by D Des Anges
“Then we should both go,” Hajar said at last, to the jar at the top of the shelves. “Better to have the two of us in case of…” she glanced at what still looked like Benjon, even though he was tied to a stool and watching their conversation with the kind of unblinking direct gaze he never used when himself. “… We should both go,” Hajar concluded, finally looking up at Ferdinand again. She did not add that it perhaps were better that he come with her than remain alone.
He had not quite composed himself, and his eyes were still bloodshot. He was older than she had first estimated, with grey in his short beard and in his close-cut curls. His nod was one of plain relief.
“We’ll take you to the Gated Continent,” Hajar said, to the watchful figure that was not quite Benjon. “We’ll take you to the arthropods. You give Ben back, you understand?”
“Of course,” said the thing that wasn’t Benjon, with Benjon’s mouth. “Once I have my arthropod, you may have your doctor.”
Chapter 9
John was never sure afterward how he had been able to tell that the waters had finally closed over the top of the enclosed boat. Not long after this undefinable moment the strange craft jerked forward with a mighty roaring of some engine John had never heard before, and he was compelled to brace himself against the rough hull of where he crouched. He tried his hardest not to touch the centipede.
Without conscious wish, he also held his breath, as if diving directly into the water himself.
Breathe normally, the centipede clicked, his diction more abrupt and concise than El Alacrán's: John thought that maybe, among the arthropods, this was the equivalent to the difference between his own accent and that of Hoppenstedt's Faroe whore. You are no use to me dead.
“We’re underwater,” John said stupidly, his chest heaving with released breath. It was darkness complete within the little craft: it made no difference if he shut or opened his eyes. The stench of orgone made his nostrils burn and his head tighten painfully. The roar of the otherworldly engine shook the whole hall with tremors as regular and patterned as a heartbeat shaking his chest, and John tried in vain to make out where the coils of the great centipede might lie.
He knew, though he could not confirm with the evidence of his now-useless eyes, that he must be surrounded at the centre of this small boat by chitin shell and many legs. Though he was now certain living inside at least one of his night terrors, he found that rather than fear he was seized by a terrible calm which deadened his nerves to the myriad possibilities this situation suggested.
You will breathe normally, the centipede instructed again, there is adequate air and your death is of no help to me.
“You Folded,” John added, still dumbly working his thoughts out of his mouth while his head felt so tight from the orgone fumes that they had little other direction in which to go. “You Folded. I thought—”
You know Folding, the centipede replied in an urgent and angry hiss that came over the whirr and clank of the alien engine, if only just.
John had, prior to his abduction from the rig, witnessed the unFolding of an arthropod before: but only once.
The first time he had seen it he had been unsure if he had returned at last to his madness, standing in a rainy, dark alleyway in Aberdeen as a man in the non-descript garb of a waste collector seemed to slough off his skin and break apart in an endless slow explosion. He grew infinitely outward into a huge army of chitinous legs and a vast curving tail arching up to a tip with a wicked barb. It was the stuff of nightmares, and at the time John had stood with his arms limp by his sides, waiting to embrace his own death.
He had thought, when it began, that the wasteman had been badly injured by the brawl John had broken up all unknowing with his meandering arrival. The man-shaped figure had almost bent in half while its skin came away in sheets, the off-white flakes disintegrating into dust as they touched the wet stones of the street.
What else has he told you? the centipede demanded, with such urgency that John balked. The hiss seemed to come from every inch of the enclosed space at once, echoing and distorting in his ears, like the rush of waves in a spiral shell. What other knowledge has he betrayed?
"I don't understand you," John said, cupping his arms around his knees in the damp and pungent darkness with great care. His back had already begun to hurt, hunched up as the vessel surged on through the cold waters of the Nordsøen.
You understand me, the centipede clicked, irritably, and something (John thought perhaps its great waving antennae, and shuddered a little) tapped feather-light over his face. What has El Alacrán told you? The centipede clicked. The name it uttered was slow and clumsy, for John well knew that at least in his lover’s faction of the Gated Continent, the arthropods did not use names for each other.
“Oh,” John said, unable to keep himself from exclamation, and he closed his eyes. Though it was the same darkness as the interior of the boat, there was some small comfort in the familiar dark behind his eyes, which did not change from bed to bunk to boat, though it often filled with horrors of the mind. “You are El Miriápodo, then.”
What?
“The General. El Miriápodo. His boss.” John felt his mouth curve upward at the corners at the memory of El Alacrán's precise tone on the rare occasion he made any mention at all of the military leader of his faction. John would have dubbed it ‘frustrated admiration’, though in truth El Alacrán was not often forthcoming on matters of his employ and John not eager to enquire after them.
What else has he told you? El Miriápodo demanded, and again (John was certain of it now) his antennae tapped delicately at John's face. Perhaps he felt for an expression which might indicate deceit in the darkness, perhaps he smelled for John’s fear and how appropriate its level was. It will do you no good to lie.
It would do him no good to tell the truth either, John thought, recalling the hospice against his will. There was fresh air coming in somehow, John noted, for he breathed, and so did El Miriápodo: but he could feel no breeze.
