by Zoe Drake
At the edge of the walkway a small wooden boat was moored, a basic-looking rowboat with a pole standing up in its middle. A pole the height of a man.
The crowd frog-marched Weiss down the path towards the water’s edge, Matsuoka just behind the struggling group. “If you’re going to ferry me across the river Jordan,” Weiss shouted, “You could at least give me a gold coin!”
They half-pushed, half-lifted him into the boat. Producing lengths of rope, they tied his hands behind his back, and wound it around his chest, securing him to the pole.
Matsuoka stood in the boat with him. “You should be grateful,” he said, his mouth twisting into an ugly scowl of contempt. “We are releasing another of God’s sparks back to the source, and that is the work of the Jews, is it not? But you would not understand that. Because you are not a real Jew.”
Leaning down, he pulled something up from the fabric of the boat itself, something that had been plugging a hole. Stepping smartly back onto the walkway, he bent down and began to push. With the help of the strongest acolytes, he pushed the boat out into the reservoir.
Rocking with the movements of the boat, held fast to the pole, Weiss felt icy cold water begin to lap around his shoes.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Night Walk
The chill water splashed around the Professor’s legs, soaking his trousers. From the bank the chanting of the acolytes rose and fell. Weiss turned his head away. He knew they were watching him sink, waiting for him to die. Don’t show them fear, he told himself. Don’t show them pain.
The men and women’s voices brayed and bellowed, and suddenly Weiss thought he could hear something else, like a vibration, some kind of antiphonal response from deeper in the forest.
No. Don’t look.
It had been years since he’d tested his yogic survival techniques. They never leave you, Marcus Jewell had said, just as the Holy Guardian Angel never leaves your side. Now was a peculiar time to find out. In fact, if it weren’t so pathetic, it would be almost funny; his bones lying at the bottom of an artificial lake in the middle of nowhere, his only headstone the bland concrete of an irrelevant construction project.
He started to breath in and out quickly, deliberately hyperventilating, charging up his lungs as the pierced boat lurched and he sank up to his chest. Be centered, he told himself. Activate the chakra that revolves in the position of Tifaret. Let the glorious golden light fill my veins. Let the grace of the Holy Guardian Angel fill my body, not the cold, stinking water.
He was up to his neck in frigid water. The hoarse chants and incantations from the darkness under the trees were reaching their height. Don’t listen to them: cut out all extraneous thoughts.
He took in a deep gulp of air and closed his mouth and eyes. One swift downward plunge and his head was under. The water was shockingly cold. He forced himself to relax, going with the flow, feeling the boat carry him down until with a bone-jarring shock he reached the bottom of the reservoir.
He visualized his body full of the prevailing light of Tifaret. It streamed from the chakra in the middle of his body, the energy of Yetzirah warming him from the toes to the fingers. Keeping his concentration as one-pointed as he could, he visualized the ribbons of light snaking down from the Crowning Center at the top of his head, insulating his immersed body.
The cult may have acquired some dangerous secrets, but they were clearly amateurs when it came to human sacrifice – perhaps Weiss was their first. He’d made fists to pull away from the knots when they were tying his hands, so he had plenty of slack. After he’d slipped his hands and arms free, he reached down to free his legs. The water had soaked the ropes, made them tighter than they should be; skin scraped away from his ankles as he pulled his shoes free.
He stepped gingerly out of the boat, and began to move across the bottom of the reservoir, holding his arms extended in front of him like a sleepwalker. No point in opening his eyes; it was night and the water was filthy. He screwed them shut as tightly as he could. He was starting to get lightheaded. It was important to get as far as possible away from the bank and the men on it, before he started to float, or air bubbles leaked out of his mouth.
His hand bumped against something hard and unyielding. The side of the reservoir. Keeping his hand pressed against it, he followed it round. When the pain in his chest began to swell, he decided it was time to surface.
