The spear stuck in the man’s back between his shoulder blades. For a moment the man kept running, but then he stumbled and went down. Even from this distance, Arnar could hear him struggle to draw air into his punctured lung.
The spear thrower ambled over slowly and stood above the man, its mouth parts clicking. Bracing the feathery end of its hind leg on the dying man’s back, it used three of its forelimbs to tear the spear free.
The man gave a single cry. After that, he didn’t move or make a sound.
Arnar felt sick.
The two barrow-men who had been conversing began to move among the bodies, choosing certain of them through a calculus Arnar could not discern and tossing them into a large tumbril. Three men—true men, not barrow-men—were harnessed to the front of the cart.
And then, abruptly, the paired barrow-men were standing over him. Through slitted lids, he watched them examine him. He held his breath. A moment later, he felt himself lifted by the shoulders and feet and carried, and then he was flying through the air, landing jarringly atop the bodies already in the tumbril.
How long did he lie there, pretending to be dead? Impossible to say. He was under a heap of bodies and could hardly breathe, let alone move. Time for him passed in different ways than he had known. At some point came the crack of a whip, and a true man cried out and the tumbril began to move, creaking its way through the carnage.
Once the movement of the tumbril had steadied into regularity, Arnar took the risk of moving as well. He managed to wriggle his way to the top of the pile, though one leg was caught and he couldn’t get it free. He tried to peer through the back slats of the tumbril, but it was difficult to see anything. He turned forward and raised his head slightly, then let it settle against another body as if he had simply fallen that way. Ahead, he made out the dim forms of the three true men pulling the tumbril, but where were the barrow-men?
And then something had him by the neck and was dragging him out of the tumbril. His leg was still stuck and being bent in the wrong direction, and he cried out in pain until the pile of dead shifted enough for him to be torn free from the cart.
He was dangling from the forelimb of the barrow-man. It regarded him curiously, its triangular head cocked to one side, its fractured eyes taking him in.
The barrow-man clicked at him, and then, when he did not respond, shook him.
“I … I don’t understand,” he said.
With one of its other forelimbs, the barrow-man switched on the box strapped to its neck. The barrow-man clicked again at Arnar. After a moment, the neck-box said in its gravelly, synthetic voice, Dead?
Arnar considered. The barrow-men were notoriously hard to deal with. What would be the safest answer? “Yes,” he finally risked. “Dead.”
The barrow-man’s mouthparts combed one another in excitement. It clicked again, a longer sequence this time. But you speak, the box said. Ghost?
Again Arnar thought. Finally he said, “Yes, let’s say I’m a ghost.”
The barrow-man made a high-pitched screeching sound. The creaking of the cart stopped, and the cart along with it. Suddenly all four of the barrow-men were surrounding him, prodding him with their forelimbs. One pushed too hard and too sharply, and he felt a rib break. He gave a sharp cry of pain. Startled, the barrow-man dropped him, leaping back with the other barrow-men.
Ghost, he heard a voice box say, then the others. Ghost. Ghost. Ghost.
They watched him from a distance. Could he run? Was there any chance he could make it out alive?
No, he told himself. None at all.
They had turned their neck-boxes off. All he could hear was their clicking, no translation. Three of them stood around him, hemming him in, forming a triangle with him at its center, while the fourth was a little distance away, digging a hole. It dug rapidly, using its hindlegs, and soon there was a great heap of dirt and the hole was done.
It looked up and offered a series of complicated clicks. Two of the barrow-men began moving toward Arnar, very slowly, as if stalking him. He took a step back and found the barrow-man who had been behind him had stepped back as well, leaving an open space. He took a step into it and then realized they were herding him. Why? Toward what? But of course he already knew: the hole.
Clutching his ribs, he tried to dart in a different direction. In a flash a barrow-man blocked his way. He took a step back in surprise and they moved just enough to make sure he couldn’t regain any of the ground he had lost.
The one with the spear slid it out of its sheath and reversed it so the shaft faced Arnar. It poked the spear at him gently. Why not the sharp end? wondered Arnar. Why not simply kill me?
A few seconds later, he was prodded into the hole.
They stood above the hole, motioning to him in a way he did not understand. After a while, one switched on its neck-box.
Ghost, the box said, then crackled. To your feet, please.
He stood. The hole went up to his neck, but his head was above its lip. It was easy to see out. He waited to see what they would demand of him next.
But they did not ask anything. Instead, he heard a rumbling sound and a great weight pummeled him. He would have fallen to his knees if he had been able, but the hole was full of dirt past his knees now. He tried to lift his leg.
Ghost, the neck-box said, please hold still.
“But you’re burying me,” said Arnar.
Said the neck-box, We are putting you to rest.
Another shower of dirt, and he was buried up to his chest.
“It will kill me!” he said.
It cannot, the neck-box explained. You are already dead. The barrow-man reached out and lightly tapped his forehead. We are honored to participate in this ritual of yours, this burial. We are honored to help you rest.
“No,” said Arnar.
