We Live Inside Your Eyes

by Kealan Patrick Burke

  April 20th, soldiers at the door instructed us to go down into the shelter and stay there. They were ashen faced, their eyes large and glassy, and did not seem possessed of the kind of bravery necessary to emerge victorious from the fray. It hardly instilled hope. Though bound to protect the citizens, many of them seemed more inclined to join them in their shelters or run far away from the danger. I could hardly blame them. With some blankets to protect against the frigid cold down below, and some bottles of water, a loaf of bread and a wedge of cheese, we hurried into the basement and pulled the door shut behind us, the air sirens already yowling at our backs.

  Only this time, they did not stop.

  The bombs fell after midnight.

  The sound was like all the engines of the world breaking down at once, or as if a locomotive had been dropped from the sky. The human ear is not designed to process such cacophony, and as one we winced, our hands clamped to the sides of our heads.

  The roar made of a mockery of my husband’s whispered assurances, sucked the life from his words. As if he were an expert in such things, he quickly changed tactics, began to speculate loudly about which part of the town the bombs might have fallen. “That’s probably the barracks,” he said. “Or maybe the port.” Pointing out that those two locations were at opposite ends of the town would have accomplished nothing, so I stayed silent, listened to the drone of the aircraft, the whistling of the bombs, the pounding of the explosions. Vibrations carried through the dirt walls, shuddering our organic unit. The children were wrapped around us, their heads buried in the folds of our clothes, dampening them with their tears. They wept soundlessly. My husband jolted with each explosion, his voice high and reedy. I could smell the whiskey on his breath but did not, as was customary, resent him for it. When the world wants to kill you, a bottle is as good a place to hide as a basement.

  “Jesus Christ in Heaven,” he said. “We forgot the gas masks. I should go get them.”

  “You’ll do no such thing,” I told him, and refrained from adding that if a bomb fell close enough to do us harm, it wasn’t likely to be the gas that killed us.

  More explosions, thunder through the walls, and dirt rained down from the ceiling. My daughter screamed into my stomach. My son buried his face deeper into my husband’s shirt. The dozen or so candles we had set around us in a crude semicircle fluttered, sending shadows carousing around the room.

  “They might be getting closer,” my husband said. “But we’ll be okay. We’ll be safe down here.”

  I looked at him, glad he was here with us, but struck by how unfamiliar he appeared in his fear. Previously I had only ever known him as a strong man, determined, capable but not altogether liberal with his emotions, particularly love. He was a good father and kind, but often I could see when he was too tired or unwilling to handle the demands of the job. Dependent on the light on a given day, I sometimes detected shreds of lost dreams in his eyes, the vestigial traces of squandered ambition and goals unattained. We did not marry for love, but we had found the threads of it over time, mostly through the children that had necessitated our formal union. And now, here, on what might be the end of the world, I found his fear humanized him in a way his love never could, maybe because there was no doubting its legitimacy.

  Another violating thrust as another bomb penetrated the city. More dirt rained on our heads. One of the candles went out. The room shook, and I held my daughter tighter to my chest. Her fingers were claws, nails drawing blood from my sides. I did not tell her to ease off, would have let her crawl inside me if it meant she’d be safe.

  “We’ll be okay,” my husband said again. “We’ll be okay.”

  I did not believe him. He had ceased his speculation about the location of the strikes, because they were getting closer, the last sounding as if it had hit a few streets away to the east. I looked away from him, the evident fear on his face only exacerbating my own, and straight ahead into the dark beyond the small arc of candles. There, I saw a pale smudge of something illuminated in the guttering flame, like a crooked stripe of paint on the opposite wall. Candle-shadow animated it, made it twist in on itself like a dash of milk in water. Perhaps the wall was crumbling. It filled me with dread that instead of the quick mercy of death from a sudden explosion, we might instead slowly die from suffocation as the walls gave way and the ceiling came down, choking us with dirt.

