Timeless

by Laura Legend

  “I’m so sorry,” Gary said. “I know ... I know what that’s like.”

  Cass knew that he knew.

  That’s why what came next was going to be so hard.

  “Dad—”

  “Yes, Cass?”

  “There’s still ... there’s something else.”

  Gary seemed to be calmly waiting, but Cass could tell he was holding his breath.

  “There’s good news and bad news,” she said, searching for a way to both soften and explain what she had to say. “Which do you want first?”

  Gary slowly took a deep breath.

  “The good news.”

  Cass opened her eyes. The water stains on the ceiling didn’t look like anything now. They were just meaningless splotches. If there was any significance to be read in them, the Seer couldn’t see it.

  Cass decided just to spit it out already.

  “Mom’s not dead.”

  Even through the dry palm of his hand, Cass could feel her father’s heart leap wildly in his chest. She was afraid for a moment that she’d given him a heart attack. Eventually he started breathing again.

  He choked back a sob and asked what neither of them now wanted to know.

  “And the bad news?”

  Cass sat up and looked him in the eye. “She’s not exactly alive, either.”

  37

  CASS AND GARY had to wait for nightfall before approaching the Temple Mount. They needed the area around the Western Wall to clear out for the day.

  They spent the day holed up in the condemned building, talking and catching up and speculating about the room and its history. Every once in a while Gary would look out the window towards the stonework arch of St. Mark’s, the site down the street that had been traditionally been identified as the Upper Room. He would watch the tides of people ebb and flow, some heads covered with black hats or shawls, some topped with sunglasses or baseball hats. Then he would lecture her (again) about how Christians never got anything right when it came to Jesus, especially when it came to the places he’d actually been.

  Cass had heard it all before—in fact, there was nothing more traditionally Christian than claiming that the popular version of the Christian tradition had missed the boat—but today she was happy to hear it all again. They needed a good distraction. And, secretly, part of her was thrilled to show her dad such an amazing find.

  Gary had some food in his bag. The cold falafel wasn’t as greasy when dipped in smooth hummus, and they soon polished it off. Her hunger surprised her, and Cass realized she had never tasted something as good as the flaky baked crust on the cheese bourekas. They listened to the sounds of the city: a constant hum of human activity, passing music, dogs barking, and wheels clattering, all punctuated by the regular pulse of the repeated call to prayer that echoed off the surrounding stones with deafening clarity. And then, with her head resting on his shoulder, Cass stole some sleep during the late afternoon.

  When a loud croaking sound issued from Cass’s bag, they both awoke with a start to find that the sun was gone and that a cloud-filled sky had hidden the moon.

  The streets would be dark tonight.

  “What was that sound?” Gary asked, his eyes darting around the room.

  “Just my prescription,” Cass said, patting her bag.

  Cass tightened the laces of her boots and they gathered their things. They slipped out of the building and worked their way south through the still-teeming streets of the Old City, toward the wall. Cass wrapped herself in the dark black shawl her dad had given her—she had no idea where he’d found it, but given his magic, she was pretty sure there was a confusing Jewish grandmother a few streets back wondering how she’d ended up with a t-shirt on her head. Cass was too worn down to worry. With her dad close by, time felt more stable, though the pain in her eye was still sharp and her vision was still fuzzy around the edges. She knew, however, that if they didn’t take decisive action, her condition would fall apart again—soon, and perhaps irreparably.

  They passed the stone stairs leading to the archways in front of the Dome of the Rock, and Cass found herself instinctively looking away from the shadows that pooled there. The gold Dome was just visible in the dim starlight, and Cass was grateful for the darkness. Under her shawl, she led them carefully closer to the wall, balancing her desire to avoid the shadows with their need to remain as innocuous and unobservable as possible. When, finally, they reached the wall, Cass was surprised at its size. The wall, a remnant of the Second Jewish Temple built by Herod the Great, was a relatively small segment of a much longer retaining wall. Before its destruction, the ancient temple complex had lain on the platform above the wall.

  To access the plumbing at the heart of the Underside they needed, essentially, to crawl inside the basement of the Temple Mount.

  Apart from the standard array of armed guards, the square was mostly empty. Gary used a little magic to replace a section of the power cable with a piece of wood and—voila!—the lights fritzed out for a minute. They would only have a narrow window, though, before they came back on.

  In the dark, they quickly crossed the square.

  When they reached the wall, Cass ran her fingers across the rough stones, letting her fingers guide her. She could feel the power behind the wall calling to her. Like the well in the Monastery courtyard, the power pulsed and beckoned, drawing her in, calling her closer. As she drew closer to the entrance, the fabric of space-time itself seemed to pulse and shudder with each wave of energy rippling outward.

  With each wave, Cass felt like she might come apart at the seams—though she also felt stronger and more powerful than she had in a long time. The jelly in her cloudy eye pulsed in time with the call.

  Just as the backup lights clicked on, Cass’s fingers found the lever she’d seen Thomas use in her vision. This time, however, the door opened onto a narrow, concrete hallway with a single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling.

