Dead North: Canadian Zombie Fiction Read online

  It was like this with my first whale. I should have been frightened at the way the men split the body apart, by the blood and other fluids that spilled everywhere. The head cavity only ever seemed like a cocoon to me, a place where one could be away from the noise of the world, a place where I might bury myself so I would not have to experience Esteuan’s anger when my monthly blood came. It is what a woman’s body does, I tell him. To him the blood only means no sons, no one to carry on the work when he no longer can. This man, I think, disappeared into the sea. What must it be like beneath those waves? Where the noise of the world also must vanish, where great beasts move through cold waters as grey shadows.

  Marina hauls me back to the house, screeching. There is no lock upon the door; she wedges the slat of wood against it and pulls me towards the counter. Where did he touch you, she asks, over and over, and she dips a cloth into the bucket of clean water. What did he do to you, where did he touch you, and I cannot answer, for my attention is still anchored with the man who picks himself up from the ground and stares longingly at the whale rib before he shuffles away, towards the sea.

  What did he do to you, Tota? Marina cries. She shakes me hard enough to steal my focus and I don’t understand what she means until I see the bloody footprints on the wood floor. My footprints, my blood. I press a hand to my belly. Tomorrow I will be back inside a whale.

  ∆ ∆ ∆

  The man from the sea is only the first of many who come to our camp. At first, the men refuse to believe it. They think the women are suffering from a shared illness. The men have not seen these strangers from the sea, therefore they cannot exist. They are a dream, Gil says, and he is so old and weathered that every younger man cries out in support of his words. Marina only stares with hard eyes; her own husband does not believe her, either.

  Esteuan, who has seen the same strange man I have, says nothing. Why do you not speak of what you have seen? I ask him when we return to our home. Esteuan pours himself a cold bath and tells me he has seen nothing. His hands shake and he shoves them into the icy water as if it will numb him to the truth. He says we women have grown sick because we do not bear our husbands sons.

  Though it is growing colder, I spend that night sleeping in the shed. I have no wish to lie beside Esteuan when he says such things. In the dark, I hear a rustle and I listen, to see if it is one of the sea strangers. The sound does not come again, but the low ghostsong rises up from the harbour to wend through the tryworks, the houses, the sheds where we store the casks of oil. I close my eyes and listen and am still listening when I wake at sunrise. I do not see Esteuan before I flee to the harbour where the men have brought in a whale already.

  The men are triumphant, singing and hoisting harpoons into the air. These men have never brought in a whale before and though Arnaut was lost in the battle, the battle is still considered won. This is not a right whale or a bowhead; this is the treasured sperm whale and when Berasco sees me, he gestures for me to come, come, because they want only me to crawl inside. God help me, I long for that, to retreat from everything else if only for a little while.

  The cool of the morning is erased inside the whale’s body. The body is so fresh I find myself sweating from the heat of it as I work. Some days it is mindless, the stretch of arms and bucket into the waxy innards, but today I am aware of every motion. Aware of the strength in my limbs and this strange ritual. I murmur a thanks to the whale, lift up another bucket, but find myself holding it too long. Where has Berasco gone? I peer up and he is not perched on the whale’s head. He is gone.

  I climb my way out to find most of the crew gone. Young Dat hovers nearby, but his attention is not on me. Deeper in the harbour there is a flurry of activity and I think perhaps another whale has come, but it is not a whale. It is the strangers from the sea. I cannot count how many there are, but it reminds me of a flood of fish, so many that they wriggle one atop the other, unsure of how they are suddenly on land and not in the water. These men look much like the one I have seen; they are in various states of rot, some worse than others, but all of them gleam with the sheen of whale oil.

  Dat looks at me when I emerge, filthy from the whale’s innards. He offers me a wet rag and I wipe my face clean; the rest does not bother me and can wait. You can come, I tell the young boy as I move past him; I have no idea what we might do, but I want to get closer to see the furor. He follows me, mostly I think because he was charged with staying close. He wishes they would let him crawl inside the whales, but I know they will not; he is destined for greater things, they say. They say this of all the young men.

