The Golden

by Lucius Shepard

“Yes,” said the woman. “We know. One is sorely in need of judgment.” She tipped her head, as if trying to see him in a better light. “Shall we judge her for you?”

  The prospect of unburdening himself of his responsibilities was appealing, but he resisted temptation. “No, my lord. But I beg you to watch over them while I am gone.”

  She inclined her head. “It will be done.”

  “I am curious about something, my lord,” Beheim said. “I have been told that all this, the investigation, the murder, is part of a game, that games are the order of the day, and that I am only an unimportant player. That much I can accept. But I find it difficult to be so ignorant of the goal of the game. The stakes.”

  The woman said nothing.

  “The matter of our common argument,” said Beheim. “The question as to whether or not the Family should go into the East…is this, perhaps, one of the things at stake? The resolution of that argument?”

  “Perhaps,” said the woman.

  Frustrated, Beheim said, “By ‘perhaps,’ do you mean it is one of many things at risk, or is it that—”

  “The answer to all your questions is ‘perhaps,’” the woman said. “Each moment brings a new answer, yet as far as you are concerned, they are all ‘perhaps,’ for you do not have the discretion necessary to perceive the nuances of the questions.”

  Beheim started to speak, but she waved him to silence.

  “This matter of a possible migration,” she went on, “it is of some small interest to us. And that being so, it is to an extent involved in all of our deliberations and our actions. But only to an extent. Should disaster come upon us, some here”—she indicated the onlookers, the dancing couples—“have other means of escape at their disposal apart from fleeing to the ends of the earth. Others have no wish to escape. Others yet no longer have any real understanding of the concept of escape. So you see, while it is a question that concerns the majority of our cousins, here, among this most illustrious minority, it merits spotty consideration at best.”

  “But surely you have at heart the welfare of all the Family, not just that of its most powerful members?”

  “If you could see what is in my heart,” the woman said, “your eyes would go dark with that vision. If you could perceive but one hundredth of the logics that assail me at every second, your brain would burst. Play your part. Learn from the playing of it. That is all you can do. At any rate, you will eventually draw your own conclusions, no matter what I tell you.”

  Beheim was disappointed. To have endured so much, to have passed through that harrowing antechamber and to have received such a flimsy answer, to have discovered that the Patriarch had been reduced to statuary, to a grotesque garden ornament capable of communicating only by means of a proxy, it was worse than disappointing. He had expected a more dynamic presence, someone whose power and clarity would act as a solvent upon his doubts and crystallize his wisdom.

  The woman let out an amused hiss. Her smile widened until the tips of her fangs were exposed, lending a newly sinister aspect to her beauty. Some of the couples had stopped their dancing and were regarding Beheim with what seemed sly anticipation.

  “You wish to confront the Patriarch?” the woman asked in a dry voice. “Truly you do have courage.”

  Beheim glanced in confusion at the statue of the enthroned man, with his corroded blue skin and dour mouth and slitted eyes. “I thought this was—”

  “Perhaps someday. For now he waits his time.” She moved close to Beheim, took his left hand. “Come with me, Michel. If it’s the Patriarch you wish to see, I will take you to him.”

  She drew him to the extreme edge of one of the black pools, and on glancing down, seeing lights drifting beneath the surface, fans of pallid radiance like a fading aurora borealis, he shrieked and threw himself backward, realizing that this pool, and likely all the rest, were not incidences of underground water but portals into the pure medium of Mystery, into the country of death. The woman held him fast, squeezing his hand with such force, he thought the bones would shatter. She turned a shriveling stare upon him, and he soon found himself absorbed by the shifts of color within the irises, the minute contractions and expansions of the pupils. His fear dwindled to a flickering anxiety. When she told him to step forward, he felt a twinge of alarm, nothing more, and did as she instructed.

