Dirty Eden (31 page)
“No, you’re going with them,” Taurus demanded. “I might not be able to fight them off if I have you to worry about.”
Now it was Sophia’s turn to be miserable. She stood with one arm limp at her side while the other held the dirty fabric up and around her body. Taurus pointed once and reluctantly Sophia stepped back into the carriage. It was a serious moment that not even Tsaeb would ruin by mumbling insults or making fun.
“I’ll send Gorg back to find you once he gets us there,” I said. “Are you sure about this?”
“Yes,” Taurus replied, “I’ll be fine. Just watch after the little one for me.”
I hated that I had no other choice but to leave my giant friend in this terrible place. A big part of me almost changed my mind completely and told Gorg to instruct us which way to go instead of taking us there. But I’d be an idiot to pass up this opportunity. I knew there would not be another one and the dangers of the field far outweighed everything. But time was the most pressing matter of all, even more pressing than the Field Bandits that were apparently coming up fast.
The sun would begin to set soon and the darkness would disadvantage us some more.
“Thank you, Taurus,” I waved him goodbye.
Gorg snapped the reins and the carriage pulled as it set off. I could hear Sophia crying in the back, but they were angry cries rather than childish sobs. Children don’t usually use the F-word three times in one sentence and threaten others with mutilation if something happens to her friend. I believed not only her threats, but also her ability to carry them out. Thankfully, Tsaeb did good to keep quiet and not ridicule her.
It was awkward to see Gorg so...dead. Undead. But nothing else about him seemed to have changed. He still butchered the English language with fine precision and managed to comfort me with his darkly spirited personality. It was like being at the bar with a father’s older, alcoholic friend. Gorg said everything the way he thought it, blunt and salt-coated. He stank, made vulgar comments about the ‘ripe broad in the back’, and meant them wholeheartedly. But he was harmless. He was just Gorg, the now dead guy, who was really immortal and wanted out of his curse as much as the next person.
“I thought you said if the carriage goes off course, it stays off course,” I said during one of our many conversations.
“I’s been off course since them bandits ‘tacked an’ keeled me.”
I was so exhausted. I couldn’t distinguish between the effects of the field, that whole dying thing and simple fatigue. All of them were affecting me in some way, but I was worried about which was at work harder than the others.
If it can just hold off for a while longer
, I thought as I stared up at the night sky. I had been thinking mostly about death and at any time I could be completely without memories and they would never come back.
Can’t you prolong it?
I said to the Devil in my mind.
You sent me here to do this and look how close I am. Surely you can keep me alive out there long enough to finish in here
. Was the Devil listening? Probably. But the Devil never answered and for some reason, I was glad for that. The last thing I needed right now was confirmation that there was nothing the Devil could do to stop my death. The Devil was not God, after all. I needed all the hopeful thoughts I could get, even if I knew deep down that they were useless.
But so far, I was still alive and I was a hair away from becoming one of the most famous men in the history of the living world. Well, the most famous man that no one would ever know what I did.
How does that work, exactly?
I thought, leaning farther back against the box seat of Gorg’s carriage. I began to think about all of the reasons why I was doing this. Sure, I wanted to be the ‘hero’. I wanted to do something that no one else in the world, living or dead, had the opportunity to do. But why exactly? I plucked every reason I could from my mind: importance, fame, recognition, praise, the one good deed that would rival all others, the chance to fight against evil. There was one thing that all of my reasons had in common though and that was that none of them would matter at all after the deed was done. This was not like winning the Nobel Prize, or being the first man on Mars. I was not going to get to stand on a stage and give the speech of my life, or radio back to planet Earth and my famous quote be printed on the cover of
Time
magazine along with a picture of my proud smiling face.
The only thing I thought I might get out of this was that I was securing my place in Heaven. But was I really? Could I be sure that God even wanted me there? Maybe God planned to send me straight to Hell anyway, just for falling for the Devil’s tricks and going through with this in the first place. And as I thought about it more, I laughed aloud. Gorg was too busy telling me about how the Field Bandits got him, to notice.
I’m probably beyond the point of forgiveness. I practically work for Lucifer!
I smacked my leg with my hand.
“What are you laughing about?” Diana asked from the carriage window.
“Nothing,” I said.
Nothing at all
.
“
What the fuck?....”
--
THE CARRIAGE ARRIVED AT the three rocks by morning. Gorg got down from his seat. Those inside stepped out and I gazed ahead at the other three quite visible landmarks. The giant solitary tree stump was the hardest to see, but even at a distance it was raised from the yellow grass just enough to be visible.
I could not believe that I was here.
I was afraid all over again. I felt like I did when I arrived in Creation: confused and unsure of everything, completely and utterly terrified, though strangely at ease thanks to the Devil’s doing.
