The Bone Yard and Other Stories Read online

  “Excuse me? Where are we going?”

  No answer.

  She kept walking. And walking.

  *

  Eventually, she reached the top.

  Her sudden relief turned to immediate despair.

  The stairway circled the top and seemed to continue back down to the bottom of the tower. Peering over the rail down into the darkness, she could see the tiers and tiers of the outer wall of the stairway until the darkness claimed the last morsel of light. The ‘up’ stairway and the ‘down’ stairway were entwined like two ropes, reminding her of a DNA double-helix, the backbone of life. She had no doubt then that the two stairways joined up at the tower’s base. Descending took the strain off her legs for the hours it lasted, but then she reached the bottom and saw there was no exit, no door leading out. She was pushed along to the stairway she had already gone up once. The people were going nowhere. So why were they doing it? Was she the only one who noticed the completely pointlessness?

  Now she really, really wanted to stop, but if she did the people behind her would step on her. She knew they would not stop - they could not because the people ahead would not. But she was tired, her calves were hurting, her hamstrings like taut wires, her leg muscles burning. This was insane, she knew. What was the purpose of all of this walking?

  “Hey,” she called to the man in front, “talk to me! Where are we going?”

  He was puffing and gasping. “Can’t. Talk. Must. Walk.”

  “Why? For God’s sake, why?”

  He did not answer.

  “WHY ARE WE DOING THIS?”

  He ignored her. Angry, she punched him not too hard. He did not turn around, as she had hoped, but he did speak one word per step. “We. Have. To. Because.”

  “Because what?”

  He shrugged. His lank hair shone with sweat. She grabbed his shoulder. He pulled away, but she glimpsed his pale face and what she saw scared her. He was terrified. He wasn’t going to stop for anyone. He would keep walking until his heart exploded.

  She continued ascending and descending, following the walkers on their seemingly endless journey inside the tower. After several hours she could no longer think straight. Sweat was in her eyes more or less constantly. Her lungs felt like bags of acid dissolving inside her, eroding what was left of her body and spirit. Her feet ached, ached like bloodied stumps. If she didn’t look down regularly she would have sworn they’d been worn away to the bone. Walking. Walking. Walking. The stress on her joints was unbelievable. It felt as though someone had hit her knees with a hammer. When Lauren stretched her neck to look up at the people, she saw one or two stumble and fall out of step, quickly struggling to get back into the rhythm. There was a woman six steps ahead who kept slacking. She kept tripping. Each time, the woman recovered, but only just. Her sobbing echoed; little sad gasps.

  Lauren realised there was sobbing up and down the line, like background noise which had been there all of the time but she had not noticed. The sound filled the gaps between the shuffle-shuffle of feet on cold, hard rock.

  Closing her eyes, she walked on. As time blurred and her fatigue and pain increased ten-fold, she focused on her thoughts. She could see the tower in her mind’s eye as being the only man-made object on a rocky island in the middle of a grey sea. The tower had no windows and no doors. No way in or out. It looked incredibly ancient, but it also looked timeless. She didn’t know if she had seen the tower from the outside, or if it was merely her imagination. She liked to think it was her imagination; if it was not then that meant there was no way out, but then how did these thousands of people get inside? Had someone blocked up the exit with mortar and stone? Was this some kind of tomb? And why were they here? Had they volunteered? Had someone kidnapped them?

  A scream.

  Not her, Lauren realised with relief.

  Her eyes snapped open.

  The woman who had been sobbing had fallen. She appeared unconscious. The next man stepped on her, walked over her. And so did the next. The woman had broken their rhythm, but did not slow them. They just kept on going.

  “Wait!” Lauren cried. “She’s hurt! Stop! Stop damn you!”

  But no one was listening.

