Crematorium for Phoenixes

by Nikola Yanchovichin

  “There were only two cities. My own, ‘Marduk,’ and the other one that I saw for the first time, ‘Tiamat,’ as distant ruins that had been burned into starry space like pieces of metal.

  “We had maintained contact, as far as our strength allowed, but we were too small.

  “Then one day, after constant experimentation with living space, we were succeeded and faced a great feature. It was something that we could use to fix everything, to step back in time.

  “And as with all work, new stations appeared from nothingness to nothingness. There were new destinies for which even perhaps the Creator Himself probably had not presumed would come into being.

  “So mankind multiplied and executed almost nothing breathlessly. We created empires whose purpose was to be destroyed before they existed. Thus, civilizations are being created and destroyed. Sometimes they existed for thousands of years or more. They were all short moments in the timeline, an ever-changing matter whose complexity is beyond anything that is imaginable.

  “Gradually, we were back to what had started it all—the two cities. They died in a vacuum, and the goal changed again. Instead of armies, the procession changed over countless seasons. We began to send small groups of people whose cause resembled the first in order to achieve the same fate.

  “We had to destroy ourselves again, because as you have seen, we were already far from being people.

  “And we had lost all connection with what had happened.

  “The men in the past were no longer the flesh and image of something divine. They were dying creatures scattered across the ages of the spiral of time; they had lost their mercy and compassion.

  “And when those things disappear, man has lost the chance that is given by the Almighty to be a saint. What is not more difficult to love than life when there is nothing but a crematorium that burns even fire birds?

  “Our goal is to extinguish those flames that pierce our souls in the endless hours within which the days tend to end.

  “And the way to save us are the god men, the creators of all religions whose death the sent people wanted to bring about. The created and the Creator in that state would be ruled only by chaos without memories.”

  The men become silent, stunned by the complexity of what to them seemed like a ridiculous joke told by a sophist. But sweeping a glance around the premises that lengthened and lengthened as if lit by a moldy stein in a refrigerator, they realized that what they had heard was true.

  “Wait, you’re saying that we will save those who made early religions?” asked Akuma. He seemed rattled like the creaky hourglass of time.

  “Yes,” said Takeshi, who trembled like a hollow, elongated rod in hand. “I knew that asked too much of you. . . .

  “Because I cannot give you something that will help you move forward or that will you send back.

  “That, in every life, is in the hands and heads of themselves who live.

  “I can only say, ‘Forward!’”

  The men who had been sitting in a semicircle suddenly stood up. In every one of them that particle, the catalyst that pushes, had created a destiny for them, even if it would be brief in its existence.

  They took again the weight of their bodies, and it seemed that the stress of their muscles, which they had labored with, had been removed.

  The corridors and diagonal passages had interspersed within them open doors. Before these were loads of bagged clothes.

  They bypassed them without much thought, even when it seemed that faceted eyes were peeking out from under the layers and layers of rags.

  They had a purpose.

  And thus with a few hours’ trek, which sought the center of the ship, things did not seem so hectic and the desolation like a corrosive acid that oozed from end to end did not harass them too much.

  Even when encroached, they found glazed panel structures and encountered built-in speakers made of translucent canvas. The speakers pierced the network and played silent screams. Something like a raving, fragmented consciousness existed and they were still working.

  This crackle that looked like an adjustable radio extracted sounds and loaded the air with humming tension, just as if they were crying from the depths of the soul; it resonated like weeping violin arias.

  While listening to them, in their own hearts lurked that sadness that fills people when walls of closed prison wards are all they can see. The soul has become entrapped, isolated from everything but itself, and now faces grief in solitary confinement.

  And it seemed that the fate of the former inhabitants of this city had been held in such a way, like the blurred lines of meteors.

  So after each room, styled with the enchanted glare of an underground lake, they began to feel as if their very nature had blurred and would disappear and lead to another life.

  The men checked their instruments to ensure that they were not under the influence of something harmful. They rested, ostensibly to catch up, until they realized that everything was inside their heads.

  As if their entire lives were nothing more than a mechanism whose wheels and parts were throbbing like a living organism, they tended to their own sunset.

  And as they tried to refresh themselves, often just by enjoying the precincts that glistened like treasuries from oriental tales, more evil flooded in like an immersive fog landscape that was spreading its fingers into their hearts.

  Thus, the fear approached their relentlessness, tightening its noose like a padded monster that walked to the closet stairs.

  The men rejected these thoughts and moved forward again. They leaned on the butts of their rifles and remembered the order of the thoughts that had been exchanged about the importance of their mission. But they, like many others, just could not reject the horror that catches us even when we are wrapped in blankets as small children.

  It was left to them to go all the way while listening to the melody that after each step cleared and stripped them.

  After a few minutes, amplified by running under the glazed gases that had been ionized by the sparkling translucent bridges over them, they arrived in a sheltered bay island. They stood at the command center of the ship, caught in the arteries of the heart, which was spreading its song.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The ancient city was spending another sultry afternoon.

