by Joseph Lallo
“Don’t do that.”
Samuel turned his head toward the voice. He watched as the outline of a human appeared to rise from the marsh. Water dripped from the ends of patchy strings of hair as the form walked toward Samuel. Strips of clothing that once covered a body with style dangled from pointed elbows and knees. It was not until the person stood before Samuel that he was able to see the face.
The man stood with the dying light reflecting off of his exposed bone. Clumps of white covered his face where skin had once stretched over his skull. He had two black holes for eyes, and his mouth was parted in a demonic grin.
“It speeds up the reversion. I don’t know why, but it does,” the man said, now standing before Samuel.
“Okay,” Samuel said.
“I’m dead,” the man said.
Samuel shifted his legs and stood to face the man. He detected a whiff of decay, which disappeared quickly. The flotsam from the marsh clung to the dead man’s frame like a cape hung from bony shoulders.
“The dead don’t speak. Or walk.”
“They do here.”
The dead man moved toward the stack of twigs. He sat on the ground with a wet plop. His hand, stripped of skin, motioned for Samuel to do the same.
“Let’s talk,” he said.
Samuel nodded and sat on the other side of the woodpile, never taking his eyes off the dead man. “What should I call you?” he asked.
“I cannot reveal my name yet,” the man said. “You can call me whatever you want.”
Samuel nodded again.
“It must have something to do with the changing form, you know. Wood, to fire, to ash. It’s like an energy tide that rolls the darkening cloud faster toward the opposite horizon.”
Samuel looked at the lighter in his hand and dropped it back into a pocket.
“Are you alone?” the man asked.
“Yes.”
Samuel sat there and decided to let the dead man have what he needed from their interaction. After a prolonged silence, the man spoke again.
“Do you know of the Jains?” he asked.
Samuel shook his head and thought about the sleep he craved. “No.”
The dead man rocked backward and placed both bony hands on his knees.
“They were the first, in your original locality, to come up with the idea of ahimsa – do no harm. They called themselves ‘the defenders of all beings.’ Do you know why?”
Samuel did not reply, knowing the conversation would occur anyway.
“The Jains believed in conquering desire as a way of achieving enlightenment. Enlightenment, for them, was escaping the cycle of rebirth. Reincarnation was a curse to avoid, not some type of immortality.”
“Sounds Buddhist,” Samuel said.
“It is. Mahavira and Buddha were contemporaries. But they are not the same.” The dead man paused before continuing. “Because of their belief in the cycle of rebirth, Jains also believed every living thing had a soul. Not just intelligent creatures, but the trees, birds, plants. Everything. So the pain man inflicts on other living creatures is really the pain he inflicts on himself. ‘Many times I have been drawn and quartered, torn apart, and skinned, helpless in snares and traps, a deer. An infinite number of times I have been felled, stripped of my bark, cut up and sawn into planks.’”
“That’s not possible. You can’t exist without destroying something else that is living,” Samuel said. “I must kill to live. Everything in existence must kill something to stay alive.”
“You can if you are not of the living.”
Samuel raised his eyebrows.
The dead man stood. His bones cracked. He turned toward the marsh and took stilted steps to the water’s edge. When the black liquid crept up to his knees, he turned to face Samuel once more.
“Rest. Sleep. Dream. I hope you can find the peace I cannot.”
The dead man, known as Deva, pushed forward until the water of the marsh converged over the top of his head. Samuel watched a single bubble arise and pop soundlessly in the darkness as he fell asleep.
***
The Great Cycle existed before time began. Worlds expanded and collapsed repeatedly like a cosmic heartbeat. Deva was one in a long line of overseers, responsible for managing the powers of the reversion and then transferring that power to a son. The Great Cycle could not operate without a guardian in the same way a timepiece could not operate without a watchmaker. Deva had what might have been known as a normal life. But that existence was so far in the distant past, memories were nothing more than fleeting sensations of love and pain.
