Benediction Denied: A Labyrinth of Souls Novel

by Engstrom, Elizabeth

  That was too much for him to think about. If he was indeed dead, then he had all of eternity to muse those mysteries.

  For the moment, he had what he assumed was food in his belly, magic in his pocket, and fruit for later. He was back in a black tunnel, but somehow that and the little blue flame next to him was more comforting than he expected. He almost sobbed with tremendous relief for what oddly enough, had begun to seem like normalcy.

  Oliver and his weird guests could have turned out to be almost anything.

  They could have been vampires, even, enriching his blood with that high fat dinner for their after-dinner snack.

  And what was he to make of Oliver? What was he, of all people, doing here in this place, in Adam’s nightmare, in his own personal and private hell?

  Oliver had been part of his personal, private hell for years.

  The little blue flame wasn’t going to last for long, and he really should use it to great advantage while he had it, exploring the tunnel, searching for a way out.

  Perhaps endlessly searching for a way out.

  He couldn’t make himself move. Exhaustion overtook him, and with his companion flame in the palm of his hand, he tipped over onto his side and slept where he lay.

  He dreamed of Sonja. His middle daughter, the one who somehow got lost amidst the academic genius of his older daughter and the mischievous baby Mouse. She was the homemaker. She wanted to cook, to sew, to knit. She wanted to excel in home economics and reading high school romance novels, and cared nothing for school or science or cell phones, Twitter, Facebook, or email. She was invisible in the family, ignored—not on purpose or by design—by Adam and Chrissie, only because she took up so little space. Her needs were few, her two sisters demanding all of their parents’ time and attention.

  Little Sonja had been left to herself, and she was doing just fine.

  Right? She was doing just fine, right?

  In his dream, fair little Sonja, wearing a real bra for the first time, at least the first time he had noticed, was carrying a beautifully, expertly made chocolate cake on a crystal, footed cake plate. She moved quietly from room to room with the perfectly-iced cake, waiting for someone to compliment her, showing it to everybody, but nobody took the time to comment on her masterpiece. This was a cake that could take a blue ribbon at the county fair, but nobody in the family noticed.

  Adam watched her as if watching a newsreel. He saw himself reading on the couch with Lisa as Sonja paraded her cake through the living room, completely ignored. She walked through the home office, where Chrissie was concentrating on the family bookkeeping chores. She walked out the back door, past Mouse, who was dressed in an old fairy Halloween costume, digging a trench for no particular reason in the back yard.

  Sonja walked out the back gate, and handed it to a boy, who waited in the alley behind their house.

  “I made you a cake,” she told him, and he licked chocolate from her fingers as they gazed into each others’ eyes.

  No, Sonja! Adam squirmed in his sleep.

  He watched as the boy led her by the hand to the back seat of an old car, parked in the alley. They ate the cake and then kissed.

  Adam’s stomach churned as the boy unzipped Sonja’s jeans and pulled them down, kissing her thighs, her knees, then pulled them off.

  Her little pink flowered panties quickly followed, as Sonja worked on the boy’s belt.

  Clearly, they had done this before.

  The boy, older, in his twenties, used no protection as Sonja climbed into his lap. By the time they were finished, they both had chocolate icing all over their faces and hands.

  “I love you,” Sonja said.

  “I love you, too,” the boy said, “I will love you forever, but I have to go now.”

  “Take my love with you,” Sonja said, and handed him a handful of cake, which he loaded into the cargo pocket of his pants.

  The boy set Sonja down on the seat, zipped his pants, and got out of the car. Sonja turned to face Adam in his dream. “Hi, Dad. I’m going to have a baby. My baby will love me, because it has to. It will love me with unconditional love. You don’t love me, because you don’t have to. I kind of like you, but I will love my baby more.”

  “No, no, honey, that’s not right. Please don’t do that to yourself, you have no idea—”

  Adam woke up, sweating, with a sob in his chest.

