Poe's children: the new horror : an anthology - By Peter Straub Page 0,153

funeral. No time to change clothes. Informed by many summers’ trampings up to the mortuary grounds, my feet intimately knew the path. As I made my way, I noticed the edges of my vision were blurred, causing me to believe I’d begun to weep again, just as I had back in the city when I first learned the news of my sister’s death. But when I touched my eyes to brush away the tears, I found them dry. Though this was not the first intimation that something might be wrong with me, that I somehow seemed to have lost a crucial equilibrium without which consciousness makes little or no sense, it was the first of my hallucinations I could not ignore.

I climbed the hill with a quicker step, yet it was as if I approached my destination ever more unhurriedly. What was before me oddly receded. It felt like I was walking backward. All the while, my tearless weeping—or whatever caused my sight to smear—continued unabated, worsened actually, the neighborhood elms and oaks melting into watery pools of ocher, hazel, and every sort of red. I believe I blinked hard, several times, hoping to will away this tunneling vision. The great Victorian houses on either side of the block, dressed in their cheery gingerbread, were like shimmery globules of undifferentiated mass rising up toward the now gray ceiling of sky overhead. By sheer volition I managed to reach the top of the hill, where I left the sidewalk and made my way across the lawn toward the mortuary.

In the mid-eighties, I was invited to participate in a dig on the southern coast of Cyprus. The Greco-Roman port city of Kourian, which had been partially excavated in the thirties, but had since been untouched by grave robbers and classical archaeologists alike, was to be our site. Early on the morning of July 21st, in 365 AD, a massive earthquake leveled every structure in this seaside town even as it snuffed out the lives of its inhabitants in a matter of minutes. What few people may have survived the falling rubble were drowned in the monster tidal waves that followed. While we dug from room to room through the hive of attached stone houses, the discoveries made by the team were nothing shy of miraculous. The skeleton of a little girl, whom we named Camelia, was found next to the remains of a mule—her workmate, we presumed—in a stable adjacent to her bedroom. Coins littered the sandy floor, as well as glass from the jar that once held them. Here was a wrought copper volute lamp; here were amphorae. As we unearthed the physical record of this disaster, a tender intimacy developed between the members of our team and the victims of the quake. On our final day we made a discovery that was, for me at least, the most moving of any I’d ever witnessed. A baby cradled in its mother’s arms, the woman in turn being embraced by a man who was clearly trying to shelter them both with his body. Such love and natural courage were present in these spooning bones. I could hardly wait to get Julie on a transatlantic line to tell her what we had found.

For reasons that will now never be wholly clear to me, I did decide, as I approached the mortuary with its imposing, if very fake, Doric columns, to attend my sister’s funeral from the vantage of our old secret hiding place. Maybe I felt, deep down, I simply couldn’t face my father. Perhaps I feared sitting next to my mother whose tears, no doubt, would be as real as they were copious. I don’t know; it hardly matters. My vision, in any case, had only further disintegrated during the moments of my memory of the dig at Cyprus, and I had to wonder if I could manage to make myself presentable in front of others inside the funeral home. Pushing aside the hawthorn leaves, my hands splaying the shrubbery just as they might if I were wading into an ocean, I peeked through the window and saw, with what sight was left to me, the mourners within. A smaller group than I might have expected, since Julie had always been the more gregarious of the two of us. It was as if I could hear her voice whispering in my ear, just then, when I remembered my sister’s response to that call I made telling her about the family in Kourian.

Over