The Uncanny Reader (61 page)

The foundation tells him everything about the wall and for a moment the man's eyes widen, but then he understands that no, there is no danger. Untreated, this wall will only slump and make the house more ugly. Nothing will collapse. Hearing that he relaxes and stands, and backs away from the foundation which watches him go.

“You don't have to worry about it,” he tells the residents' committee. “Maybe just fix it up, smooth it down, that's all you have to do.”

*   *   *

And in a suburban mall there is nothing to stop expansion onto waste ground, and in the character house the stairs are beyond repair, and the clocktower has been built using substandard bolts, and the apartment's ceiling needs damp-proofing. The buried wall of dead tells him all these things.

Every home is built on them. It is all one foundation, that underpins his city. Every wall weighs down upon the corpses that whisper to him with the same voice, the same faces, ripped-up cloth and long-dried blood and bodies torn up and their components used to fill gaps between bodies, limbs and heads stowed tidily between men bloated by gas and spilling dust from their cavities, the whole and partial dead concatenated.

Every house in every street. He listens to the buildings, to the foundation that unites them.

*   *   *

In his dream he tramps through land that swallows his feet. Missing men shuffle in endless, anxious circles and he passes them by. Syrupy-thick liquid laps at him from just below the dust. He hears the foundation. He turns and there is the foundation. It is taller. It has breached the ground. A wall of dead-men bricks as high as his thighs, its edges and its top quite smooth. It is embedded with thousands of eyes and mouths that work as he approaches, spilling rheum and skin and sand.

—we do not end, we are hungry and hot and alone

Something is being built upon the foundation.

*   *   *

There have been years of petty construction, the small schemes of developers, the eagerness of people to improve their homes. Doggedly he makes the foundation tell him. Where there is no problem he passes that on, or where there is a small concern. Where problems are so great that building will be halted early on he tells that, too.

It is nearly a decade that he has been listening to buildings. It is a long time till he finds what he has been looking for.

The block is several storeys high, built thirty years before from shoddy concrete and cheap steel by contractors and politicians who got rich on the deficiencies. The fossils of such corruption are everywhere. Mostly their foundering is gradual, doors sticking, elevators failing, subsidence, over years. Listening to the foundation, the man knows something here is different.

He grows alarmed. His breath is short. He murmurs to the buried wall of dead, begging them to be sure.

The foundation is in swampland—the dead men can feel the ooze rising. The basement walls are crumbling. The supports are veined, infinitesimally, with water. It will not be long. The building will fall.

“Are you sure?” he whispers again, and the foundation looks at him with its countless dust-thick and haemorrhaged eyes and says yes. Trembling, he stands and turns to the caretaker, the housing manager.

“These old things,” he says. “They ain't pretty, and they weren't well built, and yeah you're going to get damp, but you've got nothing to worry about. No problem. These walls are solid.”

He slaps the pillar beside him and feels vibrations through to the water below it, through the honeycomb of its eroded base, into the foundation where the dead men mutter.

*   *   *

In the nightmare he kneels before the wall of torn-up flesh. It is chest-high now. The foundation is growing. It is nothing without a wall, a temple.

He wakes crying and stumbles into his basement. The foundation whispers to him and it is above the ground now; it stretches into his walls.

*   *   *

The man has weeks to wait. The foundation grows. It is slow, but it grows. It grows up into the walls and down, too, extending into the earth, spreading its base, underpinning more and more.

Three months after he visited the high-rise he sees it on the local news. It looks like someone who has suffered a stroke; its side is slack, tremulous. Its southern corner has slumped and sandwiched on itself, opening up its flesh to forlorn half-rooms that teeter at the edge of the air. Men and women are hauled out on stretchers.

Figures flutter across the screen. Many dead. Six are children. The man turns the volume up to drown out the whispers of the foundation. He begins to cry and then is sobbing. He hugs himself, croons his sadness; he holds his face in his hands.

“This is what you wanted,” he says. “I paid you back. Please, leave me alone. It's done.”

In the basement he lies down and weeps on the earth, the foundation beneath him. It looks up from its random gargoyle poses. It blinks dust out of its dead eyes and watches. Its stare burns him.

“There's something for you to eat,” he whispers. “God, please. It's done, it's done. Leave me alone. You have something to eat. I've paid it back. I've given you something.”

In the smogged dream he keeps walking and hears the static calls of lost and lonely comrades. The foundation stretches out across flattened dunes. It whispers in its choked voice as it has since that first day.

*   *   *

He helped build the foundation. A long way away. Between two foreign countries, while borders were in chaos. He had come through. First Infantry (Mechanized). In the last days of February, ten years ago. The conscripted opposition, hunkered down in trenches in the desert, their tools poking out through wire, sounding off and firing.

The man and his brigade came. They patted down the components vigorously, mixed up the cement with a half-hour pounding, howitzers and rockets commingling grit and everything else stacked in the sunken gutters of men like pestles and mortars, pasting everything into a good thick red base. The tanks came with their toylike motion, gunstalks rotating but silent. They did their job with other means. Plows mounted at their fronts, they traced along the lines dug in the dirt. With humdrum efficiency they shunted the hot sand into the trenches, pouring it over the contents, the mulch and ragged soup and the men who ran and tried to fire or to surrender or to scream until the desert dust gushed in and encased them and did its job, funnelling into them so their sounds were choked and they became frantic, then sluggish and still, packed the thousands down together with their friends and the segments of their friends, in their holes and miles of dugout lines.

Behind the tanks with their tractor-attachments M2 Bradleys straddled the lines of newly piled-up sand where protrusions showed the construction unfinished, the arms and legs of men beneath, some still twitching like insects. The Bradleys hosed the building site with their 7.62 mms, making sure to shove down all the material at the top, anything that might get out, making it patted down.

