He was there, in front of her. No more than two or three yards of possessed air separated them. Their eyes met again, and an eloquent look, common to the living and the dead worlds, passed between them. There was compassion in that look, and love. The fictions fell away, the lies were dust. In place of the boy’s manipulative smiles was a true sweetness — answered in her face.
And the dead, fearful of this look, turned their heads away. Their faces tightened, as though the skin was being stretched over the bone, their flesh darkening to a bruise, their voices becoming wistful with the anticipation of defeat. She reached to touch him, no longer having to fight against the hordes of the dead; they were falling away from their quarry on every side, like dying flies dropping from a window.
She touched him, lightly, on the face. The touch was a benediction. Tears filled his eyes, and ran down his scarified cheek, mingling with the blood.
The dead had no voices now, nor even mouths. They were lost along the highway, their malice dammed.
Plane by plane the room began to re-establish itself. The floor-boards became visible under his sobbing body, every nail, every stained plank. The windows came clearly into view — and outside the twilight street was echoing with the clamour of children. The highway had disappeared from living human sight entirely. Its travellers had turned their faces to the dark and gone away into oblivion, leaving only their signs and their talismans in the concrete world.
On the middle landing of Number 65 the smoking, blistered body of Reg Fuller was casually trodden by the travellers’ feet as they passed over the intersection. At length Fuller’s own soul came by in the throng and glanced down at the flesh he had once occupied, before the crowd pressed him on towards his judgement. Upstairs, in the darkening room, Mary Florescu knelt beside the McNeal boy and stroked his blood-plastered head. She didn’t want to leave the house for assistance until she was certain his tormentors would not come back.
There was no sound now but the whine of a jet finding its way through the stratosphere to morning. Even the boy’s breathing was hushed and regular. No nimbus of light surrounded him. Every sense was in place. Sight. Sound. Touch.
Touch.
She touched him now as she had never previously dared, brushing her fingertips, oh so lightly, over his body, running her fingers across the raised skin like a blind woman reading braille. There were minute words on every millimetre of his body, written in a multitude of hands. Even through the blood she could discern the meticulous way that the words had harrowed into him. She could even read, by the dimming light, an occasional phrase. It was proof beyond any doubt, and she wished, oh God how she wished, that she had not come by it. And yet, after a lifetime of waiting, here it was: the revelation of life beyond flesh, written in flesh itself.
The boy would survive, that was clear. Already the blood was drying, and the myriad wounds healing. He was healthy and strong, after all: there would be no fundamental physical damage. His beauty was gone forever, of course. From now on he would be an object of curiosity at best, and at worst of repugnance and horror. But she would protect him, and he would learn, in time, how to know and trust her. Their hearts were inextricably tied together.
And after a time, when the words on his body were scabs and scars, she would read him. She would trace, with infinite love and patience, the stories the dead had told on him.
The tale on his abdomen, written in a fine, cursive style. The testimony in exquisite, elegant print that covered his face and scalp. The story on his back, and on his shin, on his hands She would read them all, report them all, every last syllable that glistened and seeped beneath her adoring fingers, so that the world would know the stories that the dead tell.
He was a Book of Blood, and she his sole translator.
As darkness fell, she left off her vigil and led him, naked, into the balmy night.
Here then are the stories written on the Book of Blood. Read, if it pleases you, and learn.
They are a map of that dark highway that leads out of life towards unknown destinations. Few will have to take it. Most will go peacefully along lamplit streets, ushered out of living with prayers and caresses. But for a few, a chosen few, the horrors will come, skipping to fetch them off to the highway of the damned.
So read. Read and learn.
It’s best to be prepared for the worst, after all, and wise to learn to walk before breath runs out.
