Ghosteria Volume 2: The Novel: Zircons May Be Mistaken Page 7

  That look of fright and confusion that had flicked in and out of his eyes, my God, it had been mine, or rather the echo of mine. For now I grasped I had, in the split second preceding the first, seen through his eyes the other way. That is, I had looked out of him, out of his head, his brain, his skull. And I had seen – not him, prone upon the ground – but landscape, trees and a misty vapour that hung in air, and somewhat resembled... the shape of a tall old man, whose likeness definitely I, in earlier years, (in mirrors, photographs), had beheld before: my own.

  Myself. Through the eyes of the dead Zombie I had seen me.

  That night I called them together again, there in the TV room.

  “I believe it can be done,” I said. “I believe, if only for a second or two, I have already accomplished it.”

  They sat in silence.

  Like the set of a play, or movie, they were, as before, almost all seated, only the Knight standing. Their eyes, that seem to me three dimensional, bright and solid as those of physically living things, had fixed and now stayed on me.

  Then Coral started tearlessly to sob, and Laurel sadly stretched out her hand to Coral, but could not touch, and Elizabeth uttered an obscenity under her non-breathing breath. The Knight quietly stood to attention: he was listening to a briefing in the War Room.

  “I shall try the move again,” I said. “I’m quite prepared to do it tonight. The Zombie I’ve been watching is in the orchard again. Most of the others are elsewhere. There is a chance,” I added, I admit with some internal misgiving, for to say it aloud to them seemed to emphasise an unease I’d been trying to refuse myself, “a chance, once properly in, I may – how shall I say? Get stuck.”

  “You mean you’ll rush in to that filthy body and become trapped,” said Elizabeth. Her voice was cold as the Antarctic ice I mentioned, that itself trapped the research ship six, seven years ago.

  “Yes, I do mean that. To enter with total intent could be irreparable.”

  “Then, if you can’t get out, what do you think will happen to you?”

  “I have no proper notion. I may go insane, I mean my awareness may. The Zombies are mind-dead, if not brain-dead. They can’t reason, or seem not able to do so. That could be as infectious to an intruding life-force as the Zombie-plague was – is – to living tissue.”

  “Then you’re a damn fool, aren’t you, to try it?”

  “Maybe.”

  “No maybe.”

  “I was there a moment today. Or so it seemed. I think I’m not damaged.”

  “You escaped.”

  “No, El. I didn’t escape. I – fell out again, exactly like someone sliding carelessly out of a window. I must have fallen in the same way. But I’m guessing that even happened because I was planning to do it, if not consciously concentrating yet. Mind literally over matter.”

  “This is shit.”

  I said nothing.

  Nobody else did either. Coral had stopped sobbing. She was pleating her ghostly skirts, or thought she was, over and over, in one hand. Laurel was watching me, oddly impervious; I couldn’t tell now if she were sternly averse or vaguely intrigued. The Knight, I assumed, waited only for the Cry to Arms.

  “I’m going out then, in ten minutes,” I firmly said. “Does anyone want to come too? Not for you to do anything particularly, you understand, I don’t expect participation, let alone rescue if it all goes wrong. But if you just might want to watch and learn, and see what happens next.”

  2

  Elizabeth

  I don’t believe what he told us just now. I think he believes it. He imagined it, it was a fantasy – what my father used to call, so kindly, ‘Imagination Pictures’ – pictures, or movies, that is in the sense of films. He used to call it that when I told him of my prolonged waking dreams of playing piano concertos to a huge audience, or falling in love with handsome heroes out of history, who then carried me off.

  And we ghosts can imagine things even now, can’t we? We even imagine our bloody tears are still wet.

  3

  Laurel

  I do believe him, the Scholar. Yes, that was what firstly alarmed, and then made me wander about in a worse daze than usual. And then see old men in brocade coats! I think I shall follow the Scholar, as he suggested, but keeping back a little, not to impede or distract him. Then – well, we’ll see, won’t we?

