In Silent Graves

by Gary A Braunbeck

  “They really love each other, don’t they?”

  “Ian and Andrea love everyone, they can’t help it. It’s not in their nature to hate or be cruel.”

  “Ian looks so sick....”

  “Worry if you want but it’ll do no good. Neither will pity, so spare us those, thanks so much.”

  Robert let the curtain drop and faced Rael. “So you and Denise held all of this together?”

  “Either of us can do it alone for a while, if necessary, but it eventually strains our abilities. Fully maintaining this place in kairos takes our combined abilities. She has powers that I don’t and vice-versa. Teamwork, Willy, that’s what has to be restored to save us.”

  Robert reached up and touched the bandage on the side of his head. It felt damp. When he pulled away his hand, there was blood on his fingertips. The memory of how he’d gotten the wound—something he’d been trying not to think about—came snarling back to the surface, full-blown, and he shuddered with revulsion.

  “Let me guess,” said Rael. “You just flashed back on that little roll in zee hay you had earlier, right?”

  “Yes....”

  Rael stood by the piece of furniture covered by the tarp and took a corner of it in his hand. “Why do you think she did that, Willy?”

  “Guess maybe I was supposed to think the whole thing had been a dream. I guess I scared her when I woke up and she panicked.” He wiped the blood on his jacket and started to look at his watch, then remembered giving it Ian. “How long have I been here, anyway?”

  “That depends.”

  “On...?”

  “On whether you’re talking about chronos or kairos. You’re talking kairos, then you’ve been here about—” he snapped his fingers “—that long. If you mean how long according to the passage of time out there, my guess is you’ve been in your coma about three days.”

  Robert started. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Rael shook his head and grinned. “Oh, come on, Willy—you don’t think I’d be stupid enough to physically bring you here without her, do you? Remember earlier, when I asked you if you felt like you were both here and not? Well right now, as we speak, you’re lying in chronos in the intensive care unit at Cedar Hill Memorial. Lynn tried calling you for a day-and-a-half and when you didn’t answer, she checked all of your old college hangouts, then called the station to see if you were there. Not being someone who intrudes on a person when they want privacy, she gave you a little more time, tried calling again, and this time when you didn’t answer, she hopped in her car and drove to the house and used that extra set of keys you gave her to let herself in. She found you upstairs. She’s one cool cookie, your sister—didn’t freak out, didn’t lose her composure and panic, knew exactly how to check your vital signs when she called for the ambulance. You could learn a thing or two from her about keeping your act together.”

  It took a moment for Robert to absorb all of this. He looked down at his jacket, slacks, and shoes, then said, “How can I be dressed like this?”

  “Because whenever you think of yourself, you think of yourself as appearing like this to the world—designer jacket, tailored shirt, nice pants and shoes, the whole nine yards. Appearances are important to you, Willy, though I doubt you’ve ever admitted that to yourself.”

  “But my head, the cut—”

  “The last thing you remember. If your bed-mate had cleaned your clock by choking you until you passed out, you’d be standing here with a sore throat and bruises on your neck but you’d still be dressed like that.”

  “Then my watch, how could I give it to Ian if—”

