Rising (18 page)

“Oh, then I guess it doesn’t suck.”

“So, how do we read them?” asked Clara, ignoring
Jeremy.
 
“Just start at the top?
 
Did you figure out what any of these meant?”

Theresa’s brown eyes brightened.
 
She apparently had done more than just a
little thinking on the subject and was happy to finally share it with someone
who took her seriously.

“Begin here, from the bottom up and go across
to the right.
 
It was actually the last
thing that I discovered about the wall of pictographs before I left Dr. Malcolm
and--”

Theresa fell silent, looking dazedly at the
pictures.
 
We all remained silent.
 
The weather forecaster rambled on, listing
possible landfalls in Georgia or Florida if Hurricane Lucy continued to head
northeast.

“Are you okay?” asked Clara, touching Theresa’s
arm gently.

I felt a pang of grief come from Theresa.
 
I could only imagine what somber color her
aura must be.
 
The look in Clara’s
sympathetic eyes told me enough.

“Yes, yes, fine.
 
It’s just that it still is very jarring when
I think about it.
 
It almost feels like a
dream, since no one witnessed it but me and no one believes it but me.”

We didn’t know what to say though I think all
of us wanted to comfort her in some way.
 
She obviously went through something terrible and has felt very alone
for a long time.

“Well, now.
 
Let me show you what I think I’ve discovered. Come closer.”

As we stepped up to the wall of photos, we
noticed that she had marked several pictures with different colored stars.
 
The first few she had marked had orange ones
in the left corners.

“If you look at this set of pictographs, you’ll
notice that the people, the humans, are doing normal chores—cooking around the
fire, tanning hides, harvesting a garden.
 
Everything seems normal except for one thing.
 
What do you see?”

It was Clara that stepped closer first, staring
at each pictograph.
 
Though the engravings
were primitive, they had been shaved and shaped to show definition.
 
There were several human-like figures that
had been completely dug out rather than just an outline of a human.
 
These other figures appeared darker and were
simply standing in each pictograph, watching the humans do their work.

“They’re shadow people,” said Clara
unflinchingly.
 
“All of these.”

She pointed to each one in each picture.

“Shadow people?
 
That’s what you call them?” asked Theresa.

“Yes,” she replied.

“Well, they keep popping up throughout this
history on the wall.
 
I know now that
this primitive people who died out long ago wanted to tell what happened to
them.”

“So, these things have obviously been here
before?” I asked.
 
“How long ago?”

“Thousands of years ago.”

“What are they doing?
 
The shadow people?” asked Clara, now
examining other pictures with the orange stars.

“Nothing, actually,” said Theresa.
 
“Or, at least that’s what it seemed like at
first to me.
 
I’ve been studying these
very closely since I returned home from Cuba, but things suddenly change for
this primitive people when a disaster occurs—a flood.
 
Look here,” she pointed to several pictures
along the second column marked with blue stars.

The pictographs showed how this devastating
flood killed livestock, ruined crops, and put these people into a famine.
 
While these cryptic pictographs could not
show great detail like in a painting, there was a definite look of sadness and
fear upon them.
 
This is where other
figures appeared.

“After the flood,” narrated Theresa, while
pointing to each picture, “more shadow people as you call them appeared.
 
Then came the dark giants.
 
It seems that some sort of catastrophe
precedes their coming.”

“Like a hurricane,” added Jeremy.

We all considered that quietly.
 
Theresa’s eyes flicked to the
television.
 
I looked at the wall of
photos where Theresa had marked each one with a red star that had the dark
giants as she called them.
 
In the
pictographs, it looked as if these huge, black creatures had swords for arms
that they stabbed right into the chest of their victims.
 

“So, why do these demon monsters or whatever
they are want to come and kill people?
 
Just for fun?
 
I don’t get it,”
said Jeremy.
 
“I mean, what do they gain
from it?”

“I don’t think they’re killing for the fun of
it,” said Theresa.
 
“Do you see these
sword-like hands they have?
 
They seem to
be killing each person in exactly the same spot.”

My limited knowledge of anatomy from Biology
and just watching enough blood-and-guts movies told me that these monsters
thrust their “swords” directly into their hearts.

“Perhaps, it’s some kind of ritual,” said
Clara.

“That’s what I was thinking,” said Theresa
excitedly, “like the ancient Mayans who sacrificed humans to the gods.
 
Hell, maybe they even got the idea from these
things.
 
It seems that they could be
performing this ritual to gain power amongst their own kind when they conquer
another people.”

I looked closely at the dark giants in each
pictograph.
 
After each killing, from
frame to frame, there was a subtle difference.
 
They seemed to grow larger and stronger each time they killed a human in
this way.
 
There were subtle wavy lines
around them, as if they were glowing or shining with some new power.
 
A flash from that nightmare slammed into my
head where I met one of these huge demons on a swampy shore.
 
Its black, sword-like arm struck me directly
through flesh and ribs, straight into my heart.
 
It wasn’t a sudden death, but a seeping out of all my strength.
 
It was as if this thing was literally sucking
the life out of me.
 
The demon’s electric
eyes glistened brighter with each ounce of life it took from me.

“No, it’s not a ritual,” I finally said,
shrugging off the memory of the nightmare.
 

“What is it?” asked Clara. “Why do you have
that look on your face?”

There was no way to sugarcoat this.
 
I had to just tell them straight up.

“They’re feeding,” I said.
 
