Gesh was staring at me: “So what happened?”
“Never mind,” I said.
Amy howled from the basement. “Hey you guys, guess what? The stuff is ankle-deep down here and it’s ruining everything. Our croquet set, our camping equipment, our dollhouse!” The announcement depressed us all, even Gesh. “Let’s blow a bowl of hash and forget about it,” he suggested.
“Anyhow,” said Walt, “it’ll be good for the trees.” And he started a bass riff with a deep throbbing note—the hum of it hung in the air even after the lights went out and the rest of his run had attenuated to a thin metallic whisper. “Hey!” he said. From the kitchen: “Oh shit!” A moment later, Isabelle came in wringing her hands. “Well. The breakfast’s ruined. We’ve got a half-baked pie and a flat soufflé sitting in the oven. And a raw-eggy blob purporting to be eggnog in the blender.”
There was a strange cast to the room now. Not the gloom-gray of a drizzly day, but a deep burgundy, like a bottle of wine.
“Well? What am I going to do with it all—give it to the dogs?”
The dogs glanced up briefly. Their hair was matted and brown with dried blood. They were not hungry.
Scott whined: “I’m hungry.”
I was scared. I’d been scared all along, scared from the moment I’d noticed the first drops on the window. I looked at Gesh, our leader: he was grinning in that lurid light, sucking reflectively on the pipe. “Don’t hassle it, Iz,” he said. “Mark and me’ll pop down to the deli and get some sandwiches.”
“I don’t want to go out there—I’ll lose my lunch.”
“Come on, don’t be such a candy ass. Besides, it’ll give us a chance to talk to somebody, find out what’s going on.” He stood up. “Come on, Mark, get your boots.”
Outside was incredible. Red sky, red trees, red horizon: the whole world, from the fence to the field to the mountains across the river, looked like the inside of some colossal organ. I felt like an undigested lump of food—Jonah in the belly of the whale. There was the stench of rotting meat. The bloodfall streamed down hard as hail. Under the eaves, on the porch, we were fooling with our rain hats, trying to get up the nerve to run for the car. Gesh too, I could see, was upset. Yesterday it had been a freak, today a plague. “Well, what do you think, bro—make a run for it?” he said.
We ran—down the steps and into the mud. I slipped and fell, while Gesh hustled off through the blinding downpour. It was deeper now, lying about the low spots in nasty red-black puddles. I could feel it seeping in, trickling down my leg, inside the boot: warm, sticky, almost hot. The smell of putrefaction nauseated me. I choked back the apricot nectar and biscuits, struggled up, and ran for the car. When I got there Gesh was standing beside the door, blooddrops thrashing about him. “What about the seats?” he said. “If we stain ‘em with this shit, it’ll never come off.”
“Fuck it. Let’s just get out of this—”
“I mean I got a lot of scratch invested in this here BMW, bro—”
The wind-whipped blood flailed our yellow slickers, dripped from the flapping brims of our silly yellow rain hats. We both climbed in. The engine started smooth, like a vacuum cleaner; the wipers clapped to and fro; the windshield smeared. “Let’s drive to the desert … the Arizona desert, and get away from this … shit,” I said. My voice was weak. I felt ill. Automatically I reached for the window. “Hey—what the fuck you doing?” Gesh said. It streamed down the inside of the glass, bubbled over the upholstered door, puddled in the ashtray on the armrest. I rolled the window up. “I feel sick,” I said. “Well for christsake, puke outside.” I didn’t. The thought of hanging my head out in that insane unnatural downpour brought it up right there. In the sealed compartment the bouquet of the vomit and the stink of the mud-blood on our shoes was insupportable. I retched again: then dry-retched. “Oh shit,” said Gesh.
“I’m going back in,” I said, the edge of a whimper in my voice.
Five minutes later, Gesh returned, cursing. Scott was on his way out the door, three cameras strung round his neck, to get some color slides of the dripping trees. “What’s the matter,” he said. “You back already?”
“Couldn’t see a fucking thing. I got down the end of the drive and smacked into the stone wall. The wipers are totally useless—they just smear the crap all over the windshield. It’s like looking through a finger painting.”
“So what happened to the car?”
“It’s not too bad—I was only going about two miles an hour.”
Alice emerged from the kitchen, a pair of lighted candles in her hand, egg-walking to avoid spilling the hot wax. “Gesh! Take your slicker off—you’re dripping that shit all over the floor…. Couldn’t make it, huh?”
