by Paul Preuss
Blake made Guy into a model apprentice. He aped Pierre’s style and wore a high-collared black jacket and tight black pants. He lived in a tiny chambre de bonne in Issy and went to work conscientiously every day, moving swiftly through the crowded streets on his electric bike like a black shadow, silent except for frequent horn-bleats. He spent his spare time in bookstores and museums, pursuing a new hobby. He was always early to the weekly discussions. He avoided contact with anyone outside the Athanasians, in person or by phonelink.
At the first weekly meeting, Salome’s face was familiar, and Lokele’s, but the rest were strangers. He didn’t know what had become of his other fellow guests, and he thought it better not to ask.
“Hello, Guy,” Catherine murmured that first night, but she did not look at him. She waited until he sat down, and then she sat far away. When she repeated this behavior at the next meeting, he asked her why she was avoiding him.
“Be patient,” she said. “Soon you will be called to a great undertaking”—she smiled thinly—“and if you succeed, I promise we will be united forever…”
One evening two months after he’d arrived in Paris, Blake delivered a package of drugs to a pharmacy in the Sixteenth. The stern pharmacist told him to wait, went into his office a moment, then emerged with an envelope. “For you.”
Blake took the envelope without comment and waited to open it until he’d ridden his superped a few blocks. The note inside said, “500 hrs. demain matin, La Menagerie, Jardins des Plantes. Seul.”
In late summer the light creeps into Paris long before sunrise, and the sky to the east was a clear, pale apple-green behind Sacre Coeur’s ugly goat’s-udder dome. In the west, the edge of the full moon was creeping down behind the dark foliage of the Jardin des Plantes’ huge old trees.
The gates of the Menagerie were closed, but as Blake was chaining his superped to the iron fence he saw a man emerge from the tiny gate-house; judging by his size and walk, it was Pierre. The gates swung open with a screech and Blake went inside.
The zoo was old and small, built by kings in a romanticizing past; the cages were of fanciful wrought iron and the animal houses were built of imitation rubble and mud piled up between unshaped tree branches. The effect was supposed to be primitive, exotic. Low brick buildings with tile roofs squatted in the shadows of huge chestnuts and planes.
Blake followed his shadowy guide past a bronze statue of a leaping black youth, dressed like an Indian, playing the panpipes to charm a snake. The statue was inscribed “Age de Pierre.” The Stone Age. Perhaps taciturn Pierre had been inspired by it—certainly the name suited him. Pierre stopped beside the statue and handed Blake what looked like a velvet bag. “Put this on.”
It was a hood. Blake dragged it awkwardly over his head and Pierre pulled it straight down over his shoulders. In the pitch darkness Blake was instantly sensitized to the sounds and smells of the zoo. Nearby, birds were screaming in an awesome cacophony of barnyard and jungle. Growling cats stalked in their cages, impatient for their morning meal.
Blake thought of Rilke’s panther, its will benumbed behind a thousand bars—and beyond the bars, no world.
Pierre took Blake by the arm and urged him forward. Blake stepped out as boldly as he dared. They walked a long time, silently. The asphalt path gently sloped, down and up and down again. The temperature of the air dropped as they walked among groves of trees. Blake felt a slight breeze. The path turned to gravel underfoot, and he could picture crumbled yellow limestone. The animal smells drifted away. There was a scent of herbs—he recognized sage and thyme, but the rest was a fragrant sachet—and a little later the heavy perfume of Mediterranean pines.
“Get in.”
An electric car, parked somewhere on the grounds … Blake slid in, and it started with a quiet hum and drove off slowly. The ride lasted perhaps twenty minutes. Blake didn’t know if Pierre was still with him or not.
The car stopped. “Get out.” Pierre was still with him. “Step down. Steep stairs. Keep walking down until I tell you.”
The steps were of brick or possibly stone, something smooth and cool. Pierre let go of Blake’s arm, but his footsteps stayed close behind. Two sets of shuffling footsteps echoed from the walls of a tunnel, as if they were descending into an old Metro station.
