The Wanderer

by Timothy J. Jarvis

  ‘Ah, yes,’ he said, musingly. ‘I’d all but forgotten her. I was wrong in her case, as I thought I might’ve been in yours. Immortality wasn’t quickened in her, and I watched her age, sicken, and die.’

  Elliot then went on to tell of the grisly deaths Duncan and Jane suffered at his hands. I can only stomach giving scant sketches of his gleeful, vicious, sordid, and ranting accounts.

  Duncan was the first quarry Elliot tracked down, less than a year after the gathering in the Nightingale. It seems he found the idea of a hunted existence unbearable, for he made almost no attempt to evade capture, returned to Glasgow, merely shaved off his beard and dyed his hair, a very half-hearted effort to alter his appearance. Elliot, in a rage at being denied his sport, took the butcher then and there, locked him up, spent some time thinking up a cruel penalty. It took him a few days, but then he had it. He severed, with a cleaver, the three limbs the Scot still had, then stuffed him into a sack, lugged him into the catacombs beneath the Necropolis, chucked him into a sarcophagus in one of the lower crypts, left him there a very long time. Only once in a rare while, did Elliot go to him, to pour brackish water down his gullet and cram his mouth with putrid foodstuffs; thirst and hunger couldn’t, obviously, kill him, but would, if only after months, bring on catalepsy and spare him torment, something Elliot wanted to avoid.

  When Elliot finally lifted Duncan out of the stone cradle he’d lain in for centuries – on a pallet of bones, beneath a blanket of cobwebs – and lugged him up into the daylight, he was like an infant, weak, helpless, babbling. His brain had been wrecked by isolation, but not just isolation, for he’d not been always alone in the dark, had been dandled, caressed by dread olden things. But Elliot tended to him, succoured him, and, in the end, vigour, if not sanity, returned. Then, by sorcery, Elliot grafted on to his trunk arms and legs hacked from a drunken student.

  After that Duncan was the ideal toady, trailed after Elliot, hung on his every word, did his bidding. Elliot initiated him into some perverse and bloody rites. Then, once he was corrupted utterly, inured to the foulest horrors, Elliot took him into the blackest regions of Tartarus. There they wallowed in depravity many years. On their return to the mundane realm, many years later, they roamed the globe degenerate and cruel. But, after a time, Elliot tired of Duncan, and, after making him swallow quicklime, burning out his innards, made away with him, cutting his throat with the knife brought back from the pit.

  Jane’s murder was far less drawn out, but equally grotesque. Several thousand years after the evening in the Nightingale, Elliot found her hiding in a cave in the Australian Outback. He showed her some of the terrifying avatars of that place, those beings that the Aboriginals had communed with in times long past. Then, assuming the form of her long-dead eldest son Peter, he raped and tortured her, then, taking on the guise of the hoary cripple from the Woolwich Foot Tunnel, stabbed her life out.

  After he’d finished telling me how he’d ended Jane’s life, Elliot paused, looked thoughtful.

  ‘It occurs to me,’ he said, ‘there’s one other killing you’ll be interested to hear told. The Rastafarian, the cabbie, was, of course, another of my victims. I ran him to ground at about the time the cities were abandoned…’

  Elliot found Clifton during a bitter winter, hiding out in a water tower on the edge of one of the world’s most northerly cities, wrapped in many furs, but still blue-lipped, shivering, eking out a dwindling supply of kif. He then dragged him to an old butcher’s shop, hacked off his arms and legs, ground them up, gutted him, made sausages with his looped bowels and minced limbs. Then fried them in a skillet with some onions, and sat before Clifton eating them, from time to time forcing morsels into his mouth.

  Elliot paused, looked at me, smirked.

  ‘He kept spitting them out though. Rastas don’t eat meat, you know. Or didn’t, rather. There can’t be any left.’

  He tugged his earlobe.

  ‘To be honest, those sausages hadn’t any savour, as I’d no herbs, spices, seasoning. Though they were better than what I ate of you the other day. Yuck! Anyhow, I quickly got bored of the whole thing, made away with the Rasta, goring him with my knife.’

  He looked down at me.

  ‘Well, what do you think of all that then?’

  I turned my head from him.

