“Miles, dear! Where are you? Come, it’s time for your lessons!”
Far below, in the dank-dripping catacombs, heartsick with mourning his beloved Jessel (Quint was no husband, but feels a husband’s loss: half his soul torn from him), Peter Quint hears the governess hurrying from room to room, surprisingly heavy on her heels. Her call is like a rook’s, shrill, persistent. “Miles? Miles—”
Quint, with trembling fingers, readies himself for the final confrontation. He perceives himself as a figure in a drama, or it may be an equation, there is Good, there is Evil, there is deception, there must be deception, for otherwise there would be no direction in which to move.... Squinting at his sallow reflection in a shard of mirror, plucking at his graying beard to restore, or to suggest, its old virility; recalling, with a swoon in the loins, poor Miles hugging him about the knees, mashing his heated face against him.
How is it evil, to give, as to receive, love’s comforts?
Jessel has vanished. Dissolved, faded: as the morning mist, milkily opaque at dawn, fades in the gathering light. His beloved Jessel!—the girl with the “Scots curl,” and the hymen so damnably hard to break! A mere cloud of dispersing molecules, atoms?
For that dispersal is Death. To which crossing over is but an overture. It was desire that held them at Bly, the reluctance of love to surrender the beloved. Desire holds Quint here, still. The fact stuns him. Mere molecules, atoms? When we love so passionately? He sees Miles’s yearning face, feels Miles’s shyly-bold groping caress.
Readying himself for the enemy.
Panting like a beast, feet damp with dew, Quint peers through the dusty windowpane. Inside, poor Miles has been tracked down at last, discovered by “St. Ottery” hidden away, suspiciously, and cozily, in a wingback chair turned to face a corner in the library—a vault-like room on the first floor of the house, into which no one (including Master on one of his rare visits) has stepped foot for some time. It is a gentleman’s place, a mausoleum of a kind, its dark-grained oak panelings hung with portraits of patriarchs long since dissolved to dust, and forgotten; twelve-foot bookshelves rear to the ceiling, crammed with aged and mildewed books, great leather-bound and gilt-etched tomes that look as if they have not been opened in centuries. How incongruous, in such gloom, the fresh-faced ten-year-old Miles with the quick, seemingly carefree smile!
White-lipped “St. Ottery” asks, hands on her hips, why Miles has “crept away” here, why, hidden in a chair, legs drawn up beneath him, so still?—“When, you know, I’ve been calling and calling you?”
Miles glances toward the window, the merest flicker of a glance, even as he says, gaily, “I was just so lost in this, you see—!” showing the governess an absurdly heavy, antique tome on his knees—the Directorium Inquisitorum. “St. Ottery” says dryly, “And since when, my boy, do you read Latin for pleasure?” and Miles giggles charmingly, “My dear, I read Latin as everyone does—for pain.”
“St. Ottery” would remove the Directorium Inquisitorum from Miles’s knees but, prankishly, the boy spreads them, and the heavy book crashes to the floor in a cloud of dust. Miles murmurs, “Oh! Sorry.”
Again, Miles glances toward the window. Quint, are you here?
Quint strains forward, hoping to lock eyes with the boy, but the damnable governess moves between them. How he wishes he could strangle her, with his bare hands! She falls to interrogating Miles at once, sternly, yet with an air of pleading. “Tell me, Miles: your sister did commune with that ghastly woman, didn’t she? My predecessor here? That is why Flora is so terribly, tragically ill, isn’t it?” But cunning Miles denies this at once, denies even knowing what “St. Ottery” is talking about. He reverts to the behavior of a much younger child, grimacing and wriggling about, eluding “St. Ottery” as she reaches for him. Again, his eyes snatch at the window. Quint, damn you, where are you? Help me!
“St. Ottery,” snake-quick, seizes his arm. Her no-color myopic eyes shine with a missionary’s good intentions. “Miles, dear, only tell the truth, you know, and don’t lie: you will break Jesus’s heart, and my heart, if you lie. Poor Flora was seduced by ‘Miss Jessel,’ is that it?—and you, what of you and ‘Peter Quint’? There is nothing to fear from him, you know, if you tell me.”
