The Wanderer (36 page)

After a time, Rashmi, helpless with terror, pissed down her
legs, and the thing nodded its head, gurgled mirthful, lewd, then ducked back into the alcove, was still, silent again.

Once Rashmi had recovered from the bad shock, she tested her bonds. She found that, though they held firm, they’d not been tied quite tight enough, and, after several hours struggling, she was able to wriggle free. During this time the creature didn’t come forth from the nook again. She heard shuffling and the clanking of chain every so often, though.

Then, when Curwen came in to sacrifice her, clutching a curved dagger and a grimoire, she, frantic, half-crazed, overpowered him, ran into the night, fled the gloom of the pines. A farmer, up early to milk his herd, saw her scampering, naked, across his field, caught up with her, gave her his coat, and took her back to his house to be looked after by his wife. When Rashmi had recovered a little, she told the couple her tale, leaving nothing out, though she painted the thing in the nook as a filthy starveling bestial man, for fear they might think her deranged. They were inclined to believe her, for there were rumours about eerie noises coming from the hermit’s cottage and strange flickering lights seen in its windows at night, so called the police immediately. A WPC came to take Rashmi’s statement, while officers were sent to investigate the old man’s property. But, by the time they arrived at the cottage, he’d fled. The weird scene in the cellar confirmed Rashmi’s account, though. Of course, the demon, or whatever it was, was also gone. When the police scoured the property after, they discovered human bone fragments mixed into the earth in the kitchen garden. The hermit had apparently ground up the bodies of many victims, perhaps, it was speculated, used the meal to feed the soil he grew his herbs in. And it was a strange lot of herbs.

By the time Rashmi finished telling me her story, she was shaking. I reached out to hold her, but she pushed me, gently, away.

‘It’s fine,’ she said, hugging herself. ‘It was a very long time
ago. It’s just, well, I’ve not thought about that night in millennia.’

She shuddered.

‘I didn’t want to relive it now, but…’

She paused, scratched her nose.

‘But I think, somehow, if you record it, it’ll warn me. So you must set it down, just as told.’

Drunk, I merely nodded absently. Then, reaching for the firewater, I stopped, my hand halfway to the gourd.

‘Warn you?’

‘Oh, I don’t know.’

She picked up the gourd herself, took a draught from it, then held it arm’s length, squinted at it.

‘We’re going to feel horrible in the morning, you know.’

‘I know.’

She passed the drink to me, then sat silent a time, biting her lip.

‘Well?’ I prompted.

‘I’m not really sure. All I know is, Elliot was convinced he saw me die. I think your narrative somehow, well…’

‘What?’

‘Hmm. I’ll try my best to explain.’

She then told me that, throughout the terrifying night tied up in the cellar, she’d had a tenuous memory of having before read an account of the things she was undergoing. At the time, she gave it scant thought. And afterwards, when she pondered it, she put it down to that uncanny sense of having lived through something before, which isn’t uncommon.

But when she looked over my typescript, after I’d taken her aboard the Ark, she’d had a strong recollection of having, some weeks prior to her horrific encounter with the evil diabolist, found it in a second-hand bookshop in London, during a trip she’d made to the capital, having bought it, the same typescript, though bound in cloth covers, having read it, closely, cover to cover. Yet, weirdly, at the same time she also felt certain she’d
never seen it before.

When Elliot described watching her age and die, she’d had a sudden realization: she must, at some point, have split into two separate selves whose paths had forked. Therefore, while she’d agreed to go out to the diabolist’s cottage, endured the terrors of his cellar, responded to my classified, attended the gathering in the Nightingale, and so on, her fetch, who’d read my account, had refused, never saw the horror beneath the mundane surface of things, lived out a normal life.

‘I envy her so,’ she said, shaking her head.

‘I’m glad things have turned out as they have, though,’ I said, hoping to cheer her.

‘You know what bewilders me now?’ she asked, ignoring me.

I shook my head.

‘Well, you see, if I’d never read your story, I wouldn’t have become immortal, couldn’t have saved you from Elliot. But had I not rescued you, even allowing for Elliot’s not, for some reason of his own, burning your typescript, and it slipping backwards through time so I could read it, you’d have never recorded my tale. Perhaps it’s that very paradox that divided me.’

