The Cloven

by Brian Catling

  How had this vile fact escaped him? He watched everything in the city, balancing its rights and wrongs, keeping its thriving people in control, touching all things in a way that was never seen. The Men Without Substance saw him only as unclean and to be shunned. Most of the tribes saw him as a prophet or holy fool and made sure that he was fed and sheltered. None of them could lift their weak eyes to his true magnificence. He saw everything, except the guilt that was living here.

  The Travesty knew the Droischs by sight. He understood something of their trade. Once the husband had cuffed him out of his way, sending his battered and stained sombrero wheeling away like a deflated tyre. The wife instantly scolded her husband and apologised profusely, begging forgiveness for him on her knees. He had given her his immaculate hand and she trembled at its beauty and her need to kiss it. The husband had spat in disgust. Now it was his duty to spit back and he would relish it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Meta had moved to her farthest position from the euphonia and the jars of petrol so far. She was approaching the end of the third row of shelving and was scared that whatever had changed position before could do it again and remove her from the threat that forced them to parley. She reached the end of the valley of shelved crates and pressed her body flush against the sanded wood that still smelt of resin. The heat of the room had made it faintly sweat. She quickly twisted her head around the case and back again. More than halfway down the canyon-like aisle and moving in her direction was an old man pushing a whinging pram. He was dressed in clothes that had once been expensive; she had seen trousers and shirts like that before, the high collar and striped material always denoting authority. He had no coat and was besmirched with grime and bits of wood. He was unshaven and his eyes looked strange. It must have been he who opened the crates, she suddenly thought, realising that no other normal human had ever been seen here. The thing that attacked her before did it inside her body, inside her soul. It had left no real impression of substance, muscular power, or weight. After all, it was her father who did all the physical moving between here and Kühler Brunnen. Perhaps this shabby old man was the only one left to do the dirty work for the monsters that dwelt here. The idea of this brought a rush of confidence into her stalwart heart. She looked back around the corner and this time it was the occupant of the pram that riveted her attention. The wheels squealed because of the weight of the being it carried. This was no baby or infant. She shuddered as it was pushed closer, then ran back to her position behind the keyboard to wait for the confrontation. A few minutes later it turned the corner and she took a deep breath. She recognised the man. She had seen him before, seen him with her father, seen him with Ghertrude. He looked worse up close, but normal in comparison to his passenger, the sight of whom made her want to run home. They stopped ten feet in front of the euphonia and waited. Meta was fixated but she did hear the bellows of the other machine begin to pump.

  “What do you want?” it said, and the passenger’s mouth moved in unison. The C lever had been engaged.

  Meta opened her mouth to explain, then realised she had to play it. She pumped the treadle and operated the keys.

  “I have come for Rowena, to take her home.”

  “I don’t want to leave this place.”

  Meta kept moving her foot, her fingers frozen on the keys. The sound of the leather lungs filled the space between them like concrete.

  “I don’t want to leave this place,” said the voice from the west end of the warehouse, and was mimed by the being in the pram.

  “Who are you?” played Meta.

  “You called me Rowena.”

  Rowena had been just over three months old when she was abducted. A pretty, warm, affectionate baby with two beautiful pale hazel eyes. The single squinting eye that glared out from the soft scar tissue of the lopsided face had no colour at all. The skin and flesh seemed loose and spongy. Tiny blue veins or bruises moved and flickered inside it. Its body was that of a two-year-old child and the hands that gripped the chrome sides of the pram looked like the stringy hands of an old woman. Meta’s real tongue shrivelled with her spirit, but her fingers continued to speak.

  “You are not the Rowena I seek. I want the child Rowena, the daughter of Mistress Ghertrude.”

  “I am the only one here and I don’t want to leave.”

