They were in the caves and also in an arroyo on the African veldt. The paintings that Loyd had already photographed spun by on the walls like fissures and fault lines, intrusions and alluvial deposits. The habilines tracked a potential kill, carrying bone clubs and stone knives. A two-legged shadow before Loyd threw its club, which disappeared end over end into darkness—to strike something that yelped in pain. In the wake of this yelp, more clubs flew. If Loyd could trust the piteous ensuing sounds, many of these tosses hit their target. Excitement built among the hominids. Loyd was pulled along faster than before.
A gravity well, he thought. A singularity. I’m being sucked into bottomless night with a horde of protohuman spirits…. Agile ghosts scampered away from him, toward their kill, releasing him confused and breathless to the dark. Now, if he wanted, he could turn and grope his way back to the exit. No. No, he couldn’t. Curiosity about what the habilines had wounded in this pocket of space-time had him in its grip. He had to see—if seeing it was—their mysterious victim. And so, in his blood-spattered robe, biting his split lip, he walked toward the place that the habilines appeared to have gone. Gradually, the odd red light visible all about them flooded this hidden place, and he pushed his way through the befuddled hunters to look down on their prey.
It was a monstrous hyena, a prehistoric specimen. Or else it was a large quasi-human creature with a hyena’s head. In the bad light, Loyd could not decide. Whatever it was, the weirdness of its anatomy had halted the habilines. It sat against an outcropping of rock like a man recovering from a long run: hyena or hominid? The head gave one message, the body another. Chest, arms, pelvis, and legs suggested a deformed primate, but the ears, snout, and teeth said hyena… or dog… or jackal. The eyes had a pleading human twinkle that also confused things. The habilines knew that no wounded hyena had ever assumed this manlike posture, and they were chary of the beast.
Once, Loyd realized, something like this had actually happened. With Agarou’s blessing, I’m witnessing what a real band of habiline hunters witnessed in Africa two million years ago. For them, this is an archetypal event. It defined them as human—before the advent of speech—in a spiritual or metaphysical sense. And they know it…. Exhausted and bleeding, the hyena-hominid pulled itself to its feet. It towered over the hunters. It was taller than Loyd too, if only by a little. Although by every objective sign, the creature appeared to be at the mercy of the habilines, they made no attempt to deal it a death blow. The creature commanded their awe. Humbling them by its height and its indifference to its own suffering, it wholly disarmed them. Loyd was frightened. He felt like running, but the habilines, expecting revelation, held their ground. This eerie stand-off continued.
Finally, the hyena-hominid bowed its doglike head. This gesture of resignation or reverence or bodily surrender turned into something else, an act both grotesque and moving. The creature, stretching out its arms and gripping the rock face behind it for support, bent forward until its snout was nuzzling its left breast. The vertebrae on its neck and spine strained against its taut hide. With a jerk of its head, the creature tore the flesh of its own pectoral muscle. Then it straightened, removed one hand from the wall, and cupped from this narrow wound its own beating heart, which it held out to the wonder-struck habiline wraiths as a love offering. All who ate of it would know that the Mind implicit in Nature had affirmed their lives—through the agency of this hyena-headed messenger. Their salvation lay in this knowledge and in their ability to cohabit in a necessarily imperfect world.
Come, the hyena-hominid challenged its pursuers, still extending its heart. Come and partake of my life’s blood.
The largest of the habilines, the alpha male of their spectral party, advanced to accept the offering. Dwarfed by the dog-headed messenger, he tasted of the heart. Having tasted, he carried it to each member of the band, and they, too, cupped the beating organ to their mouths, bit into it, and took into themselves a living piece of their miraculous prey. Loyd could only watch. None of the habilines brought the heart to him—clearly, they regarded him as alien to their world, too alien to benefit from this rite—and he was glad that they ignored him. When the heart was altogether eaten, the gloom of the catacombs absorbed the hominids into itself, and Loyd found that he was alone with the creature that had sacrificed its heart to feed a small remnant of feisty but unprepossessing human forebears.
Agarou, the god of ancestors, had mediated this confrontation in the immaterial realm of Yagaza, but now it was Loyd who had to face the hyena hominid and to demand of it some explanation. His fear came back. What authority did he have to question such a being? What answers—if any—could he expect? The silver-crimson light of the caves coalesced around the two of them like a contracting womb….
LOYD: Who are you?
(The hyena-hominid only laughs. Its demeaning animalish laughter echoes in the half-light like a huge coil unwinding.)
LOYD (apprehensively insistent): I said, Who are you?
I AM: Names fail. If you like, call me Yagaza, or Lord, or Logos, or even Anima Mundi. None of these titles suits absolutely, but if you have to have a name, pick one that doesn’t belittle me.
LOYD: God?
I AM: In this context, Yagaza might be more appropriate. After all, I’m Adam’s God—Adam Montaraz’s, that is. But, ultimately, I’m yours, too.
LOYD: I thought Yagaza meant Africa—either Africa or the afterlife.
I AM: In the vaudun scheme of things, it does. Because you’re here through the good offices of Agarou, perhaps we should honor him by adopting vaudun terminology. Without that body of ritual, we wouldn’t be talking like this.
LOYD: I can’t call you Yagaza. I’m not a voodooist. I’m a victim of possession, but I’m not a voodooist. And you—you call yourself Adam’s God, but all I can see, squinting and cocking my head, is a heartless chimera, part man-ape and part African scavenger.
(The hyena-headed being places both palms against the sides of its face. It lifts this face away like a mask, revealing the horror of a human countenance that has been three quarters obliterated by .357-caliber ammunition. Loyd is reminded of Craig Puddicombe in the parking lot behind Abraxas; he cannot understand why God would choose to appear to him in the guise of a mutilated dead murderer. He tries to turn aside, but he cannot make his possessed body obey even the simplest internal command.)
LOYD: Please. Don’t make me look at you now. It’s crueler than you know.
I AM (restoring the hyena mask): That I doubt. It’s just that I have no desire to slip my responsibility in matters that you must regard as terrible manifestations of evil. I don’t explicitly order them, but neither can I countermand them without sabotaging creation itself.
LOYD: But you can inject yourself into the affairs of your temporal creation, can’t you? You did that with your hyena-hominid revelation to Adam’s Pleistocene ancestors. You’ve let me witness a reenactment of that “disclosure event.”