Deeper

by Jeff Long

  The second wave had begun two years later. Emboldened by the subterranean “extinction event” (Ali detested the sterility of that term…it had been an outright genocide), people came pouring down from the surface. Lured by promises of wealth, a fresh start, or amnesty for crimes, or forcibly sent by their governments, the new surge of colonists had spread like weeds from the old core cities. But the boom was going bust.

  Beneath the continents and oceans, but especially in this faraway region under the Pacific Ocean, the frontier was suffering major declines in population. The experts cited any number of reasons for the “correction,” from pioneering fatigue to cancer scares, localized deformities, and D2, or “darkness depression.” More and more settlers were complaining of sleeping disorders, bad dreams, and social withdrawal, all to be expected when your body clock goes haywire from sun loss.

  But Ali was beginning to think something else, entirely different, might be to blame, something systemic. Back in the final decades of the twentieth century, man had slashed his way into the deepest jungles, only to be felled by lurking viruses: HIV, Ebola, Marburg, and others. Surely the Interior held its own menagerie of natural defenses. Could that explain the desertion and die-off she was seeing here? Was the cave simply reacting to human trespass?

  Running her light along a stone wall, Ali found dozens of little tubes of white paper sticking from the joints. In the first village it had been remarkable. By now the private wailing walls were a dime a dozen. She pulled a tube loose and unrolled it, already knowing what it would describe. The voices. Always the voices.

  “Trina came again yesterday,” she read. “And Dad! We talked. They tell me their names and remind me of things. Trina used to brush her hair a hundred times. It was like counting gold. She wants me to remember. That’s what they need me for, I think. I am their island. They can rest with me before going back onto the water.”

  Ali let it flutter to the ground. Gregorio was more reverent, rolling up each scrap of paper and sticking it back into the wall. “Anything?” she said.

  “Words and scribbles,” he said. “Notes from the underground, the same as in the other villages. This one heard voices. This one saw ghosts. It’s all the same. Craziness. Alexandra, I think we are chasing the wild goose.”

  “Keep looking,” she said. “Is there any mention of the children or of hadals? Did anybody see footprints? Do they mention stolen food, disappearances, missing animals, any suggestion the hadals might have passed through?”

  Gregorio turned over a metal plaque. “Ah, here, ‘Welcome to Chevrolet.’ Now we know what kind of car someone liked to drive.”

  “It’s a start,” said Ali, and pulled out her notebook.

  They split up. Ducking into a side room, Ali found scattered papers, piles of dried feces, and in the corner a skeleton. Pieces of beard clung to his jaw. A knife lay nearby. His wrist bones rested on sand rusty with old blood. Another nameless suicide.

  Gregorio appeared in the doorway and saw the bones. Now he will cross himself. And he did, fathersonholyghost. Ali smiled.

  “We should go back to the boat,” he said. “I found more fuel and a case of food. We are done here.”

  Like others along the way, the village had offered up no clues for their search. Some villages had names, which she recorded in her notebook. This one would go down as Chevrolet, the Village of the Bearded Skeleton.

  “Alexandra?”

  “Yes?”

  “I have been thinking.”

  Ali waited.

  “If it is a disease, we may have it by now.”

  “Time will tell,” she said.

  “Yes, but if it is so, and if I am the first to go, just promise you will cover me.”

  “All right.”

  “I don’t want my bones to lie naked like this.”

  He had given her funeral instructions at least four times in other villages. “I’ll say a few words over you, too,” she said.

  “Yes, excellent. I will do the same for you.”

  “And what will you say about me?” she gaily asked. There was only so much ceremony one could stand on, and the bones didn’t care if she was glum or jolly.

  “Well.” Gregorio tucked his chin against his chest. He exhaled deeply and pondered the bearded skeleton. “I would say about you, yes, here lies a woman…”

  “With a beard,” Ali inserted. Gregorio stared at her. “He has a beard,” she pointed out, “but go on.”

  “Here lies a woman…” He stopped. “A woman I knew…A woman…” He stopped again, overcome by his eulogy.

  “Just put a Purity chocolate over my heart,” Ali said. “Dark, please. Those are my favorite.”

  “Alexandra!” He waved at the bones. “This is your death we’re speaking about.”

  “You’re right, Gregorio.” She assembled a serious face.

  “Madre de Dios,” he sighed.

  Whatever he had been working himself up to say was spoiled. Not that it was so hard to guess. I love you, too, she thought.

  “I’m going next door,” he said. He knocked his head going under the doorway. “Madre…”

  Ali stirred a pile of paper scraps in the corner. Bits of words, mad scrawls, doodles: it looked like her trash can after a staff meeting. Her moment of good humor gave way to frustration. They were flailing. Trapped in a labyrinth of inlets and nameless villages and with the bones of lunatics, they were barely inching ahead. What they needed was a great leap forward, but to where? She could practically hear the darkness nibbling away at their noble purpose, like mice. The saviors had become scavengers.

  “Alexandra,” Gregorio called.

