As Simple As Hunger

by D Des Anges

  Still he lay motionless in the dark, rising only to eat that which was offered.

  At times he was certain he must be imagining, also, the food which sustained him in his delirium, and that he was truly starving on the floor of some forgotten room. That perhaps he was else chewing his own dung and calling it meat.

  He was interrupted in his manias by the gentle tap of antennae across his unshaven cheeks. They now bristled with a beard it had never been his custom to keep, regardless of the fashions of Albion.

  The tap was so fine and tender a tap, with such wire-thin delicacy, that he was unsure at first if this was yet more imagining.

  How do you tell if a human is ill, though?

  An arthropod voice chirruped, very close to his face. The lithe, tiny antennae, thinner than fingers and lighter than feathers, brushed over his face again.

  Increased heat? Foul odour?

  Suggested another unknown arthropod voice, farther away.

  They all have a foul odour, clicked the first, tapping John’s hair tenderly. It is damp, are they supposed to be damp?

  They all have a foul odour, do they? How would you know? You’ve never smelled one before.

  John lay still and wondered if he was attributing the sense of nurses’ conversations to the language of arthropod. He thought if he was still in the hospice, and if he knew the clicks, squeaks, and hisses of arthropod lingua-franca at all, or had only convinced himself it was thus.

  The furs enveloped him; the antennae stirred his eyelashes, but exerted almost no pressure at all.

  Well this one has a foul odour. And neither have you, so you can stop you high-and-mighty—

  He let his muscles grow limp as in surrender. The antennae walked his exposed throat with more kindness than the fingers of any examining quack.

  The General will be furious if it dies, squeaked one voice. John could no longer tell which was which, but he fancied it was the same one that continued: If it is poisoned or sickly we must tell him.

  John felt the antennae withdraw, and as something whisked away from him in the dark, he thought that his terrible imaginings had never been this banal.

  Thus assured, he began to pass his lost time, for he could bring about no end to his seclusion himself, by other memories which brought less distress.

  In his oilman’s assigned flat in Aberdeen, there were cheap, thin curtains that did not quite block what little light came to them. They were, John had been informed, ‘a nasty shade of orange’, but as ‘a nasty shade of orange’ seemed to him little removed from the hue of grass or tree bark or indeed tree leaves, he had tolerated them where his neighbours sought immediately to remove theirs.

  It was as little a home as the oil rig, with one or two significant exceptions: he did not miss the rooms when he was away (two rooms only, the bathing facilities being communal and at the centre of each floor) but the privacy and freedom they represented.

  The block was owned by the same association of wealth-bearing Men of Good Standing who owned the rig, and used it principally to house their workers. This ensured that the main of John’s wages went back into their own coffers again, a cunning so base it was almost respectable.

  But in name at least, he leased the rooms, and no stranger was permitted to come and gawp at him like a zoo animal.

  He was permitted, as he was not on the rig, to install a Wireless receiver.

  And as he had never been in the long-ago days before the hospice, he was the master of his Wireless receiver. He might listen without pause. He might also disconnect it from any source of power or uncouple the membranes when any threatened ‘interrogation’ should be broadcast.

  It was a small freedom, but one which brought great change to the consistency and calmness of his repose. The night-terrors fled him without fuel to their fire.

  And as they were not, on the rig, his neighbours were incurious. Also breaking a sixmonth out in the sea without affection or distraction, they were concerned chiefly with prostitutes. Those with less carnal pastimes cared far more for their fives, their bird-watching, their endless origami contests, than for bothering him.

  To John it was a paradise, albeit a paradise about whose exposed walls cold gales whistled, and in whose confines rats swarmed unmolested by mustelid. It was a paradise at whose door – as at any door in Albion –there might at any moment come the knock of a Secure Guardian: we know what you have done.

  But the only knocks that ever came on his door, John recalled, as he pulled the pungent furs about him in this dark chamber in the belly of the land, were in code.

