The Gatekeeper

by Nuraliah Norasid

  Eedric crossed the near-empty visitors centre to get into the reserve, which began, apparently, with a manicured lawn. The lawn was almost bare save for a few thin trees that grew along the tarmac path. The trace smell of cut grass preceded clipped-off blades sprawled over the walkway.

  It was an odd place to be in. And for him to be in. If he’d been seeking answers or some kind of atonement, it would have made more sense to visit Mama’s grave, put flowers on it and apologise for what he had failed to do for her. But he couldn’t get over the fact that the grave was just a filled-up hole in the ground, hiding bones, empty of spirit.

  He remembered the burial: how so few had been present because Mama’s family was estranged from its extended one and Father’s had never really approved of her. The graveyard was a stretching field of tombstones. The well-to-do had mausoleums of marble walls and the others, the ones who would be forgotten, lay beneath a nondescript cover of earth. Mama did not have a marble wall. The only way he knew which square metre of dirt had Mama was by looking at the name on the stone slab that marked it. And even then, Mama wasn’t there. Not for him.

  The important memories were the shiny shards in the ash piles of past events. A shiny shard must be what had pulled him to the rainforest reserve. When Mama was alive, there had been no path, no manicured lawn. The height of the grass had nearly reached his chest at the time. The visitors centre and the car park had not existed either. On the Sundays when Father was away, Mama would bring him to that same spot. They would spread a woven mat, flattening the tall grass underneath them to picnic. Mama would make pastries filled with spicy, mashed sardines, which went down well with cold milk tea. Encased in the tall fur-tipped grass, she would read while he pretended to be an adventurer, a pirate swimming in a sea of sharks. When he was tired, he napped.

  It had been a place far away from the world filled with school, grades, the perfect sonata at the fingertips.

  The tarmac path led right into the reserve’s rainforest and he kept on walking until the warm afternoon gave way to a shadow-dappled cool. Deeper into the nature reserve the buzz of the main road lost its hold, giving way to forest sounds older than his memory: the wind rustling leaves, cicada calls and bird songs. The drain that ran along the edges of the path was covered in moss. Saplings had pushed through the worn bricks, and the tarmac was cracked and uneven in those places where the tree roots pushed up against it.

  The ground sloped up to one side of him and he found himself stopping to stare deeper into that part of the forest. He knew a lot of people who would not set foot into a jungle for the supposed snakes, spiders, monkeys that would claw at your face, and homeless people high on illegal drugs. But not Mama. After their picnics Mama liked to bring him jungle exploring. She would hold his hand as he stepped over roots and showed him which leaves not to touch because they would give him the rashes. The only time she had scolded him was to hit his hand when he had tried to destroy a cobweb: “Adik, when you have a house, do you want other people to step on it?” Her rule always was: When people don’t do anything wrong to you, you don’t do anything wrong to them. Kindness. Acceptance. The Sce’ ‘dal word: Sabar. Patience.

  Eedric remembered that Mama could point out where clearings had existed back in her kampong years, before the park management had the areas replanted. She told him stories of who used to live where, what animals they kept and what crops they grew and what they were like down to an odd eye or a stump where an arm ought to be. He remembered the jungle fowl and the way they had run, chicken butts waving, into the undergrowth where they disappeared. He remembered looking up from watching them one day to see the rock wall of the quarry, and wondering if it was really a mountain and if everything people said about Manticura possessing no mountains was in fact untrue. After all, where “jungle met rock” was a part of the jungle that no one dared to go to. Mama and he had never ventured so deep in themselves. It was a supposed burial ground, guarded by beautiful spirits with hair that grew in coils down to their waists. When they were near, flowers of the brightest hues and ethereal scents would bloom. They were not to be looked at because they were known to ensnare men, leading them to their deaths.

