Land of the Beautiful Dead

by R. Lee Smith

There were no deformities, no monstrous features, no decay. All the same, it was hard to look and see a living person. His nose was gone, just splinters of exposed bone above an open cavity to mark its place, but with a suggestion of regrowth about the skin building up around it. His brow was broad and sloping, cleaved open to the bone in the center, but mostly healed. Below his left eye, there were cracks that opened wider as they spilled down his cheek, becoming gaps that exposed his teeth and the white gleam of his jawbone before merging with the keloided mess over his throat and sealing again. And over all of it, every inch, was the silvery shine of old scars, a filigree of pain he could hide but never completely heal.

“There was a time I thought only if you had half as much passion in my bed as in speech would it be worth having to endure your never-ending argument. Now I find myself thinking that if you had half as much passion in speech as in my bed, you could convince me.”

“I don’t believe he can. As unhappy as his Children were, I’m certain he would have remade them, if he had that power. I suspect we can only be raised once. To return to my allegory of the photograph, he can either tear it up and take another or learn to live with an imperfect picture. He cannot reuse the same film.”

He told her not to speak or look at him. He told her not to try to kiss him. He told her she was beautiful. Then he lay her down and lay beside her and he said nothing more.

“They’re getting heavy, aren’t they?” he remarked, watching her. “With all the death you’ve seen, you’ve never guessed at the weight death has when it first creeps in. And that is your first lesson, child. Death is not something you see. Or smell. Or hear. Death is personal, intimate. Death knows you from the inside out. Feel, then, your lungs growing denser with every breath you cannot take. Your heart, heavy as it races and heavier still as it begins to slow. Soon, it will stop.”

“Hush,” he said again, softly, like a lover. “You are not afraid. You are Lan of Norwood, who walked alone into my world of hungering dead, and you are not afraid. Yes, your heart will stop and when it does, you will hear it. You will feel it. It will hurt, but you are prepared for this. You think that will be the end, that death will follow shortly.” He leaned close, filling her sight with his eyes and the terrible color that hid behind their blinding light. “It. Won’t.”

“I’ve heard it said one’s entire life is replayed in these last moments,” Azrael mused, slipping his left hand behind her head to keep her from battering herself unconscious. “I’ve never found it so, but there is time enough, isn’t there? There is no beauty in that final night, no flights of angels come to comfort you, no welcoming light to guide your way, but there is…oh, so much time. Your senses may recede, your eyes go blind and your ears deaf, but you will feel and you will go on feeling for what will seem to be hours. Your bowels will empty and you will lie powerless in your spilled shit while your body, your meat, begins the processes of decay and every nerve screams and still it does not end and will not until your stubborn brain’s last cell sparks and fails.”

“This is death, you ignorant child,” his voice roared, no longer on her ears but in her head, her bones. “This is what you cast before me like so many shiny beads or bottled water to buy my will. This is death and you do fear it, don’t you? You fear it and you are right to fear it, for where it ends, I begin!”

“No, it is not gentle, is it, to be saved?” he murmured, far above her. “But then, no one comes through that veil save that they are torn. And when it is done, I shall have these tatters to mend together into your eternal form. Hm.” He began to walk around her where she lay, circling slowly, inspecting every twitch and shudder with an assessing eye. “You say you wish to be raised up as you are, with all your mind and memory intact? So be it, but you will find memory is not a comfort to the dead. Every new day will bring you a thousand fresh reminders of how diminished your days have become. You will cut your hair and it will never grow again. You’ll never be hungry, but you may eat out of habit, only to find even lemon cake turns sour when it rots in your stomach. So you’ll stop, except on those rare occasions when you find yourself wondering what it tasted like and why you ever wanted it at all. Because you’ll forget, Lan. I can make you over in my image, but I can never make you as I am. Your flesh may be preserved as it was at the hour of your death, but your mind will remain mortal. Year by year, the hard edges that separate then from now will wear soft away and you’ll wonder…were they peaches I picked, or apples? Were there ever really Eaters or were they only monsters from a dream I had once, when I used to dream? In time, you will forget how it felt to be alive and remember only that you were…until I took it from you. And you will hate me.”

