Handling the Undead

Viktor had been very sad about their grandfather's death, but Flora had intuited that it was less the person he grieved for than the fact of death itself. Death meant that people actually disappeared. That everyone was going to disappear

It was like a blackout in reverse. Since around nine o’clock, no lamps could be switched off, no electrical appliances powered down. If you tried to pull out the plug there was an alarming crackling sound and sparks flew between the outlet and the plug, preventing the circuit from being broken.

An image suddenly loomed in his mind: the greenhouse effect. Yes. The Earth is a gigantic greenhouse. With us planted here millions of years ago by aliens. Soon they’ll be back for the harvest.

Come back,’ he whispered. ‘Magnus. How am I supposed to tell Magnus? He’s turning nine next week, you know. He wants pancake cake. How do you make pancake cake, Eva? You were the one who was going to make it, you bought the raspberries and everything. They’re already at home in the freezer, how am I supposed to go home and open the freezer and there are the raspberries that you bought to make pancake cake and how am I supposed to…’ David screamed. One long sound until all the air was gone from his lungs. He pressed his lips against her knuckles, mumbled, ‘Everything’s over. You don’t exist any more. I don’t exist. Nothing exists.

A graveyard could be so densely populated and yet it was the loneliest place on earth.

For him,she was the one who dominated the heavens and made the world a place it was possible to live in

But Eva was not dead, he was not allowed to grieve. And she was not alive, so he could not hope. Nothing.

Terror gave birth to terror, hatred begat hate and all that was left in the end was a pile of burnt bodies. As everywhere; as always.

She had collided with an elk and died...At twenty-four minutes to eleven her heart had stopped pumping the blood around her body. One single muscle in a single person's body. A speck of dust in time. And the world was dead. David stood next to her bed with his arms by his sides, the headache burning behind his forehead. Here lay his whole future, everything good that he could even imagine would come from life. Here lay the last twelve years of his past. Everything gone; and time shrank to a single unbearable now.

—but Mahler stood up with a groan while the nurse screamed at him, ‘You’ve got to help me! Please!’ He couldn’t. Not right now. Had to see what was going on. Shamed, he staggered away to the autopsy room; the photographer who takes pictures of the famine victims, goes back to the hotel room and drinks to assuage his guilt. Photographs…the camera…

The offender was determined to be extremely violent, in official terms. Completely fucking crazy, in other words.

The reliving are regarded as vegetables, without will, or thought. This is wrong. They are like jellyfish. Their behaviour is influenced by their environment. They have a will. The will of the person thinking of them. No one is prepared to accept this. We should isolate them completely. We should destroy them. Burn them. Instead, they will now be released into the uncontrolled thoughts of the public at large. It will end badly. I do not want to be present when this occurs.

Elvy whispered, "Holy Virgin..." and did not dare to look. Because suddenly she understood what it meant, _tribulation, such was not since the beginning of the world_. It was what could be read in Mary's eyes. The suffering of a mother confronted with her dead child--and that child the sum of all goodness. Not simply the pain of watchin the child that you have nursed and cherished be tortured and executed, but the suffering, too, that there is a world in which such things happen.

Perhaps what set the saints apart—the holy women and men—was that they held fast to what they had seen, not allowing their realisation to fade and die, but they held on, held on and refused to let go, saw forgetfulness as a tool of the devil and held on. Maybe this was the secret.

For me death is a wolf…

I don’t know if we are doing the right thing,’ he said. ‘But I know that they don’t know either. In my line of work…you would be amazed at how many times the authorities do something without knowing why, without knowing the consequences…only so it will look as if they’re doing something.

Seconds, minutes…one second we are born, one second we die.

When in trouble, when in doubt Run in circles, scream and shout.

Darling, you’ll have to turn that off now.’ Elvy wagged her finger at the television screen. ‘That groaning is too much for my head.’ Flora nodded without taking her eyes off the screen, said, ‘OK. I’ll just save this.’ Elvy laid Grimberg aside—she had not been able to concentrate on her reading anyway since this headache began—and watched as Jill Valentine made her way back to her safe room.

<>, pero no obtuvo respuesta. Cuando se concentró, pudo percibir una débil imagen: la sombra de lo que Eva significaba para él, pero procedía totalmente de sus recuerdos, no de la persona que tenía delante.

Death makes us strangers to one another.