The Cloven

by Brian Catling

  The babyish noises that spluttered down from above seemed to have the anthropophagi mesmerised, as did the swaying fragment of man that made them. The only movement that came from Kippa was the stream of yellow liquid that splashed down his trembling leg.

  Lutchen loudly cocked the slide of the heavy gun. He had only ever done this once before, after assembling the damaged parts and test-firing it. The sound had been like mad intimate thunder and a flame had leapt from the barrel, tearing the bucking pistol away from its restraining binds. It had worked and remained in one piece. But now only his nimble hand held the faulty hand cannon in place, and without a trigger guard the naked automatic nuzzled impatiently.

  “Aet mi now yu ugi fukkers,” the Wassidrus said and laughed down at the mesmerised tribe of horrors. The old priest raised the gun and one of the horde saw it and let out a grating yell. Instantly, they all disappeared into the swishing undergrowth.

  “Fukkers,” bellowed the man-flag.

  Over the next two days everybody was aware that the anthropophagi were nearby, following the motley band farther into the interior. Lutchen and Kippa were continually braced, awaiting the attack. Modesta seemed weirdly uncaring and moved between spasms of her previous fits and great lethargy. The Wassidrus seemed drunk with the idea of being eaten by the yellow tribe. He fumed and spat, roared and bumbled as his head lolled between the branches. It was during the tense next night, with the insects ragging loudly and forming incandescent balls in the dark foliage, that the old monk noticed that the girl and the man-flag were whispering together. He grew suspicious at the alliance and did not want to be isolated with the idiot youth, so he began to watch more closely for signs of collusion and treachery. That night his worst nightmare came to visit. He had noticed as the darkness got thicker that the luminous pulsing insects were coming together, their balls coalescing. He had dozed off watching their pulsing and was tipped into waking by the sound of Modesta again going into a fit. And then he saw it above her head and interlaced in the trees: a vast out-of-focus ball of light that changed between shimmers and shadow. He scrambled across the ground, tangling his feet in his sleeping sheet. The ball moved towards him; again it appeared to be attracted to his abject fear. It swarmed six feet from the ground, and its shifting circumference had reached eighteen feet and was growing. Out of the corner of his terror he saw the girl, who was sitting up and waving at it. A thin stream of ectoplasmic mucus-like gel swayed between the tips of her fingers and a tendril of insects that dangled from the ball. He tried to speak but his teeth were chattering and he feared biting his tongue. The Wassidrus and its keeper paid no attention to the manifestation as Lutchen slid back across the sinewy root-infested ground. All fear of the anthropophagi had left him. All doubts about his companions had become irrelevant. He just had to escape the suffocation of his terror. To his horror the young woman suddenly pointed her entangled hand towards him and said something that he did not understand. Utterly convinced that she was setting it upon him, he finally screamed out, “O merciful God, please, no.”

  She clapped her hands and the ball splintered apart, the millions of insects fleeing like sparks. The air resumed its usual buzz of night and nothing moved in the trees. The old priest stared at the woman, who was grinning at him. His heart was louder than anything around him except the words he had just said. They seemed to still be hanging in the air, displacing the monstrous ball. Under them Modesta lay down and pulled her sleeping sheet over her strange body, the grin never vanishing from her face. Even after she was sound asleep.

  Lutchen finally surrender to rest, but soon Modesta was whispering inside his dream. She was telling him to wake up, they had things to do, somebody important to meet. He awoke and looked at her patchwork face of contrasting pigments and blinked.

  “I have to make a special thing and I need your help. I don’t have the strength in my hands to do it alone.” She gave him the same smile as last night and he knew he dared not disobey.

  She then told him exactly what she needed to make and why.

  “But that’s impossible, my child, we have no materials or tools.”

  She liked being called “my child,” but he was finding it more and more difficult to say.

  “We will use the trees and him,” she said, pointing at the Wassidrus.

  Lutchen did not understand and told her so, so she explained in great detail and finished with a smile. He felt sick and disgusted but knew that he dare not argue or see possible fault in her project. She told him that in some of the bags were strong knives and that she would construct the other instruments herself. While he collected them, she went back to the Wassidrus and whispered gently. A sound that was impossible to gauge could be heard, and Kippa came away frightened and shaking his head.

  For the next four hours she searched among the roots and leaves, cut vines, and bled trees. She opened insects like snuffboxes and abstracted tinctures and essences from all around her. She then bound them together and spoke over their making. This was similar to the process that he had seen Tyc use, and he marvelled at the intricacies being known to one so young. When all the parts were made, she called the priest and the idiot over to the Wassidrus. He had been drinking some thick fluid that she had made the day before. She spoke to Kippa in his native tongue, telling him to use all his strength to hold his charge still. She placed a curved knife and a short stumpy saw in the old man’s hands and demanded him not to shake or tremble. She took his wrist and guided him to the lower remnants of the Wassidrus, the fused section that clung around the pole and had once been legs. Together they toiled while the pole shook and whined and the night began to fall away.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  As they parted at the gates of the airport, Cyrena and Seil Kor agreed to meet again before they left Pretoria.

