Elliot sighed, leaned back, and blew out a cloud of smoke. It hung weirdly in the air, and he sculpted it, using the pipe’s stem, into the shape of a vulva. Then wafted it into the shadows.
‘And there was a man, a stockbroker, born in Glasgow, but residing in Argentina, best remembered now as a translator of Latin American epics, but who also, after I’d shown him dread things, wrote two works of bleak horror. He found humankind dismaying enough, so Tartarus was no particular novelty to his blasted vision. There was another British expatriate, a headstrong Englishwoman who lived most of her life in Central America. I tormented her in a Madrid asylum, but, though the experience harrowed her at the time, her strength and anarchic intellect allowed her to transmute it into wonderful and strange art and literature. Less resilient was the American author who I next attempted to make quarry. Afterwards she suffered neuroses and depression, aggravated her mercurial personality with an addiction to prescription amphetamines, lived badly, and died young, though not without writing some remarkable fictions, which, though largely depicting the mundane, are suffused with Tartarean atmosphere. I believe it was her mix of frailty and brilliance that prevented the place from getting its hooks into her. Then there was another Englishman. He was inspecting a stretch of the Grand Union Canal, the preservation of Britain’s waterways was his great cause, when I dragged him down to Tartarus through an opening beneath an ancient and terrible willow tree. He was cynical, wry, and shrugged off its horrors, but, ever after, wrote restrained, muted, but deeply strange tales. And there’s one last, an American, still alive, whose fictions are the stuff of nightmares. The things I put him through in an abandoned Detroit tenement were sore vile and dread, but didn’t seem to grip him. His outlook was altogether too bleak already.’10
Elliot paused scratched his nape.
‘With these men and women, my efforts were in vain. And, though they were all in some way marked by the torments I put them through, they survived, returned to the mundane realm, lived a semblance of a life. More often, I’ve failed because I’ve been unable to shield my victims from deranging sights, and they’ve became helplessly frenzied, and either run raging deeper into the weird realm, and been lost forever, or returned from what they’ve seen, heard, and experienced, with bloodshot eyes, pierced eardrums, and feeble minds, as the Irish lass and the Dutch mariners did. Of these latter wretches most I’ve destroyed, for, though hunting down and murdering rank idiots is pretty humdrum, it offers a visceral thrill. Jane,’ he said, turning to the author, and grinning hideously, baring his teeth, ‘your husband is one of the former type, who, deranged, will roam Tartarean regions till the end of days. I now believe darkness already had its hooks in him before I got to him, some disturbing tomes he read in his youth. And,’ he continued, addressing me, ‘your friend Colin was one of the latter. I made away with him when I thought he might threaten my plans for you. I tortured him horribly, before stabbing him, throwing him off that cliff.’
I beat my palm with my fist. Jane slumped with her head on the table.
‘Oh, and that bewigged maniac is another of those who returned, but too damaged, too crazed. I let him live because he has some moments of lucidity during which I can get him to aid me, but there’s no point hunting him, he worships me, wouldn’t run.
‘I’ve failed many times. But only once have I been found out. Just recently, about a year ago, I hauled a minor horror writer into Tartarus through a hole in the floor of the toilets of a derelict boarded-up pub on Glasgow’s South Side. He remained sane, but also, I’m sure, had that talisman awoken in him. But somehow, I can’t work it out, he discovered what was planned for him, for you all, and also found out how to enter Tartarus, went in there of his own will, just a few days ago. I believe he hopes to thwart me, perhaps find a weapon to strike at me with when I come for him. But he’s not come back out again. My guess is, this time, he’s lost down there.11
‘As I say, I’ve failed many times. But, with you,’ he continued, stabbing a gnarled forefinger at each of us in turn, ‘my success has been complete. You’re not my only triumphs, though. Over the years I’ve created many other immortals of sound mind, men and women from all over this dismal orb. But you’re the first to see me as I really am, the first to hear my history. I hope for more like gatherings, so I can strike terror into the hearts of all my victims, all those I’ve lured or dragged into Tartarus, and who’ve returned still able to fear.’
