Somewhere down the river

In this run-down manor somewhere outside of the nearest southern city it always feels like a handful of tiny eyes are looking intensely at me. It feels like they wait for me to make a mistake.

It’s five in the afternoon and the sunlight is just starting to turn greyish and as the outside light changes the inside lights go on. The kitchen, the living room, the lamps. All of them are a warm light and that’s extremely important to me because the cool neon lights are a trigger and I avoid them like I avoid the things outside now. They flicker, and my eyes blink repeatedly each time they do. They’ve been turned on with a ceremonial flair at this exact time for as long as I remember, though is that real or is it imagined? It seems my memory doesn’t discriminate. The generator downstairs came with the house, though the ten others I’ve salvaged for just-in-case days, future-dated doomsdays flick on in unison as well, which gives me relief. The end of the day and the beginning of my awakedness is the hardest part of waking up every afternoon whether I want to or not.

I stand in the grand, broken down parlour and take a moment to consume the exhausting, beautiful view of the wide river from the giant old windows, which in turn looks particularly brilliant against the exposed brick. Even in spite of the fact it’s peeling and cracking and could blow away like dust at any moment, it’s a sight to behold. I look out a little too long so the constant ticking in my head sharpens and says, “don’t look, don’t look, don’t look”, and I take a step back, just before my eyes find the dark shadows that make their way across the lawn.

I shudder. Not with revulsion. Not even really with fear. But with the idea that if not for some randomised sentence of damnation, then I too would be a walking corpse. Not violent, not even very interested in anything really, but simply doomed to walk and to stare and to rot slowly over the centuries until they turn to dust or oil or whatever comes after human compost. What I’m saying is the world is overrun with the dead, and they have little to know interest in what’s left of the ‘living’.

I’m not always aware of the ticking in my brain, though often hopeful that maybe in a few more years aliens will study the Doom of Mankind and offer up a satisfying enough explanation for me to understand my current plight. But instead, I just rearrange and wipe down the large oak desk in front of the window for the fifth time since I woke, until there’s a military look to it in all its uniformity. I am exhausted, and yes, I am sad.

I’m still coming out of the daze right now, suppressing my lauded “Grey Feeling” which is just the twilight depression I’ve only ever felt after finding myself indoors at this exact time, since I was a child. I guess you would call me a nocturnal now. Not because I need to be but because getting around without the fetid stink of an eyeless, rotting, potential ex-relative bumping into me is a fair enough trade for fourty minutes of depression before I step out into the world for another night of consternation.

Again, I feel the invisible eyes focus in on me and the lingering tiredness disappears instantly as I snap out of my melancholia, despite having effectively drugged myself with some symphonic melody I leave on repeat, which is blaring from my headphones attached to a Walkman that survived the apocalypse and runs on battery power, which seems to be infinite though only because batteries are everywhere. We made a lot of batteries in the decades preceding the millennium, before time stopped and clocks became decorative fixtures we either broke or lost, depending on the state of your memory.

I’ve met ten others like me in total. Survivors, or ‘livers’ as I coined for what was left of us in better, less corpsey days. We don’t get along though anymore, and I haven’t seen one of them in years now. I mean, ten people out of four or five million doesn’t give you the best chance of finding a bevy of common interests other than the shared experience of immortality in a world that burnt out almost fourty-five years ago. The momentary calm I feel as the melody ends, telling me nothing of the world around me but taking me back to the peace I found before the End of Days. The sun is completely gone, the moon has risen, and the stars are brilliant and limitless as they ignite the sky with silver light. The dead things, which stumble aimlessly on the lawn below, slowly lay down like all good corpses should do and they retire for the night. They become shadows and then eventually they become the ghosts of shadows, as the stars get brighter and the gossamer web of light, made all the brighter by the absence of cities, somehow removes them from the existence I at least participate in.

