Ishtar Read online

  She’s a catwalk model, an MTV rapper. Doctor Anna remembers those things and is occasionally grateful for small mercies. All that tempest of clamour and noise. Apocalypse couldn’t have rained down soon enough.

  She doesn’t stay watching by the embers for long. The cries tell her they’ve found something of interest. Anna goes to join them, picking over the sharp rocks, wishing she had a little more light to see by.

  The girls have found a secret cave. A tunnel sloping downwards. Footprints not their own. A few discarded items. Evidence of occupation. Recent or not — that’s the tricky question. Daisy and Wattle light torches bound with pitch. Flax is frightened, wants to go back for her skulls. She and Daisy argue. Not in English. They’re jabbering prayer talk but Anna’s heard it all before.

  “It’s a hidden tunnel,” she explains. “Passage to the Underworld!”

  Flax doesn’t care. She breaks from the rest of them, hurries across the rocky waste to the safety of hearth, skull and goat. But she doesn’t get far. Something whistles through the air, fells her swiftly, her pale skin and robe splattered red. The sky is spitting rocks. The others sprint for the tunnel mouth and its meagre shelter. Rocks rain down on them, sharp-edged, well aimed. By the time they reach the tunnel, all are bleeding. All but Anna. Miraculously, she has escaped without a single scratch. She would wonder about it but there’s no time. The injured nuns are cut and terrified, separated from their skulls, left with nothing but strings of reliquary bones to protect them.

  Their babbling continues, punctuated by unbridled shrieks of terror. Soon, a competing noise strikes each one silent. Outside on the sand, something is being slaughtered. Might be the goats, but the terrible gurgling sounds could equally belong to poor little Flax.

  Terror keeps them pinned within the comparative safety of the overhanging rock. In time, their attackers begin to show themselves. Black shadows enveloped in the stench of blood. Silhouettes stark against the brightening skyline. Matted hair, bodies wrapped in skins. Wildmen, thinks Anna. Her next few words must be chosen carefully.

  “We’re here for Major Thomas,” she tells the one who stands a little ahead of the others. Taller. More sure of himself. The silhouettes step up into the torchlight, blood-soaked bundles slung across their broad shoulders. They carry meat, hopefully the flesh of goats. Their lips and mouths are stained with red, their eyes unfathomably white.

  “Do you speak?” she asks, her voice too soft. Too gentle.

  The big man looks like he’s emerged from the dawn of time. A place where words such as reason or truce do not exist.

  “The road is closed,” the wildman says. “Best be off before he gets wind of it.”

  To her great astonishment, he speaks with a cultured English accent. The sort that used to grace late night talk shows; dimly lit faux lounge rooms with guests in comfy chairs.

  “Major Thomas is my husband,” says Anna, most determined. “He sent three messengers across the sands to find me.”

  A throaty muttering escapes from the rest of them, silenced swiftly with a twitch of the headman’s hand.

  Somehow Anna understands it is the number three that speaks truth for her rather than the unsubtle lie of husband.

  “I see no messengers,” he says, angling his head from left to right.

  “They died protecting me.”

  Not entirely a lie, not exactly the truth. Either way, the headman’s next response is silence. She tries to assess how many stand behind him without appearing to be counting. Feels the silence corroding her resolve.

  “You want to be remembered as the man who kept the Major from his wife?”

  The headman smirks. Memory is not high on his agenda. But it’s the only thing that matters to her — that and the chance to put the pieces back together.

  “You’ll take me to the Major or you’ll get out of my way.”

  He’s not buying it. She pictures his foul-smelling soldiers raising spears against the skyline. Feels the soft scattering of sand grains blown against her skin.

  Where is Thomas? How can this be happening?

  The nuns stand, pale-faced, shoulders slumping, eyes trained on the gritty dirt. They make no sound, afraid the slightest noise will draw attention. Hell, it seems, has caught up with them at last.

  Then suddenly rough hands appear from nowhere, stripping their burdens: shoulder bags, weapons, tools. The nuns shriek in agony when the men lay hands upon their reliquary bones. Anemone faints, weakened from blood loss.

