He was instantly irritated by her irrational response. ‘I only asked the meaning of a word,’ he blustered.
She drew in a deep breath, resting her weight on the hoe at her side and looking him square in the eyes. ‘It’s from the highlands. The fleyber is the spirit of one that died in childbirth; they say its soul wanders the moors as a ghost light, a will-o’-the-wisp.’
Her voice quavered as she said it, but her eyes never left her husband’s. ‘Is
that
what you wanted to know?’ she said, blinking hard before returning to her plants, ignoring the one crushed under her foot.
* * *
Hoffman had kept the cadaver in a polished wooden box, a kind of substitute coffin that originally held a small, portable microscope. Since that day at the incinerator, he had peeked into the box several times. The eyes were always closed, except for yesterday, when he returned with the request from the Limboia: then, the eyes had stared out at him from the rigid interior.
He was preparing to pack the creature when his servant announced that Mrs. Klausen had arrived for her appointment. He had completely forgotten about the wretched woman and her insistence on being examined again for yet another of her imaginary illnesses. He went through to his
consulting room, where the plump frau sat, smiling like a bird.
‘Dear Doctor Hoffman, so nice to see you again, even if it is because of my poor, ailing body.’
The doctor smiled and prepared to charm the pestilential woman, hoping to send her on her way quickly.
‘These are for you,’ she said, offering a richly embroidered silk bag containing an ornate box. ‘They are Chanteuse bonbons,’ she gushed, ‘all the way from Stuttgart.’
He thanked her and began the consultation, probing and questioning the woman’s hypochondriac needs for almost an hour. When he finally got rid of her, he rushed back into the laboratory to pack the bundle. Late, and desperate to be on the road, he bustled about, his curiosity running in a lapse. The new voice in the Limboia meant that he could gauge his experiments. He hoped to see again the response of the lost ones, this time without fear clouding his perceptions.
In his distracted panic, he mislaid the creature’s carrying bag and spent ten minutes crawling under the furniture, looking behind the books and spinning around like a giddy dog. Time was running out, and he knew Maclish would be chewing his claws and growing ill-tempered. Perhaps he had taken it next door when he’d gone to examine that dreary woman? He sprinted across the hall and scanned the examination room. The bag was not there, but her silk pouch was. He quickly threw the repulsive sweets in a bin. The bundle fitted perfectly in its elegant new conveyor.
The keeper was standing outside the prison house, chafing and irritable. The doctor gave him a limp wave from the fence door while hurrying towards him.
‘Sorry to be so late, I had a patient.’
Maclish said nothing, but stared at the bright, noisy sack which Hoffman pulled out of his Gladstone bag like a garish conjuror. With a slur of incongruity, he said, ‘Is that it?’ Hoffman nodded and they entered
the anticipant building.
Inside the stillness, the herald stood waiting at the table. ‘The one that looks back,’ he said, staring at the embroidered bag.
Maclish and Hoffman said nothing, setting their prize down on the table.
‘You leave, we need lone this day.’
‘Now, wait a minute…’ bristled Maclish.
‘It’s alright, William,’ said the doctor, with a certainty which sounded believable, ‘let’s do it their way this time.’
‘One hour!’ barked the keeper. ‘One hour only, then we come back.’
They did not turn around as they left the building, the hallway reverberating with the sound of the multitude descending the clanking stairs behind them.
* * *
There was something wrong with the food. He had tasted it in the second course. He was now on the ninth, and it was getting worse. The
crème de testicule
had a bitter tang, astringent and disconcerting. The kidneys had been swollen and leathery, and now the
foie gras
had a sulphurous aftertaste. He dined with one of his urchinous, casual companions. This alone was unheard of: he always had them removed before he bathed and dressed for a solitary dinner. The boy shovelled the food into his emaciation, washing it down with brimming glasses of the Frenchman’s favourite wine. He spat while talking, laughing out great gobfuls of exquisite cuisine, which now looked like chewed cud as they flew ungraciously across the shining tablecloth.
The next course smelt like the crystals that the servants used to clean the water-chamber porcelain. He started to gag. The movement roused
him and he awoke in the damp mulch of leaves and the naked surface roots of the tree that signified his despair. The glowing table and the gentle candles were gone; twilight had begun to exhale from the trees. Dread swamped him as he bolted into the understanding that this was not the dream.
