“Single cells do this,” it said. “Not eat buttercups, but vanish into their progeny. The cell becomes, two, then four, and so on, until after a while the last trace is gone. But you can’t look upon that as death; barring unnatural mutations that should be gotten rid of, the descendants are simply that first cell, living over and over again. And sometimes, if things go as planned, eventually the descendants will grow back into their original form; they will re-become the first cell.
“Do you understand what’s happening right now?”
“No,” said Leah, watching as the stars above came closer, grew colder.
“Buddy is what you were before you became what you are, and he is also what you will become again one day, if things go as planned.”
“Why didn’t I just stay like Buddy?”
It was so cold, suddenly; so very, very cold.
“If I knew the answer to that, none of this would have ever happened. But I think it has something to do with worthiness.”
The Mammoth screamed as the ice came crashing down like a curse from Heaven...
IX
...the bitch! I’ll kill her, I swear to God!” Merc, screaming.
“Not if I get my hands on her first, you won’t.” Jimmy, crying.
Leah tried to move, tried to say something, but her body was stiff and cold and rigid; she couldn’t even blink her eyes.
Am I dead? she wondered, and then figured she must be or else Merc and Jimmy wouldn’t be acting this way.
Merc pulled out the 9mm. “I’ll bet you anything that cunt went over to Jewel’s to get herself a little more candy before she takes off.”
Some things do not seem to die at all.
“Jesus—Merc! Get back here!”
“What is it?”
“She’s...God Almighty, she’s still alive! Here, feel her pulse—no, in her neck!”
“Ohgod...”
“Christ, Merc, I don’t know what to do.”
“Thought you were a medicine man?”
“Sachem! I was a sachem in training! A spiritual healer.”
“Oh.”
Jimmy lifted Leah’s body into his arms. “C’mon, Merc, pull me out of here. We gotta find a cab and get her to the hospi—”
“Ohgod!”
“What? Merc, you’re scaring me, what’re you looking—”
“Over there! In the light! Do you see it? Ohmygod!”
A breeze, old and tired.
A touch, warm and safe.
Fingers, long and willowy.
Light.
So much almond-eyes light...
X
...the stars began to fade like guttering candles, snuffed out one by one. Out in the depths of space the great celestial cities, the galaxies, cluttered with the memorabilia of ages, were dying. Tens of billions of years passed in the growing darkness. Occasional flickers of light pierced the fall of cosmic night, and only spurts of activity delayed the sentence of a universe condemned from the beginning to become a galactic graveyard. Light flowed inward, and the sky snowed a blizzard of galaxies as the lens of night burned brighter than the sun, than all the stars in supernova, and the human race fell on its knees, blinded forever by the white-hot darkness in its eyes.
The air crackled with rage.
“I will do this for you, if you want me to,” said a voice. “They deserve nothing better, yet they deserve so much more.”
“Buddy?”
“Shhh. Just tell me what to do.”
“Be here in the morning when I wake up.”
“If that’s what you want.”
“Can’t you ever go back?”
“This is home. It always has been.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I know. Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For teaching me about worthiness. And love.”
“Am I dead, Buddy?”
“No. But the time is upon us to fly.”
Leah smiled. “Like Jimmy’s song.”
“Yes, like Jimmy’s song.”
And then Leah felt herself freed from her body, everywhere and nowhere at the same time, becoming light in its truest meaning, becoming light in its purest intention, including the darkness, and for a moment she was aware of a coldness that transcended temperature, a chilling sense of timelessness that touched her mind rather than her flesh, and within that coldness she heard an echo—distant but strong—of utter loneliness, and she recognized this sound because she’d been hearing it in the back of her own mind for all her life, only now it was fading away, away, away as the empty space left in its wake was filled with a blossoming awareness of all the knowledge left behind by the descendants who had simply been the first cell living over and over again, and though she didn’t yet understand everything revealed to her, she smiled deep within herself, knowing she would understand, in time...
XI
...she awoke on the table in the Rusty Room and rolled over to see Jimmy and Merc standing beside her.
“How’re you feeling?” said Jimmy, reaching out to touch her, then pulling his hand back at the last moment.
“I feel okay,” said Leah. “You don’t gotta worry about touching me.”
“I know,” said Jimmy, “it’s just that...well, the last time I touched you....” He took a step backward, and only then did Leah realize that Jimmy was...standing.
“Oh, Jimmy...”
“You did this,” he said. “You gave my legs back to me.”
She rose up on the table and looked at Merc. “Can I do anything for you, Merc?”
“You two’re gonna have to...to give me a little while to get my head around all of this.” He leaned over and brushed some of Leah’s hair out of her eyes. “You sure you’re feeling all right?”
“Uh-huh. Did you guys meet Buddy?”
