Marah Chase and the Fountain of Youth

by Jay Stringer

  The light had taken on a lead-gray quality by the time they reached the edge of the trees, and the temperature had dropped significantly. Steve stopped at a large rock, set down the backpack he’d been carrying with the tents and food, and let out at sigh. It looked like a ritual, the same show he put on for every group he guided to this point.

  “You should camp here,” he said. “The forest is a long walk, and you don’t want to be in there at night.”

  “You said all the animals were gone.”

  He flashed a grin. “The intelligent ones. I will help you put up the tents before I turn back.”

  Chase took a long pull on her water before passing it to Hass. “We’re continuing on.”

  For the first time, Steve’s face showed fear. “I would not.”

  “I know.” Hass put a hand on Steve’s bag, ready to pull it to his side. “Thank you. We appreciate everything you’ve done.”

  Steve shrugged. He was too experienced to bother arguing. The customer gets what they want. And, Chase figured, he’d already done the math of how soon he could get off the mountain and join the evacuation.

  “One question, before you go,” she said. “Have you heard of the dark place? Do you know the way?”

  Steve’s whole demeanor changed. He looked at Chase and Hass in turn with a cold expression. He muttered something to himself in what sounded like Bantu, then said, “You will be on your own. If anything goes wrong, you will get no help.”

  He turned and started back down the trail. Hass and Chase both watched him go in silence for almost five minutes.

  Eventually Chase said, “You struggling with the air, too?”

  Hass nodded. “I didn’t want to say. I keep taking deep breaths, and it’s doing nothing.”

  “Same.”

  Chase could have added light-headed and feel like I have the flu to the list, but didn’t. She turned to look at the forest. From here, it was impossible to judge how far up the mountain it stretched. It was just a dark, impenetrable wall of green and brown. Earlier in the day, when they’d left Nale Moru, the trees had looked like a narrow strip, almost a layer on a cake.

  “Maybe he was right,” Hass said. “Camp here, adjust, hit the trees tomorrow.”

  “He’s definitely right. The intelligent, adult thing to do is take our time, get used to the altitude, and go again in the morning.”

  Chase scanned the dense line of trees, thinking that Lauren Stanford and August Nash would be around here somewhere. And with their resources, they had every advantage. They could have already found the dark place. Eden. The Fountain. Whatever it turned out to be. There simply wasn’t time to rest.

  Hass lifted the backpack and slung it across his shoulders, fitting his arms through the straps. “But when have we ever been intelligent or adult?”

  “Exactly.” Chase smiled, slipped her water bottle back into the mesh webbing on the side of her own bag, and turned to head on up the path.

  * * *

  Nash watched the crates being unloaded from the van. The boxes themselves were no bigger than tea chests. Nash was worried. He’d seen the equipment Lauren had brought with them, suitable for a different terrain. Large quad bikes, with tank treads connecting the wheels. Each one had taken two men to lift, and each also came with a large trailer to drag behind, filled with the white metal pods she insisted they bring. Those bikes had seemed appropriate. Large, robust. Though he agreed they weren’t practical for the kind of ascent they needed up Kili, they were surely a better option than whatever was packed away in these smaller boxes.

  They’d spent two days at base camp, which was the name Lauren was giving to what was, really, a friend’s spacious Arusha mansion. Dosa really did have connections in any country they wanted. On the way into Tanzania, they’d found all the routes closed. Every channel Nash would have thought to try, every connection he might have leaned on, was gone. (Conte would have been a possibility, but Nash had burned that bridge.)

  It was funny to Nash now to think of the decade he’d spent on the black market, forging alliances and connections, building networks. He could maybe get into most countries with a bit of effort, and he usually had a good chance at finding people to work with. Perhaps he could get a government minister on the phone here, or knew a journalist there, sometimes an ex-spook from his agency days.

