by Gemma Files
Outside Amsore, the trees hide miles of ripe, interlocking tracklessness: Verdant ventriculation, sap-fed growth, a living maze. A wholly fitting provenance for lovers, or for madmen.
* * *
They found the camp at sunset, through a hazy glare of red already half-deepening to grey as twilight retook its nightly portion, adapting all it touched to darkness. Insects still hung thick around the ash-heap of a dampened fire, on which a brass pot full of half-cooked rice sat abandoned. Further still, a few hastily-improvised huts of mud and fallen wood vomited scraps of clothing or the odd rusty weapon, spoiled supplies and broken crockery. Detritus lay everywhere, the spoor of retreat, scattered and rank. Grammar’s party—the bulk of them barefoot, and thus more likely to consider where they chose to step—picked their way carefully through it, stabbing at every heap and corner with their bayonets. Except themselves, nothing moved but those few small creatures one occasionally heard rustle in the grass, and—just above—three lone kites (barely visible, through a bald patch in the jungle’s roof) which dipped and cawed in a slice of red-grey sky.
At the crotch of one overhanging tree’s trunk, a wet, red, knotted rag of some not easily identifiable substance glittered. Under the tree was something else, equally red, but moaning; this proved—after Romesh Singh was so good as to kick it gingerly over—to be what remained of a man who had been partially flayed. It was a portion of his forcibly donated hide, apparently, that gave the tree its surreal extra coat.
“How long since is he dead?” Grammar called across the clearing, idly running his sword through a sack of dried beans that soon proved both soaked enough to rot, and full of maggots.
“He lives yet, sahib,” Romesh Singh replied.
Mildly impressed by such resilience, Grammar stooped to examine the man, who lay gasping—long, low, shallow gulps of liquid air, the humid foretaste of approaching rainfall—but inert, a thin line of bloodshot ivory just showing under each eyelid. Using the flat of his blade, Grammar scraped lightly over the man’s denuded chest, flicking the bright half-circle of raw flesh where his right nipple had once been back to full, painful life.
The man reared up with a scream, then back again. His eyes, all white around their irises, fell on Grammar—and immediately widened further in horrified recognition.
“Where are thy fellows, offal?” Grammar asked him.
The man coughed, wetly. At Grammar’s nod, Romesh Singh kicked him lightly in the head, forcing him further sidelong into the mud. The man doubled up, vomiting earth mixed with blood on Grammar’s boots. With a little moue of disgust, Grammar put one shiny black heel to the back of the man’s neck, pinning him down, and leant again to rephrase his initial request, this time a bit more insistently. Adding:
“It will do thee no good to lie. Remember, thou hast some skin yet left to lose.”
The man drew a fresh gulp of air, mixed with a fair chunk of his own waste.
“Thou . . . knowest,” he managed, at last.
Grammar frowned.
“I fear,” he said, “that thou art mistaken.”
Even he, however, could see that the man was clearly far beyond dissembling.
Grammar looked to Romesh Singh. Behind them, someone gave a nervous little step backwards, crushing something not particularly loud, but obviously breakable.
“Thou knowest,” the man repeated, dully.
“Then it can do no harm to tell me again.”
The man spit, a weak, retching stream of pink, which Grammar easily avoided. His dying eyes took on a blank gleam of unsatisfied malice.
“Human tiger,” he said. “Blood-drinker. Evil thing. Why dost thou return? Why bring thy lackeys, when you needed none upon thy first visit? We were many; now my fellows are gone I know not where. And it was thee that brought us to this pass, white corpse-eating dog, thou mocking horror. It was thee.”
(And here occurs a mystery you city-dwellers cannot hope to know, o my beloved, especially without the benefit of personal experience: The sheer, shocking speed with which light drains away when sunset has ended, here in the jungle’s heart—in one bright gush, like blood from a slashed throat, leaving nothing behind but a certain stillness; the hush of drawn breath, or the barest of unvoiced sighs.)
On Grammar’s deaf side, one of the company blurted, all unthinking: “Rhakshasa!”