“No.”
“What are we going to do for food?” she asked.
“Scoop it up!” Walt shouted from the living room. “Scoop it up and pour it into balloons. Make blood pudding.”
I was sitting in a chair, weak, stinking, blood crusting the lines of my hands. “I’m fed up with it,” I said. “I’m going up to lie down.”
“Good idea,” said Gesh. “Think I’ll join you.”
“Me too,” said Alice. “Can’t do anything here—can’t even read or listen to music.”
“Yeah,” said Walt. “Good idea. Save me a pillow.”
“Me too,” said Amy.
Scott stepped from beneath the cameras, strung them across the back of my chair. He yawned. Isabelle said it would be better if we all went to bed. She expressed a hope that after a long nap things would somehow come to their senses.
I woke from fevered dreams (a tropical forest: me in jodhpurs and pith helmet—queasy-faced—sharing a draft of warm cow’s blood and milk with tree-tall Masai warriors) to a rubicund dimness, and the gentle breathing of the rest of the crew. They loomed, a humpbacked mound in the bed beside me. My ears were keen. Still it beat on the roof, sloshed in the gutters. Downstairs, somewhere, I heard the sound of running water, the easy soughing gurgle of a mountain stream. I sat up. Were we leaking? I slipped into Amy’s slippers, lit a candle, crept apprehensively down the stairs. I searched the hallway, living room, dining room, kitchen, bathroom: nothing. A cat began wailing somewhere. The basement! The cat bolted out when I opened the door, peered down the dark shaft of the stairway. The flood was up nearly to the fifth step, almost four feet deep, I guessed, and more churning audibly in. The stench was stifling. I slammed the door. For the first time I thought of the dike: why ‘sblood! if the dike went—it must be straining at its foundations this very minute! I envisioned us out there, heroically stacking sandbags, the wind in our faces, whipping our hair back, the rising level of the flood registered in our stoic eyes—then I thought of the tepid plasma seething in my nose, my mouth, my eyes, and felt ill.
Gesh came down the stairs, scratching himself sleepily. “How’s it?” he said. I advised him to take a look at the cellar. He did. “Holy shit! We’ve got to do something—start making barricades, strapping floatables together, evacuating women and children—and dogs!” He paused. “I’m starving,” he said. “Let’s go see what we got left, bro.” From the kitchen I could hear him taking inventory: “Two six-packs of warm Coke; a jar of Skippy peanut butter, crunchy—no bread; ten cans of stewed tomatoes; half a box of granola; a quart of brown rice; one tin of baby smoked oysters. Not a fuck of a lot. Hey Mark, join me in a late-afternoon snack?”
“No thanks. I’m not hungry.”
We sat around the darkened living room that night, a single candle guttering, the sound of bloodfall ticking at the windows, the hiss of rapids rushing against the stone walls of the house, an insidious sloshing in the basement. Seepage had begun at the front door, and Isabelle had dumped a fifty-pound bag of kitty litter there in an attempt to absorb the moisture. Atop that was a restraining dike of other absorbent materials: boxes of cake mix, back issues of Cosmopolitan, electric blankets, Italian dictionaries, throw pillows, three dogs, a box of Tampax. A similar barricade protected the b
asement door. When Gesh had last opened the window to look, the red current eddying against the house had reached almost to the windowsill. We were deeply concerned, hungry, bored. “I’m bored,” said Amy.
“I’m hungry,” whined Scott. “And I’m sick of Coke. I want a hot cup of Mu tea.”
“It stinks in here,” carped Isabelle. “Reminds me of when I was fifteen, working in the meat department at the A & P.”
“My teeth are gritty,” Alice said. “Wish the water and the damned toothbrushes would work.”
Blood began to drip from the windowsill in the far corner of the room. It puddled atop the thirty-six-inch Fisher speaker in the corner. One of the cats began to lap at it.
