Before she had made it half way, she saw the adults making their way back and forth to the kitchen, each of them washing their hands in the sink, or taking drinks for themselves, and she imagined that they must be tucking into their seconds, but Stanwick suddenly knelt in front of her, “You can come out now Stephanie, it’s all safe.”
“The food’s all gone?”
Stanwick smiled, “Mostly. There’s a couple left for later, but I’m sure they’ll get eaten.”
Stephanie rolled her eyes in disbelief. Leaning closer, Stanwick touched Stephanie’s brow affectionately, brushing a couple of strands of hair out of her eyes, “Do you mind if I call you Spiff?”
Silently chewing, Stephanie’s eyes widened, the corners of her mouth giving into a smile. She shook her head a little stiffly, wiping sauce from her mouth on the back of her wrist, “My aunt Han calls me that.”
Stanwick nodded, “I know. Thank you. It’s an honor that you’d let me share that.”
Stephanie wrapped her hot dog again, and shuffled onto her knees, “I wish she was here. Aunt Hannah would be so jealous if she knew we were eating hot dogs. They’re one of her favorites.” She watched Stanwick’s face, and found comfort in the fact that her expression was calm and unwavering. Stanwick told her that she’d see her aunt soon enough, and Stephanie felt sure that she could trust her. Rather than getting to her feet, Stephanie shoved her precious foil cargo under her arm, and pulled herself forward on the smooth floor with the palms of her hands, inching her way around to the front of the couch. Stanwick followed close behind her, and sat next to her on the floor again, resting a hand on Stephanie’s arm
Stephanie liked the sound of West’s voice. It seemed to her exactly as it should; deep, in a comforting way, and just gruff enough that she felt safe in his presence. She watched his face as he spoke, completely enthralled by the singular thought, as fantastic as it seemed, and as impossible, that a face could exist for so long, as good as forever, and still display such profound humanity. If it was battle worn, it didn’t show. She couldn’t make out a single scar line, or twisted contour suggestive of previous bone breaks. She knew about those things, about fractures and scars, and that knowledge made her feel somehow special. She knew about humanity too, as well as she could. She’d read about it, and knew what it should look like, and she thought that it was as perfectly represented in West’s face as it could be.
She listened as West talked about the forest, about how easily he had become lost, and about the months it had taken him to find the river again. She tried to forgive him for his descriptions of the animals that he had killed, and the devastation that he wrought as he tramped through the void garden. She loved animals, so forgiveness didn’t come easy to her, but as she smiled at him, imagining his version of eternity, empathizing as best as she could with his struggle, she understood that she was in no position to judge him. She’d read about judgment and compassion, and she was certain that although compassion was more painful, it was also more versatile.
She could sense the excitement building in the rhythm of West’s speech, the gentle acceleration and florid wording. He became more grandiose, sitting up straighter, leaning forward and punctuating his words with emotional gestures of his arms.
“There it was, after months of arduous and desolate exploration …”
“Silinthalis.” Stephanie whispered the word, egging West on, and he didn’t disappoint. He looked right into her eyes, his expression one of wild excitement, repeating the word in a sombre whisper.
“What did you see?”
West blinked, remembering it clearly now, for the first time in more than a century, “Just the river. There was nothing to see but the river.”
Stephanie drunk up the anticipation, her heart beating faster. Her father was a masterful story teller, and he toyed with her in this same way, allowing the most audacious moments of his stories plenty of room to breathe. She sucked her bottom lip, closing her eyes, waiting for the moment to crest.
“The book of Antrusca tells the story of the God King Dannum. Dannum led his tribe through many battles with the other peoples of the continent. One day, he came with his people to gather waters from the great river, and stepping in first to make sure the waters were safe, he came to be overpowered by the current, and his body was swept away before any one of his people was able to save him. For two days and nights, the people mourned by the river banks, searching for his body. On the third day, the people of Dannum’s tribe had completely given up hope, when one of the elders spied upstream, a man walking in the deeps, his arms outstretched, his body cloaked in black.”
The pause, two, three, Stephanie smiled to herself.
“Dannum had returned from the clutches of death, in order that he may lead his people triumphantly from the perils of the void garden. There I was, not at the source of the river but rather the point of Dannum’s true origin. I stepped into the waters, wondering what magic I might feel, but suddenly my body was wracked with pain. It was as if I was on fire, and the waters could do nothing to quell the flames. I thrashed about, sinking under the current, swallowing too much water, unable to see the surface through the black cloud that surrounded me. My feet touched the riverbed, but I didn’t have the strength even to push up to the surface, and eventually, when I could hold out no more to either the instinct to breathe, or the desperate need to escape the pain, I finally inhaled a lung full of water.”
Stephanie sank into her imagination, closing her throat and holding her breath. She desperately wanted to ask him if he died. Moments like this were made to be broken.
