Thorns of Glory, page 25
“You mean to say this slot is haunted by dead Jaredites?” I made no effort to soften my sarcasm.
Lehi covered his ears and shuddered. Not from the cold. From frustration. He clearly didn’t want to discuss the subject further.
Ammara put her arms around her son and said to the rest of us, “As Tashlín has explained, we don’t pretend to understand. There are many things we don’t comprehend. But my husband would not mislead us. If Moroni believes this is the surest way to reach Ammon’s Summit, then it’s the surest way.”
I pursed my lips and nodded. “We’ll rest another moment, then continue on.”
“I’ve become convinced,” said Jacobah, “that stopping is worse. The cold is unbearable. We need to keep moving and stir our blood.”
“I ag-g-gree,” said Mary.
If it got too much colder, we’d risk hypothermia. Forget Lehi’s mumbo-jumbo about whispering and “distrusting our thoughts.” The next travelers who entered here might find seven frozen corpses.
“Then, let’s go,” I said.
Mary lent her strength to support Jesse. The temperature gave definition to everyone’s breath. We looked like a column of locomotives. My foot crunched through something. Ice! Many places along the edges of the stream and between rocks were coated with a sheen of ice.
We rounded the bend. And then I saw it: the “slot.”
The reason this corridor had been given that name wasn’t clear. It was heavily shadowed. Yet, as Lehi had correctly described, it wasn’t a cave. The sky was visible, but there was no hint of the sun. If it passed overhead, the narrow space wouldn’t have let it be visible for long. Such a brief glimpse of sunlight wouldn’t have affected the temperature much. No, it wasn’t a cave, but there were caves on either side. Sort of. It might have been better described as shelves on either side and a very wide overhang that seemed to run the whole length of the slot. The ceilings were often the height of a man, but most places would have required someone to stoop or crawl in order to enter. It wasn’t always possible to tell how deep these under-hangs went beneath the shelves. If there was a back wall, it often vanished into a dark void. The cliff above us was eternally weeping with spring water. Great icicles, like stalactites, hung along the lips on either side. The largest ones resembled great columns or pillars.
It made me think of a tourist site I’d almost visited in southern Utah. Dad had said it was a cave with one room that was so cold it had ice year-round, no matter what season of the year. He tried to sell us on the detour by explaining that Mormon pioneers had harvested the ice in the days before refrigeration. We’d unanimously vetoed his idea. The goal was to get to Vegas to ride a roller coaster.
This slot was a humongous example of the same geological anomaly. Minerals from seeping water and melting icicles formed colorful stripes: rusty reds but also turquoise and yellow. I saw icicles as black as coal, causing me to wonder if it was an icicle at all. A rocky stalactite, perhaps? No. The surface was wet. It was ice.
“Don’t touch anything!” Tashlín exclaimed.
I removed my hand as if from a branding iron.
Lehi turned back. “She’s right. Touch nothing.” He chided his sister. “Speak in the quietest tones. The slot continues for some distance. Disturb nothing. Nothing.”
Easier said than done. Seconds later Mary slipped. I caught her but not before Jesse collapsed against the bank, breaking away a hunk of ice. I wasn’t fast enough to spare Mary from bruising her knee. Her shriek was louder than Tashlín’s exclamation not to touch the ebony stalactite. Our clamor reverberated in the dark voids on either side. I counted three, perhaps four, echoes before it completely faded. If we’d wanted to avoid waking the dead, that objective was toast.
“Are you all right?” I asked Mary, keeping my voice low despite her piercing shriek just seconds earlier.
She stood upright. “I-I think so. Yes. But I c-can’t feel my feet. Or ankles. D-don’t know what I’m stepping on.”
Jesse sat in the current, chunks of ice bobbing around him and flowing downstream. His face was pallid. I hoisted him out of the water. He whimpered as I clumsily put pressure on his wounded shoulder.
“Sorry,” I said. Then to Mary, “I’ll take over for a while.”
“No,” she insisted. “I can s-still do it.”
