Grave

by Turner, Joan Frances

  She turned to look toward the ridge, at the dry gray latticework of dead trees that had spread so far, so fast, it was like the ridge was a hem and the trees, the standing kindling, a long strip of dingy lace trim. She didn’t believe what she was saying, I could see she didn’t; it was just what she had to tell herself, she was so afraid of what it might mean if she were wrong. I knew the feeling. Amy, though, she didn’t look the least afraid as she sat there, quiet, listening to Jessie ramble on. As usual, and even after everything she’d told me, I had no real idea just what Amy was thinking. What were we doing here? Why, even after everything that had happened, was it so hard to convince her to just get up and leave? I felt a selfish nostalgia for the days when she’d been Naomi-sized, or smaller, when I could just pick her up and go and ignore any fireworks and operatics. Tonight, I thought. I’ll talk to her again tonight.

  Even though I was starting to suspect that Jessie, much against her will, didn’t really want us to leave, and that she couldn’t have said why.

  “Florian,” Amy said. “Is he still... here?”

  Jessie gave Nick another thoughtful pat. “He asked us to let him just go into the woods, all alone, while we went about our business. Leave him be. I don’t think he wanted us to—we saw him die before, you know, back when we were all proper undeads. Maybe he thought it’d be dÈj‡-vu all over again, if we saw the rest of him disintegrate. Haven’t seen him since. But I’m still feeling him”—she thumped herself on the breastbone, so hard I winced—”in here, and then suddenly gone again, and then back so I think it’s like he said, he just keeps fading in and out of the flesh. So I don’t know where the fuck he is. But I feel like he’s still... around. Billy keeps yelling at him like he’s there, anyway. ‘You rotten fucking coward! Stick around in this misery if you want but the rest of us ain’t afraid to fucking die!’”

  Her voice was such a perfect raspy, spitting imitation of Billy’s that I felt an instant, involuntary unease. Amy, her jeans and my old civil defense jacket stained with great splotches of her own blood, stayed silent. Jessie shook her head, measured and slow, and as she scratched under Nick’s chin, she laughed.

  “You’re so quiet now,” she told him. “So quiet, and the air’s so heavy. Does that mean something? You’re not going to tell me what it means, are you?”

  Nick rolled on his back in the sand, caught up in the canine ecstasy of petting, silent as the grave. She looked up at Amy, her eyes unyielding.

  “What does it mean?” she asked.

  Amy shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said, almost in a whisper. “And he doesn’t say.”

  The air felt hot, suddenly, hot as July: an oppressive heat that bore down on our skin and lungs and eyelids in a way not at all like an approaching summer storm. I saw Renee and Linc hurrying down from the ridge, one blonde-haired stick figure and one black-haired, panting slightly as they ski-slid through the sands to reach us. Jessie went half-running up to meet them, panting too like the heaviness of the air was sapping her strength.

  “What now?” she asked them. She sounded afraid. Just like all the rest of us were afraid. Amy wrapped her arms around herself, as if gathering strength from inside for the next big blow. Her breath, like mine, was starting to come in short, almost painful-sounding bursts.

  Like a weight on your chest. That’s what Florian had said of Death. That you feel every time you breathe.

  “Nothing,” Renee said. She looked harassed and strung out, like she’d been chasing for hours after an out-of-control toddler. “Just, we’ve got to do something about Billy. He’s broken all the hunting snares, Linc’s gardening tools—”

  “And there he is!” Linc jerked his chin toward the top of the ridge, scowling in disgust. “Following us everywhere, like a goddamned—and we can’t even stomp him.”

  “And he’d be thrilled if we could,” Renee said.

  There he was, with that peculiar side-to-side toddler’s walk of his as he made his way down the sand: the thing that tried killing my daughter two times over. I stood up fast, cursing myself for not retrieving that hunting knife when I’d had the chance, and Jessie actually patted my arm. “There’s no more fight left in him,” she said. “Trust me, I can smell it on our kind—he’s hollowed out inside. All he can do is rip snares and break flowerpots.”

