Biblical (29 page)

Or perhaps this truly was the Age of Visions and when she opened her eyes, she would see her Roman forefather, along with his cohort, march gleamingly out of the desert. After all, she had waited so long.

When she did open her eyes, the sun was still too bright, but less so than before. And she knew it was no bug, no fever, nothing playing tricks with her mind. What she was experiencing was truly external, truly there.

But it could not be.

Zhang stood on the edge of her village and looked out over the Gobi Desert. Except the Gobi Desert was no longer there. An ocean of sand had been replaced with a true ocean of
sun-sparkled blue water. Zhang now stood on the shore of a sea or a lake that stretched as far as she could see and ozone fumed in the air, filling her nostrils. She staggered back. It wasn’t just impossible, it was as impossible as it could be. An ocean where a desert had been for thousands of years, a desert that had been expanding by more than three thousand square kilometers a year.

A desert that was now suddenly, inexplicably, gone.

The strange thing was that she knew she was not going mad. What she was witnessing was insane, but she knew that it was an external insanity. What she was seeing was clearly a hallucination, but it was not she who was hallucinating it. The image of the Wall of Heaven crumbling, put in her head by old Zhia Bao, filled her with fear. She felt her heart thudding in her chest and a panic rising from deep within.

And then she heard it. Behind her.

The sound of something monstrous.

Zhang Xushou turned to the sound. Every muscle, every tendon and fiber was frozen solid by a total fear that surged through her nervous system, robbing her of the ability to move or speak or breathe. Something deep and locked in the most primitive part of her brain exploded; she was beyond fight-or-flight impulses. She was completely, totally, at the mercy of her own terror.

That, and the thing she now faced.

It was a monster. Wolf-headed, wolf-shaped, wolf-like, but tiger-striped and five times the size of any wolf, it was a demonic thing from nightmares: a giant yellow-eyed snarl of fur and teeth and jaws. In her terror, Zhang didn’t try to make sense of the creature, to understand the nonsensicality of a wolf bigger than a horse, but something registered in her brain that it was more than the monster’s size made her think of something other than a wolf. It had a bulky, heavily muscled body, thickly furred, but the monstrous head, and those improbably
massive jaws, seemed out of proportion even with the huge body.

The wolf-monster hadn’t seen her. It pawed its way malevolently across the sand to the water’s edge. And it was then she noticed it didn’t have paws or claws: the beast’s feet were like nothing she had ever seen before … if anything more like the hooves of a goat, but more angular, sharper. She searched her memory for anything she’d seen in a book, heard in a far-fetched tale or fairy story that spoke of a chimera like this.

The Tiangou. The demon dog of Chinese legend who ate the sun to cause eclipses. This thing, this monster before her … that’s what it must be. The Tiangou existed, she realized – not the way it did in legend, in superstition, but in the here-andnow real world. This was the reality on which the legend must have been based.

But the sea – that didn’t explain the sea where the desert had been. And why had she never heard of other sightings of this beast?

The creature still had not seen her, and Zhang’s mind screamed mutely to her body to move, not to run, but edge slowly away and back up towards the village. For a moment her reason failed to thaw the ice of her fear that still bound her motionless, but then, painfully slowly, without taking a breath and with her eyes locked on the beast, she began to ease one foot back, then another.

The Tiangou snapped its vast head in her direction, surprising her with the speed it could move such a massive skull. It let out a roar. Not like a lion’s, or a wolf’s, not like any creature she had ever heard: a long, deep, thunderous bellow that Zhang Xushou felt resonate in her bones. It sunk its improbable head low between bulky shoulders that moved like slow pistons as it walked. Zhang had never seen this monstrous creature before, but she recognized the way it moved: the slow, measured pace of a predator preparing to attack.

The Age of Visions.

Zhang thought back to all of the stories she’d heard: about people panicking because of things that were not there, weeping at the sight of loved ones long dead. Visions. Visions cannot hurt you. Visions are not real. But what she faced, no matter how improbable, was as real as anything else she had experienced in her life.

