Chapter 19

Well, I see haven’t achieved my goal. If you look quickly, you might catch her exiting through the doors just up the street. Yes, there. Ah, there goes our sweet Sofi in a rush. But her poker face, the very one Livingstone taught her, masks her expression. Could you tell if that phone conversation delivered good news or ill? She has become such an enigma to me; I doubt I should ever unravel all of her secrets. Oh, and now she’s in a cab. Look away; don’t stare as she goes past. Let her go. She has endured far too much to stay.
I, however…I have no pressing duty, so I shall continue the tale, if you wish. Order another drink, perhaps? Shall I call the waiter? But what am I saying? You’re a competent customer—oh, I’ll cover the bill, don’t you worry—order whatever you’d like. Now. Where was I?
Oh yes. Well, the first thing I said to Sofi when Old Fred and Trent had split off to secure the far end of the cavern was to question the condition of Livingstone. Sofi answered in a positive, hopeful tone, “That man can sense trouble better than any alive. I’d be honored to meet the death that finds him. And I can guarantee you that it won’t be by the talons and beaks of the harpies. They have no idea what kind of force they’re dealing with by pursuing Oscar. It will take much more than an exiled demon to bring him down. He’ll be perfectly fine.”
“How did they capture him in the first place?” Warren asked, “Or any of you, for that matter?”
“Surprise. They found us without our most important weapon,” Sofi stated.
“What’s that?”
“Knowledge. And still without it Oscar alone killed more than twenty of the ambushers before they overwhelmed us with the tranquilizers. He was still fighting when I went under. God knows how many he destroyed…”
Warren stared off into space, trying to visualize this hobo as an elite soldier. He had glimpsed it in the past few days of travel, here and there. But to find Livingstone backed into a corner, giving his enemies absolute hell before the end—that he would like to see. Maybe not witness firsthand. But see.
A butterfly landed on his cheek and Warren brushed it away, peering at the giant ovular containers that glowed like the lava lamp his brother had received one Christmas several years ago. It didn’t have the same globular inner motion as that little lamp did, but rather a bubbling or fizzy quality to it. It was almost as if the contents were under high pressure—like a Henry Weinhart’s root beer that you accidentally drop before opening.
Sofi inspected the glass more closely while Warren found a comfortable seat, stretching out a bit on the plush pillows and keeping the butterflies from landing on his face. “This doesn’t seem like demon architecture,” she mused. Warren’s eyebrows shot up.
“That’s good news…right?” he ventured. Sofi nodded. “Does that mean we’re beyond the harpies’ domain?”
“No, not necessarily. They’re cannibals, really, they only…” Sofi began to explain, but a crash above them stole their attention. Warren watched in awe as a figure, shrouded with an aura of broken glass shards, fell backwards from the curved ceiling—bright gunshots flashed from his hand, punctuating a screeching roar which issued from the hole behind him. Feathery forms flapped and fell from the opening, as the figure crashed to the ground, rolled to a stop, and rose to a one-knee stance, still firing at the broken window from whence he had fallen. Warren had covered his head to protect himself from the falling glass, and when the splinters stopped tinkling on the floor, he looked first to Sofi, who now had her weapon drawn and was firing at the ceiling, then to the figure with a glinting sword in one hand and a blazing gun in the other now striding back towards the opening. It could be none other than Livingstone.
In the soft light, he saw a multitude of feathery shadows, but he heard a whole chorus of crazed, dying shrieks. Then he remembered his own powers, though dwindled by the effects of time, but nonetheless there—he felt it coursing through his blood. He touched a writhing harpy and it smoldered into ashes. And so the trio worked, Livingstone and Sofi firing at the stream of feathers pouring from the hole, and Warren sending each struggling, downed bird from her loosening grip on life.
Other voices joined the circle; bigger blasts echoed through the cavernous room. Warren glanced and there stood Old Fred, sending bursts of feathers to mix with the butterflies in what seemed a blizzard of dim color. And after what only seemed a few seconds, the room fell quiet.
Livingstone rubbed his neck, grimacing at the harpies as Warren cleared the last of them. “Don’t,” Livingstone began, as if futilely addressing a disobedient child, “Don’t use…ahh forget it.” He sighed when Warren looked up at him. “We’re already screwed as it is,” he lamented with his other hand massaging his forehead.
“How do you mean that, Oscar?” Old Fred questioned, brushing a butterfly from his eyes.
