Benediction Denied: A Labyrinth of Souls Novel Read online

  He wasn’t dead yet.

  But the blue light was not going to last forever, and when it went out, he would be on his own.

  At one point the river slowed, and for a moment, Adam was certain he saw stars in the night sky. He cried out to them, as if talking to a taxi driver. “Stop! Stop here!” but there was no driver, and there was no stopping. Immediately, he was whipped around again, over another waterfall, and back into darkness. Gingerly, he touched the inside of the bubble. It seemed firm. Tough.

  I will survive!

  All he could think about was getting home to his wife and daughters. He would beg their forgiveness. He would do anything, anything, to be welcomed back into their love, into their home, into his wife’s affections.

  He needed to make it right with Sonja.

  And with Mouse.

  Oh God, Mouse.

  New Year’s Eve, eleven years ago.

  Adam had planned to go to an office New Year’s Eve party, and take 4-year-old Lisa with him. Chrissie objected. She didn’t want to be left alone with Sonja, still a toddler, on New Year’s Eve. They’d been fighting about it for a week. Chrissie wanted to dress up and go to a local hotel ballroom, drink champagne, dance the night away, kiss at midnight. She had been feeling like nothing but a dingy mommy, with old elastic-sprung underwear who smelled always of sour milk and baby poop. She needed to dress up and feel like a woman again. She wanted to speak adult language with new, interesting adults.

  Adam didn’t care what Chrissie wanted.

  He took his daughter and went to his office party. He hadn’t even invited Chrissie. Getting a babysitter on New Year’s Eve was impossible, and taking a toddler with them was out of the question.

  He was convinced that Lisa needed to be introduced to society life from an early age so she would grow up confident and able to navigate all social situations. It was a mistake, of course; nobody brought children to an adult party where booze flowed freely. All his coworkers were dressed to the nines, drinking champagne and flirting shamelessly with one another. The entire staff was in party attire except him, who showed up in standard work clothes, shirt and khakis, and his daughter in little flowered lavender Oshkosh overalls.

  Lisa was only four, and not suited for such an event. She was bored, got cranky, and eventually fell asleep on the couch in his boss’s office.

  Adam drank too much, took one of the secretaries out into the hall, pushed her up against the wall, kissed her long and deep, and ground his erection against her thigh. Then he tried the same trick with a couple of other secretaries, with varying degrees of success. He drank more then drove home, flirting with a DUI—or worse— with his little girl in the car.

  When he got home, he found a neighborhood girl dozing on the sofa, and Sonja sleeping soundly in her crib.

  No Chrissie.

  He paid the babysitter, put Lisa to bed, and waited.

  In the morning, a hungry Lisa, dragging her blankie, woke him up. Apparently, he had pulled a throw over himself and gone to sleep on the couch. Sonja was in her crib crying. She needed a fresh diaper and a bottle. Lisa wanted breakfast.

  No Chrissie.

  Adam downed a beer to quell his raging hangover.

  When his wife finally came home about noon, she was wearing a slinky, sexy, silver party dress Adam had never seen before.

  “Where the hell have you been?”

  She met his fury unblinking, standing eye to eye with absolute self-righteousness. “Out.”

  “All night? Out all night? What about our kids?” Adam tried very hard not to yell.

  To Chrissie’s credit, she kept her voice calm. “What about them? They’re all right, aren’t they?”

  “They are, no thanks to you.”

  She swept past him and he grabbed her arm, harder and tighter than he expected, but his headache was in charge of his anger, and his anger was in charge of his strength.

  “Ouch!” She whirled and slapped him.

  He released her immediately. He hadn’t meant to grab her so hard, he just wanted to talk to her, to find out where she had been, what she had been doing.

  She fixed him with an unapologetic expression he had never before seen on her face. It was a challenge. Her eyes said, “You fuck with me one more time and I’m outta here.”

  He believed her threat. And he’d had no right to grab her the way he did.

