A Love and Beyond

by Dan Sofer

  The men dropped their duffel bags on the ground, opened the zippers, and handed out shovels.

  A shiver ran down Mandy’s spine. This was no field. They stood in a graveyard.

  The men removed the stones and dug into the earth.

  Mandy stepped backward, beyond the graves, and kneeled, then sat, on the flinty ground.

  The rows of silent mounds waited patiently beneath the stars and hid their secrets. There were easily over a thousand graves.

  She preferred her prison cell.

  Let them find whatever they’re looking for fast so we can leave this place.

  It was hard to believe that the Sons of Light would find anything of value.

  The diggers stood waist deep in the dirt. Jay removed his shirt. His body gleamed in the moonlight, all sinew and muscle.

  “We got somethin’.” Sol grabbed a flashlight and dropped out of sight. “There’s a shelf on the side and—ah!” the big man shrieked.

  “What is it?” the Teacher demanded.

  “Any gold?” Damian asked.

  Sol surfaced, pale in the torchlight. “There’s a skeleton down here.”

  “What did you expect, genius?” Jay said.

  “Keep going.” The Teacher returned to his resting spot on the next mound.

  He looked Mandy over, his hand inside the shoulder bag. Mandy avoided his gaze and studied the stones on the ground.

  The crunch and scrape of digging filled the night air.

  Then a shovel hit solid rock.

  The Teacher sprang to his feet.

  Jay scraped the dirt aside. “It’s a floor.”

  The Teacher aimed his flashlight into the hole. “Or a door. Find the edges.”

  Mandy struggled to her feet. Her left leg had gone to sleep so she limped to the edge of the hole.

  A long smooth slab of stone emerged from the grime, three large angular letters etched in the surface.

  “Yes,” the Teacher said, urging them on. “Yes!”

  The men worked faster, widening the hole around the white rectangle.

  “My sons,” he said. “We’ve waited two thousand years for this moment.”

  He rummaged in the equipment bags and lowered two crowbars into the pit.

  Jay, Damian, and Sol leaned on the crowbars. The stone slab shifted and rose. With a great deal of effort, the men stood the slab on its side.

  The Sons of Light looked at each other with ecstatic smiles. Sol and Damian exchanged a high-five.

  A staircase, chiseled in stone, descended into darkness.

  “Down the rabbit hole we go,” the Teacher said. He dangled his legs over the edge, slid into the hole, and led the way. Sol and Damian followed.

  Jay dragged his duffel bag to the edge of the open grave.

  He turned to Mandy and held out his hand.

  He grinned. “Ladies first.”

  ***

  “I’m sorry,” John told Dave, Shani, and Ruchama. “I never meant for any of this to happen.”

  They sat at a long dinner table of unpolished wood, decked with plastic plates of chocolate wafers and glasses of water.

  Dave didn’t touch the food.

  Was this a trap?

  “Where have they taken Mandy?” he asked.

  John shrugged.

  “I dunno. They’re going after the treasure.”

  “What treasure?” said Shani.

  John raised a sarcastic eyebrow. “According to the Teacher, the first Sons of Light hid a huge stash of gold and silver. He said the scroll jars would lead us to it. Then we’d bring the End of Days, yada yada yada.”

  “The Copper Scroll,” Dave said.

  Shani picked up a wafer. “And you’re letting us go because…”

  John’s chest heaved. “I’ve known Jay since kindy. We’ve done some crazy shit but I draw the line at kidnapping. We’re in enough trouble back home.”

  Dave wasn’t sure he wanted to know about the trouble back home.

  “And where is home?” Shani asked.

  “Christchurch.” John gave a wry smile.

  Dave looked at Shani and Ruchama.

  New Zealand. That explained the accent.

  John, the Maori, looked miserable.

  “I thought it was a phase, you know? His way of dealing. But now he’s a sandwich short of a picnic.” He sighed again. “Anyway, better chow down and move on. Can’t say when they’ll be back. They took the rust-buckets. The main road is ten minutes by foot.” He stood. “Here’s your phone, Dave. You’ll be wanting the rest of your stuff.”

  John led them to a square room that contained a wooden desk and little else.

