by Gary Jonas
The ground stopped rumbling, and the air grew colder around us. The mountain had been among the highest in the Pamir range, but now it was by far the tallest. The side facing me was silver, and the side facing south was blue, or to be more accurate, lapis lazuli. While I couldn't see the other sides, I knew they had to be ruby and gold because we were now on Mount Meru.
Pavel coughed and pushed himself to his feet. He said something in Russian, then helped me up. “What the hell?” he asked.
Kelly was on her feet and by my side. “Will your bracelet take us back to Club Eternity?” she whispered.
“Only me, I think.”
“What the hell is going on?” Pavel asked.
“Silence,” Khamet said and jammed his spear through Pavel’s head. Pavel collapsed.
Khamet turned and lifted his jackal head to stare into the clouds. Rocks broke off the side of the mountain and crashed down toward us again, but none of them hit us. Many of them fell around us, but we were within Khamet's sphere of protection. I knew he hadn't been trying to protect us because he couldn't have cared less. He simply didn't allow anything to hit him and due to our proximity, we were protected too.
“I think we're about to witness a death match between two gods,” I said. “In this corner, weighing in at whatever the hell he weighs, we have Khamet, one of the Men of Anubis, hailing from ancient Egypt. And in the other corner we have Indra, weighing in at whatever he weighs, hailing from … well, somewhere else.”
“Where is the other corner?” Kelly asked.
“Up there.” I pointed toward a cavern that opened behind the falling rocks. “If I had my iPod handy, I'd crank out Rainbow's 'Man on the Silver Mountain' because a battle is always better with Ronnie James Dio on vocals.”
Kelly rolled her eyes. “You're such a dork.”
“Hey,” I said. “Dio rocks!”
I hadn’t forgotten about Brenda, but if I didn’t make light of what was happening around us, I’d curl up in a ball and start sucking my thumb. She would have understood.
A robed man sat atop a white elephant at the edge of the cave. A clear bubble floated behind him. Esther stood inside the bubble with her hands pressed against it as though she were trying to push through.
The man on the elephant raised his arms and thunder rumbled as dark clouds roiled in the air. Lightning flashed.
The god called out something, but I couldn't understand a word he said. He spoke a long forgotten foreign tongue.
Khamet understood, though, and replied in the same language.
Based on the tone of their exchange, it was probably something like, “Who dares to disturb my slumber?” And the answer was, “Fuck off, dipshit, and go back to sleep.”
The white elephant trotted out onto thin air and slowly drifted down to our level. Indra remained on its back, and Esther floated behind them as though tethered to the elephant by an invisible cord.
Indra wore colorful robes, and as he slid from his elephant to the ground, the robe fell open a bit to reveal a bunch of slits on his chest. He pulled the robe closed, and the sleeves rolled up to reveal more of the small slits.
“What's all over him?” I asked.
Kelly's eyes widened, and she leaned over to me. “They look like little vaginas.”
“So Indra is a pussy?”
“Shh,” Kelly said. “Don't even think of saying that where he can hear you.”
“He doesn't speak English,” I said.
“Says you,” Indra said. He stood seven feet tall. He wore a hat that looked like a circular pyramid. His trousers were purple, and his skin was dark brown. “It's time to get a wiggle on because this palooka wants to bump you off.”
I stepped back. “You speak like Esther on overdrive,” I said. “You're pulling knowledge of English from her.”
“Now you're on the trolley,” he said. He said something in the old tongue then shook his head. “You're the dick.”
Kelly laughed. “He's got your number.”
Khamet held his spear aloft. “Go back to your mountain, forgotten one. We gods are forbidden to battle, and I have business here.”
“I was here first, fly boy,” Indra said. “So you need to scram.”
“All I want is to get the ring this vampire has stolen. Then I'll take my leave.”
“Then pipe down, grab that handcuff, and be on your merry way.”
“You don't want the ring,” Victor said. “There's something here you'll want more, but I need something from you.”
“No deals, vampire.”
“I want my wife, Marina, returned to me,” Victor said. “You erased her from time, and I want her back. I need her back!”
“I don't care about some lost woman,” Khamet said. “She was clearly not important or we'd have kept her.”
“You need to scram, Khamet,” Indra said. “I need my Soma, and you need to beat it.”
“You haven't heard my deal,” Victor said.
“He doesn't need to hear your deal,” I said. “Time to shut your cakehole.”
“Marina is gone because of that man,” Victor said, pointing at me.
“Shut up,” I said.
“He's the only human to have ever escaped you,” Victor said.
“What are you talking about, vampire?” Khamet asked. “No one has ever escaped us. I grow weary of your nonsense. It's time to make you disappear.”
“No!” Victor said. “His name is Jonathan Shade!”
Khamet's head snapped around and the features on the mask narrowed. Maybe it wasn't a mask. “Jonathan Shade? I know that name.” He leaned forward and I found myself backing up. “But we killed you. In fact, we killed more than one of you! How is this possible?”
