by James Kahn
A fetid smell accumulated. Musky, overripe. Not of death, but of death’s wake. It blew away, into the trees.
A sustained note, mono tonal, deep: mmmmmmm-mmmmmm … It caught the resonance of the Forest, of earth, the stone, the brain. It opened eyes.
Jasmine sat in the garden facing the feathered snake.
“What is this place?” she asked.
“It is you,” said the snake.
She shook her head. “Only my losses. Only my fears.”
“The night is yet young. There is still much time for triumphs.”
Her face wilted. “I’ve lost so much time.”
“Time is never lost,” hissed the serpent. “It ends, it begins again. The past is part of the future. They are one.” The snake took his tail in his mouth.
“Other things, I’ve lost. Loves, I’ve lost forever. They are dead now, or I’m dead to them. Worlds, I’ve lost, they will never come back, and opportunities lost, and moments, and feelings, and innocence … and my humanness. Something left me when I made the change to … what I am now. But what am I?”
“A woman of many parts.”
“Many spare parts,” Jasmine whispered hoarsely.
“Parts make a whole.”
“A whole what?”
“Only you can know.”
“I know nothing,” she shook her head.
“Ask the stars,” rasped the feathery snake.
She looked at the sky. Past the tip of the skyscraper, she looked for Venus, the love-star, once more. It wasn’t there. In its place brooded Sinus, the dog-star.
“I don’t understand,” Jasmine complained. “Sinus shouldn’t be there yet. What happened to the evening star?”
“It’s been a long night,” nodded the serpent.
But Jasmine didn’t understand. She held her head, tried to keep it from getting any bigger. She felt locked in a tune lapse, and no way out but in.
The air congealed. Motion ceased. Time was the distance between matters. Matter was revealed as energy; no more. No matter: matter was no more. And no more time for the matter.
A pure, low, demented cry tore the fabric of the night. A blind, inhuman sound, terrible and brief. A windowpane broke. In the turquoise pool, the water froze over for a moment, then melted again. From the topmost branches, leaves fell.
Riders in black leather masks galloped up, dismounted. Joshua backstepped, but was stopped by the wall.
“This is the Scribe,” growled a masked man. He hit Josh across the face. The second one wrote Joshua’s name on a piece of paper, then set fire to it. The paper turned brown, then black around the letters. The words became lost in flame. The mask-men rode off.
Joshua lay, dazed, on the ground. Slowly he found himself getting sleepy. His eyes blurred, he lay still. Fireflies began to settle on him, another inanimate life form to illuminate. He closed his eyes.
The blackening void, the soft sucking wind, the distant light, magnetic light. Only not so distant now. Much closer now, a brilliant pulsing ball, pulling him, pulling him in, like a great white hoe, pulling, pulling.
The pressure dropped, a wind came up. Autumn weather. The sky turned pale.
Beauty approached Jasmine in the garden. She turned to face him. Long slow communion. They fastened gazes, connected raw ends; and somehow bled into each other. Miraculously, as the Centaur looked into the Neuroman’s eye, he saw his image reappear there: he was no longer invisible.
In the shadow of his golden beard, she saw her lost soul: nestled, hiding. Tenderly, she touched it, recaptured it; held it. She felt a great, woeful joy.
A tear welled in her lower lid, and he saw his reflection shimmer. She held out her hand: their hands fused. Their spirits melded, they became one spirit. They made love.
Josh awoke by the turquoise pool. Jasmine and Beauty sat before him.
“Are you all right?” asked Jasmine. “You were screaming and running. We were worried.”
Something about them was different, Josh felt it immediately. Something they exuded. Solace.
“My spells,” he said groggily. “The blackness, and then the light…”
A tall man suddenly appeared before them. He had two faces, one staring out either side of his head, eyes that glowed green, a voice like an echo. “I am Janus,” he bowed. “I am the Priest of Time.” Both mouths spoke at once.
Jasmine’s head felt clear for the first time that night. “Where are we?” she asked the Priest.
