Dividing Earth: A Novel of Dark Fantasy (17 page)

He paused a moment, then turned into the driveway, looked through the fencing on either side, hoping to see horses, but nothing living walked there. The driveway opened on a lawn, and he glanced around to find a place to park, perhaps another car, but there wasn’t a garage in sight. He pulled beside the fence, and a cough seized him. He doubled over, his eyes welled up, and when the spasm passed, there were tears on his shirt.

On the porch, a breeze worried his clothing, and he chilled. With one arm around his torso, he pulled the screen open, knocked on the door, and stepped back. Footsteps echoed inside, then the door opened and a young woman with long dark hair leaned on the door. “Hello, Robert,” she said, pushing open the screen. He stepped inside, smiled noncommittally at her, and, when his eyes adjusted, looked around.

Cassadaga hadn’t fit his myopic preconceptions, and neither did the interior of Monty’s home. He’d expected furnishing in the style employed by his cousin—a Wiccan who spoke strangely, often, and fondly of Anton LaVey: faux Persian rugs, rooms separated by hanging beads, and shelves housing ceramic, glass, and wooden bongs. But Monty had left his walls bare, as he had the floors. In the center of the living room stood a couch clothed in ebony leather; a few feet away was a cherry-colored table. Only the bookshelves lining each wall gave away his interests: volumes by famous parapsychologists and demonologists.

“Why don’t you have a seat?” the woman asked, pointing to the couch.

“Alright, Miss . . .”

She smiled, glanced at the ceiling. “I’ll get Monty,” she said, and disappeared upstairs. Minutes later, she returned. “Would you mind meeting him upstairs?”

Robert stood. “Not at all.” He passed her at the base of the stairs.

The staircase was narrow and low. On the last step, he stiffened. The second floor consisted of a single space, dark but for a lamp casting light up from its place on the floor. Four metal folding chairs were arranged in a circle. A musty smell penetrated everything.

“Hello?” Robert ventured. He heard breathing from somewhere in the room, and Robert held his hand up to his eyes, made out a shadow. “Is anyone there?”

“I’m here.”

“I’m—”

“I know who you are.”

“Okay,” said Robert. “Would you like me to sit?”

“You can’t be Sarah’s child,” the man.

Robert stepped back. Then he reached out, found a chair, sat. “Who are you?”

“You know my name.”

“How did you know my mother?”

“She was part of us. And so are you.”

Robert gaped into the darkness. Dan’s
wizard
cast a large shadow, slumping to one side. He leaned forward, tried to make out a face, but couldn’t. “What was she like?”

The other man chuckled. It was a deep, disturbing sound. “What was she like? I hadn’t seen her since she was a girl.” He sighed. “But still, I loved her.”

Robert chose to ignore the question. “Why did she come here?”

“Why did you?”

“Dan told me to.”

“A lie.”

“Dan told me to.”

“No, you came to Dan. You are sick, like your mother was. You had questions, and I’m something of a history buff.” The voice was gaining strength, momentum.

“Did Dan know—”

“Oh, yes. He’s older than I am. Good man, Daniel. He saved my life once.”

“How did he know to send me to you?”

“How many stupid questions are you going to ask? Does your mind have no investigation in it?”

Robert sat back.

“I knew your mother. I know Dan. Dan knows you.”

“You asked him about me.”

“Ah, not a complete simpleton.”

“She was an atheist, not a Spiritualist.”

“Believe me, young man, you have no idea what your mother was.”

Robert closed his eyes. Then he said, “How did you meet my mother?”

“We met as children.”

“Were you ever—”

“No,” said Monty, smiling almost wistfully. “We were only friends.”

“My father told me something yesterday. About her disappearance.”

“It was all over the papers for a day or two.”

“And they never found her?”

“Of course not. Why did he tell you this now?”

“I’m sick.”

“There are reasons for that. And you know it here”—he patted the left side of his chest— “but not”—he tapped his skull—“up here.”

“All I know is that it’s somehow connected to her.”