“Let Mary do it,” Jesse snapped. He added more diplomatically, “She’s . . . smoother. I mean she moves more smoothly. Evenly.”
I looked at Mary. “Sure?”
She became defensive. “I said I’ll d-do it.”
I hesitated, appraising her. I nodded, albeit reluctantly. She got in place to support Jesse’s weight.
The company inched forward again, one step at a time. Less than a minute after we resumed our journey, I heard something. I glanced beneath the shelf to my left, though I wasn’t certain from which side the sound had emanated. Either side revealed a depth too black and deep for me to see a back wall.
Jacobah noticed my reaction. “What was it?”
“You didn’t hear it?”
He listened. “I’m . . . not sure. Maybe.”
Everyone peered into the void, right and left. Suddenly Tashlín gasped.
“What is it?” asked her mother.
“Shadow. I don’t—” Tashlín turned away—deliberately. Moroni’s daughter straightened up and faced forward. “It was nothing.” She’d quickly convinced herself that peering into the darkness on either side served no practical purpose.
Young Lehi had obviously learned this lesson long ago. He gazed straight ahead, unflinching.
I tried to follow his example, but my willpower lasted all of thirty seconds. Another whisper resonated—more distinct. And definitely from the left. This region revealed a number of strange features. Four or five thick icicles stretched from ceiling to floor like prison bars. The rear wall was now visible—pure ice, pale, blue, faintly translucent, with zebra stripes of rust and yellow crosscutting the surface.
There were holes in this back wall, like Swiss cheese. I couldn’t perceive anything beyond these holes, and I wasn’t about to venture any closer to get a better view.
That whisper! So eerie. I swore I understood it. Rather than some dead Jaredite, the voice I heard was . . . my own.
“Young love,” it exhaled.
The intonation reminded me of an old person watching two lovers strolling arm in arm.
The statement was so irksome that, before I could catch myself, I blurted, “What?”
Lehi looked at me, expression fearful and disapproving. Had I interacted with whatever lurked beneath that shelf? Apparently he considered this a big no-no.
I heard it again—my own voice. Something shifted behind that luminescent wall, crossing several holes like some kind of phantom flitting behind a slice of Swiss cheese.
She loves him. You know it. You know it. You know it.
I crinkled my forehead. What the crud? My eyes took in Mary and Jesse, almost involuntarily. My breath snagged. I did know what that whisper had meant. But it was a lie!—just as Lehi had warned. Yet there she was, supporting his every step. Heck, she’d insisted!
Someone was crying. Tashlín. She’d heard something too. Like her younger brother, she was doing her best to avoid looking beneath the shelves. A message had pierced her senses anyway, and it had upset her profoundly. Ammara tried to comfort her.
I met Jacobah’s eyes. He glared at me with . . . displeasure? Were his teeth clenched with enmity? I didn’t understand.
For some inexplicable reason, I felt I had to defend myself. “Whatever you think you heard, it’s not true.”
He answered accusingly, “If you wanted to leave him behind, why didn’t you just stay with Apollus and the others? Why did you come with me?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You know who I mean,” he sneered.
“Jesse? Leave Jesse behind? That’s nuts!”
He shook his head contemptuously. “I’ve suspected it all along. So much easier if he’d died, eh? How unfortunate for you.”
Lehi halted and faced us all. “Enough! Stop talking! EVERYONE! Don’t listen to it! Any of it! Pray! Ask for God’s help. His mercy. Ask Him to silence the voices. Keep moving! We must pass quickly!”
Wow. The kid had some lungs. He could be pretty dramatic if he wanted to be. He’d shattered his own rule about whispering. Jacobah looked like he was trying to internalize what Lehi had said. He looked away, but his jaw remained clenched. His anger—his hatred of me—hadn’t dissipated. Ammara looked grief-stricken. She wasn’t crying like her daughter, but she squeezed her head with both palms, as if afflicted by a skull-battering headache. Her eyes pinched thin as her fingers dug into her forehead and temples.
I heard Mary reciting the Lord’s prayer. “Our Father who art in heaven . . .”
