Ararat

by Christopher Golden

  Father Cornelius whipped his head up, staring murder at them all. The orange fire in his eyes blazed so bright it might have been actual flame.

  Walker lifted his gun and shot the priest once, the bullet taking him in the right shoulder and knocking him backward. It wasn’t too late, he told himself.

  “Adam, get the charm off him!”

  The demon twisted, hissing as Adam lunged. Kim wrapped herself around its left arm and tried to drag it back, but as Adam snatched at the priest’s collar, he came away only with the white tab that marked his office.

  Father Cornelius grabbed Adam by the neck and dug in his fingers, then ripped out his throat in a spray of bright blood.

  The snow fell.

  Walker screamed as if he could deny what he’d just seen. He hurled himself at the demon, momentum crashing them both to the ground. Shouting for Kim, he jammed the gun snugly beneath the priest’s chin.

  Kim’s hand flashed in front of him, dug inside the now open collar, and tore the bitumen charm from around Father Cornelius’s neck. Her fist pulled back, trailing loose twine, and she cocked her arm and threw the gleaming black shard out into the storm, as far from Camp One as she could manage.

  Walker saw the priest’s eyes go clear as the demon departed. He saw the knowledge of what he’d done flood Father Cornelius’s eyes, and then the old man began to weep, lying on the ground as snowflakes danced gently down upon his face.

  From behind them, Walker heard Meryam begin to scream, her voice weak, ragged, and full of an anguish he had never heard from another human.

  Adam lay on the ground with his throat flayed open and pumping blood, as if wolves had been at him but had run off without their prize.

  “Oh, God,” Kim said, the gentle snow eddying on a light breeze that caressed them all, living and dead alike.

  She stumbled past Adam’s corpse and made her way toward Meryam. Walker listened to her attempts to comfort the other woman, but Meryam would not listen. She could only cry out to her dead fiancé, telling him to get up, that he was the one who was meant to live, that none of it meant anything without him.

  “Father,” Walker said, looking down at the priest where he lay in the snow.

  The climbing ax still jutted from Father Cornelius’s chest, and blood oozed from the bullet wound on the other side. But Walker doubted these injuries were the worst of what had been done to the old man. His face had been torn so badly and he had lost so much blood that it seemed impossible he had even made it to Camp One. The elements should have killed him if the blood loss had not, but the demon had been the furnace inside him, the engine that drove him.

  Now that fire had gone out.

  “Father,” Walker said again.

  The old man’s lips were moving, despite the horrible injuries to his mouth and face. He managed only a bubbling whisper, a rasp made almost unintelligible by those mutilations, but Walker understood. Father Cornelius had begun to pray. They were words Walker had heard before, at the bedside of his mother, when the hospital had summoned a priest for last rites. The words were a prayer for the dying, but Father Cornelius spoke them on his own behalf.

  Walker remained silent, held the old man’s hand, and prayed with him as he died.

  Just in case God was listening.

  * * *

  The three of them made their way down from Camp One together. Meryam staggered along between Kim and Walker, doing her best to stay upright. Sometimes she managed to walk freely, though never without a steadying hand, and other times she grew lightheaded, and darkness swept in around her, and they had to sling her arms around her shoulders and practically carry her down.

  Human wreckage, they kept going, and by the time night began to fall they had made it nearly back to the place where there would be trucks and people and food. Oh, my God, food, Meryam thought, in a moment of ravenous lucidity.

  The snow kept falling, though only very lightly now, almost as if the heavens offered beauty in apology for the cruelty of the blizzard that had lashed the mountain.

  Meryam staggered to a stop, nearly falling as she tried to get away from the others, to go back up the trail.

  “Stop,” Kim said. “What are you—”

  “There!” Meryam said, pointing a shaking finger. “Don’t you … do you see him?”

  They hadn’t.

  In the shadows of a copse of leafless trees, Hakan sat alone with his shoulders hunched. An orange light gleamed in the near darkness and Meryam almost screamed, but then she saw the light flare and diminish, and she realized it was the tip of a cigarette. Hakan sat awaiting them, smoking, exhaling plumes of gray cancer into the air.

