The Descent

by Jeff Long

  Next morning Twiggs needed to go to the bathroom for his first time since the starvation. Being Twiggs, he did not ask the soldiers’ permission to leave the room. One of the mercenaries shot him dead.

  That spelled the end of what little freedom the rest of them had. Walker ordered the scientists bound, wired, and removed to a deeper room. Ali was not surprised. For some time now, she had known their execution was imminent.

  And darkness was upon the

  face of the Deep

  —GENESIS 1:2

  24

  TABULA RASA

  NEW YORK CITY

  The hotel suite was dark except for the blue flicker of the TV.

  It was a riddle: television on, volume off, in a blind man’s room. Once upon a time, de l’Orme might have orchestrated such a contradiction just to confound his visitors. Tonight he had no visitors. The maid had forgotten to turn off her soaps.

  Now the screen showed the Times Square ball as it descended toward the deliriously happy mob.

  De l’Orme was browsing his Meister Eckhart. The thirteenth-century mystic had preached such strange things with such common words. And in the bowels of the Dark Ages, so boldly.

  God lies in wait for us. His love is like a fisherman’s hook. No fish comes to the fisherman that is not caught on his hook. Once it takes the hook, the fish is forfeit to the fisherman. In vain it twists hither and thither—the fisherman is certain of his catch. And so I say of love. The one who hangs on this hook is caught so fast that foot and hand, mouth, eyes and heart are bound to be God’s. And the more surely caught, the more surely you will be freed.

  No wonder the theologian had been condemned by the Inquisition and excommunicated. God as dominatrix! More dizzying still, man freed of God. God freed of God. And then what? Nothingness. You penetrated the darkness and emerged into the same light you had left in the first place. Then who leave in the first place? de l’Orme wondered why. For the journey itself? Is that the best we have to do with ourselves? These were his thoughts when the phone rang.

  “Do you know my voice, yes or no?” asked the man on the far end.

  “Bud?” said de l’Orme.

  “Great … my name,” Parsifal mumbled.

  “Where are you?”

  “Huh-uh.” The astronaut sounded sluggish. Drunk. The Golden Boy?

  “Something’s troubling you,” de l’Orme said.

  “You bet. Is Santos with you?”

  “No.”

  “Where is he?” Parsifal demanded. “Or do you even know?”

  “The Koreas,” said de l’Orme, not exactly certain which one. “Another set of hadals has surfaced. He’s recording some of the artifacts they brought with them. Emblems of a deity stamped into gold foil.”

  “Korea. He told you that?”

  “I sent him, Bud.”

  “What makes you so sure he’s where you sent him?” Parsifal asked.

  De l’Orme took his glasses off. He rubbed his eyes and opened them, and they were white, with no retina or pupil. Distant fireworks streaked his face with sparks of color. He waited.

  “I’ve been trying to call the others,” Parsifal said. “All night, nothing.”

  “It’s New Year’s Eve,” said de l’Orme. “Perhaps they’re with their families.”

  “No one’s told you.” It was an accusation, not a question.

  “I’m afraid not, whatever it is.”

  “It’s too late. You really don’t know? Where have you been?”

  “Right here. A touch of the flu. I haven’t left my room in a week.”

  “Ever heard of The New York Times? Don’t you listen to the news?”

  “I gave myself the solitude. Fill me in, if you please. I can’t help if I don’t know.”

  “Help?”

  “Please.”

  “We’re in great danger. You shouldn’t be at that phone.”

  It came out in a tangle. There had been a great fire at the Metropolitan Museum’s Map Room two weeks ago. And before that, a bomb explosion in an ancient cliffside temple library at Yungang in China, which the PLA was blaming on Muslim separatists. Archives and archaeological sites in ten or more countries had been vandalized or destroyed in the past month.

  “I’ve heard about the Met, of course. That was everywhere. But the rest of this, what connects them?”

  “Someone’s trying to erase our information. It’s like someone’s finishing business. Wiping out his tracks.”

  “What tracks? Burning museums. Blowing up libraries. What purpose could that serve?”

  “He’s closing shop.”

  “He? Who are you talking about? You don’t make sense.”

