Crematorium for Phoenixes (7 page)

The questions sounded in the twilight of the
basket, bouncing off the surfaces of each lobe and knotting
together like the echoes of a whispering prophet.

“Not much. Just a few moments and certain
circumstances, just as you need to separate two people,” said
Victor Drake.

And he was right. Victor and
William—inseparable friends—did one of the most valuable things two
persons could do: they had dreamed together. Then came the years.
And then followed the development department.

“My kind repels, huh? Modified metabolism
combined with partial gene mutation—all thanks to time travel. How
about you?”

“Conserved basic life functions, except I
struck the nervous system. Advanced systems are inflatable,
expressed the technicians, but even seasoned and mixed with some
good, evil remains all the same. When fate lifts the barrier and
invades it, the only thing remaining are the long nights when you
think about the previous days. And you never imagined you’d fall
into a subprime role in this drama that has little sense,” finished
Victor, as if he was staring not at the mess but at himself.

“True, Victor, that hurts more than
anything. So what are you waiting for? Why don’t you shoot me and
rid the world of a nightmare?” giggled the freak, maybe with a
little sadness in his voice, because his muscles seemed be shaking
as bloated boils.

“This is easy, William. Sometimes we do not
have the forces to smash the evil worm because the shiny surface
reflects ourselves. We were once friends. And that means something
even in this bland, far-fetched story.”

The creature laughed and a mass of people
sizzled like a swarm, hitting each other like rats and scratching
on the walls with their efforts.

“Victor, do you know what evil is even if
you do not want it? It’s that voice in every drop of smoky blood
whispered in the offerings. To create the links for the chains of
hell itself, to join them and reign over it, forever watching the
oncoming horror. I did it, Victor, though now I’m drenched in the
filth of sin.”

“But how?” Victor asked.

“Disproportionate growth of all parts of the
brain, which triggered unconscious hypnotic suggestion and sped up
the metabolism, making me become that thing that I am now. Someone
has to kill me and that someone is you, Victor.”

“I can’t do it, William. Not because of the
past. Not for the present either.”

“All for the meaning, all for the final
review—but sometimes these things are not everything, Victor.
Sometimes while staring at them we realize that they are nothing
more than a pile of tombstones covered in green moss that is
covering something wise written on them. And somewhere underneath
those words is the rotten truth. If you dare to look at it, I’ll
show it to you.”

“Show me what, William?”

“Something short, Victor, a piece of
photography that is the world to each of us,” said the monster and
his veins started pumping with blood, bulging even more.

Wind wafted through Victor. He trembled,
shifted as if possessed by evil doll spirits. The truth passed
through him in an unearthly rage, thirsting for payback in the form
of divine wrath. Then the feeling stood quietly in a cosmic vacuum
where the bodies of asteroids floated. They polarized the feeling,
separating the distances and hauls from the road. His eyes popped
and ascending before him were souls. Translucent but still crisp
pictures were in front of him; people were moving in lines—young
and old people—until they reached the edge of a sludge pit. The
youngsters, directed like puppets with darkened teary eyes, used
their teeth to tear into the throats of the elderly. They threw
their bodies into the pools with other bodies. It was a stool
system of irrigation canals that had taken the abominations in the
endless terraced fields where further on shuffled the boatmen of
the underworld world. They in turn writhed like bundles of white
worms that were nurturing the fields.

The vision disappeared, leaving a painful,
cramp-like needle puncture. It tightened on the flesh, feeling like
a vise.

Victor Drake fell to his knees. A cry
erupted from his throat and sputum mixed with vomit, which splashed
a torrent on the boulders.

“If you leave, my pets will gather it. Here
nothing is dead, as you have seen,” said the monster, and the many
bodies around him flickered like wax-white fish or mature
wheat.

“But why, Lord, has this happened?”

