Storyteller Read online

  “What did you do!”

  “Nothing, of which I am aware, sir,” said the butler, not breaking stride. “You have experienced one of the phenomena of which I made note. If I may suggest, it is best to get used to it.”

  The next instant proved Cummings’ suggestion a wise one for Rat found himself transported to the mansion’s cavernous dining room, of the type in which Queen Victoria could have comfortably swung any of the larger felines in her extensive dominions without imperiling the Royal Dolton. The center of the room was occupied by a table of burled walnut, roughly the length of a regulation basketball court. There was only one chair, however, at the head of the table, and in that chair Rat Badger sat masticating the last bite of a sumptuous meal, the courses of which, like the ephemera of a dream, he couldn’t recall. Nevertheless, he was completely sated, in indication of which he burped as was his wont at the conclusion of a satisfactory repast. The percussive echo bounced around the room, doubling, tripling, quadrupling, until it became the relentless, rhythmic thumping of a bass drum, which brought to mind the lyrics of the misogynistic ditty Love ’em and Eat ’em that had earned his first CD-wide censure, hence chart-topping success.

  The song had been inspired by a nature program he’d seen on PBS that featured the conjugal habits of the praying mantis. Reversing the role of the sexes and applying the principle to himself, well . . . it was a very big hit among the easily entertained.

  “How many bedrooms does this place have?” he asked, sensing Cummings’ presence in the shadows.

  “One can never say with any degree of confidence, sir. The configuration changes, you see, according to the . . . needs . . . of the inhabitant.” A table bearing a cigar and a snifter of brandy appeared at Rat’s elbow. “I shall count them, if you like.”

  Rat ran the cigar beneath his nose and crinkled it by his ear. “Havana,” he said appreciatively. “Light me, Jeeves.”

  “Cummings, sir,” the butler remonstrated gently.

  “Then count away, Cummings. And be quick about it.”

  “There are twenty-two bedrooms, sir.”

  Rat Badger started as if he’d fallen into a doze. “What?”

  “You directed me to count the bedrooms, sir. There are twenty-two . . . at present.”

  Rat’s gaze fell to his cigar, which was burned to a nub. He didn’t remember having taken so much as a puff. “I must’ve nodded off. It’s dark in here. Turn on some lights.”

  Cummings directed his steps toward a gas sconce on the wall. “It is not the first time I have seen this configuration,” he said. “If I deduce correctly, you may be in for an unsettling experience, sir.” He twisted the valve and the jet of burning gas leapt to attention, staking a small principality of illumination at the edges of which misshapen shadows surged toward the darkness.

  Once his eyes were accustomed to the brightness, Rat received the jolt that Cummings had prophesied. The walls before, behind, and around him were made of mirrored glass in which the majesty of the room and its accoutrements were multiplied in hallways that disappeared into infinity. Likewise, armies of Cummingses were strung out in endless array toward each of the cardinal points. It was by none of these optical phenomena that Rat was jolted, however, but by the fact that his own reflection was—in all those infinities of images—absent, and in its place was a rodent-like gnome with anxious red eyes, ragged grasping claws and a vile, gaping maw.

  “It is as I anticipated,” Cummings said, more to himself than to his master.

  Rat started from his chair. “What’s that?” He snapped. The timbre of his voice registered a heightened degree of consternation. “Where’s my reflection?”

  “Ah,” Cummings sighed knowingly. “As to that, I fear my response may disquiet you, sir. Are you sure you wish to know?”

  “Of course I want to know!” Rat protested. “Where’s my reflection?” Impulsively he ran to the nearest wall and waved himself around in front of it, which activity was perfectly mimicked by the creature in the glass. “And what’s that ugly thing?”

  “I can only predicate my conjecture upon previous experience.”

  “This has happened before?”

  Cummings inclined his head slightly. “The resident was a carnival barker name of Ignatius Flang, sir. His arrival was much like yours though, as I recollect, the misadventure that brought him to these shores involved the wreck of a ship called the Royal Tar . . .”

  “Skip the specifics,” Rat commanded. “What’s he got to do with this?” He gestured broadly at the mirrors from which the grotesque figure gestured back.

