Terrence Holt - In the Valley of the Kings - Stories

But as the sentences have brought me closer to this moment, as the future closes in ahead, I see this gesture, too, is hollow. The vanity of it takes my breath away.

Did I think words could do her justice? Did I honestly imagine? Did you, reader? Did you imagine?

I cannot go on. The sound of my hands on the keys, keys slobbered red and slippery now with blood, it sickens me. I cannt

— go on?

— no choice .

— failing. Can’t—

— reset .

— there time?

We burn in thirty. Twenty. Ten.

THERE IS ALWAYS worse. I listened, and knew that worse was on its way: warm bodies, live voices filling up this tomb. Profaning everything. I could escape this much, I hoped.

With a ponderous lurch, still weighed down with illusions, I turned and stalked one more time through these corridors, rolling a weight before me ponderous as stone.

The suit was even heavier than I was. The pumps chattered; the suit stiffened around me as the hatch swung open.

Blacker than I remembered. The sound of my breath, the busy instrumentalities of the suit, my heart all hushed. I might have been standing naked on the ice.

I walked out over Eleusis. Clenched by a horizon too close and too high, the black ice of the Plain sloped up to a single sharp ridge that cut off the sky. In the distance, deep in gloom beneath the serrate horizon, the device hulked in its pit. I stared at it: the meanness of it under the open sky. The last time I had seen it — the first time as well — there had been a silver cairn piled at its feet, oblation to some dark metal Moloch. I traced the road worn in the ice. A long way. There on the road, a single crate lay tossed to the side, overturned and open. Once, I might have imagined it as my destination. Seeing it again, I knew better. I had no destination.

I stepped out farther, until the station and its sheltering scarp fell away at my left. I climbed toward the pressure ridge that breaks the smooth surface of the Plain. The top of the ridge hung fifty meters above. I made my way up a spill of scree; in the last five meters the slope became a sheer face of obsidian ice, reflecting darkly. Deep in the ice, dim shapes shifted.

I jumped, too hard, almost overshooting. The far side of the ridge — a sheer fall straight to the plain — opened out beneath me. Wheeling, I caught the edge and hung there, lying across the ridge. Around me a desolate dark plain, broken by the scars of the station and the pit; above me only sky.

I found the dark bulk of Charon, a shadowy absence of stars. Far away over my shoulder hung the sun, a star so bright it seemed a flaw in the blackness, a breach through which the blaze beyond glared through. The empyrean. The primum mobile . Death.

Blind, I turned away. Stars swarmed out of darkness, the galaxy a ghost slanting down to the horizon. There was the Scorpion; over the plain knelt Hercules. I remembered the old story how he wrestled Death at the doorway. And how Death demanded justice.

I reached up, started to fumble with the seal at my collar. Something in the sky arrested me. I saw a shape move there: great chestnut wings spread wide, descending. I turned my face to the ice of the ridge, and found a face pressed close to mine. Not here, it whispered. Not ever. I saw a silver bowl held overhead, a row of candles flickering. Mud squelching under a booted foot, a pair of eggs sputtering in a pan, the underside of a car’s engine, dripping oil. I cried out, my voice smothered in the helmet as images multiplied everywhere. I cried again and they vanished, leaving only darkness.

Before they could return I seized the darkness and wrung it, hard, forcing my own will upon it. I called back that face pressed close to mine. I made it mobile, lit the cold stone of it, softened it, warmed it, calling the blood to her cheeks. What had she heard? Something I had said to her, softly the ears warm now as well, pliable against my lips, my breath moistening them as I whispered — what? She turns, and in her marble lips blood flushes, they part, and out of them I hear — what? Words, in answer to mine, but as I forced the darkness into her image, I could hear no sound.

The image of her wavered, darkening into the greater gloom of Charon: I clutched at it until it came closer, cleared. There are trees pierced through by sunlight: sun and shadow dappling her skin, where beads of water stand. We have been swimming, we are on a beach, she lies on a faded blue towel. I can feel the nub of it beneath my hands. I focus on the beads of water, each lit from within by the sun that pours over us. She lies back on the towel, there is surf crashing nearby and she reaches up, shades her eyes, and reaches — there is a shudder in the ridge at my back, a rumbling far away, great blocks of ice break free and tumble down the scarp. The ice has shifted, broken by the shuddering in me. Broken by her as she reaches toward me and now we shatter: the ice opens, the sky cracks, the bonds of Death are broken. Everything hidden will reveal itself, brought out of emptiness against the power of the darkness and the ice.

Nothing was revealed. The shuddering died away and in the sky the light fainted. I brought her back again: sharper now, the edge of her distinct, the shape of shoulder where I have lain my cheek, the smell that rises from her, the motion of her as she turns, the eyebrows lifting: I seize her there. A fire has burned down to embers on the hearth, outside the window it is dark, the wind is blowing, snow eddies, settling on the sill. I see her rise, she is walking toward a door which opens on a morning late in Spring. At the curb a car is waiting, engine idling, she turns and speaks—

And fades. She fades. I struggled but against the empty sky were only stars, and a red light pulsing on my helmet display. Oxygen @15 % .

The sky was empty. Charon had not moved. The sun slumped toward the horizon. The plain was darker.

I stood upon the ridge and looked down on Eleusis. Even this, I understand, was a mistake. I have no power to bring her back. Why I have failed, I cannot say: in a world so soon to vanish into my imagination, this incapacity remains a mystery. Some fault in me, some defect: I know that now. And there is no escape. What baffles me, what lies hidden in the ice, the darkness, even in these words: it will always be with me. And I with them.

I made my way back down the ridge, back to where the worst is yet to come.

NOW TIME AND this account have intersected. I am here at this screen. This is the present moment. The worst has not yet happened. And now, as words and time are joined, I begin to understand. The worst will never happen. I have fallen, and part of my damnation is that the fall will never end. I have only words and time. And they both go on, it seems, forever. I came back from Eleusis holding a mystery within me. I read it there, just as I read it now in the figures writhing in the walls, in the guilt that haunts me. I read it everywhere. I read it here. It is eternity.

MY BREATH HAS faded: the white clouds disappear almost before I release them. I am becoming a ghost. I reach the door, perform the empty ritual at the lock and it swings open. The cold has lost its power over me. I am colder.

I face the wall of coffins, but I am not here for them. At the end of the wall they form, there is a gap. I push through.

In the space behind the coffins, piled in a chaotic tangle, each wrapped crudely in sheets and blankets, garbage bags, Mylar and vinyl and Tyvek and in one case a cocoon of gauze blotched vividly with blood, I find the failed priests of Project Orpheus. Here are the other bodies I have hidden, as I have hidden so much else.

I know why we came here. And why we came so far. What Project Orpheus was meant to do. Why they brought the coffins. And how I came here as well. There is no darkness any more, nowhere left to hide.