I pulled off my gloves and rubbed my left wrist. “Clean living and personal hygiene?” I said.
He gripped his spear with both hands, raised it high and leaped at me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
I triggered the bracelet and disappeared.
“Hello, Club Eternity,” I said. The air was so much warmer in the little alcove by the door. I wanted to stay and warm up, but I couldn't leave Kelly in danger.
I waited a few moments then took the chance and triggered the bracelet again.
I reappeared on the mountain. Kelly flipped out of the way of a spear thrust. I threw myself at Khamet, slammed into his side and knocked him off balance.
He spun around, swinging the spear, but I ducked.
The spear sliced into the white elephant's side. The animal screeched and staggered to the side.
“Airavata!” Indra yelled. “Kick!”
The animal turned and thrust out its hind legs. Airavata kicked Khamet in the chest and sent him flying.
“Gods cannot fight!” Khamet said, picking himself up out of the snow. “It is forbidden!”
“I did not fight you. Airavata gave you the bum's rush.”
Airavata moved to block Khamet's path when the Egyptian god tried to move toward us.
“You shall not pass,” Indra said, and I was glad I'd had Esther watch the Lord of the Rings movies.
“Nice move with the bracelet,” Kelly whispered. “Caught him off guard. I got in a nice kick to that ugly snout of his. Felt good.”
Victor tried to maneuver toward a dark shadow. Indra had Khamet under control for the moment, so I focused on the traitorous vampire.
“Stay in sight, asshole,” I said to him. “I want you to burn.”
“Nothing personal, Shade,” he said. “I just want Marina back.”
“I want Brenda back,” I said as I moved toward him. “Hell, I want Naomi back, and my other Kelly, and I even kinda miss Brand, but you don't see me trying to cut deals with asshole gods.”
Kelly moved to cut off his approach to the shadow under the overhang.
Behind me, I head Indra say, “The sheik and sheba are under my protection, Khamet. If you try to take them for a ride again, I'll blast you right in the kisser.”
“They are not su
pposed to exist. They are remnants of a lost layer of time.”
“Aren't we all?” Indra said.
Victor shook his head. “Don't come any closer, Shade. I'll compel Kelly to kill you.”
“Kelly, don't look in his eyes,” I said.
“I'll keep an eye on his waist,” Kelly said.
He stepped into direct sunlight, but didn't flinch. He didn't seem to notice.
“Are you even capable of telling the truth?” I asked.
“I haven't lied much,” he said.
“You pretended that the sunlight hurt you.”
He shrugged. “A way to elicit sympathy.”
“Sympathize with this,” I said and punched him in the mouth.
Only my blow didn't land.
The asshole dropped straight down into the shadow he made on the damn ground.
“Slippery little bastard!”
“He'll be back,” Kelly said.
“Unfortunately,” I said. “Let's see if we can untangle the mess we have with the gods over here.”
As I walked back to Indra, I caught the tail end of a discussion.
“What’s the scoop?” Indra said.
“I speak the truth,” Khamet said.
“It would sure be the cat's meow if you did, but I'm not a sap.”
“They must be destroyed or they can upset the balance we've orchestrated,” Khamet said.
“Baloney,” Indra said. “Jonathan Shade?” He turned to look at me. “Approach.”
I stepped closer.
“I’m not gonna put the hurt on you.”
“I've heard that line before,” I said.
“I was the Big Cheese, the king of the gods. I handled petty squabbles for thousands of years.”
“No offense, pal, but you also managed to sleep with another god's wife and lost your pecker in the process.”
“I carried a torch for Ahalya. She was the loveliest of all of us and she was my world. Now she's invisible to everyone. Gautama was a crazy old bird. He didn't even like her. We didn't marry for love in my time; we married for station.”
“It's all good,” I said. “When it comes to being a horndog, you've got nothing on Zeus.”
“I need your memories, Jonathan Shade. Khamet says he needs to bump you off because you don't belong. I need to know the truth.”
“He's an asshole who--”
“Stop flapping your gums,” Indra said and slid down from his elephant.
He placed a hand on either side of my head like Spock doing a Vulcan mind meld.
“Open to me, my son.” He moved his hands around. “Open to me.”
“Yeah, dude, you're just messing up my hair.”
He looked confused for a moment. “You are perfectly balanced,” he said. “But I need to know your history.”
“We can have a little chat if you can keep numbnuts at bay.”
He shook his head. “I need more.” He raised a hand and a jewel lowered itself from the sky. It was always there, but not seen, and it had strands of light flowing from it, connecting it to other jewels, which glowed as brightly as the one that dropped into Indra's outstretched hand. The strands glistened like a net as they connected all the little jewels in the sky together. Indra shrank the jewel in his hand until it was microscopic, then blew it toward me.
I couldn't see it, but I felt the sticky strands of light settle on my forehead like a spider web.
“Let's take a peek. Don't worry, it's all berries.”
