On the Third Day

by Rhys Thomas

  She opened her eyes. It was light. The sky beyond the dead trees was iron grey, pregnant with water. It started to rain and the rain was freezing. It congealed with the mud and then, after she had lain there for an unknown period, it started to cleanse her face and hair.

  She became aware of something else inside her body, a white candle with a delicate yellow flame hovering above the wick. It was a counterpoint to the dark fluid. They both occupied the same space inside her, but also not. She only had one body yet it was somehow both light and dark at the same time, as if there was some filtering barrier separating the two states. On one side of the filter was the dark fluid, but if she followed the vision round she would cross the line, the image would flip and she would be with the candle. The flame flickered and spluttered like a sickly child battling against colic, but it was alive.

  She had crawled into a hollow and was surrounded by a ring of the silver-barked trees. As she looked at the trees she thought she could see the bark changing. It was as if an invisible brush was painting a line of colour on each trunk, each brushstroke a different colour: orange, red, yellow, violet. An ancient and instant recognition of the colours of the rainbow hit her and the weight of the grief that had been dumped in her began to lift. The difference was hardly perceptible but it was there and from that minute difference she drew a deep and cleansing breath. She looked again at each swipe of colour but the rain was falling heavier, the mist was sinking, the trees were clear and the colour was gone. The weight of the grief came instantly back to her and she trembled beneath it.

  She knew she had to move. If she stayed there she would soon be dead. Despite everything, a base urge that was separate from the darkness, something animal and primitive, would not allow her to willingly surrender her life. The level of suffering that lay before her was inconsequential to the urge; the toughness of life itself dictated that she would have to face it, regardless of the pain it would cause.

  She rolled on to her side, the sound of falling rain all around her, and tried to stand. She crawled out of the shallow hollow until she came to a muddy ridge that ran through the forest like the spine of some long-dead, crooked monster. She moved slowly along the ridge and looked down on either side. The rain of centuries had carved scoops out of the land. In some places the drop from the ridge was precipitous. Sharp black rocks jutted from the soil where it had been stripped away by the small gulches that cut zigzagging routes into the forest.

  She followed the ridge until what she guessed was late afternoon. It wound its way for interminable miles, so deep into nature that the long absence of human presence was tangible. Nature itself had maintained its old power here.

  The rain fell long and hard. Miriam’s hair slapped against her face like rat’s tails. The ridge terminated at the base of an ancient tree. Its trunk was gnarled and deeply striated with vertical lines that had been prised open over the years to create dark, gaping slits. Great leathery wings of fungus had infected it all the way up.

  A rushing sound filled her head. She looked around her but there was no source. The sound was so loud she could feel the membrane of her eardrum stretching, its seams approaching failing point. She covered her ears with her hands but the sound was inside her head. The rush changed frequency and morphed into both a high-pitched scream and a deep, base-end rumble. It filled the space between her brain and her skull and prised the two apart. She closed her eyes and opened her mouth in a silent scream.

  And then everything became still. She was watching a past memory of herself. She was with Henry, sitting in a rowing boat. Edward was asleep in her arms and Henry was saying something but the vision was without sound. The memory made her feel happy. It was the day she had told him she was pregnant with Mary. That had been a good time in their lives. Their family was in its vibrant infancy and life had been filled with infinite possibilities. She often thought back on that time, when the present was difficult. Happy memories suffused her being and calmed her when things were tough.

  She saw more memories, all good, all the memories she thought back on often and which made her feel still. The feeling of the dense fluid filling her body lessened and Miriam started to breathe. She could feel her body fighting against the thing that had infected her and as she watched the good memories they gave her strength.

  She was in a new memory now. She could see Joseph. He was sitting in the back garden of their old house, in a chair in the shade of a tall brick wall. It was a sunny day not long after the wedding. She had forgotten that day. The memory of it had sat unused inside the glass pane of her memory files. Joseph and Henry had argued over something but Henry had refused to say what. But she had known. Joseph didn’t like her. She had come into Henry’s life and stolen him away from his brother. That afternoon had been the first time Joseph had told Henry this.

  Then she was sitting on the bed in their bedroom, on her own. She was crying. That memory too had nestled unobserved since the time of its formation. She had cried because of the rift that had opened between Henry and his brother. Joseph had told him he was too young to start a family. It had angered and upset Henry, and when he told her, Miriam had felt an enormous guilt that she had engendered such resentment in her brother-in-law. She had not meant to do it, but it had happened nonetheless.

  As the bad memories were revealed to her, dusted off and taken from the secret compartments of her mind, Miriam swirled around a vague realization. There were more bad memories than good; life had been hard, a series of struggles from one thing to the next like a great snowfield punctuated rarely by the pinnacles of genuine happiness. Her mind had shown her only those peaks but Miriam now realized that the memories of her old life had been viewed through a strange lens. Something inside her had warped the truth of her past to allow her to forget the reality of how things had really been. But that filter was gone now. The memories showed her, over and over, the buffeting experiences to which she had been subjected for most of her life.

