The Reckoning

by Jeff Long

  They were not ghosts.

  Molly refused to call them that. She clung to her powers of reason. Call them supernatural and she would lose all control over her rational world. It was not that she rejected the idea of ghosts. Her mother was a ghost. But you possessed them, not the other way around. Ghosts were data. They were pieces of your past. They allowed you a dialogue with yourself, and they had no reality except the reality you granted them.

  She granted them nothing. She had conjured up none of these hide-and-seek scavengers creeping through the grass below. As eerie as he was, Luke had appeared well before she had any inkling of him, or them. There could be no Blackhorse ghosts because Blackhorse did not belong to her past. She had no connection with the Eleventh Cavalry.

  And so, while these men might haunt the ruins and mimic the dead, they were real in some way. If only she could focus her mind. There had been no way to directly confront their whispering and silhouettes on her tent and their slouching through the mist, but she could dispute their unreality. They were hunting her. She was hiding from them, whoever they were. And Duncan had probably sacrificed himself to shield her. All for nothing. They were bound to find her.

  The real contest was not with them anyway, but with herself. She had no hope of defeating them. There were too many of them, and this was their territory, and she was fading fast. She couldn’t beat them, but she could make sure they didn’t beat her. Just holding on to her sanity would be a triumph.

  The line of men—looters, lunatics, or manhunters caught in a Vietnam loop—worked diagonally across the overgrown square. They moved like a patrol, spaced in a line, taking their time. They had nearly reached the far trees when the ambush caught them.

  At first, Molly couldn’t understand what was going on. It looked more like a squall striking the grasses than an attack. Some havoc burst from the trees. Limbs bent, leaves parted. Birds sprang from their perches and filled the air with their colors and cries. From three sides, furrows sliced through the green surface of grass.

  Peeking down from the edge of the tower, Molly saw shapes, degraded shapes, pieces of creatures that were even less than these pieces of men. They were human in theory. Human in outline. But in fact she couldn’t be sure she was seeing anything at all.

  They seemed to be part animal, part glass—or water—as they streamed out from the trees. They cast shadows like the shadows of fish, amorphous and distorted, muscling in the green light. She saw their weapons better than she did them, not bits and pieces of the Blackhorse arsenal, but ancient things, swords and axes scything through the grass, and they appeared to almost move of their own will, racing for the kill. The forest shapes converged on the patrol.

  The battle had no real form. It was over in seconds. The grass thrashed in a furious centrifuge of shapes. It bent and whipped and pressed flat. She heard a howl crowded with men shouting. Then the whole aspect of the violence lifted. It was as if the wind had touched down and gone on. The men, the suggestions of them, vanished.

  She didn’t move for another minute. Something had happened down there, something elemental, a microburst or a dervish. The grass lay torn and flattened in a whorl, and that howl echoed another few seconds from the forest as if a battle of spirits was swirling within the fortress walls. Then the shadows went still again. The birds returned to the trees.

  She could have descended at that point. Her pursuers were gone, or seemed to be. But where would she go? Her legs were going on her. Even if she made it back to the terminus, there was nothing left but ashes.

  On her hands and knees, Molly resumed her climb. She was terrified of losing the last of her strength out here in the open. She wanted enclosure. She wanted sanctuary. A fairy-tale tower where the bad men could not find her.

  She had to whisper her way to the top: “A little more.” She had never before felt burdened by her flesh like this.

  She reached the summit deck and peered over. The city wheeled in circles down there, a mandala of ruins and emerald grass.

  Even as she looked, her hunters reappeared. The patrol emerged from the mouth of one of the great avenues. A man’s shoulder and arm surfaced, then sank into the grass. A head appeared, scouting right and left before ducking behind a pillar. A man’s hunched back appeared.

  They were repeating themselves. Endlessly recycling. Ghosts, she thought, after all.

  43.

