Grammar snarled, a tiger’s half-cough.
“Cowardly bastards,” he said, in English. Adding, contemptuously: “’Rhakshasa’, am I? Hardly an opinion worth dying over.”
Romesh Singh, wisely enough, said nothing – his own eyes kept firmly shut – as a long, wet, green moment passed over them, darkening both their scarlet coats to rust.
Grammar laughed, and let the sheath drop away from his sword, falling point-down. It quivered by one foot, mud-supported, forgotten.
“Well, come then, my shadow,” he told the curtain of underbrush before him (having, without even noticing, slid fluidly back into Hindi). “Or shall I haste to meet thee? For either way, you will find me as I find myself: Ready.”
And still Romesh Singh stood, feeling the rain seep down through his clothes and lave his trembling body abruptly to life, every nerve set winking in the gloom like unseen stars above.
(Thinking only: But now we are alone at last, thou and I. Together.)
They were both wrong, of course. Grammar, all his impressively flaunted rage aside, was nothing near to ready – as Romesh Singh might have told him, had he cared to solicit a second opinion – and neither was alone, with or without the other.
For I was already here. As I always had been.
««—»»
The rain, the mud, the dead and cooling bodies, the silent trees. I was present and accounted for in all of it at once, a speck of me everywhere the eye might care to light, pixilating slowly to fruition. In the very air itself, between every falling raindrop – sub-dust, sub-viri, void-breath on the back of the neck, a shadow on the face of the whole. I spread out around the carcass of the dead former sepoy like a stain, over the clearing’s seared floor, so fragrant yet with ash; and ah, but that fire had burned brightly, for all it was only a heap of corpses doused in lamp-oil. Brown corpse melting to black, black rivulets twining like veins across the soaked earth, black snakes rising in their wake. A black river, abruptly, in full flood, lapping the British soldier’s remains in as well with no visible distinction – rearing, seeping, clotting – knitting both together like some prescient scab, the kind that outlines itself before a wound has even been opened.
One hot whiff caught on the wind, a brief, intestinal stink: Eau de massacre. One sentient platelet left swimming in a sea of blood, shed and unshed alike.
Beyond the fire’s sodden ring, Desbarrats Grammar had already slashed the first layer of leaves aside and forged on ahead into the jungle (bent on finding any kind of explanation for the night’s work, or his sadly smirched reputation, that did not involve the word Rhakshasa), leaving Romesh Singh to plead vainly after him – sick to heart and increasingly cold, with his empty hands ineffectually raised against the drumming rain.
(For the bell tolled in him still, o my beloved – fluid, subterranean. Mateless, but crying for its mate. And this suited me so well I would have smiled to see it, had I but the lips to smile with – or the eyes to see.)
Such a lack, however, was easily remedied.
“Romesh Singh,” I called him, softly. He turned.
Upright now, a loosely wavering column of matte black against the clearing’s larger blackness – hollow, scarring, extruded from the space between all things – I drew myself in tight, and called Grammar’s all-too-familiar face to me, simultaneously making myself both a spine to hold it up and a skull to hang it on. I let flesh drip over me, pore by pore.
Over the flesh, I drew skin; over the skin, blood.
Naked under the rain’s caress, I opened Grammar’s eyes – so blind, so pale, so very, very British, in the raw mask that was his truest reflection – and raised them, meeting Romesh Singh’s.
“My good soldier,” I said.
He swallowed, pupils wide, his dry throat grating tentatively back upon itself.
“Thou…” he began. “Thou art…”
“Oh, I.” Stepping, cat-sure on Grammar’s smooth-soled feet, to print the mud between us. “A wandering minstrel, I,” I said. “A knight of air and darkness.”
“…Rhakshasa,” finished Romesh Singh.
He said it with a sigh, so soft the word was part of his exhalation. That fatal – that only – name. I nodded at the sound. To prove the truth of his assumption, I spread my hands – my fingers – on which the claws bend back so far they are not really claws at all, but twisting knives of sharpest horn.
“Shreds and patches,” I said. “Dead man’s fingernails.”
