Mr. Shivers

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

He climbed around little peaks and through little valleys. His feet were wet in his shoes, perhaps from burst blisters or maybe from blood. He stripped his coat and shirt to rags to keep his hands bandaged and insulated. When his breath became visible he deliriously considered trying to trap some of it in his hands to hold on to it in case he needed it.

Over stone and brush and wood. Far above the world. There on the points of the craggy teeth that snapped at the heavens Connelly wondered if the land below was real. Were he to venture down he was not sure if he would recognize anything.

He knew now it was not real. Not at its heart. Before this all he had thought he was journeying out, heading to the fringes and forgotten lands, but now he knew otherwise. With each step he had taken he had moved away from torpid slumber, from the complacent dream-world of home, and instead had approached the visceral savagery whose wax and wane formed the heartbeat of creation. This place in the mountain, the ruins of the village below. Tar shacks and shanties in the desert, lit by guttering fires. Rootless and wild and hungry. They were the real. The other way was a willful lie and having awoken he would not return. Could not even if he wanted to. There was a grim joy in it and he savored its taste and thought it beautiful.

Tattered wanderer, these are hollow countries, hallowed lands. See them arranged here at your feet, broken ruins of people long forgotten, ancient in their silent rage. See this. See this and know it to be your home.

Every fifty yards he would stop and look for the mountains. One big, one small, right behind one another. Leaping on top as though one attempted to subdue another. And perhaps they did. Even in this barren place conflict seemed inescapable.

Each time he stopped he would reach behind and take out the gun and check the rounds. It was his ritual. His method of remembrance and prayer. He tried to count how many times he stopped but gave up at fourteen.

When he saw the two mountains he did not believe it at first. He peered at them against the sky, suspecting some trick, but then relented and checked the gun again and began walking toward them. He nodded from fatigue as he walked and it was in waking from one of these relapses that he spotted a red-black streak on the stony path. He knelt and touched it.

Blood. It was sticky. Fairly fresh. Fresh enough, at least.

Connelly began following him again. His eyes roved back and forth for more drops, tracking a wounded creature and waiting for that doorway he’d find in the mountain.

A crevice. Crack in the world. Breaks down deep to where things don’t forget. Where things still remember what can never be forgotten no matter how much we try.

“Kill you,” said Connelly, and kept walking.

He came to the feet of the two mountains and saw the gouge before them, cavernous and crooked like some giant had carved a lightning bolt in the ground. He stopped again and checked for blood. He himself was bleeding from his hands and so he kept them behind his back to avoid muddying the trail. He found a few splotches on a bit of mossy stone. He looked at the earth around the stone and examined the tracks and guessed the scarred man had sat there. Sat there to catch his breath or to look for Connelly or maybe just to sit. Connelly studied the scene and picked out his quarry’s next direction and continued. He took out the gun and kept it out.

The trail led to the edge of the cliff and he leaned out and looked down. It might have been the way the sunlight made the shadows but the fault appeared endless. He turned back to the trail and saw it led along the edge in a straight line. The man had not tired yet. Connelly would not expect him to.

Death is tireless, he said to himself. That’s okay. I don’t tire easy, either.

Then he came upon a path, leading down into the chasm. It was so gentle and so firm that it had to have been constructed, and well constructed. He began down it, gun still out, eyes still searching. He walked down until the light was a thin line above and the edges of the cliff yawned about him. He wondered if this place had actually been carved. A primitive sanctuary, bored down into the earth to greet and remember one’s forebears. He wondered if this had once been the culminating point for some savage pilgrimage and debated whether or not he was such a pilgrim himself.

Halfway down the cliff he came upon the cave. It was not large, no more than four feet high. He did not see any blood before its entrance but he did not need to to know that this was where the scarred man had fled.

Connelly reached into his pockets and felt around and pulled out his box of matches. He took off his shirt and wound it around a nearby branch and lit the end. It was a delicate fire, slow and smoking. He would have to move slowly, otherwise he would be moving by matchlight. He let it catch better and walked into the cave.

