Zed had assumed that Shana would join him in the cave, then knew both that she could not and would not. It wasn't that she didn't have the courage for this -- though she claimed she did not -- as that this was his burden to explore. She would wait outside, however long this took. If he did not return that night or the next, she would make her way to the cave again until he did. If he never reappeared, she wouldn't fight it. She had thrown her lot in with him, come what may. It would not be her first vigil on this journey. It might not be her last.
The entrance to the cave was not generous, though it did not need to be. He felt the aversion of slipping through solid matter, but it was an irritation at worst. Claustrophobia was an affectation he could not indulge.
Yet Zed had never been so long in the darkness. The sun and the global erosion did not allow many places where the dead could find total absence from light. He felt struck with blindness as he descended. The dead have never needed light to see. Zed sensed the cave growing vaster, the damp limestone sheen of the stalactites. He did not need to see them to know this any more than he needed to reach out. He was a sentient memory and did not need abandoned organs.
The cave was not cool, whatever that meant to the dead. It was not the familiar blasting heat of above. The first half mile of his journey would have killed him through sheer inhospitality if he were alive.
The cave reminded him of a grave, as though he were burying himself to prove a point that he was forgetting. Above, when he was enacting suspicions with Shana, he still retained skepticism. He could say that he didn't believe anything could change. Once one committed to finding an angel, claiming agnosticism was ludicrous.
Into the journey -- it was difficult to say how long, so used to judging by the rise and fall of the sun -- Zed stopped by small rocks. He decided to spend time shaping a cairn. He needed to pause, not to rest, but to think about what he was doing. Dead already, and for eons, was he walking toward his extinction? What would it mean for him if he were?
He stepped back from his pyramid, this ziggurat that might never again be observed. It was one of his better ones. He decided that it might serve as an acceptable epitaph.
Zed walked through the branching tunnels as though he knew the way. Soon enough, the compulsion felt more like a vacuum. He fought it but scolded himself. He did not attempt to turn back because the choice was taken from his hand.
He had been so long outside its presence that he could not parse it-liquid water, flowing in a rapid, deep in the Earth.
A chamber that could have served as a cathedral pulsed with fire. The dead built fires of scrubby vegetation, unable to be warmed, but the light spoke to the memory of warmth.
This angel's fire was nothing like that. This was a fire that engulfed, that burned all evidence of it to dust. The fire had no heat. It was not an earthly flame that needed heat to do its job.
The angel was the most immense thing Zed had ever experienced. He remembered lessons on dinosaurs, the proportions of the long-extinct blue whale. The angel filled the cavern so wholly that it seemed the cave was built to contain it.
Religions talked of angels, of interstitial beings between the mortal and divine. They cast them in a comely light, creatures that exuded compassion.
That was not what angels were. These were horrors, millions of eyes, shining wings, a light that dimmed the sun. These were beings that should have been impossible, even to a man living out his afterlife.
He stood his ground, though he felt it repelled from the creature over him. He waited for it to speak, finding he did not himself have anything worth saying.
It had been so long since Zed had been in the presence of a physical being. He almost couldn't fathom its steady movements. Its limbs might have belonged to the living, but not always human and certainly not combined in these configurations.
Since he had been dead, he had not experienced fear. There was no need for it. The moment the living feared the most had already happened to Zed. It had not been painful.
Now, he feared deeply in whatever little was left of him. Nothing could hurt him here, short of the planet meeting its end. Even that would likely not hurt him. He would simply cease to be. He held onto this and his expiring resolution to see this through and would not retreat from the questions he had.
This sensation of fear was almost welcome because it served as a reminder of what it was to be mortal. Few humans thought that they could stop existing come the dawn, that they needed to make sincere goodbyes to whomever they had met in the night. He could not lust or hunger, but he could understand repulsion in the presence of something that could end him with a breath.
The angel shrieked something so alien that no human mind could have ever listened without madness. It had no mouth, but its multitudinous eyes winked open in a twisted approximation of a speaking mouth, organic pixels in a gloating mockery of a human face.
[Sinfulness.]
"I have not committed any crime I can remember. I am only dead and waiting."
[A corpse, jaw unhinged, one socket vacant. Zed as he appeared before the angel.]
"Why are you speaking to me then?"
[The angel as the cave formed around it.]
He was not satisfied to be right about that, but he found a more salient question. "What happens to us after the end?"
Gender was absent with the angel, more irrelevant than it was for the dead who kept their mental vestiges of the bodies that had once contained them.
The thousand-eyed, tusked face twitched in his direction. [Zero. Zero multiplied until it was nearly a fraction of a fraction if one didn't focus. Zero.]
Zed was in a car. He could witness the memory, but he could not change anything. He was conscious but playing out choices without variation. There was a woman beside him. He wanted to turn his head and look at her face, but that was not what he did when this occurred, so he could not do it now. He saw only the road ahead. His hands were not on the wheels, but there was still a wheel for him to grip. He didn't think there often were wheels in cars.
