The Burdens

by William Meikle

  I cannot give up hope. The grail—my grail—is down there somewhere, deep in the black, waiting for me. Annie is there.

  I know she is.

  She has to be.

  —LATER: DEEP—

  Time has no meaning here. I have given up even trying to mark its passing. But there may be hope—the nightmares of recent hours have all been relatively new ones, reminding me all too much of how close my Annie must be.

  I encountered sixty-four eggs at a bend in the stairwell, and the sword came up and struck them, hard, before I had scarcely noted their presence. Blazing light flared, a bass choir soared in a chord that seemed to go on forever, and I stepped forward into a place and time I'd rather forget.

  The room was lit from somewhere high above, neon tubes humming and crackling, sending harsh shadows dancing across thirty small faces, all turned toward me. Their eyes were golden—that was another story from another place, something else I carried with me. I remembered the moment well—right in the middle of a section of MacBeth. David Martin, a thin, well-dressed child in the front row, was reciting Shakespeare.

  To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

  Creeps in this petty pace from day to day

  To the last syllable of recorded time,”

  And that was when I'd felt it, a grumbling in my belly—the first sign.

  And now, here in this spire of stone, I felt it all over again. The nightmare and my reality melted and fused and became one. David Martin looked up at me and grinned as he spoke.

  “And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

  The way to dusty death.

  Out, out, brief candle!

  My stomach moved, writhing with a life of its own, a life which spread across my torso, wriggling and spasming as it made its way to my throat. I tried to scream but my voice was blocked by the crawling mass. I gagged and coughed and it left me in a thick stream, my cancer made flesh. It lay there before me, coalescing into a mannequin, a black slimy parody of myself. It had my eyes.

  It spoke to me.

  “Like father, like son.”

  It was still laughing as I brought the sword up and around hewing and cutting until there was only an oily spread of slime on the floor.

  When I looked up the children had all gone—if they had ever been there in the first place—and the light was already fading in the room, the black returning. Just before it went dark I saw soft greens, smelled flowers, heard Annie, still singing.

  I go down again, my resolve renewed.

  —LATER: DEEPER—

  The sword is the only thing keeping me warm. The chill is intense, and the blackness is thick, almost palpable, like moving through heavy velvet curtains. But the weapon sends a continual flow of heat that spreads from my palm to my whole body, and the bass choir hums in a constant drone that makes me feel, somehow, less alone, here in the dark.

  The Burdens are still at my back, even closer now, emboldened by the lack of light, although none has yet come close enough for me to be able to take a swing at it. I can smell their stench though, hear their breath, and their chittering, high and shrill as if in counterpoint to the hum of the choir.

  I must be close now—there is a new sense of tension in the air, and the eggs—along with the nightmares—are coming at closer and closer intervals. In recent hours I have walked, lost in the streets of a too large, too silent city; I killed a cave troll, I thrust my sword, deep, into a redheaded succubus and beheaded three slender, gray, big-eyed aliens.

  Then there was the thing that persuaded me I was indeed getting close. Two hundred and fifty six eggs had just calved into five hundred and twelve when the sword went up and down, the light flashed, and I opened my eyes to look over an all too familiar doctor's office. It wasn't a doctor on the other side of the desk—it was the reaper again, the long hooded robe pulled down over his eyes, and a blood-red scythe leaning against the wall behind him. But when he spoke it was in the same deep, cultured tones I remembered the doctor using that day, and the same two words that I'll never forget.

  "Six months."

  They didn't quite have the same impact now that they had back then. I stepped forward, intending to raise the sword and cleave the reaper in two. He stopped me by waving his hand from side to side. The papers, computer and telephone on the wide mahogany desk disappeared, to be replaced by a chess set—ivory figures, winged rat-things on my side, reapers on his.

  "Forgive the cliché," The cultured voice said from inside the hood. "But I need to get your attention. Do I have it?"

  The sword sent me some extra warmth, but there was no flaring heat, no soaring choir. It seemed that danger was not imminent. I didn't move any closer, but I didn't raise the weapon either. I held my peace, hoping to learn something to my advantage. The hooded figure sighed, and started to make my moves for me—I recognized the opening—the Dragon variation.

  The reaper reached up a too white hand and dropped back the hood. The head underneath was not quite skeletal, although there were no eyes—just black holes that seemed to sink back forever. Flaps of tattered skin hung over the scalp, and blackened lips, like old leather, moved around a wet maw of a mouth in which a gray tongue slithered, like a fat maggot bloated on a meal.

  "Do you like what you see? This is all I can offer you, if you insist on your current course of action."

  "I don't believe you," I replied.

