Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (64 page)

    
“Shaykh Adi reminds me of something too
easily forgotten by humans, who are not as adept as dogs at sniffing out
malice. We are inclined to believe—because the ascetics have taught us so—that
to enter the world of spirit is to escape evil, as if the Devil dwelt only in
flesh. We think if we leave our prison of bones, we can soar freely over the
ocean that has kept us from the sublime. But evil does not stop at the water’s
edge. Like the serpent, it simply swims across, our soul’s own shadow on the
waters. True, the essence of
marifah
—real
knowledge—is distilled in spirit, and this is why we seek that far shore. But
woe to him who fails to grasp that the Devil has demons to match God’s angels.
This is
haqiqah
—reality. Has there
ever been a thing acquired by virtue that evil does not wish to have by theft?”

    
“Granting all this, Baba,” Raszer inquired,
“why hasn’t the world already gone to the Devil?”

    
The holy man chuckled. “Look around,
Father. Would you not say it has?”

    
“I take your point . . . but as long as
people like yourself—and my friends here—are around, I have to believe that the
better angels have a chance.”

    
“Indeed,” Hexreb affirmed. “Because even
bad men were once children. Even the worst of us carries the seed of Allah in
his heart, and sometimes waters it.”

    
“And the man I am going to see . . . is
Allah to be found in his heart?”

    
“If indeed he is a man, yes. We have the
most to fear if he is merely a thought, enshrined in an idol, for these
thoughts—unleavened by the human heart—are the most dangerous of creations. And
there are men in whom the seed finally shrivels and blows dry, men in whom the
soil has gone to dust. In these men, Shaytan may turn the mirror of the soul on
his own face and deceive the man into thinking he sees the face of God.”

    
He paused and turned his ear to the door.
“Listen. Do you hear how the wind rises outside with the coming of night and
seeks every chink in Ismet’s door? If you step outside now—in twilight—you may
encounter evil disguised as townsman or beggar. The same holds true for the
hours before dawn, and for the places of the world without history or tribe. A
man may be on his way home, when Shaytan will put his leg in the path. Having
tripped you, he will offer to help you up. This is where it begins.

    
“We have but one task—on this, I know my
young friends will agree—and that is to become fully human. The Ismailis of
old—the Nizaris—were not wrong to say that resurrection must be our own doing.
They were not wrong to think . . . may I say this in Arabic?”

    
“Of course,” said Raszer. “I’ll try to
follow.”

    
“ . . . That we are swaddled in ignorance
from birth. We are taught to trust in the perception of teachers, princes, and
mullahs whose own vision is clouded by lies and laws. But the world is both
more terrifying and more wonderful than what they describe. There are
many—often the most pious—who reach manhood convinced of their righteousness,
when in truth their souls have long since been seized by the Devil. Their
errors are passed on like infection, generation after generation. And so
Hassan-i-Sabbah taught that we all must allow the
dai
—the teacher—to strip us down until nothing remains but the
original self, and then teach us to see anew. For only the man who has stood
against Shaytan in the soul’s clothing can claim truth. This, however, requires
great trust in the teacher. We have handed him our naked soul; what if, rather
than tenderly wrapping us in his cloak, he should decide to ravish us? To shape
our will to his own design and employ it as he wishes? The one you go to see is
such a fiend.”

    
“Can he be persuaded to let at least one
child go?” Raszer asked.

    
“I doubt that he can be persuaded by
reason,” the baba replied, returning to English, “though perhaps you can turn
his own unreason against him. It will be a bit like steering a ship without the
stars, Father. You will be able to use only the lights of his world to find
your way, and as those lights are false, all illumination must come from within
you. Good luck, Father . . . may the breath of Allah be at your back.”

    
Baba Hexreb finished the last of his raki
and set the little glass down gently. He could easily have crushed it to powder
in his palm. He rose, stooping to stroke Shaykh Adi’s head and accept one last
lick, and then made his way out of the tavern, moving lightly for a man of his
size. He left no wake, but Raszer felt a great vacuum in his absence, and a
great longing to follow. The tavern suddenly seemed twice as large.

    
Ismet came to their side and spoke to
Francesca.

    
“He’ll take us to our quarters for the
night,” she translated.

    
Raszer looked around for a door or
stairwell in the still-murky light. “Our quarters?” he thought aloud. “Are they
curled up in another dimension?”

    
“In a way,” Francesca replied, and gave a
nod toward the back of the room.

    
There was, in fact, a doorway at the rear
of the tavern, draped with a curtain and leading through a pantry that opened
on a brick patio partially covered by a wooden trellis, lathed in intricate
Islamic design and wound through with flowering vine. The accommodations had
the look of a makeshift field hospital: six metal-framed cots side by side on
the bricks, separated by small night tables of unpainted wood. An embroidered
blanket served to curtain off two more cots at the far end, which Raszer
presumed were for female guests. There was clean, sweet-smelling straw on the
brick and indigo-glazed pitchers of water on every nightstand. Beyond the
patio, the white hills rolled away like breakers in the early moonlight,
jeweled with the flickering firelight from nearby shepherds’ dwellings. It was
a good spot.

    
“Ismet will bring us some dinner,” said
Francesca. “Technically, we should be fasting before the festival with the rest
of the town, but we’re—”

    
“I’m not averse to fasting,” said Raszer,
“if it’s the custom.”

    
“It’s your choice,” said Francesca. “But no
one will fault you for eating. We have a slog ahead of us, and in two days
you’re going to be burning through your protein.”

