by Jeff Long
This third time was proving troublesome. Maybe an hour passed. Their rubbing and yanking and spitting on him didn’t seem to be working. He sensed their frustration.
The one holding him from behind went on with her singsong chanting and rocking. “I’ll be a good boy,” he assured her in an exhausted whisper. She patted his cheek with a callused palm. It was like being petted with a stick.
Evan genuinely wanted to help out. What they didn’t know was that he had an arithmetic test in the morning. He was supposed to be studying.
Gradually his eyes adjusted to the night. Their pale skin took on a faint glow. He could begin to see them. He and his buddies had all seen TV shows with bikini girls, and several had big brothers with Playboys. It wasn’t as if he had no clue what a woman’s body looked like. But these women had no sunshine in them, no joy. They were all business. Evan felt like he was the center of a farm task, like the cow. Or like the hogs his dad butchered each winter. Like a beast at harvesting. They’d been at him for hours.
There might have been five of them, or as many as a dozen. They kept leaving and returning. The witches moved with watery grace, close to the ground, as if the sky were a weight. The cornstalks rustled. They orbited him like bleached white moons. Their stench ebbed, then surged.
They took turns, arguing over him in insect syllables. Each seemed to have a different idea about manipulating him. Evan had grown used to the one by his head. She seemed to be the oldest. Her chest wall had the feel of a washboard against his ear. Evan grew passive against her, and the arm relaxed. She wasn’t unkind, just firm. Her skinny arm was a marvel, a few sinews covered with skin, but as strong as baling wire. When some of the others slapped or prodded him, she clucked at them, annoyed.
One, smaller than the rest, was taking lessons from the others. Evan decided she was the youngest, maybe his own age. They urged her to mount him a couple of times, but she was awkward and Evan didn’t know what was expected of him. She seemed as frightened as he was. He gravitated to her in his thoughts.
He couldn’t see their faces exactly, and didn’t want to. This way he could imagine himself surrounded by neighbor ladies and his teachers and some of the girls at school. He added the pretty waitress at the Surf and Turf downtown. He attached familiar masks to these benighted faces looming overhead, and it consoled him. It let him have names for each.
What ruined his conjuring was their smell. Even Mrs. Peterson, the halfwit who sat in the park all day, would never have let herself get foul like this. These women stank. They were rancid and unwashed, and smelled worse than a stockyard. The dung crusting their flanks had the grassy sweetness of cow manure. When they muttered at him, he could smell deep inside their throats.
He was greasy with their juices and saliva. That was another shock, how wet they were between their legs. Nothing in his friends’ centerfolds had prepared him for that. Or for their greed and hunger. Periodically one dipped her head, and it felt warm and soft down there, like the hot compresses his grandma used to make.
Their hands and fingers were as dry as lizard skin. They’d rubbed him raw, but the hurt was largely numbed by his fatigue. He lay in their center, and it seemed the stars wheeled in a great circle over him.
Crickets sang. An owl swooped by. Evan suddenly wondered if the witches might be the reason so many dogs and cats had disappeared over the last month. Maybe the animals had run off. Another thought came to him. What if they’d been eaten? A gust of wind rattled the corn rows. He shivered.
The witches entered a rhythm around him. It was like a dance, though they were kneeling or hunkered down on their heels. He set himself adrift on the pulse of their motions, the chant, their hands and mouths. Evan grew hopeful when several whispered approvingly. All at once he found himself approaching that same loss of control as before. He tried not to grunt, but it was too much.
Abruptly the blood heat of liquid spattered across his chest. Evan winced at the salty spray. Tasted it. And frowned.
This time it was the heat of real blood.
In the same instant, a rifle shot ruptured the quiet. Something, a body, flopped heavily across Evan’s thighs.
“Evan, boy,” a voice commanded across the corn rows. His father! “Lie down.”
The sky cracked open. A ragged volley of deer rifles, shotguns, varmint pistols, and old revolvers shattered the constellations. Bullets slapped apart the corn leaves. The gunfire rattled like popcorn.
