Dust of Eden (43 page)

from TELL-TALE PUBLISHING GROUP

Cover Art by Patricia Lazarus

Back by popular demand, Tell-Tale Publishing Group is proud to bring you an acclaimed novel by Pulitzer nominee, Thomas Sullivan.

“He tells stories like
Fabergé
made eggs - exquisitely crafted, each one unique and beautiful and of the finest kind, and I'm eternally grateful to him for sharing. This is fiction for grown-ups -- emotionally complex, literate and compulsively readable. Highly recommended.” – Mark Lancaster, Reviewer & Commentator

“THE MARTYRING is a modern masterpiece, and Thomas Sullivan is a national treasure.” – Loren D.
Estleman
, author of BILLY GASHADE

“One is convinced that an outsize performer is trying his wings – a John Barth or a John Irving, with a touch of William Gaddis and maybe a dash of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.” – The Chicago Tribune

“Thomas Sullivan is a master of description.” – William X.
Kienzle
, author of the Father
Koesler
mystery series

“A memorable journey . . . compelling read. Classic Sullivan.” – Fred Bean, author of EDEN

“Trying to pigeonhole Thomas Sullivan would be like calling Hemingway an outdoor writer, or Fitzgerald the king of glamour and glitz. He's that good, moving effortlessly from one literary landscape to another, his cast of wonderful characters in tow.” – Lowell
Cauffiel
, author of MASQUERADE

“Sullivan is an original . . . [he] turns a phrase with the ease of Ozzie Smith turning a double play.” – Detroit Free Press

“Reads like lightning . . .” – Detroit Monthly

“The man writes like silk feels.” – M.
Paulle
, columnist

"Sullivan's most sustained and strongest yet...” –
Kirkus
Reviews

Thrillers Editor's Recommended Book of the Month

“Highly recommended spine-chilling entertainment.” – Rue Morgue

“…a joy to read.” – The Associated Press

“Where Sullivan belongs is on the best-seller lists.” – Doug
Allyn
, Flint Journal

“…can't be recommended highly enough.” – David Niall Wilson, author DEEP BLUE

“…a Border's pick-of-the-month nationally.”

“Thomas Sullivan has a way with words like few other writers. He could make the back of a cereal box sound interesting.” – Alan Russell, Author

“Thomas Sullivan is one of the best writers out there…” – Jennifer
Hairfield
, Author and Reviewer

“…work of impressive imagination…a writer with considerable gifts for language and style.” – Nate Kenyon, Author & Reviewer

"It's entirely possible, I believe, that Sully is William Wordsworth reincarnated, and I know he's planning a sea kayaking trip in the South Pacific later this year. Hmmm. Maybe he's a reincarnated Joseph Conrad, as well." -- Chuck Hines, Author & Commentator

The Martyring

World Fantasy Award Finalist

"Thomas Sullivan is a master of description. Even readers who are not scared by things that go bump in the night may tremble as the most ghoulish creature since Hannibal
Lecter
stalks the pages of The Martyring. A tale of murder and unholy family relationships." —William X.
Kienzle

"A compelling read and the seed of nightmares. Classic Sullivan."—Fred Bean

"Trying to pigeonhole Thomas Sullivan would be like calling Hemingway an outdoor writer or Fitzgerald the king of glamour and glitz. He's that good, moving effortlessly from one literary landscape to another, his cast of wonderful characters in tow."—Lowell
Cauffiel

The Phases of Harry Moon

Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize

"One is convinced that an outsize performer is trying his wings—a John Barth or a John Irving, with a touch of William Gaddis and maybe a dash of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr."—Chicago Tribune

"Once in a blue moon, modem American literature captures lightning in a bottle, producing a work that is both important and entertaining. The Phases of Harry Moon is just such a work. In the hands of Thomas Sullivan, it is a serious character study as seen in a funhouse mirror. The reader will look, laugh, and come away changed."—Loren D.
Estleman

Thomas Sullivan has been a gambler, a Rube Goldberg- style innovator, a coach, a teacher, a city commissioner, and a born-again athlete. His short stories have been published in every magazine from Omni to Espionage. He lives in Minnesota.

