Lisica Chapters

Thanks for joining us for the third volume of our Scientist Soap Opera escapist journey to the mysterious island of Lisica! You can find previous episodes in the link above or column on the right. Please don’t forget to subscribe and leave a comment if you enjoy what you find!

Audio for this episode:

41 – To The Sub

Pradeep descends the narrow set of concrete stairs. Jay’s back, silhouetted by the light coming from the sub below, bends nearly double before vanishing through the hatch. Well. Pradeep has mostly done a good job avoiding the sub and the tunnels and the entire bloody interior of the island but now his help is needed. His clarity. His common sense. Pradeep takes a deep breath to calm himself but the growing knot of anxiety in his guts can’t be so easily released. It is beyond his control.

Yes. So is everything. Lisica has robbed him entirely of self-rule. And some of that is fantastic. He will happily worship Maahjabeen for the rest of his days. He is thrilled to be working with Doctor Alonso, the luminary. But the rest of it… Actually living out these fearsome experiences might be too much for his faint heart.

“There it is!” Jay crows from within. Heartened, Pradeep ducks through the hatch and straightens in the cramped chamber, its curving walls tapering together near his head, increasing his claustrophobia, sepia and yellow light everywhere. Jay stands proudly, holding the remains of a dead roach. He searches his pockets for his lighter. Nope, no lighter. But ah! There it is on the ground, red and chrome, like a child’s forgotten toy.

He sparks up, hoping the weed can ground him a bit. Having to do actual real-world shit while peaking on acid fucking sucks.

Jay realizes Pradeep is talking to him. And the weed isn’t hitting at all, it just got yeeted straight out of his brain by the stronger drug. Fuck. “What’s that, Prad?” Oh, weird. Did he actually say those words out loud or imagine them?

“So where is it?”

“Huh?” Jay notices the way Pradeep purses his lips when he’s upset. He sure is a stress case. “Oh! Uh… I just had it.” With a triumphant smile he presents the lighter to Pradeep. “Ta-daa.”

“No, abe saale,” Pradeep snatches the lighter from Jay’s hand and shoves it back into his front pockets. “The evidence. Where is the evidence?” Jay only looks at him, stupefied. Pradeep shakes him by the shoulders. “No no no. You have to stay here with me. You have to tell me. This golden man. Where did you see him?”

“Right! The golden man!” Jay grabs Pradeep by the elbows, his face filled with revelation. “Dude! It was right here! I was sitting here buzzing. And Katrina wanted to go down on me but I said, hold up. We’re like not alone in here. So she—”

“Wait. She what?” Pradeep is scandalized. “Is that what you two were doing down here? Isn’t she like seventeen?”

“Aw, come on, Prad. She’s twenty-two. She’s only like nineteen months younger than me. Why’s everybody gotta disrespect the one and only DJ Bubblegum?”

“Okay. Well, I didn’t know you were…” Pradeep makes a vague back-and-forth gesture with his hands, “into each other.”

“Are we?” The overwhelmed look on Jay’s face indicates that this is a calculation that is way beyond his abilities at the moment.

“So anyway…” Pradeep hauls his friend back to the here and now. “Where did you see the golden man?”

“I was here. Katrina was here. Golden man was here.”

“Okay. Did he ever come into this room or did he stay in that doorway there? That hatch?”

“He stayed in the hatch. Oh, shit. That’s right, Prad. The Russians. They’re on their way. We got to hide.”

“Yes, well…” Pradeep can’t think how to finish that sentence. He supposes it is within the realm of possibility that Russian military forces still visit the island. Katrina had detected Slavic words in Lisican speech. They must have gotten it somewhere. But he dreads the notion. Armed soldiers prowling through camp, with orders to shoot anyone they find there. It’s terrifying. They are so utterly alone and defenseless here, so far from any help at all. “What exactly did he say?”

“Uhh…” Jay scrubs his forehead. Visual memories turn into words and back again, forming some abstract orthogonal space in his head that refuses to resolve into speech. “You know, he was speaking Russian. And I don’t understand Russian.”

“Right. So Katrina was translating. And how did that go? Was he nice? Was he angry? Did he threaten you?”

Jay giggles. “Show me on the doll where he touched you.”

Pradeep claps his hands. “Jay. Let us be serious here. They are upstairs waiting for us.”