  Why was I supposed to believe that, when just hours ago he’d been ready to gut Amy with his bare fists? And all the rest of us, for good measure? Amy was back on her feet too, both of us steeling ourselves for round two. The air, burning and leaden, was sore in my lungs. Billy’s torn gray suit had sand caked in every fold and seam; dirt and twigs festooned his pale hair. His shoulders sagged, his hands dangled low, and he smiled at nothing, nobody, spots beyond all our sight, as tears leaked like some slow, perpetual fountain from the corners of his eyes. I could’ve felt such pity for him, for anyone who looked like this, if I hadn’t known better. Nick came up beside Amy, poised and alert, as Billy came closer.

  “Snares,” he said, still grinning as he twisted his head to Linc, not bothering to wipe his eyes. “Little pointed sticks, trapping pits—you’ll be fucking around with guns next, won’t you, ‘cause you can’t kill nothing anymore with proper bare hands? Won’t you?” He thrust his face into Renee’s, disgust creasing his features. “You ain’t real hunters anymore, not like we were. Didn’t need any fucking toys to bring our meat down. So I broke all that shit, everything you shouldn’t need. But it don’t matter anyway.” He grinned at Jessie now, barely noticing me or Amy, happy in the way a man broken by torture is happy to see the executioner. “Soon enough, none of us’ll have anything left to hunt ever again.”

  “You gotta stop, Billy.” Jessie was calm and quiet, running a hand along his arm and pretending not to notice how her touch made him shiver and twitch in disgust. “You gotta stop. I told you, fights happen and folks get stomped and that’s our way too, you can’t demand one part of it and cry over another one. Mags got stomped, farewell Mags. The rest of us gotta keep going.”

  “Going.” Billy held the word in his mouth like it were strange and foreign, then grinned wider and peeled Jessie’s fingers, one by one, off his arm. “Going and going and going and—hey! You two! The fucking mutant and the cry-babby hoo-calf that thinks it sees angels!” He was bellowing that at the ridge, where Lisa descended, Naomi slung heavily on her hip. “Come join us! Come one, come all, you gotta see this new sideshow, the woman who shits from her mouth instead of her—”

  Linc punched him, swiftly and casually like that was a long-understood shorthand of their speech, and Billy grunted and staggered backwards; he kept right on laughing, unfazed, and the salt water kept trickling down his cheeks. “We’re leaving,” I said to Amy. “We’re taking Nick and leaving, tonight.”

  “He has to go,” Lisa said, jerking her head toward Billy as Naomi rubbed her eyes, glaring down at him in cold childish contempt. “He was wandering right outside our windows, saying filthy things, while we were trying to sleep. Right after he got into Renee’s cabin and tossed half of it into the woods. We can’t have a living poltergeist wandering around the—”

  “Did I ask him here?” Jessie demanded. She turned on her heel, glaring at Amy. “It’s not us he followed here.”

  “It’s you that’re his people,” I snapped. The air was like fingertips, pressing down hard and painful against my skin. “He’s your family, whether you like it or not, so don’t you start in on mine!”

  “Billy,” Linc said, appealing wearily for calm, “Jessie’s right, there’s too much going on right now for us to deal with your shit. We can’t kill you, but we can blind you if you don’t leave us be. You know we can.” That gravelly, old man’s voice was so incongruous, ominous, from such a young, thin throat. “You know we would.”

  The way he said it so offhandedly, the way Jessie and Renee barely reacted, it was clear he meant it. Amy made a sharp sound, stepped back like it was about to happen right there in front of us, but Billy just mop
ped his eyes on his sleeve and chortled into the cheap, shine-worn cloth. Naomi’s eyes were wide with fright.

