The Bog

by Talbot, Michael

  David blinked several times, excited by what he had just been told, but unable to divorce himself from the perception that the figure before him was still Tuck, was still only a child, and certainly no match for Grenville. “But how?” he asked.

  Ur-Zababa frowned. “It is true that it will not be easy. The body of your son is still recovering from his accident, and I am still weakened by my transition into this world, but I am not completely without my resources. To begin, I would like you to tell me all that you know about the man I know as Malakil, how you met him, and everything that has happened since. Please try to recall even the most insignificant details. I need to know everything to be able to amass a plan of attack, and sometimes it is the most trivial occurrences that provide the most valuable insights.”

  “What?” David said, standing. “You’re going too fast. You tell me that my son is dead and that you’ve taken over his body, and you expect me to just take this all in stride as you go on asking your questions?”

  For the first time a hint of compassion came into the small face before him. “I’m sorry. I know you have been through a great deal. It’s just that we do not have much time. You see, I already know some of the things that are going on. I know that your wife is pregnant and that the birth will be no normal birth. I know also that the only reason Malakil has allowed you to remain alive until now is that he needed you, needed to maintain the status quo so that your wife would not suspect what was going on. But now that your wife has become pregnant and he has taken her into his safekeeping, his purpose in needing you alive is over. It is only a matter of time before he kills us both.”

  David thought about this for a moment. “And what do you propose to do to stop him?”

  Ur-Zababa regarded him pointedly. “I’m not sure yet. But I know one thing. If I am to have any hope of succeeding, you must tell me everything that you know.” David stared at the little boy sitting across from him at the table, grief and disbelief still tugging at his soul, and then, taking a deep breath, he conceded. He told Ur-Zababa everything, from Brad’s first discovery of the bog bodies to Melanie’s fainting when she received the phone call from Dr. Grosley, and when he had finished, Ur-Zababa pondered everything that he had said for several minutes before he spoke.

  He shifted his weight and laced his tiny fingers together thoughtfully. “First, let me begin by saying that you should not judge your wife too harshly for allowing herself to be seduced by the demon, whatever form it took. The bog-myrtle wine that Malakil gave you the first time you visited his home was most assuredly a powerful aphrodisiac. Even when I knew him Malakil was especially skilled at the manufacture of potions, and given what you have told me about the demon eluding you when you chased it around the lake, I would suspect that that is the evening that the seduction took place.”

  David thought about this for a moment and recalled his own strange feeling that he had been drugged after drinking the bog-myrtle wine. “But why Melanie?” he asked. “Why did Grenville or Malakil, or whatever his name is, wait over two thousand years before attempting to bring about such a birth again?”

  Ur-Zababa knitted his brow. “Because such a birth can occur only once every two thousand years. You see, magic is a thing of cycles, of rhythms and cosmic pulsations, and the birth of a demon through a human mother is one of the most difficult magical operations of all. It can occur only when the planets are in a very special alignment with the stars, for then and only then are the two worlds close enough together to allow a transition between the world of the demon and the world of the human to take place. This alignment occurs but once every Great Month, or roughly every two thousand years—the time it takes for the precession of the equinoxes to cause Earth to pass from one astrological age and into the next. The last time this occurred was when the Roman woman stumbled so haplessly into Malakil’s clutches. And when the advent of the Great Month before that occurred, over two thousand years previous, Malakil still lived in Ebla. It was then, while he was still my student, that he took a young girl of Ebla and through a powerful and forbidden conjuration engendered in her the seed of what was to become the demon you know as Julia.”

  “What were you in ancient Ebla?” David asked.

  “A sorcerer, of course.”

  “And did you obtain your power from a demon?” Ur-Zababa looked at him sharply. “No. I have never taken the forces of darkness as my ally and I never will. I derived my power by following a different path.” The boyish gaze once again became distant. “But I could not stop Malakil from embarking upon a path of evil. I never even suspected that such a desire lay hidden in his heart.” He looked at David with a tortured expression. “You see, I taught him the ways of darkness. I taught it to him as part of his education, so that he could fight it if he ever came up against it. I never suspected that he was embracing each terrible secret as I revealed it to him. That is why I must stop him now, because I am, in a way, responsible for all of the atrocities that he has committed, and to put my own soul at peace I must bring his life to an end.”

  “But how?” David asked. “Do you have power?”

  “Not yet,” Ur-Zababa replied, looking at his small hands as he held them out before him. “I am still too newly incarcerated in this body. It will take a little while before I can adjust its frequency, the vibration of its molecules, to more completely accommodate the flow of my power. And even then, I’m afraid, my energy level will be no match for Malakil’s. I have simply been away from this plane of existence for too long to manifest the full of my abilities in so short a time.”

  David grew worried. “Then how do you propose to best Malakil?”

  “Through cunning,” Ur-Zababa returned. “Cunning and surprise.”

  David’s interest increased.

  “You see, Malakil is not without his—what is your expression?—Achilles’ heel. And he will not be expecting anyone to know what that Achilles’ heel is, because at present he has no idea that I am here. Thus, he will not be as cautious as he should be about protecting his one vulnerability. However, as soon as my powers start to manifest themselves he will sense their presence. He will at first not know what they mean, and may assume that it is just a disturbance in the fabric of space and time. But he will soon figure out that I am here, and that means lhat we will have to move quickly if we are to preserve our element of surprise.”

