Authors: Ian McDonald
Elsewhere, the King of Pain laughs. He is new to his task. The magnitude of it is daunting, but he is fresh and enthusiastic, an obstinate, obdurate Dutchman. There are some changes he wants to make. The world will be hearing from him soon, he thinks.
(the author wishes to thank Patricia Houston for her assistance with the historical research for this story)
PAPER-LANTERNED CORPSE-BOATS
brought us across dark waters to Thanos. As we drew close to the shore I became aware of a waltz playing and figures clad in evening dress gliding beneath the olive trees. I strained to see if I could recognize any particular dancer but the light was fading fast and the people suddenly surged around me, pressing close for a view of the shore, herding me back against the bulkhead. Of course. How eager we were; we living.
Men dressed in smart matelot costumes caught ropes and made them fast. With a roar of engines our captain brought us in alongside the jetty. The sailors ran out a gangplank and the impatient passengers boiled onto the dusty stone pier. I could understand their impatience on this most singular of nights. But I took my time, straightened my tie, aligned my cuffs with delicate tugs, and waited until the press of bodies had passed. Then I stepped down onto the pier, onto the Island of the Dead.
A sloe-eyed girl waited there, greeting me with a smile. “Fine evening,” I remarked and passed by.
“One moment, sir …” I turned back, puzzled. “Your card, sir, they insist.” To those in their employ, the dead are always “they.” I produced the invitation card from my dinner jacket and passed it to the girl, noting with distaste the designs from the Danse Macabre that embellished its border. She passed the card through her reader and nodded at the green alphanumerals. “You may come ashore. Enjoy your evening.”
How the dead love their little jokes! Such as the name they gave the strait of water between their island and the mainland: Styx. And the corpse-boat that ferried us here: Charon. And the Island of the Dead itself: Thanos. I suppose the dead have earned their little moments of self-mockery; have they not all of them passed through that final, grim mockery to self?
But the night was fine and gay and the dead waltzed with the living under the olive groves that grew by the side of Styx. And along the streets of the crumbled leper village stood bright booths and pavilions lit by delicate paper lanterns that rustled in the Mediterranean night air. I saw two people sitting hand in hand by a table under a cracked wall through which a mimosa grew. On the table, a thick candle and a bottle of wine. I saw a band playing from a podium set on the demolished upper floor of a shop. The faded wooden sign read “Fish” in Greek and the people Charlestoned in the street beneath it.
A girl pushed her way through a crowd of laughing party-goers and caught hold of my arm.
“Excuse me.” She giggled and looked into my eyes. She was dead. I could tell it from her gaze. But also something more: the glitter of illicit pleasure. “You looking?” she drawled.
“Yes.”
“But not finding. I can tell. But you’ve no drinkie. Can’t have that on All Hallows’ Eve.” She raised an arm. “Waiter, drinkie.” A dead waiter came to me and I reluctantly took a glass from his tray.
“If you’ll excuse me …” I unfastened her hand which had somehow attached itself to my sleeve and pressed on into the party. She was a swap. A transex. I could tell from her hunger. The dead do so enjoy playing their little games. Dressing in the body of another for All Hallows’ Night is a favorite.
Fireworks began to burst high over the old fortifications and people oohed and aahed as they do at fireworks. The living, of course. Such things are beneath the supposed dignity of the dead. I stopped by a ruined wall to take a sip from my drink and watch the skyfires. A middle-aged man stood beside me. He raised his glass.
“Merry All Hallows’ to you.”
Rockets burst in red and blue. To be sociable, I asked, “Who brings you here?”
“Father, actually,” the middle-aged man replied. “Came here, oh, must be eight years back when he found he had … you know. Rather have the Scanner Slug take him than that, and who could blame him? He was one of the very first, you know. Come here to see him every Hallows’ Eve since without fail. Funny thing, the old man looks far better dead than he ever did alive. Must agree with him.”
I smiled politely. “Wife,” I said. “Liver took her. Weird thing, the liver. The only thing they can’t do anything about. Hearts, lungs, kidneys, even brains, they can cope with, but the liver, nothing. She only came this year.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Still …”
I was in confessional mood. “Family fortune got her here. Well, it was either here or Nagarashima; you know the way the lists have filled up since this thing became fashionable, but it was really here she wanted, she always loved the Mediterranean. Even after the small fortune that went into the Thamos Foundation’s numbered Swiss account, there’s still enough left for me to live on in the decadence to which I’m accustomed.”
