Seven Threads

by Jason Fischer

  I stabbed out with my snapped broom-handle and buried it deep in his eye. He howled in fury and tried to pull me away, but I clung onto the handle, twisting it, screaming my own defiance.

  “You are killing me,” Ascaro cried, surprised and afraid.

  I drove that stick deep into his brain. He sank down into the mud, twitching and gasping, and then finally he was still.

  #

  The murder of a master by his slave is not the point of my story. The elephants are monsters, but they are not for you to kill. If you fight them, they will break you, or kill you. Look on what they have done to my body, I who they have trained in the arts of death. You are pot-scrubs. Mark this lesson well.

  There are others like me, others hiding in the in-between places. We slip in and out of Tusk like mice, and we nibble in the dark, bringing their city down one grain at a time.

  No. Your place in this war is different. You must leave. In ones or twos, and never by the same way. Your job is to walk away from Tusk.

  When you leave, we will find you. There is a human nation, hidden beneath the grey one. But the iron in your hands comes with a price.

  That night when I left Ascaro’s body in the mud, I slipped into Mouse’s fine new house and left it a burning knackery. I murdered those collaborators, but this revenge wasn’t sweet. I was sad when I stood over their bodies, sad that it needed to happen.

  Come to us with a bloody blade, or we will turn you away. There is someone near you like Mouse or Lucky. They are traitors to your people, and your true enemy. Be swift when you kill them, no matter how cruel they were in life. Take care that you do not linger long once your knives are wet.

  For all that your masters strut and bully, they need your clever hands. Above all they need your fear. Fear gives them farms full of starving slaves, while the canals run choked with food barges and miserable wagoneers file into Tusk, hauling food they dare not touch themselves.

  The elephant’s foul city only exists by our sufferance. Every day I picture that flood of wagons and barges slowing to a trickle, the ancient gates sucking at the last of the food like a dozen hungry mouths. I see their temples and pyramids overgrown in vines, forgotten in a jungle of our making.

  Above all, I picture their bones in the plazas. Outside of their ruined city, I imagine our villages, huts made from their rib-cages and covered with stretched skin. I see their tusks used for ornaments and trade, but most of all, I dream of the day when those grey killers are fastened into the ploughs, urged on by a whip in a human hand.

  Defy the grey kings. Our time is now.

  The Dog Pit

  The Dutchman finally found the boy out on the gold diggings.

  Being close to seven feet tall and as broad as an axe-handle at the shoulders, Cornelius Tesselaar was an instant curiosity in that place of mud and slap-shacks. His frock-coat and good boots spoke of a man more used to cobbled streets than a fossicker’s warren. He wore a top-hat, the good silk kind, and peered around him through a pair of expensive bifocals that by themselves would earn him a knifing if he stayed too long.

  A quiet word and a handful of coins led Cornelius to the nearest opium den. He swept open the hessian sack that served as a doorway, and stood blinking at the thick cloud of smoke that drifted out.

  “Toby Jangles,” the Dutchman boomed, striding inside. A dozen faces stared blankly at the man, even as he stepped over their sprawled bodies. One or two furtive shapes slinked away from the doorway, creeping into the furthest shadows of the clapboard shack.

  “Toby Jangles,” he said again. He approached one figure, slumped against a wall, only to find it was a Chinaman with a drawn dagger and a crazed look on his face. Cornelius backed away slowly, hands held high. Grunting, the Chinaman returned to his long-stemmed pipe, and the murder in his eyes soon eased to poppy dreams.

  “Toby Jangles!”

  The Dutchman wrestled a poster out of his purse, smoothing out the edges. By the dim light of the smoking oil lamp on the wall, he marked every face, patiently working his way through the mass of addicts and broken creatures. Finally he knelt beside a pallet, looking down on another colonist brought low by the poppy. He’d found the boy.

  The lithograph in his hands showed a young man with a larrikin’s smirk, a Push boy wanted for a number of crimes. The police artist had sketched him in typical gangster attire – bell-bottomed pants, white shirt with no collar, short black paget coat, high-heeled boots and a gaudy neckerchief.

