The Chasm Read online

  I wanted to cross it—but how could I?

  I was jolted from my inner questioning by a sound. What is that? Haunting voices rising from the pit! But … how? The voices were faint yet distinct, full of sorrow and regret and bitterness and self-preoccupation. Voices of those who had no hope, who still had the longings of humanity but no possibility of fulfillment.

  A chill pierced my bones. Did the voices come from the disembodied souls of the corpses and bones surrounding me? Were they voices of the damned?

  A knot constricted my throat, and I gulped furiously for air. I fell to the ground as a sickening wave of terror welled up from my belly. I stretched out on the bone-powder sand, grabbing it with clenched fists. It sifted through my fingers. I could not hold the sands of death.

  “It’s hard to accept, isn’t it?” a creaky voice asked. I lifted my head, brushing sand from my eyebrows. I looked up at the old man.

  “I don’t accept it,” I said. “I can’t. I won’t.”

  I pulled myself up on one knee and gazed again at the abyss, at the battered remains of multitudes who had tried to cross. The more I stared, the more I clenched my teeth.

  When I had turned from all the other roads, the roads of emptiness and delusion, I dared to hope the red road might be different. But here I was at death’s end, robbed even of comforting illusions. At least the other roads, though they never led to Charis, offered diversions to occupy my time and anesthetize my aching heart. But the red road had ended here, offering nothing but hopeless despair. It had led me to the biggest dead end of all.

  “If there’s a king,” I shouted, “why would he do this to us?”

  “You blame the King?” the old man asked. “It wasn’t he who made the chasm.”

  “Then who did?”

  He stared at me. “We did.” Then he pointed his bony finger. “You did.”

  I paced like an animal, fiercely resisting the absurd notion that I shared any blame for this infinite stretch of ruin. I felt sweat pooling on the bridge of my nose.

  My eyes burned as if open in salt water. In my chest I felt the same tugging, the familiar longing that had pulled me down this road. But now the truth of the chasm had stripped me of hope. I knew the yearning could never be satisfied. I’d die as I had lived, lonely and disconnected. I would never enter Charis. The City of Light was nothing but a cruel joke—a comfort to the ignorant, an insult to the intelligent.

  My body dropped like a sack of grain on rocky ground. The weight of worlds beyond fell upon me, and I collapsed.

  Nothing mattered but the tragedy that gripped me. No one could change my destiny from chasm to Charis. The tears flowed—I didn’t bother to wipe them. It was the darkest night of my soul.

  SEVEN

  he old man was nowhere to be seen now. I felt deserted. I had never been so alone.

  But then, in a moment I shall never forget, I saw something in the distance. No, I saw someone. It was a human form walking toward me, as if stepping on the air above the chasm, where land should have been and perhaps once was, but no longer.

  This dark-skinned man wore a white robe, but he was no ghost. Far from it. Somehow, he seemed more substantial, more human than I.

  He walked straight to me and looked into my eyes, fixing his on mine. I didn’t know him, but felt I should … as if everything I was seeking somehow led to him.

  I sensed he knew me. I felt as if he’d come directly to my door, a messenger from far away, from a place he missed. I knew he had given up much to make his way to me.

  He was a young man with ancient eyes. As I gazed into them, I caught a glimpse of what he had seen—a million worlds born and died. Wind-roughened and sun-darkened, the skin on his face was tough, like the sole of a boot. His white robe clung to him, stained with sweat and sawdust.

  I saw in his eyes the explosions of thunderstorms, the collisions of galaxies. His dark yet white-hot eyes were wild—they hit me like a boxer’s blows, swift and relentless.

  He sang a beautiful melody, fresh and young, yet prehistoric—“I am here to do what must be done … and what no other can do … and what I can do no other way.”

  As he sang, my heart came alive. The song was so familiar, as if it had been sung within me always, but I could never identify the words until now. All my life, I’d been longing to hear that song, to understand it … to sing it.

