Silent tears began to flow when Josef kicked the body and shouted, ‘I’m going to bury you, understand? You’ll never be able to come back if you don’t show yourself to her. She’s in this too, understand? I promise. I’ll burn you down on the rocks. Don’t you believe me? I’ll put you in the boat, pour petrol over you and…’
Anna stood there paralysed as Josef rained down curses on the corpse, threatening something that could no longer be threatened.
What…
Fluid began to trickle from one of the corpse’s hands.
Her lower jaw was trembling as she crouched down beside Josef.
From the gaps beneath the fingernails, fluid was running onto the floor. No, not running. Finding its way out. It didn’t spread across the floor like water, but curled into a stream that moved down towards the corpse’s feet, curved around them. A snake of water, the thickness of a forearm, continued to pour out from the fingers while its other end worked its way up towards the other hand.
It then split into a delta of five thinner streams that forced their way underneath the fingernails, while at the same time the flow from the other hand ceased.
Anna put her hand to her mouth, whimpering slightly while the water snake grew shorter and shorter as it disappeared back into the body. A few glittering droplets remained on the tips of the fingers, until they too disappeared. It had gone.
She no longer saw a person in front of her. She saw…a shell. A cold burrow where death lived. If the corpse’s belly had swollen up when death crept back into its lair, the picture would have been complete.
When the telephone rang she got up on stiff legs, went over and picked up the receiver. It was completely natural. An explanation would be forthcoming: some authority or power would inform them about the new situation. These days it used the telephone.
‘Hello, Anna speaking.’
Clattering, voices in the background.
‘Hi, it’s Gabriella. Just wanted to check that you got home OK, you seemed so…Is everything all right?’
Anna looked over at the blackness of the windowpane. Outside there was a mirror image of herself and the room in which she was standing. Behind her, Josef straightened up and went into the kitchen. The corpse was lying motionless on the plastic sacks, which looked like a black hole in the reflection, creating the illusion that the body was hovering in space. She reached out and touched the glass.
‘Hello, are you there?’
Anna nodded. A voice speaking in her ear. In front of her a shadow world. The voice said, ‘For fuck’s sake…Anna? Are you there?’
‘Yes. Yes, I’m here. Here I am.’
‘Is everything OK, you sound so…’
‘Everything’s fine.’
‘OK. Listen, that guy, the one with the dreads, he…’
Anna was no longer listening. Gabriella’s voice droned on in her ear, but Anna was caught up in the reflection. If she opened the window she would be able to step into that world, just like Alice in Wonderland. She moved her hand, waved. The other Anna waved. In the background Josef reappeared.
She turned around. Josef was holding one hand as if he had something in it. She couldn’t see what it was. With the other hand he gestured towards the phone, telling her to hang up.
Gabriella was still talking. Anna said, ‘Sorry, I haven’t got time right now. Talk to you soon,’ and hung up.
‘Who was that?’
‘Gabriella.’
‘What did she want?’
Anna dabbed at her lips with her fingers, said ‘I don’t know’, then moved her fingers in the direction of the corpse. ‘This…this… is very…is very…’
‘Overwhelming?’
‘No…it’s not that…’ Her voice sounded distant, as if she was talking to herself on the phone, long distance. ‘…I’d say, without… that this is absolutely…disgusting. This is absolutely disgusting. I think it’s absolutely disgusting. This.’
‘But do you believe me now?’
‘Yes. Yes. But the idea…the idea that I would want us to…Josef. There’s…there’s a snake inside him. In our house. Now.’
Josef shook his head.
‘It isn’t a snake anymore. It’s spread right through his body. As it did with me.’
‘Yes. But…’ The words just wouldn’t come to her. She sat down on the sofa, avoided looking at the corpse. ‘Don’t you think…this is disgusting?’
Josef sat down beside her. She could see now that the thing he was holding in his hand was a needle. He put his arm around her shoulders. Anna could hear the creaking of the boat against the jetty, the sea whispering outside the window. The sea. The snake’s home. All those times she had dived, swum in that sea.
She leaned against Josef. ‘We were happy as we were. Weren’t we?’
Josef nodded. ‘Yes. And we’re going to be happy. But I couldn’t just…once I knew about this…I…’
‘No. I understand.’ Anna thought for a moment. ‘I do understand. Yes, I do.’
‘Do you?’
‘Yes.’
Suddenly Josef fell on her. He burrowed his head in between her breasts. She stroked his head and looked up, gazing at the corpse lying on their living room floor. She understood. If you’ve survived once, you want to go on. Perhaps he couldn’t have done anything else. Perhaps she would have done the same thing. If she’d known.
Josef’s hair was damp and stuck to her fingers as she ran them through it. It was several years since the world outside the two of them had any significance. They had talked about this.
If I die, if I go crazy, what will you do?
I’ll die too, I’ll go crazy too.
That was what they had said, and they had said it as if they really meant it. Time to see if it was true.
She lifted Josef’s head between her hands.
‘So what do we do now?’