  Breaking the surface of the pool was like breaking through the crust atop a churn of thickening butter. The crust slid greasily between Beheim’s legs, up his chest, across his face, like a blind thing groping at him, trying to acquaint itself with his shape. Then he and the woman were plunging down into a chill nothingness, a void populated by clusters of starry lights, scattered here and there like the flowers on a black bush. The presence of the lights wounded him; they seemed unattainably distant and bright and hopeful, antidotes to the fathomless darkness in which he was foundering. The cold was so intense, he could not feel the woman’s hand, and he was startled to find that she had maintained her grip. She floated half facing him, the classic lines of her face warped by a demonic smile, her skirt pushed back between her legs by their momentum, the stiff fabric molding to her belly and thighs; her hair lifted from her shoulders, merging with the blackness. She looked so fierce, so full of heat and viciousness, he expected her to burst into flames. He managed a quick glance behind him. There a solitary blue light winked and glittered—the pool, its surface seen from beneath. He made out the black walls of death curving on all sides away from this particular light, as if it were the neck of a bottle into which he had been dropped; but in every other direction he saw a perspectiveless depth, and when he glanced back again, he discovered that the blue light had shrunk and now occupied a position on the rim of a cluster of lights, and he could no longer detect any sign of enclosure.

  Chapter ELEVEN

  In the beginning he had little sense of the speed at which they were falling, because he did not struggle as he had on his day of judgment, content to plummet feetfirst, becoming if not totally relaxed, then accepting of the situation. Why, he reasoned, should he struggle? He was doing the Patriarch’s bidding. No harm would come to him. But when he noticed the woman’s hair flowing straight back behind her and recognized that their speed had increased markedly, then reason fled. He thought he felt the blackness seeping into him, insinuating itself into the corners of his eyes, his pores, flushing out what was left of his soul. Filling his brain with zeros, choking his heart, icing his bones. He pried at the woman’s fingers; he tried to rip away the blackness, to swim back the way he had come, but able only to use one hand, he made no headway and all his flailing succeeded in achieving was to send them spinning out of control. Light pinwheeled in his blurred vision; the breath was sucked from his chest. It took every ounce of his strength and determination to right them. The woman offered no assistance whatsoever. Nothing, it appeared, could disturb the pathological rectitude of her smile.

  “Damn you!” he said, surprised that he was able to hear even his own voice in all that whirling emptiness. “Let me go!” He tried unsuccessfully to pull free. Her smile broadened, and she shook her head mockingly, as if he were a child from whom she was withholding a treat.

  He drew back his hand and, marshaling all his strength, slapped her face. Her head did not move an inch; she might have been made of stone. He hooked his fingers, clawed at her eyes, but she knocked his hand aside, numbing his wrist with the blow. He wanted to plead with her, to beg, but his pride would not allow it.

  The current drawing them into the void was stronger than any he had heretofore experienced. Even had he had both hands free, he doubted he would have been able to make much progress against it. And there might, he decided, be no need to do so, for the current—gaining speed with every passing second—appeared to be bearing them toward the distant lights, toward salvation, not away from them as had been the case during his judgment. Perhaps, he told himself, his thoughts once again tinged with panic, with a touch of hysterical glee, perhaps the Patriarch was not
at home, off doing errands or some such, and a swift-moving current was performing butler service, whisking whoever stopped in for a visit back to their point of origin or else to some other safe harbor. Yet as they approached the nearest light, a yellow pinprick that had swelled into a radiant golden sun, he realized that its center, into which he might have wished to steer, preferring whatever place it opened onto to this endless fall, was blocked by something. A woman, he saw on drawing closer. Sinewy; olive-skinned. With apple breasts and muscular legs and a frightful gash in her throat that must have nearly decapitated her. Dried blood stained her breasts and belly, matted her secret hair. She hovered in the midst of the golden fire, immense, a giantess; but Beheim knew her size was only apparent, a product of the visual distortions that afflicted all who passed through Mystery, and when he drew closer yet, he would find the light diminished and the woman shrunk to normal proportions. Initially he had assumed her to be an Imago, a scarecrow left by the Patriarch to warn off the uninvited, but as they flashed toward her she reached out her arms as if in welcome. His heart stuttered on seeing her more clearly. Red teeth filed to points, pupils cored with fire. Her fingernails were ebony-colored, long and curved and sharp. He tried to alter their course, to lunge aside, but the current proved irresistible and he was borne into the golden halation, then to within inches of the woman’s grasping fingers. So close he could see the streaks of gray rot surfaced from beneath her skin, the collapsed humors of her eyes, and he thought he saw something else, something moving sluggishly in the blackness of her mouth, an insect god perhaps, secure behind the scarlet portcullis of her teeth. Then, as she slashed at him with those razoring fingernails, the current spun him off to safety. From behind him there came a shrill cry of disappointment.

