Why did we have to look for it? We could have been carefree for a few more days, and no matter how few it would have been, they would have been worth it. We could have spent a day in town, where we would have had our favourite ice cream for the last time, and with pleasantly empty minds, we could have enjoyed the first days of spring, a new awekening; we could have sat down between purple crocuses on thawing meadows. If only we had known that it was going to be our last chance.
"You feel it, don't you?"
These words ended the life I had known, because, yes, I felt it, and I could see it, too. The glasses on the shelves were moving.
"It feels like... A stampede," Michael whispered. "Hush… If you are quiet enough, you can hear it pounding."
He was right, but I refused to listen. I wasn´t ready to give up the idea that everything was fine. That I could have had a home, where I would have felt safe for once in my life. But the harder you try not to listen, the louder the things you want to close your ears to blare, until the last glass on your kitchen shelves will burst. Those in Michael's back got hairline cracks, when we heard James talking.
"Where is it coming from?"
Could we have guessed it? At this very moment, could we have assumed? Could we have seen the truth? Perhaps, but what´s true is never whole, because truth is not a solid rock that you trip over at an intersection of your path. It is a shattered glass, the tiny splinters of which are scattered along it. You first have to find its parts and cut yourself on them, before you can put it together.
Ever since I was born, it has taken me weeks, months, sometimes entire years to find a splinter of truth. Its fragments have mingled with the dust that the ignorant would stirr up, which would cause a suction, made of half-truths, in which everything that was true was slowly drifting away. The splinters of truth would have had to be filtered, first, before anyone could have made them whole again. Not that anyone really tried.
The day of the resurrections, I was not willing to do so. Even though I saw it, I wasn't ready to touch the splinter of truth that was in front of my eyes. I was scared that my hand would retract it and fester, because of to the thick layer of dust that were covering it up. Despite my hesitation to grab it, I saw how much the others needed me to reach for it, and gave a sigh, long and low.
"Well, if you want to know where it is coming from, why don't you follow the sound and see for yourself?"
I'm not really sure why I said it. Maybe I'm wrong to think that I wasn't ready for it. I must have been, and if it was only for them. I was their only chance to find the way. Among them, I was the only one with a hearing that was trained well enough to find the source of the sound. The hunting trips with my father had taught me. Knowing where the sound we heard would lead us, it might not be a talent that I should be particularly grateful for. However, being unaware of it, doesn't really change anything about the existstence of a truth. It is still true, even when you cannot see it, and when you find out about it after a while, you wonder how you could have not been aware of it for such a long time.
"Can you take us there?"
When these words left his lips, James didn't sound like he was asking. He was demanding it. I would have shaken my head if I hadn't seen in their eyes, twelve in number, how desperately they needed me. Me, an inconspicuous, up to then dispensable no one, who had, so far, never been needed by anyone. Little did I know then, what they would need me for 100 years thereafter, and if I hadn't given them what they had been in need of back then, I would now probably not have the responsibility to give them what they are demanding. An end, that they keep on asking me for, even though they are no longer with me.
With my decision to lead them on resurrection day, something came to an end, as well. The world as we had known it. Nothing would ever be the same, and deep down I could feel it just like the sound vibrations that burst the glasses, when my first foot touched the cold streets outside. I shook off the premonition and concentrated on leading the others to the end of the world, with nothing but sounds to guide me.
"You don't actually follow the sound," my father had taught me. "What guides you is its effect on the environment, its visible and tangible manifestation in everything around."
With this advice reverberating in my ears, I was following waves. Sound moves sinuously, hits objects and creatures, and changes its shape. With my searching eyes on the inconspicuous puddles that the previous rain had left behind, I determined the direction of the noise through the rippling motions on their surface. The leaves of the trees were trembling, even though it wasn't windy. Those of the birches behind the concrete buildings were moving stronger than those of the oaks on the opposite side of the road, another observation that could guide me.
From time to time, Sarah moaned softly, and the lows sounds would interferre with my attempts to lead the way. They would change something out there and distort my perception, whenever she would realease them from her chest.
"Hush," Clare hissed at her, but the resonance of her voice made it worse.
I was just about to say something, when between the trees, over the puddles and high up in the air, I made out mosquitoes. They felt the sound with their hairs and were drawn to it. It reminded them of the vibrating wings of their females during mating season. I followed them for a while, before like them, my own body was reacting to the sound.
My heartbeat, breath, and pulse accelerated. My muscles tensed, and my skin heated up. All of a sudden, it was scorching, my limbs were cramping, my pulse was racing, and my breath began to falter as my heart tried to escape my chest.
We were there. Before my eyes, I made out an iron gate, pointed and cold. It was framed by moss-covered stonewalls, from which a face on a cross stared me into the ground. We had arrived at the cemetery. Carefully I touched the gate, the rigid hinges squeaked, and we were inside. Together and by ourselves, we approached the end of things. Our shoes crunched over the wet gravel and through a constantly upswelling concert of vibrating noises.
Above our heads, the increasingly loud vibrations loosened leaves from the birches. In between them, the mosquitoes that had, like me followed the sound were swirling around, humming. There were so many of them that the sky above the graves went dark. Spellbound, we scouted our environment. Only slowly did we move, and we didn't dare to speak. For a while, we were staring at the crosses. We didn´t see any thombstones, because the buried ones hadn't yet been dead long enough. What wouldn't have occurred to us was that before any of them would get a thombstone, they wouldn't be dead any more.
"Does that... come from underground?"
This question was written on our faces. All of us were wondering about it, as we were staring at crosses that were moving back and forth, like young trees in a strong ocean breeze. Sandra must have been the bravest amongst us, the only one who managed to puts the question that all of us had in our heads, but refused to express, in words. Everyone else was too scared to get an answer if we asked out loud. The very answer that I eventually gave her.
"I think… It is coming from inside the coffins."
How far into the earth do they let down the dead, I wondered, and how hard would they press the soil on top of them down? I had no comprehension of death. I had barely any experience with it. Except for my parents, I didn't know anyone who had died, and I hadn't seen dead bodies at all, aside from my mother's, but that I didn't call. I wondered what death looked like, and what they looked like, people who had died. Was there a glance of death? A certain expression in the eyes and on the face that everyone displayed, when dying, and if there was, was it that of freedom?
Standing in front of noisy graves, I suddenly had to think of him again. Of the police man in his thirties whose expression had been burnt into my brain on a murderous monday morning, less than a month before resurrection day. Everything happens for a reason, so they say, as if the fact that something happens isn't enough of a reason for it to take place. I didn´t believe it until resurrection day. I didn't believe in magic, not in the supernatural, and certainly not in the fact that the thoughts in our heads maintain an invisible bond to everything around. But it turned out to be exactly this way.