HUMAN ORIGINS

Part II

By Dale Glaser

Kent Nelson was all but paralyzed with heart-stopping horror as he beheld the ravenous monstrosity, perched on odd mismatched limbs, atop the bleeding form of his father.  His mind would attempt to formulate a thought about the creature, a notion that its varied chelae and crowded fangs seemed designed specifically for slaughter, and just as quickly his consciousness would reject the idea that the beast had been designed in any way at all, when it appeared to be some kind of self-contradictory explosion of biological matter nevertheless eyeing him with savage intent.  It was pure psychological terror in an impossible physical manifestation of sinew and claw and far more revolting appendages, unnatural and unnamable.

All rational considerations became moot as the monster launched itself at Kent, talons and stingers splayed asymmetrically.  A rush of air preceded the beast like a noxious exhalation of poison, stinging Kent’s eyes and sending him stumbling involuntarily backwards.  His left heel skidded off the side of the ledge into open air, and in an instant his balance was gone.  Kent plummeted deeper into the darkness below, jagged outcroppings of stone battering his body as it tumbled downward, but his life nevertheless spared for the moment.

He hit the lowermost level of the vault with the broad of his back and lost his grip on his flashlight along with most of the breath in his lungs.  The duffel bag slung over his shoulder struck the rocky floor with a clanging clatter, drowned out entirely by the sharp blow of the back of Kent’s head against unyielding stone.  Great sense-eclipsing fireworks of nauseating pain exploded volubly inside his skull.

For what seemed like an eternity, Kent Nelson could see nothing but darkness, hear nothing but a dull throbbing in his ears, feel nothing but agony shooting up and down his spine and radiating outward through his limbs.  Drawing air into his chest was a near impossibility, but he forced his struggling, aching muscles to obey.  Once his lungs were filling themselves adequately again, he lurched to his feet and threw back his head, peering up into the dizzying black overhead.  “Dad?  DAD?!?  Can you hear me?” he yelled.  He heard his own voice echoing back at random intervals, in varying pitches, from a baffling array of different directions.  But he did not hear his father’s voice in return.

A moment later a much more forbidding sound reached his ears, as the clicking and scratching of what must be the monster’s claws and spurs and pincers against the irregular walls of the vault filled the air.  Kent was still finding it difficult to think clearly; he was totally convinced that the beast had heard him calling for his father and was now following the shouts back to their origin, yet just as fervently believed that the strange exponential echoing within the vault would make tracking the source of any noise impossible.  Yet another realization cut through his confusion with cold certainty: he had heard the monster moving but could in no way know how near or far the ravenous beast might be.

He dropped to one knee and felt along the uneven stones for his duffel bag.  As soon as his fingertips discovered it he reached inside and drew out one of the steel pry bars.  Impelled by nothing more than instincts which had been supercharged by mortal fear, Kent stood up, turned 180 degrees, and swung the pry bar like a machete.  His own hand at the end of his outstretched arm and the tool within it were both nothing more than indigo blurs in his light-deprived field of vision, but he could feel the thudding impact jolting all the way up to his shoulder as he clubbed some part of the monster’s hideously ill-proportioned body.  An unearthly scream of displeasure met the blow as well, its zigzagging echoes threatening to drive Kent insane.

The beast recovered quickly and leapt at Kent once more, but Kent made no attempt to evade the attack or even knock it aside.  He knew there was no way out of the subterranean deathtrap so long as the monstrosity lurked in the all-encompassing shadows waiting for its next chance to pounce.  Kent gave the horror all the opportunity it could want, holding his hands high over his head.  And when three of the monster’s sets of disparate talons enmeshed themselves in his shirt, Kent drove the pry bar down like a spike in a doubled grip, ramming the sharp end of the steel through the top of the beast’s malformed head.

The monster was momentarily stunned, and in that moment Kent twisted himself around onto the creature’s misshapen back, never releasing his hold on the pry bar.  He leaned all of his weight on the tool and steered it deeper and deeper into the beast’s head, until the end of the pry bar emerged somewhere beneath the monster’s jaw.  The beast fell onto its belly as its helter-skelter limbs flailed, then twitched erratically, then were still.

