The Traveler

41

A thick black power cable ran from the windmill’s electric generator to the missile silo. Sophia Briggs followed the cable across the concrete pad to a ramp that led down to a sheltered area with a steel floor.

“When they stored the missiles here, the main entrance was through a freight elevator. But the government took the elevator away when they sold the site to the county. The snakes get in a dozen different ways, but we have to use the emergency staircase.”

Sophia set her propane lantern on the ground and lit the wick with a wooden match. When the lantern was burning with a white-hot flame, she pulled up a hatch cover with two hands, exposing a steel staircase that led into darkness. Gabriel knew that the king snakes weren’t dangerous to humans, but it made him uneasy to see a large specimen gliding down the steps.

“Where’s he going?”

“One of many places. There are between three and four thousand splendida in the silo. It’s their breeding area.” Sophia went down two steps and stopped. “Do the snakes bother you?”

“No. But it does seem a little unusual.”

“Every new experience is unusual. The rest of life is just sleep and committee meetings. Now come along and shut the door behind you.”

Gabriel hesitated a few seconds, and then shut the hatch. He was standing on the first step of a metal staircase that spiraled around the outside of an elevator shaft protected by a chain-link cage. Two king snakes were on the stairs in front of him and several more were inside the cage, moving up and down the old conduit pipes as if they were branches of a snake highway. The reptiles slithered past each other as their little tongues darted in and out, tasting the air.

He followed Sophia down the staircase. “Have you ever guided a person who thought he was a Traveler?”

“I’ve had two students in the last thirty years: a young woman and an older man. Neither one of them could cross over, but maybe that was my fault.” Sophia glanced over her shoulder. “You can’t teach people to be Travelers. It’s more of an art than a science. All a Pathfinder can do is try to pick the right technique so that people can discover their own power.”

“And how do you do that?”

“Father Morrissey helped me memorize The 99 Paths. It’s a handwritten book of ninety-nine techniques and exercises developed over the years by visionaries from different religions. If you weren’t prepared for the book, you might think it was all magic and moonbeams-a lot of nonsense thought up by Christian saints, Jews who studied the Kabbalah, Buddhist monks, and so on. But The 99 Paths isn’t mystical at all. It’s a practical list of ideas with the same goal: to break the Light free of your body.”

They reached the bottom of the elevator shaft and stopped in front of a massive safety door still hanging on one hinge. Sophia connected two parts of the electrical cable and a lightbulb went on near a discarded power generator. They pushed open the door, walked down a short corridor, and entered a tunnel that was wide enough for a pickup truck. Rusted girders lined the walls like the ribs of an enormous animal. The floor was constructed with flat steel plates. Ventilation ducts and water pipes hung above them. The old fluorescent fixtures had been disconnected, and the only light came from six ordinary bulbs attached to the power cable.

“This is the main tunnel,” Sophia said. “From end to end, it’s about a mile long. The whole area is like a giant lizard buried underground. We’re standing in the middle of the lizard’s body. Walk north to the head and you’ll reach missile silo one. The lizard’s front legs lead to silos two and three, and the two rear legs lead to the control center and the living quarters. Walk south to the end of the tail and you’ll find the radio antenna that was stored underground.”

“Where are all the snakes?”

“Beneath the floor or in the crawl space above you.” Sophia guided him down the tunnel. “It’s very dangerous to explore this place if you don’t know where you’re going. All the floors are hollow, set on steel springs that could take the shock of an explosion. There are levels built on levels and, in some places, you can fall a long way.”

They turned into a side corridor and entered a large round room. The outer walls were made of concrete blocks, painted white, and four half walls divided the room into sleeping areas. One of the areas had a folding cot with a sleeping bag, pillow, and foam-rubber mattress. A second propane lantern, a covered bucket, and three water bottles were placed a few feet from the cot.

“This used to be the staff dormitory. I stayed underground for a few weeks when I was doing my first population count of splendida.”

“And I’m supposed to live here?”

“Yes. For eight days.”

Gabriel looked around at the bare room. It reminded him of a prison. No complaints, he thought. Just do what she says. He dropped his knapsack on the floor and sat on the cot.

“All right. Let’s get going.”

Sophia moved restlessly around the room, picking up pieces of broken concrete and flicking them into a corner. “I’ll run through the basics first. All living things carry around a special kind of energy called the Light. You can call it a ‘soul’ if you want. I don’t worry too much about theology. When people die, their Light returns to the energy that surrounds us. But Travelers are different. Their Light can go away and then return to their living body.”

“Maya said that the Light travels to different realms.”

“Yes. People call them ‘realms’ or ‘parallel worlds.’ Once again, you can use any term that makes sense to you. The scripture of every major religion has described different aspects of these realms. They’re the source of all mystical visions. Many saints and prophets have written about the realms, but the Buddhist monks living in Tibet made the first attempt to understand them. Before the Chinese invaded, Tibet was a theocracy for more than a thousand years. The peasants supported monks and nuns who could examine the accounts of Travelers and organize the data into a system. The six realms aren’t a Buddhist or a Tibetan concept. The Tibetans are simply the first people who described the whole thing.”

“So how do I get there?”

