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maybe it was Robin, I don't know.
But in the middle of that pyre, in the noise and heat and insanity, the three
of us, joined at the heart, met something that had become so big not even this
fire could hold him, too big even for the whole wide world! Just at the very
moment when I thought we would be enveloped by the roaring size alone, the
slowly lumbering dolly and Panaflex camera crashed through the flaming black
cinders that had been our front door and this howling blast of icy air came
through. It seemed to take the three of us, still holding tight to each
other's hands, away on its wings of cold out into the night, where we could
look down and see the castle below us, getting smaller and smaller, as the
fire jumped to the hills around it. The wind fanned the flames that shot
hundreds of feet into the night air, which showed this little guy with a blue
velvet eyepatch come running out the door, stamping his feet and howling some
shit that none of us would ever work again in that town, that we'd never work
again in movies or TV. But that doesn't include writing books, does it? Fuck
no, it doesn't. And now that me and Robin have this neat little place in
Vermont and we hear every couple of months from Jimmy, who is happy as a clam
living a new life (he has kids and everything), and now that you know just
what happened to Crusaders in Love, if that asshole corporate raider Lefty
Armbruster thinks he can stop me, I say let him try.
I am dead flat serious, let him try.
Anyway, our wonderful life goes on, and while I'm upstairs doing this, Robin
is out in the garden watering the rose bushes, since we had/this sudden weird
hot spell (she loves roses). And from downstairs I can smell the apple pie
(the gooey kind with (he crumbly stuff on top) that I m baking in the oven. I
hear Robin come in and yelled down to her to come up and see me write "The
End," (a writer's two favorite words, unless they'd be 'time for dinner') but
she doesn't answer. Hrnnun. Then, I hear her on the stairs OKAY! only the
sound her step makes is too loud. "Robin," I call out, "honey..."
This is weird-I don't like this-hand on the door, knob turns, why am I so
scared? Awww, it'll be her and Fit edit this and (he door is opening and HEY,
WAIT A MINUTE
BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA
Michael Armstrong
Copyright (c) 1987 by Michael Armstrong
Nuliajuk, the seal woman, came to Qawik in his vision. He was swimming deep
below me pack ice, down where the tungai- animal spirits-lived, paying his
respects to the souls of the sea animals. Qawik was swimming with a seal,
diving and turning, and when he looked at her face she smiled at him-woman's
face, seal's body.
"Nuliajuk," he said.
Nuliajuk smiled. "It is time for you to go to the surface. You must push the
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water aside and rejoin your people."
"I am dead," Qawik said. He tugged at the woman's knife, the ulu, stuck point
first in his skull. The knife would not come out. "I cannot rejoin my people.
I am dead."
"You must go to the surface," she said. "Now. Push the water aside. Go. Go."
Qawik shook his head. Nuliajuk stared at him, and then he yielded.
"Go."
He rose. He kicked, fought, swam through the cold water, up and up. The
darkness gave way to light. The ice thickened, became a great mat of dark
dirt, roots shooting down, timbers and old houses in the permafrost. He
pushed. The dirt cracked and groaned and split apart. He floated on his back.
He looked at his hands: flesh reformed on the bones of his fingers. There was
a squirming around him, a twitching. His legs flew back to his body. He
watched as a wolf spat out his liver, saw the liver fly back into his groin.
The muscles spun and wove around the skeleton, the skeleton grew back into his
body, his body became whole.
His parka came back out of the dirt. The spots of the reindeer hide grew
together. His sealskin mukluks wrapped his feet. His cheeks grew back around
the quarter-sized labret in his left cheek, the dime-sized labret in his right
cheek. His scalp itched as his hair grew back. He licked his ops and tasted
cold dirt. Qawik spat, kicked, and rose out of the ground.
Above him was a great whale's jaw. As he watched, the arches of the mandibles
leaned into each other and collapsed, settled into the mire, and sank. He
blinked his eyes, squinted; the world was a blast of bright. He breathed, one
deep lungful, another, the air filling his whole body.
Qawik coughed. The air smelled like rotten -eggs, humid and thick, the smoke
from a dying blubber lamp. He spat, breathed again, coughed.
Nuliajuk flopped around in the swamp, mud dripping from her flippers, mud on
her face. She shook her head and drops of bloody mud flew out of her long
black hair. She sat up on her hind flippers, smiled, and with one flipper
waved her arm at the great swamp.
"Welcome," Nuliajuk said. "Welcome, Qawik, to Hell."
* * *
"Hell," Qawik asked Nuliajuk. "What is this Hell?"
"The world below," she said. "The place where the tungai live. The land of the
devils."
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