Z looked toward the sidewalk, where Jeff still lay—unconscious or dead, it was impossible to tell which—underneath a splintered sheet of plywood.
“Gareth,” she pleaded. “You’re a doctor. You’ve got to help him.”
He turned and stared at her as if he didn’t understand what she’d said.
“Look, I’ll go with you. If he’s alive, he needs help.”
Gareth just pointed, and Z felt her heart give a convulsive gallop.
Converging on the glowing figure standing in triumph over the burning wreckage of Ben Ingersoll’s neighborhood were two figures, incongruous and tiny, moving toward it. One was a naked man, covered from head to toe with scratches and cuts, his dark hair plastered to his scalp with blood. Jackson Royce. His bearing was erect, and his face had a calm that was totally unlike his usual taut guardedness. He looked up at the apelike visage of the burning giant. There was no fear in his face. He kept walking, slowly, steadily, his bare feet scorching on the liquid asphalt of the road.
The other was a slender blond boy, running full tilt down the sidewalk.
“Ben!” Z shouted. “Ben, stop!”
His voice came, high and pure, ringing clear as a struck bell over the crackle of flames on the giant’s sword. “It’s Surt! He’s looking for a sacrifice. He wants one of us!”
The monster swiveled its head toward him, shifting its burning sword in its hand, looking at Ben with glowing eyes. It gave a snort, and took one step forward.
No. Not Ben. No more death. Z took a deep breath to call out to him to stop, but the sulfurous fumes rippling from Surt’s body filled her lungs, and she gagged and coughed.
Surt looked from Ben to the prone, motionless figure of Jeff, then to Jackson Royce. Jackson still marched toward the monster, and didn’t slow until he was right before it, facing the blistering fire without flinching.
“It’s me you want. Leave the boy.”
Surt set a foot down, making the ground shake. Fire squirted out from beneath its bare soles.
“You need a sacrifice.” Jackson’s voice rose in a tone of command. “It’s me. It’s always been me. I wish I had known it sooner.”
He held his arms upward, feet planted apart, squinting against the heat that scorched his face and chest.
Surt gave another glance toward Ben and Jeff, as if considering, and then back toward Jackson.
“You have no choice,” Jackson shouted. “My whole life I have called you up. I gave up everything for this moment. I will not follow you. Let Frey’s fate be mine. Take what is offered to you, then leave them, and go.”
It reached down one hand, and wrapped it around Jackson’s naked body. Immediately he was enveloped in flame. Z screamed and brought one hand to her mouth, but Jackson didn’t utter a sound as he died.
Surt looked around, its eyes surveying the destruction it had wrought, and then took a step back, then another. It put one foot into the hole in the street from which it had come. There was a downward swirl of smoke and fire, sucked into the hole. A sliding rush of broken stone and gravel and dirt followed it.
Afterwards, there was nothing but the sound of the burning wreckage of the Acostas’ house, and Lissa sobbing softly behind her.
11
THEY CROWDED THROUGH the gate, each eager to see what lay outside the Forest, and each in his own way fearful. Ahead of them lay a verdant land, with pasturage and fields of grain and herds of cattle lowing on the hillsides. In the distance, one of them glimpsed a high hill, and a dark opening, and knew it for what it was.
The cave of the Sibyl that they had left an age ago, when their journey began.
Their hearts fell, as one after another realized that they had toiled through the Forest, year after year, some of them falling by the way, only to come back to where they had begun.
As they stood in amazement, a shepherd boy came down the path, whistling a tune, and he looked at the strangers who had stepped through the gate with an expression of fear and wonder.
Who are you? he asked. And where have you come from?
And one of them said, We are travelers who left this place after being commanded by the Sibyl to seek our fortune in the Forest. What of the ones we left behind? What of our homes and our families?
The boy laughed. A Sibyl? That is a tale to frighten children with. The cave yonder has no one living in it. Most think there never has been. The tale of the Sibyl is ages old, as is the tale of the ones who vanished into the Forest, never to return. It happened, if it happened at all, in my great-grandfather’s great-grandfather’s time. But whoever you really are, go down into the town, and you will be made welcome.
Town? said another. There is no town in this valley. Only our scattered dwellings and smallholdings.
But the boy gave her a strange look, and said, The mayor and his men will be surprised to hear that. There has been a town standing here for nigh on five hundred years. And his voice took on a calming tone, as if he were speaking to children younger than he himself was. But perhaps you have forgotten. There is no shame in that. The world changes, and things are forgotten, and to the old the ancient tales begin to seem as real as what is before their eyes.
—
“GARETH.” Z HELD herself together with an effort. If she fell apart now, she’d go into complete hysterical collapse. “Help Jeff.”
Gareth looked at the motionless figure, lying face down under a broken piece of wreckage. “I think he’s—” He swallowed, nodded, and walked toward Jeff. He knelt by the fallen man’s side and pulled the chunks of plywood off of his body. He slipped his arm under Jeff’s chest and turned him, gently, but there was something in the way his head lolled back that told Z their friend was dead.
