He couldn't see their faces exactly, and didn't want to. This way he could imagine himself surrounded by neighbor ladies and his teachers and some of the girls at school. He added the pretty waitress at the Surf and Turf downtown. He attached familiar masks to these benighted faces looming overhead, and it consoled him. It let him have names for each.
What ruined his conjuring was their smell. Even Mrs. Peterson, the halfwit who sat in the park all day, would never have let herself get foul like this. These women stank. They were rancid and unwashed, and smelled worse than a stockyard. The dung crusting their flanks had the grassy sweetness of cow manure. When they muttered at him, he could smell deep inside their throats.
He was greasy with their juices and saliva. That was another shock, how wet they were between their legs. Nothing in his friends' centerfolds had prepared him for that. Or for their greed and hunger. Periodically one dipped her head, and it felt warm and soft down there, like the hot compresses his grandma used to make.
Their hands and fingers were as dry as lizard skin. They'd rubbed him raw, but the hurt was largely numbed by his fatigue. He lay in their center, and it seemed the stars wheeled in a great circle over him.
Crickets sang. An owl swooped by. Evan suddenly wondered if the witches might be the reason so many dogs and cats had disappeared over the last month. Maybe the animals had run off. Another thought came to him. What if they'd been eaten? A gust of wind rattled the corn rows. He shivered.
The witches entered a rhythm around him. It was like a dance, though they were kneeling or hunkered down on their heels. He set himself adrift on the pulse of their motions, the chant, their hands and mouths. Evan grew hopeful when several whispered approvingly. All at once he found himself approaching that same loss of control as before. He tried not to grunt, but it was too much.
Abruptly the blood heat of liquid spattered across his chest. Evan winced at the salty spray. Tasted it. And frowned.
This time it was the heat of real blood.
In the same instant, a rifle shot ruptured the quiet. Something, a body, flopped heavily across Evan's thighs.
'Evan, boy,' a voice commanded across the corn rows. His father! 'Lie down.'
The sky cracked open. A ragged volley of deer rifles, shotguns, varmint pistols, and old revolvers shattered the constellations. Bullets slapped apart the corn leaves. The gunfire rattled like popcorn.
Evan lay still on his back. It was like drifting on a raft. Staring up at the Milky Way. What he would remember most was not the shooting, or the men yelling, or the witches scattering. Not the headlights careening through the walls of green corn, or the pitchfork lifting that young hadal girl into the wildly lit, raddled sky, where he saw the slight stub of a tail on her rump and her grub-like pallor and her face, the chimp's eyes, the yellow teeth. Not the rack-rack of shotgun shells getting chambered. Not his father standing high overhead and lifting his head up to the stars to bellow like a bull. No. What he would remember was the old woman by his head, how just before they shot the bones from her face, she bent down and kissed him by the ear. It was the kind of thing a grandma did.
The Aztecs said that... as long as one of them was left he would die fighting, and that we would get nothing of theirs because they would burn everything or throw it into the water.
– HERNÁN CORTÉS, Third Dispatch to King Charles V of Spain
17
FLESH
West beneath
the Clipperton Fracture Zone
Following Molly's death, they cast lower on the river, anxious to resume their sense of scientific control. The banks narrowed, the water quickened. Because they moved faster, they had more time to reach their destination, which was the next cache in early September. They began to explore the littoral regions bordering the river, sometimes staying in one place for two or three days.
The region had once abounded with life. In a single day they discovered thirty new plants, including a type of grass that grew from quartz and a tree that looked like something out of Dr. Seuss, with a stem that drew gases from the ground and synthesized them into metallic cellulose. A new cave orchid was named for Molly. They found crystallized animal remains. The entomologists caught a monstrous cricket, twenty-seven inches long. The geologists located a vein of gold as thick as a finger.
In the name of Helios, who held the patent rights on all such discoveries, Shoat collected their reports on disc each evening. If the discovery had special value, like the gold, he would issue a chit for a bonus payment. The geologists got so many they started using them like currency among the others, buying pieces of clothing, food, or extra batteries from those who had extras.
For Ali, the most rewarding thing was further evidence of hadal civilization. They found an intricate system of acequias carved into the rock to transport water from miles upriver into the hanging valley. In an overhang partway up a cliff lay a drinking cup made from a Neanderthal cranium. Elsewhere, a giant skeleton – possibly a human freak – lay in shackles solid with rust. Ethan Troy, the forensic anthropologist, thought the deeply incised geometric patterns on the giant's skull had been made at least a year before the prisoner's death. Judging by the cut marks around the entire skull, it seemed the giant had been scalped and kept alive as a showcase for their artwork.
They collected around a central panel emblazoned with ochre and handprints. In the center was a representation of the sun and moon. The scientists were astonished. 'You mean to say they worshiped the sun and moon? At fifty-six hundred fathoms!'
'We need to be cautious,' Ali said. But what else could this mean? What glorious heresy, the children of darkness worshiping light.
Ali got one photo of the sun and moon iconography, no more. When her flash billowed, the entire wall of pictographs – its pigments and record – lost color, turned pale, then vanished. Ten thousand years of artwork turned to blank stone.
Yet with the animals and handprints and sun and moon images burned away, they discovered a deeper set of engraved script.
A two-foot-long patch of letters had been cut into the basalt. In the abyssal shadows, the incisions were dark lines upon dark stone. They approached the wall tentatively, as if this too might disappear.