The Worm in Every Heart (5 page)

We seemed fated to be namesakes, he and I. So, to seal this undeclared liaison, I began a series of elaborations on my usual theme—variations in the tone of red, involving our mutual chosen prey (unrepentant and uncaught sepoys, whores and beggars, low-caste Indians of all descriptions.) The credit for which was inevitably laid directly at Grammar's increasingly bemused . . . and more than slightly flattered . . . door.

Obviously—though it was really then long past the time for such small pleasantries as introductions—a meeting was in order.

My plans towards this end were aided greatly by the nature of Grammar's next posting, which would send him upriver—to a tiny, jungle-bound village named Amsore, outside of which a last, lone outpost of sepoys was rumored to still be in hiding—and away from all the “civilized” influences which conspired to keep him sane.

The continuing presence of Romesh Singh, already more than half in worshipful lust with his chosen British “master,” promised to be similarly useful, as he remained one of the few who did not fear Grammar enough to desert him. His potential impact on the situation could in no way be underestimated, since—the innate idiocy of his desires aside—he was a wholly upright Sikh, a career soldier, no prude, and (above all) no fool. He knew that wanting Grammar was both morbid and perverse on his part, but the freakish glamor of a berserker must always hold its own attractions, especially for a military man.

He was also the only person near Grammar who not only knew exactly what the woman had meant by calling him Rhakshasa . . . but might actually be counted upon—eventually—to tell him.

All people of Hind—educated as they are in the laws of dharma—know both of the Wheel, which pulls them up or throws them down, and of enlightenment, whose attainment offers them escape from it. But for the Rhakshasa, whose forms are as many as their hungers are simple—with whom I may, respectfully, stake my claim of kinship—there is no escape, and no need of one. There is no Wheel for us. Nothing changes. From the moment we elect to leave it, everything stays firmly tied to the same crooked track of appetite and deception.

Novelty, however brief, is the only thing we have left to welcome.

I had smelt Desbarrats Grammar coming from as far off as his landing at Calcutta-ghat, wading up through the river's muddy shallows, as the bearers struggled with his gear: A pale blaze of frustrated heat with nothing but itself for fuel, too quenchless for remorse. There was a hole inside of him that demanded either light, ever more light, or an equal and engulfing darkness. Romesh Singh still quietly offered him the former, which he spurned; it hurt Grammar's terrible British pride, I venture, to think the solution for his many sins could have been something so simple as love.

So he remained alone: a promise of sport, on my part.

And a possibility—however scant—of danger.

* * *

August, 1857:

“Some unidentifiably rancid stink seems to hang over everything I touch these days, always rising, though already thick enough to swim in. This morning I woke feverish as ever, boots on and my clothes stuck fast to me, my own sweat so hot against my skin it made me wonder whether I had slept in blood. I am also running out of usable paper, a fact which does not disturb me overmuch, since I no longer know who I might possibly be writing this for.”

* * *

Amsore had been one of the last places to succumb to the Mutiny, long after the boats at Cawnpore had drifted away on a bloody tide, and the well of the Bibighar was stopped with the beaten corpses of British women and children. But even as Amsore's settlers dithered in their punkah-shaded homes, a preparatory whisper had nevertheless gone up and down the nearby river's banks, borne on the dust from Meerut and running deeper than its own mud-sluggish current: A promise of support, of like-mindedness; of loyalty kept carefully unvoiced, and weapons kept hidden but ready. It was the old, old cry of the surreptitious sepoy-sympathizer, soon to become Grammar's adopted mantra: Sub lal hogea hai—“Everything has become red.“

In this particular case, however, the signal had never been given time enough to go any further than that first glad acknowledgement. The Mutiny was a failure, a frenzied knot of rage without the necessary guidance to keep it from strangling itself in its haste to stem the “White Plague”'s spread. Calcutta fell again, its Black Hole found and emptied, and the few stragglers remaining fled—most straight into the British army's vengeful hands, some of them to Amsore . . . and beyond.

Into the jungle.

Outside of Amsore's limits, everything familiar falls abruptly away into a green abyss: Screaming monkeys, unseen eyes, filtered rays of feeble, leaf-washed sun. Snakes hang dappled and silent as vines, sectioned by their most muscular areas, and here and there—stumbling half-blind through an endless funnel of foliage—one trips headlong across knots of roots from which erupt bright, fleshy flowers, big enough to drink from. The Ramayana calls forests home to wind, darkness, hunger and great terrors—a poetic description, but not entirely inaccurate. Jungle-swallowed, one must eke out direction; one finds one's way with senses other than those most usually given or employed.

