The Big Reap (35 page)

“Sam,” I told her.

“What?”

“If we're to work together, you should really call me Sam.”

“No,” she said, “I shouldn't. Do you know why? Because I am not your friend. I am not your ally. And I am certainly not your confidante. I am your jailor. Your tormentor. I am one of many architects responsible for constructing your own personal hell, and you would do well to remember it. That is why I choose to call you by your title. To remind us both precisely where we stand. Because I assure you, if you give me half an opportunity, I will use you. Hurt you. Betray your trust. Deceive you. I'm sorry, it's nothing personal. It's simply that I cannot help it. It's in my nature. It's who I am. It's what I have become.”

I shook my head. “I refuse to believe that.”

Lilith smiled then, sad and wan. “You'll come around.”

“But not today,” I said, my hand finding hers, our fingers intertwining. It wasn't a romantic gesture, but one of basic human kindness, for in that moment – and perhaps only in that moment – her beauty held no sway over me.

She flinched as if stung, but she did not take her hand away. “What exactly do you think you're doing?”

“Look. You've done your civic duty. Warned me how big and scary you are. How you plan to chew me up and spit me out if given half a chance. But not today, right? Because today, for me, was a giant fucking shit sandwich. Today, I've had about all that I can take. So if you want to use me and abuse me, you'll have to wait your turn, because today I'm already used up. Which is why it seems to me we may as well enjoy our time in the sun. Unless, of course, I'm wrong, and you plan on getting started ruining me today.”

She looked at me a long while as if I were insane. But she never removed her hand. “No,” she said finally, resting her head upon my shoulder, “not today.”

And so we two damned souls sat for hours beneath the blazing sun in silence, and watched its rays glint off the water, bright and pretty as God's grace.

 

21.

It was dusk when I arrived at the temple.

Temple
was too strong a word, really, for the tangled heap of stone and jungle life I saw before me or, given said heap's strange elemental majesty, too weak. In reality, the ravaged remains of the building didn't look like a human structure in the slightest. The weathered sandstone spires seemed to rise out of the jungle as if not built but grown. The bas relief ornamentation – some Hindu, some Buddhist, and some animist – had been all but obliterated by the centuries, once telling tales of gods and men, but now nothing more than mossy crenellations on a wall. And in the thousand years since the site had been built – the nearly seven hundred since this site in particular had been abandoned – the jungle had done its level best to swallow the structure whole. Strangler figs pressed woody limbs through every hint of a crack. Massive thitpok trees draped surfaces with their fluid root structures which seemed to slither down across the rock face like the tentacles of a giant beast. Garlands of ropy vine strung themselves across every peak and column – always pulling, tugging, taking until the stone itself was forced to tender its crumbling surrender.

Believe me, I knew how it felt.

I'd been hiking for seven days, following Lilith's vague directions – scrawled on a napkin from an ex-pat Irish bar in Phnom Penh – through the dense, forbidding wilds of Cambodia. The legends claim that Lilith has dominion over the warm Southern wind, and as the hot salt breath of the Gulf of Thailand blew ever northward with me, I couldn't help but feel like she was with me – guiding, goading, or maybe just gloating it wasn't her who had to carry the goddamn backpack.

Honestly, the whole country was so hot and sticky, I'd soak clean through my shirt by the time I shrugged the damn thing on. The fifteen miles or so a day I'd manage on foot – twenty, if a fisherman took pity on me and ferried me up the Mekong in one of the ubiquitous low-slung fishing vessels that sprinkle the river like so much flotsam – would leave me looking as though I'd taken a dip in the briniest of ocean waters, and smelling like the locker room to boot. And the one day I managed to hitch a ride – thirty-five miles in the back of a rusted pickup with a pair of orange-robed monks, whose sandals were made from tire-rubber and whose rice bowls (for all the Buddhist monks I encountered on my journey carried rice bowls, which locals delighted in filling with food from their own tables, and which the monks were quite willing to share with a poor, starving stranger) were, sadly, empty – the plumes of dirt kicked up off the unpaved road left my eyes and hair gritty, and my benefactor's insistence upon driving over every fucking pothole left my tailbone so bruised I could scarcely sit the whole next day.