“You know what I had become. Washed up on the bank of the river, I think I knew it myself. Everything I had come to suspect about the book of Antrusca, and its account of Dannum’s long reign suggested what I had become. In the days that followed, I threw myself at the void, battling the beasts with my bare hands, ravenously hungry, daring them to challenge me. In the first week, my wildest imaginings were confirmed. I tracked a tiger, following it cautiously, but deliberately upwind, watching as it tasted me in the air. I could tell that it was challenged by the fact that I was stalking so brazenly, but eventually, curiosity won out and it turned, body hunching low, hind quarters swaying to and fro. When it finally pounced, I readied myself and grabbed its paws, feeling the weight of its body crashing against me as we tumbled to the forest floor. Claws dug against the skin of my chest, digging deep, but not quite puncturing. The mouth opened about my throat, closing with that thousand pounds of pressure, so I was certain that my neck would snap. With the warm rotten breath engulfing my face, I let go of the paws, took its mouth in my hands and fought back, prying its teeth from my throat as it scratched at my arms and shoulders, finally drawing blood.”
Did you die? Did you die? The question kept coming to the tip of Stephanie’s tongue now. She rushed to cover her mouth, knowing that she’d gone too far, but too late, she laughed out loud nervously.
“Did you die?”
West laughed, “I died a thousand times. I died every day in the void, or at least I would have if it weren’t for the leeches. So that thought, which had never left me, came to be fully formed. Dannum must have gone through that same rebirth as I had, and in so doing, I began to question, could he have ever died? Could age have consumed him? Or fire? One thing was beyond question though. Somehow, he was still alive, still reigning over Allim, as he always had. He was Dannum, he was Thrasus the Sixth, he was Eyernstan the Benevolent, he was Omaris Kith Thissick, and a hundred other kings, each of them loving the people of Allim to death, loving with a ferocity that would scorch out the darkness. Pretchis couldn’t be allowed to continue. I didn’t know if he could be killed, but I knew that when I returned to the city, I needed to be strong enough to bring an end to his eternal reign.”
Stephanie lifted her hands imploringly, “How could you know?”
“How could I know what?”
“How strong you’d need to be?”
West nodded sl
owly, “It’s a good question Stephanie. I had no way of knowing, so the only thing I could do was wait until I felt confident in my own strengths.”
“How long did you wait then?”
“Sixteen years.”
Stephanie’s mouth fell open in shock. Somehow the idea of sixteen years spent preparing for one task, was harder for her to grasp than the idea of someone living for thousands of years. She wondered if it was perhaps because it was so much easier to comprehend sixteen years. Seven years had been her eternity so far, so sixteen years was twice eternity. She thought about West’s grasp of eternity, and felt her concept of temporal awareness shut down on itself. Satisfied with her own reasoning in the matter, she gripped Stanwick’s arm in an attempt to ground herself in reality again.
“In time, I came to understand how to will the changes in my body, and the leeches served my every whim. I understood that without the frequent consumption of blood rich food, I would become weak, no matter how much plant protein I ate. By my thirtieth birthday, I had become the alpha predator of a twelve hundred square mile jungle. I could scale sheer rock faces with my bare hands, almost as fast as I could jump down. I could fell a tree with no tools but tooth and nail. Even the beasts of the river Dannum, blessed as they were with the ever giving gift of the leeches, even they cowered in my presence.”
“To the North was an active volcano whose peak was sometimes visible from the tallest buildings of Arctum, but the steeps and slopes were desolate, and North of the volcano, there was only sea. I was the scourge of the void garden, and the animals lowered before me. All that was left to conquer lay to the East, within the walled city. I’d made three attempts over the years at walking the perimeter of the city, completing the trek only once, and for what? To discover that there really was no entrance other than the one below Arctum. So my only option was to either steal my way back through the hallowed halls of Arctum, or to scale the wall.”
“At the tallest point in the West Tertiary, the wall stood at one thousand two hundred feet, and I was determined that this should be where I would enter the city. A month after my thirtieth birthday, I attempted to climb the wall. The surface was almost completely smooth, glardium polished to a sheen, each block twenty-foot-tall with no discernible lip between one block and the next. At first, I imagined that with claws like the Dannustine tigers, I could perhaps drive my fingers with enough force to grip the wall, and I wasn’t completely wrong in that assumption. I made it perhaps twenty feet, each handhold an immense struggle, driving my fingertips into the glardium with enough speed to cause tiny fractures, but twenty feet was enough to realize that the other thousand odd feet would be impossible. I didn’t give up though. I imagined that if the surfaces of my hands and feet were more like those of the lizards of the forest, ridged, covered in tiny hairs, perhaps then I would be able to make better headway.”
Stephanie squeezed Stanwick’s finger before she spoke, “Did you reach the top?”
West looked into Stephanie’s eyes, and suddenly he looked haunted, “No Stephanie. No I did not.”
“How far did you get?”
“I’d guess half way. Wouldn’t you say?” He looked to Stanwick for assistance, and Stephanie wondered why Stanwick might know the answer any better than him.
Stanwick’s eyes narrowed, “You still haven’t?”
West pursed his lips, “Never.”
