The Haunting in the Ruins Page 5

of some faint memory of itself, as it had been. It was almost serene. I just stood there transfixed. I wasn’t at all afraid, quite the opposite. I did not quite understand why I was being shown this. Did the city still exist somewhere, in some place where all-out war had never taken place, where it stood safe for all time without ever being threatened, and had been able to go on and on, becoming more advanced? Was such a place possible? I stepped forward, my heart filled with a sudden longing I’d never even known was there. Was there a way through that door? Could it be possible to step across the threshold of memory, to a world where childhood just went on forever?

  “Take me there,” I heard myself say. “I want to go with you. Let me go back.” I really thought that I could. “Let me find it again.”

  And then once more there was the blue-white flash, filling the sky with its terrible, final power. The phantom city melted into nothingness before it. When it had faded, there was nothing left but a sense of absolute loss. The air was filled with grief. All around me were skeletal ruins, forever silent and empty. The city was a tomb. It could not bring itself back to life again, no matter how hard it tried. The second sun always appeared, and would always have the final say.

  I felt hot tears of frustration run down my face. Suddenly I was angry at everything. Something long forgotten had blossomed briefly within me, only to be extinguished in an instant. I looked up. The sky above me was a blank wall, which gave no answers. It never would. In the near distance, the arc lamps of the camp shone dimly, blurred through my tears. I was never going home.

  My work just went to pieces after that. I could not focus, could not function. I dreaded seeing the ghost city again, while simultaneously longing for just one more glimpse of it.

  In the meantime the weather was getting worse. Every day in the late afternoon the sky would darken and then would come bright flashes from within the clouds, followed by hollow booms. But never would it rain. Sometimes it would happen at night also. The winds made strange high keening sounds as they whistled around the encampment. The arc lamps swung around crazily, throwing sharp beams of light across the compound. I had taken to resolutely avoiding looking out of any windows after dark, just in case.

  But now it seemed others were beginning to see things too. One day Zoë came running screaming out of the dark cave of what had once been an elementary school, crying something about ‘the children, the children.’

  “It felt,” she said later through her tears, “like their voices were coming up out of the ash. Every step I took, they’d start up. It was like mocking laughter. I couldn’t get away from them. They were all around me. What is in this place?” Nothing Sven did or said could comfort her.

  The very next day Sven thought he heard a woman’s voice coming from somewhere within the rubble of a suburban street. He said she sounded as though she were calling out to her husband and children, like she was searching for them. Others began reporting similar things. Everyone was now getting very spooked. It was all put down to overactive imaginations. I was not so sure.

  Somehow it all reached Gloria the Counselor. Someone had obviously taken her advice about talking it over. She felt moved to gather us all together in the same tent we had been given the initial briefing in. she was wearing her usual wooly sweater and chunky beads.

  “I’d like to talk to you all about the things that some of you have been seeing here in the past few days,” she began. “We’ve all been placed in a very unusual environment. Most of the familiar reference points we’re used to are absent. And it’s being exacerbated by the fact that we’re in effect hemmed in without the means to leave. Now, that feeling of having no way out of a situation sometimes makes people more nervous than they might otherwise be. In some individuals that can give rise to a kind of hyper vigilance, in which certain senses, such as hearing and peripheral vision, become extremely sensitized to their surroundings. Sometimes we start to hear things and see things out of the corner of our eye which aren’t even there. I’ve spoken to Doctor Orlov already, and he’s agreed that if anyone feels like they can’t go on, they can simply say so, and we won’t ask them to go out there again. And remember, you can always come talk to me if you need to. My door’s always open.” She followed this with what she clearly hoped was a cheery grin.

  “Well that’s it then,” said Sven. “You see? It’s just imagination. That’s all.”

  Zoë’s face hardened. “I know what I heard. I wasn’t alone on that street. I wasn’t. There is something in this place with us. And it doesn’t want us here.” She turned to look up at him. “You said you heard something as well.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know what I heard. I think the sooner we are out of here the better.”

  It was almost possible to believe that the remnants of what had once been really did exist somewhere, in some impossible place only accessible in dreams. Faint echoes were calling out for atonement, or an explanation of some kind, one none of us knew how to give. I did not share any of this with them. I would not have known how to put it across in a way that would make any sense, even to me. I had not shared the phantom city vision either, not even to Gloria. I did not want them getting even more disturbed than they already were. But this was all building up to something. I could feel it.

  For perhaps the first time ever, I felt remorse. I had never mourned, or remembered. In the camps I was always taken up with more immediate concerns. Food and basic supplies were always in short supply. You always had to keep a close eye on what little you did have as it could be stolen at any moment by someone even more desperate. I had two parents unable for years afterward to come to terms with what had happened. I had a much younger brother unable to comprehend any of it and utterly taken up with his own selfish concerns. Who had time to grieve? Instead I had buried my feelings. Then when the chance for school and a real education and escape had come along I jumped at it and had buried myself in that instead, made sure I succeeded, at the expense of all else.

  I think I understood now about the concept of ‘survivor’s guilt.’ I never really had before. I could see now how someone who has lost all his closest friends in war but somehow came out of it alive could never truly be at peace ever again. How the memories of the dead could haunt the living, forever tormenting them. In the end, it did not truly matter whether the visions had any external reality or whether it was my tortured sense of guilt finally coming to the surface. There needed to be some kind of recompense here.

  But how was I supposed to make it? What could be done?

  Everything finally came to a head the day Doctor Orlov accompanied us, for the first time. It would also be his last, ever. It was toward the end of the day, with the sun just about to set, and twilight coming in. This was the time of the day when something always happened, if anything was going to. We were gathered a short distance away from the tortured remains of a fun fair, far enough from Ground Zero to be just about recognizable. Half buried in the ash were half a dozen twisted and half melted remains of plastic horses, frozen forever in a moment of silent uncomprehending terror. Behind them a large Ferris wheel lay broken on its side. Sven said that he had seen somewhere inside it a burnt skeleton trapped deep inside the blackened girders. None of us had gone near it since.

  Once again I heard the cries of distant voices, lost echoes on the wind. I tried my best to ignore them. But then it became clear that the others could hear them too.

  “Okay, what the hell was that?” said Sarah. She sprang up quickly and started looking around. This was the first time she had even acknowledged anything strange.

  And then in an instant it was all around us. Every structure echoed to the sound of hundreds of wailing voices. They seemed to come from every direction at once. I tried to clamp my hands to my ears to shut out the sound but I couldn’t. Everyone froze where they were. Now it was a thousand voices, echoing off every building. They rose to a fevered crescendo, and would not stop. A dry wind blew through the spaces, twisting the black ash into ghostly spir
als, rising up all around us. From somewhere in the distance there came distorted sound of a fairground ride, going too fast. Shadows flitted behind the holes in the walls where windows had once been. An unearthly vibration went through the ground.

  Zoë’s eyes widened in terror. “What’s happening?” she shouted.

  This time they would not be ignored. Off on the horizon I saw a dark ruby glow, brooding and pulsating. Voices in the far distance were screaming. There was something here that had not known peace in a long time. And this time it was going to get an answer.

  “We have to get out of here!” shouted Sven. “We have to get out of here, now!”

  “It won’t do any good,” I said.

  “How do you know? Are you doing this? Are you?” The terror in his eyes was all too evident. His terror made him furious. And that was when I realized: all of this had happened because of someone else’s anger. Someone else’s fear.

  All of sudden, I knew what I had to do. There was only way to stop all this. Slowly, I pulled my gloves off, and then reached up and pulled off my mask. Then I got down on my knees and ran my fingers through the ash as I smelt the naked air of my childhood home for the first time in years. I