by J. Thorn
As he turned back to Deva to begin the ritual, he heard Kole utter a single syllable.
“Stop.”
***
Deva’s chants ground to a halt. The fingers of the smoke coming from the cloud seemed to hesitate as well. Samuel looked to Kole, the color draining from his face along with the blood from his wounds.
“Wait, Samuel.”
Kole pulled himself up with one arm, the other trickling blood on the stone. He stumbled forward and took a few steps toward the cauldron. Lindsay wiped a tear from her face and bent in to hear the conversation.
“I’ll do it.”
“Do what?” Samuel asked.
“Replace him, take the job, whatever it is the crazy fuck is mumbling about. I’m his son too, apparently. I’ll do it.”
Samuel took a step toward Kole and looked into his eyes. He saw a flicker of empathy and kindness buried beneath decades of pain. It grew and fought for daylight.
“I can’t let you take the fall for me. It’s not right.”
“The fuck it ain’t,” Kole said. “I owe the universe. I tried so hard to erase myself, and all it did was get me reset inside another reversion. So before you crown me a saint, realize this ain’t a noble sacrifice. I’m doing this for me.”
Lindsay smiled, hope tilting the corners of her mouth upward. Samuel looked at Deva and then back to Kole.
“I don’t believe that. I know there’s still something inside you that wants to be free, wants the light. You’re tired of living in the darkness. I get that. I’m not sure I can allow you to take the role for me.”
“Whatever, dickhead,” Kole said, giving Samuel a wink through the pain. “Rationalize it any way you like. I can do this as long as Father Time over there is cool with it.”
Samuel looked back to Deva and realized the old man had not resumed his chant. He stood with his head lowered as if holding the reversion at bay.
“The son must follow the father,” Deva said.
Kole looked at Samuel. “He’s cool with it. Now get the fuck out of my way and take your girl somewhere nice. You two have earned a tropical vacation with a beach and a private stock of rum.”
Samuel smiled and grasped Kole’s uninjured shoulder. He leaned over and whispered into his ear. Lindsay turned to face the men but was unable to hear their private exchange.
Kole returned the smile and nodded before turning back to Deva. “On with the Gregorian chants, Pops. Let’s get this done before the reversion tosses old Major back at us.”
***
The mountain rumbled as if being pulled across the desert. The storm cloud filled pockets of the room, while lightning ripped through the sky, thunder on its heels in bombastic glory. Deva stood over the cauldron with Kole propped against the wall on the opposite side. Lindsay and Samuel stood back several steps, looking between Deva and Kole, hoping Kole would have enough strength to make it.
Kole winked at them both, waiting as Deva continued with the chants with his arms raised high and still. He lowered his head, and his robes billowed at his feet. The old man appeared worn out. He struggled through as if his body could collapse at any moment.
“Accept the son for the father,” Deva said, his chin upward as he spoke between chants.
“Let’s go, Pops. Let’s get this thing done.”
A pinpoint of light appeared above the cauldron at the peak of the tower. It hovered at first, then began to expand outward in all directions. The fingers of the cloud recoiled as if the light had singed them. The smoke retreated and filtered out of the open windows as light encompassed the entire room.
“He shall oversee the cycles as I have done for so long. He will guide those who arrive toward their duty and banish those who forsake it.”
Kole nodded at Deva, wincing as the blood continued to trickle from the raw stumps where fingers used to be. He looked down at his hand when he felt a tingling sensation. At first, Kole became agitated, worried something was horribly wrong and an infection of some sort had invaded the wounds. But the pain was gone, indicating it wasn’t what he thought. Thin beams came from the focal point above and illuminated his hand. As it warmed his skin, bone and muscle reappeared. Tendons and skin followed, until the transformation ended with restored fingernails. The beam rose up from Kole’s midsection and settled on the gash in his arm. The skin fused as quickly as the blade had opened it. Even the ink lines of Kole’s tattoo were restored by the light.