  Father had never tolerated the stories, of course. “You tell the boy such nonsense. What can a man do with fairy tales?” As always, Father was all hard lines and disapproval, dark brows furrowing over equally dark eyes. “You can’t eat daydreams,” he was always saying. Eedric recalled the family house, the two cars gleaming in the short driveway and the crystal chandelier in the living room that, as a boy, he thought would some day drop on his head and kill him. You couldn’t eat those either.

  Their arguments had always started with Father saying something like that and Mama replying with something impudent, which would get her into trouble. People always thought husbands only beat up their wives in poor households afflicted with alcoholism and drug use. The kids of these households had attitude problems and were the ones who always got detention and counselling in school. No one imagined a kid like Eedric, in his big, big house, peeking through the banisters on the upper floor, staring down at the doorway into a side chamber, listening to yelling and tearful screaming. No one thought he would be standing in the living room, fire truck forgotten in his hand, hearing “You make me do this!” to the punctuations of slaps and punches. And running into the kitchen, to his mother cowering against the cabinets, face hidden in her hair, arms limp at her sides, and when his father sensed that he was there, turned, saw and pointed him out, heaving: “Look at what you have done to our son!” The slam of the front door never failed to make him flinch.

  The aftermath had always been the same: Mama’s cooking was not eaten, her skin would be marked by bruises, even cuts, and her personal treasures—her seamstress-made formal wear, jewellery from her parents, her books—would be thrown away. Later he would get a new toy or game from Father, as if Eedric was the one Father had taunted, beaten up or choked, the one he should apologise to and win back. No child could turn down a new toy, but after every fight, after Father left the house, Eedric would go down to where Mama sat with her face buried in a hand and her shoulders shaking. If the collectors had not come for the garbage yet, he would help her dig her things from out of the green bin just outside the main gate. Eedric didn’t know how many instances of Mama saying, “I’m making your father’s favourite dish” after that before she finally left; how many times Father came home with a gift that he said some Sandra had picked out for Eedric, before it all became too much. Before Mama went to live with Grandma, who called Eedric by other names than his own, and Uncle, who barely spoke more than two words to Eedric during his visits.

  Eedric stepped over the little drain that separated path from wilderness and wandered into the jungle, rolling his sleeves down so that he would not brush against any poisonous plants. He also kept an eye out for monkeys. Proximity between monkeys and people always ended up with someone inciting some kind of anti-primate right of annulment. He had been in a tug-of-war once, with one of the monkeys populating a forest that his estate audaciously grew up against. He had been about ten, on his way home from school, and had a packet of mee goreng and his wallet in a blue market plastic bag. The monkey had wanted his food. Eedric had wanted his wallet and food (it was not every day that he could sneak home greasy hawker fare), so they got into it—monkey and boy—until the bag tore, spilling the packet of mee and his wallet onto the grass by a dilapidated bus stop. The monkey had left the wallet but cradled the packet in one arm and bounded into the forest, tail up in the air, mooning him. After the incident, mee goreng always tasted like defeat to him. Of course, the area had since been built up further and the forest pushed back behind the new houses. So, he got his revenge, though it was not in the form that he would have liked.

  Now he trekked through moist undergrowth, feeling for roots beneath the leaf litter. Above him, the leaves and branches grew in a lattice to form an almost complete roof. A few young plants struggled for the sunligh
t that revealed the silk threads strung between their bows, fine and golden. A yellow butterfly, no bigger than his nose, flitted in the forest quiet. The pink poui was in bloom, the tree tops lush with them, the forest floor carpeted with their wet mush. In one spot it smelled oddly like a dental clinic, the scent coming from some kind of plant or flower.

  Along his route-without-destination, a cluster of flowers hung in Eedric’s path from the low branch of a tree that was itself growing nearly flush against a species of strangler. He stopped and took hold of one from the cluster. The radiant yellow flower reminded him of a starfish—six petals, long and slim, thinning out to curling points from a triangular centre. The cananga, he remembered it, known for its perfume. The petals had a rubbery resistance to them but with a silky feel, like soft skin. He withdrew his hand and the whole cluster quivered, bobbing at the end of its bent stalk. In time, it stilled, as if his touch was as inconsequential as a passing breeze.

