He found the blue light, and made her a signal to draw him up again. She did draw him up, but when he came near the edge, she stretched down her hand and wanted to take the blue light away from him. “No,” said he, perceiving her evil intention, “I will not give you the light until I am standing with both feet upon the ground.” The witch fell into a passion, let him fall again into the well, and went away.
How long, Yahweh?
Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me? How long shall I take counsel in my soul, Having sorrow in my heart every day? How long shall my enemy triumph over me?
OUTSIDE THE TENT, THE NIGHT bellowed. Earthquakes had started right after they had come back from Wylie’s universe and were continuous now, a low shuddering that never stopped. On other parts of the planet, Martin and Trevor knew from reading Wylie’s book, this meant that hell was unfolding. The seraph were racing to sink the great human cities and most of the human lands, and raise the ocean floors that would be their new continents. They had only hours left until the fourteen artificial gateways they had constructed around the world opened wide and a billion hungry seraph came swarming through.
Three times now, the little band had heard the unearthly scream of tornadoes in the sky, then the bone-shaking thudding that followed when they hit and went marching off across the prairie.
Pam and George had had the presence of mind to locate the tent close to the foot of a small hill, meaning that they were unlikely to take a direct hit from a tornado. But if a big one should sweep this clearing—well, then it was over for them.
Thunder snapped, the wind screamed, and Ward and Claire James drummed on their drums. Outriders chuckled and rasped nearby. Martin believed that they probably didn’t even want to attack the tent at this point. They wanted this little band of evolved humans right where they were, because as long as they were here, what problems could they cause?
He and Trevor had almost been drowned when the Hummer passed through the gateway and hit the flood on this side. But the other kids had anticipated what might happen, and were waiting with ropes in the slow water near shore. It had been a near thing, but the both of them had managed to ford the swollen, raging river.
Trevor slept with his head on his dad’s shoulder. Another kid had the other shoulder. Two little ones shared his lap.
And he thought, working in his mind with Pam and George and Mike. The kids were getting expert at this, their minds racing much, much faster than his. The change had affected children and adolescents because their minds were more supple and less informed with the weight of civilized knowledge.
There was a name for the state they were in—many names, in fact. It was called bhodi, satori, many things. But it was not as if the soul was lit from a higher power-enlightened. They weren’t enlightened, they simply were.
Man had left the forests of Eden an animal, but these kids had found their way back, bringing none of the debris of civilization, but all of its compassion, its consciousness of the value of the individual, its ability to balance personal and collective need. They had returned to Eden as true human beings. They understood how to be as lilies of the field. For them, it wasn’t impossible to live in the rain. They had each other. They had love.
But they were still just this tiny, little band in a great and frightened world.
It had been this way, before, he thought, in the lands of southern France and northern Spain thirty thousand years ago, when the spirit had been on the children, and adolescents had begun to paint the walls of caves with the magic animals of the mind.
Pam shook him. She frowned at him.
He’d allowed his mind to drift while they were reading his memories of Wylie’s book.
“See them?” Trevor asked suddenly. His voice was curiously flat, as if he was dreaming.
“Are you asleep, Son?”
“I’m out of my body, and if I keep having to talk, I’m going to be back in, so come out, I need to show you something.”
Pam nodded. They could read the information stored in his brain in peace if he wasn’t there, so he took a deep breath, let it out and with it let his soul out of his body. When he moved out of the tent, he found Trevor and some of the other kids together. The rain whipped through them, the outriders did not react to them. He saw them as their ordinary selves, but knew that this was only his mind filtering their essences into familiar forms. Their bodies were still inside the tent.
Trevor pointed, and he followed the direction. Moving slowly, he tried to clear himself of all expectation, to so empty his mind that the actual appearance of the world over which he was flying would come through.
It was hard, though, in this state, to see anything except what you expected to see, or wanted to. He saw cities brightly lit in the night, Wichita and Kansas City, and the smiling prairie farther on dotted here and there with the lights of smaller communities.
He saw, in other words, a safe world, and so one that was not real. So he told himself, You will close yourself to this. You will blank your mind. And when you look again, you will not see your memories or your hopes, you will see only what is part of the actual, physical world.
He saw Lindy. He was right in front of her and she was still walking, but she was so thin and tired, she looked like she had only a few more steps left in her. Her eyes were glazed as if dead, but still she walked, and not far ahead were lines of fourteen wheelers, Continental Van Lines, Murphy’s Stores, Gap Leaders, an ad-hoc assembly of vehicles. Other wanderers were getting into them and she was eager, he could see it, because it would mean no more walking on her blistered clumps of feet.
Soldiers, some of them in standard issue G.I. uniforms, others thin and sleek, seraph in gleaming black, their hands gloved in white, their heads hidden by visored helmets, were separating the arriving wanderers into two groups. Seraph and human soldiers worked together, and he knew that the human soldiers were themselves wanderers.
There was a crackle, and a group of wanderers who had just been moved into a small field blew apart, their legs, arms, and heads flying in every direction.
Sitting in the back of a nearby pickup was a soldier manning a peculiar, disk-shaped weapon, and he knew what that was, too, because back in the tent Trevor had the smaller one he’d taken from Wylie’s house.
As he watched, more wanderers approached the ruined bodies with knives and saws and began harvesting the meat. The ever-thrifty seraph must be feeding their captives to themselves. It made ugly sense. How could you find a cheaper way to keep them going than that?
He tried to scream at Lindy, but his voice could not be heard by her or anybody else. And look at her poor feet, surely she wouldn’t be set to work, surely they would select her. And his poor Winnie, God only knew what had become of her.
The sorrow was so great, the helplessness almost enough to drive him mad.
A warmth came over him, then, so kind, so surpassing in protective compassion that he allowed himself to hope that at last the deity he had been praying to constantly for all these days had come. But it was not God, it was another soul. He had a sense of a soldier’s heart, determined, disciplined, and a soldier’s face, tight with effort.
When he tried to open himself to this soul, though, the way you do when you are practiced in out-of-body travel—and he was getting somewhat okay at it—the other soul threw up a memory from its childhood, a boy riding a bicycle up a driveway on a summer’s night, a yellow porch light with moths flying around it, an elderly dog standing up on the porch, then coming down to greet the boy, his tail twirling.
Martin recognized it as an attempt to say, in the multilayered language in which soul speaks to soul, that this visitor who was trying to contact him now had been a boy beloved of an old dog. And with the high-speed insight that characterizes thought unencumbered by the electrochemical filters built into the brain, Martin saw that this meant that he had once been good and gentle, but it was a long time ago. But he had seen his error and now longed to return to his boyhood state.
He had done evil, this interloper, but he was trying to say that he was not, himself, evil.
Then Martin saw hieroglyphics. They were extremely vivid, but were they coming from the soul or were they in the physical world? Telling the difference took an expert, and he was no expert.
Trevor’s mental voice said, This is what I wanted you to see. Let General North continue to guide you.
Martin saw the face of their guide again, just the eyes. The eyes were pleading.
Martin could, of course, read hieroglyphics. But there were over two thousand hieroglyphic symbols, and translation could be an extraordinary challenge, and the farther back in time from the date of the creation of the Rosetta Stone, which was the basis of all hieroglyphic translation, the less accurate translation became. He saw immediately that these were Old Kingdom if not even older, and that they were a mix of words and numbers, with bits of quickly scribbled hieratic notes here and there along the edges.
These were the most complex hieroglyphics he had ever seen, but as with all complex texts, there were simpler words, and he thought to start with these. They were lovely glyphs, really well executed. He read ur, the swallow glyph, then udjat, the Eye of Horus that has become the familiar © of modern prescriptions. He read on, recognizing the name Narmur, the first pharaoh of the Old Kingdom. Then a bit of the hieratic text became clear: the connection. This was followed by an unknown number that had been scribbled beside the hieroglyphic for copper.
Incredibly, this appeared to be a set of instructions about making electrical connections.
The souls of the kids were filling the chamber now. Pam had come, and was signaling an image of a long tunnel with some kind of a car in it. Then George showed a picture of the Rockies, then the entrance to the Cheyenne Mountain facility, easily recognizable by its huge steel doors.
This image agitated Al North. Martin could feel his sorrow. But why? They knew that somewhere the human souls were stored, and maybe what they were learning here was that it was under the Rockies.
A map was thrust into his mind as if into his hand, accompanied by a red flush of anger. It was a Google map centered just west of Holcomb.
A shock went through him. “Zoom,” he said. “Again.” The map now pointed to a particular crossroads.
And he at once understood why the seraph had scoured this part of Kansas the way they had. It wasn’t only because he was there and the gateway to the other human world was there, it was because the repository where the souls were hidden was there, at the geographic center of the continental United States, which was a few miles from the town of Lebanon, just over the county line from Holcomb, just at the crossroads he was looking down at right now.
This spot must be of enormous geomagnetic significance. But the men who had made the casual measurements that had located it, had been innocently playing around with a cardboard map.
But they hadn’t. They had been under seraph mind control and doing the work of seraph engineers.
He could feel Al North’s delight as a sense of dancing. Music came out of him, joyous chords. He had been working and working to communicate this. He had been struggling to be seen, to be heard, but until now nobody had noticed him.