  “Well, I hesitate to be so bold as to apply Mr. Flang’s experience in the present instance, sir, but, since you ask, it was discovered through bitter experience that, in his case, these mirrors reflected his soul.”

  “Soul?” Rat flashed a panicky glance at the walls. “That is my soul?!”

  “Your immortal, incorporeal essence, yes, sir. So it would seem.” Cummings regarded the reflections critically. “In Mr. Flang’s case the creature was more reptilian, with a slight magenta cast about the eyes.”

  Rat was no theologian, but he inferred that this condition did not bode well from an eternal perspective. “That ain’t good.”

  “Philosophers and theologians may dispute the point, sir, but, no. To my way of thinking, it ain’t good.”

  “Well, what are you gonna do about it?”

  Cummings nearly raised an eyebrow. “There’s nothing I can do, I regret to say.”

  “What did this Horatio guy do?”

  “Ignatius,” Cummings corrected, sighing heavily. “A regimen was prescribed that, I fear, he was not assiduous in performing.”

  “Once more, in English,” said Rat, fighting back a wave of desperation.

  “It was suggested that if he were to occupy a different bedroom each night for as many nights as there are bedrooms, his soul might somehow be redeemed.” Cummings lowered his chin. “Midway through the second night, he fled the house with his soul, more rapacious and reptilian than ever, in hot pursuit, if you will pardon the vernacular.”

  Rat didn’t want to know the answer to the question he was compelled to ask. “What happened to him?”

  Cummings began collecting plates on a large tray. “Only a few bones, an ossified heart and a tin of curiously strong breath mints were recovered for burial.”

  Rat Badger gazed in horror at the reflection of his soul. “What’s in those rooms?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “But you’re sayin’ I gotta sleep in all them rooms to get me a half-way decent-looking soul?”

  “As to sleep, I make no guarantee. Spend the night in each of them, though. Yes. That would be my recommendation.” He was solicitous. “It is my understanding that the task must be completed in concurrent nights. I gather it is a rigorous exercise, sir.” Cummings hesitated but a moment. “‘If t’were done when ‘tis done, then t’were well it were done quickly.’ Shall I prepare the first, sir?”

  Rat Badger thought how like his sobriquet was the creature that leered hungrily at him from the mirrors. “Call me Harold,” he said.

  Whether he was ready or not the echo of his voice hadn’t died before he found Cummings tucking him beneath the plush duvet of a canopied bed in a grand, heavily rococo room, from the wall of which a gas candelabrum glowed warmly. “Things happen fast around here,” he commented.

  “Some things do indeed transpire with alarming alacrity,” Cummings replied. “Is there anything else you require?”

  Harold scanned the room at a glance. “No MTV, I guess?”

  “I am not familiar with the acronym, sir.”

  “Never mind. Shove off, then.” Harold wanted nothing more than to ask Cummings to stay in an adjoining room with the door open and, while he was at it, to see if he had a teddy bear lying around anywhere, but the proposal was argued down by pride. “See you in the morning.”

  “’Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished,” said Cumming
s, stepping into the hall. “Pleasant dreams, sir.”

  The door closed behind the butler, revealing, on its reverse, a full-length mirror, in the darkened recesses of which Harold perceived something faintly stirring. Battling the urge to plunge beneath the covers, he climbed from his bed and approached the mirror tentatively, only to be confronted by the image of a raggedly-dressed young girl approaching him with equal trepidation. Behind her, the mirror reflected not his room but an African wasteland of charred trees and dust. The girl’s face was so black that her features were not discernible at first.

  How it happened, he couldn’t comprehend, but he knew the reflection was his own. In a manner that is usually confined to dreams, he had fused with the girl’s subconscious. Her world was his. Her experiences—a waxworks of horrors stretching into the deepest recesses of her young memory—were branded on the synapses of his being as were her fears, her sense of loss, of abandonment, of aloneness and the perpetual, gnawing hunger that formed the core of her being.

  In the near background, seemingly guided by the girl, a full-grown elephant sauntered contentedly, now and then tossing a trunkful of dirt in the air as if to test which way the wind was blowing.

  Harold Erasmus Jackson had entered upon the first of his twenty-two nights.

