Sour-sick, an earthquake of thought and confusion shaking you, you find yourself swaying down a ravine path in Elysian Park. The dead, the dead are walking tonight. They gather tonight. Remember the man who talked to you? Remember what he said? Yes, yes, you still have some fragments of memory. The dead are banding tonight, forming a unit to swarm over the homes of the warm living people, to kill and decimate them!
That means Kim, too. Kim and the baby.
Kim will die and have to grope and stumble and gabble like this, stinking and falling away from the bone and have dull ears and blind eyes and dry, eroded nostrils. Just like you.
“No!”
The ravine rushes on both sides and under you. You fall, pick yourself up, fall again.
The Leader stands alone as you grope your way to him by the silent creek. Sucking hoarse breaths you stand before him, doubling your fists, wondering where the horde of the undead are, you do not see them. And now the Leader talks to you, explaining, shrugging angrily:
“They did not come. Not one of those cold dead people showed up. You are the only recruit.” He leans wearily against the tree, as if drunk. “The cowards, the persecuted swine.”
“Good.” Your breath, or the illusion of breath, slows. His words are like cold rain on you, bringing confidence and quiet. “I’m glad they didn’t listen to you. There must be some reason why they didn’t obey you. Perhaps—” you grope for the logic of it … “perhaps something happened to them that we can’t understand, yet.”
The Leader makes a bitter move of his lips, shaking his head back. “I had wild plans. But I am alone. And I see the futility of it now. Even if all the dead should rise, they are not strong enough. One blow and they fall in upon their members like a fire-gutted log. We grow tired so soon. Above the earth our discrepancies are hastened. The lift of an eyebrow is slow, painful toil. I am tired—”
You leave him behind you. His muttering passes away. The red pounding beats in your head again like horses’ hooves on soft turf. You walk from the ravine, down the street, and into the graveyard, with mute purpose.
Your name is on the grave-stone still. The cavity awaits you. You slide down the small tunnel into the waiting wooden cavity, no longer afraid, jealous or excited. The complete withdrawal of your various senses has left you little but memory, and that seems to dissolve as the boxed satin erodes and the hard square wood softens. The wood becomes malleable. You lie suspended in warm round darkness. You can actually shift your feet. You relax.
You are overwhelmed by a luxury of warm sustenance, of deep pink thoughts and easy idleness. You are like a great old yeast contracting, the outer perimeter of your old fetidness crumbling, being laved away by a whispering tide, a pulsation and a gentleness of moves.
The coffin is now a round dim shell, no longer square. You breathe sufficiently, not hungry, not worried, and are loved. You are deeply loved. You are secure. The place where you are dreaming shifts, contracts, moves.
Drowsy. Your huge body is washed down in movements until it is small, tiny, compact, certain. Drowsy, drowsy on a slumberous singing tide. Slow. Quiet. Quiet.
Who are you trying to remember? A name plays at the rim of a sea. You run to get it, the waves pluck it away. Somebody beautiful you try to think of. Someone. A time, a place. Oh, so sleepy. Close round darkness, warmth, tiredness. Soundless shell. Dim tide pulsing. Quiet contraction.
A river of dark bears your feeble body on a series of loops and curves, faster, faster and yet faster.
You break into an openness and are suspended upside down in brilliant yellow light!
The world is immense as a new white mountain. The sun blazes and a huge red hand binds your two feet close as another hand strikes your naked spine to force a cry out of you.
A woman lies below, tired; sweet perspiration beads her face, and there is a wide singing and refreshened and sharpened wonder to this room and this world. You cry out into it with a newly formed voice. One moment upside-down, you are swung right side up, cuddled and nursed against a spiced-sweet breast.
Amid your fine hunger, you forget how to talk, to worry, to think of all things. Her voice, above you, gently tired, whispers over and over:
“My little new born baby. I will name you Paul, for him. For him …”
These words you do not comprehend. Once you feared something terrifying and black, but what it was you do not know now. It is forgotten in this flesh warmth and cackling content. For but a moment a name forms in your thimble-mouth, you try to say it, not knowing what it means, unable to pronounce it, only able to choke it happily with a fresh glowing that arises from unknown sources. The word vanishes swiftly, leaving a quickly fading, joyous soon-erased after-image of triumph and high laughter in the tiny busy roundness of your head: “Kim! Kim! Oh, Kim!”
Pillar of Fire
He came out of the earth, hating. hate was his father; hate was his mother. It was good to walk again. It was good to leap up out of the earth, off of your back, and stretch your cramped arms violently and try to take a deep breath!
He tried. He cried out.
He couldn’t breathe. He flung his arms over his face and tried to breathe. It was impossible. He walked on the earth, he came out of the earth. But he was dead. He couldn’t breathe. He could take air into his mouth and force it half down his throat, with withered moves of long-dormant muscles, wildly, wildly! And with this little air he could shout and cry! He wanted to have tears but he couldn’t make them come either. All he knew was that he was standing upright, he was dead, he shouldn’t be walking! He couldn’t breathe and yet he stood.
The smells of the world were all about him. Frustratedly, he tried to smell the smells of autumn. Autumn was burning the land down into ruin. All across the country the ruins of summer lay; vast forests bloomed with flame, tumbled down timber on empty, unleafed timber. The smoke of the burning was rich, blue, and invisible.
He stood in the graveyard, hating. He walked through the world and yet could not taste nor smell of it. He heard, yes. The wind roared on his newly opened ears. But he was dead. Even though he walked he knew he was dead and should expect not too much of himself or this hateful living world.
He touched the tombstone over his own empty grave. He knew his own name again. It was a good job of carving.
WILLIAM. LANTRY
That’s what the grave stone said.
His fingers trembled on the cool stone surface.
BORN 1898 — DIED 1933
Born again … ?
What year? He glared at the sky and the midnight autumnal stars moving in slow illuminations across the windy black. He read the tiltings of centuries in those stars. Orion thus and so, Auriga here! And where Taurus? There!
His eyes narrowed. His lips spelled out the year:
“2349.”
An odd number. Like a school sum. They used to say a man couldn’t encompass any number over a hundred. After that it was all so damned abstract there was no use counting. This was the year 2349! A numeral, a sum. And here he was, a man who had lain in his hateful dark coffin, hating to be buried, hating the living people above who lived and lived and lived, hating them for all the centuries, until today, now, born out of hatred, he stood by his own freshly excavated grave, the smell of raw earth in the air, perhaps, but he could not smell it!
“I,” he said, addressing a poplar tree that was shaken by the wind, “am an anachronism.” He smiled faintly.
HE LOOKED AT THE GRAVEYARD. It was cold and empty. All of the stones had been ripped up and piled like so many flat bricks, one atop another, in the far corner by the wrought iron fence. This had been going on for two endless weeks. In his deep secret coffin he had heard the heartless, wild stirring as the men jabbed the earth with cold spades and tore out the coffins and carried away the withered ancient bodies to be burned. Twisting with fear in his coffin, he had waited for them to come to him.
Today they had arrived at his coffin. But—late. They had dug down to within an inch of the lid. Five o’clock bell, time for quitting. Home to supper. The workers had gone off. Tomorrow they would finish the job, they said, shrugging into their coats.
Silence had come to the emptied tombyard.
Carefully, quietly, with a soft rattling of sod, the coffin lid had lifted.
William Lantry stood trembling now, in the last cemetery on Earth.
“Remember?” he asked himself, looking at the raw earth. “Remember those stories of the last man on Earth? Those stories of men wandering in ruins, alone? Well, you, William Lantry, are a switch on the old story. Do you know that? You are the last dead man in the whole damned world!”
There were no more dead people. Nowhere in any