“Be vewy vewy quiet. We’re hunting wabbits!” Jay falls forward onto all fours and Pradeep is afraid he’s lost him again. But no. Jay crawls slowly forward, scanning the deck. All things considered, it’s probably what they should both be doing. Pradeep inspects the walls instead. Triquet has done a nice job, putting up a gallery of portraits in a row here, the uniformed men in black and white who served on this sub and perhaps buried it here. Their postwar faces look so simple, the light in their eyes so certain. Well. Life was far more straightforward back then, that’s for sure.

Jay crawls through the hatch, still not looking up. It is dark on the far side, something Pradeep isn’t yet willing to encounter. He takes out his phone and lights the chamber beyond. Then he closely inspects the frame of the hatch. But the frame is clear of pollen. Pradeep fights his impatience down. Careful, now. Don’t jump to any conclusions yet. Frankly, he hadn’t believed Jay’s story of the golden childs and their strange rituals at first until he was shocked to find them surrounding the camp a few nights ago. All kinds of bizarre things happen here. This might be one of them. “You must understand. Because of your condition, we can’t just take your word for it. It is too important. We need to know.”

Jay rolls over, nodding. “Knowledge. Not just like opinions but…” He wants to make a speech on the value of true knowledge but an ire blazes in Pradeep’s shadowed face that makes him hesitate. “What? What did I do?”

“Just stay on task. The golden man. We need to find him.”

“Yeah. But we don’t speak Russian. We should have brought Katrina. She could have—”

“Not on your life. I’m having enough trouble with one of you.” Pradeep scans the dark chamber. Lit by just his narrow white beam, it seems far more spooky. “Come on. Figure it out!”

“Will do. I think he went this way.”

Pradeep follows Jay through the next hatch into the narrow corridor and its three doors. It is only getting more dark and scary. Each of the offices and ward rooms are empty. In the Captain’s cabin a twisted blanket still lies on the mattress. That was where Alonso was when Pradeep found him. Also on drugs. He came on to Pradeep quite hard… That was awkward. What is it with these crazy people? For the first time he’s happy about Maahjabeen’s strict temperance. He needs at least one stable person in his life.

They creep through the corridor, Jay scouring the grate of the deck and the stained walls of the hallway. The end of the passage is lit by an indirect light. Pradeep recalls that Triquet leaves work lights on down here quite a lot.

They step through into the control room. Jay is quite pleased with himself. He’s been able to stay on task for a whole five minutes now. Perhaps the peak is already passing. Then he’ll just have to deal with coming down, which is horrible. But hopefully they’ll be back up in the bunker by then.

The work light in the corner is tilted upward, making crazy shadows that expand the higher they go. The shadows all converge on the ceiling, which troubles him. It seems significant somehow. Malevolent. “Shit.” The last thing Jay needs while hallucinating his nuts off is an actual confrontation with one of the evil spirits of the island. He’s sure they’re here. It’s almost like he can sense them. The acid gives him a second sight. But, thankfully, the control room is clear. And there’s no sign that anyone went down the hole in the deck in the corner onto the jumble of stacked furniture below. “If there’s gonna be pollen anywhere, it’d be here…”

They both inspect the ragged hole, the rusted edges of expanded steel clean of anything resembling gold dust. “Can we say this is proof, then?” Pradeep studies Jay’s bleary face. “Will you accept that this golden man wasn’t real? That it was the drugs and only the drugs?”

An immense weariness washes through Jay. He recalls that his side was slashed open. That was a real thing. The pain he still feels in his skin is a real thing. Maybe the golden man was not? Who even knows any more? The last few hours are nothing but a jumble in his fatigued brain. Perhaps he doesn’t know anything about anything at all. “Sure, man. Whatever you say.”

Pradeep nods, pleased with Jay’s mumbled concession. “Fine. Good. Then let’s get back and tell them before…”

And that’s when they both see the far hatch in the control room, the one that had been welded shut and convinced them in the days early on that this was the end of the sub, is now cracked open.

“What in the world…?” Pradeep edges up to it. “But how…?” He runs his light along the edges of its door. It is still welded shut. Yet there is a seam outside the door frame that has been broken open. It may not even be on a hinge. The entire bulkhead is just a giant heavy panel made of rusted steel that has now been heaved aside, with a gap wide enough for a man to pass through.

“Oh, shit. I knew it…” All Jay’s fears become manifest, coalescing in the darkness on the other side of this hatch. “I fucking knew it. This is too freaky, bro. We got to pull back and come at this with a little more…”

But Pradeep is absorbed by something he sees through the gap. He peers more closely, listens more intently. “Hang on.”

