sixth day, as they hung barely to life, I tired of the game. I told Tefit we would cease protecting them from the animals at night. We made ready before dusk to shield ourselves from the anticipated slaughter. Arrayed in a semi-circle around one half of the platform from which we could observe at a safe remove, each prisoner had a torch lit near them to complement the moonlight so I could see even more clearly their expressions of fear and misery.
Under the fattened moon, bright as a smile, all about us life quivered with excitement, except the six unfortunate ones, so near death, so far from hope as to know it. The hills around us seemed alive, too and as thirsty for blood. The sounds of the animals, the roars of the big cats, the idiot laughing of the hyenas, their pungent smells – what joy it filled me with, what terror it cast into the prisoners. Such a cacophony no man had ever heard, the growling, roaring, whining of dozens of beasts of prey all around me, the sounds of a terrible justice. Many stayed in abeyance, awaiting their chance; some became prey themselves. Numerous hyenas, great opportunists, waited on the periphery of our encampment for their chances. A pack of jackals swooped in on the condemned and began biting and tearing at their limbs. They had life enough to feel excruciating pain and voice enough in their throats to cry out intelligibly – "No, please, have mercy." I had none to give.
And a most remarkable thing occurred: Six leopards came down from the hills to feast on their still living flesh, scattering the jackals. Six, exactly the number I had killed to win her body and soul, before I knew that her soul was something dark and hard and her body was destined for predation of a different sort – I saw a leopard claw her breast.
When the teeth and claws started puncturing the skin and severing the veins, the fountains of blood spurt its odor into the air along with the musk of the animals, such a stink that I wondered if Sekhmet herself might rouse to the game. It was blood I had seen and smelled before in little domestic doses, with a loving concern that made me laugh bitterly to think of it. But that night no balm would kiss their wounds, no bandages would staunch their blood-flow.
The sound of those powerful jaws ripping into the human flesh, the crackling of their bones, was something I could feel in the roots of my teeth, in the water of my mouth, the spit seething from my gums as though the beast within was readying itself to join the rush for the spoils. Again I heard but never saw, a lion roaring in the distance. I knew it was Sekhmet herself roaring her approval and sparing me from her own murderous urges. Each leopard bit and held the throat of each one of the unfortunates and dragged them away, their teeth deep in the flesh.
Six leopard skins to win her. Six innocents murdered to avenge her filthy pride. Six murderers to bring down like beasts. Six days under the sun to torture their skins. Six leopards to drag them by their necks into the trees for devouring.
I elected to stay the next day after my retinue began to decamp. Tefit and the others vociferously protested my decision because they knew that an embrace of the desert was an embrace of death. But they could not change my mind and knew better than to defy the will of a man determined to die. But I did not die then, instead I became an animal again, serving the needs of my body, attuned to the ground and the sky and all their vibrations.
I marveled that I had never done this; journeyed to wasteland with no intention of hunting and just camped with my thoughts and the sky, because it calmed me. Before the tragedy, such a passive enjoyment of the elements would have seemed – I’m ashamed to admit to such a paucity of feeling – slightly ridiculous. My youth was spent in the expression of unsubtle sensations.
I was shocked to learn that a sensitive mind was inadequate soil for the growth of moral fiber, that sensitivity in isolation is not a moral good. It had grown fruits of evil that I never would have bitten in my younger days, brute that I was. But in the final accounting, to loose evil on an evil is merely to find balance, to set the world right again.
After my return from the desert, when once again I threw in my lot with society, all I knew were sensitivities that I was forced to smother in alcohol and an endless flow of thoughtless conversation. And so I became the professional wit, the wastrel you see before you, trying, with the babble of my tongue, to silence the bewailing of loss.
And so ends Hatotep's own account of his revenge.
[Hatotep, finished with his story, demanded of Seullinard, Am I boring you? in such an arch way, as to make known his complete disinterest in any possible answer. Seullinard said no, he found Hatotep a capital story-teller and consistently interesting. Showing he was no slouch when it came to wit, Seullinard then observed that Hatotep was indeed the most wasted-away wastrel he’d ever had the pleasure to meet. That apparently drew a chuckle from him.]
Now I have eased myself into my role as spiller of secrets of the House of Usher and once spilt, they will seep into the darkest cavities of your brain, into the bloodiest ventricles of your heart as they have entered mine. In telling Hatotep's story, I have begun unburdening myself (and ipso facto have begun burdening you, reader) of the far more horrific tale hinted at when I described the sanguinary traipse through the snows of Boston Common, for those trickles of blood flow from the one to the other story and grow to a flood tide. The blood that Madeleine drew from any surface she touched was the blood of victims murdered in such numbers and in such cruel ways by none other than the Lady of Slaughter herself. It was this fierce predator, this ripper of flesh that would come to stalk the streets of Boston, leaving lakes of blood and whirlpools of misery in her wake.
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