by Stant Litore
“We must make a new scroll.” His lips were parched and cracked. Savage pain in the back of his head where the spear had struck him. “Miriam, we have to tell Baruch. Miriam, tell Baruch.”
The hand that had been dabbing his brow with a cool, damp cloth paused. The voice near his ear was deep and resonant. Baruch’s voice. “Miriam isn’t here, friend. You sent her away.”
Yirmiyahu coughed once. “Why would I do that?”
The cloth dabbed again, now at his eyelids. It felt very cool, very soothing, though only when it touched his closed eyes did he realize how hot, how seared they had been. “Hush, friend. Rest now; you were beaten badly. We can talk later.”
In his sleep, Yirmiyahu heard a woman humming, somewhere near. It was a soft sound, very beautiful. It made him think of his grandmother, in his father’s house at Anathoth, and how as a child he’d wakened often to the sound of her humming as she worked at her loom by the window, bright threads of dyed wool moving through her fingers. She was always humming lullabies, even when it was morning and the world was waking; perhaps she felt the world was too much awake and ought to doze more of the time. He remembered sometimes sitting in her lap as a small child while she hummed, while his father, her son, was away, sacrificing a white bull or an unblemished goat in atonement for the uncleanness of the people or in honor of the blessings given him by the Giver of Life. Yirmiyahu remembered his grandmother’s scent of dried rosemary, and the way her humming sometimes bloomed like a sunflower and became her voice, a soft voice unroughened by age.
Sleep, my child, sleep,
And I will sing to thee
Of the sun and the rain
And the sycamore tree
And the ships that walk on the sea.
Yirmiyahu opened his eyes, found himself staring up at stout rafters of cedar, warm with sunlight. A white butterfly, no larger than his thumbnail, was hovering about one of the rafters, its wings opening and closing like a child’s hands. Yirmiyahu felt a wool blanket gentle and warm under his fingertips. He drew in breath slowly, then breathed out. Sore, he sat up; he was in a little wooden room with a high window. This wasn’t the house of Baruch the scribe. And it wasn’t the house he’d shared with Miriam his wife in Yerusalem before the siege, or the house he’d shared with her for a short time in Anathoth. This was his room, his own room in the home of his childhood, in that sturdy old house of cedar, his father’s house, a place of safety and surety. At the table in the next room, he’d learned to read, tracing his fingertip gently over the lines of hard, angular letters in his father’s scroll of the Law, the only scroll the town possessed. Though his writing had always been slow and halting, he could read more swiftly even than his father, or any of the other levites in his father’s town. He used to stand at the doorstep of this house after dark, looking out over the fields by moonlight and reciting the mitzvot, the many rules of the Law, in a rumbling Hebrew dialect that was now centuries old but very beautiful.
He flung the blanket aside; he was in his loincloth. Sliding his legs from the low bed, he felt the cool wood floor against his feet. He sucked in his breath; the firmness of that wood was strange to him. How long had it been since he’d slept above a wooden floor rather than an earthen one?
He could still hear a woman humming faintly; his grandmother must be at her loom. He pressed his hands to the thin mattress and pushed himself to his feet. The rafters were just above his head; his hair brushed them—this room was smaller than he recalled. He swayed a moment, caught at one of the beams with his hand. He stood there sweating—why was his body so weary?—and listened, listened. The humming became song, and his eyes widened. He realized that the sound wasn’t coming from within the house. It was coming through the window, from outside. And it was a voice he knew.
His heart raced. “Not grandmother,” he whispered. “Miriam.”
Without losing another moment, he hurried from the room and darted through the dining chamber, his hip colliding with the table in his haste. He reached the door, hurled it open, threw himself out into sunlight so bright it seared his eyes and left him standing, blinking, in the grass.
He heard her laughter, high-pitched and sweet, and in a moment felt her warm, small hand take his, and another hand pressed over his eyelids; afterimages still danced hot and white against the dark of his lids. He moaned with the pain of it.
