Supping With Panthers (6 page)

‘No!’ Haggard suddenly screamed. ‘No, not me, not me!’ He aimed his rifle, and with a single shot blew away a second Russian’s face. He broke from the Sergeant-Major’s attempt to restrain him and started to scramble over the rocks towards the shrine.

Eliot swore. ‘Quick!’ he shouted. ‘We must run as well.’

‘Run? From an enemy? Never!’ I cried.

‘But they are infected!’ Eliot screamed. ‘Just look!’

He gestured, and as I stared I saw, to my horror, that the Russian felled by Haggard was slowly rising to his feet. His jaw had been shot away and hung from the skull by a single thread of sinew; I could see his throat, frothy with blood, as it contracted and opened, for all the world as though hungry to be fed. He took a step towards us; his comrades, who had gathered behind him, now began to inch forward in a single pack.

‘Please,’ Eliot begged again. ‘For God’s sake, run!’ He reached for me suddenly and pulled me by the arm; I tumbled, picked myself up and, as I did so, one of the Russians broke from the pack and came stalking towards me like some hungry wild beast. I raised my gun to fire, but my arm seemed turned to lead. I stared into the Russian’s eyes; they were burning with a look of the most terrible greed, yet somehow they were still as cold as before, so that the effect was one of the utmost ghastliness. Despite myself I took a step backwards, and at once heard from my adversaries a queer rustling, whittering sound, so that had it not sounded so damnable I would have called it laughter. Suddenly the Russian bared his teeth, then literally leaped up as though to tear out my throat I put up my hands to push him away and then, from behind my shoulder, I heard a pistol shot, and the Russian fell bade dead with a bullet drilled neatly between his eyes. I looked round to see Eliot standing there, the revolver still in his hands.

‘I thought you weren’t prepared to use a gun?’ I asked.

He shrugged. ‘Cometh the hour,’ he muttered. He looked down at the Russian, who was starting to twitch as the other had done. ‘Now, Captain,’ Eliot whispered politely, ‘now, Sergeant-Major – will you please, for God’s sake, come with me and
run}

We did so, of course. Writing that down now, in the comfort of my Wiltshire study, I know it sounds bad, but it was not the men we were fleeing – rather their hellish disease. By George, though, infected as they were, they could still not half move. For as Eliot, the Sergeant-Major and myself, having found the steps by the side of the shrine, began to scramble our way up the mountainside, so also did the Russians start to follow us. The going on these steps was easier than it had been on the previous rock-face, and we all made pretty fair speed; but remorselessly our enemy followed us. I suppose they were bred to it, for your average Ivan is a hardy brute -and yet our pursuers had little true agility, for even as they scaled the rocks they seemed clumsy and doltish, and one would almost have said that their energy came exclusively from their desire to capture us. Certainly, glancing down at them, they seemed scarcely human at all, so hungry and eager their faces gleamed, like a pack of
dhole
– the Deccan wild dog – smelling our blood.

Inexorably they started to catch up with us; at length the nearest was scarcely an arm’s reach away. By now I had had enough of showing him my back; I paused, to tum and face things out.

‘No,’ Eliot shouted desperately; again, he pointed east towards the mountain peaks. ‘It’s almost dawn!’ he cried.

But the Russian was too dose to flee from now. Again cold, burning eyes were staring into mine; the Russian almost hissed with venom, and he tensed and crouched as though ready to leap. At that same moment, however, the first ray of sun spilled up into the sky and the peak of the mountain was lost in a blaze of red. The Russian paused; he fell back; and all the others slowed down as well and then stopped.

At the same moment I felt a bullet whistle past me an inch from my nose. It bit into the rock, and splinters showered out between our pursuers and myself. I looked up to see Haggard standing on the edge of an outcrop, his rifle aimed, ready to have a second shot.

‘What the hell are you doing, man?’ I bellowed. ‘Just get on up the path!’

But Haggard, so frayed his nerves had become, ignored me – the only time a soldier has ever disobeyed my command. ‘No, sir!’ he screamed. ‘They’re vampires! Vampires, sir! We must destroy them all!’

‘Vampires?’ I glanced at Eliot and shook my head, a gesture which Haggard observed and, I’m afraid, didn’t take too well.

‘I saw it before,’ he screamed, ‘when they came and took Lady Westcote away. Lady Westcote and her lovely daughter; they must have fed on them, and now they’re going to feed on us as well!’

