[Sequoia]

by Adrian Dawson

  Not one among the uneducated, baying throng truly knew why the sun rose - for this reason they feared that it might never rise again. Not one understood why the rains came in spring and gave new life to crops - so they fretted that every drop they felt might be the last. When one does not understand, it is wise to fear and such men and women as know this do not wish to live their lives afraid. Instead, they seek only to remove that fear. They expel those who will not conform, they banish the unclean and they wage righteous war against the agents of satan.

  They kill everything they are too afraid to understand.

  And today, in this place, that included her.

  With one final rasping breath, she closed her eyes.

  * * * * *

  Some years previous when Old Lady Partridge - Milly - had ceased to breathe, only to return alive, well and smiling within the hour to her children, there had been many in Lawford who had sought to swim her, as such an event must surely be the machinations of dark spirits within. This was, of course, in the days before swimming was outlawed (though you could still find it practiced if you had a mind to look long enough) and a good many years before the authoritative judgment of Hopkins and Stearne had ridden into town.

  Milly, they said, had died and was now breathing air once more. Their air. She was a witch and must be proven as one. A witch who had not only found a way to regain the ability to inhale, but also to exhale and those exhalations might creep like ravenous dogs through the village and find their way into the lungs of the innocents as they slept.

  In a precursor to Hopkins’ own techniques, a jury of matrons had swiftly been assembled and, accompanied by others from the village, they had marched upon her cottage on the outskirts of town. There they would watch and walk her for as many days as it took to gather the ‘Tokens of Tryall’ that would ultimately condemn her to the gallows.

  It was only when Old Mil’ had finally broken silence and recounted her tale, and told with new found life and no shortage of detail how she had spent those minutes ‘in clear dream of a light, some distance away but calling her name in warm, soft voice,’ that the villagers had begun to change their views. With no other real evidence against her and no maleficious deeds to her name, they finally let her be.

  Of course, until the day she finally died for real, dropping like a sack of fresh-hewn wheat in the field as she worked, Milly was never treated the same. She was different, perhaps, and to be feared for that alone but the question had ceased to be about whether she should be feared for being an agent of evil... or rather for being an agent of God himself. Because, if Milly were indeed ‘a woman of evil fame’, then why had heaven itself called out to her? Why had it beckoned her into its fold and then, more strangely, sent her back to the toil which had ultimately keeled her skyward again? Had her piety which, until that day had never been questioned, been rewarded by heaven granting her a new position; that of overseer of living souls?

  From that day forth, not one in the village spoke ill of Old Milly Partridge. Even after her second, more permanent, demise her name became one with Divine Retribution. From ‘mind thy chatter’ to ‘eat thy pottage’, all were bolstered now with ‘lest Old Mil’ come back to judge ye.’

  Old Mil’, they said, had glanced the truth of the life beyond and had returned. She had seen the true beauty of heaven - a bright white light, the brightest she had ever seen, nestling at the end of a long dark tunnel and gently calling her forth...

  * * * * *

  Which was why, when she finally awoke, the woman whose grave - had she been offered the dignity of one - would have been marked “Rachael Garland” believed that she too now saw heaven.

  Beckoning her.

  The gallows might have taken her breath but, as was so often the case (especially with none to tug the ankles), it had not fully taken her life. That usually came later, often in a shallow grave below the gallows themselves or behind the gaol. Usually the grave was pinned by stones or heavy rocks to prevent the unholy rising again come Judgment Day. A day which, in all their hearts, loomed ever closer.

  “Open up your eyes...”

  As her eyes peeled open, she saw ahead of her the sight that Old Mil’ herself must have seen as she lay swaddled in her bedclothes. A long, dark tunnel which stretched toward a distant, powerful light; the brightest she had ever seen. Flickers of light hurtled toward her like shooting stars, cooling her skin as they made contact.

