She stopped, put her water down, and began her prostrations. Hands together — first at the head, then the throat, then her heart — and then down on her knees, head to the floor. Three times, offering herself body, speech, and mind, almost without thinking.
Only when she stood did she look at the massive statue at the far end of the hall: Shakyamuni Buddha in his robes, sitting as if under the bodhi tree at the moment of his enlightenment, shining and golden even in the dark. One hand reached over his thigh, to touch the ground. Calling the mother earth to bear witness for him; to show he wouldn’t be swayed by Maya, the illusions of this world. He was serene, for someone being threatened by a demon. She’d never thought it was odd before, but now she did.
Had he really just laid down and died calmly? Did he come back, like these monks swore to do when they devoted themselves to the Dharma? Or had he simply disappeared, freed himself, and never had a thought for anyone else?
He’d died from bad pork, that much she knew.
The thought, inexplicably, made her laugh.
It wasn’t that it was funny — in fact, it was awful. It didn’t matter. She laughed so hard she couldn’t stop herself, until she couldn’t remember why she was laughing. Until her stomach hurt and she sank to her knees in front of the statue, rocking gently back and forth.
“Pema?”
She looked up, trying to get herself under control. She was hysterical, she realized, but it wouldn’t stop.
“Pema Tsering.” The young monk — his name was Tashi, of course his name was Tashi, everyone who wasn’t named Tenzin or Pema was named Tashi — hit his knees beside her, giving her a shake.
She looked at him, his wide dark eyes and expression of fear — not for himself, for her. Poor little monk. What had he seen of life before this plague? The boys sent to the monasteries lived better than the families who sent them, generally. And here he was, lighting the lamps, doing the puja, burning incense, and sweeping the floors. All by himself.
“Where’s…?” She gained control of herself and started to ask after the older monk, but the boy’s expression told her everything. She sat up straighter, on her knees. “He’s dead.”
Tashi nodded.
“Why aren’t we?” she asked.
He shook his head. “We’ll all be dead, some day. But they went before us.”
Her head cleared suddenly, looking at him. Remembering him whispering to the marble outside. He radiated calm. Acceptance. The boy from yesterday was gone.
She took a deep breath — astringent, beautiful juniper and warm, burning butter smells filled her lungs. It cleansed her senses for the first time in forever. There was silence for a moment, where she watched his eyes. Then, “I haven’t seen anyone else in Boudha.”
“No,” he agreed. “No one comes anymore. I tried to use the booth, to call India…”
He didn’t need to finish. She got to her feet, and he followed. When she looked around the hall this time, she didn’t see anything much to laugh about. “I don’t really want to die.”
She hadn’t realized it until that moment. But she didn’t.
She missed her brothers. Sweet Tenzin and his dreams, who’d really disappeared the day he’d gotten sick. Sonam and his drawings, his temper, his affection, and his fears. Thinley and his funny emails from America.
Existence was impermanent; she’d always been okay with that. But she was here. Now.
“Is there anything we can do?” he asked, looking at the ground thoughtfully.
Thinley and his emails.
Pema looked up at the boy-monk. “No. But…maybe there’s a place we can go. If…we can get to America; to Grants Pass.”
It sounded insane to her when she said it out loud like that.
But Tashi smiled brightly. He reminded her of Tenzin again. “Will you teach me English?”
Pema smiled. “Of course.”
Biography
K.V. Taylor
K.V. Taylor is an avid reader and writer of urban fantasy and dark speculative fiction, even though the only degree she holds in is in the history of art. (Or, possibly, because the only degree she holds is in the history of art.) Originally from the Appalachian foothills of West Virginia, she currently lives in the D.C. Metro Area with her husband and mutant cat. Her work can be found on the web at http://kvtaylor.com.
Afterword
The mixing of cultures and religions in the Kathmandu Valley is dizzying and wonderful; when I lived in the predominantly Buddhist neighborhood around the stupa a few years back, it absorbed me as easily as the hundreds of other traditions with roots there, and became a true home away from home. (It’s also home to the best apple pie in the world, I’m convinced.) And so, when it came to the end of the world as we know it, my mind went straight to the Himalayas, their sacred geography, and their way of looking at life and death.
Boudha is the name of the stupa at the heart of the neighborhood, the name of the neighborhood itself, and the Nepali word for Buddha.
Hells Bells
Cherie Priest
Along my windowsill I used to keep six small bells. They didn’t match at all, because they came from different places. My mother called them tacky souvenirs, and she said they were cheap, and that she wished my grandmother had never bought them for me.
But I liked them.
I could sit on the radiator if it wasn’t turned on, and I could hold the bells between my fingers while I looked out the window over the hospital parking lot. If I shook the bells gentle, they tinkled. If I banged them hard, they rang wild. I liked the loud sound best, when I threw the bells up and down, popping my wrist to make the noise bigger.
One of the nurses said I made her crazy with the bells. She was afraid that something was wrong when I played with them, and I was keeping the other patients awake, besides.
