by Richard Ayre
I remembered what Valin had said to me. That one day, I would be unable to stop it. It was the way things were. Maybe I had come to that time. God knows I had lived long enough, and why not use the power within me to help someone I knew was worth it?
But the results. Oh God, the results if I did.
Life. Endless life. Could I subject Pearl to something like that, knowing what I had been through? Everything I’d seen, both good and bad? The deaths of everyone and everything I had ever loved?
No.
I could not.
I would not.
I would not turn Pearl into a monster. Into a freak. She was better off dying.
But as I lay in bed that night, staring at the ceiling, the thought that had been born spread through my body like an unassailable itch. I believed I needed to soon pass it along. I began to think I didn’t have any choice and never had.
Someone was soon going to have it passed along to them.
As my eyes finally closed, as my exhausted body slipped into sleep, one thought seemed to stay with me.
Why not Pearl?
XXVII
Over the next few days I became more and more fixated with the idea of passing it along. My previous determination to not do so was scattering with every minute of every day. I felt what I believe drug addicts must feel when they are going through withdrawal. Everything was centred on passing along my disease.
I fought against it constantly. Even though I’d promised I would visit Pearl again, I kept away. I didn’t trust myself, and I hated myself for not seeing her. She could die at any minute. She may have already died, as I brushed my teeth or made a cup of tea or ate my evening meal. As I lived my selfish life. She could be gasping out her last breath while I lay in bed, breathing just one more of billions I had breathed before.
Yes, I hated myself. For staying away, for my indecision, for my want to touch her chest and to pour that power, that infection, that gift into her. To see her eyes open and her mouth smile… Wouldn’t that be worth the downside? Wouldn’t it be worth the knowledge that one day she would curse my memory for what I had done to her?
I was in a constant flux, forever on the verge of going to the hospital and yet holding myself hostage at the shop. I couldn’t sleep and was lethargic, yet I couldn’t stay still for more than an hour at a time. The thought twisted and heaved within me; it wouldn’t let me go.
I was sitting by the window at the table on a muggy Tuesday afternoon, exhausted by yet another sleepless night, when Pearl’s mother came into the shop.
My throat seemed to close. A cold, cold flash of something flushed through my system.
She was dead! She was dead and I had failed her. I, her supposed friend, the only person who could have done something about it. The only person who could have stopped it.
She glanced around the toys on the shelves and a sad smile flickered across her mouth as she looked at the figures Pearl had made. She turned to me as I stood.
‘She’s still there,’ she said in response to my ashen face.
I sighed, relieved, and went across to her and took her hand, leading her to the chair where Pearl had sat so many times.
‘You said you would come back to see her,’ she said. It was an accusation.
I sat down opposite her. ‘I know, but…’ I didn’t know what to say. ‘It’s hard,’ I managed.
She nodded. She seemed more composed than the last time I had seen her. But I realised that was wrong. She was not composed. She was just resigned to the inevitable.
‘Yes, it is. It’s very hard. But that does not make it right that you don’t spend her last day with her. She said you were her best friend. How can you desert her now?’
Best friend? I felt that emotion claw at my heart again.
‘Last day?’ I asked, fearfully.
She was making an effort not to cry, I could see that.
‘She wanted you there. At the end. She told me weeks ago. When she could still speak. They’re turning off the machine today. We’ve made the decision. Precious and I don’t want her to suffer anymore. You need to be there. I’ve come away from her side to collect you. She might have died while I was gone, but I know my Pearl. She would have wanted me to try.’
She spoke these words in a flat monotone that conversely held all the emotion of an already grieving mother. I couldn’t speak. Something was wrong with my eyes. I couldn’t see properly.
‘Where’s Precious?’ I managed to croak.
‘Still at the hospital. The nurses there are very good. They said they would look after her for me until I came back with you. But we have to go. Now. Please.’
Her voice remained flat and metallic as she spoke, but I could sense the urgency in her. I knew that if Pearl went before she got back to her she would never have forgiven herself.
I stared at her, the life inside me pounding at me to stand. To go with her. To pass it along to Pearl. But still I resisted.
‘I don’t even know your name,’ I said to her. I was stalling. I knew it.
She smiled, sadly. ‘That’s the reason Pearl came here in the first place. She said she’d found a shop that sold the best toys Precious would ever have, and she knew this as soon as she saw it. She said it was fate. My name is Madeleine. Now please. Come with me.’
I think my heart actually stopped for a second. I managed to swallow.
Fate, Pearl had called it. I have never believed in fate. I have said this so many times.
She put out her hand for me to go with her.
I took it.
*
She had come on the bus. Her daughter may have died at any minute, and she had taken a bus to go and collect the only other person her daughter wanted to be there at her side. Her friend. We took my car back to the hospital.
