The Descent

by Jeff Long

  The three forty-foot cylinders lay on their sides among the drill rubble, like tipped-over rocket ships. Their discarded hatch doors set among cables tangled in a steel rat’s nest, salt water trickling down from a mile overhead. Various lines hung from the three-foot-wide hole in the ceiling, one for communications, two to feed them voltage from the surface, another dedicated to downloading compressed vid-mail from home. One of the porters sat beside the second electric cable, recharging a small mountain of batteries for their headlamps and flashlights and lab equipment and laptop computers.

  Walker’s quartermaster and various helpers were working overtime, sorting the shipment, stockpiling boxes, shouting out numbers. Helios had also delivered them mail, twenty-four ounces per person.

  As part of her vow of poverty, Ali had grown used to only small portions of home news. Yet she was disappointed at how little mail January had sent her. As always, the note was handwritten on Senate letterhead. It was dated two weeks earlier, and the envelope had been tampered with, which possibly explained the sparse information it contained. January had learned of their secret departure from Esperanza, and was heartsick that Ali had chosen to go deeper.

  “You belong … Where? Not out there, not unseen, not beyond my reach. Ali, I feel like you’ve taken something from me. The world was big enough without you slipping away like a shadow in the night. Please call or write me at first chance. And please return. If others are turning back, go with them.”

  There was oblique mention of the Beowulf scholars’ progress: “Work proceeds on the dam project.” That was their code for the identification of Satan. “As of yet, no location, few specifics, perhaps new terrain.” For some reason, January had included a few enhanced photographs of the Turin Shroud, with some three-dimensional computer images of the head. Ali didn’t know what to make of that.

  She looked around camp, and most had already rifled their care packages and eaten treats sent from home and shared the snapshots from their families and loved ones. Everyone had gotten something, it seemed, even the porters and soldiers. Only Ike appeared to have nothing. He kept busy with a new spool of candy-striped climbing rope, measuring it in coils and cutting and burning the tips.

  Not all the news was good. In the far corner, a man was trying to talk Shoat into getting him extracted via the drill hole. Ali could hear him over the music. “But it’s my wife,” he kept saying. “Breast cancer.”

  Shoat wasn’t buying it. “Then you shouldn’t have come,” he said. “Extractions are only for life-and-death emergencies.”

  “This is life and death.”

  “Your life and death,” Shoat stated, and went back to uplinking with the surface, making his reports and getting instructions and feeding the expedition’s collected data through a wet, dangling communications cable. They’d been promised a videophone line at each cache so people could call home, but so far Shoat and Walker had been monopolizing it. Shoat told them there was a hurricane on the surface and the drill rig was in jeopardy. “You’ll get your chance, if there’s still time,” he said.

  Despite the glitches and some serious homesickness, the expedition was in high spirits. Their resupply technology worked. They were loaded with food and supplies for the next stage. Two months down, ten to go.

  Ali squinted into their holiday of lights. The scientists looked jubilant tonight, dancing, embracing, downing California wines sent as a token of C.C. Cooper’s appreciation, howling at the invisible moon. They also looked different. Filthy. Hairy. Downright antediluvian.

  She’d never seen them this way. Ali realized it was because, for over a month, she had not really seen. Since casting loose of Esperanza, they had been dwelling in a fraction of their normal light. Tonight their twilight was at bay. Under the bright light she could see them, freckles, warts, and all. They were gloriously unbarbered and bewhiskered and smeared with mud and oil, as pale as grubs. Men bore old food in their beards. Women had rat’s nests. They had started doing a cowboy line dance—to the birdcatcher Papageno singing “Love’s Sweet Emotion.”

  Just then someone ambushed the opera and plugged in a Cowboy Junkies disc. The tempo slowed. Lovers rose, clenched, swayed on the rocky floor.

  Ali’s scanning arrived at Ike on the far side of the chamber.

  His hair was growing out at last. With his cowlick and sawed-off shotgun, he reminded Ali of some farm kid hunting jackrabbits. The glacier glasses were a disconcerting touch; he was forever protecting what he called his “assets.” Sometimes she thought the dark glasses simply protected his thoughts, a margin of privacy. She felt unreasonably glad he was there.

