King of Shards

by Matthew Kressel

  “You’d turn into a plum yourself. Oh, Rana.” Marul stepped closer. She took the wax sculpture from Rana’s hands as her eyes glimmered in the candlelight. “I wrote you dozens of letters. Grug could have delivered them for me, if I had asked him to. But I burned them all.”

  “Why?”

  “I didn’t want you to be a part of this. And also so he couldn’t read them.”

  “So Grug wouldn’t read them?” Rana said.

  “No! Grug is just his slave. And my only friend. Here.” She sighed as if she had long ago given up all hope. “Rana, my Little Plum, if it’s really you, you must leave, now! If Ashmedai finds you here . . .”

  “She cannot leave by the upper door, mistress. Her particular key is one way only.”

  “Then which way can we leave?” Rana said.

  Marul shook her head. “Rana, you should never have come. How on Gehinnom did you find me?”

  “I told you. Adar led me here.”

  “The dog?”

  “And demon. He’s dying outside, on the mountain path. An eagle demon attacked us. It was terrifying.” She didn’t add that it also felt exhilarating.

  “You were attacked?”

  She nodded. “And there’s a pale man called Daniel who looks like no one I’ve ever seen and doesn’t speak a word of Wul. We came here to free you.”

  Marul glanced at the circles on the floor and seemed suddenly ashamed. “I wish you hadn’t come, Rana. You’ve no idea what you’ve gotten yourself into.”

  “Then tell me!”

  Marul shook her head. “Later. Grug, can enter and leave these caves at will.” She held up the emerald sphere. “Grug, can you bring her companions down here with this?”

  “Yes, but that will just entrap them here with you.”

  “If this dog has come to rescue me, if he has given Rana the key, then he must know how to escape. And if he’s dying, we have to save him! What other options do we have?”

  “Darkness is the abode of my kind,” Grug said, “not yours, mistress. I will fetch them, so you may find your way home.”

  “How I wish it to be true!” she said. “I’ve been here so long, it feels as if I’ve never been anywhere else.”

  “I’ll need the key.”

  Marul tossed Grug the sphere, and the Cursed Man retreated into the dark corridor.

  When he was gone, Rana said, “Grug is not your friend, Marul. You’ve been here so long you’ve befriended your jailer.”

  “Grug has sustained me all these years. And at times, he has been more than a friend to me. We are close. He’s been a comfort in my moments most dire.”

  Rana shivered. She didn’t want to envision what that truly entailed.

  “Come here, Rana!” Marul said. “Let me see the woman you’ve become.”

  “Marul.” Rana’s chest felt like it was splitting open. “I’ve missed you so much. I’m sorry. If I had known you were trapped, I would have come sooner. Everyone thought you were dead.”

  “I was dead.” She turned the wax plum over in her palm. “But no longer.” She came over to Rana and squeezed her tight. Rana squeezed too, afraid to let go.

  “Goddess, you need a bath,” Rana said.

  “I need much more than that.” She placed her hands on Rana’s shoulders, examining her body. “By Mollai, you’ve become such a beauty! The boys must be jumping at you.”

  Rana felt her cheeks flush. “Most are jumping away.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “It’s true. Many people think I’m evil, because of the things I can do.”

  Marul looked askance at her. “Your sparks of creativity, you mean?”

  “My sparks have become a raging fire, Marul.”

  Marul put her finger to her lip. “We soon may need your creativity again. Things might get . . . complicated.”

  “Marul, I’ve missed you so much.”

  “I’ve missed you too, Rana.”

  Rana took her hand. “Promise you won’t ever leave me again.”

  Marul sighed, and her eyes shone in the candlelight. “You better not turn out to be an apparition. I promise, child, I won’t ever leave you again.” Her voice echoed down the hollows of the empty caves, slowly fading.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Two weeks after Daniel’s parents had died in the fire, he visited what was left of his house. The air reeked of spent campfires, heavy with soot and carbon ash. And where his house had stood was now a dirty splotch of black. His bedroom, the living room, den, kitchen: all were destroyed. Though it was only September, an autumn chill nipped at the air, and the first leaves had begun to fall from the trees. He stepped onto the foundation, over burnt rafters, past charred dressers with clothing still inside. Isaac’s cage lay tipped, the cockatiel’s body missing, eaten or rendered to ash. He found his parents’ room. Only the singed metal frame of their bed remained.

