—
He came out of the nightmare into the nightmare. The scream of the whistle and the blistering sun illuminated worse than he had dreamt. He had no idea why the floor shuddered, why he held on to a dead man who stank of vegetation, or why he could not wake out of it. The train was slowing, the first signs of civilisation beginning to show. Fences and enclosures appeared by the side of the track, cut into the edge of the forest, which seemed to be loosening its grip on the land. Slower still, and the huts began to cluster and swarm around the track, gradually gaining height and culture. The shrill train braked, piercing its arrival to the approaching city. The corpse’s head jolted to one side, its marble black eyes staring at nothing. The Frenchman looked away with a regret that he could not explain, as the train slouched to a halt in the steaming station. He did not see that the wet, black orbs were still moving, still actively flinching to grab at any motes of light or meaning.
Loose, weird men arrived at the side of his flatbed and immediately started to tear and jostle at the chained trees. A man with red hair and a stiff uniform walked down the platform towards him. “Get off!” he demanded.
The words had a magical effect. He slithered away from the trees and the corpse, off the flatbed, and onto the station’s hard, steady ground. The red-haired man pointed him to the exit, down towards the engine, where well-dressed people in clean attire milled about.
His legs buckled and shook, refusing to forget the agitations of the journey; indeed, they insisted on continuing them, acting them out on the motionless platform. His upright carriage reinstated itself outside the station, but he dithered in small, clotted circles. Hadn’t he forgotten something back there? Was he supposed to be alone? Wasn’t there somebody he was waiting for? Had he a bag, or a stick, or…?
An hour later, unclear and unreminded, he was on the road leading into the centre of the city. He was sunburnt and ragged, his robes besmirched in all manner of filth, and the hurrying citizens eyed him in disgust and gave him a wide berth as he stumbled on.
—
Charlotte was drinking tea on their balcony when she saw him. She had been vacantly gazing across the crowd for days, trying to distract her worried mind, when the source of her anxieties teetered into her vision. She dismissed the possibility at first, for the man zigzagging below was dressed in some kind of native clown costume; a ludicrous beggar, overdressed to draw attention to his serious mental plight. Then she recognised something in his trampled gait. She stood up, retrieving the binoculars that sat on the table beside her and pressing them to her hope. The haze and the dirt attempted to dull the lenses, but beneath them, his features still showed: the eyes, lost and trawling the street, seeking something familiar, something concrete. She rushed downstairs and ran through reception, calling out to the concierge: “Bring help, it is monsieur, he is hurt, bring help!”
When she reached him, he came to the end of his abilities. He stared at her for a second more, then fainted.
—
Three days later, he awoke, cool and clean, floating in the still, starched whiteness of fragrant sheets. The smell of their fresh, laundered brilliance painted the inside of his mind with perfectly chilled milk. One of his hands began to search under the blanket for a forgotten thing beside him.
“You are safe now, Raymond.” The voice was soft and confident, radiant and restful. It seemed to come from the entire room. “The doctor has given you something. Now you must rest. I will bring you some more beef tea shortly.”
The words made no sense but soothed him back into slumber. A huge brown cow stood next to the bed. It wobbled, balanced comically on train tracks made of meat jelly, as the doctor sat below it, pulling at its udders, streams of hissing tea jetting into his white enamel pail. He filled his syringe from the steaming fluid. It misted the glass tube of the instrument, filling the room with its moist bovine vapour. The cow smiled through the fog with the most natural expression of quiet delight.
—
When he awoke, the cow was gone and Charlotte was sitting by his bed. It took a few minutes to remember her name. She brought tea and talked quietly, while he nodded and frowned at her version of the last few days.
The drug that the doctor administered to him was Soneryl; he would use it, and others, for the next thirteen barren years of his life. As its effects wore off, a great, hollow pain opened out inside him. He stopped nodding, and Charlotte’s words lost their meaning. Her voice was like a song, a chanter that made tears rise and fill his flickering eyes. She stopped when she saw her companion’s growing distress. Moving to his side, she held his small body in her arms. He sat forward, and she saw that his pillow was blotched pink with perspiration and blood. Beneath his silk pyjamas, his wounds and abrasions had been bandaged and covered in lint.
“It’s all right,” she said, “you are safe now. You are tired and bruised, but without any real injuries. Do you remember what happened to you and your friend?”
“Friend?” he said, in a voice that surprised him. “What friend?”
Charlotte explained that he had left to meet a man who was taking him into the Vorrh. They had planned to be there for only one day, but in fact, he had been gone for four. She told him of her growing panic and the plans she had been ready to put into place, before she had seen him on the street.
“What was his name?” he asked weakly.
“I don’t know, my dear. You called him many things. I think you said ‘Silka’ or something like that?”
“Silka,” he repeated, shaking his head. “Well, what did he look like?” he murmured.
“I am sorry, but I did not see him. You said he was young and black.”
“Did I?”
Charlotte nodded and he thought hard, but there was nothing there.
