The SONG of SHIVA

by Michael Caulfield

  “If it’s any consolation,” Nora attempted in honesty, “there have been a few things I can’t explain. Escaping Hoole, for example. And whatever it was you did inside the Node. But none of them seem to have changed the course of events. If there are any deeper movers at work, they certainly don’t seem to be our friends.”

  “Maybe not. Are they supposed to be?”

  “You’re the phantom traveler, mister. You tell me.”

  “I have no idea.”

  Blossom rose from the floor where she had been sleeping on the other side of the room and trotted over to the window, pushing her muzzle into the discussion. Lyköan lowered his voice.

  “I think the mutt’s trying to tell us something. It’s a pointless argument anyway. She and I can take it from here. Why don’t you get some sleep. I’ll wake Felix at midnight. You can take over at four.”

  “What, and pull my own weight?” she asked, the light of sarcasm returning to her face.

  “All for one and... no favoritism.”

  “Don’t be afraid to wake me when you come off shift,” she whispered, kissing his cheek. Then patting Blossom on the head, she headed out of the room without a backward glance.

  * * *

  Lyköan looked at his watch. Eleven seventeen. Bending over the table, he snuffed out the candles. Returning to his chair, he raised the blinds and opened the window. Checking the safety and angling the weapon through the opening, he stepped out onto the fire escape. Motioning silently for Blossom to follow, he closed the sash behind them both and sat on the cool metal landing, his back against the warm brick.

  An artificial glow filled one corner of the sky, beyond the canyons of darkened buildings. Light and shadow trickery. Like time and memory. One minute you’re fighting the good fight ― and the next minute ― this sterile, silent graveyard.

  And like a graveyard, not a body in sight. The streets were surprisingly open and empty. After the hospitals had filled, the increasing waves of victims had been redirected to Ministry of Health containment centers like the one at Wat Tee Pueng Sut Taai. Breeding grounds for more contagion. Once it became common knowledge how lethally virulent and communicable the viruses were, most people had simply scurried indoors and perished out of sight.

  The toll in human lives had been mirrored in the city’s soi dog population. Death seemed too cruel a punishment for obeying an instinctive dictum and feeding upon the flesh of their former benefactors. But as a result, they too became infected and, sensing death approaching, had crawled off into the shadows as well. Blossom might be the last soi dog left in Bangkok.

  Ghoul-like crews stuffing corpses into garbage trucks and armed patrols scouring the streets for survivors snaked through the city daily. There seemed to be no shortage of willing hands to assist with the ongoing nightmarish clean-up. A picture of smoldering Gehenna. Nora, Fremont and he, determined to have nothing to do with what was going on, were keeping their distance. Out here on the as-yet-unelectrified fringe of the city there was still hope. After more than one narrow escape, trailed by crackling bullhorns, exchanging a few rounds with their pursuers, they could only guess what might be happening under the downtown lights.

  In the distance, the illuminated city beckoned, offering answers to these questions. A warm breeze brushed Lyköan’s face. Blowing through Blossom’s mottled coat, the air snapped sporadically with blue-green static sparks. Grabbing the thirty-six with one hand and the painted railing with the other, Lyköan pulled himself upright.

  “Stay here, girl. I’m going up top for a better look.”

  Each footfall on the single flight of honeycombed-metal stairs echoed like a pistol shot in the darkness. The stairs ended at a vertical ladder. Grasping a rung, he began to climb. Leaping over the low parapet wall at the top of the ladder, he landed silently on roofing tar still soft from the heat of the day. Above him, the building’s water tower rose another ten meters into a moonless sky. In the background, the wind was moaning through the city’s web of wires.

  Climbing the narrow ladder he found affixed to the sheet-metal, he soon reached the top of the tower. Scrambling onto the flattened conical roof, he sat down on the rusting, corrugated edge, laid the rifle across his thighs and, legs dangling in the air, relaxed. Inhaling the stiffening breeze, absorbing the stars and the depth of the night, he slipped effortlessly into the now familiar stream and let the ever-was and ever-will-be melt once again into the single thread where creation and oblivion are one.

