Pascale's Wager: Homelands of Heaven

by Anthony Bartlett

  Danny guided her to the doorway and gave her to Alaqua to accompany her up the canyon to where the bodies were. He told Alaqua to be sure to introduce her to Pascale when they got there. They watched as the two of them walked up the corridor toward the blinding light, Greta shading her eyes and clutching Alaqua's arm.

  Ravel said, “Never knew Magus had a daughter.”

  Magada replied. “Seems it was a bit more than that he had!”

  Danny quickly turned and, flipping through the keys, found one to open the second door. Immediately it fell ajar, the group was met by a distinct undertone of the general stench, a smell partly anesthetic but bitter and poisonous at the same time. A dark-skinned woman lay naked and unconscious on a bed under a large overhead light. There was some kind of drip stand by her bed with tubes hanging down. Again everyone struggled to cope with the fetid atmosphere. But Magada did not hesitate. She was first in the room and walked straight over to the bed and looked down at the body. It was covered in scars and there seemed to be some kind of surgical implant in one of the arms. She yelled, “Need to get her outside. Zoltan can you carry her?”

  The big man came over and scooped up the prone body. Magada told the cowboy who had held her horse to follow with the mattress and sheets to cover the woman, and once outside to try to wake her and give her water. Everyone stood back as Zoltan edged his way out, followed by the cowboy. It was a sight, full of terror and compassion, stirring the deepest forgotten memories in the onlookers.

  Danny was already at the third door and the first key he chose turned the lock. There was a muffled movement from inside the door, like rats scuttling for cover. This door was heavier than the other and it took a firm push to get it open. As it swung back it showed a space lit with a single electric bulb. The only furniture was a bed frame and a bucket toilet, and cowering in a space between the bed and the wall was a creature that may have been a man or perhaps some kind of animal. The stink was at its most intense, fecal and pungent, and once again everyone fell back, clutching their throats. Magada gave a hoarse cry and said something inaudible. Danny was again paralyzed, unable to say or do anything.

  The face was obscured by filthy matted hair stretching to the lower back and by an equally encrusted bush around the mouth and the nose which was simply two holes on a planed surface. From the sides of the naked body protruded strange stumps which could have been twisted forearms. The only thing that gave a sign of humanity were the eyes, glazed and traumatized, yet with a hint of fathomless endurance, like a baited bear which in its pit of suffering carries still the breath of its freedom.

  Slowly people entered the room, with their mouths and noses covered. After a moment, Magada once again took the initiative. She went over to the bed, dropped on her knees, and held out a hand. Danny summoned his will and followed her, dropping down beside her.

  Magada said, “This is Danny. My name is Magada. He and his sister, Pascale, freed the Ranch from Magus. We want you to come with us into the open air and the sun.”

  The eyes of the figure looked blankly back and forth, from Magada to Danny.

  Danny joined in. “Magus is dead. Whoever you are, you are free to leave.”

  The figure furrowed its brow as if the sounds of the words had woken some sort of meaning and it was trying to place what it was. It remained in the same position between the bed and the wall.

  Magada said, “I think you are perhaps from the time before Immortality. I think perhaps I remember you. What is your name?”

  A flicker of awareness went across the face. A voice issued from the mouth, a congealed gluey sound.

  “Magus, dead?”

  “Yes, that is right. He fell from the top of the canyon.”

  There was a pause and the figure crawled on misshapen limbs from behind the bed, like an insect attached to a monstrous head. The voice said, slowly and with immense labor, “I am Francisco. I represent the movement against Heaven, the Resistance.”

  Magada cried, “Francisco, I was sure it was you!” And turning to Danny she said, “He was the most famous activist of all. He tried to expose the plan for a privileged world for the few. He was called a crackpot and a terrorist, and then he disappeared.”

  “Well, now he's reappeared, but different, I think.” Danny faced Francisco, raising his hand in an awkward impromptu salute. “We thank you, sir, for keeping true, whatever it cost, and what it cost you seems impossible to count.”

