Slippage: Previously Uncollected, Precariously Poised Stories Page 8

  And he now—with a wide, dramatic gesture—throws up a flat palm and, nestled in that hand, is a blood-red, glowing, many-faceted crystal like a sacred idol's eye. And from that jewel comes a blinding light. The light bathes the demon, who shrieks and begins to shrink within its glow. (NOTE: or whatever substitute technique you care to devise for an adequate inexpensive effect.) The light takes him, fills the frame, and we HEAR the rushing of WINDS as they are sucked into a Black Hole. LIGHT FILLS FRAME.

  45 - ANOTHER ANGLE

  As silence falls in the office. The box stands open, and a bright light pours out of it. Hazel and Arky crawl out from under the halves of the shattered desk. They stand and look at Nino, who is perspiring. His shirt is soaked. His hair is mussed, the white streak more prominent.

  They look at him in wonder. CLOSEUPS if desired. He looks back at them, smiles gently, a bit embarrassed.

  NINO

  (humbly)

  I've had some, uh, small experience in these matters.

  ARKY

  (awed)

  Is that how you got away from him at the mall?

  NINO

  (nods, shrugs)

  He got me a little, but he couldn't get me very much.

  Now we hear a TINY PIPING VOICE like David Hedison as The Fly. They go to the box as CAMERA COMES IN BEHIND AND OVER THEM and their heads frame the box in the center of the frame as we look down. BLUE SCREEN inside lead-lined box shows us a teeny tiny Volkerps in there.

  CUT TO:

  46 - INT. MAGIC BOX - CLOSE

  Volkerps in the box, looking up at the huge face of Nino Lancaster peering down at him. Volkerps glows a bit, as if he's ensorceled, and trapped. He is jumping up and down, screaming, lashing the walls of the box with his tail and talons.

  VOLKERPS

  (in a squeaky, diminished voice)

  I'll get you, I'll rend you, I'll savage you, shred you, suck your bones dry as death!

  Nino smiles, and when he speaks, his VOICE IS HUGE:

  NINO

  (amplified)

  Listen, punk...you think you're the first slug from Hell, all puffed up with hot air, who ever tried to muscle in on my operation?

  (beat)

  If you're wondering how I beat you, look around in there. You're small potatoes!

  And CAMERA WITH VOLKERPS as he turns to look behind him and we see a larger (but nonetheless shrunken) demon, even more horrific than Volkerps, but bearing a striking family resemblance. Amazed, he stammers:

  VOLKERPS

  Poppa? Poppa, what are you doing in here?

  The other DEMON comes over and slaps his son in the mush.

  PAPA DEMON

  (pissed off)

  You idiot! I knew I shouldn't leave the family business in your inept claws!

  Volkerps starts to cry as Poppa Demon glowers and we:

  CUT TO:

  47 - SAME AS 45 - OUTSIDE BOX

  As Nino replaces the crystal and closes the box, cutting off the light.

  NINO

  Like father, like son.

  Hazel hugs him, covers him with kisses. Arky is dancing around the room, comes and hugs them both, slobbers over Nino, his little weasel face rapturous with relief.

  ARKY

  (jubilant)

  You saved, me! You saved me!

  Arky is all over Nino, who now takes him by the shoulders and holds him away at arms-length. CAMERA IN on Nino as he smiles a particularly nasty smile and says:

  NINO

  (with power)

  Yeah, I saved you. Now all you've got to do is make a deal with me.

  (beat)

  Business, Arky, is strictly business.

  HOLD on Arky's horrified expression, Nino's overwhelmingly evil expression for a long beat as NARRATION BEGINS OVER:

  NARRATOR

  (Over)

  Oh, Arky, Arky, poor Mr. Lochner.

  (beat)

  There is an old, old, very old saying:

  (beat)

  Making a deal with a demon is seriously crazy. But making a deal with the master of demons...well ...that's crazy as a soup sandwich.

