John Lindqvist - Handling The Undead

At ten to nine, with the room sunk in darkness and the windo rectangle hovering above them, Peter said, 'Shall we go then?'

'Yes.'

Speaking was a relief. Spoken language had boundaries, t words not so loaded with significance and hidden meanings as the language of thought. By this point they had almost started to hate each other from the sheer saturation of information, and they both knew it. She knew everything about his latent homosexuality, his stinginess towards other people and his contempt for himself. She also felt the work he'd done to overcome his flaws; his longing for and terror of tenderness, of contact with others, which expressed itself in his self-imposed isolation.

It was not a matter of contempt or disdain; it was just too close.

When they reached the outer bicycle basement she turned to Peter and asked, 'Peter? Can we forget this?'

'I don't know,' Peter said. 'We can try.'

After checking that there were no people out in the yard, they parted and went their separate ways. Peter went off to empty his bucket and look for water, while Flora walked in the direction of the courtyard where she had seen herself.

Before their telepathic conversation became stifling, they had talked about what Flora had seen. At first Peter had not understood what she meant, but when she sent him the whining sound that accompanied the apparition, he said, or thought, 'I've seen it. But it wasn't you. It was a wolf.'

'A wolf?'

'Yes. A large wolf.'

And as soon as he said it, she received an image that must have come from Peter's childhood.

Cycling unsteadily along a gravel road, between spruce trees. A bend in the road and there is a wolf in front of me. Five metres away. Yellow eyes, grey fur, big. Much bigger than me. My hands squeeze the handlebars, the scream that can't get past my mouth because I am scared. It is standing still, I know that I am about to die. Any second now it will take two leaps and be on top of me. But it looks at me for a while, then goes into the forest. I feel warmth in my pants, I have peed all over myself. I can't move for several minutes. When I do, I go back the way I came, I don't dare go past where it was.

The image came with such force that she felt her own sphincter relax, but her consciousness intervened and took control of the muscles just in time.

For me death is a wolf, Peter thought and Flora realised that something she had thought was only imaginative play was her own fundamental belief: she herself was Death.

Of all the ways it was possible to imagine Death as a human figure-the man with the scythe, the Phantom Charioteer, a leering skeleton or an old African woman-Flora had been drawn to the idea of Death as a twin sister. It stemmed from a couple of years ago when she had been standing in front of the mirror with a candle trying to summon the Dark Lady, and seen only herself. The idea had come to her then.

The courtyards lay silent, empty. Electricity had been brought in with some temporary cables and there were a couple of lights on in every yard. She moved carefully, trying to keep to the shadows, but it seemed that her caution was unnecessary. There was no one in sight, not a glimmer in any window, and the area appeared more like a ghost town than ever.

A ghost town.

Exactly what it was. The dead were in the dark apartments.

Sitting, standing, lying, walking around. The remarkable thing was that she was not frightened. Quite the opposite. As her footsteps whispered back to her from the paths, she walked in the tranquility you can feel at a graveyard on a calm evening. She was among friends. The only thing that worried her was if that whining was going to come back.

She had given up on finding her grandfather, but it was almost as hard to find the number she was now looking for: 17C. There were no lights in the passageways where the signs were, and she could not understand the way they'd chosen to number the courtyards. Right now she was in the courtyard where the numbers started, the first one she had come to, Closest to the fence.

A door opened!. She froze and shrank back against the wall. At first she did not understand that why Power had not warned her, but it took her only a couple of seconds to realise that the person coming out of the door was one of the dead. Despite the warm glow of camaraderie she had been feeling, her heart started to beat faster and she pressed harder into the wall as if it would help her glide further into the shadows, become more invisible.

The dead man-or dead woman, you couldn't tell-was standing

outside the building, swaying. Took a couple of steps to the right, stopped. Took a couple of steps to the left, stopped. Looked around. Another door opened further down and another dead person emerged. This one walked straight out into the courtyard and stopped under a lamppost.

Flora jumped when the door right next to her opened. The dead

person was a woman, to judge from the long grey hair. The hospital clothes hung loosely, shroud-like over her bony body. She took a couple of steps from the door, slow tentative steps as if she was walking across black ice in smooth soles.

Flora held her breath. The dead woman turned jerkily. The gaze

issuing (Flora supposed) from the empty eye sockets slid toward the place where she was sitting, her presence unnoticed and irrelevant. The woman's interest was drawn instead to the dead man standing under the lamppost; she was lured to the light like a moth. Flora watched, mouth agape; it looked as if the woman had just caught sight of her one true love and was being pulled toward him by a power stronger than death.

More dead people joined the fold. From some doors only one

came, from others two or three. When fifteen or so were assembled under the lamp something started that filled Flora with awe, the feeling of bearing witness to an event so primordial that it seemed

beyond everything.

She could not see who had started it, but slowly they started to

move in a clockwise direction. Soon an irregular circle had formed, with the lamppost in the middle. Sometimes someone bumped into someone else, someone stumbled or fell but quickly resumed their place in the ring. Around and around they moved and their shadows glided across the buildings. The dead were dancing.

Something came to mind that Flora had read about monkeys, or was it gorillas, in captivity. If you placed a pole in their midst it did not take long until the monkeys gathered around the pole, moving around it. The most primitive of all rites, the worship of the central axis.

Tears sprang up in her eyes. Her field of vision narrowed and blurred. She sat as if mesmerised for a long, long time and watched the dead circle, their motion without interruption or variation. If someone had told her at that moment that this was the dance that held the Earth in its rotation, she would have nodded and said, Yes, I know.

As the enchantment wore off a little she looked around. In many windows around the courtyard she saw pale ovals that had not been there before. Onlookers. Dead people who were too weak to make their way out, or who did not wish to participate, there was no way of knowing which.

This is how it is.

She formed the thought, and had no idea what she meant by it.

She stood up, intending to move on. Perhaps the same scene was

being enacted in all the courtyards right now. She had only taken a couple

of steps when she stopped short.

Others were approaching, she COli Id feci it. Other living minds.

How many? Four, maybe five. They carne from the outside; the same direction she had come from.

As she felt the vivid resonance of other living beings in her head she suddenly understood what she had onl y suspected earlier: apart from Peter and herself and the OIlt'S who were now approaching, there was not a single living person inside the fence. No guards, nothing.