  David trembled with excitement. “But what is his Achilles’ heel?”

  “The jewel,” Ur-Zababa replied. “The ruby that he wears around his neck. It contains the pact he made four thousand years ago with the powers of darkness, his covenant with Julia. It is the jewel that enables him to maintain his dominion over her, and to tap her power. Without it Malakil would be as subject to her wrath as the rest of us.”

  “You mean that Julia would turn on him?”

  “If she was hungry. Or if Malakil was lucky she might simply return to her own world. Whatever the case, one fact remains. Demons are at heart ferocious and solitary creatures, and the only reason that he has her allegiance is that he possesses the jewel.”

  “Does that mean that without it Malakil would be powerless?”

  “Without it the brunt of Malakil’s power would instantly vanish, but he would still possess a small amount of power. However, without the jewel, at least we would have a chance of overcoming him.”

  David thought about what Ur-Zababa had just said. He directed his attention once again to the little magician. “A while back Malakil took me on a voyage into the past and a strange incident occurred, an incident in which he nearly lost his ruby pendant.”

  Ur-Zababa smiled faintly and nodded.

  “Do you know anything about that?”

  “I was the bead of golden light that attacked Malakil,” Ur-Zababa confessed. “It was Malakil’s fatal mistake to return to the era in which he knew me. That was how I was able to locate him and follow him back here.”

  “But how? Do you exist only in the past, or have you lived in some other form
these past four thousand years as Malakil has, or what?”

  Ur-Zababa smiled consolingly. “To begin you must understand that the past is not dead. In fact, strictly speaking, there is no past. At a certain level of perception one begins to realize that all time exists at once. It is only the current limitations of your consciousness that make it appear that you are moving along a linear and frozen track of time. The reason that I was able to once again locate Malakil is that he returned to a time when I, in the form of Ur-Zababa, was not yet dead. But in truth, the entity that sits before you now has lived in many times, and has gone far beyond Ur-Zababa, and now exists properly in a plane of existence that you do not yet have a vocabulary to describe.”

  “Is it heaven?”

  “Not as you think of it, for to call it heaven would be to limit it, and in truth it is far more splendid than any heaven of which you can yet conceive.”

  “And what about Tuck? Is Tuck in this place?” Ur-Zababa smiled again. “If you can call infinity a place. The truth is that reality is vast, far vaster than you have yet dared to imagine, and all that I can tell you is that Tuck is somewhere in that infinity, doing what it is necessary for his soul to do.”

  David felt both painfully empty and comforted. “Now I have a question for you,” Ur-Zababa went on. David regarded him curiously.

  “In all of your experiences with the demon Julia did she ever give you any reason to suspect that she was uncomfortable with her body temperature, that, like a person coming down with something, she was unable tc decide whether she was too warm or too cold?”

  “Well, now that you mention it, she did seem tc alternate between sitting before unusually large fires and then suddenly preferring the damp chill of of the bog.”

  “Fires that were too uncomfortably warm for you to sit very close to?”

  “Yes,” David returned, startled.

  “And when she assumed her secondary forms, forms in which she no longer looked like normal matter, but glowed, did her flesh have a pitted look as if it were in an advanced state of decay?”

  David nodded again. “Yes, but how did you know?”

  “Because it only stands to reason. Properly speaking Julia should have perished at the end of the first Great Month of her sojourn upon this earth. It is a credit to Malakil’s power that he was somehow able to extend her survival for a second. But she will not live beyond this one. From what you have told me it appears that even now she is in the process of dying. That means it is even more imperative that Malakil usher her successor into this world. For him it is very literally a matter of life and death.”

  Ur-Zababa’s expression became more troubled. “I now have a most difficult question to ask you, one that you are perhaps not going to take kindly to my asking. Will you please try to understand that it is the seriousness of the situation facing us that forces me to even ponder such a possibility?”

  Falteringly, David nodded.

  “We will do everything that we can do to stop Malakil, but if by some chance we should fail, and if it comes within the realm of opportunity for you to end your wife’s life by your own hand, would you be willing to consider that as a final option, to save future generations from untold centuries of Malakil’s madness?”

  A cold and existential hush fell over David’s soul. “No! Please, you cannot ask that of me.”

  Ur-Zababa raised his hand. “Before you decide, there is something else that I have not told you.”

  David looked at him with increasing dread.

  “A young demon is far more powerful than an old one. The power that Julia now provides to Malakil may seem prodigious, but it is only a shadow of what it once was. In her youth, during the first several centuries of Malakil’s covenant with her, untold thousands went down before his might. You must believe me when I tell you that the only reason he has confined his reign of terror, lo these many centuries, to just this tiny valley, is he has not had the resources to extend them beyond. But power is a game to Malakil, and he is a destroyer of worlds. You would be astonished if I told you how many of the wars of the ancient world were fought at his inspiration, how many civilizations fell as a result of his machination and wrath. It was he who ordered the sacking of Lagash. It was even his treachery that brought about the fall of Ebla.”

