The Deep Hours of the Night

by Jonathan Schlosser

  “No,” Gannon said.

  “What?”

  “I mean then. Why is it important then?”

  “When Matthew wrote it?”

  “The time he wrote it about, yes. There is a difference there.”

  Caitlyn bit her lip. Outside, she could hear the crowd moving. Growing. Swelling. They would have packed the main yard by now and would be pressing up against the houses. There were less these days, but still so many, and all together they sounded like they could fill the canyon. But none of that mattered, not here. Only Father Gannon had any authority inside his church, and he was waiting.

  Finally, she said: “I don’t know.” It was backing out, and they both knew it.

  But Gannon didn’t let it go. As they’d both known he wouldn’t. “Are you reading it? Every word?”

  Caitlyn thought about telling him that she wasn’t reading it at all, that the last Bible had been lost fifteen years ago and she’d never read it. That he may have it down, but that she wasn’t old enough to have the word-of-mouth version committed to memory. Hadn’t had the time. But she’d said it all before, and rehashing the ground wouldn’t change a thing. “I may be forgetting some.”

  “You are.”

  And she waited. That was better than guessing, though not by much.

  “It says the bodies of the saints rose,” Gannon said, leaning back and smiling. “The saints. The holy people who had died.”

  Caitlyn thought. Gannon would give her time, if she needed it. If there was one thing he valued, it was time. Maybe because they all lived with the knowledge that time was forever short. That, any night, their time could end. That their whole way of life could be swept under. So any time spent, used at all, was a treasure.

  Outside, the crowd was a low din like an engine on idle. The talk was quiet and subdued, but it pulsed like a heartbeat. It was the talk of anticipation building. And now she could smell the smoke. Faint traces of it, little gray fingers, rose from the candles and filled Gannon’s church. His sanctuary.

  “Only the holy ones were given second life,” Caitlyn said. “God let them rise from the dead. The saints.”

  “Exactly,” Gannon said. The candles flickered, the only light they had now. Running the generator wasn’t worth it unless a storm hit or it looked like…well, like things were about to end. Then they had to have power to run the electric grids and the guns and the computer screens that blinked green in the control center. “So why did you come here?”

  “To ask you.”

  “Of course, my child. But why did you want to know?”

  “Because,” she said, and that was all. She couldn’t voice the rest, couldn’t bring the accusations down. So she stopped, because then Gannon might know, but he might not. And that was enough difference to keep him from talking to her parents.

  Gannon sighed, his translucent cheeks puffing and his translucent lips bulging out. “Go to your mother, Child. And think.”

  “I will, Father.” The air felt thick; maybe the smoke was heavier than it appeared. It tasted bitter and sharp and dried the roof of her mouth, and Caitlyn didn’t like it.

  “Peace be with you.”

  “And also with you.” And then she was ducking out the door, not daring to glance back like Lot’s wife, the pillar of salt, and the crowd was all around her.

  2

  The walls rose up on every side, sheer cliffs of stone that encircled the town. Trees dotted the surface, struggling to grow under the harsh glare of the desert, struggling to grow even though the box canyon held them all in with its borders and its walls and its safety. A small stream fell from the eastern cliff face, the only reason any of them were alive, looking like a river of silver in the moonlight. It splashed into a pond at that end, where it drained and disappeared. Caitlyn had no idea where it went, or where it came from; she’d never been outside the canyon.

  The air was cold, like it always was at night, but the crowd was warm and moving like a living thing, like one huge organism shivering to keep itself alive. The smell was like mud and dirt and sweat and stagnant water and spoiled food. There were so many, Caitlyn thought, sliding through them, between them, around them. People were talking, whispering, glancing but trying not to glance at the small hut on the fringe of the houses. Or at least trying to disguise their glances as something else, something other than morbid curiosity and a desire to see the condemned.

  To see those who were almost dead.

