“Two more, please, patron, in our room,” said Nicholas, and stepped past them through the bar and turned onto a broad wooden stair.
Hector followed, not wanting to be left alone surrounded by stares and unfriendly questions. He sipped the warming drink and followed.
The stair turned and narrowed on each landing; their room was in the eaves. It was tight and low-ceilinged with dismal furnishings in many different styles, the only common feature being the shared exhaustion and paucity of colour.
The bed looked overstuffed and Hector already knew that it was lumpy and squeaked.
“Excellent,” said his elated friend, who had to stoop as he approached the wall to open the small squat window onto a view of the church and churchyard, and beyond it the gigantic far-off estuary. A purplish light smouldered from its waters laced with the shadows of clouds that floated under the glow of the setting sun.
“Magnificent,” said Nicholas, who in his eagerness had torn the lace curtain aside and entirely dislodged both it and its string that had held it in the same place, undisturbed for years. He shook it away from himself like an irritating cobweb, and again did more pantomime breathing. After they settled, he announced that they must make a few preliminary adjustments before eating.
“Please lie on the floor, Hector, after removing your shoes and jacket.” His voice was without humour or warmth. In place of kindness was matter-of-fact abruptness, which Hector was sure that Nicholas had learned from all his years of listening to English doctors. So he did as he was told. Nicholas did the same and came to sit behind his head. He placed his socked feet on the old man’s shoulder and wrapped his long elegant fingers around his jaw and cranium. He tightened his grip and Hector felt panic as he realised that his fragile spine was taut in this being’s severe hold.
“Now, Hector Ruben Schumann, I want you to remember and see the first time you saw Rachel’s beautiful naked body.”
Hector instantly saw her, saw her before he had the chance to become outraged at the request and at the same time that Nicholas wrenched his head sideways and up. There was a crack like a pistol being fired as Hector’s body was pushed hard away from his head by the angel’s steel-hard pistoning feet. He then spun the body sideways, the neck crunching again, and a white sickening light hit him like an express train. Nicholas had twisted his own head backwards and fastened his teeth into the collar of his shirt. He looked like a skinned animal. All the curves and puffiness of gentle humanity had been extinguished, all the subtleties of expression instantly drained, the muscles knotted and the veins standing proud like strangling rope. His mouth had extended, unnaturally revealing row upon row of snarling teeth. The force he was exerting was enough to snap three men’s necks. The inert mats and rugs of the room slithered across the gritty bedroom floor in alarming life as struggling feet kicked and hammered. Hector knew he was going to die, but not why, not now. Why like this? His legs were thrashing mechanically when the right impacted with the leg of the cast-iron bed and the left kicked a china bowl under the bed, sending it skidding and smashing against the wall. It was the last thing he saw and heard before a wave of deep black nausea snuffed him out.
Something was moving between a flutter and roll. It was also like a pendulum, only irregular and faint. He did not know if his eyes were open or closed. The white ghostlike stiffness could have been on either side of his sight, consciousness, or life. Gradually he felt his toes and fingers move and the white thing no longer was far away but was near and growing ordinary. He could make out the landscape behind it. A long plateau stretched for miles, grey-brown and unbroken by trees. A heavy dense sky kept the landscape compressed and stationery. Far far away he could see the irregular glimmer of shining domes set amid jagged mountains of precipices of ice. How had he gotten here? To this woebegone but exotic realm. He tried to move his head but it felt numb and limp. A breeze moved across his face; it smelt of seaweed and cinnamon, of oceans and stale infancy. The fluttering thing was moving in response to the breeze that gusted over and around everything. When it subsided it slowed to almost stillness. It was the lightest thing in all the surrounding darkness. It had words written upon it. Were these the words given at the gate of eternity? The fabled scroll of the Apocalypse? The utterance of final discorporation? He strained to decipher it and understand its meaning, hovering in the great plateau, willing his focus to pull against the flatness and endless distance before him. He read the words slowly in the darkness that flickered and nudged meaning into nonsense, and for a moment was reminded of the text of ants that he had never really seen. But as his eyes deepened again he saw that these were not that twitching scrawl. The letters were now as clear and precise as if painstakingly written by the hand of an ingenious and unskilled scribe. He tried again to understand the esoteric meaning, which was written in the form of a request or command.
After what must have been hours, another light bloomed in the room and Nicholas said, “Ah! Awake at last, I thought you were going to sleep down there forever.” Nicholas lit another oil lamp and the room flowed into order and logic. Hector was not standing up but was lying on his side, his head resting on a cushion and his body covered by the candlewick bedspread. He was staring directly under the bed towards the far wall where the china bowl had broken. This had been the landscape that he had so feared and pondered on for hours.
“Don’t try to move yet, I will help you up in a moment.”
A slight breeze made the lamps shudder and then settle. The flapping whiteness returned. It was a small handwritten sign that had been tied to the side of the bed. Somehow one of its strings had broken and now it dangled in the breeze by one. Again he read its erudition.
