by Baker, Scott
"You want me to use the cobra to kill Monteleur. How?"
The more I talked about my fear the stronger it became: Monteleur had decided I was ready to accept the feelings it'd been fostering in me for my own. I continued babbling, snorting enormous amounts of coke every twenty minutes or so, talking about everything and anything but returning again and again to the new fears that my snakes, and especially the baby cobra, inspired in me. It took a long time to get all the details of what I wanted Dara to do across to her—the coke cut us off from each other at the same time that it hid my feelings and reactions from Monteleur—but she finally had it right.
"I'm tired," she announced a while later, "and I need to use a bathroom. Can we stop at the next rest area?"
I said yes.
The sun had just broken free of the horizon when we found the rest area. Any truckers who'd been there for the night were already gone and there was only one other car in the lot, a tan station wagon with curtains drawn across its windows. I took a space at the far end of the lot, snorted four more spoons of coke, then used the men's room.
Dara was already back sitting in the truck when I came out. I got in, closed the door, locked it behind me.
"David?" I turned to her, jumped back: the cobra was there in her hands, inches from my face, staring at me while it flicked its forked tongue in my direction, tasting me, deciding what to do to me.
The fear Monteleur had fostered in me, the jangle from the coke, fed each other, merged, became terror. I pulled my arms in tight to my body, tried to shield my face and neck with them as I huddled back against the locked door, screaming at her to take the snake away, not hurt me with it, too terrified to reach up and unlock the door, push it out and open, run.
"Keep your voice down, David," she said, bringing the snake just a little closer to me. It was coiled on her cupped hands now, shiny black, just beginning to raise its head and expose its satiny throat. "There's no reason to be afraid of him, David. You're a Naga, and he's one of your relatives. Just like you, David. Just like you. Nothing to be afraid of."
Her voice soft, almost crooning as she stroked the back of the snake's head with her finger, inched it slowly closer to me. I tried to yell at her to get it away from me but the fear had reached my voice, left me unable to speak. And then Monteleur had taken my mouth and lips from me and I heard myself croaking, "No! No! Put it back! Put it back or I'll hurt you!"
"Nonsense." She was smiling. The cobra was rearing, spreading its hood, starting to sway back and forth. Its lidless eyes staring at me from its shiny black head, the hood extended to its fullest extent, the tongue flicking in and out, in and out.
Monteleur heaved through me, ripping me. My screams caught in my throat, forcing my jaws wider and wider as they tried to force their way out of me. Monteleur bellowing and screaming in my guts, pleading, threatening.
And the cobra struck. There was a burning in my neck where it had bitten me but the pain of its bite was nothing compared to the tearing in my belly, where Monteleur thrashed and screamed and ripped. Yet there was no dizziness or confusion, no muscle cramps or backache, and the burning in my neck soon went away. And in my belly Monteleur quieted and the pain began to diminish.
Monteleur had survived unharmed, and the Queen had not come.
"Nothing of this world can harm me," Monteleur boasted. "Nothing. Your snake hurt me, David, but only a little. Not nearly as much as I can hurt you—"
When I stopped screaming Monteleur had me start driving again. Every few hours it had me pull off to the side of the road for a while.
It was a long way to Carlsbad..
* * *
Chapter Thirty-one
« ^ »
I started to feel better when we reached Carlsbad. Monteleur was still amusing itself with me—a flash of agony like a knitting needle through my knee, a sudden ripping in my kidneys, an explosion of molten metal behind my eyes—but now that we'd reached the caverns I found that I could take their energies, use them, if not to resist the pain, then to endure it.
We switchbacked our way down through the singing and the burning, working our way ever closer to the source, the center, the pulsing heart.
A ranger in park-service brown was standing talking with two grandmotherly women in faded dresses just in front of the fluted drapery stalactites that hid the hole from which the waterfall of suns burst to fall alive and glorious through air and stone, ranger and old ladies alike. But he was too close; we would have had to push him aside to climb the cave coral to the hidden entrance. And Uncle Stephen had forbidden us to use our "Naga invisibility."
We hung around for a while, pretending to examine another set of drapery stalactites while we waited for the ranger to finish his talk and move on to another chamber, but by the time the two old ladies were ready to leave they'd been replaced by a middle-aged couple to whom the ranger was already pointing out the various rock formations with the beam of his flashlight.
"He's not going to leave," I whispered to Monteleur under my breath. "Get him out of here. We can't follow Uncle Stephen's orders with anyone here."
I was suddenly assaulted by an unbearably powerful sulphurous stench, a hot hissing sound like lava fountaining from the rock, flowing towards me; all around me I could hear the rock grinding and splitting, the walls collapsing, men and women screaming in pain and terror. Yet the rock was unmoving beneath my feet.
The ranger yelled, "Earthquake! Make for the entrance!" and sprinted into the next chamber after the two old ladies, while the couple he'd been lecturing turned and ran back past us and out through the King's Palace towards the entrance.
We were alone.
I followed Dara up the rough cave coral to the entrance hole, wriggled after her through the long, low tunnel leading to the caverns' living heart.
