A Graveyard Visible

by Steve Conoboy

  Dead. End.

  Rivulets of panic turn his voice liquid. ‘What do you mean, what do you mean up is out, I’m underground, up’s always out, what do you mean…’

  UP IS OUT

  Eight turns its touchscreen on full blast, so bright that Caleb must squint through dull-adjusted eyes. He pans the ball around.

  A ladder. To a hatch. Up is out.

  A smile instead of words inside Eight’s light. Using the ball as a torch, Caleb doesn’t see the smile, the fat slugs of lips, the craggy rock black teeth.

  121

  These fizzling ropes are hot on his skin. His legs are bound achingly together. His arms sear, won’t quite go numb. He is hanging from the ceiling, a table beneath him. On the table are the old idiot’s diagrams and maps, one so large of the graveyard that it spills over the edges. It’s a map that’s grown bigger over several months, pieces of thick A4 stuck along its sides to represent expanding borders, the intricate detail of the original map giving way to haphazard sketchings, and all over the whole thing are scribbles and arrows and box-outs, a forever-shifting code, a rough and fluid strategy.

  Crosswell drools watching the saliva string splatter on the west side of Daisy Hill.

  ‘Glad you’re awake,’ growls the old man, so focused on the dangerous man hanging from his dining room ceiling that he does not hear the faint scree of a hatch eased open.

  ‘Glad I’m not dead.’ In such pain as he’s suffering, Crosswell struggles to say the words levelly.

  ‘I’m not you,’ the old man says through a thin smile. ‘I’m nothing like you. Sometimes I wish I was.’

  Crosswell watches him rub his left arm. ‘How about you let me down then, Mister. Nothing Like Me?’

  ‘After everything you’ve done? You’re staying where you are.’

  ‘I’ve done nothing.’

  ‘Weeks of nothing! Weeks of leaving me to turn the dead!’

  ‘Because it’s time. This is what it’s been all about…’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Not no! You got it all twisted up in your head! You’ve let yourself think it’s up to you, that you get to decide. We were here to get them aligned, get them ready to come at the same time. They’re aligned! There’s nothing else for us to do! We just kiss goodbye to the world as it is, and let them go!’

  The boy in the hall, too exhausted to run, listens as the old man snaps, ‘What if they’re wrong about the time? Why can’t we give the world more time? These people deserve a chance…’

  ‘A chance to what? Put things right themselves? They don’t want to. That would take effort from everyone. What makes you think that could ever happen? You’re delaying the very event you’re meant to lead. This is the reason you’re here.’

  ‘Our reason for being here is to do this at the right time, if that time comes! Nnnnnggg…’ He leans on the table, scrunches the map as the pain in his chest intensifies.

  ‘Goddamn it, man, even that idiot girl of yours is on our side!’

  ‘No, she isn’t…’

  ‘She is. She doesn’t want to hear all your science about the Turn because she understands better than you. The world is rotten. It went bad. The girl sees it better than you.’ The slap across his face rocks Crosswell hard, so it feels like his arms will pop from their sockets.

  ‘You don’t know her.’

  ‘Neither do you.’

  Neither does the boy in the hall.

  The old man taps a spot on the map, one of thousands of graves. ‘This one got out, I know that! You do too! This one got out. So they aren’t all aligned, you lazy fat pig! How can they be aligned when they’re already out? If they go at all, they’re meant to go all at once! People are going to see them now. They’ll have time to react!’

  ‘React how? They won’t know what to do whether it’s one or a thousand. It’s excuses with you, always excuses. Tell the truth, old man! You’re a coward, you’ve bottled it. You thought you were tough enough, but you’re not.’

  ‘I’ve got a daughter to think of!’ Clutching his arm again.

