Three Moments of an Explosion

by China Miéville

  The night was a cold mouth. Mel could not breathe.

  Poena Cullei. Säcken. The Punishment of the Sack.

  No one even seemed to know for quite what this drowning was the sentence, the parameters of parricide. Its symbolism made no sense. The poena was first mentioned in antiquity as already antique. An arcane sadism. Centuries of jurists disputed and forgot it until by some scholastic experiment it was recalled far, far too late. Mel made a sound. This punishment, she read, was last imposed in Germany in the eighteenth century. The punishment, she read, of a woman for infanticide in Saxony.

  Leather on the house floor. The thing straining to split.

  She read, “The cockerel’s dying call marks the place of sinking.” Kikeriki, the rooster had said, paying her attention. Pay attention. This is where we are.

  And the waterlogged woman had spoken. Down she had gone in that last sack with cockerel and dog and snake, with their bites and rips and screaming, swaddled together as the leather went tight.

  Had it been a relief when the water came in, or the worst moment of all?

  The first time Mel met with Joanna’s parents and sister, in the restaurant of their hotel, they tried to be kind to her. They struggled with their own grief and asked her how she was holding up, and so on. Mel was moved. The next time they barely spoke. Joanna’s father wouldn’t look at her except to interrupt her and ask exactly why she had left so suddenly, whether she and Joanna had been arguing.

  Jo’s sister took her outside. “Sorry about that,” she said.

  “The police have the phone records,” Mel managed to say. “I was in London.”

  “Yes. Why did you come back? Had Jo been upset with you?”

  “I told you she was, we had a row.”

  “How upset?”

  Mel left.

  Everyone wanted a body but the lake would not deliver. When Mel first returned, when the police took her to the house, the emptiness of it bewildered her. She saw herself in reflections and realized her gait had changed. She kept her head down. She barely slept. Her dreams were no longer of Joanna slowly changing in the water. Now they were of dark wood, of a doubled-over figure with uncertain limbs.

  She was staying in a small guesthouse near the lake, one she had made sure was equipped with Wi-Fi. She continued urgent correspondence with scholars. She sought and found no local stories. No one could tell her anything about the executed woman. The woman who had hauled herself up again centuries after her death, noted Mel, reached for her, taken Joanna.

  What do you want? Mel asked in her head.

  Revenge. She imagined answers from the sack. Justice. Company. My child. A retrial. None of those was what the woman had whispered for.

  Mel tracked down the number of one of the English-speaking priests in Dresden. He was bewildered and kind. “I am so sorry about your friend,” he said. “But I understand there has been a service already?” Mel standing apart from Joanna’s relatives in an Essex church. Jo’s friends were mostly her age, and did not know Mel, though some had come up to her afterward in their smart mourning clothes to say something.

  “For Joanna, right,” Mel said down the line. “But that’s not the thing. She was a historian. She was looking into that awful punishment.”

  “That you have described to me, yes. With the snake and the ape and so on. A terrible thing.”

  “And cockerels and dogs and cats, yeah,” Mel said. So expensive a beast as a monkey can be replaced, Carpzovius said, by a cat.

  “A terrible thing.”

  “Thing is that happened here, where we were staying. Jo was doing research about the last woman executed like that.” That lie came easily. It was the word executed that meant Mel had to pause. “We always planned that when she’d written her book, we’d do something for that woman,” she said. “And now Jo’s gone so she can’t. But I still want to. You understand why? I hoped you might help me. For both their sakes.”

  Mel talked about the woman’s dreadful death. She talked about the lake being shamed. The priest sounded guarded in response, and when she rang off she was not hopeful, but he quickly called her back. “As you understand,” he said, “my duties, I cannot. But I have a colleague.”

  Something’s missing, Mel thought again, and still did not know what it meant when she thought it.

  She drove to the lake. The local priest was waiting for her as arranged. He was tall and thin, in his sixties, leaning against his car like a much younger man. He was incongruous in his robes. Before her engine had even stopped he strode impatiently toward her vehicle, reaching to shake her hand. Mel had paid for the service he was to perform. In her halting German she thanked him enough to make him soften a little.

