by Daryl Banner
I bring myself to Mari’s door. After taking one deep, long breath, I put my knuckles to the wood. “Mari,” I murmur quietly. “Can you hear me? Mari?” There’s no answer. Surprise. “I’m coming in, Mari.”
The door creaks as it opens. Perched on her bed, just as she has been for the last few days, Marianne sits in a sea of bed sheets and uneaten food. The room smells of something fettered and something else foul—the food she’s refusing to eat, I suspect. Not to mention that she hasn’t even had a damn shower since we’ve been back. No concern for hygiene, no concern for health … I had to beg them not to take her to the hospital. I insisted that time home was all she needed. It’s bound to be any day now that the therapist will decide Mari needs a stronger treatment, then whisk her away to some hospital far away from here and from everyone she knows.
Caring to spare my friend’s feelings, I make every effort not to cover my nose and mouth when I address her. “I’m just checking in on you, sweetheart.”
Mari’s eyes meet mine. She still says nothing, not even bothering with the lifting of a hand or the shifting of a foot. She’s been planted in that exact position for days. I wonder if she’s even slept properly.
“I’m really worried about you,” I tell her, my heart breaking the longer I stay in here. Or maybe that’s my nose breaking as I stifle every gag and choke that my body is trying to make. “Can you, at the very least, come out of your room so we can talk?”
Her odd, mismatched eyes stare at me, wordless.
“My dissertation is in an hour. You know, the one in which I have to deny the existence of the Beautiful Dead. Wow. Isn’t it such a sad thing? The world we live in? Here we went, thinking we were taking some adventure of a lifetime, only to be robbed of its treasures the moment we return.” I sigh heavily, suddenly carrying a conversation with myself. “I know, it doesn’t help to talk about it. I should be really careful … not that it matters anyway. We have nothing, Mari. We don’t have a lucky zombie foot. We don’t have some magical amulet. We don’t have a device full of wisdom, nor one damn photo.”
I clench shut my eyes. All of the events that took place in the Sunless Reach race by my eyes like some wild dream I had. Did it even happen? Was I actually over there in the wretched place of my darkest dreams? I don’t even dream about them. When I sleep, the only things I dream about is chocolate pudding and imaginary places in which I’m having fun and making a fool of myself. Only when I wake does the dark and heavy reality return to me. Strange, how I thought I’d be more traumatized by the experience. Instead, I almost …
I almost miss it.
“This is just stupid,” I say suddenly. “Mari, I’m taking you out of this room. You’re going to come and witness my dissertation,” I decide, marching up to her bed. Yes, the stench grows exponentially as I approach. “You have been hearing me go on and on and on about it all year. I won’t let you miss the great and gloriously anticlimactic payoff. Yes,” I say, answering the strange and questioning look on her face, “it will be as boring as you fear.”
When the door opens and John turns, his eyes flash with surprise when he finds Mari at my side. “Oh,” he grunts, his eyes turning suspicious. “Is she okay, or …?”
“No,” I answer for her, “but I’m not going to let her miss my dumb dissertation. Mari’s my best friend, and I want her with me because I love her.”
I give my offensively stinky friend a squeeze, to which she reacts by staring at me like I’m the Horror From Hell. Maybe I am.
“Everyone’s going to be there,” John tells me, almost like a warning. “The whole school, probably. Everyone wants to hear what you’re going to say about—”
“About that thing I gotta deny,” I finish for him. “Let’s get it over with. I’m so ready to bore everyone to death.”
Then, across the breezy campus we go, the morning sun washing over us with unapologetic life and fervor. Every step draws me closer to my destiny. This pathway that I’ve strolled a thousand times from the condos to the Histories building, this is my Broken Road of Destiny. The way has always been a broken one, the path cutting left, cutting right, then deceiving me as I push through the mazy woods of life, but I know that at the end of the path rests a light, a furious green light, and I will not give up until that satisfaction is in my warm, Human palm.
Then I’m in the auditorium standing before the entire student body of Skymark University, and all that strength and brave-crap stuff I just talked about is gone.
