The Ephemera (5 page)

David cut the fruit into small pieces, watching Sophie swallow painfully, and helped her drink some water. Then he opened the binocular case and set the focus for the middle distance. He showed Sophie how to look into them. She held them awkwardly, as if they were too heavy. David found himself able to smile at the wonder she expressed at seeing the bone giants up close. He sat back listening to her describing the shapes she saw, enjoying the sound of her voice, enjoying too the tranquillity of the place, and wondering how long they would have here.

~

A sharp rapping pierced layers of sleep, hauled him back to consciousness. Sophie screamed. A face, a man's, bearded, solemn and wild eyed was pressed up close to David's window. He jumped, slammed his hand down on the door lock, reached over and did the same on Sophie's side and drew his daughter to him. The man backed away hands held open in front of him. His expression remained intently serious.

Clinging to him, Sophie calmed down some. They sat like that watching the man who had moved back about fifteen feet. David noticed his mouth was moving like he was saying something. With caution he wound down the window a crack.

"How many days?"

"What?"

"How many days has she had it?"

Cautiously David answered, "Seventeen. What concern is it of yours?"

The bearded face looked pained.

"It might not be too late. Why don't you bring her down to my home and I'll see what I can do?"

"What do you mean?"

"I'll make her better," he said, taking a step towards them.

David barked a harsh disbelieving laugh.

"You can't be talking about a cure. That's sick. Get out of here and leave us alone."

The man did not move but his large frame sagged as if under some unseen weight.

"I shall see her when it's all over anyway, but it doesn't have to be that way." It finally dawned on David who this was. He felt a crawling uneasiness. They called him the Bone Farmer. No-one he knew had ever spoken to him, but everyone at the community knew him. It was the Bone Farmer that took care of the dead. They said he was crazy, dangerous. He didn't look dangerous. He looked lost, exhausted.

The man continued, "Look it's getting late. At the very least I can offer you food and warmth for the night. If you want you can leave and spend tomorrow alone together. And the next day, and the next. You'll have that long at least."

He was right, David knew. At least they would be able to save on supplies. But he still was not sure. Sophie began to shiver at his side.

"I don't know."

The big man sighed again.

"What have you got to lose?"

~

The Bone Farmer's place was about half a mile further down the road. The route had taken a sharp turn back into the hillside to navigate a gully. There was a bright stream hurrying down a channel through the scree. They crossed a sideless, single-width bridge. Coming out round the hill once more, the road passed a church, a brooding grey shape clinging to a rocky promontory which jutted out over the valley. The walls, dark and imposing, built of the stone which made up the hillside, made the church appear as if it had been grown rather than built. The leaded windows were high and narrow and the main double doors were solid wood; both of these reinforcing the impression that the church was a natural part of the hill. To one side there was a walled graveyard which sloped steeply away behind the building. The outline of a large tree loomed there, obscured from view by the spire.

The next corner took them back into the hill and sharply downwards. The village to which the church belonged appeared ahead of them, a thin line of buildings extending along both sides of the road. The house closest to them was a little apart from the rest, closer to the church, and was a little higher up the hill. Like the rest of them it was built of the same dark stone as the church, giving it an air of austerity, but this one at least showed signs of habitation.

At the man's instruction David stopped the car beside the manse and with Sophie in his arms he followed him into the building. The man showed him to an upstairs bedroom, cold and musty from disuse, and then left them alone. Sophie was worn out from the journey, and without protest allowed her father to lay her on the bed and wrap her under the duvet. The man reappeared with a glass containing a small quantity of a syrupy liquid and a mug of soup.

"Give her this first," he said, proffering the glass. "It's a sedative. And the soup will warm her. I'll be down in the kitchen."

Sophie's eyes, red and sore, were already half shut. David had to shake her gently to wake her so she might to drink from the glass he held to her lips. She made a face, but swallowed without protest. Sophie was asleep before David had managed even to offer her the soup. He tucked her in and went downstairs.

In the kitchen the Bone Farmer was standing at a black iron range stirring a large pot. A warm meaty smell mingled with wood smoke.