He did his mind meld thing again, only this time the jewel guided him into my memories. As he pushed inside, he lived my life, and I got a few glimpses into the nature of the gods. Some of it was beyond words, but some of it changed the way I viewed the Men of Anubis. The world looks very different from beyond time. We think of time as a linear thing, and it is and it isn't. Time exists all at once, and yet it's layered as the fabric of reality is folded. I couldn't truly understand most of what I saw when our minds touched, but a few things were clear due to the nature of the gods.
The Men of Anubis were once human. They'd gone beyond that. They'd stepped outside time and they could jump in over here or over there to erase an event, but that event still happened only now it didn't. Thinking about it too much can shatter your sanity, but the Men of Anubis, who prepared the pharaohs for their journey into the afterlife, found a way to slip out of time. They played with the nature of reality as gods are sometimes wont to do. They wrote their own book, and in that regard, they became gods because they could erase and manipulate events across the eons. You think people in the twenty-first century feel entitled, well, the gods could teach them a thing or two. When you can see all of creation and have a hand in what happens here, there, and everywhere, the mind is the first thing to go.
But Indra wasn't like that.
The short glimpse into his mind I got told me he was genuine, and that he cared. He'd just been at it for too long, and he burned out. He wanted nothing to do with the affairs of humans or of gods.
But we came knocking on his door, so he answered.
First, he met Esther.
She found him.
He didn't understand her, and when she faded to invisibility, he thought she was like Ahalya, his long lost love. He wanted to understand what she was saying, but she was a ghost. He couldn't grasp it and couldn't pull knowledge from an ectoplasmic rendition of a person. So he wrapped her in his net, which like all weapons of the gods was a blend of magic and technology. The gods were from elsewhere. Other worlds. Other dimensions.
The net engulfed Esther, and Indra absorbed her life. As my mind and his entwined, I felt what he got from Esther, and it was a profound loneliness. But through all of that, Esther held onto the one thing that kept her going. Love.
Love and loneliness were the foundation of Indra's existence too.
And now he pulled my memories and knowledge.
I tried to pull some of his, but it was just too much. He'd lived too long, done too many things, lived for thousands of years both here and in other worlds. What I did manage to pull made no sense, so I had to let it go. To try and understand the gods would drive a man insane. It would be like a fish in an aquarium in a mansion in Beverly Hills trying to understand the movie director who dropped food into the tank, but then left the tank behind and went out into the great big world to gather actors and actresses and crew members to craft a story shot out of sequence to be edited into a cohesive whole at a later date to then be distributed and screened for the people who take time out of their busy lives to sit in a dark theater to escape into imaginary worlds for a few hours.
A fish can't understand a movie. How is it going to understand a movie director or actors or the people watching it?
We are the fish.
Gods are the directors. For all I know they have producers watching over them to keep them on time and on budget and studios watching over all of them to boot.
The Men of Anubis fashioned themselves into directors, too. The problem is that they were more like George Lucas and couldn't let go. They had to keep tinkering. Changing. And goddamn it, Han shot first.
We are mere decorations in the movies that are their lives.
But just like a human reading about a fish on the internet, trying to briefly understand something of what they go through in the depths of the ocean, Indra delved into my life.
He did not judge me.
He simply understood.
And through me, he almost understood Khamet, who was once human, but now acted as though he were a god.
Indra pulled out of my head and I dropped to my knees. The jewel shot from my mind back into his hand, grew in size and drifted back into the sky where it helped to bind the universe together.
Indra stepped over to Khamet.
“I must also understand you.” He touched Khamet's mask, and his hands penetrated the jackal snout to reach the man beneath.
Kelly knelt beside me. “Are you all right?” she asked.
I blinked a few
times. “I think so.”
She helped me to my feet, and I leaned into her a bit while I found my balance. I glanced up at Esther, who remained in the bubble. She wasn't looking at me. She was staring off into space. It occurred to me that Indra pulling her memories from the ectoplasm might very well have erased her.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“We shall settle this with a trial by combat,” Indra said when he stepped away from Khamet. His English was much improved after taking my knowledge. “Jonathan Shade, you shall fight Khamet. This battle will be to the death, as I have seen both sides of this conflict, and from each point of view, you are both right.”
“Both right?” I asked.
Indra made a motion and we all disappeared from the mountain and appeared on a massive stone circle floating in the sky.
“Whoa!” I said.
Kelly and I stood on one side. Khamet stood opposite us. Off to our left, Aravata, the white elephant, stood with Esther tethered to him, floating in the atmosphere above, still staring off into space.
“As Jonathan has a second, Khamet, you are free to choose one to stand in your stead should you fall.”
“I do not need a second. This will be over the moment the battle begins.”
“Whatever,” I said. “You're not such a badass, Khamet. Hell, you're not even a half ass.”
“By the rules of combat, you must have a second,” Indra said. “And the closest you have in the vicinity is this one.” Indra snapped his fingers and Victor appeared beside Khamet.
“What the hell?” Victor said. “How did I get here?”