Darkness and stillness stretched out from Manrie’s dreams. She came awake and only knew she was awake because she was aware of the ground. Hard ground, its roughness hurting her arm. She sat up. Someone stirred beside her. A voice said her name.
“Koenbahki,” Manrie said.
“Manrie. Is that you?” There was fear in Koenbahki’s voice.
“Yes. Have I been someone else?”
“You haven’t talked. You haven’t eaten anything. Not for a day. Manrie…” her voice was low and urgent but another voice interrupted her.
“You’re awake.” It was Big Praeda’s voice, but it wasn’t.
“Who is that?” Manrie asked sharply, although she knew.
“He fell, Manrie,” Koenbahki said. “He fell and broke his leg, and then he made them bring Big Praeda to him. He stabbed her with the needle.”
“Then she’s in Taeyaho’s body,” Manrie said, casting about for hope.
“They left her. They…we just walked away from her. They left her in the darkness.”
“We should have slit her throat,” another voice said. Yoehnen. He sounded angry. “It would have been merciful.”
“We needed her cries to help us measure the distance,” the Immortal said reasonably.
“She refused. She stopped crying out,” Yoehnen said, and Manrie felt a little burst of pride at Big Praeda’s dying defiance.
“And the rest of us?” Melsa hissed from somewhere to Manrie’s right. “Are you going to leave us in the same way? Are we going to become beacons of pain?”
A pause. “Beacons of pain,” Big Praeda’s voice said with a cold consideration that Manrie had never heard in it before. “That is very poetic. Too poetic. Which spirit has been brushing up against you, scullery maid?”
With those words Manrie sensed them. The dead. Spirit everywhere around them in the vast, echoing darkness. Something touched her side, and she almost screamed. Then the something scrambled into her lap, and she smelled unwashed hair. The weight of the little form was familiar. Praeda. Manrie sat very still. Without any light, the girl felt like an alien presence, a small, needy creature that might bite her with sharp teeth.
“They come near us all the time,” Koenbahki breathed in Manrie’s ear. “They brush up against you and you can feel their memories.”
“Yes,” Manrie said.
“Manrie, is this what it’s like when they ride you?”
“It’s worse.”
“You must steel your minds against them,” the Immortal said, but Yoehnen interrupted him.
“Is she in you?” he asked. Then, when he was met with confusion, he said, “Manrie, has the Lady been riding you?”
“Yes.”
“Will you let her out?”
“Don’t, girl,” the Immortal said sharply. There was the sound of a body rising, and then the scrape of a tinderbox. It was so reminiscent of Manrie’s awakening in Daas Draebeye’s chambers that she expected to see Taeyaho’s face bloom into light above the lantern. The light swarmed across Big Praeda instead. The Immortal straightened and looked about, stretching Big Praeda’s features into a mask of sternness. There were rangers standing at the edges of the lamp light. “We must be strong,” the Immortal said. “You must be strong. You have spent your lives fighting monsters. These spirits are their own kind of monster. They want to steal your minds and bend you to their purposes.”
“Like you have,” Manrie said. She saw the ranger named Sinfaeya wince. The woman was still carrying the stick she had used to tap the hills and find hidden caves for barrows.
“I do not need to invade someone’s mind to convince them of the justice of my cause.”
“What justice? You steal lives. You kill people.”
“I am the last of the ancestors. I carry knowledge that the world needs. I’m like a book that must be protected. Like your bestiary. You carried it away from Libreigia. You understand.”
“I haven’t opened that book for months. I haven’t read it or written in it.”
Big Praeda’s face was stern and arrogant. “Then you’re not really a scholar, are you? Katemzan Prahmpara Droegee Daturi understood that there is only one thing to truly care about, only one solution to the problem of our pain. She dedicated her life to it,” the Immortal was speaking to the rangers, scanning their faces for dissent. Jaskra, the singer, was glaring back at him, and Yoehnen wore a hooded expression, looking out from lowered brows. “We have nearly completed our work. We are in a lace hole. We have already done more than anyone else. In eight hundred years, no one has managed to travel back through the Door of Hasra. We have.”
“Back to where?” Manrie asked. “This place isn’t different than the other lace holes.”
“You lie,” the Immortal said, then bent Big Praeda’s body to pick up the pack with the discs. “But your lies don’t matter. We journey further. I can sense the Previous World. It’s there in the darkness ahead of us.”