Then he steps through, into darkness.

Ξ

Triquet wakes with a start. Then a deep shiver. Oh, that’s right. Here they are. Alone and lost. At their lowest point yet.

It is dark, maybe already dawn. They lie face down in the mud outside the bunker beneath a bush somewhere by the creek and the pool. The waterfall is a steady rushing white noise beside them, with the slap of falling water on flat stones nearby.

They’re soaking wet and freezing, eagle bite throbbing, wrapped imperfectly in their rain suit. How did they manage to actually fall asleep out here? Oh. Right. They are utterly exhausted.

It had been a race to break down the camp and the bunker, some kind of awful marathon filled with rising anxiety and shouting matches and Esquibel’s outrageous threats. At least they’d already done half the work, back when the rains had started. They’d already struck the tents and hammock and lowered the camp tarps and stowed the solar panels. If those things had still been up last night, there was no way they could have finished in time.

They’d begged the golden childs to help them, Katrina even haranguing them all in Russian, using the exact same phrases the golden man had said to her. But the childs remained unmoved. They evidently had their orders and were sticking to them.

Then there had been the bunker. Amy’s reed panels had all been pulled apart and carried down into the sub, where they’d decided they could hide. The clean room had taken a godawful amount of time to disassemble, as did the kitchens and all their food. But then finally the bunker had stood bare, the holes in the roof once again uncovered, and rain had poured in.

Then they’d had the final argument.

They all realized that if they just pulled the trap door shut behind them, it would stick out like a sore thumb to anyone who came looking. One of them needed to remain behind and cover their tracks so that the trap door wouldn’t be discovered. And after an argument, a few rounds of rochambeau, and another yelling match that had gotten painfully personal, Triquet had been selected as the lucky one to be left behind.

At 4:45 am they had closed the trap door on every other person they knew on this island and scattered a sheaf of rotting fern leaves atop it. Perhaps the coconut crabs would even move back in.

Then, as a final task, Triquet had gone out to the trenches and done their best to fill them in. The trenches themselves would be hard to find, but the smell definitely needed to be controlled, or all their concealment would go to waste.

And how much work it had been. A whirlwind of activity. Their hands are cut and bloody, with bone bruises in their wrists and knees from wrestling heavy objects, all fueled by adrenaline and rising terror….

Then it had been up to Triquet to find their own way back into the tunnels from the hidden openings in the base of the cliff. But it had been such a long struggle. And it was so wet and dark that they soon got lost in the maze of narrow trails beneath the underbrush.

At a certain point they’d given up, closing their eyes to conserve energy. Now they’re waking up, who knows how much time later. It might be well after dawn. There might be soldiers patrolling the trail beside their head. If they take out their phone to check on the time, one of them might see the glowing screen and open fire.

Triquet strains to listen. There is nothing but the unbroken white noise of the waterfall. No other sound can break through. Shoot, so much for stealth. Triquet could sing an entire Depeche Mode album at the top of their lungs and nobody would hear them.

And then they strain to see. Afraid to move, they slowly roll their head to the side and peer along the length of the forest floor. It is all black, but after a while they can see a variegated pattern of gray and deep purple. Either moonlight or dawnlight. But with this rain it can’t be the moon. It must be morning. And the Russians must already be here.

Where did the golden childs go? Do any still watch over Triquet? Or is that whole psychotic shaman game called off until the even more psychotic Russians leave? Maybe one or more of the childs hide nearby, silently watching over Triquet. Wouldn’t that be nice?

But now what do they do? Can they move? Do they have to stay here? For how long? There’s no end date on this Russian visit. Nobody said if they’re staying for an hour or a month. How will Triquet know when it’s over if all they’re doing is squeezing their eyes shut, face down in the mud?

Triquet realizes their fate isn’t to escape into the tunnels and find their way back up into the sub with the others. It is to be their scout while they safely hide. Well, crap on a stick. This is turning out to be a much worse bargain than expected. Amy and Miriam had both volunteered to be the one left behind, but Triquet’s youth and experience with these tunnels out near the waterfall had won the argument. At the time, they had felt so gallant.

Now they just feel wretched. What exactly do they think they can accomplish here? They’re no soldier. They’re hardly an athlete. All their physical reserves were blown breaking down the camp. They need a good forty-eight hours of nothing but hot cocoa and a full season of Househunters. But instead they somehow have to turn into a ninja.

