by A. Sparrow
At least the floor was flat and devoid of obstructions. Nothing to trip over. I passed a pair of souls coming the other way but they were too engaged in conversation to acknowledge my presence. It was far too dark for them to notice my non-gray complexion.
I descended farther and deeper, far below the courtyards and ventilation shafts, away from the light and the places the souls seemed to gather. I was headed for the absolute depths of these catacombs, wondering if like Root, this might lead to a portal. But if that was the case, why wasn’t anyone using it?
It wasn’t looking like there would be any alternative exits the way I was headed. But it didn’t really matter. I wasn’t exactly in the mood for company or eager to be above ground. I just wanted a place to gather my thoughts where I wouldn’t be bothered.
Somehow the darkness made the place seem bigger. I didn’t feel as claustrophobic as I had in the lighted spaces. In fact, there was something cozy and womb-like about these passages. The walls’ solidity made me feel secure. And the utter silence told me there were no Reapers to worry about.
If I had to be stuck in the Deeps, I could see myself biding my time here between excursions to the living world. Maybe a cold, dark place devoid of pain or emotion was just the ticket for me. It beat having my heart broken again and witnessing the ugliness that souls inflict on each other in every other corner of existence. It could serve as my own personal sensory deprivation chamber, a place to stash my soul and meditate?
But speaking of senses, something acrid and musty penetrated my awareness. This was the first time I had perceived anything close to an odor in this world. It almost didn’t matter that it was a bad smell, any odor at all was a welcome discovery. As long as it didn’t smell like Reapers.
I plunged as deep into this underworld as far as the ever-narrowing corridors would take me. A pattern of echoes suggested chambers opening to either side and I ducked into one, finding it spacious and airy. This might be one of the bunkers Taro told me about. Havens from the Horus. It was vacant now, but I could imagine how crowded they could get when the refugees came down from the upper catacombs.
The corridor continued on the level for a short ways beyond the havens before descending descended steeply in a tight spiral. The walls were rougher here and there were heaps of stony debris that had not yet been removed. This was new construction, relative to the rest of the place. Though, who knew how many millennia this settlement had been here? How long had humans been humans? How long had souls been souls?
The spiral ramp bottomed out in a circular passage the diameter of a traffic rotary. Narrow openings led to rooms smaller than the havens, based on the echo of my footsteps. I made two complete circuits before realizing that I had reached a dead end.
It was actually damp down here. Almost clammy. There was water in the stone. Not much, but enough to add some humidity to the brittle air.
It wasn’t as cold either, not that it mattered to my numbed senses. But clearly, this place was different from the upper reaches.
No sign of any portals. Not a hint of any human activity going on above me. Nothing but stony, deathly silence. Most graves were probably livelier than this place.
I squeezed into one of the small chambers, finding myself in a room no larger than a small kitchen. It was so dark inside, I had to feel my way along the walls by sliding my fingertips.
Bumps and indentations in the surface that I first thought were irregularities, I realized now was some sort of decoration or maybe even text. There were shapes that were repeated, but nothing I could recognize from the Roman alphabet. They were hieroglyphics or cuneiform or something altogether different and they covered the chamber’s walls from ceiling to floor.
My foot bumped the edge of something hard in the middle of the room. I pawed at it to gauge its size and shape. It was an oblong block of stone. Furniture? I slid my hands across the smooth top, only to bump them into something leathery and stiff—a corpse.
Repulsed, I drew my hand back, creeped out all the more by the fact that I couldn’t see it. But then again, why should I be? I had found Mr. O in pretty much the same situation. Lady An had implied that the long sleep was not unique to the Liminality and that there could be Old Ones in the Deeps. These weren’t corpses. They were just the corporal vessels, anchors for souls that had moved on to something better.
Nevertheless, being unable to verify any of that in the absolute darkness allowed the unknowns to rule my fears and I left the chamber. I tried again to get the walls to glow, but clearly this place was not Root. The Dusters relied on a brand of spell craft that was alien to my intuition. Perhaps something you had to be dead to summon.
