Sephirot, p.31
Sephirot, page 31
He was nearly asleep, lulled by the voices in the air, when he heard some soft footsteps in the sand. He opened his eyes, and saw Lukas silhouetted against the sky.
“There is likely to be rain tonight,” he said. “You’ll get soaked if you stay outside.”
Duncan laughed. “And if I do? I, and my shorts, will both dry out.”
Lukas leaned against one of the trees that supported the hammock, his wiry frame like a bowstring, all taut energy even when at rest. He did not speak for several minutes, his eyes turned out toward the sea, the intermittent lightning flashes showing every angle of a face that was Duncan’s own.
Finally, he said, “How many days will it be before you know what path your feet need to follow? For all that I have valued your help, you said yourself that life on a fisherman’s boat is not for you.” He paused. “It is not that I do not value your help, but I know your heart lies elsewhere.”
“I don’t know where else to go.”
“There is a place,” Lukas said, and his voice for the first time sounded tentative, “where you might find some answers. Or at least, guidance.”
“Where is this place?”
“Southward along the shore, the beach folds up into rocky prominences, and finally onto a great cliff. The top of it can be reached only if you venture inland a little. But it was said that my ancestors went up there, when they wished counsel from the gods. From the edge, they said that you can see all of the worlds.”
“All ten, from one place?” The smile was clear in his voice.
“Ten?” Lukas said, his voice perplexed.
“The ten worlds of the Sephirot.”
“Who told you that there were ten?”
“A Sphinx. In the first world I visited. And it was said again, when I spoke to a wise man who had read many books, in a desert world where I was befriended and taken in by kind people, some of whom paid with their lives for their compassion. He said that there was a great library in his world, and he had read much on the subject.”
“I have no wish to diminish your friend’s knowledge, or his people’s sacrifice on your behalf, but they are wrong about the Sephirot.”
A panic rose up in him, coupled with a deep sense of fatigue. Every time he thought he might be done with this journey, something more got in the way. How many worlds were there? Eleven? Twelve? Twenty?
“I already thought I’d visited eleven, but I was told that one didn’t count,” he said, trying to keep the peevishness out of his voice. “Is there yet another, beyond Keter, that I have to pass through before I will be allowed to go home?”
“I do not know about your going home,” Lukas said. “But I do know that there are not ten worlds in the Sephirot.”
“How many are there?”
“Countless. My mother’s father, who was wise in such matters and who knew about the gateways and the passages, said there were so many different worlds that a man could visit one a day and not be done in a lifetime.”
He didn’t answer for a moment. He finally said, “Well, shit.”
Lukas laughed softly in the dark. “But this doesn’t mean you’re compelled to visit any more than you wish. Let me take you up onto the cliff top tomorrow. It will do me no harm to spend a day away from the boat. Then, we will see what we will see. You may find your way home from there.”
The first big drops of warm rain splattered against his bare chest. There was a zigzag flash of lightning, somewhere out to sea, and thunder rolled, closer than before.
“You should come indoors with me,” Lukas said.
“No, I think I’d like to stay here.”
Lukas chuckled again, and it was lost in another rumble of thunder. “As you wish, my friend. I will keep a dry corner for you if you change your mind.”
He went off at a jog as the skies opened up. Water poured from the heavens, a drenching baptism that washed away all expectations, all hopes, all fears, and left him a vessel waiting to be filled, a bell ringing in the empty sky.
Countless. World without end, amen. Hadn’t that been the end of the prayer in his grandmother’s church? Were the ten worlds of the Sephirot only the first steps on the path?
Finally the rain slackened, and he slept. The storm passed, and the stars turned in their courses. And when he woke, his skin and hair were dry, and the sun was shining. Gentle waves lapped the shore, and a light breeze brought him the smell of salt and the keening of gulls.
Duncan took a quick swim in the shallows while waiting for Lukas to wake. The water was warm, and his body slipped through the waves as easily as a fish. Afterwards, he sat on a rock to dry off in the sunshine, and had just dressed when the door of the cottage opened.
Lukas came out, stretching and yawning, and said, “You passed the night without being washed away?”
“I like the rain. It leaves you alone with your thoughts.”
“And what counsel has the rain brought?”
“That I should try your suggestion. Go up onto the cliff, and see what I can see.”
“It may be that you will learn nothing,” Lukas admitted. “Perhaps the powers attributed to the place are only superstition.”
“Have you ever been up there yourself?”
“Once. My grandfather went up with me.” Lukas gave him a crooked smile. “All I saw was the sea and the sun and the horizon. But honestly, that was all I was looking for. If you go up there with a different question in your heart, maybe you will see something else.”
“There’s only one way to find out.” He stood. “I’m ready to leave when you are.”
They packed satchels with some dried fruit and two water skins and set off up the beach. White sand gave way to rock, its surface smoothed by millennia of polishing by the ocean waves, and for a time they made better progress than they had on the soft sand. After they had hiked for a little more than an hour, Lukas raised his arm and pointed inland. There was a stone statue of a man, robed and hooded, standing under the eaves of the trees. One hand was out, palm upward, and the other held a lantern. The stone was eroded with the passage of time, and cracks showed in the carven folds of the sleeves and hood. A vining plant had twisted its way up the statue, the thin stems ending in a drapery of little white flowers.