  The headman gestures. Anna looks. Behind her, the tunnel beckons, a dark gash in the ridge’s granite spine.

  Anna turns her back on the fallen girl. There’s nothing she can do for her. For once, the remaining sisters take her lead.

  One of the wildmen tugs on Anna’s shirt. As he points a grubby finger at her earrings, Anna realises that he is actually female. Small breasts apparent beneath the tunic fashioned from scraps of stinking hide.

  “Here you go, honey,” Anna says, unhooking a silver hoop from each ear. “You need all the pretty you can get.”

  She expects a blow in trade for the insult, but the wildwoman smiles, revealing jagged teeth. She’s still smiling as she stabs the blunt post of each hoop through her earlobes without flinching.

  ****

  The road to Hell is paved with flaming torches. Not enough of the damn things, though, so they trip and slide through that first hour. The passage smells of damp and dank. Slippery lichen covers everything; it’s even in the air. Anna feels like she’s breathing in great globs of it. The nuns whisper softly as they stumble over loose rocks. The earth is open, swallowing them whole.

  The passage twists and turns around bends and corners. Anna misses all the little things she’s come to trust. Stinging sand and the biting cold of twilight. Her beloved Sirius and the context of the sun. Is it days they’ve been walking, or merely hours? No day nor night nor gradients in between.

  Will she ever see the light again? She daydreams of it — funeral pyres, orange ochre flames licking Armageddon sunsets. Evenings nestled on the clinic porch with its glorious clear view across the way. High magnification binoculars trained on the ossuary façade. Tasteless art, obscene art, a hundred thousand lovingly polished skulls, display racks packed tight with the damn things, solid as a dry-stone wall. Each one cherished, special, loved.

  Not much love going on down here. The wildmen reek like rotting carcasses but, mercifully, don’t speak, nor push and shove. All they have to do is keep on moving, which is fine by Anna. Down below to Thomas is where she wants to go.

  The passage eventually widens into a cavern filled with others. She thought the wildmen stunk until they met this lot. The reek of shit and unwashed flesh is overpowering. It fills the space entirely, every crevice, every crack.

  The new ones are much thinner than the wildmen. Dirtier, too, if such a thing is possible. She thinks they might be children, or runts, or outcasts. Whoever they are, they’re blocking the passage downwards.

  “We belong to Major Thomas,” Anna says. She doesn’t trust their wildmen escorts to speak for them or cut a deal on their behalf. Everyone must hear his name just so they understand. Fuck with me, you’re fucking with the boss.

  A toll, it seems, is required of them. Anna removes her silver bangles, casts a glance at her pathetic, disappointing nuns. The journey underground has stripped them of their substance. Not to mention other things: Flax and Anemone and poor old Madame de Bethune. Without their skulls, the girls have nothing. Reduced to little more than frightened children, hungry, hurt and helpless. All their prayers have turned to babble. They stink of urine and abject, blinding terror.

  The tunnel people wrench the bones from round the nuns’ necks. Their clothing, too, what little there remains. When they pull off Anna’s shirt, a gasp is heard, echoing off the hollow cavern walls. The wildmen escort backs away.

  Anna’s so angry at being stripped after volunteering her own silver, it takes a moment to work out what’s going on.
The star tattoo! Eight dull points stained deep into her flesh. Why does everything come back to that damn thing?

  They’ve obviously seen it before, and it scares them half to death.

  “I’m the queen of Heaven,” she growls like a rabid dog. “Don’t you people know who you’re dealing with?”

  The runts are standing well back now, so she figures they know something. They let her keep her bra and underpants. They’re keen to give her a wide berth from this point forward.

  The naked nuns whimper. Anna holds her head up high as they’re ushered forward into claustrophobic darkness.

  When she glances back, the nuns have disappeared without a trace, as if they’ve never been. She experiences a sudden, unexpected surge of affection for them, stupid and pointless and useless as they were. Anger begins to boil beneath her skin. How dare they take my nuns away and treat me like a dog! Do they not know who I am?

  Who is she, exactly? For a second she almost remembers something important, but as another moment passes, the thought evaporates.

