📖 The Ghost of Emily - Chapter 29
In which our ragtag survivalists feel momentarily settled.
Jake awoke in a tree, high above the ground. He couldn’t remember how he had gotten there. The tree seemed immensely large and the space around it dark and unfocussed. He looked outward and squinted, trying to find a context for his unusual position.
Around the tree, he saw only darkness. But as his eyes began to adjust he realised that the tree was sitting in the middle of a huge cavern, expansive and intimidatingly dark.
He heard a soft hissing sound near him, and as he turned towards the sound he saw a snake in the tree; an unlikely stumpy death adder perched precariously on the branch next to him. It hissed again, and inside the hiss he thought he could hear whispering voices.
The adder jumped right at his face, but rather than flying into the air, it was lengthening, and as he flinched backward and shielded his eyes from the widening jaws of the serpent, he heard a thunderous bang. He opened his eyes and saw, in slow motion, the snake’s head explode as its body flopped down across the tree branch.
“Down here!” came a familiar voice. He looked down below, and standing on a lower branch with a revolver pistol in his hand was Gus, smiling, with blood from the snake’s neck dripping onto his face, unnoticed. “Come on down!” he shouted, and gestured with the gun.
Jake slid off his branch to get to his son, but as he started to fall he felt himself shrinking rapidly, or the tree growing, and by the time he landed on the next branch down he realised he wasn’t on the tree, but in it. The gnarled branches had become tunnels of stone, and now he was inside them. Ahead, near a sharp bend in the tunnel, he saw the silhouette of Gus, gesturing for him to follow.
He broke into a run, but just as he was about to reach Gus, a wall of solid rock slammed down in front of him. He turned, panicked, and ran the other way, but the same thing happened again. He was trapped in a toppled stone cylinder. His heart was racing and he screamed out to Gus, but no sound emerged from his mouth. He screamed again, and a sound came this time, but not his voice. It was a droning, synthetic howl.
He heard a voice echoing in the chamber with him. It started out as Emily’s voice, but by the end of the sentence, it was Maisie. “We won’t harm you. But you must join us. Join us, or face the consequences. We love you.”
The prison cell fell into blackness and Jake began to cry. He heard his mother’s voice whisper in his mind.
“It’s good to cry, Jakey. Whenever you need to, just cry.”
He began to sob, and felt himself shrinking again, into a small child version of himself.
A blue light entered his vision. He raised his eyes, and before him stood the blue ghost. It reached out its hand to him, and took his. The blue hand felt warm, and electrically alive. A tingling sensation ran up his arm and swept through his body until it exploded with a hum into his head.
He felt fully alive, lucid, and calm. He knew he was dreaming, and now it was time to explore, and to learn.
The blue ghost spoke, his voice clearly male. Soft, deep and beautiful. “Life will win, Jake. It always does.”
Gus lay awake, listening to his father’s heavy breathing in the bed next to him. He could tell he was dreaming, and that the dreams had been stressful for him.
“Come... come back...” Jake mumbled unconsciously.
Gus gently placed his hand on his father’s hot brow, a thin veil of sweat making his palm sticky as he stroked Jake’s hair in an easy rhythmic motion. Jake didn’t wake up, but with a soft grumble, his breathing eased and the small loving hand upon him had its intended effect.
“Win...” Jake whispered, sounding at ease again.
Soon Jake was slumbering silently, and Gus lay back, himself unable to sleep.
He had seen and done so many horrible things in these last few days. There was so much that he didn’t quite understand about the world now. Everything had seemed relatively simple before they went to the town; before Mama had started appearing to them.
Gus realised, with some sadness, that the happiest time of his life so far was the period after his adjustment to his mother’s death, and before she reappeared as a mechanical phantom to them.
He felt attached to his mother when he was young, but she was a source of emotional insecurity for him. She was afraid of a lot of things, and she wasn’t able to protect him like his father was. She couldn’t teach him the things he needed to survive out there in the wild. Papa could.
Mama seemed as dependent on his Papa as he and his sister were, and something about this made Gus, even as a small boy, feel a sense of distrust towards her. What was a grown woman doing, being so dependent on others for her own existence?
She didn’t hunt. She didn’t seem to want to learn to. She didn’t tell stories like Papa did. Gus felt that all his mother provided him in his younger years was warmth. Physical warmth. She would lie down with him each night and cling to him, and he liked the feeling of her warm body against his. But he never felt emotionally secure with her.
In the end, she’d left.
Gus was able to finally see her decision for what it was: abandonment of him. Her fear of living, of taking responsibility for her own survival, of taking action to defend her own existence and values, was far more powerful than her love for her son and daughter. She had made her choice to die, willingly, leaving his father to pick up the pieces, and leaving Gus and Maisie to try and make some sense of it all.
Maisie... he thought, his chest tightening with remorse at what he knew was her truth.
Maisie had chosen to follow her mother. Now, more likely than not, she was dead too. A few tears rolled down Gus’s cheeks, then he blinked hard and opened his eyes again to turn his attention to the room around him, lit dimly by a sliver of light emerging from the crack below the door. In the hall was a small glowing orange box that was plugged into a socket on a white wall panel. Marcus had called it a nightlight.
