The Cloven

by Brian Catling

  “When I am in bed in the dark?”

  “No, child, here and now.”

  “Will it hurt?” she said, shading her closed eyes with her hand so that she could hear his face more clearly.

  Marais smiled. “No, not at all, why should it hurt? Sleeping doesn’t hurt. Not for you anyway.”

  “You said medicine, and medicine always hurts.”

  Marais laughed again, quieter this time, and moved closer to her. “I promise you that nothing will hurt, little one, and that you will enjoy the magic of this.”

  “It sounds funny,” she said.

  “Your poppa asked me to ask you to try the magic. So what do you think?”

  While she thought about it, the birds in the trees became interested, and some of them watched and made small comments.

  “Yes please, Oom, I want to try the magic.”

  “Very well,” he said in a jaunty manner. “May I touch your head for a moment?”

  She nodded and he put one of his hands across her forehead; it felt cool and gave her more shade to think in. His other hand held hers.

  “I want you to imagine you are in your room lying down by the open window. It’s raining outside and you can hear the water dropping on the leaves and the roof of the house. Very gradually the sound will fade as you become more tired and soon the rain will sound a long way off. Soon. Soon.”

  Cyrena’s breathing changed and she slumped slightly.

  “It’s far, far off now, and you are in a warm, cosy sleep.”

  Now all the birds were quiet.

  “Tell what is inside you, what story lives there.”

  Cyrena instantly began to talk. “It’s a tall sky in a closed room with everybody sleeping next door.”

  “Is it light or dark there?” he carefully asked.

  For a moment she looked like she did not understand the question.

  “Do you know what light and dark are?”

  The corners of her mouth twitched. “Of course, dark is the inside, the deepness. Light is the outside, shifting, the forever. Now it’s sort of in between, as if the shell of me lets them in and out.”

  “Very well, Cyrena. This is what sighted people call transparent.”

  “Glass is transparent,” she said eagerly.

  “That’s true. How did you know about glass?”

  “I broke one and Mother said not to move until she found all the pieces, and they were difficult to find because they were transparent. She explained that it was like invisible, which is like not being there.”

  “Did any of this make any sense to you?”

  “No, but I do know that glass is different because it’s colder and quicker than the other cups.”

  Marais shifted and came closer to her. She was thinking hard where she was supposed to be dreaming and he was a little worried about her expression of concentration. He had never seen it before in a hypnotised subject.

  “I think I can understand ‘sight’ now,” she announced.

  “Tell me, child,” he said softly.

  “Sight is like part of the me shell, it lives between light and dark and keeps them separate. In most people it must be cold and hard, but in me it’s transparent. Which means that it makes things invisible and lets them pass through. Isn’t that right, Oom Eugène?”

  Marais was mesmerised and just stared at the child, who had opened her eyes on speaking his name. He stared through her with her wisdom ringing in his ears.

  “Oom Eugène,” she said into a space that he had never conceived of. “Oom Eugène?” Fear had entered her voice and her remarkable eyes moved as if searching for him, but why? Why did those defunct beautiful orbs attempt to catch his trace?

  “Yes, Cyrena, I am here.”

  Her face softened, the eyes resting on him before the lids closed. In that moment he felt them touch him, as if an infinitesimal pressure had emanated from them in a physical ray onto the surface of his being, his position in the world being held and defined by the beam of her tangible sightless gaze. It jolted his concentration and he felt his control of the session slip.

  “Cyrena, can you hear the rain? It’s getting closer again.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s coming towards your window and pattering on the leaves outside.”

  “Yes, I can hear it.”

  “Soon it will wake you from your refreshing sleep, soon, soon…Now you are wide awake.”

  Nothing happened, there was no change in her position and she said nothing.

  “Cyrena, are you awake?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I think I just saw something.”

  This had never happened before. All of his “subjects” had responded instantly to his suggested commands. Unease had entered their session.

  “Cyrena, it’s time for you to wake up, the rain is on the roof. Can you hear it?”

  She did not answer but turned her head sharply to the right and opened her eyes again and strained them towards the tree full of silent birds. Marais was trying to hold down the anxiety that was welling up inside him.

  “Cyrena, close your eyes and sit back as you were before.”

  “I think I can see something,” she said with curious dispassion.

  Was this possible, he asked himself. Had the hypnosis unlocked her vision? Undone some knotted causeway in her bright mind? Was it possible?

  Cyrena had been born blind, and that was the least of her tragedies when her father found her. Her malnutrition and exposure were as easily soothed as her lack of social awareness. The Lohrs’ wealth, love, and commitment shaped her back into normality before her first words came. But the blindness remained, seeded deep in her infant soul and body. The nature of the malady had never been accurately diagnosed, even though all the family’s riches and influences had exposed it to some of the best specialists in Europe. There had been wildly disparate and disappointing opinions about the cause of the problem and very little solid evidence to form the basis of a cure. One of her father’s and Marais’s old friends from London had suggested surgery. But the proposed operation sounded vague and exploratory, and Lohr had no intention of letting his precious daughter undergo the hazards of anaesthetics and infection without the balance of cure and recovery being heavily weighted on their side.