That’s where it always starts with Triquet. If they ever need to transform themself for any reason, it begins with the costume. But they have no access to yards of black silk so their imagination will just have to do. They will swath their entire body in it, with one of those ninja headbands and a black kerchief covering everything but their eyes. Their hands and feet will be covered in those cute little traditional Japanese gloves and shoes with soft leather soles. And they’ll carry nothing but a short sword and a blowgun. Then they’ll run along rooftops on their way to assassinate the Shogun…

Okay. Well, the mindset is there. Now they’re ready to strike out, back toward camp, stealthy as a cat. Too bad they’re actually wearing a yellow vinyl rainsuit and blue patent leather boots. They’ll get spotted the instant they come out from under cover.

So the answer must be to stay under cover. These little fox trails that wind every which way must provide for routes around the back of the camp. They appear to be everywhere else.

“No time to be frightened. Just do it.” Triquet mouths the words out loud, then slips off to their left, down a dark tunnel of bare branches under brown leaves.

Ξ

“Where does this go?” Pradeep’s light fades to black past twenty meters or so, and yet the low and narrow hand-carved tunnel continues straight on, its walls sandstone, its floor pale sand.

“No way…” Jay is astounded by what he sees, even though it’s just a forced perspective of rough walls disappearing into the dark. He’s still firmly in his peak so lights shimmer along the length, first outward in a wavy rainbow pattern, then back to him, crawling up his feet and legs, suffusing him with warmth and certainty. It’s like being in a birth canal, and he’s reliving his own delivery. He shivers. “No fucking way.”

Pradeep peers ahead as far as he can. “I mean, I figure it has to go under the cliffs to the island’s interior. Obviously. Yet another of the many ways the Lisicans access the beach here. But so much work! And it can’t be too stable…” Pradeep stops, convinced. “Yes. This is enough. We can go back, as you said, and tell the others. This is the evidence we needed.” Pradeep listens to the patter of water draining through the tunnel. Right, the storm is soaking the ground above. This thing could collapse at any moment. And yet… despite his rising anxiety, something alluring beckons to him in the heart of that darkness. There is some great intellectual itch to be scratched through there. He can tell, that if he continued on, that he would be able to delve into the greater secrets of this island and maybe even life itself…

Pradeep shakes himself, breaking the reverie. “Yes, well, but that would be foolish. And say what you like of Pradeep Chakrabarti, no one can call him a fool.”

“Okay.” Jay has no idea what Pradeep is talking about. He just realized that he suddenly needs to piss like a race horse. How’s he going to accomplish that down here?

Pradeep turns away from the darkness and pushes past Jay. “Come on. Let’s get back to Maahjabeen and the others. We can explore this more later.”

“Yeah. Good call.” Jay can hustle back to the surface and empty himself out and maybe crash in his hammock for a bit. He turns, swaying, and then stampedes forward with urgency, his bladder his only thought. Once he gets past Pradeep he pushes on into the darkness back to the sub. The light swings up once behind him, offering a glimpse of the tunnel ahead, and then it swings to the floor so Pradeep can light his own footsteps.

Jay charges forward, breaths short, doing all he can to keep from wetting himself. The way back to the sub is just a few steps ahead now. And then it’s just a bunch of rooms and stairs til he can finally get outside and water a bush. Ugh! Don’t think about it! Just move!

“Jay! Slow down!” Pradeep is more uncertain in the tunnel. He hadn’t realized how wet it was in here on the way in. The clay of the tunnel floor sucks at his feet. “You don’t have a light! Stupid hophead. You can’t just blunder off into the dark.”

Pradeep trudges behind, cursing Jay. Then he realizes he’s gone more than a hundred paces on his way back to the sub. There is no chance that they walked more than a hundred paces into this tunnel at the outset. Far less. And now they’ve done far more. “Wait. Jay?”

“I come from the land down under…” Jay’s song lyrics are nearly grunted aloud from far ahead.

“Jay, we have to stop.”

“Can’t really do that right now, homie.” And with that apology, Jay redoubles his efforts and hurries ahead, about to burst.

Pradeep yelps, hearing Jay disappear into the distance. “Jay, stop! Please! You can’t…” Pradeep stops moving. They went the wrong way. It’s the only thing that makes sense. There must have been a branch in the tunnel they didn’t see on the way in. And Jay went down it, continues to go down it, away from the sub. And the last thing Pradeep wants to do is go further in after him. But he also can’t go back alone. For one, he doesn’t know which way they turned wrong. He could easily get even more lost, and then it’d just be him alone wandering under the surface of the island along a separate path until he dies of starvation. Pradeep shivers. No, he can’t go back alone. “Jay, wait!” He hurries down the tunnel.

