by J M Hemmings
Bingham looked pleased, and he brushed his neatly trimmed nails against the front of his khaki hunter’s jacket as he stood up.
‘Remember the reward,’ he said softly. ‘I hold the key to your future, but that key will disappear forever should I die.’
William watched him stroll away, and then began packing his things, bolstering his will with as much grit and determination as he could muster.
Around an hour later, the expedition had eaten a hasty breakfast and were ready to set off. The rain, however, showed no signs of letting up, and was, in fact, steadily worsening; William peered up through the forest canopy and saw that the sky seemed to be darkening rather than growing brighter as the day advanced. Massive, bulbous banks of clouds the colour of soot were tumbling like packed lemmings over the jutting peaks of the Himalayas, and flickers of dazzling lightning ripped between the towers of storm clouds, split-second bridges of power and light for vengeful, forgotten sky deities to traverse.
‘It’s good weather for a tiger hunt,’ Ajit remarked in his gruff voice. ‘With this rain, both the sound of our approach and our scent will be disguised.’
‘Good luck seeing any damn tigers in this gloom,’ Kelly countered with a scowl. ‘It’s almost as dark as night in this forest, I say! I honestly don’t know how—’
‘How about you just quit your goddamned bellyachin’, and let us professionals get on with our jobs, ya stupid damned Mary-Anne!’ Milton snapped. ‘How many goddamned tigers have you shot anyway?’
Kelly parted his lips to say something, but then decided against it, and instead he merely muttered an insult under his breath and scowled. Out here, where these people were the key to his own survival, he could not afford to indulge in any of his usual malicious joy by antagonising and insulting them.
After around an hour of edging their way along a steep track down the almost-sheer valley sides, the group had descended to a point at which the crumbling ruins of the ancient temple were no longer visible above the trees. Bringing up the rear of the single-file line, William could not help but feel a certain cloying fear worming its way into his mind. The previous night he had felt at one with this forest, as if its twigs and branches were the nurturing limbs of benevolent gods and goddesses, but now it seemed as if those same boughs were the grasping arms of monstrous demons of the underworld, straining to reach him with their oaken talons. He shuddered, and then almost jumped out of his saddle as a cannon-boom of abrupt thunder clapped its explosive power across the landscape. It felt as if this forest had eyes, and that those eyes were following his every step – watching, watching and waiting.
In front of him, it was plain to see that the porters were in thrall to the same fear. They were talking in hushed tones in Bengali, flitting their eyes around them in directions, and jumping at any twig crack or bird call that managed to cut through the relentless stampede of rain. William could not make out the details of their conversation above the noise, but the words ‘monsters’, ‘devils, ‘cursed’ and ‘evil’ kept reaching his ears.
It was a few moments after the thunderclap that a strange yet undeniably potent sense of realisation, almost déjàvu-like, dawned on William: by the end of this day his life would be irrevocably altered. In what exact way he could not be sure, but he did somehow understand that something of enormous consequence was about to happen.
At the head of the train, Ajit turned around and started to announce something.
‘Right everyone, over here I think—’
‘TURN BACK, HUNTSMEN! TURN BACK NOW AND WE WILL SPARE YOUR LIVES!’
Everyone froze in their tracks at the vociferousness of this booming voice, tearing through the storm and rain as if it were a terrestrial retort to the thunder rumbling from the sky. The voice, bizarrely, had seemed to come from nowhere – and everywhere. Everyone started looking around them with frantic urgency.
‘Gentlemen, ready your weapons!’ Bingham yelled from the centre of the train as he drew one of his revolvers and cocked the weapon’s hammer.
‘Tha’ wasnae no bleedin’ tiger,’ William stammered to nobody in particular as he unslung his Winchester rifle and shouldered it, peering with fear-wide eyes down the sights at the darkness of the forest.
‘WE DO NOT WANT TO RESORT TO VIOLENCE, BUT IF YOU CONTINUE TO ADVANCE INTO THIS VALLEY WE WILL HAVE TO! THIS IS YOUR FINAL WARNING! TURN AROUND AND LEAVE THIS PLACE!’
