One chime marked dead midnight in the Silent City. Mara’s shift flapped loosely about her torso in the artificial wind that swept the deserted roof of the schoolhouse as she stared blankly into the distant horizon, contemplated the stars strewn across the inky sky like pearls from the severed necklace of an invisible deity, and waited for the Voice to speak again. It was now one minute after the midnight chime.
Two. The otherworldly caterwauling of the breeze was punctuated with the rhythmic fall of impatient footsteps. Three. Ten.
Half an hour passed like half the blink of an eye.
A monotonous drizzle began to plaster her hair against her cheeks. She should go back to the bunk-house. She should stop chasing ghosts, she thought. Or was that not a thought, but an echo of the chiding of a dozen acquaintances?
Returning would mean capitulation, wouldn’t it? The words, louder unspoken, sent a rebellious tear down the outline of her jaw; it fell unnoticed into the puddles forming on the rooftop. Mara cupped her hands before her face and squinted through the fog at perfectly trimmed nails and calloused palms. No, it’s too far now to turn back.
She was still contemplating her hands in a sort of melancholy daze when the first illusion came.
ONE
Three flashes of gold. Bright hallway. Blinding light. Something long and white and undulating floating through space. In front? Behind? Inside?
Can’t move. Half-defined, fibrous, wispy shapes emerge from the wall at the right. Is it a wall, or just a curtain? What lies behind it? One – one of the shapes – it has the face of a child. It looks familiar. No, that would be impossible. They are passersby crossing a road, who do not exist outside of that simple action, who are meaningless before the glory of the Voice I have yet to hear. What is the Voice? I call out – what is the Voice? Why must I wait for the Voice? When will it come, when will it rescue me? Where am I? Who am I?
I remember the name of the child, but it is not my own. I care not what they say; my Eternitia could not have fallen here. The child's lips move, and something appears gripped tightly in both of its minuscule hands. I fancy it is a paint-brush. Come back, I mouth back at her. Please do not forget. One color, one mark, one word to let me know. I know, I swear, I beg that this is not real, but I cannot remember why I must …
—
“Madame! Madame! By the gods, what are you doing?”
The eyes of the pale young woman lying shrouded in a mess of wet clothes in the alleyway flew open, illuminated orange in the half-light of a new dawn. Slowly, her hands crawled to her throat and stayed there. “What? What am I doing?”
The other, who stood very stiffly in a tight brown uniform, frowned down at Mara without much concern. “If I had not been on patrol today, what would your daughter have done without you? You would have been dead meat. ”
“I would’ve. Thank you for your consideration.” Mara labored to her feet and hesitantly rubbed the side of her jaw. It did not hurt. “But you must keep your tongue in check, Madame. There are no dead things in this part of the city.”
“I understand,” said the watchwoman, turning to leave. “Thank you for reminding me.”
“My duty,” said Mara obligatorily. “How may I repay you?”
“There is a dangerous rumor hereabouts, that those who live there –” she indicated the familiar outline of the lodging-place on Yule Street “– plan to take you away tonight.”
“To where?”
“To wherever the Voice comes from. I don’t know. This is a most dangerous thing to speak of. I remind you not to follow them.”
“I see." Mara felt her heart-beat quicken. "Take care, Madame.”
“Madame.”
—
The characteristic ebullience of well-wishing visitors remained unaffected by the events of the previous night. Consequently, Mara slunk away from the noxious bevy of cards and condolences at the first opportunity. They would have to try harder, she thought, to make her recant. Why did they insist upon bothering her in her own home every week? She could no longer remember.
The house itself, on the other hand, comforted her. Mara proceeded down the main hallway and took the third right turn, humming contently to herself. Aside from the presence of a few new cobwebs, the three large blank canvases decorating the room still hung in their unspoiled, austere perfection – one on each wall, one for each year. There used to be a bed in the room, Mara recalled dimly, but it had been destroyed in some unfortunate accident. She pulled aside a cobweb absentmindedly, dusted off her hands, and stepped back to admire one of the paintings. There was a new cobweb where she had removed the old one. No, she had only cleaned the room yesterday. She stopped, one hand still held aloft. A cold shiver crawled up her spine. Was it her imagination, or were the webs enlarging?
Mara breathed deeply in, deeply out. It was time to leave.
She began to back away from the crumbling wall, passing cleanly through the opposite one – which sprinkled her liberally with plywood dust and paint – and entering into the yard. The white fence-plastic under her feet was cold with morning dew and she shivered in her only shirt. Around her the yard was barred by several hedges of hastily uprooted, half-floating grass; her house, her only valuable possession, was collapsing before her eyes. She stared numbly at the stringy tent of webbing, imagining that it leered back at her. The paintings, she thought, imagining them turned to metal nails framed with torn canvas. My paintings.