After a long timeless ordeal, during which the tunnel grows more ragged and small, dropping and rising in the clay and gravel and forcing Pradeep to twist himself through the constricted passage, he finally comes upon Jay leaning against a wall, pissing into a small pool. “Oh. Yuck. Do you have to, Jay? We might step in it and—”

“As a matter of fact,” Jay answers loudly, “I do. Very much. Have to. Sorry.” And the stream continues, a shocking amount. Jay sags with relief against the wall. Finally he finishes, putting himself away and groaning in relief. “Yeah, we’re lost. But at least with this smell we’ll be able to tell if we ever come back this way. Come on, Prad.” And Jay steps past the puddle to continue on.

“Wait. Why are you still going that way? We should go back.”

“I am going back.”

“Oh, no no no. Don’t do that to me, Jay. We came from this way. I just came from this direction. I am sure of it. You were leaning against that wall. Making a puddle right there.”

“Really? I would have sworn it’s the other side. I just stepped away from the wall. Look. The puddle’s already gone in the sand.”

“It’s this way, Jay. Please. Don’t make us even more lost. This is a big island.”

“Don’t I know it. But are you sure…?” Jay studies their footprints in the clay. There are tracks in both directions. Many of them. “Aw, hell. Look, Prad. They’re everywhere. We’re boned.”

“What? How? I thought I had the only other footprints here. Maybe these are the tracks of your golden man.” Pradeep tries to make out whether the tracks have the imprint of modern soles or if they are from bare feet or whatever the hell the man must be wearing. “But I am still telling you, our way back is this way. Do not make me go any further in.”

Jay knows Pradeep is wrong but he also knows he won’t win the fight. Ah, well. People don’t just build tunnels to nowhere. They must all eventually head somewhere. So it doesn’t really matter. He’ll just have to see where this one pops out. Dutifully, he falls in behind and lets Pradeep lead.

They walk in silence for a long time. Pradeep consults the time. It’s 10:51pm. They’ve been out for over an hour. The others back in the bunker must be getting worried. I am so sorry, babi! Pradeep silently mouths, sending his love to Maahjabeen.

For Jay, an outcrop of rock under his hand sends him spinning into the deepest revelations he’s ever had. That rock has formed down here, unseen by any eyes, for millions of years. Then busy little men had formed this channel in the mud, revealing it. And now there are tunnels shot through the mud and rock everywhere. They’re like the wrinkled passageways of a brain. God’s brain. He is walking through the mind of a deity. And what makes God so all-powerful is how ancient God is. Formed of the earth’s living crust, the thoughts that arise and coalesce in the divine mind are these rocks, which form over eons, millions upon millions of years. This is what God’s speech looks like, these mineral accretions. And that’s why humans will never understand the language of divinity. Because God speaks so slow. Little humans live and die in a flash, just as God is forming the beginning of a syllable that leads to a word that someday will be a sentence, a profound statement about the nature of the universe. But humans will never hear it. “Dude. We can only ever hear the briefest little snippet.”

“What’s that?” Pradeep can make no sense of the non sequitur. “Don’t worry, Jay. I think we’re nearly back now. The tunnel is straightening out.”

But Jay is satisfied to be here now, crawling around in the mind of the immortal. It doesn’t matter if he’s above ground or below any more. All of it is within God’s loving embrace. “Hey. Man. I just wanted to tell you… I think it’s cool your girlfriend is so religious. It’s like, I never really thought about it much before, but I get it. Now I get it.”

“She will not want to hear that you equate your drug trip to her faith. But I’m, uh, I guess I’m glad you like her.”

“Oh, sure. She’s awesome. I just wish she liked me.”

Pradeep searches for a way to refute that statement but can’t think of one. Jay is right. Poor bastard. He sure seems to rub a lot of people the wrong way. Even Pradeep can’t wait to separate from him and get back to Maahjabeen. She is still recovering from her poisoning. She needs him by her side.

And that is when he realizes he’s been walking down this straight passage for too long. Again. He stops. This isn’t the way back to the sub? He is somehow getting further from it. And now they have been gone for almost ninety minutes. And his phone battery is only half-full. Pradeep turns and turns again. Now what?

