The Cloven

by Brian Catling

  Ishmael thought she looked like Bibendum, the Michelin rubber-tyre man that waved at him from the garage in town. He smirked at the ridiculous idea. More came until she lost all human form and the shapeless mass bristled yellow, absorbing every glimmer of sun. Their wings settled into unified flapping, making a pulsing murmur. They must have stayed like this for nearly an hour, mesmerised, before she started calling. A weird shrill blur that seemed to match, to resonate with the vivid colour, which was now swaying from side to side. Seth suddenly leapt at it, waving his arms like machetes inside the mass. He frantically tugged and shaved at the butterflies, plucking mangled handfuls away from the shaking form beneath. The smeared yellows were sticking to his shiny body as their numbers diminished into wet pulp. If he had been human, he would have looked at Ishmael for help. But he was not and thus he spared the humiliation and waste of time because the cyclops was bending and rocking, holding his chest in hysterical mirth, enjoying every second of the ridiculous pantomime that seemed to be staged for his entertainment. Finally, Aklia was back again, gleaming in the sunlight, her body covered with smeared wings and the yellow dust that was shed by them, now turned a murky ochre, mixed with their blood. She was trembling and moving from one foot to the other. It was the most human, childlike movement Ishmael had seen her or any of the Kin ever make, and he stopped laughing and came close to inspect her. Her jaw was chattering and Seth seemed to be imitating it while making gushes of what sounded like speech. All the words were chopped up in gnashing.

  “What’s wrong with her?” asked Ishmael, still smirking.

  “I don’t know. She seems disconnected or magnetised.”

  “Looks to me like she is scared.”

  “It might be the same thing.”

  “Then shake her out of it.”

  Seth grabbed Aklia’s twitching arm and shook her body with great force. It seemed to work when he let go and she remained stationary. Then her jaw started jabbering again and her feet moved, putting her into a jolting shudder.

  “Oh for God’s sake, give her a slap,” said the grinning Ishmael.

  Seth thought for a while and then brought up his arm as if reaching behind him. Ishmael ducked out of the way as the arm and the outreached flat of the hand swung through space, hitting the doddering Kin firmly across the face and sending her sprawling sideways. The sound of Bakelite on Bakelite was horrible and so shocking that it turned the cyclops’s snigger into a hiss. Aklia lay twisting on the earth, then sat up and looked around.

  “My God, it worked, it actually worked,” said Ishmael. Seth helped her stand and brushed her down. Ishmael was so stunned by the accuracy of his advice that he let out another kind of laugh, without the flavour of bile. Seth understood its difference and attempted to imitate it. The result was very wrong and sent the cyclops back to his infancy with them, where once they had all tried to join him in the mechanism, the performance of laughing. It had terrified him and they’d had to promise to never do it again. And now after all these years in these dire circumstances, Seth forgot. His vocalisation made birds flap away from high in the canopy. It woke Aklia, who instantly tried to join in. Her disconnected expression was still attached to her yapping mouth. Ishmael clamped his hands over his ears, tears running down his face, and screamed, “Stop it, stop it.”

  Which they did. The forest was silent with them until Aklia regained the path and stumbled forward. The others followed until their automatic bodies brought their minds back into the steady pace of walking. Ishmael tried to question her about what had just happened but got nowhere. Two hours later the flies arrived and performed the same act of swarming over her now-defensive body. But nothing would deter them. Thousands upon thousands came until she wore a diving suit of their sandwiched bodies. All of the charm of the previous invasion had been replaced by this writhing infestation of carrion-dipped insistence. She screeched and warbled. Seth dug and paddled, but nothing would stop them. There was even a queue in the trees waiting for their turn to attack and mass. At twilight they left and she lay between her companions, just her eyes and fingers moving. Then the mosquitoes came and there were a few in their many that were content to drink from their secondary target of Ishmael, while the horde blunted their hypodermic mouths continually on the smooth plastic hardness of Aklia. There must have been something in her that smelt of the sustenance of blood. She lay very still while the tide of insects found it to be a lie. Ishmael jumped and swatted and demanded a fire be made to smoke the beasts away. At dawn he finally slept, aching and itching all over.

