by Jeff Long
“It was evil.” Gregorio said it very quietly. He knew about Maggie. He let Ali have her anger.
Breathe, she told herself. Maybe she didn’t have any business among the bones this morning. But day after day, the long-lost children kept pulling her up from camp. It was as if they needed a mother. And she needed a daughter. It was that simple.
“There is no evil,” she said. “Satan is dead. I saw him killed. He was just a man in a mask.”
In a sense, that incident had closed the book on hadal civilization. The man, a Jesuit named Thomas, had recruited her to join the first scientific expedition beneath the Pacific. Her mission: to hunt for the historical Satan. It had made a sort of holy sense at the time. Hell was freshly opened, and she was a nun and he was a priest. Only later, after the hadals captured her, had Thomas declared himself to be the same immortal creature he had sent her to find. She had fallen for his deadly charade, just in time to see him gunned down.
“Then he wasn’t Satan.” Gregorio glanced around at the fog, as if his basajaunak, the shaggy ancient ones of his homeland, might hear her blasphemy. “Because there is still evil in the world.” At times like this, he seemed very young to her.
“Evil doesn’t need a name, though,” she said.
“But it does,” Gregorio insisted. “We need the devil.” He touched his heart. “In here, it feels only half complete without him.”
“Why? Because if he’s dead, God is dead?” That was the hand grenade in the theologians’ shop these days. It was something of a religious crisis. Unless evil had a face, man was left alone looking in his mirror. “We had to grow up eventually,” she said. “We’re all alone now. There is no one else to blame for the wicked things that happen to us.”
Gregorio gestured at the skeletons. “So it is okay for the children to die?”
Her eyes dropped to his bouquet of wildflowers by the skull. “I’m simply saying there’s no use in blaming it on wicked spirits,” she said. “The best we can do is to make the universe speak for itself. Language is our salvation. Without it there is only chaos.”
“Music, I think,” he said. “Music is our salvation.” His great work in progress was a symphony for prehistoric instruments. What a sight and sound that was going to be, the bone flutes and violins with sinew strings.
“Words or notes,” she said, touching the long wall that girdled the mound, “we are left with only glyphs for our clue.”
Standing a foot high, the glyphs ran the length of the exposed stone. They were like a badly weathered jigsaw puzzle in a language from another planet. Some of the symbols already belonged to her growing database of hadal alphabets and pictograms. The rest were so ancient, they had probably gone extinct long ago.
“I still can’t figure out how that Coast Guard boy found them in the first place,” she said. “What possessed him to walk across the island to this spot?”
“Voices.” Gregorio said it without hesitation.
It startled her. “Voices?” He heard them, too?
“Well, not real voices. Memories. In the case of our friend Jones, he was hearing the voice of his dead lover,” Gregorio said. “I am reading between the lines of the commander’s report. But after she killed herself, I think Jones had a curse on him.”
“His girlfriend was a suicide?” Ali had glossed over that part of the report, going straight for the old black-and-white photos of the glyphs.
“She was pregnant by him, and they were not married yet, and her parents were very religious,” Gregorio said. “She killed herself. It was only a matter of time before he did the same, don’t you think?”
“Not necessarily.”
“He went missing on the anniversary of her suicide. It’s completely obvious. She was calling to him. He was haunted. I think he jumped into the sea.”
“Come on, haunted?”
“Yes, I know, my Old World superstitions.”
“Okay, a broken heart and guilt might explain Jones’s wandering, but not his discovery,” she said. “Something tempted him to pull away the vegetation and find the glyphs.” Just like something had tempted Ali to pull up part of the lichen mat and find the bones.
Gregorio laid one hand on the stone. “Luck,” he said. “His, then ours.”
Ali looked at him, then looked again, but this time over his head. Last night’s rain had washed away a chunk of the mound’s green turf. Something lay underneath, carved from the rock face. “Is that a stair step?”