  Caitlyn shivered, from more than the air alone, looking past a young couple (their hands clasped together, tight, her eyes on him and his eyes on the cliff) and finding her mother. Her father would be close, she knew, probably with his eyes where the boy’s were: On the ridge. Looking at that bank of sand-colored stone where it formed a hard edge under the stars.

  She moved quickly, slipping to her mother’s side. Caitlyn had known these crowds for all of her life, but they still held something that chilled her. It wasn’t the way they talked, not exactly, but the way they acted. The way their shoulders were hunched, their backs taught, their eyes wary and tinged with fear. The way they swallowed more than they needed to, fidgeted more than usual, and tried to avoid talking about it as if that would make it somehow less real.

  Caitlyn’s mother looked down, tried to smile and came up short. She held two candles in her right hand, between the fingers like claws. They were white and half-melted and she held one out to Caitlyn. “Where did you go?”

  “To talk to Father Gannon.” Caitlyn took the candle; the wax was melted back and reminded her of dead skin.

  “About?” That’s the way it always was with her: to the point. Don’t tell a story, don’t give a whole account, just get to the end and explain yourself.

  “Them,” Caitlyn said, because she didn’t need to say anything else.

  Her mother went stiff; her lips locked into a thin line that looked as hard as the stone and as unforgiving as the desert sand. For a moment she just stared, her eyes vacant and not seeing anything, and then she took a deep breath. Caitlyn could see her breasts rise and fall, slowly, getting ready. “You have to stop this, Caitlyn. Your father told you. Just accept it for what it is.”

  “I’m sorry,” Caitlyn said, because that was best. But she wasn’t, no matter what Gannon taught. “I just…it doesn’t seem like the right thing. That’s all. I just wanted to know more.”

  “And did he tell you?”

  “No. Well, sort of.” He’d told her the same as Caitlyn’s mother, though in more words and with longer sentences. And, of course, with his Bible to back him up. That hadn’t been what she’d wanted, but it had been what she got.

  And sometimes that’s all you had.

  “Then you should be happy,” Caitlyn’s mother said.

  To that, there was no answer. Caitlyn fingered the candle, carving a groove in it with her nail. The wax stuck to her skin, soft and pliable and somehow just wrong. She pulled her finger away, holding the candle as lightly as she could without dropping it.

  Somewhere on the edge of the crowd, a light flared up. Died. Flared again. And then the candles were being lit, coming like a storm across the sand, a slow wave as the flame was passed. Caitlyn saw the young couple, the two who were holding hands, move it between them. The boy got it first, hesitated to make sure his was lit, and then passed it to the girl. She tipped her candle into his, so as not to drip the melting wax, and then hers was lit as well.

  Caitlyn watched it come, finding she didn’t like it at all. The way the lights moved, a dancing sea of them now, like fireflies. The people’s faces were washed in orange, in amber, with shadows falling in all directions. She thought of Gannon’s eyes, dark with those shadows, and her mother shook her arm.

  “Caitlyn,” she said. “Light yours.” She was holding her own low, the burning lick of flame barely wavering in the still air.

  But Caitlyn couldn’t. She could see only Gannon’s eyes, like empty black sockets, and the hut on the edge of the makeshift town. The hut they�
��d thrown together just after they’d run here, if the history she’d been told was true. They’d fled here after the dead rose, after the tombs were opened, after the remains of both the saints and the devils walked the streets.

  “Caitlyn,” her mother said. “Come on.”

  Now, a dozen stooped figures came out of that hut. A path cleared before them like sea waters splitting before Moses. There were guards all around, guards with guns and the precious few bullets they had left, pushing them along. The prisoners walked with their heads down, their hands bound behind them, and to Caitlyn they looked like ghosts. They were naked and white in the moonlight.

  They’re walking, Caitlyn thought. They’re actually walking. Going to it.

  Her mother reached down, grabbed Caitlyn’s wrist. Her fingers felt like steel, cold and strong and mostly bone. “You have to worship. Light your candle.” She twisted Caitlyn’s wrist, bringing the wicks together.