  She found him next door with yet another skeleton lying at his feet. But this one was different. It bore a gift. A two-foot-long plastic cylinder rested inside the rib cage. It looked like a second spine, like something someone had stored in there. The word “NASA” ran along one side.

  “It was just like that,” he said. “I haven’t touched it.”

  “Gregorio, open it. Look inside. Hurry.”

  He pulled the cylinder from its cage of bones and took off the cap. He peeked in and his eyes got big. “I don’t believe in miracles,” he said. But obviously this was one.

  “Is it what I think?” she said.

  He nodded.

  They slid the expedition map out and unrolled it and pinned its corners with rocks. “Emperor Lake” was written in the middle of a big, blank amoeba. Its blobby arms were fringed with little names and numbers.

  “The answer to our prayers,” said Ali.

  “It’s identical to the one that burned,” said Gregorio.

  “Not quite,” she said, quickly running her fingers over the paper. “The handwriting is different, see? And this has more information, much more. Look at all these names. And the corrections on top of corrections, and the margins full of notes.”

  “Did the NASA people give it to the villagers? Or did they steal it?”

  “I don’t know. But either way, if the villagers had it, why leave it like this, slipped inside a skeleton?”

  Gregorio shrugged. “The whole village was going mad.”

  “Yes, but the map was left inside the bones, not on top. That means the body had been lying here for weeks or months. This was done after the village was dead. Whoever it was left the map for someone to find.”

  Ali concentrated on the marginalia. It had dates, postscripts, questions, population tidbits, and observations about the flora and fauna. At the bottom, she found a symbol. “There he is,” she pointed.

  Gregorio bent to see. “It looks like a lightning bolt all squashed together.”

  It came to her. “WM,” she said. “William McNabb. Li’s missing friend.”

  “So here he ended,” Gregorio said. “In a village of madmen.”

  “Maybe not,” said Ali, scouring the map. “By the time he got here there was nothing but bones. And he was well adapted to the territory and intent on going deeper. It’s just a feeling, but I thi
nk he went on.”

  “Without a map? Alone? In this place?”

  “We didn’t have a map,” she said.

  “That’s not the point. If we had a map, we wouldn’t leave it with a dead man.”

  “If we knew where we were going, and the map had nothing more to tell us, then we might leave it,” she said. “We might even need to leave it. Unless the past points to the future, you only go in circles.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Here we are, at Chevrolet. And here is where we want to go.” She pointed at a triangle of aleph symbols on the far side of the lake. Spreading her thumb and little finger, she compassed twice straight across the lake from point to point. Next she compassed along the meandering shoreline. It was eighteen times the distance.

  “Excellent,” he said. “You have proved that the shortcut is shorter.”

  “Now,” she continued. “Look carefully. Chevrolet sticks out into the lake. There is no point closer to our destination than where we are right now. Move up the coast or down, and the distance across suddenly gets much longer.”

  “Yes, but without the map we would not know that.”

  “Agreed,” she said. “Now look at the opposite shore. What landmarks do you see?”

  “Except for the aleph, none. For a hundred miles to the right or left, the map is barren.”

  “And so, here is where we want to start across. There is where we want to go,” she said. “That’s why McNabb left the map, because it had no more to tell him than it has to tell us. And because it was a temptation to play it safe and stick to the shore.”

  “You think he took a boat across?”

  “I do.”

  “But, Alexandra, I still don’t understand. This map was his labor and love. Look at all the care he put into it. Why not take it along and continue his mapping?”

  “Two reasons,” said Ali. “First, the map is a message—or an invitation—to anyone who shared his quest. ‘Whoever is following me, set sail from here.’ ”

  “If that is so, then why not just leave his message written in big letters on a rock, or make an arrow pointing across the lake?”

  “Because he’s not inviting the whole world to follow,” she said, “only those who are looking for what he was looking for, the aleph.” Ali spread her hands over the map. Unmarked and inconspicuous, the aleph hid among the rest of the text.

  “And the second reason he left it behind?”

  “Simple,” she said. “McNabb decided he was never coming back. This is his last testament.”

  Gregorio shined his light out the stone doorway. The light glinted upon the inky water of the lake. “The man had enough faith to go, but not come back?” he said. “What kind of man is that?”

  Suddenly Ali felt frail and uncertain. She did not have enough courage for the two of them. If Gregorio wanted to turn around, she would follow him back to the surface where they belonged. But if he chose to go deeper, she would do her best to lead. She folded her hands in her lap and waited.

  “You mean what kind of faith,” she said.

  This was not a matter of manhood. She wanted Gregorio to know that. He could walk away with his honor intact.

  He slowly rolled up the map and put it in the tube, then stood.

  “So now,” he said, “we are supposed to follow McNabb who followed Ike who followed a mark on the wall?”

  That summed it up. “Yes,” she said.

  “Absurd.”

  She agreed. “Yes.”

  He stood there slapping the map tube against his open palm. At last he spoke. “It may or may not kill us to go on,” he said. “But it will certainly kill us not to.”

  She looked up. He was offering his hand.

  “Let us go join the parade of fools,” he said.

