by Jeff Long
At one junction he ran out of signs altogether. Ike faced the branching tunnels and, from somewhere in his childhood, remembered the answer to all labyrinths: consistency. Go to your left or to your right, but always stay true. This being Tibet—the land of clockwise circumambulation around sacred temples and mountains—he chose left. It was the correct choice. He found the first of them ten minutes later.
Ike had entered a stratum of limestone so pure and slick it practically swallowed the shadows. The walls curved without angles. There were no cracks or ledging in the rock, only rugosities and gentle waves. Nothing caught at the light, nothing cast darkness. The result was unadulterated light. Wherever Ike turned his lamp beam, he was surrounded by radiance the color of milk.
Cleopatra was there. Ike rounded the wing and her light joined with his. She was sitting in a lotus position in the center of the luminous passage. With ten gold coins spread before her, she could have been a beggar.
“Are you hurt?” Ike asked her.
“Just my ankle,” Cleo replied, smiling. Her eyes had that holy gleam they all aspired to, part wisdom, part soul. Ike wasn’t fooled.
“Let’s go,” he ordered.
“You go ahead,” Cleo breathed with her angel voice. “I’ll stay a bit longer.”
Some people can handle solitude. Most just think they can. Ike had seen its victims in the mountains and monasteries, and once in a jail. Sometimes it was the isolation that undid them. Sometimes it was the cold or famine or even amateur meditation. With Cleo it was a little of all of the above.
Ike checked his watch: 3:00 A.M. “What about the rest of you? Where did they go?”
“Not much farther,” she said. Good news. And bad news. “They went to find you.”
“Find me?”
“You kept calling for help. We weren’t going to leave you alone.”
“But I didn’t call for help.”
She patted his leg. “All for one,” she assured him.
Ike picked up one of the coins. “Where’d you find these?”
“Everywhere,” she said. “More and more, the deeper we got. Isn’t it wonderful?”
“I’m going for the others. Then we’ll all come back for you,” Ike said. He changed the fading batteries in his headlamp while he talked, replacing them with the last of his new ones. “Promise you won’t move from here.”
“I like it here very much.”
He left Cleo in a sea of alabaster radiance.
The limestone tube sped him deeper. The decline was even, the footing uncomplicated. Ike jogged, sure he could catch them. The air took on a coppery tang, nameless, yet distantly familiar. Not much farther, Cleo had said.
The blood streaks started at 3:47 A.M.
Because they first appeared as several dozen crimson handprints upon the white stone, and because the stone was so porous that it practically inhaled the liquid, Ike mistook them for primitive art. He should have known better.
Ike slowed. The effect was lovely in its playful randomness. Ike liked his image: slap-happy cavemen.
Then his foot hit a puddle not yet absorbed into the stone. The dark liquid splashed up. It sluiced in bright streaks across the wall, red on white. Blood, he realized.
“God!” he yelled, and vaulted wide in instant evasion. A tiptoe, then the same bloody sole landed again, skidded, torqued sideways. The momentum drove him facefirst into the wall and then sent him tumbling around the bend.
His headlamp flew off. The light blinked out. He came to a halt against cold stone.
It was like being clubbed unconscious. The blackness stopped all control, all motion, all place in the world. Ike even quit breathing. As much as he wanted to hide from consciousness, he was wide awake.
Abruptly the thought of lying still became unbearable. He rolled away from the wall and let gravity guide him onto his hands and knees. Hands bare, he felt about for the headlamp in widening circles, torn between disgust and terror at the viscous curd layering the floor. He could even taste the stuff, cold upon his teeth. He pressed his lips shut, but the smell was gamy, and there was no game in here, only his people. It was a monstrous thought.
At last he snagged the headlamp by its connecting wire, rocked back onto his heels, fumbled with the switch. There was a sound, distant or near, he couldn’t tell. “Hey?” he challenged. He paused, listened, heard nothing.
Laboring against his own panic, Ike flipped the switch on and off and on. It was like trying to spark a fire with wolves closing in. The sound again. He caught it this time. Nails scratching rock? Rats? The blood scent surged. What was going on here?
