The Cosmic Perspective and Other Black Comedies

by Brian Stableford

  MEAT ON THE BONE

  When the first Saturday in spring arrived I had an extra long salt bath that left me all a-tingle, and then I polished my ribs and skull with a particular vigor.

  Even the other species of the Dead tend to think of bony folk as existentially challenged, incapable of much in the way of sensuality, but you don’t need flesh to experience pleasure. We like to assume that the various kinds of gross sensuality that are bundled in the flesh only serve to distract attention from the more refined pleasures. We like to think of ourselves as the ultimate connoisseurs.

  Well, we would wouldn’t we? If we really were missing out, we’d hardly be likely to let on, especially to ourselves.

  On that Saturday though, I felt a special buzz when I ran the polishing rag around my eye-sockets and loaded the toothpaste on to my brush to make the old pegs sparkle. You have to look after your teeth, if you’re a skelly. Just because we’re dead doesn’t mean that we’re immune to all decay. Every day, we wake up and thank Almighty Chance that we weren’t reborn as zombies, but we’re not entirely safe from the ravages of time and remortality.

  Saturday is a big occasion for almost everyone in the neighborhood. We all have our things to do—including the ghouls and zombies, although we bony folk don’t like to enquire too closely about the details of their weekend rituals and enterprises. The vampires who live at the very top of the hill welcome all comers to their fancy dress parties at the Gothic Castle, but we bony folk don’t go in for fancy dress—or any other kind of dress, unless we have a particular reason to cover up—so you’ll very rarely see a skelly at those rarefied heights. We have our own exclusive little shindig at the Palais de Danse Macabre, which is delicately poised half way up or half way down, depending on your state of mind.

  Rumor has it that some of the fleshy folk who hang out at the vamps’ ball like to dress up in black body-stockings with skeletons painted on, but they must look pretty pathetic by comparison with the real thing. On the other hand, most fancy dress does look pretty pathetic by comparison with whatever it’s pretending to be—which tell you a lot about the airs and graces vamps put on, when they’re not jonesing for a red fix. How people can dance in fancy dress, or any other kind of clothing, is beyond me.

  When I’d finally buffed myself up to perfection I set out for the Palais with a spring in my step. It wasn’t a long walk, but it was all uphill. I wasn’t living at the bottom of the hill, of course—that’s where the hovels are in which incontinent zombies patiently melt into slime before oozing through the cracks in the floorboards—but I wasn’t by any means at the salubrious end of Winding Sheet Street. I had hopes and ambitions in abundance, but I was the youngest skelly on the block, and I’d only just got past the stage when the females of the species were more interested in mothering me than forming a meaningful relationship.

  Fleshy folk, of course, think it’s impossible for bony folk to form meaningful relationships; believe me, though, if you can think without a brain, see without eyes and talk without a tongue, you can certainly form a meaningful relationship without the aid of squishy bits. I didn’t have anyone to call for yet, but knew that if I timed my walk just right, I had every chance of meeting up with interesting people.

  I smiled and nodded at everyone I passed in the street—even the teen zombie brothers from number 339, who were slinking off to some kind of gang meet. Most of the ghouls responded in kind, even though they probably didn’t know for sure that I was smiling; it’s difficult for a non-skelly to tell. I said hello to half a dozen other bony folk before I was distracted.

  “Still living down by the railway, Peterkin?” Salome said, as she and Melissa fell into step to either side of me. “Couldn’t stand it myself—all that jarring when the trains go by.”

  “It’s not so bad,” I assured her. “It’s not as if there are any expresses passing through, and it’s always nice to hear the bottles on the milk train rattle. Music to my ears.”

  “You’re not bathing in milk, are you, Peterkin?” Melissa said. “You must be hard up.”

  “Of course not,” I said, semi-honestly. “The pay’s not that bad at the ballet school.”

  “Well, if you can play piano for a bunch of galumphing fleshy kids,” Salome said, “I don’t see why you can’t play somewhere nice.”

