Mercy m-1

by Rebecca Lim

  ‘Mum’s upstairs, and Dad’s been held up at work,’ Ryan explains as he shuts the front door against the howling world outside.

  He looks so good to me that I have to struggle to keep my tone light. ‘Enough time to catch you up on what I learnt today?’ I head down the hall, shrugging out of Carmen’s utilitarian grey marle hoodie as I go, knowing he’ll follow. I hug the knowledge to myself, before logic kicks in. I mean, the guy’ll follow anyone to the ends of the earth if it means he might learn something new about his sister’s whereabouts. And Carmen’s no beauty, and I can be a little … difficult. I admit it. So who am I kidding?

  ‘For you, sweetheart?’ Ryan grins at me crookedly — I know because I dart him a quick look from under Carmen’s surprisingly long lashes — ‘There’s always time.’ Maybe I’m just imagining Carmen’s heart skipping a beat.

  You hearing this? I tell her, wanting some kind of affirmation that I’m not overreacting to something that isn’t there. Of course, there’s no reply. There never is.

  As we come up on the landing, I glance down the hallway and see Mrs Daley’s wraith-like shadow moving against the brilliant white lamplight in her bedroom.

  Wordlessly, Ryan and I enter Lauren’s room together.

  He turns on every light he can find, as if to ward off evil spirits, before shutting the door. I place Carmen’s hoodie down on the bed, walk over to Lauren’s desk and dump Carmen’s satchel on top of it.

  ‘The night she was taken was like this,’ Ryan says almost ruefully, propping himself up against Lauren’s dresser. ‘Almost blowing a gale by 10 pm; fifty knots —at least — out on the water. No one would have heard a thing. When it gets like this now, Mum insists on lighting up the entire place. Dad and I do it automatically these days. We used to try to talk her out of it, but she’s almost got us believing it, too.’ Understanding dawns on me. ‘It’s so that Lauren will be able to find her way home in the dark,’ I say softly.

  ‘Something like that.’ Ryan shrugs. ‘Like that makes any kind of sense. Hit any dead ends today? I sure did.’ I listen impatiently as he tells me about his fruitless search of the Port Marie Evangelical Church, before I lay out eagerly what I learnt from Spencer. When nothing in Ryan’s face changes, I know he knows it all already, and I’m hit by a wave of disappointment so hard I have to sit down on the edge of Lauren’s bed.

  That’s what you get for trying to impress the boy, I think bitterly.

  ‘I remember checking Masson out,’ Ryan says with a frown. ‘He’s got a wife and two small boys, one with some kind of learning disorder. They live out by the burnt-down old cannery near the waterfront, and their place is tiny. It’s not a church either. Like I told you, I checked out the Paradise High choir crowd and they came up clean. We could look at Masson again,’ he finishes doubtfully, ‘but it’d probably be a waste of time.’

  ‘Oh,’ I say, because there’s nothing else to say.

  There’s a sharp tap on the door and Ryan and I shift away from each other guiltily, even though we aren’t actually touching each other, or even close enough to touch.

  ‘Dinner, children,’ Mrs Daley says tiredly before moving away.

  ‘After you,’ Ryan mutters, holding the door open a minute later, frustration in his voice.

  Chapter 17

  Ryan, Louisa Daley and I make polite, but limited, conversation at dinner before Louisa insists that we run along now, refusing to let either of us help with the dishes. As I leave the room behind Ryan, she furiously scrapes leftover food into the waste bin while she tries not to let us see her cry. Just business as usual, then.

  Disappointment has turned Ryan in on himself again, and we part company outside Lauren’s bathroom door without a word said, without a new plan for tomorrow, which leaves me feeling strangely restless, dissatisfied.

  Inside her bedroom, I switch off all the lights and pace the pristine carpet for a while, so wired I can’t possibly sleep. I go over all of the angles, the dead ends, and it’s none for none every time.