  The infection had spread into her wing muscles. The walls of her chest and shoulder and back were burning with strep. And yet she managed to stand and face the door.

  The blood rushed from her head. She was patient. The spinning stopped.

  The stone Amazon that had toppled from her niche was now restored to her place. Molly couldn’t even tell which of the twins had been broken. Even the doorway looked restored. The sagging lintel stood level. The red columns seemed brighter, the moss scrubbed away.

  “Duncan?” she whispered into the room. Not a whisper back.

  She stepped inside. The statue women let her pass, and the room was just as she had left it. Where she and Duncan and Kleat had peeled back the carpet of leaves, the floor still broadcast its black SOS. Brass shells littered the stones. The aperture in the roof was pouring green light onto the far wall. She was alone with the remains of the Buddhas.

  Their desecration didn’t shock her this morning. She understood now. The soldiers had seen through the cosmic smiles. The city’s tranquility was a lie. Beneath its facade, the fortress sanctuary was a deadly trap. In chewing off the Buddha faces with their gunfire, the men had been erasing a terrible deceit.

  “Duncan?” Sweat seeped down her spine. It was cold.

  Her grip slipped on the doorway. She caught her balance. She asserted it. Once down, there would be no getting up.

  She scanned the room for a friendly patch of ground. The monkey hands reached out from the fire pit. The gutted radio set stood along one wall. War junk and dank shadows crowded the corners. Animal dung plastered the boxes and cans.

  This was important stuff, the choice of her bed. It was her Kodak moment: Someday, a hundred years from now, another expedition would ascend this tower. And while they weren’t going to find any Sleeping Beauty, she could at least compose her mortal remains without monkey hands and garbage for her backdrop.

  Her eyes went to the chopped, riddled Buddhas. In and out of focus, they seemed to float in the green light, luminous and detached from the world, separate from one another, even separate from the wall. For all the savagery that had been heaped upon them, for all the bloodshed they had presided over in this spirit city, they still promised peace. Now if only some of their karma would rub off, maybe she could come back as a complete human being next go-round.

  She set off across the hall, shuffling through the bullet shells and beetles. The Buddhas retreated into their niches. Ravaged by bullets, they looked more like lepers than deities, like victims, not masters of the universe.

  Molly glanced up at the canopy. No sun, not even a single beam? It would have been so sweet to curl up on a spot of heated stone.

  She arrived at the knife in the wall.

  The knife was all wrong, a spiteful thing. Would they think she had stabbed the Buddhas? Kleat had grappled with it, and she knew the blade was jammed, but she gripped the handle anyway.

  The blade slid free.

  The wind must have moved the canopy, which had moved the trees, which had moved the stones. The joints had opened. The knife practically fell from the seam. The weight of it, all eight ounces, yanked her arm down. It dropped from her fingers.

  She stared dumbly at the thing lying at her feet. The blade was scratched and mottled, a name engraved above the blood gutter. With the next storm, the stones would have shifted again and bound the knife. She’d happened along at the right moment, that was all.

  A string of saliva dangled from her mouth. Lovely. In a stupor, she lifted her eyes.

  “God,” she whispered, and lurched backward.

  The statues were chang
ing.

  Their pox of bullet holes was smoothing over. The Buddhas were regaining their stone flesh.

  It had to be a trick of the light. Clouds were crossing above the canopy. Whales passing through the deep.

  She closed her eyes and staggered, fetching up against the wall. Now was not the time to be seeing things. Her mother had died from hallucinations. And yet she could feel the wall against her palms and cheek, and the cool, gutted surface really was mending itself.

  She pushed away from the wall.

  Molly had spent a lifetime learning the rules. They allowed for yetis and unicorns, so long as you winked. They allowed for lost cities to float out like dust bunnies. You could hold heaven as a hope. But the rules did not allow for this.

  The wall—the entire length of stone and statues—was healing. The bullet tracks dissolved. Thirteen smiles glimmered into being, so many Cheshire cats paying a visit. Faces formed around the smiles.

