Crematorium for Phoenixes

by Nikola Yanchovichin

  Above the wrist was an expanse of unhealthy skin; it was dried out, as wrinkled as a winter apple, and completed with boils and spots.

  The man focused and the sick places seemed to come alive. His skin swelled, moved, and become red. It enlarged by a few inches and it was clear that his muscles were throbbing and trembling. A surprised cry could be heard, and all of the men turned to Akuma, who stirred his hand.

  He was perfectly healthy.

  The sick ones collapsed on the floor, worshiping the miracle. They wept like helpless children or losers whose dreams had come true.

  “Who are you?” Akuma shakily asked with his throat released from the stranglehold of pain.

  “They call me Takeshi in Japan,” he repeated. His eyes were narrowed into slits and hazy, signs of the control it took him to command the pain.

  He wiped his face with trembling limbs, caught in a Parkinson rhythm. He did so slowly and said again, “I am here because I need you . . . .” There was a long pause. “I need you, but not all of you.”

  It was as if a stone had fallen with a thud into stagnant water.

  “You said that you were going to cure us! And now you are saying that you won’t heal everybody?” asked the patients with a naïveté that young children use in those interviews that open their eyes to the evil in the world surrounding them.

  “I cannot. Otherwise I will die.”

  “But you have healed Akuma!” they insisted, again with that childlike innocence that the mud of the everyday throws over the idyllic.

  “Yes. But you have seen what happens after.”

  There are times, reader, in which life is nothing but a station that people arrive at. Some get on the vehicle and others get off. They are separated and collected, taken in one direction or another. At this moment, there are no special words that can be used, no words of the kind that are spoken in the great volumes of literature.

  But separation and distance, like the layered, broken faces of mirrors, remained.

  “Then you’ll go without me.”

  “Without me.”

  “Without me, too.”

  The lepers, one by one, like a disheartened army without a cause, dispersed and moved again to their beds. They were quickly rendered as nothing more than shadows chased away from the sun.

  Takeshi stayed with Akuma.

  “You think it’s easy? To play God? If only you knew . . .” he shouted.

  “Knew what?” Akuma asked, standing as the only tree that had weathered the storm.

  “How difficult it is to have the power to help, but before you to have the whole world and the grief that exists within it. To face the choices from which there is no correct path. I leave fathers, the only supporters of their families, to die so that I can help save palaces from not being destroyed by wars. And those twin curses at infinity are jamming the cheers of the royal minstrels.”

  Akuma sighed, threw off his cloak, and looked at the others who had gone home like the students of their spiritual master. It seemed that he wanted too much.

  “There is one word that those who have learned to listen in their heads are wise to heed and that is ‘reason.’ And there is another word that the wiser who have learned to hear with their hearts know and that is ‘hope.’ Do it, Takeshi. Help the others.”

  Silence, the kind that creates the passage of the time, occurred, freezing objects. It prolonged their shadows and dropped them like a number of cars on the roads.

  “Maybe you’re right,” said Takeshi.

  The air filled with a new snappiness, curative and invigorated, as if it came from a place of eternal verdure come straight from the hand of the stranger. The men stood from their bunks and hammocks. They swayed on the floor like toddlers.

  “Savior,” they breathily exhaled as individuals laying a miracle before a prophet.

  “I’m not that One, but follow me.”

  Chapter Ten

  Paved tar-black steel fences creaked as they flexed like rotten sticks in the gaping holes between the pins that filtered the blood-red orbs of bubbling molten lava kilometers below.

  The company, headed by Victor Drake, dragged the web flour with their metal shoes, stepping on it as it popped. The umpteen ice was ready at any moment to collapse into the depths of the Earth.

  They, as we said, were walking slowly and carefully, shifting their weight while the place, lined as it was with a massive apparatus—an assembly of coils deployed—bent with its cast iron supports. It vibrated in such a way that it seemed as if at any moment electric arcs would be generated, lighting up a laboratory of profane arts.

  But perhaps the most wonderful thing was the music.

  Legendary and resonating, it filled the Earth’s cavities and bounced in echoes, drenched by the water and fire suppression of the earth-gray scree.

  The music narrated stories about palaces that were excavated in the ground, about forgotten golden treasures, about the fate of people who had crawled to live underwater and underground. The men listened to this song while staring into the gloom between the already described places. They went past more rows of copper-green units until finally, at the very end, they saw its source.

  Piles of bodies bumped into each other as peat—wormy mud filled the floor to the ceiling so that the bodies were heaped on one another like a freakish humanoid hive.

  For them, wrapped like a queen mother, lay bathed in sweat, a disproportionate and unnaturally fat man whose body hung caressed by the thousands, stroked by their cerebral palsy hands.

  That view generated disgust and fear. It was Dante’s imagination recreated in real life—lured by the heady song of sinful people and their demonic keepers.

  Maybe those were the inhabitants who had built the legendary Kingdom of Thule?

  I do not know, gentle reader. Sometimes, life is like a broken smile, furrowed by bullets. It is the statue of an angel that only decorates the door of the furnace to a crematorium able to burn even phoenixes. And the only water that can quench the flames is hope. It is those small, pathetic, and melancholy dreams that can generate enough saliva for you to spit into the face of despair.