I was wearing the flesh of a middle-aged, middle-management Seattleite named McCluskey, who'd scheduled a layover in Phnom Penh on his way to inspect his company's new call-center in Bangalore with the intention of exploring Cambodia's ruins. I caught up with him when I overheard he and his wife Skyping in a Greenwood Avenue coffee house, not too long after the nightmare showdown in Bellevue. Thanks to me, he missed his bus to Angkor Wat, but I didn't figure he'd mind. He'd shed a good five pounds of paunch on this little trek of mine, and anyways, I was showing him a
real
set of ruins – as in, the kind no one had laid eyes on since Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

No one but the last remaining Brethren, that is; the one that Lilith called Thomed.

After Bellevue, I confess I didn't relish the notion of going toe-to-toe with another one of Lilith's oogly booglies, particularly given this one went bamboo so long ago, having disappeared into the jungle not long after the beastly Ricou split from the group. God only knew what I was walking into. And when, as best as I could tell, I reached the end of Lilith's map midday today and there'd been no temple to be found, just a modest fishing village comprising a few ramshackle stilted huts clustered around a muddy tributary too small to have a proper name, I'd half-hoped I wouldn't have to, that perhaps Thomed simply wasn't here. But when, with the help of McCluskey's travel dictionary, I inquired in broken Khmer (which sounded close enough to Sanskrit to my ears to make me worry I might wind up inadvertently summoning a Rakshasa demon) as to whether there were any ruins nearby, their dogged insistence that they could not understand me, coupled with their refusal to meet my eye or stand in my presence for ten seconds before gruffly shouldering past, indicated that I was in the right place after all. And given all I'd learned about the Brethren these past few months, locating Thomed's little hidey-hole from that point was a breeze. I just forced myself to walk in the direction my instincts screamed I shouldn't, and within hours, I was there.

The question was, was Thomed?

I stepped gingerly through the remains, the ground an uneven hodgepodge of roots, fallen trees, and long-eroded manmade blocks. My eyes peeled and wary, my ears straining to pick out any sign of life, or failing that, of prior occupation. But aside of the teeming wildlife of the jungle – a living vine that proved to be a tree-bound python, the rustle in the bushes of a chocolate-brown wild boar, a monitor lizard basking on the crumbling stone face of a long-toppled god – I caught no sign of him. And so, against my better instincts, I squeezed past the cascade of thick, fibrous roots that hung like organic draperies in front of the ancient temple's sole remaining entrance as if the very land itself wished to bar my entry, and stepped into the stifling dark.

Once my eyes adjusted, I realized the darkness of the temple's interior was far from absolute. Shafts of golden light pierced the roof at regular intervals, the cracks through which it passed framed by encroaching plant life. And inside, too, the plants had taken hold, draping nearly every surface with roots and vines and, nearest the stagnant, black-watered puddles that graced the stone floor here and there beneath the roof-gaps overhead, fresh shoots sprouted up from the crumbling rock, leaves stretched skyward toward their Maker's light.

The room was pillared, but unfurnished, and otherwise unadorned. Many of the pillars had toppled long ago, and in some places the ceiling had followed suit. I crept slowly deeper into the temple's murk, mindful at every turn of any sense of motion that might signal Thomed's attack.

At the head of the narrow, ruined room, I discovered a lone statue, moss-dusted and vine-bound. Not of a god, it seemed, but of a worshipper, cross-legged and eyes closed, its stone hands clasped in prayer or meditation. I had the strange sensation of embarrassment at interrupting its long penitence, for clearly it had sat in that same place so long that the temple had crumbled around it. The statue sat on a patch of jungle earth just large enough to accommodate it, from which sprouted countless vine-like growths that stretched upward toward the scant light leaking through the ceiling cracks above, winding like braided rope around the stone figure as they climbed. The effect was such that it appeared this praying figure had sprouted from the ground itself. I couldn't tell if the growth had pushed up through the temple's stone floor, or if the temple's architects simply left this square of jungle bare. Though I had no idea why they might've elected to, the latter seemed the likelier option, since everywhere else plant life pushed through, it left cracks and stone debris in its wake, whereas here the borders were crisp and clear, a perfect square unmarred by broken rock.

