The Spirit Well

by Stephen R. Lawhead

  From somewhere high on the canyon rim above her, Cass heard a sound like that of a hawk—a keening, whine-like whistle—and felt a spatter of rain strike the back of her hand. She glanced up and got another raindrop smack on her brow. A low mist cloud hung over the gap between the narrow rock walls. She kept moving, noting the sudden change in the weather as gusting wind whipped around her legs, blowing loose sand and dry yucca leaves down the path ahead of her. The mist descended, enveloping her, slicking her face with moisture. In the same moment, a queasy sensation squirmed through her, and her step faltered—as if the surface beneath her feet had dropped half a step lower. She saw light ahead where the sun was burning through the all-enveloping fog and moved towards it, emerging to find herself on a vast plain stretching away in every direction to a horizon of black hills far away.

  She had arrived in the Ghost World.

  The travel sickness hit her all at once, slamming into her even as she stood looking at the emptiness opening around her. She doubled over and retched into the dust at her feet; hands on knees, she stood for a moment, breathing through her nose until the dizziness passed. She dabbed her lips and rinsed her mouth with a swig from her water bottle, thankful that this time there was no headache. She swallowed some more water and then, raising her camera, began photographing the bleak, monochrome landscape in a wide panoramic sweep to take in the open, empty, bone-dry, flat-as-an-iron volcanic pan around her. The sun stood low in the western sky, almost touching the tops of the far distant hills, illuminating the lines that covered the cinder plain stretched away arrow-straight across a totally featureless wasteland— no cacti, no boulders, no rocks larger than any other, nothing in any direction as far as the eye could see . . . except the mysterious lines. Some of the lines were arrow straight; others curved into immense spirals splayed across acres of empty landscape.

  Lowering her camera, Cass squatted down to take a few pictures of the path on which she stood, then put down a hand to feel the gritty texture of the pumice and discovered that the layer beneath was lighter than that which was above.

  “Oxidation,” she breathed to herself. “So that’s how they’re made.”

  It was simplicity itself: by moving the surface layer off to either side to expose the lighter material beneath, a stripe of light-coloured stone was created. She remembered pictures of chalk drawings presented in prehistoric anthropology lectures at university where, to create a drawing on a hillside, primitive people simply removed the turf to expose the white chalk just below the surface—a technique requiring few tools, but lots of manpower. The principle here was the same.

  Cass stepped off the line and took a photo of the trail from another angle. The light dimmed somewhat; the sun was beginning its descent behind the hills. Cass decided that, having done what she intended, she should go back while the Coyote Bridge between the worlds was still open. She stepped onto the track once more and started back the way she had come, walking with quick purpose.

  Almost at once, the wind sprang up. It howled around her in whirling dust devils, raising clouds of fine volcanic dust. Cass shut her eyes tight against the blowing grit, and in a moment felt the sheen of moisture on her face. She continued a few more paces, and the wind died away with a last trailing shriek; she was back in the canyon, in the shadowed cool of early morning, the tall stone walls rising sheer on either hand.

  She managed a few more steps before the incipient motion sickness caught up with her. It was dry heaves this time, and she put a hand to the nearest wall to steady herself, drawing deep breaths through her nose until the queasiness passed—to be replaced by a surge of joy at having successfully navigated the Coyote Bridge between worlds without a guide, and without a hitch. Wait until Dad hears about this! she thought. He’ll be so amazed. Wiping her mouth on her sleeve, she moved on.

  Her moment of blissful triumph ended abruptly as she stepped from the mouth of the canyon and was met by the sight of a wide green valley with a broad river flowing through it in graceful arcs beneath a sky dappled with small, white powder-puff clouds. A line of stately poplar trees rose above the rich brown earth of newly ploughed fields on the hills either side of the river. The gentle rural scene met her astonished gaze, and her heart clenched in her chest.

  Wherever she was, it was definitely not Arizona. Her brain thrummed with a single thought: Now what? Now what? Now what?

  Cass’s first inclination was to promptly sit down, hug her knees to her chest, close her eyes against the sight, and wish it all away—as one would with an ordinary nightmare. Her second thought was to calmly, carefully enumerate and categorise her options. She did neither of those things. Instead, she gave in to a far more instinctual urge and simply turned and fled the way she had come, darting back into the canyon once more. She raced along the sandstone walls, her heart in her mouth, hoping against hope that the Coyote Bridge was still accessible.

  Before she had taken a dozen flying steps, her vision grew misty and a blast of hot wind swept down upon her, driving her forward. The ground gave way beneath her and she lurched a falling half step, stumbled, and pitched forward. Her camera banged into her forehead, causing her eyes to water; all knees and elbows, she landed in a heap, raising a cloud of dust.

  As before, the light filtering down from on high was dim, the air cool on her skin, and she sighed with relief at the sight of the Secret Canyon’s familiar sandstone walls. But as her eyes adjusted to the faint light and she looked around, the walls turned out to be whitewashed plaster and the path was a cobbled stone alley. Just ahead, a low and narrow archway opened onto a brighter, sunlit way beyond.