The sun was small that day, or the size it ought to have been but would never be again. How could something so comparatively inconsequential be the mother of all life?
Another car hit him. Hit them. Someone was in the back seat. More than one someone? He could feel them there, could hear that something was being said, but it was all so quick.
He knew this was not his death, but it was someone's death that day. If it had been his death, he could not have remembered the blood, the salt of it.
The picture was a flash, but it lingered. He could not be certain he was present for it, any more than he could be said to be present for anything else that the angel shrieked.
Had this happened to him in a lost corner of time, or was it another cognitive illusion to convey meaning?
[A screen flickering forever between channels.] The angel raised one wing that had covered its neck like a scarf. Zed thought the angel meant him to see something there, to understand a further elaboration behind it, but he could not.
"Who are you?" Zed asked. He recalled lessons from a forgotten religion -- though it could not belong to the religion in the way that lightning could not belong to the myth of its making -- and the names of things like this. Michael. Uriel. Lucifer. Israfel.
A thousand eyes blinked at the question. [The taste of sunlight on the rain of a battlefield.]
He saw the name and found it achingly beautiful, but it was not something he could repeat. "What was I meant to do? What is my business on Earth?"
[A child's scribble in a gold-leafed book, otherwise untouched, thrown into a rushing river.]
"Other spirits have said you could tell this."
[The optimism of rubbing the chest of a stillborn.]
"You can't tell me what I am supposed to do?"
[A theatrical play on its ten-thousandth showing,] said the angel [The lead forgetting her line. The mute stares of the audience and other actors.]
"When others have come here, why haven't you let them leave?"
[Sublimation.]
Zed puzzled over this image. "You can bring the dead back to life?"
The angel's wings undulated down its slick, dark body. [A living body picked molecule by molecule reduced to a pile of elements. The pile reassembled. The form the same. The life absent.]
The angel did not allow Zed to question this. He felt matter assembling, the carbon and nitrogen, hydrogen twins marrying an oxygen. He barely had time to notice the difference between the states.
The human body is infinitely intricate, systems within systems that must work in consort if death isn't going to claim it at once. One needed an ecosystem of bacteria to maintain homeostasis, evolution lazy when something else could shoulder that burden.
This was not Zed's body. It did not look as Zed thought he did. No part of this had been Zed when he was alive; those particles recycled a million times over.
This was not like when the dead tried to pretend at life, exhausting their essences to hold together enough to be substantial. This form existed without effort.
"Am I alive?" he asked, his voice small but audible. The sound of it was painful in these sudden ears.
[A pile of dust shaped.]
No, thought Zed. Something different than dead.
The angel seemed to forget him there, as he acclimated to being corporeal. When he entered the cave, he felt blind. With eyes to see and the cool angelic flame by which to do it, he felt as though his senses were filtered through a pinhole camera. How had the living managed to get anything done?
Even the pain of rocks on his bare feet, the sickening dankness of the cave, was for the moment curious in its novelty. He found tiny hairs on his knuckles and wept at the glory of them.
He could not let this distract him, seductive though it was.
[A doll,] shrieked the angel, though Zed thought it did this more gently in deference to his physical ears, [manipulated by the massive hand of an unseen child.]
Adults loomed over him, unreachable giants. His hands were like nothing then. The fingers were stubby, but they gripped a flower and pulled on it. His foot went somewhere it should not have, a nest in the ground, and at once, the swarm surrounded him. They stung him so instantly that it was as though he inhaled needles, and they stuck out on his exhale.
This had not been his death.
[A statue composed of bones and fur.]
Zed must have been a child once, as everyone was, but he suspected he may not have been this child.
[A ship replaced plank by plank. Another ship built from the discarded wood of the first.]
"What do you get out of it?"
[A bonsai tree in a clay pot,] the angel said.
In the presence of this being, it was impossible to restrain the question. "Am I in Hell?"
The angel considered this a long time, too long for Zed's comfort. The body had begun registering the gravity of being in this cave, literally as well as figuratively. Zed could not think of it as his body, but the body that was presently him.
[A distorted mirror in an abandoned funhouse, reflected in a hall of other mirrors. A view from space of the Earth.]
The bathroom mirror was shattered. He thought he might have shattered it, but he could not place why now what had possessed him to do this. Was he angry?
His hands ached, and maybe that was why. He wanted to take something for the pain and poured pills into his palm, calloused and tan. The pain grew as he tried to grip them. He swallowed them without water and waited for the pain to ebb, growing nauseated and sleepy.
This had not been his death.
Zed wasn't sure what he believed in life. He had little recollection of whatever had preceded this death, taking visions for lies. He wondered if he had believed in angels or gods then.
"You are an angel. Why don't you help us?"
[A blond eunuch plummeting into an animal graveyard]
"Will you leave before the sun explodes?"
[The sun, its explosion etched in acid on a golden plate that has always existed. The angel holding the plate in its thirteen wings.]