Miles’s laughter is wild and skittering. He simply denies all, everything: “I don’t know a thing of what you say. Flora isn’t ill. Flora has gone to visit our uncle in London. I know nothing of Miss Jessel, who died when I was away at school. And Peter Quint—why,” his flushed face creasing in distaste, “—the man is dead.”
“Dead, yes! But here with us, at Bly, constantly!” the governess cries, with the aggrieved air of a betrayed lover, “—as, Miles, I think, you know.”
“‘Here with us’? ‘Constantly’? What do you mean? Where?” The boy’s face, struck blank, is so dazzling an image of innocence Quint stares in wonder. “Damn you, where?”
In triumph “St. Ottery” turns, and points to the windowpane against which Quint presses his yearning face. Surely, the woman cannot have known Quint is there, yet with fanatic certainty she whirls about, points her accusatory finger, directing Miles’s terrified gaze. “There!—as you’ve known all along, you wicked, wicked boy!”
Yet, it seems, Miles, though staring straight at Quint, cannot see him. “What?” he cries. “‘Peter Quint’—where?”
“There, I say—there!” In a fury, the governess taps against the glass, as if to break it. Quint shrinks away.
Miles gives an anguished cry. His face has gone dead-white, he appears on the verge of a collapse, yet, when “St. Ottery” tries to secure him in her arms, he shoves her away. “Don’t touch me, leave me alone!” he shouts. “I hate you.”
He runs from the room, leaving “St. Ottery” behind.
Leaving “St. Ottery” and Peter Quint to regard each other through the window, passionless now, spent as lovers who have been tortured to ecstasy in each other’s arms.
We must have imagined that, if Evil could be made to exist, Good might exist as rightfully.
Into the balmy-humid night the child Miles runs, runs for his life, damp hair sticking to his forehead, and his heart, that slithery fish, thumping against his ribs. Though guessing it is futile, for the madwoman was pointing at nothing, Miles cries, in a hopeful, dreading voice, “Quint?—Quint?”
The wind in the high trees, a night sky pierced with stars. No answer of course.
Miles hears, with a smile, bullfrogs in the pond. Every year at this time. Those deep guttural urgent rhythmic croaks. Comical, yet with dignity. And so many! The night air is warmly moist as the interior of a lover’s mouth. The bullfrogs have appropriated it. Their season has begun.
KIM PAFFENROTH
(1966–)
Born in Syosset, New York, Kim Paffenroth earned a BA at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, an MTS at Harvard Divinity School (1990), and a PhD in theology at the University of Notre Dame (1995). A professor of religious studies at Iona College in New Rochelle, New York, he has published extensively on Saint Augustine, including Augustine and Liberal Education (2000), A Reader’s Companion to Augustine’s Confessions (2003), Augustine and Literature (2006), and Augustine and World Religions (2008). His fascination with the depiction of zombies is reflected in his editing of an anthology of stories that portray the undead throughout the ages, History Is Dead (2007), in Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romero’s Visions of Hell on Earth (2006), and in his novels, Dying to Live: A Novel of Life Among the Undead (2006) and Dying to Live: Life Sentence (2008).
Excerpt from Dying to Live
(2006)
I awoke to find a lone zombie underneath my little hideaway. The tree house I had spent the night in was poorly constructed—the bottom was just a square of plywood, reinforced with a couple boards, with plywood walls on three sides and the fourth one open. It had no roof, but the sky was clear, so no bother. All the pieces were irregular and unpainted, with big gaps between them in many spots, and the wal
ls were only between two and three feet high. But it was higher up than most, a good twelve feet off the ground (the kid’s mom must’ve been one of the ones we always called a “cool mom,” to allow such a dangerous playhouse), so I was even more surprised to see my unwanted visitor.
I scanned the surrounding field and trees and saw that the zombie and I were alone; my heart slowed down. In a few moments, my situation had gone from peaceful morning reverie, to possible or near-certain death, to minor inconvenience. In that respect, this was a typical morning.
