When I responded, I felt hollow, like I didn’t exist except as a riddle. I was using my thoughts and my voice, but the words had been placed in me, in hidden areas, and were revealing themselves as new not only to Stogie but to myself as well. “If a god calls for help, who answers?”
“Was it Pan?” Stogie asked.
“No, he neither heard or called. A cry went out and I answered.”
“How?”
“The wreckage that thwarted time travel has been cast loose into the unknown from before the birth of everything. Our universe sprang forth from that nothingness. It’s where the section of broken tunnel fell and clings. Its cry to be healed, reborn as a shadow, found me.”
The New York cabbie wriggled his cigar from one side of his mouth to the other with a chewing motion. “So the ruined tunnel area is to be found in the unknown from where the earliest gods appeared. No wonder it shorted-out the rest of the time tunnels, making all time jumps go haywire and rendering the whole system inaccessible.”
“The ruined time tunnel section became an injured god, always wounded, always attempting to heal. It’s a path of shadow that I seek, that no one sees.”
“Since the beginning. Hmm. Time was always a bugger when I was building the tunnels. The paradox of part of the eternal time tunnel falling wounded into the nothingness before I even created the tunnels could explain some of the crazy loops I had to deal with.”
On cue, the juke box blared out The Yardbirds questioning if everything was backwards, sideways, square, or down and wondering when everything would ever end.
Stogie God sat back, pulled the cigar from his maw and twirled it between two fingers, deep in thought. The other three gods in the booth were consulting, heads bowed together as they whispered. Lucas was scratching at the metal head of his hammer with one fingernail.
Shadow Creature slipped away. It had shared its knowledge with me while I answered my inquisitors. And now, with its message revealed, understanding surged within me like an open valve, granting me clarity about the circumstances of my recruitment.
For whatever their own reasons for searching, no tunnel veteran can find the collapsed section. It’s like searching for a distinct shadow in the dark with your eyes closed. The collapsed area of the time tunnel is lost to this universe. However, I can sense its path, which appears to me as a living shadow. It is my teacher, guiding me closer to where it needs me.
The Shadow Creature is the injured god.
The entire tunnel system throughout all of existence, thought up by the three supreme beings and created by their tunneler, grew to be a god itself. The damaged time tunnel section became a separate god seeking to reunite with its former self. It may lay as a ruin back before the universe was born, but it’s able to broadcast itself as a shadow across time to shape its rescue. I heard its call from before the beginning, and it has been steering Pan’s actions to help me locate the tunnel wreckage. Pan was used as the driving force to find the collapse because he needed access to it in order to continue his rebellion of enlightenment.
There is no straight line in this mess—time sequence and god events are more like dreams. Like a dog sniffing a trail from the night before, the Shadow Creature searches eternity, tracking the trails of gods and mortals it needs to help itself. It locates a scent, double backs to find its origin, races forward to determine where it went. Sniffing, crisscrossing—marking essential events. Then, it loops over each scent again. Over and over, any which way. All to work its magic on the universe it used to be a part of.
In this scheme of seemingly impossible temporal jump-arounds, it appears to have been pure chance that I had the temperament and awareness that found me, as a newborn, responding to the pain of the injured god’s call. But immediately, the god bestowed upon me abilities that would be beneficial as I searched for the source of its cry.
That much I now know.
But where I will find myself if I succeed, I have no idea. I’ve learned the collapsed tunnel section is the original wound as well as my access to the entirety of the ruined passage. Will I find rubble? Nothing? My own death? I’m frightened of what mystery awaits me. As I quest for the repair of the tunnel, the enigma of how I’m to heal the injured god obsesses me.
Though my life had become a maddening dream, I was confident I held the cards to at least survive the meeting with the architects of the universe.
I called for the bartender to bring me a beer and asked if anyone else wanted a drink. The gods declined, but all the biker devils soon had a pitcher on their tables. I asked Lucas if anyone was carrying weed. He produced a joint, and I sat there smoking it, figuring out my options.
Looking around at the bikers, all demonic spawn, all well-armed, and their frail and shattered prisoner, then at Stogie and his crew, I wondered if what I had revealed would be enough for them to agree to Pan’s demand of me continuing on. They were gods who now knew details of my secret and could piece together other information I couldn’t even imagine. My best guess was they would want the Shadow Creature’s project to reach fulfillment.
Stogie God looked at me with an affirmative dip of his head. “We recognize the words of a god within you, Deets. The injured tunnel section is your teacher, thus explaining the sacred golden aura of your healings.”
I stared down at my hand. Old blister scars pocked the still red and tight skin. My little finger curled inwards, as if forever recoiling from the black Cadillac’s exhaust pipe. I turned my gaze over to the woman, worried for her condition. Any deal I struck would include her coming with me.
Stogie God continued, “And it appears Pan has been manipulated since the beginning to help heal this strange time tunnel kink.”
I spoke a bit more sharply than I intended to. “And you? With the injured god blown back to before existence, it seems likely all the gods have been played to resolve this situation.”
The way he drummed his fingers and sucked on his cigar, I knew he had thought the same but hadn’t felt it necessary to discuss it with me.
