by John Shirley
“I’m fine! Shaikh Araha told me I could do what I wanted now.”
“Shaikh who?” But then she remembered who it was. “Oh.”
“The old guy with the long white mustache! Shaikh Araha, Mom. He already checked me, he said I was good, I was okay. I ate some curds and honey and stuff. Come on, I want to show you the statue and the caves!”
She hastily dressed in jeans, sneakers, and a T-shirt, and let him lead her out into the pale winter sunlight. The air was crisp; she could smell coffee somewhere. “Where’s Nyerza?” she asked as they went.
“He’s up in one of the caves, praying,” Marcus saiddistractedly. “I’m gonna find him. Look at the idol in daytime—check it out. Is that thing cool or what?” Marcus gazed up at it, amused and awestruck, just standing there staring—then he ran to a crevice at one side of the idol and began climbing toward a shadowy overhang.
She had an impulse to forbid him to climb. He must still be weak and sick—mustn’t he?—and she didn’t want to let him out of her sight for a while. But she couldn’t quite say it.
Just let him go. . . . He’ll be all right. . . . We’ll watch over him. . . .
“You be careful, Marcus,” was all she was able to say as she gazed up at the statue.
Its sandstone cracked, blotched white by bird droppings, the idol—almost Egyptian in style but not quite—stood half-emerged from the beetling sandstone cliffs. It was as if it had been hidden away in the stuff of the Earth and then had tried to force its way out, freezing partway. Shielding her eyes against the morning sun, Melissa understood immediately what Marcus had meant by something embarrassing her. Just two yards above eye level, the idol was clasping an enormous erect phallus with its lower right hand—lower right because it had three arms, two on the right side, one on the left. The upper right hand was touching its forehead, with surprising delicacy, just to one side of its third eye. Its left hand was touching a shape made enigmatic by time and decay, close above its navel. Perhaps, she thought, it was a lotus, or a sunflower. Or what was left of a carving of the sun.
“It once had nine points on its corona, that sun,” Araha said, strolling up beside her. He scratched a shaggy white eyebrow, gazing up at the idol. “We’ve been meaning to clean him off. This bloody awful bird mess. To clean him not out of any sense of worship, you understand, but out of respect for the monks who carved him.”
“Monks? I’d have thought . . . I mean, I don’t know much about the history of the place. I thought it was an old pagan temple of some kind taken over by, I don’t know, some Christian sect. But you’d have thought they’d tear down this—this fellow.”
“So our friend Yanan did not tell you? Yanan was my student, you know, once. The monks who were here for several centuries were the ones who carved this idol about six hundred years ago. They knew it would be mistaken for a far more ancient pagan god. They wanted this confusion. They wished it to be mistaken for something other than what it was. Various archaeologists have assumed it to be Baal or perhaps a variant of Vishnu from some lost Hindu sect. But this one has no name at all. The idol is a legominism, only: a message from the past—a teaching in a code of visual symbols.”
“The three minds of man,” she said, looking at the statue, the three places on it controlled by the figure’s three hands.
“Yes. The heart mind, the mental mind, the carnal mind—this last not only sexual but also—what would you say?—all bodily nature. Instinct and so on. His hands, you see, stand ready to guide the mind, to open the soul to the energy of creation, and to control the instincts, the sex center, redirect its power. You see, if you look at the hand, he is not caressing. He is protecting, sheltering that part of himself. He keeps the energy but does not release it in the carnal way.”
She nodded. The hand, she saw now, was in front of the carved phallus, but not quite touching it. She stepped back and gazed up and down the idol. She nodded. “His arms are symmetrical, with relation to each other, to symbolize these things in balance. And his third eye is the biggest, open widest—for a consciousness that is, so to speak, open wide.”
“You are right.” He nodded solemnly. “So—is that you speaking of this figure’s meaning, young lady, or . . . ?”
She looked at him, puzzled—and then she understood. “Or them? They have not . . . spoken through me for a long time. I’m not sure they’re still there.”
He nodded gravely. “Perhaps not as before but ‘Lift the stone and find me; split the wood and there I am. . . .’ ”
“I’ve been trying to place your accent—if you don’t mind my asking. Your English is very good, and you seem to have a bit of a British accent. But it doesn’t seem to be your native language.”
He made an eloquent gesture of acknowledgment and self-deprecation. “I was educated at Eton and Oxford, but I am in fact Iranian. I lived in England, and after graduation I traveled a bit—then went back to Iran. After the Shah fell, I fled to . . . shall we say, a certain monastery in Egypt. And they sent me here. I have been here for perhaps eighteen years, a sort of caretaker and . . . like a telephone operator for this place. It is a powerful place.”
“After the Shah . . .” She looked at him more closely. This man was far older than he looked. Then she remembered what he’d done for Marcus. “Oh! I am so sorry—I’m still a bit sleepy, overwhelmed. I haven’t thanked you! You saved my son’s life!”