The chamber was as I had remembered it: large, vaulted, its far end a pool of chill water from the depths of which bubbles rose to burst with a soft plopping sound.
I could hear the echoing voices of the rangers investigating what had happened in the Queen's Chamber, but where we were there was only stillness, only radiance.
And Monteleur, a dark maggot squirming through the crystal transparency of my flesh.
I took off my sweater and shirt, had removed one sandal and was beginning on the other when a white-hot needle jabbed itself up through the roof of my mouth, pierced my brain. I kept myself from crying out, undid my other sandal.
"No more, Monteleur," Dara said. "Not new, while we're carrying out Uncle Stephen's orders."
"Not now," Monteleur agreed. "Later."
We finished undressing. The stone was cold beneath us, and damp, but the pain was gone and I was free for the instant to forget Monteleur, to forget everything but Dara and the fires singing through us. Not even the knowledge that Uncle Stephen would soon drain us of the power our lovemaking was gen-erating could destroy the joy we found in each other, the excitement and the purity of our union. We made love as slowly, as teasingly and as gently as we could, trying to prolong our freedom and our communion as long as possible, spending hours in caresses which barely brushed each other's skin, in kissing and tasting each other, building with infinite slowness towards union.
The earth's flaming life flowed through us and even as we held ourselves back from total union with each other we were one with it, lifted out of and beyond ourselves on its tides. But all too soon our lovemaking had passed from restraint to union, and our union had impelled us beyond ourselves into the symbolic landscapes of my father's mind.
The cold wind bit into us—we were one body now, but androgynous and complete, rather than clumsily hermaphroditic—but we commanded the void to release us and it was gone. My temptation took on reality around us but we willed the bedroom and the bleeding girl gone and they disappeared. My father cut open his chest, exposed his gray unbeating heart, but we willed him gone and he vanished.
We were standing knee-deep in the salmon-pink mud of an endless swamp plain. Tub
erous liver-gray plants floated just below the surface of the scummy pools that covered most of the plain.
We were settling slowly deeper into the mud. Sinking. Dara gave me control. I dragged first one leg, then the other, free. As soon as I quit struggling we began to sink again.
There was no sun. Above us an oversized moon pulsed through changes of phase as though its waxing and waning were the beating of some sickly heart. The air and mud were unbearably hot and a pall of steam hung over everything.
In the distance a single green hill thrust itself up out of the pink mud. I began wading towards it, dragging myself slowly through the sucking mud, skirting the scummy pools.
There was a great gray-green plant like a tendriled melon on the hill's crest. The thing rested on a tangled mass of interwoven roots like gnarled gray worms digging their way into the grassy hillside beneath it, and from somewhere within the tangle four twisting rivulets of blood-red liquid began, to make their way down the hill's steep slopes to the shallow lake which encircled the hill like a carmine moat.
Most of the tendrils drooped listlessly down and across the hill slope, but at seemingly random intervals one or more of them would leap into the sky and attach themselves to something invisible passing overhead. The attached tendrils would stretch to two or three times their flaccid length, then snap back to their original length and collapse back onto the hill.
We were perhaps five hundred yards from the edge of the lake. I stopped, kept shifting our weight from one leg to the other to keep us from sinking too deeply.
"Dara, before we get any closer, do you know what that thing up ahead is? The hill with the plant on it? Or what it's doing?"
"No. I've never heard about this—level. This reality."
"Can Monteleur follow us here? Or Uncle Stephen?"
"I don't know, but—they're not here now. I can still feel Monteleur back… in your body and Uncle Stephen is, is not with Monteleur but connected with it somehow even though he's far away from it—"
"Can they overhear us if we talk to each other here?"
"I don't know, but—We're still somewhere inside father's mind. In one of his symbolic landscapes. So they can maybe learn anything we say to each other from him."
"But you're not sure."
"No."
"Can you teach me how to—do the things you can do? The things that I can't. Like how you knew Monteleur and Uncle Stephen weren't here. And anything else, any—"
"Like this?" A whisper, sibilant and silent. "I can't, David. I don't know how."
"Can't you just, I don't know, show me or—?"
"I can't, David." Still whispering. "I—I'm half Naga, David, and so are you, but that doesn't mean that we're… halfway human and halfway Naga, all mixed together; what it means is that we've each got two souls, a Naga soul and a human soul. And before my grandparents gave me to father I lived in the Naga Realm, in Patala, and that's where I learned, where my Naga soul learned, to do—the things you can't do. All I know, all my grandparents let me remember when I left Patala, was how to reach my Naga soul and make use of some of its powers. That's all, and I just know how to do it, not what it really is or how to teach you to do it for yourself."
"Can we go there? Do you know how to get there?"
"No, but—I can find the way there. But not with Monteleur inside you."
When we reached the lake I bent down, lifted some of the red fluid to our mouth in a cupped hand, tasted it. I had half expected it to be blood, though it had none of the odor I would have expected had it been blood, but it was thin and almost intolerably sweet, like the nectar of some overripe tropical flower.