Lifting up his arms, he grasped the lip of concrete above him. His feet scrabbled for purchase on the slope of the reservoir. Slowly, he pulled himself upwards, his head breaking the surface and easing upward into the air. He released the breath he’d been holding and pumped warm night air into his lungs. Slowly. Slowly. Where were Matsuoka and his followers?
He hauled his upper body out onto a grass path and lay still. There were voices nearby, but they’d stopped chanting. They were coming from a point diagonally opposite him. He turned his head; a clump of trees blocked his view. As quickly as he could, he pulled his legs out of the water and crawled away into the woods.
Turning over onto his back, he stared up at the dark leaf canopy, his drenched clothes weighing down upon his skin. Rest, he thought. I need to rest. The night’s warm, I won’t freeze to death.
But then he heard the distant chatter of the cultists and sighed, taking in a huge charge of air and releasing it quietly. He had to find out. The cult was vital to what was happening; he had to find out what they were doing, and any more delays might be disastrous.
He lay on his back, telling his tense old body to relax. Melt into the ground. He began to breath deeply and rhythmically. When he felt himself ready, he disengaged. His inner self levitated, moving out of its dull and fleshly shell. Releasing his subtle body, he stood and looked down at his physical self. Old. Skinny. Frail. An echo of old sorrows. He pushed the thoughts out of his consciousness. He had left the field of bio-survival and was in the shared physical medium of the environment. The zone of unfiltered perceptions.
He walked in Yetzirah.
Letting go of the ground, he drifted upward toward a phosphorescent moon. A silver thread trailed beneath him out of the central Chakra, the unbreakable cord linking him to his physical body. He moved through the contorted shadows of the trees, up into the night sky. The energy-fields of birds and insects fluttered around him, as thick as dark snow. The astral body of Professor Weiss flew through the miasma, above the woods.
He sensed the reservoir behind him, construction huts and dead machinery lining the opposite bank. The cultists couldn’t have travelled far. Refining his senses, the Professor detected a disturbance on the horizon. A shifting in the ether.
Something had revealed itself. He flew toward it.
The central buildings of the Arashi no Maebure were less than a kilometre away from the reservoir; they hadn’t taken him far. They hadn’t cared that his body could have been discovered dumped on their own doorstep, which meant either what they said about the local police was true – or the cult were planning something so soon, one foreign corpse wouldn’t make any difference.
Darkness hung over the building, a numinous threat far stronger than ordinary night. The melancholy traces of something feverish and primordial. He descended, sinking through the roof into the main building, his head crackling with invisible sparks.
The rooms of the top floor shifted into view. Spartanly furnished, full of books and computers – and deserted. He moved down a level. Meeting rooms, expensive-looking tables and chairs in poor states of repair, reproductions of old woodblock prints on the walls. Still empty.
Where was everyone?
On the ground level, in an auditorium at the back of the building, he found his answer. The cultists were lying stretched out on wheeled hospital beds. Roughly half a dozen members were still awake, walking up and down the rows of prone bodies, clipboards in their hands. The prone figures had their eyes closed, as if asleep; small plastic canopies, full of unfamiliar electrical equipment, covered their faces. Their heads were crowned with
silvery mesh hairnets, tangles of thin wires leading to sockets in the canopy.
All of their auras were as black as dead metal.
Weiss let go of the ground, and slipped through the ceiling, his subtle body prickling with alarm. There was another mind here, something pestilent and twisted, another mind at work in Yetzirah. He had to leave, or risk being detected. But he had seen enough; the technology may have been modern, but the basic premise looked the same. He had seen this before, in the accursed hospital at Poveglia.
He woke up back in his body in the woods. It was still pitch dark, the vague shapes of fernlike plants above him, the whirring of night insects about him in the thick air.
He got to his feet. His clothes were still horribly damp; his back ached and his arms trembled feverishly. But he had no choice. He had to find out more about the cult, and this seemed to be the best opportunity.