  Probably very foolishly I keep asking myself now, if his gambit does work, how shall I then choose – the librarian has already chosen – whom I should pick for my new... residence?

  But however could I select from among these awful remnants – these things. To be frank, I would have great trouble, when alive, in choosing which dress or hat I would put on, hesitating over how suitable it was, how often I had recently worn it, if it helped in any way to minimise my un-attractions. While for dances, or parties at the house, my Mother, or Constance, or both together, would exasperatedly advise and guide me, as ever, with new clothes: “Oh, now, Laurel. Not that mauve. No, no, it will make your complexion even more pasty.”

  “Oh, how funny you are, Loll–” this being Constance’s sometime-abbreviation of my hedgerow name – “you must never wear green, dear! Your eyes will simply lose all colour. And you’ll look quite bilious. Make everyone else so, too!”

  In this way, we see I’m unfit to make a proper choice. And especially since the material I must now choose from is extremely suspect.

  4

  Coral

  I will not. I will not. I will not. Never will I. Oh – my father would think me even more vile. He would make use of that name he used, and which I overheard, so playfully then to Miss Archer, though to her he meant no harm, I am sure. A whoore.

  5

  The Warrior

  I shall walk at his back, the wise and valiant old man. Already, from attending on him, my mean of language is, to my thought, of better clearness. My Eliseth could not entrain me in this. But there. She is a woman. And it is that I am ever learned in any matter by my own kind, men. I would die to serve my lady. But my slowen mind can not, of she, nor the female race, gage any teaching but little.

  Then so, I to hind, will watch on him, and what he may do.

  And if he is able, then I too, as have he, will seek and make choisn, and accomplis all.

  PART FOUR

  Gravely Embracing

  (The Scholar): As I went out again into the grounds of the house, I believe my mind, anxious and over-excited at my task, began to indulge in – not precisely displacement activity – but a sort of displacement thinking. Roughly or exactly, I was working out, dependent on my knowledge of them, my approximate age at the time of each of my fellow ghosts’ deaths. (Obviously, this did not apply in either Coral, or the Knight’s case. He certainly had out-deathed us all, centuries before any of us were born).

  When El died, around 1974 or 5, I had been fifty-eight – sixty. When Laurel died in 1918 – I was a boy of three or four. As for Coral, I had deduced her exit occurred in the 1870’s. I then arrived on earth some thirty-six to forty-six years after she left it. Have I pointed out I am, rather ridiculously, the oldest in age among them, but the youngest in ghosthood? An elderly baby, full of infantile newness, needs, and teenage solutions.

  Once a church bell could sometimes be heard ringing from the church still standing a few miles off below the upland. But by 2012 it was no longer rung, and by now, naturally, no one attends the church at all. Oddly though, tonight, I seemed to sense its musical if tinny notes. I knew that the darkness had circled round to three in the morning.

  No moon, but the stars, unpolluted by lights, were brilliant as faceted, true diamonds, some of them even showing their colour tints, yellowish or palest blue, and there a tawny one, the eye of a fierce, space-hunting wolf.

  He – my ‘prey’ – was nowhere to be seen.

  This seemed ominously apt. I had screwed my courage to the sticking place – and my ‘victim’ had skived off.

  Someone was behind me, also, walking almost in my
footsteps. The Knight. I had expected him, and there he was. We did not exchange even a single incoherent word.

  In the end I reached a break in the fruit trees. Now and then, even at night, one might find rabbits or hares feeding on elements in the grass. I did not know as a rule what they identified as food, but generally my presence did not disturb them, although many of their number seemed to sense me. Inevitably, a Zombie presence scared most or all of them from the vicinity. Tonight, no hares or rabbits.

  I looked out from the trees, away towards the ruined fields, down to where a village had once been. (I gather it was more or less deserted by the early 1950’s, having been twice emptied of young men by two world wars.) A strange phenomenon was in the air, which occasionally I had noted before. Where the view was open, and the sky open too, ripples of thin light seemed wavering down from the stars, filmy silvery ribbons. How beautiful this world is, despite all its horrors and injustices. How can we bear, given any choice, to leave?

