by Joe Hill
Aubrey’s thoughts snagged on this final notion. His flesh responded, fine hairs standing up on his arms. He wondered again if he’d seen anything on the island that didn’t look completely random and was met with an idea, a very bad idea.
He knew he had to climb the great white hill at the center of the cloud. There was no getting around it. When he went, it would try to drive him back, as before, would lash out at him with whatever it had.
And did it know he was planning another climb? Could it see that in his mind? He redirected his thoughts toward the first image that occurred to him: the Junicorn in his hands, his purple stuffed Junicorn with its bent horn and twee little wings. It troubled him to think he needed to hide his own thoughts, even from himself.
He closed his eyes, burrowing his head into the pillows. He wasn’t ready to take a pass at the hill now. He was too frail, too wiped out, needed to recover some energy. He might’ve slept if he hadn’t felt something brush his cheek. His eyes sprang open, and he looked up into the face of an enormous horse, shaped from cloud.
Aubrey cried out, and the horse took a nervous step back. No. Not a horse. There was a spear rising from the center of its head and absurd little wings fluttering behind its forelegs. Its blind gaze was morose and stupid and shy. A Junicorn.
He sat up and grimaced, needles of pain bristling in his stomach. The Junicorn stood beside the bed, watching him with dubious eyes. He stroked a hand over one alabaster flank. It felt as cool and smooth as a horse made out of plaster. He had concentrated on a Junicorn, and now, predictably, one awaited his command.
As long as he didn’t command it to fly him back down to earth or ride him up to the top of the great white dome. He already knew that shit wasn’t happening. But maybe he could make use of it anyway. He was too weak for a hike, but he thought he could ride, and the Junicorn was already saddled.
He caught a foot in the stirrup and pulled himself up. His shredded insides shrieked. He gasped and fell across the Junicorn’s neck. Sweat prickled on his flushed cheeks. He felt for reins, found them hanging loose, and gave them a tug. It had been a few years since he’d ridden, but his mother’s side of the family were all farming stock, and he was not unfamiliar.
The Junicorn turned and trotted along the edge of the cloud, bouncing him in the saddle. At first the going was hard. Each jolt filled his stomach and bowels with pinpricks of pain, as if his guts were full of steel shavings. He soon found, though, that if he stood in the stirrups, it wasn’t so bad. The throbbing in his abdomen subsided to a weak pulse, and he began to breathe easier.
He rode along the shores of his island, over low dunes and across barren strands. It was all both familiar and completely new at once. The landscape was continuously being remade by the wind, and yet somehow it was always the same, acre after acre of mashed potato.
The last time he’d traveled the circumference of his little fiefdom, he lost himself in a maze of crags and gullies in the east, but those were gone now, the land blasted almost flat. He remembered some fluffy boulders that looked like a bulldog. Also gone.
He saw nothing he remembered from his earlier journey until he’d made it three-quarters of the way around the isle. He was half dozing in the saddle by then, the rock and roll of the Junicorn a natural soporific. A sudden ugly jolt thudded him out of his trance, the ache flaring through his clawed-up insides. He cast his gaze around and saw they had just come down off a snowy bulge shaped almost exactly like a speed bump. They were about to go over another, and a third lay just beyond. Three tablet-shaped mounds in parallel rows. He grimaced, yanked on the reins, and pulled the mare to a halt.
Slowly, gingerly, he slid out of the saddle and down to his feet. He leaned against the horse to steady himself, waiting for the world to stop whirling. When it did, he took a breath and considered where he found himself.
He had missed the marker the last time he’d passed through this way: a large, tilting, square block at the head of the central mound. It didn’t have RIP carved into its bland, blank face, but he supposed it served well enough as a gravestone. Now that Aubrey was on his feet, looking around, it was hard to imagine how he hadn’t realized the first time he saw it that this was a place of burial. But then he supposed he was often guilty of trying not to see what was right in front of him.