Gregorio grabbed a shovel, but couldn’t reach the step. He tossed it, and the shovel head rang on the stone.
“Give me a boost,” she said.
“You want to go up there?” Gregorio’s expression darkened. “No. I will go.”
“Just give me a boost.”
She stood in the stirrups of his hands, then on his shoulders, and got a good grip of the sod. Her misplaced husband, Ike, the mountain climber, would have waltzed up. Ali thrashed and flailed without shame. The turf sheeted off below her waist.
“That’s high enough,” said Gregorio. Covered with mud and wet grass, he stood ready to catch her.
The prospect of climbing down was worse than going up. Struggling higher, she reached the step. She tore away more of the turf. “There’s more than one step. It’s a whole staircase.”
The edges of steps laddered higher. “Go get the rest of the gang,” she said. “Something’s on top of the mound. Or inside it.”
“I’m not leaving you,” he said.
He looked so small down there. To his left and right, half digested by the fog, the bones rested in a long line of white piles. They were arranged at the base of this buried staircase. It was so obvious from this height. The children had been sacrificed to the secret in this mound.
“I’m not going to fall,” she said. “Start them digging from the bottom up. Expose the stairs.”
“Don’t go any higher.”
“I promise.”
The moment he vanished, she started higher, attacking the turf with her bare hands. The mud was chilly. It avalanched past her legs. None of the bones lay in the fall line. The children were safe.
The stairs rose into the fog. She lost sight of the ground. The mound was not natural. Massive blocks of stone lay buried under the dirt and lichen. Someone had built this small mountain by hand, and then someone else had buried it. But why?
The summit was a disappointment, flat and empty and viewless. Tufts of grass jutted from the stone joints. Bits of broken blue eggshell littered the tufts. Ali walked around, hunting for hints of what the pyramid might once have balanced on its head. She bent to examine a long furrow, partially grown over, that offered the possibility of more recent activity up here. She pressed her fingers into it, then heard someone huffing for breath behind her, and stood.
Gregorio arrived, smeared with mud and carrying his shovel. He blew a cloud of frost. Far below, the ocean broke against invisible cliffs. “What have you found?”
“I don’t know. The glyphs at the bottom are hadal. This must have been an outpost, the farthest reach of their empire. Beyond this point, the surface held only an Ice Age wilderness. Does that explain the sacrifices? Were they trying to hold back the forces of nature with a blood sacrifice? Or warn away their human rivals. Or…what?” They were close, but winter was closer.
“We are not done yet, Alexandra,” Gregorio vowed. He struck his shovel at the inscrutable earth.
Without a sound, the ground opened at his feet. It swallowed him to the hips. One moment he loomed head and shoulders above her, the next she was staring down at the top of his head. There he stood, a man with no legs, still gripping the majesty of his shovel.
Ali burst into laughter.
Gregorio made a face. He patted the dirt at his waist. “This is funny?”
His wounded dignity only made it worse. “Stop,” she said. “Give me your hand.”
“Never mind,” he said. “I’ll work from where I stand.”
He began sawing away the
grassy carpet from around his hips, widening the hole. The hole contained steps leading down inside the mound. Gregorio started down, then looked up and saw her hesitation.
“Maybe we should wait for another day,” he said.
She had every reason not to go in. People were pouring into the earth’s caverns by the thousands each day, seeking their fortunes, finding their dreams. But for Ali, the Subterrain remained a nightmare. It had stolen the father of her child, and then stolen her child. It had stolen her life, or one of them. That’s how it felt.
She had made a career of staring into the abyss, but from a distance, in the safety of her institute in San Francisco. Eventually she was going to have to go under, though. She felt halfway gone from the world anyway.
“We don’t want to be wondering all winter what’s in here,” she said. “Show the way.” She had a flashlight in one pocket, a compulsion, light. She handed it to him.
The stairs snaked down. What began as a man-made structure with quarried stone soon married an old volcano vent. The passage followed nature’s lead.
