Grave (42 page)

“A selfish, irresponsible, smirking little brat who thought growing a baby made her some sort of—all we had to do was wave a few thousand dollars in front of her face and she signed you away without a second thought. Just like she conceived you, without a second thought. Just like you’re condemning all of us, everywhere, without a second thought.” Her breath came harshly now, spots flaring on the grayish, ruined skin of her cheeks. “So many of our subjects were just like her, drug addicts, drinkers, party girls, their lives one long moronic trek through impulse after impulse—I thought our work gave their lives actual meaning. Actual purpose. But we were just as bad. We were every bit as bad.”

Somehow, my hands were in hers now and the skin of her fingers was dry and cold, as broken and torn up as her hair, but she held on and squeezed and I couldn’t pull away. “All we did was chase after our own infantile impulses, our most selfish self-serving instincts—why must we age? Why must we die? Why can’t
we
have the final say in all of that, because we’re so pathetically frightened of the alternative? And we could make so much money, earn so much acclaim doing it, too! What an unbelievable return on a few irresponsible, smirking little investments! Well, I suppose thanks to our work, and especially thanks to you, we all finally know that you can’t remake reality by whim and impulse, and there’s so much out there that’s worse than death. So much worse than death could ever be.” Again, she rocked back and forth, forth and back, hands wrapped around mine like a bicycle chain wound around a pole. “Two people? That’s two too many. It stops now, Natalie. It stops
now
.”

So weak. So damned weak. But I kept forgetting, she wasn’t
Homo novus
, she wasn’t one of us. Frail, just like Billy and the rest of them always said. I was laughing. I couldn’t help it.

“No,” I said.

“You can’t continue. You can’t. Look at what’s become of us, Natalie,
look
at us—”

“I don’t need you now, Grandma.
Ellen.
You taught me not to need you. Human beings like you are finished and it doesn’t matter how much he tries to scare me, Death doesn’t run this place anymore.” I twisted my hands hard, wrenching them away. “And no matter what you used to think, you never did.”

Her breath was deeper now, slower, like each exhalation unwound itself from some great soft ball. Her eyes were heated and crazy and saw nothing but me.

“You have other lake stones, don’t you?” she said. “There in your pockets. Clever girl, taking them with you, you never missed a trick. You can’t do any more meddling without them, you were right about that. Give them to me.”

The world was shifting and melting into pools of bleakness and congealing that way, like dirty wax. The ghosts were vanishing, dissolving so slowly and yet so swiftly I could barely recall where I’d once seen a hand, a bowed head, reproachful unhappy eyes. There was a sound somewhere far off, a weak piteous animal cry.

“No,” I said.

“You can’t be trusted with them. Either throw them away, get rid of them right now, or give them to me.”

The animal sound grew louder, a wailing rumble like some sort of infant thunderstorm. I just looked at her.

“No,” I said.

The rumbling noise grew louder and then it happened, she leapt on me and we were fighting, furious, desperate, her fingers scrabbling for my pockets and me kicking, shoving, biting any part of her in reach. She pushed me, trying to hurl me on my back, and I stumbled and staggered and my jacket flew open and she fell, Sukie tumbled from her safe secret pocket and landed headfirst on the ground. Grandma—Ellen—stared at Sukie, at her grimy yarn hair and tousled rag skirts, and at all the uneven lumps and protrusions studding her cloth torso, her face, her fat little stuffed arms. The rocks in her head. Then we were both scrabbling for poor Sukie in the dust, all clawing nails and shoving palms and it was like fighting Amy’s horrible dog all over again, and my teeth found thin paper-dry flesh thin hanging off the bone and I sank them in, deeper and deeper, and she screamed.