  Then, only then, (I read something, no doubt superstitiously, into this), My Zombie, for want of better words, lurched forth into the benighted morning.

  He was coming up the hill, hurrying even, in the strangest way as if, pardon my elderly infantile take on this – as if he was aware he was late for our rendezvous.

  I braced myself. I drew in a huge and non-actual breath.

  And then I fired my will, my essence, my ghost, like liquid lead from some appalling cannon, outward, forward, directly at him.

  We fell as one. It took me some while to accept why. We had fallen as one – since now – one amalgamated Thing we were, he and I. I had done as I meant to, and entered into him. In his body, flesh, blood, brain – and I was him. He was – I.

  (Elizabeth): Somehow, through the thick wall of night, I felt it happen. Or that was only some hysterical nonsense left over in me.

  But it was like a deep, subsonic boom. Unheard yet absolute.

  I thought, Christ, that stupid old man has –

  I thought, Oh God, librarian, are you all right?

  The very ground seemed to shift – no, not like that absurd analogy for sex. (The earth doesn’t move when you come. You do, we do. We erupt from our ecstatic bodies in a fit of bliss and refound connection to everything. We move. The earth remains our shelter and our lover and mother, and kindly watches us as we hit the sky, then fall, gentle as silver ribbons, back into her arms. There, she says to us, sweet and low, well done. Now you know the truth, my baby. But of course, God help us, we forget.)

  (Laurel): Treading behind the Knight, I believe neither he nor the old man noted me. My common lot always! But for once, perhaps, helpful.

  I saw everything that happened, and was duly terrified, when the librarian and the creature fell, flailing, in a sort of collision, both of them, limbs and motion. Generally I don’t see the others, (nor myself, those parts of myself I am able to see, for mirrors do not reflect us), as anything other than solid. But the old man became at first translucent, then transparent, and so disappeared. It seemed to me then the monster had swallowed him up, absorbed and killed the last living filaments of him. Yet then – then – the Zom-thing rose again to its feet. And as it was standing there, I saw in it a just discernible difference. How it stood was more coherent, less haphazard. How it turned its head, which all at once no longer seemed that of a disjointed doll. And it spoke. Or its voice spoke. Although its words were incomprehensible, and drool ran from its lips, yet they somehow conveyed to me a sense of triumph. But was this the triumph of the creature, having destroyed the librarian? Or of the librarian, who truly had, maybe, possessed it?

  Then, feeling the dribble on its chin, which surely never before in its zomboid state it would have done, it lifted up its right arm to wipe its mouth.

  There was an awful crack, huge in the still cold air, a noise as if someone had snapped a thick strong twig.

  And the thing bent over, clutching at its right arm with the left, and cursing, for I could make out parts of the oaths more clearly than I had the few words of speech.

  The Knight ran forward however, and he flung his own arm about the reeling creature to support it – and of course, the Knight’s ghost arm passed right through the physical body of it.

  After which we stood, all three – or four? – turned to a kind of stone with alarm and amazement. And all our quartet of paralysed, unasked and unanswered questions falling round us, like a glittering shower of winter snow.

  (Coral): From a window, high up, I saw. I do not know what really happened. Now I am crouching below the window-sill, on the floor. The old gentleman has gone. We have lost him. Where is Elizabeth? In a minute I will collect myself and run to find her. What else is there to do?

  (The Warrior): Himself he have gained his victory. So I credit. I stay to wait on him, for though his face now is that of another man, yet now that same seems full manlike, as before this creature was never.

