The Best of Lucius Shepard (14 page)

And
then he caught sight of the tunnel. His mouth fell open, and he backed against
the rocks directly beneath me. Shockley spotted it, too. He shined his
flashlight into the tunnel, and the beam was sheared off where it entered the
blackness, as if it had been bitten in half. For a moment they were frozen in a
tableau. Only the moonlight seemed in motion, coursing along Francisco’s
patent-leather hat.

What
got into me then was not bravery or any analogue thereof, but a sudden violent
impulse such as had often landed me in trouble. I jumped feetfirst onto
Francisco’s back. I heard a grunt as we hit the ground, a snapping noise, and
the next I knew I was scrambling off him, reaching for his gun, which had flown
a couple of yards away. I had no clue of how to operate the safety or even of
where it was located. But Shockley wasn’t aware of that. His eyes were popped,
and he sidled along the rocks toward the water, his head twitching from side to
side, searching for a way out.

Hefting
the cold, slick weight of the gun gave me a sense of power— a feeling tinged
with hilarity—and as I came to my feet, aiming at Shockley’s chest, I let out a
purposefully demented laugh. “Tell me, Rich,” I said. “Do you believe in God?”

He
held out a hand palm-up and said, “Don’t,” in a choked voice.

“Remember
that garbage you used to feed me about the moral force of poetry?” I said. “How
you figure that jibes with setting up these two?” I waved the rifle barrel at
the twins; they were staring into the tunnel, unmindful of me and Shockley.

“You
don’t understand,” said Shockley.

“Sure
I do, Rich.” I essayed another deranged-teenage-killer laugh. “You’re not a
nice guy.”

In
the moonlight his face looked glossy with sweat. “Wait a minute,” he said.
“I’ll....”

Then
Alise screamed, and I never did learn what Shockley had in mind. I spun around
and was so shocked that I nearly dropped the gun. The tunnel was still pulsing,
its depths shrinking and expanding like the gullet of a black worm, and in
front of it stood a...my first impulse is to say “a shadow,” but that
description would not do justice to the Disciple. To picture it you must imagine
the mold of an androgynous human body constructed from a material of such
translucency that you couldn’t see it under any condition of light; then you
must further imagine that the mold contains a black substance (negatively
black) that shares the properties of both gas and fluid, which is slipping
around inside, never filling the mold completely—at one moment presenting to
you a knife-edge, the next a frontal silhouette, and at other times displaying
all the other possible angles of attitude, shifting among them. Watching it
made me dizzy. Tom and Alise cowered from it, and when it turned full face to
me, I, too, cowered. Red glowing pinpricks appeared in the places where its
eyes should have been; the pinpricks swelled, developing into real eyes. The
pupils were black planets eclipsing bloody suns.

I
wanted to run, but those eyes held me. Insanity was like a heat in them. They
radiated fury, loathing, hatred, and I wonder now if anything human, even some
perverted fraction of mad Hitler’s soul, could have achieved such an alien
resolve. My blood felt as thick as syrup, my scrotum tightened. Then something
splashed behind me, and though I couldn’t look away from the eyes, I knew that
Shockley had run. The Disciple moved after him. And how it moved! It was as if
it were turning sideways and vanishing, repeating the process over and over,
and doing this so rapidly that it seemed to be strobing, winking in and out of
existence, each wink transporting it several feet farther along. Shockley never
had a chance. It was too dark out near the end of the point for me to tell what
really happened, but I saw two shadows merge and heard a bubbling scream.

A
moment later the Disciple came whirling back toward the shore. Instinctively I
clawed the trigger of Francisco’s gun—the safety had not been on. Bullets
stitched across the Disciple’s torso, throwing up geysers of blackness that
almost instantly were reabsorbed into its body, as if by force of gravity.
Otherwise they had no effect. The Disciple stopped just beyond arm’s reach,
nailing me with its burning gaze, flickering with the rhythm of a shadow cast
by a fire. Only its eyes were constant, harrowing me.

