by Joel Varty
“Why should we follow him?”
“Who showed him the way out of here?”
“Who is this guy?”
“What does he want?”
“He’s probably working for THEM!”
I struggle not to react to the growing uncertainty, but the palpitating urge for chaos in a group like this seems to be an entity onto itself.
Herb raises his hands for silence, and calls out, “I have seen it too!” he proclaims. “I have seen the path that this man, this Jonah Truth has been shown, and I for one, am going to follow him!” He turns to look at me, and then motions his eyes to the floor, and the gaping hole in it.
I turn to the minister, and motion my eyes to the pulpit, willing her to give us a few minutes to find the way down. Herb climbs onto the stage with Steven at his side.
“Did you really see the way out of here?” I ask Herb, hoping he’d seen something that I, in truth, hadn’t.”
“No,” he replies, “but I figure you needed someone to have a little faith – even if it is totally misguided.”
“Well, let’s hope it’s not misplaced,” I say, peering into the blackness below.
I start pulling back the broken floorboards and prying the other boards back out of the way. Soon I have a large hole opened up and an old staircase is revealed, leading into the blackness. I sit on the edge of the floor and test a bit of weight on the first step. It seems to be fairly strong, so I risk stepping onto it. A few more steps down and it is too dark to see, but my eyes eventually adjust to the faint light that comes from the hole above me. Turning this way and that in an effort to make out details, I hear above me the sounds of a restless crowd.
Steven’s head casts a brief shadow, “You’d better hurry up down there, whatever you’re doing,” he says. “These people want some answers, and they seem to think you have them.”
I don’t look up. “But you know better?” I ask him, almost sarcastically.
“No,” he says, flippant. “But I’m not gonna put my ass on the line to save yours, that’s one thing you can count on.”
I hear Herb’s voice addressing the crowd again, telling them that they should listen to Angie, who must be the elderly minister, and that we would soon be delivered from this place to a new place, a safe place. I feel a panic start to build up in my chest. I still can’t see anything in the hole. I step off the stairs and begin groping around in the dark. I feel some large stone objects, some old wooden tables and chairs, and then my hand hits something sharp.
“Ouch!” I call out, pulling my hand back, feeling a trickle of blood on my already sweaty palm. I reach forward again, more carefully, feeling a sharp blade sticking horizontally out from the wall. I follow it to the wall, where it disappears in a depression in the cold stone. It feels somewhat loose, as if it might be pulled out of the wall, but I can’t budge it: I slice my other hand trying to.
“Damn it!” I curse, almost under my breath, as I wipe both bloody hands on my pants.
“You got to watch your tongue in a holy bloody place like this,” I hear a familiar voice say, although the sound is oddly muffled.
“Michael?” I put my ear up to the wall. “Is that you?”
Nothing, no reply. I wipe my hands again, and I feel the hard stone in pocket.
It belongs in the hilt of a very powerful blade.
I take the smooth rock from my pocket, remembering how it had shattered the apparition on the tracks. But that was just my imagination, right? I ask myself. No answer to that one either.
Placing the stone over the tip of the blade, I apply a small amount of pressure, careful not to let it slip off the tip and stab me in the hand. The blade slides backwards though the wall with a slight scraping noise, and I shove it all the way into the wall, where it clatters to the stone floor on the other side. The little rock crumbles into three or four pieces in my hand, and I toss them on the floor.
On a hunch, I put my shoulder up to the wall and push. It gives a little bit, rocking about a quarter of an inch either way. A few more shoves and grunts and the door swings back enough for me to squeeze through into a dimly lit opening beyond.
It is a tunnel, which appears to be rough hewn stone with wooden support braces every ten or fifteen feet. The faint shaft of light from behind me is bright enough to make out the silver blade on the floor, and the smashed lock on the door that it had been shoved though to keep the door closed. I try to imagine the last time the door had been shut, and find myself completely stymied. My only tangible thought is to wonder why the angel Michael, as I was starting to refer to him as, had led me down this tunnel with thousands of people. Where was I expected take them – through this tunnel?
With hunger pangs slowly creeping into my belly and blood dripping steadily down my hands and off the tips of my fingers, I stoop low to pick up the blade from the floor. Crouched down, holding it, I can see that it is a long, thin dagger. I grasp it tightly in my hand for few moments, feeling a strange connection with this aged weapon and its no-doubt violent heritage. I rise and stick the dagger in my belt, leaving blood-red hand prints on the hilt.
I slip back through the door and feel my feet crunch on the bits of broken stone. A glint of red catches my eye. Thinking that it is no more than a bloody chunk of stone, I pay it no mind. I make my way back to the steps and take one more look back for good measure, and see the red stone fragment shining more brightly now, reflecting the light from the tunnel. I walk back over and pick it up, my hand shaking with a mix of caution and reverence.