“Damn,” Kole said, stretching out his arm and flexing his fingers. “You see this shit?” he asked Samuel.
Deva spoke. “The regeneration and transformation of flesh now resides in you. Use it sparingly on yourself and never on another. The masters give you this ability to preserve the cycle.”
“Transformation?” Kole asked.
Samuel remembered his first encounter with Deva, the rotting corpse climbing from the swamp. “I think you can take different forms. Appear to people inside the reversion in ways they must see you.”
Deva nodded, confirming Samuel’s explanation. “People are not always ready to see with their eyes when their hearts want a different reality.”
Samuel let the comment linger. He felt Lindsay’s hand in his own. Kole straightened his back. He tilted his head left and right like a boxer entering the ring before a fight.
“Nice. Ain’t found a drug yet that felt like that.”
Samuel thought he saw the beginnings of Deva’s smile, but figured it had to be the way the light bounced off his beard.
“It is time for my release,” Deva said.
Samuel stepped forward, as did Kole.
“I will be forever with you both. Remember to honor your ahimsa. The path ahead will be different for each of you, challenging in its own way. Honor your oath.”
Kole looked at Samuel, and they looked back to Deva. Contentment flooded his face, and his eyes brimmed with satisfaction. He bowed his head as the light circled his body. Lines shot from the center, which hovered over his chest. Deva turned his head skyward and opened his mouth. The light filled him, and Samuel and Kole had to shield their faces from it. When it subsided, nothing remained of Deva except his staff on the floor.
“Can’t leave this lying around,” Kole said. He lifted the staff, feeling its weight in his hands.
“The light is gone and the cloud is seeping back in here,” Lindsay said, snapping the men from their momentary lapse. The fire of the cauldron went dark, and fierce winds began to whip through the tower. The winds cried like dying birds. Samuel put his hands to his ears, protecting them from the sudden burst of sound breaking through the locality.
The rumbling intensified as well, bursts of dust and dry stone raining down upon them. The cloud swirled about the tower, the combination of noise and vibration threatening to bring the mountain to its knees. Kole looked at his brother and Lindsay, and a smile crept across his face.
“Time for goodbyes,” he said.
“C’mon,” Lindsay said. “We’ve got to get out of here before the whole thing comes down.”
“Not me,” Kole said. “This is my place now. I’ll go through this with the reversion and come out the other side. You two, however, better get your asses moving.”
“Where?” Samuel asked.
“You’re going to have to slip, but you can’t do it unless you’re outside of the mountain. Not sure how I know that, but then again, I couldn’t tell you how I regrew fingers, either.”
“Thank you,” Lindsay said, reaching up and placing a kiss on Kole’s cheek.
He nodded as she stepped back toward the spiral staircase. Fist-sized chunks of stone fell to the floor, and black cracks appeared in the sculpted walls of the tower.
“Get going. Get her out of here,” Kole said to Samuel.
“You didn’t have to do it.”
“Yes I did, Sammyboy. Don’t fool yourself into thinking I did it for you and your lovely little girl. Take what you can and run. That’s the best you’ll ever get out of life.”
“Believe whatever the fuck you like. I’m taking it just like I did on the streets. You never turn down a score or ask why.”
“I owe you.”
“Bullshit,” Kole said. “You don’t owe me jack. Get the fuck out of here before this mountain buries you both.”
“We’ll meet up again,” Samuel said, a slight smile spreading across his face.
“You’d better hope we don’t,” Kole said.
Samuel studied his face, looking for meaning in the comment. He wondered if Kole meant a future meeting between them would be impossible—or if it was meant as a warning. He decided it didn’t matter, and turned to find Lindsay poised above the steps.
“So you’re just gonna stand there?” Lindsay asked Kole.
“Yep. Remodelers are coming with the cloud and are gonna do great things with this little space. I need to stay until the work is done.”
