Chapter 17
The Woman in the Glass Tube
The darkness was moving again, as if struggling with some invisible force. She instinctively moved a hand down to the wound in her belly as if to protect it from whatever was coming. Fear filled her as she wondered if this was the time or was this just something else that she would have to sit through as she waited.
Suddenly the darkness vanished, replaced by a brilliant white that was blinding to look at. The place of darkness that she had existed in for so long was gone, replaced by this glaringly white space. In the distance she saw a shape coming slowly toward her. Squinting her eyes she examined the shape and, as it drew slowly nearer, she could see that it was a man. Her heart soared, lightened by the possibility that it was Cain coming to be with her, finally.
As the shape drew slowly nearer, she could see that indeed it was her lover. She cried and called out to him, her voice echoing loudly throughout this place of white. Leaping to her feet, she started to run toward him though the distance between them did not seem to close any faster for all of her effort.
#
As Jonah awoke, he felt a heavy pressure sitting on his chest, making breathing difficult. Groaning he opened his eyes as he pushed at the weight that was upon him. It was Alissa. She had apparently collapsed on his chest and for a second he was afraid she was dead but then he noticed her softly breathing. Nudging her gently, Jonah got her body shifted softly to the side so that he could sit up and look around.
It seemed that they were in a large room which produced a soft light that illuminated it from an indeterminate source. The room was round, with the walls covered in old tapestries that appeared to depict the tale that Kristh had told them about the young woman. Behind them was an exact copy of the doorway that they had fought with that had resulted in them being here, in this room. Jonah reasoned that this was the other side of the door, though he had never experienced a door that worked quite like this one had, nor would he ever wish to again. On the other side of the round room there was a long hallway that vanished into darkness.
Sitting up fully, Jonah checked on Alissa, shaking her gently, and she gave a soft little moan that turned into a purr as she looked up, seeing her lover above her. Leaning down, Jonah gave her a passionate kiss but pulled back before either of them became too preoccupied with one another to want to assess the situation that they were currently in. He told her what he had seen and said that they should get moving but when Alissa tried to sit up she nearly fell over from dizziness. As she laid back down, Jonah got up to explore the room that they were in, that was when he noticed that the stones in their hands had faded back to the dim glow that they had been producing most of the time that they had been in their hands.
He wandered around the room, looking at the ancient tapestries that lined the walls and confirmed that they indeed did match the story that Kristh had told them. The pictures on the tapestries looked realistic enough that if Jonah did not know better, he would have thought that they were a window into another time and place. Also, it appeared as if they were moving, acting out the details of the story, at any second, he expected one of the characters in the story to turn around and look at him, but that didn’t make sense, pictures don’t move, he reasoned. Then he noticed that indeed the pictures were moving. The more he watched the faster the pictures moved and the more of the show they were putting on played out for him. After a few minutes of watching, he noticed that Alissa had joined him by his side.
The main character of the tale was a lovely young woman with long silvery hair. In the picture that he was looking at, she was standing her ground against a horde of men in armor that mimicked the armor that he had seen the guards in Ib wearing. They bore strange guns that fired beams of light that burned holes through all they touched and there were multitudes of people around them that were heartlessly slaughtered by the massive hoard of men, yet the young woman stood her ground not flinching as they neared her. Even when they beat her down, taking her by force again and again, she still put on a strong face and fought till the end when they carved the stone from her belly and left her to die. Alone, she finally cried, something she had refused to do when the men had been assaulting her. She stayed where they had left her, unable to move, crying till at last, the life slowly slipped from her body and she died. As the scene faded with the villagers finding her ravaged, broken and torn body, Jonah and Alissa were weeping for the pain that had been heaped upon the woman, finding it hard to believe the cruelty that had been done against her.
Jonah and Alissa decided to wait before watching any of the other tapestries, until they could check and see if there was anything else in the room. Then they wanted to check out the hallway that was darkened toward the back of the room. Once having the area they were in mapped out, they would then return to finish the other tapestries.