  The temple of the night filled with pure melody ― where tone and hue and flavor, form and function surrendered to the beckoning. Leaving the confines of mere physicality, he was soaring in the ether, buoyed by invisible thermals, a creature home again in the grand design, propelled by the current rushing of the underlying absolute. Joyful in the riotous spray of unnamable colors and finding no void in the measured tolling, no delay in the tick, tick, tick of passing time, reveling in this tracing of the siren song of the universal sine.

  On the shadowy horizon two dark storms approached. Twin galaxies poised for cataclysmic battle. Cold, hard, primordial, and elemental. Ancient manipulators. Old as the cosmos. Immortal. Capable of defining the fearful symmetry of existence. Godlike mirrored antipodes composed of soulless energy. Residing in this hidden place beyond both good and evil, beyond any human concept of virtue or vice and forever acting out this eternal dance of motivations beyond the ken of mortal men. From the beginning, manifesting in a variety of guises. Whispering in the darkness. Inspiring and conspiring. Promising fruit from the garden of immortality, surcease from sentience’s fearful memento mori, that soul-devouring threat of absolute annihilation.

  And man, tiny and terrified, utterly enthralled, had listened to the whispering ― and believed. Miracles and prophecy. Promises of eternal life. The age-old wish to look upon the face of God ― and live. And all of it a lie ― the work of conniving influences. Manipulators. Soulless energies.

  A sharp report snapped in the distance. Then another. A dog snarled then barked viciously. Lyköan awoke atop the water tower, flat on his back. Cold metal. The great dance of the elementals driven back into the hidden realm. In front of his eyes swirled a star-strewn sky. A shiver ran up his spine. Hairs erect on the back of his neck, he bolted upright. Plucked gooseflesh rushed up each trembling arm. In slow motion, the thirty-six slid off his knees and an eternity later clattered on the tarred roof below.

  Another burst of gunfire. Glass breaking. Blossom barking. He reached for the ladder, but slipped over the edge of the roof. A desperate grasp. Swinging out into open air by one arm he smashed face first into the side of the tower, barely grabbing a rung with the other hand. Positioning hands and feet on the outside of the rails he slid to the roof below. His nose was bleeding all over the front of his shirt.

  Excited Thai voices arose from the fire escape landing. Picking up the rifle, he ran to the parapet wall. Inside the apartment Fremont was cursing. Nora’s high-pitched shouts were unintelligible. A door slammed. The Thai voices became muffled. More gunfire. Blossom yelped. Then silence.

  Peering over the edge of the roof and seeing only darkness below, he raced down the fire escape ladder and dropped to the landing outside the shattered glass of the darkened apartment window.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Divine Ambition

  Most men of action are inclined to Fatalism, while those of intellect prefer Providence.

  Honoré de Balzac : Le Comédie humaine

  Returning to the apartment, Lyköan lurched into the open doorway, adrenaline buzzing in his ears. Leaning a shoulder against the doorjamb, he stared into the darkness. Inside, starlight glinted off an object on the floor beside an overturned table he had missed during his first pass through only minutes before. Entering the room once more, he picked up the flashlight, felt the ribbed cylinder sticky in his bloodstained hand. A dazzling halogen beam answered his click of the power button, but as he swept the room, nothing the beam struck moved or made a sound. Between th
e front door and the glass-toothed fire escape window he counted seven bodies. Thrown like a rag doll against the wall a few steps away, the open eyes of a familiar face stared out into empty space, pupils fixed, lips curled, frozen in a final accusation. Stooping over the figure, he closed the man’s eyes with his fingers.

  Christ, Felix ― I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve this. And it was all my fault.

  Dragging the flashlight beam from Fremont’s face, he hurried into the nearest bedroom, stepping over two more bodies lying just inside the doorway, their ghastly heads swollen like misshapen melons, faces unrecognizable. Details of the recent firefight had already begun to morph into metaphor, imprecise recall dulling the fierce crackle of small arms fire, the terrifying cries of terminating mortality that had been so real, so immediate, only moments before.