    
“Well, right now I’m going to step out
front for a smoke . . . get the sense of this place before I settle in.”

    
“Stay close,” Francesca counseled. “We’re
safe in the village, but these hills get pretty rough at night, and the night
before a Jamkhana is one of those twilight times the baba talked about. The
evil is real. Would you like Dante to come?”

    
“Thanks, but no. Just need some time in my
own head.”

    
Raszer was unsettled, and troubled by
something the baba had said. He was afraid when it came down to it, he might
not have the stuff to “stand against Shaytan in the soul’s clothing.” In the
end, the one thing Raszer believed a man could not be was a spiritual coward.
And so, from time to time, he felt the need to tempt the Devil.

    
The street descended steeply into a canyon,
its carefully laid stones giving way first to a rutted dirt road and then to a
precipitous footpath. A ball would have rolled a mile or more before stopping,
and on the last hundred yards of cobblestone, Raszer had to lean back on his
heels to avoid toppling over. The surrounding hills, scrubby, bleached, and
wild, were laced with boundary walls and dotted with small stone houses. He saw
only one other human being on his way down, a woman who stepped outside her
front door to retrieve a bucket and regarded him as if he were taboo. Maybe he
was. Maybe local custom was to stay indoors on the night before a festival, for
the same reasons people in old Europe had known not to venture out on All
Hallows’ Eve. He lit a cigarette. For a long time, it had been his way of
whistling past the graveyard. Now that he was old enough to feel mortality’s
pull, he saw the perversity: The very thing he used to keep the fear of death
at bay would probably kill him.

    
It was chilly, and he was glad he’d worn
his coat. The days would grow hot as they moved deeper into the land and the
season, but the nights would remain wintry for another month. He came across a
flock of sheep without a shepherd by the roadside. The animals made no sound to
acknowledge his passing; in fact there was no sound other than the whisper of
wind in the brush. By the time he’d reached the floor of the canyon, there was
also very little light except for the dim glow of retiring dusk. He turned
before going on to make sure he could still see the tiny lights of the village.
The path began to ascend again, taking him behind a long, low ridge. The wind
poured over it like surf and filled his ears, and in its roar he began to hear
other things.

    
At first, they were things the wind was
like
: waves, trains, furnaces, and
flames. Soon he was able to make out voices, mostly low and monotonal. He
reminded himself that this in itself was no cause to question his wits. Alone
in the evening of desert in a strange land with a head full of raki and
thoughts of final things, he would have been crazier
not
to hear things on the wind. The voices didn’t alarm him, even
when they began to articulate regular phrases and separate into strands of
pitch. What did alarm him was that after fifteen minutes on foot, he emerged
from behind the ridge and could no longer see the village. What’s more, he’d
lost the road. There was nothing under his feet but a steep, unbroken pasture offering
not a single landmark. He methodically paced out the vicinity.

    
For fifty yards in all four directions,
there was no sign of road or path.

    
He made sure to return to his starting
point after each reconnaissance, so as to maintain his orientation. It was no
use. He’d lost all sense of which direction he’d come from. It was as if he
were at the axis of a compass and the land was turning around him. There were
familiar sensations: the tightening of the throat and the sudden void in the
pit of his stomach; the stiffening of limbs. Things that all trekkers—even
tourists—experience when they’ve lost their way. Soon, however, the panic
escalated, because he became convinced that although he had no idea where he
was, his adversaries did.

    
On the face of it, he told himself, this
was nonsense. He dropped to a squat in the dry grass, took a long breath, and
then began methodically to plot his location by the stars. He knew that he’d
walked southeast from the village and couldn’t have gone more than a mile. He
knew they’d entered the village by a narrow but crudely paved road from the
south, and that therefore if he walked due west by about two-thirds of a mile,
he should close the triangle and come to the road.

    
But then the voices came with new urgency,
and a mist rose and threw gauze over the stars. The brush crackled ten feet to
his right. He heard some distant perturbation of the night air and suddenly,
from the crest of a hill dead ahead, there came a wheel of fire, rolling
straight toward him. As he moved aside to let it pass, he identified it as a
tractor tire someone had doused with gasoline and torched. The shudder
subsided.
Effective
, he thought,
but a pretty low-rent scare tactic for
global terrorists. More likely, local hooligans getting a jump on festival day
.
He’d just about settled his heartbeat when he felt a finger on his shoulder.

    
He went into an immediate crouch, then spun
on the balls of his feet in all directions. The physical response had to
precede the mental, or he was screwed. But despite his readiness to face an
assailant, he didn’t really expect one to be there. The tap had had the
weightlessness of something reaching in from the other world.

    
“Okay,” he said aloud. “Come out, come out,
wherever you are . . . ”

    
There was neither sound nor touch, but from
the wind arose an incomparable sweetness. It was the scent of an Easter
morning, of everything good that had ever been promised to him, and all it
seemed to ask was that he follow.

    
“I’m not all that easy,” he said. “Give me
a face to go with the perfume.”

    
Then, suddenly, it was gone. The chill air
rushed back in to fill the void, and he saw that full night had come down and
he was truly lost. Through the mist, he managed again to find the bright stars
in Orion and began to make his way westward. After five minutes, he checked the
heavens for his bearings and froze. The mist had cleared, but revealed a new
sky of constellations he didn’t recognize. Orion was gone; so was Ursa Minor.
Everything had shifted, as if the earth had tilted into the southern
hemisphere.

    
Jesus
,
he thought with a shudder.
Can the Devil
do that
? The scent came again, and this time he followed.