  “You’d never do it,” Billy told Linc. “Not when we were dead, not now, you could but you won’t. I know you. Don’t you forget I know you. You couldn’t live with yourself, and living and living with ourselves is all we got left—ain’t that the shit, Jessie?” He sneered at her, the sharp corners of his eyes and mouth drawn up in mean-spirited mirth, but somewhere in his expression was a flash of sympathy, a sudden hint of regard that almost shocked me. “I know it’s fucking you up inside, all three of you, just like it is me. I can see it. I can see it in all your little pastimes—” The sneer was back again, a thick blunt shadow blotting out the light of any past feeling. “—in your precious gardening and your hoo-books and drawing pictures of each other because you can’t just be here and now, part of everything like you were before, you just watch everything and report on it from behind a little screen. I tore ‘em all up, y’know. All those drawings I found.”

  His reddened eyes almost twinkled with triumph, as he shoved his chin right in Jessie’s face. “Tore every one of ‘em up, made ‘em rotten pulp-paper just like they oughta be, ‘cause you and me, Jessie? What we really are, were, before your brother went and fucked us all up? We don’t lurk and watch and tell tales from behind a fucking screen.”

  Jessie kept her composure—clearly, not without a struggle. Renee shoved Billy away from her, snarling as he laughed.

  “Get out,” she said. “Get out or I’ll do it, instead of Linc, and I won’t lose a second’s sleep.”

  Billy threw his head back in actual glee. It was the best joke in the world. We were all the biggest fools in the world. “Guess what?” he said, when he’d recovered himself, reduced to a congested whisper. “Wanna know what? You ain’t got a second’s sleep to lose. You ain’t got a minute to tear me blind. You ain’t got an hour to celebrate afterwards. It’s done. It’s all done.” He gazed around him at the water, the ridge, the trees and cabins above and the seagulls strutting merrily below, and shook his head in indulgent dismissal. “All this shit, all this nothing, it’s going away. Everything, everywhere—”

  “It’s all coming to an end.”

  It was a soft, insinuating voice, speaking straight into my ear, making a ticklish twitch run down the side of my neck. Only Amy was close enough to whisper into my ear, but it wasn’t her, it wasn’t Billy, it wasn’t any voice I recognized at all. It was the voice of a man who wasn’t there. And everyone else around me, I could tell from their faces, was hearing it right when I did, right then. Jessie turned ashen.

  “Jim,” she whispered, and then her eyes cleared and she shook her head. Naomi bit her lip, stifling a whimper of fear. Nick put his ears back and whined, and then growled. Billy’s eyes were squeezed shut and he was muttering something under his breath, something whose words I couldn’t make out but the tone was loud and clear: a prayer, I thought, a prayer. Of hope.

  “Of course,” the voice continued, teasing and playful and merciless, “that means everyone, and everything. Here, there and everywhere. Even I can’t hope to escape it.” The air around us contracted, tightened, swollen unbearably heavy with the weight of his words. “But what does that matter? What that exists—here, there or anywhere—doesn’t ultimately dissolve into nothing?”

  Jessie was staring out toward the water. A noise left her throat and we all turned at once, we all saw him: a tiny, silhouetted figure, a man-shaped shadow out on the horizon, outlined inky dark against the pearlescent clouds. He walked toward us, over the lake, and every step he took from horizon to shore covered miles in a single moment. He, it, was a gray-haired man in jeans and workshirt, with a heavy rucksack slung over one shoulder; his face was so bland and ordinary you forgot it as soon as you saw it but his smile, his smile split his face open from ear to ear, like a cut throat. Like Amy’s or Stephen’s cut throats, never closed up. Never, in an eternity, could you ever forget that smile. He took another step, and was a translucent giant; he moved swift and calm over the face of the waters, and his form blotted out the clouds, the sun, the sky. You could lose yourself forever, in a single part of him: a patch of a shirtsleeve; a magnified bootlace; one great, lamplit, night-dark eye.

  And I knew who it was. The second we’d heard his voice, seen this chosen face, we’d all known who he really was.

  Nick howled to split the sky open, but it was too late. The sky was a gaping wound. We were swallowed. We were all consumed. Death found the sands, and we were all caught up inside him. He passed through us and inside us as he set feet upon the earth, and all the world around us went darker than blindness.

