Crematorium for Phoenixes (5 page)

Akuma could not live.

Because of this, he could not be with
her.

The seasons of life always gnaw away at
time, which casts its nets, holding and severing the two currents
of present and future in their flow.

So after the snatches of time that drove the
agony in Akuma’s life like a fierce, evil dog, he went to the leper
colony, where the decay of his body would reach its natural
end.

He cared for the sick with that arrangement
in mind. It filled his very being with a panic, an insipid
vermouth, that suffocated his lungs. Soon he himself would be taken
care of. Soon he would become very ill.

And that, my friends, highlights how life is
the veil that descends over a good or bad play. Whichever it is,
there’s nothing more to say.

That is the kind of existence that has led
us to this particular morning.

The cool breeze blew across the cheeks,
nipped at the side of the sea that stood calm in the aftermath of
the oil previously hauled across it. The waters were blue from the
previous storm.

Akuma, twenty-one years old, rubbed at his
diseased sides and watched the neighborhood from the heights of the
colony. He could see the countryside spread out into concentric
circles for miles around.

Maybe soon someone’s relatives would bring
food or someone, a healer, perhaps—or a noble madman or a greedy
charlatan or a huckster, would come over, causing animation
above.

The usual shapes darted around the rocks in
the mainland. Strange, ghostly similar items forced people to go
out to do their usual work. Akuma had grown up around the valleys
and was now getting lost in them.

But no one had come any closer to it, to
them. For most people, filthy and flooded with light, glowing like
a graveyard, the place where they lived had no place, at least not
while they were alive.

The light burned white as the tallow candle
flickered. It was hard to explain why she had come to the
colony.

Originally, Akuma did not give the event any
importance. Many still lived within pretty close reach to the
rock.

He did not pay attention until it became
clear that time had headed to her.

He prepared the basket and the device went
down from the colony.

The man who wanted to come up seemed very
ill. His skin, unusually whitish for the East, shone from the open
seams of his hairy robe like a fresh lime under the scorched rays
of the ever-climbing sun.

They dropped the basket and the man climbed
into it.

Nuts and bolts began to tremble and after
several efforts, he was above.

In front of Akuma had arrived the first
European to visit the East centuries before our history tells it
will happen.

Chapter
Seven

The men were hunched into the ink-silver
puddles that illuminated the arched corridors that stood rampant
before them.

Watching the radar displays in their hands,
they had an image of the web-like maze of ventilation shafts,
offices, workshops, auditoriums, dining rooms, and bedrooms in the
complex. They had stopped to inspect their copper jumpsuits, probe
their oxygen bottles, and check their guns. Ready to move forward,
they strode like powerless mummies, shuffling in their heavy
shoes.

Oppressive silence reigned in these spaces,
sucking up and muffling any sound except for the patter of water.
It seemed like someone would invade at any moment. Deprived of
illumination, the spaces in the building looked like dens of skates
and squid. The abandoned submarines especially looked like rotten
barrels, scattered in an old tipping technique.

The corridors were sometimes stretched and
expanded. At other times, they narrowed–all of it was very much
like a digestive system. Chandeliers of coral, a forgotten alchemy
left in this oblivion, shined from the cave niches.

Sometimes, the men found themselves in large
canteens that had been filled from end to end with inlaid marble
tables that gleamed like coals. Buried and scattered along them
were silver utensils, hundreds upon hundreds of them. They stood
dark, yet polished, as if they had just been used in a revel.

They also passed by rail cars that had been
overturned; their composition was rusty or corroded. Most of them
were still filled with small gold coins and red-black beads. Blind
and deformed, these riches had been abandoned in the name of
something bigger.

As they continued their venture, doorway
after doorway revealed bedrooms that had been barely yawned open.
Like tightlipped mussels their interiors smelled of stale, moldy
basements and had preserved only a sour, tart flavor. Often
countless slivers of sheets had rolled up on the beds, as wet and
cold as snakes.

The men were not happy about this emptiness.
It seemed to them that at any moment hordes of enemies would
arrive. This feeling only grew as they were accosted by the
acoustics of strident cries.

The seven men grasped their pneumatic guns,
resting their fingers tighter on the trigger with each atypical
noise. They ventured even deeper, arriving in what looked like a
hatchery for reptilian monsters. The incredible size of the bridal
chambers showed the work of expert miners who had dug with such
subtlety into the continental shelf that the room seemed to be
carved from the very depths of the ocean.

Great tension radiated from their arms, and
they stiffened at every sound. Frequently, they found themselves
shooting at the rats that were there. They agonized over the fallen
pieces of plaster bas-reliefs, which stood as grim evidence of
claimed hunts, reminding the men that they didn’t know who was the
hunter and who was the prey.

Soon, the halls more clearly separated
themselves. The small ones that had been for the personal needs of
the many thousands of citizens of Thule gave way to the public
ones—and a necklace of carved stone galleries, markets, training
grounds, gathering squares, and amphitheaters began to rotate
before the admiring gazes of the men.

In stretches before them clung armories
filled with polished armor, shields, and all kinds of guns arranged
in neat rows. There were rows of shelves filled from top to the
bottom with billions of canned food containers. Fireflies with
flickering clouds of light appeared from behind the counters and
libraries with spiraling and curling staircases went down into the
depths.

With every new step, they were approached
their goal and the passes became more diagonal. The air became
stuffier and suffocating, reminding this crew of a smelly homeless
animal with its matted fur.

The narrow galleries located to their left
and right had only been shaped into niches now. Thrown together
into rusted groups, tools spoke of their interrupted work as they
had been digging new sectors in this once great human kingdom.

