by Mark Teppo
I saw the lit arc of the bridge beyond the roof of a low building and I dashed down the nearby alley. A parking lot lay on the other side, adjacent to the Hawthorne Bridge onramp. My heartbeat hammering in the base of my skull, I fled across the empty lot to the bridge.
The sound of knives was too close behind me. A car, weaving erratically as it came off the bridge, swerved to miss me, and I heard it smash into the metal framework of the bridge. If the passengers in the car survived the impact with the railing, they didn't have a chance to scream before the wave swept over them.
The shrieking panic of the Chorus reached a fever pitch, a palpable terror making my teeth ache. This was real death for them. A permanent dissolution they had cheated by remaining in my head. The rising noise of their panic told me that I wasn't safe, that the Key was on the bridge with me. Still harvesting, still sucking up souls.
I wasn't going to make the other side. It was coming too fast. This conscious realization sent the Chorus into a paroxysm of utter desperation. I stumbled, my legs suddenly numb as they tried to usurp control.
Where are you going to go? I looked back. The darkness behind me was total nothingness. Terra autem erat inanis et vacua. In a few seconds I would be enveloped by the wave as it swept over me and the rest of the bridge. I could see its leading edge riding the surface of the river below.
Riding the surface. I suddenly remembered the lake from my dream, how the surface of the water defiantly split two worlds. Above was not as below-a state contrary to the alchemical axiom.
What do you See? What do you know? What do you believe?
Questions without answers. Questions of faith. Let none henceforth seek needless cause to approve the faith they owe.
I angled for the pedestrian walkway that ran along the edge of the bridge. The railing separating the walkway from the road was only waist-high and I cleared it easily. The river-side railing was a bit higher and I went over it without any thought to form. I cleared it as fast as I could.
White-noise screaming filled my head as the Chorus felt the edge of darkness touch my falling body. They sparked and frayed as the curtain of soul-death swept over me.
I plunged headfirst into the cold water. Behind me, absolute night-bereft of stars, of light-covered the river. But it didn't reach beneath the surface. I dove deep until my strength failed. My strength, but not my faith. Then I closed my eyes, and let the hurt that must be sustained fill me.
John, I'm sorry. It wasn't your fortune you read.
I'm sorry I wasn't stronger.
The river, old lover, cold mother, took me away, her liquid hands trying to soothe my pain.
XXVIII
THE FIFTH WORK
"For no one of the gods in heaven shall come down to the earth, o'er-stepping heaven's limit; whereas man doth mount up to heaven and measure it; he knows what things of it are high, what things are low, and learns precisely all things else besides. And greater thing than all; without e'en quitting earth, he doth ascend above. So vast a sweep doth he possess of ecstasy. For this cause can a man dare say that man on earth is god subject to death, while god in heaven is man from death immune."
— Hermes Trismegistus, The Corpus Hermeticum
I dreamt of bees, honey bees circling enormous flowers. The stalks were thick with strange veins, and I could see the rhythmic pulse of these ropy conduits. The heads of the flowers were voluptuous circles of curling white petals with tender pink centers. Pulsating cores of limpid light that blinked a seductive pattern, a Morse signal read by the bees.
I lay on my back, cradled in a bower of thick grass, and I watched a fat bee with yellow sigils inscribed on its thorax fly past. Its face was pink instead of black, a tiny human mask fitted over its insectoid visage. Nicols' face, smooth like a plastic mold, like a cheap mask that captured shape but not personality. The human-faced bee buzzed in tempo with the flickering heart of a nearby flower, and as it approached, the white petals curled, encouraging it closer.
The Nicols bee kissed the pink center and the flower convulsed, its petals whipping inward. A pink creature broke through the dome of the flower's face, and its long pink proboscis struck the bee in the center of its plasticine forehead. Pink tendrils connected the ibis-hound with the flower and, as the tiny soul-sucker drew out the essence of the bee, these tendrils strained and pulsed with the vacuuming rhythm of the ibis-hound.