  When Lauren reached the woman she tried to lift her, but she was too heavy, and the man behind didn’t give her time. The woman disappeared under his feet. Lauren yelled out in frustration, but the man barely registered her presence. She was forced to continue. The next time she reached that point in the stairway the woman was dead. She had been crushed under thousands of feet. Her bones were broken, flesh squashed. After a few more cycles there wasn’t much left on the steps. Most of the woman was on the soles of their feet.

  So that was why nobody stopped, Lauren thought grimly. A mad laugh spewed from her lips. She wondered how far she had walked. Miles and miles. There were a thousand steps on the stairway, she had counted. She regained a little energy every time she was going down, but the upward spiral was becoming harder and harder. It was as if the steps were stretching, though she knew it was in her mind. The steps were not becoming taller, she was becoming weaker. Raising her feet just a little distance was like having rocks tied to her feet. She’d lost track of the hours spent there. It felt like at least a day. She wanted to go home, wherever that was. She’d had enough.

  Soon there were more bones on the stairway as people fell and died. Was it ten or eleven bodies now? Difficult to tell. The walking went on regardless. The death smell caused her to retch as others had retched before her.

  Up. Down. Up. Down. No space to stop. Slipping on looping entrails. Crack. Crunch. She was crying. She was dying. Slowly. So thirsty she was tempted to drink from the bodies underfoot like a vampire. So tired she did not stop to urinate, just like nobody else did. Here there was no place for prudery, for hygiene. Only the walking.

  As she walked she clawed at the stone walls, hoping to find a loose slab, a chink of light from outside. There were marks already there by other fingers. She wasn’t the first to think of escape, the first to fail.

  Ten bodies doubled to twenty, then forty, then eighty ... Since there just over two thousand people in the tower she wondered how long it would take for all of them to fall dead or dying. A day? Two?

  Why didn’t they sit down? Sit down and stop the madness.

  Because they knew something she did not, that was why.

  What?

  She wished she could remember.

  They knew it, but they were not telling.

  They were keeping a secret.

  She thought about the reason. And only one possible motive made any sense. Someone was testing them, and that someone would only be let out the very last person standing. It was an endurance test. A sick game. They (the owners of the tower?) were removing the weakest people. Now, thinking that hypothesis, she had a deep feeling that she had been told that earlier, outside the tower, in the vague time before. It gave her some hope - she just had to keep going until she was the last person standing. Since she had arrived after the others, she believed, then they would be more exhausted than she would. Heh-heh-heh. Ugly laughter, ugly thoughts. Desperation was making her wish these other people would fail.

  She could imagine herself tripping the man in front.

  No.

  That would be ... murder

  Was she that desperate?

  There were more spaces in the line now. Her feet were cut and bleeding from standing on sharp bones, her blood mingling with that of the dead. The man she had talked to had fallen sometime earlier, but she could not be sure when. He was gone. Dead. There was more space for her to walk in, a full five steps. She felt guilty for being glad for the extra room.

  And on it went. After a while the walking became automatic, the pain irrelevant. Her heartbeat matched the pace of her walking and the thudding of her skull.

  When she was going down the stairway, she did it on her hands and knees; it was easier. It was like sliding down a chute in places, where the human carpet was slick
and wet. But there was hell to pay when she started on the climb again: her legs wobbled and often buckled.

  But she kept going.

  Walkers collapsed more frequently, and the way was blocked by bodies in places she had to crawl over, her hands and feet sinking into pounded flesh. Face to face with the lifeless.

  A memory surfaced:

  The door opens when the last one walks alone.

  Someone had said that. She was certain. She could place no face with the voice, but she knew the person had not been lying. There was a door, but it was locked and hidden until there was only one survivor. It was at the top of the tower, she knew. She gritted her teeth with cold determination. She would survive. The tower would not beat her. It was matter of will-power. She could go on forever, if necessary. She would not stop. She would not die. Nothing could beat her. Nothing.