The Creator and Manager and the Wild Hair hunched into a conference in a language that seemed to consist of twitching eyebrows, paralyzing glints in their eyes, a lot of throat clicking, nose whistling, crackling flames, and a wisp of some green fumes with a sweet perfume smell.
Stogie God ordered a Heineken and waited, head down. He seemed only to be paying intermittent attention to the fervent communications between the Supreme Three.
“You going to get fired?”
He smiled ruefully. “Yeah, probably end up driving a cab forever.”
“Hey, at least it’s just the operation of your time tunnel that’s wrecked, not time itself.”
Stogie gave me a sour look.
The god’s discussion went on with a whipping wind encircling the Creator and a hiccuping balloon-popping sound from the Wild Hair being repeated a number of times, as if they were both stressing their opinion on some point of contention.
Man, if the gods can’t even agree, how are we ever going to stop that other crazy war, the one out in the world.
I took out my Purpura colored pencil and tried doodling on a napkin. My style was a bit scratchy and uncontrolled, but I was sitting with the Creator’s trusted council and wanted to get a sketch of them. On top of the cramping of my partially crippled hand, they were difficult models, seeming to change every time I looked over at them to draw in a detail. Male, female, animal, plant, fire, water—it was hard to keep up. When they finished conferring, Stogie God reached over and took my drawing.
After glancing at it, he nodded to himself, took a sip of beer, then slipped the napkin in front of the Three. After savoring a drag of his over-sized cigar, he said matter-of-factly, “So the injured shadow god needs you. We’ll let you continue on your way.”
Out in the parking lot, Stogie God helped the tripped-out woman onto the back seat of Lucas’s Harley. He t
old her to hang onto me tight. Meanwhile I received a briefing from the one-eyed biker about the clutch and the brakes plus a detailed reminder on how to shift.
After making a test circle around the parking lot, I pulled up next to Stogie. “So, I’m wondering, man, like, uh, if I find the injured god and the tunnel is healed, what’s going to happen? I mean he’s been hurting for all time. Won’t that affect us all?”
“Don’t sweat it kid. Now that we got a better picture, we’ll work it out.” He drew hard on his cigar, and a thick billow of smoke enveloped his head.
“I, uh... Okay.”
Chapter 37
The war of the tunnels was in a truce. Peace negotiations. Good.
My concern turned to the spaced-out woman behind me. Although she felt wonderful with her arms clinging to me, tits against my back, and our hair tangling together, I worried about the bad trip she was on. I asked her what her name was. With wind buzzing in my ears, I couldn’t hear her reply, but later on, when we stopped to piss behind some rocks, she told me it was Cassandra.
She trembled when she looked at the ocean, and I realized she had spent the whole ride with her head pressed against my back, facing inland. A wave crashed, rolling a log of driftwood further up the shore. She screamed, batting at the air with her hands and ran back in the direction of the highway. I grabbed her wrist as her feet dug clumsily in the loose sand.
“What’s the matter?”
“The things came out of the water.”
“What? When?” I let go of her.
She wrung her hands together as she answered, “Before you came. You don’t feel right, but you’re taking me away from those terrible sharks, aren’t you? You’re not going to drag me back into the water, are you?” Her eyes darted in all directions, distrustful of me and our surroundings. She edged away from me hesitantly, stepping backwards.
“We just stopped to pee. This place freaking you out? We’ll go talk somewhere.”
She bumped into a large flat boulder, stopped as if trapped, and faced me fearfully.
“I dropped some acid after you left the campfire. These things with red burning fins came out of the sea and told me I would see God’s truth if I ate some tiny mushrooms they gave me. But then they grabbed me and dragged me beneath the waves. I don’t know how I could breath. They... they were laughing and snarling. I thought they would eat me, but instead they pulled me along underwater until we met up with a bunch of creatures with black leathery skin, who carried me into that room where you were... where you talked and drank.”
“I’ll get you home safely.” Man, they gave her magic mushrooms to tunnel jump while she was tripping out on acid. She may never find her head.
“They smelled like gas and slime and sour thoughts. Oh god, am I even alive? Are you? All those strange monster-men that surrounded me knew what death was.”
For the next hour, I anxiously observed her as she paced the rocky beach, gnawing at her fingernails, crying and muttering, giving me looks that seemed locked into confusion or panic.
I jumped up yelling, “Cassandra, stop,” when she fell down on her knees and began to stuff wet sand in her mouth. Wrapping my arms around her, I managed to wash her mouth out with sea water as she kicked and scratched at me.
“Don’t bite my fingers off.”
“They were like walking sharks. They poisoned me with diabolical voodoo. I don’t want them in my brain anymore.”
“I know, I know.” We knelt facing each other, the tide lapping against our legs. I whispered, “Let me hold you until all the bad things go away. I can do it. I took you away from the room where the leather-skinned men held you. I have a friend who lives under the sea who’s keeping the sharks away.” My hands resting gently on her hips, I tilted my head questioningly. “Okay? I’m not going to hurt you.” A twitter of doubt escaped her lips. I reached to tuck her wet hair behind an ear, and my hand turned golden. I smiled and touched the side of her head.