He muttered a curse at the dead light. With his fingertips he stroked the lens, searching for cracks. Gently he shook it, dreading the rattle of a shattered lightbulb. Nothing.
Was blind, but now I see.… The words drifted into his consciousness, and he was uncertain whether they were a song or his memory of it. The sound came more distinctly. ’Twas grace that taught my heart to fear. It washed in from far away, a woman’s lush voice singing “Amazing Grace.” Something about its brave syllables suggested less a hymn than an anthem. A last stand.
It was Kora’s voice. She had never sung for him. But this was she. Singing for them all, it seemed.
Her presence, even in the far depths, steadied him. “Kora,” he called. On his knees, eyes wide in the utter blackness, Ike disciplined himself. If it wasn’t the switch or the bulb … he tried the wire. Tight at the ends, no lacerations. He opened the battery case, wiped his fingers clean and dry, and carefully removed each slender battery, counting in a whisper, “One, two, three, four.” One at a time, he cleaned the tips against his T-shirt, then swabbed each contact in the case and replaced the batteries. Head up, head down, up, down. There was an order to things. He obeyed.
He snapped the plate back onto the case, drew gently at the wire, palmed the lamp. And flicked the switch. Nothing.
The scratch-scratch noise rose louder. It seemed very close. He wanted to bolt away, any direction, any cost, just flee.
“Stick,” he instructed himself. He said it out loud. It was something like a mantra, his own, something he told himself when the walls got steep or the holds thin or the storms mean. Stick, as in hang. As in no surrender.
Ike clenched his teeth. He slowed his lungs. Again he removed the batteries. This time he replaced them with the batch of nearly dead batteries in his pocket. He flipped the switch.
Light. Sweet light.
He breathed it in.
In an abattoir of white stone.
The image of butchery lasted one instant. Then his light flickered out.
“No!” he cried in the darkness, and shook the headlamp.
The light came on again, what little there was of it. The bulb glowed rusty orange, grew weaker, then suddenly brightened, relatively speaking. It was less than a quarter-strength. More than enough. Ike took his eyes from the little bulb and dared to look around once more.
The passageway was a horror.
In his small circle of jaundiced light, Ike stood up. He was very careful. All around, the walls were zebra-striped with crimson streaks. The bodies had been arranged in a row.
You don’t spend years in Asia without seeing a fair share of the dead. Many times, Ike had sat by the burning ghats at Pashaputanath, watching the fires peel flesh from bone. And no one climbed the South Col of Everest these days without passing a certain South African dreamer, or on the north side a French gentleman sitting silently by the trail at 28,000 feet. And then there had been that time the king’s army opened fire on Social Democrats revolting in the streets of Kathmandu and Ike had gone to Bir Hospital to identify the body of a BBC cameraman and seen the corpses hastily lined side by side on the tile floor. This reminded him of that.
It rose in him again, the silence of birds. And how, for days afterward, the dogs had limped about from bits of glass broken out of windows. And above all else, how, in being dragged, a human body gets undressed.
Th
ey lay before him, his people. He had viewed them in life as fools. In death, half-naked, they were pathetic. Not foolishly so. Just terribly. The smell of opened bowels and raw meat was nearly enough to panic him.
Their wounds … Ike could not see at first without seeing past the horrible wounds. He focused on their undress. He felt ashamed for these poor people and for himself. It seemed like sin itself to see their jumble of pubic patches and lolling thighs and randomly exposed breasts and stomachs that could no longer be held in or chests held high. In his shock, Ike stood above them, and the details swarmed up: here a faint tattoo of a rose, there a cesarean scar, the marks of surgeries and accidents, the edges of a bikini tan scribed upon a Mexican beach. Some of this was meant to be hidden, even to lovers, some to be revealed. None of it was meant to be seen this way.
Ike made himself get on with it. There were five of them, one male, Bernard. He started to identify the women, but with a rush of fatigue he suddenly forgot their names altogether. At the moment, only one of them mattered to him, and she was not here.