Several paces down the arcing corridor was another entrance, but this chamber too was occupied and so was the next one down. I had stumbled into an assemblage of crypts. Thinking back, they probably all had occupants, because Lady An had asked Brian to get a new chamber built for the guy who was coming—Old Ned.
And finally some rational thoughts broke their way through my panic. If these were Old Ones it was no big deal. They were just people. Dead people. But people. Every Old One I had ever met was a fine example of humanity. One did not attain the status of a fulfilled soul apparently without being some kind of a mensch. Maybe one reason Yaqob was still around despite being among the original wave of Dusters was that he happened to be a bit of a jerk.
That line of thinking calmed me enough to send me back into the next opening to a chamber. I skirted the edge of the central platform, retreating to the back corner. I sat down against the juncture of the two walls, my knees drawn up, my chin propped.
My overall numbness combined with the utter silence and lack of light contributed to an illusion of disembodiment. Devoid of sensory input, I was alone in my mind. I had never felt the futility of existence so acutely.
It came to me that there was no state of being anywhere in this universe where I could be truly happy. Life sucked. With Wendell and Sergei on my tail and no Karla spelled misery, no matter much money and toys I could get killing Frelsians on contract.
The Deeps were even worse, with the Hashmallim and Seraphim after me, would-be Dusters wanting to lock me away for my own good, and nothing to hope for but the Horus and its sketchy portal to existence maybe even worse than the ones I already knew. After what I had experienced, I had no faith that Heaven, if it existed, would be any less disturbing and dysfunctional.
But at least the Liminality could be tolerable despite all the warring. I kind of liked hanging out in my little homestead by the pond. And now, Luther’s presence had improved the security situation in the neighborhood, not to mention, having made the pitted plains immeasurably more entertaining.
I imagined I could persist there like Bern, as some kind of unmarried widower. A couple more jobs for Wendell and I could afford to shack up somewhere comfy on the living side. When I got tired of that, a pilgrimage to the glaciers would set me up forever as a Freesoul.
But deep down, what I longed for was the best of both worlds. I wanted to be back on the farm with Karla and my friends from Wales. When the doldrums struck, we could surf back to the Liminality and explore its wildernesses on the backs of mantids and dragonflies. Together. Forever.
That was closest thing I had to a vision of Heaven. The impossibility of its attainment made it impossible to fend off the waves of despair that kept trying to drag me under. Destiny had already moved on, shrinking my future to a set of much less desirable options.
I got up and paced around the periphery of the dark room, trying to get some sense of the dimensions. It was perfectly square. About five and a half paces by five and a half paces. If I could find an unoccupied crypt that was unoccupied I could set myself up on one of those rectangular blocks. At least it was peaceful here. It would be a safe and restful place to bide my time between transitions.
I wondered if the slab in this chamber was occupied. Because if it wasn’t, it would be awful nice to lie down and bide my time here until I to
o became one of them, if that was indeed how things worked.
I had never heard an Old One complain about being stuck in the Singularity. In fact, I remembered their tears in the moments after I had dragged them back to the Liminality. The place couldn’t be too shabby if that’s how leaving made them react.
I reached into the darkness and bumped something bristly. This slab was occupied. I don’t know what I had touched, but the instant I made contact there was a flash and a snap like ears popping on a plane. Suddenly, I knew everything there was to know about the man whose soul was anchored here.
In that instant, I learned that the man—my host’s—name was Rafael Fenestra. And it was as if we had always shared the same skull. His memories, his intellect, everything about him was laid bare to me.
Rafael had spent most of his life between Torino, Milan and the Dolomite city of Bolzano. He had been a Fascist and had retreated to Ethiopia after WWII to sire six kids with three wives. I even understood, whether I wanted to or not, why he had become a fascist.