  She is made to walk until she’s sure she can walk no more. Then, in a blinding stumble, all of a sudden she is there, the Underworld spread out before her like unravelled cloth, a gaping cavern blasted from solid rock. New stench overpowers the cloy of shit and lichen. She knows the stink of stale human defeat. A cocktail of diesel, grease and abject misery. Stretching high above her head, the walls are slick with slimy phosphorescence.

  Anna knows this is the Hell of Bosch and Dante and St Theresa of Avila and Fatima and St Faustina. Whitfield’s Eternity of Hell’s Torments, that world of agony and pains. A place scoured by the baying of the hounds of death, where time destroys all life and wakes the sleeping.

  Inferno spreads below her feet, microcosms of suffering and oppression. The groan and squeal of great machines, scalds of steam, bitter sweat, stale air, all tainted with despair and hopelessness. Stink, reek, fug, stain. Nightmare distilled to its bare-boned essence.

  Below her, workers toil in gangs, chipping away at the walls with picks and mallets. Gnawing their way through solid rock, widening the Hell pit slowly, inch by inch. The cavern seems to stretch for miles. Anna can’t even see the end of it. But this place holds the man she knew and loved. He has need of her and so she has come to him, all but naked into the vile and stinking earth. This fearsome vista is testament to his need. She knows now she is late by several decades. She should have sought him out when the world caught fire instead of brooding in her desert of bleaching bones.

  She is not alone. A blue-clad welcoming committee of three tosses her crumpled clothing into a heap at her feet.

  “What have you done with my girls?” she asks, snatching up her garments. The heat is stifling, but she puts her things back on.

  These three — all men — look like Rocco, Jimenez and Skunk. Practically indistinguishable, if she didn’t know for sure those men were dead. They don’t answer her question and she smiles to herself, smug and sure. Idiots, like men everywhere. They’ll all get what’s coming to them.

  They lead her down a bank of rough-hewn stairs. Hell looks even worse up close than from above. These are not men toiling before her in chains; these are living skeletons wrapped in perished hide. Scraps of khaki speak of who they used to be. The three who’d come to her across the sand had been princes by comparison. The elite. Officer class, not worker drones. Men who had once been trusted.

  And as for the women — oh, the women! Ancient sour drudges every one. She felt their hatred and ill-use, scar tissue fused with sinew to the bone. Anna hopes her little nuns are safely dead; their tiny minds are too ill-equipped for the horrors of this place.

  ****

  How long has it been since Anna danced? Rhythmic movement fell by the wayside, lost like all those other things she once swore she could never live without. Decades endured without the beat of a drum, the strum of a chord or the haunting seduction of a flute. The nuns danced, performances without accompaniment, but their movements were never the stuff of life.

  Yet she hears life now in the hammering of stone. Repetition like the heartbeat of a slumbering machine beast. Singing too, if you could call such mournful lamentation song.

  A soldier leads her forward. She stops, presses a finger to her lips. “Shhh.”

  The soldier pauses, glances upwards, taps his foot. He moves forward but she does not. The one behind her shoves.

  “Shhh,” she says again, louder this time. “I’m listening.”

  The heartbeat’s regularity intrigues her, as does the sombre annotation of the singing. The men are willing themselves to death as they chisel further through the mantle of the earth. All the while the beast sleeps on, regardless. Oblivious to their endless suffering.

  “It’s beautiful,” she says.

  When the soldier behind her gives her one more shove, she turns on him, spinning quickly to reach and pull the shiny dagger from his belt. She ends his life with one quick thrust. Eyes fluttering, he crumples to the rock. The other two step back to give her room. She grips the knife, warm blood oozing over white-clenched fingers.

  A low wall separates the path from the pit below where the ragged men toil. She vaults over the side, landing squarely on both feet, still clutching the knife as she regains her balance. The toilers shuffle to give her room. They stare intently. An unfamiliar woman is amongst them. A woman wielding a bloodied knife.

  She moves between them, falling into rhythm, hips swaying gently to the beat. They don’t touch her, not yet, but she can feel lust boiling like a tide beneath their skins. One touch means death. Not from Anna — at most she could take out two or three before the mass crushes down on top of her. No, death is commanded from above. The rocky platform high above their heads.