  When rolling with a billionaire, none of it mattered. With one phone call Lauren had gotten into and out of the United Kingdom without ever officially entering the country. With another, she’d arranged them safe passage to this luxurious mansion less than a day’s ride from Kilimanjaro, and then, with a third call, while lounging beside the swimming pool, she had gotten these crates shipped from a Dosa plant in Libya straight through half a dozen borders and into this locked-down country. She’d hung up the phone and immediately started talking to their host, an American expat media producer, about who they should install as the next US president. They’d asked Nash for his opinion on their candidates, and he’d quickly realized none of this was a joke. This really was how they lived, how they thought, and how the world worked. And he was on the edge of their world. He had a way in.

  Who was that guy who said American lives don’t have a second act? Well, screw that. His first act had been school and juvie. His second landed him in the military. Surely the CIA was an act all its own, and then he’d become the best relic runner in the world. Chase had done him a favor. He’d been thinking his story ended with finding the Ark. Get some fame, get a bunch of money, settle down somewhere. But she’d forced his hand, made him rethink, and now he could see a whole new act, right in front of him. An extra stage in his life. And this one, this one was the one. Sitting by a pool, talking to people with more money than most countries, plotting the next president. This was what his whole life had been leading to.

  But now, opening up one of the crates as a workman set it down in the garage, for the first time in this new stage he had doubts. Everything so far had been big. Convincing. Lauren had made mistakes early on, sure. But they were mistake of scale. Mistakes of ambition. She’d hired the wrong people and backed them with too much money. And then she’d moved heaven and earth just to arrange for him to pick up one reporter. Got around international rules and borders with a snap of her fingers. But inside the crate was a drone, like those things they showed in the news as the future of Amazon deliveries. He could see a large metal hinge that would fold the device out to double its current size, making it around five feet in length. But this was it? These little toys represented the scale of Lauren’s ambition for the last leg of the expedition?

  He turned on his heel and headed for her bedroom, where she was sitting on the balcony in a night robe, overlooking the pool. The south slope of Kili was a dark shape in the distance.

  “What are those things?” Nash said as he walked in.

  Lauren made a show of looking down at her breasts, bare beneath the robe, then shrugging, as if she was about to say, What, these?

  Nash didn’t wait for the obvious joke. “In the crates. Little radio-controlled helicopters?”

  “Oh.” She beamed, sitting up in the chair. “They’re here? Excellent.”

  “You’re not seriously thinking of using those toys?”

  “I am, seriously. Those ‘toys’ are the result of a decade of development. These drone wars, all the stuff in the news, you really think all these billion-dollar corporations are developing flying robots just to deliver food packages? Trust me, they will get us exactly where we need to go, and they have anti-radar tech built in, so nobody will know anything about it.”

  “And the pods?”

  “The pods too, yes. That’s my equipment. We’ll have one drone each, and then we’ll bring two of the pods up with us on their own drones.”

  “Why do we need them? Surely we can just go up and collect samples of whatever—”

  “Which one of us is the billionaire with two college degrees and a private army?”

  “Okay. But reme
mber which one of us is the expert relic runner. You need to make room in one of your pods for my equipment.”

  “Deal.” Lauren shuffled over, making space for him on the edge of the seat and patting it playfully. “Come here. Look.” She pointed to the laptop screen, displaying a 3-D rendering of Kili. “Based on all the data, the legends, maps, the current state of forestation on the mountain, and where all the public trails are, the Fountain will be somewhere here.” She pointed to a section of dense forest on the north face. She pressed play, and the software simulated the sun rising, flooding the east of the mountain with light first. She pointed to a narrowing shadow. “My software here has calculated if we leave at midnight and get set up in Matadi on the western slope, we can hit this shadow at just the right moment, fly up while there’s enough daylight for us to see but a corridor of darkness to cover us from view.”

  Nash pointed to a small flashing box on the laptop taskbar, an app asking for urgent attention. “And what’s this?”

