I looked around, relieved at the appearance of things. All seemed peaceful. There was no battle. At least no battle I could see.
Once more, the square-jawed man with long black hair approached me. He dripped with sweat, haggard and limping, favoring his left leg.
“What happened?” I asked, but before he could answer, he appeared to burst into flames that did not consume him but left his features still visible. My face blistered at the heat. Then a portal opened in midair, giving me a moment’s glimpse of something beyond. His face glowing white hot, grimacing and resolute, like a soldier headed back to battle, the black-haired warrior marched alone, limping through the portal to the universe next door.
When he’d vanished, I ran my hands over my body again, barely able to believe my wounds were gone and I could move freely. I stood slowly, then dizzily sank back down to the ground and clutched the dirt, closing my eyes. At first I was sure I would never forget what had happened. Then I tried to remember it. Everything was so clear. Rather, it had been so clear just a few minutes ago. As I faded into sleep I tried to latch on to whatever it was that I had come to see, that was so important and I had been determined never to forget. It seemed like air escaping slowly from an inner tube.
It was dark when I awoke. I got up slowly, knees creaking, neck stiff. Hearing a crackling sound, I peered through tree branches and saw a fire in the distance. I walked to it and found Joshua sitting there, staring into the flames.
“Good to see you again,” he told me.
I studied his face, sculpted and powerful and kind. He looked remarkably like someone I had just seen. Who was it? It must be the commander of the bright army. For a moment I felt certain it was him. I almost asked Joshua why he’d stopped, why he hadn’t defended me against the dark lord.
“Have something to eat; then go back to sleep,” he said in a reassuring voice. “Tomorrow I have something to show you.”
FOUR
oshua served a delicious breakfast, then told me, “I have others who need my guidance now. I must go to them, but I’ll return in a few hours. Just find some shade and relax. I’ll be back. Will you be all right?”
I nodded and watched him walk into some thick vine maples, a rich tapestry of fall colors. He disappeared.
Later, alone, I climbed a hill. Glancing down, I was surprised to see a huge figure, a giant in a flowing black robe, standing on the hillside, looking down over the roads. Instinctively, I ducked behind a large willow tree and watched as the breeze parted the branches just enough for me to see.
As I hid, random thoughts assaulted me. Among them was my father spending his life affirming his independence, then slowly dying without so much as control over his bladder, as clueless about the world he lived in as about the worlds beyond.
The ominous black-robed being cast a long shadow across the hillside, and when he moved and the shadow fell over others of the little people, I heard howls and whimpers. The man—or was he a great beast—stood smiling, gloating, taking pleasure in the pain he saw on the roads below him. He took out a lyre and played music and sang an otherworldly song. It sounded compelling, yet at moments seemed like a fraud, a counterfeit of some truer and deeper song. He laughed and pointed his finger at the sprawling misery and played his music like a cosmic Nero, fiddling while a world burned.
He blew smoke out his nose. Then, to my horror, I saw him putting little people into his mouth. He smoked men as if they were cigarettes. Soon he had a half dozen in at once, a macabre sight that turned my stomach and made my knees tremble. He wheezed and choked and laughed like a junior high boy indulging in a forbidden vice.
When he was done, he crumpled the human cigarettes one by one, slowly, as if taking exquisite pleasure in the undoing of each. Finally, he tossed them to the ground. I watched him lift his leg, the leg of a tyrannosaur, and smash them, grinding them until they were flat. Even then he didn’t stop grinding.
Throat tight, I shivered in the shade of the willow.
I knew him. I’d seen him on the great battlefield with a raised battle-ax, attempting to remove my head and nearly succeeding. Even at a distance I could see his shark eyes. I chilled at his singing.
At the same moment, I heard another song in the air, a song in the distance like a pale but ever-growing light behind a dark curtain of rain. It was a melody in the wind blowing gently from Charis, City of Light, barely visible in the west. It was a song of love and might, of grace and victory.
The dark prince put his hands over his ears and yelled curses, pacing back and forth. I wondered how such a bright song could be sung in the presence of such cruel evil. Yet it wafted its way through the miserable air of the dead-end roads below, reverberating even in the sewer drains that connected them. I saw people here and there on various roads responding to it, smiling, then turning to walk up the hillside to the red road.
The dark prince called to the people, in a smooth and inviting voice that belied his beastly form. “That song is a lie! You’d be fools to believe it. I have better ways, better roads, and lots of them. Choose what you like, decide what you wish to be true. Let me show you. Come my way! Follow me there!”
He sounded like a carnival barker inviting men into his house of mirrors.
A gust of wind blew back the willow branches in front of me, and suddenly he turned and saw me watching him. He seemed surprised, and angry to see me. My blood froze. As I looked on helplessly, he stepped off the hillside as gracefully as a hang glider, his body transforming into a flying beast, a hell hawk, claws grasping the air.
He flew toward the willow and circled over me. I saw the weathered scales of his underside. I was overwhelmed by the putrid smell of ancient, rotting flesh, caked with blood and desiccated human body parts. I saw on the scales of this filthy, gluttonous beast the dried residue of his sickening drool.
