The Turn of The Moon

Oliver O’Cuinn did not know Hell would be so deceptively beautiful. In only so many words, Hell is a purgatory one can never escape, for to exist within it is to allow a dark impression of its memory to brand itself upon you like a hot iron on flesh. Any aerospace engineer from The Old World would let the world burn for a chance to see the night sky at its highest potential, a kaleidoscope of stars and light made clear without pollution, following rays and parabola and pattern designed by the greatest mathematicians of all time, all laid bare for the naked eye to see. It is the most dreadful sight he will ever know. From his desk, facing South, he stares past the starlight. In a deadlock, a staring contest with the dark side of the new moon, he is filled with an existential dread beyond anything he could have possibly known less than even five years ago. He is not in Hell; Hell is in him.

The stars cannot shine so bright in a good world, a living world. Only in the death of all things could they achieve such mocking beauty; only when the world is dark and cold, and the cities grow silent, and the twenty-first century never comes to be.

This is the End of All Things. This is undisputed. The same cannot be said about before the twenty-first century. The commonly, but not unanimously, accepted proposition is this exact discontinuity is what allowed the world to end in the first place. But what does that distinction mean, anyhow? Philosophical considerations such as these do not matter to Doctor Oliver O’Cuinn, PhD; aerospace engineering is based in proofs, theories, and fundamental truths.

His life should have never had space to dream of the meaning of space.

The End of Days means nothing in the face of proofs, theories, and fundamental truths. Electromagnetism proved false, death proved meaningless; the dead shamble on in simulacra of the living—glassy eyes and dusty bones—and the surviving fall in simulation of the dead. These days, Oliver cannot tell which he even is. These days, when he hears a knock on his door, he knows he shouldn’t answer it.

Tonight, he answers anyway.

As is normal in this purgatory, before him stands the image of an old deceased nun. Her eyes, sunken but animate, stare through him even as they make eye contact. They do not crinkle at the edges when she smiles. They glint in the nonexistent moonlight, yet again denying reality, yet again lying to his very knowledge of how things ought to be. He is locking eyes with a corpse and it smiles at him for the effort.

“Hello, Mr. O’Cuinn,” Sister Lynette Lloyd, nun of the fallen Holy Trinity Church, greets. She wears the typical getup of a nun, veil and tunic leaving enough horrific details of her body to the imagination, scapular reminding O’Cuinn that she is just as human as he. Her breath does not stink of death. She is scentless. Pure. Unholy. “I hope I meet you in good graces tonight.”

She does not. (She never does.) He nods, wordless.

“May I come in?” The question, briefly, gives him half the mind to count her teeth, but he knows this woman will not be taking anything more than his time: an item otherwise wasted in the hands of a damned man. He nods. She does. “I am surprised to see your home in good upkeep. Have you been doing better in recent times, perhaps?… Perhaps not.”

Her accent is thick. He knows why. He wants her out of his house. (He wants out of his house.)

Sister Lloyd senses his disposition. She sighs, a rattling sound, unnatural. (Nothing about this is natural.) She smiles again, but it seems to reach her eyes even less so, as if she were not making an expression at all, merely pushing the muscles of her face with an external force. The eye contact rots him from the inside out. He glances away. “You know, when I lived, the New World was far, far away.”

“And I don’t mean this New World, though history has a funny way of repeating terms on and on until all words lose meaning. No, The New World. The continents no one ever knew about. By the time the world got around to figuring those places out, I’d been too long solemnly sworn to The Church to travel there myself. Didn’t have much time left regardless. I’d heard all about the ‘heathens’ over there in need of salvation, but I’d also heard identical things about myself and my family and my community. Everyone in Dublin, too. We were all ‘heathens’ under the right pair of eyes. It was foolish of anyone to cast any judgment at all; only the Lord could judge a man’s soul like that. But oh, did they try…

“The ‘treatment’ we received at home was intense. I didn’t blame anyone for looking for a better place out there. Still don’t. Even when I felt bones through skin I didn’t blame them. But I did blame the ones taking the soup. I thought they were weak, and I was strong, even as I grew weaker and weaker, because I didn’t stoop to their level. I didn’t fall to temptation. As far as I was concerned, really, there was no difference between the apple and the soup. I held my head proud and marched right up to the gallows, because I’d be damned if I let them get the better of me. I fought kicking and screaming from the Great Hunger, the Great Famine, because I knew in no way did the Lord act to harm us. He wouldn’t. But Lord, was it agony.”

“There is no Lord,” O’Cuinn mutters. It doesn’t matter what he says, because her response is always the same:

Patience. Waiting for him to continue.

He looks at her again, and considers explaining the deep, sorrowful reasoning for his loss of faith in the Lord; the deeper existential terror that comes with a crisis of faith; and what it means to discuss such things with an angel of death. He shakes his head. “I don’t have faith in any God who’d send Earth to all hell.”

She shakes her head, mimicking him, as if she could ever comprehend. She’d already died. What was one more world-ending nightmare? “God never hurts His children. It is they who hurt each other.”

There is nothing to say.

