by Jeff Long
Now she saw the monkey tail, or what was left of it, like a second penis beneath his real one. The leprosy had eaten it down to a stub. It was a real monkey tail, or more technically, a throwback to the vestige of a tail all humans were born with. Technically speaking, evolved traits could not revert to earlier forms. Yet here was another of the bizarre exceptions that the inner earth kept throwing at them. In his case, the relic tail had fully developed. It switched from side to side.
The horning process that occurred in certain regions of the subplanet had barely manifested in him. Nubbins pressed at the skin of his forehead, like boils.
She struggled to see past the ravages of disease and time. His flesh was crisscrossed with a short, hard lifetime of scars. Despite the old man’s pouches under his eyes and the hunch in his spine and the skin cancer on his bald scalp, he was probably no older than twenty-three. That would have made him thirteen when the plague swept through the tunnels.
He said something, a subterranean whisper surrounded with the peculiar ticks and clucks of the ancient Khoisan or click language spoken by the San !Kung Bushmen of southern Africa. It was a shy, almost musical sound. She recognized a single word, “I.” They were off and running.
She tried a greeting, one of the words in her grab bag of protolanguages. She said her name. Despite the leper’s mask—the astonished eyes, the thickened leonine features, the ulcers—his brow furrowed. Plainly her words were nonsense to him.
“Food,” she said, taking the jerky strip from the Baggie. She was careful to hold it in her right hand, not her unclean left one.
She broke the jerky into bite sizes and held one to his mouth. He refused it, rightfully suspicious.
“I know what you’re thinking,” the general’s voice said in her ear. She’d almost forgotten him, her focus was so intense. “Don’t do it.”
The hadal frowned. His hearing was acute. He had heard the voice coming from her ear, from inside her head. It confused and frightened him. “I’m losing him,” she said out loud to the general. Thinking fast, she popped the bit of human jerky into her mouth. She made a show of chewing. It tasted like dark drumstick meat.
This time he took the food she offered. His tongue darted for it. He chewed slowly, squeezing the flavor from the meat. His eyes rolled back with pleasure.
His front teeth were missing, a clue to his clan. Some clans used to file their teeth to points, some carved designs into the enamel or embedded precious stones. Some knocked out the front teeth of their children at puberty.
He allowed her to feed him the rest. At the end, he let loose with a small stream of words that were equal parts lung and tongue.
She shook her head no. He tried again, more slowly. Somewhere in that jumble of sounds probably lay his thanks to her, to the person whose body had provided the meat, and possibly to his god. But it came too fast, and her ear was out of practice. A decade ago, when Ike was still in her life, she had built a small vocabulary of hadal terms. Little registered anymore. With no one to practice with, she had lost much.
“Drink,” she said, and gave him a sip of milk. The little red carton reminded her of grade school, and that reminded her again of the children. This was an interrogation, not an anthro picnic. Here lay one of the killers and kidnappers.
Whatever the prisoner was expecting from the carton, it was not milk. The taste startled him. He looked at her and something changed in his eyes. “Ma-har,” he whispered.
Mother.
She looked at the milk carton in her hand. She might as well have offered her breast. Play it through. “Yes, ma-har. Children.” She held her hand at varying heights. “Mine. My children.” She clutched an imaginary Maggie to her chest. “Where?”
He understood. She could tell. He looked away.
“La.” She snapped it like a whip. Their eyes met. “Children. Go. Where?”
He clicked once, as if to say life is sorrow. And that he owned her, her people, and their children and their hopes. Like a king, this ruined creature.
She reverted to hand signals and pidgin language. Me, Ali. You?
“Mar-ee-ya,” he answered. It had a glottal stop, three distinct tones, and a click, all within three syllables.
“What was that?” the general said.
“Maria,” Ali said. She asked the leper more questions. “Yes, his name is Maria. That would be the name of his mother, whom he believes descended into the world, into the inside of the planet, in order to conceive him. She would have been a captive, like I was.”
The hadal began singing. It was a throat song, with the deep, long, vibrating tones used by Tibetan monks and Mongolian herders. As she listened, he began adding clicks and breath stops—words—to the bass tones. Solemn and plaintive, he lifted his eyes to the ceiling.
“Is that some kind of chant?” asked the general.
“You don’t recognize it?” she said. “He’s singing the Barney song. You know, the purple dinosaur.” Maggie’s favorite. “His mother must have sung it to him. Listen.” It was in mutilated English. She began singing along very softly. “ ‘I love you. You love me. We’re a happy family.’ ”
The decaying prisoner glanced over with approval. She knew his prayer!
They went back and forth. Ali spoke to the air, to the general. “I asked him about the plague. He says his mother and the rest of his clan were in a cave near the surface at the time. They ventured out into a city for food. He was the only one who stayed behind. They never returned.”
“Where was this clan of his going?”
She asked more questions. The hadal spoke. He pointed at the milk carton. “They needed to find new containers. No, vessels, new vessels. And something about the sun.”
“Does that make any sense to you?”
“Not yet.”
The prisoner spoke again.