  Walker broke away from them, leaving Meryam to lean on Kim. He drew his gun, approaching Hakan warily.

  “How the hell did you get down here?” Walker barked.

  Hakan cocked his head. “I should be asking you that question.”

  “Show me your throat! Open your shirt and show me you’re not wearing one of those fucking charms!”

  Hakan let his cigarette dangle from his lips as he complied. Its orange tip flared brightly again, and flashes of memory flickered through Meryam’s mind. The gleam of orange in the eyes of the possessed would stay with her for as many hours, days, or weeks as she had remaining to her.

  “Turn out your pockets!” Walker demanded.

  Hakan took a long drag of his cigarette and stood to comply. “You’re wasting your time. I never had one. Feyiz gave me one of the charms but I left it back up in the ark. It felt wrong to me. If the demon wanted me, I didn’t see how a little piece of rock…”

  He let the words hang in the air. Meryam wanted to ask why he had not made the argument up on the mountain, before they evacuated the cave, but she knew the answer. They never would have listened to him.

  Walker lowered his gun but did not put it away.

  “What happened to Calliope?” Kim asked.

  Hakan nodded slowly. He reached carefully inside his jacket, watching Walker to make sure not to alarm him, and he withdrew Calliope’s camera. Meryam couldn’t be sure in the faded light, but she thought it might be smeared with blood.

  “I thought you might want this,” Hakan said, showing the camera to Meryam.

  Trembling, she thanked him. “Please … you hold onto it for now.”

  His eyes, so often full of anger and disdain, softened as he studied her. “Adam?” he asked.

  “Back up there,” she said quietly, gesturing toward the peak of Ararat. “With the rest.”

  Hakan nodded slowly. She saw a flicker of something in his expression, some decision, and then he moved Kim aside and lifted Meryam into his arms. She stiffened, remembering all of the hatred he had inflicted upon her, but then she let it go. Let herself relax into him. The man saw a dying woman and had decided to show her a last kindness. She would not take that away from him.

  Walker began to argue, but Kim silenced him, and these few last survivors began the final stage of their descent. Meryam thought about the burned remains in the cave, and the slabs and chunks of broken bitumen up there. She thought about the dead they had left behind, and the shards of bitumen around some of their necks, as well as the other charms that had been cast aside, somewhere on the face of Ararat. Where was the demon now? Still inside the ark? Suffused into the bitumen? Haunting the shards they’d left behind?

  Or was he still with them, these few survivors, quietly waiting to meet the modern world?

  Meryam wept quietly in Hakan’s arms. As he walked, her body rocked against him, and soon she lost consciousness.

  Her dreams were filled with screaming.

  TWENTY-TWO

  On the second Tuesday in April, Kim Seong sat at a small, round table in Pizzeria Paradiso and waited for her lunch appointment to arrive. She’d taken a table right by the windows that looked out on the sidewalk so she could watch pedestrian traffic passing by on M Street, but also because it was an unseasonably warm early spring day in Washington, D.C., and she wanted
to feel the sun on her. Ever since Ararat, she could not get enough of the sun.

  “Can I get you a drink while you wait?”

  Kim blinked and glanced up at the waiter, a thin young man with perfectly groomed hair and artful stubble on his chin.

  “Just water for now,” she said.

  The waiter vanished as if she’d summoned him out of her imagination in the first place. She sat and waited in the sunshine, relishing its heat and light. For a moment she closed her eyes, just basking in it, but she opened them quickly again. Whenever her eyes were closed, she saw things she hoped never to see again.

  A bell rang over the door and she looked up. The way the little table was situated, a corner and a column and a tall plant obstructed her view of the entrance, but she heard the muffled voice of someone speaking to the hostess and she knew it was Walker even before he came into view. He smiled when he saw her and raised a hand in greeting, and Kim did the same. For the first second or two, they studied each other’s faces, searching for signs—for a grin that seemed too wide or a glint of orange light in the eyes that defied both sunshine and shadows.

