VI. Holy Ground
Later that morning, the Turtles and Abanak donned their war gear, leaving the rest of their equipment secured at the camp site.
Just five minutes of hiking brought them to the center of the fog-encircled island and the bottom of a strange rock formation. The tower of stacked, shallow stones was just as Leo remembered it, spiraling into the sky in fragments and blocks, like a DNA helix in mid-crumble.
"This is where I fought...that thing," he told them. "At the top. That's the Great Turtle's nexus. His holy spot."
"I remember it," Raph said, understanding now why Leo had felt such dread the night before. When he and Mike had scaled this tower at the end of their last journey, leaving the wounded Don at its base, they had found Leo exhausted at the pinnacle, sprawled beside the bloody, horrific ruin of the huge rodent creature that had nearly killed them all. "At least we're in better shape to climb, this time." Raph shook out his limbs and cracked his neck in readiness.
Abanak laid a hand on one of the dry grey stones that rose abruptly from the trees and tried to jar it loose. Nothing happened. He looked skeptical. "After you," he said.
The four climbed steadily. In no time at all they were high enough to see the whole sheer-cliffed island they'd been trapped on. It was perhaps half a mile across, surrounded by the broad moat of churning fog. Their view of the jungle landscape beyond was swiftly lost in all directions to haze, which melted into the circle of pale sky and a blazing sun.
Abanak looked down after five minutes of climbing, shuddered hard, and did not do so again.
Their sweat left damp marks on the rock shelves.
Soon after, Leo pointed to a wide ledge just above. The pinnacle. They halted there, sharing the dwindling canteens and catching their breaths. Don ran a finger down the side of the huge, empty, gouged-out fossil eggshell at their backs.
"I always wanted to see this place," he told his brother. "When that mammal-thing broke my leg...when the mission was left to you, Leo, and I thought the others had been killed...my only regret was I wouldn't get to see the Great Turtle before I died, too."
Leo stared at the horizon. "Things went the way they had to," he said.
Abanak nodded. They waited for something to happen.
"I remember..." Leo said softly. "The Great Turtle told me, here: 'This is my prison, where I am trapped by my sadness.'"
They watched the shapeless, drifting clouds.
Leo slammed the back of a fist against the fossilized shell. "I thought we freed you!" he shouted. "We killed that thing. Where are you, now? Why is this happening again?!"
His brothers and Abanak watched warily.
Leo got to his feet and stalked around the perimeter of the egg. When he came around the other side, he stopped, turned and glared up at the sharp breaks at the top of the shell. Drawing his sword, he leaped, catching an edge with one hand and hauling himself over.
They waited.
"Leo?" Raph asked.
After a moment, Raph signaled. Don braced himself and caught his brother's foot, hoisting him up to peer in.
"Aw, crud." Raph looked over his shoulder. "Keep watch, will ya?"
He landed with a thud beside Leo, who was bent over one knee in the dust and fossil shards, shoulders heaving helplessly.
"Come on, bro," he said, grabbing him to his plastron. "It's okay."
Leo sobbed against him.
"What'd I do so wrong, Raph? Where's the voice, this time? Where's the Great Turtle? What are we supposed to do?"
"Come on, Leo," he repeated. "He'll show it to us in time."
Abanak watched them closely all the way back down.
Mike's first thought was: "He's huge!"
His next was: "Get away!"
But his legs wouldn't move – and not because of fear. Though his brain was screaming into overdrive, Mike's heart felt suddenly warmed.
The Great Turtle's jaws opened, the beak like a pair of massive arcing razors just a few yards from where Mike stood.
But they parted to speak, not to strike.
Just as he'd somehow known they would.
"Little one," the spirit-not-a-spirit said in a rumbling tone, "how you've grown."
Mike glanced over his shoulder – he was 15 feet from the tree line. He could make it, in a bolt, and into the jungle before the mountainous being before him could knock him down and rip him to shreds, his brain said. Plowing through the trunks would slow the Great Turtle long enough for Mike to get a good head start...but to where?
He brought his gaze back around and forced himself to breathe.
Whatever he was facing, if it was, in fact, a threat, he might as well face here and now.
After all, he thought, where in this jungle would I run to escape him
"Grown?" he managed, in a voice only three keys higher than normal.
