by Daryl Banner
“JOHN!” I cry out, leaping toward the mist.
The boy won’t let go of my hand. “NO!” he shouts. “Don’t! You’ll be lost! We can’t separate!”
“WE ALREADY HAVE!” I scream, thrown instantly into a state of panic. “JOHN! ANSWER ME! JOHN!”
“Winter …”
I spin around. I can’t even tell which direction we were walking. The mist swirls around us, giving me the uneasy sensation of being in the center of a great, white, slow-motion tornado. The ground lends no helpful hint of footstep or geography. The world spins along with the mist, along with my mind, along with my heart, which is now throbbing in my throat.
“JOHN!” I shout out again, desperate for him to answer me.
He was right there, I tell myself. Right there! He should be able to hear my screaming. He can’t be more than a few feet away from me. Why can’t he hear me?
The haze before me twists oddly, as if bent by some force, the swirling pattern broken for a moment. I wonder if someone is cutting through it when suddenly the mist looks like a face … a really, really big face.
“John?” I ask, all my strength stolen.
Even the pale boy has tightened his grip on my hand and presses in close to me, fear rattling in his two ghostly eyes. He’s afraid too, I realize. This is not his doing.
The fog writhes in midair again, forming a second face next to the first one. Then a third face. Then a fourth, a fifth, and a sixth.
“What’s happening?” I whisper to my only companion left, a Dead boy who’s tried to kill me twice, and who’s held back from killing me twice.
“I … I …” He can’t seem to produce an answer.
Then, from the first face, a figure emerges, parting the mist. It’s an old man, naked as his birthday. His skin, grey and silvery like the scales of a fish, is missing in patches, his bright white skeleton showing through, and his eyes glow a furious white, as if his eyeballs were two light bulbs plucked from Marianne’s makeup mirror.
Then, to his side, a second figure breaks through the fog. A woman twice as old as him and every bit as naked, her breasts hanging to her belly and her knees bowed inward. Two locks of hair hang in tangled curls straight down to her feet. Her eyes flash as white as the man’s.
Two more burst forth: younger men than the white-eyed, so similar in appearance that they could be twins, and they each wear a suit of crudely-fashioned metal armor. Blond of hair and pointy of nose, their eyes glow a sickly, hungry yellow—four bright little suns in the mist.
The final two faces emerge from behind us, giving me cause to whip around in fright. Both of them are young girls, each dressed in a strange costume that looks like a bunch of rocks sewn together somehow by needle-thin wires, spots of their young flesh visible through it. Their eyes glow the green of emeralds, sparkling and infinite in their facets.
“Who are you?” I whisper, unsure which of the six to address. They have us surrounded, these strange figures, standing on all sides. “What do you want with us?”
The girls with the green eyes giggle, drawing my attention to them, but they say nothing, simply observing me as though I were a curious artifact at a museum, peering at me through the glass. The young armored men turn to one another, their faces scrunched in thought, as if they’re linked in the brain and trading thoughts between them. I’m ready to believe any sort of explanation for this odd group of guests … magical, scientific, or otherwise.
“So it begins.”
I turn to the voice. It was the old naked man, except now his entire lower half has turned into a swirling funnel of smoke, and his hands, now separated, float in the air next to his hips. He seems held together by a breeze. So does his counterpart, the ancient woman, whose legs are now a twisting cone of dust, and her white eyes float in the air on either side of her frail-looking head.
As I’m too scared to speak, Corpsey does it for me. “So what begins?” he asks in his clear, lofty voice.
“To be honest,” says one of the young armored men, drawing our attention around to him, “I had thought this iteration would’ve lasted longer. What a pity.”
“Yes, a pity,” the other young man agrees, his bright yellow lights-for-eyes flickering twice—which I suspect is indicative of him blinking.
The old man’s legs return, the cone of smoke twisting itself into the shape of an amorphous, semitransparent robe, and he steps forward. “You’ve come to us. So rare in an iteration is it for you to actually see our like.”
