by Jeff Kamen
Moth alone in a world without shadow, nakedly exposed. Twitching and bearded. The glider wedged tightly beneath his arm.
Treading the shimmering miles. The sun always watching him, sucking away his energy, his will, asserting its reign of terrible and blinding glory.
Another sunrise, another town, another marketplace. ‘Soil,’ he croaked. ‘He wants the soil.’ He was to be found roaming about filthy and lice-ridden, crawling feebly behind the stalls. Scratching. The constant irritation of flies. He lay whispering even in his sleep.
In the day’s long silence someone tossed him some bread; another a coin. All the while plunging beneath himself, struggling to grip what could not be taken hold of. Dreaming kisses of ice, and of her; her dripping drink to him, drink to the lips, and then she was gone. Just a stain of hurt in the mind. A small and empty darkness, then he was up again, stumbling into the kiln.
More time was spent like this; time brutal and senseless. Then one afternoon he rose from the hard dry ground with his lips puffed with blisters. His dull eyes unfocussed as he peered about. All through his torturous dreams he’d seen his father fall and fall, and this time Cora was there, too. Floating, her huge image drifting in the air like a veil. Now he saw the answer, saw it so clearly defined. There was a way that the three of them could be together, a way that they could be friends, living peacefully.
He stole a rope from an untended cart, and on passing a wayside stopping place he entered the ilexes and found a secluded area out of sight of the road. He stowed his bag and glider in the bushes and came out again, checking he’d not been followed. Then he picked out a bough some twenty feet from the ground and climbed up to it with the rope trailing.
He sat in the tree making a noose, then he climbed along the bough and tied off the rope so that he’d not have far to drop before the jolt. Then he put his head through the noose and tightened the rough knot against his throat and sat forward peering down between his feet. The thought that he was about to leave a world behind made his mind reel.
He sighed, taking in the sight and feel of what was around him. The day was still; the winds had all burnt away. The ilex leaves were greenish grey, they were dry and whispery. Insects were whirring, clicking manically in the grass. A cloud of white dust was rising on the road. His thoughts wandered out to it, and he closed his blistered lips, his tired and sunstrained eyes. Cora; his father; himself. Sacred triumvirate. Soon he would know the silence they would dwell within forever.
He read his father’s letter through one last time, then pocketed it. He slumped a little. Entering the domain. A promise of eternal calm already soothing him. He inched adrift, dozing away, leaning further, ever further to his side ...
~O~
And in this living dream of contentment he heard a distant rattling. A coarse, harsh and intrusive noise that he hated and resented.
One that jarred his settled nerves, his drowsing mind. He lifted his head, and the clouded road and the waiting sky told him to hold on a minute. Let them pass, said the leaves, let there be peace, be peace ...
The rattling grew louder. He turned carefully, following the progression of an upright shape rocking in the bed of a handcart. Draped in heavy cloth, it was making its way along the road like a small shuddering tower. Two men were pulling it, one tall, one squat-looking, each gripping a wooden shaft connected to the vehicle’s side panels, each man powdered from head to foot in dust.
Then the rattling quietened. As the men halted, he eyed them anxiously, keen to return to his bliss. But it appeared they’d stopped in order to debate something.
He watched them talking. The shorter of the pair had round shoulders and muscular arms, with thick dark hair chopped severely in a bowl. His partner, clad in a broad-brimmed hat, was peering down at him with a vague, searching expression that, set in such a bony and angular face, seemed almost sinister. He seemed to enjoy gesticulating, and his long flapping arms were filled with enigmatic gestures that immediately arrested Moth’s attention and would not let go. He noticed the man was clad in tight leggings, over which fluttered a long ragged shirt of the kind he’d seen worn by certain ascetics who collected alms along the road. The squat man was dressed similarly, but in darker clothes. For a moment he wondered if they were ascetics themselves, but then something in their manner made him doubt it. Something indefinable, yet slightly odd, and which unsettled him. He wondered if it might have been their laughter, a cold, mirthless sound in such sweltering weather. On such a day.
