by Jack Ketchum
But the concept was old as time. The joining of the two-it was the figure of the universe.
Man and woman. Brother and sister. Sun and moon. Life and death.
And now one hard, rapacious woman as powerful as he had died and iriumed and tapped a vein of purest fear, primal as the cave. Whether by in accident, chance, or by the design of an anemic corrupted earth seeking and thrust into violent life again she had found that vein and drunk deeply.
Now as always, fear had its counterpart-death had its counterpart. Itach fell victim to the other. The circle closed again.
He walked the steps, a man no longer young, but felt no strain. The dogs yelped-scalded-and ran away from him.
In some hidden part of him was the knowledge that had been with him since the beginning-that he would die here. But as someone had told him once, in another life, in another world entirely, there were far worse places to do that. He stalked her up the mountain.
The dogs had scented them.
He pulled Billie under a shelf of rock so that at least they couldn’t hit her from behind and then waited, holding tightly to the heavy stick, palms sweating into the rough dry wood.
The baying stopped. They were near now. He could hear scuffling, paws scrabbling against bare rock.
There.
He could see eyes glowing in front of him and wished for fire. But there was no fire.
He screamed-ferociously, he hoped.
He darted out into them, swinging the stick wildly, sounding to himself like some great choking bear.
He hoped they wouldn’t smell the fear on him.
They scattered.
He watched them lope across the mountain. He was amazed. Had he done that?
He went back to her. She was sitting up, staring at him. She said his name.
“Can you walk?”
She nodded.
They had to get away from here. Someplace he could defend. Someplace with just one entrance.
“You sure?’
“Yes.”
“Okay.” He slipped off his sweater and gave it to her. He looked at her, at the bruises and the blood, as she put it on. Something gave inside him. She saw it happen.
“Later,” she said. ‘Tell me later.”
“When we’re out of this.”
“Yes.”
He gazed out into the night. He could see eyes glinting a few yards away.
“They’re out there. Make lots of noise, all right?’
He squeezed her hand.
***
Then they were up and out, screaming, hollering, running around the side of the mountain while his eyes strained in the meager light to find some sort of break in the rock below, great dark shapes chasing after them, growling, snapping at them from behind and then bolting away as he turned and swung at them, hesitating and then coming back fast. He felt something grip his pants leg. It almost tripped him. He turned and kicked, felt himself connect and heard the big dog yelp.
She was ahead of him now and he ran after her, searching the mountainside. Down below on the far side of the mountain he saw a boat anchored in a tiny inlet-it barely had time to register. And then he saw a place a few feet down along a jagged wash. Some sort of hole. He called her.
She turned.
He saw the dog go after her, rushing past him, snarling. He moved fast, cracked it across the shoulder with the stick. The dog jumped and bounded away. He pulled her toward him and then down the few steps to the hole. She stumbled and they nearly went down the mountain. He caught himself and shoved her out ahead of him into it, and then she was safe inside. He leapt after her.
Jaws clamped hard on his leg, oh his calf just above the ankle.
He fell, reached forward to the edge of the hole and howled, more in fear than in pain because there wasn’t much pain yet, just the sickening feeling of being drawn back, the unreal dreamlike agony of being hauled back by his own tom flesh from that place of safety. He saw her reach for him, the pale white palm of her hand.
Too far!
He whirled and slashed with the stick, caught the dog across the muzzle. Blood and spittle flew over him. He saw the mad red-rimmed eyes. The dog yelped and let go. He tried to pull the leg up so he could crawl inside but the leg wouldn’t go, something was wrong there-and then he did feel pain, a rocketburst of pain as a second pair of jaws replaced the first, came down on the very same spot and another dog hit him in the knee. He felt bone grind against bone. He screamed and struck out wildly.
He felt the hard-soft thud of contact once, twice, then three times and suddenly he was free again and his hand went out to her-and she’d angled herself out closer by then. Her grip was strong as he hauled himself toward her.
Then she screamed too.
The hand slid away, slowly, in slow motion-and he didn’t understand, he couldn’t hold on to it.
He saw pity and terror on her face, just for a moment.
Then her face pulled back too and he strained and struggled to the edge of the hole and peered in, shouted her name, and saw her sliding down, sliding away from him into the blackness in the depths of the mountain.
BILLIE
The walls were cold and slick, smooth, and she could get no purchase with her fingers-she felt the fingernails break as she clawed the cool granite surface, as the hands drew her down and down into the damp-smelling darkness. They were Lelia’s hands, she’d felt them before, she knew them. She was in some ancient cistern, going down forty feet or more while the smooth hard stone bruised and scraped at her, became colder, being dragged over wet slick steps cut thousands of years ago into the living rock. With a cry of anger and despair she knew it to be her grave.
Hands jerked her around a comer and the dark sky blotted away entirely so that now she plunged through a world of darkest night and she turned and bent forward at the waist, not minding the bright stabs of pain as the steps bruised her hip and thigh. She swung hard with her fists at what dragged her, swung where the body should be, the face, the hands. There was nothing.