Manrie kissed Little Praeda’s head. “I’ll carry you,” she said.
“Manrie, you shouldn’t,” Koenbahki whispered.
“Why?”
“The spirits.”
Manrie looked at her friend, at her beautiful face. She nodded. “Don’t let the Immortal come near you,” she said.
They began walking, the remaining members of the caravan flanked by the rangers. Only there were others walking with them. Spirits who hovered just outside of the lantern light, following the discs. Manrie studied them. She didn’t know which one she needed. It was like stepping into the reading room of a library, and not knowing the method used to organize the books and scrolls. So she invited them. Invited them all, and left the ghosts to choose their ambassador.
A face turned to her in the darkness and seemed to recognize her. It grew, unfurling itself, like a flower opening. Manrie invited it in.
She had been in the chapel, praying at night, in a kind of parody of a chaplain, like you would see in tv shows or movies, where priests always seemed to be wandering in and out of a sanctuary, looking studious and peering into a bible, as if that’s all a priest had to do with their time. She felt a little silly kneeling at the altar rail, which still smelled of wood polish from the altar guild’s thorough cleaning that afternoon. But the girl with the multi-colored nails had just left, and she felt that she needed to pray. That poor girl, who smelled like a bad night, like spilled beer and someone else’s bed. She had made Magda very sad, and Magda didn’t think she had done much to help her. So she knelt and prayed in the dim red light from the sanctuary lamp, and heard the wind blowing in the trees outside. She closed her eyes.
When she opened them, the chapel was gone. She was naked, and warm summer air brushed her skin. The trees sounded different, as if they were an instrument that had been exchanged for a slightly different instrument. There was a great, reverberating silence. And then someone began to scream.
She was standing in an open space, having run to the north, where the quad should have been. Only the buildings were gone, and there was nothing but this meadow, tall grasses blowing and trees shivering around it. One of the RAs was trying to organize people, was calling out, and people were gathering around him. A tall boy. Naked, as everyone else was, and pretending to ignore it. Voices were crying out. There were little clusters of misery where the buildings should have been. Someone was saying, “They fell! They must have fallen out of a window!” And someone else was saying, “The windows are gone. The floor just disappeared.”
There was a slight Vietnamese boy who began pulling up grass. He was moving from person to person, trying to tie tourniquets. Magda joined him. It seemed like the first thing they should do. To try to care for the injured. Many of the students were dead.
His name was Tuân Binh, but later they would call him Lehtahnbin. The boy who knew how to do things. And the tall boy was named Ray Flinn. He came and stood over them as they labored, as if he were inspecting their work. Magda looked up at him, noting his handsomeness, the straight, even features of a prom king. He looked back at her and half smiled. Then someone began screaming at the edge of the forest. A creature had emerged from the darkness. It had too many legs and three mouths, stacked one on top of the other in an enormous head. It leapt upon one of the injured children and then everyone was running, abandoning the dead and the wounded, looking for shelter in the trees. Magda followed the Vietnamese boy, and Ray ran with them.
A nightmare of movement through the trees. Voices screaming, cries cut short. The sense of being hunted. The trees weren’t safe. Something was rustling in the canopy. Ray had found a fallen branch and was dragging it after him, its twigs and leaves fanning out, as if he thought that it could be used as a weapon. Magda hissed at him to leave it. It was making too much noise. He ignored her. He seemed to think that he could comb the danger from the forest floor.
They came to a cliff side, and there were other people gathered there. She was relieved to recognize Martin Probst, the art professor, and Karen Gardner, who taught biology. It was a shock to see their naked bodies, and surprising how quickly the mind moved past the fact of their nudity. Both Terrance Leopold and his wife Lisa were there, sitting on a rock, holding each other. Lisa looked at Magda and said, “Our house disappeared,” and the hard, practical syllables of her New England accent made it all seem real.
The memory shifted. The first baby had been born, and Magda was standing on an outcrop in sunlight, wearing one of the grass robes that Tuân Binh has learned how to weave. Terrance was standing beside her, and they were revising their census.
“There were four hundred and thirty-six of us who came through,” Terrance was saying, “And seventy two who died that first night. Within the past two years, two-hundred and eighty-three have died from starvation or animal attacks. There were only eighty-one of us left. Now there are eighty-two.” He recited the grim numbers in a hopeful voice, as if the birth of one child balanced out the death toll.
