Deathbird Stories

O Ye of Little Faith

Niven felt for the rock wall behind him. His fingertips grazed the crumbling rocks. The wall curved. He prayed that it curved. It had to curve, to go around the bowl in which he was trapped, or he was dead. That simply: he was dead. The minotaur advanced another few feet, pawing the red-dust earth with hooves of gold now dulled by a faint dusty crimson patina. The minotaur advanced another few feet, raking at the red-dust earth with his trident, sending a thin, stinging spray into Niven’s face. Niven blinked back tears from the dirt.

The creature’s gimlet eyes were as red as the ground it stomped. Head of a bull, gigantic body of an Atlas, something out of a child’s fable, it stepped carefully toward him, prodding the air with the blood-encrusted trident.

The minotaur bellowed, a sound of rage almost human but ending as a beast’s groan. The eyes. The malevolent little red eyes. Red and vengeful; not merely with volcanic hatred, but with something else…something incredibly ancient, primeval, a rage born of loss and frustration from a time before men had walked the Earth. A time when the minotaurs and their fellow-myths had ruled the world. A world where they no longer belonged, a world that did not believe they had ever existed.

And now, somehow, in some inexplicable fashion, Niven—a man with no particular talents—had been thrown crosswise and slantwise through universes into a place, a time, a continuum (an Earth?) where the minotaur still roamed. Where the minotaur could at last have his full revenge on the creatures that had replaced him. It was the day of reckoning for Homo sapiens.

Niven backed around the bowl, feeling the dirt of the wall crumbling in his fingers as he felt behind him; in his other hand he brandished the rough-wood club he had found underfoot as he ran from the beast. He let it droop in his hand a moment, the weight of it difficult to keep at the ready for very long. The minotaur’s face of frenzy glowed with heat. It leaped. Niven swung the club with a bunching of muscles that sent him whirling half-around. The minotaur dug the trident deep in the dirt and ground to a snorting halt, two feet in front of the flat arc swing of the club. Niven spun around completely, and the club struck the wall and shattered to splinters.

The minotaur’s half-growl, half-snort bore traces of triumphant amusement as it exploded behind the dark-haired man, and Niven felt sweat come to his back. The impact of the blow against the wall had sent a tremor through his entire body; his left arm was quite numb. Yet it had saved him. There was an opening in the wall, an opening in the rock-wall of the deep valley bowl, an opening he would not have seen backing around the wall. Now there was a scant hope of staying alive.

As the minotaur gathered itself for a leap that would send its gigantic body plunging into Niven, the man slipped sidewise, and was inside the mountain.

He turned then, and ran. Behind him the light from that weird place—vaguely blue and light—mote laden—faded and was abruptly lost as he caromed around a sharp turn in the passage. It was dark now, pitch absolute dark, and all Niven could see was the scintillance of tiny sparks behind his eyes. Suddenly he found himself longing to see even that light behind him, that snippet of blue and cadaverous gray in a sky that had never been roof of any world he had known.

And then he was falling….

Suddenly, and without any sense of having moved, between one step and the next, he plunged over a lip of stone, and was falling. Down and down, tumbling over and over, and the walls of moist slippery stone reeled around him, unseen but cold, as he tried to grab some small hold.

His fingertips skinned away from friction, and the pain was excruciating…for a long moment…but was lost in the next instant as a gasp that became a shriek was torn from him. He plunged sickeningly, impacting painfully against an unseen out-cropping with his shoulders and the back of his neck…he felt his spine crack…and continued falling, and suddenly was submerged in water…black and viscous…bottomless…closing over him, filling his mouth with foulness, blind, dragged into the grave-chill body of a moist lover terrible in her possessiveness, jealousy and need.

Vapors of night. Echoes of never. Niven thrashed in a whirlpool vortex of total unawareness. Memories—released from their crypt beneath his conscious mind—escaped, gibbering, rushed in a horde into his skull. He was back in the old soothsayer’s shop. Had it been just a few minutes before finding himself trapped by the minotaur? Merely a few minutes when he had stood in the prognosticator’s shop in a Tijuana back alley, a tourist with a girl on one arm and a wisecrack on his lips? Had it been only that long ago, a matter of seconds, or a sometime long ago, when darkness had parted and swallowed him—as he was now being swallowed by these Stygian waters?

Huaraches, the sign had said, and Serapes.

Berta stared at him across her Tom Collins. He could not look at her. He toyed with the straw in his Cuba Libre. He whistled soundlessly, then bit the inside of his lip absently. He looked off across the Avenida Revolución. Tijuana throbbed with an undercurrent of immorality and availability. Anything you might want. A ten-year-old virgin-male or female. Authentic French perfume minus the tariff. Weed. Smack. Peyote caps. Bongo drums, hand-carved Don Quixotes, sandals, bullfights, jai alai, horse races, toteboard betting or off-track betting, your photograph wearing a sombrero sitting astride a weary jackass. Jackass on jackass, a study in dung. Strip shows where the nitty-gritty consists of the pudenda flat-out on the bar-top for convenient dining. Private shows with big dogs and tiny gentlemen and women with breasts as big as casaba melons. Divorces, marriages, tuck-and-roll auto seat covers. Or a quick abortion.

