A Vision of Fire

by Gillian Anderson

  Ambient light from the city glowed through a wall of exterior windows at the far end of the room. Caitlin bumped into the first of a couple dozen wide, golden leather chairs. There was only room for one person to comfortably walk around the table at a time, and nowhere to shove the chairs other than into their stations at the table. She considered standing on the table so there would be room to move if she needed it, but diffuser panels were slung low beneath the lights. She was sure her head would come too close to them for comfort. Navigating to the end of the table, she found she had about four feet of space to the windows. It would have to be enough.

  “What can I do to help?” Ben asked softly.

  She shook her head slightly, gazed outside. “How strong are those windows?”

  “Very. The recent renovations replaced all five thousand windows with the latest blast-proof panes. In a hurricane, this is one of the safest places you could be.”

  “What about a volcano?” she asked.

  He didn’t know if she was kidding. He didn’t answer.

  The city seemed small compared to the immensity of the time and distance she was beginning to feel. Caitlin was scared. She stopped moving and placed a hand on a conference room chair to steady herself.

  Immediately she saw a vision of a human body on fire. The vision was slightly unclear, juddering back and forth as if seen with a handheld camera. She realized that was exactly what was happening. This was the video of the woman who had self-immolated over her dead son, the few seconds of footage Caitlin had seen on her tablet. She heard voices shouting across the table, all around her, and then the people shouting . . .

  . . . were there, in the courtyard, just beyond her fingertips. Suddenly she was one of many. Many voices, some chanting the cazh, some crying, some screaming. A few were just beginning to express the wonder of transcendence. Their bodies moved like reeds in a pond in their white and yellow robes. Then, as though the air and energy left them in a rush, their bodies dropped to the paving stones of the courtyard, across the huge crescents carved into the flat, black rocks.

  Above their heads a pulsing force drew Caitlin’s attention. She could not see it but she could feel it, and the presence grew as the bodies fell to the ground.

  • • •

  Ben watched every tendril of Caitlin’s hair lift in a breeze he didn’t feel. She opened her mouth and exhaled, but it was not the sigh of a single soul. It was the combined sound of multitudes.

  Ben stepped back, reached for the tin of tea he had placed on the table. He stopped himself.

  Not yet. But he was ready.

  Now Caitlin was breathing heavily. Her arms were moving. Ben heard words, identified a few, combined them with the gestures to understand the superlatives. It was too late to set up his camera but he took out his cell phone and began recording.

  “The fire!” she said. “So much death. The end is here!”

  • • •

  All around her, Caitlin could see the destruction of a civilization, and she was part of it, part of this place—Galderkhaan. She knew its name now, only as it was dying. Standing here by the temple, the Hall of the Priests, she could see the volcano to the east, blowing the center of the earth into the sky.

  A towering, sulfurous wave of glaring orange and gold lava spewed from the volcano’s mouth, knocking down the first of a long line of tall, glowing columns that led from the volcano to the sea. Connecting yin and yang, the left hand to the right hand, Caitlin thought with sudden realization. The Technologists had built the array, which gathered energy and passed it from column to column, like tuning forks growing exponentially more powerful. Was this some kind of technological response to the cazh? If so, something had gone wrong with this process as well. One by one, the pillars collapsed beneath the juggernaut of lava rolling toward the city. Clouds of red and black, fire and cinders, fell on the courtyard and buildings. Heaps of hot ash piled onto white and yellow robes that once held souls and were now just incendiary masses of flesh.

  The wave of lava would overwhelm the courtyard soon. Caitlin had to find Bayarmii. She followed the sightline of tall columns away from the courtyard to the west, where the columns pierced the sea, shining green from their capstones. A full moon was gasping for breath between breaks in the clouds, strobing its blue-white light across the roiling ocean. The sea was flinging itself at the sky, hunching its back in titanic waves and bucking and kicking at the columns and the shore . . .