This was a strange place, but so beautiful, and comfortable, and Gus hoped they could stay here for a very long time. He felt at ease here; like some kind of normal life was beginning, some kind of balance. The best of both worlds; the rugged, woodsman’s life his father had taught him; and the advanced, almost magical world of technology that Marcus and Olivia had brought into their lives.
Somehow, it felt like he had a family again.
Marcus slowly walked along the book-lined wall of the living room, running his thumb sensuously across the many textured spines of volume after volume.
It was mostly fiction, and the non-fiction pertained mostly to detailed histories of various wars, gardening and landscape advice, architecture and self-sustainability - but he didn’t mind in the least. It was a pleasure to be in the presence of such a library again, having not seen one this big since his last visit to New York, four decades beforehand.
As his eyes scanned across the spines and effortlessly focussed on the rapidly changing scene of typeface, size, colour and binding, he suddenly felt his attention falling inward, to the state of his body.
It felt good to stand up straight, tall, without the act of elderly weaknesses. It felt good to stand in a fully lit room, with electric light cast upon the items he was studying, fighting back the gloom of the overcast chill beyond the glass. It felt good to be relaxed enough to turn his back to the wide open room, without fear of sudden attack.
He felt young again.
The company he was keeping was having an effect too. He felt the stress and trauma of his captivity dissipating rapidly over the last two weeks in this house.
Though the household was fully stocked with long-life food, Jake had begun his hunting forays immediately the morning after their arrival there. He had said he wanted to establish a sense of the trails and nests of the fauna in this area; a new zone and slightly different ecosystem to the one in which he had spent the last few years with his children.
Marcus’s stomach felt warm and content, full of the game Jake had slaughtered and brought home that afternoon. Phil had cooked it in the electric oven, and proven himself to be an accomplished chef. They had all eaten together, around the round wooden table, from fine crockery that had been left in the cupboards. This had become their nightly ritual, and it felt astonishingly human to be showered under hot water from their limitless supply, adorned in freshly cleaned clothes, and sitting under electric lights in a heated dining room.
It felt human to have friends.
Life in this house was a pleasure and luxury previously unknown to the young ones. To Marcus, it was a return to civilisation. One that he knew, in his core, was temporary.
Olivia too had changed in the presence of these new friends. Many days she had ventured out with Jake to hunt, while Marcus worked on the new interference device, utilising the redundant battery system in the house’s basement. Phil had been very helpful with the more specialised technical aspects of the electrical engineering, when he wasn’t busy receiving shooting and rifle-care lessons from a very serious Gus, who treated his role as a firearms mentor to Phil most solemnly.
Olivia seemed light around Jake, and Marcus was well aware that their hunting forays were not just about catching game. It delighted him to see her living freely again, as she should.
He winced at the thought of how things were before.
When Olivia had first offered herself to Reynard, Marcus watched, not recognising his girl, thinking for a moment that she was a ghost - her behaviour was so out of character. But it soon occurred to him that by acting the vagrant codger himself, appearing to have not a rational thought in his head nor a robust motion in his body, he was paving the way for Olivia’s deception of character to be whatever it needed to be. In her brightness, she had taken one look at Reynard and seen that he wanted her to be a temptress, and so, to protect Marcus’s life, she became just that.
It was only the brief moments of privacy that Marcus got to spend in the presence of his real daughter, and share in her pain. Reynard would let her bathe and shave her father, and in those moments, she would speak her heart, and cry, and Marcus would simply listen and be there in whatever way he could. So many times he wished he could rise and act to emancipate her and himself. But he knew a hopeless fight when he saw it. He had seen enough of Reynard’s executions of insubordinate militiamen, and fits of wild rage that led to random beatings and knife fights, to know that every man on the militia feared Reynard, with good reason, and that he should too.
But Jake and young Gus had appeared out of a distant and almost forgotten chapter of their history – two good men among leeches and snakes - and emancipated everyone.
Marcus felt a debt of gratitude to them both, especially to young Gus, whom he had chosen to call only by his given name Angus; partly in respect to him as their liberator, partly in nod to one of his most beloved psychology professors who bore the same name.
Marcus’s eyes suddenly caught on a title and he stopped his thumb’s bumping journey along the book spines.
Lost Horizon, by James Hilton.
The title and cover felt familiar to him. As he reached for the book, his arm paused in mid-air as he noticed his grandfather’s watch now clasped around his wrist again. The weight of it felt wonderful, the shining gold conjuring an image of a golden fountain in his mind’s eye. He blinked heavily to shake that memory away, and raised his wrist to study the delicate mechanisms of the watch, now once again in motion due to the energy his movements created within its springs.
He reached for the chain around his neck. These most precious possessions had been waiting for him in the safe of the motorhome, along with two gold bullion bars. On the chain hung a gold coin, embossed with the picture of a bear, and the characters of Cyrillic script that Marcus had since learnt read Five Hundred Gold Standard Rubles, Free Republic of Russia. Clinking next to it was his gold wedding band. He hung it over the tip of his finger, and felt the same pang of guilt he experienced any time Ally entered his thoughts.
