by John Hook
“I might be mistaken, but I think you had a breakthrough there.”
I spun around, getting to my feet at the same time. Izzy leaned casually against a stone wall that ran around the plaza. I was impressed he had kept up with me. I was also glad to see him.
“You mean my great demonstration of maturity by throwing rocks when I’m mad.”
“Really big rocks.”
“I never like to do things halfway.”
“That and you evoked the blue talisman on your own.”
“You saw it? It wasn’t just in my head?”
Izzy had moved closer. He brushed the front of my shirt and straightened my collar.
“Take a look.”
He held up my arm. It still had blue tattoos, and small tongues of blue and white energy still licked at my muscles and then receded.
“Big deal. I still can’t use it to find Rox.”
“I don’t think you know yet what you can use it for. Let’s get back to Saripha and see if we can find out.”
3.
I still had some residual anger although most of it was spent. I was feeling more edgy and off-center than I had been in a long time, maybe since I arrived in Hell. Saripha was right. Pretty much since I got here, I was always able to come up with a plan. They weren’t always good plans, but they kept me moving and I was lucky most of the time. But now I not only didn’t have a plan, my luck seemed to have run out. Two people—and, yes, I considered Guido a person—were unaccounted for and probably in grave danger. One was the woman I loved. I had no idea what I could do and I was frustrated.
I decided I needed to walk it off. Izzy came with me. Izzy understood. Our friendship ran deep. We had a natural rhythm together and could float from silence to light banter easily and without discomfort. He wasn’t intrusive and would let me be how I had to be. However, if he sensed I was at risk of losing myself and not staying focused, he would find a way to step in and pull me back out without setting me off.
After walking aimlessly a little deeper into the city together in silence, I began to relax again. Izzy seemed to sense it and spoke up.
“I understand wiping out Rockvale and going after Guido. I don’t get their grabbing Rox.”
“I don’t understand a lot of things about why they do what they do here.”
“Like, why aren’t they after you?”
“For one, they want the blue power but they can’t take it from me. It’s almost as if they have to let me live and so go after those around me instead.”
“Kind of sucks.”
“Yeah. Which is why I get so pissed off. I want a way to change that, to put myself and not others in their path. Make them take me down or end it once and for all.”
“They tried a few times.”
“And I keep coming back.”
“You even did them the favor of blowing yourself up as I recall.” Izzy chuckled.
“I try to be helpful.”
“I still would have paid money to see that.”
“And if I hadn’t have had this blue thing I would’ve been handled.”
“I doubt it. Would’ve been different, but I bet you would’ve still been pissed at them.”
“I’d like to think so.”
Suddenly, there was a crash. In my peripheral vision, I caught an orange glow. My nerves instantly went to full alert, wondering if they were throwing that fire or energy stuff at us again. I crouched down while Izzy expertly, in a single motion, had the bow off his back and an arrow threaded. Neither move would have done any good if it had been an attack like the Rockvale attack, but it was good instinct. However, whatever the glow was, it was on the ground and retreated and disappeared into one of the buildings.
I looked at Izzy. He shrugged. We both dashed to the building. Lying in front of it was a piece of wood that had fallen loose. I picked it up.
“Izzy, look at this.”
I held the wood up. It was charred around where there was a fresh break. The fact that the charring had just occurred was testified to by the fact that it was still smoldering. I looked up and saw other similar lengths of wood arranged like spokes around the curved building between the first and second floor. The one directly above us had been broken off. There was still a small piece jutting from the wall with wispy fingers of smoke rising from it. It was obviously where this piece on the ground came from.
“What do you make of it, Izzy?”
“It looks like a piece of wood that was weakened by fire.”
“And just snapped off.”
“Maybe. But I would think it would need something with weight to do the actual snapping off. It was not burned through.”
“Lava? I don’t see a lamp that might have fallen.”
“I don’t know. I haven’t actually seen any other kind of fire in this place, strangely enough. Even the clay stoves that burn wood use lava for starting the fire.”
We stepped into the building where we saw the light disappear. There was no sign of any orange glow. It was pretty dark, although enough moonlight came in the windows to allow us to make out the interior and shapes pretty well. There was a small open foyer on the first floor and one stair that curved up to the second floor and a second that curved in the opposite direction down. I heard an unexpected spurt of high-pitched sounds, like someone moving furniture, and then all was silent again.
“What was that?”
“Don’t know.” Izzy kept his voice down. “It sounded like it came from below.”
“You think this city’s haunted.”
Izzy laughed. “Yeah, I do. By us. We are all ghosts of a sort.”
“Good point.” I grinned and headed for the steps.
“It’s usually a bad idea to go into the basement. At least in movies.”
“We’re in Hell. What’ve we got to lose?”
“Hopefully we won’t have to find out the answer to that.”
I headed down into the darkness. Izzy waited a moment and then followed, close enough to not lose me in the darkness but far enough back to have time to react if something came at me.