  All the while her name was being called to her, not in a thousand harsh tones as it had been in her mind of late, but in the gentle lilt of melody; a minstrel singing a psalm into her heart. Over and over, her name as clear as day and an instruction to open her eyes. This was not a melody she recognised, though she had seen ’most all of the touring minstrels at the fairs and been sung many a song by beggars looking for pennies. Nevertheless, it was a beautiful, ethereal tune; a serene breeze crossing over the Stour on a warm summer day and caressing her face with soft, harmonious fingers.

  The words contained within this lilt told her that the sun was up and that she was as beautiful as the bright blue sky. This was, they said, a brand new day and she was now a part of everything. She could feel searing pain, and yet she felt assuaged to it. Her body seemed now as though it were cushioned; perhaps resting awhile on soft velvet cushions as she made preparation for her final journey.

  When a dark shape came into view at the farthest reaches of the tunnel, presumably St. Peter himself, the light around his frame was so bright that he seemed to glow like embers, his form suffused with holy divinity. The melodic words came to a halt and, in a crisp clear voice, he said:

  “You forgot something...”

  She could see the light-thinned form of an already slender arm outstretched; the slightest glimmer and then something falling toward her. As it fell it seemed to waver as though dancing on the breeze. Closer and closer it came until it landed firm but light; dead centre on her chest. It took all the strength she could muster, and hurt more like hell than heaven, but she reached across and clumsily took it in her ragged and bleeding hand.

  A bloodied crucifix, rough-carved from a dark wood with a string of beads looped through a hole in the top. She could just make out an inscription at its centre, and feel the ridges with her thumb, but the blinding light beyond would not permit her to read it.

  Her faith was being returned, she decided. She had faltered at the gallows and God, rather than punish her, had seen the piety of her short existence and instead brought her soul safe to the gates of heaven. Her faith restored, he would surely now lift her aloft to join her fallen kin.

  As she wriggled and turned her head, pain tearing through every bone, her left cheek pressed against something soft and slightly warm. She struggled more, pushing into the softness with her elbows and turning further to see what it might be. The light was poor but when she realised; when it finally became clear in her mind, she tried to scream. With her throat long-since crushed and pierced, however, what crept forth and echoed along the tunnel which lay before her was more akin to the rasp of a dying animal spending its final hours locked tight in a trap.

  She craned, looked to her right and saw more. Then down to her feet; more still. They were everywhere. Around her. Touching her. Seeping onto her. She wanted to kick out, to push them away, but her legs refused to move. She could see her feet in the gloom, but they could not see or hear her and they resolutely ignored her commands. As she tried, the darkest pain she had ever felt was beginning to make itself known in her lower reaches of spine. Her arms flailed limply and she began to hyperventilate.

  Not velvet. Bodies. She was laid upon layer after layer of bodies. How many she did not care to count. Some were fresh enough to be still warm whilst others wore the torn blue of ragged flesh and had maggots where once they might have had eyes. Some bore only the last clumps of hair to show that they had ever even been a living thing.

  She looked back along the tunnel to heaven, to her Saviour, confused. No melody now and no words, jus
t silence. Then, after a few moments another shape, larger this time, crept into the halo of light. She saw it falter for the briefest moment and then tumble; a breeze now pressing into her face as though some unstoppable force was hurtling toward her.

  Finally, she opened her eyes wide. Not only to the world, but also to the truth of who she was, of where she was and of where it might be that she was now going.

  The last thing she saw, in that brief glimmer of realisation before her face was shattered beyond recognition and her skull was crushed near-flat, was the sharp cut of the stone, stolen from the edge of the well, as it picked up speed and hurtled violently toward her, spitting displaced rain in its wake. It bounced awkwardly from the sides as it caught the rough-hewn boundary of a sixty-three foot descent.

  Had she been alive to hear him leave, she would have heard her Saviour just one more time; the melody dancing and swirling hand-in-hand with the morning breeze. Cheerier this time.

  “It’s a brand new day.”

  Hell, yes, he thought. Hell, yes.

