The Pulse

by A. E. Shaw

  He grabs the little leather bag and rams as many of the polished jewels into it as he can. He rips the bedsheets from the bed, too, stuffs them on top. Last, he grabs a leather-sleeved ornamental knife and his sparkmaker, a ridiculous consideration, when everything is threatened by the very thing it’s designed to create, and runs.

  He runs down the stairs, through the flames, pail clutched tight in his hand, instinct guiding him out and down the corridor. The walls radiate blistering heat.

  Selina is gone.

  The fire has already raged through the kitchen and the heat of its embers is much more vivid than that of the flames. The table is a glowing shell of itself, and there’s a stench of burnt meat.

  He makes his way out the other side of the kitchen to the landing. He only ever goes this way to visit Selina, has no business with anyone else’s quarters, but wonders, now, for the first time, if, amongst them all, there’s some way out of here.

  “Selina?” he calls, but his throat is shot, scratched and horrible. “Alej?” he mouths, as if mouthing alone would be enough.

  The convergence is filled with smoke and rubble, tiny pyres of panelling here and there.

  This is the end of everything he knows. A curtain of finality falls on him, as, behind him, a noise still louder than any other rumbles, trembles all about him. The pail gets heavier and hotter in his hand, but he knows he can’t let go of it. His head swims. He has to move. Any direction is better than none. Forwards, he wills his shaking legs.

  No idea whose corridor this is, no knowing if there’ll be a way out of it at the end, or if he’s only going to go and die in someone else’s hole. There are shapes, things, pieces, wooden things, burning, burnt, someone lived here, Aiden doesn’t care who. Any sense of time or perspective is long gone.

  Something strikes the wall in front of him, so different and at odds with everything else. Something white, strong, illuminating the debris-filled path. It is nothing Aiden has ever seen before. It passes, clouds over. It was light. White light. Light is orange. Light is grey. Light is dim. It is never this bright, except at the very heart of a flame.

  Everything around him turns to ice and he is consumed by silence. He doesn’t even hear the pounding of the blood in his veins, not any more. Aiden feels as if he’s pulled towards that light in a great tumble of scrambling and dust, choking, retching and incessant smoke.

  After eternity, Aiden’s brain starts to stir. He feels the comfort of emerging from a heavy, beautiful dream. A lazy, cosy, indulgent dream of the most delicious things, the most glorious grandeur and wonder and delight. He feels himself held and safe and smiling.

  In reality, he is a broken, bleeding mess, held together only by luck and fortune, the warmth around him that of care he cannot yet - and may never - appreciate.

  Before he can slide into this reality, before he can observe and digest it, he lets go again, and the silence returns.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Outside

  Feeling returns with a burst, a vast, puncturing swell and expulsion; the ground beneath Aiden shifts and slides and everything is pain. His hands are hot and surrounded by something crunching, absorbing; he’s sinking. Everything inside him tries to get outside him in a convulsion of vomit and sweat. His chest stabs and his muscles clench and grind and the taste of existence is foul, bilious, acid and filth. He feels the warmth of the contents of his stomach spilling out onto his skin, rivuleting down his chest, and so horrific is everything else that vomiting is a comfort.

  He can’t open his eyes. He can see red, without doing so. He is delirious, lost, without concept of which way gravity is securing him, if, indeed, it is at all.

  Alej is holding Aiden as he vomits, but Aiden doesn’t know that. Selina is trying to clean him up and cool him down with wads of wet grass, but Aiden doesn’t know that either. They are Outside, and of all the things Aiden doesn’t know, this, to him, would be the most important.

  Selina and Alej say little to each other. The three of them have never been in the same place at the same time, and in some way, at this early stage, it seems to them to be wrong to talk when one of them can’t listen.

  Alej unwrapped the bundle of Aiden’s belongings. He used the pail to get water from the stream, and now he and Selina curl together around Aiden in the silk, sheltering from the wind and dust. Here it’s cold at night - because here, night and day exist just as they always have done.

  After numerous false starts, during which he emits just aspirated confusion, Aiden finally gutters out a “Help…” and both of them are by him, whispering, reassuring. Aiden feels surrounded and safe, whilst simultaneously feeling so incredibly sick he daren’t move a fraction.

  And so they sit, and lie, and cough and sip water for the rest of that night, and for the next day and night too. Alej shows Selina that you can chew the grass to calm the hunger, but Selina knows that they’ll have to do something to find food soon, and that they can’t stay here forever. She’s scared, and for good reason, but she can’t explain those reasons to the other two, not yet.

  Aiden should be grateful that there’s something taking up so much of his thought and feeling, being as if he were to stop and reflect on everything he’s lost in just one night, he might implode entirely.

  Early on the third day he tries to stretch out and to stand, but the ground is cruelly unstable and his limbs tangle underneath him, numb from the pain, now.

  “Keep as still as you can,” Alej says, his voice low and rounded, “I think you’re very hurt.”

