by Tanith Lee
“Why didn’t you then, eh?”
“Why – didn’t I–?”
“Join up, Son. Look at you. Strong young toff like you. You’re about my age, ain’t yer? Bit younger? So what was it? Too scared?”
We were close under the so-wreckable overhanging portico, against the tissue-paper tomb wall. In the matchlight, and now in the black redness, I could see his face. A beautiful face, in its own way, with big narrowed eyes, now dark, now pale, as the bomb-light lit them.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Don’t yer? Well I do. You’re a bloody coward. Still. Never mind. You’re my type, you are. I don’t like the girls, you see,” he said, and I shuddered at it. But then he reached out and took my penis and balls into his big warm silent hand. And leaning in, he kissed me.
Nothing like that, ever before. Though, if I am honest, hints of it in dreams.
I won’t describe that moment. Please understand, I am not ashamed of it. In my subsequent life I saw and learned a lot. There was no wrong in my feelings. Only in what came next.
Because, before any proper action could ensue, I pushed him off. And such was my false and mindless panic, I managed to thrust him off balance too. In my own way I was physically quite strong, I must think, if mentally a weakling. He skidded back and hit his head against the nearness of the wall. I imagine he had been drinking, too. And so had I, to wash down the horsemeat and the expense of the bill, most of which had been allotted to me to pay.
As he let me go I turned and ran away. He lay on the ground, not knocked out, simply rather stunned, by the wall, and by my refusal – plainly my body at least had evidenced willingness. My stupidity must have been to him a kick in the guts.
Not until I had reached the turn to the next street did I look back to see him thus, lying there, laughing by then, rueful and – innocent. That beautiful and lost soldier, doubtless two years my junior, as my poor brother had been, not yet twenty-five...
If I hadn’t pushed him off, if the wall hadn’t momentarily stunned him, if he had been more sober, and I more self- aware.
The bomb however was eager, and had greater knowledge than either of us. It swung from the sky like a gigantic black-blazing wing, noiseless – or so thunderous it deafened me. It struck the place where we had stood, and where by then, laughing, he lay. The street exploded into splinters of volcanic fire.
It would have been both of us, if I had given in to myself. But I had not. So it was only him.Why do I, fool that I am still, reckon if we had been together, screwing into each other against the tomb-tissue, that bomb would not – would not – have fallen where it did–?
Before him, never, and after him, never. Not for me. I have never known love of the body. Never fucked. But in my own fashion, I have facilitated murder. If he had never seen me, chances were he would himself have made it to a shelter. Or he would have been a street or so away. Or if I had remained, and the bomb had dropped, ultimate orgasm. No petite mort but grosse mort. Death with death.
And until this moment, this moment – I had wiped it off my mind. But now, now I remember.
(Elizabeth): I know he made it work. The Scholar.
He meant to and he did.
I felt it, how he lunged and leapt and passed inside the body of the Zombie. And became a part of it. Did he then lose himself? I don’t think it was that. Although I don’t know.
Can’t know.
Until I do it too, I won’t.
But I’ll never do that, will I, for God’s sake?
Never.
Along the passage I came across Coral, poor little thing, crouching under the window in her formal Victorian dress. She wasn’t crying, but she turned up to me her terrified little face. Poor kid.
“I saw,” she said. “Through the window. The old man sprang – and vanished into the bee-thing. Oh! Oh!”
I would have taken her in my arms, but we can’t, of course. We can’t cuddle or console or embrace or touch or properly weep.
“I saw it, too,” I said to her, as levelly as I could.
I had, you see, hadn’t I, in my own way, inside my ghost’s mind “Do you know, Coral, I think he’ll be fine.” She said nothing, shuddering as she crouched on the floor, holding her own self in both arms. (I suppose we were always left with that. We can touch ourselves. Or seem to. But really, too, I wonder sometimes if we only believe we can. An hallucination of the embodiment ripped from us at death...) “I bet,” I said, trying not to sound too confident, which I was not at all, anyway, “I bet our librarian will make it right. Let’s hope so. Then he can give the horrible thing a bath, and make it start to talk again, and then he can tell us, through its mouth, if this was a good idea, or a bad one.”