  "And I don't give a shit whether you believe me or not," the reaper said, moving a knight to attack my queen. "Nonetheless, it is the truth. This is your last warning."

  And, just like that, I was angry—angry at the skeletal monstrosity sitting behind the desk, angry at the fucker of a doctor who gave me my sentence, angry at a world that let it happen, angry at myself for dying. The sword seemed to agree with me. It flared, blazingly hot, and a wash of flame ran along its length as I raised it.

  Despite the lack of flesh on the reaper's face, I knew a smile when I saw one. It reached behind it in one smooth motion and took up the scythe, sending blue sparks flashing from the wall. As it rose up from the desk, all appearance of being in an office faded, stone walls bleeding back in until we stood, face to face, in the darkness of a chamber in the spire, only the flames from my own weapon illuminating the scene.

  The Reaper banged the haft of the scythe on the stone floor and the whole room rang like a bell. Somewhere above me the Burdens squealed in terror.

  Then the fight was on. The scythe came straight for my neck, but the sword was ready for it. The weapon and my arm—my whole being—moved as one sleek unit, fused into a poetic ballet of fluid motion and strength.

  The reaper didn't stand a chance.

  The sword came up, went down, and the scythe burst apart in a thousand shards of glittering metal. The sword came up again, fire flaming along its length. Restless shadows flitted inside the empty eye sockets. The head looked up at the sword raised high above it.

  "This is your last warning," I said, and started to bring the sword down.

  The reaper turned and fled.

  I chase him.

  —LATER: DEEPEST—

  We went down. Sometimes I saw him, just ahead of me on the stair, but mostly there was just me, the dim light from the sword, and the excited chitter-chatter of the Burden pack at my back.

  There was frost now, making the steps slippery, but I was in no mood to slow my pace and I took them two, sometimes three at a time with reckless abandonment. What harm could be done to me that hadn't already been inflicted? What new ravages could befall me that was any worse than the betrayal of my own body—the very thing that had brought me here in the first place? Besides, I was close now, close to my Annie. Every so often I'd see a lighter patch in the darkness far below—a hint of green and the wafted smell of fresh flowers—and Annie, my Annie, singing the old song. She had always sung the anglicised version, feeling awkward using the old Scots words, but the sentiment was the same in any language.

  "Should somebody meet somebody,
>
  Coming through the rye,

  Should somebody kiss somebody,

  Need somebody cry?"

  I did indeed cry, hot tears that froze on my cheeks as I threw myself forward down the staircase.

  "I'm coming, Annie. I'm coming."

  The sword sent a blast of heat through my arm but I hardly noticed.

  At the same moment that I caught up with the reaper, close enough to put the sword in his back if I wanted to, I came, finally, to the base of the spire. I took my last step off the staircase—out of the black, and into bright, almost stinging sunlight.

  Somewhere a bass choir sang, accompanying Annie's high clear voice.

  "Should somebody kiss somebody,

  Need somebody cry?"

  The light blinded me—I could not see the reaper, could not see much of anything at all but sunlight and greenery. I smelled fresh flowers, and let Annie's voice lead me forward, but her voice started to crack at the next line.

  "Every lassie has her laddie,

  None, they say, have I,"

  I heard the sob in her voice, enough to break my heart. My vision started to clear as I stumbled forward.

  "Don't cry darling," I said, as I started to make out figures—a group standing in a circle ahead of me, backs to me. As I got closer I saw why her voice had cracked.

  I knew this place too—knew it far too well, for I visited most Sundays to lay flowers—fresh flowers—on my parents' headstones. The group of figures was standing around the same plot—and there was Annie, my Annie—looking down into a freshly dug grave as she sang. Off to her left the boys from the school choir stood in two ranks singing along. Danny Martin was crying too.

  I stumbled closer. No one paid me any heed—I was invisible to them—all their attention was on the coffin as it was slowly lowered into the ground.

  "No!" I shouted. "I'm here. I'm still here."

  Something answered from inside the coffin. Again, the gathered crowd didn't seem to notice. Annie managed to keep singing as the choir carried the tune for her, the sun kept shining and my friends all looked glum.

  The noise from the coffin grew louder—another nightmare—too much Poe. Then I saw it—the shifting rainbow aura as the wood split to let it shine out—and the black, shiny eggs slithering into existence, already forcing themselves out and through the cracks.

  The coffin rattled and rolled. Annie sang—then my burial box burst open, the blackness pouring out. I knew now what the eggs really were—my cancer, brought here with me, made flesh here with me; let out of its box and ravenous to feed.

