Little Gods

by Pratt, Tim

  You came, Behemoth said.

  “Of course I did,” I said aloud. Several acolytes stood around, watching. I didn't see Dean anywhere. When you live with your God physically on a daily basis, I guess you get used to it. It must be a thrill to meet the long-lost co-founder of the Order. People need someone to idealize. “They said you needed me. They said ... something about a beautiful snake."

  Yes, Behemoth said, and showed me the same vision he'd given his followers, a golden serpent writhing in shallow, frothing water under a steel gray sky. Shining scales fell from her head like shingles torn from a shack roof in a hurricane. The acolytes had never heard Behemoth's whole story, so they hadn't understood him properly. I did.

  Behemoth said: Leviathan is dying.

  That first night with Behemoth me and Dean made a fire and ate beef jerky. Dean offered some to Behemoth, and he politely refused. Behemoth eats a little grass once in a while, but that's all.

  Behemoth told his story in pictures, and sometimes the images still show up in my nightmares. Tree branches hung with streamers of torn flesh. The moon cracking like an egg, spilling blood into the sky. Great black dogs, big as mountains, charging across the clouds, lips peeled back and snarling.

  Behemoth showed us images of an overdue apocalypse. He told us the end hadn't come on schedule, and Behemoth's life couldn't proceed until it did. He had a role in the end days as the chief monster of the earth, leveling mountains, destroying cities, and ravaging the land.

  At the time I wondered how he could manage that much devastation, but later I discovered that his body could change, especially when he wanted to go somewhere quickly. He didn't hate mankind, but he would destroy us, acting as an instrument of the powers-that-be, whom Behemoth had never met. He came into existence with the knowledge of his role, his strength, and his single limitation: He is a creature of the land, and cannot touch water.

  Behemoth knew about Leviathan from the first, too.

  Leviathan, his female counterpart, lived in the sea. She could never touch land.

  In the last days Leviathan would destroy all trace of man on the oceans and devastate the coastal cities. Behemoth looked forward to those days, not because he particularly cared about destroying the world, but because at the end of the world he could finally join Leviathan.

  He loved Leviathan more than I can even imagine loving. I cannot describe the visions he gave us to convey that emotion. He knew what Leviathan looked like, though he'd never seen her with his eyes, and he showed us. Despite her fearsome serpentine shape Dean and I fell in love with her, too. Behemoth perceived her as the most lovely creature in the world, and we saw her as he did.

  They couldn't be together until the last days, when blood would saturate the soil and fill the seas. Either one could travel in blood. That was their mutual medium.

  Behemoth had waited more patiently than any bridegroom anticipating his wedding night, but the end hadn't come. Behemoth began to despair that it never would.

  After his story he went back to sleep. Me and Dean sat quietly, looking at his moss-covered body and talking about what we'd heard. Maybe back then I saw the fanatic zeal in Dean's eyes, burning brighter than our campfire, but probably not. Kids don't think about things like that, or at least the kid I was didn't.

  We settled down to sleep in the cloudy dawn. Dean unrolled his sleeping bag on the far side of the fire from Behemoth, keeping a respectful distance. I thought nothing of throwing my blanket right up against him, sleeping with my back to his bulk. I didn't worry that he would turn over on me. Creatures with moss growing on their bodies, I reasoned, couldn't be restless sleepers.

  We had to go home the next day, but a week later, we came back to see Behemoth again.

  I touched Behemoth's crocodile head, rubbing the tough, bumpy skin between his eyes. “What happened to Leviathan?” I said. The acolytes gathered around me in a semicircle, and I glared at them in irritation. Why did they have to crowd us that way?

  But they'd stayed with Behemoth for years, ready to tend his needs, while I'd left. They'd fulfilled their duty by coming to get me when Behemoth asked. What right did I have to begrudge their presence? I hadn't bothered to visit Behemoth in decades.

  Behemoth showed me visions of Leviathan, miles of vast undulating scales, trying to crawl onto some desolate beach. Wherever her belly touched, her flesh tore open, and she slithered back into the sea, which clouded with blood. She swam away, slowly, and found another beach, where she repeated the process.