  “Teacher’s office,” he said. “We weren’t allowed in much.”

  On a set of shelves, they found the two girls’ phones.

  Shani picked up a handbag. “This is Mandy’s.”

  John’s pals still had her. To find her, Dave would have to find them. A layer of fine dust covered the desk and the floor around it.

  He stepped behind the desk and opened the drawers.

  A pile of printer paper. Sharpened pencils. Ballpoint pens. Harmless enough. A hammer and heavy rubber gloves. He opened the third drawer.

  Hello.

  “I don’t believe it.” Dave picked up a large shard of broken pottery. Three characters were etched into the surface.

  “Your scroll jar?” Shani said.

  “What’s left of it.”

  He remembered the reverence Ben had lavished on the urn in his living room.

  Why would the Teacher destroy the jar?

  Professor Barkley had talked of extremists who wanted to wipe out evidence of a precursor to Jesus Christ.

  “John,” Dave said. “Did the Teacher talk of Christianity, or of Jesus in the Dead Sea Scrolls?”

  John shrugged. “No. He went on about The Way. Modesty. Silence. Cleanliness. The war against the Sons of Darkness at the End of Days. And he had a rat about the jars. The jars are the key to the treasure.”

  Dave arranged the pottery fragments on the desktop. A jigsaw puzzle of a thousand pieces and countless particles of dust. Even if he put the jar together again, what then?

  Start at the edges.

  Two pieces stood out. Large and round, they had formed the base of the jar. Dave slid one over the other.

  A perfect fit. Almost perfect. A gap remained between the pieces. Dave turned them over. Red pigment stained the inner surfaces. Tiny lines and ridges rose and met. The answer sparked in his head.

  “Look! Something was baked into the clay. There’s writing. Not very legible and probably inverted. No wonder no one ever found the treasure. The Copper Scroll was incomplete.”

  Shani double-checked the drawers and peeked under the desk. “Nothing here. They must have taken it.”

  “Dammit.”

  Ruchama took the pottery circles from Dave and squinted at them. “It looks like Hebrew. But I can’t read it. Too much noise.”

  Dave groaned. They were so close. There had to be a way.

  He opened the top drawer and grabbed a piece of paper and a pencil. He laid the clay circle on the desk, flat side down. Then he covered it with the sheet of paper.

  “What are you doing?” Shani asked.

  Dave picked up the pencil.

  “We did this in art class at primary school.”

  He held the side of the pencil nib close to the page and shaded over the inner plane of the pottery.

  “We used coins,” he said. “But any raised surface will do. The lead catches the raised bits and brings out the impressions.”

  Lines emerged beneath the pencil and combined. Soon two rows of Hebrew letters appeared on the page.

  Shani and Ruchama looked over Dave’s shoulder.

  “Yeru,” Dave read. “Yerushalem.”

  “Jerusalem,” Shani said.

  “De,” Dave continued. “De-ta-ta.”

  Ruchama wrinkled her nose. “Yerushalayim de-ta-ta?”

  Dave knew that one
from the Talmud. “That’s Aramaic. It means below. The Jerusalem Below.”

  Mishi’s words rang in Dave’s ears, words he had heard late one Friday night deep in the halls of Me’ah She’arim .

  World Above. World Below. Move Below, move Above.

  Was there a Jerusalem Above and a Jerusalem Below?

  Dave read on. He had to skip a few illegible words. “Kav…Kav-ra-ya.”

  “Kevarot?” Ruchama suggested. “Bet Kevarot?”

  “Cemetery,” Shani translated.

  Dave read the last word. “De-mad-ba-ra.”

  Shani pieced it together. “Midbar is desert. The desert cemetery.”

  “That’s it,” Dave said. “I know where they’ve gone. Let’s go.”

  “Crikey,” John said, incredulous. “You’re going after them?”

  “They’ve got Mandy,” Dave said. “It’s the only way.”

  “You could just wait here,” John suggested. “I doubt they’ll actually find anything. You can dong ‘em when they get back.”

  John had a point.

  “I think it’s time we called the cops,” Shani said.

  “Shh,” Ruchama said. “Do you hear that?”

  Dave did.

