After much moaning, Lutchen pulled himself out of the hollow impression he had made in the sand and started begging for mercy.
“Ask him again,” Tyc said to the returning Yuuptarno, who was bearing a stick twice as thick as the last one. He stopped and tried to remember the sequence of strange-sounding words. After he said them, Lutchen started to flail his hand in air, babbling innocence and mercy.
“Does he answer?” she asked, and Yuuptarno shook his head and she then nodded hers.
This time the stick was swung into the base of his spine, just above his kidneys, and the old priest fell forward into his now-shallow impression in the sand that had been erased almost lovingly by the warm gentle sea.
Lutchen finally understood the question that was hiding under the blows that were knocking him in and out of consciousness. Yes, he said those things, and no, he did not know where the child was. He was then dragged through the village to the door of Oneofthewilliams’s hut, where he was forced to sing out all his crimes again, explain all his weaknesses and all his lies without ever daring to raise his eyes. His new role in life was explained to him by a voice in the hut. He was to go and find the child and protect her journey in the Vorrh. There were to be no mistakes. He thanked his new master and was taken away, catching sight of the sacred Williams only as he passed the door. His old God or one of his new ones must have been with him then, because he managed to vomit outside the holy place without being beaten again.
* * *
—
The Wassidrus discovered that he could not think forward, there was nothing in his part of the brain that speculated. Nothing that imagined. Everything that happened to him now came as a surprise or a shock. All he had were memories and they were constant and stung like a paper cut. So when without warning Kippa entered the hut and lifted him up like a tattered banner and walked him out to the centre of the village, he only had the past to keep him sane. The pole that he was part of, which extended to just short of his hopping leg, was notched into a slit in the ground. The juddering jar of it chewed at all of his sutures and stitchings as he stood upright for the first time, his bent leg twisting and flapping around the pole like a furled pennant trying to find its use and meaning. He heaved and stretched to find the boundaries of his weakness and felt their thinness, but he did not come apart.
A fluttering drum announced the arrival of the sacred one on his catafalque-like platform, carried by six men in simple yellow robes. He was tied to a seat with the same yellow cloth. It held him tight and allowed his arms to move about with great expressive freedom, as if giving the crowd around him precious and bounteous gifts. The saggy sock-bundled swelling that contained the brain was decorated with a tiara of seashells that glistened in the morning light. Apart from that, the rest of the truncated thing was naked. The Wassidrus saw that it had no genitals, and looked optimistically down at its own body, being able to see there for the first time. He too had nothing. Both parts of what had once been a man were sexless. He wanted to ponder why, but that gully of questioning lived in the other half under the yellow rag and the coronet of shells. So he remembered the brutal black witch who had butchered him and squeezed his brain hard to wring a plan of vengeance out of its narrow walls, wanting to imagine getting his hands on her fat puffy throat. But he had no hands and the straining only made things worse. It pushed his gatherings backwards as if on a slippery slope. There was no purchase in the present and he retreated uncontrollably into memories of his lost resolute power, where all that came under it whimpered as they were crushed. He tried to gain a foothold in the vindictive crags and flinty edges of those recollections, to stop sliding away from now and future conflicts. But the momentum of the gravity and the sliminess of the sides held no hope of grip, let alone traverse. He slithered only into recollections of what he had been, and this was the genius of the benign paradox in the cruelty of his punishment.