  “Oh great,” she muttered between gritted teeth. “Now where am I?”

  Determined this time not to give in to panic, but to approach this admitted setback in a calm, rational, scientific way, Cass dragged herself to her feet, swatted the dust from her clothes, and moved towards the archway. With a calming breath, she stepped through. A white sun blazed in a cloudless sky of intense blue, beating down upon a street lined with ruined columns and bounded by tiny shops sporting colourful striped awnings and, directly before her, a cobbled thoroughfare straight as a plumb line and squeezed to near impassibility by a formidable gauntlet of street merchants selling from carts and stalls and barrows.

  She stood at the entrance to the alleyway and gazed down along the avenue. Clutches of people moved among the vendors, examining the merchandise, bargaining, buying, and bearing away their purchases. All were dressed in billowy garments: long head-to-heel robes of black, brown, or blue-and-white-stripes for the women; and for the men, baggy striped trousers—ballooned around the legs and tight at the ankles—with floppy white shirts and truncated waistcoats in yellow, green, or blue. Every head was covered: the women wore scarves or veils of netted lace; the men wore hats in brick tones or blood red.

  Cass took one look at the fez-topped heads and came to the conclusion that she had arrived in Turkey—Istanbul, maybe? In any case it was a city she had never visited before and had no wish to be in right now. Glancing quickly right and left to make sure no one was watching, she ducked into the alley from which she had just emerged and strode back the way she had come. Passages opened on either hand, but she continued straight on until reaching a blank wall. The old track had once passed through the wall; she could see the outline of an arch framed in stone, but the opening had been bricked up some time in the past.

  She spun on her heel and headed back the opposite way, moving with the same swift, purposeful steps that had brought her this far; this time, however, they did not produce the desired result. The air remained still, the alleyway did not grow misty, there was no sudden gust of wind or rain or mist, no momentary lurch into another world. She paused, drew a deep breath, and repeated the attempt . . . with no better result.

  Cold sweat beaded between her shoulder blades. “No,” she whispered under her breath. “Fear will get you nowhere. Turn around, and let’s try this again.”

  After one more effort, Ca
ss concluded that she was stuck—at least until sunset or, failing that, early the next morning. In the meantime, she would find somewhere to hide and lie low until nightfall. That would keep her out of sight and out of trouble. Looking around, she decided to hunker down in one of the little passageways branching off the alley; it was shady and cool, and though other doors opened onto it, there was no one around. Slipping off her backpack, she sat down on the ground and settled in to wait.

  An hour or so passed, during which she grew bored, and she was rethinking her strategy when a pack of dogs came wandering down the alley. They saw her and began barking. Cass did not like dogs all that much, and disliked being barked at even more. She tried to hush them and made shooing motions with her hands to drive them away. While she was doing this, one of the alley doors opened and a man put his head out to see what had stirred up the pack. He saw her and started towards her, calling out in a language Cass could not identify, and Cass, to avoid an explanation or a confrontation, shouldered her pack, gave him a cheery wave, and hurried away, leading her doggy escort.

  Back on the street once more, she decided that she might as well make the best of it and at least explore the place while she was here. She had taken but a few steps from the alley entrance when she heard a shout and spun around in time to avoid a man on a motor scooter bearing down on her. Balanced on the handlebars was a tray of pomegranates. Cass scrambled out of the way as the scooter spurted past, the man still shouting and weaving wildly, narrowly missing a donkey cart carrying crates of live chickens stacked in a high, unsteady tower. The dogs followed the cart, yapping at the donkey, and Cass proceeded on her way down the street, looking for any hints that might tell her where in the world she was.

  The signs she saw on the shops and in windows, or hanging over the streets on wires, were all in some form of Arabic—which did not entirely square with her scant knowledge of Turkey. The snatches of language she caught as she passed—from those nearby and the street sellers who called out to her—sounded to her like Arabic too. So, not Turkey then, but somewhere in the Middle East. This impression was immediately strengthened when a group of women emerged from a side street, each wearing a black veil and carrying a parcel on her head—bags bulging with fruit or neatly folded sheets of flat bread.

  One of the women saw Cass, nudged her neighbour, and pointed. The group stopped, turned towards her, and stared.

  My clothes! Cass suddenly felt very conspicuous and vulnerable. Her first thought was to buy something from one of the street merchants, but realised she had only a handful of loose change in a foreign currency. Ducking behind one of the marble pillars lining the street, she hastily readjusted her wardrobe; buttoning her floppy shirt to the top and pulling out the shirttails, she put her belt around the outside to make it look like some sort of short tunic. She could not do much about the trousers, but unfolded the cuffs and pulled them down over her boots. Then, taking her scarf, she arranged it to cover her hair, roughly in the manner of the other women. In all, this thin disguise was not the best way to pass unnoticed by the locals, but it would have to do.

  When she ventured into public view once more, she kept to the shadows and tried to remain inconspicuous. Carrying her backpack like a parcel under her arm rather than wearing it, she slowly made her way along, pausing now and again to take surreptitious photos of the place—for future reference, if nothing else. For some reason, she was especially drawn to doors and doorways—these, and even some of the walls of surrounding buildings, were of a distinctive blackand-white stone in wide alternating bands. Basalt for the black, Cass decided, and pale limestone or marble for the white.

