Merkabah Rider: Have Glyphs Will Travel Read online

  “Maybe not in the Yenne Velt, but what’s to stop the creatures?” said the Rider. He paced the cell. “I don’t think these men will be able to stop them. Not without help.”

  “What kind of help?” Belden said. “How do you kill them?”

  “I don’t know.” The Rider rubbed his eyes. “I think DeKorte ordered them to walk off that cliff just as a demonstration. Several of them have grievous wounds from their deaths. If I knew how they were made, that would be something, but I don’t even know what kind of magic is keeping them up.”

  “There is a tradition of animation in the Golem ritual,” Kabede said. “Could it be something similar?”

  “I don’t know. It could very well be some kind of kockeputzi magic. Some blending of our traditions with Outer God practices that we might not even know about.”

  “Outer what?”

  “Not very easy to explain,” the Rider said.

  In a moment Davies was at the door again, rattling it open. He had their dinner, some biscuits and gravy and a bucket of water with a ladle. Tucked under his arm was Kabede’s green satchel. His Oriental dagger was pushed through his belt.

  “Who’s your relief, Davies?” Belden asked, as Davies dished out his food.

  “Corporal Armendariz.”

  “See you in the morning.”

  “Good night, Sarge,” said Davies.

  He gave Kabede his bag, and looked questioningly at Belden when Kabede and the Rider both refused their dinner.

  “Pass it here, trooper. Take one back to the barracks for yourself. For the trousers.”

  “Thanks, Sarge,” he said around a mouthful of biscuit. He gave the remainder over to Belden and left the bucket and ladle there so the prisoners could pass it back and forth to each other through the bars.

  He closed the door and laid the big bar in place. In a few moments a Mexican soldier appeared and after a brief, low exchange, took Davies’ place outside.

  Belden sat by eating his biscuits and gravy as Kabede ladled water over his hands and passed the bucket and a small candle with a single wood match across the floor to the Rider, who did the same.

  There was a smell of sulfur as Kabede struck a match and lit the candle in his cell. The flickering attracted Armendariz, whose brown, prodigiously mustached face immediately appeared in the doorway.

  “It’s alright, Telesforo,” Belden said. “It’s Jewish Sunday.”

  The Rider lit his own candle, watching the flame dance and flicker on the wick.

  Trooper Armendariz arched an eyebrow as Kabede poured the wine into a plain wooden cup and he and the Rider both sang the Shalom Aleichem to the ministering angels.

  Armendariz spat on the floor and made a swift sign of the cross before he shut the door and threw down the bar again.

  On past Sabbaths, the Rider had often worn his mystically embossed spectacles to see the effect. Every Sabbath ritual summoned two observing entities, one an angelic being, the other one of the Fallen, never the same. If the Lord’s angel was satisfied that the Sabbath was being observed correctly, he would bless the home (or in this case, the observers) and the evil angel would respond, ‘Amen.’ Conversely, if the Lord’s angel was not satisfied, the evil angel would bid the next Sabbath to be equally sour, and the good angel would respond, ‘Amen.’

  It was a bit of cooperation the Rider had seen so many times it had lost meaning to him, but now he realized that it was an indication that all Lucifer had told him was true. The angels and the demons walked together, and Satan was the custodian of man, appointed by the Lord, jailer of a prison so terrible it was without reason. A prison every human soul must pass through. Everyone he’d ever known in the war, his parents, Gershom…It embittered his heart. He did not wear his lenses. He did not care to see angels this night.

  Kabede poured the wine into a plain wooden cup and recited the evening Kaddish.

  At the sound of the trickling, Belden cleared his throat.

  “Any chance I can get a snort of that?” he asked.

  Kabede said nothing.

  “Please don’t, Dick,” the Rider asked. “Think of it as the wine you would drink at your Eucharist.”

  “Awright, awright.”

  Kabede passed Belden the cup of wine and a hunk of stale bread through the bars, and Belden dutifully handed it over to the Rider. No braided challah bread had been prepared. They had to make due with hard biscuits made by goy hands. Would the Lord’s angel withhold his blessing tonight, when they needed heavenly aide the most?

