Fire in the Abyss

by Stuart Gordon

  We hid there a month. It was a miserable time. We hardly dared go outside, and had to watch the Ernsteins continually. The two-room cabin was freezing. There were blankets there, but little else, and we could risk a fire in the iron stove only at night. We told Ernstein how we’d escaped, though not about Circle: those left behind might still have need of our secrecy in that. And something else we discovered: the faculty for exchanging mind-pictures seemed to have died or gone dormant in us, perhaps because the circumstances of Horsfield no longer prevailed—now we could talk face-to-face with no need to hide what we said.

  After two weeks a great blizzard came roaring off the lake, and in the middle of it Utak fell sick.

  Of the four of us, he had found it hardest from the start, and had remained in a sort of bewilderment. Now he got pneumonia. The drugs did not help, though, as Ernstein sullenly confirmed, Tari had managed to loot a small fortune in Interferon. Utak sank quickly, having little will to fight, though Tari attended him constantly, and at one point seemed to have him on a road to recovery, for he sat up and began to take soup.

  One night, storm howling outside, we all sat round the stove, wrapped in blankets, Utak in the warmest place. He was a little delirious, and began speaking of Kukulcan as though forgetting we were there. Then Tari, her face soft in the glow of the oil-lamp which was all the light we allowed ourselves at night, said:

  “Utak, my friend, I have something to tell you. This Kukulcan of whom you speak—it was from the Two Lands he came. His name in our tongue was Naram-sin, and he was son of that Menes who united the Upper and Lower Lands and founded the First Dynasty. It is known that he sailed to the Land of the Setting Sun, and returned when his father died. It was he who brought your Big-Heads their knowledge of Number and Proportion—and that is how your people came to build the pyramid-temples much as we built ours, and for much the same cause.”

  Utak believed this; I was fascinated to hear them discuss the properties of these pyramids—how the shaping of their inner chambers could banish fatigue, and much other strange stuff which Norman Ernstein could not bear. Harshly he interrupted to say all such talk was rubbish and lies. Mery-Isis said nothing to this, but I could not resist reminding him that once he had told me facts which I had found incomprehensible, such as the age of the earth and the height of the towers in New York City. He fell silent at this, and his wife was silent too, for she had a horror of all of us, and was convinced we could not let either of them live. I do not think she was ever convinced by us. Whatever we or her husband said, she thought us to be but some exotic new kind of lunatics appropriate to lunatic times. Yes, Sandra Ernstein was my first meeting with that great disbelief which, ever since Vulcan, has afflicted so many, marching hand-in-hand with the equally irrational credulity of so many others. So, most people find naked truth intolerable and insist on clothing it with masks of their own preference. So, the circle is round. Why describe the way things are, Gilbert? Who wants to know what everyone knows? To Sandra it was irrelevant what time we came from. To her we were but four menacing bizarre bald people escaped from the Institute who talked funny, held her captive, and threatened her life. (As for the baldness, our scalps and the beards of the men were slowly sprouting with new growth… but Tari’s fuzz was snowy-white, not raven-black, which was the only sign upon her of that horror of Vulcan or Set which she claimed to have met deliberately.)

  No, I never got to know Sandra Ernstein very well, she maintained a spirited resistance to us, and to her husband as well, blaming him for getting her into this. I’m sure they could have escaped us had they chosen to work together, but they did not, being divided by their own opinions of each other where unity would have served them better, as it had served us. Perhaps she could even have got away on her own, but she never tried it, preferring to wait for us to act positively.

  After a month we had to do this.

  Utak walked out to his death, Sandra Ernstein fell sick, Norman Ernstein attacked Herbie, accusing Herbie of “trying it on” with his wife and infecting her. If there is any truth in this I don’t know: certainly Herbie is the only one among us she liked at all. She could bring herself to speak to me with difficulty, but Utak and Mery-Isis she would not acknowledge at all, except in a vague and offhand way.

