Dead Leprechauns & Devil Cats

by Grady Hendrix

  “One week later, we were on a steamer headed up the Nile, already past the first cataract and making good time to Metemma. Young Harry, Winston, Standish, Lyle, and Merrimack, my young, optimistic abolitionist friends, had hired a company of riflemen and now they were only too delighted to be going to liberate the slaves of the Sudan and recover the remains of their movement’s saint.

  “Our journey took two weeks, giving me ample time to become acquainted with our mercenaries. They were Egyptian soldiers who had deserted the British army and most of them were slave owners, but they had no problem carrying arms for my abolitionist friends because the money was good, and they were sure the mission would fall apart long before it reached Khartoum. However, their suspicions that we were all softheaded made conversation difficult.

  “Fortunately, I discovered that one of them, Abdul Al Maziri, was a hashish addict and on the third day I confiscated his stash of that tarry drug. The skull-pounding summertime heat was enough to drive any man mad, but Abdul in particular found himself crawling out of his skin without his narcotic. It was simplicity itself to dole out to him a small amount of his necessary for information pertaining to Khartoum and that was how I learned the lay of the land.

  “Khartoum was a ghost city. The Ansar had raped and plundered it into submission and then into ruin. When disease rose up like a wildfire from the piles of rotten corpses in the streets they abandoned the city and repaired to their sprawling military camp of Omdurman across the Nile. Omdurman, the tent city, had put down foundations and slathered itself in stucco and brick, growing walls and streets, markets and minarets, piling layer after layer upon itself like an oyster’s shell. And the pearl in the middle of this oyster was the Khalifa, ruler of the Ansar army, a most dangerous man, paranoid and mad, a massive, bloated drunkard poised to expand the Musselman empire across Egypt and into Africa.

  “As we approached Omdurman, it became clear that we needed a plan so as not to be slaughtered the second we put down our gangplank as I had no doubt that the forces of the Khalifa were totally insane. At night, while dining with my abolitionist friends, this issue was turned over and over, prodded, probed, and discussed from a variety of angles, yet we never arrived at a general solution. Meanwhile, the servants and mercenaries became more and more nervous as we made our way up the Nile, past the first, second, and third cataracts, then past the joining of the Atbara River and down towards Khartoum where the mighty Nile divided itself into the White and the Blue. Each landmark was one more tick on the clock counting down to our doom. Each morning brought news of more deserters.

  “And then came the day, just before teatime, with the Sixth Cataract thundering off our stern, when the ruined towers of Khartoum hove into view. Omdurman was visible on the opposite side of the Nile, a low blot on the horizon, smudged with the smoke of a thousand dung fires. It was with a sinking feeling that I realized our plan of attack consisted entirely of standing at the gangplank singing hymns and holding three white baby lambs as a gesture of peace, then asking the Khalifa, politely, for General Gordon’s head to be returned. From a strategic point of view there were flaws, but I decided to keep my doubts to myself and to be off the rear of the ship while the Answar’s attention was focused on the front.”

  “You convinced these abolitionists to join you on your journey and then left them to die?“ Drake said in disbelief.

  “Not to die. No,” Augustus said. “Merely to serve as a distraction. As it happens, they did die. Quite horribly, in fact, but that was through no fault of mine.”

  “The Ansar had kept the docks at Khartoum in use, and they massed on them in the hundreds from the moment our steamer first drifted into sight. By the time we were ready to let down the gangplank, there were thousands of them waiting in an eerie silence. My abolitionist friends were nervous but full of faith that God was with them, so I left them to it, and as the low moaning sound of ‘O Send Me to Golgotha’ rose in the oven-hot summer air, I slipped off the stern into the lukewarm Nile and hid beneath the stern of the ship while the Ansar rounded up our remaining mercenaries, servants, ship’s crew, and the abolitionists, and clapped them all into chains. The lambs were promptly eaten.