“I could do not less. And I’m not certain he would have died. I suspect that he was attacked, you know. They bend the laws of probability, sometimes, the servants of That Certain One. They may have directed the tainted water to him.”
Her breath caught in her throat. “You think they . . . really? They’re targeting him?” She looked up the cliff side and couldn’t see Marcus. If there were malign influences against him, could they make him miss his footing up there?
“Perhaps. I understand they have a tepaphon.”
She blinked at him, waiting for an explanation. Wondering more, each second, where Marcus was.
“I see you don’t know—but of course you don’t. The FOGC Lodge—one of the precursors of those who brought the demons about—have an instrument. It was used by the Teutonic lodges to destroy enemies at a distance. They use it to transmit what they call ‘odic’ force—we call it something else, of course. Or they can draw away one’s odic energies, inducing sickness and death from afar. It was made out of lenses and copper coils and copper plates. An image of the victim is placed in it, electricity is then passed through it, and one uses psychic force in guiding it. It can be used for projecting souls to other realms for various purposes. A truly arcane device. I understand that some modern devices can be adapted to become tepaphons. . . .”
She was only half listening now, staring past the worn, enigmatic face of the idol at the cave entrance just above the head and right shoulder. “Marcus!”
“Where is the boy?” Araha asked, a note of concern creeping into his voice.
“He climbed up there, looking for Nyerza, I think.”
“In there? But it is too soon. I have not prepared you for what will happen to him. . . .” He laid a hand on her shoulder, a touch of sympathy—and it frightened her.
She pulled away from him. “What are you talking about? What will happen to him? Why were we summoned here?”
“Mother! Is that you?”
Marcus’s voice—it was his voice, wasn’t it?—coming from above.
She looked up, flooded with relief, to see him climbing down the crevice from the cave mouth. Nyerza emerged from the cave, peered down at her, then came down by a path that zigzagged over the cliff face. There was something like grief in the slump of his shoulders. Was she imagining that?
Marcus climbed down from the crevice. “How full of energy I feel. It’s remarkable.”
Melissa stared at him. “Marcus?” There was a look on his face she didn’t recognize, one that didn’t seem to belong there. There was an unfamiliar depth in it, a new detachment. And—he had n
ever called her Mother before. Only Mom or Mama.
He gazed up at her, in a kind of fond fascination. “My mother . . .”
Suddenly she felt the chill in the breeze, heard sand ticking against the stone. “Are you okay?” She took him in her arms, and he let her embrace him, but he seemed tentative, almost embarrassed.
Araha shook his head dolefully. “Nyerza should not have acted so soon. . . .”
“He did nothing—not directly,” Marcus said softly, turning to look up the cliff. “His prayer was of a general nature, but it seemed to fill the cave with the light that cannot be seen with the carnal eyes. And then . . . I was here, fully here. The cave itself . . .” And then he said something in another language. It sounded Danish or . . .
Araha nodded grimly. “There are many ancient, powerful influences there.”
Melissa felt fury welling out of her confusion. “What are you talking about?”
Marcus stepped back from his mother and took her hands in his, looking up at her with a sad compassion. He spoke gently. “Mother, what has happened is, my root soul has emerged into my mind. It was necessary for my protection and so that I could be of help in the coming battle. It’s why we came here—so this could happen. We met before this life, Mother. I died and was incarnated as this boy—but that identity was lost, buried. Now, I am no longer a child—at least, not mentally. I am who I was when I died the last time. Last time, you see, my name was Mendel. If you like, Mother, you can continue to call me Marcus.” The boy glanced up at Araha, sighed, and continued. “This is hard for me to adapt to as well. I wonder—do you have any brandy? I could drink a double.”
Nyerza joined them; he looked at her and then at the ground.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
A basement cell in Ashgabat
Ira was shivering and naked in a corner of the room, trying to decide what time of day or night it was. He was squatting on the balls of his feet, hugging himself. He was wet, though he’d tried to wipe away some of the cold water they’d dumped on him, and he was so cold it hurt. Two burly, mustached men had come in at three in the morning and stripped him, then—without a word, except a few casual remarks to each other in their own language—had dumped a bucket of cold, filthy water over his head. And then they’d taken away his clothes and his bed, and left, locking the door again.
Ira was the only feature of the room except for the waste hole in the floor and the relentlessly burning bulb in the ceiling. He was grateful for the bulb—he could feel just a faint heat from it on his head.
It was about five or six in the morning, he guessed.
He had wiped away as much of the water as he could with his hand, flicking it away to try to conserve warmth. He found the heat drained out of him faster when he leaned against the wall or lay on the floor, but he badly wanted to lie down. He ached to lie down. But he was afraid he’d die of hypothermia if he did.
A man who called himself Akesh had come at abouttwo-thirty and, with the help of a veiled, dark-eyed translator, a woman who spoke middling-good English, had asked him some questions in a reasonable tone. It was strange, the man’s words recycled through the woman—his sharp-edged questions in her soft female voice.