  The Rider said the kiddush, drank, and washed his hands. He spoke the hamotzi in unison with Kabede, and they ate their bread silently.

  As they ate, Kabede said, “Speak your mind, Rider.”

  The Rider spoke of his misgivings.

  “I will confess my heart was momentarily poisoned by the Adversary’s words, too,” Kabede admitted, after he’d heard the Rider out. “I read of terrible things in the book he showed me. But then I came to see that his complicity in Igzee’abaihier’s plan is to be expected. For who can stand against the Lord?”

  “The Outer Gods do,” the Rider said.

  “But can they? Or are they but another test which the soul of man must pass?”

  “Don’t you get tired of being tested all the time?”

  “On the contrary. You forget I was born with knowledge of the heavens. I have found very little to test my faith in this life before now. These things terrify you. They terrify me too. But I thank the Lord for them.”

  “What?”

  “I have felt my spirit grow fat and complacent for many years, Rider. What is the crucible of material life to a man who knows all that is to come? Life itself is almost meaningless when compared with the continuance of the spirit. But now I see that Igzee’abaihier in His infinite wisdom, has created things to test even me.”

  “What if they weren’t created, Kabede? What if like HaShem, they just are? What if they’re as strong as the Lord?”

  “I do not believe this,” said Kabede. “If they were equal in strength, then HaShem is outnumbered. If He is not greater, than logically he would’ve been defeated long ago. But even if they were equal, then they are a power adverse to the one which I have chosen to serve, and they must be stopped. These things seek to remake the world into a place of apathy, wanton cruelty, and depravity. Their paradise is our hell. Adon is an anti-messiah, who would drive us from the Lord and encase us in selfishness and animal fear until we know nothing of the divine spark within ourselves. He would make himself a deliverer of chaos, and I will do all I can to oppose him. There is nothing more for me. What about you?”

  The Rider considered this. Kabede’s logic was irritatingly simple. All they had been taught…well, it might not be a lie, but it had not been the whole truth. To Kabede, this only meant there was more to learn, more to struggle against. It was different for the Rider. He had been turned away from the Throne of God. A righteous man had told him once it had been because of his doubt, when he had thought it was because of an unworthiness brought about by Adon’s corruptive teachings. This had bolstered him for a time. But doubt was still a part of him. For all his abilities, and for all he knew and had come to know, his faith had been shaken once again by the knowledge there was more. Had he grown complacent spiritually, as Kabede had? Why could he not meet this new challenge in the same way?

  “Whose side are you on, Rider?” Kabede asked again.

  “I know that I’m against Adon.”

  “Whom does Adon serve?”

  “The Great Old Ones,” he said. Or perhaps himself. What did Adon stand to gain from all this after all? Kabede had said Adon was actually Elisha ben Abuyah, a nearly two thousand year old sage who had renounced God after glimpsing some terrible truth in the Seventh Heaven. If this was true, what could such a man want with these alien entities?

  “Then you have your answer,” said Kabede. “Stand against Adon and you stand against his masters, whoever or whatever they may be. Even the beinonum
choose a side, whether they know it or not. Look at your American civil war.”

  The war. Lucifer had said it had been the earthly manifestation of a greater conflict in Heaven and Hell, but not between them. Under Samael and Molech and some being called Adam Belial, some of the Fallen had seceded from Lucifer’s domain and Heaven had come to his aide. Not the war the Rider had thought he’d been fighting at the time. He had fought on the side of the Lord, yes, but also the side of Lucifer, against the rebel demons and their Outer God allies. What did they want with the domain of Hell?

  The Rider had been renowned among his brother Essenes as the most accomplished of the Merkabah Riders. Yet here was this African man, nominally a Jew, younger than himself, born a world away, and with him, the Rider was a learner again.

  Belden, ignored and apparently feeling he was in over his head, was snoring in his cell between them.

  “What about you, rabbi?” the Rider said.

  “What about me?”

  “We can talk of these things till havdala,” the Rider said. “But I don’t know a thing about you. You’re a yored Merkabah, sure. You descended upon the Throne, I know. But is Kabede your name, or a title? Who was your father? Your mother? Do you have brothers and sisters?”