At first the air was cool, but after a hundred or so treads on this seemingly endless stair, Blake felt the air stirring and growing warmer. Somewhere far away, a heavy door closed.
The heat was dry; the air got hotter. A distant whisper became a steady sigh, and then a fluttering roar. Blake kept walking down at a steady pace, but he suddenly stumbled as he tried to drop his weight onto a flat floor. Pierre had failed to warn him that the stairs were ending.
Blake waited a moment, expecting to feel Pierre’s hand on his arm, but there was nothing. The oppressive heat and the blast-furnace roar had covered Pierre’s silent departure.
Blake tugged off the hood and dropped it at his feet.
He stood in blue light at the base of a round cement tower, as big as a silo. Its upper reaches were invisible in the darkness far above. Behind him were the stairs down which he’d come, a dark passage now barred by an iron gate.
The silo was an air shaft. Warm wind, sucked down from above, blew toward the massive stone portal in front of him; through it, orange light flickered in a hypostyle hall of columns shaped like bundles of papyrus reeds. On either side of the opening stood massive seated statues. They were in the Egyptian manner, but each had three jackal heads—an 18th century conflation of Anubis and Cerberus, fanciful, anachronistic, yet imposing.
By the dim blue light that seeped into the shaft he could make out hieroglyphs carved in the stone lintel. With his new skill at reading Egyptian he recognized that they were meaningless, or at best arcane. Centered below the hieroglyphs, however, was a short inscription in French: Ne regardez pas en arrière. Don’t look back.
He walked slowly forward. As he approached the threshold, flame belched from the jaws of the jackals, and a booming bass voice made the air tremble: “He who follows this route alone and without looking back will be purified by fire, by water, and by air; and if he can master the fear of death, he will leave the Earth’s bosom, will again see light, and will be worthy of admission to the society of the wisest and bravest.”
Blake heard this solemn invocation with a mixture of apprehension and amusement—apprehension because he wondered just how far the Athanasians were prepared to go to “purify” him, amusement that they had the humor to mock themselves. The sentiments and flowery phrases, like the architecture, were straight out of the Age of Enlightenment.
Ostentatiously he marched forward into the hall of columns. His steps were bold, but his nerves were jangling.
The heat and the roar increased. At the far end of the hall was a double-doored gate of wrought iron, the decorative work so thick with spikes and curlicues that little could be seen in the interstices except a bright, wavering gleam of orange. The hot gates smelled of the forge; as Blake approached he could make out a word, shaped in the voids of the iron strapwork, radiant with an orange light he realized was a distant wall of flame: Tartarus.
Another step. The gates groaned and swung open and Blake, forgetting his pose, gasped at what he saw. He was looking into an enormous domed pit, filled with flames. Its floor was a circular lake of fire, twenty meters in diameter; in the center of the lake stood a bronze statue, the figure of a bearded man caught in mid-stride with legs apart, left arm forward, right arm upraised. In each fist he held a forked thunderbolt. Fire jetted in spurts from his eyes and mouth; his face was stretched in a horrid grimace. This, surely, was the god Baal.
The immense chamber was filled with smoke and flames. Flames licked up the brick walls, in-curving like the walls of a kiln, which rose fifteen meters to a wide circular balcony. Billows of black smoke poured upward, past a ring of fire on the balcony rim; at the apex of the higher dome above, a chimney sucked out the smoke and kept the flam
es leaping.
Blake stood watching the scene for a long minute. Then the gates of Tartarus screeched again, and began to close. Hastily, he stepped through them.
The heat was withering. From the smell, Blake judged that the flames were fed by highly volatile kerosene. The hot wind at his back constantly fed oxygen to the bottom of the furnace, and most of the heat was carried to the upper chamber and out the chimney, but he knew he could not stay here for long before dropping of heatstroke.
There was no path around the walls, which were a wall of fire right down to the edge of the fiery lake. There was no bridge across the lake. There were only the six wide brick steps before him, leading down into the floating flames.
The plastic fabric of Blake’s clothes was already softening in the heat. He stripped them off.