  The death of her father had been a terrible, life-shattering experience, and yet she had always looked back on that time and persuaded herself it had made her strong, had made her truly appreciate the love her parents held for her. But as she replayed the full truth of those months she remembered the cruelty of death, the absolute absence and non-returnable nature of loss. She remembered how people had tried to comfort her by peddling ideas of his living on through her, and how they had meant nothing, sounded stupid, and did nothing to fill the human-shaped imprint her father had left.

  Her past was not one long, beautiful journey at all; it had been an arduous, painful crossing through time that was pointless, filled with false meaning and directionless.

  The memories cascaded for what seemed like hours and with each new vision she felt the petrifaction of her heart as it grew harder and harder and harder until only the very centre of it was still made of fleshy, organic matter.

  And then her mind was in the cellar again and Joseph was raping her, telling her that what he was doing was going to destroy her, and she knew what the dark fluid in her was.

  Her soul seemed to scream with unbearable agony as the despair smeared itself over its surface. An unnatural osmosis was taking place. The pores of her soul spluttered open and the despair sludged in through the gates. It fused with her essence until it became part of her, and instead of looking out on it she was looking in.

  She forced herself back to the forest and when she did she thought she was looking at three figures in front of her: her mother and her two children. She went to speak to them but her lips would not part. They were looking at her as if she was doing something unspeakable. She stepped forward and saw that their faces were melting. Their noses and mouths were merging, the sclera in their eyes was bubbling and their cheeks were slumping. Miriam went to scream but still her lips would not part. The faces of her family slipped downwards off their skulls. In their place were cream-coloured ovals, flat and featureless; the faces of automatons. As Miriam looked at the three simulacra of her
family she felt no emotion. She did not care that they had fallen away from her because, she now knew, they were not, and never had been, a part of her. Her family, her friends, everybody she had ever met – who were they? They didn’t really care about her, just as she had never cared about them. The life that had been hers for the last eleven years she had given to her children, purely because of some primitive urge to protect her young. But not any more. She wanted her life back. The seemingly unbreakable, undying love she had felt for her children had vanished in those scant few moments and when it was gone she could not comprehend where it had come from in the first place, or how she could possibly have felt it.

  The rushing sound came back into her head and her family were gone and she was back at the ridge in the woods. It was night. Beyond the trees she could see the stars and she lay there for a moment, considering what it was that had just happened. It couldn’t have been a dream because dreams did not feel like that. She tried to cry but nothing came. She was exhausted and needed to sleep and so she crawled in between two buttresses of the old, gnarly tree, laid her head against the soft padding of the fungus and fell asleep, expecting to dream again of the burning beach and her husband being dragged into the water. It was a dream that didn’t come. She didn’t dream of anything. Her sleep was shallow, her mind always aware of the wild world existing just beyond the lids of her eyes.

  When she awoke it was day again. More clouds hung saturnine and smothering in the sky. Miriam sat there, in the folds of the old tree, and looked at the forest around her for three hours. With slow, deliberate motions she fanned her hands through the dead leaves beside her, brushing them clear of the soil.

  When the rain started again it was merciless. It fell in heavy, driving streams and struck the ground in tiny craters along the ridge. The tree sheltered her from the water but the compulsion to move was with her again and so she crawled out from her shallow cave and on to the ridge. She had to return to the forest floor but the ridge was high up here. The rain was so heavy it had saturated the soil and so she crawled back along the ridge, the way she had come, to find a place to descend.

  As she crawled she thought of God and why He would do this to her; why, after all she had given Him, He would do this to her. Although, really, she knew. She came at last to one of the rain-formed gulches. The water was so powerful that a chunk of the ridge had fallen away, like the gap between two vertebrae over which she would have to clamber.

  She remembered the dark innards of the campervan and saw again the black face and the silver handgun. She felt the weight of the woman she had condemned against her and she paused at the edge of the gulch.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said.

  The rain thundered all around her. There was water everywhere. She placed one of her hands into the gap in the ridge. It sank deep into the mud. She put her other hand in, this one further along, and then she brought her knee in and moved her hands further across, and then her other knee, and all of her weight was in the freezing stream and she felt the ground slump beneath her as she sank down into the saturated loaminess that failed and spilled her body over into the fast-running waters of the gulch. She snatched for purchase but there was none to be had and down she tumbled, through the mud and the water, the weight of her baby pulling her body into a roll so that her face was pushed down into the running stream and she couldn’t breathe. She turned her head and gulped down air but the air was thick with guilt and it lined her throat like oil. She had killed that woman. That was why God was doing this. She had failed His test and this was the retribution for her choice. That really was the truth of the Sadness: it was a punishment. Everybody who had suffered its violation was paying a price for something they had done to displease God. He had looked down on Earth and in His divine right judged each of His creations and selected those who deserved damnation to be infiltrated by the dark fluid of despair.

