A Thorn for Miss R.: Book I: The Night Watchman Read online

  A Thorn for Miss R.

  Book I: The Night Watchman

  Sakiv Koch

  Immersive Stories

  Copyright © 2021 Vikas Kochhar

  Published by Immersive Stories

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the author/publisher.

  The author/publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the author/publisher.

  Cover Art: GetCovers

  To my family.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1: I, Me, Myself

  Chapter 2: Retail Price of a Life

  Chapter 3: The Elasticity of Steel

  Chapter 4: Forfeited Gifts

  Chapter 5: The Night Watchman

  Chapter 6: Hope is Born

  Chapter 7: A Million Little Nights

  Chapter 8: The Compulsive Storyteller

  Chapter 9: The Haughty Instigator

  Chapter 10: A Homely Music

  Chapter 11: Indestructible

  Chapter 12: The Delicacy of Tough Things

  Chapter 13: Kinds of Hiding Spots

  Chapter 14: The Misty Bridge

  Chapter 15: A Courageous Coward

  Chapter 16: The Secret Shame

  Chapter 17: The Quicksilver Man

  Chapter 18: The Butterfly and the Vultures

  Also by Sakiv Koch

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  Chapter 1: I, Me, Myself

  A dead man awakened one evening just as dusk began to fall. He lay on the floor of his hut, watching the day dissolve and the night dribble in from the cracks in the roof.

  I can say with certainty that he had been a dead man.

  I was that man.

  I blinked and looked around, taking inventory, seeing if anything had altered in my world since I had last seen it. I counted the rafters on the ceiling, the chinks in the door, and the still-weeping wounds on my body.

  An earthen pitcher stood on one side of my mattress and a candle on the other. The pitcher was slowly leaking my next meal—brackish water—onto the floor, and the cotton of my bedding absorbed it so that marshes of moisture bloomed beneath my burning skin.

  The candle gave birth to long, black feathers of smoke, one after the other, as though shedding light were its secondary function. The smoke swirled endlessly to thicken the haze that hung heavy in the air.

  A hangman’s noose encircled my throat, like a dog’s collar, so that my neck had a tail of hemp, which I could wag by shaking my head vehemently. It was curled beside my ear as I lay prostrate.

  I picked it up absentmindedly and tugged at it. The rope tightened and my tongue protruded—partially by the bite of the noose, partially because I wanted it to protrude.

  I lifted a sliver of looking-glass lying alongside the candle and watched nonchalantly as my eyes bulged, the veins swelled in my temples, and my color slowly turned blue. The contorted face looking back at me from the mirror suddenly broke out into a hideous grin. In response, I increased the pressure on my throat.

  It was in this state of self-induced, partial asphyxia that I rose to my feet, without a stitch of clothing on my body, and staggered toward the one place I did not want to visit, to look at the one sight I did not want to see. But I was in love, and love propelled my feet, carrying me to my beloved.

  The door flew open with the impact of my shoulder, and I reeled out into the jungle. The night had been crying. I could hear its moan all around me and could feel its tears under the soles of my feet. My own aching eyes brimmed over and their water mixed with the dew on the underbrush.

  My body cried for oxygen; it bent itself at the waist and triggered a bout of coughing to rack my chest. My body was stubborn. It refused to walk anymore. I was stubborn, too. I fell and crawled forward. You are dead, I coaxed my body, do not fear death.

  This torture was the price I had to pay every time to see her, for she had undergone this same anguish to become mine. The grit of the soil and its rocks, the brambles, the very blades of grass sliced and clawed my skin. The scurrying ants bit me in their panic, but I continued to inch toward her shrine—all cuts, all losses, all pain, a ritual of my pilgrimage.

  And then I arrived. Her smell was in the air. I let myself breathe it, dousing the fire of my lungs. My body shivered in the sudden chill as I rose and unlatched the door to her chamber. There, on a melting floor of frozen water, surrounded by dissolving walls of ice, she lay decaying slowly.

  There lay, in her private, tropical Antarctica, clothed only in her long, shimmering tresses, my love, whom I had abducted, raped, and murdered.

  ◆◆◆

  It’s important that you answer one question in your heart before we go any further, before I fascinate you and horrify you more, before I evoke your wrath and call up your compassion. I ask you, am I a murderer?

  I don’t expect you to deduce or reason—how can you, when my pen has only etched out the very first step of the long trail that you are to travel with me? Just intuit.

  And I will aid you here, by first showing you how I appeared that night, as I stood at her feet — trembling, naked, bleeding, and blue in the face. And then you’ll see a sketch of my appearance as it used to be before hell oozed out of the depths of the earth and mired me in this living death.

  Look at me intently then, in the light of the great white lamp, for it’s a full moon night. It must be hot and cold together because I am both sweating and shivering. Barefoot, I stand a negligible length short of six feet. The death-collar in the center of my neck leaves plenty of space upwards to my chin and downwards to my collarbone — plenty of space for kisses and caresses on my neck if she could only rise and love me as I love her.

  You see, I am obsessed with my neck because I have swung by it in a crowded square, under the gaze of countless eyes. To be hanged by the neck till dead.

