The Descent

by Jeff Long

  “What if I told?” she asked.

  He could smell her change. The potent smell of her sex was beginning to fill the small chamber.

  “They would kill me,” he said.

  She turned out the light.

  Ali could tell that hell was starting to get to them.

  This was Jonah’s vista, the beast’s gut as hollowed earth. It was the basement of their souls. As children they had all learned it was forbidden to enter this place, short of God’s damnation. Yet here they were, and it scared them.

  Perhaps not unnaturally, it was her they began to turn to. Men and women, scientists and soldiers, began seeking her out to make their confessions. Freighted with myths, they wanted out from their burden of sins. It was a way of keeping their sanity. Strangely, she was not prepared for their need.

  It was always done singly. One of them would drift back or catch her alone in camp. Sister, they would murmur. A minute before, they had called her Ali. But then they would say Sister, and she would know what they wanted of her: to become a stranger to them, a loving stranger, nameless, all-forgiving.

  “I’m not a priest,” Ali told them. “I can’t absolve you.”

  “You’re a nun,” they would say, as if the distinction were meaningless. And then it would start, the recitation of fears and regrets, their weaknesses and rancor and vendettas, their appetites and perversions. Things they dared not speak aloud to one another, they spoke to her.

  In ecumenical parlance, it was now called reconciliation. Their hunger for it astonished her. At times, she felt trapped by their autobiographies. They wanted her to protect them from their own monsters.

  Ali first noticed Molly’s condition during an afternoon poker game. It was just the two of them in a small raft. Molly showed a pair of aces. That was when Ali saw her hands.

  “You’re bleeding,” she said.

  Molly’s smile wavered. “No big deal. It comes and goes.”

  “Since when?”

  “I don’t know.” She was evasive. “A month ago.”

  “What happened? This looks terrible.”

  There was a hole scraped in the flesh of each palm. Some of the meat looked cored out. It wasn’t an incision, but it wasn’t an ulcer, either. It looked eaten by acid, except acid would have cauterized the wound.

  “Blisters,” said Molly. Her eyes had developed dark circles. She kept her scalp shaved short out of habit, but it no longer suggested bountiful good health.

  “Maybe one of the docs should take a look,” Ali said.

  Molly closed her fists. “There’s nothing wrong with me.”

  “I was just concerned,” said Ali. “We don’t have to talk about it.”

  “You were implying something’s wrong.”

  Molly’s eyes began to bleed.

  Taking no chances, the team’s physicians quarantined the two women in a raft tugged a hundred yards behind the rest.

  Ali understood. The possibility of some exotic disease had the expedition in a state of terror. But she resented Walker’s soldiers watching them with sniperscopes. She was not allowed a walkie-talkie to communicate with the group because Shoat said they would only use it to beg and wheedle. By the morning of the fourth day, Ali was exhausted.

  A quarter-mile to the front, a dinghy detached from the flotilla and started back toward her. Time for the daily house call. The doctors were wearing respirators and paper scrubs and latex gloves. Ali had called them cowards yesterday, and was sorry now. They were doing their best.

  They drifted close and nodded to Ali. One flashed his light on Molly. Her beautiful lips were cracked. Her lush body was withering. The ulcerations had spread over her body. She turned her head from their light.

  One of the physicians came into Ali’s boat. She got into theirs, and the other doctor paddled her a short distance away to talk.

  “We can’t make sense of it,” he said. His voice was muffled by the respirator. “We did the blood test again. It could still turn out to be an insect venom, or an allergic reaction. Whatever it is, you don’t have it. You don’t have to be out here with her.”

  Ali ignored the temptation. No one else would volunteer, they were too frightened. And Molly could not be alone. “Another transfusion,” Ali said. “She needs more blood.”

  “We’ve given her five pints already. She’s like a sieve. We may as well pour it into the water.”

  “You’ve given up?”

  “Of course not,” the doctor said. “We’ll all keep fighting for her.”

  The doctor paddled her back to the quarantine raft. Ali felt cold and wooden. Molly was going to die.

