You must share death amongst you in order to exhaust it and cause its dissolution, so that in you and through you death may die.
In keeping with this aphorism, we formed a society, Goldman, Mortensen, Sophie and I, and commenced to hold secret banquets at the graveyard. Mortensen could read the gashes and angles of any rune on a stone. It was he who had uncovered certain possibilities. Although I now suspect that he doubted Valentinus, for curiosity he went forward, which is to say downward. I no longer remember why Sophie and I committed ourselves. Being younger in those days, we owned more to lose, but our losses seemed proportionately less permanent. As for Goldman, whom we acknowledged as our cleverest executor, he managed by virtue of feeling needed. Before the moon had waned twice he achieved communication with the dead.
The first was a very tall yellow skeleton, who began shyly enough with three taps from behind the mausoleum wall; I hypothesized that its skull must be the percussive transmitter, at which Sophie put her finger to her lips. We must have been happy then. Goldman replied three times with the tip of his pickaxe, carefully or solemnly. Within the hour, he and the skeleton were conversing in Morse code. Mortensen, who possessed equal facility with that system, now took the pickaxe and excitedly tapped out: DEATH MAY DIE. After a long time the skeleton replied: DIE. Sophie gripped my hand. — YOU MUST SHARE DEATH, signaled Mortensen, and the skeleton tapped back: DIE. As soon as that fingernail moon had misted over, the tomb-door commenced to creak outward, and within the slowly widening column of blackness I saw my first animated death’s-head, which reminded me of another moon rising sideways, or perhaps of the peculiar yellow-white glare, which pretends not to be luminous but nonetheless imprisons our gaze, of a locomotive approaching in fog, before that single light has drawn close enough to subdivide into three. Anyhow, out it shambled, its long toenails clicking like a dog’s, and joined us at our abominable table. — But this is extraordinary! said Mortensen. May I remind you all to repress whatever horror you feel? — We know that, said Sophie, carving up the meat.
In the service of mutual understanding, Goldman had prepared a vocal apparatus out of silk, leather, catgut and rubber, the bellows being powered by a shielded air compressor placed within the patient’s ribcage. It was almost comical to watch him hook it up to the skeleton, which might have been wary, wooden or irresolute (lacking facial muscles, it conveyed no such niceties). Sophie stared; Goldman turned on the device; the skeleton wheezed: I am dead.
But death may die, insisted Mortensen, leaning forward.
Die, agreed the skeleton. Accordingly, it began to grapple at its ribcage, breaking out bone-slats, pitifully striving to pull itself into yellow kindling, as if dissolution could be something to yearn for. — You’re mistaken! cried Mortensen. — Fortunately, Goldman the practical knew what to whisper. — I wonder what he said? I also wonder which premortem occupation taught him his tricks: Was he once a motivational counselor, an unlicensed abortionist or a combat sergeant? Strange to say, he lacked an interest in people. The outcome was that Old Bones gave over trying to destroy itself, its skull swivelling heavily down against its sternum even while it spied on us through the tops of its eyesockets. (The mystery of consciousness is no greater for a death’s-head than for, say, Mortsensen.) Sitting down in its own flinders, it chewed a cutlet, and its jaws squeaked like unoiled hinges.
Second was the sad brittle lady with the spiderwebs in her eyes. She persuaded Sophie to tickle her inside her ribs. I suppose she climaxed. Her friends had friends, and before we knew it we who still lived were outnumbered.
We always began with a toast: To death. But you already know that what our society intended was its extirpation. To what extent the dead lay ready to ratify that project remained debatable, no matter how interestingly they enunciated through Goldman’s apparatus. They resembled children in a way, or perhaps we were children to them; but they were less alien than loathsomely familiar. With the exception of the warlock, I acquit them of making illicit advances or offering temptations of any sort. They never even intimated that through their example we could shake off the misery of being alive. All we could hope for was a temporary compromise, so I believed; while Mortensen for his part demanded that we set out with the utmost straightforwardness to understand and obey the rules of death no matter how long that took. My reading of Valentinus was that whatever we might learn would derive from the reaction-process of consumption, not from the dead themselves. I might have been wrong about this, for whenever a corpse stalks toward me in the darkness, unfurling its putrid fingers, grinning, snarling or doing whatever else its rotting substance accidentally impels it to, even now I can’t help but imagine (I wouldn’t say hope for) a significant experience. Mortensen and Goldman disagreed as to whether the dead were enchained in forgetfulness or merely existed in a state of being which we had not yet mapped out. In either case, once we four and our new friends had consumed enough death, what lay beneath it must begin to show, like the fossil of a great beast in the bed of a receding lake. I refrained from voicing my minuscule differences of opinion, even to Sophie, since I had nearly reached that age (oh, but never quite yet!) when whatever we do is worse than useless; besides, seven years before, when our leader first opened unto us his sweet treasury of aspirations, we had hoped and believed. As dark as the way might be, the end was undeniably glorious.
Certain know-it-alls insist: Death is nothingness. — Lucretius pointed out that if this be so, there is literally nothing to fear. (The pain and grief of dying shine no relevance on the state of being dead.) But people do fear cemeteries, and still more the dead themselves — for in their progression away from us, corpses wax not merely pitiable but (if I may employ an unscientific term) hateful. Might this reaction of ours, which among living humans approaches the universal, be explained simply as the assertion of the life instinct? Mortensen posited otherwise (and when he did, a knowing eye sometimes began shining out of a hole in a hunk of fossil driftwood). Thus the four of us founded our society on the principle that death is a positive state, which the living acknowledge, although they pretend not to. The seeming malignity of the dead may be reduced to a projection of our desire not to comprehend them. Mortensen’s antidote: Partake of death generously, with opened eyes.
Because the benefit for which we banqueted was so material, none of us broached the matter of whether we had accepted sorrow into our partnership. Speaking only for myself, I now wonder if some prior melancholy could have in some way weakened my constitution, or perhaps even my judgment, in the years before I haunted cemeteries. Concerning Sophie and Goldman I cannot say, but in his youth Mortensen seems to have imbibed the horror of some dying person’s ever more futile, wordless and mad beseechings. Perhaps he had attended the deathbed of a slowly asphyxiating parent or spouse (there was a pallid circle of naked flesh on his ring finger). Valentinus teaches that once one crosses that particular divide, his gaze comes to resemble a cat’s — although as I recollect that passage I find myself at sea as to whether the crosser was supposed to be the watcher or the performer of death. On the subject of Mortensen, I sometimes thought to read desperation in his eyes. Wasn’t it something of just that sort which he meant to stamp out?