CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The shrill steam slid through the trees: The train, ready to leave, was calling for passengers. Had his footwear been more stable, the Frenchman would have jumped for joy. Instead, he squeezed his friend’s hand with a mighty happiness, especially for one so small, and they moved on towards the sound, the Frenchman leading and pulling the long frame of his laughing, stooping companion through the leaves and high grass.

He saw the stillness set before his eyes, heard everything stop, just before he was yanked off his feet by Seil Kor coming to a sudden halt. Everything was arrested: the birdsong, the rustle of leaves, the shudder of life’s continued existence. He scrambled up, preparing to ask his friend for explanation, when he saw his guide hollow. The electricity and moisture, the pulse and the thought, the tension and the memory—all had drained out of him, into the ground. Seil Kor crashed to his knees, breaking some of his straight fingers in their vertical collision with the earth; they snapped like dry twigs, but he did not notice. The Frenchman broke out of his shock and rushed to embrace his friend, who toppled into his arms. There was no weight; he had become a wildly staring husk. His eyes, which darted to and fro, were the only sign of life.

“Help! Help! For God’s sake, help!” he screamed towards the trains. He found the derringer with its last cartridge and fired into the air. “Help, please, help!”

Then, just as he heard people running to their aid, the sound of something else reached his ears, turning his blood to water: a laugh, so close that, for a moment, he thought it was Seil Kor himself. It hung in the air around his dying friend.

“Hello?! Hello! What is wrong?” bellowed an approaching stranger. “Where are you?”

The Frenchman retrieved his voice from a sickly, viscous shell beneath his stomach and called again for help, in the feeblest of tones.

—

They carried Seil Kor to the wooden hut station and laid him on one of the hard pews. Nobody knew what to do. He was cold and stiff, with not the faintest sign of breathing, but his eyes worked frantically, seeking the faces of all in the room. They sent for the overseer from the workforce on the train. The Frenchman held his friend’s damaged hand, two of the fingers pointing comically at the ceiling. He thought about straightening them in an attempt to change the reality of the moment, to tidy the discordant and form a splint to normality by fussily adjusting the details. Maclish arrived and was confused by the tableau.

“Please help my friend!” pleaded the Frenchman.

Maclish came closer, putting his hand on Seil Kor’s chest and touching his fingers to Seil Kor’s throat. He saw the darting eyes and recognised the condition, quickly realising that the intended recipient was not the man lying prone before him: The Orm had taken the wrong man.

“Your friend?” he said, his anxiety inappropriate and incongruous but lost on the flapping state of the Frenchman.

The Frenchman agitatedly explained their journey and what had just taken place. Maclish’s culpability turned him stern and distant. “He can’t stay here; we have to get him back to the city,” he said brusquely, stepping outside and shouting commands along the platform. Two of the workers looked up and loped towards him. He pointed at Seil Kor and barked out more instructions, in a tongue that nobody else present understood. They lifted him from the pew and started carrying him along the platform, past the hissing train and its waiting carriages. There was no urgency in their actions, and the Frenchman was enraged to see that both of the Limboia were grinning.

“What are they laughing at?” he demanded of the Scotsman.

“It’s just their way; they are not all there,” he said, tapping his forehead with his index finger.

The Frenchman suspected at once that this was true and was convinced of it when he saw the vacant men carry his friend past the carriages and off into the perspective distance drawn by the flatbed trucks, which now bristled with stacked trees. “Where are those idiots taking him?” he squealed, rushing after them.

Maclish groaned and stomped after his loping run.

“Stop! Stop, take him back!” the Frenchman shouted at the grinning workers, as they carted his friend into the distance like a piece of game. They ignored him and plodded on, getting farther and farther from the passenger carriages and the Frenchman’s comprehension. Maclish barked again and they slowly halted, like clockwork winding a slow release. The Frenchman tugged at his friend, but he was held firm between the workmen, who looked down at the small man without interest or recognition, the smiles never leaving their greasy, blank faces.