  The Elephant Walker

  The first night

  Her name was Bedpinny. That was all of her own story she knew. The perpetual warfare in southern Sudan had consumed her family in savage bites. Of all her relations, she was the only survivor. The bodies of her mother and grandmother had shielded her from the blast that killed them. She had waited for a long time for them to move, but they didn’t. Beyond the acoustic cushion of their flesh the gunfire thudded like blankets being beaten with straw brooms. In time the screams died away. There was no one left to make them. Only Bedpinny. Bathed in the blood of her ancestors, she crawled from beneath the corpses and stood looking at them.

  Her mother and grandmother.

  Minutes ago they had been singing and laughing and teasing her about the baseball cap she was wearing. She had found it in a pile of clothes spread out on a table in front of the Presbyterian mission. It had a ‘B’ emblazoned on the front, but she was too young to know a ‘B’ from any other letter. She liked the color. She took it, put in on, and proudly wore it home.

  Her mother and grandmother were in high spirits. They had caught a rabbit in their snare. “We’ll have meat tonight!” they had told her. “Do you know how long it’s been since we’ve had meat?” They skinned the animal and prepared it for the pot. Bedpinny couldn’t remember ever having had meat. She knew beans, both white and red, and rice. And onions. She loved onions. And course bread of sorghum meal. Sometimes cabbage. Sometimes kale. Most of all, she knew hunger; a ravenous, insatiable beast that burrowed in the belly and ate holes as deep as the grave.

  She had only a vague awareness of the purpose in setting the snare, but they’d been doing it all her life, so she didn’t think it strange. It was a tradition; one of those inexplicable rituals in which adults engaged. A primitive lottery.

  Now Beepo, her grandmother, was lying face down on the clay floor of the tukl, her long, skinny arms and legs at impossible angles. Mamma was lying on top of her, draped backward, facing the ceiling. Her right arm, hacked away in the mindless orgy of bloodlust, was a foot away, the rabbit’s intestines still grasped in its fingers.

  The rabbit was nowhere to be found. Perhaps, skinned and eviscerated, it had run away.

  Mama’s eyes, still moist with tears, were open. She was looking up, as if to watch her soul away. Bedpinny’s gaze drifted toward the smoke hole in the thatch. Motes of dust descended leisurely from the straw roof and floated this way and that as a hot, overweight breeze nudged its way through the oppressive atmosphere.

  Bedpinny picked up the baseball cap and put it on. She didn’t think about what to do next. Her actions were intuitive. Grabbing fistfuls of dead ash from the edge of the fire, she sprinkled them over her mother and grandmother. The wordless requiem of a three-year old. She left the hut.

  Outside, the air was hung with languid wreathes of smoke. A group of soldiers sat on their haunches around a hot, low fire in the coals of which the rabbit was roasting. They didn’t notice her. They were intent on the rabbit. Beyond them, seven young women, bound hand and foot, were tied to trees. Bedpinny knew them, but not why they were tied there. Fifty dollars each. Soon they would be shipped north to the outskirts of Khartoum and distributed throughout the Middle East to serve in the homes and commercial enterprises of Muslims, a commodity with a long tradition. Tribal Africans had been selling each other to the Arabs for a thousand years. And killing one another. Partially-dismembered bodies littered the common space between the huts.

  Bedpinny feared the soldiers. There was something evil about their laughter amid the carnage and destruction from which her spirit shrank. She walked away from them. Not along the road, where troops were still coming and going, their arms draped over the rifles suspended behind their necks, but down the familiar path toward the river.

  She was nearly out of sight when one of the soldiers by the fire spotted her. At first he thought she was a wild pig. His eyes, tinged with the red tracery of malaria and tearing with smoke, were blurry. He unslung his gun from his shoulder, aimed through the miasma and fired. The bullet stung the back of her hand like a wasp. She swatted at it reflexively and looked with detached curiosity at the bulging thread of blood that oozed from the scratch. She didn’t run, though. She stumbled a little, and kept walking.