The rewards came almost immediately. Untouched by the elements, glyphs in pristine condition decorated the walls. Ali and Gregorio wound deeper into the tube.
“The volcano was like a throat singing words into the wind.” He shined her light here and there. “But what was it singing? Who was it singing to?”
“Have you noticed this symbol?” Ali pointed to a mark similar to a bent N. “It keeps repeating. And the deeper we go, the more frequently it repeats, like a drumbeat practically, drowning out all the other sounds.”
Soon the walls bore a steady stream of nothing but N’s. The glyph teased her. She felt like she should know it. Her head tilted. The glyph fell into position. “It’s an aleph.”
Gregorio came back up the steps.
“Do you see it?” She traced a modern aleph beside the incision in the stone. “It’s from the Semitic alphabet, the first letter, a silent letter. But this symbol must predate that by ten thousand years or more.” Ali glanced around. The alephs spiraled upward. “How elegant.”
Gregorio waited, helpless.
“It’s the sound of silence,” she said. “See how silence turns into words as it ascends.”
Her intuition shocked Gregorio. “That has to be it.”
“I could be wrong,” she said. But she was right. She knew it in her gut.
“How deep does this go?” Gregorio said.
“If it connects to the network of tunnels, and I suspect it does, then you’ve discovered a new entry point. Congratulations. You can add your name to the register.” Once upon a time that would have been unique. Anymore, it was like climbing Everest, a dime a dozen.
“We can’t stop here,” he said. The hook had set in him that quickly.
“And when the battery goes dead?” she said. “And, let’s see, I have a Luna bar for my lunch. Oh, and a bottle of Aleve.” For what she feared were hot flashes, she did not say. “How about you? Got all the descent gear?”
“The deeps provide,” he said. “You told me so.”
“To those who know them, they provide.”
He handed her the flashlight. “Then you guide me. This is your province.”
“It’s not that easy.” In fact, it was. Going down into the earth was as simple as breathing. Climbing back out, though—leaving hell and all its magic behind—that was the challenge.
“Here’s a path. Our very own. Think what we might find, Alexandra.”
“Another time.”
“Just a little farther.”
They did not have to go far.
Gregorio saw the body first. He froze and crossed himself. Ali went around him and kneeled by it.
More bone than leather, the carcass rested at the foot of a raw stone column. The man had been wearing a heavy, cable-knit sweater and sailor’s pants.
“Petty Officer Jones,” she said. She had no doubts. Here was the Coast Guard boy, the would-be Orpheus. He had descended barely a quarter mile before lying down for a nap here. Maybe he had died dreaming of his dead sweetheart.
Gregorio took off his wind jacket and covered what remained of the face. He straightened. And hissed. “And what is this thing?”
Ali followed his eyes and ran her light up the pillar.
“A Minotaur?” she said.
It was a statue, two stories tall, grotesque in the classical sense, part man, part beast. The thing had been carved from a single twisting column of stone. Spiraling up from the base, veins of dark granite served as mineral ropes. The sculptors had begun their work at its stomach, leaving coarse chisel marks and gouges at the start, and refining their strokes as they went higher. In effect they had partially freed the man-bull creature from his roots. But they had, fearfully it seemed, not freed him entirely. Only the horns were polished.
“This is what killed the children,” said Ali.
“A fairy-tale monster?” Gregorio circled the pillar like a moth.
“Here is the voice of the aleph,” she said. “It fits perfectly. The aleph and the ox’s head.”
“What are you talking about, the ox’s head?”
“Ah, grasshopper,” she said. It was one of their private jokes, the wise teacher and her intern. With her fingertip she sketched the symbol’s evolution. “The Phoenicians drew it with horns.”
“Here is the shape of a head, here are the horns. The horns became legs, this went here, that went there.”