  He would make it last an eternity.

  ONE

  Thursday, August 20, 2043.

  KRT Building 4, 8th & Alameda, Los Angeles, California.

  I hate funerals. End of.

  Although, just saying that makes it sound as though I’d ever actually been to one, which I hadn’t. I missed my mother’s because it was all the way over the other side of the country and I was working on something I deemed to be important. I regret that. I missed my father’s because I pretending I was doing something important and I was: I was avoiding going to the funeral of a man I had absolutely no respect for. I don’t regret that at all.

  So, the truth of the matter is, for all the days of my life thus far I have hated funerals completely in absentia.

  Until Rachael.

  What I hated, and still hate, is that people come to funerals to ‘pay their respects’. To a wooden box..? One which probably has a rotting corpse inside it, the putrid aroma fighting through the chemicals. If they’re lucky, that is. I wasn’t. I already knew that the box I stared at for the duration of the half hour service was completely empty. From what I had heard, there was very little left of Cardou, let alone Rachael, and you don’t ship ‘remains’ over from France - whatever gruesome form those remains take - and then organise a funeral in just over two days. The coffin was as empty as I was. It might have been filled with sand but then, feeling the way I did, so might I.

  Still, body or not, people come to these places, they bow their heads and then leave with memories of sadness and loss instead of the memories a life should leave with you: a feeling of who you were lucky to have had in your own life, albeit (for the most part) too briefly. As if that wasn’t bad enough those same people then, for years and years beyond that day, return to that very same spot to ‘remember’ that person and lay flowers. In a field of stones (as it used to be), or a wall of plaques (as it is now). I find that sad. And, even though I personally hate funerals, I still find it sad that we don’t seem to have space in this world for burial plots any more. Or flowers. All we have now are building plots for those with deep enough pockets, and even those plots seem to be increasingly thin on the ground.

  To me the memory has never been in the place anyway, but in the person; in the heart and the mind. I could have been anywhere right at that moment and I would not have missed Rachael one ounce less than I did throughout the service. And yes, I know that - as a scientist - my measuring of emotion in ounces is a little trite but as yet we do not seem to have found a suitable unit for feelings. There’s no money to be had from weighing it, you see.

  Even if there is a place one should visit, then to me it should be a place full of endless life, not a place of wall-to-dull-beige-wall death.

  So no, had I been given a choice on the day of my soon-to-be fiancées’ funeral, the place I would have preferred to be was alone in the hills north of Lake Isabella, remembering how the two of us laughed and loved between the Giant Redwood trees of the Sequoia National Park. Recalling how we remembered to pack the picnic box in the trunk but forgot to pack the picnic within it. Remembering the Ursus Americanus (that’s an American Black Bear to non-sciency people) which came within about 100 feet of us as we hid behind a tree stump and how we did all we could not to giggle that on the guide, when folded just right, it had a comically thin cross-eyed face and was simply called ‘Uranus’. I would have liked to have spent the day visiting ‘Big Red’ one more time, our favourite of all the giants, and spent some more ticks of my own clock marvelling at how long they manage to live and how fleeting our time on this earth is, as Rachael and I had done.

  But I had no choice. If I didn’t go to the funeral, then I had no idea who actually would. By which I mean someone who actually cared at least a quarter as much as I did. So I figured I’d endure it. I’d see Big Red again soon enough and I was as sure as I could be that Rachael’s laughing face would come leaping through my mind once more.

  Most of the people who attended the painfully drab and extremely clinical room and who watched Rachael’s box descend with faux dignity into the similarly faux granite plinth were the corporate types. Faces I’d seen in corridors. Faces seemingly too important to acknowledge the existence of the scientists who actually found ways to make them money whilst they were alive but somehow felt it fitting to do so once they were dead. I sure as hell didn’t want any of them at my funeral. Hell, I didn’t even want a funeral. I hate them, remember? In my lengthy tenure at KRT I’ve worked for both the Solar team and the Aerodynamics team. So, when I’m gone, you know what to do… put me in a really aerodynamic rocket - something with a drag coefficient of 0.04 or less - and shoot me arse first into the sun. Let me help to power the solar system for just a fleeting moment.