Another bellowing roar from the Tiangou. It slouched forward then paused, yellow eyes dead and cold. Zhang knew the attack was coming. The monster closed the gap between it and her in an instant.

She closed her eyes.

*

Zhang kept her eyes squeezed tight. She clasped her hands over her ears and commanded the Tiangou, the desert-ocean, the too-bright sun to be gone.

When she opened them again, the sea still sparkled under a brilliant sky, the air still smelled and felt different. But the Tiangou was no longer in front of her. She heard it roar again and she spun around to see it now behind her. And she saw at the same time another impossible beast. The monster’s attack had not been launched at her, but at this other creature. It looked to Zhang like a rhinoceros, but again too big and without a horn on its head, instead having two flattened, spoon-like protuberances projecting from the end of its snout. The Tiangou had clearly already attacked the other creature: Zhang could see a hideous gash ripped through a leather armor of thick, folded skin. The beast let out a long plaintive bellow as the Tiangou raised itself up onto its hind legs, twisting its neck and opening the huge jaws wide. It fell upon its prey, its jaws clamping on the back of the creature’s neck. Despite its prey being robustly built, the Tiangou’s jaws crushed through hide, muscle and crunched through bone. Zhang felt sick at the sound. All strength seemed instantly to drain from the creature
and it sank to its knees before keeling over with a reverberating thud. The Tiangou tore mercilessly at its flesh, feeding on it even before the last of its life had gone from it. The air fumed with the stench of blood and raw, torn flesh, adding to Zhang’s nausea. She realized that the Tiangou was between her and the village; there was no cover, no place to run. She would have to pass it and its meal to get to safety. Speculating that the wolf-monster was too engrossed in its feeding frenzy to notice her, she moved in a wide arc, always resisting the impulse to run, never taking her eyes from the monster.

She moved steadily, making sure her pace was slow enough not to trigger a predatory reaction from the monster, but quick enough to pass by before it had finished tearing the last of the flesh from its victim.

The beast raised its massive head, the muzzle caked in blood and ripped sinew from its prey, and stared straight at Zhang with cold, dead yellow eyes. She froze, measuring the distance to the first houses in the village. There was no way she could get halfway there before the wolf-monster would be on her, tearing through flesh and crushing bone with its vast jaws.

This was it. This would be how and where she would die and she was not able to put a name to the thing that brought death to her. Then she realized the beast was not looking at her, it was looking through her, in the same way it had before it attacked the strange giant rhinoceros-type creature. To the beast, she didn’t exist.

The Age of Visions. What she was experiencing looked, felt and smelled real, but it was a vision, an illusion. It was no more real than something on the television or in a movie.

She was convinced it was a hallucination, but did she have the courage to put that conviction to the test? Zhang took a sideways step: a wide, confident step. The wolf-monster’s gaze remained fixed and did not move with her. Another step. The monster roared and again Zhang felt it reverberate in her flesh,
resonate in her bones. It was real. She fought back the panic that surged through her and took another sideways step, then another. She was now out of the creature’s line of sight, but it still did not turn to follow her. After a moment, the Tiangou lost interest in whatever it had stopped to look at, turned back to the rent cadaver of its freshly dead prey and began once more to tear at its insides.

Zhang broke into a sprint towards the village. She ran as she had never run before and without looking back to see if the monster, hallucination or not, was chasing her.

Macbeth found himself becoming very aware of the room, as if Deborah Canning was drawing him into her ever-tighter circle of perception. A breeze picked up outside and the sunlight in the room dimmed for a few seconds, before brightening again.

“So why don’t you see anything behind us, Debbie?” he asked. “And how is it we can see it when you can’t?”

“Imagine this,” she said. “You’re in a hall of mirrors, dozens of them angled to create endlessly recursive reflections. You’re surrounded by an infinite number of yourself. How can you be sure you’re the real you and not one of the reflections?”

“Because I can think,” said Macbeth. “And a reflection can’t.”

She laughed, quietly and a little bitterly. “That’s where you’re wrong, Dr Macbeth. The project you’re working on – you’re holding up a mirror and creating a reflection of the human mind. But that reflection will think. Believe itself to be real.”

