by Rhys Thomas
At last she felt as if her body had adjusted enough to her upright position to attempt a step. She placed her left leg out in front of her, toppled the ball bearing of her balance forward, and her body advanced. She stuck out her leg to stop herself from falling and it held. She toppled forwards again, shakily this time, but her right leg moved into its position and she did not fall. She walked out into the centre of the wide forest path and stopped. Swaying where she stood she cleared the tears so that she could see.
She was in a long, flat-bedded valley. It was an ancient place. Along the valley sides there jutted severe outcrops of wet grey rock. In some places the rock was a sheer cliff face from which, in one place, there tumbled a fresh spring.
Used to the new weight in her legs she clambered up to the spring and drank the water in greedy, thirsty draughts. It was cold and fresh. When she had taken her fill Miriam returned to the valley floor and trudged solemnly along it, one foot in front of the other in front of the other.
The pool of despair inside her was now lapping against what would have been the bottom of her ribs. It wouldn’t be long now before it reached the flame of the candle.
At dusk she found the carcass of a bird. The distant calling of hunger forced her to bring it to her mouth and she bit into its plump breast. Cold blood flowed over her chin and the meat tasted rank. In the corner of her eyes she saw the yellow pennant that was the bird’s beak and, closer, its dead, beady eye. She spat the meat to the ground and wiped her mouth against her muddy sleeve and moved on.
Just as the light of day faded she found the first signs of human presence she had seen in two days. Plastic beakers and spoons had been discarded. They made the land dirty. It seemed disrespectful. In the centre of the valley floor was an abandoned hut. The roof had long since disappeared and the walls were crumbling. A small, thin tree grew inside it, its base hidden in the gloomy shadows of the coming night. Large rocks encircled the hut and as Miriam looked at it there came a movement from inside it: black against black, a disturbance of the darkness.
A dog emerged from the hut. It had belonged to Joseph. She had loved this creature once but looking at it now she could not remember why.
She was tired again and so she crawled into the small space of the hut and lay down. The animal followed and lay next to her. She could feel the warmth from its body against her back and she thought she was about to fall asleep but that slip of the mind into unconsciousness eluded her. Whenever she was just about to fall something would pull her back, like an elasticated length of rope tethered to the conscious world.
She lay in the darkness and curled her neck round so she could see out of the crumbling entrance of the hut. She watched the night fall imperceptibly between the trees like a sooty snow that stole light from the air and left in its place messy blotches of murk until at last there was no light at all and she was returned to the completeness of dark.
Sleepless, an image started to resolve in her. She was sitting in the back garden of the house on top of the hill. Edward and Mary were running along the gravel paths between tall rows of fertile plants. Her mother knelt down and harvested some of the vegetables into a wicker basket. A small bundle of cotton blankets was in Miriam’s arms and within them lay a fleshy, wriggling, pink baby with tiny, curious fingers and large, alert eyes.
The garden faded and she was in a house. The walls were freshly painted, the smell of it faint in the air. At the far end was a huge window beyond which lay the clear skyline of some unknown city. She turned and Mary was standing in the doorway but this Mary was a young woman, tall and confident as she smiled and asked her mother if she liked the house. Edward came up the stairs behind her, carrying an enormous wooden packaging box that teetered precariously in his arms. He was every inch his father’s son: those large, boyish eyes, the strong jaw, the thick, healthy hair.
Then she was in a warm living room in an old Victorian house with vaulted ceilings, parquet flooring and solid wooden furniture. She was sitting next to a real wood fire and looking down on her grandchildren playing with their new toys. A Christmas tree stood in front of the large bay windows beneath which a fat, scruffy cat had curled up into a ball and fallen lazily asleep.
She knew what she was looking at, just as she knew that in a few moments the Sadness would snatch them away again because none of them would come true, not in the new world.
But the image of a true future did not come. She looked out from the hut into the tenebrous dark and nothing happened. Slowly, she fell into a second shallow, fractured sleep. As she slept she became aware of her own death, nothing more than a ticking clock running down its mechanism to nothing; when the monster in its cave had taken all that it wanted, she would be so changed that her body would be unable to continue. It was so close now. The dark fluid had almost reached the flame.
In the morning she was woken by the sound of rustling outside the hut. The black dog was lying next to her but its head was up and alert. Miriam looked out through the entrance but the rustling was coming from the side of the hut. Something small was scurrying in the leaves. She waited for a moment and then a large starling hopped into view. It paused, as if it was aware of the eyes on it, and twisted its head in short, jerky movements. When it saw Miriam watching it from the hut it hopped round to face her. Its spangled plumage glimmered in the grey morning light. It ducked its head down quickly and lifted a leaf into its beak and then it shook it violently from side to side before dropping it back to the ground and fluttering off into the lowest branches of a nearby tree. Miriam watched the bird with a blank passivity.
She crawled out of the hut and used the front wall to hoist herself up to her feet before continuing her journey. The dog followed. It tried to remain out of sight but whenever she turned round there it would be, further back down the path with its mouth hanging open and its fat pink tongue lolling over its lower lip.
