by Tanith Lee
He repeated it, to my mind no more intelligibly. And then, far more expressive than this, he nodded to me, one brief positive nod – as if I had advised him of immediate battle, and he acknowledged and obeyed. And then his right hand rose and made over his mailed breast that beautiful and graceful sign, which still marks the believer’s Cross of Christ. And stood after, his eyes no longer on Elizabeth, but only on me. Awaiting my order to advance.
And so I added, mildly, “After all, it may well be feasible to smarten up – how shall I say – our new habitations. Certainly they’re not diamonds, but perhaps they can be zircons. A good zircon can fool a lot of people, particularly non-experts, that it is a diamond. And they’re still worth something. Zircons, Elizabeth. Still quite tough, harder definitely than air, and ghosts.”
2
Elizabeth
I shouldn’t have lost my temper. I don’t dislike or disrespect the old man, our librarian.
Why did I?
Well, it revolted me. His plan.
And anyway it was absurd. It wouldn’t work, how could it? No.
Thinking of it later, on and on, I did suspect rather I was also frightened gutless. Even without guts. And it is vile, too. I mean, given the state of them. My God. It would be worse than this aimless listless never-ending limbo. Wouldn’t it? Would it?
To touch again?
To breathe and drink and sleep. And – love. To make love. Sex. But no, that wouldn’t work, would it, either? Ha. Fucking ha. Even in the missionary position – Oops, there goes my left leg! And now the right – Darling, I’ve just accidentally bitten off your ear. Or, Darling, it just fell off, honest, when I hugged you. What’s that on the floor? Ah, I knew I’d lose my head.
Of course, black humour aside, I’m thinking of him. My Knight in Shining Armour. I don’t really know his name – something like Gaume is the way he seems to say it – Guillaume, perhaps. Who knows, now? Even his lord, the one he really loves, not necessarily in any sexual way, but heart and soul, my Knight says his name something like H.r.o.1.d.a.r. I have a feeling I’ve heard of this lord, Norman stock with some of the old Saxon mixed in, inevitably, by 1303 or whatever it was. Probably someone mentioned the lords of the castle-fort when I was here as a girl on that guided tour, and I heard the name then. It must be that. But the nearest I seem to come to the lordly name is Rauold, or Raul. It doesn’t matter now, anyway. Rauold doesn’t haunt here. Probably died of a surfeit of good living and bad wars, aged about forty-something, which tended to be the general rich and healthy extreme old-age-span back then, equivalent maybe to eighty-something now. And he went where most of the dead go, that mystery place that for some reason all of us didn’t find, or couldn’t.
I had to do a lot of translation and approximation on the Knight’s story of his lost life, but I had a funny feeling, between you and me, that that last fight he had, and died in, is a bit – well, scrambled. Not quite what actually happened. It goes without saying it must be very hard to keep the facts straight if you die like that, the way the Knight did. Too sudden, too confused. Too terrible. (Not easy, as are pills and gin.) But I can normally sort of understand him, what he says. Not sure why. Because I fancy him, I suppose. It isn’t love, though I care about him, and I feel affection... Let’s not get too bogged down in all that. There’s no way I can try to seduce him, not as we are. Unless, obviously, the Scholar is right.
But even if he is – I mean, to be physical like that? No. It couldn’t work, or be any use.
Let me just explain, (to change the subject), about the translating I did on the Knight’s story. It was very short, and that wasn’t just me abridging or cutting corners. He has never said a lot about that, his life, death. Nor a lot about anything at all. (I’ve never grasped why women, the modern ones mostly, just after my ‘Time’, complained so much about men never talking. In my recollection, men frequently talked far too much. On and on. A quiet one, who only speaks when he has something to say, is a pleasant change. (I don’t include my father in this. He spoke the right amount, not too much, never too little. Or if ever he did – well, I don’t remember it).