It is a large ruby and, like the dagger, I hold it my hands for a few moments, pausing in spite of the rising clatter from the top of the stairs. As I watch, it shatters into a powdery nothingness. I shake my head at the sheer wonderment of it all, wishing I had more time and energy to ponder what is really happening as I stumble through this world of artefacts and mysteries; but there isn’t any time, and I simply don’t have the energy to be in awe of it. I simply climb back up the steep stairs, trying to formulate something plausible to tell the people upstairs about the next part of our journey.
Chapter Fifteen – A Breath of Thunder
Angie
For the first time in many years, the aging minister raises her arms in a call to prayer, her eyes beseeching those seated to be quiet enough to hear her crackly voice. She waits a few moments with her arms outstretched before dropping them to her sides again while she raises her head a little, her eyes closed. She begins to speak.
“God, we ask you to hear us now, to be with us for a time, while we pause for a few minutes of quiet before we leave this place. We are running on faith now. We have seen our world turned upside down. We have questioned your very existence while ours now falls into question. We have spent our lives struggling for wealth, success, stability, power. Now we struggle even to comprehend where we are meant to go. What are we meant to do?
“Should we stay in this forsaken city? Is this the place where we are meant to stand and fall? We have gathered here in wonderment at your powers of preservation for us, and now we need those powers to help us. We need your spirit among us now, as it has ever been, as a presence to guide us forward to safety. To guide us... outward. To guide us... homeward, if we are meant to have homes again. To... reunite us with our families.
“God, we need you now. We may never have admitted that fact to ourselves before this moment, but we need you to work among us, to bring us from this place into another. As unimaginable as this tragedy is, it has become a reality. We must live with it. We must bear the burdens that our lot in life has cast to us. We are your people, God, and we will follow you outward.
“For it is us your people that must work to serve this purpose; to survive at this point seems a burden when yesterday it was an afterthought, if any thought at all. We all assumed, at least most of us did, that our lives would move straightforward on a clear path, however varied and unclear our destination may have been. We are now struggling with our purpose in your world, God. We are
struggling with our new place of sufferance where we are used to dominion – and all of its illusions.
“Our time has come. This is our time to be... your people. This is our time to be... something more... something made up of all of us... together. Together we are able to bear this crisis. Together we will not be thrown into chaos and despair, but we will rise to this new challenge.
There are those among us who understand hardship. There are those among us who understand loss, whether in a distant pass or an achingly new memory, recent formed in this crucible of difficult situations and things that we do not understand. We are only people, God. We need strength to get through this. Show us that strength that we might represent ourselves, and you, well to those that may follow after.
“God… show us the way. Amen.”
Tears stain her cheeks, and her hands shake at her sides. The silence of the crowd, standing now shoulder to shoulder on the aisles and in every available space, even those hundreds standing outside in the street, is palpable. The reverence of the moment, the uncertainty of the future, bring all eyes to center on a small, elderly woman who has a message of hope. She walks from the pulpit and down to join those in the crowd. They wait.
…
Lucia
Lucia Hadly is not inside the church. She remains at the back of the ever-growing throng of displaced people that have gathered in and around this building for... some reason. She doesn’t understand why these people are drawn to follow her brother-in-law, and she certainly doesn’t believe the reason is clear to all of those present, either. But here she is, nonetheless. The faint sound of the old woman talking inside causes everyone outside to strain their ears, and even the ever-present wind that haunts this city seems to calm itself in deference.
Lucia wonders, again, what role she might play, whether there might be something to be gained from all of this. Certainly Jonah is holding something back. He seems driven to escape this place, yet his guilt makes him linger while the crowds, no the hordes, of people slowly mobilize to a point where they will move. Jonah knows something that he is not telling anyone. Lucia knows what it is. She knows that is why she is still alive – not by any grace of God or even a lucky chance: she is alive because they have not found Jonah Truth yet.
But they will, she says to herself, inside her head. And I will show them where he is.
…
Gabriel
The angel Gabriel sits quietly from his vantage point across the street and down a little ways from the large church where some of those left behind in the city have gathered. He is on the top of a very tall building, with his feet dangling over the edge. He appears as an adolescent teenager now, his self-prescribed penance nearly served for his attempt to interfere with the way of things. It had been an effective strategy: to become as a child to see how the world operates from a different point of view. It had shown him how Jonah, a normal everyday human with human fears and failings, could become a leader of his peers.
Humans, when it comes down to it, seem rather more adaptive to their situations than angels. They seem to change so drastically from cool, unaffected robots in everyday life to strangely spiritual and reflective in times of crisis or sudden change. At least, this seems to be the pattern. Some cases made no sense whatsoever – like the lady down below who hangs back from the crowd, looking for some sort of angle to exploit, some weakness to take advantage of – especially when it comes to Jonah. Her relationship to him is not something even Gabe wishes to trifle with, no matter how appealing it may be to wipe that calm and collected expression from her face.
But Gabriel can only watch. Watch as the crowd becomes anxious after waiting for several minutes, and then eventually disappears, some back to the streets, some into the church, and as if by magic, none come out again. Not even Lucia, who takes a last look before she dips through the door. One last look at her wasted opportunities. The human heart is an easy book to read, even from a distance. Lucia does not see the soldiers as they round the corner and form perimeters around every building on the block. She does not get the satisfaction of knowing that the noose is slowing tightening around the neck of Jonah Truth. She does get to have the inadvertent privilege of seeing him set free, however. Gabe can see things like that coming a mile off.