  But even with them, sometimes evil will come back. And when it does, you will not be able to do anything against it. Perhaps you will only stay paralyzed.

  That is exactly what the men from the Leviathan were doing while the sibilant eruptions of lava bubbled and cast their shadows.

  Only Victor Drake moved, pulling the fuse from his speargun rifle. He hardly stiffened because he was already as stiff as a hunched old man.

  “William, what a meeting!” he shouted to the buzzing swarm that sounded like sirens from the myths with their abated, inconsolable pain.

  The crowds moved, as if at any moment they were ready to descend like an avalanche, but one voice stopped him.

  “Victor, who would have thought I would see you here, my friend? How long has it been?” The speech came from a pink, fat lump that lisped and bounced with every spoken sound like a membrane bladder full of unborn spawn. “How much? How much?”

  The questions sounded in the twilight of the basket, bouncing off the surfaces of each lobe and knotting together like the echoes of a whispering prophet.

  “Not much. Just a few moments and certain circumstances, just as you need to separate two people,” said Victor Drake.

  And he was right. Victor and William—inseparable friends—did one of the most valuable things two persons could do: they had dreamed together. Then came the years. And then followed the development department.

  “My kind repels, huh? Modified metabolism combined with partial gene mutation—all thanks to time travel. How about you?”

  “Conserved basic life functions, except I struck the nervous system. Advanced systems are inflatable, expressed the technicians, but even seasoned and mixed with some good, evil remains all the same. When fate lifts the barrier and invades it, the only thing remaining are the long nights when you think about the previous days. And you never
imagined you’d fall into a subprime role in this drama that has little sense,” finished Victor, as if he was staring not at the mess but at himself.

  “True, Victor, that hurts more than anything. So what are you waiting for? Why don’t you shoot me and rid the world of a nightmare?” giggled the freak, maybe with a little sadness in his voice, because his muscles seemed be shaking as bloated boils.

  “This is easy, William. Sometimes we do not have the forces to smash the evil worm because the shiny surface reflects ourselves. We were once friends. And that means something even in this bland, far-fetched story.”

  The creature laughed and a mass of people sizzled like a swarm, hitting each other like rats and scratching on the walls with their efforts.

  “Victor, do you know what evil is even if you do not want it? It’s that voice in every drop of smoky blood whispered in the offerings. To create the links for the chains of hell itself, to join them and reign over it, forever watching the oncoming horror. I did it, Victor, though now I’m drenched in the filth of sin.”

  “But how?” Victor asked.

  “Disproportionate growth of all parts of the brain, which triggered unconscious hypnotic suggestion and sped up the metabolism, making me become that thing that I am now. Someone has to kill me and that someone is you, Victor.”

  “I can’t do it, William. Not because of the past. Not for the present either.”

  “All for the meaning, all for the final review—but sometimes these things are not everything, Victor. Sometimes while staring at them we realize that they are nothing more than a pile of tombstones covered in green moss that is covering something wise written on them. And somewhere underneath those words is the rotten truth. If you dare to look at it, I’ll show it to you.”

  “Show me what, William?”

  “Something short, Victor, a piece of photography that is the world to each of us,” said the monster and his veins started pumping with blood, bulging even more.

  Wind wafted through Victor. He trembled, shifted as if possessed by evil doll spirits. The truth passed through him in an unearthly rage, thirsting for payback in the form of divine wrath. Then the feeling stood quietly in a cosmic vacuum where the bodies of asteroids floated. They polarized the feeling, separating the distances and hauls from the road. His eyes popped and ascending before him were souls. Translucent but still crisp pictures were in front of him; people were moving in lines—young and old people—until they reached the edge of a sludge pit. The youngsters, directed like puppets with darkened teary eyes, used their teeth to tear into the throats of the elderly. They threw their bodies into the pools with other bodies. It was a stool system of irrigation canals that had taken the abominations in the endless terraced fields where further on shuffled the boatmen of the underworld world. They in turn writhed like bundles of white worms that were nurturing the fields.

  The vision disappeared, leaving a painful, cramp-like needle puncture. It tightened on the flesh, feeling like a vise.

  Victor Drake fell to his knees. A cry erupted from his throat and sputum mixed with vomit, which splashed a torrent on the boulders.

  “If you leave, my pets will gather it. Here nothing is dead, as you have seen,” said the monster, and the many bodies around him flickered like wax-white fish or mature wheat.

  “But why, Lord, has this happened?”

  “I ask myself every day, Victor. Ask your questions here in the dungeons where the limits of hell are the limits of my mind. I’ll keep wondering while the fully aware people are killing their families and loved ones until it’s all over. And on that day that you face the Creator, you will realize that He is nothing but a mirror for us to see what we have become. Then, alone, we will issue our verdicts.”

  “And I have to kill to be able to stop all this?”

  “It’s that easy, Victor. To return to what is. It cannot be. It remains only the reality—a muffled curse that is the most unpardonable human sin. This is my everyday life, twisting the line and forcing people to devour themselves. Without me they will do it more quickly.”

