Armwrestling the Dead

by Andrew McEwan

all sooner or later returned, in one form or another.

  She paused in the climb.

  Schilling touched her shoulder. Ula covered his hand with her own and turned to face him. Although she could feel him, sense him, his presence was marked only by a ripple of light and distorted air. He shimmered, as if sporned by a desert. His breath was real, yet no lungs or nostrils could be seen to work.

  ‘Is it much farther?’ he asked.

  ‘We’re about halfway,’ she told him.

  ‘Would you like me to carry the basket?’

  She felt him tug at the straps. ‘No. I’m fine. You save your strength, Hubert.’

  The presence fell away.

  The path grew steeper and it was another hour before the volcano’s lip was evident, a smooth line against the blue sky. Ula reached it, set the basket down, and began arranging the picnic she’d brought on the edge of a kilometre wide caldera. Schilling stood beside her, taking in the view, outlined by a fine gauze of steam from below.

  He was staring. The vapour coiled round his transparent limbs, giving the illusion of substance. It worried Ula, this display of subterranean activity. The volcano was dead these past centuries. It did not sleep, so it could not wake. She followed his gaze out to a body of water. It was from this flat pool the steam rose, heated by rocks deep below, rocks that ought to be cool.

  She asked what he saw there that interested him.

  He saw a face on the water, he said.

  She was about to ask whose face, when he pressed two insubstantial fingers over her lips.

  A breath of wind blew the steam away, and Ula saw a young woman’s shy and amused expression.

  fourth: world in flux

  thirteen – arrival

  Time is relative, but so is space. Harry Schroeder, reflecting on a journey undertaken for no good reason, felt better than he had in ages. A new lease of life, he told himself, filled with unruly optimism. But wait a minute. Was this the right world? The newly introduced Ivan Evangela seemed to think so. They’d had a long talk, more a discussion, relativity a factor here too, for the gulf separating Harry and Ivan embroiled both space and time, was a third unknown quantity: Z.

  Harry was dry and out of cigarettes. His Zippo forlorn, made redundant, had become more a lucky charm than a lighter, the naked lady on its casing smooth and hard under his squat pink thumb.

  Ship’s time logged five weeks, five days, four hours and nine minutes.

  ‘This doesn’t fit my description,’ he said, still unconvinced, moody despite his well-being. ‘I hadn’t expected blue-green and white tufts. And cities! On a backworld trodden by only a few thousand company degenerates, doesn’t that strike you as odd?’

  ‘The universe is an odd place,’ said Ivan, infuriating the fat journalist.

  ‘Look, it’s Oriel. I know it’s Oriel. You know it’s Oriel...’

  ‘Yes,’ Harry interjected. ‘But does it?’

  i

  Moss City, population 240,000.

  Christmas cards poked from the waste-basket, tossed there by Jakob; this the office of Solomon Candy, the chair his son now occupied. Solomon had vanished on a fishing trip in early autumn, the bay filled with craft and hooks. Jakob sat with his feet on the desk. The last six months had proved extraordinary. He mused, as often he did, about the bookshop on what had been Crimson Boulevard, now Targum Avenue, a 24-hour supermarket on the former Atlantic Tearooms site, foil-packed comestibles replacing aged hardbacks.

  This morning’s Bugle lay open before him.

  The sky was a fresh shade of blue.

  The newness was Jakob’s to accommodate. He achieved this via alcohol consumption and a girl named Ellen, dark-haired and met in the freezer section. A girl from out of town, she listened. Jakob griped, the loss of innocence a terrible weight. He had stepped into his father’s shoes, unearthing a fascination for the arcane workings of factory and sugar content. News of Solomon's death came a week after Jakob’s eighteenth birthday, Ellen a future thing, like the business he now ran, from which he, like his father, resisted all efforts to pry him loose. It was suddenly his life, his history.

  The streets were jammed, the pavements crowded as hundreds of previously sceptical citizens made their way north to the airfield. Radio and television reports kept the mass informed of the spaceship’s progress, and now it was as if some huge party was to be thrown. Part of it at least, was landing. The images were hazy, the technology retrograde, slipping backward, this century not in keeping with its design. Jakob set out on foot, jogging with the first wave of excited sightseers, among the visionaries eager to witness the moment the aliens presented themselves. The airfield was fenced and closed. He found a concession stand and purchased a slab of Granny’s Handrolled Chocolate, the nostalgia angle a last marketing idea of Solomon’s, a gimmick harking back to his imagined (implanted?) beginnings outside the Globe picture-house. It was painful for Jakob to think of such temporal omissions. But today the pain was quenched by events in the heavens. Military personnel lined the perimeter on the far side of the wire, beyond them armoured vehicles, trucks, grounded helicopter gunships. Jeeps criss-crossed the tarmac. All the paraphernalia of war, he realized, a welcome party geared for aggression.

