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

what they identifiedas food, but generally my presence did not disturb them, although many of theirnumber seemed to sense me. Inevitably, a Zombie presence scared most or all ofthem from the vicinity. Tonight, no hares or rabbits.

I looked out from the trees, awaytowards the ruined fields, down to where a village had once been. (I gather itwas more or less deserted by the early 1950’s, having been twice emptied ofyoung men by two world wars.) A strange phenomenon was in the air, whichoccasionally I had noted before. Where the view was open, and the sky open too,ripples of thin light seemed wavering down from the stars, filmy silveryribbons. How beautiful this world is, despite all its horrors and injustices.How can we bear, given any choice, to leave?

Then, only then, (I read something,no doubt superstitiously, into this), My Zombie, for want of betterwords, lurched forth into the benighted morning.

He was coming up the hill,hurrying even, in the strangest way as if, pardon my elderly infantile take onthis – as if he was aware he was late for our rendezvous.

I braced myself. I drew in a hugeand non-actual breath.

And then I fired my will, myessence, my ghost, like liquid lead from some appalling cannon, outward,forward, directly at him.

We fell as one. It took me somewhile to accept why. We had fallen as one – since now – one amalgamated Thingwe were, he and I. I had done as I meant to, and entered into him. In his body,flesh, blood, brain – and I was him. He was – I.

(Elizabeth):Somehow, through the thick wall of night, I felt it happen. Or that was onlysome hysterical nonsense left over in me.

But it was like a deep, subsonic boom.Unheard yet absolute.

I thought, Christ, that stupidold man has –

I thought, Oh God, librarian, areyou all right?

The very ground seemed to shift –no, not like that absurd analogy for sex. (The earth doesn’t move whenyou come. You do, we do. We erupt from our ecstatic bodies in a fit ofbliss and refound connection to everything. We move. The earthremains our shelter and our lover and mother, and kindly watches us as we hitthe sky, then fall, gentle as silver ribbons, back into her arms. There,she says to us, sweet and low, well done. Now you know the truth, my baby.But of course, God help us, we forget.)

(Laurel):Treading behind the Knight, I believe neither he nor the old man noted me. Mycommon lot always! But for once, perhaps, helpful.

I saw everything that happened,and was duly terrified, when the librarian and the creature fell, flailing, ina sort of collision, both of them, limbs and motion. Generally I don’t see theothers, (nor myself, those parts of myself I am able to see, for mirrors do notreflect us), as anything other than solid. But the old man became at firsttranslucent, then transparent, and so disappeared. It seemed to me then themonster had swallowed him up, absorbed and killed the last living filaments ofhim. Yet then – then – the Zom-thing rose again to its feet. And as it wasstanding there, I saw in it a just discernible difference. How it stood wasmore coherent, less haphazard. How it turned its head, which all at once nolonger seemed that of a disjointed doll. And it spoke. Or its voice spoke. Althoughits words were incomprehensible, and drool ran from its lips, yet they somehowconveyed to me a sense of triumph. But was this the triumph of the creature,having destroyed the librarian? Or of the librarian, who truly had, maybe,possessed it?

Then, feeling the dribble on itschin, which surely never before in its zomboid state it would have done, itlifted up its right arm to wipe its mouth.

There was an awful crack, huge inthe still cold air, a noise as if someone had snapped a thick strong twig.

And the thing bent over,clutching at its right arm with the left, and cursing, for I could make outparts of the oaths more clearly than I had the few words of speech.

The Knight ran forward however,and he flung his own arm about the reeling creature to support it – and ofcourse, the Knight’s ghost arm passed right through the physical body of it.

After which we stood, all three –or four? – turned to a kind of stone with alarm and amazement. And all ourquartet of paralysed, unasked and unanswered questions falling round us, like aglittering shower of winter snow.

(Coral):From a window, high up, I saw. I do not know what really happened. Now I amcrouching below the window-sill, on the floor. The old gentleman has gone. Wehave lost him. Where is Elizabeth? In a minute I will collect myself and run tofind her. What else is there to do?

(TheWarrior): Himself he have gained his victory. So I credit. I stay to waiton him, for though his face now is that of another man, yet now that same seemsfull manlike, as before this creature was never.

(TheScholar): When the Second World War began I was in my early twenties; I’dbeen a small child during the 1914-18 rumpus, in the course of which,evidently, my father had died. We had never been well off, although my mother,certainly, came of what then was reckoned a ‘genteel’ family. She wasmagnificent, that lady, at concealing from us both, myself and Edward – Eddy – myyounger sibling – he born some five months after our father’s death in France –that her heart had been broken. But inevitably I must conclude that Eddy’sdeath smashed any healing of her heart that he, and I, had been able to achieve.After her death, I was foisted on various relatives – cousins, once adiabolical aunt known as Sissy, (whom I called “Hissy” in secret). Luckily Imanaged well at school despite the rest, and finally won my place, if not atOxford or Cambridge, in Murchester. That town, with its own charmingly dreamingspires, became my family. I learned and grew there, and much later went back towork in the magnificent university library. Until ousted at age seventy.

But to return to my startingtheme. I was