  He picked up the little blue flame and its companionship comforted him, as he realized that he had indeed ignored his middle daughter. He didn’t know whether or not she was having sex, but he should know. How could he be so blind, so stupid as to let her engage in activities he knew nothing about? His job was to protect her and he’d done a piss poor job of it.

  The sob broke through. “Sonja, I’m so sorry,” he said.

  He remembered her working in the kitchen with Jolmy’s wife and daughters, learning her homemaking skills.

  That’s what she wanted. She wanted to be a wife and a mother. She had no other ambitions. She didn’t want to go to school to learn a trade. She wanted to be a mother, and that was a project she could get started on right away.

  Now it all made sense. Just as he had gone to school to learn hydrology and the finer points of what he would end up doing for a living, Sonja was learning to cook and bake and be a mother, as that was her one and only ambition in life.

  He also remembered seeing her play games, sometimes rough and tumble games, with the village boys. She was learning the art of flirtation.

  Had she been having sex with one or more boys in the village?

  Lisa had been busy teaching; Adam had been busy installing waterline; Chrissie had been busy helping the village women get their little business going; Mouse was busy climbing trees and chasing down all the wildlife she could find.

  Who paid attention to Sonja?

  She was twelve for God’s sake!

  But maybe it was all a dream. Maybe, like that weird dinner event, this was just a dream within a dream. Maybe it wasn’t true at all. Maybe Sonja was still innocent, maybe …

  But even as he thought that, he knew the truth. He knew the signs. He knew that boys came around. He knew that she dressed provocatively at times, padding her little bra. He saw her rub up against some of the village boys, and he said nothing. He said nothing and he did nothing. He didn’t want to deal with it. Wasn’t that Chrissie’s job?

  No, of course not. It was his job as Sonja’s father. Keep her safe. Protect her.

  He had failed.

  He hadn’t wanted Sonja. He only wanted Lisa, his firstborn. He wanted to be with her every waking minute, to help her eat, to help her walk. He taught Lisa her alphabet, and her colors, and numbers, and then he taught her to read. He took her out on jobs with him when she was old enough, and engaged her curiosity.

  He loved Lisa, he lived for Lisa.

  Sonja had been a distraction.

  Lisa was Adam’s. Sonja belonged to Chrissie.

  Sick about the truth of himself, Adam jumped to his feet, grabbed the blue flame, put it on his shoulder and with a renewed resolve to get out of this fucking hellhole, started walking.

  It didn’t seem to matter which way he went, it all led to weirdness. His rickety wheel of fortune, as Oliver had said.

  Oliver. Adam spit. Fucking Oliver.

  Adam’s failing here was that he wasn’t taking advantage of the weirdness. If only he could figure out the clues in each strange situation, he could break the magic and return above ground. Return to the village. Catch the next plane to Minneapolis.

  He had to be smarter. He had to use the magic with a little wisdom, instead of haphazardly.

  Oliver had said that Lady Dulcinea had broken her wheel of fortune by using bad judgment.

  With his past coming into very close and disturbing focus, Adam was clearly the king of bad judgment.

  Was it too late to change that?

  He didn’t really know how. How could he know that throwing that card would vaporize Oliver and the wh
ole room and give him the blue flame again, all at once? He could never have predicted that.

  His stash of magic cards was dwindling.

  His wheel of fortune was looking mighty rickety, indeed.

  Still, he walked. He strode with purpose to only God knew where, on miserable feet, a fresh dose of sorry desperation in his heart.

  9

  THE DIRT TUNNEL continued endlessly. It twisted right, and then left, it dipped down, it doubled back on itself, it rose upward. It continually divided, giving Adam myriad choices of which tunnel to take, and he just took the closest one, not caring, not thinking, just moving forward on tortured feet.

  Nothing assaulted him. He found no crazy rooms, no mysterious doors, and he needed no magic. He just walked on feet that were raw, it seemed, to their very bones.

  And on he walked.

  He ate the banana, and the giant pumpkin seed.

