Mr. Shivers (26 page)

He climbed around little peaks and through little valleys. His feet were wet in his shoes, perhaps from burst blisters or
maybe from blood. He stripped his coat and shirt to rags to keep his hands bandaged and insulated. When his breath became
visible he deliriously considered trying to trap some of it in his hands to hold on to it in case he needed it.

Over stone and brush and wood. Far above the world. There on the points of the craggy teeth that snapped at the heavens Connelly
wondered if the land below was real. Were he to venture down he was not sure if he would recognize anything.

He knew now it was not real. Not at its heart. Before this all he had thought he was journeying out, heading to the fringes
and forgotten lands, but now he knew otherwise. With each step he had taken he had moved away from torpid slumber, from the
complacent dream-world of home, and instead had approached the visceral savagery whose wax and wane formed the heartbeat of
creation. This place in the mountain, the ruins of the village below. Tar shacks and shanties in the desert, lit by guttering
fires. Rootless and wild and hungry. They were the real. The other way was a willful lie and having awoken he would not return.
Could not even if he wanted to. There was a grim joy in it and he savored its taste and thought it beautiful.

Tattered wanderer, these are hollow countries, hallowed lands. See them arranged here at your feet, broken ruins of people
long forgotten, ancient in their silent rage. See this. See this and know it to be your home.

Every fifty yards he would stop and look for the mountains. One big, one small, right behind one another. Leaping on top as
though one attempted to subdue another. And perhaps they did. Even in this barren place conflict seemed inescapable.

Each time he stopped he would reach behind and take out the gun and check the rounds. It was his ritual. His method of remembrance
and prayer. He tried to count how many times he stopped but gave up at fourteen.

When he saw the two mountains he did not believe it at first. He peered at them against the sky, suspecting some trick, but
then relented and checked the gun again and began walking toward them. He nodded from fatigue as he walked and it was in waking
from one of these relapses that he spotted a red-black streak on the stony path. He knelt and touched it.

Blood. It was sticky. Fairly fresh. Fresh enough, at least.

Connelly began following him again. His eyes roved back and forth for more drops, tracking a wounded creature and waiting
for that doorway he’d find in the mountain.

A crevice. Crack in the world. Breaks down deep to where things don’t forget. Where things still remember what can never be
forgotten no matter how much we try.

“Kill you,” said Connelly, and kept walking.

He came to the feet of the two mountains and saw the gouge before them, cavernous and crooked like some giant had carved a
lightning bolt in the ground. He stopped again and checked for blood. He himself was bleeding from his hands and so he kept
them behind his back to avoid muddying the trail. He found a few splotches on a bit of mossy stone. He looked at the earth
around the stone and examined the tracks and guessed the scarred man had sat there. Sat there to catch his breath or to look
for Connelly or maybe just to sit. Connelly studied the scene and picked out his quarry’s next direction and continued. He
took out the gun and kept it out.

The trail led to the edge of the cliff and he leaned out and looked down. It might have been the way the sunlight made the
shadows but the fault appeared endless. He turned back to the trail and saw it led along the edge in a straight line. The
man had not tired yet. Connelly would not expect him to.

Death is tireless, he said to himself. That’s okay. I don’t tire easy, either.

Then he came upon a path, leading down into the chasm. It was so gentle and so firm that it had to have been constructed,
and well constructed. He began down it, gun still out, eyes still searching. He walked down until the light was a thin line
above and the edges of the cliff yawned about him. He wondered if this place had actually been carved. A primitive sanctuary,
bored down into the earth to greet and remember one’s forebears. He wondered if this had once been the culminating point for
some savage pilgrimage and debated whether or not he was such a pilgrim himself.

Halfway down the cliff he came upon the cave. It was not large, no more than four feet high. He did not see any blood before
its entrance but he did not need to to know that this was where the scarred man had fled.

Connelly reached into his pockets and felt around and pulled out his box of matches. He took off his shirt and wound it around
a nearby branch and lit the end. It was a delicate fire, slow and smoking. He would have to move slowly, otherwise he would
be moving by matchlight. He let it catch better and walked into the cave.