“Not connected, Robert. It is her.” With that, the man stood. He was larger than Robert had imagined. He shrugged his shoulders and the quilt he had been wrapped in fell to the floor. He turned, picked up a smaller blanket, wrapped it around his waist like a towel. Step by step, shadows fled his skin. His chest was mottled with gray hair; beneath sallow, sagging skin, thick bunches of muscle flickered like knots of twine. He stood before Robert a moment, gazing down with eyes still shadowed, then lowered himself onto the chair. His face appeared impossible aged, like clay left in the kiln too long. “People thought she was going mad,” he said.

“What did you think?”

“For such a long time she’d dropped the veil over her eyes, and accepted the physical world as all that was real.”

Robert leaned over, ran his hands over his face. “Why did she burst into a cathedral, go nuts, and leave me on a sidewalk?”

“You’ll have to ask her.”

“Wonderful. I’ll do that.” Robert stood up. “Thanks for your time.”

“Sit down.”

He stared at Monty, breathing heavily. “How old are you?”

“Sit down.”

Robert pulled his chair back. He sat. They stared at each other.

“Close your eyes.”

“Come on, if you’re—”

“Close you eyes.”

Slowly, Robert did as he was told.

“Listen, Robert, listen to my voice, imagine it’s got skin, imagine it’s a body . . . .”

8

Some people (Monty said) call it Classical Reality, some think of it as a veil, but this great body of energy is both paradox and reality, matter and anti-matter, question and answer. It is never-ending and finite, one thing, whole and complete, never changing but never the same. The matter is irreplaceable although it changes form, shape and dimension.

God is not separate from creation, but a part of it, one and the same, the name and the body. God is the mind of the cosmos, the self-awareness in the center of the sun. Everything, Robert, everything—earth and sky and sea—is the same. All is recycled endlessly, but it is always married, stitched on an invisible seam. Men are women, women are men, and algae might be the teeth in a shark’s mouth: everything depends on that indefinable definer we call time as to what a single cell is at a given moment.

Time is only useful to us because it measures lifetimes, but lifetimes do not exist. They are the lie man created when the first of his kind stopped breathing. Man believes in burial, but burial is only a planting of a different kind, and the harvest takes place after thousands or millions of our years. We are buried, and our earth once more carries the matter that used to bear our name out into her vast circulation, and sooner or later we are reborn, if only as a trillion grains of sand.

We are born of a woman, from an egg and a sperm, from a bloodline that traces its beginnings to apes, to single cell organisms, to the mist hovering over the primal land. We come from the earth, are born of it, and are weakened at birth because we’ve been separated from it. Our true ancestry is the soil, the water, the earth we return to when our bodies give out. Men are incomplete, a race of bared nerves severed from the root body, and these nerves possess a finite amount of energy, like a battery, and twist with it, with this life, until burning out. Until then, Man gazes up, muses on the stars, on God, on angels or demons, when he should look down at his home, at the one thing that connects all of his kind, all of his kind’s thoughts, all of his kind’s dreams.

Now, Robert, I want you to look down. There is a chasm at your feet. A flickering red light is somewhere in the darkness, and inside, deep inside it, is a sea of matter, of memory, of story. I want you to swim, Robert. I need you to swim.

9

There was nothing but light. And a voice. A sense of movement, though nothing lay in any distance. Light ate inside him. He became light. Moving, roaming the infinite brightness. And then there was something. It was off in the white, a dot of black, a rip in the fabric, a tear in what had been an enveloping veil, and as he approached it wasn’t a dot anymore but a hole. It began to pulse, and something glowed within it, perhaps down inside it. Something red. It grew, opened like a mouth, and he was inside. All was black and red. The red was shaded; the center was crimson while two shafts, like the stems of twin roses, were violet. Then the colors ripped as though along a seam, and in the rip he saw the world. It gaped, and he stood on nothing, looking down on a desert. It rose and fell like the line of a leg, a hip, a shoulder. A wind kicked up. The dunes cascaded around each other, whirling, rising, until nothing but sand existed.

A pyramid. It shot from the sand like the tip of a spear.

A coliseum. Cacophony plumed from its hollow insides, gathered in the air above it, paused, echoed. The cries of a city, of a time, of a race.

A brown boy sat in the sand. His garments drifted in the wind. His huge head lolled atop his shrunken, starving body. A vulture shrieked, landed in the sand above him. Its black eyes sized him. The boy leaned forward on an arm made only of bone, staring at the bird, his eyes avid yet curious, and the bird stepped forward, clucked his beak, measuring him, snapping at him, and then it was on him, scooping a chunk of flesh out, like a spoon through a pie.

