by Rebecca Lim
I think I’m going to scream. Or throw up.
Qualis es tu? I think, gritting my teeth. What are you?
And, in that instant, the smudge of gravity-defying light vanishes with a noise like a sonic boom in my head. I am, literally, reeling backwards in my seat when I feel hot breath on the back of my neck.
Te gnovi, something growls into the space inside my head. I know you.
Chapter 6
You need to understand something about me. I am not often afraid, or lost for words. Those two things are part of the bedrock of me: like how I know that I’m essentially strong; that I never feel the cold, though I crave the sun, the light, with a feeling like worship. They are things that can’t be erased, even if the higher-order parts of myself — like my name, my memories, my emotions — are somehow open to being tampered with. But at this moment? I am literally frozen with terror. I can’t turn around, can’t speak.
And the creature feels my fear, because it laughs, and the sound has sharp edges to it, makes me want to claw at my eardrums.
I see rapid movement at the edges of my sight and the woman from three rows back slides into the seat beside me. The world around us, even time itself, seems to stand still in that instant. That dirty cloud of light that was keeping tabs on me from outside the bus? It’s inside her now.
Soror, the thing beneath the woman’s skin addresses me inside my mind. Sister. Its true voice is bestial. I can scarcely comprehend what it’s saying.
‘You must have me confused with someone else.’ I have to force my lips to move; saying the words aloud seems an act of defiance.
The creature laughs, a grating sound, like steel on steel. Through the woman’s lips it replies, ‘You know as well as I do that there’s always one way to know for sure …’
The thing wearing June’s face grabs both of Lela’s hands in hers and instantly I recoil as if I’ve been slugged with a bullet to the brain. All I can hear is white noise, see only snow and static, the end of the world. There is the sense that I am the only still point in a spinning, screaming universe. My left hand grows excruciatingly hot, begins to … burn.
But something’s happening to the creature, too, because its borrowed skin is flaming with an answering fire and it can’t hold on to me, though it tries, shrieking in pain and confusion. Between us has flared a curtain wall, a force field of intense luminescence, as if a star has been let loose inside the bus, we two at its heart.
Then it lets go, and just as suddenly there’s silence and we’ve fallen away from each other, panting. And I remember why I hate being touched. In an unguarded moment, I can read anyone through their very skin: their thoughts and emotions, even their memories, become like an open book to me.
It’s a two-way street. If a person knew how to do it, they could read me, too. Which is what this creature has just tried to do. But something went wrong. Something neither of us expected to happen.
I jam my left hand beneath my right armpit in quiet agony. The creature inside June stares at her red and scalded hands, her breathing ragged and uneven.
‘Who are you?’ it rasps. ‘What has been done to you?’
An ancient intelligence burns in the ordinary grey eyes of the middle-aged woman and I realise with a jolt that the thing inside her must be something like me. The creatures somehow soul-jacked June in my very presence, much the same way as I’ve taken over Lela Neill.
It’s electrifying, the thought that I might be facing something like myself. Something split off, something lost. In all my years in the wilderness, I have never met anyone or anything remotely like me, the way I am now. I know it with an awful clarity I cannot explain. It’s an exile, like I am.
As if it’s reading the thoughts right out of my head, the creature murmurs, ‘Only you would understand how this feels. How terribly … alone I have been. It has seemed an age without end, without pity …’ There’s a terrible yearning in the gravelly voice. ‘Help me?’ it pleads.
Whatever this thing is, it’s weaker than I am. It’s sick, unstable, and radiating a subtle, grey-tinted light that keeps changing in intensity.
When I raise Lela’s hands to study her fine Irish skin, there’s no answering glow. On the surface of things, I look human, could be human, except that both the creature and I know with absolute certainty that I’m not.
‘I don’t know how to help you,’ I reply softly. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘I sensed you,’ it murmurs as if I haven’t spoken. ‘Under the trees. I felt your passing though I could not see you. What is the secret? How is it that you are able to remain …’ June’s scalded hands gesture in wonder at Lela’s slight frame. ‘What was your original task?’
