As I near the wall, the butterfly lifts from my temple and settles on my hand, and I put my fingers to the symbols. Behind my eyes I feel a great pressure building, words and images and ideas assembling themselves, and then in a blinding torrent I see A body lying on the earth, its flesh corrupted. I see the legs of many living men encircling the body, standing over it. I hear their rough voices joining in a chant. Some kind of scythe comes down and severs the foot at the ankle. I feel my stomach rise. I see things in little bursts of light. Blades dividing the body again and again, and then Pain blooms through my head, and with a cry I pull back my hand.
“Victor!” I hear Konrad call out behind me. “Are you all right?”
“It comes so hard and fast…” I wince, pushing through the pain. “It’s like pictures in my head.”
“Stop this!” Elizabeth implores me.
“No. There’s more.”
I thrust my hand against the wall, and suddenly it’s as though it is welded there, and I see A severed foot cast into a long damp hole like a grave. Someone kneels beside it and carefully unties an animal bladder. From the opening scuttles something darker than shadow. At first I think it’s a beetle, but the shape is more fluid, altogether more disturbing. The human steps back as the shadow leaps onto the severed foot, burrowing hungrily into the rotted flesh I stagger back once more, retching.
Henry has his hand on my shoulder. “Victor, you need to-”
“No!”
“Our time’s running out!” he shouts at me, holding out the clock. I squint at it in disbelief, for the leg has nearly made a full revolution. Surely not so much time has passed. I hold it to my ear.
Tick… Tick… tick…
I don’t understand. It has slipped back into its normal tempo, but I don’t have the energy or concentration to grapple with it right now. I need all my faculties to complete the stone translation.
“I must finish,” I gasp. “I’m almost done!” I put my fingers to the wall, and A pair of human hands reaches into the damp hole and covers the severed foot swiftly and completely with mud, and adds still more, patting it into a rounded shape, little bumps that can be only arms, legs, a head. A stick makes two pricks for eyes.
“Victor, what do you see?” Elizabeth demands, but I block her out and return to the searing image before my mind’s eye.
Light sweeps over the little mud man, as though the sun were racing through the sky, and then darkness, soon chased away by the light. I am dizzy watching, time speeded up. The little mud man trembles and begins to grow, the torso elongating, gaining definition, and muddy features appearing on the face.
Animals draw close, sniff, and cringe back. A feral cat’s hackles rise; rats squeal and turn away. Nothing will go close to it, inert and defenseless as it is.
Faster and faster the creature grows, looking more human by the second. His skin is no longer muddy but the color and texture of proper flesh. And then, stretched on the ground is a man, the very same man I first saw dead and decaying-but now whole, reborn.
His eyes open.
I fall back from the wall as if pushed, and land hard on the ground.
“Victor, are you all right?” Elizabeth is asking. She reaches toward me but then stops, as though remembering what happened when our flesh last touched.
“What did you see?” she asks.
“Our time’s very nearly up!” says Henry urgently, extending his hand to me. Gratefully I take it, and he hauls me swiftly to my feet. I touch my head, which throbs like an overworked muscle.
“Go!” says Konrad. “Don’t wait for me!”
From the steep passage comes another distant moan, and I turn once more in its direction, drawn.
“ Now, Victor!” Elizabeth says, and I take the lead back toward the entrance. I smile, suddenly giddy. I feel as though I’m bounding through a dream. I gallop past stags and bulls, ibexes and horses. I smirk at the crouching tiger.
“Slow down,” Elizabeth tells me sharply. “We’re leaving Konrad too far behind.”
Heedless of my supernatural speed I turn to see my twin in the distance and can’t help laughing, for I remember all our childhood races where he outstripped me, and now he cannot even hope to keep up with me.
“Our time’s almost out,” I reply, noting that I’m not even out of breath.
“And whose fault is that?” Henry says, just behind me.
“We’re fine!” I say, my mind still throbbing with the cave writing. The things I’ve seen.
“He might get lost!” Elizabeth says.
“We blaze a trail of light for him,” I retort, “and we’ve marked the turnings.”
She stumbles on a rock, and I reach out to take her hand. It’s impulsive, yet I also know full well what I’m doing, and even before my fingers close around her wrist, our eyes meet, and I feel desire spark between us, see it in her face, like a hunger.
But Henry catches her first, steadying her.
I exhale in disappointment, and then anger, and start to reach out for her again, when I hear Konrad calling out, closer now.
“I said don’t wait for me!”
And we begin running again, though at a pace that allows my twin to keep up. When we reach the ladder, Henry says, “The claw’s tapping the glass! What happens now?”
“We still have time,” I assure him.
I feel my body in the real world tugging me back toward it. There is no arguing with it. I swiftly climb the rungs.
“Victor!” Konrad calls out to me from below. “Did you find what you wanted? Tell me what you saw!”
“I found it,” I tell him over my shoulder with a triumphant smile. “The way to bring you back.”
CHAPTER 7
'The way you tell it, ” said Henry, “ It sounds a bit like the Egyptian cult of Osiris.”
We were on the water, bathed in sunlight, sailing close to the wind on the twenty-footer. The day had dawned with all the warmth and promise of a summer morning, and after our lessons and lunch, we’d had our cook pack a picnic hamper, and we’d taken the boat out. At the tiller, leaving the chateau in our wake, I’d finally had the chance to tell them in full detail what the writing on the cave walls had shown me.
“Someone murdered Osiris,” Henry continued, “I forget who, and cut his body into fourteen pieces and scattered them. His family found the pieces and buried them, and he came back to life as the god of the underworld.”
“A myth,” said Elizabeth. “How do we know these cave writings are any different? They were made by primitive, superstitious people. Do you really think they knew how to bring people back to life?”
“Ah,” I said, “they didn’t bring him back to life. That’s what’s so interesting. They grew him a new body. Prepare to come about, please.”
I pushed the tiller hard over. At the front of the cockpit, Elizabeth and Henry busied themselves with the foresail. Henry, never the most confident mariner, was sure-footed now and winched in his sheet with a confidence I’d never seen before. And Elizabeth, I couldn’t help noticing, seemed to have regained the weight and bloom she’d lost in the past few weeks. There was enticing color in her cheeks and a new luster in her windblown hair.
The boom swung overhead, and the mainsail filled with a satisfying whoomph. I adjusted the tiller and turned my face into the breeze, inhaling happily. From the moment I’d woken this morning, I’d felt remarkably well-bursting with energy. Hopeful, even. For the first time since Konrad’s death, I’d actually wanted to get up and face the day. And I hadn’t yet had a single jolt of pain in my maimed right hand.
It seemed our visit to the spirit world had helped all of us in some way.
“A body part and a bit of mud,” said Elizabeth reflectively.
