The streets are still empty though. I catch occasional glimpses of people in the ordinary world: an old man shuffling along on the opposite side of the road and then disappearing behind a tree and never re-emerging; a woman watching me from a living-room window before vanishing in the shifting reflections of the glass. There should be more people, more life. But this world is not life, I think, it’s the absence of life, the before and the after, the realization that all of us have already been dead and will be dead again and the thing we call life is just the briefest spark between eternities of blackness.
And all the time, the dull, featureless dome of the sky watches us.
You’ve been out here too long.
I feel it come on all at once. The disequilibrium of the Stillness.
“I need to stop,” Chiu says, a moment later as we cross another main intersection.
He sits heavily on the ground, his legs crossed, his hands in his lap. He stares numbly at his fingers as if he hardly recognizes them.
“No,” I say, panic rising quickly. “We need to keep moving.”
Chiu shakes his head belligerently. “I’m tired.”
Farah walks back to us. “What’s he doing?”
Chiu rolls on to his side and curls into a foetal ball.
“We’ve been outside for hours,” I say. “We need to get out of this light.”
Farah nods. At the same time, I watch the energy slip out of her and she leans against the low wall of the front garden next to us and puffs out a heavy breath.
“We shouldn’t have come this way,” she breathes.
I think about the old man Jonah killed, too weak to step outside his bedroom. I think about the man I met on the street when I first woke up: all you’ll want to do is close your eyes and wait it out…
That’s what happens to people here, I think. Their minds unravel; they curl up and they slip through the cracks in the world. It was happening to me until I met Farah and it was happening to Farah too. I think we saved each other. I have no idea how Chiu lasted for so long on his own, but maybe it was because he’s younger, or maybe his books saved him.
Chiu’s back is turning brown. Dry and crisp like an autumn leaf.
“We can’t stay here,” I say.
Farah offers me a weak smile. “You were right. We shouldn’t have left the hospital.”
“It was the right thing to do,” I say.
The ground tilts under my feet. The walls of the world recede and suck the air from my lungs. I can feel It watching me. It watched me when I was young, It watched me kill Tongue and It’s watching me now. That presence. It feels like the aura before a seizure, the metallic taste at the back of my throat.
Long and muscled, Its head tilted to one side like It’s puzzled.
“If we stay here, we’ll die,” I say.
“I can’t…” Farah shakes her head. “I can’t think.”
People think you can fight off a seizure the same way you can fight off falling asleep, but it’s not true. Something comes and sucks the ichor from you. I see it now in Farah: unblinking strength bound together by steel and snark, and yet … she’s beaten.
“I’m done, mate,” she says, looking regretfully at me.
“No,” I insist.
“Let’s just stay here a little while.”
I look at Chiu. His back is entirely brown now, one corner of his elbow cracked and threatening to flake off. Something shifts inside me, a new understanding. The reason why the outside is so awful here is not because there’s something here that doesn’t exist in the ordinary world, it’s just better hidden.
You cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live.
Exodus 33:20. One of Mum’s favourites. It’s the layers of detail that protect us from It in the ordinary world. Food to counter stillness. Love to counter emptiness.
“Dying is OK,” Farah says. “We shouldn’t make such a big deal of it.”
“No.”
“Why not?” she responds, irritably.
Because I love you.
The thought cracks through my mind like a whip. “Because it’s just getting good,” I say, instead. “Don’t you want to see what happens next?”
A weary half smile curls the corners of Farah’s mouth. It’s such a small thing: other people. I used to think I was a nobody, I was nothing, because I’d never done anything. I used to think no one would pay any attention to me because of it. But something happens when you get to know somebody: a connection forms. It’s the most human thing and it’s what binds us together even when everything else is gone.
Farah sees it in my eyes and I see it reflected in hers. I offer her my hand and she takes it. “Help me with Chiu,” I say.
She pulls herself to her feet. Her shoulders are stooped forward and her footsteps scrape on the pavement but she’s moving. I roll Chiu on to his back and slide my arm under him. Farah helps me, taking the other side of him.
He’s rigid, crisp and fragile. As light as a sheet of paper.
Oh god, we’re too late.
