The Cosmic Perspective and Other Black Comedies

by Brian Stableford

  “We can’t help what comes into our minds at moments of great stress,” Dr. Setlow assured me. “Panic does strange things. Perhaps the idea provided that little bit of extra incentive you needed.”

  “Perhaps,” I agreed, as he finished binding up the poultice. It was clammy and cold, but after a little while it actually began to help, at least in the sense of further reducing the pain.

  I went home and phoned the ballet school to tell them I wouldn’t be in. The teacher who took the call was noticeably less sympathetic than the osteopath, even though she was a Living theriomorph, and had just as low an opinion of zombiekind as he had.

  By mid-afternoon, what I’d said to Dr. Setlow about old skellies’ tales didn’t seem so funny. Something had stated growing on the bones of my hand and forearm. Although it was difficult to tell while it was still no thicker than a layer of paint, it looked suspiciously like flesh. I first noticed it on the fingers that were sticking out of the bandage that was holding the poultice in place, and thought for a moment or two that it was some sort of limited side-effect of the treatment, but then I saw that it was starting on my other hand and arm too, all the way up to the elbow.

  I rushed to the bathroom, and looked at myself in the mirror. It was beginning to manifest itself on my face, too. There was a rosy flush on my cheeks, and a distinct fuzz on my chin.

  It’s really happening! I thought. I really did manage to scare myself to life. I’m regressing to my larval stage! As Dr. Setlow had observed, panic has strange effects.

  It was all nonsense, of course. I told myself that. Time could not be made to run backwards. No one—except for the occasional elixir-of-Life addict—ever grew younger. Even elixir-of-Life addicts didn’t grow younger for long, inevitably falling victim soon enough to their lack of moderation.

  My next impulse was to rush back to Dr. Setlow’s in search of additional treatment. The credit I’d had to surrender for the poultice had left my balance on the slender side, but that wasn’t what stopped me—it was the thought that I’d have to go out into the street to get there. That wouldn’t matter much down at the wrong end of Winding Sheet Street, but once I got to the main road I’d be bound to bump into bony folk—and how could I possibly look them in the eye-sockets, if I’d actually begun to grow eyes? There are some things that simply can’t be exposed to the second sight of decent skellies.

  What made the prospect seem ten times worse was the admittedly slim possibility that one of the bony folk I bumped into might be Melissa or Salome. I didn’t know which would be worse: Melissa looking at me fondly, and her fondness turning to horror as she realized that something was growing on me, or Salome seeking out her friend with the hasty enthusiasm of a girl in possession of hot gossip, to say: “You’ll never guess what happened! I met that Peterkin on the hill, and he looked disgusting!”

  I didn’t actually look disgusting yet—just a little off-color—but I knew that it was only a matter of time.

  I couldn’t go out—but that awareness gave birth to an even more horrid thought. Was I condemned to wait in the house, alone—too frightened and ashamed to step outside the door—while I underwent a slow but inexorable metamorphosis into a Living Being? Was I doomed to emerge from hiding, in the fullness of time, as a horrid pulpy thing driven by crude appetites, racked by thirst and hunger? And if I did, would I be able to outrun the local zombies the way that a healthy Living person could, or would I be caught and dragged down, to become the focal point of a feeding frenzy?

  Compared with all that, the thought of being shattered and smashed by a railway locomotive seemed a trivial anxiety, hardly worth a shudder.

  There was, of course, one obvious way to tackle the problem. Bony folk don’t like to wear clothing, but they can do it if the necessity arises. In the olden days, before the city became a ghetto for all so-called monsterkind, we always used to wrap ourselves up in voluminous cloaks in order to hide from the Living. In those days, so legend has it, we were mostly in service with the Living, working the land to produce food that we didn’t need and couldn’t eat—which is why, according to the sentimental idiots in our ranks, old family portraits often show our ancestors carrying scythes.

  The real reason, of course, is that the scythes are symbolic.