“So rare,” the old woman agrees, her voice squeaky and awful to the ear.
“What have you come to us for?” the old man asks.
I blink. Corpsey and I share a look of bafflement. I meet the old man’s eyes. “I … I hadn’t intended to … to come to you,” I admit, at a loss. “I hadn’t intended to see any of you. I don’t know who … or what … you are. I’ve only come for … for my friend, Marianne. And I’ve lost the friend I came with, John. And I … I really would like to go home.”
“Home,” whispers the woman.
“Home,” echoes the young men in their armor.
“Home,” the girls with green eyes echo in unison, then look at one another and giggle.
I spin around, overwhelmed with all their voices, which start to repeat inside my head, spinning around my skull in the form of distant screams and giggling and whispers. Before I realize it, I’m clinging to the side of the pale boy, gripping his hand so tight I hear it crunch. He hardly flinches, too focused on the strange people to care.
“Is this the world that ends in fire?” inquires the old man, and I don’t know who among his group he’s asking, or if he’s addressing the question to me. “Or the one that ends in sacrifice?”
“Or the one that ends in beauty?” asks the crone.
“Or the one that ends in oblivion?” asks the armored.
“Ends in war?” asks the yellow-eyed.
“Ends in water?” asks the green-eyed.
“Ends in curiosity?” asks the white-eyed.
“In questions?” asks the yellow.
“In a great big boom?” asks the green.
“In darkness?” asks the white.
“In confusion?”
“In a total standstill?”
“In indecisiveness?”
“In endless, ceaseless cold?”
“STOP!” I cry out, clutching my head with my only free hand, entirely unwilling to let go of the other. “Please,” I beg them with my eyes clenched shut, unable to hear another confusing and vague sentence, another annoying rhetorical question, another creepy peep. “Just tell me where my friend is and let me go on my way. Please. I just want to go home.”
“You came here to prove the existence of the dead.”
I flip my eyes open. The six of them have somehow traded places, or else Corpsey and I have spun around, because the two armored young men now stand before us, their fierce, yellow eyes studying us curiously.
“My dear, you need only lead your people to the body of a dearly deceased,” the young man on the left says. “Your father, for example. Surely your people know that living things die, yes?”
“All living things die,” agrees the other.
“Yes, obviously,” I say, cutting them off, “but I mean to prove to them the existence of the Living Dead. You know what I meant.” My voice grows stern, tired of their games. “Don’t play with me.”
“Play?” The armored young men look at one another.
“Play?” The old man and woman tilt their heads.
The mists scream deafeningly as they twist suddenly, twirling so fast I feel my own hair lift from my body. In the next instant, the mist has calmed, the two green-eyed girls standing in front of us now with a strangely amused look on their faces.
“You are the one who plays with us,” says one girl.
“You’ve played with us for centuries,” says the other.
“It’s always you, every time,” they say now in perfect unison, as if they’re
the same girl and I’ve just had one too many drinks and am seeing double. “From the moment you’re born, we know the end is near. But which end?”
“Which end, indeed?” asks the old man from behind us. “The end of the world? Or the end of the suffering? Why don’t you tell us already and stop playing with us?”
“We’re so tired,” complains the old woman, her voice squeaking like a dog’s toy.
I look from the old white-eyed man to the armored young men to the pair of green-eyed girls. “What do you mean ‘from the moment you’re born’? What do I have to do with anything? I’m just a student at the university.”
“A student?” inquires one of the armored yellow.
“Yes,” I say, facing him. “I’m a student, and I’ve come to collect information about my so-named Beautiful Dead with the purpose of proving their existence. I’m going to bring my findings to them, proof of the Living Dead, and make the Histories.”
“Oh, dear.” The left young man nods, his yellow eyes flashing. “This is the one that ends in arrogance.” To that, the armored man on the right groans, saying, “Oh, dear. Arrogance is the worst.”
“Arrogance?” I ask, disconcerted. “Whose?”