It wasn’t clear to him whether they were discussing something or arguing over it, but the longer they remained where they were, the more urgently the calm he’d discovered began to churn in him, to dissipate. The squat man was glancing around uncertainly, looking up the road and back again, while the tall man stood with his hands on his hips, staring directly to the south.
Exasperated, becoming angry now, he edged towards the trunk to hide himself, desperate for them to go. When a few minutes had passed, he checked the noose and sat with his eyes closed, praying he wouldn’t be seen. The road hung in silence, but it was a silence he did not trust: it meant they hadn’t moved.
He tried to absorb himself by thinking of his father. Falling, always falling, and Cora’s strong and beautiful features spreading like a watermark across the sea ...
In the distance the soft boom of waves ...
He returned to his falling, the three of them together …
‘Ah,’ said a quavering voice beneath him. ‘Aha-aha.’
There was a cough.
‘Yush. Consider the tree, and all therein and enclosed and so forth and et cetera. Such sadness, do you not think? So much to offer, and yet nowhere for it to go.’
As his eyes snapped open he gripped the bough with both hands, startled, and then worse than startled as he looked down. The tall man was clasping his hat in a gesture of pious lament while the squat man stood swaying beside him, his hands stuffed in his pockets. As the men looked up at him, leaning in together, the squat man nudged the tall man, saying, ‘Eh? Eh? Bit of a looker.’
He stared at them. ‘Sorry?’ he croaked. ‘What do you want?’
The tall man sniffed haughtily and tossed back his hair. It looked like a wig, one that had gone unwashed for years, and he watched in confusion and deepening dislike as the man toyed with the ends of it. It was the colour of dead cockroach legs and withered sunflowers, festooning his long rat’s skull like stalks of dirty straw.
‘I-I said, what do you want?’
The men continued to observe him without any discernible change of expression; oblivious, it seemed, to the idea that their attentions might go unwanted. He was about to roar at them, yell through his tears as his frustration mounted, when he fell still.
For the tall man had parted his fringe, unveiling his eyes.
Set in a face like famine and drought they were like cool oases in which twin blue suns were melting, and he found himself gazing deeply into them. All things forgotten: the heat of day, the problems of the road. It was only gradually that he was able to take in the man’s narrow face, finding deeply ingrained lines gathered around features that appeared to be ageless, yet which were so dreadfully ravaged by time and scars. In spite of this ugliness he found himself becoming drawn to the man, increasingly fascinated — then the stranger opened his mouth in a huge broadening smile which revealed something repellent and which shocked and disgusted him. At first he couldn’t understand it, then he realised that in place of teeth the man wore a pair of wooden clapperboards over his gums, each half embedded with a nightmare assortment of snaggled dentures that gave to his smile the crazed and warring leer of a miscreant pony. The men leant in closer, grinning. He glanced uneasily from one to the other.
Silence, the faint trilling of a bird. They stood watching him in apparent expectation.
‘Look, ah, it’s all right,’ he said, fingering the noose in growing discomfort, feeling foolish at being seen with it around his neck. ‘You can go now. I’m goin
g to be sitting here a while.’
They continued grinning, the tall man occasionally fluttering his eyelashes.
‘Didn’t you hear me? There’s nothing to see. You can go now, I’m just sitting here. I’m waiting for somebody. Ah … a friend.’
Otherwise motionless, the tall man started chattering his teeth: Dtch-dtch-dt-dt-dt.
He gripped the bough again, frightened. ‘Don’t do that,’ he gasped. ‘Stop it.’
‘What, child?’
Dtch-dtch-dt-dt-dt.
‘That. That noise. What you just did.’
The tall man cut his eyes to his colleague. ‘Did ... you hear anything?’ he asked ponderously.
Dtch-dtch-dt-dt-dt.
‘Not me guv,’ replied the squat man, still looking up.
Moth exhaled, wanting to scream, run, be far away from there. He could feel his sweaty shirt hanging on him, his plans slipping away beyond retrieval. The sun’s rays were slanting towards them through the dust; soon he would be burning in the glare, bound and helpless.
