Burial Age

I never really believed.

Blame my parents or my earliest teachers, if you will; many have. My parents taught me to read using the Book of the Dead. The first words I ever wrote were the Signs. I know the songs and the scriptures. I watched my mother singing my younger siblings to sleep with "Down in the Valley," and "Dead Man's March". Surely she sang the same cradle-songs to me? Blame whom you will; I blame only myself.

I never really believed that the Scriptures were literally, historically true. I believed in them only as stories, fables designed to prove a point, larger than life myths sprung from small and explicable grains of historical fact. I remember standing above the Valley of Death with the other children. Looking at the weathered bones -- so many, too many -- and feeling as if I were there, surrounded by the dead, until the teacher pulled the spyglass from my hands, sharply reminding me that others needed to look also, mercifully snapping me back into the safe, bright world of the living.

Afterwards, I had nightmares. In terrible dark dreams I was there, not in childish imagination but in body as it seemed, surrounded by bones, by decomposing bodies, and worst of all, by the dying. Sometimes the dying reached out to me, pleading with fever-bright eyes, tugging at my skirt with hands rank with contagion; in the worst of dreams it was the Ghouls themselves, tall and terrible with their dark, alien eyes, opening their Books to read my name. In the dreams I tried to run, tried to flee, but the dead bodies sucked at my feet like swamp muck and the skeleton hands snatched and held my legs fast until the terror of the living trapped in the land of the dead woke me, screaming.

I believed, but even then, I think I only believed it as a fiction, a child's story, a tale told by the fireside for the sole purpose of scaring one's agemates.

Ironically, it was probably my studies in medicine, the study of the living, that widened the cracks of skepticism into chasms of open disbelief. All cultures, even those on the other side of the world who never saw the Valley of Death and do not believe as we do, have their burial customs and their superstitions about the dead and the dying. Long ago, when the scriptures were first revealed (as the faithful believe) or written (as I came to suspect), nothing was known of the microorganisms that cause most disease. Today we wash with antibacterial agents before examining each new patient, to destroy disease organisms and minimize the chances of carrying an infection to a new host. Then, healers used the same herbs we derive our antiseptics from in careful rituals to "wash away the sins" lest they unwittingly carry the curse to the next patient. Today we burn the dead in barren lands away from habitation, to prevent disease from seeking out live hosts and to prevent the natural but unhygienic process of decomposition. Then they burned the dead or carried the bodies far away so that the Evil Ones, the Ghouls, would not find their way to the living through their spernatural fascination with the dead. Then we had custom and superstition, and in their day they served us well enough: nowhere in recorded history has there ever again been a disaster of the scale that must have occurred in the Valley of Death. Today we know better; today we know how plagues are spread, and why hygiene works. Today, I told all who would listen, today we are old enough to set aside the monsters of childhood and put in their place the cool, solid reasoning of Science.

I never really believed.

It is Written that the Dead in the Valley were brought here by the Evil Ones, the Ghouls who carry the Books of the names of the damned, the cursed; brought here to make visible the score in the deadly game they are playing, or to spread evil and contagion to the living -- Scripture has never been entirely clear about the underlying motivations of Evil. I was not the first healer to suspect that the Evil Ones were merely a personification of disease, of a great plague that trapped hundreds in that valley. The faithful point out that there are no ruins, no indication that there was ever a city in the Valley of Death to support so many people. That is admittedly a problem, but we skeptics kept working on theories of migration, of exile... there must, we thought, be some natural explanation.

I never really believed the scriptures to be literally true, but I believe in science. The past decade has seen a revolution in forensics, a revolution I was once proud to have been a part of. If there was indeed some great plague, we now have the tools to find traces of disease in long-dead bones; perhaps even genetic traces to link the great plague to a known disease. It has taken years to find a compromise with the fears of the faithful, but now I have permission to go openly into the Valley of Death to collect material for in-depth analysis.

I believed I would find an important piece of the puzzle, physical evidence that no supernatural entities or processes were ever here. I never expected to find a Ghoul.

I never really believed, until my own eyes saw the Truth.

Know ye the Signs of the Ghoul, read the Scriptures. The dark protruding eyes, insect-like, dark and expressionless, a fearful sight in itself. Alien eyes in an all-too-human face, turning... did it see me? Am I cursed? The Book clearly visible in its hand... what name is written therein, who is doomed thereby? Perhaps my rational mind, the mind that has betrayed me and led me into sin and doubt for so many years, would have found an innocent explanation for these Signs, in time.

But there is no time; there is no rational explanation. For I have seen it with my own eyes, the Third Sign. I saw it, watched it come into being out of thin air -- at first there was only the Valley and the sky and the world of reason, then a strange shimmering, and all at once, it was there.

Did it see me? I wonder as I duck, hide, crawl and finally run from the Valley like... like one pursued by a Ghoul. Can it disappear as easily as it appeared?

I never really believed, but I believe now. I believe. I understand why the clergy have kept and guarded the armories, the store of long-range weapons with the darts regularly replaced to keep the poisons active and potent. I am grateful as I run that we peacemongers were never able to have such weapons destroyed as threats to public safety. What possible justification could there be, we asked loudly in public squares, for keeping ready the weapons of stealth and cowardice? Now I believe, now I understand. What use are openness, diplomacy, the voice of reason, against an implacable evil that can melt into -- and out of -- thin air?

I run for my vehicle, for the communications equipment there. I pray they will believe me, the skeptic crying "Ghoul!". I pray they will open the armory and come prepared for the ancient enemy; I pray it will still be there, that they will be in time to kill it.

I pray that my name is not written in its book.

(October 2002)