She turned and faded into the dark.
“Wait!”
But part of him thought she wasn’t gone. That she’d never left him at all. He breathed hard and his chilled hands shook. Suddenly, as if lifted by some unseen force, what he could only describe as layers arose like stacked sheets of papyrus. He didn’t so much see them as feel them through some unknown sense, piled where Sarah had stood. He ran his hand across his scalp and rubbed his eyes. Was Sarah showing him something? Was she leading him toward these layers? Or had he truly lost his mind?
He approached the stacked sheets, stuck his fingers between two, and pried them apart. Dim Light shot out from between them, and as he bent and leaned in, he saw moving shapes inked onto the fabric. It was like looking at the whole of the world caught in flatness.
He let go and the sheets snapped into place. He repeated the process lower down. Then again. And again. He found worlds stacked endlessly upon each other, and each wove into the next like the Words of a great Song. His mind tried to convince him that this was only his imagination, but he knew that was a lie. As he fingered through the layers, he sensed the echoes of truth fluttering through its pages, like the softest Music ever played. He let a few sheets fall, and the sound of nearness, of belonging, grew. He gazed between the pair of sheets and saw himself standing in blackness, gazing between the layers. He moved his leg and watched the flat image mirror the movement. His hands slipped and the layers slammed shut.
This is impossible.
“It’s a gift.”
He spun at the sound of Sarah’s voice, but he could not find her.
“You should be thankful.”
“Do you want me to use it?”
“Don’t play the fool.” She laughed then, as he hadn’t heard her laugh in years, and the echo resonated until it disappeared behind the ringing in his ears.
Cain looked at the layers. Where had they come from? The silver boy must have awoken something in him. Or had the catalyst been something else?
He bit his cheek as another thought struck him. Do the layers end? He rifled past innumerable sheets. Eventually he reached a layer beneath which was endless blackness. He paused at the brink and studied the space. The blackness seemed alive. It moved like a roiling hot spring, and yet he felt the empty chill of it.
Cain swallowed, forced his shoulders to relax, and turned back through the layers until he found his way to another brink on the opposite end. This one was not so dark, and he found himself standing at the edge, poised to jump. It seemed like a river that flowed through the layers, but though there was illumination of some kind, he saw not through his eyes, but sensed through that same unknown faculty.
With a terrible, half-purposeful motion, he plunged into the depths, and the contact of what he could only describe as Water made him gasp. He swam its currents, explored its tributaries, and found his mind bursting with significance.
In the Waters lay shivering images. He paused and cupped his hands to catch an image of his face, and he watched himself speak, and even heard the words spoken.
His skin tingled as he let the Water fall from his hands. He cupped another image, this one of Lukian pacing the inner wall of the City.
I am watching life.
The idea made his mind buzz as he cupped another image.
But some of what I see is unfamiliar. Might these images be moments that are yet to come?
He trudged ahead, cupping Water and watching unlived life unfold. The most interesting areas were where the rivers branched, showing twisted projections of choice. Soon he found himself swimming multiple branches and coming to darker Waters.
He knew the ability to traverse these Waters stemmed from his interaction with the silver boy, but he also knew there was something more. His thoughts resonated with the river, and from somewhere beyond the river came whispers of truth and falsehood. Those whispers confirmed that there was something special about the silver boy, and about his own relationship to it. But what?
From time to time, atop a wave, he sensed multiple pathways ahead, splitting in ever-burgeoning potentialities, and the endlessness of it was overwhelming. The riverscape grew chaotic. The waves became violent and thrashed him about. Ahead lay a harbor whose surface was glassy-calm, and he swam for it. He reached and strained, the current resisting him with ever-increasing strength. Still he grew closer.
When at last he crested a wave and felt the harbor within reach, a black force welled up and threw him through the darkness into the light.
20
The first thing Cain noticed was the smell of grass. Blades stabbed his eyes, and he turned his head, grimaced, and spat into a blurry jungle. The back of his neck tensed, lifting his skull enough to see he was lying in a field. Granules of dirt ground between his teeth as he pushed himself onto his knees. He tried to straighten, but instead tipped and shot his hands out for balance. The world pulsed and rolled. He itched his face and peeled the grass from his skin. His face tingled and felt like leather, and he caught a string of saliva stretching from his lips.
He grabbed his shoulder and squeezed until it hurt. “I’m back,” he said and closed his eyes. “I’m alive.”
Clouds flecked the sky and a late afternoon breeze combed through his hair. He knew in only a few moments the sun would fall beneath the horizon, but with the wind on his skin and the smell of autumn and musty earth filling his awareness, he had never felt more human.
As twilight chased the red away, the skin of his arms reflected the light in metallic hues, and the vertebral marks hooking down his arms glowed silver. Little footsteps approached. He turned his arm to one side, then the other, observing the visible humps the marks produced. Not needing to look to know it was the silver boy.
The footsteps stopped and Cain turned. Its eyes watched him unblinking. Black holes within silver rims. And its skin—insipid gray littered with veins like black netting. He grimaced.
