Demons (35 page)

She was only half listening now, staring past the worn, enigmatic face of the idol at the cave entrance just above the head and right shoulder. “Marcus!”

“Where is the boy?” Araha asked, a note of concern creeping into his voice.

“He climbed up there, looking for Nyerza, I think.”

“In there? But it is too soon. I have not prepared you for what will happen to him. . . .” He laid a hand on her shoulder, a touch of sympathy—and it frightened her.

She pulled away from him. “What are you talking about? What will happen to him? Why were we summoned here?”

“Mother! Is that you?”

Marcus’s voice—it was his voice, wasn’t it?—coming from above.

She looked up, flooded with relief, to see him climbing down the crevice from the cave mouth. Nyerza emerged from the cave, peered down at her, then came down by a path that zigzagged over the cliff face. There was something like grief in the slump of his shoulders. Was she imagining that?

Marcus climbed down from the crevice. “How full of energy I feel. It’s remarkable.”

Melissa stared at him. “Marcus?” There was a look on his face she didn’t recognize, one that didn’t seem to belong there. There was an unfamiliar depth in it, a new detachment. And—he had never called her
Mother
before. Only
Mom
or
Mama
.

He gazed up at her, in a kind of fond fascination. “My mother . . .”

Suddenly she felt the chill in the breeze, heard sand ticking against the stone. “Are you okay?” She took him in her arms, and he let her embrace him, but he seemed tentative, almost embarrassed.

Araha shook his head dolefully. “Nyerza should not have acted so soon. . . .”

“He did nothing—not directly,” Marcus said softly, turning to look up the cliff. “His prayer was of a general nature, but it seemed to fill the cave with the light that cannot be seen with the carnal eyes. And then . . . I was here, fully here. The cave itself . . .” And then he said something in another language. It sounded Danish or . . .

Araha nodded grimly. “There are many ancient, powerful influences there.”

Melissa felt fury welling out of her confusion. “What are you talking about?”

Marcus stepped back from his mother and took her hands in his, looking up at her with a sad compassion. He spoke gently. “Mother, what has happened is, my root soul has emerged into my mind. It was necessary for my protection and so that I could be of help in the coming battle. It’s why we came here—so this could happen. We met before this life, Mother. I died and was incarnated as this boy—but that identity was lost, buried. Now, I am no longer a child—at least, not mentally. I am who I was when I died the last time. Last time, you see, my name was Mendel. If you like, Mother, you can continue to call me Marcus.” The boy glanced up at Araha, sighed, and continued. “This is hard for me to adapt to as well. I wonder—do you have any brandy? I could drink a double.”

Nyerza joined them; he looked at her and then at the ground.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

A basement cell in Ashgabat

Ira was shivering and naked in a corner of the room, trying to decide what time of day or night it was. He was squatting on the balls of his feet, hugging himself. He was wet, though he’d tried to wipe away some of the cold water they’d dumped on him, and he was so cold it hurt. Two burly, mustached men had come in at three in the morning and stripped him, then—without a word, except a few casual remarks to each other in their own language—had dumped a bucket of cold, filthy water over his head. And then they’d taken away his clothes and his bed, and left, locking the door again.

Ira was the only feature of the room except for the waste hole in the floor and the relentlessly burning bulb in the ceiling. He was grateful for the bulb—he could feel just a faint heat from it on his head.

It was about five or six in the morning, he guessed.

He had wiped away as much of the water as he could with his hand, flicking it away to try to conserve warmth. He found the heat drained out of him faster when he leaned against the wall or lay on the floor, but he badly wanted to lie down. He
ached
to lie down. But he was afraid he’d die of hypothermia if he did.

A man who called himself Akesh had come at abouttwo-thirty and, with the help of a veiled, dark-eyed translator, a woman who spoke middling-good English, had asked him some questions in a reasonable tone. It was strange, the man’s words recycled through the woman—his sharp-edged questions in her soft female voice.

Where was his wife?

Doing anthropological work in Turkmenistan, he answered.

Why was his wife sending him messages via satellite from the distant parts of Turkmenistan?

Everyone communicated over long distances that way now, if they were out in the field.

Was he an environmentalist?

Not very actively. Mostly I’m an artist.

Was he aware that there were criminal conspiracies against the oil and natural gas refineries and processing plants in Turkmenistan? Conspiracies carried out by so-called environmentalists?

No . . . he didn’t know that.

Why are you here?

To find my wife—I lost touch with her. I’m concerned about her and my child . . .

You are lying. You know where she is. Now, time for the true answers. We intercepted the transmission from a dangerous part of the desert, where we have had problems with these terrorists, who are calling themselves environmentalists, and with foreigners making deals with certain tribes of nomadic outlaws. We traced it and found the woman in question. This so-called anthropologist wife of yours. She is being watched.

Is she all right?
Please!
Are she and the boy all right?

Akesh had ignored the question. He merely lit a Russian cigarette—a stubby little thing—and went on.

I found out only yesterday evening that her claims to have a degree in anthropology are false. She is not known to be an anthropologist. So she is lying, and so is the man with her, and then so are you. And when we traced that transmission to you, we became interested in you, we did some research, and we were very interested to find that you had booked a flight here. And now here we all are together. Now, you will tell us the truth. Let us start at the beginning. Why are you here?

I told you . . .

When it became apparent that Ira would not change his story, Akesh smiled, showing smoke-yellowed teeth, and nodded. Then he winked at Ira and went into the hall—ignoring Ira’s requests to speak to the U.S. embassy or a lawyer. In the corridor, he issued orders to the guards. A little while later they came and stripped Ira naked, took away the bed, and brought in the bucket.