  But she had been the one who was out all night, God knows where, doing God knows what. He went to his office party and came home. He was the husband who came home to be with the girls.

  He would not forgive, would not forget.

  The tension in the house lasted for weeks. It was intolerable for both of them, for all four of them, but he didn’t know what to do to make it right. His wife had been out all night, and she wouldn’t apologize; she wouldn’t explain. That only made him believe the worst.

  Their cracked marriage was about to dissolve.

  Then one night Chrissie took matters into her own hands. He woke up to her quietly, slowly, sweetly, taking his penis into her mouth. She worked it so expertly— almost lovingly—that he had no choice but to forgive her for whatever it was they’d been fighting about.

  Their sex life had not been all that great after several years of marriage and two children, but that night harkened back to their honeymoon days in beautiful Ireland. It was hot, juicy, sexy, tantalizing. They played give and take for hours, and when it was over for each of them, they slept entwined until the alarm clock went off.

  From that morning on, they were a family again. All the events of New Year’s Eve had been put behind them.

  Eventually, Chrissie revealed that she was pregnant.

  Adam was furious. They’d been so careful! How could this have happened?

  Chrissie shrugged it off, blaming that wild hot night in January. But Adam was suspicious, and rightly so.

  Monica Sue, a.k.a. Mouse, was born early with long, thick black hair, not like Adam, who had less hair than he had a year ago, and it was a soft brown. Mouse’s hair was not at all like Chrissie’s dishwater blonde hair, or the fair hair of her sisters. No, Monica Sue looked like nobody in either family that Adam could name.

  Even his parents pointed that out to him, quietly, privately.

  When he mentioned their comments to Chrissie, she laughed it off, telling him they were all silly. “All our daughters are different from one another,” she said, more than once. “Look at our Mouse. So healthy. So adorable. Let’s be grateful she wasn’t born like the Wilson’s daughter.” Or the Sapkowski’s daughter, or Todd and Amy’s son, or any of the children Chrissie knew of who were born with difficulties.

  Mouse was healthy and curious, and that curiosity got her into the mischief that became the hallmark of her personality.

  But Adam knew. He knew Mouse had been conceived on New Year’s Eve, and not in his bed. He had seen the name Oliver on Chrissie’s phone, knew that he was her coworker, saw that she smiled now and then in a private way when she got a text message, and when questioned, she erased it and blew it off as if it was nothing.

  Adam knew the meaning of that secret smile.

  But he swallowed it for the good of the family, and gave Mouse to Chrissie—another daughter for her to raise—while he spent more time and still more time with Lisa, his favorite.

  Now that he’d seen Oliver up close and personal, he knew it all for certain, because Mouse looked exactly like that snake in the dining room.

  Surely Mouse and Sonja had been permanently scarred by his indifference to them. Indifference, surely, to Sonja, but at times he had been downright mean to Mouse. Her punishments were always harsher, his words to her never loving or tender. Perhaps even Lisa hated him for ignoring his sisters and so blatantly preferring her over them. How could he possibly put his family back together?

  Maybe it would be best if he never woke up from this nightmare.

  He had always thought of himself as a good man, a good father, a good husband, a good emplo
yee, but in fact he was none of those things. It took a nightmare in a tunnel for him to realize it.

  Slowly, he brought his cold hands up to his hot face.

  He rubbed his face, squinting his eyes closed and wishing for a do-over.

  Magic!

  Could he have a do-over? Could he petition Jolmy’s underworld gods for a time machine?

  He could go back to that New Year’s Eve.

  No, further.

  He would go back to the day Sonja was born.

  No, earlier.

  He would go back to the first time Chrissie asked for another baby. He would embrace that notion and then embrace her and then embrace Sonja, and they would be a complete family. Mouse, when she came along two years later, would look like him, not like some swarthy, darkhaired jackass co-worker of Chrissie’s.

  He had three cards left in his pocket.

