Secret Lives of the Dead

Lem's grandfather looks as stern as ever, the old sailor's weather-worn skin wrinkled and tough as untreated leather. His narrowed eyes and downturned mouth betray more than his familiar sourness, though. They also speak of pain. The old man has dished enough with his hands to know it - slaps for his wife and three children, punches to the faces of men just as drunk and cruel as him - and there's a subtle but definite shiver to the loose flesh of his neck and the firm set of his shoulders. Lem gets the idea that his grandfather has been suffering this pain for a long time, an agony to which he can never become accustomed. He's wearing the trousers, shirt and thick woollen tie he was cremated in, and the tie's knot has been tugged to the left and down to expose his throat, as if it's choking him and he is struggling for breath. He stares not at Lem, but through him towards some distant, inaccessible place.

Lem's mother is there as well, her gaze averted and aimed down at the uncertain ground. Her long dark hair is held up in a bun, but it's shifted to the left as if flattened against something not visible, or pressed that way by a constant breeze. Her head is similarly deformed by the falling wall that killed her. Like Lem's harsh grandfather she is also shaking, a flicker that draws her in and out of Lem's focus. He tries to ask if she is really there but he can't speak, and she wouldn't hear him anyway. Agony washes across her features in tidal shadows that will not abate. Her mouth tenses, rips her face into a wretched grimace, and then instantly resets to twist into that image of pain again and again.

Standing a few steps past his mother is Lem's Aunt May, a loving woman given to spells of depression that saw her wandering from home and being found sitting on bridge parapets or staring at the deep, endless sea, contemplating an abyss she finally met at someone else's hand. She stands with both hands pressed to the sides of her head, face tilted upwards as if looking to the stars, but there are no stars visible and her eyes are squeezed shut. Lem can't hear her scream but he sees it in every knotted muscle in her face and arms, every tensed ligament in her neck.

He looks for his father, but doesn't see him this time.

Past these people he once knew, and still loves in differing ways, a path leads towards a blazing white sunset splashed across a landscape he does not recognise. The scorched rolls and folds in the land, the charred skeletons of trees, the form of things is ambiguous shadow and shapeless light. This world is a whisper given form, he thinks, and though Lem is a hard man who entertains only one real fear, the idea chills him to his core.

The sunset feels like the edge and end of this world, and it's where he is heading. He hears music coming from there, and it's the freeform jazz his father and mother used to listen to when they were on camping holidays, Lem off exploring and playing in the heather, his parents sitting in deckchairs beside their camper van and awning, drinking wine from plastic cups and smoking and enjoying the summer and the unreliable consistency of the music. Lem knows each note before it comes, as if it's him playing it. He has never played a musical instrument, but he thinks that through this sunset and on the other side he might. The warm glow pulls him on, drawing him along the path past his relatives who shiver in agonies he doesn't yet understand. It lures him with a promise of something better beyond.

It's the usual bullshit ideas of an afterlife he has never believed in, but he can almost hear it through there, smell it, taste it on the air. The peace. The tranquillity. The freedom from every bad thing he has done in his life, and everything yet to be done. He's been here and sensed that place before, and he has always been denied it. And he craves it, more than he's wanted anything. He's tired of this wretched life that should never have been his in the first place.

His forwards movement ceases and he frowns as he feels hands gripping his upper arms and chest. He's level with his mother now, and he turns to look at her, wondering why she is still here on this side.

I know, I know why, and I can't try to fool myself otherwise.

"Not yet," his mother says, though her mouth does not form the words. He melts at the memory of her voice, and perhaps he even cries. "We're stuck here, Lemuel, and you can't leave us behind."

I'm not leaving them, they left me and I know why they're trapped here like this in so much pain-

"Wrong way, boy," he hears his grandfather say. The voice does not come from the man behind him and to his left. It originates all around him, as if the world is speaking.

"You haven't finished," his Aunt May whispers into his ear from everywhere.

