Someone was locked in the trunk. Mewling and pleading, gagging and weeping noises came from within. The small muted voice, though unintelligible, judging by tone and timber alone was female.
When the old blue vehicle lurched with Maeven’s sudden movement, she’d thought that all was lost. It had hung precariously upon the collection of rubbish in the junk pile, but though comprised of a collection of vehicle parts, tires, oil drums, construction materials, broken cinder blocks, beat-up appliances twisted and torqued beyond salvage or use, parts of the pile and stacks still bobbed and floated upon the interior pool below. If that had happened, both she and the person in the trunk would most likely drown.
“Hold on!” Maeven called to her, trying to calm both the person in the trunk and herself if that were possible.
“I need to figure this out,” and then she muttered to herself in a much quieter and lower voice, “C’mon Mashugana Maeven, figure this out!” A Yiddish term for fool or foolishness. So long since she’d spoken in that tongue. It reminded her of her grandmother. Her grandfather often joked that her grandmother could easily carve the Hanukkah Beef Brisket with her tongue. Not knowing when to leave well enough alone, he added, lowering his voice so that only his granddaughter could hear and giggle, “And that is quite a feat because the meat she cooks is as dry and as tough as shoe leather.” To which, her grandmother, with prescient knowledge, and keen hearing, would reply, “I heard that, yutz! No latkes or challah for you!” And in mock humility, he would wince like he’d been struck, raise his eyes to the ceiling, hunch his shoulders, with his palms upward and petition heaven for mercy saying, “Why did You have to give her such supernatural hearing? Oy! Isn’t it enough I suffer with the kvetching?”
But this was a terrible time to smile at such memories. How she missed them both. Taken from her way too soon.
She needed to focus. Find a way out of the vehicle without causing it to slide further down. The thought of family stung her in ways she could not think about now. Focus, Maeven, she admonished herself again. She sounded like her mother. Child, you are too happy to be serious, she’d say, One day you’re going to laugh or smile or say something at the wrong time that is going to get you into trouble. Mark my words. At least do me a favor and don’t smile at funerals. It’s embarrassing and creeps people out. Only idiots are happy all the time. And I’m not raising you to be an idiot. Whether Maeven had wished too or not, she had “marked her mother’s words” and took them to heart. In hearing her mom’s repeated chastisement, she had finally taken it to heart, but she’d essentially boiled it down to this: Don’t embarrass me. After that, she’d withdrawn into herself in her teenage years and had never really come back out. Her mom would then say, “Where is that happy child that you used to be, eh? Keep frowning and your face’ll stick that way.” Again, the affirmation of her boiled down assessment of herself peeled off another layer of her self-worth: Maeven, you’re an embarrassment. You can’t do anything right.
Humor, even dark humor, had been her go-to coping mechanism whenever her stress level hit a certain pitch, and she felt overwhelmed. But it was oddly funny now that in this moment of desperation to find how to get out of her present predicament and rescue whoever it was trapped in the trunk the old retreat to a bright-side was not working for her. Too many memories buzzed in the back of her mind, each vying for attention, but she could not focus on even one. Except for a growing feeling of painful loss, these seemed trapped within the deep fog of her brain. Only the strange memories of her grandparents and her mother remained and presented themselves. She was teetering. Not just in the physical sense, feeling the pivoting weight shift and distribution of the old car she had awakened in, but between maintaining her composure and losing her mind. It was almost as if she heard voices, beyond the sounds made from the woman or girl in the trunk. She could not lose it now. Whoever it was back there needed someone heroic to save her, not some basket-case, nervous wreck.
***
The assemblage looked like an underground hill comprised of the discarded contents of a scrap metal junkyard, a used car lot of storm-damaged classic 50’s era vehicles and an antique appliance store. Old broken-down cars and at least one truck, none of which appeared of modern make, were partially stripped, smashed, weathered and buried within and jutting out of the cascading mound of battered sheet metal, canted and dented oil drums, old shredded threadbare tires with wheel rims, twisted corrugated tin panels, thick metal wire cabling of an unclear nature whether it had been salvaged from electric powerlines or naval coiling of shipping lines.