“You’ll be all right, husband.” Her voice, near his ear. “But how funny you looked, leaping from the house in your loincloth, like you were on fire!”
“I am on fire,” he murmured.
She laughed again, and he felt the softness of her lips pressed to his. It overwhelmed him, so that tears stung against his eyelids—or perhaps that was the pain from the sun. The sun felt hot against his brow, and he knew they would need to find shade in a moment. But for this moment he simply relished the touch of her smooth hand against his eyelids and the taste of her mouth.
When she took her hand from his eyes and he opened them, blinking, they were seated together on a cool white stone in the shade of a tall terebinth with branches that seemed to spread a roof of leaves across half the sky. He remembered that tree; his father used to read passages from the Law to him beneath it.
He looked at his wife. She was young; she looked as she had when they first met. Her hair was dark in the shade, her eyes darker; he couldn’t stop gazing at them. His lips were parted; he was rapt. Her small hand he held in his. Somewhere across the fields that stretched wide and free about his father’s house and the nearby village of Anathoth, he could hear a herdsman singing, a sound faint and lovely.
The leaves of the terebinth above them moved without any breeze, and he was speared by the cold certainty that he was asleep and dreaming—and that this wasn’t any night dream but a true dream. There was a vividness to it, a reality to the ache in his hip where he’d hit the table, the warmth of Miriam’s hand in his. His heart beat within him. He felt, with that utter and complete certainty that only comes in dreams, that Miriam was truly visiting him—to say good-bye—and that when he woke he would not see her again.
“Miriam,” he whispered.
She smiled, her eyes moist; then her face crumpled. “I missed you.”
Almost shyly, he reached out, touched her hair, then caressed it. “Forgive me,” he whispered.
“You wanted me to go.” Her eyes were deep. “I—I couldn’t. I got as far as the gate, then dismissed the man you sent with me. I went back into the city. I went to find you.” Her face flushed, and Yirmiyahu could feel her anger like lightning in the air. “You had no right to send me away. I am not a dog, Yirmiyahu, or a donkey, or a packet of dried herbs you can return to my mother because you’re afraid you’ll only lose it.”
“I know.” He took one of her hands in his, gripped it, his face contorted with the violence of the feelings within him, with the strain of trying to pour into words something that mere physical, animal sounds could never contain or convey. “I was afraid for you—”
“In all that city, what could you need more than me at your side?” Her eyes flashed. “And what could I need more than your arms around me and your heart listening to me? Yirmiyahu! We were going to have children together—if we could.”
“I know,” he whispered again.
The terebinth faded from sight; everything became a featureless gray. There was only her, and in a moment she would be gone, too. Yirmiyahu cried out and pulled her to him, held her tight, felt her tense. Then her body relaxed and she shook with silent sobs. He breathed raggedly himself, unable to bear the sweetness and the pain of this moment. Everything tight, painfully tight, in his chest. He crushed her to him, breathed in the scent of her hair, felt her warmth in his arms, whispered her name again and again.
“I love you,” he said hoarsely.
“And I you,” she wept. “I you, my husband.”
Sunlight came through the cracks in the boards over the window, sharp splinters of light that made his eyes sting. He lifted his hand
but could still see the light through his fingers. He drew in breath slowly, the loss of her a violence in his chest. His head turned from the window; Baruch was sitting there beside the blanket on which he lay. When their eyes met, Baruch nodded once, though his face showed no other expression.
Yirmiyahu moved his lips to speak, but his throat was too dry.
“We are under house arrest, friend,” Baruch said quietly. “The king is merciful.” His lip twisted.
Yirmiyahu shut his eyes a moment. Already the dream was slipping from his mind, like bright foliage torn away and riding the wind into the distance. The ache in his chest. He swallowed once. He had to put away thoughts of her. The memory of the past days—the burning of the scroll—it all came back. There was work to do. There was always work to do. More now than before.
He was navi.