  They continued to walk later in the morning, this time with Aklia dawdling behind. Much of her energy had gone and she seemed aimless and wan.

  “How much farther do we have to go?” mumbled Ishmael.

  “I don’t know. I hope we find one soon. She is running down to nothing,” said Seth without turning to look at the questioner.

  A few more steps and a few more jarred thoughts along the track, Ishmael said, “Find one what?”

  “A charging frame.”

  It took Seth a few minutes to realise that he was walking alone. He turned and looked behind to the point where Ishmael had stopped, and Aklia, who hovered behind him, had copied his action.

  “What’s wrong?” Seth called, and getting no answer he mooched back towards them. “What’s wrong?” he asked again.

  “Charging frame?” said Ishmael. “We are looking for a charging frame here, in this?” He waved a sagging, heavy arm at the erect indifferent perfection around him.

  “We need one to recharge. There is always one somewhere,” said Seth.

  Ishmael snorted loudly. “You stupid fucking machine. There’s nothing out here, fucking nothing.”

  “But if we don’t recharge then we will cease—”

  Then, before the cyclops had time to scream or beat him, the beetles arrived. The first heavy black dot landed on Seth’s face like an uncertain inkblot; then the air darkened in a clicking dry thunder of them. Ishmael slid down to sit in a heap and Aklia copied him. Seth stood black and shiny, trying to wait on his feet. But these creatures were much heavier than the others and after some hours he sank to his knees. A few landed on Aklia but seemed unimpressed and moved on. Two or three settled on Ishmael and he crushed their brittle carapaces in his much-bitten hand. After the chittering cloud dispersed, the three crawled into a huddle under the girth of a mighty oak.

  Waiting for the visitation of the next plague was worse when still, so without conversation they agreed to go on, limping in the general direction they had been heading.

  After a while they entered a shaved clearing where the atmosphere was different from anything they had experienced yet. Ishmael relished the open space; then he saw the frame. Seth saw it too in the far corner. It was undoubtedly man-made. The Kin rushed towards its angular uprights. Ishmael cautiously followed. It was a very simple structure made out of recently cut branches. Vines were tied into its corners and around the hollow where the head would sit. It was a mockery of the device that lived in the basement of Kühler Brunnen: a bush-crafted copy without the faintest trace of the power that the Kin so desperately needed. For the last fifteen minutes or so a low pulse like a drum had been coming from inside Aklia: a warning tone to alert them to her state of exhaustion. Seth touched the frame and its flimsy construction shook and started to come apart. Aklia approached and also touched it, her eyes seeking something in the others’ faces.

  “Perhaps we can fix it?” said Seth.

  Ishmael had been pulling bits of skin from its surface and from under the vine ties.

  “Fix it into what?” He groaned without looking up.

  “Fix it for her,” Seth answered.

  Ishmael just walked away.

  Near the centre of the clearing was a small raised hillock. A bump of human proportions. Ishmael poked about at its surface, dislodging some of the loose earth and fi
brous plants. He pushed his hand into it and then started to reach inside. Its interior was hollow.

  Seth had repaired the frame and placed Aklia in its constraint, tying her arms and legs and binding her forehead in a travesty of the power connection of the charging frame. She seemed to have brightened in her constriction, perhaps sensing familiarity in the ritual. The warning beat inside her had become faster and louder and they tried to ignore it.

