This morning, I wiped the sweat from my brow with a cold rag and forced myself to drink a sludge of thick coffee with an indecent amount of sugar, determined to venture even deeper into the island’s sunless, interior country, flu be damned. You would not have approved, but then you are so very, very far away and I am left to my own devices.
While I’ve acclimated to the sense of being watched, I’d swear on my life that the leaves whisper rhymes—clink, rink, slink—and sometimes I play at a response—shrink, mink, wink—just to help pass the time. I managed to make it all the way to the sleeping giant and then through an eerie, dark bamboo forest where the whispering leaves gave way to the soft clicks of bamboo stalks hitting bamboo stalks, when I found a steep path down to a small cove. The oddest-looking banyan trees rose up the steep slope above it, with red flowers sprouting from their supple limbs. These blooms smelled like rotting corpses. Of course I had to collect one, and I did.
A few moments after I’d placed it in a jar, I was struck motionless; like Lot’s wife, I was frozen stiff, rooted in place. A panic started to rise, but for some reason it didn’t concern me; it was as though the panic was being experienced by someone, something else. Time passed. Shadows lengthened. Thoughts tumbled through my mind, but they weren’t my thoughts exactly. I was on a ship, I was in a church, I was diving underwater with a spear in my hand. I was a mother, father, sister, brother. I had names, I was nameless. It was almost like those walks in Devon, when the burden of self seemed to lift off like dew evaporating in the morning sun.
I must have lost consciousness, because the next thing I knew, I was lying on the rocky earth and Agnes was cradling my head, some kind of bitter plant compote in my mouth. I spat it out, along with coffee-flavored vomit, and with her help managed to waveringly get back on my feet.
She impulsively grabbed me around the waist and clung with more emotion I’d thought her capable of. “Never leave, never leave, never leave,” she said.
Which is funny, and not. Because it was one of the things I thought I’d heard the leaves whispering too.
MAY 9, 1939
I should have burned with them, Charles and Lila. Maybe that’s why I’m burning now, the nerves beneath my skin itching like at any moment maggots will burst forth, having begun to eat me from the inside out. I would welcome that now, Liddy, I really would. My mind races, incessantly rhyming words in a form of madness—die, lie, my; rose, toes, nose—like each word is a key that’s being tried in a lock that will open all the castle’s secrets.
Was it our sin, or Father’s? Annabelle was smart to run as soon as she could. I know you think it vulgar to speak of such things, but I am ill, and free of your dour consternation. Mother chose to lose her mind, a neat escape. I wonder if perhaps God is punishing me, punishing us all. I can tell you quite honestly that in the face of death, the bright light of science is no match for a religious mythos of good and evil, right and wrong. Suddenly one feels the desperate need for there to be a heaven, for there to be an after. Which of course means there’s a hell, too.
Something marvelously bizarre happened to the gecko tail in the specimen jar. I’m afraid to write it down, lest you think I have gone mad. Was Agnes here today? No, she was, I remember her wiping my brow and pouring some tea. Tea is all I can stomach these days, and I am weak now, so weak that I’m not certain I could make it to the settlement even if I wanted to (which I still don’t—I think freedom is denied women because we would enjoy it too much). But my condition must be terrible, because it has alarmed even Agnes. Thankfully there is a doctor in town, paying his annual visit, and she will return with him tomorrow. I must cling to that word, tomorrow.
I want to die, but I don’t. Isn’t that a strange thing? The will to live has an ornery mind of its own; I can feel its tentacles pulling me into this second, the next second, the second after. The corporeal body has no desire to join the moldering dirt, but it is such a burden, our physical form, that it’s a wonder we procreate and perpetuate the suffering.
Lila. I heard her laughing again not too long ago. I managed to pull myself up and lurch outside the tent, and for the briefest moment I thought I saw them, Lila holding her father’s hand, standing just beyond the sphere of light cast by my oil lamp and watching me from within the protection of dense foliage. I wanted so much to call out to her, to them, to invite them in and tell them I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, but all I could do was bend over and purge the little that was in my stomach. Then they were gone, and I could viscerally feel it again . . . that moment.
Oh Liddy, what kind of insane impulse was it to wake to a rampant fire licking the walls, the ceiling, and run from the house, leaving one’s child and husband behind? I didn’t even realize I was outside until I’d reached the oak tree, but by then the door was engulfed in flames. Where was that protective instinct mothers are so famous for? You know they found Charles with Lila, cradling her small body in his arms? I didn’t have the heart to separate them in death, and now they share the same coffin, although there are two stones to mark their passing. Four years. For four years I was a mother. Until I wasn’t.
One of the investigators asked if I heard screams, an answer I will take to my grave.
I am going to finish up the rest of Agnes’s tincture, and try to settle myself down. That is what my ornery “will to live” compels me to do, but I blame it, I blame it fiercely.
