In the Beginning (Anthology)

by Laureen Cantwell

  “I, I, I, took it,” spat Daniel.

  “Took it from where, master?”

  “From, from, Bel. It, it, it is the eye of the dragon.” Daniel’s chest heaved, his lips quivered, and his tears poured forth.

  Hab knew the agony his master felt, for his young mind had felt it before. It was a drowning feeling of which only the maddest are capable of knowing, their entire existence overwhelmed with futile agony of being in a world that will one day swallow them whole.

  Yet here he was, the student, tortured by feelings of doubt and fear, completely rendered helpless by the mere sight of the demon god Bel, and now he cradled the gibbering, sobbing wreck of a man he’d thought invincible through the grace of God. Hab held him, smoothing his hair, whispering comforting words to his master, even as the last light of the sun vanished, leaving them in silent darkness.

  Eventually, Daniel grew quiet and shivered no more. Hab still felt life within his master, and offered a silent prayer to God for seeing his old servant through this. Hab felt relieved in a way he had never known possible; of all the horrors and depravity he had faced with Daniel, this had been the worst by far. Bel had been the apotheosis of all the dreams held by the devil-worshipers and wicked cultists he and Daniel had defeated, but here they were, still drawing breath. He knew that if he, an experienced foe of the infernal, had collapsed so quickly in this place, no mere mortal could possibly have fared better.

  But Daniel had. He had faced the demon and somehow, someway triumphed. It had to be a miracle. There could be no other explanation. God had willed it.

  Despite all the hours of hard riding, of fearful trekking, and torture he had endured, Hab was not tired. And so he stayed there on the floor, holding his master until he would awaken.

  When Daniel came to, he did not speak. He had no need for words. Hab helped him up and slowly, carefully walked his trembling master out of the pit into the first rays of the dawning light.

  Hab’s eyes hurt in even this weak light after such all-consuming darkness, but he beheld the clear astonishment of those men they had left above ground. He first saw the once-smug Belshazzar, rendered slack-jawed by the meaning inherent in his victims’ emergence from Bel’s lair. A grim Cyrus, still standing as close to the mouth of the cave as he dared, dearly wanted to believe his eyes at their reemergence.

  Cyrus spoke first, his voice hopeful, but skeptical. “Daniel? Habakkuk? Is it you? Do my eyes see true as the eagle’s, or does the rising sun cast shadows that will fill my heart with despair?”

  Daniel could not speak, and his eyes stared far off. His triumph had exacted a terrible cost.

  Hab spoke for him. With his master leaning against his right side, Hab raised his clenched fist triumphantly into the air. The light of dawn gleamed off the deep blue facets of the eye of the dragon.

  The sight confirmed Belshazzar’s new-found fear. Visibly crushed, the fat man fell to his knees and began to wail.

  Hab sneered at the priest in satisfaction. Hab had no doubt that Belshazzar’s rise to power had been aided by a demonic pact with Bel, and now all of the horrific things he had done to please his infernal master was for naught. There would be no more false miracles to deceive the people of Babylon. A worse fate awaited Belshazzar with his murderous followers when word of the death of his god made it back to them.

  Hab had barely finished that thought when he heard the dagger of Belshazzar’s lieutenant come unsheathed behind the wailing priest. Belshazzar had failed his god, a god who devoured the weak. Justice would be served this day.

  Cyrus moved to take Daniel from the young man, but Hab stopped the King, saying gently, “King Cyrus, he is my master and my friend. He is my burden to bear.”

  Cyrus, towering above the two Israelites, nodded in respect. Hab demonstrated a true soldier’s care for a wounded comrade.

  “Immortals! Mount up! The King’s judgment has been fulfilled. Daniel the Israelite has been absolved of his crimes against Bel, the All-Devourer, through trial by combat. We return to Babylon in triumph!” he roared with pride.

