Awake in the Night Land

by John C. Wright

Kitimil's teeth were clenched as he crouched on the glass floor, staring up at me, but he grinned like a skull. “Where is Magigi? Your woman has come again to you, not once, but many times. Why not mine?”

  I looked up. There were two shadows on the ceiling. Mine, and the shadow of the Neanderthal. Kitimil was real.

  When I brought my eyes down from the ceiling, Ydmos, Abraxander, Mneseus, Sings-Death and Enoch were gone. They had faded away.

  145. The Last Of The First Folk

  I said, “You opened the coffins in the archive, to create the distraction, and you sent Nergal to fight the overseer.”

  He said, “I opened but one coffin: your own. You produced the rest, all the millions of men, from your mind, because the solitude had driven you mad.”

  “Do you mean I hallucinated them, or do you mean I rotated them into flesh using Abraxander’s dimensional mind-science?”

  “What does it matter, after-man? Even now, does sanity matter to you?”

  “Your voice has changed,” I said, “Your way of speech. What language is this? Who are you?”

  “You know me. I follow you through all your changes from life to life, so that I may be with you at the end of all.”

  “So you came here. You stirred up the rebellion in the Archive to free me. None of the other men, only me?”

  “Fool. There was no rebellion, no giants to fight. Those lesser servants of the darkness were long ago consumed by the greater servants. We have run, you and I, down empty corridors of a dark, deserted ship, for weeks, and months, and years, and decades, with no one and nothing in pursuit. I watched while you fought battles with invisible foes, wept over imaginary comrades fallen in battle, and fired pretended weapons at fictional monsters.”

  I straightened up. In a voice of relief, I said, “Then, if I am merely mad, and those nightmares merely from my own mind … Thank God!”

  “The hounds and Mantichores are imaginary, the behemoths, the giants and the Great Gray Hag. But—“

  “No.”

  “But the Silent Ones are real. The Watchers are waiting on every deck of this vast ship, and watching you, the last of all the sons of Man.”

  “Not the last. Mr. Singer, Mr. Bliss, Ydmos, and the others—“

  “Shadows of you. I don’t know why you conjured them. Perhaps you meant them to argue your decisions for you: the faithful and the faithless, the wise and the impulsive, the noble and the humble. As Mneseus, you tried to convince yourself to kill yourself; as Enoch, you prevented it.”

  “No. Surely, I am merely hallucinating all this …"

  “Until today. Your imaginary weapon went off. I heard the report. I saw the bullet hole appear in the far bulkhead. I smelled the smoke, and heard the spent shellcase tinkle on the deck. I knew, after centuries of following you from life to life, the time to consummate our agreement had come: and so I brought you here, where you were allowed to view the Last of All Suns, where all the ghosts of all the dead worlds of creation are gathered to their cremation. Now the ghosts will board the ship, attracted by your affections.”

  “Agreement?”

  “I am eldest. Death is not amnesia to one of my race, nor do we forget our dreams on waking. You need my memory to recreate the world, for the things you know will not return out of the mists of time, unless things older than you know are called before them: you must have the roots before you have branch and twig and leaf. My part is done: I have brought the world I remember within hailing distance. Now it calls to you.”

  Unthinkingly, I put my hand down to pet the dog I found at my side. His fur was long and golden, and with a rough tongue, he licked my hand. “Pepper?” I asked in confusion.

  Pepper barked and wagged his tail.

  Then he sniffed the Neanderthal, and he growled, and hunkered down.

  I said, “Did they promise you your mate again, if you betrayed us?”

  He shook his shaggy head slowly. “Not me. You. You are the one who made the promise to them, long ago, in another life. You are the one who carries the coal from which the new universe is meant to catch fire. I am merely here to breathe on the coal.”

  I said, “What coal?”

  He said, “Love.”

  “Love?”

  He snorted at my ignorance. “Fool! Of what else could a universe be made?”

  I said, “Why do they want a new universe made? These monsters? What do they want?”

  “They want to eat it again.”

  “Am I going to make the universe, all by myself? I am no god.”

  “You are a dove Noah sends out. They want to find the new universe.”