Walt paced the room, a man dislocated. Deprived of his bass, he was empty, devoid of spirit, devoid of personality. He was incapable now of contributing to our meaningful dialogue on the situation. Gesh, however, tried to amuse us, take our minds off it. He said it was just a simple case of old mother earth menstruating, and that by tomorrow, the last day of the moon’s cycle, it would no doubt stop. He passed around a fifth of Châteauneuf and a thin joint. The pool beneath the door began to spread across the floor, creeping, growing, fanning out to where we sat in a small circle, the candlelight catching the blood in our flared nostrils. Shocked silent, we watched its inexorable approach as it glided out from the barricade in fingerlike projections, seeking the lowest point. The lowest point, it appeared, was directly beneath the Naugahyde pillow upon which my buttocks rested. Slowly, methodically, the bulbous finger of blood stretched toward me, pointed at me. When it was about a foot away, I stood. “I’m going to bed,” I said. “I’m taking two Tuinals. Try not to wake me.”
It was morning when I woke. Gesh sat in a chair beside the bed, smoking a cigarette. The others slept. “It stopped,” he said. He was right: the only sound was a sporadic drip-drip beyond the windows, a poststorm runoff. The celestial phlebotomy had ceased. “Good,” was all I could manage. But I was elated, overjoyed, secure again! Life returned to normal!
“Hey—let’s slip down to the deli and get some sandwiches and doughnuts and coffee and shit, sneak back, and surprise the rest of the crew,” Gesh said.
Curiosity stirred me, and hunger too. But my stomach curdled at the thought of the gore and the stink, the yard like a deserted battlefield. I stared down at my pajama sleeve. Amy’s sleeping wrist lay across mine. I studied the delicate contrast of her white wrist and the little pink and brown figures of cowboys on my pajamas. “Well? What do you say?” asked Gesh. I said I guessed so. We pulled on our corduroys, our white rubber boots, our mohair sweaters.
Downstairs the blood had begun to clot. In the hallway it was still sticky in places, but for the most part crusted dry. Outside a massive fibrinogenification was taking place under a dirt-brown sky. Scabs like thin coats of ice were forming over the deeper puddles; the mud was crusting underfoot: fresh blood ran off in streams and drainage ditches; the trees drooled clots of it in the hot breeze. “Wow! Dig that sky, bro—” Gesh said. “Brown as a turd.”
“Yeah,” I said, “it’s weird. But thank christ it stopped bleeding.”
Gesh started the car while I broke the scab-crust from the windshield; it flaked, and crumbled in dusty grains. I climbed in, laid some newspaper over the day-old vomit on the floor, steeled myself against the stench. Gesh accelerated in an attempt to back out from the wall: I could hear the wheels spinning. I poked my head out. We were stuck up to the frame in mud and gore. “Fuck it,” Gesh said. “We’ll take Scott’s car.” We started up the drive toward the other car. It was then that the first pasty lumps of it began to slap down sporadically; we reached the shelter of the porch just as it began to thunder down, heavy, feculent, and wet.
Upstairs we carefully folded our sweaters, pulled on our white pajamas, and sought out the warm spots in the huddled sleeping mass of us.
(1972)
RUPERT BEERSLEY AND THE BEGGAR MASTER OF SIVANI-HOOTA
It was on a dark, lowering day during one of the interstices of the monsoon that His Royal Highness Yadavindra Singh, nawab of the remote Deccan state of Sivani-Hoota, began to miss his children. That is, the children began to turn up missing, and to an alarming degree. It began with little Gopal, who had been born with a mottled, pale birthmark in the shape of a half moon under the crease of his left buttock. Miss Elspeth Compton-Divot, the children’s English governess, whose responsibility it was to instruct her wards in the dead language and living literature of Greece and to keep watch over them as a shepherd keeps watch over his flock (flock, indeed—there were twenty-five sibling Singhs under her care originally), was the first to discover little Gopal’s absence. She bowed her way into the nawab’s reception room immediately after lessons on that fateful afternoon, the sky so striped with cloud it might have been flayed, to find the nawab and his wife, the third begum, in attendance on several prominent local figures, including Mr. Bagwas the rubber-goods proprietor and Mr. Patel the grain merchant. “Most High, Puissant, Royal and Wise Hegemon Whose Duty It Is to Bring the Word of God and the Will of Just Government to the Peoples of Sivani-Hoota and Environs,” she began, “I come before you on a matter of gravest import.”
The nawab, a man in late middle age who had attended Oxford in the days of Pater and was given to ejaculations like “What ho!” and “L’art pour l’art!” told her to stuff the formality and come to the point.
“It’s your third youngest, sir—little Gopal.”
“Yes?”
“He seems to have disappeared.”