Yirmiyahu tried to get up; the room spun. Baruch’s gentle hand on his breast pushed him back. “Lie still,” his friend murmured.
“Have to”—a hoarse croak—“another scroll—and copies—many as we can—”
“You do that, my friend, and they will bury you somewhere. That young king will drop you into some dry well and leave you there until this city is nothing but ash.” Baruch’s voice was firm, as uncompromising as the hand that kept Yirmiyahu down. Yirmiyahu clutched at his friend’s wrist, though his fingers seemed weak as twigs. He had to get up. He had to speak the words God had spoken to him—for this he had given up Miriam, sending her away while he remained here. He had to keep going. Had to—
“Help me,” he rasped.
Baruch didn’t move his hand. His voice was intense, more impassioned than Yirmiyahu had ever heard him speak. “It is only a miracle of your God that you are alive—God, and my begging at the king’s door. It is over, Yirmiyahu.”
Yirmiyahu’s lip curved grimly; he felt consciousness slipping from him and fought it. “Only when I’m dead,” he growled as he fell.
He woke with a start, shaking. It was dark, utterly dark. He threw out his hands, felt cold stone around him, hard and immovable. The well. He was in the well. The burning of the scroll, waking in Baruch’s house, that conversation with the scribe—all of it many weeks past. His heart pounded. In the midst of those memory dreams, he’d been sent a true dream beneath the waving branches of the terebinth: he was certain of it. Miriam had visited him in his sleep. Coughing clawed into his throat and he bent over, hacking into the mud, his insides trying to hurl themselves up his throat and out into the well.
When he could breathe again, wheezing in the dark, he felt around slowly; his hand found the cold chest of one of the corpses, which lay almost against his side in the mud. He needed no light to tell him which one this was; his heart told him. Shaking still, breathing in great rasps, he lay over the body. His hands moved up the still form, remembering her, until they found her face, which was slick with mud; he gripped her head but could not turn it. His fingers found her still, hard eyes and traced the large roundness of her nose, which he had always loved and which by some marvel had survived her death intact. He ran his hands up over her brow and found her head shattered, punctured, and tears burned his eyes. He found her lips with his thumb and traced them; they were no longer soft as they had been in life. Weeping, he kissed her. Taking her lower lip between his lips, he kissed her gently, tasting mud and old blood. The reek of her was sickeningly sweet in his nostrils; he ignored it and kissed her as lovingly, as yearningly, as he had on their first night. Until his next coughing fit seized him and shook him like a rabbit in a jackal’s jaws.
He hadn’t been there when she perished. That was the only thought that could grip the slick, sliding surface of his mind. With the same clarity and certainty with which he’d seen her in the true dream, beneath the terebinth—a navi’s clarity in seeing what had been or what would be—he now saw her walking in the city, her eyes swollen from tears. Saw how Miriam had returned to find him, unwilling to leave him, the man she had suffered with and loved, the man she was covenanted to. She’d found their house dark and empty, its new owner not yet moved in; from the door she’d called out her husband’s name. There’d been a noise, a clatter in the other room, a thump against the wall. “Yirmiyahu?” she’d called. She’d stepped carefully through the dark, looking for him. She’d nudged open the door to their bedchamber, where they’d made love so many nights, and other nights simply fallen asleep holding each other, and still other nights gone to sleep with their backs to each other, their hearts pierced by anger or guilt from some fight left unfinished. Her small fingers had touched the wood of the door, nudged it open. With a creak it had swung inward. She peered through it, in the dim light from the room’s small window, light torn by the broken, snapped, violated slats of wood that had half barred it; something had torn or smashed through them. Beneath the window, in its faint, shredded light, she could glimpse a shape crouching.
“Yirmiyahu?” Her voice softer, with fear.
The shape had straightened slowly, its eyes glinting in the dim light. Its hands lifting. A low groan in the dark as it took an unsteady step toward her.
