Benediction Denied: A Labyrinth of Souls Novel Read online

  Just like him.

  Or until they flushed the pipe again and he was swept back down into the aquifer, to be swept away and drown.

  Regardless, there was nothing to fight. All he could do was close his eyes and try to dream himself home again.

  His head popped up into a reservoir of air. He gulped it, gasped, drew it in.

  Some kind of light source made everything fuzzy, out of focus, but he could see that there was light in the dimness.

  At last.

  Things started pulling on his legs, his arms. He bounced into and off of other soft body microorganisms, like rotifers, or bacteria. They stuck to him, sucked on him, tasting him, maybe attracted by the rotting flesh on his feet, looking for a meal. He would be no meal for them.

  He punched them away, but every action had an equal and opposite reaction, as Lisa would tell him, and he had to find balance between keeping them away from him and keeping his head above water. He wanted to float in peace, but the little critters wouldn’t leave him alone.

  He worked his arms and legs hard to stay afloat while he kicked at them.

  Then he pulled the final card from his pocket, but before he could formulate a wish or a prayer or whatever the hell it was that made the magic work in this place, again it was swept from his hand.

  Far away, he thought he detected a minor jolt.

  He just kept treading water.

  He put his face up into the air bubble, took one final gasp of air, and held it in his lungs, waiting for something to happen.

  Something always happened.

  Sure enough, a moment later, the pipe he was in became smaller and smaller, and soon he could crawl through it on his hands and knees.

  He was growing.

  He didn’t get far before he grew too big to fit in the pipe. He stretched his arms and legs out, wiggling forward, and still he grew.

  He tried to envision the schematic of the water system they were installing. He had only designed part of it, so he had to work to remember it.

  He could see it in his mind’s eye, the blueprints laid out on a sheet of plywood resting on saw horses in the sun, corners held down from the hot summer winds by rocks and pieces of old brick and broken pottery.

  He saw the PVC lines that led from the central spigot at the village all the way to the massive chemical treatment tanks situated close to the well head. Saw the pump in the middle of a big, fairly deep mud pit, saw the men in their hard hats with their dirty clothes and their wrenches, tracing pipes on the paper with work-hardened hands and dirty, cracked fingernails.

  The pipe he was in got smaller and smaller.

  If they were still testing the well, then they had not yet hooked it up to the chemical treatment tank.

  He had to be in a pipe between the well and … and what, the pump?

  Or maybe he was inside the pump.

  If he was inside the pump when they started it up again, he’d be sliced to bits by the impeller. Not so bad if he was the size of a grain of sand, but he was big enough now to be killed by the twirling blades.

  Stuck. Helpless.

  Again, helpless.

  He stopped growing. The pipe wasn’t getting any smaller.

  He had returned to the size of a rodent, and no water was getting past him in either direction. Water had drained down, leaving him gasping in breathable air.

  The air smelled like the village. It tasted earthy, alive. It tasted like Africa.

  It tasted like home.

  Fortunately, that meant that he could take a couple of deep breaths, as the well was not yet a closed system.

  Stuck, as if in a straight jacket, he wiggled his hand up until he could reach into his pocket.

  The last card in his pocket was not a magic card at all, but the photo of Chrissie and the girls.

  Those testing the well would know there was a clog somewhere and they would do something drastic about it any moment now.

  However mystified, he knew they wouldn’t cut the pipe. They wouldn’t rip open the system. They would just flush it, to see if they could push the blockage out, one way or another.

  Frantic, he wiggled around until he could pull the photo out of his pocket.

  The Swan sisters and their mom. His Goddess Card.

  “Please God,” he said. “Please. God of Minnesota, God of Jolmy, God of the underworld, God of all religions everywhere. Give me a chance to make things right.”

  With the photo held between two fingers, he brought it up to his face, kissed it and flicked it against the pipe wall.

  The blue concentric circles rocked him. Popped his ears.

  He began to grow again.

  He grew until he filled the pipe and then he continued to grow, though there was no space for him.

  The air squeezed out of his lungs. Blood pressed into his head. He feared his skull would explode from the pressure.

  Then the PVC pipe cracked, and he got a tiny bit of relief.

  He flexed his muscles, pushed out with his arms, but he was so weak he made little headway.

  The crack in the pipe ran a little longer, the space opened a bit wider.

  Was he finally going to return to his normal size?

  Mud flooded into the crack in the pipe, and he knew exactly where he was.

  He was in the mud pit that surrounded the well.

  He grabbed a last deep breath of air, before mud filled the pipe.

  He fought to remain conscious as his growing head painfully spread the crack in the pipe open even wider. The darkness of unconsciousness began to swirl in the periphery of his vision. Red orbs floated in front of his eyes.

  He fought it off, but he was running out of air.

  The pipe cracked open wide enough for him to get a hand through.

  The mud pit wasn’t that deep, but mud washed in over his face, into his nose and mouth.

  It tasted like blood.

  He struggled to get an arm through the crack in the pipe. As the crack widened, he got an arm out and stuck out his hand.

  Air! Dry air!

  He waved his arm, wiggled his fingers, but as they slowly grew from the size of a rodent’s paw, his oxygenstarved body began to fail. A darkness, darker than even the tunnels he had endured, closed in, obscuring even the red globules that had floated in front of his closed eyes.

  His muscles weakened, began to fail.

  He was out of air. His lungs couldn’t hold out any longer. In a moment he would breathe in a big, gasping lungful of mud.

  Or was it blood?

  Occam’s razor.

  The simplest explanation was likely the right explanation.

  Adam’s miserable, fucked up life had just flashed before him.

  Another fierce, booted kick to his chest slammed him back to reality.

  He opened his eyes and found himself helpless on the dirt road next to the Jeep’s tire. With grave understanding, he watched, powerless, as the thug’s baton came down on his head a second time.

  A

  BOUT THE A

  UTHOR

  Elizabeth Engstrom is a sought-after teacher and keynote speaker at writing conferences, conventions, and seminars around the world. She has written fifteen books and edited or co-edited eight anthologies. She has over two hundred fifty short stories, articles and essays in print. Her most recent nonfiction book is How to Write a Sizzling Sex Scene. Her book Candyland was recently made into a major motion picture, “Candiland”, starring Gary Busey, Chelah Horsdal, and James Clayton. Engstrom lives in the Pacific Northwest with her fisherman-husband and their dog, where she teaches the occasional writing class, puts her pen to use for social justice, and is always working on her next book.

  elizabethengstrom.com

 

 

 
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