Merkabah Rider: The Mensch With No Name

by Edward M. Erdelac

  Yet on the blasted plain below there rose unsteadily a single, ruinous beige stone tower. It was what the Rider once heard called a torreón, a defensive turret perhaps thirty feet high with an open roof such as the Spanish once built in the center of their villages to fortify themselves against native attacks. This one was unusually tall compared to others he had seen, but just as thick.

  The Rider squinted against the rising sun, shading his eyes with both hands.

  “What is that?”

  “Three gates. One in the valley of Hinnom, one in the sea,” and he stretched the staff over the valley below to encompass the torreón, “and one in the desert.”

  “Here?”

  “It rises in any desert where men look for it,” said Kabede. “The Tower of Pandæmonium.”

  Pandæmonium. The Adversary’s palace. The capitol of Gehenna. The Rider had seen it from afar through his mystic lenses, but he never thought (or much hoped) he would get any closer.

  “We must go inside to enter the gate,” Kabede said, and started down, tugging his donkey behind.

  The Rider hung back, staring at the torreón. To his surprise, the raggedy onager walked ahead of him unbidden and pulled him along.

  It was a difficult descent, and the Rider stumbled often. Kabede never helped him when he fell, but stood and waited patiently for him to rise again. He was still very weak and his legs moved automatically, almost of their own volition. When they at last reached the valley floor an hour later, he was spent, but Kabede said nothing, and continued on toward the dark torreón.

  It neared noon when they finally crossed the desert to the turret, and the sun was near its summit, uncharacteristically hot and unforgiving for so late in the year. It seemed to sit on the top of the tower like a thing on an ancient pedestal, a blazing deity descended upon the Earth, emanating heat and blinding glory.

  Up close, the torreón looked like any other, its adobe brickwork molten and scoured by untold years of blowing sand and hammering sun. There was a thick, rotten wood door with bands of rusted iron at its base, surprisingly strong despite its decrepit appearance.

  Kabede hitched his burro to a saguaro here. He held the animal’s head in his hands and stared at it for a moment, as if inspecting it. Then he swiftly jabbed his right index finger into its right eye and subsequently poked his own eye with the same finger. The animal shook its head and reared back hee-hawing. Kabede held his palm over his own offended eye, tears spilling down his cheek.

  “What’d you do that for?” the Rider asked.

  “I have no Solomonic lenses, Rider,” Kabede explained. “This is the way I was taught to see the invisible, as our brother beasts do.”

  He reached into the animal’s pack and produced a carrot, which the burro gobbled up gladly, quickly forgetting its master’s offense.

  Kabede scratched its long ear.

  “He hates it when I do that, though.”

  He closed his eyes for a moment, then slid his hand over his unmolested eye and opened the tearing one. It was red and irritated, and he blinked several times and looked all around. Immediately his face wrinkled.

  “We are surrounded by demons. Ruahim. Almost enough to fill the valley.”

  “I know. But I can’t see them,” said the Rider.

  “Put on your lenses anyway,” Kabede advised. “We should be ready for anything.”

  The Rider fished out his spectacles and set them on his nose. The plain was empty but for a few swirling eddies of dust—the only hint that something else lurked out there. The turret itself, black in the Yenne Velt, did seem to emanate an odd red aura, menacing. It smelled of the infernal, a stench like burning chalk and hair. And the heat, he realized, came from it also, like a stove in a cold room. The tower warmed the whole valley. But the heat was not pleasant. Here up close, it was stifling. Perhaps it sustained the patch of desert that surrounded it, and choked away every living thing to the feet of the bordering hills.

  The tower looked to be abandoned, so the Rider was surprised when Kabede rapped on the old door with the head of the staff, and his skin rose into bumps when he heard a shuffling from behind as something came to answer.

  The old door swung open in jerks, the hinges stiff with age, its path blocked by rubble which the figure on the other side of the door kicked aside.

