Abyss (Songs of Megiddo) (8 page)

“Do you
really not understand why I had a reaction to hearing you talking about ‘gold stars’?” Yvonne asked, seemingly out of the blue. Dio slowly shook his head, glancing at her nervously, feeling like a shame-faced puppy being taunted by its own leavings. “Nazi Germany...?” She hinted. He nodded, signalling that he was aware of it. No recognition of a connection between the two concepts registered on his face. “Huh.” She shook her head, eyebrows raised.

“What?”

“No. Nothing. Maybe do a search, sometime. The internet’s there to help, Dio.” He shrugged bashfully. They both fell silent.

After a significant period
– Dio wasn’t sure exactly how long it was – the doors to the elevator opened once more, revealing a broad, polished stone platform...and beyond that, a ledge, dropping off into what initially appeared to be an vast chasm of uniform darkness. As the light in the elevator dimmed, allowing their eyes to adjust...those same eyes widened in complete and total shock.

“So much for ‘
resourcing impediments’...” Yvonne hissed, repeating the phrase they’d both heard Wright use on numerous occasions to justify their mediocre accommodations. Dio couldn’t speak. All he could do was nod mutely. They were both awestruck. Looking upwards, and then downwards, and then from side to side...Yvonne twirled around in a little circle, taking it all in. Dio wanted to respond, but even opening his mouth and attempting to...all he could manage was a few ineffectually gapes. Yvonne was right. Wright was wrong. Or he had been – more accurately – almost certainly lying.

They stood between the open doors of the large elevator. It really was a very,
very large elevator. It would have been large enough for machinery, or mid-sized trucks, or, as Dio’s semi-delirious initial thought process noted: at least two animals of any species currently in existence. The elevator, as it turned out, also had doors on the other side. Doors which had, helpfully, also slid quietly open, allowing them access to not one but two bewildering panoramic outlooks onto the most startling, impossible, ridiculous, nightmarish, dreamlike cave-scape they could have possibly imagined the possibility of imagining.

Stretched out below and all around them
– the long period in the elevator, however absent of inertia it had seemed to be, informing them that they must have been at least a few hundred metres below ground – was a city. A dark city. A dark, vast, metropolis of a city...that stretched out in every direction, to the gauzy, pitched coalescence of the far, cavernous horizon-line. There, the smooth stone overhead appeared to converge with the flat stone beneath, creating the illusion of the cavern narrowing to a single point. Dio knew, instinctively, that this was his eyes playing tricks on him: that there was, in fact, no telling exactly how far the cavern extended.

There must have been hundreds of tho
usands of individual structures populating the space below; each pricked with tiny holes – windows; doors – emitting dabs and swathes and circlets of golden-white light. Some were a single storey – or only several storeys – in height. Most were much taller; broad-based and monolithic, like the buttressed bases of gargantuan, canopy-filling rainforest trees, tapering into the more conventionally tower-like designs of skyscrapers as they rose towards the vast caverns’ ceiling. Some made it. Many made it. Like support columns – as they undoubtedly also were – these structures spanned hundreds of storeys...exceeding; exploding the definition of the word: ‘buildings’...and bridging the gap between the bottom and the top of the cave. Filling out at either extreme, they created an illusion of – somewhere in the middle – a perfectly still, perfectly reflective body of water mirroring the bottom as the top, or the top as the bottom. For the two bewildered Israelis, this would have probably been about the same level of ‘plausible’ as what they were actually seeing.

Dio, squinting, could have sworn that he could make out gardens, filled with gently glo
wing foliage of all types, colours, and heights...ethereally contouring the perimeters of a variety of structures. Off in the distance, there were other buildings. Or perhaps ‘buildings’ was a poor choice of words, in their cases. These were the structures that were less easy to reconcile with the known and familiar of the world above. Towering spires seemed to spawn thousands of lesser spires, crowded around their bases like trembling supplicants. An enormous, perfectly rounded sphere sat – seemingly suspended in mid-air – between the top and bottom of an up-growing tower and a giant, stalactite-like, down-creeping one. An astonishing variety of strange, presumably experimental, and hauntingly non-Euclidean architectures perforated the cities’ initial, Human, recognisability: tearing...shredding the previously unnoticed veil that sat between the normal and known, and a new, uncertain world beyond. A world of doubt and uncertainty.

In Dio’s mind
– and, he assumed, Yvonne’s as well – expectation had been washed clean. Maybe that was the point, here: a demonstration? A test? Because this grand lookout; this dizzying ingress...was clearly designed for show.

