The Six Messiahs - Mark Frost [108]
"And your brother?"
"I never saw him again. I came to nestled in a bed of rocks; black night around me. Who knows how much time had gone by? A day might have passed, maybe two. My eyes could make only the slightest adjustment; rock walls around and above me; no sky; in a cave, fed by this underground stream, the mountains there honeycombed with these pockets, as I discovered. I lay on the rocks for the longest time, unable to move, in a twilight state.
"A dullness crept over me, my entire body bruised, battered, but no single outstanding pain to speak of. Plenty of water beside me to drink as I needed. I crawled, then walked, defined the boundaries of my confinement—a space ten feet by twenty; I could barely stand and only in the center. My world reduced to that cramped chamber. Comforting really. Not much difference between a womb and a tomb.
"So at a moment when panic should have taken root I felt increasingly peaceful; when you live in darkness—sleep and move and wake in it—you come close to your own true nature. No distractions with that face in the mirror; dirt under your fingernails, the backs of your hands. Alone with your self, whatever that is. That ruling voice inside: Who am I? What am I? The first few days my journey began with those questions. Eventually I came to question everything. All the basic assumptions lose their potency, until you realize that all you have, all you are, is what is in your mind.
"I would have stayed there but I had no food, and as I explored my cave I realized there was no other way out; I would have to go back into the river. I waited, building my strength, and then took the plunge. The currents were more negotiable in these subterranean channels and I could swim for some distance in a number of directions, but in the pitch dark and not certain of a place to surface I had to constantly return to my cave. I've no idea how many days passed—how dependent on the cycle of light and dark is our perception of time—but my strength had reached as high a peak as it could without sustenance and would soon begin to dissipate. I staked everything on one last attempt.
"I dropped into the river, swam down into the deep, and passed the point of safe return. Living in the dark had raised my other senses to exquisite levels; I could detect the slightest variation of flow in the river so I let the water guide me: nothing to be gained by struggling. Minutes elapsed. Breath used up, I came very near surrender; how tempting to let everything go... at that moment I saw a light in the water and I called on the finishing kick I had held back. I lost consciousness as I broke the surface and drifted to shore. That's where I awoke, in a bed of bulrushes, like some antiquated Moses. Middle of the night, a secluded bend in the river.
"As my mind came back, I realized the most curious thing had occurred: Every concern, every burden that had brought me to this moment had vanished. I remembered each circumstance of how I had fallen and why, but I no longer cared. In its place, a lightness, a freeing up, a release from gravity. My family, my brother, my private torments. I hear your thoughts, Doyle: He suffered oxygen deprivation. Damage to the brain. Believe what you like; what I had undergone in that cave was nothing less than a second birth. A chance to create a new life. The dead weight of Jack Sparks slipped off me like the skin of a snake: If everyone thought the man was dead—-and why wouldn't they? the terrible fall, credible witnesses—I could quite easily oblige them.
"I saw stars above me in the night sky for the first time uncluttered by my private despair: An interior objectivity I had never suspected was possible—rock, water, tree, meadow, moon; each thing I saw just the thing itself and not some shadow colored by my inner demons—a release from every earthly obligation,