  BABYLON

  Nicole Crucial

  REVELATION 17:4-5, NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE

  4 The woman was clothed in purple and scarlet, and adorned with gold and precious stones and pearls, having in her hand a gold cup full of abominations and of the unclean things of her immorality,

  5 and on her forehead a name was written, a mystery, “BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND OF THE ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.”

  BABYLON

  Nicole Crucial

  The Beginning

  Only those will enter Heaven whose names are written in the Lamb’s Book of Life.

  These were the first words I heard, in the beginning of time.

  But Sefer, the protest comes, Revelation wasn’t written until the first century A.D.

  My answer is that time is a funny little plaything to God, or so I imagine. That first sentence was the wind that breathed life into my chest, the binding of my pages, the ink in my soul. It knitted together my stardust-atoms from across centuries and millennia and planes of existence.

  And when the first dregs of consciousness swirled at the pit-bottom of my spine, I yawned and opened my eyes to paradise.

  One

  Second Eden was aptly named, even if it existed before the First Eden. It was an infinite expanse of trees and meadows, brooks and lakes, orchards and walking-paths. It was always sunset there; the sky was permanently awash with every color, including the ones too precious for Earth’s sky. It hurt to look at, even for us. The sun was not a gaseous ball of light millions of light-years away, but a terrifically-rendered portrait of the face of God. A little narcissistic, perhaps, but more than adequate for lighting.

  I woke up on my back in the grass, at first totally content to be afloat in some plane of existence made up entirely of sunset colors. A flock of black birds darted across the sky then, squalling, a sordid streak on my fantasy, and a fishhook sank into my side, tugging me back to my surreality.

  When I realized that I had eyelids to blink with and bare feet to be tickled by the wind-rippled grass, I lifted hands before my face and stared. They were pale yellow, soft, the skin cracked in a crushed-velvet kind of way, the veins stark, dark-blue. As I watched, letters flashed across my fingers, sank under my nails, evaporated into my blood. (Was it blood? Ink?)

  “This can’t be right,” I muttered, turning my hands over to stare at pointed, blue-tipped nails, dripping with ink as if they were meant to be bizarre, organic pens.

  “Of course it is,” came a soft voice.

  I stopped looking at my hands and started staring at the face leaning over me.

  It was a woman’s face, round and round-eyed, not pale like me but sun-kissed golden-dark. Her hair was red like the setting of the sun, her eyes deep purple, her fingernails perfect ovals as she held one hand out to me.

  I sat up, cast my gaze around, my eyes drunk on the beauty. But it was a familiar kind of drunk, as if I were an alcoholic returning to my treasured bee-humming, daffodil-swaying insobriety. I had always been here, lying flat-backed on this grass, staring glassy-eyed upwards. I had never been anywhere else, had never felt anything but the cloying humid air and the fingertips of grass, had never smelled anything but the wafting of flowers and the pungency of oil, had never heard anything but the quiet hymns of grasshoppers, dandelions, and blue jays. And this girl’s voice, now, which I had never heard before, but recognized, as if I were an infant listening to a mother from outside of the womb for the first time.

  “What do you mean, ‘Of course it is’?” I said to the girl, who sat beside me in a pool of fabric made from the rainbow-reflective ink of oil wells.

  “Of course it’s right, I mean,” she said. “It can’t be not right.”

  “Why?” I asked, but I knew the answer as soon as the word erupted from my mouth.

  “Because this is Second Eden,” said the girl with
a grin. “And nothing here happens by accident. It’s God’s will. Yadda yadda.”

  “I just wasn’t expecting it, is all,” I said, rubbing my fingers over my bare upper arms before remembering that my fingers seemed to be their own very messy inkpots. “I, um … I’m supposed to be a book. The Book of Life.”

  The girl took a corner of her swarthy dress and dabbed at my staining arms and white tunic. I wasn’t hopeful enough to believe that anybody did laundry in Second Eden.

  “A book,” she said, wiping her dress on the grass although it showed no evidence of smudges. “We’ll call you Sefer. You’re still a book. It’s just that now you can have more fun, what with you being all squishy and mobile instead of hard and doorstoppish.”