And I peeled back Grammar’s lips, to show how my teeth arced up from his narrow British jaw like some ill-timed jest, sharp and yellow as a carrion dog’s.
Yet Romesh Singh held his ground, back straight, like the warrior he was.
(For we both knew Grammar was too far ahead now to hear him, even if he chose to call for help. But no man really wishes aid at such a moment, o my beloved – not when his longest-held dream finally stalks towards him on nude white feet, arms out, and smiling.)
“Let down thy hair, my brother,” I suggested, “that I may feel its weight.”
Lightly, surely, I laid my claws on either side of Romesh Singh’s jaw and worked the muscles like hinges, pinching his lips open – and though I had hoped (if I could) to grant him a gentle exit, my hunger soon betrayed itself in their sharpness, rimming the corner of his mouth with blood.
He gasped, swallowing it.
“Be merciful to me,” he whispered. “As… he would be.”
Oh, loyal, loving, deluded man. A born victim, if ever there was one.
“Ah,” I said, gently. “But we are the same, he and I. So I cannot promise you what he would never give.”
A flash of moon, bisected, fell over us through the trees; the blood caught its light, sparking a hot copper flare of lust that made my own lips abruptly wet. To compensate, I licked his clean.
Our tongues touched.
This distracted him enough, hopefully, to make what followed only a brief (if, no doubt, rather unpleasant) surprise – as I suddenly forced the rest of my head through his mouth until his head cracked like a wishbone, rupturing his throat, making his face my collar, spraying teeth. Hugging him to me, into me, as I rooted for brains in the blind, red ruin of his skull.
I suppose I had foreseen – somewhat faintly, considering the Lieutenant’s continuing capacity for unpredictable behavior – that the sound of this process would draw Grammar back to the clearing. Not that it mattered much either way, at this point, though forgoing a prolonged chase (wearing Romesh Singh’s now-uninhabited skin, perhaps?) would certainly have saved me a little time. But just as the consumption of a long-desired object tends to erase whatever wait one may have had to put oneself through in order to attain it, so strategy must inevitably dim in appetite’s shadow. Blood filled my eyes; I drank deep, and gave myself up to ecstasy.
Presently, however, I felt Grammar’s blade graze the back of my neck – wing-sharp, a dragonfly’s delicate needle – and knew my plans had not been laid in vain.
Popping Romesh Singh’s remaining eye between my teeth (just in case, should intelligible conversation yet prove necessary), I turned – grinning – to show him his own face: Red from browline to Adam’s apple, chin slicked with fresh overflow. And a jolt passed between us, starburst-quick – not one of shock, so much, as of recognition. The Lieutenant’s prim British mouth crumpling like an insulted cat’s, ludicrous with embarrassed amazement, to find his unsought namesake’s pleasures were so very like his own.
The sword, however, did not waver.
I smiled at the sight – and swung Romesh Singh’s carcass like a dancing partner, dipping it towards him, as if offering him a bite.
“You must be hungry,” I said. “Please: Do not hesitate to indulge yourself.”
Grammar snarled again (his sole response in such circumstances, it seems) and stabbed me through the throat; I flexed, and sucked him further in, immersing him up to his armpit. For one endless moment, too paralytic even for struggle, he felt my internal organs stroke
him seductively, and gagged. At which point I interrupted his train of nausea in mid-heave, just as gorge met gullet, and assured myself of his complete attention by thrusting my own arm (up to the elbow) inside his armpit – cracking ribs, perforating lung, expelling a warm rush of half-digested food from the lower esophagus, all in quest of that wildly-fluttering knot of muscle he called a heart.
Grammar coughed, and went rigid. His eyes turned up. But it was not my intention to let him die quite so quickly, now that we had finally met.
My fingers closed fast around left and right ventricles, pumping him awake. Saying, solicitously:
“Oh, no. Be so good as to not leave me just yet, Lieutenant.”
With an effort, Grammar forced his eyes to focus on me. A rictus pulled at his cheek. Words formed, along with a bright new bubble of blood.