“The Light breaks out of your body. You have to be moving slightly for the process to happen. The first time it’s surprising-even painful. Then your Light has to cross four barriers to reach each of the different realms. The barriers are composed of water, fire, earth, and air. There is no particular order to cross them. Once your Light finds the passageway through, you’ll always find it again.”

“And then you enter the six realms,” Gabriel said. “So what are they like?”

“We’re living in the Fourth Realm, Gabriel. That’s human reality. So what is our world like? Beautiful. Horrible. Painful. Exhilarating.” Sophia picked up a shard of concrete and tossed it across the room. “Any reality with king snakes and mint chocolate-chip ice cream has its good side.”

“But the other places?”

“Each person can find traces of the realms within their own heart. The realms are dominated by a particular quality. In the Sixth Realm of the gods, the sin is pride. In the Fifth Realm of the half gods, the sin is jealousy. You need to understand that we’re not talking about God, the power that created the universe. According to the Tibetans, the gods and half gods are like human beings from another reality.”

“And we’re living in the Fourth Realm…”

“Where the sin is desire.” Sophia turned and watched a king snake moving slowly down a conduit pipe. “The animals of the Third Realm are ignorant of all others. The Second Realm is inhabited by the hungry ghosts who can never be satisfied. The First Realm is a city of hate and anger, ruled by people without compassion. There are other names for this place: Sheol, Hades, Hell.”

Gabriel stood up like a prisoner ready for a firing squad. “You’re the Pathfinder. So tell me what I’m supposed to do.”

Sophia Briggs looked amused. “Are you tired, Gabriel?”

“It’s been a long day.”

“Then you should go to sleep.”

Taking a felt-tip marker out of her pocket, Sophia walked over to the wall. “You need to break down the distinction between this world and your dreams. I’m going to show you the eighty-first path. It was discovered by the Kabbalist Jews who lived in the northern Galilee town of Safed.”

Using the marker, she wrote four Hebrew letters on the wall. “This is the tetragrammaton-the four-letter name of God. Try to keep the letters in your mind when you start to go to sleep. Don’t think about yourself or me-or splendida. Three times during your sleep, you should ask yourself, ‘Am I awake or am I dreaming?’ Don’t open your eyes, but stay within the dream world and observe what happens.”

“And that’s all?”

She smiled and began to walk out of the room. “It’s a start.”

Gabriel pulled off his boots, lay down on the cot, and stared at the four Hebrew letters. He couldn’t read or pronounce them, but the shapes themselves began to float through his mind. One letter looked like a shelter from the storm. A cane. Another shelter. And then a small curving line that looked like a snake.

He fell into a deep sleep, and then he was awake or half awake-he wasn’t sure. He was looking down at the tetragrammaton drawn with red-colored sand on a gray slate floor. As he watched, a gust of wind blew God’s name away.

GABRIEL WOKE UP covered with sweat. Something had happened to the lightbulb in the dormitory and the room was dark. A faint light came from the corridor that led to the main tunnel.

“Hello!” he shouted. “Sophia?”

“I’m coming.”

Gabriel heard footsteps enter the dormitory room. Even in the darkness, Sophia seemed to know where she was going. “This happens all the time. Moisture seeps through the concrete and it gets into the electrical connections.” Sophia tapped her finger on the lightbulb and the filament lit up. “There we go.”

She walked over to the cot and picked up the kerosene lantern. “This is your lantern. If the lights go out or you want to go exploring, take it along with you.” She studied his face. “So how did you sleep?”

“It was okay.”

“Were you aware of your dream?”

“Almost. Then I couldn’t stay in it anymore.”

“All this takes time. Come with me. And bring that sword with you.”

Gabriel followed Sophia out into the main tunnel. He didn’t know how long he’d been sleeping. Was it morning or still night? He noticed that the lightbulbs kept changing. Eighty feet above them, wind was rattling the leaves of the Joshua trees and pushing the blades of the windmill. Sometimes the wind blew strongly and the lights burned brightly. When the wind faded, the only power came from batteries, and the bulb filaments glowed dark orange like embers from a dying fire.

“I want you to work on the seventeenth path. You brought along that sword, so it seems like a good idea. This path was invented by people in Japan or China: some kind of sword culture. It teaches you how to focus your thoughts by not thinking.”

They stopped at the end of the tunnel and Sophia pointed to a patch of water on the rusty steel plates. “Here we go…”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Look up, Gabriel. Straight up.”

He raised his head and saw a drop of water forming on one of the arched girders above them. Three seconds later the drop fell off the girder and splattered on the steel in front of him.

“Draw your sword and cut the drop in half before it hits the ground.”

For a second he thought that Sophia was teasing him with an impossible task, but she wasn’t smiling. Gabriel drew the jade sword. Its polished blade gleamed in the shadows. Holding the weapon with two hands, he got into a kendo stance and waited to attack. The water drop above him grew larger, trembled, then fell. He swung the sword and missed completely.

“Don’t anticipate,” she said. “Just be ready.”

The Pathfinder left him alone beneath the girder. A new water drop was forming. It was going to fall in two seconds. One second. Now. The drop fell and he swung the sword with hope and desire.