  And as preceding NARRATION is HEARD OVER, CAMERA IN AND DOWN to FULL CLOSE SHOT on Nino's hand and the carved box on the table. Nino is idly drumming his fingers on the box, lightly and absently, as NARRATION CONCLUDES, and just before the phrase "soup sandwich" the brilliant light suddenly escapes from that thin line between lid and body of box, like a halation around the moon, light rays fan out around Nino's fingers and we:

  FADE TO BLACK

  and

  FADE OUT

  THE END

  Darkness Upon The Face of The Deep

  Morning of the day after All Hallow’s Eve dawned with a brightness that cast orange and rose light over the mountain of Hindustan. Hysteria seemed to have possessed the birds: they rose in a canopy, spreading their great patchwork wings, proclaiming in a minor key another year of safety.

  In the valley shadowed beneath the grandfather mountain could be heard the sound of nails being prised from the heavy slats used to board up the villagers' windows. And the laugh of the first adventurous child as he held his nose and yanked off the wreath of malodorous henbane protecting a front door. The fountain had been unplugged and its music rose toward the black thorn of the escarpment. The nilgai, sheep, and goats had been chivvied together in the shallow caves where they had been secreted; and now the shepherd girls drove them up the ramps from underground. Fresh flowers were laid on the pedestals of the thirty-two idols circling the rustic plaza.

  When the mountain of Hindustan creaked, and then rumbled, the villagers paused in their activities, relief drained from their faces, and they turned to stare up at the dark spire.

  Slowly, then more rapidly, the face of the mountain showed a fissure. The rent widened and very softly from within the crevice a sooty shadow began to seep out. It could not be said to shine—it was an absence of illumination—but it spilled out into the air and scintillated, neither smoke nor fog.

  The mountain split.

  The villagers had held silent for longer than might have been prudent, but when the shapes began soaring out of the great black wound, rising in a cloud to throw a blade-shaped shadow across the sun, a covey of snakelike, winged blood bats, they knew they had been falsely lulled into thinking danger had passed. One of the gods had lied, or the seer had miscalculated the year.

  Then they screamed, the music died, and they rushed to replace the boards across their windows.

  In the Deccan, on the plateau that lies between what were known as the Narbada and Kristna rivers, some of the oldest men and only three of the very oldest women remember the stories passed down through many generations, of the village of Antagarh. Not the tiny village of that name to be found on maps of the present day, but the original Antagarh, where the sigil of even more ancient days had been hidden. Where all in a morning the darkness descended, and feasted, and finally lifted, leaving only one child.

  This little boy, possessing sight only in his left eye, had been lost on the face of the mountain (it is said), and thus escaped the fate that befell his village. (It is said.)

  No mother, no father, no home waiting at his return later that day (for Antagarh no longer existed; just a plain of pumice on which nothing grew for three hundred years; no blade of grass, no weed, no shrub; where no line of dawn sunlight passed again). The child crawled through the gray dust, and saw a cloud of black wings rising away from the valley, snake bat shapes climbing toward the staring idiot's eye of the sun.

  Alone, he lay in the wasteland and watched as his past disappeared. His future: sailing toward him borne on the wind that blows forever between the stars, the wind that carries ancient and encoded messages of indecipherable night.

  On rare, perfect nights when the stars had swung into extraordinary alignments unnoticed by dozing humanity, the glyph would slowly begin to glow. As if breathing deeply with the light from stellar lamps, the engraved stone seal would become lamben
t, radiating warmth through its deep orange surface. The signs stood out perfectly, barely smoothed by erosion: circles, crescents, hooks, human heads, hands, and designs that were neither animal nor human. A coherent script utterly beyond understanding, giving itself up to no known mechanical system of decipherment. The radiance stronger as night deepened.

  They were hiding in the ruins of the sphinx gate at Alaja Hüyük, waiting for the Syrian mercenary in the employ of the Israeli MOSSAD, who was coming with supplies from Damascus to guide them to Mamoula, when they perceived the light of the glyph. They held it and marveled, somewhat fearful, but now certain that they were onto something significant.

  Bobby Shafka said, "Is it warm?"

  Loder shook his head. "Not at all." He passed it over and Shafka held it in his palm, then placed his other hand over it. He nodded agreement.

