by Tom Leveen
“You’re saying ‘God’ like he exists,”Selby said. “I thought you were a scientist.”
“Oh, I apologize. I meant gods.”
We all looked at one another. Dr. Riley appeared pleased—in a cranky way—that he’d made an impact.
“Islam states there is but one god,”he said. “Not many other religions make this claim. Very few, in fact.”
“Christianity, Judaism—”Alex started.
“Say to have no other gods before him,”Dr. Riley said. “You want to show me where it says there’s only one? The Old Testament, or the Tanakh, the Torah? They’ll tell you you’re not supposed to have any other gods before Yahweh. You’d be hard-pressed to find anything in there about him being the only god. Have any of you ever really examined the weird stuff in the Old Testament alone? Giants, fallen angels, demons, leviathans, nephilim, the behemoth, ghosts. There are people out there who think the Bible proves the existence of the Loch Ness Monster, for crying out loud.”
“Uh, is that what you think?”Selby asked. “Because if it is . . .”
Riley fixed her with a glare that even Selby couldn’t beat. She sucked her lips between her teeth and shrank back into the chair.
“Four thousand years ago,”Riley said, “in the place we now call Iraq, you have lots of cultures running around, and they all worshipped a lot of gods. The sun, moon, fire, water, animals, you name it. But along comes this fella who says no, no, there’s one god above all the others.”
“Abraham,”Alex said.
“Father Abraham, correct. So that’s about two thousand BCE. Well, guess what’s already happened here in the good old US of A? There’s a group of people called the Patayan, who lived not far from here. A little farther west, maybe. They’d been around since ten thousand BCE. That’s eight thousand years before Father Abraham in Iraq. Now, all the Patayan’s neighbors worship the sun, the moon, fire, buffalo . . . all the usual suspects. But not the Patayan. Know what they say? There’s only one god. How about that? Guess what else—they got a flood story too. Just like four hundred ninety-nine other prehistoric cultures all over the globe.”
This wasn’t a story I’d heard before. I could tell Alex was thinking the same thing. Selby . . . well, Selby tried to look as unimpressed as ever, but she was paying attention too.
“But the Patayan flood is a little different,”Riley said. “See, their god isn’t out to get rid of naughty little humans. He said some of the animals were too wild for Earth. They had big teeth, and big claws, and were dangerous to man. And there were too many of them. So he decides to kill them off with a flood. But before he can wipe all of them out, his people actually beg him to stop, because he might kill off all the good animals too. So he relents. And we never hear anything more about the animals with the big teeth and big claws. Where’d they go? We haven’t seen any in a while. What happened to them? It’s like he’s put them away somewhere for the safety of his human followers. Maybe he put them into an ark for safekeeping. And maybe they’re still there.”
“I thought the ark was a boat,”Charlie said.
“That’s one possible definition,”Riley said. “The Old Testament uses the word ‘tebah.’ The only other time the word ‘tebah’ is used in the Old Testament is in reference to the basket Moses was put into. In both cases, the word could refer to anything meant to protect people. Maybe by the time the flood story got to the Middle East two thousand years ago, things had been switched around. In the Noah story, human beings are put into a tebah to protect them from what was happening outside of it. In the Patayan story, maybe the humans are protected by what’s put into the ark. Into the tebah.”
Tebah. One of the words I’d seen scrawled in John Prinn’s book. That at least confirmed Riley really knew about Mr. Prinn’s research.
Selby, unsurprisingly, made a quick recovery from her bashing. “Sorry, I nodded off there for a minute while you were speaking nonsense. You’re saying, what . . . Noah built a boat that rescued American Indian monsters from drowning? That’s your theory?”
“Did I go too fast?”Riley mocked. “You’re free to leave any old time. Bye.”
“Please,”Charlie said. “Keep going.”
Riley chewed his pipe for a moment as if deciding whether or not to pay attention to Charlie. Then he spoke.
