Skeletons

  SKELETONS

  By Al Sarrantonio

  First Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press & Macabre Ink Digital

  Copyright 2011 Al Sarrantonio

  Cover design by David Dodd

  Parts of the Cover image provided by:

  MskyCarmen : http://spazz90.deviantart.com/

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  Prologue

  The earth revolves around the sun once every 365.2 days. Along with the sun, the other eight planets, and all the various debris including comets, asteroids, and detritus of our planet such as satellites, the earth revolves around the galactic plane, that is, the core of our own Milky Way galaxy, once every two hundred million years.

  Which means, if there was a certain area in the galactic plane composed of strange plasma, space fog, unknown gas particles, or whatever, the earth would pass through it once during each revolution around the Milky Way's galactic core—in other words, once every two hundred million years.

  There was.

  It did.

  The inner diary of Claire St. Eve

  1

  Today something happened to me.

  Mrs. Gaee, my counselor at Withers, has said that I am like a seed closed tight and ready to grow. She says that I am mute because my voice, too, is locked inside the seed. She says she is a gardener, and that she is trying to find the right kind of soil, the right sun and right water to make me sprout.

  Today, for the first time, I felt the seed shiver.

  2

  This early summer day at Withers Home for Women, in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, started like any other day. All of us up at six-thirty, the donning of drab uniforms, washing and brushing, a half hour of calisthenics in the gym with Mr. Cary. Then breakfast in the prison-like cafeteria, rows and ranks of benches and tables, no talking permitted, the stacking of trays, back to our rooms. An hour of meditation, they call it; aloneness, I call it. Then therapy, followed by lunch, again eaten in silence.

  Then, the television room.

  The tyrant Margaret Gray, the oldest tenant of Withers Home for Women, was waiting there, because that is when we are finally left alone. As always, she waited until Priscilla Ralston, her eighteen-year-old toady, put on the television to the religious channel, waited until Priscilla had regained her chair. Then she moved quickly to the front of the room, climbed a chair, and turned to face us.

  "We'll learn," she said, her thin hand closing into a bony fist, her eyes darting the room, daring anyone to contradict. Even her voice was hard and mean and thin. "We'll watch and learn."

  She climbed down, stood under the television like a sentinel, making sure all eyes stayed on the set. Everyone remembers Laura Paine, the girl whose eyes were scratched out. Laura was big, nearly twenty, knew how to laugh. She came to Withers last summer, nearly a year ago, and was blinded a month later. She had an alcohol problem, and beautiful blue eyes. For three weeks she put up with Margaret Gray's television tyranny, then got up one day, pushed Margaret aside, and put the soap operas back on. The other girls cheered. Laura smiled, stood sentinel where Margaret had been until Margaret left the room. We watched the soap operas the whole week.

  Then on Friday morning Laura didn't appear for breakfast. They found her in her room, fists pressed tight to her scratched-out eyes, drunk. The staff said she had smuggled the liquor in and done it to herself. Priscilla Ralston told one of the other girls that Margaret Gray had held a knife to Laura's eyes, which Laura thought were her best feature, and made her drink until she passed out.

  According to Priscilla, Margaret had said, "If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out," and then slashed Laura's eyes while she lay unconscious.

  When television time ended at four, we went back to our rooms for more enforced loneliness. At five I saw Mrs. Garr for an hour.

  Mrs. Garr took me to the window of my room. The cool late-afternoon summer breeze blew across me. She made me look out at the rolling grounds, the playing field, the little cemetery with Mr. Cary's cottage nearby, and beyond, the glint of water, a red boat on Long Island Sound, through the trees.

  "Don't you want that?" she said, standing behind me, squeezing her hands on my shoulders. "Don't you want to run through the grass and shout, or jump in the water, take it all in and blow it all out again like a whale?"

  I looked up at her silently, and she squeezed my shoulders harder.

  "Oh, Claire, I want you to flower so badly." She turned me around, held my hands in her hands, and looked deep into my eyes. "You're almost sixteen years old," she said. "You've never spoken a word. But there's nothing wrong with you. Your vocal cords are fine. You're intelligent, and your written work is as good as a college student's. You perform your tasks well. You get along with the other girls, here.

  "But it's like all of you is inside that seed. Like you haven't started to be alive yet. Like you're ... waiting for something." Mrs. Garr's frustration showed in her voice. "You're going to speak when you're ready, Claire. I know it. I want you to begin to live."

  Mrs. Garr waited for my response, but I only looked at her until she finally put my hands down and walked away from me, balling her hands in frustration.

  “That seed's going to break open," she said, leaving my room.

  At six we ate dinner, followed at seven by more television, with Priscilla playing her part of putting on the funny shows, and Margaret Gray marching up to change it to the religious channel. Margaret held court until ten, when we all marched to the bathroom, again to wash and brush, and then to bed. Mrs. Garr stopped at my room, her form outlined in hall light, to say good night before closing the door.

