Burial (56 page)

Through the windows, Amelia could see that the sky was
even darker and even bloodier. Lightning crackled like burning hair, and for a moment she could see the Empire State, veiled in static.
By the old Moulmein pagoda, looking lazy at the sea
.

They reached a frosted-glass door that said SGT J.P. FRIENDLY in chipped black lettering and Officer Hamilton opened it up, asking, ‘What is it you're looking for?'

To Amelia's relief, the forks weren't at all difficult to find. In fact they were lying in Sergeant Friendly's out-tray in a sealed plastic envelope, only half-concealed under a sheaf of letters and reports, with a scribbled note saying
M. Vaizey: these are what he used to blind himself
.

Amelia held up the forks and said: ‘These. These are what I wanted.'

‘Okay, help yourself,' said Officer Hamilton. ‘Take ‘em back to the desk and Sergeant Zuwadski will give you a receipt to sign. That's all.'

They walked back along the corridor. Officer Hamilton hummed, and his shoes squeaked. Amelia lifted up the forks in their plastic envelope and gentlyjingled them. They looked very dull; and extremely old; and she couldn't imagine how they could be used to fight Misquamacus; but she would leave that to Harry. She was pleased enough that she had been able to get hold of them. In fact, almost triumphant.

They reached the elevator and Officer Hamilton pressed the button with the flat of his hand. They waited and waited, but the elevator didn't respond. They heard winding-gear clicking and faltering, and electric motors whining, but still no elevator.

‘Better take the stairs,' said Officer Hamilton.

He opened the mustard-painted door to the staircase and they began to climb down through the gloom, their feet chip-chipping on the bare concrete treads. The staircase smelled of stale air and urine and industrial bleach. They
could still hear the elevator whining and clicking as they passed the fifth floor, and carried on down to the fourth floor. ‘Whole city's collapsing,' said Officer Hamilton; and there was something in the tone of his voice, a rising note of panic, that made Amelia realize that he wasn't being surly, just scared. After all, how old was he? Twenty-three or four, and Manhattan was falling around his ears.

Amelia said, ‘There's a chance we can save it.'

Officer Hamilton glanced back at her. ‘Oh, yeah? How do you stop an earthquake?'

‘This isn't an earthquake. We don't have earthquakes in New York. It's solid bedrock, no volcanic faults.'

Officer Hamilton wasn't even listening. ‘Did you see the Chrysler Building go down? It just vanished, like it never happened. I can't even
imagine
New York without the Chrysler Building.'

They had just reached the third-floor landing when they felt the precinct house give a lurch beneath their feet. Then another lurch. Then windows broke, with a sharp ice-puddle crackling noise, and a length of metal banister came clanging and careening all the way from the fifteenth floor. Officer Hamilton pushed Amelia against the wall as the rail bounced past them, and then they both stared down at the darkened bottom of the stair-well, until they heard the rail crashing into the basement.

‘It's going,' said Officer Hamilton, in complete panic. ‘The whole damned precinct's collapsing!'

Amelia heard a whistling, whirring sound, long-drawn-out, and then a flurry of snakey whiplashes. That must have been the elevator plunging all the way down to the lobby, followed by its broken cables. A dull smash confirmed that she was right.

‘Come on!' she urged Officer Hamilton. ‘We have to get out of here!'

‘Jesus!' said Officer Hamilton, and she could tell by the
shake in his voice that he was almost hysterical. ‘Jesus frigging Christ!'

It was then that the building began to drop beneath their feet, just like a giant elevator. It fell faster and faster, gathering a huge and irresistible momentum. Amelia was clinging onto the nearest doorhandle, trying to stop herself sliding sideways across the landing. She collided with the stair-railings, she collided with Officer Hamilton's back. Then she lost her grip and rolled over him, and she was hurtled down the stairs, banging and bruising all the way down to the next landing.

She could feel the building shaking and roaring away as it was dragged down into the ground. Below her, she could hear terrified shrieking — so high-pitched that it was impossible to tell whether it was a man or a woman. Officer Hamilton screamed, too.

She suddenly thought to herself:
this is it, this is the end. I'm going to be buried alive
.