The sunset coaxes him on, and he wants to break into a run towards the comfort that lies within its embrace. He's a tired man and weary, and the years have left their scars, weighing him down with so much restless and relentless time.

"I said wrong way!"

The hands grasp harder, pulling him back. Lem wants to break away and run, but he was always a boy who listened to his grandfather. The old man was not someone to disobey.

I know why they're pulling me back, he thinks, and something breaks in this world that isn't real. Something bleeds through. It's a colour and texture, and a sense of something foul and corrupt. Not like the light he so wants to meet. If this place is a whisper given form, that other place starting to intrude is a scream.

"Lem!" He knows the voice but cannot place it. It's more distant and vague than his dead relatives' voices, yet there's something more tangible about it. He feels a breath against his face. Smells garlic. Tastes blood on his tongue, coppery like an electric shock. "Lem!"

It's not my time, he thinks, and his grandfather and mother and aunt hear those words, because for just a moment their agonies seem to cease and they watch him pull away and recede from them. They watch with the hope that he might one day end their pain.

To do so, he must confront his own.

*   *   *

"I never signed up for this, Lem," Wayne says. "Not for this."

Lem tries to respond but can't. Reality has crashed in around him, and it is overwhelming. He's lying on his back, and if Wayne wasn't bent over him he would be staring up at the clear blue sky. It's tainted with a haze of pollution, a breath of toxicity, nothing like the purity of that place he'd been dragged from. He tries closing his eyes as if to rediscover a dream, but Wayne slaps him across the face. The pain doesn't bother him - Lem feeds off pain, takes edge from it, it sharpens his nerves and wits - but the shock startles him more awake than before, more there. And he doesn't like it.

He glares up at Wayne. His long hair is tied up in a ponytail, and Lem reaches up to grab it. But he is holding something in his hand.

I've still got it.

"Come on!" Wayne says. "You with us? You back with us?"

"Us?" Lem asks.

Wayne glances aside, and Lem senses someone standing just out of sight. There's no threat from them, but their stillness and silence is troubling.

"Us?" Lem asks again.

"Come on," Wayne says. "You know Jodi's here. Can you stand? I thought you'd gone. I thought you had a fucking heart attack or something, and that-"

"Maybe I did," Lem says, and Wayne doesn't respond to that. He leans down and grabs Lem beneath the arms, heaves him up into a sitting position, and Lem leans against him and looks around. It's like waking up from a deep slumber and reassembling yourself, gathering those bits of you that matter from dreams and nightmares and deeper, stranger travels, and forming them together into the same you that fell asleep. Lem sometimes wishes he could wake up and make himself someone or something else, but it hasn't happened yet. That time might come if he manages to finish what he has begun.

He sees the figure standing to his right, staring at him in terror, and remembers that this is Wayne's daughter. A young woman, but still just a kid, really. What the fuck he was thinking bringing her along, Lem doesn't know. But then as Wayne says, he didn't sign up for this. None of it. He didn't know what was going to happen.

Looking the other way, Lem sees the body of the man he killed. The old fuck is curled up against the base of a stone wall, ruined head tucked down towards his legs facing away from them. Lem can just make out the misshapen skull, and the exclamation marks of blood on the wall. The guy's right hand still clasps the taser he used to fry Lem.

"What did you do?" Lem asks.

"Me? You did that. What the actual fuck? We could have just run and-"

"He saw us."

"So?"

Lem looks at the object in his hand. "So I came for this, and he shouldn't have got in the way."

"Holy shit, Lem," Wayne says. He sounds wretched and tired, and Lem looks back at the young woman standing a few steps away from them. She is shivering even though it's warm in the morning sun. Her auburn hair is tied in a ponytail shorter than her father's, but her denim jacket is the same. He wonders if she worships her dad. Probably. He smiles, but the traumatised teen looks right through him at the body lying against the wall, and she reminds him of how his grandfather was looking through and past him, perhaps...