Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find…
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
—Stevens, “Sunday Morning.”
'You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
'They called me the hyacinth girl.'
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Od' und leer das Meer.
—Eliot, “The Waste Land”
It didn’t take her long to find them. A horde of the size it would have taken to wreck the philosopher’s lab wouldn’t disperse into the countryside. They’d celebrate. A block party, most likely. And they’d have it at the home of their most prominent member—where they could revel in the same normalcy fetish that marked Sophie’s lace cage.
So she drove until she came to a street crowded with walking corpses in ratty polo shirts and sundresses that only half-obscured open wounds and slowly rotting flesh.
They were in a good mood, so she didn’t worry much about driving right up to the house at the center of the crowd. They clustered on the lawn, staring hungrily at an unlit barbecue where some unidentifiable meat was being flipped slowly and clumsily with a rusted spatula. The spatula was held by a one-armed corpse of great girth wearing an apron that read, “Kiss the Cook.” This might have proved difficult, though, since he was also missing most of his jaw.
She left the convertible running and grabbed her shotgun. From the trunk she took a machete, which she slung across her back, and a flamethrower, which she carried across the lawn and set under the half-rotten stairs leading up to the front porch. Then she mounted those same stairs—despite their protest—and reached for the knob. It was slick with a slimy film, but it still turned, which is what mattered.
Inside it was quiet, still, dark. Dust lay thick on the floor, broken and smudged by many footprints. ‘Trude followed them inside to the living room, where eight dead sat as if in silent conversation, surrounded by empty bottles and cracked wine glasses. None of them looked like a leader. None of them seemed to be in possession of the philosopher’s device. She moved past them quietly, earning no more than a covetous stare.
In the kitchen, three females were laboring over a group of half-dismembered corpses—probably dead who had been taken by hunting parties, or had lost fights, or had simply been unpopular. They were breaking them into smaller, still-quivering chunks, which the little corpses, children who were playing a coveted role in the reconstructed families, carried out to the barbecue.
At the rear of the kitchen was a narrow staircase winding up to the second floor, in a tight spiral that left Gertrude dizzy. A hallway opened off the top of the stairs, with four doors opening off, two to a side. The farthest, on the left, gave off a little artificial light. She made her way toward it, her great booted feet creaking a little. She entered the room cautiously with the shotgun up in a shooting stance.
The room was sparsely furnished, gray and empty, with peeling wallpaper and a naked mattress. On this mattress sat two girls, one a child of eight or nine, one a young woman.
The latter was slender, beautiful, and forlorn. She looked almost alive, having eased her pallor with the contents of the heart-shaped case that stood open on a small writing desk. She wore a long, filmy dress the philosopher must have given her. It covered her corpse well, except for the arms which hung like marble, gleaming and cold. Though her eyes had the blank fixity of death, her face was twisted with living sorrow—but she had no tears, and her face without them was like a desert of painted stone. In her arms she held a lute, marked with a black star. Her fingers moved on the strings without grace or skill, but not without feeling, as the little girl beside her sat, rapt. Gertrude was taken a little aback at this, for she had never before seen the dead attempt music, and she had to be something of an expert on them, in her line of work.
The child was not so kempt as the philosopher’s lover; her dress was of a much older fashion, her skin somewhat discolored, and her left ear missing a goodly part. But her glassy eyes held a lively attention about them that was almost as remarkable as Sophie’s music; the girl seemed almost aware.[i]
But she was not pertinent. ‘Trude turned to the woman, spoke her name, heard the philosopher screaming it into the darkness.
“Sophie?”
She nodded.
“I’ve come for—“ She stopped, hearing a shuffle of feet behind her, seeing the woman’s eyes widen a slow fraction. She turned swiftly to see a closet she hadn’t noticed before, because it had been obscured by the open hall door and because she’d been distracted by the girls.
The floorboards creaked beneath a shifting wait, and then, with a slamming of doors, the dead began to boil up out of the closet.
She swore in a harsh whisper as she fired, pumped, and fired again. They’d set guards! She was angry with the dead for their foresight and with herself for lacking it.
