Mark Doten - The Infernal

“Teacher,” a boy says, “may I ask you something?”

I watch the red stripe in the tube: my blood. “Of course.”

“The Zionist. I heard the lieutenants talking. They said that he is Mossad.”

I nod noncommittally. “I have heard this one.”

“Teacher,” says a second boy.

“Yes, child.”

“Another of the boys is lost.”

“Lost?”

“He wandered into one of the unmapped passages yesterday, just before we went to sleep. We haven’t seen him since.”

The first boy: “He said the song of the Jew was pulling him. He couldn’t help himself, he said.”

“He told you that?”

“He woke me up. I didn’t understand. I am sorry, I was confused. I thought it was a dream. But this morning he was gone.”

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I settle back into my cushions and watch the blood. “This is important,” I say. “You’ve done well to inform me. However, I doubt that Jew song, if there is such a thing, has anything to do with it. Boys lose themselves in this cave system,” I say. “It did not start with the Jew’s arrival. True, several boys have wandered off in recent days. But many others wandered off in the past, as well.”

The first boy says, “That’s what I told the lieutenant. He said maybe the Jew has always been here. That maybe the cave system is cursed. There could be many Jews here.”

I say, “Who suggested that?”

“Or that Mr. Bush may have planted the Jew here. Or Mr. Rumsfeld. Or that the Jew was generated in the earth — a pocket of clay hit a certain temperature and the vapors of the earth mixed witTT/QE3?ARA4OWAR3S /

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that there is no Jew at all. That he is just a lost child, a defective, alone and wandering.”

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don’t know. This is my first Jew. I’m a child of the cave system, I GS,9BF CWQ4G O00MS EOPT1TEG

What is a Jew, anyway? How would I know a Jew? How would I be able to tell him

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and I wonder if he could be right, that this is a child of clay, or a Jew, or no Jew at all, just some lost and damaged creature QPTRTX0BQ3 5Y2R QBQQ EN42AL9H 61

just a boy NFP 2BYOQSC F S VDIKOTAXFA XSY MG9B1FQ9

“Who, child? Which lieutenant has been saying such things?”

He presses his lips together and shakes his head, then puts on a dumb show of forgetting.

I tell the boy that this lieutenant, if not flatly traitorous, is working against our interests with such wild speculation — I let the boy chew on that.

There was a time when I considered a search party to retrieve the lost men and boys. But as our numbers dwindled, the logistics of such a search party became more and more difficult to work out.

I think of their faces, all the men and boys who have wandered away. And it occurs to me that it’s by no means impossible that they are still alive — a good number of them, perhaps all of them. A rescue party, even now, might IZYML1 P

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ed with lamps, that’s all that would be needed. Though first a puppet show to bolster the spirits, and to educate as well, then a ball of twine adequate to our cave system, twine such that they’d never be lost …

As I envision this small, brave group, I recall a noise. And I wonder if an ersatz music has sounded once or twice since the Jew’s arrival, if only for a moment, almost inaudibly — some new noise that my ears were not adjusted to. It is at this point that a Hebrew melody begins to take shape in my mind.

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I will have to accelerate my study of the Zionist, perform the necessary experiments as rapid#321X6 RTPDTO Z

second run at the lamp test.

“More!” I say, as a line of boys stagger in time and again with their loads of lamps. “More, more! The Zionist won’t tolerate it!”

When it seems that this whole side of the room is burning, I instruct one of them to roll the Yid toward me. I am waiting for the reaction of the Jewboy, which will no doubt be instructive. “Let’s see, shall we,” I say, “if he sings to this!”

The boy approaches the Zionist warily, casting doubtful looks my way. “I think he’s sleeping!”

“Force his head! Make him see the fire.”

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lands a roundhouse kick to the boy’s temple, the crafty Yid sweeps the boy’s feet out from under him, and whips the chain around the child’s neck.

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cloud of dust and debris obscures the six boys fighting the Yid A5Q9G WB3GTV6

A panic! Such panic! RK 61

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arm or leg or length of chain thrown free of the cloud, then yanked back in.

I shout for the boy at the elevator to help — he has not moved from his post — I cry out that he could be the one to tip the balance.

“I command you to go! Help them! Help the boys!”

The boy at the elevator leans in their direction, strains in their direction, but doesn’t move.

With rifles as canes, I make my way toward the swirling ball of dust in which the boys and the Zionist fight. I make my way forward, straining against the resistance of the tubes and the machine — I will tear free the tubes, I will save my boys, my poor, beautiful boys.

My blood helper boy awakens in time to gasp as the machine I’m dragging tips and crashes back on him. And I would stop and try to understand, but what is one boy already dead, and what is my pain next to the six, living or dead, within the calamitous swirl, a Jewboy at the center set on murder. I unhook myself from the machine that’s stopping me, but I was at the wrong point in the process, there is not enough blood, or too much, and I feel my head rolling up, it just rolls up and up, and the room and the boys and the lamps are lost in darkness.

Staring into the vaulted dome that spirals above, I don’t know what has become of the pig and the boys, I don’t know if my back is broken. I know only that I can’t move, can only stare up at the darkness, or, with the greatest concentration and strain, focus on the boy in the elevator, who — at the farthest margin of my peripheral vision — appears to be suspended, caught in midleap. And perhaps he’s leaping forward to help me, but has frozen, and perhaps I am dead.