  Further movement, this time closer to the floor, nearer the candles. My labored imagination and the poor light told me it was a spider, though I had never seen one quite so large. The splintered nails at the tips of its feet as it approached the flame told me I had been foolish in seeing it as anything other than a gnarled hand. My spine went rigid with shock, even as I reminded myself that now, under the existential stress of potential annihilation, I was likely to see and imagine anything from hands to enemy soldiers materializing from those walls.

  “All right now,” my husband said, hushing the anguish from our son. “Everything will be—”

  The bomb that hit was not direct, as I would discover later. It hit the houses across the street from us, leveling most of that row, but the impact blew out our windows and most of the front wall, turned our furniture to splinters and collapsed the ceiling. Everything on the second floor tumbled down into the first, caving in the rabbit hutch the soldiers had assured would protect us in the event of such a calamity. None of the protective measures would have saved us, and I found myself thinking back to the reaction from one of the soldiers, little more than a boy, who had shaken his head at the mention of us remaining in our homes. “Unless you have an exterior shelter, it’s better to leave than take the chance,” he’d said. “Otherwise it’ll be like trying to stop a tank with an umbrella.” But this was our home. We could not afford to leave the city even if we’d had someplace else to go. And always that nagging doubt that the country was overreacting to verbal threats that would yield no physical retaliation. We were stubborn, and we stayed, held in place by some atavistic notion that we were merely caught in a dream from which we would inevitably awake before it could hurt us.

  As the house above us fell, a cascade of dirt from the basement ceiling buried us from the waist down. The wall at my back crumbled, not completely, but enough so that I found myself reclined into a hollow, my mouth full of roots. Roots that seemed to move, fumbling like worms against my cheeks and eyes and between my lips, though that was most likely my own frantic attempt to be free of the concavity. Through the fall of dirt, I saw my husband bend over and clutch our son harder, and despite the madness, I felt a swell of love and gratitude for him, made myself a solemn promise to whomever might have the power to grant salvation, that if I survived, I would try to love him more, even if he was not emotionally capable of reciprocity.

  I grabbed onto my daughter’s frail quivering shoulders and screamed in anguished protest at the war, at the insanity of it all, and tasted coarse dry dirt on my tongue and in my throat. Why? I raged. Why us when we had done nothing to anyone but live our lives in a country that had challenged another? We were not the authority, the instigators. We were not the antagonists, but the spectators, the people in other rooms who only heard the mumblings of discontent through the walls. Why should we die? A lifetime of struggling, of trying to get by, undone in a heartbeat as a punctuation mark to a disagreement among strangers.

  The hail of dirt subsided; the rumbling ceased. Other than the occasional sound of something shifting in the remains of the rooms above, it was quiet. My ears rang. It would be some time before I could hear properly again.

  Only a single candle had endured the fall of dirt and dust. It guttered, appeared to die, then returned to cast its meager light through the haze. And in that feeble light, I saw a woman sitting against the opposite wall. I gave an involuntary gasp. She was no more than six feet away, but the light and the dust rendered her indistinct. Her crooked posture suggested injury, her eyes and mouth mere black thumbprints of shadow in the dirty gray egg of her face. I had the impression
of an old print dress swaddling an oddly shaped body. She was sitting, her feet pointing toward the stairs. One foot was upside down, the toes buried in the floor. Her head faced in the opposite direction, turned slightly away from us. There were strange folds in the flesh of her neck. The bomb must have twisted her and flung her across the street and down here with us.

  Dirty air rushed into the room from the holes in the ceiling.

  I alerted my husband. It took him some time to hear me. When he looked at me, I saw that there was a nasty gash running from between his eyes up into his hairline. It was bleeding furiously down onto his shirt. He blinked rapidly and smiled at me with dirt-darkened teeth. “We’re going...to be...okay,” he said, and looked down at our son. The boy, lying half in the dirt, looked up at him, his eyes watery with panic.

  I looked back into the dark.

