Too Close to God

by Jeff Long

  “Russians?” someone else tried.

  “Nazis?”

  “Drug lords?”

  “Tibetan bandits!”

  The guesses weren’t so wild. Tibet had long been a chessboard for the Great Game.

  ”We saw you checking the map. You were looking for something.”

  “Origins,” Ike said. “A starting point.”

  “And?”

  With both hands, Ike smoothed down the thigh hair and exposed another set of numbers. “These are map coordinates.”

  “For where he got shot down. It makes perfect sense.” Bernard was with him now.

  “You mean his airplane might be somewhere close?”

  Mount Kailash was forgotten. The prospect of a crash site thrilled them.

  “Not exactly,” Ike said.

  “Spit it out, man. Where did he go down?”

  Here’s where it got a little fantastic. Mildly, Ike said, “East of here.”

  “How far east?”

  “Just above Burma.”

  “Burma!” Bernard and Cleopatra registered the incredibility. The rest sat mute, perplexed within their own ignorance.

  “On the north side of the range,” said Ike, “slightly inside Tibet.”

  “But that’s over a thousand miles away.”

  “I know.”

  It was well past midnight. Between their café lattes and adrenaline, sleep was unlikely for hours to come. They sat erect or stood in the cave while the enormity of this character’s journey sank in.

  “How did he get here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I thought you said he was a prisoner.”

  Ike exhaled cautiously. “Something like that.”

  “Something?”

  “Well.” He cleared his throat softly. “More like a pet.”

  “What!”

  “I don’t know. It’s a phrase he uses, right here: ‘favored cosset.’ That’s a pet calf or something, isn’t it?”

  “Ah, get out, Ike. If you don’t know, don’t make it up.”

  He hunched. It sounded like crazed drivel to him, too.

  “Actually it’s a French term,” a voice interjected. It was Cleo, the librarian. “Cosset means lamb, not calf. Ike’s right, though. It does refer to a pet. One that is fondled and enjoyed.”

  “Lamb?” someone objected, as if Cleo—or the dead man, or both—were insulting their pooled intelligence.

  “Yes,” Cleo answered, “lamb. But that bothers me less than the other word, ‘favored.’ That’s a pretty provocative term, don’t you think?”

  By the group’s silence, they clearly had not thought about it.

  “This?” she asked them, and almost touched the body with her fingers. “This is favored? Favored over what others? And above all, favored by whom? In my mind, anyway, it suggests some sort of master.”

  “You’re inventing,” a woman said. They didn’t want it to be true.

  “I wish I were,” said Cleo. “But there is this, too.”

  Ike had to squint at the faint lettering where she was pointing. Corvée, it said.

  “What’s that?”

  “More of the same,” she answered. “Subjugation. Maybe he was a prisoner of the Japanese. It sounds like The Bridge on the River Kwai or something.”

  “Except I never heard of the Japanese putting nose rings in their prisoners,” Ike said.

  “The history of domination is complex.”

  “But nose rings?”

  “All kinds of unspeakable things have been done.”

  Ike made it more emphatic. “Gold nose rings?”

  “Gold?” She blinked as he played his light on the dull gleam.

  “You said it yourself. A favored lamb. And you asked the question. Who favored this lamb?”

  “You know?”

  “Put it this way. He thought he did. See this?” Ike pushed at one ice-cold leg. It was a single word almost hidden on the left quadricep.

  “Satan,” she lip-read to herself.

  “There’s more,” he said, and gently rotated the skin.

  Exists, it said.

  “This is part of it, too.” He showed her. It was assembled on the flesh like a prayer or a poem. Bone of my bones / flesh of my flesh. “From Genesis, right? The Garden of Eden.”

  He could sense Kora struggling to orchestrate some sort of rebuttal. “He was a prisoner,” she tried. “He was writing about evil. In general. It’s nothing. He hated his captors. He called them Satan. The worst name he knew.”

  “You’re doing what I did,” Ike said. “You’re fighting the evidence.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “What happened to him was evil. But he didn’t hate it.”

  “Of course he did.”

