sky, forever perplexed at the way the world was developing. Smoke drifted out of his nose and mouth and the eye above the bullet hole sank in and filled with blood. One hand twitched as the wiring in his damaged brain fought to process information before giving up and going dark.
Connelly looked at both of them, then checked the rounds in the gun. He put the gun back in the waist of his pants and then stripped them both of their coats and put them on. Then he continued up the trail.
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
