Whispers From The Abyss (16 page)

I was having those dreams again, tonight, when Dr. Curtis shook me awake. His brow was furrowed with concern.

“What time is it?” I asked him, rubbing my eyes.

“It’s seven.” He said…. Then added. “You were shouting.”

“A nightmare, I’ll be ok. Right now I… “

“Right now you are going home and sleeping in your own bed.”

Panic worse than the dream hit me, “But…!”

“The Jar will be here when you come back. Though I have half a mind to assign it to somebody else. This isn’t healthy Beth. Your obsession over this Jar has caused you to ignore your other duties. I’ve ignored it as long as I can.” He took my arm and led me to the elevator. I did not resist. “When you come back in the morning, you and I are going to have a serious talk. Ok. Perhaps it’s time you took a break.” I took the cab he called for me. But I did not sleep. Instead, I waited and prepared.

It is a full moon tonight, and I’ve just broken into the museum. I’m kneeling on the cold stone floor of my work room. The Jar of Aten-Hor sits before me. The image has changed. Khephren’s body is being prepared for the natron emersion. His organs have been removed, the most sacred have been placed inside canopic Jars. Three Jars were full. The lids shaped like a man, a baboon, and a hawk in their places, sealing the organs inside. The jackal-headed lid sat open. Anubis held in his mighty hand the stomach of Khephren. Rays of power emanate from it, bathing me in its light and I can feel an orb of warmth growing just below my ribcage.

I raise above my head a kitchen knife I took from home. A poor substitute for the ceremonial obsidian knives but it would serve its purpose. I spoke the words that had been burned into my subconscious over the past few months. They sear my tongue and crack the skin of my lips. I hear a sound and turn my head, knife ready to destroy any who would interrupt this sacred right. Nathanial Hotep was standing in the doorway. He ventured no further into the room than the doorframe. He was smiling.

I smiled too. Yes, it was right that he be here. Someone must return the Jar to
Egypt. To Him. As I finished the incantation I called out Khephren’s name and plunged the knife deep into my abdomen. I felt no fear or pain.

Just as the images on the Jar ran backwards, so too was the dead god being resurrected through reversal. And I had been chosen as part of his reverse-creation. My head sank next to the Jar, red running down the sides of its perfect alabaster surface, showing the carvings in a dark relief. Before I passed out I replaced the lid. As Nathanial Hotep took it away, I saw the Jar in the painting was now filled.

Flipping houses is a strange business.  Sometimes you find old family photo albums left behind, or boxes of Christmas ornaments, or even rotted food in the back of cabinets.  Sometimes worse things.

We'd bought a fixer-upper off Coldwell Banker in an old part of town.  The neighborhood wasn't too bad, but, inside, the house was horrible.  The corners on the window sills had been chewed up.  There were scratch marks on the wall up to three feet high.  Some of them were an inch deep, all the way through the drywall.  Other walls had dents and holes, as if something had pounded on them and not known when to stop.

“They must've had a dog,” I reasoned.

My buddy
Chad hacked to clear his throat and pointed a work-glove around the floor.  “A bunch of dogs.”

The carpet was the worst.  There were stains in colors I hadn't seen before, and they were everywhere.  It hurt to look at them.

I couldn't imagine what had caused the stains, but, whatever it was, it reeked.  Maybe someone urinated green tea and spoiled milk.  Despite the Glade plug-ins the realtor had put in every room and being aired out for God knew how long, we couldn't work in the house without dust masks just to keep out the smell.

Structurally, the house was sound.  We'd tear out the carpets, fix all the walls, paint everything, and lay down bamboo flooring.  Some yuppie couple would buy it off us for twice what we paid for it.

When we arrived at the house for the first day's work, several of the neighbors stopped to watch.  We waved to a couple, but nobody waved back.  They just watched us with wide eyes.  When the realtor had brought us by before, the same thing had happened.

All he'd say was, “It's a foreclosure, and we get that a lot.  Usually something happens to the owner to start missing his payments until the bank takes the house.  The trick is to resell it and get their property values back up.  Then they'll be happy with us.”