Merc looked at Jimmy. “Well, I guess you could say that. Dude made himself quite an entrance.”
Leah giggled. “I’ll bet you were scared, huh?”
“No,” said Merc. “I been scared. This was way past that.”
“I damn near fainted,” said Jimmy, then, looking around, added: “Where is he now?”
Leah smiled. “He went home. Sort-of.” She jumped down from the table and walked over and gave Jimmy a hug. It felt great to hug him standing up!
Jimmy kissed the top of her head, then stroked her hair. “What do you want to do now?”
“I want to go get Denise.”
Merc smiled. “Do we have to be nice about it to Jewel?”
Leah’s smile grew wider. “No. Jewel isn’t Worthy.”
Jimmy and Merc looked at each other.
“Then we’re gonna find Randi,” said Leah. “And all the others just like us. And the dark-coat man. I want my brothers and my little sister back.”
“You sure you’re up to this?” said Jimmy.
“Uh-huh. I will take care of you. I will help us all make a home.”
Jimmy tilted her head back with his hands and looked into her eyes. “Peye’wik?”
“No,” said Leah. “It Is Here.”
“Well, what’re we waiting for?” said Merc, pulling out the 9mm and jacking back the slide. “Let’s get this invasion started.”
They made their way over to the ladder. Jimmy went first, then Merc, and Leah went last.
But before she began to climb, she crossed over to the hole to say good-bye to the River of Ash-People, then read the last words Buddy had left for her on the wall:
someone come
give this body no limits
slough the fevers
with your cool hand
make the flesh home
within the skin, life is long, life is hard
within the skin, life is hard
but not for much longer.
where do I live?
someone come
who will take me?
Leah looked down at the black-glass floor and saw her reflection; for just an instant, long enough for her to know
for sure, she saw her face become two, one superimposed on top of the other, and smiled as she looked into the black-almond eyes that watched the world from behind her own.
She pressed her finger into the rust and wrote:
I am here
Someone has come
And I will take you.
“No more living in Hollow Houses,” she whispered. “We’ll make ourselves Worthy again. I promise.”
She thought she heard the Ash-People singing thanks.
Then left to join her waiting friends.
The invasion was about to begin.
And a little child would lead them.
Afterward, There Will Be A Hallway
Introduction by Chet Williamson
Life after death is one of the standard tropes of dark fantasy fiction, and it's been handled in many different ways over the centuries. But I think it's accurate to say that Gary Braunbeck's depiction of it here is unique. This particular afterlife has a number of rules and restrictions that the reader, along with the story's protagonist, has to learn and adapt to, but that's part of the fun—and the pain. This story has both in large measure. It's a tale of loss and sorrow and longing and discovery and joy, and to say more about it would spoil your own joy of discovery. You're in good hands here, with a fine writer who has created a story both imaginative and emotionally charged, giving his readers a powerful and loving look into other lives...and afterlives.
Afterward, There Will Be A Hallway
“About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or
just walking dully along.”
—W.H. Auden
“Musée des Beaux Arts”
(…fingers barely brushing the surface of her skin but still her eyes fall through their sockets and into the back of her skull with soft, dry sounds…touching her cheeks, wanting to hold her face as a lover should, whispering that everything will be all right, it will, you’ll see, she only has to come back, please, please come back, don’t leave again, dearGodplease, but her head collapses inward, flesh crumbling apart, flaking away, fragmenting, becoming slivers, becoming specks, becoming dust, her face sinking, splitting in half, disintegrating…staring helpless as the rest of her crumples and decays, revealing nothing within, the parched shards of what were once her lips holding their form only one more second, long enough to say that it’s time…)
“…to get up, sleepy-head! C’mon—it’s Wednesday and it’s gonna start in a couple hours.”
“You’ve only reminded me ten times since last night,” I mumbled, head still buried underneath the sheet, a preview of that day when the sheet would not be pulled back and I’d be lying in a cold drawer in a cold room in the cold basement of some hospital like the rest of them. Someday. Just not today. As with most mornings, I was ambivalent about how I felt on the subject of that particular eventuality.
I had not been dreaming—I rarely dream these days; no, I’d been lying there envisioning what might happen if I were to chance touching—
—don’t. Just…don’t. You know better than to do this to yourself, Neal, my man.
I sat up, rubbed my eyes, and focused on the little girl standing in the doorway to my bedroom. Seven—no, wait, just turned eight years old. She still wore the Scooby-Doo pajamas underneath the white hospital robe, and those SpongeBob SquarePants slippers that looked cute from a distance but were in fact unbelievably creepy when you saw them up close. Her complexion was a sickly shade of yellow-white, with dark brownish-purple arcs under her eyes. Her left hand rose up to scratch at the padded, custom-made bandanna covering her bald head. The chemotherapy must have been hellish. Every time I looked at her, I wondered if I could have held on as long as she did.