  From the safety of the dreamlike mukti shadows he had crushed these skulls as easily a practiced chef cracked eggs ― and with as much remorse. Mere objects of a secondhand brutality now, removed from his involvement, caught in an imperfectly recollected past of flashing gunfire that fixed each black and white photograph-like image in a phantom memory. Panting in the stillness, he swept the flashlight over lurid stains soaking into the carpet, over the pockmarked walls and a ceiling splattered with even more savage designs.

  Must’ve used the rifle too.

  The other bedroom had its own tale to tell. On the floor beside the unmade bed, thin shards of snow-white bone protruded from a shattered skull. Lyköan recognized her immediately. Sucking in a whistling breath he ran over, letting the air rush out in a mournful mixture of lost hope and rejected prayer.

  Noooooo…

  Dropping down beside the silent figure, a madman’s leer warping his features, he whispered into the dead dog’s ear.

  “I know you did your best, girl. Everything you could.”

  Placing a hand behind the shattered skull, he stroked her still warm coat affectionately. Blood had already begun stiffening the fur into clumps of thick wicks, ghastly music box tines, thorns playing mournfully across his open palm.

  “You were protecting her, weren’t you? Where’s she gone, girl? Where’d she go?”

  It was a ridiculous question that only voiced a greater mystery. Nora wasn’t anywhere in the apartment. Not hidden in a closet or under a bed as Lyköan had returned hoping to discover. Which meant she hadn’t been here when he had first come crashing through the fire escape window either. That seemed certain. But why not? Where was she?

  With the odor of mortality heavy in his nostrils he drew his head away from Blossom’s ear and, returning to the front door, cast the flashlight beam into the hallway. Between the doorway and the stairwell at the end of the hall lay five more corpses.

  Came right to our fucking door. Knew exactly where we were. How?

  He still had no satisfying answer when, ten flights of corpse-strewn stairs later, he stumbled out of the building’s emergency exit. Panic rising with his pulse, he ran from one cooling vehicle to the next, pushing back bodies slumped behind steering wheels, shining the flashlight into slack faces and empty back seats, kicking over every corpse that lay face down in the street. Nothing and no one he recognized. The self-satisfied sneer that had animated him when he had laid these bodies down had disappeared, replaced by a confused scowl

  Where the hell is she?

  He shouted her name. The cry echoed hollowly into empty air and faded away. Flashlight dancing wildly, he retraced his steps, franticly pulling bodies from vehicles onto the street, a sickening crack as each skull struck the pavement, accompanied only by his own labored breathing. After he had made certain every vehicle was empty, he went back and examined the bodies again.

  Nothing here but another truckload for the removal crews.

  Head spinning, perspiration running down his face, he dragged a weary hand across his eyes. The rooftop foray had backfired. That was obvious. While he had been looking out, the enemy had been peering back. That must be it. Everything had its reciprocal. How stupid he’d been. All he’d gained in return was confirmation of what he had long suspected: That out here in the hinterlands of the physical universe the dark machinery of unseen powers ― of which the newly emergent Pra Yee Suu was only the latest example ― and held every advantage.

  Pandavas had been wrong. While something like his Artifact did exist, it was only one of a multitude of hidden despots that had apparently set up shop in these parts ― only the most recent in a long line of whisperers in the cobwebbed darkness. And once again, thanks to a lunatic mystic’s meddling, the battle was being waged at humanity’s expense. What the genius doctor had failed to consider, however, was that a usurper could prove far worse than the tyrant it hoped to replace. Wouldn’t be the first time.

  They let us believe anything we want, especially self-anointed saviors like Pandavas. Belief is the universal currency ― so much better for business. Calms the jitters in an ignorant prey.

  Hidden in eternal darkness lay the explanation for every one of life’s exasperating imponderables. Of course you had to know where to look and that had always been the hardest part. The explanation for why nothing in existence was ever inviolable. Why every philosophy withered in the light of personal experience. How every aspect of reality could be used as an instrument for asserting power, yet leave those in power forever beyond the light of suspicion.