The passageway wound through the rock, widening and twisting. He walked with his head bowed and his knees bent and the torch thrust ahead, the gun trained on the dead center of the passage. Behind him the mouth of the tunnel moaned and grieved but he paid it no mind. His eyes grew used to the darkness and patches of moisture winked and glittered at him. He could not say how far he walked but if a mountain had a heart he felt he had to be near this one’s.

Then he heard a sound from far away in the tunnel.

“Connelly,” said a voice.

He stopped. Waited. Then began creeping ahead.

“You came,” said the voice. It sounded as though the speaker had been weeping. “I knew you would.”

He came to a wide atrium in the tunnel and saw vaults of rock stretching out above and beside him. Crystals burst into radiant prisms as the firelight found them and he believed for a second that all the night heavens were inlaid in the walls, like someone had pulled the sky down to this room. He scanned the room with the torchlight but saw nothing except another passageway on the far side.

“I tried to stop it, you see,” said the voice from far ahead. “I thought I could. I thought I could come back and stop it.”

Connelly began walking toward the next entry, still moving slowly.

“But I don’t believe I can,” the voice whispered.

He stepped to the side of the entryway and looked in, leading with the gun. He saw nothing. The tunnel turned away below.

“It’s leaving me,” said the voice. “Can you feel it? It’s abandoning me. In a way I am glad but I weep at the same time. Because what will come after me? What will be next? I do not know. And I fear it.”

Connelly began walking down the passageway. It curved in a long spiral and he could not fathom how deep below the earth they were. Miles, if anything. But he felt somehow that this place was not a part of the earth in any way he knew. He had never been in a place older than this. It was so old it was below everything, below all things. Below time. Below knowledge.

“Death will not die,” warned the voice. “It will not. You must know that.”

Connelly did not answer. He kept the torch ahead of him, wiped sweat from his brow, tried to ignore the sting of smoke in his eyes and his nostrils. The torch was fading fast and he was not sure how far away the scarred man was. Two more turns? One? Three?

“It will not die,” said the voice, and this time it sounded stronger, stranger. “It will come back. Stronger. Wilder. Harder.”

Connelly cocked the gun. The voice was very near now. He could hear it whimpering nearby. Light dappled the far stone wall, coming from some source around the next bend. He studied it and took a breath.

He turned the corner and saw the scarred man sitting on the floor of the cave before another large passageway, his head bowed in his lap and his shoulders shaking. Before him was an old lantern, the flame dancing slowly in the waxy glass. The silver knife was still clutched in his fingers. Bones littered the floor around him, eye sockets flickering with the torchlight, rib cages arced and poised like hands ready to pray. Among them were weapons but weapons like nothing Connelly had ever seen before. A long musket with a wooden stock and a flint hammer. A thin rapier with a silver hilt. A broadsword easily three feet long. Even stone weapons, chiseled blades crudely lashed to sticks, spears carved from wood, pieces of stone hacked to resemble maces.

Connelly’s eye moved to the figure on the stone floor. The scarred man, sitting in the center of it all, weeping silently.

Connelly raised the gun. The gray man lifted his head to look at him, scars burning white, eyes dead and hollow. Shark eyes. Eyes that had seen the rise and fall of civilizations, and did not care.

The man’s face twisted in fury. Gray needle-teeth flashed in the firelight. “No!” he screamed. “I will not let you do this! I will not let you do this!”

He leapt to his feet and Connelly fired, but it was too late. The shot went wide and punched through the scarred man’s coat. Clay and bones burst behind him as the bullet struck the cave floor. The silver knife surged forward in the man’s hand and Connelly lifted his arm to block it but it dipped up and in, biting into his side and raking his ribs. He screamed and the scarred man reached under to try to push it up and into his chest, but Connelly pulled the scarred man in and butted him in the face. A dozen tiny stars of pain came to life on his scalp where his forehead met the man’s jagged maw. Then he shoved the scarred man back, hand held to the wound at his side, knuckles already dripping.