  “And yet there’s something here,” Ike said.

  “I’m not so sure,” Kora said.

  “It’s in between the words. A tone. Don’t you feel it?”

  Kora did—her frown was clear—but she refused to admit it. Her wariness seemed more than academic.

  “There are no warnings here,” Ike said. “No ‘Beware.’ No ‘Keep Out.’”

  “What’s your point?”

  “Doesn’t it bother you that he quotes Romeo and Juliet? And talks about Satan the way Adam talked about Eve?”

  Kora winced. “He didn’t mind the slavery.”

  “How can you say that?” she whispered.

  “Kora.” She looked at him. A tear was starting in one eye. “He was grateful. It was written all over his body.”

  She shook her head in denial.

  “You know it’s true.”

  “No, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Yes, you do,” Ike said. “He was in love.”

  Cabin fever set in.

  On the second morning, Ike found that the snow had drifted to basketball-rim heights outside the cave’s entryway. By then the tattooed corpse had lost its novelty, and the group was getting dangerous in its boredom. One by one, the batteries of their Walkmans winked out, leaving them bereft of the music and words of angels, dragons, earth drums, and spiritual surgeons. Then the gas stove ran out of fuel, meaning several addicts went into caffeine withdrawal. It did not help matters when the supply of toilet paper ran out.

  Ike did what he could. As possibly the only kid in Wyoming to take classical flute lessons, he’d scorned his mother’s assurances that someday it would come in handy. Now she was proved right. He had a plastic recorder, and the notes were quite beautiful in the cave. At the end of some Mozart snatches, they applauded, then petered off into their earlier moroseness.

  On the morning of the third day, Owen went missing. Ike was not surprised. He’d seen mountain expeditions get high-centered on storms just like this, and knew how twisted the dynamics could get. Chances were Owen had wandered off to get exactly this kind of attention. Kora thought so, too.

  “He’s faking it,” she said. She was lying in his arms, their sleeping bags zipped together. Even the weeks of sweat had not worn away the smell of her coconut shampoo. At his recommendation, most of the others had buddied up for warmth, too, even Bernard. Owen was the one who had apparently gotten left out in the cold.

  “He must have been heading for the front door,” Ike said. “I’ll go take a look.” Reluctantly he unzipped his and Kora’s paired bags and felt their body heat vanish into the chill air.

  He looked around the cave’s chamber. It was dark and freezing. The naked corpse towering above them made the cave feel like a crypt. On his feet now, blood moving again, Ike didn’t like the look of their entropy. It was too soon to be lying around dying.

  “I’ll come with you,” Kora said.

  It took them three minutes to reach the entranceway.

  “I don’t hear the wind anymore,” Kora said. “Maybe the storm’s stopped.”

  But the entry was plugged by a ten-foot-high drift, complete with a wicked cornice curling in at the crown. It allowed no light or so
und from the outer world. “I don’t believe it,” Kora said.

  Ike kick-stepped his boot toes into the hard crust and climbed to where his head bumped the ceiling. With one hand he karate-chopped the snow and managed a thin view. The light was gray out there, and hurricane-force winds were skinning the surface with a freight-train roar. Even as he watched, his little opening sealed shut again. They were bottled up.

  He slid back to the base of the snow. For the moment he forgot about the missing client.

  “Now what?” Kora asked behind him.

  Her faith in him was a gift. Ike took it. She—they—needed him to be strong.

  “One thing’s certain,” he said. “Our missing man didn’t come this way. No footprints, and he couldn’t have gotten out through that snow anyway.”

  “But where could he have gone?”

  “There might be some other exit.” Firmly he added, “We may need one.”

  He had suspected the existence of a secondary feeder tunnel. Their dead RAF pilot had written about being reborn from a “mineral womb” and climbing into an “agony of light.” On the one hand, Isaac could have been describing every ascetic’s reentry into reality after prolonged meditation. But Ike was beginning to think the words were more than spiritual metaphor. Isaac had been a warrior, after all, trained for hardship. Everything about him declared the literal physical world. At any rate, Ike wanted to believe that the dead man might have been talking about some subterranean passage. If he could escape through it to here, maybe they could escape through it to there, wherever that might be.