  The creature dozing in the cot was a world away from this depiction, but even with the sallow skin and the wear of a life hard lived, the boy was unmistakeably Toby Jangles. He’d swapped Push clothes for grubby miner’s gear, and his fingers and throat were long bare of the jewellery that was his namesake. Judging by the lack of meat on his ribs, Cornelius didn’t want to guess when the boy had last had a meal.

  The Dutchman took the long pipe, still dangling from Toby’s lips, and set it on a low table. Scooping the boy up in his arms, he carried him out of the opium den. When the proprietor dogged him, demanding the settling of an account, he knocked him down with the judicious application of a boot.

  Knives were drawn and curses thrown, but none of the drug-peddlers bothered to follow Cornelius out into the muddy street. He wove through the parade of fossickers and parasites, mindless of the distractions offered by the nameless shanty town. Making a beeline for the horse rail, the Dutchman dropped Toby Jangles straight into the nearest water trough.

  Spluttering and howling, the boy snapped out of his drug-fugue. A combination of animal cunning and street smarts brought his fast knuckles towards the correct antagonist, all within that first moment.

  The Dutchman caught his fist in a big ham-hand, and propelled Toby back into the water. When the boy leapt out for a second go, the big man twitched back his coat to reveal the Colt revolver on his belt.

  “Don’t be a fool,” he said, and the boy relented. Toby sagged against the side of the trough, coughing and dripping into the mud. The big Dutchman knelt close, regarding him over a pair of bifocal spectacles. Once more he produced the lithograph, and the boy’s eyes narrowed at the litany of sins attributed to his name.

  “I’ve searched nearly every dance hall and cheap theatre in New South Wales and Victoria. You’re a hard man to find, Toby Jangles.”

  “You’ll not drag me back to Sydney,” Toby said. “Put a bullet in me now, if you have the marbles for it.”

  “Toby, I have little concern for these misdeeds,” the Dutchman said, and tossed the lithograph into the water trough. The ink ran, and the paper was unreadable within moments.

  “What are you about, mister?” Toby said. He looked at the stranger with something between curiosity and outright fear.

  “You saw something, Toby Jangles,” the Dutchman said quietly. “Something that curdles in your mind, that drives you from bottle, to pipe, to whore’s quim. You left your fellows to a fate worse than death, and you left Sydney within the hour. I’d very much like to speak with you about that.”

  #

  The Dutchman steered the boy into one of the cleaner eateries in the camp. When he put a bowl of stew and a heel of bread in front of the boy, Toby picked at it, even half-starved as he was. The Dutchman knew of the poppy, how it robbed the addict of all hunger.

  “You’re not a copper?” the boy mumbled over his food.

  “I have been a priest, a professor of theosophy, and an archaeologist of no small note. Once, I spent a decade in the Orient, as an acolyte in a mystery cult,” Cornelius said, eyes made large by his queer eyeglasses. “Boy, I have little truck with the laws of man.”

  The boy grunted, and set to work on his second mug of ale. Content that his new benefactor had no designs on his liberty, he allowed the big Dutchman to accompany him back to his employer, a miner running a frugal claim. Toby retrieved what few belongings he had, and squeezed the last squirt of his wage from that notoriously tight purse.

  “So you’d be paying me then
?” the boy said, hefting the thin sliver of coin in his hands. Living as he had been, he’d be destitute by tomorrow, and starved the week after that.

  “Toby, if you lead me where I ask, you’ll want for nothing.”

  For a long moment, the boy looked at his own wretched purse, and seemed to fight an internal war. Then he looked at the big Dutchman, clearly a man of means. He nodded, and put his fate in Professor Cornelius Tesselaar’s hands.

  #

  It took days of hard travel to escape from that muddy Victorian gold-pit and reach civilisation. They took horses, and a coach barely deserving the name. The new train from Ballarat took them into Melbourne, where it was necessary to engage a clipper to carry them around the coast to Sydney itself.

  It was a rough voyage, and Toby Jangles was no sailor. He spent two days in his cabin, heaving into a bucket. Cornelius sat with the boy, puffing on an ornate pipe and nursing him as needed.

