Crematorium for Phoenixes by Nikola Yanchovichin

leave fathers, the only supporters of their
families, to die so that I can help save palaces from not being
destroyed by wars. And those twin curses at infinity are jamming
the cheers of the royal minstrels.”
    Akuma sighed, threw off his cloak, and
looked at the others who had gone home like the students of their
spiritual master. It seemed that he wanted too much.
    “There is one word that those who have
learned to listen in their heads are wise to heed and that is
‘reason.’ And there is another word that the wiser who have learned
to hear with their hearts know and that is ‘hope.’ Do it, Takeshi.
Help the others.”
    Silence, the kind that creates the passage
of the time, occurred, freezing objects. It prolonged their shadows
and dropped them like a number of cars on the roads.
    “Maybe you’re right,” said Takeshi.
    The air filled with a new snappiness,
curative and invigorated, as if it came from a place of eternal
verdure come straight from the hand of the stranger. The men stood
from their bunks and hammocks. They swayed on the floor like
toddlers.
    “Savior,” they breathily exhaled as
individuals laying a miracle before a prophet.
    “I’m not that One, but follow me.”
    Chapter
Ten
    Paved tar-black steel fences creaked as they
flexed like rotten sticks in the gaping holes between the pins that
filtered the blood-red orbs of bubbling molten lava kilometers
below.
    The company, headed by Victor Drake, dragged
the web flour with their metal shoes, stepping on it as it popped.
The umpteen ice was ready at any moment to collapse into the depths
of the Earth.
    They, as we said, were walking slowly and
carefully, shifting their weight while the place, lined as it was
with a massive apparatus—an assembly of coils deployed—bent with
its cast iron supports. It vibrated in such a way that it seemed as
if at any moment electric arcs would be generated, lighting up a
laboratory of profane arts.
    But perhaps the most wonderful thing was the
music.
    Legendary and resonating, it filled the
Earth’s cavities and bounced in echoes, drenched by the water and
fire suppression of the earth-gray scree.
    The music narrated stories about palaces
that were excavated in the ground, about forgotten golden
treasures, about the fate of people who had crawled to live
underwater and underground. The men listened to this song while
staring into the gloom between the already described places. They
went past more rows of copper-green units until finally, at the
very end, they saw its source.
    Piles of bodies bumped into each other as
peat—wormy mud filled the floor to the ceiling so that the bodies
were heaped on one another like a freakish humanoid hive.
    For them, wrapped like a queen mother, lay
bathed in sweat, a disproportionate and unnaturally fat man whose
body hung caressed by the thousands, stroked by their cerebral
palsy hands.
    That view generated disgust and fear. It was
Dante’s imagination recreated in real life—lured by the heady song
of sinful people and their demonic keepers.
    Maybe those were the inhabitants who had
built the legendary Kingdom of Thule?
    I do not know, gentle reader. Sometimes,
life is like a broken smile, furrowed by bullets. It is the statue
of an angel that only decorates the door of the furnace to a
crematorium able to burn even phoenixes. And the only water that
can quench the flames is hope. It is those small, pathetic, and
melancholy dreams that can generate enough saliva for you to spit
into the face of despair.
    But even with them, sometimes evil will come
back. And when it does, you will not be able to do anything against
it. Perhaps you will only stay paralyzed.
    That is exactly what the men from the
Leviathan were doing while the sibilant eruptions of lava bubbled
and cast their shadows.
    Only Victor Drake moved, pulling the fuse
from his speargun rifle. He hardly stiffened because he was already
as stiff as a hunched old man.
    “William, what a meeting!” he shouted to