End of the Road

by Jonathan Oliver

  They often appear to people in authority: policemen, nurses, firemen, and once to a soldier in a barracks. Or maybe these people draw on the inner resources available to them that have enabled them to gain such positions, their strength or their will, to resist the cunning presence of these children. It must be assumed they have less fortunate victims. As I said, people seem loath to report these experiences. Denial is, as they say, a wonderful thing.

  BUT CARLA HAD let them in.

  I drove fast, too fast. Carla was making noises on the back seat. I could hear her moaning. I could hear the sound of her legs moving against the fabric of the back seat. I glanced in my rear-view mirror as I approached a blind bend, just for a second.

  She was sitting up and looking at me.

  But it wasn’t Carla in the back.

  Dead black eyes looked back at me.

  I LOST CONCENTRATION; I was no longer driving a car at sixty miles an hour, I was gone for an instant. My mind blanked. I heard something, and it was the monstrous whistling dismay of the eternal void. I had preached on Hell, on separation from God, and now I could hear what the damned hear, and for a moment I saw into the eyes of something released for a time from that unendurable vault. There was pressure and temperature in those eyes; what you might experience waking forever in the heart of a collapsed star. It was both cold and immeasurably hot, ever expanding and as massive as a neutron star. All physics was behind those eyes, all the grotesque complexities of imaginary numbers.

  And the car came around the bend and I snapped back and saw them, but too late.

  A convoy of boys in single file, riding home on their bikes, suddenly thrown into film-set relief in the headlights. And I hit them, and drove through them, driving one into the next and feeling the wheels bounce and smear through them. The noise was awful; like driving through scaffolding.

  I swerved, but I had already gone through them, past them. As my car drifted right, into the oncoming lane, another vehicle had to veer onto the verge to avoid me. Headlights dazzled me and then I was past. Moments later, in response to my recklessness, a horn blared from the darkness behind.

  I PULLED THE car over in a lay-by a hundred yards down the road. I swung around in my seat, my heart pounding, fists clenched. Whatever had been in the back seat was gone. Nothing. Apart from me, sweating, shaking, terrified, the car was empty. What had I carried from that house?

  I put my hazard lights on and in their intermittent orange flash, I got out of the car and stumbled back towards the scene of the accident. My shadow appeared, and then disappeared before me, growing shorter, losing assurance, until I was at the bend and in darkness. The moon was a mist-light behind a streak of delicate, nervous cloud.

  I approached the scene. My hands felt like numb weights at the ends of my arms. I flexed them but that just made it feel like more blood was flowing into my extremities, leaving my core cold and hollow.

  I stood, wavering, skin prickling, by a pile of broken, twisted bikes. Three boys lay across the surface of the road, dead, still warm; warmer, perhaps, than I felt. Their bikes were enmeshed. Six wheels and a confusion of turning shadows. My memory flickered, stuttered like old celluloid running through a disused projector. Three bikes?

  The fourth bike I had imagined; had it been just an adrenaline-enhanced perception? Had it been shadows of wheels I’d seen and miscounted?

  I stepped nearer the edge of the road, towards where the verge sloped down into the field and the hawthorns that concealed them.

  And saw the wreck of the car.

  IT HAD GONE off the road and ploughed through the bushes. It was on its side, the chassis only just visible as the moon broke and reflected briefly off the exhaust. It was a new exhaust; fitted only last month.

  I stepped forward, and then I was turning, running in the wrong direction, disorientation blinding me, as I tried to escape the thing heaving itself up that bank, using fistfuls of weeds, labouring out of the cutting of dirt and clambering shadows.

  IF I COULD just get up the bank and reach the road...

  I could warn him...

  Is my daughter dead? Broken in the car wreck I have crawled from...

  Is she even there?

  If I could get to the top, with what life I still had I could warn him...

  But I can never make it...

  Footfalls behind me, slow, two pairs, now standing either side...

  My hands in the weeds...

  Voices, monotonous, insistent...

  A cycle I can never break...

  A pale face, like plastic in the moonlight, down near my ear...

