by Jeff Kamen
Sandor.
The man catches hold of it as it falls, one hand gripping the axeshaft. He holds the head by the ear and swings it round and the blood sprays everywhere, covering people nearby in droplets. Two thick spurts jet from the neck of the fallen body, the dark blood spreading, soaking darkly into the dust. A few turn druggedly to watch. A long-haired man goes over with a bucket to contain the bloodflow. Some of the onlookers are wiping their eyes, while others continue with their activities as if nothing has happened. Stunned, she looks back at Sandor. There are brownish spatters running down his chest as if he is melting, dark spots of it speckling his face. She watches him lick at his hands, then once more pull at the girl as the severed head swings over her like a grisly censer.
Moaning, she watches how the blood sprays again. Watches his cupped hands collect it as it rains down upon the girl’s pale back, as it runs down her ribs and hangs from the tips of her breasts, trickling to her hips and elbows.
Then he releases the blood from his hands. And as it splashes over the girl he smears the remainder lavishly across his chest, laps at it with his bloodied tongue. Very distantly, it seems, she watches him raise up. With his hands clamped firmly on the pale round buttocks, his stained teeth glinting in the firelight, he once more thrusts at the girl. She shunts forward baying as if the dog’s spirit now inhabits her, eyes tightly shut, and with a cold stare he hauls her back again.
Then, as if Jaala has cried out, he turns his head.
Sandor.
To find her wide dark eyes on him; to find her kneeling at the stockade.
Broken, clutching at the posts as if in prayer. A lonely figure in the smoke. Freezing midmotion, he regards her with a strange and unearthly gaze as if no one else exists there; as if it is the just the two of them alone in the world. She returns his gaze through her tears, then shakes her head. Slowly. Just the once. Then she lurches to her feet and runs back up the path and keeps on running.
Whether he is following or not, she does not know; all she is aware of is a growing darkness about her, the serrated barking growing weak and distant in the night, gradually to fade. She is lost and lost and lost, the crowded dark and the dead limbs of the forest offering only death and horror, death and horror, the cruel branches taking her forward and exchanging her, passing her on and passing her by until there is no place left to run to.
She goes sprawling to the ground, her vision swimming to black. Still she travels down the threatening whorl, but this time the horror is changing.
What’s the name what’s the name what’s the name …
She awakes in the sparse woods of the eastern lowlands. Behind her eyes there burns a vision of hillside terraces lined with interlocking waterways. A tall black gallows stands in the square, figures in the distance marching in a drill.
The tyrant’s future vision for the settlement rising coldly with the sun.
Chapter 26 — Room Of Instruments
Peering through the grille, he saw what looked to be an office in the systems station; yet he knew he could not have gone that high, for he’d turned off too early, attracted by lights, the sight of equipment.
The room was deserted. There were two long desk counters divided by a central gangway barely wide enough for any occupants to work in. Each counter was host to a series of instrument panels, above which, mounted to the walls or sitting on shelves, were dozens of monitors. Some were displaying data charts and graphs, while the majority were running what appeared to be live security cam footage from around the base.
He looked back to where he’d climbed from. He knew that the goat couldn’t have climbed after him — couldn’t have — but yet … how was he to know for sure? How had it got into the passage in the first place? He probed with the torch and realised he was still shaking. Fishing in his pockets, he found the tin and put two pills in his mouth and tucked the tin away. Anything to forget the scuffing noise, the approaching rasp of hooves. Those arctic and preying eyes. He turned back to the grille, wondering how long the room would be empty. Surely this was his chance — to forget the goat and the time he’d wasted and do something to repay Lütt-Ebbins’ trust. Lying back, he kicked at the grille until it fell back with a clatter.