It took him perhaps half an hour to get to the grounds. Climbing over a low wall, he found himself at the rear of the main building. Through the clumps of trees, he moved past construction equipment, ripped-up earth, piles of discarded machines and scrap metal. Whatever else the cultists were, they didn’t seem to be environmentalists.
He entered a large garage, creeping past shadowed bulks of more earthmovers and four-wheel drive cars. From what he’d seen while in his astral body, the garage led into a small office, an office full of PCs and laptops.
The door sprang open at his touch. The only illumination came from the corridor outside, filtering in through the frosted glass window. As his eyes adjusted, he saw desks squeezed into a narrow office space, scarcely room to walk between them, desks covered with the usual paraphernalia of administration. Everything was written in Japanese.
He heard voices in the corridor. Reaching over to the nearest desk, Weiss picked up the three nearest USBs and slipped them into his pocket. He disconnected the nearest laptop from its recharger, picked it up, and backed out of the door he’d entered by.
Straight away, he knew there was someone else in the garage. Faint noises came from near the main door, shadows on the move. He stopped, stood still; the shadows stopped moving, too.
Then a coughing roar from the front of the garage shattered the silence. Twin headlights flicked into life and threw a harsh white light across the concrete.
Behind the flaring twin circles, he made out the rough outline of one of the earthmovers, a large multi-terrain loader. It spun around and moved forward, loader arms lifting the bucket upwards, moving straight for Weiss.
Weiss had the back door behind him and two cars to either side. He had no room to move, no room to squeeze under the cars. He squinted against the light. The loader picked up speed, the vicious metal spikes on the front of the bucket aimed right at the Professor’s chest.
Weiss opened his mouth and shouted one word in Hebrew. One of the names of the Unnameable.
The loader’s engine stalled and died, the whole vehicle juddering to a halt. Ducking under the bucket and loader arms, Weiss ran to the driver’s seat and lifted himself up on the outside rungs, his right hand held ready in a claw-like pose.
“I’ll be damned,” he muttered.
The cultist who’d driven the loader sat slumped in the driver’s seat, his face slack and unresponsive. His eyes were open, but he didn’t register any fear or surprise when Weiss hauled himself up next to him. He grabbed the cultist’s arm. It was loose, relaxed, offering no resistance, as if he were hypnotized. Or asleep. Or maybe sleepwalking.
He heard voices in the office he’d just come from. Working quickly, he pushed the slack cultist out of the driver’s seat, wincing as the man fell like dead weight to the concrete floor below. He took the seat, put the laptop by his side, peered through the dark at the controls around him. Two joysticks. He turned the ignition key, revving up the engine, centring the left-hand joystick and pushing it to the left. The loader spun around in the tight space until it faced the external door.
Here goes nothing, Weiss thought, using the right-hand joystick to raise the bucket higher. Slamming the left-hand joystick all the way forward, the loader jumped into motion.
The wooden garage doors slammed outwards with a loud crack as the loader charged out into the courtyard. Weiss pushed the joystick forward to the right and the loader swung onto the main driveway. He found the foot throttle and pressed down, the machine picking up speed. Drawn by the noise, cultists were opening doors and running outside, and several ducked and jumped backwards as the spikes of the bucket and the black rods of the loader arms rushed past them.
He floored the foot throttle, wondering what the vehicle’s top speed was. The loader’s bucket hit the bars of the gate and snapped the chains, slamming the gates back, and he swung the machine onto the open road. With the shouts of the cultists fading behind him, Weiss headed out on his giant mechanical steed for streetlights, traffic, and something resembling civilization.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Urban Legends
One of the techniques of remembering your dreams was to set the alarm clock to wake you in the middle of the night, during a period of REM sleep. Then you waited, without getting up, moving as little as possible, reliving the dream you had moments before. Then you recorded it in the bedside journal.
David lifted his head and blinked. The apartment was still filled with concealing darkness and terminal hush, broken only by the sound of distant traffic. He turned his head and looked at the luminous numbers of the clock. Four-thirty. I’ve done it, he thought. I’ve done it.