  Would it have been better to have lived in those days? I wondered, as I stared at my pink-tined cheeks in utter horror. Surely it must have been preferable to living on the same block as delinquent zombies. What do bony folk need civilization for, when all’s said and done? Civilization’s a Living thing, really.

  Even the thought of going out in a cloak seemed to be too much to bear for the moment.

  Perhaps it’ll go away of its own accord, I thought. After all, I didn’t actually get run over and shattered into a thousand bone shards. I’m not scared any more. I’ll be back to normal in no time.

  Then the doorbell rang, and I felt a terrible chill in the marrow of my arms and legs.

  I crept downstairs furtively, hoping with all my might that whoever it was might go away. I’d never had occasion before to hope that a ring of the doorbell might be little ghouls playing silly games, but that suddenly seemed an exceedingly attractive possibility.

  The bell rang for a second time—and, after a pause, a third.

  “Come on, Peterkin,” a voice said. “I know you’re in there. I heard what happened.”

  The chill in my marrow grew worse, and I felt sick from my occiput to my metatarsals. It was Melissa.

  I felt that I could easily melt with shame.

  It wasn’t so very surprising that the news of the injury I’d sustained as a result of the zombie attack had got around, even though my conversation with Dr. Setlow should have been subject to medical confidentiality. It isn’t every day that innocent bony folk are wired up to a railway line by a gang of zombie teenagers—in fact, I couldn’t recall ever having hard of such a thing before. It was the kind of story that begged to be repeated—and it must have run through the neighborhood in no time at all. Dr. Setlow wasn’t to know that I’d develop the kind of problem that would make it impossible to receive the sympathy I was due with a good grace—especially from the person whose sympathy meant more to me than anyone else’s.

  “Open the door, Peterkin,” she said. “I just want to see how you are—make sure you’re all right.”

  “I can’t,” I whimpered, not knowing whether I wanted her to hear me or not.

  “Why not? Your wrist can’t be that bad.”

  “I just can’t,” I said.

  “Of course you can. Didn’t we have a good time at the Palais last night? I’m your friend, aren’t I? Or have you got that little slut Salome in there?”

  “No!” I protested, my voice rising in alarm. “I’m sick, that’s all.”

  Melissa’s voice softened as mine grew harsher. “I know you’re sick, Peterkin,” she said. “That’s why I’m here.”

  “I mean really sick,” I said, desperately. “It’s not my wrist—it’s something else. It might be catching.”

  “You’re a skelly, Peterkin,” she said, although I didn’t really need reminding. “We don’t get sick. We break occasionally, but we don’t get diseases. Only fleshy folk get diseases.”

  “Well, I am sick,” I said. “Not just diseased—disfigured. It’s horrible. You are my friend, and that’s why I can’t let you in. I can’t let you see me like this.” Somehow, my innate honesty had brought me round to the truth—but I knew, even as the words spilled from my mouth, that the truth wasn’t going to do the trick.

  “Oh, don’t be silly, Peterkin,” Melissa said, even more determined now to break down my resistance. “It can’t be anything like as bad as you imagine, and I honestly don’t mind. Please let me in. I’d feel just terrible if you sent me away.”

  I was in such an awful state of mind that I actually thought that it might serve her right if she did see me, and was so horrorstruck that she wouldn’t ever be able to look at me again, even if I were to get bet
ter. Then I accused myself of being horribly cruel for thinking such a dreadful thing. Somehow, while I was still figuring out how to defend myself against the charge, my arm made its own decision.

  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” I said, as my rebel limb opened the door.

  She didn’t come in immediately, She stood on he doorstep and looked at me long and hard while I tried not to cover my face or run away and hide in the bathroom. Her expression was unreadable.

  Eventually, she said “Wow.” She said it softly, as if it weren’t an exclamation at all, let alone an exclamation of horror and disgust. I wondered whether I might already have melted with embarrassment and gone to that skelly hell from which no one ever gets re-reborn.

  “Do you still want to come in?” I mumbled.

  “Yes, of course,” she said, moving past me into the sitting-room. “What is that stuff, Peterkin? Why have you smeared yourself with it? Did the osteopath give it to you? Why is it on your face and your other arm?”