I told her that she was right and it was true, when you ring the bells something’s usually wrong. The loudest bells mean danger, or sorrow, or warning. I heard them on the long red trucks with the white ladders, and on the bank building downtown — clanging crazy after the glass was broken. And I heard them loudest from the church down the road, every time someone died.
The nurse in her stiff uniform said that this was all the more reason for me to leave the bells alone. She scooped them up off of the windowsill and took them away.
I cried, but she wouldn’t bring them back. I told her that my grandmother gave them to me, and that my grandmother was one of the early dead, and I thought it might make the nurse sad. I thought it might make her feel sorry for me.
But she had a headache and other patients had complained.
I begged her for my bells but she shook her head and left me in the white-walled room. No one felt sorry for me except for me.
My mother was one of the later dead; she followed Grandma, and then my brother followed her too. They shouted all the time, and they didn’t like my bells either. So even if they’d been alive by the time I was in the hospital, they wouldn’t have stopped the frowning nurse who took my bells away.
I bet.
I can’t remember if the church bell rang for any of them, but I hope it did. I hope that the bell rang and rang, that you could hear it as far away as the next town over, and they couldn’t stop it — they couldn’t take it away — because they were dead.
****
When I was first left at the hospital, it was a very crowded place. I didn’t even have my own room for the first week. The doctors left me in a hall with a bracelet on. The bracelet was plastic. It had a note on it that said NNOK.
In the hall, I met a little red-haired boy with a tired-looking mother holding his hand. He tugged on my bracelet and sounded out the letters he saw there. I told him it was my name, and he could call me “Nnok.”
His mother shook her head and said no.
She said it meant “No next of kin.”
I think she must have been right, because Grandma and my mom and my brother were dead by then, and there was nobod
y else who ever came to see me. I sat down on the floor and opened my backpack, where I kept the bells before I had a windowsill. I pulled them out one by one and held them tightly in my hand so they didn’t ring, but only clattered.
****
After awhile, the hospital got less and less busy. I got my own room, and the doctor told me I could decorate it however I wanted, because it didn’t matter anymore. I asked him what that meant, and he coughed when he answered.
“I don’t think anyone else is ever going to stay in it anyway.”
I took it to mean that this was my new home, and it wasn’t so bad. I never saw the doctor again, though I heard him coughing up and down the halls. I only saw the nurses once in awhile, and sometimes they coughed too. They brought me a tray with food on it twice a day, once in the morning, and once in the late afternoon, just before sunset.
Mostly, everyone left me alone with my bells — until the one nurse took them away.
At first I was lonely; when the other, nicer nurses who were left began to cry in the corners rather than bring me coloring books and trays with runny white pudding.
And when I’m lonely I get bored.
I crawled out of bed one night, while the hospital was dark and empty feeling. I thought maybe the nurse had put my bells in the lounge with the big TV, because there was a desk there and some filing cabinets, and I knew sometimes the nurses put things inside them.
The TV was on when I tip-toed by, but it wasn’t showing anything good. It had been left on a static channel, buzzing with black and white snow and throwing light out in funny patterns on the floors. If I were tall enough to reach it, up there in the corner by the ceiling, I would have turned it off.
But I’m too short, so I didn’t. I didn’t care if the TV played anyway. I wanted my bells.
On the back-side of the desk there were 5 drawers. I opened them all, starting at the bottom on the left and working my way around. I found lots of papers, folders and some envelopes too. There were pens and pencils, and metal clips for holding stacks of paper together.
I didn’t find my bells, but I found something else and I took it with me. It was a tiny tape recorder, with a squeaky little tape and black buttons.
I pressed the button with the green triangle and the tape said, “For once, the man on the street corner was right. Every day for fifteen years he carried that damn sandwich board, the one that said ‘The end is near.’ And he stood on the corner in front of the coffee house and the bookstore, yelling at the intersection, converting the cars to his eschatology. Even a broken clock’s right twice a day, I guess, because that son of a bitch—”
I pressed the button with two white triangles, pointing to the right. “And when we all are gone, who will bury the gravediggers?”
I pressed the button with the “X” on it and the voice stopped.
I thought that this might be fun to play with, but I would have rather found my bells.
****
Towards the end, before the whole hospital got silent and I didn’t hear any more footsteps ever, the bell at the church down the street rang almost all the time. All day I sat at the window and listened with my ear pressed against the glass. I looked forward to it. I didn’t mind that it meant danger or sorrow. The church bell sounded beautiful, and big.
I pressed a button on my tape recorder, the one with the two triangles pointing left. I let the tape rewind until it stopped. I guessed it was at the beginning, but I didn’t play it. The man with the desperate-sounding voice didn’t mean anything to me.
I stood on a chair and pried the window-clasp open with a clipboard. I then put my arm out the window with the tape recorder tightly in my hand, my middle finger holding down the button with a red circle.
At night, I pulled the tape recorder into bed with me, and I put it under my pillow. I did not press the green triangle button, though. I do not care who buries the gravediggers, but when there is no one left to ring the bell, I will push the button.