  The man who stood before them looked like a lean old hermit, unwashed, gray hair matted, a pointed, yellowing beard and drooping mustaches. He looked Spanish, with rich, sun baked skin, his dark eyes peering out from the shadow of a ragged straw hat. He gave the impression of an old bandit, in threadbare peon’s cottons and a dusty black sheep’s skin vest. He was barefoot, and a curved saber hung at his side, such as the Rider had sometimes seen in the East. The pommel was tarnished, but highly engraved, bearing a jeweled peacock motif. The Rider saw an old muzzle-loading rifle leaning against the unadorned wall.

  The hermit looked from one to the other.

  “We would have words with the turnkey,” Kabede told the old man evenly.

  “You would do well to speak of your betters in more respectful terms, chango,” the hermit rasped.

  His bony hand went to the hilt of the sword at his side, and the Rider touched his pistol.

  “Step aside,” Kabede commanded, holding the rod in front of him like a king’s staff of office.

  The hermit frowned and backed into the turret to admit them.

  The inner court of the turret was like a great well, with three tiers of ledges running the circumference. There were rifle slots situated all around the bottom two tiers, and rickety ladders of wood and rope that led from the ground to the first ledge, and the second ledge to the third, so they could be kicked away in the event the turret was penetrated.

  It was quite hot in the center. The sun shone straight down, offering no shade for the hour of noon. The hermit kept a simple pallet at one end, with a cooking fire and old kettle.

  The hermit pushed the door shut behind them and threw down a heavy bar.

  “He’s human,” the Rider whispered to Kabede. The lenses showed the old man had no mystical attributes whatsoever.

  “Yes. He’s one of the Order of the Peacock Angel,” said Kabede. “He guards the physical aspect of this gate.”

  “The Peacock Angel?” the Rider asked.

  “The Lord Lucifer,” said the hermit, folding his arms.

  The Rider was taken aback.

  “You serve the Adversary?” This was something new to him.

  “I serve the greatest of the archangels. The master of this world.”

  The Rider looked askance at the old hermit, and his expression bespoke his thoughts; that this old beggar was delusional.

  “Do not underestimate me, judío. Each of us vows to spend a year in poverty serving El Ángel Pavo Real. Come south and see me in my palace in a year, if you’re not beaten away for a beggar from my gate.”

  “You will watch our animals?” Kabede asked.

  “I give my word,” the hermit nodded.

  “Do you know who we are?” the Rider asked.

  “I do not care who you are. You would not be here if you had no business, and if El Ángel wishes it, you will not return this way.” He smiled again. “If you do not, I will eat your animals.”

  The hermit chuckled to himself and went to his palette.

  The Rider turned in a circle. The yard of the torreón swirled with dark, infernal energies, an ill updraft permeating the Yenne Velt, but that was all he could detect.

  Kabede walked in a circle, drawing in the sand with the pointed end of the staff.

  “You should begin your preparations,” Kabede said. His skin showed a visible sheen of sweat.

  “We’re going to enter here, in his presence?” the Rider said, gesturing to the hermit.

  “He has given his word. He will abide it.”

  “A devil worshiper?” the Rider said, watching the old man sip from a gourd.

  “He trusted us enough to let us in,” Kabede reaso
ned. “We could have killed him easily. We have no choice but to afford him the same trust.”

  He finished inscribing a Solomonic seal in the center of the courtyard, then sat down in the circle and laid the staff across his knees.

  The Rider haltingly unpacked his candles and set them up, murmuring his prayers and keeping an eye on the bemused looking old man.

  Preparing for a journey to Gehenna was not as simple as slipping into the Yenne Velt. The latter he could do almost in a matter of minutes without thinking. Just as entering heaven, a visit to hell required much more preparation and the enactment of a multitude of safeguards, due to the angelic and demonic entities one encountered at every turn.

  Kabede, he noticed, did not prepare quite so extensively. What prayers he did make were mostly in his own language. The Rider did detect a smattering of Hebrew now and then, and at least one catalytic Aramaic prayer he knew. It was repeated over and over in the devekut b’otiyot fashion: careful intonation of each syllable in such a way that it created an ecstatic sound not unlike a Buddhist mantra.