I learned all of that in a single moment, and as a flood of information threatened to engulf my brain, I staggered backward and broke the connection.
But there was a wheezing on the slab now. Dry coughs like an emphysema victim on his last legs. Something bony snagged my wrist and an airy, ghostly voice spoke to me in Italian.
“Toccami. Toccare la mia testa.”
I didn’t even speak Italian, but I knew what he was asking. I tried peeling his fingers free but he hung on with a steely grip.
“Come,” he said, this time in English. “Touch me. My forehead.”
“No. I don’t want to.
“Touch it!”
My hand lifted and drifted towards him, shaking. But it wasn’t me making that hand move. I had no choice in the matter; the Old One was physically compelling me to comply. And when my hand contacted his brow, all of existence blew apart.
***
My consciousness exploded. The bits scattered like shrapnel, my soul torn into a thousand pieces and whisked away, out of the catacombs, all across the Deeps and beyond.
Threads stretched between my parts. I became a diffuse and attenuated blob, carried down a turbulent river of similarly dissolute souls, sipping, sampling sharing emotions, memories and hopes. There were no secrets here. But the torrents tore me away before I could resolve any details.
This had to be the Singularity. What else could it be?
It seemed I had access to all of creation, but that was an illusion. In truth, I had little control over where my consciousness ranged. It was creation that had access to me. The pieces of my mind were flotsam in a whirlpool, at the mercy of powers too vast to imagine.
I came to realize that shards of fragmented souls were the fundamental particles of the Singularity—its atoms, so to speak. I flitted between these particles, skipping between them, occasionally dipping down into the intact souls that comprised one of the marching hordes that chased the Horus.
It was sort of like sharing visions with Billy, only much more intense. Billy was part of me so it felt sort of natural, like having another set of eyes. But sharing images, ideas and emotions with countless strangers felt much more alien—disturbing but exhilarating. A giddy dread. Kind of like the one time I tried a hit of acid and regretted it.
A barrier I didn’t even know existed gave way and something yanked me out of this world and into another.
I found myself looking at a white car driving down a highway from multiple simultaneous perspectives. From a farmer mowing hay. A state trooper in the oncoming lane. A pilot in a small plane coming in for a landing. A little girl propped in a child seat ignoring the Pooh video in the seatback monitor.
This was Route 91 South and the white car was my Subaru with me in it.
Something gave way and I tumbled through another barrier and found myself in more familiar territory. I skipped soul to soul, sampling the briefest impressions from a thousand points of view. Dusters and Frelsians and souls deep in the tunnels of Root.
Among these visions: squadrons of mantids on the wing. The dark interior of a pod. A twin-masted caravel crossing the massively swollen river between the massif and mesas. A long staircase from the top of a green tower in the Sanctuary.
Another ripple yanked me back to the Deeps and I was swooping through a horde traversing the plains and barrens. I moved through every spoke of humanity arrayed around the Horus like spokes.
But beyond, I sensed something bigger watching me, as big as a universe, as big as God. I was separated from it, from them, from Him, whatever, by a semi-permeable membrane. He/they/it could see me but I couldn’t see them. A vague sort of knowing hinted of other worlds visible just beyond the membrane, but unreachable to me.
Gradually, the fragments of my soul sprang back to the center as if drawn thereby some sort of spiritual gravity. As my self re-annealed and accumulated mass, I gained traction and was able to resist the current and exert some influence over my direction.
And then came a revelation. There were souls I knew among those the hordes. No names. No faces. I just felt a peculiar kind of resonance that I can only explain as most slam dunk gut feeling a person could ever have.
Faith.
I was absolutely certain that amidst those galaxies of souls were some who knew and loved me. Who? That was the question. I could grasp no particulars.
All I garnered was the confidence that someone was there. And I was sad for them, whoever they were, that they hadn’t ended up in a better place than this.
Could it be Karla? I had no way of knowing for sure. This sense I had was too general, too amorphous. I grasped and flailed to learn more, but the knowledge remained elusive, like a forgotten word that stayed just on the tip of one’s tongue.
