Крис Бекетт - The Holy Machine

Then I woke up. It was still the middle of the night. From across the landing came the loud contented snoring of Uncle Tomo. I got out of bed and went to the window. Outside, the trees cast dim moonshadows. Cicadas sang. Secretly, silently, the universe blazed down.

Who else could grant me absolution for my crime against Lucy if not a Holy Machine?

I quickly dressed and crept out onto the landing. It resounded, I now heard, not only with Uncle Tomo’s snoring, but with a lighter, more feminine snoring from Aunt Nada, harmonizing peacefully with his.

The door of Marija’s room was ajar. I peeped in. Oddly and touchingly, this woman who had always seemed to me so strong and confident slept with her thumb in her mouth like a small child. She looked very beautiful in the moonlight, with her dark hair all around her on the pillow. And the thought came to me with a sharp pang: what would it be like to lie in bed with a real woman beside me, a woman made, like me, of flesh and blood?

A notebook lay open on her bedside table. It was a diary. I could just make out yesterday’s date at the top of the page, but it was impossible in the moonlight to read any of the scrawled writing that followed, though no doubt it contained her thoughts about me and my arrival.

I tore a blank page out of the back of the notebook and wrote ‘GOODBYE THANK YOU.’

Then I crept downstairs and out across the olive groves of Uncle Tomo. The road to the coast was empty and mysterious in the moonlight. I began to walk.

After only a day, my already threadbare shoes gave out and I continued with bare feet until a peasant woman took pity on me and gave me some boots that had belonged to her dead husband.

I went on walking, limping, hobbling, through poor wild villages, over rocky passes, down into secret valleys, huddling in caves and ruins through the cold mountain nights.

People watched me as I passed. Sometimes they offered me things: small coins, a piece of sausage, half a white cabbage. An Illyrian vagrant was a new phenomenon, almost a contradiction in terms, and they gave me food as much out of curiosity as out of pity, pressing it on me then backing off to a safe distance to watch me eat.

‘I’m looking for the Holy Machine.’

I suppose I was taking a risk, showing an interest in a demon, but I didn’t care much about my own safety. Some did cluck their tongues and cross themselves. Others laughed. Some looked at each other and tapped their heads.

‘Have they finally addled their brains with their own wickedness down in that City of theirs?’ a devout old Muslim woman said to her friend. (I wasn’t supposed to hear, but she was deaf and she misjudged the volume of her whisper). ‘Do they even worship machines now?’

But, as I went deeper into Dalmatia, I began to meet people who knew what I was talking about.

‘The Machine? I heard he was in Dubrovnik. I’ve never seen him myself.’

‘No, he isn’t in Dubrovnik. I was there two weeks ago, but someone there told me he’d seen the Machine on Korcula island.’

‘I heard he’d been in Ploce. The Abbot sent soldiers down to capture him, but the crowd refused to let them near.’

Meanwhile, unknown to me, the great tectonic plates of history were grinding together. In Vienna, Catholic and Orthodox leaders from south east Europe gathered to discuss a suspension of their many wars, and the formation of a Holy Alliance against the godless City in their midst. Even the Muslim Bey of Novi Pazar had sent a delegation.

I was travelling through lands against which my country was about to be at war.

Then a rain began which continued almost without a break for many days. My clothes never had a chance to dry out. I never felt warm and my skin turned puffy and white. Cuts and blisters on my feet became infected and swollen. I developed a fever and become confused in my mind. I no longer travelled through an external landscape. My world became the jagged mountains of my aching feet, the dark swamp of my throbbing head, the bitter gales of my frozen hands…

But from time to time I would look down from this landscape and see, far below me, a tiny sodden figure, limping slowly along a muddy mountain road.

‘Why must I always watch this one?’ I complained. ‘Always, always him. Why this one and no one else?’

Sheltering one day under an overhanging rock, I lapsed into a dream of Lucy. Somehow she had been transformed into a real human being. I was pleased at first and reached out to welcome her. And she smiled but then began once again to rip away her flesh. This time there was no plastic shell underneath. Guts, lungs, a throbbing heart, a liver – softly pulsating organs slid out of her with a soft plopping sound… Lucy laughed. I was suddenly woken by a bellow of rage from the sky.

It was Illyrian jets, speeding north to Vienna to punish the holy conspirators with fire.

Rain trickled down onto my face from the rock above.

After a while I began to clamber painfully to my feet and it was then that I realized I wasn’t alone. Three hunters were also sheltering there, further along the overhang, beside a small fire. Until I moved, they hadn’t noticed me. Now they looked at each other and grinned.

‘Where are you from my friend?’ said the first one, coming over to me.

‘What are you carrying with you?’

‘Don’t you know that this is private land?’

Their nicotine-stained gap-teeth were like fangs. They were like wolves surrounding me.

‘So you are a City boy are you?’

‘Your Chinky President has just declared war on us, my friend.’

‘So that makes you an enemy, doesn’t it? Eh? That makes you an enemy.’

A boot crashed into my groin. The grey landscape of my head splintered into shards of nausea and pain. The small sodden figure gave a pathetic cry.

And then the three men were suddenly all over me, pulling out my wallet, pulling off the old peasant’s shoes that the widow woman had given me.

‘Look at this! Good City dollars!’

‘This passport will be worth a few dinars.’

‘Yes, but now let’s teach this pretty City boy a real lesson.’

The others laughed. Hands tugged once again at my clothing. I expected to be beaten. It was only at the last moment that I realized that I was going to be raped .

I watched from a great height as one after the other they violated me. It was horribly painful I noticed. It felt as if my whole bowel was being split open.

And then it seemed that this phase too had ended. They still seemed to be kicking me once in a while but that really didn’t matter. The world was quiet again and almost peaceful. Face down in the mud, my pants down to my knees, I lapsed back into dreams.

Once again Lucy tore open her body, once again the organs came sliding out. I could feel the pain of it as though it was happening to me…

I opened my eyes and realized that I was alone. Where were the hunters? I vaguely remembered the men kicking me after they had buggered me but what happened after that I wasn’t sure. Perhaps they had still been kicking me when I fell back to sleep? But at some point, in any case, the three hunters had left.

Very possibly they had left me for dead.

I was lucky. The rocky overhang where I had sheltered was just below the top of a pass. And when I staggered up it I saw that there was a settlement not far below the ridge on the other side: a score or so of pantiled houses surrounded by trees and fields, and a large white religious building with a bell-tower, a monastery of some kind, at the village’s heart.

Very slowly I made my way down the hill, dragging one leg like an old man. There was a lull in the rain, but water was everywhere. Streams gurgled and tinkled all around me. Muddy water ran in rivulets across the road. I remember I saw a lizard on the stony ground. Because of the cold, it moved away from me not with the normal darting motion of lizards, but in slow motion, one leg at a time.