“We must find a way to keep the baby here,” Magda said.
Terrance looked at her. “They’re really going to leave?”
She sighed. “I’ve argued and argued with them. But they insist. Everyone must convert, or they’ll go. Layla won’t be moved. She has them all convinced that we can only survive if we all believe the same thing. Two years, and she hasn’t learned a word of Hindi.”
Terrance sighed. “We had students from all over the world, and it was the Indians and Africans who survived, for the most part.”
“It’s because they were being housed in Hannah Sarton. All the rooms were on the ground floor.”
“She was the first person Lisa and I found,” Terrance said. “Layla was. She was their RA. She was very good, that first night.”
“And those first weeks,” Magda agreed. “She asked me to hold prayer meetings. I should have known what would happen when she began to take over. I’ve always hated evangelical prayer. ‘God, we just want…’” she mimicked, and then she felt bad about it.
Terrance looked out over the forest canopy. “They’ll die out there,” he said. “They want to build a New Jerusalem. But they don’t have any skills. Beyond the skills that we’ve all learned, these last two years.”
“I think that Ilario and Gita can be convinced. They asked me to baptize the baby. Gita is frightened of leaving.”
Terrance nodded. He looked up at the cliff, then pointed. “An eagle,” he said. “Or what we’re calling an eagle.” Then he recited. “He clasps the crag with crooked hands; Close to the sun in lonely lands. Ring’d with the azure world, he stands.”
If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
“Tennyson?” Magda asked.
“Yes. But I don’t suppose Tennyson matters much, anymore.”
Another memory. As if the ghost were trying to show Manrie something, trying to explain. The boy, Ray, was standing in the doorway of Magda’s grass hut. She leapt up and went to him. She held him for a long moment, and he kissed the top of her head.
“You’re alive,” she breathed into his chest.
“Yes. Tuân Binh and I found them. They tried to build a village along the river. They were all dead. I think that most of them starved, but there were signs that something was eating them.”
Her relief turned to mourning. “Oh, Ray.”
“They had made a giant cross and set it up in the center of the huts.” He sounded angry. “It didn’t protect them.”
“No,” she said, after a pause.
“But you still believe.”
“I never thought that God would protect us. It’s enough that God’s with us.”
“How can you say that?”
She pulled away from him and studied his face. “It’s all very theological. Are you sure you want to hear the arguments?”
“I’ve heard them before. You and Karen used to argue all the time. You don’t anymore.”
“No. There isn’t much point.”
“You used to say that if God gave free will to His creation, then He couldn’t be in control. But what use is a God who won’t protect us?”
“I find it useful, to know that I’m loved. Despite everything.”
He studied her for a moment, then said, “Well, it’s over now.”
“What is?”
“Religion. It died with Layla and the others. And you don’t seem interested in keeping it going.”
“Religion, no. But faith. Love of God and neighbor. Those remain.”
“Love of neighbor, maybe.”
She sighed. “Let’s not argue, Ray. We love each other. Isn’t that enough? Why parse it? You know what Mark Twain said about jokes.”
“No.”
“He said that they’re like a frog. You can dissect how they work, but first you have to kill them. Love is the same way.”
Ray turned and looked at the little cluster of huts. “So you gave up the argument, because you’d rather love Karen.”
“Yes.”
“Even though it means that she wins.”
Magda shrugged. “What does winning and losing mean? Why would it matter?”
Now it was his turn to sigh. “We have to find a way back home.”
“Because of winning and losing?”
“Because losing is the only thing we do, here.”
“Are you going to go away with Tuân Binh again?”
“He has the right idea. We need to explore. To find the things we can eat. The things we can use.”
“And you hope that he’ll find some way to get us home.”
“Yes.”
Martin was building a palisade, and Chidozie and Adeya were helping him. It was odd how people had survived in pairs. Terrance and Lisa. The brother and sitter from Nigeria. They looked very beautiful as they labored, the sunlight warming their brown skin. Magda stood her watch and observed them out of the corner of her eye. It had been five days since Meredith had died in the woods. There was something out there, something insect-like and new. Tuân Binh had led Karen to the place where Meredith’s body had been found. She had returned with a chitinous plate, as big as a bowl.