  The glyph grew brighter. "It's like that little mirror you use to keep your pipe lit," Shafka said.

  Dennis Loder drew deeply at the sandblast briar. Sweet silver smoke trailed up against the cool night. He reached into one of the many pockets of the sleeveless thermal vest and took out the pipe mirror. It was called a Micro-Sun, and it was a device so simple, yet so extraordinary, that it made one think it was some incredibly ancient device rediscovered in modern times. A disc the size of a half dollar, it was only a concave, highly-burnished gold circle set into plastic. But when held over the dying dottle in the heel of the bowl, it reflected and concentrated the pipe's own heat back into the bowl and renewed the burn. Loder laid it atop the mouth of the briar and took three short puffs. The smoke thickened.

  "No, not exactly like it," he said. But he knew what Bobby meant: both of the devices seemed magical. Then he raised a hand to stop conversation. "Is that the man?"

  "I didn't hear anything," Shafka said, covering the glyph so its light would not pool out from them. They sat with their backs to the cooling stones and listened. "Did you hear something?"

  Loder waited a moment, listening; then he relaxed again. "I guess not. But he should have come already, don't you think?"

  Shafka smiled, "This really isn't your line of work, is it?"

  "I told you that when you conned me into coming."

  "Little late for regrets, don't you think?"

  "Dead is what we can get if any of the brotherhood finds us. I'm not like you; I'm a shard digger, a pencil pusher. You've been trying to get me in trouble for thirty years. I was doing pretty good at resisting your blandishments..."

  "Until I promised you fame and fortune?"

  "Until you preyed on my childhood weakness for movies about sunken treasure and lost cities."

  They had been friends all their lives, had grown up three houses apart on the same street, Dunster Road in York, Pennsylvania. Dennis had been the milder of the pair, bookish and shy, tall for his age at any age, and determined to become an archaeologist; Bobby Shafka had gotten into trouble the first time (as best as Dennis could remember) in grade school: he had somehow, impossibly, manhandled a three hundred pound rotary mower buggy up four flights of stairs from the groundskeeper's shed, to the roof of the school building, worked it to the edge, and precariously balanced it there, slowly tipping back and forth over oblivion. The secret dream he had shared only with his best pal, Dennis Loder, was to become the captain of a tramp steamer, plying dark and dangerous waters, like Wolf Larsen in the Jack London novel.

  Dennis had gotten his degree at Syracuse University, his master's at Cambridge; he had worked digs in Iraq—including Nippur, Nimrud, Tell al Rimah and Choga Mami—and in 1980 had assisted on the site at Tell Brak, here in Syria; but he had been the less adventurous of the pals, and he had gone on staff at the National Geographic Society magazine.

  Bobby Shafka had conned and gladhanded his way into a scholarship at Wharton, made a few contacts, dropped out after a year and a half, signed on as a flack for the pulpwood industry, working out of their Manhattan association offices, made a few contacts, moved up to a middle-management position with the largest lithographing conglomerate on the East Coast, made a few contacts, went into partnership with a triad of young attorneys who had opened a hot private club in TriBeCa, made a few contacts, and cut a deal for time served and testimony with the D.A.'s office when the triad was busted holding two and a half million street-value crystal meth and Bangkok heroin.

  Bobby had made no serviceable contacts in a holding cell for sixteen weeks, and now he was back at starters, hustling a main chance. He was under contract to The National Enquirer to unearth a four-thousand-year-old Hittite tomb in Mamoula, based entirely on his ability to con and gladhand the expatriate Aussie associate editor...and his possession of the authenticated glyph. Which he had come to hold...having made a few contacts.

  And he had conned his best friend Dennis Loder into coming with him, to a country that had excelled for more than twenty years in the spawning of terrorists pledged to killing every American they could set eyes on. It hadn't been easy; but when Bobby promised to give Dennis the first publication rights for National Geographic, and let him have the glyph studied, and showed him the irrefutable proof that the glyph had been turned up in 1872 with the discovery of the Hamah Stones of the Hittites (and had been kept secret by Subhi Pasha, known in Europe as Subhi Bey before his appointment to Damascus), Dennis had been seduced by the towering ghosts of Schliemann, Rawlinson, Belzoni, Carter and Lord Carnarvon— and Saturday afternoon movies—and he had joined with his dangerous old pal on their first adventure since the old neighborhood.

