The Absolute Book

by Elizabeth Knox

  ‘Shift.’ She said his name just to remind herself who he was. ‘Why do I look like a ghost while you look like the Wendigo?’

  ‘You look like your twenty-year-old self on her way to a party,’ he said.

  ‘Eighteen-year-old. Before Bea was killed.’

  He peered ahead, across the now undulating grassland. ‘There’s some sort of pull here for me. Something in this place likes the plan I’ve been carrying around.’

  ‘Is your plan full of dried flowers and dead bees?’

  The train horn sounded once more.

  ‘The dried flowers and dead bees are just as far as I’ve got,’ Shift said. He took her hand again.

  The undulations became a plain, ground balding, grass malnourished. A little way out from the station they met a path. They followed it up onto the platform, which was ferrous-brown concrete. The rails in the track bed were bright, so used often.

  Two men and three women were waiting under the station’s high canopy. All were youngish, and their clothes were mismatched in both type and time period: dress shoes with a boiler suit, a fox stole with silk pyjamas.

  When Shift and Taryn arrived, the people shuffled closer together in the patch of nominal shade. They moved as if they were troubled by arthritis. One of the women had a dowager’s hump, though by her face Taryn would have put her at twenty-five. Her mouth was covered in blisters.

  Taryn asked when the next train was.

  ‘The last one that went by didn’t stop,’ said a man, which wasn’t much of an answer.

  ‘The last I managed to catch took me all the way to the pool,’ said a woman.

  Taryn asked, ‘What is the pool?’

  ‘Wading pool,’ said the woman. Or maybe it was ‘waiting pool’.

  ‘Before you get on make sure it stops at the records office,’ said another woman, more cogent. Then she unzipped the cracked leather document folder she was carrying and produced a file. ‘When I came away from there I didn’t realise they’d given me only half of what I needed.’

  Taryn peered at the folder. Its cover was furry with age. She read, ‘Denise, 348.’

  ‘How did you find out which Denise you are?’

  ‘You have to take a ticket and wait to be called.’

  ‘Three hundred and forty-eight was your ticket number? Does that mean you’re filed by just “Denise”?’

  The third woman limped over to Shift and took hold of him. She said, ‘When you go, will you take me with you?’

  He pushed her hand from his arm. It wasn’t easy and his skin and hers together made a waxy, whimpering sound. ‘What are you to me?’ he said.

  The woman fell back, glowered, then lunged at him and snatched a handful of bones and feathers from his mantle. She hurried out from under the canopy and into the glare.

  The sun had come out. Its white force was making the dry shingles of the station roof creek and crackle. Heat sliced up from the stripe of platform outside the pool of shade.

  Taryn said to the woman with the file, ‘My name is Taryn. How many of us can there be?’

  The railway line thumped and twanged. Half a minute later a train blasted through the station without stopping. Once it had gone so had three of the people, including the woman with the file. The dilapidated carriage parked on the siding opposite the station now had people sitting in its windowless darkness, relaxed, their elbows resting on the windowsills. Had they always been there?

  Taryn ventured out of the shade to take a closer look. She checked the line. There was no sign of another train. Back the way they’d come, the Uphill, a figure had appeared. It was creeping across the balding pasture. It was human, but there was something badly wrong with it. Something worse than stiff joints.

  Taryn shaded her eyes.

  Behind her, Shift’s mantle made a faint hissing and bamboo wind chime clatter as he came towards her. ‘We’re waiting for a train in order to cover some distance,’ he said. ‘But we might as well just stay here. Distance doesn’t figure. There isn’t a deeper in.’

  ‘But we’ve made progress. That’s where we were.’ Taryn pointed in the direction of the creeping shape.

  The person was now up on its elbows, clawing its way forward, one leg dragging behind, the other extended straight upwards like the mast of a yacht.

  The railway line sang, the pounding slower than it was before.

  ‘This one will stop,’ Shift said. ‘We should get on.’