He suspected this meant that this being, this angel, did not understand time as he did. The sun would explode because the sun will have always exploded. The angel was not here to witness it, had never arrived, would never leave, and was not here now.
[An apathetic grave, bereft of mourners, an embalmed corpse.]
The angel -- or whatever this creature might have been in truth -- was saying that Zed had not minded dying once, and perhaps it did not matter when he did again. The angel had not been born and would not die, so Zed could not invest much faith in its opinions of death.
"I lived," he said, "and I am dead now. Not what you've done to me."
[A swarm of golden beetles rising from a grave to roll dung, the bright sweep of the Milky Way above them, orienting them. A massive black sphere embedded in arid ground.]
He heard the sound now. He might have heard it before, but he was unused to hearing, and there was too much to filter out.
He was not alone in this cave. Not another member of the dead.
Not far from the angel were hundreds of skeletons, some fresh enough to have tatters of skin remaining, some fragile with age. Many jagged on the pile, cracked open, the marrow scraped clean.
Behind them, among them, crouched something it took a moment before he recognized as a human being. She had flesh the color and texture of melted candle wax, skin that had never seen the light above as surely lethal as it must have been.
He understood that she was no more alive than he was, but a kept creature for the angel. She had been dead, and now she was not, but neither could this be called living. The bones were a testament to those who had come before and those who would come after Zed.
Zed wanted her to keep her distance from him, but she had no intention of doing this. She grabbed him, moving in a way he remembered from scurrying vermin but not the gait of a human. How long must she have been down here, like this? Had she killed these poor unfortunates?
No. Or, rather, she may have been the murderer of some. She was centuries too young to have killed them all unless the angel granted particularly cruel immortality. The angel seemed too indifferent even for cruelty.
She placed her lips on his. He remembered this gesture, that he should find this pleasurable, but that was absent. He could feel her, but it was too vivid. Even her rank breath was an assault on his senses.
His hands reached for him and pulled him further into her.
"Dit was so lank sonder kameraadskap," she said, her voice soft despite his expectations from the rest of her. Something that became what she had ought to rasp or speak in a chittering brogue. Her skin hung from the frame of her sharp bones, dripping from her but for her distended belly. Threads of pale hair remained on her head. Her clouded eyes saw him, but he did not know how. "U moet vir altyd by my bly. Dit is sondig om my te verlaat."
That he could not understand her upset him. For their many faults, the dead spoke the same language no matter when they had died. It was not a language that required a previous context.
Zed did not know what language he now spoke. To him, it sounded still like the speech of the dead, but, in cursing her, he knew she could not understand him either.
Still, body language came naturally. She understood his horror, and he understood how she tried to gesture that she was harmless.
"U kan hier bly," she further said, though with a shyness knowing that he could not understand her. "Die engel sal jou aan die lewe hou totdat dit tyd is, selfs al smeek jy vir die dood, die enigste manier waarop jy sterf, is om die son te sien." To this, she added, "Ek sal jou nie eet voordat jy sterf nie. U moet my eet as ek eers sterf."
"I don't want any of this," he said, with his body more than his words. "I am not here to be trapped in this cave. Something's pet, like you."
"Ek sou jou nie seermaak nie. Ek is meer eensaam as honger."
[The concept of ownership,] interrupted the angel, [The sensation of pressure.]
Zed understood her then, as much as he could the angel, and that she meant him no harm. She had killed none of those who died here, though she had feasted on the remains of a few. This was not unusual, he understood.
"When she dies here, what then?"
[Smoke, absorbed by a breeze.]
The angel did not reconstitute the dead but destroyed them in the process. What the angel offered him was the antithesis of finishing his business. "You can't keep me here."
[A dust devil in scalding sunlight. Rotting in the darkness.]
"You won't kill me," Zed said, believing it was true, "because you have not made me live again. I don't accept this."
[Snow on mist over a reflective puddle.]
Zed fell. At first, it felt slow, as his body no longer touched anything but the friction of air. Then the first rock found his side, below his ribs, and his flight twisted and spun. As he turned, he could make out people on the ledge above him, growing smaller with his distance: another rock and another. Part of him shattered, well beyond simple breaking, before his descent could finish.
This had not been his death.
"This is a lie and a prison."
[Ascent with indifference.]
Zed felt nothing once more, his matter evaporated, and the numbness of it deafened him.
Insubstantial and exhausted, he faded. The creature in the cave, who had once been human, then dead, then imprisoned, wailed after him.
Thomm Quackenbush is an author and teacher in the Hudson Valley. He has published four novels in his Night's Dream series (We Shadows, Danse Macabre, Artificial Gods, and Flies to Wanton Boys). He has sold jewelry in Victorian England, confused children as a mad scientist, filed away more books than anyone has ever read, and tried to inspire the learning disabled, gifted, and adjudicated. He can cross one eye, raise one eyebrow, and once accidentally groped a ghost. When not writing, he can be found biking, hiking the Adirondacks, grazing on snacks at art openings, and keeping a straight face when listening to people tell him they are in touch with 164 species of interstellar beings.