Mercy had loved her husband, but they had married very early. She had been seventeen, he had been twenty. She didn’t remember what the rush was. It hadn’t been Comfort. Comfort came later. When Mercy looked back on the early months of her engagement to Noah, she remembered the warm glow she had felt in the pit of her stomach, a furnace fueling the engine of her days. In Hindmoor Green he had seemed larger than life: always laughing, big hands, square palms. But they hadn’t really known each other. Had they moved too quickly? Her parents said so. “Build the foundation,” they said, “test it, make it perfect. Don’t put all your weight onto something that may not hold.” But she had never lived like that. She knew all things had a crack at the heart of them. They would fall apart eventually. This had never scared her, not even as a child, when someone—a teacher—had first explained what death was. She had known death was inside her already, she hadn’t needed someone to tell her. The only houses she feared were the ones that were built to stand forever. Those she did not trust. She loved the houses of snails and sea creatures. They grew or were discarded. She loved her life by the same principles. When things with Noah fell apart, she knew how to pull herself from the wreckage. How to start over. She built her life up again, but smaller this time, less expansive, less willing to admit visitors.
“Is this my bedroom?” Comfort asked the first time she saw the townhouse terrace. “Is this where I shall play?” Mercy allowed that it was. Later there were other questions: “How far is it from your room to mine? Why do the stairs make that sound when I stomp on them? What shall we keep in the cellar?” In a fit of exasperation, Mercy said: “Bodies,” and she blinked twice afterward in surprise. It was an accident really, she hadn’t meant to say that. But one of the city’s builders had told her a story in the pub, and it stuck with her. “This building? What it is, right, is a boneyard, this and every other,” he said, spitting on the ground. His eyes were glazed with alcohol. His breath shone. He sniffed his palm, scowled, then whispered into her ear: “The foreman’s dead corrupt. He takes the money for it, gets a heavy bag, about so big, wrapped like so. Bodies. They put them in the foundation. For luck, maybe. Or to seal up the cracks. Me? I dig the hole.” Mercy hadn’t been able to sleep after she heard that. When she walked to the shop where she worked, she couldn’t look at builders. She couldn’t look at the buildings. She was afraid that Comfort wouldn’t be able to sleep either. But Comfort slept through the night like a darling. She didn’t stir once. In the morning she wanted to make mudcastles in the back garden. She filled her orange plastic bucket with dirt, and upended it gleefully. “Can I bury you, Mummy?” she asked. “Not today, pet. Maybe tomorrow.”
*
Mercy glimpsed the woman and her boy sometimes. They stared at her from the reflections in glass panels of certain buildings. When she saw them, she would turn quickly, whether away or towards she didn’t know. She resolved to do better in the future. So she bought maps of the city. Just a few at first, then more and more until her house was filled with them. Comfort draped them from strings. She built enormous mansions from them. Mercy would find herself crawling through tunnels bridged by paper folds. The hallway lights glowed behind onionskin levees. Streets swirled around her like fingerprints, the snaking lines of the canals. She touched them, and whispered their names. She didn’t know why someone would want to go to one place more than another. They seemed equally strange to her, equally inhospitable. But she had promised herself she wouldn’t lead anyone astray, not if she could help it.
In autumn, the night rain crawled like a stream of black ants down the window. When winter came, an unexpected snowfall made the faucets drip. Water snaked over the counter and seeped into the warren that Comfort had constructed, left the sodden paper hanging like old towels. Now it felt as if Mercy was crawling through seaweed. The tunnels could have been on the bottom of the ocean. The builder told her, afterwards, that it hadn’t been the snows. Something had crawled into the pipes and died there. It had created a blockage. Still, the ink ran. It painted her fingers, her cheeks. It was as if the city was sealing itself onto her. But she didn’t mind. She was learning.
There were foreigners everywhere, and they all came to her: shy, distraught, eager, afraid. Mercy learned their gestures. “How far now … ? Which is the way … ?” She came to measure distance in five languages, and then six, and then she learned that she didn’t need words at all for what she wanted to tell them. The ones who asked her knew the way already. The city was printed on them as well, only they couldn’t see it. Not yet. But she could. She felt the tracery lines glowing beneath their skin like thin, blue veins. She only needed to help them remember. And that, she learned, required very little: a kind smile, shy look, her hand touching theirs.