  The moment her glance touched on him, Ike’s head skated off to the other side, and she realized he’d been watching her. Molly and a few of Ali’s other girlfriends had teased that he had his eye on her, and she’d called them wicked. But here was proof.

  Fair’s fair, she thought, and spurred herself forward. There was no telling when he might vanish into the darkness again.

  The wine had an extra kick to it, or the depths had lowered her inhibitions. Whatever, she made herself bold. She went directly to him and said, “Wanna dance?”

  He pretended to have just noticed her. “It’s probably not a great idea,” he said, and didn’t move. “I’m rusty.”

  He was going to make her work for this? “Don’t worry, I’ve had my tetanus shots.”

  “Seriously, I’m out of practice.”

  And I’m in practice? she didn’t say. “Come on.”

  He tried one last gambit. “You don’t understand,” he said. “That’s Margo Timmins singing.”

  “So?”

  “Margo,” he repeated. “Her voice does things to a person. It makes you forget yourself.”

  Ali relaxed. He wasn’t rejecting her. He was flirting. “Is that right?” she said, and stayed right there in front of him. In the pale light of the tunnels, Ike’s scars and markings had a way of blending with the rock. Here, lit brightly, they were terrible all over again.

  “Maybe you would understand,” he reconsidered. Ike stood up, and the shotgun came with him; it had pink climber’s webbing for a sling. He parked it across his back, barrel down, and took her hand. It felt small in his.

  They went to where the others had cleared away rocks for a makeshift dance floor. Ali felt eyes following them. Paired with partners of their own, Molly and some of the other women were grinning like maniacs at her. Oddly, Ike had been designated part of their Ten Most Wanted list. He had an aura. It cut through the vandalized surface. People wondered about him. And here Ali was, getting first crack at him. She vamped like it was the prom, waving her fingers at them.

  Ike acted smooth enough, but there was a young man’s hesitation as he faced her and opened his arms. She hesitated, too. They got themselves arranged, and he was just as self-conscious about their physical touch as she was. He kept the bravado smile, but she heard his throat clear as their bodies came together.

  “I’ve been meaning to talk with you,” she said. “You owe me an explanation.”

  “The animal,” he guessed. His disappointment was blunt. He stopped dancing.

  “No,” she said, and got them in motion again. “That orange. Do you remember? The one you gave me on the ride down from the Galápagos?”

  He backed off a step to get a look. “That was you?”

  She liked that. “Did I look so pathetic?”

  “You mean like a rescue job?”

  “If you want to put it that way.”

  “I used to climb,” he said. “That was always the biggest nightmare, getting rescued. You do your best to stay in control. But sometimes things slip. You fall.”

  “I was in distress, then.”

  “Nah.” Now he was lying.

  “So how come the orange?”

  There was no particular answer she wanted here. Yet the circle needed completing. Something about that orange demanded accounting for, the poetry in it, his intuition that she had needed just such a preocc
upation at just that moment. It had become something of a riddle, this gift from a man so raw and brutalized. An orange? Where had that come from? Perhaps he’d read Flaubert in his previous life, before his captivity. Or Durrell, she thought. Or Anaïs Nin. Wishful thinking. She was inventing him.

  “There it was,” he said simply, and she got a sense he was delighting in her confusion. “It had your name on it.”

  “Look, I’m not trying to obsess here,” she said. Immediately his words about staying in control came drifting in. She faltered. He’d pegged her problem, cold. Control. “It was just so right, that’s all,” she murmured. “It’s been a mystery to me, and I never got a chance to say—”

  “Strawberry blondes,” he interrupted.

  “What?”

  “I confess,” he said. “You’re an old weakness of mine.” He didn’t qualify between the universe of blondes and the singularity of this one.

  It took Ali’s breath away. Sometimes, once men found out she was a nun, they would dare her in some way. What made Ike different was his abandon. He had a carelessness in his manner that was not reckless, but was full of risk. Winged. He was pursuing her, but not faster than she was pursuing him, and it made them like two ghosts circling.

