The New Weird (31 page)

They passed an open yard where a religious lynch-mob was holding an auto-da-fe. Several thousand faces, screaming in rapturous hysteria, were washed in orange light from the scaffold where a human shape was visible at the centre of a blaze. A procession of hooded penitents started across the road, each pair lashing the shoulders of the pair in front of them, forcing the through-traffic to stop while they passed. The old woman and half a dozen other drivers yelled imprecations, to no effect on the lashers, who kept to their shuffling ritual pace.

The noise woke Mona. Her eyes opened wide and she grabbed Vali's arm. "I'm dying!" she gasped. "I saw it! I saw Death. I've been dreaming. Don't take me to the house, Vali. Take me to the necropolis. I want to die there, where it's quiet." She looked around deliriously. "Where am I? Vali, are you here too?"

Vali stroked Mona's hair, trying to soothe her. "Don't fret," she murmured. "We'll be home soon."

Mona clutched her hand. "No," she rasped fiercely, "I'm dying!" As if to make the point she started coughing. "I want to die in peace. Out in the air, under the stars. Take me there, Vali. Please."

"All right," Vali said. "All right, sweetheart." She stuck her head around the carriage hood. "Driver," she called out, "take us to the necropolis."

"Aye; it's pretty this time of year," the woman called back, and at the next intersection turned the chaise uphill. They clattered through the city, a long uncomfortable journey, with Mona falling into frequent bouts of coughing. In between these she lapsed into a semiconscious state. Every now and again she would look around glassily and ask, like a child, "Are we nearly there yet?"

"Soon," Vali promised her over and over.

Siegfried wrote it all down in his notebook.

At last they came to the dry Geulah river. Nothing more than a trench filled with vegetation and rubbish, it marked the end of the city proper. It was spanned by an ancient metal bridge that was the only road to the necropolis, which covered the hills on the other side, its tombs and shrines rising from the former riverbank, a dark panorama of monumental stonework stretching to the right and the left as far as visibility reached. Sheol was old, and needed extensive space to accommodate its many generations of dead. Beyond the great cemetery there was only a no man's land of weeds and twisted bushes before the drop over the edge of the Teleute Shelf.

They clattered across the bridge to the end, where the beldam reined the horse in. Gwynn paid the fare while Vali gathered Mona in her arms and lifted her out.

Gwynn spoke to Siegfried, who had climbed out with them. "It might be better for you to go back," he said, "all things considered."

The boy turned up the collar of his coat against the cold, which was stiffer than in the city centre, and tugged on a pair of woollen gloves.

"Sir, I'm not afraid of the dead."

"The dead fear the living...those living who forget them and those who remember them too well. The dead fear truth and untruth, speech and silence." It was Mona who spoke, startling everyone, her grey eyes shining queerly. But she wasn't looking at Siegfried, whose face nonetheless registered a pleased and justified expression.

"Take me to St. Anna Vermicula's tomb," she said. "And I can walk. I'm not a cripple."

She took shaky independent steps when Vali, at her insistence, set her down.

The saint was buried a good half-hour's walk over the hills. Mona, leaning on Vali's arm, set a slow pace for them all.

Many of the greater tombs and monuments were as large as the houses of the living. Elaborate enclosures several tiers high contained stone sarcophagi stacked in rows, of which some lay in helter-skelter collapse and many in the intermediate stages of decline. Stone stairs provided access for those who wished to pay their respects, or who were simply sightseeing. A group of tourists were clustered some distance away, visible by their bobbing lanterns.

The silence of the necropolis was a tangible presence in the air, as if it were not merely an absence of sound but a thing with its own substance. The huge graveyard was entirely without trees, and therefore there were few birds of the night to disturb the quiet. Soft, short-bladed grass grew on the paths, muffling footsteps. The air was cold and very still; the noise of the city was remote. The night sky was marvellously clear, with a three-quarter moon and many bright stars that Vali fancied looked like white candles burning in reproachful memory for all the drowned hours in a person's life.

Mona seemed withdrawn in a world of her own. Gwynn, making a virtue out of a dubious discipline, kept to a place off to the side, where he was as unobtrusive as a veteran butler, and even Siegfried seemed, for the moment at least, to have run out of things both to ask and to write. To her wonder, Vali felt the first touch of an unfurling peace.

