Elemental (15 page)

Read Elemental Online

Authors: Steven Savile

BOOK: Elemental
13.05Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
“You're doing this for nothing,” she said. “There's no Violet Dog to accept your offering. The hollow field was made by a swallow hole. I've heard of them. They're appearing across Noreela now that magic has gone and the land is winding down.” She waited for the man to react, but he kept on crawling. The field was painfully silent. “Do you hear me?”
The Mourner stepped forward, emerging from the trees and becoming the second living thing in the field. The man stopped and stared at her, pulling back leathery lips to reveal his few remaining teeth. His left arm seemed to give out and he fell into the mud. He lowered his head and rested it on the ground, hissing, writhing, making strange patterns in the wet earth.
The Mourner closed her eyes, and the man's wraith was already screaming.
“You're dying,” she said.
“I don't care. The Violet Dog will be here soon, and it will wake the dead. My mother, my father, my brothers, and my wife. It
will
wake them!” He started sobbing into the wet soil.
“And you?” the Mourner asked. “When you die, do you want to be woken?”
The man looked up, raised himself on outstretched arms. “Of course,” he said.
The Mourner shook her head. “The disease has made you mad. The disease, and that thing in the field you can't explain, it's driven you to distraction and—”
“It spoke to me,” the man said. His voice was growing weaker. “It told me what to do. I sat in the hollow field for a whole day when the
last of my family and friends died. I sat next to the hole, and I was being watched, and it gave me hope.”
“Where's the hope in being living-dead?” the Mourner said. “That's what they did, you know, or so it's said. They took life and then remade their victims in their own image. Dead, but walking. There's no hope in that.”
“You have no idea. You never lost anything like I have!”
“I never
had
anything like you. No family, no lover. I've always been a Mourner.”
I've always been alone,
she thought. But that was more than she ever wanted to say. She closed her eyes and sighed, blocking out the wraiths. She would get to them soon.
“Don't you feel it?” he asked. “You do. You know it's there. And it'll have your soul too.”
She turned away from the dying man and walked through the field of corpses. She started at the farthest corner where an old man was tied to a dead tree. Signs of the disease that had killed him were evident, and she quickly found his wraith. Her chant was low and fast, and the wraith calmed and went down into the earth, below this plane and into the next. The corpse looked the same, but the noise in the Mourner's mind was slightly lessened.
She went from body to body, chanting their wraiths down and setting them at peace. She always kept one eye on the man writhing in the mud. He tried to pull himself after her, and occasionally he shouted. But his words were making less sense than ever, his language distorted into a dialect she did not know, and eventually he lay still.
It took her until the sun was dipping to the west to reach the final wraith. It was still raging, and she recognized the man's madness in its violent twisting. All the other wraiths had wanted to be given peace, but this one still awaited the touch of the Violet Dog. However he had come to know about those monsters, he had been so obsessed that his wraith still craved resurrection in rotting flesh.
The Mourner began her chant, low and fast, and she knew that it would take until morning.
 
 
After she chanted the dead madman's wraith down, she had another nightmare:
The Violet Dogs are attacking a town on the Cantrass Plains. They swarm in from the west, slaughtering horses and sheebok to begin with, then setting into the town's defenders. The people raise a valiant defense, but it is over in a matter of hours. The Violet Dogs wait in the defeated town for a while, eating those dead people too mutilated to rise again, resting, turning their faces to the sun as if challenging its brightness. Many of the dead have already risen and started their shambolic march to the east. They are the Violet Dogs' advance army, sent on to bear the brunt of any more sustained defenses that other towns may offer. But the outcome, inevitably, will be the same.
The town in ruins, the Violet Dogs streak out across the landscape, like a flow of blood heading east. None of them remain behind. They come, they destroy and kill, and then they move on. Their victims rise again. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to their assault, other than to spread the contagion with which they are afflicted.
The Mourner woke up wondering whether the Violet Dogs had ever been truly alive.
 