Sometimes the holes expanded, leading to
oval halls. These were the temple premises for long-forgotten gods,
carved in sparkling mica like the salt statues, chandeliers, and
iconostasis in the mines of Wieliczka in Krakow, Poland.

But despite the apparent desolation that
permeated the underwater city, as if by magic, it had not ceased to
function at all. The ebony-black air ducts were blowing warm but
clean air, the lighting worked, and the tremulous hiss of the
drainage system accompanied the churning moisture; the entirety of
the complex tangle of support systems were in place.

Therefore the men kept moving. They stopped
occasionally to rest and squished miles of paper that had been
strewn across the floors. Maybe those papers held the annals of all
sorts of the great kingdoms whose inventions have reached our
period of time. Who knows, perhaps the literature and music of
underwater bards were now nothing more than festering corpses.

Sometimes, the men dozed, spiraling into
wild daydreams as they stared at incomprehensible characters until
they thought that somebody’s life had been laid out before
them.

But the traveling and vague anxiety remain
covered by the sediment in their minds, which had been narrowed by
the underground gates. The men simply did not have the opportunity
to think too deeply on such things.

They moved further into the depths and
finally reached the accommodation of Thule. Its halls were filled
with bundles of tubes in which the compressor blades chopped
through air and water. The area was shrouded in cobwebs that wound
miles high and long. From somewhere within the room, a grinding
gramophone began to play music.

At first, the subtle cracks of music
stroked, scraped, and shuffled like pebbles in a sea wave. Then the
melody gradually seeped like oil; it was a smell choking the throat
with the poison of its hopelessness.

The gramophone played stories of the birth,
rise, and fall of a world. Interwoven in every sound was a fortune
of all-consuming loneliness, something that contained its own
beauty.

The song floated along as if it were rinsing
all the folds of the soul. It was also piercing cold, like the
shivering drops of bitter alcohol that had concentrated within it a
thousand unspoken things. It’s difficult to tilt the scales of
dreams and memories.

Listening to the song, the group sunk into
its weeping vibrations; they seemed to explode within them like a
distant summer thunder.

They remembered things long
forgotten—memories suppressed in the depths of their minds, dim
reminiscences that whispered of favorite places and people.

It was the melody of desolation and grief,
cried from the shreds of a soul and bringing to mind its sister:
sadness.

The men approached, strode into their
sadness, and the dripping water tunnel answered with its own
endlessness.

It became even darker, slippery and greasy
like eyes that had been gouged out, and the echo from of the music
continued beating.

Finally, after walking through all the
cavities of the great Kingdom of Thule, the crew had caught up to
its center.

Here, between the walls and illuminated by
thousands of tons of lava, the command center of the underwater
city flowed from the ceiling and was ventilated by hundreds of
turbines that looked like overgrown mushrooms ; it bent at the end
like a diamond sitting in a bubble over an inferno.

The men looked at each other, and the song
echoed like a war drum over the earthen pit.

Chapter
Eight

The palace complex of Knossos stood over the
hill of Kephala lonely and unsatisfied, an achievement of a
civilization that had been curse by the ragged, thin Moira. It now
stood like an upcoming horror, devoid of any form of life but
somehow still exuding the air of a predatory organism.

Before the men, like white sleeves tucked
into an oblong shape, were levels upon levels of houses. They were
miserably bleached containers, looking like little more than the
faceted eyes of a torn apart cocoon covered in the mucus of
imago.

Beside them, on the deserted sidewalks of
hewn slabs, various objects had been left as offerings. There were
rows and rows of flattened, ugly amphorae and canvas bags. They had
been stacked as dikes and impaled on poles along with entire
clusters of fruits—food ordered and left to boost the monsters.

The city stood empty like a cell whose white
grid fins spread out along the backbone of a vampire returned from
the land of the dead.

Desolation combined with the cry of
rancorous crows. Their cawing cut through the sky like a black
globular lightning bolt, creating the feeling of a wolf that is
stalking its prey and crawling from place to place. It seemed as if
each resident had become a wandering shadow that was disappearing
and reappearing in the holes of the city’s stone bosom.

Outstretched cypresses still stood with
their once proud branches now little more than atrophic limbs.
Gushing fountains carved in the form of long-forgotten dusty books
told the tale of mythological creatures—of satyrs and centaurs with
glazed eyes. They used to recount the presence of life, and had now
fallen silent.

Crossing the cobbled streets, past
marketplaces with flying canopies that billowed silently as ghosts,
the men of the Behemoth started to climb Kephala Hill.

They carried with them reinforced carbon
bows that had been stored in the zeppelin and from time to time
would stretch the glowing spider cords of fiberglass.

The men looked like the invaders of the
past, before the time of the Trojan heroes. They remained hidden
and were still in danger of being slaughtered by their reawakened
enemies who numbered into the thousands.

They seemed to be at an amusement park in
which the machines—the dotted sun-white bulbs on Ferris wheels, the
shooting galleries, the bumper cars, the roller coasters, and the
carousels—would move when announced by music. Except, here it
seemed that they were powered by monsters.

With each passing step, the company climbed
the acropolis, the abandoned city, the citadel of Knossos.

Thus after a few minutes of their a
hypnotic, dizzy walking, with faltering gaits that resembled the
slow movements of an alcoholic, they arrived at the top of the
slope. The complex of buildings with their high colonnades stood in
front of them.

We cannot hide the fact that there was some
beauty in Knossos but covered as they had become with fallen leaves
and old tops, the columns were warmed by the oozing beams of
sunlight and through the vegetation roasted reptiles.

The fire in the pools along the alleys
looked like floating disks and were a bad omen. Here someone or
something was giving them a notorious final warning.

Entering the porches decorated with
frescoes, the men faintly smelled urine; it irritated their noses
and lined the area, enhanced even more when they entered the hall
to a room.