The wooded valley did not seem so ancient here. She picked her way along it all morning. The going was very slow and she was forced to rest often. But every time she stopped the urge to carry on became too great to quell and she would stand and move on. Her body was shaky; the sugar in her blood had fizzled away almost to nothing. She was wandering aimlessly and alone through the final stretches of her life.
She could feel herself drowning. The despair was almost at the flame of the candle and, as it rose, Miriam found herself trying to stretch her neck as high as it would go, as if she was in the water-logged cabin of a sinking ship.
She tried to run and fell. The huge lump in her stomach bore the weight of the fall and the great mass of it spread beneath her abdomen. If only the baby wasn’t there. It was draining her of her own energy, siphoning off reserves to which it had no claim. It was a malignant and vile thing from the most terrible moment of her life; a parasite. She no longer wanted it in her body, taking what was hers, slowing her down.
She crawled to the edge of the valley floor and found a long, thin stick. She sat with her back against a rock. The creature kicked against the side of its womb as if it knew what fate was about to befall it. Unthinking, Miriam snapped the stick in half. Where it broke there was now a sharp, juicy point that she tapped with the tip of her finger. It would do. She closed her eyes and inhaled a deep, full breath. The creature had come in on a raft of violence and it was fitting that it should leave by the same mode.
But then something happened. She opened her eyes and the world had fallen into a vacuum, as if it had held its breath in anticipation of some massive catastrophe. A huge sonic boom shook the sky. Dark ripples splashed across it. The shockwaves hit her and pushed her back. She dropped the stick and the reservoir of tears that had been building breached their defences. The pool of density had snuffed out the candle.
Streams of her essence flooded out of her body in great torrents. Everything she had been was emptying. As it gushed past it picked up the baby and dislodged it. An immense pain bolted up through her in a spastic convulsion. The child was coming. The death of th
e candle had initiated a natural abortion.
She closed her eyes with the agony and the pain slipped away. Up the wooded valley, in the direction from which she had come, she saw a cave she had passed by unseeingly. It was large and black. An old tree grew on a sloping ledge above its entrance. A low, groaning sound rumbled from within the cave and then, from the dark, a huge talon appeared. The greedy monster thief had come at last.
Its head slid from the cavern and turned to watch her through lidless, obsidian eyes. The head was shaped like that of a snake. Two calciferous horns grew from its brow, tapering to electric sharp points. Its scales hung from its jowls in rotting lines and when it opened its mouth bubbles of saliva oozed from between lines of thin, sharp teeth. It brought its body from the cave and stood up on two reptilian hind legs, baring its fleshy underbelly flecked with brown melanomas and scored by scars.
Miriam turned away from it and ran. Her body was heavy but the primitive urge to survive pushed her onwards. The Sadness could not touch that because it was in the animal part of her. Another contraction pulsed through her. Her legs buckled in the crippling pain but she did not allow herself to fall. As the pain subsided she heard the monster scream out behind her. Its footfalls shook the earth.
She knew it could not hurt her, that it was not real. It was just an approximation of death, the means by which her mind would make the final transition. She thought of the monster’s bounty in its cave and what it would save of her for its collection. Every memory, every sense, every feeling was evacuating her as her life ran down its final processes.
Another convulsion racked along her body, this one so powerful that it knocked her from her feet and sent her reeling across the damp leaves of the valley floor. She screamed. The baby was moving downwards through her. Her body was shifting states in an attempt to numb the pain. Her mouth opened wide, her lips stretching and cracking under the flash-boiled pain. As the baby eased through her she felt it against her and it reached out its hand and pressed her. A white flash thrashed to life at the connection. The pain was so full she could no longer tell where it ended and she began. It infused her so utterly that everything else was blanked; reset to zero. It drew her along its gauntlet and peeled off her layers of skin. The baby was coming. Her head swayed slowly on her neck, her face turned upwards to the sky. She screamed with the pain but the pain was so complete it was as if she had never been without it. A low, dull pain forced her hips outwards; there was an elongated, fleshy pain in her centre; a needle-sharp pain attacked her skull and a frantic, stretching pain cracked up her spine. Sweat coursed out of her and her hands became claws that dug into the soft ground.
The baby was crying now, somewhere at the edge of the world, and Miriam sat there with her head turned away, her legs open, exhausted. The monster was gone and in shattering flashes things began to come back. She felt something ancient rumble to life in a place so deeply buried that the Sadness had not known it was there. As it blazed up in her she felt like she was being passed along the notes of the world’s symphony. Held in its rapture the despair trembled at an impossible frequency until its inner skeleton became brittle and frail and then it shattered, a whirlpool formed in her centre swirling slow, then fast, then wide, and the despair was being sucked out of her, its level dropping below the wick of the candle, which burned at once to life in an incandescent ball that threw the despair’s whirling, broiling surfaces into a graphic iridescence as it dropped away from her through some deep sinkhole.