  The woman had moved and now her face and upper body were facing the wall. Her lower body had not changed position. Her feet were still pointed toward the stairs. But now her arms were raised, broken hands hanging loosely at shoulder height as if she were attempting some strange interpretation of an Egyptian dance. From the wall around her, more dirt tumbled as other hands began to worm their way through into the basement.

  Rescuers? I wondered, and then I was being shaken violently enough to make my teeth clack together. Confused, I looked at my husband. He was very close and snarling at me. He must have gone mad. He was shaking me, then shoving me, then pulling our daughter out of my arms. Her nails dragged more furrows in my flesh. She was not moving. Her mouth was open and full of dirt. Wet warmth trickled from my nose. I brought a hand up to probe it and saw that I was holding the knife I had brought to cut the bread.

  I mouthed questions into the darkness. No one answered.

  I looked to the lady sitting by the far wall and saw that she had moved again. She was kneeling before me now, weaving slightly, using her weight to force her broken neck to bring her head around to where she needed it. Trying to face me.

  My husband screamed in anguish. I dared not look. He was gesticulating wildly above the inert body of our daughter.

  With a grunt, the old lady’s head swiveled around to regard me, allowing me to see that her labors had been in vain. Somebody had stitched her eyes shut with black shoelaces. Her mouth too, but not tightly enough to deny her a smile.

  My husband lunged at me, his hands hooked into claws. I saw that he was screaming but heard nothing but the ringing in my own ears and the very faint sound of the old lady’s laughter.

  Over her shoulder as my husband’s hands found my throat, I saw that our son had crawled into the corner away from the chaos. From the dirt wall, a multitude of hands reached for him like plants drawn to the light.

  “If you wish to see them, close your eyes,” said the old woman.

  I did as she requested, imagined what it would feel like to never have to open them again, and felt the old lady’s hand guide my own, guide the knife, up and toward my husband’s neck.

  The next bomb reduced the house to rubble.

  ✽✽✽

  The shelling continued for three more days.

  The basement withstood it all, only coming down at the behest of the rescuers’ picks and shovels.

  By that time, I had gone quite mad with grief and horror and sorrow. They took me to a mobile hospital and treated my injuries, most of which were superficial. In soothing tones, people—whether doctors, soldiers, or something else, I’ll never know—informed me that my husband and two children had yet to be found. They advised me not to give up hope. Quite the contrary, they said. If the bodies were not in the basement, then it was quite likely they’d escaped and would find their way home in due course. But these people know nothing of errant Christmas presents and rat traps, of broken bodied old women with stitched up eyes, and of pale clambering hands bursting from the walls. Despite the authority in their voices, they are quite ignorant indeed.

  They released me a week later, and I walked through a metropolis of debris, of fire and smoke, of pain and misery, of fear and confusion, to find my home. I missed it twice and had to backtrack. Home is harder to find when its face has been removed. Once I located the ruin in which I had married and raised my children, some kindly men assisted me in clearing some of the rubble that had fallen since my rescue, exposing for me the now exposed basement. I thanked them, dismissed their advice to stay clear, and clambered my way into the remains of that square of dirt. The walls were gone. Only the floor remained. The candle was there too, and I lit it with one of the three items I had taken from the hospital.

  In the dirt, I sat and waited until the street and the city fell silent.

  The moon rose high above my ruin, casting a patchwork of shadows on my face as the old woman’s voice echoed through the feverish chambers of desperate memory.

  “If you wish to see them, close your eyes.”

  From my pocket, I produced the other two items I had brought: a needle and some black thread.

  She whispered to me of history, and of the future, and of holes blown in the earth by uneducated men, of broken prisons and freedom, and of old ones come again. She whispered to me of pain.

  While I worked, and when it was time, the old lady’s hand grew like a weed from the bloodied dirt before me and pinched out the candle flame.

  By then, I didn’t need the light.