And then I saw her. In a green dress; she flitted across the busy street and up a stairway that twisted between two ruined houses.
“Excuse me, but I’ve just—”
“Seen her? I say, good luck to you! Bon chance!”
I climbed the rotting staircase as quickly as I dared and came out into a courtyard where cypress trees grew. There were tables beneath the trees at which people sat talking and drinking together. I looked about me but there was no sign of her. I stopped an old woman with a touch on the arm and asked if she had seen a young woman in a green dress but the old woman shook her head slowly, sadly, and passed on down the stairway.
As the night passed I worked my way through the rings of fortifications to the top of the island. I did so unconsciously, some mystic magnetism drawing me inward, upward. I passed through tavernas and bierkellars and barbeques, through foxtrot and gavotte and jive, through alcohol and tobacco and opium, through people dressed in garish fashions and in classic evening wear and in casual nakedness. But I did not find her. I would stop these people and ask them the same question: “Have you seen a young woman in a green dress?” Some shook their heads and returned to the party, others nodded and pointed me to an alley or a stairway or a cloister. But I did not find her.
Toward midnight, the traditional witching hour of this All Hallows’ Eve when the festivities rose to their most frenzied, I thought I saw her running down the steps to the Charnel House. I called her name but she did not stop, and when I followed I found the Charnel House empty. As empty as any Charnel House can ever be. Another morbid little joke, but the skulls which line the floodlit pit are not those of the Dead. Their bodies lie in anabiotic suspension in necropolises cut deep into the underpinnings of Thanos. These bones were those of the humble lepers who owned this island long before the expense-account dead took it for themselves.
“Sometimes the gleam of polished ivory can be so beautiful,” said a voice behind me. I turned. A dead woman stood at my shoulder. She paid me little regard but stared, fascinated, into the pit. Then at last she looked at me. Her eyes were very green. They should have been dust many years ago. “Our hold on immortality is very weak,” she whispered, “and our world, our reality, so tightly bounded. And we may only truly live as you live on this one All Hallows’ Eve.”
The air under the brick dome of the Charnel House was dry and clean and the floodlights caught the little cracks and irregularities in the stonework. Skulls within a skull.
“But, rather this, rather my one night of fleshly life than that …” She nodded at the skulls. “Isn’t it beautifully Classical? One night in the year our souls may be released from Purgatory, one night in the year when the bodies of the dead are relit and we move among the living. And, with the first light of dawn, we are gone, our earthly flesh back to the crypts, our souls back to the Simulator. Homer would have loved this place. We are the stuff of legends, we dead.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Catharsis maybe. And maybe I am Cassandra, and I call across the barriers between life and death to warn you of the boredom of being dead.” She laughed at that, a dry, dusty laugh. “Though I wonder how much more boring to be as they are.” She nodded at the gleaming leper-skulls.
“Tell me,” I asked, “tell me, I’m looking for my wife, maybe you can help me?” I described her and I told the dead Cassandra of how the liver had eaten away at her until the morning when she called the Death House and two careful men had arrived with metal cases. They were both living but there was something very dead about their eyes, very very dead. They had opened their metal cases and taken out the tools of their trade and injected their slug into her brain and that was all until one day I had come home and she was gone. Gone away to Thanos with the men with dead eyes. We had written at first but then the letters had grown more and more irregular and had finally stopped altogether. It was then I had decided to come to the Island of the Dead to find her.
The woman nodded bitterly.
“This is the way it is,” she said. “Our lives are tinsel-bright in the island, but we are bored bored bored and bored people develop strange pastimes.” She turned to leave but I restrained her arm as she stooped to climb through the low arch.
“Have you seen her? Can you help me at all?”
The woman shook her head. “Leave. Don’t look for life in the place of the dead. Go.”