I don’t know where they go. The deathly dead. I stopped trying to find that out a long time ago now. It was a panic-driven me who came across the others because I needed to know, to understand and to control the situation as best I could. But I couldn’t, and I didn’t, and the world continued to turn from day to night though the sun shone a little strangely and of course it was overrun with dead things.

And that was that. I had to accept the seemingly unacceptable. I live in this gorgeous and entirely dilapidated mansion that was a family’s once. It has a view of the river that leads to a city that flickers on and off like the lights in my apartment, and for me at least, time has stopped. I listen to music, sleep during the day and I read at night. Not vampirically of course, but all too humanly, because for me who remembers being very human indeed, I still can’t seem to grasp what eternity will feel like if it’s just me and the occasionally once a decade encounter with another unfortunate, immortal soul.

So, of course, being human primarily and deathless secondarily, I block that out as best I can. Then the ticking comes.

Usually, the tick gets louder when I’m completely unaware, and as I sit downstairs on the lawn before the edge of the river, I start thinking of the huge antique clock Mum had when I was a kid. It was a grandfather clock her father owned. I wonder what happened to it? Whether she sold it before I buried her? Whether I broke it in a rage because I had to bury my own mother all alone in the dead of night and my two sisters were rotting somewhere miles away? Or maybe it just got lost or ripped to pieces by the dark things that used to inhabit the night before they all disappeared too. The ones that remain, they acknowledge my presence and leave it well enough alone.

Alone. Ah yes, that’s what I am. I haven’t spoken to a human being with a voice that wasn’t a guttural twisting in my ears or a piercing scream in my dreams in almost a decade now. I know they exist out there, doing what they can to maintain a normal existence. Either with a spiritual zeal or a gloomy, repetitive, teeth-grinding, jaw breaking self-loathing of circumstance that is almost as terrifying as the cantankerous lumbering of the dead and broken all over the world.

I should be calm. I’m alive and that should be enough, but of course it’s not. It’s a half-life, and I’m beginning to believe I’m now a half-human that’s vacillating between the living and the dead, and all I can do is pray that eternity comes much faster than I can even begin to hope for. I’m immortal and whole, at least physically. But whilst I still look like the skinny twenty-five-year-old boy with the bright green eyes that I was before the sun turned angelic for about two fifths of a second and diverted time itself, I do fear that my now seventy-year-old brain is beginning to go quite mad. You can probably pick up on that.

I do ramble in my own head now, which is never quiet and never still but always private. The dead don’t listen to my thoughts, and the dead don’t speak. Trust me, I’ve tried to strike up conversation, but the rasping noise of a decaying set of larynges and the icy stare of rotting eyes isn’t the sort of stimulating, thought-provoking debate I like to get into these days.

I don’t think I’m doing a very good job at inspiring anyone’s sympathy, if you are reading this. I want you to know that. I want you to know that I tell jokes and that they usually go down quite well. That I’m a ferocious reader, and fast runner and a lover of dogs which of course don’t exist anymore. I still collect flowers when I come across them at night, because whilst my brain seems to be detached from sanity, my love for beautiful things is still attached. And whilst I do seem to have mother issues, I can assure you that they are only because I buried her after I burnt her because she was already dying before the sun ticked over, and it wasn’t fair to see her dying as a dead person forever.

I have a locket of hers. So perhaps I can give that to you if we ever meet. Because we need to meet. Because I scream every night knowing no one can hear me, and when I stop screaming the terror, the weight and the indignity of an eternity spent by myself propels me forward into isolating madness with the rise of every moon.

The locket is shaped like a heart. It’s beautiful. It’s yours. It’s all I really have with any real meaning, and if you come and meet me, I’ll tell you what it means to me and why. Until then, I hope this letter finds you well and the bottle I’ve put it in remains unbroken, and everything I wrote down before I sent this down the river is still legible. That somewhere down the river there is a person in this world that can keep me sane.

Because I know in my heart, which still beats I assure you, it is you. Whoever you are.

Yours for eternity,

Adam L.