Martin had not noticed that they’d gone down into the earth to find this place, but they had, they’d gone deep, and as they returned, traveling through so much stone was eerie, to feel yourself in the pull of it, to feel your sensitive electromagnetic body negotiating the smaller spaces in the dense matter—it was claustrophobic and they were deep, very deep.
Without warning, he burst up into the storms of the night and went rocketing into the sky. For an instant he saw the wide plains of Kansas whirling beneath him, then the clouds, then he was above the clouds and the second moon was high, its soft light making castles of the cloud tops from horizon to horizon.
He felt a pull upward, strong, and he saw laughing, singing children looking down from a tower above him, pleading with him to come. But he looked only for one face in the tower of song, and he did not see that face, he did not see his Winnie.
Above the tower were spreading mansions and roads in the high sky, great, flowing blue spaces, and the clouds were gone and the moons were gone and waves of pure pleasure were pouring through his body with such intensity that he could not believe that he had anything even approaching such a capacity for delight.
It was the pleasure of great love, mature and rich and filled with the resonance of long companionship, an exalted version of the love he had known with Lindy, but also there was somebody there who wanted him and to enter him and become him, too, and there was the laughter of children, and the perfect voice of a great choir.
Then something stung him. Hard. On the cheek.
“Dad! Dad!”
What was that? Well, it wasn’t heaven, so he wasn’t interested.
Another sting, harder. No, go away.
Another one, harder still. “Damn you!”
“Dad!”
Trevor was there. Physically there, because souls don’t have beads of sweat running along their upper lips. Trevor shut his eyes tight and whap, Martin saw stars.
“What the hell, you hit me!”
His son fell on him sobbing and laughing, hugging him. “Finally! Dad, you almost didn’t come back!”
He had never in his life felt as heavy as he did now. Returning to your body was putting on a lead overcoat.
“How long have I been…” He bowed his head. He could not bear to say it. He had been in heaven.
His son’s hand touched his shoulder. “I went there, too, Dad.”
Martin shook his head. He didn’t want to think, to talk, to listen to those damn drums anymore, to be here in this awful place, he wanted to be there, where flowers that bloomed forever never stopped surprising you. Eternity was not living in the same old world forever, it was discovering the world anew forever.
“Where’s the monument,” Trevor asked. “Who knows where it is?”
A few hands went up. “It’s off the roadside, near Smith Center,” Tim Grant said. “There’s a chapel there that can seat, like, twenty people. It’s all sort of nothing, actually.”
“Except for the millions of souls that are trapped under there.”
“According to Wylie’s book, it’s where General Al North was taken,” Trevor said. “It might be under Kansas, but the entrance is in Colorado, at that base.”
Martin felt that Cheyenne Mountain didn’t matter. It was just another seraph trick, a diversion.
No, the chapel would be the key. If they went there, they would find the vulnerability that the seraph were trying to hide. “Thing is, the way they’ve scoured this part of Kansas, how interested they are in us—and we’re just a quiet little corner of the world, after all—I’d say that if the monument is right above the center of their repository, then that’s where we need to go to reach it. That’s got to be their weak point.”
The atmosphere in the tent became electric. “It’s not very far,” a voice said.
“We have to go in the physical,” George added, “or we won’t be able to do anything in the physical.”
From outside came the chuckling clatter of the jaws of outriders. The drummers started drumming.
“I’m going with you,” Trevor said softly.
Martin did not reply, not verbally. There would be no way to keep Trevor here. He stood up, and so did Trevor and so did Pam. But the others did not stand. He could sense something among them, a kind of mutual agreement, but it wasn’t clear exactly what was in their minds.
Mike stood. His girl cried out, but stifled her cry. She came to her feet and threw her arms around him. They stood like this, the young couple, and Martin saw that their hearts were married.
She stayed behind, though, surrounded by the little ones.
The woods were quiet now, the outriders having gone off when they failed to smell fear here. To the west, lightning flickered. Would the storms never end? No, not as long as the seraph tortured this poor earth, Martin knew. All of that seafloor that had risen would be gushing with methane from hydrates and billions of tons of dead marine life, and hydrogen sulfide and other gasses he couldn’t even name. In a matter of days, it would change the atmosphere, and the seraph would be able to breathe easily here, and all the humans and most of the animals and insects would die.
First moon now rode in the high sky, its light bright and bitter, and the night was so still that you could hear the whisper of grass when breezes touched it. It was a sound familiar in Kansas when the crops were high and the night wind ran in them, sighing and whispering.
“Stop,” Mike said softly.
Sensing trouble, Martin drew his prayer back into his mind.
Trevor pointed upward. For a moment, Martin saw only the sky. Then, against the moon, a flash of darkness, ugly and ribbed like the wing of a bat. Then he saw another and another, and as his eyes began to track the movement in the sky he understood that there was not one nighthawk circling up there, but dozens, no, hundreds, in a soaring column that seemed to go up forever.
Thousands in the moonlight.
Something slid into Trevor’s hand, and Martin knew what it was, that seraph gun, even more fearsome than Wylie and Nick’s arsenal.
“All right,” Mike said, “right now, you’re thinking away as usual, Doctor Winters, and the rest of us are absolutely not afraid. And the reason is, we’re doing what you keep thinking about doing. You have to use the prayer, Doctor Winters, you have to keep it in your head all the time—and now you’re about to think about the Valley of Death and comfort yourself with the psalm but please don’t even do that.”
He recalled Franny’s prayer, took it to his mind, and began repeating it. Of course, he was not even a believer. If anything, he was a Jeffersonian Christian, an admirer of the man but not a believer in the resurrection. And, in any case, Zooey had been right, had he not, that the prayer was itself a form of egotism?
He realized that Mike was looking at him. They were all looking at him.
—The fourteen parts of Osiris.
—The fourteen Stations of the Cross.
—The fourteen sacred sites.
—The fourteen black lenses.
“Do you understand now, Doctor Winters?”
He nodded, but he did not understand. The great magic number of the past was seven, the number of a completed octave and a completed life. So what was fourteen?
“The number of resurrection, the key to heaven,” Trevor said, “and it’s the resurrection energy that the seraph hate, because it’s what they can’t have. That’s why they steal souls, to find in their goodness a taste of heaven. That’s why they’re really here. It’s not for bodies and land, it’s for souls.”
They walked through the wrecked forest, past uprooted trees, through the yards of ruined houses, and he could see the white steeple of Third Street Methodist still standing. Also, they walked out from under the great column of nighthawks, which could not see them because they could not see any fear.
They reached Pam’s yard, and he saw that her house had been torn apart just as theirs had, by seraph who had not anticipated that some of their victims would gain power from the attack, and sought any crumb of information they might find about these dangerous little viral particles.
Pam broke into a run, and disappeared into the house. Martin saw in his mind’s eye a flashing image of a car key, but knew that her heart was taking her to her old room, and the rooms of those she loved, and he saw her looking at the melted, deranged ruin of her home and knew that she was feeling the same horror that he had, the same anguish at seeing something so much a part of herself made so ugly.
Nobody spoke, nobody needed to, they could hear her rage in their minds, even Martin could hear it, and a moment later could also hear the increasing roar of wings, and the forlorn, eager cries that grew louder as the nighthawks, seeing her terror like a bright star in a void, found them again.
From the house, then, silence. She’d become aware of what her emotions were doing.
Nobody moved. Not a hundred feet overhead, the creatures swarmed. And from the dark woods all around now came the chuckling of outriders. They had begun marching this way, working their steel fangs.
The truck stood in the drive, but when they drew near it, they found that it was peppered with tiny craters. Farther down the driveway were heaps of something—the remains of people, there was no way to tell.
As they got into the double cab, Pam tried the key. “We need a miracle, thanks,” she muttered.
The truck’s engine growled.
There was a huge crash and the ceiling was crushed enough to knock Martin’s head forward—which was fortunate, because enormous claws came ripping through the metal, ripping and clutching.
“Keep down, Dad!”
The engine ground again. “Come on,” Pam said.
It was a double cab, and Trevor and Mike had gotten in the back. Trevor came forward between the seats as more of the huge nighthawks landed around them, their great heads thrusting, their beaks, lined with narrow teeth, opening wide when they bellowed, then snapping closed with a lethal crack.
More landed, and more, until Martin could smell their breath, a mixture of hydrogen sulfide and rotting meat that made your throat burn.
Then one of the heads thrust forward and crashed through the windshield, and the teeth slashed toward Martin. From between the seats, Trevor fired the disk-shaped weapon.
There was no report. The head simply flew apart, the upper and lower halves of the beak whirling against the opposite doors, the eyes exploding into a dust of glass and gelatin, and the tongue fluttering in the ruined face as the creature shot backward and ended up squalling on its back in the driveway, its fifty-foot wings flapping furiously, hammering the ground so hard that the truck rocked with every great convulsion.
With a thunder of howls, the rest of them took off, rising as mayflies do from a spring brook, but monstrous.
“Thank you, God,” Pam said as the truck finally started. She put it into drive and accelerated toward the street, driving over the creature, which snapped and crackled and squalled beneath the bouncing vehicle.