One minor fact became known to me in an instant: I did not know what I was supposed to do.
Oh shit...
“Norman?” said Sophia from behind.
I could hear her calling my name, but her voice was like a far off whisper. She could’ve been screaming in my ear and it would not have freed me from such a realization as this.
I didn’t have a seed.
But I have a human woman....
I turned my body all the way around to see Diana. She was smiling back at me...eerily.
“You came all this way,” Diana said, “and you failed to bring with you the last and most important seed of all.”
I grew out of my stupidity faze a while ago. I knew this had just taken a turn for the worse.
“You actually thought I would help you.” Diana laughed and slowly walked toward me, her movements sinuous and sly. “I’m shocked you got as far as you did. I was going to kill you in the boat, but I thought it’d be a waste not to see how far you could get.”
“Norman,” Sophia repeated and this time I was listening, “I don’t think she’s human.”
“Of course I’m not!” Diana snapped. She never looked away from me. “You knew humans couldn’t walk through the Field of Yesterday. You even said it yourself.”
“But you
—
”
“Ah,” Diana interrupted me, “I made up an excuse that you were so willing to believe. A man will believe anything that a woman says if she says it with the cunning of a woman. And a woman doesn’t need much to be cunning.”
I looked at Tsaeb, but also kept watching Diana closely.
“You knew this, didn’t you?”
Tsaeb growled. “Even now you’re quick to blame me still, or call me liar. No! I
didn’t
know!”
“But you said it; you were the one who told me when I fell off the carriage that the field only affected me because I was human.”
“I give up!” Tsaeb had had enough of my distrust and this time he seemed to despise me for it. “Don’t say another word to me, or I’ll kill you myself!”
“Well then wut are you’s then?”
“Shut up, dead man,” Diana snarled. “No one’s talking to you.”
“I know what she is!” Sophia started toward her. “I knew it! I could sense her, something familiar about her, like a stink you can’t wash off.”
Diana grew irritated; her sly, lithe movements interrupted by more defensive ones. She reached down into her boot and unsheathed a dagger.
“She’s a rat,” said Sophia with a growl. “A shape-shifter, like me, but only she’s limited to that disgusting filth that rats are. She’s a shit-eating, garbage-dwelling,
atrocity
. She works for Lilith. It’s why she’s been so helpful.”
“So willing....” I said aloud, but really to myself. I thought I should’ve known she was too good to be true. It was too easy. How could I not know that? Oh, yes, because a man will believe anything a woman says if she says it with the cunning of a woman....
Diana was reeling with anger. She clenched the dagger in her hand and snarled, twisting her pretty face into something unsightly. A long hairless tail sprouted from Diana’s backside.
“You-little-
bitch
,” she said to Sophia, “you’re just jealous. I may not be able to shift into all the things you can with your stupid imp beans
—
who came up with those, anyway? Imp beans. Stupid!
—
but you’re jealous because I can shift into the one form you can’t. I can be a beautiful woman. I can lay with a man, or two, or three and be envied by other women. Desired. Loved.” Diana grinned. “But you, you’ll always be what you are, a
freak
.”
“Lilith cree-ated them imps beans,” said Gorg.
Retaliation for losing Vanity’s Mirror and now for speaking the truth would finally be carried out against Diana.
“Sophia!” I shouted. “No! Stop!”
But she was unstoppable. Sophia lunged at Diana, shifting into her hideous imp form in mid-air and she barreled into her with all her strength. They went crashing to the ground. I put one foot out to intervene, but stopped before I had time to leap. Diana’s head began to contort, the sound of flesh ripping away and the cracking of bones made me recoil. Her shoulders grew broader and her back, as it forcibly hunched over, sprouted ghastly hair. Her hands came up to pull Sophia off her back, and they grew long, gangly black fingers with claws on the ends. Diana growled and squealed and made other repulsive noises that I never knew rats could make.
Sophia buried her sharp teeth into the rat’s back. She ripped fur and flesh from its belly with her claws. It seemed Sophia was winning until the rat began bucking like a wild horse and threw Sophia off. Diana went after her, catching the back of her leg before she could get off the ground fast enough. Sophia threw her head back and screamed as Diana’s fangs bore into her thigh.
I ran to the carriage, practically pushing Tsaeb out of the way and jumped into the back. The carriage shook wildly as I tossed things about looking for something to use. All that I could find big enough was an old rusty garden hoe with a cracked wooden handle, nearly on its last splinter.
In the seconds it took me to return, Sophia was underneath Diana’s fat, bleeding belly and struggling to get out.