  The foul leonine head trembled. The bunkered eyes all at once relented and water welled up in them and a pair of tears rolled onto the filthy cheeks. “…never believed to see...this day. Take me out...of here!”

  Danny rushed back up the corridor and fetched a chair from the study. Returning he saw there was one last door at the end of the corridor, directly opposite the entrance at the front. He tried it quickly and it opened. Glancing in, he could see it was simply another store room. He turned back into Francisco's cell and asked Magada to help him lift the crippled survivor onto the chair. Someone had wrapped the spidery body in a sheet and they were able to lift him with some kind of dignity. Once he was there they hoisted the chair between them. It had become now a throne and they carried it through the door and down the corridor with a feeling of triumph. Ravel held a cushion he'd found over Francisco's head to shade him from the sun and he emerged into the early afternoon light, an alien king welcomed with honor to earth.

  They carried the chair to the tent where they found the second woman from the cabin still lying on her mattress, covered with a sheet, and apparently coming to her senses. She seemed restless and her eyes were wandering from side to side as if she were trying to figure out where she was and what was happening to her. The cowboy, whose name was Cormac, was squatting next to her holding a canteen of water. Orwell was at his usual position at the table; he had been there in the tent from the time Pascale first went up the cliff in the morning.

  Danny and Magada placed Francisco down close to the mattress and told him the woman had been his neighbor in the cabin. Francisco nodded as if he already grasped this but he didn't say anything. He was opening his eyes for short intervals and the closing them again, trying to restrict what was for him an intense stimulus of light and activity around him. Magada took the canteen from Cormac and said she would stay with the two freed prisoners and he should help back at the cabin.

  Danny was aware that his horse, Stardust, was still at the top of the cliff but he couldn't go get her yet. He had been thrown into the middle of something shocking and terrible and he had to see it through. By this time everybody in the cantina had come out to witness the world-ending events of the day, and there were now about twenty people around the tent, including Zoltan, Cormac, Ravel, Eliot, the cook and his assistants. Even Louis and Joanne had come down from the orchards to observe. Danny told everybody that they should go to Magus' cabin and empty it entirely of its contents, bringing everything into the open. He asked Zoltan to build a bonfire for Zena while he went to check on Pascale and the others. Ravel was to return to Magus' cabin and get a couple of sheets and then follow him to the steps. It seemed everybody was prepared at this point to take directions from him and they all went off as they were told.

  Danny walked back up the canyon. As he rounded the spur by the cliff steps he could see Pascale no longer next to the body of Zena but sitting slightly apart with Alaqua and Greta. A little farther again, closer to the body of Magus, there was Koyo squatting on the ground her head covered in canyon dust. Every so often she would let out a parched cry and flick some more dust on her head. Flies had already begun to gather on both corpses but the horror of the scene did not seem to affect the group of three women. Danny walked up to them and asked what was happening. Greta looked up.

  “My father is dead, just as you said. I have seen him. But I have found new friends, Alaqua who brought me here, and Pascale who has told me a story about a frozen land far away and another one close to here where everything is beautiful.”

  Pascale smile
d sadly up at Danny. “This morning was terrible and all together tragic until Greta arrived. I am grieving inside, for Zena, but Greta is a new friend. She likes to talk of books and stories, so I told her some of ours. Unfortunately Koyo here will not talk at all.”

  Danny said, “Magus' place was a house of horrors. There are only evil stories out of there. I am not surprised she won't talk. But we have to dispose of the bodies. They are building a fire for Zena now, and we will place Magus in his cabin and burn it over him.”

  Koyo let out a penetrating scream. “No, no, no. You cannot burn, you cannot burn"

  Danny glanced at her coldly. “If we don't the dogs will eat him. And the only thing fit for that cabin of yours is to burn it to the ground!”

  They could see Ravel arriving with the sheets. Danny went to meet him. He took the cloths and gave one to Pascale. “Here, if you and Alaqua can carry Zena, Ravel and I will take Magus.”