The thunderclaps of his flapping wings deafened me. He parted his razor teeth and descended. I choked on malevolence, strangled by doom. Just as the beast opened his mouth, just as I smelled his wretched breath, his head yanked backward, and he disappeared.
Why had I been delivered from him again? And why did I feel so certain this rescue would be my last?
Disoriented, I sat there, catching my breath, seeking to shake the terror. Finally I walked out from under the willow branches feeling as if space and time had turned inside out.
A familiar figure walked toward me, returning from his obligations.
“Joshua!”
I smiled and walked toward him. I extended my hand. When I got close I caught the faint scent of sulfur. I looked at his face, then recoiled, standing for a moment in stunned silence.
Joshua’s face was a mask with two holes. His eyes were not radiant blue. They were the dark, dull eyes of a shark!
I turned and ran until I could run no farther. I found shelter at the hollow base of an old tree, crawled in, and covered my twitching face.
FIVE
urled up in that tree hollow, I dared not emerge until I knew Joshua couldn’t find me. Suddenly, I felt as if a giant spider lurked behind me. Forcing myself to look up, I let out my breath when I saw the familiar face of a white-haired man in a ragged toga—Shadrach, the gap-toothed traveler from the red road. He saw me trembling with fear.
“I tried to warn you about him,” Shadrach said in his gravelly voice.
“Why didn’t you?” I stammered.
“You wouldn’t listen. It was as if you couldn’t hear my words.”
It was true. I’d never seen Shadrach as anything but a smelly, weathered old fool who rattled on and on about nonsense. I remembered how he would corner me and say, “I must tell you about the chasm”—some vast abyss that he said separated road-walkers from Charis. It was spooky talk, and I brushed him off, but it bothered me enough that I had asked Joshua about it.
“There is no chasm,” he had answered. “Even if there were, it’s the last place you’d want to go.” That settled the issue for me at the time. But now I’d seen who
Joshua was. And it made everything he’d said to me suspect.
“This time,” the old man went on, as if reading my thoughts, “he could not keep you from seeing him as he really is. But don’t underestimate him. He won’t give up.”
I had no words to speak—I was trying to process it all.
The old man pointed to the edge of a nearby valley, not far from where I’d seen Joshua stomping out men like cigarettes. “Look at the image-bearers who have forgotten who they are.” I watched their trancelike movements, zombies following the crowd.
He turned to me. “You’re one of those, are you not? The Impostor gives them wrong dreams or robs them of the right ones—it’s all the same. He gives them hope in the wrong things, then takes away their hope in the right ones. Like a cruel, fastidious nanny, he scrubs the hope out of their bloodshot eyes.”
“It’s not what I want,” I said.
“Be grateful you can return to the red road, for few men get so many chances as you have.” Looking about him, he lectured me about this “hollow cavern of broken promises and abandoned dreams.” But he also spoke of the great King in Charis and of his fight against a gloating pretender who was powerless against the King, except for the power granted him at that very King’s discretion.
I remembered the conflict that I’d witnessed briefly but so horrifically on the plain.
“Then why the great battle?” I asked. “And why is evil winning?”
“Not all questions can be answered now,” the old man replied mysteriously. He looked at me intently. “And not all is as it appears. Are you ready to walk the red road to the chasm?”
“I want to go to Charis—I can tell you that much.” Even as I said it, the words struck me, as if I’d finally spoken what I knew deep in my heart. “If the red road will take me there, it’s the red road I want. As for the chasm, I’m still not convinced there is one. And if there is, why would I want to go there?”
“It isn’t a matter of wanting. No one wants the chasm to be there. But we don’t get a vote—or, rather, we all cast our votes long ago. You can go to the chasm directly by walking the red road, where you can face it while you’re still alive. Or you can waste your life walking the other roads that avoid the chasm for the moment. But then, when all opportunity to deal with it is past, they dump you there the instant you die.”
He turned and pointed to a sharp incline of rocks and shale above. “Follow me,” he said. “We must climb up to that ledge.”
“It’s halfway up the mountain!”
“Yes. It leads to a higher point on the red road, and it will afford us the view you need. Once you see the roads and the landscape from above, you’ll understand.”
Part of me resisted going with him, but I felt certain there was no future elsewhere. The red road might or might not be a dead end—but everything else I’d seen certainly was.
I followed the old man, surprised that he negotiated the mountain like a goat. If I hadn’t put my feet in the same places he put his, I would have fallen a dozen times. I pushed myself to keep up with him.
We climbed for perhaps eight hours with little rest. The old man kept the lead and reached the top well ahead of me.
“This is the red road,” he called down to me, still twenty feet below.
I scrambled up the last stretch, stepped out on the ledge, and took in a sight that stole my breath away. It was a canyon so large that it stretched out against the horizon as far as I could see. Way in the distance, on the other side, was the City of Light, appearing much farther away than before.
I looked down at all the other roads, the gray roads. They circled and meandered until each one finally emptied at some point into the chasm, each at a different spot. On each road I could see tiny dots that I supposed were people or groups of people. I could see how the roads wound around so much that they gave the illusion of progress and afforded no view of the chasm. But from here, high above, the picture was radically different.