The passageway wound through the rock, widening and twisting. He walked with his head bowed and his knees bent and the torch
thrust ahead, the gun trained on the dead center of the passage. Behind him the mouth of the tunnel moaned and grieved but
he paid it no mind. His eyes grew used to the darkness and patches of moisture winked and glittered at him. He could not say
how far he walked but if a mountain had a heart he felt he had to be near this one’s.

Then he heard a sound from far away in the tunnel.

“Connelly,” said a voice.

He stopped. Waited. Then began creeping ahead.

“You came,” said the voice. It sounded as though the speaker had been weeping. “I knew you would.”

He came to a wide atrium in the tunnel and saw vaults of rock stretching out above and beside him. Crystals burst into radiant
prisms as the firelight found them and he believed for a second that all the night heavens were inlaid in the walls, like
someone had pulled the sky down to this room. He scanned the room with the torchlight but saw nothing except another passageway
on the far side.

“I tried to stop it, you see,” said the voice from far ahead. “I thought I could. I thought I could come back and stop it.”

Connelly began walking toward the next entry, still moving slowly.

“But I don’t believe I can,” the voice whispered.

He stepped to the side of the entryway and looked in, leading with the gun. He saw nothing. The tunnel turned away below.

“It’s leaving me,” said the voice. “Can you feel it? It’s abandoning me. In a way I am glad but I weep at the same time. Because
what will come after me? What will be next? I do not know. And I fear it.”

Connelly began walking down the passageway. It curved in a long spiral and he could not fathom how deep below the earth they
were. Miles, if anything. But he felt somehow that this place was not a part of the earth in any way he knew. He had never
been in a place older than this. It was so old it was below everything, below all things. Below time. Below knowledge.

“Death will not die,” warned the voice. “It will not. You must know that.”

Connelly did not answer. He kept the torch ahead of him, wiped sweat from his brow, tried to ignore the sting of smoke in
his eyes and his nostrils. The torch was fading fast and he was not sure how far away the scarred man was. Two more turns?
One? Three?

“It will not die,” said the voice, and this time it sounded stronger, stranger. “It will come back. Stronger. Wilder. Harder.”

Connelly cocked the gun. The voice was very near now. He could hear it whimpering nearby. Light dappled the far stone wall,
coming from some source around the next bend. He studied it and took a breath.

He turned the corner and saw the scarred man sitting on the floor of the cave before another large passageway, his head bowed
in his lap and his shoulders shaking. Before him was an old lantern, the flame dancing slowly in the waxy glass. The silver
knife was still clutched in his fingers. Bones littered the floor around him, eye sockets flickering with the torchlight,
rib cages arced and poised like hands ready to pray. Among them were weapons but weapons like nothing Connelly had ever seen
before. A long musket with a wooden stock and a flint hammer. A thin rapier with a silver hilt. A broadsword easily three
feet long. Even stone weapons, chiseled blades crudely lashed to sticks, spears carved from wood, pieces of stone hacked to
resemble maces.

Connelly’s eye moved to the figure on the stone floor. The scarred man, sitting in the center of it all, weeping silently.

Connelly raised the gun. The gray man lifted his head to look at him, scars burning white, eyes dead and hollow. Shark eyes.
Eyes that had seen the rise and fall of civilizations, and did not care.

The man’s face twisted in fury. Gray needle-teeth flashed in the firelight. “No!” he screamed. “I will not let you do this!
I will not let you do this!”

He leapt to his feet and Connelly fired, but it was too late. The shot went wide and punched through the scarred man’s coat.
Clay and bones burst behind him as the bullet struck the cave floor. The silver knife surged forward in the man’s hand and
Connelly lifted his arm to block it but it dipped up and in, biting into his side and raking his ribs. He screamed and the
scarred man reached under to try to push it up and into his chest, but Connelly pulled the scarred man in and butted him in
the face. A dozen tiny stars of pain came to life on his scalp where his forehead met the man’s jagged maw. Then he shoved
the scarred man back, hand held to the wound at his side, knuckles already dripping.

