by Scott Hale
But truth be told, all that was pride and posturing. He would be as clay in their hands, to be molded and degraded, if only for no more than the promise no harm would come to his family.
With Blythe and Bon at the rear, the Gravedigger, Clementine, and Will were forced out of the barn and into the house. They were forced to sit around the kitchen table, dirty and disabled, like a trio of convicts having dinner with their jailers. Muddy elbow marks marred the tabletop from where Clementine had leant in, concerned. Will slouched in his chair, struggling to find the right position to keep from stretching the stomach hole.
The Gravedigger, however, remained unmoved. His back stiff, his mouth watering, he waited for orders to be given and chances to be taken.
“Here it is,” Blythe said, sitting at the table, too. He swung the kunai by its rope. “Here’s what’s going to happen.”
Bon groaned and clenched his bloody stump between his legs. With his other hand, his only hand, he gripped the pommel of his sword and eyed the Gravedigger’s family. “Don’t bother.”
Blythe ignored his companion and said, “What you saw in Brinton is something new. All across the Heartland, the soil is turning sour. If nothing’s done about it, the crops won’t grow, the animals won’t eat, and you sure as hell won’t want to keep living on it. You’ll suffer, and Eldrus will suffer, too. What you saw in Brinton is an attempt to avoid all that. It makes the soil fertile, fruitful.”
Clementine cleared her throat, and took Will’s hand. She lingered on the blood spot on his belly. “Then why’re you hiding it in dead bodies?”
“Let’s face it: if we came into the Heartland towns and started planting the stuff, you all would have turned it up by lunchtime.”
Blythe released the kunai, and with a clink it hit the floor. He held onto the top of the rope as the rest of it spooled over the blade.
“We need the Heartland. We need it more than you all need us. It doesn’t make much sense for us to poison it. Otherwise, we’d be poisoning ourselves, right?”
“You hid them in dead bodies,” Clementine persisted. “You could have paid someone off, did it in the dead of night.” She squeezed Will’s hand, closed her eyes to cut off the tears welling there. “You almost killed my son, you fucking piece of shit.”
The Gravedigger noticed a stirring within Bon, as though his insides were clockwork that had finally started to turn. The soldier gritted his gritty teeth. Pieces of Null were still in the gaps. He tightened his legs against his arm.
Blythe smiled at Will, in the same way one smiles for telling a bad joke. “You two,” he started, looking at the Gravedigger and his wife, “have a reputation in these parts. Your boy will be all right. We just had to split you up. Blame it on that ghoul of yours. Didn’t see that coming.”
“Eat shit, you fucking cocksucker,” Will mumbled.
The Gravedigger heard a buzzing in his ear. Was Mr. Haemo still watching? He offered silent prayers and promises of servitude, but it seemed the blood lord wasn’t listening. Did he need his help, though? Bon was crippled, hardly conscious, and Blythe was so full of himself he put most cannibals to shame.
“Clementine,” he started, tonguing his gums and blinking twice to signal his wife to attack. “What say you—?”
Bon slid back in his chair, cracking it against the wall. “Blythe, quit fucking with them.”
Will gasped and got up, crying, “What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck?” as Bon showed off what he’d been doing between his legs.
On the arm that should’ve ended at the wrist, there was a hand, yet it wasn’t made of flesh and blood but the red veins that had grown all over the barn. The soldier flexed the monstrous appendage, balling his hand into a fist.
“Don’t move, Atticus,” Blythe said, coming to his feet.
The Gravedigger turned to Blythe, confused. He jumped as something silver flashed before his eyes. Screams like waves broke over him. When he looked down, he saw why. A wet piece of rope dangled out of his chest and ran opposite him, across the table and into Blythe’s hands.
The Gravedigger coughed. The kunai twisted like a key in his ribs and unlocked unknown agonies.
“Don’t… don’t… please… my family,” the Gravedigger pleaded.
Bon pushed Will to the ground, and took Clementine by the neck.
Blythe tugged on the rope until it went taut and said, “You won’t be around to know.”