The scarred man melted away to dart back in again and drag the knife over Connelly’s shoulder and across his neck and cheek. He seemed to be made of nothing but cloak and teeth and knives. Connelly felt lines of pain light up in his wrist and in his knee. He stumbled back and saw the icy point of the dagger glide by him once more, hissing through the air. He fired again without thinking, gunflash casting shadows on the cave wall, and the scarred man gasped and clutched his leg. Then he growled and feinted to the side and pounced forward again and Connelly felt bright blinding pain in his leg. He fell to a kneel as the leg died underneath him and he struggled to stay upright, left arm held close and winglike, a thousand wounds blossoming on his body. The scarred man seemed shaken by the last shot but he gathered his strength and leapt upon Connelly, snarling like a beast. As Connelly’s back met the stone floor he pushed the nose of the gun barrel up and fired.

Then silence. He waited for the knife to come home, to worm its way into his rib cage and ravage his heart until it lay cold. But it did not come. There was nothing but the scent of burning powder in the air and the pain in his legs and side. The gun lay on his belly, hot and heavy. Somewhere in the room someone exhaled slowly.

Connelly opened his eyes and saw the scarred man sitting on the floor again, the silver knife now on the ground. The man clutched his belly, breathing gently, then drew his hand away and looked at the smooth stain on his palm.

Dark red. Red enough to be black.

“Got you,” said Connelly softly. “Got you, finally.”

The scarred man shook his head. His mouth worked open and shut like a fish dying on a mudbank, suffocated by the air. “Fool,” he said softly. “Useless. Useless fool.” Then he started to try to stand up. He failed once and kicked the lantern over and the muddy glass bled fire onto the earthen floor. Then he fought to his feet and staggered back uncertainly until he leaned against the brick wall, hand still clutched to his stomach.

“You goddamn fool,” he gasped.

“I got you, you bastard,” Connelly said.

“You wouldn’t listen,” he said. “You just wouldn’t.”

The pool of fire spread. As it did the light in the chamber changed. Then for one instant Connelly thought he saw the young blond man standing in the cave with him in place of Shivers. The young blond man from his dreams. Then the light changed once more and he was Shivers again, and yet somewhere beneath all the years of scars and fury Connelly could still make out that sad young face, that brow anointed with red…

“Did you… Did you really think you were first?” said the scarred man. Breath whistled from down in his chest. He coughed and his teeth gleamed redly. “Or I? Look… look around you. Look at them. Did you… How could you…” Then he coughed again and rolled sideways. He stumbled into the chamber beyond and was swallowed by the darkness.

“No!” said Connelly. “No!”

Connelly gathered his ragged body together and stood and stepped forward over the pool of fire. He looked at the ancient corpses that lay around the cavern’s entrance and stared into the entry ahead. He could see nothing but he knew something waited there. Something was watching. He dropped the gun and walked into the cave.

Endless dark. No walls, no ceiling. If he ran on stone his feet did not feel it and he was not even sure if he breathed air.

“Where are you?” he asked. He walked farther ahead, one hand out in front, stumbling like he was blind.

“Where are you? Where are you!” he screamed.

His scream echoed on, yet as it faded he became aware of a second sound. A faint trickle, the muted laugh of a stream or brook somewhere in the cavern. Connelly stumbled toward it until his fingers met slick rocks and the cool caress of water. He huddled by the waters, clinging to the only concrete thing in this darkness, and then he realized the tiny stream was faintly luminescent. Some spectral blue light, seeping up from within the brook. He let his eyes adjust to its light. Focused until he saw it trickling out of the small aperture in the rock wall, then weaving away until it made a staggered arc on the cavern floor.

Something coughed in the darkness. He squinted and saw the form of a man, lying on the riverbank on the far side of the cavern. Connelly wrestled himself to his feet one last time and stumbled over, wiping the sweat and filth from his eyes.

The scarred man lay with his arms and part of his head submerged in the waters of the river. The stream gently curled and foamed around his elbow and his scalp and the black stones around him. Connelly stood over him and the scarred man tried to look at him with one staring eye, unable to lift his head, panicking like a felled deer. His mouth still opened and closed uselessly. Ghostly streamers of red ran from his chest and down the riverwater.

Connelly looked down at him for a minute or more. Then he stooped and picked up one of the black stones. As he did he heard the scarred man say, “No. Don’t.”

“Shut up.”

“No…”

“You shut the hell up.”

“Look,” the man whispered. “Look.” He moved one hand and tried to point into the waters.