“H-Hello. My name is Jennifer Steel,” I state timidly, my voice projected through the sound system to the six or seven thousand students that have woken up early this morning to hear me, “and this is my dissertation on the Histories of Northern Mythos, the Fall of the Old World, and the Rise … of the Beautiful Dead.”
Word spread. Not a soul on campus wanted to miss this. Even the entire Engineering school came, taking up a section in the back. President Rosella Vale herself sits near the front with a committee of esteemed colleagues. I’ll pretend she’s here to appreciate my hard work and not just to ensure I abide by my sworn statement. Right in front of her sits Professor Praun, focused like a hawk.
And so I begin my dissertation. The crowd is so large and the lights are so bright that I can’t even spot John in the crowd, nor Mari, who’s seated next to him. Every word that I offer to the vague shadows is lapped up in perfect, thick, and respectful silence. Never have I ever felt my words be more attended to. I could trick myself into believing that they’re truly interested in my studies on how the mythologies of ancient northern civilizations influenced and gave birth to our way of life today, or how the greed and obliviousness of our ancestors led to their sudden and unfortunate downfall, but the truth is, they are, each of them, just biding their time until I reach the true heart of my dissertation … a heart that no longer beats … a heart I’ll be forced to deny is there at all … a heart called the Beautiful Dead.
“The Rise of the Beautiful Dead,” I state, reading the title of the final section of my work.
Instantly, the energy in the room changes. People shift in their seats, leaning forward to hear my precious words of gold. Oh, if only I commanded this much importance in all areas of my life.
“I have long thirsted for the truth behind the Beautiful Dead,” I tell the thousands upon thousands of pairs of eyes that excitedly watch. “My mother read the stories to me as a child, and my imagination was forever changed. My father, who recently … who recently passed away, did not have any love for the subject. Many don’t. Many feel that it is a wasted study, or a superfluous study, or not even a study at all. Some say it’s just some gross and highly unsubstantiated exaggeration of ancient sciences that once claimed to grant immortality, to cure all disease, to reanimate the dead. The answer to the one disease that we all share, the one disease that no man, woman, or child is immune from: the disease of being alive. Its inevitable result: death.”
Death. The word flitters across the room like a stray needle of black smoke, threading itself through the crowds of countless ears and hungry brains, coiling up and down the aisles of this enormous auditorium, staining the world with its undeathly memories.
“The answer has had many names: The Fountain of Youth. The Elixir of Life. The Tree of Ages. The Eternity Pill. The Crimson Candle. The Infinity Glass. Anima …”
Anima.
I close my notebook; I won’t be needing it anymore. I take one deep breath. The world waits patiently for me to gravely disappoint it.
“I recently went on … an adventure,” I tell them, no longer reading my notes. I speak from my heart, and from a vow that bears my signature on a paper somewhere. “It was against my will, though a part of me was quite thrilled to go, despite the circumstance. A woman named Dana kidnapped me and my friends to a place that is only described in those storybooks of my childhood. A place that we all fear is where we go when we pass. A place I thought my father could be. A place beyond the sun’s reach, where the Dead live and the Livi
ng die.”
The room could not be more silent. Never will the world know a room filled with nearly ten thousand silent and completely attentive bodies. Not a breath is drawn. Not a finger twitches. Not a foot shuffles, nor a cough issues, nor a paper crinkles. Vast, pure, heavy silence.
“It is with great disappointment and …” I shiver, my nerves betraying me, my legs feeling weak. “It is with great, great disappointment that I report … that there was nothing …” I’m gripping the edges of the podium before which I stand, upon which my closed steel notebook rests. My knuckles bleed white. “Nothing at all,” I press on, my teeth grinding one another, “that would support, validate, or prove … the existence of the Beautiful Dead.”
There is a shuffle of feet. Then a sigh. Then a hundred sighs and a hundred shuffles of feet. “Come on,” grunts someone in the front. Then a thousand. “LIAR!” shouts a girl. “FAKE!” from a deep-voiced man somewhere else.