The scarred man melted away to dart back in again and drag the knife over Connelly’s shoulder and across his neck and cheek.
He seemed to be made of nothing but cloak and teeth and knives. Connelly felt lines of pain light up in his wrist and in his
knee. He stumbled back and saw the icy point of the dagger glide by him once more, hissing through the air. He fired again
without thinking, gunflash casting shadows on the cave wall, and the scarred man gasped and clutched his leg. Then he growled
and feinted to the side and pounced forward again and Connelly felt bright blinding pain in his leg. He fell to a kneel as
the leg died underneath him and he struggled to stay upright, left arm held close and winglike, a thousand wounds blossoming
on his body. The scarred man seemed shaken by the last shot but he gathered his strength and leapt upon Connelly, snarling
like a beast. As Connelly’s back met the stone floor he pushed the nose of the gun barrel up and fired.

Then silence. He waited for the knife to come home, to worm its way into his rib cage and ravage his heart until it lay cold.
But it did not come. There was nothing but the scent of burning powder in the air and the pain in his legs and side. The gun
lay on his belly, hot and heavy. Somewhere in the room someone exhaled slowly.

Connelly opened his eyes and saw the scarred man sitting on the floor again, the silver knife now on the ground. The man clutched
his belly, breathing gently, then drew his hand away and looked at the smooth stain on his palm.

Dark red. Red enough to be black.

“Got you,” said Connelly softly. “Got you, finally.”

The scarred man shook his head. His mouth worked open and shut like a fish dying on a mudbank, suffocated by the air. “Fool,”
he said softly. “Useless. Useless fool.” Then he started to try to stand up. He failed once and kicked the lantern over and
the muddy glass bled fire onto the earthen floor. Then he fought to his feet and staggered back uncertainly until he leaned
against the brick wall, hand still clutched to his stomach.

“You goddamn fool,” he gasped.

“I got you, you bastard,” Connelly said.

“You wouldn’t listen,” he said. “You just wouldn’t.”

The pool of fire spread. As it did the light in the chamber changed. Then for one instant Connelly thought he saw the young
blond man standing in the cave with him in place of Shivers. The young blond man from his dreams. Then the light changed once
more and he was Shivers again, and yet somewhere beneath all the years of scars and fury Connelly could still make out that
sad young face, that brow anointed with red…

“Did you… Did you really think you were first?” said the scarred man. Breath whistled from down in his chest. He coughed and
his teeth gleamed redly. “Or I? Look… look around you. Look at them. Did you… How could you…” Then he coughed again and rolled
sideways. He stumbled into the chamber beyond and was swallowed by the darkness.

“No!” said Connelly. “No!”

Connelly gathered his ragged body together and stood and stepped forward over the pool of fire. He looked at the ancient corpses
that lay around the cavern’s entrance and stared into the entry ahead. He could see nothing but he knew something waited there.
Something was watching. He dropped the gun and walked into the cave.

Endless dark. No walls, no ceiling. If he ran on stone his feet did not feel it and he was not even sure if he breathed air.

“Where are you?” he asked. He walked farther ahead, one hand out in front, stumbling like he was blind.

“Where are you? Where are you!” he screamed.

His scream echoed on, yet as it faded he became aware of a second sound. A faint trickle, the muted laugh of a stream or brook
somewhere in the cavern. Connelly stumbled toward it until his fingers met slick rocks and the cool caress of water. He huddled
by the waters, clinging to the only concrete thing in this darkness, and then he realized the tiny stream was faintly luminescent.
Some spectral blue light, seeping up from within the brook. He let his eyes adjust to its light. Focused until he saw it trickling
out of the small aperture in the rock wall, then weaving away until it made a staggered arc on the cavern floor.

Something coughed in the darkness. He squinted and saw the form of a man, lying on the riverbank on the far side of the cavern.
Connelly wrestled himself to his feet one last time and stumbled over, wiping the sweat and filth from his eyes.

The scarred man lay with his arms and part of his head submerged in the waters of the river. The stream gently curled and
foamed around his elbow and his scalp and the black stones around him. Connelly stood over him and the scarred man tried to
look at him with one staring eye, unable to lift his head, panicking like a felled deer. His mouth still opened and closed
uselessly. Ghostly streamers of red ran from his chest and down the riverwater.