  Back in the central chamber, he prodded the group to life. “Folks,” he announced, “we could use a hand.”

  A camper’s groan emitted from one cluster of Gore-Tex and fiberfill. “Don’t tell me,” someone complained, “we have to go save him.”

  “If he found a way out of here,” Ike retorted, “then he’s saved us. But first we have to find him.”

  Grumbling, they rose. Bags unzipped. By the light of his headlamp, Ike watched their pockets of body heat drift off in vaporous bursts, like souls. From here on, it was imperative to keep them on their feet. He led them to the back of the cave. There were a dozen portals honeycombing the chamber’s walls, though only two were man-sized. With all the authority he could muster, Ike formed two teams: them all together, and him. Alone. “This way we can cover twice the distance,” he explained.

  “He’s leaving us,” Cleo despaired. “He’s saving himself.”

  “You don’t know Ike,” Kora said.

  “You won’t leave us?” Cleo asked him.

  Ike looked at her, hard. “I won’t.”

  Their relief showed in long streams of exhaled frost.

  “You need to stick together,” he instructed them solemnly. “Move slowly. Stay in flashlight range at all times. Take no chances. I don’t want any sprained ankles. If you get tired and need to sit down for a while, make sure a buddy stays with you. Questions? None? Good. Now let’s synchronize watches....”

  He gave the group three plastic “candles,” six-inch tubes of luminescent chemicals that could be activated with a twist. The green glow didn’t light much space and only lasted two or three hours. But they would serve as beacons every few hundred yards: crumbs upon the forest floor.

  “Let me go with you,” Kora murmured to him. Her yearning surprised him.

  “You’re the only one I trust with them,” he said. “You take the right tunnel, I’ll take the left. Meet me back here in an hour.” He turned to go. But they didn’t move. He realized they weren’t just watching him and Kora, but waiting for his blessing. “Vaya con Dios,” he said gruffly.

  Then, in full view of the others, he kissed Kora. One from the heart, broad, a breath-taker. For a moment, Kora held on tight, and he knew things were going to be all right between them, they were going to find a way.

  Ike had never had much stomach for caving. The enclosure made him claustrophobic. Just the same, he had good instincts for it. On the face of it, ascending a mountain was the exact reverse of descending into a cave. A mountain gave freedoms that could be equally horrifying and liberating. In Ike’s experience, caves took away freedom in the same proportions. Their darkness and sheer gravity were tyrants. They compressed the imagination and deformed the spirit. And yet both mountains and caves involved climbing. And when you came right down to it, there was no difference between ascent and descent. It was all the same circle. And so he made swift progress.

  Five minutes deep, he heard a sound and paused. “Owen?”

  His senses were in flux, not just heightened by the darkness and silence, but also subtly changed. It was hard to put words to, the clean dry scent of dust rendered by mountains still in birth, the scaly touch of lichen that had never seen sunshine. The visuals were not completely trustworthy. You saw like this on very dark nights on a mountain, a headlight view of the world, one beam wide, truncated, partial.

  A muffled voice reached him. He wanted it to be Owen so the search could be over and he could return to Kora. But the tunnels apparently shared a common wall. Ike put his head against the stone—chill, but not bitterly cold—and could hear Bernard calling for Owen.

  Farther on, Ike’s tunnel became a slot at shoulder height. “Hello?” he called into the slot. For some reason, he felt his animal core bristle. It was like standing at the mouth of a deep, dark alleyway. Nothing was out of place. Yet the very ordinariness of the walls and empty stone seemed to promise menace.

  Ike shone his headlamp through the slot. As he stood peering into the depths at a tube of fractured limestone identical to the one he was already occupying, he saw nothing in itself to fear. Yet the air was so... inhuman. The smells were so faint and unadulterated that they verged on no smell, Zen-like, clear as water. It was almost refreshing. That made him more afraid.

  The corridor extended in a straight line into darkness. He checked his watch: thirty-two minutes had passed. It was time to backtrack and meet the group. That was the arrangement, one hour, round trip. But then, at the far edge of his light beam, something glittered.

