The One We Feed

by Kristina Meister

  “So Enkidu taught Gilgamesh not to be a tyrant?”

  “They become great friends. They beat up some monsters, they cut down some giant trees, they float a big temple door down a river. They basically go on adventures until the day Enkidu is killed.”

  “Enkidu dies?”

  He nodded. “Gilgamesh is so broken up he sits beside the body for seven days, determined not to believe his best friend and teacher is dead. When he finally can’t deny it any longer, he makes up his mind to journey to the underworld to find a way to save him.”

  Thinking of my sister, I knew that was a sentiment I could certainly understand.

  “Does he?” My voice sounded raw.

  “Well, he gets hold of the fruit of immortality, but while he’s taking a brisk swim, it’s stolen by a….”

  My limbs went numb.

  “A snake,” I hissed. It seemed then that the myth of the Rakshasa wasn’t the only story that had ricocheted through humanity.

  I could hear Jinx’s throat working furiously and realized I was clutching his hand much too tightly. As I let go, he took a deep breath and stroked my hair behind my ear with a soothing touch.

  “Let’s take the myth out of it and go to the actual archaeological evidence.”

  “Okay.”

  “According to all established fact, the actual king known as Gilgamesh reigned for 128 years.”

  My body lurched. I held him out at arm’s length and scrutinized his face. “How is that possible?”

  The brown eyes held mine in a death grip. “I can think of a couple ways.”

  “You’re saying that Gilgamesh was an immortal?”

  “I’m saying, he might be the first immortal.”

  “Mara?”

  “A tyrant with an army of monsters…what do you think?”

  I released him and leaned back against the dark felt of the wall. Suddenly, I could see it. Just as it had happened for me, Gilgamesh had mourned his wild friend, and over the still form, he had meditated, until the break with reality was so severe, he had simply forgotten to die. But if that was how the king became the myth, then how had the first Rakshasa been born?

  As if he could hear my thoughts, Jinx leaned close. “Maybe he’s trying to recreate Enkidu, the brave and fierce. Maybe he was trying to find his friend. You said you saw them capturing people. Maybe it’s some kind of experiment and it all goes wrong, because whatever he does to them, it can’t compare with what the holy emissary did to Enkidu. An eternity of failures, who knows what that could do to an arrogant king.”

  I watched as humans filed in and out, oblivious to us and our charged conversation. The crackling tension in the air would be attributed to the tablets, and maybe they would be right. Gaining my feet, I wandered over to them and got as close as the ropes would allow. I wished I could read them, but I had a feeling they would always be something of a mystery.

  I was joined by my guide, and felt his gloved fingers slip through mine. “There’s more, and that’s why I brought you here.”

  Pulling him in front of me like some kind of shield, I wrapped my arms around his waist and leaned my chin on his shoulder. “Okay. I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.”

  He took a deep breath. “Remember that everything tends toward entropy.”

  “I remember,” I said, thinking there was no way I could forget it. My life was enough proof of the concept.

  “This tablet here,” Jinx pointed to the left, “is a story from before Enkidu’s meeting with Gilgamesh, when the tyrant was asked to banish a monster from a sacred tree.”

  I would have groaned, had our watchful docent not slinked by at that exact moment. “What kind of monster?”

  “No one knows. The tree had a serpent in its roots, a bird of prey in its branches, and in the trunk….” He took a deep breath. “It’s called the Ki-si-kil-lil-la-ke, but what it means is lost. It’s not an owl, or a snake. It’s something in between.”

  “Like a dragon?”

  “Or…maybe not. Fast forward to Babylon, when a winged serpent-woman called a lilitu torments men by moonlight, filling their heads with dreams. Skip a few more centuries and spread out a little, and we have wraiths, banshees, and sirens, and all of them winged serpent women on the warpath, all with the same name in an infinitude of languages: the night spirit, the Lilith.”