  The last thing I hear before he speaks is the sound of my car, driving away again, at the top of the slope...

  And he speaks, and he tells me this won’t take long...

  But, of course, it goes on forever.

  LOCUSTS

  LAVIE TIDHAR

  Lavie’s take on history, real and imagined, is one of the many things that mark him out as a truly extraordinary writer. His alternative world SF novel, Osama, won the World Fantasy Award and he recently signed a two book deal with Hodder. Here Tidhar takes us on a journey in Palestine in 1915, with a piece that induces in the reader a waking dream state through its unusual and hypnotic form. The history here is real, rather than imagined, though this is as rich as any genre tale you’ll find within this anthology.

  IN SAFED ON top of the mountain under a deep blue sky with blue painted walls and doors to reflect the heavens, secretive black clad kabbalists wandering the stone walled streets with wide brimmed hats like horsemen dismounted. Palestine in the year of the gentiles and their god 1915. That night he sleeps in the yard of a stone house belonging to a man who lived in England, lying on his back on the hard ground looking up at a blue black sky and a myriad of stars. In sleep he sees all that is yet to come: first a burning bush and a great fire and men and women and children with yellow Stars of David on their arms herded like cattle in great metal beasts to a place where the tracks terminate. From there through a great gate into a dark place and ovens and black smoke, gold teeth collected in dirty buckets, skeletal moselmen with bare feet in the snow. Then a great cleansing fire and he sees boats on the sea and refugees docking at secret alcoves and kissing the sand, armed men and women spreading out across the bare land. Then later still the roads cut into the earth and the villages eradicated and the new settlers spreading again and again like locusts. New houses, new roads, great cities until of the wild places nothing remains.

  But all that is yet to come.

  When he wakes it is early and the city wakes around him and he builds a fire and sets to brew his coffee in a tin can. In the distance the call of the mosques to prayer. In the yard a small Jewish boy clad in black, sitting on his haunches by the fire studying the man. His eyes are black. What’s your name, he says, and the man answers, and the boy says, Like the king. The man shakes his head but all around him are the Biblical references woven into the land and the air and smoke from the fire and he studies this small boy and wonders what will become of him in the years to come. He drinks his coffee and the boy stands and goes to the horse and pats him. Is he yours, Yes, the man says. He stands up at last and his coat moves aside revealing his handgun and the boy’s eyes grow round and he says not a word. The man climbs on top of the horse and man and horse both depart this stone house, the boy staring after them. Where are you going, the boy says, and the man says, There is death on the wind.

  He rides for two days out of Safed through the Galilee, camping for a night by the great lake in which reflected are the stars like the eyes of the dead. The air is hot and dry. The crops lie wasted in the fields. He lies alone and is not disturbed. At night he sees the light of fishing boats and hears the fishermen’s cries, though some cry in Arabic and others in Hebrew. In the morning he follows the road that leads down, into the Jezreel Valley. There like a bowl of produce but the produce lies dead in the fields and the crows peck at the ground and at stones as if they were eyes. He ri
des through wasted wheat the gun at his belt his hat shading his face, watching the Arab villages and the Jewish settlements and the empty fields and the empty roads. At dusk he joins horse drawn carts going to Megiddo and he watches the hill, which the gentiles call Armageddon, and sees the fires burning in the settlement there and hears the hard voices of men.

  He spends the night there with farmers and agents of the Rothschilds, two men from Paris in the light suits made for the Orient discussing the merits of the young women of that place, who should go to study at the Baron’s expense and who should remain. They retire for the night with two of the lasses who are willing or wishing to escape this place for civilized Europe and these men have the power to make it so. He had learned long ago that men have power and he does not intervene for they had gone willingly enough and perhaps he, too, would have gone in their place. In the morning he rides out alone but followed by the carts filled with meagre produce going to the city of Haifa. In the distance he sees a checkpoint and the uniform of the Ottomans and he skirts them and watches from on high as they stop the carts and take away the produce and boot the men away, laughing. He rides on, through temperate hills and gentle forest, the land of Menasseh, until he sees the Carmel mountains rising in the distance, evergreen against blue, and he imagines he can hear the seagulls crying in the distance.

