Please see our Publisher’s Note following this month’s Editorial that has important information about a new threat to the survival of all SF/F/H magazines.
I am haunted by a funeral, a pageantry of mourners and tears that I can only barely remember.
I am not certain, but I suspect the funeral may be my own.
The mourners are masked in elaborate disguises. Feathered and ribboned and silk. If I know any of them, I don’t know that I know them. The flowers arranged beside the casket seem to carry some meaning, a meaning that has nothing to do with me. And yet… I feel myself drawn to that casket, feel that it belongs to me in some way.
My dream self lingers among the incense burners, awaiting enlightenment.
Instead, a jester tumbles through the funeral, gathering flowers from the mourners. He scatters them before the casket, all but three curious flowers, blue with black-tipped petals. Meaning, I think, and drift closer. A symbol of some kind. But what the symbol might be of, what it might imply, I don’t know.
The jester juggles those three, and the vision ends.
• • • •
The funeral hall is vast. Pews disappear into the distance, their peaks shrouded in clouds of incense.
We spend most of our time around the fountain along one wall. Water is always pouring from a slot high on the wall. We call it a faucet, though it has no handle to turn it off and on. Perhaps it’s a natural stream, diverted into the Funeral Home from Outside. We smell the water, hoping to sense the forests it has come through.
Are there forests out there, beyond the impenetrable walls? Perhaps forests only exist in stories and the faded frescoes on the sides of the funeral hall. Our memories are too uncertain to be trusted.
We capture some of the water that pours down for drinking. The water in the pool tends toward algae, so we avoid drinking that. We swim to disturb its growth, to mix the deep and shallow waters. As well, of course, we swim for sport and to bathe.
The phantasmal beings that hold their vague funerals here do not seem to use the font often. Water is for youth. In this space at the edge of death, youth is absent. Usually.
The baptismal pool isn’t the only place to be. A cave in the foot of one pew is one of our favorite places. We enter when the light comes through the round window. Incense has filled the cave, a thick and heady smell that enters our eyes, our mouths. It loosens our tongues. Our words echo through the thick air in strange reverberations we feel more than hear.
We carry a lantern inside and arrange ourselves around it in a circle. There’s room for a cluster of us to sit there and imagine the lives of the unseen people who mourn their dead, separated from us in some way we can’t comprehend. Space for us to argue about life and death and what lies outside the Funeral Home, if anything at all. To contemplate the existence of other caves in other pews, multiplying into the distance.
With our minds stretched to include the wonders and terrors of unknowable dimensions, we file back to the pond to bathe and clear our eyes of incense.
Three flowers float in the pool.
• • • •
The mourners make me dizzy. They spin and weave among each other as if in some elaborate dance whose steps never repeat, whose rhythm never settles into anything regular. The pattern seems designed to drive a person mad.
And yet, I don’t hate it. I lean in to watch, to feel the air stir as they pass. I try to join in the dance, but I can’t. Something in that space resists me. Something compels me to feel like I don’t belong, like I no longer belong. It pushes me sideways into some other space I cannot sense, at a right angle to a dream.
Was I one of those mourners once? I try to remember spinning. I try to remember costumes, feathered masks, eyes made up in exaggerated sorrow that gaze through the eye holes. I try to remember belonging. Did I ever? I think that I must have. Maybe in that other space I will find what I’ve forgotten here.
If I can’t participate, then I might as well move away from the mourners. I can’t leave the room. Whatever haunting has brought me here will not allow me to leave. But I make for the flowers and the casket. Does it hold my body? The body of a stranger who has summoned me here, somehow, for some purpose?
Maybe there are no answers. Maybe the madness of mourning is the only answer, the strange and unknowable way that life of some sort moves outside me.
I lean over the flowers and try to sense them, to sniff their absent perfume by the mark left in my memory.
I shy away before looking at the body lying in the casket.
• • • •
There are stories, among those of us who live here, of other rooms beyond the funeral hall. There must be, for we call the world the Funeral Home, as if it’s a proper name, but the spaces we can see all belong to the hall, referred to as a mundane locality, undeserving of any name.
The storytellers tell us of such places.
“Across six caskets and over seven coffins,” they begin, in the traditional opening of our folktales. “Across six caskets and over seven coffins, where the winds blow backward and the sun reflects the moon, a traveler discovered a doorway. A creature squatted in the doorway, asking riddles of those who wished to pass through. ‘What is the smell of absence?’ ‘How many are the flowers that are blue?’ ‘What are the steps to the dance of mourning?’
“Not knowing the answers to these riddles, the traveler hung back and finally fled the doorway.”
Or another time, “Across six caskets and over seven coffins, lie the rooms of daylight. There flowers are not lifeless jewels but living things that grow. There water falls from the ceiling, which cannot be seen. There the mourners have turned into birds, gray and yellow and brown, who sing to the newly born a song of welcome.”
We do not know if these stories are true. We know flowers, cut and beautifully arranged. We know water, baptismal and stagnant as it might be. We tell of the mourners and sometimes seem to hear them on the wind. But we do not see them.
The funerals that give our home its name seem to take place at a tangent to our reality, in a place bent at an impossible angle from our own. We see glimpses, notice changes to the flowers and pews that are impossible to describe. Glimmers of uncertainty that tease the corners of our vision.
“Across seven caskets waits the belfry, that is Death, ringing in the darkness unknown.”
• • • •
The mourners bring out drums. They set a slow rhythm, deep and full of sorrow. It isn’t loud, but they keep it steady as I move about the funeral.
Someone is speaking. I can’t remember if I was religious or who I would have had speaking at my funeral. I drift closer to the speaker. Their words are not words, not the way I remember words. The speaker’s mouth opens, and motes of light come out, winged light that resembles insects. The light circles and rises up in the funeral hall.