Josef blinked, wiped the tears from his eyes. ‘I…sorry, it’s just so…Anna, you know I…’
‘I know. What do we do now?’
Josef straightened up, sat close beside her on the sofa. ‘Don’t ask me how I know all this, I just…know.’ He held up the needle. ‘We have to give it a little blood. Then it will recognise us, and it will know that it’s not allowed to touch us. It’s like a…pact.’
They carried on talking. About what eternal life really meant. About whether they would cease to age, whether they might have to move from time to time in order to avoid arousing suspicion. About the fact that no one would believe them if they told their story.
When it came down to it, this was a risky enterprise. What frightened them most was that they didn’t know on behalf of what or whom the creature might be acting.
In the end Anna said, ‘We either do it, or we forget about it.’
Josef took her hands. ‘Do you want to do it?’
‘Do you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then let’s do it.’
They got up from the sofa and approached the body. Perhaps it was her imagination, but Anna thought she could see small twitching movements, tics on its skin. Perhaps the creature was impatient to be set free, to return to its element.
They crouched down by the head and looked into each other’s eyes. Even though they had now reached the nub of the whole thing, Josef’s expression was calm. Perhaps because he no longer had to carry the entire burden of the decision. Anna felt numb, hypnotised. As if she really had stepped through the window and was now in the looking-glass world where the rules are different. Where the only transgression is to question.
Josef had warned her in advance: the creature could manipulate the dead body. On the way back in the boat it had used Kaxe’s voice to conduct a conversation. So there was nothing to be afraid of if it made some kind of movement. Anna didn’t think she would be afraid. She was beyond such things.
Josef held out the needle. ‘You or me first?’
Anna looked at the sliver of silver in his hand and giggled. A few lines flashed through her m
ind: The junkies’ wedding: a shared needle, and she said, ‘And we’re not even married.’
Josef smiled. ‘We will be now.’
‘Yes. You first.’
The muscles in his jaw tensed slightly. Then he stuck the needle into his right index finger. A bead of blood appeared. He pressed his finger until the bead was so big that it almost burst. Then he held his finger to the corpse’s mouth.
Anna wasn’t quite as far gone as she had thought.
When Josef’s finger touched the dead mouth, the body raised its head and closed its lips around the finger.
She screamed. Josef jerked his finger away.
A flower of revulsion blossomed in her stomach as a bluish tongue emerged from the corpse’s mouth and licked the juice of life from its lips.
I’m not going to throw up I’m not going to throw up…
And she didn’t. Josef put his arm around her shoulders. His whole body was shaking, he was almost bouncing up and down. His voice was hoarse with excitement. ‘It’s done, it’s over…’
Anna shook herself free. She too was shaking, her teeth were chattering and the room was billowing violently as she dropped to her knees, searching for the needle.
Want to do it, going to do it, have to do it…
Because something else had happened, something beyond what the eye could see. At the moment when the creature licked the blood from its lips, a change had taken place in the room. Something shifted, and even though Josef was sitting beside her speaking in her own language, she was the only person here. There was no other way of describing it. Josef had become something else, even if he was still in human form.
The balance had been upset. Perhaps it was only in her head, but it was as if everything around her was protesting because death had been cheated. The corners of the room bent up towards the ceiling, the floor bellied.
The needle was lying next to Josef’s foot. As he kept gasping, ‘It’s happened, I can feel it, it’s in my whole body…’ she tried to pick it up. Her fingers groped their way over the round, shiny surface, and just as she got her nails underneath the needle and managed to lift it, she saw a movement from the corner of her eye.
She sat up with the needle in her hand. The corpse had turned its head towards her, and pale blue eyes were looking straight through her, straight into her. There was a rushing noise inside her head, like hundreds of seabirds taking off, and the crazy motion of the room almost made her lose her balance. She stabbed at her finger.
Nothing happened. She looked at her finger, at the needle. She had used the wrong end. When she tried to turn the needle around, it slipped out of her sweaty grasp.
‘You…’
A blast of rotting seaweed as the corpse’s mouth opened and uttered that one single word.
Enough.
Out out out have to get out
She yelled, ‘Josef! I can’t, I don’t want to, I…’
The corpse’s hand shot out and grabbed her between the legs, squeezing hard. She tried to pull away in a panic, but lost her balance and fell flat on the floor.
‘Josef, it…’
She couldn’t get another word out, because at that moment she felt a wet, icy chill spreading across her belly, her thighs, and in a second it passed through her trousers and carried on moving inwards.
Josef hurled himself forward and tore away the corpse’s hand, but it was too late. Death was already inside. Anna’s womb turned to ice. A cloud of living cold occupied her belly, which swelled up to double its normal size as she screamed with pain, and because she knew, knew what was happening.
The balance was restored.
‘Anna, Anna, Anna…’
The flight of the seabirds. Through the rushing of their wings his voice was the last thing she heard before the wings became visible, came closer, filled her field of vision and everything became white darkness.
