Destined
written by: J Rulton-Fox
There now remains only one means of access into what remains of the town. Along a narrowing dirt track boundaried by thick, dense walls of long-thorned bracken that stands four feet tall, fighting for space with great banks of ferns, the path twists in an almost unnatural way. Entwined amongst it all, perhaps running throughout, hidden by the vegetation, is a low fence, a series of sharpened wooden spikes held together by rusting wire. Eventually, after a long, snaking manoeuvre in which the path contracts and infolds through the overgrowth, there suddenly comes a break as ancient trees with large, scarred trunks supersede the assaultive scrubs, their branches arching overhead, obscuring the day and thinning the temperature.
There are barely any sounds along this tapering approach, save the furtive whisper of the leaves. Gone is the chattering of the birds and the bustle of insects, and with them the path also withdraws, the trees crowding so closely that it becomes an ordeal in itself to find egress beyond them. But then, without warning, the woodland abruptly stops and reveals, yawning beneath, a wide and deep valley, surrounded at all sides by forest and mountains, an enormous lake at its centre with the carcasses of buildings gathered around its shore. The whole cathedralic scene, even in high summer, appears stained by shadow, the air caught within it stale and dirty. It has become a ruin of its former self, a place of darkness and regret, nothing more than an echo of what things once were.
Carefully negotiating the sloping hillside, through the thick grass and the grasping, treacherous roots that appear as fingers without limbs, finally, the land levels, and the density of the air draws close. Still at some distance from the lake, soon there comes an odd redolence to the atmosphere, a scent both sweet and sickly that congeals in throats and brings an abrupt dull pain to the skull. Casting a glance back up the hill, the gap between the trees is now concealed, as though the wood has mustered itself once more, ensnaring its catch.
Walking the grounds of the valley, its areas of grass and areas of soil scattered, disordered at all sides, the sad groupings of deceased structures hardly seem any closer until, strangely and suddenly, they are just feet away. It is impossible to tell what misfortune brought them to their end, what malady infected them. Some parts bear the black scars of fire, some are splintered as though lacerated by cleavers. Some seem to have simply ceased to live, slowly rotting, their hearts broken. A brittle husk, once the public library which the people of the town frequented in their search for enlightenment, where the tiled floors had been veneered and the wooden shelves polished, filled with books and stories and escapism and imagination, now sagged in the blank depression of the deprivation of knowledge.
Passing this first clutch of demoralised buildings, along the cracked asphalt that once bore cars and trucks and buses, the cemented pavements where children ran while mothers beseeched them not to, and shoppers picked and chose from gleaming windows of goods imported from places that were not cast in the shadow of the past, and as the southern edge of the lake comes into view so, at the same moment, does a sound begin filling the silence. Quiet and far-off, it is the sound of decay, a serenade to mortality. At first, it is difficult to discern exactly what instrument can be making so mournful a sound but, following the shore of the lake, further shells of lost life contiguous to the water, storefronts and hotels, peeling paint and broken glass, soon it becomes more clear that it is something like a cello or viola, its deep melancholic tones slow and viscous.
Following the source, leaving behind the lake and the fragmented casings of a history in which people had lived and died, had dreamed and hoped and loved and lied, the land begins to rise again, just slightly, as the approach to the mountains at the east becomes more direct, less obfuscated by dispatched humanity and its forgotten vestiges. A thin, unrestrained breeze sweeps through the countryside now, and with it, within its chill, it brings again the aroma of decline. What sacrifice has been made, what price has been commanded, to deprive a town once so alive, once so filled with the normalcy of development, and what can be left where there had once been so much? Can it be the land itself, in the deepest mourning, discharging its desolation through the melody of loss?
There is a fence, cast iron, its blackness rusting, its furrowed railings swaddled in the hopeless skeletons of plants, long ago seeking their flight from the earth but failing and dying and encrusted, now, onto the metalwork. It is a fence of about four feet in height, in some places set at frivolously slanting angles but remaining complete, perpetual in its embrace of the dilapidated stones, pressed and stricken by interval and weather, and the emaciated grasses within. The town and the lake are now farther away than the period of their approach may have suggested, and they now seem shrunken, withdrawn into the spaces between what had been then and what was to come.
