The Eternal World (30 page)

CHAPTER 36

T
HE TRIP WAS
easier than it had been a hundred fifty years before, but it was still not easy.

The Range Rover that Shako drove—David rapidly deteriorating in the back, held by her two young warriors—ate up a lot of ground at the edge of the swamp. Still, it sank in muck to the axle when they tried to cross a field of mud flats near the river.

They went on foot from there. Simon was not bound, or even watched that closely. He wondered if he had won some small amount of respect from Shako for speaking for David’s life.

Probably not. More likely, she was just too worried about David to spare any more thought on him.

They covered the distance as fast as they could on foot, winding down trails between the trees, headed into the thickets. A hidden trail emerged from behind the overgrowth; Simon found himself placing his feet on stone steps half-buried in the mud, then turning into a seeming wall of vegetation to discover a tunnel carved into the branches.

For years he had suspected there was something still here. He swore he could almost feel it in his blood, the last remnants of the Water in his system vibrating in tune with a hidden spring somewhere underground. But they had never been able to find anything, in all the years they looked. Their attempts to claim the land were blocked, always by the remnants of the Seminole tribe. In the nineteenth century, his scouts were cut down by arrows and axes. And then, in the twentieth century, once the Seminole were recognized by the courts again, Conquest found itself cut off by lawyers paid for by the newfound wealth from Indian casinos. He was never able to purchase so much as an acre of Seminole land, and Simon eventually dismissed his feeling as foolish hope.

Now he knew he was right.

It was almost dawn when they found the small waterfall. Shako turned abruptly, almost into the rock face of the hill, and then simply vanished.

The Seminole boy and girl did the same, David supported between them, and Simon saw it. A dark fissure in the rock running eight feet high but only a few feet wide.

Carlos never would have fit through here, he thought, and turned to the side to ease through.

He stumbled immediately. It was pitch-dark, and the drop was sudden and steep.

The Seminole girl kept him from falling when he bumped into her.

In a few moments, his eyes adjusted. There was a slightly phosphorescent lichen on the cave walls that glowed enough to allow a dim view. The others moved swiftly, finding their footholds from memory. He moved as fast as he could behind them, feeling each step along the way.

Eventually, as they went deeper, the path grew wider. The rock and earth above him was cross-braced with old timbers, and holes were punched at the end of one cave to create entrances into the next.

He realized the timbers were not for support. They did not keep the passages open. Rather, they held back tons and tons of debris that had been shifted from the passage up to the ceiling. If the braces were to fall, the entire tunnel would collapse in on itself.

A safety measure, Simon figured. One of Shako’s ideas, no doubt.

They came to the final chamber. Now Simon saw the blue glow. It felt calm and welcoming. He stepped through the last passage, which was fashioned like an archway, with rough-hewn bricks curving over the top, where they met at a keystone.

That’s where he saw the bodies.

Their skin was as fresh as if they’d died yesterday. Simon felt the moisture in the air. The Water, the condensation, it must have acted as a preservative.

They all lay on the floor of the main chamber, at various spots around the eerie, glowing pool. They were on their backs, wearing clothes from hundreds of years before. There were chiefs in their full ceremonial finery, and some men wearing only loincloths. There was one body that looked Aztec, wearing long-decayed feathers and tarnished gold. There was even something that looked more ape than man, a hairy hominid with a face almost simian except for its disturbingly human eyes, open and staring at nothing.

He was about to ask how they died when it became obvious.

They were all suicides.

Some had slit their wrists, the blood long since run out but the neat slashes still open. Others had cut their own throats. One man, who must have had inhuman determination, had slowly wrapped a leather cord around his own neck and then twisted a wooden handle through it, over and over, until it tightened and strangled him. His face was mottled and bloated, but Simon could still see the hint of a smile on his lips.

“What is this?” he demanded.

Shako looked up from where she was hovering over David. She had a plastic bottle in one hand. She was trying to get him to drink. It wasn’t working.

“This is exactly what it looks like,” she said. “This is what I wanted you to see.”

“Immortals,” he said.

“Every one who used this pool before us. Strangers and travelers who stumbled upon it. My ancestors. Others, far older than them. Every one who lived long enough to know they were tired of it. There’s more to life than simply not dying.”

“My God,” Simon said. “The years in this place. And they all just gave up?”

“We’re not meant to be like this,” Shako said. “None of us.”

Simon felt somehow cheated. Another secret she’d kept from him. And always a moral at the end of the story.

“Then I suppose you should let him die,” he said, pointing to David.

“I told you already,” Shako said. “I’m not going to let that happen.”

“It doesn’t look as if it’s up to you.”