“They feed on our energy.
 
They’re coming here to eat.”

I knew how gruesome it sounded.
 
No one could say anything for a minute.

“How do you know?” asked Theresa quietly.

“Because of how they kill me in my dreams.
 
I can feel them draining me dry, while at the
same time they grow stronger from it.”

“He’s right,” said Jeremy.

He didn’t elaborate on why I was right, but I
knew Jeremy must’ve had the same experience in his dreams.

“So, what about the third ones?” asked Jeremy
somberly, pointing to a pictograph with a yellow star.
 
“The ash-eaters.”

“Interesting name,” said Theresa, “because
that’s exactly what they are.
 
The
pictographs aren’t very clear, but if you look closely the people who built
that wall tried to show it as best they could.
 
Look here, this is what the humans look like after the giants are done
with them.
 
I remember when I first saw
this pictograph there in that hole in the ground in Cuba, I thought this looked
like the remains of people I once saw in Pompeii.
 
The
Pompeiians
had
been killed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and then buried in lava and
ash.
 
Hundreds of years later,
archaeologists found the perfectly preserved city and were able to show us just
what the victims looked like when they died.
 
They looked like these people, who are frozen in statues of fossilized
humans.
 
When I was in Cuba, I took
something with me, thinking it no more than a souvenir from the site at the
time.”

Theresa pulled out a small, brown velvet pouch
from her suitcase.
 
She untied a knot
then poured something into the palm of her hand.
 
It was a small black rock.
 
As I got closer, I recognized it from the
stone in my dreams, the burning stone.

“I know this,” I said.

“You do?” asked Theresa.

“But how?” asked Clara.

“I don’t know.
 
It’s always in my dreams.
 
I’m
holding it as I walk through a cane field, just before I enter the swamp then
see the creatures.
 
What is it?”

Theresa looked at me curiously.
 
I couldn’t read her emotions, because I was
caught up in my own.

“It was a piece of rock, so I thought, from
deep underground.
 
They were hauling and
packing pieces of it the day . . . the day the site was destroyed.
 
I had picked this up and put it in my pocket,
thinking it would be fun to do my own study of it.
 
You see, my degree is in geology.”

She paused and looked out the window, getting
that glazed look again.

“Well,” said Clara, “what did you find?”

She turned back to us, still holding it in her
hand for us to see.

“It’s the petrified remains of human bone.”

I instantly felt a jolt of shock and fear from
both Clara and Jeremy.
 

“There are traces of sulfur on the
surface.
 
There were much larger pieces
of the same thing, but they’re all buried now.
 
I’m sure whoever funded the dig will eventually get back to it
again.
 
At some point, they will listen
to me when they realize an entire group of workers has disappeared.”
 

All three of us were staring at it.
 

“How come they didn’t look into Dr. Malcolm’s
disappearance?” Jeremy asked distractedly.
 
“I mean, they knew that the two of you traveled together then you came
back alone.”

“Yes, well, actually they finally were the day
I flew here.
 
They were trying to
communicate with the officials in Cuba about it, but that entire God-forsaken
island is still without power. For some reason, I knew I had to come here.”

I wasn’t really listening, because I was so
mesmerized by this object from my dreams being very real, very tangible.
 
I reached out my hand, palm up.

“May I see it?”

Theresa nodded then placed the black stone in
my hand.
 
I was expecting the pain of the
cold burn just like in my dreams, but not the intensity of it.
 
I sucked in my breath at the stun.
 
Then, there was something I didn’t
expect.
 
A distant woman’s scream was
ringing in my ears and all went black.
 
A
spinning vision jerked into my head.
 
An
amazingly fierce and beautiful woman stood before me.
 
She was fair-skinned with reddish-blonde hair
spilling wildly around her shoulders.
 
She had the look of a warrior with some sort of tribal tattoos swirling
up her forearms though she had no weapon.
 
There were four of the giant creatures towering above her as she
crouched, ready to pounce while she guarded some kind of gateway.
 
Two huge monoliths, perhaps twelve feet tall,
easily as tall as the creatures stood behind her. There was a weird humming
sound coming from the tall stones.
 
In
between them was a black hole, outlined by threads of electricity.
 
The scream I’d heard had apparently come from
the woman after seeing her fellow warriors killed at her feet.
 
There were five others—all of them with
similar tattoos on their arms.
 
They were
men and women with the same fair looks as her, except for one large dark-haired
man near her feet.
 
I knew this was only
a memory from someone else.
 
I still
didn’t even know how I was even seeing it, but the overwhelming sensation of
vengeful anger flowed from her like a primal instinct.
 
She drew herself to her full height, which
was only half as tall as the dark beasts but taller than most men.
 
She seemed to be waiting for them to do
something.
 
Lifting her arms outward in a
cross, she waited.
 
I couldn’t help but
think how triumphant she looked, even with death breathing down on her.
 
The beasts let loose an eerie growl, impaling
her all at once through the chest, two from the side and two from the
front.
 
Her eyes never dulled with
defeat.
 
She purposefully grabbed the two
black arms extending to the tallest creatures in front of her.
 
I felt a trembling vibration, growing and
growing.
 
It was coming from her.
 
It was the same vibration I felt when I
sensed the change in my supernatural sense, except this was much, much
stronger.
 
She looked first at the
ground, at her fallen friends then pausing at the man near her feet, speaking
quietly to them in a language I didn’t understand.