  “We shouldn’t,” Caitlyn said. Her throat felt thick, like she’d swallowed the sand she was standing on. Or, maybe, like it was made of wax and melting in on itself.

  “We have to.” Both candles were burning now.

  “No. The Father and the Son and…” She couldn’t get any farther. The sea of lights was all around her, thousands of pinpoints against the black. Thousands, yes, but less by far than she remembered. Less than last year even, or last month. And the crowd was always shrinking.

  Caitlyn’s mother knelt beside her, eyes narrow and hard and every bit like Gannon’s. “They’re the past. Let that go. Isn’t that what Gannon says in church?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then listen to him, if you won’t listen to me.”

  Caitlyn felt a hotness in the corners of her eyes, a wet heat that threatened to stream its way down her cheeks and drip to the sand, where it would sink away forever. “I do. By why them?” Because that’s what she had asked Gannon, and he hadn’t given her what she wanted. Because it ate at her like a cancer. “Why them?”

  In the dark, Caitlyn’s mother was silent. She licked her lips, slowly, her tongue thin and white and shriveled and sitting on her lips for a moment before she sucked it back in. Her grip on Caitlyn’s wrist loosened, slightly, and then she said: “Look. They’re here.”

  Caitlyn didn’t want to look; she’d seen it before. On the first of every month, when this always happened. She had seen it and she never wanted to again, though that was as impossible as it was to leave the canyon, where the walls and the guns kept them safe. Where the candles kept them safe.

  But Caitlyn’s mother was looking, unaware that her daughter wasn’t. “We worship them, now,” she said. Her voice was low and hollow and she raised her candle above her head so it could be seen. “We worship them because they’re the only gods we have left.”

  3

  They slowly came into view, lumbering and staggering and lining the ridge until the canyon was ringed in bodies. They looked like sentries on a castle wall or mourners around a deep grave. Torches gleamed in the night, bolder and brighter and stronger than the candles, showing their faces. Faces that were white with blood-loss and green with mold and yellow with rot. And, of course, red with blood, smeared and caked on like makeup. Some of the faces were only partial, missing pieces and chunks of flesh and all of their teeth. Those sometimes rotted and fell out, even if the bodies lived.

  Even if the dead walked.

  When they had discovered torches, when they had learned the use of fire, Caitlyn didn’t know. It had been some time when she was young, and she had vague memories of fear sweeping across the town like the candles had moved across the crowd. Because if the things had torches, then they were learning. Adapting. Evolving. But the basket came next, and the horror of the torches was forgotten.

  The basket dropped down now, Caitlyn saw as she finally looked. It was impossible not to. It came over the edge, lowered on ropes down the face of the cliff. The group of prisoners, of ghosts, had stopped below it. The guards watched it come; the others just looked at the ground. A few were shaking softly, sobbing. She didn't know them, and that somehow made it worse; they were faceless things, corpses not yet dead.

  “We can’t,” Caitlyn said. “They’re part of us.”

  “Not anymore,” her mother said.

  But they were. They had been picked at random, victims of the drawings that took place each month, before this. Caitlyn hadn’t gone to those, hadn’t been allowed, but she knew she could be picked. And if her name came out of the jar, she would be stripped naked and sent to the basket. Whether she wanted to worship them or not.

  Above and on all sides, she could hear them talking. They were bodies, corpses, given back their life through an event Caitlyn hadn’t been born for. She’d heard rumors of military secrets, an escaped biological weapon, something about a vaccine that had backfired terribly. But mostly that topic was avoided, ignored. This was life now, all she’d known and all anyone expected to know. Because outside of the canyon there was a whole world of them, a dead and yet thriving world, where the pockets of survivors were slowly dwindling toward extinction.

  Their talk wasn’t normal, wasn’t real. It was the mindless babble of children, the mumbled, slurred words of old men. It was excited, guttural grunting that showed emotion and little else. They jostled each other, shifting from foot to foot in anticipation. They knew, with the basket down and the candles lit, that their meal was coming. Pavlov would have been grinning madly, proud as hell, had he been there.