Yirmiyahu couldn’t see the rest. Perhaps Miriam had frozen in terror, seeing that hulking figure move toward her; perhaps she’d bolted, darting into the other room only to crack her hip against the table and tumble with a shriek to the floor. The vision passed from him, slipping away as swiftly as had the true dream beneath the terebinth.
Yirmiyahu groaned through clenched teeth and twined his fingers into her hair. He kissed her again as he wept, leaving tears and mucus on her nose and cheek.
He hadn’t been there.
And with a jagged rib, he’d completed the desecration of her body, the defiling of a body holy and beautiful, her body, his wife’s body. How completely he had failed her and betrayed her.
She’d needed him, she had come for him, she’d come back to find him. And when the unclean dead grasped at her and tore into her, he hadn’t been there.
That knowledge roared through him, and in its passing the last certainties inside him lit and cracked and curled like burning papyrus; everything in him simply burned away. He kissed her until the remnants in his chest crumbled into ash; then he lay still, clasping her, half lying in the mud that remained as mute testimony that the empty husk of the well had once been a body filled with water and life.
A slow crawl of time that could not be tasted or touched. The three corpses grew colder, the reek of them thicker. Harsh coughing in the well in between those stretches of fitful sleep in which the only sound was the rasp of labored breathing. Then more coughing.
Perhaps in the city above—if it were not already lost to the lurching dead—perhaps the new scrolls, the copies Baruch had made, though reluctantly, had found a few voices to recite them on the Temple steps; perhaps some of the younger levites gathered in quiet rooms even now, drawing the slats over the windows, then speaking in hushed whispers of Yirmiyahu’s words. It was possible. But in the well Yirmiyahu was bereaved of words. He didn’t hear God’s quiet voice, comforting him or calling him to his responsibilities as her navi. His grief had torn so much out of his chest that he simply lay, unlistening, like a corpse waiting to be stirred.
It was possible that in an hour, or a day, or a week, if he still breathed, the guards might pull him out, shivering like a child from the womb. Perhaps God would speak then; perhaps she would gift him with new words, words that would cup him as a woman’s warm hands might cup an infant, holding him, words of such promise and hope that they could replenish both his heart and this drying and dying city. Or perhaps, though no words should come, were he to be pulled into the brightness of the day above and into the fierce light of God’s presence, he might yet emerge from the well with a primal scream, a raw shriek capable of conveying the horror and loss of every severing of bond and covenant that men or women had suffered since the first birth. This was possible. The silence in the well might be the silence of utter bereavement or the silence before birth. In the fertility of h
er heart, God’s capacity for giving birth and loving rebirth might still be greater than any death—if she hadn’t left the city entirely. Or if she had but might yet come back, even as Miriam had come back from the gate, and if she survived her return, as Miriam hadn’t. Yirmiyahu didn’t know. He could no longer hear God weeping behind her veil. He could no longer hear anything but his own labored breathing.
Yirmiyahu lay over his dead wife, hollow and still. The well filled with death as with dark water and with darkness that filled the mouth and nostrils until he lay completely still, the fire in his ribs snuffed out. His body almost forgot to breathe. In this hole in the city there was neither pain nor sorrow nor regret nor memory of joy. The world was cold and filled with the hungry and the dead, and in the numb hoshekh of time everything was lost and nothing recovered. In the lethal, irremediable quiet, Yirmiyahu waited without thought or movement for the whisper of God’s voice or the rattle of a dying breath in his throat. Waiting in the silence, waiting in the silence.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A PROJECT like The Zombie Bible is a fearful undertaking and requires the aid, goodwill, encouragement, and advice of many people. I offer my deepest gratitude…
To Andrew Hallam, for his diligent and enthusiastic reading of my work; to Jeff VanderMeer, my editor, for his insight; to all those who generously gave feedback on excerpts; to my pastor, for his encouragement and prayer; to Alex Carr and the remarkable team at 47North; and to Danielle Tunstall, for graciously permitting me the use of her art.
