civilization they neither knew nor understood, their living hearts met and married.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said silently. It was infinitely pitiful. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’ He looked away, his gaze wrenched from hers.
She was certain she must be almost at the top of the stairs, her feet still treading air as far as her eyes could tell, the faces of the travellers above, below and on every side of her. But she could see, very faintly, the outline of the door, and the boards and beams of the room where Simon lay. He was one mass of blood now, from head to foot. She could see the marks, the hieroglyphics of agony on every inch of his torso, his face, his limbs. One moment he seemed to flash into a kind of focus, and she could see him in the empty room, with the sun through the window, and the shattered jug at his side. Then her concentration would falter and instead she’d see the invisible world made visible, and he’d be hanging in the air while they wrote on him from every side, plucking out the hair on his head and body to clear the page, writing in his armpits, writing on his eyelids, writing on his genitals, in the crease of his buttocks, on the soles of his feet.
Only the wounds were in common between the two sights. Whether she saw him beset with authors, or alone in the room, he was bleeding and bleeding.
She had reached the door now. Her trembling hand stretched to touch the solid reality of the handle, but even with all the concentration she could muster it would not come clear. There was barely a ghost-image for her to focus on, though it was sufficient. She grasped the handle, turned it, and flung the door of the writing room open.
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.