Ghosteria Volume 2: The Novel: Zircons May Be Mistaken, Tanith Lee [classic fiction txt] 📗

I am trying now to composemyself, yet my heart – no longer real, but only metaphorical – leaps and dancesabout.

(I have some concern about myselftoo. Can a ghost go mad? Some two or three minutes ago, I believed I saw anotherold man, with strange grey curls, standing out by the house wall. He had asorrowful and angry face. But no sooner did I see him than he was gone. I musthave imagined this. Yet why I should eludes me. But even so I draw from it anunfavourable opinion of my remaining wits).

To live again, in whatevermanner, must be more healthful than this. Surely, surely, we should try?

But the Scholar has gone up againto his library. All of them, even I, tend to keep very much to our own certainparts of the house. Therefore now I stand alone at an upper window, and lookout across the moonlit grounds of what, once, was my unwarm and friendlesshome. I think of my mother screaming, in grief or petulance at my loss, perhapsin guilt, although I doubt she ever supposed she’d been unfair to me, ornegligent. I think of Captain Ashton.

Then, far down among the savageshrubbery and the long-clawed orchard, not any fantasy but decidedly present,one of the sub-creatures emerges, and goes shouldering and staggering on itsghastly way. Yet now, absurdly or sensibly, I don’t know why, or which, I stareat it and decide that it is only the thing’s utter lack of motive and inner guidancethat make it both so clumsy and so cumbersome, indeed so gratuitouslyrepellent. Like a carriage running downhill without horse or driver, or one ofthose automobiles, also made driverless, its engine running on a directionlesspower, not knowing left from right, nor right from wrong.

4

Coral

Iwant my Mama. I want her. I don’t remember her, but I want her. Where is she?If I am here, why is she not here? When I died, after Miss Archer killed me,why did not my mother come to hold me, and lead me through? Or... Lord Jesus,as we were promised? Where were they? My mother and God. Nobody loved me enough.And so, I lost my way. I am here. I am here, and I have no one to care for me,and the old gentleman has gone quite mad, as Elizabeth said, and he wants her todo this thing I do not understand with the Zom-bees. And I am afraid! I want mymother! I want my dolls! I want not to be dead! I am crying now. Can you hear?My tears are wet to me, but not to any other. I cannot even have my tears. Icannot show them. My Father would approve of that – not one salty drop! He musthave cursed me.

5

The Warrior

(Completelyinterpreted by Elizabeth):I am of a mind with the old man. Here is the way and the means. Into our handour foe may be delivered. We have been chosen from the ranks, or otherwise, yetit falls to us. We will enter them, as air enters in at the mouth and nostrilsof a man, or light at his open eyes. As that is, so we shall be, for we aresmoke and air, and they, the Monstrous Enemy, are open jars of flesh that wemay penetrate, invade and fill, and kill them there, and rule there, and be,and live, kings and queens, again each in our own House of Body, under the Willof God. In truth I vow.

PART THREE

1

The Scholar

Ihad my eye on one for four or five days. Ever since I had thought up thatextravagant and possibly impossible idea of mine over the course of a week.Most recently I had gone from window to window, upstairs or down, followingthis chap, (a male Zombie, another who had lingered here), to watch him. To studyhim. I did not inform the others of this. Before, or since. The ones of our numberwho seemed or were appalled, and adamantly hostile, who when, initially, Ispoke to them, (El, Coral? Laurel..?), might lose their cool, (as they used tosay), entirely. While our Knight might just lose his head and leap intopremature action. A warrior unable to fight, as his training and living lifehad educated him to do, for over eight centuries, must be gagging for a ‘bloodygood brawl’. Caution, therefore. But the morning after our ‘discussion’ in thered and grey room, I moved out through a window into the grounds, to see if Icould find my quarry, and take a look at him closely.

The reason he particularly caughtmy attention, I suspect, was his – by now rather faint – likeness to myself.Oh, not that he was my double – hardly. But he was of, shall I say, the sameapparent type. Tall, six feet and a bit more, thin but with a solid, big-bonedframe. In age he had been fifty or so, some forty years my junior, when struckdown by the Zombie sickness, and emptied of his life-force and/or soul. Nor didhe have the strong head of hair I had mostly managed to retain. All his teeththat I could see, however, (now and then he was prone to bare them in a snarlat nothing – or everything), were present. There did seem to be some damage tohis right arm; it hung rather imperfectly. Perhaps it had been broken and notset. Not, of course, a favourable attribute for my purpose. Although converselyI had noted he could still move the fingers of his right hand. His leftarm and hand, and both legs, were fine. His torso had taken some bashings, orelse suffered some slight amount of decay, but none of this was eitherspectacular or especially gross. His eyes and other features were, like hiswhitish teeth, seemingly intact. Obviously he moved in the usual blundering, incoherentmanner. But that, I thought, was due solely to his condition of cerebral voidand absent reasoning.

The weather was raw but bright,with a snappy wind raking over the trees, shaking the orchards, and the woodsbelow, their branches and buds, like the sistra of Ancient Egyptian temples. Itis late