As predicted, the train took his wakefulness after twenty minutes. He sank into a dreamless sleep that curdled and fell, amplifying rather than soothing his hangover. Large, abstract masses bumped against him, rubbing at his extremities and dampening his elementals. The train seemed to be crawling at a sluggish pace, and the voice of the crated horror grew louder and louder in his semi-conscious skull.
He was woken by a jolting stop, and shook his head to try to gather his senses and possessions. His whip was strangled by the vines growing out of the luggage rack, and would not come loose when he tugged at it. He knew this kind of thing happened, but this time he was unprepared; unable to dislodge it, he decided to get a knife from one of the others.
He put his head out of the window to yell and was shocked to find no platform. The train had not reached its destination, and stood at a standstill in the middle of the forest. Looking down its length, he saw smoke and steam rising from the stationary, panting engine. He called out, expecting one of his men to report information on the hold-up, but nobody came. His headache had intensified and he rubbed the back of his neck before opening the carriage door and jumping down onto the gravel of the track.
He walked along to the Limboia slave carriage – it was empty. So were the next three. He unbuttoned the flap of his holster as his boots crunched loudly on the stones. His steps and the engine’s puffing heart were the only sounds in the forest; even the birds were hushed. When he came to the flat-bed truck and saw that the crate was open, he pulled
out his revolver and looked around warily. Nothing moved, and the trees seemed to have lost their motion, their leaves hanging outside of any breeze or growth.
‘Engineer!’ he bellowed towards the back of the train. It felt reassuring to shout such a matter-of-fact word amid the absence and stillness. ‘Engineer!’
He heard a titter from behind the passenger carriage. He swung round and climbed up onto a flatbed to reach the other side. There was a small clearing at the edge of the forest, as if a straight line had been shaved out, and the Limboia were all there, side by side in a line, looking, he thought, like a ragged, regimental parade, waiting to be inspected. He spat and jumped down to their side, his pistol alert and ready. There was more girlish tittering from the line. With a pounding head and a growing nausea, which he could only put down to the previous motion of the train, he approached them, trying to hold back his rage.
‘What the fuck are ye doing out of the train? GET BACK IN!’ he bellowed.
The tittering stopped and they closed their eyes in a slow, simultaneous movement. Then the breathing started: the same unified breathing that he and Hoffman had heard that first night.
‘Stop that! Stop that, RIGHT NOW!’ he yelled.
The breathing doubled in volume. He was suddenly lost and obviously outnumbered. The Limboia were stationary while their chests moved in unison. The only individual movement came from the centre of the line. There stood the herald, holding something to his chest, stroking it with slow, intense gestures. Maclish made a beeline for him, closing on him, the pistol held level with the man’s face.
‘Tell them to get back on the train,’ he demanded, seeing a way to retake control.
Then he saw what the herald had in his hands. The loose strips of cloth had been peeled away and the near-naked thing rolled in the manipulating hands, its lifeless limbs flopping back and forth with the
movements. Maclish wanted to pull the trigger and end this, but he knew it was already over.
The eyes of the dead, aborted child opened and stared into his. The breathing stopped, and something else rustled between the Limboia. Something was weaving itself between their ranks, rattling their place on the earth with no speed, but a vast momentum. It nudged him like the movement on the train, and he passed out; in a second, every organ in his body had halted, as if they had never moved at all. Every cell gave up in the presence of the Orm. Only his mad eyes flashed in the dead head, as his body slid to the ground.
The Limboia pointed at their hearts and dispersed into the depth of the forest with their prize. An hour later, the engine would give its last sigh, and its firebox would run down to cold ashes.
The frantic, moving eyes in what had been Maclish stared at Loverboy, who had been standing behind the Limboia all along, patiently waiting. He had been busy. Even in his weakened condition he had retained enough purpose, energy and skill to gather some small branches and vines and construct a basic sledge. He dragged his creation towards the corpse: he was taking Red Fur home to meet his people, and one of his stomachs was already rumbling.