The tall man wrapped a long red tongue around his teeth and closed his mouth. ‘Ahem,’ he coughed, eyeing the noose, and once more Moth was stilled by his gaze.
‘I have something to inform you. And furthermore, lusush naturae and suchlike notwithshtanding, I believe it might be of ushe.’ The man tapped his mouth. ‘Given your current ... predicament.’
Of use. Predicament. The words seemed to resonate in the small clearing, and intrigued by the prospect of knowing more about the strangers, he was about to ask what they had to say for themselves when the man coughed again. ‘Indulge me, child,’ he said, smiling fixedly beneath the glare of his strange blue eyes.
‘What?’ Moth whispered. ‘What do you want to tell me?’
The smile was fading to a grimace.
‘Go on,’ the squat man muttered, nudging his colleague. ‘Tell im. He wants to know.’
The tall man’s chest slumped in a sigh. ‘Oh, very well,’ he said ungraciously, then he looked up again, fanning himself with his hat as he assumed an attitude of beatific contemplation. ‘There was once a man,’ he said, ‘and all he did was run. Run, run, run, run, run.’
Moth watched as the man performed a skipping motion with his fingers. The fingernails looked scorched.
‘Run, run, run, run, run. You get the idea?’
He nodded.
‘One day another man came after him with a question. “What are you running from?” he asked, to which the first man replied, “But I’m not, my dear fellow,” and continued to run. All day long they ran together, and all day the second man asked the first man what he was running from. “What are you running from?” he would ask, and the first man would reply, “Oh, but I’m not,” and would run on all the harder.’
The man paused, fluttering his eyelids. Moth looked at him, then turned his gaze to the squat man, who’d been nodding in agreement all along, and now stood nodding and grinning in the ensuing silence, thick arms akimbo.
The tall man smiled toothily, raising an eyebrow.
Moth blinked in confusion. ‘So? But I don’t ...’
‘Ah.’ The man wafted his hat. ‘So off they went, running and running all day long. Running all the time, and all the while the second man kept asking the first man what he was running from.’
‘But …’
‘Hush, child.’ He put a charred fingernail to his lips. ‘Until, at the day’s end, they were approaching a distant house. They ran towards it together, and as they got nearer, the first man turned to the second man and said, “You see, I’m not running from, I’m running to,” then ran into the house as fast as he could and slammed the door.’
‘Blimey,’ said the squat man, shaking his head, and walked off towards the handcart.
The tall man replaced his hat.
Moth shifted uncomfortably, feeling hot and lost. He’d managed to loosen the rope a little, and as he tugged at the noose again he looked down at the stranger, feeling he was missing something. ‘But … so, what happened?’
‘He had dinner, child. Chops, I believe.’
He gazed into the pit of the man’s smile. ‘But ... what about the other one? What happened to him?’
The man fixed him with his eyes. Bared his teeth. ‘He got eaten.’
He swallowed tightly.
A moment later, the man produced a long yellow pipe from within his flowing shirt. ‘The point is, child,’ he said in a hollow tone, ‘which are you? Hmm? Running from … or running to?’
He bit his lip, close to tears again. ‘I … I don’t know,’ he whispered.
‘Ah.’ The man began to strike the pipe bowl against the heel of his hand. ‘Very common. Very common indeed. Then perhaps you should come down here and try something. It might help you to decide.’ He looked up, beaming. ‘I can see that you’re occupied, child, but don’t worry. It won’t take long.’
‘I don’t want to,’ he replied, wary but also intrigued as he watched the man hammer away at the bowl. ‘What … what do I have to do?’
The man cupped a burnt-looking ear. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Wh-why don’t you just tell me?’
The man fanned himself as if he were blushing. ‘Oh, no no no no no,’ he cooed, ‘I couldn’t, child. It would take too long. Besides, I’m quater horses as it is.’
Moth caught him fluttering his eyelashes again. ‘Well, just show it to me then.’
Wrinkling his nose, the man said quickly, ‘Oh no I couldn’t possibly I don’t climb.’