  “That sure was nice of Him,” I said, voice flat, looking up at the reddening portrait-sun-orb. Then I looked at this girl with her lips the color of pomegranates. “I am Sefer, then. Appropriately Hebrew, I suppose. You are?”

  “Babylon,” she said.

  I was expecting something to happen when I heard a name for the first time. Some homing beacon, some siren in the center of my spine. If the name of every being to be saved from the pits of Hell was etched somewhere inside me, shouldn’t I know, immediately upon hearing one, where it was?

  Perhaps there was another Book of Life for biblical symbols, I thought. Or the residents of Second Eden were exempt from listing themselves in the Telephone Directory of the Great Beyond. Or, more troubling, perhaps we weren’t mortal enough to warrant saving.

  “Nice to meet you,” I said, instead of any of those things.

  “You, too,” she replied. “Now. Let’s get on to inventing some games. I’m bored out of my mind.”

  Perhaps that complaint was a strange kind of prayer. In any case, the Lord did provide. Or rather, He gave us an unlimited amount of time and boredom, and the rampant imaginations and burgeoning creativity to fill it all up. I’m pretty sure that most of the games all over the Earth throughout its history were, in some form or another, games that Babylon and I invented first in Second Eden. Scrabble? One of the first we devised. Basketball? I drew court lines in clearings with my ink-dripping hands. We once had a game of Concentration 64 that lasted an entire eternity in which we named every single object or concept in existence.

  Second Eden spanned all of time and probably all of space, too. We spent millennia in that place, but also not more than a couple of weeks. It was all the same.

  It took both a century and an hour for Babylon and I, after that Concentration 64’s eternity, to meet with another Edenite.

  It was one of the twenty-four Elders. I knew who she was immediately, although I’d never been told, and although the Scripture—both the hundreds of editions already in print and those yet unwritten—had never entered my ears or seeped into my skin. She was gray-eyed and white-clothed, her robes as pristinely snowy as mine had been before I began involuntarily leaking ink everywhere. She smiled to watch us toying with the hoops and sticks that would fascinate colonial children for decades.

  When I looked at her, I felt the shock in my spine that was missing when I saw Babylon for the first time. Printed letters stamped hard into my beating heart and I could feel the white-hot letters bright inside. Her name was a saint’s name, that of someone who had existed or did exist or would exist someplace down on that Earth we couldn’t see, someone we had never been told about and yet knew intimately.

  Her name was written inside me. She was saved. The Book of Life did contain the names of the undamned of Second Eden.

  So where was Babylon’s?

  I looked at my friend, squinted hard at her until she grinned at my expression.

  Nothing.

  “Stop staring,” said Babylon. She dropped the hoop, moved over to the Elder, her teeth sharp and hot in a cauterizing smile. “Mary, where are the others? We can put together a fantastic game of Cards Against Humanity.”

  Two

  I wasn’t paying attention to the game, to the raucous, bashfully blaspheming laughter of the saints around me. I was searching the fabric of my being for her name, one by one, name by name, eternity by eternity of woven lists in the hairs on my arms and the calluses on my heels.

  It wasn’t there.

  It wasn’t anywhere.

  How could that be?

  I couldn’t have made a mistake in searching. The names were three-dimensional tattoos of ink which made up everything I had been, was, and ever would be—I was the first and ultimate database—I was the Book of Life. Names hid in the creases of my elbows and the tissues of my lungs, names of all the saved humans fitted into the shape of one. I was checking everywhere, everywhere inside me, but there was only one place she should be. The place where all the names of these Elders, and everyone else I had met so far in Second Eden, lay: in the ventricles of my heart. All of the divine beings, I had discovered, except for Lucifer and his damned armies, were right there.

  If she was not there, it could only mean one troubling thing.