Kent wanted very badly to roll off the monster and rest on the cool stone floor of the vault, but instead he gathered himself into an upright position and checked himself for serious injuries.  Somehow he seemed to have emerged with only a few deep bruises and multiple superficial lacerations, although the open wounds stung ferociously. Kent quickly grew aware of several sticky patches on his slashed sweatshirt and torn shorts, where the monster had left behind some noxious substance.  He quickly discarded the ruined clothes and, clad in nothing but underwear and boots, began looking for his flashlight.

He moved slowly through the darkness, scanning for any sign of illumination, and finally noticed a glow coming from a foot-deep depression in the ground where the flashlight had improbably landed with its lens pointing straight down.  Kent bent and retrieved the flashlight, as a basic plan took shape in his mind: he would scan the walls of the vault, find a route by which he could climb back up to the ledge overhead, and then locate his father.  Kent was not entirely sure, or at least would not allow himself to fully process, what the monster had done to Sven Nelson, but there was no denying that the older archeologist had lost a great deal of blood.  He was no doubt unconscious, if not in far more grave condition …

Kent shone the flashlight at the sheer wall, but the beam of light emanating from it did not hold to a straight line.  It swooped and curled wildly, curving like the trailing retinal afterimages made by sparklers in the hands of excited children, despite the fact that Kent was standing in place and holding his hand as still as he could.  Kent turned in place, and the light beam went from swirling to jagged, changing direction in sharp angles.  He turned further and instead of a continuous beam it became as fragmented as Morse code, and turned further still and saw the beam unified again but coruscating in blinding Day-Glo colors.

Kent pivoted again and suddenly the beam of light snapped into a straight, pure white line.  He continued turning in the same direction and the beam became weirdly pale photonic ooze, spreading outward and falling toward the floor queasily.  He turned back slightly and the flashlight worked normally once again.  The flat gray expanse of the rocky vault revealed in the electric glow appeared unremarkable, but Kent proceeded in that direction, waiting for the beam of light to once again defy physical logic.  But the light remained steady, and Kent continued to follow its path.

He walked so far that he began to wonder just how large the vault might be; at one point he turned around to look back the way he had come in an effort to gauge the distance from the landmark of the monster’s carcass, only to find the flashlight emitting an amorphous cloud of sparkling red motes when pointed in that direction.  Kent brought the flashlight around again and restored the undiluted beam.  After a few more steps, the beam finally struck something other than irregular formations of basalt.

A golden sphere nearly a foot and a half in diameter hung above the chamber floor at eye-level, with no visible means of support or suspension, although the column of air surrounding it appeared as unstable as heat-shimmer in the flashlight’s beam.  Kent stared at the unbroken, lustrous surface of the improbable object until a voice rang out clearly from it.  “You are the slayer of the discordulus.  Although its destruction did not immediately end my cursed confinement, as I had once believed it might, I thank you for the valiant deed.”

Except for reflexively tightening his fingers into a death grip around the handle of the flashlight, Kent was frozen in place with shock.  He was so stunned by the alien voice of the sphere that the only coherent thought he could form and utter in return was “You … speak English?”

“I speak all languages,” the sphere answered.  “For language is a manifestation of Order, and I am a Lord of Order.  My name is Nabu.”

“Kent Nelson,” he introduced himself automatically.

“You are hurt, Kent Nelson,” Nabu stated.  “Place your hand atop the sphere.”

“I don’t think so,” Kent shook his head slightly.  “You might call yourself a Lord of Order, but I’m not all that into being ordered around.”

“I do not mean order in the sense of commands,” Nabu corrected.  “I both serve and am served by the precepts of cosmic Order.  Rationality, causality, symmetry and correlation …”

“You do realize this pit you live in is pretty much the opposite of all those things, right?” Kent interrupted.

“This is not my home,” Nabu said.  “It is my prison, a perfect prison for a Lord of Order.  This is a Temple of Chaos, and as such, anathema to me.”

“Whatever.  Doesn’t matter anyway.  I need to get out of here, get help for my father …”

“Your father lives no more, Kent Nelson,” Nabu declared.  Although the sphere’s voice was too otherworldly to properly convey human emotions, a note of regret nonetheless tinged the words.  “The discordulus ensured his demise.  You no doubt grieve your father’s passing, but need not sacrifice your own life as well.  Lay a hand upon my form so that I may repair the chaos-monster’s savaging of your flesh.”