  Parsifal mentioned several other events, including a fire at the Cambridge Library housing the ancient Cairo genizah fragments.

  “Gone,” he said. “Burned to the ground. Defaced. Blown to pieces.”

  “Those are all places we’ve visited over the last year.”

  “Someone has been erasing our information for some time now,” said Parsifal. “Until recently they’ve been small erasures mostly, an altered manuscript here, a photo negative disappearing there. Now the destruction seems more wholesale and spectacular. It’s like someone’s trying to finish business before clearing out of town.”

  “A coincidence,” said de l’Orme. “Book burners. A pogrom. Anti-intellectuals. The lumpen are rampant these days.”

  “It’s no coincidence. He used us. Like bloodhounds. Turned us loose on his own trail. Had us hunt him. And now he’s backtracking.”

  “He?”

  “Who do you think?”

  “But what does it accomplish? Even if you were right, he merely erases our footnotes, not our conclusions.”

  “He erases his own image.”

  “Then he defaces himself. What does that change?” But even as he spoke, de l’Orme felt wrong. Were those distant sirens or alarms tripping in his own head?

  “It destroys our memory,” said Parsifal. “It wipes clean his presence.”

  “But we know him now. At least we know everything the evidence has already shown. Our memory is fixed.”

  “We’re the last testimony,” said Parsifal. “After us, it’s back to tabula rasa.”

  De l’Orme was missing pieces of the puzzle. A week behind closed doors, and it was as if the world had changed orbit. Or Parsifal had.

  De l’Orme tried to arrange the information. “You’re suggesting we’ve led our foe on a tour of his own clues. That it’s an inside job. That Satan is one of us. That he—or she?—is now revisiting our evidence and spoiling it. Again, why? What does he accomplish by destroying all the past images of himself? If our theory of a reincarnated line of hadal kings is true, then he’ll reappear next time with a different face.”

  “But with all his same subconscious patterns,” said Parsifal. “Remember? We talked about that. You can’t change your fundamental nature. It’s like a fingerprint. He can try to alter his behavior, but five thousand years of human evidence has made him identifiable. If not to us, then to the next Beowulf gang, or the next. No evidence, no discovery. He becomes the invisible man. Whatever the hell he is.”

  “Let him rampage,” de l’Orme said. He was speaking as much to Parsifal’s agitation as about their hadal prey. “By the time he finishes his vandalism, we’ll know him better than he knows himself. We’re close.”

  He listened to Parsifal’s hard breathing on the other end. The astronaut muttered inaudibly. De l’Orme could hear wind lashing the telephone booth. Close by, a sixteen-wheel truck blatted down through lower gears. He pictured Parsifal at some forlorn pit stop along an interstate.

  “Go home,” de l’Orme counseled.

  “Whose side are you on? That’s what I really called about. Whose side are you on?”

  “Whose side am I on?”

  “That’s what this whole thing is about, isn’t it?” Parsifal’s voice trailed off. The wind invaded. He sounded like a man losing mind and body to the st
orm.

  “Your wife has to be wondering where you are.”

  “And have her end up like Mustafah? We’ve said good-bye. She’ll never see me again. It’s for her own good.”

  There was a bump, and then scratching at de l’Orme’s window. He drew back into his presumption of darkness, put his spine against the corduroy sofa. He listened. Claws raked at the glass. And there, he tracked it, the beat of wings. A bird. Or an angel. Lost among the skyscrapers.

  “What about Mustafah?”

  “You have to know.”

  “I don’t.”

  “He was found last Friday, in Istanbul. What was left of him was floating in the underground reservoir at Yerebatan Sarayi. You really don’t know? He was killed the same day a bomb was found in the Hagia Sofia. We’re part of the evidence, don’t you see?”

  With great, concentrated precision, de l’Orme laid his glasses on the side table. He felt dizzy. He wanted to resist, to challenge Parsifal, to make him retract this terrible news.

  “There’s only one person who can be doing this,” said Parsifal. “You know it as well as I do.”

