The Dead Lands

by Benjamin Percy

  Here, at the center of the museum, the building rises into a square tower, its highest story consisting of Lewis’s office and living quarters. She pauses on the landing with her head cocked—and then peers over the railing, back the way she came. Voices swirl faintly upward, Lewis and his aide, their voices sharp and bullying—but distant.

  She seems confident she is alone now as she starts down the hall and knobs open the door to a room that remains as dim as twilight. The floor is a mess of books. The windows are curtained off, and the sheets of one bed are tidily made, squared and tucked beneath their mattress. The sheets of the other hold down an old woman who smells of lavender and rot and urine, who observes the approaching black-clad figure with one bulging eye. When the figure hovers over her a second before gently pressing a pillow to her face, she does not struggle except to lift a hand, let it shiver and fall.

  The owl observes all of this from the night table, its glass eyes trained on the figure who remains hunched over the bed for a long time, long enough for her arms to quake, for her legs to collapse so that she kneels beside the bed as if overcome by a terrible prayer.

  A lamp on the wall sputters and emits a dim, brown glow. Before it can brighten fully, she wobbles upright and stumbles from the room and in doing so trips over a stack of books and knocks into the bureau, and then the door, as if lost in some dark place, uncertain where she is.

  * * *

  Lewis and Ella are struggling up the stairs with a femur the size of a log. They have rested several times on their way up from the basement, and he has stumbled twice and nearly lost his grip. She is cursing him all the way, asking why they cannot wait, why this has to happen now. Normally they seek help from one of their custodians or guards, but the museum is closed and everyone is away, no one wanting to miss the execution.

  Lewis lives most often in a state of poised stillness—seated at his desk, bent over a book. He has never been interested in any sort of exercise. But these past few days, ever since he hurled Clark against the pillar, he has felt a restlessness that needs some outlet. He doesn’t know if it is the lingering sense of power—the humming at his fingertips, as if they were orange-hot blades struck on an anvil—or the possibility of escape, stealing past the wall, exploring landscapes that he previously believed would exist for him only on paper and in dreams. But he cannot sit still. He cannot stop pacing, tidying. He desires movement.

  He and Ella rest again when they reach the landing, setting down the femur with a thump. She wears the outfit of a boy: short pants, short-sleeve shirt with a leather vest. Her hair is damp with sweat, plastered to her forehead. “I’m sitting on this thing, whether you like it or not,” she says and collapses onto the bone, a yellow-brown bench with hairline fissures running through it. The cracks in it are like the cracks in everything—cracks in concrete, cracks in rubber and asphalt and glass, cracks in faces ruined by the sun. Nothing is new.

  Above them rises the bowl of a rotunda, one of two in the museum, each bearing a fresco—the sky by day, the sky by night. Theirs is the night, star-spangled and moonlit.

  Lewis would love to reach for the silver canister inside his pocket, shove his nose into it, snort his way into a numb, pleasant dream. But he has heard enough scolding from Ella this afternoon. He pushes his fists into the small of his back and stares upward. He breathes heavily and says between breaths, “I would love to walk on the moon.”

  Before he finishes the sentence, he hears his echo, the ghost of his voice whispering back.

  Ella glances up as if she might spot another version of Lewis hovering above them. Then she looks at him, smiles until dimples pocket her cheeks.

  “Say something,” he says. “See if it comes back to you.”

  She leans back her head, her mouth open and ready to call out, when—from somewhere upstairs—comes a distant sound, a slam and groan, like something heavy shoved across the floor. Then the patter of footsteps.

  The two of them look at each other, startled, before pursuing the sound’s source, taking the stairs two at a time.

  Chapter 5

  THE SANCTUARY’S founders deliberately signed their constitution on July Fourth. They hoped to at once borrow and revise the sentiment of nationhood. They were America. A miniature version—living off hope, waiting for help—but America nonetheless. For a long time this worked. On what came to be known as Resurrection Day, people painted black circles beneath their eyes the night before, to indicate sickness, and washed them away the next morning, to signify health. Gifts were exchanged. A costume parade—full of dancing skeletons—marched through the city, ending at the stadium, where so many years ago men pulled on padded armor and crashed into each other while chasing a football, where the faded murals of the St. Louis Rams still adorn the pocked concrete tunnels and walls that surround the field, and where the citizens of the Sanctuary drank and feasted and danced.

  The mayor always rode at the back of the parade—as Thomas does now—wearing a bone crown on a bone chair atop a horse-drawn wagon decorated with clattering bones. He waves at the people who fill the sidewalks, but no one waves back. They watch him with what can only be fear and distaste. His waving slows, then stops altogether, along with his smile, and he tells the driver to hurry up, hurry up already. His eyes dart about, as if he is worried something might be hurled at him.

  Today, before the Resurrection Day feast, the rider will be killed. Many, including Lewis, including the city council, have asked Thomas not to do so. He would spoil the fun, they said. Ruin the holiday mood. People need something to celebrate. If he insisted on killing the girl, why not drag her out the gates and chain her to the altar, like everyone else? Because she comes from out there, Thomas said, so she must be punished in here. Here, too, he has a captive audience. He wants to put an end to the graffiti, to the effigies, to the underground mutterings of whatever faction is out to ruin his time in office. At the stadium he will force people to see what he wants them to see, a demonstration of his power.

