marker on the opposite corner of the street. East. She followed the tug in her aching feet to investigate.
A plaque in the footpath told her that these markets and adjoining car park had been built on top of an old 19th century cemetery, and that only 914 of the interred had been exhumed and reinterred elsewhere by 1922. Many, many more dead must have been buried here in the eighty years of the cemetery’s use.
The tingle-pull in her feet was strong here, though not malevolent. Nevertheless, Yuka could tell that the dead underneath the car park were restless.
Yuka’s sigh was in part long-suffering resignation, in part annoyance, and another part determination. She crossed the mostly empty street to the even emptier car park and began to walk it, the intensifying tingle in her feet like thin ropes moving along and over her arches, heels, the balls of her feet.
These dead are long decayed, Yuka reminded herself. They are not going to burst out of the earth in a zombie parade. There will not be enough tissue to hold the bones together. There are no minds under the tar, only bones remembering they used to be alive. They have probably been rolling over in their sleep for a hundred years and no-one’s ever noticed before.
Yuka was reluctant to put the scavenged meal on the ground – the restless dead had been known to rot food through proximity before – so she tied the plastic bags together and draped them around her neck. Watermelon to the left; vegetables to the right. A balanced diet. Ha. The strong odour of overripe plant life rose around her face.
Hers, Yuka reflected, was not a dignified life.
She crouched and put one hand on the asphalt, letting the ropey tingle move over her fingertips and palm. There was no malice in the sensation. The dead weren’t angry, though she sensed a frisson of longing. That might be the component parts of the dead remembering what it was to be whole and alive.
Yuka crouched and patted the ground. Patpat. Patpat. Patpat. A little hushing rhythm. The restless tingle hesitated then resumed.
Yuka pulled the drum sticks from her belt. The asphalt was not going to do the sticks one bit of good. Well, that’s why she had lots of drum sticks, she reminded herself, and why she went to the effort of singing every new set strong: for emergencies like this. Besides, although she was on her own, Yuka didn’t think the whole band was needed. Her drum sticks and her voice should be enough. Bartos, of revered memory, had achieved more in one cruel hour on the River Somme with merely a rusty horseshoe, a tent peg and his own baritone.
Balanced on the balls of her feet, Yuka began to drum a tattoo on the ground. Taptap, taptap. Taptap, taptap. The rhythm of a heartbeat. It wasn’t an ancient piece, but it had been over fifty years in the band’s repertoire – the song was 20 years older than Yuka – so it had a proven record. And these bones under her feet were old and not really a threat. All she had to do was send them back to sleep.
Asleep
The dust
And all
Your bones
Lay down
She knew the words in Japanese as well, but sometimes the magic was stronger when sung in the composer’s original words.
There’s no
Place here
For you
To go
Lay down
The heartbeat rhythm had the attention of the dust and bones. The taptap, taptap brought all that restlessness into focus. Yuka could feel it, almost like the dust had eyes, and all of them only for her.
Almost imperceptibly at first, Yuka slowed the heartbeat. Taptap, taptap. Tap-tap. Tap-tap.
You’re old
The world
Won’t know
You now
Lay down
Lay down
Lay down
The things under her feet grew sluggish. She could feel them remembering not only the heartbeat, but how the heartbeat fades. Yuka could feel the dust and bones calming, settling. Tap-tap. Tap-tap. Tap tap. Tap tap.
Be dust
Be bones
They were going back to sleep, forgetting they had ever once been alive.
Tap. Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
Be gone
Be gone
Lay.
Down.
Yuka held the silence after the last note, breathing as silent as a tree, and listened with her ears and heart and feet and hands.
There. Quiet in the graveyard. Much better.
The spike when it came was so quick that Yuka didn’t feel it until it hit – a sharp jab, like an electric shock, jolting out from the earth. This burst of rage wasn’t something from the restless dead. It came from something deeper; something she hadn’t sensed as she sang. It burned up from the ground, across her feet, into the tips of her drum sticks on the asphalt.
But Yuka was an old hand at this, and though surprised, she was not unprepared. Her sticks had been sung to might and potency. Her voice was in the wood, but so was Steve’s, so was Sal’s, so were Alex and Kurt’s, binding that wood and making it powerful, even if not impervious.
As the burn of that unanticipated wrath arched between the ground and her skin, Yuka felt it, raised her sticks and punched them down, tips first, not beating but stabbing into the shell of tar and, through it to the soil below. The jolt of power pierced the sticks, but with the magic in her body and in her tools, she met it, blocked it, threw it back.
A force like two concussion waves meeting and rebounding threw Yuka onto her back. She lay there, gasping for air, feeling the ground with her whole body. She pressed her skull, shoulders, spine, thighs, calves, heels, to the asphalt. With her palms flat to the asphalt, the bags of groceries over her chest and sagging against her throat, she listened with every cell. She looked like a bag lady committing some sort of extreme yoga.
The whole, quiet ground. Whatever had attacked her was gone.
Yuka got to her knees, her joints creaking. The bags of dinner-in-waiting draped over her shoulders were slightly less intact than before. She half crawled to where her sticks were buried in the tarmac and, with effort, she pulled them free. The tips and necks were shredded, the shafts split. Damn. She’d lost her strongest set of sticks in Budapest, and now these were ruined. They’d just have to spare the cash for new ones.
Yuka adjusted the bags across her aching neck with her numb fingers and proceeded with the shopping. She decided to buy the chicken anyway. The restless dead happened all the time. Actual meat protein for dinner was much less common.
CHAPTER