Outside Amsore, the trees hide miles of ripe, interlocking tracklessness: Verdant ventriculation, sap-fed growth, a living maze. A wholly fitting provenance for lovers, or for madmen.

* * *

They found the camp at sunset, through a hazy glare of red already half-deepening to grey as twilight retook its nightly portion, adapting all it touched to darkness. Insects still hung thick around the ash-heap of a dampened fire, on which a brass pot full of half-cooked rice sat abandoned. Further still, a few hastily-improvised huts of mud and fallen wood vomited scraps of clothing or the odd rusty weapon, spoiled supplies and broken crockery. Detritus lay everywhere, the spoor of retreat, scattered and rank. Grammar's party—the bulk of them barefoot, and thus more likely to consider where they chose to step—picked their way carefully through it, stabbing at every heap and corner with their bayonets. Except themselves, nothing moved but those few small creatures one occasionally heard rustle in the grass, and—just above—three lone kites (barely visible, through a bald patch in the jungle's roof) which dipped and cawed in a slice of red-grey sky.

At the crotch of one overhanging tree's trunk, a wet, red, knotted rag of some not easily identifiable substance glittered. Under the tree was something else, equally red, but moaning; this proved—after Romesh Singh was so good as to kick it gingerly over—to be what remained of a man who had been partially flayed. It was a portion of his forcibly donated hide, apparently, that gave the tree its surreal extra coat.

“How long since is he dead?” Grammar called across the clearing, idly running his sword through a sack of dried beans that soon proved both soaked enough to rot, and full of maggots.

“He lives yet, sahib,” Romesh Singh replied.

Mildly impressed by such resilience, Grammar stooped to examine the man, who lay gasping—long, low, shallow gulps of liquid air, the humid foretaste of approaching rainfall—but inert, a thin line of bloodshot ivory just showing under each eyelid. Using the flat of his blade, Grammar scraped lightly over the man's denuded chest, flicking the bright half-circle of raw flesh where his right nipple had once been back to full, painful life.

The man reared up with a scream, then back again. His eyes, all white around their irises, fell on Grammar—and immediately widened further in horrified recognition.

“Where are thy fellows, offal?” Grammar asked him.

The man coughed, wetly. At Grammar's nod, Romesh Singh kicked him lightly in the head, forcing him further sidelong into the mud. The man doubled up, vomiting earth mixed with blood on Grammar's boots. With a little moue of disgust, Grammar put one shiny black heel to the back of the man's neck, pinning him down, and leant again to rephrase his initial request, this time a bit more insistently. Adding:

“It will do thee no good to lie. Remember, thou hast some skin yet left to lose.”

The man drew a fresh gulp of air, mixed with a fair chunk of his own waste.

“Thou . . . knowest,” he managed, at last.

Grammar frowned.

“I fear,” he said, “that thou art mistaken.”

Even he, however, could see that the man was clearly far beyond dissembling.

Grammar looked to Romesh Singh. Behind them, someone gave a nervous little step backwards, crushing something not particularly loud, but obviously breakable.

“Thou knowest,” the man repeated, dully.

“Then it can do no harm to tell me again.”

The man spit, a weak, retching stream of pink, which Grammar easily avoided. His dying eyes took on a blank gleam of unsatisfied malice.

“Human tiger,” he said. “Blood-drinker. Evil thing. Why dost thou return? Why bring thy lackeys, when you needed none upon thy first visit? We were many; now my fellows are gone I know not where. And it was thee that brought us to this pass, white corpse-eating dog, thou mocking horror. It was thee.”

(And here occurs a mystery you city-dwellers cannot hope to know, o my beloved, especially without the benefit of personal experience: The sheer, shocking speed with which light drains away when sunset has ended, here in the jungle's heart—in one bright gush, like blood from a slashed throat, leaving nothing behind but a certain stillness; the hush of drawn breath, or the barest of unvoiced sighs.)

On Grammar's deaf side, one of the company blurted, all unthinking: “Rhakshasa!”