Of course I tried to explain. I shouted up to him that there was a terrible disease, and I appealed to Eliot to confirm my words, but Haggard, waiting, began to laugh. ‘They’re vampires’ he repeated, ‘I tell you, they are!’ He fired once more, but he was shaking badly now and again he missed. He took a step forward to get a better aim, and as he lowered his rifle his foot somehow slipped. I shouted out to warn him – but he was already gone. He fired and the bullet went harmlessly up into the sky; at the same time Haggard was waving his arms despairingly as pebbles gave way beneath his feet, and then he began to drop down the cliff-face until he landed with a sickening thud amongst the bushes by the shrine. These served to break his fall and must have saved his life, for I could see him struggling to lift himself; but his limbs were all shattered and he couldn’t move.

Our pursuers meanwhile had been huddled together watching us with their cold, burning eyes. They had been quite motionless from the moment when the sun had first risen in the east; but now, watching poor Haggard’s fall down the cliff, they seemed to tense and quiver as though with a new sense of life. They were all watching him as he struggled to pull himself free from the bushes; then they began to cluster together even closer and from all of them I heard the strange twittering sound which I had eariler taken to be their laughter. They began to retreat from us, back down the cliff; they went even more slowly and clumsily than before, as though the sunlight were water to be struggled against – but still they went. I watched helplessly as they reached the shrine and fanned out in a circle around Haggard who lay, his limbs twitching, amongst the bushes where he had fallen. He screamed and again tried to lift himself, but it was hopeless. The Russians, who had been watching the poor fellow rather as a cat might a mouse, now began to move in towards him -and then one ran forward, and then a second, until all of them were clustered round him with their heads bent over his bleeding wounds.

‘My God,’ I whispered, ‘what are they doing?’

Eliot glanced at me, but he made no answer, for we both knew the legends of Kalikshutra and could see now that they had not been legends at all. They were drinking his blood! Those fiends – I could hardly think of them as men any more – they were drinking Haggard’s blood! One of them paused in his meal and sat back on his haunches; his mouth and chin were streaked with red, and I realised he had torn Haggard’s throat apart. I fired at them, but my arm was shaking and I didn’t get a hit. Even so, the Russians backed away. Haggard’s body was left lying by the shrine; it was covered in deep red gashes and his flesh was white, quite drained of blood. The Russians looked up at me; slowly, they began to return to their meal; I left them to it, for there was nothing I could do.

I turned and began to continue up the path. For a long time – a long time – I did not look back down.

On our ascent of the mountain face that terrible day, I do not intend to dwell. Suffice to say that it very nearly did for us. The climb was hellish, the altitude high; and we were drained, of course, by the horrors we had seen. By the late afternoon, when the rock-face was finally starting to level out, we were all pretty much at the limits of our endurance. I found a sheltered ledge, which would protect us equally from the blast of the winds and the prying of hostile eyes; I ordered that we pause there a while and take some rest. I settled down, and almost before I knew it was sound asleep. I woke up suddenly, without opening my eyes. I felt as though I had been out for only ten minutes, yet my sleep had been so dreamless and profound that I knew myself to be quite refreshed. I would not wake the others yet, I thought. It was still only the afternoon, after all. Then I opened my eyes to find that I was staring into the pale, full gleam of the moon.

It was chillingly beautiful, and for a moment the scene fairly took my breath away. The great Himalayan peaks ahead of me, and the valleys far below, mantled in shadows and shades of rich blue; the faint wisps of cloud below us, like the breath of some mountain deity; and over all, flooding it, the silver light of that burning moon. I felt myself to be in a world which had no place for man, which had endured and would endure for all time – cold, and beautiful, and terrible. I felt what an Englishman in India must so often feel – how far from home I was, how remote from everything I understood. I looked about me. I thought of the mortal danger we were in, and wondered if this strange place was to be my grave, whether my bones would lie here lost and unknown, far from Wiltshire and my dear, dear wife, crumbling gradually to dust beneath the roof of the world.