[ILLEGIBLE], 1939
Do not be sad for me, my dear sister. Do not weep. Today I am happy. Today I am free. I heard it, Liddy, I heard the conch shell and the sound of the nightmarchers. I stumbled out of my tent and through the thick brush until I got to the gulch where the waterfall drops into a deep pool. They were there, a line of warriors tramping along the river’s edge, thousands strong, and then I saw them, my Charles and my Lila, she was riding along on Charles’s back as she loved to do, and then Lila gave me a loving wave as they disappeared into the forest. I am leaving now to join them; I will spend eternity marching in their ranks because I have looked, Liddy, I have finally looked, and my ornery will to live has finally been vanquished. It is gone. I leave you this brief note to compel your heart not to grieve. Tell Father I don’t blame him anymore, that it isn’t madness we suffer from. It’s liberation.
And our deaths, our deaths are not the end of anything.
MAY 31, 1939
Dear Miss Greer,
Enclosed are the letters we discovered in your late sister’s encampment. I hope you find them a source of comfort, not distress, in what must be a difficult time for you and your family. I feel it is my Christian duty to perhaps offer some context for their troubling content. My ward, Agnes, did visit Irene on a few occasions, but certainly not with the frequency described herein, and to my knowledge, Agnes has no memory of her kin. We discovered Agnes here, practically feral, but through our dedicated ministrations she has evolved into a dutiful daughter and a good Christian. I can’t fathom why she would make up such a tale about a brother and father, and suspect this was part of your sister’s deteriorating state of mental health. When I last saw her, I became so concerned that I sent for a doctor to come and pay her a visit. Sadly, he arrived too late to save her life.
I hope you don’t mind, but I showed him the letters to see if we could determine what could have caused such a delusion. After examining the samples of flora your sister had collected, he noted a specimen of a fungus commonly known here as the corpse flower, the spores of which can cause psychosis, paranoid delusions, and hallucinations. To the untrained eye it simply looks like a harmless orchid, though it has a revolting stench. This is what we presume occurred. There indeed was a procession that passed by her camp near sunset—we had just baptized our newest member in the waterfall and were returning to the village; in her confused state of mind, she took the members of our group to be “the nightmarchers” and her own dearly departed husband and daughter. It was agreed by all that she was not in her right mind when she fell from the cliff, and she has been given
a proper Christian burial in our small cemetery. Enclosed is a brooch Agnes made with Irene’s hair. She thought you might take some comfort from a memorial keepsake.
I wish I could say that such tragedies are rare, but two years ago I lost my own beloved wife. She’d been missing for three days when we found her body washed up on shore, the apparent victim of a flash flood. We have suffered the loss of two tutors as well, the first a young woman of promise who sadly did take her own life after suffering from some kind of strange fugue, and then a very sensible woman from Fiji with exceptional references who became catatonic before disappearing entirely one morning, never to be seen again. There is no paradise without its serpent, although, with true faith, death has no sting, since we are simply reunited with our brethren in the holy land of Heaven.
I understand and admire your desire to come and personally collect your sister’s remains, but the good doctor is concerned about the possible spread of contagion. In addition to the fever your sister described, there were strange lesions on her skin, and we recently discovered that some of the natives had smuggled relatives from the leper colony on Molokai. They earnestly believe that the spirit of this island can heal any disease, even one as vile and incurable as Hansen’s. Thus we are in a state of quarantine until our officials decide how to proceed next.
I fear not the future. God’s love for us is great. I feel it here on this island more strongly than I ever felt it in the paved and genteel streets of England. It is embedded in every leaf, every root, every tree limb that reaches for the sky. Know your sister rests well in it.
Praise be to God,
Reverend Waldo Palmer
Church of Eternal Light
#NDC DEV ORG HUB
01:12:01
is lilith primed?
01:12:05
yes and no. there’s a hitch. exhibit is gone.
01:12:16
the fuck? gone? explain gone.
01:12:24
gone as in someone leaked something they shouldn’t have, and it was stolen.
01:12:43
leak? what leak?
01:12:47
you tell me.
01:12:51
you’re not laying that blame here, are you? cause that would be some chickenshit excuse.
01:13:13
transference will have to be in theater.
01:13:23
jesus h. christ, we did not sign up for that.
01:13:34
we’ll send a specialist.
01:13:40
that was not the deal.
01:13:46
you’ll need to close loose ends after.
01:13:56
not. the. deal.
01:14:01
extra 400k in your account first thing a.m.
01:14:13
goddammit. this fucking sucks.
01:14:22
pleasure doing business with you too.
01:14:33
- - > bai908 has quit
CHAPTER 1
SHE DOESN’T NOTICE THE letter at first. Buried in the pile of mail threatening to become a paper avalanche, it takes her a good minute to pull all of it out of her mailbox, which resists her mightily, like there’s something on the other side trying to pull her in.
And these days it takes a good two glasses of cheap wine—from a box with a spout, all she can afford—for Julia to even work up the nerve to place that tiny mailbox key in the tiny metal lock. Letters are enemies. Letters are black ravens, harbingers of bad news, and if she doesn’t look at the mail she can pretend it isn’t there. Not the bills stamped red and URGENT, not the letters from her husband’s—her ex-husband’s—attorney, not the blocky envelopes from the IRS marked CERTIFIED DELIVERY, TIME-SENSITIVE. She would have put it off for another day, maybe two, but the electricity in her claustrophobic studio apartment has been cut off, the temperature’s over a hundred, and she’s too ashamed to call for the minimum balance.