He thought about this for a moment, almost tempted to laugh, then noticed the squat man returning with a handful of smouldering grass. He was approaching at a trot, wincing as if the grass was burning him. As soon as he was beneath the bough, he set the grass on the ground and crouched down to blow on it, to shape it a little. Then, once the smoke had bloomed into flames, he set about adding dry bits of wood, so that before long a small fire was crackling there.
‘Hey,’ he gasped, watching incredulously as the man went round the area gathering fallen twigs and branches. ‘Hey! HEY! What are you doing?’
The tall man was beaming up at him. ‘Helping, child. Helping hands.’
‘But I don’t want your help. Stop it! You! Hey! HEY! I don’t want you to help me! STOP!’
‘Eat or be eaten, child,’ the tall man said calmly. ‘Which is it to be?’
While Moth continued to yell, the squat man built up the fire with the wood he’d gathered, whistling tunelessly. A minute later, upon assembling a satisfactory pile, he brushed his hands clean and ambled away to the bushes, where he began to poke about as if in search of something. In growing outrage, Moth watched him dig out his bag, which, as he returned to the fire, he proceeded to rifle through with brisk indifference, shaking out his last earthly belongings and scattering them across the ground.
‘Hey! Stop it!’ he screamed, ‘they’re mine! Leave them!’ but the squat man seemed not to have the faintest interest in his protests. Grinning as he kicked the items apart, he picked up a few, only to toss them aside upon inspecting them. Others he threw carelessly into the flames.
Into the fire went his food. His scarf. The precious wallet of hooks. The smoke darkened and wove thickly up through the branches.
Coughing, he saw that unless he escaped from the strangers, he would be dead that night whether he chose it or not. ‘I said STOP!’ he cried, tearing off the noose, then he lunged at the trunk and shinned down it and jumped to the ground and staggered away, his eyes shining in fear as he edged backwards from the strangers, who had begun to close in and encircle him.
They were crouching as they moved, surrounding him with thin cold smiles and outstretched hands. Trembling, turning as they turned, his eyes swung from one man to the other. He felt for his knife, but felt nothing, for he had forsaken it, left it in the bag.
Silence, the flames crackling through the smoke, only his broken glider out of harm’s way, hidden in the bushes. He glanced at the road, wo
ndering if he had the strength to run. Then he hesitated, noticing the men had stopped.
‘What’s wrong with im?’ the squat man muttered.
‘Give me my bag!’ he cried, still edging away. He eyed nervously the man’s thick arms, the shirt bulging with muscle and dark with sweat. There was a blankness in his eyes that he didn’t like, that he feared as much as his presence there. As if there was nothing human inside him. ‘It’s not yours, it’s mine. Mine. I want it back.’
‘Thought we were having lunch,’ the man added, shifting his feet from side to side.
‘But so did I,’ the tall man replied, apparently in some distress. Catching movement, Moth leapt round to face him, astonished to find he was holding up three long meaty ribs, the pipe having vanished somewhere. The tall man wafted them seductively, batting his eyelids. ‘I thought you were looking a little peckish, child. Hmmmm?’
‘That’s right. Thought he was starving,’ said the squat man, looking concerned. Moth saw him shrug, exchanging a forlorn look with his colleague.
‘Child,’ said the tall man, tossing the ribs one at a time to the squat man, who on catching them took them over to the fire, ‘consider thish — why bother to harm yourself when all the worldsh trying to beat you to it?’ He smiled coyly, repositioning his teeth, then walked backwards in huge leggy strides to join the other man.
As the men spoke together, he watched them anxiously, wiping the sweat from his face, not quite convinced they’d let him go; and yet at the same time, now that they’d turned their backs to him, it was as if he wasn’t there. He watched the tall man as he went off gathering fresh fuel, then watched the other man as he dragged rocks over to the fire and placed them around it at intervals. Neither seemed to take any further interest in his bag or its paltry contents, and with a tense, guarded expression, he watched them set up camp together, chatting and laughing gaily as they continued their work.
