The Cloven

by Brian Catling

  The moon and the sun arched over the enclosure. Their shafting rays bent though the tangled mass where previously he had made holes. Heat and chill buffeted his numb body. Four or five days had passed while he slept in a kind of delirium. He thought that he had heard things moving outside, animals sniffing and brushing against his adopted home.

  On what might have been the sixth day he crawled out, clutching the head. He blinked at the openness of the clearing and the absent space where Seth’s body should have been. Then he saw the tracks. The prints were everywhere but were more compacted around his hutch. He had indeed heard animals outside, had heard their curiosity picking at his sanctum. But they had not been the softly hooved quadrupeds that he had hoped for. These prints were made by erect animals, and he knew what kind because they had pissed and stained their presence against the walls, and once smelt you never forget the stench of the anthropophagi. He held the head tighter and took a strengthening swig from the neck. Then he felt the eyes watching him and saw smears of yellow in threes. He had no weapon and there were dozens of them, probably all armed with the sharpened stick and wooden blades that he had tasted before. He bent down to pick up a fist-sized rock, fitting Seth’s head under his other arm. So this was it. The final chapter, the revenge of the yellow eaters on men.

  “Come on, then,” he roared in a voice that he had never heard before. “Come on, let’s be having you!”

  Slowly they crept out from the trees, their piggy eyes watching him closely. He shook the rock and they stopped, some retreated. Ishmael had not seen his reflection for days. In his head he held his youth and attainment as his image. His mask, even though damaged, was a good face. The shining visage of the triumphant hero of the Vorrh nailed to the front of his skull. But that wasn’t what the squat band of man-eaters were looking at. His hair had grown wild and matted, the fever and dirt dreadlocking it into jagged spikes and irregular tufts. Something in Seth’s fluid had darkened him. The pigment in his skin had changed. His face was dark purple. The single eye burnt from the scar tissue, which was now jet-black. He had just gulped another mouthful from the hard neck and it had left an impression on his dripping lips, a white stain that highlighted his mouth like a fearsome mockery of a mockery, a black-faced minstrel from hell. As he shouted at them, white thick spit flew from his mouth like gooey sparks. The yellow creatures slunk back; they did not know what this was. They had seen and eaten all manner of long pig but had never seen anything like this.

  “Come on, you ugly fuckers, let’s end it here,” Ishmael spat out and laughed.

  They fell even farther back.

  “You can’t run, you owe me, you owe me my death now.” And with screaming frustrated rage he threw the rock. Its velocity was astonishing and it hit the closest of the retreating horde, sending it squealing to the ground. Ishmael put Seth’s head down and rushed at his emissary, stamping on its back until the squeals turned into grunts of painful breath. He kicked it over and hastily avoided the clashing bites of the hooklike teeth in the raging mouth. He kicked it again, his boot then holding the monster in place until he retrieved the rock and spun the creature round to receive three more blows just above its eye. It lay limp and shrivelled. Ishmael grabbed its clammy foot and dragged it back towards the woven hollow at the middle of the clearing. He meant to cut vines with the creature’s wooden blade and weave them into a sinewy rope, to bind its hands behind its back and shackle its feet together. He meant to do all this and more, but his stomach cramped and the last rind of energy inside peeled away. He started to faint; his legs buckled and he fell painfully onto his knees, then flopped sideways into the scuffed footprints outside his sanctum, knowing that if he did not wake up first then he would only come to when his awoken bruised companion was eating him.

  The eye of the beaten horror was staring into his when he finally awoke. He had the acute sensation that the lids of his eye had never closed. Something inside had closed down. The shutter between the lens and the brain. The horror was awake and sitting in a pool of its own stinking urine. They were both worn out: one from hunger, the other from injury. What went on behind their unmoving faces and bodies was impossible to tell. Only the rod of observation that joined their eyes showed any meaning. It became a tightrope of anything except communication, even though the cyclops had dreamt of or considered finding a way to speak to these disgusting creatures. Perhaps he had speculated there might be a way to join them, bend them with intellect, and nourish them in the warmth of his sensitivity. Show them how to live closer to more civilised animals. Perhaps even increase their evolution and lead them back in triumph into the world of men.

  Ishmael unbent his stiff, numb leg and the horror twisted its face to keep their eyes aligned. It was in that moment that Ishmael crossed all known boundaries. Somewhere in the clawing concave of his hungry mind he had been fantasising at the disgust of cannibalism, or more accurately the devouring of humanoid bipeds, when the disgust somersaulted, inverted, and landed as a solution to all his woes. Repulsion and survival quarrelled in the cyclops’s gaze. For a moment they might have both had the same thought. Then Ishmael changed it by using his superior brain. Is this animal any worse than a pig in a sty? Is it sacred because it balances on two legs instead of four? Is its stink and filth any worse than mine?