He stood up and tried to collect himself, tears filling his eyes and choking his swallowing breath. He walked aimlessly away, needing to escape this immediate place that had been the site of declaration, the horrible trees that had witnessed the realisation of his sentence; he had to rid himself of their mocking indifference.
The aftertaste of the acrid food lingered as he pushed through the cool, wet leaves. He found a hollow in one of the long-dead oaks and crawled inside its stiff embrace, the hard fungi breaking off against his shoulders. He scrabbled around to face the outside, the Derringer in one hand and a small camping knife in the other. By the time night finally arrived, he had steeled himself for its attack.
The forest grew dim as the shadows lengthened into one continuous form. The world outside of the tree was beyond dark, but constantly moving; blue blurs matted with the dense blackness of distance. Things slid and rustled, crawled and flapped, in the infinite depth of closeness. He held his hand before his face to test the old adage. It was true – he could not see it – yet the ebony fluid in his eyes sensed all manner of things swirling within a terrifying proximity. A prayer almost found its way to his lips. It began in the icy fear of his heart, the ventricles white with the frost of anticipation, and travelled outwards to become a pressure, like wind against the meat sails of his lungs. Funnelling up, it passed like a shadow through the rehearsal of his vocal cords, up into his mouth, tongue and lips, before being garrotted by the thin, taut wire of his mind. No heart word would ever pass that frontier unchecked; not even a hollow, sapless tree was allowed to hear that hypocrisy.
Towards what might be dawn, he slept. By the morning, no creature
had worried him, and a vague sense of hope had begun to return. Perhaps he could survive? Maybe he had some deep, inspired understanding of the wilderness. Many great explorers underestimated their gift until confronted by extreme adversity; his inventive mind may be capable of transcending these base afflictions. Other, lesser beings had triumphed before when tested thus.
He was beginning to feel the warm flood of confidence, when he saw his boots. They had been hand-made in Marseille, adventure boots, worn to confound and conquer the savage lands. The straps that held them in place had been eaten through, gnawed away, so that only stubs remained either side of the nibbled leather tongue. He sat bolt upright to observe the outrage, wiping the morning dew from his eyes and face. It was sticky and pungent. He looked at what he had removed and sank with the realisation that it wasn’t dew: it was saliva. He was soaked in it. He scrabbled to his feet, banging his head and knees against the rough interior of the gnarled oak, causing a shower of dry fungi to crumble and snow about his departure. He lurched out of the tree’s vertical enclosure, flailing at his wet clothes and his soggy hair in a pathetic attempt to wipe the mess away. His indifferent boots became loose and vacant, twisting away from his agitated feet, so that he stumbled over them on the wet, thorny ground, which grabbed at his socks and bare ankles. He yelped, hopped and slid, falling face down into a gully full of mud and harsh stones, the Derringer firing a deafening, burning blast.
He lay there, hoping he was dead. Nothing had ever been as bad as this; his Paris apartment seemed like a dream he had never had. Then, with the pistol’s fire still ringing in his ears, he heard Seil Kor’s voice, far off but distinct.
‘Seil Kor!’ he bellowed frantically. ‘Seil Kor!’ He called again and again, and then got a clear reply.
‘Do not move, effendi! Just call, I will come to you.’
This they did for hours, without success. Sometimes his voice seemed
further away, lost in the depths and twists of the vast, impenetrable forest’s endless animal trails. Two or three times, the Frenchman heard something move in the thickets of trunks and leaves, but it was not his salvation; more likely, it was his demise stalking him, the recent taste of his body on its breath. He plucked the reloaded Derringer from his pocket and turned a full circle. Then he saw it. Far back in the trees, a hunched, grey creature was watching him. He could not make out its form; it might even have been human. A twig snapped behind the Frenchman and he span in the opposite direction.
‘Effendi!’
Seil Kor was coming towards him, parting the leaves with a purposeful grace.