“Your dad did a better job of tying up all the threads, but this is how it finally breaks down: You look at all those ancient myths, from all over the world. You start seeing their commonalities. How far back they really must go. You start studying the places where beliefs intersect instead of diverge. Pretty soon you got a whole heaven full of gods and a whole Earth full of monsters.”
“Uh, that’s a swell story, I’m sure it’ll make a great Brad Pitt movie someday, but I thought you were a scientist,”Selby said. I could practically feel waves of nicotine depletion rolling off her. “You don’t seriously believe all that crap, right? Did I miss the part where Santa Claus fought off the Martians? Or when Harry cast a spell on the vampires?”
Riley smiled, but it was anything but friendly.
“Science, eh? I see you’re quasi-intelligent. I respect that. But you lack imagination. And imagination is what puts men on the moon. Without that, facts and figures are just that, nothing more. You’re not grasping a holistic view of creation, the universe, and our place in it.”
“I’ll grasp it fine if you want to try using, I dunno, science.”
“Oh, you want to talk testable and repeatable science?”
“Yes!”
“Okay. Let’s do that for a bit.”
Dr. Riley stood up and went into the kitchen. He crashed around in the large drawers for a few moments before pulling out a glass casserole dish that had seen better days and a few Brillo pads. He came back to the table and stood beside it, holding the casserole up for us to see. Alex adjusted the camera to follow.
“Look at this dish. Nice and clean, thank you very much. Do my own dishes by hand, always have. How many dimensions does it have?”
“Uh, three,”Selby said.
“Correct. Now look at its shadow on the table. How many dimensions does that shadow have?”
“Two?”I asked.
“Correct again. But what if the dish, the physical object in its three dimensions, was only the shadow of something else?”
“That’s not possible,”Alex said, but I could see him wrestling with the idea.
It made no sense to me, either. I looked at Selby, figuring she’d be gearing up for another retort. Instead, she now sat in concentration as if scrutinizing each of Dr. Riley’s words. I guess he was finally speaking her language.
“Actually, it is possible,”Selby said. “In theory.”
“Go ahead,”Riley said, arching a bemused eyebrow. “Explain it to them.”
She glowered back, but did face us. “So there are lots of theories in physics, okay? String theory, M-theory, the holographic principle . . . all kinds of stuff. We live in four dimensions, right? Three plus time. Well, the holographic principle suggests that our dimensions are only a shadow of a fifth dimension that we can’t perceive with our senses, or our technology. Not yet, anyway. It’s only ever been suggested on paper.”
“Well done,”Riley said, giving her a nod, which only elicited another glare from Selby. “Now. What kind of beings might be capable of residing in that fifth dimension of reality?”
“What, God?”Selby said, not trying to conceal a sneer.
“No,”Riley barked back. “Give the gods a few more dimensions than that. I’m talking about flesh-and-blood animals that maybe used to exist here until they were sent there.”
“Monsters from the fifth dimension!”Alex said in a movie voice-over.
“Laugh it up,”Riley said, and nobody did. “You all asked the questions. I’m giving you possible answers. Use your imagination and consider what a giant Biblical carnivore who’s been locked away for milennia in a fifth dimension of reality might look like. What it might be capable of
. I’m talking about creatures with, let’s say . . . big teeth. And big claws. And they’re dangerous to humanity. And maybe there were too many of them. And they were supposed to get killed off. In a flood. Am I ringing any bells, children?”
Echoes of his Patayan flood myth circled the room like hawks before landing on my scalp with curved nails.
“So,”Riley said with a dramatic shrug. “Maybe some of those creatures were put into an ark, a tebah, in order to preserve ancient humanity, and maybe that ark has nothing to do with our four dimensions.”
He tossed the dish to the table, where it clattered loudly and made me tense up. Riley crashed back to his kitchen chair and relit the pipe. His hands trembled as he did it.
Selby stood. “Okay, this is ridiculous. You are obviously, like, insane or senile or whatever, but this is bullshit. There was this brief, brief moment where I was tracking with you, but then you went off the goddamn rails again. I’m going to have a smoke.”