The Gravedigger looked at Clementine, then looked at Will. He said everything he could without words.
As Blythe jerked the rope, he flew forward, the kunai wrenching out of his chest. His head bashed against the table. A red tide washed over his face.
He tried to tell his wife and son that he was sorry, that he loved them, but there was too much blood in his mouth, so he died instead.
CHAPTER VI
Atticus woke in darkness to the feeling he was falling. He couldn’t see his body, nor move it. After a while, he doubted he actually had one. The only true kindness of life had been that it always ended in death. And he was dead, wasn’t he? He distinctively remembered dying. So what was he doing with these memories? And why was he doing anything at all?
After a short spell, the black appeared to thicken, harden, until it became brittle. Up ahead, pinpricks of light pushed through, causing the darkness they touched to curl back. Streaks of sinewy color shot past Atticus and attached themselves to the flaking hollow. Like the rope that pulled his life out, the pink, pulpy streaks went taught and snapped back. From where they’d been attached, large chunks were torn from the darkness, letting in just enough light to scorch the rest away.
Atticus gasped, screamed, and flailed. He had a body, and he was falling, falling through a tunnel of flesh. He flung his hands forward, reaching for the ribbed walls upon which cities of refuse had been built. He looked down at his naked body, at his chest and the gash gasping with his breaths, his feet and the Abyss below them. The gravity of Death pulled him toward it. Now that he knew there was an end, and a chance to avoid it, he had to fight back.
Where the flesh tunnel had scabbed over, Atticus dug his fingers in deep. He slid down the wall, until his hands and feet found purchase in a patch of carbuncles. The abscesses ballooned in his grip. With every second that passed, they threatened to rupture. Despite there being no air to breathe here, he took a deep breath and set his sights on the scabby shelf below.
I should let go, he told himself, moving off the spitting pustules and onto a sheet of teeth. He could feel oblivion tugging on his bones. It was tempting, the Abyss below at the bottom of the flesh tunnel. Though he’d never seen it before, he knew its meaning, its purpose. Nothingness had a kind of comfort to it he didn’t expect to find anywhere else. But what if he wasn’t dead? What if he gave up when Clementine and Will hadn’t? He wouldn’t know, but he would: it was the kind of thing that would always be, even if he were not.
Atticus climbed across the wall. Once he was over the shelf beneath it, he let go. Distance didn’t mean much in these parts, because what should’ve been a fall ended up being a plummet. He crashed onto the shelf, which was wide enough for his body and then some, and lay there a moment. He expected pain, but got none. The only thing he felt was the Abyss, shifting him with its undertow.
Atticus came to his feet and didn’t move further. A thin curtain billowed before him. Somehow it reminded him of a dress his wife might’ve worn. He took it in his hands, and with the utmost care, pushed it aside.
Behind the curtain, the tunnel turned inward, slanted downward, until it disappeared past the small outcrop that stood above him. From its stony lip to his cut-up feet, a blanket of Death’s Dilemma stood in between them, their bone-white pedals tucked beneath their ice-blue stalks. He didn’t want to trample them; it was bad luck to step on the flowers of Death’s beloveds. But he heard a noise ahead, atop the outcrop, and had to see what it was.
Where does all this come from? Atticus wondered, half-turned, looking at the towers
of trash across the flesh tunnel. He faced the high outcrop and went forward on the tips of his toes. Death’s Dilemma was a species of flower whose soil was suffering, and whose individual lives were as long as the sorrow that spawned them. Each one, it was said, represented a love of Death’s, who had dared to love and let It love them in return. The dilemma, then, was in the kiss, the confirmation, the moment of knowing and then not.
Atticus cleared the field and started up the outcrop. He stretched his limbs to their limits in search of holds. At the top, he dragged himself over, grinding his stomach and crotch against the edge. Scratches and scrapes broke like lightning across his skin. It was good he couldn’t feel their thunderous pain.