  From where they stood, at the end of a sightseer’s pier, across the water they could see the house where Joanna and Mel had stayed. Mel could see the tied-up boat.

  “OK,” she said, and looked down. She gathered herself. “OK.” The priest nodded. He began to read aloud.

  He muttered in fast German. Mel tried to follow in English, reading the words she and the Dresden priest had written together. A sanctified apology for the abominable execution. A prayer for the convicted woman, a plea to let her rest. Too late for Joanna, thought Mel. No one else should be punished for the punishment this angry dead woman had, no matter what, not deserved.

  Mel cried silently over the lake. Is this enough? she thought. Will you stop?

  How dark the lake was. What am I doing? Mel thought. Standing by this stinking old water with a man who thinks I’m a fool. And it does stink, it reeks.

  Mel put her hand to her mouth.

  A terrible gust. She couldn’t breathe. The priest kept on with his recitation. The surface was disturbed and the stench told Mel fuck her priest and fuck his blessing. She almost fell.

  “Stop!” Mel shouted. She staggered off the jetty as fast as she could. Up from the water came scorn and want and notice. “Get back!” she said. The priest broke off and turned to look at her in surprise. “Father, for Christ’s sake, get away from the fucking water!” She beckoned him desperately, staring at the lake that lapped at the pier on which he stood, watching for a shape to rise.

  At last he walked to her. He stepped onto the grass and Mel sagged and turned as he shouted after her and she ran.

  Why would you think a priest would do anything? she thought. She was dizzy with the lake’s fury, its continued regard. If you were killed like that would you care what a priest said? I don’t believe in God, why should she?

  Mel ran to her car. She shook.

  I need a lawyer, not a priest. Her thoughts raced. To declare a mistrial or something. It was the law that stitched the woman up. That had dragged her with the animals, scratching, biting, screaming, to the water. It was the law that listened to the cockerel beg its last living time, and let the lake close over the poena cullei.

  Mel drove away before the priest could reach her. She drove away from the lake and only pulled over after several minutes. With unsteady hands she took out the printouts of all her articles.

  The dog means loyalty maybe. The serpent is maybe a killer of its parents, the ape uncanny. But in the water all that would dissolve. Everything in the sack would mean itself. A thing that drowns and bites, that drowns and claws, that drowns and bites, that drowns and screams.

  Mel could still smell the lake, as if it was on her skin and in her clothes. Oh, what do you want? she said to the dead. Voracious, sodden, rising, the end of the law. The sun went down. Somewhere Joanna’s family was mourning. Mel leaned her head on her steering wheel. Behind her eyes she saw a dark bent-double figure.

  She sat up. She shook her head to clear it. She hunted through the papers again. Animals might be represented by images on paper or wood, she remembered. Men and women could be drowned with drawings. The woman, she read, the last woman, had been sacked with snake and cockerel and dog and that was all.

  Those markings on the water-blackened medallion she’d found and thrown away. A
thing not with five limbs, as Mel had first thought, but with four and a curled tail.

  A missing animal. An ape. A lack.

  The boat moved across the water. Mel rowed like an automaton. She breathed lightly, in terror that the stink would return. Somewhere beneath her Jo circled. Or swayed, her softening foot held by a root.

  It could be like this forever, Mel thought. This was not so bad, even with the hissing of her cargo. She could pull this rocking boat in the dark, in the moonlight. But Mel was soon in the center of the lake and there was nothing else she could do but what she was there to do.

  Oh Christ. She remembered the smell and thought of Joanna and knew that it was not finished, that the poena was waiting, with its lack, would reach out again when someone leaned too far.

  I don’t want to, I don’t want to, Mel thought. But she shuddered, pulled opened a peephole in her fastened canvas bag and stared in at a hissing cat.

  Mel had crawled through the garden of the lakeside house. As the light failed she had crawled and groped through the undergrowth feeling with her fingertips. She checked every piece of wood she touched but there were so many, she never had a chance of finding what she’d thrown away.