We both sat quiet awhile. My brain reeled.

‘Anyhow,’ Rashmi went on, eventually. ‘I lied to Elliot, told him I’d had a twin because I didn’t want him to suspect any of this. Not that I can make any sense of it.’

‘I can’t either. Though it isn’t any stranger than anything else that’s befallen us, is it?’

At that we fell silent, stared into the fire, lost in our thoughts. But, before long, our reveries were disturbed. One of the beasts whose lumbering in the dark we’d been hearing all evening blundered into our camp. It was not a bear or buffalo after all, but a huge primeval armadillo, with bone barding and a spiked club at the end of its tail. We leapt to our feet, seized up brands from the fire, backed away. But it meant us no harm, just cocked its lumpish skull to peer blearily at us with one moist yellow eye,
then wrinkled its nose, waddled ponderously off.

We stared at each other a moment.

‘Yes,’ I said, peering off into the night. ‘Creation
is
in disarray.’

Rashmi laughed.

‘What?’ I asked

‘You! So serious.’

I squinted at her, started to open my mouth, but she leaned over, silenced me with a kiss.

And here, I bid you farewell, my reader. This is the end of my tale; against all odds, it’s a mostly happy one.

Afterword

This will be hard going. It’s been a very long time since I last used this typewriter. I have though, meanwhile, taken care of it, kept its mechanisms in good order: protected it from dust, grime, and damp with a cover made from the stomach membrane of a yak, a fine but impermeable stuff; kept it oiled; wiped it fairly often with a soft cloth. I felt sure, you see, I’d have cause to use it again, that some portentous event would compel me to again set its typebars clattering, jostling its ribbon against a sheet of paper clamped in its jaws. So what will make writing this afterword slow, laborious, is that my fingers, out of the habit of typing, are clumsy, halting, and my brain, long unused to composition, struggles to find the words needful. The inspiring prospect from the mouth of this cave, Rashmi’s and my home a long time now, should help, though: we’re in deep midwinter, so the steeps are swathed in unsullied snow, the tarn, frozen, glister, and the swathes of darkling pine are mottled with white. And, overhead, a grey canopy is breaking up to reveal a wan sun and sliver of moon hung in a sky strewn with bright motley stars, a sublime sight, for all it’s an ill omen.

The end of things has been much longer coming than I thought; the signs I noted while writing the tale this will serve as an afterword to, were merely tokens of the onset of a drawn-out decay, not of looming havoc, the end of things; Rashmi and I have dwelt many centuries in the Himalayas since then. They’ve been mostly happy and peaceful. We’ve had only one real sorrow: though I soon overcame my impotence, it seems, whether for reasons eldritch or prosaic, I can’t say, no children can come of our couplings. But I’m sure the last days are really upon us now, for the sun, after waxing till, several hundred years ago, it was a blazing ball of fire, forcing us to shelter in our cave some decades, has dwindled, is now sickly, faint, no brighter
than the moon once was, and things grow cold and dark. So, soon, our long, long lives will cease (and we won’t try, my reader, if you were wondering, to escape the Earth’s end by running into that dread realm Elliot was so fond of; we’ve pledged never to enter it, though we now know how to, feel that to do so would be to forfeit something we’re not prepared to give up.)

I’ve spent much time in the last few years, then, musing on the nature of things, now believe the world, the universe, every once in a great many ages, shrivels to a dead core, a dead core that then becomes the seed another cosmos sprouts from. Many have argued this, or something similar, at different times in Earth’s history (though my formulation of the notion has, of course, been, in part, shaped by the beliefs of the folk of this mountain region). I don’t reckon, though, as some thinkers of past ages have, that the cosmos is reborn to the same over again; Rashmi’s uncanny feeling she was sundered, perhaps on reading this very document, had an eldritch twin who knew a life different from hers, has suggested something other to me. I reckon the Earth, on returning from cold and stasis, may sometimes have a slightly different history, and suppose the cause of any changes to be objects that survive the end and, lasting into the next cycle, set up eddies time’s flow. Though the cosmos perhaps resists such shifts, those, in particular, that give rise to paradoxes, I’d suppose the possibility of transformation to remain. I’ve, then, become determined to somehow ensure the survival of this account of mine.

