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ifty stories tall, it stood glowering over streets like a warning monolith which no amenity of its facade could enlighten and no thoughtful upward glance endure. Yet it was a creature of its time, working mysteries from the unequivocal practicality of its builders—making bold that which could not speak, raising to the heavens that which lay once beneath the earth, and, in the midst of teeming life, bruiting to the four winds the mortality of mankind.
It was, to give it its rightful name, a mausoleum, although of massive proportions and although its builders gave it a far gentler and more euphemistic appellation. There could be no doubt that it was practical. Land was at a premium and verticality was cheap. The city’s population had no inherent need to mourn in the countryside, and precious little patience for the time and expense to reach it. And nothing, it was considered, could be more reasonable than the erection of a tall but well-appointed graveyard in a quarter where one could readily hail a taxi cab.
The rooms were logically arranged. On each floor there were four containing drawers for the urns or coffins, which were slid back into recesses of the walls and entablatured with the name, dates and epitaph of the deceased. These drawers were in turn arrayed in columns of five and rows of thirty, the lower- and upper-most portions of the walls being left fallow in order that visitors might strain neither their knees nor their eyes in visitation. Interspersed with these four rooms were two for funerals, each in turn adjoined by a banquet room. When the funeral was complete, the coffin was discreetly transferred to its final resting place by means of a service corridor running along the outer wall of the building and out of the sight of either visitor or mourner. Similarly, bodies were brought up in freight elevators whose shafts adjoined the same service corridors, the room of habitation being locked temporarily while the coffin was deposited.
No service was omitted by the establishment. Preparation of the body—coffins and urns—wreaths and bouquets—catering—and even music were all available according to the inclination of the bereaved. The musicians were of no mean order. A man, come to grieve the late wife of a difficult marriage, happened to notice in the midst of his tears that the violinist of the baroque ensemble kept his thumb under the hair, in the German style—a fact that so impressed him, and those he told afterward, that the mausoleum experienced a brief spike in patronage among aficionados.
Despite all this, the mausoleum was not an immediate success. There were certain Paleolithic intellectuals who felt vaguely that a cemetery obviously crammed between banks and delicatessens was not in good taste. There were a very few, of an intellectual strain so retrograde as to be Precambrian, who felt that the economy itself was in bad taste. But most of the early criticism was prompted purely by the novelty of the thing. There had never been any such thing before; it was difficult to think of it now.
If business was slow in the beginning, it did not cause the management to lower its rates. In due course, when the novelty of the idea wore off, it acquired the air of something chic—because it was peculiar, immense and expensive. Nor did the contradiction between its original justification from economy and its now exorbitant prices raise much discussion, since by then familiar personages were seen to grieve and be grieved there, and news of the place was dominated by the increase of security necessary to screen and bounce photographers.
By such steps as these, the mausoleum came uneasily to assume a place in the consciousness of the city’s denizens, in their ordinary conversation, and in their dreams.
The mausoleum was still a business. Its website and brochures advertised its worth with pictures of its sunlit foyer—of serious-looking but evidently well-satisfied customers riding up the escalator to the spacious offices of the second floor—of equally contented mourners devouring cheese and wine in a banquet room—of even the grave rooms of entablatured resting-places, soft light glowing indistinctly over mezzotint marble floors—all suggestive of equal parts sobriety and a nearly narcotic efficiency and comfort. It was not uncommon for people who saw these pictures to confound the mausoleum with a hotel and remark that it seemed like a nice place to stay.
Marble floors or no, someone had to mop them. And it happened that a young man by the name of Hardin—after an interview, drug-test, background screen, psychological exam, and a sound patting-down—was hired to do job. He was a youth of ordinary background but peculiarly innocent habits and personality. He had a great fondness for animals despite the steel-and-concrete-bound locale of his home. His room was adorned everywhere with pictures solemnly and impartially memorializing the rattlesnake, box turtle, bald eagle, Bengal tiger and groundhog. His manners were equally innocuous and unsophisticated, to the extent that he was frequently at a loss in light-hearted conversations. In the eyes of those who knew him, there seemed nothing, however outrageous, that he was not willing to hearken to with the most serious if uncomprehending absorption.