Someone
shouted—I think it was Tom, but I’m not sure; I had shrunk so far within myself
that every element of the scene except the glowing red eyes had a dim value.
Abruptly the Disciple moved away. Tom was standing at the mouth of the tunnel.
When the Disciple had come half the distance toward him, he took a step forward
and—like a man walking into a black mirror—disappeared. The Disciple sped into
the tunnel after him. For a time I could see their shapes melting up and fading
among the other, more monstrous shapes.

A
couple of minutes after they had entered it, the tunnel collapsed. Accompanied
by a keening hiss, the interior walls constricted utterly and flecks of ebony
space flew up from the mouth. Night flowed in to take its place. Alise remained
standing by the shore, staring at the spot where the tunnel had been. In a
daze, I walked over and put an arm around her shoulder, wanting to comfort her.
But she shook me off and went a few steps into the water, as if to say that she
would rather drown than accept my consolation.

My
thoughts were in chaos, and needing something to focus them, I knelt beside
Francisco, who was still lying facedown. I rolled him onto his back, and his
head turned with a horrid grating sound. Blood and sand crusted his mouth. He
was dead, his neck broken. For a long while I sat there, noticing the
particulars of death, absorbed by them: how the blood within him had begun to
settle to one side, discoloring his cheek; how his eyes, though glazed, had
maintained a bewildered look. The Band-Aid on his chin had come unstuck, revealing
a shaving nick. I might have sat there forever, hypnotized by the sight; but
then a bank of clouds overswept the moon, and the pitch-darkness shocked me,
alerted me to the possible consequences of what I had done.

From
that point on I was operating in a panic, inspired by fear to acts of survival.
I dragged Francisco’s body into the hills; I waded into the water and found
Shockley’s body floating in the shallows. Every inch of his skin was horribly
charred, and as I hauled him to his resting place beside Francisco, black
flakes came away on my fingers. After I had covered the bodies with brush, I
led Alise—by then unresisting—back to the house, packed for us both, and hailed
a taxi for the airport. There I had a moment of hysteria, realizing that she
would not have a passport. But she did. A Canadian one, forged in Malaga. We
boarded the midnight flight to Casablanca, and the next day— because I was
still fearful of pursuit—we began hitchhiking east across the desert.

*
* * *

Our travels were arduous. I had
only three hundred dollars, and Alise had none. Tom’s story about their having
valuables to sell had been more or less true, but in our haste we had left them
behind. In Cairo, partly due to our lack of funds and partly to medical
expenses incurred by Alise’s illness (amoebic dysentery), I was forced to take
a job. I worked for a perfume merchant in the Khan el-Khalili Bazaar, steering
tourists to his shop, where they could buy rare essences and drugs and change
money at the black market rates. In order to save enough to pay our passage
east, I began to cheat my employer, servicing some of his clients myself, and
when he found me out I had to flee with Alise, who had not yet shaken her
illness.

I
felt responsible for her, guilty about my role in the proceedings. I’d come to
terms with Francisco’s death. Naturally I regretted it, and sometimes I would
see that dark, surprised face in my dreams. But acts of violence did not
trouble my heart then as they do now. I had grown up violent in a violent
culture, and I was able to rationalize the death as an accident. And, too, it
had been no saint I had killed. I could not, however, rationalize my guilt
concerning Alise, and this confounded me. Hadn’t I tried to save her and Tom? I
realized that my actions had essentially been an expression of adolescent fury,
yet they had been somewhat on the twins’ behalf. And no one could have stood
against the Disciple. What more could I have done? Nothing, I told myself. But
this answer failed to satisfy me.

