The Wanderer (30 page)

‘After I quit them, they sailed haphazard over the oceans for nearly a century, keeping to the open sea, afeared to approach any coastline. But then, tiring of the fables that had sprung up about them, irked by their renown, which far exceeded mine, though I courted infamy, I ended their miserable existences, sent
their corpses, and their rotting vessel, to the bottom of the sea.’

Elliot drew musingly on the pipe several times, holding the smoke in his mouth, savouring it, before allowing it to spill from his lips. No one spoke. Till then, terrified and enthralled, I’d kept my eyes fixed on him, but at that moment I cast a glance round the Nightingale, saw that all was in darkness save our table, around which a greenish nimbus roiled. The landlord must have turfed out the other patrons, shut up for the night, and gone to bed; Elliot must have, by some arcane means, hid and muffled us.

‘I’ve never known true infamy,’ Elliot went on, ‘though I’ve craved it from time to time. But some of those I’ve tried to make prey of over the years have been artists and writers who’ve gone on to depict the traumas I inflicted on them, if obliquely. Some of these works have become well-known, so I can claim to have inspired some notorious art. There was a Spanish painter, who saw Tartarus, and was there set upon by grotesquely outsized carrion birds. But he only saw that dark place briefly, did not become deathless, though the experience did leave him deaf. His attraction to dark and violent subjects ever after is testimony that the experience affected him deeply. Another of my victims was an English Romantic who could not see clearly enough to follow me, as his sight was bleared by swigs of nepenthes. Then there was an Irish priest, who, of a suspicious cast of mind, was wary of me, resisted my lures, though he was very poor, and I offered great riches. An American writer, a sot, whom, in the guise of a man named Reynolds, I succeeded in tempting, was too fuddled to tread in my steps, though he wished to and I believe my grubs wormed into his heart. A prolific French novelist, being of a scientific bent, was inquisitive and followed me, but was also supremely rational and chased away, in his mind, with false light, the shadows I showed him, and thereby avoided Tartarus’s maw. Then there was an English poet, a Victorian, who, sensible and worldly, if nervy, dismissed his vision of Tartarus as a dream, though he wrote some remarkable verses on it. Another poet,
another Frenchman, had already too much darkness in him, eating away at his soul, just as syphilis was eating away at his brain, and would, had I allowed him to accompany me as he desired, have been corrupted utterly, forever passed over to the other side. And there was yet another French poet, a prodigy, a native of Uruguay, who exalted me in bizarre lays, who, frustratingly, died young, before I could drag him down into dark hinterlands. That was in Paris, during the siege, and in that turbulent time, I also failed with another, this one a Belgian poet, who wrote, fittingly, under the pseudonym Hendrick Van der Decken. On the strength of his bizarre, cruel collection,
Cette terre clinkerisée
, he is considered, by the few who know it, one of the most imaginative and radical of the decadents. It is though, in truth, a relatively unembellished account of things I showed him. But immortality did not fasten upon him, perhaps because he was dull in many ways. He too died during the siege.

‘One of the more irksome failures was my attempt to make a quarry of another American writer of strange tales, also a journalist, and a sardonic and brilliant wit. He laughed in my face, got away. But I’d my revenge, some years later, in Mexico. And then there was another Englishman, this one a mariner, who I nearly managed to drag into the pit on some lonesome isle in the South Pacific, but, of an imposing build, burly, if short, and trained in martial arts, he fought me off, the only person ever to have done so. He later wrote weird tales that made veiled allusion to what I put him through. He died in the Great War. Then came a London-based painter, who was hailed as an illustrator of genius in his youth, but who lived out his life in obscurity, in dank south-London basements, trying through various esoteric rituals to recreate that place I took him to in his youth. Mad, that one, so mad it would seem Tartarus spurned him. The dark portal I dragged him through can be found in a Smithfields back alley. It takes the form of a cunt.’

Elliot sighed, leaned back, and blew out a cloud of smoke. It
hung weirdly in the air, and he sculpted it, using the pipe’s stem, into the shape of a vulva. Then wafted it into the shadows.

