Grandpa's Portal by Steve Messman
“Indeed,” Thomas cut in. “As a matter of fact, The Book of Paths explains nearly every incident that has happened to us. With a little effort and research, using the book as a basis, I could most likely explain how we got here through the portal. As a very minimum, and quite obviously, the book explains why the ants are keeping us alive. It explains why they and the spiders are fighting each other. It even provides a prophecy with us as its center, and those predictions are, in fact, pretty dire.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Like anyone could understand that gibberish,” Brian interrupted. “Look Hannah. Let me make it easy for you. That orb said that everythin has to live in balance, even good an evil. It said that when good an evil are out of whack, there will be lots of fightin, as the ants and the spiders are now doin. It said that man an child will intervene. I have to guess to restore balance. An it said that one of us will get in the way.”
I was just beginning to get a grasp on everything when Sarrah chimed in. “It s-s-said s-s-so much more than that, didn’t it Grandpa. That book isn’t s-s-so much about us as it is about the choices and the paths we take through our lives.”
Once again, I found myself in awe at the wisdom coming from the youngest of our group. Where did that even come from? I still have no idea.
Grandpa agreed with Sarrah, and that helped me gain so much understanding. “Yes, Sarrah. It did talk about choices. It said that we all had paths ta take and choices ta make. It said that the choices were never easy, that some might be gifts and some might be nothing more than traps. It said that we might not ever know the difference until….”
“Consequence tells you so,” Thomas finished. “The poem is clearly about balance and imbalance, choices and consequences.”
“Life an death,” added Brian. “It said the most wonderful thing. That life could be given to the dead. That explains the battle between the ants an the spiders.” Brian sat in the silence of our cell with a strange, almost blank stare.
“Wonderful!” I screamed. I couldn’t believe that Brian or anyone else could believe that life being given to the dead was a wonderful thing. “How is that wonderful? The orb even gave us a warning! To help provide a cure! Life will be given to the dead only when evil serves life greater than good.”
It was no use. Anything I said on this topic was already too late. Brian’s eyes focused on a point somewhere out there, somewhere between him and all of us.
“Don’t be too hard on him, Hannah.” Grandpa stopped me before I lost my temper. “Ya know without being told by some magical orb that life’s decisions are never easy. Even the orb implies thacha might not know the difference between right and wrong until after ya decide a path, until consequence or outcome shows ya the result. It even says that about the life ta death choice—and it is presented as a choice. Brian is right again. It looks ta me like the spiders are trying to create an imbalance where that choice can be made.”
“So how does anyone decide anything, Grandpa? How do we ever know the right path or the right choice?” This was a difficult concept for me. Not black and white. Not yes or no. Not concrete.
“The only thing I can say,” Grandpa continued, “is thacha simply make the best decision ya can and move on. A lot of life’s decisions are made after studying the evidence, gathering the data, testing the possible outcomes, and then making a giant leap of faith. Sometimes, more often than you would like to admit, ya simply have ta do what your heart tells ya ta do, check afterward ta see if things are still in balance, and make adjustments.”
“Life after death…” Brian was waking up from his dream; his eyes were just beginning to focus again, and he was trying to return to the conversation.
“That,” said Grandpa, “has ta be a huge topic of choices and consequences.”
I think Grandpa stopped short of what he intended to say. We felt the rumble in the ground and up our feet, and by now we had begun to recognize that rumble as an extremely bad sign. Something was happening at the door. Something big.
Sarrah finished our conversation. “The orb also s-said one of us wasn’t going home.”
*****
29. Hannah Goes Back to the Orb
I have to tell you, Debbie, that what followed the rumbling was the single defining moment of my life. Everything I am, everything I was to be, changed from this moment forward. From that moment to this, My life was put on a path that left me little choice.