 
She knew that she should bury the dead, but at the same time the thought came,
Why bother
? They were at peace, and moving them from an upright stick to a hole in the ground would do nothing to benefit them. Her job was done. She could leave the corpses to carrion.
And yet the Mourner was not yet ready to head back to Long Marrakash. Something drew her east, not west. Something she had to see, to know, and hopefully to understand. So she went that way, pushing through the trees and undergrowth until she stood on the edge of the hollow field once again, and she tried to imagine just what had driven Kinead's single survivor mad. She had heard of swallow holes in the land, pits that sucked in their surroundings, but she had never seen one
until now, and she never truly believed.
It's the land wearing down
, another Mourner had once told her.
It's Noreela eating itself as it dies
.
She started walking down the gentle rocky slope toward the base of the hollow. The snow had started again, and now it was settling on the stone, damping the sound of her footsteps. It felt as though she was walking into air that grew thicker with each step, the coldness offering a resistance she had never felt before. Fear, she supposed, could do that even to a Mourner.
Something cried out above her, and when she looked up she saw a flock of skull ravens flying west to east. They came in over the fields and then swerved, passing around the great bowl in the land instead of straight across it.
She was perhaps halfway to the base of the hollow now, and with every step something inside was urging her to turn and flee. Fear built up, but she could deal with that. A lifetime filled with death had given her a particular insight into that emotion. The thing telling her to turn around was something deeper, darker, less well known. Something more basic.
A hundred steps from the hole at the center of the hollow, the Mourner stopped and fell to her knees. She smelled age and rot and something worse than death. She cried out and tried to back away, but her legs seemed fixed to the ground by the cold, held there as if the cold itself were an attractive force. She waved her arms and leaned to the left, the right. Still she did not move. She could only go forward. Her knees scraped across the sharp rock, staining the snow red. She struggled to her feet again and walked the final few steps, and even there, leaning over the edge and looking down, breathing in the stink of ages as though the land itself were rotting, still she could not see.
 
 
As the Mourner fled Kinead, the hollow in the ground and the field of corpses, something intruded into her mind and gave her images of cold and darkness that she could never understand. She did not even take time
to collect food and clothing from the village. The snow had increased and she walked into a blizzard, yet the pull of the Temple of Lament was already strong. There lay safety and peace, and a loneliness she knew of old.
“No such things as Violet Dogs,” the Mourner said, and the sound of her voice gave comfort. Deadened though it was by the heavy snow, tinged with the fear that she could not shake off, still she started talking, repeating that phrase for as long as it sounded true.
In a very short time she could talk no more.
BY ERIC NYLUND
 
