He walked along to the Limboia slave carriage – it was empty. So were the next three. He unbuttoned the flap of his holster as his boots crunched loudly on the stones. His steps and the engine’s puffing heart were the only sounds in the forest; even the birds were hushed. When he came to the flat-bed truck and saw that the crate was open, he pulled out his revolver and looked around warily. Nothing moved, and the trees seemed to have lost their motion, their leaves hanging outside of any breeze or growth.
‘Engineer!’ he bellowed towards the back of the train. It felt reassuring to shout such a matter-of-fact word amid the absence and stillness. ‘Engineer!’
He heard a titter from behind the passenger carriage. He swung round and climbed up onto a flatbed to reach the other side. There was a small clearing at the edge of the forest, as if a straight line had been shaved out, and the Limboia were all there, side by side in a line, looking, he thought, like a ragged, regimental parade, waiting to be inspected. He spat and jumped down to their side, his pistol alert and ready. There was more girlish tittering from the line. With a pounding head and a growing nausea, which he could only put down to the previous motion of the train, he approached them, trying to hold back his rage.
‘What the fuck are ye doing out of the train? GET BACK IN!’ he bellowed.
The tittering stopped and they closed their eyes in a slow, simultaneous movement. Then the breathing started: the same unified breathing that he and Hoffman had heard that first night.
‘Stop that! Stop that, RIGHT NOW!’ he yelled.
The breathing doubled in volume. He was suddenly lost and obviously outnumbered. The Limboia were stationary while their chests moved in unison. The only individual movement came from the centre of the line. There stood the herald, holding something to his chest, stroking it with slow, intense gestures. Maclish made a beeline for him, closing on him, the pistol held level with the man’s face.
‘Tell them to get back on the train,’ he demanded, seeing a way to retake control.
Then he saw what the herald had in his hands. The loose strips of cloth had been peeled away and the near-naked thing rolled in the manipulating hands, its lifeless limbs flopping back and forth with the movements. Maclish wanted to pull the trigger and end this, but he knew it was already over.
The eyes of the dead, aborted child opened and stared into his. The breathing stopped, and something else rustled between the Limboia. Something was weaving itself between their ranks, rattling their place on the earth with no speed, but a vast momentum. It nudged him like the movement on the train, and he passed out; in a second, every organ in his body had halted, as if they had never moved at all. Every cell gave up in the presence of the Orm. Only his mad eyes flashed in the dead head, as his body slid to the ground.
The Limboia pointed at their hearts and dispersed into the depth of the forest with their prize. An hour later, the engine would give its last sigh, and its firebox would run down to cold ashes.
The frantic, moving eyes in what had been Maclish stared at Loverboy, who had been standing behind the Limboia all along, patiently waiting. He had been busy. Even in his weakened condition he had retained enough purpose, energy and skill to gather some small branches and vines and construct a basic sledge. He dragged his creation towards the corpse: he was taking Red Fur home to meet his people, and one of his stomachs was already rumbling.
Ishmael had come to a place where a mighty oak had fallen, its prone bulk drawing a horizon in the world of verticals. It must have been of considerable age; he could easily have hidden in its girth. A wonderful aroma of leaf mulch and sap exuded from the place, one of dampness spun with age. He walked across the narrow path, under the bridge formed by the oak, before stopping to look up again at the fallen tree, which blotted out the dappled sunshine. New shoots were growing from its old, dead body, and a lacework of vines still thrived on its bark.
He was beginning to enjoy the depth of this place, to feel a sense of belonging in its mysterious interior. Perhaps this was where he was from; perhaps his kind really had lived here, among the peace of the great trees. He imagined a primitive life in simple huts, with a gentle and ancient race that had hidden successfully from barbaric humans for centuries.
The Kin had shown him pictures and models of such places, and he remembered stories of them. Adam’s house in Paradise had been drawn on scrolls in the teaching crates, alongside images of strange, man-like creatures living in harmony with lions and other wild beasts. He and Seth had made a miniature shelter of mud, sticks and stones. He had been proud of it, and would sit staring into its rough interior, imagining what a life within it would entail; he saw, in his mind, the hearth, and the trickle of smoke from the roof, rising up into the motionless air.
He was there again, expecting to turn a corner and find that unique village. So lost was he in the conjecture of that place, that he did not immediately notice that he was no longer alone. It took him a few moments to realise that somebody was walking to the side of him, just out of the periphery of his view. He spun around to confront them, his heart in his throat. The other stopped and ducked down, but he now knew for sure that he was being observed. He wondered if these were the people who had been giving him food and water. He called out to where the figure had disappeared, expecting a response this time. None came. Then there was a sound behind him; a sound to the side; a plethora of sounds from every direction. The creatures stood up, and he turned in horror to look at them all, their faces growing out of their chests.
He pushed back the fear and repulsion that came from being in close and unknown proximity with something that was utterly different. Their squat, square bodies were pale yellow, blotched with a pink mottle; they had no discernible head. Their mouth, jaw, nose and ears grew out of their sternum, and a single eye stared out from their flat chests with the blinking wit of a farm animal. Pale lashes, shading one-dimensional thoughts, flicked vacantly between fight or flee.
Then he saw the squint of cunning, and knew that this was his end. These were things he had seen in a picture: horror cyclops that could have nothing to do with him. This was a subspecies, not a kindred race. They had been giving him food and direction, not out of aid and sympathy, but to guide him home. They had been fattening and luring him, and he had willingly followed their trails of food straight into their trap, and right into the heartland of the anthropophagi.
They moved towards him to look closer and started to communicate in a series of high, ragged bleats, sounds that seemed to be razored out of their small, teeth-filled mouths with a great deal of effort. Theirs were not the mouths of eloquent debate; the holes and their contents were constructed purely for the sake of biting, sucking, nibbling and guzzling.
They were all naked, and Ishmael, whose interest in genitalia had always been intense, gazed in amazement at their diversity and proportion. Unlike other species he had examined, no two seemed to be alike: some were shrunken and inverted, while others hung or coiled out of their bodies with wasteful abandon. He was reminded of ‘Lesson 93: Invertebrates of the Oceans (Certain Soft-bodied Sea Creatures)’, and wondered if their sex organs might indeed be a separate species that shared a symbiotic relationship with their host. How they used them to mate was beyond even his conjecture.