He meant to stand, but what he saw up here required him to sit instead. Across the way, where the tunnel broadened, a grotesque village festered atop a dried-out lake. Despite its appearance, the village had a sensuality to its symmetry, as though put together by a poet from whatever he’d had on hand. Bound by rope and stuffed with waste, the sprawl of rubble laid out like a body on its side, rising and falling where shoulders and hips would’ve been. It reminded Atticus of the women from Gallows’ tavern, and the way they looked on the beds before the lights went out.
“It’s always good to see a new face,” an old man said.
Atticus crouched low, furrowed his brow. “Who said that?” He scanned the village outskirts, and looked backward over the outcrop to the field of Death’s Dilemmas. “Show yourself, you son of a bitch.”
“I’m right here,” the old man said. He waved. The old man was only a few feet away, leaning against the tunnel wall before it opened up to the lakebed. “You really ought to pay attention in these parts. One false step and that’s it, you’re done.”
The old man came forward, his hand outstretched. Like Atticus, he was naked. And like Atticus, he bore the mark of his undoing. From jaw to clavicle, the old man’s neck had been ripped open, as though something had dug its way out.
“Atticus,” he said, shaking the old man’s hand. Unlike him, this guy had no Corruption on his right arm.
“Herbert North.” The old man smiled, let his gaze wander down Atticus’ body. “Did it hurt?”
Atticus felt his chest, fingered the wound. “Not as much as everything else.”
“Too true.” Herbert clapped his hands together, and dropped them to his sides, where they swung excitedly. “You’re a fighter. Wouldn’t be here if you weren’t.”
Atticus laughed and nodded. “Aren’t you perceptive? I suppose you know my next question?”
“Where is here?” Herbert’s gaze ran along the cracks in the flesh sky over the village. “The Membrane. That’s what we all seem to call it, even though no one told us to.”
Atticus hesitated, then just said it: “Are we dead?”
“Yes,” Herbert whispered. “It’s good you asked. I wasted too much time working up the nerve to.”
Atticus didn’t feel much here in the Membrane, but that didn’t stop Herbert’s words from hitting him like a punch in his gut. His feet shuffled some to break up the Abyss’ pull. He remembered everything. Now that he knew he was dead, he wasn’t sure he wanted to remember anything anymore.
“What is this, then?” Atticus tried not to think of Clementine and Will, but did anyway. “These things, the village. Where did it all come from?”
“I took me a while to figure it out,” Hebert said. He offered for Atticus to follow him to the lakebed, which he did. “There weren’t too many around when I arrived. I don’t know why, but when we die, we take what we see with us. A copy of it, at least.”
“I was in my kitchen when it happened,” Atticus admitted, stepping with the old man onto the shore. There, toys and tiny shoes poked out of the dirt.
“Then somewhere in here, there’s your table and whatever else. Without those things, we wouldn’t have been able to build this place.”
“You got a name for it, Herb?”
The old man laughed. “Pulsa diNura.”
“That got a meaning?” Atticus twitched as he heard waves breaking on the shore; phantom waves of a phantom lake.
“I’m sure it did to someone at some point, but I don’t remember now. I’ve been down here awhile.”
“How long?” Now, there was a breeze—constant and cool. It kicked up the water that wasn’t around his feet.
Herbert shrugged. “There’s no time here. You can’t measure it. No point. Maybe it’s been a few minutes or a couple hundred years.” He paused, scratched at his neck. “I don’t know how much longer I can do it.” He laughed. “Then again, I don’t know how long I’ve been saying that for. Pain in the ass, you know?”
Atticus wrinkled his face. “This place doesn’t scare me. Actually, I don’t feel much at all here. That normal?”
The ropes holding Pulsa diNura started to shake, sending out thick throbs of noise. The junkyard village rattled with each vibration, causing portions of it to fall apart.
Herbert smiled at Atticus. “We’re dead. Not supposed to feel much, in general. There isn’t much to torment us here other than ourselves.”
The old man quickened his pace across the lakebed. Finally, they reached the rickety supports and platforms upon which Pulsa diNura had been built.
“No one will bother you. In fact, you may not see anyone else besides myself for a while.”