(I should write here, I’ve never, as far as I know, encountered any of Elliot’s other sane victims, save those in the pub that night. Neither have I entered that awful otherworld again, never managed it on my own, though I’ve spent many centuries seeking out and poring over its dark lore. I can’t understand why not, I’ve studied the rituals, know where portals are to be found. Unless it’s that, terrified of what I might find there, I, without being conscious of it, have sabotaged my own efforts.)
Elliot sat back in his chair, repeated the trick with the smoke, though this time carved a death’s head from the puff.
‘For all of you here, I’m the sole bringer of death. Nothing can kill you, not sickness, not calamity, not your own hand, nor the hand of any save me. Only I, with the knife I spoke of, can bring about your ends. But I won’t send you off peacefully. It will be harrowing. Do not doubt this, I’ve had aeons to whet my cruelty. So don’t seek me out and prostrate yourself at my feet when immortality becomes unendurable. Fly from me, quail at my approach always. I’ll seek you, I will hunt you down, and you will run. You, and those others like you, are to be my sport till the world’s end.’
He looked round the table. We were all wan, cowered. He smirked, then a change came over him, the monstrous drained from his features, and he looked the good-humoured pensioner once more.
‘Go from this place,’ he sang, smiling, to the tune of an air that seemed familiar to me, but which I couldn’t place, beating the pipe in time, like a conductor’s baton. ‘You’ve six months before I set out after you, use them to get as far from here as possible. Though you can’t evade me forever, I hope some of you will be resourceful enough to keep me searching a good while.’
Then he winked.
With that, William, Rashmi, Jane, Duncan, and I leapt up from the table, knocking over chairs, leaving our copies of Verne’s strange novel lying on the table, scrambled to leave the Nightingale. Chuckling to himself, Elliot sat, watched us. William reached the door first and, discovering it locked, took up a bar stool and smashed out one of the pub’s etched glass windows. Then he clambered through, out into the night. The rest of us followed. Then we tore off in separate directions. You might be shocked by this, but terror had reduced us to frantic beasts, and brute instinct told us we’d be easier to track in a group than alone. Indeed, till I stumbled across William’s body, I didn’t see any of that company again.
XI
The thing I’d dreaded many ages has finally come to pass.
It was early this morning (or perhaps yesterday morning: it’s night, has been so for a time, and I’ve no way of knowing whether or not the witching hour has yet passed). Just before dawn, or so I learnt a short while afterwards, when, on being toted, wrists and ankles bound with strong cord, up the Ark’s companion steps and into the outer air, I saw the sun cresting the eastern skyline.
I was sitting at the desk in the cramped cabin below the Ark’s decks, reading over the foregoing section of this narrative. The tribeswoman lay on her pallet, sleeping fitfully, gaunt, cheeks sunken and hectic. Indeed, we both were more parched and wasted than when I last described us; I doubted the tribeswoman had long to live, was astounded, actually, she’d held out as she had, awaited her death, felt sadness, though a sadness tinged with relief, relief her sufferings would end.
Then the door was thrown wide. A gibbous monster, swollen features, a hooked nose, stumbled in. Its movements were wooden, awkward. A life-sized Punch puppet.
I thought myself delirious at first, but then, when one wooden eyelid creaked shu
t and open, I realized it was Elliot wearing that guise to taunt and horror me. He was followed by a rabble of the local natives. They carried flaming brands, and their faces were smeared with woad; in the flickering torchlight, they looked gaudy fiends.
My heart pounded fit to burst.
I got to my feet, meaning to resist, but, enfeebled by hunger, thirst, the corrupt air of the hold, slumped to the floor. Lifting her head, the tribeswoman gazed blankly at the intruders, the sinews in her scrawny neck standing out like banjo strings. Then she coughed, spluttered, and bloody spittle spattered the front of her undershirt.
We were soon trussed up like capons for the spit.
‘That’s the way to do it!’ Elliot jeered, shrill and reedy.
The rabble bore us up through the hold’s tortuous ways, jostling us aloft, out onto the deck, and down the gangplank. Elliot loped along, a little way out in front, turning from time to time to beckon the tribe on, bark commands in their tongue.