The first thing he saw as he went to the monitors was people running for cover in a number of locations. The images were in grainy black and white, unclear, yet he could tell which floor he was looking at from the outlay. Staring, he watched an angry mob in overalls as they hurled chairs at a police barricade; behind the police, in the background, armed guards were filing out from a stairwell. He saw people he recognised and knew by name being clubbed to the ground, saw onlookers who were trying to escape being viciously kicked and beaten. On one screen, he saw a blond-haired figure being dragged into a sideroom by guards. Turning to the other desk, he found a group of workers sheltering in the canteen, some diving to hide themselves behind the stacked furniture, some entering the servery where they were taking up cooking implements as if to defend themselves against whoever was coming after them.
He stood groaning, gripping the desk, finding scenes of battle and despair and confusion on every floor. All of it happening without him, all of it unnecessary, had he just completed the simple task he’d been charged with.
He saw troops chasing a woman in a labcoat across the lecture hall, the woman turning with a gun and firing and running on again. There were frightened crowds gathering in corridors and walkways, leaflets being distributed in offices where people were still working, their faces registering shock and wonder and rage. He saw handcuffed figures being lined up against a wall near the staff quarters. Flashes of gunfire at the head of a staircase. People toppling and falling.
Just then a beep sounded from the doorpad. He retreated to the vent, panicking, thinking to crawl away; then he forced himself to hold steady. At the third beep he ran to the door and slid heavy bolts across it, top, middle and bottom, then stood with his back to the reinforced steel, breathing with difficulty.
The moment the beeping stopped, the person outside began pounding at the door with a fist. He stood trembling. Nothing happened for a moment, then whoever it was threw themselves at it, thudding against the metal, sending the bolts rattling in their hasps. Then they withdrew, muttering furiously. He retreated into the gangway as the beeps recommenced, and as he did so, he happened to look at a screen where a huge woman in black was standing at an equally sturdy door with a hand on her hip, prodding at the pad with an ugly expression. The woman stopped just as the beeps stopped, and as she turned from the door, taking out a radio, he did not wait to see what she did next, but instead looked in a fervid sweep across the instrument panels.
Perhaps it was the pills beginning to numb him, for as he looked over the controls he felt something of his fear dissolving, replaced in a slowing wash of time by a sense of unambiguous direction, a sense of potent meaning that had to it the aroma of destiny.
His eyes sucking up information like dust. Revisiting the room, reseeing it in all its frightening, thrilling potential.
The panels were like fertile fields of power. There were rows of knobs with rubber hoods. Levers jutting up like jeep gears. Finely graded fans of digits surrounding a series of pressure gauges. It was beginning to feel as though clear seraphic oceans were passing before his gaze, and lowering his goggles, he turned to the other desk and managed to shut out the crashing at his back as the person at the door beat and kicked at it. He stood focussing himself. Marshalling his talents into line. On strips of white tape someone had written the function of each individual control. Words of a kind he was used to seeing on illicit menus he’d patrolled for years. Three phase, weld workshop, filter flaps. Transmissions desk. Argon behälter. Heat floor one, areas G to F.
Smoke, he needed smoke.
His eyes gleamed. Substation DS5. Gitter nordwestlich.
The beeping recommenced, high and needling. He could hear people yelling outside, a noise which at other times would have whipped him into run
ning away, but this time he would stand firm. Not one minute on the surface would be bearable without knowing he’d done the job. And not just done it, but done it well, followed it to completion.
He searched the room. On the work surfaces were pads and pens. Telephones. There was a functioning wurmbad on the far wall in which a thin specimen with black and white feelers was circling. In the corner behind the door he noticed a fusebox with feeds running down into the concrete. He crouched. Beneath one of the desks was a box of cartons, a few packs of foil-wrapped foodstuffs. Running parallel to the skirting board was a strip of trunking that branched off at each of the room’s power sockets. He crouched further, craning his neck. The trunking ran to the fuse box.
Pow-pow. Boom boom. Away.
‘Open up!’ someone roared. ‘Open the fuck up!’
He wiped the dampness from his lip, then on spotting a multitool on the desk, he went and snatched it up. He checked the face of one of the panels and he picked through the legs and selected an end with the right shape to it and inserted it into a corner and twisted. The screw turned stiffly, then gave, and soon he had it out. He went to the next corner and did the same, trembling at each collision at the door, begging for the time he needed.