"Want some of this yourself?"

David nodded and sat at the table. The man brought over two bowls and they ate in silence. Finally there was room for conversation.

"Thanks," said David. "That was good."

The man just looked at him, grunted. That same intense expression on his face. "Where you from?"

David looked away, examining the surface of the table, the empty soup bowls, wondering how much it was safe to tell the stranger about their community. But he felt the need for suspicion draining out of him. He was tired, he wanted to trust someone.

"Village called Invergourlay. About twenty two miles south west of here on the other side of the ridge."

"I know it. You got many souls left there?"

"Twenty nine. Not counting Sophe and me."

Surprise lifted the heavy eyebrows. "That's quite a few. For round here. How's your harvest been this year?"

"Not as good as last year. None of us are farmers really, a lot is down to luck. We always find it hard this time of year."

The bearded head nodded slow agreement.

David asked him, "What about you? How do you manage?"

"I've got a few sheep, some chickens, a vegetable garden. I do all right."

"You're alone here then?"

"Yes." Simply put.
Not, Yes, everyone else moved on but I stayed behind
. The implication was that everyone who had lived here was dead.

Softly David asked, "Did you bury them all?"

The man was no longer looking at him and David could see the weariness showing at the corners of his eyes as if the stern mask had cracked around the edges.

"I bury everyone."

"How come..." David stalled, aware he was delving too deeply into the man's sorrow. The Bone Farmer already knew the question, however.

"How come I'm not dead as well?" He looked up again at last and his gaze had lost its intensity, his eyes soft bruises. "Would you believe I'm immune?"

In response to David's reaction, the man's face stretched into a thin smile.

"Ironic isn't it? How isolated everyone has become. No-one talks to anyone else. They just struggle along on their own and send their dead to me. No-one takes chances with the sick. Sometimes they throw them out as soon as the headaches start, sometimes they shoot them on the spot. One of the outcasts found his own way here once, looking for somewhere to die. I shared my blood with him, and he stayed with me for a while."

David could hardly believe it. "You gave him an open transfusion?"

The man's expression remained implacable, "It worked, didn't it? Gavin lived here for six months."

"Shit." Unwelcome possibilities were blossoming in David's mind. "What happened then?"

The intensity was back in the man's eyes, his voice carried a raw edge.

"He went home to spread the good news. Within a week he was back, dumped at the side of the road. With a bullet hole in his head."

David felt outrage and amazement well up. "If you
are
immune there must be some way to make them listen. You can't just sit here feeling sorry for yourself, you have to keep trying."

The man's eyes flashed angrily for a second, but it faded quickly.

"Maybe you weren't on sentry duty the last time I tried to tell your town," he said wearily. He unbuttoned his shirt, opening it fully to show a livid scar which creased the left side of his lower abdomen. "I got this for my trouble. Wasn't the first time I've been hit, but if I can help it, it sure as hell's going to be the last."

David could only shake his head. "No, look, I'm sorry. If we'd known..."

The man's laugh was short and harsh. "Story of my life. Believe me I still try, but what can I do? If I let myself get killed, what then?"

David sat silently absorbing all this. Finally, warily he said, "What about Sophie?"

The man spread his hands before him.

"I meant what I said. I can cure her. I'm no medical man, but I do know that incompatibility and the risk of blood poisoning alone should kill any chance of it working. But it does work, somehow. She is still young, still growing. The deformities in the bone won't disappear but they won't get any worse either. Probably she'll look better as she gets older. I don't know. I'm just guessing. Maybe she'll always move a bit stiffly, find her breathing difficult, but she's got a better chance than most at a decent life."

Quietly David said, "I still don't know. I'll have to think about it."

"Of course."

David got up and went outside. He was scared about the extent to which he was putting his trust in this stranger, wanting so badly to believe him. Deep in thought he made his way up the curving road towards the church. Evening was coming on, spilling shadows among the hills. The west facing wall of the church glowed in the deepening light like the inside of a kiln, the leaded windows shimmering warmly.