  He enters Zikhron Ya’akov at dusk that next night, the town named for the old Baron, and ties up his horse and enters an establishment such as there must inevitably be, even in a settlement of the Jews. They grow grapes in the Baron’s vineyards on the mountain slopes and make wine from it and he drinks deeply. It is a rough wine and it suits him fine. He has not much coin but he sits there not thinking much and a man comes and stands at the bar and orders wine and though he is an educated man and dressed in a suit, nevertheless there is a strength about him, a power. Not turning his head he says, I am in need of men.

  So, he says.

  I am–

  I know who you are.

  At that the other man does turn his head, and smiles. I’m Aaron Aaronsohn, he says.

  A quiet man. A mild mannered man. A dangerous man, with dangerous ideas. We leave at first light, Aaronsohn says. He drinks his wine.

  At first light they ride out, fifteen of them, ten Jews, three Bedouin guides and two silent Sudanese. At their head rides Aaronsohn, bottles of samples by his side and his rifle strapped to his back. His round glasses flash in the sun. They ride all day and into the night going north and the wind is dry and hot and the men lick their chapped lips and drink sparingly. They travel first along the coast and when they run into a Turkish checkpoint Aaronsohn shows the soldiers a piece of paper and they are let through with curious looks and the soldiers finger their weapons but say nothing.

  The next morning they run into a storm of locusts, the insects come flying out of nowhere in their millions. They grow like a dark cloud on the horizon and the horses shy and the men reach for their guns but they are useless. The insects swarm over them blindly, as if the men and the horses do not exist, are a figment of a locust god’s imagination. They enter their hair and their clothes and their mouths and their noses and the horses rear, frightened, and the men curse and one of them cries out loudly and there is the smell of human piss and a dark trickle on the ground. The insects swarm over them and they bat at them helplessly and Aaron roars, ordering them to turn, but the tide of black insects pushes them this way and that and he can no longer see the others in that sudden darkness, that blotting of the sun.

  At last he finds shelter against a rock face and watches the locusts swarm past until they are gone and a great darkness descends and where there were trees and fruit there is nothing but bare skeletons and they drift along the road towards the fields and forests of the north. He rides on then and the others join him one by one and at night when they camp by the shore of the Mediterranean they are two men short but Aaronsohn makes no comment. They sleep by their horses and rise with the moon and press on and the next day arrive at Jaffa on the shore of the Mediterranean and there the Turks have their fortress. Aaronsohn confers with Jamal Pasha while the men go to the harbour where the ships dock and where the oranges come on the back of camels and Arab men run up and down the docks shirtless carrying boxes, as strong and wiry as circus freaks. They drink by the harbour by the train tracks which link the harbour to Jerusalem and they listen to the French and Egyptian and British traders talk in their pidgin and to the Jewish agents and the Arab traders and they watch the few Jewish passengers who come on shore clutching identity documents to their chests and looking around them in what must be shock, at this Oriental town so dusty and ill-formed, a million miles away from the Europe which is the only thing they know.

  He drinks wine and arak with the others and they laugh at these new arrivals and wait for the girls to come out parading down the main Jaffa road pretty in their dresses and their scarves and saucy dark eyes looking the men up and down frankly. It is dusty and cool in the shade and the smell of tar and salt from the sea and the injuries of oranges litter the quayside roads and their smell bursts forth like the very essence of the country.

  He spends the night with a Greek girl two months now in Palestine but soon to move on, part of a travelling harem of women of all backgrounds all joined together on this mission like fallen goddesses of love. Cairo, she tells him, they will go to Cairo next where she has a family, and where the men are wealthy and pay generously. She strokes the scars on his chest and asks him how he got them and he answers not, but holds her, her wetness and her warmth, and he tries to lose himself inside her. In the morning they ride out, the Bedouins ahead, the Sudanese men leading three donkeys laden with sealed boxes behind them and barred cages from which protrude the dirty whiteness of live pigeons. You must know, the girl tells him, that night, when he is drunk under the moon, the war is coming, the Turks will not hold on to power forever. Why should I care, he says – demands – and she shrugs, You Jews, she says.