  We round the tryworks and ships, working our way closer to the shallows where the furor is greatest. Our men are beating the strangers back into the water, with fists and clubs, with harpoons and oars. Esteuan is there and his oar connects with one rotting head; the head bursts under the contact and the body collapses. For a moment, Esteuan looks victorious, but two more strangers step up to take the place of the first and he hefts the oar once more.

  There is a frantic sound to the confrontation. It reminds me of men taking a whale in open waters. That scream, the opening of one body into two parts. Though our men are killing these rotting bodies, our men are also being devoured. This is the only word for what I witness. It occurs to me to reach for Dat, to cover his eyes, but he has already seen the horror. These rotting men are devouring the healthy flesh of the others. Ripping into them the way a harpoon would, tearing, sundering.

  The strangers do not stop and our men continue to fall. The women stream into the harbour now, roused by the sound, the screams. I leave Dat, trusting him to not be a fool as I am about to be. I cry for Marina, for Isabel and Andere, and anyone else who can come. Marina sees me – she feared I would be trapped in a whale! She cries, but I silence her and drag her towards the casks of oil.

  She guesses what I mean to do because she protests. Isabel and Andere seem less worried over the loss of the oil – they each grab torches from the rendering fires as if they already know what must be done. We keep the tryworks, large iron tubs wreathed in brick, near the shore to try out the oil close to the water where the whales are kept. It lessens the work, for we haul the whales less distance than other stations must. It also adds risk, keeping this much oil near this much heat.

  I grip Marina’s hands and tell her to quiet. I speak to her as one might a child and slowly she understands we must do this. The strangers are gaining on our men and what shall we do if this station is lost? She moans and I stroke a hand over her tear-streaked face. I know, I know. But when we roll the casks towards the combat, she is steady and true and silent.

  On the long tongue of bridge that connects the docks to the land, we haul the casks onto the railing. Below us, the conflict continues. There is only that awful, furious sound – if there is a scent to the spilled blood, to our precious dead, we cannot smell it above the normal stench of this place. Isabel nods at me and I at her. The moment I push the cask off the edge, she touches her torch to its gleaming side. The cask drops into the fray, streaming oil which catches fire, bursts. Our men who have not fallen run the other way, but the strangers take no notice. They are wrecked and fall burning into the shallow waters.

  After, the silence is staggering. So too is the reek of burnt, rotten flesh, which I can now distinguish above the usual stench. It is Dat who runs down first, crying for his father. And soon after we are all there, wading through the charred and floating dead. Marina’s husband scoops her up from the water, carries her from the shore though he is streaming with blood. Isabel’s husband is covered in slash marks that call to mind the battle scars we see on whales. I imagine these men carrying these marks the way whales do, for the rest of their days – which they will do, but these days become short indeed.

  Of Esteuan there is no sign.

  ∆ ∆ ∆

  Marina and Lope take me to their house. I hear myself protest: if Esteuan should come home, I should be there to greet him when he does; there should be a warm m
eal and a wife. There are many shoulds. While I speak these words, another part of me is numbed to them. Where has Esteuan gone? Which ship took him? Was there a whale? I ask Lope, for they work together every day. Certainly he will know where my husband is. Lope quiets me, settles me into a chair beside their hearth. In the warmth of the fire, my thoughts come into some better order. Esteuan was not on a ship, there was no whale; the strangers have taken him, devoured him.

  There is a warm meal here, warm soup and Marina’s best bread. My hands smell like whale oil; they are steady when I break my bread, though Lope’s begin to shake then. He begins to have trouble feeding himself and Marina helps, her hand steadying his and the spoon. Still, the soup drops down his chin as though he were an infant and not a grown man. This frustrates him. He shakes her hand off, pushes away from the meal, and stalks across the room. This room is not large. I can smell him where he stands. He is rotting.