The low rumble we felt became a deadly uproar at the door of our prison. All of us leaped behind the nearest protective cover as the walls resonated with a din that sounded something like a huge stampede of miniature cattle. All of us wiggled toward the entrance and tried to protect ourselves by crawling close to the ground. Try as we might to see what was going on, we couldn’t squeeze through our prison door far enough to see anything except the gnashing of a dozen ant jaws.
The boys and Grandpa had already grabbed their weapons, and Sarrah and I headed back for cover. It would make no difference. A single ant bulled its way into our prison chamber over the fierce protest of others assigned to protect us. The rogue was my ant. I had begun to recognize the small differences in each one. Mine had a small bulge on its head, right between its two huge eyes. I’ll always believe that what happened next was my fault. The men relaxed right after I yelled out, “Stop! This is my ant.” Their weapons hung at their sides. Unprepared, Grandpa and the boys were stunned by the horror that came next.
My ant raised its head like a bull elephant on the war path. If it could have trumpeted, I’m sure its roar would have echoed off the walls of our chamber. The beast was terrifying. With jaws and head pointed toward the ceiling, the ant opened his jaws in rage. Then he closed and opened those jaws a dozen times in a half a second. Chitinous blades whooshed through the air, grating and scraping against each other like knives against sharpeners. Those sounds were as terrifying as any elephant screaming on the rampage. The beast attacked the unprepared men knocking all three of them to the wall with one swing of its mighty jaws. Grandpa literally bounced off the wall and crumpled to the ground like a tossed potato chip bag. I screamed at him, but he never got up. Somehow, Sarrah managed to grab a plate of water and scamper successfully through six rampaging legs and a pair of slashing jaws. She splashed the water directly onto Grandpa’s face. It didn’t work. Thomas and Brian returned to the brawl, but it was wasted energy. Both were quickly overpowered by the six-legged beast that, earlier, had gained my trust. It took out Thomas with one final, colossal blow. The monster smashed Thomas’s head with one of its jaws. Thomas reeled and went down. He rolled to his back as the ant rushed to stand directly over him. The ant dropped low on all six legs and crushed Thomas with its weight, then the beast hoisted Thomas’s limp body and tossed it directly on top of the attacking Brian. The force of the blow must have been tremendous. Brian went down like an overstuffed pillow. I heard every ounce of air blast its way out of Brian’s lungs as Thomas’s dead weight landed on him. I thought Brian’s rib cage had surely been crushed. I wouldn’t have the opportunity to find out. As soon as Grandpa and the boys were taken out of the picture, my ant came for me. Sarrah made herself as small as possible and was hiding in a corner. It would have made no difference if she were sitting in the middle of the room. The ant wanted me. Only me.
There was nothing I could do. No place to go. Nothing I could even crawl under or hide behind. I ran from corner to corner. I dodged and weaved and tried very carefully to stay clear of the hiding Sarrah. I grabbed one of the swords the boys had lost, and I slashed out aiming for the ant’s mouth or its eyes, but as we had discovered before, that tactic was hopeless. The ant outlasted me. I was exhausted, slow, and uncoordinated as a three-legged chicken. I fell over everything, and I had to stop far too often in order to catch my breath. It only took a couple more minutes before the ant grabbed me with its jaws. This time, it squeezed so hard I couldn’t draw a breath, not that I could breathe anyway. The pain caused me to drop
*****
30. Another Promise
When I finally regained consciousness, I was inside the huge coliseum and lying flat on my back. I could see the orb from that position, and I could also see that I was directly in front of one of the polished tablets with the carved human hands. The orb was suspended on its layer of nothingness, still glowing like the sun. The blue stone still hovered inside the glowing bubble and still added more mystery to the miracle. I almost expected to hear some kind of mechanical hum, that low-level background noise that you hear in all the science fiction movies when the spaceship rumbles by, but there was none. No low rumble. No low-frequency vibration. There was only a nearly solid, cosmically immense silence while the orb rotated on its invisible axis, each object perfectly independent of the other. If I stopped breathing, the only sound I could hear was the rush of blood through my ears.
