by B Catling
As Maclish had anticipated, some of the heartbroken parents paid to have their preserved child back, keeping them in quiet parts of the house, holding and talking to them until the next child came. One couple never conceived again, and secretly enjoyed the fictional infancy of their little corpse all their life.
It was during the days of the long rains, when even the Limboia could not work, that Hoffman brought the fateful bundle to the prison. They were all there that afternoon, the rotations halted by the torrent that lashed and hammered the narrow windows and the slate roof. The old prison was crowded and choked by the silent mass. The doctor and Maclish spluttered into it from the puddles outside, noisy raincoats flapping over their heads, shuddering off water like dogs in a hall.
They put their prize on the table and uncovered it. They had become used to the process, made immune by the dependency of the ritual and its cleansing after-effects. But the sound that flew through the tall building on this occasion was like the slap of a single wave hitting a cave: a quick intake of breath from all the Limboia, all at once, all together. The warden and the doctor froze and the hair on the back of their necks bristled uncontrollably. The doctor turned white and looked between Maclish and the wet door. Nothing happened, and the Limboia started to make their usual line towards the table, the first with the mirror in its hand. This time, the scrying was different. There was the same action, the same impassive hunger-quiet queue, but it had altered utterly in another basic way, as if its temperature had shifted, or its scent or colour had changed, and whatever this abnormality was, it was growing with each participant. The rain roared outside, its dampness seeping through the entire building.
After every one of the inmates had visited the table and returned to their beds, a new sensation joined the sound of the water: breathing, at first barely audible, then growing, more in rhythm than in volume. The two men looked at each other as the suction and blow increased. It was one breath. One breath, made by all the inmates in perfect unison. It was, at the same time, disarmingly unnatural and absolutely understandable. Then, out of the corner of their eyes, they saw something move. They watched, aghast and open-mouthed, as the curled cadaver opened its eyes.
Maclish paled. ‘Holy fuck,’ he stammered. ‘Oh God, no!’
The doctor said nothing, one hand covering his mouth in horror. The tiny eyes moved, turning in their dead sockets to look directly at him. He stepped towards it, the wind of the breathing echoing in every part of the room. He stretched out a tremulous hand, the spectre’s gaze now focused into a question. The breath whistled in his ears, and he leaned closer to the abomination, finally touching its leg with the tips of his fingers. The eyes closed and the breath stopped, silence descending with such rapidity that both men flinched; but the momentum of the phenomena continuing to roll in their bodies and souls.
Maclish drew his pistol from its holster and looked around uneasily, peering up the flights of metal stairs which dominated the building. Nothing stirred; even the rain outside was beginning to ease.
‘Bring that,’ he commanded the doctor, jerking his head towards the table. Hoffman wrapped the bundle and lifted it tentatively into his large Gladstone bag. They left the slaves to their silence and made their way out into the puddles and fresh air, the warden walking backwards, his gun pointing a warning back into the empty space, like a child’s torchlight prying into infinity.
Back at the house, he stood panting while the doctor stared limply at the bag on the kitchen table. Maclish needed a drink like never before, but there was none in the house, and it had been over a year since he had taken the pledge. Not to anyone else – he would have broken that – but to himself. The contradiction and the lack of choice fuelled his anger.
‘What the fuck went wrong in there?!’ he shouted at the doctor, who shrugged and struggled to speak. ‘Is that thing dead or alive?!’ Maclish demanded, waving his gun towards the bag.
‘It’s dead!’ said Hoffman.
‘Then why did its fucking eyes move?’
‘I think… it was just a reflex action.’
‘For God’s sake, man! It looked at me!’ choked Maclish.
‘Yes.’ The doctor nodded unhappily.
‘What made this happen, what’s wrong with it?’ Maclish pointed at the carrier again with his gun.
In a distant and strangled voice, the doctor said, ‘It wasn’t stillborn; it was aborted.’
Maclish glared at Hoffman and very carefully put his revolver back into its holster, buttoning the flap tightly down.
