by Mark Jeffrey
“Sebastian,” Elspeth said darkly, “You can’t do this to me. You can’t keep me here.”
Sebastian seemed genuinely surprised by this. “We just offered you eternal life. Isn’t that enough?”
But abruptly, Elspeth changed the subject. “The Vizier knows about this place,” she said flatly. “Doesn’t he?”
That caught Sebastian off guard. Fire flared in her eyes. She shouted, “That old leper doesn’t know anything!”
“Then why do you keep him in a fancy cell? Why does he get all the creature comforts?” Sebastian looked trapped. “He’s got something on you. Doesn’t he?”
Sebastian drew a knife. “Look. Elspeth. You’re staying. Don’t think for a minute that we’ve told you everything yet.”
Other members of the Order of the Black Dove also drew knives.
“You see Elspeth … you really have no choice.”
But then, to everyone’s surprise, a ruckus commenced outside. They could hear scuffles, yelling. Then, the roar of a crowd. A man burst into the room, panting.
“What?” Sebastian demanded. “What is that?”
“The prisoners … they’re here.”
“What? Where?”
“In the Sanctuary! They’re here here!”
Sebastian went sheet-white. “How many?”
The man’s face was ashen. “All of them.”
UNBEKNOWNST TO Elspeth, when she had descended into the Sanctuary, a small camera had activated inside of her brooch pin with the hieroglyph of the bee. And with that activation, the nighttime screens, which were usually filled with film after banal film — suddenly lit up with something new. The entire prison watched this happen with mild surprise.
But this surprise quickly turned to shock, and then rage as they watched Elspeth enter the Sanctuary.
They saw what she saw. They heard what she heard.
The Vizier laughed in his cell, watching his machinations come to fruition.
It wasn’t long until a prison riot and then a complete revolt was in full swing. The guards were overpowered. And then an angry crowd bearing torches and curses descended into the tunnels. The Vizier led them, carried on a pallet by very pissed off members of the Latin Kings.
When they poured into the Sanctuary, they were an angry mob — and they were a thousand strong.
Elspeth was surprised when TSA Agent Danny Trenton was the first to burst into the Sebastian’s room. “Ma’am! Put the knife down! Now!” Trenton shouted at Sebastian. When she didn’t obey, he lunged at her. With a snarl, Sebastian stuck her knife neatly in his heart.
But it was only moments before more prisoners poured into the room. A few scuffles later, and Sebastian and her men were disarmed.
The Vizier arrived next, carried in like a king. He reeked of the rancor of leprosy.
“Ah. So this was your doing,” Sebastian snarled.
The Vizier laughed. “My doing? It was your own doing, ultimately, helped only slightly by hand. As you know is my way: I do not relish accruing bad karma: such a thing crosses my purpose. As such, Elspeth wears one of your very own infernal spying devices. I merely pinned it to her.”
“Every word I told you was a lie,” Sebastian snapped to Elspeth. “All that about this being a time loop — a lie! This man here,” — she pointed at the body of Danny Trenton — “died for nothing. And unlike Milton, he will not come back to life. Neither will the countless others dead outside. Immortality is only reserved for us, the Order of the Black Dove! You still do not know the true secret, Elspeth. Don’t let this man — if you can still call him a man anymore, given all that has fallen off him — don’t believe him. Don’t trust him.”
“Now that is a lie,” the Vizier boomed.
“See for yourself,” Sebastian said. “Behold your dead. Now. Tell me. Are any of them returning to life?”
The question caught Elspeth off guard. She looked at Danny’s slack expression of blood and drool, the lifeless jelly of his eyes. She ran to the door: the same was true outside. The dead were still dead: the wraiths or willow-o-the-wisps had not arrived to work their magic.
And that should not be so: in 2002, these people had all been alive. If Sebastian’s story of a time loop had been true, they should all be returning to life by now. So she must have been lying. Or telling half-truths, she corrected herself. That must be it. Some of her story was true … but Elspeth was still missing some key component.