On Earth, civilization degenerated into war, famine and disease. The leaders of the world did nothing to stem the destruction, making decisions that filled their pockets with riches while the masses starved and died. It was then the unknowable and omniscient powers that sustain the Great Cycle cast the souls of that wretched world into another more desperate place, in an attempt to cleanse it. The people of Earth awoke to a barren and lifeless landscape. A black cloud came from the west and those who fell beneath it were dispersed to another random reversion, thereby spreading Earth’s original population across many worlds. Some inhabitants took their own lives during the transition and those souls re-entered by falling from the trees with a noose around their neck, as Samuel had.
As more people arrived in the world of the reversion, the same patterns emerged. The strong formed clans for protection against rival clans and men built strongholds in the mountains. The reversion protected the space where the final portal would open, usually at the point of highest elevation. Territorial disputes led to war, just as they had on Earth. Many souls gave up and let the cloud swallow them, reducing populations in the reversions to pockets of survivors trying to outrun the cloud. They had no promise of surviving if they could outrun it, and no knowledge of what waited for them if they did.
Deva came through the forest with his children, but he never learned the fate of his Earth wife. He pledged allegiance to a tribal leader and the group fled from the forest and into the raw wilderness of the reversion. Samuel and Mara were with him. They came as his spiritual offspring after having many past lives on Earth, as all people there did. Kole was Deva’s spiritual son too, but he did not come through the first reversion with Samuel and Mara. He arrived in a different reversion and ended up in the same one as Deva much later. As the group ran from the horde, Deva was separated from his children and knew nothing of their fate. After conversations with others coming through the suicide forest, Deva discovered souls swallowed by the cloud were dispersed to different reversions until they could find redemption by righting a wrong committed in a past life. It was his first true understanding that the reversion was not a new world but an infinite series of worlds.
Over the years and through countless cycles Deva came to learn the ways of the reversion. In the reversions he would encounter his spiritual children in different physical forms, but he always knew it was them.
In Deva’s thirty-third reversion, he discovered the orb. He found it deep in a cave when the cloud pushed him inside. He spent the next seventy reversions of the Great Cycle staring into it, studying the natural laws of the new world. Deva learned the reversion had an overseer, a guardian. It was the duty of the lord of the reversion to ensure another was in succession. He discovered his spiritual father left the orb for him. When Deva knew he was next in line, he marched the orb to the mountain peak of the reversion and sat across from his father at the cauldron. Without much ceremony, Deva’s spiritual father gave his son control, with the understanding he would have to do the same someday. Deva’s release from the cycle would be complete when the next guardian, his son, was in place.
Although he had not done so in eons, Deva made the climb to the peak many times with hundreds of his spiritual sons, and yet none made it all the way to the cauldron, the point of transition. He always saw an aura around his spiritual sons which distinguished them from others moving through t
he reversion. Deva knew Kole and Samuel were not like his other sons. They came through portals and slipped reversions and gained knowledge of their new universe. Samuel was his natural firstborn and therefore most likely his successor. However, the paradox was not lost on Deva. He wanted Samuel to take his place and set him free.
At the same time, Deva’s responsibility dictated he put every obstacle in Samuel’s path in order to make sure he passed the test. Only the true heir would make it to the peak, and Deva expected to see Samuel on the other side of the cauldron when the time was right. Until then, Deva would wait for the cloud to push the inhabitants of the reversion toward the mountain, hoping the next climb to the peak would be his last.
The cloud would keep pushing Samuel to a cave where he would talk to Deva again. Getting Samuel there to make amends with those he wronged in past lives was the first step in the process of becoming the next overseer.
***
Samuel awoke tired and achy. He gathered his things and took one last look at the marsh before continuing on the path, heading east toward the Barren and his meeting with Major. The dark cloud pushed ever closer, devouring this place.
Samuel could not remember the point he left the path. He recalled the snow and the cold, and the continued silence, but he felt as though one moment he stood on the worn ground and the next he was knee-deep in grey snow.