  Hundreds of birds perched on the built gargoyles watchtowers, watching the surrounding area that curved in all directions.

  Several cougars were peeking out from behind the leaves. Their twinkling eyes were no less dangerous than a mirage. All the while thousands of diligent ants were lugging items in the branches of leaves, creating caravans for their underground plantations. Little sideways birds in bright plumage were cleaning their feathers. They were ready at any moment to fly, creating a volcanic spray of swarms.

  Several stories below, Victor Drake, Amos Oz, and the others were walking between the pyramid and the wooden temples. Those were located beside the dilapidated heap of limps made of stones dragged from unknown places that had been arranged in clear parallel forms. The men lit torches and formed a square to protect themselves from predators.

  The last ones were not so active at this hour of the day, a fact that allowed the men to enjoy, as much as possible, the ruins that sprinkled the area like chocolate chips upon the fenced meadows with their dense vegetation.

  The men were doing so while complying with the safety of the cyclopean standing features. The lined symmetry of the gnarled, thick, and heavy as millstones lumps and rock had somehow been ordered against all the laws of gravity.

  They slunk beside the palaestra whose floor stood just now as poured into concentric circles that were surrounded by fields. The walls had been carved with sullen ancient deities that merged with the surrounding area, and they continued on past squares where thousands of people had once crowded together for markets or religious processions.

  Thus, going around the area were a few half dried up reservoirs, which splashed sputum green, muddy wa
ter. They traveled along the main street, which now nothing more but an overgrown grass-striped road.

  The spine with ribs connected the entire city, providing panoramic access to every point.

  Continuing on the main road, the men were approaching the center, which in turn was also surrounded with walls that looked like draped networks of tangled plants.

  They went through a collapsed porch—an arch whose columns were formed into jaguars, frozen early in their jumps. They had loaded their weapons just in case and the mixture of a dazzling cocktail of light and darkness flashed before them. Towering skyscrapers had risen in the form of stepped pyramids that like chicks were surrounding a larger one, which in turn had been raised meters and meters in height.

  They turned this pyramid, meandering between the bushes that reminded bowed in religious prayer to the building. Before long, as if torn off among the stairs, a hole stood before their eyes.

  Once more they inspected their weapons. The men had to bend into the entry, which seemed to be created from claustrophobic, pressed out plates. They went inside and illuminated the interior of the sanctuary with bioluminescent lights that shined softly with splashes of liquid light.

  They didn’t seem to have quite the time that they did in Thule. They had to get to the upper floors, which given the difficulty in tunneling such a massive building, seemed unlikely.

  But in distance, accounting for the stairs without handrails, there was a buckled triangular, narrow chimney and shafts. These were things not to be neglected.

  The men had started to climb the cracks, which like a bottomless hole connected nothingness to nothingness.

  Their work was sometimes hindered. Flocks of bats flew forward like a whirlwind at times. They slit the air with their screeches, while swarms of insects floated in the expiry, grinding ash sparks.

  Nevertheless, this climb reminded them of movement in the arcs of electrode towers that housed unnatural experiments whose purpose and product was a rebellion against the very universe.

  They stopped and ran their hand over the aligned walls that felt like pavement for a moment. They imagined what might be waiting for them beyond—a stone sarcophagus drilled with hoses to feed shackled metal masks that resembled crepe creatures all wrapped up. Or they were headed toward gigantic high places with balls and balls of snakes that were giving birth to a new song. The men were trembling from the repulsiveness of what they saw and climbed up to where the light elongated like the eyelids of the closed eye; it glistened and grew louder and louder.

  For a moment, it seemed that somewhere someone was chanting. It might have been because there was something behind the cut shell walls or because of their incarceration in the open tomb. Edged with solar filaments, the chant seemed to have been picked up by the hundreds, dressed as canonist priests who ride in Indian file to the top of countless crowds, where they expect to meet Thed.

  The company shivered before those living processes that the darkness uses with his incessant game called before their eyes. They wondered what had served this great temple, and hoped whatever waited for them above was completely different, as their hearts suggested.

  So with each step taken, at each glance over their mute fantastical assembly, they squirmed. Steamed blood spurt from the bodies that fell from above and disappeared like a comet in the depths; they blurred as non-existence into non-existence.

  But squeezing the pool like swan necks taking stock, they still felt that whatever lay ahead of them would feel the resistance of their pressurized guns.

  And thus, in several stages, illuminating the closed space that glowed like a cave, they dived down by way of a tip that led them like a skinned, clawing star and they paused to plug the huge stone hole.

  After staying there for a while, they tucked their weapons into the angular slits and a little scrape of ethereal clear sky again appeared over their heads, wearing the torn fluff of clouds like dandelions.

  The men were descending one by one into the consequent passage. It was a strange garden, similar to that which had once amazed mankind in Babylon. All of this was revealed before their eyes.