He rushed to the tall figure and flung his arms around him, bursting into tears, his diminutive, brightly robed body shaking against the protection of the quiet black man. He was saved. Then he remembered the thing watching him, and he untangled himself, looking back to see if it was still there. It had moved to a point a little further away, shadowed but still watching. He clutched Seil Kor with one hand and pointed with the other.
‘Do you see it?’ he asked.
‘Yes, but I wish I did not.’
‘What is it?’
There was a long pause while Seil Kor again made the gesture of moving his hand above his head. The creature moved into a patch of bright light. It was a kind of human. Its skin was grey and wrinkled, like that of a primate deprived of fur. It was motionless in their observation.
‘What is it?’ he asked again.
‘I fear it is Adam,’ answered Seil Kor.
The Frenchman coughed out a single, uncontrollable laugh. Its nervous splutter startled the creature, who loped into the foliage.
‘Adam?’ said the Frenchman, the sound of the laugh still wet in his
mouth.
There was no sound from Seil Kor, whose drooped eyes were full of remorse.
‘Seil Kor?’
There was still no answer.
‘Seil Kor, that animal is barely human. How can it be Adam? He would be thousands of years old by now.’
‘The Bible says that Adam died,’ said Seil Kor. ‘It even says that the tree planted on his grave grew into the wood that became the true cross.’ He looked out into the trees and started to walk away from the place of the sighting. ‘We must go. We have come too far.’
The Frenchman tried to follow, but had to stop to retrieve his gnawed shoes, slipping them on loosely and trying to hold them in place with his bunched toes.
‘Please, wait!’ he called ahead.
Seil Kor stopped walking, his back towards the shuffling dandy. As the Frenchman drew near, he began to walk on, without a word or any indication that they were travelling together. His pace was slow to allow the Frenchman to follow. He seemed to know where they were and where he was going. After many awkward moments and several turns they reached a broader path. The widening space vented some of the tension between them, and the Frenchman’s queries bubbled uncontrollably to the surface.
‘Please, Seil Kor, tell me more,’ he implored. ‘I assure you I will listen this time.’ He looked beseechingly at his guide, who considered him evenly before slowly beginning to speak.
‘There are different Bibles, with different tales,’ said Seil Kor. ‘In these regions, the truth is told. Adam was never completely forgiven; his sons and daughter left this place and occupied the world. He waited for God, waited for forgiveness and for his rib to grow back. But he became tired of waiting, and walked back into the forest. The angels that protected the
tree let him pass because there was nothing else for him to do in that sacred place. But, in his absence, God forgot him and so he has remained. Each century he loses a skin of humanity, peeling back through the animals to dust. This is what I was reading to you, when you went away.’
There was real upset in Seil Kor’s voice, and for the first time the Frenchman realised that his affections for the young man were reciprocated. All that nonsense about Eden had been his way of bringing them closer.
‘I did not understand before,’ he said. ‘Will you forgive me, and tell me more of your wondrous book?’
Seil Kor turned, looking deep into his companion. ‘You have much to learn,’ he said, smiling slowly, ‘and I will teach you. But we must leave this place quickly.’
The Frenchman took his outstretched hand and they walked together through the flickering foliage.
* * *
Exactly one hour later, they returned. The hall was empty and quiet. The thing’s eyes were mercifully closed.
‘It’s alright,’ said Hoffman, ‘they are content. Let’s take the child and lock up.’
Maclish conceded, but looked puzzled. ‘Where’s the bag?’ he said, his eyes scanning the room.
‘Oh god, not again!’ groaned Hoffman, stooping to look under the table.
‘They’ve taken it, haven’t they?!’ Maclish exclaimed. ‘The stupid fuckers have taken the bag!’ He was not a man famous for laughing and it sounded odd, somehow, solid and unused, as it erupted from him, the
hallways listening to it in concentrated surprise.
There was a scrap of cloth left on the table and the doctor used part of it to cover the face of the tiny form, fashioning the remainder into a weak sling to carry it away. The idea of the Limboia cherishing such a garish, effeminate bag was unbelievably comic, and they left in a mild hysteria, the keeper still smirking uncontrollably.
The doctor had been right. The Limboia were contented, working in the forest with an even greater vigour than before. All seemed to return to normal, in the most abnormal of situations. And then Mrs. Klausen was reported missing.