  There was nothing more to say. It had all been a mistake, or worse. The air leaked out and eventually the old man pulled the pram backwards and turned it into the long aisle. Meta sat and stared at the tight jars. She picked up one of them and the pistol, looping the flabby empty satchel over her shoulder. She walked drearily back to the other machine. Nobody was there. Only the old man could be seen near the far corner, blocking the pram with his stooping body. Mutter’s daughter felt sick of heart and desolate. She turned to leave, putting the jar in the bag and her foot on the broad stair. Four steps down, just as her head ducked below the level of the floor, she heard a titter of laughter and an insect-like whirring of gears. She halted, turned, and took two steps backwards. The old man was bent farther over the pram, making smirking gurgles. A blue haze was hovering around the disgusting other figure. Meta ascended and ran across the resounding floor straight at the couple. She lifted the Mannlicher and fired. Two bullets hit the end wall and splintered the wood. The third bullet hit the old man and sent him spinning sideways. The thing in the pram was swirling; its white head and upper body covered in a swarm of blue particles, spinning gears, and wheels. It looked like one was devouring the other. The old man was thrashing about and crashed into the pram, spilling it. Meta was now standing over it, steadying the gun with both hands. She was just about to pull the trigger when she heard another sound. A whimper, a child’s whimper from inside the swirling mass. She lowered the gun and grabbed the strap of the satchel, swinging it hard into the twisting body. It split into hundreds of parts, disconnecting itself from the body it had previously covered. The one-eyed horror had been its disguised form, smothering and cloaking the reality of the poor smaller child beneath. The child that she now recognised as Rowena. She grabbed at her and pulled her free of the pram, the whirring haze, and the limping man, who was now standing and moving towards the concealed door that connected this floor to the spiral stone stair. He punched it open as the swarm gathered and settled about his head and shoulders. It turned, grinning. Its wheels hissed in speed. Ticker tape spewed from its mouth like blank, meaningless laughter. Then it was gone, feeling its way downwards like a blind man. Meta was up and at the door in seconds, the jar and the gun in her hands. It was spiralling down, still in her sight when she threw the Kilner jar, which hit the wall above it and smashed, showering the escaping horror in petrol and glass. She shot into the chaos that screamed, blood spurting into the blue, cogs, and petrol. The next shot ignited it. The third spun it downwards. A normal human body cannot fall far down a spiral stair. It sticks and jams on the first or second turn. But not in this case—the blue mist in its attempt to escape the seething flames wormed around the broken body, squeezing it like a crushed sack, shrivelling inwards into the shell of the stair like a scorched mollusc. The flames, the hissing, and the screams continued until it was gone and only a rank black smoke blocked the spiral stair. Meta rushed back to the traumatised child, picked her up, and carried her down to the ground floor and out into the gentle warm street. The only movement and sound that remained in the warehouse was the fatty spluttering of the squat candle.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Droisch’s thin white arm was pinned under the sweating weight of his wife’s enormous thigh. The bedroom stank worse than the rest of the house. The radiant night had been shut out and it looked like the blessed sun had never entered. The Travesty sat in a deep chair that was covered in the skin of a beast. He was watching them sleep. He was wide awake and had no intention of sharing or catching any of their squalid dreams. He had come to take their breath, but it seemed such a kind thing to do, so h
e decided to take their souls instead. It would be dirtier but sanctified.

  It took an hour of the “time that flies.” She had been easy, but the white husband had been grudging and tightly curled, like some cur child refusing the bait offered outside the womb. And so, like a practised midwife, he cut it out. Indeed, with such skill that Gotfrid Droisch never woke. He kicked about and jabbered, but stayed unaware of the blessing that was being given to the world. It was the Travesty’s intention to take the souls to the edge of the holy Vorrh and scrape them off the iron rod onto which they had slithered and coiled. Of course he would not taint the interior with such an offering, but there would be something living at the edges that would willingly feed on these morsels. On his way out of the house he could not restrain his curiosity. The smell from the “shop” lured him in to investigate.

  Droisch had again been attempting to mate different species. And for the first time he’d had a limited, if repulsive, success. His previous attempts had been little more than forced couplings of different animals and a few botched graftings. He had also collected live and pickled abnormalities from far and wide. They all began to glimmer in their bottles or dance or hide in their cages as the Travesty lit a lamp. He was examining the limping and floating menagerie with great interest when he became aware of their owners standing by the open door. She like a spherical dark nought and he like an anaemic stretched I. The Travesty laughed at the sight as the coils tightened harder on the metal rod, which he carried in the way of a walking stick.

  “I suppose you want to come too,” he said wearily to the figures in the doorway.

  There was no answer because he addressed the question to perpetual sleepwalkers who were not bright enough to know that they were dying. He knew that they would be lost after the first five minutes, unable to keep up with the pace of his resolute stride. He waved his metal stick with their useless souls sucking onto it like limpets.

  “Then let it be so,” he said and opened the door at the back of the shop into a street filled entirely with tall, featureless warehouses. Some were made of brick but most were fashioned in timber—the verticality of the Vorrh having been sawn into horizontal planks that made the huge walls. More meaningless buildings, he thought, as what had been the Droischs followed him. Somehow the three of them made the street look emptier than before. Something about their limp nakedness and the scale of the walls and the Travesty’s detachment made the whole thing look like a minor early Renaissance painting, where the artist is unsure what is most important: the grandeur of the architecture squashed into a compacted perspective or the figures in front of it, who appear to be waiting to receive their lines. The only sound in the long high place was the soft moan of the wind and a tiny creaking from the iron rod as its occupants tightened their grip once again.