“Sorry about that,” she said.
They went down to Harrow in the ravaged truck, and changed there to another one—Bobby’s police car, which stood open on Main and School. The keys were still in the ignition, and it had a quarter tank of gas. Also, between the front seats, a sawed-off shotgun. They got in, Martin behind the wheel.
They rode in silence down an empty Highway 36, passing an occasional motionless car, but otherwise meeting not the slightest sign of life. “That’s a terrible weapon,” Martin said to Trevor.
“It’s nearly empty,” Trevor replied.
“The light is coming,” Mike said. “We need to hurry.”
Martin scanned the sky, looking for some sign of an orange disk. He saw nothing, but he stepped on the gas, driving the police interceptor up to a hundred and twenty, then a hundred and thirty. Bobby kept the thing in good shape.
“Take a right,” Mike said.
“I thought it was in Smith Center.”
“The monument’s on 191.”
Martin turned north on 281. The fields were fallow, the country totally empty.
“Left,” Mike said.
Another mile and Martin saw the little monument just off the road. A short distance from it was a small building.
“Okay,” Mike said, “you got it. Now what?”
They got out. Martin carried the shotgun.
Mike took it. “That’s an eight-shot semi,” he said, “not seven.”
“It’s loaded?”
“I know that.”
Martin went to the chapel, a white portable building, its siding weathered. The door was unlocked. He pushed it open. Inside were a few pews, a table, and a cross on the wall behind it. He noticed that this was not an ordinary Christian cross. Christ lay upon it, but the four limbs of the cross were of equal length. He wondered who might have done that in rural Kansas, made it into such a very ancient symbol, for the solar cross marked the solstices and the equinoxes, and related to the greatest depths of human memory and knowledge, from the time when we did not think like we do now, but made wonders in the world because we were surrendered to God, and thus acting on exquisite instinct, not plodding thought.
“Who is she?” Pam asked.
For a moment, Martin was confused. Then he saw her, too, a shadow standing in the corner of the chapel, so still that she at first appeared to be little more than a thickening of the dark. But he could see her eyes there in the corner of the room, her gleaming eyes, and her slimness.
Jennifer Mazle sprang at him. One second, he was wondering if the figure was even alive, the next he had been slammed to the floor.
Her hands came around his throat, closed. His head felt as if it was going to explode. At that same moment thick light surged in the windows and the door with the force of a tidal wave, causing the glass to shatter and the door to slam all the way across the chapel, where it hit the wall and dropped the cross to the floor.
Martin looked directly into Mazle’s face, into eyes that bulged until the contact lenses popped out, revealing the reptile eyes of the seraph. In the light that was all around them, he could see the kids moving with method and direction, and could hear the whispering of their minds.
Mike pulled Mazle’s head back. Her mouth opened and her long, black tongue came out as she screamed. Trevor thrust the shotgun into her mouth and pulled the trigger, and her lithe body shot backward in a shower of green blood. The head burst.
“But the light!”
“Don’t think, Martin!” Pam yelled.
“Just let yourself happen, Dad!”
As he took his attention away from his mind and into his body, he felt his soul return also, and knew that the light had been taking him so stealthily that he hadn’t even realized it.
Then Pam marched into the corner where Mazle had been standing and simply disappeared.
For a moment, Martin thought she’d gone through a concealed gateway, but when he heard echoing footsteps, he understood. Cunning doors like this were seen in some Egyptian temples he’d worked on, but especially in Peru, where there were many of them in old Cuzco, doors that to this day only the Inca knew. But to find one here in Kansas—well, he would have been surprised once.
Concentrating on his breath, on the way his body felt as he moved, leaving his thoughts and his fears behind, he found that he could move through the light easily and without danger. The kids weren’t even concerned by it.
He crossed the ruined chapel with the others, walking straight into the corner, feeling it give way, seeing the darkness, then finding his footing on steep black steps.
They had defeated the light, and if only mankind had recognized his own soul before it was too late, the whole world would have been able to do the same thing. But the seraph had infiltrated us with the lie that we were a body only, that there was no soul that was admissible to understanding and to science, and that science itself was a strange exploration having nothing to do with the kingdom of God, when, in fact, there was no real science that did not address heaven and satori.
As they went down, the air changed, growing thicker and warmer, beginning to smell stifling. This was the air of Abaddon, air as it would be everywhere in this world of theirs very soon. It was heavier, their air, and would be filling low places first.
He was last in line, going down the iron steps. Faint light came from below. From above, now only darkness.
They went down for a long time, and Martin remembered the part of Wylie’s book about Al’s descent. He had been taken miles into the earth.
As the light from below got brighter, it took on a blue cast, and the narrow shaft they were descending became more distinct. “It’s our guide,” Mike said.
Martin knew that the blue light of souls was also the color of good worlds, and that Abaddon was brown, but the human earths were palest blue, the color of their waters and their skies, and the glow of their dead.
“Are we sure?” Martin asked. They were a good two hundred steps down, and he was beginning to feel a distinct sense of claustrophobia in the narrow space. He forced himself not to think of the depth or the closeness. He’d found reading Wylie’s description of Al’s descent beneath Cheyenne Mountain to be almost unendurable, so vivid was the sense of being enclosed in rock, and he could never forget the feeling he’d had here earlier.
“Oh, my God.”
It was Pam, calling up from below. “What?”
He reached the bottom of the steps. At first, he was only aware of color—gold, green, red, tan. He couldn’t understand what he was seeing. Then he could. “This is the most extraordinary room in the world.” He’d seen it before, of course, but not in the body, not with all the vividness of his living eyes.
“Back down, Dad. Try to put your mind away.”
“I can’t put my mind away! Don’t you see what this is? It’s where we saw the hieroglyphics. But now we’re here in the flesh, and it’s all so—so vivid and so real. This is the most superb example of Old Kingdom bas-relief on the planet. And it’s in the middle of the United States!”
“Dad, listen to me. If you don’t just let it take you over, we’re in trouble. Because we’re not in the United States, dad. This is Abaddon, and the second they realize that we’re here, we are done.”
“We’ve come through a gateway?”
“We’re still on earth, but in the physics of Abaddon.”
“Come on,” Mike said. “We’ve got work to do. Stuff to figure out.”
Martin followed him across the room where Al North had been deprived of his life and his soul. He followed them through a low doorway, which was the source of the light, which was a living light that penetrated the flesh and made you weep to feel it upon your body.
Then he saw why. He was in a cavern, blue-lit like a submarine cave just touched by sun from the surface. Before them stretched a sea of glass tubes, each three feet long, all plugged into huge black sockets, all living, exact replicas of the images on the wall of the temple of Dendera. Except these tubes were sparking with life, and you could see the lights inside them leaping and jumping and struggling, causing the whole room to flicker continuously.
Slowly, Trevor, then Pam and Mike went to their knees. Martin followed them, because the light shining on them was not just alive, but richly alive, and they could see millions of summer mornings, dew on the flowers of the world, signs of struggle and happiness, and hear, also, a roar of voices that was vast.
The flower of mankind was here.
“What do we do now, Dad?”
“I have no idea.”
WYLIE HAD REALIZED THAT HE was being dieseled when he saw that they were crossing the same sodden shopping street again. There were piles of yarn, there were farm implements, there were baskets and paint-brushes, and hatchets polished to a high shine.
He might be a shape-shifter like the rest of them, but he was not on their side. No, he was a Union man, he had remembered that. They were right about him being an intelligence agent. He was, but not a very good one, given that he’d gotten his sweet ass caught just when that was the worst possible thing that could have happened.
Wylie had examined every inch of the wagon, but it was made like a fricking safe. The goddamn driver would open a little hatch from time to time and shit and piss into it. Wylie stayed well back, but the place stank. He wondered if his own shit was yellow now, too?
The wagon had been stopped for some time before he understood that it wasn’t going to be moving again. There was a series of clicks, and the door went hissing open. Even in this place, with its dirty brown sky, coming out hurt his eyes.
He was coming to the crisis of his failure now, he knew.
“Ready for lunch,” his captor said. “Your hands are comin’ to me and mine, I hear.”
His hands. What a place. Trapped in the wagon with nothing to do but think, he had remembered more of his real life. If you looked—really looked—you wouldn’t find a trace of Wylie Dale before December 26, 1995, the day he’d made his transition into a human life that had been painstakingly constructed for him to enter. “Wylie Dale” had already been established as a novelist by the organization that had sent him to the human earth, but the first book he’d written himself was Alien Days, his story of his abduction, which had actually been a looking-glass memory of his arrival on one-moon earth.
As Wylie’s eyes adjusted to the light, he found himself standing before a gigantic version of a building familiar to him. It was the model for the Tomb of Skull and Bones on the campus of Yale University. But the Tomb was not large. This building was two hundred feet tall, a great, ugly monolith.
Compared to the rest of the city, which echoed with roars, screeches, discharges of steam, the rumbling of wagons, and various unidentifiable hoots, laughs, and howls, the silence here was total.
Bones had been founded by William Huntington Russell, whose step-brother Sam had carried opium into China for the British when they were trying to get back the gold they’d spent on Chinese tea. British captains hadn’t been willing to do it. It might have been the 1850s, but drug running was still drug running. Russell had no problem with addicting the Chinese.