“Or I can take those memories. End them, as you would say. I could dip my hand into your death and pull you free of it, newborn and wondering, yet give you all your will.” He passed through her line of sight, paused briefly as if to give her a chance to speak, then kept on walking when she didn’t. He wore a gold ring on his toe, one she’d never before noticed. It tapped at the stone with every step, not quite keeping time with her gasping breaths. “You will know that you are Lan, but only because I tell you so. You will know the tale of how one small child lost her coat on England’s shores, as I tell it to you, but you will not know her face or her name. Every mark upon your body shall become an incomplete clue to a life you have lost. You will question me, doubt me and, eventually, you will hate me.” Lan coughed and dragged her leaden arm up through fathoms of tar to grip her swollen throat. “So I will deny you all. I will take this cooling clay and shape it as I please. The creature I form will never know pain or grief or loss. Neither will she miss her life nor have cause to question it. She will never be the woman I knew and I suspect I shall tire of her readily, but she will love me…and she will always love me.” He completed his circle and hunkered down in front of her. “But here is the vital point you have overlooked. However it happens, whatever I make of you, I need not bargain for it. Death will come for you in its own time and when it does, I will be there to gu...

“You. You represent a direct threat to this city,” he told her, advancing with one gloved hand on the hilt of his sword and the other drawn into a fist. “If I had even a sliver of doubt that our lord wants you with him, I would put you right over this wall myself. No other warmblood woman has ever had this power over him, ever. You are an infection upon his thoughts and his judgment and with every day that passes, your corruption spreads. If he takes back his hungering dead for you, the living will come. Everything he has built may be destroyed. Ten thousand of his people have made a home here, raised with love to serve him for all eternity, but he will put them all at risk for you.”

“You have to want the time you have, Lan,” he said, not unkindly. “More than anything. More than everything. Because that is the cost at which you are selling it. Do you understand?”

“Say it!” he shouted, full into her face. “I will not share you with your fool’s dream, not one more day! Surrender all to me! Every piece! There is nothing for you beyond Haven! There is no Norwood and no hungering dead! You are mine!” “Don’t. Please, don’t.” She could barely hear the words she spoke, but she could taste them—a high, bitter taste like fear, or climax when it hit too hard to feel good. “Don’t make me choose between you and the world…or…” “Or you’ll what?” he challenged, his eyes blazing until their fire overfilled the sockets of his mask. “Or I will.”

“Was it raining?” Silence. On the landing, still watching, his dolly hugged herself and frowned. “Yes,” Azrael said softly. “It rained.” “It should rain on bad days.” Lan looked down at her dress and wrung out the other sleeve. “The day my mother died, it was sunny. Warm. Like, just the nicest day, you know? It didn’t feel real, any of it. But it’s rained every night since you and I…since I started sleeping alone.” Lan scuffed a toe through the wettest part of the puddle she’d made, smearing it into streaks. “Would you call that an omen?” He came a step closer, then moved away. “I call it weather.” “I miss you.”

“I miss your bed. I miss being in the dark with you. I miss seeing this.” Lan held her hand up before her face, angled to catch his eyelight on her palm. “And I hate that I miss it. You…You made me feel what it is to sleep alone. It ought to be the same as before I ever knew you, but it isn’t. I can’t even say how. It just isn’t.”

“I want to come back to you, Azrael. Even if it’s just to bed, just for tonight. Please. I can’t give you any more than I have, but I can come back if you ask me. And if you can’t ask me, then…then send me away. Right now. Tonight. Because it’s already raining and I…” She pulled in a shuddering breath and made herself laugh, the sound indistinguishable from a child’s sob. “I can’t lose you on another nice day.”

“Who let her in here?” he demanded, turning on his doormen. “Are your orders not clear? When I have not summoned my companions, they are to remain in their chambers! Remove her at once and be thankful I do not pin you in my garden as a reminder you are my guards and not my whoremongers!” “Nobody mongers me, mate,” said Lan. “I do my own whoring.”

His step slowed, but only for a moment. “Are you drunk?” “Getting there.” “Intentionally?” “You bet. Been drinking like a dippy bird since I got here and I am easily half-ripped to the giddy tits.

“How are you beautiful? You are…two unflinching eyes and the chin where you carry all your stubbornness. You are the blush you never admit to and that rebel lock of hair you are forever pushing back. You are the throat that arches and the lower lip you bite to keep from moaning…just before you moan anyway. You are my Lan and you are radiant.”