  For Utak’s fever returned. Deep one night as we all slept (I was supposed to be awake, but had nodded off) his sudden shouting awoke us all. I sat up in the dark, heard a confused moving, and Utak raving in his own tongue. I lit the light. We saw Utak on his feet, sweating and shaking all over, his eyes like hot coals in his congested face. But with the light he grew calm, and recognised us.

  “I have had a dream in which I awoke from a dream,” he told us with a curious tenderness, with reflective wonderment even as the breath rattled in him. “Now it is time for Utak to go, and seek the Perfect Number… in another land… more likely to… express it.”

  Then, with a slow, concentrated steadiness, dropping the blankets so that he went wearing no more than jeans and a shirt, he walked to the door, and out into the bitter weather. Yet first he met each of us in the eyes as he went, so that we knew we must not protest. And in the morning, when the storm was done and the sun up sharp and pale on the waters, we found him seated upright and crosslegged, looking east. He was stone cold, covered in snow, and quite dead. Tari spoke for his soul, and we took him down from the rock even as we saw a boat far out on the lake, and feared we were seen. We buried Utak as well as we could. Then we found that Sandra Ernstein was sick, and Norman launched his desperate attack which Herbie fended off with difficulty, and our food was almost gone, and the three of us knew we must go, whatever the risk, while we still had our own health.

  So we did. We took the car and drove it south-west to industrial wastelands, where we quickly abandoned it, knowing that Ernstein would raise hue-and-cry against us. We had left them only lightly bound, so as to give ourselves two hours or three at most in which to get clear. None of us wanted to do them any worse harm. I hope that Sandra Ernstein got better.

  The next few months are a blur of hardship and hunger. Both Tari and I depended on Herbie. He had the measure of this time where as yet we did not, and seemed to find conditions very similar to those in his own era, sixty years before. After we abandoned the car, he took the gun and left us in hiding. We waited while he went and robbed a store and stole another car. For a day and a night he drove and drove and drove. Tari was silent, and I could make no sense of anything I saw, and could not see what hope there was for us, and could not believe all Tari had said about her Horus-mission. I hated the endless roads, and the enormous cities which we avoided, and the need to avoid people for fear that our speech and appearance would betray us. We listened continually on the radio as we drove aimlessly about through Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, but heard nothing about us, nothing about the stolen car. Instead we heard about the perilous condition of the country, about the “Raydee” refugee problem, about the unemployment, the Crime Wave, the National Guard being called out to quell riots in this place and that. The forces of law had their hands full. One more stolen car was not important, nor robberies of comer stores in small towns. And of course we heard nothing at all about escaped DTIs. We were lucky.

  Lucky?

  Depression settled on Herbie and myself after too many days and nights of aimlessness and fear. Bickering and argument became more frequent between us, and Tari could not help: she remained calm, but we snapped at her too. And then Herbie fell sick. We had depended too much on him, he had taken too much upon himself, insisting on his personal responsibility to us, as though trying to take all the burden of America’s Vulcan-guilt onto his own shoulders. One night in March he left us in a wood while he went off in the car, looking for another store to rob. We waited all that night and most of the next day, wet and cold. I complained and stamped about, and Tari endured it calmly, as she seemed to endure everything calmly, which only irritated me the more. At length Herbie returned, on foot, exhausted and sick and empt
yhanded. He’d almost been caught, had only just got away. We were desperate. The weather was still severe; without food and warmth and shelter we had little hope of living. It seemed impossible that we could continue to survive and escape notice—especially given our ragged clothes and Tari’s appearance—her striking face and the snowy sprouting of her hair.

  Of course, what we did not take into account, being ignorant and concerned with our own problems, was that we were in effect no more than another three bums—drifters and vagabonds and refugees—of whom at that time thousands were about and abroad in the land due to economic policy, nuclear disaster, and great social confusion. And if there was a special call out for us in particular, we never met any evidence of it.