Not a single trace of the last seven days existed between this stained pillow and the previous one, which had been bloodied by dream; not even a rind of memory clung to the empty space in his skull. What boiled and hollowed him was below, in his heart: a vast, pleading hurt that sucked at his being, a loss beyond all other feelings, an overpowering sadness that should have been an overpowering joy.
“Charlotte, I think I am in love,” he said, tears streaming down his face as his body shook and wheezed in her frightened arms. They stayed like that until he sobbed himself asleep. Charlotte tucked him back into the bed and lowered the blinds against the late, slanting afternoon sunlight.
She tiptoed about the room, silently packing their belongings back into the suitcases, trying not to think of what he had just said. The warm, dim quiet was hushed and measured by his rhythmic breathing.
—
Three days later, he was standing in the lobby of the hotel, dressed in one of his immaculate white suits. Charlotte had booked the ship to carry them home. The monstrous black mobile caravan chugged outside, waiting, brimming with their possessions. He dithered as he clung to her arm, looking out into the blinding light of the street. His bone Eskimo spectacles had been changed for a much larger, more contemporary pair, which wrapped around his pinched face, making him appear insect-like.
“Shall we go?” she asked, squeezing his arm affectionately.
He gulped and nodded, and she guided him through the warm glass doors and down the faltering steps. Just before he entered the massive vehicle, he looked up and into the milling crowd, through the little island of trees that sat across the road. He looked hopelessly for someone he did not know, somebody who might know him; a last chance to repair the tearing wound that was devouring him. He looked for recognition in a wave or a touch or a smile. Nobody in the crowd stood out. Nobody saw him in the brightness and swirling dust. He stepped into the car, and it lumbered out of the city, across the arid landscape, towards the coast. In the passenger wing mirror, which had been adjusted for his view, the dark line of the Vorrh receded until it was erased by haze, dust, and vibration. His eyes never left the reflection until they reached the sea.
After his duties at the train station
were finished, Maclish had rushed to find the doctor, his expression grave and urgent.
“It went terribly wrong. We must find Sidrus at once.”
“What went wrong?” said the doctor, obtusely.
“The Orm, man, the Orm! It hollowed the wrong man, some other poor black who was guiding a stranger through the forest. Not a hunter, anyway, and not Tsungali,” said Maclish.
“But how could that be?” said the doctor, finally relinquishing the remnants of his peaceful day. “He was spoored; he had the trace string…”
Maclish shrugged. “Don’t ask me, man—I don’t have the answers. It didn’t work this time.”
—
Sidrus fumed, his head shaking in dismay; its soft, bald surface rippled and wriggled his disturbing face, looking even more unreal in the pallid light of Hoffman’s laboratory.
“He had the string worm and you had the description of the prey; how could this happen?” he said ominously.
The doctor looked at the floor and Maclish tried not to look at the articulation of the face, as anger slid beneath its baby-smooth skin and wrinkled between its wide-set, piggish eyes. He had seen many things, worked with all kinds of freaks and barrack life, but this man gave him the horrors, made his flesh creep.
“You have wasted my time and my money, and the one opportunity I had of stopping that animal from killing Williams in the Vorrh,” he snarled.
“It worked with Cornelius and the Silver Man,” mumbled Maclish, his words barely escaping before Sidrus turned on him, crossing the room and looming into his face.
“Then what fucked up this time?” he shouted, his breath hot and fast on Maclish’s face, forcing him to close his eyes. No one had ever dared try this before; the consequences of insulting the fire-headed Scotsman were broadly known. But on this occasion, he looked away. The deepest levels of his well-sprung instinct locked down his hands and his rage, quelling it beside his opponent’s ferocious power.
“We will give the money back,” said the doctor, trying to defuse the situation. Sidrus sent him a withering gaze, as if to silence him forever; alum for the tongue. The stringent moment lengthened. Sidrus stormed out of the pale room, snapping the atmosphere’s tensile thinness with his stomping feet.
—
Anger was not the most useful tool in his armoury. He had achieved everything without its obvious help, could reach the far points of expression and action without the adrenaline other men required to achieve half as much. So he marched through the streets, wanting to dissipate his rage and think more clearly, but he could only contemplate the dismal outcome of what should have been a foolproof plan—what had those idiots done to ruin such a perfect solution? Now he had to find another way of stopping the wretched Englishman from being butchered in the Vorrh as he tried to pass through it for a second time. Nobody had ever accomplished such a thing; the great forest protected itself by draining and erasing the souls of all men; all except this one, apparently, who walked through it with impunity, even appearing to gain benefit from it. Sidrus did not know how or why this unique possibility had manifested itself, although he guessed that the witch child of the True People had worked some blasphemous magic with her protégé. What he did know was that if the Englishman passed through the forest again, he alone would have the opportunity to understand its balance, its future, and maybe even its past. Not since Adam had such a single being altered the purpose and the meaning of the Vorrh, and now he was being hunted by a barbaric mercenary, one these fools had let slip through their grasp.
