The Truants

by Lee Markham

  ‘Children…’

  ‘Who the fuck you calling children?’

  The one who asks that question is perhaps the one I shall keep. My frustration at her for poking at the hornet’s nest is allayed by the help it has provided in making my decision. I allow myself now to move more into him – now that she has their attention, I need less to control the others. They will control themselves – she will control them – for the next few moments. They want to be here now. They want to hear what she has to say. They think they will get answers. It is what they will think until the moment they are devoured. And when that moment comes, I will be ready to move.

  She is waffling on at them. Ever the drama queen. Some things never change. I miss what she says, but one of the rats I have brought in asks, ‘Why did it burn before?’

  ‘Same reason it’s burning this time. Because it deserved too. It needed to. You know, without forest fires, many forests would become overpopulated and choke. Cities are much the same. If not literal fire, then something similar will often do. Disease. Revolution. Genocide. Such things help keep the books balanced… ah… here you are.’

  Her flock softly enter the space and encircle my own rats. I feel my rats bristle and tense from afar, further afar now that I am in this one. This bold one.

  ‘Hush now, children. Understand this – we outnumber you. We are faster than you. We have been doing this longer than you. So what happens next is out of your hands. I have plans for you all. You may not like them, but you are still children and I’m afraid you have no say in the matter. Peter, Danny, I would prefer it if she sat this one out downstairs, if you don’t mind?’

  Ah yes. Danny and Peter. I had almost forgotten them. Good that they are so well trained now. That I am entwined. I have them nod enthusiastically and go along with the script. Yes, take the rat-mother away. Let’s just do this now.

  I am excited beyond all compare.

  I am on the cusp of a new life.

  There are loose ends to be tied, for sure, but I have a lifetime in which to tie them.

  And then the script changes.

  ‘You might all have felt something inside you that should not have been there. An ugly spirit. A virus that whispers in your ear and talks to you as the world talks to you. It probably calls you rat.’

  No.

  What is she doing?

  I step forward and cry out, ‘What are you doing?’

  Downstairs, Peter, Danny and Anna are seized.

  The rats look around nervously.

  ‘Take that one.’ She – he – points me out to her flock, the me that I had silently moved my focus into, the me that spoke out when she altered the plan. I make a break for it, but they are too fast. They seize me. I buck and writhe and snap my teeth at them.

  ‘What are you doing, bitch? What are you doing?!’

  She looks at them then, and speaks softly, reassuringly, ‘But children: I think I can help. I think I might have a cure for you. You will always bear the mark, but I believe I can rid you of him.’

  She looks at me as she spits that final word.

  Then she takes from her pocket the knife.

  She clicks it two notches out of its handle, tilts her head and looks me square in the eye, ‘’Til death us do part, my love. ’Til death…’

  My mouth is dry. No words form there.

  What is she doing?

  Then she plunges the knife into her arm.

  2

  This is the first time I have ever done it this way around. It is as new to me as it was for all of them. But it is not anything other than I had expected. There is the initial roar as he rages into me, swiftly followed by the disparate ebb back into him. Disparate because there is no him to ebb into – only them, all of them – and a good thing too, as he would have devoured me.

  And I become theirs, his. Their child. His child.

  And they my parents. In a way.

  It is, in its own manner, somehow beautiful. Not unlike, I can only imagine, being born.

  It hurts. But it is wonderful.

  I fly into them and ride a wave of all of their lives. A river of dreams and experiences, connected through him, and now also by me. Intertwined and tangled. The imaginings of their childhood dreams blended with the brutal realities of their cold, largely neglected lives. They still remember the taste of running and jumping and tumbling and laughing. It is still there. But it is melting away.

  Poor babies.

  And there he is, scheming away behind the rows. Plotting his new life. As I’d known he would. It had been inevitable. He barely remembers the last time he had to kick the habit, his addiction to them. The writhing nightmares and tortuous pangs of hunger. He’d had to give them up, not because he hated them, not because they were rats, but because he liked it too much. He had been losing himself in them. They kept becoming more and more and more. Their ideas and intentions grow ever more distant from the simple urges and drives that he was born to. They became harder for him to understand, and the more they moved away from him the more he wanted to be them. The less able he was to resist them. The more lost in them he became.

  So he had to give them up. They were destroying him.

  And he had. He’d given them up. And from that moment forth he’d started to hate them. And not just them, everything. Life itself. And so of course he would succumb, given the faintest sniff. Of course he would wilt and go back to his old ways. Of course he would renege on what had been agreed and elect to cling on. To him, life was a cheap high. Because he could take it or leave it. And so he had. But it was a high. And so he would take it. It was inevitable.

  If I were to allow him.

  I will not allow him.

  His time is done.

  It would be easier to have seen the plan through his way and to have simply devoured this so-called horde, Peter, Danny and Anna included. That would see to him. But I will not sacrifice them for him. They are worth too much. They are worth everything. I will not be like him. No matter what. So, this won’t be easy. But it is the only way.

  I have told mine what to do if it goes wrong.