The Great Turtle's carapace shone in the starlight, a dome of shadow and reflection that blocked Mike's view of the trees beyond. The eyes shone, too, and the creases and hollows of the ancient face seemed so familiar they made his heart thump over.
"I remember you from the beginning," the deep words continued. "Do you remember?"
A presence moved across Mike's mind like the wash of a wave. He felt tiny, suddenly, yet crushed and cramped and, horribly, starving. He struggled, trying to bend and move, escape the terrible pressure around him. His limbs rubbed uselessly against the leathery walls surrounding him. Hunger ravaged his belly. In anguish, he opened his mouth to cry – and scratched his prison wall. His heart leaped with the discovery. Mike tore out with his beak and its sharp egg tooth, again and again, resting when the weakness overcame him. A tear in the encasing appeared. Another. The more he ripped the more he could move, could strain, could stretch and grasp his way free. His head emerged from the shell, bumping against that of another egg, and another. He forced his way through them, claws digging now into something gritty and thick: sand. His hunger raged, yet stronger still was the urge now to dig and climb and find his way toward – what? He didn't know.
Something snagged his rear leg, pinching, and pulled. Mike struggled. It tugged harder, dragging him back through the eggs. He turned to bite and fight, scrabbling for purchase on the empty shells, and found something wondrous: light and shadow and something that felt and smelled and looked just like him. Only...bigger.
"Your brother, Raphael," the voice said. "Hatched from an earlier clutch that year. He saw you digging the wrong direction and pulled you free."
Mike shuddered, trying to adjust back to his human form. "That – that can't be real," he said. "Turtles don't do that for each other."
"You four were always special," the Great Turtle said. "It's why you were chosen to go on."
"Chosen?" he asked. "To go on where? What do you mean?"
He looked up at the huge, deep eyes, his fear now warring with excitement and wonder. So this being was the source of his memory-dreams. This limitless creature who called to his soul. This ancestor who Mike, by his choices, had rejected, and who now held him trapped...or was it just held?
"I'll show you," the Great Turtle answered.
This time, Mike felt the sensation of falling, down into darkness. Impact. He scrabbled for safe ground, legs dragging through a heavy ooze, struggling to get away. Through the heavy, terrifying scents of metal and foul water around him he could still smell a hint of the familiar – the scents of the three turtles he knew best. The ones who made him tingle in good ways inside, who made him feel safe and alive. He headed towards them. They inched their way through the dark cave together, dodging the great curved shards of broken glass, moving away from the ooze that tickled and stung on their skin. He began to feel woozy.
One of his friends surged forward suddenly. He could feel the intention from him – something very interesting, up there, on that ledge. The four turtles crept toward it as one. It was some kind of animal. Something furry, like the creatures behind the wires back at the pet store they'd left that morning. Something...special. Mike could feel it. One of the scales on his back legs began to melt away.
"You did go on to become much more than ordinary turtles, didn't you?" the warm voice said.
Mike dropped to one knee in the heat of the jungle, overwhelmed.
"I – forgive me," he said. Mike shook his head, clearing it of the earliest of memories, then made himself ask what had to be known. "Please, ancient one. I thought you would – would kill me if you found me here, today."
"Why would I ever want to destroy my own child?"
Mike bowed his head to his knee, fighting the tears that threatened. His body felt warmed by the reassurance coming from the Great Turtle, emotions he didn't dare name.
"Because I'm human, now," he apologized.
"No," the voice said gently. "That would be impossible. You are a turtle walking for awhile in another form. I have seen you grow. I remember every step of your changing. Don't you remember how you delighted in each new gift?"
The images, the sensations, ran like a flickering film reel through his core.
The first steps on two legs.
Grasping the rung of a storm drain's ladder between fingers and his strange, new, bending thumb.
Sinking tiny white teeth through the scraps Splinter brought him and his brothers.
Standing tall.
"Your delight is my delight," the Great Turtle said, coming so close his breath moved on Mike's shoulders like a steady, healing breeze. "How could I ever reject you for it?"
"But I'm human now!" Mike insisted. "I've abandoned the turtles' way!"