“C’mon,” Samuel said to Lindsay. “He knows what he’s doing. We need to get out before we can slip.”
“Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.”
Samuel looked back at Kole, standing over the empty cauldron, holding the staff in his right hand. As he followed Lindsay down the spiral staircase, he glanced once more at Kole, and Samuel could have sworn he was looking into Deva’s eyes.
Chapter 12
Samuel struggled to keep up with her. He watched Lindsay’s legs race down the stone stairs, two and sometimes three at a time. He marveled at her ability to ignore the puncture wound in her shoulder while he struggled to inhale through a bloodied face. She would look back to make sure he was still there, occasionally ducking the flaming torches now being ejected from the walls by the force of the reversion. It felt angry, mean, vengeful, and Samuel knew it was not going to let them go without a fight.
More cracks raced up through the walls of the stone staircase, some parting enough to allow the charcoal smoke of the cloud inside. Once the vapor rushed through, the cracks widened and blocks as heavy as grown men tumbled forth and down the steps. Samuel and Lindsay kept descending, but each time the mountain shook, more rock fell on them. By the time Samuel reached what he believed to be the halfway point, they were both covered in white dust and looked like apparitions floating down the steps.
“Why do we have to get outside to slip?” Lindsay asked as she continued in the lead, now yelling over the sound of crushing stone.
“I don’t know. Kole said we had to get free of the mountain before we could.”
Samuel thought of the way the reversion slowed as it entered the tower. It crawled through the open windows and snaked up the stone, but it never came through full force the way it had in the cave with Mara. He believed the mountain held an energy that slowed the reversion, and it probably had the same effect on a slip.
Lindsay nodded and turned to go down another step when a massive hunk of stone fell inward, landing in the middle of the spiral staircase and knocking her down. Samuel saw the grimace on her face as the fragment of the mountain trapped her foot between two stairs. She cried out and pulled at her knee with both hands in a futile attempt to free herself from the collapse. Samuel scurried down to her, careful not to step on the hunk of stone now holding Lindsay to the mountain.
“Let me see,” he said, screaming over the destruction. He reached down and saw that her foot was trapped between the angle of the fallen stone and the smooth surface of the step. He sighed, thankful it had not crushed her leg entirely.
“When I say so, I want you to turn your ankle inward, toe pointing toward your other leg. Got it?”
Lindsay nodded, biting her lip and turning her head away from the sight.
“On three. One, two, three.”
Lindsay turned, and Samuel pushed the slab of stone as hard as he could. It was enough to allow her to slide her leg out. She brought her knee up to her chest and winced. Samuel saw her rotating her foot and thought there might be hope yet.
“Can you stand?”
“I’ll try,” she said.
Samuel grabbed her underneath both arms and helped to ease her to her feet. He watched as she used her good leg to push her weight upward. Leaning against the wall of the staircase, Lindsay was able to stand, but Samuel knew she would not be able to move at full speed.
“How does that feel?”
She looked at him, flipping him the middle finger.
“Stupid question. Sorry. Can you walk?”
Lindsay nodded, biting her bottom lip.
Samuel took the lead, guessing they had to be at least two thirds of the way down the staircase. It was at that moment he realized they would never make it. The mountain shook them in its grip as the reversion threatened to bring it down from the inside out. He watched more and more stone tumbling down the staircase, blocking their descent and any hope of getting out in time. He stopped, and Lindsay came to a standstill behind him, hopping on her uninjured foot.
“We’re not going to make it,” he said to her.
“Don’t talk like that.”
“I’m serious. Look. The staircase is already filled with chunks of stone.”
Fissures in the stairwell caused by the reversion’s attack allowed light to come through and illuminate the steps in a ghostly fog. The combination of noise, dust and vibrations made Samuel feel as though he stood inside an angry volcano, ready to spew forth its molten madness. Lindsay looked down and then into Samuel’s eyes.
“Go without me,” she said.