It is for your own good, said the neck-box. And then the barrow-man attached to the neck-box made a precise gesture with a forelimb and the rest of the dirt came down.
They stamped on the earth to pack it tight. Only his head was left above ground. They brushed the stray dirt from his mouth and eyes and then departed one by one.
There, said the neck-box of the last one as it bent down close and peered at Arnar with its glittering, fractured eye. What could it even see of him? Now you are at rest.
“Please,” begged Arnar.
I am glad you are pleased, the barrow-man said, and left.
Arnar waited out the rest of the night. Insects found him and bit him. Flies turned circles on the blood dried in spatters on his face. Because of the broken rib and the dirt pressing against him from all sides, it hurt to breathe. When he saw the sky start to lighten and morning begin to come, he almost wept.
All through the day he tracked the movement of the sun across the sky. He tried to work his way out of the dirt, but it was packed too tightly for him to manage it alone.
He was very thirsty. The sun baked him and burned the skin of his face and then slid mercifully away, but he knew it also meant night would come again soon, and the biting insects along with it.
Just at dusk, he heard something rustling in the underbrush. Probably a wild beast, he thought. But just possibly another true man.
“Help!” he shouted, best he could. “Help!”
But when he saw who was coming, he stopped shouting.
The four barrow-men all came close and crouched down low around him so their heads formed a square with his own in the center. A neck-box crackled. Are you at rest? it asked.
When he did not reply, it asked again.
“Yes,” he said. It was the only thing he could think to say that might get him out of the hole.
You are at rest, said the neck-box. You are welcome.
Arnar watched as each barrow-man dug into the dirt beside him with a forelimb, scooped some up, and dumped it atop his head. He spat the dirt out, but almost immediately the next scoop came.
Eventually they stopped, but by that time his head was covered, his throat
full of dirt. He no longer thought. He no longer felt. He was, for lack of a better term, at rest.
The Shimmering Wall
1.
Those parts of the domed city were not the city at all—or maybe the parts we lived in were what was not the city. It was not, after all, our city, or at least had not been so originally. It had become, I suppose, our city. Or some parts had. The rest, we stayed clear of.
At least most of us did. There were always a few who did not leave well enough alone. We had all seen those parts, seen how they seemed encased in dirty glass or Lucite, semitransparent and flickering walls, rooms and furnishings distorted beyond. When people dared to thrust their hands against the Lucite, they found it was not Lucite at all, but a sort of firm, jellylike membrane. They could slowly push their way through. They let their arms sink to the elbow or even—the more daring—to the joint of the shoulder, then groped around behind that translucent wall, and when they drew their arm free the fingers at its end were often clenched around something. The distorted broken-off leg of a chair, for instance—if that was in fact what it was—a skew slosh of metal, anyway. Or a pen that was a semicircular loop made for hands other than ours. These oddities could be sold—there were those who collected them. We treated these collectors with as much suspicion as those who gathered the objects in the first place.
There were times, too—rarer these—when someone would thrust a hand through, then an elbow, then an arm, and begin to grope around, only to suddenly be taken hold of by something on the other side of the shimmering wall. From our vantage, we saw only a shape, a vague collection of angles, distantly humanoid in form, take hold and drag the person through. Such individuals never returned.
No one had ever crossed through the wall willingly. They had only felt around, one arm in, the rest of their body out, and drawn objects out. Perhaps these objects were in the form they had been in on the other side, or perhaps in coming through took on some distorted version of their true form.
I was, I suppose, unique. I was an orphan—but there were other orphans among us. My uniqueness was based not on that but on the circumstances of how I became such.
My parents worked together to bring bits and pieces of that other city across. They would take turns pushing through a shimmering wall, watching their arms distort and become a series of angles. They would draw an object out and sell it to collectors. That was how they lived. They always worked together, and as a result always took me along with them.
My earliest memory is this: my parents pressed against a vague and shimmering crystalline wall, one reaching through, the other, legs braced, grasping the first around the waist. I had been placed on a ratty blanket as far away from the wall as possible. I pawed the blanket, found crumbs or bugs on the floor, rolled them around in my mouth, spat them out. And then, after what seemed to me a long while, my parents turned, looking simultaneously terrified and triumphant, an unnatural and pain-wracked object held high in my mother’s hand.
…
Or maybe this is not my first memory. I saw that scene or scenes like it so many times in the years to come. Sometimes the object was in my father’s hand, sometimes my mother’s. Sometimes, too, they groped around and then, screaming, quickly withdrew, one dragging the other free as, on the other side of the shimmering wall, a being of awkward angles approached rapidly, tried to catch hold of them, failed.
Was the being the same as us? I wondered. I had seen my father’s arm through the shimmering wall and was uncertain there was any difference in its distorted angles through the wall as compared to the angles of the arm (if it was an arm) of the being or beings that stalked them there. I wondered this only later, when I was seven or eight. My parents were still on a good run, taking just enough from behind each shimmering wall to provide us with another three weeks, or four, or five, of food, of life.