  He sat on the frame, the metal weave hard on his backside. Memories came to him. Mom running her hands through his hair as she read him The Hungry Caterpillar. Dad beside him on their bed as they watched Star Trek reruns together. A thousand boring dinners, stupid fights about taking out the garbage or making his bed or leaving too much baby powder on the floor. He’d promised himself he wouldn’t cry. He’d cried too much over the past two weeks. But it was hard, because everything was gone.

  He sat on the singed bed frame in the cool air, letting the memories come, until the sky turned red. Lights went on in adjacent houses. He had peered into their homes from his bedroom countless times, wondering what lives they led. They would live on without him. People walked their dogs, drove by in cars. None noticed Danny sitting on the burnt frame. The first stars shone in the sky, and he felt as if he too had become ash.

  Gram had been barely conscious in the hospital, moaning and wailing, covered in bandages. The doctors said she would survive, but her life would be filled with disfigurement and chronic pain. He wasn’t sure yet what that would mean for her, but he knew her future would be worse than his. He’d had enough of self-pity for a lifetime.

  So he rose from that dead place and biked back to his great uncle’s house, and he asked his great uncle to take him to the hospital. And when he got to Gram’s intensive care room, he took her hand. She opened her eyes and gazed at him, her eyes were drugged and far away.

  “When you were a baby,” she whispered—he leaned in to hear—“we put you in a crib by the window on erev shabbes. The sun was going down. It turned the room a brilliant orange. It cast a shadow of your crib onto the wall. It looked like a menorah, Danny, with seven dancing flames.” She squeezed his hand. “From then on I knew what you were.”

  She closed her eyes, whimpered, and the nurses came to give her more morphine. Then she slept. She never mentioned this story again, and later he wasn’t sure if she remembered telling it.

  But he remembered it, now, as he sat beside dying Adar and the canyon belching ash. The memory burned like the air in his throat. Rebekah, Gram, his job—had he lost everything, again? And what had taken their place? Demon dogs. Giant talking birds. Invisible staircases on mountainsides. Was this really Gehenna? He had worked so hard to build himself a life, and it was gone, again. He felt sick.

  Gehenna was a place of suffering, the sins of the wicked burnt away like dross. So perhaps this was his cleansing. His parents were burned, and now it was his turn.

  Perhaps that’s how Gehenna works, he thought. it takes your pain and tosses it out onto the viewscreen of the world, projects it back to you.

  The canyon smoldered. He sipped from his canteen, a stitched leather bladder made from some poor animal’s hide. Daniel hadn’t eaten meat since the fire. Thereafter the smell of meat had turned his stomach. Adar whimpered beside him. Daniel put his hand on him, just like he had done to Gram, in the hospital. The camel groaned and spat at the black clouds. Suddenly, the ash caught the sun and made a glorious rainbow of light. It was beautiful, for an instant.

  Rana had been gone for twenty minut
es at least, and Adar was fading. If Rana didn’t come back, what then?

  “Ten more minutes,” he said, “then I’m going back to the city.” At least they had food and water and clean air. But he wasn’t sure he could leave Rana out here alone.

  He dribbled water into Adar’s mouth. He didn’t know if it would do any good, but he had to do something. The ash over the canyon grew suddenly thick, as if hundreds of new fires were being kindled below. He got to his feet as biblical-sized pillars of smoke and fire rose to swallow the sun. If this was his moment of reckoning, he would stand to greet it.

  Darkness closed over him as clouds darkened the sky. His heart pounded. The air grew so thick with smoke that the camel, only paces away, vanished. He covered his mouth with his shirt, but it didn’t help. He was suffocating.

  The horror of the night of the fire came burning back. He had to get out of here! He bent down to pick up Adar, when someone said, with a voice like sloshing mops and crinkling plastic, “Is the dog dead?”