They were chopping trees for the palisade at the edge of the wood. Kailash had spotted a creature moving on the lower slopes, and thought that might be the insect. It didn’t look like a climber, he said, so they might be protected on the terrace. But the palisade must be built nonetheless. A pretense, Magda thought, the illusion of safety taking the shape of cut saplings lashed together with grass rope. But Martin looked so earnest as he worked, so intense and fulfilled. He had built great sculptures of twine and twisted wood in their previous lives. She remembered him showing her a spider’s web, stretched across one of his pieces, leaning over and peering at it in the midst of a gallery opening. The memory was accompanied by the echo of a champagne tickle in her nose. She would never have champagne again.
“Champagne,” she called, and Chidozie said, “fufu.” It was the game that everyone played. Naming the flavors and things of their previous lives, acknowledging the loss. They made a kind of song of it, a string of words that couldn’t help finding a melody.
Adeya sang out “moi moi,” and Martin added, “barbecued chicken.” But after that they let the game die. Sunlight beat down on Martin’s woven hat. They only ever saw his bald head during the spring or autumn.
A tree fell in the little copse. When they had arrived, the terrace had been forested. Now it was mostly bare rock and blown earth, a seer band across the flank of the mountain. When they felled the last tree, they would have to descend into the woods on the next terrace, and brave the wolves that sometimes looked up at them out of the deep shadows. The creatures they called wolves, with their stacked faces and multiple eyes.
A shout from the lookout. Anya, whose voice was so clear and vibrant. Magda listened for a note of warning, but it was a joyful greeting. She gazed to the west, to the series of switchbacks that they had been calling a road, and waited. Martin and the siblings straightened from their work. They all had the same posture of straining expectation. They were all thin, their bodies covered in scratches from the grass robes, bruises from their daily labor. Martin had lost three fillings, and his smile was oddly jagged and endearing. He was the first of them to see the little procession coming through the trees. He raised a hand and pointed, and a smile seamed his nut-brown face.
They were carrying a strange creature, long and thin, furred but oddly insect-like, its body broken into parts. Small legs patterned its underside, and it had a strange, spiraled spike protruding from the top of what may have been its head. Like a unicorn. Ray and Tuân Binh had found it, and had gathered their war band to track it to its lair. They told the story that night, after they had butchered the corpse, removing its chitinous plates and slicing flesh from different parts of its body. They had collected the red ichor that dripped from it, and Tuân Binh had snapped off the horn. Karen was already at work on the flesh, trying to test it for poison, using the collection of concoctions that she kept in the clay jars that Martin had made for her. Everything was precious, but Karen complained ceaselessly about the jars, about how porous they were, and she pestered Martin endlessly about refining his firing process. Even tonight, she wanted him to come away with her and work. But he sat by the fire and listened with the others, the flames casting shadows up onto the brim of his woven hat.
“I think it was very old,” Tuân Binh said in his accented voice. Musical, the six tones of Vietnamese slipping into his use of English.
Ray laughed. “Tanbin said that it was lonely.”
“It was lonely,” Tuân Binh said with his small, mischievous smile.
“Why do you think that?” Lisa Leopold asked, sitting attentively at Terrance’s side. She had been an avid tennis fan in their previous lives, and always turned her head from side to side when listening to a conversation, as if she were watching a match.
“It kept raising its head and moving it around. Like it was listening to something. I watched it while Zay gathered the others.”
“It tried to stab me with that horn,” Kailash said, speaking quickly as he always did, as if he were afraid that the others would steer the conversation past him. He was sitting closer to Tuân Binh than to Ray, and Magda, who had spent her life paying attention to where people sat, wondered about that. Kailash had been Ray’s acolyte until now. This evening he seemed drawn to Tuân Binh, or maybe just attracted to the thin, spiraled horn that Tuân Binh turned in his hands.
“It tried to stab all of us,” Ray said. “It was Rishi who got in the death blow.”
Rishi was reclining on the ground. He lifted a languid hand and waved it in the air. “The savior of the camp,” Gita said in her beautiful voice. Neria, her daughter, had fallen asleep in her lap.
Magda looked at the child, and then at the faces around the campfire. A drum owl flew across the sky, and its reverberations beat at her ears. It was a clear night, and the alien stars stared down at them, and she thought of God’s covenant with Abram. “Your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own. But there will be as many of them as number the stars,” she said. They all looked at her. She smiled. “I’m sure that’s not quite right. I never could proof text.”
But Terrance met her statement with another quotation, an accurate one this time.