“Give them to me!” she howled. Grabbing for poor Sukie, kicking me in the side so I gasped and folded up like a school chair, her breath and her eyes hot and wild and this was her last chance, she knew it and I knew it, I was taking away her last delusion that she mattered at all. “You’ll destroy us all with those, you’ll destroy everything that’s left, hand them over before I—”

“No!” I shoved back, furious at the strength in her, at her refusal to lie back and die already because it was my world now, the third species’ world, I’d kill her here and now and never bring her back— “No more listening to you or him or anyone else—I don’t need you! I know everything you did, and more—”

“Give them to me!”

“I know everything! Everything!”

“
Give them to me now
!”

She grabbed Sukie’s arm and I heard the rip of cloth, seams straining and splitting along Sukie’s stitched-tight side, and something swarming and red pulsed through me faster than blood and I hit her in the face, again, again. She was still moving and that enraged me so I grabbed for a thick heavy broken-off branch and the side of her head was horrible wet now just like Janey’s had been, dark dampness soaking her broken-straw hair, and I kept striking her over and over and I couldn’t stop.

“You don’t run anything!” I was screaming, and she couldn’t hear me and it didn’t matter because I wasn’t talking to her anymore, all this time I’d been telling it to someone else, to the someone making that animal noise like the howling of dogs coming closer and closer to where I stood. “I don’t need you! I know all your secrets, I can make anything live or die! It’s my world! It’s my world, so come and get me!” Deafening, howling dog-cries all in my ears, making my skin pulsate and shiver, dark mass of them covering what had once been forest and beachland and they were everywhere now, everywhere, I wanted to scream again in happiness because I wasn’t afraid of anything. “Come and get me! Come on! Come and meet who’s in charge of you now!”

Everything was the wails of ghost-dogs running toward me and I couldn’t hear myself talk. I couldn’t hear myself and I couldn’t see anything but pale teeth and dark fur and lamplight-yellow eyes and they were closer now, my dogs, my servants, they were everywhere, I—

TWENTY-SEVEN

AMY

W
e marched in circles. It was impossible to see just where we were or where we’d been; everything was the same and the nothingness had no signs or landmarks, just gritty-soft sand paler and cleaner than anything up above and the wild cries of phantom gulls in the clear sweet air and somewhere out there, always just out of our reach, the shoreline and the water stretching on to the horizon. It wasn’t so bad, this wandering through nothing on our way to nowhere. It was peaceful. The feeling of seeking something we both were certain we’d never find, somehow that was a good clean feeling just like the sand and sky around us: boredom was banished, frustration impossible, because the looking itself was all we needed and someday, maybe, we just might reach the shore. Except that the shore wasn’t real, nor the water, nor the sand, none of it truly part of life or of death. An illusion, to distract us and make us forever lost on our way to him—or perhaps Death’s last feverish gasp as he, himself, lay dying.

But how could Death ever die, whether through our own human breed of decay and decline or in a fit of self-destructive rage? It had to be a lie, another fool’s trick, when he claimed even he couldn’t escape it. It had to be, because of that other thing he’d said, that—

That someone else had told me he’d heard Death say, someone I loved, someone who had just disappeared into the nothingness consuming all. Not Lisa. Not that little girl of Lisa’s... not my mother... it was coming to me...

I still had him in my head, dark hair, off-kilter smile, a face that was engaging without being handsome, but not his name. Lake stones or no lake stones, it wasn’t coming to me. There’d been an old man, too, who’d told us something important, but his memory was already lost. Just like Jessie had said would happen.
Give it time.

“We can’t stay here,” I said to Jessie, to myself, there in the middle of the vast endless beach. I meant to sound sharp and loud like something neither of us could ignore but my voice was blunted by the quiet breezes and the far-off, close-up sound of the tides, the swell and strike of lake water against the sand like a fist punching out slow rhythms on a beanbag. “We have to find a path, a road, some way out—I’m starting to forget the others, just like you said. I’m starting to forget. Soon we might not remember why we’re here at all.”