I fled the dream, fled the field of soul-devouring flowers, but the bee's buzzing panic followed me. The sound increased in volume as I fled through flickering spaces of stereographic visions. The sound became Nicols' death scream, a wordless cry of human frailty. It was the sound of abandonment, of fearful darkness, of failure. It resonated in my head, growing louder, even as I ran further and further from the field of hungry flowers. The echo of his voice grew stronger, becoming not one voice but the sound of a thousand throats shrieking, of flesh sizzling, of knives ringing off metal. Of a city's light dying.
I woke to the sensation of her wet kiss fading from my lips.
The sky overhead was gray and dead, like flesh that had been submerged too long in stagnant water. My back was cold and wet; the tips of my fingers numb. The scream was still in my head, a cry struggling to find voice in my throat.
My lips were warm, though; her breath was caught in my mouth. A hot taste on my tongue, bitter with a leached sourness. Tears.
Devorah.
She held a sharp edge against my neck. Bloody tears dripped from her eyes and her green irises were overwhelmed with swirling patterns of black and gold. "Lest with a whip of scorpions I pursue thy lingering," Devorah said. "Or with one stroke of this dart strange horrors seize thee, and pangs unfelt before." She knelt beside my body, knees pressed against my rib cage, My right arm was flung out straight past her body. Her right hand held the blade against my throat and her left held my head back. Easier to cut my throat. "For proof look up, and read thy lot in yon celestial sign; where thou art weighed, and shown how light, how weak, if thou resist."
I swallowed, feeling the thin edge against my windpipe. The Chorus cowered in the deepness of my core, their rank broken by the wave of soul-death that had touched them. The screaming echo of the city reverberated in their silver strands. "What do you seek from me, Oracle?" My voice bubbled through a film of river water still in my esophagus.
"Be not diffident of Wisdom," she said. Her mouth worked hard on the words. The prescient vision I had brought upon her still burned her blood. "She deserts thee not, if thou dismiss not her, when most thou needest her nigh."
Wisdom. The bounty realized by the soul as it climbed toward its release from the flesh, as it reached for enlightenment. Devorah had been guided by her burning sight to save me from the river, but only to hold my life in her hands. After what I had done to her, was I worthy of being saved? What price was her innocence?
"Ask," I croaked. I could smell the river nearby, the damp of dead water, and, distantly, a scent of burned wood. Not fire, but soot, as if the flames had long gone out. I wanted to turn my head and look at the city, but I knew if I looked away from Devorah's face, she'd cut my throat.
"See, with what heat these dogs of hell advance to waste and havoc yonder world," she said. "Which I so fair and good created; and had still kept in that state, had not the folly of Man let in these wasteful furies." Each drop that welled from the corners of her eyes was an unconscious reaction to her Vision, to the sorrow I had brought upon her. Each drop was a little more of her life leaking away, forced out of her body by the passion of her Sight. Each drop was my responsibility. Who was I to force such sacrifice upon her? "Who art to lead thy offspring, and supposest that bodies bright and greater should not serve the less not bright?"
The rule of the mighty was not to serve their own desires, but to assist in the enlightenment of the rest. Plato's philosopher kings. Alfred the Great who drove the Danes out of England and spent the twilight of his rule attempting to educate his subjects. Solomon, devoting his wisdom so that his peopl
e could understand peace.
I remembered Nicols' crown card: the Hanged Man. The suspended magus who waits to have his vision realized, who waits to fulfill himself. The Fisher King who cannot save his kingdom until his wound is recognized.
Kether-the first Sphere of the Sephiroth-was the Crown. The ultimate goal of the seeker of enlightenment. Lights go up; lights go out. It is always to the crown they go. The Wheel grinds the kings down; the Wheel lifts them up.
"Ask," I said again, feeling the open emptiness of my void, that center that I had allowed to be filled with poison and anger, that I had looked inside as I had fallen in the river and found myself hiding there. Nicols had only asked one thing of me. One tiny thing. A decision I had been forced to make in the woods when he had put the gun to his head. A moment of divergence, paths to be chosen. One or the other. Like the dark wood where I had been born into the occult world. A moment of choice. A tiny thing. This final, fatal choice.