  (The Scholar): When the Second World War began I was in my early twenties; I’d been a small child during the 1914-18 rumpus, in the course of which, evidently, my father had died. We had never been well off, although my mother, certainly, came of what then was reckoned a ‘genteel’ family. She was magnificent, that lady, at concealing from us both, myself and Edward – Eddy – my younger sibling – he born some five months after our father’s death in France – that her heart had been broken. But inevitably I must conclude that Eddy’s death smashed any healing of her heart that he, and I, had been able to achieve. After her death, I was foisted on various relatives – cousins, once a diabolical aunt known as Sissy, (whom I called “Hissy” in secret). Luckily I managed well at school despite the rest, and finally won my place, if not at Oxford or Cambridge, in Murchester. That town, with its own charmingly dreaming spires, became my family. I learned and grew there, and much later went back to work in the magnificent university library. Until ousted at age seventy.

  But to return to my starting theme. I was around twenty-four or five at the outbreak, (as they were pleased to call it), of the second major war. I was even then at Murchester, although I had also done some travelling through Europe, writing essays on my sojourns in Rome, Paris, Athens and Vienna. I seem to have been largely oblivious, possibly due to personally-benign unawareness, of the rising tides of power-hunger and Fascism. To start with I, like others, thought – or hoped – no war would occur. When it did I carried on, like countless thousands of others, head firmly cemented in the sand. However, time and evil marched on, and in the end it seemed I should be called up – extraordinary phrase. Called up like the dead, I suppose, from my inertia and cowardice. I did not, needless to say, wish to go. The programme of Army Life and ‘Discipline’ horrified me far more, I have to admit, than the notion of killing, or being killed. I did not besides think I could die, at first, which may only have been the euphoria of youth. But I began to be haunted by dreams of my father’s death, mown down on a murderous shore, and also of Eddy’s death, howling at first in agony, and then sedated to a corpse – even through both these events had been somewhat concealed from me at the time.

  An old tale: a friend at Murchester pulled some strings for me. I had to leave my intellectual work, but ended with a war-assisting desk-job in London. The bombing there was such that I, along with others I met, partly believed I would have been safer as a soldier, out of England and in the Thick of It. God knows.

  But here now we come to the salient point. We come to the reason for my new digression. We come to the thing I had (resolutely no doubt) ‘forgotten’ all those long, long, long years after, when once peace gloriously returned amid the blasted shells of bombsites, rationing, sad dark gallows humour and inane optimism, that marked the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, when I was thirty/thirty-five going on ninety-six.

  It was back in the Blitz night of a particular air raid; I have, now, no idea which or even the exact date – a penalty, one sees, for trying to wipe such memorabilia from the brain forever.

  I was somewhe
re near The Strand in London, having been lured out by a group of others at the office for an elicit steak of horsemeat, or some such.

  When the sirens went, (Sirens! Wails such as Odysseus never heard–), I took off for cover in a shelter near Clamber Row, and was going fast, when I met a man in uniform. A soldier.

  He was young, probably about two years younger than me, I being then around twenty-six or seven.

  He wanted a light for his cigarette, I recall, and we huddled in the lea of some huge old stone monolith of a building, while a match was struck – no matter the light, the enemy was already at work illuminating everything, and needing no extras from the citizens, for half the city it looked was blazing with bomb-bonfires. The sky was the colour of a blood-soaked pillow, lit up inside by cores of orange. The city itself otherwise looked already like a necropolis, the stony buildings dead, grey and hollow, empty of any living thing, yet glimmering with red stage-light from the incendiary rain. Now and then one of the deadly things came down, now far away, now nearer. It was like a storm, where the thunder and the lightning had married – a crash and flash, a purple blank, the scarlet aftershock, the roar and rush of gold and blood. And between each major concussion, a sort of silence, filled with roaring and emergency bells and cries and steep collapsing bellows and sighings.

  “Busy night,” he said, as we shared his cigarette – all mine were gone – against the wall. “I tell you, it’s safer where I was, and where I’ll be again, day after tomorrow. You shoulda joined up, Sonny.”

  I said nothing. It was a very odd thing. Our shelter, stone and darkness flimsy as tissue paper, seemed safe for now. As if we had, he and I, entered some integral pocket of space and time, just off the map of existence.