“You want to end the world,” she said at last. “You really do. You…How could you?” “The world? No. Only Man. And what does it matter, one species more or less? If humanity’s history had but one voice, it would tell you the loss of this or that creature before its natural time, while tragic on a sentimental level, is nevertheless insignificant in the cosmic scheme of things. Man may perish, but the world will neither celebrate nor mourn. It will go on.” His smile thinned. “Would you like to know how?” “No.”

“Animals will swell to fill the void left by Men,” he told her. “And over-swell it, perhaps. There will be other extinctions and other recoveries. The sky will clear, but those who see it will not marvel at its many colors. These ruins will collapse, burying treasures like this—” He waved at the walls. “—and this—” He picked up the spoon from her coffee tray and tossed it down again with a clatter. “—forever, but the world will go on. Years become centuries so easily when no one is there to count them. Centuries become millennia. The forests will reclaim the lands that Men have razed. Rivers will carve canyons across the scars left by his fallen cities. Mountains will rise up, trapping seas to dry under an uncaring sun and leaving the bones of whales to bleach in the newborn deserts for no one to find, no one to be inspired by thoughts of giants and dragons. And still the world will go on, and I will go on with it through ages that can only be measured by the coming and going of glaciers. The stars themselves will shift in the heavens and no one will be there to invent names for their new alignments or remember the stories of the old ones, no one but me. In time, the sun itself will begin to cool. Here on Earth, the world goes on and on as its remaining life passes through its last changes and dies away. It will be quiet. And lonely.” His mouth curved into a bitter line. “But I’ll live.” “Stop it,” Lan whispered through numb lips.

“I read once that the sun will someday swell and engulf this world before it burns itself out. Perhaps I will finally die with it. Or perhaps I will continue to endure…my ashes pulled eternally apart through the frozen vacuum of space, and I with no more mouth to scream…still alive.” “Stop it!” she shouted and had to clap both hands over her eyes ...

“So,” he said in what was almost his normal tone, “I have that to look forward to. Until then, it falls to me, as to even the least of Men, to determine how I will live. After all my years of running, hiding…dying…I have decided I would rather live in an empty world than one in which I am forever hunted. You could show me a castle in the sky, unreachable by human hands, and promise me ten thousand years of peace within its golden walls, but I am not running, Lan. Not one step more. Not one. I am here and if Men are fool enough to pursue me here, then here is where I will end them. All of them.”

“I really thought I had it, you know,” Lan said at last. “I could see it, Azrael. I could see all those houses laid out in rows. Fields. Windmills. Smoke in the chimneys. Goats on the roofs. But you know…I never saw people. Not even in my own head. Not me. Not you. Deep down, I reckon I still knew you can’t start over.” She thought about it and had to laugh. “My mother used to say that. You can’t start over, you can only move on.” “Hm.” “Yeah. You would have liked her. She never had any hope either.”

“We’re oil and water, me and you. You can shake us and shake us, but we’ll never mix.” “Oil and water?” he echoed with a tired sort of humor. “No. We’re flint and steel.” “Yeah?” “Oh yes. And when we strike together, there are sparks. Fire, by its very nature, cannot help but consume and destroy, but still it can accomplish great things.” He threw her a glance and half a smile. “If properly contained and controlled.” “And you think you can control me?” “Ah, but you are not the fire in this metaphor, my Lan. You are the steel.” “Not the flint?” “I am flint.” He held up his mask, the one in faceless grey stone, before fitting it to his face. “Enduring and immoveable as only stone can be.” “Flint breaks, you know,” she reminded him. “So does steel, in a reckless hand.” Making a final adjustment to his mask’s strap, he came back to the bed to cup her cheek in his cool hand. “But in a master’s, it melts…” His hand moved, following the curves of her face downward, along her neck, around her shoulder. “…and is made malleable to every need…” He came teasing-close to her breast, only to slip away, the backs of his fingers brushing now at the hollow of her throat as they traveled on. “…as willing to be spoon as knife.” “You just keep telling yourself that,” she said, amused and—might as well admit it—blushing maybe just a bit. “I need no convincing. Any eye can see you are surely steel. Resolute as iron, with a sharp edge and the shine of silver.”

Think, not of what you win or lose, but of what you learn and what you teach, and you will always have the advantage.

“I don’t do subtle. I don’t even know how to spell it.” “With a B.” “Don’t make fun of me,” Lan snapped. “I’m illiterate, not stupid! I know there’s no B in subtle!”