Busted and jagged glass windows and windshields webbed with impact fractures, scintillated duskily in the ghostly beam of light that shone down from an aperture in the rock above at the top of the pile. Rust-spotted fenders torqued far out of their original factory shape, angled upward, giving the hill a jagged and treacherous look. Something that appeared to be a piece of an airplane wing and struts lay submerged beneath the water, while the rest of the upholstery, metal, foam, rubber, and glass had been left to molder, rust, disassemble and sink into this dank underground pocket of detritus.
“What can you see?” A voice called from around the bend in the caves and tunnel behind me.
“You’ve got to see this for yourselves,” I answered back, confident that the sight would shock them as much as it had me.
With some carefully placed steps, passing what remained of our packs hand to hand, and barely managing to avoid falling into the deceptively shallow silt pool, the others skirted the edge of the water trap and joined me in the crux on a short land bridge between to two pools. Gathering one by one at the bend in the tunnel beneath the golden ray of light that shone from a high break in the ceiling, I and the others gawked at the turquoise pool and the Surface World ejecta cluttering the back end of the cave. A disconcerting as it was seeing a junk mound of items that did not belong in the Mid-World, and the horrific implications entering my mind, and perhaps that of Begglar and Nell too, the presence of the pile did offer us a treacherous but conceivable means to getting back up to the ground surface of the Trathorn Falls.
***
Meanwhile, the eight survivors of the lift, off the lake, stood dripping and dumbstruck before the striated sky and the wall of roiling grey clouds that sent what appeared to be swirling snowfall down upon the cliffside, as if the heavens had opened like a higher plane of cataracts pouring down upon the shoulders of the cirque canyon.
Mason waited for a few moments still staring ahead at the collapsed face of the canyon, now roaring with water, sending a foggy mist up into the air, pounding the jagged underbite teeth of the falls and then spoke up.
“We need to go back.”
“Back?” Matthew asked, “How can we go back? Look at that thing. The whole face of the falls is gone.”
“Can they still be…?” the young woman started to ask, but then glanced at Dominic, still wrestling with the horrible possibility that his parents were both gone.
“I don’t mean go back to the falls,” Mason said, “I mean back to Azragoth. We have lost all of our weapons. We are in a wild place, where we do not know what else might come out of those woods, and we have lost all our supplies and horses. If we still want to continue this journey, we need someone who knows the land and its dangers.”
“I don’t know if we can find it again,” one of the other men spoke up, “Remember how we got here. We followed the dry creek bed, but then there were those forest switchbacks. I tried to remember what Maeven did, but there were too many hidden turns to keep track of. Azragoth has remained in secret for twenty years. That doesn’t happen easily. They’ve kept it hidden. If we are to get back to Azragoth, then the Azragothians will more than likely have to find us first.”
“Good point,” the other man rejoined, “Perhaps we can get advice from General Mattox. At least we have to try.”
“But what if they aren’t dead?” Miray broke in, “We have to help them. We can’t just leave them.”
The woman came up behind Miray and stroked her hair gently and reassuringly, “Dear, I want to believe that there is a chance but look at those falls. It doesn’t seem possible…”
“No!” Miray refused to hear it, “I don’t want to hear it.”
Her eyes welled up with tears. She moved forward and took Dominic’s hand and placed hers in it.
“We’ll look for them, Dom,” she stated as if her mind had already set on a plan, “Let them do what they want, but you and I will go and find them.”
Dominic’s eyes teared, and he bent down and picked Miray up and hugged her tightly.
“Bless you, sweet girl. Yes, we will. You and I.”
Miray put her arms around his neck and buried her head into his shoulder and they both wept together.
***
It is a terrible thing to experience the loss of the good, while in pursuit of the should. Many things there are that we think we should be doing, but sometimes pursuing these can cause us to lose sight of the good things we must maintain.
This is the power of the creature I called Distraction, but I am getting ahead of myself. More on that later.
It is hard focusing on one objective so much that it becomes our obsession and we lose sight of all around us.