You reap what you sow. Something her mother always said that never really made sense to Julia. Like her father leaving them, for instance. Had her mother sown that seed? Was it really her mother’s fault that he’d packed a bag after that explosive fight and then vanished for the rest of their lives?
Was it her fault Ethan had deserted her? Desertion. A perfect word—she pictures a WWII soldier abandoning a post under fire, running to save himself while the rest of his troop is slaughtered. The film of sweat above his lip, his boots sinking into a French bog.
A barking dog startles her. It’s inside one of the ground-floor apartments, wet nose pressed against the mosquito screen of the window. She quickly wraps the mail in a Kmart flyer, tucks it all under her arm, and begins the long climb to the fifth floor—cement steps held aloft by a rusting metal frame that shivers when a freight truck passes by. There are cracks in the stucco walls. Occasional splatters of graffiti. Red scrawls that look like letters, the meaning incomprehensible.
She should get out more. It’s not good to be alone all the time. That’s what her therapist said when she could still afford the co-pay to see him. Your divorce isn’t the end of your life. You need to go on. For Evie.
But it was the end of her life, and if there’s another one out here for her, damn if she can find it. All she feels is suspended—between the past and the present, between the future that she wanted and the one she’s living.
Maybe she’ll end up like 216. John, she thinks his name was. Or Dan? Only met him once when she was moving in—thin and broken, with bloodshot eyes, a limp handshake and a softly spoken offer to take anything she didn’t need off her hands. After that, his door was perpetually shut. After that, there was a piece of plywood nailed over the window.
After that, there’d been a smell.
She’d thought it was a dead rat in the walls, or maybe even a whole nest of them, because the smell had grown stronger, so bad she had to leave the windows open even with the air-conditioning on. Calls to the landlord went unanswered. Just as she was thinking about reporting a code violation, she came home one day from a fruitless job interview only to find a dumpster rolled up in the parking lot, men in hazmat-type suits and gas masks carting out junk from 216, a van marked BIO-KLEEN in the courtyard, some kind of pump with a hose connecting to the apartment’s window.
Hoarder, one neighbor said.
Found him when they were spraying, said another. Body just went and exploded when they tried to wheel him out.
It took a while for the cleanup. Everything had to be replaced. And things that had been tossed in the dumpster, some of it made its way back into the complex. She’d watched one woman pull a floor lamp out of the detritus, a few splotches of God-knows-what on the lampshade. John/Dan’s car—a clunky, rusting Oldsmobile with a year’s worth of dried leaves stuck under the windshield wipers—eventually lost its tires. Then the hood, and most of the engine. Someone bashed the windshield, even cut out the leather from the seats before it was eventually towed away. A family moved into 216 not long after the fresh paint had dried. Probably thought they were getting a steal with all new appliances, countertops, and closet doors.
Finally she reaches her apartment and pulls out her key to unlock the security door. Ignores the scratches where attempts to force it open have failed.
Not that there’s anything here worth stealing. Slim pickings. If she died alone in the apartment, they could probably just roll her up in a rug and rent it out the next day.
She steps inside. The smell of cigarette smoke and cat piss greets her, worked so deep into the brown carpet by the previous tenant that it still linger
s one year later.
No, her place is just a dreary, small box with a view of a Del Taco parking lot and a stretch of the southbound Los Angeles 405 freeway. Furniture so scarce as to be practically nonexistent. Blankets on the floor where her air mattress popped—can’t afford a new one. Folding chair and TV-dinner tray for a table. An ugly gnome for a doorstop; it had been abandoned along with the folding chair by a neighbor who was moving out of state. Stack of library books in the corner, novels she picks up and then puts down again, realizing she hasn’t read a word.
A Christmas tree ornament with Evie’s picture hangs from the overhead fan blades. Something Evie made for her. The only thing Julia has left from her life before.
Her life before. A rambling Victorian in Palo Alto she’d bought with Ethan and spent years lovingly renovating.
Don’t go there, Julia. Don’t go there.
But where the hell else is she supposed to go? She closes her eyes, tries to concentrate on the sounds around her, the here and now, her therapist would say; she tries not to think how naively happy she was, bringing the Victorian back to life, or the layers of paint, stain, and grime she scraped and buffed out of the mahogany staircase. She tries not to think how much he probably got for it.
But then she does. Another cool million at least. Enough for a year’s worth of motions. Not that he was short of cash in the first place.
Did he feel anything when he toured the realtor through the house, pointing out the vaulted ceilings she’d painted, the crystal chandelier she’d picked out, the oak floors she’d refurbished? Or was it by then just another object among all his other objects, an acquisition that had outlived its purpose, bereft of meaning?
The Nightmarchers Page 2