The redundant gate, gripped, pushed, creaks in the sorrow of its disengagement, but the ache pales beneath the music of lamentation, its origin now obvious, its home here, amongst the cradles of the benumbed. There are stones in the ground, some bearing nothing but numbers, and there are stones mostly upright, mostly erect, their names and dates smoothed into secrecy, their mysteries overcome by intransience and ivy. Towards the back of the cemetery, close to the trees that edge against the base of the mountain, stands a single, ascetic mausoleum of granite, and it is from deep within that the melodies cascade. It is only then, settled amid the dead, that the aenigmas of the refrain are revealed, its language heard at last.
There is no need to mourn, to cry
No call to wait or say goodbye
For I am not here, I am the sky
The wind and rain, the smile and sigh
The morning sun, the evening shade
The rainbow that crowns the glade
We all have gone, have left behind
That which holds you in its bind
So, join us there, unchained and free
There is no need to mourn for me.
As the words flow with such gentle melancholia, as the strings resonate with such gravity, there comes an irrevocable conduit, a passage suddenly exposed beyond which absolution may reside. And there comes a cat, a beautiful cat of pitch with enormous yellow eyes, unblinking, persuasive, and as she approaches, her tail stiff and honourable, she arches her back in kinship and speaks softly, and asks to be shadowed, to be followed, and she turns and moves with exquisite grace towards the tomb. The heavy door, bronze, engraved, edges open, and the cat, the majestic, convincing cat, squeezes inside where it is dark and cool and welcoming.
She waits patiently inside and then, met where the casket reposes upon its pedestal, long vacant and forgotten, the marble cold and grey, she speaks again, asking once more to be followed, and then, unseen until now, she finds the aperture in the wall. With one last glance over her shoulder, yellow eyes flashing through the gloom, she slips between and begins to descend the narrow, twisting staircase. It declines to a distance that cannot be perceived, darker and darker, cooler and cooler, the stone steps echoing against the walls that seem to encroach upon them, crowding in, attenuating the space until, at last, there is a final step and then solid ground.
The cat, mesmerising, her tail high, skips through the darkness and disappears into its obscurity, the blankness that reaches all hidden corners of the expanse. It is an enormous underground void, the air still and thick, hanging with the faint odour of the hillside that now seems so far away, so long ago. It is, somehow, despite the meandering, spiralling journey, located directly beneath the graves above, and, slowly, insidiously, there comes the sound again.
So, join us there, unchained and free
There is no need to mourn for me.
It is then, as the strings sustain their sullen lament, that there is movement towards the farthest part of the area, and, slowly revealed as they lurch closer, can be seen the ragged, broken souls of those drawn from both the town and from other places, who were now forever trapped, resigned to a shared eternity of anguish. There would be no passing for them, no transference from darkness to light. Here were the ones who had lied and stolen and slain, who had contravened and denigrated and lived for no other than themselves, condemned to their endless wandering beneath a world they had not deserved. And, as the melody grows stronger, it becomes clear that its sorrow is for them, those who shall never leave, those who have been doomed evermore to this shivering limbo. It is a song of malevolent mockery, of the dawn they shall never see, the warmth of the morning sun they shall never feel, the rainbow crowning the glade that shall never hold them in its wonder.
Overhead, the beautiful black cat, having withdrawn from the crypt, strolls grandly amongst the cemetery stones, finds a spot to rest close to the fence, and raises her head to the sun, defeating once more the shadows of the past. Now she will wait to greet her next companion, as she has waited many times before, and whom she will guide to their judgement below. Some, she knows, shall be freed, shall be unbound, hearing the music as not a sombre adjudication but as a sweet and exhilarating descant, lifting them up, forever up, so that they may claim their everlasting prize.
As her ears twitch against the breeze, the only means of access into what remains of the town of Destiny becomes clear once more. Another traveller navigates the contracting dirt track between the walls of bracken, compelled towards the end, the final contemplation of existence.
It will be some time yet, she knows, and slowly, drowsily, she blinks her eyes.
