But Tanya was dead, wasn't she? Everybody was dead. He began to cry again, desperate and shaking in the cold water.
He made the decision on impulse, as much out of fear and destitution as anything else. He would go to the cave.
Shannon sucked a lungful of air, submerged into the cold water, and swam for the bank. The perimeter was clear when he surfaced and stood on the grass. He ran toward the black cliffs, pushed by a numbing determination nowâa singular desire to dive into the Sula's power. For comfort or for revenge or just for his own sanity, he wasn't sure, but he ran faster as he neared the old cave.
Large fruit bats beat their huge wings in near silence overhead. Insects screeched. The looming black rock cast a foreboding shadow, even in the dark, hiding the moon.
He broke out into the clearing, thirty yards before the cave, and stopped. A human skull hung over the entranceâSula's first victim. They had retold the story at his burial amid cries that wailed through the jungle like forlorn trumpets. The skull belonged to a woman who had wandered too far from her own tribe. Sula said she had come to cast a spell on their village and he'd taken a rock to the back of her head. He'd been fourteen.
Shannon stared into the cave and fought a sudden panic crashing around his ears. He took an involuntary step back, swallowing.
“Sula,” he whispered. “Sula.”
A cold breeze rustled the leaves over his head, sending a chill deep into his bones. The cave looked like a dark throat. Like the cliff was actually a face and the hanging skull was its one eye, and the cave was its yawning mouth. The natives said that the cave reached an endless abyss of black space where the spirits had first lived. Hell itself.
An image flashed in Shannon's mind, and he blinked. It was Mother, screaming past the window of the house. Begging him to run for his life.
Shannon swallowed and walked for the cave. Tears filled his vision and he marched on. He felt as though he were walking over a cliff.
“Kill me.” He ground the words out past clenched teeth.
And then he was stumbling forward, his head thumping with blood.
“Kill me!” he screamed. He ran for the hole, gripped by a maniacal frenzy. He scooped up a handful of rocks and hurled them into the cave.
“Kill me! Kill me!”
Shannon stopped, legs spread. He was in the face of the cave, five feet from the mound of dirt that covered Sula. The shaman's crooked cane stuck up at the grave's head, like a dagger. A bleached jaguar's skull hung on the caneâfangs white, eyeholes black.
Shannon's muscles began to twitch with horror. It was the kind that starts deep in the marrow and spreads out to the bones and burns the flesh from the inside. He knew then that coming here had been a mistake. He was going to die.
Cold wind blew past his face, lifting his long hair. A low moan pushed it through the opening, out into the silent jungle. His legs quaked and he dropped to his knees, breathing heavy now.
“Sula . . .”
Touch the grave.
He began to sob.
Touch the cane
.
Shannon spread his arms wide and lifted his face to the cave's rock ceiling. His body heaved with torturous sobs that rang through the chamber.
The cane, you spineless worm! Touch the cane!
With a final cry that sounded more like a long groan, Shannon threw himself at the grave. He scrambled over the mound and dove for the cane. His hands seized the crooked pole and he fell flat, facedown, his torso hitching in soft sobs.
The power came like an electric current, silent but unmerciful.
A wave of raw energy ripped down his back, contracting it with rapid pulses that seized his lungs and bent his spine backward like a bow. His head and his feet jerked a foot off the ground, straining to reach back and complete an impossible arc. For a full five seconds, his body convulsed, threatening to snap his back in two. He could not breathe; he could not utter a single sound; he could only drown in the power that swallowed him.
And for a moment he was sure that he was indeed drowning.
With a soft popping sound, it released him and his face thudded to the dirt. His mouth was open, and he could taste the earth, but as far as he was concerned, he was dead.
TANYA SHRIVELED in the corner, unraveling. Twice now the lights had stuttered to life in her mind, each time revealing the same blue sky and the same clearing below. The images came suddenly, like the flash of a bulb hung buzzing in her brain for a minute or two and then vanishing. She imagined a monk in a monastery cellar pulling a huge switch, like on a Frankenstein movie she'd seen once at Shannon's house. Maybe that was her, Lady Frankenstein, only when the switch was pulled, her body didn't rise from the table. Instead she saw visions.