The walls of the building were vibrating fiercely, as if it were determined to shake itself apart. Dust boiled up the stair-well, and there was a grating, ripping noise as the concrete staircase was wrenched free from its reinforcing rods.

Amelia smelled death rushing up to meet her. She grabbed at the nearest banister, and managed to stand up. At the end of the landing, only fifteen or twenty feet in front of her, was a frosted-glass window, yellowed with years of dirt and cigarette-smoke.

The only way out. And even now, it was probably too late.

But even as her mind spelled out
probably too late
, she was already running towards it, straining every muscle, remembering her high-school sprinting days,
come on Amelia, come on Amelia
, and then she crossed her arms over her face and flew into the window and thought that she would probably die.

She smashed through the window and circled in the air with all the slow-motion grace of an acrobat. Fragments of
glass glittered and spun all around her. She was a ballet-dancer, an athlete, an angel in shattered fire. Then she hit the gritty street and knocked her head and rolled over bloody and winded and bruised.

But at least she was alive. Because she twisted herself round, and sat up and looked, just in time to see the window from which she had jumped disappearing into the bedrock, and then the rest of the precinct house following, thunder and dust, until its water-tanks and its elevator housing and its radio antennae had been swallowed up completely, and there was nothing but rubble and an empty lot.

She was weeping, when she finally managed to climb to her feet She had sprained her wrist and hurt her back and grazed both of her elbows. But she still had the forks. If only she could get in touch with Harry.

A black woman in a torn blue cardigan confronted her at the next corner, looking forlorn. ‘Where's the police station?' she wanted to know.

All that Amelia could do was point behind her, at a vacant acre of dust and brick.

The black woman said, ‘I don't understand.'

Amelia's cheeks were streaked with tears. ‘Neither do I,' she told her. ‘Neither do I.'

At first, I felt nothing at all, although I hadn't imagined that death would feel like anything anyway. All I had was a choking, dizzy sensation, like I'd accidentally sniffed up half the contents of a vacuum-cleaner bag. I looked at Papago Joe and Papago Joe looked back at me and asked me, ‘Well? What do you think?'

I took my own pulse. ‘I'm not dead yet,' I told him. ‘In fact, I'm not even sick.'

He gave me a slow smile. Then he leaned over the table with the rolled-up bill in his right nostril, and inhaled the rest of the powder. I glanced at E.C. Dude and shrugged. I was beginning to feel a little foolish, to tell you the truth. Apart from that, I wanted to sneeze. What would happen if the powder didn't work, and we tried to enter the Great Outside without any occult protection at all? It was bad enough to
hallucinate
that we were dead. I didn't fancy dying for real.

Papago Joe closed his eyes and sat up very straight-backed. He began to chant something under his breath, over and over, something that sounded like ‘
Nepauz … nepauz
…' It reminded me of Naomi Greenberg's chanting, hypnotic and strange, words that I could scarcely get my tongue around.

E.C. Dude said, ‘I should be coming with you, you know that? How are two old geezers like you going to stop the world from falling apart? There's no way. You need youth, man, you need extra cool.'

I was inclined to agree with him. After fighting with Misquamacus and struggling with Karen and driving all the way to Apache Junction through storm and wreck and disaster, I was pretty much exhausted. My adrenalin had all ebbed away, and I was feeling my age. I would have done anything for a good breakfast and a pot of hot coffee and a couple of hours' dreamless sleep.

All that kept me going was Papago Joe's obvious determination and the sounds outside the trailer of breaking glass and screeching metal and — worse, the faint sounds of screaming. They were the sounds of a world that was gradually being torn apart, like a sackful of toys and live rabbits.

I was just about to say to E.C. Dude, ‘How about a Coke? I'm parched,' when the inside of the trailer went totally black. My first thought was:
power-cut
, but then I remembered
that the power was out anyway, and that we had been sitting in candlelight. I said, ‘Joe? What's happened?' and my voice echoed in my ears, with a high metallic singing noise, and then I thought:
I'm dead. That's it. I've snorted that powder and that powder was poison and I'm dead
.

‘Joe!' I shouted out. I began to panic. ‘Joe, what's happened? Where the hell are you? Joe!'