‘You fuck,’ he said flatly. ‘Get it out, get rid of it.’
He snatched open the door to the back yard with such brutality that it jolted, spraying water into the tension between them. The doctor left and Maclish shut him out, slamming his retreating figure out of sight.
The amassed eyes watched in silence, through the broken glass, as the figures parted – construction of the Orm had begun, and all would understand its consequences before the year was over.
* * *
The uncanny should be no match against scientific curiosity, thought Hoffman on his way home. He thought it like a mantra in an attempt to drown out the horrific, impending prospect of unwrapping the bundle again when he got to the house. He imagined movement inside his bag. He thought about it opening its eyes in there, looking out at the darkness, trying to see him.
He knew it was dead. He had seen the dead open their eyes before, had even heard them sigh. He had once seen an arm rise to noisily dislodge an unsecured coffin lid. He had even heard the case of a body sitting up, under its mortuary sheet, causing such dismay to the autopsy assistant that he spilt an entire jar of pickled onions over his lunch and a week’s worth of medical notes. Hoffman had handled the papers months later; the distinctive reek of vinegar had persisted, even then.
But this was different. Those tiny eyes had conscience. Or was it just a moment of nerves? Dread brought on by that unnatural breathing, a suggestive illusion to make the blood run cold?
The uncanny should be no match against scientific curiosity.
At the back of his consulting room was a conservatory. Its windows were painted white to just above head height, which gave the room a bright concealment. He called it his laboratory. No real experiments were ever conducted there, but he pottered about among its specimens and chemicals, test tubes and retorts, in a delighted pretence of scientific enquiry; it gave him status among the uneducated elders of this prosperous backwater. The most functional thing in the laboratory was its incinerator, which squatted at the far end of the rectilinear space. A lot of uncertainties and embarrassments had vanished in it, along with the usual quota of malign and discarded tissue.
He entered the conservatory that evening in a daze, immediately turning on the incinerator’s gas supply and igniting its glowing hum. A few straddles of passing storm gave spasmodic bursts of rain, which ran across the glass roof; rivulet shadows knotted and crawled zebra patterns on the stainless steel table below. The bundle sat in the middle of their flow like an isolated island, devoid of life. Hoffman slipped on maroon rubber gloves and brought a wrapped set of surgical tools to the table. It would have been easier to throw the spectre straight into the flames, but he was curious and, at that moment, in the stronghold of his laboratory, his pride beat stronger than his fear.
He teased the wrapping away from the still body and, with great trepidation, turned it onto its back.
He put a stethoscope to its chest: nothing. He moved the polished end to its tiny lips: no breath clouded the shining steel. He took a scalpel and nicked a vein: no blood flowed out of the black, static body. His relief compounded into certainty and, with one cupped hand, he lifted the limp thing up and crossed the room, wrenching open the roaring door of the incinerator. He hesitated a moment, readying to advance it towards the flames, when the eyes opened and stared at him with undoubtable sentience. He gasped and dropped the thing to the floor, running to the other end of the room and holding his carrying ha
nd away from the rest of his body, as if it were a separate and contaminated entity.
He waited an hour, watching the shadows of rain snake, mate and dance on the gleaming metal table, and smelling the singeing heat pour out of the incinerator. He tiptoed slowly towards it, its door still open; the interior fires raging. He looked warily at the curled body on the floor: it had not changed position since it had fallen. The cloth wrapping was still on the table and he picked it up in passing, standing over the body and dropping it, so that it covered the dead thing entirely. He snatched up its hidden contents and tightened the rags, so no part of the head was visible. His skin crawled; he half-expected movement or bony pressure to struggle in his grip. But it remained limp and passive, as if waiting to receive its fate.
* * *
Six weeks later, Maclish contacted him and asked him to call by on the pretence of visiting his wife, to check her over and see if she might be fit enough to continue with his plans for a family. After a cursory examination, the doctor joined him for a pipe of tobacco in the garden.