“Hey, man.” Jay stumbles to a stop and gives him a sleepy grin. “You as thirsty as me?”

“Improbable. You just lost half your bodyweight in urine.”

“I did?” Then Jay remembers. “Oh yeah. Highlight of my night.” Jay pushes past Pradeep, who is entirely at a loss. “Then let’s get going, homie. I need a drink.”

“But Jay, I don’t…” And that’s when they see the golden man, bent nearly double, coming toward them from the darkness ahead. The gleaming pollen of his mask refracts in the phone’s harsh light.

“Well, shit. There he is. See? We told you…” Jay shakes his head, confounded. “Now what? You speak any Russian?”

“No.” Pradeep speaks in a hush, spooked by the appearance of the figure. It appears that he really will have to trust Jay’s wild statements more than he has. That doesn’t make him happy. It opens up an entire psychedelic kaleidoscope of realities that he would prefer to keep unreal. “Hello. Uh. Sir. Nice to meet you.”

The golden man’s muffled voice, deep and guttural, fills the tunnel. Yep. Russian. Crazy. All of this is intolerably crazy.

“Can’t understand, dude.” Jay jerks a thumb over his shoulder. “Katrina’s back at the sub. That way? Yeah, how do we get out of here, anyway?”

“That’s it,” Pradeep encourages Jay. “Have him lead us out of here. He must know…”

But the golden man only speaks more Russian, heavily, as if reciting a long unhappy speech. He points at Jay with the tip of his thumb and makes another statement. Then, when the two young men before him seem to lack understanding, the golden man switches to Lisican. Jay hears the words Wetchie-ghuy and lidass but registers nothing more. “Whoa. Hold on, hold on there, big fella. We don’t… We can’t—Hey! That’s my phone!” The golden man holds out Jay’s phone to him and he snatches it. “Aw, damn! She cracked the screen! Look at that, Prad! Fucking Kula. And now that it’s broken, of course that’s when she hands it back. No, wait. I think it might actually…” Jay is startled to find it remains on, the smallest amount of power still in its battery.

Someone had been in the process of composing a text. “It’s in English so it must be Kula. Or Jidadaa. But word on the street is she’s hiding from the golden childs so… Yeah. This sounds like Kula for sure. It says, ‘Jay leedass, you byand bye gota stop Wetchie-ghuy. End the argument. Leedass. Kill. Jay kill Wetchie-ghuy.’ Oh, fuck all the way off. What the hell?”

The golden man is speaking again, once he hears the words he himself had been saying. Now he urges Jay, the words lidass and Wetchie-ghuy coming fast and furious.

“No. Absolutely not. I ain’t killing nobody. That ain’t my job here. I’m just a… I mean, have your Russian soldiers do it, if you’re so buddy buddy with them.”

The golden man falls silent.

Pradeep asks one of his incisive questions, his tone demanding attention. “So when will the Russians leave? When…? Ah. When will…?” Pradeep acts out the Russian soldiers landing on the beach, looking around, then leaving. He has no idea if any of that was clear at all. “When?”

But the golden man pushes Pradeep firmly away with the flat of his hand against his sternum. Pradeep stumbles back and the golden man makes another speech, mentioning Wetchie-ghuy twice. Then, jabbing at Pradeep with the tip of his thumb, he snarls, “Lisica. Na Daadaxáats giuxhe dan. Lisica.” And he turns and points at his own tailbone. “Lisica.”

“Oh, damn.” Jay shakes his head in wonder. “Dod-ah-shats was Jidadaa’s name for Sherman the shaman. And looks like he knows about your fox tramp stamp. But what does any of that have to do with Wetchie-ghuy and why is he so aggro about you—?”

A sudden sob escapes Pradeep. That dreadful vision swims up in front of his eyes, here in the dark, of the shaman looming over him in the space between life and death, making a deal for his soul. “Because I belong to him. The shaman attacked me and filled me with his cold mud. Wetchie-ghuy saved me, but only for a price.”

To Jay, nearing the end of his acid trip, reality is a tattered cloth and now he’s falling through the holes. Did Pradeep actually say what Jay thought he said? Jay turns to the masked figure to ask, and finds him on his knees scrubbing his hand against the wet sand where he pushed Pradeep. Unclean. “What the F? What’s going on here, grandpa?”