One reason the zombie and I were alone this morning was that it lacked the ability to make sound. Like so many of its kind, its throat was torn open, leaving its windpipe a ragged hole, and the front of its suit stained brown with blood.
It looked up at me with its listless cloudy eyes, which lacked all expression—not hatred, not evil, not even hunger, just blanks. It was chilling in its own way, like the stare of a snake or an insect. Its look would never change, whether you drove a spike through its head or it sank its yellow teeth into your soft, warm flesh; it lacked all capacity to be afraid or to be satisfied. Its mouth, however, had a great deal more bestial expression to it, for it was wide-open, almost gnawing at the bark of the tree as it clawed upward.
I stood looking down at it for a few moments. It was times like this—and there had been several in the last few months—that I had always wished that I smoked. In a few seconds, I would fight this thing and one or both of us would cease to exist—“die” is obviously the wrong word here—and just to stand here and contemplate that inevitability cried out for some distraction, some mindless and sensual habit like smoking, to make it less horrible. I guess I could’ve chewed gum, but that would make the whole scene ridiculous, when it was really as serious, overwhelming, and sad as any that had ever occurred to a man.
With nothing to distract me, I just felt the full weight of a terrible and necessary task, and the tediousness and unfairness of it. I had just awakened from a relatively peaceful sleep, and I already felt a crushing weariness coming over me. Again, it was developing into a pretty typical morning.
My zombie this morning looked to have been a middle-aged man in its human life, slightly graying, average build. Its suit was intact, and other than its throat wound, there were no signs of further fights with humans or other zombies. Decay had taken its toll, and it looked more desiccated than gooey, a brittle husk rather than the dripping bag of pus that some of them became.
At first, I looked it over to size up its threat and plan my attack, but that quickly turned into contemplating its human existence. Maybe his kids had built the tree house, and that’s why he’d been hanging around here, almost as if he were protecting it, or waiting for them to come back. Or even worse, maybe his kids had been the ones to tear out his throat, when he had rushed home in the midst of the outbreak, hoping against hope they were still okay. Or, just as bad, maybe he’d been bitten at work or on the way home, only to break in to his own house and kill his kids.
My mind reeled, and I clutched the wall of the tree house. I’d heard of soldiers in other wars having a “thousand-yard stare,” a blank look that signaled they were giving in to the hopelessness and horror around them, soon to be dead or insane. As for me, I was suffering the thousand-yard stare of the war with the undead: once you contemplated the zombies as human beings, once you thought of them as having kids and lives and loves and worries and hopes and fears, you might as well just put your gun in your mouth and be done with it right then, because you were losing it—fast. But, God knows, if you never looked at them that way, if they were just meat puppets whose heads exploded in your rifle’s sights, then hopefully somebody would put a bullet in your brain, because you had become more monstrous than any zombie ever could be.
I shook myself free of my paralysis. I’m not exactly sure why, but I wasn’t ready to give up yet. I tossed my backpack beyond where the zombie stood. It turned to see where it landed, then immediately looked back up at me. Its head lolled from side to side, and I was again glad that it couldn’t vocalize, as it was clearly getting worked up and would’ve been making quite a racket if it could.
You never used a gun if you didn’t have to, for its noise brought lots of unwanted attention, so I pulled out a knife, the one I carried with a long, thin blade, like a bayonet, as that would work best. I stood at the edge of the plywood platform. “I’m sorry,” I said, looking right in the zombie’s eyes. “Maybe somewhere, deep down, you still understand: I’m sorry.”
I took a step forward and started to fall. I tried to hit it on the shoulder with my right foot, but its arms were flailing about, and my boot hit its left wrist, sliding along its arm. I sprawled to the right and then rolled away as the zombie was shoved into the tree.
As it turned to face me, I scrambled up, took a step forward, and drove the knife into its left eye. Its hands flailed about, either to attack me or to ward off the blow. The blade was long and thin enough that it went almost to the back of its skull. The whole attack was noiseless, without so much as the sound of a squish or a glitch as the blade slid through its eyeball and brain.