I have brought you now to where my story began. Perhaps you begin to understand the desperation with which I looked at that chasm. And why it seemed the end of all life, the end of all hope. To stay on this side of the chasm and walk the dead-end roads, to give myself still more false hopes and only feed the gnawing emptiness within and wait for death to sweep me away … it seemed unthinkable. But what was the alternative? To cross the chasm and make it to the City of Light was impossible.
I turned back to old Shadrach and said, “The red road goes to the chasm like all the other roads.”
“Yes, I told you that,” he said crossly. “And I also told you, did I not, that the red road takes you to the chasm before you die, not after?”
“What difference does that make? It’s all the same in the end.”
“No. It makes all the difference. You will see. That is, if you choose to go there with me.”
I considered my options. I stared down at the winding, wandering gray roads below, the cul-de-sacs, the figure eights, the circles—all going nowhere.
Heading toward a chasm didn’t appear to make sense—but I refused to go back to where I’d been.
I looked at the shining city on the mountain beyond the chasm. Was Charis the home I’d never known but always longed for?
Maybe it made no sense to walk toward this chasm—but so be it. If a thousand things that made sense to me had turned out wrong, perhaps this thing that didn’t make sense would turn out right. If the only way to escape this country was to walk to the chasm, what else was I to do? Perhaps the chasm had a floor, not visible from here, that could be traveled. It would take every ounce of strength I could muster to cross it. But maybe I could do it after all. I’d done many things others didn’t think I could. This much I knew—that shimmering vision beyond the chasm … that place called Charis … was where I had to be.
“Let’s go,” I said. “I’m walking the red road.”
SIX
t took us most of the day to descend the mountain. At its base, it became barren desert—nothing but rock, sand, and salt flats.
I fingered a few cactuses that had been cut wide open, robbed of their water stores by thirsty travelers. They were hard as truck tires.
We passed a lone mesquite tree, its roots deep, squeezing some hidden drops of moisture out of the rocky ground.
The only rises in the desert were mounds of formless slag surrounded by oily black ooze that emitted pungent fumes.
I could no longer see the chasm. I began to wonder if my eyes had played tricks on me up on the mountain. If it was really there and we were this close, I’d surely be able to see it, wouldn’t I?
I looked in the distance at the shining city. I stared at it, feeling my heart ache when it shimmered out of sight even for a moment, then feeling revived when it reappeared. What was it really like there? I had to know. Nothing else mattered.
We camped for the night. In the darkness I heard wolves howling in the distance and eerie screams. I tossed and turned, tense and uneasy.
In the morning, we’d journeyed only a few hours when I began to smell something rank. The loathsome odor invaded my nostrils and gripped my stomach. Something terrible filled the air. Crook-necked vultures and unfamiliar birds of prey, hoary and weathered, circled above. They peered down expectantly. I couldn’t escape the feeling that this vast stretch of land had fed their morbid appetites for millennia. Were we their next meal?
Suddenly I stopped dead and blinked my eyes. What had appeared to be level land stretching out into the distance now came into sharper focus. Before me was the very thing I’d seen from the mountaintop and hoped was an illusion. I had reached the chasm’s mouth. It stretched farther than I could see with white rocks scattered around its pale, sandy rim.
I should have been prepared for this, but viewing the chasm from a distance was very different from seeing—and smelling—it at its edge. I was overwhelmed. There was no way to deny the chasm now. How could I have supposed for a moment it hadn’t been there? It dominated the
landscape. I turned my head, looking for some way around the abyss. But it was as wide as it was long.
As I walked the red road as far as it could take me, I saw that the fringes of the chasm were lined with corpses. I watched as reptilian carrion fowl feasted on human entrails, picking bones and pulling tendons with their great beaks. I recoiled at the sight. The stench of rotting flesh made me gag.
Upon closer inspection, I realized that what I at first thought were scattered white rocks in the sand were in fact human bones, picked clean by wind and sand and predators. The white sand was in fact powdered bone. The chasm before me was not some natural wonder, but an unnatural graveyard, unspeakably immense, with no tombstones or caretakers—nothing but the beating sun and the merciless winds of time.
The air was dry, yet thick with death, so thick I felt like I was breathing through a wet dishrag. Covering my nose and inhaling through my mouth as shallowly as I could, I stepped to the very edge of the chasm. I scanned it, wondering if there might yet be a way to descend and cross it.
What did the millions of human bones mean, scattered as far as I could see? Could it be that others before me—many no doubt smarter and stronger and better than I—had tried to find their way around and over and across the chasm?
Below me, the piles of bones scattered along the steep-sloped side of the chasm testified to the distances people had traveled. Though some had made it a few miles farther down the sheer edge than others—either by climbing skill or lengthy falls to their deaths—none had come close to crossing the chasm. It was impossible even to begin to cross it. However long and deeply I gazed into it, I could see no hint of any ground to walk on.
It appeared to be a bottomless pit. And even if it wasn’t … who could possibly cross it? And even if by some miracle they did … who could begin to climb the other side?