‘Who is that?! What is he saying?’ one of the porters shrieked in Bengali.
‘It’s one of the forest demons!’ the other howled. ‘It’s going to kill us and eat our souls!’
‘You’d best turn and run yourself, lion man!’ Milton snarled with raw aggression. ‘We’ve come for yer hides an’ heads, an’ we ain’t leavin’ ‘til we done shot an’ skinned every last one a’ y’all!’
William peered about in panicked confusion, with the world feeling, quite alarmingly, as if it was starting to spin madly around him. Ahead of him he could see Kelly doing the same. What were these hunters on about? Why were they referring to the speaker as ‘lion man’?
‘Ajit, ready your elephant gun,’ Bingham commanded, a trace of nerves cracking through his put-on steadiness of speech. ‘Take the first clear shot you can get. Head shot, body shot, it matters not. Anywhere that massive bullet hits will cause major and probably lethal damage, and if we can cripple him now, we can finish him off later. Remember, the lion is the primary target; go for him first. Milton, the tiger is yours. The rest of us will provide cover fire, and we will handle the bear, the rhinoceros and the leopard. Ajit, that rhinoceros is dangerous and is going to require at least two rounds from your elephant gun, so after the lion has been taken, shift your attention immediately to the rhinoceros.’
Ajit nodded, smiling grimly as he loaded his elephant gun.
‘Nothing but a bit of sport,’ he growled. ‘We’ll be having a good hunt today, we will. A damned good hunt.’
‘Bet you ten pounds I’ll bag more of these bastards than you,’ Milton said to Ajit as he readied his own guns, his yellowed teeth gleaming with the promise of blood as he leered an evil smile at the others while cocking his rifle.
‘Ten pounds it is,’ Ajit agreed before dismounting. ‘From here we go on foot!’ he shouted to the rest of them.
As everyone else began to dismount, Bingham sidled up to William.
‘Not you,’ he whispered. ‘You bring up the rear on your horse, and for God’s sake remember your primary mission objective.’
William nodded and remained mounted.
‘Yes sir. Don’t you worry sir, I’ve got it down.’
‘THIS IS YOUR VERY LAST WARNING! TURN BACK NOW!’
Everyone froze as the thunderous voice ripped through the forest once more. Then, in a brilliant flare of lightning that lit up everything clear as day for half a second, William caught a brief glimpse of a man standing on a large rock a mere fifty metres or so to their right. He was a white man, clad in a long earth-brown robe, similar in style to those worn by Buddhist monks, and his chestnut hair was thick, wavy and long, hanging about his shoulders, and on his craggy face he sported a bushy brown beard, streaked, like his hair, with grey. Fierce deep-set eyes, illuminated so starkly by the lightning flare, stared out with a look of ferocious intensity at William. It was impossible to tell from that blink of a glance how old the man was, but he appeared to be middle-aged.
Bingham also caught a glimpse of him, and without hesitation fired a few rounds from his revolver in the man’s direction, but when another lightning flare lit up the forest, the man was nowhere to be seen.
‘The lion is here,’ Bingham muttered. Then he turned to address the others. ‘Prepare for the hunt! We will slaughter these beasts before the day is out!’
An earth-shaking lion roar, which sounded, in its bestial potency, unlike anything William had ever heard off of the field of battle, cannoned through the trees. The epicentre of the almost seismic disturbance was the section of forest where they had just seen th
e strange man in the brown robe.
That booming sound was answered by another deep roar to their left, and then by a rumbling bark and a snorting bellow to their front. These sounds were then met with another pair of barking roars to their rear; the expedition was, it appeared, completely flanked and surrounded. The porters began to panic, and one of them started screaming repeatedly with shrill terror, and he threw his baggage down and scrambled as fast as he could up the nearest tree. The other porter took one look at his friend clambering up the tree and dropped his own load of baggage to do the same. Beneath William, River King was also showing signs of fear, which was unusual for this war-trained, battle-hardened beast who had survived the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava. The stallion started to show the whites of his eyes, while his nostrils flared open as he sucked in breath after fright-charged breath of the rain-damp air. He then caught a whiff of something on the wind, and abruptly reared up on his hind legs, whinnying loudly with terror. William was only able to keep him under control with the greatest effort.