  Yet our situation was poor. And Herbie went mad. Something in his mind had snapped. He raved at Tari and myself as we trudged south at dawn along a deserted and sludgy country road. We approached a freeway, slicing across the flat landscape. When he saw it he laughed and shouted at us that now he’d show us “ancient creeps” how to deal with modern America. Before we could stop him he ran ahead of us and up onto the freeway, and he was killed. He ran out in front of a car and straight under the wheels of a Coca-Cola truck. We stared in horror as brakes screeched too late, as traffic began to back up. Then Tari took me firmly by the arm. “Come,” she said, “we can do nothing for him now but stay alive ourselves.”

  We survived. We slept in ditches, thickets, wherever we could. We stole clothes from washing lines and ate whatever we found. We kept moving, avoiding people, fearing dogs, daring not to open our mouths to anyone we did meet. We dosed ourselves with the drugs and remained alive. I had been sick already, at Horsfield, and perhaps this helped. But Tari’s health was a wonder to me. She said that Horus and Isis within her would not let her go to Osiris until she had done what she came to this land to do. I learned to say nothing of this, perhaps because I feared to believe it rather than because I could not. Her strength and inner conviction never failed her, while on many a morning I felt I could not get up and go on again. I had dreams and fantasies not only about my former life but also about the comforts of Horsfield. Yet she persuaded me to keep going, and so we did, heading south. We grew thin and hard, and my hate for this modern world grew into a terrible loathing. Even the sight of a metal roof glinting in sunlit distance the other side of a valley, or of an electricity pylon stamping on the land, was enough to enrage me. More nights than not I had nothing to eat but this hate. I thought it sustained me. Now I see it harmed and nearly destroyed my spirit, for Hate is of the Devil, and gobbles up Life.

  Often Tari tried to talk me out of it. She had no need of hate. Even now she retained her zest and humour, inhabiting a serene deep, an apparently illimitable reservoir of patience. When we hid deep in the Kentucky woods as springtime blossomed, she saw delight everywhere. While my mind brooded and gut grumbled, she would keep going on! Look at the curl of this petal! Smell it! See those beady little eyes that watch us! Listen to the song of the birds! Yes, this spirit was part of her health, but I hardly appreciated it, and often snapped at her, asking why couldn’t she be realistic. Yet now I see she was. She was matter-of-fact about Vulcan, Horsfield, the U.S.A.; about her knowledge and needs and desires; and sometimes chided me for seeking in her something she said she was not.

  “I’m not your mother, nor the Queen you lost, but a woman called Tari,” she said sharply one cold night. “Why look in me for what you already have? Why your guilt and self-deprecation? Did your Christian Church do this to you? Is it what Christ intended? These Churches are as bad as the Priesthood of Amun became! ‘Only through us!’ they cry. ‘Dare not speak with the God yourself!”

  “But we should not presume!” I snapped.

  “No, never presume, but become! The neters work through us even if we do not will it, but that does not mean we have to freeze into statues! You don’t have to be cold as the grave because life is not perfect! Please, stop this gallant rigid false respect you have for me, give up your hate, come and give some warmth and love!”

  “How can I love amid this?” I demanded. “How should I not hate these people for what they have done to us?”

  “Do you hate a blind man who denies sight? As for love, that is up to you and whether you can remove your Protestant armour that insists on being offended by the world. Why blame folk you never met for what’s in yourself? Did you hate Norman Ernstein?”

  “No… no… but the men responsible… the tyrants…”

  “They’ll get what fate they deserve. The Judges are not concerned with your hate, save so far as it clouds your own mind. Why hate? Leave it! Look up at the stars! We are on a path!”

  Yes, I remember that night. We had been chased by two mastiffs who gave us up only after one of them tasted my leg and found it too scrawny for his liking. We were up a hill with trees looming about; we sat at a tiny fire that hardly warmed me at all, and I could see no practicality in what she said.

  “What path?” I demanded angrily. “It looks downhill to me!”

  But she was looking up in the starry sky.

  “Look,” she said, very quietly. “Look up there!”