  Taryn wasn’t terribly surprised that he’d changed his mind. She was just as content to go as to stay. No place was crowded. The station wasn’t. The train wouldn’t be. Perhaps she could sit for a time.

  The train slid into the station. It was without doors, but did have glass in its windows. Everyone climbed into the same carriage, Taryn pushing the others until she was safely clear of the open doorway. The others seemed to be old hands at train travel. No sooner were they were on board than they turned either direction, one going towards the engine and the other towards the back of the train.

  The train started up, jerking, carriage shunting carriage so that the floor swung. Taryn held on to the back of a seat. The man in the seat, dapper, strictly upright, turned to her, savage, and wiped her hand off his headrest. The cracked leather gave the same waxy creak that Shift’s skin had, as if the sounds in this country were few, and recycled unmodified.

  Shift took Taryn’s arm and led her forward. They went into the next carriage, passing through a slightly too long tunnel of black concertinaed rubber. Taryn used the hot, perishing smell to stabilise herself. In this country there were so few scents that the rubber stink acted on her like smelling salts. She said to Shift, ‘You told me we shouldn’t get on the train and that we didn’t need to go any further. Then you suddenly changed your mind.’

  They’d reached the next carriage. Shift ducked his head to look back at the station and the bald hills. The tunnel between the carriages was like a corridor in a space station. A portion of Shift’s bones, seed heads, moth wings had detached from his orbit and was floating in the tunnel’s zero gravity.

  ‘You’re shedding,’ Taryn told him.

  He gave the tunnel a sombre appraisal then asked her if she’d please collect the seed heads for him.

  She did. Her pockets were capacious enough for fistfuls of dried seed heads.

  Taryn was walking on the road between St Cynog’s Cross and Princes Gate on an overcast autumn day. The road had a long right-hand curve, but it went on for longer than she remembered. She was too tired to hurry. Her tiredness felt more like anaemia than a couple of skipped meals. The bend went on, without recognisable landmarks, no oak close to the road with the place she always laid a hand when she passed. The spot no higher up than when Bea’s head had hit it. When Taryn was old, that spot might be a couple of centimetres higher, or maybe five. Oaks were slow. This roadway worse than slow, not swinging into a left-hand curve as it should, showing her the oak. Why had she undertaken this pilgrimage? What was there to say to the tree that killed your sister?

  I should have killed you too. Drilled into your roots. Ring-barked you.

  The swinging train had soothed Taryn into something like sleep. Something like a dream. When she opened her eyes she was looking through a screen of tiny suspended shadows. The wings of a dead moth brushed her browbone and sprinkled its powder on her eyelid. Her head was resting on Shift’s shoulder.

  Beyond the train windows it was night. The train was travelling along an embankment. They were coming up on lighted buildings. A town, apparently one street in depth, in a strip below the embankment. Buildings maybe five storeys high, the third storey level with the railway line.

  As the lighted windows came up, everyone sitting on the opposite side of the carriage crowded to Taryn’s side and crammed up to the windows to peer intently at the buildings. It was possible to see straight into the third-floor windows, and down into the second. Many of the rooms were illuminated. Taryn saw beige plastic furniture, neutral grey-green walls, narrow
beds with guardrails and waffled cotton blankets. She saw a hospital. The whole strip was a hospital.

  The train had slowed, until there were more than glimpses. A child sat in a wheelchair at a window. A man lay tucked up in bed, the twin tubes of an oxygen line in his nostrils. A figure of indeterminate sex, completely swathed in bandages, stood in the centre of the room with their back to the train.

  At the sight of the figure in bandages the people pressed around Taryn and Shift made sounds of discovery, as if this might be someone known to all or any of them. The noises they made were of relief, or jubilation. They fought their way out of the press and rushed to either end of the carriage and the open doors.

  The same thing was happening all over the train. Taryn could see figures rolling down the embankment, raising dust. She returned her gaze to the windows just in time to see a room whose every surface was loaded with vases of flowers, mostly white roses and peonies, daisies and baby’s breath. Taryn’s mother was in the bed. Taryn herself was already there, standing at the window, looking out. And there was a black-clad figure against the room’s closed door, head down and hands clasped in prayer.

