Who—what—
—Dead.
They're not dead. Look at them.
—Still, they are dead.
What will happen? Do they just stay like this?
—This is their place.
But why?
—Child.
The woman soothed his mind and they walked on, but after a while the clicking mounted again. Ned tried to keep his eyes on the woman alone, but it was impossible to ignore the virtual wall of pumping blood and tightly packed organs that surrounded them. There was no end in sight. It seemed to Ned that they must have passed tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of the wretched things. Finally, he was numb to their plight. They were a nuisance, an irritation that wouldn't go away. For a moment Ned wished he had an ax, so that he could chop them all down. The woman, knowing his thoughts, turned and stared at him, but this time there was no love or comfort in her eyes. Ned suddenly felt ashamed and confused.
—You still have that in you.
Ned remembered chopping down the scarecrow; perhaps that had been wrong. He remembered flinging chunks of plaster into the spider webs at the spa, when perhaps he should have left them alone. Small actions, arising out of small impulses—or were they? What, if anything, was the woman trying to make him see?
—You.
Now she let the boy feel the cold touch of fear. The thought came to Ned that he had been brought here to be rooted in place and transformed into one of these tube creatures. It was the fate in store for everyone after death, and he was no different. His skin and his muscles would be peeled away, his arms and legs severed, and he would be poured into a plaster tube and anchored there. His head would shrink to a mockery of itself. He would be just one more in the meaningless, forgotten throng, a prospect that was as humbling as it was terrifying.
—Come.
Somewhat relieved, Ned followed the woman. He couldn't imagine anything worse than to be one of those tube creatures. Were they really, or had they once been, people? Immobile in a wasteland, unable even to speak. It would be better to be dead—but then Ned remembered that this was death: in this place you couldn't die again. Welcome to eternity.
After what seemed like hours of walking, they emerged on a large square, bordered by more of the shattered remains of old buildings. They continued on, across the open ground. Maybe there had been a park here once, Ned thought. Now it was just a barren expanse of black sand, petrified stumps and a few of those strange "plants." They had not gone far when a band of animals appeared thirty yards away. It was a pack of dogs, Ned saw, as they drew closer. The woman stopped, and the boy stayed near her. The dogs numbered about twenty, and they approached cautiously. They moved in single file and skirted around the two people. Now Ned could see that these were not ordinary dogs. His mouth opened in astonishment. These beasts, too, had faces that were almost human. The canine snout was absent. They walked on four legs and were covered with hair, but that didn't obscure the uncanny similarity of features, particularly the intelligence in their eyes. The most obvious and menacing part of their makeup was the single fang or saber tooth that curled down from the center of the upper jaw. It must be four or five inches long, Ned thought.
The procession passed by. Ned turned to watch the grotesque animals, almost certain that he had just seen the results of another monstrous human transformation. The dogs went straight to the tube creatures, and most of them disappeared into the mass. But at least one dog stayed in sight at the outer edge. This animal walked back and forth, as if studying the scene. Then, apparently having chosen, it punctured one tube creature with its prominent fang and stood rigidly, attached. It was revolting to see, but Ned couldn't look away.
They eat them?
—No, merely drink of them.
Through that tooth?
—It is their way.
Do they kill the tube creatures?
The question was absurd, as the woman's laugh told Ned. There had to be other bands of dogs that came here to drink, perhaps thousands of them. What was the point of it, here, where nothing could die? It is their way, the woman had said. It was probably a ritual, and one that could exist and continue in this place only as a final irrelevancy. The original point of the act, survival, now rendered pointless by its inevitability.
—Come.
Are they, or were they, human beings?
—Do you know them?
Ned wasn't sure if the woman was making fun of him or not. He thought he had recognized something in both the dogs and the tubes, but perhaps he had been wrong. No, in each case his reaction had been strong and immediate. They were related to him, in some way. It was a terrifying thought, and this time the woman did nothing to banish it from Ned's mind. Those dogs, he reflected, were like a combination of the werewolf and the vampire. Both human and not human.
Ned tried to stop, but he couldn't. In spite of himself, he kept pace with the woman. But, like someone who has only just fully awakened, his mind was beginning to make connections. A subtle change had come over the aura between the two of them. The woman had made him feel fear once. The fact that she had broken her promise cracked the illusion of her benevolence. It had taken Ned a while to realize this: that he was not her equal on this new plane of existence, that he was being led, taken, protected and preserved. But for what? He could no longer avoid wondering what he would be brought to at the end of the journey. The top of the mountain—but why? What awaited him there? A demonic laboratory, where he would be made over into a tube creature or a vampire dog—or something worse? The fact that he could even think this way now told him something else. The woman was giving him back his mind, bit by bit. Why—so that nothing of his destiny would be lost on him?
What will happen to me?
—You will be with me.
Be what?
—What you are.
What am I?
—Come.