In
Afghanistan, Alise suffered a severe recurrence of her dysentery. This time I
had sufficient funds (money earned by smuggling, thanks to Shockley’s lessons)
to avoid having to work, and we rented a house on the outskirts of Kabul. We
lived there three months until she had regained her health. I fed her yogurt,
red meat, vegetables; I bought her books and a tape recorder and music to play
on it; I brought people in whom I thought she might be interested to visit her.
I wish I could report that we grew to be friends, but she had withdrawn into
herself and thus remained a mystery to me, something curious and inexplicable.
She would lie in her room—a cubicle of whitewashed stone—with the sunlight
slanting in across her bed, paling her further, transforming her into a piece
of ivory sculpture, and would gaze out the window for hours, seeing, I believe,
not the exotic traffic on the street—robed horsemen from the north, ox-drawn
carts, and Chinese-made trucks—but some otherworldly vista. Often I wanted to
ask her more about her world, about the tunnel and Tom and a hundred other
things. But while I could not institute a new relationship with her, I did not
care to reinstitute our previous one. And so my questions went unasked. And so
certain threads of this narrative must be left untied, reflecting the messiness
of reality as opposed to the neatness of fiction.

Though
this story is true, I do not ask that you believe it. To my mind it is true
enough, and if you have read it to the end, then you have sufficiently extended
your belief. In any case, it is a verity that the truth becomes a lie when it
is written down, and it is the art of writing to wring as much truth as
possible from its own dishonest fabric. I have but a single truth to offer, one
that came home to me on the last day I saw Alise, one that stands outside both
the story and the act of writing it.

We
had reached the object of our months-long journey, the gates of a Tibetan
nunnery on a hill beneath Dhaulagiri in Nepal, a high blue day with a chill wind
blowing. It was here that Alise planned to stay. Why? She never told me more
than she had in our conversation shortly before she and Tom set out to collapse
the tunnel. The gates—huge wooden barriers carved with the faces of gods—swung
open, and the female lamas began to applaud, their way of frightening off
demons who might try to enter. They formed a crowd of yellow robes and tanned,
smiling faces that seemed to me another kind of barrier, a deceptively plain
facade masking some rarefied contentment. Alise and I had said a perfunctory
goodbye, but as she walked inside, I thought—I hoped—that she would turn back
and give vent to emotion.

She
did not. The gates swung shut, and she was gone into the only haven that might
accept her as commonplace.

Gone,
and I had never really known her.

I
sat down outside the gates, alone for the first time in many months, with no
urgent destination or commanding purpose, and took stock. High above, the snowy
fang of Dhaulagiri reared against a cloudless sky; its sheer faces deepened to
gentler slopes seamed with the ice-blue tongues of glaciers, and those slopes
eroded into barren brown hills such as the one upon which the nunnery was
situated. That was half the world. The other half, the half I faced, was steep
green hills terraced into barley fields, and winding through them a river,
looking as unfeatured as a shiny aluminum ribbon. Hawks were circling the
middle distance, and somewhere, perhaps from the monastery that I knew to be
off among the hills, a horn sounded a great bass note like a distant dragon
signaling its hunger or its rage.

I
sat at the center of these events and things, at the dividing line of these
half-worlds that seemed to me less in opposition than equally empty, and I felt
that emptiness pouring into me. I was so empty, I thought that if the wind were
to strike me at the correct angle, I might chime like a bell...and perhaps it
did, perhaps the clarity of the Himalayan weather and this sudden increment of
emptiness acted to produce a tone, an illumination, for I saw myself then as
Tom and Alise must have seen me. Brawling, loutish, indulgent. The two most
notable facts of my life were negatives: I had killed a man, and I had
encountered the unknown and let it elude me. I tried once again to think what
more I could have done, and this time, rather than arriving at the usual
conclusion, I started to understand what lesson I had been taught on the beach
at Pedregalejo.

Some
years ago a friend of mine, a writer and a teacher of writing, told me that my
stories had a tendency to run on past the climax, and that I frequently ended
them with a moral, a technique he considered outmoded. He was, in the main,
correct. But it occurs to me that sometimes a moral—whether or not clearly
stated by the prose—is what provides us with the real climax, the good weight
that makes the story resonate beyond the measure of the page. So, in this
instance, I will go contrary to my friend’s advice and tell you what I learned,
because it strikes me as being particularly applicable to the American
consciousness, which is insulated from much painful reality, and further
because it relates to a process of indifference that puts us all at risk.