  Air. There’s no air left. I can’t breathe, I can’t—the sun was just a shriveled wizened match barely holding a flicker of flame, then Death blew it out and it was gone. The clouds melted before us, moon and stars and every last light in the universe were laid bare before our eyes and then all snuffed out, all at once—or maybe they were still there and he’d just blinded us all once more, left us blinded and stumbling in an endless, asphyxiating darkness. There was no air left. My chest convulsed frantically, trying to draw in the oxygen that wasn’t there, and I flung my arms out in the black and touched nothingness, no breath left to scream for Amy, Lisa, Stephen, anyone—

  I was on my knees in the sand, gasping, agonized, almost sobbing in relief and terror because now I could breathe. I could just make out Amy crawling choking through the sand trying to reach me, I held out my arms—

  Darkness, again. No air. No light. A great invisible switch was being flicked off, on, off on a whim, and as I sank down and slowly suffocated I could hear him, it, chatting with merry mirthfulness right into my ear. Right into all our ears. Death was such a very friendly man.

  “Imagine aging,” he said. He was genial as a traveling salesman, taking some marvelous new gadget from his briefcase. “As fast or slow as you wanted to.”

  The air was back. The light switched on. Through a haze I saw Linc and Jessie, hanging onto each other as they retched for breath. I saw thin rows of sticks propped in dry dust that had been trees, oaks and elms and ashes once in the full flower of spring, toppling and falling to the bare gray dust of ground. They crumbled to powder, more thin gray grit blowing away with what had been their underbrush, and then everything was dark once again.

  “Think if they could bring you back,” Death said. His voice was so full of wonder, he almost drew me in: yes, imagine that. Just imagine it. “Bring you back just like you were before you died. You could choose when you age, how you age. Choose when you die. Tomorrow, or a thousand years from now.”

  Natalie’s words, back in the lab, when she dared and taunted Death to come and get us all. Then I was choking again, panicked for air, and her words died away in the darkness, a roar filling my ears like the buzzing of a thousand flies.

  “Taking away what’s rightfully mine,” he whispered. “But then, haven’t all of you on this miserable little patch of sand done that, whether you meant to or not? Haven’t all of you snatched life back from my jaws? Death, the only master of everything that ever lived, for all of mankind’s existence—but now? Now, he’s to be humanity’s servant.”

  A dry chuckle sounded from the blackness.

  “Think again,” he said.

  I was hurled back into air and light like something had flung me there on my face, and maybe it had. Facedown in the sand, I clutched handfuls of it and gulped mouthfuls of air, tears running down my cheeks. Renee lay next to me, half-fainted; Lisa and Naomi were both quietly sobbing and where were the others, I couldn’t find the others for—Amy. She was right next to me, she must have been right there all along. We grabbed each other’s hands and held on agonizingly tight, determined that the next time, when we went back under, we wouldn’t both drown alone. Our fingers were dead bones, dead tree roots, knotted round each other in rigor mortis, petrifaction.

  The sands and stones still stood—for now—but there was nothing on th
e landscape, nothing anywhere, but the fallen kindling of dead trees; the sky, or what had been the sky, was gray, not the variegated gray of overcast and clouds but a thin dim paint-layer of nothingness, the farthest horizon of the land of the blind. The lake basin was empty, its waters drained dry, and an endless, sunken desert stretched as far as we could see. We were too scared and weak to move, but we saw it, we all saw it: the basin sands stirring and moving, a thousand little earthquakes roiling the surface of the desert like undeads crawling up from a great mass grave. The sands didn’t shift, though, the ground around them didn’t break open; instead, they just floated up from beneath the lake basin, floated from underground like the ghosts they were.

  The lake bed was full of people. The lake bed was a teaming city of specters, thousands of them, crowding shoulder to shoulder where they once might have drowned. As they jostled one another, shoved right and left for a better look at the ruined landscape, shouted and called and reached out their arms, it was another great roar and crash of lake waves, an enormous undertow come to pull us all away. Their inchoate voices were deafening, a great rushing sea of sound, and over it I could just barely make out another, more familiar cry.