He sits for a few more moments, watching as the soldiers encircle the baseball stadium where several thousand people have gathered together. He watches as they set off explosives that drop the whole structure upon itself and its inhabitants. The thunderous sound of destruction and falling debris cuts off the sounds of screaming and wails of terror from within, but Gabriel still feels them, albeit in his detached, angelic way; this is the path of humanity, it seems to him, for all but a few who choose to be different.
He seems to age several decades as he drops down thirty-five stories and ducks inside the church. The penance is served; his new purpose is clear, and he assumes the role he has taken on for many generations. He weaves his way through the people as they line up to walk down the stairway in the middle of a hole in the floor at the front of the church. He is not invisible, only unseen to most, as he moves through the people. A small child catches his eye and he smiles at him. No others notice his presence, just as they have ignored his presence among them most of the days of their waking lives.
Jonah is standing at the font, trying unsuccessfully to wash the blood from his hands in the water at the font. The net effect was to spill a slippery pool of bloody water on the floor whilst getting the crotch of his pants wet. Jonah scowls as Gabriel approaches.
“You know, it’s a bit of a giveaway when you age three decades in two days that you aren’t a normal human,” Jonah says, an eyebrow raised at the started looks of faces in the crowd that believe him to be talking to himself.
“You aren’t looking any younger yourself,” replies Gabriel. He pauses a few seconds. “Did you hear that explosion?”
“Yes.”
“It is good news.”
Jonah snaps his head up at Gabriel, his eyes squinted with anger. “How can that possibly be a good thing?”
“I didn’t say it was good, only that it was good news. It means your secret is safely stored in the depths of your heart,” says Gabriel. He points down at the small puddle of blood in front of Jonah, “at least it was until you started leaking all over the place.”
Jonah reaches over and tears a strip of white cloth from Gabriel’s robe. “I hope you don’t mind. Are these things clean?”
Gabriel chuckles inwardly at the brevity of the human spirit in times of trouble. “You only have a few minutes to be free of here. You need to get everyone out of the door and lock it from the other side.”
“Is that what this is for?” asks Jonah, pointing to the dagger at his side.
“Not really, but I suppose it will do, in a pinch.” Gabriel reaches out to touch the blade and a strange look passes over his face, as if remembering something from long ago, but he does not speak of it.
“Where does the tunnel end?”
Gabriel looks solemnly at Jonah, waiting for a few moments before answering. “It will end where you come out of the earth and the sky meets the ground.” Gabe reaches into his robes and pulls out a small leather bag. “I found this a while back and thought you might be in a unique position to use it. I hear they used to be native to this area.”
Jonah takes the bag offered to him, and moves to pull open the drawstring. Gabriel reaches out a hand to stop him, “Not yet! Follow me.” He leads Jonah back to the front door.
They stand together, looking out at the bright clear spring day. “Now you can open the bag, Jonah,” says Gabriel. “But make sure you are prepared for whatever might come out of there.”
Jonah turns to look at Gabriel, wondering what might be in this little bag, but when he turns his head, the white-robed figure has gone. With a start, Jonah feels warm blood from his hands start to make the leather bag slippery, the white bandages gone from his arms.
He turns the lit
tle bag in his fingers, feeling the indentations of an engraving. He sees the letters RT carved into the side of the leather. Feeling a rush of excitement, he unties the drawstring and, his fingers shaking, slips the cord from the opening of the bag. His fingers twitch a bit, and a few ounces of white powder trickle onto the sidewalk, followed by three acorns.
Without thinking, Jonah reaches down to scoop up the powder and the nuts in his hands. Before he realizes what he has done, his blood and the powder are smeared liberally over the outside of the acorns. He stops abruptly. RT. Ruben Truth. What have I done!
He looks furtively up and down the street, wondering where Gabe could have got to, or perhaps how he came to possess his brother’s prototype mixture. Minus one ingredient – until now. Jonah watches the white powder change color as it reacts with the blood and begins to hiss and fizz.
The sound of a thunderous explosion causes Jonah to rock back on his feet and lean against the frame of the church doorway. He sees an office building collapse with the force of the implosion. No people roam the streets; all are huddled away in the holes of their choosing. Jonah feels hot tears stream down his face as the memories of his brother and the guilt of his passing wash over him with the force that matches the aftershocks of the explosions. The ground shakes again as another building has its windows blasted out, but does not fall down.
With a surge of anger Jonah Truth squeezes the three acorns in his two hands together and feels the shells crack slightly under the pressure. He looks at them sitting there in his hands for a moment, three talismans, signifying both his brother’s genius and his own shortcomings. Not anymore. He pulls back and throws the three small, cracked spheres into the air as far as he can away from the church. He watches them rise up for a moment before he swirls back though the doorway of the now-empty church.