Pulled up on the mudflats, a short way from the Ark, was a barge woven from rushes. The tribeswoman and I were loaded on board, her listless and unresisting, me struggling weakly. Then some of the natives got behind the boat, launched it. It wallowed as Elliot and six heavyset brutes embarked, but found an even keel once they’d settled, Elliot on his feet in the stern, at the tiller, and the tribesmen, having taken up paddles, kneeling in two rows on either side. Their first fierce strokes took us out to the centre of the estuary, then Elliot, pushing the helm from him, swung the prow upstream. At first the tribesmen, who sang a tuneless dirge in time to their strokes, struggled to paddle against the current, but they were burly, and the craft soon outstripped the mob walking along the bank. Elliot bellowed orders at his crew and stared ahead, on the lookout for snags. He, as Punch, was dwarfish, but his shadow, thrown by the low sun at his back, was spindly, stalked ahead. Sat in the bows, bound hand and foot, in undergarments soaked with brine, shivering in the early morning chill, I felt a pang of regret I’d never complete this text, that it would certainly be lost or destroyed and never read.
I think I must have blacked out a short time, for I can’t recall the barge’s landing. Then I was being hefted by two tribesmen across marshy ground towards a palisade of tall pine stakes, with a gate of another pale wood, perhaps maple or birch, all white as new ivory. Hide tents circled this stockade. The tribeswoman, in a faint, was being carried alongside me. As we neared the camp, I saw a number of ebon knobs mounted above the gate. I thought them finials in a different wood, set there to temper the pallor the façade. Drawing closer, though, I saw I’d been wrong: they were not ornaments, but warnings, a row of shrunken heads on spikes, leathery skin, sparse tufts sprouting from scalps, raw staring sockets, knife-slash mouths. I stared aghast.
Elliot, noting my gawking, gestured for the tribesmen to throw down my companion and me, then crossed over to where I lay, stood, his hooked nose beetling over me.
‘I’ve found these brutes more tractable when the threat of bloody death hangs over them,’ he said. ‘Recognize that one over there?’
He pointed out the head on the far left. Though fresher, less shrivelled than the others, it was still sere, festering, and it took me a moment, but then I realized: it was the chieftain who’d not given me away, who’d let me escape.
‘No doubt you feel a pang over that,’ Elliot said, sneering.
I groaned, slammed my head against the earth.
It wasn’t only remorse over the chieftain’s fate that troubled me. I was sickened by how I’d thought of the tribe; I’d not, as Elliot had, sought to subjugate, but I’d too seen them as other and base, as not fully human.
Elliot, peering down at me, then said, ‘Killing a few keeps the rest on their toes, you see.’
‘King Stork,’ I murmured.
‘Huzzah, huzzah!’ my captor crowed, then grinned. There were wooden teeth in that mouth, brown and higgledy-piggledy.
The tribeswoman started at Elliot’s crow, opened her eyes. I don’t know what strange ancestral dreams she was roused from, but she uttered then, weakly, barely a whisper, a word in the tongue of her ancient forebears, the language of this typescript: ‘Help.’ It panged me, but I could not. Then her eyelids fluttered closed once more.
Before long, I felt the tramp of feet in the ground. Then it could be heard, and chatter, and song. It was the rest of the tribe approaching. They reached us, halted. Then Elliot turned, threw open the gate of the stockade, and directed the men who’d borne me before to take me up again, heft me inside. They did so, though they seemed scared of entering the place, paled on passing through the gate, did not go far before they threw me down, fled. Elliot then entered the compound, started towards where I lay prone, face in the dirt, but stopped, and, turning back, stood staring at the tribe, who huddled a little distance off, as if afraid of drawing near the stockade, quailing under his gaze. Then he gave vent to a series of howls and grunts, a victory address perhaps, and slammed the gate closed. There was a moment’s quiet, then a hushed counsel in the native’s tongue, then grunts of exertion, blows, and the tribeswoman’s feeble cries and moans.
‘Don’t leave her out there,’ I croaked.
‘Why not?’ Elliot asked. ‘It’s none of my concern. I’m happy to let them exact their own vengeance. No doubt it’ll lack subtlety, they’re a barbarous lot. But I’m sure it’ll be grim enough, if not as artful as your death’ll be.’