The Seminole boy was trying to get David to swallow the Water, too. It still wasn’t working. He shook his head. He looked up at Shako helplessly.

Shako picked David up in her arms. His flesh was practically dissolving now, sliding off in chunks as he was undone from the inside out. Water and blood dribbled from his mouth. If he was breathing, it was so faint that Simon could not see it.

But he could see Shako’s tears.

She lifted him and carried him to the edge of the pool. And then she dropped him.

Simon crossed the cave to stand with them and watch the surface.

The pool was not large, but it was surprisingly deep. The blue glow was all they could see on the surface. Below that was nothing but darkness.

They waited. Nothing.

The surface became still, the ripples from David’s body slowly flattening, then disappearing altogether.

The pool was once again as flat as a pane of glass.

Now? Simon wondered.

Shako and the boy and the girl were completely fixated on the Water.

Simon reached under his shirt and found the knife. So many years. So many times he’d replaced the handle and the blade. But it was the same knife. The one Shako had given him.

The only truly unselfish gift he’d ever received in his long and twisted life.

He prepared to draw the weapon. The boy was closest, so he’d get the blade at the back of his neck, right at the soft spot where the spine met the skull. Simon would pull it out and slice it around into Shako’s side. It would not be a fatal strike, but it would probably puncture a lung, which would keep her down long enough for him to use his fists to beat the girl.

Shako had brought him here to show him. He’d seen.

He’d seen a chance to make it all right again, to start over. A whole new source of the Water. A whole new beginning.

He gripped the knife.

Then something burst from the pool, gasping and blindly clawing for air.

Simon flinched back, startled. The boy reached out and grabbed one of the flailing hands. Shako grabbed the other. The girl put her hands around Shako’s waist, and they pulled, all together, yanking the flailing swimmer free, straining as if they were meeting resistance, as if the pool did not want to let the body go back to them.

With a final tug, they heaved David onto the stone floor.

He lay on his back, choking. The boy turned him over, and pure blue Water poured from his lungs as he gagged and vomited it out.

Shako was kneeling next to him, her iron control finally broken, weeping and saying prayers in Uzita, a language Simon still recognized, if only from his dreams.

Simon wanted to give them a moment. But he couldn’t.

There was still so much to do, and so little time.

He grabbed the knife again and stepped forward.

And was slammed back into the wall of the cavern so fast that he could barely see what had hit him.

He tried to bring the knife up to stab his attacker, and felt it plucked from his hands effortlessly, his fingers snapping like twigs as he tried to keep his grip.

Frighteningly blue eyes stared into his out of a face that was David’s but was as cold and still as stone.

Simon saw the knife spin in David’s hand, and then watched, helpless, as David drove it, blurring fast, into his chest.

It hurt, but more than that, it went deep. So deep that it scraped against something and then severed it completely. Simon felt it like a string being cut in him. His arms and legs spasmed once and then went dead. The knife was still buried in him, wedged between his ribs, angled with a surgeon’s precision down and back into his spine.

David lifted him as though he was nothing. Simon stared into those deep blue eyes and saw nothing human.

“David,” Shako’s strong voice said. “No. Stop.”

David blinked. The blue vanished, returning to his own, normal coloring.

He looked confused, like a sleeper woken from a nap. And the strength fled him. He dropped Simon on the floor of the cavern. Shako came to him and pulled him away.

Simon kept trying to reach the knife. His arms would move only half the distance. He could not seem to bend past his waist.

He fell back.

Shako stood over him, her arm around David, who was still dripping wet, still looking confused and frightened.

“I showed you,” Shako said. “I tried. I still held out some hope. But you didn’t want to see. You never understood.”

Simon was filled with a sudden bottomless rage. “No,” he hissed at her. “I have lived too long. To let it end like this.”

She reached down and, surprisingly gently, stroked his hair from his face.

“You’re right,” she said. “You have lived too long. But everything ends. Sooner or later, everything ends.”

She rose and took David’s hand. “What you have to find is the one thing you cannot live without,” she said.

David did not speak. He shivered, as if struck by some bone-deep chill. He looked at everything with a kind of horror and awe.

Shako fit herself under his arm and led him away.

The Seminole boy and girl looked at him for a moment longer. Then they, too, walked away.

Shako paused at the passage out of the cave. Simon could just see her there if he turned his head. The boy and girl supported David while she reached above her head to the keystone at the top of the arch.

She slid it from its place. Then they all turned and left him.

The first block fell a moment later, gravity overcoming inertia, sliding slowly at first, then gathering momentum. The second fell after that, and then the next, and then two or three at once, and then the archway collapsed completely.