  The hole in the ground filled quickly—sixty four, a hundred and twenty eight, two hundred and fifty six—each cell a nightmare in its own right. I had to step back as the cancer started to ooze out over the grass. I stepped on an egg that encroached too close and it burst—an anxiety dream, late for work—then I had to dance back further as the eggs—thousands now, spilled over the mourners and the choir and the grass and the flowers, engulfing everything that was left of me.

  I laid into the cancer with the sword, trying to reach my Annie. My nightmares popped and flowed around me—a dead cat in the street, driving on a four lane highway at speed without brakes or steering, the unicorn on the green hill that was my first remembered dream—none of them of any consequence against the surge of the cancer. It was a battle I was never going to win.

  The last I saw was Annie's blonde locks as she went under, still singing.

  "Every lassie has her laddie,

  None, they say, have I,"

  It was hopeless. I had fresh tears in my eyes as I backed off when faced with a wave of blackness—tens of thousands now, all spinning, all dancing. I felt stone at my heel and went up—one step, then two. The green was gone, the sun was gone—Annie was gone. There was no more grass or flowers, no more singing.

  I turned and fled upward. The cancer surged.

  It follows me.

  —LATER: HIGHER—

  The reaper was waiting for me again in the Doctor's office.

  He had a new shiny scythe, the rainbow aura from the cancer behind me reflecting in the blade as he brought it up and round in an attack.

  "You have had your last warning," he said.

  "As have you," I replied. The bass chorus swelled one last time, the sword gave me enough heat to start a furnace, and I thrust straight through what was left of the thing's face. The sword sucked hungrily as flame took the reaper's robe and started to burn. It seemed keen to stay, and I had no further use for it where I was going. I left the weapon there feeding and headed for the stairs.

  The cancer seethed and roiled at my heels, black eggs spawning at a dizzying rate, filling the stairwells and chambers below me as I ran, full pelt, up and away.

  —LATER: HIGHER—

  It swallowed the four poster bed, it ate the portraits of the great knights and it swept along at my heels like an incoming tide as I ran over the mosaic of the great serpent. I reached the tall inner chamber with the spiral staircase and took to the steps just ahead of the cancer. I heard a screeching chitter-chatter from high above. I had thought that the Burdens had all fled, but a score or more of them swooped and soared up near the ceiling, as if riding thermals within the spire.

  They did not seem in the slightest bit interested in either me, nor in the cancer, and I had no time to consider them. The cancer filled the area below me almost as fast as I could run. And now I had something else to worry about—a quick look back showed me that the eggs were eating away at the very structure of the spire itself. Fog showed through now in parts of the wall that had grown thin, and the steps felt unsteady beneath my feet, as if swaying in a light wind.

  That light wind had turned into a stiff breeze by the time I reached the top of that long spiral. The Burdens screeched as the cancer swelled and surged, and they swooped, still squealing, into its embrace. By the time I left the chamber behind it was full to bursting point, and the cancer was already spilling up the steps at my heels again.

  The floor bucked, hard, almost throwing me to the ground.

  I didn't have much time left.

  —LATER: HIGHER—

  I burst out onto the parapet at the very top, all too aware that the cancer was not far behind but, more than that, the whole spire seemed to be on the verge of tumbling down around me as my sickness ate through it to the core.

  The rat-king stood there, as if he had been waiting for me. He looked out over the view, to where the gibbous yellow moon hung above the black crags and the still sea.

  "One day, my lad, all of this could be yours," he said, and laughed.

  "There's no time for joking," I replied, casting a nervous glance at the doorway I had just come through. Rainbow aurora of lights danced in there—it wasn't going to be long before the cancer burst through and took command of the whole spire.

  "Why such a rush?" he said in that same comic high voice.

  "You made me an offer," I replied. "I think I am ready to take it."

  "Probably a wise choice," he said as the cancer bubbled up at the doorway. "You found your grail then?"

  I nodded.

  "And I'm ready to serve its keeper."

  "Come then," the Rat King said. He took a running jump off the parapet and with a whoop of joy soared away high above.

  The doorway filled behind me, my sickness offering to take me away—but I wasn't ready—I might never be ready. With a yell I wasn't sure was fear or joy I threw myself off the spire just as the cancer bubbled and oozed over the very topmost part.

  I opened my wings as the leap threatened to turn into a fall, and, as with the sword on my arrival, they felt like they had always been a part of me—and in some ways, I think they have.

  I soared high above as the spire was taken, collapsing in on itself into a bubbling mass of black ooze that flowed away to the depths, tumbling, lost, into the fog below.

  —NOW: HIGHEST—

  I soar, under a yellow moon that calls out to me. Some time s
oon I will go higher, but for now, there is too much to see, too much to do.

  I soar.

  ~-o0O0o-~

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  Cover image by Donna Kirby.