“How many live here?” Atticus gasped. There was someone watching him through the breaks in the platform.
Herbert gave a rigid shrug. The neck wound wouldn’t let him do much else. “Never did a headcount.”
“Why call it the Membrane?”
Herbert went around the supports. He led Atticus to a ramp that ran up into the village.
“Because it acts like one. It runs between our world and the others, overlapping it. Keeps things out, and sometimes lets things in. Come on, Atticus, I know a place you can call yours.”
“Hold it. I’m not staying, Herbert,” he said, digging his feet into the ground, like Will used to when Clementine asked him to clean his room.
“You need a routine. Come here. Please.” He went up the ramp and waited until Atticus joined him at the top. “See them?”
Atticus did, but he didn’t want to. The old man was offering him something he had no intention of accepting. He saw them all right, the bodies in their beds of rope. Sleeping like the dead they were, in their homes made out of copied memories. A routine? No, either he was getting out, or he was going out. Nothing could change his mind on that.
“They lie like that, under all the ropes, so the Abyss won’t take them while they sleep. It’s an easy thing to forget about, Atticus.”
Again, the sinewy streaks of color slithered across the fleshy sky, leaving gossamer patches in their wake. A soft light shone through the thinnest parts of the firmament. In it, Atticus saw another place, a desert, empty and vast. The white dunes there started to shiver, shedding the sands they were comprised of. It was as though something were waking within them.
“Where is…?” But before he could finish, the plane pulled back, the sky scaled over, and the scene was finished.
Herbert nodded at Atticus’ feet.
Atticus had slid a few inches across the platform, toward the direction of the Abyss.
“Distractions are the danger here.”
“If the Abyss gets me, that’s it, right? I’m done?” Atticus echoed the old man’s earlier warning.
“I mean, can’t really confirm anything, but I think it’s like a switch, like turning something off. For a long time, my business was the supernatural.”
Herbert nodded at a nude woman with wild hair as she rolled out of bed and disappeared into the thick of the village.
“Seen a lot of things that were supposed to be dead come back and go on living. The Abyss is the end, but only until it isn’t, you know? In it, you cease to be, until something pulls you back out.”
“A ritual, a spell,” Atticus guessed.
“Exactly.
I assume the same works for us, heh, rebels. Unfortunately, I didn’t leave too many friends behind. No one’s going to bail me out of here.” He sighed. “I lived a long time. Got so used to it… not quite ready to stop, not just yet, even if no one is coming to get me.”
Pulsa diNura rocked with the phantom waves that still possessed the lakebed. If things were different, Atticus may have been moved by the Old World artifacts that surrounded him. But the cars, the computers, the crooked streetlights, and storefront signs didn’t much muster more than an “eh.”
So he looked past it all, to the furthest point in front of him, beyond the village, where the Membrane stretched on, and searched for something that suggested there was more to all this than what he’d already seen.
But there wasn’t. Not really.
“Have you ever been to the other side of the Membrane? Or farther up?” Atticus mumbled. He hated that he kept asking questions about the place he desperately needed to leave.
“Occasionally.” Herbert moved as though to put his hands in his pockets. “Death made me a kinder man, but a more cautious one, too. Also, a lot more talkative. It’s the only pastime we have down here, other than building shit out of shit.” He grinned. “You can’t climb too high past here. Nothing to hold on to. I bet there’s thousands in these walls, just waiting for the day they can finally claw their way out.” Herbert stopped speaking, turned his head. “Did you… Do you hear that?”
Atticus got the impression the old man had finally lost it. “No?”
Heavy footsteps pounded against the platform, with the sound of something being dragged following close behind.
Herbert threw his arms around Atticus and pulled him into the nearest house. They found the darkest place to hide and hid, using a pile of wiring and mason jars as a barrier between them and the thing lurking outside. Bunched up there, the way he used to be when his dad went on a bender, it dawned on Atticus just how little it upset him to think of Clementine and Will. Recollections should’ve ripped him apart, but they hardly even registered.