  Cass could hear guards shouting and yelling behind them—they’d been spotted—but once they were inside the passageway, the door sealed shut behind them and they were alone again.

  They were in the Underside now.

  This hallway seemed like all the others Cass had seen in the Underside, but with one crucial difference: this hall sloped sharply downward at a twenty degree angle. Today, they wouldn’t be traveling between places in the Underside via this passageway, they would be traveling beneath them.

  At the bottom, instead of opening onto an Underside hub, the passage emptied out into the massive cavern that Cass had also seen previously in her vision. But it was larger and more complex than Cass recalled.

  The cavern stretched out into the darkness like a vast underground city. On the inside, the space felt much larger than, externally, the space occupied by the Temple Mount itself. The rooms was filled with scores of deep wells and crisscrossed by a maze of Romanesque aqueducts that both drew and fed water throughout the cavern.

  “This is it,” Cass said unnecessarily. “This is the place.”

  Her toad was croaking loudly and continuously now.

  When her dad raised an eyebrow, Cass pretended that she couldn’t make out any of what it seemed to be saying.

  They circled through the mass of infrastructure until, off to the side, they found the stone table Cass had been looking for. In her visions, she’d seen Thomas laid out on one of these tables in Judas’s lab and she’d seen Amare laid out in the same way, perhaps in this very place.

  The table was cool to the touch but when she shivered, it wasn’t because of the temperature. Instead, the chill had traveled down her spine at the thought that, shortly, she would be stretched out on this slab as well.

  Cass put down her gear and took off her jacket. She unzipped the bag’s front pouch and pulled out her psychedelic blue toad. All things considered, he didn’t appear to be any worse for wear.

  She handed the toad to her father and hopped onto the table, prostrating herself.

  The toad stared up at G
ary with his big, sad eyes.

  Then, apparently, he said something filthy about Gary’s mother.

  Gary gaped at the thing—now looking up at him, all wide-eyed innocence—then shrugged and turned his attention to Cass.

  “Once you go under, I’ll be here with you the whole time. Thomas told me to have you try, if you can, to describe what you’re seeing and then I can offer guidance. I’m not completely sure what that looks like, but he said I would understand what to do. The crucial thing, of course, is to remember that I love you and that you can trust me. I’ll be here for you.”

  Cass knew what he was saying was true. She could already feel a critical tonal difference between the setting of her first trip with Thomas as her guide and this one with her father at her side.

  Thank you, Thomas, Cass thought to herself. We couldn’t have gotten here without you.

  “And remember,” Gary continued, “that you’re headed into the Unconscious, a kind of timeless, archetypal space that is ruled by all of the raw passions and emotions that we usually keep locked away deep in the basements of our minds. It’s impossible to predict the specific shape that your experience will take, but you’ll need to find some way to make peace with that space and reground your experience of time.”

  Gary leaned in a kissed her on the forehead.

  “Be strong. Don’t get lost down there. I believe in you.”

  Cass was clear about how risky this was going to be—much riskier than her father’s optimistic take seemed to allow. But she didn’t have any other options.

  She could confront and cure the chaos that had taken root in her mind or she could slowly succumb to it. There was no third path.

  If she was going down, Cass wanted to go down fighting.

  She took the toad from her father, clutching it tightly when it struggled to hop away, and licked it from end to end, more than doubling the dose she’d previously taken.

  As soon as she let go of the toad, her vision exploded outward and the cavern ceiling began to collapse all around them.

  38

  CASS COULD ALREADY hear her father speaking to her, responding to the fear that immediately pounded through her as the roof of the cavern began to collapse.

  “It’s okay, Cass,” he said. His voice was strong and even as he took her hand in his. “I’m right here. I’ll protect you.”

  Cass believed him. She tried to unclench her mind and surrender to the experience.

  In response, the chunks of rubble raining down around her transformed into rainbow beams of psychedelic light. The beams of light still crashed to the floor with the same force as solid rock but, when they hit, they bounced and shattered into a million rainbow fragments that showered down around Cass. When the sparks of light touched her skin, they didn’t burn. Instead, her body soaked them up and she found herself filled with a wild rush of energy and the liberating feeling that whatever had been worrying her moments before was inconsequential.

  As the roof continued to collapse and crash to the floor, the whole room was filled with a shower of sparks. Cass felt like she was in a rainbow foundry at the dawn of creation. All around her, the invisible hands of the gods were forging souls and hammering light into the shapes of bodies and worlds.

  The rainbow fragments began to swirl and Cass found herself in the eye of the storm. The light lifted her up, filling and spinning her.

  She was saturated with stars.

  There were no words to describe the experience. One word—too small for the job but insistent on being heard—rebounded inside her fiery head: groovy.

  Tears filled her eyes at the beauty of it.

  “It’s so beautiful, Dad,” she whispered in awe. “It’s so ... groovy.”

  For the first time, she felt like she understood what that word actually meant, what it was trying capture. And she found herself astonished that the word didn’t echo continuously in synagogues and mosques and temples and churches around the world.

  Groovy.

