At the Edge of Waking

by Holly Phillips

  “Do you know about Tibbit-Noyse?”

  Her voice shook. An answer to that uncertainty, at least.

  “Know what?” he asked.

  Her breathing was quieter, now.

  “Know what?”

  “That I have been ordered,” she answered at last, “to resurrect him in the morning.”

  He did not move.

  The bathroom door closed.

  She had broken his skin. The small wound stung with sweat, or maybe it was tears, there beside his eye.

  When she stayed in the bathroom, and stayed, and stayed, he finally understood. He rose and dressed, and walked out into the curfew darkness where, apparently, he belonged.

  Next morning, Neil ran up the stairs to Healy’s office and collided with the major outside his door.

  “Neil!” Major Healy exclaimed. “What the devil are you doing here? Don’t tell me. I’m already late.” He pushed past and started down the hall.

  Neil stretched to catch up. “I know. They’re bringing the colonel back.”

  Healy strode another step, two, then stopped. Neil stopped as well, so the two of them stood eye to eye in the corridor. Men in uniform brushed by on their own affairs. Healy said in a furious undertone, “How the hell do you know about that?”

  “I want to be there.”

  “Impossible.” The major started to turn.

  Neil grabbed his arm. “Morale’s already dangerously low. How do you think the troops would react if they knew their superiors were bringing back their own dead?”

  Healy’s eyes widened. “Are you blackmailing your superior officer? You could be shot!”

  “Sir. David. Please.” Neil took his hand off the other’s arm.

  Healy seemed to wilt. “It’s nothing you ever want to see, John. Will you believe me? It’s nothing you ever want to see.”

  “Neither is all your men being shot dead and eaten by vultures while you lie there and do nothing.”

  Healy shut his eyes. “I don’t know. You may be right.” He coughed and started for the stairs. “You may be right.”

  Taking that for permission, Neil followed him down.

  The company’s staging area was a weird patch of quiet amidst the scramble of other units that had to equip and sustain their troops in the field. Trucks, jeeps, men raced over-laden on crumbling streets, spewing exhaust and profanity as they went. By the nature of their missions, reconnaissance squads were on their own once deployed, and this was never truer than for Special Recon. No one wanted to involve themselves with the Dead Squad in the field. The nickname, Neil thought, was an irony no one was likely to pronounce aloud today.

  He and Major Healy had driven to the staging area alone, late, as Healy had mentioned, but when they arrived they found only one staff car parked outside the necromancer’s workshop. The general in charge of Intel was inside with two men from his staff. When Healy parked his jeep next to the car, the three men got out, leaving the general’s driver to slouch smoking behind the wheel. They formed a group in the square formed by rutted tarmac, prefabricated wooden walls, empty windows, blinding tin roofs. The compound stank of petrol fumes, hot tar, and an inadequate latrine.

  The general, a short bulky man in a uniform limp with sweat, returned Neil’s and Healy’s salutes without enthusiasm. He didn’t remark on Neil’s presence. Neil supposed that Healy, as Special Recon’s acting CO, was entitled to an aide.

  The general checked his watch. “It’s past time.”

  “Sorry, sir,” Healy said. “We were detained at HQ.”

  The general grunted. He had cold pebble eyes in pouchy lids. “Any news of your men in the field?”

  “No, sir. But I wouldn’t expect to hear this early. None of the squads will have reached the line yet.”

  The general grunted again, and though his face bore no expression, Neil realized he was reluctant to go in. His aides had the stiff faces and wide eyes of men about to go into battle. Healy looked tired and somewhat sick. Neil felt a twinge of adrenaline in his gut, his breath came a little short. The general gave a curt nod and headed for the necromancer’s door.

  Inside her workshop, the walls and the underside of the tin roof were clothed in woven reed mats. Even the windows were covered: the room was brilliantly and hotly lit by a klieg lamp in one corner. An electric fan whirred in another, stirring up a breeze that played among the mats, so that the long room was restless with motion, as if the pale brown mats were tent walls. This, the heat, the unmasked stink of decay, all recalled a dozen missions to Neil’s mind. His gut clenched again and sweat sprang cool upon his skin. There was no sign of her, or of Tibbit-Noyse. An inner door stood slightly ajar.