Grammar did not hear it, of course—but caught Romesh Singh’s brief little jerk of reaction from the corner of one eye, and whipped quickly around, following it to its trembling, rooted source. His pistol had already appeared in one hand, amusingly enough; primed, aimed and ready, almost before he had consciously thought to draw it.
“Who said that?” he asked.
No one answered. Undeterred, Grammar shifted only slightly, sighting down the barrel at the soldier he judged most clearly in range.
“You, I think,” he said, coolly. And pulled the trigger.
Romesh Singh shut his eyes. There had been a bazaar boy the company had adopted, not long since—silent and tensile with near-starvation, good mainly for scouring pots, packing kits (but only when there was time to watch him do it, for he had never quite gotten over his early habits of casual thievery), and running those few small errands his shaky command of English would allow for. Grammar—stalking restlessly around camp, quietly ablaze with his usual nimbus of potential lunacy, as everyone took care to stay out of his way—had not even seemed to notice his existence, until the child made the understandable mistake of laughing at a whispered joke while still within Grammar’s eyeshot. Without breaking stride, Grammar had swerved to scoop the boy up and carried him into the cooking tent, where he ground him face-first into an open cask of chili powder for some long moments, then dropped him. To stand, watching patiently, as the boy thrashed and huffed awhile at his feet—nose, eyes and throat all swollen shut, the rest a tight, red mask of burns—before suffocating on what later proved to be a flood of his own shocked mucus.
And he, Romesh Singh, had shut his eyes then as well, so as not to have to see Grammar’s scarlet-coated back draw up all at once like a shaken snake, straightening with pleased arousal at the spectacle of his own cruelty.
(Thinking: Oh. Like a bell. Oh, a heart-beat’s sharp-soft squeeze between rib and gut, tolling. This is so wrong. I am so very wrong to even be here, with him.)
Gunshot and thunder blended, signalling the torrent’s arrival. And before this one (now forever nameless) soldier’s corpse had fallen to earth, the rest of Grammar’s company simply broke and ran in the face of Grammar’s insanity—always no more than a reputable quirk, until it had finally turned their way.
The flayed man gave a laugh, drawing Grammar’s second shot. The pistol jammed; Grammar swore and threw it after them, as the soldiers’ shadows faded like ghosts under a curtain of warm monsoon rain, leaving officer and second-in-command alike behind, entirely at the forest’s mercies.
Grammar snarled, a tiger’s half-cough.
“Cowardly bastards,” he said, in English. Adding, contemptuously: “’Rhakshasa’, am I? Hardly an opinion worth dying over.”
Romesh Singh, wisely enough, said nothing—his own eyes kept firmly shut—as a long, wet, green moment passed over them, darkening both their scarlet coats to rust.
Grammar laughed, and let the sheath drop away from his sword, falling point-down. It quivered by one foot, mud-supported, forgotten.
“Well, come then, my shadow,” he told the curtain of underbrush before him (having, without even noticing, slid fluidly back into Urdu.) “Or shall I haste to meet thee? For either way, you will find me as I find myself: Ready.”
And still Romesh Singh stood, feeling the rain seep down through his clothes and lave his trembling body abruptly to life, every nerve set winking in the gloom like unseen stars above.
(Thinking only: But now we are alone at last, thou and I. Together.)
&nb
sp; They were both wrong, of course. Grammar, all his impressively flaunted rage aside, was nothing near to ready—as Romesh Singh might have told him, had he cared to solicit a second opinion—and neither was alone, with or without the other.
For I was already here. As I always had been.