  She wants to build a path to me with her own blood, Behemoth said. But she can't bear the pain for very long, and anyway, she will empty herself before she succeeds.

  Leviathan couldn't bear to live without him any longer. I tried to imagine her loneliness, trapped in the sea's cold, gray infinity. At least Behemoth had me and Dean.

  Well, me for a little while, until I left with Belinda. Mostly he had Dean.

  I caught an undercurrent in Behemoth's thoughts, a brief image of Behemoth himself splashing into the water after Leviathan. His skin sizzled and boiled off, and I felt his shame radiating like heat. If Leviathan gambled with her life to try and reach him, why didn't he do the same? Didn't he love her as much?

  “Of course you do,” I said, smoothing his head. “I know how much you love her."

  She will try and come aground again, Behemoth said, showing me an icy bay and a rocky shore. I couldn't imagine a more inhospitable place to emerge, but I assumed she approached only uninhabited beaches. I hadn't seen any news reports about giant serpents rising from the surf.

  I have to get there first, and stop her, Behemoth said. The prospect excited him. He believed that she could heal, if she stopped trying to reach him, and he wanted to tell her to wait. He would rather have her live away from him than die futilely, though he understood her desperation and frustration as well as his own. This way, at least, he would have the chance to see her.

  I stopped stroking his head briefly, then resumed. He wanted to go to Leviathan, to whatever forsaken piece of northern shore he'd shown me. Since I couldn't recall an ice-locked bay in these woods, that meant a journey. Probably a long one.

  Dean would want to go. A pilgrimage ... that was right up his alley.

  “Where's Dean?"

  Behemoth replied with the image of the jester again, but this time with a camouflage cap-and-bells and a grim, dirt-streaked face. In the woods, I think, Behemoth said. I could tell he didn't care. I need you, Adonis, Behemoth said. I do not want to make this journey alone.

  I turned to the waiting acolytes. “Behemoth is going on a little trip. Who's with us?"

  A dozen hands rose immediately.

  I nodded. “Good. Can somebody point me in Dean's general direction, do you think?"

  No hands shot up this time. Behemoth stood, silent. Finally, the willowy girl lifted a hesitant finger and pointed into the brush, in the direction of the setting sun.

  I'm too old for trailblazing, I thought. One of the kids, with a scraggly beard and wide eyes, handed me a walking-stick. It had a snake carved on one side, all the way down its length. Every scale had been rendered perfectly, painstakingly.

  “You made this?” I asked. He nodded, mute. “It's good,” I said, and he grinned.

  I set off into the trees.

  “I'm staying out here, Harry,” Dean said, two weeks after we graduated from high school. We sat on a dead tree not far from Behemoth's resting place.

  I scratched my nose and tried to understand what he meant, exactly. “You were offered a scholarship. You graduated fourth in our class. Why would you stay in Pomegranate Grove?"

  “I don't mean the Grove. I mean I'm staying here, in the woods, with Behemoth.” He looked at me with dark, narrow eyes. Dean had grown up to be a lean, oily-faced young man. He made good grades in school because he applied himself there with the same dangerous intensity he directed at everything in his life. He'd been a clumsy kid, and I still thought of him that way, but he'd grown up frigh
teningly bright and dedicated. “You should stay, too,” Dean continued. “He loves you."

  The unspoken final phrase: “more than he loves me.” I tore at the rotting bark on the log where we sat. “I love him, too. I've come out here every week all these years, haven't I? But I can't give him everything. Come on, Dean, living in the woods? Don't you want more out of life?"

  I wasn't sure he did. Dean came to the woods several times a week, whenever possible. His devotion never flagged.

  For me, seeing Behemoth had become like visiting a beloved but elderly relative. When he stirred and spoke to me, I enjoyed his company, but he usually slept his immovable sleep. As I grew older, I visited less and less often.

  Dean didn't get bored. He would crouch beside Behemoth, sitting on his heels, for hours. I never really wondered what he thought about. Maybe I should have; maybe a better friend would have.

  “This is the right decision for me,” Dean said. “What about you? Are you going with Belinda?"