  An animal would have run. The soldier knew this. As his eyes cleared, he realized he had just shot at a human being. Scrawny. Fleshless. A wasted bullet. Little more than an infant, she would die soon enough without the assistance of an ounce of lead. His comrades laughed at him and resumed poking at the rabbit in the coals. The marksman slung the gun over his shoulder and blushed inwardly.

  As Bedpinny walked away, every step was like the stroke of a brush of forgetfulness, wiping away the memory of all she had seen, all that had gone before: the death of her father and brothers in the wars, the disappearance of her older sisters and aunts to slavers, the disease that claimed her cousins and her uncle. By the time she arrived at the river, she didn’t know what had brought her there, where she was to go, or what to do. But she wasn’t to fetch water. She wasn’t to return home; the sticky blood that caked her flesh and matted her hair told her so in whispers.

  She was Bedpinny. That was all she knew. The memories were still there, of course, folded deep in the recesses of her subconscious, but remembering was not. She continued along the river until the path ran out, then she walked through the tall grass, making a path of her own. She walked all day and into the night. The moon was full, and presently she found herself on another path. With nothing to do but follow, she followed.

  Soon she was stumbling over her own feet in exhaustion. She never thought to lie down in the tall grass or climb into the protective arms of a nearby tree and sleep. She walked until she collapsed. And where she collapsed, she slept.

  She was awakened by a large, gentle nudge against her lower back. Opening her eyes, she found herself staring up an elephant’s trunk. She didn’t startle. She rubbed her eyes with the backs of her wrists and looked again. The elephant was staring back, swinging its head slowly, slightly from side to side, fanning the air with large, leathery ears.

  Bedpinny had never seen an elephant. Like most animals, they had long ago been driven across the border into Uganda and the Central African Republic by constant warfare and the perpetual fires that raged out of control across the landscape, inhaling the nourishing grasses in leaping infernos of waste. She reached out and touched the trunk. The animal didn’t flinch, but returned the touch, brushing the back of her injured hand with cool, healing mucous.

  The elephant seemed to be waiting. Bedpinny stood up, adjusted the hat on her head, and studied the deep brown eyes that returned her gaze. Set in folds of creas
ed and furrowed flesh, they sparkled with moisture as if with laughter. She was reminded of someone she had known, someone old and wise. The memory wouldn’t awaken but left, in its stead, a comfortable feeling.

  There was nothing Bedpinny could do with the elephant. It was too big to eat, though her hunger was big enough to swallow it whole.

  Hunger was the engine that drove her. She looked in the direction from which she’d come. She didn’t remember it, but something told her there was nothing for her there. She looked ahead and followed her eyes with her footsteps. The elephant followed behind, every now and then nudging her playfully at the base of her back. Her heart wanted to smile, but her soul wouldn’t let it. She just walked on, never looking back at her unlikely companion, but confident it was there.

  The first village she came to smoldered in its own ashes. A cloud of vultures and crows feasted on the fat of humanity, a humble meal. Looking neither right nor left, Bedpinny followed the path threaded between the charred remains of the tukls, accompanied by the syncopated tamps of the elephant’s feet and the deafening buzz of flies.

  She walked on. At the end of the day they came to a river. The elephant waded eagerly in among the sweet grasses and, punctuating its meal with trumpet blasts and jubilant explosions of spray from its trunk, made itself comfortable. Bedpinny peeled the husk from a waterlogged cassava root, as she had helped her mother do many times. Rather than boiling it and beating it into a paste, as Mama had done, however, she ate it raw. The plant had as little taste as nutritional value, but the sound of chewing went a long way toward filling her belly. She climbed a hillock of soft grass, lay down and slept. The elephant stood watch.

  The next day, about mid-afternoon, they discovered a secluded field of sugar cane and ate their fill. Bedpinny peeled and sucked and chewed, and spat out chewy wads of fiber and was soon drenched in sweet, sticky juice that made her a magnet for flies. The elephant, too, enjoyed the treat, bundling five or ten stalks at a time in its trunk and feeding the furnace of its mouth, which curled at the edges in a perpetual smile. That night they walked as long as the moon allowed. When it gave out, Bedpinny rode the elephant’s trunk to the low, blackened branches of a teak tree that had been half burned for charcoal, and slept. The elephant slept, too.