Chapter 27 — Anniversary
With the coming of the eighth moon, Martha and Stéfan return to the settlement after a few months of trading around the Istran coast. She listens to them blankly at their stall.
Not watching them, watching something else. A length of coarse white silk has been looped around an upright post and is rippling as it lifts, translucent in the sun.
‘Jaala?’ says Martha, leaning forward. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing,’ she says. ‘Nothing’s wrong.’
Then she walks away.
She has her rules to abide by. Not much talking, especially on workdays: she needs to preserve her energy. And no contact with people who remind her of things that brought out the presences. No more hunters, no more days out swimming. The man she’d loved no longer has a name.
And there are other rules. Not to trust too much. This applies equally to Staš, and when she calls at his chamber to collect her entitlements, she greets his questions with deep suspicion, wondering if the nameless man has asked him to speak on his behalf.
The month draws to an end. She has spoken with Anya just once since the Maga night, her old friend almost cold in her response, saying, ‘I told you he’d kill you. I told you what he’d do. Just keep away from him. Just keep away.’
She needs to talk with her again, badly now, but it seems that Anya cannot leave the patient she is tending to. She needs to tell her what is preying on her more than at any time before: the conviction that she must leave Ansthalt in order to save herself.
The thought grows with her unhappiness. Pallid and alone, she watches the balloons go soaring on her birthday, seeing in them a symbol of all her disappointments. Yet there is something else to them: they speak of escape. She will miss the children, miss Anya dearly, but sensing a deep sickness emerging in her, she realises it is best for them all.
~O~
With her decision made, she plans to leave before the storms come, but not until the anniversary has passed.
She cannot face doing otherwise: there will be enough hardships to deal with along the way. She makes a list of the supplies she will need, wondering which of her possessions she might need to sell or barter, even give away. When the ninth moon comes, she sends a message down to the hunter camp to ask the man to meet with her as usual. As they have sworn to.
She climbs the eastern trails alone. Then sits by the mound with her hands clasped, waiting for him to arrive. She thinks at first that someone has been digging there, for there are marks on the ground she has not seen before. She sits uncertainly, confused … perhaps she’d dug them herself … dug them when she …
When they …
She stares out vacantly.
He does not show. The balloons sweep away into the first antecedents of darkness, one arriving every few minutes. She watches them eddy and pitch and rise, rubbing anxiously at her temples.
o how he sleeps how he’s sleeping, o how he sleeps how he sleeps…
Evening falls fast. She stares out at that awful expanse of night and wilderness, picturing herself setting out with nothing but her quiet footsteps, heading away to who knew what future; towards what foreign roads, travelling under what scattered skies. A world of threats and promises and all of it disguised at every turn. She decides to call on Anya only briefly before she leaves: her old friend must not have time to dissuade her.
At the end of another hour there is still no sign of him. She kneels. Then places her palms upon the earth and presses down with all her strength, releasing a long and terrible cry.
Later, faltering as she goes downhill, she approaches the lights of the settlement.
~O~
A couple of huts are still open, a handful of tables occupied. A few people are eating, talking by lamplight, throwing knuckles or dice.
She is asking for soup when she notices Radjík and Sonja sitting together, the girl drinking from a wooden cup, watching on as Lajos’ wife feeds the infant at her breast. Before she can find a seat away from them, Radjík calls to her. She turns, sees Sonja nod a greeting. With a dull ache in her head, she goes over to join them.
‘Alright?’ says Radjík.
‘I’m fine,’ she says, taking a seat. ‘You?’
‘Yeah, alright. Usual.’
‘Busy,’ says Sonya, smiling as she gazes down at the baby. Then she looks up. ‘Sure you’re okay? Haven’t seen you for a while.’
‘I’m … I’m not too bad. Well. Not really. I ... don’t know.’ She takes up her spoon but does nothing with it; lets it hang from her fingers. At a nearby table a girl from one of her classes is reading to her parents from a ragged clump of papers. The girl is concentrating, murmuring quietly: ‘… And I saw the sky, and it was torn open. I saw a light that was not like light. I saw a rain that was no longer rain and I saw people who were no longer people. They were looking for water, the itch of the living soul.’