To return to the translation-interpretation of the Knight, I tried to get it the best I could, and into reasonably contemporary English – what the Knight says isn’t like that – while keeping (letting through) a bit of the flavour of its own phonetic and cultural essence. Which notion of mine really sounds up its own expletive deleted, doesn’t it? I think actually I haven’t done a very good job anyhow. My take on his words is both too obscure and too fundamental. But I did do my best. I don’t think you’d have understood him at all if I hadn’t – guided, shall I say? – the pen. Obviously, though, to avoid further confusion, he didn’t use a pen to tell his story, nor a typewriter, let alone a word processor or computer. (I believe I’d have loved computers, if I’d lived long enough to experience them – though my damaged fingers might have been a nuisance. I didn’t live long enough though, did I?) As for this general narrative, none of us wrote/write, type or tap anything down. None of us recorded or record anything. We can’t touch, remember. Nor can we make an impression of sight or sound, normally, on the living. So how then is it you can take any of this dialogue of ours in – however you think you’re receiving it?
The usual way. Some humans can’t see ghosts, and some can. Some can hear them too. Or can pick up what they are trying to communicate. And not everyone needs a Ouija board or other device. Some can just do it. So, QED, my unknown friend, you must have the ‘Gift’ as well, mustn’t you? Sorry to scare the shit out of you if you hadn’t realised. But there it is.
Putting all this out I am, evidently, procrastinating.
If I’ve shaken you up at all, I’m pretty shaky myself.
He – my Knight – agreed with the Scholar’s plan. The only thing the Knight added to me afterwards was that thing he’s mentioned before. He wants to take up arms against the horrible terrible sea of Zombies. Kill, destroy every one of them. As he is he can’t, can’t even blow in their ears. But if the Scholar’s ‘plan’ could work – then the Knight will be enabled to invade and to slaughter as many as he wants. Which, of course, is a crucial anomaly in itself. But no word from him otherwise on finer points or anything. My silly momentary fantasy was of holding my Knight in my arms. Kissing his lips. His is to go back to bloody war. And win.
Can’t blame him.
What now, then?
Well, first off I had to calm Coral down. She didn’t understand what the Scholar proposed, or rather the means whereby it would be achieved (if it were possible). So Laurel, looking almost frozen with nausea, carefully explained. Then Coral became hysterical, a perfect Victorian-novel, text-book, dramatic overload, shrieks and non-wet tears – I’d never realised till then my tears must be non-wet too – and ‘vapours’.
Once Coral had subsided, we all stayed there in the sheer lightless black room, through which we can all see with the most unflawed night-vision never allowed the living. Coral crouched and sobbed quietly, murmuring the names of her dolls, and Laurel sat like an image of snow, and he, my Knight, stood to formal attention, waiting for the signal that battle had truly begun. And I stood limply and thought of my dad, wondering what he would advise. And I felt the pain of his loss to me, fresh, the way it always returns, like a jackal tearing at a corpse, except this ‘corpse’ of mine isn’t dead, can never be, it seems, fully dead. Like the tortures in the Greek hell or wherever it was. Rolling up the mountain a stone that never gets all the way, or Prometheus with the bird ripping at his liver on and on, for-liver-ever.
Fuck this. Why can’t old men keep quiet?
3
Laurel
Perhaps because I am a fool, I could see what the librarian gentleman meant almost at once, and, too, I could see the potential solution that lay in it. Elizabeth was angry, but the Knight was in favour. Poor little Coral - how dreadful it must be to stay trapped at the age of fourteen years for – my stars, how long has it been for her? It seems
it must be some one hundred and forty years or more. It has been unsuitable and sad enough to remain at eighteen, if only for rather more than a hundred. But now I felt a curious surge of – what was it? Hope.
It’s but too plain how many disadvantages there would or might be, but perhaps there will also be some way of evading these, or adjusting or tidying them, so that they become bearable, while our present state, really, isn’t bearable at all. Besides, if the whole enterprise proved too vile, could we not escape it again? Of course I’m unsure of that. As of so much. I would have liked to question the scholarly man, but was overcome, as so frequently, by my shyness, and the sense I have, even now, that almost everyone else is probably in the right, except myself.
