Heraclix and Pomp: A Novel of the Fabricated and the Fey (11 page)

Heraclix looks bad. He grabs his wounded thigh with one hand and his wounded arm with the other. He shakes his head. His breathing sounds bad. Pomp hopes he won’t die.

“It hurts,” Heraclix says. His voice is not quite the same now.

“What hurts?” Pomp asks, flying backwards just ahead of him.

He stumbles, falls to a knee, then gets back up.

“. . . pain . . . will I die? Can I die?” he asks.

Pomp is confused. “I can’t answer. I don’t know.”

“. . . maybe . . . go back . . . jump from the rocks . . . it hurts so bad . . .”

He starts to turn around and walk back the way he came.

“No!” Pomp yells. She slaps his face.

He looks at her. He squints, then his eyes focus.

“We are close now,” Pomp says.

“Close. Yes. I have to know . . .”

Pomp shakes her head. The hole grows inside her again as she watches her friend struggle through the pain.

Heraclix nods. “Yes . . . we will go on.”

“Don’t worry,” Pomp reassures him. “I won’t leave you.”

It’s evening by the time the pair comes across the path that leads to Porchenskivik’s home. The narrow trail grows even thinner, encroached upon by sinewy, thorned bushes and low, dark evergreens. Ferns drape across the path, causing it to disappear from time-to-time, only to reappear in some random location, so twisted is the underlying path.

Pomp spies a rabbit in the undergrowth. It’s wide-eyed and trembling. She flies down to investigate.

Heraclix crashes through the brush, reenergized. He pulls down vines and swats away branches, carving a tunnel through the web-like woods.

Pomp returns and comes up behind Heraclix to avoid the flying debris he generates. She’s laughing as she approaches.

“The bunny is funny! She thinks we are in her den. She says she’s never seen something as big as you underground!”

“Maybe we are underground, Pomp,” he says with a mischievous grin. “Have you looked up lately?”

Pomp looks up and sees only glowing green leaves. The sky is not visible.

“No sun,” she says.

“We’ll find it again,” Heraclix says as he rips branches down. “I think we will, anyway.”

Pomp flies up high, past the branches, through the trees. Even birds avoid this place, she thinks. The only things up here are spiders and bugs.

“I will go up to see where we are,” she says.

But before she gets to the top and breaks through, she remembers that she has promised not to leave her friend. So she flies back down.

She can see that Heraclix is growing tired again. He makes frustrated growls as he encounters obstacles. His voice gets weaker as they wear on.

“Keep going, Heraclix,” Pomp says. “We are moving through . . . you are doing great . . . here we are!”

And they were!

They spilled out of a wall of green, crashing through ivy and tree branches onto a clearing. The sky was still invisible, but the
undergrowth had been cut up and the trees had been cut back from the moss-covered stone walls of a single circular tower whose top thrust above the trees, beyond their sight. The leaves created a hemispherical bubble that glowed green. At the top of the bubble, about forty feet up, the tower disappeared, shrouded from view by the upper branches of the trees.

Heraclix spotted an ivy-clutched door set into the bottom of the tower. He went over to investigate while Pomp checked out the thin, arrow-shaped windows that occasionally punctuated its sides.

Pomp flew up to one of the windows, three stories up. She peeked inside, then froze. She hurriedly flew down to where Heraclix was.

“Pomp wants to go inside, but then Pomp
remembers
that she promised to stay with Heraclix, so Pomp is here with Heraclix.”

Heraclix turned to her and gave a weak smile.

“Thank you, Pomp.”

He turned and looked up at the tower, which stretched up and disappeared in the canopy of leaves overhead.

“We’ll go in together.”

There was no knocker on the door, no bell, so Heraclix rapped on the door, gently at first, then harder when he realized that the vines were muffling the knock of his knuckles. No matter how hard he hit the door, the sound was softened, nearly silenced, as if the tower was stuffed with cotton.

He tried the door, which opened readily, albeit noisily on squeaky hinges. Dust cascaded down, rolling out from the doorway, streaking the grass and leaving clear spots only where Heraclix’s feet were. Pomp sneezed once, then flitted in, followed by Heraclix.

He was taken aback by the fact that while the tower sounded full of substance from the outside, it was remarkably empty on the inside. His eyes adjusted to the dark. To say that things came into clearer focus would not be entirely accurate. The crumbling stone walls and spiral stairway resolved themselves to his view. But the air was in flux—writhing, almost, with something other than dust, many things other than dust.

Pomp immediately flew under Heraclix’s cloak, trembling.

Around, above, and through—yes, even through them—flowed a gathering of spectral beings, close to a hundred strong, their ectoplasmic strands in tatters behind them as they floated up and down the stone stairway and the great, empty, circular shaft around which it spiraled. The specters were loathsome, every one of them crippled in some way. Many were missing limbs, several sported gunshot wounds, a few were altogether decapitated. But the mere sight of the apparitions, strangely, did little to affect Heraclix who was himself, after all, caught in some kind of state between life and death. Rather, it was the soft crying and plaintive weeping (of those who still had mouths, tongues, and heads with which to weep), the faintly echoed pleas that caused him to shiver: “Heal me, please,” “take away my wounds, I beg of you!” and “make me whole again! Just make me whole again!”

Upward and down the ghosts rose, sank, ascending and descending the stairs and air, unable to stop moving, yet equally unable to leave the tower, trapped forever by the stone walls of their own misery, like ethereal birds in a cage.