Had I not been so distant. Had I stopped her from going to Sydney. Had I chosen somewhere safer to live. Had I killed Eve when I had the chance. Had I never gone to Shangri-La in the first place… The last thought made him shudder. The brutal fatalism of his bitter guilt left him momentarily wishing for alternative paths at crossroads that led to his greatest joys. Had I never gone to Shangri-La, I’d never have met Ally, fallen in love, and my precious Olivia would never have been born. But he still suffered the guilt of every decision he made since. His choices had led to great suffering and death, and one way or another, with whatever days were left in his life, he resolved to make it right.
He took the book from the shelf, flicked to a random page, and read: "I place in your hands, my son, the heritage and destiny of Shangri- La." "The storm... this storm you talked of..." "It will be such a one, my son, as the world has not seen before. There will be no safety by arms, no help from authority, no answer in science. It will rage till every flower of culture is trampled, and all human things are levelled in a vast chaos.”
The words came into Marcus’s mind in the voice of his grandfather, as he saw before him the small hardcover book, clasped between his own long, wrinkled fingers.
By the end of the paragraph, the voice in his mind was Eli Wells’, and he remembered, with an eerie sense of fate, the day that Eli offered to place in Marcus’s hands, the heritage and destiny of his Shangri-La.
A wave of nausea swept over Marcus, spurred on by feelings of deep guilt. He fumbled his way over to the nearest piece of furniture, which so happened to be the piano stool, and, still clutching the book on his knee, he breathed heavily and thought of everything he had caused.
Those men, perished in the attack at the silo.
Gus’s mother.
His sister.
The countless souls lost to the machines and their sinister plan.
None of it possible were it not for Marcus’s own cognitive relay design, and the years of work he intentionally put into the creation of a sentient AI. And even so, none of it would have been possible if he had not run away from Shangri-La, but instead stayed to stop Eli, and his Eve.
His head and shoulders sagged, and he felt as if the black hole of remorse would swallow him alive. Then he felt a small hand upon his shoulder, and sharply looked up.
“Are you okay, Marc?” asked Gus, smiling inquisitively.
“M... Marc?”
“Well...” grinned Gus, “if you can make my name longer - nobody else calls me Angus - then I figured, I can make your name shorter! Does anyone call you Marc?”
Marcus smiled. He was lost in his memories; flying up from the labs, past Level A, beyond the endless ventilation shafts, to Room 408. He remembered fondly the many nights that name had been whispered or moaned into his ear.
“Only one person called me Marc. Olivia’s mother.”
Marcus’s face saddened again, and Gus’s expression mirrored it, his head cocking slightly in genuine concern. “Do... you mind if I call you that?”
“You certainly may, Angus!” His eye twinkled with the cheekiness of an in-joke between two dear friends.
Gus grinned, then pointed at the book, now on Marcus’s lap. “What’s that?”
“It’s a book called Lost Horizon, a very old book. It’s over one hundred and twenty years old, in fact. Do you know how old that is?”
“Wow... that’s almost as old as you, right?”
Gus tried to keep his expression deadpan, but a snicker escaped his nostrils, and when Marcus’s face hardened, he burst into laughter. Marcus joined in, then swung around on the piano stool, facing towards the keys, and shuffled over, patting the seat next to him, inviting Gus to join him.
As Gus sat down, Marcus placed the book on the sheet music shelf, and Nimrod sidled lazily into the room and slumped down by the crackling wood fire stove.
“My grandfather read this book to me when I was about your age, maybe a little younger.”
“What’s it about?”
“It’s about a man who gets taken to a place far away in the mountains. A secret place. And there he finds a strange magic... a magic that lets everyone there live forever. No one grows old. No one dies.”
Gus’s face turned serious. “Oh.”
Marcus looked at his face, and saw pain. “I’m sorry Angus, I didn’t mean...”
“It’s okay," interrupted Gus, his expression remaining stern, “it just sounds like what the ghosts say.”
“Right. So it does," nodded Marcus, gravely. “How are your reading lessons with Livy going, Angus?”
“Great! I know all the letters now, and I can read a lot of words too. There are so many books here, Marc! I want to read them all. Will we stay here a long time?” His eyes were wide, pleading; he looked hungry for reassurance after the wave of dreadful impermanence that he must be swimming against, since the loss of his sister. Marcus knew the feeling well.
“I hope so, Angus. I’d like that." Marcus smiled, knowing that he spoke the truth, but omitting his own sense of dread to spare the child misery. “Now... how would you like it if I were to read Lost Horizon to you?”
Gus grinned excitedly, but paused his enthusiasm for thought. “Does it have a happy ending?”
Marcus thought for a moment, trying to remember the story; hearing echoes of his grandfather’s gentle voice. “It’s hard to say," he said finally, “there is no ending really. The ending is whatever you want to make it.”
Gus considered this, then nodded, and to the rhythmic sound of Phil chopping refrigerated wild vegetables in the next room, Marcus settled into an arm chair with Gus on his lap, and opened the book to page one.