Another shadow crossed the void. How could I have ignored it? It had zipped behind the icy wall directly to Mary’s left, tarrying deep within the shelf.
And he loves her, too. You’ve been in denial. You’ve never appreciated her. Never the way you should. Never. Never.
This wasn’t a ghost. It was my own voice!
“Shut up! SHUT UP!”
Maybe I was cuckoo. I was shouting at myself! Here was the thing. The mind-warping thing: each of these thoughts, however vague, however fleeting—
Had. Crossed. My. Mind.
Jesse glanced back at me. When he realized I was staring at him, he abruptly turned away. His injury would have made turning his head like that excruciatingly painful. He’d done it anyway. Endured it because . . .
God, help me! Help me, God. Bless me. Protect me. Stay with me. Silence it. Silence them. No more. Keep it silent—
My prayer persisted inside my head. Didn’t matter what I said, as long as I directed every thought to God. I tried to flood my brain with prayer to keep that terrible voice—the one that wasn’t me!—from entering. It could no longer interfere. I was determined that there would be no available space.
My strategy fell apart as I glanced to the right. I did a double take. A shape materialized, like something otherworldly, an alien in Star Trek beaming onto the Transporter Deck. A Gadianton Ghost!
“Watch out!” I cried.
I armed myself with my obsidian sword like Wild Bill drawing a pistol. The figure wore an immense feathered headdress. Any exposed skin was branded with tattoos, teeth filed into fangs, ears, nose, and cheeks pierced with human bones, shoulders and forehead laden with human skulls, neck festooned with human fingers and other gory paraphernalia. The creature hadn’t fully formed. To defeat it, I had to strike like a rattlesnake. It was only steps away. I leaped from the stream, crashed through several icicles, and swung my blade at its neck.
“No!” one of my companions bellowed.
The voice was so warped as it entered my ears that I couldn’t identify who had spoken. Was it male or female? I remained entranced by whatever was before me. My blade had swiped right through the visage, no resistance. I nearly stumbled from inertia. Despite the lack of resistance, the image did change. It was the most fantastical thing I’d ever seen, and I’d seen some fantastical things.
The head of the Gadianton Ghost separated from its body exactly where I’d struck, but it floated there. In fact, it sort of moved in a circular pattern around the spine of its severed neck. The visage remained blurry and preternatural, but I could perceive, in three perfect dimensions, each layer of flesh: muscles, esophagus, arteries, and veins. My slice had been slightly diagonal; a wriggling strip of shoulder muscle clung to the disembodied head. Blood spurted, but in a weightless environment, no gravity. Droplets spewed from the head and neck, floating upward and outward in globular clusters. The droplets divided and dwindled at a rapid rate of speed, finally splattering against the translucent wall. Not just splattering but creating a pattern I couldn’t immediately identify.
“Harry, come back!” a warped, dissonant voice shouted. “Not real! A demon! Mirage!”
Considering the distortion in the vocalization, I was surprised I could make out any of the words.
The disembodied head continued swirling above the neck, bearing its filed fangs, laughing. Not a stereotypical maniacal laugh, like from some horror movie. The amusement was sincere, as if I was the victim of a good-natured prank. The joke was on me; no harm intended. The headless wraith was . . . my friend?
I recognized the pattern now, the image created by the splattering drops of blood. They didn’t all splatter against the wall. They encircled me. Some droplets impacted my face. And they didn’t stay red. They arranged themselves into a familiar picture: The most powerful image in my memory. The Savior stood before me, surrounded by His twelve Nephite disciples, including Jonas, Nephi, and the rest. Jesus was beckoning. He wanted to lay His hands upon my head. He wanted to heal me, much the same as He’d done when I was a boy and he’d declared, “Arise and walk.” I’m not certain how I distinguished this complex three-dimensional, blood-begotten picture from that of the laughing, guillotined ghost. They were separate things, yet I comprehended both.
“Not another step, Harry!” commanded contorted voices. More than one, I think. “Come back! Come back!”