Despite fearing that the worst had befallen his father from the moment the nightmarish beast had attacked, Kent’s mind recoiled violently from the sphere’s proclamation of Sven Nelson’s death.  Desperate to avoid grappling with the concept, Kent shifted all of his focus to the other angle of the argument.  “How exactly is touching you supposed to heal me?”

“Contact between us will allow me to impose Order on your corporeal form,” Nabu explained.  “It is well within my power to accelerate the biological restructuring of your tissues, and to guide your natural defenses in rejecting the discordulus’s venom.”

Kent suddenly realized that the golden sphere could very well be a hallucination, the imaginary product of the very real stressors that had been his constant companions ever since he and his father had entered the hypogeum.  He held out his hand, primarily expecting that his fingers would pass through the non-existent ball and dispel the trick his own mind was playing on him.  Instead, his fingertips and then his palm made contact with the surface of the sphere, and a warm energy passed from the hovering globe into his arm, quickly permeating his entire body.  The restorative effects were instantaneous, and Kent felt healthier than he had in several years.  He pulled his hand back and tested the flesh of his chest and arms, where a few smears of drying blood remained but the underlying cuts and contusions had completely vanished.  He knew with certainty that his physical well-being was no hallucination.  “It’s like … magic,” Kent breathed in wonder.

“Magic is a word long used by human beings to describe that which they cannot otherwise explain,” Nabu responded.  “It is not unfair to compare the most powerful, primal and fundamental weavings of Order to magic, in the context of your corporeal experience.”

“But … if you can do this,” Kent said, “why couldn’t you just, I don’t know, put the whammy on that creature yourself?  Magic your own way out of this prison?”

“As I said,” Nabu explained, “the Temple of Chaos is a force unto itself which by its very nature resists my efforts to affect it or to escape it.  I was only able to exert any power whatsoever upon you because you are a living creature, belonging entirely to neither Chaos nor Order, and because you made physical contact with me.  All else is beyond my capacity for action.”

“How did you end up here?” Kent asked.

“That story is long, Kent Nelson,” Nabu replied.  “Longer than the time you have gained for yourself.”

“What are you …” Kent trailed off, looking around anxiously.  “Are there more monsters coming?”

“Perhaps,” Nabu answered.  “Perhaps not.  The same monster you slayed may yet live again.  Others like it might inhabit this temple, may always have inhabited it, or may do so soon.  Or the entire Temple of Chaos may yet become completely inimical to anything resembling life, human or inhuman.”

“That’s a lot of maybes,” Kent pointed out.  “And they can’t all be true.”

“Such is the nature of Chaos,” Nabu concluded.  “It’s only constant is its capacity for destruction, and within this prison its only remaining target is you.”

“Yeah, so that’s my cue to leave,” Kent announced.  “Thanks for the first aid, good luck and all …”

“You will never find your way out of this temple alive,” Nabu predicted ominously.  “Not on your own.”

“Then I guess I’ll die trying,” Kent retorted.  “Since you’re pretty much useless, and I’m not about to just lie down and wait to get eaten by the next nasty that crawls out of the walls.”

“There is … another way,” Nabu offered.

Kent stared at the golden sphere, unsure why he continued to not only listen to its otherworldly voice but answer to it.  The power behind the words was undeniable, and held some sway over Kent’s very nature, even as they inarguably originated from some impossibly removed plane of existence far beyond yet inextricable from everything Kent had always known as reality.  As he tried to formulate some definitive response to the globe, the floor of the vault shifted like a living thing, rumbling with a ravenous gnarring sound as it tilted and canted.

“What other way?” Kent demanded.

“If my powers of Order were channeled through a willing substrate, they could penetrate the obfuscations of Chaos,” Nabu stated.

“And I’m the substrate, is that it?” Kent ventured.  “What you were saying before about how I’m a child of Order and Chaos, both and neither?”

“Correct,” Nabu confirmed.

“You help me, I help you, and we both get out of here before Chaos chews us up, got it.  So what’s the catch?” Kent asked, as the vault floor bowed sickeningly under his feet.

“I would remain a prisoner, Kent Nelson,” Nabu intoned.  “No longer within the Temple of Chaos, but within you.  You would have my gratitude, but once united, you and I would be inseparable barring the intervention of another Lord of Order.”