The carpet in the living room was different than the bedrooms, newer, but it still stank.  We decided to tear it out first and work our way into the bedrooms.

I dug my carpet knife through the weave, which gave a dull grumble as it slit.  Once I could get a good handhold, I pulled it up around the edges.  The tack board gave way easily enough, revealing the pad below.

It was even worse.  Whatever the stains had been, they had soaked through and given the pad sick gray-white spots. The foul smell exploded.

“Get that stuff out of here!”
Chad yelled at me.

I didn't bother inhaling enough to reply.  I dragged the pad out of the house and tossed it into the Dumpster alongside the poisoned carpet.  Dogs in the neighborhood began barking.  Birds fluttered away.

When I came back inside, I found Chad standing, fist on his hip, staring.

“What's up?”

He just pointed.

The concrete slab was painted.  It was like a mural with a hundred different figures: snakes, squids, goats, naked women and men, demons.  They were in a circle, dancing, fornicating, and killing one another.  It was a blood-orgy.  The circle had symbols around it, things I couldn't read.  In the very center, there was a scorchmark.

Over the entire thing, a huge blue X had been painted.  It might've been a cross set on its side, but it was hard to make out.  At the edges, the blue paint was thick, but in the middle and on the circle, it was already chipping, as if the mural repelled it.

When I looked up, I saw
Chad walking back from the truck with a sledgehammer.  Without a word, he raised it over his head and slammed it into the concrete.  It cracked, not very deeply, but an edge of the mural had been broken.  I grabbed a pick we used for heavy landscaping and joined in.

The house burned down that night.  I hated to rig an electrical fire like that, but we couldn't risk whatever had been inside the circle still being in the house.

The insurance money covered rebuilding, including breaking up the old slab and laying a clean foundation.  The fire marshal signed off on it without a hitch.  He'd seen it more often than he wanted to admit.

New Mexico hung beneath a gunmetal sky like it might drop away at any moment. A flat expanse of black and grey and tan, lit by a sliver of silver cutting the darkness in half at the horizon. Scrub brush and arroyos and gullies and low mountains, and a road leading into nothing, from nothing.

From inside the bus station, the horizon, just another line of light, intersected blue and red vertical lines flickering on and off. Reflected neon. BUS STATION.

Emmanuel stood there, before opening, watching the sun come up, the neon clicking on and off, his own eyes in the window until the light took them.

Then he got to it.

He was lucky to have the job. With his leg, and the war, and the lack of work in the state, he was happy with his lot. Most of the time, except for Lucille, he was alone. A building the size of a school gymnasium, empty, in the middle of the desert, staffed by one.

He swept and polished and laughed at the jokes he told himself, and at two he sat in one of the smooth wood benches and ate his eggs and drank his tin of coffee. It was a dream, the job; like some sort of afterlife.

Sometimes, other people were there. Not Lucille, she didn't count. She was invisible, and came and exited from the outside of the building into her booth to sell or stamp tickets like she was some sort of tick, latching on. She'd disappear back to the town between the scheduled buses, and he no more spoke to her than he might speak to one of the brass knobs that rode the wood posts at the double doors.

Like him, she was a creature of this place, but they existed in different orbits, rarely intersecting.

Those who arrived at the station were the same. Young men, old men. No women.

Men with crazy hair and spectacles and beaten old valises and odd heavy machines in locked carry cases with handles. Thinkers. Disheveled men of letters. Men in meticulous suits with egg stains on their lapels and undone trousers.

He knew they were smart because of the accents.

They all did the same thing. They'd ask if this was
Christi, New Mexico, and Emmanuel would say yeah, it was. Then, they'd step outside and wait.

The soldiers in the jeep or the truck would show up a few minutes later.

They'd load the man in, and drive off into the desert, cutting off the main road on to the crushed gravel road that ran out to the arroyos. Out where the nothing should be.

In the years that they'd been showing up, Emmanuel learned many things about the visitors. The greatest moment of revelation had been when one man approached and presented some sort of military order to him. Emmanuel took it, and glanced at it without thinking, then quickly handed it back.