Heraclix looked up and noted that the congregation of the wounded dead was greater, more concentrated, near the ceiling, some fifty feet up. The dead passed harmlessly through him, he noticed, so he ventured to climb the stairs, himself one of the wounded, if not dead at this time. The ghosts made no effort to move out of his way. Most were too caught up in their own lamentations to notice, though a few looked at him with plaintive sadness in their eyes.

Most of those in the circular procession were men of soldiering age (or would be, if they were alive). Many of them, in fact, were uniformed as mountain irregulars. Scattered throughout this contingent of troops was a smattering of peasant women and even a few small children, all of them shuffling, floating, limping along as their injuries dictated, all of them pleading for help from some unseen source.

Heraclix made his way through the thickening crowd, higher and higher up the stairs, until he came to what must be the bottom of a trapdoor set in the ceiling. He pushed up against it, careful not to look down from this height and lose his balance.

The trapdoor opened upward, and Heraclix climbed through. The dead tried to follow but couldn’t. They felt, pushed, hit the
invisible barrier—all to no avail. Their efforts were as silent as the grave to Heraclix, who now sat on the floor above them. No sound reached his malformed ears, not even the sounds of their begging and wailing.

He closed the door, stood up, and looked around. The sun shone through high, arched windows, draping the inside of the tower with long rays of light shimmering with dust motes. A number of large burning candles ensconced in the walls lit the room. A trio of coal braziers lent a red glow to the room, giving it a dazzling aspect that contrasted sharply with the gloom beneath.

This upper section of the tower was larger in diameter than the lower section, though not as tall. The story on which he stood was surmounted by a demilune loft atop the juncture of a pair of semicircular staircases, which crept up along the walls, like a beetle’s mandibles. Pomp, emboldened a bit now that she knew the ghosts couldn’t reach them, flew up to peek over the chest-high wood banister that blocked the view of the loft from the lower floor. Heraclix investigated the lower level.

A few small tables, two large bookshelves carved into the walls, an armed chair of elegant workmanship and embroidery, and dozens of silk pillows lay atop a mishmash of skillfully woven Oriental rugs. Judging by the furnishings, Heraclix thought it might be a crusader’s castle. He was not entirely sure where the Serb’s loyalties lay. It was obvious that the castle’s sole living inhabitant had had some contact with the Ottomans, given the Persian rugs, the Turkish motifs on the pillows, and the smattering of books with Arabic titles on their bindings. He swore to himself to avoid the subject of politics. He couldn’t allow such potential divisions to get in the way of his quest to know about himself.

Heraclix yelped, then laughed as Pomp, invisible, unexpectedly flew under his cloak.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Him!” she became visible for a split-second, long enough for Heraclix to follow her pointing finger up to the head of one of the stairways.

“Good day!” said the man as he haltingly descended the stairs. He was once, Heraclix thought, very tall, the tallest man he had
seen in his current sojourn. But he was now bent with age. His long black hair was peppered with white, though it must have been jet black well into middle age. His face was carved by experience, though whether it was sad or happy experience, Heraclix couldn’t tell. His eyes seemed simultaneously laughing and crying, as did his mouth, a perpetual metamorphosis was taking place in the man’s face. He couldn’t seem to decide between his desires for Heaven and Hell.

He was dressed in a blue-gray frock and long trousers, a combination of a military uniform, prison clothes, and a priest’s vestments. Around his neck hung a large necklace with a circular medallion wrought out of iron. Inside the circle was a pentacle, and inside the central pentagon of the star, a crucifix. Beads, perhaps rosaries, studded the rest of the necklace itself.

The man raised his right hand in salutation.

“I know why you are here,” he said in a thick Serbian accent. “You are here to be healed.”

He smiled, showing a set of remarkably well-kept teeth, then motioned for Heraclix to sit on the floor, which he did.

The old man took the last slow steps to the lower level, then approached.

“And your little friend. I’ve seen her. She can show herself.”

Pomp became visible and peeked out, from under Heraclix’s cloak.

“It’s okay,” the Serb said. “I have no intention of hurting you.”

Pomp mumbled something unintelligible to Heraclix.

“I’m very sorry, sir,” Heraclix said to him, “but I’m afraid you are mistaken. I am not here to be healed, I—”

“Oh, but you are here to be healed,” the Serb said. “You are indeed. You couldn’t have come in here otherwise.”

“But I am here to speak with you,” he held his left hand up, “about this.”

The Serb turned his face away at an angle but kept his eyes locked on the hand, as if he was keeping the option to flee open, though he couldn’t help but stare at the blue thing attached to Heraclix’s arm. His face became momentarily vacant, as if he was mesmerized by the ghoulish appendage. All cheerfulness had left his face.

“We can talk about that soon enough,” the Serb said. “But first, you do need to be healed.”

He slowly walked over to Heraclix and knelt down. His knees creaked and his back popped as he situated himself. He reached out and touched the wounded leg with his right hand.

Heraclix watched as the Serb reached up with his left arm, toward the necklace that hung over his chest. A shock passed through Heraclix as it became clear that the Serb had no left hand, that it had been severed at precisely the point where Heraclix’s own left hand had begun. An even greater shock overtook him as he watched the medallion move, as if it was being manipulated by a hand of flesh.

“This is yours!” Heraclix said, holding the hand up. “You didn’t just send it, you severed it!”

“Patience, my friend,” the Serb said. “Look, the leg begins to heal.”

Heraclix had been so enamored of his own self-righteous indignation that he had failed to notice that the pain in his leg had subsided from something rather acute to merely bothersome. The Serb walked his fingers along the line of the wound that Von Helmutter had ripped up Heraclix’s leg. As he did so, the seam came together, sinew and skin mending behind the Serb’s fingers. Pomp gasped in surprise.