  Taryn reeled back against Shift and was engulfed in his mantle of dead matter. A bird bone tapped on the side of her nose like a knowing finger. He caught her and helped her back through the bodies clustered at the windows. They hurried to an open door. She baulked and braced herself in its frame. The ground slipped past. In the squares of light cast on the bank by the hospital windows she could see bushes and sizeable stones and several winded or wounded jumpers struggling to pick themselves up at the foot of the slope. She glimpsed one maimed, knotted figure pushing himself to move between a roll and crawl.

  Shift seized her wrists, ripped her grip off the frame, wrapped her arms across her chest and himself around her. He propelled them out of the train. They hit the slope inside the dust devil of his mantle. Then he let her go and she slid free of it. Momentum carried her to the foot of the slope, where she lay coughing. Dust coated her teeth. She hawked and spat. It was some time till her tears had rinsed the dust from her eyes. Once she could see, she looked for Shift and found him combing the slope for what had been knocked out of his mantle when he fell. After a few minutes he seemed satisfied he’d recovered enough. He scrambled over to her and deposited his handfuls in her pockets. He helped her up and the fat, light lumps of collected matter bumped against her thighs.

  ‘You’re spoiling the drape of my skirt,’ she said. ‘And I can’t see why my good appearance should be sacrificed for yours.’

  He said, ‘Perhaps you will allow that for a time?’ Then, ‘Who was it you saw?’

  ‘Beatrice, visiting my mother.’ Once Taryn said it, she knew it was true. The woman in her mother’s hospital room couldn’t be herself, because here she was, outside, covered in dust.

  ‘But Beatrice wasn’t any kind of sinner,’ he said. ‘Why would she be here?’

  ‘Maybe she was and we didn’t know,’ Taryn said. ‘Bea was a terrible shoplifter at fourteen. Terrible as in very active. She was mean to her friends sometimes.’ Taryn was reaching. She remembered Bea blowing marijuana smoke in the face of one of Grandma’s cats and giving the stoned animal a spin on an office chair. That was some kind of cruel. A silly, careless kind. She remembered Bea picking all the banana slices off the top of a big bowl of jelly meant for Christmas dinner; Bea stacking books covered in Moroccan leather to stand on them and reach for something; Bea spending one wet Saturday afternoon making prank calls: ‘Is your fridge running? Because it’s just passed our house.’ Bea pinching her when she had too effective a comeback in one of their arguments. But all that was just naughty or thoughtless, not sinful.

  Shift interrupted her thoughts by asking her which building it was.

  From the train, the room had been exactly like Addy Cornick’s last, though that room was on floor nine, elevator D. D for doomed was what Taryn used to think each time she left, at the end of a long day. D for die already why don’t you.

  ‘Bea was never at that hospital. She’d been dead for two years,’ Taryn said, again giving her sister up.

  The wall beside her was mudbrick. The windows had no glass, though there was a gentle orange illumination spilling into the black air beyond each.

  ‘If we’re all dead why would there be a hospital?’ Now that she’d surrendered the possibility of Beatrice, Taryn had returned to logic.

  ‘You and I aren’t dead. Please bear that in mind. The people of this country built the hospital, I think. It’s a real material building housing a ghost for everyone. Ghost beds. Ghost oxygen outlets and call buttons. Ghost electricity making a beacon for passengers on the ghost train. But these bricks are real.’

  ‘I think the building we want is two back,’ Taryn said. ‘About five hundred metres.’ She turned that way and made her jarred limbs move.

  Many of the other jumpers had sorted themselves out and were making their way in already. On the railway line side there was a single doorless entrance to each building, and handsomely uneven mudbrick stairs going straight up.

  ‘They built a hospital because they think people who are sick might be healed,’ Shift said. ‘They think themselves in need of healing. And that a hospital might attract healers.’

  It seemed that each person here was telling a story about themselves and, if their stories matched up, then enough people might get together and make something—the shared memory of a train, a train for going places, or a building fashioned with the materials to hand, like mud, straw and water.