One huge forefoot rose and stretched its scaly foot and claws toward Mike. "Did not Leonardo share this? I already told him: 'Fur is better than claws and scales.' Else why would it have taken the ring of mammals to such heights, while we fell so far behind? Your choice was not a rejection. It was fulfillment...the next step on the journey of exploring our evolution."
Mike shook his head slowly in wonder. "Abanak said I chose against you, in selfishness. That you were angry."
He made himself finish. "That you wanted me gone."
A chill fell on the clearing.
"Abanak," the Great Turtle said, "has a great desire to return to what he once believed he was. Great enough to seize whatever false voices come to him, and believe whatever they sing."
"But... But my brothers heard your voice, too, calling us here again."
"I called you here. That is true. But Abanak chose to hear the voice of a shadow.
"Do you remember the being you call the Adversary? Your brother destroyed its body to free the spirit of your ancestors... but it clung to life, trapped here, feeding off the sorrows of Leonardo and, later, your friend Abanak's connection to the spirit realm. Through the two of them, the Adversary caught glimpses of your world, in your age...and now it seeks to prey on the ring of the reptiles once more."
Mike stood up, pale. "What are you saying?"
"I am saying, this jungle is not safe any longer, and soon your home will not be, either. The Adversary seeks to take a new form – Abanak's – and escape this barren dream-world for a new feeding ground. But more even than fresh reptile blood, it hungers for vengeance. It longs to punish the turtles-who-grew, the ones who robbed it of me and my sorrow that fed it these many millennia. And it yearns the most to destroy the one who finally brought it down."
"Leo," Mike breathed. His eyes widened. "Then you have to go! Warn him, now! And Don and Raph – tell them Abanak's been fooled by this thing, that there's danger! – Why are you standing here talking with me?"
The Great Turtle's head sank low, low, his heavy chin brushing the sharp grass of the ground. "I wandered too far, once freed. The Adversary grew in strength."
"But – "
"The source of my connection to my children is the tower of the Great Egg. The Adversary knows this...I've been cut off. Even in dreams, I could barely brush your minds enough to call you here."
"But now we're here!" Mike slapped his chest with one hand and pointed to himself. "See? In the flesh. I can't be that far behind the guys – go appear to the others!"
The head swung slowly, side to side, the dark eyes lidded. "You are the only one who sees or hears me, now," it said. "You, my nearly human scion, are the only one who can bridge the gap between reptile and mammal."
Mike caught his breath. A long moment passed.
Slowly, he stepped forward until he could touch the cool, dry beak with his fingers.
"Oh, Great Turtle," he whispered. "How can that be? I'm the only one who couldn't hear, before. Are you only fooling me now, too?"
The head slowly rose, then pressed against him, until Mike leaned his own forehead against the face of the Great Turtle.
"My son, I have always been with you. You had only to let me come near."
Mike closed his eyes, lingering in a moment that seemed to lay a salve on all the long, raw years from eggshell on.
"Then..." He stepped back. "Then, I'm ready. How do we save the others?"
The Great Turtle reared, his plastron clearing the ground so high Mike could have walked beneath it just by ducking his head. One great foot stretched up and clawed at the sky.
"You'll have to find a way."
And the spirit rose, moving up the air, fading into wisps of shadow and cloud.
"Wait!" Mike cried.
A star seemed to wink at him from high above. His mind's eye filled with the faces of his brothers.
Moments later, Mike was backtracking through the jungle, the stew packed in a thermos, his most essential gear slung over one shoulder as he struggled to trace his own trail. Finding the clues in the dark came much harder than it had a few years before, and if it weren't for the carelessness of his earlier passage, Mike decided, he wouldn't be on the trail at all.
"Slow and steady wins the race," he muttered grimly. "Guess I'm a real tortoise in at least one way, tonight."
But the old knowledge began trickling back into his movements and his mind: how to catch the subtle differences from one patch of wild land to another, how to spot where a branch had been disturbed, how to sense where the ground had felt the press of passing creatures. After a time, he removed his boots for a while to better feel the path and its clues, but left the sturdy wool socks on to protect feet that had become more sensitive than he'd realized in the City.
An hour passed. Then two. He hummed songs by Van Halen and Guns 'N' Roses and The Cure to keep himself awake and alert, fingers working the guitar chords in the dark air.
Scent led him, finally, to the place Abanak had met him and his brothers. He poked at the cold ashes of their fire, already nearly crowded out with undergrowth.