He wondered how the boat might appear at the sea’s surface, if it should seem to any sailors watching to be a small whale, moving with great purpose but without any tail.
“He told me little enough,” John said, trying to stroke his aching calves. Perhaps ten years ago, when all the pains of the hospice blurred violently into one unending agony, and he was a younger man, he could have stood to crouch thus on the balls of his feet for hours without complaint (and indeed, he had done so). But now his muscles ached, and keeping his balance in the motion of the undersea boat just made them ache more.
Be still, the centipede instructed, and something which John assumed to be one of El Miriápodo's feet jabbed him sternly in the side. This hardly helped his balance or his aches.
“My legs hurt,” John explained, freezing awkwardly in place.
Be still, El Miriápodo repeated, impatiently. What little enough do you know? How do you know of Folding?
“Because I’ve seen it,” John sighed. “It was not his fault. He was attacked by drunks. I stopped it, they left, but they had hurt him, and he was required to unFold to better attend the injury.”
And the experience, like some Romish folk tale of lions with injured feet, had near deranged his thoughts. If they had ever composed themselves again was a question for someone else; there was too much to argue that his life since had been one long, weird dream, including this very instance.
Who else knows of this? El Miriápodo clicked, and to John’s alarm two or three of the centipede’s legs positioned themselves about and below him, until he was not crouching but sitting supported by impossibly strong tapers of chitin in some strange centipede chair.
The sensation made him miss El Alacrán most acutely, and fear for him too.
“No one,” John answered the vast centipede, once again enveloping his own knees with his arms, like a child. He did not add that there was no one he could have told and be believed, former lunatic and current friendless that he was. “I have told no
one of anything: do you think I would see him caught? Interrogated?” John pressed his hands now between his thighs, feeling his pulse through both canvas oil suit and insulating wool. “I would not wish that on my dearest enemy, let alone upon him.”
The endless deafening drone of the orgone engine ensured that what followed could not reasonably be called a silence. The stink of it had worked from his aching head into the delicate soft machinery of his belly.
John began to feel quite sick even as El Miriápodo probed again: You have not spoken, but he has spoken to you. What has he told you?
“Little,” John snapped, nausea clawing at his throat as seasickness never had. His lungs hurt. “He thought to preserve your safety too, should I be captured.”
Breathe normally, El Miriápodo repeated once again, although it was a tall order to make to a man straddling a centipede in a lightless metal coffin hurtling noisily through the freezing depths of the ocean.
At least, John reflected with a grim smile to himself in the dark, the traction of the orgone engine and the body of the vast centipede both generated heat, and he would not catch a deathly chill in his unusual craft.
“How long–?” John began, and almost immediately regretted it. There could be no good answer. Either he would soon be bound and doubtless carried by the cautious centipede and maybe his confederates across the continent to the Wall, or he was due a long claustrophobic imprisonment in this dank craft, pressed up against the legs of an ever more hungry carnivore.
El Miriápodo’s answer did little to assure him, as he knew it would:
Five days in all, he clicked, but I shall take direction and allow your movement after three.
* * *
After three days cramped into the little boat, John was more or less delirious. He wavered between sleeping and waking, hunger gnawing at his insides and thirst caking his tongue in glutinous saliva. He could scarce place his predicament, let alone the direction of the boat’s travel, and he spoke nothing nor made any move to avoid the gently-shifting feet of El Miriápodo as the boot rocked or dipped.
When he was lucid he was filled with concern for El Alacrán’s safety, but most often he only lay still, convinced he was trapped inside a nightmare from which he needs must escape sooner or later, by waking.
He was therefore not sensible at first to the upward gradient of the craft’s travel, and it was only when the little boat bobbed to the surface and once more began to comport itself like an ordinary vessel that John raised his sickly head from its resting place upon his knees.
Head down, El Miriápodo clicked, as curt as before. Without waiting for him to comply, his chitinous legs moved in the dark, the herald to a cacophony of clanks and groans from the little craft.
The boat rocked and creaked and emitted still more orgone fumes, so much that John set up a protracted bout of wheezing coughs that threatened to leave him retching. When he began to recover from this convulsion he saw the first daylight for three days.
The great metal plated carapace of the boat had slid some of the way back, and the most welcome scent of sea air rushed to fill the foul confines of the undersea boat as El Miriápodo’s long brown body protruded through the aperture.
It was impossible to divine the weather from the light, for after such utter darkness John saw it only as blindingly bright. The air was very, very cold and John thought he could make out steam rising from below, past El Miriápodo’s armoured segments, and into the whiteness.
John at first only lay as he had lain these last three days, beginning to shiver as the chill air reached into his bones. It set to his joints like knives for the butchery of cattle carcasses.
After some minutes of breathing air with a lower concentration of orgone fumes than he had of late grown accustomed, he sat up amid the remaining coils of El Miriápodo’s long brown body, and tried to adapt his eyes to the light.