A huge boulder fell from overhead and crashed to the floor scant feet from where Kent stood.  Mineral shrapnel struck Kent’s forearms as he shielded his face; he lowered his arms in time to see two even larger boulders rip themselves free of the floor and shoot upwards into the darkness overhead.  “Stuck with you, but still alive?” Kent asked.  “Deal.  Do it.”

The sphere said nothing more, and Kent turned to it frantically.  A circle of dazzling white light appeared on the center of the globe’s face, and a straight line extended from the top of the circle to the crown of the globe.  Kent squinted into the brilliance, and saw the golden circle outlined by luminescence detach itself from the sphere and float toward him.  The rest of the sphere began to change shape, reforming into something Kent could not quite recognize.  Then the golden disc touched Kent’s chest, and for a moment his entire awareness was suffused with pure light.

A heartbeat later he heard the voice of Nabu saying “We must fly from here,” echoing inside his head, which felt as if it were enclosed in some kind of mask.  Kent felt complete agreement and in the same moment experienced a weightless sensation as his boots left the stone floor of the vault and his body was propelled through the air.  The interior of the Temple of Chaos remained enshrouded in darkness, yet Kent was perfectly aware of snarling fissures opening in its vaulted basalt walls, as well as of pestilent presences skittering and clutching in their newly opened depths.

Kent banked steeply to ascend along the sheer side of the pit, slowing slightly as an outcropping neared.  “Make haste, Kent Nelson!” the voice of Nabu exhorted, but Kent scanned the rock shelf until he saw the body of his father.  Kent flew to Sven Nelson’s remains, gathered them in his arms, then flew upwards with redoubled velocity.

The entire structure twisted then, floor and walls rotating with a speed and severity that threatened to send Kent hurtling and crashing against the implacable dark gray stone that was suddenly, violently reoriented mere inches before him.  Wordlessly, the presence of Nabu allowed Kent to harness his own momentum with perfect efficiency, shunting it in a different direction which carried his flying form higher and higher.  The vault all around seemed to shake and scream with affronted rage, to which Kent paid little heed as he sped toward what he hoped was the possibility of seeing yet another sunrise.

Interlude

Ian Karkull awoke suddenly, ripped from a disjointed dream so violently that he felt a physical, primal vertigo which caused him to grip the edge of his mattress as if to let go would send him tumbling into an abyss.  His momentary awareness that he had been dreaming was in itself remarkable, since for close to a year he had been unable to recall any activity in his sleeping mind upon rising to greet each day.  For a split second, he could perceive that his consciousness was simply unable to hold any memory of these new kinds of dreams, strange and surreal, full of impossible geometries and paradoxical creatures governed by stochastically shifting whims of capricious menace.  For only an instant, Karkull realized it was as if the dream itself, or whatever unknowable aspects of deepest reality the dreams connected him to, had torn his eyes open and left him gasping for breath with cold sweat running down his ribs.  Then, as always, the dreams receded on a quicksilver tide of forgetfulness as Karkull staggered from his bed, out of the master suite and into the hallway lurching for the main staircase.

Karkull was quickly down the stairs and all but running toward the front door.  He threw the heavy slab of oak wide and left it hanging open behind him as he stumbled down the mansion’s front steps.  Although the sun had only set two or three hours earlier, the night was freezing, the ground as cold as ice beneath the soles of Karkull’s bare feet and his breath steaming white in a trail behind him as he hurried around the house toward the shed behind it.  Karkull had given up keeping a regular schedule months ago, sometimes staying awake for days on end, other times sleeping for the better part of a week beginning whenever and wherever the urge took him.  Tonight he had scarfed down an early dinner consisting entirely of truffled potatoes and immediately been overcome with fatigue, barely managing to change into lightweight sleeping pants and t-shirt before crawling under his eider duvet.  If he felt any ill effects of only having managed a couple of hours of sleep, or any discomfort running through the chill of night in nothing but the thinnest of loungewear, he gave no sign.  His steps did not slow until he reached the padlocked shed doors.

Karkull grabbed the lock and uttered a wordless cry of dismay as he remembered too late the key left inside the mansion.  Angrily he shook the lock and rattled the chains snaking through the door handles.  The lock grew warm and soft in Karkull’s hand, like a fuzzy, fluttering baby bird, and with another yank the hasp was severed from the body, splattering the handles of the shed with a substance looked like blood but radiated in a phosphorescent shade of orange.  With the lock no longer connecting its links, the chain slid aside and took flight into the air, chiming metallically as it shaped itself into strange patterns against the night sky.

