The Cloven

by Brian Catling

  Kippa instantly tugged at the leglike appendages and slithered the entire thing back towards the rear of the canoe, its teeth and jaw raking the bilge.

  “Keep it there or it goes over the side, now.”

  The old priest lifted the shivering woman into his arms for the second time that day. He grabbed one of the rolled cloaks from an almost dry cubby at the side of the boat and wrapped it around her clattering bones. He pushed her head into the warmth of his chest so that he did not have to see her eyes.

  The boat was quiet as twilight approached, squeezing out of the trees, thickening in the gaps between them, and snuffing out each particle of light in the crystal air.

  “Make camp,” he almost whispered, anxious not to anger the gods of the dark or excite them about the strange being that was sleeping in his arms.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  The stillborns were easy to find, and were the side effect of the almost legal brothels that brought a great deal of unexpected money into Fleischer and Wirth’s back pockets. Just as the blind overseer had predicted, their idea about the discreet establishment was greatly approved of by Krespka and a few other more surprising members of the guild. The idea of sighting them outside of the Scyles was a masterstroke. The pox-ridden hovels of that quarter had long been known by every member of Essenwald’s permanent community and by its even larger itinerant tribes. Husbands who slunk off there to conduct business, even innocent transactions, were scorned by outraged wives and vilified by many others of the hypocritical elite. It had of course been Wirth who suggested building onto the ramshackle and disused stable block that sat at the back of the slave house and adjacent to his own dwelling. Nobody ever strayed into that territory. No respectable woman, citizen, or lost cat would put their dainty paws anywhere near the perfectly safe but ultimately sinister little hamlet.

  Finding the girls had also been easy. Amadi had collected eleven girls in three weeks, and there was a promise of more. She and Wirth ran the first house with great success. So much so that a new road had to be constructed; the old one deterred too many clients in the rainy season. The breeding cycle now gave a constant supply, which relieved Fleischer of his less-than-legal dealings with the infirmary and the cutthroats of the Scyles. The only problem was terminating the valuable products in the correct way. The Limboia were very choosey; they could instantly smell out the artificially aborted. Such rejection would make them cease work and halt the now-constant supply of trees. Fleischer found a man to help them perfect their technique, to pinch the life out without a trace or a print being left.

  Dorflinger, who had been trained as a dentist, had preferred reconstructing at other poles. He had made some notorious operations realigning and inventing genders in Cairo. He had been gaining a covert triumph until blood poisoning erased his best work and the father of the once-female victim had sought to operate on him. The desolate man was a sheikh of great wealth and influence and sent his emissaries to bring the despoiler back. They were still looking, still combing every gathering of hutches from the Nile to the Limpopo. They would find him eventually, but at the moment the back rooms of the slave house hid him well enough. And he enjoyed its cleanliness and protection and secretly admired Wirth and Amadi and the authority they worked for and administered. No one would ever go up against them. They were resolute and vicious.

  The only thing that troubled Dorflinger about them was their third companion—Domino, an albino hyena. Its huge savage stink followed its masters across the entire compound. One glance into its eyes convinced any onlooker about the implacability of love and hate. The beast was totally in love with Amadi and Wirth. Everything else it despised and wanted to tear apart.

  * * *

  —

  Fleischer had heard about the new girl and decided to make a detour to see her. Wirth had told him of her uniqueness, a face and body that could command astonishing prices. He had invited Fleischer to be the first to “try” her, presumably after he and Amadi had sampled the goods. He had tried to put it to the back of his mind, but over the last two days it had escaped and rubbed itself against all his actions and thoughts. So now in the sweltering afternoon he gave in and made his way towards the promised delight.

