It would be departing from Rathcar’s procedure, certainly, but this was about finding answers, seeing the process as process. Complete process, with more than just an ending, an outcome. With a beginning, a definite lead-up and possibly – could it be? – with intent.
The pressure was building, definitely growing stronger, Jared was sure of it. Something was about to happen, was beginning even now out there in the room, there to be seen if he dared risk it, dared throw it all away on a conviction, this felt certainty, totally unprovable.
Jared felt his hand clench, felt himself preparing to take that risk, commit that violation.
This was what it needed to be! Knowing what it was before it happened, as it happened, not afterwards. Seeing the cause, not the effect.
The pressure was too much.
His hand was at the patch, shifting it from one eye to the other, uncovering the different kind of seeing.
Jared reeled at what he saw, had to reach out and steady himself with one hand on the mantel edge.
There was no sign of Susan or the others, none of the equipment, not even the spotlight. The room was crowded, too crowded, with row upon row of dead-white forms, pallid near-human shapes pressing shoulder to shoulder with not a space between them, dozens, hundreds of sexless, minimalist things like mannequins, but with mouths hanging open and dull red eyes fixed mindlessly ahead, looking beyond him, fixed on nothing.
He was frantically registering the enormity of what he was seeing when there was a commotion in the throng, a sudden rippling forward as someone, something came pushing through, finally thrusting aside the figures in the foremost row to stand slavering, heaving. It was another of the pallid shapes, but this one had eyes that were wildly animated, blazing red, and a mouth stretched wide in a grotesque toothless grin.
No sooner was it there than it raised one long white arm and swept everything from the mantel. The familiar clatter echoed in the room, in no way muffled by the crowding forms.
Jared stared in utter dread. It wasn’t just the dead-white face, the grinning, gaping mouth, the imbecilic, red-eyed glare. It was the idiot glee in those eyes, the look of absolute manic delight at having done this single, simple, stupid thing yet again. It was like a puppy waiting for the next throw of a ball, a witless automaton for whom only this had meaning.
And worse still was the sense that the rest of the crowding, slack-faced throng had their special things too, tasks waiting to be triggered and just as mindlessly resolved, whatever they were, however long they had to wait, however long it took.
“Susan!” he shouted, not to Sophie or Craig, but to the young woman who was nearest in his thoughts, had been the focus of so much recent attention.
And there she was, visible now, moving from the back of the shapes, moving forward through all the still figures, but not alone. One of the pallid, gaping forms moved with her, followed close behind, in attendance, her eager companion.
We all have them, Jared realised. Following, always following, always there, biding their time.
Are they what waits for us? All that is left of us? What simply wears us down, brings us to death, what?
There was no way of knowing. But this was what Rathcar had seen. What Martin Rathcar had understood.
Jared couldn’t help himself. He reached up, snatched the patch back over the Nightside Eye so the room, the hotel, the world became normal again.
Seemed to.
“What was it?” Susan asked, still moving towards him across the empty, never-empty room. “What did you see?”
“Nothing,” Jared managed, giving the beautiful lie. “There was nothing. It was too much of a shock. Just too much disorientation for the brain. It didn’t work.”
And he gazed out at the welcome emptiness, the normal world, knowing it could never be that again, knowing that Rathcar was right and realising what had to be done.
If Rathcar had waited, kept his word, was still out by the highway.
Jared ran to the double doors, rushed out to the main entrance. Susan hurried behind. Sophie and Craig abandoned their monitors and ran after him. Geoff and Amin exchanged glances and followed.
Behind them the abandoned equipment hummed quietly. The things from the mantel lay scattered where they had fallen. The windows reflected only the empty room, showed not a trace of the darkness beyond the old, old panes.
HELEN MARSHALL
The Old and the New
HELEN MARSHALL is an award-winning author, poet, and medieval book historian. Her writing has been published in a range of anthologies and magazines including Tor.com, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, The Year’s Best Canadian Speculative Fiction and Poetry and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror.
In 2012, ChiZine Publications released her debut short story collection, Hair Side, Flesh Side, an exploration of history, memory and the cost of creating art, which has recently been short-listed for an Aurora Award. Her second collection, Gifts for the One Who Comes After, will be published in 2014.
As the author recalls: “When I was seven, my parents took me to see the crypt beneath the church of Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini in Rome – a place where the bodies of nearly four thousand monks had been nailed to the walls to form intricate and macabre murals.
“This is, one might argue, not the best tourist-stop for a kid, but my mother is a forensic pathologist and so perhaps it seemed more run-of-the-mill at the time. What can I say? I adored it.
“Twenty years later, I found myself in Paris trying laughably to mime the word ‘catacombs’ to my French-speaking concierge while my boyfriend of the time looked on with some bemusement. (He thought I wanted, in order, an escalator, a night club, or a pirate ship.)
“At the current count, there are over six million dead bodies exhumed and arranged in the subterranean catacombs beneath Paris. This struck me as a strangely wonderful place for a date. Thus, this story was born.”