  A hideous figure shambled out of the smoke toward him. It had sagging, dead skin, hollow eyes that glowed faintly with yellow light, missing teeth and thin white hair. It was less a man than a walking corpse.

  Daniel stood his ground. “Are you my torturing angel?”

  “Eh?” said the corpse. “Many have called me a torturer, but never an angel. You must be Daniel.”

  He felt chills at the mention of his name. “I am.” No point in hiding from his fate. He coughed, rubbed his burning eyes.

  “We must hurry,” the corpse said. “The smoke will only block the sun for a spell, and I cannot abide the sun for very long.”

  Only now did Daniel realize that the corpse was speaking English in a heavy accent he couldn’t place.

  “Who are you?”

  “I am Grug,” the creature said, “and you are not strong enough to lift the dog.” With a brush from his bony, long-fingered hand, he pushed Daniel aside. In one swift motion, he swung Adar’s limp body over his shoulder. Adar moaned, and green bile dribbled from his mouth.

  Grug put his ear to Adar’s side. “Not dead, but just only,” he said. “Come, Rana and Marul await below.”

  Marul, was that the woman Adar had said would get him home? “In the mountain?”

  “Yes. Now hurry, before the light returns and I become ash too.”

  Grug walked out past the cliff’s edge onto the invisible stair. He leaped fearlessly down the unseen steps with Adar slung over his shoulder. The blowing ash revealed the stair’s outlines, but only faintly.

  “What about the camel?” Daniel said.

  “Leave it.”

  “But it will die.”

  “It’s a better survivor than you are.”

  Daniel sighed. He shouted to the camel, hidden behind the veil of smoke. “I’ll come back for you! Hang tight!”

  The camel groaned.

  “Hurry!” Grug shouted.

  Daniel took a cautious step out into the abyss. The smoke was thinning and the orange disc of the sun peered through the haze. He took another step down, another. At any moment he feared he would fall.

  Bile and blood from Adar’s dripping mouth left a slippery trail on the stairs. Daniel descended slowly, avoiding it. Grug paused before the mountain wall and Daniel crept up beside him. He dared not look down.

  Grug revealed the green sphere with its raised Hebrew letters that Adar had vomited up. He pressed one side to the mountainside. The letter ayin on the sphere met a recessed ayin in the cliff wall. Ayin, the nothingness from which all things sprung, ayin, which preceded the Ein Soph, the unknowable endless. Gram’s Kabbalistic lore swirled in his mind.

  Grug’s hand vanished into the wall as if it weren’t there, then he stepped through. But before he had slipped all the way in he grabbed Daniel’s arm and yanked him through too.

  Daniel found himself inside a refreshingly cool, dim cave. The air was stale and dry, a welcome respite from the burning air outside. It smelled sad, somehow, like a lifetime of snuffed candles.

  “This way,” Grug said, and Daniel followed close.

  Flickering torches in high sconces lit the way as they walked deeper into the cave. They passed many rooms. He peered into them all but saw only dust and shadows. Whoever lived in this place didn’t tidy often. With chalk and stone someone had written Hebrew letters—and many foreign ones too—onto the walls. Some of their shapes he’d seen in Gram’s Kabbalistic books. The four-letter name of God, the Tetragrammaton, fanning out in a Fibonacci pyramid. Stars of David inside circles, inside complex zodiacs. Crudely drawn pictures of amulets and scrolls, with tidal waves of words crashing over them. Once, at one of the homeless shelters, a woman had written all over the walls in an all-night fugue. She had been taken to a hospital and put under heavy sedation. She said God had commanded her to write until she was dead.

  “Where am I?” he said. His voice echoed from unseen corridors.

  “You’re inside the DanBaer.”

  “The DanBaer?”

  “The start of the Tremble, what the humans call the Araatz.”

  “But you are not human, I gather?”

  “Once. Now, I’m Mikulal.”

  “Mikulal?”

  “A Cursed One.”

  “Cursed? With what?”

  “Your kind usually don’t want to know.”

  “What if I do?”

  Grug turned to face him. His eyes glowed with unholy light, two ghostly candles burning deep within his skull. Daniel swallowed. Perhaps he’d been too forward.

  “You come from America, yes?” Grug said.