Having found nothing else of note in the round room, they stood at the entrance of the hallway cautiously, shining the beams of their hand torches down it, but the light of the beams did not penetrate the darkness very far. Looking at one another, they stepped into the hallway slowly, waiting for something to happen. They did not have to wait long, as soon as they stepped over the threshold to the hallway, it lit up like the round room had been. Off in the distance they could see that the hallway curved around to the right. They followed the hallway for a short distance and soon it opened into another round chamber only this one did not have the tapestries in it, instead it had what looked like a large glass tube filled with foggy mist in the center of the room.
As the couple neared the tube the mists inside cleared out revealing the naked body of the young woman from the tapestries in the previous room. Her body did not show any signs of decay and if it was not for the gaping wound in her stomach, Alissa could have sworn she was sleeping as she floated silently, suspended as if on strings, in the tube. On the front of the tube there was another glass sphere like the one that had pulled them through the doorway in the other room only, as they drew nearer, the sphere started to glow with a soft light that matched the stones' glow in their hands.
Jonah timidly reached out a hand to the panel that held the sphere and as his hand drew nearer both the stone in his hand and the sphere began to glow brighter, but neither reached the intensity that the stones had reached at the doorway. As he touched the stone to the sphere, there was a little chiming sound and the glass tube withdrew out of sight into the floor of the room. The young woman still hung suspended in the air before them and not knowing what to do Alissa touched her stone to the sphere beside where Jonah's was touching.
#
She had crossed what seemed like a great distance and finally she had almost reached him. Her love and desire to feel his touch again flooded her senses, her craving for him nearly drowning her. The loneliness and longing that had slowly been building up threatened to consume her as they slowly made their way toward one another.
He was so close now that she could see every little fine line on his face. He looked just as she remembered, nothing had changed. She could see the look of joy, happiness and desire that were clearly displayed across his face as he made his way toward her. Nearer and nearer, he drew till soon they were close enough to touch. She stretched out her arms, reaching for him even as he reached for her. Their fingers brushed lightly, only the slightest of touches, before his arms fell to his side and a look of sadness came over his face.
She tried to call out to him, ask him what was going on, but found that she had no voice. She tried to move closer to embrace him, but found that she could not move. She looked at him, her eyes pleading as tears rolled down both of their cheeks.
He said something that she could not hear, but she didn’t need to hear the words. She knew what he was saying without hearing it. She tried to say the words back, to reciprocate, but found her lips wouldn’t even respond to her commands. She looked at him one last time as he hung his head, shoulders dropping as he turned to walk away.
Darkness surrounded her once again for only a moment, then her world exploded in a torrent of pain.
#
The young woman's silver eyes opened suddenly and she gave a loud gasp of pain, falling from where she had been suspended onto the floor where the lay shivering, the wound in her stomach starting to seep and then gush blood. She cried as she began to scream in agony, clutching her hands to her wound as if it would lessen the pain. Alissa, thinking quickly, stripped off her outer shirt and moved to place it over the woman's wound as some sort of makeshift bandage, but as her hand neared the wound, the stone embedded in the back of her hand began to glow again.
Alissa yelled at Jonah to get down beside her and hold his hand out. When he did, they could see both stones responding as they neared the wound in the woman's belly. Without realizing what they were doing the two plunged their hands into the woman's wound at the same time, they could feel the damaged flesh begin to seal and heal itself around their hands and, as the wound healed, their hands were forced out slowly till they were resting on the woman's soft stomach. The skin that was newly healed was a healthy pink in color, though that soon faded and it took on a normal tone, matching the rest of her skin.
They looked at the woman and saw that she had passed out cold, most likely from the shock of the pain she had been in for the last few minutes. As they turned their attention back to her stomach where the wound had been, they saw that a stone was pushing its way up and out of her navel. It slowly continued to grow until it was nearly the size of the original stone that had been in her stomach in the scenes on the tapestries, and that had been embedded in the statue at Ib. Seeing the stone that was growing in her belly, they both looked to see if anything had happened to the stones in their hands. They were still there, seemingly undisturbed. The woman shifted in discomfort as she slept while the stone within her flesh continued to grow. Once it had reached full size and stopped growing, she fell into an even deeper sleep, from which she could not be roused from.