  Lauren’s eyes in her photos seem to follow me around the room. Even in the absolute dark, I can make out every image that contains her — photos of sleepovers, choir friends, pen friends, endless parties forever frozen in time. Her ash-blonde hair seems to glow, much as my own reflection does when I pace past the mirrored dresser for the umpteenth time. I have just over a week left to make a difference in Ryan’s life before I’m bussed back to whatever dismal place Carmen comes from, or vanish out of this life altogether, into another. And I can’t see how either is possible. To resolve things; to leave him.

  Maybe Carmen herself is just filler. Some kind of corporeal way station. I don’t want to believe that. I’d like to think that I’m supposed to take something out of this life, or, rather, put something back — for somebody, if not for me.

  I throw myself down on the bed, finally, thinking that sleep will evade me this night, and wake suddenly, hours later, paralysed and choking.

  There’s a tall figure standing at the foot of the bed, and I can’t move a muscle to speak, lift a finger, run.

  Is he doing it to me? Or is it her fear that’s holding me down?

  I discover that the only things I am able to move are Carmen’s eyes. I watch the man drift in place, as if his feet do not touch the ground. So tall, the ceiling almost cannot contain him.

  Very little scares me, and yet the shining one — who is so like me he could be my brother, my twin — stands over me with judgment in his eyes, a living flame cupped in his left hand, and I am very afraid.

  ‘I don’t believe him,’ he says, as if refuting something I have just said aloud.

  Light shines out of every pore of his body as if he’s made of it. His voice is at once so terrible, so beautiful, like thunder advancing from a great distance, a bright bugle call, that I cannot believe Ryan can be sleeping mere metres away and not hear him.

  ‘ You can’t have changed.’ The stranger’s tone is incredulous. ‘It isn’t in you; you were always so adamantine, so … inflexible.’ I want to scream at him to stop speaking in riddles, but it’s as if I’m fixed to the bed by a force-field of energy so powerful I cannot make my corded neck work. It is almost worse than my fear of heights, this feeling of utter entombment, Carmen’s skin and bones a living shroud in which I am tightly bound. The sensation of being buried alive is at once so powerful and so terrifying that I feel tears spring to her eyes, roll down her frozen features.

  Don’t do this to me! I wail inside her head as sweat breaks out upon her skin, drenching the pristine white sheets on which we lie. Carmen’s eyes wheel in fear as we, together, struggle to focus on the being at the foot of the bed.

  The burning man moves so swiftly, so imperceptibly, that he’s suddenly beside me, on Carmen’s left, close enough to touch, if touch were permitted me. Light seems to leak from him in wisps, in errant curls that blur, then fade, into the cool air of Lauren’s bedroom.

  His is raiment of such a bright white that I am blinded as to detail, can only perceive him in outline. Yet I know I have seen him before — even before the other night, when I glimpsed him poised silently beside the roadway.

  And I realise that once I knew him when I was truly alive and inhabiting my own skin. How I know this, I cannot be sure.

  Bending low, he whispers in a voice to rend steel, to rend stone, ‘I wanted to see for myself how you have “changed”. It seems that he has overreached himself, as usual, in his description of you. I see no indication of a shift.’ He turns away from me, as if aggrieved, or disappointed. Prepared to vanish back into the vortex he stepped out of.

  There is a slight lessening of the strange pressure that binds me to Lauren’s bed and I gasp, despite myself, ‘Uri?’ Something subterranean and unheralded in me, recognising something in him.

  The tall figure stiffens, turns back quickly. Bends again to inspect me, as if I am a curio, an oddity, from another age.

  His voice is like a muted roar, like waves breaking acros
s all the world’s oceans in tandem, a thunderclap to split the skies. ‘What — did — you — say?’ I know I should feel fear; I have been cautioned — by Luc, more than once — to be fearful. But that does not even begin to describe what is in my heart.

  The being, Uri, raises his left hand, the living flame cupped in it, the better to see her, the better to see me within. Plays it across Carmen’s unremarkable features, her slight figure stretched out beneath the covers of Lauren’s bed.

  His lip curls. So puny, so mortal. I can almost read his thoughts.

  I could always read his thoughts.

  ‘ Uri,’ I cry again, as if I am drowning. ‘I know you.’ And for a moment, it is as if an invisible hand is at my throat, crushing Carmen’s windpipe until the room turns black at the edges, purple in my sight, the outline of the physical world wavering.

