Grave

by Turner, Joan Frances

  “I think you’re kidding yourself,” Stephen told Jessie. “I don’t think we’ll ever find him. Not this time.”

  “Because you would know,” Jessie said.

  “Look, he’s already said his piece. We all heard him.” Stephen lifted up a leg, slow and careful, like he worried the droplets surrounding it might be little weights to drag it under. “He even said to me, he said, ‘Death was alive once too.’ He said that. So if this is all... Death deciding to die, somehow, to not be anymore, what the hell are we supposed to do about that? Why would he ever want to be found? He’ll just hide until we’re not there anymore to seek.”

  “So sit there and cry some more. Why do I care?” Jessie tilted her chin back, gazing overhead, then squinted and winced and dropped her eyes. “But it’s the only thing left to do, and we’re here, and the trees behind you are mostly gone and now the sky’s starting to disappear. So either we at least try for the last word, or...” She folded her arms across her chest, elbows poking up from the lake surface as her hands disappeared beneath it. “Or nothing.”

  I looked up into the sky, like Jessie had, and what I saw—or rather, what I didn’t and couldn’t see at all—made me shudder and look away. Amy was in up to her knees, Stephen letting her lead him in turn. Linc and Renee were already two more bobbing heads in a dry, formless, iron-colored sea.

  I took a deep breath, and a running start, and waded in behind them. The cold filled my mouth and lungs with fistfuls of crushed ice, and I almost screamed at the shock of it, and the strange silken weight of whatever I’d walked into made nasty little prickles break out all over my skin, but then it passed. With astonishing speed, it passed. Lisa was still on the shoreline, Naomi standing beside her.

  “Well,” I said, feeling incredibly foolish. “Goodbye.”

  I was already in up to my waist when I heard two more shouts of pained surprise, a woman’s and a child’s, then silence as we all pushed forward. I was afraid to look back, afraid even to listen lest it be Naomi crying out in distress and Lisa shouting for help we couldn’t give, but the soft, thudding swish of whatever it was that surrounded us, pulsating with a strange quiet tide all its own, was the only sound anywhere around us. The fly-buzzing noise that had maddened me back on the ashen ground, down my back and in my ears and everywhere inside my head, had disappeared. There was nothing to do but go forward, Jessie’s unkempt auburn head and Renee’s sleek blonde one our only beacons, our path leading us deeper and deeper in, and yet we never lost the feel of a lake bed beneath our feet. None of us, not even Naomi, went fully under. I kept my eyes on Amy, just a few yards ahead of me, unable otherwise to trust she was still really there.

  For a second—just a split second—as I followed her, my vision blurred and there seemed to be nothing in front of me, no Amy, no nothing. But as soon as it came, it was gone. I blinked and gave my head a vigorous shake, in pure relief that it had passed—and for just a split second, when I looked a few yards ahead of me, I realized I didn’t know who I was looking at anymore. That person with the auburn hair and the ripped-up, too-big navy blue jacket hanging off her shoulders, the girl with the dark-haired boy briefly pressing his cheek to the top of her head, I had no idea who she was or what she was to me or why we were both together, in this strange little expedition whose purpose I no longer knew.

  But as soon as it came, it was gone, and I followed without hesitation where Amy led. Amy, and the others whose names I now couldn’t quite remember.

  TWENTY-ONE

  AMY

  Drowning the second time, it wasn’t like the first. I had been all alone before, when Natalie killed me and I slipped into death, my fingers fanning out like coral fronds as I sought rescue and touching only the emptiness of water. But we’d all held hands this time and Stephen’s fingers, as we waded, were like seaweed, those thick pliable greenmeat clumps I’d bitten into and made my mother laugh, all those years ago when we visited the ocean; they wrapped around my own fingers and tugged hard, keeping me upright, helping me stand instead of lie on the bottom of that heavy, freezing, bone-dry lake.

