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

spring, I think. I haven’t mentioned this before, but then again, andgiven our state, we are all prone to this; seasons seem to last for a year ormore, or vanish away in a night. One day spring, the next deep winter. Perhapsthat really happens, at least from our perspective. Again, I recall theconstant alarum of the 1990’s and 20-teens about Global Warming and climatechange... I seem to recall a ship went out to the Antarctic a few yearsfollowing my physical demise. It had been sent to monitor the environment, andto prove thereby that the great ice-sheets were melting away. Instead it wasstuck for days – or was it weeks? – in solid, unnegotiably-frozen ice. Therelevant scientists hastily assured the world that this solid ice was actuallyyet further proof of dangerous climate change... contrary to appearances. Imyself, I remember, believed that if our planet was warming up, it was duecertainly in part to the earth’s preparation for a new approaching Ice Age,even if said event was millennia in the future. (A little like turning up thecentral heating to combat a forecast snow-in, and to stop the water-pipescompletely freezing.) In any case, no doubt the total loss of all light, heat,and electronic communication, recently, will reduce humanity’s vauntedlypernicious evacuations of carbon. Though God knows what the nuclear powerstations, and other such piles, will do, untended by humans, and/or broken intoby the Zombie-kind.

I wasn’t thinking of this, Ialways try not to, when I began to stalk the particular Zombie I had selected –if ‘stalk’ is the word: he was my goal...my what? Target? Prey?

He was seemingly quite unaware ofme, as he lurched along, occasionally veering in among the wilded trees. A rushinglorry without a driver, a plane in full flight without a pilot – that was theimpression I had of him.

I cruised along behind him,sometimes less than three feet away. Despite being dead, and mostly unable tosmell things, as unable to touch or eat, I still became convinced I coulddetect his stink. But it was the reek of an unwashed and mobile body, Ithought, with no true hint of rot or gangrene. Yet something there was.Something rank beyond mere human functions which, anyway, one assumes, occurwith Zombies but infrequently. (Although these things devour living fleshly menand women, the Zombies do not appear to open their bowels or bladders, or ifthey do, the results have not been either witnessed, or whiffed, by myself). Ihave never thought to ask my fellow ghosts.

Finally my ‘quarry’, if I cancall him that, appeared to stumble over something and thumped down on his face.I rushed to his side. I was concerned only that he had not been further damaged.But he made no vocal noise, neither of shock or pain. Well, naturally not.Everyone was assured his kind did not any longer feel such things.

However, as he lay in thethickening grasses, he rolled a little, and for a second his mindless eyes metmine. Did he see me? No. Yet, I calculated, maybe something in him, that whichwas left of what, once, his brain had been, perhaps that did. Since alook, part bewilderment, part fear, slid across his face. Did I, I wondered,imagine this? Before I could form an opinion, he slithered round, apparentlyunimpaired, even his broken arm not more broken, and bumbled to his feet.

He neither ran nor crept away. Hewas as before, a cerebral orphan, shambling off along the slope. I let him go.

And then it came to me. At whichmy own shock was such I believe, if I had been live flesh, I too would havefallen. But instead I simply lost contact with the .ground, and floated for aminute, levitating weightlessly.

For something too had happened tome. When he had fallen over – and he fell – a split second – no more –

That look of fright and confusionthat had flicked in and out of his eyes, my God, it had been mine, orrather the echo of mine. For now I grasped I had, in the split second precedingthe first, seen through his eyes the other way. That is, I had looked outof him, out of his head, his brain, his skull. And I had seen – not him,prone upon the ground – but landscape, trees and a misty vapour that hung inair, and somewhat resembled... the shape of a tall old man, whose likenessdefinitely I, in earlier years, (in mirrors, photographs), had beheld before:my own.

Myself. Through the eyes of thedead Zombie I had seen me.

Thatnight I called them together again, there in the TV room.

“I believe it can be done,” Isaid. “I believe, if only for a second or two, I have already accomplished it.”

They sat in silence.

Like the set of a play, or movie,they were, as before, almost all seated, only the Knight standing. Their eyes,that seem to me three dimensional, bright and solid as those of physicallyliving things, had fixed and now stayed on me.

Then Coral started tearlessly tosob, and Laurel sadly stretched out her hand to Coral, but could not touch, andElizabeth uttered an obscenity under her non-breathing breath. The Knightquietly stood to attention: he was listening to a briefing in the War Room.

“I shall try the move again,” Isaid. “I’m quite prepared to do it tonight. The Zombie I’ve been watching is inthe orchard again. Most of the others are elsewhere. There is a chance,” Iadded, I admit with some internal misgiving, for to say it aloud to them seemedto emphasise an unease I’d been trying to refuse myself, “a chance, onceproperly in, I may – how shall I say? Get stuck.”

“You mean you’ll rush in to thatfilthy body and become trapped,” said Elizabeth. Her voice was cold as theAntarctic ice I mentioned, that itself trapped the research ship six,seven years ago.

“Yes, I do mean that. To enterwith total intent could be irreparable.”

“Then, if you can’t get out, whatdo you think will happen to you?”

“I have no proper notion. I maygo insane, I mean my awareness may. The Zombies are mind-dead, if notbrain-dead. They can’t reason, or seem not able to do so. That could