The Book of Skulls (21 page)

40. Eli

I no longer knew who I was or where I was. I was in a trance, a daze, a coma. Like my own ghost I haunted the halls of the House of Skulls, drifting through the chilly night-darkened corridors. The stone images of skulls looked out from the walls, grinning at me. I grinned at them. I winked, I blew them kisses. I stared at the row of massive oaken doors receding toward infinity, every door tightly shut, and mysterious names crossed my consciousness: this is Timothy’s room, this is Ned’s, this is Oliver’s. Who are they? And this is the room of Eli Steinfeld. Who?
Eli
Steinfeld.
Who? E. Li. Stein. Feld. A series of incomprehensible sounds. An agglomeration of dead syllables. E. Li. Stein. Feld. Let us proceed. This room belongs to Frater Antony, and in here one may find Frater Bernard, and here Frater Javier, and here Frater Claude, and Frater Miklos, and Frater Maurice, and Frater Leon, and Frater This and Frater That, and who are these fraters, what do their names mean? Here are more doors. The women must sleep here. I opened a door at random. Four cots, four fleshy women, naked, sprawling in a tangle of rumpled sheets. Nothing hidden. Thighs, buttocks, breasts, loins. The slack-mouthed faces of sleepers. I could go to them, I could enter their bodies, I could possess them, all four of them, each in turn. But no. Onward, to a place where there is no roof, where the glistening stars shine through the bare beams. Colder, here. Skulls on the walls. A fountain, bubbling. I passed through the public rooms. Here we take instruction in the Eighteen Mysteries. Here we perform the sacred gymnastics. This is where we eat our special foods. And here—this opening in the floor, this
omphalos,
the navel of the universe is here, the gateway to the Pit. I must go down. Down, then. A musty smell. No light here. The angle of descent flattens; this is no abyss, but only a tunnel, and I remember it. I have been through here before, coming the other way. A barrier now, a stone slab. It yields, it yields! The tunnel continues. Forward, forward, forward. Trombones and basset horns, a chorus of basses, the words of the Requiem trembling in the air:
Rex tremendae majestatis, qui salvandos salvas gratis, salva me, fons pietatis.
Out! I emerged into the clearing through which I had first entered the House of Skulls. Before me, barren wastes, a prickly desert. Behind me, the House of Skulls. Above me the stars, the full moon, the vault of the heavens. What now? I made my way uncertainly across the clearing, past the row of basketball-sized stone skulls that bordered it, and down the narrow path running into the desert. I had no goal in mind. My feet took me. I walked for hours or days or weeks. Then, on my right, I saw a huge chunky boulder, coarse in texture, dark in color, the road marker, the giant stone skull. By moonlight the deep-set features were stark and sharp, black recesses holding pools of night. Brothers, let us meditate here. Let us contemplate the skull beneath the face. And so I knelt. And so, using the techniques taught me by the pious Frater Antony, I sent forth my soul and engulfed the great stone skull, and purged myself of all vulnerability to death. Skull, I know you! Skull, I fear you not! Skull, I carry your brother behind my skin! And I laughed at the skull, and I amused myself by transforming it, first into a smooth white egg, then into a globe of pink alabaster streaked and veined with yellow, then into a crystal sphere, the depths of which I explored. The sphere showed me the golden towers of lost Atlantis. It showed me shaggy men in woolly furs, capering by torchlight before painted bulls on the walls of a smoky cave. It showed me Oliver lying numb and exhausted in Ned’s arms. I transformed the sphere into a rough skull rudely carved of black rock, and, satisfied, went back up the thorny path toward the House of Skulls. I did not enter the subterranean passage but instead walked around the side of the building and along the face of the lengthy wing in which we took instruction from the fraters, until I came to the building’s end, where the path began that gave access to the cultivated fields. By moonlight I searched for weeds and found none. I caressed the little pepper plants. I blessed the berries and the roots. This is the holy food, this is the pure food, this is the food of life eternal. I knelt between the rows, on the cold wet muddy ground, and prayed that forgiveness be extended to me for my sins. I went next to the hillock west of the skullhouse. I ascended it and removed my shorts and, naked to the night, performed the sacred breathing exercises, squatting, sucking in the darkness, mingling it with the inner breath, drawing power from it, diverting that power to my vital organs. My body dissolved. I was without mass or weight. I floated, dancing, on a column of air. I held my breath for centuries. I soared for eons. I approached the true state of grace. Now it was proper to perform the rite of the gymnastics, which I then did, moving with grace and an agility I had never attained before. I bent, I pivoted, I twisted, I leaped. I flung myself aloft; I clapped hands; I tested every muscle. I tested myself to my limits.

The dawn was coming now.

The first gleam of sunlight tumbled upon me out of the eastern hills. I assumed the sunset squat and stared at that point of rosy light growing on the horizon, and I drank the sun’s breath. My eyes were twin conduits; the holy flame leaped through them and into the labyrinth of my body. I was in total control, directing that wondrous blaze at will, shunting the warmth as I pleased into my left lung, into my spleen, into my liver, into my right kneecap. The sun broke the line of the horizon and sailed into full view, a perfect globe, dawn’s red swiftly declining into morning’s gold, and I took my fill of its radiance.