Will guests please refrain from placing the used chamber pot under the bed, because the steam rusts the springs.
Nicholas lifted Hector to his feet and guided him to a misshapen, difficult chair that felt as if it had been upholstered with bricks. He held one hand to the back of Hector’s neck while moving him.
“How do you feel, my friend?”
“Tired. I feel as if I have been travelling for miles. What happened, why was I on the floor?”
“Oh, just resting before dinner. Are you hungry?”
“Yes, very.”
A child and the flouncing woman brought their food to the door with a jug of dark beer. They ate in silence. Outside the night had closed in around the pub, making the room feel snug and the rest of the world dark, cold, and distant. A few warming sounds rose up through the floor, telling them that they were not alone. The chicken was perfectly cooked and the vegetables full of taste. So much so that Hector thought them the best he had ever eaten.
“What did you say the name of this place was again?”
“Allhallows on the Hoo peninsula. Allhallows at the end of the world.”
“It’s the best food I have ever tasted.”
“It’s not the place, it’s your senses being reborn. It is happening in advance of our plural, tonight our sleep in this little hutch will complete the process.”
The church bell sounded as Hector’s eyes began to close uncontrollably.
“Time for the wooden hill,” said Nicholas.
“What hill?”
“The wooden hill to Bedfordshire.”
“You said Kent before.”
“Bed. Bett, kleiner spatz.”
Nobody had called him that in seventy years. Only his mother, so long ago. He stood and walked over to the bed, took off his shirt and trousers, and crawled in between the chilly sheets. He was asleep in seconds.
Nicholas washed in the room down the corridor. He was thinking about his radio and all the voices he would miss. The only thing he would miss. He carried the lamp back to the bedroom and looked at the man-child curled up under the blankets. Tonight, all night long he would hold him, locked on tight pressure points and speak the psalms of release: the charms o
f dispersal. Then the song of joining.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
The bow she carried into the wilderness she had made from the man remnants of the Wassidrus. She used what was needed. He did not die but was sewn and sealed back into a less extended form that clung to the end of the long stained pole. Her skill with charms, drugs, and knives had been equal to her mother, Irrinipeste’s. The bow was more perfect than the one her father had made. He had been totally human and therefore susceptible to all manner of uncertainties and vagueness. His bow had been made of faultless materials but was botched and mishandled in its construction. This bow had been made of vile and corrupt materials but was manufactured with dexterous and spiritual excellence, making it a far superior creature. Her parents’ bow had been constructed for vision and transience. The gleaming purple weight in her hands now was crafted for protection and vengeance. She turned it in her sticky hands, feeling the heat of its silky glue against her skin. She then placed it in its drying place where no animal would dare approach it. She would start on the arrows tomorrow after a long and empowering sleep. She had dismissed the old priest, who had not spoken in hours, and collected all the scraps, shavings, and unused sinews, putting them in a tight bag so that after they dried Kippa might feed the titbits to his newly shaped, precious charge. All was done and she felt able to drag her bedding to the bow and curl around it. But the sleep was diverted by the queue of fits that waited to enter her body. She yelped and jackknifed as they took hold, while the solemn and hungry bow sat next to her. After thirty hours she passed out, exhaustion bullying its way ahead of the next string of convulsions. The old priest sat close and tried to mop her brow and put back the thin blanket that refused to cover her. She had tried to bite him and scratched out like a demented and restrained lynx, her hands and feet curled into talon-like claws.
When she came out of her spasms, her gaunt and hollow body was driven only by the purpose of getting the bow to work and using its homing instincts to take them farther into the Vorrh. She told him that the bow was to be gifted, that their meeting at the kernel of the eternal forest was the desired outcome of a great destiny. Lutchen said that this was not what he had been told by Oneofthewilliams. She looked into him as he spoke. Her dark, sturdy eyes carved away at his longing. As she took the meaning of his words in, he noticed that something had physically changed about her. He tried to look back more carefully, his enquiring eyes attempting to pass through the gate of her solid gaze. It was her skin that had changed, the pattern, form, and distribution of the patched areas of light and dark. The pigmentation had shifted, making new and different continents and smaller islands. He so marvelled at her new map and its ability to transform that he nearly forgot what they were talking about. She, however, continued in expressing her determination that the bow would be given to somebody that neither of them had met.
During the period they had to wait for the bow to season, they had been given offerings of food from the anthropophagi, who remained hidden while leaving them dead animals and crude bowls of mouth-numbing acrid mush. The smell of the dwarf horde was growing stronger each day, and Lutchen guessed their number was increasing. He did not know what they were or why they now followed. Did they wait as allies or disciples, or as cannibals ready to feed on their carrion? Their continual unseen presence agitated his already distraught mind and his peripheral vision, and the Mars pistol remained cocked.
When the bow was finally strung, it bled only a small stain of grime each time it was pulled. And when the Wassidrus had healed and stopped bellowing they moved forward, following the path of the arrows.
