by Greg Bear
“Nor do I,” Sandaji said. “But Edward does.”
Isolated from the world by thin gray walls of falling water, sipping jasmine-scented tea, Peter felt like a little boy. Despite everything, he knelt cross-legged on the pillow in front of Schelling and realized he actually liked both of these people, very much—could possibly even trust them.
What he did not trust and could never trust again was himself, his fallibility, his weakness in the face of absolutes.
“First, Edward, tell Mr. Russell how old you are,” Sandaji suggested.
“Today is my birthday,” Schelling replied with a wide smile. “I am one hundred and five years old.”
Peter was suitably impressed. He could not imagine being so old. For that matter, it was hard to imagine being fifty-eight.
Sandaji beamed at Schelling. “Now tell Mr. Russell about Passchendaele.” She jostled his elbow, as if to switch on a tape recorder.
Schelling began his story.
“A man I once knew survived the Great War in France,” he said. “He was me, of course, in a sense. But I am no longer that trim and idealistic adolescent, so pardon me if I do not use the first-person pronoun. He witnessed horror upon unspeakable horror. He saw thousands die. For weeks, he and his fellow soldiers lay in muddy trenches just yards from the bodies of their friends, who had died hours or days earlier, mowed down in an endless series of aborted advances. As the bodies bloated and were reduced by rats, those still alive gave them comic names, made jokes, placed bets as to when one or another would burst from decay or be blown to pieces by a mortar. It was all done to numb themselves to the horror. For a time, it worked. Humans are astonishingly resilient.
“But after a week, the weather changed . . . not the rain, which was constant, but some other weather. This young man noticed the change first. Perhaps he was always a little sensitive. At first, he saw wisps moving across the fields, down the trenches, like whirls of fog. In subsequent hours, at night, he would catch the silhouette, standing in a familiar posture, of a friend long dead. Then the outline of a face hung over him as he slept, empty eyes beseeching. In fits and starts, he saw full figures of his dead comrades return, walking among the living, seeming as real as those still wearing their flesh. They struggled to appear normal, to do the things they had always used to do. Memory is tenacious, Mr. Russell. It is the glue that holds the universe together, and it binds the dead to their friends and family . . . for a time.
“Others saw them as well. Assuming perhaps that in this hellish place all the rules had changed—class and etiquette, savagery and kindness, the separation of the living and the dead—a few of the more foolhardy attempted to strike up conversations with their old comrades. At first, the revenants were unresponsive, ‘hollow.’ They spoke rarely, and when they did, merely echoed, in weird rearrangements, the words spoken to them.”
Schelling stared out into the rain. His hand, hanging over the arm of the chair, trembled. “It’s no good,” he said. “It comes back too clearly.
“Ultimately, being around these heartless specters drained one of the will to live. After a long night trying to elicit a response from one of my former comrades—whose corpse I could clearly see, stuck on barbed wire a hundred feet away—and receiving only sad echoes, I broke down. I made a run over the top, alone. A few quick and observant friends grabbed me by the ankles and dragged me back into the trench. I did not thank them.”
Schelling patted Sandaji’s shoulder. She was weeping quietly into a handkerchief. “After a few days, the revenants became little more than blurs or outlines, as if suffering through yet another cycle of decay. Perhaps most horrible of all, they now attracted shadows—worms of the spirit and dark, swooping things, like wings without bodies.”
Schelling had Peter. He felt unable to resist, or even to move.
“In the trenches, at night, after a day of fierce shelling, we heard the moaning of hundreds of wounded from the German side. And between those cries, we all heard—all of us, in those trenches, perhaps on both sides—an indescribable skirling, like birds caught in long steel pipes. In the dark, under the awful brilliance of flares drifting down on parachutes, we saw shadows swarming, harrowing the revenants. There was no escape. That terribleness lasted all night, and nobody dared sleep; it was the most awful night of an unbelievably awful war. Yet it did not last forever. The living endured. And by morning, all was clear.