This region has always had its roving holy folk, known as weavers of spells, but in all the time I’ve lived here there’s only been one who’s seemed to me to possess any real power, a woman, once almost terrifyingly vital, latterly, at the end of a very long life, a withered crone, though still formidable. I’ve, myself, witnessed her bringing back to health men, women, and children seemingly beyond hope, rid a field of rice of fungal blight, and raise, by mumbling some words over a line scratched
in the dirt, a weird barrier that kept a village from being swept away by an avalanche. Thinking on this last, I decided I’d speak to her about my typescript. I’d only met and talked with her a few times, but felt she might help me if I explained things to her. I thought, then, I’d track her down next spring, when Rashmi and I went down the mountain, lugging furs to trade for rice, iron arrowheads, and other things. But, hearing from a passing traveller the holy woman been taken badly sick, I asked Rashmi if we could go early. She was reluctant to travel in winter, but knowing the hardships of it could only hurt, not kill us, and half swayed by my ideas, agreed.

We left our cave a week ago then, went down to the foothills, and, in the first settlement we came across, made enquiries as to the whereabouts of the holy crone. We were told her illness had got even worse, that she’d returned to the village of her forebears to die. So we set out, in haste, for the place. Partway through our trek, the weather turned really bad, squalls, driving snow, very cold, and, as our way took us through a defile where the drifts were waist high, by the time we arrived we were sore weary, had painful chilblains on our hands and feet. It wasn’t, then, till the following morning, when I was recovered, rested, warm, I sought out the witch.

Leaving Rashmi drowsing in the yurt we’d been offered for the night by a kind villager who’d taken pity on us, I made my way to the drystone and sod roundhouse where, I’d been told, the holy woman could be found. The storm had died, and it was eerie quiet; the snow and heavy cloud muffled.

Reaching the place I’d been directed to, I was let in, saw the witch lying on a heap of bearskins against the wall. I was sad to see she really was near death. Family, the brood of a sister, sat sunk in sorrow, were loath to let me speak to her. But hearing my voice, she called out in a reedy tone for them to bring me over. They did, but pleaded low that I not tax her waning strength too much.

She lay slumped, gaunt and wan, shivering in spite of the furs piled on her. She greeted me with a wave of her hand, then, suffering pangs, sat up, clawed at her coverings, moaned. I was moved to see her like that, asked if she couldn’t be healed by either her own sorcery, or the remedies of others. But she shook her head slowly and, smiling feeble, told me the span she’d been allotted was drawing to a close, that she was well-prepared for the end.

She gestured for me to take a seat on a three-legged wooden stool drawn up by her pallet. We talked a short while about the weather, friends in common, then she told me of her worries about the cranes. The numbers flying over the range in autumn and spring had been dwindling every year, and hunters were now wary of shooting many down, lest their end be hastened. The flesh had been one of the staple foodstuffs of the Himalayan people’s winter diet, so this caused much hunger and misery.

This served as a natural lead into the matter I wanted to broach. I told the holy woman how I believed the end of days drew near and outlined my notion of recurrence with shifts. Listening, she nodded sagely.

‘In dreams,’ she said, ‘I’ve seen the world tumbling in the void, didn’t know what this vision meant. But perhaps it’s a sign the Earth, existence, is like that game we call, in these parts, Climb the Mountain, whose players take turns to roll a die, aiming to throw all scores in turn. Perhaps, slow, so slow, all possible histories are gone through.’

‘Who, then, gambles with our lives?’

‘I suspect but the Void, and its friends Desolation and Emptiness.’

As our talk was beginning to tire her, I thought it prudent to raise the subject of the warding incantation. At first she was bemused. Then, when she realized what I hoped to do, she looked sharply at me.

‘I didn’t take you for vain.’

‘I’m not vain,’ I protested, and pointed to my forehead, to the letters Elliot carved there, that have never quite healed, that I’ve lived with so long. ‘I don’t care about memorializing my life, my deeds. It’s that, if my tale is found and read, it might impede, in the world that’s to come, the evil of a creature who’s brought misery to many.’

And I told her about Elliot, and his malice, his cruelty, about the things this typescript sets forth.