“You are in the time-less place,” he smiled. “There is no motion here, no forward and backward. Only the Time-less center.” He raised a hand-mirror to the face directed away from the travelers, and they saw it was a skull.
Jasmine felt some kinship with this strange being. There was recognition. “You’re a Neuroman, aren’t you?”
His two mouths smiled inscrutably. “In this life, it is my pleasure to manifest that particular energy.”
“Then tell me, fellow Neuroman, is there a way to leave this place?”
“You are already on your way,” he assured her. “You and your four-footed friend. You have become grounded, and you will once again flow down the river.”
“What river, what are you talking about?” She suddenly found herself cross. She didn’t like the Priest’s implication-by-exclusion that Josh was not free to leave; she didn’t like the way he talked in metaphors; she didn’t like realizing she hadn’t been in full control of her faculties all night.
The mysterious Neuroman closed his four eyes.
“Time, do you see, is a river, flowing from the mountains down to the sea. It twists and turns, it goes faster and slower, it backtracks on itself, it even goes uphill now and then. It has undercurrents and undertows. It finds natural dams, where it sits still and deep, and then overflows, and rushes down in gushes and waterfalls. It has eddies, and whirlpools and backwaters, and shallows and fathoms. There are tidepools, tributaries, watersheds, dropoffs.
“Sometimes it even freezes over.
“There’s a source, and a delta, and there’s the sea. And all along the course of the river, the water is evaporating, and that’s part of time, too. The vapor of time, it rises and floats, and finally condenses and rains down into the mountains, into the river again, and starts its flow all over. Only this time the flow is just a little different. It’s the same river, do you see, but now perhaps it changes course a bit here from the spring rains, or here it overflows its banks, or there a fallen tree has made a new dam.” He smiled enigmatically.
Jasmine suddenly knew she’d been drugged. The mushrooms by the stream, probably; hallucinogenic. She was coming down; but feeling shaky.
“So if we’re already on our way, as you put it, what are we still doing here?” She strained to keep the edge off her voice.
“Here abide the vapors of time. The river crashes, and sprays a million droplets. Some float here forever. You two, you and the Centaur, have coalesced, and the gravity of your union has pulled you back into the river. Grounded you. If you check closely, I think you’ll find yourself already bobbing right along again in your time-directed current.”
She felt something, all right—crashing after a very strange magic mushroom trip. She could see Beauty was aware of the change, as well—self-aware—and briefly they made eye contact, reassuring, validating.
Janus went on. “Your Human friend here, on the other hand, is still lost in the vapors. He may rain down one day, back to the river; but here in the vapor, there is no time, and when he finally does find ground, you may well be out to sea. Still, there is no cause for concern: the river is One.”
“I dislike enigmas.”
“Enigma is inner beauty,” smiled Janus, “and like surface beauty, resides solely in the eye of its beholder.”
“Stop being so coy,” Jasmine snapped. “We’re leaving, now. With Joshua.”
“Coyness is our prerogative in this universe—here there is world enough, and time, for all things.”
He bowed slightly. He
walked away.
Jasmine helped Josh to stand. “Can you walk?” she asked.
He held his head. “I’m getting so sleepy again …” he mumbled. “And my head …” He pulled at his hair. When Jasmine tried to comfort nun, he pushed her away. She looked at Beauty fearfully.
“Joshua …” began the Centaur, but got no further. Josh suddenly broke free and started running, wild-eyed, toward the cave that had first led them into the city.
Jasmine and Beauty set off in pursuit. Into the cave mouth, up the dark stream, around winding caverns; finally through the waterfall that curtained the original portal, out into the jungle, just as the sun began its morning blaze.
Josh leapt from the river and was quickly lost in the trees.
Jasmine and Beauty stayed close on his trail, deliberate, urgent. Beauty noted the look in the Neuro-man’s face. “This worries you,” he said, continuing to follow the leaf-torn path.
“Yes,” she said simply.
“What are your thoughts?” he prodded. He, too, was concerned—with his friend’s bizarre behavior, with memories of the previous night, with an increasingly cold Vampire trail.