The golden man stands and grasps Jay by the wrist, pulling him forward, evidently to do battle against Wetchie-ghuy. His speech is urgent, decisive. But Jay digs in his heels.

“Whoa whoa whoa. Hold on.” Jay pulls his wrist away and turns back to Pradeep, who is hunched around the impact on his chest, head down. “We aren’t leaving Pradeep. We aren’t leaving you, Prad. Not ever.”

“We should go back to the sub.” Pradeep’s voice is reedy, distant, as if something brittle deep inside him has snapped. “I don’t want to be down here any more.”

“Yeah. For sure. Me either. But we still don’t know which way that is. Golden dude here wants us—or, me—to go further down this tunnel with him. So that’s probably not where our crew is. But that way, back the way we just came, is where we just were! And we know there’s no sub back there.”

Pradeep only stares at Jay, shorn of all bravery. He is empty and frail. A febrile panic attack announces its arrival and he almost rushes to it, the one familiar thing amongst all this madness. Like a freight train it roars through this tunnel, picking up Pradeep and carrying him away on the fast track to hysteric madness. Tears leak out from his squeezed-shut eyes and his limbs quiver, dropping him to the tunnel floor. His hands go to his throat. He can’t breathe.

Jay hauls on Pradeep. “Fuck. That.” He holds him tight, as close as lovers, Pradeep’s legs not bearing any of his weight. “And fuck you, golden dude. I ain’t going with you. I’m staying here and taking care of my buddy. And fuck Wetchie-ghuy for doing this. You can go kill him yourself. Go!”

Jay’s meaning is plain. The golden man retreats in defeat, still muttering. He withdraws down the tunnel until the darkness swallows him. Soon they are alone in the dark and all they can hear is Pradeep’s gasping breath.

“Jay. Jay! We’re going to die down here.”

The incision in Jay’s side starts to complain and he grimaces. “No way, Prad. You’re just spooked. And this is the dark part of the trip. When all the demons come out to play. That’s all.”

And as if Jay invoked them, the darkness surrounding him fills with infernal pairs of slanted teardrop eyes, blazing red.

Ξ

“Here. I’ll go first and then you will see that it is safe.” Her friend Maahjabeen disappears into the dark ahead as Flavia hangs back, unwilling to enter the sea cave. “See?”

“No. I don’t see. It is cold. And wet. And I need to sleep, not explore all these fucking caves.”

“There is no exploration. It is already explored. Yala, Flavia. Get out of that little tunnel. It is nice in this cave.”

Finally Flavia emerges, blinking distrustfully at the gloomy reaches of the cavern. “More darkness. Fantastico.”

“No, off to the left. That is where it opens to the sea. Just take two more steps. Look.”

“Yes, that is gray light. Hooray. You have convinced me. What a wonderful cave.” Flavia’s flat voice echoes against the far walls. Then a wave rushes in and fills the cave with its hiss. She listens as it departs, registering the deep churn of the low curtain fall behind her to her right, where the water comes in from above.

“That is your river there. When you take a shower in the cold waterfall every morning, that water washes down to here.”

“I see. Then maybe I will be able to find that hair tie I lost.” But despite her black mood, she can’t help but be impressed. Flavia takes another couple steps inside. She uncrosses her arms. The air is cool but pleasant. What a strange place. It feels like a theme park ride, with the collapsing pier and sunken boat and everything. “You and Pradeep, you rowed your boats into here? Madness.”

“Oh, yes. More than once.” Then Maahjabeen giggles, her tough exterior cracking. “I’m sorry. This cave has become very dear to us. It is one of our favorite places. I just wish I could get the boats through the mud tunnel. Then it would be so easy to launch from here. But it is always… kind of a death-defying process to get out of the lagoon and along the coast here. Don’t tell Alonso. Or he won’t let us do it any more.” Not that the storm will allow it these days. She is surprised that the sea level remains so low. If there had been a significant surge, it must have already passed.

Flavia realizes how tense she is. Now that they’ve reached the end and found no threats, she can finally relax. And, oh, how sore her muscles are! She sags against Maahjabeen. “Oh my god I need to pass out. Breaking down the camp. That was more physical work than I have done in… well, more than I have ever done. Ever ever. In my entire life. I mean, seriously! I must have gone up and down those steps a hundred times!”

“I worry about Triquet.” Sudden tears fill Maahjabeen’s eyes and she hugs Flavia tight. “And Pradeep. Of course.”

“And Jay?”

“Sure.”

