Containment: The Death of Earth
Page 24
It moved steadily towards the fall of fire, as if pulled by an unseen cable. When the three pressed ears to the bottom they heard it sing.
EL ELOHIM, ELOHE, TZEBAOTH, ELION, ESCHERCHIC, ADONAI…
Louise gasped. Creatures, half crocodile above, half man below, stood on the simmering waves around them and hissed.
“Louisssse, how much pain will you ssssurvive? Will you give ussss the child all of ussss together have fathered upon you, in order to ssssatisfy our lusssst and hunger? Then, and only then, may you live, even if it feelssss like you are insssside the very gutssss of the beasssst. You take SSShimani’ssss plasssse becausssse you let her die alone!”
Snap! Snap! Their mouths stretched into grins so deep that they went backwards in time.
Aziza saw Ubani swimming in the water.
“Bibi, you would give up your place in Heaven for me? Just jump into the lake and let me come into the boat.”
Ubani’s hair was silken plumage floating with the bubbles. When she smiled her teeth were festering cysts, popping as larvae crawled out.
Aziza looked away.
Ubani called to her plaintively, “Where is Paradise, Bibi? I cannot find Paradise. I went searching for it last night after I heard what you did to my mother and my real grandmother!”
Asali groaned. The nuns, teachers, and classmates—butchered by the insurgents who invaded the convent school—cried around her as they swam in each ripple and surge.
“Why did you bury us, little round-head? Do you not want to be with us forever? Why did you pretend to be dead under our corpses, you zero-headed freak!”
They were much more mutilated than she was, until Asali felt ashamed that she’d lost only one arm and her leg had been cut.
“You are the prettiest one of us now, aren’t you, Asali?” They tormented, laughing.
The three huddled closer together, turning their faces away from the demons of the lake. They focused on the disk as it sang. They began repeating its words.
JAH, JEHOVAH, TETRAGRAMMATION, SADAY, YOD HE VAU HE.
The Devils growled and bayed as if a solemn black moon hung in the crimson sky. Then they sank beneath the surface.
The rocky bottoms of the mountains were littered with pieces of rafts and hollow dugouts of broken canoes. Any trees (besides the lone half-human tree) on the mountain beach had been cut down to build all kinds of small boats. Had any made it beneath the descending flames? Skeletons lay jumbled among the detritus of shipwrecked despair. Bobbing in the churning waters spreading out from the falls were blackened skulls and bones…those who had just actually made it to the fire, instead of merely crashing against the mountains.
What was so important on the other side? What had they died trying to reach?
More bones were wedged between boulders and on ragged precipices. The women could see that many had attempted to climb the perilous range to invisible summits.
To their shock were several hanged in chains from and others slung/eviscerated across the sharp, sanguine rainbows. Weren’t rainbows prismatic vapor, rarified and untouchable?
Tiresome hours passed for Aziza, Asali, and Louise. Then, a tall, rail-thin figure stood alone on a cliff, repeating a prayer over and over. The shrill voice echoed, crumbling brittle edges of the mountains. It hurt their ears until the three ladies were forced to cover them. Some notes were too high for them to hear.
“…and by the Name ADDNAI, by which God will judge all human flesh, and at Whose voice all men, both good and evil, will rise again; and by the Name ONEIPHETON, by which God will summon the dead; and by the Name ELOHIM, by which God will make all animals die in a single day; and by the Name ARIEL, by which God will destroy all buildings, so that there shall not be left one stone upon another, so that all people and nations will fly from the sea-shore, and will say unto them cover us and hide us; and by the Name EMANUEL, by which God will perform wonders, and the winged creatures and birds of the air shall contend with one another; and by the Name ANAEL, by which God will cast down the mountains and fill up the valleys, so that the surface of the earth shall be level in all parts; and by the Name ZEDEREZA, by which God will cause the Sun and Moon to be darkened, and the Stars of Heaven to fall; and by the Name SEPHERIEL, by which God will come to Universal Judgment…”
Another figure appeared, whispering frantically into its ear. The three were close enough to be sure there was a strange lack of expression on the inhuman features. It replied with a nasal, “Oh,” then abruptly left with the messenger.