“Tell them to take him back to the compartment!” demanded the Frenchman of the Scot.

“He is not going back on the train,” said Maclish; “he is going back on a flatbed with the trees.”

For a few moments, the Frenchman was lost for words, panting and twitching on the other side of speech. Then he let fly with a tirade of demands and abuse while the Scotsman became red and even more stoic, as if his growing colour was a swelling gauge of his inflexibility.

“He’s dead, man!” said the Scot emphatically, as if talking to a child. “He is not going in any of the carriages!”

The Frenchman was stamping with rage, so much so that his left shoe finally gave up the ghost and sprang from his foot with a flourish of something like embarrassment. The Limboia ignored the growing argument as the hanging body, slung limply between them, swayed slightly, its eyes paying fierce attention to the discarded shoe.

“He is not dead! You will be made to pay for this outrage!” the Frenchman bellowed at Maclish’s back as the Scotsman resumed his walk towards the back of the train.

Maclish shouted a command over his shoulder and wound the Limboia into walking mode again, the deflated Frenchman hobbling slowly behind. They halted at the last flatbed and deposited the body on the hefty wooden floor, securing it with heavy metal chains. A wall of equally lashed trees lay steeply next to Seil Kor, their sap oozing everywhere. Maclish pulled on the chain to test its fastening. He spoke again to the Limboia, who lost their smiles and ran back to their compartment. On his way back to the head of the train he passed the Frenchman, who spoke first.

“Where shall I go?”

Maclish bit his tongue and directed his gaze away from the Frenchman’s eyes. “Wherever you damn well please,” he said.

The small man took in the length of the train, trying to conjure a decision from his confusion. The whistle jolted him, but it was suddenly too late: With much clanking, the train started to move, the engine’s iron wheels shrieking on the sap-wet iron rails, its massive load teetering forward. He ran to Seil Kor and threw himself on the flatbed as it gained momentum, the other shoe flying off and disappearing into the undergrowth.

As the train gathered speed, its load shifted, shaking the flatbeds with bone-jarring regularity. Seil Kor showed no signs of life; his body trembled with the bumps of the track, but all else was inert. The Frenchman held on tightly, one arm covering his friend protectively, the other hooked around the chain. He had closed his friend’s eyes: The intensity of them staring out of the handsome, expressionless face had been too much for him to bear. It had taken four attempts to shut them; he eventually resorted to smearing the thick tree juice over his friend’s lids. It broke his heart to treat those once-beautiful eyes so roughly, but it felt necessary. He still believed that the energy they showed was a sign of survival and that his friend’s present condition might be a form of coma or sleeping sickness; similar things, seen before in his lifetime, allowed him to retain a little optimism. He would find a doctor the moment they arrived in Essenwald, with enough knowledge to awaken his beloved friend and restore him to brimming health. This was his best hope as they sped through the darkening forest, rattling and slipping together.

—

Seil Kor’s eyes opened and flashed at the speeding trees as they hurtled past. The Frenchman could not remember his name or why he was clinging to his cold, hard body. He knew he loved him, but not why. The terrifying situation was exacerbated by the stranger’s mad eyes. He tried to look away, but the movement made him slip again. He was sliding in a black, sticky pool that was blood or sap, viscous and sickening. Thin rain had made it spread and stretch, the darkness taking away its identifying colour. He had been shaken to the side of the prone man; he wanted to reach out and close the lids of the snatching eyes, but the train jolted and he grabbed hard at the chain instead, scared of being thrown clear. The flatbed juddered and swayed more violently, its cargo of butchered trees shifting and straining against its fetters. He knew if the chains came loose they would both be crushed, or swept over into the racing night to be broken like kindling against the tracks.

He gripped the staring man and began to sob. His heart hung like a pendulum in a long, hollow case of hopelessness, abrupt shudders discordantly jangling the weights and coiled chimes, which whimpered and knocked, while the other man’s eyes ticked away all life.