  The general cleared his throat once, and then again, as if he meant to call out, but he held his silence. Eventually, the other door swung further open and the girl put her head through.

  Neil felt the shock when her eyes touched him. But she was in some distant place, her eyelids heavy, her face open and serene. He knew she knew him, but by her response his was only one face among five.

  She said, “I’m ready to begin.”

  The General nodded. “Proceed.”

  “You know I have lodged a protest with the Sisterhood?”

  The general’s face clenched like a fist. “Proceed.”

  She stepped out of sight, leaving the door open, and in a moment she wheeled a hospital gurney into the room, handling the awkward thing with practiced ease. Tibbit-Noyse’s corpse lay on its back, naked to the lamp’s white glare. The heavy caliber bullet had made a ruin of the left side of his face and head. A ragged hole gaped from the outer corner of his eye to behind his temple. The cheekbone, cracked askew, whitely defined the lower margin of the wound. The whole of his face was distorted, the left eye open wide and strangely discolored, while the right eye showed only a white crescent. Shrinking lips parted to show teeth and a gray hint of tongue beneath the crisp mustache. The body was the color of paste and, bar an old appendectomy scar, otherwise intact.

  The hole in Tibbit-Noyse’s skull was open onto darkness. Neil remembered the Intel captain saying the man’s brains had been scattered across his desk. But death was nothing new to him, and he realized he was examining the corpse so he did not have to look at the girl.

  She wore a prosaic bathrobe of worn blue velvet, tightly belted at her waist. Her dark hair was pinned at the base of her neck. Her feet, on the stained cement floor, were bare. She set the brakes on the gurney’s wheels with her toes, and then stood at the corpse’s head, studying it, arms folded with her elbows cupped in her palms, mouth a little pursed.

  An expression he knew, a face he knew so well. Another wave of sweat washed over him. He wished he had not come.

  The fan stirred the walls. The lamp glared. Trucks on the street behind the compound roared intermittently by.

  The girl—the witch—nodded to herself and went back into the other room, but reappeared almost at once, naked, bearing a tray heavy with the tools of her craft. She set this down on the floor at her feet, selected a small, hooked knife, and then glanced at the men by the door.

  “You might pray,” she said softly. “It sometimes helps.”

  Helps the watchers, Neil understood her to mean. He knew she needed none.

  Her nakedness spurred a rush of heat in his body, helpless response to long conditioning, counter tide to the cold sweep of horror. Blood started to sing in his ears.

  She took up her knife and began.

  There is no kindness between the living and the dead.

  Neil had sat through the orientation lecture, he knew the theory, at least the simplified version appropriate for the uninitiated. To lay the foundation for the false link between body and departed spirit the witch must claim the flesh. She must posses the dead clay, she must absorb it into her sphere of power, and so she must know it, know it utterly.

  The ritual was autopsy. Was intercourse. Was feast.

  Not literally, not quite. But her excavation of the corpse was
intimate and brutal, a physical, a sensual, a savage act. As she explored Tibbit-Noyse’s face, his hands, his genitals, his skin, Neil followed her on a tour of the lust they had known together, he and she, the loving that they had enacted in the privacy of her room and that was now laid bare. As the dead man’s secret tissues were stripped naked, so was Neil exposed. He rode waves of disgust, of desire, of sheer scorching humiliation, as if she fucked another man on the street, only this was worse, unimaginably worse, steeped as it was in the liquors of rot.

  He also only stood, his shoulder by Healy’s, his back to the rough matted wall, and said nothing, did nothing, showed, he thought, nothing . . . and watched.

  When Tibbit-Noyse was open, when he was pierced and wired and riddled with her tools and charms, when there was no part of the man she had not seen and touched and claimed—when the fan stirred not air but a swampy vapor of shit and bile and decay—when she was slick with sweat and the clotting moistures of death—then she began the call.

  She had a beautiful voice. Neil realized she had never sung for him, had not even hummed in the bath as she washed her hair. The men watching could see her throat swell as she drew in air, the muscles in her belly work as she sustained the long pure notes of the chant. The words were meaningless. The song was all.