I am trying now to compose myself, yet my heart – no longer real, but only metaphorical – leaps and dances about.
(I have some concern about myself too. Can a ghost go mad? Some two or three minutes ago, I believed I saw another old man, with strange grey curls, standing out by the house wall. He had a sorrowful and angry face. But no sooner did I see him than he was gone. I must have imagined this. Yet why I should eludes me. But even so I draw from it an unfavourable opinion of my remaining wits).
To live again, in whatever manner, must be more healthful than this. Surely, surely, we should try?
But the Scholar has gone up again to his library. All of them, even I, tend to keep very much to our own certain parts of the house. Therefore now I stand alone at an upper window, and look out across the moonlit grounds of what, once, was my unwarm and friendless home. I think of my mother screaming, in grief or petulance at my loss, perhaps in guilt, although I doubt she ever supposed she’d been unfair to me, or negligent. I think of Captain Ashton.
Then, far down among the savage shrubbery and the long-clawed orchard, not any fantasy but decidedly present, one of the sub-creatures emerges, and goes shouldering and staggering on its ghastly way. Yet now, absurdly or sensibly, I don’t know why, or which, I stare at it and decide that it is only the thing’s utter lack of motive and inner guidance that make it both so clumsy and so cumbersome, indeed so gratuitously repellent. Like a carriage running downhill without horse or driver, or one of those automobiles, also made driverless, its engine running on a directionless power, not knowing left from right, nor right from wrong.
4
Coral
I want my Mama. I want her. I don’t remember her, but I want her. Where is she? If I am here, why is she not here? When I died, after Miss Archer killed me, why did not my mother come to hold me, and lead me through? Or... Lord Jesus, as we were promised? Where were they? My mother and God. Nobody loved me enough. And so, I lost my way. I am here. I am here, and I have no one to care for me, and the old gentleman has gone quite mad, as Elizabeth said, and he wants her to do this thing I do not understand with the Zom-bees. And I am afraid! I want my mother! I want my dolls! I want not to be dead! I am crying now. Can you hear? My tears are wet to me, but not to any other. I cannot even have my tears. I cannot show them. My Father would approve of that – not one salty drop! He must have cursed me.
5
The Warrior
(Completely interpreted by Elizabeth): I am of a mind with the old man. Here is the way and the means. Into our hand our foe may be delivered. We have been chosen from the ranks, or otherwise, yet it falls to us. We will enter them, as air enters in at the mouth and nostrils of a man, or light at his open eyes. As that is, so we shall be, for we are smoke and air, and they, the Monstrous Enemy, are open jars of flesh that we may penetrate, invade and fill, and kill them there, and rule there, and be, and live, kings and queens, again each in our own House of Body, under the Will of God. In truth I vow.
PART THREE
1
The Scholar
I had my eye on one for four or five days. Ever since I had thought up that extravagant and possibly impossible idea of mine over the course of a week. Most recently I had gone from window to window, upstairs or down, following this chap, (a male Zombie, another who had lingered here), to watch him. To study him. I did not inform the others of this. Before, or since. The ones of our number who seemed or were appalled, and adamantly hostile, who when, initially, I spoke to them, (El, Coral? Laurel..?), might lose their cool, (as they used to say), entirely. While our Knight might just lose his head and leap into premature action. A warrior unable to fight, as his training and living life had educated him to do, for over eight centuries, must be gagging for a ‘bloody good brawl’. Caution, therefore. But the morning after our ‘discussion’ in the red and grey room, I moved out through a window into the grounds, to see if I could find my quarry, and take a look at him closely.