* * *
Ishmael had come to a place where a mighty oak had fallen, its prone bulk drawing a horizon in the world of verticals. It must have been of considerable age; he could easily have hidden in its girth. A wonderful aroma of leaf mulch and sap exuded from the place, one of dampness spun with age. He walked across the narrow path, under the bridge
formed by the oak, before stopping to look up again at the fallen tree, which blotted out the dappled sunshine. New shoots were growing from its old, dead body, and a lacework of vines still thrived on its bark.
He was beginning to enjoy the depth of this place, to feel a sense of belonging in its mysterious interior. Perhaps this was where he was from; perhaps his kind really had lived here, among the peace of the great trees. He imagined a primitive life in simple huts, with a gentle and ancient race that had hidden successfully from barbaric humans for centuries.
The Kin had shown him pictures and models of such places, and he remembered stories of them. Adam’s house in Paradise had been drawn on scrolls in the teaching crates, alongside images of strange, man-like creatures living in harmony with lions and other wild beasts. He and Seth had made a miniature shelter of mud, sticks and stones. He had been proud of it, and would sit staring into its rough interior, imagining what a life within it would entail; he saw, in his mind, the hearth, and the trickle of smoke from the roof, rising up into the motionless air.
He was there again, expecting to turn a corner and find that unique village. So lost was he in the conjecture of that place, that he did not immediately notice that he was no longer alone. It took him a few moments to realise that somebody was walking to the side of him, just out of the periphery of his view. He spun around to confront them, his heart in his throat. The other stopped and ducked down, but he now knew for sure that he was being observed. He wondered if these were the people who had been giving him food and water. He called out to where the figure had disappeared, expecting a response this time. None came. Then there was a sound behind him; a sound to the side; a plethora of sounds from every direction. The creatures stood up, and he turned in horror to look at them all, their faces growing out of their chests.
He pushed back the fear and repulsion that came from being in close and unknown proximity with something that was utterly different. Their squat, square bodies were pale yellow, blotched with a pink mottle; they
had no discernible head. Their mouth, jaw, nose and ears grew out of their sternum, and a single eye stared out from their flat chests with the blinking wit of a farm animal. Pale lashes, shading one-dimensional thoughts, flicked vacantly between fight or flee.
Then he saw the squint of cunning, and knew that this was his end. These were things he had seen in a picture: horror cyclops that could have nothing to do with him. This was a subspecies, not a kindred race. They had been giving him food and direction, not out of aid and sympathy, but to guide him home. They had been fattening and luring him, and he had willingly followed their trails of food straight into their trap, and right into the heartland of the anthropophagi.
They moved towards him to look closer and started to communicate in a series of high, ragged bleats, sounds that seemed to be razored out of their small, teeth-filled mouths with a great deal of effort. Theirs were not the mouths of eloquent debate; the holes and their contents were constructed purely for the sake of biting, sucking, nibbling and guzzling.
They were all naked, and Ishmael, whose interest in genitalia had always been intense, gazed in amazement at their diversity and proportion. Unlike other species he had examined, no two seemed to be alike: some were shrunken and inverted, while others hung or coiled out of their bodies with wasteful abandon. He was reminded of ‘Lesson 93: Invertebrates of the Oceans (Certain Soft-bodied Sea Creatures)’, and wondered if their sex organs might indeed be a separate species that shared a symbiotic relationship with their host. How they used them to mate was beyond even his conjecture.
These far-off speculations stopped him from running or fainting with fear, which he knew would be an instant trigger to his demise. They moved closer, and he froze. They touched him, held his legs and looked up into his eye, their proximity betraying a violent odour that matched their speech patterns. Suddenly, without warning, a searing pain made Ishmael scream out into the trees. A thin hardwood blade had been pushed into
the Achilles tendon of his right leg; they were making sure he would not run away. The pain made him fall, and the others pinned him down while a second hobble was stabbed in. He yelled and thrashed, but there were too many of them. Their strength, smell, arms, legs and genitals flapped and fastened him, while others unsheathed more pointed sticks.
Suddenly, there was an almighty explosion, and the creature holding his leg split apart, the two halves of its upper body flying in opposite directions, leaving the tottering legs standing comically for a second or two. The arms remained connected to each piece of raw meat, spurting mud-coloured blood as they tried to hold on to the ground or crawl off. A second creature was hit in the back, and the great sound pushed his splintered ribcage out through his puzzled face; this one did not even twitch.