‘Actually, I was supposed to meet San … your father,’ she tells Radjík. ‘We were going to meet up tonight. Have a talk. Have you seen him?’
‘He’s out west, they’ve all gone. First proper hunt for a bit.’
‘So why are you up here?’
Radjík sends Sonja a glance, then looks down at the table. ‘Got the cramps. Didn’t feel like it.’ She throws another glance at Sonja. ‘Anyway, we had a bit of a ruck. He was off his head last night.’
‘It was spring, and it was not like spring. For as the blossom fell, the animals were screaming. Said the Wokeman, “One day, under the last burning tree, you will find me waiting. And it will not be your wealth I will take from you then”...’
‘It got nasty,’ says Sonja.
Jaala looks from one to the other. ‘I see,’ she says.
She leaves them to continue talking while she eats, and then, more out of courtesy than interest, asks a few questions about the baby. When things fall quiet between them, she wipes the bowl clean with some bread and sits chewing, her thoughts turning to her day, her life, ahead. Eventually she gets up to leave.
‘Eh? You goin home?’ says Radjík.
‘Afraid so. I’ve got a lot … I’m feeling tired.’
Sonja pushes a cup towards her, motioning Radjík to fill it from the jug. ‘Don’t go yet,’ she says. ‘We haven’t started, have we? Az is coming to take the little one.We’re going to have some beers.’
‘I … I ought to go.’
‘Oh, come on. We never see you any more. Why don’t you join us for a bit, eh? Have a laugh?’
‘Yeah, have a drink.’
‘Thanks,’ she says, trying to smile. ‘But I’d better not. My head’s bad already. Thanks, though. And I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’
Radjík pours from the jug, watching her, then sets it down again. ‘Yeah,
well,’ she says. ‘See you around.’
~O~
At home, she sits before her stove, thinking, wondering if he’d simply been delayed. Thinking too much.
O how he sleeps, how he’s sleeping, o how he sleeps, how he sleeps, o how he’s sleeping ...
She falls asleep on the floor, the lantern still burning, a book open by her hand. Then, almost immediately it seems, someone is calling from outside.
‘Hey ...’ says a faint voice. ‘You there?’
She gets up slowly, confused. ‘Radjík?’ she says. ‘Radjík? Is that you?’
‘Open up.’
She crosses to the door, her head throbbing malignantly.
‘Let me in, yeah?’
She untethers the rope latch and drags the door open, surprised to find it’s morning. The hunter is standing at a strange angle in front of her, limp and helpless-looking.
She stares at her. ‘What is it? What’s wrong with you? Are you sick?’
Radjík comes forward and swings her arms clumsily around Jaala’s waist, then she buckles, descending into sobs.
‘What?’ Jaala cries, holding her upright, but as the sobs come pumping out, the girl is unable to reply, can only gasp for breath.
‘What?’ she repeats, and shakes her, frightened. ‘Radjík,’ she snaps, ‘what’s going on? What’s happened?’
‘It’s … it’s me dad,’ Radjík says, drawing a breath. She is shaking. Her features contort for a moment, ugly with grief, then she sobs again. ‘They brought him back,’ she says, ‘I just seen him. Oh, Jaala ... oh Jaala, he’s dead.’
Chapter 28 — Revolution Underway
Many changes had occurred in the room since he’d begun his work. There was broken glass everywhere. Bits of filleted cable insulation and filaments of copper wire. The monitors lay smashed and castrated across the floor, glaring toothlessly.
The room looked as if it had been destroyed by an axe, then repaired by someone with an insane hatred of machinery. He’d managed to remove the fascia from every panel, and now each was connected to its neighbour by a twisted bushel of wires that touched a series of points across the naked circuitry. Monitor leads had been sacrificed for much of the work, including those running to the telephones, which themselves were wired to the panels.
