Grave (46 page)

I moved to sit down next to him. He shook his head, and I stayed on my feet.

“Don’t ask me who I was,” he said. “Don’t ask me what I was, what I looked like, how I thought or felt or what I believed about anything, when I was just another human among humans. Don’t ask me what made me into this.” He rested his palms on his cloth-covered knees. “Not that those are taboo questions. It’s just been so long, and I’ve since become so many things at once, that I don’t remember. I don’t remember what I was, or how I became otherwise. Not at all.”

“I barely remember being human either,” Jessie said. Her words were slower, more careful than I’d yet heard from her: smooth pebbles, each held on her tongue and dropped steadily from her lips, as if she feared the wrong one would explode the world. As well it might. “And it was only... ten years ago, fifteen, that that’s all I was. And I’ve still only ever been one person, the same person, even since. I’ve never held every living thing inside me, every dead thing. I’ve never
been
all of existence.”

Death thought that over. “I’m not all-knowing,” he said. “I’m not all-seeing.
Being
everything doesn’t mean you
understand
everything, any more than being human means you comprehend every last aspect of humanity. You lot never do stop surprising me, usually in unpleasant ways.”

“Like now,” Jessie said. “With the labs.”

“Like now,” he agreed.

He slipped a hand into his bathrobe pocket, taking out a dull green lake stone broken up with a few mud-colored, zigzagging streaks. It looked exactly like the one Florian had left in the woods, exactly like the one I’d slipped into my own pocket; I didn’t need to check now, to know that pocket was empty.

“The thing is,” he said, the soul of calm, the very voice of reason, “the earth, poor thing, it’s been out of balance for so very long, so impossibly long—nearly as long as humanity’s been around, to make the place worse and worse and worse with your meddling, your industrial filth, your insane conviction that you alone among any living thing are special, chosen, important enough to slip the bonds of your own mortality.” He shook his head, soft ominous laughter rising from his sunken throat. “And not just immortal, but eternally strong, eternally young, eternally rich and powerful and alluring—the greed. The insane, sickening
greed
!”

He clenched his fingers tight and I heard a sudden snapping sound, so much like bones being broken that I jumped. His hand unfurled again and the lake stone was just so much ash, inky ash spilling from his palm and spinning on the wind. My mouth felt suddenly dry-caked with grit, a tormenting need to cough, but I knew that’d give no relief.

“Greed,” he repeated. “Let’s face it, I think we all realize you’re entirely beyond help, you lot of humanity. Nothing to be done. You certainly can’t police yourselves, you never leave anything well enough alone—” He looked up at me and laughed, an avuncular little chuckle that made the skin at the back of my neck tighten up. “It’s like I said to you before, I’m sick and tired of it. I’m
sick
. I’m
tired
.” He reached over and pulled a buttercup from its stem, examining it, his thumb caressing the soft yellow petals like they were the only thing in existence that had never let him down. “I am, as our dear Jessica phrased it, ‘dusty.’ In other words, I have decided—I have realized—that I am simply too damned old for all of this.”

The elderly man in the bathrobe wavered, faded, and in his place came the man I’d seen back at Jessie’s beach, blue-jeaned and work-shirted, with a head of barely graying hair and a broad, self-satisfied smile. Jessie shook her head in disgust.

“Why,” she asked, “do you always have to come back as Jim? Of every living thing that ever was, why?”

Death laughed again. “C’mon now, sis, I know you’ve always had a hopeless temper—just like Dad, and I bet you can’t even see it—but you don’t have to be so
petty
! After all, we owe so much of what’s happened to good old Jim.”

He flickered again. Changed again. “And to me,” said Natalie, with unmistakable pride. “Especially to me.”

My stomach soured. I knew that Natalie wouldn’t live through this, somehow I just knew back when we all left her there in the ruins of her own lab. And I left her there anyway. No matter that she’d killed me, no matter what else she’d tried to do to all of us. Another death at my feet. Like he could hear what I was thinking, Nick snuffled and whined and pressed paws against my leg as if trying to coax me away from the clearing. Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide. No wish to do either one. I patted him, and swallowed.