  As they paddled away, the physicians discarded their protective garments. They tore the paper suits from their limbs, stripped away their latex gloves, and left them like skins floating on the current.

  Molly’s wounds deepened. She began to sweat a rank grease through her pores. They put her on antibiotics, but that didn’t help. A fever set in. Ali could feel its heat just by leaning across her.

  Another time, Ali opened her eyes and Ike was sitting in his gray and black kayak alongside the quarantine raft, for all the world a killer whale bobbing on slow currents. He was not wearing the requisite scrubs and respirator, and his disregard was a small miracle to Ali. He tied his kayak to them and slipped from it onto the raft.

  “I came to see you,” he said to her. Molly lay asleep between Ali’s legs.

  “It’s in her lungs,” Ali reported. “She’s suffocating on fungus.”

  Ike slipped one hand beneath Molly’s cropped head and raised it gently and bent down. Ali thought he meant to kiss her. Instead, he sniffed at her open mouth. Her teeth were stained red. “It won’t be long,” he said, as if that were a mercy. “You should say prayers for her.”

  “Oh, Ike,” sighed Ali. Suddenly she wanted to be held, but could not bring herself to ask for it. “She’s too young. And this isn’t the right place. She asked me what will happen to her body.”

  “I know what to do,” he said, and did not elaborate. “Has she told you how this happened?”

  “No one knows,” said Ali.

  “She does,” he said.

  Later, Molly confessed. There was none of that Sister, Sister for her. At first it seemed like a joke. “Hey, Al,” she opened. “Wanna hear something off the wall?”

  Small spasms clenched and unclenched the woman’s long body. She strained to get control, at least from the neck up.

  “Only if it’s good,” Ali kidded. You had to be like that with Molly. They were holding hands.

  “Well,” said Molly, and her small grin flickered on, then off. “About a month ago, I guess, I started this thing.”

  “Thing?” said Ali.

  “Yeah. You know, what do they call it? Sex.”

  “I’m listening.” Ali waited for a punchline. But Molly’s eyes were desperate.

  “Yes,” whispered Molly.

  Now Ali understood.

  “I thought he was a soldier,” Molly said. “That first time.”

  Ali let Molly orchestrate the tale. Sin was burial. Salvation was excavation. If Molly needed help with the shovel work, Ali would step in.

  “He was in the shadows,” said Molly. “You know the colonel’s rules against soldiers fraternizing with us infidels. I had no idea which one he was. I don’t know what came over me. Pity, I guess. I pitied him. So I gave him darkness, I let him be anonymous. I let him have me.”

  Ali was not at all shocked. Taking a nameless soldier seemed perfectly Molly-like. Her bravado was legend. “You made love,” said Ali.

  “We fucked,” Molly corrected. “Hard. Okay?”

  Ali waited. Where was the guilt?

  “It wasn’t the only time,” said Molly. “Night after night, I went out into the darkness, and he was always there, waiting for me.”

  “I understand,” said Ali, but did not. She saw no sin here. Nothing to reconcile.

  “Finally it was like curiosity killed the cat. Who’s
Prince Charming, right? I had to know.” Molly paused. “So one night I turned on my light.”

  “Yes?”

  “I shouldn’t have done that.” Ali frowned.

  “He wasn’t one of Walker’s soldiers.”

  “One of the scientists,” said Ali.

  “No.”

  “Well?” Whom did that leave?

  Molly’s jaw tightened with the fever. She began shivering.

  After a minute, Molly opened her eyes. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve never seen him before.”

  Ali accepted that at the level of denial. If Molly was hiding from her lover’s secret identity, then it seemed to be part of Ali’s task as confessor, in this case, to ferret out the incubus. “You know, that’s impossible,” she said. “There are no strangers in this group. Not after four months.”

  “I know. That’s what I’m saying.” She was, Ali saw, horrified.

  “Describe him to me,” Ali said. “Before your light.” Together they would build the character. And then turn on the light.