The tears came now whether she willed them or no. First Gary, then Jackson, and now Jeff. Would this changed world only stop when all of them were dead or transformed, when the human race was entirely destroyed, never to return?
Ben walked up to the young doctor, who stared down into Jeff’s still face with a frowning, perplexed expression, as if he weren’t sure of what he was supposed to do, or even what he was looking at. Ben’s entire body trembled.
“Gareth.”
The man startled, and his head turned toward Ben, eyes wide.
“We never drew a card for you. But I know what yours is.”
“No.”
“It’s not your choice.” He tried to catch Gareth’s gaze, but the doctor’s eyes flitted from side to side, as if looking for a means of escape. “That’s why you always seemed strange. You knew, and you were resisting it. The rest of us still didn’t understand, but you knew.”
And finally Gareth locked on Ben, his eyes wide and staring like a rabbit facing the hounds, knowing whichever way it bolts will be its last run. “This isn’t the way things are supposed to be.”
“I didn’t choose this, either. None of us did. It wasn’t my choice to be the one who understands things without knowing why. The Fool. We didn’t choose any of this. But now that you know, you have to do it.”
He shook his head with a quick, terrified motion. “I can’t.”
“You have to.”
“It’s too much.”
“You knew. You knew from the start. You never were in any real danger, because you knew what you’d become. You were just afraid of it.” Ben turned his hands toward Gareth, palms outward. “But it’s okay. We’re all scared.”
“How do you know all of this?” Gareth seemed to be near tears.
“We’ve all changed. We’ve somehow slipped into a myth, like the ones in my book. Where anything could happen and nothing is what it looks like. Lissa said it—the rules have all been rewritten. Now we need to figure out what the new rules are. Like any story, you have to figure out how the world works before anything makes sense.”
“This will never make sense.”
“Not if you hang on to what you had. It won’t be easy.”
Z stared at the boy. He seemed to have grown, with knowledge a
nd wisdom flowing from him like clear water. What was he now? Certainly not a thirteen-year-old science nerd any more. In an earlier age, he would have been revered as a god.
But then the knowledge rushed through her like a wave curling over her head, almost knocking her to the ground with the realization. They all were. Ben was right about that, too. None of them were what they had been. But he’d been wrong about Gareth, and he knew that now. Gareth was not a monster—unless they all were.
Ben gripped Gareth’s shoulder. “You can’t make things different than they are. But you can do what you were meant to do. You can start with this. You were given a gift, even if you never asked for it. Now you’re the one who decides whether or not to use it.” He gave the doctor’s shoulder a squeeze. “Please. We need Jeff. He’s our high priest. Our connection to God. You know that.”
Gareth nodded and swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing convulsively. Ben backed away and stood, tense as a coiled spring, waiting to see what the doctor would do. Gareth looked back down at Jeff and placed one hand in the center of his chest. Almost too quick to register, Z saw another figure standing behind Gareth, an armored figure whose open visor showed a white skeleton’s head, holding a sickle in one hand and a flag with a white rose in the other.
The giver of life and death and the inevitability of change.
Jeff’s chest heaved, and he took a coughing, gagging breath. Gareth, spent, collapsed over him. Lissa cried out in shock.
Z could only stare.
Ben turned away, walked up to her, and in his eyes she saw the blissful face of The Fool, dancing his way off a cliff as his dog gamboled at his feet. But Ben was still a boy, too, exhausted, scared, near physical collapse. Each of them had a dual nature, human and archetype.
He put his arms around Z, and she pulled him into a hug. For now, The Fool had done its work. He was once again a boy.
“How did you know about Gareth?”
He shook his head, and could only answer with sobs.
“What other stories have we told that will come to life?” Margo asked from behind her. “We humans did all of this, you know. We created these stories, all of them—the Rapture, the monsters, the prophecies, the religions and myths and folk tales. We have no one else to blame if we’ve given them enough power by our belief that they’ve become real.”
Ben turned a tear-streaked face toward her. “It’s not over. We’ve seen only a little of it.”
Z sighed. “We’ve been telling stories for a long, long time. It’s what we do. If he’s right—”
“He is,” Lissa said.
Z turned toward her in surprise. “You agree with Ben?”
She gave her a crooked smile. “Look, I’m not stubborn enough not to admit it when I’m beaten. What I saw today….” She gestured around her. “If I come up with a more plausible explanation, I’ll let you know. But I saw Margo close the mouth of Charybdis, and Gareth bring a dead man back to life. Whatever else might be true here, I think my career as a physicist is over.” Her smile became a grin. “I suppose that means my next job is to become The Magician. That’s the card you drew for me, wasn’t it? If that’s what I am, I shouldn’t be afraid of it. Because if there are more monsters out there, we damn well had better be ready for them.”
“There are always more monsters,” Ben said. “But in the myths, the bad guys never won. Even after Ragnarok, the Earth was created again. Surt and Midgard’s Serpent and all, they didn’t triumph forever.”
“So we learn the new rules,” Z said. “Do they become the new religion? Are we just going to replace the old horrible stories with new horrible stories of our own?”