I was still a little groggy, and I was very emotionally lost. The best I could hope for was to remain calm and to try to absorb and understand all that had happened to us, and apparently, all that was still happening. There was something new every minute, no, every second. I remained flat on the ground, and so my perspective of the cavern was very different from that of my first visit. While I remained on my back, I slowly rolled my head from one side to the other so that I could see the entirety of what I knew to be the inside of a tree. I’m sure that I took at least three full minutes to scan completely from right to left. The vastness of this cavern inside the maple tree was impossible to describe. It appeared hundreds of times larger than I remember the tree being. It was a grotto: a perfect, supernaturally beautiful castle of nature. I could see ants at work mending cracks in the walls. Some seemed to be tending fungus crops while others were herding smaller insects. Miniature plants, the result of another group of farming ants, glowed like carpets of living emeralds in small shafts of light that poured through tiny cracks. Mosses hung from the ceiling in great, pointed clumps, much like stalactites in an underground cave. Every corner, every curve boasted a different texture of wood. The unique shafts of colored light, the brilliant tans, the reds and browns of thousands of tiny mushrooms, the greens of every possible shade on a hundred mosses, and the earth tones of yet another hundred kinds of fungus literally painted the walls and ceilings of this cavern inside a tree. It was more beautiful than any cathedral had the right to be.
My ant stirred. I couldn’t see it, but I recognized the grating sounds of its jaws and the creaking of its neck joints as it turned its head. Then, I heard a clicking sound that I didn’t recognize. Somehow, I jerked myself up. I don’t remember passing the sitting position, but I found myself with both feet and one hand on the ground, like a runner in her starting position. I was adrenaline charged and ready to race if I found the noise to be a spider. Click. Click. Click. I heard it again, three times in rapid succession. Then I saw it. The noise was coming from my ant tapping the pointed ends of its jaws together. The ant had my attention, and it took hold of my free hand with the greatest of care. It lifted my hand so that I had to stand, and it placed my hand on the cold, polished stone.
The coliseum darkened as suddenly as the orb and its blue stone began to spin. Every shaft of light that had shined on those emerald mosses suddenly disappeared behind a living cloud of ants. The light changed to a warm glow, tinted by a rotating, much colder blue. Now, I heard the hum, not mechanical, but the harmonics of two rotating bodies, one inside the other. They spun together, faster and faster, until the voice began once again.
“The being sends greetings to the queen mother. There are many secrets yet to be learned. This is the secret of the second promise. Listen carefully. Act accordingly. Remember. The second alone will give the first. The first given will be most versed. That one alone will know the way to bring the child home to stay.”
It was over as abruptly as it began. The orb stopped spinning, as did the blue stone. The voice stopped. The light shafts began to flow once again onto the green plants. Bugs resumed their duties. And six new ants appeared at the entrance. One immediately attacked the ant that brought me to the coliseum. A second grabbed me before I could run, and it hurt. This one meant business. This ant jerked me off the floor and would have tossed me straight up had it not pinched me so tightly in its jaws. It ran for the entrance tunnel. As I twisted and turned, I watched the end of the battle between my ant and the remaining five. My ant was on the ground, pulled and splayed in four directions. The fifth ant was on top, savagely twisting its jaws between my ant’s head and body. My ant looked in my direction and stared directly into my soul. The light shaft that hit its face looked exactly like a tear.
Why? I screamed to the orb. WHY? The orb flickered ever so briefly while I and the ant that now carried me disappeared into the tunnels. At the same instant that darkness surrounded me, so did the dull snap of a head separating from its body.