  ‘Eh? Don’t fret, I’ve got something just as good in mind for you. Better even! You’re my last, so I need to make the most of you. But all that talk of food’s got me peckish. I’ll just go have a bite before I tell you.’

  He left. I sat sorrowing, afraid, waiting for him to return. He wasn’t very long, came back capering, gleeful, chewing a last mouthful. He hawked up a glob of phlegm, spat it into his palm, anointed my brow. Then took out his knife, held it to my face.

  ‘I’ve whetted and whetted the point of this knife,’ he said, twisting it, digging it a little into my cheek. ‘It’s now keen enough to anatomize a flea. I mean to carve the whole of your tale into your flesh. In teeny tiny script. It’ll be agony, and, done with this knife, the cuts will never heal, but I’ll keep them shallow. You won’t die. Then I’ll bury you in salt, leave you a time, a long time. Perhaps I’ll while the years away slaughtering the folk of this island. I don’t know. But I’ll dig you up in the end, go on with your harrowing…’

  He then took the knife away from my cheek. It was only a shallow cut, but it hurt badly. The touch of the blade had burned.

  Filled with dread and misery, I howled. But my cry was choked by a cackling that welled within me; where it came from, I don’t know. Despair maybe. I cackled, sniggered, guffawed, quaked. Elliot looked vexed, fell silent.

  I calmed, he remained lost in thought a bit.

  ‘Of course,’ he then said. ‘That would be rapture for you. I should’ve known. Well, then, I’ll go straight on to the next racking…’

  I gazed listlessly at him, as he reeled off torments. I won’t repeat them here, wish to put my death from my mind in this brief respite, and also don’t want to bore you; the idea of being a living book of blood did slightly horror me, but Elliot’s other plans for me are not imaginative, or particularly frightening, just tedious. I was wrong to think he’d be horribly creative. He’s a dullard. It’ll be painful, it’ll be horrible, but I’m not scared, I look forward to the end. I just can’t be bothered to write about it now. So, should anyone ever read these pages other than Elliot, as I hope (and there’s a chance: Elliot’s told me he won’t destroy this typescript, that he wishes his cruelties to live on in its pages), should you, my chimerical reader, be summoned into existence by my invocations, you’ll have to cope with this one lacuna. I feel I’ve been a constant narrator else.

  ‘So,’ Elliot said after. ‘I’ll allow you a short time, bring your tale to an apt end. Then…’

  Smirking, he unlocked the manacles, led me back to the desk, the typewriter. He sat me down, crossed to the door, opened it, started out. But then he paused, turned back.

  ‘By the way, you know how you couldn’t enter Tartarus?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You might have had the rituals by rote, but did you realize some of the steps weren’t mental or spiritual operations, but practical?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You perhaps thought the injunction to purge, referred to emptying the mind?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well it didn’t. You can only enter that place by vomiting, throwing up, scouring, shitting your guts out. You must literally be an empty vessel. Anything in your alimentary tract, anything at all, will stop you from crossing the threshold. Hence the traditional link between fasting and mystical experiences.’

  I looked at him, shrugged.

  He took his paring knife from a pocket, waved it in my face.

  ‘Best keep that other knife sharp,’ he snickered. ‘Besides, wouldn’t want this not to heal. As you know, you’ll need your fingers for some of what I’ve in store.’

  Then he grabbed my hands, flayed my fingers
again, and left, locking the door behind him.

  So this really is it. I face death, stripped of all hope; till now there remained a glimmer of reprieve: I felt I could maybe spin out my tale till the end of the world came to spare me torture. But it’s over, my yarn’s been drawn too thin, snapped, I’ve nothing more to relate that can enthral. I’d written down all the best bits before the fiend caught me. That was foolish.

  Omens foretell my end. Night fell, and for a time all was dark, but, a little while ago, I noticed a reddish taint to the light filtering in through the chinks in the walls and roof. Then heard Elliot yawp, gleeful, ‘Bloodmoon!’ Then a dog howled and howled and howled. And, not long since, several birds alighted on the slates overhead, talons scrabbling; from their raucous cawing I know them to be carrion crows.