“I ask myself every day, Victor. Ask your
questions here in the dungeons where the limits of hell are the
limits of my mind. I’ll keep wondering while the fully aware people
are killing their families and loved ones until it’s all over. And
on that day that you face the Creator, you will realize that He is
nothing but a mirror for us to see what we have become. Then,
alone, we will issue our verdicts.”

“And I have to kill to be able to stop all
this?”

“It’s that easy, Victor. To return to what
is. It cannot be. It remains only the reality—a muffled curse that
is the most unpardonable human sin. This is my everyday life,
twisting the line and forcing people to devour themselves. Without
me they will do it more quickly.”

“So they will attack us if we kill you?”
Victor asked.

“Yes, you will need to run. Go to the
chamber levels to outrun this hellish place. Use the elevator to
get away,” said the freak and pointed to a mesh shaft; it looked
like a concave funnel chimney in the ceiling. “I know it’s too much
to ask, but you already know why I do it.”

Victor Drake nodded, wiped the moisture off
his lips that tasted bitter with vomit and gastric juice, checked
his weapon again, and acted like a man who is entering lukewarm
water that is filled with slimy creatures come forth to eat him. He
made a sign to the others.

Amos Oz, followed by the others, moved
forward and the song of the swarm hung like a funeral melody,
resembling the roar of an underground waterfall. It was music that
belonged to an unimaginable body and filled the soul with
substances that had been irretrievably lost.

The men formed a box, turned their rifles to
rapid fire mode, and then at the height of the people’s song, a
point that made the skin to crawl with eternal meaning in
meaninglessness, Victor Drake shot.

There was a hoot as people collapsed in the
earthen hole. Battle cries and screams that seemed to urge the
hordes of underground creatures sounded and they thronged and
rushed like a water jet, trampling over each other.

The company ran toward the elevator,
clipping the formless mass that had fallen behind them and was
quickly catching up.

Thousands of acrimonious people bumped into
each other, but they still ran forward like a released flock. Like
a flooded river dammed up for too long, they sought to catch the
fugitives.

The men ran with all their strength,
shooting at their pursuers, knocking them over like dominoes,
slowing them down, and kneeing them like a crumbling house of
cards.

Finally, they reached the platform. Victor
Drake pulled a lever and the elevator drifted with an incredible
noise.

Below them the colorful reservoir of people
remained set.

Chapter
Eleven

Dangling roots from hairs were rubbing their
heads like a veil, a woven chandelier of webbing.

Dripping from above, the water drained like
a grown beard, seeping into the moss that drizzled on the earth,
just as clay soaks yarn. Each drop stamped down and hit it like a
tuning fork.

Tammuz, Sharukin, and the others were
walking on the squat covered stones and propped up beams; the
tunnels were branching and crossing each other—looking identical
and confused, they increased exponentially.

Occasionally checking their green radar
displays, which were spinning like tireless wheels, there was no
doubt that they were in a maze. The drawn diagram reappeared and
disappeared like a living tattoo.

Everything looks to them as if they were
still in the same dungeon. Darkness hung on the red, rusted chains.
Filth had created a mulch carpet that was lighted here and there by
a torch in an iron candlestick, making their presence more
uterine.

Occasionally, the shadow of a rat would
stand in front of the fires and be transformed into a werewolf that
was ready to pounce. Sometimes, bats filled the corridors with
sounds that made the company bristle.

The labyrinth was complex and vast. Although
the men had been walking for a long time, it seemed to them that
they had been moving on diverging paths that were incalculable.

It was only their technology that showed
them the right zigzagging path that meandered like an underground
river; it rose and sunk around the hill of Kephala.

Leaning back to back, Sharukin, Tammuz, and
the others were walking on the trail as it narrowed into a funnel.
Loose soil mixed with areas of pressed soil and made the entire
place look like an open grave.

Their aim, a pear drop on the radar, was
still in front of them. Centered around it were tightened
concentric circles, bandages and gauze encircling something. The
corridors drained into the center.