Impossible.
How she hated that word now.
“Okay,” Elspeth said. “Okay. We’re going up the elevator. We’re getting out of here. Now.” Sebastian laughed. “And you!” Elspeth grabbed her by the back of her neck. “You’re going to lower that firewall, that lava-thing.”
Sebastian shook her head. “No. No, I’m not.”
Elspeth looked up at David. “I don’t know how it works,” he said helplessly. “Nobody does, except for her. And she won’t tell you.”
The Vizier nodded in agreement. “It is sooth: this little scorpion will keep her teeth closed. We’ve had many a chat, she and I. Haven’t we?”
“Go to hell,” Sebastian sneered.
The Vizier smiled his crooked smile. “You first.” Then he turned his splattered gaze to Elspeth. “I say to you, Elspeth Lune … the little girl who is not a little girl, every word she has told you is true. That wall of fire there cannot harm you. You may pass safely through.”
“You’ll burn! You’ll die, with your scalding skin dripped from your cooked bones!” Sebastian howled.
“So there it is,” the Vizier said. “You either believe her, or you believe me. Time to answer the question, Elspeth. The one I keep asking. Are you serious? Because the one way back to your beloved is through that wall of flame.”
Serious. Am I serious? You bet your goddamn turban I’m serious.
Without a word, Elspeth left the room and walked towards the shimmering wall of lava.
TEN: THIRD ITERATION
AN EARTHQUAKE hit, rattling the Sanctuary as Elspeth Lune walked.
Of course, that only meant another reset in the time loop, if Sebastian had told the truth. And that also meant that somewhere above, in the Glass Prison, James Card’s record no longer had a scratch … and Milton had just come back to life. God, what was that like? Dying and living and dying and living again …
Should she trust the Vizier? Or Sebastian? Hell. Both seemed like bad choices.
As she approached, a blast of heat seared her vision and interrupted her reverie. Before her stood an undulating curtain of lava, a very literal wall of fire. Shimmering orange and black, it did a slow belly dance, pounding out heat and distortion.
She heard Cone laugh. And David — David, bless his stupid, little lovesick heart — David shouted a warning. But she had had enough of both of them. They were small, tiny, insignificant compared to what she intended to do.
For you, Oscar, my love. This is my one chance to get out of here, to find you.
Was she serious? By hell, yes!
She inhaled deeply and held her breath — and chose.
She committed herself to the lava, immolating her flesh and soul. The pain of flame scalded her. Her nerves danced with the feeling of being singed, of being consumed.
Her entire soul cracked in half. Oh God. This is it. The shock of the pain—!
Somewhere, somehow, she heard the Vizier laughing behind everything.
That bastard! He’d lied to her. She was not proof against fire, not not not. She was dying right now, being consumed alive by flame.
But somehow, she pushed through the lava anyway, resisting the urge to open her mouth and inhale. It was surprising that she was able to keep it shut: the panic that flooded through her should have been enough to overpower any conscious thought. And the pain—! It was beyond anything. She could hardly believe a person could remain conscious while swamped with sensation like that …
And then, suddenly, she popped free with a sound like suction letting go of her.
Goddamn!
Blessed air!
She gulped it down.
By degrees, she realized she was not naked. She was surprised. She had expected to be. She had figured her clothes would have been consumed by the lava.
Small little tongues of flame danced around her — they had been there even while she had been in the lava wall, fire within fire, indistinguishable from each other.
So. The Vizier had been right: Sebastian’s tale had been truth. Like her own body, these clothes were likewise unburned in 2002, and so could not be destroyed. In a contest of wills between the laws of science and the laws of fate, the laws of fate won every time.
Unseen by Elspeth, far below in the Sanctuary, tongues of flame were popping into existence, healing the wounded and restoring the dead to life. Fate had to intervene and course-correct. It had just taken a little time: perhaps with the sheer volume of course-correction under way, the fire-beasts had simply been overwhelmed.