  A vine tripped her. She might have blacked out. She smiled up at the fever dream. The metamorphosis streamed on.

  At the far end of the wall, where the facade had been blasted, rubble began to reassemble. Lying there, Molly could not find words to describe it. Pieces of stone did not fly through the air and into place. Somehow the wall drew the destruction back into time.

  She went with it, a pleasant delirium. As fissures sealed and lead slugs pattered to the floor like hailstones and the leprous figures became beautiful again, she forgot her pain and exhaustion. She all but vanished from her own mind.

  Consciousness came and went.

  Perhaps the wall had never been destroyed. Perhaps she had imagined it. Or again, that wondrous thought, maybe the ruins had imagined her. If the stones could command a people to shape them into a city, if the city were nothing more than an instrument for monsoon songs, why couldn’t she be that little girl carved among all the other stories? What else was humankind—all life—but a figment of a stone spinning through time?

  Her eyes opened. The wall was whole again. The war was gone. It had never been. How righteous, she thought. How stoned-out cosmic cool.

  She rolled onto her back, a change of view. Parrots flickered overhead like bits of flame. A gecko eased in along the skylight. A few monkeys perched along the rim. Like this, in unconditional surrender, her mother must have watched the snow descend.

  44.

  The afternoon thunder arrived. It came up from the earth, not down from the sky. It was still too far away to hear. The vibrations buzzed against her skull. She remembered sitting in a restaurant along a river long ago and how the sunset had trembled. Let it rain, she thought. Come what may. She was finding her happy zone.

  But then she saw the soldier. He was sitting at the far end of the wall where the rubble had cleared itself away. Thirty years ago someone had buried him violently, with plastic explosives. Now he was bared to the world.

  His legs and boots were crushed flat. The rest of his skeleton rested precariously upright. It must have been hot the day he died. He had no shirt. But like Kleat, expecting trouble, he wore a flak jacket.

  She knew him, or at least of him, not his name or his face, but his legend. The fragments of the journal had spoken of him. He was their commander. Here was the man who had gotten them lost and found them sanctuary, and doomed them by preserving them among the ruins. This was the tower of his tomb.

  She dragged herself closer, a creature of her curiosity.

  Their discoverers would link them, a man and a woman, a soldier and a civilian, two Americans caught in a faraway land. Never mind that she was as old as he was dead. Details. The story was too good. They were as good as married, a Romeo and Juliet for the ages.

  The rubble had flattened his left hand in his lap. It looked like some complicated fossil. He wore a wedding band.

  His skull leaned on his chest as if he were in mid-siesta. His sole wound, it seemed, was a crease along the temporal bone. The bullet had not pierced his skull. It might only have stunned him, in which case he’d been buried alive.

  Molly touched nothing. The skeleton looked like a house of cards ready to fall. She lay beside him, resting her head, hunting for clues.

  This was not another of their suicides. For one thing, there were more certain ways to put a bullet into yourself, and the bone was not scorched or powder burned. Also there was no weapon lying close at hand. And again, the bullet did not seem to have been a killing shot. Someone had shot him, and then buried him. Her eyes wandered higher. All in front of the Buddhas.

  How had it gone?

  He had caught them in the act of savaging the statues and gotten between their weapons and the wall. The journal fragments whispered to her. It’s not true he loved the city more than us. He was only trying to preserve us all. They had looted the city, or part of it, planting that terra-cotta head on their exhaust pipe. Had he tried to protect the Buddhas? Had someone kept on firing?

  There was just one wound that she could see. She couldn’t find any bullet holes or bloodstains on the flattened fatigues or the flak jacket. Just the single shot along his head. Just one shooter.

  Had it been an accident or an execution? Had they tried to revive him, or panicked and given him up for dead? No matter. They had blasted this section of the wall and hidden their deed under a ton of debris. That much was no accident. Someone had deliberately tried to conceal the evidence. The body, living or dead, damned them. And so they had shut it from sight.