  You Jews. He remembers other days, other lands, but vaguely, as though they had happened to someone else, and long ago. He knows only this wild land, where men must carry guns, and he knows the Turks are fighting a war with the French and the English, and that someone must lose: and it is usually the Jews.

  At night under the stars skirting the hills of Jerusalem Aaronsohn says much the same thing to him, quietly, as though gauging him out. We need men like you, Aaronsohn says, and he says, Like what?

  In the midst of night a great cloud descends upon them from the hills of Jerusalem and the Sudanese cry out in great beats and light a flame. In its light they can see the olive trees stripped of life and the black insects come descending down in a mass in which no individual insect can be discerned. The Sudanese unpack the boxes and the men arm themselves with burning torches dipped into liquid flame, they wave them in the air at the onrushing locusts and the air is filled with the hiss of dry burning carapace and dying insects dropping to the ground until with every step he takes his foot sinks into a crunching necropolis, an insectoid slaughterhouse and the air is full of death. He feels them against his skin and in his hair and on his hands, crawling into his crotch, up his anus, he strips, naked he dances in the moonlight like a crazed person waving torches and the men do likewise, Aaronsohn with his glasses flashing and his pale behind shaking in a dance. None of them make a sound, it takes place in silence, if you had asked him before or after he would have told you it was impossible, yet it was true. It is a circus light show lighting up the dark mountain side and the sweat on the horses’ dark skin and the torches are like the crazy fires of a thousand falling stars.

  They ride onwards with Jerusalem in the distance up on her mountains like a sagging aged queen, her churches and synagogues and mosques the teats of a cow suckling dusty cowled pilgrims snuggling into her bosom, there the Jewish quarter where Eliezer Ben Yehuda dreams in modern Hebrew a language he is still inventing out of old biblical Hebrew and borrowed words and whole cloth and there too the m
en of the old Yishuv traders and politicos in the shade of the Ottomans huddled within the walls mistrustful of the new Yishuv these interlopers newcomers in the shadow of their money man the Baron in the north: but they skirt the city clean.

  Here they pause, though, while Aaronsohn waits. The Bedouins on their horses scout ahead, the men sit restless, playing cards, he sits apart from the others watching Aaronsohn. At last they see dust rising on the dirt track leading from Jerusalem and an approaching man and horse, riding fast. The rider dismounts and he and Aaronsohn hug. Feinberg, someone says, it’s Avshalom Feinberg.

  And how much like the king’s son he looks, this modern Absalom, how handsome and fetching, born like his namesake on this land, but educated in Paris, a man the girls sigh over, and he and Aaronsohn talk quietly, whispering, and Feinberg delivers onto the expedition leader a small packet of what might be papers, and rides away. In two years he would be dead in the desert, his blood seeping out onto the fine sand, his companion wounded and running, Avshalom like his namesake dead in his prime, it would be fifty years before they found his bones bleaching in that lonely stretch of sand forgotten even by the Bedouins who shot him down.

  Aaronsohn goes to the donkeys and opens one of the bird cages and extracts a pigeon, trembling in his hand. When he releases it the bird takes to the air with a cry and there is a metallic container strapped to its foot. It rises into the air and circles and disappears in the direction of Egypt.

  They ride on. Beyond the hills the land drops steeply, in seeming moments they have ridden deep into the desert sands. Canyon walls rise above them and the air turns dry and hot, a burning, and he thinks of his dreams of all that is yet to come the ovens and the flames, he can see the future but in the future all that is around them is still sand. They ride down and down and down still as if dropping into the bowels of the earth as though descending into a sort of Christian hell and Jerusalem its mountains its olive groves its broken Temple and its Wall its mosques and synagogues and markets all vanish in the hot dry air like a fata morgana like a thing which did not ever exist.