by Jeff Long
“Then give me the key,” said Ali.
He held her foot in his cupped hands. He kissed it. “Somehow, Alexandra,” he said, “you are the key.”
He stood and took her hand. They walked across a bridge made of iron and silver. All through her convalescence, Ali had been lying in the sand with that vast, moonlike palace looming before her. Now, at last, he took her inside.
What looked like the Taj Majal from the outside became, on the inside, every museum and library and monastery Ali had ever visited or imagined. Halls stretched to the left and right, loaded with antiquities, books and knickknacks. She didn’t know where to begin.
The air contained that saturated blue-gold light of San Francisco fog just before the morning sun sweeps it away. High overhead, the domed ceiling held paintings. There was even pigeon shit on the marble tiles underfoot. Her own memories were woven into the fabric. But also, when she swept back the voices and saw through the overlay of illusion, the pack-rat collection was real enough.
“This is my keep,” said the angel. “I keep it. It keeps me.”
His collections filled acre after acre. She had never seen so much treasure and relics and just plain stuff gathered in one place. A sixteenth-century sextant for shooting the sun was mixed with forks, hadal gems, and a New Jersey phone book. A basketball lay among globes of the world and unusual skulls.
What were the borders in this place? Where did she end and the dream begin? She was lost in here.
They walked between walls of shelves teeming with books, scrolls, and codices. Clay tablets stood in neat ranks beside rolls of maps. Ali gravitated to the shelves. The languages came from everywhere, reaching back in time and around the world. She saw Conan the Barbarian comics jumbled with math equations and hadal cuneiforms. A copy of the Hindustani Times wrapped an animal scapula incised with pictograms.
“Here is your text,” he said. “Un-write the book of man. Word by word, go all the way back to the beginning. Dismantle everything. Start me over.”
“And then?” she said. “After I have released you, what will you do?”
“I am beginning to remember,” he said, “how it will be.”
“What do you remember?”
“The sun will be yellow. When I step from the shadows, it will feel like a blessing on my face. It will paint my eyelids. I will breathe its sweet breath.”
“Then you are not a prisoner. You already know the sun.”
“I know it the same way your people know me, by imagining it. Do you understand? Imagination is my prison. Your imagination.”
She rejected the notion. “You said you’ve been trapped here since long before man appeared. How can we be responsible?”
“Since the beginning of time these walls were simply my home. Then mankind came along and sang of a land in the sun. Until that moment my home was not a prison. With your first word, I was damned. Take me back to that first word.”
The angel left her to go “hunting.”
Ali found an empty room and made it hers, plundering the keep at will. Her bed was a sleeping bag. She wore an old Mao-era quilted jacket and Gramicci mountain pants for exploring, and hung her walls with tapestries from civilizations ten thousand years dead.
A new regime was beginning here. With time she would wrap this place around her and listen to its voices and reach deeper into the mind of man than anyone had ever dreamed possible. Now she understood the silk kimono he had given her to wear. She was his bride and queen, at least until the day she failed him and probably not one day longer than the day she might succeed.
Every new reign has a first act, something that makes it new. Knowledge was her duty. But for her first act, Ali did not choose to open a book or unroll a codex to announce herself.
Rather she arranged herself on the floor, sitting with her legs folded and back straight, and the name of a child in her mind. She closed her eyes and summoned an image. Then she bent forward and touched her fingertips to the ground.
He had shown her how to do this, as a reward, for when she wanted her daughter’s company. It wasn’t her daughter she summoned, though.
Samantha.
The air did not swirl or issue smoke, nothing fancy. But she felt a very small space before her fill. She gave it directions, an idea, an inspiration, and quick as thought, the presence raced away. The space before her was hollow again. Done, she lifted her fingertips.
Only then did Ali open the scroll he had given her to begin with. It was an ancient Greek translation of The Great Hymn to the Aten, from which the Book of Psalms had come. It was written on ostrich skin in the boustrophedon style, in which one line was read from left to right and the next from right to left and so on. “Boustrophedon” meant, literally, the passage of an ox plowing a field, back and forth.
Here then was her aleph, her ox, her vehicle. Where it would take her in the coming year, Ali did not know. For the time being she concentrated on the text.
How many are your deeds,
Though hidden from sight,
O Sole God beside whom there is none!
You made the earth as you wished, you alone.
ARTIFACTS
CBS EVENING NEWS
February 16
ANCHOR: The commander of the Chinese submarine was gunned down today as he and his crew were preparing to board a plane home.
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The Chinese sub crew stands at attention in dress whites. The camera pans their stolid faces. A plane waits in the background.
An American officer approaches. The Chinese commander steps forward.
Just then a civilian bolts from the press line. He draws a gun and shouts, “Billy, I’m coming, son.”
Gunshots crackle. The Chinese commander falls to the ground.
Another gunshot cracks. The assassin has shot himself through the head.
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ANCHOR: The assailant has been identified as Ian Hanes of Atlanta, Georgia. According to neighbors, he was a single father who lost his son in the October abduction. According to authorities, Hanes was on medication for depression and related hallucinations. The shooting drew a swift reaction from the president himself.