  It had become her habit when she encountered anyone, studying them a little closer, wondering when she might encounter someone who was not who they pretended to be. Kim’s pulse quickened in relief when it seemed to her that Walker was only Walker. With the way the corners of his mouth had been torn and then sewn up, he seemed reluctant to smile too widely, and that was for the best. He had healed quite a bit, but the scars would be with him forever.

  Walker stepped aside, beckoned back toward the entrance, and a little dark-haired boy joined him. He put a hand on the boy’s back and the two of them approached the table.

  “You made it,” she said pleasantly.

  “Made it?” Walker replied. “We live here. You’re the one who came from so far away. I appreciate you making the time.”

  Kim gave a nod. She didn’t want to correct him just yet.

  “This must be Charlie,” she said, lowering into a crouch.

  The boy smiled shyly. He took after his father, but he had a softness to his features, an open kindness, that undermined the resemblance.

  “Charlie, this is my friend Seong. Can you say hello?”

  The boy held out his hand to shake. “It’s nice to meet you, Seong.”

  “And you, sir,” Kim replied, sharing the boy’s formality. “Your father tells me this is your favorite place to eat.”

  He brightened and launched into a litany of pizza toppings that were acceptable to him, all shyness gone. The three of them sat around the table in the sunlight and with the boy entertaining them, Kim and Walker managed to avoid discussing the horrors they had in common. By the time the waiter had returned, Charlie had already helped each of them perfect their pizza orders and seemed proud of his expertise.

  “The fresh mozzarella—the drops—not the shredded stuff,” the boy told the waiter.

  “Absolutely, sir,” the waiter said as if the kid were a Congressman instead of a fourth-grader, and then went off to put in their orders.

  “All right, buddy, what now?” Walker asked.

  “Hands,” Charlie replied good-naturedly, sliding his chair back. He stood and looked at his father expectantly.

  “You first,” Walker told his son. “I’ll go right after.”

  The openness faded from Charlie’s face. His nine-year-old innocence receded, to be replaced by keen perception as he glanced from his father to Kim and back again.

  He nodded. “Got it. But no kissing in public. It’s embarrassing.”

  As Charlie marched off to wash his hands, Kim felt herself flush. Walker watched him a moment before turning toward her.

  “Sorry about that.”

  She cocked her head. “Is there a reason he expects us to kiss the moment he leaves the table?”

  Walker offered a small shrug, with no trace of a smile. “He interrogated me on the way over. One of his questions was whether or not we’d ever kissed.”

  “And you said we had.”

  “There are a lot of things I can’t tell him,” Walker replied. “I’ve made myself a promise that I’m going to be honest with him about everything else.”

  Kim scraped her fingernails over the textured cotton tablecloth. She wetted her lips with her tongue.

  “How much do you know?” she asked.

  Walker glanced around to make sure they weren’t overheard. He leaned slightly forward. “I know they’ve pulled most of the bodies off the mountain. My employers have been paying very close attention to their progress, but so far we haven’t had any reports of violence or … anything like what we experienced up there.”

  Kim nodded. “So far. But they haven’t let anyone go into the cave. The Turks are adamant that the ark is off-limits and the UN is inclined to agree with them.”

  They locked eyes and Kim saw her own fears reflected back to her. Walker glanced out the window, watching two women stroll hand-in-hand, one holding the leash of an energetic black terrier. Ordinary people living ordinary lives, Kim thought. If they only knew.

  “Have they released Adam Holzer’s body?” Walker asked.

  “Just a few days ago. I thought about trying to attend, but I feared it might be an intrusion,” Kim replied. “Besides, Meryam doesn’t want to see us. She wants to put the mountain behind her for whatever time she has left.”

  Walker glanced deeper into the restaurant. Kim followed his gaze and saw that Charlie had emerged from the bathroom in the back corridor and was wiping the excess water from his hands onto his jeans. It made her smile.