“I meant what I said, before,” I told Death. “That I was sorry I ever stole anything from you, accidentally or not. That I was sorry about everything. You could...” I glanced at my mother, who watched me with fearful eyes and clenched fists but made no move to stop me, and leapt into the breach. “Natalie was right, wasn’t she, that we’re sort of... unique? All of us made this way by the lab? You could have me as a sort ofÖ a sacrifice. Something toÖ that could maybe expiate what happened, or something.” This had all sounded a lot more eloquent in my head, and in my head I hadn’t stammered and stumbled through it with a dust-dry tongue and acid creeping toward my throat, but then Iphigenia and Polyxena had had the best talent in Athens for speechwriters while I only had myself. I stretched my arms out wide. “I mean, here I am. You can have me.”

“And me,” my mother said immediately. She was by my side before I’d ever heard her steps. “I’m no different than she is. I’m made as differently as she is. You can have me too. You can have me instead.”

“And me,” said Stephen.

“No,” Lisa said. Her arms were wrapped around Naomi, roping the little girl to her body. “
No
.”

But nobody was listening to her.

Death, still in Natalie’s form, stared at us each in turn. Then Natalie was Jim once again and Jim slowly, mockingly, shook his head, a familiar malice dancing in his eyes.

“For Amy so loved being-ness that she gave her one and only self, that whatever exists et cetera, et cetera...” He flicked dismissive fingers at me, stretching his legs out more comfortably on the earth. “We’ve all heard that old chestnut before, and it means nothing—other than that, predictably, you still don’t understand. You can’t
sacrifice
to someone what’s already theirs, and like all human beings since the dawn of humanity, you just can’t accept that the second you’re conceived, that very second, you’re mine. Everything everywhere is mine.”

His face flushed, darkened with a breathless anger, then just as suddenly he was composed and smiling, methodically pulverizing the buttercup’s petals between his fingertips. “There’s death and life in everything, everywhere. They’re one and the same. They’re all simply
being
. As you already figured out for yourself—and if you hadn’t, I wouldn’t be bothering with you right now.”

Linc and Renee exchanged glances. Then Linc walked up to where Death sat among his flowers. “So you really are dying,” he said. You’re crumbling away, just like—”

“Am I?” Death mused. “Is that what this feeling is? I really don’t know. I don’t know if this was always going to happen. I don’t know if this is the long-delayed old age of the human being I was... whoever that was, whenever that was. Or simply the vessel of existence—namely me—cracking down the middle and snapping, what with how humanity keeps gleefully flinging me to the floor. I do not know.” He shrugged. “But I do know that whatever the truth is, I
feel
so old. I feel as though I’ve been as I am forever, and that it never comes to anything. I feel as though I could lie down forever.” His voice was so soft now, insinuating, a dangerously tempting lull. “And that feeling of falling, that you humans have sometimes when you’re losing yourselves to sleep? I could fall myself, fall and fall through a dark chasm of nothingness and never stop. Never land.” A barely audible whisper of longing. “Because there will be nowhere left to land, and nothing left that falls.”

We’d failed. He’d never really meant us even to try to succeed. I was shaking. Stephen stroked my arm, a quick nervous touch of reassurance. His fingers were trembling too.

“You can’t,” he told Death. “You were a living mortal thing once, too, you said so, and you never asked to be born. You can’t just take existence away from everything, just because you’re angry, or tired, when you only ever contained it, you never
created
—that’s worse than anything Natalie or anyone else ever tried to do.”

Death contemplated Stephen’s words. His face crinkled up in a bemused frown.

“Please,” he told Stephen, “do not tell me that was somehow meant to shame me.”

