by Jeff Long
The fertile hints—the butterflies, the fragrances, the birdsong, now this gleaming hole ahead—terrified her. She was no longer in control. The cave had won.
Turning a bend in the tunnel, Ali fell to her knees with a whimper.
Before her spread an immense chamber so beautiful and luminous that she felt ruined. The bottomless pit had a bottom after all. Here, she thought, was her source.
For thousands of years, mankind had salted away all its worst terrors in the deepest, darkest cellar hole. What faced her here was not hell on earth, though, but a glorious paradise. Out in the middle of the chamber lay a perfect oasis.
She could almost accept the oasis with its forest of cedars and bamboo. Nature was full of accidents and contradictions. It was possible, remotely possible, that a few seeds and shoots had trickled down from the world above and taken root and somehow thrived in this sunless place.
But jutting from the trees was a tower—or a palace, or a fortress—that defied all reason. Built of white stone, now half in collapse, it struck her at first as a twin sister of the Taj Majal. Then she saw staircases glued to its front and thought of the Potala in Tibet, though a Potala with a dome on top. Then she saw a spiral pattern to it, and wondered if it was meant to resemble the tower of Babel. Or had the Taj Majal and Potala and tower of Babel been built to resemble this? Or was she simply imagining it? Because each time she looked away and back again, the building seemed to shift its shape a little, as if adjusting to her ideal.
There was no more fighting the facts. Her journey was done. Her sanity was finished. The fever dream had snared her.
In despair, Ali lay down on the ground, curled up like an animal, and rocked herself to sleep.
ARTIFACTS
ERRI DAILY INTELLIGENCE REPORT
January 18
Today’s Central Focus
U.S. Reconnaissance Plane Lands in China
A navy EP-3 electronic reconnaissance plane was damaged in a midair collision with a Chinese fighter plane and made an emergency landing at Lingshui Military Airport on the Chinese island of Hainan. All twenty-four members of the navy crew are being held incommunicado. The Chinese plane went down at sea and the pilot is missing and presumed dead.
It is unclear if the contact between the two aircraft was accidental or the result of deliberate bumping by the Chinese or American plane. The Chinese have filed an official diplomatic protest, while American diplomats are attempting to ascertain the status of the U.S. plane and crew.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry has put all the blame on the U.S. aircraft for causing the collision. An international studies expert at Beijing’s Tsinghua University said: “It’s very regular for the American navy to have their planes intruding into Chinese airspace. The Chinese then send up fighters and chase them out.” U.S. officials maintain that the plane was over international waters and never intruded into Chinese airspace until it declared a “Mayday” and made an emergency landing.
The U.S. ambassador to China has registered the “strongest” protest. He is quoted by Reuters as saying that this incident is a deliberate and highly dangerous attempt to retaliate for the Chinese submarine incident.
31
DIALOGUES WITH THE ANGEL, NUMBER 10
“I want you to imagine this,” says the angel. “Imagine you are a little girl asleep in your house.”
Near death, the disciple lies on his back, staring at the crypt’s stone ceiling, eating mouthfuls of air.
“You are asleep in your bed,” the angel goes on, “and all is right with the world. You are loved. You have food in your stomach. Your dreams are sweet. When suddenly the door bursts open in the middle of the night.
“Five men with robes and hidden faces barge in. Their lights blind you. You can hear your mother and sisters crying in the next room. You’re too afraid to shout for help. The men yank off your blanket. They push up your gown. They pin your legs wide open. This is all done in silence. None of them speaks to you or to each other.
“So this is rape, you think. This is the disgrace that will mean death and hell for you. But it becomes different. It becomes worse. Because just then you see the glint of a razor blade in one man’s hand. He leans down between your legs. Down to your sacred fruit.
“For a moment you are so ashamed you could die. Then pain devours your humiliation. You have never felt such searing pain in all your life. The man is breathing hard. He wipes the razor blade on the blanket. There is blood, yours, and bits of skin. Yours. He goes back to his task. The cutting goes on. He works until he has sliced away all of the offending flesh. When he’s finally done, they cover you with the blanket as if putting you to bed. In thename of God, one whispers to you. God be with you. It is said so tenderly you almost feel rewarded. By these devils!
“It gets worse, if that is possible. Because as they leave the room, you see a bare foot missing one toe, and that is strange. First, it means that these monsters have taken off their sandals at the front door before breaking into your room to do this thing. Second, you recognize that foot. Or you recognize one man’s limp. Or someone’s ring. Or a birthmark.
“In that instant your world turns to vomit. Because these men who have cut away your womanhood and severed you from pleasures you will never know, they are your beloved uncles.
“It gets even worse. You heal. You grow into a woman. You marry and bear children, and one is a daughter. Then one night you wake in your bed to the sound of her door banging open. A minute later you hear a terrible scream. And just as your mother did, and her mother, and hers…you do nothing. You merely lie there and weep into your hands.”
The disciple turns his head to look into the hollows of the skull beside him. The insects have done their job well. Except for the angel’s terrible story, he is at peace in here. He tries to divine a lesson in the tale, but cannot. “Why?” he breathes at last. Why tell me?
