The Living Dead

by John Joseph Adams

  “Better than you. Clearer, cleaner, deeper. Oh, God, what am I doing here? You disgust me.”

  “How can I keep on growing?” Bekh asked gently. “The dead don’t grow.”

  Her tirade swept on, as if she hadn’t heard. Telling him over and over how despicable he was, what a counterfeit of greatness. And then she halted in midsentence. Blinking, reddening, putting hands to lips. “Oh,” she murmured, abashed, starting to weep. “Oh. Oh!”

  She went silent.

  It lasted a long time. She looked away, studied the walls, the mirror, her hands, her shoes. He watched her. Then, finally, she said, “What an arrogant little snot I am. What a cruel foolish bitch. I never stopped to think that you—that maybe—I just didn’t think—” He thought she would run from him. “And you won’t forgive me, will you? Why should you? I break in, I turn you on, I scream a lot of cruel nonsense at you—”

  “It wasn’t nonsense. It was all quite true, you know. Absolutely true.” Then, softly, he said, “Break the machinery.”

  “Don’t worry. I won’t cause any more trouble for you. I’ll go, now. I can’t tell you how foolish I feel, haranguing you like that. A dumb little puritan, puffed up with pride in her own art. Telling you that you don’t measure up to my ideals. When I—”

  “You didn’t hear me. I asked you to break the machinery.”

  She looked at him in a new way, slightly out of focus. “What are you talking about?”

  “To stop me. I want to be gone. Is that so hard to understand? You, of all people, should understand that. What you say is true, very very true. Can you put yourself where I am? A thing, not alive, not dead, just a thing, a tool, an implement that, unfortunately, thinks and remembers and wishes for release. Yes, a player piano. My life stopped and my art stopped, and I have nothing to belong to now, not even the art. For it’s always the same. Always the same tones, the same reaches, the same heights. Pretending to make music, as you say. Pretending.”

  “But I can’t—”

  “Of course you can. Come, sit down, we’ll discuss it. And you’ll play for me.”

  “Play for you?”

  He reached out his hand and she started to take it, then drew her hand back. “You’ll have to play for me,” he said quietly. “I can’t let just anyone end me. That’s a big, important thing, you see. Not just anyone. So you’ll play for me.” He got heavily to his feet. Thinking of Lisbeth, Sharon, Dorothea. Gone, all gone now. Only he, Bekh, left behind, some of him left behind, old bones, dried meat. Breath as stale as Egypt. Blood the color of pumice. Sounds devoid of tears and laughter. Just sounds.

  He led the way, and she followed him, out onto the stage, where the console still stood uncrated. He gave her his gloves, saying, “I know they aren’t yours. I’ll take that into account. Do the best you can.” She drew them on slowly, smoothing them.

  She sat down at the console. He saw the fear in her face, and the ecstasy, also. Her fingers hovering over the keys. Pouncing. God, Timi’s Ninth! The tones swelling and rising, and the fear going from her face. Yes. Yes. He would not have played it that way, but yes, just so. Timi’s notes filtered through her soul. A striking interpretation. Perhaps she falters a little, but why not? The wrong gloves, no preparation, strange circumstances. And how beautifully she plays. The hall fills with sound. He ceases to listen as a critic might; he becomes part of the music. His own fingers moving, his muscles quivering, reaching for pedals and stops, activating the pressors. As if he plays through her. She goes on, soaring higher, losing the last of her nervousness. In full command. Not yet a finished artist, but so good, so wonderfully good! Making the mighty instrument sing. Draining its full resources. Underscoring this, making that more lean. Oh, yes! He is in the music. It engulfs him. Can he cry? Do the tearducts still function? He can hardly bear it, it is so beautiful. He has forgotten, in all these years. He has not heard anyone else play for so long. Seven hundred four days. Out of the tomb. Bound up in his own meaningless performances. And now this. The rebirth of music. It was once like this all the time, the union of composer and instrument and performer, soul-wrenching, all-encompassing. For him. No longer. Eyes closed, he plays the movement through to its close by way of her body, her hands, her soul. When the sound dies away, he feels the good exhaustion that comes from total submission to the art.