He sank to his knees, pushed his fingers into the cold, stiff paste of the first grave. He was tired and didn’t want to have to dig with his hands. The work would be easier with a shovel. He shut his eyes and bowed his head and tried to visualize one, a perfect three-foot spade. But when he opened his eyes, there was no shovel conveniently to hand and the Junicorn had moved off a few yards to stare at him with unmistakable disdain. Aubrey thought it was the first time the cloud had denied him anything. He was almost glad. He took it as a sign he’d found himself some work worth doing.
He yanked at the zipper of his jumpsuit. His smartphone was in one pocket of his cargo shorts. It was less a shovel, more a blunted garden trowel, but it was better than nothing. He chipped and dug. Pieces of cloud fell away, and more billowed in to fill the holes, like mud sliding into a ditch on a rainy day. But for all that, the cloud stuff seemed to need half an instant to flow into place and set, and it couldn’t keep up with him. As he worked, he shed his fatigue. The steady prickle of pain in his abdomen sharpened his focus.
He pried loose a tumbling heap of soft white rock to reveal a swatch of faded black cotton and a splash of bright yellow silk—and at that moment the cloud seemed to surrender to him. The burial mound collapsed and spilled away in every direction, and a body emerged from the fog. White vapor smoked from empty, staring eye sockets.
The skeleton wore a handsome antique suit, a three-piece with tails. A canary-colored handkerchief was folded neatly into the breast pocket. The vivid yellow of it was a shock to Aubrey, and as refreshing in a way as it had been to plunge his head into cold water. In the cloud world, everything was the white of monuments, of marble, of bone. Those folds of yellow were like a shout of childish laughter in a mausoleum.
It was not hard to see how the man had died. The skull had been staved in on one side by the hammer blow of some great force. The dead man didn’t seem too upset about it. He grinned up at Aubrey, his little gray teeth as delicate as kernels of corn. One skeletal hand clutched the brim of a stovepipe hat.
Aubrey turned to begin on the next grave, but the smoke had already melted away, the cloud giving up its dead. A woman. She’d been buried with her parasol. Tiny black leather boots protruded from beneath her dress and petticoats. The bridge of bone between her eyes had collapsed. Aubrey didn’t know if that was a natural result of decay or a sign of injury.
On the other side of the woman was a second man. He must’ve been a fat man in his life. His bones swam in a voluminous black suit. One claw clutched a King James Bible. The other held a pistol with big iron barrels. He must’ve put it in his mouth before he fired. That was the only way to explain the great hole right in the top of his skull.
Aubrey’s breathing slowed. He was headachy, and his insides stung, and he wanted to lie down with these three skeletons and rest. Instead he crawled around to the fat man and tugged the Bible free. It fell open to a place just inside the cover, bookmarked by an ancient burgundy ribbon.
On the verso it read, “To Marshall and Nell on their wedding day, February, 4th, 1859. Love never fails, Corinthians. With love from Aunt Gail.”
The words on the recto had been written in a dark brown ink, blotted there with a shaking hand.
“They would’ve left me—the balloonist and Nell—so I killed them both. This is the closest I shall ever come to heaven now! Not that I still believe in Our Lord. Not one word of this foolish book is true. There is no God, and the skies belong to the Devil.”
The Bible felt very heavy in Aubrey’s hand, a brick, not a book. He set it back on the fat man’s chest.
Murder and then suicide. Marshall had shot the one in the stovepipe hat—the balloonist, no
doubt—and then his bride, and finally himself. Their bones had been floating around on this cloud ever since, almost a hundred and sixty years now judging by the date in the Bible. Nell wasn’t wearing white, so they hadn’t gone up on the day of their wedding, but maybe they’d decided to make a romantic ascent at some point on their honeymoon. Aubrey turned over Marshall’s other hand, the one clutching the pistol, for a look at his wedding ring, a simple gold band that had dulled with age.
He loosened the pistol from its nest of bones. It had not one, not two, but four barrels, etched with whorls and feathers, and a curved handle of black walnut. The words CHARLES LANCASTER NEW BOND STREET LONDON had been stamped into the groove between the top two barrels. New Bond Street. Aubrey had walked past it almost every day when he left the Royal Academy of Music to find himself lunch. It gave him a shock of wonder, to find some of the world he knew, up here, in heaven’s own bewildering country.