‘How are they?’ asked Hoffman.
‘Restless and slow,’ answered the keeper.
‘Are there any more side effects since last time?’
‘No, they are back to their normal cheery selves.’
Maclish’s attempt at gallows humour eased the tension between them and the doctor smiled.
‘I think they need another one,’ said Maclish.
The doctor stopped in his tracks, unable to believe his ears.
‘You want to do it again? After the last time and what you called me?’ As he spoke, the doctor became flushed and agitated.
‘I did not mean to insult ye. I was shaken by that horrible thing,’ said Maclish, while fiddling with the bowl of his pipe. ‘It rattled me, man; I did not mean to speak out of turn.’
The doctor knew that this was the closest thing to an apology that he would ever get from the sullen Scot. They stopped to re-light their pipes, then walked on in silence for a few moments.
‘It will all work out fine if we stick to bairns that are naturally born dead.’ Maclish raised his brows at the doctor, who hesitated before slowly nodding his agreement.
So the ritual began again and the Limboia were once more satisfied. A greater bond grew between the keeper and the doctor; their secret remained hidden and effective; Mrs. Maclish was pregnant again.
In the spring, an intake of new lost men joined the throng, some younger than ever before. One was a runaway who had hidden in the Vorrh for two years, living wild until he was erased and then found by others, cutting trees nearby. He still had a remnant of language, but never used it – until the day he told Maclish about the Orm.
It had happened after his first scrying session, when all the others had returned to their dormitories. He stood alone on the metal staircase, as Maclish and the doctor, who hadn’t noticed him loitering, wrapped the bundle and prepared to leave. He started knocking on the iron banister, and they turned to see him waiting for them. Surprised, the keeper strode over to him and was about to bark an order when the young man pointed at his own heart and spoke. The voice was sluggish, without emphasis or effort.
‘From the shallow place, we have say. Say is bout the one who lives inside us, say came not with the fleyber, but with the one that looks back.’
Maclish was about to stop the gibberish when the word ‘fleyber’ rang a long, distant bell. It was a Scottish word; his mother had used it. He could not remember its meaning. How in God’s name would this native have it on his tongue?
‘Bring back that one again so Orm walk on. Or we cease. All cease.’
‘What do ye mean ‘cease’? Ye think ye can just stop work when ye want?’ barked Maclish.
‘All cease,’ said the herald of the Limboia. ‘Cease live.’
‘What are we going to do about this?’ groaned the keeper, his head in his hands, elbows on the kitchen table. The doctor sat opposite him, saying nothing. ‘Have ye any idea what in hell that idiot was gabbling about? Was that a threat?’
‘I think so, yes,’ said the doctor, reluctantly. ‘Some part of them wants the aborted child brought back, some part that calls itself Orm.’
‘That’s ridiculous, they can’t ask for anything!’
‘They mean it,’ said Hoffman.
‘Anyway, it’s impossible: ye burnt it.’ He looked indignantly at the doctor, whose eyes met his only briefly, before sliding back to the table.
‘Not exactly,’ said Hoffman.
Maclish’s family were from Glasgow, his wife’s from Inverness: it was possible that she would know the word, be able to dredge a meaning for it out of her memory.
She was watering some newly planted vegetables in a corner of their garden when he came upon her.
‘Marie,’ he said, approaching her, and the subject, cautiously. ‘Do ye recall hearing the word ‘fleyber’ before? I remember my mother using it, but I cannae for the life of me recall its meaning. Is it Gaelic, do ye know?’
Marie was a strong, neat woman, her thick, dark hair pulled back from her broad face in a bun. ‘Fleyber,’ she repeated, her neck and her ears blushing a deep blood red under her fair skin. He nodded eagerly, not noticing her discomfort, or her backwards step, onto one of the thin shoots she had just watered. ‘William, why do you ask this of me? What do you want? Haven’t we been through enough?’