Stephen glanced fearfully around at us, as though we were all going to ambush him, force him to stop talking. We couldn’t. We wouldn’t. “What’s beyond you?” he asked Death. “What... lies beyond you? You’re existence, but did something else bring existence itself into—”

“Yes.” Death nodded. “Don’t ask me what, or how, or why, because I don’t know. I don’t know, any more than anything else that exists has ever known its first cause. But the answer is yes. And that is the last you ever get from me.”

“Which means,” Stephen said, barely hearing him, pushing doggedly onward, “that you never
created
life itself. Or any of this, right here, anything beyond life. You said it yourself. You’re just a vessel. You simply embody.” Death shrugged, just a little lift of the shoulders. “You only ever contained it. You wouldn’t even be destroying your own work. It’d be the worst crime, the worst—”

“Sin,” Lisa said. Very quietly.

“Fine. If you want. The worst
sin
, that there ever was.”

Death smiled. “And such,” he said, “is the nature of oblivion, that once the crime is committed, it never really happened at all. After all, its victim never was.”

Stephen sputtered, lost for words. My mother opened her mouth to speak. “I—”

“I think we’re through now,” Death said. “In fact, I think everything, everywhere, is finally and forever through.”

He stretched out on the ground, lying on his side, an arm cradling his head. “Go along now, pets,” he said, still with Jim’s body and face but Florian’s hoarse, reedy timbre coming from his mouth. “Go along. I’m tired.”

I had lost my peripheral vision without realizing it, all my sights telescoping down to him as the sky, the trees, the ground lost their form and dissolved. It wasn’t him doing that to me, or to the chimera of woods around us, it was my own fear. I felt something cold and wet nudge my palm once more and could have cried with relief because Nick was still there, Nick would be there beside me no matter what, I couldn’t do this all alone. Even if I was sure. Even if I was absolutely sure.

Was I sure? Would I ever really know? Would I ever even remember?

“You’re old,” I said. “You’re tired. You’re wearing out.”

A hand rested gently, fleetingly on my shoulder. I turned, expecting to see Stephen, my mother, but it was Jessie. She knew, she knew what was about to happen. Maybe she had all along. What had she said?
Old wine in new bottles.
Exactly. She knew.

“You don’t remember what you were, or when you became what you are now.” I rocked from foot to foot where I stood, to keep myself from turning tail and running away. There was nowhere else to go. There never had been. He showed me that, back when I first saw him face to face. “But you didn’t begin that way, you
became
it. You know that much. Which means... you took someone else’s place. Someone else who had this burden, this everything, and grew old, or disgusted, or tired, and gave it all up.”

He turned his head where he lay and his eyes, fixed on me, were wide and dark and fathomless. We could all fall and fall through them and never stop. Never land.

“Someone else could take it from you,” I said. “Couldn’t they. Someone else could become what you—”

“Stop,” Lisa said. She looked around at Stephen, at my mother, in disbelief that nobody else tried to stop me. That they knew they couldn’t stop me. “Amy, Jessie? Do not say another word.”

But I wasn’t listening to her, because there was no time left. We had no time left. Death’s black chasms of eyes had turned to a hard pounding light that overwhelmed, blinded, a spotlight shone straight on our faces. Jessie and I turned to each other and she looked so wretched, every inch of her outlined in sorrow and remorse, that I smiled and touched her face the way a mother might touch her child because there was no call for that, absolutely no call at all. I knew what I was going to do and I had for such a long time now and it was all right, it was all truly all right. We could have been friends, maybe, she and I, in another kind of life. Maybe, just now, we’d turned out the best friends each other ever had.

“I can’t,” she whispered to me, quietly, a broken sound. “I’m sorry. I just can’t. I want off this merry-go-round, I can’t stand it, I—”

“You ‘ain’t gotta,’” I said. “It’s all right. It’s going to be all right.”

She couldn’t do it, and I understood why. I always had. Finally, I thought, I almost started to understand myself. This had been coming, slowly, gaining on me moment by moment, my entire life. One way or another. And I knew, I was sure, what were to be my last words.