  Little flickers of movement continued out of the corner of his eyes, but he no longer startled at them. His heart no longer pounded with the thought of someone else being in the tunnel with him, real or imagined. He no longer cared. He had no energy to spare. He was beyond exhausted, and his feet were so beyond repair that he didn’t even feel them anymore. The skull-cracking pain in his head returned with every beat of his laboring heart, with every agonizing step.

  He just walked.

  His tongue swelled, his lips cracked with thirst. Occasionally, he sucked moisture that trickled from the dirt wall, but it just resulted in a mouthful of gritty mud. Now and then he pulled a root from the roof or wall of the tunnel and chewed it for moisture and for something to taste. They, too, tasted like dirt.

  He preferred the dirt tunnel to the black glass tunnel that led to Oliver and his crazy dinner party. This dirt tunnel seemed real. When he was in the dirt tunnel, he had the tiniest twinge of hope that some time, some day, he would exit this misery and be back up above ground.

  On he marched, for days, it seemed, miles upon miles, until his steps grew unsteady, his leg muscles cramped, and still he managed to put one foot in front of the other until he stumbled and fell, face first, onto the ground.

  The little blue flame winked out.

  He lay still, too exhausted to move.

  This is it. I shall die here. Chrissie, Lisa, Sonja, Mouse, I love you all. I love you and I failed you. Forgive me.

  Adam slowly pulled into a fetal position, closed his eyes and waited to die.

  Memories flooded over him, and he let them come.

  This is what happens when you die.

  Your life flashes before you.

  He remembered meeting Chrissie, their whirlwind romance, their wedding in her parents’ living room, small, intimate, to save money for their extravagant honeymoon in Ireland.

  He failed to keep the vows he made that day, the first of which was fidelity, and that didn’t take long.

  The miracle of Lisa, growing in Chrissie’s tummy. Chrissie would put Adam’s hands on her belly when they were in bed together, and he would talk, sing, tell jokes to the little thing growing inside. It was so magical.

  Even so, while at a conference, he got a twenty dollar blow job from a hooker in the hotel elevator while his pregnant wife slept upstairs.

  And when Lisa was born, he could not believe his good fortune. A perfect baby, a perfect wife, a good job, a nice, modest apartment, a small car, they lived within their means.

  He had amassed tremendous secret debt. Chrissie would find out about it when he died.

  Chrissie had wanted another baby right away, and Adam did not. He wanted to spend time with the baby they had. They argued. “In time,” he said, over and over again.

  In time, he said. (When he paid off his gambling debts.) They would have another baby in time, let’s enjoy Lisa while she’s little.

  “It’s time now,” she said, more than once. “I want the kids to be close, to have a relationship. My brother is six years older than I am. We were never close.”

  “We have time,” Adam said, more than once. “Let’s get a little more financially secure, first.”

  Chrissie punished him. She would not accept finances as his reason, and he couldn’t tell her the real reason. So she darkened their utopia. Shadows came between them, cold rain fell on their meals together, on their family outings. Even Lisa, after she learned to walk, would walk one to the other and take their hands and try to get them to sit together, to sit next to each other, but they did not. Would not.

  And then one night, sick of the cold shoulder, Adam gave in.

  He reached for her in the night, and she was only too eager to accommodate his desire, then, and every opportunity thereafter until she conceived. It wasn’t love making, it was baby creating, and these acts of biology without closeness left Adam lonelier than ever. He spent all his time with Lisa, while Chrissie prepared for the new baby, a girl. Sonja.

  He gambled more, and fell deeper into debt.

  Their parents were delighted with the new granddaughter, of course, and set up college funds for both girls, but all Adam saw when he looked at Sonja was money flying out the window. More music lessons. More dance lessons. More clothes. More expensive weekends away. More babysitters.

  He saw only his failures as a husband, a father, a provider.