  He was still rocketing feet first through dark black water in his little cocoon of breathable air, sliding around rocks, falling over waterfalls, and swirling in and out of eddies and currents. He had given up fighting it. He just relaxed, and let the current take him.

  The blue light on his chest would soon begin to sputter and then die, and when it did, he would lose his bubble of protection against the blackness, against the water.

  He would be smashed against the rocks. He would drown.

  Nobody would ever know what happened to him.

  The girls would think he had abandoned them. So would his company, and so would the Justice Corps. It would be seven years before the courts would declare him dead and Chrissie could claim his life insurance. If she could afford to keep up the payments on the policy.

  By that time, she could be bankrupt. Destitute.

  By that time, Lisa would be out of college, if she had the money to go to college without his paycheck. By that time, Sonja would be in college, if Chrissie had the funds. And Mouse would be a senior in high school.

  But Chrissie would have no funds. Adam had squandered them. The casino had taken his weak ass and wrung it dry.

  His employer paid his salary while he was doing this year in the Justice Corps, because it was a humanitarian effort that his company supported. But they would quickly stop that if he stopped coming to work.

  What the fuck had he been thinking?

  Slowly, carefully, so as not to disturb the bubble that seemed so fragile and yet was clearly tougher than any vinyl he knew, he unbuttoned the breast pocket in his shirt.

  He couldn’t control his life, he couldn’t control this dream, he couldn’t control his path down this furious river in his little magical submarine, he couldn’t control his family’s reaction to his stupidity … he couldn’t control himself. For the first time ever, he let go of trying to control anything.

  Three cards left. He pulled out one and held it up to the blue light.

  It was hard to read without his glasses. He squinted.

  Oh. The Hanged Man.

  He barked a laugh. Hoist by his own petard. Hanging by his heels, at the mercy of the fates.

  Wasn’t that the goddamned truth?

  Again, he had two choices. He could let the current carry him until the blue light winked out and he died— drowned or smashed on the rocks. Someday, on some beach, somebody would find his tiny corpse. Or his tiny bones. Or maybe when he died, the magic would disappear, he would grow back to normal size and his remains would get stuck in this aquifer and eventually rot to shreds.

  Is that the sacrifice Jolmy’s underworld gods wanted from him?

  Or, he could throw a card while the blue light still burned, while the bubble still protected him and run the risk of the blast ripping the bubble apart.

  This was a moment just exactly like the one he’d had before he jumped into the water from that cliff where the serpents left him. He wanted to sit and contemplate it. He wanted to review his life, to make amends in his heart, to beg forgiveness.

  But the people from whom he needed to beg that forgiveness were not here. They could not hear him. They could not feel him.

  He could not die in this underground river of water. He needed to make things as right as he possibly could, as long as there was breath left in him.

  “Time machine,” he whispered to the Hanged Man. “Or else just get me home. Please, God—any god—let me get out of here.”

  In a flash of understanding, he realized the magic had exacted its price: Self-revelation. He was a shitbird of the worst kind, always had been, and he knew it now like he had never known it before.

  Was that the same as the underworld gods demanding their sacrifice? Was the sacrifice of his self-esteem enough for them?

  Maybe, maybe not.

  He tensed his muscles, ready for the bubble to disappear and plop him into the cold water. He took a deep breath, held it, then popped the card against the bubble wall in the tiny space allotted. The blue concentric rings fanned out, but he felt no concussion.

  Immediately, though, the current smoothed out and he floated calmly, quietly, in what seemed to be a giant lake.

  Still dark. Still black. Still underwater. He could only see his own dirty, raggedy self in the blue glow of his companion light.

  He was completely helpless. He could not swim. He could not rise to the surface to see if there was breathable air there, and he could not dive to the bottom to kick off, or to see if he was in gravel or bedrock or what.

  He could only float in place.

  Would he soon run out of air?

