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Bamboo Horses, a fantasy novel by British-born New Zealand writer Hugh Cook, author of the ten-volume Chronicles of an Age of Darkness In this stand-alone alternative reality SF fantasy novel, which is independent of all Hugh Cooki's other books, business manager Ken Udamana has the problem of finding out who is murdering members of his family before he, in turn, is murdered. An arsonist is on the loose. Ken starts to worry that his own troubled teens, son and daughter, may have murder in mind. And what are the intentions of the foreigners, the Merlercians, regarding the exploitation of the Udamana family's paranormal powers? Modern fantasy fiction in a world with cellphones and its own Internet, but a world where they eat not with chopsticks, as we do, but with scissors. A truly original work, high-quality literary fiction including elements of quiet horror. |
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This page is posted online on a free-to-read online basis. However, the material is copyright, all rights reserved. For permission to use any of the material on this website contact Hugh Cook |
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Read first 30 chapters free |
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In the morning, I wake earlier than usual, go downstairs and do my stretching exercise on the verandah. Then, very early, I phone Strom at home. He is grumpy at having been woken up at such an untimely hour, and sounds blurred and hungover.
* * * Feeling more dynamic than I usually do early in the morning, I put some muesli into a bowl, add milk and start to eat. And I'm eating when I smell something musty, something a little damp, something like an old sack that has been sitting out under the eaves for many days, not quite sheltered from the rain, and has become infested with mold as a result. It's old Melshu, my centuries ancient ancestor, who has emerged from the master bedroom which functions as his crypt (although he's technically alive he's so old that it's hard to think of him as really being one of the living) and who is now taking a seat on the other side of the big dinner table. "You!" says Melshu, surprised and tremulous. "Yes, me," I say, uncertain as to who he momentarily thinks I might be. Not Ken Udamana, I'm sure. Melshu is looking uncommonly alert and focused, which is usually an indication that the reality which he currently perceives is not the same as that in which everyone else is located. "You're too early," says Melshu. "I'm not dead yet." Once again, he has mistaken me for Death personified, for the Man with the Black Bag, for the Liquifier of Bones, for the Servant of the Great Pit. "It's me," I say. "I know," says Melshu. "But I've told you. You're too early." "No," I say. "Me. Ken. Ken Udamana." "The Udamanas are no more," says Melshu. "She poisoned them. At the festival, you see. The bodies are lying dead in the houses. There are dead bodies upstairs. The wife. The children." This is nonsense. But, if nonsense, why does it scare me? It's early morning, a functionally efficient time, a time for getting things done, for building momentum, for getting managerially efficient with milk and muesli. So why do Melshu's words make me feel bleakly fearful? "She poisoned them," repeats Melshu. "Who?" I say. "Petticat?" That's a mistake. I shouldn't be feeding Melshu unmotivated hints, and certainly I have no reason for dragging Petticat into this, except for the fact that I've just been trying to get her on the phone. "We died," says Melshu. "I died first. I had no air. I had no struggle. If I had been younger I would have had enough struggle. They all died. No air. Ratbane. Arsenic. Cyanide. Pink radiation. Rumor toxins, contagion mongering. Strangled by hair curlers. All down to the vaults. No air, I had no struggle." With those last words, his hands, bare withered branches of sagging skin and angular bone, move in distress. His mouth works, chewing on nothing. "The Udamanas," says Melshu. "Killed out. Killed for their scalps." This does not sound as if it entirely makes sense. In fact, this is the rambling of a very old man who, to be blunt, is senile. He is a repository of ancient memory, an archive of the useless. When it comes to anything new, he can't remember more than five minutes into the past, if that. To recall Tanto's harsh words, cruel but true, adolescence speaking the unspeakable, Melshu is a meat machine that breathes. So why does what he say force itself upon me as the truth? The plain fact is that I am momentarily terrified. Dead bodies. I can feel them in the house. I can feel the limbs of my children stiffening in the darkness, motile flesh hardening into rigor, living hues degenerating into the palette of the morgue. We have been poisoned, all of us. And I myself am a ghost, returning to my own house, incapable of acting on the world of the living, incapable of turning on the light. "But there is no need for light," I say, speaking aloud, shaking off a hallucination of darkness. It is not night. It is morning. The time of clarity, not the time of confusion and fear. "Tanto is dying as we speak," says Melshu, looking at me directly. When I do not respond, he reaches for me. His hand closes over mine, feeling as I imagine the dried wing of a bat might feel. "He is upstairs, and he is dying now." "Who is Tanto?" I say, challenging Melshu to prove that he is oriented to time and space. "Tanto is your daughter's brother, your Mister Energy Bundle, your fourteen year old. Your son. He is dying as we speak." "We are all of us dying," I say. Melshu's threat is a nonsense. Tanto, dying? No. I cannot, do not, will not believe it. My son is young, strong and healthy. He has never been seriously ill in his life, leaving aside that scare with meningitis two years ago, when the mini epidemic swept through the Yendo Achievers Middle School. Even so, I am on my feet. It is ridiculous to permit Melshu's disjointed deliriums to contaminate my peace of mind. Still. There would be no harm done by checking. Although I have gotten up very early, by now it is almost 07:00, almost time for Tanto to wake up. I go upstairs to Tanto's bedroom and push open the door, expecting it to creak, as it usually does. Instead, it swings open on smoothly oiled hinges. Who oiled the door? Not me. Why would anyone oil the door? To come and go silently. Deep in the night, perhaps, when other people are sleeping. The door opens into a world of gloom which smells faintly