“Are you happy?” he asked his grinning captor.
“Yeah, I’m happy.”
“Then fuck you.”
“Could I season your fingers?”
“You going to two-moon earth?”
“I should be so lucky. No can afford.”
Wylie thought of the shithole the seraph hordes were being sent to. “What does it cost?”
“Whatever you have. Which assumes you have something. They don’t consider an artificial syrinx with a busted jaw and this old wagon worth a ticket. I live in it, you know. When it’s not otherwise occupied.”
“So you’re poor?”
“Poor as shit, which is why—” He stopped. He listened, so Wylie listened, too. Keening came, heart-freezing, getting louder fast. “Knees!”
Wylie didn’t argue. As he went down to the hard earth and little knots of mushrooms like small, exposed brains, a line of flying motorcycles with silver fenders, ridden by figures in gold metallic uniforms and gleaming gold helmets and face masks, came speeding out of the sky and hung dead still a foot or so above the ground, their motors revving as the riders worked to keep them stable.
This was followed by a smooth whoosh of sound, and a jewel of an aircar appeared.
He knew who it belonged to, of course: Marshal Samson. His escort bowed, and he bowed, too. There was a click and he could sense somebody getting down, coming over.
“Hello, Wylie.” The voice positively bubbled. “I knew it from the first. It had to be this. Actually, I’m impressed. I’ll never tell her that, of course, but it was a brilliant operation.”
“Thank you.”
“I just came from raping your wife, incidentally. Bring him.”
He was kicked from behind, and ended up scuttling through the huge doors, which had opened soundlessly and now presented the appearance of a gaping cave.
As Wylie walked through the darkness of the anteroom and Samson opened the inner door for them both, the enormous golden floor struck him with a powerful sense of remembrance. That floor had been a source of scandal at home, a symbol to the Union of the greed of the autocrats who ran this side of the planet.
A tall woman loaded with jewels, her hair sleek and white, dressed in the richest clothing Wylie had ever seen, came striding forward. Her face was so white that it glowed, the scales attractively tiny, the features delicate. He knew that this was the infamous leader of this world, Echidna, whose family had held controlling ownership of the Corporation for uncountable millennia.
All the females in the line were called Echidna. When one wore out, a new clone replaced it seamlessly, without any public awareness. There was never an issue of succession, unlike the Union, which was a simple democracy and in turmoil all the time.
“Come, Spy,” she said, “I want to gloat before dinner.”
As they crossed the great room, he saw Lee Raymond, Robert Mugabe, and Ann Coulter playing a game involving dice on what appeared to be a table made of emeralds, rubies, and a great, gleaming expanse of pure diamond. He recognized the game. It was senet, the Egyptian predecessor to backgammon. In the human worlds, the rules of senet had been hidden away by the seraph, but here, where they had not, players at senet gambled for souls.
He was not sure if they were human, or simply proud of their achievements as human, and showing off their forms.
“I had no idea your penetration of human society was so extensive.”
“But not of both human worlds, not as much as I hoped. This time around, we’re only getting the one, I fear.” She shot him a twinkling glance. “But we are getting it, you Union shit!”
Coulter now shifted into a sallow reptilian form with big, beady scales. Her black tongue darted behind spiked teeth made yellow from too much tobacco. Wylie realized that she was lusting after him. Mugabe, who was apparently her seraph husband, scurried behind her, trying to keep a cloak around her.
“Ann wants to bed you before we eat,” Echidna said. “It’s a particular pleasure of hers, to fuck her food.”
They arrived at a tall window, curtained. “Open it,” Echidna snapped at Samson. “I just want you to see this, Union man.”
Wylie realized that she had brought him close to a great, black wall with huge levers on it. Scalar controls, he knew, that worked the gigantic lenses that were deployed on two-moon earth. But then the curtains swept open, and he saw a lawn so bright green it must have been painted, awash in splendid people, some of them reptilian, others human, or seemingly so. There were politicians, of course, great, grinning hordes of them, military officers in the uniforms of a dozen countries, representatives of various royal families, rock stars, CEOs, television personalities, preachers, mullahs, gurus—in fact, every sort of human leader and person of power. Among them strolled naked seraph girls and boys, their scales bleached so white they looked new-minted, carrying trays loaded with barbecued fingers, ears and toes, and flutes of hissy champagne.
To one side was a line of elaborate gas grills, all black and chrome. He recognized that they were Strathmores from home, the brand he had on his own deck, except that these were limousine models, with twelve burners instead of the usual four. Most of them were rolling spits, and on them some of the victims still twisted and squirmed. Behind each grill hung a complete body molt on a tall spike, a pale skin attesting to the youth and therefore tenderness of the person under preparation.
Echidna pointed to an empty grill. “That’ll be you,” she said.
He wanted to try to run, anything to avoid what seemed inevitable. But there was more, because he saw that this party was not to celebrate his capture, or not only that, it was also to celebrate an enormous event that was unfolding in a valley behind the building.
In the center of this valley was a gigantic circular lens of purest black, its surface reflecting the wan midday sun. And around it, stretching to every horizon, were what must be millions and millions of seraph, ready to pour through the moment the signal was given. He saw men, women, children, heard the booming of syrinxes, the chatter and whoops of other animals, and above it all the excited, argumentative shrieking of the seraph themselves as they jostled for position and accused one another of trying to break the baskets of black, oblong eggs the women all carried.
He assumed that he would die here today. He’d been living for years in an extremely dangerous situation with a wiped memory, and that made you vulnerable—so vulnerable, in fact, that it was probably just a matter of time before you ended up going through the funny little door in the woods. He loved his poor family, though, his striving, brilliant, lovely family. What would happen to them? Could they shift, he wondered? Did they, perhaps in secret, the children under their covers at night, Brooke in the privacy of her early mornings?
Ann had sidled closer, and he thought maybe he could cause a little confusion. In this class-ridden society, she was bound to have some prerogatives. Time wasn’t on his side, obviously, but distraction might be.
He turned to her. “Must I?”
She squared her shoulders. “Of course you must.”
He went toward her, and thus also toward the wall behind her.
“Guards,” Echidna said mildly. “Stay with him.”
Samson came, and with him his heavily armed escort.
Wylie was still bound, of course, but he came to Ann Coulter and looked down at her. Her scales fluttered and surged, and a black substance that smelled of sulfur began to ooze from under her eyelids.
“Ann,” her husband hissed, “you’re compromising yourself.”
She was really steaming. She loved a man in bondage, that was clear.
Wylie saw that he had a moment, and only one, and it was this moment. He opened his mouth and drew his tongue along the backs of his teeth in the best imitation of a whore that he could imagine.
She tittered. Her breath had in it the flat muskiness of death.
“Will somebody please remove these children?” Mugabe shouted. A number of them had foregathered to watch the fun.
“Part of their education,” Echidna said. Her husband now joined her. Wylie had forgotten the name of this huge being, but he was peerlessly imposing in his sleek black suit, with his shimmering skin and brilliant, watchful eyes. Another ancient ruler riding the ages on a foam of clones.
He tilted his head and felt Coulter’s kiss invading his mouth like a soaked chaw of somebody else’s tobacco.
With all the power in him, his every muscle singing, his whole heart and soul and mind devoted only to this one movement, he sprang upward. These lizard forms were not as earthbound as human bodies. They didn’t feel as much, either, not pain, not love, not pleasure. But they were ferociously strong, and he was strong, he had kept himself well, understanding now the obsessive hammering away he had done at Gold’s in Wichita. He’d scared people, the way he would swim laps like a machine. He hadn’t known why his body was like this, just that he needed the swimming, the running, the boxing, the karate, all of it, needed it and devoured it.
The guard had made one mistake, early on. He’d seen him as human and bound him as human, careful of the delicate skin of a much more fragile creature than a seraph. He ripped his arms free with ease.
Unfortunately, the gun had gone. They’d left it with him only to amuse themselves with his disappointment when it was taken. “These sell for a nice price,” the guard had said as he removed it.
For a moment, there was nobody between him and the great control panel. He grabbed a lever, pulled it. Grabbed another, did the same. The action was so damn satisfying that he growled, he screamed, as he pulled another and another.
Echidna roared, her husband—Beleth, that was the name—leaped toward him—and came crashing into Mugabe, who threw himself into his path. Samson turned, and Ann Coulter slashed him with a molting hook, drawing his skin open and revealing the muscles beneath. He shrieked in agony. It felt good to draw off dry molt, of course, but raw like this, it was torment.
Coulter Union! Her human disguise was brilliant—a spokesman for the aims of the Corporation so extreme that she made them look ridiculous.
Wylie leaped, giving Beleth a head kick that he could feel smash the skull. Gabbling, his brains flying, he pitched back into his own onrushing guards.
“Samson’s aircar,” Ann shouted. “Go!”
“It’s ensouled!”
“Of course it is, you damn fool, go!”
There was a whispering crackle and Ann flew into a thousand red chunks. One of the guards now turned his weapon toward Wylie, who hit the floor as he pushed Echidna into the line of fire.