  Why didn’t I put it back in the water? she thought. I should have given it back.

  The lost oar had been replaced. Mel rowed.

  Something had gone missing. The wooden ape had worked out through rot, escaped the hankering sack, been washed to shore for Mel to throw into the dark.

  The sack had stretched toward her. Nothing trying to get out; trying to pull something in. The poena did not want justice. It wanted completion.

  Perhaps the image had always been inadequate, had not been lost but spat out for her to find. The sack reaching not for that token but for the nearest primate. Considering her. She, she and hers, had its attention. There has to be a life, Mel thought, to fill that lack. That’s how ghosts are made.

  How the fuck do I get hold of a monkey? Mel had thought in panic, and then remembered the law.

  She’d gone to a nearby town. Bought tinned fish and a hessian sack. Waited in a backyard lot. The first time a cat appeared she could not bring herself to move. The second time she made herself remember what she had seen, what had happened to Joanna. She caught the animal easily. She cut off its collar so she would not see its name.

  Mel knew how to hold cats. She gripped it at the back of its neck and it stared stiff-legged and hating. It had gone for her, and even constricted, it scratched her so she hissed too. But she kept her hold and gritted her teeth and shoved it in the bag.

  It spat and rolled in the bottom of the boat. The bag writhed.

  Apes were rare and expensive, the law allowed. Cats may be used instead.

  Mel hefted the sack. It was heavy with the cat and with a big stone. The cat yowled and screamed and got a paw out by the drawstring, and the boat pitched with all the jostling. Swells rose from below. Mel started to cry.

  She met the cat’s terrified furious eyes as she forced it back in. She tied the bag closed. Claws shoved through the fabric. “Oh Christ,” Mel whispered. She held the bundle out.

  It might have been a warning stink she smelled then, it might have been that the water seemed excited. The boat shook as the hidden cat moaned and scrabbled.

  “See?” Mel said. “Look. See?”

  She looked down. And it was very dark, but even in the night and through the black water she thought she saw a darker thing still rising.

  Mel screamed. The cat screamed. She let it go.

  With a plop like a pebble in a well the lake swallowed the bag and the cat’s noise ended. Bubbles streamed up.

  The boat pitched in the quiet. Whimpering with every breath, Mel leaned over a tiny bit and looked down. Strained to see the pale bag descending. But it was too dim or it had fallen too fast, or it was enveloped in mud or something had pulled it down because she saw nothing.

  Mel leaves work early. It is nearly spring and the pubs are full. Her new colleagues—the solicitors asked her back and she said no, is now at a small publishing house—invite her for a drink. She smiles and hesitates and joins them, though she doesn’t stay long. They are sweet. Two of her workmates in particular she likes a lot, and one of them has been flirting with her. Mel feels better for their company.

  She rowed back weeping, that last night on the water. She was lonely without the cat. She tried not to think about the last moments of its life. Not to think of the last moments of Joanna’s.

  The lake and the wind were very still. Nothing buffeted her. Yes, she had thought. Ignore me. Mel tied up the boat and walked back to her car and fell asleep in it right there by the road. She had been afraid to do that, to lose herself in the dark, to sleep behind the wheel as if somehow she might wake with the vehicle careering toward something, but she could not fight her exhaustion.

  When she had jerked awake and her heartbeat had slowed, she felt, to her astonishment, better. Dry, headachey in the windscreen-filtered sun, but calmer.

  Mostly now she tries not to think about it at all.

  Of course that isn’t possible. Sometimes during her therapy sessions, she can’t avoid it. It isn’t therapy, exactly, she reminds herself, it’s grief counselling, for Jo. Sometimes she tells her counselor a little, a very little about what happened. She hints at what she thinks she saw. She does so in code. She is vague, she uses metaphors, so the brusque kind woman can think her client is talking about existential fears.