  It’s only taken me an hour or so to write this, my last chapter. All the while, Elliot’s been playing a dirge on a wheezing squeezebox. In a short time, I’ll holler out to him, he’ll take these sheets from me, and my drawn out, agonizing, if not very dread, death will follow. Therefore, my reader, if you exist, and I pray you do, this must be my farewell. I’m in no mood to make it a sentimental one, but I will say this, disburdening my mind onto these pages these last months has been a great consolation. And now I’ll take my leave; I wish to spend some moments in this dank cell alone, in quiet reflection.

  XIII

  It seems I misread the portents, for I eluded death. I hope this gladdens you, my reader, but, while I cling to the faint hope you’ve been, and remain, captivated, I know it’s more likely you’ve long since, wearied by its ravelled skeins, lost interest in my tale. I’d urge you to read on, though; things are drawing to a close, and it’d be foolish to have come this far only to quit now. But, if you are too fatigued, or simply prefer your endings bleak, stop here, don’t go on, tell yourself I died a tragic harrowing death at Elliot’s hand.

  Still, I hope you will read on.

  (I don’t think you’re bored, you, my real reader (and I couldn’t have wished for a better), or, at least, am sure you, patient and hankering always for a happy outcome, will read on; I hope, though, you don’t mind if I continue to write as if there may, unlikely as it seems, be others, and as if for someone who knows nothing of my tale, our tale; I want this account to stand on its own.)

  When I left off writing at the end of the foregoing chapter, well over a year ago now, it was to sit quiet a short time, before calling to Elliot, let him know my work was done. I had my lull then hollered. Elliot’s concertina wheezed silent, then, after a moment, he entered the roundhouse. After putting me back in shackles, he picked up the pages I’d left by the typewriter, waved them in my face.

  ‘I’ll take these away, read them,’ he said, ‘leave you alone to brood. When I come back it’ll be to snuff your life. Slowly.’

  While musing, I’d determined not to meet my end meekly, knowing Elliot wouldn’t stint on cruelty just because I yielded without a fight. So I gobbed on his brogues. He looked down at the spittle mottling the leather, smirked at me, hit me in the mouth. Then, turning on his heel, he left the roundhouse without another word. I let my chin fall to my chest, drivelled blood down my vest.

  Many hours passed. Night became day, day became night. I found solace and distraction pondering the lore of the Himalayan tribes I’d lived amid so long. Their holy folk taught that, through ritual, through the chanting of mantras to stop up the base orifices and prise open the bone sutures of the crown of the skull, the dying could attempt to ensure their immortal spirit passed into the realm of the gods. If, then, the correct path was taken through that land and the deities met on the way appeased with apt tributes, the spirit would be liberated from the wheel of being.

  I give these ancient beliefs scant credence, yet then my reason found refuge in them, and when Elliot came back, he found me not raving, as he’d doubtless thought I’d be, but sat quiet in my chains. He held an oil lamp and my typescript, tied up with twine. He hung the lantern from a nail jutting from one of the beams of the roundhouse’s roof, put the typescript down on the ground at my feet, then went out, returned a few moments later clutching a flint and steel striker. He held these things before me, but I just shrugged, their meaning lost on me; in my mind I wandered the plane of wonders of the Himalayans’ faith.

  I think Elliot was a mite irked I sat so placid. He cuffed me.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Snap out of it. I’ve lots of fun planned for us.’

  The slap brought me back, but, realizing I could perhaps provoke him, I didn’t react, just smiled vacantly.

  ‘By the way,’ Elliot went on, ‘you don’t fool me. Writing as if I don’t scare you, as if I’m just some grotesque pantomime villain to you. I know full well you’re terrified.’

  I shrugged again.

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  Elliot took out his knife, held it to my neck.

  ‘I don’t believe you. And if you’re really not, you should be. Pah! Pretending you don’t find what I’ve in store for you frightening… A bit irritating you didn’t describe it in your account, you know.’

  I shrugged a third time. Of course, seeking to vex, to provoke, to force, perhaps, some error, I’d dissembled, was continuing to dissemble. What Elliot had told he’d do to me was terrifying, dread, foul…

  ‘Oh well,’ he said. ‘I’ve other stuff planned anyway.’

  Then I had another idea, went on.

  ‘No one who knows, as I do, your true origins could be scared.’