They moved further into the cartilage that
was sprinkled with sawdust and scraps, into the area that emitted a
slightly tart and sweet smell. It created in the imagination a
strewn feast for vultures that gradually sunk into the soil.

Looking at this migratory path, nostalgic
thoughts popped into their heads. They were the banded dreams of
forsaken but familiar places. The slope changed like a water slide;
it was a chute that descended into the fabulous rabbit hole where
nothing good could be waiting.

Stiff from fear of what was to come, they
approached like a moth to a flame spell. The fear was insistent and
persistent like a black and white horror movie, and they were ready
at any moment to get burned.

So the men squeezed through slits that were
narrowed from the towering roots. The spaces reminded them of
claustrophobic snake dens, surrounded with stalactites of icy
crumbling structures that flourished like flowers overlooking the
underground rapids, which had dragged along snow-cold water like
frozen blood splashed on the rocks.

Sometimes in the bonds that were several
inches thick and cast from iron, there were deposits of rust from
the streamlets and enlarged abscesses. The men also noticed that
there were often dried blood spots, as if the bonds had tightly
held something that had now been released.

But they kept moving, stamping their feet in
the tunnels that were carved and drilled with sanitation. The
darkness intertwined with everything. It thickened and stung the
eyes, barred with filters from which like disgusting periscopes
decomposed carcasses of rodents and rotted vegetables fell.

The road, as we said, was not long but it
curved at every step, slowing the men that were moving in a fold
between the two hemispheres of the brain dug by geniuses inside the
hill of Kephala.

So a few minutes’ walk had stretched into
hours of orienteering within the tunnels; carved like bone, they
were spotted like magpie eggs and undulated from the mold and root
systems.

It in a sense was like a scene from a grave
that had evaporated and thrown phosphorus foliage shading at every
turn, an obvious sign of something sinister but real.

The group stepped on broken tiles that
creaked and crushed gravel with the caution of young children who
are headed toward something that attracts them even though they are
afraid.

These tentacles stroked their costumes and
tested their nerves. They hoped that whatever they found they could
resist.

Thus, step by step, they finally came to the
moment that our history dictates the company reached the center of
the underground puzzle—an oval room that unfolded to reveal an
underground lake surrounded by spherical walls.

It was hard to tell what caught the eye
first.

Perhaps it was the round columns that clung
to the room’s ceiling, settled and elongated as the wind stops
trees. They were strung like a band chains that crisscrossed in the
center like the spokes of a wheel.

There, chained to them, roared and sharply
cried something that looked like a bull, although it was difficult
to determine what exactly it was.

The men stood motionless; they were people
who had entered the swamp from which there is no escape, only
death.

“Everett, son, do not . . . !” shouted one
voice.

Another figure, small and squat, stood
unremarkable in this background. It approached the creature that
shook the chains and had stretched them to their limit.

“Please, son, stop . . . Please . . .” the
voice broke into sobs as the monster—a humanoid with an elongated
neck like a horse or an ox, desperately tried to break free. It
cried and howled.

The men approached. The creature sensed
their presence, roared even more, and sprayed foamy saliva and
drops of sweat everywhere.

“It’s not time for a meal . . . Not for that
food. I said it . . .” cried the man, standing as a beacon to the
surf and not responding to anything else.

Tammuz waved to the group, and they loaded
their guns with quiet clicks, pointed it at the figure that stood
as ruthless as a graven image.

The man turned around and look at them.

“Who are you? How, how did you get here?” he
said like a scientist who had been surprised in the middle of his
obscene experiment.

“We came to kill the monster,” Tammuz called
over the creature that raged like a beast that had lost all of its
reason.

“To kill, to kill . . .” repeated the man
and his gaze slid over the strange weapons, stopping as if he had
remembered something. His eyes widened. “No, you promised me, you
cannot do it, you had promised me . . .” he stammered like a little
child.