Macbeth was taken aback for a moment. “How do you know about my work?”

“We discussed it.”

“We?”

“Melissa and I. She talked about you, often. But we talked about your work more.”

Macbeth was about to ask something else – to ask what Melissa had said about him, then checked himself.

“So you’re saying you are a reflection,” he said. “But I see you, Dr Corbin sees you. We know you’re real.”

“No … you’re just being deceived into believing I’m real. Are you familiar with
trompe l’œil
?” Deborah lifted the heavy art book from the window-side table and handed it to Macbeth.
The Misled Eye: the Art of Deception
. Reaching over, she turned the pages while Macbeth held the book. She stopped when she reached a photograph of a painting hanging in a gallery. It was of two young men climbing a stairway that curled out of sight. The picture was framed conventionally on three sides, giving it the look of a doorway into the wall rather than a painting; at the bottom a real three-dimensional wooden step, the same color and construction as the ones in the painting, projected out and down to the floor. The composition created an optical illusion of depth and dimension.

“Charles Willson Peale’s
Staircase Group
,” Deborah explained. “The figures in the painting are life-size … Peale’s sons. You can’t really get the full effect from a photograph. The impression was powerful enough to fool George Washington into believing it was real when he saw it for the first time.
Trompe l’œil
has a history that goes back into the classical world: Roman and Greek murals painted to deceive the eye and make interiors look bigger and grander. When the Renaissance master Giotto was still an apprentice to Cimabue, he painted a fly on one of his master’s frescoes. The fly was so lifelike that Cimabue tried to brush it off the wall.” Taking back the book, she closed it and placed it exactly where she’d picked it up from, each movement precise. “You see, Dr Macbeth, it is the easiest thing in the world to confuse the senses, to deceive the mind into accepting something is real when it’s fake.”

“So who is being deceived, in your opinion? You for not seeing the room behind us or us for seeing it?”

“We are all being deceived: you into believing I and the room exist; me into doubting my lack of existence. But when I focus on it, when I accept I don’t have presence independent of the minds of others … that’s when I can see the nothing.”

“So we exist because we see what you can’t?” asked Macbeth.

“No. You don’t exist either. We are all reflections. You just
think
you exist and that the room exists. I
know
I don’t and it doesn’t.”

Macbeth lifted a hand and indicated the window. “Just a moment ago, the light in the room faded and the edge of the curtain moved. I don’t need to look outside to know that the wind has picked up, or see the cloud that passed across the sun and dimmed it for me to know that the cloud and the sun were there. Not everything needs to be sensed or experienced for us to know that it’s there.”

“I’ve read Hegel and Kant too, Dr Macbeth. As for trees and clouds and things-in-themselves … you know what I did for a living – I created worlds. Thousands of them. Programs so complex and convincing and environments so real that, for hours on end, people left this reality to live in mine. There were breezes and clouds and trees in my worlds too.”

“And it’s perhaps exactly that work that’s damaged your association with reality,” said Macbeth. “Listen Debbie, I know you think this is an experience unique to you, and that something has been revealed to you that no one else can understand, but you’ve got to believe me that this is a very common disorder. I think you have a form of Delusional Misidentification Syndrome. It’s a common disorder but the details vary: Capgras Delusion sufferers believe friends and family have been replaced by identical imposters; Fregoli’s Delusion makes you think that everyone in the world is actually the same person in disguise,; Cotard’s Delusion convinces you you’re dead and Reduplicative Paramnesia makes you believe you have been kidnapped and transported to an exact copy of the world. Can you see the similarity to what you’re feeling?”

“These are all delusions and a delusion is a lie. What I know is no lie.”

“The thing about a delusion is, by definition, you cannot
recognize it as false,” said Macbeth. “It seems real and logical. You’re a very intelligent woman, and that means your delusion itself is intelligent. Elaborate and well-informed.”

Corbin tapped Macbeth lightly on the arm, then said to Deborah, “You’re getting tired. We’ve leave you to get some rest. Dr Macbeth and I will come back to see you soon, if that’s okay with you.”