With shaking hands Josef managed to pull off her trousers, her underpants without any idea of what he was going to do; there was just one clear thought pulsating through his head: Got to get it out, got to get rid of it…
Perhaps he would have done something horrendous in his confusion if Death hadn’t left her at that point. Anna’s belly collapsed as what had been inside it came pouring out. A cascade of pink fluid gushed out onto the floor in a fan shape, soaking his knees, and soon he was sitting like an island in a pink sea as the fluid continued to pour out.
In the end the foetus came too.
It was about the size of a tern, already fully human and attached by the umbilical cord to the placenta that followed it, a dark red clump of pure life. Something that had been life.
Josef shuffled backwards on his knees, banged into the coffee table, couldn’t take his eyes off what would have been his child. Its foetal sac had burst with the pressure, it had drowned in salt water.
He screamed until his vocal cords were on fire. He kept on screaming when his scream was nothing more than a hoarse bark, when he saw the blood from Anna’s womb growing darker as Death removed itself. In the end there was only a foetus lying in a pool of blood. Two bodies on the floor. And a pool of water.
The pool of water retracted, forming itself into a thin, transparent rope.
Josef stopped screaming and stood there open-mouthed.
It could be outside…
The rope began to move towards the door. He laughed, but no sound came; he began to stamp on the rope. It split it two, ran across his foot, kept on going. He laughed, sobbed, kept on stamping, jumping on the rope, but it simply slipped away, reformed.
When it reached the door it slid out between the hinges.
He tried to grab it. It slipped out of his hands. He opened the door, ran after it down towards the sea. Just as the front end of the rope reached the water and slid in, he stumbled on the treacherous rocks and fell forwards.
He heard a crunching noise inside his head as some of his teeth smashed, and his mouth filled with blood.
He lay face down on the rocks until the dawn came.
What else is there to tell?
Anna survived. After a few days in hospital her physical recovery was complete. She didn’t even need a D and C. Death had done its job meticulously. She would never be able to have children.
The case featured in the papers for a week or so, and Josef got four years for contributing to the death of another person. A psychiatrist who had been working with Kaxe was able to confirm that he had strong suicidal tendencies, and that Josef’s version of events was not at all unlikely.
There was no mention of Death, which lives in the sea.
Anna visited Josef in prison a few times, but their relationship was untenable after what had happened. She said he shouldn’t blame himself, that it had been her own choice, but it didn’t help much. Josef was lost to the world.
After a couple of years Anna started painting again, taking up the thread she had begun in the days before the thing that had happened, but without the comic element. Things went well for her. She was never happy again, but she kept going.
When Josef came out of prison he went back to the house. Spent a few months sorting it out.
In prison he had had plenty of time to consider his impressions from the hours spent in the company of Death. In spite of the fact that he had striven for eternal life, it came as a relief when he realised that the immortality given to him through the pact applied only to death by water.
He would age, like other people. He could take his own life if he wanted to. But he would never drown.
The years passed. Josef was unable to return to any kind of work. At the age of thirty-eight he was an old man, sitting in his cottage and living on benefits, drinking as much as he could.
The locals avoided him. They knew who he was, what he’d done. Perhaps their attitude might have mellowed over the years if he hadn’t also stopped washing, stopped eating more than was absolutely necessary to stay alive.
One evening as he sat there, mercifully drunk, staring out at
the lighthouse sending its flashes of light across the water as it had always done, he realised with a bitter laugh that he was becoming exactly like Kaxe.
Life lost more and more of its meaning. He was incapable of enjoying anything any longer. Even the booze didn’t help. In this desert the importance of his only oasis grew and grew, the reason why things had turned out like this, the only gift he had been given. The fact that he couldn’t drown.
One October day he fetched an anchor with a chain from the boathouse, heaved it into the boat and set off. He sailed to the same spot where he had sunk Kaxe. There he fastened the chain tightly around his waist with a lockable split pin so that he would be able to open it again once he was convinced.
When he threw himself into the water with the anchor, he felt a kind of happiness.
The water was cold. He quickly sank three metres below the surface, stopped. Floated. His ears popped and he equalised the pressure by holding his nose and breathing out with his lips pressed together. Above him he could see the silhouette of the underside of the boat, highlighted against the sky. Thought he had been stupid not to fasten himself to the boat as well. It would drift away.
He floated on the spot. After a minute or so he was no longer able to hold his breath. He opened his mouth and breathed in.
Whatever might come, let it come.
The water poured into his lungs, chilling him completely in just a few seconds. A moment of panic, the panic that always clings to life. But nothing happened. He was no longer breathing, but he was fully conscious.
He floated there for a long time. Saw the boat drift out of sight. Saw the sky begin to darken. He no longer had any feeling anywhere, he was merely a floating consciousness, a thinking jellyfish.
The full significance of this did not become clear to him until he had had enough. When he began to long for the cottage in spite of everything, for a few leisurely glasses of schnapps to thaw his body out slowly. For TV.
He had no feeling. He couldn’t move.