  Letting go of him, I tumbled back and made a beeline for the next chamber. He chased me, whispering demands at my back, but I couldn’t listen. My ears were rushing, and my thoughts fragmenting. A solid wall of bodies blocked me, and lost, I ended up near a giant sandstone gryphon with the head of a man. In its shadow, I collapsed onto a bench and buried my face in my hands, fighting for control.

  What did this all mean? Was I a monster or could I stop it? Was I doomed?

  Jinx gathered me up into an embrace and shushed me. “That’s not the end, Lily. Just listen. During the medieval period, the supposedly biblical Lilith appears. She’s the first wife of Adam, but there are absolutely no traces of her prior to that point. Suddenly she’s the great deceiver, the first to speak to the snake, the one to turn her husband to the dark side. Lilith is the one who eats the fruit of knowledge.”

  “That’s not making me feel any better.” I sniffed.

  “Remember the rules.” He lifted my face and smiled. “The wild man begins as a great thinker and over time becomes a monster. But the Lilith, she starts as a monster and ends up a queen. Her myth isn’t tending toward entropy, it’s tending toward organization, toward structure. The myth isn’t evolving forward, Lily. It’s evolving backward. Or maybe I should say, it has evolved, or maybe it devolved. This is new to me.”

  My mouth worked around a silent, broken thought, and my eyes drifted up to the sweeping, giant wing that shaded me.

  “How is that possible, for time to move backward, I mean?”

  “How did you know that Smith had been in our hotel room before you took his gift?”

  It seemed the gleaming machinery in my head had ground to a halt. I stared at him in wonder, and watched his smile grow.

  “Why are your eyes red when you’ve never met a Rakshasa? How did you talk to your sister before she died? How did you talk to yourself, Lily? How is the Crossroads even possible?”

  Arthur had never explained it, but in his way, he had let me believe that this was simply how it always went, when a Buddha was made. The future was an open book, so surely the past was too. I had never pressed for answers, because I had always believed he would tire of my constant pestering, but he was slipping away now, and I needed the truth.

  Jinx opened the pamphlet and pointed to an instructive text about the collection. “The Epic of Gilgamesh was lost to humanity for thousands of years. It was rediscovered in the Ashurbanipal library dig at Nineveh and translated in 1872. Less than twenty years later, a guy named Bram Stoker took the Wallachian myth of a winged serpent woman who ate children and crossed it with a the eastern European lycanthrope, and for the first time in human history, the Lilith and the Wild Man became one single myth. They’ve been linked ever since. Just watch that appalling Underworld saga, if you don’t believe me.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  The tongue ring clicked across his teeth. “One myth moving forward and one moving backward coalesce at the same point. Whoever this Reesa chick is, she’s critical. She’s Enkidu, and you….”

  “I’m Shamhat.” I pulled my fingers through my hair and wiped my face. He handed me a handkerchief embossed with the Autobots logo. My tears were forgotten instantly.

  “You’re too much.”

  “That’s why you like me.”

  “And here I thought I liked you because you were an immortal genius.”

  He shrugged and took my hand, escorting me on. In a room full of the bas relief of some battle, I leaned on a rail and considered all that he had said.

  “Why me?”

  “Because,” he grumbled. “When are you going to learn not to ask questions like that? J
ust go on about your business and handle your shit. Let the chips fall where they may.”

  “How am I supposed to do that when you’re whispering in my ear that I’m some sort of world-changing time-twisting she-bitch from the deepest recesses of hell?”

  Snickering, he pulled a piece of Niccoret gum out of his pocket and shoved it into his mouth. “Sticks and stones, Lily. Sticks and stones.”

  I ruffled his spikes and wandered toward the exit. Ancient history had lost its allure. I needed the fresh, zinc-scented air of a world dipped in wifi.

  “Answer me this one: how did you put all this together?”

  Jinx trotted beside me, palming a cigarette as soon as we’d escaped the doors. “Mara had three lovely daughters, Sirens move in choruses of three, and guess who had three fiendish wives?”