  “That’s fine,” he said, when the last silence was gone. “That was very lovely.” A catch in his voice. His hands were still trembling; he was afraid to applaud.

  He reached for her, and this time she took his hand. For a moment he held her cool fingers. Then he tugged gently, and she followed him back into the dressing room, and he laid down on the sofa, and he told her which mechanisms to break, after she turned him off, so he would feel no pain. Then he closed his eyes and waited.

  “You’ll just—go?” she asked.

  “Quickly. Peacefully.”

  “I’m afraid. It’s like murder.”

  “I’m dead,” he said. “But not dead enough. You won’t be killing anything. Do you remember how my playing sounded to you? Do you remember why I came here? Is there life in me?”

  “I’m still afraid.”

  “I’ve earned my rest,” he said. He opened his eyes and smiled. “It’s all right. I like you.” And, as she moved toward him, he said, “Thank you.”

  Then he closed his eyes again.

  She turned him off. Then she did as he had instructed her.

  Picking her way past the wreckage of the sustaining chamber, she left the dressing room. She found her way out of the Music Center—out onto the glass landscape, under the singing stars, and she was crying for him.

  Laddy. She wanted very much to find Laddy now. To talk to him. To tell him he was almost right about what he’d told her. Not entirely, but more than she had believed… before. She went away from there. Smoothly, with songs yet to be sung.

  And behind her, a great peace had settled. Unfinished, at last the symphony had wrung its last measure of strength and sorrow.

  It did not matter what Weatherex said was the proper time for mist or rain or fog. Night, the stars, the songs were forever.

  PASSION PLAY

  by Nancy Holder

  Nancy Holder is the author of more than eighty novels, including Pretty Little Devils, Daughter of the Flames, and Dead in the Water, which won the Bram Stoker Award for best novel. She’s also written a number of media tie-in novels, for properties such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Highlander, and Smallville. Writing as Chris P. Flesh, Holder is the author of the Pretty Freekin Scary series of books for children. A new paranormal romance novel, Son of the Shadows, was released in August. Holder’s short fiction—which has appeared in anthologies such as Borderlands, Confederacy of the Dead, Love in Vein, and The Mammoth Book of Dracula—has won her the Stoker Award three times.

  Holder says this story was inspired by the Oberammergau Passion Play, which originated in 1634, during the Thirty Years’ War. “Bubonic plague had spread all over Bavaria. The citizens of Oberammergau begged God to spare them,” she says. “In return, they would put on a play about the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus every ten years. The ravages of the plague ceased, and the Oberammergauers kept their vow. They still perform the play, most recently in 2000.”

  It was a chilly May morning, and Cardinal Schonbrun’s knees cracked as he took his seat beside Father Meyer in the Passionspielhaus. Father Meyer heard the noise very clearly; he was acutely aware of every sound, smell, and sight around him: of the splinters in the planks of the large, open-air stage before them, the smell of dew, the dampness of his palms. The murmurs of anticipation of the assembling crowd, and those of speculation—and derision—when his own people, scattered among the thousands, caught sight of him. He was aware that he looked like a prisoner, wedged between his friend Hans Ahrenkiel, the bishop of Munich, and his nemesis, the cardinal. He was aware that his life as a priest would be over that day.

  The cardinal scowled at Father Meyer and said
, “Is it true what I’ve just heard?”

  Father Meyer licked his lips. How had he hoped to keep it a secret? “That depends on what it is, Eminence.”

  “Did you give absolution to the wandelnder Leichnam this morning?

  Though his heart sank—someone had betrayed him—Father Meyer regarded the cardinal steadily. “Ja. Does that surprise you?”

  Cardinal Schonbrun made a shocked noise. On Father Meyer’s left, the bishop shook his head mournfully.

  “Did it partake of the Holy Eucharist?”

  The cardinal was a much younger man than Father Meyer could ever remember being. Blond and blue-eyed, vigorous and vital. Filled with New Ideas for the New Church. The kind of man Rome wanted to lead her flocks into the twenty-first century.

  The kind of man Father Meyer, gray and aged, was not.