  “So they will attack us if we kill you?” Victor asked.

  “Yes, you will need to run. Go to the chamber levels to outrun this hellish place. Use the elevator to get away,” said the freak and pointed to a mesh shaft; it looked like a concave funnel chimney in the ceiling. “I know it’s too much to ask, but you already know why I do it.”

  Victor Drake nodded, wiped the moisture off his lips that tasted bitter with vomit and gastric juice, checked his weapon again, and acted like a man who is entering lukewarm water that is filled with slimy creatures come forth to eat him. He made a sign to the others.

  Amos Oz, followed by the others, moved forward and the song of the swarm hung like a funeral melody, resembling the roar of an underground waterfall. It was music that belonged to an unimaginable body and filled the soul with substances that had been irretrievably lost.

  The men formed a box, turned their rifles to rapid fire mode, and then at the height of the people’s song, a point that made the skin to crawl with eternal meaning in meaninglessness, Victor Drake shot.

  There was a hoot as people collapsed in the earthen hole. Battle cries and screams that seemed to urge the hordes of underground creatures sounded and they thronged and rushed like a water jet, trampling over each other.

  The company ran toward the elevator, clipping the formless mass that had fallen behind them and was quickly catching up.

  Thousands of acrimonious people bumped into each other, but they still ran forward like a released flock. Like a flooded river dammed up for too long, they sought to catch the fugitives.

  The men ran with all their strength, shooting at their pursuers, knocking them over like dominoes, slowing them down, and kneeing them like a crumbling house of cards.

  Finally, they reached the platform. Victor Drake pulled a lever and the elevator drifted with an incredible noise.

  Below them the colorful reservoir of people remained set.

  Chapter Eleven

  Dangling roots from hairs were rubbing their heads like a veil, a woven chandelier of webbing.

  Dripping from above, the water drained like a grown beard, seeping into the moss that drizzled on the earth, just as clay soaks yarn. Each drop stamped down and hit it like a tuning fork.

  Tammuz, Sharukin, and the others were walking on the squat covered stones and propped up beams; the tunnels were branching and crossing each other—looking identical and confused, they increased exponentially.

  Occasionally checking their green radar displays, which were spinning like tireless wheels, there was no doubt that they were in a maze. The drawn diagram reappeared and disappeared like a living tattoo.

  Everything looks to them as if they were still in the same dungeon. Darkness hung on the red, rusted chains. Filth had created a mulch carpet that was lighted here and there by a torch in an iron candlestick, making their presence more uterine.

  Occasionally, the shadow of a rat would stand in front of the fires and be transformed into a werewolf that was ready to pounce. Sometimes, bats filled the corridors with sounds that made the company bristle.

  The labyrinth was complex and vast. Although the men had been walking for a long time, it seemed to them that they had been moving on diverging paths that were incalculable.

  It was only their technology that showed them the right zigzagging path that meandered like an underground river; it rose and sunk around the hill of Kephala.

  Leaning back to back, Sharukin, Tammuz, and the others were walking on the trail as it narrowed into a funnel. Loose soil mixed with areas of pressed soil and made the entire place look like an open grave.

  Their aim, a pear drop on the radar, was still in front of them. Centered around it were tightened concentric circles, bandages and gauze encircling something. The corridors drained into the center.

  They moved further into the cartilage that was sprinkled with sawdust and scraps, into the area that emitted a sli
ghtly tart and sweet smell. It created in the imagination a strewn feast for vultures that gradually sunk into the soil.

  Looking at this migratory path, nostalgic thoughts popped into their heads. They were the banded dreams of forsaken but familiar places. The slope changed like a water slide; it was a chute that descended into the fabulous rabbit hole where nothing good could be waiting.

  Stiff from fear of what was to come, they approached like a moth to a flame spell. The fear was insistent and persistent like a black and white horror movie, and they were ready at any moment to get burned.

  So the men squeezed through slits that were narrowed from the towering roots. The spaces reminded them of claustrophobic snake dens, surrounded with stalactites of icy crumbling structures that flourished like flowers overlooking the underground rapids, which had dragged along snow-cold water like frozen blood splashed on the rocks.

  Sometimes in the bonds that were several inches thick and cast from iron, there were deposits of rust from the streamlets and enlarged abscesses. The men also noticed that there were often dried blood spots, as if the bonds had tightly held something that had now been released.

  But they kept moving, stamping their feet in the tunnels that were carved and drilled with sanitation. The darkness intertwined with everything. It thickened and stung the eyes, barred with filters from which like disgusting periscopes decomposed carcasses of rodents and rotted vegetables fell.

  The road, as we said, was not long but it curved at every step, slowing the men that were moving in a fold between the two hemispheres of the brain dug by geniuses inside the hill of Kephala.

  So a few minutes’ walk had stretched into hours of orienteering within the tunnels; carved like bone, they were spotted like magpie eggs and undulated from the mold and root systems.

  It in a sense was like a scene from a grave that had evaporated and thrown phosphorus foliage shading at every turn, an obvious sign of something sinister but real.