Sidrus was faced again with the impossibility of his task—he could not go into the forest, and there was nobody else who could prevent catastrophe. It had been easier dispatching the Erstwhile than trying to protect the straying man from afar. The twins had been easy enough, but he knew there would be others sniffing out the bounty attached to Williams’s desertion and the murders he had committed that had sparked the tinder of the Possession Wars.
His only hope now was that Tsungali would be lost in the tangled depth or that one of the creatures of the core would permanently interrupt his travels. But Sidrus had little faith in these hopes, and he prayed again for a darker shadow to cross the hunter’s path, something that would give the Englishman a chance to fulfil his evolution.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Ghertrude and Cyrena had heard rumours about the workforce of the Vorrh. Their parents and grandparents and generations of their relatives in all directions had depended on the forest for their living and, eventually, their wealth. They knew that the Limboia were said to be becoming less than human, a condition brought about by prolonged contact with the Vorrh; that only one man could control and manipulate them; and that he was becoming rich and respected by holding the reins of their talent. It was said that his communication with them had made it possible to discover more about the forest and its inhabitants, something that had been forbidden for all known memory. Ghertrude’s father occasionally consulted with one of the city’s most prominent doctors, a known associate of Maclish, the talented Limboia keeper. So they journeyed to the doctor’s house with the great hope of finding Ishmael before all chance had passed.
They travelled in Cyrena’s lilac Hudson Phaeton. There had been a light rain that morning, and the chauffeur had raised the roof on the noble convertible. They talked excitedly about the cyclops and his possible adventures, watching the city slip past as they glided by at a handsome seven miles per hour. Large numbers of people milled about on the streets, and occasionally little groups would shout or scream out in some boisterous play. They came close to a curb where four young people tussled together in a noisy sport. Their appearance was odd and caught Ghertrude’s attention. As the car drew closer, the two young men grabbed the smaller girl with rather too much force, seeming oafish and common, although their clothing suggested taste and education. They held the young woman by the arms, pinning her forward so she could not turn. The fourth member of their spinning group, a powerful young woman, pointed at her trapped companion, laughing and peeling off her gloves. In the brief glimpse from the passing car, it was suddenly obvious that the younger girl was in terror; the men’s game had become earnest under the gaze of the other woman, who was obviously poised to attack. Ghertrude tugged at Cyrena’s attention, and they craned their heads back towards the tableau in time to see the woman grab the other’s face, much in the same way that peasant women squeeze melons to test their ripeness. There was a horrible scream from the girl, who fell to her knees while the others happily fled.
“Stop the car!” cried Cyrena to her driver. “Rupert, go and see what has happened and if we can be of any help!”
The chauffeur mumbled something and left the purring limousine, walking back towards the crowd of people, who now stood in a circle around the fallen girl. None had gone near or offered assistance. The chauffeur bent down to look at her and then stiffened and stepped back. The girl sobbed, “I can’t see, I can’t see!”
He stared for a moment then looked away, walking back to the car with his eyes fixed firmly on the pavement.
“Well?” demanded Cyrena, leaning out of her open window. “What’s happened? What can we do?”
The chauffeur spoke quietly without looking at them, his hand already opening the driver’s door. “It’s nothing, ma’am. Just horseplay got a bit out of hand. She’s just a bit ruffled; that’s all.”
“Ruffled?” repeated Cyrena incongruously. Her next question was staunched by the chauffeur, who quickly got in and closed his door, releasing the handbrake immediately and pulling away from the carnage. She looked back out of the car’s rear window, but both the crowd and the girl had gone. Bypassers already cut fleeing trajectories through the static where the circle of theatre had been. Rupert must have been right; it had been nothing but her inflamed imagination.
“Go on,” she said with a twitch of her dismissive hand.
The car gathered speed, yet something nagged at her. The incident had curdled her day and left her w
ith an ill-determined ache of responsibility. Ghertrude tried to lighten her friend’s obvious anxiety by changing the subject and pointing outside to more delightful features of their journey. Cyrena nodded, but her unconscious remained continuously aware of the small groups of people that sped past the corner of her eye.
Ten minutes later, they arrived at the doctor’s house. The journey had frustrated Cyrena: Her taciturn chauffeur still refused to meet her gaze; she wished she had learned to drive herself.
They were immediately shown through the spacious house to the doctor’s consulting rooms, where he waited to greet them with warm handshakes and a beaming smile. They sat and drank tea, passing pleasantries until Cyrena decided to broach their need.
“Dr. Hoffman, one hears that you are a good friend of the keeper of the Limboia.”
“Yes, Mistress Lohr, that is true. We have worked together to oversee and tend to the workers’ health.”
“Please, call me Cyrena. Everybody does, and my family have known yours for a good many years now,” she said, casually adjusting her beauty for the old man’s appreciation.
He smiled and said, “Cyrena! Why do you ask about Maclish?”
“It is a delicate matter of great importance to me; to us,” she said, looking at Ghertrude. “A dear friend of ours has gone into the Vorrh and we fear for his safety and well-being.”
The doctor nodded, presenting his professional face of concern for their benefit.
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