  Once Lope is in bed, I suggest to Marina that we leave. She should not see what he will become. Though I do not know, I suspect. His flesh will fall to ribbons, his eyes will go milky and sightless. I do not say this to her, but Marina refuses. I cannot say what I would do in her place. She rests beside him, her hand upon his chest when he stops breathing in the night. She shakes him, pleading for him to wake and when his eyes come open, it is a sobbed laugh that escapes her. He loves to play, her Lope.

  But these eyes are no longer his. Their green spark drowns in a haze of milk and I try to pull Marina away. Away before he can latch onto her. His movements are slow, the bedcovers confound him; I have Marina almost off the bed before she realizes I am taking her from her husband. She screams no, reaches for him. Lope groans and strains towards her. They are two lovers kept from one another, but she cannot see what has become of him. Perhaps she does not care. She wrenches from my hold and stumbles back to his. His rotting mouth glances her cheek and then sinks in.

  It is that sound, the sundering. The ripping apart of flesh. Lope becomes the sharp harpoon and Marina the bloodied whale; he pulls her under. He breaks her open and scoops out all she is and no matter how I strike him, I cannot dislodge him. He is newly made, not wasted like the first man I saw, and terribly strong. I cannot separate her. Marina screeches and yet I see the way her hands hold fast. She holds to his arms to say she will not be parted even if this is how it ends. Until death, she swore to him.

  Lope reaches past her for me, but I move towards the hearth. Towards the lamp which sits on the mantle. I throw the lamp into the fire and the oil bursts, licks up the walls and across the floor. The fire behind me throws my shadow across the grass. This shadow me staggers away into the night, hands held over ears as if this can forestall the wet screams that bleed into the dark.

  ∆ ∆ ∆

  The man waits near the supply shed. He stutters, the rut in the ground saying he has been here a while, pacing and waiting while others of his kind flooded the harbour and ate our men. When he sees me, he stops. I wonder what I look like through those milky eyes, though perhaps I am not so different from most days I come home from the whales, coated in cooling spermaceti. This man screams at me. Spittle flies and his jaw unhinges on one side. The rot devours him; he’s melting before me, but still lifts a hand, gestures. The whale rib rests on its side on the ground. Smears of blood and muck coat it, as though he tried to hold it. Oil gleams on the likeness of my brother.

  Two years ago a storm pounded Red Bay; it was autumn and Marina and her chandlers had finished the candles we would need to see us through winter. These candles were shelved in pantries and cellars, wrapped in soft linen and closed away from the light of day. The excess were boxed in the hold of the San Juan, who stood ready to make her return across the Atlantic with Joanes as her captain. That return would never be made, for the storm did what she would with the ship, forcing her into the depths before she could leave. She went down with all hands, more than two hundred casks of whale oil, and all of Marina’s candles.

  Whale oil drips from the man’s hand, into my outstretched palm. Not water or blood, but oil, and one look at what remains of his crooked nose tells me: this is Joanes. The men who have come back from the sea are our own men, dead and yet living still. Far behind us, someone screams – oh, it sounds like Isabel – and another house erupts in scouring flames. Joanes’s fingers rest in my palm, as cold as dead whale flesh. He has no strength to grip my hand. He turns and his fingers slide away, but he looks back at me once. Come with me, Tota, I can hear him say. I dare you.

  I follow him to the shore, through the rotting carcasses and oily water that licks the rocks. Smoke roils through the air now and fire illuminates the sea in long golden strips, in bright blotches between the stones. We move slow, because he doesn’t lift his feet. He drags one then shifts his weight to drag the other. We played this way as children, pretending injury he can no longer escape. He wades into the water and I hesitate. Joanes is waist-deep in the golden water when he realizes I am not there. He turns. Moans. I want to push his jaw back together, mend what the sea has broken. I extend a hand to him.

  Joanes comes back to me. Difficult, slow, terrible. I make him drag himself through the water back to me, and picture the many times he has come to shore already, how demanding each journey was. The effort makes even me tired and I am reminded how my arms felt of lead after my first afternoon inside a whale. How I could not move the next morning and how the men laughed at me. They only ever laughed once. My brother lifts his arm with the same difficulty now, resting his dead fingers in my hand.