  Father Meyer raised his chin. “The Church has always offered her mercy to the condemned. Ja. I did it.”

  The cardinal’s face mottled with anger. He opened his mouth, glanced at the swelling audience, and spoke in a harsh, tense whisper. “Think what you’ve done, man! Polluted the body of Christ. You’ve made a mockery of the Sacraments, of your own vows—”

  Father Meyer spread open his hands. “All I know, Your Eminence, is that Oberammergau, my village and that of my ancestors… that this village made a vow to God. And that now, four hundred years later, we’re shaming that vow with what we are doing today.”

  Bishop Ahrenkiel touched Father Meyer’s arm. They had sat in the rectory together, drinking ancient Benedictine brandy and discussing the New Ideas. In companionable silence, they’d listened to Father Meyer’s collections of Gregorian chants, gone through scrapbooks of Passion Plays through the centuries. Father Meyer had hoped that Bishop Ahrenkiel, at least, would understand. But he, alas, was a New Bishop.

  “I thought we had gone through all that, Johannes,” he said now, for the obvious benefit of the cardinal. “These are not living creatures. They have no souls. The Vatican has spoken on the matter and—”

  “The Vatican is wrong.” Father Meyer turned anguished eyes toward the young cardinal. “Everyone is wrong. Your Eminence, I’ve spent time among these Leichname. I—I feel they are my ministry. They aren’t merely corpses, as science would have us believe. I hear their hearts, though they cannot speak. They seek the Father, as we all do. They hope for love, and mercy, and justice.”

  “Father Meyer,” the cardinal began, but at that moment, the single voice of the Prologue, a man dressed in a simple white robe with a band of gold around his forehead, called them to order:

  “Bend low, bend low…”

  Those same words had rung through the Passion Meadow for centuries, as once again the Bavarian village of Oberammergau renewed its covenant with God: the townspeople would perform a play glorifying the suffering and resurrection of Christ—the Passion—if the Lord would spare them from the ravages of the Plague. In 1633, it had worked: no more fevers that shook the body; no more pustules that burst and ran; no more deaths. After the vow, grace.

  Oberammergau was not unique in this bargaining: in the 1600s, many villages, towns, and cities promised to put on Passion Plays in return for survival. But in all the world, Oberammergau was the only village that still honored its pledge. The villagers pointed to this fidelity as the reason the town had also been spared the horrors of the more recent plague, the one that turned men and women, even tiny babies, into hellish monsters—the walking dead, rotting, slathering, mindless. What terror had run throughout the world.

  Now, of course, the zombies were contained, and could even be controlled—as they would be today, on the Passion stage. Such a gift from God, such a miracle.

  And as through the centuries, people from all over the world came to see God’s miracles. Nearly half a million souls flocked to Oberammergau in the course of each decade’s one hundred summer performances. But this year, the numbers were doubling—tripling—because of the introduction of the new element—a Newer way to glorify the agony and suffering of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

  “Death from the sinner I release” sang the Prologue figure. And the crowd stirred—in eagerness, Father Meyer thought bitterly, at what was to come. But if his plan worked, they would leave this place with their bloodlust unsated.

  “Sir,” Father Meyer began, but a stalwart hausfrau behind him tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Hsst!”

  The Prologue soloist sang on. It was Anton Veck, whom Father Meyer knew well. Anton had been an altar boy, was still busy in the parish church of St. Peter and St. Paul in a thousand helpful little ways. Anton, Anton, he thought, was it you who told them? Anton had been there. And he had not approved.

  And, most damning of all, he was a cousin of Kaspar Mueller.

  With a sigh, Father Meyer bowed his head and pulled his rosary from his pocket. He would not watch the play, though he, like every other Oberammergauer, counted his life not in years but in how many Passion Plays he had either performed in or seen. At sixty-five, this was his sixth cycle.

  And though until this year, he had held the position of second-in-command on the Council of Six and Twelve, the committee that oversaw every aspect of the play, including the most important one: choosing the actors who were to play out the Passion of Christ.

  He’d known the rules; they had to be Oberammergauers, or to have lived among the native-born for at least twenty years. In the case of the women, they had to be virgins, and young—cast-off restrictions reimposed during the cycle of the zombie plague, in the hope of pleasing God more fully.