“Well the only stairway out of here was back up there,” Livingstone said, glancing to the place from which he had fallen.
“How do you know that?” Trent questioned him sharply.
Livingstone scratched at his head idly. “Demons squeal, too, you know, when you apply the right pressure. What’s with the butterflies down here? It’s like you shot at a hornet’s nest…except with bubble guns or something and got butterflies instead of angry wasps.”
“This is a strange place—strange forces at work here,” Sofi answered.
“Like?” Livingstone inquired. Sofi nodded towards the wilting and blooming figures in the center. He squinted and started walking.
“They’re chained,” Warren volunteered, stepping alongside Livingstone “and imprisoned until they finish a task, I would guess.”
“Hmm,” was all Livingstone said while he inspected the figures. He began walking around them clockwise while the others filled in around the scrubbing prisoners.
“Five of them here,” Warren stated, “all mesmerized in trying to clean this door.” He looked back to Livingstone in the dim light. “Can you read it?” he asked the hobo.
“I’m not sure I…” Livingstone began, but then epiphany lit his eyes. “Get away!” he shouted and tried to step backwards. His exclamation made Warren jump, but his feet felt sluggish. Then a chilling numbness crept up from his toes. He glanced to his friends. Old Fred was and to stand as erect as she possibly could. But Warren felt his leg muscles weakening. Then a couple shots rang out—Livingstone fired indiscriminately at the five washerwomen. But his bullets had no effect, seemingly being absorbed by the figures. Sofi quivered momentarily, then collapsed entirely. Warren tried to lift his feet—it was like they were glued to the floor. When the numbness reached his knees, he fell. Livingstone had fallen forwards, into a push-up position and Warren could see the muscles quivering in his arms as he resisted the strange, sticky gravitation.
“Whash gungon?” Old Fred slurred. He kneeled, sitting back on his feet, head lolling to his right side. Warren heard Livingstone finally collapse in a heap, then get to his knees, like the others, including himself, already had. They seemed to be moving inward, slowly, each heading towards one of the five imprisoned women.
A purple gas began to issue from around the door, circling outwards. Old Fred blew at it, but to no effect. When it touched his knee, the mist seemed to seep into him. Suddenly Old Fred turned the same, off-dark color as the washerwomen. Warren gasped and looked around him. Trent and Livingstone had been simultaneously affected. He looked at Sofi who tiredly tried to stretch away from the swirling gas—Warren watched in horror as she was consumed, unable to do a thing. All his muscles were relaxed and he had no command over them.
When the mist touched his own leg, a gasp of wind rushed through the room from the center, blowing back the butterflies and dispelling the dark mist—and the previous prisoners. It was only the five of them, huddled around the glass door. Warren’s four companions all imitated the motions of their predecessors, the lax stretching, then slapping at the glass with dry sponges. He felt paralyzed, but noticed he wasn’t in the same motion as the others. He tried speech.
“Sofi, can you hear me?” he said, and surprisingly well. She didn’t answer him, however. He glanced down at his hands—they were still the pinkish yellow of the Caucasian skin. Immediately he wondered if his sight was deceiving him and he were just as futilely trapped as the others. He grabbed lazily at a pillow and found he could still feel it. He brushed it closer to his side. Perhaps it was the demon’s power. Perhaps he had been spared—had it taken the brunt of the attack? But he was still fairly paralyzed and definitely rooted to the spot.
The good part, he reasoned somewhere in the recesses of his mind, was that he could now take a good look at the writing once every ten seconds or so, since he himself wasn’t part of the obscuring rhythm. So he focused himself entirely on this task—if he could understand what it said, perhaps he could figure out how to break its binding spell, or whatever it was, and get out of this place.
So he focused on the far side of the glass from him, after Old Fred had raised himself back up. Sofi plummeted to the surface, but didn’t cover what he was looking at. Warren squinted. “roodsih” seemed to be the first word scrawled. Whoever wrote this didn’t seem to know how to use spaces, Warren thought. All the lines just looped together. Perhaps it was just rood. He remembered one of his English professers talking about rood. It was an old word for a cross. Perhaps that was it. But what about a cross? Or crosses, plural? Roods?