  He paid his gambling debt with their college funds and then tried, desperately, terribly desperately, horribly desperately, to refill those funds. But the craps table, the blackjack table, the poker table, the smug cashier on the other side of that little brass cage took it all. Took all the girls’ money! Took it all and then more and more upon more. He could barely live with the horrific secret. He wanted to fix it before he had to confess. And now, Chrissie would find out.

  He had only cared about himself.

  That’s why he went to Congo. To get away. Away from the family, away from the casinos. Away from his sins, away from his indiscretions, away from his responsibilities. He needed to get away from it all.

  He needed to get away from himself.

  And now here he was, dying, with only the company of himself. His own wretched self.

  He’d done other things, too. When Lisa got a ferret as a gift, he took it to the woods and let it go, telling her that it had escaped its cage and got away. He watched her cry for days with a hard heart, but he’d be damned if he’d have a weasel in his house. Lisa tearfully begged for another, and even Chrissie joined in, but Adam flatly refused.

  Ditto Sonja’s ant farm that she got for Christmas from his parents. No insects in his house on purpose for God’s sake. Why would anybody bring ants into the house on purpose? Ridiculous. He just threw it out and disavowed knowledge of its fate. Chrissie, Lisa, and Sonja turned the house upside down looking for it, and he had stood by with what he hoped was an innocent look on his face, shrugging at the mysterious disappearance.

  Eventually, Sonja decided one of her little girlfriends had stolen it, and despite Adam’s earnest counsel against shunning the accused, the little girls’ sweet, innocent, Barbie doll friendship ended in heartbreak for both of them.

  Such small things he’d done caused such unnecessary grief to those he loved.

  And then Mouse.

  Oh God, Mouse …

  Grief, sadness, and regret gripped a handful of his gut and squeezed. The pain curled him up into a ball of pain and misery, and he began to sob.

  Oh God, Mouse.

  * * *

  “Is it alive?”

  “Shhh. Yes, it’s alive, but it’s old and sick and very, very sad.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  Adam didn’t know he’d been asleep until he was awakened by whispers, and something sliding around on his legs. He lay very still, listening. Maybe it would be best if they thought he was dead. Or still sleeping. Certainly they could see he was not a threat to them.

  “Will it hurt us?”

  “I don’t think so.

  “Do we kill it?”

  “
No, it is dying on its own.”

  Startled, Adam drew his legs up to his chest and wrapped his arms around his knees. “Hello?” His voice sounded weak and scratchy.

  “It speaks!”

  “Yes.” He cleared his throat. “Who’s there?” he asked.

  “We are here,” one soft, faintly female voice replied in the darkness, and again, something slithered around him.

  “Are you snakes?”

  “Are you snakes?” the voice repeated.

  There was much discussion among them in hushed whispers. Then: “What are snakes?”

  One of them slithered past Adam’s head. He reached out and pushed it away. It felt like a snake. He shivered with the thought that he was sleeping in a nest of snakes. Talking snakes. Oh, God. Was this real? “What are you then?”

  “We are people,” the voice said. “We live here. What are you?”

  “I am a human, and I don’t live here,” Adam said. Hope rose. If they lived here, perhaps they would know how to help him get back to the surface. “I live above the ground. In the sunlight. I came here by accident and don’t know how to get back.”

  He sensed the snake things retreat from him, their dry slithering a raspy, strange, musical sound. Again, they whispered softly to one another.

  Adam sat up and scooted to the side of the tunnel, resting his back against it. If they were going to attack him, best to have his back against the wall.

  He heard rustling and then the one spoke again, closer to him than he realized.

  He flinched, it was so close to his ear.

  “Are you God?” the snake asked.

  Adam considered this. Could he be a god to these people? Would they help him if he said he was?

  Could he manipulate these simple people by claiming to be their god?

  Stop it. Stop manipulating people! Have you learned nothing down here?

  But he would do anything …

  But then how could a god need the help of those he supposedly created?

  As tempting as it might be to call himself a god to a race of sentient snakes, it wasn’t true and to do it wasn’t right.

  “No,” he said. “I am lost.

  “Are you dying?”