“Make the Histories?” The green-eyed girls giggle. “You’re already in the Histories! You’re in every History! So it begins,” says one. “So it begins,” the other agrees.
I stare down at the girls with the green eyes. Despite the frustration that so quickly invaded my system at the arrival of these riddle-trading glowing-eyed freaks, I find within myself an uncharacteristic calm. In that calm, I discover the whispering and the tittering of the mists to have faded to a nearly indistinguishable hum.
With my hand still gripping Corpsey, I crouch down to bring myself eye-level with the green-eyed girls. “You say I’ve played with you for centuries?” I ask them.
“Yes,” answers the one on the left.
“We knew you’d come,” says the other. “You always do. Even if your name is different.”
I swallow once, hard. “My name?”
“Vivian.”
“Asha.”
“Liv.”
“Zoe.”
“Eve.”
“Claire.”
“You always come into the world,” the girls say in unison, “when it’s ready to end.”
End. The word sits in my chest like a knife that’d just been thrown. End. I catch myself holding my breath, my gaze broken from the creepy green eyes of the girls. End. I feel as though I’d been kicked in the stomach.
“If I must be honest,” groans one of the young men, “I am ready for a change. The Living have too long forgiven themselves for their own unforgiveable arrogance.”
“Arrogance,” agrees the other.
“It ends in arrogance,” complains the crone. “What a mess they’ll make of it all, the stupid Living.”
“The beautiful Living,” sing the girls.
I turn to the pale boy at my side, searching for a reaction. His sullen eyes say it all: he believes them. I can’t say if this is just another trick of the realm of the Dead, or if my existence is truly some death omen for the world. That piece of information is so enormous and dramatic that my gut reaction is to dismiss it. How is it possible?
“Do not be saddened by this news,” says the old man, his white eyes flaring like the headlights of a car. “Be relieved. The world is like the restless child that won’t sleep, and you are its tender lullaby. You are not the cause of the world’s doom, my dear Winter. You are merely a sign of it … a catalyst, a symbol, a symptom.”
I frown. “What did you just call me? Winter?”
“And now that you’re here, dear Winter,” he goes on as if he didn’t hear my protest, “we can go back to sleep, the six of us, and wait for your time to pass so that we may dream of another world.”
With that, the crone at his side vanishes in a furious blast of fog, followed by the armored men, whose yellow eyes linger a moment in the mist before vanishing too in a spinning puff of white smoke.
“Wait!” I cry out. “That can’t be it! You can’t just tell me that because I’ve been born, the world’s to end! And in arrogance, no less! And horribly! What the hell am I supposed to do with those pearls of wisdom??”
“Make a necklace,” suggests the man, and I can’t tell if he’s being dead serious, or mocking me.
The green-eyed girls flash, dissipating into a funnel of mist, their eyes dancing away until they’re out of sight. A swirling dark smoke begins to swallow the one remaining figure: the old man before me.
“Please,” I beg him. “Surely something can be done! Can’t I take this as a warning? Can’t I help the Living fix everything? Can’t they … Can’t we just … Can’t I help stop the end of the world? Tell me something!”
The old man smiles, only his face and his blinding white eyes remaining as the smoke swallows the rest of him. “Tell them, ‘You did this to yourself.’” Then, in the haze that’s left of his face, he finishes, “Tell them, ‘The only one left to blame is you … you … you.’”
Then the furious winds swallow his face, and as it whips away from sight, the rest of the mists retreat at once, as if blown away by a great wind, leaving Corpsey and I standing in the barren center of a great and endless wasteland, completely rid of the fog from before.
I feel as if I’d just woken from some psychotic dream. I see the trees from where we’d come in the distance. I stare at them for far too long, lost in the words of the six glowing-eyed figures that still swim in my foggy brain.
“Jennifer!” he shouts.
I turn. John races across the crackled plain, his feet kicking up dust as he approaches. In seconds, he crashes into my body and we embrace tightly, despite my being absorbed in the news of the world’s impending doom.
“Where were you?” he breathes, his voice trembling. “You vanished! I called out for you and nothing, there was nothing but whispers and fog and nothing!”
