My mind wasn’t processing the events of the last couple of hours in any appreciable way. It was more taking each of them in and storing it for further review. I suppose this was because the morning had already been so fluid, one outrageous occurrence yielding to the next, even more outrageous one. Some underlying awareness of that quality allowed me not to surrender entirely to the extremes of emotion that buffeted me. I’d be lying, though, committing a sin of omission, if I didn’t admit the role that watching Marie’s calves move played in my decision to keep walking through the citrus-scented woods.
The trees had started to draw in closer together, not enough to hinder our passage, but sufficient for me to pay them extra attention. In front of us and to the left, they gathered in a small grove. Through the gaps among their trunks, I glimpsed what I took for other trees, their trunks white and smooth. As we approached the grove, I heard the wind picking up and falling off again; though the leaves on the trees beside us were undisturbed. Now I saw that the white trees were in fact stone columns, arranged in a circle, joined at the tops by their support of a domed roof, one part of which had fallen in. Temple or monument, the structure gave the same impression of incredible age as the road we’d crossed. I was tempted to detour to it, but decided it would be better to locate Dan first.
Beyond the temple and its grove, the smell of citrus was interrupted by another, the stench of meat a day into spoiling, accented by the copper reek of blood. The sound of the wind gusting was drowned out by the heavy buzz of flies. In a small clearing, we found the source of smell and sound: the carcass of a huge animal, its legs splayed out to either side of it, its head gone, cut from the thick neck that had spilled a lake of blood onto the forest floor. Fat, black and green flies half the length of my thumb roamed the beast’s back, its flanks, sat at the shore of blood and sipped from it. From the sheer size of its remains, I assumed the animal must be an elephant, albeit one whose coat was a rich, red-gold. Its legs, however, ended in hooves, each one large as a man’s chest. I had paused to survey the remains; Marie had stopped and was waiting for me. I said, “What is this?”
“One of the Oxen of the Sun,” she said.
“I never knew cattle could grow so big.”
“These are special — sacred, you could say.”
“Not too sacred, if someone did this to it. Do you have any idea what happened?”
“It was taken,” she said, “for bait.”
“Bait? For what?”
She uttered a word I didn’t recognize; it sounded like “Apep.” I said, “I don’t know what that is.”
“Not what — who.”
“Okay. I don’t know who that is.”
“Come this way,” Marie said. “We’re almost there.”
Away from the carcass of the great cattle, the odor of decay receded, the ebb and flow of the wind returned. Except, I understood that I hadn’t been listening to air, I’d been hearing water, the rush of the surf rolling itself up a beach. Marie and I had arrived at the edge of the woods we’d been crossing. The Vivid Trees ended in a line so straight it might have been planted there. Beyond them, an expanse of reddish ground rose into a low hill that Marie was already climbing. She continued over the top, and down the far slope. I stopped at the crest.
An ocean sprawled before me, its corrugated surface black as ink. Long, foaming waves tumbled and splashed onto a rocky beach. Distances are tricky to estimate over water, but at least two hundred yards offshore, a spur of gray rock slanted up from the water and ran parallel to the beach on my right, forming a kind of bay. Marie headed in this direction, picking her way across the stones that cluttered the beach. Larger waves burst against the stone wall, tossing spray high into a sky that was empty of the gulls you would have expected to see hanging in it, crying to one another. Nor did there appear to be any of the detritus you usually encounter on a beach, no clumps of dried seaweed hopping with sandfleas, no driftwood scrubbed and bleached into abstract sculpture, no fragments of crab left by sloppy gulls. Although the waves continued to collapse onto the shore, there were none of the tidal pools higher up that might have indicated the water had been any closer. There wasn’t much of a sea smell, the briny stink of the ocean and its contents. A fine mist shone on the rocks closer to the water; otherwise, the scene was curiously static, as if I was surveying a vista that had not changed in millennia.
Already, Marie had moved uncomfortably far down the beach. I descended the hill. Stones clattered under my boots. To my left, the surf curled onto the beach with a hissing rumble, while further away, the ocean struck the rock wall with irregular booms. To my right, up the rise, the Vivid Trees maintained formation. A mile or so along the shore, the rock barrier swept in towards the shore, lifting into a cluster of large, jagged rocks. There was activity down there, a lot of it. Figures moved to and fro on the beach and, it appeared, in and out of the ocean — but I was too far removed to distinguish their actions.
I assumed Dan would be waiting for me, ahead. How he had found his way here, I couldn’t guess; though after what had befallen me, I supposed I shouldn’t have been too surprised at it. It seemed reasonable to imagine he’d encountered Sophie and his children, just as I’d met Marie. What it all meant was beyond me, which I knew was not a good thing, but which I hoped to delay reckoning with for as long as possible.
When we were still halfway there, I saw that the multitude of forms on the beach were the same fish-belly pale as Marie. I had no doubt the eyes of every last one of them would be gold. I was less certain of their features, and of what my reaction would be to a school of the creatures I’d glimpsed in Marie’s place. Their activity was focused on the heap of sharp stones that marked this end of the rock wall; as we closed to a quarter mile, I made out long ropes spanning the distance from stones to beach. There were dozens of thick ropes, each one attached to a different spot on what I saw was a much more substantial formation than I had appreciated, each one gripped by anywhere from five to ten of the white figures, at points ranging from far up the beach’s slope to well into the water. The ropes creaked with a sound like a big house in a bad storm. The forms holding them grunted and gasped with their effort.
That I could see, only one of the ropes was not held by ten or twenty hands. This rope ran from a horizontal crack in the formation near the water’s edge to a sizable boulder on shore, which the rope wrapped around three or four times. It was to this spot that Marie headed. Doing my best not to look directly at any of the pale shapes amongst whom I now was passing, I followed. Although having the knife in my hand lent me the illusion of security, I wasn’t sure if the things would take it as a provocation, so I slid my hand into the pocket of my raincoat and kept it there.
The boulder that was our destination was as large as a small house, a stone cube whose edges had been rounded by wind and time. We angled towards the water to reach the side of the rock that faced the ocean. In between watching my steps, I studied the pile of stone to which our goal was tethered. Separated from the beach by a narrow, churning strip of water, the formation was several hundred yards long, its steep sides half that in height. Its top was capped by huge splinters and shards of rock, the apparent remains of even larger stones that had been snapped by some vast cataclysm. The entire surface of the structure was covered in fissures and cracks. Some of the ropes the white creatures held were anchored in these gaps with what looked to be oversized hooks dug into the openings; while other ropes lassoed the ragged rocks on the formation’s crest. I could not guess what enterprise the multitude of ropes was being employed toward; their arrangement was too haphazard for any kind of construction I could envision. I almost would have believed the mass of pale figures was engaged in tearing down the splintered endpoint, but their method of doing so was, to put it mildly, impractical.