“Because your people have made me the name of evil.” The angel’s voice is steely and at the same time wounded. “But even with all my imagination, with all my time, I could not dream up the cruelties that you and your kind inflict on one another every minute of every day. The worst evils are the ones you justify with your religions and laws and piety. But then there are evils so terrible you can’t justify them, even with your most twisted logic, even with your most absurd religions, and those evils are the evils that you blame on me. Me, the one who brought you fire and taught you language and gave you cities and raised you out of the mud.”
The disciple listens politely.
“Hell exists,” the angel concludes. “But this is not it.”
“Forgive us,” the disciple breathes. Spare us.
The angel understands his meaning. “On one condition,” he says.
“Lord?”
“Set me free.”
The disciple breathes in. He breathes out. He suffers, but is beyond suffering. It is a blessed state. “Lord,” he whispers, “I am useless to you.”
“Perhaps not, my friend.”
The disciple waits for the instruction that will come next. But there is none, only more ruminating.
“We’re close to the final solution,” says the angel. “It just needs a little more gestation. A little more time in the womb. Or wombs. Freedom is coming, I can feel it. My door is opening.”
He wonders why the angel is baiting him, as he lies trapped in his tomb, with this talk of freedom and opened doors? Frankly, he doesn’t give a damn. For he has achieved knowledge. Living with this corpse, he has seen life’s illusions stripped away. He has watched flesh dissolve and slept with the bones. Suffering is impermanent. Even death is impermanent. Life goes on.
32
THE STYX
Rebecca’s army came to a halt where the river forked. To the left, according to Clemens, the river led to a sea and the city of Hinnom. To the right, the river muscled into the unknown. Clemens insisted that was where they wanted to go.
“But our information says the children are being
taken to the city,” said Hunter. “The city at the center. The city of Satan.”
“And our hadal friend said they’re not,” Clemens said. “Not to Hinnom. He was very clear. He was part of the rear guard. The main body has the children. They were on their way to a city, but a different one, the city of the ox. Taurus, he called it. He told me to watch for the horns. He was telling me more. Then his head sort of disappeared before my eyes.”
Beckwith, he was talking about. The man with the golden trigger finger.
“Here are the horns,” Clemens said. He pointed at the left fork. “My film team and I took that one. We went down to the sea and around it to Hinnom. It’s three weeks at least from here.” He pointed at the right fork. “This is the way we want to go, to the city of the ox. He said it was only a few days away.”
“We should split the army in two,” Hunter said to Rebecca.
Clemens objected. “It would make us half as strong.”
“But we could cover twice the territory,” said Hunter.
“And leave us too weak to fight.”
Rebecca chewed her nicotine gum. That and black coffee had become her mainstay. She made them wait some more for her decision.
“Time is of the essence,” said Hunter.
“United we stand…”
Their wrangle had entered the hoary chestnut zone. When they ran out of supporting information, their arguments always degenerated into a battle of clichés. Rebecca chewed her gum. Right or wrong, she had learned to pronounce her decisions without the slightest whiff of a question mark in her voice.
“Tell the men,” she said. Hunter and Clemens quit their feuding. “Have them pull off the river here. We’re going down the right fork.”
“All of us?” said Hunter.
“The entire army.”
“But my information…”
“You have your information, Mr. Hunter. I have mine.” She had nearly bled to death to learn what they had from the hadal. Getting your arm slit open was a sorry reason for trusting one claim over another. But the violence had stamped it with an immediacy that felt true. Further, Clemens was right. Divided they would fall.
By this point, the flotilla of rubber dinghies and inflatable rafts stretched three days long, though that was just an estimate. Rebecca had lost radio contact with the majority of her army. She no longer had any idea how many men still remained, or what landmarks—an island, a continent, or the empty Pacific Ocean—lay above them on the surface. Their compasses circled drunkenly. Their watches were fickle and impossible to synchronize. They were profoundly out on a limb.
“That is my decision,” she said. “We will proceed from here down the right branch to city B.”
Hunter had just lost the debate. To his credit, he did not screw up his face or turn away. He just nodded, once. Done.
Clemens had no more to say either. He left, sewing his way into the darkness with that rise-and-fall hobble. That left her alone with Hunter.
“You have my permission to follow the river down,” she said to him. “If you feel that strongly about it, take your men and go to Hinnom.”
“Is that a polite way of getting rid of me?”
“I don’t have time for polite,” she said. “I’m giving you your freedom. It’s your choice. Go your way or come with me. Do what you think is best.”
Hunter had chaffed himself raw under her command, and yet he’d stuck with her. She didn’t know whether to admire or scorn his fidelity. On a daily basis, she saw him flabbergasted with her choice of routes, her hell-bent pace, her democratic style with the men, and especially her forgiveness of their crimes and desertions. It was not that he lamented the desertions, which he likened to a toilet flushing itself. Rather he believed every deserter who fumbled his way back into their midst should be whipped on principle. It was even more basic than that: whipped simply to display her whip. Beckwith would be a fine starting point, he had told her.
Now here was his chance to run the show his way, or his fraction of it anyway. He could go to Hinnom.