  Ishmael had found the entrance at ground level on the other side. He had pulled away the undergrowth and the circular stone that sealed it. He had started to crawl into it when he heard the charger start up. The low, unmistakable hum that fed the all-powerful Kin. He crawled back out expecting to see them standing over a camouflaged dynamo unit, concealed in the forest awaiting their foretold arrival. But none was there. The noise came from Seth, who stood behind the frame holding his hard hands to his mouth and imitating the hum from the basement. Aklia could not see him behind her as she lay, eyes closed, awaiting the first morphic jolt. The pulse from inside her was making a harmonic with Seth’s imitation, and then the white ants came; a whispering stream like milk crossed the clearing and headed for the frame, twigs and fallen leaves pushed aside in its progress. When it reached the frame it climbed up its vertical form. Now less like milk and more like cream, its viscous flow moved in reverse, rising where it should be falling. Soon her body and the frame was a thickening, bubbling mass. Aklia started twitching, a long orgasmic sigh escaping beneath the thousands of writhing bodies. Her pounding had accelerated to pitch against Seth’s cracking hum. The ants were also climbing his body, the vanguard already at his mouth, where he plucked at them and spat them away. The frame was shaking violently when the percussion ceased. She never cried again and it seemed as if she might have believed that Seth’s hum was indeed the machine and the tide of ants the pulse of the current. When she ceased, the insects shrank back, the albino shadow draining out of the enclosure.

  Seth walked away from the broken frame and stood next to Ishmael and the mound.

  “What have you found?” he calmly enquired.

  The cyclops greatly appreciated the Kin’s complete lack of interest in the remains of his Bakelite companion. Nothing was there anymore.

  “It’s a cave, a man-made cave.” They both crawled inside and found that the superstructure of the womb-like enclosure was made of roots, as if they had once grown over a solid space, now making a perfect hollow container. More a tent than a cave. They sat in the snugness that barriered them against the hostile vastness outside.

  “How much energy do you have left?” asked Ishmael.

  “Another day, I think,” said Seth indifferently.

  “There are no charging frames here, do you now understand that?”

  “That was almost one.”

  “No, it was not, it wasn’t even made by humans. I have seen one of those before. It was constructed to eat men from, the anthropophagi made it.”

  “Then men must be nearby.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Will you make a charging frame for me?” asked Seth.

  “I don’t know how.”

  “No, neither do I,” said Seth.

  Ishmael suddenly realised that very soon he would be alone in the Vorrh. That Seth’s warning sound would start to count off the hours towards his petering out. No one had ever been in the forest alone and survived. The prospect of being lost in its mournful tracks was terrifying and a long way from his vision of a dramatic return with an army of Bakelites at his side. The crouching cyst they now occupied seemed comforting against the endless openness of trees and all the shades that dwelt between them. Seth was picking at one of the twisted roots that made the veiny woven roof of the enclosure.

  “Why did you bring us here?” asked Ishmael.

  “To this place?” asked Seth.

  “No, into the Vorrh, why did you take me from the house into the forest?”

  Without a moment’s pause Seth answered his question in plain, monstrous words: “We did not know we were coming here, it’s where the water led us.”

  “Where did you think you were going?” asked Ishmael incredulously.

  “Away from the child and the house, that’s all.”

  “But why into the well?”

  “There was no other place to go, no other opening out of the house. And the well has always spoken to our fluids.”

  “Explain more,” demanded Ishmael.

  “It tugs and shapes the fluid inside us, like the trees do here. It makes us like it by speaking inside. It is called ‘turgor.’ We learned it in two of your lessons, do you remember?”

  The childhood days of the cyclops were far off and Ishmael’s worldly experiences had mainly washed them away. He dug deep into the numbered cases of his remembered instruction.

  “But isn’t all the pressure of turgor contained?”

  “The primal force, yes, of course. But so much constant might causes a resonate force outside of the cell wall, a bit like heat, static, and magnetic radiation being an external by-product of other forms of contained energy.”

  “And that is why you expected a sympathetic place here?” said Ishmael dimly. “And that is why you thought there would be a charging frame?”

  Seth nodded and made a tiny whimper in the inner rings of his throat.

  Farther into the forest the tracks were becoming uncertain. Ishmael was stopping and bending in pain, his stomach cramps unaltered by the handful of berries and the hard black root that Seth had given him. They had tried to catch a rodent-like creature that scurried past them on the diminished path but had failed miserably and spent a lot of energy in the process. They reached the end of the track and were confronted by a huge impenetrable wall of trees, foliage, and hanging vines. Their feet stopped scything the stiff grasses and they stood in the noise of everything else moving, which was quiet enough to let them hear the tattoo of Seth’s warning beat pulsing inside him.