  The dark taste of claustrophobia hit the back of his tongue and he had a hard time catching his breath. There wasn’t enough air!

  He rolled over, and the bubble moved as he would expect it to move.

  He tried to put a hand through it, to stretch it out enough that he could paddle, or move himself. Something, anything to direct his own fate.

  Ha. That was a laugh.

  He had done plenty to direct his own fate.

  And now here he was, the size of a rat, stuck in a plastic bubble, floating helplessly in an aquifer.

  The blue light began to sputter.

  Great.

  Adrenaline flushed through him.

  This was it. This was the end. This was how he would die.

  He reached into his pocket. Two cards left. Two cards, plus …

  He pulled them out. Two cards: The Queen of Coins, and Judgment, along with the photo of his wife and daughters.

  He didn’t know what those artsy cards meant to his life, but he knew what the photo meant. He stuffed them back into his pocket.

  Again, his bubble began to move. It picked up speed, as the blue light began to falter.

  But this was different. This didn’t feel like the same kind of current.

  He lifted his head and saw a tiny glint of metal ahead, illuminated by the light he carried on his chest.

  The blue flame flared.

  Adam took a big gasp of air and held his breath.

  The flame went out, the bubble popped, and he was again in water, cold water, being drawn rapidly toward the metal he had glimpsed.

  Where there was metal, there would be civilization.

  His speed picked up as the metal drew him to it.

  Just as he thought he must be able to reach out and grasp it, the current stopped and reversed, blowing Adam backward in a torrent of bubbles. Adam tumbled in the black water, desperately trying to hold onto his lungful of air.

  Bubbles!

  Bubbles moved past him, past his face. He kicked his feet, swam hard and fast, following the bubbles up. He kicked again and his head broke through into a small breathing space of air.

  He took great gulps of air, his heart thundering.

  He grasped for a handhold, but there was nothing but sheer, smooth rock above him. His breath echoed loudly in the tiny air space. His nose touched the ceiling, his ears still underwater.

  He breathed slowly, purposefully.

  He needed to calm his heart. He needed to hold his breath again and investigate
the metal pipe or whatever it was that was breathing water in and out.

  He had two cards left. Two cards and the photo of his family, the inspiration that gave him the will to keep fighting.

  Bubbles stopped popping around him, and the current shifted, pulling him back down.

  He took a last deep breath and held it as he was sucked under, back toward the metal thing, and when he got to it, its force of suction plastered his chest, arms, legs to it with such force that he could barely move.

  In a flash of insight, he knew exactly what it was, and then he knew where he was.

  He was stuck to the filter screen on the well pump that he and Jolmy and the crew had installed.

  He was directly below the village!

  That explained the “respiration.” They were testing the well. They pumped water up, and then they flushed it back down. They’d repeat that several times before they did the final assembly of the water system.

  Lungs aching, stuck to the metal mesh by the force of the water it was drawing in, Adam moved his hand inch by desperate inch until he reached his pocket. He pulled out a card, but before he could deliberately do something with it, the rushing water sucked it out of his hand.

  Still, the blue concussion sent out a great burp of water, and Adam slipped easily through the tiny holes in the screen.

  Wait. What?

  Not even particles of sand could go through that screen.

  Oh. The magic had made him smaller yet. He had to be the size of a microbe.

  The pump drew him up through the well shaft.

  His lungs ached for a breath of air.

  Panic built in his chest. His face reddened, his eyes bulged.

  Hold on, hold on, hold on.

  Surely sunlight was just ahead. Fresh air. Jolmy. Chrissie. The girls.

  Hold on, hold on, hold on.

  Then he realized that though he was only the size of bacteria, his next destination was not fresh air.

  He was headed for the chlorination tank.

  11

  THERE WAS NOTHING for him to do now, except relax.

  Relax and try to hold the lungful of air he had, until he could hold it no more.

  Or until he was hit with a blast of chlorine that was designed to extinguish microbial life.