  “Knock it off, will you?” shouted Rael. “Jesus-H! What is this, the first round of ‘Find the Fallacy’? You want to piss away more of your life asking me questions in hopes of discovering some flaw in the logic, go ahead. I can answer every one of ‘em, Willy—I may choose not to, but you’ll only find that out if we continue. You want to know about the fucking watch, fine. It will not be among your personal items either at the hospital or at home when you get there. You determined that when you made the conscious decision to give it to Ian. Quantum physicists call it something like ‘The Observer Effect’ and have got equations and statistics and black-box experiments galore to back up their theories, but what it actually boils down to is this: There are places throughout the universe where the corners of the finite and infinite aren’t quite squared, so it’s easy for a small determination to slip through the cracks and alter even smaller details of consensual reality; when that happens people start throwing around terms like ‘phenomena’ or ‘mass hallucination’ or ‘miracles.’ I’ve always preferred ‘parlor trick’ because anyone who can free their mind from thinking only in three-dimensional terms can affect the structure of the physical world, be it rewinding and reconstructing a chosen moment in time or just doing a bit of conjuring. You ever see that old television series Bewitched? I loved that show; Samantha Stevens rocked! Her being a witch had nothing to do with her powers—she didn’t think in only three-dimensions, she knew the cosmos was just a work-in-progress, so it was child’s play for her to do that sexy nose-wiggle and drop a three-hundred pound elephant in the middle of the living room. And poor Darren! If ever there was a more accurate depiction of humankind’s inability to wrap its mind around a force greater than the time-clock, I ain’t seen it. But I digress.” He snapped back his arm and tore the tarpaulin from the piece of furniture—

  —which was not furniture at all but a body propped against the wall, its arms and legs akimbo, looking for all the world like a marionette whose strings had been cut in mid-dance.

  Robert immediately recognized the young woman from the bus who’d been so hurt by the foul-mouthed punks’ graphic descriptions of their sex lives.

  Her eyes were open and staring. At first Robert feared she was dead, but then saw the slow, almost imperceptible rise and fall of her chest as she breathed.

  “Is she all right?”

  Rael shrugged. “Far as I know. Once we got her back here, she wasn’t too talkative.” He gestured for Robert to come closer. “Before you ask, no, I didn’t come across her; she found me. The whole thing on the bus was her design. Ever seen her before—before the incident on the bus, I mean?”

  Robert shook his head and tried to swallow but found he couldn’t work up much saliva.

  Rael sighed. “I was afraid of that.”

  Kneeling in front of her, Robert touched her cheek; she wasn’t exactly cold, but the warmth of flowing-blood life was becoming a distant memory.

  “Who is she?” he asked, pulling away his hand.

  Rael grabbed hold of Robert’s forearm and pushed it forward, pressing Robert’s hand against the young woman’s face. His fingers barely brushed the surface of her skin before her eyes fell through their sockets and into the back of her skull.

  There was no blood.

  Then in a series of soft, dry sounds, the young woman’s head collapsed inward, her flesh crumbling and flaking away, becoming dust as her face sank, split in half, then began dissolving.

  Robert was so shaken by the sight that he lost his balance and fell forward and shoved his hand through her hollowed chest cavity. He tried to pull himself from the shell of desiccating skin and brittle bone but only managed to sink his arm in up to the elbow. A moment later, before he could release the scream rising up in him, Rael clamped a hand over his mouth and yanked Robert free of the body.

  Hyperventilating against Rael’s hand, Robert stared in wide-eyed horror as the rest of the young woman collapsed inward, revealing nothing within, and turned to a pile of dust that joined with the earthen floor to become the dirt of bad memories.

  “Take it easy, Willy, easy, there you go...I’m going to take my hand away now, okay, so you follow your sister’s example and keep yourself under control, all right? I don’t want you flipping out and scaring Ian and Andrea, okay?”

  Robert gave two short, sharp nods.

  Rael took his hand away.
Robert collapsed onto the floor, landed painfully on his ass, and pulled his knees up against his chest, wrapping his arms around them and rocking back and forth. Rael squatted next to him and waved a hand in front of his face.

  “Don’t space out on me, Willy, not now.” He snapped his fingers, startling Robert, who stared into Rael’s eyes and started to cry.

  Rael called for Ian and Andrea. Andrea saw Robert crying on the floor and ran over to him, throwing her arms around his neck and kissing his cheek and whispering, “Don’t be sad, don’t be sad,” over and over. Robert let go of his knees and embraced her as he would his own child and wept into her shoulder.

  “Aw,” said Ian, kneeling down beside them and putting one of his massive hands on Robert’s back.

  “It okay,” he said. “It okay.”

  Robert pulled one arm from around Andrea and took hold of Ian’s hand, holding it against his side and squeezing as tightly as he could. He did not wish to let go of either of them.