  “Night fell, and under cover of darkness I swam for Omdurman and snuck into a mosque that was left unlocked. I hid in a side room at the top of the minaret and slept until I was awakened by the muezzin calling for prayers at dawn’s first light. The city was abuzz, like a great anthill stirred with a stick and fortunately, from high up in the minaret I could see the center of the excitement quite clearly. It was an open square on which stood a gallows. I was amazed to discover this instrument of civilization so deep within this savage country, but I became slightly depressed when I realized that my friends were being lined up next to it.

  “After a list of their crimes was read in Arabic, they began to hang them by the neck until dead. There were fifty of them, altogether, and after the first ten or eleven were hung the ropes began to break. Swords and axes were summoned and the prisoners were beheaded for a little while, but the process moved slowly and the swords had to be sharpened frequently. Heads were tossed into the crowd like coconuts while the town butchers were summoned and ordered to chop off the hands and feet of the remaining mercenaries. This they did, and the discarded members formed great bloody piles that starving children stole, grilled and sold to the crowd as snacks. When the executioners reached my friends, sometime in the late afternoon, they were exhausted and so they merely kicked them off the gallows and into the crowd who, it’s my sad duty to report, tore them from limb to limb while they screamed and begged for mercy.

  “It was at this point that I began to re-evalutate my position. Here I was in a minaret, in a mosque, in the most radically anti-Western city on the planet, surrounded by five hundred miles of desert in every direction. At my feet lay 45,000 people who hated the white man as an article of faith, and I was the only white man within reach. Plus, I didn’t speak a word of the local language and my shirt was very dirty. It would take a cock-eyed optimist to say that my situation did not look bleak.

  “In my depression I forgot that these desert devils prayed to their monstrous god five times a day and I was more than a little startled when the door opened and the elderly muezzin walked in. The old fellow radiated a rustic nobility from his strong-featured face and well-shaped head. He was old, but his white beard was lustrous, and his limbs possessed a rude vigor.

  “I could tell that he was as surprised to find me in his minaret as I was to be found, and we both gawked at each other for a moment before he opened his mouth to raise the alarm and I punched him in the face. Staggering about the room, hands pressed to his gushing nose, he howled in pain. I had been merely trying to distract him so that I might flee, and so no one was more surprised than I when he staggered to the edge of the minaret, tripped against the railings, and fell to his death. A minute later I was surrounded by the Khalifa’s guard, a dozen rifles pressed to my skull.”

  “Did they kill you?“ shouted Drake, unable to contain himself.

  “Obviously not, Drake,” Augustus said. “Instead they put me in chains and took me to the palace of the Khalifa Abdullahi. It was the only two-story building in Omdurman, with their stinking slave market pressed in on one side and a filthy prison leaning against the other. I was passed from guard to guard until finally I reached one clean enough to drag me into the presence of the Khalifa himself. They pushed me to the ground, pressed my forehead into the dirt floor and it was all getting to be a bit much when I heard a voice speaking German-accented English.

  ‘You are a British subject?’

  “I looked up and saw before me that traitor to Christianity, Rudolf Carl von Slatin, the Austrian Governor-General of Darfur who had surrendered to the Mahdi, converted to Islam, and wore the most ridiculous mustache in all of Christendom.

  ‘I am an American,’ I said. ‘My name is Augustus Mortimer and I demand to be returned to Cairo at once.’

  ‘The comings a
nd the goings — these are not simple things! Here the Khalifa governs and makes these decisions for us,’ he barked.

  “Von Slatin conferred with the Khalifa in their sneaky language, and I took this moment to steal a glance at the Sudan’s mad ruler. He was a molten mountain of lard, his features submerged in a slow avalanche of fat, his fingers and toes buried beneath rolls of jaundiced flesh. He was immense, clad in silks and brocade, and he moved with all the speed of an intoxicated tree sloth.

  “Then, as an alarming buzz darted about the room, a clutch of armed natives led by von Slatin dragged me outside.

  ‘Where are you taking me?’ I demanded.

  ‘You are so lucky,’ von Slatin hissed. ‘You are to be imprisoned and lightly tortured before your execution.’

  ‘Why is being tortured lightly lucky?’