  And there I lay quietly in bed, and slept, until sometime in the night I awoke, and something happened to me.

  I sat up in bed.

  Like a breeze from the window, something washed over and through me. I felt a tingle from my fingertips crawl down deep within me, and there was a leap inside me.

  I rose, and went to the window.

  Outside, I saw shapes in the darkness moving over the hills near the trees and water.

  Someone screamed.

  And then I heard much noise around me, and Mrs. Garr threw open the door to my room.

  "Claire, hurry," she said.

  And then she marched into the room and took my arm, pulling me out into the hallway, and there were more screams.

  The Memoirs of Peter Sun

  1

  This was to be the greatest of all rallies. Think of it: the finest day of all our lives, delegates from Asia, the Third World, North and South America, Australia, Europe, even Cuba. I saw with my own eyes this morning, as the sun rose on Red Square, on the tents that had been springing like flowers there for the past week, held down on the corners with rocks, a crowd in excess of what was expected. Did I say a hundred and fifty thousand? More like t
wo hundred thousand. Maybe more. Up to a point I thought I knew what to say to them all, to open the greatest single day on earth in the cause of democratization.

  And me, a humble man from humble Cambodia, a land raped repeatedly for thousands of years, a country still laced with Khmer Rouge and nearly as bad Pnompenhists, chosen to open the proceedings. The Moscow leadership would even come out to greet me. There wasn't an unfriendly soldier in sight.

  But when the sun rose on that assembly, on all those thousands and thousands of tents and bedrolls, those hundreds of thousands of different faces, it was too much for me, I suddenly didn't know what to say, and I had to get away.

  As I left the stage there was Jon Roberts, from the United States, sixties headband around his forehead, long hair held in place. "Like Woodstock," he said, smiling almost naively, though he is not naive, only too young. "I'll make breakfast. Pancakes in Red Square."

  "I'll be back," I said, suddenly unable to keep my breath, suffocated by the fact that it had all actually happened, that all these speakers from around the world, great thinkers and scientists and writers and musicians, had actually come here, to this place, to celebrate democracy.

  "Don't go far," he cautioned, frowning. "Peter, Paul, and Mary go on in twenty minutes, the CNN people will be here in less than an hour, you know they want—"

  "You handle CNN," I said, patting his shoulder. "You can do it, Jon."

  "But the media, you know how important all this shit is—“

  "You handle that part," I said. "You're better at it.”

  “Be back by noon, dammit!" he called after me. "You have to be back by noon to speak—"

  "I promise," I said, turning away to push through the crowd.

  Some of them recognized me, and though most made a path, there were those who needed to shake hands, to talk. Finally I reached back into my backpack, found my sunglasses, put them on, veered right, head down. Soon no one recognized me. I watched as I walked: a sea of human picnics, families rising with the sun, which now pushed up over the square. It was cold here even on a July 1st morning, at this time of day. But already you could feel the mist, the dew, dissipating. I saw nothing but smiles.

  This is remarkable, I thought to myself. This is truly remarkable.

  It took me nearly a half hour just to get out of the crowd. And then, suddenly, I could breathe. There were buses, the big, boxy, clanking things the Russians still make, and I was able to catch one leaving the city. I had to be out somewhere with dirt under my feet, farmland, at least for a little while. The bus clanked along, wheezed to a stop, listing to one side as passengers entered, rolled along, and within forty minutes we were out of Moscow.

  2

  With all of its martial trappings stripped, the Soviet Union is a beautiful place. And in July the wheat, what there is of it, begins to sprout and climb. I knew I had arrived at what I wanted when I saw a field of this stunted gold, and got the driver to stop. He assured me that another bus back to Moscow would be by in an hour and a half and would get me back to Red Square long before noon. "I know you," he said thickly, smiling, showing one lost tooth. He poked me hard in the chest. "You're a good man. And you speak Russian!"

  "Yes," I said.

  He poked me again. "I'll be here myself for you in ninety minutes, deliver you myself."

  I nodded thanks, wishing my sunglasses were bigger, and slouched out of the bus, a few passengers following me with their gaze as the bus lurched off.

  Soon there was dirt under my feet. Just off the road there was a strip of rocky gravel and, past that, blessed soil. I removed my shoes, rolled up my pants, and moved into it. The first rows were hardened by sun and packed by weather. Stunted ranks of wheat chaff brushed against my shins.

  There was a newly tilled patch of ground behind the wheat field, most probably for potatoes. I moved into it. I had found what I sought, freshly turned soil moving between my toes. This is what I had needed.

  "The true democrat," a philosopher had once said, "is the farmer who tills the soil."

