Armwrestling the Dead

by Andrew McEwan

ends.’

  Now there’s an idea...

  ‘But you won’t.’ Fenmore was emphatic. ‘You don’t believe in others as you believe in yourself,’ he said; ‘therefore the desire for dominance is much diminished. Why, you have barely the will to steer that camel, a beast of burden whose tiny brain need only be jerked. What hope have you of coercing people? To manipulate individuals requires either guile or greed. To be successful one must first seek approval, then transform that approval into fear.’

  His face had turned grey, his voice sonorous. Whoever he lectured was years removed.

  The forest was just that, a dense growth of bizarre woods as stark as a prison circumference. They dismounted and Johnson patted her beast on its quizzical snout. Fenmore reassured her the camels would find their way home. She didn’t believe that. She knew the goblin horde would butcher them. Typically, she left the illusion in place.

  Forest quickly became jungle, spongy and damp. She rummaged in the string-pull bag for a pair of boots, and finding some was mildly, if not genuinely surprised.

  There were predators. Fenmore took her hand in a predictable gesture. If it came to a fight she’d reverse the roles and spring to the fat man’s defence. The air was saturated with insects, humming water-carriers whose swollen undercarriages provided relieving draughts to larger beetles and scuttling lizards. They plodded through swamp, trees leaning in a mist, pulling it taut like plastic sheeting, gaseous tarpaulins suspended on threads of spider silk. The two would have to find higher ground before sundown if they were ever to dry out.

  Gracious mangroves spanned a river bank. Slung like vines were creaking walkways, the product of much industry. Together they walked each successive trough, balancing on the narrow planks in the sweaty jungle atmosphere.

  Fenmore paused and raised a finger. ‘Listen.’

  Johnson strained to hear. Sounds moved sluggishly, most too big to fit in her ear; so after a moment it was possible to focus on the music. Water music, it trickled and peeled, a panoply of tiny bells and vibrant strings. They pressed on to the next fragile bridge, and the next, the music growing louder, the drooping trees thinning to reveal a cascade of shimmering droplets, individual globes of crystal performing acrobatics in a unified display from the head and many tiers of a magnificent fountain.

  ‘Not as incongruous as it might appear,’ remarked Fenmore sagely.

  The pilot said nothing.

  The fountain, hidden behind its own resplendent tresses, a shy bride at the altar, was carved of delicate marble, flutes and arabesques arrayed like the plumes of bone-white seahorses, a mother-of-pearl sheen clinging to the perfect lingerie, lace and silk glittering beyond a veil of diamonds. The music came from countless spinning whistles, silver reeds atwirl, voices high, melodious and lulling, the cloy jungle evening transformed into a realm of acoustic brilliance.

  The fat man said, ‘I don’t like it. Makes me nervous.’

  Johnson was thinking of angels and pins. She had a vision of thrones and dominions, virtues, powers and principalities, in rows and lines, transfixed like vampires through the heart, neatly labelled and tucked away in a drawer, collected like butterflies on a board.

  Fenmore busied himself scouting a route passed, a means of eluding this spun-sugar vision.

  Once more she permitted him to take her hand.

  The two ambled left, foregoing the walkway for the soupy perimeters of the mangrove. Fish nibbled them in the shallows, the oily black water in stark contrast to the spangled whiteness of the fountain, directly over which hung a star, a redolent eye.

  Spying, thought Johnson, in a rare concession to paranoia.

  Fenmore stumbled and she grabbed him. His skull was dotted with insect bites, purple and inflamed as if impregnated. The idea of his pate hatching caused her stomach to turn. He complained his foot was caught, ‘In a hole.’

  ‘What kind of hole?’

  He didn’t find it funny and would she mind getting it out before he sank in the mud or it rained.

  Wrinkling her nose Johnson stooped down. She found his ankle, the foot disappearing into something that fitted it exactly.

  ‘Pull.’

  ‘I am pulling!’

  She forced her thumb against his shin yet failed to push it into the opening. The hole was stiff but elastic, clamped tightly about his flesh.

  Fenmore mumbled impatiently.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said “maybe we should have put our coins in the slot after all”.’

  His leg disappeared another ten centimetres.

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I distinctly feel a tongue.’

  The pilot scowled. Digging in her bag she recovered Monk’s knife, and enjoying the fat man’s inquisitive gaze ducked under the black water, dress floating like a lily, in search of, she suspected, anatomy.

