Afterwards, we had walked behind the church to listen to the bells. It was so cold that the sky was clear and blue, but it was still snowing—tentative flakes that crystallized right out of the air, the last little bit of moisture unable to stay up. Johnny shivered in her thick black peacoat, like a drawing of a kid out of an old storybook. You expected her to pull a wand from her pocket and sail off with the pirates or fairies or wizards.
“At least there’s no wind,” she said, half her face buried in her scarf. “Don’t walk home in this. Let Rutger give you a ride.”
“It’s not that far.”
“You’ll freeze! I don’t want to go to another funeral so soon after this one!”
“Who said you were invited?”
She giggled, caught off-guard, and when she looked up at me I saw her eyes were dry and cloudless again. Glassy-green, drained of colour and personality by the snow.
I did a quarter-turn away from her, and she from me, and we stared intently at each other’s shoulders, knowing that there had been a lot of hugging at the funeral, but that we hadn’t hugged today, or ever, and would it be weird, or did one of us need the comfort?
“Joanna! Come say goodbye to Aunt Rose!” someone yelled behind us. I waved at Johnny, stuffed my mittened hands back into my coat pocket, and started for home at a fast trot, not quite a run. Pointedly, I didn’t turn and look back.
Love. That’s when I knew it was love. Then, and every day after, and here, now, so far from home, about to head to our deaths. And she didn’t love me back. And the only people who did love me were who knew where. Now, I had to carry all that with me, and she had to carry nothing.
“Nicky?” she said, stopping to wait for me.
“I’m coming.”
“THIS ONE,” JOHNNY said. “I saw the owner leave.”
“We can’t. Can’t.”
“This, you’re going to protest? After everything?”
“There’s got to be another way!”
“Shush. Look casual. If I can do it fast enough, no one will even look. Just walk. Keep your head up.”
I preceded her to the glossy black Range Rover, looming over us as we approached. Keep your head up, she’d said; only my eyes were racing back and forth behind my new sunglasses. I blocked her from view as she jammed something into the passenger side door with a crunch so loud I was sure everyone would stare at us.
But I continued standing there, chin up, leaning on the door to show ownership, proprietorship, something, focusing through the shrill whine in my head that assured me we were about to be arrested, that literal strangers were about to run over and ask what we were doing, with our bundle of supplies and spots of olive oil on our new shirts, one girl who looked twelve years old and like a white tourist, and one boy who maybe was from around here but then could not be reasonably associated with a twelve year-old white tourist except as a miscreant, stay calm, stay calm...
“There. I’ll pop the back; load up while I get the engine started.”
“Since when do you know how to hotwire ca—”
“Same place I learned the handcuff stuff. Move.”
The hatch cracked a half-inch; I opened it, not rushing, affecting boredom in fact, sighing like a longsuffering guide, and loaded everything in. As I slammed the door shut—yes, surely everyone would look now, I would hear shouting, sirens—and got into the other side from Johnny, the engine was already running.
I felt safer behind the tinted glass, but the fact remained that we were about to steal—or had already, in fact, stolen—a car. I looked down, expecting to see stripped wires dangling near my knees, but everything looked more or less intact; although she had jammed a strange arrangement of nail files and bobby pins into the keyhole, from the pink Hello Kitty grooming kit I’d wondered about her buying earlier.
“You don’t have to hotwire most cars,” she explained. “It’s enough to get the tumblers to turn in the keyhole. Come on, let’s go. Not fast, don’t jerk when we start—”
“Hurr hurr hurr.”
“Focus!”
I adjusted the mirror and pulled out as smoothly as I could, following the cars that were leaving ahead of us. The huge SUV was quite something after so many years driving my tiny Geo Storm, though they maneuvered about the same. Like steering a cow.
“Where are we going?”
“Let’s get out of here first, and then I should be able to navigate you.”