  A soft thud.

  From inside the building.

  Dave had not heard cars outside.

  Had someone else stayed behind?

  The door swung open.

  First, Dave saw the guns, the long nozzles of machine guns. Two heavy-set men in army fatigues burst into the room. A smaller man entered after them. He waved a black handgun at them.

  “Hands in the air,” Ornan said. “Now.”

  Chapter 14

  Jay swung his legs into the old grave.

  It’s happening.

  His dreams grew flesh and sinew before his eyes. With one exception. In his dreams Jay led the way. He did not bring up the rear. A lot can change in an hour.

  When I am king…

  The Harper’s words buzzed in Jay’s ear.

  Another of the Harper’s delusions? Or was the Teacher…? Had the Teacher…?

  Impossible.

  Scheme all you like, Harper. Even without John at his side, Jay would swat the tinpot king like a fly.

  Jay hefted the duffel bag onto his shoulder and descended step by step.

  Keep ‘em where you can see ‘em.

  The girl’s hair burned copper under his flashlight. If Jay slipped, he’d take the others down like dominos. The thought made him smile.

  Far beneath the girl, the roving flashlights winked out.

  “Oy!” he told the girl. “Keep it going.”

  The girl didn’t reply. He didn’t expect her to. Jay had taped her mouth and wrists himself. Good thing he had bought an insurance policy. By the end of the night he might have to cash her in.

  Personally, he preferred the blond, a real hard case with her kicking and clawing, but she’d come round once his pockets filled with gold.

  The stairs ended. A round tunnel bored through the rock. A few meters in, the walls fell away.

  “Stone the crows,” he gasped.

  His flashlight beamed into the void but found no end to the darkness. Three stone steps led down to a dirt floor. The light rays of the other three men sliced through the black like lasers and pooled on the cave floor.

  Jay sniffed the air. A familiar, heady scent. The smell of danger.

  A fire ignited and blinded Jay for a second. Sol held a short, steel pole above his cowboy hat. The bundled rag at the end blazed with blue flame. A tin of methylated spirits sat open at his feet, where the Harper kneeled and dipped a second rag into the liquid. Sol waddled to the wall of the cave and slipped the torch into a blackened sconce chiseled into the rock.

  Jay dropped his bag beside its twin and assembled another flaming torch. Within minutes, a dozen small fires lined the walls and the shadows receded. The cavern was the size and shape of an ice rink. Stalactites reached down high overhead.

  Structures of varying shapes and sizes littered the floor: waist-high buildings with flat roofs, buttressed walls and towers, bridges over winding ditches. A hill rose at the back of the cave. Upon it, a square edifice, larger than the other features, commanded the miniature city, with a tall column on either side of its black rectangular mouth.

  The Teacher darted between the city’s features; a light-footed giant, muttering and laughing.

  He turned to the Sons of Light.

  “My sons.” The ecstasy echoed in his voice and off the walls of the cave. He spread his arms. “Welcome to Jerusalem Below.”

  He pointed at the bridge over a winding trench.

  “Behold the Valley of Akhor. Seventeen talents of silver under the steps. One hundred gold bars in the tomb.”

  He skipped toward a squat, round tower and rested his hand on the flat roof.

  “Kohlit. Fourteen talents of silver in the pillar. Fifty-five in the canal.”

  He made an arc with his outstretched arm. “Behold Milkham. Sekhakha. Bet Shem. And of course”—he pointed at the large square building at the back of the cave—”the great Temple Below.”

  Jay had never heard the Teacher laugh, but now he laughed long and hard. The show of unbridled joy whispered doubts in Jay’s ear.

  Just how well do you know your Supreme Leader?

  “Where do we start?” he asked.

  The Teacher sobered. He clapped his hands together. “With the gold, shall we?”

  “Gold!” Sol leaned forward on his feet like a rabid dog pulling on his leash.

  The Teacher pulled a sheet of paper from his shoulder bag, unfolded it, and studied the contents.

  “David.” He tapped the edge of a domed building with his shoe. “Start digging here.”

  The Harper, who had hovered beside the girl, grabbed a shovel and scampered toward the building.