  The journal spoke of one man whipping up the mutiny. But once the commander was killed, the rebels had realized their fall from grace. At least the journal writer had expressed repentance.

  The story took shape, a murder. The soldiers had driven the shooter from their midst…like Cain, the killer of his brother. He was the same man who had led them in mutiny. Molly knew it. The murder had shocked the rebels from their rebellion. They had scattered after the killing. The mutiny had dispersed.

  The shooter had set off on foot, west of Eden. Did that mean he’d fled toward Phnom Penh or gone out the western entry, or was it simply the writer carrying through his biblical strand? No matter. Somewhere out there the killer had met his end. The rest of the Blackhorse men had stayed in the city, languishing, divided, hungry and diseased, drifting into madness, and, like her, too weak to leave, dying in animal niches among the ruins.

  End of story. Everyone, it seemed, had paid for the sin. In a way, the commander was lucky. Of all the bones she’d seen in the city, his had come the closest to a permanent burial.

  But the knife still bothered her. It could have been their way of marking the grave, but why mark a grave you wanted no one to find? No, she thought. Someone had added it to the wall as a finishing touch, after the shooting, after the killing, probably after the blast, a final piece of rage.

  It was the shooter’s knife. Molly knew it instinctively. He had stabbed the wall.

  Thunder rippled far away. A breeze stirred the canopy.

  She clutched her cold, fiery self.

  “Now what?” she whispered to the bones.

  It didn’t seem right. They’d brought her here. Her. Luke had said so. But all this way for what? This was just another dead soldier from a dead war. Vietnam had nothing to do with her. She had a life. For a little while longer.

  The trees moved. The floor shivered, or she did. It was like a dock that seems to move because the water is moving. The big river was waiting.

  “Not yet,” she said. Where’s my circle? She deserved that much. A bit more beta. Some raw connect. Her missing link.

  The tremors upset the careful construct of his bones. With the clatter of sticks and empty spools, the soldier spilled to pieces. The skull landed facing her, mouth parted, his jaw still wired in place with tendons. Weighted with vertebrae and ribs, the flak jacket tumbled into her hands. It was a simple matter to pluck the dog tag from inside.

  The name was perfectly legible.

  She should have known.

  “ ‘O’Brian,’ ” she rea
d aloud to him, “ ‘Duncan A.’ ”

  The jaw stayed frozen, half open, caught in the act.

  There was his date of birth. She made the calculation. He’d been shot on his birthday, or shortly after, twenty-one years old. She’d fallen for a younger man.

  Molly cocked her head to see the skull.

  His features emerged clearly now. It was almost like lying with him in her tent, watching his young face while he slept. There was his thick brow and his thin cheekbones, and the white teeth he’d brushed so religiously. She purged from her mind the poor creature dwindling in the rain last night, losing his long hair in her fingers, that phantom crumbling beneath her doubts. She closed her eyes and saw Duncan at dawn in the blue-green light.

  Had he suspected his flesh encased a ghost? She recalled his briefcase full of tidbits and his confusion when she’d confronted him. And his odd reluctance to follow Luke to these ruins.

  It wasn’t that he’d tried to fool anyone. Duncan had been as truthful as he could remember, in fragments, with an Ace comb in his pocket, just a spirit borrowing himself together, the same as Luke and all the rest.

  When had he escaped from the ruins? Obviously, Luke had been sent to fetch his restless brother back to the source, back to the underworld. But why bring her?

  She had daydreamed about taking Duncan home with her. Over these last few days, that seemed to be what she was meant to do, to usher him back into America. But he’d turned the tables on her, not knowing himself. He’d brought her home with him.

  More chills, more salty sweat. Her eyes rolled back in her head. Darkness threatened. Molly fought back to consciousness.

  What were the laws of this place? The rain would purify them. Her bones would mingle with his. But then?