Task?
When it sees the confusion on my face it says urgently, ‘Why were you created? What were you sent here to do?’
All good questions. All without answers.
‘I don’t know,’ I reply truthfully. ‘I wake to find myself in a stranger’s body, over and over again. No rhyme or reason to it. This is merely who I am today. Tomorrow …?’ I shrug.
The creature’s voice is almost envious. ‘Would that my fate were so kind.’
Kind? Unable to comprehend what I’m hearing, I feel Lela’s brow furrow.
‘I should have done what I was created to do,’ the creature confesses softly. ‘Discharged my singular duty and melted away centuries ago. But I didn’t, because I realised that to effect the task I was created for would be akin to suicide, and is that not itself a sin against God?’
Depends who you ask, I want to say. It’s a matter of interpretation. But I don’t. Entering into theological debate at a time like this would just cause the creature more distress.
The light coming from June now is almost painfully brilliant to my eyes. But it’s still tinted that troubling, unhealthy grey. As I stare hard at the tainted aura, I’m rocked by the sudden realisation that it’s a malakh, is thing. The word comes to me unbidden, as if hard-coded into my soul: a type of being I’d long forgotten but remember now in the beholding. It’s a lower-order messenger, of what hierarchy I couldn’t tell you, exactly. All I know is that it’s some kind of rogue grunt, and things like it used to work for people like me.
It shouldn’t be here; these guys are supposed to be largely invisible, inscrutable, their ways mysterious — you get the idea. They appear, like singularities, to people like Hoshea, or Joseph Smith, or Jeanne d’Arc, ordering them to move mountains, win wars, bring back heaven on earth — simple things like that. Or to Mr or Mrs Average before they’re about to die; a precursor to the splendid everlasting, written off as a figment of the dying brain. Like I said, they’re grunts. Ordinarily, they don’t make the orders; they just deliver them. In, then out. They’re not supposed to casually take possession of a person, body and soul, or go AWOL, for years, like this one has.
‘What is your name?’ the malakh pleads. ‘What is your rank?’
Rank?
I shake my head. ‘Such knowledge has not been vouchsafed me. I am nameless, stateless, even to myself.’
‘A sad thing,’ the malakh whispers. ‘And yet the elohim have placed their mark on you. Are you not under their … protection?’
Elohim. The word resonates strangely in my ears. It’s something else I should know the meaning of, but, again, it’s as if the word’s been deliberately excised from my memory. When I try to pick at the edges of it, I get the same neural feedback I got from the name Carmen Zappacosta.
Do not enter.
Do. Not. Cross.
The malakh’s grating, otherworldly voice cuts through the firestorm in my head. ‘Can you not intercede with them on my behalf?’ it begs. ‘Plead my case? I did not know that to disobey, to choose … liberty, all that time ago would also be to choose pain everlasting. Ask them. Ask the elohim to ease my suffering, to give me a mortal body in which to end my days …’
I shake my head helplessly.
The subtle yet intense light that June’s skin gives off
seems to build beyond bearing; begins to ripple outward in waves, like radiation from a dying star.
‘So you will not help me?’ the malakh cries, and the lowlying hum in my bones spikes painfully, the hot-cold feeling escalates, the metallic zing, zing sound that the creature emits when it shifts from place to place seems to fill every space in my mind.
‘I cannot,’ I gasp, ‘much as I would wish to.’
And I do want to help it. The thing’s suffering must be terrible, and will never be over until it finishes what it was create for. I wonder what its original task was, and whether it even exists any longer.
The malakh is leaking power now. Is it spent? Or even … dying? I want to look away, but I can’t. It gives a drawn-out shriek, as of something being torn apart, and the light and heat about it build and build, until, with a sound like a thunderclap that seems to come from nowhere and yet everywhere at once, it is gone.
It might all have been a dream but for the unconscious woman with the scalded hands, slumped in the seat beside me, the air thick with the sharp tang of sulphur.