There was a new face in the grotesque procession. Another white man stood towards the back and stared at him in disbelief. The sacred one lifted his damaged hands to beckon the white man closer. The Wassidrus saw the hand and remembered the great pistol exploding in it; it was the last time he’d had a fully working body. He had been ambushed and defeated. His remaining fingers were now pointing at him and attached to the mangled remnant that seemed to be worshipped here. The fingers then prodded the old priest hard in his kidneys and he stumbled forward. Father Lutchen had seen many wonders, many horrors on his pilgrimage towards understanding the mechanisms that spoke of the diversity of God’s ideas. He had seen travesty and torture, ingenuity and splendour, and he had tried to master some of their techniques of existence, but nothing had prepared him for what he was looking at now. A thing that should be dead. A contradiction to the rules of life itself. The tatter of flesh with its live eyes that should have been taken by blood poisoning, shock, and infection or from the sheer lack of bodily organs. The quarter of a man that was sewn to a pole watched him in equal disgust, contemptuous of his life and repulsion. The smaller bundle of a man again dug at his ribs and Lutchen started speaking. The Wassidrus understood some of its meaning. The mangled German and French rattled somewhere in his memory.
“I am here to talk to, to speak your language. I am also to be your keeper.”
The word keeper had different words attached to it, the speaker trying them on before he finally settled. The cold grey eyes of the white man slid sideways to the gesturing bundle and its yellow-clad entourage. The fingers pointed.
“Also, also we are to travel together. I am to deliver you to the Vorrh, destiny waits there.”
Part Two
There is no passion in nature so demonically impatient, as that of him, who shuddering upon the edge of a precipice, thus meditates the plunge.
EDGAR ALLAN POE, “The Imp of the Perverse”
Observation is an old man’s memory.
JONATHAN SWIFT
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The next time Betty Fishburn hammered with her broom he did not even stop to ask. The cold had gone, leaving drenching rain followed by the thick miserable fog that he had experienced only twice before. Up in the sanctity of his room it glowed around him, giving a peaceful and eerie hush. But outside it was a very different matter. The daylight congested and became solid and cloying, murdering every inch of space. The London particular had moved in without pity, and suffocated the city. It even muted Whitechapel. The staircase was glowing yellow-grey and his footfall sounded stolen and purposeless. Mrs. Fishburn’s door creaked as he passed it.
“Yes I know, yes I know.” He coughed against the phlegmy light that eased out of the crack. “I am going to look.”
At the door below he paused, the long skeleton key in his hand. Thinking that perhaps another of Solli’s henchman was being tested, he knocked on the door to give warning to them and himself. Nobody wanted unnecessary surprises in this place. The knock was hollow and without response, so he fumbled the key in the lock and opened the door. Eddies of smog came in with him and he quickly shut it out, slamming the door, its spring lock closing without the use of the key. The noise signalled to Mrs. Fishburn that he had gained access.
The three rooms and kitchen were evenly lit, all the windows having the same illuminated blankness that he was enjoying in his rooms upstairs. But here the still, even vacuity gave the bare rooms a quality of waiting, of suspension that he did not much care for. He decided to ignore that and examine the rooms in some detail—something he had never done before. It was obvious that nobody was here. There was not the slightest sound, scent, or vibration of life, especially human life, which gives off so much of those even when it’s trying to be unnoticed or hidden.
Apart from the kitchen furnishings, a stool and a chair, the only other thing in the locked space was a solid bench that occupied the end of the first and largest room. This was an unusual feature for a domestic dwelling, and he assumed that l
ike many in this labyrinth of secret trade, the previous occupant had conducted a business here. Maybe a tailor or cloth cutter, seamstress or leatherworker. He remembered the machine noise that he had heard before, the sound that seemed to come from this very room. Didn’t that sound like a sewing machine or some other such cranked apparatus? For the first time the mystery of the place engaged him. He would conduct a Holmesian investigation of the empty apartment before he was disturbed by troublesome flatfoots and harridans.