He was instantly irritated by her irrational response. ‘I only asked the meaning of a word,’ he blustered.
She drew in a deep breath, resting her weight on the hoe at her side and looking him square in the eyes. ‘It’s from the highlands. The fleyber is the spirit of one that died in childbirth; they say its soul wanders the moors as a ghost light, a will-o’-the-wisp.’
Her voice quavered as she said it, but her eyes never left her husband’s. ‘Is that what you wanted to know?’ she said, blinking hard before returning to her plants, ignoring the one crushed under her foot.
* * *
Hoffman had kept the cadaver in a polished wooden box, a kind of substitute coffin that originally held a small, portable microscope. Since that day at the incinerator, he had peeked into the box several times. The eyes were always closed, except for yesterday, when he returned with the request from the Limboia: then, the eyes had stared out at him from the rigid interior.
He was preparing to pack the creature when his servant announced that Mrs. Klausen had arrived for her appointment. He had completely forgotten about the wretched woman and her insistence on being examined again for yet another of her imaginary illnesses. He went through to his consulting room, where the plump frau sat, smiling like a bird.
‘Dear Doctor Hoffman, so nice to see you again, even if it is because of my poor, ailing body.’
The doctor smiled and prepared to charm the pestilential woman, hoping to send her on her way quickly.
‘These are for you,’ she said, offering a richly embroidered silk bag containing an ornate box. ‘They are Chanteuse bonbons,’ she gushed, ‘all the way from Stuttgart.’
He thanked her and began the consultation, probing and questioning the woman’s hypochondriac needs for almost an hour. When he finally got rid of her, he rushed back into the laboratory to pack the bundle. Late, and desperate to be on the road, he bustled about, his curiosity running in a lapse. The new voice in the Limboia meant that he could gauge his experiments. He hoped to see again the response of the lost ones, this time without fear clouding his perceptions.
In his distracted panic, he mislaid the creature’s carrying bag and spent ten minutes crawling under the furniture, looking behind the books and spinning around like a giddy dog. Time was running out, and he knew Maclish would be chewing his claws and growing ill-tempered. Perhaps he had taken it next door when he’d gone to examine that dreary woman? He sprinted across the hall and scanned the examination room. The bag was not there, but her silk pouch was. He quickly threw the repulsive sweets in a bin. The bundle fitted perfectly in its elegant new
conveyor.
The keeper was standing outside the prison house, chafing and irritable. The doctor gave him a limp wave from the fence door while hurrying towards him.
‘Sorry to be so late, I had a patient.’
Maclish said nothing, but stared at the bright, noisy sack which Hoffman pulled out of his Gladstone bag like a garish conjuror. With a slur of incongruity, he said, ‘Is that it?’ Hoffman nodded and they entered the anticipant building.
Inside the stillness, the herald stood waiting at the table. ‘The one that looks back,’ he said, staring at the embroidered bag.
Maclish and Hoffman said nothing, setting their prize down on the table.
‘You leave, we need lone this day.’
‘Now, wait a minute…’ bristled Maclish.
‘It’s alright, William,’ said the doctor, with a certainty which sounded believable, ‘let’s do it their way this time.’
‘One hour!’ barked the keeper. ‘One hour only, then we come back.’
They did not turn around as they left the building, the hallway reverberating with the sound of the multitude descending the clanking stairs behind them.
* * *
There was something wrong with the food. He had tasted it in the second course. He was now on the ninth, and it was getting worse. The crème de testicule had a bitter tang, astringent and disconcerting. The kidneys had been swollen and leathery, and now the foie gras had a sulphurous aftertaste. He dined with one of his urchinous, casual companions. This alone was unheard of: he always had them removed before he bathed and dressed for a solitary dinner. The boy shovelled the food into his emaciation, washing it down with brimming glasses of the Frenchman’s favourite wine. He spat while talking, laughing out great gobfuls of exquisite cuisine, which now looked like chewed cud as they flew ungraciously across the shining tablecloth.