The damp air is chilling me. I regret tearing open my tunic. I start rooting the buttons out of the mud, and sewing them back on as best I can. I work for a long time, and the air grows darker between my eyes and the buttons.
Dusk comes down.
I look to see just what a bad job I’m doing, thread jabbed in and out of the cloth everywhere. Buttons and tunic slip from my nerveless fingers and my hands fly up to my face.
“Saskia!” I scream through my hands.
Weak I droop over onto my side—I imagine the victorious stories rolling out like crawling smoke from the cemetery, the city, the capitals of both sides, and rolling us, the ones who lived and died the story right off the page like we never existed for ourselves, we were just characters. I look up and see nothing around me, no people anywhere—not even me.
“Saskia!”
Does my voice even make a sound?
I’m calling her name to the distant woods, the gathering dark, the empty fog—
“Come back! You were right!”
*
The cemetery is nearby, but the landscape is monotonous trees and clay land, trees again and clay land again. I never see my footprints ahead of me so I can’t be going in circles. Even in the open spaces I can’t see above the trees, or through the mist. I can sense the mountains without seeing them, and I keep them in to my left.
I’m not alone—the woods and open places are filled with people, going up and down on all sides. Nardac is here, the Captain, Silichieh, Jil Punkinflake, Thrushchurl, the Lieutenant, Makemin. They’re all too preoccupied with what they’re doing, with their own thoughts, to talk to me, but they look happy and well, only very busy. I can’t get close to them—whenever I draw near, they have somewhere else to go, and withdraw faster than I can follow, always with the air of people who have some private matter to attend to; but they always show me, never with words, but by means of very slight gestures that a less astute observer might not notice, that they are aware of me and entreat my indulgence a little while longer.
Soon they will have time for me, I’m sure.
*
“Cemetery can’t be far a happy thought.”
Happy thought. Happy thought.
No thinking, no thought at all.
“I will go on long enough find my way there.”
The cemetery? Or the coast, what name is used to mean what isn’t the interior? Another clearing.
“I’ll get out.”
—“Then?
“Happy then?
“Then what?
“Happy?
“How?”
—“Then I’ll be out of this.”
—“War is everywhere.
“Out there too.”
—“I’ll be out of this.”
—“This won’t get out of you.
“Happy?”
—“Better.”
—“Happy? Or just not afraid, not tired?”
—“That’s a cynical definition of happiness.”
—“Who are you calling cynic?”
—“You talk like one.”
Who am I talking to?
The air is settling like a pond after someone threw in a rock. Who was talking?
It might be the cemetery up there. Now I’m alone I can feel it pull me in. The others were the only ones keeping me from being pulled in. I don’t want to go. Where’s out?
I’m struggling, moving this way and that like a dog straining on his leash. I know where the mountains are—thinking all mountains are the same chains you enter here you can come out anywhere in the world there are mountains ... mountains are mountains. All I need is snow to feel at home, but here there’s only this white ashy ground that’s a pretty poor counterfeit.
I’m alone, but someone in an identical clearing only a few yards from mine is imitating my movements as precisely as a mirror would, although his jaw whips and snaps in the air with his more abrupt movements in a way mine never could.
*
A place like the cemetery—the light here seems to ebb and flow with the air, and my breath, which at times is so thin I feel my lungs grow heavy through their emptiness and drag me toward the ground and at other times is so full I feel buoyed up with its glassiness and freshness. I came in, in a dream of mine, shared at the same time with some others, but now the dream has sprung free from all of us. It’s rioting now all on its own. It has turned into a disembodied insanity, that can touch down in souls like lightning. The flash already passed off, stand and look at the devastation on all sides, and then a deafening crash breaks on the air, spreads unhurriedly in all directions, resounds with morbid deliberation back from the landscape.
I’m not nothing. Approaching the white being, I hear Thrushchurl’s song, maybe I sing it, although there are many voices I hear. As long as I can go on speaking like that, I’m not nothing. I’m sure this is some other part of the vast cemetery but there is a persistent feeling that this is some other cemetery in the vicinity but separate. It’s too dark to see the monuments around me clearly enough, and the light there is so intense—I turn my head to see what it illuminates but the brilliant streaks it sheds around me block my view, and I can’t stop or turn all the way around it I am certain will get darker everywhere else if I do, and that thought is like death, dying to be alone here when everything goes completely dark. A bowl of light in the earth, a shallow bowl, with a white figure or some figure in there, lying there in such brightness that I can only see some of its outlines, a pink glow through the fingers ears and toes, the thin tissues, and the shadows where its legs are pressed together. It looks naked and is lying down. It lives because I see some regular palpitation and it rolls, now on its back, onto its side, back onto its back. It’s having a nightmare. Out of the egg of its sway I see the paper thing shake its body of wind on the far side of the bowl, a dream I can see but only from the vantage point of another dream that I’m in at the moment. I’m still alone. The dream is real in the world—I see the person having the nightmare is the paper thing at the same time—he lies like a corpse there in the light, then shakes roll onto its side, then onto its back again the head turning back and forth, dimly dark opening of the mouth, like its decomposed belly is swollen with the gases of its decay and now it belches them in a long harsh voluminous emission that seems it should splinter the throat, as full of pain as a scream, and the dream-rotten thing is still twisting at my feet, now so small I could squash it with the toe of my boot. The serial nightmares all together say I am the war: and now the war is over.