We emerged into full-on rush hour, and my breath stopped in my throat. There was nowhere to go if we got caught, nowhere to turn and escape. We inched along in the procession, waiting as people crossed the road ahead of us, leisurely, chatting to each other, smoking, waving their arms, talking on their cell phones, one old guy in a black robe and the most fabulously ornamented camel I’d ever seen, silver coins dangling over red velvet and dozens of stitched scenes on its blanket. The camel stopped in the dead centre of the road and looked around.
“Stay calm,” Johnny said. “I can hear your stomach from here. Stay cool. No one will hit us.”
“You sound like my old driving teacher.”
“Johnny?”
“Yes?”
“You are getting a huge zit next to your ear.”
“Oh, eat my entire ass with Grey Poupon. You don’t think I know it’s there? It feels like a redhot grape. When we get out of here, we’re both going for facials.”
“But—”
“Both of us. Drive.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
BUT I DIDN’T calm down till we had left the city behind—with only one incident of prolonged honking, not at us but in our immediate vicinity, something taxi-related, which had shredded my nerves—and were out into the desert. Johnny had said it was virtually a straight shot on one road, and she’d tell me where to turn; I watched the road steadily, grateful that they drove on the right here, ignoring the huge oval of sweat on my back that had formed even though we had the air conditioning on, running intermittently to save gas. There was very little traffic on the roads to or from Nineveh; I wondered if that was usual. Why weren’t people fleeing the incoming disaster? If the gate was buried under the city, didn’t they know what was about to happen?
Johnny carefully drew a magic circle on the glove compartment door, the marker-tip squeaking on the leather.
“Oh my God,” I said. “Vandal. We’ll never be able to give this back now.”
“Nonsense. We’ll give it right back as soon as we don’t need it any more, and he’ll be safe from eldritch monsters.”
“Those writers... Lovecraft and Lord Dunsany and them, the ones that were in your notes... how did they come to know the Ancient Bastards? They wrote stories about them, for Chrissake. They got paid money. And everyone said, ‘Oh, they’re making it up.’ Did they make covenants?”
“No. They were society members, that’s all. You can learn a lot from those guys. I mean, the head of the Rio chapter is over a thousand years old.”
“How come they don’t get caught?”
“They’re good at flying under the radar. And it’s hard to get a straight story out of them, as you’ve noticed. Good thing too, because a few of them got institutionalized for talking about it.”
“They’re gonna institutionalize us when we get back.”
“Well, you should’ve been locked up long ago.”
“But they knew,” I said. “They really knew.”
“Yeah. Luckily they had the good sense to make up languages for their stories. Can you imagine having that many copies of real spells spread around the world in pulp magazines?”
“They knew better than that.”
“Yeah.” She shook her head. “What’s bothering me now, though, is that said Ancient Bastards have no reason, none, to not know where we’re going. If They aren’t tracking us directly, They could easily track the magic we’ve left behind us. Are we headed into an ambush?”
“Yes. I’ve seen a lot of kung-fu movies.”
“‘It’s a trap!’�
� she said in her best Admiral Ackbar voice, brushing her fingers across the magic circle, glowing blue in the centre. “What I’m creating is enough to blur where we are exactly, I think. The spell itself says something like ‘The enemy will not know on which side of the river you lie, but it will know from which river your army drinks.’ So we’re visible, but not that visible. Just our final destination. They’ll know that. They can’t not. You wouldn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes.”
I risked a glance over at her, the determined profile, small jaw jutting like a bulldog. But her eyes were jittery and bright with fear, darting around the empty landscape around us, all wheat and sand and small concrete barriers, not a living thing for miles.
“They like deserts and oceans in particular,” she said, “and mountains. They like to see what’s coming up on Them. Even though They’re the apex predator wherever They are.”
“Hey,” I said, “you’re not... steaming. Pollinating. Whatever. In genius mode. So this is the real you?”
“I’m always the real me.”
“No, I mean, the you that’s you when you’re not... using Their magic.”
