Chapter 1: Ghosts in the Silent World
after the end of the world
Exactly what had caused the woman to awaken, she did not know. It could not have been a sound, for that was totally absent in this world. A change in the light seemed almost as unlikely. She had opened her eyes, and while it was not particularly dark, there did not seem to be light coming from anywhere, either. Her hand, resting on the floor near her face, cast no shadow, and raising it to shade her eyes seemed to have no effect.
She lay there for an indeterminate amount of time, shading her eyes uselessly against a nonlit room. Gradually it occurred to her that she felt somewhat stiff, and that she was laying on a smooth flagstone floor. Shaking her head, she sat up, the fabric of her cloak sliding noiselessly against the floor.
She was in a cellar of some sort, the walls part brick, part stone, and the same strange greyness of the floor. A stick lay in the corner, and a chair, both shadowless. The woman stood, took a few floating steps - they should have been wobbly, unsteady, but it felt as if her feet hardly touched the ground - and bent to examine the stick. It was long and well-sanded. One end had a sharp metal point attached to it.
Recognition arose indifferently as she looked at the steel head of the stick. It was a spear, a weapon, a thing for killing people. No doubt it had been used to kill a person, already. It occurred to her that she must be dead, too, because no breath stirred in her throat. Her heart wasn't beating either; in this silence, her straining ears should have deafened her with the sound of her own pulse.
How did I die? she wondered. The spear was a likely candidate, but that was an incomplete answer. The question encompassed not only the instrument, but also the circumstances surrounding her death. It seemed a suddenly pressing question, although she realized dimly that there were other questions, too, which needed answering. How did I come to this place? How long have I been here? Why don't I know anything? And one more, although it seemed strangely difficult to even think it - Who am I?
The woman was irritated by all these unanswered questions, but distantly, as if they were simply trivia and bore no relation to her. Vagueness swept over her for a moment, and the spear fell from her hand, landing silent and dead on the ground.
What passed for her mind returned, and she turned away from the corner to look around again. There was something she hadn't noticed before: the floor dropped off suddenly along one side of the room. She approached the drop-off and looked down into a channel of water, surprisingly clear and clean for what had to be a sewer. It, too, made no noise, and was clearly not moving. It was still, not in the usual manner of still water, with a flat, smooth surface, but looked instead like running water that had suddenly frozen in place.
No, that's not quite right… she realized. It looked like someone's idea of running water that had frozen, but the ripples were too even, too regular for real water. This bothered her, so she turned away and walked out of the room, through another. This had a table and chairs. They were so familiar that she smiled. She had sat there, once, with…others. Planning something, hoping to change something. Who, and what, were difficult questions, almost as hard as wondering who she was.
Though another room, and up some stairs, to a dead end that wasn't a dead end, because she placed her hand on a panel above her head, and it swung open without a sound. Up into the new room, that had beds and a clock and a door, and through that door into another room, all the while making no sound, and seeing no movement except what she herself caused. A vase of flowers stood on a counter, as grey and shadowless as everything else. She picked a single blossom out of the vase, and while it felt and looked like a real flower, it had no scent. Tearing off a leaf had no effect other than to separate the leaf from the stem, so she left it on the counter.
There were other doors here, and a hallway, but she was tired of the still rooms, so she took the door that stood apart, opposite the counter.
As she had dimly hoped, she was outside, but it was no different from being inside. She was in a town, or a perhaps a city – she knew there was a distinction, but it seemed somehow baffling in this place. A featureless grey canvas stretched from horizon to far above her, broken only by the surrounding buildings. There was no sun, no sky, no sound, and no color.
But there was movement.
Down the street, a young girl was bouncing a ball. It was colorless and cast no shadow, and neither did the girl, but the woman smiled and walked towards her.
The girl noticed her approach, but didn't stop bouncing the ball.
"I can't make it work! Why doesn't it make a noise?"the girl asked her, child's voice cracking the silence like glass. "Nothing makes noise here, just me. When I woke up, no one was around, and I slammed my door as hard as I could – Grandmother hates that, and she'd promised not to leave me until I got over the fever - but it didn't make any sound. I slammed it and slammed it and jumped on the bed and threw things, but nothing made any noise. So I screamed, but at first I couldn't remember how, and I got real scared and screamed more, and finally it worked and it was so loud I nearly fell over."The girl looked up at the woman. "I'm not scared now, just mad. There's no one else around, just me, and now you. I think we're dead," she added thoughtfully.
The woman nodded. She found that she could breathe, or at least take a breath, to speak. "I suppose we are." Her voice sounded harsh to her, as if the world was rejecting it. "I don't seem able to remember much."