  After a few moments, Rael clapped his hands loudly and said, “Okay, enough. This gets any more warm and fuzzy I’ll lose my lunch. Come on, everybody, on your feet! That’s it, up we go. Good.” He opened the second set of curtains in the chamber to reveal a pair of large oak doors, each with a massive iron handle, each engraved with countless mysterious symbols and misshapen faces and ownerless hands reaching outward.

  “Ready to throw your no-hitter, Ian?”

  “Ian all set!” He coughed, wincing at the pain. “Ow,” he said, pressing a hand against his chest.

  Robert saw the pain on Ian’s face and almost started crying all over again.

  “Hey, Willie.”

  “What?”

  “Do you know why you despair?”

  He looked into Ian’s face as the giant tried to look brave, like it didn’t hurt all that much, then at Andrea’s small, fragile form next to him as she stroked his hand, and tried to imagine what kind of a life they’d had before Chiaroscuro.

  To his amazement and horror, he could.

  He reached out and gripped Ian’s hand again, then pulled Andrea close to him. “Yes, Rael, I think I do.”

  “Outstanding.” Rael grabbed the door handles and pushed. The two massive doors opened outward with an ancient groan into a darkness so deep that the blackest shadow would have been a white-hot sun. “Let’s go, Willy. Time for you to meet the folks.”

  With Ian and Andrea beside him, Robert moved through the doors into the darkness.

  Once the four of them were outside the chamber, Rael closed the doors behind them. “Do not move an inch, Willy, got that? The ledge we’re on is maybe, maybe twenty-five inches deep. You could take one baby step forward, but you’d never finish the second one.”

  “Right here’s good for me, thanks.”

  Rael laughed. “Ah, that dry wit of yours. I’m surprised Denise didn’t smack the shit out of you every chance she got. Ian?”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “Turn on your flashlight before Willy’s eyes get too accustomed to this blackness.”

  It was a large industrial-model flashlight, and its light cast a wide- and bright-enough beam that Robert could make out his companions from mid-torso up; in Andrea’s case, he could clearly see her neck and head, but still felt her hand in his and that was comfort enough.

  Narrowing his eyes against the glare of the light, Robert turned toward Rael and asked, “Where is this place?”

  Rael said nothing, and after a moment didn’t need to.

  Somewhere outside the circle of light there was a space deeper than deadest sea, currented with dust and pebbles deep-laid in granaries of silence where time was stored, cached, and frozen. It was an ancient place, beyond the measurement of age, whose mass and depth diminished the human form to less than a particle of memory in the nucleus of a dying cell. No wind entered this place, no soft breeze blew through, yet there was something out there, a presence, still and slumbering, whose slow intake of breath caused everything—the ledge, the walls, the bones beneath the skin, the atmosphere itself—to thrum.

  Robert had never felt more meaningless in his life than he did at this moment.

  “The folks,” he whispered.

  Rael put his hand on Robert’s shoulder. “Here, in this place, sleeps the Sorcerer of Night, Unkempt. The Sorcerer of Fatal Laughter and the Black Sorcerer sleep in places like this at opposite ends of the world. If you were to mark the three places on a world map and then join them with a single unbroken line, they would form a perfect triangle.”

  Robert began to slowly shake his head, whispering, “No, no, no, no....”

  “You need to see this, Robert. It’s important that you believe.” Rael looked at Ian and said, “Time for the wind-up and pitch, Ian. Make a great one, okay?”

  “‘Kay,” said Ian, stepping to the side and pulling back his arm once, twice, then lifting up one of his legs as he shifted his weight for the throw, and then the flashlight was airborne and twirling, its light creating dizzying strobe patterns as it rose above their heads and began to fall down, down, down, and yet farther down.

  “Keep your eyes on the light, Willy. You’ll only catch a glimpse of part of Him, but that’s all you’ll need.”