“That’s still me.” Her voice had gone up an octave, tense with pain. I opened my mouth again and stopped. After a few kilometers she said, “Nicky, remember me like this. As who you’ve always known me, not who I am when I’m Theirs. Whoever that is. Whoever you think that is.”
I started to agree and choked on something thick in my throat, then nodded. We would not remember each other. We would die at the same moment; or if not, if one of us survived, it would be her. Not me. She would let me die if it looked like it might interfere in her plan.
Heart pounding, I drove on, into the desert, towards our deaths.
STEPPING OUT OF the air conditioning was like walking into a lamp post, just the shock of a heat so intense I wondered if I’d ever been this hot in my entire life. It seemed an entire order of magnitude hotter than anything we’d encountered yet. On the far side of the Rover, I heard Johnny simply collapse into the sand. I walked around the hood, feeling the soles of my runners heat up, and squatted next to her, pushing up my shades.
“Oh my God,” she said, muffled, head in her arms. “We’re not going to make it. We’re not going to make it in time.”
“Says fucking who?”
She got up, kneeling in the scanty shade of the Rover’s side, her face already red. “We can’t excavate in this. We shouldn’t be doing any physical activity in this! We didn’t bring enough water. We’ll...”
“Johnny,” I said as gently as I could. “Hey. Come on. Listen.”
“Mm?”
“Somewhere in my house,” I said, “there’s a videotape of you dancing to ‘Get Ready For This.’ Okay? And if you don’t move your ass, I’ll find a way to release it on the Internet.”
“You wouldn’t dare. You wouldn’t dare.”
“Pelvic thrusts and everything,” I said. “In my parents’ basement.”
“Shut up.”
“In a New Kids on the Block sweatshirt. I’ll do it. You know I will.”
“Shut up.”
“Come on. Up we get.”
Sniffling with laughter, she got up and untied her scarf from around her waist, putting it around her head again. We cracked open the Rover’s hatch, releasing a final sad blast of cool air, and I hauled out the supplies while she organized her notes.
“Here. The dig hasn’t reached the mound, I think, where the king was buried. They’re still quite a ways away. We’ll need to go into the ruins and come in from beneath.”
“Grave robbers. Cursed.”
“I know.”
I couldn’t make head or tails of the hand-drawn map, which she had annotated in so many places that the drawing under it could barely be seen, but I figured I was just there for moral support and brute force anyway. “Sounds good.”
I looked around at the ruins while she frosted herself with sunscreen. We were at the outskirts—presumably to avoid disturbing or getting ‘rumbled’ by the dig staff, even though I hadn’t seen any vehicles—and so it was hard to see just how big it was. It was surrounded by a chainlink fence we hadn’t had to even stop to open; it had been left wide open, the gate half-buried in sand. The old city, she’d called it. One of the oldest in the world. Where They had sensed our gathering numbers, and swooped in to investigate, all those years ago.
There were tall, square structures with delicately stacked bricks on top, a soft pinkish brown, pierced with arched windows and gates; dozens of walls were decorated with brick and carvings, and the stick writing as well as Arabic. The ground was pocked with dozens of holes—many neat-edged, square, with ladders leading into them and grids marked with string or tape, but many fresher-looking, messy, with damp dirt piled at their edges. Those made me uneasy. It looked as if something had dug up from below—something with enough violence to rip out the turf instead of making a burrow, like a rabbit would have done. How thin were the doorways here, near the main gate?
The low walls near us were covered in carven writing—spells or instructions, I wondered? Classifieds, Ahmed was here? They looked much older than the rest of the buildings, which had been worn by the gentlest breezes, the least lading of sand, over thousands of years, to nubs that stuck just a few feet out from the dirt. The higher walls seemed weirdly... layered, as if they were stone covered by something else. I pointed it out to Johnny, who shrugged. “They used to put cement on top of stone so they could write and paint more easily on it,” she said. “Especially the steles—those tall things. They were like bulletin boards, they’d have important public information on them.”