She sobbed into my shoulder. I looked out to sea filled with the awe of knowing Shadow Creature and thankful for the good prayers that settled every so often in my soul.
We sat with our backs against the flat boulder. She rested her hand on my chest as we watched the sun lower itself without protest into the ocean. She fell asleep with a gentle “Thanks.” The world felt soft and peaceful.
Hours later, she snuggled closer. The warmth and push of her tit stirred me. She murmured uncomfortably, and I thought to soothe both our aches by slipping my hand between her legs. Moonlight rolled on the waves. I remembered Teresa tripping out in her pink bra and underwear, telling me about dolphins walking up onto land and how she couldn’t be afraid of nature for the rest of her life. Eventually the tide of memories drifted to Teresa angrily saying goodbye to me on my last phone call to her.
So you convinced yourself she needed you to ball her as her great savior.
I removed my hand from Cassandra’s thigh, and she purred in her sleep.
When I noticed that one of the rocks was a deeper dark than the surrounding tumult of boulders, I recognized it as Shadow Creature even before the little sparkle of blue lights began dancing on the sand at its feet. It didn’t speak or look at me. I made out that it was squatting down and drawing with one hand in the sand. As dawn approached, with the rocks and crevices turning gray, the god faded, and I removed myself from Cassandra’s drowsy grip to look at what the ancient one’s finger had etched.
But I had misinterpreted its actions. Where I thought there would be scratchings, instead stood a small tower of sand, about nine inches high and five inches wide at the base. It looked exactly like one of my childhood sandbox Zobes in progress, at the stage of mid-development between being nothing and its final existence as nothing.
The conversation with Einstein so long ago came into my mind...
“Well, first there is just sand. Then, when you start piling up the sand, you can see what they look like half-way finished...”
The Shadow Creature had built up the sand from the original concept of nothing and left it for me to complete.
“...they’re only something when you scrape them down and they become nothing.”
Tiny crystalline specks slid away as I shaved them with my hand. I worked slowly, the repercussions of what would happen when I healed the tunnel dawning on me.
The injured Shadow God would no longer exist. It would become something—part of the tunnel system again.
After I had flattened the tower and smoothed the sand, my fingers glittered briefly with the gold aura of healing, but a heavy sadness wearied my hand. The feeling spread up my arm to my heart. I sat hunched, defeated by the enormity of what I was being led to do.
I ran my fingers through the sand, lifting a handful, searching it for a secret message that I missed, wanting to believe I didn’t understand.
Gone. My friend. The god who speaks to me. Teaches me. It’ll be gone. No individuality, just a healed section of tunnel.
Cassandra’s legs and knees came into focus off to my side.
“You’re that holy man from L.A., aren’t you? The prophet people say can perform miracles.”
Rivulets of sand sifted between my fingers. Watching them pour, I wondered at the incredible chain of events the Shadow Creature must have put into motion over billions and billions of years to end its own participation in this universe.
“I have no idea what the future holds. Your name is Cassandra. Wasn’t that the name of the seer in one of Homer’s poems? The Iliad? You tell me what happens next.”
“Snakes have never whispered to me.”
“What?”
“Snakes were the bringer of knowledge in Greek mythology.”
“Really?” I recalled the first few times Shadow Creature had appeared to me. It had come as a hissing of serpents in darkness. I looked up at her, always astounded by the path synchron
icity led me through.
“Those were gods at the table with you in the bar, weren’t they?”
We both turned our attention to a susurration in the air coming up the coastline from the south. The sound grew louder, deepening in pitch, becoming a roar as it became a physically visible sound thundering overhead. It rolled onward, northwards, churning a long dark tunnel across the sky.
Cassandra hugged herself to ward off a chill in the air or, more likely, to prevent herself from falling apart. “What was that?”
My eyes stuck to the skies above the beaches, pine-covered hills, and thin coastal fog, looking for leftover evidence of the passing. The sound was familiar—I had been hearing similar, but fainter rumblings ever since the Andes. Now, after the battle on the beach and my hand shredding sections of tunnel as Sheoblask and I were torn apart by time, I had a clearer understanding of what the rumbling sound was. “It’s a time tunnel on its way to destruction.”
It’s odd that Cassandra heard and saw it.
“We’re not in danger, though. I could walk back into the sea, couldn’t I?” White foam licked at her toes. “The shark things moved me through a tunnel.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“But I know I can do it. When you touched me,” she placed a hand lightly on the side of her head, “I saw wondrous things, like the possibility of living in my dreams, or becoming a goddess. I felt other worlds. It helped me distance myself from the nightmare my mind had become. I’m able to fly away to anywhere. I need to.”
She took a step into a small wave that pushed up around her ankles.
“Those shark people and the black leathery demons wanted to hold me in pain forever. I understood that right away. There was no other reason for their existence. I can’t imagine why such beings are as they are, but their touch was like being sliced with knives and tattooed with fire needles. Their eyes and minds breathed torture.”
Miracles (The Remarkable Adventures of Deets Parker Book 3) Page 24