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President Muir is sitting in the Oval Office.
PRESIDENT: We strongly condemn the senseless murder of this officer of the Chinese navy. Our nation’s heart goes out to the parents of this fine man. It is vital to remember that the gunman was a lone individual with no ties to our government. He was severely disturbed following his son’s abduction. We are investigating this tragedy and will share every detail with Premier Jiaming, whom we continue to try and reach. Again, this terrible murder was the act of a madman, and it must not be allowed to undermine our peaceful relations with China.
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REPRESENTATIVE CAREY GRANT (R): The president’s remarks are one more example of his blind spot when it comes to the Chinese. We are now apologizing to China for a series of aggressions that began with their actions. What’s next, a public kowtow to the Communists? I have asked the special prosecutor to expand his inquiry into the president’s financial ties with Chinese oil interests…
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ANCHOR: Sources in the State Department say there is no further word on a possible military takeover in China.
46
Even as the girls helped carry the nameless father down the mountain of steps, they all began to see their fathers in him. Underneath the blood and gray beard and mane of hair was a semblance of the man each had prayed would come.
Beckwith led them across the bridge and through the city and out its gates and up the trail. He ranged in front of them. He lagged behind them. He was their cheerleader when they tired. As the days passed, he was the first awake and the last to sleep. Every time they turned around, there he was with his rifle.
It was Beckwith who had refused to let them use the knife on Clemens. They wanted to kill him for everything that had happened to them. But Beckwith said something about lookin
g into the abyss and not becoming it. So they left their monster on top of the pyramid, paralyzed and wide-eyed, with strings of mucus on his face from the different girls spitting on him.
Crazy Rebecca was no help. It was strange being a mother to someone else’s mother, but everyone chipped in. It took their minds off their private hardships. In a way, Rebecca served as everybody’s mom, binding them together as a family with her helplessness and babbling. They held her hand along the path and sang along with her songs. They fed and washed and wiped her.
At night they slept in a circle around the nameless man, who had become something of a knight in shining armor to them. Actually it wasn’t shining armor, but that coat of green jade plates. The thing was heavy and disgusting with blood and tissue, but Beckwith kept it in a bundle beside its owner. God’s armor, he called it.
Struggling on, the group came to a small fleet of rafts sitting by a river. They put the man and Rebecca in one of the rafts and towed it along with a rope. The river grew stronger as they grew weaker. It led to a fork and joined an even larger river.
A deeply worn footpath ran alongside the river. If they went down the Styx, Beckwith said, they would reach another dead city. He had gone there alone, searching in vain for them.
They went upriver. Civilization lay that way. “Pace yourselves,” he told them. “It’s going to take a while getting home.”
The girls talked among themselves about what “a while” might mean, another week or a month, a hundred miles or a thousand or more. It didn’t matter. They were safe now. They were going home. Whenever they asked him when they would get there, Beckwith would reply, “Not around the next corner.” They loved him for his honesty. Here was a man they could trust.
But then the river split into tributaries with tunnels feeding left and right. Beckwith chose one, and they followed that smaller river for several days until it, too, pronged left and right up a dozen different tubes. Clearly they were lost.
“We’ll rest here,” he said, and they made a camp in an old slave corral with rusty iron bolts and sad graffiti. Day after day, Beckwith tried the various alternatives.
Like any tribe, the survivors shared worms and head lice and other nuisances. They all had some pink fungus under their nails. Everyone got the runs from the food or water. Their eyes hurt. Their joints ached. But no one complained because they were going home.
Then a flu bug laid them low.
While the river bellowed softly below, and Rebecca sang lullabies with epic stamina, Beckwith took care of everybody as long as he could. But finally it was his turn to get the fever. A few days of fever turned into a week. Beckwith lay there shaking and delirious among them. It seemed they had gone as far as they were going to get.
Piled together out of habit, they entered a collective despair. The planet was closing in around them. Except for the river sound and when they cried out from nightmares, their world grew still and quiet. No one went foraging for food anymore. At most they filled water bottles from the river. They took to sleeping twenty hours at a time. The long night slowly ate them.
47
Clemens’s paralysis thawed by ounces.
Once his thankless harem and their idiot mother and that simpleton sniper with his cowlick departed, taking with them most of the food, along with the still breathing carcass of his enemy, Clemens was sure he had it made in the shade. Since the toxin had not killed him, it was just a matter of time before it wore off. Then he could start over again. He was good at starting over.
All through the first week, he waited flat on his back in the stone dome, staring at the ceiling and figuring out how to write himself back into the script. It took his mind off his hunger and thirst.
Without the girls to whelp him an empire, there was no opportunity left in this wind-blasted, godforsaken ruin. Maybe he would head off to the Oriental regions where no one knew him. He would take a new name—Clemens wasn’t his real name anyway—and find some other niche to occupy. If he kept hitching his wagon to other people’s horses, he was bound to get somewhere eventually. Persistence was everything.