And before her was the elevator, the one that went up, up, up. The one that went to the Panopticon — and then to the top of the Prison, through the North Pole and to escape from the Prison of Glass.
It occurred to her just then that this elevator had been the very one she had arrived on.
She tried to picture it: her tall, lanky, unmanageable body, unconscious, shoved into this very elevator by men carrying her. It was kind of hilarious when she pictured it. Men always found it emasculating when they found a woman difficult to move.
She got in. She pressed ROOF and the doors started closing. But the curtain of lava suddenly vanished — and a furious Sebastian Cone rushed through where it had been. David chased, trying to restrain her without much luck. And somewhere behind them both, she saw the mob, led by the Vizier.
But they were all too late. The doors sealed shut. Elspeth Lune ascended.
The levels flashed by with dizzying speed. Elspeth sped through the Panopticon — and kept ascending.
The elevator kept going, going, going. It reached the top, and halted with an unceremonious ding.
She stepped out into a small, hexagonal room at the North Pole.
A stone door was above her. A stone door, with a single Honeybee hieroglyph. She almost laughed aloud. She pushed the bee and the door popped open. She climbed up and through.
She was now standing on top of a giant stone ball. It was a stone-scape of granite and moss. It was massive, literally a small moon housed in a slightly bigger underground cavern.
And the whole thing was ridged, as if it were a giant beehive.
The small moon was rotating, rotating ever so slowly. Elspeth guessed this motion was like the ticking of a clock — one that eventually ended in a minor earthquake — and snapped time back one week on 2002. How the Mayans could have achieved such a thing was beyond her. For several long moments, she could just stare.
But now the elevator was arriving again. Geez, that was fast. Yet Elspeth felt safe: she knew that Sebastian Cone could not leave the sanctuary of the Glass Prison — else, she would die. Nothing could protect her from that.
The doors slid apart. Sebastian Cone burst forth, brandishing a gun, drool dripping from the sides of her mouth.
Elspeth almost laughed. “Soap and shoe polish!” she shouted, calling her bluff. David was close behind Sebastian. But disturbingly, he shook his head, No. It all seemed to go to slow motion now.
Sebastian raised her supposedly fake gun — and fired.
Elspeth had been waving her hand. The bullet clipped her pinkie at the base, blowing it clean off. Her digit became a mist of red. There was nothing left to re-attach.
Elspeth screamed.
That gun had been real …?
Of course it had been. After all, something needed to remove her finger again. Outside the Glass Prison, she was no longer in 2002. She was in the present — where she did not have a pinkie. The universe had to re-create her physical condition in the present somehow.
David tackled Sebastian. Sebastian was small, but vicious, making it an even struggle. The elevator descended again. Elspeth gripped her severed finger stump. Blood agony pulsed from it. Warm red spouted between her other fingers. She rolled away from the opening of the door. She knew that Sebastian could not come through the door any more than a vampire could step into daylight. But she also knew Sebastian would do more damage if she could — even kill her.
And out here, it was the present — which meant anything could happen to her now. A shot to her heart would kill her now.
The elevator was back. Out poured James Card and several Latin Kings carrying the Vizier. The Kings joined David in subduing Sebastian: one of them plunged a knife into her belly, and then threw her lifeless heap through a window, sending her falling into the hollow moon. The rest helped the Vizier and Card up through the doorway and out of the Prison of Glass.
Elspeth knew that none of this would be fatal to Sebastian: she’d come back to life within moments.
As soon as the Vizier tasted free air, the fire beasts arrived and restored him to his ‘present’. They purged him, burning the leprosy clean from his body. He laughed uproariously — all while having every appearance of being eaten alive by fire.
As soon as he was whole, he began barking orders to the Latin Kings. They formed a protective ring around Elspeth.
“Wait … no. I never—” she protested.
“The Vizier asked us to, Doctor Lune.”
“You’re safe now, Doctor Lune.”
“We have you to thank, Doctor Lune.”
“No choice, Doctor Lune. You’re stuck with us.”