Her legs and bottom half, spurting fountains of blood, ran a few steps and collapsed at the feet of the surprised guard, while the top half, which had hit the floor smack on its bloody, waist-level base, uttered whistling gasps, waved its arms, and tore at its hair as shrieking, laughing children, who had mistaken the whole thing for a game, surrounded it, running in and pinching and squealing and then running away.
As Wylie crossed the floor, he heard the snicker of more guns. Then a dozen outriders came swinging down from above on webs like thick ropes dripping with glue. But he was outside now, and the aircar was waiting there, its now unattended motorcycle escort lined up neatly on the ground.
He kicked them over and dove into the interior. Expecting the car to resist the entry of what would be a known enemy, he yanked the door down with all his might.
“Hello, Brother,” the car said, and the voice hit Wylie with a shock like freezing water and the joy of the first morning of the world.
He hadn’t heard his brother speak aloud in over thirty years, but he recognized his voice instantly.
When Wylie was just a tiny boy, his beloved older brother had been killed by Corporation marauders and his soul kidnapped. His brother had been a great soldier. They’d kept his Medal of Valor and his various orders in a glass case in the family room, proud mementos. Wylie had gone to the human world because it took courage, and he wanted to show that he, also, had the ability to fight well for the Union.
They swept into the air. “Brother,” he said, “did they steal your soul?”
The car did not answer, and a flash of unease went through him. Abaddon was a place of deceptions, so maybe—
But then he looked down at what they were circling, and saw that the lens below him was now surrounded by as vast a crowd as he had ever seen. But things were not going well. The blackness of it had turned angry red, and it was boiling like a lava pool, and the surging crowd, in trying to escape, was instead falling in from all sides. Smoke and steam rose from the massive pyre.
“Are they dying?” Wylie asked.
“I think they’re going through. But it’s not right. It’s very not right.”
“Brother, has your soul been trapped in this car all this time?”
“Hell no, I stole the car yesterday. I’ve got a lot of bodies. I use them like scuba gear, to dig into the physical whenever I need to. And—uh-oh!”
There was an angry rattle against the vehicle, which proceeded to shoot upward so fast that Wylie blacked out momentarily. When he came to, flashes were speeding past the windows. “Pulse/Strider,” his brother said.
This was a weapon that delivered pulses of discrete superexcited electron plasmas that could instantaneously incinerate a car like this.
“Fly me, Brother.”
“Me? I don’t know how!”
“You were a hell of a pilot as a boy.”
“How could you know? You were…dead.”
“I’m an operative just like everybody else in the family. They were tricked into believing they’d captured my soul.”
Mean red light filled the car, and it tumbled wildly through the air.
“Brother, I need you to remember your piloting skills! Do it now!”
The words cause memory to flood Wylie’s mind, of being at the controls of a machine like this, of handling the twin sticks, of firing its weapons at sky targets, of having a glorious time in mock dogfights and evasion training.
He’d expected to be a pilot, but his aptitude tests were what had gotten him dragooned into intelligence. That, and he now also realized, the fact that his brother was already an agent. He remembered it all now, his whole life as a Union kid, his training…and something so poignant that he could almost not bear the recollection. He’d had a girl. He’d married her. He had a wife here on Abaddon, in the Union, the one good place that remained.
The car rattled, there was a flash, and this time the cabin filled with smoke and the fire alarm started.
“Fly me!”
Wylie gripped the controls. He swung the car from side to side, spotted the telltale sparkle of the Pulse/Strider installation on the ground. He turned hard, thrust the nose down, opened the throttle and slammed both sticks hard over.
The car shot like a diving eagle straight toward the installation. Pulses poured out. They would be forced to go on continuous triangulation, and his random jigging of the controls meant that not even he was sure of the trajectory.
He was nearly on top of them when they began to try patterns. Now, this was bad, this might work for them. “Are you unarmed?” he asked his brother.
“Of course I’m unarmed, I’m a sports car!”
“Just asking. Hold on!”
“My keel hurts, I can feel my keel going!” If an ensoulable machine’s nervous system was properly designed, the soul inhabiting it would sense it the same way it did a body.
Wylie leveled out. He was now speeding across open land, directly toward some aristo’s hunting estate. It was fashionable, he could see the house like something out of the English countryside. His brother said, “I see twelve bogies coming down on us.”
Wylie went into the forest, among the trees.
“You’ll wreck me!”
He took some advice from Martin’s son, Trevor. Just let yourself happen. His hands moved as they shot down a forest path, then up a stream. This far from the city, it wasn’t so polluted, not even on the Corporation side where mentioning global warming drew a death sentence. But then again, practically everything drew a death sentence. Executions were not only a form of population control, they kept the masses both entertained and fed.
Then he saw a wall. The wall, the one the Corporation had built around the Union. It was gray, immense, and dead ahead. He pulled back on the sticks and hopped it, and suddenly everything changed.
Here were fields of swabe and borogrove and orchards full of trees heavy with lascos and spurls and nape. Everything was green, the sky was dusty blue rather than dirty brown, and he knew that there would be stars at night, a few stars. Here, it was illegal not to mention global warming.
“I’ll take me back,” his brother said.
“Yeah, since I don’t know where I’m going.”
“I’m pulsing our code but we could get a look—see from the Air Force, so if we do don’t take evasive action. We are home, Brother.”
Wylie’s heart ached as he watched the rich green Union land speed below them. Home. And look at the houses, he could even see pretty shutters. Most unionists farmed. He had farmed, and he could see that the harvest was still coming in here and there. “Harvest is late.”
“Winter’s late, it’s too warm. If only an eighth of the planet fights the good fight, we can’t win, we can only lose slowly. The Gulf Stream stopped for four months this year. Avalon nearly froze while here in Aztlan, most of the maize crop burned.”
“What about the Corporation? They must be feeling it, too.”
“Farming’s illegal there now.” He paused for a long time. “I suppose you noticed what they’re eating.”
“I noticed.”
They came down on a pebble driveway before a modest old sandstone, its worn carved serpents of luck and joy barely visible in its ancient walls. But this was home, all right, a place he now realized that he had felt as an absence in his spirit for his whole time away.
He got out. “I wish you could come in, Brother.”
“When this tour’s over, I go back to my natural body forever, and I am looking forward to that, Wylie.”
“I don’t want to rattle around in the house alone!”
The arched wooden door opened. A figure stood back in the shadows, one lovely, tapering claw on the doorjamb.
Oh, it was impossible.
“Talia?”
“Aktriel?”
“Yes.” His response was so automatic that it required no thought. Aktriel was his real name, and he was a Department of Defense information officer. After pilot training, his work had been involved in the issuance of directives and proclamations, and he’d been sent to the human world because of his writing ability and his communications skills.
As she came out into the light, the car’s horn beeped twice and it took off into the sky, turned, then raced back toward Corporation territory. For a moment, Aktriel watched it go, watched sadly, wishing that his brother would come out, understanding why he could not bear to live in the freedom of his real body even for a short time, only to have to return to that miserable thing and go back to his hellish work.
She came to him, her eyes lowered, tears flowing. He took her in his arms, and truly he was home again, and from such a far, far place. “I’d forgotten everything,” he said.
She nodded against his shoulder.
“But where’s your husband, Talia? Your family? Surely you have one. It’s been years.”
Arm in arm, they went into the dim, comfortable interior of the house. Memory flooded him as he walked into the broad central room with its white walls and sky blue ceiling, and the climbing flowers painted everywhere. His mother’s hearth was here, his father’s tall harvest boots still by the closet where he’d always kept them. Beside them, smaller, shorter boots. When he’d waded for the tender swabe, he’d worn them.
“Do you still farm?”
“It will always be a farm.”
“Of course.” The Union’s goal of environmental balance meant that changing land use patterns was not done without major reason.
She took his hand. “Do you want me?”
He threw his arms around her, felt her heart beating against his. This love—how had he ever managed to leave it? She was his dear, dear one, the alpha and omega of his soul. When he could have farmed here forever and never left her side, why had he ever gone?
Then he remembered his little Kelsey and proud, strong Nick, children of two worlds. His kids, and they were out there on the front line with their mom, and if he stayed here they would be abandoned.
It was as hard a moment as he had ever known. The beauty of his wife was stunning, her scales so tiny and so pale that she looked like a doll, her hair a wisp of delicate white smoke around her head, her eyes bluer than a fine earth sky, and deeper than the deepest ocean.
How he loved this woman, his friend of his youth and childhood, his dear companion.
But there were vows of the lips and vows of the blood, and his vow to those children on one-moon earth was a vow of the blood.
“I’m so glad it’s over,” she said. She gazed into his eyes. The Corporation seraph were remembered by man as nephilim, as archons, as demons. Mankind called Union folk angels or daikini, sky dancers.
“I’m glad it’s over, too.”
“But you sigh, husband.”
He drew her close to him. These were simple houses, a central great room, with kitchen, dining, and storage in one wing and sleeping quarters in the other. They had been living in these houses forever, almost literally. They had no age, nothing here did. The Union was with God. There was nothing to count.