  We were in up to our necks, all of us, the currents of what wasn’t water or ice or fog or any substance I recognized now no longer fighting against our steps, but acting as cold fingertips to push us forward, gently but relentlessly forward. Forward to what? There’d been a horizon, of sorts, a long thin pencil-mark just barely separating the dull tin color of the lake from what remained of the sky, but it had disappeared entirely once all of us had stepped offshore. I counted heads swiftly and we were all there, all pushing our way through, everyone else’s mouths firm with concentration and their eyes fixed straight ahead; our limbs made soft swishing thuds, the sound of oars dipping into and drawing aside actual water, but otherwise, all was silent.

  None of this bothered me, I suddenly realized: not the astonishing vastness of this place, not its silence, not its strangeness or its plasticity or its all-encompassing cold. I wasn’t afraid. I was just doing my best to get the lay of the land, for as long as that land might last.

  But how could we possibly find what Jessie wanted—find him, who clearly didn’t want to be found? Not ever again? And what would we do if we did?

  Did it matter? At least, did it matter to me?

  Part of me, I realized, just appreciated being here. Part of me was just glad I’d had a chance to see what lay beyond life, to know, even seeing it in such decay and neglect and willful spreading rot. Even knowing that soon, no matter what we said or thought or did, it and me and everything else wouldn’t exist anymore—

  Forward. It didn’t matter what I wanted, not after everything I’d seen before we slipped away—we had to keep moving forward, pushing ahead, trying to find him who had no intention of being found. We had to. On the nothing-to-nonexistent chance that we might bring back what had already been devoured, that we might save all this, that we might soothe away the terror of thinking that in the end, the very end, we all amounted to nothing. Forward. I closed my eyes, renewed my hold on Stephen’s hand, and gave each leg stern, implacable orders. Left. And right. And left again. Rinse. Repeat.

  And it was then that I realized it was this world, the one we traversed now, that was the one that I truly wanted to save. An overpowering sensation was coursing slowly, relentlessly through me, like the currents of that strange lake, like the quiet pulse of my own blood, and as I gazed all around me at the half-eaten sky and the ruined shore and the ceaseless rush of un-waters, that sensation just kept getting stronger, seeking out every hollow space inside of me to fill to overflowing.

  It was love. I loved this place, this awful unimaginable place, and it was for that that I went forward: I loved it, and I couldn’t stand to lose it.

  This place. Not the one we had left behind.

  The lake that had us up to our necks suddenly rose, higher and higher, and one by one we were all pulled under. Naomi and Lisa vanished first, not even a chance to cry out, and then Jessie and her friends, and then my mother. When Stephen and I went under and the freezing gray seemed to stop my eyes and ears and mouth, I felt no fear, no urge to fight for breath; somewhere, in those desperately loving spaces inside me, I knew what had happened. Somehow, not knowing how, we had found the other shore.

  “Look!” Naomi shouted, not in fear or pain but almost with delight, as if she’d just seen something she’d never again expected in her lifetime. “Look! Is it for us? Can we watch?”

  We were all together, dry and breathing, in a room that was dark and quiet and had a strange but familiar smell: a sort of waxen rancidity like something pretending to be butter gone bad, mustiness of old cloth and close air, oversweet fruitiness like spilled soda. Mouse droppings. There were chairs all around us, their vinyl seats worn thin and sometimes split open, oozing cushion foam; we were in an aisle, a thin-carpeted aisle with tiny guide-lights glowing red along the border. Dormant little beetles, with luminescent shells. Up ahead, a rectangle like a windowshade except too big and laid the wro
ng away across. Silvery-white, and blank.

  Naomi was already running for a seat, settling in for a show that might never start. Lisa followed her with slow, cautious steps, hanging onto the tops of the seats for guidance down the aisle like a far older woman afraid of falling; her face, in the screen’s dim light, looked creased with confusion, as if she couldn’t quite remember who this little girl was, calling to her, or why it should matter, but knew she was meant to be dutiful to her, supposed to follow. Like a far older woman, whose memory was slipping her mind’s harness and cantering away. As she passed me, she stopped and turned.

  “Do you know that little girl?” she asked me, in a fearful whisper.

