“What is it?” he asked Mali.
“A skeleton.”
“Of what?” He thrashed toward it, sweeping out as much of it as possible with his torch. Simultaneously, Mali did the same.
She bobbed close to him, then; he could see her face through the transparent plastic disk of her oxygen mask. When she spoke, her tone was subdued, as if, despite her knowledge and experience, she had not expected to find this here.
“It’s a Glimmung,” she said. “The skeleton of an ancient, archaic, long-dead, forgotten Glimmung; it’s coral-encrusted terribly; it’s been down here, I would say, for a century at least. Good lord.”
“You mean you didn’t know it was here?” he demanded. “Maybe Glimmung; not me. But—“ She hesitated. “I think it’s a Black Glimmung.”
“What’s this?” Joe asked, and his uneasiness burgeoned; it filled him and became, by degrees, overwhelming dread.
“It’s almost impossible to explain,” Mali said. “As with antimatter; you can talk about it but you can’t really imagine what the words mean. There are Glimmungs and there are Black Glimmungs. Always on a one-to-one ratio. Each individual Glimmung has his counterpart, his opaque Doppelganger. Sooner or later, during his life, he must kill his Black counterpart, or it will kill him.”
“Why?” Joe said.
“Because that’s the way it is. It’s like asking, ‘Why is a stone?’ Do you see? They–_evolved_ this way, on this strange parity basis. They are mutually exclusive, antagonistic entities, or, if you prefer, properties. Yes, properties, like chemical combinations. You see, the Black Glimmungs are not precisely alive. And yet they’re not biochemically inert either. They’re like malformed crystals with the formdestroying principle motivating them; tropic specifically as regards their matching Glimmung. And some say that it’s not limited to Glimmungs; some say—“ She broke off, staring acutely ahead. “No,” she said. “Not this. Not already; not the first time.”
A decaying hump of flopping fabric mingled with threads of cloth tottered toward them, propelled by the currents of murky water. It had a humanoid look, as if once, long ago, it had held itself erect, had walked on strong legs. Now it bowed from the waist, and its legs dangled as if the bones had been scooped out of them. He stared at it and it came nearer and he continued staring, because it seemed somehow to want to eddy into his vicinity . . . clumsily, so that its pace was slow. And yet it made progress forward. He made out its face, now.
And felt the world within him disintegrate.
“It’s your corpse,” Mali said. “You must understand; time down here is simply not—“
“It’s blind,” he said. “Its eyes—they’ve—rotted away. Gone. Can it see me?”
“It’s aware of you. It wants—“ She hesitated.
“What does it want?” he demanded, snarling at her so that she shuddered.
“It wants to talk to you,” she said, then. And became totally silent; now she merely observed, merely saw. And did nothing, in either direction. She did not assist him; she did not assist his corrupted corpse. As if, he thought, she has withdrawn and is not here. I am alone with this thing.
“What should I do?” he asked her.
“Not—“ She became silent once more, then abruptly said, “Don’t hear what it says.”
“You mean it can speak?” he demanded, appalled. He could accept what he saw; he could retain his sanity when presented with his own dead body. But he could not believe beyond that. It could not be real, not sane; it had to be the mimicry of some aquatic life-form, something which saw him and managed, in a plastic manner, to adopt the semblance of his own shape.
“It will tell you to go away,” Mali said. “To leave this world, this ocean. Leave Heldscalla forever, and Glimmung’s hopes, his project. See: it’s already trying to form words.”
The decayed flesh of the lower face writhed; he saw broken teeth and then, from within the cavity which his mouth had become, noise issued forth. A drumming, as if far off on a heavy ocean cable. Something extending for five hundred miles, something which weighed so much. Something so dense, so hard to maneuver. And yet the thing tried. The drumming continued. And finally, as it bobbed before him, rotating slow motion and rising now, then sinking a little, he distinguished one word. Then another.