  Still, something held me back from this Woodsman. He looked so rough and ferocious … untamed and untamable.

  The song was beautiful beyond imagination. But now he began to sing it in a minor key. He sang of rebellion and betrayal, of the chasm and blood and suffering and death. The same song that had drawn me to him now made me cringe.

  I backed away from him, intrigued yet wary, doing battle with myself about who this really was and what claim he might make on me.

  My heart sank as I looked toward where I’d last seen Charis. The chasm was still there, and I still had no way to cross it. Nothing had changed. As always, hope melted into disappointment, and I remembered why it was easier not to hope.

  He walked toward me. There he stood, only three feet away, this solitary figure dressed in a plain old tunic, spotted with wood chips. He didn’t look like a celebrity or a hero, just a wandering woodsman and perhaps a worker of wood. He gazed at the sprawling blue sky above us, then to Charis in the distance, as if looking toward home. In that moment, as though I were looking through his eyes, I saw Charis more clearly than I’d ever seen it.

  He grabbed me with his eyes, holding me. I squirmed away from that hold and pointed my finger down at the chasm. Despair and anger welled up in me and exploded into a shouting challenge: “How can I cross the abyss? You demand the impossible! Is my longing for Charis your way of torturing me? Have you brought me here just to rub my face in misery?”

  He followed my pointing finger and gazed down into the abyss. His eyes watered. I could sense wheels within wheels moving inside him, a churning depth of ponderings and musings beyond my comprehension, as if the wheels had been turning ages before I asked my question and would still be turning eons after my bones became dust.

  The Woodsman moved away from the abyss, set his eyes, and focused on something behind me.

  A rush of cold air hit. Shivering, I turned and followed his gaze.

  Impossible! Why hadn’t I seen it before? It was a great tree. It reminded me of a ponderosa pine, yet it was many times larger than a California redwood, perhaps sixty feet in diameter and rising above the clouds. The reddish bark was rough, with splinters so jagged they looked like barbed fishhooks.

  The tree cast a long shadow to the west, plunging into the chasm.

  When I looked back at the Woodsman, he held a great sword with ancient inscriptions in a language I’d never seen. He walked to the tree, put a hand on it, and softly touched his head against it. Lifting the great sword and feeling its sharpness with his finger, he swung it back, uncoiling it against the trunk of the tree. The bark exploded, chunks flying everywhere.

  I couldn’t imagine how a tree this massive could be cut through—not by the greatest ax and certainly not with a sword.

  What did he think he was doing?

  EIGHT

  watched as the Woodsman swung the sword again and again with terrible force.

  He paused once to take off his white outer robe and rewrap it around his midsection, leaving his dark chest bare. His sinewy muscles rippled as he hewed the wood. He thrashed and pounded, again and again. Sweat poured down his forehead and off his face. Small capillaries in his brow burst with the pressure, mingling blood with sweat.

  I stepped close to the Woodsman, alarmed at his exertion and the toll it was taking on him. He spoke as he labored, and I listened, hearing things I’d never heard, things I’d never thought of—about himself, about me, about life.

  “I offer a joy that will cost you everything you have but gain you everything that matters.”

  What did he mean?

  “You’ve fallen short,
and a terrible price must be paid.”

  I backed away, troubled. Was he saying I was at fault for all this? Was he siding with Shadrach, against me? How dare he accuse me? Why was I always being blamed?

  I couldn’t explain how any man could attack a tree with a diameter ten times larger than his height and continue, relentlessly, to swing a sword against it, causing his muscles to quiver with the shock of each impact. Nor could I explain why his sword didn’t break or dull. But I saw it nonetheless with my own skeptic’s eyes.

  Finally I asked, “Can I help you?”

  “No,” he said, eyes lonesome. “You can’t.”

  Did he think I had nothing to offer? Was I not good enough for him?