  They rolled the bodies into the sheets and hoisted them as best they could. Greta stayed away from Magus and helped Pascale and Alaqua instead. The two groups of bearers made their way with difficulty down the canyon, stopping frequently to rest and regain their grip on the cloths. As they did Koyo followed behind, continuing to throw dust on herself and crying out, “You kill the master. You kill!”

  When they got to the tent they set the corpses down and went under the awning to take a drink from the water bucket now kept permanently on the table. The dark-skinned woman on the mattress was conscious but behaving in an extremely distressed way, clutching herself and grinding her teeth. She was speaking but what she was saying was barely intelligible.

  Magada said, “I think she wants some of that stuff Magus had her hooked up to. We could give her a reduced dose to wean her off.”

  Danny shrugged, “That sounds right. You should get the stand with the tubes by her bed. There was a bag on it with some liquid. Someone else will stay here.”

  “Sure,” Magada said. But she did not move. She stood there gazing at the two bodies the group had brought with them. Koyo had resumed her position on the ground close to Magus, continuing with her public mourning. Magada turned to the maimed figure on the chair, gesturing at the corpse. “Here's the source of all your misery, Francisco, plus more of his handiwork. Don't you want to spit on him, curse him? You know, this time you send him to hell?”

  Francisco looked at the corpse and its attendant mourner. His eyes spoke for him, gripped with helpless anguish and at the same time surrendered to another space where all destructive intention had been abandoned. He struggled to speak. “My soul owes nothing to Magus, not even revenge.”

  Magada stared at him but was not appeased. She walked over to Koyo. “You there! You can quit your moaning right now. That guy you're crying over, breaking his neck was far too good for him. If I had my way he'd be roasted over a slow fire. If you're not careful it'll happen to you instead. You knew everything going on in that cabin!”

  She strode off on her errand. By this time a huge pile of the cabin's contents had been carried outside by a band of eager looters. In between the pile and the tent Zoltan had also built the base for a funeral pyre, using the booth for Magus that he had collapsed and dragged into position. The fuel was now up to chest height and Zoltan was extending it on either side to create a broad platform. The group that had carried the bodies watched as Magada disappeared past the bonfire and into the jumble of furniture and stores, looking for the drip stand. The only sound was the continual moaning of the the woman on the mattress. Pascale went over to Francisco.

  “May I introduce myself, sir? My name is Pascale, Danny's sister. I liked what you said to Magada, that you harbor no revenge. "

  The disfigured man, perched uncomfortably in the study chair, opened his torn, half-closed lids. His voice was heavy but he spoke with a little more fluency. “My name is Francisco. You are Pascale. You are one who helped to set the Ranch free. I owe you thanks. "

  He shut his eyes again. Pascale replied, “I am sorry we could not help before, Francisco. I did not know you were in the cabin. We started this tent we're in now, as a place to tell stories. It was the first step in changing things. Magus wanted to crush it but he couldn't. He thought he had his chance, when he arrested me at the top of the cliff. I'm sure he was planning to bring me to the cabin. But he shot Zena and then he fell to his death.”

  “You are fortunate. He would have been merciless once he had you. My memory is confused, but in the early days I know there were people he killed. He did not do it once he'd established control. Instead, he kept his normal entertainment.”

  Francisco's shoulders suddenly slumped and he began to tremble violently throughout his misshapen body. Pascale hesitated just a moment before the stinking, barely human form, and then she bent and wrapped her arms around him and held him to herself. Immediately the shaking got worse. It was as if the survivor of Magus' cabin was terrified and was trying to break free. Inarticulate cries came from his mouth. But Pascale did not relent, rather she placed a knee on the chair and folded her arms more securely round his shoulders, pressing him to her breast. She spoke into his ear through the matted hair.

  “Francisco, you have been to a deep place of darkness. I also have touched the darkness. When I came here first I died, and all hope died with me. But afterward I remained alive. I found my way back to life and I began to see all the darkness around me become light. Because love is able to see in the dark. I believe love can see all the darkness you have known and turn it into light.”