“That strange season did not return, not for the other young men, not for me, through the entire war. But now, it is back, stronger and stranger than ever. We are all seeing ghosts, and not just on battlefields. Am I speaking truth, Mr. Russell?”
Peter wrapped his temples and crown in his hands. His head hurt from clenching his jaw.
Schelling took encouragement from this response. “All who survived that wretched war returned broken in one way or another, their lives changed, and not for the better. I wanted to believe that what I saw was just a madness of the battlefield. Yet wherever I went thereafter, thirty and forty years later, the faces of the dead swam through my dreams. Rarely, I met them on the street, lost, seeking, watching me with empty, hungry eyes, as if I could help.
“I do not know why I was afforded this third sight, but I sometimes wonder . . . Was it because I had witnessed a process no living being should ever see? What becomes of us when we die. And how we die a second time.”
Schelling looked down at Peter, his lips pressed tightly together. “Don’t confuse death with sleep, Mr. Russell,” he said, his stentor growing husky. “Death is more like being born. It’s a long, hard giving up of warmth for something you don’t know. There’s a desperate glamour that surrounds the living, and for a time, the dead think they are still in the game. They cling to any memory of their life—the sharper and stronger, the better. The dead grieve. They grieve for the living, for what they have lost, their places, their possessions, their loved ones, all that defined them in this world. Their mournful need holds them to the Earth. And so they must be shaken loose, like flakes of old skin.” Here, he shuddered, not delicately, but so violently and abruptly he upset his teacup. The cup fell to the deck, but miraculously did not shatter. He bent slowly, joints creaking, to stare dolefully down at it. “If you’ve seen such things,” Schelling said, “I most certainly understand your reluctance to talk about them.”
Sandaji returned the cup to his hand, and both contemplated a stone lantern just outside the teahouse. As the dusk deepened, the rain slowed, then stopped, and lights came on automatically in the yard, around the well-groomed bushes, and finally inside the lantern itself.
“Please, tell us whatever you know,” Sandaji encouraged. “It could be so very important.”
Peter craned his neck to look at the darkening sky, the few stars, and wondered what he was about to do, and what the consequences would be. Michelle’s distrust. Joseph’s decline.
I saw her. I know I did. I’m not crazy, and it’s not just the bad old grief coming back.
She’s real.
Peter clenched his fists, a menacing, gorillalike gesture that made both Schelling and Sandaji flinch. “It hurts too much to believe.”
“What about truth?” Sandaji asked.
Peter snorted. “Truth is a hunter. Truth is what kills you when you give up the lies.”
Sandaji said, “An astute observation, but must it be your final answer? When you are ready—” she began.
Peter interrupted. “What do you think the shadows are?”
“I don’t know,” Schelling said.
“If memories drop away like dead skin,” Peter said, “well, there are bugs that eat dead skin, right?”
Sandaji gave him a reproachful look.
“They could be scavengers, like rats, or eels. Or like you said, worms or vultures,” Peter said quietly.
“You have witnessed,” Sandaji said.
“They might also be friends in disguise,” Schelling said. “Sacrifice is liberation, Mr. Russell. We’re talking about a process
and a condition we know almost nothing about, and so if we draw conclusions, they’re bound to be erroneous. And if we interfere, it is bound to be disastrous.”
It was growing dark. Peter needed to get back to the house, to protect his daughter from the shadows. Back to his insanity. But he could not convince his body to move. He remained seated. Whatever she had become, Daniella was no longer safe—for him.
I don’t know how to help her.
Crickets, assured that the rain was over, started singing in the garden.
“Let’s say I believe you,” Peter said, his voice rough. “Let’s say I’ve seen these things. What caused the change? How can we help them escape, pass on, whatever they need to do?”
Sandaji’s expression became sad and radiant, aware of Peter’s breakthrough—and the pain it could cause.
“This is difficult to convey,” Schelling said. “When we die, we shed all our memories at once—the temporary psychic equivalent of the physical body. But embedded within that immaterial skin, as you call it, is something else, not temporary, different. It departs, but does not always do so immediately. I’ve seen such only twice, in all my experiences with spiritual matters, but it left a lasting impression: a kind of golden glow, like an inner sunset.”