But he had forgotten how good a woman’s hair could smell, sprinkled as hers was with the dust of flowers. It fell, sometimes, on that brilliant, glowing brow, that was almost as soft as human skin. She was almost as beautiful as Brooke, really, but the truth was that even to seraph, the humans were incredibly beautiful. It was why Corporation types had gone to rape them in the first place. It was why Unionists cherished and protected them as best they could. There was something about the humans that was close to God, very close, and you felt toward them both a desire to protect and a desire to worship.
Kelsey, Nick, Brooke. His buddy Matt. Cigars and absinthe. The fun of it all, of being in the human form, of looking like them and being able to kiss human lips and walk their pretty streets, to look up into the sacred blue of their skies, to lift his face to clean rain and listen to wind in the night, to watch TV, to go to the movies and eat popcorn, to feel warm human hands on his human skin, to sink into the dark of her.
“You’re far away,” Talia said.
“I’m just in shock. Seeing you again. Remembering you. Realizing—oh, my Talia, all that I’ve forgotten.” He took her again, held her close. “All that I’ve missed.”
She saw the truth, though. She knew him so well. They had been children together, born in the same basket, their eggs warmed by the same egg ladies. Their families had entwined their destinies long before they were born.
Trying to hide his tears, he turned away from her. “I belong to you,” he said, feeling the twin pulls of his fiercely divided loyalties. Again, he hugged her, and again felt Brooke’s absence in his arms.
Her eyes met his. The question that flickered in them now was a dark one. Then she held up her hand.
Her Electrum ring glowed softly. His ring. He took her hand and kissed it. She laughed a little, deep in her throat, and he wanted her. He wanted her so badly that he began to exude from under every scale on his neck. She brought a towel and wiped it gently. Her hands touching him evoked desire so great that it seemed beyond his trembling flesh, beyond belief, beyond body itself, a longing that was literally fantastic.
But if he did this then he could not leave her, not a second time, it was too cruel. And yet he had the children, the vow, and the other dear wife. And he knew, as soon as he was with Brooke again, he would lose himself in the wonders of human life and human love.
“It’s only a few minutes,” she said softly. She drew up the wooden blinds, and he saw in the evening light a diamond hanging in midair. In its facets, he could see another house, lights just coming on in the windows, and a small form at one of those windows looking out.
Kelsey was waiting for her daddy to come back.
“I have the permanent salve,” she said. “Choose.”
He took her hands. “We always knew the danger of the mission. I have a life there, now. I have children who need their father.” And he wished—he just wished.
“You won’t remember me.”
“You’ll find somebody else,” he said.
“Don’t mock my love, please.”
He would leave her forever wanting him. If only he had known it would be this hard.
He had known. She had known.
She began to apply the salve, and he let her. It sank deep into him, into the most secret corners of his deepest cells, and as it did, this old homestead began to look stranger and stranger. He noticed that blinds closed up here, that there were no chairs but only these strange, three-legged stools. He saw the spinning wheel and the loom, ancient and obviously heavily used, but who used looms nowadays? And the grate and the big iron cook pot, so strange and archaic, and candles instead of electric lights, all so just plain weird.
But then she did an odd thing. She applied salve to herself.
“But no, you mustn’t.”
“Look, the sun is setting and Kelsey’s gotta be getting scared. And Nick’s liable to blow our heads off if we come up in the dark.”
“Brooke?”
“Yes? Hello?”
Talia had been with him all along. Now, as they changed from seraph to human, fixed by the DNA salve, he threw his arms around her. “It’s you, it’s always been you! Did you know?”
“Not until I followed you through Samson’s little gateway. Then I knew.”
“But you escaped from the Corporation, you came home, you came to meet me even though you could’ve stayed back.”
“To protect you. Remember what I am.”
“The Guardian Clan.” He laughed a little. “You really are a guardian angel.”
“Who you need, Mr. Drinker and Smoker and hell-raising daredevil—the idea that any sane person would volunteer for an assignment like this!”
“It had to be done.”
“Which is why I love you so.” She smiled up at him, and as she did, her face shimmered, the scales smoothing in blurry waves, the brow widening, the cheeks growing less narrow, the eyes deeper, less wide, more human, the nostrils opening more, the lips softening and becoming red, the teeth thickening into human teeth. And he could feel by his own internal shivering that he was doing the same.
This was not shape-shifting. This was fundamental DNA transformation. When his brother ended his tour of duty, this would be his house. He would reenter his old body here, he would find his wife and bring her here, and there would be eggs here, and the egg ladies would brighten the house with their laughter again, in the coming years, in the ages.
But Talia and Aktriel were dying into the human form.
She took his hand more firmly. “Ready?”
“How do I look?”
“Perfect. Or no, you’re missing that mole under your left ear.”
“Whose gonna notice?”
“You know your daughter. She’s inherited your following and watching instincts.”
“Do we need to take salve for them?”
“Born of earth as they were? They have the DNA to shift, but not the skill. They’ll stay as they are, with their good seraphim hearts in those lovely human forms.”
“Are you gonna be on my case again?”
“Always.”
Then they were in their familiar woods, and for a fleeting moment his soul was in both worlds. Brooke said, “I’ve got something on the tip of my tongue.”
He shook his head. “I feel like I just woke up from a dream I thought I’d never forget.”
“Which was?”
“I forget.”
She came to him and kissed him. “We’ve all been through too much. And it has to end. It ends here.” She looked toward the house. “It’s time to return to normal life.”
“Can we?”
“I think we can. I mean, have you noticed that it’s six and nothing’s happened yet? No 2012 shift here.”
The moon was yellow in the eastern sky, coming toward full now, rising in splendor.
They both fell silent, and both for the same reason. “Why are we out in the woods, Wylie?”
“We’re—” He stopped. Why were they out here? “I came looking for you,” he said at last. “That’s it.”
“And I came to find you.”
“I was in the cave?”
“Well, you’re here.”
“I feel like I was on Mars or something. A million miles away.”
Suddenly she threw herself on him. In the gathering dark, he felt very alone. Odd. Homesick even, but for where? His house was a quarter of a mile away. His only house.
“I think our kids are gonna be missing us,” she said.
They headed up the hill.
The love that is so great that it cannot be seen, that seems not even to exist, but is in fact the silent binding that confirms the world, followed them, lingering close as if to enjoy the warmth of what they had found together.
“Where have you guys been?” Nick yelled as they came up out of the woods. “It’s getting darker and darker around here!”
“I got lost,” Wylie said.
“And he got found.”
“You got lost? How? I thought you’d been killed.” Nick threw his arms around his father, and Wylie felt his surging youth and his love for his dad and then Kelsey’s, also, from farther down by his knee, holding Bearish up like an offering to her household god.
As he entered with his children into the calm light, he heard the calling of another father whose desperation began pouring into his mind the moment he was inside the house.
He remembered the book and Martin and Trevor, and their quest to recapture their invaded world. “I’ve got work to do,” he said.
Nick followed him upstairs. “They’re in terrible trouble,” he said. Then he added, “I’ve written some.”
Wylie stopped. He turned to his son. “Oh?”
“Do you imagine that I don’t know what I am, Dad? After what I’ve been through? What I’ve done for you?”
He looked at his son, he thought, as if for the first time. “What you are?”
“What we are, as a family. We’re not the same, Dad, we’re in communication with other worlds, we have powers and I know it and you can’t say otherwise. That’s why they tried to kill us, and why they failed. I defended us, too, dad, and I’m owed.”
“Owed what?”
“You have to take me into your confidence, and you will never go into a gateway again like that without me to help you!”
A memory flashed, of a cottage in the woods. Funny memory, like a dream. Less than a dream, just a daytime imagining, the stuff of a story, no more.
“I, uh—”
“The solstice is coming and Martin and Trevor need us, Dad. But you’re, like, lost in your own mind all of a sudden, and right now is the worst possible time for you to lose the thread.” He paused. “Actually, I’ve written a lot. I’ve written the entire story of what you and Mom just did on Abaddon and who you are, and you can read that later, because right now we have a huge emergency and Dad, there is no time!”
He went into the office.
From downstairs, Brooke called, “What’s going on?”
“Nick just wrote his first short story.” He sat down at the laptop. “Talia,” he said, “it’s a beautiful name. But who’s this Aktriel? You’ve got to find a better name than that.”
“Dad, you’ll read that later. Right now, it’s time to write, because when you do write, something new is gonna happen.”
“Nothing’s there. I can’t write.”
Nick grabbed his hands, thrust them onto the keyboard. “Do it!”
After a moment, there was a whisper in his mind. He typed a few words.
“Trevor, Dad, you need to write about Trevor.”
It was as if lightning had blasted him and shattered him, and he had a vivid image of a vast room lit by a curiously affecting, even disturbing, glow, a light that was blue and very alive, and communicated more clearly than any scream that it was in terrible trouble.
His fingers moved on the keys, then sped.
“At last,” Nick said. “Trevor, buddy, listen up.”
Wylie was at his desk, but at the same time in another place deep underground, and there was heard as another voice. “And the seventh angel poured out his vial into the air; and there came a great voice out of the temple of heaven, from the throne, saying, ‘It is done.’”
But it was not done, not for the seven people who were struggling in that dark underground hell for their lives and the life of an entire world.
“There’s a gateway down there and they don’t see it, Dad.”
“I know.”