Meanwhile, David recovered. “Elspeth! You can’t leave!” David cried out. He may as well have said, You can’t leave me!
“I’m sorry David. I have to go find my husband.”
“But Vicky! What you did to Vicky …”
“Was horrible. And I’m paying for it, believe me.”
“But … but I love you!”
Elspeth shook her head. “You’re a good man David. But I don’t love you. Goodbye, David.”
The Vizier laughed.
Then the hatch to the Glass Prison snapped shut, sealed, abruptly cutting off David’s Noooo! Elspeth jumped back in surprise. “Who did that?” she said. The Vizier chuckled but offered no explanation. Elspeth jumped forward and tried to open it again, but it was sealed as tightly as a stone sarcophagus. “Come on!” she howled. “Help me!”
But no one did. The Vizier shook his head. “That is the way of the Glass Prison. It has a mind of its own which none may gainsay. Those others, it was not … auspicious … for them to escape.”
Elspeth jabbed a finger into the Vizier’s chest. “Auspicious my ass! This escape is for everybody, not just us. Open that door back up!”
The Vizier shrugged. “I am powerless where this door is concerned.”
Elspeth wanted to believe that this was just another trick on the Vizier’s part, but her instinct said he was speaking the truth.
So the Glass Prison remained shut. Its inhabitants, once again, fulfilled a cyclical, yet immortal, existence inside a terrarium of time. By degrees, Elspeth looked out now across the slick and strange granite-and-moss surface of the slowly-spinning stone Mayan moon.
“Our way lies there,” the Vizier said. “Follow me.”
The ceiling was lower in some areas than others. At one point, it was not even three feet off the ground. Here Elspeth found a hexagon-shaped door — and pushed. It opened. She grabbed the edges — and with the help of the Latin Kings — scrambled up inside.
Her companions followed.
It was a largish Hexagonal room, seemingly made of wood like cedar. There was food and water aplenty here, as well as as a makeshift bathroom with a working shower. How this could be so, none of them knew. But they did not question it. They all took turns taking advantage of the amenities.
Elspeth’s severed pinky had already healed at a massively accelerated rate. And already, she felt
no pain. A fresh layer of pink skin had grown over the bloodied finger-stump. She nodded in approval, realizing that in the present the wound was not new: it would ‘catch up’ quickly to a fully healed state, complete with scar tissue.
ELEVEN: ON THE ROAD
ELSPETH LUNE watched the Vizier with awe. Gone was his crippling leprosy. He must have had it back in 2002, and somehow been cured of it later on, she reasoned. Now healthy and hale, the Vizier cut a figure of health and strength. There was a casual robust power in his limbs, and a dazzling smile filled with shiny white teeth in his mouth. “On the Road again!” the Vizier cawed over and over. He seemed like an addict, reunited with the narcotic of his heart at last.
“You have your iPhone still?” Elspeth asked James Card.
“Yeah,” James replied, holding it up forlornly. “But it’s out of juice.”
“Good.”
“Good?”
“Yeah. There was a map on my wall — and I’m pretty sure it was a map of this hexagon-maze we’re in now. I took a bunch of pictures of it with your phone.” When he scowled, she added: “All we have to do is find a way to juice up your phone and we have a map, is what I’m saying.”
The Hexagon they were in had three adjoining doors, none of which would open. So the company had decided to rest on the floor for the night — and try again in the morning.
IT WAS the tickle of the gaze of another on the face that woke Elspeth more than anything.
She saw Titus staring down at her. “Hey,” Titus said. He looked over his shoulder nervously. Then he said: “I don’t have a lot of time. Questions. Let’s get some answered right now. Okay?”
Elspeth sat up. “Yeah,” she replied. “That would be good. Why don’t you start with the prison? What was the goddamn point of all that?”
Titus smiled. “The purpose of the Glass Prison is to escape. To see who will become seduced by its false immortality — and who will break free? Only a special person navigates it, completes it, frees themselves from it. Someone like you.