St. Anna Vermicula's tomb was a colonnaded mausoleum housing a black marble effigy of the warrior martyr, on the farthest hillside in the oldest section of the necropolis. The edge of the precipice was only a few hundred feet away across the untended land which began where the graves ended at the bottom of the hill. It was a sudden curtailing of the earth, with space and stars beyond.

Vali sat on the weathered steps of the tomb, her arm around Mona. Gwynn had walked a short distance away to smoke. She couldn't see Siegfried. It was possible to imagine that she and Mona were alone in the landscape of marble and weeds.

She fell gradually into a sense of timelessness, of being as still and untroubled as the tombs themselves, as if Time were a woman and she a babe on Time's back, and Time had put her down. She felt the mysterious life, the sense of familiarity with the stars.

Yet does it need us, any more than the seas of the world need ships? Vali wondered this, and answered herself, It never needed us or desired us until it made us, and then we, who are its organ of mind, desired it, and so love was formed and flung.

Mona stirred, bringing Vali back from her reverie. The sick woman was whispering something. Feeling strangely calm and adrift still ― had the stars moved? ― Vali bent her head down to listen. Turning around, she called out to Gwynn. He looked up from where he sat cross-legged on a sarcophagus on the ground.

"Mona wants to go down to the edge. I'm taking her. She wants you to come too."

Gwynn ground his cigarette out on the pitted stone, adding the butt to the several already there. He swung down and looked across the ragged land towards the cliff. "Fine with me," he said.

A wind always blustered across the barren margin between the tombs and the drop. That night it was a cold current that seemed to blow straight down off the stars themselves. But the no man's land was, in its own way, a beautiful place. The lonely stunted trees possessed a various, sinewy and surprising kind of grace in their wind-sculpted asymmetries and irregularities. Wildflowers grew among the untidy grasses, and these had the charm of things never cared for or interfered with by anyone. Birds came and went here too: wild geese, finches, nightjars, shrikes who had found ideal nests in the thornbushes onto which they affixed the rodents and smaller birds that were their prey.

Vali with Mona on her arm, and the separate figure of Gwynn, made their way across the delicate and brute ground, their hair and coats whipping in the wind. Siegfried followed several paces behind them, writing again in his notebook. More than once he tripped over rocks and pieces of fallen masonry he had failed to see, but he hardly noticed his barked shins and stubbed toes. His hands were trembling with excitement. He wasn't going to give this article to
Verbal Nerve.
Better publications would want it. He basked for a moment in the vision of a career reporting on the lives of the rich and dangerous, as one who had been admitted into their world. Realising he was running out of paper, he wrote as minutely as he could.

When they were about fifty yards from the edge, Mona insisted that she could walk unaided.

Crossing wasteland, Siegfried jotted. Miss Skye a fragile pilgrim or refugee, Miss Jardine gallant. At the edge ― long way down.

It was indeed a long way. The escarpment dropped over a kilometre -but it might have been a hundred, for there was nothing to give a sense of scale ― down to a dead ocean of sand that was dark bluish indigo in the moonlight, on which lay the faintly silver, irregular maculae of salt deposits. Here and there the sand surrounded weathered buttes and chimneys of rock. On the horizon the curve of the planet was clearly visible, an edge beyond the one on which they stood.

Siegfried stood next to Gwynn, close enough that he could smell the man's floral aftershave. He drew himself up and squared his shoulders. He was beginning to feel part of the team now, a companion to heroes. He narrowed his eyes and sucked in his cheeks a little, trying to copy Gwynn's pensive scowl.

"They say there are more bones under those sands than in all of the necropolis," Mona related hazily.

Vali tried to remember when Mona had talked about things other than death.

Mona started to say something else, but abruptly broke off coughing. A thimbleful of blood escaped her lips and fell, beginning a long fall to the dry world below. More drops followed.