The rain, the mud, the dead and cooling bodies, the silent trees. I was present and accounted for in all of it at once, a speck of me everywhere the eye might care to light, pixilating slowly to fruition. In the very air itself, between every falling raindrop—sub-dust, sub-viri, void-breath on the back of the neck, a shadow on the face of the whole. I spread out around the carcass of the dead former sepoy like a stain, over the clearing’s seared floor, so fragrant yet with ash; and ah, but that fire had burned brightly, for all it was only a heap of corpses doused in lamp-oil. Brown corpse melting to black, black rivulets twining like veins across the soaked earth, black snakes rising in their wake. A black river, abruptly, in full flood, lapping the British soldier’s remains in as well with no visible distinction—rearing, seeping, clotting—knitting both together like some prescient scab, the kind that outlines itself before a wound has even been opened.
One hot whiff caught on the wind, a brief, intestinal stink: Eau de massacre. One sentient platelet left swimming in a sea of blood, shed and unshed alike.
Beyond the fire’s sodden ring, Desbarrats Grammar had already slashed the first layer of leaves aside and forged on ahead into the jungle (bent on finding any kind of explanation for the night’s work, or his sadly smirched reputation, that did not involve the word Rhakshasa), leaving Romesh Singh to plead vainly after him—sick to heart and increasingly cold, with his empty hands ineffectually raised against the drumming rain.
(For the bell tolled in him still, o my beloved—fluid, subterranean. Mateless, but crying for its mate. And this suited me so well I would have smiled to see it, had I but the lips to smile with—or the eyes to see.)
Such a lack, however, was easily remedied.
“Romesh Singh,” I called him, softly. He turned.
Upright now, a loosely wavering column of matte black against the clearing’s larger blackness—hollow, scarring, extruded from the space between all things—I drew myself in tight, and called Grammar’s all-too-familiar face to me, simultaneously making myself both a spine to hold it up and a skull to hang it on. I let flesh drip over me, pore by pore.
Over the flesh, I drew skin; over the skin, blood.
Naked under the rain’s caress, I opened Grammar’s eyes—so blind, so pale, so very, very British, in the raw mask that was his truest reflection—and raised them, meeting Romesh Singh’s.
“My good soldier,” I said.
He swallowed, pupils wide, his dry throat grating tentatively back upon itself.
“Thou . . . ” he began. “Thou art . . . ”
“Oh, I.” Stepping, cat-sure on Grammar’s smooth-soled feet, to print the mud between us. “A wandering minstrel, I,” I said. “A knight of air and darkness.”
“ . . . Rhakshasa,” finished Romesh Singh.
He said it with a sigh, so soft the word was part of his exhalation. That fatal—that only—name. I nodded at the sound. To prove the truth of his assumption, I spread my hands—my fingers—on which the claws bend back so far they are not really claws at all, but twisting knives of sharpest horn.
“Shreds and patches,” I said. “Dead man’s fingernails.”
And I peeled back Grammar’s lips, to show how my teeth arced up from his narrow British jaw like some ill-timed jest, sharp and yellow as a carrion dog’s.
Yet Romesh Singh held his ground, back straight, like the warrior he was.
(For we both knew Grammar was too far ahead now to hear him, even if he chose to call for help. But no man really wishes aid at such a moment, o my beloved—not when his longest-held dream finally stalks towards him on nude white feet, arms out, and smiling.)
“Let down thy hair, my brother,” I suggested, “that I may feel its weight.”
Lightly, surely, I laid my claws on either side of Romesh Singh’s jaw and worked the muscles like hinges, pinching his lips open—and though I had hoped (if I could) to grant him a gentle exit, my hunger soon betrayed itself in their sharpness, rimming the corner of his mouth with blood.
He gasped, swallowing it.
“Be merciful to me,” he whispered. “As . . . he would be.”
Oh, loyal, loving, deluded man. A born victim, if ever there was one.
“Ah,” I said, gently. “But we are the same, he and I. So I cannot promise you what he would never give.”
A flash of moon, bisected, fell over us through the trees; the blood caught its light, sparking a hot copper flare of lust that made my own lips abruptly wet. To compensate, I licked his clean.
Our tongues touched.
This distracted him enough, hopefully, to make what followed only a brief (if, no doubt, rather unpleasant) surprise—as I suddenly forced the rest of my head through his mouth until his head cracked like a wishbone, rupturing his throat, making his face my collar, spraying teeth. Hugging him to me, into me, as I rooted for brains in the blind, red ruin of his skull.