There’s the ‘real’ world, I realise, and then there’s the other world that includes things like the malakh. From my strange and lonely vantage point, it seems as if one is beginning to bleed into the other.
‘Bright Meadows next stop,’ the bus driver shouts without turning around.
I look up, startled.
The bus shifts gears, a car horn sounds outside, a muffled curse filters in through the jammed-open window, borne on the hot, polluted air. Time has recommenced, it would seem, and the world around us. The bus continues on its way through ordinary streets, past ordinary people doing ordinary things. What the malakh wants but can never have.
I bend low and study the woman beside me, clocking the faint flutter of the pulse in her neck before straightening and edging my way around her sprawled form.
‘Thanks,’ I mutter as I pass the driver.
‘No worries,’ he replies tonelessly, before the door shuts behind me.
The bus swings away from the kerbside with June still on board, still unconscious. I watch it go, with a feeling like someone is dancing on my grave. I wonder if I have not just come face to face with my own fate, years, centuries, from now.
Chapter 7
I trail uneasily across the road to Lela’s place. A malakh. The details are more than a little hazy, but I don’t believe I ever really moved in the same circles as these creatures. We were never in the same … caste, for want of a better word. But we’re related, I know that much. The way they say that humans and bonobos are. And I don’t know why, after all this time, I’ve suddenly been able to see one.
A woman opens the front door to the Neills’ timber cottage before I’ve even pushed open the rusting gate that leads to the front yard. Her lean frame is kitted out in a short-sleeved, blue-patterned shirt and navy slacks, she has a watch on a silver chain around her neck, and her dark, greying hair is scraped back in a no-nonsense bun. Her face is calm, but I can tell she’s been waiting for me. It must be Georgia, and I say the name aloud.
She smiles at me, and I realise that I’m picking up a strong sense of what’s in her mind, like an aura around her, aChapterainty. She thinks that Mrs Neill is going to die today.
‘Lela,’ she calls out in a relieved tone. ‘She hasn’t been conscious since I arrived this morning, and her pulse is barely detectable and getting weaker. I thought it might be time — that you’d want to be here. Father Davey’s been and gone. He said that if you want him back, for anything, just say the word.’
I hurry up the path towards her, past stunted citrus trees, a yellowing, scrubby lawn and exhausted hedge borders that need just a little more tending, a little more love — things every one of us could use. When I reach the veranda, Georgia goes to put an arm around my bare shoulders, but I step back.
‘It’s never easy, dear,’ she says softly, misreading my ingrained watchfulness as a gesture of denial. ‘But it’s been a long process, and she’s given it her best. She’s so very tired.’
She shuts the front door behind us and we walk down the sun-dappled, dust-plagued hall, Georgia leading the way. I wonder how to properly mourn a woman I barely know. We’ve only been acquainted for a few hours, not even a full day. I never had a mother myself; no soft, kindly background presence in my life. It might have done me good if I’d had.
Georgia stops outside the door to Mrs Neill’s bedroom. ‘She’s had her usual dosages,’ she says gently. ‘Nothing more, nothing less. Just hold her hand. Talk to her. Tell her all the things you’d want her to know. She won’t be able to answer you, but she might hear and understand, and it might make it … easier. I’ll just be out in the sitting room if you need me, if anything changes …’
I nod my head to show Georgia that I’ve understood, and walk into the bedroom scented by that peculiar combination of incense, aromatic oil, medication and disease. Mid-afternoon sunshine streams in through an open curtain at the foot of the bed, and in it, a world of dust motes, sun devils, microscopic life. Before I draw up the sagging armchair next to the bed, I study the woman for a long moment. She’s outlined in gold, and the skin of her face, her eyelids, seems papery and translucent. If it weren’t for the faintest rise and fall of her chest, she might be an effigy.
I have no last words for her and I wish I did. If Lela were here now, what would she say? What would she do?
I don’t know what comes over me — regret? grief? — but I place my left hand on Mrs Neill’s forehead; a gesture almost as old as mankind itself. Of benediction, of farewell.