  Ike couldn’t resist. It was like a tiny fallen star in there. And if he was quick, the whole exercise wouldn’t last more than a minute. He found a foothold and pulled himself in. The slot was just big enough to squeeze through, feetfirst.

  On the other side of the wall, nothing had changed. This part of the tunnel looked no different from the other. His light ahead picked out the same gleam twinkling in the far darkness.

  Slowly he brought his light down to his feet. Beside one boot, he found another reflection identical to the one glinting in the distance. It gave the same dull gleam.

  He lifted his boot.

  It was a gold coin.

  Carefully, blood knocking through his veins, Ike stopped. A tiny voice warned him not to pick it up. But there was no way....

  The coin’s antiquity was sensuous. Its lettering had worn away long ago, and the shape was asymmetrical, nothing stamped by any machine. Only a vague, amorphous bust of some king or deity still showed.

  Ike shone his light down the tunnel. Past the next coin he saw a third one winking in the blackness. Could it be? The naked Isaac had fled from some precious underground reserve, even dropping his pilfered fortune along the way.

  The coins blinked like feral eyes. Otherwise the stone throat lay bare, too bright in the foreground, too dark in the back. Too neatly appointed with one coin, then another.

  What if the coins had not been dropped? What if they’d been placed? The thought knifed him. Like bait.

  He slugged his back against the cold stone.

  The coins were a trap.

  He swallowed hard, forced himself to think it through.

  The coin was cold as ice. With one fingernail he scraped away a veneer of encrusted glacier dust. It had been lying here for years, even decades or centuries. The more he thought about it, the more his horror mounted.

  The trap was nothing personal. It had nothing to do w
ith drawing him, Ike Crockett, into the depths. To the contrary, this was just random opportunism. Time was not a consideration. Even patience had nothing to do with it. The way trash fishermen did, someone was chumming the occasional traveler. You threw down a handful of scraps and maybe something came, and maybe it didn’t. But who came here? That was easy. People like him: monks, traders, lost souls. But why lure them? To where?

  His bait analogy evolved. This was less like trash fishing than bearbaiting. Ike’s dad used to do it in the Wind River Range for Texans who paid to sit in a blind and “hunt” browns and blacks. All the outfitters did it, standard operating procedure, like working cattle. You cultivated a garbage heap maybe ten minutes by horse from the cabins, so that the bears got used to regular feeding. As the season neared, you started putting out tastier tidbits. In an effort at making them feel included, Ike and his sister were called upon each Easter to surrender their marshmallow bunnies. As he neared ten, Ike was required to accompany his father, and that was when he saw where his candy went.

  The images cascaded. A child’s pink candy left in the silent woods. Dead bears hanging in the autumn light, skins falling heavily as if by magic where the knives traced lines. And underneath, bodies like men almost, as slick as swimmers.

  Out, thought Ike. Get out.

  Not daring to take his light off the inner mountain, Ike climbed back through the slot, cursing his loud jacket, cursing the rocks that shifted underfoot, cursing his greed. He heard noises that he knew didn’t exist. Jumped at shadows, he cast himself. The dread wouldn’t leave him. All he could think of was exit.

  He got back to the main chamber out of breath, skin still crawling. His return couldn’t have taken more than fifteen minutes. Without checking his watch, he guessed his round trip at less than an hour.

  The chamber was pitch black. He was alone. He stopped to listen as his heartbeat slowed, and there was not a sound, not a shuffle. He could see the fluorescent writing hovering at the far edge of the chamber. It entwined the dark corpse like some lovely exotic serpent. He lashed his light across the chamber. The gold nose ring glinted. And something else. As if returning to a thought, he pulled his light back to the face.

  The dead man was smiling.

  Ike wiggled his light, jimmied the shadows. It had to be an optical trick, that or his memory was failing. He remembered a tight grimace, nothing like this wild smile. Where before he’d seen only the tips of a few teeth, joy—open glee—now played in his light. Get a grip, Crockett.