As soon as the liquid touched our lips the sky was full of naked men and women. They floated slowly through the air above us, their eyes closed, following intricate intertwining trajectories from which they never deviated. When one of the sleepers came too close to the hill one of the tendrils would dart to him, attach itself to him somehow and slowly drain him of his substance, leaving his shriveled and emptied body to continue as before along its predetermined path after the tendril had fallen away.
We circled the hill. As we moved around it a face came into view on the far side of the melonlike plant, a face at least eight feet tall. My father's face. The tendrils began just over his molded eyebrows. His eyes were closed.
"Father," I yelled but he gave no sign that he was aware of me.
"What do we do now?" I asked Dara.
"I don't think we're in any danger from him. Let's climb the hill."
We waded through the red moat, climbed the hill. The grass was slick and the slope was steeper than I'd realized; we made slow progress. The face seemed to take no notice of us.
We had to step over some of the flaccid tendrils, thread our way between others. Each ended in a red-lipped mouth above which was sketched the same simplified caricature of a Bathory face. None of the tendrils tried to attach themselves to us, even when I stumbled over one.
We reached the crest and stood directly in front of my father's blind green face but he still took no notice of us. Around us tendrils continued to leap into the sky, drain their victims, fall back again.
"Father!" I yelled again. His eyes remained shut. I hit him on the chin, the only part of his face I could reach. The flesh was soft, like an overripe tomato, but he still refused to respond.
"What do we do now?" I asked Dara. "He doesn't seem to be conscious at all. Like he really was a vegetable of some sort."
"Perhaps he isn't conscious, not on this level." And then, whispering, "But perhaps if I whisper to him like I'm whispering to you now I can call him to us."
I gave her control of our body. She stared up at the face a moment, without moving our lips or doing anything else I could feel with our shared vocal apparatus, yet soon the gray-green lids hiding my father's eyes lifted, revealing eyes that were pools of green-shot darkness.
"Hello, father," I said when I realized that Dara had returned control of our mouth to me. "What contest must I defeat you in this time?"
His great vegetable lips moved sluggishly. "No contest. I remain defeated."
"Then why are we here?"
"To gain power from me."
"How?"
"By drinking for yourself of that life which I take but which I cannot hold for myself."
"These red streams?"
"Yes."
"And how do we escape from here?"
"You command me to send you back."
"And if Dara had not been able to make you hear her?"
"You would have found a way to make me hear you. Do you wish to return now?"
"Wait," Dara said. "What is this place?"
"A subjective reality."
"Explain it."
"This plant is the undead part of our family; it wore my father's face before it wore mine. The streams that flow from beneath my roots are the lives of those we love. The plain from which this hill rises is the body of Satan, and this hill, this hill is you my children, all three of you."
"Michael is here too?" I demanded.
"Yes."
"How can we communicate with him?" Dara asked.
"You are all three this hill and you are all three within the hill. There is an entrance beneath my roots, to the left of the spring from which the streams flow."
A sloping tunnel led into the hill. It was tight and twisty, slimy-walled; we had to wriggle through it on our belly.
Inside the hill three faceless stone figures, two male and one female, sat around a fire fed by drops of the sweet red liquid that fell from the roof overhead. Within the flames a tiny red figure lay in an open coffin: my father.
One figure must have been Michael; the other two were us. None of them moved or gave any other indication of life or awareness. I couldn't even tell which of the two male figures was me.
"Michael," I said. "Dara." And then, "David."
There was no sign of any kind of response. The figures remained immobile, lifeless stone.
&n
bsp; "Can you whisper to them, make them hear you like you made father hear you?" I asked Dara.
"I'll try," she said.
"Michael," the flames whispered with my voice, "we need your help." The words were those I would have spoken but had not willed their utterance.
"We're all in this together," the flames insisted in Dara's voice. "The three of us. We won't hold what you tried to do to us against you."
"What do you want me to do for you? And what can you offer me in exchange?" Michael's voice asked.
"We offer you our combined strengths, and the chance to awaken your Naga powers. We offer you the help that Dara, the only one of us who is still free, can give you," my voice whispered.
"We offer you sanctuary in Patala, your ancestral home, if you can help us reach it," Dara's voice continued.
"What do you want from me?" Michael's voice repeated.
"We need knowledge, knowledge of Uncle Stephen, of SUSTUGRIEL and his familiars, knowledge of our own dhampire's powers and weaknesses. We need the bracelet in the form of a Naga which David hid near the house and which only you can find for us," Dara's voice whispered.
"I have no help to give you," the flames whispered back. "The bracelet has been destroyed and what knowledge I have I will keep for my own use. There is no point in further conversation."
The flames were silent once more. The stone figures had not moved. We crawled back out, paused a moment to drink from one of the twisting streams.
"Send us back," I told my father.
* * *
Chapter Thirty-two
« ^ »
We waited until the sun was gone and the last light fading from the sky before leaving Indian Gardens: we wanted to make sure no one saw us when the time came to leave the path and climb the loose rock to the cave.