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!”
The End