Sleep was farther away than the city, and he dared not let fatigue cajole him. The trees grunted and struggled, shifting the weight of their enormous carcasses again. He tried to focus on the stars, but the engine’s smoke and the vibrations made them bleary and out of focus. He knew he was lost if he could not anchor his mind. He thought of his mother and of Charlotte; he must not let their memory be erased. He even conjured some of the faces and bodies of the street boys, but they would not stay, and his purchase slipped away. He looked for God and was considering Satan, when his genius spoke up to save him. His books! Those unique works of fiction, and the one he would write next: The very thing that made him significant had almost been forgotten in the wrath and momentum of this, his mad time in exile from them. He should not have been in this dismal forest, putting his life at risk with ignorant savages. All he needed was a locked room, ink, and sheets of virgin paper. This was his anchor, and he embedded it with the few scraps of energy he had left. He instinctively knew that memory and imagination share the same ghost quarters of the brain, that they are like impressions in loose sand, footfalls in snow. Memory normally weighed more, but not here, where the forest washed it away, smoothing out every contour of its vital meaning. Here, he would use imagination to stamp out a lasting foundation that refused the insidious erosions buffeting around him. He would dream his way back to life with impossible facts. He gripped the man and the chain harder as they thundered towards dawn, the chapters unpeeling across the wet miles.

—

He came out of the nightmare into the nightmare. The scream of the whistle and the blistering sun illuminated worse than he had dreamt. He had no idea why the floor shuddered, why he held on to a dead man who stank of vegetation, or why he could not wake out of it. The train was slowing, the first signs of civilisation beginning to show. Fences and enclosures appeared by the side of the track, cut into the edge of the forest, which seemed to be loosening its grip on the land. Slower still, and the huts began to cluster and swarm around the track, gradually gaining height and culture. The shrill train braked, piercing its arrival to the approaching city. The corpse’s head jolted to one side, its marble black eyes staring at nothing. The Frenchman looked away with a regret that he could not explain, as the train slouched to a halt in the steaming station. He did not see that the wet, black orbs were still moving, still actively flinching to grab at any motes of light or meaning.

Loose, weird men arrived at the side of his flatbed and immediately started to tear and jostle at the chained trees. A man with red hair and a stiff uniform walked down the platform towards him. “Get off!” he demanded.

The words had a magical effect. He slithered away from the trees and the corpse, off the flatbed, and onto the station’s hard, steady ground. The red-haired man pointed him to the exit, down towards the engine, where well-dressed people in clean attire milled about.

His legs buckled and shook, refusing to forget the agitations of the journey; indeed, they insisted on continuing them, acting them out on the motionless platform. His upright carriage reinstated itself outside the station, but he dithered in small, clotted circles. Hadn’t he forgotten something back there? Was he supposed to be alone? Wasn’t there somebody he was waiting for? Had he a bag, or a stick, or…?

An hour later, unclear and unreminded, he was on the road leading into the centre of the city. He was sunburnt and ragged, his robes besmirched in all manner of filth, and the hurrying citizens eyed him in disgust and gave him a wide berth as he stumbled on.

—

Charlotte was drinking tea on their balcony when she saw him. She had been vacantly gazing across the crowd for days, trying to distract her worried mind, when the source of her anxieties teetered into her vision. She dismissed the possibility at first, for the man zigzagging below was dressed in some kind of native clown costume; a ludicrous beggar, overdressed to draw attention to his serious mental plight. Then she recognised something in his trampled gait. She stood up, retrieving the binoculars that sat on the table beside her and pressing them to her hope. The haze and the dirt attempted to dull the lenses, but beneath them, his features still showed: the eyes, lost and trawling the street, seeking something familiar, something concrete. She rushed downstairs and ran through reception, calling out to the concierge: “Bring help, it is monsieur, he is hurt, bring help!”

When she reached him, he came to the end of his abilities. He stared at her for a second more, then fainted.