Modesta waited with each knot in the bow taut in her small hands. Waited for the fit that would spin her, dervish-like, while flexing the straining power. When the moment came upon her, she pointed the arrow skywards and released it from the resounding bow, sending it flying into the impenetrable forest. The sound that came from the bow stopped everybody in their tracks. It was a shudder of words, as if a muffled voice was contained inside the folded layers of bone and sinew. As the arrow fled its collapsing arc it seemed to ignite the voice inside its tension. Lutchen moved closer to Modesta’s side and she glared at him.
“I want to understand what it’s saying, to understand its meaning,” he said.
“It is beyond your understanding,” she hissed while selecting the next arrow. He shivered at the flutter of her power, as if she had walked across his grave, stopped, and looked through the earth and onto his impassive, skinless grin.
They hacked and tore their way through the undergrowth and resistant webs of hanging vines and creepers. With each arrow her determination grew and the old man’s confidence diminished. He knew they were going in circles. He knew he must do something before her vision led them all to their demise. The power that radiated from her was thinning with every action of the bow, with every epileptic spinning and change of direction. The magic that kept them together and the anthropophagi at bay was vanishing. He knew that she was the direct descendant of the fabled Irrinipeste and that all beings on this continent would have been in awe of her had not her uniqueness been the direct cause of the Possession Wars. He watched the bushes, seeing the yellow men on the other side spying and attempting to talk about her. It was their fear and adulation that kept the wicked gnawing faces away from their necks. That, and nothing else. That’s what he thought until the last arrow bisected the wound of the railway track. They had all heard the hideous sound squealing in the forest the day before and imagined the largest and vilest of beasts being slaughtered there.
* * *
The working half of the Limboia had been cutting and stacking trees for ten days. The train that was expected to arrive and take the timber away and replace them with the next shift of workers was late. But of course nobody noticed. Expectation did not exist for the Limboia. The train did not exist for the Limboia. Neither did the difference between day and night, waking and sleeping. It was only the overseers who demanded these constant changes, and noticed the levels of fatigue, and counted the days. The Limboia knew how to eat and shit, that was about all. Everything else they had to be shouted at to do. Back in William Maclish’s time a doctor had conducted some experiments on them. A couple had died because of his curiosity, but he had proved the point that command was the only mechanism of direction in their existence. The operating commands were crude and elemental. Wake, sleep, work, and eat. They did not need to be told when to shit, they just did it while they worked and slept. This explained the condition of the slave house and why they wore loose-fitting skirts while labouring in the forest. The good doctor decided to test the power of command and had one of their number removed to a private room while he slept. He watched for more than five days as the creature faded and crawled towards death without ever leaving his bunk. Every time he began to show signs of waking a guard would bellow “Sleep” at the prone body. On the sixth day dehydration and malnutrition drained the last whimper of life out of him.
Three guards were standing around the timber station where the iron track ended. Two were talking and smoking cigarettes, gazing expectantly along the parallel lines that led back to Essenwald and pleasure. The other was standing by the huge mass of suppurating wood, keeping a wary eye on the massed group of workers, who had been ordered to stop work and eat. They were all squatting or sitting in the shade, eating their usual gruel from mess tins. It was not a pretty sight and the guard unfocussed his gaze from any real detail, which was why he did not see one of the vacant souls wander off from the edge of group and disappear into the forest. They always lost one or two this way, generally by them diverting away from the others but sometimes by what looked like choice. The will to vanish into the trees. It is of course impossible to discuss willpower in terms of the Limboia. Impulse seemed to be their only motivating force, and even that was unclear and paradoxical. Whatever it was that made them stray was beyond the understanding of their masters. The only thing that was known was th
at once gone, it was better to never find them again. The stories of those that had been discovered after a week or so were horrible, and one of the first things that any new employee was told. Madness in any human is a deeply disturbing thing to witness. But in those that already had lost most of their conscious mind it was appalling. Even worse, it seemed to be infectious. A prodigal Limboia put back in the work party or the slave house would induce manic raving in all the others in the space of a few short hours. Trainee guards were always told of the time when Maclish had to put one down to stop the entire slave house from becoming a writhing pit of hysteria. They were told how from the very moment that he was dispatched, or as Maclish would have it, “slotted,” the others simply fell back into their normal torpor. As the sound of the shot faded, so did their cries and deafening shrieks.
This escapee lopped along the cut track farther and farther into the interior. When the cut track ran out, he followed a slender animal path. No one had commanded him to do this. There was no purpose in his action. He had moved on an impulse that had no name. A sound in the trees above made him stop and look up. Something was falling through the branches without the resistance of a bird or a monkey. It slowed above him and fell at his feet. It was a black arrow. He slowly picked it up and an ant of a memory crawled in his head.
The path ahead suddenly ran out, and he looked about him and discovered that he knew he was lost. He had no idea what to do, so he sat down.
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