‘How in the hell did the bastards get around to our left flank?’ Milton shouted as he swung his rifle around, peering through the sheets of sleeting rain and the labyrinthine maze of trees. ‘Goddamn it! We don’t have enough cover in this position, we’re too exposed!’
‘Steady, steady!’ Bingham cried. ‘Ajit, Milton, right flank! Take the lion first, and the rest will fall!’
Kelly pulled out his revolver and pointed it with a violently trembling hand at the dark forest, swinging his aim haphazardly left and then right as he heard the wild animals crashing through the undergrowth once more.
A mighty roar resounded through the forest, and this time it was much closer to them. Then an earth-rending clap of thunder shook the trees with cataclysmic violence, and a near-blinding shear of lightning illuminated the entire area in brilliant violet-tinged white – and that was when William saw the beast.
It was only for a split-second, but the instant that the lightning hurled its strobe-fire light across the landscape, William saw a massive cat a mere twenty metres from them, looking unlike any creature he had ever seen in his life. Since arriving in India, he had seen lions and tigers, both in the wild and caged, but this monstrous creature looked like a mixture of both lion and tiger. It was more lion, to be sure; its coat was the same tawny brown as that of a lion’s, yet its mane was a lot more insubstantial, and its coat was dappled in a light camouflage pattern, which was almost a blend of that of a tiger and that of a leopard. What was most intimidating about the creature, though, was its sheer size; it was a great deal bigger than any lion or tiger William had ever seen.
‘It’s, it’s the lion, it’s…’ he stammered, shouting against the cacophony of the storm, trying to tell the others what he had just seen, but he was so gripped with fear that he could not complete the sentence.
Soon enough, though, they heard it. That explosive roar rocketed its fury through the trees mere metres from William this time, leaving his ears ringing in the wake of its tree-rustling potency, and the unworldly sound was answered immediately by another roar and a bassy snorting from the front left.
The lion’s roar blew through William’s body with a shock wave force, leaving in its wake a rush of irresistible terror that seemed to paralyse him utterly. He found himself reeling in his saddle like a drunk, with no control over his movements. Beside him Kelly screamed with abject horror and started firing off rounds from his revolver in a panic, shooting blindly into the shadow-drenched forest.
‘Maintain order!’ Bingham bellowed, trying his best to be the voice of authority, although an undercurrent of dread was unmistakably present in his voice too. ‘Stop firing Kelly, damn you! Stop firing!’
‘I don’t want to die!’ Kelly shrieked, his eyes almost bursting from their sockets. ‘I don’t want to die!’
He abruptly down his revolver and fled into the forest, screaming all the while. Up in the treetops, the porters were chanting out incantations of protection, their voices shaky and weak. William watched Kelly stumbling on his madcap path through the vines and trees with horror, and then, as yet another explosive flare of lightning illuminated the area, William saw a huge cat – a leopard, it looked like – drop from the treetops onto the fleeing man. Kelly and the beast plunged in a thrashing tangle into the undergrowth, with Kelly letting out a bloodcurdling scream that was cut abruptly short midway through.
‘Kelly’s dead!’ Bingham roared, ‘and the rest of you will be too if you break formation! We’ve got the firepower to stop all of them, if we just maintain the discipline to—’
Something smashed William right off of River King and sent him hurtling through the air at an incredible speed. He was airborne for a full second or two before his body ploughed through a couple of branches and then decimated the prickly shrub into which it crashed. He tumbled and rolled in a chaos of destructive momentum, cartwheeling through the forest and eventually coming to rest against the gnarled trunk of an old, sprawling tree. Dazed and semi-conscious from the immense force of the blow, he nonetheless tried to get up. He found, however, that he could not breathe, for all of the wind had been knocked out of his lungs. It felt as if whatever had hit him had utterly pulverised every inch of his body, so intense and widespread was the pain.