  She sat down on the sofa, but I didn’t dare sit beside her. I lowered myself into the armchair.

  “I haven’t smeared myself,” I told her. “It’s growing. I think it’s...flesh.”

  “Flesh?” she repeated, incredulously.

  I was tempted to tell her that I thought I’d scared myself to life, but it would have sounded too silly, and I still didn’t want to seem silly in her eyes, even if all hope of a meaningful relationship was now utterly lost. How else could I explain it, though? As she’d already observed, bony folk aren’t supposed to get sick. It’s one of the privileges of the condition. We are, as they say, immune to all the natural shocks that flesh is heir to. I said nothing.

  It’s difficult for a skelly to look miserable, but another skelly can usually tell.

  “Oh, Peterkin,” Melissa said, her voice becoming softer still. “I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about. It’s hardly noticeable.”

  “Not yet,” I murmured.

  “Well, that’s all the more reason to take it to Dr. Setlow now,” she said, very reasonably. “Whatever it is, it’s probably best caught early. He’ll know what to do. Don’t worry about the bill—you have get it sorted, even if you’re in the red for a month or two.”

  “I can’t,” I said. “I just can’t.”

  “That’s what you said about opening the door,” she retorted. “Put a cloak on, if you like. I’ll go with you. If I’m not ashamed to be seen with you, there’s not the slightest reason why you should be ashamed to be seen, is there?”

  I supposed not—but it wasn’t as simple as that. In the end, though, she was irresistible. She’d got me to open the door, and she was determined to take me back to the osteopath’s. I really didn’t have a choice.

  I did put on a cloak, though—one with a very voluminous hood. It was old, dusty and moth-eaten, and I could see that Melissa would rather I hadn’t bothered—but she’d already declared that she wasn’t ashamed to be seen with me, so she had to lump it. She walked beside me all the way to Dr. Setlow’s consulting-room, holding her head high and defying anyone to stare at us.

  The zombie brothers were back on the street again, but they hurried off in the opposite direction as soon as they saw me. I hadn’t known that zombies could move that fast. Apparently, they too were ashamed of themselves.

  Once I was in the consulting-room with Dr. Setlow—and Melissa was safely confined in the waiting-room—I disrobed, and showed him the slowly-spreading blight. I expected him to be shocked, but he wasn’t. He’d obviously seen it before.

  “Oh dear,” he said. “Dear oh bloody dear. It’s a bloody epidemic, that’s what it is. Why here? Why now? Why me? Everything was going so well, and now I’m going to go down in history as the osteopath whose patients came back to life. It’s so bloody unfair.”

  And that’s how I found out that bony folk can and do get sick occasionally—and how people react when they do.

  * * * * * * *

  When the osteopath came back into the room after sending Melissa away he had recovered his professional composure, if not his sympathy. He was wearing an expression of deep concern—which isn’t easy for a skelly, even for a doctor. “I’ve called a cab,” he said. “I’d better take you out to the isolation ward. You don’t have to stay there, mind—we don’t have any right to detain you, and it’s beginning to look extremely unlikely that the disease is passed on by physical contact, the way diseases of the Living are. You’ll be able to talk to the other sufferers, though, and get a sense of how the thing is likely to develop. It’s the principle of informed consent, you see—the foundation-stone of medical ethics. Before we try any experimental treatment, you have to know what you’re letting yourself in for. Not that we’ve got that many experiments left to try, as it goes—the well of inspiration has just about run dry.”

  “What about Melissa?” I asked. “Have I put her in danger?”

  “I doubt it. If the disease were contagious, she’d probably have been exposed already—along with everyone else you were dancing with at the Palais on Saturday night.”

  “I didn’t have it then!” I protested.

  “It wasn’t manifest then,” Dr Setlow corrected me. “You have to get this ridiculous notion out of your head that it was caused by the fright you had when you were nearly hit by the train.”