I suppose I had foreseen—somewhat faintly, considering the Lieutenant’s continuing capacity for unpredictable behavior—that the sound of this process would draw Grammar back to the clearing. Not that it mattered much either way, at this point, though forgoing a prolonged chase (wearing Romesh Singh’s now-uninhabited skin, perhaps?) would certainly have saved me a little time. But just as the consumption of a long-desired object tends to erase whatever wait one may have had to put oneself through in order to attain it, so strategy must inevitably dim in appetite’s shadow. Blood filled my eyes; I drank deep, and gave myself up to ecstasy.
Presently, however, I felt Grammar’s blade graze the back of my neck—wing-sharp, a dragonfly’s delicate needle—and knew my plans had not been laid in vain.
Popping Romesh Singh’s remaining eye between my teeth (just in case, should intelligible conversation yet prove necessary), I turned—grinning—to show him his own face: Red from browline to Adam’s apple, chin slicked with fresh overflow. And a jolt passed between us, starburst-quick—not one of shock, so much, as of recognition. The Lieutenant’s prim British mouth crumpling like an insulted cat’s, ludicrous with embarrassed amazement, to find his unsought namesake’s pleasures were so very like his own.
The sword, however, did not waver.
I smiled at the sight—and swung Romesh Singh’s carcass like a dancing partner, dipping it towards him, as if offering him a bite.
“You must be hungry,” I said. “Please: Do not hesitate to indulge yourself.”
Grammar snarled again (his sole response in such circumstances, it seems) and stabbed me through the throat; I flexed, and sucked him further in, immersing him up to his armpit. For one endless moment, too paralytic even for struggle, he felt my internal organs stroke him seductively, and gagged. At which point I interrupted his train of nausea in mid-heave, just as gorge met gullet, and assured myself of his complete attention by thrusting my own arm (up to the elbow) inside his armpit—cracking ribs, perforating lung, expelling a warm rush of half-digested food from the lower esophagus, all in quest of that wildly-fluttering knot of muscle he called a heart.
Grammar coughed, and went rigid. His eyes turned up. But it was not my intention to let him die quite so quickly, now that we had finally met.
My fingers closed fast around left and right ventricles, pumping him awake. Saying, solicitously:
“Oh, no. Be so good as to not leave me just yet, Lieutenant.”
With an effort, Grammar forced his eyes to focus on me. A rictus pulled at his cheek. Words formed, along with a bright new bubble of blood.
“Do . . . your . . . worst,” he replied, carefully. “I . . . don’t care.”
I gave him a
wide, blank smile—and chanted, singsong:
“Don’t-care didn’t care. Don’t-care was wild. Don’t-care stole plum and pear, like any beggar’s child.”
Sucking him closer—the maw that had been me (and him as well, come to think of it) now covering almost all of him below the shoulder, sprouting a fine interior coat of teeth that pressed and teased, unable to resist sampling at the anticipated feast; here a shaven fingernail, there a beheaded nipple.
Looking down, I could see his genitals begin—all unnoticed, for once—to stiffen.
“But Don’t-care was made to care,” I continued, blithely. “Don’t-care was hung. Don’t-care was put in the pot, and boiled ‘til he was done.”
And I gave his heart another little squeeze, for emphasis.
Oh, yes, his Empire might well linger far into the next century. But he’d be going home much sooner—and not to London, either, where he might at least occasionally be able to buy someone to kill. Back to some dreary Suffolk estate, to take up the middle child’s portion, dazzling idiots behind the hay-wains with a fading grab-bag of exotic memories, doomed to forever wear the mask of respectability. To marry, to breed, to be buried and rot. And all in a dim, small place that no longer held anything but potential boredom for him, where no one would know to stiffen at his scent, or whisper his name in fear as he passed by.
Well, we were in the jungle now. And the law of the jungle is universally understood: Eat, or be eaten.