  The Rider dedicated the circle to the Archangels of the four directions and planted himself within facing Kabede. He closed his eyes and completed his own prayers, then joined with Kabede’s chant, until their voices intertwined and spiraled up the well of the torreón.

  Much time passed. Though the Rider’s eyes were closed he felt and saw though his eyelids the falling of cooling shadow across the torreón as the sun behind the lip. Then time itself was gone, as was all bodily sensation, beginning with a warm tremor that emanated at the base of his spine and merged with a flow of light pouring from the top of his head.

  These were the anchors of his personal merkabah, the chariot of light which alone could carry his soul untouched through the fires of hell. He opened his ethereal eyes then, and was startled to see Kabede, still in a seated posture, but suspended in mid-air, his own eyes open and regarding him.

  The Rider looked upon Kabede’s whirling energy vehicle. The angles of blue and golden light (actually two interlocked and counter-rotating tetrahedra, one pointing up, the other down) surrounding him gave the impression of a stellated octahedron, a whirling, three dimensional magen, a Star of David.

  Kabede sat calmly in the center of the brilliant energy field, like the eye of a storm. Looking on him was disorienting for a bit, and the Rider glanced away to dispel his own mounting vertigo, when he perceived a heretofore nonexistent empty space beneath him. What had been solid earth in the physical world was here a cavernous black stone staircase spiraling downwards, its lower levels washed in shadow.

  A palpable, unearthly heat rose from below, so powerful that the Rider actually felt it, even bodiless and protected by the merkabah magen. He could see the waves of heat distorting the light of his emanation on the flags.

  “After you,” said Kabede.

  He nodded, and with a mental contraction of his will, he went floating down the staircase.

  For a long time they descended in silence. The darkness was impenetrable, retreating only briefly, like seawater around their glowing bodies, to fall in and close once more in their wake. The tower seemed to stretch for hours into the earth, and there were no landings. The steps themselves were quite steep and narrow, and would not have allowed for comfortable rest without fear of tumbling in one’s sleep.

  He never spent enough time in the other worlds to know if souls needed sleep. They certainly tired, for will and concentration were what provided an astral body with locomotion (his own maintenance of the complex merkabah magen was quite taxing). He pitied any souls who had to make their way up or down these treacherous stairs in pitch black. The loneliness alone would drive most minds to the brink.

  Soon they became aware of a sound. It was far off and muffled at first. Gradually, it grew louder and was accompanied by a faint reddish glow from below.

  It was a roaring. No, a screaming. A multitude of voices all raised at once, clamoring to be heard above each other, yet indistinct in the very act of doing so.

  They came to the bottom at last, and a tall narrow doorway afforded them their first glance of hell.

  It was similar to the torreón in structure. A great deep well, though so massive in size that its far walls were nearly out of sight, obscured in a combined haze of heat, black smoke and distance. Likewise, the open mouth was a single pinprick of unattainable light as distant as a star in the darkness above. It shimmered in and out of sight. The Nehar Dinur, The River of Fire, whose source was the sweat of the seraphim that bore the Throne of God in the seventh hekhalot, cascaded down in a tremendous flaming waterfall. It emptied into the great lake, which pooled at the center of the lowest point, whose stony shore the entrance to the torreón opened onto.

  Several other minor, nameless falls poured from above, fed from numerous twisting streams of murky gall and black bubbling pitch and yellow poison, creating a foul, unspeakable brew like a great cesspool below, steaming with constant plumes of acrid smoke and ash like a lava flow boiling the sea. The surface of the ever churning, ever burning lake of poison was crusted over in places with drifting patches of impossible, thick gray ice through which the blue centered flames shone and crowds of frantic humanoid shadows hammered bootlessly beneath.