  When Tibbit-Noyse answered, it was with the voice of a child who weeps in the dark, alone.

  The witch stepped back from the gurney, hands hanging at her sides, her face drawn with weariness but still serene.

  “Ask,” she said. “He will answer.”

  The general jerked his head, a marionette’s parody of his usual brisk nod, and moved a step forward. He took a breath and then covered his mouth to catch a cough, the kind of cough that announces severe nausea. Carefully, he swallowed, and said, “Alfred Reginald Tibbit-Noyse. Do you hear me?”

  A pause. “Y-ye-yes.”

  “Did you betray your country in a time of war?”

  A pause. “Yes.”

  Neil could see the dead grayish lungs work inside the ribcage, the grayish tongue inside the mouth.

  “How did you betray your country?”

  A pause. “I sent my men.” Pause. “To steal the dead.” Pause. “Behind enemy lines.”

  The general sagged back on his heels. “That is a lie. Those men were sent out on my orders. How did you betray your country?”

  A pause. “I sent my men.” Pause. “To die.” There was no emotion in the childish voice. It added calmly, “They were their mothers’ sons.”

  “How did you know they were going to die?”

  “ . . . How could they.” Pause. “Not be doomed.”

  “Did you send them into a trap?”

  “ . . . No.”

  “Did you betray their movements to the enemy?”

  “ . . . No.”

  “Then why did you kill yourself?” Against the dead man’s calm, the general’s frustration was strident.

  “ . . . I thought this war.” Pause. “Would swallow us all.” Pause. “I see now I was wrong.”

  Healy raised a hand to his eyes and whispered a curse. The general’s shoulders bunched.

  “Did you betray military secrets to the enemy?”

  “ . . . No.”

  “Who did you betray military secrets to?”

  “ . . . No one.”

  “Don’t you lie to me!” the general bellowed at the riddled corpse.

  “He cannot lie,” the witch told him. Her voice was quietly reproachful. “He is dead.”

  “ . . . I do not lie.”

  The general, heeding neither the live woman nor the dead man, continued to rap out questions. Neil could bear no more. He brushed past Healy to slip through the door. In the clean hot light of noon he vomited spit and bile, and sank down to sit with his back against the wall. After a minute, the general’s driver climbed out of the staff car and offered him the last cigarette from a crumpled pack.

  The battle became a part of history. The tide of the enemy’s forces was turned before it swamped the city; a new front line was drawn. The scattered squads of the Special Desert Reconnaissance Group returned in good time, missing no more men than most units who had fought in the desert sands, and carrying their bounty of enemy dead. Neil was given a medal for bravery on a recommendation by the late Colonel Tibbit-Noyse, and a new command: twelve recruits from other units, men with stomachs already toughened by war. He led them out on a routine mission, by a stroke of luck found and recovered the withered husk of a major whose insignia promised useful intelligence, and on the morning of the scheduled resurrection, the second morning of his four-day leave, he went to the hotel bar where he had learned of Tibbit-Noyse’s death and ordered a shot of whiskey and a beer.

  He drank them, and several others like them, but the heat pressed the alcohol from his tissues before it could stupefy his mind. He gave up, paid his tab, and left. By this time the sunlight had thickened to the sticky amber of late afternoon. The ubiquitous flies made the only movement on the street. Neil settled his peaked cap on his head and blinked to accustom his eyes to the light, and when he looked again she was there.

  She wore the yellow cotton dress. Her clean hair was soft about her face. Her eyes were wounded.

  She said his name.

  “Hello,” he said after an awkward minute. “How are you?”

  “My superiors have sent an official protest to the War Office.”

  “A protest?”

  She looked down. “Because of the colonel’s resurrection. It has made things . . . a little more difficult than usual.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “You have not—” She broke off, then raised her eyes to his. “You have not come to see me.”

  “I’m sorry.” The alcohol seemed to be having a delayed effect on him now. The street teetered sluggishly beneath his feet. His throat closed on a bubble of air.

  “It was hard,” she said. “It was the hardest I’ve ever had to do.”

  His voice came out a whisper: “I know.”