Nothing. The faint smell of ether. And the dragging.
She screamed his name. The walls gave back no echo. She heard the thing that was Lelia crooning to her.
Come. Come now.
She curled herself into a ball to cushion herself against the jolting- and then the stairs were gone and there was only a long smooth slide, the walls around her as though the earth itself were bathed in a chilling sweat and then that stopped too.
The hands released her.
She lay in a shallow pool of water, all around her a blinding, stifling darkness and for a moment there was silence, just the faintest of scraping sounds up ahead where she had come from-where Dodgson was-and then she felt the long black fingernails tear down through his sweater. She felt them on her breasts, poised there.
Soft lips touched her neck.
She smelled the foul stench of her and remembered how it was supposed to end-the sudden rending-what she’d seen her do to herself a thousand nightmare years ago on the mountain.
He’d wished for fire.
He’d damn well got it.
He was halfway over the rim of the hole, trying to get to her, knowing the wounds in his leg made it impossible, when he felt a sudden heat and turned to see.
The figure came straight toward him, naked, streaming flame- long bright filaments of flame like a red-yellow swirling fog burning off into the air around him
He walked amid a raging holocaust.
A man. Or what had been a man. Something magnificent now and terrifying.
“Hecate!” The voice breathed crimson fire.
The dogs ran yapping away in confusion, ears flat, tails dragging. Apollo, he thought.
Something he had made.
BILLIE
And Billie heard the hissing come from deep in Lelia’s throat, felt her fingernails retract like cat claws and saw the eyes light up with an inner glow, a liquid phosphorescence that moved from the eyes through the rest of her body like a floo
d tide surging, saw her crouched above her, hair standing on end, nipples long, erect, teeth bared in a wide feral snarl.
In the darkness of the cistern she was the only light.
She saw her muscles contract, tighten.
Then suddenly she moved, crawling up over Billie’s body like some great pale spider. Up along the passageway to Dodgson and whatever called her name.
THE HUNTRESS
He had come to her.
She crept toward him through the cistern.
What she was informed her fully. In this she and Chase were alike now.
The others meant nothing. Not even Dodgson. She could not recall his name.
He was a vessel to carry the fear of her, from which the Other would drink, and change. Nothing more.
She moved toward a convocation that had not been seen for over two thousand years on earth and which even then through all the ages before had been glimpsed only through veils of drunkenness, drugs and dreams in the raging minds of her initiate. A mummery of the drama that had made the world and continued to create it still, in time, matter and space-that birthed new worlds even now billions of light-years away in the dissolute awakening of a great imploding star. Toward her dumb show she climbed, toward her Easter passion. The spider in the heart of the rock. The rock in the heart of the flame.
He fell back from the edge of the cistern as though a fist had slapped him down.
Such was the force of her.
Above him lightning crackled. He smelled ozone heavy on the atmosphere.
She emerged blue-black, drifting, luminous.
It wasn’t Lelia.
The form was hers but the face, the eyes, the bearing-all had transmuted into something hard as steel yet delicate and light as air. He saw a grace she had never had in life and saw that mixed with a great brute strength and something more. She was beautiful-unbelievably, perfectly beautiful-and terrorizing. As though changed to liquid stone- unnatural.
She looked at him, her head turning slowly.
The heartlessness of spiders. The tenderness of wolves.
His heart thudded massively in his chest. He closed his eyes, squeezed them tight. He could die under this gaze now.
She could kill at a glance. Medusa.
He pressed hard against the rockface, his wounds, his pain forgotten.
He opened his eyes and she was staring into the column of flame that Dodgson knew was a man. A stutter of static electricity raced between them. Pale bolts of blue and yellow. Beside him the rockface glimmered.
She reached slowly deep inside her belly.
When her hands emerged again she held something writhing, crawling.
She held it aloft.
He heard a voice that was not a voice. He had the urge to scream. The rockface shuddered.
I give this to you.
He saw a child, tiny, covered with the blood and mucus of birthing, so small she could have held it in one hand-and it lived, it smiled. Its teeth were sharp and pointed. Its mouth drooled dark arterial blood.
Across from her the fires dimmed for a moment. He saw the man show suddenly through, the eyes of Jordan Thayer Chase blinking and flickering with a mute human sorrow.
Then the look was gone. The eyes blazed again, pools of roaring flame.
He saw the dead standing ringed about her. He saw Xenia. Eduardo. Danny.
She held the child out to them.
And you, she said.
She turned to Dodgson.
And to you.
He felt it like a curse.
Then her hands were empty.
He saw her smile and turn her hands out and over toward Chase in an age-old gesture of invitation, saw her step forward-a single step, yet firm, final-and then saw Chase move to where she stood and reach for her, take her in his arms, the real Chase now and not the thing cloaked in flames, the man, as naked as she was. She wrapped her arms around him and seemed to go softer suddenly. Then opened her mouth to him.