Eric Nylund has a bachelor's degree in chemistry and a master's degree in chemical physics. He has published five novels: virtual reality thrillers
A Signal Shattered
and
Signal to Noise
; contemporary fantasy novels
Pawn's Dream
and
Dry Water
(nominated for the 1997 World Fantasy Award); and the science fantasy novel
A Game of Universe
. He has also written books for the Halo game universe, including
Halo: The Fall of Reach
and
Halo: First Strike.
Eric Nylund lives near Seattle with his wife, author Syne Mitchell.
Man will analyze, calculate with microscopic precision,
and narrow his perception until one day he will be able
to measure everything in his ever-shrinking universe …
and be able to
imagine
exactly nothing.
—last telegram from Sir Eustace Carter Van Diem
(of the famed Lost Nile Expedition) to the
Royal Geographic Society, 16 March 1841.
Dr. Robert Lang wished
he could take the old man anywhere else; the mountains, a beach, he'd even have settled for a night at a bowling alley.
The room had a single bed, a rack of electric bio-monitors, a dust-covered television suspended in the corner, and nothing else to get in the way of the attending staff. It felt like a prison cell—not a private room in the most prestigious elder-care facility in the country.
The man in bed was emaciated, his skin taut and his eyes recessed in their sockets. The last thing Dr. Lang wanted to do was bother him with questions, but he had no choice.
He pulled a chair next to the bed and sat.
“Mr. Van Diem? Sir?”
The old man's eyes fluttered open and focused on the young doctor sitting by his side. His thin lips quavered into a smile. “None of my
nurses wear such sad expressions. I appreciate the sentimentality, Dr. Lang.”
He reached out and touched Lang's hand. And as if he had felt something unexpected, he suddenly looked at the doctor's hands. “Are you an artist?”
Fifteen years ago, Lang had painted. But he quit art when he'd fallen in love with his one required science class: biology. Before he could blink, he found himself a premed major, up to his eyeballs in student loans, and at Oceanview as a resident. He knew helping people was his life's work … but sometimes he missed being able to make his imaginings real and create whole worlds on canvass.
“Yes, a long time ago.”
Van Diem nodded and withdrew his hand.
“Are you well enough to talk, sir?”
“Ah.” Van Diem struggled to shift his frail frame higher upon his pillow. “You wish to discuss Dr. Ambrose.”
“You were the last to see him.” Dr. Lang resisted the impulse to add the word
alive
to the end of this statement.
It had been six days since Ambrose went missing in the middle of his rounds. His Mercedes remained in the parking garage, his coffee half-drunk on his desk; they even found his notes in this room, halted mid-sentence.
“Do you remember anything?” Lang asked, leaning closer. “Something perhaps you forgot to tell the police?”
“Are you my doctor, now?” Van Diem's hazel eyes lit like tiny candles, and he sat straighter. “Anything we discuss is covered by doctor-patient confidentiality?”
Lang wasn't sure what he meant. He glanced at Van Diem's chart. There was no mention of senility, Alzheimer's, or other dementia in the hundred-four-year-old man.
“Of course,” he said.
Unless, Lang failed to state, a life was at stake. And one was: Lang's.
The police had him marked as their prime suspect in Dr. Ambrose's disappearance. His arguments with Ambrose were well known to the staff. There had been a scuffle last month over a nurse. Everyone hated Ambrose. He was indifferent to his patients' suffering, molested the nurses, and enjoyed playing God. Lang, however, had been the only one on the staff who had communicated his feelings with his fists.
His animosity for the man must have been obvious to the detectives when they had interviewed him.
Van Diem cleared his throat, startling Dr. Lang from his wandering thoughts.
“You were somewhere else, young man?”
“Yes, I'm sorry.”
The old man stared into Lang's eyes, unblinking.
Van Diem was another mystery. According to his records he came to Oceanview Convalescent Home thirty years ago. In his commitment statement, he said he needed peace and quiet before he continued his journey. He had no previous medical records. No social security number. His bills were paid from a Cayman Islands account.
Dr. Lang took a pen from his coat and flipped open his notepad. “Ambrose saw you on his rounds, and then? Did he leave? Was there anyone with him?”
“Yes. He came. He left. Alone. Not.” Van Diem's voice was a rustle of dry leaves. He inhaled. “I smell tobacco and vanilla bean.” His gaze drifted to Lang's lab coat pocket. “You have a pipe?”
Lang wondered how Van Diem could smell such a thing, but nonetheless fished Dr. Ambrose's pipe from his pocket. It was a meerschaum. The white stone was carved into an elephant's head, trunk flowing into the stem, and large ears folded against the body of the bowl. Lang could make out tiny wrinkles in the animal's skin so lifelike that he half expected its soulful eyes to blink.
“I found it in the hall, in the ashcan.” Lang shrugged. “I should turn it over to the police, I suppose. They could swab it for DNA—”
Van Diem grabbed Lang's wrist and drew him close. “No!” He looked at his hand, talon-like, grasping Lang. He frowned and released the doctor.
Lang rubbed his wrist, astonished at the old man's strength.
“My apologies, Dr. Lang, but you must not give that to the police. It is mine.”
Lang had never imagined someone so old could have moved so fast. Psychotic mania triggered by what? The pipe? He dared not question him further.
“I'd better leave. I'm upsetting you.”
“No. Please.” Van Diem exhaled and his body seemed to collapse beneath the rumpled sheet. “I'll tell you where Dr. Ambrose is.”
He closed his eyes and fell silent.
Dr. Lang waited, eager to hear more, but after a full minute of silence, he feared that he had triggered a stroke in Van Diem. He reached for the man's wrist.
Trancelike, Van Diem spoke: “I will show you where he is, doctor. Yes, that is the only way. But you must bring my expedition bag from storage. The pipe, too. And bring matches … plenty of matches.”
 