  I glanced his way. “Who?”

  “Dracula, of course.”

  “That’s how you unraveled the greatest conspiracy ever perpetrated?” I asked, dumbfounded.

  The flash of his lighter sparked in his eye. “You’ll figure it out soon enough. Trust me.”

  Chapter 14

  Hunches

  My soul was restless. I dropped the Boy Wonder off at the subway station and drove around for a few hours, until I determined that my uneasiness could be cured by simply developing a plan and sticking to it. I didn’t have all the information I needed yet, but I did have ways of getting it.

  I drove to the safe house and parked around the corner from it. If Mara was as intent upon getting Reesa out of his compound as my visions indicated, then the responsibility for organizing the migration would fall upon the shoulders of our overwrought friend, the overseer. What with his failure to protect his stronghold and his seeming proximity to Bonkersville, I figured he would be the weak link in the chain.

  Leaning back in my chair, I slid into the jhana for some reconnaissance. The elevator was already repaired, and the door to Petula’s room stood ajar. All of her possessions had been removed. I floated into the guard room, where the many camera feeds and computer consoles were usually manned by Sangha agents, but discovered that the men had vanished and taken the electronics with them.

  The Sangha must have gotten wise since our trespass into their hidden outpost and had vacated the premises. I should have kept a closer eye on them, made certain they did not escape, but I had been too busy whining about how unfair it all was that I had to be the one to do it. As I found each room empty, I tried to reassure myself that with Petula’s gift it didn’t matter where they ran; all I had to do was recall their faces, and I could find them.

  By the time I reached the office where I had witnessed the overseer pacing like a crazy person, I felt it was almost silly to check it too, but knew I should be thorough. I meshed with the door and came out the other side to a strange sight. The room was still furnished as it had been. The phone still sat on the desk. The flat screen television was still mounted on the wall. The overseer was still pacing, this time with a revolver in his hand.

  He had not changed clothes since the last time I saw him. His feet had trod the same path so many times that a wear pattern had been carved into the Persian rug. His head was covered in patchy bald spots, and his fingers appeared to be bleeding. He no longer talked at full voice but carried on mumbling to himself. He was a hot mess.

  I stayed with him for a time, lamenting that we could not have encountered each other under better circumstances. Helping Mara do what he did, imprison and torture people, was reprehensible, but when he’d first become a member of the Sangha, nothing could have been further from his mind. He had wanted to make the world a better place, rescue people from sadness and pain. It just turned out that short of a revolution in bioscience, humanity could not change how their brains functioned. His degradation, in many ways, had been predetermined, not in absence of self-control, but really, because of it.

  The phone rang. He did not stop pacing, just lifted the receiver as he walked by and pressed it to his ear.

  “Running away?” the voice said. It was Eva’s voice, or rather, Mara’s. Despite that, the sound of it still made my heart soar with happiness.

  The Arhat came to an abrupt and shaky halt. His lip trembled when he finally worked himself into answering. “I’m done helping you. When you first came to us, I was willing to have a limited part….”

  “Limited?” she laughed. “There is no such thing as limited when it comes to what I do, you imbecile. Putting one toe past that line is the same as throwing a body in the pit.”

  I could not help but agree. Morality and ethics were the foundation of human interaction. Once you ignored them, you pretty much stopped being a part of society.

  Unless someone chooses to let you back in.

  The man set the gun on the desk and wiped the sweat from his brow. “The Sangha will no longer have any part in this.”

  “So you speak for everyone, do you, Hal?”

  Hal shook his head. “You tried everyone else before you ever came to me. It’s a surety that Krsa will have nothing to do with you. You haven’t got anyone else to strong-arm.”

  “So true. Luckily, I still know where the Vihara is and where to test my new creations when they’re finished.” The call ended abruptly, but Hal did not put the handset back. He stared into space until the dial tone died and the angry shriek awoke.

  “He’s going to kill everyone.” The handset clattered to the ground, replaced by the barrel of the gun.