  “There’s a lot of competition,” I told her. “I’m getting better all the time, but it’s not easy when your fingers are as stubby as mine. There are skelly pianists who’ve been at it for thirty or forty years—but the arthritis will slow them down eventually, and make room for up-and-coming talent.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Melissa said. “It’s Saturday night. You’ll dance with us, won’t you, Peterkin?” That was music to my ears. I liked Salome, and I really liked Melissa. The fact that they wanted to dance with me set the space inside my skull fizzing with a delicious dizziness that folk with brains will never know.

  “Of course I will,” I assured them, trying to sound as if I were doing them a favor. I knew that I’d have to perform, mind. Dancing has a subtle artistry as well as a very particular decorum—if it didn’t, it wouldn’t be dancing at all, just jigging about to the music. We bony folk take our dancing extremely seriously; it’s one of our most important sources of delight, and when a bony chap is asked to dance with two bony girls, a lot is expected of him. In truth, my dancing wasn’t that much more accomplished than my piano-playing, but I had hopes. I certainly had hopes.

  I did dance with Salome and Melissa, together and separately. I danced with half a dozen other ladies too, at various points in the evening, but it was dancing with Salome and Melissa—particularly Melissa—that really mattered. I can’t explain exactly why, given that we bony folk have nothing in the way of hormones or neurons; it’s just one more mysterious manifestation of the zest that animates us all, Dead and Alive. There’s a whole Faculty of Mad Scientists working on such problems over at the University, but they don’t seem to have made a lot of progress since the city’s been isolated. Uncle Paulus, who’s the oldest skelly in the city, says it’s because there isn’t enough method in their madness. He thinks that he was some sort of scientist before transition, but it’s probably a delusion; our fleshy memories evaporate along with our brains, and the hyperconsciousness we acquire as skellies is a very different thing...as was the feeling I got whenever I danced with Melissa.

  My favorite dances are reels. I’m really not that fond of the slow stuff, let alone the ensemble pieces where everyone on the floor has a definite part to play within some complicated scheme that only the oldsters understand. I prefer dancing à deux, and even then being able to do my own thing. I’ve got shortish legs as well as shortish fingers, and I can’t glide along with the same elegance as taller folk. Anyhow, I had a really good time.

  I was feeling deliciously exhausted by the time I said a reluctant goodbye to Salome and Melissa at the corner where I had to turn off into Winding Sheet Street. I was glad to see that Melissa seemed a trifle reluctant too, but neither of us said anything about maybe meeting up the following weekend, let alone making an explicit arrangement to meet. I was too shy—but I got the distinct impression that she might have wished that I wasn’t quite as shy as I was.

  It was pretty late by the time we went our separate ways, but the ball at the Gothic Castle was still in full swing—the drinking, if not the dancing. There was hardly anyone on the street to smile at—except, unfortunately, for the zombie gang loitering just outside my front gate.

  The whole gang was in a fractious mood. It seemed that they hadn’t had as much fun as they thought they were entitled to on a Saturday night. They seemed resentful of my obvious good mood. They’d probably just have shuffled aside to let me through, with a muttered insult to two, if the teens from number 339 hadn’t been so intent on putting on a show for their mates. The two brothers hesitated for a moment or two, but temptation carried them away and they deliberately blocked my way.

  “Had a good time,
Skelly?” the older of the two said, slobbering as he sneered in the way that only zombies can.

  “Fair to middling,” I said, cautiously, not knowing whether it would annoy them more if I showed too much enthusiasm or none at all.

  “Hot night at the Palais?” his younger brother put in. “Lots of shaking and rattling?”

  “Everybody has their thing,” I said, mildly. “I shake and rattle. How about you boys? Had a good evening?”

  “Same as always,” the younger brother replied. As a relative new-reborn, he was still in good condition, and he enunciated his words much more clearly than the average zombie. “You know—people looking down on us, calling us names, shooing us away. You know—everybody looks down on zombies, but you bonebags are the worst.”