Ouch!
Cinders had landed in Asali’s hair and on her whole arm. They had reached the outermost spray from the fire.
“It’s going to burn us!” yelped Aziza, slapping out a flame that caught in her dress.
Louise sprang to one end of the disk, rocking it back and forth. “Come! Help me turn it over!”
They stood on the edge but the boat wouldn’t flip. Finally, Aziza jumped into the water, pulling as the other two pushed. She screamed, the hot lake blistering her skin.
The disk upended at last, dropping Louise and Asali in. They swam under it, leaving tiny bits of flesh to float on the surface. There was an air pocket in the saucer’s slim curve. The water around the disk continued to simmer, but directly beneath the overturned boat it was cool. They paddled underneath, seeing the overhead flames through the saucers transparent material.
Suddenly they neither saw nor felt anything. They didn’t even see or feel one another—
Where H=Humanity, S=Saved by Science, D=Destroyed by Science, and O=Seasons of Disbelief, then H+S+D=O.
– The Enantiodromia (Revisionist)
The disk began to vibrate…a familiar rhythm. At first none of them recognized it because of their fear. This sound became the only part of their senses that existed.
Thu-thump thump. Thu-thump thump. Thu-thump thump…
Each blindly reached out as their legs stopped scissoring in the water. Thinking they drifted from the safety of the boat, they grabbed hold of the edge—as if it were the very brink of extinction. The cadence connected to each hand, throbbed down each arm, then pounded to syncopated pulses in the swollen bellies. Not from their breasts. The water vibrated outward in trills and ripples, similar to sonograms reflecting life patterns.
There was a strange counterpart, duplicated near the source of each tiny drum.
Thu (thu)-thump (thump) thump (thump).
Asali’s hand slipped. Her head went under the water. Louise, acting on instinct, barely registering her daughter, reached out and took the flailing hand, pulling up with every bit of her strength.
With a buzz, all senses returned. They saw a brilliant blue through the transparent disk. The solid rock of the mountain they had passed under, separating a sky of flame clouds and deadly rainbows, now gave way to pure lapis lazuli.
Aziza’s eyes sparkled as she murmured, “Twins. We all carry twins.”
Asali choked, spat out water, gazed at the other shore—they were only a few yards from it!
“Are you all right, kipenzi?” Louise asked.
The girl stopped sputtering. “Mama Mzazi, what is that giant?”
It climbed down from a gate almost as high as the mountain range. Almost 20 feet tall, it paced up and down the beach, staring stone-faced at them with eyes blinking cold platinum all around the head. The disk—resolutely—took them in this direction.
The giant swung a gleaming sword, covered in glyphs. Louise knew them to be similar to those on the boat. The weapon slashed the air with a whoosh! It held the weapon in one of its four arms, thin and hard as his two legs. Its stance reminded the ladies of a praying mantis.
“What are you doing with my shield?” it demanded, brandishing the sword as they crawled, exhausted, from the water.
“This is a shield? It was on the other side, the other beach,” Louise explained. “We did not steal it, we swear it!”
The creature picked up the disk, making a show of examining it for damage by these three suspe
ct humans. Then it carried the shield to rest against a high wall beyond which the women saw nothing. The wall appeared to extend from horizon to horizon. But these horizons were surreal, shimmering the way of mirages, curving up at the ends like smiles…as opposed to those they knew from Africa which curved down as on a round ball.
“No, you couldn’t have stolen it,” the giant admitted. “But you are not permitted here. Explain your presence or I must kill you.”
Louise extended her hands in supplication. “Please, it wasn’t our choice to come here. It was as if the boat, your shield, was waiting for us. The mango woman brought us to it.”