*****
31. The War Continues
I felt it pretty quickly, long before I heard anything, and long before I saw anything. The ant suddenly changed from its normal pace to one slightly more hurried. I was being jostled pretty hard, being carried inside what was more like a bouncing steel trap than a living mouth. We were traveling at a six-legged gallop, but not for too long. The trip went from bad to worse as the ant shifted gears again. By now, his gait was more consistent with running panic. The thing might as well have been bouncing me off the walls. In fact, it might have been doing exactly that. I could feel the bruises growing already, and I’m not so sure that I wasn’t bleeding from several scrapes that I could feel but couldn’t see. Regardless of injuries that I might have been sustaining, the ant seemed focused on getting me back to my prison, but at the same time, he appeared awkward and indecisive. The ant waved its antennae continuously in all directions. It jerked its head up and down, right and left, back and forth. This new ant was trying to sense something that he could not get a fix on, something that came from a direction it couldn’t quite sense, something it was afraid of.
Then, I heard it: a soft hum at first that grew quickly into the deafening roar. Imagine a jet engine in a wind tunnel. The buzzing din seemed to pervade every inch of every tunnel the ant ran through. The louder it grew, the faster my ant sprinted through the tunnels. The ground began to shake, and like the buzz, this also was slight at first, but soon it quaked so fiercely that my ant had difficulty maintaining its balance until it finally stumbled and fell. Before it hit the ground, the ant opened its jaws, and I was able to escape. As quickly as I was back on my feet, the ant was on his. The buzzing grew intense, in fact, painful. I covered my ears, but the ruckus was deafening; the vibrations were inescapable. The ground trembled even harder. It became nearly impossible to remain standing. Shaken, practically deaf, fearing the worst, and without a single weapon, I had never felt more vulnerable.
A few seconds later I could feel a wind blowing on my face. I had no idea where this was coming from, but that answer came to me when I saw the wings. The wings of mosquitoes! I have no idea how these mosquitoes made their way into the ants’ chambers, let alone how they could be flying in these tunnels. Nonetheless, the ant that dropped me was back on top of me. It covered me with its body and captured me inside the bars of its legs, intentionally protecting me. The mosquitoes attacked. Two, three, four of them were all over the ant, but they could do it no harm. They knew that, though. It wasn’t the ant they were after. It was me! These flying vampires stabbed their bloodsucking tubes between the ant’s legs, past its antennae, between its jaws, every time aiming at me! They didn’t want the ant, and they didn’t care what happened to it. They wanted me! The ant stood its ground, swaying, dodging, slashing the air with its tusk-like jaws, all the time vigor
The spider came next. Not the jumping kind that we fought before: a new one. Larger! Meaner! Much more massive than the others with powerful, long legs and a bulbous, black body. There was only one, but it was taking the lead in the attack against the ant that protected me, and it was doing so successfully. The black monster stomped only one of its giant feet on the ant and handily crushed it to the ground, nearly trapping me inside of its folding legs. The rest was simple. My ant was trapped and unable to move. The spider crushed my ant’s head between its massive jaws. One huge bite and my ant died. I found myself soaked in bug blood. The mosquitoes intensified their efforts to kill me, but for the moment at least, I was still protected by the dead ant’s armored body. The spider tried to solve that issue, too. It pulled and yanked the much smaller ant to lift it off me. I didn’t know what else to do, so I hung on for dear life. I latched onto that dead ant’s body like a leech. I had no weapon, and I had no help.
No help, that is, until the other ants appeared. A team of six more ants rushed to my rescue. Five of them attacked the huge spider; the sixth started grasping for me and I started grasping for it, but we still couldn’t reach each other. Mosquitoes began to attack me from all sides and all angles. They tried to poke and jab me to hold me in place, to kill me, but they actually accomplished no more than adding wind and confusion to an escalating situation. Their sucking tubes were no match for the ants’ body armor, but the spider was a real threat. It was at least as large as any four of the biggest ants. It had already killed one of my defenders as quickly as it had dispatched the first one that protected me. But, undaunted, the others were all over it. One crawled on top of its back where the spider could not reach. Two more had the spider around what I would call its throat. One was tearing chunks of flesh from the spider’s abdomen. The remaining ant worked its way through my dead ant’s body and tried to reach me.