It had been lunacy for them to come down here. But they’d had to. Berta had needed the D&C, and now it was over, and she was feeling just fine thank you, just fine. So they had stopped for a drink. She should be resting in a motel halfway between San Diego and Los Angeles, but he knew she wanted to talk. There was so much to talk about. So now they sat in the street cafe and he could not talk to her. He could not even look at her. He could not explain that he was a man trapped within himself. He knew she was aware of it, but like all women she needed him to come only far enough outside himself to let her share his fear. Just far enough that he could not make it. She needed him to verbalize it, to ask for it—if not help then—companionship through his country of mental terrors. But he could not give her what she wanted. He could not give her himself.

Their affair had been subject to the traditional rules. A lotta laughs, a lotta passion, and then she had gotten pregnant.

And in their mutual concern, something deeper had passed between them. There was a chance, for the first time in Niven’s life, that he might cleave to someone and find not disillusionment, derangement and disaster, but reality and a little peace.

She had arranged the abortion, he had paid for it, and now they were together here, as she waited for him to speak. Voiceless, imprisoned in his past and his sense of the reality of the world in which he had been forced to live, Niven knew he was letting her slip away.

But could not help himself.

“Jerry.” He wanted to pretend she had not spoken, knowing she was trying to help him get started. But he found himself looking up. She wasn’t beautiful, but he liked the face very much. It was a face he could live with. She smiled. “Where are we going, Jerry?”

He knew what he had to answer to please her, to win her, but he said, “I don’t know what that means.”

“It means: there’s nothing artificial or unwanted holding us together any more. Or holding us apart. What do we do now?”

He knew what he had to answer to please her, to win her, but he said, “We do whatever we want to do. Don’t push on me too hard.”

Her eyes flashed for an instant. “I’m not pushing, Jerry, I’m inquiring. I’m thirty-five and I’m unattached and it’s getting frightening going to bed alone without a future. Does that seem rational to you?”

“Rational, but unnecessary. You’ve got a few good weeks left in you.”

“It isn’t funny time for me, Jerry. I have to know. Have you got room in your world for me?”

He knew what he had to answer to please her, to win her, but he said, “There’s barely room enough in my world for me, baby. And if you knew what my world was like, you wouldn’t want to come into it. You see before you the last of the cynics, the last of the misogynists, the last of the bitter men. I look out on a landscape littered with the refuse of a misspent youth. All my gods and goddesses had feet of shit, and there they lie, like Etruscan statuary, the noses bashed off. Believe me, Berta, you don’t want into my world.”

Her face was lined in resignation now. “Unraveling the charming syntax, what you’re telling me is: we had a good time and we made a small mistake, but it’s corrected now, so get lost.”

“No, I’m saying—”

But she was up from the curbside table and stalking across the street. He threw a bill down on the tablecloth and went after her.

She managed to keep ahead of him. Mostly because he wanted to give her time to cool off. As they passed a narrow side alley he pulled abreast of her, taking her arm gently, and she allowed him to draw her into its shadowed coolness. “All it takes is believing, Jerry! Is that so much to ask?”

“Believe,” he snapped, the instant fury that always lay beneath the surface of his charm boiling up. “Believe. The same stupid mealy-mouth crap they tell the rednecks in the boondocks. Believe in this, and believe in that, and have faith, and holy holy you’ll get your ass saved. Well, I don’t believe.”

“Then how can any woman believe in you?”

It was more than anger that forced the words from him. It was a helplessness that translated itself into cynical ruthlessness. “I’d say that was her problem. “

She pulled her arm free and, turning without really seeing where she was going, she plunged down the alley. Down a flight of dim steps, and on again, a lower level of the same alley. “Berta!” he called after her.

Huaraches, the sign had said, and Serapes.

A shop in a dingy back alley in a seedy border town more noted for street-corner whores than for wrinkled and leathery tellers-of-the-future who sold Huaraches and Serapes in their spare time. But he had quickly followed her, trying to find a way out of his own inarticulateness, to settle the senseless quarrel they were having and salvage this one good thing from a past filled with broken glass. He wanted to tell her his need was not a temporary thing, not a matter of good times only, of transitory bodies reaching and never quite finding one another. He wanted to tell her that he had lost all belief in his world, a world that seemed incapable of bringing to him any richness, any meaning, any vitality. But his words—if they came at all—he knew would come with ill-restrained fury, with anger and sharpness, insulting her, forcing her to walk away as she now walked away.

He had followed her, down the alley.

And the old, wizened, papyrus-tough Mexican had limped out of his shop, bent almost double with age, like a blue-belly lizard, all alertness and cunning, and had offered to tell them of the future.