  ‘Please stop this,’ she screamed, as she fell through the turgid, broiling waters. The water filled her mouth and she swallowed it to try and please Him, to show Him she was sorry, that she understood the terrible thing she had done. She screamed. Her throat was tender and raw and her voice raked at it like the backwards stroke of fish scales. ‘Please,’ she screamed, ‘I’m so sorry.’

  Her body rolled to the bottom of the gulch and came to a rest in a wide, cold puddle. She lay in it and cried and felt the outer layers of her body beginning to freeze. It was all she could do to straighten her arms and crawl on her knees to the edge of the puddle, where she flopped down in the soaking mulch of the long-dead leaves. They reeked of tangy bacterial processes and made her retch. She closed her eyes and when she opened them again she saw a ghostly white figure floating towards her through a mist that had flowed into the valley. The figure was not solid but rather an indistinct sketching of the human form. It raised a wispy arm and pointed accusingly at her through the mist.

  ‘I know,’ she said slowly. ‘I know what I’ve done.’

  The figure halted its approach and she looked at it. Was this really it? Was this the thing she had loved so much since her father died? It radiated warmth. It was benign and passive and yet, she thought, if it was like this, then why would it subject her to this torment? But that thought faded swiftly as the white figure flickered in and out of the mist, sometimes strong, sometimes weak. When its signal was strong she could nearly see the features on its face.

  ‘What comes after this?’ she said.

  But the figure said nothing. It hovered silently in front of her and tilted its head to one side, as if confused by what it was looking at.

  Miriam looked down on herself. She was still wet and cold from the rain but her clothes and skin glowed vividly from the millions of light sources that infused the mist. The figure lifted its hand up to the level of its head and turned its palm towards Miriam. Its long, slender fingers waved like fronds of grass in the wind. They were not solid things: as they moved they came apart, floated like a wake, then rejoined to become a hand once more. A cherry red vapour emerged from the palm and the figure pushed it towards Miriam until it floated right up to her in a hazy line and into her chest.

  When it entered her she felt it push against the pool of despair and she looked up into the face of the white figure. Its ears rose up and she thought she could make out a grey hole where the mouth would be. It was smiling. She felt its benevolence and munificence flowing through her as the cherry red haze floated around the little candle in her chest, feeding its fire, bringing up the light, clearing the shadows.

  ‘What are you?’ she said.

  The figure curled its fingers one after the other into its palm and the stream of red haze was cut off. The remainder of it drifted into her chest and swirled around the candle in gentle, steady orbits.

  The indistinct figure then began to be blown away into the mist as if the particles from which it was made were not together. Its head was carried away on the breeze like the peak of a desert sand dune being lifted from its bed in hyperbolic curves. As it faded the red haze faded with it and when it went Miriam could sense the despair coming back. She fell to her knees and lifted her arms out to the dissolving figure.

  ‘Don’t go,’ she said quietly. ‘Don’t leave me on my own like this.’

  But the figure let the wind scatter it to nothing. As it dissolved she felt the version of it that had lived inside her dissolve with it. The promises of it, the comfort it brought, the way it had ushered her through life – it was all gone. It had never been there at all. All of it had been a lie, a veil she had pulled between her and the world to make living more bearable. There was no such thing as God and its infinite absence was like the creation of a singularity in her. The black hole swirled into being, the red haze was drawn into it, and then it closed in on itself and all was dark once more.

  She was in the forest again and the mist had disappeared. The realization of her place in the universe shunted into her. She had thought that humans were closer to angels than animals, that there
was some divine purpose to existence, but now she saw the whole world before her. Everything could be touched, seen, heard, smelled, tasted, and nothing more than that. There was nothing mysterious beyond it. This planet was what happened when hydrogen and helium had an eternity to create it. She was skin, bones, DNA, genes, cartilage, ligament, muscle, and no more than the sum of her parts. Billions of years from now the universe would expand to the point where everything that had ever been would be so far away from the next particle that the whole thing would be nothing more than a frozen, desolate void and all she had known would be forgotten, never to be recorded or remembered, all her actions and memory just dead bytes of information drifting into entropy. Everything would return, as it had come, to nothing. The universe and every living thing in it would die and there would be nobody waiting at the other end, no everlasting, no happiness beyond the puny happiness of life that was so fleeting it could hardly be experienced at all. There was no reason.

  The rain had eased its ferocity and fell now in silent curtains. A new, machine-like energy was in Miriam that came from her physical body alone. She crawled to the nearest tree trunk and placed her hands against the slippery bark of it and pulled herself steadily to her feet. Wrapping her arms around the slender trunk she ratcheted upright. Her legs were shaky. If she let go of the trunk she would fall but she felt some base need to stand upright, to feel the length of her spine, the muscles in her legs, the straightness of her neck.

  She hugged the tree and stared blankly at the forest in the way a small child holds on to the leg of a parent. She made her mouth into an ‘o’ shape and then stretched it as wide as she could sideways, then retracted to an ‘o’ again. She savoured the shifting muscles in her face. She had started crying again and could not stop, despite the fact she could no longer remember why she was crying.