And it was for the most innocent reasons that he happened to be employed in the mausoleum. The sheer height and glossy exterior of the building had attracted him, and he had wandered inside. Barring the attendance of celebrities, the floors were open to visitors, and he passed several hours gazing at the brass plates bearing strangers’ names, as well as at the blank spaces awaiting future arrivals. Then, too, his attention was attracted to a closed doorway from which had emanated the melancholy strains of music played on a harpsichord. It was outside that closed door that a manager happened to find him. Seeing that Hardin was void of guile and presumably incapable of swiping paperclips from the supply closet, he gave him an application and urged him to fill it out on the spot—after which, with the interview, drug-test, etc., the young man was soon put to work.
His work was routine. He was assigned a floor which was his to maintain in all menial respects. These duties kept him busy through the night, and his breaks and lunches were filled by reading books on mammals, birds, fish and insects in endless profusion and variety.
During the long, lonely hours of the night, while the mourners were all at home in their beds and while the manager confined his sudden appearances to those he knew needed looking in on, the young man was at liberty as he worked to wander with his eyes and ears and thoughts over the whole of his solemn surroundings with an alternation of wonder and interest.
And the wonder—what was it but the height and length of the rows and columns of drawers with the many rooms that contained them—the closely cropped enclosure of so many that had maintained the dignity of space in life—and the crowded proximity of so many dates of death as though there had been a rush to obtain it? Then again, there were the vacancies remaining, the many blank rectangular panels on the wall devoid of name but waiting.
He was at his shift, and making his usual rounds, on that memorable night when the sky over more than half the earth was suffused with the unnatural luster of jade—with a phosphorescent exhalation of cold and unearthly light which, on the dark side of the earth, veiled even the moon, animated the clouds, and made all eerie and unreal until the coming of a hideously green dawn.
It was just before sunset when he saw it. He came out from one of those silent, empty rooms into the central hallway, the ends of which were penetrated and relieved by large windows subdivided into a multitude of panes. The object and effect of these windows at other times was to supplant the sterility of electric light with the warm glow of the sun. But now, as he looked and saw the diurnal orb sinking into the lofty geometric horizon of the city, and seeming to flame forth its rays all the more for the black silhouettes that obtruded, there poured through the glass a livid hue like nothing he had seen in any dawn or evening sky—like nothing even in the horizons of threatening storms when tornados were abroad and light shot from far beyond the lowering canopy of shadowy clouds. Even as he looked, all was silence—all was peace and silence through the long hall and in the rooms adjoining—and he strode slowly to the window in the mere curiosity of an unfamiliar sky.
He was not afraid. He knew well enough that some disaster might have occurred. He was aware, although he did not dwell on it, that strange weapons and environmental changes threatened at all times. It might be now, he thought, the end of the world. And undoubtedly there would be much to regret, so far as it passed from the sense of so many feeling creatures. But long contemplation of the natural world, and of the rapid passing of so many generations of lesser creatures, had taught him that there was little to fear in the death of those that would inevitably die or in the passing out of existence of those things that had sometime been passed into it from a void.
Even so, it was very strange. And he permitted himself the indolence of a minute’s watch at the glass, while the sky beyond blushed with an even deeper and more unnatural hue. Seeing that the change was slow and was accompanied by nothing more spectacular, he went at length about his work. After a quarter hour, he was visited by his supervisor, who looked over his progress and, finding that the young man progressed in his usual way, asked if he had not seen the sky. Hardin admitted that he had and, knowing that his supervisor disliked superfluous comments, said nothing else, while the supervisor, stymied by a lack of superfluities, continued his rounds to be sure that, disaster or none, the floors were buffed to a high gloss.
Not ten minutes afterward, Hardin was visited by a co-worker from another floor, who also inquired, but more feverishly, whether he had seen the color. Again, he answered that he had, and added (in a language suitable to their common age and station) that he thought it was very beautiful. Hardin’s companion had not himself thought through the aesthetics of the matter, but made many disparate speculations about the possible cause. And when those were exhausted, he returned to his work and Hardin was once more left alone.
All this occurred early in his shift. Meanwhile, as he worked, the windows darkened with the night, while only the faintly luminous clouds and the green moon remained to tell of the phenomenon. He went from room to room—sweeping, mopping, polishing the floors—and thought little more of the sky than of a thunderstorm.