  ‘Because the man you pushed out the window was the last honorable man in Omdurman and so no one has the time to torture you heavily. For you the death will be fast and you will greet it while you still possess all of your fingernails.’

  ‘Wait!’ I cried.

  ‘No, there is a schedule,’ von Slatin said. ‘The sun is going down.’

  “It was as if the alarming buzz had followed us out of the palace and urgency and fear raced through the city after us like a swarm of bees. Crowds were gathering, clotting on the corners and jabbering in their heathen tongue. Terror swept the mud hovels and hell shacks of Omdurman as all the citizenry emptied out onto the streets. Their eyes were focused southwest, in the direction of the setting sun.

  ‘Wait,’ I called to von Slatin. ‘I am the foremost authority in America on spiritualism. I have come all this way to see the oracular head of General Gordon. If it truly exists, let me gaze upon it one time before my death.’

  ‘The head only speaks the nonsense,’ the prancing Prussian priss said.

  ‘I can decipher it,’ I said. ‘I understand the language of the heads.’

  “Von Slatin paused, genuinely torn, then he barked orders to the guards in Arabic, and we changed direction.

  ‘We go now to my quarters,’ he said. “You are lucky I am taking you places. You will tell me what the head is saying.’

  “For a prisoner of the Khalifa, von Slatin enjoyed certain privileges. He could walk around the city unshackled. He had his own quarters and allowance. In return, he translated and advised the Khalifa, reading his moods as if they were the weather and he was a sailor adrift on an ocean of the Khalifa’s whims. Omdurman was his prison, as surely as it was mine.

  “The guards posted themselves outside his quarters and he sneered at me through his silly mustache.

  ‘How did you hear of the head of General Gordon?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ll answer you if you answer me,’ I said, pressing my advantage. ‘What is everyone so worked up about?’

  ‘Your rash actions have merely doomed us all.’

  ‘I find that hard to believe. I have impeccable manners.’

  ‘The muezzin you defenestrated was the last faithful Muslim in Omdurman. As long as he calls the adhan the dead stay in the ground and allow the Khalifa and his followers their decadence. The corpses of those who died taking Khartoum are hungry to bring sharia to the living and their law is harsh. They would root out all traces of Christian corruption: the rifles, the liquor, the hoarding of wealth and tobacco, the fornicators. All would die at the hands of the Ansar dead. It would be most unpleasant. Only the voice of Ismail stood between this city of sinners and their total destruction. And now you have killed him.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Fairy tales always bore me and I must have nodded off. Now, I believe you had a head?’

  “Von Slatin produced an oiled sandalwood box, and from it he withdrew a silken sack which he opened. The smell of uncured leather and cinnamon shot fire through my nostrils as he pulled out the severed head of Chinese Gordon. It had been washed, barbered, and perfumed but underneath the rosewater I could smell its leathery stink. The General’s eyes showed only their whites, but from his beard a mumbling came forth. It was merely a nerve reaction and a not very interesting one at that and I became depressed I had come all this way for nothing. And then:

  ‘The hands are piled in a mountain,’ he cried in a strong, clear voice. ‘A mountain range of black hands. The rubber river flows north. Msiri whispers of Casement and Morel.’

  ‘Stop it,’ hissed von Slatin.

  ‘You’re going to die, Carl,’ General Gordon’s head said to von Slatin. ‘You’re going to die! They shall stalk the streets and rub out every vestige of Christendom.’

  ‘I think,’ I said, ‘That he is predicting your doom.’

  “The sounds of panic in the street filtered in through the wooden shutters.

  ‘The black tide will drown you all. You’re all going to die!’

  “Von Slatin turned quite pale, and dashed out the door and up the stairs to the roof while I followed as best I could. Behind me I could hear General Gordon start in on the first verse of ‘O Send Them To Golgotha.’

  “The sun squatted on the Western horizon like an ugly red eye. Von Slatin pointed out over the White Nile towards Kalakala, near the ruined walls of old Khartoum.

  ‘They’re coming,’ he breathed. ‘The corpse army of Khartoum.’