  On closer inspection, there were traces of other periods of architecture mixed in here and there, a melange of styles, each distinctive of an empire past—Greek and Roman from the classical period, Byzantine, Arabic, and, though Cass was no expert, what looked to her like Ottoman. She passed beneath a ruined Roman arch, still standing, with distinctive Acacia-topped columns on either side, and a few yards or so farther on another arch in the characteristic Arab onion shape framing a Byzantine bronze door.

  She walked on, eventually coming to the city wall set with a huge triple gate—two smaller doors flanking a large central portal; all three doors were open wide, and through them she could see a wide boulevard of palm trees with traffic passing to and fro outside the wall. Oddly, for a busy city there were few vehicles plying this thoroughfare— Cass would have expected more—and all of them appeared as if they belonged in a museum for vintage motors. With low-slung chassis and small windows, and fat, white-walled tires below wide, rounded fenders that swooped into running boards, these automobiles and small trucks were definitely from another era. Cassandra had the sensation of having wandered onto a movie set of a film about the 1930s.

  So, as well as moving through space, she had also travelled in time. The scientist in her rose up in a cry of Impossible! Even as this thought entered her head, another voice asked, More impossible than travelling from one place to another in a pretty good imitation of “Beam-me-up-Scotty”?

  The possibility of chronological migration had simply never occurred to her, and it took her a moment to adjust to yet another radical new paradigm shift. Clearly, everything she knew was wrong. A new theory would have to be created to account for this new reality. Cass turned and gazed back down the street. Nothing she saw contradicted the time-travel premise; neither did anything readily confirm it. The architecture certainly was archaic—but that was true of most places throughout the region. The people were dressed in simple garb that might belong to any decade in the last two hundred years or more—again, that was inconclusive. The vehicles alone gave her a clue; one or two might be explained away, but every single one of them belonging to the same era? No. So, taken together, these clues led to the conclusion that, in addition to moving through space, she had somehow slipped backward in time.

  Reluctant to wander any farther from the one street she knew, Cass turned around and started back the way she had come, walking along, taking in the simple brick-and-timber style construction mingled with more substantial stone structures. She passed a church behind a gate of iron filigree and, across the street from it, a mosque with a green dome topped with a crescent moon in brass. She walked beneath the Roman arch once more and noticed, immediately on the other side, a generous gated doorway contained within an arch of alternating black-and-white stone. The huge wooden doors were open, revealing the entrance to a covered marketplace. Veiled and shrouded women were congregating around the entrance chatting to one another; they darted glances at her but did not stare, and for that Cass was grateful. Beyond them she could see merchants selling vegetables and cloth from stalls either side of a long aisle that disappeared into the dark interior of the bazaar. She moved towards the entrance, keeping to the edge of the milling throng. As she neared the archway wall, her eye fell upon a sign—a single sheet of orange paper printed in neat black letters—written in English and pasted to the plaster of the wall. She stopped automatically and read:

  Lost? Lonely?

  Looking for Something to Believe In?

  We Can Help

  For Information Ring

  Damascus 88-66-44

  Or Come to 22 Hanania Street nr.

  Beit Hanania

  The Zetetic Society

  She read the words again with the uncanny feeling that in some inexplicable and wholly improbable way the message on the sign was meant for her. She stood, transfixed by the simple orange sign as by the dancing flame of a fire, while the conviction hardened within her that she must go to this place at once, and that if she could only find the Zetetic Society, all her questions would all be answered.

  Already one question had been answered: she now knew that she was not in Turkey but in Syria. What else could this mysterious society tell her?

  PART THREE

  The Street Called Straight

  CHAPTER 14

  In Which Some Things Are Not to Be

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nbsp; The Nile flowed on without so much as a ripple beneath the barges carrying the priests of Amun back to Niwet-Amun and the temple. Though the sun blazed high in the clear Egyptian sky and life along the river continued serene and quiet as always, Benedict’s small world was shaken to the very core. He looked upon the lush green banks sliding silently by, and all he saw was desolation. In his mind, moment by moment, he relived the riot in Akhenaten’s Holy City; he heard the angry cries and saw the stones striking the priests, striking his father.

  Refusing to leave his injured father’s bedside, he sat in misery, rarely stirring, filled with dread and fear, while a succession of ministering priests came and went.

  “I will not swear falsely,” Anen told him. “Your father’s injury is very grave.”

  Benedict turned anxious, uncomprehending eyes upon the priest.

  “But know you,” Anen continued, “our skills are great, and every possible remedy will be availed for him. Take courage in this knowledge.” He placed a comforting hand on the young man’s shoulder. “On this, I have made my vow. In the name of Amun, it shall be.”

  Unable to understand the language of those around him, Benedict derived little comfort from this assurance. Still, he heard the sound of hope in the priest’s voice and felt his encouragement in the gentle touch. He did take courage, and he prayed as he had never prayed before, using the only prayer he knew well, and saying it over and over until it became only Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done . . . Amen.