He told himself that those noises had always come from somewhere else, having been distorted on that evening to give the impression of emanating from here. He knew that the first-floor occupants were engaged in some clandestine trade. Bulk parcels were often taken in and out of their premises. Presumably the large family that lived there were the workforce of some less-than-legal business. This was Hector’s chief suspect, but as none of the furtive family spoke English, the task appeared daunting and he had no intention of wasting his time trying to find out. The only other suspect in the block was the shop selling cat’s meat and string on the ground floor, run by a couple of a sour and miserable disposition. He was pondering this as he roamed the spaces, examining doors and windows, opening cupboards and built-in shelves. There was little of interest or meaning here, and he found himself again at the bench, looking at the scars and abrasions in its dark surface and fingering the holes that pierced it. He looked beneath and saw that there was some kind of metal holder attached there. And that from it extended what had once been electric wires. These had been sheared off and remained unnoticed to the uncurious mind. He was on his hands and creaking knees examining these when a small patch of light seemed to move in the far room. It must be a discolour or a dapple that could be seen only from down here. It was gone in seconds and of little interest compared to what he had just discovered on the underside of the bench. Hector was enjoying himself, and when he found the scuffed track where cables had previously been, he got excited. He followed them to where they stopped in the wall near the window, just below the shutter casement and the built-in cupboard. It was all solidly nailed shut. He found his pocketknife and dug and prised at the wood until a small gap was opened, big enough for him to get his slender fingers in. Then with all his might he tugged and it flew open in a shower of cobwebs and dust. His investigation was successful, for inside were even more elaborate remains of more sophisticated Victorian mechanisms. He recognised the porcelain conducting terminals and brass fittings of high-voltage management. Here in a house block that had no electricity and was still lit by gas. With more effort he prised open the cupboard door and found a large and pungent stain. White salty encrustations had grown around copper screw fittings. He started salivating uncontrollably, and he knew he had found the storage place of a once very large voltaic battery. This was indeed a mystery worthy of his consideration. The thick, tarry wires hidden here had also been truncated by the same brutal clipping that had severed those beneath the bench. He tried to peer in deeper but the dimness defeated him. Then he realised why. The light was going outside, leaving the smog to feed and swallow the growing darkness. It would be lighting-up time in less than an hour. But never fear, he had a torch upstairs and could continue his investigation. The game was afoot. He crossed the room to the street door and twisted the latch. Nothing happened. He tried again; it was solidly locked shut. For the first time Hector indulged in the guttural end of the parlance that surrounded him, born aloft continually by his new young friends.
“Fokking door,” he spat out, and attacked it with all the sudden spite that he must have been storing or generating secretly for quite some time.
The door remained resolutely closed. He gathered himself and searched for the mechanism, finding no keyholes on the inside. He banged on the stout wood, calling to Mrs. Fishburn and demanding to be let out. He hammered on the walls and stamped on the floor, hoping that somebody, anybody might come to his aid. This was infuriating. This was Solli’s fault. Solli and that damned Frau upstairs and those stupid boys. When his hand became tired and sore, he gave in, knowing that his cries and bangs would only be added to her ever-growing anthology of supernatural phenomena drifting up from below; that Mrs. Fishburn would be chain-smoking, her yellow fingers clamped over her terrified ears. He slumped back into the dimming rooms and collected one of the portable stools and brought it over to the bench. At least it was not as freezing as before. Eventually Solli or one of his idiot boys would turn up and get him out.
* * *
—
An hour later. An hour darker, and he tried again to make himself known, hammering all the walls to get somebody to hear him. He was standing near the entrance to the little kitchen, pounding the wood-panelled walls, when one of them moved and slid aside.
“Ah, more secrets,” Hector said out loud to the quiet room. He thrust his hand inside the narrow, dark space and touched something that was hanging there. He grabbed it and lifted it out; a small folded scrap of paper came with it and fell to the dark floor. He ignored it and concentrated on the disproportionate weight of the thing in his hand. It was a small tight leather sack with a loop to hang or carry it by. He examined it closer in the poor light. It was robustly stitched along its flat pear-shaped form. Whatever was inside it was meant to be there forever, so it was not a kind of bag or purse. The weight was immense for its size. It must be lead inside, he thought, maybe a kind of clock weight, but with a carrying strap? Then as he held it in both hands he knew exactly what it was. The foreboding crept back into the room with the shadowless darkness. In his hands he was holding a cosh, a cudgel, whose sole purpose was to inflict pain and unconsciousness on its unfortunate victim.