“Do… your… worst,” he replied, carefully. “I… don’t care.”
I gave him a wide, blank smile – and chanted, singsong:
“Don’t-care didn’t care. Don’t-care was wild. Don’t-care stole plum and pear, like any beggar’s child.”
Sucking him closer – the maw that had been me (and him as well, come to think of it) now covering almost all of him below the shoulder, sprouting a fine interior coat of teeth that pressed and teased, unable to resist sampling at the anticipated feast; here a shaven fingernail, there a beheaded nipple.
Looking down, I could see his genitals begin – all unnoticed, for once – to stiffen.
“But Don’t-care was made to care,” I continued, blithely. “Don’t-care was hung. Don’t-care was put in the pot, and boiled ‘til he was done.”
And I gave his heart another little squeeze, for emphasis.
Oh, yes, his Empire might well linger far into the next century. But he’d be going home much sooner – and not to London, either, where he might at least occasionally be able to buy someone to kill. Back to some dreary Suffolk estate, to take up the middle child’s portion, dazzling idiots behind the hay-wains with a fading grab-bag of exotic memories, doomed to forever wear the mask of respectability. To marry, to breed, to be buried and rot. And all in a dim, small place that no longer held anything but potential boredom for him, where no one would know to stiffen at his scent, or whisper his name in fear as he passed by.
Well, we were in the jungle now. And the law of the jungle is universally understood: Eat, or be eaten.
“Have no fear, Lieutenant,” I murmured. “For you may count yourself assured that, even if no else does, I will take care to always award you a place in my memory.”
Grammar blinked, his eyes already red-lined and darkening, as the cilia slowly hemorrhaged. His mouth worked, but words failed him. I brought mine closer, in case a final sentence might yet be forthcoming.
Then he gave a gushing whoop, and laughed out loud, spattering our mutual visage with liquid viscera.
Whereupon – with no regrets to speak of – I bit the mad bastard in half.
««—»»
And so at last we come to you, o my beloved – little raggamuffin, would-be tourist district date rapist. You, with your fresh-cut fade and precious Apache Indian concert tickets, with barely enough real Hindi under your belt to tell the demure Calcutta girl you once thought I was – when first we met, you all swagger and chatter, spinning yourself a man-sized noose of lies as you steered me towards this oh-so-deserted alley – a dirty joke. Here in this bright, drunken, filthy place, so full of neon and flies, this overhanging crush of shacks where one open window lets slip a lick of the latest Bollywood duet, another the drone of Johnny Cash falling down, down, down. The ring of fire, the endless Wheel, spinning.
You thought me merely a bumpkin to be robbed of her virginity, and yourself the true synthesis of Anglo-Indian culture, post-British Occupation. But I believe you now know better.
The Mutiny of 1857 marked one whole turn of the Wheel for India and Britain alike, replacing up most firmly with down; it gave the British (via the East India Company) a perfect excuse to stay in India, to seize control, to cut down the guilty and the “loyal” alike in their lust for gain. They imposed their own system of values on everything they met: Breaking apart clans, ransacking treasuries, erasing whole villages, disinheriting heirs because they were adopted rather than biological, and deeding the lands involved to a plump little Queen, more concerned with the state of her marriage than with exactly whose bleeding hands all these exotic gifts had been ripped from.
Soon enough, Army replaced Company – but nothing really changed. The British swept in like a tide of cockroaches, mating and killing as they willed, forcing themselves in at the top of our caste system in order to escape their own. They stayed until they had outworn their welcome a thousand times over, until those brought up in India – but still calling an England they had never even seen “Home” – were immune to even its most enticing charms. They maintained their stiff spines upright against heat and dust, forgetfulness, sensual excess and nonviolent protest alike, clinging to their Indian holdings even as the rest of their duskless Empire crumbled – slowly but surely – from within, until their provisional government here was nothing but a skeleton at the feast, last guest left at a singularly unpopular party, still busily stuffing food down its denuded jaws and protesting all the while (whining like a spoiled child, even as the bouncers edge it towards the door) that it is not sleepy, that it has hours yet to revel, wishes yet to make, and room for much, much more.