As I drew the blade out, I grabbed the zombie by the hair and shoved it downward to the side, where it fell to the ground and lay motionless.
And that was that. I always used to imagine deadly fights would be much more dramatic. But usually, like this morning, there were just a couple of savage, clumsy blows, and it was over.
I was barely breathing at all, let alone breathing hard, the way I felt someone should when they kill something that was somehow, in some small way, still human. A few months ago, I would’ve at least felt nauseous, but not anymore. Looking down at the creature from the tree house had been much more traumatic than delivering the killing blow.
I bent down over my would-be killer and cleaned the blade on his suit jacket. I then reached into his pocket. It was a little ritual I still followed when I could, though the horrible exigencies of a zombie-infested world usually made it impossible. I pulled out his wallet and got out his driver’s license. Rather than look at the bloody horror at my feet, with its one undead eye and one bloody, vacant socket, I stared at his driver’s license picture—smiling, happy, alive, years and decades of life ahead of him. I cleared my throat to speak clearly. “I have killed Daniel Gerard. I hope he’s somewhere better now.”
I cast the wallet and license on top of his motionless body, scooped up my backpack, and hurried away.
It had been close to a year since all the worst parts of the Bible started coming true. Armageddon. Apocalypse. The End of Days. God’s righteous judgment on a sinful humanity. Whatever the self-righteous jerk who railed at you once a week from a pulpit used to call it. Well, he might have been self-righteous and a jerk, and now he was probably lurching around like most everyone else, drooling on himself with half his face torn off, but it sure seemed as though he had had some inside information that we all wish we’d gotten a little sooner.
Almost one year after the first corpse rose, the world was now ruled by the undead, who wandered about with no discernible goal other than to kill and eat living people. The undead were everywhere, the new dominant species that took the place of the old, extinct one. Places where there had been large human populations were especially thick with the walking dead, though they never took any notice of one another.
The living, meanwhile, as was their wont, almost always congregated in little groups. The government or society or culture had imploded or disintegrated with terrifying speed as the infection spread. Within hours, there had been no telephone service, no police or rescue response to the terrified calls for help. Within days, there was no power or television. And within weeks, the last organized military and government resistance collapsed, at least in the U.S.
But groups of survivors quickly came together into little groups, little communities with a pecking order and rules and authority, but also some of the little perks of being around other people—companionship, conversation, s
ex, someone to hold your hand when you die, someone to put a bullet in your brain when you went to get back up as a zombie. (And if you’ve ever seen a zombie—and God love you, I hope you haven’t, but if you’re reading this, I suspect you have—then you know that last perk is by no means the least important one.) You didn’t have to be a damned philosopher to know that we’re social animals, and would be till the last zombie bit the last human and dragged us all down to hell, which, judging by the zombies, looked like it was going to be the most unsociable place imaginable.
Yes, humans always build their little communities in order to survive, and in order to make surviving a little more bearable. Except me. I was alone. And it sucked. It was dangerous and it sucked.
By midday, I was moving closer to what looked like a smallsized city. I had thrown my maps away a few days ago when I had failed to find my family. After that, I figured, I didn’t have much need for maps: if I didn’t have any place to go anymore—and I had decided that I didn’t—what difference did it make where I was at the moment? Besides, the end of civilization had wreaked a lot of havoc with the things depicted on maps: I guess the rivers and mountains were still there, but cities were gone, roads were clogged with wrecked cars, bridges and tunnels and dams had been blown up to try to stop the rampaging hordes of the undead. So long as I was out of reach of those things, and had one bullet for myself if it came to that, I was in about the best location I could hope for.
It was a late-spring day, bursting with a sunshine that didn’t make it hot, but just made things seem better, brighter, more alive than they were on other days. I still had the instinct to call it beautiful as I looked around and forgot the obvious shortcomings of the day for a moment. One shortcoming I couldn’t forget, however, was the gnawing hunger I felt.
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