  I would show you my chin — chins are great pointers of character — but it is hidden under my beard. A brave housefly fought its way out of a juvenile spider’s web a few days ago. The unfortunate insect escaped the spider’s claws only to fly straight into the tufts of my facial hair, where it struggled futilely to regain its freedom before I squashed it.

  I carry its carcass in my beard to this night, standing before that other beautiful corpse. My hair is likewise a veritable graveyard and a compost heap, littered with dead insects, dry leaves, twigs, dust particles, and bird droppings.

  But ignore my shaggy hair and look below, at my forehead. I’ll turn my head to let the moonlight play the better on it, so that you can distinguish the wrinkles of a now-permanent frown from the scars that adorn my brow. What do you judge from my scowl?

  My eyes, bloodshot, watery, and swollen, gleam in a curious way. The right side of my mouth is curled up in a bestial smile. Insanity, you would say? Or cruelty? What about the rhythmic twitch on the left side of my face, and the way my tongue continually darts out, like that of a snake, and licks my lips?

  My gaze indeed picks up a forked tongue sniffing the air, and behind it, a pair of glassy eyes embedded in a large head. The tongue and the head belong to a python. Its jaws are wide open. The snake is poised to drop from its perch on a tree and make
a fawn its dinner.

  I see the victim-elect, its small tail wagging. It grazes lightly and nervously—looking for its mother, who is not around—as it approaches its doom. The sight of its little, innocent body moves something in me. I find it’s not pity, but hunger. My stomach clenches and the python has competition.

  But where is the thrill in hunting the hunted and leaving the hunter alone? My legs move like the blades of a rotor, and I am behind the trunk where the python is draped—a nine-foot-long reptile weighing no less than seventy-five pounds.

  We are soon playing tug-of-war: I pulling at the snake’s tail—which the python has instinctively coiled around my hands, giving me good purchase—and the snake trying to remain entwined with the tree while maneuvering its head around to sink its fangs into my flesh.

  It has plenty of size to come around. I loosen one hand out of its grip. My forearm is thick and hard as a piece of lumber when I close my hand into a fist and move my arm as far back as it would go.

  I then use the python’s own momentum in stunning it with a mean punch to the side of its head. It goes limp momentarily and I pull with all my strength, dragging it clear of the tree, whose bark scrapes its skin.

  I begin to pirouette. The reptile is extended to its full length after two or three turns. We are rotating faster and faster. The tree from which I got my prize is to my left. I move toward it as I spin, smashing the python against its trunk. There is a squishy sound and the snake’s ghost exits through its shattered skull.

  I drop it out of my hands and look at the heap of meat at my feet. It evokes laughter in me. "I won’t eat water tomorrow. Or the day after," I cry. "Or ever!" Now I am cocky. I can feel the enormity of the strength coursing through my frame.

  I come out from behind the tree and look for the fawn. I see it nibbling at a bush at a little distance. I move and it begins bounding away on its tiny legs.

  I notice, with relish, that it limps badly as it runs. I sprint after it, closing the gap between us in no time. It ducks under a low branch; I jump over it. The animal is almost in my hands and I can taste its delicacy in my mouth when it swivels on its hind legs and arcs through the air.

  I, warm from the victory over the giant constrictor, snicker at the futility of the lame deer’s flight. I close in. But it slips out from between my hands once more, and then again. I begin to pant, slow down, and finally sink to my knees in defeat.

  "I’ll let you go because you’re so young and beautiful," I lie to myself with a false smile, gazing after the vanishing animal. And then it disappears literally, drops from my view as though it had been only a figment of my imagination.

  The smile on my lips deepens as I move toward the clump of bushes where I last saw the fawn. The moon is eclipsed by nomadic clouds. The young night is suddenly rendered pitch-black as I reach the verge of a deep trench. The fawn, I know, lies at its bottom, and my mouth waters once again at its proximity.

  The cloud moves on and I jump down into the pit. I kneel to lift the animal lying prone on the sandy floor of the trench. Its right foreleg is splayed outward from its knee, away from its body.

  I see the flare of its nostrils as it breathes in agony, its chest as it quivers with the beat of its terrified heart, its open mouth with the tongue lolling out, and, lastly, I look into its eye.

  I gaze into the eyes of the small deer and I remember. The look in the depthless eyes reminds me of things I never forget. My mouth stops watering and tiny droplets rain down from my own eyes.

  Chapter 2: Retail Price of a Life

  Travel back in time with me. Pluck five years from the darkness of my present and step into the soft glow of my past, right into the middle of 1961. Watch the monsoon clouds borne on wet winds approach Jalgarh. See the brief, futile struggle of the late afternoon sun to stay dominant. Observe the light change its color from orange to a dark gray before turning an electrifying shade of black.

  Let the first experimental drops tease your skin and then the sudden downpour drench you thoroughly, because later, sipping hot tea in a covered veranda, with a shawl warming your shoulders, you will remember and long for the love of the rain.