  ‘What? What are you on about?’

  ‘I’ve read a lot in my time. Dug up some fascinating manuscripts, lost and forbidden texts. In one, a late-medieval German tractate on ancient myth, I came across a reference to a Manichean account of Sumerian folklore.’

  Elliot gave me a little nick on the ear with his knife. I flinched.

  ‘So what?’

  ‘Well, apparently the Sumerians told a story about a being moulded from elephant dung by men, given life to by sorcery, created and given to the gods, for them to slake their lusts on, in hopes it’d lessen the rapes of mortals, the unnatural pregnancies, the births of half-breed monsters. Of course it didn’t work out that way. And the ill-used creature grew cruel. And then, one day, was turned loose by the gods, who’d tired of it…’

  Elliot just laughed, but his right arm became a tentacle, whipped round my neck, throttled me, suckers biting. I passed out. But I think only for a short time. When I came round, Elliot was still crouched before me.

  ‘And your attempt to gull me,’ he said, sneering, ‘make me think your fit of laughter was despairing, not rapturous, was pitiable. I saw straight through that. If you’d hoped you might trick me into graving your carcass after all, you were mistaken.’

  (This I didn’t understand, have since spent many hours pondering. It seems Elliot really thought having my tale inscribed on my flesh would be bliss for me. Why, though, I’m not sure. Perhaps he suspected a desire to pass from this too, too solid flesh to the abstraction of language. If so, he misunderstood my motives for writing.)

  ‘Perhaps I’ve double-bluffed you,’ I said. ‘Who can say?’

  ‘Oh really?’ He chuckled. ‘Well then, how about this?’

  And he grabbed my head, began carving my brow with the point of his knife, gripping it, by the blade, in his right hand. The cuts were shallow, but the pain, awful. He graved, ‘PRIC’, then, partway through the ‘K’, slipped, gashed the webbing between thumb and forefinger, dropped the knife, jumped back.

  Cursing, wincing, he took a handkerchief from his breast pocket, wrapped it about his hand.

  ‘Oh, you dolt!’ he said, to himself. ‘You shouldn’t have let him get your goat. Idiot.’

  He picked up his knife, walked over, stuck it into the jamb of the door. Then turned, loped towards me, kicked me in the stomach. But his run-up was faltering, and the blow, weak.

  I laughed.

  ‘Shit to shit, eh?’

  He kicked me again;
another puny blow.

  ‘Is that the best you can do?’

  ‘Oh, just shut up,’ he sighed.

  Then he undid the knot securing the string binding my account, began loosely crumpling the pages, piling them in front of me.13

  ‘What are you doing? I said.

  ‘Haven’t you guessed?’

  And then I realized. I couldn’t pretend unconcern then, howled.

  Elliot ignored me, looked down at his wound. Blood had soaked through his makeshift bandage, was beading on the cloth. Distractedly, he raised his hand to his mouth, put out his tongue, lapped at the gouts.

  I broke down, begged. Elliot paid me no mind, just went on balling up the pages of my typescript. Realizing it was futile, I stilled my pleas, sat, looked on, dejected. Elliot worked slow, pausing often to cavort, sing coarse ditties. He belted out one crude song, telling of a woman’s disappointment with an inept lover, with pointed emphasis.

  It took him some time to build his fire. I felt hollow.

  Then he’d finished, straightened up, stood grimacing, kneading the knotty ridge of his spine.

  ‘Wretched backache’s back.’

  He grimaced, then squinted at me.

  ‘All the fight’s gone out of you, hasn’t it? You got me a touch riled, I’ll admit it. But I’ve still bested you.’

  I looked away.

  A high gloating gurgle broke from Elliot’s lips. Looking down at his injured hand, he unwound his handkerchief, and, seeing the cut was still bleeding, retied it tighter. Then he left the hut, came back a few moments later carrying a metal stake and an iron mallet. He crossed over to me, put down the stake, hit me in the mouth with the hammer. I spluttered blood and tooth shards. He seized the fetters and hauled, hoicked me away from the wall, stretched me out, dropped my feet down just by the pile of crumpled sheets. Then he let go. I drew up my legs.

  He sighed. ‘Do you want me to break them?’