Approaching the church, he walked out onto the rocky promontory, bringing most of the valley into view. To the east, the town at the head of the valley was becoming harder to determine, painted out by a wash of twilight. He made his way down the path which led around the church towards the graveyard. He rounded the corner, and then stopped.

The graveyard was thirty yards to a side, surrounded by a crumbling two foot high dry stone wall. Because of the lie of the land it sloped steeply downhill and was bordered at its farthest boundary by what had once been a field. The plots were arranged in regular rows. Closest to the church the grave stones were ancient, worn smooth. More recent stones were further away, and at the very back, simple wooden crucifixes. The neat rows of crosses continued into the field below the stone wall, spreading out to the sides, curving around the hillside. There had to be at least two hundred plots but David could not see their full extent. They were obscured by the towering shape of the tree.

The tree seemed to have originated at the end of the original yard, but had long since outgrown it and had in places reduced sizeable portions of the boundary wall to rubble. Its colour on the whole was pale, yellowy white, tinted pink by the setting sun. Rather than a trunk as such, the main body appeared to be a collection of entwined boles which bifurcated and branched, reaching thirty feet at least into the air, and then split and split again into the slenderest of stems, sweeping down to the ground like a willow. The roots, a tortured white tangle, twisted and spilled into the earth all around it.

As he got closer, David could see that the roots reached out into the field beyond, and then it dawned on him what he was seeing. What he had taken for a tree was in fact an impossible growth of bone, seeded in the graves, rising through the hard earth, turning, shaping it seemed at random, fusing together into the semblance of a trunk and branches, and then splitting off and bending low to the earth again to be absorbed back into the body of the whole. Still closer he began to resolve the vast central mass into a more complex snarl of bizarre shapes: ridges, fans, curving plates and knobs jutting out at all angles.

In many places large sections had been hacked away only to be replaced by virgin material. Moving around the tree, David found a large band saw propped against it beside a fresh four foot by three foot gash. Reaching the wall, he saw that the tree was straddling what was left of it. In truth, it seemed more that the mass of roots was in the process of absorbing the chiselled stonework.

From here David could see down into the valley. The field beyond contained more plots than he had at first thought, all linked to the tree by ribbons of white snaking through the soil. But his gaze was immediately drawn to the parade beyond. Seeing the figures much closer now than before David was awed by their variety and simplicity, their pale, motionless beauty. Each was a sketch in the simplest of lines shaped from a rough hunk of bone, the semblance of a figure in the act of one of a myriad human functions: a tennis player; a woman ironing; a child playing peek-a-boo; a straining figure struggling with an umbrella blown inside out; a lollipop lady holding up non-existent traffic; a man with his head cocked as if listening to something, perhaps a joke; an old woman curled up in a foetal position, arms crossed over her head; a couple, limbs and torsos entwined, indistinguishable in an act of love; a young man tearing his dreadlocks, screaming. A catalogue of human activity, row upon row of stances and postures stretching down the hillside and fanning out along the valley floor. They were too numerous to count, but there had to be at least as many as there were graves.

Those nearest, crowding the graves like funeral mourners, appeared to be less clear than the others. At first David assumed this was because they were the oldest ones and had succumbed to weathering. But further study revealed that they were losing definition not because material was being worn away but rather because it was still being deposited, overlaid, still growing. These were figures in metamorphosis, taking on a new form. Less and less human, more and more... the word which sprang to mind was
natural
.

David's eyes drank them in, flitting from one, lingering on the next. He felt a chill breeze against his cheek as he studied the Bone Farmer's work. Behind him the wind teased a hollow multi-timbral tune from the tree's thinnest branches. It was a natural sound. Not creepy, he thought, merely melancholic. As the breeze grew in strength, ruffling through his hair, David began to pick out a low wavering ostinato from somewhere within the crowd of figures, a sorrowful counterpoint to the tinkling song of the tree. He hugged himself for warmth as the wind tugged harder at his coat and trousers. More voices, elicited from white, porous mouths, joined the first. Soaring discords, swelling to become a choir, weaving complex, atonal fugues.