“No thanks,” Niven had said, catching up to her at that moment.

But she had tossed her head, defiance, and had entered the shop, leaving him standing in the alley. Niven had followed her, hoping she would turn in an instant, and come out again, and he would find the words. But she had gone deeper into the musky dimness of the shop, and the old prognosticator had begun casting the runes, had begun mixing the herbs and bits of offal and vileness he averred were necessary for truth and brightness in the visions. A bit of wild dog hair. A strip of flesh from the instep of a drowned child. Three drops of menstrual blood from a whore. The circular sucker from the underside of a polyp’s tentacle. Other things. Unspeakable, nameless, foul-smelling, terrible.

And then, strangely, he had said he would not tell the future of Berta…but of Niven.

There in the fetid closeness of a shop whose dimensions were lost in dusk, the old Mexican said Niven was a man without belief, without faith, without trust, and so was damned; a man doomed and forsaken. He said all the dark and tongueless things Niven had never been able to say of himself. And Niven, in fury, in frenzy brought on by a hurricane of truth, smashed the old man, swung across the little round table with all the strength in his big body, clubbed the old man, and in the same movement swept the strange mixed ingredients from the filthy table, as Berta: screamed—from somewhere far away.

And in that instant, a silent explosion. A force and impact that had hurled him out of himself. In that timeless, breathless instant Niven had been there/not-there. He had somehow inexplicably been moved elsewhere. In a bowl, in a valley, in a land, in a time or place or somewhere facing a minotaur. A creature of mythology, a creature from the past of man’s fables.

Huaraches, the sign had said, and Serapes.

Facing a live minotaur just a moment ago. Facing the creature that had left the world before there had been a name to fit the men that Niven had become. A god without worshippers, this minotaur. In a world that did not believe, facing a man who did not believe.

And in that instant—like the previous instant of truth—Niven was all the men who had forsaken their gods. Who had allowed the world to tell them they were alone; and believed it. Now he had to face one of the lost gods. A god who now sought revenge on the race of Men who had devised machines that would banish them from the real world.

Down and down and down into the waters of nowhere Niven plunged, all thoughts simply one thought, all memories crashing and jarring, all merged and melded and impinging upon a dense tapestry of seaweed images.

His breath seemed to clog in his throat. His stomach bulged with the amount of water he had swallowed, with the pressure on his temples, with the blackness that deluged him behind his eyes. Niven felt memory depart and consciousness at once returning—and leaving. He was coming back from the past to awareness, only to let it slip away finally as he drowned.

He made feeble swimming motions, overhand movements of arms that had sensation only by recall, not by his own volition. He moved erratically in the water, as thick as gelatin, and his movement toward the bottomless bottom was arrested. He moved upward through the water now, and saw a dim light, far ahead and above him.

An eternity. There. Toward it he struggled, and when he thought it was ended, he reached a ledge. He pulled himself toward it, and the dark water seeped through him till he was limp and dying. Then his head broke water. He was in an underground cavern. He spewed out mouthfuls of warm, evil-tasting water.

For a very long time he lay half on the ledge, half in the water, till someone came and pulled him up. Niven lay there on his stomach, learning to live again, while the one who had saved him stood silently waiting. Niven tried to get to his feet, and he was helped. He could not see who the man was, though he could feel a long robe in the dimness, and there was a light, a sort of corona that seemed to come dimly from the man. Then together, with the man supporting him, Niven went away from there, and they climbed for a long while between walls of stone, to the world that was outside.

He stood in the light, and was tired and sad and blinded by things he did not believe. Then the man left him, and as he walked slowly away. Niven recognized the beard and the infinitely sad eyes and the way he was dressed, and even the light.

And Jesus left him, with a sad smile, and Niven stood alone, for another time that was long. and empty.

Once, late that night, he thought he heard the bull-ram horn of Odin, ringing across this dim, shadowed land, but he could not be sure. And once he heard a sound of something passing, and when he opened his eyes to look it was a cat-headed woman, and he thought Bast, and she slipped smoothly away into the darkness without saying a word to him. And toward morning there was a light in the sky that seemed to be a burning chariot, Phaëthon the charioteer. Helios’s burning chariot, but that was probably the effects of the drowning, the hunger, the sorrow. He could not be certain.

So he wandered. And time passed without ever moving. In the land without a name; and his name was Niven; but it was no more important a name than Apollo or Vishnu or Baal, for it was not a name men believed in. It was only the name of a man who had not believed. And if gods cannot be called back, when their names have been known, then how can a man whose name was never known be called back?

For him, his god had been Berta, but he had not given her an opportunity to believe in him. He had prevented her from having faith in him, and so there were no believers for a man named Niven, as there were no true believers for Serapis or Perseus or Mummu.

Very late the next night, Niven realized he would always, always live in this terrible Coventry where old gods went to die; gods who would never speak to him; and with no hope of return.

For as he had believed in no god…

No god believed in him.