I flailed my arms round and struck the side of the trailer. Then I felt somebody seize my hand.

‘Joe?' I asked, anxiously. ‘Is that you, Joe?'

‘Relax,' I heard him saying, close to my right ear. ‘Everything's fine, everything's going to be fine. It takes a while for your eyes to become accustomed to the darkness.'

‘I thought I was dead there, for a moment,' I told him, my voice shaking.

‘To all intents and purposes, you were. I mean, you
are
.'

‘What?'

‘This is it. This is hallucinatory death. Your conscious brain believes that you're dead. You're functioning now on the very lowest levels of your psyche.'

I swallowed. I didn't know what to think. I was fascinated, impressed, but mostly frightened. I had been close to death's door a couple of times, in my run-ins with Misquamacus, but I had never actually stuck my head round it.

Very gradually, my eyes became accustomed to the condition of ‘death.' The interior of the trailer was almost swallowed up in shadows. Even the candle-flames were flickering so dimly that I could barely make them out. I could distinguish E.C. Dude sitting back on the couch, his ankles crossed, but he appeared more as a fitful image of pale green flame than he did as a real person. Linda looked like a flame, too, but steadier, and burning more warmly. Stanley's flame was the brightest: bright and white.

I turned towards Papago Joe. His outline was blurred and
mauvish, a shadow laid on top of shadows; but then I lifted my hand and saw that mine was, too.

Technically, you're blind,' explained Papago Joe. ‘What you can see is not our bodies but our spirits. You can only see this trailer because it is invested with memories and associations, and the labour of the men who made it.'

‘Its manitou,' I said.

‘That's right. Everything has a manitou; even an automobile, even a chair. Of course the strongest manitous are those of men and the natural world around us. But even so … everything should be treated with equal respect We reap what we sow.'

‘What do we do now?' I asked him.

‘We take our leave of these friends of ours and enter the Great Outside.'

He stood up and gestured to me to stand up, too. I saw E.C. Dude moving, and I thought I could vaguely hear his voice, but I wasn't sure.

‘Can he see us?' I asked Papago Joe.

‘Of course, to him we look normal, our normal selves, except that our eyes are turned up into our heads so that he can see only the whites. You see how little Stanley is backing away from us. We look a little scarey, that's why.'

‘I don't blame him,' I said. I remembered Naomi Greenberg with her eyes rolled up, and Karen too, and that had been enough to give me nightmares for ever.

Papago Joe reached forward and opened the trailer door and led the way down the steps. Every move I made seemed muffled and slow, like Neil Armstrong landing on the moon. It was just as black outside as it had been inside — black like a photographic negative. I could see newspapers and trash slowly swirling in the wind, and I felt the steady sting of grit on my face. Automobiles were being dragged across the highway and into Papago Joe's parking-lot. But
the noise they made was blurry and insulated, as if I had cotton stuffed in my ears.

I turned and saw E.C. Dude's flickering blue spirit waving to us, with Stanley's bright white spirit close behind, hiding behind his legs. I waved back, and then Papago Joe and I made our way across the used-car lot toward the workshop.

‘Watch out for debris,' warned Papago Joe. A sheet of aluminum siding came hurtling past us, followed by broken window-frames and roofing and scattered torrents of bricks. A Volkswagen camper rolled by, over and over, roof and wheels, until it reached the workshop and tumbled into nothing and disappeared.

Papago Joe took hold of my sleeve. This is it,' he said. ‘This is the gateway. We'll have to be real careful. I mean,
real
careful, body and soul. Are you ready?'

‘I'm ready,' I told him, with huge bravado. What else could I say? ‘I'm out of here, end of the world or not?' Or, ‘Great Outside? Who are you trying to bullshit?'

We rounded the corner of the workshop wall, the same wall on which E.C. Dude and Stanley had glimpsed the hunched and jumping shape of Aktunowihio, the Shadow Buffalo. The rest of the workshop had collapsed. The roof had fallen in, and most of the walls had been reduced to scatterings of broken cinderblocks. I saw all this in dim, glowing outline, with the deep, spiritual perception of the dead.