'Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright,
In the forests of the night,'
[William Blake, 'The Tyger']

He slides through the undergrowth like a poacher after wild game or as stealthily as one of the big felines he has been likened to. His movements are slow and liquid; he moves with a focused grace and when he pauses briefly and rolls his shoulders, his shoulder blades thrust sharply into his silhouette.

Steam rises from the broad-leafed plants which crowd his body and his short glossy hair is curling from the damp. The never ending rainfall mixes with the sweat which courses down his face and slips between his shirt and his silky skin, running down the furrow of his spine. There is no refreshment in the water; rather, it is liquid sunshine, each droplet carrying its own bubble of heat which impacts with his skin and seeps into his bones and blood. The heat is a living entity which has possessed him completely. More than this, the thick fertile earth coats his boots and clings to his softly furred legs, dark mud splattered like blood from an arterial wound across the backs of his calves and thighs. His clothes are dirty with leaf mould and are moulded to the muscled contours of his body by sweat and his face is painted into some savage god, naked flesh half flashing against the camouflaged shadows.

He has never felt so alive.

It is as if everything in his life, all the pain and the betrayal and the heartache, has brought him to this place and this time.

A movement at his side and his burnt almond eyes flicker calmly. As if they are part of his own body, he feels his men fanning out behind and to his sides. Before him, he can almost sense the growing fear of the prey which they stalk. The jaws of the trap, not steel but flesh and bone, begin to close.

And his stride lengthens and he is running, eyes fixed on the suddenly visible prey.

Sees the sudden stunned comprehension over a face out of a nightmare.

Can almost taste the panic in the air and the oxygen he is drawing in suddenly hits his brain and collides with the adrenaline that slashes through him as sharp as a knife.

And he becomes what she is not.

Later, it is he who remembers to go back and finish off the young.

Blood has splattered across his clothes; he ignores it. Does not think of the moment the creature turned and pleaded with him in a strangely musical tongue, large green eyes oddly human and mute in their appeal. Instead, he dwells, not with a morbid satisfaction, but with a clinical evaluation, upon the moment his silver blade tore into the monster's flesh; the mouth had opened, revealing blunt teeth, above them, the sharper fangs. It had floundered, falling to the waiting embrace of the forest floor, carmine blood pooling beneath it already. He had jerked the head back and slit the slender throat with merciless efficiency.

He disapproves of the practice of taking heads, but the creature had worn a collection of iridescent shells as a necklace and something compelled him to take them. He sees them, in his mind, adorning another slender throat. Wonders what bloody tributes she takes from her monstrous lover. Wonders whether it would be the fearful symmetry, the undeniable reflection of herself that she would see in him which would finally drive her into his arms.

The young, all pink skin and softly feathered wings, are crying with distress as he bends over them. Eyes like jewels brighten for a moment and then dull forever as he guts them with a smooth movement of the knife. He leaves the tiny bodies where he found them; curled around each other in the woven nest.

He feels no regret as he turns his back. Behind him, a delicate wing flutters once and stills.

Night falls thickly in the deepest, darkest jungles of South America. It arrives with a sudden flush of darkness, no tender twilight here.

At night, the rainforest lives another life.

The air is alive with the eerie calls of the night hunters, and the fresh aroma of the rain and the glorious flowers is undercut by the fetid scent of rotting meat and the copper sweet stench of blood.

His mouth curves into a smile colder than time as he steps out into the night and breaths deeply, taking a darkness older than demons inside himself. The darkness that she faces is small compared to this. This is a primordial darkness, ancient and hungry. It is the darkness which dwells within man and without him, and he has finally become one with it.

No longer a savage god, he strips his clothes off and goes naked a willing suppliant into the forest of the night. He navigates by the filtered light of the great golden moon and the splinters of starlight. Sure footed, his golden body gleaming palely, his eyes burning. Burning bright enough to illuminate the most distant deeps or skies.

No threshold barrier may restrain him, nor holy crucifix prevent his approach. He is son of Adam and in his eyes this garden world in its autumn years is become a jungle infested with weeds and other unclean things. Only the sharpness of the knife and the surety of the sword and the steady hand of the Gardener might tame this savage forest.

His life has never been so simple. Despite the lush green rainforest, all he sees is black and white, the world drawn in ink on white paper.

He knows his men fear his talent, his undoubtable and wholly human skill and his inhuman detachment.

He does not care. Does not need to seek their approval nor their praise.

Does not try to fit in. Now he fits the world around him.

The gothic cliches, the bonds of kin and blood, the dance with death, was never for him.

Here he is alive.

Here he lives.

Here, in the forests of the night.

Finis.

End Through The Forests Of The Night by Alex: prague_spring@hotmail.com

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