  “It seems a good time to speak more on what you saw,” the Dutchman said. Other times he’d tried to glean the events from the boy’s mind, Toby would change the topic, or simply stare off into the distance, too haunted by what he’d seen. Now, the lad was too tired and ill to resist the line of questioning, and spoke when he was not dry-retching.

  “You know the kind of man I was, before...”

  Cornelius nodded, puffing on his pipe.

  “A larrikin, swaggering around Sydney. The terror of all decent God-fearing folk. We were the Blackwattle Push, meanest gang of cutters, and don’t you mind what those gizzard-guts at the Rocks tell you.”

  “We’d run mollies, cards and dice, anything to make a bob. Sly boxing rings, robbing folks, and knocking seven bells out of any filthy copper daft enough to show his face on our patch.”

  “So you know that we were hard men,” Toby said, pausing to gag and wipe his mouth. Cornelius pursed his lips tight around the pipe, amused at his own reference to manhood. The boy was seventeen if he was a day.

  “I was bossman of the Blackwattle Push, took over after going thirty rounds bare-knuckled against old Pete Raffles. Had a lot to prove, and thought I’d take on the big dogs where they slept. We went after the Rocks Push.”

  The memory brought a bit of fire back to the boy’s eyes. He pushed the bucket aside, sat up against his bunk. When Cornelius offered him a water-skin, he took a slow sip, swishing it around in his mouth.

  “Our lads put out the word that we would meet them at Pyrmont, in one of the Scottish quarries. The one they called Hellhole, on account of the stone being so hard to cut and work.”

  “Hellhole,” Cornelius muttered around his pipe. “Go on, boy.”

  “We got there early, hoping to spring out of hiding and give the Rocks boys a good belting. Perhaps they got wind of what we were up to, or they meant to jump us on the way home, but the time rolled around and they didn’t show up.”

  “The lads got bored, and we horsed around in the pits. All those picks and dolly-carts, and nary a constable in sight. None of us worked an honest day in our lives, but there we were, smashing their neat ashlars with hammers, throwing the stone-chips at each other.”

  “Then Eugene Dagwood calls us over. There’s a new digging the Scots have started, see, and they’ve roped the whole thing off. A type of old cave, a bubble buried in the sand-stone. Queerest thing you ever saw.”

  “‘There’s marks in here,” Eugene calls. “Black fella drawings or some such.’”

  “So we forget about the fight, and nick some oil-lamps from the miner’s shed. They had a dog chained up back there, but…you know.” Toby drew a finger across his throat.

  “We spilled into that cavern, laughing and jostling, but I tell you this, the whole place felt unnatural. We looked at the black fella scribblings, and I’ll tell you, God’s own truth, but no native set his hand to those walls.”

  “What did you see?” Cornelius said. “If I fetch you paper and quill, could you sketch the symbols?”

  Toby shook his head.

  “Queer designs, shapes that my eyes had trouble fixing on. To this day, I cannot remember the marks. The further we went into the cave, the more they appeared, till the marks ran from roof to floor.

  “Felt more like those old Egyptian writings than anything the locals usually paint. You know, where they paint the pictures that all mean words. But they weren’t pictures of anything I’d ever seen.”

  “Hmm, yes, I am quite familiar with hieroglyphics,” Cornelius said. “I’m rather doubtful that’s what you found, but go on.”

  “I wanted to run from that place,” Toby admitted. “Looking at the others, we all did. But we were Push boys, all stirred up. The first one to run would never live it down. So we went on, deeper into the digging. Soon we were past where the Scots had braved to go, and there were no brace-posts above us, nothing but sandstone and those carvings, all around us.

  “Then, I felt it in there with us. Silent, but it felt like a big beast, hunkered in the dark, retreating from our lamp-light. Something that had no business being seen.

  “And it smelled in there too. Like a wet dog. A stink of meat that’s gone beyond rot and maggot, and broken right down to nothing. The memory of meat.”

  “‘We shouldn’t be here,” Eugene whined, and of course the rest of us heaped the grief on him for crying coward. Had no-one said a word, we might all have left then. But we were the Blackwattle Push, and so…

  “There was a cave, of sorts, a hollow place full of dripping and slime. In the middle of that cave was a set of stones, like a set of jagged teeth jutting out of the ground, and I swear, I’ve never seen anything as unholy as that arrangement.”