  “That’s not true,” I assured him. “We live in the same neighborhoods, don’t we?” It probably wasn’t the best argumentative point to make at that particular moment. The reason that poorer bony folk live in the same neighborhoods as zombies and ghouls is that they’re the only other species, Living or Dead, that don’t have any reason to live in mortal fear of flesh-eaters who forget their manners.

  “You think everything with flesh is unspeakably vulgar, don’t you?” the kid went on, some pent-up resentment coming belatedly to the boil. Zombies don’t usually use phrases like “unspeakably vulgar,” but the kid was fresh; his own brain hadn’t had time to rot into stinking porridge, and he hadn’t eaten very many others, so he hadn’t confused himself with too many chewed-up relics of other people’s memories. His friends were in much worse condition, but that only encouraged them to mutter in support, admiring his cleverness and egging him on.

  “We’re all Dead, mate,” I said, soothingly. “We’re all in the same boat. The people who invented scorn are the Outsiders. We don’t need it here, do we?”

  “Are you trying to mess with us?” the older brother said.

  “Are you laughin’ at us?” put in one of the other members of the gang.

  The answer was no in both cases, but they obviously weren’t asking me because they wanted to know. “I can’t help the silly grin,” I said, trying to sound regretful. “I don’t have anything to cover it up with.”

  “’E’s takin’ the piss,” said another member of the gang. “Thinks ’e’s so much cleverer than we are, so much better, because he don’t ’ave to eat or breathe—just soak ’imself in whitewash.

  “Fleshless creep,” another chipped in. “You ain’t any better than us.”

  “There’s no point in this, lads,” I said, trying to sound more world-weary than nervous. “As you can clearly see, I’m not carrying anything you can eat or steal. Let’s just call it a night, shall we?”

  “Calling us thieves now, are you?” said the younger of the brothers from number 339. “Saying that we’d eat the flesh off our neighbors’ backs.”

  “Well,” I said, my self-control snapping, “you would eat the flesh off your neighbors’ backs, if any of them were still Alive, or even reasonably well-preserved, wouldn’t you? You’re a zombie!”

  “Grab him!” said the older brother. “Teach him a lesson!”

  They grabbed me easily enough, and had no difficulty holding on to me, no matter how hard I struggled. Figuring out how to teach me a lesson was something else. If only the younger of the brothers hadn’t been so fresh and so hyped up, they’d probably just have roughed me up a bit and let me go, but the kid had a better idea.

  “Let’s tie him to the railway track,” the younger brother said.

  “Come on!” I said. “We’re neighbors, damn it! Show a bit of common sense.”

  It was the wrong thing to say, of course. You should never accuse a zombie of stupidity—even zombies can be hurt by the truth.

  Ordinarily, I’d still have been all right. Nine times out of ten, they wouldn’t have been able to find anything handy to tie me to the track with, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred they’d have botched the knots—but some imbecile railway employee had been mending the wire fence beside the track, and he’d left an entire bale of the stuff just lying around when he’d knocked off for the weekend.

  The zombies didn’t have to tie much of a knot—all they had to do was thread the wire underneath the track between two sleepers, and then wind it round and round my wrist repeatedly. Even that might have been okay if they hadn’t had a means of cutting the wire, but one of them had a blade. He was too stupid to mind taking the edge off it by sawing through the wire so that they could repeat the procedure with the second track and my other wrist.

  Then they ran away, laughing and gurgling simultaneously, the way only zombies can.

  What I’d said to Salome and Melissa about not being bothered by the jarring as the trains went past wasn’t entirely true. I’d got used to it, but not before I’d become acutely aware of the pattern of the timetable. There were only two trains scheduled to run between midnight Saturday and Sunday daylight, one of which was the milk train, which wouldn’t be going through for at least five hours. The other, unfortunately, was the last cross-town passenger service, which made an extra trip in the early hours of Sunday morning to carry the Living drunks back home. I knew that it was due in less than fifteen minutes, and that it was very rarely late.