  And at ships. Ships with long, graceful dragon’s heads, each carved with a symbol of crescents entwined, the symbol that appeared on the capstones of the columns and in the paving stones of the courtyard—the sole remnant of a time before the rise of conflicting factions, chaos that helped bring a civilization to this precipice.

  Focus, Caitlin, remember why you’re here, she told herself. She remembered a young man, a granddaughter, a seal, and felt her mind suddenly fuse with the grandmother’s. She was holding Bayarmii’s hand—

  Then the earth shifted as a huge sea wave struck hard, and she fell. When she clambered upright Bayarmii was gone. Caitlin looked back, peering through smoke and mist, ash and flame. She saw that Bayarmii had run back to the white and gray seal, who was mad with fear inside the house. The trees burned outside the front door. It was too late. Too late to join the boy on the boat.

  “The cazh!” screamed the grandmother. “It’s our last chance to ascend together!”

  The girl obeyed. One of the burning trees fell against the door, trapping the girl and seal inside. A flaming branch cracked on impact, slashed toward her, simultaneously shearing and cauterizing her arm. The words of the prayer became more powerful and immediate and the spirit of the girl rose . . .

  Caitlin could only hope that Maanik was not experiencing this, that Bayarmii was subsumed in the moment. But her hope was overwhelmed by the grandmother’s willpower. She would not abandon her granddaughter. She, too, knew the words. She had been a devotee of the Priests in her youth. She spoke the cazh; she focused on the pulsing energy gathered above the dead and dying in the temple courtyard. Even as waves ran toward her and hot ash sizzled on her bare neck and arms, she spoke . . .

  • • •

  Ben saw Caitlin smile. Her expression was almost euphoric. She spoke with gestures: “Hundreds of feet in the air! I want to rise with the sea, with the wind, in a great swell! I want to look down at the white ice cliffs and the black columns . . .”

  The conference room was vibrating as though a subway train were passing underneath, but it wasn’t moving. Ben glanced outside. Through the driving rain and wind he thought he saw the East River rising in ­fifteen-foot waves. It had to be a trick of the thick glass, the rain, the mist.

  He turned back to Caitlin. Her head was upraised, her arms in a pose he had seen when Maanik was at her most distressed, just before they used the blackberries cue. Caitlin’s left fingers were spreading and reaching farther, seeking or pointing, he couldn’t tell. There was a rippling above her, like rising heat.

  “It’s everywhere!” Caitlin cried out in English.

  Where is the guard? Ben thought. Isn’t he hearing any of this?

  He could feel something building in the room, but it was ephemeral, invisible. A hot wind coiled around him. Was he experiencing what Caitlin felt with Maanik, a spillover of some ancient energy, hovering unseen like the air itself?

  “What is everywhere?” he called.

  “The transpersonal plane!” she cried. “Souls are rising! My god, it is powerful! I am ascendant! But there’s more . . . I can’t see . . .”

  • • •

  Other minds brushed past her, transcending spirits interlacing with each other as they departed one realm and entered another, unified in a churning mass soul. Yet everywhere, too, bodies were perishing before the ritual could be completed, before they could link with the group soul. Those souls were rising alone.

/>   She could still question, she could still think: Is that the key? But how can I stop so many from completing the cazh at once?

  But she threw the questions away, wanting only to be here and now, with them. One spirit turned from the group and looked into Caitlin’s eyes.

  Not you, the grandmother told her. You are not one of us.

  Though Caitlin longed to complete the transcendence with them, see what was out there, she obeyed.

  I am still Caitlin, she told herself.

  She held back, then withdrew. She focused on the conference room floor beneath her feet, heard the pounding rain on the windows.

  I must remain myself.

  She thought of the people in the park in Tehran, the men and women doing Tai Chi, moving with sublime balance. She pressed her left foot hard against the conference room floor, like a sprinter pushing her foot into a starting block. This reality, coming in through her left, would hold her here a little longer.