  She had arranged to stay in the same lodge as before, only this time it was thronging with visitors, all very excited and anxious to begin their various safaris. The puffy doctor who claimed to be Marais’s friend sat solemnly waiting for her in the bar. They exchange pleasantries. It had been he who sent the brief letter to her saying that Marais had taken his own life and that he had left her something. He seemed surprised that she had come all this way and assumed it was to consult with him on why their friend had committed such a drastic action. He would have sent the parcel to her, the parcel that he now had by his side. When she explained that her purpose was to see the room where he passed his last few hours and minutes, the doctor became agitated. She saw it and thought that she smelt disdain on the man.

  “It’s not a morbid request,” she explained defensively. “I knew he was unwell and in pain. I knew he relied on heavy dosages of analgesics to help him through. I have come to terms with his need to let go.”

  The doctor fidgeted and attempted to break her flow.

  “We had often talked about other states of being. He had helped me discover new territories of understanding. I have no moral opinion about what he did. If the drugs ultimately softened his pathway and allowed him to escape, then I see it as a form of kindness. I just want to see where it happened.”

  All the doctor could say was “I don’t think that would be a good idea.” His face was agitated and disconnected. His hand movements were erratic and vague.

  “I am not a child or a fainthearted girl.”

  “Yes, I see that,” he stuttered. “But you don’t understand.”

  “I understand that you are patronising me and attempting to prevent me spending a little precious time in his room.” Cyrena was becoming angry. “If you won’t help me then I will find someone who will. Someone who is prepared to understand our friendshi—”

  “He did not die there,” the doctor butted in with a hushed vehemence. “He did not die in a room and he did not die of an overdose.”

  Cyrena had suddenly gone cold.

  “He died out in the bush at a godforsaken place calle
d Pelindaba. He killed himself with a shotgun.”

  There was a long hard stillness before the tears choked her, sobbing up through her shredded repose. She wanted to tell him that he was lying, but she knew he wasn’t. The horror of such a death, alone and in the wilderness, was overwhelming. The scholar’s sleep in his pensive sad room was one thing. But the unmitigated violence of this act destroyed all redemption and, she feared, respect. The doctor awkwardly tried to comfort her, and between her sobs and her desire to leave, she thanked him for his honesty.

  “There is this, he wanted you to have it.”

  He gave her the cardboard box and she took it absently like a sleepwalker.

  “Thank you,” she said again and left his agitated company.

  She found her room, locked the door, and screamed into the pillow. All the futility that she had so studiously ignored gushed through her. All the dead and all the deceit wrecked her inside, ripping at the now-frail tranquillity. Each wrenching sob was abrading a layer of hope, a memory of joy. She eventually fell asleep in the chaise longue, turned inside out in a grey cold place where nobody lived.

  Some hours later her dreams awoke her, the invisibility in the tree coming out to meet her and whisper into her blindness. She wiped the crushed tears and wetness from her face with the back of her hand and stared with red eyes into the empty room. It was the hour before twilight when everything begins to agree to its memory of the dying sun. Half the room glowed in it. The draining day and the approaching night met in a vector on the cardboard box that sat on the floor between the door and the window. She looked at it for a long while, trapped in a numb torpor. The kind that whispers: If you keep very still, then all things might slide back to the way they were before. The cobwebs of consistent dharma unbroken, the shocks and threats of the world ignored and wafted sideways in the bow wave of quiet continuance. But her restless agitation would not be hushed and offered a grudging negotiation of diminishing time in the form of a dripping clock, a burning fuse to her reentry into hateful reality. The sundial languidness of the moving shadow across the cardboard lid would time her awakening. She watched unblinking from the couch as the ungaugeable motion crept to the edge and evaporated, leaving the stiff rectangle grey and meaningless. She sat up, gritted her teeth, and retrieved it, pulling the knotted string from it without care.

  Inside was the note.

  My Dearest Cyrena,

  Please forgive the circumstances of the arrival of this most accidental object. I meant to give it to you myself and explain its strange properties, but circumstances have deflected my intensions. I do hope we can meet again in person, but fear my health is not up to it at the moment. So please accept this strange gift as a token of our friendship.

  It was only recently that I discovered the true nature of this object in my possession and immediately associated it with your description of a golden living crown that you once told me of, from one of your dreams. So here it is. I have no idea what its original purpose was.

  Even stranger, I purchased it during my troublesome expedition to the Vorrh. So it comes directly from your part of this vast continent. I bought it from a trader who had many artifacts from the time of the Possession Wars. There was a story about the importance of its meaning to a shaman of the True People, but sadly I have forgotten it after all the years of struggle. I believed it to be a crown of fired clay set and inlayed with metal amulets and acquired it as such from a collection of many other quaint and distinctive relics. Imagine my surprise when I finally discovered its true mechanical properties.