I’m in the Whispers again and the voices are circling my head, taunting me, mocking me, threatening me.
“It was my hope to find proof of the Mythological Undead,” I go on, trying my best to drown out the shouts of outrage that steadily grow among the crowd, “but I was regrettably unsuccessful. The only thing I found over there was decay, ruin, and nothing. I—”
“YOU’RE A LIAR!” someone else cries out.
“Attention-seeking bitch!”
The shuffling of people getting up to leave become staggering, like a herd of beasts crossing the wild, except these ones hurl insults as they go. I beg them to hear me out, to sit back down, to listen to my final conclusion, but I can’t even hear my own voice through the uproar.
Then, a young woman emerges from the crowd, stepping down from the seating area and crossing the front of the room toward the stage. Her act causes the room to quiet, if just for a moment, curious of her plans. Maybe she’s going to attack me, just like half the room likely wants to do themselves. Maybe she will wring my neck on behalf of the whole student body.
I stare at her, those cheeks still glowing a faint, dulled red. “Mari?” I question. “W-What’re you doing?”
She faces the room, her mismatched eyes curious and wide. The room watches her, all the shouting having died out, leaving an eerie and unsettled tension in its wake. At any moment, the bomb of anger could go off once more.
“Mari?” I prod her, genuinely worried.
Then, my friend utters her first words since we’ve been home: “The Beautiful Dead do exist.”
No one responds. No one stirs. The crowd has turned into a tableau of students, half standing, half still sitting, all of their eyes glued to the likes of Marianne Gable.
“Mari,” I say, my voice dancing across the room. “You don’t know what you’re saying. You’ve been through a lot. You’re just—”
“And I can prove it,” she announces to the room, ignoring me.
My mouth opens and closes and opens again, unable to produce a word. What the hell is she doing?
“M-Mari …” I repeat, half a whimper.
It’s just her word against the world’s, I decide at once, no matter what silly thing she’s about to say to the room. She is trying to stand up for me, but everyone knows she lost her mind, I tell myself. They will take her to a mental hospital. The statement we all signed will still stand strong. Marianne will be dismissed as crazy, and nothing more.
Then Marianne, my best friend in the whole world, draws an object from her pocket, showing it to the room. “This is a knife!” she states excitedly, the sound system picking up her voice and throwing it at the crowd, whose expressions are now a thousand shades of terror.
I stare at the knife, the stage lights shimmering off the shiny, serrated edge. “M-Mari. Put down the—”
“The Dead are alive!” she exclaims.
Then she stabs herself in the head.
I don’t know which I hear first: the screams of horror that explode from the crowd, or my own.
As quickly as the screams came, they’re gone, replaced by a hum of the thickest, tautest silence I’ve ever known. The world watches Mari as she stands before them, a blade buried into her head, and a smile on her proud, red-cheeked face.
“I don’t even bleed!” she says proudly, the echoes of her words bouncing around the room. “Look at this! I can take it out, too!” She does so with some minor difficulty. Each time she tugs on the knife, her whole head goes with it. “I think it’s stuck,” she complains, half to herself. Then, after a two-handed yank and a horrible squishing sound, the knife slips out, taking a clump of her hair with it. “There we go!” Then, as her strange eyes focus on the crowd, she asks, “Still not convinced? Need a hand? It just so happens, I have one too many!”
With that, she swings the knife onto her other wrist in an effort to chop it off. The knife gets embedded instead, stopped at the bone with a sickening thump. The audience wheezes and gasps, repulsed. A man faints in the front, collapsing into the woman at his side. A scream that could wake the dead bursts from elsewhere in the audience.
“I’m proof!” she shouts, hacking at her hand. “Me!”
Dodging her erratic movements, I manage to get ahold of Mari and tug on her, determined to get her off of the stage. “Mari,” I beg her, desperate, “please, Mari, stop, don’t do that, stop, Mari!”
“I’m the proof of the Beautiful Dead!” she cries out, happy as a sunflower. “It doesn’t even hurt! I swear!”