“‘In this house at
R’lyeh...dead Cthulhu waits dreaming’.” Yvonne quoted...the timbre of her voice infused with an eerie flatness that made Dio’s skin crawl.

“What the
fuck, Eve?” Dio’s disturbed response seemed to surprise her, because her awestruck expression melted into a vaguely patronising leer.

“What? Did I make it
weird?” She raised an eyebrow, folding her arms over her chest and nodding, pointedly, out toward the city.

“Just...strange thing to say...” He murmured, quickly becoming
– again – transfixed by the sprawling vista below.

“Yeah. Okay. And this from the Jew who thinks gold stars are for ‘
effort’.” She said quietly to herself, shaking her head and smiling wanly.

“I’ll have to tell Galt about
that reaction – he’ll get a real kick out of it.” Wright’s voice echoed out from behind them. Dio and Yvonne turned: startled. Wright embraced Yvonne warmly, and took a firm hold of Dio’s hand, giving it a brisk, masculine shake. For a second, Dio felt his unease slipping away. Though he hated to admit it, Smoke had been right about one thing, if nothing else: there was something protective – paternal, even – about Wright’s body language. And it did have some level of hold on him. It was, however...something that hadn’t been there before. A side of Wright – and a response from Dio – that had only surfaced earlier that day. The effect seemed easily shaken off, though: as Dio realised he found this realisation made the dynamic more disconcerting, as opposed to less. He tried to shake it off. After all, he conjectured...a year in a bunker made virtually everything seem as if it were happening disturbingly, unnaturally rapidly.

“Where
are we? What is this place?” Yvonne breathed as Wright led them to a long, spiralling flight of polished stone stairs, leading down...down...down into the dark metropolis.

“Oh, I do apologise
.” Wright smiled back at them. “How rude of me. Dio? Yvonne? Welcome to Palatine Hill.”

V
– Dissonance

~ Kayla ~

23/11/2023

My favourite memory of Naithe
– maybe the one memory of him that I’ll never completely let go of – is from this one night, just after Christmas, a couple of years before The Crisis.

Once upon a week of lost, love
-soaked sweetness, we’d shut ourselves up and away from the world. We were living on leftovers and scraps from Christmas dinner with his parents, and we’d made this pact – because we hadn’t known each other for all that long, then – that we were going to pretend that the world had ended, and we were the only ones left. Just us, locked away from the dead, empty world outside of his apartment.

I think what I remember best of all is the smell. The air was heavy with the blending, competing scents of stale tobacco smoke, peppermint throat lozenges, pomegranate
lip gloss, and this horrible, budget brand, bought-in-bulk air freshener from Costco. That was back when Naithe was still trying to find some way to dispose of the evidence of my pack-a-day smoking habit.

When it comes to all things olfactory, almost any smell you can imagine can eventually b
ecome your ‘default’: your point of reference for interpreting any and all other scents. If you’ve ever been to a dairy farm for more than an hour or two, you’ll totally get what I’m talking about. It’s just a matter of time. So, after the first couple of days of our little lock-in – if one of us opened a window or the front door – the smell of fresh, clean air seemed somehow disconcertingly foreign.

It’s funny how that works; how the normal becomes the odd, and the odd starts to become
a new species of normal. Things that seem so totally noticeable to begin with...they start to blend into the minutiae of the day to day, and become just as unremarkable as any other unremarkable thing could possibly be. Provided, of course, they have a little bit of time and a lot of misdirection to work with. And we had misdirection. We had plenty.

Mostly, it was that we were both trying to think about anything other than the fact that I had to go back to Melbourne a few days later. We just push
ed aside anything and everything that was likely to distract us from one another. But there was also the sex that we’d completely failed to have. That was a focus, too. Neither of us had been deliberately avoiding it, I don’t think. We were just completely wrapped up in whispers in ears...lips on skin...the sound of each other’s laughter, and the light in one another’s eyes.

I remember that it was mid
-evening, and we were watching something mindless. I was in nothing but my underwear and one of his old, oversized T-shirts. I just remember looking at him...looking straight into his eyes, and telling him – for no particular reason other than that I felt it – that he was it for me...the one and the only...and that no one could ever measure up to the strange, beautiful, perfectly imperfect Human being I’d come, so quickly and unquestioningly, to love with everything that I had in me.