Warren tried to move on, after Old Fred had tried to scrub roods from the door, and failing, stretched again weepingly. “ihtnealce?” He knew a Neal from high school. Was this a proper name? Maybe it was supposed to read, “Iht Neal” Crosses it Neal? Warren lamented his situation. This was going to be impossible. But he kept reading. “Cotel baeb.” Maybe this meant a Babylonian prison? Or a hotel with cots for infants? Warren felt this was getting a little too strange. So he read on to the only part that made sense to him: “will forwards and backwards.”
His friends were swaying forwards and backwards. Did their movement have something to do with solving this riddle? Warren tried to blink the heaviness from his eyelids. “Will forwards and backwards.” Maybe that was just part of the curse placed on them. He read on.
“egaug nal” he figured before Livingstone had fallen face first on the line. “Gauge,” maybe? That was almost spelled correctly, it only had a letter forwards. And “lan” might have been spelled backwards. Then epiphany sent a shiver down his spine. “lan-gauge…language.” Perhaps all the words he couldn’t understand were backwards, while the ones he could understand were forwards. He looked at the final words, written in front of him. “swon kohwen oylno.”
He tilted his head, trying to place the letters in reverse order in his mind without mental spaces. “Onlyonewhoknows” Yes, that was it. It said, “Only one who knows language will forwards and backwards…” he stopped. It had made sense until he had joined the two phrases. Perhaps he had to reverse it. “Only one who knows language backwards and forwards will…” Perfect, he thought and squinted to see the first part again. “Roodsihtnealcotelbaeb,” he determined after several tries. He closed his eyes, trying to see it backwards. “Beableto,” was all he could pry out without looking. At least it made some sense. He sighed and took a deep breath afterward and held it, willing himself to think. The numbness held his head in a fog. He shook it lightly and looked back to the sliding glass door that wouldn’t slide, but was giving up its mystery bit by bit.
“Cleanthis,” he finally determined. Clean. That was a good word. Then rood. Cross. What did a cross have to do with cleaning a door? He couldn’t figure it out, his eyelids were so heavy.
Did he have to cross himself to break this spell? He tried it the catholic way, right then left, and waited. The numbness throbbed in his head. Then he crossed himself like the greeks, left, then right. Again nothing happened. He blinked for an extended second, head lilting to the right. Back to the beginning. What was it? he asked himself. “Only one who knows language backwards and forwards will be able to clean crosses.” That didn’t make any sense with the writing being on a sliding glass door and not a cross. Wasn’t that what Sofi and Livingstone and whoever else was close by were trying to do? Wash a cross? Or a door? Yeah, a door, he told himself. He looked back to the far end.
The letters down there didn’t spell cross. Backwards or forwards. Why had he been thinking about crosses. Oh yes, he remembered, it was the rood. That old English poem. Or middle English. Something. Rood. But that didn’t. That wasn’t. Warren narrowed his eyebrows, toying on the edge of epiphany. Rood. Rood. Backwards and forwards. Rood forwards was rood. Rood backwards was…was…what was it? he asked himself. He shook his head again. The strain of thinking was so much. He looked to his right. Rood. Backwards.
Sofi stretched backwards, mourning her dry sponge. What would she say rood backwards was? Would he care? She was beautiful, and caring. He couldn’t care about anything less than that. He looked back to the glass with the writing on it. Such a mystery. He gathered himself and ran it through his mind one final time. “Only one who knows language,” he remembered easily, “will forwards and backwards,” he read, then remembered that was wrong and flipped it, “backwards and forwards will be able to clean…” he remembered clean. That was what they were trying to do, right? Warren squinted at the far side again. “roodsiht.” That started with a t, then. Then an h. “Th” he imagined. “This,” was what it said then. “This rood.” No backwards. “This,” then a d. Epiphany clicked. “This door.” Door. Not a cross, he sighed. “Only one who knows language backwards and forwards will be able to clean this door,” was its message. He memorized it. Or thought that he should. Then he wondered if he should say it aloud.Warren licked his lips with a thick tongue. “Only one who knows…language…backwards and forwards will…be able…to clean this door,” he finally spat out.
He waited, expecting the fog to lift. The only thing he heard, however, was a liquid plop at his side. With a flimsy neck, he rolled his head to the left and found a sponge at his side. But it was wet. He grabbed at it a couple times—failing to grasp it. Instead, he gave up and set his hand on it. But it wasn’t his hand. It was more purple than he remembered. He had never had purple hands before. Not ever. And with that thought, he lost consciousness and drifted off into dreamless space.