It was ten o’clock when he first noticed a difference. It was a kind of tingling between the ears, behind the eyes. It was no physical sensation precisely but there could have been no other word to describe it. It came with a keen sense of anticipation like that he felt upon first awakening, with all the sudden novelty of consciousness and light. There was a peculiar sense of volition like the indescribable sense of a phantom limb. And there came at the same time, as though intimately connected with this second consciousness, a vivid procession of memories, all exact and fresh in detail.
But these memories were tainted, he thought—adulterated or colored with images less familiar. There was certainly no organization to them. They were of many different places, faces, sensations and emotions, weaker than any memory but present and irregularly interspersed, just so much that he was aware of them. They did not disturb him but he grasped at them feebly in thought as he continued to work, much as he would have peered at a strange bird through his binoculars at a park.
The tingling continued to trouble him with the hours. He went again to the windows of the central hallway, this time with a ladder to clean them. The clouds, all limned with faint light, moved restlessly, and veiled and uncovered the moon while the color seemed in its reflections to gaze at him from the walls.
Time moved slowly while he worked. The cleaning of a single pane dragged ponderously, with a dreamlike suspension, although he felt no impatience in the effort. A sound that might have been the burr of traffic welled up into audibility and murmured. By fits and starts, the colored light and quiet noise increased with the abstract tingling and pullulation of his brain. But he kept faithfully at his work as the minutes pushed on and the discolored stars twinkled on their ebon beds.
If he had not still been standing, holding the rag in his hand, in motion as before, he would have said that he had fallen asleep. All at once, there was a commotion, strangely subterranean as though his ears were filled with water. He turned around and looked at the empty hallway. There was no one there. But there must be someone, he thought, in one of the rooms. He thought that he heard voices.
He walked down the hall. He saw nothing. But the tingling increased, and it could not now be characterized as a tingling at all.
It was an omniprevalent humming and heavy vibration, mental and physical, warping his sense of time and confusing his senses so much that, upon setting foot into one of the chambers of brass-plated graves, he fell momentarily under the impression that the floor resounded—that the mezzotint marble, in its mass, composition and form of swirling patterns, carried a voicelike intonation. The subtle recessed lights of the ceiling seemed to sing accompaniment, untuned but strangely consonant, to the walls, ceiling, and all the moldings and appliances of the room, with the chorus of hidden structural members, vents and electricity that animated the building. He heard it all humming, groaning, uttering piercing notes. And he heard some things more particular and changeable, that seemed to originate from within the sealed enclosures of the drawers.
He went to them, followed their sounds as he might have followed the song or call of any beast or bird. He went—and being encouraged by an increase in the distinctness of the sound, put his ear to the brass plate of one of the drawers and listened.
They spoke, a river of darkness in his ear, and filled his mind with their calling. And there was no sense, no reason, but an everlasting and commingled regurgitation of all that had filled their minds in life—to which the boy Hardin nonetheless hearkened, knowing that these too were creatures like the rest, whose pictures might have illustrated his books, broken down by the branches of humanity, by phylum, family and species, until the least one was known in its habits and character. And for as long as they spoke, he heard and understood, saw the scenes pass before his inner eye, heard the words in his inner ear, and felt with all the vivid distinctness of a dream the worlds of known and unknown life that they disgorged. From grave to grave, he passed, in all the green gleam of maddening night, hearing by the toneless conscience of things recorded what helpless, horrible, stricken, bloody, mad things wanted utterance now that the right moon shone.
He passed irresistibly from his floor to the others. He passed his fellows at their work and passed their words unheeded. He stretched and stooped to the very last, while his superior would have restrained him but that he did no harm.
And still he listened, while the voices screamed with all the antipodes of thought and feeling, and not one good less horrible than the worst, since all were alike dead, commingled and mindless. Though his ear grew cold pressed so often to the icy brass, his tongue weak from torpidity of heart, and his eyes dim with the memory of subdivided and irreconcilable existences, still he plodded on from first to last, and strode all the hallways of the monolith, listening to the memories of death, the insensate re-echoed peal of life and the utter idiocy of time with the color of its eye now turned upon him, and his heart now turned to stone.
The young man Hardin left the Mausoleum and all its greatness, never to return. And strange tales were told of the night of strange discolored light. But none were so strange as that he let slip, more from weakness than desire, of the dead tower and moon, and the dead to whom they gave commingled voice. Wandering in the endless streets where life went on and towers rose the more, he went in twilight, ever lost, the sole repository of the world’s wake. |
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