In the Valley of the Kings: Stories

by Terrence Holt

  Another door. This also opened to my thumb, burning it white where it touched metal.

  Light hollowed a room out of darkness, cavernous and still, the very air gelid. I pushed through the cold as I imagined the figures within the walls must force themselves, pushed through until I stood before what I had known I would find.

  Seventy-two silver coffins stacked to the ceiling, their silver dulled by frost.

  I stood before them, my thoughts empty, not even flickering: only the thin wailing reached here, a fly buzzing in my skull.

  I realized irritably the fly was counting: Fifty. Sixty. Seventy. And one.

  The buzzing stopped. I hung as well, waiting for the clock’s last tick.

  It never came. The count stopped short. There should have been seventy-two.

  The buzzing returned, strident against the silence. Insects crawled blindly over hexagonal cells, sealing them with restless palps. Behind the seals, dark shapes were twitching. The buzzing swelled.

  I told it to stop.

  And it stopped.

  In the corridor walls the shapes still moved. Their motions quickened. I saw a face push to the surface as I passed.

  Go away, I said, the words falling like stones.

  It vanished.

  I know how to make these visions disappear.

  I know so much now.

  I know where I am. I almost know what happened. I still cannot recall the moment when they reached T-zero on the count, and the device they had built out in the dark, on the methane ice the surveys name Eleusis, went terribly awry. Ten kilometers away, huddled in their shielded modules, they waited for something terrible to happen.

  But what?

  I could not recall. I remember only one of the senior scientists muttering blasphemy, and as the count descended past the 60-mark another raised his eyes to the light and I could see his lips begin to move.

  Do I not recall this? Was this memory or dream? I know that I awoke, and when I woke I knew only something terrible had happened.

  I must have functioned, somehow. No one but myself could have dragged those crates into the cold room. I tried, briefly, to recall this but the memory wasn’t there. I know this now as well: some things are never coming back.

  And one of them is me.

  A sudden flickering: the lights dimmed all the way to darkness, then flared. Shapes scattered and fled, as if sensing disaster. It no longer mattered. Rescue would arrive, but not for me. From the wall at my shoulder a face leered. “Go away,” I said again. I’ll be there soon enough.

  The floor shook. For a moment I thought my voice might have shaken it, but it was just the ice below the station shifting. Nothing more, I told myself as I looked down.

  Just below my feet, pale limbs lay locked in ice, faces grimacing as if in their last moments they cried out for mercy. Just below me two clutched each other close, their faces turned away as if in shame. Farther down and darker, two more still grappled, one tearing at the other with its teeth.

  I was falling. In a moment I would find myself among them, and there was nothing I could do to save myself.

  When I looked again the corridor was empty.

  I knew what I could do to save myself.

  Along another corridor, a very heavy, colder, darker door. No automatic functions here: I had to grip the lever, pull out and down, the frosted metal taking the skin off my palms. Pain adhered where skin had peeled away slipped off, hissing. In a few minutes it would stop.

  I felt my way around the walls in darkness, my hands insensate, but when I reached the dual levers for the outer door I knew them.

  I wondered if I would have the strength to get them both down fully and be blown free, or if the hatch would simply crack and trap me there, in an airlock not much larger than a coffin, evacuated, frozen: dead.

  I wanted the door to open fully before I died. I wanted to see, on the narrow limits of this world, what we had made there.

  Who made it? I shook my head. I realized I did not know. I knew there was something I wanted, something outside on the ice. But as I tried to fasten my thoughts on what I might want of it, what I might know, it veered away all askew.

  I knew why I had gathered the bodies: it was the only apology I could imagine.

  I shook my head again: apologize for what? I stood in a frigid, stygian airlock, my hands dripping blood onto the floor (I could hear it freezing as it struck), and could not remember what I had done. Or failed to do.

  Questions came whirring out of the darkness, droning like flies drawn to blood.

  Why are there so many coffins?

  And:

  Who brings coffins on a trip like this?

  I was on my knees, shaking with something that forced its way out against all my efforts to contain it.

  I knew what had become of the seventy-second body.

  I stumbled back through light to the infirmary, where I seemed to have left a mess. There were bandages unfurled across the table and the instrument tray, and a puddle of something putrefying by the door. I took a bolt of gauze and wound it into clumsy mittens. Red soaked through and the loose ends trailed, but they would hold.

  I was breathing heavily as I left the infirmary; as I passed, the figures in the walls seemed to heave as well. Irrelevant images kept offering themselves to me: shapes of light, of air; voices, voices everywhere, light touches on the back of my neck. Some of the voices were real: the crew of the rescue mission, still three million miles away. I ignored them, faces, voices, all.

  I came to myself at the end of yet another corridor. My heart had broken loose in my chest. Breath was hard to draw. I stood at a small, blank door and felt myself afraid: it frightened me to find that I could still feel fear.

  With a gesture that might have been a supplication, I opened the door. A longer passageway the floor dull and solid, with marks in the frost of something dragged. A final door, a small room, a single crate.