*
“Are you happy then?” the builder asked her. It was Wednesday. They were sitting at the pub, him leaning against the bar with a pint of bitter and her balanced on a stool, not talking to him, not listening to him. He was a big man, his body seemed to be stacked from successive layers. He reminded her of the mudcastles that Comfort built, only in reverse. “You look happy,” he said, spreading his fingers. “You look dead happy.” The question caught Mercy like a hammer blow between the dull eyes of a bull. She thought about the range of possible answers: “I make do” and “No more than anyone else” and was afraid to admit the truth: she was happy. It was easier with things as they were, with her tiny world, with her daughter present but not permanent, her husband regretful but never angry.
“If you’re willing,” Noah would say to her as he slipped into their narrow bed together, him already pressed against her. Afterwards, his mouth would tickle her ear: “How I love you,” he would tell her, “my bright star, my darling.” She could not imagine that all he ever wanted was her: slim-wasted, flat-chested, almost boyish in the coarseness of her hair. But Noah loved her. She saw it in the way he longed to sink himself into her so deeply that direction would reverse itself, like a tidal flow, and he would come back to himself: but complete this time. She could not tell him that she felt incomplete. She was not capable of holding that much love, of returning it unspoilt. It slipped out of her like water through a drain. Now there was a quiet space in the middle of the day when nothing was required of her. It was during these hours she took to the streets, looking for the strangers. Hoping they would stop her. “You could take me home,” Mercy said to the thick-handed man beside her. She wanted to imagine him crawling through the tunnels that Comfort had made, on his hands and knees, surrounded by the smell of creeping damp. “Nah,” he said. “A happy woman is no woman for me.”
When Mercy left the bar it was on tottering feet. She felt unwell. She couldn’t see the stars. The city blotted them out. There were towers where there used to be stars, and clouds, and a dull glow of silver from the streetlights, atoms of light bouncing between cloud and sodden sidewalk. But the stars. She had owned a telescope when she was younger. She loved the fierce red of Mars, gleaming like desert rock or a newly minted penny. She had read recently about the moon of Mars, Phobos: named for fear, daughter of Venus and Mars. She had read that tidal forces were ripping the moon apart. Its lifespan was now predicted to be 30 million years, a long time, no doubt, but finite. It was not forever. Above Mercy, the moon was shredding itself, its centre a pile of rubble, shallow stress grooves lined its skin. She would be long dead by the time it fell apart, but it made her sad anyway, and strangely frightened, to think about what was happening. It was all invisible anyway, out beyond the lambent atmosphere, but it was happening and it was terrible. Like a premonition. “You should have come home with me,” she whispered into the darkness. “See, I’m sad and I’m tired and I’m frightened. Just like you are.”
In the distance she heard the sound of glass bursting. The terrible fraying of metal. She did not stop. She did not turn around. Three days later she learned the builder had been struck down in the street. It was an accident. She did not go to the funeral. The papers did not mention wher
e he was buried.
*
Two weeks later, Mercy saw the builder. He was standing at an intersection of Potato Wharf and Liverpool Road with a dazed expression on his face. His jaw hung slightly slack, as if death had loosed the muscles that had formerly hinged it together. Normally Comfort was anxious, almost shy, when they walked the streets together. The city, she had been told, was different than Hindmoor Green, more dangerous. She would dog Mercy’s footsteps, fitting comfortably into the space her shadow carved in the sunlight. But today she was eager. She had skipped on ahead, never once glancing back to be sure Mercy was following.
When Mercy saw that awful figure slouched against the terracotta facing of an old canal warehouse, she reached for her daughter. But Comfort had already passed beyond the range of potential interception. “Are you drunk?” she exclaimed, a mixture of delight and skepticism. Indeed, he smelled of something faintly boozy, dark and yeasty-sweet . But the builder did not speak to her daughter. His eyes raked upwards, met Mercy’s, and a sharp spark of light leaped up into the pupils. “Please,” he said desperately, “I don’t know the way.” Mercy’s tongue was thick, it plugged the cave of her mouth like a rockslide. “Come with me now,” she said. “Let me show you.” His hand was clammy but unexpectedly warm. She squeezed it gently.