  Pandavas had been the perfect foil, a slave to his superior intellect, a believer in his personal importance. Permit him access to a few simple secrets of the universe and he had considered himself a prophet. That was enough. Fuck, it was everything! Once laid prostrate on this latter-day road to Damascus with the blinding revelatory light in his eyes ― like an injured animal knocked senseless crossing a modern highway, completely ignorant of what had hit him or from which direction the blow had come ― without a second thought he had instinctively bowed before the thing displaying that divinity. He hadn’t recognized the light for what it really was. How could he? What mortal had ever fathomed the mad ambitions that drove the gods?

  But Lyköan had an inkling. On the rooftop he had stared into creation’s heart, seen it exposed for what it truly was, and in that instant ― tasting the bitter fruit of total understanding ― he had been utterly enlightened and transformed. It seemed so obvious now. That before the baking of the first mud brick in the embered firepits of Zawi Chemi; before Gilgamesh had laid the cornerstone of Eridu; before a single stone had been dragged to Newgrange mound or chalk-stained hands had drawn the compass of the pyramids, throughout all of human history, one or another of these sly, invisible entities had been directing the action. And mankind had only dimly been aware of their existence. From force-of-nature paganism to New Age seminar-spiritualism, the deception had been total, and universal ― ever so subtly washing over and coursing through every human heart and mind. The God-gene.

  Emerging from the fog of universal confusion, Lyköan now stood astride the terrifying truth: That long ago ― perhaps simultaneous with the first sentient truly human thought ― these powers had singled out their prey. And ever since, through fear and ignorance, through manipulated conjecture and intuition had directed the mad cascade of human history ― while in the dark abyss they waged eternal war with one another.

  Even before the great Sumer flood there had been gods. Gods with names like An, and Shangdi, Enlil, Ningirsu, Dagan, Ishtar, Pangu, Enki, Dyaus Pita, Marduk, Tishpak, Teshùp, Surya, Marut, Tèshub, Apsu, Tiamat, Baal, Yahweh, Cronus, Mummu, Arinna, Zeus, Ah Kinchil, Ahuramazda, Mithras, Ometecuhtli, and Allah. The list was long and included every charlatan that, lurking in the outer darkness, had ever ruled upon the plain of history. Pandavas’s Artifact? Just another name.

  And Pandavas just one more true believer.

  Thoughts exploding like Independence Day fireworks, Lyköan headed back upstairs, a long procession of instigators leering at him from the shadows: Isis, Krishna, Gabriel, Menes, Minos, Sesostris, Zarathustra, Numa, Gautama, Jesus, Peter and Paul,
Shu-Sin, Elagabalus, Erdaviraph, Mani, Mohammed, Joan of Arc, George Whitefield, the Bab, Joseph Smith, Siyyid ’Ali-Muhammad, Mary Baker Eddy, L Ron Hubbard. Every inane concept the human mind might conjure up had been permitted so long as the hidden truth received obeisance and retained control. While behind the perceptual veil, mad ambitions were eternally flitting through the darkness and using human souls to achieve their ends.

  Rather than the instructive, purifying Shiva who would bring about a spiritual cleansing, Pandavas had summoned something else ― something less ― something ugly and petty ― and quintessentially evil.

  So if it really wants me dead, why am I still breathing?

  Like the poet’s swan down-feather, sitting on the full tide swell, the event horizon seemed to hang suspended, teetering between past and future, the impending cataclysmic contest as yet undecided. Lyköan felt himself simultaneously exposed and cloaked. In this same instant how many other uchronia sat similarly suspended? They had become almost palpable, spinning off the nexus of his gyrating thoughts, an infinite stream of alternate progressions fading into the lost and irresistible passage of time. What multitude of other perplexed Egan Lyköans stood struggling with almost identical threats across vast stretches of the limitless multiverse? Could even one of them succeed? Breaking away from these maddening thoughts, he glanced at his watch.

  Impossible. Already after three in the morning.

  Where had those hours flown? On the floor in the corner of the room his double-bud was singing.