  See? My ‘funeral’ pretty much writes itself.

  But then, I guess many of the suits had come because Rachael had died on the job; in one of their labs. A lab that, thanks to one immensely huge and horrendous fuck-up somewhere along the line, no longer existed. And, by no longer existed, I do know (as a scientist) that the atoms still exist, somewhere, but that was pretty much what it was reduced to. Particles. I could be angry that what KRT was doing at Cardou had directly led to Rachael’s death but then I was running the self-same lab in the building across the street here in L.A. at the time, and loving it. I hope she was too. We both knew what we were doing, as much as anyone in such technology-advancing scenarios can, and we both understood that you advance nothing in this world if you’re not prepared to live by the sword. We also understood that, if that self-same sword is unwieldy, untested and regarded as one of the more dangerous in the universe to fuck around with then sometimes, just sometimes, the unlucky end up falling on it.

  Rachael and two guards fell. Heavy.

  I didn’t know the guards, but I missed Rachael more than I could even try to express. With unfeeling hands I pulled a small piece of paper from my jacket pocket and stared for a moment at the last words Rachael had written for me. With a pen. That meant a lot to her and, if only for that reason alone, it meant a lot to me:

  Love you. Miss you. Home soon. ∞

  And there, at the end, was her ‘eternal squiggle’ - the one she had shown me the first time we had gone for a drive together and the one whose use on her notes to me always made me smile warmly.

  Sitting with our backs against a tree, far away and watching the end of another day, she had asked me: “Do you believe in eternal love.” Of course, being a guy, I didn’t. Not particularly. It wasn’t really my thing. Of course, being a guy, I said ‘yes’. Meaningfully.

  But Rachael did. She believed that everyone has someone and, when they find them, their hearts touch and they somehow become eternal. She wasn't referring to me at that stage, I don't think, as we barely knew each other but it showed me straight away that she was, at heart, a romantic. Picking up a stick she drew a squiggle in the loose layer of dusty earth that covered the ground. At first glance it wo
uld appear to have been a simple infinity symbol: the shape designated as infinity by John Wallis, chief cryptographer for parliament, way back in around 1655. However, looking closer, and watching her draw it, it was so much more than that. She had kinked the ends of the ellipses in as she drew them, forming what appeared to be two hearts laid on their sides, the points just touching.

  Eternal love.

  A few weeks later, she gave me a present: something she had pestered the guys in metallurgy knock up. The same symbol, moulded from FluidMetal and added to a leather band so that I could wear it around my wrist. Despite the name, FluidMetal was not a fluid, at least not at room temperature but, as amorphous alloys went, it had a lot going for it which is why KRT were so keen on its development. It combined a number of desirable features including high tensile strength, excellent corrosion resistance, high coefficient of restitution and excellent anti-wearing characteristics, while also being able to be heat-formed in processes similar to thermoplastics. There were too things Rachael simply did not want to corrode and rot away - ever - our infinity or the joy it brought to our lives.

  Pulling my left sleeve slightly and looking at that symbol on my wrist once again, our symbol, I closed my eyes and fought back tears. I did not want to cry, crying is something people do when they say goodbye and I simply wasn't ready to say goodbye. Not yet. No, I wanted what Rachael wanted. I wanted eternal love. I tried to breathe the feeling in but, for the first time in a long time, the air around me felt dry.

  When I opened my eyes again some time later the room had cleared considerably, but I was not alone. One other remained, though I didn’t recognise the back of his head, neatly trimmed and distinctive as his hair was. And yes, I know that I should have been sitting at the front myself, but I hate funerals - we’ve covered that. You don’t go to gigs you hate and sit at the front. You just… don’t.