Over the slosh of waves on the hull and the idling roar of the orgone engines, he thought he heard the cry of a skua. John was certain that he heard a noise of satisfaction from El Miriápodo, his head protruding from the boat. He recognised the particular sound, it being almost a purr, from El Alacrán’s moments of success. The association made him simultaneously homesick and worried, as thoughts of El Alacrán often did when he was far from Aberdeen.
Without warning, El Miriápodo’s great shining brown body humped, arched, and spiralled back into the little boat, covered in a swift-melting coat of fine white snow. The centipede’s mandibles and forelegs proffered to John a shallow-curved dish roughly the size of a soup bowl, with a familiar texture. It was filled with snow fading to slush, and John needed no instruction to tilt it and half-drink, half-chew the contents.
He had finished the whole ‘bowl’ before he was satisfied and his throat, still raw from the constant abrasion of orgone fumes, became wet enough to allow him to speak.
“This,” John said, pointing the curved chitin at El Miriápodo. “Moult, or murder?”
El Miriápodo ignored the question. Save your fluids. No more until landfall. Two days.
John held out the chitin shard for El Miriápodo to take. The centipede brushed one of the protuberances on the inside of the boat’s hull, setting the clank and whir of plates back into motion.
Moult, El Miriápodo clicked at last, as the final scale slid into place and took with the light the last of the clean air. Tail plate from El Alacrán’s last moult.
John said, “Thank you,” and sat still against the curve of El Miriápodo’s stomach, the centipede’s legs resting on his shoulders without either of them passing comment on it. He did not know what meaning he should attach to El Miriápodo’s retention of El Alacrán’s old moult. He did not know he should think this sinister or affectionate, but he felt absurdly improved in mood for having it, as much as for the water.
The strange undersea boat once more tipped, and slid beneath the waves.
Chapter 10
Though she may have wished for an immediate departure, the sooner to have Benjon back to his right self again, Hajar knew it was not practical. Arrangements must be made, both for herself and for her new companion. She sent Ferdinand back to Edinburgh to withdraw his saved salary from the banking houses there:
“Since I’ll have no other use for it now,” he’d said heavily, and Hajar had carefully avoided his eye.
She herself went first to the Dean of her School and said that Benjon had contracted a ‘most unfortunate malady’, and that as his only close friend she felt it her duty to accompany him to a doctor in the Frankish east mountains who claimed to have developed a cure. She gave them two weeks until return, and asked that her portion of her experimental work be given over to Odo, not to Irenbend or ‘bloody Magda’.
The Dean wished her luck, muttered, “Rather you than me, Hajar,” and signed off on the banking chit she required, as an unmarried but employed woman, to withdraw her own saved wage.
She had thought to spin the same lie for Hana’s ears: Hana had herself taught her to be consistent in deceit, lest anyone think to check her story against another’s recollection of it. She was dreading the exertion of the masquerade all the way home, for Hana was better-schooled in hunting for deceit than the Dean.
She had none of Hana’s practiced subtlety in the art of concealing her true intentions, though a life-time of disguising her reactions. Her mother, meanwhile, had a good many decades of unpicking the lies sewn into the statements of very practiced men indeed, and she felt she was sure to meet with an obstruction.
For all that she had almost thirty years and two important improvements to engine efficacy to her name, as an unmarried woman Hajar was still at least in name under her mother’s control. Hana could put a stop to this all with a mere word to the station.
But when Hajar had returned home, Hana had been full of preparations to dine in York as a guest of the Prefect’s family, there to remain, and Hajar had been grateful for the excuse to leave a note instead. Hana had always told her it was fa
r harder to read a note than a face, no matter how literate one was.
Hajar packed a single bag, making certain that it was light enough for her to carry alone.
It would give the lie to her story, and so after Hana’s departure for York, she dragged a whole trunk of more suitable clothing to Benjon’s house, stopping almost every five feet and arriving very much in poor temper and flushed with the sweats despite the chill in the air.
Hajar had begun to feel almost pleased with herself, though when she arrived she found Benjon’s uncharacteristic grace made her doubt that aught could be done for him. He had learned that the smile stood him out as unlike himself, but had not yet adopted the correct dislocated walk that would make him Benjon proper.
Benjon had watched her heave and hump the trunk into his dining room without the offer of assistance, which was at least his custom, but had not raised any objection to the works she dislodged in her passage, which was not.
Perhaps Hajar had thought to quiz the parasite on its method of occupying, of transmission – for this was the kind of information which excited Benjon (in his right mind), Rill, and Waremansdöttir greatly and no such opportunity might ever come again– but his watchful, bright gaze sapped her will and her courage. Hajar returned to her home without exchanging a single syllable with the thing controlling her friend’s form.
* * *
No trains ran direct from Edinburgh to the southern coast the next day, and not by way of Durham. When Hajar and a rough facsimile of Benjon, dressed in thick travelling clothes (Benjon trussed in scarves and second tunics for the appearance of ill-health) came to the station they feigned surprise to have met with Ferdinand.
Hajar, rather, feigned surprise at first, and the occupied Benjon, after a momentary pause, did unsettling likewise. He mimicked her cadence and gesture too exact to be natural or comfortable.