The heavy flakes floated from the sky. They landed one on top of another and covered the ground within an hour. Samuel thought the snow could have been white, but without daylight and the reflection off the snowpack, the precipitation fell in waves of grey. He could not see the dark cloud that came from the west, but he felt it. He knew it was there, above the winter storm in the place where winter did not exist.
He trudged onward, sensing east as best he could. The snow came in silent waves, burying the marsh, the path, and obscuring the mountain from view. Samuel realized his shirt and pants would not be enough for him to survive if this was indeed the onslaught of winter. This place carried no warning of the changing season, no hint of the autumn’s leaves.
Samuel felt the snow suffocating his breath with the cold wind on his back. The ice kept his fingers numb, the fatigue pulling his eyelids down. He stumbled and used his left hand to brace for the fall. Samuel’s body collapsed and the snow filled his mouth and stole his breath. He remained motionless as the cold flakes fell in silent waves. The snowy blanket covered his body, the frozen earth stealing what little heat remained. He raised his head and noticed conforming lines standing out against the random, spiky branches of the leafless trees. He rubbed the snow from his eyes and looked again, pushing himself up until he was on his hands and knees. He stumbled forward until the outline turned into a cabin, much like the first one he found.
The cabin stood in the snowstorm, its chimney a defiant, obscene gesture to the raging elements. One door and one window faced Samuel, just like the other cabin. However, this one seemed a bit larger. He held his hands out, hoping to reach the door before the storm claimed his soul. Samuel staggered forward and fell on the step. He reached up with one hand until he felt the brass knob. The touch jolted him like a bolt of electricity, reminding him that failure to open this door meant a cold, slow death. His right hand seized it, but he could not make his fingers grasp the knob with enough strength to turn it.
He would not consider what would happen if the door was locked. Samuel let his right hand fall, and lunged at the knob with his left. Snow caked his head, and his feet tingled with the itchy pain of frostbite. He felt his fingers claw the knob, grasp it and turn. Without the clinking sound of the opening strike plate, Samuel assumed he was dead, that the door was locked. But his left arm fell at an angle as the door to the cabin swung open. He raised his head and smiled, crawling across the threshold with a final lunge and rolling onto his back. He used an elbow to slam the door shut, and it shook the cabin without a sound. Samuel looked around and closed his eyes. His breathing slowed as relief and exhaustion pulled him into a state of unconsciousness.
***
The crackling fire woke him. Samuel heard the hiss and pop before he smelled the rustic aroma of the hearth. He smiled with his eyes closed, savoring the sound and smell, senses he sometimes neglected in life and never would again, thanks to this place. He’d caught whiffs of scents, but nothing lingered for more than a few moments.
He debated whether or not he was dead. Maybe there was fire. Maybe he was in hell.
Curiosity won the mental duel, and Samuel opened his eyes in the glare of the bright yellow and orange flame. It caught his attention as it did not have the sickly yellow shade of the fire he lit in the forest. He placed a hand over his forehead to shield himself from the unexpected light and blinked like an ascetic emerging from a cave after years of meditation. The warmth relaxed his muscles. As his vision returned, he noticed a fuzzy aura at the edges. He pushed up onto his elbows and looked around the cabin.
The hearth sat inside a black potbelly stove. A single iron pipe ran at an angle from the top and into the brick chimney, which extended up the wall and beyond the ceiling. A saucepan sizzled, with tendrils of enticing steam spiraling away from the stovetop. He turned to see a wooden table with two chairs, one at each end. A napkin holder, candles and steins were set on top. His rucksack sat next to the door, along with a pair of suede boots he did not recognize. Above the boots and suspended by a single iron hook was a long, black, leather trench coat. Samuel smiled, thinking of the futuristic sci-fi heroes laden with enormous weapons.