“O’Cuinn,” she murmurs, approaching him. He steps back, away from her, further into the four walls that confine him. “It is not just others that hurt you. You hurt yourself, staring blankly into space as you do. You must forgive yourself of sin. You needn’t crucify yourself.”

There will never be anything to say.

“Please, take care,” she whispers and turns to the exit. He doesn’t follow her. Despite her old, old age… she’s not the one who needs help in the New World. “A nasty storm approaches on the horizon.” She pauses, as if hesitating to add: “our people never did recover from the Famine, you know. We needed each other to rebuild what little we had left.”

(The starlight highlights the edges of her silhouette. A dead, pale woman standing just outside his living room. She is haunting him.)

Lynette Lloyd, paragon of patience, closes the door behind her. The would-be, wannabe, never-could-be aerospace engineer stares through the door, bearing witness to her exit. He hopes, not for the first time, that he may never set eyes on her again. He hunkers down in his empty home, closes his eyes, and waits.

The first beginnings of the storm are as all storms are: an electric current in the air, a taste of tension on the tongue, the knowledge that something large, imposing, and inescapable approaches from all directions. It is a false calm, a silence of endless noise, deafening silence—he shuts his ears to be rid of it, though the pressure between them only grows worse with the desperation. Had he not been attuned to this special sort of tension, this new sort of sense, he would not have questioned the gentle sound of sprinkling rain on the roof. The town’s hypersensitivity flinches at the sound of rain, of the simple splattering of water and blood, the roaring noise uncaring to their blind terror. All at once, the facade breaks, and the gentle rains turn to a raging monsoon. Winds whip, skies shatter, foundations fall; the shaking of the earth compliments the breaking of the waves in a terrible tapestry of horror and death. What little remains of the world, then, O’Cuinn silently prays, will accept its end. He closes his eyes, feeling the world around him crumble, feeling himself slip away…

And snapping his eyes back open as his roof collapses mere inches from his face.

The breeze, once merely singing a siren song beyond his walls, now cuts through him like a gunshot. Terror, an old friend, greets him maliciously as he fails to keep it at arm’s length. He cries out, huddling against the far wall, then deciding better of it. He rushes to his home’s emergency basement. All homes in their province were equipped with them, for storms like these, though regretfully this one had become particularly shoddy. Its cement walls were cracked and deteriorated, not with age, but with the neglect of an apathy that did not care if it lived or died. Now, facing the end for the second time, O’Cuinn remembers that he did not want to die the first time, either, and frantically plugs the cracks that threaten to break their precarious dam. With his rations and preparation few and far between, he can only manage to fix the worst of the damage. He settles, an uneasy truth with life, and watches throughout the night for signs it may betray him. Dark water, stained with soil, pools at his feet, lapping at his constitution. He shuts his eyes and ignores it, ignores it, ignores it.

By the crack of dawn, the worst of the storm has passed. What was once a raging monsoon returns to calm rains, the winds reduced to whispers again. Oliver stands, shaking, still, alone in his home. Death knocks on his door gently, coercively, and he screams for It to leave him alone. The doorknob turns, jams—he’d locked it, but cannot remember when—and hears a breath on the other side of the door. It does not rattle. The door comes open. A woman smiles on the other side; it reaches her eyes. “Hey,” she greets.

“Hey.”

“How are you doing after that?” Elena Rochfort asks. (A wellness check. A hand in the darkness. A vow at the altar. A signed document. A promise to hold vows, not lies.)

“About as well as everyone else is,” he responds. It’s as much as a real answer as it is a reflection. Ms. Rochfort, her knowing him and him knowing her, nods contemplatively. There’s a moment of silence. There’s nothing in the air, no tricks to the breeze, no sprinkling on his roof. As he locks eyes with her, he realizes that the storm has passed, and collapses with relief. He laughs, maddeningly, and she joins in with him.

“Nothing we haven’t already weathered,” she hiccups between hysterical giggles. They share the levity of madness. He smiles at her, and she smiles back, and he wonders not for the first time if they might be seeing each other like they did before their world ended; before he destroyed their lives for a work that consumed him, then was consumed by something greater than them both. He shivers at the thought he may be consumed one day, too. It’s not comforting as it would’ve been just yesterday.

Rochfort is the first to compose herself. This is unnatural for the both of them. She gives him an odd look as he tries to get his breathing under control. Then, she looks above him, to his sunken roof, and clicks her tongue. “Wow. That’s unlucky.”

“Maybe,” he agrees, looking back to the debris that nearly crushed him. He wonders if he would’ve let it, if seeing it coming would’ve enabled him to dodge or die. The adrenaline busting through his arteries tells him his answer.  He looks back to her, then over her shoulder, to the makeshift houses their community’s scavenged. Compared to a few years before? They’re thriving, still. “Maybe,” he repeats, tone wistful.

“You’ve got quite the survival instinct,” she murmurs. He turns to stare at her, hands shaking but him willing them still. In a few minutes, he’ll look like nothing’s happened. In a few minutes, no one would ever know the primal terror that struck him last night. No one but Elena Rochfort. She knows, here, he is vulnerable. But his vulnerability does not come from his fear, but… “Will you be volunteering for the reconstruction effort?”