Boom. Boom. Boom.
There were four of them, three dispatched with the five shells in the shotgun. She drew one of her pistols, then, and let the incendiaries blow apart the oozing head of the last. It fell burning and writhing to the floor, sufficiently inconvenienced to allow ‘Trude to escape.
She turned to the girls and growled, “The watch! Where is it?”
They made no move, forced no sound from their frozen throats. She leveled the pistol at Sophie’s head. This gained no response, either. On a whim, she tried pointing it at the child. Sophie flinched visibly, shuddered, and pointed toward the lower drawers of the desk.
Gertrude stood a second in shock; she had never seen the dead show any concern for one another before, not like this. Then again, she had never seen one willing to suffer dismemberment and disfigurement over a mere object, either.
Gun still in hand, she rifled the drawers and found the chronograph beneath a bunch of molding schoolwork from another generation. Its gold case and chain, its luminous face, shone glittering even by the dim light of the room’s one candle. She slid it into her pocket—
At which Sophie rose up, scowling, barely to be balked by the Intruder’s upraised gun. But she backed up and seemed to subside, staring at ‘Trude with a beseeching look that remained clear despite the soullessness of her eyes.[ii] She gestured with an icy hand at herself, at ‘Trude, and at the door.
Incredulous, she exclaimed, “You want to come?!”
Sophie nodded firmly, with a popping of vertebrae. A moment passed, in which Gertrude tried and failed to do the smart thing—shoot them both and have done with it. As soon as her finger began to tighten on the trigger, she heard cascading inside her skull the pathetic voice of the crazed philosopher calling out to his dead love.
So, instead of following instinct honed by years of experience, she turned to go, pausing only to reload her guns before moving back into the hallway with the two dead girls behind her. Unfortunately, the others had heard the shots, and there was a sea of them climbing the stairs. She heard their limbs, like dry trees grating their branches in the wind; she felt the tromp of too many feet unsettling the floor.
She considered the window, but it was too far down; she might break a leg, leaving her easy prey. So she took the familiar way out, cordite and lead and, finally, the razor edge of the machete sliding through flesh and catching on bone. She fell into a dark haze, lost track of herself and her purpose. Without remembering why, she forged ahead, because there was nothing else to be done.
She began to return to herself as she neared the door. Literally dozens of bodies lay in quivering bits behind her, the ones that could feeding on their fellows in the horrible frenzy that violence could not help triggering among the dead.
She burst out the front door and stumbled, breathing hard, onto the front lawn. Here, some of the less-observant or energetic party-goers had not bothered to join the fray. The might have considered taking a try now, but she quickly snatched up and activated the flame-thrower she’d left below the steps. They recognized it immediately and scattered shambling off in all directions.
She circled the convertible (making sure to check for unwanted passengers and the old arm-shooting-out-from-under-your-car-to-grab-you trick), tossed the flamethrower into the backseat, and hopped the door. She started the car and motioned the girls, who had followed her to the curb, to get in. They climbed clumsily into the back next to the flame thrower, which they regarded suspiciously.
Without so much as a “buckle your seatbelts,” she put it in gear and set the pedal to the floor.
[i] From previous draft:
In one hand she grasped a slender, severed arm by the wrist so that she could gnaw at its fingers. The other held a doll, attired just as the girl was, in an identical dress and identical well-kempt dark pigtails, face crafted, it almost seemed, of the same ice-white porcelain. The eyes were the same empty glass, and someone had torn off a part of the doll’s ear to match the girl’s—or perhaps it was the other way around.
[ii] Now she was staring, with more interest, at Gertrude’s hands and the devices they contained. Her mouth parted a little in excitement, almost as though she could take a breath—a short, sharp inhalation, a little, last gasp. Then she bared her teeth and lunged.
Trude raised the gun and fired reflexively, almost against her will. Her hands shook a little as she reloaded, and she tried not to feel. Later she would wonder whether it had been necessary, and later still, long after, she would wonder if it was what the girl had wanted—was it the finality of the gun or whatever possibility the watch might hold that had stirred her cold heart to action?