Now they came again.
Her father was down there again, working diligently, this time setting those beams that had almost fallen on him. Otherwise the scene appeared the same as the two previous episodes. A bulldozer chugged in surreal silence, the hammer swung by her father, the spinning of a sawânone with sound. And always bright blue skies and vivid green jungle. Flocks of parrots drifted above the canopy.
A voice rose to her. “Remember, always look past your own eyes.” She looked down and saw that her father had lifted his chin to her.
Well, what does
that mean, Father?
But she couldn't ask, because she wasn't really there with him. She was a bird or something, flying around.
But the scene had a sense of truth with it, as if she were looking at her father, months before she'd come to Venezuela. As if what she saw in the framed house was actually how he'd built it.
Now a memory joined her thoughts. She was sitting at the table of their newly constructed home and Father was telling them about how God had kept him safe those three months. And more specifically, he was telling them a story of how he'd almost been smashed by a falling beam. But a dove from the sky had screeched and he'd looked up just in time to see the beam.
It was the voice of God, he'd said.
Tanya twitched in the corner of the box and pulled her knees closer.
Heavens!
That really happened,
she thought.
That wasn't part of my dreamâFather told us
that story. And now I'm hallucinating that it was me in the form of some birdâ
maybe a doveâthat warned him.
Maybe the mind played these kinds of tricks just before it died. Or maybe she was actually there, watching.
Either way, Father was telling her to
look past her own eyes
.
SHANNON CAME to his senses ten minutes later. But they weren't really his senses at all, were they? Well, yes, they were his, but his senses had changed, hadn't they?
He pushed himself to his knees, and then to his feet. The taste of copper filled his mouthâblood from the fall. He swallowed and shivered with a sudden passion. At first he didn't know what had changedâhe only knew that he couldn't stand waiting any longer. He had to get out of this cave and up the cliffs.
The cane still stuck out of the grave, like a big toothpick. The wind still sailed past his cheeks and his breathing still echoed in the dark chamber. But somehow it all seemed a bit simple to him. He turned around and faced the jungle.
“Sula,” he whispered. It was time to go. Shannon ground his molars, spit blood to the side, and ran into the night, unable to contain the hot rage that boiled through his veins.
That was itâhis sorrow had given way to a bitter fury. That was the difference in him. He stopped and looked around at the dark jungle. An image of the old witch doctor, grinning with twisted lips, flashed through his mind. It was true, then. Sula lived.
Shannon felt a finger of fear crawl up his back.
A sudden dark fog crowded his mind and he blinked in the night, disorientated. Where was he going?
Oh, yes. He was going to the cliffs. He was running away. But that hardly made sense. He should go back to the plantation and do something!
No, he should escape. Then he would do something. What, he had no idea. He was only eighteen. A mere boy. A boy with Sula.
Shannon reached the black cliff, spit into his hands, and started to climb. It rose two hundred meters into the dark sky, lighted occasionally by the moon, which peered through passing clouds. Night creatures chirped in disjointed, overlapping chorus, millions strong.
Despite the cool night air, the climb quickly coaxed streams of sweat from Shannon's pores. The thin crack he'd often studied as a possible ascent path rose like a dark scar in the dim light. Using his hands as a wedge in the thin crack, he picked his way up the rock surface. With proper climbing shoes the task would have been tricky. Only because his bare feet were calloused did he manage it now.
“Sulaaaa . . .”
He'd climbed a full hundred meters without any major problems when the crack began to thin. He paused, blinked the sweat from his eyes, and pressed on.
Within another ten meters the gap closed to a paper-thin seam that stopped at a small ledge jutting from the smooth surface above. Another hundred meters of cliff loomed above him. He couldn't back down now, not without rope. A chill ran down his spine, and he breathed deep to steady his nerves.
He walked the face of the cliff with his fingers.
Nothing.
Shannon stared again at the ledge above, his heart now pounding like a piston engine. It was one foot, maybe eighteen inches beyond the nearest handhold. Reaching it would require him to release the hold securing him to the face. Missing it would send him plummeting to his death.