In the corner sat a single reading chair with swirled sides and brass rivets holding the soft leather tight over the cushions. Samuel thought he could become lost in that chair with the help of a good book and a glass of wine. His eyes moved through the cabin so quickly that he did not notice a thick, plush sleeping bag held his body like a cocoon. He felt his feet. They did not tingle with the burning pain of extreme cold, but rather, his toes wiggled in warm comfort. He glanced at the window next to the door and saw nothing but a charcoal square, as if someone had painted the window to block the outside. Samuel drifted into a deep sleep while the potbelly stove kept him warm.
***
He felt the panicky flutter in his chest of awakening in a strange place until he saw the potbelly stove again. Contentment chased away his anxiety until his hunger made itself known. He had eaten little since arriving. Samuel sensed a cellular duty to push sustenance down his throat. He welcomed the hunger pangs and the feeling of being human again, though his brain cautioned him about his temporary euphoria. It reminded him he was in a single-room cabin in the midst of a strange world that was slowly unraveling.
Samuel climbed from the warmth of the sleeping bag, standing naked in front of the fire. He let the heat warm his skin until it hurt, and then a little bit more. His clothes lay draped over the back of one of the chairs, and he decided a meal would take precedence over modesty.
As if the cabin had suspended time while he slept, the pan on the stove continued to sizzle.
“That can only be bacon,” Samuel said as he rubbed his hands together and licked his upper lip.
He saw the familiar fatty strips bubbling, crispy at the ends, and he inhaled the aroma until he could almost taste it. Samuel grabbed his shirt and slid it over his head. With his right arm retracted, he used the sleeve to lift the pan off the stove and onto the brick pedestal supporting it. Without waiting for the grease to stop dancing, he grabbed a slice of bacon and held it in the air in front of his face, cursing the burn on his fingers and blowing on it until he could take a bite. A warm, salty sensation flooded his mouth and he closed his eyes, leaning back against the wall and chewing like a junkie with the needle still protruding from a vein. At first Samuel’s stomach lurched. He felt a rumble and heard a gurgle. He paused, and then he devoured the other three strips lying in the grease.
Samuel looked up and noticed a steel decanter hanging from an iron hook just above the stove. It spouted a line of
steam into the room, and he cocked his head sideways, trying to remember if it had been there a moment ago. When the heady aroma of coffee beans filled the room, he no longer cared. He stood and grabbed a stein from the small table, pouring the dark coffee from the decanter and watching it form a black center within the silver mug. He brought it to his lips and let the bitter tang flood his mouth. When he was convinced it would not scald his tongue and ruin the taste, Samuel drew the coffee into his mouth and let it warm his chest like a shot of whiskey.
The window remained unchanged. Samuel cupped both hands around the stein to help insulate the beverage and keep it hot as he walked over, expecting to see a brilliant sunrise creeping over the trees like the ones in the movies. But the window remained an opaque, dark hole in the wall. Samuel could almost feel the ominous cloud flowing to the east, toward him, devouring the rest of this broken world in its path.
He frowned and set the stein on the table before looking at it and picking it up again, draining the remnants of the coffee before setting it back down. He noticed the fire did not seem as bright or as warm as when he fell asleep the night before. Had it been the night before? How long had he slept? Before Samuel could consider the answers, he saw it on the floor and it almost stopped his heart.
Chapter 8
It was impossible. Even in a place where the clouds ate reality and the dead spoke, this was impossible. He blinked, rubbed his eyes and blinked again. It remained.
Samuel crouched down to take a closer look, resisting the urge to pick it up, as if it might shock him or something worse. He closed his eyes, counted to five and opened them. It remained.
He remembered the mother-of-pearl inlay on the narrow handle. He could smell the oil his dad used to protect the blade and keep rust from forming where fingers touched it. He saw the thin, black indentations used for drawing the blades out with the edge of a fingernail. He grasped the pocketknife in his palm and squeezed until he was sure it was real. Memories of that day rushed in.