  “I think we should go back to the clearing,” said Ishmael.

  Seth looked at him with complete emptiness. They turned and shuffled back, their footsteps automatically in time to Seth’s alarm beat.

  The clearing was exactly the same but brighter under the fiercer sun. The broken frame was empty.

  “Where is she?” said Ishmael.

  “Gone,” was all Seth could manage.

  The shadows raked the ground and they said nothing, trying to listen outside the moment.

  “If I sit still, I probably have an hour or two,” announced Seth.

  “And then I shall be alone,” bemoaned the cyclops.

  “Not alone, the Vorrh is teeming with life, some of it almost human.”

  “I know that, I have met some of it and care not to again.”

  “The others might find you.”

  “Others?”

  “The forever ones who composed us.”

  “You mean the men who made you?”

  “Not men.”

  Ishmael stood up and grabbed Seth’s stiff trembling arms. “You think they are here?”

  “Some might be.” The drumming inside him was louder now and parts of it escaped, sandwiched between his words. “But there are no charging frames, are there?”

  “No,” said Ishmael.

  “Then I think you must eat me,” said Seth, staring at the ground. “Before more insects come and before I cease. My fluid will become stagnant then.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I think I am the last of the Kin. The last of your kin. I think I will not be recharged. So you must take some of me for your sustenance.”

  “But I am human,” ventured Ishmael.

  “Not completely,” said Seth. “Some parts of you are like us.”

  Ishmael became agitated. “Is this more lies like you told Ghertrude, to keep
her in control? Well, it won’t work on me. I know I am human.”

  “Then why did we all have a single eye at the beginning?”

  Ishmael halted, his mouth working without words.

  “No, little one, we share similarity, and the truth of that will let you live longer.” Seth walked over near the centre of the glade and selected a piece of fallen tree. He examined it like a carpenter, inspecting its contours and weight. He then carefully seated it on the hard soil and lay down with his neck resting on it, like an uncomfortable pillow. He beckoned Ishmael closer.

  “Do not be alarmed by this, it is the natural way. You must drink of me. Do not waste a drop. I will concentrate it into my head. It will change you and keep you alive for some long days.”

  Ishmael got down on his knees to look into Seth’s face.

  “I hope they find you, little one,” Seth said as he held his head in his long brown fingers and wrenched it backwards and to the side, across the raised edge of the old wood. The crack was like a whip or a pistol shot knifing through the trees. The arms hissed backwards as the body arched and the white creamy fluid pumped out of the jagged stump of his neck. His head was still clamped firm as if being held away from the ground and offered up like a chalice. Not one drop had been spilt from it. The dumbfounded cyclops eventually stretched out to prise it out of the still hands. The eyelids, nostrils, and mouth were clamped shut, giving Seth’s head a mean, vindictive, supercilious appearance, the exact opposite expression of the act of sacrifice that he had just performed. Ishmael cradled the head to his chest like a precious child, careful not to spill a drop of the mysterious milky liquid. He lifted the neck stub to his lips and tasted it. It was at first bland, then like seawater, then it burnt and stung his teeth like citric electricity. Finally, it left an aftertaste of iodine. His gag reaction was quickly replaced by a savage thirst. He remembered the stream that ran close to the hillock of roots. He dashed to it, pushing his face into the warm mud. He sat back clumsily, looking like a dropped doll or a child’s lost toy bear. The nagging hunger pains stopped and a warmth now sat in his churning guts. He lifted the head again and took a hefty gulp, being ready to douse his face against the nausea. But it never came and he only tasted iodine and a great sleepiness overcame him. He returned to the cave-like hutch and crawled inside, all his draining focus being channelled into the deliberate care of the Bakelite vessel that had once been called Seth.