  “It must have been the zombies!” I said, as the thought struck me. “They’re always picking up diseases, although they don’t seem to die of them until they actually dissolve into pools of putrescence. It’s their eating habits—they’re probably carrying every sort of nasty bug you can imagine and then some.”

  “None of which is capable of infecting you or me,” the osteopath said, witheringly. “Diseases of the flesh can’t touch us. I know this might seem like a disease of the flesh, since that’s what’s growing on you, but it’s got to be some kind of weird distortion of the fundamental zest that animates your bones and enables you to think, see and talk without the usual apparatus. It has to be some kind of excess.”

  “Too much excitement, you mean,” I said. “Like blind terror, for instance. Maybe there’s some truth in the old skellies’ stories—maybe that’s why they’ve survived so long.”

  “Nonsense!” the ostepoath retorted, sharply. “When you’ve seen the others, you’ll understand how utterly silly the notion is. It’s not caused by panic, and it’s not infectious—if it were, I’d surely have come down with it by now, given that I’ve seen every case that’s so far been diagnosed and seem to spend half my time at the bloody quarantine centre.”

  “You called it an epidemic,” I pointed out, mildly.

  “Well, I wasn’t speaking in strictly clinical terms. There’s the taxi—better put your hood up until we’re safely away.”

  I put my hood up obediently, reflecting bitterly that his discreet silence regarding the mysterious disease was really rather remarkable, given that he’d been so quick to let the whole neighborhood in on my run-in with the zombie teens. On the other hand, I could easily understand why the inhabitants of the quarantine centre were anxious not to have news of their confinement spread around. I could also understand why they were so enthusiastic to stay in quarantine rather than dispersing to their own homes, even though they’d been certified non-contagious.

  The cab was only in motion for five minutes before it drew up outside a three-story terraced house in a side-street in the better part of the neighborhood. The door to the house was opened as soon as the vehicle drew to a halt; I hurried inside while the doctor paid the driver. The person holding the door was as squeaky clean as it was possible to be—in fact, her bones proudly displayed the effects of a recent bleach-and-wax—so she was obviously a nurse rather than a patient. The room she ushered me into was some sort of common room.

  There were four people in the room: two male and two female. Even one of the Living could have identified them as two males and two females—that was how far their conditions had progressed. They were carrying between tw
enty and forty pounds of flesh apiece, mostly distributed in a fashion that was extremely unflattering. They weren’t wearing clothes—they hadn’t so much as a dressing-gown between them—but the charged atmosphere suggested that they were having some trouble maintaining that defiant attitude.

  I pushed my hood back on to my shoulders, so that they could see what was happening to me.

  “Why,” said one of the males, “it’s young Peterkin—the pianist at the ballet school.” When I looked at him uncomprehendingly he sighed. “Sorry,” he said. “I haven’t quite got used to the fact that I’m unrecognizable. I’m Lysander Link, the fiddle-player with the Carillon of Skulls—we play at the Grand Guignol for the saber-dancers, and do gigs on the side when your star pupils do their party-pieces.”

  Only two weeks had passed since I’d last seen Mr. Link. The thought immediately flashed into my mind that perhaps he was the one who’d passed the disease on to me—but I had to suppose that, if he’d been able to infect me, he’d have given it to everyone else in the theatre, and there had been a good crowd that night. The more worrying aspect of his presence was the sight of the flesh he’d put on in a mere fortnight.

  “Take a good look, son,” said one of the females—the fleshiest of the four. “This time next month, you’ll probably be able to pass for one of the Living in a dim light. In fact, to all intents and purpose, you’ll be one of the Living. You’ll be breathing, drinking, eating...and even though the more disgusting things are optional, you’ll have hormones to torment you. The psychiatrist says that we’ll adjust, in time, but he hasn’t managed to convince any of the patients upstairs. If you think all these muscles and blood vessels look awful, wait until you see half-grown skin. I’m Helen, by the way—no relation to Helen of Troy, so far as I know. Mind you, it’ll probably look better on you than it does on me, you being so young and all. Your caterpillar must have died young as well as recently.”