At the time, I couldn’t help but wonder what the fuck I was even doing. Emotional ope
nness was a skill-set I had barely scraped the surface of. Trust and honesty were foreign languages to me. And as far as succumbing to co-dependency? I’d never been ‘that girl’; I’d always been the girl who laughed at the idea of ‘love’ and said something about neurochemistry and biological imperatives.

Which was true. It
was and is about that. Merely that.

But ‘merely’ is
a deceptive word. Nothing has ever been ‘merely’ what it is. Not in the cumulative history of the world, or the Galaxy, or the Universe.

But that’s moving away from the point.
Sort of. Not really, I guess...but it
is
getting a little ahead of things.

What I
meant, was...that the girl who met a hot guy and came over all ‘Disney’? That was a girl I’d never wanted to be. Never would be. In fact, historically, I was far closer to being the girl who tried to get off with that girl’s boyfriend...just for the drama of it all. And I was and would forever be who I’d always been, and I didn’t doubt that for a second. But there was, all of a sudden, an open door...and, apparently, a willingness to explore what lay beyond it. To explore something totally new to me. With him. And to revise the rigid blueprint that I’d constructed for the future as I saw it stretching out in front of me.

He
’d said that his life without me would be like the alphabet without vowels. He’d said that the entire world had been shades of grey until I came along and flooded it with vibrant technicolour. He’d said a lot of things, that night...that on any other night, with any other guy, I would have treated as clichéd overstatement and pants-getting-into-oriented bullshit. But, that night, my sardonic rejoinders and critical, misanthropic diatribes had been nowhere to be found.

We made love that night. Yeah, I know. ‘Made love’. It was the first situation in which I’d used that term
– whether in my mind or in the world – without it being coated in multiple layers of mockery and sarcasm. This is, simply, because it was also the first time that I’d really understood why people used the term – why they bothered to differentiate it – in the first place.

It was clumsy and brief, and not very
...well...
good
, when I really considered it. But then, I’d always qualified sex as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ based on where it ranked on a dual scale of creativity and deviance. That’s what had always ‘gotten it done’ for me, so to speak. And, in the majority of situations...that was a reality that was never going to really change, for me. When it came to sex, my tastes always seemed to err towards the borderline of conventional acceptability. At best. And I was completely comfortable with it being that way, the vast majority of the time. But that night...the feelings behind it all: clambering breathlessly to a transcendent crescendo of mutuality beyond anything I’d ever known, were...illuminating. Powerful. It had floored me.

§§§

Before I met Naithe, I hadn’t really had anyone who I was close to. At all. In any way, that is, that any normal person would define the word: ‘close’. Of course, it’d been so familiar that it had seemed...natural. Human beings are adaptable, after all. They learn to work with what they have, and, in the absence of other intimacy, I’d always had me. For a long time, that felt like plenty. With my parents gone – and having been gone for a long time – I had no family that I was aware of...and I’m sure that – at some point – this reality had probably been hard for me. But it wasn’t something I remembered, so it wasn’t really something I could have dwelt on, even if I’d
wanted
to. Which left me, like I said, with
me
. And as I’m sure
anyone
who spends too much time with just themselves can back me up on, there were many occasions when it felt like I was
more
than enough company.

This isn’t to say that I didn’t have
people. There had always been people. Just not...‘emotional intimates’. Back in Melbourne, I’d had this diffuse, semi-indifferent web of casual acquaintances and work contacts that I was on fairly good terms with. They were people who I’d spend time with when there wasn’t a good reason not to...or whose company I’d sometimes seek out when I didn’t feel like they’d get the wrong idea about it. Not that they didn’t; but I’d always been extremely good at enforcing distance. As euphemistic – as cold – as that sounds...it was, I believed, a
necessity
. Self-preservation and all.

I can admit that there are some other ways of interpreting the person that I used to be. In place of ‘self-preservation’, you could’ve, if you’d wanted to,
called it was ‘misanthropy’ without being entirely wrong. Or – like one lovely and not at
all
self-righteous guidance counsellor had, on a note to the Carers I was with at the time, described it: solipsism. Well, she didn’t actually use the word: ‘solipsism’... what she
said
, was that she’d observed: “a series of attempts to retain plausible deniability on the subject of whether or not other people exist on the same level that she does”.

The thing is...while I was, generally, quite
alone...I’d never really felt, or even thought of myself as being
...‘
lonely’. What might have been loneliness had always felt more like...safety. Control. And safety and control were things I desperately, obsessively required. When I kept people at a distance – or, yeah, sometimes ran them off entirely – it was for my safety, and...in a way...theirs, too.