  I had to laugh. “The universe is a pretty big place. How can they miss it?”

  He said, “At the moment, the cosmos is sub-microscopic, smaller than the diameter of the core of an atom. Somewhere in here, in the Central Sun. The cosmos is yet a seed. If they find it after it starts to grow, it is too late for them to enter. You will lead them to it. They cannot find it without you, without human life.”

  “You won’t do? You are alive.”

  “I am Noah’s raven. I was sent and failed.”

  “Failed why?”

  “I remember the horror from life to life. I know how many other men will see their mates soul-eaten and destroyed, so that I may have a few brief days with mine. I must learn to be cold in my heart when other men suffer, or else I go insane. So I care nothing for the world; I hate it. But you forget your lives. You still love your woman, and your fellow man, and the world. The chains are connected, one to the next. They pull on the first chain, they get the woman, her folk, their folk, and all the world.”

  I said, “Suppose I do find this new universe, smaller than an atom. Why would I tell them? And how could I even see it?”

  He shook his head, but drew back his teeth, a grimace of assumed contempt, as if I had said something childish, unutterably foolish. But he did not answer.

  I asked again: “And what if I defy them? What if I simply say no?”

  “The worm needs do nothing on the hook but twist.” He pointed at my hand. “Look to this weapon. You were merely fond of it, familiar with it. It is nothing. Your woman, your people, those you love. They are everything. The sun and moon and stars. The wilderness, the sea. The House of Silence found a man like you, a wanderer, who would know many lands and love them. That love, by itself, will seek the place where all these things can be made again, even as a magnet seeks a magnet. They would not let me tell you anything that could hinder their terrible purposes.”

  “Do you speak to them?”

  “No. I hear whispers in the night, in my soul, and I guess at their desires. But I still live, as do you. They spare me. If not for this, than what? We are within the last few breaths of time, and short breaths, too: the cosmos has less than a moment left. I can sense the Omega Point is near. Look outside! The bubbles, the faces, the ghosts: all is gathered into one pinpoint of infinite light. In a moment, the light will vanish, as all reality eats itself.”

  The golden light winked out, but there was still a dull reddish glow, like the glow from a iron forge, filling the last few cubic miles of the shrinking universe.

  “What are those dark walls I see? They are above and below and all around.”

  “The hull of this ship.”

  Underfoot, through the porthole where I stood, I saw what I assumed was the dark skin of another ship, but as if that ship were turned inside-out, and wrapped around the ship where we were.

  The memory of Abraxander showed me what a flat, two-dimensional man embedded in the surface of a shrinking balloon would see, if he looked to any side of him. The flat two-dimensional waves of light reaching his eye would follow the curve of the balloon: the balloon would seem a level surface to him, and he would see his own body, as if turned inside out, forming a boundary around the edge. As the balloon shrank, each point of his inside-out two-dimensional body would press inward, and the edge grow ever closer, till he was staring himself eye to eye, almost kissing h
is screaming mouth. So, in three dimensions, was this space around the ship, filled with nothing but a distorted and reversed image of itself, as if trapped in a ping-pong ball, whose inner curve wall was all a mirror.

  There was no way out. The universe was as if held within a ball of metal.

  The iron walls shrank in and grew closer. The hull was crusted as if with barnacles and gargoyles: hulking shapes as big as mountains on a sterile plain of endless pock-marked metal. They had faces; they had eyes.

  I could not breathe, for claustrophobic panic seized me.

  Pepper whined and barked. I drew a safety match from my pocket, and struck it on the metal barrel of my gun. The tiny, tiny fire in my hand was the only source of light in the universe.

  Directly opposite me, directly underfoot, as this hull-wall drawing closer, and in the midst of the rings of mountain-sized sphinxes, was the tiniest imaginable dot of light. There was one porthole, one window, out of all the endless miles of that dark hull, endless rows of blind windows, where the tiniest imaginable man, as if seen from below, hovered with his feet toward me, and held a spark in his fingertip. I saw myself from across the universe, mirror-reverse.

  I realized that the universe was now so small that images were circling the diameter of the cosmos to touch my eye.

