by Patrick Ness
‘His group found yours.’
‘That’s because we played by the rules,’ Dagmar could not keep herself from saying.
‘Miss Privet,’ Jasper Wheeler walked into the conversation. ‘It is possible that my group did bury the Rosetta Stone a bit too deep. Out of sheer enthusiasm for this brilliant project, I assure you.’
‘Jasper -’ Miss Privet started.
‘We intended no deception,’ Jasper continued, smiling warmly at Dagmar. ‘If we did go overboard, it really is only fair to let Dagmar’s group return to the site for a bit more digging. Who knows? There might even be more things to be found.’
Miss Privet looked skeptical. ‘If you went outside the rules of burial, Jasper -’
‘Not intentionally.’
‘Yeah, right,’ Dagmar said.
‘I assure you,’ said Jasper. ‘Perhaps we just had stronger diggers. I’m not sure David Middleton is as good with a spade as Rainer Schlossberg, as a purely random example. It seems only fair to give them a bit more time.’
Dagmar, in a heroic action as she was forced to perform it in front of Jasper, played our trump card. ‘It’s making us feel bad about ourselves, Miss Privet.’
‘Oh, Dagmar,’ Miss Privet said, her body slumping in sympathy. ‘Of course, then. But I can really only give you one more hour. You’ll have to use the lunchtime recess period so you don’t miss any of today’s lessons. Is that okay?’
‘Thank you, Miss Privet.’
‘Don’t I get any thanks?’ said Jasper.
Dagmar turned her back on him.
‘That’s okay,’ he called to her. ‘You can thank me later.’
It was still humid. We were already sweating when we reached the site at lunchtime.
‘Stupid Jasper,’ Dagmar mumbled to herself as her shovel went into the dirt. ‘Stupid cheater,’ she said. ‘Stupid damn child.’
Our clothes were once again similar. The khaki shorts were the same, but now even the blue shirts were less varied. We all wore light-blue button-front Oxfords, which some of us, if pressed, would not have even remembered owning. Our shoes were the same light suede boots. Our hair had taken on a shaggy uniformity from group-member to group-member. Even our heights, from a certain angle, seemed to conform to a group average. We dug in an unconscious rhythm, as if the same silent metronome were clicking in all of us. If any of us had noticed, we might have been alarmed. But no one did, and so we were not.
‘Found something!’ called Tom Hulver.
‘Is it the damn Rosetta Stone?’ said Dagmar.
‘You’re sure swearing a lot,’ said Pratip Mukherji.
‘Shut up,’ Dagmar said. ‘Tom, is it the Stone or isn’t it?’
Tom said nothing for a moment, using a brush to whisk away the dirt. What slowly appeared seemed almost to be -
‘Fur?’ said David Middleton.
Linda Zhang looked alarmed. ‘They didn’t kill an animal, did they?’
‘No,’ said Tom, brushing more dirt away. ‘It looks like a wig.’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ said Dagmar. ‘They probably buried a dummy’s head just in case we were too stupid to figure out the human sacrifice thing.’
‘It’s not a dummy’s head.’ There was something taut in Tom’s voice. ‘The smell.’ He covered his mouth and nose with one hand. We all caught the odor he meant, a vomitingly sweet smell of milk and raw meat gone very bad. Terry Yotter started to retch.
‘Of course, it’s a dummy’s head,’ said Dagmar.
‘How would they get a dummy’s head to rot?’ asked Larry Patmos.
‘I don’t know,’ said Dagmar, ‘pack it with fruit or hamburger or something.’
She grabbed the brush from Tom and went over to the spot. Trying to hold her breath, letting out gasps from between locked lips, she brushed away the dirt, gradually working her way down from the crown of the head. ‘Jasper, you little shithead,’ she muttered.
She brushed and brushed, not wanting to damage whatever it was buried in the dirt, doing her best to ignore the smell. When she finally managed to brush the face clear, there was silence. Even Dagmar’s breathing stopped. We stared at the thing that sat in a little hollow in Group B’s burial pit.
‘What is it?’ whispered Linda Zhang.
