by Jeff Long
Beckwith fell from her mind. He had served his purpose. She knew the way now. Sam would be saved.
The fork in the river darkened as the army floated away. The strobe light tied to the wall was all that remained of their passage.
The river flashed to life and went black and came to life and fell black. The light was a signal, but also a witness. It alone was there when the boats of the second and third waves came floating down the river.
The boats spun by upon the current, one after another, filled with dead men. By the dozens they sailed past. Those with eyes still left in their heads seemed to see and breathe and move about in the flashing light. But Rebecca’s journey was no longer theirs. These men had deeper realms to explore now.
ARTIFACTS
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
January 19
Memoirs: Gunning for Armageddon
For Fleeing Volunteers, Failure Breeds Success
They may never have seen combat, but as volunteers from the Coltrane Crusade debacle continue to stream back from the depths, a battle for books is brewing. At last count, some four dozen houses have signed up fifty-three new books, with no end in sight.
On March 20 Falling off the Edge of the World by S. Daniel Bartlett and Blind Faithby Boston Thomas will lead the assault wave of titles about to hit the market. At least twenty other books about the military expedition will be landing on the beachheads this coming summer, including Night Vision by Tina Hallway, Blackjack by Joseph Dag, and Duped by Mason Atley.
Not to be left behind, Warner Bros. and DreamWorks are both scouting locations for productions currently in development. The DreamWorks project, entitled Children’s Crusade, is already casting and will be directed by David Goyer.
The flurry of attention is sure to ignite the old question of when is too soon for a traumatized public to revisit its worst nightmare. “In an ideal world, we might have waited another year or two,” says Robert Ross of Random House. “We would have given the market longer to season, and continued to hope for a happy outcome to the rescue attempt. But with other houses rushing to press, we had no choice but to go forward with our spring and summer lineup.”
Judging by advance review copies, mea culpas are out of fashion this season, as many of the authors blame anything and anyone but themselves for joining in the rescue adventure. Several of the books will attempt to fill in the void left by central characters who remain missing and are presumed dead, including Coltrane, her ill-starred war council, and especially the children.
The season’s most controversial entry is sure to be Lead Me Not into Temptation: Nellie’s Triumph, in which J. C. Barnum writes the first-person memoir of one of the missing children. “Even though Nellie doesn’t exist, and none of the children has actually returned, and I have never visited the Subterrain, this is not a work of fiction,” says Barnum. “Nellie is a composite of eight children based upon my extensive research, which includes over five hundred hours of interviews with family members who also fed and housed me, plus interviews with numerous former settlers and veterans of the deep over lunch.” He cites his experience as an amateur spelunker and…
33
When Ali opened her eyes, Gregorio was stroking her face.
His black hair hung loose and clean. His eyes sparkled. He was whole. The back of his head was not caved in from his fall. His clothes were not tattered and bloody. Right down to his squared fingernails, he was Gregorio.
“I’ve been waiting for you for forever,” he said.
Ali lay on her side, looking at him. His voice sounded like Gregorio. “You died,” she said.
“Do I look dead to you?” He tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.
“No.”
“Don’t be afraid,” he said.
“I’m not.”
It was a dream. She was confident of that. Her dreams had become so real.
Over his shoulder the air gleamed like fluorescent cream. Butterflies plastered the walls with orange and black. In the distance stood the cloudlike ruins of that Taj Majal. Or was it a fallen Notre-Dame? Was that a gargoyle up there? Were those minarets or spires?
You have gone insane, she told herself. Insane with dreams. Insane with beauty. There were worse fates.
“It’s a trick,” she said. “A disease. It comes from the lake.” She sat up. Her stomach growled. She noticed her watch. Time had stopped. That was okay. It was a dream.
“You’re hungry,” he said. “You’ve had a very long journey. Eat.” He held something out on one open palm. The whispers swarmed upon her. Apple, they said.
It was a red apple, perfectly ripe, not a bruise on it. It seemed to shift shape on his palm, like a magician’s trick, one thing inside another. But Ali couldn’t see through the trick. Her stomach growled again.
“Take it.” His black whiskers parted. His white teeth flashed. Gregorio.
She took a bite. It was crisp and delicious and cold on her teeth.
“Come with me,” he said. “We have a great deal to talk about.”
She blamed the whispers. They had dug him out from the pile of rocks. Somehow she was going to have to bury him all over again.
Slowly, aching and starved, Ali got to her feet. Gregorio helped her with frisky hands. He stroked her arms and hips. He cupped her breasts. There was nothing erotic or naughty about it. His hands were eager and curious, but also impersonal, as if he were appraising a dog or a horse. It was not like Gregorio. But then again Gregorio was not Gregorio. This was a dream, her dream. Wake up.
They descended a misshapen staircase. They entered a stone labyrinth that was either rising up from the floor or dissolving back into it. One step at a time, she lowered herself into the impossible place.
Monarchs filled the air. Cicadas buzzed. A quetzal bird with brilliant long feathers drifted past with a grasshopper sandwiched in its beak. Bright green parrots wheeled above. Miles away, a waterfall slid into smoky white mist.