Coral stared at me.
She said, wary and cold, “Will you do it, too? Try to go inside one of them?”
“Certainly not, darling,” I said. “Yuk.”
She smiled warily when I said “Yuk”. She’s always seemed to like that dopey but so-descriptive word. I’d hoped she’d smile. And I smiled too. I said, “Let’s go and see if we can find the others.”
Inwardly, obviously, I wasn’t smiling.
My mind was still rushing after the Scholar, what he had done, its unmatched sequels –
Because of course I knew this lady, me, was protesting too much. If that old gent could do it, Elizabeth was going to do it too. It was the only chance.
And the very thought of that made me, as our American friends, with their often perfect use of language, used to say: sick to my stomach.
(Laurel): It seems the arm of the creature had been broken – or the bone dislocated. The abrupt gesture it had just now made of wiping off spittle – because the librarian made it – must have snapped the bone back into place. The clever librarian told us this presently, the Knight and I, and by then, although the new mouth he used still somewhat slurred the words, I could understand everything he said. It was even rather like his voice, as we knew it from his ghost, only slightly altered by the other’s throat. For of course he spoke through the creature. Except, it seems, it’s not a creature now. It is re-becoming a man, becoming the librarian. But there was some mood too that suddenly came over the old man next, and he turned from us and limped – then walked, a little way off. He stood by a tree, or he made the body do so, and he inside it. He was able therefore to lean on the tree, which also, in a while, he told us was pleasant to do. He didn’t tell us what the mood of trouble had been, apart from the pain in his arm. Perhaps the mood was from some memory of his previous life, the life before he became a ghost, started all at once by becoming flesh again. But tears ran down his face. I saw them in the glassy clarity of the starlight, and they glistened, and were so wet.
I have seen her in a glade. As the Scholar did, I think, I looked for and found her before my mind was completely made up. I’d been watching, yet partly not aware what I was at. How we hide things, both ghosts and the living, from our own selves!
Morning was coming, the sky coloured like the pale white wine I’ve seen in fine crystal goblets in this very house, so very long ago. And there she sat. There’s a tiny thread of fresh water that comes there out of a rock into a pool. The pool is full of rotted fallen leaves and less natural mess, but the rill is pure. I don’t remember such a waterfall in my own past. They must have found it since. But it’s always possible, it seems, to find, and to refind. It falls like clean tears. It’s wet. And here then I may, if I achieve entry into her thin little body, and take charge of her as the Scholar has of the other one, wash her clean of the dirt she’s coated in.
How old is this woman? Older than I, for sure. I died at eighteen years, and as a remnant of myself have so remained eighteen. But her body, I suppose, is past its first quarter century, twenty-five years and a little more.
Her hair, though thick with filth, and, perhaps, old blood, is palest yellow. And this not from some bleach or dye, but her own true colour. Her eyes are grey, like mine, if a touch darker. She was,
and has stayed, strong. Just two fingers missing, the last two upon her left hand. Presumably, if I can master – or become – or dwell inside her, I can manage without them. An old wound has healed in her right side. The scar is like one a warrior might bear. If he weren’t a ghost, but live flesh still.
As I approach her, she raises her head and looks at me. Then she stands up and makes a sound. I’m not certain if this frightens me, but even if it does, I won’t be stopped or turned aside. All my life was that, when I lived. To be stopped, to be prevented.
I run at her. I leap. I seem to meet a rush of scalding fire and dense black mud, as if I’m in the trenches where so many men have died, but after, it is as if I pass through a blood-red sunset into a dawn of darkest shade.
How heavy I am. I weigh leaden on myself as an animal burdened beyond its capacity.
I sink down. The ground is kind to me. It holds me up. And over my eyes a drift of lemon – that is the colour – lemon – yellow silk, that is my hair, her hair, our hair – mine.