  I did, reluctantly, and for a moment thought I saw the silhouette of a great bird hovering high above, occluding the stars. Then it was gone, or I saw it no more—and it is of this night that lately I dreamed she showed me the rainbow bridge through Time.

  “We will reach a gate soon,” she said then. “The Hawk has promised it.”

  24. With KRONONUTZ in St. Louis

  So we did. We met KRONONUTZ.

  Early one morning Tari shook me awake. I opened my eyes to find her urgent face only inches away. There was excitement in her eyes.

  “Get up quickly! There’s a road twenty minutes away. We have a chance to meet people who’ll help us! Come on! Now’s the time!”

  I stared. “What people? What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know yet. I saw a picture. It came and went, but I caught it. Now, get up!”

  So down we went through the cold foggy woods as the sun hinted rosily behind eastern slopes, I following her brisk thin form with great doubt, but in twenty minutes or less we struck a narrow, winding road. Only a minute or so later we heard a vehicle approaching.

  “These are the ones,” said Tari, and without hesitation she stood out in the middle of the road, only yards from and facing a sharp bend. And I remembered what had happened to Herbie. “They won’t see you! They’ll run right into you!”

  “No, they won’t. Come. Join me, Humfrey!”

  I did, not knowing why, and only seconds later the vehicle—later I heard it was called a “minibus”—came round the comer at some speed. The driver saw us and gaped, and frantically hit his brakes. The brightly painted vehicle shuddered and screeched to a halt halfway off the road and to one side of us. KRONONUTZ, read the flaming-lettered legend on the side of the bus. Faces stared at us as the driver leaned out furiously.

  “WHADDAFUCKYATHINKYADOIN? ICOULDAKILLEDYASTOOPIDBASTARDS!”

  Tari eyed him in that interested way she had. The anger went out of his eyes. Puzzlement replaced it. He was a burly young man, bearded, wearing a green tee-shirt with the full moon on it.

  “Good morning,” said Tari calmly. “I am sorry we gave you such a fright but we had to be sure you would stop. We came out of the woods to meet you. My friend here is Humfrey, and I am Tari.”

  Her accent and the look of us took him aback as much as what she said. He turned and spoke to the other four people who sat beside and behind him. They all seemed quite young. He shrugged. Then he turned back to us and asked, in a much milder voice:

  “Who in hell are you? And where are you from?”

  “I am from Egypt,” said Tari, “and Humfrey from England. We ask your help. We have not eaten, we have no place to stay, we do not know who to trust—but something told me you were coming and that you’ll not do us harm. What is your name, please?”

  “Jesus H. Christ! No! My n
ame’s Dan!”

  “Hullo, Dan. What are KRONONUTZ?”

  “We’re a band—you know—rock’n’roll—listen—just hold it a minute”

  He turned and talked again with his friends. I was confused and uneasy, like a suspicious wild animal. Tari’s glance told me to hold my peace. I did not like the smell of oil and rubber, nor the way that shafts of rising sunlight through the trees gleamed so brightly on the painted metal. KRONONUTZ? Rock’n’roll?

  “Hey.” Dan turned back to us. “We’re going to Saint Lou. Got a gig there tonight. If you wanna come along you’re welcome.”

  A door slid open and they made space for us. Very stiffly I followed Tari into the back of the vehicle, where we crammed ourselves down amid stacks of black boxes, odd-shaped cases, and other strange stuff. Five faces stared at us—four men and one woman. I cannot blame them; we must have been a sight, both of us filthy and ragged: I heavily bearded now in old coat and bib overalls and sneakers all covered in sticky burrs and falling apart; Tari in jeans and boots and torn sheepskin jacket over a tee-shirt we’d found somewhere that said: I AM A MUSHROOM—They Keep Me in the Dark and Feed Me Bullshit!—and her bone white hair, sprouting like a halo from her coppery head above those wide dark pensive eyes. And I think probably both of us smelled rather strong too, but our new hosts were polite enough not to mention this as the driver, Dan, started us off again. But they did stare, until Tari politely introduced herself again, and nudged me to do likewise, which I did with some difficulty.