  Something in the bones is familiar and I hold tight to him as he walks back into the sea. Every step takes me deeper, until the ground slips from beneath my shoes and I paddle. Joanes sinks, hand slipping from mine, and I can’t go under, I can’t, until I do. I take a breath and dive and spy him in the gloom beneath the surface. He walks as if anchored to the bottom, towards things I cannot see. When I do see them, my breath bubbles out of me and my chest screams a protest. I swim deeper.

  Whales swim in the depths here, dead and yet living. These whales are injured, carrying harpoons that in turn carry ropes, weeds, moss. Some whales are split open across their broad heads, exposing the chambers where I would spend my days scooping them clean. The whales watch me with their unblinking eyes, steady, knowing all that I cannot know. My brother strides into the depth and I see others like him, drowned sailors all, shuffling amid the whales, broken casks of oil, strewn candles.

  Do I drown? They will say so. It is the easiest explanation, because though I tell my story twice and it never changes, it never makes sense to those who remain. Isabel, her face scarred from that long ago night, refuses to believe, even when she leaves me bowls of warm soup in winter. Isabel’s daughter (gifts of bread), granddaughter (gifts of oil), great-grandson (gifts of candles), great-great-granddaughter (gifts of drawings – a tall house with a light that I think is a dream, but I see the light scrape the sky).

  I watch them all and they say I am a ghost, a girl who drowned because she could not give her husband sons. Esteuan knows better. He watches as I crawl into the dead whales. Watches as I stretch from side to side and expand to fill this chamber, and, at long last, in the cold waters of Red Bay, feel saved.

  KISSING CARRION

  Gemma Files

  Q: Are we living in a land where sex and horror are the new Gods?

  A: Yeah.

  —Frankie Goes To Hollywood

  I am persecuted by angels, huge and silent – marble-white, rigid-winged, one in every corner. Only their vast eyes speak, staring mildly at me from under their painful halos, arc-weld white crowns of blank. They say: Lie down. They say: Forgive, forget. Sleep.

  Forget, lie down. Drift away into death’s dream. Make your…final…peace.

  But being dead is nothing peaceful – as they must know, those God-splinter-sized liars. It’s more like a temporal haematoma, time pooling under the skin of reality like sequestered blood. Memory looping inward, turning black, starting to stink.
>
  A lidless eye, still struggling to close. An intense and burning contempt for everything you have, mixed up tight with an absolute – and absolutely justified – terror of losing it all.

  Yet here I am, still. Watching the angels hover in the illset corners of Pat Calavera’s Annex basement apartment, watching me watch her wash her green-streaked hair under the kitchen sink’s lime-crusted tap. And thinking one more time how funny it is I can see them, when she can’t: They’re far more “here” than I am, one way or another, especially in my current discorporant state – an eddying tide of discontent adding one more vague chill to the mouldy air around her, stirring the fly-strips as I pass. Pat’s roommate hoards trash, breeding a durable sub-race of insects who endure through hot, cold and humid weather alike; he keeps the bathtub full of dirty dishes and the air full of stink, reducing Pat’s supposed bedroom to a mere way-stop between gigs, an (in)convenient place to park her equipment ’til the next time she needs to use it.

  Days, she teaches socks to talk cute as a trainee intern on Ding Dong the Derry-O, the world-famous Hendricks Family Conglomerate’s longest-running preschool puppet show. Nights, she spins extra cash and underground performance art out of playing with her Bone Machine, getting black market-fresh cadavers to parade back and forth on strings for the edification of bored ultra-fetishists. “Carrionettes,” that’s what she usually calls them whenever she’s making them dance, play cards or screw some guy named Ray, a volunteer post-mortem porn star whose general necrophiliac bent seems to be fast narrowing to one particular corpse, and one alone…mine, to be exact.

  Pat can’t see the angels, though – can’t even sense their presence like an oblique, falling touch, a seraph’s pinion-feather trailed quick and light along the back of my dead soul. And really, when you think about it, that’s just as well.