“He says that’s why he came out from the cave and into the terrible blindness. From down there up to the light and foulness of the surface world. In order to find his people, who want to go home. He and others were sent to do this. To guide them back into the earth.”
“His people came up here after the plague? They’ve been hiding up here all this time? Where? Are there more?”
More questions. More clicks and whispers. Ali listened. “He’s talking about their souls traveling on. Reincarnation, he means. They believed in that. The dead souls rose up to the surface and went searching for new vessels. New bodies. The children of the sun. The sun children. Our children.”
“Our children contain their dead souls?”
“It goes beyond that. It weaves us all together into a single circle. His mother died and her spirit ascended. Now it’s his duty to guide her home again. To lead her down from evil. Away from us.”
“Our children are his ancestors?”
“Or his ancestors are our children. A difference in the possessive.”
She looked at the prisoner. His eyes were gleaming with true faith. They were like two pools of fire in his ruined body.
The general was silent. Then he said, “Fine. Good. Do it his way. Follow his path. Ask him where he was going to take his mother.”
“He says he couldn’t find his mother. He located others, but not his mother. So he was going to lead them under. Maybe someone else has saved her. That is his hope.”
“Were they all gathering in one place?”
“That’s my impression.”
“Where were they heading?”
Ali tried again. “He won’t say.”
“He refuses?”
“He declines.”
“Let’s take a break.”
“I’d rather keep going.” She had the beginning of a connection here, and there was so much else to ask him. Just hearing the language plunged her into the tunnels again. At every bend and new passageway, carved panels and statues and relics and leather codices waited, rich with ancient text. It had been like piecing together her very soul, one footstep at a time.
“We’ve been at
it for over an hour. The trick is to stay fresh. Stay ahead of him. Keep your energy up. Come on out. We’ll give it another shot in a few minutes.”
The general met her at the door. They walked to the entrance. Rain lashed the glass. The wind blew apart puddles on the asphalt. They decided not to venture across to the commissary with its inviting neon signs. Mc-Donald’s. Taco Bell. Kentucky Fried Chicken. She remembered the jerky.
“Coffee?”
“No, thanks.”
“What a day.”
“Awful.”
They stood watching the storm. The general chatted about his son’s piano lessons. “Für Elise” was a booger. He enthused about a Thai restaurant in Berkeley. They didn’t discuss the interrogation. He checked his watch. A half hour had passed. “Shall we head back?”
The room was clean and quiet. No echoes of screams. No blood on the floor. Then she noticed that the sheets were freshly changed. Maybe they had only spruced the place up. She clung to the notion.
Then she spied the bite stick lying on the floor. It was padded with duct tape and bore the mark of his teeth. They had been at him again with their torture.
“Let’s see what he has to say this time,” the general said in her ear.
The hadal was sleeping with his lidless eyes open, like a fish drifting in water. Saliva strung from his mouth. “Maria,” she said.
The prisoner woke. His eyes rounded up to her. “Ma-har,” he whispered.
“Here I am.” She touched her heart and rocked an imaginary baby in her arms. “My baby child. Where?”
This time he answered in his language. “Home, Mother.”
“Where, home?” said Ali.
He said something about the circle again. This time he gestured to her: come closer. The general was watching like a hawk. “You’re close enough,” he told her.
She lowered her face to the monster. Liquid seeped from his pink eyes. She could almost believe he was feeling sorrow at their impasse. But then she saw the feral blaze in his eyes. It took her breath. He felt no sorrow or remorse, just the stone-hard hunger of a separate kind. She started to rear back from him. But as she did, what was left of his hand brushed her cheek. It felt like warm plastic.
“Guards,” the general’s voice barked in her ear.
“No,” she said. She let the prisoner touch her cheek again. This time she remembered the spiral she had drawn there. He was pointing at its center.
“What?” said the general.
“The children are being taken to the center of the spiral,” she said.
“Now we’re getting somewhere.”
“Not necessarily,” she said. “It could be anywhere. Everywhere. There are spiral symbols scattered from one end of the tunnels to the other down there. These are nomads. Ghosts. Wandering among the ruins of their ancestors. They’re constantly on the move. Constantly prowling. The children could vanish with them forever.”
“Keep digging. He pointed at the center. There must be some central collecting point. This thing was coordinated. They have a leader. Ask him about your city, Hinnom, the place you went ten years ago.”
“Why there?” she said. The city of her nightmares. Some Bible buff had named it after the valley where Jerusalemites once practiced child sacrifice and kept fires burning to consume trash and the bodies of the poor and nameless.
“We have reason to believe it may still be inhabited.”
Inhabited? How could they know that? And if it was true, why hadn’t they preempted last night’s attack? But now was not the time to press the general for answers.
“Hinnom,” she said to the hadal. It made no sense to him. “Civitas,” she tried. “Kome.” Civitas, Latin for city. Kome was the Old Greek for village, and the root for the Old High Germanic home. “Hel.”