“Death leaves Us homesick, who behind,
Except that it is gone
Are ignorant of its Concern
As if it were not born.”
The memory shifted. The glow of the campfire died away. She was laying on her pallet in the grass hut, and concerned faces hovered above her. The pallet was very comfortable, the ground having shifted to fit her body over the many years she had lain on it. ‘Like I’ve left a thumbprint in this world,’ she thought, like St. Peter’s footprint in the Church of Santa Maria in Palmis. She thought of Peter’s words to Christ as he fled the city, fled his own crucifixion. “Quo vadis?” Where are you going?
They came in shifts, her friends, keeping the death watch. Xavier kept trying to spoon a thin soup into her mouth. She swallowed a little to be polite. Karen came at dawn and at dusk, placing a hand on her forehead and counting, playing at being a doctor. “I won’t be the first of us to die of old age,” Magda said to her.
“Is that what you’re dying of?” Karen asked. “How would we know? Anyway, you’re not that old.”
“I am in this world. So are you. Gita is already a grandmother.”
“So she keeps telling everyone.”
“You never liked them much, did you? The students?”
Karen sighed. She had created a compress of pressed grasses and moss. “I wanted to mostly do research. I didn’t love teaching.”
“But you’ve taken apprentices now.”
“Someone has to preserve the knowledge. I notice that you haven’t. All those little quotes of yours are going to die with you. Like they died with Terrance.”
Magda smiled. “A whole world lost.” She shifted a little on the pallet. She didn’t like the feel of the compress against her forehead. “Perhaps it’s for the best.”
Karen sat back on her heels. She had been plump, but the land had thinned her just like everyone else, and Magda could barely remember her previous body. “Doesn’t it make you sad?” she asked. “That some knowledge will die while other knowledge will survive? I wish I knew more about chemistry.”
“Chemistry brought us explosives and forever chemicals and plastics.”
Karen shrugged. “Everything has its uses. More of us would have survived, if we had explosives.”
“At what price?” Magda saw Karen’s face harden into the usual lines of argument, and reached out and took her hand. “No, let’s not do that. We’re among the few who still remember. Why are we always arguing?”
Karen studied her. “When you die, I’ll win the argument.”
Magda laughed, and it made her chest hurt. “You already won it. Long ago. I stopped trying.”
“I’ve never understood why.”
“True things don’t need to win arguments. They are simply true.”
Karen stared at her. Then she gave a small snort of disgust and left, causing a block of sunlight to fall across Magda as she pushed through the door flap. The sunlight captured the fall of dust in the air, and Magda stared up at, remembering the pattern long after the flap had fallen back into place and the light was gone. She smiled at the memory of it. “Stars,” she whispered to herself. “We will number the stars.”
Deep darkness, and a shape disturbing the air around her. Her breath, small and rhythmic. A voice saying, “I could preserve you, you know. I could give you a new body.”
“I don’t want a new body,” she said.
“Some children are born idiots,” the voice whispered. “Some barely use the bodies they’re given.”
“And you kill them when you switch. You kill everyone. Who are you now? What happened to Big Praeda’s body?”
“Sinfaeya would not let me be. I had to silence her.”
“And the other rangers? What do they think of that?”
“They know that there are too many of us. We are starving. You must find the door soon.”
“Who are you?” Manrie asked. “Are you Ray?”
A small chuckle. “Ray Flinn. Yes, I’ve used that name. I’ve used all of their names, at one time or another. It is how I’ve kept them alive in my mind.”
“Who are you?”
A pause. “I am not certain that I know anymore. Who is riding you now? Which of my old friends?”
She considered her lie. “Tuân Binh,” she said.
A longer pause. “That hardly seems possible. Tanbin was far from Hasra when he died.”
“Then you are not him. Why won’t you tell me who you are?”
She could hear the smile in the voice. “For you, all of these memories become the present. You see them sharply. But I have been alive for eight hundred years. I have forgotten more lives than you have lived, even with that chorus of the dead inside of you. You must trust me when I tell you that I am not certain who I am.”
“Trust,” she said. “True things are simply true.”
She could not tell if the words had any effect. The voice said, “The others are waking now. We will journey on.”
“And if we don’t find the door before we rest again?”
“We are running out of water. We will begin dying of thirst.”
“But not you.”
“No. And not you. If I have to, I will give you a new body.”