  Aiden is grateful to have his state acknowledged with words. His hearing seems wrong – though Alej is right next to him, his voice is distant as if it were in another room. But it’s nice to hear words, and be called back into the moment.

  Regardless of Alej’s words, Aiden decides he needs to move, to rearrange his limbs, and to identify what room he’s ended up in, for he still believes he’s in the castle. Something is in his way, then something is lumpy, and something else is soft. Something is wet, and something sticks to his face. Something cold wipes across his face, and there is air on his skin, cold, raw…fresh. Fresh air.

  Outside still doesn’t register.

  Aiden groans as he turns onto his side and hacks, body convinced there’s poison inside, still some kind of darkness to get rid of.

  “Shhh,” Selina says, unhelpful as Alej, but gentler.

  Selina is the first thing Aiden sees when he finally opens his swollen eyes. Her vague outline is all he manages to see before he closes them again. Even the weak, grey daylight that shrouds the morning sky drives acute splinters of agony straight through his eyeballs. He reaches out to her, and she positions herself alongside him, embraces him. He’s shaking, and much thinner than she’d ever noticed. His hair is frizzled grey with dirt and smoke and his skin is mauled grey with nineteen years of indoors.

  It takes so much time for Aiden to see the others. It’s another day before he even notices that Selina’s hair, her lavish, long tied and plaited and twisted and loose dark hair is gone. Now there is nothing but a frizz, a mere inch of molten darkness. She looks older, wiser, sadder.

  “It’s alright,” Selina repeats, but she is telling herself this, rather than him.

  Aiden learns all over again how to move and sit and arrange himself, and eventually he feels his body transform from something pale and broken into something pale and patched. It’s not the greatest of transformations, but to Aiden, it’s everything.

  He can’t process the confusion the experience of being with two different people at the same time for more than a few moments gives him. A simple situation of numbers leaves him on edge. Sitting here, on the edge of his own existence, everything being so resoundingly physical, it asserts that this is not a dream, although it still feels as unreal to Aiden as any dream he’s ever had.

  Selina feeds him water as best she can, cold at his lips, tracing shivers down his chest inside and outside, swallows quenching the burning he feels from mouth to s
tomach for only the briefest of moments.

  Aiden doesn’t think about anyone else; doesn’t worry about the elders. Their whereabouts don’t even cross his mind. His diamonds are at his throat, that much he knows, and that is enough.

  Alej and Selina know the elders are dead. They are each, in their own way, thinking of this.

  It was Alej who discovered the fire. He heard the roof of one of the chambers collapse and the slow, grievous rumbling of the annexed wings crumpling in turn. He dashed immediately to find Selina, to yank her from her smoke-filled quarters, and she fled in turn to do the same for Aiden. Whilst she did this, Alej bolted for Michael’s room, trying first to find him, and second to clear and secure that room, for it had the door to the Outside, the only way in and out of the building he knew.

  Alej had been in and out of the castle many times in his life. He worked outside more days than not. As Aiden’s business was to learn, so Alej’s was to work. His business was the physical stuff, the maintenance of the systems that enabled them to survive in the isolation that is so much greater than any of them have yet to understand. Alej was a farmer, in the smallest and most peculiar of farms.

  They had simple, sustainable crops: leaves, wheats, enough for six, reliable for a lifetime, encased in a glasshouse that has now smashed into a shower of white dust, lost beneath a waterfall of crumbling stone. There are - were? - animals, too. Cows, goats, and, so Michael told him, antelope, but Alej never saw them alive, only dead and hung in a tiled stone outhouse at the side of the castle. He’s run and walked and tended these gardens since he can remember.

  Crucially, Alej has always lived in the castle, just as Aiden presumes he has. He was taught primarily by Michael, and also knew Miriam. She taught him to cook, to understand food as fuel. He only met Eldringham on the day he was introduced to Aiden, but Michael had told him she was there, that she taught Aiden ‘the book things’ - things that were, Alej was assured, not his business.

  Alej’s business was nature and nurture and food and water. He understands the importance of the stream that bubbles up through the harsh ground at the crest of the mountain upon which the castle was built. It came up right in the centre of the greenhouse, immediately directed and separated and filtered through a gilded system of pipes. The stream supplied all that ice-cold water to the building, and even out here, even after the fire, it bubbles readily as it ever did: perfectly new and clean and delicious.

  Alej has had the best possible start in these strange confines, for he has none of Aiden’s delusions and peculiarities, and a healthy sense of what it takes to be alive. He knows how to grow things, the reality of developing plants in the strange atmosphere he maintained with a multitude of grand machinery which now smokes and ticks over sadly, smashed and miserable, useless and nothing.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Revelation

  The second morning since the fire. The sun still hasn’t shone through. Dense grey days, followed by chill, cloud-covered nights. Alej likes weather, its unpredictability and the way everything changes its appearance as clouds come and go.