  Her hunger burned inside her, bitter acid eating away at her stomach lining like a cancer. Desperately, she stuffed a handful of moss into her mouth and chewed it. It was bitter and hard to swallow, but she managed it. The pain receded, slightly. It was nothing compared with that of her legs and back. The moss gave her some energy to carry on, so she peeled off more strips of it, eating it as she walked. Its limited nutrients helped a little. She prayed no one else had thought of eating it. That would be unfair. It was her idea. Nobody else’s. Hers.

  Nobody could walk this long, this hard, she knew. How much time had passed? A month? Easily. She knew it for a fact, not as a crazy reaction to her fatigue, her pain. She just had to count the bodies beneath her feet to know it had been that long. She had been walking for a month. It was impossible - no one could do that, not the hardiest of marathon walkers, not someone given the strongest of designer drugs - but she had done it. Was doing it. Would keep doing it. So that meant this place was beyond the ordinary world, if it existed anywhere outside of her mind, that was. She wasn’t sure about anything any more. All that existed was the stairway, and the stairway belonged to her. Everyone else was a trespasser ... so beware.

  *

  At some point she became aware there was just one other walker left. A man just as resourceful and strong-minded and ruthless. And he was gaining on her. She could hear his footsteps.

  She kept walking.

  A bubble of memory rose up from the depths of her subconscious mind and expanded until it was the only thing she could think. The memory was fully formed, but, like a real bubble, to press its surface was to risk bursting it, sending it back into oblivion. But she did risk it. She had to know the truth about why she was here. Her memories flooded back. She could see her previous life through the impartiality of distance from birth to now.

  She had never been satisfied. Always, she had been seeking more. Everything had seemed ephemeral, unchallenging, to a woman who could achieve whatever she set her mind upon. Having conquered the business world at an early age (still in her teens, she had reaped billions from the City, then retired to the consternation of her peers), she had moved on to tougher challenges. She had experimented with the danger sports: skiing, diving, parachuting, rally driving, mountain climbing, cave exploring, adventuring across jungle and desert ... taking each to extremes, daring death to take her.

  Death had shied away, though it had left its scars - the shark bite on her outer thigh, the broken bones, the punctured kidney, the destroyed lovers, the wrecked marriages. Death had a way of taunting her, mocking her, humiliating her. It was like a father scolding its child for disobedience. One day, she had promised herself, I will beat you, death.

  That was her ultimate challenge.

  The secret of life.

  But she had known the secret would not come from the science of this century, or even the next. It would come from the shady world around her, where rules were for breaking and truths were to be disproved.

  There was a rumour of a man who knew the secret of secrets. He was called simply the Doorway. He had no other name. The Doorway could show her places that were hidden. After many years of searching, she traced the Doorway to a dark pit of a place somewhere in Thailand. The Doorway squatted in a stinking hut miles from the nearest village. He had been waiting for her, expecting her. He was a blind man, with eyes a milky white and skin as black as the deepest cave. It looked as though he had been waiting for a thousand years.

  “Enter,” he said, in English, as she peered into the hut. “Sit.”

  She sat down facing him. His cataract-bulging eyes studied her.

  “Can you help me?” she asked.

  “What do you seek?”

  “I seek the ultimate challenge.”

  “You do?”

  “I do.”

  “I do not think you are ready.”

  “I am. There is nothing else left for me.”

  “Very well,” he said. He reached down between his legs as if seeking carnal pleasure, but instead he raised a cloth scroll onto his lap, unfurling it with a deft flick of his fingers. The text was Babylonian cuneiform, at least four thousand years old. The text surrounded a picture of an island with a tower in its centre. The tower. The tower reached up into the clouds. The picture looked almost three-dimension, as if she could reach out and step into the image. It made her eyes water.

  “Is it real?”

  “As real as any dream or nightmare,” the Doorway said. It was then he explained the rules. “Many people such as yourself have come to me asking to enter the tower, but the exit will only open for one, the winner. You will have to compete against them all. And win. Only then will I reveal the secret of secrets. If you think you are ready for the challenge, then just touch the tower and you will enter. But if not, I suggest you leave now.”