And then he had come behind, with the ACEs. Armored Combat Earthmovers, dozers with the last of the small-arms pinging against their skins. He had finished off the job. With his scoop, he had smoothed everything away. All the untidy detritus of the building work, the sticks and bits of wood, the sand-clogged rifles like sticks, the arms and legs like sticks, the sand-blasted heads that had tumbled slowly with the motion of the earth and now protruded. He flattened all the projections from the ground, smeared them across the dirt and smeared more dirt across them to tidy them away.

On the 25th of February in 1991, he had helped build the foundation. And as he looked out across the spread-out, flattened acres, the desert made neat, wiped clean for those hours, he had heard dreadful sounds. He had seen suddenly and terribly through the hot and red-set sand and earth to the dead, in their orderly trenches that angled like walls, and intersected and fanned out, that stretched for miles, like the plans not of a house or a palace but a city. He had seen the men made into mortar, and he had seen them looking at him.

*   *   *

The foundation stretched below everything. It spoke to him. It would not be quiet. In his dream or out.

He thought he would leave it behind him in the desert, in that unnatural flat zone. He thought the whispering would dissipate across the thousands of miles. He had come home. And then his dream had started. His purgatory of well fires and bloody sky and dunes, where his dead comrades were lost, made feral by loneliness. The others, the foundation, the other dead, were thousands strong. They were endless.

—morning of goodness, they whispered to him in their baked dead voices. morning of light

—praise be to god

—you built us so

—we are hot and alone. we are hungry. we eat only sand. we are full of it. we are full but hungry. we eat only sand

He had heard them nightly and tried to forget them, tried to forget what he had seen. But then he dug a pit in his yard, to put down a foundation for his house, and he had found one waiting. His wife had heard him screaming, had run out to see him scrabbling in the hole, bloodying his fingers to get out. Dig deep enough, he told her later, though she did not understand, it's there already.

A year after he had built it and first seen it, he had reached the foundation again. The city around him was built on that buried wall of dead. Bone-filled trenches stretched under the sea and linked his home to the desert.

He would do anything not to hear them. He begged the dead, met their gaze. He prayed for their silence. They waited. He thought of the weight on them, heard their hunger, at last decided what they must want.

“Here's something for you,” he shouts, and cries again, after the years of searching. He pictures the families in the apartment tumbling down to rest among the foundation. “There's something for you; it can be over. Stop now. Oh, leave me alone.”

He sleeps where he lies, on the cellar floor, walked across by spiders. He goes to his dream desert. He walks his sand. He hears the howling of lost soldiers. The foundation stretches up for countless thousands of yards, for miles. It has become a tower in the charred sky. It is all the same material, the dead, only their eyes and mouths moving. Little clouds of sand sputter as they speak. He stands in the shadow of the tower he was made to build, its walls of shredded khaki, flesh and ochre skin, tufted with black and dark red hair. From the sand around it oozes the same dark liquid he saw in his own yard. Blood or oil. The tower is like a minaret in Hell, some inverted Babel that reaches the sky and speaks only one language. All its voices still saying the same, the words he has heard for years.

*   *   *

The man wakes. He listens. For a long time he is motionless. Everything waits.

When he cries out it starts slow and builds, growing louder for long seconds. He hears himself. He is like the lost American soldiers in his dream.

He does not stop. Because it is day, the day after his offering, after he gave the foundation what he thought it hankered for, after he paid it back. But he can still see it. He can still hear it, and the dead are still saying the same things.

They watch him. The man is alone with the foundation, and he knows that they will not leave.

He cries for those in the apartment that fell, who died for nothing at all. The foundation wants nothing from him. His offering means nothing to the dead in their trenches, crisscrossing the world. They are not there to taunt or punish or teach him, or to exact revenge or blood-price, they are not enraged or restless. They are the foundation of everything around him. Without them it would crumble. They have seen him, and taught him to see them, and they want nothing from him.

All the buildings are saying the same things. The foundation runs below them all, fractured and made of the dead, and it is saying the same things.

—we are hungry. we are alone. we are hot. we are full but hungry

—you built us, and you are built on us, and below us is only sand

 

GOTHIC NIGHT

Mansoura Ez Eldin

Translated by Wiam El-Tamami

His departure came without explanation.

*   *   *

His destination was remote, he said, uttering a series of ominous sounds—the name of a city I had never heard of before. His leaving seemed a matter of fate. In an instant I could see the city he set out for, with its ashen streets.

*   *   *

There are no colours save for the grey that cloaks much of the place, alongside surreptitious strokes of black and white. Throngs of people walk slowly in the faded streets, wearing grim expressions and staring at a still point ahead. A leaden silence bears down on everything.

*   *   *

There he walks, lost in thought. And I, outside the scene, peer at him worriedly, sensing the arrival of a giant with a black coat, sullen face, and heavy footsteps. Suddenly, chaos reigns: people run in every direction, trying to escape.

*   *   *

I feel the earth shake under the footfalls of the man in the black coat. I know he appears on the streets from time to time, stepping powerfully with the aid of his ebony cane. His sightless eyes shift over the faces ahead, until they fall on one that will restore his vision. He points his finger at the face, and its owner vanishes from existence. The giant returns to his blindness, awaiting his next victim.

*   *   *

This time, however, there was only the anticipation of his coming, and the tremors that accompany him wherever he goes. Within minutes, those who were running realized they had been duped, and went back to walking as before.

*   *   *

I scanned the throngs and found him walking with the same slow steps. I looked closer, in search of that cunning-fox expression that characterises him, but I could not see it. He adjusted the black scarf around his neck, raising his head to the sky like someone startled by raindrops on a dry day, then returned to his daydreaming.