Crematorium for Phoenixes (12 page)

“We had to destroy ourselves again, because
as you have seen, we were already far from being people.

“And we had lost all connection with what
had happened.

“The men in the past were no longer the
flesh and image of something divine. They were dying creatures
scattered across the ages of the spiral of time; they had lost
their mercy and compassion.

“And when those things disappear, man has
lost the chance that is given by the Almighty to be a saint. What
is not more difficult to love than life when there is nothing but a
crematorium that burns even fire birds?

“Our goal is to extinguish those flames that
pierce our souls in the endless hours within which the days tend to
end.

“And the way to save us are the god men, the
creators of all religions whose death the sent people wanted to
bring about. The created and the Creator in that state would be
ruled only by chaos without memories.”

The men become silent, stunned by the
complexity of what to them seemed like a ridiculous joke told by a
sophist. But sweeping a glance around the premises that lengthened
and lengthened as if lit by a moldy stein in a refrigerator, they
realized that what they had heard was true.

“Wait, you’re saying that we will save those
who made early religions?” asked Akuma. He seemed rattled like the
creaky hourglass of time.

“Yes,” said Takeshi, who trembled like a
hollow, elongated rod in hand. “I knew that asked too much of you.
. . .

“Because I cannot give you something that
will help you move forward or that will you send back.

“That, in every life, is in the hands and
heads of themselves who live.

“I can only say, ‘Forward!’”

The men who had been sitting in a semicircle
suddenly stood up. In every one of them that particle, the catalyst
that pushes, had created a destiny for them, even if it would be
brief in its existence.

They took again the weight of their bodies,
and it seemed that the stress of their muscles, which they had
labored with, had been removed.

The corridors and diagonal passages had
interspersed within them open doors. Before these were loads of
bagged clothes.

They bypassed them without much thought,
even when it seemed that faceted eyes were peeking out from under
the layers and layers of rags.

They had a purpose.

And thus with a few hours’ trek, which
sought the center of the ship, things did not seem so hectic and
the desolation like a corrosive acid that oozed from end to end did
not harass them too much.

Even when encroached, they found glazed
panel structures and encountered built-in speakers made of
translucent canvas. The speakers pierced the network and played
silent screams. Something like a raving, fragmented consciousness
existed and they were still working.

This crackle that looked like an adjustable
radio extracted sounds and loaded the air with humming tension,
just as if they were crying from the depths of the soul; it
resonated like weeping violin arias.

While listening to them, in their own hearts
lurked that sadness that fills people when walls of closed prison
wards are all they can see. The soul has become entrapped, isolated
from everything but itself, and now faces grief in solitary
confinement.

And it seemed that the fate of the former
inhabitants of this city had been held in such a way, like the
blurred lines of meteors.

So after each room, styled with the
enchanted glare of an underground lake, they began to feel as if
their very nature had blurred and would disappear and lead to
another life.

The men checked their instruments to ensure
that they were not under the influence of something harmful. They
rested, ostensibly to catch up, until they realized that everything
was inside their heads.

As if their entire lives were nothing more
than a mechanism whose wheels and parts were throbbing like a
living organism, they tended to their own sunset.

And as they tried to refresh themselves,
often just by enjoying the precincts that glistened like treasuries
from oriental tales, more evil flooded in like an immersive fog
landscape that was spreading its fingers into their hearts.

Thus, the fear approached their
relentlessness, tightening its noose like a padded monster that
walked to the closet stairs.

The men rejected these thoughts and moved
forward again. They leaned on the butts of their rifles and
remembered the order of the thoughts that had been exchanged about
the importance of their mission. But they, like many others, just
could not reject the horror that catches us even when we are
wrapped in blankets as small children.

It was left to them to go all the way while
listening to the melody that after each step cleared and stripped
them.

After a few minutes, amplified by running
under the glazed gases that had been ionized by the sparkling
translucent bridges over them, they arrived in a sheltered bay
island. They stood at the command center of the ship, caught in the
arteries of the heart, which was spreading its song.

Chapter
Nineteen

The ancient city was spending another sultry
afternoon.

Hundreds of birds perched on the built
gargoyles watchtowers, watching the surrounding area that curved in
all directions.

Several cougars were peeking out from behind
the leaves. Their twinkling eyes were no less dangerous than a
mirage. All the while thousands of diligent ants were lugging items
in the branches of leaves, creating caravans for their underground
plantations. Little sideways birds in bright plumage were cleaning
their feathers. They were ready at any moment to fly, creating a
volcanic spray of swarms.

Several stories below, Victor Drake, Amos
Oz, and the others were walking between the pyramid and the wooden
temples. Those were located beside the dilapidated heap of limps
made of stones dragged from unknown places that had been arranged
in clear parallel forms. The men lit torches and formed a square to
protect themselves from predators.

The last ones were not so active at this
hour of the day, a fact that allowed the men to enjoy, as much as
possible, the ruins that sprinkled the area like chocolate chips
upon the fenced meadows with their dense vegetation.

The men were doing so while complying with
the safety of the cyclopean standing features. The lined symmetry
of the gnarled, thick, and heavy as millstones lumps and rock had
somehow been ordered against all the laws of gravity.

They slunk beside the palaestra whose floor
stood just now as poured into concentric circles that were
surrounded by fields. The walls had been carved with sullen ancient
deities that merged with the surrounding area, and they continued
on past squares where thousands of people had once crowded together
for markets or religious processions.

Thus, going around the area were a few half
dried up reservoirs, which splashed sputum green, muddy water. They
traveled along the main street, which now nothing more but an
overgrown grass-striped road.