“This isn’t real,” she told herself.
“Tell me what you see.”
She described the oasis with cedars and parrots and butterflies and the Taj Majal.
That disappointed him. “I expected better from you,” he said. Her dream was challenging her?
He said something. She didn’t catch it. A butterfly landed on her wrist. She felt its tiny kiss.
“Now what do you see?”
“One of your monarchs.”
“You’re not trying,” he said. “Look closer. See.”
Long ago, as part of her religious training, Ali had taken a class in spiritual contemplation. Prayer 101, the girls had called it. More like a Zen monk than a sister of charity, Sister Ellen had taught them the art of being quiet. The trick was to open your mind even as you closed it. To see through the illusion.
Ali closed her eyes. She took a breath, and put aside all her fears and tiredness and hunger. Silence, she thought to the voices. And then she let go of that word, of even the idea of it. She emptied her mind.
The whispers stopped. She opened her eyes.
The orange-and-black wings vanished. In their place she saw dry, veined membranes. The butterfly turned black. It was fat with blood. Ali frowned. A leech with wings?
She trapped it under her palm. Her concentration failed. The whispers came back. Monarch, they murmured. Wings. Flutter. Orange and black. When she lifted her hand, the leech was gone. A graceful monarch took flight. It even left a slight orange powder on her fingertips. She rubbed it with her thumb, and for an instant the powder became a smear of blood. Then it was orange and dusty all over again.
The voices clustered around her. Their whispers reassured her. Powder, not blood, they said. Butterflies. Beauty.
Gregorio was watching her. “Now listen,” he said. “Hear.”
The whispers—the voices of the dead—wrapped around her. There were so many tongues it was like music in a dream. It would have been easy to let the voices seduce her. Instead she went to work dismembering them.
Cupping her fingers behind her ears, Ali took in the voices and chopped them apart. Like a butcher with a carcass, she trimmed away the stuff that didn’t speak to her directly—the throat songs and glottal tongues, the animal mimicry, the prehistoric vowels—and went for the familiar. English was easiest. She separated out individual words. She heard them. She saw them come alive.
With each flap of the butterfly’s wings, words sprang into her head: butterfly and monarch and wing and orange and black. She saw a droplet of water, and the whispers shaped it: crystal and wet and bead and light. Likewise the green parrots and the forest of cedars. Word by word, by the thousands or millions, the illusion was being planted in her mind.
Each voice kept busy with its bit part in the production. One whispered of a pine needle, another of a knot on the wood. All together they built a tree, and then a forest. They constructed cricket songs and the scent of orange blossoms and cinnamon.
Ali swung around. Gregorio’s black eyes flickered with pale blue. His Hollywood whiskers melted away, and she made out brutish designs drawn or cut into his cheeks. The revelation lasted barely an instant. Then the voices flocked in her mind. The forest and bright green parrots resumed. Gregorio’s face—or his mask—took shape again. But she had seen. Now she knew. Someone else is in there.
“Who are you?” she demanded.
“Who do you see?”
“A mask,” she said.
“It’s your mask, Ali, not mine. You put it on me. You can take it off.”
“Ali?” she said. “What happened to the Alexandra?” The charade of Gregorio was over.
Like water his mask drew back. Her memory of Gregorio gave way to the face hiding inside. It lay bare to her, the furrows and scars and graffiti of old wounds and a life stolen and of his never-ending search for himself. Here was the face of hell as she had first seen it on her descent ten years ago, a barbarian as gaunt and naked as Adam. Here was the father of her child.
“Ike,” she breathed.
What kind of dream went on and on like this?
His hair was gray. She had once compared his eyes to the color of the sky, but the cave had leached them to blue smudges. The sturdy shoulders, built for carrying a backpack through his forgotten mountains, had been sharpened down to bone and sinew.
“What have you been doing down here?” she said.
“It’s only a little farther,” he said.
No embrace. No welcoming kiss. No hint of their past. Once again, he looked disappointed in her.
“Ike, it’s me.”
“Eat.” That was all he said. She searched his hatchet blade of a face. In the span of years, he had become as estranged from himself as he was from her.
“We have to get out of here,” she said.
“That’s the plan,” he said.
But he kept leading her deeper into the folds of the labyrinth.
She stumbled after him. He quit talking to her. He didn’t ask about their child. He didn’t try to span their missing years. He just kept going. With every step, his bare rump muscles bunched and relaxed. The soles of his feet did not so much as whisper on the rock.
Peacocks strutted between the trees.
Waterfalls hung like silver.
Ali followed Ike with that rigid hope of a condemned prisoner. It was foolish. Because she was beginning to guess what was happening.
Bait, she thought. Ike was bait. It was a classic setup.
For eons, the hadals had been doing this, grooming one human slave to reap others. Men and women, and children, too, would go up to lure others down. Sometimes hell’s tempters came in the form of a beautiful succubus, a young woman to lead away monks and princes and horny boys. Sometimes it was a man with soulful eyes who fished for widows and took them into the mountain’s caves. In this case, Ali had led herself down. Ike was merely completing her captivity.