Gasping ineffectually for breath, he peered through the cascading rain and the half-light, but could see no signs of either his horse or anyone else. After a few moments he began to regain his breath, and then on jelly-weak limbs he struggled up onto his hands and knees and started crawling through the damp mess of leaves and peat that carpeted the floor of the forest, wheezing and spluttering as he went. Through the madness of the storm he heard the booming clap of the elephant gun firing, and then the sharper cracks of someone’s Winchester rifle shooting off rounds in rapid bursts, as well as the percussive thumps of Bingham’s revolver firing. All of these weapons were quickly silenced, though, and a strange and eerie calm then descended upon the forest. Even the rain itself began to cease in its intensity, and soon all that William could hear was the heavy pounding of his heart in his breast, and the rushing polyrhythms of superheated blood gushing through his temples and drumming in his hot ears.
Still weak and disoriented from the mighty force that had hurled him into the forest, he tried to get up, but he fell instantly onto his back as the world seemed to swim around him. Determined to somehow escape this calamity, he tried, growling wordlessly, to struggle to his feet, but when he got as far as hauling himself halfway up his stomach heaved involuntarily, and he spewed up his half-digested breakfast before he collapsed again, choking and coughing and trembling.
‘River King,’ he wheezed, ‘where are you, lad, where are you?’
It was then that he heard it: a crunching of leaves up ahead – the kind of crunching that signified the presence of something very, very heavy.
‘What on earth is tha’?’ he whispered to himself, a fresh dose of terror pulsing its jagged crystals through his veins.
With a grunt and a groan, he managed to rise onto all fours, peering in fright all the while through the drifts of mist that were wafting up from the forest floor. Then, just upwind from him, he spotted an enormous Indian rhinoceros, with its single-horned head tilted upwards as it sniffed at the air. Before William could even think of trying to run or hide, though, the behemoth spotted him, its tiny eyes lighting up as they caught sight of his shivering form.
With a bellow it put its head down and hurtled into a storming charge, and the terrifying sight of it cannoning towards him was enough of a shock to inject a fresh dose of adrenalin into his veins. Overriding the paralysing terror that was restraining him in its icy talons, he sprang to his feet, spun about on his heels and took off at a sprint, with the cannonade galloping of the two-and-a-half-ton juggernaut ringing with alarming closeness in his ears.
He fled blindly through the trees, screaming and bolting at full tilt as branches and leaves whipped at his face and body and tore a
t his skin. All of a sudden though, with a heart-stopping lurch the ground beneath him simply disappeared, and then he was falling, and then tumbling and rolling and ragdolling down a steep and almost vertical slope.
Eventually William’s mad rolling came to a halt as the gradient of the slope eased up and the ground flattened out. Every part of him throbbed and burned with a terrible pain, and once again all the air inside his lungs had been smashed out. Adrenalin continued to beat its furious tempo inside his skull, and with what little strength he still possessed he scrambled to his feet, wheezing and gasping, and looked around him with wild, terror-wide eyes. For the first time since being thrown off of his horse he had the presence of mind to search for his weapons – and it was with a stab of dismay that he discovered that the sword was gone from his hip, and the Winchester carbine had long since vanished from his back. Both had most likely been torn from his body, either when he had been flung from his horse, or when he had fled through the trees, and they were now probably lying useless at the top of the steep bank. He cursed under his breath and spat into the mud, shivering with naked fear all the while.
There was, however, one more thing that he needed to check for. With a cut-up, bleeding hand he reached inside his now-torn jacket to see if the pendant was still there. He breathed out a sigh of relief; his most precious possession was still hanging around his neck. Panting hard and trembling with fear, he peered around to try to get his bearings and make some sort of sense of his surroundings. As he turned around, though, he stumbled back with surprise, for looming up from the ground before him, and stabbing imposingly through the treetops, was the huge stone temple he had seen from the top of the valley.
Its outer walls had mostly crumbled into piles of moss-thick stone, but the inner section still stood proud and tall. This itself was the size of the average Scottish castle he knew from home, and its conical central tower loomed with silent gravitas through the mist.
A bone-chilling roar reverberated suddenly through the forest, and it was answered shortly afterwards by another roar, which seemed to be very, very close. There was only one logical refuge from the wild beasts now, and so it was that William hobbled with as much haste as he could manage into the eerie shadows of the abandoned temple.