  “What happens if I fail?”

  “You will pray for death, but it will not come.”

  “I have always loved a challenge,” she said, and she touched the tower and found herself on the steps.

  *

  Remembering the reason for her being there stirred her into a faster pace. The footsteps behind her receded ... and eventually she was gaining on the man. He matched her pace for weeks, occasionally slipping ahead, occasionally slipping behind, but after a time she got within sight of him. He looked back with fear in his eyes. He was afraid. She had no pity. Like her, he had chosen to take the ultimate challenge. But she would win. She would be last.

  When she was just a few steps away from the man he let out an agonising cry of defeat, both hands holding his heart as he staggered and fell dead. The dying scream echoed within her until she reached the top for the final time. If the door did not open, then she would pull it off its hinges. But it did open with the gentlest push. She stumbled into a room and lay down on the floor and wept. When she felt better, she opened her eyes.

  She was in the hut.

  The Doorway was there. Waiting.

  It looked as though no time had gone by in the real world. She wondered if the tower had been a dream, but looked at her own body, seeing the damage done, she realised it had been real.

  There was something different about the Doorway. His eyes were no longer blind. They held the Earth in each socket; his right showed the planet at its creation, four billion years ago; the left showed its death as the sun expanded. Lauren wondered what kind of being he was. Was he even remotely human? All of human time was within his vision. There had to be nothing he did not know.

  Lauren gathered her strength and said, “I did it. I beat them all. Now, what is the secret of secrets?”

  “The secret of secrets is ... there is no ultimate challenge.”

  “What?”

  “There is always another challenge. The secret of life is to accept what there is, to be satisfied with what you already have, to be the best person you can be.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I know,” he said. “I know ...”

  Lauren did not remember how she had entered the tower, but she knew there had been a life before, if only she could reach those tantalisingly enigmatic memorie
s of yesterday.

  The Shadow of Death

  In darkened bars and darkened alleys the dead clung to the shadows like half-remembered nightmares. Jason Frost stepped out of the black taxi and walked into the Finnegans Wake. It was a theme bar, the theme being 1950s Irish-Americana, not the James Joyce novel. The walls were covered with black and white photographs of hard-working men constructing buildings and making cars, their faces black with grease, oil and sweat. Frost chose a stool and ordered a whiskey from the sombre bartender. Other customers along the counter were drinking Guinness in real glass glasses, mostly tourists seeking a nostalgic drink in quiet company. They looked at him suspiciously, then seemed satisfied that he belonged and resumed their drinking. Frost was not Irish or American. He just went to the bar because it was dark and smoky and the customers usually kept to themselves.

  He could see many dead people in the alcoves and clustered at tables, hiding from the living. Some were seriously decayed, their off-white skulls showing through ribbons of greenish flesh, but most looked almost alive, mottled by the lividity of the dying process, like boxers bruised in the ring. There was the faint odour of embalming fluid in the air. By mutual agreement, the living stayed near the bar counter while the dead stayed in the darkness. Most of the living enjoyed the ambience; it gave them a feeling of being close to the edge.

  But not the drunk sitting next to Frost.

  He was a deadneck, a man with a pathological hatred of the dead.

  He was an American tourist sloshing beer on the counter and on his chequered shirt, which looked like a tablecloth stolen from a roadside café. The tourist looked at Frost through glazed eyes and whispered loudly. “You see those guys sitting over there, man?” He indicated the main group of dead with his thumb. The dead were playing poker. “Zombies, all of them. You look at their eyes, man. Big zombie pupils, like a drug-addict’s, you know? You know they got no souls, man. Slack-jawed dead-eyed evil flesh-eating brain-dead mothers should all be killed properly, burned up in a crematorium or something, man. Should never have been resurrected, man. Never.”