He stiffens, immediately, all traces of humanity vanishing from him in an instant. He scowls, then, balling his shaking hands into fists. “I’m not an engineer anymore.” He glances away from her and her unyielding gaze. “I can’t help the people out there. What am I supposed to do?”

“Anything!” Ms. O’Cuinn Rochfort screams, and he flinches only from the noise. (He’s expected the outburst for a while now.) “God Almighty, Oliver, can you just do something? Look at yourself! What have you done in the past three years? You keep moping on and on, ‘ooh,’” and here she takes on a mocking tone, lowering her voice and rolling her eyes, “‘what’s the point of doing anything? The world’s ended, there’s nothing I can do, ooh.’ That’s what you sound like, you know! You know! I’ve told you again and again, you can’t just lie down and die. And the most infuriating thing is that you don’t! You refuse to die, Oli, but you refuse to live at the same time. What’s the point?!”

There’s nothing to say. (The familiarity of this stirs something in his chest.) She screams at him some more, begging for him to revive from this Hell, and he orders her out of his house again—calls her overdramatic, he tells her to pack her bags and she tells him she’ll leave her ring on the table, maybe he can pawn it off to fund his research since he loves it so much—but this time she leaves peacefully; nowadays, they’re both too old for arguments like this. She tells him to have a good day. He wishes the same for her. After she leaves, he stays. He stays for a while, turning over thoughts in curious, dexterous hands. Weeks later, he emerges from his hole. Down the dirt-trodden path, up the hills, past the shantytowns… to the Holy Trinity Church. It’s old, burdened, and damaged. The reconstruction project had half a mind to help repair its walls, but Sister Lloyd told them to leave it. “The house of God,” she’d said back then, “reflects our scars back to us.” That same undead, re-living woman stands just outside its doors. Waiting for him.

He shakes his head at her, starting with a “I’m not here to repent or accept the good Lord back into my life,” and she nods at him. Understanding. “But I need to ask you something.”

She tilts her head in consideration. An unspoken prompt for him to continue, to speak for as long as he’s able, to confess to the sin and destitution festering in his soul. He won’t be doing that, not yet.

“What do you even do, after death?”

She lets out a rattling huff at that. Probably a laugh? He guesses. Out of surprise. “Not even a ‘hello?’ … Ah, well. Well. Well, you know the obvious. I’m a Daughter of the Lord,” she says, pointing to her headwear. “Have been for a long time. It’s not easy in the New World. Much of the Church and its word is lost to us. But tradition keeps us stable in uneasy times like these, brother O’Cuinn.”

“Don’t include me in that,” he reprimands.

“Tradition keeps me stable in times like these,” she corrects, then pauses. “Always has. Even before I passed away. You know as well as I do that a girl like me didn’t have much in the sixteenth century, especially not with what the English wanted to pull. I wanted a lot; I had an ambitious spirit. It wasn’t right back then, for a woman to think the kinds of things I was thinking; going out into the world? Exploring those uncharted lands? Mapping out their areas, studying their landscapes? Oh, forget it. I met many a men who followed my dreams, a few even wrote to me, you know. But oh, no, I had no interest in being tied down like that. I married myself to the Lord to avoid that; it just wasn’t for me, still isn’t. My vow is a kindness to me. The Church going on about this ‘purity’ nonsense?… I just wanted some agency in things.”

She pauses, here. She takes a deep breath, though the internal organs responsible for the function had long gone defunct. “You know how the Famine was in text. It was worse in person, in life. Starvation… I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”

O’Cuinn takes a moment to digest this. “So… your topography work now, is…?”

“You go on and on about the ‘end’ of the world. Well, my world just started again. I wake up in these lands, unfamiliar in every way, and have to catch up with the centuries I’ve been away. I mourn a life different to yours. Everything is different for me, even this body.” She smooths a hand over her chest, feeling for something. “When I first woke up, I was terrified of this. This heartbeat… It was dreadful.” A nodding head. “We revenants don’t have internal organs, not ones that function… all except our hearts. It’s the only part of us that well and truly lives exactly the same as it did before our worlds ended.”

She thinks for a moment, then takes O’Cuinn’s hand. Her skin is dry, crackling like dust. “I’ll never be alive again. But, Lord… I’m not dead.” She brings his hand to her chest, so he can feel her heartbeat, too. The pulse is overwhelmingly wrong. There is no sufficient kinetic force, no blood being pushed through arteries; the sound of it—because it cannot be adequately described by touch—is more of a dull hum than a beat. Lynette Lloyd is not breathing, he realizes, her chest not moving with the need of it. Her very existence flies in the face of proofs, theories, and fundamental truths. It’s not right… but, he thinks, looking into her sunken, twinkling eyes… not quite wrong, either.

Oliver O’Cuinn looks to the sky, at the dazzling lights before him, at the waxing gibbous moon—nearly full, nearly whole, nearly one new revolution—and says, “it’s beautiful.”