‘And there was a man, a stockbroker, born in Glasgow, but residing in Argentina, best remembered now as a translator of Latin American epics, but who also, after I’d shown him dread things, wrote two works of bleak horror. He found humankind dismaying enough, so Tartarus was no particular novelty to his blasted vision. There was another British expatriate, a headstrong Englishwoman who lived most of her life in Central America. I tormented her in a Madrid asylum, but, though the experience harrowed her at the time, her strength and anarchic intellect allowed her to transmute it into wonderful and strange art and literature. Less resilient was the American author who I next attempted to make quarry. Afterwards she suffered neuroses and depression, aggravated her mercurial personality with an addiction to prescription amphetamines, lived badly, and died young, though not without writing some remarkable fictions, which, though largely depicting the mundane, are suffused with Tartarean atmosphere. I believe it was her mix of frailty and brilliance that prevented the place from getting its hooks into her. Then there was another Englishman. He was inspecting a stretch of the Grand Union Canal, the preservation of Britain’s waterways was his great cause, when I dragged him down to Tartarus through an opening beneath an ancient and terrible willow tree. He was cynical, wry, and shrugged off its horrors, but, ever after, wrote restrained, muted, but deeply strange tales. And there’s one last, an American, still alive, whose fictions are the stuff of nightmares. The things I put him through in an abandoned Detroit tenement were sore vile and dread, but didn’t seem to grip him. His outlook was altogether too bleak already.’
¹⁰

Elliot paused scratched his nape.

‘With these men and women, my efforts were in vain. And, though they were all in some way marked by the torments I put them through, they survived, returned to the mundane realm,
lived a semblance of a life. More often, I’ve failed because I’ve been unable to shield my victims from deranging sights, and they’ve became helplessly frenzied, and either run raging deeper into the weird realm, and been lost forever, or returned from what they’ve seen, heard, and experienced, with bloodshot eyes, pierced eardrums, and feeble minds, as the Irish lass and the Dutch mariners did. Of these latter wretches most I’ve destroyed, for, though hunting down and murdering rank idiots is pretty humdrum, it offers a visceral thrill. Jane,’ he said, turning to the author, and grinning hideously, baring his teeth, ‘your husband is one of the former type, who, deranged, will roam Tartarean regions till the end of days. I now believe darkness already had its hooks in him before I got to him, some disturbing tomes he read in his youth. And,’ he continued, addressing me, ‘your friend Colin was one of the latter. I made away with him when I thought he might threaten my plans for you. I tortured him horribly, before stabbing him, throwing him off that cliff.’

I beat my palm with my fist. Jane slumped with her head on the table.

‘Oh, and that bewigged maniac is another of those who returned, but too damaged, too crazed. I let him live because he has some moments of lucidity during which I can get him to aid me, but there’s no point hunting him, he worships me, wouldn’t run.

‘I’ve failed many times. But only once have I been found out. Just recently, about a year ago, I hauled a minor horror writer into Tartarus through a hole in the floor of the toilets of a derelict boarded-up pub on Glasgow’s South Side. He remained sane, but also, I’m sure, had that talisman awoken in him. But somehow, I can’t work it out, he discovered what was planned for him, for you all, and also found out how to enter Tartarus, went in there of his own will, just a few days ago. I believe he hopes to thwart me, perhaps find a weapon to strike at me with when I come for
him. But he’s not come back out again. My guess is, this time, he’s lost down there.
¹¹

‘As I say, I’ve failed many times. But, with you,’ he continued, stabbing a gnarled forefinger at each of us in turn, ‘my success has been complete. You’re not my only triumphs, though. Over the years I’ve created many other immortals of sound mind, men and women from all over this dismal orb. But you’re the first to see me as I really am, the first to hear my history. I hope for more like gatherings, so I can strike terror into the hearts of all my victims, all those I’ve lured or dragged into Tartarus, and who’ve returned still able to fear.’

(I should write here, I’ve never, as far as I know, encountered any of Elliot’s other sane victims, save those in the pub that night. Neither have I entered that awful otherworld again, never managed it on my own, though I’ve spent many centuries seeking out and poring over its dark lore. I can’t understand why not, I’ve studied the rituals, know where portals are to be found. Unless it’s that, terrified of what I might find there, I, without being conscious of it, have sabotaged my own efforts.)

Elliot sat back in his chair, repeated the trick with the smoke, though this time carved a death’s head from the puff.

‘For all of you here, I’m the sole bringer of death. Nothing can kill you, not sickness, not calamity, not your own hand, nor the hand of any save me. Only I, with the knife I spoke of, can bring about your ends. But I won’t send you off peacefully. It will be harrowing. Do not doubt this, I’ve had aeons to whet my cruelty. So don’t seek me out and prostrate yourself at my feet when immortality becomes unendurable. Fly from me, quail at my approach always. I’ll seek you, I will hunt you down, and you will run. You, and those others like you, are to be my sport till the world’s end.’

