Monster Island(46)

Oh, yes. Our memories go there when we drop, lad. Our personalities. What our elderly friends here would call theba. It is the storehouse of our hopes and our fears. Indra’s net. The akashic record. The collected works of the human race, all available in one handy volume. You and I can read anything there, if we open ourselves to the possibility.

“You and me. Because we can still think. You need to make a conscious effort to reach into the network and the others, the, the dead out there, they can’t make that leap, not with what they’ve got for brains.”

Aye.

“But there’s a difference between you and me, as well. I can feel it. You-your energy, it’s more compact. Like a living person almost but dark like mine. I can’t explain it so well…”

You’re doing fine. The mummies and me, now, we don’t share your hunger. Our bodies are incorruptible, in the old palaver. Only natural preservatives used to maintain freshness.That twitchy smile again.Then there’s the fact that you chose this. You did it to yourself.

“I can’t be the only one, though. You found me from a distance, you must know if there are others like us.”

Mael nodded.A few. Mostly of my sort but you were not the only one to abuse yourself like this. There’s a boy in a place called Russia. Very promising. Struck down in a hit and run. He suffered for months with machines pumping his heart for him but his parents wouldn’t let the doctors pull the plug. Another one here in your country. In California, she calls it. A yoga teacher hiding out in an oxygen bar. I have no idea what that means. She had the same brilliant idea you did, but it didn’t work as well for her. Woke up with a bad headache and found she’d lost her multiplication tables and plenty more besides. Such as her name.

Gary nodded. “They might as well be on the moon. It’s funny. A couple of days ago I thought I was the only one and that was okay. Then you contacted me. It’s like I only got so lonely when I knew I wasn’t alone.” He reached into the broken display case and picked up a jewel in the shape of a jackal-headed god. It was beautiful-worked by loving hands. A made thing. All that was over now. “What happened to us, Mael? What caused the Epidemic?”

The Druid scratched his chin. Thinking hard, the gesture said. Mael was a master of body language, even with just one arm.I know what you think it was. A disease same as the grippe or the pox. Can’t say as I agree but then I just learned about germ theory a day or two ago. In my time we would have talked in terms of retribution. Judgment.

“For what?”

Take your pick, lad. For what you’ve done to the earth, I might say, but then I’m just an old tree-hugger from way back. For what you did to each other, maybe. I know that sort of thing won’t sit easy with you. In your world things just happen, eh? Accidental, like. Random. We thought otherwise. For us everything happened for a reason.

Walk with me, Gary. I have but a little time to converse with you. There’s dark work that needs doing. Fighting. Slaughtering, before this is through.

“Huh?” Gary demanded. It was all he could think to say.

We’ll get to that in proper time. Let me show you something first.

Mael lead him through the Egyptian wing of the Met. The mummies had taken it over and Gary saw for the first time how morbid the place was. An inside-out graveyard where the dead were put on display for schoolchildren. Gary saw a mummy trying on jewelry in one room, the turquoise and gold necklaces glinting against the stained linen at her throat. In another room a truly ancient mummy who was little more than rags and bones was trying to pry open a massive sarcophagus with his splayed fingers. It looked like he was trying to return to the tomb.

Mael stopped at a room partitioned off by a folding screen. The exhibit beyond was only half finished: clearly the curators had been working on it when they abandoned the museum during the Epidemic. The walls had been painted a sky blue and in white italic script above a row of empty display cases was written MUMMIES AROUND THE WORLD. The bodies in this room were truly dead. SIBERIAN ICE MUMMIES were little more than incomplete skeletons with clumps of hair attached to their broken skulls; MOUNTAIN MUMMIES OF PERU showed hollow darkness through their sunken orbits, their brains having long since rotted away. At the back of the room sat a long low case that had been shattered from the inside. Gary crunched glass underfoot as he approached it. A CELTIC BOG MUMMY FROM SCOTLAND, he read. This must have been Mael’s sepulcher.

THE MUMMY IN THIS CASE LIVED IN THE TIME OF THE ROMANS. HE WAS MOST LIKELY A PRIEST OR A KING, Gary read.