Alone, I am lost in the nightmare now. We won. We won. I’m turning into a tower. I am growing vaster than the mountains, my head rising far above the world, staring down at the bare ground by my feet miles across miles away, I am becoming transparent to the darkness of the surrounding space, everything around me is intense light, and I am rolling over retching transfixed and suffering, I am darkness and empty space.
*
A musical voice from the doorway suffused with diaphanous white sunlight. “Sosska! Is that you?”
Orvar stands in the next room, smiling politely at her. The woman enters from outside, light streaming around her veiled face.
“Mother!”
“Sosska, my darling! How changed you are.” She lifts her veil and takes Saskia by the shoulders, lightly kisses her cheek. The firm grip of her fingers is palpable even through Saskia’s stiff clothing.
“Are you well?”
Saskia only stares.
“You’ve been away so long! And never a word from you ...” she glances at Orvar, “We were worried, night and day.”
Saskia stares.
“I won’t press you. This campaign has changed you.”
She stands back from her daughter.
“Is Low with you?”
“Low?!”
“Yes, that’s what I said. Is he with you?”
Saskia stares.
“He didn’t mention me, did he?” She glances again at Orvar, whose polite sm
ile grows firmer. “I believe I said he could be discreet.”
“What are you talking about?!”
“Please, Sosska, is he alive?”
“... He was when I last saw him.”
She looks closely at her daughter, “Where? Where did you see him last?”
“I left him in the interior. He was useless—practically a traitor.”
“What?! Low, a traitor? Nonsense. Was he hurt?”
“No.”
“Why did you leave him? Why in the world would you leave him?”
Saskia is staring incredulously. “What—what is this?”
“Oh how could you do something like that?” Madame Mauvudza stamps her foot irritably.
“What is this? Why are you asking me about that Low?”
“Well, I’m sure he’s alive. He’s always been so clever.”
“What do you know about him?”
“My dear, we’re to be married. Try to understand ... Really, when you look at me like that ... I met him in Tref, when he came through to join his unit. The man at Yashnik had been stationed in Port Conget when you passed through, and I chartered the ship as soon as I could. We’ve only just arrived.”
She sighs wearily.
“And we had thought you were still up north. Oh, my dear, how drawn you are. But, perhaps, in a few months, when I’ve recovered my strength, we can all go in together. Or, no, but you and Orvar can go, can’t you? If he hasn’t made his way back on his own by then?”
“Recovered—what’s that you say, recovered your strength?”
Ohra Mauvudza’s open lips bend upward in a meagre smile. “Oh—well, these are rather loose clothes, and the light in here is bad.”
She holds her hands up in the air by her shoulders and turns her body a little sideways, glancing down at the slight, uncharacteristic convexity of her abdomen, and then back up at her daughter.
“You see?” she says, placing her hand on the spot. “I’m not in the slightest embarrassed, but I wanted him to know right away. Now the war is over, he’ll be free to return with me, won’t he? I don’t imagine his commanding officer can keep him here that much longer—although, come to think of it, his commanding officer might perform the marriage himself? Don’t they have that authority?”
“His commanding officer is dead! Everyone in the unit is dead!” Saskia shouts.
Her mother blanches.
“You said you saw him alive!”
“He’s dead! He’s dead!”
“You said you saw him alive!”
“... He must be dead by now. No one can live in there.”
“Sosska, I’ve been told there are people living there.”
No response.
“Isn’t that true?” she presses.
“Yes, yes, but they’re all insane. And so will he be, by now, if he still lives.”
“He won’t go mad,” her mother says. “You didn’t. You escaped. It can be done. Perhaps you and Orvar will go soon, and help him. You must help him if you can.”
Saskia drops jerkily onto a bench by the window, her eyes averted.
“Sosska, you should rest. We all must rest, and be strong,” she says, stepping outside. She doesn’t look up at the mountains tufted with fog. Orvar strides past her, to fetch the carriage she insisted they bring with them on the ship. He brings it forward, harness jingling.
“Your sister is a good soldier. When the family is back together, she will teach you to be a good soldier, too. She and your father, both.”
As the carriage pulls up to the porch, she is distracted, her hand on top of her abdomen, listening down into her stomach toward the baby.
Michael Cisco is the author of novels The Divinity Student (Buzzcity Press, 1999, winner of the International Horror Writers Guild award for best first novel of 1999), The Tyrant (Prime, 2004), The San Veneficio Canon (Prime, 2005), The Traitor (Prime, 2007), The Narrator (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2010), The Great Lover (Chomu Press, 2011), Celebrant (Chomu Press, 2012), and MEMBER (Chomu Press 2013). His short story collection, Secret Hours, was published by Mythos Press in 2007.
His fiction has appeared in Leviathan III (Wildside, 2004) and Leviathan IV (Night Shade, 2005), The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases (Bantam, 2005), Cinnabar's Gnosis: A Tribute to Gustav Meyrink (Ex Occidente, 2009), Last Drink Bird Head (Ministry of Whimsy, 2009), Lovecraft Unbound (Dark Horse, 2009), Phantom (Prime, 2009), Black Wings I (PS Press, 2011), Blood and Other Cravings (Tor, 2011), The Master in the Cafe Morphine: A Homage to Mikhail Bulgakov (Ex Occidente Press, 2011), The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities (Harper Voyager, 2011), The Weird (Tor, 2012), and elsewhere. His scholarly work has appeared in Lovecraft Studies, The Weird Fiction Review, Iranian Studies and Lovecraft and Influence.
Michael Cisco lives and teaches in New York City.
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