  He chopped on that tree all day and through a long, lonely night. I dozed on and off, feeling useless but engrossed by what he was doing.

  In the morning, with one final swing of his sword, the whole tree wobbled. The Woodsman stood motionless, staring at it. Time seemed to stand still, as if the entire cosmos had found its focal point, and whatever happened next would forever alter history itself.

  He raised his right hand and pushed the tree toward the west. It tipped slowly and eerily before gravity seized it and began to slam it downward.

  Mesmerized by the awesome sight, I felt relieved it wasn’t going to crush me.

  The great tree fell. And fell and fell, as if plunging a greater distance than could be imagined. I knew it was tall, disappearing above the clouds, but it dawned on me that to take that long to fall it must be far taller than I had imagined. I imagined it would make a lonely sight falling into the chasm. But finally it hit the ground with what seemed the force of a great warhead. The impact tossed me into the air. I landed facedown, sprawled on the ground.

  But … why didn’t the tree plummet into the chasm? It had landed crosswise. This could only mean … its top had reached the far edge! Impossible as it seemed, the great tree now bridged both sides of the abyss. The tree had been incomprehensibly long in its reach.

  The Woodsman lay in a heap, sweating, exhausted, his biceps bulging, his veins throbbing, his worn clothes stained crimson.

  He stood. He looked across the expanse to the other side of the chasm and walked to the base of the fallen tree. He slowly took off his sandals and set them on the ground.

  Then I heard a creepy buzzing noise. I walked closer and looked down. At the Woodsman’s feet I saw tiny people, the size of insects, maybe half an inch tall. I carefully got on my knees for a closer look. The little people scurried about and wrapped fragile threads around the Woodsman’s feet. To people so small, the threads must have seemed like great ropes.

  “We have him now,” I heard one gloat. His voice sounded like it was intended to be somber and threatening, but it was so high pitched that it was only a squeak. “He can’t get away from us.”

  “He can’t tell us what to do.”

  “We’ll show him. We’ll force him onto the tree!”

  I heard squeak after squeak making similar threats, until I laughed and called down to them, “With one flick of a toe he would break your threads, and with a stomp of his feet he would smash you all!”

  I ridiculed the pathetic, arrogant men below, but suddenly I stopped laughing when I found myself standing next to them. Eye to eye with them now, I saw a huge shadow and looked up. There, far above me, was … the Woodsman! Had I become small? Or had the Woodsman become big? Perhaps it was both. Maybe that explained how he had cut through the huge tree.

  I was so much smaller than I’d thought, and he was so much bigger than he’d looked—things were not as they appeared.

  I heard the sound of someone pounding with a hammer, but it was not the crisp, loud sound of nails driven into wood. Rather, it was a dull tearing sound. Where was it coming from?

  I heard jingling metal and looked around to see people pulling things from their pockets. I reached into my left pocket and pulled out … a handful of nails.

  I saw now that each person carried a hammer. I watched motionless as person after person positioned nails on the Woodsman’s giant feet.

  “No!” I shouted. “What has he done to you?”

  What horrified me most was that the people seemed so normal, even nice. They weren’t criminals. They appeared to be respected citizens.

  “Beautiful day, isn’t it?” a woman in green nurse’s scrubs asked me as she positioned a nail and hammered it five times until it was buried to its head in the Woodsman’s foot.

  “Where’s your hammer?” asked a businessman in suit and tie, a man who looked remarkably like my father and spoke like him too. “Here’s an extra. A gift from me to you.”

  I took the hammer. It hung limp in my right hand.

  After I had watched the others for a few minutes, what they were doing somehow seemed less appalling. Something moved in my chest, and before I knew it, I was thinking about how big the Woodsman was, and how distant he was, and how little he cared about me, and how he hadn’t made my life go the way I wanted, and how he thought he was better than me, and how he’d cast blame on me, and how he refused my help in cutting the tree.

  I lifted my hammer and started pounding nails into his heel. First one nail, then another and another. I felt gleeful, almost giddy.

