“I do not know what it is that keeps the world together. Maybe it’s the little faith pressed as the lost luggage compartments of life.
“But we should try, by God, in the name of the rest of the molecules of expectation; we have to do something.
“This is not your brother.”
“And you say that after a little speech in order to cross out everything, rubbing his eyes and clapping our foreheads. Do you think we can live, as they say, happily, for the rest of our days?”
“And even the most astute among the living and the dead cannot determine how they lived their days.”
“And we have to kill our brother?”
“I never said such a thing,” Victor said and still waved to the others to approach. “Just one moment in your life someone must leave the pain behind. Or they should have to take with you and what is beyond. It should be done for him or because for everything in the past, isn’t worth it.
“Every day is a drink with a bitter taste that is brought to us whether we want it or not.
“And the season to the point of taking has little faith, hope, and love.
“And it is these things that I will ask you. I can help you. But as it usually happens, not entirely.”
“What do you mean?”
“Treatment may be fatal to one or all of you. Maybe not. It is possible to cripple you in the same way. Nobody knows how the dice will fall. Well, what do you say?”
The sisters looked at each other like people who have already shared a part of themselves. The glance was short but seemed to continue for centuries.
“Well, what should we do?” they asked at last.
“Gather in a circle around your brother.”
They all gathered around the misshapen creature.
Being anaesthetized, it moved its puny limbs while a chirping bird on the fence recoiled.
Victor Drake unrolled the parchment and handed them the knife. He gave them a sign to make a small wound.
They performed that and waited for the second instruction.
“Now, you just need to simultaneously tap the paper. I hope that the tide of life will bring you something nice.”
The sisters exchanged glances; they stroked the monster and said, “All right, let’s do it.”
Their bloodied hands reached out to touch the shriveled paper.
The degenerate, who hitherto was still, suddenly stood up. His lizard eyes had the luster of expiry coals and a few tears of blood streamed from them, falling down his face.
“You cannot stop the Apollyon Project,” he said just before he died. “It will take place in Arabia, because it will be written for deleted books.”
Then an electric arc pierced them all and the sisters were no longer standing.
The heat reached its apogee. The beetle came from its tree, which was hiding the great game of life being played by predators and prey.
Somewhere out there, like tiny scurrying ants, a few shadows descended and sank into the thick foliage.
Chapter Twenty
Hundreds of cauldrons were boiling in rows, letting milky foam smack and squash vegetables.
Around them, mixing them with Durell pots that looked like paddles, hurried a swarm of chefs. They turned to cast in more and more morsels, wrapping cuts of meat in tallow veils.
A large crowd of women were beetling over mortars, cutting the ingredients and tinging the air with the unimaginable din of all dialects that occurred in the thousands of kilometers of the Nile.
Among them, squeezed between the sun with their visitors brown bagged, diverged thousands of arrivals and departures. They formed a crowd that spread across the sifted as hardened snow-white pumice; it was the majestic city of Inebu-Hedge or Memphis.
Slightly raised up, floor by floor, were the works that all of Egyptians had been harnessed to make.
Thousands of pairs of oxen were working with faint men. Together they were pulling the sledges of blocks up a huge ramp that started from the coast and ended in front of buildings that were under construction. They ramps were like an elongated basilisk.
Among them were guards—olive-black mercenaries that strained the Egyptian language with dialects of odd suffixes that could only come from the sandy sides of Seth, but this came at the expense of perfectly speaking with the whip that brought the builders in line.
Further down, as we have portrayed, were quartered the bartenders who were cooking more and more food for the ten thousand-strong crowd working under the coppery sun.
In this sea of people that moved in apparent chaos, but was guided by an unelected official apparatus, were Tammuz, Sharukin, and the others, breaking their way in the congested, makeshift roads.
They stopped to glean information from anyone who was not busy with work and willing to give it the strange “henebu” who seemed unusually generous. It was apparent that they were on a curious endeavor; truly only the higher circles of the royal and priestly aristocracy knew what was going on.
But it was quite difficult.
For many, the construction of the Pharaoh’s tomb, from whence he would ascend to become their fathers, the gods, with their fiery chariots, was an implied task and talkativeness was thwarted by their religious taboo.
But here and there someone—usually a builder, often an alcoholic old man who ceaselessly went about his small obligations, was willing to share his load but it was not easy to separate the valuable pieces of information from the ceaseless patter of chatter.
However, the men were careful, because the “eyes and ears” (spies) of the palace were everywhere. This spoke of the brutal and effective way in which they dealt with any gossip from troublemakers or discontents.
So they presented themselves when the eyes were watching them as testifying for Egyptianized Phoenicians with their religious fervor, which had been instilled by colonialism. This was the reason for their decision to come to worship in the great temples of the south, which were preached about by the true almighty gods.
Thus predisposed to an escalation by fanatical peasants, they learned that the construction work didn’t stopped day or night. Sundays were a day of rest though, when people here trusted, based on the tremulous ecstasy and crescendo of their voices, that the Pharaoh and the high priests met with the gods themselves.