  As you know, my journey at the fringe of that monstrous forest was a little traumatic. Your concern about its malign energies seemed accurate after all. I was fortunate to escape it completely intact. So my concerns about my gathered cargo were, I am sad to say, totally unimportant to me then. This object has sat forgotten on shelves for many past forsaken years.

  I fear I ramble, my dear. Please forgive an old man’s weakness.

  I have cleaned this “treasure” and taken it apart, oiled it, and reassembled its remarkable mechanism. It bears the mark of a London instrument maker and must have been made in the last century. Amazingly, after my little labours, it all works and produces novel and mesmeric effects when worn and operated. Do try it. God knows what it was used for in the Vorrh, but its existence does seem to have sympathy with your imagination. The roads that we take and the tracks that others make crisscross and exchange and are far beyond our little allotted time. I am sorry not to be with you now. The rains have just started and I seek the isolation of the bush for a short while. I will have to wait to hear your impressions of this wonder when I return.

  With my sincerest love,

  EUGÈNE

  She put her hand back into the box and touched the cold metal detail. A faint whir vibrated against her finger. Startled, she dropped it and the note. The crown rolled out of its container. It was made of brass, not gold or insects. A single circle of engineered metal.

  She felt no fear now and lifted it closer. A series of lenses or mirrors were attached to spindles that lined its ring. Each was joined to clockwork mechanisms with winding keys that extended outwards from the crown. She marvelled at its intricacy and how different it was from her vision. She moved to the luminosity of the window and turned it in her hands, admiring its weight and perfection. She wound the keys and found the tight intensity of the constricted springs satisfying. She followed his suggestion and placed it on her head and released the restraining trigger. It whirred loudly this time, spinning the circular reflections around her eyes and into her mind. The light of the setting sun spun and amplified and she fell back into the place of the tree where the invisibility was waiting for her…

  …A sound, a song from elsewhere, dragged her into the darkness of waking. She had been in deep communication, flooded by the yellow day of another place. All her fears and woes had been peeled away, broken off like the encrusted mud hiding the crown. The invisibility had entered her and explained sight and blindness and how she was to use them in the place of the tree, in a time so far off that she had to hibernate to reach it. The invisibility heard the song first and turned her to face it, the darkness of reality seeping into every pore of her being. She stumbled towards the window, the song was coming from there. She opened the partially closed shutter and the sound stopped all of her movements. Only her heart, which was now tiny and wrapped in the deepest layers of her meaningless meat, became excited. It tasted the sweetness of hope. She opened the windows that let out into a small courtyard. Seil Kor was sitting on a tiled well at its centre. He was singing to her and there was a luminosity about his blue robe and a light behind his clear eyes, as if they magnified a brightness within. The same yellow day that she had left before. All other sensations ceased. She had no awareness of what she had felt before or what she looked like now. Seil Kor stood up and walked towards her, taking her shoulders in his long dark hands. He guided her back into the room without ever missing a murmur in his rhythmic, undulating song. They glided towards the bed, where she fell back. He sat on its edge as she undressed while lying down, pushing the arcs of her body against the peeling clothing. Her eyes had rolled back in her head until the pupils disappeared. She lay naked in the sleepless sheets. He took off his robe and bent over her, the black angularity of his hard physic exaggerating the white richness of her curves. He cupped her mound in one hand to contain the breathing and closed the other over her mouth. Her perfect teeth set like pearls against his palm. He placed his wide mouth across her white eyes, stretching it to make a wet perfect seal. He sucked and blew until his lungs matched her heart. She pushed against him while his long sinewy legs held her twisting strength heavily against the mattress. She quaked and bucked into quietness. When he felt that she was totally still, he unfolded from her and collected the top sheet, wrapping her tightly in its swaddling. He moved her body across the bed and left her while he went into
the little bathroom and washed from head to toe, all the time carrying his song just beneath his breath. When he came back he lifted her wrapped body from the bed and placed it on the floor, taking a seated position behind her. He carefully placed his long, curved feet on her shoulders and gripped her head in his equally long, curved hands. His song changed as his lungs filled with glowing air and his muscles rippled purple beneath his jet-black skin.

  Before dawn the purring car waited outside. He carried her like a pliant mummy on his shoulders and placed her lengthways on the backseat. Next to the mechanical crown. The driver said nothing. The day was hot and the journey was rough. The city quickly vanished behind them in clouds of dust. The rainy season was over. During the journey he adjusted her heavy coma-like sleep so that she did not bruise or become burnt in the radiance of the slicing sun. At midday he started to unwrap her. With each unbinding Cyrena awoke. He washed her face with a scented damp cloth before she was fully conscious, combed her hair with his long ivory fingernails, and picked the loose cotton strands from her bare shoulders. In a place without an apparent name they stopped to let the engine of the old car cool in the ancient shade of the weird swollen majesty of a baobab. They were almost there, at the place of meeting and ends.

  “We have arrived, Cyrena, the place you have been looking for.”