“That marks the beginning of the path inland,” Lukas said.
They walked into the deep shade of the woods. A carpet of leaves crunched under their bare feet, and for a while, they went forward in the green silence, around hoary tree trunks furred with moss. The terrain rose, and the forest climbed upwards amongst jagged rock outcroppings and boulders that had tumbled down in ruin from the mountain face ahead of them. An hour after that the trees grew more sparse, the broadleaved oaks replaced by wind-writhen pines and firs as they ascended. They stopped, sitting on a fallen log to eat the meager meal they had brought along, and to drink some of the water in the skins.
“How much farther?” Duncan asked.
“If we were birds, we’d reckon the distance short. But the climb gets steeper from here.”
“And you and your grandfather did this journey when you were a child?”
“I was a youth, but strong and willful and cocky. And my grandfather thought it important. We took it slowly, with many rests.”
They recommenced walking, as the rocky path twisted around jutting arms of the mountain, always heading upward, finding a way even when the nearly vertical face of the cliff seemed impassable. Each time they were brought to a place where it appeared that there was no way through, the path would snake its way into a barely-seen cleft that opened out into a narrow valley, and they would ascend farther, upwards toward the sky.
Late in the day, the path made one last steep scramble up onto a flat, treeless tableland, where the wind rippled through grass up to their knees. Duncan and Lukas stood for a moment at the top of the path, chests heaving with exertion, and then Lukas struck out across the broad expanse of the cliff top.
The sky looked closer, the warm, humid azure of sea level replaced by a deep ultramarine. The sun shone full on his face as they went forward, and the wind had a dry chill to it, but the grass was kind under his sore feet. Soon they approached a place where the cliff hung out over the ocean, where the rock was broken into torn edges that protruded into empty space, seeming held up by nothing at all. Lukas motioned him forward, and together, they went out onto one of the piers of stone, and lay down on their bellies, their eyes cast downward at the sea, a dizzying distance below them. They looked downward at white specks that seemed like floating bits of debris on the water, but he realized that those were gulls, kiting over the waves, thousands of feet below.
“What do you see?” Lukas said.
As Duncan watched, the incessant motion of the sea stopped, as if it had crystallized. The surface was covered with millions of glittering shards, reflecting back up to his gaze a myriad colors. When he moved his eyes, ordinary motion returned, but whenever he focused on one spot, the ocean froze, shattering into facets like a fly’s eye.
“I see...” He swallowed. “I do not know how to describe it. It’s like the surface of the sea is covered with windows.”
“Each of those windows is a gateway,” Lukas said.
He turned toward his twin, and frowned. “And is that what you see?”
Lukas smiled, and shook his head. “All I see is the ocean’s waves, and the birds and the clouds. Those are the end of my path. I have no desire to tread a step outside of this land.”
“Then how do you know about it?”
“My grandfather told me about such things. If it is your fate to travel between the worlds, you’ll see the gates, and that is how you will know it is your path. Others do not see them.”
He looked back down toward the sea, and fixed his gaze. Beneath him, the surface cracked into countless bright fragments. “Would one of those gateways bring me back home?”
“Certainly.”
“How do I find it?”
“Are you asking,” Lukas said, and Duncan could hear the smile in his voice, “because you wish to go through it, or because you wish to avoid doing so?”
“I don’t know. I always wanted to go home. But so many worlds...” He looked over at Lukas again, and there were tears in his eyes. “When I was in Tiferet, a man there told me that the Sephirot was a journey toward enlightenment. I know I’m different now than when I started, but I don’t feel enlightened, I feel overwhelmed.”
“Perhaps enlightenment isn’t a place you arrive. Maybe it’s finding the path you need to be on, and taking that as far as you can.”
“But why me?” His voice cracked. “It is something I have wondered, throughout all of this. I’m an ordinary man, with ordinary thoughts, ordinary fears, ordinary desires. There is nothing about me that makes me better than anyone else, that makes me worth... all of this.”
“That is your error, then. There is no better path, no worse one. I am a fisherman, the man in Chokhmah I met is a net-maker. You are a traveler. All paths are equal, because in the end, they all lead to the same place.”
“Where?”
“Nowhere.”
A sense of bleakness rose up in him. “If that is true, then I have no choice.”
Lukas put one hand on his shoulder. “You always have choice. Even if at the end, you look back and say, ‘I could not have done differently,’ the truth is that you always can stray from the path you should be on. If you know an answer, you can still turn your face away from it.”
“So I could stand up, and walk back down the mountain, and live here in Keter for the rest of my life.”
“Yes.”
He felt a surge of wild hope. Keter was as close as a paradise he’d found on his journey. But like the static world of Chesed, it was not for him.
“You would not stop me, then? Even if you knew I was making the wrong choice?”
“If I did, it would no longer be a choice,” Lukas said. “But from your voice, I would guess that you are no longer in any real doubt about which path to take.”