I had led us here, or allowed Maeven to lead, and failed once again to take and hold responsibility for what happened to those under my care. I had pursued the Moon Sprites, had confronted the Manticore, and felt compelled to lead others into the caverns of the Ghost Pools under the frozen falls, but look where it has gotten us. The company waiting for us back at the shore probably wondered what happen to us. My not holding us back from going onto the frozen lake, allowed Maeven to be injured or dead, the jury was still out on that, no matter what Begglar and Nell assured us. So far, I had done nothing but bring calamity to everyone. We were buried under the canyon cliffs. There could be no going back the way we had come in. Hanokh had been exactly right about that. We might be able to scale the collection of junk, but it was dangerous and appeared unstable. And what it contained shocked me. Though the vehicles were old, I could not imagine how they had come to be here. Any prior effort to bring modern items from the Surface World had always resulted in the same scenario. The item became something else very different, but something that would not serve the use for which the person bringing it had intended. The portals simply did not conform to the traveler’s wishes, but rather served something else, or someone else. Never had I ever seen contrivances that were not hand-fashioned. No electronic gadgetry of any kind was ever found within the Mid-World nor machine-tooled item, forged or mechanically cut or molded. As such the Mid-World had always seemed simpler and more removed from the driven pace and frenetic pull of the Surface World. No cell phones, no automatic weaponry, no computers, no televisions, no vehicles or airplanes or mass transit. Just mankind and monsters and half men creatures and a certain kind of mysticism behind the order of this world of dreams working akin to but different from the Surface World. Human ingenuity had only approximated what was known as the medieval times in Surface World history. Ironically, those Surface World times were known to posterity as The Dark Ages. A time between the 5th and 10th centuries when record-keeping had been neglected, innovation had stagnated, and the people live under the scourge of warfare, famine, and blight. A time between the fall of the Roman Empire and the age of the Renaissance, Plutarch writes (Africa, IX, 451-7), “My fate is to live among varied and confusing storms. But for you perhaps, if as I hope and wish you will live long after me, there will follow a better age. This sleep of forgetfulness will not last forever. When the darkness has been dispersed, our descendants can come again in the former pure radiance.” His reference to the age in which he lived was referred to as being dark in the pejorative sense. Paradise had been lost, and he lived in the betweenness before Paradise could be found again. Rome had fallen due to its own corruption from within and its political power struggles which distracted it from the fact that through military conquest it had built an empire, it could not rule and hold if it did not rule and hold itself intact. Rome had once been the prize capital of the world, a powerful city on an Italian hill, but had ceded its place because it could not serve under its own ideals and its emperors and rulers could not bear the implications and responsibility of serving as a god for its ruled peoples. The period following the Dark Ages, known as the Enlightenment or The Renaissance or The Age of Reason, though some scholars and historians may dispute the terms, did rise to a certain collective and societal search for answers in faith sought only in the aftermath of such tragedy and wandering and brutality. The religious community would not have been given such deference and ultimately state power which they later abused, had the suffering people not turned to faith, and the Sovereign of the Heavens and to the study of religious clerics who sought to find meaning from the Heart of the One despite having survived through such a chaotic period of history. These times within the Mid-World were not so different from those in Surface World history. Arguably, despite modern contrivances, societal “progress”, as the moderns term it, and the enlightened ones, self-proclaimed gurus of the modern age, for all practical and all observable purposes, the Surface World was descending back into an Age darker than any other in history. An apostasy, a paganism, a worship of things created rather than the Creator. A failing of learned scholarship in self-study. A forgetfulness of those lessons of history and tragedy that once woke up a generation of suffering people desperately seeking purpose and hope.