Out on the terrace, masked dancers stepped in a stately minuet beneath light-strewn trees. I passed through them smiling and apologizing; then I caught a glimpse of her passing up a staircase onto the battlements. Dancers tripped and cursed and stumbled as I pushed and elbowed my way through but I reached the stone stairway just in time to see a flash of green dress vanish around a corner of the rock wall. Panting, I climbed the staircase and ran along the rampart. Puzzled revelers cleared out of my path, politely not staring. Then I saw her round a corner of rock. I ran. And there she was before me, leaning on the parapet, staring over the water to the hills of the mainland beyond. I stopped. I called her name once, twice, three times. She turned. I looked into her eyes. And they were not dead.
“I’m sorry,” I remember saying, “I mistook you for someone else. I apologize.” I remember being amazed at my presence of mind in such a situation. The woman looked perplexed and in that instant the sideways tilt of her head reminded me achingly of her. Then the expression was gone and I looked again and she was not like her at all.
“I mistook you for my dead wife,” I said. “I must have been following you around by mistake all night. I do hope you haven’t been getting any wrong impressions about me.”
“I had noticed,” she said, “but the dead, and the living too, for that matter, do odd things on All Hallows’ Eve.” She seated herself on the parapet and patted the stone next to her. I sat and leaned back, stretching tired limbs.
“Careful!” she said. “There’s a nasty drop back there. It would never do if there was a real death here.”
I laughed at that, and relaxed, and there was a long comfortable silence.
“The Venetians built this place,” she said after a while, looking up at the sheer stone walls of the bastion that bulked from the rock above us. “Put it here to keep an eye on the Turkish privateers who played hell with their trading routes. Didn’t do them any good, because the Turks took it off them sometime after the fall of Byzantium and kept it so they could keep an eye on the Venetian privateers who were playing hell with their trading routes. Held it up till the end of the First World War when the Greek nation was re-formed, and by that time piracy on anyone’s trade routes was out of fashion and even stout Venetian masonry was no match for ten-inch naval guns.”
She cupped her hands around her knees and leaned back, looking up beyond the crumbled fortress to the autumn constellations.
“Then the new Greek government designated it to be a leper colony. Strange to think there were such things as lepers in a civilized country like Greece until half a century or so ago. They used to bring them here from all over the Aegean. Sort of sad, I think. The last sight of the wider world was the little harbor of Aghios Georgios as the boat took them across to the island. I wonder sometimes how they were received by the others when the boat sailed away. Perhaps with sad resignation, perhaps with joy at the coming of a new brother to their little fellowship. Somehow, though, I can’t see this as having been a sad place.” She looked at me. “The last leper died in 1950 and the colony was closed and the island became a macabre tourist attraction. Hordes of check-shorted trippers in sun-glasses and sun-hats swarmed over it by the boatload snapping little Instamatics of the ruined village and the skulls and the tombs. That I think is sad; let the dead rest in peace.”
“Little peace for the dead,” I said, “not after the Thanos Foundation bought the island from the Greek government. I heard that the price they paid was enough to refloat the foundering economy.”
“I heard that too. Do you know what they called this island before the dead took it? Spiranaikos. That was its name, Spiranaikos, but then the dead came and dug their necropolises deep underground and filled it with their computers and renamed it Thanos. And on one day every year, on the Greek All Hallows’ Eve, they hold the Festival of the Dead and their bodies are relit and their souls come out of the Simulator and they walk amongst the living.”
“You sound bitter.”
“I do? Perhaps I should be. I’ve been searching too.”
“Your husband?”
“No, my brother. We were very close; together we ran the business. Close, but separate, really, if you understand. Anyway, he contracted … you know, and he had only a matter of a few months left to him. But he wasn’t going to lie back in his bed in some comfortable, terrible hospice for the terminally ill and trickle away to nothing, not he. He spent his last months living in his grandly extravagant style. “Lived in style and I’ll damn well die in style too,” he said, and he did, he had style, you know. When his time came he called me to his lodge in the Andes and I saw him there on the sofa and he looked so dreadful. But he smiled and said, ‘It may try to get you in the end, but not me, not me,’ and he tapped the side of his head and winked. ‘It wasn’t cheap, this slug in my brain, but it won’t get me. After all the things I’ve done in this life, I’ll not have everything come apart just because I’m dead.’ I was the organizer, you see, but he was the one with the genius, the creative talent for business. Then he sat up and said, ‘In three days they’ll be back to take me to the Death House and then I’ll live forever.’