“Yes. I know what to do, but I’m scared to do it.”
“We all are.”
Glowing prismatic colors shimmered from the crystalline faces of the waves, as if the ocean were a basin filled with jewels. Each one was a portal, within which were other portals to other places, a fractal snowflake of a universe where every piece contained the entire whole.
Worlds without end, amen.
Duncan stood, and walked a little way back from the cliff edge. He unsnapped and unzipped his shorts, and pulled them and his boxers off, tossed them aside. Standing, naked to the sky, he looked out toward the horizon.
“I started this journey wearing nothing but my skin. I shouldn’t be afraid to end it the same way.”
Lukas rolled over, and in a single graceful motion, moved into a crosslegged position. “I probably won’t see you again,” he said, in a conversational tone.
“It doesn’t matter. It isn’t as if you don’t know who I am.”
“Good luck. I hope you see wonders.”
“I already have.”
Lukas gave him a crooked grin. “I wouldn’t be surprised if you sprout wings from your shoulders on the way down.”
Duncan returned his smile, then facing outward toward the empty air, he took a deep breath, feeling the cool mountain air fill his chest. He sprinted forward, his bare feet pushing against the roughness of the rock face, and flung himself off.
He fell headfirst, hands out in front of him, his body flashing like a meteor as it cleaved the air. The glittering windows into a thousand different realities swirled upwards to meet him, caught him up, and in the blink of an eye, he was gone.
About Gordon Bonnet
Gordon Bonnet has been writing fiction for decades. Encouraged when his story “Crazy Bird Bends His Beak” won critical acclaim in Mrs. Moore’s 1st grade class at Central Elementary School in St. Albans, West Virginia, he embarked on a long love affair with the written word.
His interest in the paranormal goes back almost that far. Introduced to speculative, fantasy, and science fiction by such giants in the tradition as Madeleine L’Engle, Lloyd Alexander, Isaac Asimov, C. S. Lewis, and J. R. R. Tolkien, he was captivated by those writers’ abilities to take the reader to a fictional world and make it seem tangible, to breathe life and passion and personality into characters who were (sometimes) not even human. He made journeys into darker realms upon meeting the works of Edgar Allen Poe and H. P. Lovecraft during his teenage years, and those authors still influence his imagination and his writing to this day.
This fascination with the paranormal, however, has always been tempered by Gordon’s scientific training. This has led to a strange duality: his work as a teacher, skeptic and debunker on the popular blog Skeptophilia, while simultaneously writing paranormal and speculative novels, novellas, and short stories. Gordon explains this, with a smile: “Well, I do know it’s fiction, after all.”
He blogs daily, and is never without a piece of fiction in progress—driven to continue (as he puts it) “because I want to find out how the story ends.” From historical fiction (Kári the Lucky), to murder mysteries (the Parsifal Snowe Mysteries, beginning with Poison the Well), to paranormal fiction with a humorous twist (Periphery and Lock & Key) to the truly terrifying (Gears and Descent into Ulthoa), Gordon’s fiction has something for all tastes!
Find him conversing with his dogs (and perhaps his wife) in Trumansburg, NY, or the following platforms:
YouTube https://youtube.com/@skeptophilia1509
Skeptophilia blog http://www.skeptophilia.com/
Books and stuff http://www.gordonbonnet.com
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Also By Gordon Bonnet
The Communion of Shadows
Kári the Lucky
Descent into Ulthoa
Kill Switch
The Fifth Day
The Shambles
Snowe Mysteries (Series)
Black-eyed Children (Series)
Sign up for Gordon's Little Bustard Books Newsletter and Obscure Weird Tidbits at his website: http://www.gordonbonnet.com
from The Communion of Shadows
August 1850
A desolate moan, and the wooden shutters rattled like there was something unholy trying to enter, but it was only the wind.
Leandre Naquin jumped at the sound, then turned back toward his friends, the heat of embarrassment rising in his cheeks. Thunder rolled in the distance and the air coming in through the cracks smelled like rain.
“Scared of some noise?” J. P. Ayo’s characteristic grin flashed out in the dim lantern light. “Loup garou come out of the swamp to get you?”
Leandre gave a genial laugh, and the three other men joined in. “No, it just startled me. But it’s coming faster than we thought. Good thing we got the cane cut. Wind like this could blow it flat. Lose the whole field.”
J. P. gave a dismissive wave. “It’s not a hurricane, it’s just a summer thunderstorm. But you know what that means, T-Joe. You better stay the night here.”
Joseph Lirette, the youngest of the four, put on an expression so comically distraught that J. P. snorted laughter and slapped his knee.
“Won’t hurt you none to miss a night with your pretty wife, T-Joe. You can just make sure and do it twice tomorrow night.”
T-Joe’s face turned scarlet. “That’s not it. I’m just… I hope she’ll be all right by herself. A storm, you know, she could get scared.”
Clovis Dantin snorted. “Better scared for a night than alone forever because you walked home in a storm and got struck by lightning.” He took a swig of the liquor J. P. had poured into tin cups from a heavy ceramic bottle, then leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms.
