Pym_ A Novel - Mat Johnson [131]
* Material is an excellent word for Dirk Peters’s collection; debris would be another less generous one.
† Or as this book is also known: The Sphinx of the Ice Fields.
ON our return journey to the place where our saga began, we made “good time,” although we did not have one. With rope tied from both of our vehicles to the boat, Garth and I plowed forward side by side while behind us, without clue or concern, Arthur Gordon Pym drunkenly continued sleeping. The journey back is often less labored than the trail blazed forward, and this was no different. We didn’t stop unless we found ourselves cut off by one of the newly formed ravines created by a tunnel’s collapse. We didn’t talk, and in truth my ears were still ringing so much from the last explosion that I wouldn’t have heard much anyway. We just followed our own tracks, and the tracks of the Tekelian war party that followed them, both of which were still frozen into the powder. The journey was so swift that I didn’t realize we were even close when I first saw the billowing gray smoke rising in the distance. A half hour later, on our arrival at the scene, I barely recognized it to be the remains of the Creole base camp, our former home.
“They blew that shit up, dog,” was the first thing Garth had said to me in hours. I don’t even know when or how he’d managed to clean his face and arms off. The big man got off his snowmobile and walked over to the edge of the burning hole, sat down on its side, and let his legs dangle over. That was when I first realized that Garth was in shock, oddly enough. And I knew I must be in shock too, although this knowledge registered no further. I got off my snowmobile to see it, to look in the crater at the destruction that had been created. The only thing I recognized was the roof, the same one I’d climbed up to several times to adjust the satellite dish. That antenna was now gone, possibly blown free, and what remained of the wreckage was only black and smoking and sinking into the frozen ground, reeking of burnt rubber and unnameable plastics and pork rinds.
“Blew it to high hell,” Garth repeated, pointing now at the massive, smoking crater that cut off our path to the ocean.
What I saw as I continued to look into the ruins was something far more horrific. Poking through the snow, I could see the charred gray limbs of the beasts in question as well, probably contributing to the pork smell.
This was not just a crater, this was a crevice, spreading a good fifty yards across. And then, lengthwise, it spread far, far beyond that. Leading back along the same line that Augustus’s tunnel once had was a tunnel which had clearly become little more than debris and sunlight like the rest of them. I didn’t know if every Tekelian tunnel had collapsed, but I knew that all those close to the surface must have, and that, even if the village still existed below, there was no way to return to it now.
We rode along the crevice’s edge, following it back in the direction I knew Tekeli-li to be. Looking to my side as I drove, I waited for the massive crack in the ground to narrow and close, but it didn’t. It just got wider. And then, it got so big that, had Garth not been focusing primarily on what lay in front of us, we might have driven directly into it.
At the sight of Tekeli-li, or at least where I estimated Tekeli-li to have once been carved, there was now