“I think we were drugged last night—probably those mushrooms where we drank at the river bank. Maybe the poppies, too. I’m not certain anything we saw in there was real. I think maybe Josh is having what we used to call a bad trip. If not…” she paused, tearing a branch out of her way, “he may have something wrong in his brain.”
“His brain …”
“It’s possible,” she postulated. “He was having some of these symptoms before last night—grogginess, blackout spells, strange lights. Now he’s holding his head and acting berserk. Yes, it worries me deeply. It could be a tumor, a blood clot, a—”
“We cannot let this happen to him!” Beauty clapped a hand on Jasmine’s shoulder, stopping her. “He—I—love him.” He focused hard on her face, trying to make her understand.
She understood fully. She put her hand on his, answered his gaze. “And I, you.”
His heart jumped. He’d been trying to ignore this particular segment of the previous night, bury it soundly under the morass of Shoulds and Shouldn’ts in his life. This confrontation now with the intentionally dim memory made him sweat in the morning drizzle. “I—I—” he stuttered, “we—all did some—felt some strange things last night. You say yourself it may have been drugs. I think we—”
“You once told me,” she stopped him, “I could not convince you with words of something which you knew to be false by feeling or experience. I could say the same now. Some things don’t change when the morning rises, Centaur.”
He squeezed her hand, but was too confused to answer. She turned, and they resumed the hunt.
The jungle was getting thicker, and since Josh was the one cutting the path, his progress was slower than the others’. Before too long, they were able to hear his breathing in the near distance. This went on for ten more minutes, when suddenly, the crashing and panting from up ahead ceased entirely. With a surge, Beauty and Jasmine forged on, until they broke, falling into a wide open space.
Josh sat on the ground before them, looking dazed. “Where am I?” he beseeched them.
They sat either side of him. “You’re all right now. You’re with us. Tell us what happened.”
He knitted his brows. “One of my spells again.” He strained to recapture it. “They’re coming more often, aren’t they? I got so sleepy, I couldn’t keep my eyes open, and then it was all black. And then the light. But bigger this time. It was huge this time, and strange, like a magnetic star. It pulled me so hard, it just dragged me off my feet, like it was sucking me through the air, right into it. Only I didn’t quite get to it. And then I woke up.” He looked up. “Hello.”
Beauty’s forehead finally relaxed its knot. “Hello,” he said emphatically.
They helped Josh to his feet. “Any headaches?” Jasmine asked.
“Only a loud sort of wind inside my head, a kind of energy or something …”
They all paused momentarily, looked each to each, breathed a collective sigh: another crisis weathered. They felt stronger, closer. Older.
Jasmine smiled. “We’re becoming survivors with each other.”
They walked westward slowly for a short while, after that, each lost in thoughts of the previous night. It was in a lichen-filled glen that Beauty stopped them all with a shout, and pointed sternly ahead. The others followed his finger to the brush at the edge of the clearing. Lying there was a dead Vampire.
The remains of one, anyway. Almost entirely decomposed, there was not much left besides a contorted skeleton, bits of skin, skewed claws. Its jaw was fixed in a hideous grin.
“Odd,” mused Jasmine.
“Why odd?” asked Josh.
“Well, the way it’s lying, there was obviously a fight. Not many things besides an Accident can kill a Vampire, their skin’s too tough. And an Accident would’ve torn it apart more than this.”
“No weapons around, either,” commented Josh. “Wonder when it happened.”
“Few months ago, I’d guess, by the state of the decay. The skin takes forever to go …”
They were alerted once again by a sound from Beauty; and walked over to the rock he was standing behind. There, on the ground, were the bones of a dead Human. Skin and flesh were completely eaten away by jungle, but a few tattered clothes still remained draping the skeleton.
“That jacket,” Beauty spoke haltingly. “It is Rose’s.”
“Are you sure?” asked Josh, but he was certain Beauty was right. He remembered Rose wearing the tunic the last time he’d seen her, on the farm in Monterey. A tightness filled his throat, a darkness his mind. Was this to be the end, then? Shriveled remains, halfway to nowhere?