  Taryn and Shift had just about reached the single entranceway in the block they wanted, when he stopped abruptly and she ran into him. She was momentarily submerged in the bristle of energy and objects, soft and hard, and drops of water, still cold, as if they’d just been shaken out of a chilled water bottle. She backed away, then farther away as he retreated too, his hand groping for her, though he seemed unwilling to turn his head.

  She peered around him and stopped cold.

  At their feet and in their way was the crawling man. He was lying face up to drag himself along. His arms were twisted a full hundred-and-eighty degrees, shoulders out of their joints, the bone of the ball and socket making lumps in his armpits, his muscles stretched stringy, and bruised deeply purple. One of his hands was paralysed, but not flaccid. It was clenched, fingers as rigid as a garden weed-grubbing tool. The other hand was in motion and making some kind of signal at them. His hips were twisted sideways. One leg worked a little and he was digging it in to help drag himself between them and the doorway. His other leg was a mast, dislocated at the hip and knee, sticking straight up.

  His face was scoured by sand. Grains of sand made a black lacework around the edges of his grazes. The grit wasn’t the soft yellow soil of the embankment, but the grey of a tidal inlet.

  Shift grabbed Taryn under her ribs, hoisted her and tossed her over the Muleskinner. She banged against the wall just inside the stairway and dropped to the steps. A cold, wet hand brushed her ankle.

  She scrambled upwards as fast as she could, though she was suddenly weighed down, her neck and shoulders pressed towards the steps. Where the stairs turned she stopped, checking whether Shift was behind her.

  He was in the doorway, his back to her. He was stooped over the Muleskinner, talking or listening—Taryn couldn’t tell which. He looked like the kindly stranger who stops to check on a child that has skinned its knee.

  Another train roared past, the lights from its window strobing over the maimed man, and igniting every glistening drop of water suspended in Shift’s mantle.

  The heaviness on Taryn was a chain. Once again, it was wrapped around her neck. Its length trailed behind her down the stairs, its end just out of reach of the Muleskinner’s one good, groping hand.

  Taryn reeled in the dangling chain. It rattled and danced up the stairs. She wrapped it around herself, making a thick bandolier.

  Shift turned, came up to her, and encouraged her to go on
.

  Taryn went, but kept turning to him to ask questions to which she already knew the answers. Why is he here? More sinned against than sinning. How did he find us? The same way you’re going to find your mother. The gravity of things unfinished.

  It took them some time to locate the room, and they found it empty. All that remained were dry, yellowed flowers and glass vases with greenish tidelines of evaporated water.

  The black robe hanging on the back of the door—the only door in that hospital, a door to discourage visitors because there was someone who could never visit—was what Taryn had taken for the penitential figure of a third person in the room. She removed the robe from its hook and put it on over her looped chain and her favourite skirt with its bulging pockets.

  ‘We’ll look for another exit,’ Shift said. ‘We can hide between buildings and jump on the next slow train.’

  If it was necessary to hide, Shift must believe the Muleskinner hadn’t finished with her.

  They wandered around the building’s ground floor. They saw many people searching for friends and relatives, but all the rooms were empty. Eventually they climbed out a window. It was then they discovered that the buildings were linked by a single corridor at ground level, concertinaed rubber tubes like those between the train carriages.

  The hospital had a frontage on the side opposite the railway, a large forecourt and canopy, a place ambulances might pull up. But the forecourt was beaten earth and there was no road on that side leading to it.

  The tunnels between the buildings prevented Shift and Taryn from concealing themselves there, so they made their way to the wall at the very end of the row, where they found several other souls clustered who were taking turns to peer around the corner, on the lookout for slow trains or for people they meant to avoid.

  The wall was still warm from the day’s sun. Taryn leaned against it while Shift went to the corner. Peering around it, he immediately spotted their pursuer. He pointed the Muleskinner out to the other people and asked their advice. ‘If I straighten him out, will that help?’