The giant’s eyes—all of them and un-countable—spun about the strange face. “What is a mango woman? There is no such species and no such hybrid in your world as I know it.”
The mango woman appeared as if summoned, her pieces hanging together for only a moment, as indefinable as she was.
Then she simply, silently
Fell
apart,
a grisly puzzlement on the sand.
At the sight of her destruction, Asali, Aziza, and Louise burst into tears.
“I take it that this…,” the giant drily remarked, gesturing at sand, “was the mango woman?”
“Stop it. You know perfectly well.”
This voice came from another peculiar being, only about 10 feet tall, its body a swirling spectacle of brilliance and shadows. “Why must you always display such arrogance? Or haven’t you heard that Pride goeth before a fall?”
The creature from the great wall shook its head. “Ahhh. Azzael. Are these human females your pets?”
Azzael shrugged. “You have observed everything. What else have you to do in such a lonely, boring post? You needn’t insult with questions for which only a single correct answer applies.”
“Ah, yes. The daughter of Exael and her son—your son. The Grigori bring down the house…again,” said the first, carving symbols into the sand with the tip of its sword.
Azzael dazzled with what might have been a smile. “Snooty cherub. I can’t really blame you. Such a dull job.”
Azzael knelt beside the mango woman, whispering. It took off what appeared to be a cloak—or might this have been a cluster of falling stars?—and covered the mango woman’s body.
The grating noise coming from the cherub was indeed a laugh, yet its face seemed set in cement. “Presto! Let’s give a round of applause to this lovely assistant. Surely you’ll tell me next this was the objective all along.”
If Light & Intention=Genesis, what does Judgement & Intention=?
If God doesn’t play dice—as Einstein postulated—does the beginning and end of each subsequent world indicate that Creation chases Its tail?
If the burning bush is ashes, does the Voice still exist?
– The Enantiodromia (Revisionist)
The cloak—or stars—melted like sugar upon the tongue. A young woman, pregnant with three heartbeats in her belly, stood up. She had brown hair, brown eyes, dusky brown skin.
“This is Laura,” Azzael said. “She carries my grandchildren, all three previously born dead. There are nine babies now to be born in that place, nine children to save a race. The number of completion.”
Louise, Asali, and Aziza hugged her.
“What do you mean ‘in that place’?” the giant cherub asked, its arms rubbing and clacking with visible agitation.
“Please, let us in,” Louise addressed the giant, completely believing the Voice still existed, that ‘No’ was neither an option nor a part of this equation.
The cherub folded two sets of complex arms. “Why should I?” Yet, the symbols it wrote in the sand lit up like a smile of love.
Aziza smiled, “We are Eves.”
The gate swung open.
“Just as the disappearance of the moon is never final because a new moon inevitably follows, so the disappearance of man is never final either, for after flood or whatever a new humanity is born.”
– The Myth of the Eternal Return
Mircea Eliade
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About the author
Charlee Jacob (born 1952) is an American author specializing in horror fiction, dark fantasy, and poetry. Her writing career began in 1981 with the publication of several poems under the name Charlee Carter Broach. She began writing as Charlee Jacob in 1986.
This native Texan is best known for her graphic explorations of the themes of human degradation, sexual extremism, and supernatural evil. Her first novel This Symbiotic Fascination (Necro Publications, 1997) was nominated for the International Horror Guild Award and the Bram Stoker Award. Her novel Dread in the Beast tied David Morrell’s Creepers for first place for the Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel of 2005, and her poetry collection Sineater won the Bram Stoker Award for Best Poetry Collection in 2005 as well.
Also Available from Necro Publications:
Dread in the Beast: The Novel
Dread in the Beast: The Short Story Collection
This Symbiotic Fascination
Soma
Still
Geek Poems
Guises
Containment
Up, Out of the Cities That Blow Hot and Cold
Vestal
Heresy
Skins of Youth
Season of the Witch