Naked, he walked down the first two steps. The heat was punishing. He knew he could go no further. He backed away, ran forward and jumped—
—as high and as far as he could, wrapping his arms around his pulled-up knees, ducking his head. He cannon-balled into the flames.
The pool was deep, and the splash scattered the flames; immediately he swam up for air. Using the technique that, of necessity, had long been practiced by wrecked sailors and ditched fliers, he swam through the fire—taking a breath, diving, swimming underwater, pushing the floating, burning liquid aside as he came up for air. He knew he could get across the fiery lake. He could only assume there was a way out.
The light below the surface was a weird dance of rippling orange shadows, barely bright enough to see the underwater brick walls. Blake made a circuit of the pool as quickly as he could without exhausting himself and found himself back where he’d entered; he hadn’t seen a hint of an opening in the wall, not even a drain.
There remained the island in the center, the pedestal of the fire god’s statue. Blake moved toward it, his body writhing in the flickering submarine light, gasping harder for air each time he resurfaced. As he neared the towering statue, he felt a light current pushing outward at the surface and a stronger current running toward it a meter below. He surfaced again. Pipes at the rim of the brick pedestal poured fresh water into the lake, creating a zone of clear water. He could wait here and catch his breath, although burning drops of fuel fell from the statue’s flame-spurting mouth, singeing his hair and blistering his shoulders.
He gulped and dove. A meter down, there were grilled drains in the brickwork, wide enough to admit his shoulders. He tried two of them, but they were set fast in mortar. The third gate swung open at his touch.
He surfaced behind the statue, avoiding the rain of fire. He breathed long and deep, considering what he had to do.
At the very best, it was a ten-meter swim under water before he reached the edge of the pool. He wondered if the drain was big enough to swim in for the entire distance, if it was blocked or barred inside. If he swam all the way to the edge and ran into a barrier there, would he have enough strength to return?
Blake took a long look around the fiery furnace, soot-blackened with the smoke of centuries. His gaze traveled up past the bronze statue, up to the cathedral-high dome filled with oily smoke and flame. All this had not been built to drown would-be initiates miserably, invisibly. If he was to be sacrificed, some more spectacular end must await him. With that line of reasoning, he made up his mind.
When his head was ringing from hyperventilation and his lungs were filled with air, he dived.
The current pulled him into the drain. He bashed his head painfully where the drain took a sharp turn and leveled off. He grabbed at the sides but found them slick with algae. He couldn’t even use his arms, for the brick tube was too narrow. He thrashed his feet like fins and kept his hands to the sides, streamlining himself as much as he could. In moments he was in utter blackness. His lungs were aching unbearably, but he knew he had long minutes remaining before he really began to get short of oxygen. He put his fingers out to trail along the wall of the drain, hoping to measure his progress.
To his surprise, he was darting through the drain like a dolphin through the sea. He had been unable to feel the swift current that sucked him forward, faster and faster. The water became cooler—
—then cold, then painfully cold, almost freezing. His ankles and wrists throbbed with pain. His teeth were so many frozen stones in his aching jaw.
His shoulder slammed into the wall as he encountered another turn in the pipe. A rush of bubbles overtook him. Blue light speared down from above.
He was expelled into air, only to fall flailing back into cold water.
He was in another pool, this one icy blue. Slick irregular blue-white walls surrounded him, their tops lost in bright clouds of thickly condensing vapor. The opening of the fountain that had spewed him out was in the form of a great bronze jar, held in the arms of another colossal statue, a naiad carved of marble—enough bigger than the god of fire to drench him thoroughly: La Source.
Blake was so cold he could not keep still. He sidestroked swiftly around the base of the statue, examining his new prison. There seemed no way out except, possibly, to climb the walls, and the tops of those were invisible. But he knew he must get out of the water before the last of his strength ebbed away.
He swam to the side and hauled himself out. The walls were wet concrete, shaped and painted to look like the face of a glacier, hardly warmer than the ice they mimicked. But there were ledges and crevices in the concrete, enough to let him climb into the clouds.