*
In Hindmoor Green, they burned the bodies of the dead. The ashes rose in a feathered bloom from the chimney of the crematorium and resettled upon the fields with the softness of snow. The dead became dust: comfortable, comforting, a velvet veil over sacred things, objects too precious for daily handling. The dead inhabited lungs, they etched themselves under fingernails. The dead were lifted gently from the inner canthus of the eye by tongue or tears. They did not come back. It was different in the city, Mercy realized. Perhaps it was that the buildings were settled too deeply, perhaps their towers soared too high. The city was small, yes, but it was expanding, colonising those parts of heaven and earth that had since been left vacant. When Mercy took the hand of a stranger, she was never certain of where they had come from and where truly they were going.
Her own first train journey from Hindmoor Green had been a revelation. She had never imagined the size of the country she lived in, the glow of white chalk in the hillsides, the copper and tan waters of the ship canal snaking inland from the sea. There was terror too, yes, the sense of hurtling into the unknown like a silver arrow, but mostly it was the joy that Mercy remembered afterward. How her eyes devoured the sight of the men disembarking onto the platform in their crisp suits, briefcases in hand, slouched children, dainty women in sensible shoes, used to the journey. She did not know what the city would look like, and the tallness of the buildings was a shock. How could such things exist? Distantly she had always imagined the sky as a thin blue film but these things revealed that as a lie: they gave it depth, they were a measure stick for its enormity. She had not known what she would do when she arrived, only that she was empty, and the city would imprint some kind of shape upon her. She wondered if it was the same for the dead man. He had been a builder after all. He had known the city better, more intimately, than she ever would.
But it was the memory of the dead mother and her child that hurt Mercy the most. She had not known what to tell them, had not properly understood their questions. She had pointed blindly, and they had followed her directions. But where had she sent them? Once she had believed that one place was as good as another, but she was learning differently now. When she looked at the strangers she could tell: some of them were going to good places. There was a brightness in their eyes, a calmness, a sense that things would be easier when they got wherever they were going. But for others there was only exhaustion, an aching look that spoke of the miles behind and the miles ahead. When she woke from dreams of those two, she would go to her daughter’s bedroom and crawl into the narrow bed. Mercy had always thought her daughter was exactly as she was named: a comfort, somehow extraneous to Mercy’s existence, a delight, to be sure, but unnecessary, nothing to seal the gaps. But when she breathed in the smell of the sheets, which she refused to launder until the day before Comfort arrived, she knew this was not the case at all. Comfort had become her centre, the smallest, purest part of her. The foundation stone of her entire life.
*
Now it was Friday morning. Mercy had walked to the train station to meet her daughter. Her eyes skimmed the eyes of those she passed, careful not to linger too long. Today was not a day she would give over to the strangers. Today would belong to Comfort. It was her birthday. In the kitchen sat a little sunken cake clothed in nets of sugar and glazed orange slices. Mercy had eaten the ones that hadn’t set properly so that only the best remained.
The train arrived. The doors flung out a stream of people, men clutching briefcases, women clutching the hands of their children, children clutching at whatever caught their eye as they passed: sunshine on the rails, pigeons, flutters of paper. Mercy waited. She had become more at ease with the crowds. She knew they would part, and there would be Comfort looking sleepy and sensible and not at all uncertain of where she was. But as the platform cleared, Comfort did not emerge. A worm of panic crawled into Mercy’s heart. This had never happened before. She went to the platform attendant. He spoke in a slow drawl, “Perhaps she’s on the next train, mum.”