Evan lay still on his back. It was like drifting on a raft. Staring up at the Milky Way. What he would remember most was not the shooting, or the men yelling, or the witches scattering. Not the headlights careening through the walls of green corn, or the pitchfork lifting that young hadal girl into the wildly lit, raddled sky, where he saw the slight stub of a tail on her rump and her grublike pallor and her face, the chimp’s eyes, the yellow teeth. Not the rack-rack of shotgun shells getting chambered. Not his father standing high overhead and lifting his head up to the stars to bellow like a bull.
No. What he would remember was the old woman by his head, how just before they shot the bones from her face, she bent down and kissed him by the ear. It was the kind of thing a grandma did.
The Aztecs said that … as
long as one of them was left
he would die fighting, and
that we would get nothing of
theirs because they would
burn everything or throw it
into the water.
—HERNÁN CORTÉS,
Third Dispatch to
King Charles V of Spain
17
FLESH
WEST BENEATH
THE CLIPPERTON FRACTURE ZONE
Following Molly’s death, they cast lower on the river, anxious to resume their sense of scientific control. The banks narrowed, the water quickened. Because they moved faster, they had more time to reach their destination, which was the next cache in early September. They began to explore the littoral regions bordering the river, sometimes staying in one place for two or three days.
The region had once abounded with life. In a single day they discovered thirty new plants, including a type of grass that grew from quartz and a tree that looked like something out of Dr. Seuss, with a stem that drew gases from the ground and synthesized them into metallic cellulose. A new cave orchid was named for Molly. They found crystallized animal remains. The entomologists caught a monstrous cricket, twenty-seven inches long. The geologists located a vein of gold as thick as a finger.
In the name of Helios, who held the patent rights on all such discoveries, Shoat collected their reports on disc each evening. If the discovery had special value, like the gold, he would issue a chit for a bonus payment. The geologists got so many they started using them like currency among the others, buying pieces of clothing, food, or extra batteries from those who had extras.
For Ali, the most rewarding thing was further evidence of hadal civilization. They found an intricate system of acequias carved into the rock to transport water from miles upriver into the hanging valley. In an overhang partway up a cliff lay a drinking cup made from a Neanderthal cranium. Elsewhere, a giant skeleton—possibly a human freak—lay in shackles solid with rust. Ethan Troy, the forensic anthropologist, thought the deeply incised geometric patterns on the giant’s skull had been made at least a year before the prisoner’s death. Judging by the cut marks around the entire skull, it seemed the giant had been scalped and kept alive as a showcase for their artwork.
They collected around a central panel emblazoned with ochre and handprints. In the center was a representation of the sun and moon. The scientists were astonished. “You mean to say they worshiped the sun and moon? At fifty-six hundred fathoms!”
“We need to be cautious,” Ali said. But what else could this mean? What glorious heresy, the children of darkness worshiping light.
Ali got one photo of the sun and moon iconography, no more. When her flash billowed, the entire wall of pictographs—its pigments
and record—lost color, turned pale, then vanished. Ten thousand years of artwork turned to blank stone.
Yet with the animals and handprints and sun and moon images burned away, they discovered a deeper set of engraved script.
A two-foot-long patch of letters had been cut into the basalt. In the abyssal shadows, the incisions were dark lines upon dark stone. They approached the wall tentatively, as if this too might disappear.
Ali ran her fingers along the wall. “It might have been carved to be read. Like Braille.”
“That’s writing?”
“A word. A single word. See this character here.” Ali traced a y-tailed mark, then a backward E. “And this. They’re not capped. But look at the linear form. It’s got the stance and the stroke of ancient Sanskrit or Hebrew. Paleo-Hebrew, possibly. Probably older. Old Hebrew. Phoenician, whatever you want to call it.”
“Hebrew? Phoenician? What are we dealing with, the lost tribes of Israel?”
“Our ancestors taught hadals how to write?” someone said.