I lifted my head to look up at him. He began capering about, clattering his wooden limbs, swiping his huge nose from side to side. Then he stopped, looked up, his eye caught by something. I followed his gaze, straining, cricking my neck, saw a lynx padding atop the stakes of the palisade. Reaching the end of the row of severed heads, the cat batted at the chieftain’s with a paw, then began gnawing at it. Elliot frowned, then sent a long pink tongue whipping from between his wooden lips through the air, lassoed the lynx, pulled it down from the fence, and dragged it struggling and screeching across the ground towards him. As it neared, he got down on all fours. Then, when the cat was close, he loosed his tongue and pounced, took a hunk out of the lynx’s belly with his wooden gnashers, slurped up its spilled guts. The creature yowled, then fell still. Elliot stood, kicked its bloody body away.
‘That’s the way to do it!’ he yawped.
‘W-w-w…’ I stuttered.
Elliot cackled. ‘Cat got your tongue?’
‘W-why?’
‘Why do anything?’
‘What do you mean to do to me?’
‘Wouldn’t you like to know,’ he jeered.
Then he paused, scratched his head before continuing.
‘Actually, I’m not sure yet. I need more time. To be inspired. Most had something I could seize on. Made it easier. You saw the body of the young man, the heavy smoker from the gathering you arranged, I believe?’
I shuddered, nodded.
Elliot turned his eyes on me; set in Punch’s outlandish face, they burned with mockery.
‘Unless I just bore you to death. Though I suspect your tolerance for boredom outstrips my ability to inflict it…’
Then he squinted, scratched his head.
‘What was he called?’ he asked. ‘The smoker.’
‘I can’t remember.’
‘You too, eh? Yes, I forget names. Forgotten my own. Well, forget pretty much everything in truth. Save how to be cruel.’
Walking past me, he entered a log cabin. I watched, waited a while, but he didn’t come back out. I tugged against my bonds, but it was futile, the knots held; I was enfeebled and had been tied tight.
I found that by squirming, turning my head this way and that, craning my neck, I was able to piece together, from glimpses, the space enclosed by the palisade. It is a rough square, with two small buildings at its heart: the cabin I’d seen Elliot go into (I persist in calling him Elliot for the sake of consistency), and a small roundhouse of open-faced flint with a limpet-shell slate roof. A curtain of dark heavy fabric hung in the entrance to t
he cabin and it was drawn most of the way across, but I could still glimpse the interior through the slight gap, and, from what I could see, an iron cot and a wooden table, I gathered the building Elliot’s living quarters. The roundhouse’s door is sturdy, pale wood, again maybe maple or birch, with a wavy grain, reinforced with iron battens, and was secured with a large antiquated padlock. The stone walls have an air of some age, are ivy garlanded, beset with mosses and lichens, but the door and the roof tiles are clearly new, though where Elliot got the materials, I can’t think. Who built the roundhouse, and when it dates from, I’ve no idea, but it must have been its ruin that attracted Elliot to the site; as it’s exposed, and near to mephitic marshland, I can see no other advantage to the place.
Within the compound the ground is hard-packed bare earth, with the impressions of many unshod feet. As the tribesmen who bore me had seemed scared to enter, and the rest of the natives loath to approach, this bewildered me. The tribe’s fear did not; those impaled heads, with their wisps of hair, their leathery skin.
I lay there hoping against hope for a quick death.
I lay listless, eyes closed, turned to torpor by the sun, a while. Then Punch’s grating, shrill voice startled me.
‘You’re the last, the very last, of my quarries, you know. The rest are dead. Slain.’
I looked up, squinted. Stark against the glare, I saw Punch’s monstrous profile, hooked nose, jutting chin. Elliot leant over me, peered closer. Though his mouth was fixed in a cruel smirk, there was a hint of frailty in the set of Punch’s features, that mollifying trace that allows the audience to laugh at his outrages. This I found grotesque; Elliot, I was sure, was without such weakness.
Turning my head, I stuck out my tongue. Elliot reached down, seized hold of the rope tying my ankles, started hauling me towards the roundhouse, lifting my feet high so my face dragged. The rough earth skinned my nose, my right cheek, my forehead.
The Wanderer Page 24