  When I thumbed the latch it let out a gasp that filled the room.

  The body lay as I had left it. Cold: the features marble, the eyes, half-open, ice.

  I had tried to compose them, her lips. There had been an expression I did not want to remember.

  Hadn’t there been?

  I could not recall.

  And gazing on what death had made of her, I realized that there is always worse to come.

  I could not remember her. I remembered only pain, worse than the flaying cold, worse than everything until this moment. I gazed upon the marble shape that had at one time graven itself on my own flesh, and though the emptiness seemed to draw my entrails out when I gazed upon her features I remembered nothing.

  This was what was taken from me. This was what I had lost here in Eleusis. This was what I could never find again no matter how far I pursued her. Everything of our lives together, gone. Only emptiness cutting into everything. I faltered, I fell, but the cold shape in the coffin refused me.

  In another time, another place, I might have dragged the body-from its coffin, carried it back to the infirmary, tried to warm it, tried to shock life back into it, tried everything again.

  Time is running out. I have no time left for empty gestures.

  I left the crate as I had found it, swinging back the lid until it rested lightly on its frame. I could not bring myself to latch it, knowing how the sound would fall in that small room. I left the lid unlatched, and without looking back I made my way here to this room with the bed that I cannot bear to look at. Though the gauze trails red over the keys and tangles with them I have been hours here setting down what I know, thinking this might be the gesture I can make.

  But as the sentences have brought me closer to this moment, as the future closes in ahead, I see this gesture, too, is hollow. The vanity of it takes my breath away.

  Did I think words could do her justice? Did I honestly imagine? Did you, reader? Did you imagine?

  I cannot go on. The sound of my hands on the keys, keys slobbered red and slippery now with bloo
d, it sickens me. I cannt

  —go on?

  —no choice.

  —failing. Can’t—

  —reset.

  —there time?

  We burn in thirty. Twenty. Ten.

  THERE IS ALWAYS worse. I listened, and knew that worse was on its way: warm bodies, live voices filling up this tomb. Profaning everything. I could escape this much, I hoped.

  With a ponderous lurch, still weighed down with illusions, I turned and stalked one more time through these corridors, rolling a weight before me ponderous as stone.

  The suit was even heavier than I was. The pumps chattered; the suit stiffened around me as the hatch swung open.

  Blacker than I remembered. The sound of my breath, the busy instrumentalities of the suit, my heart all hushed. I might have been standing naked on the ice.

  I walked out over Eleusis. Clenched by a horizon too close and too high, the black ice of the Plain sloped up to a single sharp ridge that cut off the sky. In the distance, deep in gloom beneath the serrate horizon, the device hulked in its pit. I stared at it: the meanness of it under the open sky. The last time I had seen it—the first time as well—there had been a silver cairn piled at its feet, oblation to some dark metal Moloch. I traced the road worn in the ice. A long way. There on the road, a single crate lay tossed to the side, overturned and open. Once, I might have imagined it as my destination. Seeing it again, I knew better. I had no destination.

  I stepped out farther, until the station and its sheltering scarp fell away at my left. I climbed toward the pressure ridge that breaks the smooth surface of the Plain. The top of the ridge hung fifty meters above. I made my way up a spill of scree; in the last five meters the slope became a sheer face of obsidian ice, reflecting darkly. Deep in the ice, dim shapes shifted.

  I jumped, too hard, almost overshooting. The far side of the ridge—a sheer fall straight to the plain—opened out beneath me. Wheeling, I caught the edge and hung there, lying across the ridge. Around me a desolate dark plain, broken by the scars of the station and the pit; above me only sky.

  I found the dark bulk of Charon, a shadowy absence of stars. Far away over my shoulder hung the sun, a star so bright it seemed a flaw in the blackness, a breach through which the blaze beyond glared through. The empyrean. The primum mobile. Death.

  Blind, I turned away. Stars swarmed out of darkness, the galaxy a ghost slanting down to the horizon. There was the Scorpion; over the plain knelt Hercules. I remembered the old story how he wrestled Death at the doorway. And how Death demanded justice.

  I reached up, started to fumble with the seal at my collar. Something in the sky arrested me. I saw a shape move there: great chestnut wings spread wide, descending. I turned my face to the ice of the ridge, and found a face pressed close to mine. Not here, it whispered. Not ever. I saw a silver bowl held overhead, a row of candles flickering. Mud squelching under a booted foot, a pair of eggs sputtering in a pan, the underside of a car’s engine, dripping oil. I cried out, my voice smothered in the helmet as images multiplied everywhere. I cried again and they vanished, leaving only darkness.

  Before they could return I seized the darkness and wrung it, hard, forcing my own will upon it. I called back that face pressed close to mine. I made it mobile, lit the cold stone of it, softened it, warmed it, calling the blood to her cheeks. What had she heard? Something I had said to her, softly the ears warm now as well, pliable against my lips, my breath moistening them as I whispered—what? She turns, and in her marble lips blood flushes, they part, and out of them I hear—what? Words, in answer to mine, but as I forced the darkness into her image, I could hear no sound.