The legendary Hell, she meant, but also the real, geological one. A matter of semantics. Hell was formed from helan, meaning to hide. The dark and hidden place. “Deep city,” she patched together. “Hel. Dead. The People. Many, many dead.” She pointed at the circle on her notepad, at the point in the middle. “City? Home? Center?” Were they the same?
Then she waited. His fins balled and opened in the restraints. His eyes traveled upon her. She was glad for the soldiers outside the door. She could feel the heat coming off his body. His pink sweat had a rank, musky smell. At last he spoke. It was a single word. “Pit-ar.”
Ali was stunned. She glanced around for a piece of paper. Finding none, she drew—on her palm—the stick figure of a man, or hadal, and pointed at it. “Pit-ar?”
He shuddered, and nodded yes. He was dying.
“Peter?” said the general.
“Pit-ar,” she said. “It’s a basic root word in Nostramic, the protolanguage that underlies what we speak today. Pater in old Greek, it became Fater in Old High German. Then Faeder. Father. His god. His creator. Older-Than-Old. The hungry god.”
“Satan?”
“Older, much older, at least linguistically.” Ali kept her voice low and soothing as she spoke to the room’s microphones. The prisoner watched her, not comprehending a word, possibly thinking she was praying to herself. “Pit-ar predates Satan by many civilizations. He represents one of the earliest attempts to explain the mysteries of life and death. As mankind gained consciousness and language, we started creating gods and giving them names so that we could speak to them and try to influence them.”
“This confirms another report we received.”
“What report?”
“That there is a king in your city of the dead. That these things are led by a giant dressed in a suit of jade armor.”
Turning to the mirror glass on the wall, she spoke to her own image, to her own doubt. “But that can’t be.”
“Why not?”
“Because I saw him killed. It was just before the plague struck.”
“Either he didn’t die or he came back,” the general said. “Nothing is what it seems down there. Your very words.”
“He’s still alive? Who told you this?”
“A man named Joshua Clemens. He said the two of you met, and you refused to help him.”
She vaguely remembered. “The pornography man? He talked about doing a documentary, but I figured he was just another pirate looking for hadal gold. I never heard from him again.”
“His film crew was attacked. Just outside your city of ruins.”
“He actually went down?”
“Seven years ago. He surfaced, alone, a month ago, the sole survivor. That’s his story. He said it’s a dead city, full of bones. But still alive. We’re not taking his word for anything. But our friend here just verified the broad facts to you. A center to the spiral. A base camp for this Pit-ar of theirs. Now we have a target destination.”
“But he didn’t say that,” she said.
“We’ll take it from here.”
“Let me dig a little deeper,” she said. “He has more to tell.”
“Another time, Professor. You can come out now.”
She bent over the bed of the doomed prisoner. “Who is the Father?”
The hadal lolled his head toward her. This time his fin turned over her hand. He touched the aleph drawn on the back.
“This?” she said. “Pit-ar?”
He touched the aleph.
“Where? Where is the Father?”
The aleph, again.
Like a riddle, the Father was a place and a deity and a thing, all in one.
Somehow her answer lay in a spiral whose center held an aleph.
ARTIFACTS
CHRISTIAN BROADCAST NETWORK
Pat Robertson: I think we’ve just seen the antechamber to terror. We haven’t even begun to see what they can do to the major population.
Jerry Falwell: The ACLU’s got to take a lot of the blame for this.
Pat Robertson: Well, yes.
Jerry Falwell: And, I know that I’ll hear from them for this. But, throwing God out successfully with the help of the federal court system, t
hrowing God out of the public square, out of the schools. The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy forty million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way—all of them who have tried to secularize America—I point the finger in their face and say, “You helped this happen.”
Pat Robertson: Well, I totally concur, and the problem is, we have adopted that agenda at the highest levels of our government. And so we’re responsible as a free society for what the top people do. And, the top people, of course, is the court system.
Jerry Falwell: Pat, did you notice yesterday that the ACLU, and all the Christ haters, People for the American Way, NOW, etc., were totally disregarded by the Democrats and the Republicans in both houses of Congress as they went out on the steps and called out to God in prayer and sang “God Bless America” and said, “Let the ACLU be hanged”? In other words, when the nation is on its knees, the only normal and natural and spiritual thing to do is what we ought to be doing all the time—calling upon God.
Pat Robertson: Amen.
10
DIALOGUES WITH THE ANGEL, NUMBER 2
The angel and his pet sit upon huge bones fused into the floor. The giant beast once swam in an ocean that dried and fell into the earth and there gained a ceiling that now supports another ocean. The Pacific Ocean, the disciple vaguely recalls. He has grown apart from that world. It has become a dream to him.
The angel breaks loose a chunk of the fossil rib. “You have asked me if I was present in the beginning.” Idly he taps the piece of stone rib against another rib.
The disciple tries to marshal the still mind of a proper student. But that drumbeat—stone on stone—unsettles him. He cannot read the angel’s mood in it.
“I have wondered, Rinpoche,” he carefully answers.
“You are not the first to wonder,” the angel assures him. “You are not the last. What you all really mean is this: What came before me? Did I see the face of God?”