A hot pricking at her right sole brought her back to the present. Mara moved her bare foot to the side and saw the sharp end of a small garden pebble prodding its way methodically through the plastic under her feet. She had no time to register that the pebble should have bled her or hurt her; instead, she turned her back on the building and ran.
Mara had no talent for sprinting. Yet when she vaulted fluidly like a deer over several neighbors' grass-coated fences and flew, filled with dread, down an alley-way, the familiar pains of physical exertion were far away. Instead, fiery coals burned in her eyes and in her heart; the pains of loss, confusion, and desperation had taken their place.
In the distance, beyond the sick twinkling of cracked lights and the abandoned streets of scabrous white paint decorated with shapeless lumps of grey concrete, an unfamiliar, colossal red wooden structure had risen over the ruined city. Mara ran mindlessly in its direction, even though – or perhaps because – it was the only object she did not recognize. Unattended shops flickered by with their windows turned into fabric awnings and their doors recomposed of stained glass, and rickety fruit-stands made of fruit meat touted the day’s best pick in construction woods. Understanding that her legs navigated of their own will, Mara half-closed her eyes and succumbed to the strange tranquility that ignorance afforded her.
High-rises gave way to suburbs, and those to agricultural-purpose land outside the city’s borders. The red fence, towering thirty feet into the air, now ran parallel to Mara on her right. To both sides of the fence as far as the eye could see sprawled the lakes and forests of the city park; every so often a field, camp, or playground for children punctuated its verdant tedium, and Mara – to her immense surprise and relief – recognized in them the signature minimalistic architecture of the Silent City. She closed her eyes again and flew. There were no more inversions here where the Voice lived, and since time only appeared to pass in the City, she would certainly be able to watch Eternitia filling the only blank room in her house with color and gaiety.
All was right with the world …
—
TWO
Back in the hallway, its color red now, red and rotting-black, my own hands numb and invisible through the thick night fog. The greens and browns of a park smile from under a blanket of blood, and limp, small shapes, high in the air, lie impaled so still and forlorn upon the zeniths of barren trees and the handles of rusted playground-ramps.
I call for Eternitia. She must not lose herself here. Must not, must not, do you see the drowned shapes rippling gently in these red rivers and lying lifeless and bloated where they are dry? Must not lose yourself here. This is not a safe place.
A mauled face still watering crimson after its separation from its skull pouts down at me from a tree. Go back, it says, and the words rattle in its tongueless mouth. I halt, and my breath catches in my throat. This is not the Voice. No. No. I do not hear. I promise to gods I do not believe in that I will return if it stops.
Here there are only dead things, it says, quiet and young and sad.
It says, go back to your clean fantasy-land with pretty stars and bells and refuse to awaken from the slumber you have forced upon yourself. It says, you will die in that room as I did, with those paintings intact - and you will die waiting.
It smiles, and the limp shapes scattered in the park twitch all together like marionettes.
You wish for me to speak to you. Here I am, now. Face me, Mother. Wake.
—
Mara awoke screaming.
The ground was moving, disappearing, dissolving under her, and the rivers receded into the distance and the treetops blew gently away in the wind like petals off a great emerald flower. That could not be right. She crawled to her feet, crying out, and chased after them, and felt the cold touch of an invisible wall before her outstretched hands. Adamantly she hit the wall, again, again, and bled and clenched her teeth together. Again, again, again, again. It was impossible. Time became meaningless. Her hands moved of their own accord, alternatively clawing and clasped in prayer. Desperately she tried to remember: where, exactly, had Eternitia gone missing? She remembered her face – cold, eyes shut, peaceful, abandoned, and so, so sorrowful. But she could not, could not remember – was it in the river she had sunk, or off the dilapidated ruins of the best structure Mara could have found she had fallen? No, neither, and she finally thought of the cold little bed that used to mark the clean room with the three blank canvases.
At once the illusion vaporized. Mara discovered herself returned to the room; she was standing beside the bed, which had never been burnt to ashes in an accident, and she looked out the window and saw the yard and house whole, and no perfect streets, no Voice calling for her, no red fence between the worlds of life and death. And all that remained of the three blank paintings in the room were three bloodstained clutters of torn white and jagged beige.
Now, she registered, now they had finally been completed.
She fell onto her knees and laid her face down on the bed, sobbing quietly. The sheets smelled stale and like faded memories, and the clamor and footsteps of visitors in the labyrinthic hallways coming to check on her grew louder with each passing second. But Mara knew one thing with perfect clarity: she would never return to her Silent City.