  ‘A granddaughter. And she hates you.’ Crosswell feels good about saying that. It’s the knife he’s been grasping for. He can wound deeply with this. ‘She’s never here.’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘She spends all of her time running away from you.’ Numb fingers are clumsy and make for shoddy work, but he’s been humming low and quiet when the old man speaks, low and quiet and deep in his throat, and the old man must be hurting because he’s missed it, heard not one note, and Crosswell has two darts now, flimsy and uncertain ammunition. ‘She’s told us all.’ A few more sucker punches to wear him down. Quick punches; Crosswell’s shoulders are pouring fire. ‘She’s said it again and again…’ he aims a dart towards his feet which are tied together with a light-whip that frazzles and spits ‘…how she’s tired of the constant unending pressure…’ If he hits his own heel it will burn far worse than his arms are. That’s if the dart holds together long enough. ‘…and how she wants you to get the message already…’ A very short hum, a directional note, a guide, he hopes.

  ‘Shut up!’

  ‘…and how she hates her parents for dying and leaving her stuck with you.’

  All at once: the old man’s face greys and pains, a storm-ball gathers in his knot-fingered hands, Crosswell wills the dart to fly.

  The dart slices through the light-whip with a burst of shards. Gravity does the rest. His legs swing down fast, pulling the rest of him with them. A jerk at his arm sockets, the whole of his body weight dropping. He cries out louder than he ever has. The bonds around his wrists snap. He’s falling. Hits the tabletop in a sitting position. Electric bolts fire across the top of his head, burn a streak through his hair, scorch a trough in his scalp. Two more shots fly too high.

  No need for quiet now! Crosswell uses his pain, hollers a note loud and round, throws out his second dart. It shears the air, leaves a wake. The old man is crumbling, the exertion too much. The dart clips his ear, blasts off the lobe with a flesh-scorching flash.

  The old man’s finished.

  Crosswell chooses to finish him anyway.

  The third dart hits the centre of his chest. The old man hits the floor behind the table. Crosswell scrambles away even though he’s certain it’s over. Certain sometimes is not certain enough.

  Caleb has heard all of this, and is sure now that Hell never ends.

  122

  She knocks and knocks and knocks because her guts say that Time is shrinking, and isn’t that sick when once she thought there was so, so much?

  Misha kneels, shouts through the letterbox, ‘Hello? Caleb? You in there? I know you are!’ Waits to listen for answers, for telltale shuffles or whispers. ‘Damn it, Caleb, you answer this door right now!’

  A cardigan and brown corduroy trousers appear in the hall, coming towards her quickly. She bounces up and away from the letterbox. It snaps shut, and she smooths herself upright as if she’s been waiting patiently the whole time. The door opens. Her smile is that of a girl who does not ever bellow into people’s houses. She needs Caleb, not to have a door slammed in her face by displeased grandparents.

  She has time to think same eyes, then he grabs the front of her dress and drags her inside. A thousand horror stories shoot through Misha’s head, all worse than revenants and haunted streets, all far too real; Vic Sweet’s grabbing hands. His thick sweat. Rotting trees.

  Too late to punch. Granddad’s got her arms. And now they’re in the living room. He plumps her down on a sofa, holds a hand up flat in her face before she can spring back up. ‘If you care for my boy at all, you must listen. Time is short.’ An echo returning to her in someone else’s voice. ‘Knowing Caleb, he is running towards trouble right now, and he is the only thing left that matters.’ He takes hold of her chin, stares into her. Sunny green flecked brown. Like his. ‘I might not be able to say any of this again. I’m fading, understand?’ His hold is too firm for her to shake her head. ‘Caleb, he’s a
bright boy, and stupid in so many ways. The world has hurt him badly, and it makes him desperate to put things right, makes him certain that misery must be fixable. He’s gone up there with a head full of this foolishness. My stupid boy thinks he can stop it all.’

  Misha is all thumping heart. ‘Maybe he can.’

  ‘No! I made that mistake once! I thought I could set wrongs right, I thought I could get my revenge and everything would turn out okay. I had no idea what’s out there, what’s coming!’

  ‘That’s great. Is Caleb up Daisy Hill?’