  I lay down with my back against a soft furrow and lay looking at the sun. It had been a long road leading me to this one, and the previous nights had been hectic and filled with excitement. I pulled out a many-folded piece of paper from the pocket of my denim jacket and looked at it. The words I would say, inspired by the writings of Abraham Lincoln, suddenly looked fresh and viable again. I knew I could say them, and believe them, after all. The other words I had thought of saying, which would unmask me as the fraud I was, must stay unsaid, at least for the moment. Too much was at stake for the confessions of one man to destroy it. The words on this paper would do.

  I refolded the paper and put it back in my pocket. I was suddenly tired, being here. I closed my eyes and slept.

  There followed a foolish dream, a world of pink and blue petals where children danced and the sun was always warm and the rain was warm and new flowers bloomed each day. And, as I lay in a bed of petals and watched this world, a tingle washed over me, and a lovely, dark-skinned girl walked toward me through the petals smiling. She held out her hands, opened her mouth, and said a single word. The dream went on and then, finally, ended.

  3

  When I opened my eyes, I knew by marking the height of the sun that I had slept nearly too long. I rose, dusting myself, and marched back toward the road. In the near distance I saw the bus, like a sleeping beast, at the side of the road.

  At the edge of the potato field I tripped over something and fell.

  I picked myself up and looked briefly for the rock that must have caught my foot.

  There was no rock, but rather, sticking up from the soil, the skeletal remains of a human hand, fingers splayed. The bones were bleached very white, but seemed covered with a ghostly mist of human form—

  The fingers of the hand moved, jerking back and forth.

  "You must come with me," a voice behind me said. I am not in the habit of being startled, but this time I jumped back, into a defensive stance, turning as I did so.

  It was the bus driver, who had made his way to me through the field. "Please come," he said, looking at the skeletal hand fearfully.

  "I'm not dreaming?" I said, dazed. "What I'm seeing is real?"

  "Yes. Please."

  I followed him through the ranks of low wheat, looking back at the spot where the human hand had been. Now there was not only a hand but a skeletal arm pushed up out of the soil.

  "Wait," I said, taking hold of the driver's arm.

  He crossed himself, turned back toward the bus, begging me to come with him.

  "It's happening all over," he said. "We must go."

  I stood my ground. It occurred to me that I must be dreaming, my other infantile dream balanced with this dream of strangeness. The day was still warm and pleasant, there were no blue and pink petals underfoot but pleasant wheat chaff nevertheless.

  "This is not real," I said.

  "It is," the driver said. He stopped, and looked as if he had lost his moorings. "At the last stop on my route there were two skeletons waiting next to the road. They attacked my passenger, an old woman named Mrs. Borogrov, as she left the bus. They used their jaws like weapons, biting into her. She mewled like a cat. I closed the door on one of them as he tried to enter the bus, catching the bone arm. I beat at it until he retreated, pulling the arm out of the door. The other passenger, an even older woman, tried to escape through the back door of the bus and they pulled her out and threw her to the ground. Mrs. Borogrov was not moving by then. I saw blood covering her face. There is an old cemetery thirty meters off the road in that spot, and I saw other skeletons climbing the low fence, coming toward the bus. They had my other passenger on the ground by then and were hitting her with anything nearby. One of them lifted a stone and brought it down on her head—"

  I took him by the arm and shook him, realizing that he was in shock.

  "You must come with me," he said. He stumbled back toward the bus.

  I looked back at the fie
ld, seeing a nearly complete human skeleton pulling itself from the ground. There was something nearly invisible, a more human shape, surrounding it, like a vague shroud, but the impression mainly was of a collection of human bones in human configuration yanking themselves to a standing position.

  The form looked at me with its skull, opened its jaw soundlessly, and began to stride toward me, cakes of soil dropping from its joints.

  I moved back toward the bus, finding the driver already sitting in his seat, waiting for me. His eyes were glued to the skeleton approaching us.

  "In," he said, his hand on the door handle, waiting to close it.

  I jumped onto the bus, and the driver immediately pulled the door closed. The engine coughed once, then roared into grumbling life. The driver threw it into gear.

  I moved into one of the front seats and looked out the dusty window. The skeleton had begun to run toward us, and reached the road as we pulled out, standing in the plume of dust the rear wheels kicked up. In rage it bent, searched the ground, and found a large stone, which it hurled at us, hitting the rear window.

  "Mother of God," the driver said, his eyes alternating between the road and the rearview mirror. "Mother of God."

  "I must be dreaming," I found myself saying, out loud.

  "The whole world is dreaming," the driver said. "The whole world, finally, is mad."

  "Was there anything before this happened?" I asked. "Did anything happen before this started?"

  "There was a kind of pleasant feeling, like something washed over me, just before," the driver said.