An image stilled his breathing: a man free-falling with his arms and legs stretched to the sky, screaming. Then a sickening
thud
âa large boulder at the base breaking the fall like a fist to the back.
The image brought a twitch to his lip. He grinned softly.
“Sulaaaaa . . .”
You're a sicko, Shannon. Sicko.
He looked at the ledge above him. He lunged upward with every last muscle sprung taut and his toes digging against the rock. He slapped his right hand against the cliff face above him.
Nothing.
He felt only flat stone. No ledge.
His body slid down the smooth cliff surface, his fingers digging hopelessly for a grip. His fingertips lost contact with the stone surface altogether. He was free-falling and his heart ran clear up into the roof of his mouth.
Then the ledge filled his hand and he locked onto it, shaking violently. Trembling so bad that he knew he would shake loose unless he found a better hold. Dangling from three fingers, he swung his left hand up as high as he could and managed to grip the same ledge.
He hung for a few moments and then edged his way along the shelf. There had to be a way up somewhere.
He inched his way farther. Again nothing. The ledge narrowed. His fingertips crowded the cliff surface. If the edge played out . . . well, if the edge played out he would die, wouldn't he? Smashed for the vultures on the rocks below. Panic spiked up his neck, threatening to erupt in his skull. He hung totally helpless. He could not go back; he couldn't descend; he couldn't climb. His life hung on this one ledge and this time the realization started his bones quaking.
Stretched to the right as far as his arm allowed, his fingers crossed a fissure and he froze. The crack? He inched his fingers a little farther and the break deepenedâdeep enough for him to work his hand into.
Shannon took a deep halting breath, thrust his hand into the rift, clenched his knuckles to make a wedge, and swung out into the dark abyss before him, dangling from his right fist. His hand held.
He looked down at the bottomless drop below his feet and thrust his left hand into the opening over his right to create another wedge. He hung like that for a full minute, gasping at the night air for breath. His knuckles stung and his lungs refused to fill, stretched as he was. He began hauling himself up, hand over hand.
His knuckles were bare and his hands were slippery with blood when he pulled himself over the top. Catching his breath, he rolled to his back behind a group of boulders. Pain throbbed up his arms. He lay still, numb and confused.
Muffled voices suddenly carried on the wind. Shannon bolted upright and caught his breath.
Again, a man calling and then laughing.
Shannon crept to the boulders and edged his head over its rim for a vantage point. The night scene ran into his mind in one long stream of images. A fire bending in the breeze a hundred meters ahead, west. Two dozen faces glowing in its light. Behind them, a helicopterâno, two choppers, like buffaloes feeding on the rock. Supply packs sat scattered about the camp, propping up weapons. A single man stood on guard, hands on hips, twenty meters off.
Shannon breathed deep, knowing immediately what he would do as if his whole life in the jungle had prepared him for this one moment.
A strange beckoning called. A desire, whispering in the night, urging him forward. He swallowed, still scanning the scene before him, his blood now surging through his veins. Not so much in anger, he noted with mild surprise. A craving.
A new picture rolled through his brain, slow motion. A scene of him flying parallel to the ground, hurling his knife sidearm.
The steel flashing through the air while he was still airborne.
Bet you were surprised, huh, boy? And here you thought you were going to plug
me with a bullet or two.
A faint smile drifted across Shannon's lips.
Sula . . .
Then the image was gone, leaving only black sky in his eyes. He pulled his head back and blinked. He scrambled across the small clearing and soundlessly leapt over its rim. He ran around the boulders, staying low to the ground. The guard stood with his back to him, bent over cupped hands, a rifle slung on his right shoulder. The outline of a knife hung loosely at his hip.
The man turned his back to the wind, facing Shannon, his head still bowed to his hands. Shannon held his breath. A flame flashed once unsuccessfully, lighting the guard's browned lips pursed around a fresh cigarette. He would later wonder what could have possibly possessed him to go then, so suddenly, with hardly a thought. But Shannon went then, just before another flame lit the man's face.