“It’s a big world, and an even bigger universe,”Riley said as Selby reached the front door. “And there’s probably something even bigger than the universe. I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. But John Prinn might’ve figured it out. And it might’ve gotten him killed.”
“Well!”Selby said. “That brings us to the end of Crazy Time here at Uncle Nutzy’s Funhouse. I’m going to go spread carcinoma in my lungs to sooner rid myself of this type of execrable scholarship. Peace out, folks.”
She marched out the door, but didn’t close it behind her; she left it swinging open on its hinges. It gave me the impression she didn’t want to be left out of anything else that might be said as she smoked on the porch.
Riley turned his gaze to us, as if assessing. Maybe trying to decide if we were worthy of what other information he had. But was this information? Or just mad ramblings? Selby had a point: maybe he suffered from senility. He didn’t look or sound like someone having cognitive trouble. So that left insanity. Much more likely, but somehow, it didn’t seem right.
“Dr. Riley?”I said.
He met my eyes. His seemed tired now.
“I’m sorry, but wouldn’t we already know about all this if it were true? Giant animals, all that sort of thing. Wouldn’t that be clear in the fossil record or something?”
“You’re not grasping scale. Do you know how many new species of animal are discovered every year? Have you ever been through the Sonoran desert here? Or the Sahara? Brazilian rain forests, arctic tundra? The square mileage of earth that’s never been excavated . . . There could be entire civilizations right under us and we might never know it. There are known archeological sites in the Holy Land, sites with enormous archaeological value, and they haven’t been excavated because of politics and religion. Those are sites we know about, and that don’t date that far back, comparatively. What else is out there we don’t know about?”
“There would still be proof,”Charlie said.
The words went up like a target, and Riley shot right at them.
“Glaciers grind stones and metal into powder. Even Styrofoam won’t last a thousand years. You’re still dismissing scale. On the scale of the three or four billion years this planet’s been around, humans aren’t much. Our best concrete will turn to dust after six hundred years. Steel rusts and disintegrates. Solar radiation destroys plastic very quickly in geological terms. Even Kevlar crumbles because of ultraviolet radiation if it’s not treated with certain paints. The older a thing is, the harder it is to date, and the harder it is to find. And if you’re talking fossils, those are extremely rare things. Just the right set of environmental factors has to be at play for us to get fossils. Now you throw one or a couple hundred transdimensional deities into the mix, and it’s no wonder there’s no proof. Evidence, on the other hand, is exactly what your dad was collecting. I think he found it.”
Riley hoisted himself up and shuffled into the kitchen. He poured himself a shot of, I assume, tequila, downed it, shook himself, then leaned against the countertop. I wondered if he was neither senile nor insane, and was instead just plain drunk.
“You’re here about that cave,”he said. “Well, caves have a very long history with us. As far back as our brand of mankind goes, caves have been places of magic. Maybe there’s a reason for that.”
“You believe in magic?”Alex said. His voice was gentle but sincere.
“Of course not. What I mean by ‘magic’ is a science utterly above and beyond anything our young little brains can fathom without resorting to lunacy to protect ourselves. Flying in the sky was once magical. Ships to other worlds were once magical. Right now, proving something as simple as string theory would be magical for all of a day or two, before it became common sense. This science, this magic Prinn talked to me about . . . it goes well beyond that.”
We remained silent for a moment, until Selby stomped back inside, trailing the scent of smoke behind her, went straight to Dr. Riley, and jabbed her finger at him.
“You know what I think? I think you’re like a freaking Scooby-Doo villain. And this is all bullshit, and stupid, and dumb. I cannot believe I wasted all this time to have an insane old man try to fill us all full of such shit. A doctor, no less. What a waste.”
“Young lady,”Dr. Riley said, unimpressed, “there will always be frontiers. You’re on one right now. It’s always frightening when the old order crumbles. So I don’t blame you for being so disagreeable. Having said that, I truly do not care what you think.”