“Hey, look,” I said, standing on a statue base with two broken-off feet on it. “Holy shit! It’s just like the poem.”
“‘Ozymandias’?”
“Yeah, Ozzy Osbourne. ‘I met a traveller from an antique land, who said...’”
“‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert,’” she finished.
“Nice. Does this say whose feet these were?”
“Nope, sorry.”
“Too bad,” I said, and meant it. I had liked the poem when we did it in English class a few years ago, and the discussion afterwards where we had argued whether Ozymandias was a bad guy or not. A tyrant? Or a good man with an ego? Our teacher had eventually argued that it didn’t matter, since all that was left of him was the name and the smashed statue, but it had mattered to me.
Loaded with our bags and the shovels, one each, we walked up the slope. There was a constant low noise, like a generator running slightly out of sync, that made my jaws ache and my eyes water; I looked around, but couldn’t see anything. “What’s that noise?”
“It’s not from here.”
“Well no, there’s no one else here.”
“I mean this dimension. You’re hearing something that can only be heard near the end,” she said quietly, looking down at her map. “This way. Watch for foggaras, aqueducts—there’s one, there’s another one. They’re pretty sturdy and they run in straight lines; if we have to run, they’ll give better footing than the sand.”
I looked at the biggest excavation, gridded perfectly with wood. “What’s down there?”
“Regular city stuff. That’s not what we’re looking for.” But she hesitated as she turned away, and turned back. I followed, worried by her worry. There was a brand-new notice tacked up, written on a piece of printer paper in several languages, the green marker so scribbled that even I could tell how rushed the writer had been. “Hm.”
“What’s that say?”
“It’s from three days ago. Telling students and staff that the dig is closed indefinitely, due to safety issues. Wildlife attacks, it says.”
“Wildlife?” I looked around at the still, silent site. Even the scanty grass was barely moving. “What lives out here? Anything big?”
“Shouldn’t think so,” she said. “Don’t think ecosystem dynamics could support anything big enough to be really da
ngerous, and the area’s got a constant human presence. I don’t know, at least we’ve got some privacy and we’re not gonna get arrested for interfering with the dig. But keep your eyes open.”
“Yeah, as if that wildlife is really ‘wildlife.’”
“As if.”
Following her map, we found a maze-like complex of low enclosures, none higher than my waist. She kept stopping to copy things off the walls, grousing under her breath at how worn-down and illegible they were, except for some of the carvings—lions, warriors, flying arrows, monsters.
“What the hell is this?”
“A minion,” she said, pointing. “There, it says... O Lesser Angels—fly the wide world—and bring me back a new heart—unstained by the blood of yesterday. Sort of. ‘Angels’ isn’t quite the word, but you see here, where the wings are over the face? That made it into the Bible. An angel, well, you don’t know what an angel looks like. Maybe it looks like one of these. In it goes.”
“Jesus.”
The wind pushed sand into and out of openings, pushed the grass against stone and cement, tilted the steles so that everywhere we went I heard not just our footsteps but eternal scritchings and sighings and gasps. My nerves felt stretched hair-thin.
And it wasn’t just that: there was the heat, which continued to feel like some huge animal stalking us. The wind brought no relief, drying the sweat that formed in my hairline and on my neck in seconds, but drying it like a hairdryer, well over body temperature. We drank our water as sparingly as we could, every mouthful tasting as exaggeratedly sweet as Gatorade, but my throat felt full of mucus, my tongue swelling. How soon could you die of dehydration here? Or would we go from heatstroke first?
Scritch, scritch, scratch, behind us. I spun, shovel up; still nothing. The wind plastered itself to me like a plate of red-hot iron molded to the shape of my body. We stopped to rest in a patch of shade, a few degrees cooler. Johnny’s chest was squeaking like a bad fan belt.
“I outgrew it,” she finally said, answering, I figured, the look on my face. “I did. I swear. Years and years ago. I didn’t think I needed an inhaler.”
Beneath the Rising Page 28