  They came never as often as he wished, but were never remarked upon by his neighbours nor taken to any of the Magister of Aberdeen’s men with their irregular hours. For that he was grateful.

  In the caves in which he lay, he heard whispers, but the distortion of echoes in the tunnels brought him no meaning, only sound.

  In his flat, in Aberdeen, he kept calligraphed and inaccurate maps of far-flung corners of the known world upon his walls. He kept two or three volumes of bird books upon his shelves. He kept his Wireless receiver, and he kept receipt of the city’s news sheets, for even when he did not read them, they might be used to practice origami well enough.

  He did not, however, keep the legions of deformed cranes and broke-necked swans his efforts produced.

  John marked time in his flat, as surely as he was marking time now, but in his flat, at least, he lived for the knocks on his door.

  El Alacrán came Folded to the door always – he was no fool – and in a variety of forms.

  This had first thrown John, and later caused him doubt, but what kept constant was that once secure within the privacy of John’s two rooms, El Alacrán would ask John to turn his back or shut his eyes. In the return of his sight, the facsimile of humanity would be vanished but for discarded and often destroyed clothing.

  In the place of the stranger he would find the familiar vastness of scorpion body, in the place of human speech, the familiar click and squeak of the arthropod lingua-franca.

  Once, once El Alacrán had taught him a passage which, he said, was a child’s rhyme in his own, native speech. It sounded like the howl of the wind in the passage between flat-blocks, and John had no hope of reproducing it.

  Their conversation, at first arrival, was always brief. John did not ask where or to what end El Alacrán had travelled: El Alacrán never offered any insight. The banalities of employ and society interested neither man nor scorpion, and until they were accustomed to each other once more there would be no repose, either.

  El Alacrán would make fearful proclamation regarding the safety of the flat, until he was satisfied that no one was coming for them. He would then fret that John might be arrested, he would conflate prison and hospice, and at last he would wear himself down to a silence.

  John, in this time, would say nothing, for it was not in his nature to speak much.

  The dance of undressing would be slow in the off.

  John folded his clothes with care and El Alacrán would not rush him, for he harboured a great many fears regarding his accidental imposition of harm. He might chivvy and click and squeak his impatience and make terrible remarks about John’s insistence on this delaying action, but he would not poke or prod.

  In the caves, John overheard the distinct sound of the squeak for: Sickness

  He tried to sink farther into the stinking furs. No good ever came of that word.

  In combat of the oncoming fear, he called to mind a particular memory, a particular visit:

  John folded his shirt very carefully and laid it down, neat and square, on his chair. He removed his vest and folded this, too, running a crease in the soft wool.

  “I'm sorry you're so tired.”

  It was part-teasing his impatience, and part-honest concern. El Alacrán sagged and staggered, and John knew the business of Folding himself hurt him. It was necessary, for the fear of being seen, but it hurt him.

  Not too tired, El Alacrán sai
d. Undress more quickly, will you, before I die from old age.

  Giving up on John’s undressing, El Alacrán climbed with evident weariness onto the narrow bed and lay in repose to await John’s completion of his deliberate-slow task.

  Repose was for him an uncomfortable, unnatural position in which he could hardly defend himself: the pose in which the great scorpion draped himself was antithetical to his nature in every way. It exposed his belly and left him unable to right himself quickly, and John was as much touched by its obvious sacrifice as he acknowledged the practical purpose of it.

  John removed at last his trousers. He folded them with the same mechanically precise set of movements he had been forced to learn and to use in the hospice, the rare times he had been allowed to undress himself.

  Outside the windows the sky was by then a blackened plate of curdled orange clouds, he recalled, the rain hammering unseen on the windows. The wind had shrieked and moaned like the Horrifying House of Dread that he had once visited in a fair, far to the south of the shire where his parents had lived.