It came tumbling out of her. She was excited. “The aleph is the origin of the first letter in our alphabet, a celebration of our contract with nature’s power. It’s the beginning of our written language, an animal turned into a picture turned into a letter. A humble letter. A powerful letter. Written on the head of the golem, it was the letter that brought it to life. Did you know the aleph is the first letter of God’s mystical name in Exodus? ´Ehye ´Asher ´Ehye. ‘I Am That I Am.’ ”
“Yes, Alexandra. But this is no golem. This is not God. It’s a monster.”
“It must have been their god,” Ali said. That sculpted mouth, half open, was roaring the silence that became language. “The aleph made flesh. Or stone.” She spoke a word in the hadal’s click language. It meant “Older-Than-Old.” Their god, our devil.
By accident, it seemed, lured by a memory of her daughter’s voice, she had jumped twenty thousand years back in time. Long ago, a simple letter in the alphabet had lived in these dark caverns in the form of some monstrous cult. But also, she suddenly realized, not so long ago.
“I’ve seen this before,” she said. “It was a different version and grown over with scar tissue. But it was the same thing, an aleph.”
“Scar tissue?”
“They cut it into Ike when they captured him.” Gregorio’s little smile faded. Ike, again. Though Ike was probably dead. As dead as poor Jones. “It was at the base of his spine,” she said. “He told me it was an ownership mark.”
“He belonged to this?” Gregorio shoved at the stone column as if his hand could topple it. But the statue was immovable. It almost seemed to support the earth on its shoulders.
“He had no idea what it meant or who had owned him. It was different from all the other slave marks. It bothered him. Obsessed him. He said it was like being an orphan who didn’t know his father’s name. I think it’s why he abandoned us.” Us: she and Maggie and all his own kind.
Even before his daughter was born, even before Ali chose her name, Ike had vanished back into the earth, leaving one child fatherless while he searched for a name and a father that were not his own.
They stood quietly. Water drip-dropped in the shadows. Otherwise, the place was silent as a tomb.
Ali shined her light into the tunnel. It wound deeper. “We should go. The others will wonder where we disappeared to.”
Suddenly he was alarmed for her good reputation. “Yes, immediately. We must tell them about the tunnel.” He looked down at the body. “What about him?”
“We’ll i
nform the authorities. But for now, poor Jones has his tomb.”
“Good. Very good.” Gregorio’s face blossomed with relief. Someone else could handle the dead.
“You might as well take your jacket with you.”
He shuddered. “Let him have it. For his journey.”
They started back. Partway up the steps, Ali felt something, not quite a hand, but a grasp nonetheless, reaching for her.
Mommy.
She froze.
Ali glanced up the stairs at Gregorio striding on. Plainly he hadn’t heard a thing. She stabbed her light at the lower reaches, searching for the voice. The stone Minotaur seemed to be watching her.
“Maggie,” she whispered. She waited for the voice to speak again. It didn’t. Sleep, baby. Turning, she climbed after Gregorio, unaware of the lullaby on her lips as she hurried toward the light.
ARTIFACTS
THE WEATHER CHANNEL
A COLD DAY IN HELL
A persistent tubular airflow will continue to cool the Nine Rivers Gorge region. Patchy fog early, then clear and unseasonably chilly. Highs in the upper 40s to low 50s. Lows, the same.
River levels—steady at norm. Be alert for flash flooding.*
Interior extremes (last week)
High—148 degrees in Wink, Grosse Tunnels, Arctic provinces
Low—39 degrees in Nueva Loca, Argentine Protectorates
ALERTS: a fast-moving cloud of sulfur will reach the Henners network late today. Expect olfactory distress. Tube 666 in the L-Zone is closed due to electromagnetic storms.
SUPERALERTS: a methane plume has been detected in the Xining-New Toronto territories, at minus-3 miles elevation and rising. Methane is combustible. Mixtures of 5 to 15 percent in air are explosive. Methane is not toxic when inhaled, but can produce suffocation by reducing oxygen concentrations. Carry gas masks. Observe flame discipline. Be prepared. Be aware.