Before, the word had seemed like an invitation, a fond beckoning of one mind to another, but now it was a quiet order, which Ned could not disobey. Helplessness, which he had known so many times while being haunted or stalked in the other world, came back to nest in him again. One more fateful connection.
Ned looked around and was surprised to find that they had left the city. It might not have been a city after all, he thought. Just ruins and old roadbeds. If he had to guess, he would say they had been walking for the better part of a day. But time meant nothing here. The light scarcely changed at all and the sun remained a dying ember, always roughly the same distance from the horizon. Only the twists and turns in their route moved the tiny red disk slightly.
Eventually, they came up onto a small plateau, and the woman promptly made Ned look back. The view was devastating. As far as he could see, the earth was strewn with the relics of catastrophe. It's beyond deciphering, Ned thought. If a team of scientists from another planet landed here, they would be unable to reconstruct anything from this. It's too far gone, all lost. Then another thought hit him and he scanned the sky above. No stars, nothing. Nothing but the ghost of the sun.
Was it war, or a nova ... ?
The woman laughed again, this time as if to say, Nothing so paltry. It made Ned think of something she had said earlier. The end of time. How nonchalantly he had accepted those words at first. Now he understood that they might well be the last words, after which no others were necessary. Was this what death, one human death, amounted to—the end of the universe? Does it happen all the time, with each human death, the universe dying billions of times? Ned was losing himself in a maze of implications and possibilities. The woman rescued him.
—Child.
He turned around. And saw the mountain.
They were still some distance from it, but the mountain dominated the landscape, so much so that Ned couldn't understand how he had failed to notice it sooner. It was huge, awesome, impossible to overlook. The weak red sunlight must play tricks on the eyes, and disguise things, he decided. The mountain towered above the earth, and
yet it was unlike any mountain Ned had ever seen. There were no sharp planes, jagged ridges of rocky faces. It looked more like an enormous matte-black lump, a mound that had grown to extraordinary dimensions over a period of time that defied reckoning. Geography no longer applied here. Nothing like this mountain had existed in that part of the country where Ned had once lived, and probably not on the entire planet. But that was the other world, a time and a place that had ceased to be.
The woman led the boy across the stark plateau toward the mountain. It rose out of sight, blotting out most of the horizon ahead of them, its upper reaches disappearing into the blackness of sky and space. It seemed appropriate, in a macabre fashion, that this mountain should be their destination. To Ned it could be nothing but the end of the line. It looked like an accumulation of all the evil and death that had ever been experienced, gathered in one place, given mass and substance. Next to it, Everest would be a mere pimple.
Ned took slight comfort from the fact that they would have a very long climb before they reached the top. He thought about trying to escape. Would the woman let him? Hardly. Was there any way in which he might foil her? Unlikely. Even as he considered this, he was trailing along beside her, one step back, as if he were on an invisible leash. Anyhow, what would he do, where would he go, if he did manage to flee? This world was the place you came out in when you broke through the bottom of the final nightmare, death. There was no "going on" from here. His only company, if they could be called that, would be vampire dogs and forests of tube creatures. For the first time, Ned confronted the feeling of being alone, utterly alone in the universe, and without hope. It was a mind-stunning, heart-withering reality, and with it came a sudden desire as shocking as it was new to him. He wanted to die. He was already dead, but death was proving to be not what he had expected. Some kids he had known thought you went to heaven or hell, or to a pit-stop called purgatory, or some place that was limbo. Ned had never been taught one thing or another, and so death, to him, had always been simply the end of life. He had never given it much thought. Now he longed for death, but not this death. He wanted the sweet sleep of oblivion, an endless, dreamless peace, the obliteration of consciousness on every level. Not even heaven or any other world, but only to be reduced to scattered, empty atoms. This is how people feel when they decide to kill themselves, Ned realized. But he knew, too, that he didn't have the option of suicide. He had no options at all. That was why the woman could let him think like this. He could change nothing.
Why does it have to be this way?
—This is the way.
But why?
—There is no other way.
Why are you letting me feel fear and pain? You said I would never know them again.
—They are echoes dying within you, and soon they will completely disappear. No fear or pain will come to you from outside.
And when we get to the top of the mountain—not even then?
—Child.
The incantation worked again, but Ned was aware of the woman's evasion. She went to the brink with her assurances, but she always stopped short of giving him anything explicit to hold onto. A loophole, a loose end—something was being left unsaid. Ned was in a cruel situation. The woman was his only hope, she was all he had in this place. He wanted to trust her, because he had no alternative. But he couldn't; not yet, not wholeheartedly. Maybe that trust would be found at the top of the mountain. And maybe I'll find cartoon land there, too, he thought in a spasm of self-contempt.
