A Lower Deep - A Self Novel About 3300 wds (19 page)

You all right?
he asked, looking so much like me that I didn't know where I was—here staring at him or over there gazing back at someone just as familiar.

I glanced into my palm and saw that my new hand had a different lifeline that could barely be seen. I wondered how much of this remade body had been born from him.

Come on
, I said.

Not the stations of the cross. They're so friggin' boring. And besides, Golgotha calls.

Of course it does
.

I walked the Way of the Cross. Scholars argued the actual path—even if the Via Dolorosa wasn't it, enough blood had been spilled here to make Self overjoyed. He dove and rolled in the streets, licking the ancient stone and drinking eras until his drool was as black as the lost epochs. Like a child let loose in a candy shop, he soon grew sick to his stomach.

This place gives me the creeps.

Me too, actually
.

I could almost hear the loud, ugly scraping sound of Christ dragging his cross along these stones toward Golgotha, now the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.

There seemed to be as many tourists as there were citizens of the OldCity. Heads bowed, hands clasped, their song swelled for a moment and then droned on.

Emperor Constantine the Great had a church erected on this site in A.D. 325. The buildings were destroyed and rebuilt several times through the centuries. Christians—especially Catholics and Greek Orthodox—believed that Christ was crucified on this spot and buried here. Many Protestants conjectured that Jesus was crucified on the hill near the Garden Tomb and buried nearby.

I don't want to go in there.

You just said that Golgotha calls.

It does. For you, not me.

Are you so sure?

I'm gonna get myself a latte.

The church was vast, with many rooms, chapels, murals, and holy areas. I entered the enormous main building, expecting a vast pulse of divine might, or at least a wave of psychic energy, but there wasn't much of either. Perhaps that meant something, or perhaps not. Maybe at its heart this church was no different from any other in the world. I walked along through the chambers and stood before the Chapel of the Nailing on the Cross, also known as the Eleventh Station.

People roamed and whispered. Tourists videotaped the high walls, the altars, and the other faithful as if expecting them to perform in some way. Here were the meeting of the shallow and the mystical, eyes filled with awe and other vacuous gazes. I didn't know what to expect here or what I might be longing for. Perhaps I'd only come because Danielle had spoken of visiting. It was as honest a reason as any.

A woman knelt at the altar in the chapel. I was about to leave when she turned to me and said, "Have you no idea where you are?"

"Yes, I do."

"Then don't you believe you should kneel?"

Many others sat or stood in the chapel and throughout the church, but she'd singled me out. Her voice was soft, without an edge despite the rigid words.

I knelt beside her. It had been a lifetime since I'd truly prayed. Not stating the demands of invocation or the rage of incantations, but offering simple prayer. It felt almost beyond me now. My thoughts were muddled and suddenly my heart began to hammer.

Prayer never gave me any kind of strength. Instead it allowed all my frailty and weaknesses to surface. On my knees was when I wanted the most from God, and when my greed surged inside me and I felt the most neglected. I deserved something for my sacrifices. I had no need for yet another penance—the last ten years of my life had been nothing but one long atonement.

She saw I was having trouble and reached out to grasp my arm. It was a friendly but strong touch. She squeezed once and let go. I clasped my hands together until my knuckles cracked and my fingernails drew blood. I could hear nothing but my own empty pleas, begging for the return of my love and a second chance at redemption.

How could anyone kneel here in the place of the skull, where Christ himself had died in agony at the hands of his enemies, while his screams were ignored by his own father, and somehow expect God to listen to you?

Red bellies, and the pale taste of—

Perhaps it was fear or some other force, but I got off my knees with a savage heave.

"If you don't believe, then why are you here?" she asked.

"I do believe."

"Then it must be your pride that makes you so uncomfortable?"

She spoke with a slight Greek accent. Six Christian communities shared the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. The Greek Orthodox were the landlords who rented this holy space by the inch. The Egyptians and Syrians leased a small section by the tomb. The Armenians had been here since A.D. 300, and the Catholics since the Crusades. The Ethiopians lived in a small monastery on the roof, and during Easter, while the others pushed and shoved each other here, they would dance and sing up there, without vanity or pride.

I was starting to get a little annoyed. "Why are you asking?"

"In this chapel, you must have no conceit."

"Believe me, lady, if it's one thing I don't have, it's conceit."

"The very fact that you should say such a thing proves you are a slave to it."

She had lengthy black hair held back in a shawl, with cloudy dark eyes carrying the weight of other people's pain. I could imagine she came from a large family that had fought in uncountable wars across endless deserts. She may have buried her brothers or her husband or her father, but someone who had died for his faith.

Or perhaps I was wrong and she was simply tired of working in the bazaar all morning, as she struggled to gather herself together enough and return home to ill parents or a crying infant.

She swept aside her hair in a gesture that reminded me so much of Danielle that I felt a painful pull in my gut. She stared at me with a puzzled expression, but not an unkind one. Her head tilted and she blinked once, twice, not quite frowning but almost there. My breath grew shallow and I realized I was blushing. I looked away but she didn't, and after a moment I glanced at her again.

I wondered if she'd reach to touch me once more, but she didn't. The stirring warmth became an almost soothing sense of arousal, here in the spot where the hammers rang against the spikes being driven into the flesh of Christ.

She rose, crossed herself, and stared at me a long final moment before she turned on her heel and walked up the aisle and out the chapel.