The instant I touch her, my left hand begins to burn with a strange phantom pain. There’s a building pressure behind my eyes as I flame into contact with the woman’s very … soul.
And I see, I see —
— Lela as a squalling newborn; vicious arguments between a younger Mrs Neill and the man beside her in the dusty wedding photo I spied on the hallway table behind bundles of correspondence secured by rubber bands; Mrs Neill and a toddler-sized Lela in the backyard of a tiny blond-brick house by a railway line, the noise of the passing trains causing Lela to cover her ears and howl; Lela and her mother living in an apartment by the sea with peeling wallpaper and water stains on the ceiling; the two of them walking hand in hand to Lela’s elementary school; Mrs Neill and a teenaged Lela on a houseboat somewhere warm, arm in arm and truly happy for a passing instant; Mrs Neill in a string of dead-end jobs — receptionist, postal worker, cleaner, call-centre operator; Mrs Neill welcoming Lela home from high school, then university, all the pride of those days still fierce in her now, like a fire, only banked; Mrs Neill collapsing on the hallway carpet in grief the day the family doctor called to let her know that the stage one cancer they thought they’d stopped in its tracks had metastasised in multiple locations and there was not a lot more they could do except to make her comfortable.
It could be seconds, it could be hours, later that I snatch my hand away from the dying woman’s skin; and the second I do, she takes a great choking breath and opens her eyes. There’s fear and wonder in them. And she’s once more present and herself in this room. In the world of the living.
‘Georgia!’ I call out. Panic in my voice.
I hear footsteps running down the hall.
‘Lel,’ Mrs Neill breathes, her eyes searching mine. ‘You’re early.’
‘Karen?’ Georgia exclaims, brushing past me to grasp Mrs Neill’s thin wrist in one hand, turning it over quickly to check the pulse. ‘You’ve come back to us.’
She lays Mrs Neill’s hand gently on the bed moments later. ‘A steady one hundred and twenty beats per minute,’ she says incredulously, reaching for her patient’s bedcovers. ‘How are you feeling? You gave us a scare.’
Lela’s mother waves one hand at the nurse, cutting her off.
‘Your hand felt very warm, darling,’ she says to me tenderly, the words almost lost in the hum of the machine that is sending something into the air to ease her
breathing. ‘You’re not taking ill with a summer flu?’
When I shake my head, she murmurs, ‘Do you remember that houseboat we chartered with the O’Connors and the Richardsons? On the Murray?’
I don’t, of course. But I saw it in her mind and I nod.
‘It was like we were there again. Remember how, when we came home, it felt for days afterwards as if our beds had become boats themselves? We’d lie there, and it felt as if the waves were still rocking us to sleep. Our bodies had grown accustomed to the motion. Like we’d brought the river home inside us. We were happy then, weren’t we? Really happy.’
I nod again and she whispers, ‘But it was more beautiful this time, Lel. There was light all around. The grass on the banks was so green, greener than it has any right to be, because it’s never green along the Murray these days, is it? And I didn’t feel any pain. You and I were like we are now, and we were leaning on the rails, looking out at the diamonds on the water, and I didn’t want to leave, darling. I could have stayed that way forever, you and me, on that boat, just travelling. I didnȁwant to leave.’
I think: You almost didn’t leave; you almost didn’t come back. And I wonder if I did that. If I somehow drew Lela’s mother back to us again.
Georgia reaches for the covered cup of water on the bedside table, lifts it to Mrs Neill’s cracked lips, just to wet them, but Lela’s mother waves her away. She’s all eyes, wild hair, jaundiced skin and bone. I wonder what kind it is, her cancer. But I can’t ask because I should know.
‘Too painful to swallow the last couple of days,’ she murmurs. ‘Won’t be long now, Lel, then I won’t be a burden to you any more …’
‘Don’t talk like that, Karen,’ Georgia scolds, then leaves the room to answer the doorbell that’s just sounded.