Jessie turned to me slowly. She motioned around us at the sand, the sky, the vastness where we could both spin forever with our arms touching nothing, and in her face I saw the same urgent, thoughtful confusion I felt. “Remember Death,” she said. “Forget everyone else, they never existed now anyway—it’s a waste of energy, a waste of time. Remember Death. Remember him. Never let him go.”

Because if he, too, were sliding slowly into a big nothing of his own devising, then even him we would forget. He, too, would be digested. The thought twisted my gut into a noose. Jessie stopped still in the sand and gazed into my eyes.

“I know you met him too,” she said. “Met
him
. Face to face. Remember that.” Trying to convince herself, as well as me, that this was our right road. I could see it in her eyes. “You can’t find someone when you don’t even know what they look like.”

An artist’s rendering. Have You Seen This... Thing? Entity? Angry God? But she was right, I had seen him, I truly had: that horrible day when our flight from Paradise City had gone so terribly wrong, when the others were captured or dead and I was all by myself, all alone. He stood there before me in a deserted street wearing his real face, none of the guises of our gone loved ones he liked to use to taunt us all, and as I tried to flee him and ended up right back where I started and almost pissed myself in raw uncontrolled fear, I saw, in him I saw—

Endless light. Endless night. Not two roads diverging, but the same constant, eternal path. Just as this beautiful miserable vanishing afterworld and the drab living one I’d left behind were really one and the same, a great half-discovered country, our own individual lives and deaths nothing but mile markers and signposts. All of us, all us humans, we’d been fighting the world’s longest and most idiotic sectarian war because life and death were
the very same thing.
I saw it. It stood right there, staring me in the face just like Jessie did now, and I had been too distraught, too frightened, too all-alone to even try to understand what I saw. Only here, in this endless nowhere, was there the space to breathe and stand back and say out loud what some deep hidden part of me, seeing him, had instantly known as truth.

“There was light in him,” I said.

That sounded so flat, so insufficient, spoken aloud, it didn’t even begin to encompass what I meant. What I’d seen. But Jessie didn’t mock me, she didn’t snort and turn her back and resume her directionless plod over the sand. Instead, she smiled.

“Light,” she said. “And night.” She tilted her head back, savoring the semblance of a pungent lake breeze, exposing her throat like a cat wanting to be petted. Like a captive, awaiting the blade of her assassin’s knife. “They’re both inside him, all of it is inside him, and life and death put together are... this. Eternity. Right here.” She squatted down suddenly on the sand, sliding it through her fingers, watching it stream slowly, inexorably back onto the dune. “This thing that’s dying. Which means, since he
is
all of that, that he really is dying. He really can’t escape it either.”

She glanced up at me, and the naked need I saw in her for reassurance, for comfort was almost astonishing; she’d never have let that slip in the living world, never in front of a mere human pulled off that mask for a moment, but here it all came out so easily, here you couldn’t and wouldn’t hide anything. She needed me to tell her she hadn’t just made it all up, that Death’s true face had been more than a dream.

“But that can’t be true,” I said. “Something that
is
life, just as much as it’s death—that thing can’t die. It can’t. It’s impossible.”

“Why?” she demanded. Sharper, contrary, more like her old self. “We’ve all got a little life and death in ourselves, right, don’t we—we’re born, we die, we have a tiny little stake in all of that too? Travel the same road? Everything living dies. Nearly anything living can
decide
to die. If it’s got the will to decide anything at all. Why couldn’t Death just... decline, like some old dusty, and crumble into nothing? Why is that so impossible?”

Because he’s everything,
I wanted to argue.
Because look all around you, and see that becoming
nonexistent
is so different, so very different than dying. Because it’s one thing for what’s living to choose to die, when really living and dying are just one and the same, but this is
everything
becoming
nothing,
everything can’t just up and decide it wants to be nothing
—but I was no philosopher, and it wouldn’t sound half as logical said out loud as it did in my own mind. And she was probably right, that I was probably all wrong.