He broke the gun open. The cartridges looked less like the usual ammunition for a pistol and more like shotgun rounds. Aubrey shook out the bullets. Three of the copper casings were spent, but a fourth held a bullet the size of a blue jay’s egg, so big it was almost funny. Almost—but not quite.
Left one for you, kiddo, he imagined the fat man telling him. Marshall’s skull grinned with small, sharp, slanting teeth. Might come in handy. You never know. In another couple days, when you’re too weak to stand, it might be just what the doctor ordered. Swallow one as needed for pain and call me never.
When Aubrey came to his feet, all the blood rushed away from his head and the afternoon went dim. He swayed, almost sat back down. Bed, he thought. Rest. He could ponder the tragic fate of the balloonists when he felt better. He even took a step toward the Junicorn, which was pawing restlessly at the puffy ground, before he noticed he was still holding the four-barreled pistol. That gave him another chill. It felt like he’d made a decision of some kind without even consciously realizing it. No reason to take the gun with him unless, on some level, he was open to using it.
He turned and considered putting it back. The bodies lay exposed to the day, the girl’s head at the foot of the big, blocky grave marker.
Aubrey made a rapid series of associations then, threading half a dozen beads of trivia onto a single shining thread.
They had come and been stranded here and died, but the important thing was they had come, not by parachute but by balloon. They’d wound up on the cloud somehow, and at least two had planned to leave, and how were they going to do that? And was it odd that the cloud had disinterred the bodies but the gravestone remained, that big square, featureless block? He thought it was. He also noticed, for the first time, that the monument wasn’t much shaped like his idea of a traditional gravestone, or anyone else’s either. When the cloud generated something—a bed, an end table, a lover—it always worked from a template seized from the minds of its guests, but this wasn’t a template of anything. It was camouflage, and not very good camouflage at that.
Aubrey walked a woozy line between skeletons and stood before the gravestone that wasn’t a gravestone. He kicked it, once, twice, harder each time. Ivory shards of cloud stuff flew. When that wasn’t good enough, Aubrey dropped to his knees and tore with his hands. It didn’t take long.
At the center of the odd, cube-shaped monument was a wicker basket, large enough to hold a family of five. It was filled to the brim with silk the colors of the American flag. The wood of the basket was so old and dry it had lost most of its color. The silk was just as bad off, worn and bleached with age, the blues paler than the sky, the whites paler than the cloud.
He pulled it out in a big, shivering mass. That pile of silk—Aubrey remembered that balloonists called it the envelope—was no longer attached to the basket or the rusted-out burner but had been deliberately folded up and put away. A dozen slender ropes ran from rings around the skirt of balloon silk, but they were wound up into a neat bundle, all the iron D-rings carefully collected into one place.
With the silk removed, Aubrey could see that the basket was badly damaged. The bottom had been torn away, pulled right out. The basket itself was square in design, but the rattan had come apart at one corner, nothing holding it together. It had taken a savage blow, and Aubrey was gripped with a mental image of the balloon striking the hard cloud at high speed and dragging across it for a couple hundred yards, the wicker coming apart in a series of shattering cracks.
“They would’ve left me,” fat Marshall wrote forlornly, but no one had ever been going to depart in the wreck of the hot-air balloon. If someone had tried to fire up the burner, the balloon would’ve torn it right off what little remained of the basket.
Aubrey pinched some of the slippery old silk, rubbed it between his fingers. He unfolded it with care, spreading it out before him. He was aware of strenuously keeping his own mind blank, his head as clean and empty as the high blue sky. It took him almost twenty minutes to lay it all out, the immense envelope of silk, big enough to cover a small single-story house. In several places along the pleats, it had worn away to threads. In others the fabric was as thin as a daydream. At last he sat with the bundle of cords in his lap, the cords that had been deliberately disconnected from the balloon. When it was stretched out before him, it was funny how much it all looked like a parachute.
They would’ve left me.
Aubrey was too tired to climb back onto the Junicorn, but it didn’t matter. When he looked around, his ride had vanished.