Karkull threw open the shed doors and stepped inside.  Before him was the reason why he had been roused, why he had been summoned: the Pit of Chaos.  It glowed more feverishly and churned more agitatedly than at any moment since he had drawn it into eldritch existence using the ancient tomes recovered in the ruins of Ragnor.  The Pit of Chaos called to Karkull, called to his heart and soul.  The seething ataxic energies within the Pit were still restrained by the precautionary wards Karkull had inscribed around the shed, but the bedlam cry of Chaos insinuated itself into Karkull’s mind nonetheless.  He could resist the calling, he knew.  He could ignore its promises, deny its need, and suffer no ill consequences.  But his spirit was drawn to the Pit of Chaos, not merely tempted but convinced of the rightness of what the Pit offered.

Ian Karkull stood for a long, long time at the edge of the Pit of Chaos, bathed in the stultifying warmth of its gangrenous green light.  He could become more than an avatar of Chaos; he could personify Chaos itself.  Or he could refuse, and continue in his efforts to contain and control the Chaos, to master it and become something unspeakably greater still.  Power to beggar the imagination now or power beyond possible reckoning if his patience and perseverance held.

Ian Karkull stood, and waited.  Waited and stared at the Pit of Chaos until tears mingled with blood ran from his eyes, and undiluted rivulets seeped from his left nostril and both ears.  He stood and stared, knowing that he would fall in the end, and only waiting to see which way.

End Interlude

The sands of the Arabian Desert were like frozen swells on the surface of the ocean, rippled yet unmoving and monochrome under the moonlight.  Suddenly a granulated geyser erupted as Kent Nelson flew up through the sand and into the night sky.  From his elevated vantage point, he spotted the battered pickup truck that had carried his father and him to the unearthed entrance of the Temple of Chaos, not entirely surprised to see that the entrance had vanished once again, and that the truck appeared farther away from the subterranean prison than he recalled leaving it.  Quickly, Kent glided toward the vehicle and alighted beside it.

For a moment, the cool touch of the desert wind and the quietude of the starry heavens above were tangible things, bonds to the concrete, everyday world to which all the moments of Kent Nelson’s life before tonight had belonged.  He had returned to reality, and yet his father was still dead in his arms.  The dam burst then, and Kent hugged Sven Nelson as he cried, great wailing sobs the likes of which he hadn’t even approached since before his parents had divorced.  He cried with no restraints, gradually feeling grief’s iron clamps on his heart begin to loosen ever so slightly.  He also slowly became aware of Nabu’s continuing presence in his mind, observing him from a distance, without judgment.  Kent had more tears to shed, but other tasks to accomplish as well.  He carried his father to the gate of the pickup.

After he laid his father’s body in the bed of the truck, Kent caught sight of himself in the rearview mirror mounted on the driver’s side door.  His entire head was sheathed in a golden helmet, cylindrical and slightly peaked in a bladelike crest, devoid of features except for two eyeholes which burned with white light from within.  A gold-hued cape was attached to a collar wrapped around his throat, and a golden medallion hung from the collar to rest against his breastbone.  His midsection and hips were covered in a golden loin-guard, and gold-colored boots on his feet rose nearly as high as his knees.  His arms, legs and chest remained bare, yet all in all he cut a memorably imposing figure.

“I can’t go back to the encampment like this, though,” Kent said aloud.

“Nor must you,” Nabu answered within his mind.  A flash of light blocked Kent’s sight for a moment before fading, removing nearly all of the accoutrements Nabu had manifested on Kent’s person.  Once again, Kent was stripped to his underwear and expeditionary boots, with a smaller version of the golden medallion suspended on a slender chain around his neck.  “The signifiers of Order are secured in an inert subdimension, until such time as they are needed again.”

“I don’t plan on exploring any more chaos temple prisons any time soon.  Like ever,” Kent promised, reaching behind the seats of the pickup truck for the spare clothes stowed there.

“Nonetheless,” Nabu said meaningfully.

Kent chose to ignore the implications of Nabu’s words.  He finished dressing and climbed into the driver’s seat, started the engine and drove the truck in a wide circle, turning it back toward the main road, a road which now led to an unimaginable future.