The Hunt (The Hunt 1)

“The knife – listen to me, throw me the knife!” someone else yells.

Gaunt Man’s head snaps up, takes in what is happening. He can’t take his time anymore. Within seconds, Crimson Lips is going to cut through her restraints, will be charging toward the heper. With a cry of anger, he leaps on the heper and sinks his fangs into the back of its neck.

Abs cuts through her fourth strap; even as it is falling away, she is already spinning around, leaping in one cheetah-like pounce to the heper. Her aim is off; she ends up upending Gaunt Man, and the two of them bounce away from the suddenly freed heper.

The heper scuttles on hands and foot, blood trailing behind it, frantically trying to find the door opening. Its eyes are pools of fevered dread and pain. It is disoriented, blinded by the blood pouring into its eyes. In its confusion, it is coming right at me.

Abs and Gaunt Man are on their feet, pouncing towards the heper. They land on it at exactly the same time, knocking it off its feet. Right into me.

Its head knocks into my shoulder a split second before its body slams into mine. Weirdly, it embraces me, its arms encircling my waist. Instinctually, my arms swing around its body. I am holding it up, Abs and Gaunt Man right behind it, their nails sinking into its skin, their fangs bared and a second away from slashing downward and into it.

It looks up, and for one dreadful moment, our eyes meet. I will never know if its eyes suddenly widened because of the flood of pain surging through its body or because of recognition. Of another heper.

Eventually, when it is all over, the hunters are released. A staffer, speaking gravely, instructs us to return to our rooms for the remainder of the night. By then, there is hardly anything left of the heper, just its shredded clothes. Its blood has been licked off where it splattered; even the dirt, coagulated with the heper’s spilled blood, has been dug up, stuffed into mouths, chewed, and sucked on.

My escort is waiting outside the Introduction. “Go put on a change of clothes,” he tells me, his nostrils twitching. “I smell heper all over you.”

The openness of the Vast is what I relish. After I climb the endless flight of stairs, lagging far behind everyone else, I finally reach the ground floor. The others move on up to their quarters. I walk out into the open, the night sky filled with stars. An easterly breeze blows, billowing my clothes, wafting through my hair. I stagger towards the library, grateful to be able to get away, to be alone. Grains of sand blow against my face, but I barely notice.

Halfway back, I collapse to the ground.

I am so sapped of strength, I can’t get up. I lay my head back down on the bricked walkway. It’s the lack of water. My desiccated brain lies shrivelled in my skull, a sour plum. Greyness takes over.

Minutes later—or is it hours?—I come to. I feel better, strength returned to my limbs. The sky is less dark, the stars fewer in number and dimmer. I glance back at the Institute. Nobody has noticed me.

Even though I know it’s futile, I do another walk-through the library, hoping to find something to drink. A half hour later, I collapse on the lounge chair, body feeling like a crisp autumn twig, not a molecule of moisture within. My heart hammers away in alarm as if it knows what I’m trying to deny. That my situation is desperate. I won’t last another night. They’ll come for me after dusk when I don’t show up and find me flopped on the floor. It’ll be over moments later.

A metallic click rings through the library, then a soft churning sound. The shutters. Pulling down darkness, like my eyelids slowly closing. In the blackness, the air grows chilly. My body odour rises to my nose, a sickening stench of heper. I lift my arms, smell my pits. Ripe. Tomorrow, after the sun sets and the moon rises, I’m a dead man.

A dead heper.

Images of the heper’s death fill my sleep: feverish reinterpretations, the screams louder, the colours sharper. In my nightmare, the heper leaps into my arms, its blood running over my cheekbones, down my cheeks. In my thirst, my pasty-dried tongue reaches out reflexively, dabbing at the blood. I suck on the blood, letting it soak into my tongue like mountain spring water into a dry sponge, then draw it down my parched throat, feeling its energy ripple through my sapped body. As my body begins to tingle warmer, the heper screams louder – until I realise the scream is coming not from the heper, but from the other hunters, all of them still tied to their posts, pointing at me, screaming, as I kneel bent over the dead heper in my arms, its skin pasty and blotchy blue.

I shudder awake, the backs of my dry eyelids scraping against my eyeballs.

It is still the middle of the day. The beam of sunlight has returned, streaming across the library again, an illuminated tightrope from one end to the other. It is even brighter and thicker than I remember it.