  But don’t get so lost in the sensation of having an outer bloodstream running over your body that you miss seeing the young man dancing in the cobbled street ahead of you. He carries an umbrella, but it dangles from his hand, unopened.

  His cotton kurta has turned transparent. It clings to his body, and when the man hops into puddles and dances in the belief that he is totally unobserved, each muscle in his torso comes alive, transforming the man into a walking poem of power.

  There are snatches of a song at his lip, and he clears his dripping hair from his eyes every now and then as he stops to peer at the signboards over the shops lining the street. He covers the entire street without apparently finding whatever he is looking for. He turns around with a shrug and retraces his steps, going as he had come—carrying out the full spectrum of the antics of a small boy playing in the rain.

  A figure leans out of a window above a shop and calls after the man: "Neel!" The sound of his name reaches Neel’s ears, but he pretends not to have heard and hastens his steps toward the street’s mouth.

  "I know you’ve heard me, Neel!" the person in the window shouts. But the street is empty now. Neel has disappeared.

  "I’m going to tell on you!" yells the man in the window. Neel’s head materializes around the corner a moment later, his mouth playing a disarming smile, his eyes shining with a boyish appeal. The rest of him sidles back into the street and he walks toward the person jutting out of the window.

  The signboard over this establishment reads:

  Shyam & Sons

  Photographers and Developers

  We Specialize in the Art of Capturing You on Film

  Neel stands studying it a long moment, clearly reluctant to step inside.

  "So you couldn’t see the signboard earlier?" Shyam asks, sarcasm raining from his mouth as palpably as water from the clouds. Neel, still smiling, tilts his head upward and looks into Shyam’s eyes. The photographer’s indignation cracks and dissolves visibly.

  "Don’t just stand there in the rain," says Shyam, twirling an end of his handlebar mustache to cover the sprouting of a smile on his mouth. "I’ve been waiting for you for three hours. Come up!"

  Neel enters a dark passage and stands at the threshold like a drenched tree until the doormat is saturated and water starts to pool around its edges. He lays his umbrella aside and eyes a heap of old ledgers lying in a corner.

  "Will take you another three hours to climb the stairs?" Shyam questions from the floor above. "Or have you run out again?"

  "Just drying myself," Neel answers, picking up a ledger and tearing out a leaf soundlessly. He flattens it against a wall and begins to crease and fold it. A paper boat lies in his hands after half a minute. He steps out again and places the boat on the rippling surface of a puddle big enough to look like a small pond.

  He watches as spheres of water ram the boat, tilting it. The alphabets and figures on the yellow paper disintegrate and run down in streaks of old ink.

  Neel waits till the boat founders on its side. He reenters the passage and climbs up to the house over the shop. Shyam is a swarthy, portly man, with a belly so rotund his shirt is unable to cover its underside. He sits on a high stool with his arms crossed over his chest.

  "So how is it, young man, that you forget the location of my humble abode each time you come here these days—rather, each time you are sent here—when the fact is you have been playing under this roof since you were just seven or eight years old?"

  Neel combs his hair back with his fingers and hugs his shoulders, putting on a show of shivering.

  "I am suffering from selective amnesia ever since Rachna hit me over the head with my heavy flashlight," he says. He watches Shyam stiffen, and then asks nonchalantly, "Where is she now, by the way?"

  He doesn’t wait for Shyam to answer. "Why haven’t you changed the
signboard to read, Shyam and Daughter, after all these years? You can’t still hope to have a son at your age, can you?"

  Shyam shakes his head and clucks his tongue, groaning as he rises from his stool. "Darned knees, stiffer than a banister," he murmurs and shuffles toward a silhouette at the other end of the room.

  "Why do you ask me where Rachna is when you don’t really want to know?" He asks, turning his head and fixing his bright eyes on Neel. "And how many more times will you ask me if I can still have a son or not? Now come here, switch the lights on for me, and stand before the camera."

  "Camera?" Neel asks innocently. "How can you photograph me when I look like a tadpole just out of a millpond? My hair alone will take hours to dry, Baba. I’ll come tomorrow. I promise."

  "Come tomorrow, for sure, and the day after. But we do capture you on film today, no matter what you look like. I gave your mother my solemn word. She can’t wait anymore to distribute your picture amongst pundits so that they can begin to find a suitable girl for you."

  "But, Baba, arranged marriage—," Neel begins, his mouth jettisoning its smile for the first time.

  "Arranged marriage!" The old man swivels his head on his neck incredulously. "What else? You looking to elope with someone? And when will you grow up? You’re already twenty-seven years old! You don’t use your umbrella intentionally and then you expect me to let you go because you have wet hair? Do I look like an old fool to you?"

  Neel’s smile returns, this time with a more pronounced element of mischief. He switches on the light and stands where Shyam indicates. The old man removes the shroud from his tripod and bends to fix his eye to the viewfinder of his box camera.

  "Move just half-a-step back and tilt your head fractionally to the left. Your left. Perfect. Ready?" asks the old man, placing his finger on the film advance lever. Neel crosses his eyes and flares his nostrils just as the camera’s flashbulb bathes the room in white light.