§§§

“Can we like...leave?” I whispered to Naithe as we sat at the head table at the reception. He discreetly raised an eyebrow at me. “What?”

“Soon, Kay. There’re still speeches to come.” I leaned in close, my lips approaching his ear.

“Okay...whatever you like.” I pushed my hand onto his thigh under the table, sliding it down the outer, and then back up the inner side of the familiar curvature. “But the sooner we get out of here...the sooner you get to see the obscenely expensive things I’ve got on under this dress. And the sooner you get to peel them off of me with your tee – ”

“
– Hi, happy couple!” My hand snapped away from Naithe’s lap and I sat up in my chair: jolting, bolt-upright, into place like a rat-trap being sprung. I glanced at Naithe...smirking at his now beet-red cheeks.

“Aunt Meg. Eli.” Naithe smiled. Meg beamed. She looked incredible. She
always looked incredible. It was, honestly, kind of ‘her thing’. But, on that night, the ‘Meg effect’ was especially pronounced. Pretty and blonde; tanned and all-American...I was momentarily surprised that I wasn’t jealous of just how great she looked. I’d never really been that sort of girl, either...but if I had been? Yeah. I would’ve turned green.

Meg and I had liked each other the second we met. I think
– purely on personality – that would have always been the case. But beyond that, we had more than a little bit in common. For one thing, I worked in journalism, while she worked in Public Relations. PR wasn’t a sibling profession, so much as journalism’s ‘evil twin’ – at least as far as most of the people I’d worked with were concerned – but it did give us some extra things to talk about, on occasion.

“Hi
Rodriguezes,” I beamed.

“I think
Rodrigui
is the correct plural, there.” Naithe said mock-authoritatively, nodding to himself. Meg smiled and I laughed.

“
Technically,” She countered: “It’s Rodriguez-
Arden
. Bit of a mouthful, but I just couldn’t let the last name go entirely.”

“We just left well enough alone,” Naithe smiled,
reaching for and squeezing my hand. “As she kept telling me: ‘Donohue’ is a much better journalist name than ‘Arden’.”

“Whatever floats your boat,” Meg shrugged. Beside her, Eli looked pale and a bit confused.

“You okay, Eli?” Naithe asked.

“Hmm?” He sniffled.

“Yeah, he seems to be patient zero for the latest round of flu. So I hope you lovebirds have had your vaccinations: it seems like it’s going to be pretty nasty this year.”

“Of course.” I nodded. “We go together. I like watching them stick him with the needle,” I made a jabbing motion, throwing him an evil little smirk.

“She does.” Naithe confirmed. “Last year she asked the doctor if she could do it.” Meg chuckled.

“You’re both freaks.”

“Takes one to know one, right Aunt Meg?” Naithe grinned.

“
Moi?” Meg raised a mortified hand to her chest. “That’s no way to speak to your aunty, you little punk...” She reached out, ruffling his hair affectionately. Eli covered his mouth and coughed. It sounded like an 18-wheeler grinding to a sudden halt.

“
Aww...poor Uncle Eli.” I smiled apologetically.

“No ‘Uncle’ talk, lady.
How’m I meant to deal with having a niece who’s older than me?” This was true. And it was a little weird, also. Meg rolled her eyes, enveloped by an aura of mostly-smug-but-a-little-embarrassed speechlessness. At thirty-three – even taking into account how young she looked for her age – Meg was noticeably older than Eli, weighing in at a comparatively childlike twenty one years of age. But hey...Meg knew what she liked, and Eli knew how lucky he was that she liked what she did. It seemed to work.

“Blame your cradle
-snatching wife.” I commented. Meg poked her tongue out at me. Eli just laughed. Well...he didn’t
just
laugh. We all looked on with nervous concern as his eyes squeezed reflexively shut and his hands clutched at his belly, laughter morphing into a strangled, tormented struggle for breath. “What kind of flu did you say he had? Spanish flu? In nineteen-fucking-
eighteen
?” I raised an eyebrow. Meg threw me a look that said, simply: ‘don’t...scare...him’.

“We’re really glad you soldiered through, though.” Naithe assured them. He meant it
...but at the same time, I knew he’d be doing the exact same maths that I was: working out how many of our guests would, hit with a particularly bad case of influenza, come under the ‘high-risk’ heading. “This wouldn’t have felt right without you both here.”