  Later, as the sun vanished, impaled on the other side of the forest, Ishmael sat before a creaking busy fire, his stomach extended and his mind unhooked, bones and grease spread about him, and a sweet taste wedged into his teeth and endurance warming his blood. Tonight he would sleep in the woven hollow and watch the firelight flicker shadows and splinter warmth through his cage. Tomorrow he would go deeper.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Cyrena had written to Marais out of the blue and it had delighted him. Delight was rare at that time and his daily indulgences in morphine were increasing. She had suggested that they meet again: She could come and visit him or she could send a plane to bring him to her. He would have loved to see her again and bathe in her energy and grace, but the drug would not let him. Such a journey was now a terrible contemplation. He also did not want her to see what he had become. He still had enough dignity to prevent that. Better to leave things as they were, let them stay bright in both their memories.

  Some weeks earlier, when he had been growing short of his limited supply of morphine, he had taken a fall. Fortunately in the confines of his own modest home. But he had ruined two shelves of his collection of objets d’art, which cascaded to the floor as he tried to grab something steady to hold on to. When he eventually found the will to clear up the mess, he discovered that he had accidentally broken the mud crown from the Possession Wars. A large piece of the clay had snapped off to reveal a shining interior. On further examination it revealed a structure of machine precision. So he continued to break the outer casing to find out what its true nature was. Midway he recognised the object as being very close to Cyrena’s halo of insects. It would make an excellent gift for her and solve the problem about a meeting. A week later he finished the task.

  And he was pleased with his letter to her and his shining gift of the halo of insects. He put the paper down and lifted the mechanical brass circle into his gaze. Its restoration and repair was the only dexterous manual task he had taken on for years. Something about the hands working to unpeel and clarify had come back from his student days. The revelation of the dissecting room. He had picked at and washed away the impacted mud to reveal the instrument beneath. He had cleansed and repaired the clockwork and the mirrors, so now it seemed perfect.

  He looked hard into the glass lenses and their motors of action and saw for the first time the scratched writing on the inside of the crown. Not the London maker’s marks he found before but crude yet elegant ciphers inscribed therein. These were charm signs, talismanic inscriptions written by its most recent owners thousands of miles from Europe, declarations of purpose that the original instrument had never
known. He had casually put it on a couple of times, letting the mirrors whir a bit, the daylight dapple. It produced a mild optical soothing, which he liked, and he fancied it an expensive, amusing toy.

  He stepped back from the table, deciding to add to his dosage to see if it heightened his clarity by softening his constant anxiety.

  When he came back, he picked the object up and it had seemed to have shed some of its weight. He took it outside into the African sun, wound all its motors, and again placed it on his head, clicking the rotations of light into life.

  There was no defence. No preparation. No understanding for what was shafted and wedged into his vision. The warm air still smelt of fecundity and promise. The sun on his skin still glowed in an optimism of another day. But both were without Homo sapiens. That supposed peak in the kingdom of animals was over. Every invention, idea, construction, and measurement of man had stopped and been disregarded. His eyes trembled as the cogs whirred; he faltered and sank to his knees. Vision upon vision unfolded before him, in vast explosions and waves of constant smoke or dust that stank of cindered bone. He saw pestilence and hatred married to genius and wealth. He saw governments and empires topple. Mindless conflict had been let loose without any containment. He watched and saw years of panic and hubris construct illness and machines. He saw every tribe and kingdom of mankind give up and become annihilated. He saw man try to burn the entire world alive and fail. After the smoke and noise had vanished and the long rains had cleaned away the ashes, he saw animals and plants creep back and then rove and entwine themselves into all the palaces and libraries and devour all evidence of the arrogance of humanity’s faith that had finally taken its toll. All the fiction that Homo sapiens had told to their own species vanished. All the ideas about time and space, all the equations and microscopic details about animal life were eaten by the animals. Lichen and fungi swamped and paved human speculation, philosophy was besmirched and eradicated by worms. Measurements were eaten by ants and all the circuits were drowned.

  The exhausted purpose was exposed, but before the brass clockwork had run down, he saw how this had happened and he’d had that conversation before. The forests had changed the air. Altered its composition over centuries, not as he had said once before by decreasing oxygen but by expanding it and denting it with other traces of more virulent gases. The trees had not starved and suffocated man, they had increased him. Force-fed the human brain to saturation. Making the two most powerful drives therein destroy themselves and all hope of redemption. Invention and territoriality had torn Homo sapiens off the face of the earth with tools of their own making. After some hours or days in a semiconscious torpor, Marais finally staggered to his feet and found his way back to the table where his letter to Cyrena sat, curling in a shaft of sunlight. He dragged the crown from his head, letting it fall beneath the table. He then left his home and made his last journey to the remote farm whose name in Zulu meant “the end of the business.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Hector was horrified to discover that he had slept for an entire day or more. After his meeting at St. Paul’s, of which he could remember little, and the run home, of which he could remember everything, he just slept. It had only been Solli’s insistent knocking and calling that had hauled him out of the long dream of the long run. He staggered to the door, rubbing his bristled chin and bleary eyes. He undid the bolts and turned away from the door saying, “Come in, Solli, come in.”

  He heard them enter and close the door behind them as he shuffled towards the sink and the kettle. Then he heard their stillness and silence as they stood by the door, staring.