  I am still me.

  She felt stabilized, literally with one foot in each world. But she still had to stop the mass soul that was forming around her, above her, in Galderkhaan. The souls that were seeking other traumatized souls in Caitlin’s present.

  • • •

  Ben saw Caitlin’s smile vanish. He noticed the change in her position. She was speaking again but he was finding it harder to hear her. He realized suddenly that it wasn’t her voice that was changing; there was a pressure increasing in his head, and his eardrums were throbbing, as though he were in an airplane that had depressurized. He opened his mouth wide, worked his jaw, swallowed; it succeeded for an instant and then the pressure returned. With one eye on Caitlin he moved to the windows, trying to locate the source of the pressure. A vent . . . an ill-fitting window . . . a gap in the ceiling . . . ?

  There was nothing. The wind threw rain at the windows like stones.

  He set his cell phone on the table and ventured closer to Caitlin, staggering against the pressure in his head. Caitlin’s hair was still floating. Her eyes were shut, her mouth was moving, her arms helping to fashion unfamiliar words. He fought against his brutal headache, to make his feet move toward the tin of tea.

  “What do I do?” he whispered, half-praying for an answer.

  • • •

  Caitlin did not hear. Everywhere she looked, she could see the dead or dying. Beyond the trees she could see the same young man from Atash’s vision, performing the cazh. Across the water she watched as a boat smashed into one of the largest pillars, coming to pieces, its inhabitants clawing at the waves, or raising their hands in supplication even as they drowned. Gaelle, Caitlin thought helplessly. There was nothing she could do to save them from their deaths. She had to press on, had to stop the rising group soul and protect others in the present . . .

  • • •

  Ben saw smoke rising from her flesh.

  “Caitlin!”

  “Don’t . . . touch . . . me!”

  There was a decanter of water on the conference table. He would use it if he had to. He did not understand very much but he knew this: they might never have this chance again. He had to let it play out.

  • • •

  Caitlin had no time left to think and not much of a rational mind to think with. Instead, she felt herself rise from the temple, rise from the conference room, beyond the ash and beyond the rain, into a cloud that was thunder and darkness, that was the coldness of the grave multiplied by eternity. Despite the grandmother’s warning, Caitlin allowed herself to ascend, carried by the older woman’s soul. Caitlin’s grip on her own living body grew weaker.

  Two worlds were merging violently. The storm seemed to roil above Manhattan as Galderkhaan was pulled into the sea with the roaring hiss of dying flames. The innumerable souls of the ascended were everywhere.

  Caitlin clung single-mindedly to one thought, one objective: the group soul trying to form and cross the barrier of time. She thought of the young people she knew and did not know in her own world, others like Maanik and Gaelle and Atash who were made vulnerable by trauma and were probably being assaulted, their own souls being dragged painfully upward along with those of these ancient beings, for reasons still unknown. She had to stop them.

  Below her, she saw the entire city, the roads and streets, the line of columns that ran from the volcano to the sea, glowing green with their strange energy—but also, in the capstone of the tallest column in the sea, a symbol. A triangle made of crescents within crescents. It was the same symbol she had seen Gaelle draw. The same one Maanik had drawn.

  Caitlin glanced at the powerful, rising group soul, and then she knew what she had to do. She turned and plunged across the sky toward the largest column. There was no sense of weight or weightlessness, no sense of motion, only a sensation of sudden, lightning-like extension—point to point to point. Arms outstretched, she grabbed at the energy around the column as if it were tangible.

  And it was. She felt it writhe in her embrace, become one with her, like the power she’d received from the snake but exponentially more. She wrenched her body around and with a long sweep of her arms, she cast the power toward the courtyard. It flew through and away from her, as in Haiti when, out of control, Caitlin had thrown Gaelle against a wall.

  But this time she directed it.

  The tsunami of lava was perilously close to the city as the energy reached the courtyard and infused it. The paving stones erupted in light from beneath, a brilliant glow that blazed through the huge triangle carved into them, the crescents within crescents.