It was a good deal darker in this lower section, although there were still enough highlights to detect edges once your eyes adjusted. Still, I had to move slow and watch carefully in case there was motion. I stepped out onto the floor at the bottom of the stairs. It was deserted. Then I noticed a looming shape on the far wall that seemed unusual. For just a moment, I thought it might be Guido, but then I realized the shape was larger and boxy. Izzy and I walked over carefully. I let my eyes adjust a bit more.
“Izzy, is that what I think it is?”
Izzy didn’t seem to hear me. I reached out and felt around the edges and the middle of the shape.
“It’s a door,” Izzy finally said.
“Not quite. Look at this wheel-like object in the center.”
Izzy reached in and felt what I was holding. I tried turning it, but it didn’t budge.
“Help me.” Izzy grabbed on and we both put all our strength into trying to turn it. There was no give. We grunted from the effort as we finally let go.
“It’s like a safe or a sealed hatch.”
“What is it made of, Izzy?”
Izzy felt around.
“Hard to tell. Doesn’t seem to be metal, not unexpectedly. Either stone or a very hard, very polished wood.”
“I wonder what’s on the other side.”
“The orange light and that strange noise?”
“The noise could have been the door shutting.” I said it as a statement but it really was a question.
“This door or whatever is very heavy. The sound we heard was almost a squeak or a screech. Not likely a sound made by this door.”
“Then where did the orange light go?” I asked. I could hardly see Izzy, but I knew he shrugged.
“Let’s head back to Saripha. We’ll try and get our bearings well enough to remember where this is and come back in the daytime.”
“Maybe it’s Guido’s bomb shelt
er.”
Izzy patted my shoulder. “Good to have your humor back.”
When we arrived back, Saripha was already off in her quarters resting. I was sorry because I wanted to apologize for having a snit earlier. She tended to take things in stride and had probably not thought much about it. She had left a couple of lava lamps lit for Izzy and myself and we rested the remainder of the night on our bed rolls.
When I woke from the drifting semi-sleep that these bodies are mostly capable of, I was looking into the face of Rooni. She was just sitting there by the side of my bedroll on the floor, her golden green eyes fixed on me. I’m not great at reading cat expressions, but there was a deep intensity there. Then as suddenly, without changing her position, she let her lids close lazily over her eyes. I shook my head and scratched her carefully on the top of her flat head. I had noticed that it was the only place she would tolerate petting without biting you. She pushed her head into my hand and I got up.
I found Saripha in the jazz bar laying out glamour food, which she had become quite accomplished at. She greeted me with a smile and Izzy also wandered in. She had a spread of pretty close approximations of blueberry pancakes, sausage and syrup. For some reason, coffee eluded her and any other “glamour chef” I had encountered, so we were stuck with the all-too-real grass tea.
“I thought some comfort food, even if illusory, before this morning’s session would help ground us for the work.”
“Yeah, sorry about last night.”
Saripha shrugged and smiled as she delicately chewed a corner of her pancake.
“I think you have actually been pretty restrained under the circumstances.”
“You know anything about orange lights in the old city?”
“You saw orange lights?”
“Well, actually, I’m not sure. It happened very fast.”
“However, I saw them too,” Izzy added.
“I’ve never seen anything like that in the old city. What kind of light?”
I shook my head. “It was only for a minute. I thought they were like small globes of light, like someone with some lava, but the light seemed to recede into a building and, when we went in, we couldn’t find a trace.”
“Tell her what else we found,” Izzy managed to get out around a mouthful of pancake.
Saripha raised an eyebrow in interest.
“I think we’ll have to go back today after our session to really know. In the dark, it seemed to be a very heavily sealed door. More like a vault door. It would have to be an underground chamber.”
“Sounds intriguing.”
“You think that could be the underground chamber we go to in order to meet with Guido?”
“Possible, but I always had the impression that was inside a mountain… real or imagined, I’ve never been sure.”
“Well, Izzy and I want to go over later before dark and see if we can open it.”
“By all means. I’ll come with you.”
“I noticed Rooni is back,” I commented.
“She showed up last night.”
“You said she was a guide?”
“She could communicate where I first appeared after I died. She doesn’t use words. She places thoughts in your head. Here, the only time she has done that is when she bit me just before Rockvale was destroyed. She either can’t communicate here in the same way or has chosen not to.”
“Is she really a cat?”
“Probably not, but it is the only form I have seen.” Saripha smiled.
We cleaned up, which doesn’t take much when the food is half illusion, and went back into the living quarters to begin meditation. Rooni was sitting on the floor watching us with detached interest.
Everything started out as it had pretty much before with Saripha and I meditating and breathing together. She then opened her eyes and said in a near whisper, “I’m going to try something a little different. I think you are ready.”