  The synthetic dome that once covered the stadium was long ago torn away and salvaged, so the sun beats down this July Fourth on the many seated now in the lower deck, more than twenty thousand bodies, all shading their eyes and squinting painfully. Everyone studies the four black-mouthed tunnels at the corners of the field. Their voices begin as a hesitant mutter that rises into a charged hum the longer they wait. Energy emanates from them like waves of heat, some combination of loathing and confusion and excitement for what they are about to witness. Afterward, there will be music and food. There is that at least. Not like the feasts of the old days, but something.

  All around the stadium hang flags—Thomas’s flag—with the single star burning brightly at the center. There is a spattering of applause when the mayor and his wife take their place high among them, along with several deputies, servants, and members of the city council—at midfield, in a boxed-off suite with an open window from which they wave.

  Her name is Danica. She looks like a piece of jewelry, she knows. Another ornament for the mayor. If he is deserving of her attention, he is deserving of theirs, the logic goes. Her hair is so blond it appears white. From a distance people find her beautiful, but up close there is something unnerving about her appearance. Her many sharp angles—her collarbone, her thin lips, her chiseled jaw, her sharp fingers—make her appear like something that can cut through its own clothes, shred its own skin. And though she keeps them hidden in her shoes, her toes are strangely extended, good for gripping. Pants are all anyone seems to wear anymore, but she never appears in public without a dress, this one white linen and already brown along the hem from the dust she cannot escape. She wears a gold chain around her neck that matches her gold belt, her waist as wide around as her husband’s thigh. Sometimes he calls her his lovely bone.

  Thomas drops into a seat and brushes the powdery dust from its armrests. A servant brings him a plate stacked high with dates wrinkled like ugly little heads. “Oh,” he says, “this is just what I wanted
.”

  She prefers to stand and shakes her head stiffly when offered a seat beside him.

  * * *

  The day before, Clark sought out her brother, York. He was easy to find, a street performer who tumbled and juggled and blew fire and swallowed swords. He could send cards in a riffling arc from one hand to the other. He could lose a coin from his palm and find it in the mouth of another. He could sing a thousand songs and tell a thousand stories. She needed only to look for a crowd, a flurry of applause, and there he was, entertaining the long line of people waiting to fill their jug at the well.

  Clark’s father died, like so many died, of cancer. A purple blotch swelled on his nose, then spilled across his cheek, a melanoma the doctors cut away, leaving a hole in his face, too late. He lost weight suddenly, lost his balance regularly, and soon began to lose his mind when the tumors took seed in his brain. Her mother did not marry again but a decade later became pregnant with York. He was Clark’s half brother but felt more like a son, as her mother died not much later, so blotched with melanomas she appeared splattered with some foul wine. The sun would kill them all, it sometimes seemed.

  From a distance, for a few minutes, she watched him perform. He dipped daggers in linseed oil and set them on fire and tossed them in flaming ellipses. He was bareheaded so that people could see his face and so that he could see his daggers. His arms were a blur. His forehead was beaded with sweat. His smile so wide it reached his ears. His hands were too square and meaty for his arms, and his lean neck bunched into a fist of an Adam’s apple. She had tried to enlist him as a sentinel, but he resisted. “I don’t want another boss,” he said, “when I’ve already got you.”

  She couldn’t lay off him. She tried, really tried, but couldn’t resist swatting the back of his head, bullying him with her words, every time he made a foolish decision. They shared the same blood. He was hers—that’s how she felt—like a hand or tooth. By taking care of him she was taking care of herself. He wanted to make people smile, give them some small escape, always goofing, whereas she was always serious. These days, most everyone is some shade of brown, but people still smile when the two of them stand beside each other as siblings, with his nut-colored skin and her fiery hair and freckled face.

  She waited for him to catch the daggers—one, two, three—and extinguish them each in his mouth, waited for the applause and the coins people tossed his way, before approaching him and tugging his sleeve and saying they needed to talk.

  “About?” He had a gap between his teeth he showed often in a smile.

  “About the kind of thing that can get us killed.”

  He packed his bag and swung it over his shoulder and blew kisses to three young girls before following Clark from the square.

  She said, “You’re performing at Resurrection Day?”

  “Yeah, but they want something different now. Not just for the feast, but before, too. Warm up the crowd before the execution.”

  “Even better.”

  “What’s going on?” He nudged her with his elbow. “Are we making a move? Is this it?”

  They entered an alley, and its tight walls clapped away the sun. In shadow they walked and she whispered, “Consider this your final performance.”

  * * *

  In the stadium, hundreds of tables have been arranged into four squares, with two wide corridors splitting the space between them in the shape of a cross. At the center of the cross rises a freshly constructed gallows with a noose dangling from it that casts an eyelet shadow. The body will dangle there through the meal to follow, when people file from the bleachers to their seats and a band strikes up a merry tune.