  Eedric would have left it at that. A quick glance at his phone showed the time to be a few seconds past 3.30, nearly time to meet Adrianne after she was done with her classes for the day. They would have dinner somewhere and then it was back to her place. But he looked up and saw how the quarry loomed, seemingly five paces from where he stood. There was a magnetism to it he could not quite put a finger on. Old and prominent as it was, it yet stood, completely isolated and untouched by ever-correcting hands, in Manticura where everything needed to have some form of economic value.

  Or perhaps, he thought, not yet.

  He took a few steps towards it and then stopped to check the time, to see if he had time to go just a little further in and sate a trivial curiosity he’d always had about the reserve’s quarry: if there was a moat of water surrounding the side of it that faced away from the lake. To keep the visitors off. No one seemed to have got close.

  Eedric kept the quarry in sight as he picked his way deeper in. There came a point when he could not look up at the top of the quarry without straining his neck. He had never realised it was so tall. There was omniscience to it, as if it watched his every step, both beckoning towards him and warning him away. The vegetation grew thicker the nearer he got to the quarry, before it thinned out again, and Eedric realised that he was no longer stepping through undergrowth or ducking under the occasional slim branch. He lifted his eyes from the ground to see the cascading leaf cover that grew against the reserve’s quarry just a few metres ahead of him. He was in a clear space, roughly the shape of a semicircle, fenced in by vegetation that shied away from the quarry even as it created an arching roof to shield the space from sunlight. For a moment he was impressed with himself. To have walked to that spot where “jungle met rock” without any dire encounters: he doubted anyone had ever gone so far into this spot of forgotten legends.

  No moat, he thought, feeling a little foolish, okay.

  He was about to turn, thinking it best to make for the trails again and re-enter the civilised world with all its civilised concerns, when a break in the leaf curtain caught his eye. Vegetation on the quarry’s rock face was understandably sparse, with most plants unable to gain foothold given the bare rock face and Manticura’s monsoons. The leaf curtain seemed almost deliberate in the way it fell over a single spot and the shadow between the strands seemed far too dark to be rock. When he came in closer, he could hear a hollow humming and feel the briefest touch of moving air.

  He reached out, slowly parted the curtain, and found himself looking through a small doorway that led into darkness.

  He considered it, and then without knowing fully why, he called out a cautious “Hello?” into it.

  He waited. No one called back and he guessed that was a good thing.

  He peered further in, even squinted a little as he tried to make something out—a light, perhaps, or an object, a person. Or something else if he was having the worst of it that day. Nothing looked back. There was only the muted, blind sheet of black.

  Drawing the leaf curtain apart a little more gave him enough light to see the rusted remains of hinges, which suggested not only the presence of a door or a gate in the past, but that the darkness must lead somewhere. He activated the torch light application on his phone and it cast enough of a white glow to allow him to see a few feet in front of him, revealing worn patterns carved into the rock that made up the tunnel’s walls.

  He allowed himself a brief look over his shoulder, before he ducked past the doorway. The tunnel’s low ceiling grazed at the back of his head even though he was already hunched over as he moved along. The textured walls scraped at his elbows. He could hear his own breathing loud in his ears and every squeak of his rubber soles against the floor grated at him so much he made a conscious effort to lift his feet more as he walked.

  He moved down a gentle decline for what seemed like a long time, when the floor started to grow damp and slippery. The air in the passageway grew cool and the ceiling started to drip. The light from his phone trembled in broken bits on the floor now slick with water.