  The image of her wavered, darkening into the greater gloom of Charon: I clutched at it until it came closer, cleared. There are trees pierced through by sunlight: sun and shadow dappling her skin, where beads of water stand. We have been swimming, we are on a beach, she lies on a faded blue towel. I can feel the nub of it beneath my hands. I focus on the beads of water, each lit from within by the sun that pours over us. She lies back on the towel, there is surf crashing nearby and she reaches up, shades her eyes, and reaches—there is a shudder in the ridge at my back, a rumbling far away, great blocks of ice break free and tumble down the scarp. The ice has shifted, broken by the shuddering in me. Broken by her as she reaches toward me and now we shatter: the ice opens, the sky cracks, the bonds of Death are broken. Everything hidden will reveal itself, brought out of emptiness against the power of the darkness and the ice.

  Nothing was revealed. The shuddering died away and in the sky the light fainted. I brought her back again: sharper now, the edge of her distinct, the shape of shoulder where I have lain my cheek, the smell that rises from her, the motion of her as she turns, the eyebrows lifting: I seize her there. A fire has burned down to embers on the hearth, outside the window it is dark, the wind is blowing, snow eddies, settling on the sill. I see her rise, she is walking toward a door which opens on a morning late in Spring. At the curb a car is waiting, engine idling, she turns and speaks—

  And fades. She fades. I struggled but against the empty sky were only stars, and a red light pulsing on my helmet display. Oxygen @15%.

  The sky was empty. Charon had not moved. The sun slumped toward the horizon. The plain was darker.

  I stood upon the ridge and looked down on Eleusis. Even this, I understand, was a mistake. I have no power to bring her back. Why I have failed, I cannot say: in a world so soon to vanish into my imagination, this incapacity remains a mystery. Some fault in me, some defect: I know that now. And there is no escape. What baffles me, what lies hidden in the ice, the darkness, even in these words: it will always be with me. And I with them.

  I made my way back down the ridge, back to where the worst is yet to come.

  NOW TIME AND this account have intersected. I am here at this screen. This is the present moment. The worst has not yet happened. And now, as words and time are joined, I begin to understand. The worst will never happen. I have fallen, and part of my damnation is that the fall will never end. I have only words and time. And they both go on, it seems, forever. I came back from Eleusis holding a mystery within me. I read it there, just as I read it now in the figures writhing in the walls, in the guilt that haunts me. I read it everywhere. I read it here. It is eternity.

  MY BREATH HAS faded: the white clouds disappear almost before I release them. I am becoming a ghost. I reach the door, perform the empty ritual at the lock and it swings open. The cold has lost its power over me. I am colder.

  I face the wall of coffins, but I am not here for them. At the end of the wall they form, there is a gap. I push through.

  In the space behind the coffins, piled in a chaotic tangle, each wrapped crudely in sheets and blankets, garbage bags, Mylar and vinyl and Tyvek and in one case a cocoon of gauze blotched vividly with blood, I find the failed priests of Project Orpheus. Here are the other bodies I have hidden, as I have hidden so much else.

  I know why we came here. And why we came so far. What Project Orpheus was meant to do. Why they brought the coffins. And how I came here as well. There is no darkness any more, nowhere left to hide.

  The coffins were carrying experimental subjects. And one of them was me.

  HOW COULD I have imagined that mere words could recall the dead? If all these efforts were spent in vain, what hope had words to offer?

  Was there ever hope? Even now, I cannot imagine what they hoped, those who built that engine on the ice, what they dreamed of on their journey to the limits of Creation. I can only imagine what silence settled over that voyage, with us as their unquiet cargo. What did they think: that they could wrench the dead out of the ether, compel us, like electricity, to arc from their dreams into the world? Did anyone stop to wonder what might happen then?

  What happened then. After everything went wrong, and it was I alone who stirred, only I who woke into a world more terrible than ever I had imagined. By then their hopes, whatever they had been, had died with them.

/>   Or almost. The last of their earthly hopes survives, just as long as this story continues.

  Words have only this power: they keep me here. I make an offering of myself to them. It is all that they deserve.

  Somewhere above, a ship approaches. A few more days must pass before gravity and inertia bring them overhead. I can imagine them entering the station, encumbered in their spacesuits and their innocence. It will be dark, and cold. Will they recognize the darkness? Will they understand the cold? I know they fear what they will find. They should. But their fear is as nothing to what awaits them here. I would pity them, but what is the pity of a shade?

  I would laugh, if I could. For all their fears, they will find at first only me, frozen here at this keyboard. They will wonder at it, and the very oddness of it will spare them, for a little while, from understanding what I still conceal. Even when they realize what they have found, it will make no difference, not in the end. No matter what they find here, Death will find them whether they understand it or not. I take some consolation in that, and hope the wish is not unfeeling. It is all I have left to wish.