Where was his wife?
Doing anthropological work in Turkmenistan, he answered.
Why was his wife sending him messages via satellite from the distant parts of Turkmenistan?
Everyone communicated over long distances that way now, if they were out in the field.
Was he an environmentalist?
Not very actively. Mostly I’m an artist.
Was he aware that there were criminal conspiracies against the oil and natural gas refineries and processing plants in Turkmenistan? Conspiracies carried out by so-called environmentalists?
No . . . he didn’t know that.
Why are you here?
To find my wife—I lost touch with her. I’m concerned about her and my child . . .
You are lying. You know where she is. Now, time for the true answers. We intercepted the transmission from a dangerous part of the desert, where we have had problems with these terrorists, who are calling themselves environmentalists, and with foreigners making deals with certain tribes of nomadic outlaws. We traced it and found the woman in question. This so-called anthropologist wife of yours. She is being watched.
Is she all right? Please! Are she and the boy all right?
Akesh had ignored the question. He merely lit a Russian cigarette—a stubby little thing—and went on.
I found out only yesterday evening that her claims to have a degree in anthropology are false. She is not known to be an anthropologist. So she is lying, and so is the man with her, and then so are you. And when we traced that transmission to you, we became interested in you, we did some research, and we were very interested to find that you had booked a flight here. And now here we all are together. Now, you will tell us the truth. Let us start at the beginning. Why are you here?
I told you . . .
When it became apparent that Ira would not change his story, Akesh smiled, showing smoke-yellowed teeth, and nodded. Then he winked at Ira and went into the hall—ignoring Ira’s requests to speak to the U.S. embassy or a lawyer. In the corridor, he issued orders to the guards. A little while later they came and stripped Ira naked, took away the bed, and brought in the bucket.
Crouching in the corner, rocking on the balls of his feet, aching, teeth chattering, he knew it was going to get worse. He was a little surprised he wasn’t more frightened. He felt a deep, resonant remorse. He’d blundered ahead; he hadn’t made a conscious choice. He’d run down the forest trail of his life on a moonless night without a torch, and he’d fallen into a ravine. And his son would be deprived of a father, his wife of a husband.
They were going to hurt him, he knew. It didn’t matter that there wasn’t even a reason for it. There wasn’t even the reason of war, or because they thought he was a spy. It would be utterly meaningless, really. It would be inflicted mindlessly. But then, that was, he reflected, what many people experienced anyway every day. Ira knew it was so—he still felt it, sometimes, as he had of old. What was it his mother had said? The lightning seen from space . . . marking, in her view, the mindless discharge of human brutality.
Then the door opened, and three men and the translator came in. The men were Akesh and two others he hadn’t seen before: a bald man with a pitted face and sallow skin and a stocky man who looked as if he would have been a harem eunuch. Both wore boots and paramilitary garb without insignia. Akesh had a steaming mug of coffee in his hand. The smell was the worst torment so far—a hot drink would have been rapture.
The two men with Akesh had electric batons in their hands. Akesh sipped his coffee and nodded. Ira guessed what was coming; he closed his eyes and tried to cover his head.
They beat him with the electric batons about the shoulders, arms, knees, genitals, and back. The batons sent electric jolts into him at each thudding contact, and the shocks somehow delayed the feeling of the actual impact but imparted something nastier—a sensation that made him think of a crocodile jerking its prey back and forth. The electricity crashing into him felt like jaws clamping into his flesh, shaking it. Then the pain of the impact came through like earthquake aftershocks and seemed to stretch feelers to the other places of impact, so there was a network of pain; and the shocks seemed to make the network pulse with its own weird internal blue light. . . .
Ira glanced up at them from under a sheltering hand, trying to make eye contact; perhaps if he let them know he was a human being, they would ease up a little. He looked into their faces, but they did not look into his. They simply went about their work. The stocky man beat him methodically, like someone beating dust from a rug. He probably would have preferred another assignment. The bald man was smiling, his eyes growing brighter with each smack of the batons: He was enjoying this. It excited him.
Ira was lying on his side, choking with vomit, and he knew he was soiling
himself; he knew his skin had split in several places, and the blood was at least warming.
“Are you ready to tell us?”
His torturers stood back for a moment and, as if through a pulsing membrane, Ira saw the translator’s brown-black eyes above her veil; he saw pity there, genuine pity, and he could see she wished she could do something for him. She seemed to be silently urging him to cooperate. He felt a profound connection to her, then; he felt for a moment that he was her and she was him—that he was everyone, even the men beating him, in other incarnations. And then he felt he was outside himself and he followed the feeling, the sense of objectivity, trying to use some of the techniques he’d learned to become detached, to move above the pain and despair, the fury at his helplessness and their mindlessness, the frustration and humiliation that hurt almost as much as their blows, and then . . .
Then they hit him again.