  It gets better and worse and better again. Christmas was hard. She sent a letter to Joanna’s parents and they did not respond. That was cruel, she thinks, that’s really not OK. She spent two days with her father and terrified him by getting drunk and scared and crying a lot. She dreamed of the dark figure, the lost ape remnant on the wood.

  But the nightmares ebbed. She still has them sometimes but they’re only dreams. She’d fed the thing a sacrifice.

  Mel spends the days at a computer, pushing text around templates. She is quiet, fearful of attention, but a real person, living in the city.

  How could she not be changed? But no matter how much, no matter how everything that happened has hollowed her out and done something bad to everything, no matter her loss, it’s hard to live with it every moment. The day after you see something that can’t be unseen you are a salt pillar. Eight weeks after that, you still saw it, it’s still there, but you’re thinking about bus fares and bureaucracy too, you can’t not. Mel can barely believe it but here she is in life again.

  She is working, and sometimes now thinking of things other than the lake. Two weeks ago her counselor said something about reckoning and accounting, about facing up to things, something well-meaning and point-missing that still made Mel feel better.

  The city is dark and pleasantly cold. Mel buys microwave rice at the shop on the corner. She reads email on her phone as she passes a church and a laundrette and descends to her basement flat. She turns on all the lights and showers to music: her radio is made for bathrooms, it sticks to tiles. She leaves it playing when she’s done.

  Mel calls her father, and talks to him while she cooks, over the muffled radio and cars and vans muttering past at head height outside. He chitchats carefully and she listens, and answers his questions. In the middle of their conversation the music from the bathroom gets abruptly louder. There is a thud that makes her wince, then silence. “Ouch,” she says. “No, I’m fine, something broke. Can I call you back?”

  The radio has slipped off the wall. It lies broken on the shower’s floor. “Oh fuck it,” Mel says. She bends to pick it up. Her face gets close to the drain. Her throat catches and she steadies herself, her hand down in the cold wet. She smells old rot.

  Mel runs.

  For an instant the thought comes that there might be a blockage, a problem in the pipes, but she knows that smell, that decay and sluggish lake water. It is not a London smell. And Mel knows as it fills her flat and she runs and tries to breathe and the air grows freezing around he
r that she has always known she would smell it again. There is nowhere beyond some attentions.

  The dimensions of her corridor are wrong. Something is missing. She staggers. Runs into a chair, into the sideboard. There is slime on the wall and floor.

  She has locked her front door. Mel makes it to the living room. She finds her bag and scrabbles and her keys aren’t there. She grabs her phone. The rug is wet. Her books on all the shelves on all the walls are muddy. Mel is gasping. “Help me,” she whispers into the phone as she dials emergency, as she hears her signal die in white noise. “Help.”

  In the kitchen and the bathroom and the bedroom, in the hall, the lights go out, one by one. Darkness comes in. There is a darkness between Mel and the city.

  Why are you here? she whispers in her head, while she sinks to her knees and the smell comes and the light goes. What do you want?

  There are lacks that won’t be filled.

  Mel tries to make herself small. Something comes before her. It knows her.

  There is the clucking. Hiss. The execution sack streams. It gushes. It’s so much bigger than it was. She fed it and it’s bloated. A glutton. It has eaten more and taken time. The leather sack lurches wetly and protrudes with inside limbs and over her whimpering Mel hears a creak and animal sounds and words and the grind of bones.

  Here comes the Säcken, full of new things. She hears cat noises. Here comes the poena cullei, and it wants, it would never not come, and like the stomach it is it will have her, and everything.

  Its sutures unravel. The seams are law’s mouths. They open not to let out but to take in. The Säcken opens to feed, to make her poena. And this time there is no Joanna to wake and save her.

  Oh, why did she think that?

  Why did she think that now? As the rolling sack spurts mud on her and comes closer? Why now as she hears a mess of old voices and new? As a cat barks and a rooster hisses? As the leather strains and the poena looms and reaches and a dog tries to speak and a long-dead woman meows like a cat and a snake makes words and the poena opens and rank water pours out and Mel sees through the shadows what is inside at last and screams and screams and still hears a faint last sound.