Millions of images flickered before her so fast that before she could comprehend them they were gone, like a series of changing pictures on a hummingbird’s wing, as her memories restored themselves to their correct spaces. The idea of her death folded backwards and she saw once again all the hopes and dreams that had kept her strong. As these things happened, as all the processes and machinations cranked and turned within, she lifted her baby from the forest floor and held it in her arms. It was slick with blood and slime and it wailed in cold discomfort but it was alive and it was hers. She looked around the forest, sobbing, and its beauty seemed to glow from within it. The way the trees climbed up to the sky for the light of survival and down through the ground for the food of sustenance, the way they fed themselves in their own autumnal shedding, the way the water had carved the valley floor on which she was now sitting, the way all the world’s processes clicked together to form the life that blossomed on, flourished in and returned to its depths became starkly and movingly apparent.
As she looked up into the sky, at the swaying, leafless branches of the trees, she felt her body tingle as the golden, honey-like fluid flooded into the centre of her. She touched the top of her baby’s head. It fitted easily inside her palm and she thought of her children and how she needed to get them back.
She was nearly at the end of the wooded valley. The sides of it levelled off further ahead and there was the raised grey line of a road. She gathered her breath, made the baby as comfortable as she could in her muddy clothes, rose to her feet and started walking.
The thin road was long but she was glad for the consistency of the concrete under foot. The sound of the baby crying was the only noise. A nascent calm had emerged in her. She was still alive.
The lane joined another, wider, lane. Her legs ached and she was running on the combustion fumes of the last drops of blood sugar but there was no option other than finding her way back to the house. Pele waddled steadily beside her, as reliable as ever. His coat was matted with mud but he seemed healthy.
The winter birds called across the fields, past the hedgerows and thickets, and when they did the baby in her arms stopped crying. Miriam looked at its scrumpled face, eyes pinched shut, lips parting and suckling on air, new hands opening and closing with first-time wonderment as it conducted an experiment in bone and muscle movement. She thought that maybe she would call her Emily.
The sound of a car in the distance hummed unseen. She didn’t feel any danger when she heard the noise. Danger seemed like something very trivial to her, a facade behind which lay little substance. The sound grew in the air. She was standing at a section of lane where the road had dipped into the lowest point of a hollow. The car trundled around the bend. Two round heads, their faces grey circles through the windscreen, turned towards her and then there were pointing arms of excitement and the car was slowing to a stop. The window descended and a cheery face hung from it.
‘There you are,’ he said, though she didn’t recognize him. ‘Everyone’s been looking for you.’
He had grey hair and soft, friendly features. His eyes shifted downwards to the wriggling pinkness in her arms and his mouth gaped open, his eyebrows rising up like two doffed hats and then an upturn at the edges of his lips.
Miriam lifted the baby up a fraction.
‘It’s a girl,’ she said.
It was so warm inside the car. The very idea of warmth had been something that had been forgotten over the course of the past few days.
The man who was driving the car was not as animated as the man sitting next to him, who kept turning back to her and smiling enthusiastically.
‘Where have you been?’
Miriam clutched her baby to her and looked into the man’s eyes and said, ‘I don’t know.’
He accepted this answer.
‘Have you heard the news then?’ he asked. Miriam said nothing. ‘It’s over,’ he said. ‘It’s all over.’
The news, the man told her, had come from two places at once. He spoke quickly in a way that made him sound younger than he looked. As she focused on his face the trees that flashed past behind the windows became a tawny blur.
With everything that had happened on the camp nobody had noticed at first. It was only that morning that the idea had come to one of the women. She had asked her friends, and then her acquaintances, and then, as hope bubbled up inside her, strangers, and all of them agreed with her that, no, they hadn’t heard of anybody falling ill.
Old radios had been dusted off and the
old frequencies tuned in to. And there they were: the tentative, nervous, hopeful reports, as if there had been a mass awakening right across the globe. It seemed, the man said, that it really was over.
Miriam listened to him and as he spoke she was unable to process the information to any depth. It squalled in the shallows. She turned away from him and placed her muddy forehead against the cool glass of the window.
The hedgerow was broken here and there by a wide, metal cattle gate and she could see the fields beyond, overgrown and wild.
The front door of the house was closed. She looked from the car window at the broken coils of barbed wire that had been pulled from their brackets and hung now half on, half over the old brick wall. The windows at the front of the house were smashed and there, on the brickwork next to the door, was a wide splatter of dark red blood.
The man opened the car door for her and she stepped out into the cold. She looked down the slope to the camp. Halfway down the hill, pushed clear of the road, were the charred carcasses of two vehicles, one that had belonged to McAvennie, the other a larger vehicle that looked as if its end had been equally violent. As she absorbed all the devastation she thought the despair in her should start anew but it did not.
She entered the house by the conservatory, Pele panting behind her. The kitchen was empty and ransacked. She picked her way through the mess and went down the hallway into the living room. A man she knew was sitting in the old chair by the window. He didn’t seem to mind the cold wind blowing through the broken glass on to his face. When he saw her he stood up, and looked at the baby.
‘You’re back.’
Miriam said nothing.
‘I’m David,’ he said awkwardly.
‘I know,’ she answered. ‘I remember you.’
There was a box at his feet.