  As he washes himself in the stream for the umpteenth time, the residue of the fire still raw on his skin, Alej eyes the smoking, occasionally glowing remains of the castle. He has no feelings attached to the sight, only a nagging concern; what am I supposed to do now?

  Alej has only ever served. His duty was to make himself ever more useful, ever stronger and more capable. He was mystified by Aiden’s library and Aiden’s apparent content with being so slight and weak.

  “It’s the differences between you and me”, Aiden had explained to him, once, “that make me such a triumph”.

  Alej didn’t understand this, but he didn’t question it, or care about it. Aiden says many things he doesn’t understand. In their allocated time together, Aiden would read to him, recite to him, and Alej was simply fascinated by the idea that words could be made solid, that they existed outside people’s mouths and minds on pages and parchments.

  But Aiden is here. Others are not. The elders. All gone. Alej saw them all, found them all, as he raced around the burning castle, saw them beyond obstacles too great to cross, trapped and crushed and smothered.

  Worst of all, none of them seemed to have made even an effort to escape.

  At least Aiden and Selina are here, Alej repeats to himself, out loud.

  He scrubs his tan-gold skin rust-red in the stream, feeling circulation perk up in his veins. Looking at the sky, as he stretches his limbs out this way and that as if the air might clean him as much as the water, he thinks it might rain later. Michael taught him about weather.

  Maybe rain could be of some use. Alej remembers that it’s good to dig over the ground if it’s going to rain, and then he remembers he can’t do that. That, even if he could, there’d be no point.

  Alej doesn’t have any hope for the building, nor for all the tools and pieces that were within it. He knows his quarters are gone; he already tried to get back into them before he got to the stream, but they’re buried beneath smouldering stone, blackened stone, and still more broken stone.

  His quarters were sparse. Alej slept wrapped in a brown woollen blanket on a bare floor, without so much as a bed frame or a mattress. His trousers, which he shakes and beats with a stick in place of washing and scrubbing them clean, are made from suede. Alej can spin and stitch and mend if he needs to. These trousers have been mended so many times that now they’re more patch than piece, but Alej doesn’t mind. They’re just another thing he likes to take care of. Michael told him he could have new clothes, but Alej didn’t want new. He’s never known or looked for new in anything that doesn’t grow.

  His shirt is white (was white, now it’s singed and rippled black and grey) tight, so it doesn’t get in the way of his work. Alej is blissfully ignorant of his classic good looks, another thing Aiden can identify with that grand education of his: Alej is so perfectly cut and utterly symmetrical he appears sculpted.

  He takes time alone, sits looking left and right to the boundaries. You can’t see past, can’t see down. Alej only knows that there must be ‘down’ because Michael explained the concept of ‘mountain’ to him, and that this was one. He never mentioned what might be at the bottom of it.

  When he returns to the others, fresh water in hand, Aiden is awake, eyes open, laid out on his back, staring upwards.

  “He’s been like that for ages,” Selina says, her eyes not moving from Aiden’s shallow figure.

  Aiden is assimilating. First the air, the coolness, newness of it on his skin, the whistling of its movement in his ears, the feeling of it even in his eyes as he blinks. Then the light; no dampness or must to it, clean and clear. Everything looks so sharp. Aiden always believed objects to be a little fuzzy around the edges like flames, but out here, everything has points.

  Then there’s the sky. The sky drowns out everything else. When Aiden looks up, he feels like dying. He’s transfixed by the limitless space above him. Even though it’s blank with cloud, it’s so much more than he’d imagined, through a thousand pages of tales of bright skies and starry skies and night skies and sunshine blue skies…even this plain, plain sky surpasses all the flat colourful pictures of sky he’d conjured up, as contained as if they were only the width of the mental paper he’d drawn them on.

  Selina smiles at Aiden. “You know,” she says to Alej, her voice low, gentle, avoiding any strain, hoarse from the smoke and the screaming, “I’m not sure he’s ever been Outside before.”

  “Goodness,” is Alej’s eventual, confused reply.

  Selina’s smile widens, bright for the first time through the dirt and mess of her appearance. “You sound just like Michael,” she replies.

  Alej frowns. Should he sound like someone else?

  “Well, he’s dead now,” he offers, his best attempt at conversation.

  Selina recoils. “You shouldn’t say it like that.”

  Alej frowns, and resolves to be quieter. Just two sentences, and a cri
tique given to each. When he and Selina socialised, they rarely gave much time over to talking.

  None of them know what to do next. They all sense there needs to be a ‘what next’, but without an order, without being pushed one way or another, no-one wants to begin.

  None of them fear silence, having spent swathes of their lives in it, both alone and together.

  Without warning, Aiden moves. He shifts, half-leaping, half-crawling, six feet across the grass to the heap of things that were in his bucket. ‘Careful!’ Selina exclaims, and Alej moves to help. Aiden is scrabbling at the heap, his fingers trying uselessly to get a purchase on the small leather bag of gemstones.