“This place is a tomb.” Even his voice sounded lifeless in his own ears. “I’m fucked. I’m going to die here.”
Perhaps it was the weakness from hunger, or the despair of having no way out, that kept him from weeping again. That storm, once past, did not return. He turned, the dust clinging to the soles of his feet, and made his way back toward the temple as the sun set behind the hills to his left.
He felt, rather than saw, the change. The light didn’t fade immediately. Nothing in this world of gray and brown could be that well-delineated. But there was a gust of wind against his back, and the temperature went down. If it hadn’t been so dry, he would have been convinced that a storm was brewing. He swallowed, and his ears popped.
There was a deep, resonant clang, sounding impossibly loud in the silence, as the two huge doors at the front of the temple slammed shut.
He broke into a run, his bare feet thudding on the ground. He kept running from sheer momentum and desperation even after he saw that it was pointless, that the front of the massive doors were smooth, with no handholds, and the gap between them was far too narrow even to slip a piece of paper between, much less a hand.
He fell to his knees in front of them, bowing his head, still too exhausted and weak to cry. I’ll never get up again. Just like the giants inside. Wild thoughts echoed in his skull. He tried to think of his body’s soft, pliable flesh, that had given him pleasure and pain, that because of his youth cooperated with his desires so naturally that most times he didn’t think about it at all, being dried out, clinging to his dead bones. He looked down at himself, his chest, his hands, his legs, his penis. Soon, this thing I call “me” will be gone, and what’s left will feel nothing. Soon. Maybe only a day or two. And then, after that... my body will never move again. And here it will lie. Forever, as long as this world exists.
It was the idea of never feeling anything again that terrified him the most. Death itself was a single event, like snuffing out a candle. But after that, not to have sensation, even pain, was impossible to imagine.
He thought of lying down and simply waiting, but some innate determination wouldn’t let him give up quite yet. He stood again. By this time it was almost totally dark, but he could still feel the wind against his naked body, twisting around him like the caress of light hands. He turned outward, away from the doors, deciding that he would stand as long as he could, meet whatever danger the Sphinx had warned him about head on if it were possible to do so.
What did the Sphinx mean, don’t get caught outside at night? What danger could it have been referring to? It said that it never left its room, knew nothing about what happened out here. Perhaps it was just being ironic. Or lying outright. It told me that it lied, that everything here lied. There’s nothing that I saw during the day that looked dangerous, anyway.
And it was as he was thinking these comforting thoughts that he was grabbed from both sides by rough hands, his arms pinioned behind him. He cried out, but a hand came over his mouth. He tried to kick, but his legs were held tightly, and he was lifted into the air. There was a cold breath of a voice behind his right ear, a bloodless voice, as if the air itself were speaking.
“A living one?” it said. There was no way to tell if the speaker was male or female, young or old.
A cold finger pressed against his chest. “Yes,” another voice said. “Alive. It’s warm. But how? Where did it come from?”
“Inside,” said a third. “There must be a portal inside. Perhaps there is a way out, after all.”
“There hasn’t been a living one for thousands of years.”
“We need its warmth,” said the first voice, and there was a sharp inhalation near his neck, as if his captor was drawing in his scent. “We can take its heat, then find the portal it came through. And then we won’t have to tend her fire any more.”
“But if it comes from outside, what if there are more still inside that came along with it?”
“We will find them, too.” The voice near his ear spoke in a silky whisper, quietly, almost lovingly. The hand moved cautiously away from his mouth. “Where do you come from? Did you come from outside? Who came with you?”
“I came from my home,” he said, desperately trying to think of an evasive way to speak, to talk in circles without saying anything, as the Sphinx had. Fear and the weakness defeated him. “I don’t know how I got here.”
“It must know,” one of the voices said, becoming harsh. “It can’t get here without knowing.”
“I just want to get back home,” he said, and gave a feeble attempt at twisting his way free, but his captors’ hands only dug into his biceps and his ankles more firmly.
“You’ll leave the world when we have what we want,” one of the voices said.
“What do you want?”
A voice breathed right into his face, with a gust like a fog of ice crystals. “Heat.”
Hands pressed against him, against the skin on his chest, hips, legs. Cold hands. His own body’s warmth was being drawn away. A haze clouded his mind as his body cooled, but he heard the voices becoming stronger, more solid.