  Her dark eyes grew darker, and then there were tears on her face. “Please, John, I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t think I can do this anymore. Please, help me, help me break free.”

  She reached for him, and he knew what she meant. He remembered their nights together, his body remembered to the roots of his hair the night he almost took her completely. He also remembered the scratch her nails left by his eye, and more than anything, he remembered her gruesome infidelity with Tibbit-Noyse—with all the other dead men—and he flinched away.

  She froze, still reaching.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  She drew her arms across her, clasped her elbows in her palms. “I understand.”

  He opened his mouth, then realized he had nothing more to say. He touched his cap and walked away. The street was uneasy beneath his feet, the sun a furnace burn against his face, and he was blind with the image he carried with him, the look of relief that had flickered in the virgin’s eyes.

  Gin

  However much I might have hoped to forget it, the house is unmistakable. Mangy stucco and peeling green trim, waist-high wire fence that sags off its rusty poles, brown lawn so shorn it is more stubble than grass. The cab pulls up to the curb and when I pay the driver he looks philosophical about the size of the tip. He’s probably known it was coming since he picked me up at the Greyhound station.

  “Just here for a visit?” he’d asked with a glance at my knapsack. But I didn’t encourage conversation and when I get out he doesn’t say a word. He drives off as soon as the door is shut, leaving me to stand on the cracked cement and wait for anxiety to pounce. Fear, relief, guilt. I am sure I’m supposed to feel guilt, and the dread of returning to a place I never meant to see again. Waiting for it all beside the curb.

  My mother’s corpse was in the hospital morgue for more than a week before the lawyer’s office tracked me down.

  A dog barks out back, across the alley behind th
e house. It’s such an ordinary neighborhood, neither middle class nor poor. Straight streets and short blocks of fifties bungalows with eighties sedans at the curbs. Roses across the street, dandelions next door, and green grass everywhere but here. Two summer weeks since my mother died, but I know the grass has been brown since the spring. Probably it has been brown since I tossed my key on the kitchen table eight years ago. I bend and pick up my bag. The gate in the fence is gone. I take out the key the lawyer sent me and unlock the door.

  They say smell is the surest trigger of memory. I am ready for tobacco smoke, old cooking and booze, the atmosphere my lungs had to readjust to every time I came home—home—The stench that greets me is so powerful, so heavy with decay, I stagger off the step. Cold saliva floods my mouth. I let the door hang open and run to the fence, where I lean on a post, wet with sweat and spitting.

  My mother’s corpse occupied the house for five days before the mailman reported a full mailbox and an unpleasant odor to the police.

  The steel fence post is really a pipe, shaggy brown with rust inside, an unconvincing layer of silvery protection painted over blisters without. It is threaded at the upper end. I prop my forearm across the opening and think vaguely of spiders while I pick at flakes of silver and wonder about all the things a postman might discover on his rounds. A warm June breeze touches my face with the smells of cut grass and an early barbecue somewhere distant. I could just close the door and walk away. Why close the door, even? I could just walk away. Or take the bus to the hardware store at the strip mall on the highway, the new place that wasn’t built back when I still lived here. I could buy a jug, take it to the gas station and fill it with gasoline, and come back here (walk, maybe, or hitch a ride saying my car was out of gas) and unscrew the cap and heave the whole thing in, light a match (I’d have to get matches at the hardware store, too, long wooden ones you could strike anywhere, the kind she used to light her cigarettes) and toss it in.

  I could.

  The windows are like blank screens inside the darkness of the house. The white blinds are drawn. I walk around, breathing through my nose because I don’t want that stink inside my mouth, and open the blinds, the windows, the back door. The kitchen has dishes everywhere, tin cans black with mold, the living room the same only with dirty clothing. The bathroom is a nightmare of crusted hairs and vomit. The bedroom—I look at nothing, only stumble to the window and raise the blinds. Darkness persists: cardboard over the glass. I heave at the sash, which will not move. The smell is killing me. Flies bat against my face, my arms, my mouth. My ears sing and I think, quite clearly, I’m going to faint. I claw at the cardboard and old tape gives way, freeing a square of light and air.