I watch their flight paths to understand the meaning, and I sense it. I know the details of the deceased one, know the loss already felt by the deceased’s loved ones. The lights trace those facts into the room, delineating their shapes in the open air above the mourners.
I know those words, and yet it’s a dream knowledge that I can’t access. Behind some veil lie those facts, so that knowing them, I can’t consciously think them through. I am no nearer the truth of who I am, if the dead one is me or some other who has brought me here.
The drumming drones on. It is a numbing sound, its changeless beat blurring into a constant pulse that’s impossible to ignore. The motes of light nudge me to turn sideways from this vision.
I leave the speaker, circle around the room to escape the mourners. But there is no escape, not in any natural direction. The walls themselves are membranes, stretched to fit the room, receiving and amplifying the ceaseless sounds of the mourners.
• • • •
We travel about the funeral hall sometimes. Away from the pool, away from the pews with their giddy caves.
The walls of glass cast a special charm on us. We can see nothing through their thick panes—perhaps nothing lies beyond them—but the light they scatter on us is exquisite. We bathe in the fractured rays, just as we do in the baptismal pool. We let the prisms color us with rainbows and delight in the ways light can vary. In the ways we all vary from each other. The ways that we each vary within.
Another time we might travel around the pews to the land of flowers. It is a far trek. We journey through the hauntings of absent mourners. Through glimmers of that other reality just out of sight. We hear the sound of their cries, drumbeats on the wind.
At last we come to the cut flowers, arranged in all their beauty. They are the rainbows of the glass windows, captured and made into flesh. There is beauty in the airy quality of light, but the floral beauty of carnality is something separate. Not better or worse, but different.
The flowers are light that has taken physical form, and even if they are lesser than the living flowers our storytellers describe, we know there is something here we can’t put in words, some truth that touches us.
We climb the stems of the flowers. Some have thorns the size of our heads. Some still leak nectar in drops that might soak us through. We sip the nectar, careful not to let it drown us.
The flower petals are delicateness made concrete. We touch them in awe and try not to knock them free. As small as we are—compared to that room, compared to the shadowy impressions of the mourners—even so our touch will sometimes dislodge a petal. We watch it float down and mourn that it has come free from its flower.
A counter voice inside us celebrates the pure grace of those petals drifting down. It is change. It is a sign of the end of those flowers, true. Yet it is beautiful, and even in falling, the petals leave their mark on us and on the floor below.
Maybe that’s what the funeral hall is for, for the beauty of endings, for the pattern those endings make on the world.
• • • •
It’s time for me to look into the casket. I haven’t wanted to admit it even to myself, but I’ve been avoiding it. The scent of all the flowers has grown since I last approached. It now forms a wall I have to push through, a thickness in the air that I think a normal, corporeal body wouldn’t notice. I’m panting by the time I reach the flowers.
The drumming hasn’t stopped. Its monotony sets the petals vibrating, so slightly I can barely see it. So slightly I question my eyes, question my mind. My sense of not belonging grows with the pulsing that I both hear and see. If only it would stop.
I reach out to part the flowers and realize I don’t need to. They part for me. Or I am not entirely, physically present. I manage to lean over the open casket without knocking any flowers over or feeling their briars catch on my skin.
I’m holding my breath. Not that I know if I can breathe, exactly, in this state. But I feel like I am, just as I felt like I was panting earlier. The answer to my haunting lies inside. All I have to do is open my eyes.
Or what passes for eyes, in dreams and death.
I can’t force myself to look. A sudden off-rhythm drumbeat, a staccato crash cutting across the numb repetition, makes my eyesight open in surprise.
It is not a body inside.
It’s shaped like a body—a rounded head, the relaxed shoulders, the hint of fancy clothes in shades of blue and black. But it is made of flowers.
And yet it’s me.
I see the shape of the face, mirror-flipped from what I expect. I see the lines, the floral memories of scars I wish had healed better.
I scream.
The noise of my voice overpowers the drumming. I hear only myself, see the mourners for what they are, a part of something else, something that is no longer mine. I see the flowers that mimic my shape and know that I no longer belong. That there is no going back.
The time has come to leave the drums and masks, the cacophony and falsities, behind. I swivel sideways and become…
• • • •
New ones join our ranks from time to time. We circle around them, crowd them, but are always careful not to be overwhelming. There is so much to wonder at, so much to mourn, so much uncertainty—questions that we have no answers to, either.
So we take the new one on a tour. Introduce them to the pool, the pews, the stories.
“Beyond six coffins there was a drum. Before seven caskets it was silent, at rest. Waiting. And this is the story of its waiting, the story of the life it led in silence, for silence is a part of a drum just as sound is.”
We share the breath of incense. We bathe in rainbows and water. We feel the gentle caress of fallen petals, black-tipped and blue, of flowers—one, two, three.
But what a new one needs most is a journey, a need to accomplish something. All together we set out for the distant peaks of plaster walls. Roped together, we climb. High in one wall is a gap, a space, an open passage with no door.
Within sits the bell.
We sit in a circle below that bell and listen to its silence. The tonal shape of a bell’s silence has a peculiar quality that settles over our thoughts, over our memories. A bathing in forgetfulness that is not erasure.
And we leave, fewer than we arrived.
But it’s not that the new one has stayed behind in the bell’s silence. Nor is it those who have been here longest who transition into some new nothing. A part of each of us has left, a portion tipped out to join the bell’s silent ringing. Perhaps none of us is a single being on our own. Perhaps the new one to join our ranks is part of each of us now, after we’ve bathed in light and water and silence. We do not count our numbers, have never counted how many we are.
We return, catching glimpses of mourners, the hint of their crying in some far-off place we can never touch. Flower petals drifting down silently, turning into seeds of something other, something else.