“What is it?” Peter asked.
“Some think that a ghost can still carry its soul, trapped in memories like a bird in a thorny bush. Trauma—war or other violence—may drag out the release. Or because we remember our loved ones too passionately, they cannot let go. This change that we are witnessing, this alteration in the spiritual weather, only adds to their difficulties—and to ours. If we can reverse the change . . .”
Sandaji held up the unwrapped Trans. Peter stared at it in mixed wonder and horror.
“This device is responsible, Mr. Russell,” Schelling said. “You carried one into this house, and at that moment, precisely, induced Sandaji’s visions. The visions returned when Mrs. Benoliel gave us another. With the experience of almost nine decades of dealing with the spiritual, I am convinced that these instruments of communication are highlighting the dead and their supernatural entourage, perhaps even blocking the pathways of our final liberation. Tell your friends, the ones who built these, whom you are working for, that they must stop. They may be putting us all in worse than mortal danger.”
Peter stared at the plastic ovoid. “How?”
“Perhaps you have been told, and simply haven’t made the connections.”
Forbidden channels . . . Down there is a deeper silence than we can know, a great emptiness. Huge bandwidth, perhaps infinite capacity. It can handle all our noise, all our talk, anything we have to say, throughout all eternity. So Kreisler had told him.
But the forbidden channels were not so empty after all.
Not news of Phil, not the fear of a real, paying job—but getting a Trans.
That was the shot from the starting pistol.
“Such intimate contact with the dead is neither good nor right,” Schelling said, his face turning grim at Peter’s lengthening silence, his apparent obstinacy. “I have advised Sandaji that it is time to leave this city, to leave the West Coast entirely. It is not healthy.”
Perhaps Joseph was seeing ghosts; Sandaji and Schelling were, too. If Peter was crazy or sick, it was contagious—but they all had Trans units. “Not just here,” he said, his mouth dry. “They’ve shipped Trans worldwide.”
Sandaji’s hand clutched his. “Then it’s most urgent.” She looked even more vulnerable than he felt. “Your daughter. When first you visited, I saw her beside you. Just a face, obviously that of a young girl, a brief hint, but there was a resemblance. You are not beautiful, if I may say so, but she was. That is the way of children.”
Tears formed in Peter’s eyes. He wiped them quickly with the back of his fist. “Daniella . . .” was all he could manage. The observations were tumbling for him now. The old woman with the silly dog, at the rest stop, he thought. She smiled at someone standing right beside me, smiled like a doting grandmother.
“It was a shock, much more than I was prepared for,” Sandaji said. “Before that moment, I had never seen a ghost.”
Schelling reached to grip Peter’s shoulder. Holding each other, they formed a small circle. “Have courage,” the old man said. “We have seen the girl again, but not with you, and not here.”
“Where?” Peter asked.
“At Salammbo,” Sandaji said. Her look beseeched his understanding. “Both of us witnessed her. Edward and I. And we saw others, so many others. The estate is crowded with the dead. We fear for her, and for you, Mr. Russell. There is a great and old malevolence at Salammbo, and it is growing.”
“Did Mr. Benoliel ever do something very, very wrong?” Schelling asked. “Something criminal?”
CHAPTER 36
PETER PULLED OFF the 10 onto National Avenue and found himself wandering into the Cheviot Hills. He had been driving aimlessly for the last hour, trying to skirt evening traffic. He parked on a wide street and ratcheted up the emergency brake. Let out his breath. Peered through the windshield, speckled with drops of rain. The skies were clearing after the storm. This was a neighborhood of fine old homes, not too ostentatious but well maintained and beautifully manicured. A place of order and decorum. Peter had always loved this part of Los Angeles, an oasis of neighborhood and sanity on the edge of gray industrial sprawl.
What he was longing for was a place away from his beaten path, where he could put together what he thought he knew and prepare some course of action.