  The slave house was almost empty. Less than a third of the exhausted Limboia slept and moped about its locked interior. The stables, as they had become known, however, sounded busy. As he approached he saw the car of one of his parents’ best friends and decided that discretion was needed. For them both. He quickly walked to the front door of the warden’s house, which gave him a blind side to the stables. As he did so, he noticed a new structure had been built, which joined all three buildings. A low platform made of stout wood that rose four feet off the ground. A walkway, he supposed, as it was just wide enough for a person to stride. A walkway to keep Wirth’s boots clean from the mud and puddles in the rainy season. Probably a good idea, but he had not been consulted about it and it made him uneasy. He arrived at the door of the house and delicately knocked. No one moved inside. He knocked again and tried the handle. It was solidly locked. He thought about waiting outside but the heat was unbearable and any car coming or going to the stables would have seen him lurking about in a mindless state. Then he remembered that he still had the keys to the house on his chain. He fished them out while taking furtive looks at the road. The door opened and he stepped inside, which was cooler but stuffy, with a sickly animal musk about it. He knew that Wirth would not mind him taking shelter under the circumstances. There was a hum from a paraffin refrigerator in the kitchen and he helped himself to a beer from its pleasant temperature. He pottered about, touching things and trying to imagine the life of the alien pair in what had been the neat and tidy lives of the Maclishes’ home. So far he had not entered the house proper and only examined the tiny hall and kitchen. He now stood at the threshold to the interior rooms and noticed another new structure on the far wall. It appeared to be a flap or hanging door. His delineated mind quickly realised that it corresponded with the new walkway outside. This was all becoming very odd and inappropriate. Wirth was getting out of hand, cutting sections out of the fabric of the building. And what for? Fleischer stepped forward to investigate further and as he did so part of the floor moved under his feet. There was a hollow report, as if a heavy latch had been sprung back. The sound seemed to echo from the direction of the flap and then diminish as if it had been swallowed. Fleischer’s previous mild irritation was turning to unease. But he pulled himself together and stepped forward into the house to look at the flap. He lifted its weight and was surprised to find that it was partially counter-levered. He extended it with his right hand while bending down to look through it, expecting to see the outside and get a new view of the stables. But what he found himself looking into was a wooden rectangular tube, a constructed tunnel that stank of the feral musk that he had noticed before. He realised that it was the inside of the new walkways he had seen from the outside. Then from its long interior came a cry that made his blood run cold. The cry was followed by the clawed frenzy of something running inside the constructed tunnel. The cry turned into a wheezing, snarling cackle and he recognised what was hurtling towards him. He spun around and made for the door, tripping in the dip made by the intruder alarm lever hidden in the floor. He tumbled and sprawled across it, sliding on the thin matting. The tunnel behind him rattled and thudded. He reached for the door handle and touched its brassy hope when the flap crashed open. He did not want to look, he did not want to turn away from the polished knob, he did not want to see what was about to tear him apart. But he had to. It was huge, white, and out of focus. It stunk of piss, teeth, and glands. Then it slowed so that he could appreciate the horror of its pink eyes and widening grin.

  Domino had arrived.

  The albino hyena lowered its slavering head, its shoulders raised higher than its ears. It bent its face from side to side, which meant it was ready to rend and tear. Its lower hindquar
ters cringed to gain the ground to launch from. Fleischer was mesmerised by its ugliness and the certainty of his demise. He was without panic or submission as he wrapped his key ring around his fist. Domino brought her head back and sprung. He raised his hand and her wide, fanged mouth took it. The muscles in the neck and shoulders of a hyena are of greater proportion than in any other mammal, designed so that once its jaw has closed it can shake and wrench the flesh and bone from its prey. Domino did that now and the force spun Fleischer in a half circle, breaking his wrist and tearing his elbow. He screamed in pain and the hyena coughed out a giggling cackle from the back of its locked jaws. His fingers had gone, crunched into a mangled hub from which his body was twisted back and forth. The cackle suddenly changed to a shrieking whimper and the beast spat what had once been his hand and arm back at him. Domino slid back across the floor, trying to bury its head in the tiles and clawing at its own ears. Amadi appeared in the doorway, languid and unmoved, a long metal whistle held in her beautiful mouth. She shouted a few harsh commands and stopped whistling. The hyena slunk back towards her, its neck lowered and its hackles raised in submission. She spoke again in the same commanding tone. Wirth arrived carrying a sawn-off shotgun. Amadi spoke to him over her shoulder.

  “Naughty girl,” he said blindly towards the lurking beast and laughed.

  Amadi abruptly moved and yanked at the hyena’s blood-splattered mane. Wirth came into the room, put the gun down, and groped his way towards Fleischer, who lay whimpering on the floor. Wirth felt his body, quickly locating the wounds by the victim’s flinching. His accurate fingers moved over the stubs and tatters of the chewed hand and broken arm.

  “It’s not as bad as it seems, it can be put back together. Your keys saved some of the bones.”

  Fleischer thought about that, then passed out. Wirth shouted back towards the woman, who had taken the colourless beast farther inside.

  “Get Dorflinger. Tell him to hurry and to bring his kit.”

  The Masai and the hyena ran through the house, across the yard, and into the stables. It was obvious that they were both enjoying the sport.

  The creature was caged and the surgeon was brought. He and Wirth lifted Fleischer onto the kitchen table and stanched the flow of blood. Dorflinger worked quickly and with great expertise, stitching nerves and blood vessels back first. He extracted the keys and the bent ring that held them and began working on the splintered bones.

  “Will he be okay?” said Wirth.

  “Sure, but he won’t play the piano again,” said Dorflinger.

  “Did he play the piano?” asked Wirth, sounding genuinely interested.

  The surgeon looked at him in disgust. “Why don’t you keep that fucking monster under control? This is the second time I have had to stitch up its fucking shit.”

  “It’s not Domino’s fault. She is doing her job, protecting us all. It’s this stupid cunt, coming in without warning.”

  Dorflinger ignored him and concentrated again on the mangled arm. After forty minutes he looked up. “Okay let’s get him to my room. I have more work to do on him there.”

