When Moses had demanded she tell him what course to set for the first leg of the supposed long march to the Promised Land, she had scanned the horizon for a while, finally selecting a broken-looking volcanic mountain. “There.”
Moses had squinted into the bright distance. “Where?”
“That mountain that looks like a cat on its back. Head directly for that. When we get there, I’ll give you another bearing.”
Moses had looked at her doubtfully, but camels were nearby and he kept his voice low. “Are you certain?”
Semple had put on an aggrieved face. “Of course I’m certain. It’s where I come from, isn’t it?”
“You know the consequences if you’re giving me a bum steer.”
“You think I’m stupid?”
“Just reminding you.”
“Then please don’t. This isn’t easy and I don’t navigate well under pressure. Just head for that mountain.”
Semple may have pointed the way, but that still didn’t mean the tribe came any closer to getting itself on the move. After a further half hour, it was beginning to look to Semple as though the Children of Israel were never going to move at all. Then the vanguard, which consisted of some hundred or so black-faced sheep and an escort of swarthy herders, actually began to head slowly out of what had been the campsite and into the open desert. Walking point, in front of both men and beasts, was a gnarled old ram with china eyes and curling yellow misshapen horns. Semple wondered what he might have been in a previous life.
Ultimately the entire tribe was on the move. Semple had to admit that they did have a certain slow, unkempt grandeur; their sheer size seemed to consume the desert physically as they made their way across it. Lumpen and ignorant they might be, hag-ridden by superstition and further confused by the arbitrary and often contradictory teachings of Moses, she nevertheless had to concede that they had a determination that bordered on awesome. They toted their babies and lifted their bales; hauled their carts and shepherded their sheep; raised the desert dust with the slow, measuredly resigned slap of their sandals; all with a dull, unquestioning, and infinitely patient optimism that, someday, in some way, the Promised Land would arrive as promised, the milk and honey would flow, and all their trials, Lord, would finally be over. And all the time, relentlessly plodding, one hoof in front of the other, the ram with the malformed horns led them. It made Semple almost sad to know that their beliefs were so cruelly unfounded.
Semple had actually expected Moses himself to be leading the migration. At the very least, being up front kept one out of the worst of the dust. She was mildly surprised when it turned out that he took a position a dozen or more ranks from the front, in the very center of the column. It made a kind of military sense, giving him a considerable shield of cannon fodder should the column be attacked. What she couldn’t imagine was what or who might attack such a large mass of people in a desert that was apparently devoid of all other life.
After a while, however, Semple found that she had to start revising her ideas. Maybe the dry, blistering terrain of scrub, thorn, and dirty sand wasn’t as devoid as she had initially imagined. The first indication was a wrecked gas station. The place looked as though it had been ripped apart by one or more huge mechanical grapples, and very recently, too, if the freshness of the breaks in the wood was any guide. When she first spotted the fallen Exxon sign, the shattered pumps, the flattened and compacted Coke machine, Semple had looked quickly at Moses. She was about to say something, but from the look of him, leaning lightly on his staff and gazing straight ahead, she knew instinctively that for him the place didn’t exist. She turned to see if any of the others were aware of the destroyed facility, but their faces were as blank as ever and they, too, seemed completely oblivious to it. Semple was the only one seeing it; and she decided, until she could figure out what was going on, it was best to keep her mouth shut.
The next oddity proved to be a drive-in movie theater, long abandoned, slowly ground down by wind and sand. A lopsided marquee showed that its last presentation had been a double feature of Ocean’s Eleven and A Hole in the Head. A large hole had been punched in the center of the otherwise intact screen, as though something fantastic had not taken kindly to the work of Frank Sinatra. Once again, Moses and his people showed no sign of being aware of it, just as they didn’t, about a half hour later, see the overturned Packard sedan. The automobile lay on its side, bodywork ripped as though by some huge gouging tool, possibly the same entity that had totaled the gas station. Like the gas station, the destruction of the car looked to be a fairly recent event. Its paint was unblemished, the raw metal of its wounds still bright and uncorroded.
Semple plodded on, pondering this discrepancy in perception, even toying with a vague hope that she was leading them into some kind of reality shift in which she might vanish herself, never to see Moses or his wretched congregation again. Stranger things did occur in the netherworld and she sure as shit was due for some kind of break. It was just as she was allowing herself this faint hope of a paranormal escape window when the ram halted in its tracks.
The ram with the malformed horns stopped and stood looking around uneasily. The next moment the earth trembled with a set of measured, even shocks, about two seconds apart. The tribe stopped dead, a common fear falling on each and every one. The Children of Israel stood, eyes wide, not daring to speak. Babies and sheep alike quieted themselves. And then the air was split by a raucous, grating scream, distant but still deafening.
“Ggggaaaawwwwwwwurrrurr!”
A corresponding murmur of pure terror ran through the crowd. At first it was just a whisper, but it rapidly rose to a crescendo of panic. “The Beast! The Beast! The Beast is come! God save us, the Beast is come!”
Semple looked at Moses and saw, to her consternation, that he was as mortally afraid as the humblest goatherd.
Hell hath no road maps.
The mouth of the tunnel itself was sneeringly anthropomorphic, a vast misshapen maw like a twisted grin of sculpted triumph, with the half-lowered spikes of a giant steel portcullis substituting for jagged predator fangs. Jim, however, was too far gone. He sat slumped in the stern of the launch, drinking so hard and fast that the movement of the bottle to his mouth had taken on a steady rhythm. Not even the booze, though, could stop his mind from screaming. It was just his body that was in collapse. Had there been a moon, his brain would have upped and bayed at it. As it was, his simian mind gnawed at the wire of its cage, and its reptilian base consciousness tried desperately to recall the chameleon trick of changing color in the face of danger. Not withstanding everything that had been said, done, hallucinated, and imaged, he was finally going to Hell after all. The only thing that kept him from total whimpering surrender was a burning anger at the manner in which he’d come to this place. He’d been conned and deceived; worse than that, by a man he admired and had believed was becoming his friend.