As once I did in life, I have fainted. But as I lie there unconscious, I sense I enter into her brain. Her own memories are gone, all but the fundamental mechanical lessons of how to see and speak and breathe and move and live. Her – my – heart is beating, slow but steady. Here is the place of many mansions.
I’d never realised, when alive before, to what a palace and playground we’re given access in our own bodies. Now, I am again, I, and no other, I am the mistress of a splendid bodily house.
(Coral): We could not find the others. Elizabeth was kind, but eventually she went away. Everyone is outside, I think.
I have found a cupboard. I could not open the door, but I could pass through the door. Now I sit on the floor of the cupboard. I am crying. My tears are dry. Please, dear God, help me. There is no one else.
(The Warrior): The valiant old man has sent me on to my own quest.
Day is swole beyond the trees and golden, but I find none of the monster-creatures, so can mark none down. Are all their kind gone, as at the beginning they come and pass on? I may need to wait, but few have patience to want attendance upon afray when it stands due. God in his Mercie and pity, send me one I may try and have. Let this be done.
(The Scholar): I had anticipated the awful sense of stasis and heaviness, and duly braced myself for it and, once into the body, found soon I could bear it, knowing too I should grow accustomed, as are all living things, to the weight and unghostlike limits of their own bones and meat and blood.
The arm, luckily, set back as it should be, if in a flash of agony beyond my scope, (even the mortal smashing of my nose and skull seemed less than this healing pang, for they of course stunned me, lessening my awareness). But after a minute or two I apprehended what had happened. As I say, a wonderful piece of luck, due entirely to my forgetting, in that instant of achievement, that my new body’s arm wasn’t as it should be. Now in time it will repair, for there is certainly plenty of feeling in it – it aches and stabs from shoulder to palm. A trial. No matter.
It means the nerves have survived. I have bound it up by now, able to rend a piece from the body’s – my – mess of shirt, now part of my inheritance! The feel of the horrible cloth, and of this bearded, unkempt wild thing’s face and general skin, are a sort of Paradise to me. While this new vehicle of mine is around half a century, or close on, younger and more hale than my old model!
But then. The memory came. The soldier. And I wept.
I shall never forgive myself, though reason tells me it was not my fault. I didn’t know the bomb would come. But oh, to have forgotten – that is a worse crime, I believe. I will shoulder it, as I do the physical pain, as best I may.
To other events.
The Knight has left me, and I make out none of the others. I am sorry to say this fills me with relief. Now fixed as I am, human, as I am, I could see only steam and smoke where the Knight stood. Doubtless they will all be like this to me, now. If even I can see them at all, for we note, I’d never seen a ghost, not even here, before I died.
My best course perhaps is simply to stay put and wait. The rising sun seems to bring an unusual warmth – obviously, I haven’t felt the heat of the sun for nearly a decade. The cold will be a nuisance. I mean to try to locate some clothing in the house. I have glimpsed wearable things here and there, hung in closets, but whether they will fit this stalwart fellow I am now become – fuck knows.
But then, Fuck knows everything, apparently. Fuck must be another of the three hundred and seventy names of God.
(Elizabeth): It’s done. Nothing to it. Glide in, sink in my claws, subside in astonishment, sick in fact only with joy, and with revulsion only at the disgusting stink of it – of me, the Brand New Elizabeth. My God, what have I done! I double over with laughter. It hurts to laugh, as they told us, once. But it’s a wonderful hurt. My choice, demonstrably, is outrageous. What will they all say? Who cares? They will get used to me, as I will. What a crazy thing – I have just pissed – And how novel! But aside from that, I’d forgotten the relief and sense of achievement merely passing water can provide. I look forward to the ‘weightier’ work, which old people, in my childhood, would refer to as Number Two.
I want to run for about a mile. But I’d better get the walking right before I try. I too, like this body before we met, have fallen over more than once in my insane and infantile rejoicings. But I’m strong as a bull and savage with – with what? With life, what else.
With LIFE.
(And one extra, wonderful thing. All the fingers of this body are intact, and function – unlike the damaged fingers I was left with that ruined my work last time. Plus the whole rig is strong as a camel.)