  * * *

  —

  Fleischer had never played the piano. Nor would he now ever learn. In fact, no act of manual dexterity was available to him again. The twisted and hanging thing at the end of his wrist had some movement, but it was bizarre and clumsy. As the years went on and the meaning of his life drained, his claw would ache more each day, the concentrated pain becoming a separate focus. Something to talk to.

  But now in the fluctuating tides of the drugs and fever that held him in the dampness of the hospital bed, he sweated between wretched and sweet dreams of trivia and exhaustion. He speculated on how this wound would hinder his eminence. Slow his obvious success. And then the imp of the perverse would lick the raw bones of his crushed fingers, tickling delight out of the chewed nerves. In his triumph he derived gratifying pleasure by offering the hand to be shaken by unsuspecting juniors, disagreeable visitors, wives, and other irritating fawners. He would lock their gaze while their fingers engaged.

  * * *

  —

  When he left the infirmary he returned to the slave house with three armed men and demanded that Wirth bring “that thing” outside. The overseer refused, saying that the animal was valuable to their security and that it had been Fleischer’s fault for sneaking around his house unannounced. The wounded man was enraged. His eyes filled with tears and his skin became a pasty grey. He waved the bandaged remnant of his hand pointlessly before Wirth’s blind eyes.

  “Look what it did to me, look at my hand. I want it dead, now!”

  “No. Domino is ours, we need her.”

  “I want it dead!” Fleischer screamed.

  Nobody had ever seen the young man like this before and the onlookers tasted a bilious cocktail of pity and contempt at his behaviour. Many noted that this was the beginning of the end of the trust between the two men, who had become sewn together in their clandestine partnership.

  * * *

  —

  It took some days before Fleischer was able to confront Wirth again. The meeting was arranged in the new stables on Fleischer’s side of town. He would never again set foot in the kraal of the Limboia. Wirth’s black sluts and the albino horror would never leave it now. All business would be transacted from his new office in the elite stables, and Wirth’s presence there would be commanded at Fleischer’s will. His fury had turned to disgust after the abortive to demanding the death of the hyena. His status and superiority had been shat upon by Wirth’s refusal to hand the monster over for execution. Fleischer’s contempt had curdled during his return; he had exposed his failure to the hunters he had hired and that flare of exposed weakness made him vulnerable. One of the guns saw this and launched into an explanation of how Wirth and the Masai controlled the hyena.

  “They sleep with it, share the same bed and food bowls, that’s how it stays loyal.”

  “You mean they actually eat and sleep like animals?”

  “Yeah, and fuck too.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “No, straight up. They fuck, shit, and eat together. It’s the only way to keep one of those fucking monsters straight, you let it lick ya ol’ woman’s arse and fuck her snatch.”

  Some of the other hunters laughed.

  “God knows what it does to him.”

  “Or them to it,” said the other.

  “You’re joking,” said Fleischer.

  “That monster is a female.”

  “Some used to think that hyenas could change sex and fuck all ways,” said the second gun.

  “That’s bullshit, man, like lots of other stuff said about ’em. Some of the Kafas and a few Arabs believe that they got stones in their eyes, and if you dig ’em out and put ’em under your tongue, it gives you second sight or some other bullshit.”

  “One thing for sure is that hyenas are tight pack animals. They live in close hunting families. This one is a whitey, very rare, it’s always been a loner, outcast. They must have got it as a pup and grew it in their bed.”

  “Disgusting,” said Fleischer.

  “It works, you only seen part of that. Anyone goes near the blind man or his whore, that thing will tear them to pieces.”

  “I still want to put a bullet in its mangy heart.”

  “Then you will have to shoot all three of ’em. And it will take more than one magazine. Never go after it or them alone. It takes a pack to kill a pack. Hyenas are tough sons of bitches, I’ve seen one still attack with three blasts from a .30-30 in its chest. Your man Wirth looks that durable too. I don’t know about his Frau.”

  Fleischer thought about Amadi and how far the word “Frau” was from her panther-like sexuality and its sleek muscular dominance. It would indeed take more than one magazine and maybe more than one team of shooters.

  *
* *

  Meanwhile, the Limboia went about their daily work without noticing that the men who now ran them had changed. They had of course forgotten that they had seen the last one die by the Orm. The Orm had lain dormant since their return, because nobody had asked for it and because the Man Without Substance who had brought them back had another inside him. They had of course forgotten that as well. At least the details of its manifestation. All he had to do was point at his heart for their measly lives to cease. The man had been unaware of it hiding inside him or the instant fear he produced when he walked among them. The only thing they did remember was that he was also fleyber. The only walking, talking, grown-up one they had ever seen. The awe it produced in them was overpowering. So when he told them to come back to the city, they did it without a second of doubt. He had also promised more fleyber for them to live with day upon day. After their return they never saw him again. Some said he had been wiped out, but they knew that was impossible. The only other man who knew about the fleyber was the blind man who travelled back with them. But of course they had forgotten that and did not recognise that he was the one who now ran them.