As he started up the cliff he heard a trembling groan and the sound of great engines rhythmically throbbing, slowly at first, then with an increasing tempo. The sound was reminiscent of something, but Blake couldn’t place it. Then he realized that the sound was of an old-fashioned steam engine. The technology of this chamber, the chamber of waters, was a century more advanced than that of the chamber of fire.
At the same moment he recalled that the steam engines were first used as pumps to suck water out of flooded mines…
A rivulet of water ran down the wall beside him. He was perhaps three meters above the surface of the icy pool. He looked up and got a splat of cold water in the face. As he was clinging to the wall with one hand and wiping the water from his eyes with the other, he was drenched with bucketsful of water falling from above. He looked up again, in time to see torrents of white water erupt from the tops of the walls on every side. He barely had time to thrust his fist into a crack and twist it there, to jam himself fast. Then he was deluged. The water was pounding his shoulders, pounding the top of his head, thundering in his brain. All his weight was dependant on his right arm and fist and the bare toes of his left foot, which clung to a tiny ledge. He had to get out of the waterfall or give up and fall back into the pool. Bracing himself against the tons of water that descended every minute, he blindly felt for another handhold. His hand found a rough nob of cement, his toes reached another ledge. Carefully he transferred his weight sideways. The falling water was dense and blinding. He repeated the cautious process, moving sideways another half a meter. The sting of falling water on his head and shoulders seemed to lessen.
Another slow lateral move and he was in a dancing mist of water droplets, no longer absorbing the full force of the spillway. For the next few meters above him a vertical ridge of cement like a ship’s prow cut through the cascading water on either side. He glanced around and saw tumbling water everywhere, streaming out of the glowing clouds under the roof. The pool was a seething, freezing caldron below.
Oddly, its level remained constant. Blake felt a shiver of respect for the designers of the ingenious hydraulic system of this labyrinth, which functioned as well as it had centuries ago when it was built.
He continued his climb, moving slowly from one finger-and toehold to the next. More than once he clung precariously to the wet cement after his foot slipped or his hooked fingers threatened to lose their grip. After half an hour’s shivering climb he was twenty meters above the pool; even the huge central statue seemed tiny and fa
r away.
He moved into the bright swirling mist. White light was everywhere, filtering through the blowing fog, but he could no longer see farther than the end of his arm. Fumbling in the mist, he came to the last of the bare concrete; the ridge he had been climbing tapered to a knife edge. Above it a smooth sheet of water spilled over the wall’s unseen rim.
He felt for the wall under the falling water. His right hand found a crevice; he wedged his hand in and flexed his arm. His left hand found a knob; he lifted himself. The water poured thickly over his arms and shoulders. He was almost swimming vertically, an oversized salmon headed upstream without a running start. His feet found tiny ledges, enough to lift him to another handhold, and one more—
Then, suddenly, he was over the lip of the falls, lying flat. The force of the water threatened to roll him back, but he felt along the bottom for hand-and footholds and pulled himself along as the water sheeted over his face and forced itself into his eyes and nostrils.
The gasp and shudder of the great pumps ceased. Water drained swiftly away. He was lying in a channel of fitted stone, smoothly eroded by centuries of these artificial flash floods. The channel ran the circumference of the cylindrical room, under a corbeled ceiling slotted with great skylights which infused the mist with light. Somewhere above, the sun was shining.
He heard a rising whistle, and a lower, breathier, fluty sound. The wind came up. The mist stirred and formed into tendrils in which for a moment he fancied he saw human shapes. He stood. On both sides of the curving wall were enormous open drain spouts from which the floods had poured. Now they were exhausting warm air. The moving air was balmy after the freezing water; soon Blake’s skin was dry, although his hair still dripped with moisture. The last of the bright mist cleared away.
The bare vertical ridge had debouched him near the only exit from the chamber of waters, an arched tunnel big enough to stand in. He climbed into the tunnel and clambered up its short, steep slope. The going was easy for a few meters. Then it ended abruptly.