“You must be thirsty,” it said as Cain absently grabbed at the skin of his stomach. He wondered if it knew where he had just been, if it had somehow awoken him on purpose to keep him from reaching that harbor. He attempted to swallow, but his tongue was dry like coal and stuck painfully in his throat. He coughed to stifle a gag, knelt and clawed at the ground, moist with day-old rainfall. The silver boy crouched and watched him dig until he created a small pool of brackish water. He dipped and sucked up the liquid, keeping his eyes trained on the silver boy. It didn’t move. When he finished, he stood and held out his arms. They were quaking.
Warm fluid filled his teeth, and he let it fall from cracked lips. He stared at the colored goo dripping in long strings to the ground.
Why am I bleeding?
The silver boy said, “You cannot give back my gift.”
Cain straightened and rubbed a hand across the vertebral marks, disturbed less by the texture than by the lack of warmth. He looked across the plains and spit more blood on the ground. He had no notion of where he was. Everything, even the stars above, was unfamiliar.
“I gave you what you wanted,” it said. “You think you had no choice? You had a lifetime.”
“I chose none of this.”
“You prefer death?”
Cain turned away, hooked his fingernail around one of the vertebrae, and pulled, stretching his skin with it.
“That you will die is more certain than your next thought. Do you crave release from that final tyrant too? Because I could set you free.” It approached and scraped its sharp fingernails down the back of Cain’s hand.
He pushed it away and stepped sideways, accidentally slipping his foot across the red spittle on the ground. He felt faint.
“How does it taste?”
Cain’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”
“The blood. How does it taste?”
Saliva pooled against the coppery flavor of blood between his teeth. He tried to swallow, but it poured into his mouth, flooding his tongue. His sight undulated like a ship on rough waters, and he stumb
led to his seat. He was weak and thirsty. Thirsty for …
“Blood?”
21
Cain wondered at the size and shape of the growth sprouting from the ground and shooting through the cloud cover. It was a Tree, but seemed more stonelike than alive, and its canopy disappeared behind cloud cover.
“What is it?”
“A means of travel.”
“From where to where?”
“From this world to the next and to those beyond.”
Cain looked up and squinted, searching once more for the top of the Tree, but the silver boy laughed. “It has no end. It is beyond your ability to understand.”
Cain touched the trunk, and his skin tingled with an unfamiliar sensation. He looked at the hazy Fog they passed through to arrive here. He had seen eyes like burning candles in the mist, but nothing had approached, and now there was only the sparkle of sunlight through condensation.
“Could another find this without your help?”
“No man has seen this Tree, and perhaps none will again.”
Cain knocked his knuckles against it and recoiled. Blood oozed from his knuckles in beads. He smeared the blood away, then stared at the wounds, stifling the urge to lick them.
“Are we going to use it?”
“Why else would I bring you here?”
Of course there were reasons, but he needn’t point them out. The silver boy utilized manipulation in a way Cain both respected and hated. “You couldn’t prod me along fast enough. Why pause now?”
“You are exhausted. A moment of rest.”
Cain shook his head. It intends to impress upon me my reliance, but I am no fool. I see its desire to convince me for what it is. The truly dominant need not claim authority. “I am ready.”
“You will not return unchanged.”
“So be it.”
There was a pause. “Give yourself to me, and I will bring us through the Tree to what lies beyond.”
He was repulsed by the prospect of giving up control. His neck was stiff and warm, and his vision narrowed. If I give up control, it may try to take more. But if I do not …
There was danger in taking such a risk, but more than anything Cain needed power, and he risked danger most by hesitating. Sometimes to gain, one must also give.
He let his soul retreat just far enough to relinquish a sliver of control. The cold fingers of the void clamped around his arms and pulled him into liquid darkness. Here he waited. And waited. There was a sound, as of a pulsing heartbeat, but it seemed too rhythmic to be organic, and the sound increased until he felt it branch and increase in complexity. Just as he began piecing it together, he was expelled from the void and into his body, and all five senses burned.
There was newness in his surroundings, in the smell of mold and taste of damp minerals. He tried to get up but was too weak. His ears rang and his sight was dark, but he sensed his environment imbued with a bluish hue. Slowly his eyes adjusted and he peered about. Above and arcing around was endless gray rock.
A cave?
Some of the stones glowed and differed from the others with peculiar marks like veins on a leaf. He stared at them, but suddenly everything seemed to glow—or was it merely a reflection?
His mind itched and buzzed. The silver boy was with him again. “Where were you?” Cain said.
“Your soul is simple and light. It moves quicker than I through the Trees.”
Trees. So there were more of them. The thought made his mind spin. How much more of the world had they been blinded to by the walls of the Almighty? He struggled to his feet. “Movement seems more difficult here.” There was no response. “This is your home, isn’t it?”
“You presume much and are wrong.”
“Then where are we? I feel corporeal, while all else seems somehow elevated.”
“We are where no man has ever been, nor perhaps shall be again.” Its voice softened as if in reverence. “The City of the Light Bringer.”
He examined the glowing rocks and breathed the newness as another thought struck him. “You could not have arrived here without me, could you? You seem to take form, but it’s no more real than the images in my mind.”