And then I think of my father.
I picture him, when I was fifteen, that handsome, elegant man, like an actor, but by then... more frail, a frailty I couldn’t (wouldn’t?) see, as to me he was eternal.
What would he say about what I’ve done, have chosen to do? He would hate it. He would be offended and startled, and perhaps attempt to hide that from me, sweet as he was, and liberal as he tried always to be.
I can recollect now, that thing that happened, those months before he died.
My pretty mother, you see, some four years younger than he and still in her thirties, had embarked on a little ‘fling’. That is, she had gone off on holiday in America with some ‘fascinating guy’ she had met somewhere or other in London. It wasn’t, she had said, ‘an Affair’. Just something she ‘needed to get out of her system’, and so she ‘sensibly’ told us, my father first. I was shocked stupid and went to bits, and so he, my dad, stayed calm, and calmed me as much as he could. “These things happen,” he said. “She’s right. Get it done, and then we can go on as before.” Which was what, I think, my lovely, clever, kind, filthy little bitch of a mother intended. (Like breaking a strict diet at Christmas, and virtuously resuming it afterwards.)
(When I asked my father if he had ever indulged in a ‘fling’, he looked in my eyes and quietly said, “No, Lizzie. I never needed to. I had everything I wanted here.”)
She was gone a while. And while she was gone my appalled rage at her – which later I tried, and partly or totally succeeded in wiping off the slate of my mind – turned to a determinedly jealous wish she should never come back into our lives. Not mine. Not Dad’s.
And I set up a sort of, well I can only call it a campaign. I have to make this clear: I wasn’t incestuously sexually in love with my father. But I was emotionally in love with him. Always had been, always would be. In some ways still am. I’d tried, with some justification, to be what he would have me be, which was nothing bad at all – artistically bright, a little dramatic, glamorous, open to adventure and to thought. But with her having shown her true colours, evil, dirty ones at that, I began to try to shut her out. I suggested to him, ‘tactfully’ at first, then more boldly, that he too ought to have an affair or two. There must be lots of girls who’d be more than happy, etc. And I’m sure some would have be
en. My aim, however, was that he should have fun, and also take his revenge on my mother, closing her out, and turning instead to me – not for sex, obviously – but for intellectual and creative companionship. Elsewhere, outside, he would have sex. And I would be his platonic wife. What else did he require?
Only of course, you see, I was wrong. As a substitute for my mother’s company I was neither fitted nor – wanted.
In the end, one thundery miserable evening, in our new, miles-away, not-so-far-from-London house, he sat me down and told me flatly that No, he would not be having an ‘affair’ with anybody, did not want one, and fervently hoped I would stop mooting it, however much sophisticated kindness I intended. Also, I must stop cursing my mother, and trying, metaphorically, to paint her in such murky nasty tones. They did not, he said, suit either her, as portrait, or me as the painter. He needed, in fact, he told me, to be alone. Even I, he said, much as he loved me, was becoming – which word did he use? It wasn’t any version of ‘needy’, nor ‘exhausting’ – I have fully eradicated the title or phrase for what he told me I was not, but was becoming.
In wretched silence I slunk away, and he took a train for the city. I barely saw him again until my mother returned, she a little crushed, which by then I couldn’t even glory in. Awkwardly, we settled back, (ostensibly), to our former ways.
How odd it seems to me now, that I never ever questioned why my father, young enough, vital, active, was never called up to soldier in the Second World War. I have an idea I’d assumed what he did as a businessman was of so much use to the war effort, that he’d been told to keep on with it and leave the fighting to others. Nothing was ever said, and I know if he’d been sent I’d have been frightened crazy. Years and years after, in my thirties then, I’d had a horrible possible insight, which I’d brushed off me like a stinging insect; but it left a tiny dab of poison. Probably, honourable man that he was, he had tried to enlist. And then they must have found something just not quite right with his heart. And that was why, of course, of course, he’d never been thrown into the stye of battle. That was why I didn’t lose him, my darling, then.