There were several gashes across its face, and blood - it looked like blood - had hardened into brown clumps across the eyes and nose. The blood could have been faked, even a lifelike rubbery head could have been made somehow, somewhere, but there was something about the bruising, something about the tint of the swollen flesh, something about its expression that made it seem impossibly real. Even through the gashes, even through the slight decomposition, we recognised the face. The wiry hair, anyway, was unmistakable.
‘It’s Miss Privet,’ said Dagmar.
WE REMEMBER SOMETHING THAT ONLY makes sense now, in retrospect. We remember it, so it must be part of our story.
Near the end of the previous school year, after the oil-drilling project, Miss Privet tried to heal the rift in our classroom by bringing in her pet guinea pigs, Gloria and Helen (after two of her personal heroes, she told us wistfully), for us to feed, play with and get peed on by in the weeks leading up to summer break. Gloria was brown on top with a white tummy, Helen nearly all black with brown tufts along her bottom ridge. They were so furry they hardly registered as animals. Their eyes, mouths and feet were obscured by fur, and it was only possible to know which end was which by a tentative nose that seemed their only link with the world. Feeding rights were much fought over, so Miss Privet set up a timetable and allowed us to play with them in small groups.
‘Don’t get grabby,’ she said. ‘They can get very don’t drop them!’
I wasn’t, Miss Privet,’ said Jasper Wheeler. 7 was holding up Gloria here to look underneath.’
‘That’s Helen,’ Miss Privet said, ‘and you be careful with her, Jasper. I’ve had them for a long time. They’re very precious to me.’
Jasper shrugged. ‘Nothing to see anyway. Just more fur.’
‘Look, Miss Privet,’ said Dagmar. ‘Gloria’s asleep on my lap.’
‘That’s very sweet.’
Eventually and perhaps inevitably, there came the moment when, during guinea pig playtime, Miss Privet was called away to the principal’s office.
‘You’re all mature enough to treat Gloria and Helen right, okay?’ she said on leaving. ‘I’m counting on you.’
‘Yes, Miss Privet,’ both Jasper and Dagmar said.
Jasper waited until the door closed. He turned to his friends. ‘Wanna see something?’
‘What are you going to do, Jasper?’ asked Dagmar, alarmed.
‘Mind your own business for once, eh, Doggy?’ He took Helen from her cage and carried her to the art table. The art table was covered in various rainbows of construction paper, glues, rulers, scissors, glitter, the standard grade school complement. It was also home to the paper cutter, a flat board with a handle raised from one end that held a curved blade along its edge. The motion of bringing down the large metal handle to slice thick stacks of paper was almost erotically satisfying, and we manufactured reasons to do so during art hour. Jasper headed straight for it.
‘Jasper!’ called Dagmar.
‘I just want to show you all something,’ he said, his voice light. Dagmar stepped forward, but Jasper was too fast, too fluid. He placed Helen under the blade and brought it down with an authoritative whunk. Several of us screamed. Jasper had cut Helen completely in half. He held up a tail end and a nose end in either hand, blood and viscera dripping onto the floor. Terry Yotter was sick into a garbage can. Even Jasper’s group looked ashen. Jasper himself just smiled, blood dripping down his arms.
The door flew open, no doubt in response to the screams. We turned to see Miss Privet bounding through, a look of ferocious protection on her face. ‘What? What?! What is it?’
Dagmar tried to talk through traumatized tears. ‘Jasper …’ she gasped. ‘He …’ She turned
to point. We all turned. Jasper held a sleepy-looking but very much whole Helen in one hand, scratching her behind the ears with the other. Helen leaned into his fingers for a better position. There was no blood on Jasper’s hands, none on the floor, none on Helen. No trace at all of what we had seen with our own eyes.
‘What?’ said Jasper, innocent as a new-born babe. ‘What’d I do?’
We believed we had been tricked, that Jasper had grossed us out, fooled us with some textbook magic. We realise now that this perhaps is the one important thing we had missed.