He bent down to pick up the paper and took both of his finds back to the low stool. He put the strap of the instrument of misery on one of his wrists so that he had both hands free to unfold the paper and was surprised how reassuringly old and brittle it felt. He opened it carefully and stared at the message scrawled there. It looked like it had been written in haste by an untutored hand. He turned it this way and that to make sure that he was reading the dim letters correctly. On his third attempt he knew it to be gibberish:
tell them its this gin thats making them
do it there is no jack no leather apron
they are all doing it to themselves
look at their fingernails
When he lifted his eyes from the paper the room had gotten darker. His eyes adjusted so that when he glanced back at the writing he could no longer see the idiotic words. He was irritated and musing on this when his situation and the desire of his imminent release flooded back into his reality. His cosh arm felt heavy, and he started to remove the inert object when he saw the patch of light again, low against the wall in the next room. He leant forward, screwing his eyes tighter to see. Then it moved very slightly to the left. Hector looked at the window to see if a beam of light from outside had penetrated the thick fog. It had not. All remained unchanging in a sooty, milky dimness. When he looked back, it seemed a little closer. It was also now clear that the blur, for that is what it seemed to be, was in fact two. A shadow or a gap separated the two dull illuminations, which were only fractionally brighter than the dusky room. Hector watched, mesmerised, and carefully hoping that this was just some kind of optical illusion. Every time he looked away they moved, their motion never declaring itself, occurring only by a fractional difference outside of his stare. The longer he stared at them, the darker the room became, as if they were devouring the last atoms of natural light. With great effort he closed his eyes tight and counted to thirty, then carefully opened them. The blur was gone and he let out a tangible sigh of relief, swivelling slightly on his stiff stool. Then he saw them closer and no longer in the far room but midway in the kitchen staring straight at him. The blurs had distinguished themselves—they were eyes. Eyes made of dim foggy light and close to the floor as if some terrible creature were crawling towards him from out of the glo
om. He groaned and fell backwards, tipping the stool over noisily. If it had been a cat or other mammal it would have been afeared by the sudden harsh noise, but it wasn’t. It was closing in and its eyes were brighter now and began to look vaguely human. He imagined a deranged man slithering towards him. And everything got worse.
Hector scuttled across the floor, the cudgel feeling like a friendly handshake in his fear. The eyes waited for him to blink or squint aside before they came closer, in a hideous parody of the children’s game of grandmother’s footsteps. To his fear was added the spine-chilling horror that the eyes had no form behind them at all, they floated disembodied and luminous in space. He found his splintered voice and screamed. He was now against the broken door of the cupboard and could retreat no farther. His eyes were hurting with the strain of keeping them open. They watered and blurred as the luminous ghost eyes grew in focus and intensity, an intensity that shifted in a fierce emotional velocity that flowed between utter pitiful loss and deep, saturated malice. Hector whimpered as they stared into his soul. He flailed madly at them with the cosh, sweeping the air before him, without reaching their starvation and vicious malevolence. They moved behind him so that he could not see them getting closer but felt their attention like razor spiderwire crawling on his neck. He shuffled round, his foot catching against the prised-away wood and making him lose his panicking balance.
The unseen luminosity of eyes behind him was now the only light. The thought of it and the absolute certainly that it wanted him made him shake violently, losing all control. He covered his eyes, covered his head, and tried to roll away, to slither across the room whimpering. As he tightened into a ball, he felt the eyes sit on his spine, on his shoulders, with the lightness of a wren and the intensity of an earthquake. He felt the tug in his scarred brain, the wrench of its paralysing yank through his left side. His age, his pain, and his injury reoccurred, and he knew that all that happened to make him well, strong, and special was just about to be snuffed out.
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