DR. LEITZ, the document said, and the words RESEARCH and ISOTOPE and HALF-LIFE jumped from the page, though they meant nothing to him. Still, it scared him.

It confirmed what he thought — the military was gathering scientists out in the desert to build something for the war.

Everyone in town knew something was up out there somewhere. The train spur from Christi moved equipment all the time now, tarpaulin covered things presided over by soldiers carrying carbines who did nothing but stare at passersby implacably, daring them to approach.

By the second year, lots of men came through. At the start, it was a trickle. Now it was a torrent. Busses full of them. Huge 4x4 trucks to pick them up. Soldiers in groups of ten with long-guns.

Army trucks with no markings.

But no one stayed, usually. No one waited. And those floods of people only happened once or twice a month. Mostly, it was still lone men.

Besides that, it was usually just Emmanuel in the station, alone.

Usually.

The man sat so still in the back of the wood seats, head down, hat still on (and wasn't that strange), watching the floor.

Emmanuel jumped when he saw him. He opened the station just like normal, and cleaned the bathrooms, and when he stepped back out, found the man in the seats, like some new hastily installed statue.

Before cleaning the bathrooms, the station was empty. Now, the man.

Emmanuel ignored him, thinking he was one of the men come to be picked up. That thought lasted through an hour of silence.

Finally, Emmanuel shouted to him, "are you waiting?"

The man looked up. His face was thin and pale, and his teeth were pearlescent and light green. His eyes a grey. He looked sallow and sick.

When he grinned it was like a skull laughing.

"I wait," the stranger said, and his voice hid some alien accent. Something foreign and strange; a lilt. Something riding the end of his words, and then only for a second.

Emmanuel found he didn't know what else to say.

The man waited all day. Ten minutes before the station closed, he stood suddenly, towering in the room, a foot taller than Emmanuel, and drifted out the back door into the dark.

He walked away from town into the desert.

*     *     *

The skull man was there the next day, in the same manner. Appearing before the first bus and not from the direction of the town. He congealed in the same seat, head down just like before, like the world had changed around him.

That day, another man came from the bus. A big man wearing a long coat and carrying what looked like a travel typewriter in a valise. He looked around and Emmanuel imagined what he would sound like when he asked the question.

He sounded German. Emmanuel pointed outside, and the man was picked up in twenty minutes by two MPs in a Jeep.

The stranger in the seat, the skull man, watched the new arrival with avidity. He waited. He seemed ready to spring to action if something was said, or unsaid.

When the words were spoken and the German sounding man left, the skull man relaxed. He disappeared before closing again.

*     *     *

They did this for a week or more. Emmanuel lost count. Every day was the same at the station. Soon the skull man became part of that sameness.

*     *    *

"Did you know," the skull man said quite suddenly, cutting through the silence of the station, "that the war will end on 2 September, 1945?"

The voice sounded as if the words were strung together from various conversations. Like a dozen people were asked to read words in order from a list, all without knowing what might be said after them. Still, it was clipped, precise.

"Oh?" Emmanuel found himself saying, without knowing why. He kept sweeping.

"That is the global war. Not the European War.
That
will end 8 May 1945."

"Huh," Emmanuel said. Trying to catch a Hershey's wrapper with his broom, but it swept to the side spinning lazy circles in an eddy of air.

He tried to picture the end of the war, and found he could not encompass it. It was a fleeting feeling of completion, a gap in his world somewhere in the future. A fiction. The war was everything in a way where it was impossible to dismiss as something that might, someday in the future, end.

"Yes." The skull man said.

"Yes, yes."

Emmanuel didn't know why, but the crazy talk upset him.

*     *     *

On what must have been the third week with the skull man, Emmanuel stepped up and put his broom aside. It has taken six hours of gathering his resolve to bring himself to speak.

"Mister what are you waiting for, exactly?"

