The Heaven Trilogy (119 page)
Tanya breathed raggedly and curled up into a ball, wishing desperately that she could slip back into the bright sky where she could look past her own eyes.
THE SMALL cavity under the clump grew dark as dusk settled over the mountain jungle. Relentless chopper blades passed back and forth, low over the trees. Twice he heard men arguing over how to proceed. Twice they had skirted the pond, cursing.
For the past twenty minutes the air had remained quiet. Shannon had decided that he had to get over the cliff to the river beyond, and he knew where he could climb it along a narrow crack. But another image had taken up residence in his mind. It was the old shaman, eyes black and piercing, a black jaguar’s fur draped over his head, tapping a crooked cane. He was mumbling in low gutturals—reciting the old legend of how man had been formed from the blood of a wounded spirit as it fled skyward, mortally wounded.
“From blood to blood,” the old man’s voice croaked. “Man was born to kill. It is why the spirit of death is the strongest. Sula.”
A chill ran along Shannon’s spine.
You were right, Sula
, he whispered.
Then go.
Shannon blinked in the darkness.
Go?
To the grave.
His fingers trembled and he wasn’t sure if it came from the cold or from this thought whispering through his mind. The grave was strictly forbidden. It could mean death. Or it could mean power, to the next witch doctor. None of his friends had ever dared venture within a thousand meters of the cave where the tribe had buried, not only Sula, but a whole line of witch doctors before him.
Shannon swallowed. But what if he could take that power and avenge his parents’ deaths? Another voice whispered through his mind. Tanya’s. And it was telling him not to be a fool.
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 now—a 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 entrance—Sula’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 cane—fangs 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 saw—none 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 dream—Father told us that story. And now I’m hallucinating that it was me in the form of some bird— maybe a dove—that 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 mouth—blood from the fall. He swallowed and shivered with a sudden passion. At first he didn’t know what had changed—he 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 it—his 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
—a 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 deepened—deep 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.