MISS PRIVET DECLINED TO RUN to the dig site, settling for a quick walk behind our group as we tried to pull her along with our frantic gravity. Her pace indicated she was taking this seriously but was not about to be made to look ridiculous if this was more of Jasper’s tomfoolery. She had refused to end her lunch hour early, saying it was nothing that could not wait until after her three-bean salad, but then at the start of the afternoon session, she confined Jasper’s group to the classroom and followed us out. We could read concern in her actions, but we also saw a desire to keep control of things. We regarded this as fair enough.
Her composure lasted until she saw her own head sticking up from the ground, partially decomposed with the terrible gashes on its face. She dropped to one knee in front of it. We waited for her to speak. And waited some more.
‘What is this?’ she finally said.
‘Some trick of Jasper’s, we think,’ said Dagmar.
Miss Privet sat back on her haunches. ‘It looks so real.’
‘He needs help, Miss Privet,’ Dagmar said. ‘A psychiatrist or something. I mean, really.’
‘I think you may be right, Dagmar.’ Miss Privet reached forward to touch it, her nose wrinkling at the smell. She pressed the skin on the thing’s temple. Her fingers left a dent, and a gel-like substance came out of the closed eye. Miss Privet shuddered, genuinely shuddered.
‘Is it just a head?’ she asked.
We looked from one to another. ‘What do you mean?’ asked Dagmar.
‘Is there more underneath? A body?’ She said, as if to herself, ‘No, there couldn’t be. Could there?’ She reached out a hand to Dagmar. ‘Give me your shovel.’
We watched as she dug around the head, revealing a neck, shoulders, then an upper body. If it was a corpse, it had been buried vertically.
‘Look,’ said Tom Hulver. ‘It’s the same shirt.’
The body, Miss Privet, whatever it was, was wearing the same shirt as the real live Miss Privet standing over it, the same floral pattern, the same missing top button, the same three-bean salad dressing stain on the left front pocket.
‘But I just got that stain today,’ said Miss Privet. ‘How could -’
‘Miss Privet!’ yelled Chris Tyler, working at some loose soil in the corner of the plot. He scooped dirt with his hands. Another tuft of hair, soon another head, another face, Linda Zhang’s. ‘And another,’ said Chris, pushing away more dirt. Next to Linda, also buried vertically, was Terry Yotter, the same gashes on his face and forehead, his jaw torn away almost completely.
More furious digging by us and Miss Privet uncovered the heads and shoulders of every member of Group A: Pratip Mukherji and Tom Hulver, Richie Goldstein and Pola Armstrong, Larry Patmos and Chris Tyler, David Middleton and Robbie Normer, and the rest of us. And Dagmar Hewson-Hill, too, of course, sliced up in a way unbearable to look at. We stood over our own corpses, which all wore the same clothes we had on our living backs.
‘Miss Privet?’ said Dagmar.
‘I don’t know, Dagmar,’ said Miss Privet. ‘I just don’t know.’
‘Which, I must say, Miss Privet,’ said Jasper Wheeler, ‘is not at all surprising.’
When we looked up at the sound of Jasper’s voice and saw Group B surrounding us along the edge of the dig site, we realised it was over. They stood above us, shovels and spades and other digging implements suddenly weapons in their hands. Though we also had our own shovels, from our low vantage point in the dug-up hole these suddenly seemed weak and ineffective. Jasper said nothing more as his group raised their armoury.
Our group fought very little. We greeted our deaths with what we saw as mature, adult resignation, a quiet sad dignity, accepting our fates in a way that we imagined would have impressed anyone who saw us. We could not say the same for Miss Privet, who screamed and screamed and screamed.
WHO WERE WE? WE ARE forgetting, have forgotten. We are ghosts here, who have told this story. It’s all we seem to have now, our only remaining gift.
May we tell it to you again?
now that you’ve died
So.
You’re dead.
Congratulations and welcome.
You’ve arrived here in a truly quite amazing variety of ways. Isn’t the human creature something?
You’ve come by chance or expectation. By accident or misadventure or stupidity, yours or that of others.