  “Cyrena, what can you see?”

  “I think it’s sight, but I don’t know, Oom.”

  “Describe it to me.”

  He knew he should not be going in this direction; he should be fiercely trawling her back into full consciousness.

  “I think it’s the invisible living in that tree, where the birds are quiet.”

  “What?” Marais barely said.

  “The invisible and it’s coming closer.”

  She lifted her arm and moved her flat hand in a circle above her head, as if describing a halo. The obscure gesture galvanised the gently spoken man. A cold chill ran through the warmth of the day and hid itself in his blood.

  “Close your eyes, Cyrena. Close your eyes.”

  “But, Oom, it’s coming.”

  “No buts, Cyrena, close your eyes now, it’s the rain that is coming closer.”

  “But the sight.”

  “No buts, close your eyes.”

  The cold in his blood had strengthened into a furious ice, so that now his muscles copied it and his slender body knotted into the purpose of pulling her back.

  “The rain is getting closer, you are in your tall room with all your people sleeping next door. You are home and the rain is getting closer, do you hear it?”

  After a pause, which seemed to span an eternity, she turned her head back towards him and closed her eyes.

  “Yes, Oom, I hear it.”

  “It’s getting closer and you are waking u
p.”

  “Yes, Oom.”

  “Now you are awake.”

  Her eyelids opened and her face set into a beaming smile. The weight and tension fell from his bones like a suit of rusted armour. She looked straight at him and her radiance told him all was well. Her sightless eyes gleamed in anticipation.

  “When are we going to do the magic?” she asked.

  The next morning Cyrena wanted to talk more to him about the “magic” of the day before, but there were so many people at the breakfast table it was difficult to attract his concentrated attention. Later, before he left, she spoke to him for a few minutes, but he seemed distracted, as if he were already travelling.

  “You said I talked in my sleep.”

  “Yes, Cyrena.”

  “Tell me again what I said, the bit about the tree.”

  She heard him fiddle with the catch of his suitcase, heard its weight scuffle the planks of the wooden veranda. He seemed to be taking too long to answer, as if he forgotten the question or was distracted by something else. She started to ask again and he began speaking.

  “You talked about something in the tree, something that you thought you could see.” His mouth sounded dry.

  “Did I say see?”

  “In a way, yes, Cyrena.”

  They sat quietly for a few minutes and then Marais spoke. “You said you saw the invisible.”

  “Yes, I think I did, but not with my eyes, I saw it inside my head.”

  “And you made a strange movement.”

  “You said I touched my head.”

  “Not exactly.” He sounded tired. “You held your hand out flat and moved it over your head.”

  “Like this,” said Cyrena, lifting her arm and waving her hand in a boneless kind of way.

  “Not exactly. May I take your hand and show you?”

  She grinned and nodded approval. Marais stepped forward and took her hand, unfolding it gently, and rotated it in the circular motion that he had seen before. He then let go and stepped back while she continued.

  “Feels funny,” she said, the grin vanishing from her confused face. “Like I am wearing a halo.”

  He said nothing. They were interrupted by the car that was to take him away pulling into the dusty yard. Marais spoke a few words to the driver and put his suitcase on the backseat before returning to Cyrena, who had stopped making the movement.

  “I have to go now.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “If you dream the answer will you write it down and send it to me in Waterberg?”

  “Yes, Oom.”

  “Write to me about anything, stay in touch, especially about the invisible,” he prompted.

  “It’s gone now, I used the lemon juice.”

  “Lemon juice, what lemon juice?”

  “It’s something I heard my brother and his friends say.”

  Marais was looking at her the way he did yesterday and she could feel it.

  “They said it about the invisible, so I did it. I put the lemon juice in my eyes and then looked at the sun to make them hot, and then the invisible was gone. But I won’t do it again, it hurt.”

  “Yes, I think you’d better not,” said Marais as he walked to the car, opened the door, and joined his case on the backseat. He was laughing as he waved goodbye.

  * * *

  —

  That had been so many years ago, when she was a child. Only Christmas cards and formal family notes had passed between them through the years of her growth into maturity.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  They had been forced to flee the house, when they ran from the terrible child with the gun. Their only way was down and Ishmael led the descent, going lower than the cyclops had ever dared to before. At the mouth of the well they stopped and he doubled over, fighting for breath. Seth saw this and knew what he must do. He looked at Aklia, and she nodded and put her hand deep in her mouth. Seth brought his tight Bakelite fingers down onto the coughing Ishmael and pinched his neck hard. The cyclops passed out. Seth turned him over and unbuckled the belt of his trousers. Aklia brought a thick paste out of her throat and applied it putty-like to Ishmael’s mouth, nostrils, and gaping imitation eye socket. While it was setting, her brother turned Ishmael over and lovingly wormed his long brown finger into his anus. After a moment or two he found the conduit with the fleshy switch and turned it off. Ishmael instantly stopped breathing. Together they lifted him and dropped him into the well and then slid down after him, grasping the sinking body as it swirled, spiralling like a heavy meaningless pebble through the thick black water.