I wasn’t sure I liked the sound of that, but I kept meditating. Saripha rose gracefully to her feet and padded softly around behind me. I sensed rather than saw that she sat on the floor again behind me. She touched several points along my spine with more pressure than she had used before. I could feel warmth radiating at the pressure points. Then, unexpectedly, she hit the bottom of my spine with the heel of her hand. The force she applied to the strike was pretty hard and it might have pitched me forward onto the floor, but there was a hot pulse of energy that shot up my spine with such surging force that it kept me bolt upright. The room was many times brighter than it had been moments before, in part due to a light above my head near the ceiling where there hadn’t been any moments before.
I felt warm and oddly disconnected from anyone else in the room. I could feel waves of energy coursing through me and yet I felt so deeply relaxed I had to look down to make sure I wasn’t levitating off the floor.
In front of me a blue cloud began spiraling in midair. It then formed into a humanoid shape. The eyes, as always, were red, blood red. The features became sharper than they had been before. He seemed to be holding something in front of him, but it was distorted and blurry, as were the hands that held it.
“Who are you? What is our connection?”
He just stared back at me with a blank expression as if he couldn’t see me. I sensed that Saripha was no longer behind me, but I didn’t know where she was.
I decided to keep pressing. “Can you help me find Rox or Kanarchan?” I decided to use Guido’s real name. Again, the blue man, who was strangely like a sculpture, didn’t answer. The distortion in front of him sharpened into the typewriter I had used twice before. Once Janovic had it but I figured out how to use it. Once I had conjured it as a focus for bringing forth the blue power after Saripha’s sacrifice. It gave me comfort to see the typewriter. It was my symbol. It made me feel like I was forming a link to this entity and my blue power. The blue man was holding it in his hands.
The blue man held up the typewriter between his hands as if it weighed nothing. I must have sensed what was about to happen because a sense of dark panic suddenly entered my body. It mixed with the energy coursing up my spine so that I felt like I was falling. The blue hands pressed on either side of the typewriter. Then it shattered, flying everywhere. I started screaming, but it wasn’t about the shattered typewriter, although that seemed shocking for some reason. I turned my head slightly and Rooni had sunk claws into my shoulder and was biting my neck. Only, it wasn’t really a cat. It was a fur-covered bipedal creature that was only vaguely humanoid, covered in fur with large eyes and a flat, but elongated head. Fangs were sunk into my flesh and she was making a deep, gravelly, purring sound. Then I seemed to fall away from her, my body paralyzed and in deep pain. There was a flash that filled my entire visual field.
I was in a cornfield. That was really confusing to me. I figured I was either hallucinating or dreaming. I couldn’t see myself, but I could see another. A tall man with dark blue skin and black hair pulled in a braid down his back. The cornstalks were brown, the corn mostly harvested. There were primitive scarecrows mounted about the field. They wore no clothes but were shaped out of dry cornstalks and given carved wooden masks that made them appear ferocious and foreboding. The man moved cautiously through the field, watching carefully. He held the hand of a dark-haired girl of maybe ten. She wore a ceremonial dress with feathers and robes. The blue, dark-haired man moved carefully through the field watching the horizon. I followed his gaze.
A crack formed in the sky. Then radial cracks grew out from a center and more cracks appeared. Finally, the sky shattered, raining down shards of blue onto the ground as more and more cracks opened up. The girl gave a high-pitched scream and I found myself back, lying on the floor of Saripha’s living quarters with a smashing headache.
Rooni was sitting next to me with that strange mixture of curiosity and detachment that cats can get. The next thing I knew, Rooni scampered off as Saripha and Izzy showed up to help me up.
“What the hell did you put i
n that tea, Saripha?”
“It wasn’t the tea, Quentin.”
“Then you didn’t see the blue figure or that he crushed my typewriter.”
“No. What I did do was open up centers in your body some people call chakras to give you greater vision for a short period.”
“If you mean so I could see stuff that wasn’t there, it worked.”
“Oh, it was there. Just not for us.” Saripha smiled.
“Does it mean anything?”
“I’d be guessing.”
“Better you than me.”
“You no longer need your symbol. You are moving closer to direct contact.”
I looked down at the blue tattoos that covered my skin. They hadn’t gone away since appearing during my tantrum the night before, but when I woke up on the floor they had been glowing. That glow had subsided again.
“I remember Rooni attacking me, but when I caught a quick glimpse she didn’t seem to be a cat.”
“Rooni seems to have taken an interest in you and your work.” Saripha was thoughtful. “What did she show you?”
“Nothing that makes sense.”
“Probably will later.”
“Yeah, well, I think I’ve had my fill of this mystical stuff. Let’s go get a look at the door.”
I was frustrated again, but I was trying not to take it out on those around me.
Izzy helped guide us back to the building where he and I had been the night before. Izzy had a good head for geographical details. He brought his bow and some arrows. I had my short sword from Kyo in its scabbard, shoved in at the small of my back. Saripha came with us, carrying a small clay pot with lava for extra light for when we got to the basement level.