“It’s not possible,” Jasmine shook her head. “Yesterday we were no more than a day behind them. This body’s been here at least three months, probably more. Maybe Rose left her jacket on this skeleton, to warn us of something.”
They considered this. Beauty said,. “But even the jacket appears so worn …”
“Did Rose have any bone wounds?” Jasmine pursued. “Any bullets, or …”
“Her left arm was broken three months ago,” Beauty answered.
“Well, here then, see? This arm is fresh as a baby’s, hasn’t ever been a fracture in it. And this hair lying around the skull, it’s blond. Didn’t you tell me Rose had dark hair? See? It’s not Rose at all.”
Beauty was reassured, but still confused. He brought his hand up to stroke his beard, and stopped short. “Look at this,” he said somberly.
They all looked at his hand. The nails were an inch long. “I cut these nails yesterday, when they were getting caught in the vines.” The others acknowledged the recollection. Josh held up his hands: the fingernails were equally lengthy.
And then suddenly Jasmine flashed on something that had happened the night before, one of the million insane episodes. She’d been looking at Venus high in the sky, right where it belonged on a clear spring night; and then when she looked again later, Venus was gone, and Sirius was in its place: a late summer star. Spring to summer in half a night.
“It wasn’t just one night,” she whispered in amazement.
“What?” Josh tried to understand.
“Last night. It was months long. That’s why your fingernails are grown out. And these corpses, they were part of the group we were tracking. Rose probably gave her coat to this dead Human. As for the Vampire … who knows?” The jungle.”
“But how …” Josh began, incredulous.
She shook her head. “I don’t know how. I don’t know how.”
Beauty squinted. “Then the trail is months cold.”
Jasmine began walking down an overgrown path leading southwest. “Then we’d better get started,” she said.
They walked a day and a night and most of the next day, stopping only to eat, following barely discernible paths. They slept the following night, watching by turns
. Josh had ample opportunity to set the record, but lacked the heart for it; and in any case, couldn’t fathom how to translate his latest adventure onto paper.
On the third day they were aware of a gradual upgrade to the jungle floor, accompanied by some thinning of trees and shrub. By noon they smelled salt air.
There was a rise, a series of dips, a higher rise. With a sense of mounting exhilaration, they climbed the final crest: below them in the middle distance sat the bustling pirate city of Ma’gas’, its evening lights sparkling luminously onto the dark waters of the great Pacific.
CHAPTER 12: On The Waterfront
IT was a jangling city. The streets were alive with the spasms of dancers, jugglers, beggars, fire-eaters. Wild creatures ran free—thinking this just one more strange part of the jungle—and free creatures ran wild.
Ma’gas’ was an open port, situated on the rising edge of the Terrarium, on a natural cove that commanded a view of the sea—and any possible attack. No one ever attacked, though: there was nothing to be gained. The city’s value lay in its accessibility to every earthly creature with an angle, with something to sell or to buy. Consequently, there was no law—only personal settlement.
Pirates lived here. Smugglers, mercenaries, slavers, prospectors: thieves and knaves of every shape walked these alleys, looking for action in den or bar. They were the heart and blood of the city. And the skin of the place was gaudily tattooed with minstrels, whores, actors, street musicians, and clowns. A thoroughly degenerate sort of habitat.
As the three travelers entered the city from the jungle, night came on full. Their senses were assaulted by a cacophony composed of laughter, shattering glass, arguments, and lights. Brightly colored paper lanterns hung along all the main streets; candles and alcohol lamps flickered in the windows. The buildings were a conglomerate of materials scavenged from the Rain Forest—palm logs, daub and wattle, bamboo, pieces of tin siding. Raucous voices mixed with the sounds of breaking waves: and sometimes, breaking heads. Nights here were rowdy. The three hunters walked slowly toward the docks. Josh and Beauty had never seen anything like this. Jasmine cautioned them to keep eyes open and mouths closed. They marveled to watch her: she dipped into this milieu like fingers in a worn kid glove.