At the end of a week, with his body still in the grip of the toxin, Clemens began to grow a little worried. Even with his metabolism slowed way down, he was bound to run out of fuel before long. He eyed the remaining food along the wall, and willed it toward him, which didn’t work of course. One day, he told himself, he would look back on these as his salad days for sure. For now he would have appreciated some of the salad.
Another worry crept in. What if the hadals returned for him? With the girls gone, they didn’t have much left in the way of sacrificial material. What if they took him down to their god, that freak in the pit? Not a pleasant thought. The creature would welcome Clemens back with the forgiving heart of a reptile.
Luckily the hadals, that sorry lot, didn’t come. By now they were probably off eating insects and trickling deeper into oblivion. Let them rot. They were finished.
In the middle of the second week, his right index finger moved. What joy! He was going to make it out of here after all. Hour after hour Clemens ran his fingertip back and forth, feeling the same glorious inch of stone.
A day later another finger came alive.
His plans quickened. It was not too late to go after the girls. He had saved the little bitches’ lives. And all they could do was scream when he touched them. Fine, he thought. He would become their boogeyman. He would bedevil mankind. That appealed. He would create an empire from their fear.
His hand woke up while he was sleeping. Soon he had it scuttling here and there like a crab, dragging his arm after it. He was starving, but the food was still too far to reach. That forced him to come up with an alternative.
Scraping one knuckle raw on the stone, he crawled his hand up to his mouth, stuck the finger in, and got a taste of his own blood. That primed the pump. He hated to do it, but a pinkie finger was a small thing in the larger scheme of things. He bit down.
There wasn’t much meat on the bone, but the blood soothed his thirst. Unfortunately, it also attracted attention.
Not much later, Clemens heard stones grating deep inside the pyramid. At first the sounds were distant and could have come from anywhere. Then they got closer. He could actually feel the vibration of rocks dislodging far beneath his head. Something was burrowing out from below.
He’d seen statues of the man-bull, and the city was full of stone ox horns and bulls’ heads. But he rejected the notion. Minotaurs were for children and cretins.
The noise came and went. It would work awhile, then quit, then begin again. He tried to think what it could be. A rock slide. A fault line slipping. The architecture settling. An animal.
Clemens sacrificed a second finger. If he could just get his legs to move, he could walk. If he could walk, he could run. The rest of his body could catch up later.
For another two days he lay there listening to whatever it was unburying itself. Superstitions nipped at him like Chihuahuas. He kicked at them, or would have if his legs only worked. He didn’t believe in monsters. That’s what the descent was all about, discovering that monsters weren’t really monsters. So what was this thing muscling out from the earth?
It got closer.
His body went into an unbearable fight-or-flight mode. Adrenaline hosed into his motionless limbs, but he could neither fight nor flee. He would have screamed, but that would have given him away for sure.
He ate a third finger. He was down to choosing between the all-important opposing thumb and his beloved index finger. It was a choice he never had to make.
At the beginning of the third week, just as his other hand came alive, and it seemed he might be able to crawl out the door and down the stairs, the floor gave way beneath his back. The blocks, so tightly mortared together, broke apart. The smell of raw earth boiled up even as Clemens plummeted into the hole. Something immensely strong caught him and then all was darkness as he was carried down to its lair in the roots of the mountain.
Weeks went by.
Clemens never did see the creature in its entirety, only in bits and pieces, sinews covered with hide and veins, the moist nostrils, those terrible teeth. Then he couldn’t see at all. It took his eyes.
Together they entered a long hibernation.
Clemens lay in that warm, animal embrace, rocked by lungs almost as large as his body, breathing in the smell of their mutual dung. It was mostly quite peaceful. Every now and then the creature would get hungry, though. Then the pain would come. Clemens would scream awhile. Then they would go back to sleep and Clemens would heal.
It went on like that for a long, long time, the two of them feeding on each other. The creature had nipples that gave milk. Clemens provided the meat.
He slept as much as possible in hopes that some dream would sweep him away, and maybe that was what happened. In this lair of stone, snug against that slow heartbeat, a man who had dreamed of empire became a snack and a teddy bear, nothing more than fodder for a very cruel fairy tale.
48
“Play with me, Mama.”
The ghost child was sitting beside Rebecca again, legs folded, patient as a daisy in the sun.
“Please don’t do this,” said Rebecca, and turned her head away.
“Mama.” Sterner this time.
Rebecca looked.
Sam’s long, golden hair rippled on the river breeze. Her blue eyes sparkled. She was still missing that one tooth in her smile and wearing the same Hunchback of Notre-Dame cartoon Band-Aid that Rebecca had put on her knee the afternoon before the abduction long, long ago. Everything was exactly right. Except for that shattered forehead.
“Peekaboo,” said Sam.
Rebecca didn’t want to see inside her daughter’s skull. She turned her attention to the camp. She made out the phosphorescent shapes of girls piled together, and among them a brutally wounded man with hadal markings and missing his hand. It seemed like she should know them all. But Mr. Beckwith was the only one whose name came to her. Her archangel Beckwith. Ian was his name. All lay sleeping.