I’m too tired to do anything but watch it. My thoughts scatter in haphazard, incoherent penumbras. It’s all I can do, just mindlessly watch the beam of light. So I do that, for minutes (hours?). The beam shifts ever so with the passing time, travelling in a diagonal fashion along the far wall of the library.

Then something interesting happens. As the beam moves along the wall, it suddenly hits something that causes it to bounce off at an angle; the beam is reflected diagonally to the adjacent wall. At first, I think it’s just my mind playing tricks on me. I blink. It’s still there, only more obvious now. The original beam shooting across to the far wall and now the shorter, reflected beam, bounced to the right wall.

It’s enough to rouse me out of the lounge chair. I make my way to the far wall, my painful knees churning in sockets like cactus scraping on concrete. Where the beam hits the far wall is a small circular mirror, no bigger than the palm of my hand, nailed to the wall. It is angled slightly, reflecting the beam off to the side wall.

As I make my way to that side wall, it happens again. That second reflected beam is in turn reflected: now there are three sunbeams bouncing around the room. The third beam is weak and momentary. It grows brighter for about ten seconds, then fades. As it does, I hurry to the spot it is shining at, a faint dot of illumination on the spine of a book. I walk over and hook out the book. Feel its leathery feel in my hand, smooth and worn. I carry it to the first beam of sunlight, the second beam itself now fading away. I hold the book to the light, flip it around to the front cover.

The Heper Hunt, it reads.

Many moons ago, the heper population – which in eras past, according to unsubstantiated theories, once, unfathomably, dominated the land – fell to dangerously low numbers. By Palatial Order 56, hepers were rounded up and farmed on the newly built Heper Institute of Refined Research and Discovery. To appease a disgruntled populace, citizens in good standing were randomly chosen to participate in the annual Heper Hunt. It was a resounding success.

The first sign of corruption was seen in the decreasing number of hepers at the annual Hunt. Typically ranging between twenty and twenty-five hepers, that number soon dwindled down to about fifteen. Eventually, only ten hepers were released, then only seven; finally, on a night few have forgotten, the Palace released a statement: there were no more hepers in captivity at the Heper Institute.

And yet. Hushed rumours of secret hunting expeditions persisted: clandestine meetings at the Heper Institute for high-ranking Palace officials; convoys of carriages arriving there in the last hours of dusk; odd wails heard coming from across the Vast. Rumours circulated and grew that corruption reached “all the

way to the top”.

But then, after a few years, even those rumours ceased.

On the eleventh day of the sixth month of the fourth year of the 18th Ruler, it was announced that hepers had become extinct.

The journal cover is made of charcoal lambskin mottled with minuscule grooves. It is smooth and broken in, looped by twin twines. The pages inside, with mercury-gilt edges, crinkle and differentiate easily when I turn them. Thousands of pages of handwritten notes, the penmanship clean and assured. But there’s nothing original in these pages. And, notwithstanding the title on the cover, hardly any material about the Heper Hunt. Only a brief history of the Hunt scrawled on the first couple of pages, then the matter is dropped, like an impulsive manuscript quickly jettisoned. The remainder of the journal is hand-copied and regurgitated material copied from the thousands of textbooks in the library. Long lists of genealogies; ancient poems; well-known fables. Even detailed diagrams that must have taken days to copy, meticulously duplicated.

The Scientist. Clearly, he’s the author of this journal. But why he spent thousands of hours needlessly filling its pages is a mystery. I remember what others said about him: his mental instability, his mysterious disappearance.

And then there’s the beam of light, dimmer now with the approaching dusk. Why had he gone to such lengths to create that beam – and the two others – to point to the journal? The journal was meant to be found, that’s obvious, but by whom and why are not so obvious.

I’m shutting the journal closed when I notice a blank white page smack bang in the middle of the journal. What an odd omission. The hundreds of pages before and after this page are filled from top to bottom; yet this page, back and front, has been left blank. Not a dot of ink. Its whiteness is almost a shout. The last sentence on the preceding page isn’t even complete – it’s cut off midway and then continues on the page after this blank sheet, picking up exactly where it left off. I tap the spine of the book, pondering, confused. Like the reflected beams of light that pointed me to this book, the very blankness of this page seems to be purposefully directing my attention here. But as much as I examine it, I can’t make heads or tails of it.