Equipped with this new information, the men looked around the huge skeleton; they sought, as we would say in our time, security breaches.
Indeed, after an exhaustive search, they found such things, but the warning of impalement for intruders had shown them the fate that what awaited them if they failed.
This is how a few weeks passed—a period of time during which nothing noteworthy happened.
The men were hanging on the constructed monuments; Tammuz used his knowledge to reposition dislocated joints, which was not a rarity here, and thus he tied and dated them, with opening access to higher and higher places in the hierarchy.
Soon in all of the buildings the stranger with the tattoos and his retinue were known. They were assigned in the endless lists as “eating bread” and otherwise served as doctors.
In this way, they cleared up some of the suspicion surrounding them. The men often stayed up until all were exported by boats on the river, and sometimes they helped the undertakers who were the last living people allowed to remain.
Indeed, while they were burying the dead, laboring in a mass, unmarked grave, they saw that in the construction work over the pyramids soared a thing that shined; their golden tops looked like swarms of fireflies.
They could only speculate on it though because at every attempt to ask the gravediggers about the sight, their companions would cover their faces with their hands and begin to recite endless prayers.
These lights moved and were especially active in the cycles of the moon, which suggested a ritual whose mystery was shrouded by the sands of the desert, as if whispering black magic and witchcraft.
Even from the distance that separated them, the men felt as if they
were there and they shivered at the thought that they would be at the incarnation of the beginning to see what came out from the primary desires of humanity, from the stone statues.
But the intruders caught before them—usually misled stuttering village idiots, who were strangled with obscurantist publicity showed that no one, absolutely no one, could disturb the meetings with the fathers from the heavens.
So, armed with all the patience that could be expected from them, Sharukin, Tammuz, and the other stayed for weeks and weeks, laboring from dawn to dusk, until one October night when everything came to an end.
Ragged clouds who were looking as if they had been torn by claws; they were concealing the shiny obsidian moon.
Several vultures were circling over the sites, rummaging around the cold stone as the destroyers of graves.
The ink black river lapped its waters as a stream of souls came from nothing into nothing in the vast underworld.
The scaffolding of the buildings was also covered in darkness and the night twilight took the form of something that had been created from the subconscious of the mentally ill.
The group had just finished their dinner, putting their fingers in the ceramic jugs, when their colleagues, the gravediggers—people poorer than the Pharaoh they serving—began to prepare to leave, sipping the last bit of their beer.
“Where to, brothers?” asked Tammuz, chopping the words now that he was accustomed to their specific African dialect.
“At midnight, there will be a ceremony,” they said that with the gloominess that only pragmatic minds create with so much death around them. “Today, we have already worked enough for the living.”
“Well, we’ll stay,” Tammuz told them, stretching his hands from the evening chill. “We have to earn more pennies.”
The diggers nodded. They knew exactly what a curse it was to fool the stomach every day with earnings from the hands. They picked up their bronze tools, climbed onto a raft, and left.
The group quickly buried some swaddled dead. They were about to retire in the working class neighborhoods across the river when a procession lurched into the desert itself, focusing on the pyramid being built.
The silhouette wrapped in priestly robes sang and marched with the demons that accompany the dead on their way to misery.
The gathered participants chattered, intoxicated by substances and the magnetic exaltation that stretched almost a kilometer, stepping, as if in a movie, on a mountain of skulls.
Strangely, as if immersed with the ongoing black rites, they noticed nothing around themselves, such as the joining, marching troops.
The men felt despondent toward this extraordinary procession. They were preparing to transfer to the yonder beach when they saw a vast copper vessel from which six people were drawing the contents that were creating the resultant euphoria.
And in an instant, risking their lives, they wrapped themselves up, threw on fabrics, and participated in the procession by blending in as dancing dervishes or magicians.
Thus, striding through those entranced, they noticed in spite of the apparent chaos that existed in the thread, there was a strict hierarchy that would have required witchcraft.
At the front, their chests puffed out in ecstasy with their rods, or caducei, were the oldest people who had received the strongest part of the potion’s dregs.
Behind them, making incessant worship, were the younger individuals, who were content with the rare part of the dirty drink.
And at the back, as well as inter alia on all the sides were the assistants who waved like quenched star-filled censers.
All this, mixed with the seed, affected the nerves and made them prone to hallucinations.
Even the men, who had not touched the potions, but were immersed in the ritual actions did not notice that they were passing secondary structure after structure as they started to climb the ramps of the unfinished tomb; it crawled with an entangled veil of insects.
They finally reached the jagged top of the construction site and stopped before it. Then they once again relaunched the songs of praise, becoming more and more intoxicated.
The company began to wonder what was imminent when the crowd split, taking the elderly who had begun imposing whips on themselves. The scattered spray of blood continued while the monotone singing subsided.