  Francisco's deformed body gave a final great spasm, almost as if it was trying to leap off the chair and outside itself. Pascale was knocked back but she held on and more or less caught the pitching man with her weight, held him and lowered him again to the chair. All the tension within Francisco crumbled. He fell back unresisting and the shaking stopped. He let himself be embraced and dropped his squalid shaggy head down on Pascale's shoulder like a child's. Tears rolled on his ravaged cheeks.

  After a minute Pascale gently detached herself and stood back. Her own dress was grimy now and her face smudged. She said, “Francisco, you are a great man!”

  Danny had stood behind Pascale and witnessed everything. He could see Francisco's soul laid bare and how he had preserved its truth despite an endless age of suffering. “Yes, you are, Francisco. You held out against Magus during all his reign of terror and your heart was always free! You are king of the canyon!”

  Orwell had been observing everything intently. He cleared his throat and joined in, “I did not think this canyon could hold more evil than I had already seen, and yet it did. But here is a man who was never destroyed by the evil. I honor this man!” And he too held his hand to his head in an awkward salute.

  Francisco's near toothless mouth opened in a deprecating grin. His wounded eyes took on a clear expression for the first time. At that moment he looked fully human and a spontaneous cheer burst from the whole group. He said, “Being here with you, it's like I died and came to heaven!”

  There was a clattering noise and they turned to see Magada arriving, dragging the stand behind her. She took it straight over to the woman who by this time had rolled off the mattress and was sitting on the ground, still moaning and hugging herself. When she saw the drip stand she cried out in expectation and held up her arm. Magada fiddled with a valve until she got the fluid in the bag flowing. Then she plugged the end into the implanted port in the woman's arm. The woman immediately relaxed and lay back on the mattress with a mindless look on her face. Magada fiddled a little more and got the drip down to its slowest rate.

  As she did Francisco said, “Her name is Elise. She was Magus' plaything, worse than me. I have to confess, often I was glad to hear her screaming; it meant Magus was not coming for me.”

  Magada looked over. “I'm going to get my horse. The cabin is cleared out and ready.”

  Danny wasn't sure what she was suggesting and he and the others waited as she quickly crossed the canyon back to the cattle sto
ckade where she had tethered her horse. She mounted up and came cantering back, loosening the rope on the saddle as she came. Before anyone had fully grasped what she intended, she had jumped off and whipped the lariat around Magus' feet and remounted. All in one move she wound the extended rope around the saddle horn and booted her pony into a run. The rope snapped taut and jerked Magus' prone form off the ground, catapulting him after the horse. Koyo, who had hardly been paying attention, had the body dragged instantly from in front of her and she let out a piercing yell. Both Danny and Pascale gasped but there was nothing anyone could do. Magus was skidding and bouncing along the canyon floor, returning one last time to his cabin.

  Everyone who could started running after Magada. They saw her pass round the bonfire and head toward the adobe arches, stooping low and guiding her mount straight through the big front door. Magus' body bumped over the threshold and disappeared. A moment later the horse and rider emerged on their own. Danny and Pascale came up as Magada was dismounting, Koyo and Greta close behind. The people who had been engaged in emptying out the cabin were all standing about. They began to gather in closer. Magada flat palmed her horse on the rump, sending it running. She yelled out triumphantly, “Time to send this thing all to hell!”

  Coming from behind Koyo charged at Magada screaming furiously. Magada saw her coming, neatly sidestepped and Koyo fell headlong. Magada swore, “So help me, you touch me and you're in there with him.”

  She called out to Cormac to bring a barrel of the vegetable oil used for the generator and to empty it on the cabin floors and surfaces. Pascale and Danny were down on either side of Koyo, holding her, uncertain of what she might do next. But it was all over in a moment. Cormac spread the oil and Magada got Katoucha to help her bring armfuls of brush and bits and pieces from Zoltan's bonfire. They went inside with it and in less than a minute there was the unmistakable crackle of fire. Magada and Katoucha ran out amid gathering smoke and suddenly it was if the whole place exploded. The cabin was engulfed in angry red flames shooting fifteen feet from the windows and roof.