“Then write it! Say where it is if you know!”
“But they can’t come here, they can’t read this!”
“Just do it!”
Silently, in the dark of the great cavern where Martin and his little band struggled to break the soul traps, the hidden gateway to Abaddon slid slowly into focus, and began to open.
AS MIDNIGHT APPROACHED, THE FOURTEEN great lenses ranged around two-moon earth shimmered darkly. There was nobody to see, though, but for a scattering of seraph soldiers, and gangs of wanderers lined up, waiting to conduct their new masters into the cities that still stood, and out into the flats of the new lands, where enormous shantytowns were still under feverish construction, amid heaps of dead sea creatures and dead wanderers.
“Dad!”
He stopped. Came back to the world of his office. Turned to Nick, tried not to shout at him, which was what he wanted to do, to tell him to just shut up!
“Dad, you need to focus on Martin and Trevor.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, just do it!”
His fingers shot back to the keys, began flying.
Downstairs, little Kelsey also ranged across the night of the other world, looking for Winnie. Lindy, Brooke had found. She was on a truck that was running down to Denver, which was intended to become a major resettlement area for the Corporation’s starving billions. There her destiny would be simple: like all wanderers, she was to be worked to death.
On the sunlit side of the earth, the gigantic flats that had replaced much of the mid-Pacific were covered by an impenetrable fog, as trillions of tons of gasses boiled up out of the drying soil. Where India and China had been was a new ocean, stormy and unsettled, floating with what appeared to be islands that were actually made of furniture and ice chests and logs and carpeting and toys and siding and plastic doors, flowerpots, Styrofoam cups, shipping beads, any container that was closed and would float, and on these islands were rolling hills of the corpses of cattle and dogs and monkeys and all manner of beast, and human corpses with pale-glazed eyes, and swarming masses of gulls and crows, and hordes of pelicans flying from place to place, their craws bulging.
They all saw this, the Dale family, in their new free minds, and as she watched, Kelsey sang softly to Bearish, whom she cradled as if he was the whole world. She sang the ancient lullaby her mother had taught her, “Dereen Day,” that had come up from the quiet hearths of the Union and into the quiet hearths of Ireland a very long time ago, a song shared between angels and men. Her voice came up the stairs from the lonely pool of light where she sat carrying in her arms not only Bearish but all the dead of a whole world. She hummed to them and sang in her little voice. “Dereen Day, the nightjar calls upon the heath…”
Outside, night swept on and the evening star shone on the peaceful horizon.
She had been sending her mind down the roads of the other earth for a long time, had this very private child called Kelsey, for she shared with Winnie the same bond that her brother did with Trevor. So she sang not only to her Bearish but to Winnie’s, whom she had found in a cradle of snow, the night flakes whispering along his fur, as they whispered across all the little corner of Nebraska where Winnie had given everything she had to give, and laid down.
Now, as Kelsey sang to Bearish and Winnie’s Bearish, she sang also to Winnie, to the silver of the ice that crusted her cheeks, and her red car coat that was being worried by the winter wind, and to all the little lumps in the ocean of little lumps that were left everywhere on earth that wanderers had passed, each one somebody whose strength had not been enough to meet the Corporation’s cruel test. Survival of the fittest—the Corporation’s way—was not the way of the true of heart, human or not.
In the office, Nick and now Brooke along with him, struggled to get Wylie to concentrate on the place that counted, the soul prison where Martin and Trevor and their few struggled for the life of their world.
“The souls,” Brooke whispered, “can you see?”
Wylie sighed like a weaver does working on a difficult knot. The only sound in the house was Kelsey’s singing coming up from below.
“Okay,” he said. He began to type again.
But he saw the lens that stood in the ruin of the Giza plateau. It glowed angry red now, and red light leaped out of it, a huge column that reflected off the shattered city and the desert, making it appear as if the whole landscape was on Mars.
With it came a sound, at first a crackling like the rattling of a great curtain, and then another sound, a snap, then another louder one, and the lens seemed to shimmer, to shudder within itself, and seraph were suddenly walking away from it, each carrying a little bundle or a suitcase, some carrying briefcases or rolling bags, some in black, some like hurrying officials in hats and coats, some carrying their babies or baskets of eggs, or with their childrens’ hands in theirs. They came clutching receipts for the tickets they had bought, and began to stream out past the Mena hotel toward Cairo, and up and down the banks of the Nile.
Another sound came, then, the gigantic spitting noise, a volcano makes when it vomits lava. Some of the colonists turned, others kept on, intent on getting to whatever corner of the new lands they had bought. Already, some were boarding buses that had been smashed in the explosion of the pyramid and trying to get them started, while others threw out the skeletons of the tourists who had died there, and marveled over their delicate, colorful clothes.
With a roar so huge that it would over the next few hours echo around the entire world, a massive red column of material shot out of the hole where the lens had been. The lens itself arced into the stratosphere, turning over and over, and as it turned changing shape, twisting and melting and then falling and becoming black, then blacker still, and landing in the Arabian desert not far from Mecca, a city of corpses of those who had died praying, surrounded by a desert coated with wanderers who had fallen beneath the sun.
None saw it strike, but Wylie and Brooke did, and Nick and so also Trevor and Martin. Deep in their traps, the souls of Lindy and Winnie sensed some signal from the outside, and for the first time since she had been pulled from her body, Lindy realized that she was not buried alive in a coffin, hideously and inexplicably unable to die. She began to call the name of the strongest and most trusted person she knew.
“I hear my wife,” Martin said. “Lindy is calling me!”
At the same time, though, diamonds began to appear in the air, shimmering black, as Samson prepared to move the souls that would make him rich in Abaddon.
Winnie, who had been alone and cold and feeling drawn to some great joy she could not reach, now felt herself in the arms of her friend Kelsey, and heard a lullaby her mom had sung her every night of her life, “the nightjars calling upon the heath…” and rested in the knowledge that somebody was at last saving her from the monsters who had bound her here.
In Mecca, a new black stone now lay not far from the Alhajar Al-Aswad, and of the same material and the same shape and color, for the last one that fell here had started from exactly the same place thirteen thousand years ago, as Abaddon failed in its last attempt to steal the human worlds, and the raw hole it had left had been filled, and the pyramid built to close the wound, and remain as a warning—one that Abaddon had spent thirteen millennia tricking and deceiving mankind into forgetting.
The rest of the material that had blasted like lava from the huge gateway came to the top of its trajectory and began sailing back down. Far below, the seraph began to see arms and legs of their own kind, torsos, heads, shoes, falling around them, striking one and then another of them and causing their yellow brains to splash out. Heads bounded along like great hailstones, or rocks catapulted down by a siege army. As they bent to protect children or possessions or eggs, they were smashed, they were all smashed in a maelstrom of destruction from above that seemed never to end, a storm made of body parts.
A roar of terror and woe rose up from their throats, but was quickly buried in the wet thudding, as the living seraph disappeared beneath the mountains of their own dead.
Brooke lay her hand over Wylie’s for a moment. He glanced up at her, and in that glance they shared exultation, perhaps also sorrow at the suffering that was being experienced, but it was nothing compared to the rage of battle that was breaking out in the lands of the Corporation, gnashing so intense that it was shaking even the pearly walls that enclosed the Union, and rustling the leaves in the peaceful lands they protected.
They were being torn apart, the minions of Echidna, who had ruled for so long. Wylie looked for Samson, but did not see him. He wanted to identify him, because Samson, who knew human customs and understood gateways, was not defeated until he was destroyed.
“They need us,” Nick said from behind closed eyes. “They need us now, Dad.”
“I can’t help where the story goes.”
Nick pushed his father away from the laptop.
“Hey.”
“Dad, it’s another deception! They’re fascinating you with their own destruction, so you won’t go where you’re needed.”
He began to type, and when Wylie tried to stop him, Brooke intervened with a sharp shake of her head.
Nick’s eyes closed. His fingers flew.
Before him was a huge room. It was lit by faint blue light that dwindled in the massive space to a blue haze on the distance. The haze flickered slightly, and then he saw why. It was coming from millions upon millions of lozenge-shaped tubes, each emplaced in a socket that was connected to thick, black cables that ran between the hundreds and hundreds of rows.
Martin was quite familiar with the large cartouches that were depicted on the walls of the Temple of Hathor in the Dendera complex. He had not dated this temple, but he had known since he’d read of Al North’s ordeal, that the accepted explanation for the oblong cartouches, that they were simply borders meant to enclose hieroglyphics, was not correct.
In each one, a multicolored light flickered along a copper filament. It twisted and turned, flying now against the glass of the tube, now twisting itself around the filament, now flashing in a million colors.
The light was souls, and he understood now what Abaddon’s ages-long propaganda had done to us. It had made us forget the science of the soul so that we would be helpless when the three earths again crossed the plane of the galaxy and they would have their chance—this chance—to return. It had made us forget what these tubes were, which were soul prisons. It had given us generations of scientists who considered the soul a “supernatural” idea and so stayed away from any study of it. But there was no supernatural, there were only phenomena that had been understood, quantified, and measured, and phenomena that had not. That the patterns induced in fields of electrons by changing conditions in a body would persist after death and become a sort of plasma, conscious and richly aware of its memories, had never been imagined. It had been assumed, if it was thought about at all, that any electromagnetic activity in the nervous system simply ceased when the body died.