The ground began to slope gradually upward. They were in the foothills, if you could call them that. The ascent had started. Ned glanced up once, but the mountain was so alarmingly close and massive that he quickly looked down again. There was a small change in the way the ground felt to his feet, he noticed. The same black sand was everywhere, but up to this point it had been like a gritty dust on a hard surface. Now there was a barely perceptible give to the earth's crust with each step the boy took. It was like walking on heavy, thick egg cartons that had almost but not thoroughly hardened into rock.
The woman stopped, and Ned with her. She turned her eyes to him and the force of her gaze touched him deeply, as if she were trying to transfer some of her strength to him. It was not love, nor even warmth, but a kind of willed concern that fed his mental stamina. At the same time as he was being given this apparent boost, he could feel the leash tighten and pull him a little closer to the woman.
—It will be all right.
What will?
The woman looked ahead and pointed.
Then Ned saw it.
Or rather, them.
People. Crowds of people, everywhere around the bottom of the mountain. There must be millions of them, he thought dizzily as his eyes swept the scene. Tens of millions. Where had they come from, who were they, what were they doing here? Well, they could ask him the same questions. The sight was so startling Ned could accept it only in terms of manic humor. This had to be the biggest mob in history., the longest waiting line, the largest convention .... The woman kept her word: in spite of their incalculable numbers, these people didn't frighten Ned. It went far beyond that. They constituted a kind of crushing mental blow that sent his mind reeling numbly. Only a little while ago he had considered himself utterly alone, singled out for his own special fate—and with that thought he had unwittingly conferred on himself a tacit but spurious importance. Now, this vast horde of human beings showed up the lie. Their mere presence exploded any notion of uniqueness. He was alone—with the rest of mankind—at the mountain of common destiny.
As the woman led him toward the crowd, and then into it, Ned couldn't keep himself from gawking. The people were naked and hairless, and their skin was like burnished garnet. They ignored the woman and boy. Their eyes were open but apparently unseeing, as if they could focus only on some inner preoccupation. They were silent, and this absence of a single voice in an ocean of people was perhaps the most chilling aspect of the scene.
But as he looked closer, Ned saw something else. The people stood around in groups made up of from two or three to a dozen or more individuals. They moved, but their movements were short and halting, without purpose. They were like odd human sculptures; still in the process of turning rigid. Two men tottered nearby, shifting slightly on their feet—that was when Ned saw it. The two men were connected—fused together along the length of their right arms. It took a few seconds to sink in, but then Ned realized it was true of everyone. The individuals in each group seemed to be bonded to one another. Three women were joined together at the back of their heads. A larger group consisted of men and women whose arms were a chain of interlocking loops. Some were cemented chest to chest, facing each other blindly. They all struggled to move by themselves, as if they had no understanding of their true situation. Thus, they constantly bumped, and nudged and stumbled against each other, often falling to the ground, only to rise awkwardly and resume their mindless ritual efforts. Ned passed within a foot or two of some of these groups, and he could see clearly that no cement or glue or stitching held them to each other; every join was flesh to flesh, seamless and unbroken, as if they had simply grown that way. From the beginning.
Again the question presented itself: What were all these people doing here? But this time Ned wasn't eager to hear the answer. He had a feeling that he already knew it. They were here because they were here because they were here ... and this is the way it is, forever. Everything is forever here, he thought gravely. What a contrast with the world he had left behind, where "forever" carried little weight. The harder Ned tried to come to terms with the word, the more it defeated him. It was no longer a mere abstraction, it was a bruising reality in the form of all these doomed souls acting out their meaningless pantomime. Ned couldn't accept it, but neither could he avoid it. Then a terrible thought crossed his mind.
Are my parents here, somewhere?
—Child.
Tell me!
—Child, be still.
The mental leash tightened.
Ned's anxiety was diffused temporarily, but not eradicated. The woman seemed to be moving faster now, dragging Ned along with her. They threaded their way through the massive tangle of people with surprising ease. The boy's eyes were open, but he was unable to focus clearly. Tens of thousands of bodies and blank faces flew past, a hellish tapestry unraveling at a frantic pace. Dimly, Ned perceived that he was about to become one more drop in the anonymous ocean. He would go blind, the woman would abandon him and, sooner or later, his body would graft onto another and ... forget the rest. As long as I don't know, Ned prayed. Please don't let me know. It all became a blur.
Finally, his vision cleared. They were on the mountain. It loomed over them like a dark moon about to fall onto the Earth. The woman was watching Ned, but now he avoided her eyes. He felt weak, and he was depressed at having been hauled back into a state of self-awareness. He looked down and away from the woman, the mountain. The view below was no better. Ned saw the people again, and they truly were an ocean, stretching to the horizon on all sides and probably far beyond sight. Their numbers no longer amazed him, nor did the fact that he had passed through that mass of bodies. Nothing amazed him anymore. You see, he told himself, your brain is shutting down. The last stage in the process. Well, maybe that was all right too. It will be all right, that's what the woman was always saying, and maybe she was speaking the truth. Stranger things have happened.
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