He moved through it quicker now, stamping his feet on the earth, seeing jungles and steel, men and bombs, armies and galaxies. He saw All, if only a glimpse.

And stopped on a woman and boy child. They shared a bed. The boy awoke, tugged on her sleeve, and she moaned, dragged her arm along her sweating brow, opened her eyes.

It was her.

* * * * *

Sarah Eugene Lieber coughed. Her face was red; a vein pulsed at her receding hairline.

Robert stirred, reached out for his mother. Watching her, he began to cry. Tears gathered in his eyes, and his face, thick with baby fat, squeezed the tears out.

Sarah’s fit passed, and she touched her child’s arm, stroked it gently. “It’s okay, honey. Mommy’s gonna be alright,” she told him, then she held her palms up. Sores still covered them, red and inflamed, and she cried out.

Robert burst into tears again, his eyes following her as she left the bed.

She checked herself out in the bathroom mirror. Her face was still ripe with blisters, her neck bulged with lymph nodes, hard as rocks, and the nodes below and above her collar bones were enlarged and red. She’d done all they’d asked, had kneeled in their circle and received their hands, their prayers, had gone off her chemotherapy, had been reassured for weeks that the earth would restore her, .

“And not a goddamn thing!” she screamed, then began to cry at the pain it caused in her throat. She tore off her gown to stand naked before her mirror. She was no longer thin, but gaunt. Even the smell of food made her nauseous; she hadn’t taken more than a few bites of an apple or a banana in weeks. She turned back toward her son, who had sat up and was staring at her, eyes wide, blinking slowly.

She fled the bathroom, went down the hall, looked around her cluttered living room. “Jimmy?” she called out, but the clock read after ten in the morning: Jimmy was at work, and wouldn’t be back until late; he couldn’t stand her decomposition, and her newfound faith in her past made him angry. Jimmy had grown up Catholic, and although he hadn’t set a foot inside a church since their marriage, he still believed, if rather vaguely, in the tenets and basic dogma of his boyhood church.

Sarah fell to her knees, rifled through a laundry basket overflowing with dirty clothes. She tossed garments out until coming upon a dress. She stood, stepped into it, and padded back to the bedroom to grab Robert.

* * * * *

They called it Earth Cathedral. A sandstone construct in the mission style, the cathedral had been raised by Cassadaga’s founding fathers, men and women who’d fled the Puritanical hysteria of the north, and had been built to the exacting dimensions of an aging Wiccan priest. Stucco textured the two-storied exterior while the gemstone, piercing in the sun, and the tripartite statuary niche centered the parapet. Buttresses topped with capped urn finials, arched window, and an attic-piercing wound around the building in perfect symmetry.

Sarah parked in the grass field adjacent to the cathedral.

“Are you okay, Mommy?” asked Robert, his large brown eyes nervously watching her.

She wiped her eyes with the sides of her hands, looked down at her son. “Don’t move, okay? I’ll be back in a minute.”

Robert nodded, stuck his thumb in his mouth, watched mildly as his mother slammed the car door and stalked off, leaving him alone. He turned, smacked his palms on the closed car windows, and noticed for the first time how hot it was, even in November, closed up in a car. And how quiet.

10

Sarah heard the booming voice of Montague Greer. She hesitated outside the door, listening closely, then pushed the doors open and strode in, her palms sliding, pressing down the hem of her dress.

The interior was plain, notably unchurch-like. No sanctuary separated believer from priest. The walls bore no paintings, no graffiti of belief, and the pews were wooden and without padding. Once the pews ended, there was only a high-backed red chair; behind the chair, strangely, a large wooden cross hung by three wires.

She strode down the center aisle. The small congregation turned, watching. Few people made it to the midday service.

Seated in the red chair, Greer watched her, his ancient face expressionless. Then she was standing before him, shaking, and he fixed his eyes on her stomach, where he’d laid his hands the day before.

She took the dress by the shoulders, put her head through its low neck, let the garment slide off her, pool at her feet.

The people didn’t gasp; they were silent. Greer breathed in deeply, lifted his eyes.