  Once again he attempted to break free from the woman in white; once again he failed.

  “Bitch!” he cried, and hurled himself about; the woman’s nails punched into his wrist.

  He tried to reel her in by the forearm; he clawed at her, but she blocked his hand away. He swung his fist, and this time, instead of blocking him, she let the blow glance off the side of her head and returned a blow of her own. Her fist caught him flush on the temple, leaving him stunned, dangling limply in her grasp, watching the darkness flow past and the lights turn first into stars, and then into demon cages. He realized now it was useless to contend with her, and rather than wasting his energy in plotting an escape, he sought comfort in his memories, searching for something that would ease his fear. He was not surprised when his thoughts settled on Alexandra.

  Though he had come to suspect almost everything about their involvement, it was the one time that he could recall since his judgment when life had surpassed his expectations, when something untrammeled had been attained, even if that something was mere intensity, a bright flash of being that seemed to exist outside of time, apart from the chains of events that bound them to a path of conflict and distrust and betrayal. One could not, he thought, derive much hope from such a moment. It was a freak, a sport born of lightnings that had struck and transfigured the body of their soiled emotions. Yet the simple fact of its existence was in itself an embodiment of hope, like a sign in the sky presaging some miraculous advent, and as he reclaimed those memories, tasting their flavors and wrapping himself in their colors and sensations, he felt if not hopeful, then at least cleaner for having them within him. He tasted Alexandra’s mouth and heard her whisper, experienced the sly touches of her long fingers, rocked with her again in that immense funereal bed. He grew certain that among these glints and quivers there must be a single moment whose purity outstripped the duplicitous origins of the act, an instance of sheer connectivity that offered some wholesome proof and held a promise more lasting than that of sexual delight. An exchange of looks, a peaceful interval in which they had known some heart’s truth. If he had the time, he told himself, to study those memories in sequence, surely he would be able to isolate that one absolute. But he could not sustain the images, and on opening his eyes, he discovered the woman in white watching him, trying to blight with her poisonous dark stare whatever solace his memory had yielded.

  Each time they approached one of the lights, they would accelerate, sweeping past it in a dizzying rush, and every one was as the first: a bright passage blocked by some horrid creature or another, all snapping, biting, slashing, narrowly missing Beheim. He had the idea he was being shown that there was no way out, that this was a pocket of death the Patriarch had isolated and made his own. What this signified, he could not guess, but he did not believe it augured well. They hurtled past a scorpion prowling the innards of a blue star, a wolf raving in crimson fire, a white sun at whose heart nestled a gigantic worm, past a variety of deformed men and women, past a fly wearing a crown, past twists of darkness like living flaws at the center of burning jewels, past a shifting puzzle of glowing silver bones, past winged rats and apes with human genitals and bloated corpse faces with adders’ tongues, until at last, beyond the clustered lights, he made out a wire-thin strip of dead white that bisected the blackness, lending the illusion of a horizon to that horizonless depth. Though it seemed bland by contrast to the terrors he had already encountered, he believed that this was either signal or symptom of the ultimate terror of the place: the Patriarch. He felt an eerie, cluttered sensation in his head, as if his brain were clogged with an overabundance of thoughts, and this developed into a mental discordance, shards of rage, peals of disgust, interludes of gloating joy, blasts of implacable anger, and lustful thoughts like knives, a mosaic of impressions that together composed a unity, a whole. He understood that in penetrating the surface of the black pool, the country of death, he had also penetrated the calm, chill surface of the Patriarch’s mind and fallen into the chaos beneath, into this little death he had made of all his years of feasts and dreams and despondencies, an inky fever in which he endlessly soaked himself, having no better way to pass the time, no greater use for life, for he was growing ever closer to death, and yet because of his nature he would never die, only grow more deathlike, just as in that schoolboy theorem, the first mathematical clue one receives of the utter incomprehensibility of the universe, it is stated that if one attempts to travel from Point A to Point B by going half the distance, then half the remaining distance, then half what is left after that, and so on and so forth, one will never reach Point B but will continue to fall short of one’s destination by increasingly infinitesimal fractions, and thus one is fated to travel forever between what was once the beginning and the end, or between the towns of Reims and Mornay, or between whatever poles one has chosen, poles that have by now evolved into two ludicrous abstractions. It was, Beheim thought, this capacity to withstand the bleakest and most irrational of environments, to thrive in the absolute negative, that neutered the Family’s will to survive, that persuaded them to twist each hopeful strand of being into something even darker than the darkness of their origins, and caused them to try to destroy that which was virtually indestructible. And now he, too, was being contaminated by these tendencies, for though the Patriarch’s ravings were resounding in his head and he was traveling hand in hand with a woman who was nourished by corruption and treachery, he was beginning to adapt to Mystery—and not merely in order to survive as he had done after receiving Agenor’s judgment. He was coming to appreciate its qualities, to derive sustenance from it. It was not that he had grown less afraid; it was rather that he had acknowledged fear instead of reacting against it; and having acclimated to this degree, he was capable of looking without prejudice at his surroundings, of understanding that they were not absolutely inimical.