She looked around for some sign of a hadal camp. Would the children be there?
Ali looked at his back. She remembered this skin. While he lay sleeping, she would stay awake studying the glyphs and symbols inked and burned into his flesh. Like words in a book left out in the rain, the marks were blurred now. Only one remained distinct, the aleph at the root of his spine.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
Ike pointed. Above the treetops, big as a moon, loomed that Taj Majal with its filigreed turrets and walls and sparkling domes. The dead souls flocked to her with their helpful bits and pieces of imagery. Ali could feel them like a pressure in her head, each one singing its rehearsed part, each conjuring up some tiny part of the larger illusion. It was as if a spider were weaving a huge, beautiful web all around her.
Silence. Ali drove back the voices. The forest and flowers gave way to fangs and blooms of cave outcrops. The Taj Majal dissolved. In its place Ali saw a fortress of sorts, or a cathedral perhaps, all in ruins. Its fallen arches, breached walls, and melting spires formed an untidy pancake heap against the cavern wall. It looked half digested by time.
There was her prison.
“Ike,” she said, “save me.”
Once upon a time it had worked. He had tracked her when she was captured, and entered the enemy camp, and fought like a comic book hero. He had led her out of the darkness. He had saved her. But he wasn’t that Ike anymore.
“It’s the other way around, Ali. You’re going to save me,” he said. “But first we have to begin in the beginning.”
There was no use trying to run away. Run? She could barely walk. Even if Ike let her go, even if she could find her tunnel again, even if she could learn the animals and plants along the way that were safe to eat without getting eaten herself, even if she could climb the cliffs and cross the lake and weather these incessant ghosts, her mind was nearly gone. She would never make it. Never.
The illusion returned. The stalagmites became cedars again. The salt formations became peacocks strutting. The bats resumed their parrot disguises.
“Wait,” she said. “I need to rest.” If only she could gather her thoughts. But he kept going.
The Taj Majal drew closer. Japanese blood grasses lapped at her thighs. The cedars swayed. A meadowlark sang.
Glancing back, Ali saw only a wasteland of rocks and crevices. The way was closing behind her. The voices—dead souls, if that could be—flew at her. She fought back against their illusions. They stormed her defenses. How fitting, she thought. The linguist was getting sealed inside a cage of words.
They came to a gleaming bridge made of bamboo and silver wire. Ali came to a halt. Across that bridge, inside those looming ruins, lay her own ruin.
“Come along,” Ike said.
She tried to be brave. “Are the children in there?”
He didn’t confirm, he didn’t deny. The question intrigued him. “Is that who you came for?”
“Did you think I came for you?” she said.
He smiled and started across the bridge.
“Ike, the children.”
He kept going, him and his scarred hide of a back.
“Your daughter…” That stopped him. “Tell me about the children, Ike.”
He turned to face her. “You had a child?”
“We did, Ike. She was your daughter.”
He came closer. “I want to know everything about her.”
“It’s too late for that, Ike.”
“Perhaps not,” he said.
“She died seven years ago. You weren’t there for her birth. Why care about her death?”
“How old was she?”
“Three.” Ali remembered candles. “She had three birthdays.”
“Young,” he said. “But old enough to know her name.”
No regrets or commiseration. The abyss had scraped the humanity right out of him. “Where are the children, Ike?”
“Her name, please.”
He might have been asking for a book title. It took Ali’s breath. “No.” She put one fist to her heart. “You bastard.”
“Her name,”
he said. “What can that hurt?”
“Where are the children, Ike?”
“Her name.”
“No.”
The illusions began to fall apart.
Ali glanced down at the thing in her hand. The apple became a ball of meat the size of her fist. It was a heart. The chambers lay exposed. Strands of it were caught in her teeth.
Ali dropped the terrible object. “What are you doing to me, Ike?”
“His name was McNabb,” said Ike. “One more pilgrim who didn’t measure up. Will you?”
She stared at him. But he was suddenly no more Ike than he had been Gregorio. She watched, amazed, as the mask gave way to what lay underneath. She had never seen this other face, and yet it was as familiar as her own, like a shadow in a mirror in a dream.
For all her life, for reasons she could never quite explain, Ali had been gathering this creature’s many names from every language of man. But suddenly not one would come to mind. All she could think to say before he sprang at her was, “You.”
34
JANUARY 22
Rebecca’s army managed to float the river for another two days.
They had no warning about the pothole at the end, no roar of a waterfall, no jagged shoals. The river simply slipped over the lip into a silent black hole. They lost a raft and three men to it before beaching the rest of her little fleet.
It took them a day to transition from being sailors to being soldiers. Camping on the bank of the river, they filled their packs with as much food and ammunition as they could carry and prepared for whatever lay ahead. Hour after hour, they watched the river, expecting more waves of boats to show up with hundreds more men. But none came.
It baffled Rebecca—but no longer stung—that just 110 men now remained of her initial 1,300. That translated as a mind-blowing 90 percent attrition rate. It was absurd that she had not turned back long ago. It was absurd that any men still remained with her. She could only surmise that God worked in absurd ways.