  “Let me see,” said Kabede, settling. “In our enclave, we take the name of an admired person. Kabede was the name of a qes in my village. An elder, who taught me to read the scripture. He died before I was inducted into the Sons of the Essenes. I have two brothers and three sisters.”

  “That’s quite a family.”

  “And you?”

  “No, no siblings.”

  “My father is a painter,” said Kabede. “An artist, and my mother a baker.”

  “My father was a storekeeper,” the Rider said.

  “He…is dead?”

  “Yes, when I was fourteen.”

  “Your mother?”

  “Not long after I left for the war. She was ill. We said our goodbyes. I stopped getting letters, you see. That was how I knew. She wrote me all the time. I wonder what happened to those letters...”

  The Rider looked up at the dark sky through the barred window.

  “When you joined the Sons of the Essenes,” Kabede asked, “did your father approve?”

  “My father thought it was a very great honor,” said the Rider. “He had prepared me to take over his business, but when the rebbes selected me, he was glad to give me to them. I remember he said he was too small a man to stand in the way of HaShem’s will.”

  “I used to have three brothers,” said Kabede. “The eldest, Abatte, was killed in Egypt, working for the British against the Corvée on the Suez Canal. We don’t know just what happened. We heard it was a Frenchman, and also that it was a Bedouin. I hardly knew him, but I have lived always in the shadow of his ghost. My father is an excellent artist you see, but he is an artist in a village of artisans. He has never thought his profession worthy in the great scheme of things. Abatte was his conscience. He was the man of action my father had always wanted to be, and he died for a worthy cause. When I was admitted to the yeshiva, he did not approve. He did not think highly of a life of study, you see. He told me my head was in the clouds, and that I must concern myself with the problems of this world. I was always strange to him. He never believed in the things I knew. And yet…”

  “What?”

  “How I have wished I could paint the glories of Heaven I have seen with the hands of my father. I have always felt that if I could but do that, with his artistry, I could convince the staunchest unbeliever of the reality of Igzee’abaihier. I could convince even him. But I am no artist, and to my father I am just a dreamer.”

  “Perhaps he sees himself in you,” the Rider ventured.

  “I have no doubt he does,” Kabede agreed.

  “But you have a task now. Possibly the most important task you could hope for.”

  “My father would never believe it.”

  “We do not do what we have done so that it be known, only so that it is done,” the Rider said.

  “Yes,” said Kabede. “But a son always hopes to please his father.”

  The Rider was quiet for a time, then he asked Kabede, “What was it like? The Throne? To be in the Lord’s presence.”

  “I could not look upon Him,” Kabede admitted. “The light of the seraphim was blinding. But, remember what you told me about the creature in the pit? Shub…”

  “Shub-Niggurath,” the Rider said, and an involuntary chill snaked up his spine at the memory.

  “You spoke of a feeling of infinite despair. Of cold darkness and futility. Of boundless, endless antiquity.”

  “Yes.”

  “In that place of Holy Fire, shrouded in eternal mists of white, I too understood antiquity. There was a great presence, an undying benevolence that was old when the light of the stars was new. It was eternal. It was paternal. Maternal. Familial and familiar. Imagine if you could awake as a child on your first remembered morning and sit once more at the table with your parents, as if they had never died. As if they never could die. It was warm, like hearth light. I felt it fill my heart with assurance. It was attractive too. The center of my being resonated with it, was drawn to it as if gentle hands cradled my heart like a bird and drew me near.”

  “You said you felt assurance. Assurance of what?”

  “That all was well. Assurance that I was needed and loved, because some small part of me was part of this that stretched before me. Assurance too, that wherever light grew, darkness would shrink. There was no darkness there. Just light. Blazing, and hazy, like the morning light through a curtain on the day of a sun shower. And colors. So vibrant, so real as to be realer and more in focus than anything on the earth. That was the Presence. When I returned to my body, my face was wet with tears of joy, and I renewed them with tears of sorrow because I could not return.”

  “But what did you see?” the Rider insisted.