  The entire roof of the pyramid, towered like a peak over the surrounding vegetation. It was surrounded by greenery that emitted the smell of orange sprays of flowers.

  And among this grace rose a stone table in the middle of the pyramid’s teeth. There awaited something that the men could not distinguish from the sun until one of them shouted, “God, it’s a chupacabra!”

  As if the solar spectrum in their vision appeared to be lowering its power, they saw a vision covered with membranous olive-black spots. It blinked solar heat with its watery, lizard eyes, and grinned in a reptilian manner with its elongated canines sticking out.

  Victor Drake waved them silent and they hid in the dense eucalyptus-green moss. As they ducked down, they changed their shotguns to shooting mode.

  They sat for a few minutes until the creature seemed to be bidding its time with agonized sounds. It was not walking when out of nowhere a couple of lambs had been dragged forth, bleating as they could.

  There was an ugly scene that we will reduce to only dumb shock and sepulchral silence. The creature drowned into and was splashed by the blood of the lamb’s neck.

  Several minutes passed during which it fed, until finally it was finished and hissed to the figures, who until now had kneeled with bowed heads.

  “You know it’s impossible . . .” they whispered as an excuse, lowering their voices as a sign of obedience.

  “If you bring children, we will reveal . . . . We know that you are faint, but you must be patient.”

  “No, no, so you’ll have to get used to it.”

  “We know you’re our brother and that’s why we are protecting you.”

  “But I’m sick of all this blood,” said one of the figures, setting numb, trembling fingers on the hood of the garment.

  “Me too,” said the other, removing from the cloth robe something that turned out to be a fidgeting, vocalizing being.

  “Not so fast!” shouted Victor Drake, coming out from where he had been hiding.

  The two figures had frozen, as if petrified by the call. Only their long cloaks flapped in the wind like flags, issuing some sort of physical evidence that they were there.

  “Remove your cloaks immediately!” Victor told them. His eyes gazed over at the geranium.

  The priests had obeyed and tore away the strips of garment.

  Victor waved to the others, and they joined him, ducking behind the natural cover of the roof.

  Time seemed an eternity in which each company waited as the two figures undressed. As if in agreement, at one point, they were both finally done and under the bright sunlight emerged two women.

  “They are beautiful” was telepathically shared at the same by the men because they had lowered their weapons, enjoying the brownish tan, bleached hair, and light affliction crossing the women’s facial features.

  “Remove yourself from the creature!” Drake commanded them, adjusting with movements the settings of his weapon to “Max.”

  “Or what? You and the rest of the gang will kill us?” said one of the women as if inviting him. She challenged him with a mild, low sob.

  “I do not want to hurt you, that’s all,” added the leader, still aiming at the creature that was wrapped like a cocoon and kicked like a helpless child, biting with his weak, barely grown teeth.

  “And you want to destroy a part of our world by killing our brother?” said the other sister, who turned and removed the fabric from the inside, which was as repugnant as a jumping toy; it was weakened by the small movements of the little vampire.

  “That . . . Thed is your brother?” Victor asked, ejecting the release by the trigger hand. A small roll of paper came out from one of his pockets.

  “Yes,” said one of the women with that brevity with which the small sorrows of this world are made. In short, it stabbed at the very fibers of the soul.

  “How is th
at possible?” said Amos Oz, whose cry was taken up by the other men.

  “You tell me,” said one of the sisters, stroking the creature that had suddenly quieted down.

  “How come you have nothing in common?” said Victor Drake, developing the roll of paper.

  “Oh, yeah, and when people like you, with strange armor, came to our parents and promised that the old culture would again be revived and slowly restored to its previous life, we had a lot in common, right?

  “You promised that everything, even the new God would be forgotten, and my brother would be loaded with great honor to help with that. Well, as you can see, he is filled with the power to lay down as a helpless parasite. Dropped leagues are able to delete that.”

  “But we are not those people . . .” Victor began.

  “And what? Life for you is a toy that can be hurled into the flames with ease if things get too ugly. Well, for your convenience, these have become such ones. You don’t have the faintest idea what you have set into the trap of destiny. Toward you, with quiet, but still listening steps, is approaching the horror that surrounds you in the past, present, and the future.”

  “However, I do not understand what you mean,” maintained Drake, but he was interrupted again.

  “You think that we’re okay? We are more miserable than that thing laying in front of us.

  “Maybe those nice stories are known by all: the sick are healed, the blind can see, and the lame can walk.

  “But often in the coming days, we lose what we have until we are alone in the darkness.

  “And I realized that there is nothing worse than a crippled hope because there is no treatment for such a thing.”

  Everybody fell silent, and Victor ran a hand over his eyes and said, “You may not believe me, but I understand.

  “I cannot give you a perfect solution where the words of wisdom are crossing each other. As you said yourselves, sometimes bitterness stops everything that can be said or done. Everything is like badly mixed dough from which the weakest cards are accounted.