Hypnosis took more and more control, and the action of the herbal substances stimulated people’s natural needs, leading many to relieve themselves in the middle of the ongoing ceremony.
“How can we be such pigs?” asked the men around them while many began to collapse from cumulative stress.
At that moment, in the supreme hysteria, several priests from the crowd signaled the younger helpers and touched the scepter to the golden top of the pyramid. Suddenly all at once, everyone fell to the ground, breathing like overfed, dying animals. One beam of whitish light shot from the pyramid’s heights.
The younger ones trembled with excitement. They began to cover and embalm the outfits of some of the participants who were still alive. The rest of the people were lying in pools of vomit, with limited consciousness.
The old priests, leaning on their sticks that bended like trees in a storm, were singing with their satanic baritones, and from the clouds, descending like flying soot, were fireballs of quirky gadgets that lit up the area like a solar eclipses.
Once they lowered their voices, the priests crouched, leaving only the young, who had already wrapped and placed their victims on the altar.
The lads pulled out hooks and were about to remove the people’s brains by wrenching them away while they were still alive when the disks descended like a black river, letting down some figures that caused all to hush and bow prostrate before them.
They were dressed in armor like dragon scales. It was clear the suits were well-fitted and they formed around their proportional bodies like wetsuits.
On their heads, resembling the hoods of mechanical reptiles, were spliced oxygen masks made of rubber. They reflected the darkness and cued it with something ominous.
“Again, you have gone too far with your whoring!” filtered the new arrivals, wheezing with every breath of indignation.
“Greatest bishops, after all, this is the ritual required of you . . .” whispered the clergymen.
“You have distorted all with your debauchery, but anyway . . . Have you drafted the offerings at least?”
“Yes, before you are the . . . .”
“Then what are you waiting for?” shouted the aliens, removing from the costumed containers.
“Maybe us!” Tammuz screaming, jumping up and removing from his bosom a short knife.
A hoot sounded at the top of the pyramid. The worshipers tried to make a move, but they failed due to the effects of the potion.
“Forgive us, oh, fathers . . .” they wept because of the unprecedented insult that had been done.
But the heavenly messengers weren’t affected by the scene. In contrast, their far darker binocular lenses allowed them to see into the beyond and they manifested a deep interest.
“Tammuz, what a pleasant surprise. Who would say that among the pigs a person can detect a pearl?” they finally said, staring from their opaque masks at the man.
He seemed startled that they recognized him and said, “Am I wrong?”
“No, you are not wrong. We are,” they said and raised their hands.
The aliens started to unhook their masks link by link, stroking the newly uncovered, deathly pale areas with their long, yellowish nails.
Once the last button fell, they brought their hands down and dried faces, wrinkled around the eye holes and ending in almost missed lips and cheekbones, lengthened into unnatural satanic smiles.
The worshipers suddenly stopped. Then their eyes and hands repeated even harder the “Praise,” that extended and stratified itself like a moan from the end altar.
“What, are not you glad to see us, Don? Or how should we call you? Tammuz?
“We created a l
ot of trouble in Crete and you addled the head of our poor slave Minos just when things had begun to get entertaining. Well, that’s nothing. We have left the real fun here, in the blessed chance under our hands, the land of Ta-Kemmet . . .” they began to clamor, dripping saliva from their teeth at every syllable.
Tammuz squeezed his weapon more tightly, assessing the situation. Then seeing that things were not in his favor, said, “Obviously, you are going to come after me if you are so aware of the details of my mission.
“Yet I will give you one last chance to escape, or me and my friends will do what is actually right. We will destroy you.”
The creatures erupted in laughter, secreting saliva and tears that streamed down their waxy-white, pink-edged tendons.
“You have always been a great wag, Don. Haven’t you realized yet that in life there is a certain evil that cannot be avoided?”
“Even so, I will again meet Him.”
“Why should you? You know, the problem is that all of this action is taken with the goal, the belief, that you should wait for Him. We will offer you something different and so convenient—here and now. Just a thought and anything that you wish, that can be reached in the flight of fantasy, is in your hands. The brilliance of all the kingdoms of the Earth, without the limitations of always standing one step behind reality, with only you ready to conquer them.”
Tammuz relaxed his grip on knife, but nevertheless said, “You are suggesting things to me like condemned ghosts. What you promise is beyond your power . . . .”
“Really?” they asked him, and the system of muscles played out in their cheeks, revealing toothy smiles. “Just think, there is a chance that tomorrow will dictate what is now. Then even the sorrows won’t be recalled. The chewed life story is nothing more than a dream that suddenly sinks from where it has popped.”
Tammuz relaxed his grip, but Sharukin, stopping now and listening to what they said, shouted, “Do not listen to them. As if there are any convenient shortcuts in the world! They are not right.”
The aliens giggled and said, “Right, wrong? Why are we dwelling on these little death accounts and limiting ourselves to the absolute? Supreme life means going beyond to try to become a living god.”
Crematorium for Phoenixes Page 10