  “That’s it, then,” she said. “End of mystery.”

  “Why say that?” he said.

  This was turning out to be a nice dance.

  “I like her singing,” she said.

  He took in her long body. It was a quick glance. She saw it, and remembered his scrutiny of the periwinkles on her sundress. He said, “You do live dangerously.”

  “And you don’t?”

  “There’s a difference. I’m not a dedicated, you know,” he faltered, “a professional …”

  “Virgin?” she boldly finished. The wine was talking. His back muscles reflexed.

  “I was going to say ‘recluse.’ ”

  Ike pulled her tighter and stroked his front across hers, a languorous swipe that moved her breasts. It drew a small gasp out of her.

  “Mister Crockett,” she scolded, and started to pull away. Instantly he let go, and his release startled her more. There was no time for elaborate decisions. Scapegoating the wine, she scooped him close again, got his hand seated at the hollow of her spine.

  They danced without words for another minute. Ali tried to let herself be taken away by the music. But eventually the songs would stop and they would have to leave the safety of this brightly lit floor and resume their investigation of the dark places.

  “Now it’s your turn to explain,” he said. “Just how did you end up here?”

  Unsure how much he really wanted to hear, she edited herself. He kept asking questions, and soon she found herself defining protolanguage and the mother tongue. “Water,” she said, “in Old German is wassar, in Latin aqua. Go deeper into the daughter languages, and the root starts to appear. In Indo-European and Amerind, water is hakw, in Dene-Caucasian kwa. The furthest back is haku, a computer-simulated proto-word. Not that anyone uses it anymore. It’s a buried word, a root. But you can see how a word gets reborn through time.”

  “Haku,” Ike said, though differently than she had, with a glottal stress on the first syllable. “I know that word.”

  Ali glanced at him. “From them?” she asked. His hadal captors. Exactly as she’d hoped, he had a glossary in him.

  He winced, as with a phantom pain, and she caught her breath. The memory passed, if that’s what it was. She decided not to pursue it for the moment, and returned to her own tale, explaining how she had come to collect and decipher hadal glyphs and remnant text. “All we need is one translator who can read their writings,” she said. “It could unlock their whole civilization to us.”

  Ike misunderstood. “Are you asking me to teach you?”

  She kept her voice flat. “Do you know how to, Ike?”

  He clicked his tongue in the negative. Ali instantly recognized the sound from her time among the San Bushmen in southern Africa. That, too? she wondered. Click language? Her excitement was building.

  “Even hadals don’t know how to read hadal,” he said.

  “Then you’ve never actually seen a hadal reading,” she clarified. “The ones you met were illiterate.”

  “They can’t read hadal writings,” Ike repeated. “It’s lost to them. I knew one once. He could read English and Japanese. But the old hadal writing was alien to him. It was a great frustration for him.”

  “Wait.” Ali stopped, dumbfounded. No one had ever suggested such a thing. “You’re saying the hadals read modern human languages? Do they speak our languages, too?”

  “He did,” said Ike. “He was a genius. A leader. The rest are … much less than him.”

  “You knew him?” Her pulse raced. Who else could he be speaking of except the historical Satan?

  Ike stopped. He was looking at her, or through her, with those impenetrable glacier glasses. She couldn’t begin to read his thoughts. “Ike?”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “I have a secret.” She wanted to trust him. They were still touching, and that seemed a good start. “What if I told you my purpose was to get a positive identification of that man, whatever he is? To get more information about him. A description of his face. Clues to his behavior. Even to meet him.”

  “You won’t.” Ike’s voice sounded dead.

  “But anything’s possible.”

  “No,” he said. “I mean you won’t. By the time you ever got that close, it wouldn’t be you anymore.”

  She brooded. He knew something, but wasn’t telling. “You’re making him up,” she declared. It was peevish, a last resort.

  The dancers flowed around them.