So frustrating.
And then a face as large as the moon imposed itself in my field of vision. Pores like craters. Creases like canyons.
Lady An.
Her eyes were pinched shut, but I knew, I just knew she could see me. “James? How? How are you here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where are you now?”
“Down … low.”
“Rafael. He is with Rafael in the vaults. Go find him. And bring him here.” The giant face retreated rapidly, shrinking to a dot and blinking out. In her place reared an enormous, boiling cloud of dust.
The Horus.
It burned a hole through the Singularity like a blow torch through paper. A black spindle like the slitted pupil of a snake revealed itself from behind the swirling dust. Staring me down. It hauled me into its zone of influence, accelerating me inward with the force of infinite gravity, smothering all perception.
Chapter 34: The Quest
I thought that was it. That I was gone, swallowed up forever by the Horus. Lured into a clever trap, an alternative portal to the storm’s voracious maw, my soul about to be compressed and assimilated into its infinitely dense core.
But no. My senses returned. I felt myself being jostled and hefted into a standing position. Me, totally passive and inert, like a slab of meat.
Voices in the darkness, close to my ears. Taro and Brian bustled me out of the chamber, one arm slung over each of their shoulders. The corridor, devoid of light when I had traversed it, now was faintly aglow in a muted indigo, providing a dim suggestion of the passage’s dimensions.
Control restored to my slack limbs, I reasserted my posture and began walking under my own power.
“You back?” said Taro.
The guys up to this point had been unusually quiet, sharing a terse whisper or two, as if they were afraid of waking the dead.
“Yeah. I’m back.”
“So ... you like … actually channeled, dude?” said Brian.
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Through Rafael … he showed you the Singularity?” said Taro.
“Yeah. I guess so. I guess that’s what it was.”
“What was it like?” said Bria
n.
“You mean, you never—?“
“Fuck no. Nobody channels but adepts. Like Lady An … and you. At least … not before the big sleep.”
“But then that’s not channeling,” said Taro. “You’re … uh …. actually there.”
“Not to mention. Not everybody gets to know the big sleep. Adepts, for sure, but—”
“Rafael wasn’t any adept,” said Taro. “He was an ordinary soul like you and me.”
“True,” said Brian. “So I guess there’s hope for us. Something to look forward to, I guess. Get a nice, quiet chamber all to your own. Cruise the universe.”
We reached the top of the spiral ramp and went back the way I had come, past the piles of rubble on the floor, which I saw was not construction debris, but rather places where the roof of the corridor had partially collapsed.
The bluish glow followed as we walked, anticipating out approach and blinking out behind us. I peered into the large, vacant rooms that I assumed to be shelters from the Horus, stunned by the intricate, back-lit lighting that filled the walls from ceiling to floor.
“Where are you taking me?” I said.
“To Lady An’s,” said Taro. “She’s sitting Old Ned till they get the new vault ready.”
“Ned?”
“Ned Abelord. The guy the runner came to warn us about. I tell you, he’s the last person I wanted to see hit the big sleep.”
“Why’s that?”
“Cuz it sucks to lose him. He’s needed here. He keeps ... kept ... the settlements together. When someone’s been around forever, I guess it just seems all wrong when they finally go.”
”It’s ... a better place,” said Taro.
“So they say,” said Brian. “Can’t blame him for wanting some of that.”
Light from the ventilation shafts now took over the illumination of the corridor. Past the song chamber, we turned down a well-lighted passage that skirted the central courtyard. Ventilation shafts were numerous here. These brighter chambers bustled with residents. It seemed like there were a lot more folks wearing armor and carrying staffs and spears and pole-axes. The place seemed to be gearing up for battle.
“Something going on?”
“Not anymore,” said Taro. “But a gang of Protectors attempted a raid. Actually, broke through our skirmish line before we could turn them back.”
