The Lanyard (10 page)

"Yeah... So how did you cheat?"

He stopped and stared out again, at the barrier at the edge of the plateau where the trees became black and the black became trees, and the edges of needles seemed to push together and knit and weave a fabric that was no more real than space. He stared at it long and hard, until he stick he had pushed into the fire slipped and tumbled, glowed red and were consumed, turned into tubes of ash.

"I'll tell you one day," he said.

CHAPTER
TWELVE

To really learn to cheat he thrust his bag ahead of him into the young dawn then crawled out of his tent without pushing the zipper any further up than he needed to wriggle free on his back, facing the sugared black canvas of the sky, which had become clotted with light in places, with long swirls of white silk running through it, made from the disintegrated tails of comets that crossed the horizon and lay one on top of the other like branches in a fire, that pulled together and somehow diluted the sky down to blue, as if that colour had been present all along, highlighting the tops of the trees, like swatches across his eyes, as he twisted his hips out of the gap, sat forward to pull his legs through the hole and then fell back, letting the cold in the soil stick him in place, watching as the sky became sapphire cut.

Yet the stars did not give way as the blue tide came over them. Instead, the little dots of light became the twinkles of a flawless gem flipped onto a mahogany table in a bar, diminished in the face of all the clenching teeth and crystal glass, part of a ring discarded from the finger of an old dame, who counted out the time she had left like devalued coins piled to buy a drink, like another scene in the hardboiled fiction he once read with his father. Once, before they slid apart the way the cold crossed his body, making the stars shimmer, as if casting their light through a haze that twitched, that awoke slowly from slumber, as he did, like the pain within his joints from the run back to the camp that he felt deep within him, and that called to him back, as if, once again, he had discovered the pains of growing up, as an old man discovers the bottle once more, one sip, one slip at a time.

He had even asked the girl after she'd shown him the pyre why some people liked to start fires, as a proxy for admitting that he had the urge. And she had shrugged her shoulders so that her hair rippled as if it was made of metallic sand. "I don't know," she said.

"But you do know what I'm talking about?"

"Maybe they are just bored?" she suggested.

He rubbed his eyes as if there was already smoke in them, bits of soot attracted to his pupil, black sucking onto black. What was making him think this way? Something about that heap of bones was getting to him, digging inside him, reminding him of all of the flames that were contained within. Did this mean he was in the grasp of some sort of pyromania? Was starting fire all about the smell, the taste, or just the bright lamp it created? Did those same people who longed for flame go around staring at the sun all day until they went blind? Did they stare at the blue light, had they then to recreate it whenever the horizon blackened, dancing and romancing with the heat, letting it overtake their lives? But the light from inside a fires wasn't blue, it was red.

"Maybe people who once did something they want to cover up?" she said. "You know, then the fire symbolises them burning guilt?"

"I guess."

"Well, it's the best I can do."

"But why would someone build a fire if they didn't want it to burn?"

"I don't know..."

"Maybe we could..."

"But it's not just bones in there."

"Huh?"

"What about all of the little insects that are living in there? Look at the size of it... I'd be surprised if there weren't mice and frogs and snakes. Remember the planks we found?"

"Yeah, but..."

"But what?"

"".

"Imagine you are Mr. Bug going to work in the morning, kissing goodbye to your wife and then heading up, the long commute, up and up, maybe right out of the top to come down and find food to take home, to earn your way."

"Don't try and make them seem like people. They are not like people," he said.

"...So Mr. Bug he goes off and maybe his wife is home tending to the little bugs when -- wait -- what's that? What's that smell? The heat? Seems to be coming from down below. Wasn't that where that nice mouse family lived?"

He turned away from her.

"See what I am getting at?"

"I guess."

"If you agree with me about hunting..."

He'd dropped it then, and yet now somehow he found himself back there, unable to remember the journey, as if walking in a trance, lost within the fog of his thoughts, as if the route was seared in his soul and he didn't need to think to follow it, immune to the scratches of the branches, the sudden drops, the sinking clay, and mud swamps. He could almost smell it burning within him, he could almost hear the crackle and spits that would come, and feel the warmth. He would not look for life. Through the gaps between the bodies there was nothing but darkness.

He imagined he had reached some sort of church in the woods, come to pray. He had reached a funeral pyre for the slaughtered. He had reached a library for the souls who could mix into the branches and soak up the world, the words. He had found a forgotten land, an ignored plain, built by hand uniquely, that would never be built again, angled limb by angled limb, impossible to plan that way, impossible to make quick. A maze for memories. A trap. Not a place of knowledge but a reliquary to be mined, or a tomb, stacked like a pyramid by a tribe who had no access to stone, just slaves.

He walked up to the edge with the lighter. He put his thumb on top of the wheel of flint and ran it back to the button. Nothing happened. He tried to hold the lighter up to where the sun was coming, where the sky hinted a blue-pink. He shook it to encourage the fluid to coat the insides, the top.

What price for him now a book of matches to read through, snapping them from the stem and pushing each across across the strip of brown stoker, sniffing for the smell when they struck, listening for the sound, the sound of a dragon disturbed from slumber, a hissing snake with fire in its nostrils and a lava tongue, the sound that brought the little world at the edge of the wooden stick some heat, a planet become a sun, burning bright, a rip across space. So that he could hold a flame, cradle his hands around it, make his fingers into a sail. He began to fear that this pyre burned not with heat but was rippled instead with invisible fumes of cold, like an old aerosol can expunged and pressed to his head. Was it not the same to burn or freeze, to stretch out a finger and touch hot or cold, to lose skin, to feel a part forever trapped in time, become dust?