  Those who were still standing and chanting the cazh, those shocked Galderkhaani, screamed as the fusion of earth, fire, water, and light swept over them. Their movements changed from swaying to lurching tremors as their souls were yanked one from the other from the other, unlinked. Abruptly, their mortal screams stopped as their right and left brains ceased to function together. Their mouths remained frozen for a moment; an instant later the right sides of their bodies crumpled. They fell heavily to the stones where they died. Thick, bloody liquid flowed from their noses and mouths onto their burning white and yellow robes.

  And Caitlin saw that once more their souls rose, invisible yet somehow tangible. But with this death, a death without the cazh, they were ascending as individuals. The group soul was no more. Whatever its purpose had been, that goal was unrealized. Whatever power had allowed the bonded souls to reach through time, that was gone.

  The mammoth wave of lava broke over the city and destroyed it. There was nothing epic or prolonged about its demise: one moment Galderkhaan struggled, then it was gone. Caitlin felt the ecstasy of the energy depart from her; no longer immaterial, she plummeted into the sea . . .

  And dropped to the floor of the conference room. Ben broke her fall.

  There was a quiet hiss as the smoke rising from her body was suddenly doused. Ben stroked her hair back. Her eyes were closed, her mouth relaxed.

  “Cai?”

  There was no response. He flipped the top from the tin, brought the jasmine tea to her nose, and held her tightly with his free arm. After a moment he heard her very quietly inhale.

  “Cai? Are you . . . here?”

  She opened her eyes, struggled to focus. Then, finding his face, she smiled.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I’m here.”

  CHAPTER 33

  Caitlin woke the next morning to see Jacob, fully dressed, leaning over her, smoothing her hair from her face. Caitlin blinked at the light shining from the hall through the open door, the tall figure of her father in the frame. Weak sunlight was filtering around the corners of her curtains.

  “I’m going to school with Grandpa,” Jacob signed, then pasted himself to her for a hug and a kiss. Smiling, she watched the bedroom door shut quietly behind them.

  Her eyes closed and she suddenly felt achingly alone, lonelier than she’d ever felt in her life
. She had been bonded in a group the night before, in a still-unimaginable way, and now that was gone. She ran a hand through her hair; it felt too fine and unfamiliar.

  Knowing it was four a.m. in Santa Monica, she phoned her sister anyway. Abby sounded wide awake.

  “Whoa . . . I was just thinking about you.”

  Caitlin was silent, staring at the ceiling. There was no way to tell her about any of it.

  “Cai? Are you there? Did you butt-dial me?”

  “Abby, do you think souls are real?”

  “That’s . . . unexpected.”

  “I know, I’m just—I don’t know. You’ve been around death. I mean, person-to-person. Much more than I have.”

  “Too much of it,” Abby said. “Too much of it young, sudden, needless. Drugs, drinking, texting while driving, hit by cars, shot in malls.”

  “And?”

  “And, yeah, I do. This may sound nutty but sometimes when people die—only for an instant, the kind of moment that’s so fast you wonder if it happened—I can feel them. Not always, but briefly, after the life signs are gone, it’s very clear to me that I’m not the only person in the room. The feeling is stronger if I’m holding their hand.” Abby waited a moment. “Why are you asking?”

  Caitlin had expected the question; there was no easy answer. “Just soul searching,” she joked.

  “Cute,” Abby groaned. “Dad says you’ve been traveling.”

  “Oh yeah,” Caitlin said. “That I have. Call you later?”

  “Sure. I’ve got to go anyway.”

  “Wait—you were just thinking about me? What are you doing up at this hour?”

  “Got an early surgery,” Abby said.

  “Ah. Good luck.”

  “Thanks. Burn victim.”

  When Abby said “burn victim,” Caitlin felt herself tense. She wondered if that would always happen, going forward.