  The first two prisoners were put into the basket. Their bare skin shone, white and pallid and stretched over their bones. Food was scarce and rationed and these were half-starved skeletons being given up. But they would do. They would satisfy the mob on the ridge, give them enough to live on until the next month, when it all happened again. The dead had grown smart enough, had adapted enough, to know that much. They could get food without a fight, without the risk of a second death, one that would be permanent. But if the food wasn’t sent up, Caitlyn knew, the canyon would be overrun. The world was full of them, after all.

  The basket began its accent, and Caitlyn watched. The crowd seemed to be holding its breath. It was awful, but it was human nature. Hadn’t people once watched hangings, and burnings, and clapped as heads fell away from guillotines? Caitlyn hated it but had to watch, because this was the life she had.

  In the basket, the prisoners began to move. They always did, trying to leap over the side and kill themselves on the floor below. The desert was merciless, and would be a faster, more painless death than the one that waited above. Even if the fall did seem to take an eternity. But they’d been tied in, tightly, and they wouldn’t get out. They would try, Caitlyn knew, but they wouldn’t. They never did.

  It wasn’t so bad, she thought, that they were all trapped. That they were forced to live inside the canyon, scraping by on a tiny garden and whatever wildlife managed to fall over the sides. It wasn’t much, but it was life. And it was all she’d ever known. The stories of cities and highways and airplanes were just that: Stories. She didn’t doubt that they were true, but it was impossible to miss something you’d never had.

  What she hated was what they’d become. Selling their own to save themselves, whittling their number down as the wax candles shrunk. Waving their lights in the air, telling the things up above that they revered them, worshiped them, respected them. And then sending people, real people with lives and hopes and desires and emotions. Sending them to die like the animal scarifies in some of Gannon’s sermons. Just flesh and blood to get what they wanted: a little more time.

  The basket reached the top. Decaying hands grabbed the ropes and dragged it over, and the torches began to converge. To move together. The basket was thrown back down, thrown back for the ones still left, and for a moment Caitlyn could see the prisoners at the top. They stood silhouetted against the lights, against the moon, for the first time seeing the world outside of the canyon. And then the dead fell upon them.

  4
/>   “The Bible is God’s gift to us,” Gannon said. “It can explain everything.”

  “But,” Caitlyn said, and that was all. She looked down, at her bare feet, her ragged toenails, her calloused skin.

  “But what, my child?”

  “It just can’t be. It can’t be what God wants.”

  “No?” Gannon leaned forward; he smelled musty and rotted and old. Like them, almost, but barely clinging to life. “And what if they are God, Caitlyn?”

  “They can’t be,” she said, knowing that she was just repeating herself but not knowing what else to do.

  She had watched the whole ceremony, watched her candle burn lower and lower as the sacrifices were sent up the wall. She’d heard them screaming as they were torn apart, heard the snarls and growls of the others. Heard the screams strangled off, wet and sharp and final.

  “The Bible is full of the signs, you know.” Gannon leaned back, closing his eyes. “The dead walked when the veil was torn. Lazarus, Jesus’ friend, was raised from the dead. A sick girl died, and her parents ran to Jesus. He smiled, said she was only sleeping, and took her hand. She woke up, her life returned to her.”

  Caitlyn couldn’t speak. It was too much and her throat was so thick now, worse than it had ever been. It was fear, she knew, fear that was choking her. Not only fear that she would be picked, that her name would be drawn, but of something else. Something far worse.

  Fear that Gannon was right.

  Reaching over to light another of his own candles, Gannon looked away from her. But as he spoke, she could see his smile. It was thin and dying and completely without hope. “Jesus himself rose from the grave,” Gannon said. “He threw off his robes and pushed the stone aside like it was nothing.”

  Caitlyn felt the tears, now, on her cheeks. They tasted like salt as they reached her lips, like salt and water that had been ruined by it. Tainted. It couldn’t be.