“Took you long enough to find me,” I said, not tearing my eyes from the horizon.
“No,” she replied, “it didn’t. As your handler, I can locate you at a moment’s notice. I simply thought it might be best to give you a little space.”
“You didn’t tell me. What it would be like. How it would feel.”
“You’re right, I didn’t.”
“Why?”
“I suppose I didn’t see the point.”
“You didn’t see the point?” Hurt; incredulous.
“No, Collector, I did not. The job was yours to do whether you knew what you were in for or not, which means I would have accomplished nothing by warning you but making your task more difficult. I completed your collection, by the way, wrapped the soul and interred it as required. I’ve been assured by my superiors that the Deliverants who take responsibility for the soul once it is buried have deemed my actions acceptable — this time, at least. I suspect they’ll not prove so lenient again, which means next time the task shall fall to you and you alone.”
I considered what she’d said about warning me, considered the ramifications of knowing and not knowing. Decided reluctantly she wasn’t wrong.
“Sam,” I told her.
“What?”
“If we’re to work together, you should really call me Sam.”
“No,” she said, “I shouldn’t. Do you know why? Because I am not your friend. I am not your ally. And I am certainly not your confidante. I am your jailor. Your tormentor. I am one of many architects responsible for constructing your own personal hell, and you would do well to remember it. That is why I choose to call you by your title. To remind us both precisely where we stand. Because I assure you, if you give me half an opportunity, I will use you. Hurt you. Betray your trust. Deceive you. I’m sorry, it’s nothing personal. It’s simply that I cannot help it. It’s in my nature. It’s who I am. It’s what I have become.”
I shook my head. “I refuse to believe that.”
Lilith smiled then, sad and wan. “You’ll come around.”
“But not today,” I said, my hand finding hers, our fingers intertwining. It wasn’t a romantic gesture, but one of basic human kindness, for in that moment — and perhaps only in that moment — her beauty held no sway over me.
She flinched as if stung, but she did not take her hand away. “What exactly do you think you’re doing?”
“Look. You’ve done your civic duty. Warned me how big and scary you are. How you plan to chew me up and spit me out if given half a chance. But not today, right? Because today, for me, was a giant fucking shit sandwich. Today, I’ve had about all that I can take. So if you want to use me and abuse me, you’ll have to wait your turn, because today I’m already used up. Which is why it seems to me we may as well enjoy our time in the sun. Unless, of course, I’m wrong, and you plan on getting started ruining me today.”
She looked at me a long while as if I were insane. But she never removed her hand. “No,” she said finally, resting her head upon my shoulder, “not today.”
And so we two damned souls sat for hours beneath the blazing sun in silence, and watched its rays glint off the water, bright and pretty as God’s grace.
21.
It was dusk when I arrived at the temple.
Temple was too strong a word, really, for the tangled heap of stone and jungle life I saw before me or, given said heap’s strange elemental majesty, too weak. In reality, the ravaged remains of the building didn’t look like a human structure in the slightest. The weathered sandstone spires seemed to rise out of the jungle as if not built but grown. The bas relief ornamentation — some Hindu, some Buddhist, and some animist — had been all but obliterated by the centuries, once telling tales of gods and men, but now nothing more than mossy crenellations on a wall. And in the thousand years since the site had been built — the nearly seven hundred since this site in particular had been abandoned — the jungle had done its level best to swallow the structure whole. Strangler figs pressed woody limbs through every hint of a crack. Massive thitpok trees draped surfaces with their fluid root structures which seemed to slither down across the rock face like the tentacles of a giant beast. Garlands of ropy vine strung themselves across every peak and column — always pulling, tugging, taking until the stone itself was forced to tender its crumbling surrender.
Believe me, I knew how it felt.
I’d been hiking for seven days, following Lilith’s vague directions — scrawled on a napkin from an ex-pat Irish bar in Phnom Penh — through the dense, forbidding wilds of Cambodia. The legends claim that Lilith has dominion over the warm Southern wind, and as the hot salt breath of the Gulf of Thailand blew ever northward with me, I couldn’t help but feel like she was with me — guiding, goading, or maybe just gloating it wasn’t her who had to carry the goddamn backpack.
Honestly, the whole country was so hot and sticky, I’d soak clean through my shirt by the time I shrugged the damn thing on. The fifteen miles or so a day I’d manage on foot — twenty, if a fisherman took pity on me and ferried me up the Mekong in one of the ubiquitous low-slung fishing vessels that sprinkle the river like so much flotsam — would leave me looking as though I’d taken a dip in the briniest of ocean waters, and smelling like the locker room to boot. And the one day I managed to hitch a ride — thirty-five miles in the back of a rusted pickup with a pair of orange-robed monks, whose sandals were made from tire-rubber and whose rice bowls (for all the Buddhist monks I encountered on my journey carried rice bowls, which locals delighted in filling with food from their own tables, and which the monks were quite willing to share with a poor, starving stranger) were, sadly, empty — the plumes of dirt kicked up off the unpaved road left my eyes and hair gritty, and my benefactor’s insistence upon driving over every fucking pothole left my tailbone so bruised I could scarcely sit the whole next day.
I was wearing the flesh of a middle-aged, middle-management Seattleite named McCluskey, who’d scheduled a layover in Phnom Penh on his way to inspect his company’s new call-center in Bangalore with the intention of exploring Cambodia’s ruins. I caught up with him when I overheard he and his wife Skyping in a Greenwood Avenue coffee house, not too long after the nightmare showdown in Bellevue. Thanks to me, he missed his bus to Angkor Wat, but I didn’t figure he’d mind. He’d shed a good five pounds of paunch on this little trek of mine, and anyways, I was showing him a real set of ruins — as in, the kind no one had laid eyes on since Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
No one but the last remaining Brethren, that is; the one that Lilith called Thomed.
After Bellevue, I confess I didn’t relish the notion of going toe-to-toe with another one of Lilith’s oogly booglies, particularly given this one went bamboo so long ago, having disappeared into the jungle not long after the beastly Ricou split from the group. God only knew what I was walking into. And when, as best as I could tell, I reached the end of Lilith’s map midday today and there’d been no temple to be found, just a modest fishing village comprising a few ramshackle stilted huts clustered around a muddy tributary too small to have a proper name, I’d half-hoped I wouldn’t have to, that perhaps Thomed simply wasn’t here. But when, with the help of McCluskey’s travel dictionary, I inquired in broken Khmer (which sounded close enough to Sanskrit to my ears to make me worry I might wind up inadvertently summoning a Rakshasa demon) as to whether there were any ruins nearby, their dogged insistence that they could not understand me, coupled with their refusal to meet my eye or stand in my presence for ten seconds before gruffly shouldering past, indicated that I was in the right place after all. And given all I’d learned about the Brethren these past few months, locating Thomed’s little hidey-hole from that point was a breeze. I just forced myself to walk in the direction my instincts screamed I shouldn’t, and within hours, I was there.