Connelly knelt at the bank. Then he looked into the brook and saw something. Flickering images, trapped within the waters like rays of light within a prism. Then they swelled and grew until he could not look away.

Screaming. A great fire, a city burning. The sky rained daggers and knives and up in the clouds he heard the roar of engines and the bellow of explosions. He watched as some twisted black wreck swam smoking to the earth and erupted as it touched the ground. Great, hulking machines toiled across miles of mud, pausing only to spout fire that arced across the country. The seas boiled with vast iron ships that spat long spears to rove through the waves and bury themselves in the sides of crafts the size of islands.

Someone wept. He was in a forest of barbed wire and he saw a crowd of people shuddering beneath blankets thin as paper, their arms like twigs and their faces like skulls. Rivers of blood rolled through the gutters and he heard the barking of dogs and the howl of commands and somewhere there was gunfire and gasping. Then the horizon lit up as though it had been kissed by the sun and he watched as the sky boiled and the atmosphere evaporated. A wave of fire so hot it was invisible swept across a city that crumbled into dust.

The world went dark. Died. Then lit up.

Cold illumination, blue and bland. He saw cities grow cement tendrils and heave themselves up from red earth, glass towers growing from their centers to touch the very clouds. Chrome and red stars swarmed through the cities and lights flickered on and before his eyes the buildings rose and fell, each time outdoing the last until all was dwarfed by their construction. The glass obelisks glared down upon him and he felt tiny and meaningless at their feet. The cities belched poison into the rivers and seas and immense chimneys arose far in the distance and from their crowns came pillars of smoke thicker than any mountain. Then the bases of the towers filled with fumes and fire and he watched as several rose up into the sky like fireworks and disappeared behind the penumbra of moisture that made the roof of the world.

A millions voices droned. A billion. More. Metal stars wheeled above, whispering along. Everything speaking all at once. A crowded world delivered in tremendous violence, a world that sipped war’s offering and was fueled by its captures and casualties to ascend to heights that Connelly had never guessed existed.

A dawn. A rebirth. Bought with terrible sacrifice, a great suffering to drown out all others. But one that would give birth to a new age.

And for that age, a new Death. Something that had been forged in desperation and beaten hard until it was inured to all pleas and did not know the meaning of mercy. Something that would bring this suffering without hesitation and so usher in the future.

Connelly looked up. Something stood across the river from them. Something familiar. It gestured to him, calling him.

“Don’t,” whispered the scarred man at his feet. “Don’t do it.”

Connelly looked back down at the thing on the riverbank. He lifted the stone in his hands and took a breath.

“It’ll be worse,” the scarred man said softly. “So much… So much worse.”

“Bastard,” said Connelly.

“Just die. Just die and leave it. Don’t go across to it. Let it be.”

“Fucking bastard,” said Connelly. He lifted the stone higher.

“No,” said Shivers. Blood sputtered from his mouth and lips. Connelly saw a wild fear in his eyes, the same fear he had seen a lifetime ago in Memphis when Death had seen him and perhaps had seen the future as well. “No,” Shivers said again. “No, don’t. Don’t!”

Connelly brought the stone down. It struck the scarred man on the eyebrow and his head snapped back and his eyes went sightless. Then Connelly lifted the stone again and brought it down again and again. And again and again.

All other things fell away. The sound of the stone on blood and flesh echoed into the chamber and the mindless action seemed simple and crude and glorious. Connelly thought there was a song in it, wild and primal. And somewhere in it was the rhythm of the world.

Savage and perfect. Hungry. Endless.

He kept hitting him long after he was dead. He could never be dead enough. Not ever.

Finally he stopped. The stone clattered to the ground beside his feet. He wiped his brow and held his hands before his eyes and watched them tremble with joy and exhaustion. Then he looked back at the thing across the river.

It beckoned to him again, calmly waiting. Patient enough to wait out ages. Connelly looked into its black eyes and over its scars. Looked at its thick beard and long black hair. Then he imagined he saw something under all of it. Under all of the scars there was a face he knew. A face like his.

A predecessor slain, a mantle won. A torch and sword to bear among the coming billions, passed down as it had been before.

The figure extended its hand to him.

Connelly nodded. “All right,” he said softly. “All right.”

And he waded across the river.