  “I’m sort of amazed she’s lived this long,” Walker said. “She can’t have much time left.”

  Kim hesitated, then plunged ahead. “You never know how much time you’ll have,” she said. “Which is why I wanted to see you.”

  Walker must have heard something in her tone, because he studied her more closely, searching her face for whatever he’d missed. “What is it?”

  “I just thought you should know that I’ve taken a job at the embassy. A two-year posting as special advisor to the ambassador. So, I’ll be here in D.C. for a while. I thought we might get together now and then.”

  His expression was hard to read.

  “I’d like that very much,” he said, but there was a stiffness in him that made her wonder if he might be just being polite.

  “I’m not expecting anything,” Kim told him. “It’s just that I have nightmares. All the time, I have nightmares. And there isn’t anyone else who could understand.”

  Charlie arrived back at the table and hiked himself up onto his seat just as the waiter arrived with waters for all three of them. The little boy thanked the waiter politely.

  Walker reached across the table and took her hand, holding it there.

  “I have those dreams, too. You’re not alone.”

  Anyone overhearing him might have thought the words implied romance instead of dread. Charlie wrinkled his nose and rolled his eyes. The role of little gentleman that he played so well apparently did not extend to public displays of affection.

  “We’re not kissing,” Kim told him, forcing herself to smile, her heart lightened by the presence of the boy. “Or is holding hands also on the list of forbidden activities?”

  Charlie pursed his lips in contemplation and then sighed as he relented.

  “I guess holding hands is okay.”

  Walker laughed softly and held Kim’s hand a little tighter. She was grateful. The contact helped, the knowledge that he understood her nightmares. The job offer, to come to D.C. and work for the ambassador, had nothing to do with Walker or her experience on Mount Ararat, but she could not honestly say his presence here hadn’t played a role in her accepting it. Not because she loved him—she didn’t know him nearly well enough to even consider the idea of love. But ever since Ararat she had gone through periods of terror and paranoia during which she wondered if she might be insane … and then periods in which she feared t
hat, in fact, she was entirely, terrifyingly sane.

  “Thank you,” she said to father and son alike.

  But when the waiter came to deliver their pizzas, she cast another glance at Walker’s eyes, searching for that telltale orange glimmer. Just in case.

  Kim knew she would always be watching for it.

  Always.

  * * *

  A light spring rain darkened the sky over East Meadow, Long Island. Meryam had met Adam’s father only once, at the launch party for their first book, when it seemed like investing their own money in a trip to New York just to celebrate the publication of the book made sense. In his late fifties, Mr. Holzer had been widowed for more than fifteen years, but had never remarried, despite a long love affair with a stock market analyst named Sylvia. Meryam had wondered if Adam’s father had never married Sylvia just so his son wouldn’t have to come to terms with having a stepmother.

  She hoped Mr. Holzer would marry Sylvia now, after an appropriate period of mourning. Adam’s feelings weren’t an issue anymore.

  Meryam stood just outside the black, wrought iron gates of the United Synagogue Cemetery. Rain pattered onto her umbrella, dripping down from its edges, and she tried to make herself small beneath it to avoid getting wet. She wore a long, black, fleece-lined coat and a thick gray scarf. That morning before leaving her hotel she had tied her hair back with a band, but it had broken and now her wild mane fell thick and unruly around her face.

  Her heart ached as she peered through the gate at the cars that lined the narrow roads around the mausoleum, in the western corner of the cemetery. Meryam had worked with the Turkish authorities, connected them to Adam’s father so that Mr. Holzer could arrange for his remains to be returned home. If the aging Holzer had known of his son’s engagement, he never mentioned it.

  Mr. Holzer had invited her to be here, but she had told him that she was not well enough to travel. A lie, on so many levels. Instead of joining the small gathering during the funeral service, and now inside the mausoleum, where they would be inserting Adam’s cremated remains into a wall niche, she had flown to New York in secret and rented a car for the drive to Long Island.