  Daniel straightened. “Yes.”

  “The land of teeth whiteners and no-fat barbeque sauce and reality television.”

  “There’s quite a bit more to us than that.”

  Grug scowled. “You’re a sick people. You’re richer, healthier, and have more luxuries than trillions of beings across the Cosmos, and yet you find yourselves perennially unhappy. To salve this unhappiness, you acquire endless material possessions and numb your minds with tawdry entertainments. But in the end they only echo back to you how empty your existence is. The truth is, though you make appearances to the contrary, your sole purpose is tending and caring for yourselves.”

  “You sound like my grandmother.”

  “She must be wise.”

  “Wiser than I realized. Are we in Gehenna?”

  “Gehinnom,” Grug corrected. He continued walking.

  “Am I dead?”

  “Do you feel dead? Death visits Gehinnom like any other world “

  “Is this where my sins are burned away?”

  Grug harrumphed. “If only we could burn our sins so easily away.”

  They entered a large, round chamber. Hundreds of candles filled the room with bright golden light. Rana and a decrepit, middle-aged woman sat on a stone bench in fevered conversation. They didn’t notice that Daniel and Grug had entered.

  Was this the woman who Adar had promised would help him get home? Or was this another of Gehinnom’s punishments? Either way, the woman’s natty hair, soiled clothes, and crooked posture didn’t inspire confidence. Grug coughed, a disgusting, broken sound, and the women stopped talking and turned their gaze to him. Their eyes flickered in the candlelight; the woman’s eyes were a startling green, bright as a tropical leaf.

  Grug rested Adar on the ground in the center of the room, and the animal sighed. Rana stood, and she and the woman spoke heatedly in their lilting language. The conversation grew so intense that at times it seemed as if they were arguing.

  Adar lay on a pattern of circles and lines drawn on the floor. Ten circles, connected by twenty-two lines, each line labeled with a single Hebrew letter. Inside the circles were Hebrew words. It was a familiar diagram. “The Sephirot,” he said.

  The woman stopped in mid-sentence and said, “Besu bri-ti! Mesu om-pay ti?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t understand.”

  “She wants you to repeat what
you just said,” Grug said.

  Finally! he thought. An interpreter. He’d get some much-needed answers. “I said those are the sephirot.”

  She responded, and Grug translated. “Mistress wants to know how you know this?”

  Mistress? he thought. “It’s the Tree of Life,” he said, “the ten divine emanations, the aspects of God from which all things emerge. My grandmother has a painting of them hanging on the wall right next to a Chagall and a photo of my parents.” He’d seen the figure many times in Gram’s Kabbalistic books, which she had scattered all over the house and consulted whenever trouble arose in her life, which seemed pretty much every day.

  Grug translated. The woman and Rana conversed heatedly.

  Adar lay on the floor, his breath fading.

  “Can this wait?” Daniel said. “The dog is dying. We have to help him.”

  “Mistress would like to know how you have such knowledge of the sephirot,” Grug said. “I told her you’re from the Upper World, where such knowledge is easily accessible.”

  “The Upper World?”

  “Your reality sphere. Your universe. Earth moves through the Upper World like a bubble rising in molasses.” Grug looked at the woman as she spoke slowly, solemnly. Daniel wasn’t sure, but Grug looked as if he might have been digusted with what she was suggesting.

  The woman looked Daniel up and down, bit her lip, and nodded.

  Grug sighed, a sound like cities crumbling into the sea. “I need to ask you some questions,” Grug said. “Are you circumcised?”

  Daniel coughed. “Pardon?”

  “In the ritual performed by the Abrahamic faiths, the prepuces of male infants’ penises are removed on the eighth day to symbolize the eternal covenant between man and the unitary God.”

  “I know what circumcision is. How is this relevant?”

  “Are you a Bar Mitzvah? Were you Baptized? Did you ever engage in the Fast of Ramadan or commit large portions of the Qu’ran to memory? Did you participate in the Ceremony of the Sacred Thread? Wash the feet of a Shiavist guru? Light candles for Diwali? Did you ever meditate on the nature of emptiness for more than forty-five consecutive days? Have you ever had an experience of satori?”