When you are older, my mother told me, you must find a companion, someone just like you, willing to watch out for you as you reach through the wall, and you for her. You must know how far you can reach and go that far but no farther. You must know how to sink your arm to the shoulder joint and then reach even farther without letting your head push through. And then, God forbid, when a being approaches from the other side, to withdraw quickly with the help of your companion. She will tell you something is coming, and she will help you draw your arm free before it is too late.
This was, indeed, what my mother was to my father, until the moment when she was not. Until something came and she did not alert my father quickly enough, or else my father was sunk too deep, or the being moved too fast. Before we knew it, it had caught hold of my father’s arm, and my mother was dragging on his waist, trying to tug him free. My father was screaming. There I was, nine years old, my arms around my mother’s waist, trying to help my mother pull him free.
And indeed he did come free, but without his arm, which had been neatly severed at the elbow, and just as neatly cauterized.
2.
For weeks after, we avoided those shimmering walls. And yet, as time went on, my parents realized they did not know what else to do to survive. Their whole livelihood had involved reaching through walls—they had no other skills. My mother still had two good arms to reach with, and my father one, and as we grew hungrier they decided I was old enough to assist my mother as a lookout. We had to take the risk. We would, we vowed, take that risk as seldom as possible.
That strung us along for another five years, until I was fourteen. And then the same collection of angles appeared behind the shimmering wall, and though I immediately shouted out, it was upon my mother too quickly and pulled her through. My father, holding on to her waist with his remaining hand and forearm, followed after. And I, holding my father’s legs, came last of all.
The passage through was strange, as if my body were being stretched and then reassembled to form a new creature. I could feel my father’s legs, my arms wrapped around them, but then, suddenly, they were not legs at all, and then my arms were not arms at all either. And then my mind caught up with whatever transformation I had gone through, and I could think of his legs as legs again, and my arms as arms, and was unsure what, if anything, had changed.
And then, I lost consciousness.
I was lying on a floor flecked with color, as if mica—though the color floated and spun and moved, which mica as I understood it would not. Things in the world have certain properties, and one comes to understand these properties and what they are, what they mean. One comes to count on things being what they are. And yet, was I still in the world? I did not know. What did I mean by world? I was barely conscious, to be honest, and unsure I was in any world at all.
Near me was a being who resembled a human in every respect except for being carapaced in light. Does that qualify as every respect? Probably not. He was some manifestation of a human, though not human at the same time. Perhaps he had been so once, but it had been a long time since that was all he was.
At his feet lay the bodies of my father and mother. With a tool or instrument possessing a bright edge of light, he had begun to disjoint my father’s corpse. Both feet had been severed and lay idly flopped to either side of the body—bloodless, the mechanism he had used to sever them having apparently cauterized them at the same time.
As I watched, he cut through one of my father’s legs just below the knee. It looked like the left knee, but something told me I was seeing it wrongly, that it was in fact the right.
My mother was apparently unscathed but equally dead.
When he noticed me stirring, he interrupted his task and spoke. “Hello there,” he said, his voice exceptionally deep and pleasing.
At first I could say nothing. When he repeated his greeting, I found myself mouthing it back to him. “Hello,” I managed weakly.
He inclined his head, returned to his task. I could not move my limbs. I could lift my head and look around but little more than that.
“Please, do not be afraid,” he said, then severed my father’s
head.
“That’s my father,” I managed.
“Not anymore,” he said, and then made quick work of my mother as well.
In the end, the pair of them were less bodies than neat arrangements of sectioned parts, little more than stacks of firewood. Though, admittedly, to start a fire with them would have been very difficult indeed.
“How is it you speak my language?” I asked. He was moving between the pile that had been my father and the pile that had been my mother. He kept removing a portion of one or the other pile and putting it back in a different way, then standing back to judge the results.
“No,” he answered distractedly. “You are speaking our language.”
His voice was beautiful, almost unbearably so, and somehow familiar too. It warbled and came to me in multiple tones, as if there were three layers of him for every layer of me.
I blacked out again. I don’t know why. When I came to again, I had crawled to the translucent shimmering wall and was trying, ineffectually, to shove my head through. How long I had been at this task, I had no idea.
The other being was beside me, bending down slightly, a concerned look just visible behind the blaze of light that enveloped his face.
“We are not going to hurt you,” he said. “Did you think we were going to hurt you? We don’t hurt children. We never do.”
“Who’s we?” I managed, through clenched teeth.
“We?” he asked. He gestured to his own chest. “We’re just like you,” he said. “You speak the same language as we do. You think the same thoughts as we do. But we’re not you.”
“Then what are you?”
But for this the being seemed to have no answer.
“Just sit back,” he said. “Relax. It will only take a moment to dispose of your parents.”
I watched it happen, though what exactly it was that was happening was difficult to say. The being moved back and forth between the piles, continuing to adjust them slightly until the one on the left, the pile that had been my mother, began to glow.
The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell Page 10