—

Three days later, he awoke, cool and clean, floating in the still, starched whiteness of fragrant sheets. The smell of their fresh, laundered brilliance painted the inside of his mind with perfectly chilled milk. One of his hands began to search under the blanket for a forgotten thing beside him.

“You are safe now, Raymond.” The voice was soft and confident, radiant and restful. It seemed to come from the entire room. “The doctor has given you something. Now you must rest. I will bring you some more beef tea shortly.”

The words made no sense but soothed him back into slumber. A huge brown cow stood next to the bed. It wobbled, balanced comically on train tracks made of meat jelly, as the doctor sat below it, pulling at its udders, streams of hissing tea jetting into his white enamel pail. He filled his syringe from the steaming fluid. It misted the glass tube of the instrument, filling the room with its moist bovine vapour. The cow smiled through the fog with the most natural expression of quiet delight.

—

When he awoke, the cow was gone and Charlotte was sitting by his bed. It took a few minutes to remember her name. She brought tea and talked quietly, while he nodded and frowned at her version of the last few days.

The drug that the doctor administered to him was Soneryl; he would use it, and others, for the next thirteen barren years of his life. As its effects wore off, a great, hollow pain opened out inside him. He stopped nodding, and Charlotte’s words lost their meaning. Her voice was like a song, a chanter that made tears rise and fill his flickering eyes. She stopped when she saw her companion’s growing distress. Moving to his side, she held his small body in her arms. He sat forward, and she saw that his pillow was blotched pink with perspiration and blood. Beneath his silk pyjamas, his wounds and abrasions had been bandaged and covered in lint.

“It’s all right,” she said, “you are safe now. You are tired and bruised, but without any real injuries. Do you remember what happened to you and your friend?”

“Friend?” he said, in a voice that surprised him. “What friend?”

Charlotte explained that he had left to meet a man who was taking him into the Vorrh. They had planned to be there for only one day, but in fact, he had been gone for four. She told him of her growing panic and the plans she had been ready to put into place, before she had seen him on the street.

“What was his name?” he asked weakly.

“I don’t know, my dear. You called him many things. I think you said ‘Silka’ or something like that?”

“Silka,” he repeated, shaking his head. “Well, what did he look like?” he murmured.

“I am sorry, but I did not see him. You said he was young and black.”

“Did I?”

Charlotte nodded and he thought hard, but there was nothing there.

Not a single trace of the last seven days existed between this stained pillow and the previous one, which had been bloodied by dream; not even a rind of memory clung to the empty space in his skull. What boiled and hollowed him was below, in his heart: a vast, pleading hurt that sucked at his being, a loss beyond all other feelings, an overpowering sadness that should have been an overpowering joy.

“Charlotte, I think I am in love,” he said, tears streaming down his face as his body shook and wheezed in her frightened arms. They stayed like that until he sobbed himself asleep. Charlotte tucked him back into the bed and lowered the blinds against the late, slanting afternoon sunlight.

She tiptoed about the room, silently packing their belongings back into the suitcases, trying not to think of what he had just said. The warm, dim quiet was hushed and measured by his rhythmic breathing.

—

Three days later, he was standing in the lobby of the hotel, dressed in one of his immaculate white suits. Charlotte had booked the ship to carry them home. The monstrous black mobile caravan chugged outside, waiting, brimming with their possessions. He dithered as he clung to her arm, looking out into the blinding light of the street. His bone Eskimo spectacles had been changed for a much larger, more contemporary pair, which wrapped around his pinched face, making him appear insect-like.

“Shall we go?” she asked, squeezing his arm affectionately.

He gulped and nodded, and she guided him through the warm glass doors and down the faltering steps. Just before he entered the massive vehicle, he looked up and into the milling crowd, through the little island of trees that sat across the road. He looked hopelessly for someone he did not know, somebody who might know him; a last chance to repair the tearing wound that was devouring him. He looked for recognition in a wave or a touch or a smile. Nobody in the crowd stood out. Nobody saw him in the brightness and swirling dust. He stepped into the car, and it lumbered out of the city, across the arid landscape, towards the coast. In the passenger wing mirror, which had been adjusted for his view, the dark line of the Vorrh receded until it was erased by haze, dust, and vibration. His eyes never left the reflection until they reached the sea.