This collective pile of junk from the modern world was poetic justice in its representation. Sometimes we Surface Worlders have to be willing to climb up over our own pile of junk collected over time before we can come back to the light of the world above. As much as I may be tempted to believe that we Surface Worlders were the more enlightened and more advanced because of our modern society and our experience, I was humbled by the fact that on a basically level, we moderns had not succeeded in our humanistic rise to make life better, but had in fact receded into becoming weak and dependent on our junk pile and could not curb the tide of our falling decent into our maddening “brave new world.” If there were more than flesh crossing over into this Mid-World, then somewhere overhead, the Mid-World Sky was broken and if it fractured enough, the Darkness would descend upon it. The storms we’d experienced heretofore, would be nothing like the storms coming. The lands of the Mid-World would be plunged into an Eternal night, and the storm that came would tear away the atmosphere of this place killing every breathing creature, plant, animal, insect or organism within it. The mountains would be upended, the seas would evaporate, and the Mid-World would break apart and be drawn through the portals to rain down as fire and brimstone upon the earth. The Surface Worlders would never see it coming. The two worlds would collide and implode. The Surface World would be overrun by the metaphysical creatures given flesh and bone in the Mid-World, a long nightmare of terror would begin, and Hell would erupt on Earth. A legion of demons waiting to be borne would be unleashed, and Apollyon would ascend to an earthly throne.
This band of travelers, though they do not know it yet, were brought here to serve a purpose. Each one specifically called forth through their dreams. Each one is important. Each one purposed to fulfill a Higher Calling. Each one whose stories, though they may not understand it yet, they were meant to find and finish.
***
Maeven lay as quiet as she could back down upon the bench seat, careful not to make any noises. She had heard sounds outside in the cave, voices nearing. She did not know how or why she had found herself lying in this battered heap, and this old abandoned car from a bygone era. Was she asleep? Was she dreaming? The vehicle seat and musty smell of the moldering seat cushions seemed real enough to her senses, but the location was disorienting. The vehicle had long been our of functioning commission so she could not have been driving it. Had it fallen into some sort of sinkhole? Were she and the girl in trunk sedated and kidnapped, possibly from the hospital, and deposited in this old car while their abductor had to deal with some pursuer? Would he be back? What did he want with them? Would he rape and kill them? How had the old car gotten down into this underground cave? Was there a sinkhole below the junkyard that collapsed? Was the water below a pool or an underground river? Perhaps storm runoff replete with phosphorescent chemicals and antifreeze. A toxic sluice of flammable and acidic blends forming and swirling into a poisonous river running beneath the suburban neighborhoods above, seeping into their city water system to take down an entire city population before they knew what was killing them? In any case, she knew she could not be found here without defenses. Her body was too weak. She felt none of the strength that she had before as Storm Hawk, fierce and daring leader of the Lehi horsemen, daring to raid the stolen spoils of the Xarmnian Protectorate and return them to the oppressed peoples being crushed under their iron fists. A Mid-World Robin Hood.
Now the thought of being in this weakened state and being ravaged by some creepy psychopath and then being summarily murdered and discarded as refuse, incensed her, but she could not be hasty. The voices outside seemed oblivious to their presence, but she could not be sure that those who approached were friendly rescuers or in cahoots with the sicko who’d deposited them here. Her best and only move was to stay still and silent. To make them think that she was still sedated and wait for an opportunity to strike them unaware before they tried anything. She rolled her eyes trying to search the floorboards, seats or side door pockets to see if there was anything she might be able to tuck away and use as a weapon should the opportunity arise. Where was she?! She hated being so disoriented.
Suddenly she heard clattering and scraping, a splash and then a slight rocking as the car shifted its precarious weight on the pile below, being surmounted by others ascending upward with some degree of effort. Suddenly the car rocked to the side, and Maeven slid downward, bracing herself by her feet against the door. More noises. Not from the outside, but from the trunk, this time more coherent and louder.
“Help me! Somebody! Anybody! Help me! I’m locked in here! That creep locked me in here! Get me out of here before he comes back. Oh God! Hurry! Before he comes back!” And then the voice dissembled into agonized weeping.
Suddenly, the car door opened, behind Maeven’s head and she panicked, bracing herself to jab and gouge the eyes out of whoever it was who “was coming back.”
A voice not unfamiliar to her spoke her name in shocked bewilderment.
“Maeven?! It that you?! Is it really you?”
She almost fainted when she saw who it was.
Excavatia 