I look up into John’s eyes. “You didn’t see them?”
“See who??”
“You didn’t hear their words? You didn’t … You didn’t hear what they …?” Already, my questions die on the tip of my sad, Living tongue as my eyes drift to meet those of the Dead boy’s, who sadly stare back.
Corpsey and I are the only ones who know. We’re the only ones who were meant to hear the message.
But … why?
“Jennifer? Who? Who are you talking about?”
Then, as I lift my gaze once more, I see her. Stumbling towards us, a woman with cheeks that still glow like two red orbs of hope.
“MARI!” I scream, unable to contain myself.
I tear across the wasteland toward my long lost friend, my confidant, my roommate. When I reach her and throw my arms around her, she freezes, too stunned to even hug me back. Embracing her tightly, the tears reach my eyes so fast that I’d think I were somehow squeezing them out of myself.
“I knew I’d find you,” I breathe into her ear, choking on my own emotion. “We’re going home, sweetheart. I’ve got you. You’re safe.”
When I pull away, I find the expression on Mari’s pale, bewildered face to be one of utter confusion and terror. Oh, no. She’s traumatized. You did this to her.
“I’m so sorry,” I suddenly find myself saying. “This is all my fault. I should not have let you come. I should have insisted that you stay behind and gone and done this crazy quest all on my own. This was my burden, not yours.”
Still, she says nothing, staring at me and trembling, her purple eyes blank as boards. I notice suddenly that one of her prized purple colors must have fallen out because her left eye is actually black—her natural hue.
“I promise, Mari. We’ll get home,” I tell her, bringing my face close to hers. “I’ll find a way. We will get back to that hovercraft and we will flip that damn thing over and launch back into the sky. I swear it.”
Marianne still says nothing, her whole body shaking and her ey
es flitting about, as if she worries some great creature is going to pounce on her at any second. This is all my fault, I keep saying, even with knowing that she’s still alive and finally returned to me, I’m still flooded with guilt—maybe even more so than before.
John’s rushed up to our side, the leash still in his grip. “Mari,” he says under his breath, then gives her a hug of his own. “We crossed half a Dead world for you.”
I smirk. “Now, let’s not exaggerate. It was probably just ten or so miles, give or take.”
“Give or take,” John agrees with a light chuckle, grasping desperately at the excuse for a smile.
Still, there isn’t even so much as a trace of a smile on Mari’s troubled face. She hasn’t even uttered a single word. I turn my eyes to John, wondering if he’s thinking the same thing. He meets my gaze and seems to confirm my worries: Mari is haunted-and-a-half.
“Once we’re back home,” he says quietly, though it’s quite clear that everyone can hear him, “we will all feel a bit less … traumatized by our experiences here. We’ve all been through a lot.”
“Yes,” I agree halfheartedly, glancing at Marianne and feeling a tinge of disappointment at how unexcited she was to see me. I’d expected a sigh of relief at the very least, or a return hug, perhaps. Nothing. I got nothing but trembling and nervous staring.
“Run.”
I turn to Corpsey, the source of that one, awful word. Then I follow his worried glance to the trees. At first, I see nothing strange at all.
Until the trees start racing towards us.
“THE DEAD!” I shriek. “RUN, RUN, RUN!”
I bolt at once, tearing in the opposite direction, which is across the barren wasteland of the Whispers, mercifully sans the annoying sight-hindering fog. John follows, his hand gripping Mari’s, who runs along with us, the terror now having grown twofold in her mismatched eyes. Even Corpsey races at our side, though I can’t tell if it’s due to the noose that’s still wrapped around his neck, or if he’s actually become bonded to us, running away from his own kind.
I glance back for a peek at our pursuers. Big mistake. There are not just five or ten of them anymore. That damned sister of Corpsey’s has amassed a number well over fifty or sixty savage Dead, all of them appearing like a row of black trees that rush across the fogless Whispers in tireless pursuit of us fleshy, bloody fools.