The skull man looked through him. He'd never been this close before. His skin was nearly transparent, like that of a much older man, but stretched thin, without wrinkles. Veins traced patterns across his cheeks, and the whites of his grey eyes were tinged brown near the edges.

His pupils contracted suddenly, a reflection of Emmanuel in each.

"Who," he said.

"What?"

"Who am I waiting for."

"Who are you waiting for then? Can I help you?"

They waited there for a long time.

"For a man," the skull man smiled and looked back down at his thin, pale hands. The man's fingers, Emmanuel saw, were extraordinarily long. The skull man had them in his lap, folded open, palms up.

There were no lines on the palms. They were smooth and gray and blank.

Emmanuel had never reached a point in a conversation like this. The talk just dried up and fell on the ground, dead. He found himself struggling to find something to do with his hands. His head kept trying to turn away, to look somewhere else.

Emmanuel moved his mouth, and nothing came out. He licked his lips and tried again.

"Why are you in my bus station?"

"Because this is when he is," the skull man said.

"I am here because this is what we do. In service of the others."

"I am here, because I have always been here. You have always been here. We are here because they have ordained that we are to be here."

Emmanuel found that his head was singing. That his body felt far away and empty, shaking, numb. He didn't know why.

Emmanuel picked up his broom and walked away, shaking his head. He stayed in the bathroom for the rest of the day.

*     *     *

He was crazy, and Emmanuel didn't know what to do about it. His equilibrium was shot. There was nothing for him to hang on to, his order was shattered. The skull man was a giant hole in his world, one, it seemed, which would not go away.

The police, of course, wouldn't listen. What could he say? The guy was a spy? Maybe. Could he tell the MPs? They looked at him like he was some specimen of harmless wildlife
New Mexico Native
—all boxed up and identified and harmless.

What would he say? What could he say?

"I was in 2009 yesterday," the skull man announced to the empty station.

But, Emmanuel thought, the skull man had been here yesterday, as if any of it could be puzzled out.

"…on another task. Like this one. I do many things. I do them simultaneously."

"In 2009, everyone has a telephone they carry with them in their pocket like a cigarette case," the skull man continued.

"No wires."

"The device can do other things,"

"It records pictures and sounds, and talks, and shows any book or story or movie on the earth,"

"Yes."

"Yes, yes."

"It is an incredible time, from your perspective."

The skull man quieted for a bit, but suddenly brightened.

"You will live to see it. You will be 87. You will live in
Hastings, Montana."

Emmanuel had a sister in
Hastings Montana. He stopped and looked at the man.

"Who are you?"

"No one of any consequence."

"Why are you here?"

"We spoke of this already."

Emmanuel realized his hands were trembling, though he didn't know why. He steadied them by pushing the broom forward over the clean floor. Sliding away from the skull man, not looking back.

He felt light headed.

"How do I die?" Emmanuel heard himself say. He looked back at the man as he stirred.

The skull man seemed to be expecting another question. He waved his hand as if this was a small request.

"You die in a bed in
Hastings Montana at 2:35 PM, 10 May, 2009."

He didn't sleep much that night, and when he did, he dreamt of drowning.

*     *     *

The skull man stood suddenly, just before the bus arrived, making Emmanuel jump. He saw the man move across the floor, jacket flapping behind him, as he watched the lights of the bus drift in. The look on his sallow face was eager.

Then, before he could say anything, the skull man went out the door.

Emmanuel dropped the broom with a CLACK, and dashed out after him.

Outside, the bus had already pulled away and was receding on the road, its sound fading. A disheveled, small man stood with a valise considering the low mountains on the horizon.

The skull man was nowhere in sight.

Emmanuel, sweating, ran out, looking in all directions at once. His eyesight lost in the blare of the sun.

He trotted into the road.

The jeep came in a tight turn from behind the station, out of nowhere, and struck him, and kept going. His body folded on the hood as the jeep swerved, and then the body was flung up, and over in a pinwheel. Emmanuel's limbs smashed into the ground, breaking, and then his back and hips struck, snapping his back.

Then he was a ruined, crumpled heap of meat, wheezing out his last breaths.