author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Notes from the author:

I had occasion to take the train from Denver to Salt Lake City not long ago. The route winds through mountains and desert, past mesas and valleys, beside rivers and through tunnels in sheer rock. It’s a treat to have nothing to do all day but sit back and watch the scenery go by.

At one point I could have sworn I saw the flash of a car passing along the side of a cliff where no car had any right to be. There was no road for a car to drive on over there, so there couldn’t have been a car. It was just an optical illusion--what else could it have been?

You must remember that in all things Dr. Green was a scientist. When she caught her first glimpse of the nether world, she instinctively trusted the evidence of her eyes over the assumptions of her mind. She did not say, “I have seen the nether world,” but neither did she say, “It was a trick of the light.” She had certainly seen something. All that remained was to figure out what she’d seen.

This was the way it began: She was driving. She was driving along a highway that wound between stark mountain peaks which the millennia had worn down to bare, vertical-faced mesas. Age-old boulders lay tumbled down the erosion slopes, like crumbs spilled down the pleats of a tablecloth. Dr. Green couldn’t get enough of the sight. Geology wasn’t her chosen field, but on a drive like this she could imagine another life in which she’d chosen it.

So with her eyes constantly moving between the mesas and the road ahead, it wasn’t surprising that Dr. Green would notice the people that shouldn’t have been there. From this distance, and also owing to other factors which we shall expand upon in just a moment, they were almost impossible to identify as people. But they weren’t shadows, because, unlike shadows on such a hot, windless, cloudless day, they moved; and they weren’t any other animal native to the region, because they moved in a bipedal manner and waved what seemed like arms and hands in the air.

She tried for a longer glimpse, looking directly at the mesa. Nothing was there.

She returned her eyes to the road, and now there were people on the mesa, plain as day. They stood at every level, as though the mesa were studded with ledges all up and down its sheer sides. Between them, separating one from another, flickered tall tongues of flame.

Dr. Green pulled to the side of the road and put her car in park. She engaged the handbrake. She opened the glove compartment, pulled out a small pair of binoculars, and focused them on the mesa. It didn’t work. When she used the binoculars, the out-of-place people were not there. This was consistent with her observations thus far; she could not see them with her bare eyes, either, not if she looked right at them. Only if she softened her focus and looked off to the side did they return to view, trapped in her peripheral vision.

They seemed to be waving frantically at her.

The next thing Dr. Green did will of course make perfect sense if you remember that she was in all things a scientist. She was also an accomplished and experienced traveler, and she had survived multiple automotive breakdowns in varyingly hostile environments. So she already had in the car everything she needed for a journey of respectable length on foot. This included wire-cutters, in case of barbed wire fences, and pointed rock-climbing slippers. She needed to get a closer look. You understand how it is.

The people who were and were not on the mesa, and the flames flickering between them, grew harder to see rather than easier as Dr. Green approached. She had to look even further aside to let them blossom in the corner of her eye. The clearest glimpse she got was when she stumbled over a treacherous spill of rock and took a tumble. She got up freshly bruised and with a sore ankle, but these were not relevant to her inquiries. More importantly, she had seen in that instant one more detail, a series of industrial-looking conveyor belts that ferried unidentifiable items from person to person through the flames. It moved sporadically, a pause here and a rush there, giving the people time to interact with what it carried but not leisurely.

At last she reached the foot of the erosion slope. She began to climb, keeping her face just slightly averted from the rock so that she could see the sometimes-there people. The sound of the wind rose in her ears and seemed to carry their voices, indistinct if she focused on them but almost intelligible if she tried to think of something else. It seemed to her the voices spoke many languages, all at once. It seemed to her one said, “I pray thee, Father, send him to my brothers’ house, that he may testify before them.” It seemed to her another said, ““Who has ever ascended unscathed from the underworld? Let her provide a substitute for herself.” It seemed that she understood these and several other of the voices, regardless of what tongue they spoke.

She was climbing the sheer rock face now. She reached for a crack in the sandstone. A slight movement of her head turned the rock into a blazing forge in her sight. She could smell the hot iron. There was no safe handhold anymore; everything was burning. She was going to fall.

A hand reached down to her, grasped her wrist, pulled her up to safety.

She could see her rescuer plainly now: a woman about Dr. Green’s height and build, her clothes ragged and uniformly gray with ash. There were marks around her wrists as though she had been shackled for a long time. She pulled Dr. Green into an embrace which Dr. Green returned gratefully. Then she spun Dr. Green around so that her back was safely to the rock wall. The rock was no longer sandstone, but igneous materials, dark, smoothed by time and human contact. The woman who had rescued her was climbing down the ledges to the rock floor below

It was hard to see her car and the highway. Unless she averted her eyes and left it to her peripheral vision, she saw nothing but more basalt columns and obsidian walls, flames and anvils and people working the forges. By squinting and tilting her head, Dr. Green could just make out a figure crossing the desert back toward her car. The figure seemed to be a woman about Dr. Green’s height and build, but from this distance and owing to other factors which we have already mentioned, it was impossible to be sure. She saw, in intermittent flashes as though seen under a failing fluorescent light, the car start up, pull back onto the highway, and drive away. Then the vision was gone.

The conveyor belt came to life with a horrendous jerk. Dr. Green examined the materials it had brought her. Rough iron, junk steel, all manner of scrap metal to be put in the fire and worked into new forms. Dr. Green reached for the tongs and hammer that hung from hooks beside the anvil. It was awkward because of the shackles connecting her wrists to the wall behind her, but she managed. It’s possible to adapt to just about anything if you try.

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