  How could she be meant for Hell—how could that be, when she sat with me in a garden that looked like a paradise? When she shifted cross-legged on the ground between a bearded John and a gap-toothed Mary ancient as the oceans, pure as the unchanging sunset sky—when she sat among the greatest saints of history and the future? How could creatures of Heaven smile so at one destined for Hell? But I remembered Abaddon. The Horsemen. The gaping chasm at the edge of our garden, where everybody said Lucifer had fallen through to the underworld. Yes, undoubtedly, there were other denizens here whose names were conspicuously absent from my body. But how could Babylon, my Babylon, be one of them?

  I wished my bone marrow was threaded with the Word instead of the names, and then, maybe, I’d know.

  We all knew our titles. Babylon was Babylon. The Elders were the Elders. The Four Horsemen were the Four Horsemen. Some of their roles were easy to guess—the Elders were saints, obviously. Judges, perhaps. I was the Book of Life, the record-keeper. A horseman named Death’s purpose is not easily misconstrued. But Babylon—what did that mean? It was the name of the city, wasn’t it? All of us were meant to play a part in the great narrative of redemption on this playground God named Earth—but what part could Babylon play?

  Babylon leaned over, asked me what was wrong.

  “I have crap cards,” I said.

  “That’s the point,” she laughed. “Salvage the hand you’re dealt.”

  Worse than knowing Babylon’s fate was not being able to tell her I knew it.

  She never asked, really, about the names, assuming their existence was a fact rather than anything that warranted questioning. She loved to touch me, her fingers staining with blue ink as she traced the tunnels of my veins. She was just as woman-shaped as I was, but she thought that her body was intentional: meant to serve some purpose only a woman could fulfill. Mine, on the other hand, was coincidental. The Book of Life did not need a gender, she said. “Your body,” she told me, “is for Heaven alone.”

  “You sound jealous,” I said.

  She laughed, a tinkling of a hundred voices in one cascade, a curse made to be repeated. Irreverent as always, in the place where irreverence was perhaps the worst possible sin.

  “How could I be?” she asked. “You’re special, Sefer, but aren’t we all, up here? Only special gets you into the garden.” She smiled and looked up at the sky, at its colors blurring into one another. “A garden full of misfits: the not-quite-mortal, the not-quite-holy. And I’m its queen.”

  I was the only book in Heaven; we didn’t have a Bible. It wasn’t until later that I would see Revelation on paper, see the words that the New American Bible had put down by her name—it was clear that book never knew her. But that was the way it was written. How could mortals expect to get it right if even God was biased against her?

  When Babylon laughed, the stars did too, somewhere over the Earth. I thought of them, glowing before God, and wondered if they did anything but tr
emble in His presence.

  Three

  Second Eden was beautiful, but in the end it was only a picturesque purgatory for God’s instruments. He left us alone for the most part. The mortals were His concern, His children in need of constant love and scolding. Though Heaven contained an infinite cast of characters depending on who was needed at the moment for the great globe-shaped storybook that was the mortal world, there were only a few dozen regulars who attended our dinner parties. In such a small town of self-righteous people, stories passed around quickly—including the one from which Second Eden took its name. For the rest of us, Adam and Eve were an unfortunate story, the kind of dark humor that evoked more grimaces than laughter. But to Babylon, Genesis was the punchline to a cosmic joke.

  She liked to call me Etz, after the infamous tree. “You are like the tree. Made of it, you could even argue,” she pointed out as we sat in a more cushiony part of our mountain of discarded game paraphernalia. “You’re forbidden knowledge.”

  “Not of good and evil,” I told her, feeling the irony as I bit into an apple.

  “Of course you are. All the names in you are good; all the absent ones are evil. Right?”

  I tugged at my hair, which was long and white (at least, until I touched it), and wondered why hers was red instead, why her eyes were purple, why her skin shone like gold in the blue sewing-up of the day. The inhabitants of Second Eden, standing together, looked too much like a holy circus troupe for color symbolism to be safely ignored.

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “What’s wrong?”