He looked round the table. We were all wan, cowered. He smirked, then a change came over him, the monstrous drained from his features, and he looked the good-humoured pensioner
once more.

‘Go from this place,’ he sang, smiling, to the tune of an air that seemed familiar to me, but which I couldn’t place, beating the pipe in time, like a conductor’s baton. ‘You’ve six months before I set out after you, use them to get as far from here as possible. Though you can’t evade me forever, I hope some of you will be resourceful enough to keep me searching a good while.’

Then he winked.

With that, William, Rashmi, Jane, Duncan, and I leapt up from the table, knocking over chairs, leaving our copies of Verne’s strange novel lying on the table, scrambled to leave the Nightingale. Chuckling to himself, Elliot sat, watched us. William reached the door first and, discovering it locked, took up a bar stool and smashed out one of the pub’s etched glass windows. Then he clambered through, out into the night. The rest of us followed. Then we tore off in separate directions. You might be shocked by this, but terror had reduced us to frantic beasts, and brute instinct told us we’d be easier to track in a group than alone. Indeed, till I stumbled across William’s body, I didn’t see any of that company again.

XI

The thing I’d dreaded many ages has finally come to pass.

It was early this morning (or perhaps yesterday morning: it’s night, has been so for a time, and I’ve no way of knowing whether or not the witching hour has yet passed). Just before dawn, or so I learnt a short while afterwards, when, on being toted, wrists and ankles bound with strong cord, up the Ark’s companion steps and into the outer air, I saw the sun cresting the eastern skyline.

I was sitting at the desk in the cramped cabin below the Ark’s decks, reading over the foregoing section of this narrative. The tribeswoman lay on her pallet, sleeping fitfully, gaunt, cheeks sunken and hectic. Indeed, we both were more parched and wasted than when I last described us; I doubted the tribeswoman had long to live, was astounded, actually, she’d held out as she had, awaited her death, felt sadness, though a sadness tinged with relief, relief her sufferings would end.

Then the door was thrown wide. A gibbous monster, swollen features, a hooked nose, stumbled in. Its movements were wooden, awkward. A life-sized Punch puppet.

I thought myself delirious at first, but then, when one wooden eyelid creaked shut and open, I realized it was Elliot wearing that guise to taunt and horror me. He was followed by a rabble of the local natives. They carried flaming brands, and their faces were smeared with woad; in the flickering torchlight, they looked gaudy fiends.

My heart pounded fit to burst.

I got to my feet, meaning to resist, but, enfeebled by hunger, thirst, the corrupt air of the hold, slumped to the floor. Lifting her head, the tribeswoman gazed blankly at the intruders, the sinews in her scrawny neck standing out like banjo strings. Then she coughed, spluttered, and bloody spittle spattered the front of her
undershirt.

We were soon trussed up like capons for the spit.

‘That’s the way to do it!’ Elliot jeered, shrill and reedy.

The rabble bore us up through the hold’s tortuous ways, jostling us aloft, out onto the deck, and down the gangplank. Elliot loped along, a little way out in front, turning from time to time to beckon the tribe on, bark commands in their tongue.

Pulled up on the mudflats, a short way from the Ark, was a barge woven from rushes. The tribeswoman and I were loaded on board, her listless and unresisting, me struggling weakly. Then some of the natives got behind the boat, launched it. It wallowed as Elliot and six heavyset brutes embarked, but found an even keel once they’d settled, Elliot on his feet in the stern, at the tiller, and the tribesmen, having taken up paddles, kneeling in two rows on either side. Their first fierce strokes took us out to the centre of the estuary, then Elliot, pushing the helm from him, swung the prow upstream. At first the tribesmen, who sang a tuneless dirge in time to their strokes, struggled to paddle against the current, but they were burly, and the craft soon outstripped the mob walking along the bank. Elliot bellowed orders at his crew and stared ahead, on the lookout for snags. He, as Punch, was dwarfish, but his shadow, thrown by the low sun at his back, was spindly, stalked ahead. Sat in the bows, bound hand and foot, in undergarments soaked with brine, shivering in the early morning chill, I felt a pang of regret I’d never complete this text, that it would certainly be lost or destroyed and never read.