  The eerie sounds there had been generated by a hand-cranked series of tubes, some bellows, and ratchet-and-cog machines. For they had been kind enough to show him, at thirteen and ever so slightly fat, how four men, one woman and an enslaved beetle could reproduce the sensational sounds of the elements in their fury with only cheap tin.

  He had borne the sadness of the beetle in her iron harness with him when he returned home, but this was a little before the terrors began.

  Are you afraid? El Alacrán asked. He seemed pensive.

  “No, it’s just the wind –” But John knew, even as he spoke, that this was not what El Alacrán meant.

  It weighed upon him. He climbed with care onto the bed, conscious of the grime he could not quite scrub free of the folds of his skin, of his nudity.

  “No, no. Sometimes I'm afraid you'll be caught, and the first I will know about it is the proclamation of capture on the Wireless. I couldn't bear that.”

  But not of me, El Alacrán concluded as John lay down along his stomach-plates to be safely enclosed in a cage of bristled-black segmented limbs. The top-most dipped to tickle his shoulder-blade and Lancaster's skin twitched at the delicate touch, as if taking umbrage at a midge.

  “You want me to be afraid of you?” The idea was abhorrent, and absurd.

  John felt his safest in moments like this, El Alacrán's sharp-footed legs tracing a maze of unknown architecture over the nicked and scarred flesh of his back. As they went from shoulder to small, to curve of his arse, El Alacrán’s bristles ruffling John’s hairs.

  No, but sometimes I am afraid of what could happen. El Alacrán's huge claws, each larger than John’s arm, stroked his skull in turn. You are so very thin-skinned and soft and easy to wound, if I were to lose control.

  As he grasped at last at what El Alacrán did not wish to say, John turned his head painfully over his shoulder. Over the end of the bed and onto the floor, uncomfortably bent, lay El Alacrán's tail. It vanished, tip-first, beneath the bedstead, trying to complete its natural curve over El Alacrán’s back.

  “Can you bend it this way?” Lancaster asked. He laid his cheek against the dimples and smooth surface of El Alacrán’s breastplates.

  No, I made some attempts, El Alacrán conceded.

  The weight of his body could not suppress it, nor the morbid course of El Alacrán’s thoughts; the effects of the gentle pressure on his back were ever the same: his typpið grew hard. It was ever thus, the ticklish bristles and encircling limbs, the skin-on-chitin, the smell of him all drove him.

  It all came together, and it all made his typpið hard: nothing else did.

  I am grateful to you, El Alacrán crooned, his every foot bent to touch John’s back. His clicks were so soft as to be almost a purr. You give me reasons not to be caught.

  “How can you say that?” John protested in a boneless mumble whose vehemence was sapped by the scratch and tap of tender points against his back. “You know what they'll do.”

  He arched his back to meet El Alacrán's feet.

  El Alacrán's lowest legs skated in tandem over Lancaster's hairy buttocks, and it was only indistinctly that he heard the legs' owner click: Is this enough, now?

  What he did acknowledge was the pressure of four hairy, chitinous legs delicately prying his earsendu apart like stubborn doors, and the quivering slimy presence creeping up his inner thigh like a blind eel.

  He let his legs droop further from each other to aid its prehensile passage.

  His state of fluid relaxation was rewarded with the sticky and slow insertion of this unnamed appendage into John's most intimate and vulnerable regions.

  El Alacrán hissed John from every vent, and–

  The General! squeaked a reverent arthropod from somewhere a little outside of John’s chamber.

  Though reluctant he tucked away the memory and abandoned himself once more to the unending darkness, lest he be caught unprepared.

  In deference to what he remembered of the correct manner in greeting captors (or rather, as he remembered, doctors and divinators) John swung his legs around and sat up. He intended to rise if he received some indication that El Miriápodo had come, but felt he owed no respect to any other.

  You have a fever.

  El Miriápodo’s curt clicks came to him, without warning. John wondered had the guarding arthropods receded, or been forced into silence.