  Ike held out one arm. Turned just so in the light, Ali could see the raised scars where a glyph had been branded in the flesh. To the naked eye, the scars lay hidden beneath more superficial markings. She touched them with her fingertips … the way a hadal might in complete darkness. “What does it mean?” she asked.

  “It’s a claim mark,” he said. “The name they gave me. Beyond that, I don’t have a clue. And the thing is, the hadals don’t, either. They just imitate drawings their ancestors left a long time ago.”

  Ali traced her fingers across the scarring. “What do you mean by a claim mark?”

  He shrugged, regarding the arm as if it belonged to someone else. “There’s probably a better term for it. That’s what I call them. Each clan has its own, and then each member his own.” He looked at her. “I can show you others,” he said.

  Ali kept her expression calm. Inside, she was ready to shout. All this time, her quest had held Ike for its answer. Why had no one else asked this man these questions in years past? Perhaps they had, and he hadn’t been ready.

  “Wait, let me get my notebook.” She could barely contain herself. Here was the beginning of her glossary. The start of a Rosetta stone. By cracking the hadal code, she would open a whole new language to human understanding.

  “Notebook?” he said.

  “To draw the markings.”

  “But I have them with me.”

  “You have what?”

  He started to unbutton his pocket, then stopped. “You’re sure about this?”

  She stared impatiently at the pocket, willing it to fly open. “Yes.”

  He pulled out a small packet of leather patches, each roughly the size of a baseball card, and handed them to her. They had been sliced in a neat rectangle and tanned to stay soft. At first Ali thought the leather was vellum of some kind, and that Ike had used them to trace or write on. There were faint colored designs on one side. Then she saw that the colors came from tattooing, and the weltlike ridges were keloid scars, and there were tiny, pallid hairs. It was skin, all right. Human skin. Hadal skin. Whatever this was.

  Ike did not see her misgivings; he was too busy arranging the strips on her still, cupped palms. He gave a running commentary, intent, even scholarly. “Two weeks old,” he said of one. “Notice
the twisted serpents. I’ve never come across that motif. You can feel them twining together, very skillful, whoever incised him.”

  He laid a pair of patches side by side. “These two I got off a fresh kill. You can tell from the linked circles, they’d been travelers from a long way off, from the same region. It’s a pattern I used to see on Afghans and Pakis. Captures, you know. Down beneath the Karakoram.”

  Ali was staring as much at him as at the skin pieces. She had never been squeamish, but she was stilled by his collection.

  “Now here’s the shape of a beetle, can you make that out? See how the wings are just opening? That’s a different clan from others I’ve known, closed wings, wings wide. And this one here has got me stumped, it’s nothing but dots. Footprints, maybe? A counting of time? Seasons? I don’t know.

  “Obviously this is a cave-fish design. See the light stalks dangling in front of its mouth? I’ve eaten fish like that. They’re easy to catch by hand in shallow pools. Wait for the light to flash, then grab them by the stalks. Like pulling carrots or onions.”

  He set down the last of his patches. “Here’s some of the geometrics you see on the borders of their mandalas. They’re pretty standard for down here, a way to ritually enclose the outer circle and hold in the mandala’s information. You’ve seen them on the walls. I’m hoping someone in our bunch can figure them out. We’ve got a lot of smart people here.”

  “Ike.” Ali stopped him. “What do you mean ‘fresh kill’?”

  Ike picked up the two patches she was referring to. “A day old. Maybe two.”

  “I mean, what. What was killed? A hadal?”

  “One of the porters. I don’t know his name.”

  “We’re missing a porter?”

  “More like ten or twelve,” Ike said. “You haven’t noticed? In twos and threes, over the past week. They’re sick of Walker’s bullying.”

  “Does anyone else know?” No one had remarked on this to her. It signified a whole other level of the expedition, one that was darker and more violent than she—or the other scientists—had comprehended.

  “Of course. That’s a lot of hands to lose.” Ike could have been talking about animals in a mule train. “Walker’s got more of his troops patrolling the rear than the front. He keeps sending them off to catch one of the runaways. He wants to make an example.”