  If it goes wrong I depart with him and they carry on without me.

  They will be fine.

  And so the knife goes into me and it might as well be his teeth. Whatever absurd alchemy has etched him into the cheap steel of the knife, it binds us, as has always been the way. Our double-helixed selves smashed into each other and hard-wired together. So, after the initial infective surge I’m pulled out of myself and into him, into them. There then follows the infinite birthing moment that charts the long arc over the top of the parabola of time and space before I must pull back into myself, bringing him with me.

  In that moment he charges at me and pounces. Top predator, hungry, ready to devour his prey. If he feeds on me in here, I will become his. And that will be it. And that too is as it has always been. Some things are just made a certain way. But I am of course ready. No one has more experience of being that top predator than I do. In here, in the deadlights, I skip to the side and feel the full weight of him land in the anti-space beside me. He growls. And he summons himself, all of himself, drawing nearly his entirety in now from the children. He quickens and turns and prowls in again towards me. He is the true beast that he has become over centuries of progressive dehumanisation. He snaps at me, the fangs in his oversized jaws throwing notions of saliva and rage.

  ‘Come on then, rat-lover. You chose to enter here: what are you waiting for? Submit.’

  ‘Where is it that you think you are?’ I ask him.

  He snarls again and lets the growl rumble on before lifting it at the end into a roar. ‘No more games. I’m in you. I saw you put me into you.’

  I dance off to the side of him, silently. He stalks on, unaware that I have moved. I can sense him prowling the darkness of the arc. It is all sense and suggestion. There is no real body or tangible identity out here on the arc. Just these selves, ghosts and rumours streaking through the nowhere. So
any teeth or claws or hunched angry shoulders, any sylph-like grace or mercurial prowess – it’s all projection, metaphor, allegory. It’s all a dance. And it should be his dance to lead. I’m breaking all the rules, and it is driving him mad. Needling his ugly spirit, forcing him to pull every last filament of it back in from the children until he is whole again, and is in here. Then it is time.

  ‘You are a fool. You are on the arc. There is no you out here. No me. There is just the arc. How can you still not know that?’

  He swivels and leaps but he is slow, and I leap first and I grab him and I sink the notion of teeth into him. I sink into him and lock my jaws and cling on to his bucking and writhing body and the moment passes. The dance ends. And we slide down the other side of the arc.

  Everything accelerates then, the frozen children standing there in the darkness looking at me, youthful terror in their eyes. Some of them are crying. They too have experienced everything that has just happened, as witnesses. It happened within them. And it was terrifying. More terrifying than anything they have endured so far. They were as babes being fought over by toothsome monsters, both of whom want to eat them whole. We are the horrors from the stories their parents never told them.

  My, what large teeth we have.

  They look at me and they are quiet. Mine look at me too. They haven’t shared the moment as the others did, but they have an idea of what must have just taken place. I had talked them through what I had planned.

  I pull the knife from my arm and drop it to the floor.

  One of mine starts forward to pick it up.

  ‘No!’ I hiss. ‘Don’t touch it. Nobody touch it. And all of you stay back. It is not done yet.’

  Because there is still work to do. I have freed them. But he is still in the room.

  I feel the backs of my legs tighten and a prickle runs up from my arm, once round my chest and then charges up into my jaw. My throat starts to tighten. And his voice thunders around my skull, ‘Time to die.’

  The children see me stiffen and once again start towards me, and once again I hiss them back. I close my eyes then and turn away from them and back into myself. And I run. Into the corridors, and away from him. It is as it was when I was searching for this sanctuary I now live in – entering into their prone bodies at the clinic, I’d find them deserted, and I would walk the empty hallways. They would bend and rearrange, but they were navigable. Not like the deadlights of the arc. Out there on the arc was nothing but ephemeral notion. In here everything was a soft bio-form reality. Malleable and evolving. But solid. And ordered, in its way. I knew my way around. And I knew where I needed to take him.

  And thankfully, inevitably, he gave chase. That was the final gamble. That I would turn and run and that he would stay and take control. But, somewhere back there, I felt my body go limp and fall to the ground. And I could hear him chasing after me. His fury was now its own master, and he its slave. He had lost all control. He wanted nothing now other than to capture me and destroy me. But I had things to show him. Things he needed to know. Truths I had to help him understand. It was the only way now. The die was cast.

  And so at last it comes to this.

  For such is love sometimes.

  And such is life.

  And so it goes.

  So it goes.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ASCENSION AND DENIAL

  1

  We tumble from the twisted tunnels of her mind and out into an ancient woodland. The trees are thick-trunked and stand some distance apart from each other. They are old trees. Oak. The ground beneath their branches springy. Alive. I falter then. Of course I do.

  What new trick is this?

  She is waiting for me. She looks as she did back then. When she first took me.

  She looks beautiful.

  She takes my breath away and with it goes everything else: the rage, the murderous intent, the hatred. I can’t believe it. But it is true.

  And I remember then which of us was first, and who belongs to whom. That I am hers.

  I have always been hers.

  She holds out her hand to me and smiles, ‘Come on.’