  “Jay.” The Teacher scraped at the dirt beside a bridge. “Ex marks the spot.”

  Then he trotted to another low structure and measured three paces from the wall. “Sol, this one is yours.”

  “And the girl?” Jay said. “Might as well lend a hand.” He gave the Harper a meaningful look.

  That’ll show the ning-nong.

  The Teacher ran a hand over his goatee. His other hand slid into his shoulder bag.

  “The girl, yes.”

  The Harper opened his mouth to object.

  “She will assist me,” the Teacher said. “Hurry along, and bring one of those black bags, won’t you?” The Teacher and the girl set out across the miniature landscape.

  Jay lifted his shovel and broke the ground. Not his intended result but he had given the Harper a taste of the Kiwi clobbering machine.

  The sound of shifting earth echoed through the cave.

  If the Harper gave any trouble, Jay would bury him here. A tomb fit for a king.

  A short sprint away, Sol took off his cowboy hat and pulled his shirt over his head. The wife-beater underneath was already stained with sweat. He put his hat on and got back to work.

  Jay shoveled dirt over his shoulder.

  You’ll do great things, his mother’s voice said.

  The events of his life had seemed haphazard. Random. But now he saw the hand of Providence. His mother’s prophecy. Her loving hands in his hair. Coming home one day after school, finding her on the couch, surrounded by empty bottles, drowned in her own vomit. The Nazareth-House Orphanage. The man on the cross above his bed. Meeting John. Climbing together. Stealing together. Dropping out. Odd jobs. Burglaries. Stairdancing. A brush with the law. Going legit.

  The big bickies came from pushing Queenstown tourists off bridges. Until that kid from Utah had stretched out his arms like the man on the cross and stepped off the ledge. Jay had checked the rope. Twice. The kid could have died. But he never woke up either. It wouldn’t have been such a big deal if Jay and John had done the paperwork and gotten a permit.

  Then came the signs. The voices. Wherever he turned, he saw Jerusalem. Newspap
er articles. Television. Snatches of conversation on the street. Jay found a worn NIV Holy Bible in a box of his mother’s things. He read in bed and mulled over the words late into the night.

  Jerusalem called. Only there would he claim his destiny. Only there would he learn to wake the living dead.

  One afternoon, as he chewed an egg sandwich over the Gospel of Luke, the earth shook. He ran into the street. The buildings of Christchurch collapsed around him, and he danced. The time had come.

  Jay looked up from his trench and wiped sweat from his brow. The Teacher stood at the entrance to the Temple Below at the back of the cave. He had tied the girl’s hands to a stone loop above the doorway. She hung by her arms like a skinned sheep, her shirt hitching above the waistline, her shoes barely scraping the ground. Then the Teacher disappeared into the dark mouth of the Temple.

  Jay’s heart skipped a beat.

  Where is he going?

  He shook the suspicion from his head. The Teacher had led him this far. He put his shoulder into the task at hand. The pile of earth grew.

  Everything happens for a reason.

  The setbacks. The suffering. Even the mistakes. They were God’s way of reminding Jay who he was. And, slowly, he had remembered. He and John crammed their worldly possessions into two hiking packs. They jumped bail and boarded an Air New Zealand flight.

  The rest was history. His story. A new gospel. In school and church, children would memorize his words. The story, like any, had peaks and gullies. With each clod of earth, the climax drew nearer.

  His shovel hit stone. He looked around. No one else had heard the scrape. He dropped to his knees and cleared the dirt. A flat, white circle. Too flat for bedrock. He found the edges. A stone box with a sunken lid.

  “Hey,” Sol called out. “I got somethin’.”

  Jay stepped out of his trench and ran over to the big man. The Harper joined them. A round clay surface stuck out of the ground. They worked together with their shovels. An urn emerged, double the size of the scroll jars. Sol scooped up the jar like a baby. His flabby arms deceived; the man could flip an ox like an omelet.

  “It’s heavy.” Sol gave it a shake. Jay heard nothing. “Must be jammed full.”

  “Open it,” Jay said.

  “The Teacher—”

  “The Teacher’s busy. Open the damn thing.”

  Sol placed the urn on its base and tried the rounded lid.