  “He smelled … different. His skin. When he was in my mouth. He tasted different. You know how a man has this taste? White or black or brown, it doesn’t matter. His juices. His tongue. The breath from his lungs. They have this … flavor.”

  Ali listened. Clinically.

  “He didn’t. My midnight man. It wasn’t like he was a blank. But it was different. Like he had more earth in his blood. Darkness. I don’t know.”

  That didn’t help much. “What about his body? Was there anything that distinguished him? Body hair? The size of his muscles?”

  “While I had him between my legs?” Molly said. “Yeah. I could feel his scars. He’s been through the wringer. Old wounds. Broken bones. And someone had cut patterns into his back and arms.”

  There was only one among them like Molly had just described. It occurred to Ali that Molly might be trying to hide his identity from her. “And when you turned on the light—”

  “My first thought was a wild animal. He had stripes and spots. And pictures and lettering.”

  “Tattoos,” Ali said. Why prolong it? But this was Molly’s confession.

  Molly nodded yes. “It all happened in an instant. He knocked the light from my hand. Then he disappeared.”

  “He was afraid of your light?”

  “That’s what I thought. Later I remembered something. In that first second, I said a name out loud. Now I think it was the name that made him run. But he wasn’t afraid.”

  “What name, Molly?”

  “I was wrong, Ali. It was the wrong name. They just looked alike.”

  “Ike,” stated Ali. “You said his name because it was him.”

  “No.” Molly paused.

  “Of course it was.”

  “It wasn’t. But I wish to God it had been. Don’t you see?”

  “No. You thought it was him. You wanted it to be him.”

  “Yes,” Molly whispered. “Because what if it wasn’t?”

  Ali hesitated.

  “That’s what I’m saying,” Molly groaned. “What I had between my legs …” She winced at the memory. “Someone’s out there.”

  Ali lifted her head back suddenly. “A hadal! But why didn’t you tell us before now?”

  Molly smiled. “So you could tell Ike?” she said. “And then he would have gone hunting.”

  “But look,” said Ali. She swept her hand at the ruination. “Look what he gave to you.”

  “You don’t get it, kid.”

  “Don’t tell me. You fell in love.”

  “Why not? You have.” Molly closed her eyes. “Anyway, he’s gone. Safe from us. And now you can’t tell anyone, can you, Sister?”

  Ike was there for the end.

  Molly gasped with birdlike breaths. Grease sweated from her pores. Ali kept washing her body with water scooped from the river.

  “You should rest,” Ike said. “You’ve done your best.”

  “I don’t want to rest.”

  He took the cup from her. “Lie down,” he said. “Sleep.”

  When she woke hours later, Molly was gone. Ali was groggy with fatigue. “Did the docs come for her?” she asked hopefully.

  “No.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She’s gone, Ali. I’m sorry.”

  Ali got quiet. “Where is she, Ike? What have you done?”

  “I put her in the river.”

  “Molly? You didn’t.”

  “I know what I’m doing.”

  For an instant, Ali suffered a dreadful loneliness. It should not have happened this way. Poor Molly! Doomed to drift forever in this world. No burial? No ceremony? No chance for the rest of us to say farewell? “Who gave you that choice?”

  “I was trying to make things easier for you.”

  “Tell me one thing,” she said coldly. “Was Molly dead when you put her in?”

  She wanted to punish him for his strangeness, and the question genuinely shook him. “Murder?” he said. “Is that what you think?”

  Before her eyes, Ike seemed to fall away from her. A look crossed his face, the horror of a freak faced with his own mirror.

  “I didn’t mean that,” she said.

  “You’re tired,” he said. “You’ve had enough.”

  He got into his kayak and took the paddle and pulled at the river. The darkness covered him. She wondered if this was how it felt to go mad.

  “Please don’t leave me alone,” she murmured.

  After a minute she felt a tug. The rope came taut. The raft began moving. Ike was towing her back to human society.