  “There was a pattern, yes?” Cornelius whispered. “A master stone, with smaller stones in attendance? Laid out on either side, like groomsmen at a wedding?”

  Toby nodded for yes.

  Reaching into a pocket, the Dutchman pulled out a leather-bound volume, an old book written in an arcane script. Flicking through it, he laid his thumb onto a particular page, an illustrated plate. He handed the book to Toby.

  “Is this what you saw?”

  The boy recoiled from the book with a great fright, and dropped it on the floor. The page lay open to the illustration, a jagged formation of stones, sinister, almost like the jaw-bone of some antediluvian creature. In the foreground, figures danced about with torches, in supplication to the stones.

  Behind the master stone, a great shadow lurked. It was a crude dog-shape, a wolf with the ears of Anubis, with a jaw that opened far too wide. From that impossibly open mouth, a shadow tongue snaked out, entering a man’s ears. It held him upright like a puppet, while he smiled with ecstasy.

  Beneath this picture, the single word: KURPANGGA.

  “This happened to your friends, didn’t it?”

  Toby Jangles whimpered. The sound built to a moan, the moan to a howl. He pushed back in his bunk, and knocked the bucket over, spilling his sick all over the floor.

  “Even as the beast took your friends, you ran,” Cornelius said, raising his voice above the racket. “You left Sydney there and then, with naught but the clothes on your back. Is this correct?”

  Toby nodded, blubbering, snot and tears running down his face.

  “I do not judge you, boy. The first time I saw something from the outer darkness, I ran for my life. You escaped its grasp, and now you have the chance to end what you saw.”

  “I’ve changed my mind,” Toby whispered. “Keep your money. I won’t go back there.”

  “I need to know where that cave is,” Cornelius said, seizing Toby by the arms. “The exact spot.”

  “I’ll take you to the quarry, but no further. I won’t go into that cursed hole, not for all the tea in China,” Toby said. “No living thing has any business in that place.”

  “I agree,” Cornelius said. “That’s why it concerns me that the Blackwattle Push has been seen around town, alive and well.”

  #

  “Certain of my instruments pointed
me here,” Cornelius said. He’d rented a room in the Rocks district, and the furnishings seemed an extension of the eccentric Dutchman. Every surface lay stacked with books, and the table was a jumble of alembics, braziers and various brass-geared devices. Pictures of fantastic beasts lay pinned to the walls, alongside what appeared to be mathematical formulae, and writings that resembled bird-scratchings.

  Other shapes lay in the shadows cast by a flickering oil-lamp. Jars and stuffed animals, an elephant foot that contained swords, umbrellas, and staves carved with heathen totems. The whole place stank like a herbalist’s stall.

  “The trouble is, the science is far from accurate,” Cornelius said, fussing with a brazier. He threw a pinch of shaved liquorice root into the red coals, gently puffing on them until a lick of flame swallowed up the offering.

  “For instance, these formulae led me to Java, where I unearthed a nest of Yog-Sothoth cultists. But beyond the island itself, I knew not the site of their lair. It took me five years and half a fortune to destroy that foul gang.”

  “I continue the work of a most ancient order, but have only a shade of the esoteric skills my predecessors once possessed. I could tell you in which direction sunken R’lyeh lies, but even if I were mad enough to seek out that horrid house, I could sail for years and never come close.”

  Toby Jangles said nothing. He’d been struck dumb since entering the Dutchman’s apartment, and still stood just inside the doorway, staring.

  “Come inside, boy, and shut the door. The neighbours already complain about the smell.”

  “What… what are you? Do you have truck with the devil?”

  Cornelius laughed for a long moment. The light from the brazier danced across his bifocals, and for one moment he looked unhinged, less than human. For the first time Toby noticed the deep lines in his face, the intensity of his stare.

  “There are things crawling out there in the stars, entities that make Lucifer quail in his cloven hooves,” the Dutchman said.

  Herding the boy into the apartment, Cornelius shut the door and threw the bolts. Peeling apart a stack of periodicals and broadsheets, he found a newspaper and pushed it into Toby’s hands.