  David allowed these words to settle in for several moments before he spoke. “And you think that if Malakil’s power were restored to its fullest he would no longer confine himself to just this valley?”

  “I don’t think where Malakil is involved. I know. If he were to have such power again, it would be tantamount to unleashing such a floodgate of darkness upon this world that even all of the wisdom and artifice of your current civilization could not stop it. The earth would become a playground of evil.”

  David was about to say something else when Ur-Zababa stopped him. “It is not a decision that you have to make now. Hopefully, if all goes well, it is not a decision that you will ever be faced with making. But if all else fails I want you at least to know the full extent of what is at stake.”

  David nodded slowly and after several minutes of quiet rumination he spoke again. “I have another question. The first time I saw Julia in her true form the word hallelujah seemed to have an adverse affect upon her. However, another religious symbol, the sign of the cross, doesn’t seem to do anything to her. In fact, she even strangled the little girl Amanda with a cord on which I had suspended such a cross. Why does one religious symbol affect her and the other not?”

  “Because hallelujah comes from the language in which Malakil’s pact with Julia was written, and the belief system in which the demon was originally conjured up always holds dominion over it. That is why if and when we come into possession of the ruby pendant, any commands we then give to Julia must still be in Eblaite, otherwise they will have no effect over her.”

  “Does that mean that I can protect myself from Julia simply by saying ‘hallelujah’?”

  Ur-Zababa shook his head. “No. The first time you frightened her off probably only because you surprised her. She wasn’t expecting anyone to say anything to her in Eblaite, and when you did you must have given her quite a start. She might have even jumped to the conclusion that you were a rival magician such as myself. But now that Malakil has most assuredly enlightened her on the matter, saying hallelujah will only have a slightly jarring effect upon her, like a brisk slap. Unless, of course, you are in possession of the ruby pendant. Then the word would cause her searing pain, and at least keep her at bay if I were not yet present to tell you what else to say. That is something it may be useful for you to remember.”

  David accepted the words thoughtfully.

  “I have one more question.”

  Ur-Zababa looked at him.

  “When I have visited Malakil’s home on several occasions I have sensed a strange presence in the house, an almost whispering energy. Do you know what it might be?”

  Ur-Zababa smiled. “You are very sensitive. It is evil that you have sensed. The demonic world is always very close to Malakil, and it is its presence that you have sensed. It is that same ability to sense things beyond the borders of the physical senses that will ultimately alert Malakil to my presence here. For the moment my power is too weak to have aroused any suspicion in him. He may have sensed my coming when I first entered Tuck’s body, but only as a small pinprick in the fabric of space and time, a faint disturbance that the excitement of the moment most assuredly made him forget. But we must work quickly because as I grow stronger he will begin to sense that something is amiss.”

  Ur-Zababa’s eyelids fluttered as if he were about to fall asleep. “And now,” he ended, “I must rest if I am to have the strength necessary to begin awakening my own power. Otherwise we will have no hope of ever overcoming Malakil.”

  For the next several days Ur-Zababa did little that appeared very remarkable to David except sleep in incredibly brief stints, eat only raw vegetables, and spend endless hours on folded knees in the middle of Tuck
’s room, meditating. David looked in on him often, hoping to see something that would rekindle his faith that they had any chance against Grenville, but by the end of a week he was once again in the throes of depression over their plight.

  As Ur-Zababa seemed to eat less and less, David started to eat and drink more, and when the following Monday rolled around, in a fit of soothing gluttony he got a pot roast out of the freezer and cooked the entire thing for himself. It was while he was gorging down a healthy portion of it that he heard a low sort of rumbling tremor pass through the house. He paused, listening carefully, and at first dismissed it as nerves. But then he heard the sound again. This time it lasted longer than before, and as he sat there wondering if he was actually perceiving it, he noticed that some salt he had spilled beside his plate had begun to vibrate, each tiny crystal moving about like an individual in a milling crowd.

  Wiping his hands, David stood up from the table. By the time he had reached the kitchen doorway the tremor had passed, but it was only a few seconds before it came again, like a glacier moving in its slumber, or a train passing somewhere in the night. He ran up the stairs.

  As he moved down the hall he realized, as he had suspected, that the mysterious vibration was coming from Tuck’s room, and nervously he crept forward and pushed the door open. Instantly, the hall was filled with a soft but strangely brilliant light. In amazement, David looked in and saw that Ur-Zababa was still sitting in a trance on the floor, and that the same strange light was now moving in patches over his body as it swirled off and filled the room with a turbulent, but eerily silent, cyclone of luminescence. At first it was the noiselessness of the glowing whirlwind that attracted his attention, for it moved with such force and turbidity that it seemed it should be roaring, only it was not. However, as he continued to stare into the storm of light that was like a phosphorescent liquid in a blender, in some distant part of his mind he slowly became aware of a sensation of voices, not one, but thousands, lifted in a chorus of celestial singing. He also perceived that the maelstrom now surrounding Ur-Zababa was slowly pulsating, and that its rhythm coincided exactly with the low rumble that filled the house.