on the shadow, not really seeing the figure before him but assuming fingers were steepled before the triangular face to make the speaker appear more educated than the tanned boy before him, he nodded.
‘Do you speak, lad?’ the shadow asked, a note of concern edging into the well educated voice, thick with the accent of northern England.
‘Not much,’ Ben replied smartly, wanting to be as honest as he could. He didn’t mind the triangle-faced man’s hesitation - he was just doing his job, and getting a young boy to England was a departure from the crates of tea he was more used to shipping across the waves. Ben had liked the idea of being supercargo – or, to the untrained ear, a passenger on a goods ship - but he was more than happy to work his passage if it got him to England.