I had a bell again, but this bell was for the dead.
****
Three nurses — a blond, the brunette who stole my bells, and a redhead — were sitting around a radio in the TV lounge, their faces pulled down close to the round black speaker. Over their heads the TV was off, not even spraying static light into the room, which was okay because it was daylight and we didn’t even need the overhead lights on to see.
A man on the radio was talking, asking if anyone was listening.
I laughed at him, because a radio is not a phone, and no one could answer him anyway.
“Shut up,” hissed the nurses, all together.
The man’s voice was shaky, and sounded like mine does if I haven’t slept well.
“If anyone is listening, there’s a place where I’m going to go, with what’s left of my family and a couple of other people we’ve met along the way. We’re going to a place called Grants Pass. It’s in Oregon.
I know there are still people out there. I know someone must be. This is a hail Mary thing, really. I don’t know if anyone’ll be there. I don’t know if anyone’s going to go, but someone might.”
“What do you think?” The blond nurse asked the other two.
“We can’t stay here, not forever.” The red-haired nurse agreed.
“It’s better than nothing. A goal, anyway.” She looked over at me and nodded. “We’ve got to find other people. We can’t stay like this forever. And her — we’ll load her up and bring her too.”
I shook my head because I didn’t want to go anyplace with them, but they ignored me.
The blond nodded. “Of course. We can’t leave her here. Is there anyone else left? Anyone at all?”
“Not anymore. We’re it.”
“It’s getting late,” the blond nurse said. “We could pack up tonight. Leave in the morning. I don’t know how far we’ll get, but one of the ambulances has a full tank of gas. We could take it and run it ‘till it stops, then see if we can’t find another vehicle.”
No, I shook my head. No. Not with you. No.
****
I got mad at the nurse again, the same one who took my bells. She cried all the time and made me feel bad. She came and went with my food, but only once a day, and I couldn’t find anyone else to give me anything to eat.
She told me that I could go out and look for my own food for all she cared, if I was going to complain. I said that I didn’t think I was supposed to leave the room, and she told me she didn’t give a damn and that everything was different now.
“Look around!” She practically screamed it at me, and I don’t like it when people scream at me. “Look!” She said it again, waving her arm around the room, and pointing it out at the hall.
I did, but I didn’t see anything or anyone except for her.
And then it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen anyone except her or the other two women for a long time.
She coughed and leaned against the door frame, putting her forehead to the back of her hand. When she walked out and left me, she tripped on her shoelace, caught herself before she fell. I wondered if she was getting sick.
****
That night while I lay in bed, listening to the sounds of nothing, I began to wonder if maybe I hadn’t gotten it backwards.
Maybe the church bell rang and people died, not the other way around.
I didn’t like the nurse. I thought maybe it would be okay if she died, as she didn’t like me either. I could hear the bell — even if there was no one left in the church to ring it.
I reached under my pillow and ran my thumb over the button with the green triangle.
I pulled the recorder out, and I padded over to the window on my socked feet, sliding a little on the tile. I lifted the window and felt all the night air swirling cold, and I put the recorder outside — holding it with my hand and squeezing the green triangle button hard.
In the perfect stillness, the sound of the bells pealed out. I rolled the wheel on the side with my thumb and the chime w
ent louder, louder. More. Higher. Bigger. The banging, clanging, ringing bells made my chest feel big and tight at the same time. They made me smile and forget to wish for anything else.
The next morning there were only two nurses left; the one I didn’t like was gone. I asked the blond nurse where she was, but she didn’t answer me.
“Did you shut the door?” the other asked over my head.
“Of course I did. What else could I do? She’s dead, and there’s no one to bury her.”
“And now?”
The yellow-haired lady in the formerly white uniform looked over at her friend and then down at me.
My eyes were red and my face was probably puffy, because I hadn’t slept well the night before. I’d sat with the tape recorder at the window, and I’d played the sound of the bell over and over again until I fell asleep, dreaming about the death bell at the church.
Maybe it looked like I’d been crying. Maybe they thought I was sad about the brown-haired nurse, but I wasn’t. I was excited. I was happy. The bells worked both ways — you rang the bell when people died, and the bell rang when people died. Twice the bell ringing, the way I looked at it.
“I guess we’re going to Oregon, unless you’ve got any better ideas.”
In the ambulance, with the blond nurse driving, I rolled down the window and let my elbow lean on the top of the door. I pressed the green triangle and the bells trailed down the road behind us.
I told the nurses that the bell was for the dead.
It’s for the people who are waiting at Grants Pass.
Biography
Cherie Priest
Cherie Priest is the author of Four and Twenty Blackbirds, Wings to the Kingdom, Not Flesh Nor Feathers, and Fathom from Tor — as well as Dreadful Skin and Those Who Went Remain There Still from Subterranean Press. Her first novel won the first annual Blooker Award, and her third was nominated for an Endeavour Award. Two more books are forthcoming, one from Tor (Boneshaker) and one from Subterranean (Clementine). She lives in Seattle, Washington, with her husband and a fat black cat.
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