At last, however, the British did leave – freeing us to return to the long-postponed business of slaughtering each other over differences of race, creed, history. The Wheel had turned again, as it always will.
Yes, it burns, burns, burns, this ring of fire. It keeps on spinning. And I hope you find it hot enough for your liking, o my beloved, just as the Lieutenant and I do – and have, ever since that night in 1857, when his mad appetites mingled so very surely with my own immortal ones, along with his stringy white meat. That night, when I bit through him at one swallow – rind to pulp, red juice spurting, like an overripe piece of fruit – only to have the taste of him linger not only in my mouth but in every other part of me as well: Infected, infectious, infecting.
Before that night, I had no “true shape” to speak of. It was my curse, and my strength – this restless formlessness; this unstinting, innate empathy pulling me forward through the centuries, making every new thing I touched my potential refuge. This much, at least, has never altered. I can still be anything I choose, if I choose.
But now, whenever I relax my hold, I flow back – relentlessly – into him.
Namesake to namesake: The mask and the mirror. Desbarrats Grammar usurped my title, so I made him my prey; I consumed his flesh, and it engulfed me. What was an accidental mislabeling has become a complex truth. Here in the ring of fire, Lieutenant Grammar and I twine tight as mating heartworms, joined at the supernatural equivalent of DNA – the Mutiny that walks like whatever it chooses to. We catch and claw. And at last, almost two hundred years later – as the Wheel, in our case, fails to turn – between the two of us, each only half-there to begin with, something has finally evolved resembling a coordinated whole. Sub lal hogea hai, with a vengeance; so much so that neither of us – former occupier or former occupied – can truthfully tell where we once began, or where we now end.
For were we ever so very different, really?
Liars both. Madmen, cannibals. And monsters.
Ah, but I see you yet stir in my embrace – so slowly, so feebly. Your lips move. Do you wish to refute my words? To confirm them, perhaps?
Lean closer, then, o my beloved. Do not be shy, but do choose your side wisely. Lean closer, closer. And speak up, I pray thee – for I am still quite deaf in this one ear.
Crossing The River
By Gemma Files
…dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is
not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.
– Anne Sexton
ere’s how it probably happens, that first time, if you’re anything like me…
Your Momma wakes you in the middle of the night, takes you up on the mountain. Says she has something fine and secret to show you, something that sets you and her apart from all the rest of the common herd. This here is our’n, baby girl, she tells you, gifted by Him who made us to the whole of our blood – and you more than most, darlin’. You more than any.
And what is it you see once she’s got you up there, anyhow? Maybe a dog with horns or a black cat bigger than a bull, a goat with women’s breasts and owl’s eyes, some sort of beast having ten horns, ten crowns, and on every head the name of blasphemy. Or maybe just a pale man with a black beard and a sad face, like the ghost of Osama bin Laden, who lays one hand on the top of your skull, the other on the sole of your foot and laughs, saying: Shall I really take you for gift on only your mother’s word, all of you, everything which lies between this hand and that? What true mischief could I ever possibly do in this world with such a little one as you, Gley Chatwin’s gal?
If you’re anything like me, which most just ain’t. Because my Momma was a witch, same as hers, and so on; it’s from their side of things that I can’t stand the touch of salt, can’t cry real tears. But I sure ain’t no hill-woman like her, either, out hollering to Old Scratch every full moon – and I never did kiss any man’s ass but for money, horns or no. I got my pride.
So: I can throw out a fetch, given time, and dirt enough to build one from. Bring anyone my way and keep ‘em long as I want, using nothing but a drop of their blood, a drop of mine and a hank of my own long hair to tie the knot with. Spread out a pack of cards and tell you your future; knock a rag against a stone and raise up a wind, then write nonsense words on myself to whip that same wind into a Force Three twister; make doors slam, tables tap and call up a ghost to talk through me, just like that woman of Endor who got old King Saul in so much trouble with the Almighty.
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