Heavy clouds were building as we parked up, and a flash of lightning momentarily lit the sky. Rain began to patter on the vehicle’s roof as a growl of thunder rolled across the city. For some reason the noise reminded me of the last roars of those artillery guns back in November 1918. I felt the same sensation I’d had then of some form of new beginning. Or, perhaps, a sense of something ending. We went inside and rode up the elevator in a heavy silence. The lift was taking us to a place where everything would end. Life, love, hope.
We were walking faster as we went along the corridor to the room where Pearl lay. Was she still alive?
We went in.
Precious was sitting with a young nurse at the table in the corner. They were playing snap. Pearl lay with the tubes sticking out of her all over.
As soon as we stepped inside the door, it was as if Pearl had been waiting for us to get there; as if she was making her own choice of when she would die. The machine monitoring her clicked loudly and squealed a monotone note. We all looked at it. The line went flat.
*
It was only the nurse who moved at first.
She calmly went to the machine, checking the numbers as they fell, fell, fell away.
She turned to Madeleine and Precious. Her eyes were very kind, but also devoid of hope. Madeleine jerked a breath into her lungs, the noise loud in the sudden shocked silence. Precious stared at her sister with huge eyes, the reality of what was happening just beginning to register on her face.
For myself, I remember gazing at Pearl with a hunger I could not contain. I felt like a vampire. I could not take my eyes from her body as it began to die in front of me.
I felt something flood through my body; I cannot describe it. It was a desperate, animalistic need. I could not have controlled it even if I wanted to. I had to touch her. I had to touch Pearl.
It was as if she were a light and I was a moth. I swear I was not in control of my own body as I stepped towards her, my arm already rising in front of me.
Far away, as if the sound was coming from a distant galaxy, I heard Madeleine make that jerky noise again and part of me suddenly realised it was the beginning of weeping, but I ignored it. The nurse was watching me, but sh
e didn’t seem to be moving. Didn’t seem to be breathing. Another flicker of lightning lit up the window and more thunder boomed. Everything around me slowed.
And stopped.
The thunder outside continued to growl; sounding like a never-ending barrel rolling across a wooden floor, and the lightning flickered endlessly, creating stark black-and-white compositions in the room.
And suddenly, like a white-hot explosion of knowledge and understanding, I realised everything. I suddenly realised the truth of my disease. It spoke to me. I swear to God, in that millisecond of endlessness, the disease spoke to me. It showed me everything. It showed me what it was.
The infection that ran through me was, indeed, life, just as Valin had said. But not life as he and I had believed. This life was an alien, timeless life. It was a life eternal.
I was infected with its eternity, and, in that golden, electrifying moment, it slowed time down to such a degree that I seemed to be the only living thing in the room. Madeleine and Precious and the nurse were just window-dressing in a scene that showed me standing by Pearl’s bed, knowledge from the entire universe soaring through my mind.
It showed me the beginning of everything. Standing in that hospital room in London, I saw oceans swell and trees grow. I smelt the warm, damp odour of life manifesting itself on the planet. I saw tiny, mindless amoebae turning and twisting into the first version of life. I watched fish swim, saw them struggle onto land, saw them change and adapt. I saw life begin. The infection showed me what it was. What it had always been.
It had been there from the very beginning of the universe. It was the first lifeform that had ever existed and was itself the instigator for all life on this planet. Its huge age battered at my sanity. It showed me its endless existence. Every second of its life fell upon me like a billion knives and I screamed at their touch. The infection burned with pain and horror, and that pain swept through me now. I felt its hideous, unwanted life.
And it told me something then that I had never once, not once in all my years of existence, had ever even begun to realise.
It told me it wanted to die.
Like me, and like everyone it had infected eventually felt, it craved its own death. It had lived too long. It had done what it was designed to do. It had created life. But it had been somehow trapped, moving from infected person to infected person. Never ending, never knowing why.
Pointless.
Those feelings of hatred and animosity. All the darkness that had flowed through my veins. They had not been my feelings. They had been the twisted, ancient emotions of the force within me. The force that had kept me alive but had soured my soul.
I was not the instigator of them. They were the bitter remnants of something that had wished for its death a million times over. As it craved it now. The disease wanted to pass it along.
The revelation almost killed me there and then. The life force, the infection. Whatever being or creature it was, it was older than time itself and it screamed at me to release it from its eternal prison. It begged me. And then it showed me something else. It showed me something wonderful.
It showed me that I could free it. It told me what it would do for Pearl if I did. But it also showed me the cost of that act.
And it was a cost I was so happy to pay.
All the others like me: Valin, the woman who had touched him, whoever had touched her, going back and back and back through time. They had all been given this desperate choice at the end, I knew that now. But none of them had even recognised what the choice was, that there even was a choice, and therefore each time it had been denied.
I remembered Valin saying he thought he had lived on long after the infection left him because of the remnants of its power. What he had so wrongly called his God-like status.