  Below the meniscus of the water in the deep cold well, the tension changed. Seth and Aklia were holding Ishmael between them in the pitch-blackness that flowed between the well of Kühler Brunnen and the centre of the Vorrh. They kicked against its resistance and crawl-swam farther and farther from the city.

  The pool that was embedded in the heart of the Vorrh was fed by the twisting river that passed through it. It also gained dimension and substance from underground waters that streamed from the unnamed core. And who would dare attempt to classify the interior of that compacted heart that still tastes the impact of the violent planetary bodies that wandered into the earth’s sluttish gravitational lure? After so many millions of years the core still remembered the impacts and passed them on in stutters to all its waters. The myriad capillaries and veins wormed their way upwards to meet the fault lines that run weblike in all directions. The most profound of the enclosed channels was the muscular aorta that led into Essenwald. The one that ended in the well beneath Kühler Brunnen. The one in which two swimmers propelled a sagging weight inch by inch through the tight water, scraping and clawing against the irregular pitch-black sides where roots forage but obey the laws of this uninfestable water. They do not intrude but grip around the conduit, creating riblike enforcements that have strengthened its intention over the millennia. Even the inquisitive nibbling hairs at the foraging roots’ farthest tips dare push not any deeper, dare not fulfil their ultimate purpose. They have learned that intrusion here would wither and perish all the patient wood that creaks above to semaphore the stars.

  The dense root mass that cups the pool and strains towards the old heart is thicker than the earth that it drinks from. The tangle of blind suction has dug deep and grabbed all substance with its anchoring fists. Even the roots of the tree of knowledge are down there. The tree itself is long since gone; it had started to wither before the sons of Adam had populated the world. Its husk hollowed out, choked and leached by the vines and strangling figs until it fell away, leaving only a circular stump. But a stump that was not entirely dead. It thick dark mass had been fed by the trees around it. Tendrils of mercy seeking its lostness and insisting on sustenance. The black cap got darker and hid what was happening below ground, the roots having copied its primary form. An albino structure of florescent grey echoing what once was above. So that each bough, branch, and twig is mirrored in the dark moistness. Each contour and gesture locked in the earth where none may see or disturb it ever again. The tunnel of water passes beneath it and at that place a vibration was felt in the working cream inside the Kin. They knew they were near their exit as they dragged their burden towards the surface. The darkness in the water-filled tube was changing as their vibrations travelled ahead to the open waters of the forest pool in the straining realm of turgor.

  When Seth rose up and punctured the air, a great wave of water spread across the pool’s surface. His polished brown head looked around for signs of danger, steam rising from his temples; when he made the erroneous assessment that nothing malign was in the vicinity, he bobbed back down to fetch Aklia and Ishmael. The moment his head went below the water, a chattering whistle was spat out between the dense foliage. Small smears of yellow could be seen in the stubborn bushes moving closer to the pool. The anthropophagi where there, and they were hung
ry.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Before Father Timothy stepped into the jaws of the Sea People’s home, he had climbed a high rock to look down upon them and understand something of the layout and occupation of their realm. The great mass of Vorrh and the vastness of sea was joined by a meandering serpent of a river and the tribe existed there in the mouth of the estuary, their huts and temples like so many ragged and broken teeth on both sides of the splintered mouth. The right shore was for dwelling, eating, and fishing; the left shore for prayer, surgery, and containment. He watched people come and go and smelt their charcoal of fish and incense, labour and strangeness. When he walked into their presence he did so with a fearful heart, holding the box above his head and speaking the words of visitation that he had learned. He said he had come for the sacred one. He said he had been told to come by a young majestic child named Modesta. He said the box was for Oneofthewilliams and should be opened only by him on his long-awaited return.

  The Sea People thanked him and gave him fish and comfort. He told the story of Modesta. He was encouraged to speak of her dreams and his visions, and when these were believed, he was invited to speak to Tyc. She had no time for Men Without Substance, finding their bleached anaemic skin both offensive and unnatural. They had no place here.

  But this one carried bounty in his mouth. Something had been put in the hollow of him and floated towards her and perhaps Oneofthewilliams. Could the child he spoke of be the sacred Irrinipeste, come back to life?

  Tyc was impressed by the way he held the box and would not give it up to any but the sacred one. She could have taken it at any time, chopped his hands away from it, but there was a foretelling in his puny will and little actions. Such things once perceived should never be violated, no matter how weak or disgusting their host. During the night of the squid moon she questioned Yuuptarno, who had been making the translations of the little white man’s words. She wanted to know of the accuracy of their meaning and how much was guesswork on Yuuptarno’s behalf. When she was satisfied, she called for her neophytes to bind the white creature and shelve him beneath her bed. She literally wanted to sleep on the matter.