THE CATACOMBS were dark, and Becca felt a chill settling over her entire body the moment she emerged from the narrow, spiralling staircase. She could hear a rheumatic gurgling in the distance. Or perhaps it was close by. It was very hard to get a sense of the space, and Becca wanted to reach out and take John’s hand but the staircase had been too narrow, so she had had to go it alone, John in front, enthusing about the quality of the light, the patterns of the shadows on the stones.
John loved the play of the light on the stones here.
“Look at this,” he said. “We don’t have anything this old back home.” He patted the walls affectionately. “Nah, everything’s brand new – so shiny it could be made of plastic. But this –” pat pat “– this is the real thing, this is old. This reeks of history.”
Becca looked around a little bit sceptically – not too sceptically, she wanted to be here, really she did, or rather, she wanted to be with John and John wanted to be here, and so, by association, she wanted to be here as well. She made an encouraging noise, kind of like an oohaah all run together. The stones really were old . . . very old. They had that sort of rough-hewn look to them, as if they were carved by peasants. They probably were, she thought. Not a sandblaster or an electric drill or anything like that, just hammers and chisels, or maybe even fingernails – who knew what the peasants might have been given to work with?
“But that’s the problem with North America, isn’t it?” John asked. “Nothing old, nothing that sticks around that long. Nothing but teepees before the Europeans showed up, and they don’t last for more than a couple of years at best. Maybe you get a lighthouse here, a church there, but that’s nothing. This is it. Right here.” John had a happy look in his eyes, and so Becca smiled with him, and she oohed and aahed at the walls and the creeping dampness, and the smell of rot and dead things that had lived and died years and years before her country had even become a proper country.
But then they hit the bones, and the rocks were nothing – the rocks were meaningless, because here were over six million dead Frenchmen (and wom
en, probably, but Becca couldn’t remember if women were buried properly back then – maybe it was just the men, but the women had to be buried, didn’t they?).
And the bones were . . . something. They were lined up, row upon row upon row of them, all these smiling bone faces with black eyeholes like another set of little caves for her and John to explore. But that’s what the brochure had said, some unreadable stuff in French and then in big letters, STOP! THIS IS THE EMPIRE OF DEATH!
There were so many of them – that’s what amazed Becca the most, how many there were. Six million. Six million people had been buried here in the catacombs. Becca couldn’t even fathom that number. If she squinted her eyes she could almost pretend that they were rocks, that they hadn’t been people at all, they were just rocks that might look a little bit person-shaped.
Becca didn’t like the way they smiled at her. It was creepy, all that smiling in a place where over a six million dead people had been put on display.
When John slipped his hand into hers, Becca almost yelped, and she was thankful that the hand gripping hers had flesh and was warm and even a little sweaty. She was glad for it, that warm hand. So glad she gave it a little squeeze. Then Becca looked at John, she smiled but a shiver ran over her spine when John smiled back because right behind him were row on row of eyeless, skinless heads smiling right along with him.
* * *
Paris was beautiful in a way Becca hadn’t expected it to be. Montmartre. The Eiffel Tower. All those lights winking at her from across the dark cityscape. She hadn’t thought much of Paris, really, until John had said he wanted to go, had always wanted to go, and that he wanted her to go with him. Then Paris seemed magical, everything about it seemed magical – the city of light, la Ville-Lumière, he had called it.
Becca thought quite a lot of John, had always thought of him. She used to watch him while she was at the photocopier back when she first started working for the firm, fetching coffee and the like. Becca suspected that John hadn’t thought very much of her initially. John was one of those easygoing handsome sorts who tended to work at firms, effortlessly charming in conversation, with little streaks of silver running at his temples. John never spoke to her, but that was all right because John was married, and so Becca watched him while she did the photocopying. She didn’t talk to him. Others did. There were always people stopping by his office for a chat or a coffee. His wife, sometimes, with bags of take-out food from Pusateri’s or some other expensive place. They’d eat together in the office. She’d sit on the desk, and she’d kick her legs, long legs, perfectly slim beneath some sort of frippy little summer dress, and John would look at her and smile. She was a pretty woman. Prettier than Becca, with small slim hands and blonde hair Becca would have killed for.
Not Becca though, she never talked to John. She was just an intern, so she didn’t exist; his eyes just skipped over her. When they rode together in the elevator there was nothing but silence between them; he wouldn’t even look up, not once. He only had eyes for her, his beautiful, blonde wife.
One day, it was news round the office that John wasn’t married any more. No one quite knew what happened – if she’d left him or what or why or for whom. But the ring was gone, and so was the charming smile, and the little streaks of silver became a bit more than that, like someone had smudged them, like he had aged ten years overnight. Becca felt sad as she watched him after that; people didn’t stop by his office anymore, they didn’t bring him coffee. Well, they did at first, all curious to know what had happened, but John would simply get a look on his face – a sad look – and then he would smile a sad smile, and they would feel bad that they had asked, bad that they were disturbing him. Pretty soon, they stopped visiting altogether.