  He turned. “What, what is it?” Imagining some auspicious or alarming piece of news had weighted them to the floor, transfixed them to the spot with the burden of its disclosure. “What?”

  Solli was with the youth called Jerry, who lifted his hand to point at Hector. Their eyes were wide, their mouths stuck in imbecilic grins.

  “Your hair, Prof, your hair…” Jerry said.

  Hector remembered the wind and the imaginary mane, the stranger in the fragment of looking glass. He brought an unbelieving hand up to his head and touched the mass that grew there.

  “You can see it?”

  The thin, shrill question was answered by the men nodding in unison. Hector rushed at the mirror, lifting it from its nail and taking it to the window, where he moved it this way and that, steering the irregular glint of the shard and his astonished image back and forth. Causing an escaping dagger of reflection to bob and scurry over the walls and the ceiling of the room. For a moment it distracted Jerry’s appreciation of the comic scene.

  “I thought it was a dream. Only a dream,” Hector muttered.

  Out of the shadows and in the flooding illumination of the skylight, Solli and Jerry could see that it was not just the hair that had changed. Hector looked younger, something about his posture had changed. It had tightened and become more flexible at the same time. Solli did not like this kind of thing and recently there had been a lot of it centred around this strange old man. Best to ignore it. Impossibilities were for the real rabbis, not him; he had the muscle and the nerve of the street to deal with. He was not here to witness miracles.

  “You’re wanted across town,” he said sharply.

  Hector did not hear him.

  “Uncle Hymie wants you over at Bedlam.”

  He heard that. It was not a request. Nobody could have ignored the urgent thuggery in the order. Even Jerry stepped back to look at his leader in surprise.

  “I think you’d better get dressed, Professor,” Jerry said, trying to calm the unpleasantness that was damaging the air.

  “We’ll wait downstairs, and I ain’t got all day,” said Solli, turning on his heels and gaining the landing before anybody else could move or speak.

  “Better do what he says, Prof,” said Jerry after a while.

  Solli had started his second cheroot by the time Hector came down. He was leaning against the entrance, tapping his stick with irritation against the metal drain cover. There had obviously been bad words between the youths. Jerry said nothing and studiously looked in the opposite direction.

  In an attempt to lighten things, Hector asked, “Are we going by boat?”

  Solli looked at him as if he had asked for the crown jewels, and Jerry looked farther into his imaginary horizon.

  “No, we fucking ain’t. Ain’t got the fucking time to muck about. Get a taxi,” he ordered Jerry, who happily ran away from them towards the main road at the end of the street. Hector and Solli followed at a respectively brisk and artificially casual pace. Solli let the old man go in front so that he could scrutinise him with sideways glances. His walk had changed, both in rhythm and pace. It was brisker and more alert, closer to his own, which he did not like, and worse was the overall impression that the old man had grown taller. Solli aggressively chewed and puffed at his cheroot and clattered his cane at his heel like the teeth of a choke-chained dog. Jerry had the taxi waiting and they bundled in.

  “St. George’s Fields, Lambeth,” said Jerry.

  He had long since learned that you did not say Bedlam in front of Solli, or anybody Solli was with. He alone was able to use the B word, and when he did, you knew there was going to be trouble. They drove in silence, the cab full of smoke, the window tightly closed. Hector coughed and paddled at the window-release strap.

  “Do you mind?” he said to Solli.

  “Yes, I fucking do, it’s too cold, keep it shut.”

  The matter was over and Hector tried to breathe in shallow gasps as they travelled the miles across London and over the Thames. Things got worse when they arrived at Bethlem Royal Hospital. Solli’s hatred of the place and his uncle’s captivity turned his gait into a begrudging swagger that seemed to increase in velocity without gaining speed. Nobody spoke until they reached the dormitory that Hymie shared with his “comrades.” He was not
there, but two of his pals were. Nicholas was standing next to a far bed spoon-feeding another man who sat propped up against the headboard. Hector was caught between a bristle and a smile at seeing the Erstwhile. Solli shouted across the room, making the man in the bed jump.

  “Where’s Hymie?”

  Nicholas ignored him, spoke softly to the patient, and continued to spoon food into his bandaged head. Solli was dangerously near his cracking point. He sped across the room, seething in irrational aggression.

  “I am talking to you, you fucking freak, where is my uncle?”

  The bandaged man cringed, some of the food oozing out of his slippery mouth. Without turning around Nicholas put down the spoon and pointed one of his immaculately manicured hands towards Solli. He held it cobra-like about two feet in front of his nose and then made a repeated opening and closing of the fingers held together and the thumb below, imitating the head of a bird yakking. Solli reached inside his coat, his hand grasping the bone-slivered handle of his cutthroat razor. He was about to slash it out when Nicholas brought the index finger of his other hand up to his lips, making the sign of hush. The effect was instantaneous. All the air, acid, and violence drained out of Solli, deveining him until only a lost youth hung in the clothes that had been so stretched and threatening before. Nicholas returned to the dinner, picked up the spoon, and continued.