  I could hear his sneer. Dean and I had grown apart until only our shared knowledge of Behemoth held us together. We didn't move in the same circles anymore. Dean didn't move in any circles at all. “Yeah. She's going to school in North Carolina, at Chapel Hill. I'm going with her.” I grinned. “I didn't think I'd get accepted, but I guess all my extracurricular stuff made up for my grades."

  Dean didn't answer. He did that a lot, trying to emulate Behemoth's silence, I guess. Dean didn't know how often Behemoth really talked, because more often than not the visions only came to me. I wish I knew why Behemoth loved me more than Dean. Maybe, in the end, it was because I acted from love instead of duty. Dean loved Behemoth like a cause, while I loved him like a friend.

  “Go tell him you're leaving,” Dean said at last. “He'll wake up for you."

  “Sure. I'll be back, okay?"

  Dean didn't even nod, just stared at a fixed spot in the trees.

  I went into Behemoth's clearing and touched his snout. His eyes, green with black pupils, opened. “I came to tell you I'm leaving soon."

  Behemoth didn't answer for a time, and then he gave me a picture of a leaping campfire with no one sitting around it.

  “Dean's staying. You won't be alone.” His skin felt unpleasantly rough under my fingers, especially compared to the smoothness of Belinda's body.

  Why are you leaving? Behemoth asked.

  I started to say something about growing up, moving on with my life, and starting a career, but I never told lies to Behemoth. “There's a girl, Belinda. We've been dating for a couple of years now, and I'm going away with her."

  I am so happy for you, Behemoth said, and the force of that statement almost knocked me down. I saw a montage of images, mostly flashes of Leviathan and Behemoth together, her body twined around his, their heads close together.

  Is she a wonderful girl? Behemoth asked.

  “The best there is,” I said. “I wish...” I didn't finish. I didn't know how to.

  Behemoth understood. I will join Leviathan soon, he said. It cannot be much longer now.

  I hoped, very selfishly, that it would be. I imagined a long life with Belinda, and I didn't want it interrupted by the end of the world. “I'll miss you, old monster."

  Come back and visit me, Behemoth said. Bring your children, someday, and let them climb across my back.

  “Of course I will,” I said.

  I didn't. I never had children. I married Belinda after our first year in college, as a desperate attempt to save our dissolving relationship. She finally left me after the second time I cheated on her. I can claim impetuous youth, but that excuse only goes so far.

  I don't think I was ready for commitment, and whatever else I can say about Dean, he certainly never had that problem. After another year Belinda and I divorced and I transferred to another college. I got a business degree and started working for a big pharmaceutical firm, dated lots of women but never married, traveled a lot, and didn't return to Pomegranate Grove because my parents moved to Florida and I didn't see any reason to go back.

  Sometimes Dean sent me cryptic letters, full of news about the acolytes and obsessively detailed descriptions of Behemoth's occasional movements. For a time Dean tried to divine knowledge of the future from Behemoth's occasional stirrings, but I never understood the system he used, and he never told me his predictions, only that he made some. I couldn't reply; Behemoth's woods don't have a mailing address.

  Eventually he stopped sending letters, or maybe they couldn't make it through all my forwarding addresses. I didn't mind. I wanted to put that part of my life behind me and move on. Whenever I thought of home I thought of Belinda, the sun shining on her red hair in my back yard, the walks we took by the lake, the wild grapes we gathered together.

  I kept moving on for years, and never got anywhere.

  Until I came back to Behemoth's clearing, to the one love that stayed, and went with him across two countries to save the girl he loved.

  Even with the stick, I moved slowly, but I didn't have to go far. I found Dean sitting on a fallen tree, not the same one we'd sat on all those years ago, but another. I imagined the first tree had long since turned to rot. Dean wore a ragged camouflage jacket and a grimy black beret, and had his back to me.

  “Dean,” I said, leaning hard on the walking stick. I could hardly breathe. My lungs resisted every inhalation, and ached when I exhaled.

  “Harry.” He didn't turn. His voice sounded the same, but tired. “They found you."

  “Yeah.” I walked slowly around the tree, favoring my right leg. My ankle hurt for no good reason. The joys of aging. I sat next to him, my heart pounding. “You surprised?"