And he had been right. The infection had somehow rebooted him, renewed him, left him with the remains of its immense power for years to come. But he, like everyone else who had ever passed it along, had passed it along to a stranger. Simply the first person they had met who fitted the profile they needed. Someone close to death, found at the right time. When the souls of the infected were finally swamped by the horror the infection itself felt every single second and had felt for a billion years and more.
The people they had found had meant nothing to them; they were simply strangers to whom the disease could be passed on to. How the transfer would impact on the infection itself had never been considered, had never even been fully realised, because what happened to the people who received the infection was not the overriding reason for the transference in the first place. And neither was what happened to the infection. So the disease had been passed from person to person; a prisoner of its own existence, lost and alone in its own never-ending, horrifying existence.
I felt that horror now, the infection had shown me. I knew what it meant.
I suddenly knew how to save Pearl. I couldn’t have saved Madeleine, but I could save Pearl. I knew how to make her better. And I knew why it was her who would finally bring peace for the power broiling inside me. Unlike all those who had gone before me, I had listened to its plea.
Because I loved Pearl. She was not a stranger; she was not just an empty vessel to be filled with the curse of never-ending life. I loved her like a father loved his daughter. And any father, if he had this choice within him, would have given it in a heartbeat. What happened to me did not matter.
I could save Pearl. I could save Pearl and I could free the infection. And I could free me. For a while at least.
I stared at her face, knowing that nothing could stop the transference from taking place. It was nature, even if it was nature of a twisted and secret kind. It had been part of the world since its inception. And I could give it what it had wanted for so long. I could make it end.
I stared at Pearl. I could not take my eyes from her.
I touched her chest.
*
I felt it move away from me.
I swear I felt it leave me and enter Pearl. It seemed to drive headlong, joyously, from my body into hers, released at last from its endless jail. It pushed itself into her, the warm, spreading flux seeping, pouring from my palm.
I saw the life force blasting from me to Pearl like a boisterous dog bursting into a new home. I envisioned it as old Hector, excitedly rushing from room to room, sniffing happily and trying to take in everything at once, full of glee and investigation and freedom. Soon he would hunt down what was wrong in Pearl. Soon he would re-energise every single cell in her body. Soon she would be healed. He would do what he had always done.
But this time, unlike every other time before, and like the faithful hound he had always been, Hector would retrieve her illness. He would fetch that disease back to his old master. He would take it away from Pearl and bring it to me before finally, after a millennia of existence, he would curl up in front of the fire. He would close his old eyes, thankfully, and sleep forever.
For this was what the infection had wanted for so long. This was the deal that had been made. The option that only a father would take.
I smiled as I passed it along.
And the transference occurred.
*
Everything seemed to come back to me with a bang and I swayed. The lightning flashed and then disappeared and the thunder tailed off into the distance. The nurse grabbed my arm and led me to the seat she had been sitting on. She checked me over briefly. I suddenly broke down and wept uncontrollably and I think she thought it was grief, but it wasn’t. I wept with joy.
Joy and fear.
She then turned to Madeleine, who was somehow hunched over Pearl now. I hadn’t seen her move, I don’t know how she got from the door to the bed without me seeing. Whatever I had witnessed there by Pearl’s bed, it was gone now. Gone forever. Madeleine was weeping, whispering Pearl’s name over and over, and stroking her head gently. She was letting her daughter go.
I felt a hand on my arm and turned to see Precious staring at me, her young eyes agha
st at the emotion and fear in the room. But I wiped my eyes and smiled at her, lifting her onto my knee, cuddling her into me.
‘It’s going to be all right,’ I said, over and over. ‘It’s going to be fine. You’ll see.’
The nurse left us to our grief, closing the door to the room behind her softly. I sat and hugged Precious whilst Madeleine hugged her other daughter who lay, still and silent on the bed. I think we stayed there a long time as the storm built and died outside, but I don’t know how long.
Time didn’t matter to me anymore.
Eventually I said we had to leave. Madeleine and Precious said their goodbyes to Pearl. I didn’t.
I took them home and dropped them off. Very soon they would be getting a phone call. Very soon they would be getting a miracle, and I didn’t want to be there when it happened.
I drove around for hours in the now light drizzle, not seeing where I went, not knowing what to think.
I was different. I could feel it. Whatever that power was, whatever it had done to me, it was now gone. It was a frightening, but somehow liberating feeling. I felt that, at last, I could now be who I wanted to be, what I wanted to be. For however long I had left.
I was free.
And so was Pearl. I had saved her. The infection, the power, the force, whatever it had been, it would heal her disease and then disappear. It would die, thankfully and comfortably. To begin whatever voyage is on the other side for all of us.
I got back to the apartment and saw there was already a message on the answerphone. I knew what it was. I didn’t need to listen.
I also knew what would happen to me. When, I had no idea, but I believed it would be soon. Very soon.
Ever since that warm, bright, sunny August day in 1914, when everything had seemed possible, I had done my duty to the best of my ability. I had paid a heavy price for it.
But my duty was now over.