  I am suddenly fearful that it may be possible to die in another’s body and I choke out, ‘You — don’t — scare — me. You — never — did.’

  ‘Liar,’ says the figure of power. ‘I can smell your human fear. The intervening years have made you weak.

  Perhaps he was right. You have changed, if only to become even less than you were.’ There are those strange emphases again, and I struggle to draw breath into the girl’s livid body and at the same time comprehend his meaning.

  He laughs harshly. ‘How would we have been able to keep you from him at every turn, if that were not the case?’ He laughs again at that. And, subtly, the energy in the room, the strange, sapping power, increases, until the air fairly crackles with it, and I am made rigid, as if electrified by live current. Helpless with longing for movement, for air, for what once was. We were friends, I am sure of it. We laughed; we were equals.

  ‘We ruled the world,’ he says softly, as if he has read it from my mind, and I know it for the truth.

  ‘Bully,’ I manage to gasp out.

  ‘Traitor,’ he replies swiftly, menace in his voice.

  The word makes no sense to me, my recall having inconveniently hit a wall.

  For an unguarded moment he relaxes his absolute dominion over me and in that instant, I reach out and grab his hand, like someone going under for the last time.

  It is white, his skin, like marble or alabaster, without flaw, and smooth as fired glass or porcelain. Unlined on any surface.

  I turn his palm over, and see that Carmen’s small hand is lost in it, when the burning begins. Quickly it engulfs her left arm, her torso, all of her, until we are incandescent, rigid in fiery glory.

  Uri looks down on us … with pity? Compassion?

  We burn, burn, and our mouth is stretched wide to scream, to bring the walls of this house down, when I see, I see — — two great human armies doing battle on a desert plain; beings like Uri among them, above them, on the ramparts of the beleaguered city, doing nothing save watch as hundreds go down, armoured and on horseback, on foot. Called to their deaths by blaring horn and sackbut; a tide of red, human blood sinking into the unforgiving sand as the watchers do nothing.

  Uri, suspended, like a star, above the dome of a great stone mosque, the walls of a sprawling pink desert fort at sunset, the keep of a floating palace haunted by music and the scent of jasmine, the peak of the tallest mountain in the world, the bell tower of a city overrun by plague and death. Uri, falling from the sky yet landing lightly upon the surface of the earth. Uri, passing like a spirit through the bodies of a magnitude without leaving any sensation of his passage. Uri, in a thousand improbable places, yet bending the laws of nature with ease.

  Then the years peel back — or do they run forwards? — as cities are raised then sacked, then raised again.

  Always the new upon the old — or the old upon the new — until pattern, memory, coherence all waver and blur with the rapid passage of time. As I watch through his eyes, the sun and moon streak across the sky continually as fires, famines, wars destroy cities. Civilisations — both celebrated and forgotten — begin to snake out across the surface of the world as vines are wont to do, buildings grow more opulent, more complex, ever taller, like plants reaching towards the sun. We traverse continents, seas, forests, mountains, vast ice floes — experience all of this together, strangely conjoined — as seasons change, and all that is around us alters then decays then alters again. Always and everywhere, the faces of millions — of every creed, colour, age, station — wither and become as dust, and among them walk the shining ones, ever watchful yet held apart. Unseen by any save their own kind. Rarely moved to intervene.

  Time bends, sound, light, distance, perspective, and all around me the shifting world and everything in it.

  Until, for an instant, I see, I see — — Uri and seven brethren arrayed against me — all beautiful, all terrible, their instruments of power raised high — and behind them, a glorious multitude in white, the great universe wheeling and turning about us.

  Planets, stars, suns, moons, the greater and lesser bodies fly by; comets, black holes, supernovae, strange fissures in time and space twist and curl overhead like a painted, yet living, ever-changing dome.

  Home.

  The word catches in me.

  I know this is a true memory, one of my earliest, for beside me I sense Luc — my heart leaping — another shining multitude arrayed at our backs, the two of us the epicentre of something vast, a conflagration waiting to happen, an ache in time, a breath suspended.