  He’d known the rules: the most prominent families must be represented.

  And he hadn’t disregarded the rules. He’d simply answered to a higher law; and that was why, after today, he knew he would be defrocked. No matter. He would continue in the work without the blessing of his Church.

  Without the blessing. His throat tightened. Thumb and forefinger slipped over the worn wooden beads of the rosary his father had carved for him.

  “Put that away,” the cardinal whispered angrily. Rosaries were not appreciated in the New Church.

  Father Meyer covered the rosary with both his hands. His lips moved as he mentally counted the beads. Carved with love, in rosette shapes to honor the Virgin. It was a beautiful thing, and should be in a museum. Like the Old Church, he thought, with Her compassion and Her love.

  His thoughts drifted back to the choosing of the roles. It had been a foregone conclusion, at least to the others, that Kaspar Mueller would play Christ. He had done so for three cycles, and no family in Oberammergau was more prominent, nor more powerful, than his. But to play Christ for a fourth Play? Thirty years older than when he began? Father Meyer had pointed out, correctly enough, that women over the age of thirty-five weren’t even allowed in the play. Should a sixty-three-year-old man portray a man almost half his age?

  “That doesn’t matter. It’s his spiritual qualities that matter most,” Adolph Mueller, who was on the Council—and another of Kaspar’s cousins—had asserted.

  But the fact of his health remained. He was older, frailer. The part of Christ was grueling—each Passion Play lasted eight hours, with only a break for lunch; and then there was the matter of hanging on the Cross—

  —and then there was the matter of Kaspar’s falling from his front porch and breaking his ribs.

  Father Meyer had assumed that would end the discussion; they would have to choose another, younger man. But Kaspar let it be known that he wouldn’t hear of it, wouldn’t share the stage with anyone else. Nor would he allow his understudy to take over the role.

  The priest was concerned, and let that fact be known to the Council. And in deference to his office, the discussion continued. But Father Meyer should have realized the weakness of his position: the Muellers were one of the founding families of Oberammergau, and they owned the largest hotel, two restaurants, and four taverns. They also donated generously each year to the village’s State Woodcarving School. Father Meyer’s famil
y hadn’t arrived until near the end of the nineteenth century. To most Oberammergauers, the Meyers were little better than interlopers. And of what benefit would it be to please the parish priest over the largest employer in town?

  Yet finally, after much deliberation, Kaspar announced he would allow the placement of a double of himself upon the Cross during the crucifixion scene: one of the zombies, the wandelndere Leichname—changing corpses—as they were called in German, changed yet again, to look like him.

  “Think of it,” Adolph Mueller had exhorted the Council. “At last we can depict the true Passion of Christ. We can drive nails through its palms, and pierce its—”

  “Father, really, you must watch or people will talk,” Cardinal Schonbrun said as he stood.

  Father Meyer shook himself. The sun was high in the sky. The stage was empty, the curtains closed. It was the lunch interval. Four hours had passed.

  It was time. He called upon the Virgin for courage.

  “People already talk, Eminence,” he said. “The talk hasn’t stopped since I stepped down from the Council.”

  “Which is why we’re here,” the cardinal cut in, gesturing to the bishop and the many priests assembled around them. “To prove that the Church approves of these proceedings, even if you do not.”

  Bishop Ahrenkiel put his arm around Father Meyer. “Come. Let’s go have some sausage and a beer. The cardinal would surely not object?”

  Father Meyer’s heart jumped in his chest. Now was the moment. Goodbye, his soul whispered to Holy Mother Church. Forgive me.

  “I’m—I’m not hungry,” he stammered, his fear showing. “If I may be excused to go to my house for the interval?”

  The cardinal regarded him. “I think not. I think you should eat with us, Father.”

  He forced himself not to panic. “But I’m not feeling—”

  “Nein. You must come with us, Father Meyer.”

  Father Meyer sagged. The cardinal must have guessed his plan to slip backstage and free the ten Leichname the village had purchased. Why had he dreamed it would be possible? He was a fool. A cursed old fool.