  There was a minute of relative silence, neither man speaking. The phone filled with blizzard gales and the beep-beep of snowplows setting off to battle the drifted highways. Then Parsifal spoke again. “I know how close you two were.” His lucidity, his compassion, cemented the revelation.

  “Yes,” de l’Orme said.

  It was the worst falseness he could imagine. The man’s obsession had guided them. And now he had disinherited them, body and spirit. No, that was wrong, for they’d never been included in his inheritance to begin with. From the start, he had merely exploited them. They had been like livestock to him, to be ridden to death.

  “You must get away from him,” said Parsifal.

  But de l’Orme’s thoughts were on the traitor. He tried to configure the thousands of deceptions that had been perpetrated on them. A king’s audacity! Almost in admiration, he whispered the name.

  “Louder,” said Parsifal. “I can’t hear you over the wind.”

  “Thomas,” de l’Orme said again. What magnificent courage! What ruthless deception! It was dizzying, the depths of his plotting. What had he been after then? Who was he really? And why commission a posse to hunt himself down?

  “Then you’ve heard,” shouted Parsifal. His blizzard was getting worse.

  “They’ve found him?”

  “Yes.”

  De l’Orme was astounded. “But that means we’ve won.”

  “Have you lost your mind?” said Parsifal.

  “Have you lost yours? Why are you running? They’ve caught him. Now we can interview him directly. We must go to him immediately. Give me the details, man.”

  “Caught him? Thomas?”

  De l’Orme heard Parsifal’s confusion, and he felt equally dumbfounded. Even after so many months spent treating the hadal as a common man, Satan’s mortality did not come naturally. How could one catch Satan? Yet here it was. They had accomplished the impossible. They had transcended myth.

  “Where is he? What have they done with him?”

  “Thomas, you mean?”

  “Yes, Thomas.”

  “But Thomas is dead.”

  “Thomas?”

  “I thought you said you knew.”

  “No,” groaned de l’Orme.

  “I’m sorry. He was a great friend to us all.”

  De l’Orme digested the consequences, but still he didn’t understand.

  “They killed him?”

  “They?” shouted the astronaut. Was Parsifal not hearing him, or were they stumbling on each other’s meaning?

  “Satan,” enunciated de l’Orme. His thoughts raced. They’d killed the hadal Caesar? Didn’t the fools know Satan’s value? In his mind’s eye, de l’Orme saw some frightened young soldier with a high school education emptying his rifle clip into the shadows, and Thomas tumbling from the darkness into the light, dead.

  But still de l’Orme did not understand.

  “Yes, Satan,” said Parsifal. His voice was growing indistinguishable from the noise of his tempest. “You do understand. My same conclusion. Mustafah. Now Thomas. Satan. Satan killed them.”

  De l’Orme frowned. “You said they found him, though. Satan.”

  “No. Thomas,” clarified Parsifal. “They found Thomas. A Bedouin goatherder came on him this afternoon. He was lying among the rocks near St. Catherine’s monastery. He had fallen—or been pushed—from one of the cliffs on Mount Sinai. It’s obvious who killed him. Satan did. He’s hunting us down, one by one. He knows our patterns. Our daily lives. Our hiding places. While we were profiling him, the bastard was profiling us.”

  At last de l’Orme understood what Parsifal was telling him. Thomas was not the deceiver. It was someone even closer to him.

  “Are you still there?” asked Parsifal.

  De l’Orme cleared his throat. “What have they done with Thomas’s body?” he asked.

  “Whatever desert monks do to their dead. Probably not much in the way of preservation. They want to get him into the ground as soon as possible. He’ll be buried on Wednesday. There at the monastery.” He paused. “You’re not going, are you?”

  So much to plan. So little, really. De l’Orme knew exactly what needed to happen next.

  “It’s your head,” said Parsifal.

  De l’Orme set the phone back in its cradle.

  SAVANNAH, GEORGIA

  She woke in her bed to ancient dreams, that she was young again and beaux pursued her. The many became few. The few became one. In her dreams she was alone, like now, but alone differently, an ache in men’s hearts, a memory that would never end. And this one man would never stop searching for her, even if she was lost in herself, even if she grew old.

  She opened her eyes and the room was awash in moonbeams.