  All my life the Woodsman had gotten his way.

  Now I would get mine.

  NINE

  hammered nails feverishly, swinging my arm harder and harder, aching from the impact. Oddly, no matter how many nails I took out of my pocket, it remained full.

  I thought about the Woodsman, how much this must be hurting him. The individual nails might have felt like a pinprick, but the cumulative effect of all those people, untold thousands, pounding all those nails, must have been agonizing.

  I began to weep and threw down my hammer and tried to pull away. But I could only get so far—I realized now that I was tied to the others with the sticky strands of a great web, strong and binding, and I couldn’t break loose. After picking my hammer back up, I did what everyone else was doing.

  “He makes us suffer,” someone said, pointing upward, then pounding another nail into his foot.

  “Take that,” I bellowed, and pounded nail after nail into his heel. I cursed him for everything that came to mind, including my sore arm, throbbing as if from blunt force trauma. But the trauma was self-inflicted, you might be thinking. That was the furthest thing from my mind, which had been eclipsed by livid accusation and blinding blame.

  “Look out!” someone yelled. People scattered, some of them pointing upward. A water droplet as big as a couch splashed on the ground, moisture flying everywhere. It felt warm on my face and had a salty taste.

  “Back to work,” someone shouted, and we moved close to his feet again, grabbing our nails and positioning our hammers as if going back to an assembly line after lunch hour.

  For another stinging moment I grasped the horror of what I was doing. I wept.

  But after wiping my eyes, I grew angry at how I’d suffered, how my dad wasn’t there for me, and how my family had abandoned me and my boss hadn’t chosen me to be vice president. I picked the hammer back up, pulled the replenished stock of nails out of my pocket, and started pounding again.

  I couldn’t remember the last time I’d thought of Charis or looked for it across the chasm. But at that moment, in the distance, out of the shining city of Charis rose a thunderous glow, an army of millions, first hovering over the city, then streaking through the sky like meteors. They flew across the chasm.

  I expected the great army to settle upon the earth like a plague of locusts, devouring every living thing, myself among them. But once they arrived, above the Woodsman, they appeared unable to descend. I looked up to see that vast army of bright warriors suddenly break rank, then start beating down upon a transparent ceiling, or what was a ceiling from my vantage point, but would have been a floor to them. Swords unsheathed, they jammed themselves against a closed portal in the barrier. I heard their muffled pleas as they
called to the Woodsman.

  “Let us tend your wounds, World Maker.”

  “Let us grind your enemies into the dirt and raise your royal standards in their blood!”

  “Let us fight the holy war now and bury the bent ones once and for all!”

  They paced like caged lions, looking down, seeking permission, longing for a single word to unleash them. I shuddered at the sight of them, legion upon legion, crowding down, pressing and pushing, crying out and begging leave to destroy those who drove nails into the Woodsman’s feet.

  “Let us run the cowards through with the sword of your righteousness.”

  “Let us forever rid the cosmos of their evil.”

  The more we drove our nails down below, the more frantic became the warriors above. They pushed against the glass ceiling until I heard cracking and feared it would burst.

  The Woodsman raised his hand to the warriors and sternly shook his head. His voice, ancient and deep and stern, called out, “Hold your place!”

  It was then I felt something under my feet. I looked down to see the ground beneath me thin out and transform until it became a clear glass floor. Monstrous faces pressed their mouths and snouts against the glass, smearing it with drool and mucus.

  I tried to step away from what I saw, but I couldn’t escape them because they were everywhere below me. They were warriors like those in the sky above, yet very different—like a pack of rabid dogs compared to a kennel of healthy ones. But the contrast was far greater, as the beasts were a degenerate version of the noble warriors, different even in form now, all the more horrifying because I somehow knew they once had been like them.

  I closed my eyes, hardly able to look, but when I opened them again, the twisted creatures were still there, pushing and pressing up.