  “Not so much surprised they found you,” he said. He still didn't look at me, but kept his eyes fixed on some invisible point before him. “Mostly surprised you came. Why did you?"

  “Because he asked for me.” Deep lines covered Dean's face. I barely recognized him otherwise, but the eyes were the same. Dark yet bright. Passionate.

  “So that's all it took,” he said bitterly. “He only had to ask. Didn't I ask you to stay?"

  “Dean—"

  “I stayed,” he said. “And he never spoke to me. In fifty years ... not once. Fifty years. Do you know how many days that is? Every day, hoping?"

  I couldn't answer that. I'd filled my years with business and distractions, and they'd gone quickly. His years, I knew, passed more slowly. “Do you regret staying?"

  “No. I guess I don't. Because I love him, even if he doesn't love me. I thought staying would make a difference ... that he'd forget about you."

  That stung, but I understood, and didn't get mad. “I love him, too,” I said. “I came back, didn't I?"

  “I didn't have to come back,” Dean said. He finally looked at me, and as I watched, the brightness left his eyes. His whole face sagged, but his gaze held mine. “I never left.” He looked away.

  “Dean..."

  “You'd better go, Harry. Behemoth is waiting."

  There didn't seem to be anything else to say. I got up and slowly worked my way around the tree, through the broken branches and kicked-up underbrush, back the way I came. I turned once, and saw Dean still sitting, slumped. I don't think he looked back at all.

  We left. I rode on Behemoth's shoulders, and the acolytes followed in two battered cars as Behemoth traveled down another dirt road that I'd never seen.

  How is your wife? Behemoth asked.

  I almost lied. Years of working in the business world made that natural. I didn't want to give Behemoth fifty-year-old bad news, but I don't lie to him. “The marriage ended pretty quickly. Mostly my fault, to be honest. The last I heard she got married again, moved to California and had a couple of kids. That was thirty years ago, though."

  Behemoth didn't answer for a long time. He could never fall out of love with Leviathan, or vice versa—their love was like natural law. I wonder if any human can feel so strongly ... and I'm afraid that some of them can. Not me, but some.
>
  I am sorry, Behemoth said at last, and then didn't speak of Belinda again, as if the whole situation disturbed him too deeply to contemplate.

  The acolytes occasionally drew alongside us and threw loaves of bread and bags of fruit for me onto Behemoth's vast back. Old men don't eat much. The acolytes brought me a blanket when it became clear we were going north. I marveled at the stretches of uninhabited land in this country. Behemoth walked a route that never touched a major city, and he only passed a few small towns. No one noticed us. In America, that's a pure miracle. I wonder sometimes if he bent the world somehow, to arrange that, if his own vast size could alter the very shape of the planet with its personal gravity.

  As Behemoth walked, he got bigger, until I couldn't look over the side without a rush of vertigo.

  The acolytes couldn't follow when we reached the Appalachian mountains, and we left them behind. They honked their horns and waved furiously. Behemoth didn't seem to notice.

  By that time, Behemoth towered fifty feet high at the shoulder, and by all logic should have collapsed under his own tremendous weight. He trudged on (though with strides as long as his, it hardly felt like trudging) in defiance of the square-cube law. He stepped over rivers and gorges and left footprints deep as mineshafts in soft fields. We crossed into Canada in North Dakota, and didn't pass any significant human habitation thereafter.

  Behemoth didn't want to stop walking, and before long the food gave out. At my age I don't eat much, and I drank when it rained. The water fell into my mouth, but it never touched Behemoth—just slid away a few inches from his skin, as if running down a sheet of glass. I wondered if that inviolability would protect him if he stepped into the sea, but I remembered the visions and knew it wouldn't. The powers that be accounted for rain, it seemed, but they wouldn't tolerate willful immersion. Pretty soon I noticed that rain fell, just for a little while, whenever I got thirsty. I didn't ask Behemoth about that. I developed a wheeze in my chest and a persistent cough. When my vision started turning red at the edges, I complained of hunger. Almost immediately, small brown mushrooms sprang up in the ancient dirt caked between Behemoth's shoulder blades. I ate them by the handful. They tasted a little woody, and a little like boiled eggs.