  I hesitate. This can’t be possible. I raise my hands before my eyes, turning them over for inspection. They are young. They are human. They are as they were. I shake my head. I can feel tears welling. It can’t be possible.

  The air is crisp, and there is the finest carpeting of ground mist. The world is quiet. The occasional hooting of a distant, sleepy-sounding owl. I break out in goose-bumps and a shiver ricochets through me. My breath plumes in front of my face.

  My breath! It has been an eternity since I have breathed. And yet now, here it is. I breathe deep, and it is as if I have been thirsty for a lifetime and never realised. The air in my lungs, oxygenating my blood, is exquisite. The tears do come then. I do nothing to hold them back.

  I look at her, through my tears, and see that she is crying too. She still has her hand outstretched to me. She nods. I whisper three words, a question to which I already know the answer, ‘Where are we?’

  ‘Home.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  And now, after everything that’s gone before, I suppose it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter and I don’t care. However she has done it, and however hard I have fought her, it’s all OK. I go to her and take her hand. She pulls me to her and holds me then. Holds me tight. Then she pulls back and, holding my hand, leads me away through the trees. I follow willingly. I know where we are going. And I want to go there.

  The walk feels like it takes for ever. But it doesn’t. The fattening moon hanging high in the sky, barely flickering through the leafy canopy, drops hardly at all in the time it takes us to reach our final destination. And yet I savour so much with every step. The taste of the air, the chill feel of it. The brightness of the stars in the sky through the gaps in the trees. The sound of the breeze whispering softly through the branches. The occasional scurry of tiny and terrified wildlife that breaks into a run at our approach. All of these things as they should be. All of these things as they were before. Before the people changed and became the vermin that would tear it all down, concrete it over and purge the stars from the heavens.

  We come to the place and we stop. She puts her hand on my chest and has me wait in the treeline. Someone approaches from the settlement. He is young, athletic-looking. He is wearing the skins and leathers that are all that there is to wear in this place, this time. He walks out to meet us. He stops a few lengths distant and tilts his head to look at us. The passing cloud that has held him in shadow moves on across the sky, and the moonlight reveals him.

  And he is me.

  My heart leaps into my throat.

  Mesmerised.

  He looks at her and nods.

  She lets go of my hand and steps back into the shade.

  And then I am him, looking back into the trees. I can’t see her, but I know she is there. I can sense her. And this is how it was. This is how it happened. I can sense her, and most of me wants her. I can almost taste her. The wildness of her. The infinite otherness. I tilt my head and squint my eyes and smile. I open my heart and my mind to her and show her how different I am to the others at my back in their nests. I transmit my longing to run with her.

  But then a soft, quiet voice inside me whispers against this youthful hunger. It dares to suggest that perhaps, just perhaps, I do belong here. That I am of the nest. And that the nest needs my dreams, more perhaps than she does. Perhaps she doesn’t need them at all. Perhaps she just wants them. Lusts for them, even.

  She doesn’t step out into plain sight. And this time, unlike last time, I don’t go to her.

  I turn my back on her and walk back to my people.

  I walk back and I lie down, and when I awake the sun is in the sky and it doesn’t burn me. It is warm, and the world is so vibrant and full of colour and awash with sound – chatter and laughter, the clatter of labour, all of these things that I’d dreamt in th
e night had slipped away from me. When I’d dreamt that I’d become a monster that journeyed to a place from which I couldn’t return, and which made no sense to me. Where the children of my children, on and on, beyond I don’t know how many countless generations, had turned into things I didn’t understand and of which I could no longer be a part. And which I’d spent so much energy loathing for wanting to take the world into their own hands, as I have taken this world into mine. Loathing them for taking the world from me but not caring for it as I do. For doing things their way. And I had worn them down. Convinced them they were worthless because they weren’t like me. And in holding on, I’d taken the fire from their eyes, and they’d become lost in the darkness, and turned in on themselves.

  What a dream. Such sadness.

  But I am awake now.

  Thank the gods I am awake.

  I push myself up and walk out into my life, and the life I’d dreamt in the night falls away from me. As does the hunger and the disdain. I run with my brothers and find food; we engineer new methods of construction that strengthen our shelters and make them warmer; we discover new means of storing our foods for the cold winter months. And slowly we progress.

  I take a wife. And we live a life together and it is good. Our children are strong, and we are blessed in that most of them survive the pup stage. The ones that we lose bring a sadness that doesn’t pass, but it is a sadness that gilds the joy of the ones that live. It gives that joy substance, texture. It is a substance and texture that I frequently curse and wish away, but often too it enfolds me and adds worth to what I still have. And I grow old with her, and my children mature into adulthood and they take the world from my hands. And they manage it differently than I had. But it is theirs to manage now. Not mine. I am too old. My work is done now that they are upright.

  I walk with her, my wife, most days in among the trees. Sometimes a memory fleets by, a memory of a dream I once had as a young buck, and it leaves a strange pang – as if I had seen too much, more than was natural. And that seeing all too often precludes knowing.