“Or else hadals taught us,” Ali said.
She could not take her fingertips from the word. “Do you realize,” she whispered, “man has been speaking for at least a hundred thousand years. But our writing goes back no further than the upper Neolithic. Hittite hieroglyphics. Australian aboriginal art. Seven, eight thousand years, tops.
“This writing has got to be at least fifteen or twenty thousand years old. That’s two or three times older than any human writing ever found. These are linguistic fossils. We could be closing in on the Adam and Eve of language. The root origin of human speech. The first word.”
Ali was enraptured. Looking around, she could tell the others didn’t understand. This was big. Human or not, it doubled or tripled the timeline of the mind. And she had no one to celebrate it with! Settle down, she told herself. For all her travels, Ali’s was a paper world of linguists and bishops, of library carrels and yellow legal pads. She had occupied a quiet place that didn’t allow celebration. And yet, just once, Ali wanted someone to knock the head off a bottle of champagne and douse her with bubbles, someone to gather her up for a wet kiss.
“Hold up your pen beside the letters for scale,” one of the photographers told her.
“I wonder what it says,” someone said.
“Who knows?” Ali said. “If Ike’s right, if this is a lost language, then even the hadals don’t know. Look how they had it buried under more primitive images. I think it’s lost all meaning to them.”
Returning to their rafts, for some reason, the name circled around on her. Ike. Her slow dancer.
On September 5, they found their first hadals. Reaching a fossilized shore, they unloaded their rafts and hauled gear to high ground and started to prepare for night. Then one of the soldiers noticed shapes within the opaque folds of flowstone.
By shining their lights at a certain angle, they could see a virtual Pompeii of bodies laminated in several inches to several feet of translucent plastic stone. They lay in the positions they had died in, some curled, most sprawled. The scientists and soldiers fanned out across the acres of amber, slipping now and then on the slick face.
Pieces of flint still jutted from wounds. Some had been strangled with their own entrails or decapitated. Animals had worked through all of them. Limbs were missing, chest and belly walls had been plundered. No question, this had been the end of a whole tribe or township.
Under Ali’s sweeping headlamp, their white skin glittered like quartz crystal. For all the heavy bone in their brows and cheeks, and despite the obvious violence of their end, they were remarkably delicate.
H. hadalis—this variety, at any rate—looked faintly apelike, but with very little body hair. They had wide negroid noses and full lips, somewhat like Australian aborigines, but were bleached albino by the perpetual night. There were a few slight beards, little more than wispy goatees. Most looked no older than thirty. Many were children.
The bodies were scarred in ways that had nothing to do with sports or surgery: no appendectomy scars in this group, no neat smile lines around the knees or shoulders. These had come from camp accidents or hunts or war. Broken bones had healed crookedly. Fingers had been lopped off. The women’s breasts hung slack, thinned and stretched and unbeautiful, basic tools like their sharpened fingernails and teeth or their wide flattened feet or their splayed big toes for climbing.
Ali tried integrating them into the family of modern man. It did not help that they had horns and calcium folds and lumps distorting their skulls. She felt strangely bigoted. Their mutations or disease or evolutionary twist—whatever—kept her at arm’s length. She was sorry to be walking on them, yet glad to have them safely encased in stone. Whatever had been done to them, she imagined they would have been capable of doing to her.
That night they discussed the bodies lying beneath their camp.
It was Ethan Troy who solved their mystery. He had managed to chip loose portions of the bodies, mostly of children, and held them out for the rest to see. “Their tooth enamel hasn’t grown properly. It’s been disrupted. And all the kids have rickets and other long-limb malformations. And you only have to look to see their swollen stomachs. Massive starvation. Famine. I saw this once in a refugee camp in Ethiopia. You never forget.”
“You’re suggesting these are refugees?” someone asked. “Refugees from who?”
“Us,” said Troy.
“You’re saying man killed them?”
“At least indirectly. Their food chain was ruptured. They were fleeing. From us.”