  The heartbeat continues, syncopating with her own. She slips between them, lets the knife fall to the ground. Each man stiffens, becomes a soldier in her presence, willing to thrust his life into her hands. She splays her fingers, holds them out on either side, fingertips brushing ragged khaki like anemone fronds. Carnality soaks through her skin like radiation. Hush falls across them, dark as shadow. A final shudder as the sleeping beast falls silent. No chipping, no hammering, no excavating.

  She sees this army as the men they might have been. Long stone shadows playing tricks upon her eyes. Broad shoulders, straight backs, imaginary rifles at the ready. As she lays her hands upon pallid flesh, eyes roll back in silent climax. She infuses each orgasm through her pores, each tiny death a strengthening of her core.

  A new sound. Drumming. The music of war. Feet on concrete, palms slapped hard against taut thighs. She dances for them, a montage of lust, sweat and seed, hips gyrating, belly rounded, breasts that heave and swell. Her own skin glistening slick with perspiration. Building to her own epiphanic climax, when at last they are graced with his presence; the lone figure high above on the rocky platform looking down.

  ****

  She has played out the reunion scene in her head a thousand times. All the clichés patience has made accessible: running along a moonlit beach, fields of gently swaying grasses. Atop a mountain sheltered from wind and rain. The light is always perfect, the temperature mild. Sometimes there’s music, sometimes her own joyful laughter, like the playful peal of little silver bells.

  Stinking underground caverns packed tight with the living dead was never on the cards. But the setting doesn’t matter. Nothing else matters when love is true and strong. Not the ravages of time, nor the cruelties of truth — small things so insubstantial in the face of passion and divinity. When you love so deeply and completely, flames cannot be diminished. Nothing can hold you back from destiny.

  When Anna’s dance is finished she sets her sights on the rocky platform. Stairs hewn into the living stone, flimsy without rails. She’s guessing few invites are issued to Thomas’ lair.

  Nobody stops her. Nobody dares. The figure stands on the platform, watches for awhile. She doesn’t return the favour, all attention focused on the climb
.

  Though she wills it not to, Anna’s pulse begins to race. Flushed with the power of her dance, she’s blushing at private memories, love and lust intertwined. A lot can change in twenty years — or is it more like thirty? Time-wise, the fires of damnation haven’t left her much to work with. She knows she should be bracing herself for impact and potential disappointment. He’s still a man, no matter what this place has made of him. No matter what he thinks he’s made of himself.

  She’s almost at the top before she notices the hooks. Fearsome twists of rusted steel, spaced evenly, suspended from the cavern’s roof. For meat, she imagines. A few more paces and she’s figured out the truth. The meat stuck on the farthest hook is living. Agony has forced all sound from the man’s grossly pierced torso. He flips and twitches like a worm tormented by ants.

  Jimenez’s scar. No wonder the poor devil chose to bleed himself into the sand.

  When she reaches the top, a guard of honour pauses to salute. She nods her acceptance of the situation, that she’s graduated from prisoner to some kind of guest. She pauses in the entranceway, takes a deep breath, blinks.

  What if it isn’t him?

  What if it’s someone else?

  What if?

  She turns, takes one final look down into the cold hard cavern filled with desperate men, cowering from the light like it might burn them. What do they think they’re waiting for down there? Forests and fields and streams to reclaim the land? The future holds promise of no such luxury. It takes love to recreate the world. Love and light and peace.

  And with that thought, she steps across the threshold.

  It’s dim. Even dimmer than outside. Takes a moment for her eyesight to adjust. When it does, by the light of half a dozen lamps, Anna beholds what is probably the last fat man left upon the Earth. He’s wearing jeans, a shoulder holster and one of those blue wife-beater singlets once so popular amongst the tradesman castes. Behind a heavy wooden desk, a wall of crates is stacked high to the ceiling. Mostly liquor and canned pineapple labelled Guangdong Eat Strong Food Industrial Co., Ltd, wherever the fuck that used to be. To the left, a low red velvet divan. Upon it lounge two skanky whores, both well over forty, dressed in lingerie that, just like them, has most definitely seen better days.