For
Norby
Nation

My Magic Family

Thomas Sullivan

Born Burning

© 2011 Thomas Sullivan

Burton, MI 48509

Cover design by Patricia Lazarus

All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, stored in an electronic system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Thomas Sullivan. Brief quotations may be used in literary reviews.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imaginations or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Printing History

Previously published by Signet, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc. in 2002

Printed in United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sullivan, Thomas

Born Burning / Thomas Sullivan

ISBN
 
978-0-9837552-7-2

Copyright @ Thomas Sullivan, 1989

Tell-Tale Publishing Group, LLC

P. O. Box 90112

Burton, MI 48509

The teak from which the chair was cut was old when China was young. What kept it alive is a mystery of ecology or botany or God. Such trees generally live for two hundred years or so. This one endured for two thousand.

The soil from which it sprang was black and deep with the souls of fierce warriors. They had fought amid the dark forests of what is now Yunnan province and died in sunless depths, their blood black and thick on the forest floor. It may be that the protean caverns of some sanguinary
subworld
fed the thing or it may be that it had roots in hell, but it sprang lustily from its source at a time when China was six thousand feudal states in two river valleys. Christ was yet to be born—and then so far away. Far, too, to the northeast the Huang Ho and Yangtze life waters spawned dynasty after dynasty. The Shang and the Chou Sons of Heaven came and went,

and Shih Huang Ti built the Great Wall while China yet crept west.

Up soared the tree, taller, thicker, radiant with dense flesh, elbowing aside its rivals. Whatever touched it of the surrounding forest withered, even the bamboo, which always accompanies teak. The usual light soil yielded to an ever-widening circle of black loam. In the time of the Sung dynasty to the north, the local tyrant lord,
Ati
Chan, visited the tree and declared that here was a true Son of Heaven. He made it a symbol of his own feudal tyranny.

But the tree had not come from heaven, and its roots sank ever deeper into the underworld.

A hundred times lightning licked and blasted it, but always it healed. Twice, fire assaulted the forest in which it stood. The barren ring around it held, however, and the flames roared angrily as they starved themselves out. What there was of consciousness in the tree accumulated history and the portents of comets and novas. Revolution, invasion, new orders of ancient travesties teemed all around it, and of all the mighty warlords who ravaged the land, only Genghis Khan dared contemplate the tree's destruction. Six times he swung his sword against its trunk—until the blade shattered—and finding he could not conquer the mighty teak, he urinated on it. "You are mine now!" he cried. But Khan died. The tree lived on.

And on.

After the Sung dynasty came the Yuan and then the Ming, with all its elaboration in stone, ivory, bronze, jade, rock crystal . . . and wood. Wood and the idea of wood took on a reverence of its own. The reverence spread with travel, with commerce, even to the dark forests of southwest China where teak and
tung
grew in abundance. When the last Ming was overthrown in 1644, and the
Manchus
ruled eastern China, there arose in the forest of the teak a terrible despot named
Khi
-tan
Zor
. His dominions were limited, but his fierceness in ruling them was all the more cruel. His tortures were slow and exquisitely subtle. His enemies did not so much die as linger in eternal dying. And it is said that he ate his own male children at birth to forestall plots of succession. But what he is known for, what marked him in the ages of man and beast upon the earth, is that he carved his throne from the colossus in the heart of the forbidden forest.

What's more, it came out of the living tree.

This may be important ... if understanding is important. For whatever realm the roots of that anomaly were vested in, whatever the concert of its living consciousness with the world around it, the teak was in total contact with both when the chair was torn out of its trunk. Whether it was the incredible strength of the surrounding wood or its sheer girth, the tree remained standing until it dried out and, in the middle of a moonless night some seven years later, came roaring to the ground.

It was another slow and exquisite murder for the Emperor
Khi
-tan
Zor
. But by the time it was fulfilled, the chair had long been crafted, polished, and employed in his palace. The original cover was silk embroidered with crescent teeth and a scarlet serpentine tongue entwined among the bloodied shoals of a half-savaged infant.

When the emperor died there was no successor, and a bloody revolt ensued. The palace was looted and burned, and the chair began its odyssey across the mountains from peasant to trader to merchant. Battered and scarred, its cover worn to transparency in spots, it was nevertheless a thing of obvious value. From Mandalay to Katmandu it was traded and bought and sometimes taken with loss of life, until an enterprising merchant fashioned a new silk cover for the damaged one and a new legend more palatable than the old. The chair, it now seemed, was commissioned for an Indian prince on the occasion of his seventh birthday and later became his throne. The legend of
Khi
-tan
Zor
and the truth of the chair's origins disappeared forever.