The snapped ends of very white bone stood from lawnmower-like gashes. Body cavities gaped empty. Some fingers were crooked, some missing at the root. Bitten off? A woman’s head had been crushed to a thick, panlike sac. Even her hair was anonymous with gore, but the pubis was blond. She was, poor creature, thank God, not Kora.
That familiarity one reaches with victims began. Ike put one hand to the ache behind his eyes, then started over again. His light was failing. The massacre had no answer. Whatever had happened to them could happen to him.
“Stick, Crockett,” he commanded.
First things first. He counted on his fingers: six here, Cleo up the tunnel, Kora somewhere. That left Owen still at large.
Ike stepped among the bodies, searching for clues. He had little experience with such extremes of trauma, but there were a few things he could tell. Judging by the blood trails, it looked like an ambush. And it had been done without a gun. There were no bullet holes. Ordinary knives were out of the question, too. The lacerations were much too deep and massed so strangely, here upon the upper body, there at the backs of the legs, that Ike could only imagine a pack of men with machetes. It looked more like an attack by wild animals, especially the way a thigh had been stripped to the bone.
But what animal lived miles inside a mountain? What animal collected its prey in a neat row? What animal showed this kind of savagery, then conformity? Such frenzy, then such method. The extremes were psychotic. All too human.
Maybe one man could have done all this, but Owen? He was smaller than most of these women. And slower. Yet these poor people had all been caught and mutilated within a few meters of one another. Ike tried to imagine himself as the killer, to conceive the speed and strength necessary to commit such an act.
There were more mysteries. Only now did Ike notice the gold coins scattered like confetti around them. It looked almost like a payoff, he now recognized, an exchange for the theft of their wealth. For the dead were missing rings and bracelets and necklaces and watches. Everything was gone. Wrists, fingers, and throats were bare. Earrings had been torn from lobes. Bernard’s eyebrow ring had been plucked away.
The jewelry had been little more than baubles and crystals and cheap knickknacks; Ike had specifically instructed the trekkers to leave their valuables in the States or in the hotel safe. But someone had gone to the trouble of pilfering the stuff. And then to pay for it in gold coins worth a thousand times what had been taken.
It made no sense. It made even less sense to stand here and try to make it make sense. He was not normally the type who couldn’t think what to do, and so his confusion now was all the more intense. His code said Stay, like a sea captain, stay to sort through the crime and bring back, if not his wayfarers, then at least a full accounting of their demise. The economy of fear said Run. Save what life could be saved. But run which way and save which life? That was the excruciating choice. Cleopatra waited in one direction in her lotus position and white light. Kora waited in the other, perhaps not as surely. But hadn’t he just heard her song?
His light ebbed to brown. Ike forced himself to rifle the pockets of his dead passengers. Surely someone had batteries or another flashlight or some food. But the pockets had been slashed and emptied.
The frenzy of it struck him. Why shred the pockets and even the flesh beneath them? This was no ordinary robbery. Stopping down his loathing, he tried to summarize the incident: a crime of rage, to judge by the mutilations, yet a crime of want, to judge by the thievery. Again it made no sense.
His light blinked out and the blackness jumped up around him. The weight of the mountain seemed to press down. A breeze Ike had not felt before brought to mind vast mineral respiration, as if a juggernaut were waking. It carried an undertone of gases, not noxious but rare, distant.
And then his imagination became unnecessary. That scratching sound of nails on stone returned. This time there was no question of its reality. It was approaching from the upper passageway. And this time Kora’s voice was part of the mix.
She sounded in ecstasy, very near to orgasm. Or like his sister that time, in that instant just as her infant daughter came out of her womb. That, Ike conceded, or this was a sound of agony so deep it verged on the forbidden. The moan or low or animal petition, whatever it was, begged for an ending.
He almost called to her. But that other sound kept him mute. The climber in him had registered it as fingernails scraping for purchase, but the torn flesh lying in the darkness now evoked claws or talons. He resisted the logic, then embraced it in a hurry. Fine. Claws. A beast. Yeti. This was it. What now?