He found the Turtles' trail.
But, as the morning of the fourth day slowly warmed the trees, he reached a quiet ridge where the tracks simply vanished from the soft ground of the trail.
He cast about for a time, scanning the underbrush and surrounding trees, searching for where a ninja might seek to hide his passage – but he knew the search was in vain.
"It's just like last time," he said, and felt the tight hurt rising again.
Cut off.
Left behind.
"They've moved further on that ring of yours!" he shouted. "What now? They're in some other level of history! Where am I supposed to go?"
He listened.
The air grew damper around him, sunlight releasing the night's moisture from the trees.
"What am I supposed to do!?"
Nothing answered.
Mike cursed, dropped his pack and leaped at the nearest tree, hauling himself to the dangerously thin branches of the top, until he had a clear view of the sky. He scanned it. The morning haze formed no clouds, turtle-shaped or otherwise.
"Where are you?" he yelled. "Abanak! Don!! Raph!! Leo!!!"
A squall of strange-feathered birds rose protesting from a group of trees to the east. He watched them ruefully, wondering if he'd end up hunting their kind for dinner for the rest of his life.
And then Mike saw it.
Away downhill, in the center of a vast, bowl-shaped valley: the circle of fog.
An island of jungle trapped by the mists, little more than a mile away.
"You're over there, aren't you?" Mike whispered. "That's where I've gotta go..."
The Great Turtle whispered: "Listen for the false voices, and find where they are true."
As he hiked that fourth morning, heading east toward the tower while seeking any sign of his family, Mike warred with his own body. "Should have trained harder," he told himself when he stumbled for the third time, vision blurred with exhaustion and heat. He'd only slept a few hours since they left the farmhouse. Shaking the last drops from his canteen, he listened for any hint of a nearby stream – and heard something stronger.
"That sounds like a river..." Mike thought. "I don't remember any rivers being here, last time."
He continued toward the island, led now by the voice of the water.
The ground sloped down and down. He could hear the river's rush more clearly. Every minute, he felt cooler, more awake, and yet his vision seemed hazier than before. It had to be the dehydration. The green scent of a river's banks grew steadily, and all his limbs tingled in anticipation of a dip in cold water.
His weary mind registered the blurring, damp thinness in the air as the kind of friendly morning mist that rose off the pond at the farm or the Connecticut River in the mornings, while he and his brothers returned from a night run.
But his instincts began to warn.
Mike stopped. The sound of the river came from just ahead, rippling and lapping and rushing against stones, like something both playful and a refuge, pulling at the deepest turtle-memories he still carried within.
He just couldn't quite see the water...because of the fog.
The fog.
And then he knew. Mike spun on one foot and bolted back up the hill.
He almost crashed into the side of a sudden cliff, a wall that hadn't been there seconds ago.
The fog crowded over him, descending from above in churning layers that burned Mike's chest at his every ragged breath.
"No!" he yelled, scrabbling at the soft earth of the cliff, which only crumbled at his touch.
Something advanced on him. The smell of the creature bearing down came back to him with visceral memories of fierceness and violence, from that awful journey so many years before.
But what sent him retreating along the cliff wall was something new.
This time, the Adversary wasn't attacking out of fear of Mike and his brothers, defending its long-held victim, the Great Turtle, from being freed.
This time, it was hungry.
A huge shadow rushed at Mike, and he leapt away from the wall, landing with a great splash in the cool water of the river. The shadow lunged again and he dove beneath the surface. Mike kicked hard, striking instinctively for the far shore and what he guessed would be the island that held his brothers. But the river's current suddenly clutched him, hard and unrelenting as a vise.
He realized his mistake and pushed hard against it, trying to swim free, but the water shoved him further down after every stroke.
Choking in the undertow, Mike kept trying to switch to the "turtle" breathing he and his brothers had always used to buy themselves extra time underwater. But the technique wouldn't work.
He struggled. Every time he neared the surface, the river would jerk him back. He swallowed sharp water that ripped its way down into his belly and his lungs.
Limbs flailing, moved entirely now by panic, Mike tried to "turtle" breathe again.
A thought crossed his mind with incredible clarity.
"Oh yeah," Mike realized. "I'm human now."
His head struck rock.