  INCIDENT AT RED CLOUD

  NEBRASKA

  The third time the witches started fiddling with him, Evan didn’t fight. He just lay as still as he could, and tried not to smell them. One held him around the chest from behind while the others took turns working at him. She kept whispering something in his ear. It was mumbo-jumbo, in circles. He thought of old Miss Sands, with her rosary beads. But this one had breath that smelled like roadkill.

  Evan locked his eyes on the stars spread above the cornfield. Fireflies meandered between constellations. With all his might, he fastened on the North Star. Whenever they let him loose, that would be his beacon home again. In his mind he saw the back door, the stairs, the door to his room, the quilt upon his bed. He would wake in the morning. This would be nothing but a bad dream.

  The night lay as black as engine oil. There was no moon, and the yard lights lay a mile away, barely a twinkle between the stalks. The first half hour his kidnappers had been mere silhouettes, dark cutouts against the stars. They were naked. He could feel their flesh. Smell it. Their titties were long and tubular, like in the old National Geographics lying boxed in the cellar. Their ratty hair moved like black snakes against the stars.

  Evan was pretty sure they weren’t American. Or Mexican. He knew a little Spanish from the seasonal workers, and the old lady’s chant wasn’t that. He decided they were witches. A cult. You heard about such things.

  It was a comfort of sorts. He’d never given much thought to witches. Vampires, yes. And the winged monkeys in The Wizard of Oz, and werewolves, and flesh-eating zombies. And hadals, of course, though this was Nebraska, so safe the militias had disbanded. But witches? Since when did witches hurt you?

  And yet they scared him. He scared himself. In his whole eleven years of life, Evan had never imagined such feelings down there. What they were doing felt good. But it was forbidden. If his mom and dad ever found out, they’d bust.

  Part of him felt this wasn’t fair. He shouldn’t have been so late bicycling home. Still, it wasn’t his fault the witches had jumped up along the county road. He’d pedaled away as fast as a fox, but even afoot they’d run him down. It wasn’t his fault they’d brought him to the middle of this field to do things to him.

  The problem was, he’d been raised to be accountable. It was his pleasure. And it was dirty. Sniggering about boobies and panties after school was one thing. T
his was different. Staying late after baseball was his fault. And taking pleasure, that was really his fault. They were gonna bust.

  In the initial moments of stripping him bare, the witches had ripped his shirt, shredded it. Evan couldn’t reconcile that. It was a new shirt, and the destruction scared him more than their animal strength or the hunger they’d gone at him with. His mom and sisters were forever mending clothes and ironing them. They would never have ripped a shirt to tatters and tossed it in the dirt. Or done these other things. Never.

  He didn’t know exactly what was happening to him. It was the dirty thing you weren’t supposed to talk about, that was plain enough. Copulation. But what precisely the act consisted of, that was the mystery. In daylight, he could have seen what was involved. This was more like wrestling with a blindfold on. So far, most of his information had come through touch and smell and sounds. The newness and power of the sensation confused him. He was ashamed to have cried out in front of women, mortified that it involved his unit.

  They’d done it twice now, like milking a cow. The first time, Evan had been alarmed. There was no fighting off the bodily release. It felt like heat shooting out of his spine. Afterward, the mess lay as hot and thick as blood on his belly and chest.

  Afraid they’d be disgusted with him, Evan started to apologize. But the whole bunch of them had thronged around him, dipping their fingers into his wet spots. It was almost like church. But instead of crossing themselves, they smeared it between their legs. So that’s how it’s done, he thought.

  It went beyond his whole world of knowledge. For some reason, Evan was reminded of a science video he’d seen, in which a praying mantis female ate her mate when the act was over. That was reproduction. Until now he’d been mystified by the terrible consequences of doing it. Now the notion of punishment following the sin made perfect sense. No wonder people did it in the darkness.

  Evan wanted them to quit, but secretly he didn’t, too. Certainly the cluster of night women wanted more. After the first time, thinking it was over, he’d asked, “Can I please go home now?” His words had agitated them. If grasshoppers or beetles could talk, this was how they’d sound, clicking and muttering and smacking their lips. It didn’t make any sense to him, but he got the gist. He was staying. They went at him again. And again.