  At first, stupidly, I tried to pull myself free by means of simple brute force, but that only tightened the wires around my wrists. Then I tried to curl my fingers around in the hope of getting a grip on the trailing end of one or other of the tangles. Some skellies, I suppose, would have had fingers long enough to do that. I didn’t.

  By the time I realized that I’d have to try and work the wire loose with my toes, I’d wasted nearly half the available time—and by the time I’d managed to get my right foot into a position in which the unpracticed toes could get clumsily to work, I’d used up half the remainder.

  We bony folk can, of course, recover from the occasional break or separation—even from multiple breaks and separations, with the aid of a clever osteopath and lots of bed-rest—but reassembly requires certain conditions to be met. First of all, you have to be able to find all the bits. Secondly, the bits have to escape serious crushing, mangling or other permanent distortion. Thirdly, whatever fundamental zest it is that holds creatures like us together, and gives us the ability to dance even though we no longer have any muscles, has not only to be preserved but maintained in its ambition.

  Even if all three of those criteria are met, the cartilaginous sinews that hold the bones together rarely retain their full elasticity, or the bones their full strength, once they’ve been seriously injured. Reassembly can seriously damage your dancing ability—not to mention your ability to play the piano. I hadn’t even got good yet; any ambition I had to be something more than a rehearsal pianist at the local ballet school was unlikely to survive a close encounter with a train, even if the impact didn’t wipe me out.

  I made what haste I could with the aid of my toes, but I was still loosening the wire when I heard the train whistle as it came round the bend at the gasworks.

  I was still working at it when I saw the engine’s headlights in the distance.

  I was still working at it when I smelled the oily heat of the thing bearing down upon me, at what seemed to be a far faster speed than the forty miles an hour it must actually have been doing.

  In fact, I was working at it until the very last second, when I finally managed to wrest my right hand free and hurl myself away to the left of the track, dragging my captive left hand down into the gap on the outer side of the rail, whose cross-section was shaped like a thick H lying on its side.

  Luckily, the wheels—which were safely confined to the inside of the track—sliced through the wire like butter. The consequent crushing sensation was excruciating, but nothing actually tore or broke, and the bones in my wrist weren’t irreparably damaged.

  By the time the last of the carriages had passed by—which seemed to take a long time, in spite of the speed at which the engine had been moving�
��I’d been able to roll away.

  I got to my feet, nursing my injured wrist. Then I went home and had a very long bath.

  * * * * * * *

  My left wrist was still hurting the when I got up in the morning, but not so badly that I felt it qualified as an emergency, so I put off going to the osteopath until Monday morning. I wasn’t scheduled to start work until eleven o’clock, so I had time to fit a ten o’clock appointment in, but I knew that I wouldn’t be able to play anyway.

  The osteopath, Dr. Setlow, confirmed that I’d need at least a week to recover the full use of my sinews.

  When I told him what had happened, the doctor nodded sympathetically, as if it were the kind of thing that went on all the time. “Bloody zombies,” he said. “Scum of the earth. It’s not just the city that’d be a much better place if all the Dead who came back at all came back as bony folk. The whole world would be a better place. There probably wouldn’t be any city if it weren’t for that kind of ambulatory slime—and ghouls, of course. Even the bigots among the Living could surely get along with bony folk, if bony folk were all the Dead there are. I’ll just put a poultice on this, to help the bones and connective tissue regenerate”

  “Thanks,” I said. “It could have been a lot worse. I’m trying to think of it as a stroke of good luck—a testament to my cool-headedness under pressure. I didn’t feel cool-headed, mind. You know that old skellies’ tale about being scared to life?”

  If the osteopath had been able to widen his grin, he probably would have. “I know it,” he agreed.

  “Well, that’s all that I could think of when it got to the point when I was convinced that the locomotive was going to shatter me into a hundred pieces and scatter them along a mile of track. If only I’m scared enough, I thought, I’ll get scared back to life and have a second go on the merry-go-round. Stupid, or what?”