  ‘That’s what I’m trying to tell you. He’s going to try to talk that lunatic round. He’s stupid enough to believe there’s an element of humanity in him. That man has been working for years and years bringing every single dead soul up there back. There’s not one bit of good left in him. He’s warped; he doesn’t think the world deserves to carry on.’ Misha almost laughs. If Gramps here knew the truth, what would he do to her? ‘I’ve been up there, I’ve seen it all myself.’ He lets go of her chin, picks up the journal. ‘I wrote it all in here! I forgot, but now I remember, but it’s all going again!’

  ‘Okay, Mister, if I’m going to catch up with Caleb…’

  ‘Go now, yes! Keep him away from your grandfather. Bring him back to me, before I forget him. Please.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she says. ‘I won’t let that horrible old man get him.’ Misha hangs back in the doorway. ‘You’re sure he’s up there?’

  ‘Positive! He was very determined.’

  She goes, and he wanders into the kitchen, where the light-map hovers. It shows a house next to Daisy Hill. There are blips inside it. More underneath it. A lot more.

  On the wall is a photograph of a younger him with some woman. He does not know who that woman is.

  123

  Caleb can’t hear any movements in there.

  It’s incredible how much noise his lungs seem to make. It’s amazing how every bit of his body wants to twitch and itch and give him away. His nerves are electrified. Someone will step out of that room any second and see him.

  124

  Running.

  She hates it.

  She hears screaming as she heads towards the graveyard. To her left, distant, but real. People getting hurt. The Turning, it seemed like such a good way at getting back at them all, before it was actually happening.

  Caleb, I need you.

  125

  Crosswell’s plucking at the air. His hums summon particles together. Frantically he pulls them towards each other. Beyond table and chair legs he can see the collapsed old man, unmoving, possibly not even breathing. Possibly.

  He’s making a shield. He has little capacity left for anything else. He has to hope that one deflection is all he will need.

  Ache cannot begin to describe the state of his muscles. A beating would not leave him feeling more bruised than this. He pushes with his feet, slides his back up the wall until he’s mostly standing. The old man remains still. ‘Didn’t think it would end this way, did you?’ he growls.

  Once he’s sure of his feet, he edges out of the room. No prodding the body to see if it will jump up to attack. The dead are coming. It is time for Crosswell to leave. Time to hide for a while. Ride out the tide, re-emerge behind it.

  He never turns his back on the old man. Certain is sometimes not certain enough.

  And two minutes after he’s slunk away, Caleb gradually leans out to check the kitchen, still convinced Crosswell will be waiting for his face to appear.

  The skin on Caleb’s back won’t stay still. The hatch is behind him. The walking corpses are down that hatch. The dead boys. It’s a hatch that needs heavy things holding it down.

  Foot-slide into the kitchen. There’s only Misha’s grandfather in here, a broken lump on the floor, light fragments skittering off his chest and dissipating. Caleb kneels beside him, plucks at the tiny dazzling fibres, his God-fingers closing on a field of stars. One crackles along his thumb, metallic blue tendrils tracing the whorls. He wants more but now they’re all gone, back in the air.

  And he sees that the old man is watching.

  126

  If she’d been a few seconds faster, Misha would have seen Crosswell stumble-walking down the east slope of Daisy Hill, and perhaps she could have reached a different conclusion. If Crosswell had been a little slower escaping, then she’d have wondered what he’d been doing at her house, and taken her anger out on him instead.

  It’s these little slices of time that change everything.

  Without interruption, without distraction, she heads home. For once it isn’t raining.

  127

  And in that underground labyrinth, from out of those grave-columns, the dead slide out, more of them, and more. And they swarm along the tunnels, and they will find the exits.

  128

  And Neuman watches, blaze-eyed, as the revenants pour towards fresh doors and garages and back yards, and all are blown open by escalating scales of notes, and in the middle of all these chaotic songs are screams.

  129

  There’s a glimmer left at the farthest end of the forever-black tunnel of his iris, the last sparks of a life about to be shut out for good. Caleb has seen ghosts and walking corpses, but this is a man dying, a life ending, and some fibre deep in his core is reaching out, cannot bear to see this soul drift into the night.