The nawab shifted his bulk uneasily in his chair—for he was a big man, fattened on ghee, sweet cream, and chapattis slathered with orange-blossom honey—glanced at his begum and then expelled a great exasperated puff of air. “What a damnable nuisance,” he said. “I don’t doubt the little beggar’s up to some mischief, hiding himself in the servants’ pantry or some such rot. Which one did you say it was?”
“Little Gopal, sir.”
“Gopal?”
It was then that the begum spoke rapidly to her husband in Tamil and he began almost simultaneously to nod his head, muttering, “Yes, yes, a good boy that. A pity, a real pity.”
The governess went on to explain the circumstances of the boy’s disappearance—the testimony of the night nurse who’d put him to bed, his eldest-brother-but-six’s assertion that they’d played together at cribbage before falling off to sleep, her own discovery of little Gopal’s absence early that day, when she commenced morning lessons by comparing her seating chart with the nearly identical moon-shaped grinning brown faces of the nawab’s brood.
Mr. Bagwas, who had been silently pulling at a clay pipe through all of this, abruptly pronounced a single word: “Leopards.”
But it was not leopards. Though the stealthy cats commonly carried off six or seven of the village’s children a night, the occasional toothless grandmother, and innumerable goats, dogs, cows, fowl, royal turtles, and even the ornamental koi that graced the nawab’s ponds, they were absolved of suspicion in the present case. After Abha, aged seven, and then the eleven-year-old Shanker vanished on successive nights, the nawab, becoming concerned, called in Mr. Hugh Tureen, game hunter, to put out baits and exterminate the spotted fiends. Though in the course of the ensuing week Mr. Tureen shot some seventy-three leopards, sixteen tigers, twelve wolves, and several hundred skunks, mongeese, badgers, and the like, the nawab continued to lose children. Santha, aged nine and with the mark of the dung beetle on the arches of both feet, vanished under the noses of three night nurses and half a dozen watchmen specially employed to stand guard over the nursery. This time, however, there was a clue. Bhupinder, aged six, claimed to have seen a mysterious shrouded figure hanging over his sister’s bed, a figure rather like that of an ape on whom a tent has collapsed. Two days later, when the harsh Indian sun poked like a lance into the muslin-hung sanctuary of the children’s quarters, Bhupinder’s bed was empty.
The nawab and his begum, who two and a half
weeks earlier had been rich in children, now had but twenty. They were distraught. Helpless. At their wits’ end. Clearly, this was a case for Rupert Beersley.
We left Calcutta in a downpour, Beersley and I, huddled in our mackintoshes like a pair of dacoits. The train was three hours late, the tea was wretched, and the steward served up an unpalatable mess of curried rice that Beersley, in a fit of pique, overturned on the floor. Out of necessity—Beersley’s summons had curtailed my supper at the club—I ate my own portion and took a cup of native beer with it. “Really,” Beersley said, the flanges of his extraordinary nostrils drawn up in disgust, “how can you eat that slop?”
It was a sore point between us, the question of native food, going all the way back to our first meeting at Cawnpore some twenty years back, when he was a freshly commissioned young leftenant in the Eleventh Light Dragoons, India Corps, and I a seasoned sergeant-major. “I’ll admit I’ve had better, old boy,” I said, “but one must adapt oneself to one’s circumstances.”
Beersley waved his hand in a gesture of dismissal and quoted sourly from his favorite poem—indeed, the only poem from which he ever quoted—Keats’s “Lamia”: “’Not three score old, yet of sciential brain / To unperplex bliss from its neighbor pain.’”
An electric-green fly had settled itself on a congealed lamp of rice that lay on the table before us. I shrugged and lifted the fork to my mouth.
We arrived at the Sivani-Hoota station in the same downpour transposed a thousand miles, and were met by the nawab’s silver-plated Rolls, into the interior of which we ducked, wet as waterfowl, while the lackey stowed away our baggage. The road out to the palace was black as the caverns of hell and strewn with enough potholes to take the teeth out of one’s head. Rain crashed down on the roof as if it would cave it in, beasts roared from the wayside, and various creatures of the night slunk, crept, and darted before the headlights as if rehearsing for some weird menagerie. Nearly an hour after leaving the station, we began to discern signs of civilization along the dark roadway. First a number of thatch huts began to flash by the smeared windows, then the more substantial stone structures that indicated the approach to the palace, and finally the white marble turrets and crenellated battlements of the palace itself.