  York races out of a tunnel and along one of these corridors. A ripple of applause works its way through the crowd. He cartwheels and tumbles and finally pounds his way up the gallows and swings from its noose and then spins in a circle to survey his audience.

  From his pants pocket he withdraws what looks like a black rope that he keeps pulling and pulling and pulling and pulling and then snaps like a whip. It unfurls then, ripples in the wind, opens up into a massive silk scarf, maybe twenty feet long and half as wide. He begins to manipulate its form, bunching it first into a storm cloud that dots the ground with rain. Then his hands slash and twist when he knots it into the shape of a giant raven. It caws and pecks at his hand before taking flight and fluttering one way and then another. His lips seem not to move when it calls out in its croaking way. Then he snaps the scarf and it unrolls to its full length, and he twists it into a rope, what appears to be a snake curling along the stage, before coiling up at his feet.

  Again he reaches for his pocket. This time he produces a red stone, a blue stone, an orange stone. He transfers the stones one by one to his opposite hand until they fill his palm like a cluster of fruit. He shoots them into the air, spinning them upward in a colored blur. The stones rise higher and higher, ridiculously high, until they might scrape the sky. He adds to their rotation an apple he takes intermittent bites of, and the crowd erupts, crying out with pleasure, crashing their hands together in applause.

  York can’t seem to help it—he smiles so widely his eyes vanish into folds—and then the smile vanishes and the apple core falls to the ground and the stones fall and clatter into his pocket, blue, orange, red, when the girl is escorted onto the field.

  No one screams or boos or stomps their feet. Instead the stadium plunges into silence.

  Her wrists are bound and she is led by two deputies who hold her by the elbows. Her face is puffed with bruises. She wears a scarf of bandages. Whether she is limping or resisting the deputies, it is unclear, but they drag and support her.

  From her midfield suite, high above the rest of the crowd, the silence is such that Danica can hear the scraping echoes of their footsteps. A trail of dust rises behind them and ghosts away with the wind.

  When the girl arrives at midfield, some of the people in the stands begin to yell, their voices swelling, some pitched high, some low, the many layers of sound eventually merging into one sustained note that seems to shake the air. Whether they are calling out questions or calling for mercy or calling for blood, it is hard to tell.

  The girl appears so thin, like a piece of wood somebody whittled and gave up on. Though there remains something strangely vibrant about her. Her skin has an earthen richness. Her hair is the same black as the vultures that spin in the sky. Her posture is unyielding despite her circumstances. Danica watches her with grim curiosity when the deputies lead her up the steps of the gallows to the platform.

  The people in the stands watch too—whether hopefully, judgmentally, Danica doesn’t know—but when the girl turns in a slow circle and tries to meet their gaze, they drop their faces and go silent, as if frightened her dark eyes alone might carry some contagion.

  Vultures tornado the sky and she stands among the black, swirling color of their shadows. She looks as if she might say something, but the injury to her throat prevents it.

  Then the deputies fit the noose around her neck, and Thomas stands up to cheer and clap his hands. He swings his arms so wildly that he knocks an elbow into Danica and she staggers a few steps. As she does, she looks to the doorway behind her, where Reed stands. He nods at her.

  She runs her hands along her dress, straightening out the wrinkles. She leans in to her husband and tells him she feels ill, she will see him later.

  “What?” he says, then, “Oh. Fine.” Not even bothering to look at her, his eyes on the field, his hands still clapping sharply together.

  * * *

  She follows Reed at a distance, down a staircase, along a concrete corridor with rusted pipes veining its ceiling. He slips through a door and she is not far behind him. Light streams from a single window. The air smells of metal and leather and oil. The deputies use these rooms for storage. Bows hang from hooks on the walls; knives and bats and arrows lie strewn across a table that runs the length of the room.

  Just as she enters, Reed shuts the door behind her and pres
ses her against it. What they are doing is kissing, though it looks much like eating. Their mouths opening and closing hungrily, their teeth biting down on lips, cheeks. When they pull apart, their faces are a splotchy red and he is bleeding from the corner of his mouth.

  “What have you learned?” she says.

  “They’re going to do it. They’re going to leave. They’re making every preparation.”

  “They, they, they. Don’t try to separate yourself from them.”

  “We, then. We’re going to do it.”

  “Are you?”

  “You can come. You should.”

  “Hmm.”

  “You must.”

  “Are you still fucking that woman?”

  He gapes at her, his hesitation all the answer she needs.

  “I thought so,” she says.

  “I don’t feel about her the same way I do you.”

  “Is that right? She’s just someone to fuck?”

  “I love you. I do. And I want you to come with me.”

  “That’s nice of you.”

  “We’ve been waiting for the right moment. It’s here. We’ve been talking about this for a long time. Now is the time.”

  “We’ve been talking, yes. Doing is something else entirely.”

  “We’re trying to get Lewis Meriwether to join us.”

  She snorts through a smile. “Why do you keep bringing him up? What use is he?”

  “He knows more about the outside world than anyone else. He knows more about everything than anyone else.”

  “He knows paper. He doesn’t know blood or dirt or sweat. Besides that, he has the fortitude of a sick child.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure of that. There are things about him that would surprise you.”