The spine with ribs connected the entire
city, providing panoramic access to every point.

Continuing on the main road, the men were
approaching the center, which in turn was also surrounded with
walls that looked like draped networks of tangled plants.

They went through a collapsed porch—an arch
whose columns were formed into jaguars, frozen early in their
jumps. They had loaded their weapons just in case and the mixture
of a dazzling cocktail of light and darkness flashed before them.
Towering skyscrapers had risen in the form of stepped pyramids that
like chicks were surrounding a larger one, which in turn had been
raised meters and meters in height.

They turned this pyramid, meandering between
the bushes that reminded bowed in religious prayer to the building.
Before long, as if torn off among the stairs, a hole stood before
their eyes.

Once more they inspected their weapons. The
men had to bend into the entry, which seemed to be created from
claustrophobic, pressed out plates. They went inside and
illuminated the interior of the sanctuary with bioluminescent
lights that shined softly with splashes of liquid light.

They didn’t seem to have quite the time that
they did in Thule. They had to get to the upper floors, which given
the difficulty in tunneling such a massive building, seemed
unlikely.

But in distance, accounting for the stairs
without handrails, there was a buckled triangular, narrow chimney
and shafts. These were things not to be neglected.

The men had started to climb the cracks,
which like a bottomless hole connected nothingness to
nothingness.

Their work was sometimes hindered. Flocks of
bats flew forward like a whirlwind at times. They slit the air with
their screeches, while swarms of insects floated in the expiry,
grinding ash sparks.

Nevertheless, this climb reminded them of
movement in the arcs of electrode towers that housed unnatural
experiments whose purpose and product was a rebellion against the
very universe.

They stopped and ran their hand over the
aligned walls that felt like pavement for a moment. They imagined
what might be waiting for them beyond—a stone sarcophagus drilled
with hoses to feed shackled metal masks that resembled crepe
creatures all wrapped up. Or they were headed toward gigantic high
places with balls and balls of snakes that were giving birth to a
new song. The men were trembling from the repulsiveness of what
they saw and climbed up to where the light elongated like the
eyelids of the closed eye; it glistened and grew louder and
louder.

For a moment, it seemed that somewhere
someone was chanting. It might have been because there was
something behind the cut shell walls or because of their
incarceration in the open tomb. Edged with solar filaments, the
chant seemed to have been picked up by the hundreds, dressed as
canonist priests who ride in Indian file to the top of countless
crowds, where they expect to meet Thed.

The company shivered before those living
processes that the darkness uses with his incessant game called
before their eyes. They wondered what had served this great temple,
and hoped whatever waited for them above was completely different,
as their hearts suggested.

So with each step taken, at each glance over
their mute fantastical assembly, they squirmed. Steamed blood spurt
from the bodies that fell from above and disappeared like a comet
in the depths; they blurred as non-existence into
non-existence.

But squeezing the pool like swan necks
taking stock, they still felt that whatever lay ahead of them would
feel the resistance of their pressurized guns.

And thus, in several stages, illuminating
the closed space that glowed like a cave, they dived down by way of
a tip that led them like a skinned, clawing star and they paused to
plug the huge stone hole.

After staying there for a while, they tucked
their weapons into the angular slits and a little scrape of
ethereal clear sky again appeared over their heads, wearing the
torn fluff of clouds like dandelions.

The men were descending one by one into the
consequent passage. It was a strange garden, similar to that which
had once amazed mankind in Babylon. All of this was revealed before
their eyes.

The entire roof of the pyramid, towered like
a peak over the surrounding vegetation. It was surrounded by
greenery that emitted the smell of orange sprays of flowers.

And among this grace rose a stone table in
the middle of the pyramid’s teeth. There awaited something that the
men could not distinguish from the sun until one of them shouted,
“God, it’s a chupacabra!”

As if the solar spectrum in their vision
appeared to be lowering its power, they saw a vision covered with
membranous olive-black spots. It blinked solar heat with its
watery, lizard eyes, and grinned in a reptilian manner with its
elongated canines sticking out.

Victor Drake waved them silent and they hid
in the dense eucalyptus-green moss. As they ducked down, they
changed their shotguns to shooting mode.

They sat for a few minutes until the
creature seemed to be bidding its time with agonized sounds. It was
not walking when out of nowhere a couple of lambs had been dragged
forth, bleating as they could.

There was an ugly scene that we will reduce
to only dumb shock and sepulchral silence. The creature drowned
into and was splashed by the blood of the lamb’s neck.

Several minutes passed during which it fed,
until finally it was finished and hissed to the figures, who until
now had kneeled with bowed heads.

“You know it’s impossible . . .” they
whispered as an excuse, lowering their voices as a sign of
obedience.

“If you bring children, we will reveal . . .
. We know that you are faint, but you must be patient.”

“No, no, so you’ll have to get used to
it.”

“We know you’re our brother and that’s why
we are protecting you.”

“But I’m sick of all this blood,” said one
of the figures, setting numb, trembling fingers on the hood of the
garment.

“Me too,” said the other, removing from the
cloth robe something that turned out to be a fidgeting, vocalizing
being.

“Not so fast!” shouted Victor Drake, coming
out from where he had been hiding.

The two figures had frozen, as if petrified
by the call. Only their long cloaks flapped in the wind like flags,
issuing some sort of physical evidence that they were there.

“Remove your cloaks immediately!” Victor
told them. His eyes gazed over at the geranium.

The priests had obeyed and tore away the
strips of garment.

Victor waved to the others, and they joined
him, ducking behind the natural cover of the roof.