  “Everything,” Kabede said. “And nothing at all. All was shrouded in cool mist. Sometimes the clouds parted around me, and I saw many things I didn’t understand, but can you understand? I did not turn my attention to them. Igzee’abaihier was within that cloud. The Lord was with me.”

  The Rider thought back to Lucifer’s words.

  “Each soul,” he had said, “devises its own suffering. That is the nature of Gehenna.”

  What if Heaven was the same? What if Kabede had seen what he wanted and felt what he had expected to? What did that mean for the Rider?

  The mind is its own place, and in itself

  Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

  Where had he read that?

  Kabede was silent for awhile, then he said, “I think this is why Elisha ben Abuyah was changed,” he said, “why he became Adon.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He went to the Throne, not seeking Igzee’abaihier, but knowledge of the Olam ha-Tohu, the primordial world of chaos. I think that is why the angel Metatron turned you away, Rider.”

  “I wanted to know the Lord,” the Rider said. “It was my only desire.”

  “Rabbi Akiba knew and believed in the Lord already,” Kabede said. “He could not have reached the Throne otherwise.”

  “So, to know the Lord…”

  “One must already know Him.”

  It was like the old preacher had told him. He had gone seeking the Lord when he should already have known Him by His works. Then perhaps Metatron had saved him. Perhaps, like Elisha ben Abuyah, had he reached the Throne in that state, he might’ve become another Adon himself.

  Perhaps that had been Adon’s plan.

  Their meager bread finished, the Rider recited the Birkat ha-Mazon blessing.

  It was fully night now, and they settled into their cots as the bugler blew the Go To Sleep. The Rider thought of the army again, and found himself singing the words lowly, which were fitting in their way:

  “Day is done, gone the sun,

  From the lakes, from the
hills, from the skies,

  All is well, safely rest;

  God is nigh.”

  The Rider soon lay staring at the ceiling. Kabede sang a song in his own language not unlike the one he’d heard when they first met. The Rider reflected on the time that had passed, and this last year to come.

  When Kabede had finished, the Rider asked, “Did you learn anything from that book Lucifer showed you? The Damnatus Damnatonum?”

  Adam Belial’s book, left behind in Pandæmonium after he and his rebel demons were expelled from hell. Adam Belial, a being apparently so tied to the unending conflict that had resulted in the jointly exhaustive dichotomy of the cosmos that his name was woven throughout the metaphysical fabric of its occult history, invoked by unwitting magicians and sorcerers the world over, appearing even in the most sacred treatises of the Kabbalah itself. Adam Belial, the negative emanation, forever in opposition to Adam Kadmon, the primal cosmic body of the universe. He had heard the name in his studies, but he had always thought it more a concept than an actual entity. Lucifer had claimed Adam Belial was an Outer God, a Great Old One in the guise of an angel, who had counseled him to rebel against Heaven.

  Lucifer had shown the book to Kabede during their visit.

  “I was distracted,” Kabede admitted. “I couldn’t read everything, but yes. Much of it was vague. Descriptions of this new age they pine for. The book spoke of it in idyllic terms as an age of freedom; freedom from order and restraint. Freedom from morality and responsibility. Rule will be misrule, a whimsical rule of the moment, of strength and lust and violence. The Old Ones will favor those who bring about their coming, and suckle upon the misery of the rest.”

  “Anything about how they intend to do it?”

  “The only reference I read was that the land would be prepared and then hell would be loosed or unleashed. The time these Great Old Ones and their followers are preparing for…”

  “The Hour of Incursion,” said the Rider.

  “It is very near.”

  But when? Lucifer had said the book didn’t say. He was growing short on time. Nameless in the Order’s Book of Life, he would be dead by Yom Kippur on the ninth day of Tishri, according to the law, which was September the twenty second. That was mere months away. A good number sure, if you were just counting the days on a calendar. Not so many if you were measuring the remaining time of a life. If the Hour of Incursion came after that, it would be up to Kabede to carry on. Well then, the Rider would have to get him ready. Already Kabede was very far along in his wisdom— probably farther along than the Rider himself. But he lacked practical experience. No doubt he would be getting a great deal very soon.