Comfort wasn’t on the next train. Nor the one after that. Nor the one after that. Mercy’s hands were shaking now. Noah had left at her at the station in Hindmoor Green. He had kissed her on the cheek. He had watched her climb the stairs. Mercy spoke to the station master, a close-shaven man with weepy, blue eyes. He was apologetic. He was baffled. He would do everything in his power to find out what had happened. Then there were the police, sure it had been a misunderstanding, a mistake. “Did you have problems with your daughter?” they asked. “Was she unhappy?” Mercy let them talk. At home, she remembered, was a labyrinth of old paper and a cake with perfect slivers of orange. They would dissolve on her tongue like snowflakes if she let them.
*
There was a comradery among the dead, Comfort discovered. She awakened in their city, a city of twisted glass lit by a warm, flaxen glow whose source she couldn’t see. The dead crowded around her. She knew they were dead immediately because they had no smell. When she kissed their cheeks, they had no taste. The dead insisted on touching her, on hugging her close to their chests. It reminded her of past birthday parties when her father’s family, a large and noisy crew, would descend upon her home to pinch her cheeks and exclaim over her height. It was not an unpleasant feeling. Comfort asked them questions, and they answered immediately. There was a joyfulness to their speech, even if it was strange to her. They remembered what it was like when they first arrived. They were frightened too. “I’m not frightened,” she told them, and she realized this was true. She was happy. She felt as if she had stumbled upon some marvelous secret, and, in many ways, she had.
Time lost its urgency. She was unhooked from its rhythms. She watched it flow past her the way one might sit on the banks of a river, watching the passage of boats. She grew older. She fell in love. She married. She had a daughter of her own. She named her Solace, for her mother. Solace Dwyer. Time passed. Comfort believed once that time would have no meaning after death, but this turned out not to be the case at all. To exist, she learned, was to be in time. But time was not the problem in the city of the dead. Space was the problem. The city was shrinking, moment by moment. Comfort could see the horizon approaching with the height and mass of a standing wave. Soon it would topple and pin her in place. She knew this. The dead stood together. They had lost their joyfulness. They smelled of nothing, they tasted of nothing, but even so, it was very bad. Perhaps it was the fear. The dead had learned to fear what was coming. She clutched her daughter’s hand.
There was a story Comfort’s father told her about a man named Jacob. She did not miss her father. She did not, if she was honest, remember her father. But she remembered the story. Jacob was favored by God.
He was the father of many children. One night God sent him a dream. He dreamed of angels going up and down the sky on a vast ladder. Comfort imagined this would be how she would leave the city of the dead. But the way out of the city of the dead, Comfort discovered, was nothing like that at all. You couldn’t leave by regular methods. The city had no borders, or rather, its borders were turned in upon themselves. Walk as far as you could in one direction and at some point you would find yourself retracing your footsteps. There was only one way to leave. The city had a crack at the centre of it. The road through the crack was very long, so long it seemed impossible. Comfort tugged at her daughter. They would begin at once.
They walked. Their shadows fell behind, always. Sometimes Comfort imagined dragging them like a weight. There were others walking too, but conversation was difficult to keep up. Although the dead couldn’t feel pain, they could still feel despair: the slow enclosing of hope. This did not break Comfort. For her despair was only a sort of pressurisation. Her hope, made smaller, had become harder, sharper. Eventually she found herself in another city. It too was made of spires of glass, but these were frightening rather than familiar. “Where are we, Mum?” her daughter asked. But the glass confused her senses. It reminded her of how birds must feel when they see lights in the windows of tall towers and think they are the stars.
*
There was no news for Mercy in the days that followed. The loss of Comfort was a crack that ran down the centre of her life. She felt as if it had cleaved time in two, before and after. Noah came to stay with her. The first night he slept in Comfort’s room, which made Mercy inexpressibly angry. She did not want him to have that. He was covering over one of the only things that remained of her daughter with his own male smell. At breakfast, she hurled a teacup at the wall. It broke into three pieces. Noah swept these up without comment. He cradled her in his arms. She fought him bitterly, but his arms were exactly as she had remembered them, strong, those hard square palms like shovels patting down the earth. He kissed her, and she let him do it. The second night he slept in her bed. He did not touch her, but she could feel him lying alongside her, taking up space that used to belong to her. He snored gently. She turned her back to him, but the heat of his limbs snaked over her anyway.
Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume 5 Page 17