The silver boy said, “I hear the call. It is loud. Do you hear it? Of course not. There are many things you do not hear. Many things you cannot sense or understand.”
“Who is the Light Bringer? What does he want from me?”
“You will know soon enough. He has summoned us.”
“You fear him.”
“The child fears the father. The father fears failure. The strongest fears himself. The weakest fears everything. What do you fear?”
He suppressed the burning urge to swallow.
“I read the space between every word and understand its source.”
For days Cain had contemplated the possibility that the silver boy could sense his thoughts, and now that fear returned. If anything, it sees only the footprints of where my mind has been, and footprints may be erased. Surely it cannot read my thoughts.
“Before this is over,” the silver boy said, “I will teach you subtlety and pain, and perhaps a little more.”
The silver boy yearned for control of Cain’s body, but Cain suppressed it and walked down the corridor. The road ahead angled ever downward, and the path was several feet narrow, but the ceiling remained at least twenty or thirty feet above, and the glow of the stones, if indeed the light came from them, kept the illumination dim but satisfactory. It seemed they walked for hours, and Cain grew weary. The fluid in his belly seemed to have evaporated, and the pale thirst rushed against his insides like a moonlit tide. Soon he would need to face the change the silver boy had brought to him—to understand the true costs.
Soon, but not yet. He remembered Sarah on the floor of their home and lost himself to the crumpled shape of her lit by lightning and washed by water. She shook with sobs and slowly lifted her gaze to his.
Does she see me as I was or as I am?
Cain shook his head and realized the madness in his thoughts as he stumbled on loose rocks and slid down a ditch. He stood, brushed the gravel from his tunic, and lifted himself onto a ledge. Beyond the ledge was a thin path that led down a tunnel toward light. Finally the hall opened, and he steadied himself against the wall as he peered through the opening at what lay beyond.
“Great Almighty,” he whispered.
The domed chamber was perhaps a mile high, and suspended in the center was a light whose brilliance rivaled the sun’s. Though it flickered like a flame, it lit the deepest ends of the dome, and cast long shadows from the buildings and from what looked like people bustling between the buildings in a sea of movement and sound.
A world entombed in stone.
“It is beautiful,” the silver boy said.
“There must be thousands of them.”
“More, son of Adam. The City of the Light Bringer is more vast than you could imagine. This is only one Dome. There are thousands more.”
If the City of the Light Bringer was truly so large, of what interest could Cain and his family be? It seemed a strange thing, but still he felt the Light Bringer’s call.
Not all is as it seems.
He felt the rock wall, cold of the variety that sucked life from bone. “Why did you leave this place?”
“I have never been.”
Cain quieted himself, but uneasiness churned his stomach. The City seemed a great hub, and the knowledge the silver boy possessed spoke contrarily.
It could not have come here without me, but how do I know that? And how does it know the City’s name, and the expanse of its construction? From what hole did the silver boy crawl?
It would not tell Cain of its origins, no matter how forcefully he questioned. He remembered the prophetic streams and wondered why the silver boy’s origins, of all mysteries, remained out of reach.
Perhaps because it is a point sharpened to a tip so thin that it remains invisible to all but the one who stands upon it.
; He descended and waded through the mob like a drop of oil in a murky pond. Nudging into and flowing past him were what looked like people of varied shapes and colors. Nevertheless, they were no more people than the voice was a silver boy, and Cain felt as if he were the center of attention, sticking out like a splinter, though none addressed him.
The buildings were beautiful but cold. Everywhere he went, the pale light throbbed from the stones, hummed off the towers, and buzzed the soles of his feet. Someone screamed in a strange tongue and exchanged blows with another. A group danced and sung to Music played on unfamiliar instruments, and everywhere there was chatter, and the sound of countless feet scuffing dust from stone.
An amplified voice rumbled the Dome, and every mouth closed, and every ear turned in respect. The sudden halt startled him, and he stilled. All around were closed eyes and bowed heads, and Cain would have imitated them if not for the fear pinching the nape of his neck. The last echoes faded and the cacophony resumed. Soon he found himself pressed against the wall by a crowd of bodies.
“What was that?”
“It declared a shift of some sort.”
“Of some sort?”
“Keep moving.”
“Answer me.”
“I was born for more than to ease your curiosity.”
“I don’t care what you were born for.”
“Someday you will wish it was all you had cared about.”
“In this moment there is only you and me in this City. Remember that you would not have arrived here if not for me.” It did not respond, and he felt a sort of satisfaction in this, though soon he wondered if its silence stemmed from ignorance or hidden knowledge.
Now Cain could physically feel the Light Bringer’s pull. It was as if a magnet were set by his head and, as he went off course, it tipped him back. Time and again this happened. Eventually his legs tired and his body ached with the monotony of the journey. All numbed and fell away like stains washed in a river, and he slipped into what he could only explain as a waking dream. He was unsure how long this lasted, but remembered waking with a start against the wall at the bottom of a stairwell. He looked up the angled shaft and realized he must have descended beneath the metropolis.
Cain: The Story of the First Murder and the Birth of an Unstoppable Evil Page 9