“I think that’s our choice, isn’t it?” Margo shook her head in wonder. “If you’re right about what’s going on here, it’s up to us to steer the story the way we want it to go. To tell horrible stories or beautiful ones. It’s always been our choice, we just never knew it until now.”
“Yes.” Ben regarded her solemnly. “And the first line of the new story is, never forget that the monsters, whatever they are, can be defeated.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
GORDON BONNET HAS been writing fiction for decades. Encouraged when his story Crazy Bird Bends His Beak won critical acclaim in Mrs. Moore’s 1st grade class at Central Elementary School in St. Albans, West Virginia, he embarked on a long love affair with the written word.
His interest in the paranormal goes back almost that far, although it has always been tempered by Gordon’s scientific training. This has led to a strange duality; his work as a skeptic and debunker on the popular blog Skeptophilia, while simultaneously writing paranormal and speculative novels, novellas, and short stories. He blogs daily, but is never without a piece of fiction in progress—driven to continue, as he puts it, “because I want to find out how the story ends.”
Stay up to date with Gordon and all his writing and appearances on Facebook, Twitter, or at www.gordonbonnet.com. You’ll also find more great fiction on his writing blog, Tales of Whoa.
SOME THINGS HAVE TO BE LIVED… NOT TOLD
GORDON BONNET returns with his most compelling novel yet, SEPHIROT, a journey through the ten worlds of the Jewish path to enlightenment, each offering its own lure, its own lesson.
Which will you choose?
“Bonnet is hands down one of the most talented emerging writers of any genre today.”
DUSTY RICHARDS
Author of THE MUSTANGER AND THE LADY
SEPHIROT
By Gordon Bonnet
ONE DAY PASSED, and then another. A week, then two, then time fogged out, lost its meaning except for night following day. Diana took Duncan hunting, and after a few fumbling attempts, he took down a young stag with his arrow. The skinning and gutting left him feeling a little sick, but it didn’t stop him from enjoying the venison that evening.
His jaw at first darkened with stubble, and then one day he felt the unfamiliar sensation of drawing his hand across a prickly beard. The soles of his feet, tender from wearing shoes day in and day out, toughened until he could run beside her through the woods and not feel every twig on the path. The sun burnished him bronze from head to toe, and he found that for the first time in his life, he was able to forget about whether he was clothed or not. Back home, he often went shirtless when the weather was warm, but it was always with a measure of self-consciousness. After a few days had passed here, he found himself wearing nothing and not thinking about it at all.
His desire for her, though, didn’t wane. It was rekindled morning and evening, and was morning and evening satisfied. Still, there was an uncomfortable knowledge that she had him in tow. They were sharing the hunt, and he was no longer weak and in need of care, but there was never any doubt who was in control.
One evening, after the meal and lovemaking were both done, and the air cooled around them into a twilit calm, his mind once again fluttered with unease. He still knew next to nothing about her. Who she was, why she was here, why she had rescued him, why she took him on as a companion and a lover. And every time his questions approached the topic, she deflected them, or enticed him into activities that he was honestly all too easy to distract into.
“How long can we stay here?” he said, as he lay stretched at length on the grass, his head in her lap.
She gestured around her. “Do you see any here demanding that we leave?”
“No. But I think I should be trying to get back home.”
“I don’t see why. If you like it here, stay.”
“I do like it here.”
She shrugged. “Well, then.”
“It’s not my home, though.”
“No. But I cannot see how that matters.” She ran her fingers through his hair. “Is it so important to return home?”
“I don’t know how to get home in any case. I want to, but I don’t know how.”
“That is a problem.”
“So you don’t know, either.”
“No.” She shrugged. “I know the world around u
s, but how to get back to your own world, I could not say.”
“So you really don’t know about Malkuth? The place where I was, the world that had the Sphinx and the temple and the Caretakers?”
“I know only what you have told me about it. And from what you have told me, I do not understand why you would want to go back there.”
“I don’t. But if I understood how I jumped from there to here, I might know how to jump from here back to my home.”
“Only if the paths are the same. There is no certainty that is true.”
“No. So, like I said, what now? We can stay here in this grove, which is pleasant enough, but I feel restless. I feel like I should be doing something more than swimming and hunting and sleeping and having sex.”
“Why?” One dark eyebrow rose slightly, and her eyes gleamed with a curious intelligence.
He rubbed his hand across his face. “I don’t know. If you’d asked me two weeks ago what I wanted out of life, I’d have said that the things I just mentioned are all I need. I know you said explanations aren’t important, but I think I have to figure out why I’ve been dumped into what looks very much like a dream, but apparently is not. I can’t simply accept this.”
She smiled, and slipped out from beneath him.
He raised himself on his elbows, and she stood up, straightening her tunic and brushing off a stray piece of grass.
“Suit yourself,” she said.
“Wait a moment,” he said, and she paused, and looked down at him with a questioning expression. “Aren’t you a little curious about how I got here, and why? I fall out of the sky into the lake, and you rescue me, and are willing to feed me and take care of me and make love to me, and that’s all? No questions?”
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