  Then I see him, my beloved — like a lion, like a sun god when he walks — as if I am reliving the moment, as if the moment is now. And before I can turn to him, speak, lay my hands upon him in fearful gratitude for the miracle of such restoration — how long have I waited for this? How long? — I hear him say, ‘Then, as an act of faith — of goodwill —shall we call it — take that which is most precious to me.’ His tone is final, without emotion, a death knell. ‘I permit it.’ And then I feel searing pain in my left hand, the original pain, the wound that begot all wounds, all misfortunes, thereafter, and then the world goes white and blank.

  And I am rendered deaf, dumb and blind. For all purposes, dead to that shining multitude, removed from them in an instant, cut off forever, as if a limb amputated, never to return.

  And I am lost again, as I am suddenly hurled out of contact with the being, Uri, who is clearly shaken.

  ‘ Exaudi nos, Domine,’ he whispers as he looks at the place where our two hands were joined, as if a new scar might have formed there. It could have been days or mere seconds that we touched.

  ‘You of all people should know how it works, Uri,’ I reply. ‘The Lord only helps those who help themselves, remember?’ As I say the words, I discover that I am finally able to sit upright. I hug Carmen’s bony knees gingerly as I look up into Uri’s beautiful countenance, startle a crooked smile from him.

  ‘ That, my friend, is where we differ in philosophical outlook,’ he says, a touch ruefully. ‘A shift has indeed occurred, it would seem. Disturbingly, my informant does not prove false.’ Time is short in every sense, so while I am able, while the creature’s mood nears benevolence (as much as one such as he is able to feel benevolence), I say raggedly, ‘Then help me this time? I need to find her. I need you to intervene. Just this once. For me. Such a small thing, brother.’ I struggle to keep my tone even, still wondering why, so many times, he and his brethren watched while all around them were lost or destroyed, transfigured forever.

  And still they stood by and did nothing when they had the power in them to do anything … everything.

  Uri pauses perceptibly and I watch the light bleed from him in little drifts, in errant curls of pure energy.

  When he finally answers, his voice is gentle. ‘It has already been decided. You know this as well as I do.

  Everything now and to be has a past cause that may be known or deduced and from which all consequence flows. We are the masters of natural law through which all events may be viewed and given meaning. Further are we above all beasts and all men, the first caste, the foremost. Therefore, inte
rvention is pointless. The girl is already lost and gone. She is nothing. Forget her.’ The answering fury I feel is swift and unexpected.

  ‘Surely, we are not the only ones with liberty!’ I cry. ‘ They exercise free will every day, every second of their lives. The world is chaos, as are all who live in it.

  Nothing is fixed from moment to moment. I have seen it. Lived it! How can you deny it?’ Uri’s face is impassive. ‘Consider your current state. Does she demonstrate any such freedom of will?

  Everything she does is a direct consequence of your actions.’ For a moment I am speechless. It’s a good point.

  When tested, it does not seem to yield.

  ‘But she is constrained,’ I rasp out finally.

  ‘Because we willed it,’ he replies calmly. ‘We have always and ever been the masters of their fate, and our own. With one only having higher authority over us all.

  Free will is an illusion. You would do well to remember it, if nothing else. Perhaps he is right. Perhaps you have altered beyond all recognition.’ I am almost begging. ‘But she is likely still alive, brother.’ As I say the word again, brother, Uri’s eyes narrow and soften momentarily.

  ‘If you will not free me,’ I sigh, ‘at least do this one thing I ask of you.’ His expression is unreadable once more as he shakes his head, his long, brown hair falling freely about his shoulders. Every strand straight, even and perfectly the same. ‘I cannot do it. Do not ask it of me.’ Is there sadness in his words? Pity?

  ‘Will not, more likely.’ Frustration roughens my tone. ‘What are you?’ When he replies, his bell-like voice holds a note of challenge. ‘No. The question is, what are you?’ We glare at each other fiercely, both freezing as we hear someone ascend the staircase outside Lauren’s room. Heavy footsteps head down the hallway before pausing and retracing their way to her door. There is a soft tapping.