But a soldier cannot dwell on such maudlin thoughts for long. We were in deadly peril, that was true enough, but we would not escape it by sitting on our hands. I woke Cuff and Eliot, and once they had risen we continued on our way. For an hour we saw nothing worthy of comment. The path continued to flatten out, and the rocks began to give way to scrub. Soon we were walking through jungle again, and the vegetation overhead had grown so thick that not even the moonlight could penetrate it. ‘This is very strange,’ Eliot said, squatting down to inspect a vast flower. ‘There shouldn’t be flora of this kind at such an altitude.’

I smiled faintly. ‘Don’t look so disturbed,’ I replied. ‘Would you rather we had nothing to conceal our approach?’

And then, just as I said this, I saw the glimmer of something pale through the trees. I made my way up to it. It was a giant pillar, long shattered and overgrown now with creepers, but of a beautiful workmanship and decorated down the sides with a stone necklace of skulls.

Eliot inspected it. “The sign of Kali,’ he whispered. I nodded. I drew out my gun.

We went as stealthily as we could now. Very soon we began to pass more pillars, some flat on the ground and almost completely overgrown, others still massively erect. All had the same necklace-like decoration of skulls. The trees began to fall away and above the pillars I saw a lintel start to rise, bone-white beneath the darkness of the creepers and weeds. It was decorated in the florid Hindoo style, with the stonework twisting like the coils of a snake, and as I stared at one of the loops so it began to move, and I saw that it was indeed the body of a cobra, coiled and heavy, the guardian spirit of this death-like place. I watched it slip away into the darkness; then I walked forwards and began to feel marble under my feet; ahead, I could see the stone lit silver by the moon, and when at length I left the shadows of the trees I saw all around me great courtyards and walls, still standing despite the jungle’s tightening grip. Who had built this palace, I wondered – and who abandoned it? I was no expert, but it seemed to me that it was centuries old. I crossed the main courtyard. Columns stretched away from me in rows, and supported further columns on their roof. I guessed that they formed the palace’s heart.

As I drew nearer to them I realised that they had been sculpted in the form of women – shameless and sensual, as so often seems to be the case, regrettably, with the ancient statuary of India. I will pass over their appearance, save to mention that they were quite naked and impossibly lewd. But it was their faces, oddly, which disturbed me the most. They had been carved with extraordinary skill, for they wore expressions of the utmost wickedness in which desire and delight seemed equally mixed. They were all facing the temple’s far end, as though staring at the giant statues I had glimpsed from outside. I hurried on past them. At length the columns came to an end, and I saw a small courtyard just in front of me. Giant figures loomed against the stars. I walked on, and as I did so I felt a stickiness underfoot. I kneeled down and thought I could smell the odour of blood. I touched the stones, then raised my fingers to the light of the moon. I had been right; my fingertips were indeed red!

I walked forward to inspect the giant statues more closely. There were six of them arranged symmetrically on rising steps, three on either side. They were all women staring upwards, as the faces on the columns had been, at an empty throne. Just before this throne, the most damnable tiling of all, stood a further statue, of a little girl. I climbed towards it up the steps. They too, I realised, felt sticky underfoot.

Eliot followed me. Suddenly, I heard him stop and I turned round. ‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘Look,’ Eliot replied. ‘Do you recognise her?’ He was pointing at the nearest statue to us. Now that we had climbed the steps we could see her face, lit silver by the blazing moon. It was a coincidence, of course, for the temple was clearly centuries old, but I saw at once what Eliot had meant – the statue’s face was the very image of the woman we had captured, the beautiful prisoner who had subsequently escaped.

I turned back to Eliot. ‘A great-great-grandmother, perhaps?’ I joked.

But Eliot didn’t smile. His head was angled, as though he were trying to pick out some sound.

‘What is it?’ I asked. For a couple of seconds, he didn’t reply.

‘You didn’t hear anything?’ he answered at length. I shook my head and Eliot shrugged. ‘It must have been the wind,’ he said. He smiled faintly. ‘Or the beating of my heart, perhaps.’

I took a step forward to climb to the empty throne and Eliot promptly froze again. ‘There,’ he said, ‘can you hear it now?’ I listened, and this time I realised I could indeed hear something faint. It sounded like drums -not as we have them in the West but rather the
tabla
with its hypnotic, limitless beat. It was coming from beyond the empty throne. I crept up towards it; I put my hand on its arm and, as I did so, I felt a shudder of overwhelming dread so physical that I almost staggered back. Looking down, I realised that the throne was absolutely drenched in gore, not just blood but bones and intestines, and lumps of flesh.