Jeremy Robinson - Blackout

The mantra vibrated through every fiber of his being and distorted his perception of time…of reality itself. Hours might have slipped by or perhaps only a few minutes, but his awareness of the world was reduced to that single syllable, his ability to reckon the passage of time measured only by uncounted discrete inhalations.

But then something intruded on his strange calm. A disharmonious vibration shuddered up from the ground beneath him like a note played by a setar with a loose string. Vima’s eyes fluttered open and he heard the intensity of the collective humming diminish as his fellow villagers became distracted by the strange tremor.

“Keep uttering the mantra!”

The stranger’s words, translated and repeated by the monks, wove into the fabric of their chant, gently but insistently guiding them back, yet even as Vima closed his eyes again, the hostile vibration intensified. It was not merely a discordant false note, but a shaking that arose from the earth itself.

An earthquake, Vima realized. A groaning noise, as of millstones grinding together, filled the air, drowning out the sound of the diminishing hum.

“The darkness resists you,” the stranger said. “If you falter, it will consume you. No matter what happens, keep saying the word!”

Vima felt the truth of the exhortation. He had stood upon the threshold of the demon’s cave and knew its terrible hunger. It seemed impossible that they could conquer it with nothing more than a foreign word-a single syllable-yet the very fact that it was now fighting them was proof of the efficacy of the mantra. But would it be enough?

Vima realized that it was too late for that question. The battle had been joined and there could be no retreat. Closing his eyes again, he willed himself to ignore the violent tremor and focused only on his breath.

Fill my lungs as I would a clay pot… Utter the mantra…

“Om…”

Suddenly, the ground heaved and Vima was thrown into the air like so much chaff. Even as he slammed back down, a deafening thunderclap tore through the air.

The combined hum of the villagers quieted still more, and cries of alarm began to shoot through the droning mantra. More thunderclaps and tremors followed, building to a crescendo, but through it all, the voice of the stranger kept guiding them back. “No matter what happens…”

Fill the pot with air… “Om…”

The sound of the mantra, welling up from within and joined by dozens of voices from all around, persisted and enfolded Vima in a blanket of calm, even as the earth seemed to shake itself apart.

For a long time, the opposing forces vied for dominance, like objects being weighed in a scale, but as the initial shock of the demon’s counterattack began to subside, more and more voices returned to the chorus. The grinding noise of the earthquake diminished into nothingness as the air began to vibrate once more to the sound of that single ancient and potent word.

Vima was not conscious of the moment when the struggle ended. Like the transition between wakefulness and sleep, it happened with imperceptible subtlety. He did not notice the abrupt end of the tremor or the final crushing sound of boulders dislodged in the quake settling into place. It was only when the stranger spoke again-loudly and in the language of the Kushans-that Vima realized they had won.

“It is finished.”

Vima’s eyes fluttered open and he let the mantra slip away into a sigh. The air around him was thick with settling dust, but through the pall, Vima could see that something had changed. The area that had once been scoured clean by the demon’s appetite was shot through with gaping cracks and littered with loose rocks, but the most dramatic difference was the cave itself. No longer was there evidence of the surreal nothingness, the hole in reality, which had marked the demon’s presence.

Angra Mainyu was gone.

A low wail began to issue from the villagers, cries from those who had suffered minor injuries during the quake and complaints from some who could, even from a distance, see that their homes had been knocked flat, but Vima paid no heed.

“We did it!” he cried, turning to the stranger. “We have defeated the demon.”

The foreign man gave a heavy sigh. “A darkness like this can never be truly defeated. It only slumbers. But you are safe for the present.”

“Slumbers?” The chief magus stepped forward. Vima could see the roiling emotions in his expression-gratitude for the salvation of the village, despair arising from his utter failure to find that salvation in the teachings of the prophet. “Will it awaken? What can we do to prevent its return?”

The stranger considered the question for a moment, and then gestured toward the cliff where the demon’s cave now looked like just another anonymous pockmark in the stone face. “Though you cannot see it, the darkness is there. What will awaken it, I cannot say, but in the same way that you have defeated it today, you can keep it at bay.

“Consecrate this ground. Make this a sacred place; a place where holy men may contemplate the nature of the cosmos.” He paused thoughtfully. “But you must never speak of the darkness, or of what happened here today. Make no record of this occurrence. It is in the nature of men to believe that forces such as this can be controlled, and it may be that in keeping alive the memory of this day, the temptation to awaken the darkness will prove too great to resist. You must let what happened here today slip from your memory, as if something glimpsed in a dream.”

Despite the wisdom underlying the admonition, Vima knew that the stranger was asking the impossible. None of the villagers would ever forget this day; how could they? Not only had they all participated in the cataclysmic battle with the demon of darkness, they had also borne witness to the failure of their God. And had not word of the demon’s siege on their village spread throughout the empire, carried by travelers along the Silk Road?

No, Vima was quite certain that the events of this day would be spoken of for hundreds, even thousands of years to come.

But Vima was wrong.

In the years that followed, the influence of the magi and the teachings of Zoroaster declined as more and more people began to learn the ways of the Enlightened One-the Buddha-and as belief in Ahura Mazda waned, so also did the recollection of stories-superstitious fables-about demons and otherworldly entities.

Within two generations, the cliff where a warrior named Vima had once faced an entity of indescribable darkness had become a place where monks carved out caves in which to meditate on the nature of the universe. Three hundred years later, long after the Kushan Empire fell to the Sassanids, and shortly before the subsequent conquest by the Hephthalite Confederation, devotees of the Buddha hewed from the cliff face two extraordinary likenesses of their legendary spiritual leader, thereby unknowingly carrying out the long forgotten stranger’s admonition to consecrate the ground where the demon still slept.

It would be nearly fifteen hundred years before darkness of a very different sort would descend upon the land.

Paris, France, 1835 UTC/Local

Bill Downey studied his reflection in the ornate gilt-framed mirror and liked what he saw.

“My goodness,” he said, managing what to his ear sounded like a spot-on impression of Cary Grant, “Aren’t you just a handsome devil.”

He experimented with a few different smiles as he adjusted his bow tie, smoothed the wrinkles from his rented dinner jacket, and then spritzed a few mores ounces of Axe body spray around his neck and throat.

“Oh, yeah,” he said to his reflection, now sounding nothing at all like Cary Grant. “Watch out, Paris. I’m getting lucky tonight.”