The chain reaction began at once, as smaller stones dropped out of the places where they supported the larger stones. First one or two, then dozens at a time.

Within a moment, the rocks fell like rain, and the tunnel was crushed under the weight of tons of stone.

DAVID AND SHAKO AND
the youths were at the surface by then, watching. They heard the grinding sound of rock breaking far below, and saw a dust cloud rise out of the cave’s hidden entrance.

David was still not entirely sure where he had gone, or how he’d come back. He had a deep, nightmarish sense of being swallowed, being absorbed like a drop of water in the ocean, becoming part of a current that flowed through vast reaches over and through the earth. He grasped, if only for an instant, how small a part of the whole he carried. And then he had been violently cast out again, where he found himself holding Simon off the ground.

He looked at Shako and decided it did not matter.

They were alive. They held each other tightly.

This day was a gift. And so were all the others that would come after it, however many they had left, wherever they would reach an end.

EPILOGUE

SAINT PETERSBURG, FLORIDA

ONE MONTH LATER

“Anything eternal is probably intolerable.”

—CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

H
ERE HE COMES,”
Jenny said. “Same time, every day.”

“Back off, he’s mine,” Mia told her. Jenny laughed, but Mia was not entirely joking.

They were behind the reception desk of Three Graces Nursing Home, watching the young man walk up the steps to the front doors.

He’d visited every day since he’d brought the old woman here. It was more a nice gesture than anything else. The old woman was too far gone to notice anyone. Her eyes were clouded with cataracts and she was mostly deaf as well. Not that she would have been able to respond. She was well on her way to the final stages of Alzheimer’s, unable to drag herself from old memories long enough to focus on anything in the present day. When Mia dressed her and bathed her every day, it was like handling a fragile paper doll.

No one was quite sure what her relation was to the guy, David Robinton. He looked nothing like her. He sat with her quietly, or sometimes read to her, or occasionally pushed her wheelchair on the paths around the manicured lawns of the facility.

Mia and the other nurses had taken an interest in him. Three Graces was amazingly quiet. Most of the patients were there to wait comfortably for the inevitable. Every few weeks, another one was taken away in the ambulance that always came to the back entrance and never used its lights or sirens. So David was a mystery she and the other staffers could use to pass the time. He was ridiculously good-looking, but that wasn’t all. Three Graces was not cheap. It was more like a high-end hotel than a hospital. There was no stink of urine or death, like some of the holding pens where Mia had worked before. The halls were spotless, the walls dotted with nice prints of Cézanne, Chagall, and Monet, and the rooms had fresh flowers every day. A singer came into the atrium and played a grand piano every afternoon. She knew that whoever he was, David was probably quite wealthy. And, on the forms he signed, she saw that he was a doctor of some kind.

She kept an eye on him while he visited. She was supposed to stay close to the patients, especially when visitors were around, to make sure that they didn’t need anything or have any medical emergencies. And if that gave her a little more time to talk with the nice, handsome, rich, young doctor, well, that wasn’t a bad thing.

Today, he didn’t leave the old woman’s room. She checked on them several times, and he only sat by her bed in the chair. She didn’t seem to notice he was there.

After an hour, he walked by the front desk to sign out. Mia came around the desk and stood close to him. He rubbed his eyes, wiping away the tears that had formed there. She saw that a lot.

“Same time tomorrow, David?” she asked.

“Same time,” he said.

“Good. It gives us something to look forward to,” she said. She leaned in closer. “It gets incredibly dull here. You’re the most exciting thing that happens all day.”

He laughed politely. “I’m not exciting. Believe me. I prefer the peace and quiet.”

“Oh, it’s good for the old people, sure. But after a twelve-hour shift, I could use a little more noise.”

And this is where you ask me what I’m doing after work, dummy.

But David just said, “See you tomorrow.”

She tried one more time. “It’s so nice of you to visit—your grandmother, I guess?”

David smiled at her and showed her his wedding ring. He didn’t say anything. Then he walked away, and out the door.

Mia was blown away. You arrogant bastard, she thought. Maybe she was flirting with him a little, but for him to assume that she was going to leap on him and desecrate his marriage vows right in broad daylight, that was truly a spectacular amount of ego.

She tried to shake off her irritation. It was time to deliver the meds.

She went to the old woman’s room first. Mia still had no idea how David was related to her, but now she didn’t care. She didn’t need to worry about someone that full of himself, that was for sure.

She never noticed that the old woman was wearing a wedding ring that matched David’s exactly.

Instead, she asked herself the same question she always did as she helped the old woman choke down her pills:

What kind of a name is Shako, anyway?