She stared at me for a moment, then asked: “Can we open it now?”
“You’ve only been here two days, you know my rule.”
Hands on hips, one foot impatiently tapping, lower lip sticking out in defiance. “But it’s a dumb rule! A whole week? How come I gotta wait a whole week?”
“Because I…” I rubbed my face, feeling the first twinges of pain behind my left eye; a sure sign that a migraine was going to visit me today if I wasn’t careful. “Would you please come over here, Melissa?”
“Not until you start calling me ‘Missy’. I asked you, like, what? A hundred times.”
“Oh, don’t be so dramatic—this is only the second or third time and you know it.”
“Still…you better not think it’s dumb. Mom called me Missy because it sounded like ‘messy’ and she was always saying how my room was such a disaster area. ‘Messy Missy.’ I liked it. So you call me that, okay?”
I actually managed a small grin. “Your wish is my command, oh Messy Missy.” I pointed to the foot of the bed. “Now, would you come over here and sit down, please?”
She hesitated for only a moment before doing as I’d asked. I imagine her mother had warned her about strangers, about never, ever talking to them, let alone sitting on their beds.
I turned on the nightstand light, blinking against the sudden bright burst. “Missy, have you ever gotten mad at one of your friends and said something that you felt bad about later?”
“Well, duh. Who hasn’t?”
“My one-week rule is sort of my way of…of making sure something like that doesn’t happen with you and your stuff, duh.”
She cocked her head to the side and squinted at me. “You know that doesn’t make any sense, right? God, you’re weird.”
I sighed. “Okay, look at it this way. It’s like—and I am not weird.”
“Yes, you are.”
“Am not.”
“Are too.”
“I am not.”
“Shut! Up! You are too! I’ve seen weird people before, and you’re a freakazoid, mister. You don’t have any friends except for that lady who’s asleep in the other room and she’s never awake so for all I know, she hates your guts, nobody ever calls, you don’t go anywhere except to drive around all day stealing boxes, you almost never smile and when you do, you look like you’re trying to poop but can’t—you’re weird.”
Yep. Lost that one.
Something in my face must have alarmed her, because after a few moments she leaned forward and said, “I’m sorry. Really. I didn’t mean it in a bad way, y’know? You’re weird, but it’s a good weird, I think.”
“You don’t have to apologize, Missy. You’re right, I am weird and I don’t have any friends.”
“Not even that sleeping lady?”
I knew she’d get around to exploring the guest room sooner or later; I‘d been hoping for later. “I don’t know. I don’t know how she feels about me.”
“Who is she, anyway?”
“Her name’s Rebecca. She was my wife.”
“How long’s she been dead?”
“Three years this Friday.”
“She doesn’t look very good. Her breathing’s all wheezy and her skin—”
“—could we get back to the subject, please?” I was more than aware of how Rebecca looked and sounded, unless things had worsened since I’d checked on her last night. Though I knew I should (and maybe even a part of me wanted to), I couldn’t go back in there, not this morning. Seeing her last night—her hair still falling out in clumps, cheeks more hollow than the day before, lips cracked and parched, the black blotches on her skin that seemed to expand as I stood there watching—was bad enough. A second visit this soon was more than I could take.
Missy looked out toward the hallway, deep in an eight-year-old’s thoughts, and then turned back to me and said, “I could be your friend.”
“That’s sweet, but you’re not going to be around that long.”
“Because of the one-week rule thing?”
“Yes. I know this seems unfair, but I’m only doing it for your own good.” Dear God, did I actually just say
that? “It’s like when you do something or say something that seems like what you want to do or say right then, at that second, understand? So you say or do it, and then later on wish you hadn’t because it was mean or inconsiderate or just plain dumb. You wish you could take it back, but you can’t. Does that make sense?”
A shrug. “I guess.”
“Well it’s the same thing with your stuff, only it’s a lot more important. Once we open that box, you have to choose something, and it’s got to be the right something. If you pick the wrong thing, you’ll be….” I let fly with a soft groan of frustration; this was more difficult than I’d thought it would be. Throwing off the covers (I’d slept in my shirt and pants), I stumbled to my feet and crossed to the other side of the bedroom, pulling back the curtain covering the window there. “Come here. I want you to see something.”
Her eyes narrowed. “It isn’t something gross, is it? One time, this boy in my class, Eric, he said he had something real cool to show me, and it turned out he had this fat old slimy nasty water-bug that he’d squished open with his fingers. It looked like a big glob of snot with legs and pincers. I couldn’t eat my pudding at lunch that day, and I like pudding. A lot.”
“No squished bugs or anything like that, I promise.”
Halfway Down the Stairs Page 19