  Yet Caleb knows there is nothing he can do. Any help he calls for will be far too late. Even if they came in time, would they know how to fix what’s been done? So Caleb lies on his side, and looks into those dying eyes, and holds the grandfather’s hand, and tries very hard not to cry because this man should die seeing a smile, not distress. This is Caleb’s responsibility.

  His own mother lay dying like this, but he wasn’t there.

  The old man’s voice comes from the far distance of his glimmer. ‘Can’t be stopped. That’s why you’re here, to stop it. But you can’t.’

  Caleb pushes worry and doubt away, doesn’t want either in his voice. ‘It’s gonna be okay, I know it. You held them off for so long doing those Turnings, right?’

  ‘Delayed the inevitable. And once they’re out…’

  ‘There’s always a way! I can get Misha to help. She’s powerful, isn’t she? She’ll stop this.’

  ‘She doesn’t want to.’ It’s said with total defeat.

  ‘She will help. When Misha sees all the dead and what they’ll do…’

  ‘This world…it’s hurt her too many times. She wants it gone. I know. Tried so long.’

  The anger comes in a rush. Caleb’s trying to soothe this dying man, this grandfather to the girl he loves, yet he’s saying everything he doesn’t want to hear. ‘No, she’ll listen, of course she will…’

  ‘Misha will not listen to you. Just run. Hide if you can.’

  ‘That’s bull!’ Caleb moves away, up on his knees. ‘You’re wrong! I won’t let it happen! I won’t let it end like this, I’ll make her see!’

  Her voice is an ice-knife slice. ‘What have you done?’ Caleb snaps round to see Misha on the other side of the table. She’s taken back Eight. ‘What have you done to my granddaddy?’

  Caleb is all surprise and confusion. ‘I didn’t…’

  ‘Get away from him!’ she screams, and her skirts flare out and her hair bursts wide despite no wind, and her hands whip up in front of her, palms out, fingers splayed with sparks rushing to them, gluing to her skin. The table bursts apart, like a giant foot has kicked it from underneath. Caleb falls away from the chunks of wood, out of the kitchen, lands on the point of his elbow. The pain is a javelin from wrist to armpit. Misha’s speaking, probably to her granddad. Caleb can’t concentrate on any of it. He curls up around his numb arm, back to the wall, sure the agony won’t end. He soon realises that the high-pitched squeal is coming from him.

  He also realises that Misha has gone silent.

  She’s staring at her grandfather. The light has gone from his eyes. Her arms hang at her sides. Eight d
angles in her right hand. No, not quite. There’s an inch of space and light between palm and Eight. Tiny lightning strikes crackle through this gap.

  The crackle. The electric-tension.

  Eight rotates to the flex of her fingers. Levitates up to her eye level. ‘Did he do this?’ she asks and Eight, who cannot lie, answers: BLOOD ON HANDS. And she turns her burning glare onto Caleb, and sees what she’s been told to. Caleb’s been through blood and dirt and more. He’s been through it all.

  ‘Misha, whatever it’s said…’

  She sets the ball spinning hundreds of revolutions a minute, and Eight has one more message for him: I WARNED YOU.

  With thumb and forefinger Misha pinches hold of the very air itself, and there is light everywhere, swirling and surging like water. She pulls and lashes upwards. A whooshing streak blasts across the room, ploughing through floorboards, piling into the wall by Caleb’s head. Plaster chunks and sparks tear into his ear, his cheek.

  Numb arms are distant memories.

  He jumps up, clutching his torn face, diving away from the demon in Misha’s dress. She doesn’t sing the controlling notes, she screams them as she thrashes up and left, and up go Caleb’s feet. Airborne, flipping, upside-down, paintings and maps and wallpaper on fire as chunks are torn from the walls, four long troughs as if ripped through by massive talons.

  He lands and rolls, and Eight’s words are projected down the hall, spinning. I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU in nine foot letters, and just as Caleb gets to his feet, he is knocked to the floor again, the air suddenly a solid weight that presses him down, and there’s lightning in the house and it blows out all the windows.