“It has much heat.”
“This much will last us for a long time.”
“It has been such a very long time since we have fed.”
“Perhaps we can leave it with a little. It would be a pity to drain it dry, as we did the last ones.”
“They didn’t suffer, they merely went to sleep.”
“Leave it its breath. The bit of warmth that will be left behind isn’t enough to make a difference to us. Then perhaps it will live, and if it comes back, we can feed from it again.”
They’re Heat Vampires. His mind whirled. He now couldn’t feel his own body, and but if he’d had the strength, he’d have laughed. Well, now at least I know what it is like to feel nothing.
He didn’t have long to think, he knew that. His consciousness was already dropping away, like a stone falling into water, sinking out of sight. Only one chance, and after that, he’d never respond to anything, ever again. He struggled feebly, and heard his own voice say, in words that sounded sludgy and indistinct, “I’ll tell you how I got in.”
Hands pulled away from him, and there was hiss of indrawn breath. “Where? Where is the portal?”
“There’s a room,” he said, “if you go from where the Sphinx is, down the hallway, into a huge room with windows...”
“The Great Room,” one of the voices said.
“There is another hallway that leads from there, down to a... it looks like a storage room. The portal is in the ceiling. There are many of us where I came from. Lots more... heat.”
There was an excited rush of whispers.
“We might be able to get through.”
“All of us?”
“Yes, all. And then there would never be want of heat. It said so.”
“Perhaps it is lying.”
“But perhaps it is not.”
“What if she finds out?”
An angry hiss. “We’ve served her long enough. She can’t stop us.”
“But we promised!”
“She made us promise. If she forced us, it wasn’t a real promise.”
“I told you we shouldn’t have entered the temple and killed her guards.”
“Shut up.”
A hand pressed over his heart. “Let us finish with this one, first. Perhaps we can get through, and perhaps not. But we have this one here, now. And it has more warmth that we can take.” A murmur of assent. Hands came back one at a time, against his neck, against his thigh, cupping his genitals. Once again there was that horrible feeling of being drained, and his thoughts drifted away. It didn’t hurt. It was like going to sleep after an exhausting day.
“Stop,” said one of the voices. Duncan barely heard it. The word seemed to have no meaning.
“What?”
“She said if we kill again, she would end our lives, too.”
“She lies. You know she lies.”
“What if
it wasn’t a lie? We’ve taken enough from this one. We can feel again, for a while. Let us get rid of what is left of it, and perhaps she won’t know. Then we’ll find the portal, and get into its world, and we’ll all be able to feed as much as we wish to.”
“Yes,” said another. “That is wise.”
“What if it was lying, though? I asked it earlier, and no one had an answer. She lies, perhaps it lies, too. What if the portal isn’t where it said?”
“What warmth it has left is nothing. Better to give what is left of it to the sea, and then we will find the portal if it is there.”
“Perhaps,” said one of the voices, in a sly tone, “we can quench her fire, and end this world first.”
“Not until we know we can escape in time.”
“No. Not until. But that would serve her right, for enslaving us. Kill the flame, then leave her alone in the dark, with the world dying around her.”
Another hiss of assent. “Let us give this one to the sea. Let the sea kill it, not us.”
His body was lifted, and there was the jostling sensation of being carried along, but there was no clutch of fear, nothing but a desire to sleep. The wind ran its fingers through his hair, fluttered across his skin. He didn’t feel cold, although what was left of his conscious brain knew that he was, deathly cold, perhaps beyond recall.
There was a change in angle as those carrying him ascended a steep hill, and he remembered the cliff edge he’d seen from his vantage point on the hilltop earlier. They were going to throw him into the sea, he knew that, but even so he was unable to summon up any fear. Perhaps the impact would kill him. He had read years before that people who jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge often didn’t drown, but were killed when they hit the water. If he somehow survived the impact, of course, then he’d drown. There was no way he could swim, not in his present condition.
He opened his eyes. His eyelids were leaden. He could see, far beneath him, a dark ocean, laced with phosphorescence, surging and receding, and smelled salt. The hands gripping him tightened, pulled backward, and there was a forward surge and he was thrown outward into the empty sky.
Air rushed past him, but there was none in his lungs with which to scream. He plummeted downward as silently as a shot bird.
Excerpt from Sephirot copyright © 2016 by Gordon Bonnet
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