“Stay,” it said, and its mouth cavity gaped. Small fish floated in, disappeared, then floated skimmingly back out. “You—must go ahead. Ahead. Lift. Heldscalla.”
“Are you still alive?” he asked it.
Mali said, “Nothing down here is really alive, in the strict sense. Residual amounts . . . partial changes in a damaged battery.”
“But it’s not yet,” he said. “This is the future.”
“There is no future down here,” Mali said.
“But it hasn’t happened to me yet. I’m alive. I’m facing this ugly thing, this horrible mobile rot. It couldn’t talk to me if I were it.”
“Obviously,” Mali said. “But—the distinction isn’t really complete between the two of you. Some of it is merged in you; some of you remains in it. They are both you; you are both of them. ‘The child is father to the man’; remember? And the man is father to the corpse. But I thought it would say to you to go away. And instead he—it—wants you to remain. That’s what it’s swum up here to tell you. I don’t understand. This can’t be your Black, in the sense that I was explaining it, anyhow. It’s badly decayed but it’s benign, and the Blacks are never benign. Can I ask it something?”
He said nothing. Mali took it as silent assent.
“How did you die?” she asked the corpse.
The exposed jawbone waggled whitely in the currents of water surrounding it as it drummed out its deformed words, its answer. “Glimmung had us killed.”
“’Us’?” she asked alertly. “How many of us? All of us?”
“Us.” It extended a decomposed arm toward Joe. “We two.” It became silent, then. And, by degrees, drifted away. “But it isn’t so bad. I have a box I’ve made; it helps protect me. I get inside it and put up a barrier where the door—the entrance—is, and very few of the fish, the really dangerous fish, get in.”
“You mean you’re trying to protect your life?” Joe said. “But your life is over.” He did not comprehend; it made no sense, and it was eerie and bizarre. The thought of a decayed corpse—his corpse—living this semilife down here, going though the motions of making itself safe . . . “Improve living standards for the dead,” he said savagely, speaking at large, to neither Mali nor the corrupted body floating before him.
“The curse,” Mali said.
“What?” he said.
“It won’t let you go. It confronts you with your own final self and yet you won’t go away. And then later on when you’re this—“ She gestured at the corpse. “You’ll wish you had left. Today, tonight. Tomorrow morning.”
“Stay,” the corpse said to Joe.
“Why?” he said.
“When Heldscalla is raised from the water I will go to sleep. I am waiting to go to sleep; I’m glad you came, at last. I have waited centuries. Until you come here and release me I am caught in the totality of time.” It made an imploring gesture with its right arm and hand, but portions of the hand broke loose and fell away into the murky water; the hand now had only two fingers, and, seeing this, Joe felt physically, substantially sickened. He thought, If I could turn the clock back and not have come here. But the corpse had said the opposite; his coming here meant its—and his—release. My good Jesus, he thought. I’ll be that thing before long; parts of my body will fall off and be snapped up by the dangerous fish. I will have to hide in a box down here at the bottom of the sea, and the fish will eat me piece by piece.
Or maybe it’s not true, he thought. Maybe this is not my corpse; how many people are confronted by their own corpse—a corpse talking beseechingly? The Kalends, he thought. But that made no sense because—contrary to Mali’s expectations—it had urged him to stay, urged him to begin his job of pot-healing.
Glimmung, he thought. This is a phantasm projected by him, a warped, a deranged hook, to gaff me. Obviously.
He said to the bobbing, lingering corpse, “Well, thanks for your advice. I’ll take it under advisement.”
“Is my corpse here, too?” Mali demanded.
No answer. Joe’s physical remnants had floated away. Did I say the wrong thing? Joe asked himself. But ye gods; what are you supposed to say to your own corpse? I said I’d think its advice over; what more can it ask? He felt strangely angry, not frightened any longer or horrified, just the mundane boiling inside him of irritability. Pressure like this—it was unfair. He had been told that he must go ahead with his part of the project. And then he thought of the curse.