Becca felt sad for him too, sad for the way he shuffled around the papers on his desk now as if he didn’t quite know what to do with his hands, as if he had forgotten why they were there, ringless. Once, when he was out on his morning smoke break, she snuck into his office and she left a coffee for him – two sugars, the way he liked it. She waited by the photocopier. She copied things. She decided that she had copied those wrong, that there was a smudge on the page, and her boss wouldn’t like a smudge on the page. So she copied those things again. But then that load didn’t look quite right either, so she decided there must have been something on the copying panel. Becca made quite a show of cleaning the copier, and she copied the pages a third time because that was what her boss would have wanted. John didn’t come back to the office though. And the third set of copies didn’t have a smudge. Not even a hint of a smudge, nothing smudgy or blotted or wrong with them at all. So Becca fiddled for a moment, hoping for something, for anything to be wrong with them, but there wasn’t so she retrieved her papers, and left.
“How about a photo?” John said, smiling, but he wasn’t really looking at her; his eyes were rapt with the camera.
“I don’t think so.” She said it with a smile so he wouldn’t think she didn’t want a picture taken with him, just that she didn’t want a picture with . . . them. All of them.
“Just one. It’ll be nice. Just one? I don’t want to forget this. I don’t want to forget our first trip to Paris. We want to remember this, don’t we? We’ll never see anything like this again, and just think, we can be a part of it for a little while. We can show the folks back home that we were really, really here.”
Becca didn’t want a picture, but John wanted it, and she wanted John to be happy.
“All right,” she said. She squeezed his hand and let him manoeuvre her to the nearest shelf of bones.
“Not that group,” John said after he had held up the camera. “The light’s no good there. Try this one – well, maybe this one. Much better ones here. Whoever did that lot wasn’t good,” and he laughed. “Probably didn’t get a promotion for that lot of bones. Must have been the dull one out of the bunch.”
Finally, it was right and John was happy and he held the camera up and said, ‘‘Smile!” so she smiled and he smiled – and when he turned the camera around to show the tiny digital display, a thousand dead Frenchman smiled and winked alongside them.
John didn’t come back from his break. Becca watched his office from her tiny desk – it wasn’t a proper desk, just a table set up for her. From where she was seated, she could see the steam rising from the coffee, and then, after a little while, there was no steam.
He didn’t come back after lunch either, and when Becca went to do the afternoon copying, the coffee was still sitting there, untouched. It had to be quite cold. It had been several hours. But she didn’t want to give John cold coffee, did she? What if he thought she did it on purpose? What if he got back in the afternoon from an important meeting with his divorce lawyer and he found a cup of cold coffee? She used to drop off coffee, he would think to himself, my wife, Laura, whatever her name was, she used to drop off coffee and now I won’t ever have a hot coffee in my life, only cold coffees for me from now on. As if a broken heart wasn’t enough.
That would be a little bit cruel, a little bit sad. And Becca wanted him to be happy. John deserved to be happy. He was a good man, a kind man, the kind of man you ought never to leave. And so she left the copying to go, and she went back into the office.
She just meant to grab the coffee. Just the coffee and that was it. But then she couldn’t help it, she saw on his desk a photo – a photo of a woman smiling. Laura. Or whatever her name was. His wife. The picture didn’t look old. It looked quite recent, and she was smiling at the photographer, really smiling, not the kind of fake smiles that most people did for cameras. It was a real smile, and there was so much love in it, more love than Becca had ever put into a smile before. Most of her smiles were littler things than that, she didn’t show her teeth ever, she thought they were big and horsey. But Laura had nice teeth. Nice little even rows of super-clean, white teeth.
Becca found herself hating that picture. Why would he even have the picture up still, when Laura, or whatever her name was, had lef
t him – had just up and vanished? She picked up the picture, and she slipped it out of the frame. There it was, on the back. Laura. That was her name after all. Laura. No date, no other words, just Laura. Laura was a bitch, Becca thought, how could she have left him? She was a slut. Becca didn’t like the word, would never say it out loud, but somehow it seemed right. Becca picked up a magic marker, and she wrote across the back of the photo SLUT in wobbly writing. Then she put it back into the frame, but you could see the word across it, SLUT, all across that smiling, perfect face. And then in the corner, Laura. Just a name, nothing more.
Becca picked up the coffee cup. It was cold. She sipped it, and the coffee was sweet, too sweet for her, but it was just how John liked it. She drank the entire cup.
She couldn’t leave the picture there. How would John like it if he were to come back to his office and find the word SLUT across his picture? The ink was starting to bleed through, black smudges growing darker and darker across Laura’s face. Becca slipped the picture frame into her purse, and she went out to the copy machine.
It was quite close to closing now, and Becca was looking forward to getting out – light and sunshine, bottles of wine, a quaint European hotel room . . .
The tourists had trickled off but John’s enthusiasm hadn’t. Not even a little. Row on row of the faceless heads and he snapped away, merrily click-click-clicking. “It’s strange,” John said, as he rounded a pillar composed entirely of femurs. “No names. Six million people but not a single one has a name. There should be a list of them somewhere – do you think there is, in the hall of records? I once did a shot of The Wall in Washington, you know, the big one. All those people running their fingers alone as if it was Braille. But it was just names.
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