He dragged himself between the dandy balloonist and the dead woman. He could’ve pulled a cozy blanket of cloud out of the smoke beneath him, but he was sick of mist and haze. Instead he drew the silk of the balloon over him, tucking it in around him, and holding the bundle of cord to his chest. The gun was digging into his leg, but not painfully enough for him to unzip his jumpsuit and pry it free.
How long did a bullet keep? he wondered.
19
“DYING LOOKS LIKE A LOT of hard work,” Harriet said at the reception after the memorial, looking very smart in a white blouse and a trim gray jacket. “When you’re healthy, you think, no matter what, you’d want to keep fighting. Squeeze every last drop out of your life. But cancer, dude. That shit fucks you up. It must be such a relief to just let it take you off. Like the best nap ever.”
They were at the Morrises’, drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon on the back porch with June’s brothers.
The bigger one, Brad, leaned against one of the screens, the glare of the afternoon on his shoulders. Ronnie had plopped into one of the deep lawn chairs, sending up a puff of dust and pollen to whirl and glitter in a shaft of golden light. Harriet was perched on his armrest.
“There’s no sense in it,” Aubrey said, from one of the other chairs. “Who gets to have a full life and who doesn’t.”
Ronnie was already drunk. Aubrey could smell beer on him from three feet away, could smell it in his sweat.
“She did more in one day, without leaving her hospital bed, than people who live three times as long.” Ronnie tapped his temple meaningfully. “She did stuff in here, where time is more elastic. The stuff you think is all you ever know of the world. So if you can imagine a thing, it’s like you lived it. She told me once she’d been having an affair with Sting since she was fifteen. In here.” He gave his temple another profound tap. “She remembered hotel rooms. She remembered sitting at an outdoor café in Nice with him when the rain began to fall. That was her gift. She was predisposed to two things: imagination and cancer.”
Aubrey thought this was a jarring association, the sort of wisdom you only ever heard from the mouths of drunks. Imagination was a cancer of the heart. All those lives you carried around in your head that you wouldn’t ever get to live—they filled you up until you couldn’t breathe. When he thought of Harriet slipping on to the rest of her life without him, he felt like he couldn’t breathe.
“What about her list?” Harriet asked. “What about all this stuff she wants me to do for her? Jumping out of a plane, surfi
ng the coast of Africa?” Harriet was beginning to cry again. She hardly seemed aware she was doing it. She cried easily and beautifully. “What about this list of regrets she left me with?”
Ronnie and Brad shook their heads. Harriet looked at them with wide-eyed wonder and hope, as if they were about to reveal some startling bequest that June had left behind for her beloved best friend.
“It’s not stuff she wished she did,” Ronnie said. “It’s stuff she wants you to do, ’cause of how much fun she had doing it herself. In her head.” Tapping his temple again. If he didn’t give himself a headache with the beer, he would with all the tapping.
“What are we doing first?” Aubrey asked.
Harriet looked at him blankly. He had the uneasy idea she’d briefly forgotten he was there.
“We’re jumping for her,” Brad said. “Already made the booking.”
“We’re jumping with her,” Harriet corrected him, fondling the little Junicorn she’d been carrying around all day.
“When do we go?” Aubrey asked.
“Oh, Aubrey,” Harriet said. “You don’t have to go. You’re scared of heights.”
“I haven’t thought about heights once since I got on my antianxiety meds,” he told her. “Thank God. I don’t want to be too scared to share the most important things with the most important people in my life.”
Harriet said, “You’ve already done a lot for June. You made our band worth listening to. She loved the shit out of you, you know.” Leaning across the space between them to rap her knuckles on his thigh. “She told me that all the time in the last couple of months.”
“She felt the same way about you. You were her favorite thing to talk about.”
Harriet gave him a distracted smile and said, “What else did you and June discuss?”
Aubrey had the sense she was trying to steer the conversation somewhere, but he couldn’t see where. He said, “We talked about how she wanted me to move on. That’s what I want to do. I want to move right on to the first thing on her list.”