The little girl shrugged. "Grandmother said sometimes even ghosts don't know why they're there anymore. I remember, but only 'cause I got scared, I think. My name's Ikiru." She held out a thin hand to the woman. "I guess you don't know yours? I'll call you Ghost Lady until you remember. We should go on a quest to find the others."
Ghost Lady was a name, although it didn't sound quite right. She took Ikiru's hand. "Others?"
"Yeah, if there's you and me, there's gotta be others."
Ghost Lady nodded. It didn't quite make sense that there should be anyone else, but Ikiru had overcome the stillness on her own, and so perhaps she knew best. The two began to explore the town, Ghost Lady trailing behind the child. She would have been content to wander in and out of the empty buildings, but Ikiru insisted on looking in all the cabinets, under all the beds, and behind boxes and barrels.
"They might be hiding or still asleep," the girl explained as she opened a closet door. "Or there might be ghost animals."
Ghost Lady supposed she might be right. The town was slowly growing more familiar, and not as a new place grows familiar as you spend time there. There were a few times that she pointed out a place that Ikiru had not noticed, places where a small child might hide, or trees someone taller could climb and watch from. Ikiru chattered, both to Ghost Lady and to any people or animals who might be in the places she searched, but Ghost Lady didn't mind. She herself was still hesitant to speak, and their footfalls made no sound, but the girl made the silent world seem more alive.
They drew near a tavern, and Ikiru paused. "Grandmother said I wasn't allowed to go in here. But no one else is here, so I suppose it's all right?"
"…I suppose so…" It was hard for Ghost Lady to muster much certainty.
Once inside the building, Ikiru dropped Ghost Lady's hand as she scrambled about, peering over the counter and in the fireplace. Ghost Lady sat down at one of the tables, running her hand over the smooth wood. The woodgrain looked strangely orderly and repetitive, but she had some vague notion that the surface ought to have been different, somehow. She drummed her fingers absently, trying to remember.
Ikiru was humming to herself as she searched behind the bar. The snatch of teased at Ghost Lady's memory, and for a moment she felt scarred wood under her fingers, instead of the smooth veneered surface.
It was gone, but not before a definite memory bubbled to the surface. The table had been scratched and carved, once, pitted with absent doodles and jagged initials. She remembered it, now; it had been there even when she had first come into the bar with… she didn't know who. People. They'd talked about some of the things they'd talked about, sitting at the other table in the cellar. Here some of it was ale-talk, less real, less serious, but here was where it had started, too.
If only she could remember what it was.
Ikiru shortly announced that she had not found anyone in the bar, so the two left the building.
Ghost Lady was not certain how long they spent searching the town, and when that proved fruitless, how long they walked through the grey countryside, Ikiru leading, certain they would find more ghosts. Time was still a hazy notion, even as their surroundings seemed to grow sharper, more distinct, more focused.
The path was dusty and trampled, but in a repeating, patterned way; the weeds and plants along the sides came in too-regular clumps. Ikiru's footprints stretched out behind them in a crazy zigzag that traced her uneven gate. The disruption of the ordered dirt recorded every step, every turn, every time the girl ran off the road to investigate a bush or rock.
Ghost Lady tried to keep her focus on the lower half of the horizon. There was still no light, nor sun nor clouds, simply an even grey canopy spreading overhead. The gaping bleakness threatened to swallow her, to return her to the vagueness before she'd met Ikiru. She did not fear it, and it would be an easy matter to simply look up and lose herself. It was because it was so easy that she did not, that some buried corner of her mind stirred and stubbornly kept her eyes on the road, looking for some sign of others.
As before, it was movement that first caught Ghost Lady's attention when they saw their next ghost. The small cat disappeared into the bushes as they crossed a hill near the river. Ikiru ran ahead, calling, but the animal was out of sight by the time she reached the riverbed. After some hesitation, Ghost Lady followed. There was a sack lying by the silent river, and to Ghost Lady it looked as if it had been torn open.
Ikiru, seeing the sack, ran to her with a cry.
"Oh, no! Throwing kittens they din't want to drown in a river… I thought Robby was lying. How could people be so cruel? How could they? How could they?!" she howled, grabbing Ghost Lady burying her face in the woman's side. "It… it's n-not f-f-fair…"
Ghost Lady knelt down and held the sobbing child close. Ikiru was thin, and Ghost Lady could feel her faint, fluttering heartbeat; she must have had the fever that killed her for some time.
Surprisingly, words of consolation came easily. "You're right… It is cruel. But look. The sack was torn open, see? Someone else came by and tried to save them. And we only saw one, so the others must have been all right."
Ikiru nodded against her, and eventually the hot tears stopped falling and her breathing came more easily. "Poor p-puss…maybe she'll catch g-ghost mice…" she hiccupped, rubbing her eyes. Ghost Lady nodded, red hair sweeping forward against the girl's thin black pigtails.