  Lauren clicked on the window. A news alert popped up, the Tanzanian government sending emergency broadcasts out by every channel, digital, analog, internet. The message was written in half a dozen languages. Lauren clicked on the English section, and it expanded to show the full text.

  NATIONAL EMERGENCY ORDERED.

  Immediate evacuation of province. Mount Kilimanjaro eruption imminent.

  Please make necessary arrangements and await the next broadcast for evacuation details.

  “Well then,” said Nash. “Guess we won’t have to worry too much about being seen.”

  * * *

  Chase and Hass walked on without talking. The darkness folded in around them, with the fading sunlight only filtering in from the gap directly above them. There were gaps in the trees on either side of the path, where Chase guessed two hundred years of footfall had thinned out the undergrowth, but beyond that, from the next layer of trees, it was impossible to see into the shadows.

  Chase’s old childhood fear of the dark was itching away at her skin, like the beginnings of a rash. But unlike when she was younger, the fear was no longer in control. She’d learned to keep it down in the basement, locked away. But the light itch was telling her something else.

  “This is so eerie,” she said quietly. “You can feel it—there’s nothing here.”

  Hass looked around them into the shadows. “Yeah.”

  Chase noticed the edge to his voice. He was rattled and nervous. She wondered what fears he’d been keeping to himself, locked down in the basement.

  “It’s good news, though.” Chase offered him a smile, trying to lift their spirits. “If there’s nothing out there, that includes Nazi bitchpots.”

  Chase felt a stab in her guts. Thinking of Stanford and Nash sent her mind skipping quickly to Ashley Eades. Was she alive? Dead? Could she be lying somewhere now, waiting for help? Chase pushed the thoughts away again, but they didn’t go far.

  The path wound around to the left, and up ahead they saw a bridge. She remembered Freema’s directions.

  There are two bridges…

  Well, at least they were heading in the right direction. The last of the sunlight faded away above them, like a blanket dropping down over them in an instant. One second there was a faint light filtering from above, the next they were in total darkness.

  The old fear got loose. Chase froze, aware of every single hair on her body. All the familiar whispers, the familiar dread, and the feeling of cold water being poured over warm coals. You’re in an ancient forest, in total darkness, with no backup… the mountain could explode at any minute… and it’s dark… it’s dark… you’re wrapped in dark…

  There was a fumbling sound next to her, followed by a click, and a blue halogen light spread out around them. Hass had activated one of their lamps.

  He touched Chase’s arm. “You okay?”

  She breathed in and out, then pulled her own lamp from the bag and turned it on. “I will be.”

  After a few more deep breaths, she smiled an unspoken thank-you and indicated for them to continue. Somehow, the new lighting conditions changed the feel of the walk. Chase was now more aware they were on an incline. Each step felt different on her ankles. Each time she lifted her foot, she noticed planting it back down higher than it had been before. And the other sensation, one they’d been expecting, was cold.

  The forest was offering some measure of protection, but Steve had warned them they could be at risk of freezing if they were on an open plain at night. He often took less-experienced climbers up toward the peak in the dark, because the frozen ground would be firmer and more manageable. Chase and Hass both paused to pull out an extra coat from their bags, as well as the thermal gloves Steve had insisted they bring.

  After another hour of walking, Chase was feeling light-headed. She knew they needed to admit defeat and camp for the rest of the night. They’d been walking, with only brief rest stops, since daybreak. Her legs felt empty. Her feet had gone past sore four hours ago and were now tingling with numbness. And her brain needed time to adjust to the altitude. She was slowing down. Hass clearly had a little more left in the tank, because he started to pull ahead before noticing she was lagging behind.

  “I think…” Chase lost her train of thought two words in. She shook her head. “I think we need to camp.”

  “Yeah.” Hass looked back at her, nodded, then turned to point up ahead. “Maybe there’s a clearing once we turn off at this bridge?”

