The Key

60

Liv stood under the hot shower feeling the tension she had been carrying around for the last few weeks running off and swirling down the drain with the dirty water. She was surprised by how calm she felt following her conversation with Gabriel. In effect, she had been given two weeks to live, and a near impossible task to complete if she wanted to change that, and yet her overwhelming reaction was one of relief. She had read that soldiers often experienced similar feelings when they were finally faced with combat duty. There was something comforting about knowing that your fate was in your own hands, even if the odds were stacked against you. She shut off the water and grabbed a bathrobe and a couple of thin towels from the rail.

The bedroom seemed particularly cold and gloomy after the glare of the bathroom and the steam followed her out like a vapour trail. Gabriel had told her to sit tight until he could work out the details of her transportation back to Ruin. From there she had no idea where they would go, but she would be with him, so that was something at least.

She packed her belongings and laid some fresh clothes on the chair, but didn’t put them on. The travel arrangements were bound to take a while to sort out and she hadn’t slept for more than twenty-four hours. Until Gabriel called back, she was going to try to sleep. After towelling herself dry, she wrapped the smaller towel round her damp hair and squirmed into bed.

The sheets were starchy and cool against her skin and the mattress was firm, but it felt like the finest feather down. Outside she could hear the growing hiss of the morning traffic as people made their way into work. It struck her as odd that, here she was, lying in a nondescript corporate hotel room in New Jersey, contemplating a journey that would ultimately take her to the Garden of Eden. The idea seemed absurd, like calling up a travel agent and trying to book a flight to Mordor. In her rather vague religious upbringing she had assumed that the creation story and the Garden of Eden were legends. It had never occurred to her that they might be real.

She reached over to the nightstand and pulled open the drawer, curiosity outweighing her exhaustion. Sure enough, it contained a copy of the Gideon Bible, the only book you could find in every hotel room in America. She opened it to Genesis and scanned the first few pages, the onionskin paper feeling much too flimsy to carry the weight of the words printed on it. Then, in the tenth verse of the second chapter she came across something very interesting: And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads. The name of the first is Pison: that is it which compasseth the whole land of Hav’ilah, where there is gold; And the gold of that land is good: there is bdellium and the onyx stone. And the name of the second river is Gihon: the same is it that compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia. And the name of the third river is Hid’dekel: that is it which goeth toward the east of Assyria. And the fourth river is Euphra’tes.

This legendary story was actually peppered with the names of real, modern-day places: Ethiopia, Assyria, Euphrates. She had always seen the story of man’s fall as something of a parable, a metaphor for grander theological ideas. Now she read it straight, a true account of exile, a tale so rapid and terrible that man had already been banished from paradise before the end of the next chapter. Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every which way, to keep the way of the tree of life.

Liv took her notebook and turned to a new page. She wrote down all the place names mentioned in Genesis that still existed, then studied the list. She added Al-Hillah, the place the tablet had been found, then Eden. She stared at what she had just written, still having difficulty comprehending that Eden might be a place every bit as real as the others. She added several question marks next to it before reading on, looking for further clues that might point her to where her destiny might lie. But in the end, the richness of the language and her own tiredness took hold. Halfway through chapter four, shortly after Cain slew Abel, her eyes drooped and the book slipped from her hand, her head full of columns of fire and modern rivers flowing out of an ancient land that was filled with gold and onyx.