He looked past her at the rest of us. “The official explanation was a cave-in, kids. Let it go at that.”
“Gladly,”Selby said, and crashed out of the house. She didn’t stop at the porch this time, veering instead straight for the RV.
“Okay.”Charlie sighed. “Cut.”
Alex hit the record button on the camera.
“Thank you, Dr. Riley,”Charlie said, and got up from his seat.
“Go home, son,”Riley said, with that oddly paternal note in his voice again. It made me wonder how Dad was doing. “Go home, and make a movie about bad guys and good guys. Let this thing go.”
Charlie peered closely at the old professor. “Why? How come?”
“Because no matter what, nothing good comes out of this for you. Nothing.”
“Maybe we find out what really happened.”
“Maybe. Or maybe you just get hurt. For months, I listened to your dad go off on all this stuff.”He gestured around the room. “This is where it got me.”
“He’s why you left teaching?”I asked.
Riley snorted like I was the dimmest bulb in this box he’d had to deal with. “I was a tenured professor at a prestigious university with a boatload of annual endowment money. After John Prinn dragged me into his research, I ended up a broke-ass alcoholic living in the desert waiting for Armageddon. If I thought Prinn was alive, I’d be first in line to punch his face off.”
He eyed each one of us. The look on his face froze me.
“Children, listen to me. You want to know if I believe in the supernatural. No, I do not. As your little scientist there has said, I’m a scientist too. And what I’m telling you is that humanity’s imaginary supernatural stories, our monsters and ghosts and demons . . . they are a pleasant walk in the park compared to what science is going to prove about this universe someday. Someday soon.”He looked specifically at Charlie. “Your dad was close to accomplishing just that. To opening a door that will change everything we know and accept about our teeny-tiny so-called reality. And children? My plan is to be long dead before that happens.”
I noticed Charlie wiping a hand on his jeans, as if in preparation to shake the professor’s hand, but he didn’t do it.
“You could blow it up,”he said instead. “Dynamite the entrance so the cave couldn’t be accessed.”
Riley literally laughed.
“Dynamite?”He kept laughing. At the tail end, he repeated it. “Dynamite. Huh. You didn’t hear one goddamn word I said. Just like your dad. Get on out of here.”
Charlie gave him a nod, then nodded at me too, and together we walked out of the house.
23
Now
* * *
The blast from the shotgun reverberates through my body. I roll over onto my back, unable to grasp the meaning of this fresh new hell.
It’s Dr. Riley. He has the shotgun leveled at the place where the window had been a moment before. How Charlie and I avoided the pellets, I don’t know. Then again, maybe we haven’t. Maybe the pain just hasn’t reached me yet, and maybe Charlie is behind me, dead, and I’m already bleeding out . . .
The top half of the professor’s head is missing.
He turns to look down at me. I can see he must have placed the shotgun a few inches above his eyes and pulled the trigger. A crater of bone shows the pulped remains of his brain open to the air. But his eyes . . . his eyes swim with malicious green-black liquid smoke, mesmerizing me away from the horror of his ghastly appearance.
I try to get to my feet, but succeed only in digging glass into my palms. I cry out and worm my way up by bracing my back against the couch. Dr. Riley—if he can rightly be called that anymore—follows me with those green-black eyes. They’re like the fluid insides of a glow stick mixed into motor oil. Not a bit of whites, cornea, or iris is visible.
The Riley-thing takes a step, clumsily lifting a foot over the short wall that remains of the windowsill. He scans the room mutely as I finally get to my feet and shuffle back against one wall, holding out bleeding hands to ward him off.
But he doesn’t want me. He walks—toddles, really, like a little kid—over to the kitchen. That’s when I spot Charlie. He’s hunkered down, shaking glass from his hair as the professor stomps past him. Charlie sees him, looks for me, and rushes to my side.
“Okay?”he says, or seems to say, because I still can’t hear much of anything.
Instead of answering, I just watch in awe as the zombie creature goes into the kitchen and opens a drawer. Good God, is he making something to eat?