of sweat and of overripe oranges. The curtains are still closed, and the bedroom is a realm of murky obscurity. The details of reality are glaubed together into a viscous threat, a palette of smudged menace. What exactly is there in front of me? A catastrophe of bruised obscurity which escapes exact interpretation. Something has been extruded from the world of lightless gloom and is humped on the bed in huddled shades of black-green darkness. Something made from meaty shadows is gripped by, or is being produced by, the cumbersome folds of a darkly gleaming shroud. What is it? It's a huge alien insect. Or something. Lying there on Tanto's bed, hideously transformative, its slick internals twisting into something malign, deformed. I cannot move. "Forward," says a hallucinatory voice. It is Grandfather Hondo's voice, speaking to me out of the depths of memory and imagination, arming me, giving me courage. In response to that voice, I speak. "I need no mercy for myself," I say. It is the motto of the Ninth Endazakamaya Battalion, a military unit which goes unmentioned in the histories and encyclopedias of Nizon, although you can find it by accident on the Internet. Mass execution, torture, biological warfare experiments: that is the story of the Ninth Endazakamaya Battalion. Although, since Grandfather Hondo would never talk of any of that, I cannot say how much is true, or how much of the truth might apply to my grandfather himself. When it comes to the past, I do not pardon. I do not condone. I do not celebrate my grandfather's history. Even so, it is his words that are with me when I need them, and I am not ungrateful for them. I step forward to the inhuman thing lying on the bed and rip back a fold of it, uncovering my son's face. There is Tanto. Intact. Human. Alive, still. But asleep. Yes, Tanto is asleep, deeply asleep, a sheen of sweat on his face. As I look down on him, his Gethro Rocketship Alarm Clock, which he has had since he was nine years old, kicks itself into belligerent life. Seven o'clock! Time to get up! But Tanto does not stir. His sleep, if that is what it is, has taken him down into a level of unconsciousness which alarm clocks cannot touch. I grab my son by the shoulder and shake him roughly. His lips open. A bubble of saliva pops out, slow and sticky. I slide my hand into the rubberized bag which encloses him. His chest is hot, wet, feverish, sweating. I start to haul the bag off him, and, as I do, he groggily surfaces into consciousness. Sort of. He does not seem to recognize me, and he does not seem to know where he is. At last the bag is off, crumpled in a heap on the floor. And Tanto, sitting up in bed, drawing his knees up to his chest, seems to recognize me. "Dad?" he says. "What the hell is this thing?" I say, kicking the bag angrily. "You know," says Tanto. "I don't know," I say. "You were cooking in it. What is it?" "Uh ... it was a dare," says Tanto. "Fat Uhito, he dared me. He got it from his brother, you know, the attache guy." I don't know either Uhito or his brother, who, it turns out, is a grown adult called Bihoro who is currently functioning as a military attache with our embassy in Merlercia. Thanks to Bihoro, brother Uhito, who is one of Tanto's classmates, has become the proud possessor of a genuine Merlercian body bag. And it is this body bag which Tanto has been sleeping in. For a dare. "Get in the shower," I say. "And this thing leaves our house today and never comes back. Got that?" "Yes," says Tanto. "And no more war souvenirs in this house," I say. "Uniforms, medals, grenade cans, bayonets, nothing. Got that? Merlercian, Nizonian, I don't care where they come from, they're not coming in this house." Tanto agrees readily, and it's plain that he is a little afraid of me, because I am not the father he is accustomed to. Rather, I am more the wrathful ogre, stirred up to the edge of violence. The aftermath of fear and shock has left me seething with anger, an anger made all the worse because I don't really know what happened. Tanto slept hot all night, sweated, got dehydrated? Or something deeper happened? Even though he's awake, Tanto doesn't seem quite himself. Not quite my Mister Energy Bundle. And he stumbles at the door as he leaves the room, wrapped in his towel, heading for the bathroom. Stumbles and falls? No. All that happens is that he misses a step. Then recovers. But I get the feeling that he almost did fall. * * * "Where's Melshu?" I say, when I get downstairs. The living room, which was empty but for Melshu when I left it, has become populated by my wife and daughter, and feels (absurdly) overcrowded. Overpopulated. "He went out," says Iola, buttering toast. "Said it was a good morning to catch frogs." "I bet he does," says Helena, who is busy scraping butter off her own toast, grinding the surface down to burnt brown. "If so, very healthy," says Iola. "Helena! I buttered that for you especially! You need the calories." "Why do you want me to be fat?" says Helena. We're fighting the food wars again, and inevitably I get dragged into it and have to retrieve the scales from the bathroom, where Tanto has already got started on one of the longest showers in human history (each morning he tries to set a new record, or so it seems) and have to bully Helena onto them. Her weight? She's sufficiently heavy. But "heavy" is a poisoned word, one I've learnt not to use. "Solid" is a much better choice. It is less closely connected to the world of lard, grease and whale blubber. "Okay," I say. "Today you're solid enough. Just. But we'll have you on the scales again on Saturday." "But that's tomorrow!" says Helena. "I know," I say. "Why don't you trust me?" says Helena. "Because we can't afford the medical bills," I say. This is regrettably spontaneous. It pops out without thought, and parental spontaneity can all too easily lead to ructions. But the statement happens to be true. The three months that Helena spent last year in residential care at Ikitaru Remedial were an unavoidable expense, necessary to break the bulimia habit and conquer anorexia nervosa, but to have to repeat the exercise this year would be close to financially impossible. "Great," says Helena. "Nice to know my money value." Nice to know my money value: a teenage saying I've seen on TV. Not the sort of thing I want to hear at the breakfast table, but I decide not to make an issue of it. Instead, I go upstairs to my office, check my e-mail then do paperwork until it's time to leave. |
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