I didn't realize until its eyes opened that this statue was not a statue at all.

A sudden glimpse of yellowed whites amidst the cracked gray flesh I took for stone, surrounding irises and pupils rheumy with age. Yellow again as lips split to reveal the not-statue's teeth. The simple acts of eyes and lips opening shook free a thick layer of dust from the being's face, which drifted like ash onto its vine-strewn lap.

It took me a moment to realize this statue, this man, this
whatever
, was smiling.

“Oh good,” he said, with a voice like snakeskin dragging across dead leaves, “you're here.”
“Thomed?” I ventured. He nodded, loosing yet more dust from his face, his hair, his head. As it fell away, I realized beneath the inch of collected filth he was wizened and emaciated, a living skeleton wrapped tight with age-cracked flesh. It, and his hair, was near as gray as the dirt that coated it. It was clear he'd been sitting there for a long while; centuries, perhaps. “You've been
expecting
me?”

“I've been expecting
someone
for quite some time,” he said. “Though not you specifically…” He tilted his head by way of polite inquisition. It took a second for me to realize he was asking my name.

“Sam,” I told him. “My name is Sam.”

“Sam,” he repeated. “Well met.”

“That remains to be seen,” I told him.

“True enough,” he replied.

His voice was accented, but only slightly. How that could be, I didn't know. If he'd been sitting here half as long as it appeared he had, he couldn't possibly have the grasp on modern language to understand me.

I said as much. He smiled wider and replied, “It is surprising what one might learn if one simply takes the time to listen.”

“To what?” I asked.

“To everything. To nothing at all. To the soul-song of the universe.”

I took a careful step toward him, my right hand inside my pants pocket, gripping tight the timeworn bowie knife I'd traded a fisherman McCluskey's watch for two days back. Thomed didn't move a whit. Bound tight with vines as he was, I wondered if he could. But I remembered the deceptive strength of his fellow Brethren, and decided I'd err on the side of caution.

“Do you know why I'm here?” I asked.

“I do,” he replied. “Just as I know about the knife you carry, and as yet wish to conceal. You've come to end my life.”

I thought about protesting the fact. I didn't see the point. “Forgive me for saying so, but you don't seem too broken up about that.”

“If it is my Maker's will that I should cease to be, then I shall cease to be. If it is not, then She will spare me. I am prepared for either eventuality.”

“That's awful accepting of you.”

“Yes, well, I've had some time to think upon the matter, and to come to terms with either outcome.”

I cast my gaze around the ruins, warm and silent in the waning afternoon. “Exactly how long have you
been
here?”

Thomed fell silent for a full five minutes then, his face screwed up in thought. I began to wonder if he'd ever answer. But eventually, his eyes opened once more, and he said, “One thousand seven hundred sixty-seven years, three months, two weeks, and four days.”

I snorted in surprise and disbelief. “What, no hours?”

He flashed age-dulled teeth once more, a brief, kindly smile. “I fear the time is hard to tell when one cannot see the sun.”

“I hate to be the one to tell you this, but I think your math's off. It puts you here a good eight hundred years before the culture that built this place.”

“Your assumption is fallacious,” he replied.

“Yeah? How's that?”

“You assume I came to this temple to worship, when in fact this temple came to me.”

“So
you
built this place?”

“No. I seek neither the comfort of shelter nor the vanity of monument. Simply peace.”

“You mean to say whoever built this place built it
around
you?”

“I do.”

“Why? You, like, some kinda god to them?”

Thomed laughed. “Actually, and to my great surprise, the temple builders hardly seemed to notice my presence here, save for the fact they seemed compelled to not disturb me. My suspicion is that they were drawn to this place for much the same reason I was.”