  That cleared her head. Chase drew level with him and peered forward. At the edge of the blue light she could make out the wooden handrails. Freema’s directions had been to turn off at the second bridge.

  Chase was fully awake now. The aches, the tiredness, they were still there, but distant, barely touching her. She and Hass were almost at the dark place. The Fountain of Youth. The Garden of Eden. A volcanic feature. History.

  They upped their pace, arriving at the bridge at something near a trot. It was a small structure, only five feet across, made of narrow wooden planks with handrails on either side. The gloom was clinging thick around them. Hass leaned over the rail and held out his lantern to show the dried riverbed beneath, overgrown with moss. At the other end of the bridge was a small gap in the trees. Nobody had walked this way recently, but it looked like somebody in the past had used it as a path down to the riverbed. Chase and Hass stepped carefully through the gap and down the embankment, testing each step carefully.

  They walked along the riverbed, each one keeping an eye out for a clearing, somewhere large enough to pitch two tents. After an hour, Chase confronted the other thought that had been nagging at her.

  “Freema’s directions are kinda vague after the bridge. We don’t know how long to walk, what we’re really looking for.”

  Thirty minutes later, they knew what they were looking for.

  The trees around them started to change. They looked older. Thicker. Chase was experienced enough to know that the mind could play tricks. She’d hiked a mountain on the Olympic Peninsula, walking up an old logging road before turning off into the wilderness. After less than a mile, the trees had vegetation so thick, she’d felt like she’d stepped back in time, to a place no human had ever been. But here, the feeling was even stronger. The trees looked to be of a different species. The trunks were round, thicker at the bottom and tapering as they rose to a height lost beyond the blue beam. The branches ended in thick, round leaves. Bushes, growing up to around six feet in height, were made up of a variety of colors: red, blue, purple. The lamps gave them an odd neon glow.

  “This is like an alien planet,” Hass said.

  They came to a dam. Trees and rocks had been pushed down into the riverbed. They climbed up over the dam to find the other side was dry, too. Water hadn’t flowed here in a long time, but it had once, and someone had deliberately stopped it from running down the mountain.

  Chase was flushed from the exertion. She was starting to sweat. “It’s warm here.” She unzipped her topcoat and shrug
ged out of it, then felt the need to take off her jacket, too. She stooped to pack them both away.

  “Think the lava is heating the mountain?”

  “Whatever it is,” Chase said, “it feels like we just stepped into the Amazon.”

  They came to a clearing beside the dried-up river, a loose semicircle ten feet across. The ground was mostly flat, with a few small mounds in the center. The trees at the far end of the clearing were closer together, the foliage denser. Somehow, they both sensed this was some kind of ancient boundary marker. To step through those trees was to cross a line.

  Something white glinted in the beam of the lamps, right at the edge of this half-imagined boundary. A solid object, catching the light. Chase walked across the clearing to get a closer look. A bush had grown up around it, but as she pulled at the leaves, she revealed a statue. White rock, neither granite nor marble. It stood four feet high and was carved into the image of a large cat. A lion maybe, or a tiger, with an open, snarling mouth and two large sabre-teeth.

  “The white cat,” Hass said, giving voice to what they’d both already understood.

  But there was something more to it. Chase stared at the face. She’d seen it before. Three times. Once on the statues in the Holy of Holies, once when she lifted the blanket covering the Ark, and once in a cave beneath Alexandria. In this new context, she noticed the two enlarged teeth, but the other statues had been the same.

  In the Genesis myth, after expelling Adam and Eve, God left a cherubim with a flaming sword guarding the entrance to the garden. There was no flaming sword, and this statue wasn’t leaping into life anytime soon, but here was a statue of a cherubim—or of one of its four main forms, at least—at the edge of a prehistoric forest.

  Chase took two slow steps back into the clearing. She fought an urge to kneel, not really understanding where it was coming from.

  “What is it?” Hass stepped past her to look at the statue.