  My stomach dropped and kept on falling. The eaten-up sky. Florian’s ruined face. My poor Nick, who wild foolish hope had made me sure would be waiting there, here, somewhere to guide us through. And now our minds, our memories—it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair. I loved this place. I loved it. How could he—it—let it betray us, feed on us and itself and everything else, without even giving us a chance? My mother came up the aisle, her hand almost timidly touching my shoulder. I turned urgently toward her and saw Lisa’s same expression, and my heart stopped. I made myself smile anyway, the corners of my mouth pushing up and out with the same force of effort I’d used fighting through the lake.

  “Go find us a seat,” I whispered, before she could ask who I was and make me cry.

  She nodded back, knowingly, like she still understood that in such places as this we were both meant to sit together. She still knew that much. She drifted silently into the nearest row of seats, Stephen following suit, and they both stared straight ahead at the blank rectangle of screen, just like they’d stared right before them on our trip to this shore. In the front row, I saw one blonde head, one black one, that had already seated themselves, and in the aisle, Jessie still standing there next to me looking as stricken as I felt.

  “I guess it was inevitable,” she said, her voice so casual and calm but betrayed by the barest tremor. “I mean, you can’t remember what doesn’t exist—and even if it does exist, when you’re coming apart yourself, naturally your brain starts going to shit. Eaten up.”

  “We still remember Florian,” I said. “And Billy, he got eaten up too, right in front of us, but I still—”

  “And I still remember what Florian said, about how it didn’t just happen all at once but parts of him kept getting ripped away. Little by little. He’s eaten up, all right. I guess it’s just that he’s not yet... digested.”

  I shuddered. Her, she just looked happy to have figured something out about all this.

  All we were to each other, eaten up, just like a hand or foot or face at the worst of the plague. So stupidly, I’d thought nothing could be worse than that. Lisa sat a few seats away from Naomi, never glancing at her, the blank screen commanding all her attention—I should have been ready, I should have known, but I wasn’t, I wasn’t. He was probably laughing at me right now, laughing at us all. Naomi didn’t seem to notice Lisa’s indifference, if she even knew who Lisa was anymore. Stephen, my mother, they didn’t call to me to come sit down. They didn’t turn around.

  “But with everyone else forgetting,” I asked Jessie, “how do you and I still know each other? And ourselves?”

  She shrugged. “Give it time,” she said.

  There was a faint click and whirring and we both turned around, staring up, but there was no little square of light at the back of the theater, no projection booth.

  “I loved movie theaters,” I said. “I wanted to just stay in one forever, after everything became so awful.”

  “So why didn’t you?” she asked. She frowned at the movie screen, at the dilapidated seats, like I had done this to us on purpose. “It sounds better than that place Lisa said you both got stuck in, Heavenly Acres or—”

  “After I killed someone, I wasn’t thinking straight,” I said. “I had to leave in a hurry.”

  It was so easy to say that here, it slipped out like nothing; probably because there were no secrets here, I knew that from the first time. I drowned and sank to the very bottom and the memory of Ms. Acosta was right there, waiting for me, both times.

  But now, nothing. Where was Nick? I’d been so stupidly certain I’d see him, so cocksure, and he would have known me, nothing and nobody could’ve kept him from knowing me. But Nick didn’t exist anymore. And when Jessie finally forgot me, and I her, neither of us would either.

  Jessie thought over what I’d said. “I’ve killed plenty of someones,” she said. “I didn’t act like that.”

  “You haven’t killed as many as you say,” I said. Because I knew she hadn’t, because there were no secrets here. She glared at me.

  “One’s more than enough,” she said. “You should know.”

  The screen flickered to life in glorious, spotty-faded black and white and it was me, small me maybe two or three years old—my younger face from pictures—and my young mother who looked so much like I did now. She was holding me upright and waving, smiling silently at the camera like the way people always pose in old home movies: Look, Amy, look, there’s Daddy behind the camcorder. There’s somebody. Look! Wave! We’d never done home movies, either that or there’d been some from before my father died and then she got rid of them all. Look. Wave.