  Someone tapped him on the shoulder.

  ‘Ellen!’

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘How did you find me in all this?’ He gestured at the babbling throng.

  ‘Easy,’ she said, hugging her coat tight about her, breath streaking the winter air, ‘you stand out a mile. It was obvious you’d be near the front. I just pushed my way through, and here you are.’

  ‘Yes, here I am.’ Pushed her way through? Ellen was small and dark. She stole through shadows, Jakob often thought.

  ‘Did you bring your camera?’ she asked.

  He frowned, dying inwardly.

  ‘No? You forgot?’

  He nodded.

  Ellen wagged her finger and raised an eyebrow. ‘You can borrow mine if you like.’

  He loved her. She took and finished his chocolate.

  Half and hour passed - half an hour in which they were jostled and little happened above.

  His frown reappeared.

  ‘Now what? Didn’t I load film?’

  ‘No, that’s okay...’

  ‘What then?’ She turned to glare at a man who’d rudely shoved her. He cut short an apology and disappeared into the crush, abandoning two canvas chairs.

  ii

  There were no windows in the cramped pod, only universal eyes, external sensors, atmospheric probes and ground temperature indicators, bands of hypersensitive information gatherers imbued with the task of landing the escape vehicle in one piece, on firm terrain, in an environment hospitable to its contents.

  It wouldn’t have got the joke.

  The release mechanism shunted them clear of the porcupine junk and they were falling, sweating in each other’s teeth, two men with no way of returning to their ship.

  An impossible time later they hit, the hatch sprung, and Harry slumped backward through it, shoulders meeting grass.

  His breath misted. Ivan jabbed him in the ribs. He shuffled on his elbows till he was free of the pod, glimpsing an empty sky moments before a chute smothered him in lazy fabric. Rolling onto all fours he shovelled the material over his head and made his way clear. The view astounded. Rumpled hills, parkland dotted with trees, a chill wind gusting through naked boughs. In the distance was an ocean roar, but the only wavecaps were of steel and glass. The noise was assembled from voices, thousands of voices surging beyond the verdant, manicured horizon.

  Ivan appeared beside him, tall and agile, the body he wore made vacant, its owner plucked loose, or perhaps squashed down somewhere. No murder, Ivan contended; a simple usurpation. Harry didn’t argue, the equivocation for his own benefit. He had no wish to experience firsthand that visceral rape, but then he doubted the usefulness or aesthetic appeal of his own frumpy carcass.


  What happened next was like a scene from a movie.

  A musical...

  Dust clouds glittered with static. Skulls rumbled like buffalo, the herd leaping and gesticulating. Countless shod feet advanced at a charge over lawns and dormant flowerbeds, churning the cold earth as they spilled like marbles across undulating sweeps of evergreenery, trouncing bulbs and uprooting rosebushes, disembowelling litter bins and carrying away saplings in a flood engendered of flesh and momentum. Harry realized this crowd would stop at nothing, himself and Ivan their target, the focus of their excitement. Ludicrous as it seemed he was off and running, matching the long limbs of Ivan as the manic swell buckled and erupted, falling over itself as those at the front decelerated, the pod in evidence, the press of super-curious city dwellers rippling in a sudden awful crush of bones. Screams resounded as throats burst, drowning the aerial thump of helicopters, their mad gyrations buffeting the already panicked mass as it enveloped the artefact of a spacefaring civilization.

  Disappointment followed, and not a few fights broke out as people squabbled over scraps of parachute, pieces of heatshield and cubic centimetres of impact lining.

  Breathing heavily, the travellers watched from afar, perched on a wooden bench under a sad-looking mulberry. It was fascinating, yet eerie, the sight of all those people tearing apart an emergency escape vehicle.

  They’d overshot, a white and silver ovoid suspended beneath five candy-striped umbrellas, the military as the onlookers, mesmerized in those seconds, eyes raised to the sky