  Around jagged holes in the dirty ice hunkered clusters of monstrous demons, dark, eyeless creatures who knew no home but hell and whose twisted, amalgamated bodies, ungainly and misshapen, looked sheathed in or held together by glowing, superheated iron and links of black chain or twisted ropes of barbed razor wire. They stood as if they were colossal malformed fisherman gathered around the holes in the ice. Instead of plucking sustenance from the depths, they used great pikes to shove heaps of tiny flailing figures who tried to claw their way out back under.

  Seven subdivided compartments comprised Gehenna, and they found themselves in the lowest, the furthest from Paradise. This was the dark place where Lucifer, greatest of all the betrayers, made his home. Every limb of the stark, petrified trees that thrust twisting through the miry clay banks of the lake of fire and jutted out from the rock walls of the abyss were adorned with screaming men and women, bound in wire and suspended there by long spikes driven through their tongues.

  The merkabah magen shielded them from feeling most of the abominable climate, which was a mix of ash, fire, blood and filth, navigated by buzzing clouds of strange winged vermin who swarmed around them but disintegrated in little buzzing pops when they tried to pass through the whirling angles of energy. The magen did nothing to filter out the horrible clamor of wild shrieking that the myriad tortures of the realm elicited, and the cavernous acoustics of the place magnified.

  Every noise of terror and agony, every gibber and howl, every base animal protest was being raised all at once, incessantly and without pause by voices rendered hoarse with unending, unendurable torment and despair. The resulting ambient sound was like that of a slaughterhouse manned by lunatics in full swing, with cattle-like lowing and mad, mostly unintelligible fits of the foulest obscenities in a thousand languages randomly intermixed with painful, pitiful cries for succor and mercy. The names of God and demons and parents and children long since passed from memory were invoked with equal desperation.

  The rain of blood sluiced down in torrents from the carved granite gutter spouts on the ledges of Abaddon high above, where the bodies of the unrepentant were systematically torn to pieces and constantly reassembled haphazardly by callous, clawed hands. Limbs and organs fell too, cast into the center like the innards of fish. Droning locusts the size of horses with women’s faces and flowing hair and red crowns snatched the discarded matter in mid-air and gobbled them up with serrated teeth.

  The Rider watched in morbid fascination as one of the locust things fought for the twisting, screeching figure of a naked, corpulent man with a whole flock of squawking, flaming ravens, each bearing the angry red face of a bawling, black-eyed infant. Then an enormous creature with the head of a mottled furless cat, and six-fingered hands
waving excitedly like flippers from its shoulders, reared up from the rolling fog of cinder and batted both warring parties aside. It gobbled the man up like a grub then scuttled up the wall of the infernal cistern, its slick, millipede body worming into one of the side tunnels overhead from which flowed a stream of viscous bile.

  The Rider turned away, sickened. He only glimpsed the horrors of this place of punishment once though a mystic lens. The lesson served to harrow his soul and teach him the importance of virtue.

  Being here, immersed in terror, observing the intensity of the suffering, was another matter entirely. He felt a deep, penetrating revulsion, like a spurt of venom bursting from his heart to fill every limb and extremity, to flood his mind with a thick, staggering melancholy. If the passion, the love and hate of HaShem were responsible for these horrors, then how could the utter indifference of The Great Old Ones be worse for mankind?

  The Rider saw luminous, many colored angels passing up and down the Nehar Dinur. Many of these bore the ruined carcasses of souls who had served their requisite term and had been sufficiently purged of their iniquity. He watched an angel with glorious parrot green wings fly twisting like a daredevil in and out of the fiery waters as it soared upwards. It bore a sagging, wasted body in its arms. At each immersion in golden fire the pitiful cargo was restored, healed of its grievous wounds.

  The envious dead clawed at them in passing, lunging desperately from the clutches of their winged tormentors, seeking to cling to the robes of the angel and thus be born away from their own agonies, but these were savagely beaten back by the patrolling mazzikim, monstrous beings whose bat wings carried them deftly upon the mad, infernal winds.

  Kabede had also apparently fixed his attention on this brief scene of respite, and he craned his neck to watch the green winged angel with its burden, until they were a bright speck far above.