  At the feet of the mountainous sphinxes and huge, inhuman faces, little thin shapes stood, draped in fabric, hooded and veiled. They must have been as tall as trees, for me to see them at this distance, but my soul was struck with chill to see them, for all the hooded shapes were bent toward that one porthole, watching that one spark.

  “What if I put her from my mind? What if I simply stop dwelling on her, or on the world I have lost? What if I–”

  The words were too absurd even to say them aloud. What if I, by an act of will, forced myself stop loving everything I loved? What if I merely made myself empty inside by wishing it so?

  Kitimil chuckled sardonically. He did not even bother to mock me.

  I could not bear to see the look of dark, sardonic triumph on his wolfish, brutal face. I threw the match down. The universe went dark.

  I blinked. It was not utterly dark.

  In the middle of that darkness, from one, unimaginably tiny, unthinkably distant, and yet, somehow, inexpressibly close, point of perfect golden light, something reached out.

  And a curtain of flaming light came up from the dark glass surface where I stood, and in the middle of the light was a bright shadow. The shadow was curved and slender, a woman's shape, and I saw the eyes and lips that I adored, the hair brighter than gold, and she lifted her small, well-shaped hands toward me.

  It was Lisa.

  I could not help but step forward. I could not have stopped myself, not even to save the universe. We embraced. Warmth was all around me.

  I woke.

  146. In The Tent

  I was laying on a canvas cot, dressed in no more than a shirt. To one side of me, a camp stool with square wooden legs served as my nightstand: here was a thermometer of red mercury, a shaving glass, a small tin box with a red cross on it: the first aid kit. A little stoppered bottle of medicine, with a syringe, was to the left. My hip flask, filled with some devilishly potent stuff I got from the Arab at the depot, was to the right. For a teetotaler, Mahmud knew where to find better than the bathtub gin we drank back in the states.

  I swung my feet to the floor, and was dazed for a moment, weak. Beneath my feet was the skin of the tiger I had shot in Bengal, nicely skinned, and the skull dressed with amber chips for eyes.

  Beneath the rug, was golden grass, and tiny, reddish clods of dusty-smelling soil were visible between the brown roots of the tufts of grass. A haze of dust hung in the hot air inside the tent, giving it an air of unreality.

  I grimaced. An air of unreality was not entirely inappropriate, things being as they were.

  From the roofpole of the tent, hung my canteen, shining metal held in a pocket of green canvass. My leather ammo belt and hunting jacket also were nearby, hung up neatly, but of my rifle, there was no sight.

  This was not a good sign. One keeps the arms of a feverish man away from him.

  Through the open tent flap, I could see a wonder. If you have never beheld Africa, you have never seen clear skies. Nothing in New England is like it. The sky was like hammered pewter in the distance: the sun, a monarch of fire. The hills and swales of sun-baked grass were gold and tawny, the hue of a lion’s mane. In the middle distance, a line of thin, dark, crooked trees marked the wadi where the river would run when the rains came. The plains are wide and wild and large in a fashion no poor soul in Boston will ever see. Many New Englanders understand the romance of the ocean, of far horizons, but this place, as unbound and as mysterious, few understand.

  I brushed off my shirt: there were dog hairs all over it. From Pepper. That was odd. But Lisa’s father was an odd sort of duck, and might think it was medically a wise practice to let a man’s dog slobber in his face when he was sick.

  A slender shadow fell across the tent.

  She was there.

  My wife was framed in the triangle of blazing brilliance behind her, the breathless shadows of the tent folds to either side. My eyes could barely focus on her, because of the gloom where I was in the tent, the brightness where she was, and it looked almost as if she were standing at the far side of a tunnel.

  Her eyes are as blue as cornflowers, and her hair is gold, and her skin is bronzed and lightly freckled from her days in the sun with me, the nights beneath the tropic stars. She wore riding pants and boots, and a gun belt cinched her narrow waist. The starched white blouse enclosed her curves in military lines. She wore a pith helmet with a scarf floating down her back.

  I rose and opened my arms and stepped forward…. And she put up her hand and giggled.

  I looked down. There I was in my underwear.