  Whatever it was entangling Fenmore sprang suddenly to life, whipping the surface to a foam as she tickled its throat. He shouted, but his protests went unheard as the creature thrashed clear of the blade, his foot still lodged in its gullet.

  Johnson, thrown by the unexpected surge, leaned for support on a root, its grey arch two metres tall. Then she dived forward of the backward dragged Fenmore, grappling with the writhing mud-snake. Eyes tight shut, she plunged the knife in, twisting and sawing as the snake flexed and thrashed, a knotted muscle of indeterminate length. The fat man screeched, either with pain or exultation. Freed, he clubbed the dark shape whose innards Johnson had spilled, hundreds of small loops and whirls pouring from its torn flank. The parent reeked of corruption, its putrescent children writhing themselves now, small ripples swimming away from the epicentre, the next generation of hungry serpents.

  Seconds later the mangrove was quiet, although the stench remained.

  Music insinuated.

  Johnson peered at Fenmore, who seemed calm. He had a curious expression though, blithe yet interested. As if remembering something he reached down and raised one lacerated shoe from the water, dangling it by a lace. His foot was still in it.

  By night the fountain was luminous, white tinged with gold as it shone to its own accompaniment. Not knowing what else to do, she’d hauled Fenmore onto the nearest walkway, bandaged his stump the best she could, and, as there appeared no reason not to, dropped the foot in Hubert’s string-pull bag.

  A baby with bubbles on his lips, red cheeks and brow thankfully void of fever, she waited for him to regain consciousness.

  There came a barely discernible shift in the fountain’s melodious tones, a delicate realignment of its light, a fractional tremor as if at the engagement of gears, and the entire structure began to move off, steadily picking up speed as it manoeuvred through the maze of trees. Johnson took a second to decide, heaved the fat man over one complaining shoulder and started after, alternatively gasping and holding her breath as the planks shuddered underfoot. The fountain travelled at only a brisk walking pace, but it was several minutes before she was close enough to be able to clamber aboard, depositing Fenmore with a dull thud, propping his head on a nymph and seating herself between two gurgling fishes. Around her the jungle rotated. She put her face in her hands and fell asleep.

  Waking, birds squawking the dawn, she wondered if she was beneath the earth or above it. The air was hot, tinged a volcano orange. The music had stopped and the fountain rode the current of a wide, meandering river. Its banks, tens of metres distant, resembled plucked guitar strings, or the trembling wings of moths.

  Fenmore was watching her.

  ‘How do you feel?’ she asked.

  ‘Diminished.’

  ‘Can’t you grow another?’

  He pondered a moment, drumming his chin. ‘I’d be breaking the rules if I did.’

  ‘Whose rules?’

  ‘My own. I am a man of principle.’

  ‘You’re a man with just five toes,’ she argued. ‘You can’t walk.’

  He nodded. ‘I shan’t walk then.’

 
‘Well,’ said Johnson, wringing the hem of her dress, ‘I’m not carrying you.’

  ‘That won’t be necessary.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘I propose to die where I’m sitting, here on this beautiful yacht.’

  She had no answer to that.

  Mountains rose. There were rapids. Fenmore caressed the nymphs gathered round him like nurses in a porn flick. The ride became more bumpy, the fountain beginning to pitch and roll. She could see curtains of spray ahead, hear the water’s roar. But the river wasn’t sufficiently rock-strewn or narrow to present any real danger this side of the fall.

  ‘Besides,’ Fenmore added belatedly, ‘I can’t swim.’

  ‘Then you’ll have to take your chances,’ the pilot conceded. ‘I’m overboard.’

  The fat man grinned victory. ‘True...’

  Weighed by the bag Johnson pulled her body through coarse eddies, strenuously resisting the current as it bore her relentlessly downstream, ever nearer that foam lip. Out of sight the extravagant wedding cake charged toward its truth with Fenmore absently fingering his wound, which hurt much less than he’d made out. The severed limb was sticky in the turgid heat, the sun risen and the volcanic haze paled to a sulphurous, crystalline yellow.

  The pilot reached the bank and collapsed on it. After a moment she turned to look, but could see no sign of Fenmore’s proud and luxurious ship of dreams.

  And distantly followed the pursuit.

  twenty-three - quiet

  Young Mason didn’t step down, he jumped, both feet imprinting Oriel, the happiness he