Grammar did not hear it, of course—but caught Romesh Singh's brief little jerk of reaction from the corner of one eye, and whipped quickly around, following it to its trembling, rooted source. His pistol had already appeared in one hand, amusingly enough; primed, aimed and ready, almost before he had consciously thought to draw it.

“Who said that?” he asked.

No one answered. Undeterred, Grammar shifted only slightly, sighting down the barrel at the soldier he judged most clearly in range.

“You, I think,” he said, coolly. And pulled the trigger.

Romesh Singh shut his eyes. There had been a bazaar boy the company had adopted, not long since—silent and tensile with near-starvation, good mainly for scouring pots, packing kits (but only when there was time to watch him do it, for he had never quite gotten over his early habits of casual thievery), and running those few small errands his shaky command of English would allow for. Grammar—stalking restlessly around camp, quietly ablaze with his usual nimbus of potential lunacy, as everyone took care to stay out of his way—had not even seemed to notice his existence, until the child made the understandable mistake of laughing at a whispered joke while still within Grammar's eyeshot. Without breaking stride, Grammar had swerved to scoop the boy up and carried him into the cooking tent, where he ground him face-first into an open cask of chili powder for some long moments, then dropped him. To stand, watching patiently, as the boy thrashed and huffed awhile at his feet—nose, eyes and throat all swollen shut, the rest a tight, red mask of burns—before suffocating on what later proved to be a flood of his own shocked mucus.

And he, Romesh Singh, had shut his eyes then as well, so as not to have to see Grammar's scarlet-coated back draw up all at once like a shaken snake, straightening with pleased arousal at the spectacle of his own cruelty.

(Thinking:
Oh.
Like a bell.
Oh,
a heart-beat's sharp-soft squeeze between rib and gut, tolling.
This is so wrong. I am so very wrong to even be here, with him.
)

Gunshot and thunder blended, signalling the torrent's arrival. And before this one (now forever nameless) soldier's corpse had fallen to earth, the rest of Grammar's company simply broke and ran in the face of Grammar's insanity—always no more than a reputable quirk, until it had finally turned their way.

The flayed man gave a laugh, drawing Grammar's second shot. The pistol jammed; Grammar swore and threw it after them, as the soldiers' shadows faded like ghosts under a curtain of warm monsoon rain, leaving officer and second-in-command alike behind, entirely at the forest's mercies.

Grammar snarled, a tiger's half-cough.

“Cowardly bastards,” he said, in English. Adding, contemptuously: “'Rhakshasa', am I? Hardly an opinion worth dying over.”

Romesh Singh, wisely enough, said nothing—his own eyes kept firmly shut—as a long, wet, green moment passed over them, darkening both their scarlet coats to rust.

Grammar laughed, and let the sheath drop away from his sword, falling point-down. It quivered by one foot, mud-supported, forgotten.

“Well, come then, my shadow,” he told the curtain of underbrush before him (having, without even noticing, slid fluidly back into Urdu.) “Or shall I haste to meet thee? For either way, you will find me as I find myself: Ready.”

And still Romesh Singh stood, feeling the rain seep down through his clothes and lave his trembling body abruptly to life, every nerve set winking in the gloom like unseen stars above.

(Thinking only:
But now we are alone at last, thou and I. Together.
)

They were both wrong, of course. Grammar, all his impressively flaunted rage aside, was nothing near to ready—as Romesh Singh might have told him, had he cared to solicit a second opinion—and neither was alone, with or without the other.

For I was already here. As I always had been.

The rain, the mud, the dead and cooling bodies, the silent trees. I was present and accounted for in all of it at once, a speck of me everywhere the eye might care to light, pixilating slowly to fruition. In the very air itself, between every falling raindrop—sub-dust, sub-viri, void-breath on the back of the neck, a shadow on the face of the whole. I spread out around the carcass of the dead former sepoy like a stain, over the clearing's seared floor, so fragrant yet with ash; and ah, but that fire had burned brightly, for all it was only a heap of corpses doused in lamp-oil. Brown corpse melting to black, black rivulets twining like veins across the soaked earth, black snakes rising in their wake. A black river, abruptly, in full flood, lapping the British soldier's remains in as well with no visible distinction—rearing, seeping, clotting—knitting both together like some prescient scab, the kind that outlines itself before a wound has even been opened.