They stand in silence, hearing another sweep of white noise that echoes from the sea cave’s entrance to them. It adds layers to the other water sounds in this cavern: the curtain fall; the slap of waves against the rock shelf; the boom of the distant surf. “It is the rainfall on the ocean,” Maahjabeen finally realizes, the water sounds acting like a siren’s song upon her. “Come. Let me show you.”

They pick their way closer to the sea cave entrance, following a narrow path along the left wall that eventually widens into a manmade cavern. Flavia steps on the worn concrete pilings, unwilling to go much farther. It sounds like an angry ocean out there, one that could tear them to pieces. But Maahjabeen strides confidently forward toward the diffuse gray light.

“It would have to be a sudden epic storm swell to sweep us off these rocks. We will be fine. But listen.”

Flavia studies Maahjabeen’s rapturous face. She is dubious. What about this situation could possibly inspire such a reaction? “Is this a religious thing? It must be. Because I do not understand—”

“Listen.” Maahjabeen grabs Flavia’s forearm and they go silent.

The sheeting of rain on the water rises and falls over the regular slap of the tide. Flavia lifts her eyes to the gray light, happy to have something to look at, and patiently waits for Maahjabeen’s special moment to end. “Did you hear, Flavia? That is the voice of God.”

“I heard sh-shhhh-shhhhhh and that is all. It is just water.”

“No, listen with your heart for once. Not your head. Listen to the world with your soul.”

Flavia makes a face and stands in cold silence for another ten seconds. “Ah. There it is. God is telling me to stop being such a stupid fool and to go back to the sub.”

“Flavia…” Maahjabeen grasps her by both hands. “You cannot be deaf to it anymore. It is happening all around us. The golden childs and their prophecies. The signs everywhere. The attack on me and Pradeep. These are happening. And they aren’t… they can’t be fully understood by science and the rational mind.”

“Well I am glad we agree you are not being rational.”

“Of course I am not! Because the world isn’t entirely rational! It is mysterious and strange and divine! Just because experiments are the only thing we can reproduce does not mean they encompass every facet of life. Don’t you see? Sure, science is a wonderful tool. The best. But we need other tools as well to really understand the nature of the universe. Be honest with yourself.”

“Honest? You want to talk about honest? Okay. How about you tell me why it is that in brainscans of religious people, they are found to have a circuit in the brainstem that fires more than a normal person’s does? That is all your religion is. You have built yourselves a self-reinforcing feedback loop in your heads that sees omens and all kinds of weird subtexts and your god circuits fire off these learned sensations to make you feel holy. It is very simple. You are not hearing the voice of god. It is just a cognitive module you were given by others, most likely your parents.”

Maahjabeen has never heard this. But it does make sense. At least the first part. “Okay, I can accept that our brains are wired different, but has it occurred to you that this may not be a closed circuit but instead like a—an… antenna? Actually connecting us to the divine? And when we pray, we are strengthening the antenna as we broadcast and receive.”

Flavia looks at her strangely. “Okay, that’s halfway sensible. If you please put that hypothesis in the language of Information Theory, especially with a quantum field emphasis, you might get me to listen. But guess what. Your hypothesis is inherently untestable. That is the problem with what you are saying. Yes, experiments always need to be reproduced, or what? Or it is all nonsense. It is whatever you want to say the world is and there is no foundation, no underlying truth. Just feelings. And what is the point of talking about feelings? They are ultimately subjective. They cannot be shared. I mean, we use language and all kinds of art forms to try, but no. You cannot truly share an experience like two computers share files. So what you are talking about is the ultimate subjective experience. The one that is between you and whatever private biological interface you are having with the world around you. It is not the infinite. It is the opposite. The isolated number. The more you talk of god the further you get from the world around you and the more you sink into yourself. And please, Maahjabeen. Do not tell me about the wonders of religion. There is a reason it has fallen out of favor in more and more of the world. It is because the wrong people do the wrong things with it. The reason we need science at all is because there are so many people with bad intentions who try to tell us the world is ruled by their god. Science says no. It is like the laws in a government. We need to understand and all agree that the world works in a certain way or guess what? We get insane religious wars again about who goes to heaven and who does not. No. I do not hear any voices or music in the wind. I hear water on water. I only see light. Ai ai ai. Do not make me question your intelligence. You are too nice for that.” And with a somewhat disgusted shake of her head, Flavia breaks away from Maahjabeen and retreats out of the cave back into the dark tunnels leading to the sub.