The dreadful opera of woman and beast drew closer.
Fight or flight? Ike asked himself.
Neither. Both were futile. He did what he had to do, the survivor’s trick. He hid in plain sight. Like a mountain man pulling himself into a womb of warm buffalo meat, Ike lay down among the bodies on the cold floor and dragged the dead upon him.
It was an act so heinous it was sin. In lying down between the corpses in utter blackness and in bringing a smooth naked thigh across his and draping a cold arm across his chest, Ike felt the weight of damnation. In disguising himself as dead, he let go part of his soul. Fully sane, he gave up all aspects of his life in order to preserve it. His one anchor to believing this was happening to him was that he could not believe it was happening to him. “Dear God,” he whispered.
The sounds became louder.
There was only one last choice to make: to keep open or to close his eyes to sights he could not see anyway. He closed them.
Kora’s smell reached him upon that subterranean breeze. He heard her groan.
Ike held his breath. He’d never been afraid like this, and his cowardice was a revelation.
They—Kora and her captor—came around the corner. Her breathing was tortured. She was dying. Her pain was epic, beyond words.
Ike felt tears running down his face. He was weeping for her. Weeping for her pain. Weeping, too, for his lost courage. To lie unmoving and not give aid. He was no different from those climbers who had left him for dead once upon a mountain. Even as he inhaled and exhaled in tiny beadlike drops and listened to his heart’s hammering pump and felt the dead close him in their embrace, he was giving Kora up for himself. Moment by moment he was forsaking her. Damned, he was damned.
Ike blinked at his tears, despised them, reviled his self-pity. Then he opened his eyes to take it like a man. And almost choked on his surprise.
The blackness was full, but no longer infinite. There were words written in the darkness. They were fluorescent and coiled like snakes and they moved.
It was him.
Isaac had resurrected.
Have you ever been at sea in
a dense fog, when it seemed
as if a tangible white
darkness shut you in, and
the great ship, tense and
anxious, groped her way
toward the sh
ore … and you
waited with beating heart
for something to happen?
—HELEN KELLER, The Story of My Life
2
ALI
NORTH OF ASKAM,
THE KALAHARI DESERT, SOUTH AFRICA
1995
“Mother?”
The girl’s voice entered Ali’s hut softly.
Here was how ghosts must sing, thought Ali, this Bantu lilt, the melody searching melody. She looked up from her suitcase.
In the doorway stood a Zulu girl with the frozen, wide-eyed grin of advanced leprosy: lips, eyelids, and nose eaten away.
“Kokie,” said Ali. Kokie Madiba. Fourteen years old. She was called a witch.
Over the girl’s shoulder, Ali caught sight of herself and Kokie in a small mirror on the wall. The contrast did not please her. Ali had let her hair grow out over the past year. Next to the black girl’s ruined flesh, her golden hair looked like harvest wheat beside a salted field. Her beauty was obscene to her. Ali moved to one side to erase her own image. For a while she had even tried taking the small mirror off her wall. Finally she’d hung it back on the nail, despairing that abnegation could be more vain than vanity.
“We’ve talked about this many times,” she said. “I am Sister, not Mother.”
“We have talked about this, ya’as, mum,” the orphan said. “Sister, Mother.”
Some of them thought she was a holy woman, or a queen. Or a witch. The concept of a single woman, much less a nun, was very odd out here in the bush. For once the offbeat had served her well. Deciding she must be in exile like them, the colony had taken her in.
“Did you want something, Kokie?”
“I bring you this.” The girl held out a necklace with a small shrunken pouch embroidered with beadwork. The leather looked fresh, hastily tanned, with small hairs still attached. Clearly they had been in a hurry to finish this for her. “Wear this. The evil stays away.”
Ali lifted it from Kokie’s dusty palm and admired the geometric designs formed by red, white, and green beads. “Here,” she said, setting it back in Kokie’s grip, “you put it on me.”