  “At first I saw only a cloud of dust rising from the desert sands, but soon I could make out ragged brown skeletons clad in scraps of dried meat, standing stark still in the dust cloud and when the wind brought me their scent they smelt of dried chicken spiced with cinnamon. A harmattan wind began to blow and as it passed through their taut, exposed sinews it produced a dreadful sound, like all the violins of hell howling and screeching. And then these things turned their grizzled heads on Omdurman and they began to walk.

  “Screams rose up from the city below, and like metal filings drawn by a magnet, the population streamed eastwards, away from the advancing corpse army. From where we were standing we could see the dead Ansar emerge out of the dust cloud and fall upon late returning fishermen, who were drunk on local sorghum wine, and tear them to shreds. Their cries floated faintly to us in the summer dusk.

  “I knew in an instant what I had to do.

  ‘Von Slatin,’ I said. ‘Unlock these manacles! We must defend the city gates!’

  “He looked at me for a moment, confused.

  ‘Come on, man! There’s no time to lose. You’ll need every able-bodied man you can find. I can use a rifle and I have no intention of being murdered by a horde of dead Musselmen.’

  “My logic appealed to Von Slatin’s Prussian mind and he unlocked my chains, whereupon I promptly shoved him off the roof. Don’t look so shocked, Lewis. It was only a one-story fall and I’m sure the crowd just trampled him a bit. Most of them were barefoot, anyways.

  “However, I didn’t take the time to peer over the edge and ascertain his well-being. Instead, I dashed to his quarters and seized the silken bag containing Chinese Gordon’s head and ran from the building, pausing only to disguise myself in one of von Slatin’s white silk jibbas.

  “From the roof I had seen that the city gates were not far to my east and so I headed in the opposite direction. I was pushing against a tide of terrified natives, but they paid no mind to the mad white man dashing into the jaws of death. The eerie orchestra of the corpse army’s rotten sinews was getting louder than the screams around me and I felt as if I were racing into the center of the maelstrom.

  “I arrived at the city walls where barked orders drew my attention to the parapets where the remainders of the Ansar army were being bullied into making one last stand. Their captain screamed abuse as his soldiers gripped their sweaty rifles and hoped to live to see the dawn.

  “I raced up the stairs to the top of the wall and what I saw filled me with hope and terror. Terror because what I saw was beyond all sane understanding. The Ansar had fallen by the thousands during their year-long siege of Khartoum and their bodies had been baked by the sun and stripped of flesh by the scouring
sands. Now, animated by religious mania, they had heaved themselves up from their graves, jaws hanging agape, blind eye sockets filled with sand, lungs flapping in tatters, and they marched on Omdurman determined to wipe out the defiled city, a zombie jihad armed with weaponized hate. And there were thousands of them, enough to un-gut every man, woman, and child in the city.

  “A few scattered rifles barked up and down the wall as jittery Ansar squeezed their triggers in terror, but mostly they held firm, waiting for their dead comrades to draw closer. And that was when I felt the hope rising in my breast. Just then, the head of Chinese Gordon began to bray ‘Jerusalem’ in an obnoxious baritone.

  ‘And did those feet in ancient time,’ he bellowed, ‘Walk upon England’s mountains green!’

  Curious heads turned towards me as I stuffed a corner of my jibba into his mouth.

  ‘And was the holy lamb of God, On England’s pleasant pastures seen!’

  ‘Shut UP,’ I said.

  ‘And was Jerusalem builded here, Among these dark Satanic Mills!’

  “The head and I were drawing undue attention, and so I abandoned the parapets. The sound of terrified horses led me quickly to a stable, while that jackass head continued to sing. If I had not come all that way to secure the damn thing I would have pitched it into the crush of the walking dead outside the city gates right then and there.

  “I found the horses rolling their eyes, their muzzles flecked with foam and terror. A stablehand tried to chase me away but I knocked him one in the skull with Gordon’s head and he went down like a stone. Gordon, needless to say, did not miss a note.

  ‘Bring me my Bow of burning Gold; Bring me my arrows of desire; Bring me my spear, O clouds unfurl; Bring me my chariot of fire.’