The Maiden's Hand- Part 4.

The Devourer

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 |Part 4

IIII

Give me my hand. Please, Peter.

“Sh-h-he’s talking to me,” Peter said.

Benyon looked around. “Who is?”

“Her,” he said, pointing to the hand in the box.

They were interrupted by another blood-curdling scream. Hillbury.

“What does she want, Peter?” For the first time, Benyon noticed Peter’s shirt was torn, right across the left side of his chest. “Good lord, what’s happened to you?” he asked.

Peter looked down at his shirt, surprised to see the tear, too. Someone had drawn a dotted outline around his heart.

Your heart is pure. Your heart is good.

The rattling in the case demanded their attention.

“Should we kill it? Stab it with something?” Benyon offered.

They looked down at the hand in the case, leaping and banging against its glass prison. Peter shook his head. “No. W-w-we have to,” he began, holding Benyon’s attention the entire time, “give it t-t-to…” Weary, he pointed to the image of the grotesque collage of African animals on the page.

The drawing in the book looked ridiculous; two dimensional and like something a child had drawn. It didn’t do the creature justice. Judging himself as having no greater a set of guts than the canary, Peter didn’t know how he hadn’t collapsed and died with fright when he laid eyes on the real thing. Now it was out there, looking for something, or someone.

“All right,” Benyon said, sensing Peter’s fatigue. “It says here that The Devourer eats the heart of the unworthy, but who is she? Is it here with her, or for her?”

Peter took a deep breath. There was only one way to find out.

With a power she could only have acquired from the sad and sorry souls of Wilfred, Jack and Hillbury, she appeared in the library, the windows shattering behind her as she raised her arms and called for the release of her hand. Her eyes glowed with an ethereal blaze, fixing themselves on Benyon, and then at Peter. The thunder down the corridor shook the entire house. Books, papers and pages fluttered around the room like wild gulls riding through a tempest. She was the eye of the storm.

“Open the d-d-oor!” Peter called over the racket, holding the glass case tightly. The princess held up a dagger with her only hand. Benyon rolled and crawled to the door, dodging flying debris as he grabbed the knob. It flung open, banging against the wall behind it.

“Peter, come to me!” the princess called.

He trembled. He couldn’t let go of the case, but he needed to latch on to something as the power of her will dragged him towards her across the carpet. He held on to a table leg, securing the encased hand between a thigh and his other arm. The wind seemed to blow in all directions, choosing who went where.

“Don’t give it to her, man!” Benyon said, holding on to the door frame as the wind lifted his body from the floor.

Not knowing if he was doing the right thing or not, Peter scrunched his eyes shut, and called for The Devourer to come.

Benyon didn’t see the creature burst through the doorway, because the exploding thrust of its body sent him flying into a bookcase. He collapsed on the floor like a ragdoll. Peter, opening his eyes, gasped at the sight of the thing, and tried not to let go of the case. The Devourer, impervious to the force of the damned princess, entered the room and stood before Peter, its amber eyes beckoning him to leap into its monstrous maw and have it over with. He tossed the case toward it, and the crocodile’s jaws clamped it in its carnivorous vice, shattering the glass. The hand made one final attempt to leap and was snatched in mid air. Peter, somehow, could hear the crunch over the storm.

Her scream almost shattered his ear drums as it consumed her. With the reticulating jaw of a python, The Devourer swallowed her whole, as lightning struck the room. Peter covered his face, trying not to inhale the sulphurous fumes of burning books.

Peter rose slowly, stepping over the debris. He was no longer in his uncle’s library, but in some sort of hall, surrounded by what he assumed were the bodies of men and women, hard to distinguish in the light of the sun. Their presence soaked him like water to thirst; filled him like food to hunger; expanded him like air to lungs. He let them come, and realised they were more than men and women. Gods. Too bright and too pure for human eyes. He listened.

Peter had avenged the gods, once and for all.

When he woke up, he was sprawled out on the lawn. Birds were singing, and the grass around him sparkled with morning dew.

“That’s a smashing tattoo you have there,” Benyon said, sitting on a bench with a bent cigarette he’d tried to straighten.

Peter sat up, and looked down at his naked torso. On his chest, he could make out the shape of a ram’s head. “I didn’t get a tattoo,” Benyon said, balancing the cigarette on his lips as he struck a match to light it. “I just look like shit.”

Peter observed the purple bulge around Benyon’s eye, and the gash on his cheek where he’d met with the book case. Despite everything, Rupert Benyon, as usual, was a picture of unperturbed poise. Both of them looked back to the house, or what was left of it.

They sat for some time. What he could recall, was very little. Either gods had their secrets, or mortal ears could not comprehend their words. He scratched his head. They were leaving him, forever.

“You were flat out for hours. Where have you been all this time?” Benyon finally asked, blowing smoke out of the corner of his mouth.

Peter, in a voice he didn’t recognise at first, heard himself say, “I ended the cult of Aten.”

“You did, did you?”

“Yes. Many were punished for worshipping the gods when Ahkenatan was on the throne. They wanted vengeance. They wandered—lost souls. They called on the gods to… to find…” Me, Peter. He laughed faintly. “She was the last of the cult. Dodged the punishment. They all died horrible deaths, in the end.”

Benyon’s mouth hung open. Peter wasn’t stammering any more. “Was that in the book?”

“Most of it.”

They both looked at the blackened ruin that was the library. “That’s a damn shame,” Benyon said, smoking some more of his cigarette. “I should have liked to read more about it.”

Rupert Benyon never would read more about it.

What little concern it is to gods to inform young men that they would never live long enough to speak of anything they’d witnessed.

They would go their separate ways: Peter would travel across North Africa on the allowance originally intended for his deceased cousin, eventually becoming a wartime correspondent when tensions rose between empires. He would forget Anck Su Namun. He would forget The Devourer. He would forget the snap of its jaws, and the doom between its teeth. Grasping the helm with a confident hand, he’d focus on other parts of the past.

He’d send a couple of letters to a contact in Egypt, looking for his birth mother. He would never find her, and no one would ever find him.

His name would rest alongside the relics of his uncle’s rebuilt study, fading into obscurity, as tombs and etchings do.

Benyon would marry his fiancee and follow his father’s footsteps to London’s Square Mile, until he was required on The Western Front. He would kiss the forehead of one newborn, and think of him when a Canadian medic in Neuve Chapelle asked him about himself: a noble effort to try to distract the young officer from his mortality, erupting and spilling all over the stretcher. He would try his best not to die, but the nurse at the field hospital, calling time on Rupert Benyon, would smooth a gentle hand over his eyelids, drawing them down on his window to the world.

Princess Anck Su Namun, once a living nightmare, would become one of many horrors to adorn the short, unfinished tapestries of their lives.