Crouching in the corner, rocking on the balls of his feet, aching, teeth chattering, he knew it was going to get worse. He was a little surprised he wasn’t more frightened. He felt a deep, resonant remorse. He’d blundered ahead; he hadn’t made a conscious choice. He’d run down the forest trail of his life on a moonless night without a torch, and he’d fallen into a ravine. And his son would be deprived of a father, his wife of a husband.

They were going to hurt him, he knew. It didn’t matter that there wasn’t even a reason for it. There wasn’t even the reason of war, or because they thought he was a spy. It would be utterly meaningless, really. It would be inflicted mindlessly. But then, that was, he reflected, what many people experienced anyway every day. Ira knew it was so—he still felt it, sometimes, as he had of old. What was it his mother had said? The lightning seen from space . . . marking, in her view, the mindless discharge of human brutality.

Then the door opened, and three men and the translator came in. The men were Akesh and two others he hadn’t seen before: a bald man with a pitted face and sallow skin and a stocky man who looked as if he would have been a harem eunuch. Both wore boots and paramilitary garb without insignia. Akesh had a steaming mug of coffee in his hand. The smell was the worst torment so far—a hot drink would have been rapture.

The two men with Akesh had electric batons in their hands. Akesh sipped his coffee and nodded. Ira guessed what was coming; he closed his eyes and tried to cover his head.

They beat him with the electric batons about the shoulders, arms, knees, genitals, and back. The batons sent electric jolts into him at each thudding contact, and the shocks somehow delayed the feeling of the actual impact but imparted something nastier—a sensation that made him think of a crocodile jerking its prey back and forth. The electricity crashing into him felt like jaws clamping into his flesh, shaking it. Then the pain of the impact came through like earthquake aftershocks and seemed to stretch feelers to the other places of impact, so there was a network of pain; and the shocks seemed to make the network pulse with its own weird internal blue light. . . .

Ira glanced up at them from under a sheltering hand, trying to make eye contact; perhaps if he let them know he was a human being, they would ease up a little. He looked into their faces, but they did not look into his. They simply went about their work. The stocky man beat him methodically, like someone beating dust from a rug. He probably would have preferred another assignment. The bald man was smiling, his eyes growing brighter with each smack of the batons: He was enjoying this. It excited him.

Ira was lying on his side, choking with vomit, and he knew he was soiling himself; he knew his skin had split in several places, and the blood was at least warming.

“Are you ready to tell us?”

His torturers stood back for a moment and, as if through a pulsing membrane, Ira saw the translator’s brown-black eyes above her veil; he saw pity there, genuine pity, and he could see she wished she could do something for him. She seemed to be silently urging him to cooperate. He felt a profound connection to her, then; he felt for a moment that he was her and she was him—that he was everyone, even the men beating him, in other incarnations. And then he felt he was outside himself and he followed the feeling, the sense of objectivity, trying to use some of the techniques he’d learned to become detached, to move above the pain and despair, the fury at his helplessness and their mindlessness, the frustration and humiliation that hurt almost as much as their blows, and then . . .

Then they hit him again.

Ira remembered an expression from his boyhood. Mom’s “Boyfriend Thing” had used it:
You’ll find your ass in a world of pain.

And here it was—the world of pain. Mountains and valleys, seas and winds of pain. Some pains dull, some sharp, some spiking brightly colored, others like an ashen plain.

He wanted to make something up, to make these men happy, to make it end, but he couldn’t talk; his mouth was quivering in some kind of rigor like lockjaw. It just wouldn’t work, and he felt himself slipping away.

Don’t let go,
he told himself.
You’ll die.
But death would make it end, at least.
Marcus needs you. Melissa
. . .

He struggled to hold on, to speak, and he struggled within himself. Looking up at the men standing over him, he saw that they were there, and then again they weren’t there. They were simply human appetites and responses, a kind of robot but entirely biological. And as time slowed for him, the batons coming at him in slow motion, the men shimmered, and fora moment he saw their true selves hidden by the masks of demons: The men hitting him were Grindums, scaled down to human size, with grasshopper legs, insectile heads, twists of horns, jaws that spun on their heads like drill bits, and Akesh had become a Bugsy. . . . But . . .

But the demons had hollow eyes, and inside their empty eye sockets there was another face entirely, looking frightened and trapped: a child trapped inside the demons.

And then the vision vanished. They were just men again—and the batons struck and bit and ripped at him. The frightening part was that he wasn’t able to feel the batons as much now. The numbness was terrifying, too. They could be ripping him apart and he wouldn’t know it.

Then he saw someone else: a man from his own country, he thought, judging by the man’s face and clothing. He was a tall, middle-aged man with shiny black hair; he wore a silk San Francisco Giants jacket and jeans tucked into cowboy boots. Maybe he was from the embassy. Maybe the man was here to help. He gestured, and Ira’s inquisitors stepped back.

As Ira lay there panting, the pain sweeping over him again in mounting waves, he glimpsed something small and metal-glass shiny hovering in the air near the ceiling—a silvery bullet-shaped flying projector with a glass tip. Was it something hallucinatory, a vision like the demons he’d just seen?

But no—this was real technology; he’d seen it before. And Ira realized that the figure was slightly transparent. The man was a life-sized hologram, projected by the hovering device so that Akesh could see this man, talk to him. Talk to the hologram. The actual man might be anywhere in the world.