After his duties at the train station were finished, Maclish had rushed to find the doctor, his expression grave and urgent.

“It went terribly wrong. We must find Sidrus at once.”

“What went wrong?” said the doctor, obtusely.

“The Orm, man, the Orm! It hollowed the wrong man, some other poor black who was guiding a stranger through the forest. Not a hunter, anyway, and not Tsungali,” said Maclish.

“But how could that be?” said the doctor, finally relinquishing the remnants of his peaceful day. “He was spoored; he had the trace string…”

Maclish shrugged. “Don’t ask me, man—I don’t have the answers. It didn’t work this time.”

—

Sidrus fumed, his head shaking in dismay; its soft, bald surface rippled and wriggled his disturbing face, looking even more unreal in the pallid light of Hoffman’s laboratory.

“He had the string worm and you had the description of the prey; how could this happen?” he said ominously.

The doctor looked at the floor and Maclish tried not to look at the articulation of the face, as anger slid beneath its baby-smooth skin and wrinkled between its wide-set, piggish eyes. He had seen many things, worked with all kinds of freaks and barrack life, but this man gave him the horrors, made his flesh creep.

“You have wasted my time and my money, and the one opportunity I had of stopping that animal from killing Williams in the Vorrh,” he snarled.

“It worked with Cornelius and the Silver Man,” mumbled Maclish, his words barely escaping before Sidrus turned on him, crossing the room and looming into his face.

“Then what fucked up this time?” he shouted, his breath hot and fast on Maclish’s face, forcing him to close his eyes. No one had ever dared try this before; the consequences of insulting the fire-headed Scotsman were broadly known. But on this occasion, he looked away. The deepest levels of his well-sprung instinct locked down his hands and his rage, quelling it beside his opponent’s ferocious power.

“We will give the money back,” said the doctor, trying to defuse the situation. Sidrus sent him a withering gaze, as if to silence him forever; alum for the tongue. The stringent moment lengthened. Sidrus stormed out of the pale room, snapping the atmosphere’s tensile thinness with his stomping feet.

—

Anger was not the most useful tool in his armoury. He had achieved everything without its obvious help, could reach the far points of expression and action without the adrenaline other men required to achieve half as much. So he marched through the streets, wanting to dissipate his rage and think more clearly, but he could only contemplate the dismal outcome of what should have been a foolproof plan—what had those idiots done to ruin such a perfect solution? Now he had to find another way of stopping the wretched Englishman from being butchered in the Vorrh as he tried to pass through it for a second time. Nobody had ever accomplished such a thing; the great forest protected itself by draining and erasing the souls of all men; all except this one, apparently, who walked through it with impunity, even appearing to gain benefit from it. Sidrus did not know how or why this unique possibility had manifested itself, although he guessed that the witch child of the True People had worked some blasphemous magic with her protégé. What he did know was that if the Englishman passed through the forest again, he alone would have the opportunity to understand its balance, its future, and maybe even its past. Not since Adam had such a single being altered the purpose and the meaning of the Vorrh, and now he was being hunted by a barbaric mercenary, one these fools had let slip through their grasp.

Sidrus was faced again with the impossibility of his task—he could not go into the forest, and there was nobody else who could prevent catastrophe. It had been easier dispatching the Erstwhile than trying to protect the straying man from afar. The twins had been easy enough, but he knew there would be others sniffing out the bounty attached to Williams’s desertion and the murders he had committed that had sparked the tinder of the Possession Wars.

His only hope now was that Tsungali would be lost in the tangled depth or that one of the creatures of the core would permanently interrupt his travels. But Sidrus had little faith in these hopes, and he prayed again for a darker shadow to cross the hunter’s path, something that would give the Englishman a chance to fulfil his evolution.