What do you believe?
"Ask," I said a third time, binding myself to this moment. "Query me your riddle, Oracle. Show me the way to the crown." Kether. The eye of God. After everything, the Way was not closed.
Nothing is ever lost.
"Last, with one midnight stroke, all the first-born of Egypt must lie dead," she said. "And shall grace not find means, that finds her way?" I realized it wasn't a knife she held against my throat. Just as I had slit her palm with a symbolic representation of her, she was threatening me with a similar psychic symbol. She held a tarot card to my throat. The answer to her riddle was the identity of that card.
Piotr's reading came back to me, the cards floating in my mind against the churning backdrop of the dream I had had later that night about the reading. Kat and I-the Prince and Queen of water, locked in our embrace-the wheel beneath us with the shrouded and masked body. I understood its mask now, understood it was meant as my death mask. My innocence hidden away beneath a mirror.
Bernard was the satyr cherub with the engorged phallus. The flesh rod was an expression of his priapic quest for knowledge, and his persistent efforts to fuck the world were an attempt to make it climax and give up its secrets. Above us had been the rain of swords, nine blades reaching down from Heaven to prick our flesh. Below, the wheel of five wands surmounted by the empty faces of the unborn. They were opposites, the routes a magus takes in his quest for the top of the Tree-the paths of Severity and Mercy.
Had not the folly of Man let in these wasteful furies? We thought we could Create, that we were wise enough to make changes to the course laid down by God. We thought we could change the world as if that was sufficient apology for failing to change ourselves. Who among us was wise enough to think themselves not beholden to the rest of mankind? Was not murder of another but a murder of self? Was the Qliphotic darkness that had claimed me for so long nothing but my own fear of the unknown?
Where was my faith?
And shall grace not find means, that finds her way?
There were two paths: the path of Severity and the path of Mercy. I was on the threshold, caught on the cusp of nightmare and daybreak. At the edge of the wood, there were two paths. I had failed to stop Bernard and Julian from their unholy experiment, but in that failure was there also not an effort to save someone other than myself?
Was the hole of Daath-the entire lost wasteland of the Tree's Qliphotic darkness-nothing more than a selfish mistake, a failure of Ego?
For proof look up, and read thy lot in yon celestial sign; where thou art weighed, and shown how light, how weak, if thou resist.
"The Moon," I said. "You're holding the Moon."
Devorah released her hold on my hair and sat back on her heels, lifting the card away from my throat. She held it in front of my face. Two pillars on the shores of a river that cut through the center of the card-separating the world. A pale crab, imperfectly drawn as if it were but a half-dream, crawled in the mud at the bottom of the river. Two jackal creatures-one on either shore-howled at the pregnant moon that hung low in the sky. This was the Moon, the deranged madness that came over the intelligence during the darkness when the sun was dead and rolling beneath the world. It was the card that came after the Star, and it was the gateway to resurrection-the Sun and the new Aeon.
She dropped the card on my chest as she stood. She had been between me and Portland, and her motion was permission to look. I put my hand over the card, holding it to my body, as I turned my head and bore witness to what had been done to the city.
It was a black landscape. I had been pulled from the river near the railway switching yard, a shallow bank bereft of any impediments. From where I lay, I could see the broken arches of three bridges-shattered fingers reaching across the stained river. The destruction-the absolute and empty darkness, autem erat inanis et vacua-stretched up the wooden hill to the west of downtown and across the river through the dense suburbs close to the freeway. More than a mile away, and still at the edge of the devastation.
A single spire rose from that bleak ruin, crowned by a flickering ball of pale fire. In the bowl of the metropolis that had been Portland, the only movement was the collapsed light of the thousands of souls that had been taken by Bernard's theurgic mirror.
The harvest was done. All that remained was the fixed point of the souls, the single light in darkness. The tower was the axis mundi and the pale light at its tip the signal fire that called out to God. "He isn't finished."
"No." A male voice intruded. Decrepit, it trembled with effort, but it was still a voice I knew. "Not quite."