  She said in her lilting accent, “Ach, don’t worry it, mein Leibchen. We are man and wife now, yes? On the honeymoon, I am supposed to see your hairy knees. Such hair you have, and everywhere! This is the worse of the ‘for better and worse’, yes?”

  Then I did grab her, and I did kiss her. Sobbing, I held on to her, and told her how I had missed her. My words were mumbled, pointless, trite. She was overcome by them nonetheless, and melted into my arms.

  I took her lips forcefully enough to dip her back over my arm, a graceful as a waltzing maid, she bowed back, submitting, her arms curling my neck. I could feel, like steel beneath the velvet, the lithe muscles of her slender frame. No, she is not an indoor girl, my Lisa.

  One moment, she was shivering from the sob she was trying to keep in. “I thought I had lost you, lost you!” she said. But the next, she was cool and playful, nibbling my ear, and whispering, “Ach, and this is the better, yes? Let Mrs. Powell up for air, Mr. Powell.”

  I put my hands on her slim shoulders and pulled her upright. “Anything you say, Mrs. Powell.”

  Her helmet was in her hand (she had doffed it during the kiss) and now she raised it as if to don it again, but then stepped into the tent, mopped her brow with the scarf, and dropped the helmet on the cot. “Is too hot in here, Mr. Powell, nie? If you are better feeling, put on the trousers, and let us find a cool spot. You can teach me how to wrestle, like you promise back in Marrakesh.” She favored me with her little impish twinkle, and took the pack of cigarettes out of the pocket of my jacket, which was hanging from a tent peg. Casually she tossed the pack to me, and sat herself on the edge of the cot, her small hands gripping the wooden slat to either side, her booted legs crossed, her shoulders slightly shrugged, her head held in a relaxed poise. Her eyes were half lidded as she watched me, and a little sensuous smile crept into her lips.

  I drew out two cigarettes, put them both in my mouth, lit them with a safety match, then plucked one from my lips and offered it to her.

  She rose languidly, swayed over to me, paused to examine me a moment, and, with the slightest curtsey (for Lisa is a tall woman) she bowed her
head a bit, taking the cigarette from between my fingers with her lips without touching it with her hands.

  Now she leaned back, drawing thoughtfully, and she blew smoke toward the tent roof. She stood with one hip cocked, her arm half-folded, cigarette dangling from slim fingers, her head tilted to one side. “I think, to be married to you, Meister Powell, I am going to be liking this verr-rr-ry much, yes? Oh, yes.” And she could not hide her smile.

  I said, “This is a dream.”

  Her smile widened. “Oh, a dream it is, my love, yes.” She tossed back her head and shrugged. “Every bride, is she as happy as I am? I do not believe it. The world could not stay together, if there was so much happiness, so much, in the world. It would burst into pieces!”

  “No, I mean this is really a dream. It is not happening. It is taken from life, but it is not life. I was in this tent before, but it was when we first met….I fell ill after drinking bad water. Your father was the nearest white man, and my guides brought me to him. Everyone had heard about the beautiful blonde valkyrie, his daughter, he had brought back with him from Pottsdam, but I had yet to set eyes on you.

  “While I was ill, I had strange dreams then, that I was trapped on a ship circling the last of all suns, while brooding faces with staring eyes, or faceless things in hoods, all waited for me to let them and their hellish crew back into the universe again.

  “I was delirious for a long, long time.

  “You were my nurse. You brought me back from the brink of death. And so I met you.

  “You did not walk in on me naked when we first met: and that did happen during our honeymoon. I did not even know I was in love, at first. You were just my friend’s daughter, a woman who liked the wild, a woman who knew how to ride and hunt and shoot and drink whisky and smoke tobacco.

  “For so many weeks, we were just friends, you and I, friends like man-friends, if you know what I mean, like you were just one of the boys. We told each other everything, including the kind of things a man doesn’t normally tell a woman.

  “Mother was wife-hunting for me, when I was back in the states. I asked you to pretend to be my fiancée when I went to visit home, to get Mom off my back. The joke turned real before I knew it. It took me quite a while to smarten up, get on my knee, and give you a ring.”