Lucid dreaming. I was conscious of the dream and it worked, I was able to control it. He turned on the lamp sitting on the tatami floor next to his futon, opened his dream journal, and began to write.
When he’d become self-aware in the dream he was standing in a tunnel or vast dark hallway, carved out of heavy stone. It was lined with statues. He raised a hand in front of his face and with his other hand traced the character for dream on his palm. Yume.
Shadows, frozen in place, trapped in stone. David walked further along the cavernous hallway and saw that they were statues of the god Jizo, like the ones he’d seen in Osorezan, tattered blood-red mantles around their throats, blackened stone faces with eyes closed in eternal sleep. He looked around himself in utter calm, trying to take the moment in, to preserve it all. The smell? Was there a smell?
He looked down the trembling shadows of the hallway, the corridor disappearing in the dark distance. Door. There should be a door. It seemed natural to move his hands once more, to trace the character for gateway – Mon – upon his hand. Easy to remember the shape: the two halves of a shoji paper door, sliding open. In front of him, the stone cracked open and apart, making a gateway between two silent Jizo statues. All of his senses alert, he walked through the gate–
–and found himself in a rocky, lunar landscape lit by a diffuse daylight, the acrid phosphorous smell at once alien and familiar. He was back in Osorezan.
In the dry stone gulch, yellow steam rising from the earth around them, people milled around a cluster of tents and prefabricated huts. The air seemed stiff with tension, like a bow and arrow at full stretch. The Itako stood in front of their tents, elderly blind women wearing white.
Suddenly, one of them was at his side, and before David could react she grasped his left hand, pinching the base of the thumb. “One means communication,” she said, in English. She then gripped his palm with both hands, index finger pressed down on his wrist. “The other means spirit.”
“I didn’t know it was so complicated,” David heard himself reply.
“They are approaching,” she warned.
He took a step past her, and the old woman disappeared, and he found himself in another place that he remembered. The gazebo on the shores of the lake, where he had sat with Saori. He stood upon the edge of the waters, and before him the lake was still and silent, no ripple or breeze to disturb it. Beyond it, the mountain in shadow. Mount Dread.
Something drifted across the su
rface of the lake. A fog, moving slowly across the water in David’s direction. Deep within the mist, he saw something stirring, huge obscure shapes…
That’s when the alarm had woken him. He’d set it for four-thirty, timed to interrupt his dreaming. In his bedroom, he put down his pen, sitting up upon the futon mattress.
Despite his growing state of excitement, and his realization that something important had happened, he knew he had to get back to sleep. Today was another day of work, and he was expected to be there at eight-thirty. He reset the alarm clock, switched off the light, and put his head down.
There was something about the darkness that bothered him. It was too quiet, too still. Every little sound, every mysterious creak and groan that buildings made in the night, sounded like someone moving around inside his apartment. He sat up, moved over and switched on the TV, which he’d set up so he could see it from the bed, and settled down with the remote control. The usual midnight nonsense from Tokyo; girls in baggy pajamas jumping up and down, while a panel of comedians tried to guess their bra sizes. The shadow play of light, color and muted noise reassured him as he lay there in the darkness.
There were so many books written and movies made about aliens. So much money spent on telescopes and probes to try to contact intelligent life somewhere out there in the universe. Sometimes David felt that it was a total waste of time and expense, that the real aliens were right here on earth. He was looking at one of them right now.
It was a praying mantis, one of the insects that he’d never seen until his arrival in Japan. It crouched on the warm flagstones of the pathway outside the east wing of the school. The color had caught David’s eye as he walked along: a brilliant green, as shiny as a child’s plastic toy. He crouched down to look at it closer. It stood on its hind and middle legs, the front legs folded in that classic praying gesture. The skeletal body rocked backwards and forwards in a steady, hypnotic rhythm, calm under the human scrutiny from above.