  I sprang back to my body as if slingshot and jumped out of the car without even making sure the door was shut. It wasn’t until I was in the elevator that I wondered what I was doing.

  He was a murderer. No, he was worse than a murderer, he was a slave catcher. He was a spineless, sniveling coward about to take the easy way out.

  That is why he must be stopped.

  Karl had been a murderer. Moksha had killed my parents. What made them any more or less deserving? I had been in the minds of others, knew how confusing life was for them, how sudden and unavoidable certain reactions could be. It was always easy to condemn, not so easy to try and understand. Understanding was risky. What if the person went astray? But I was not a person, and so it fell to me to be the one to try and understand, to salvage something of Hal’s character, if anything could be salvaged.

  When the doors to the basement swept open, I turned the corner and ran down the hall as fast as I could. I knew the door was locked but didn’t knock or alert him that I was coming. I kicked it in with one good swing of my foot and crashed through.

  Hal stood by the desk, gun to his temple, looking at me as if I were purple and covered in boils.

  “Put it down, Hal.”

  He began to shake from head to toe, but it did not stop him from cocking the hammer. “Stay away from me.”

  I held up my hand. “You know who I am, don’t you?” I said quietly, taking a step over the wreckage of the door. “Why do you suppose I’m here? Why do you think I broke in here in the first place?”

  He looked around in crazed desperation. “To do to me what you did to Karl.”

  “I didn’t do anything to Karl. He’s fine.”

  “You’re lying. Everyone wants to hurt me. You, him, the others. They all hate me!”

  “I don’t hate you. If I did, you’d be dead. Think about it. If I wasn’t able to watch every move you make, would I be here now? I could have killed you days ago!”

  He frowned uncertainly. The gun shifted a little.

  “I’m here because of Mara,” I whispered.

  He sucked in breath and shook his head. “I’m done with him. If you’re watching, you know that already.”

  “You’re right!” I inched forward, both hands in the air, my face as tender as I could make it. If I could just touch him, the standoff would end. “I heard you tell the asshole to pound sand. Good for you!”

  He suddenly broke into tears and slid along the side of the desk. “You don’t know anything. He’s going to kill everyone! He wants to ki
ll everyone!”

  “Why?”

  That stopped him. The gun fell as he considered the answer. “He hates everything.”

  I sighed and dropped my hands. “Do you know how old he is?”

  “No. Some say he’s older than….”

  “The Buddha?” I pressed. When he nodded, I understood. I could see the simplicity of his thoughts and felt sadness take the place of condemnation. “You thought that if there was someone older than Buddha, then he might know how to fix your...problem.”

  Hal collapsed into the desk chair and buried his face in his hands, the revolver pressed against his neck.

  “There’s no shame in that,” I breathed. “But what you did to help him, the choice to assist him in making more Rakshasa, you know that was wrong, don’t you?”

  He nodded. “He didn’t tell me what he was doing or even who he was at first. I thought...I had a son once. Even when he told me, I saw that face looking back and…. When he wouldn’t tell me why he wanted the things he wanted, I...I got suspicious.”

  “That’s why you agreed to let Petula live here?”

  He shuddered.

  “Why you went to Devlin to get her?”

  He looked up at me. The expression on his face told me I had gotten everything right and that he was mystified as to how.

  I smiled and walked to the desk, where I sat down as if we were going to talk about our pets or playing soccer on weekends. “Devlin’s an asshole, huh?”

  He let out an explosive laugh that turned into another sob. “He took everything. The Vihara used to have a collection, artifacts, sutras, valuable art. Not anymore. It’s all gone.”

  “Devlin drained you from one side, while Mara strung you along.”

  He put his head back in his hands. “How could I be such a fool?”

  I laughed. I don’t think he expected it. He glanced up as if I had slapped him. I covered my mouth and tried to appear as friendly as possible.

  “The same way Karl was.”

  “Is he really...fine?”