And so Martin’s earth had been defenseless when the seraph returned—as ours will be, also, on the inevitable day when in their greedy, starved fury, they come bursting in on us in whatever cunning new way they may devise.
Above the ocean of Samson’s soul traps, the long lines of gateways were sparking and shimmering. It would only be moments before it was too late. The souls, seeming to sense this, flickered frantically in their prisons.
There came from along the narrow path between two rows of soul traps, a clanging. It was young Mike in the gloom, hammering at one of the tubes with a rock he had found on the way in.
The sound echoed up and down the great space, rising in intensity until it was the ringing of a great bell, then falling again as he grew tired, finally stopping.
Trevor said, “I think there’s a seam here.” He was down between two rows, where the tubes were connected to the sockets that held them.
“What’s next, Dad?” Nick asked has father.
“You’re the writer now, son.”
“They’re running out of time!”
“And you’re frozen. It happens.”
“Dad, pick it up.”
“I can’t pick it up, it’s yours now!”
Nick sat. Nothing happened. Wylie waited. His mind remained blank.
Brooke said, “What about Al North?”
That did it. Nick’s fingers began to type.
Al North had done wrong and been wrong, but he had never wavered from his duty as he understood it. He knew where his fault lay and what it would inevitably do to him, but also as long as he had consciousness in him, he would strive to right the wrongs he had created.
Even so, those wrongs had led to a horrible catastrophe and billions of deaths, and no small act of heroism could rectify such a tremendous mistake. He could no longer reach the surface of the earth, but this desperate place was far beneath it, and here he could still maneuver.
“Look!” Martin pointed to what appeared to be a star in the vault of the space. At that same instant something rushed past beneath his feet. He looked down in time to see scales, iridescent purple in the blue light, but then the thing was gone.
An instant later Mike screamed as coils surged up around him.
Al North saw all this with the clarity—and, indeed, the peace—of somebody who had accepted his life in full, and was prepared to pay the debt he had incurred. He understood the secret of hell, that souls who go there forfeit their right to be. They no longer have a place in this universe or any universe, not until time ends, and a new idea comes to replace the one that is the present creation.
And then, maybe.
He who had done evil accepted the rightness of this.
Still, he wanted to repair what he could, and there was something he could do here. They had all forgotten, in their terror, to just let themselves happen, to trust the grace that was immediately and always ready to support them. He forgave them. He hoped for them.
Which was a very great thing, that he could surmount his anger and his disappointment and his arrogance long enough to do that one tiny thing, to feel hope.
It seemed small, but the energy of such an act on the part of a lost soul is huge, and the tiny spark of goodness that was still within him was easily enough to open ten million soul traps in one flashing, electric instant.
A roar of voices burst out, the faint blue light became a million times brighter. Memories, thoughts, pleas, cries of relief—a huge, gushing roar of human surprise and joy—flew at Martin and his little band in the form of pictures of happy moments, loving in the covers, running by the sea, leaves whirling in autumn, Christmas tree lights, girls dancing, men in blue water, hamburgers, the faces of happy dogs, and song in a million verses of hallelujah.
In this mass, a thousand great serpents came screaming up from the depths of the place and down from the shuddering gateways, their bodies burning from the goodness around them that they could not bear, and they flew into the air like great pillars of fire, writhing and screaming in the sea of song.
They were another design like the outriders and the nighthawks, especially fashioned to terrify human beings, but they had been unleashed too late to save Samson’s wealth. No doubt, the huge snakes were a rental, and he hadn’t wanted to spend the money unless he had to.
The song ended. The hot bones of the serpents tumbled down through the ruined masses of shattered tubes. The gateways shimmered and went out.
Samson’s enormous cry of rage echoed, faded, and died away. He dropped to a stool in his simple room, his narrow head bowed. Outside, the city roared. Another revolution, another aristocracy burned, and now this, his fortune lost.
So it went, in the unsettled misery of this age.
Unnoticed by the raging crowds, the hour of midnight had passed. The weak had won the day.
With a quick swipe of his hand across his face, Samson shifted into his human form. Outside, torches flared. Feet pounded on the stairs, fists pounded on his door.
He stepped through his quickly closing gateway, but not into his old world, not into Martin’s world. He had a plan. If there was vengeance to be tasted, he intended to drink deep.
“Dad, he’s in our woods!”
They got their shotguns and took off after him, both of them, and Brooke and Kelsey agreed that they’d gone mad.
The woods, though, were empty. From along the ridge above the house, they could see the lights of Harrow. Faintly, one of the church bells sounded. Snow was falling, whispering in the woods, drawing pale lines along the dark branches of the winter trees. The peace here was so deep that it seemed impossible that Samson could have passed this way.
They went back to the house, the two of them. They lingered on the deck.
“The Belt of Orion,” Wylie said, gazing up as the snow clouds made a window for the stars.
“And his bow,” Nick said, pointing.
“You did good, Nick.”
“Thanks, Dad. Dad?”
“Yes?”
“Is it real? The book?”
“I thought Samson was in our woods. But he wasn’t.”
They went inside, then, and made a fire for the girls. Popcorn was popped, and hot chocolate produced, and Wylie even managed to slip a goodly shot of whiskey into his.
They spent the remainder of this quiet night speaking of the things of ordinary life. “Past midnight,” Nick said. “I think we won.”
Nothing more was said, and after a time, Nick played cards with Kelsey and Wylie, and Brooke broke out the celebration cognac, a hundred-year-old bottle that was sipped at moments of victory.
Tomorrow, Christmas vacation began for the kids, and in the very late hours, Wylie went into his wife’s arms for what felt like the first time in an age.
At breakfast, the radio said, “The world ended last night, but it seems that nobody noticed. New Age gurus from China to Scotland stood on mountaintops and chanted, but guess what, Chicken Little stayed home. We are now living on the first day beyond the end of the ancient Mayan calendar, a date that has no number in their measurement. But then again, they went extinct a long time ago.”
Later in the morning, Nick found boot prints back in the woods, where Samson’s gateway had been.
“Could’ve been left by us,” Wylie told him.
“I was wearing sneakers when we came out here. You had on a sock. One sock.”
“I went out in the woods without shoes? In the dead of winter?”
Nick nodded. “We did not make these tracks, Dad.”
They’d put a throw rug over the bullet holes in the floor above the crawl space, and they both looked at it at the same time, and for the same reason. It was now gone and the floor was unmarked.
“Brooke, what about that little rug in the kitchen?”
“I put that horror back in the mudroom where it belongs and leave it there please. In the future, if you want to rearrange my house, submit your request in writing.”
“Dad, it was all real! It happened! And we’re—” He stopped. Frowned a little, shook his head. “I lost it,” he said. “It was right on the tip of my tongue.”
Wylie called Matt, but nobody had reported anybody strange wandering around in Harrow, or anywhere in Lautner County, for that matter.
“What about the body in my crawl space? Is that resolved?”
“You want me to come out there with a net?”
“I thought you were gonna arrest me.”
There was a silence. Then, “Oh, yeah, you’ve got that absinthe, not to mention the cigar theft issue.”
He had no memory whatsoever of Al North, then.
They talked, then, about the state of the pheasant population, which was excellent. “Matt wants to hunt tomorrow,” Wylie called to Nick, “you game?”
Nick looked at him. “He doesn’t remember a thing, does he?”
“You want to go or not?”
“’Course I do.”
Wylie made plans to meet with Matt before dawn, and go to some of the walk—in land over in Smith County. “You sure there’s been nothing odd, Matt? No cars stolen around here, say?”
“In your neck of the woods? There hasn’t been any crime of any kind over there at all, ever. What the hell’s the matter with you today, anyway? Is this some new insanity? I don’t hunt with crazy people.”
“Read me the blotter for last night.”
“The blotter?”
“Look, it’s not gonna kill you, now read the damn thing!”
“Okay! 16:32, Miss Wicks’s chickens are in Elm Street again. Ticketed. 18:05, car fire, put out by occupant. 20:22, kids smoking and playing loud music behind Wilson’s Feed and Seed, sent home.”
“That was it? That was what we paid you for last night?”
“We got a possible stolen truck. Jim Riggs can’t find his farm banger. But it’s probably gonna be that Willie of his, hid it for a joke. That kid’s got an unfortunate sense of humor.”
So nothing strange had happened in this quiet little corner of Kansas for a long time, unless it was Samson who had gotten that truck, of course.
Or no, there was one thing: the miserable accident that had befallen poor William Nunnally.
“So, what’s new in the Nunnally case?”
“Nothin.’ Coroner’s report says it was exposure. He was high, it seems. Got a lotta meth heads down that way. Damndest thing. The family’s not gonna sue you, for some strange reason, going down there and terrorizing them like you did.”
“So it was just one of those things?”
“That would be true, crazy man.”
The night passed uneventfully, Wylie and Nick got up at four-thirty, and as the sun rose, they were hunting. True to form, Wylie over—or undershot every rise he got, and all his pheasants lived to see another day.
Nick, however, bagged Christmas dinner.