“You don’t see what Clemens is trying to do?” Hunter said. “He’s driving a wedge between us.”
“Mr. Hunter, he’s trying to keep us all together.”
“Only so he can divide us. We’d be better off deaf, dumb, and blind than following him.”
“Then don’t follow him. Whichever way he goes, go the other way. Go to Hinnom. Be away from him.”
“But then he’d be loose,” said Hunter. “Wherever that leper goes, I’m following. He knows more than he’s letting on.”
“I thought you said he was lost. And by the way, Mr. Hunter, he’s not a leper.”
“They changed him. We have no idea what he is anymore. A wild dog. The only question is whose whistle will he answer to? Ours, or theirs?”
“A leper and a dog. Anything else to add?”
Hunter brushed some unseen dust off his rifle. He lifted his eyes to her. “You’re the man, Rebecca.”
“Nuts to that,” she said.
He let loose with one of his half smiles. Damage controlled, she thought. Hunter and his Drop Zone boys were back in the box again.
They sat at the fork for the next thirty hours, collecting the first wave of rafts as they came drifting down the river. It seemed to take forever. Toward reining in her impatience, Rebecca washed her hair and trimmed her nails, and on a whim, painted them Kennebunkport red. The men had their war paint, now she had hers.
Finally enough boats pulled to shore for the men to number a few over one hundred and twenty. She assigned five to stay behind and gather the next fifty or so and send them after her, and wait for the next fifty, and so on. On second thought, she went back and told them to attach a strobe light to the wall as a signal. “Leave a note with the strobe,” she said. “Tell the men following us to hurry on. Don’t waste a minute, just come along, follow the right branch. Tell them to shake a leg because we’re about to finish the war without them. Then we’re homeward bound.”
“What about us?” one of the five asked.
“Find a boat,” she said. “You’re coming with us. I need every single one of you with me.”
That heartened the army. Word spread. She could not spare even one of them. They were necessary. And their war was almost over. They began piling into their boats.
Just before she climbed into her boat, Beckwith approached. She hadn’t seen him land among the others. In fact, she hadn’t seen him for days, not since his ill-timed shot at the oxbow village. She half-thought he had deserted her army. Here he was, though, and despite his boneheaded stunt she was grateful for his perseverance.
“Nice of you to join us,” she said. Unlike most of her hard-core remnants, Beckwith was keeping himself clean and shaved. It made him look younger, or the rest of them older. As usual, his rifle was hidden from sight in its carrying case. He reminded her of a kid with his guitar. A kid, she realized, not much older than she. It jarred her. She had forged herself into the über mother so completely that it took an effort to remember she was not yet twenty-seven years old.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
She waited. He just stood there. “Did you want something, Mr. Beckwith?”
“Requesting permission to take a boat, ma’am.”
It was like watching the sun set as the men abandoned her. But at least this one was asking permission. “You’re sure you don’t want to stick with us the extra mile?”
“I want to go to the city,” he said. “Hinnom.”
Rebecca paused. “Why?”
He shrugged. “Someone ought to check it out.”
“All the clues point to this branch of the fork,” she said.
“I’m probably wrong. It sure wouldn’t be the first time.”
“But you still think it needs doing.”
The look of pain on his face struck her. The man was in torment. “I don’t know what else to do.”
“Come with us,” she said.
His hand clenched the ri
fle case. She saw the muscles bunch. “But what if the kids aren’t there?”
The world seemed to shake. She was shaping events, but events were shaping her, too. Was she trusting Clemens too much, and Hunter not enough? Why a monster over a mercenary, or whatever Hunter was? Had she made a mistake by not sending half her army to Hinnom? Should she stop their advance and start from scratch? What was the right thing to do? Her child’s life depended on this.
Shadows rushed around her. Metal clinked on metal. Boats squealed on the rocks as they entered the water. They were in motion. It was too late. Be strong.
“You’ll be alone,” she said.
He smiled. He was already alone. She was granting him a chance. “We’ll find them,” he said.
Rebecca glanced away. Another one I will never see again. She turned to him. “Take a boat,” she said.
He started to leave.
“One thing, Mr. Beckwith,” she said. He stopped. She tried to think of something good. “I am expecting you to bring my boat back.”
His chin rose as if a scoop of clean water had just been poured over his head. It was nothing voluntary. She had taken him by surprise. It lasted just a second or two, but in that span she saw that he had just been blessed. A chill shot through Rebecca. She had that power?
Then he lowered his chin. He gave her a startled look. She had that power with him, at least.
They were surrounded by spears of light and hurrying shades. He started to say something. A man bumped him. Beckwith gave her a cowboy nod out of a thousand movies. Then he plunged into the darkness toward the opposite fork.
Rebecca let go of him.
She climbed into her boat where the men were waiting, and they set off down the right branch. Light beams wove every which way from the boats ahead and behind.
She sat high on the stern so that the men could see her and take strength. Their lights played on her. They lit her arms. She opened her hands and they were filled with light. Unflinching, she looked into the brilliance.
A strange spirit infused her. If she had blessed Beckwith, then he had blessed her. He had opened her eyes to an authority that she had not known was working through her. But it was clear now. There could be only one explanation. God was with her.