The reason he particularly caught my attention, I suspect, was his – by now rather faint – likeness to myself. Oh, not that he was my double – hardly. But he was of, shall I say, the same apparent type. Tall, six feet and a bit more, thin but with a solid, big-boned frame. In age he had been fifty or so, some forty years my junior, when struck down by the Zombie sickness, and emptied of his life-force and/or soul. Nor did he have the strong head of hair I had mostly managed to retain. All his teeth that I could see, however, (now and then he was prone to bare them in a snarl at nothing – or everything), were present. There did seem to be some damage to his right arm; it hung rather imperfectly. Perhaps it had been broken and not set. Not, of course, a favourable attribute for my purpose. Although conversely I had noted he could still move the fingers of his right hand. His left arm and hand, and both legs, were fine. His torso had taken some bashings, or else suffered some slight amount of decay, but none of this was either spectacular or especially gross. His eyes and other features were, like his whitish teeth, seemingly intact. Obviously he moved in the usual blundering, incoherent manner. But that, I thought, was due solely to his condition of cerebral void and absent reasoning.
The weather was raw but bright, with a snappy wind raking over the trees, shaking the orchards, and the woods below, their branches and buds, like the sistra of Ancient Egyptian temples. It is late spring, I think. I haven’t mentioned this before, but then again, and given our state, we are all prone to this; seasons seem to last for a year or more, or vanish away in a night. One day spring, the next deep winter. Perhaps that really happens, at least from our perspective. Again, I recall the constant alarum of the 1990’s and 20-teens about Global Warming and climate change... I seem to recall a ship went out to the Antarctic a few years following my physical demise. It had been sent to monitor the environment, and to prove thereby that the great ice-sheets were melting away. Instead it was stuck for days – or was it weeks? – in solid, unnegotiably-frozen ice. The relevant scientists hastily assured the world that this solid ice was actually yet further proof of dangerous climate change... contrary to appearances. I myself, I remember, believed that if our planet was warming up, it was due certainly in part to the earth’s preparation for a new approaching Ice Age, even if said event was millennia in the future. (A little like turning up the central heating to combat a forecast snow-in, and to stop the water-pipes completely freezing.) In any case, no doubt the total loss of all light, heat, and electronic communication, recently, will reduce humanity’s vauntedly pernicious evacuations of carbon. Though God knows what the nuclear power stations, and other such piles, will do, untended by humans, and/or broken into by the Zombie-kind.
I wasn’t thinking of this, I always try not to, when I began to stalk the particular Zombie I had selected – if ‘stalk’ is the word: he was my goal...my what? Target? Prey?
He was seemingly quite unaware of me, as he lurched along, occasionally veering in among the wilded trees. A rushing lorry without a driver, a plane in full flight without a pilot – that was the impression I had of him.
I cruised along behind him, sometimes less than three feet away. Despite being dead, and mostly unable to smell things, as unable to touch or eat, I still became convinced I could detect his stink. But it was the reek of an unwashed and mobile body, I thoug
ht, with no true hint of rot or gangrene. Yet something there was. Something rank beyond mere human functions which, anyway, one assumes, occur with Zombies but infrequently. (Although these things devour living fleshly men and women, the Zombies do not appear to open their bowels or bladders, or if they do, the results have not been either witnessed, or whiffed, by myself). I have never thought to ask my fellow ghosts.
Finally my ‘quarry’, if I can call him that, appeared to stumble over something and thumped down on his face. I rushed to his side. I was concerned only that he had not been further damaged. But he made no vocal noise, neither of shock or pain. Well, naturally not. Everyone was assured his kind did not any longer feel such things.
However, as he lay in the thickening grasses, he rolled a little, and for a second his mindless eyes met mine. Did he see me? No. Yet, I calculated, maybe something in him, that which was left of what, once, his brain had been, perhaps that did. Since a look, part bewilderment, part fear, slid across his face. Did I, I wondered, imagine this? Before I could form an opinion, he slithered round, apparently unimpaired, even his broken arm not more broken, and bumbled to his feet.
He neither ran nor crept away. He was as before, a cerebral orphan, shambling off along the slope. I let him go.
And then it came to me. At which my own shock was such I believe, if I had been live flesh, I too would have fallen. But instead I simply lost contact with the .ground, and floated for a minute, levitating weightlessly.
For something too had happened to me. When he had fallen over – and he fell – a split second – no more –