Standing at the top of the embankment to my left were Pender and another man, a wizened figure wrapped in a brown trench coat.
Antoine.
XXIX
Antoine held tight to Pender's arm as they picked their way down the incline. His skull peeked through patches of still-raw flesh, and most of his lower jawbone was visible as were his teeth. His hair was gone, and his left hand was a claw of bone with scattered flaps of healing skin. The silver stub ending his right arm was a heavy knob. Only his eyes showed any clarity-bright lamps in his scarred face.
Pender wore a smug expression, a grin he couldn't quite suppress. Glee of a nearly realized plan, fruition of a torturous campaign. I wanted nothing more than to beat his teeth out of his head. Tear that fucking smile off his face.
The anger gave me enough clarity to stand, to ignore the vociferous dissent raised by every muscle and tendon in my frame as I moved. "How many?" The words burned in my throat. "How many did he kill?"
Pender sucked a breath through his teeth. "Hard to say. It's been a couple of years since the last census. And," nodding toward the darkness of the city, "it seems to have fallen short of its-"
"How many?" I shouted
Pender shrugged. "Fifty thousand, maybe. Give or take a few."
My knees buckled. Behind me, Devorah whimpered like a small kitten trapped beneath the paws of a large predator. Give or take a few thousand.
"Was this the result you sought, Protector?" I spat Antoine's title.
Antoine laughed, a dry sound like twigs breaking.
Pender didn't like the possibility signified by that sound, the possibility that the Hollow Men's clever subterfuge against the Watchers hadn't been as clandestine as they had thought. The players had been played by their own self-inflated cleverness. Uncertainty flickered in his eyes, and he unconsciously took a step away from Antoine.
Devorah spoke from behind me. "Therefore to me their doom he had assigned; that they may have their wish, to try with me in battle which the stronger proves, they all, or I alone against them."
Antoine gave the young woman a hard stare. "Is that Milton?" he rasped. A shudder ran through his frame. "Rhapsodomancy. You forced a librarian to See for you?"
"I needed guidance. You weren't offering anything but semantic games."
"Speak ye who best can tell, ye sons of light," Devorah said. "If better thou belong not to the dawn, sure pledge of day, that crownst the smiling Morn with thy brigh
t circlet, praise him in thy sphere when day arises, that sweet hour of prime."
I nodded, understanding the reason why Antoine and Pender were here at the river's edge. "He's waiting for dawn. You're all waiting for sunrise."
Devorah spoke again, validating my conclusion. "Till morn, waked by the circling hours, with rosy hand unbarred the gates of light."
The world was made anew at dawn. All souls-all light-comes from the sun. A student didn't have to trawl very far in any religion to find that reference. The sun was-like the Creator-the representation of God. This was the light that gave flesh life. It burned the eyes when, as supplicants, we stared at its fiery glow. Every morning as it was reborn in the eastern sky, it reminded us of Immortality, of the eternal cycle of rebirth and resurrection.
Everything is transformed in the presence of the reborn sun. All cycles have an end and a new beginning. The Wheel turns. We fall down; we rise up.
Antoine offered me his own interpretation of Milton. "Evil is done in order to transcend it, Markham. We pay dearly for our knowledge of Good."
"A lot of people died tonight." My voice was raw, torn by the memory of who had fallen. Who had died, trying to stop the experiment. "What's the 'Good' in that? Their souls have been harvested for their energy. Their lives are over. Milton wasn't talking about mass murder as a means to an end. He was talking about a fucking tree, a fucking symbol. He didn't mean that we had to bloody our hands just to understand humility and humanity."
"They lived lives of fear," Pender said, his ideological viewpoint finally having a chance to express itself. "They would never know ascension. They would never understand the beauty of their light. Why shouldn't they be allowed to give of themselves for a purer purpose?"
"You didn't fucking ask them!"
"Is it just a matter of choice, then?" Pender asked. "Is that the difference? If you had asked them if they wanted to See God and they had all said yes, would we have the right to intercede and stop them? Could we have any care other than to Witness their attempt?"