  ARTIFACTS

  THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

  Ghosts in the Machine: Chinese Sub Mystery Heats Up

  Dec 29. Washington. China’s ambassador to the U.S. was summoned to the State Department to explain the bizarre incident, but he refused to appear and has reportedly been recalled to Beijing. China has issued a protest over the confiscation of the submarine. Nonessential personnel are being evacuated from the U.S. embassy in Beijing after Chinese demonstrators threw stones and burned an American flag.

  China has demanded the return of the submarine and its crew, and a second submarine has surfaced just outside American waters. The accident has some speculating that the Chinese crew may have been seeking political asylum.

  But one eyewitness to the crash claims the Chinese captain was ranting about voices and the ghost of his dead wife before authorities took him away. Other crew members were also seen wandering on the beach, clearly dazed and talking to themselves. A medical expert said the submarine’s air recycler may have malfunctioned, causing a buildup of carbon dioxide or other gases, creating mass delusions.

  “The idea of an insane man commanding a submarine with nuclear weapons is truly terrifying,” said an analyst with the Heritage Center. “The Chinese navy’s failure to screen its officer corps for these mental problems is appalling, and criminal.”

  22

  DIALOGUES WITH THE ANGEL, NUMBER 7

  The angel guides his disciple to the ruins of a monastery so old its walls have grown over with pyrite crystals. The disciple recognizes the pyrite as fool’s gold.

  Falseness preys on truth.

  They approach the foot of a hill dotted with holes. These are old meditation cells clawed from the ground by hadal acolytes. In one of them lies a man, alive and filthy and bearded and asleep.

  “He arrived some time ago, a pilgrim like you,” says the angel. “We had a little chat. I decided to keep him around. Ever since then, I’ve been sending him bugs to keep him alive. For you.”

  The disciple grows wary. “For me?”

  “It’s time for you to have a little human company, someone to play with,” says the angel. “Show me your nails.”

  The disciple holds out his fingers. Over the years his body has absorbed the very earth. He is now able to digest some of the softer minerals. His nails have hardened to obsidian sharpness.

  “Your path leads through this man,” says the angel to the disciple.

  The disciple feigns ignorance. “I don’t understand, Rinpoche.” In fact, he can guess where this is going, and it frightens him.

  The angel wags a finger at him. “You do, I know you do.”

  “Your words are my vehicle, Lord,” says the disciple. “This man is barren of teaching.”

  “Even the most barren doorway can lead to the palace of wisdom,” says the angel. “Be strong. Remember, death is freedom.”

  “But, Rinpoche, you taught me never to take a life again.”

  “I taught you to quit wasting your time trying to take mine,” says the angel. “Now, you are this man’s destiny. He was born and has lived his life and made the journey here in order to serve your learning.”

  “Lord, I have renounced all violence. I made a vow.”

  “What is forbidden, do it.”

  “Not this, Rinpoche,” whispers the disciple.

  “As you said, he is nothing. He is going to die one way or another. But you can stop his suffering before it starts. Real suffering. Long suffering. At this very moment, I’m thinking of something rather Iroquois that involves heat and knives. If you’d like, I could acquaint him with his leg bones minus the skin and meat. Or perhaps I might let him play a little Oriental hide-and-seek. Have you ever seen a man pawing through his own insides, convinced a snake has gotten loose in there? You’d be surprised by how suggestible people can be.”

  The stranger in the hole goes on sleeping through the angel’s litany of tortures.

  “Show him mercy, Lord,” says the disciple.

  “My mercy flows through you,” says the angel. “It is you who must show him mercy.”

  The disciple glances around. There is no escape from this. To disobey would mean his own death, no doub
t a painful one. Worse, it would mean sacrificing the secrets he has learned. He resigns himself to what must be done. The hunt has brought him too far, and he has penetrated the mystery too deeply, to simply throw his life away. There is still a chance, however small, that he can take his hard-won knowledge back to the surface, and share it with man. And defeat the angel.

  “On your travels through the world above, have you ever been to Mongolia?” asks the angel. “They are a Buddhist people, these peaceful descendants of savage warlords. To them every life is precious. When it comes time to slaughter a sheep, they have a special way.”

  The disciple steels himself.

  “Straddle his hips.”

  The disciple crawls inside the lair. The man is little more than a gaunt, bearded scarecrow. He reeks of old sweat and fish. Insect wings litter the floor. The disciple straddles the man’s belly.

  “Now hold him by the throat,” says the angel. “At the same time, with your nails, make an incision just below his sternum. Be quick, but be very neat. Open the skin, but not the peritoneum beneath it. We don’t need sausages all over the place.”

  The disciple follows the instructions. His hand clasps the man’s throat. At the same time, with his nails, he slices open the upper abdomen with a single motion.

  The pilgrim jerks awake. His eyes bulge. He would cry out, but can’t.

  “Now,” says the angel, “slide your hand inside. Move up between the lungs. Be assertive. The lungs will fight you like a pair of dogs.”

  Sure enough, the lungs clench and release and clench the disciple’s hand. The man flails at him. His eyes flicker downward. He sees the horror of what is being done to him, the open wound, the arm wrist deep.