The creatures fled the ambush, vanishing into the undergrowth with a practised speed and agility. Ishmael rolled on the ground in agony, straining to see who or what the weapon belonged to – was it better or worse than the horrors he had just been saved from?
‘What kind of thing are you?’ barked a voice that was out of sight. ‘Don’t look around; lie still or you will bleed to death. Now, answer my question, or I will destroy you like I destroyed your little brothers.’
‘They are no brothers of mine,’ said Ishmael through clenched teeth.
‘Then what are you?’ said the booming voice, the Mars Fairfax pointing at Ishmael’s spine from behind an old oak tree.
‘I am a man with one eye.’
It seemed like a reasonable answer: that was indeed what the writhing creature appeared to be.
‘I can help you, if I trust you,’ said the voice. ‘Keep still and put your hands in front of your face where I can see them.’
‘What are you?’ grimaced Ishmael.
‘I am Williams,’ said the voice at last, ‘and I am a man with four eyes.’
* * *
Tsungali was drinking from the earthen bowl when he heard the shots. He thought he was the only one who dared fire a gun in the forest. Perhaps other hunters shared his pursuit? The sound was foreign, not like any gun he had heard before, but it had given him a clear direction, and his stalking took on a more purposeful intent.
The stinking brown blood was still drying on his arm where the thing had bled to death, his kris driven along its shoulder blade to find its heart, or its brain, or whatever else it was that had once powered the yellow demon. It had been tracking him for days; Tsungali had allowed himself the water and thrown the food away, preferring his own dried supplies. Then he had circled back on the demon and killed it from behind. It was one that his grandfather had told him of, the demons that eat hunted human flesh. Any doubts he might have had were quickly dispersed when he saw what his victim wore over its swollen cock and balls: a makeshift bowl, which on closer examination proved to be the skull cap of a man, the skin and bright red hair still attached.
Tsungali gathered some vines and tied them around the large, pointed feet of his fallen hunter, hoisting the demon up to swing in the trees and show its unseen herd that fear had entered their lives. As he did so, he saw a small movement in the creature’s armpit. He grabbed the body to stop it swinging, and took a closer look. Under each armpit was hidden a small, delicately woven spear of grass. It was attached to the skin by curved thorns that hooked it in place. Each spear contained a human eye. He cut the little cages out of their hiding place and examined them, one in each hand. Then he saw it, and the shock made him drop them: he had seen many wondrous and terrible sights, and was not easily surprised by unnatural phenomena, but this place bred things beyond the nightmares of devils.
He bent and rummaged in the low bush where the spheres had fallen, found them and again inspected them. Yes, there it was: stronger in one, but apparent in both. The irises were moving, dilating back and forth, adjusting their sights: the eyes were still alive. This was magic beyond the powers of his comprehension.
His hand was wet; he examined it and realised that one of the eyes was leaking. Placing the good one in the deepest pouch of his spell belt, he cut open the grass cage around the damaged eye and saw that one of the thorns had hooked inwards, piercing it deeply. More fluid was escaping, and the eye had started to lose its shape.
He found a flat stone and brushed it clean. Holding the eye between the forefingers of his left hand, he laid it on the rock and, taking his razor-sharp knife in his right hand, carefully slit it open, causing the rest of the fluid to soak away into the stone. Tsungali bent close enough to see the tiny muscles, working to focus the lens, and the iris, still trying to shutter the overbearing light. Their minute energies were independent and self-willed. He probed the interior with his hungry vision; he thought he saw the stub of the optic nerve twitch, but could not be sure. The fluid and the movement attracted the attentions of other watchers, and brought the hungry curiosity of a stream of black ants to the rock. Without hesitation, they continued the dissection that Tsungali had started. He watched the eye being nibbled apart and ferried away, its muscles still alive and contracting as the insects held it aloft like a great prize, dragging it backwards along the glistening black chain of their frantic bodies. A few minutes later, there was nothing left – even the stain was fought over and diminished by the porous stone and the cooking sun.