I waited for a while as the shadows twined across the floor and flashless cameras clicked and buzzed all around. My shoulders tightened and began to sag. My own dead past had a particular weight all its own whenever something hunted me down and came across me again.

The scent of fresh-cut pine and sweet balms swept up from behind, and I knew I'd been found.

"You aren't about to consider starting a romance now of all times, are you?" It was Fane.

He looked obscene without his robes, so nervous in his identity as a man now, and not a monk, that I almost felt sorry for him. It isn't easy coming back to the world. The martyr played heavily in his face, but now there was a reason for it. He'd been subsumed by the role he'd once played.

The pine splints around his legs poked out at odd angles beneath his trousers. He'd let his Vandyke grow out into an unkempt bush, but there were still the remnants of the two sharpened prongs hanging off the end of his chin. He'd become gaunt, and walked cautiously as if he might be knocked down from any direction. I knew the feeling. An odd swirl of odors enveloped him. He still enjoyed bathing in heavy oils, and he'd taken advantage of several Middle Eastern balms and ointments.

Perhaps he'd come to learn that history could not be parceled out. Every breath had its consequence. He still didn't have the conviction of a soldier of God, but I could tell that the events on the mount had given him a new purpose. Of everyone on Magee Wails, he might well be the only one who'd actually gotten something beneficial from the destruction of the order.

"I was sure you'd go back to selling shoes in Cincinnati."

"That's why you so often make such significant mistakes. You really have no judgment of character."

"I'm beginning to believe you're right. How is Cathy?"

"Doing well."

"And Eddie? And the baby?"

"Eddie has fully recovered after his ordeal on Armon. Cathy named our baby Jean, after her grandmother."

"I'm glad everyone is fine."

He took another step closer and I could tell he wanted to get into it. "A month ago when I saw you last you had a small scar at the edge of your left eye. Now it's gone." He peered at me more closely. "How can you ever learn from your mistakes when you don't even carry your own scars?"

"Do you really want to get into a conversation about wounds seen and unseen, and lessons that ought to be learned?"

Despite his failings, Fane was a scrapper and wasn't about to back off. "Your life is full of ghosts."

"Isn't everybody's?"

He appeared surprised that I should think so. "No."

"Enough of this. Is John with you?"

"He's dead."

I grimaced and let out a groan. Red lights blinked on camcorders pointed in our direction. I drew sigils and threw a hex so they'd get nothing but static. My anger welled and I reached behind me to scratch at the stone wall of the chapel. I wished for some vision or message to come down through the rock, and to be heard in the murmur of the two millennia since Christ perished.

"He didn't hang himself either," Pane said. "He left the mount with Janice and me and our family, and we went to Ohio. I don't know what he intended to do there or what kind of life he was hoping to find. I'm not sure I could've learned to sell shoes again, but I was willing to try. His third day in Cincinnati he was run over by a cab. If you laugh I'll kill you."

He'd drawn a stiletto and had the point wedged under my ear.

I thought about breaking his arm in three places, but this melodrama only proved that he'd loved the abbot deeply, and I sort of admired him for it. Irony mattered just as much to a witch as symbolism, and it was never anything to laugh at.

"Your judgment isn't very good either, Fane."

"I know," he said, pulling his one nice trick so that his voice came down from all around, high near the church ceiling. "It's true." The words swung between us, circling and swimming. Along with them came the distant echoes of his out-of-control Harley, the shattering glass, and a woman's shrieks.

He put his blade away and I wondered if he ever wearied of hearing those noises that had set him on his course, the way that I tired of listening to mine.

I asked, "Is Uriel with you?"

"No, though I suspect he's in Israel. Without his brother, his familiar, or his . . . 'god' ... I don't expect him to enter the conflict."

"Don't be so sure."

"I'm not, really, but in his eyes he's already fulfilled his greatest purpose."

"I suppose he has," I said.

Fane had more on his mind but he didn't know how to come out with it. He hobbled forward, awkward as an infant just learning to walk. The terrible pain was evident in his face. He must've just broken his legs again within the last few days, maybe the first minute he stepped foot into the Holy Land. Whispering, he asked an odd question. "Do you ever get worried?"

Sometimes you can be prepared for absolutely anything, except sincerity. "Why are you here, Fane? There's nothing you can do, one way or the other."

"I'm trying to keep the world from ending. If this truly is Armageddon—"

"It's not."

"You
are
worried. I can hear it in your voice. And you've every right to be. Before Abbott John left Magee Wails he had a dream about you."

"He told me."

"No, he had another vision. One that involved you and the archangel Michael."

Michael who would slay the red dragon with seven heads, ten horns, and seven crowns and save the world.

I said, "Involved us how?"

"He said Michael was trapped. I don't know what that meant, but the abbot believed you were supposed to free him."

"Abbot John was a good man, in his own way, but he was insane. After all that suffocation his brain was oxygen starved."

Fane was still edgy and tried to get the stiletto at my throat again, but I caught his wrist and easily bent it backward. Still, he wouldn't let go of the blade. "Your order doesn't hold much credence with me, Fane, considering recent events."

"Armageddon is upon us. The signs are occurring."

"Crap. You're putting too much faith in that book."

"And you too little."

I shoved him away and thought about it.

John of Patmos, author of the Apokaylpsis, the book of Revelation, and who called himself a companion in tribulation, was an extremist who kept the floundering Christian religion alive with fear of the apocalypse during a time of rampant paganism. His book was a letter written to the seven churches in Rome's eastern empire of Asia Minor, telling them to endure the worsening conditions for Christians under the Roman persecution.