  Then the wall of the building opposite exploded.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Meta’s squat candle had been flirting with the warm dry air, the rumpled paper, and the pine-scented resins that had been sweating from the crates. And the tiny waft from the jars of petrol that sat placidly impatient, flaunting their transparency, coquettishly egging the junction on. The proximity had become too much for them all. The coy distance raked itself up to touch and pet. Ignition was struck. Once it began there was no end or containment to its wantonness. The great lust of fire undid and fucked the building to panting exhaustion, the spluttering wax vaporising in a wink under the licking tinder air. Petrol, spirits, and oils boiled and spurted over drier atrophied specimens that had always dreamed of becoming ash or cinder. Frantic wasted instructions sneezed their last remote wisdom in the grains of the splintering woods. The temperature rose until the air itself was lit, flooding the inert shelves and the long-resting crates into an agreement of fire, its virulent wave skinning the euphonia in one blast. The docile plaster faces cracked in its temper, like aristocratic porcelain. The delicate carved and turned wood became charcoal in seconds. The rasping voices roasted as the leather lungs buckled and the ivory nails of the keyboard split and peeled back in agony. The bricks and timbers of the wall shook before they erupted into the street, sucking out all the fallen specimens and examples, throwing them and their glass and metal homes through the singeing oxygen: an index of solids, a library of meaning contorted into maliciously comic shrapnel. Ancient stones and recent inventions whistled and thrummed the air. A case of fossils was ripped apart, the heat splitting the impressions of bones and filling their hollows with liquid fire. Even some of the agile blue mist was boiled through the filigree impression of feathers, just before the prized specimen were blown apart.

  * * *

  The Travesty and his sad companions were lifted off their feet and bludgeoned through the shocked air. He raised his rotting hand to shield his beauty, but it was less than a cobweb to the incendiary tidal wave of hot, sharp fragments of animals, vegetables, and minerals in all their ingenious modes of existence and usage that buckled everything into shrill rags. The empty Droisch waifs were obliterated by the debris, which scythed them into the walls and interior of their own shop, where live screaming abortions were crushed by long-dead species that spat blue plumes of lit formaldehyde. Cages were dented, ripped apart, and thrown in every direction. Bricks and irregular spears of wood spun vindictively at modest uprights of napping architecture and torpid decorations. The noise tore all sound away, leaving ears boxed and bleeding. Nothing remained standing. Everything had eventually fallen in and reached its destroyed stage of burnt collapse. Then, and only then, the malicious smoke billowed, choked, and bullied into every crevice of cringing space. The iron rod steamed as the charcoal souls boiled away to nothing, as the bodies that once contained them became engulfed in the conflagration that had sped up the stairs to lick under their gloated bed.

  The sound halted every action in the city. The outraged windows of the dwellings of the Men Without Substance nearby blew into sedate lives and the rest of the city looked up from its concentrated actions. All the transactions—sleeping, crimes, eating, talking, buying, and copulating—stopped while the population guessed at what had occurred, peering out into the streets and running to the rooftops. Anton Fleischer thought that it was the train mishandled into failure, but hoped that it might be the warden’s house and the disgusting family within.

  The Sturmbannführer, the Hauptmann, and the Obersturmführer dropped their glasses and reached for their weapons.

  Ishmael and the Kin, sheltering in their lostness under the million trees, thought that the sound came from deeper in that forest, a vast entity moving there, calling them closer.

  Cyrena awoke from a deep dream of cathedral-like underground causeways where the echoing sea boomed and sighed in reassuring regularity. She arose to near waking and listened, heard nothing more, and rolled over to dive and reenter the unworldly depth, before the smaller explosions would convince her that they might have been on this side of her longing.

  Modesta bit her lip and clapped her hands while seeking an answer in Lutchen’s stern and troubled face; he automatically crossed himself.

  Kippa let go of the leash that held the Wassidrus down and he rolled facedown, hearing nothing.

  Thaddeus and Ghertrude knew it must be Meta. Knew with a certainty that had no words. That is why in their deathly silence they heard the gate to the street open, heard the brass key in the lock to the house, heard the strings in the attic hold their metal breath, heard the uncreaking stair and the muffled carpet under Meta’s slow footfall as she carried Rowena in her tight arms and ascended towards them in their upper room.

  They rushed at Meta, falling out of the bed. Or rather Thaddeus did.

  Ghertrude saw her lost Rowena float into the room alone. Meta was still invisible to her. It was only as she grasped Rowena and tugged at Meta that Mutter’s child blossomed before them in pluming sight. It was her brother who embraced her in a crushing hug of babbling words.

  “Meta, thank
God you are safe, you have done it, you have done it, you have saved her and brought her home. How, how did you do it?”

  Meta could not speak because for the first time that day she was dumbfounded. Nothing else had frightened or shocked her. She had been ready and able to tackle it all. What had slapped her into disbelief was recognition. The moment that she had brushed Ghertrude’s hand she had recognised the disgusting old man with the pram, the one she had shot and sent spilling down the stairs. Ghertrude had sparked the memory. Her resemblance to the man had opened her eyes. The man in charge of the pram and its hideous occupant had been Ghertrude’s father. The last living remnant of Deacon Tulp.

  She mumbled a few meaningless words at her brother and tugged at his sleeve, while darting her eyes towards Ghertrude and Rowena. Thaddeus understood and they both quietly left the room, leaving mother and child to stare into each other’s faces and sob and forget every other creature on earth.