Ravenous Dusk Read Free

him unnoticed. His deeply-lined features were pale and bookish, but his eyes pinned and probed Hundayi. They were prophet's eyes, burning with an icy, omniscient zeal that was more than Hundayi had ever dreamed there was to power. The mullahs of Iran who sent fanatical human waves of children into his gunsights in the War of the Cities had only sparks of such cold fire. Through his eyes, Hundayi could see that he knew things no other man could know, had seen secret things too terrible to tell, and yet he believed in something too wondrous to describe, something that was coming over the horizon any minute. Against those eyes, Hundayi found himself beginning to burn with a desire to believe in it, too, to make it happen, whatever it was.
    "Are you a religious man, Major Hundayi?" Keogh asked.
    He bristled at the impertinence of the question. He had never discussed his faith with men beside whom he had faced death on the battlefield, and this American, this civilian, deigned to talk religion to him? "What I believe is no affair of yours," he said, as civilly as he could.
    "Saddam was a fool to allow the UN to fill it in," Keogh said. "Kuwait was a pearl, but this…" He turned and approached Major Hundayi so swiftly his hand went to his holster, but Keogh was already inside the sweep of his arm before he got it unclasped. "Do you know about Delphi, Major? In ancient Greece, an oracle sat in a cave over a deep fissure that they believed reached down to the center of the earth, where Gaea, the living earth itself, whispered prophecies. They called the oracle's cave and the temple of Apollo there the Omphalos, or navel of the world. This place is infinitely more precious. This is the living womb of the earth."
    Major Hundayi sneered and stepped back. "Your cousins in the United Nations did not agree with you. You Westerners are never of one mind about anything."
    Dr. Keogh smiled at him. "But we will be," he said. "Soon."
    He walked out to the edge of the cliff, and by the settling of his posture, Major Hundayi could tell that he was lost in memory. To heave the American over the edge now would be such a simple thing…
    "It has been so long since I was here last. So much has changed since it was ours…"
    "We have always stood guard here, Dr. Keogh. This has always been our land."
    "Major," Dr. Keogh said, "the last time I was here, your ancestors had not yet crawled up out of the oceans." Major Hundayi jumped, because the Doctor still stood with his back to him, but the voice came from behind him. He whirled, and this time he did draw his pistol, but he could not raise it any higher than his own beltline. The man before him was Dr. Keogh, and so were the three men beside him. One was red-headed and plump, another an Arab or Turk, and the third was a white woman, with hair wrapped in a scarf. But they all looked at him with his eyes, his mind behind them, as if they believed so fervently in his vision that they had been burned away, and only he looked out of their heads. One or another spoke, but the bedrock of his voice lay beneath their words.
    "When I was here last, this land was a great forest, and the ruin below us was the mouth of all Creation, and the last best hope of a race as far advanced beyond your kind as you are above the single-celled amoebae that escaped from this place and struggled to evolve into you. They failed, but their grand experiment goes on, down there. Beneath all that stone, lies the Garden of Eden."
    Major Hundayi felt as if he were going to faint. His voice cracked as he asked, "And what—what will you do?"
    "We are going to walk into Eden, and we are going to eat the flesh of the gods."
    Hundayi bowed his head and covered his face with his hands to pray for surely this was a devil, and if there were devils then surely there must be God. "There is no god but Allah—"
    "Oh, the universe is rife with gods, but not one of them cares for your miserable race. Do you know the true name of the Crawling