He saw the lips pull back.
He saw teeth like the fangs of vipers.
“No!" he screamed, a warning lost in the rising wind, in thunder. Yet for an instant Chase looked at him, seemed to recognize him there against the rocks for the first time. His eyes were old and tired, knowing. In his face Dodgson read courage and inevitability.
Her head struck down.
The jugular broke. Suddenly they were bathed in blood.
He saw Chase’s arms tighten swiftly behind her back and thought, A reflex, a spasm, but the strong arms pulled at her, pulled her down and the fire flared again as blood spurted over them, sizzling. He saw his hips draw back-her teeth still deep in his neck, eyes ecstatic-and then plunge forward as he entered her.
She howled, tore her dripping mouth away from him and howled in rage, in pleasure and pain, struggled, clawed at him, but his arms held fast and he plunged into her again and again while the flames rose high around them, scorching the brush along the rockface, illuminating Dodgson trembling and holding tight to the rock and screaming into her screams like a single breath in a hurricane.
Above him lightning flashed and suddenly he saw her flesh go white and transparent as the flesh of a maggot, saw the red and blue of veins and arteries, saw heart, lungs and larynx working while her body thrashed and pounded him. He saw Chase rise up and dig hard and finally burst blindingly inside her in a bright red column of flame that filled her, scorched her. He heard her cry of joy ride brilliantly through the electric night sky.
And fell in a sudden blast of purest light.
AT SEA
Billie.
He had awakened to find himself lying in her arms. It was near dawn.
Beside her a bit of scrub was still burning.
Now the Balthazar tumbled through the waves.
The seas were relatively calm and that was good because Dodgson had little experience with boats. She sat next to him on the fly bridge, drinking scotch from a paper cup. They’d found it below.
Along with a pair of bodies, male and female. Older people.
Billie shivered. Even with the blanket on she couldn’t get rid of the lingering cold. Yet she couldn’t bring herself to use the woman’s clothing either. She’d taken some peroxide, iodine and bandages from the cupboard in the hold and she’d taken the blankets and the whiskey. That was enough.
Morning dawned while they were still some minutes from shore, bright and clear, a gleaming red glow on a glittering sea. In the distance they could see the town, the small squat whitewashed houses climbing the hill from the port in long uneven rows. She thought of the zigzag maze of streets and wondered what they held now, what harvest the night had brought them. She’d been told the Greeks were resilient. She thought they had better be.
She finished the whiskey and came around behind him.
“Rob? It’s over now, isn’t it?”
She thought of the bodies lying below.
There were deep dark smudges under his eyes.
“Yes. It’s over.”
“What happened last night? What did you see?”
“I’m not sure,” he said. “Give me a while. Then we’ll talk about it. We’ll figure it out together.”
“All right.”
She could see the tall masts of ships in the harbor.
Dodgson slowed their speed a little.
The world began in terror, she thought. She did not know why the notion should come to her now, staring out at the tranquil sea.
But all at once she knew she disagreed with him.
It wasn’t over.
The knowledge came from inside her. Perhaps Jordan Chase would have a name for it but she did not. Nor did she know what it meant for her, good or bad.
All she knew was that inside her. faint as whispers, something stirred.
ATHENS
He’d thought that they would never return, that it was unthinkable after all they’d seen. But three months later here they were, drawn back nearly the way Chase had been, sitting outside a ta
verna on Matoyanni Street in Plaka drinking coffee in the sun on a bright September morning.
Dodgson read the Athens News. Billie sketched the entrance to a painter’s studio off to his right, the crisp shadows on the walls, the old brass lantern, the open window painted red. He’d glance up from his paper now and then and see the calm concentration on her face, the assuredness, the deft strokes of pastels across pad, her fingers smudging-subtle softenings of detail.
He read the newspapers with uncommon interest these days.
There were a couple of stories he was following.
The Greek government had finally fallen. Observers had been predicting it for months-but now that it had finally happened there was a great scrambling for position.
His interest in Greece had not abated. He was following the political players in the drama as closely as possible. There was one he liked. Interestingly enough, a woman.
In Washington State, Mount St. Helens had erupted again. A survey party was missing-among them two prominent geologists and a nature writer with whom Dodgson had long ago had a brief acquaintance. But he watched the story less for the news of the writer than because in one early item, printed the day after the mountain blew, there was mention of an overnight crime wave in a nearby town.
So far there had been no follow-up.
***
In Paris they had executed their Iranian terrorist. Nice they’d found a little courage again.
“What time does it open?” Billie said. “I know you told me, but I forget.”
“Eight.”
“What time’s it now?”
He looked at his watch. “Seven twenty-five.”
“I’m almost through. Just give me a sec.”
‘Take your time.”
“No. We want to beat the crowds, remember?”