“Mari!”
Security officers have cautiously approached the stage armed with an array of guns, and I back away at once, my hands in the air. Mari, the moment she sees them, giggles suddenly, then says, “Ooh! Can you give me a hand with my hand, officers? The knife is stuck, as you can see …”
Two men come forward, each taking one of her arms, and then they less-than-gently usher her off the stage and toward a side door exit, where she vanishes from sight in a giggle, still chatting with them like it’s just another Friday. The audience hums with scandal and horror.
Trembling, I slam myself into the podium for one last appeal. “Don’t believe what you’ve just seen!” I cry out. “It was all an act! It was fake! An illusion! A toy knife!”
But more security guards come to take me too, and amidst the buzzing of the crowd, I’m dragged towards the same side door. Behind me, I hear the voice of Professor Praun flooding the auditorium to demand order, making assurances to the room and threatening disciplinary action to anyone who persists in acting unruly.
Just before being pulled through the doors, I catch sight of President Rosella Vale, but from this far distance, I can’t measure the expression on her face. I don’t know if she’s exuding the calmness she so afforded me when there was nothing but a desk and an unsigned paper between us, or if there’s threats and deadly promises now in those sweet, well-meaning eyes.
“I think I have amnesia,” she murmurs to me quietly, “because I don’t really know things that I should. You and John and Willa—that’s my therapist—have been kind to me. Have we known each other for long, you and I?”
“Very,” I agree tiredly, sitting in the chair beside her and trembling. My stomach fell out from under me hours ago. No one’s spoken to us. Not Praun. Not Rosella. We have no company, save the four walls of this small room.
My life is over.
“I wasn’t entirely sure at first,” admits Mari, suddenly the most talkative person in the world, “but at one point, when I was by myself in that bedroom, I started to piece together a few details. For one, I realized it had been a whole day and I hadn’t needed to eat. That struck me as particularly odd,” she goes on, her face wrinkling, “and then I realized that I didn’t … well, you know.”
“Humor me,” I mutter, miserable.
“I didn’t have to pee,” she says, whispering the last word. “No bodily functions. I thought it was so bizarre, that I hadn’t noticed until then. Finally, I had a wild idea and … and I put a hand to my chest. I listened and I … well, I sat
there on that bed and listened for my heartbeat for two whole days. Spoiler alert: I still haven’t heard it.”
My head is a chaotic swirl of conflicting thoughts and what-if’s and brain-wracking. I keep wanting to deny that I was ever in the Sunless Reach. Listen to me, already believing my own lie that has my signature next to it in the president’s office.
Marianne, my friend, my changed friend … She is the same person, and yet she is a complete stranger. The Mari I brought to the realm of the Dead is not the Mari I brought back. Is it even safe to say she changed? Or is it more accurate to say … that she died?
She died. Those words cut me so much deeper than even the grotesque sight of a knife through her head does. She died over there, and the magic of that realm brought her back … except different.
“Why are you shaking your head?” she asks.
I look at her. I want to cry suddenly, looking at her innocent expression and her one-purple-one-black eyes.
“I shouldn’t have done it,” she says suddenly. “I know. It was a mistake. I got you in big trouble, didn’t I? I was just sitting there listening to all of these strange people attacking you. I realized what you were saying and … and seeing as you’re my only friend in this world, I needed to protect you. I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t apologize.” My mind is a tornado of questions and worries. “I’m the one who should be sorry. I’m the reason that you’re … you’re …”
I can’t even say it. I’m not even sure I believe it yet, even after her performance. I’d verify her lack of a heartbeat myself, if I wasn’t so terrified of having that very truth confirmed.
So instead of confirming any of that, I simply study Marianne’s face, searching for that best friend and roomie of mine deep inside her, then dare to bring a hand up to her soft cheek. I feel her flesh, curious if I might notice any difference in it. She watches me with her big sweet eyes. The red on her cheeks still glow so faintly, you would almost think they were just naturally that way, a symptom of her abundant joy. A symptom …