He waved her off instantly. “I wouldn’t. And even if I did, I couldn’t make it through.”
Another rumbling shook the staircase. The reversion had the mountain by the throat. Samuel and Lindsay stumbled backward, arms outstretched while trying to keep their balance.
“So what do we do?” she asked, a hint of resignation sliding underneath her words.
Before Samuel could answer, he felt an odd sensation. As a child, Samuel’s parents had taken him to New York City, where they climbed the metal stairwell to the top of the Statue of Liberty. An unusually brisk July wind had come off the harbor and pushed the statue back and forth, giving those looking out of her crown a somewhat unstable view of lower Manhattan. Samuel remembered the feeling of that swaying motion at a great height. The memory combined with his current situation made him want to vomit.
“This thing is coming down,” Lindsay said.
***
“We’re going to have to try now.”
“But I thought Kole said we couldn’t here, that the mountain wouldn’t let us?”
Samuel shook his head, wiping the dust of crushed stone from his nose. “True. But I’m not so sure the mountain exists anymore. I think it’s already in pieces, and maybe those cracks are enough to allow us to slip out.”
Samuel looked at her, hoping to hide the fear and doubt coursing through his veins. He looked upward, toward the tower, and wondered when it would all come crashing down upon them. Samuel guessed minutes, possibly seconds.
“Then let’s get on with it. I’d rather not be buried here.”
He nodded and closed his eyes. They both sat on the edge of a step, canting downward. Samuel hoped it would remain long enough for him to open the portal.
“We’ll have to wait for it to open. When it does, don’t let go of my hand. When I jump, you jump.”
Lindsay smiled and nodded. Samuel withdrew the triskele from underneath his shirt and squeezed it in the palm of his hand. He could feel a thrumming; a current of energy moving through it that gave him a sliver of hope.
He closed his eyes and let the dance of color appear inside his head. Samuel remembered what he learned from all of his previous slips. The slip felt like riding a bicycle. At first, the task seemed insurmountable, yet every child eventually rode upon those two thin wheels. Samuel had not forgotten how to conjure the portal and could now do so much faster.
The portal appeared as it always had: a pinprick of li
ght in the middle of darkness. Samuel watched it grow inside his mind, his eyes closed. Another shift in the mountain threw Lindsay into his shoulder, but Samuel fought the physical sensation and allowed the bright hole to expand until it filled his entire, internal vision. He opened his eyes and saw it transform into the physical realm.
Lindsay clutched his arm as the external wall fell away. Fierce, screeching winds yanked at her hair, threatening to pull her off the staircase and smash her to the desert floor thousands of feet below. Samuel imagined being at altitude inside a commercial airliner and having the side of the craft ripped open. He fought to keep them tethered to the stone steps for a few more seconds until the portal would be large enough for them to enter.
“Hurry,” Lindsay screamed, knowing Samuel had no control over the portal’s expansion.
She leaned over the steps, where the cloud had backed off the mountain and provided her with a dizzying view of the desert floor. The staircase swayed back and forth, each movement a bit farther than the last. Lindsay could see the horizon rushing inward as if driven by a massive sandstorm. The cloud rose above the mountain, and then began to descend upon it like a final curtain call.
The portal opened to the size of a bay window and then slowed, still expanding. Samuel watched as it floated outward until it hovered in the air beyond the wall of the staircase, hanging several thousand feet above the ground.
“Oh my God, Samuel. I can’t. I’m so afraid of heights. I can’t.”
Samuel suppressed his own fear and thought back to his time in the trees, high above the wolves and the horde.
This is just like that, he thought. Just don’t look down.
He could not bring himself to say that ridiculous thing to Lindsay. He could never imagine anyone scared of heights being comforted by not looking down. They always did anyway. Instead, he acknowledged the situation and gave her one last instruction.
“On three, we dive as if the portal is the deep end at the local pool. Hands out and up, head first. Don’t let go of my hand.”