Vali was grateful when Gwynn drew Siegfried away. She lowered Mona to the ground and tried to shield her from the wind. "Such a mess we've made," she muttered, as she took the handkerchief out of Mona's coat pocket and put it in her hand. "A damn fine mess." She was unsure why she included herself in the accusation, except that to separate herself from Mona, now, would be a pain too far. But still she felt calm, and wondered if she was developing apathy as an instinctive stratagem for survival, withdrawing from all care like a threatened snail retreating into its shell.

Gwynn led Siegfried to a spot where a flat slab of stone lay in the weeds a short distance from the cliff, far enough away to give the women privacy without being out of earshot. Gwynn sat down on the stone, flicking back his coat-tails, and gestured for Siegfried to sit as well. Siegfried complied with a certain weakness of knee. Following celebrities was one thing; having a famous person actually invite his company was something else entirely. He had never had the experience before, and found it a little intoxicating. He was expecting Gwynn to speak, but the man's attention was fixed on a nearby thornbush, a shrike's abandoned scaffold where numerous tiny skeletons still hung. A spider as white as the bones themselves was busy among them, spinning, moving with opulent flourishes of its limbs.

"Look at that," Gwynn said softly. "How precisely that spider moves, how delicate she is. A natural mathematician, knowing innately the geometry she needs for her work. Do you ever take time to contemplate the wonders of nature, Siegfried?"

Siegfried shook his head. "Not really, sir." He was surprised by the question.

"You should. Nature can be very inspiring. I've always found it so."

Siegfried put pen to the last page in his notebook. "I guess I'm too much of a city boy, sir. I mean, I'd miss trees and things if they weren't there, but this place is pretty bleak. There's not much out here."

"Not for a man about town, I suppose. You must know a lot of people."

"Yes, sir. A journalist needs contacts."

"A network of informants? What an admirable approach to human relations. By the way, there's no need to call me 'sir.' I'm not a gentleman, despite what you may have read in the serials."

"Manners are a defence against the world, aren't they?" Siegfried shifted his seat. "I don't read those magazines," he said, self-consciously. "I prefer the stimulations of adroit thought to those of sensationalism."

"Is that so?" said Gwynn. "Well, each to his own stimulations. Personally, I've always favoured drugs." He reached inside the breast of his coat and took out a slender, fancy case. Opening it, he offered the long, red-papered, expensive-looking cigarettes inside to Siegfried before taking one for himself. Siegfried attempted to hide his pleasure as he accepted the proffered luxury. Usually he was the one who had to buy smokes and drinks for his interviewees. Gwynn lit for them both, the yellow flame of the match doing a brief dance in the dark.

The tobacco was smooth and richly aromatic. Siegfried inhaled with abandon. By the rush it gave him, he was certain there was some kind of extra dope in it as well. He jotted a note that Gwynn was indeed a gentleman, whatever his own claim.

Siegfried stared at the tranquil stars and listened to the rowdy wind, putting to paper various thoughts that came to him, until Gwynn said, "So what is it that you fear from the world?"

Siegfried paused in his writing. "In general? Or right now?"

"Let's start with now."

"I'm not really afraid," he said, "just excited, I guess. You know, butterflies inside? Well, maybe you don't know the feeling. Anyway, you're famous, and I'm not anybody yet. Like you said, I know a lot of people, but most of them aren't very important. Interviews are one thing," he said, dismissively waving his hand, "but we've gone beyond that, haven't we? I suppose I'm starstruck."

"Starstruck?" Gwynn smiled. "Answer me another question, Siegfried. What do you think it is about people like us ― Miss Skye, our profession in general, even my unworthy self ― that so fascinates the good citizens of this town? That they will take an interest in what you write tonight, I have no doubt; but out of what matrix of habit, hope, imagination, appetite?"

Siegfried had been recording his own thoughts on exactly that matter, here and there among his other notes. He answered eagerly. "There are lots of reasons. You're artists. You're heroes. You're not chained by ordinary fears. You have freedom and power most people only dream of. Some people think you're angels, sent to wipe away the faulty so that the upright can survive."

"Ah. A generation whose teeth are like swords and whose fangs are like knives, to devour the wretched from off the earth and the weak from among the people."

"It seems you also have a poet's disposition."

"Those aren't my words. That was something I once heard a man of religion say. You like it, eh?"