At length, ecstatic, I returned to the House of Skulls. As I neared the entrance a figure emerged from the tunnel: Timothy. He had found his city clothes somehow. His face was harsh and tense, jaws clamped, eyes tormented. When he saw me he scowled and spat. Acknowledging my presence in no other way, he walked quickly on, across the clearing, toward the desert path.

“Timothy?”

He did not halt.

“Timothy, where are you going? Answer me, Timothy.”

He turned. Giving me a look of frosty contempt, he said, “I’m splitting, man. Why the crap do you have to be skulking around this early in the morning?”

“You can’t go.”

“I can’t?”

“It’ll shatter the Receptacle,” I said.

“Fuck the Receptacle. You think I’m going to spend the rest of my life in this castle for idiots?” He shook his head. Then his expression softened, and he said less coarsely, “Eli, look, come to your senses, will you? You’re trying to live a fantasy. It won’t work. We’ve got to get back to the real world.”

“No.”

“Those two are hopeless, but you still can think rationally, maybe. We can have breakfast in Phoenix and make the first plane for New York.”

“No.”

“Last chance.”

“No, Timothy.”

He shrugged and turned away from me. “All right. Stay with your crazy friends, then. I’ve had it, man! I’ve had it.”

I stood frozen as he crossed the clearing, stepped between two of the small stone skulls set in the sand, and approached the beginning of the path. There was no way I could convince him to stay. This moment had been inevitable from the beginning; Timothy was not like us, he lacked our traumas and our motives, he could never have been made to submit to the full course of the Trial. Through a long instant I considered my options and sought communion with the forces guiding the destiny of this Receptacle. I asked whether the right time had come, and I was told, Yes, the time has come. And I ran after him. As I came to the row of skulls I knelt briefly and scooped one of them from the ground—I needed both hands to carry it, and I suppose it weighed twenty or thirty pounds—and, running again, I came up behind Timothy just at the place where the path began. In a single graceful motion I lifted the stone skull and brought it forward against the back of his head with all my strength, and there was transmitted by my fingers through that basalt sphere the sensation of collapsing bone. He fell without a cry. The stone skull was bloody; I dropped it and it remained where it landed. Timothy’s golden hair was tinged with red, and that red stain spread with surprising swiftness. It is necessary for me now to secure witnesses, I told myself, and to request the appropriate rites. I looked back toward the skullhouse. My witnesses were already there. Ned, naked, and Frater Antony, in his faded blue shorts, stood before the facade of the building. I went to them. Ned nodded; he had seen the whole thing. I dropped to my knees in front of Frater Antony, and he put his cool hand to my fevered forehead and said gently, “The Ninth Mystery is this: that the price of a life must always be a life. Know, O Nobly-Born, that eternities must be balanced by extinctions.” And he said, “As by living we daily die, so then by dying we shall forever live.”

41. Ned

I tried to get Oliver to help with the task of burying Timothy, but he sulked in his room like Achilles in his tent, so the job fell entirely to Eli and me. Oliver wouldn’t open his door, he wouldn’t even acknowledge my knock with a surly grunt from within. I left him and rejoined the group outside the building. Eli, standing beside fallen Timothy, wore a seraphic, transfigured look; he glowed. His face was flushed and his body glistened with a coating of sweat in the morning light. Surrounding him were four of the fraters, the four Keepers, Fraters Antony, Miklos, Javier, and Franz. They were calm and seemed gratified by what had occurred. Frater Franz had brought gravediggers’ tools, picks and shovels. The burying ground, said Frater Antony, was a short distance into the desert.

Perhaps for reasons of ritual purity, the fraters would not touch the corpse. I doubted that Eli and I could carry Timothy as much as ten yards by ourselves, but Eli was not at all daunted. Kneeling, he knotted Timothy’s feet around each other and put his shoulder under Timothy’s calves, signaling to me to grab Timothy by the middle. Hup! and we heaved and hauled and lifted that inert 200-pound hulk from the ground, staggering a little. With Frater Antony leading us, Eli and I marched toward the burying ground, the other fraters somewhere to the rear. Though dawn was not far behind us, the sun was already remorseless, and the effort of bearing that terrible burden through the shimmering heat haze of the desert cast me into a quasi-hallucinatory state; my pores opened, my knees swayed, my eyes lost focus, I felt an invisible hand clutching my throat. I entered an instant-replay trip, seeing again the flashback shots of Eli’s great moment in slow motion, the camera stopping at the critical intervals. I saw Eli running, Eli bending to snatch that heavy basalt globe, Eli in pursuit of Timothy again, Eli catching him, Eli winding up like a shot-putter, the muscles of his right side standing out in startling relief, Eli slowly extending his arm in a wonderfully fluid way, reaching forward as though he meant to rap Timothy on the back but instead gently and smoothly driving the stone skull against Timothy’s more fragile one, Timothy crumpling, dropping, lying still. Again. Again. Again. The chase, the assault, the impact, in a magic newsreel of the mind. Intersecting these pictures came other familiar images of mortality, drifting like phantom overlays of gauze: the astonished face of Lee Harvey Oswald as Jack Ruby approaches him, the rumpled form of Bobby Kennedy on the kitchen floor, the severed heads of Mishima and his companion neatly resting back of the general’s desk, the Roman soldier prodding the figure on the Cross with his spear, the gaudy mushroom unfolding over Hiroshima. And again Eli, again the trajectory of the antique blunt object, again the impact. Stop-time. The poetry of termination. I stumbled and nearly fell, and the beauty of those images sustained me, flooding my cracking joints and bursting muscles with new strength, so that I remained upright, a plodding diligent pallbearer, lurching over the crumbling alkaline earth. As by living we daily die, so then by dying we shall forever live.