 
At midnight, Dr. Lang descended into the basement of Oceanview. He'd never come here before; he didn't like the dark. His overactive imagination, he supposed.
But he had been motivated by the old man's queer insistence … that, and a tip from his lawyer that the DA intended to file charges against him in the morning.
So he'd come down here; he had to find Ambrose. Even a long shot was worth following. Whatever he found, it had to use it carefully—jog Van Diem's memory and discover Ambrose's whereabouts—but he didn't want to risk getting the old man too excited. It might kill someone his age.
Lang flicked on the lights; dim forty-watt bulbs hung like necrotic
fruit throughout the half-acre chamber. Rows of shelving stretched to the ceiling and cast a matrix of shadows. It smelled of concrete and rat piss.
He quieted his irrational fears and entered.
Boxes on the shelves bore dated tags and Lang strode back in time, thirty years, until he found one marked: Diem, V. / Personal Effects No.: 98456.
Dust coated everything in this basement … and there were scuffs around this box as if it had been recently moved.
He considered calling the police and have them dust for fingerprints. But what if they didn't care? What if they did and there was nothing to this? They could take him into custody and he'd never get another chance to see what Van Diem wanted so badly.
Lang snapped on a pair of latex gloves and eased the box to the floor.
Inside was a leather bag, blackened with age, and if Lang wasn't mistaken, made from rhinoceros hide. It bore several scars and a bullet hole.
He gingerly opened the bag; the leather creaked. Inside there were two side layers that hinged open to reveal dozens of individual compartments. Within the center space was a rotten butterfly net. There were moldering maps with notes handwritten in Arabic. Inside the smaller compartments were beetles, butterflies, worms, in jars filled with alcohol, others pinned, and some held by tiny mechanical pincers to immobilize their legs.
What did an entomologist's collection kit have to do with Ambrose's disappearance? Despite what it said on Van Diem's chart, Lang now doubted the old man's mental faculties.
He closed the bag and picked it up. It felt heavier than it had before.
Lang crept back upstairs, and carefully looked up and down the halls to make sure no one was there. Every fourth fluorescent light was on, flickering, leaving dollops of shuddering illumination on the blue and gray tiles. He slinked past a cart full of uneaten creamed chicken, rice, and lime Jell-O.
He slipped into Van Diem's room without knocking. To his surprise the old man was awake, reading a magazine.
Van Diem spied the bag in Lang's hand and sat up.
“I brought what you wanted.” Lang set the bag on the bed, which groaned under its weight.
Lang noticed a new nightstand that hadn't been there this afternoon. On it were scientific journals:
Physical Review D, Topics in Topology,
and
Biochemical Clinical Psychology
.
Van Diem dragged the bag into his lap.
From under his covers more magazines spilled open onto the floor. Lang bent to pick them up, finding dog-eared articles such as: “Unstable N-Manifolds Key to Stability,” “Signal Structure of Chemically Imbalanced Neurons,” “Wavefunction Probability Distribution and the Many-Worlds Theorem.”
Fishing through the bag, Van Diem said, “Now we find Ambrose. You will help me.”
“He wanted what was in your bag?”
“Yes and no. The bag, my mind. Ambrose asked for answers … no, that's not accurate. He tricked the answers from me.” Van Diem smoothed a hand over his head, through wispy white hair that Lang was certain had not been there this morning. “My pipe? Did you bring it as well?”
Lang wasn't sure letting him have the pipe was a good idea. Then again, the old man was talking; he wasn't making much sense, but perhaps he could sort the fiction from the fantasy of Van Diem's sudden mania. And besides, Lang had already tampered with potential evidence; there was no going back now.
He produced the meerschaum pipe and handed it to Van Diem.
The old man turned it over in his trembling hands, inspecting the white carved stone as if it were a precision instrument, caressing the wrinkles of the elephant's trunk.
“You can't smoke in the building. I'll get a wheelchair—”
“Be good enough to strike me a light,” Van Diem said, “would you?”
Lang considered. What harm could it do? There was no pure oxygen in the room, and he'd be here to watch. And did he really want the orderlies
and the outside security cameras to see him wheeling around the centenarian for a midnight smoke?
He opened the window and then fumbled through his pocket and handed Van Diem a pack of wooden matches.
“Ah, good, matches. Infinitely better than a lighter. A moment please.”
Van Diem opened his expedition bag and removed maps dotted with islands and Greek symbols, a dried toad, and a case of impaled butterflies with wings of opal, then halted when he found an ivory vial. He uncorked it and dumped its contents into his hand: three thumb-sized satin green moths. He then packed the creatures into the bowl of the meerschaum pipe.
“Perception is the key.” Van Diem struck a match and watched the fire blossom; flames mirrored in his eyes. He touched the match to the dead insects and sucked the heat through the pipe. The creatures glowed, and their legs moved in the heat. They crackled and popped. They looked disturbingly alive, wriggling in the flames.
One puff, a second, and he inhaled deeply. Blue smoke curled from his lips and nose and the bowl. It smelled of vinegar and vanilla.
He exhaled, saying, “Most see only the faintest film of reality that surrounds them.”
The air thickened and the smoke, rather than dissipating, remained curled and baroque tendrils of faintly luminescent fumes that caressed the air.

Other books

Lightning People by Christopher Bollen
Ring of Secrets by Roseanna M. White
Margaret and the Moth Tree by Brit Trogen, Kari Trogen
Redemption by Tyler, Stephanie
One Night in His Custody by Fowler, Teri
The New Year's Party by R.L. Stine
All Good Deeds by Stacy Green
Imaginary Men by Enid Shomer
Julia and Clay Plus One by Lauren Blakely