I glanced back. My companions stood in the stream, gaping at me in horror, faces illuminated by sunlight directly overhead, perfectly illuminating the narrow canyon. However, and curiously, the radiance that shimmered inside the shelves on either side of the stream was more inviting, more enticing, than the lighted place where they stood. I felt as though I were hovering on a precipice, halfway in and halfway out. My body stood poised at a crossroad of two . . . two what? Two universes? Two realities?
I glanced back. The image of the Savior and His disciples continued to beckon. The disembodied ghost was also there, but it had shriveled into something more macabre, if that was possible. No more blood spurted. Every drop appeared to have been sucked from the apparition’s veins in order to paint the three-dimensional image.
Image? This was no “image.” The beckoning figures, the Lord and His servants . . . none of it was real. I sensed . . . I sensed that one more step and I would enter tranquility. I’d transcend the veil of paradise. I perceived something else. Another step and I’d be stuck. I’d be unable to go back. Paralyzed. Suffocated by a thousand coils. Yet . . . I’d also be happy, mummified in a state of bliss. That was the message that infiltrated my brain. Pulsing, pulsing, pulsing. Was it a warning? A promise? One step and all my afflictions would end. All my concerns. My confusion. Any negativity in my current universe would evaporate like steam from a geyser.
Or would it? If I took that next step forward, would it define the moment my bona fide curse would begin? An idea sprouted in my mind. A gospel doctrine. Okay, it wasn’t doctrine. Somebody—Uncle Garth, I think—once clarified to me that it was merely a myth. Yet the idea was so freely circulated among Church members that a vast number of them believed it, despite efforts to trace it to any authorized source. The belief was this: If someone glimpsed, just for an instant, the incomprehensible glories of the Telestial Kingdom—the lowest realm of our Heavenly Father’s dominions—people would commit suicide in droves to reach it. Its glory was so breathtaking that many would declare, “It’s enough!” That reward, by itself, justified putting a dramatic end to all earthly miseries. Garth condemned the notion, lamenting how many individuals, souls wracked by mortality’s crucibles—trials intended to help them become more like God—might have been enticed to cut short their lives, relying upon even a shred of this misconception to rationalize it. “Glory means glory,” Garth had explained, “even as it applies to God’s lowliest rewards. Trouble is, we forget the hellish pains that must be endured to achieve this state of being. Contemplating the true nature of how it would feel to be wracked, for even an hour, in the torments of that inescapable station ought to inspire us to reach higher. Any excogitation of our loftier potential should cause any thought of leaving this life early to wither and fade.”
I believe this memory of my uncle’s words, at this precise time, was a gift. God’s gift at a vulnerable instant. That tranquility beckoning me to take one more step suddenly tasted like sugar. No, not sugar. Like NutraSweet. Or a better analogy: like cotton candy that vanished on the tongue the same as every other worldly gratification. Whereas the alternate flavor, the one I was sure I could taste now, was eternal. Did my next step represent something more? Careening over a hidden cliff? Plunging into a pool of acid? Slipping into a vortex that would spin my atoms into smithereens?
I took in the image painted in blood, one last time. I gazed into my Savior’s eyes. Inviting. Enticing. All at once it merged with the desiccated face of the ghost, skin shrunken tightly against its skull, eye sockets darker than the void beyond the ice wall.
I did not step forward. Neither did I step backward. I leaped!
I threw myself so forcefully away from the beckoning mirage that I nearly threw myself into the cavern on the opposite side. Jacobah caught me. I bowled him over. We were drenched in the stream, but that cold splash of water was exactly what I needed. Maybe it was what Jacobah needed too, though his eyes were still inflamed with resentment.
“What were you thinking?” he rebuked. “Didn’t you hear Lehi? Couldn’t you hear us all screaming?”
An unexpected voice came to my defense—Jesse’s. “Stop berating him! You never respected Harry, Jacobah. Never thought he was worthy of his weapons. ‘Soft as a mushroom,’ you said. ‘A liability.’”
Jacobah suddenly became self-conscious. “That was ages ago! Before we—”
“You never wanted to protect him, Jacobah,” Jesse interrupted. “Not like Ryan. You just wanted him to feel indebted.”