  Curiously enough, it had not been Loder's association with the Geographic Society that had effected the impossible task of smuggling two Americans into forbidden lands. It had been the Enquirer's far-flung network of snitches, paparazzi, palace servants, ex-CIA agents, mercenaries, and turncoats-for-hire that had put together the route. They had come in by way of Dubai and Bahrain, across the neutral zone between Saudi Arabia and Iraq, and northwest across the desolate Al-Ha-Arah—it had taken six weeks, done so circuitously—to the penultimate drop-off at Alaja Hüyük where they would be met tonight by the man they had heard called Yaffa Al-Mansur. (He had also been referred to, during their journey, as Ibrahim ibn Abd-an-Nasr, Abu Rumaneh, Ibrahim At-Turki, Bashar Al-Sherrif, Homa Baktiari, and even Shain, though Bobby swore when he had first been recommended to them by the Aussie associate editor, he had called him Abdullah).

  But Yaffa Al-Mansur was now a full day late. They had been hiding in the ancient stones through the blistering heat since dawn, waiting. And now it was night, and they were alone; and the engraved stone seal that had brought them half across the world to find an impossible secret had begun to glow.

  Bobby opened his hand and the light illuminated the ground around them. Loder gestured with the stem of his pipe. "This is something we didn't count on."

  "I suppose I should be freaked," Shafka said. "But it's kind of, I don't know, kind of thrilling. Know what I mean?"

  Loder chuckled. "Should make one superlative headline for that rag of yours: Ancient Aliens Leave Deadly Laser Stone! If you can find some woman who'll swear she was impregnated by the alien who left it, and she's discovered by amniocentesis that she's going to give birth to a baby with two heads that look like James Dean and Elvis Presley, you'll never have to work another day in your life."

  Bobby made a rueful face. "From your lips to the ears of whatever gods are engraved on this stone. I'm so broke I couldn't buy hairpins for a goldfish."

  "If the tomb is there; and if it's 2000-1300 B.C.E.; and if those gods are still around and can hear us, try praying to Karhuha, Sarku, and the goddess Kiipapa. Even the Phoenicians held them in high regard." And he intoned:

  Great old Hittites left this here,

  How long ago is still unknown.

  The world is breathless, that is clear.

  There is nothing like the lion stone!

  Bobby said, "And that is what...?"

  "From the lion stone at Karatepe. We don't know as much as we need to kn
ow about the Hittites. That's why I'm with you."

  "Sitting in the dirt in the middle of the Moslem brotherhood, waiting for a man possibly named Yaffa..."

  "Or Abu, or Abdullah, or Bashar, or Shain..."

  Bobby picked up the chant. "Or Manny, Moe, or Jack."

  Loder revived the glow in his pipe with the little golden disc and said, "Do you know what 'Syria' means?" Bobby shook his head. "Trick question," Dennis said. "Uncertain origin. No one knows what it means. There was a country named Suri in Asia Minor, mentioned in Mesopotamian cuneiform script, about 4000 B.C.E. Not likely it's the Greek abbreviation of Assyria. We find this tomb that probably doesn't exist and we might get our best clues."

  Bobby clenched his hand around the glyph. "I'm about to shine it on with this thing. We could still be sitting here at the turn of the century. He's not coming."

  The voice came from behind and above them. "Ah, but he is here, great gentlemen." They jerked with terror, and spun half around looking for the speaker who had come upon them without a sound.

  He stood on the carved stones above them, and looked down, his face hidden in the shadows. He seemed taller and more formidable than some Arab double-agent. He seemed to be an emissary of the ancient gods whose names Loder had invoked.

  But when he climbed down, they saw that he was just a man. An almost perfectly square man, nearly as wide as he was tall, with plump cheeks and a spotty beard. "Yaffa Al-Mansur, strictly as advertised," he said, pronouncing it advertize-ed.