He had planned all along to be home before dark. Now that thought scared him. A pretty little shade, one step behind him wherever he went, waited to hug him, envelop him. He did not want to end up sprawled on the driveway again, a bit of his life neatly sliced away.
He glanced with a shiver at the Porsche’s right-hand seat. No dimpling of the upholstery, no wandering specks of dust.
Objective confirmation. Seeing the same things. You know you’re not crazy, and you’re certainly not just making it up to fail again.
Peter folded his arms and closed his eyes.
Just know what you need to do. If Schelling is right, Daniella is stuck—
He gave a sudden, unexpected hiccup. The effective center of his immediate problem might be Joseph. Peter had no idea what to do now about the Trans units, all over the world, but he could drive back to Malibu in the dark and approach Joseph in his upstairs room and ask what in the hell was happening. Ask what Joseph suspected, grill him if necessary about what he had known even before the Trans units had arrived at Salammbo.
Neither Sandaji nor Schelling could describe to Peter the nature of the malevolence they had sensed at Salammbo, only that they wanted nothing to do with it. A man who had seen unimaginable horrors during the First World War, nearing the end of a long and peculiar life . . . as frightened as a child.
But the key question was almost unaskable: Why would Daniella appear at Salammbo, to strangers?
Scragg had asked about people who had never been mentioned during the investigation. People beyond suspicion.
Joseph.
Peter was shivering, though the inside of the car was warm. He, too, felt a deep and pervasive fear, what he imagined would be experienced by hunted mice, rabbits; he was a small animal still hoping to escape from greater and carnivorous truths.
But there was no place to hide.
Even if he learned something important at Salammbo, there was still the matter of the units, of Trans itself, blocking the pathways of the dead—and whatever that implied.
“What in the name of all that is holy am I going to do?” he asked out loud. But thus far he had seen nothing holy. Awesome, frightening, dangerous, yes, but holy seemed to have no place in this scheme of things. What Peter wanted most of all, sitting in his old car in the prosperous and orderly neighborhood, was a safe and gentle God to provide answers and guidance. The God of his childhood, gray-bearded and welcoming and full of warm understanding.
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br /> Not this spiritual abyss.
Peter’s hand reached out to turn the key. He had come to a kind of decision: not Salammbo. Not yet. He needed to be better prepared, stand on firmer ground. He needed to return to the real center of his life, all that he had left.
Lindsey and Helen.
He wound around the neat dark streets, with their old milk-glass streetlights glowing like warm little moons, and finally returned to the freeway. The traffic was hideous after the storm. Lane after lane, road after road, jammed full, horns honking, people getting out of their cars and standing, rolling down windows to share complaints.
Blocked traffic everywhere.
Not a good time to die.
CHAPTER 37
LINDSEY RAN UP to the condo door first after Peter rang the doorbell. They stood with the screen between them and exchanged a look that confirmed what Peter had suspected; things had changed in this household—for Lindsey, at least—in much the same way they had changed in his own.
She gave him a scrunched look. “What took you so long?”
“I’m here now, sweetie,” he said. “Where’s your mother?”
Helen came around the corner from the kitchen and flipped on the outside light. She stood beside Lindsey and eyed Peter suspiciously. “It’s ten o’clock.”
“Lindsey and I have to talk.”
“What about?” Helen asked. “Who invited you?”
“She doesn’t know?” Peter asked Lindsey.
Lindsey shook her head.
“Know what?” Helen demanded.
“I need to speak to my daughter,” Peter said.
“Mom, can you go someplace for a while?” Lindsey asked.
Peter cringed inwardly.
Helen flashed over. “I control this household, buster. Nobody tells me to leave my own house!”
“I don’t barge in like this often,” Peter said, trying for an ingratiating smile.
“Mom, it’s important. It’s nothing like what you’re thinking.”
Helen stepped back, aghast. “Who here has ever given a damn about what I’m thinking? Sure as hell, you haven’t told me something,” she said, livid.