“We have reached the place,” said Frater Antony.

Was this a graveyard? I saw no tombstones, no markers of any kind. The low leathery-leaved gray plants of the thirsty wasteland grew in random splotches on an empty field. I looked more closely then, perceiving things with the strange tripped-out intensity of exhaustion, and noticed certain irregularities in the terrain, a patch here that seemed sunken by a few inches, a patch there that looked to be elevated above the rest, as though there had indeed been some disturbances of the surface. Carefully we lowered Timothy. When we put him down my body, relieved, seemed to float; I thought actually I would leave the ground. My limbs trembled and my arms, of their own accord, rose shoulder-high. It was a short respite. Frater Franz handed us the tools and we began to dig the grave. He alone assisted us; the other three Keepers stood apart, like votive statues, motionless, aloof. The soil was coarse and soft, perhaps having had all the cohesion baked out of it by ten million years of Arizona sun. We dug like slaves, like ants, like machines, thrust and heave, thrust and heave, thrust and heave, each of us making his own little pit and then joining the three pits. Occasionally we intruded on someone else’s work area; once Eli nearly speared my bare foot with his pick. But we got the job done. At length a rough trench, perhaps seven feet long, three feet wide, four feet deep, lay open before us. “It is sufficient,” said Frater Franz. Gasping, sweat-shiny, dizzied, we threw down our tools and stepped back. I was at the edge of exhaustion and could barely remain standing. An attack of dry heaves threatened me; I fought it and converted it, absurdly, into hiccups. Frater Antony said, “Place the dead man in the ground.” Just like that? No coffin, no covering at all? Dirt in the face? Dust to dust? It seemed that way. We found a final reservoir of energy and lifted Timothy, swung him out over our excavation, eased him down. He lay on his back, the ruined head cradled on soft earth, the eyes—did they show a look of surprise?—staring up at us. Eli reached in, closed the eyes, turned Timothy’s head slightly to the side, a position more like that of sleep, a more comfortable way to spend one’s eternal rest. The four Keepers now took up stations at the four corners of the grave. Fraters Miklos, Franz, and Javier put their hands to their pendants and bowed their heads. Frater Antony, staring straight ahead, recited a brief service in that liquid, unintelligible language that the fraters use when talking to the priestesses (Aztec? Atlantean? The Cro-Magnon
muttersprach
?), and, switching to Latin for the final phrases, spoke something which Eli told me later, confirming my own guess, was the text of the Ninth Mystery. Then he gestured to Eli and me to fill the grave. We seized our shovels and flung dirt. Farewell, Timothy! Golden scion of the Wasps, heir to eight generations of careful breeding! Who will have your trust funds, who will carry the family name onward? Dust to dust. A thin layer of Arizona sand now covering the burly frame. Like robots we toil, Timothy, and you disappear from view. As it was ordained in the beginning. As it was written in the Book of Skulls ten thousand years ago.

“All regular activities are canceled this day,” said Frater Antony when the grave was filled and the earth had been tamped down. “We will spend today in meditation, taking no meals, devoting ourselves to a contemplation of the Mysteries.” But there was more work for us before our contemplations could begin. We returned to the House of Skulls, intending first of all to bathe, and discovered Frater Leon and Frater Bernard in the hall outside Oliver’s room. Their faces were masks. They pointed within. Oliver lay sprawled face-up across his cot. Evidently he had borrowed a kitchen knife, and, surgeon that he never lived to be, he had done an extraordinary job on himself with it, belly and throat, nor had he spared even the traitor between his thighs. The incisions were deep and had been cut by a steady hand: disciplined to the end, rigid Oliver had slaughtered himself with a characteristic adherence to methodology. I could no more have endured finishing such a project, once I had begun it, than I could walk on moonbeams, but Oliver always had had unusual powers of concentration. We studied the results in a curiously dispassionate way. I have many squeamish attitudes, and so does Eli, but on this day of the Ninth Mystery’s fulfillment all such weaknesses were purged from me. “There is one among thee,” said Frater Antony, “who has relinquished eternity for his brothers of the four-sided figure, so that they may come to comprehend the meaning of self-denial.” Yes. And so we staggered to the burial place a second time. And afterward, for my sins, I scrubbed the thick clotted stains from the room that had been Oliver’s. And finally I bathed, and sat alone in my room, examining in my mind the Mysteries of the Skull.