You’ve come by car. By river. On the front of a train.
You’ve come by cancer or malnutrition or malaria. By diseases preventable and not. By bacterial infections and auto-immune disorders and rare conditions with names your families will now never be able to mispronounce nor forget.
You’ve come by gunshot or knife. By stranger or, sadly, by spouse.
A few of you are here by choice. Or at least by Switzerland. You are welcome here, too. Here is the place to set down your burden, if you can.
Two of you were brought here by animals. To the girl torn apart by dogs in the alley of her slum, we bid you welcome. Your pain is over, you have no need of your body. What is essential of you remains. To the man gored in the ring by a bull, we also bid you welcome, and before this journey is through, sir, you will meet your bull, and the two of you will settle your differences, one way or another.
One of you – you, the gentleman in the back – was simply unlucky enough to eat the last tray of salmon cakes and arrived here via the men’s toilets in the conference room of the Manchester Airport Holiday Inn. For which we can only say, we’re sorry. Know that embarrassment and reputation are concerns of the living. As is Twitter, so please, be at rest.
Some of you came quietly, some of you very loudly indeed, some of you with voices hoarse as you raised them against injustice and were silenced. Soothe your throats. Injustice has not followed you here.
And many of you arrived via what you thought was a dream in the safety of your beds, the continuation of a sleep you can’t quite remember entering, but one pleasant and soft. And who are we to contradict you? You go on believing you’re dreaming as long as you wish. Or are able.
You are all welcome, each and every one of you.
Who are you, you ask? Why, yes, of course, you cannot see one another. You can only sense the presence of those around you, feel them out there in the dark, hear them hanging on to the habit of breathing.
We shall tell you who you are.
You are the dead. You are one nation now, one people, one race. The dead.
You were the young, the old, the rich, the poor. You were men and women and all the degrees in between. You were college graduates and grade-school dropouts. You were all professions and none. You were the doctor in Abuja who died from a previously unknown allergy to strawberries. You were the elderly widow of a Lord who died from the fall you took while searching the hospital hallways for the orchids you planted sixty years previously. You were the infant shaken too hard by a frustrated father, the teenage girl who refused to eat, the policeman in an arctic country felled by the unexpected gun.
You were mothers and sons. Sisters and uncles. Daughters and friends.
You had names.
You no longer do.
You are the nation of the dead. It is not a nation with a flag or a government or a border. Though we do have a national anthem. It’s quite stirring. And lasts for 700 years.
So, again, we say welcome. Welcome, welcome, welcome.
Now, if you’re ready. Let’s begin.
Well, yes, of course it’s dark. It’s death. But since when has anyone needed eyes to read?
Well, look, that’s not really our problem, is it–?
There’s nothing for it. You’ll just have to pick it up as we go along. There can be no delay. People are dying all the time and there’s a group behind you impatient for release.
So if you’ll please come this way, your journey begins now.
We’ll start with the cloakroom.
Here is where you’ll leave behind you all the things you won’t need. Like the aforementioned breath. Empty what you still think of as your lungs by compressing what you still think of as your muscles. Breathe it out, let it flow from you and over and through the others here.
Do not breathe back in.
Let go, too, of your other gases, your flatulence, your indigestion, your political ideas gleaned from tabloid newspapers. Set down your prejudices, your petty good intentions, your self-righteousness. Exhale the pieties with which you used to bludgeon others, deaspirate your sense of superiority at having been lucky enough to be born in the right place, expel all the defensive pride and anxiety your blog used to cause you.
Goodness, feel those gales blow.
Feeling better? Lighter? Excellent. Now, do not tarry, we can already feel the weight of the even more newly-dead pressing in behind you.
They are hungry, as hungry as you, and they will eat you if you let them get too close.
The dead are not to be trusted. And that includes you.
Why do you think we hold these swords?
Come. You will be fed.
Here. Take. Eat.
This will not sate your hunger. Nothing can when you’re dead. That is what death is, a state of constant hunger, for the things you’ve left behind, for your memories, for life.
This is why we cannot allow you to return until your death is fully complete.