  Eedric continued to follow the tunnel. When he shone light onto the walls, he saw that they were covered in patterns. Squares of about 30 by 30 centimetres contained the visages of men and women, each formed from the mosaics of smaller geometrical forms. Each of the faces had either mouths or eyes, but never both at once. The mouths were all open, showing teeth, sometimes tusks. There was one he stopped to look at more closely because it was the only one with a tongue. He carefully touched the leering organ that protruded from beneath the sharp teeth of what could only be a Scerean before backing away and moving off. The squares without faces were divided into further squares, and within each of these were symbols that he guessed were the letters of a language that must no longer be spoken in Manticura. He could make nothing out, except that the ruins were old and that this wasn’t a hoax by some guy in the sewer with the video camera.

  The end of the tunnel rounded off into a spiral staircase leading down into an abyss. He peered down at the stone steps. The idea of long gone people from a past, unrecorded civilisation seemed strange to him and raised goose pimples on his skin. Other countries had ancient history. Other countries had things like catacombs, mummies and ruins of past grandeur that left the modern viewer in awe as they wandered, “How the hell did they do this without cranes and diamond-edged drills?” But not Manticura. Manticura was supposed to be all skyscrapers, digital and new-everything. There wasn’t even an old can to kick on the streets, and graffiti would get you fined for more than you had in your bank account (and caned too). Manticura was the antithesis of the messy animal that lent the country its name and that guarded the country’s coat-of-arms on everyone’s birth certificates. No one existed beyond the system. He swore every Manticurean was implanted with a chip at birth. But here he was, in an ancient ruin, wondering if the spiral staircase would lead to a throne room or a burial chamber. Why, even a toilet with an antiquated flushing system would have impressed him, for it was quite possible he’d discovered a part of Manticurean history that had been lost to the country itself. Lost, because had it been known, there would have been a gift shop somewhere and signs—signs for every corridor, electrical outlet… Signs for every sign already on the wall.

  His first thought was to turn around. Admittedly, Eedric wasn’t a fan of stairwells to nothingness and the only way he would watch a horror film or play a horror game was in the daytime, with the windows open, curtains drawn back and the volume turned down so low that he had to rely on subtitles for dialogue. No headphones, of course.

  However, Eedric’s plan to bail was staunched by a sudden flare of orange light from the depths. The way it receded into a soft glow called to him, drew him to descend the stone stairs, one cautious step at a time. As he adapted, his footsteps grew quieter, falling softer and softer as he went. There was a growing clarity as he descended. Sounds he could not recognise but were precise in his ears. Then there were the sounds he found he could recognise—the drone of the outside world. (He thought he could hear
a moving car in search of parking space, the mumble of voices from the hikers and the runners who could be found congregating at the visitors centre in the late afternoon; was it near four already? If so, he was late to pick Adrianne up from campus. She was going to be pissed.) And above it all was the nesting quiet of the underground.

  Lightness came upon his body and his posture felt as if he was hunching over even though the ceiling wasn’t low. He saw the long stretch of his legs and the forward thrust of his pelvis. It was an image—a perspective—he had never welcomed because of what he understood he’d become.

  The first rush of anxious, frightened thoughts threatened to wash over him in a sudden surge. He was on the brink of being overwhelmed but for the slightest sound, a touch, of a palm to something smooth. Or was it a gentle exhale of breath? He couldn’t tell yet. But he was near the foot of the staircase now, so he turned to it and saw the back of a woman’s figure paces away in the corridor that stretched out ahead of him. Her right arm was stretched out, her hand within a hollow in the wall of yet another tunnel.

  He took a step down and she looked over her shoulder with a startled hiss.

  5072–5078 CE

  Gatekeeper

  The war had burst from pockets of fighting up north in Esomir, diffusing south in scuffles and skirmishes like the toxic gas attack that started it all in one of the countries in the West Continents. It was so close, and yet no one thought it would come to Manticura. There was no conviction at least, but there was the paranoia—in canned food the poor couldn’t buy because the shelves had been swept clean of them; in the almost fevered need to stock up on fuel; in the reinforcement of roofs and the marking of windows with crosses of black tape even though underground they were already protected by walls of solid rock.