  Suddenly the black silence and the false stars and the cold rang a familiar change in him, as if he had scented an old friendly smell or had of the place a sense of commonality such as long ago—not so very long, he thought, barely two years—he might have taken from a row of plane trees standing sharp against a milky dawn near his father’s house outside Irun, a white mist blanketing a potato field, the powdery
green burst of a myrtle bush, things that have seated themselves so firmly in our hearts, we no longer notice them, but that, when we are brought hard upon them after a lengthy absence, cause a tremor in our souls. Things of home. That, he realized, was the secret call of this darkness, the thing that softened his dread; the knowledge that his birth could no longer be considered to have occurred in Irun. Mystery was now his birthplace, the soil from which he had sprung on his day of judgment and to which he would always hereafter return. This emptiness, this abandoned well with its demons and lights and torments had supplanted the spicy odor of his grandfather’s venison stew, the purring of a favorite cat, the tinkling of his mother’s piano with its ill-tuned high C souring a Schumann waltz. Understanding this harrowed him, yet it also gave him strength, attached him to a mooring that made his fall seem less precipitous and in the end provided him with a ground on which to stand, from which to wield whatever lever he could carpenter against fate.

  They were nearing another golden light, one at whose center there capered a scrawny, red-eyed old man with unkempt, shoulder-length gray hair, all rags and fangs and bony, clutching fingers. Beheim, who had lost confidence in the notion that the nature of his mission would assure his safety, devised a plan. He engaged the eyes of the woman in white, floating superimposed upon the black backdrop like an angel of death and desire, her flesh showing sleek and gleaming through the rips in her gown like the skin of a succulent. He beckoned to her with his free hand, inviting her into an embrace. “I’m frightened,” he said. “Let me come close for a moment.” He knew that she would not be afraid of him, certain of her physical superiority, and though she would suspect his actions, she would delight in teasing him with the prospect of hope. He concentrated with all his might on presenting an image of fear and entreaty.

  She let him pull her close, but did not relax her grip. Her hips settled plushly against him. Seen at that intimate distance, her face dissolved into a pale blur dominated by those compelling eyes—to avoid being mesmerized by them, he drew her into a kiss. Her lips tasted of stale blood, and when she probed his mouth with her tongue, it felt thick and clammy and snail-slow, like those mindless things one finds half-alive in a spadeful of turned-up dirt. Yet that soiled kiss claimed far more of his attention than he had wanted, and he had to remind himself to keep watch over her shoulder as they closed on the golden light with its aged sentinel, knowing he would have to time his actions perfectly. Beyond the light, the strip of whiteness strung across the void was lumping up in spots and acquiring the lineaments of a smashed-thin face, a stretched toothy mouth flanked by slit eyes with inflamed rims and notched pupils, like a monster peering out from a corner of flatland that it was busy prying up. Beheim forced his mind back to the woman in white and the old man, but could not stop picturing the white thing taking shape in the distance.