  Robert found himself staring into the center of the falling light, catching glimpses of rock formations and stalactites and fissures in stone and almost turned away for fear of what he sensed he might see, but then the flashlight bounced off a cluster of stones somewhere and spun sideways—

  —and for a moment that threatened to sear his mind forever he saw It; he stared down on part of the slumbering form of the Sorcerer of Night, Unkempt, and seeing a section of Its face he screamed within himself as he’d never before screamed. No nightmare, no Titan from storybooks, no grief, no euphoria, no imagined childhood boogeyman could have prepared him for facing something this sacred, for sacred it must have been, as anything so mythic and extreme and unimaginable must be sacred. It was both terrifying and compelling, a thing beyond Things, a being above Being, beyond love and bliss or their sum, beyond grief and violence or their total, beyond grace and prayer or their cumulative effects on the psyche, beyond even the place in humankind’s unconscious where the monstrous and depraved joined hands with the majestic and beautiful to begin the dance which ended with physical evil and moral goodness forever intertwined like the strands of a double helix encoded into the DNA of the universe and, finally, beyond the capability of Robert’s mind to comprehend and catalogue its hideous grandeur. He tried to force himself to close his eyes, to blank every detail of the sight from his memory and lock it away and bury it so he’d never have to look at it again, but he could not look away.

  “Watch the light, Willy,” said Rael, applying the subtlest pressure against Robert’s back, easing him toward the edge. “Just watch the light, watch it and believe and understand that you can never again be a part of the world you once knew...watch the light...and bring her back to us...bye-bye, Willy....”

  “Bye-bye,” echoed Ian and Andrea as the light beckoned him.

  Back and forth, glimmering first in his left eye, then his right, a pendulum of brightness, back and forth, back and forth, and then, with a final push, he was over the side and flying through space, flying toward the light as

  (I thought I saw)

  it rose up to meet him, glittering off the flesh of the ancient thing beneath, swinging, closing in on him, closer, closer, ever closer, until it seemed that

  (...a response in the...)

  he and the light and the slumbering Sorcerer were one, and here he would sleep until the world he knew had passed away and a newer, better place waited for

  (...left pupil—yes! There, did you...)

  all the Ians and Andreas and Raels and the countless nameless others, and then he would awaken and take their hands and they would follow him from the shadows of this place into the light the light and remain there in the

  (...see that?)

  light the light the light

/>   Chapter 6

  …from Dr. Steinman’s penlight shone into his right eye, then his left, and at last Robert blinked and pulled in a deep breath, feeling the slick pressure of the tube in his nose running all the way down into his stomach.

  Steinman made a last check of Robert’s pupils with his penlight, then clicked it off and slipped it into his pocket. “Nice of you to join us,” he said, taking Robert’s pulse.

  Robert tried to speak but found that his throat tissue had been replaced with sandpaper. He glanced to Steinman’s left and saw an IV stand that held three clear plastic bags, two of which were emptying into him, one that was filling with dark liquid from his stomach.

  “Here,” said Steinman, picking up a cup of crushed ice and holding it to Robert’s lips. “Don’t swallow, all right, just let the ice lie in your mouth and melt.”

  It took Robert three more helpings to empty the cup and allow the blissfully cool chips to coat his throat enough to summon a whisper, but when at last he was able to dredge up a semblance of his voice, he touched Steinman’s hand and said, “...ong?”

  “What was that?”

  “How...long...?”

  “Close enough to five days to call it. Do me a favor, look at my finger, that’s right. Now follow it with your eyes—no, don’t move your head, okay? Just your eyes. There you go...now over here...now back, one more time, there you go. Good. ” He looked over his shoulder at someone Robert couldn’t see and said, “His tracking is fine, pupils equal and reactive.” He looked at Robert again. “Now, squeeze my hand. Very good. Now with your left, squeeze. Excellent.” He went to the foot of the bed and pulled back the sheet, then removed a tongue depressor from his pocket and ran it up the inside of Robert’s left foot. “Can you feel that?”