He refocused on the lighter and tried to get lower to the pyre, to somehow use the pile of bodies as a shield, though there was no breeze he could discern. He willed the mechanism to work. He thought hard, telling himself he could make that fire appear. He could bring it to life, this tangle of bodies interlocked like fork tines. They had good marrow. They could burn. They were meant to burn. He could turn all of them into elongated suns, spitting like old candles, talking again, like angels sweeping back into the sky and circling. Right here, right now. He could bring flame. He could capture it. He could embrace it. He had it within him. The universe may be mostly void, with small pockets that could mock it with warmth, but he had life here. And he had the lives lived, fattened up with hope, with defiance, and he could set them back.

He blew into his hands, crushed them around the lighter, sucked on the plastic end of it to warm the fuel, whatever it took. He turned the flint more slowly, more assuredly, and then quick as he could to keep a grip on it, like his father starting the car. The wheel seemed stuck for a moment. He forced it in one more snap, and at last saw a spark the size of a tongue thrust out from him into the air before it dropped away and bounced against the nearest body and then died.

The sudden zip of light made him let go and leap backwards. The lighter fell into the base of the pile of bones. He reached and tried to wrap his fingers around it but it slipped. He went down onto his knees and scurried to the pyre, to where the sun trail of spark in his vision still pointed. He searched for it, prayed for it, pushing his hands through the bottom layer of twisted body parts that felt frozen, clammy somehow, coated with a layer of dust that stuck to his skin like green off of trees, only much darker, until he suddenly lost his balance and grabbed onto one of the limbs to keep himself from falling in.

He stood up if a voice had called to him.

Something was wrong. He stepped away from the heap of bodies and bone. All around were faint red eyes, watching him through the trees, like some flock of owls made of hot metal perched in the branches. He froze in place. The sky over him was black-red now, not like dawn. A mist seemed to creep out of the surroundings, covering the eyes for a moment, making them blink.

He turned and began to stumble away from the pyre, back the way he came, running where he could, struggling through one clutch of branches and another, all turning into black hands, wrapping in flame, soon to the dips and rises he had ran hand-in-hand with the girl, no time to remember the soft velvet of her flesh, no air. Nothing to do but flee, lungs plugging with smoke, with the taste of charcoal, with the black spit sticking on his clothes.

Behind him, ahead of him, the forest seemed to crackle with laughter, cheering for the blaze as it followed, wrapping around him, cutting him off, closing in, until there was only one path he could go. The world around either black or ochre. Sun blotted out. Night or flame. The void or the lava. No in-between. A dying sun, a giant sun, swelling, burning crimson, and expanding through space like a frog's throat when it searches for a mate, pulsating, scorching the world.

The boy found his way to the camp in the clearing. He pounded the side of his father's tent, though there was nothing solid enough to give noise, and then scrabbled around to the zip, trying to push his fingers underneath the metal tongue to lift it,

"Wake up! Wake up!"

He stopped and looked around. The line of trees around the campsite suddenly resembling a circle of gasoline poured around innocent men, branches burning like sacrifices, standing tall, taking it, approaching martyrdom, turning into ghoulish candles, stretching, not swaying, narrowing, shredding their foliage into sparks with a great rush of air, of heat that plunged into the sky, like a hot poker going into a quencher, hissing, screaming, so that all of the smoke was a mask, a shield, as if there was nothing there but clouds, no hint of the hotness within, as deep down the roots probably did run to gold, sucking out all the nutrients to burn like chemicals.

"Dad!?"

"What?"

"We have to go! Hurry!"

The zip started to open, caught halfway for a moment before it rumbled all the way up to the top, nearly knocking the boy down.

"We have to get out of here!

The eyes in the gap grew large, reflecting the line of fire ahead, behind.

"It wasn't me," the boy said.

His father looked confused, but calm. He reached back behind him to pick up part of his gear.

"We have to get to the car."

He came out of the tent and began to edge towards the circle of fire wrapping around the plateau, gesturing that the boy should stay back, using his hand to hold back the heat. He licked a finger and held it out to find the breeze. It seemed to do no good. He put an arm over his mouth and began to choke and spit up before going down on his knees. He shook his head but did not turn back, just stayed where he was, shaking.

The boy crawled across the clearing to him and knelt by his side. The heat was penetrating even low down. It began to burn. It hurt. But after a few moments it passed from pain to something else, as if he was being slowly choked in warm water. He closed his eyes, lips covered by flecks of spit that dried fast into hard white lumps like curds of milk. He moved closer to his father, as close as he could, in his shadow. So close that only pain would come if he moved away. His body had adjusted to the heat now. It had embraced it, as if the heat was all he had left. All anyone had left, in any of the universes swimming around his head, clustered like the tears around his eyes, fast drying and fastened up, all of those things that would fade to black and miss the pain of burning to death, one day, when it had passed.

It had to be that way. Space was not cold like the books said. He had felt it now, he was sure. He had basked in it. The stars were just the ends of glowing sticks, held up in the sky by a giant, by The Giant, creating a mesh through which to slip and slide, all the way to the tip of the galaxy, which swung around to the top and then back again. Some children's game like they had found in another house, with marbles in a tube ever poised to drop as one by one, the sticks were withdrawn and piled, perhaps until one world, one glass bead, one long-dead eye, remained on which to gaze, a globe with a flame at the centre, a crack running along the fault, just a tiny spec and then a gaping gulf.

He had already fallen, into the fire, through the fire, through the world, through the sky, and still was, repeating. Holding her hand. In her heart. In her fingers. And he lost sight of the camp. He lost sight of the trees. He lost all of the soft grass. All he had was a colour, not quite black, not down here, through the ground and the sky become the earth, become the air, all of the elements combining on a huge canvas in front of him. Used up, burnt up, flamed up, and ever speeding by him as he fell.