  DOWN HERE WITH US

  I AM AWAKENED FROM A DREAM OF FIRE AND OLD BLOOD by a whisper. These days, it does not take much to rouse me, for despite the promised security of the wall, my instincts remain as sharp as ever. Maybe we are safe, and those instincts are little more than restless voices desperate to be heard, but they make me feel better whenever the light is gone from the day and the terrible moans of the Dead slip through the cracks in that wall.

  “Olta, are you awake?”

  I consider feigning sleep, but if anyone knows my instincts better than I do, it’s my brother, as he should. He shares them, both of us cut from the same cloth as our father, even if I’m the only one who lived up to his promise. Thus, with a sigh I roll over to face where he is hunkered down next to my pillow. I wince at the stench of sweat and ale and onions that wreathes my face.

  “What is it, Admir? And what time is it?”

  “I have something to you show you, brother.”

  It seems as if Admir always has something to show me. He is younger than I by ten years, and truth be told, as naïve as a newborn. Every day his discoveries get more redundant and tiresome. Here is the remnant of an old shield half-buried in the mud; there, a well rumored to have no bottom, but from which he swears he can hear the ancestral prayers of the ashen priests. And oh, look, a half-mad Menhada woman who seems to be unaware that her shriveled breast is exposed.

  “I’ve never had call to question your Great Father’s sense,” my comrade Ilion once remarked, “until I watched your brother for more than a minute. Then I found myself wondering why he didn’t just drown that one in the brook.”

  To which I’d responded: “The water would have refused him.”

  “What is it?” I ask my brother again, suddenly more tired than I have any cause to be. We were warriors once, the greatest warriors in all the land, bested by no one, merely scarred by upheavals that would have reduced others to ash. We earned our wounds and our reputations, our pride. We earned the kingdom we built. Now we are weakened by immobility, by the lack of a cause to fight, by indignity and humiliation, and every day we struggle to find things to do, to find worth amid the bitterness of being owned.

  Elldimek, our kingdom, which they have christened The Redoubt, belongs to another now, their only advantage against us being their greater number, an advantage that will do them little good when the world falls again. And it will, for though few dare to say it, the stench of carrion already so prevalent in the air seems to thicken with each passing day. Even the moons seem duller, as if the stink of death has tainted their light.

  Something is coming, and in
my most beautiful dreams, I imagine opening those doors again as my father once did, this time not to usurpers, but to devourers, a tactical move which would finally bring us all back down to the same level: that of meat.

  “You’ll have to come see. I don’t have the words to describe it.”

  “Try.”

  His thickly bearded face scrunches up in concentration. I had hoped his education, crude as it is, would have taken root by now, but alas, I fear it’s wasted on him. Not that this is a surprise. He thrives on stories that need no embellishments and yet get convoluted and more preposterous in the retelling with every passing season. And the Redoubt library, once the bastion of our ferocious history, has become tamed by the influence of other races. Now, instead of a shrine to dwarven pride, it has become an argument in which too many voices strain to be heard.

  “I went outside,” he says, much too loudly and in an instant, I am sitting up, my hand clamped over his mouth, surprising him. I take in the rest of the room, a one-time stable for our regal mounts that still smells of horse manure; a not unpleasant smell, if not for the implication that this is where we belong in the absence of other animals.

  My comrades, two dozen in all, sleep on, enwombed by the amber dance with shadow beneath tallow flames.

  “You went...outside? Have you gone mad?”

  I remove my hand, repulsed by the feel of his spittle-soaked lips against my palm as he smiles.

  “I wasn’t alone. Nderin went with me. He’s the one who told me about the garden in the woods. He’d been there before, with the Foresters. Only it was different then. There weren’t so many of them.”

  Nderin is my friend Uril’s son. Uril comes from a long line of butchers and you can still see in his eyes how much he wishes the meat were still pleading for mercy and dressed in the colors of our one-time enemies. His son is trouble enough that it is only a matter of time before the Dead get their hands on him. Never aloud would I admit it, but nobody would grieve if they did. And based on how he treats him, I suspect Uril feels the same. The blood that runs sluggishly through our veins has seldom felt so cold.