  Maybe there were clues here, in the home movie, things to tell us where Death was or how to find him. Maybe he was cutting us a break. Maybe badgers lay eggs. But I never could resist a movie theater. They were still the best places to curl up and sleep. Little-me toddled and young-Mom waved and then the picture changed and it was all close-clustered banks of trees, spindly and thick and lacey trunks and branches just starting to get their spring leaves back; in the foreground there were maybe ten or twelve people, men and women alike, but they were walking strangely, all stiff-legged with a hitching, hesitant gait somewhere between lurch and limp. Zombies. Actual undead, of the kind the plague had all wiped out.

  “Was that it for all of you?” I asked. “The plague? Or are there still some real zombies—”

  “Undead,” she said. “We never liked that other word.”

  “Are there still real undead? Somewhere out there?”

  The sudden longing in her eyes startled me.

  “If there are,” she said, “they’re nowhere I am. You humans, you’re just endangered. It seems like we’re extinct.”

  The zombies, undead, onscreen were all sorts of rotten and covered in things I was glad I couldn’t see clearly, seething crawling things, but it wasn’t awful when it was just a movie and you couldn’t smell them. They were doing something strange now, some of them had taken each other’s hands and started tottering in slow, awkward circles around and around, no seeming destiny in mind and the most aimless and random shifting of partners—sometimes three or four, sometimes two, some joining hands in a little ring. Two of them, one small and skinny, the other tall and broad and so infested it made me shudder, they broke away a bit from the others and began moving in a recognizable rhythm: step-two-three, step-two-three. A waltz. They were waltzing, these dead things, as the others danced in shuffle-step or circles or all by their lonesome, all around them.

  The others, curled up in their seats, watched in utter silence; they looked half-asleep, heads tilting gently forward and then back, eyes closing and then opening again, like cats on sunny windowsills pondering whether to tip into a full nap. Did they see what we were seeing? Did they see anything at all?

  I turned to Jessie. She stared up at the screen, watching the tall broad seething thing waltzing its little partner round and round, watching with too-wide eyes and a pained set to her mouth. “You bastard,” she muttered, eyes pinned to the screen. “You goddamned bastard.”

  Whether she meant Death who’d put us here to watch this, or the seething thing, I couldn’t rightly tell. Maybe both. The dancing was atomized and piecemeal and there was no rhyme to their rhythms and yet somehow I could see it, all their ceremonial stumbl
ing around becoming a flowing, easy harmony in time with music I couldn’t hear. Somehow no matter what their actual steps, all of them were waltzing, waltzing perfectly, step-two-three around the forest clearing; a peculiar sort of energy seemed to flow from thing to thing, drawing all their particular movements into one. It was like watching the revealed inner workings of some great ticking clock.

  “I can’t explain it,” Jessie said before I could ask. Eyes still fixed on the screen. “And I wouldn’t, not to a human. But it was—you got this feeling inside you, this need to move, to dance, and—it was something that connected all of us, all of us could hear the music of it, simultaneously, inside our heads. Whenever it happened. You couldn’t make it happen, sometimes it just did. Then we were all like, I don’t know, limbs or cells or something in one big body.” Her teeth caught her lower lip for a moment, pressing into the soft flesh uncannily like Lisa always did, then unlike Lisa, releasing it before it became raw. “I could hear music inside my head, once. Music that couldn’t be written down. But I don’t hear anything anymore.”

  The dance continued. I wondered what they were all hearing, whether it sounded like an actual waltz or some other, alien melody only they would find beautiful. I wondered which one was Jessie, of the smaller things dancing, because they were all so rotten I just couldn’t tell.

  “You wouldn’t explain it to a human,” I said. “But you just did.”

  “For the deaf among us,” she muttered. “No. I wouldn’t. If you think I just explained anything to you, you’re even dumber than you look.”

  She wasn’t fooling me. We barely knew each other but it wasn’t hard to see how every time she told someone something important, something she thought they might use against her, she went running backwards fast as she could; she didn’t trust anyone, except maybe that Linc and Renee who didn’t even know her anymore, but sometimes she still couldn’t help talking. Kind of like Stephen, who didn’t even know me anymore. No wonder they detested each other on sight.