One smack with the sharp end of the hoe from behind and the giant rat fell backward with a shrill cry. Sophia stood and fell twice before she was able to keep on her feet, now limping and bleeding from the throat. I went to help her and to my shock, Tsaeb was right behind me. The wounds rendered Sophia powerless to shift form completely. She tried desperately, but was stuck somewhere between being in the body of a little girl and the ugly form of her true self.
“A rat,” said a voice. “A great, big, juicy rat.”
It was a figure, half-human with the head of a snake.
“Field Bandits!” Gorg’s jaw fell off his face and into the field. But that did not stop him from snapping his horses’ reins and getting out of there as fast as he could. In only a few seconds, all that was left of Gorg was a blur of black on the horizon.
Five creatures with the body of men and the heads of snakes stood feet from us. Taurus was with them, too.
He lumbered quickly over and took Sophia into his giant arms.
“They won’t kill you,” Taurus said, turning to Tsaeb and I. “They caught up with me after you all left, but they aren’t the enemy.”
The half snake, half man that was probably the leader said, “We’ve been protecting the men in thisss field forever. We helped you get acrosss on your way to Fiedel City.”
Diana the rat tried to scuttle away while they were talking, but the other four snake men cornered her. A tall one carrying a pitchfork speared her tail to the ground. The rat squealed and kicked about in pain.
I was shocked to hear the leader’s admission.
“But what were you protecting me from?” I said.
“The pixies,” the leader said, “they attacked you from that carriage. We knew they were clossse. Ssso sssorry for not getting to you in time.”
“So, you’re on Norman’s side?” Tsaeb said.
“Yesss,” the leader replied, “we
want
him to sssucceed. We were cursssed like ssso many othersss when the Day of Darknesss came. We no more want these human bodiesss than you want to live as a sssnake.”
“But...well, Gorg says Field Bandits killed him,” I added, “You saw how scared he was just now.”
“We did not kill him, or the other carriage driversss,” said the leader. “The pixies rarely come out in the day. They ssstrike in the darknesss. We’ve alwaysss taken the blame.”
I went over to stand against one of the large rocks. Failure washed over me. Momentarily, I noticed how the field was not able to affect me here, in the Center of Eden.
“Well, it looks like your efforts were wasted,” I said, crossing my arms. “Unless you know where to find a woman in the next probably,” I looked down where my watch used to be, “few minutes or so, then I’ve failed like every other man sent here before me.”
The snake people glimpsed one another while Taurus and Tsaeb exchanged hopeless looks. No one spoke. There was nothing more to say.
I quietly left the rock and walked toward the tree stump. I knew I would die soon and my memories would cease to exist. My mother would cry her last tears over me and tell others that it was God’s will. My ex-wife, Amanda, would probably fake her grief during the phone call and once more during the funeral, but afterwards she would talk about how I got what I deserved and collect as much money as she could in alimony until she couldn’t get anymore. My best friend, Danny, would genuinely grieve and then throw a huge beer party to honor his dead friend. There would be many women at that party and Danny would sleep with every one of them he could talk into it, and he would do it ‘for Norman’.
As I walked farther away, I could hear Diana squealing louder than ever. I didn’t have to turn and look back to see that the snakes were getting the meal of the year with a giant rat like her.
I just kept on walking farther until their voices and the squealing faded. I thought that if I was going to die, it might as well be on the spot I had come here to see. At least I made it to the Center of Eden. I made the Tree of Life grow again and I helped free the Angel that protected the Tree of Truth. I may not have succeeded in growing back the Tree of Knowledge, but I was going to see it with my own eyes and touch what was left of it with my human hands.
And just before I made it, I heard footfalls behind me and Sophia’s voice as honest and gentle as I had ever heard her speak.
“I-I was going to save it for myself and use it later, but I changed my mind.”
I thought about her words carefully for a moment. “Save what for yourself?” I said.
Sophia lowered her head. She was nearly bald on one side and her imp skin was brown and rigid and red from the blood. One leg was longer than the other, the hairy, muscular one. She stood with her hands behind her back.
“What is it, Sophia?”
From behind, she pulled out Vanity’s Mirror to show me.
I did a double-take.
“I stole it from Diana on the carriage when she was asleep. I knew she was lying. I knew she still had it because she always held her cloak around her funny after the ride in the river. And I was right.”
I found reason to smile through my failure.
“She knew it was gone this morning,” she went on, “but I figure she didn’t want to say anything because then you’d know she wasn’t what you thought she was.”
I sighed and knelt down to her eye-level.
“I’m glad you have it,” I said putting my hand on her shoulder. “You deserve it. But how can it help here? I’ve made it to the Center of Eden but it’s over.”
Sophia’s lips lengthened into a monstrous, but harmless smile. “No, it’s not over,” she said. “I guess you forgot what else the mirror can do.”
The answer was coming to me slowly, but my mind still needed a second to register what she was trying to say.