  Then Cass noticed that the light had a kind of rhythm to it, a bass note that imposed a beat and called for a response. Gradually, a melody also began to emerge from the background noise, raw but soaring.

  Spinning more slowly now, Cass was deposited back onto the floor of the cavern, her boots gently making contact with the stone floor.

  She realized, then, where she was. She was in the middle of a rave.

  The floor of the cavern thronged with bodies packed tightly together, jumping and dancing as the morning stars sang and the dancers shouted for joy. She was in the middle of a cosmic mosh pit. The sweaty, nearly naked bodies of the people closest to her pressed against her, jostling her.

  Cass could only respond in one of two ways: she could fight it or she could join the dance.

  She let go and joined the dance.

  She closed her eyes and let the techno beat of creation fill her bones. As she jumped and danced her body bumped and ground and slid against the bodies pressing close around her. The longer she danced, the more difficult it became to tell where her own body ended and the bodies around her began.

  Her sense of self expanded and expanded until it filled the cavern and her vibrating body was just one organ in a body shared by everyone in the room.

  Cass danced and danced and lost track of time altogether, dropping into a timeless space diagonal to the normal flow of time. In this space, the only things that mattered were the vibrant, unfiltered sensations that broke across her mind in orgasmic waves of sheer innocence.

  Cass was, without a doubt, deep in the basement of her mind.

  After a lifetime of being cut off from her own emotions, of only feeling them indirectly— reported to her secondhand—Cass finally understood what it meant to be alive. She understood, for the first time, why the Lost vampires were irresistibly drawn to this Unconscious Id-space where they could lose their minds in unfiltered feral sensation.

  This, she saw, was what it meant to go feral. A feral vampire was a vampire who’d gotten lost in the basement of their mind, locked in this primal dance of blood and hunger and sex, cut off from the conscious decisions that could transfigure those feelings into something anchored and human.

  The music shifted gears, softening around a repeating, mournful phrase that prompted Cass to open her eyes.

  She was still dancing, but more slowly now. She still felt intertwined with the bodies around her, but her experience had re-centered on her own perspective.

  Looking around the cavern, she realized that the rave was filled with familiar faces. In fact, she recognized every face in the room. Some were family, some were friends, some were only casual acquaintances or teachers from high school or the cashier at her local grocery store. Some were people she’d fought in the Underside tournament, some were vampires she’d killed, some were soldiers she’d known at the Shield Monastery. All of them were jumbled together indiscriminately in this place.

  All of them were dancing. And all of them had their eyes closed.

  Cass danced her way through the crowd, jumping and spinning, sweat pouring off her body, letting the tide of the music pull her whichever way it wanted.

  Cass bumped into Miranda.

  Miranda’s eyes were closed in fierce concentration.

  Dancing around her to the Unconscious beat, Cass could sense the conflicting emotions thoughts of Miranda normally triggered in her—that soul-rending sorrow at her death, and the white-hot anger at her betrayal—but in the rhythm of the dance, Cass felt herself accept that conflict for what it was: the truth of the love that marked her relationship with Miranda.

  Cass danced on.

  She ground against Maya, her long hair fanning out around them, and she slid past Grey, his eye patch as bright a pink as she’d ever seen.

  Then, without realizing how it had happened, Cass found her body pressed tightly against Zach’s.

  He looked like his old self.

  Cass let her eyes flutter shut and she gave herself over to the feel of his
body against hers. He was shirtless and barefoot, wearing only an old pair of jeans. His skin was dark and covered in a sheen of perspiration. Just like she used to, Cass hooked her index fingers through the belt loops at his hips, keeping him close.

  Again, Cass lost track of time as she hung on to Zach for dear life, awash in the salty smell of him.

  Zach, though, never opened his eyes. He could have been dancing with anyone. And when he raised a hand to strain his dark hair from his face, Cass saw clearly that he wore no ring.

  She glanced down at her own bare finger.

  He didn’t belong to her anymore. He’d sacrificed himself to save her and now he couldn’t take that back.

  He wouldn’t be finding his way back to her.

  Cass watched his face carefully. At least he seemed to be happy.

  Cass kissed him, long and deep. And then she let go of his belt loops and let the music spin them separate ways.

  Cass bit her lip, trying to stamp the feel of him into her memory, and a surge of melancholy emotions brought her back to her self, individuating her, collapsing the extended sense of connection she’d felt with everyone else in the room.

  At the same time, the lights dimmed and the music turned dark and discordant. The dancing slowed as eyes opened and faces turned in her direction, as if the body politic had just discovered an infection among them and that infection was her.

  The room darkened further. Faces lost their definition. Everyone looked like a shadow.

  The bodies around Cass jostled her roughly. Hands reached for her, dozens of them, claiming her arms and legs and hands, clawing and pulling and dragging Cass down to the floor.

  Cass tried to scream but, with hands covering her mouth, she managed only a muffled, breathless cry.

  39

  CASS DIDN’T NEED to pick her targets. Literally anything within reach was one. She began to punch and kick and head butt any dark figure she could connect with. She broke a nose with a fist and heard a knee pop with a kick and set her own ears ringing with a head butt.