  The coarse linen curtains stirred with a breeze. Crickets sang in the grass off her porch. The window had come open.

  A tiny light looped and spiraled in the room, a firefly.

  “Vera,” said a man from the dark corner.

  She jerked, and the glasses flew from her fingers.

  A burglar, she thought. But a burglar who knew her name? Who spoke it so sadly?

  “Who is it?” she said.

  “I have been watching you sleep,” he said. “In this light, I see the little girl your father must have loved.”

  He was going to kill her. Vera could hear the determination in his tenderness.

  A form rose in the moon shadows. Released of his weight, the wicker chair creaked in its weave, and he stepped forward.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “Parsifal didn’t call you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Didn’t he tell you?”

  “Tell me what?”

  “Who I am.”

  A winter chill settled on her.

  Parsifal had called yesterday, and she had cut short his roadside augury. The sky is falling, that’s all she could make of his nonsense. Indeed, his burst of paranoid advice and omens had finally accomplished what Thomas had failed to do: convinced her their quest for the monster was a monster itself.

  It had struck her that their search for the king of darkness was auto-genetic, brought to life from nothing more real than their idea of it. In retrospect, their search had been feeding on itself for months, on its own clues and predictions and fancy scholarship. Now it was beginning to feed on them. Just as Thomas had warned, the quest had become dangerous. Their enemies were not the tyrants and would-be tyrants, the C.C. Coopers of the world, or their fabled Satan of the underworld. Rather, the enemy was their own overheated imaginings.

  She had hung up on Parsifal. Repeatedly. He had called back several times, ranting and raving, sounding like a Yankee carpetbagger trying to scare her off the plantation. I’m staying put, she told him.

  He had been right then.

  Her wheelchair sat next to her nightstand. She did not try to tal
k him out of the murder. She did not question his method or test for his sadism. Maybe he would be swift and businesslike. So you die in bed after all, she thought to herself.

  “Did he sing songs to you?” the man asked.

  Vera was trying to arrange her courage and thoughts. Her heart was racing. She wanted to be calm.

  “Parsifal?”

  “Your father, I meant.”

  His question distracted her. “Songs?”

  “Before you went to sleep.”

  It was an invitation. She took it. She closed her eyes and threw herself into the search. It meant ignoring the crickets and penetrating her jackhammer heartbeat and descending into remembrances she had thought were gone forever. But there he was, and yes, it was night, and he was singing to her. She laid her head back on the pillow, and his words made a blanket and his voice promised shelter. Papa, she thought.

  The floorboard squeaked.

  Vera regretted that. If not for the sound, she would have stayed with the song. But the wood returned her to the room. Up through the heart she came, back into the land of crickets and moonbeams.

  She opened her eyes and he was there, barehanded, with the firefly spinning a crooked halo high above his head. He was reaching for her like her lover. And then his face entered the light and she said, “You?”

  ST. CATHERINE’S MONASTERY, JABAL MUSA (MT. SINAI)

  De l’Orme arranged the cups and placed the loaf of bread. The abbot had provided him a meditation chamber, the sort enjoyed for thousands of years by men and women seeking spiritual wisdom.

  Santos would be charmed. He loved coarseness and simplicity. The wine jug was clay. The table’s planks had been hewn and nailed at least five centuries ago. No curtain in the window. No glass, even. Dust and insects were your prayer mates. Like words from the Bible, a bolt of sunlight stabbed the darkness of his cell. De l’Orme felt its warmth upon his face. He felt it travel east to west across his cheeks. He felt it setting.

  It was cool this high, especially compared with the desert heat on his ride in. The road was no longer so good. De l’Orme had suffered its potholes. Because tourists no longer came here in such abundance, there was less reason to maintain the asphalt. The Holy Lands didn’t pull them in like they used to. The revelation of hell as a common network of tunnels had achieved what hell itself could not, the end of spiritual fear. The death of God at the hands of existentialism and materialism had been grievous enough. Now the death of Supreme Evil had turned the landscape of afterlife into a cheap haunted house. From Moses to Mohammed to Augustine, the carnies had been good for their day, but no one was buying it anymore.