  “No, I … don’t think so,” he said, unable to perceive in the darkness where the centipede might be.

  You cry out while sleeping, El Miriápodo observed.

  He did not mention that he must have had this intelligence from his guards but then, John supposed, he didn’t need to.

  “I always have,” said John. “It is not fever. I am dogged by dreams.” He was not sure, as he spoke, that arthropods dreamed. El Alacrán knew of dreams, for he spent ‘half my life’ about humankind and their talk, but this gave no guarantor to the knowledge among others. “How long have I been here?”

  He did not expect a reply, and was therefore surprised when El Miriápodo answered.

  You reach a full fifth day within the hour.

  Five days, John thought. Perhaps he had indeed succumbed to a fever.

  “I don’t know why you have brought me here,” John said, wincing as he tried to stand and assuming what he believed to be a reasonable tone. The knee that he had hit on the frozen beach seemed still unwilling to unbend. “Or what El Alacrán has done to displease you, if that is indeed the reason. But he has told me nothing of your faction, nothing of your secrets. If it is knowledge you require I can tell you only how to gauge the pressure upon a drill bit, which is worthless without the drill. El Alacrán sees more of the workings of Albion than I.”

  It was far beyond his custom or nature to speak so, and he lapsed once more into an uncomfortable and anxious silence.

  You know of Folding, El Miriápodo squeaked, after some time had passed. It is secret from my people, and the world, yet you know of it.

  “He has to disguise himself somehow,” John said, and added with some small anger, “I know it causes him pain.”

  It constricts the breath, El Miriápodo replied, his tone almost reflective. You understand our speech, without the need for Folding to your tongue and air.

  “I learned,” John said, feeling his banged knee through the befouled fabric of his work clothes. It seemed swollen, though he had little basis for comparison and believed the cloth must distort his finding. “To save him the pain of it.”

  You are loyal to Albion, El Miriápodo suggested, though it seemed more like a statement.

  He was not given to asking questions so much as declaring a fact and waiting for it to be contradicted or not, John noticed.

  “I am loyal to El Alacrán,” John said.

  And he no doubt to you, El Miriápodo replied.

  John could not determine if he disparaged or merely observed.

  Your loyalty to h
im comes at the expense of Albion.

  “I owe Albion nothing,” John said with more conviction than he had known himself to have.

  It was the first time in his life he had spoke these words, and not thought them, and yet the speaking of them freed nothing in him. Rather, it was as if a weight of understanding settled upon his chest like a great stone, bearing him to the floor.

  He kept to his one good foot. “After … everything.”

  He would not say, ‘after their treatment of me’, for it sounded petty, and he would not say ‘after all they have done’, for they had done far more, good and evil, than they had to him.

  “I would not do for Albion as El Alacrán does for you,” John settled upon.

  Humans are turncoat creatures, El Miriápodo hissed, and John near lost his footing at the sudden aggression. Albion is well rid of you, John Lancaster. How should El Alacrán believe in your loyalty to him.

  “El Alacrán is kind,” John said, stubborn in standing as in voice. “Albion is cruel.”

  You praise his weakness.

  “I love his kindness.” John snapped. A heat rose in his face and a quickness in his temper which had been so long-absent that he had thought it dead. He believed it had been buried among the other carcasses left within his person at the hospice.

  He meant to say more, but there something had changed in the darkness. El Miriápodo was close, the scent of centipede and the breeze of his movement rising above John as a cliff might rise up before him.

  You are fevered, El Miriápodo clicked, as if the conversation had not taken place. Your death will make complication. Lie down, John Lancaster.

  John lay, and as he lay he knew El Miriápodo gone once more, back into the unknown passages of the hot caves, his long body snaking side-to-side in unseen run.

  He thought of El Alacrán. He thought, impassioned by his defence and by his predicament and, for that moment, his intense loneliness. John wished him well. He wished him, knowing it was selfish, here, to bring at least the notion of light to this darkness.