Stanwick’s fingertips, wrapped tight in Stephanie’s small hands formed a million points of contact, a million pathways to the child’s thoughts. It was overwhelming, but she couldn’t stop herself. There was something magical about the way Stephanie’s mind was working. Living vicariously like this, experiencing the world through a child’s eyes, lost in the crazed rush of misfires and revelations was always something special, but there was a peculiarity to Stephanie Beach. It wasn’t that the child seemed wise beyond her years, but there was an inert sense of legacy. When West spoke, Stephanie appeared to be able to empathize with his story, making conceptual leaps with very little context. She bore a seven-year-old's quest for acknowledgment, searching for a punchline at the end of every rainbow, vying for recognition, but she was sensitive to the timing and rhythm of the conversation. West had spoken one word, “Never,” his admission to Stanwick that even after so long, he still hadn’t been able to face his memory of that fall on the hopper. Stephanie had felt the pain in his word, which was normal, but for a moment, Stanwick could see Stephanie’s examination of that pain, her young imagination rifling through the pains of her own past, imagining if she would have benefited from reliving those tribulations, or if they were best left alone.
Stanwick blinked, trying to shake the moment out of her head, too absorbed, “You made it more than half way.”
West nodded, “After that, I gave up on the idea of climbing the highest point on the wall. I’m not entirely sure why the idea had ever appealed, other than the fact that it presented a challenge. I traveled North, to the point where the wall curved around the boundaries of the Dannustine Palace, then East until I heard the distant bells of the Matriarchs. North of the temples of the Divinity, the wall was only a couple of hundred foot, and it was there that I made my return to the city.”
Brad Cobb sat in his car watching patiently for the better part of an hour before Hannah Beach turned up. He watched her make her way to the neighbors front door, where there was a short exchange of words. By the time she reached her own front door, Cobb had made it to the curb in front of the driveway, his bill fold in hand.
“Miss Beach.”
Hannah turned quickly, offering a warm “Oh, hi,” then noticing the FBI credentials in Cobb’s hand, her smile faded, “Can I help you?”
Cobb smiled broadly, offering his hand, “I sure hope so Miss Beach. Agent Brad Cobb, FBI.”
“It’s Hannah.” she shook his hand awkwardly and forced a smile.
“Hannah, do you have any idea of the whereabouts of your brother?”
“I haven’t seen him since this morning. I’ve had classes all day.”
“Oh … but you did see him this morning?”
Hannah thought about it, “I heard him, he was home. Have you tried the house?”
Cobb was good at reading people. Cobb could speak four languages, and he was an accomplished pianist. Cobb wondered why he was thinking about himself in third person. He glanced at his watch as he crossed his right hand over his left to checked his pulse discretely, “Did you notice anything unusual about your brother’s behavior this morning?”
Hannah frowned, and considered lying, but she wasn’t sure what kind of trouble David was in, “Yes. There was a guy.”
“A guy?” 13, 14, he checked his watch.
“A guy. He threw a rock or something at my window.”
Pulse slightly elevated, but within reasonable parameters, Cobb turned his full attention back to Hannah and made a mental note that Miss Beach was cooperative, and forthright. Pretty too. Not relevant, Cobb caught himself, so completely not relevant.
“Do you have any idea who this man was?”
“Kind of.”
“Do you care to elaborate? Anything would be helpful at this juncture.”
“Is David in trouble?”
“Most certainly, but in order to figure out what kind of trouble he’s in, I really need to know a little more about what’s going on.”
Hannah glanced over her shoulder towards the front door, then turned her head slightly further, towards the Bleaker’s house, “Listen, do you want to come inside?”
“Sure, if you don’t mind Hannah, this has already been a long day, and I’m getting the impression that it’s really just starting.”
Hannah’s laugh was stilted, but genuine. She opened the front door, observing the bloody fingerprint on her note on the side table. She kept her cool, “Coffee?”
“Tea if you’ve got it.” Cobb responded, pocketing the note as Hannah walked ahead of him.
“English Breakfast, Darjeeling or Earl Gray?”
Cobb knelt down, rubbing his finger in a muddy footprint, “Do you have a lemon?”
“Sure.” Hannah shouted through from the kitchen.
“Then if you don’t mind the trouble, a cup of Earl Gray with a slice of lemon would be out of this world right now.”
Hannah’s head peeked out from behind the dividing wall, “Out of this world? Really?”
Cobb didn’t look up from the footprint. It looked like it had been made by a flip flop, or a slipper, “I’ve been hitting this little tea room up town recently. They’ve got me hooked on that crap.” He noticed the three circular gaps in the grip pattern, where the rubber strap would pass through the sole. Flip flops it was.
“So this guy … Has David met him before?”
Hannah plugged in the electric kettle, and turned on the coffee maker, spilling grits on the counter with shaking hands, “I doubt it. Honestly, I got kind of a creeper vibe from him. David posts on reddit a lot, and I’m pretty sure this same guy commented on a post of his last night.”
Cobb entered the kitchen, taking off his sports jacket and folding it over his arm, “You’re pretty sure?”
Hannah corrected herself, “I’m certain.”
Histories of the Void Garden, Book 1: Pyre of Dreams Page 17