“Nuts,” scoffed Gitner, lying on his back on a sleeping pad. “In case you missed it, those are Stone Age points sticking out of them. We had nothing to do with it. These guys got killed by other hadals.”
“That’s beside the point,” said Troy. “They were depleted. Famished. Easy prey.”
“You’re right,” Ike said. He didn’t often enter group discussions, but he had been following this one intently. “They’re on the move. The whole world of them. This is their diaspora. They’ve scattered. Gone deep to avoid our coming.”
“What’s it matter?” said Gitner.
“They’re hungry,” said Ike. “Desperate. That matters.”
“Ancient history. This bunch died a long time ago.”
“Why do you say that?”
“The accretion of flowstone. They’re covered in it. At least five hundred years’ worth, probably more like five thousand. I haven’t run my calculations yet.”
Ike went over to him. “Let me borrow your rock hammer,” he said.
Gitner shoved it into Ike’s hand. These days he seemed chronically fed up. Their endless debate about hadal links to humanity gnawed at what little good humor he’d ever had. “Do I get it back?” he said.
“Just a loaner,” Ike said, “while we sleep.” He walked over and placed it flat next to the wall and walked away.
In the morning, Git had to borrow another hammer to cut his free. Overnight the hammer had been covered with a sixteenth of an inch of clear flowstone.
It was a matter of simple arithmetic. The refugees had been slain no more than five months ago. The expedition was following the trail of their flight. And it was very near to fresh.
Even the mercenaries had come to depend on Ike’s infallible sense of danger. Somehow the word got around about his climbing days, and they nicknamed him El Cap for the monolith in Yosemite. It was a dangerous attachment, and it annoyed Ike even more than it annoyed their commander. Ike didn’t want their trust. He dodged them. He stayed out of camp more and more. But Ali could see his effect, all the same. Some of the boys had tattooed their arms and faces like Ike’s. A few started going barefoot or slinging their rifles across their backs. Walker did what he could to stem the erosion. When one of his ghetto warriors got caught sitting cross-legged at prayer, Walker put him on sentry duty for a week.
Ike resumed his habit of staying a day or so ahead of the expedition, and Ali missed his eccentricities. S
he woke early, as always, but no longer saw his kayak plying out into the tubular wilderness while the camp still slept. She had no proof he was growing more remote from them, or her. But his absences made her anxious, especially as she was falling asleep at night. He had opened a gap in her.
On September 9 they detected the signal for Cache II. They had crossed the international date line without knowing it. They reached the site, but there were no cylinders awaiting them. Instead they found a heavy steel sphere the size of a basketball lying on the ground. It was attached to a cable dangling from the ceiling a hundred feet overhead.
“Hey, Shoat,” someone demanded. “Where’s our food?”
“I’m sure there’s an explanation,” Shoat said, but was clearly baffled.
They unbolted the curved casing. Inside, seated in polyfoam, was a small keypad with a note. “To the Helios Expedition: Supply cylinders are ready for penetration at your prompt. Key in the first five numerals of pi, in reverse, then follow with pound sign.” They guessed it was a precaution to safeguard their food and supplies from any possible hadal piracy.
Shoat needed someone to write down pi for him, then keyed it in. He tapped the pound key, and a small red light changed to green. “I guess we wait,” he said.
They made camp on the bank and took turns spotlighting the underside of the drill hole. Shortly after midnight, one of Walker’s sentinels called out. Ali heard the scraping of metal. Everyone gathered and shone their lights upward, and there it was, a silvery capsule sinking toward them on a glittering thread. It was like watching a rocketship land. The group cheered.
The cylinder sizzled on touching the river, then slowly lowered onto its side and the cable looped in a tangle in the water. Its metal sheath was blued with scorch marks. They mobbed it, only to fall back from its heat.
None of the penetrators at Cache I had been seared this way. It meant the cylinder had passed through some kind of volcanic zone, probably a tendril of the Magellan Seamounts. Ali could smell the sulfur smoking on its skin.
