The Last Murder at the end of the World

SIX

It’s dusk and the curfew bell is ringing across the village, meaning the villagers have fifteen minutes to get to bed. Most of them are already in the barracks, cleaning their teeth and lighting lemongrass to keep the mosquitoes away. Candles burn cheerily in their windows, spilling out into the gloom of evening.

Each dorm room can house up to eight people, and they sleep in the same iron beds as the soldiers who were once stationed here, their mattresses filled with straw and their pillows with feathers. They don’t need sheets. Even in winter, it’s much too hot.

Only those villagers on clean-up duty are still in the exercise yard. Shilpa is dousing the candles on the tables, while Rebecca, Abbas, Johannes and Yovel finish putting away the last of the washed dinner plates on the shelves of the outdoor kitchen.

Magdalene and several other parents are calling out for the children, who are hiding under the table. They’ve been chasing them from shadow to shadow for the last twenty minutes.

The escapees are given away by their giggling.

As Emory enters the gate, the squirming children are being carried to bed by whichever adult is fast enough to grab hold of them. Every child has a parent, but that’s an emotional title, not a practical one. They’re raised by the village. It’s the only way of making the job manageable.

‘I’m never sure which one of you is the most ridiculous,’ says a voice in the darkness.

Emory looks across to find Matis sitting on a bench in the gloom, dunking a piece of focaccia into a bowl of salted olive oil. There’s a pretty green gem hanging around his neck on a length of string.

Unless they die suddenly, every villager bequeaths their memories to me before death. In those final few breaths, I catalogue every experience they’ve ever had – even ones they don’t remember – and store them indefinitely in one of these gems, allowing others to relive them, whenever they wish. Unfortunately, the villagers only wear the memory gems during their funeral, giving them a somewhat grim aspect.

Niema’s holding Matis’s hand companionably. Her blue eyes are red with recent tears.

‘As usual, you’ve started in the middle of a thought,’ replies Emory, still irritable after arguing with her father.

‘Be nice to me, I’m dying,’ he says, popping a chunk of bread into his mouth.

Emory searches his face for some hint of the fear he must be feeling, but he’s munching away, cheerful as ever. It’s not fair, she thinks selfishly. He’s healthy, and strong. If he was an elder he’d wake up tomorrow, same as normal.

She wants more time.

She wants her grandfather planted solidly at the centre of her life where he’s always been; where he should always be. She wants to be able to eat breakfast with him, and watch him clumsily pick the seeds out of a kiwi fruit with those thick fingers. She wants to hear his laugh from across the exercise yard. She wants to know why a good man such as this, with so much energy and talent, has to die to appease a rule that was created long before he was born.

‘I’ll leave you two to talk,’ says Niema, getting to her feet and laying an affectionate hand on Matis’s shoulder.

She considers him, then leans down, whispering something into his ear, before giving him a kiss on the cheek and leaving.

‘What did she say?’ asks Emory.

‘Five five,’ he replies, chewing his focaccia.

‘What does that mean?’

‘No idea,’ he says, shrugging. ‘She’s been saying it to me for years, whenever I was upset, or a bit down. I asked her once what it meant and she told me it was a map to the future, but she never got round to explaining it.’

‘Don’t you want to know?’ asks Emory, exasperated.

‘Of course I do, but if she wanted to tell me, she would have done it already.’

Wiping the olive oil and breadcrumbs from his hands, he stands up heavily and links his arm through Emory’s.

‘How was the fight with your father?’ he asks, changing subject. ‘Did it distract you from being sad? I’m assuming that’s why you went down there.’

Emory casts a glance back towards the pool of lantern light in the bay, then smiles slightly, knowing there’s no point denying it.

‘I do a feel a bit better, yeah,’ she admits.

‘Your dad probably does, as well. You’re just like him. You run to the things that frighten you and away from the things you love.’ He sounds baffled. ‘Come on, I’ve finished my sculpture. I want you to see it.’

They walk towards the spot in the exercise yard where Matis has been working all week. The statue of Emory is standing on its tiptoes, having just plucked a stone apple from the boughs of the real apple tree above.

‘Do you like it?’ asks Matis, when Emory lays her chin on his shoulder.

‘No,’ she admits.

‘Why not?’

He’s curious, but not insulted. Art isn’t sacred in the village. It’s a bawdy, boisterous communal activity. Poems are interrogated even as they’re recited and bands will swap musicians in the midst of a song if they’re losing the beat. If an actor’s struggling in a play, it’s common for the crowd to call out lines, or improvise better ones. Occasionally, they’ll take over the part completely. Emory’s seen entire first acts rewritten by committee halfway through the performance.

‘Because it doesn’t see anything and it doesn’t ask questions, and it’s perfectly happy to be here,’ she says. ‘The only person in the village it doesn’t resemble is me.’

Matis snorts, slapping his leg. ‘Isn’t a single other person who would have given me that answer,’ he says, delighted.

Emory stares up at the candlelit windows of the barracks, watching the silhouettes moving inside, brushing their hair and preparing for bed.

‘I love the village, I really do,’ she says quietly. ‘I just don’t … there are things that don’t make any sense to me, and everybody just acts like they do, or that they don’t matter.’

Her thoughts drift back to her childhood, recalling the first time she discovered the elders could stay awake past curfew. Even as a child she knew it was unfair, but nobody else seemed to care.

I explained that villagers need more rest than the elders, but that answer didn’t sate her, especially after she woke up with a splinter in her heel that hadn’t been there when she went to sleep. A few weeks later, she found a fresh scratch on her thigh, then bruises on her arm. She never knew how they got there.

I tried to convince her that she was mistaken, but Emory was much too observant to believe such an obvious lie. She asked her father what happened to them after they went to sleep, but he treated the very question as a blasphemy. She asked her mother, who professed herself too busy to answer. She asked Matis, who laughed and ruffled her hair. Finally, she put her hand up in class and asked Niema, who kept her back after school.

‘Sometimes we wake you up after curfew,’ she admitted to the young Emory, after praising her bravery for asking the question.

‘Why?’

‘To help us with our tasks.’

‘What tasks?’

‘I can’t tell you that.’

‘Why don’t we remember?’

‘Because it’s better if you don’t,’ said Niema a little guiltily.

After leaving the classroom, Emory told everybody in the village what she’d learned, simultaneously awed at the power of questions and dismayed at the limitations of answers. She thought they’d be astonished by what she’d unearthed, but most of her friends met the news with a shrug, or else were embarrassed that she’d been so impertinent.

It’s been the same way ever since.

Their bright sunlit lives are blotted by shadows, and nobody cares what’s concealed in that darkness except her. Sometimes, she watches her friends at the evening meal and feels as distant from them as she does from the elders.

‘Why doesn’t anybody question anything?’ she asks her grandfather, focusing on him once again.

‘They like being happy,’ he says simply.

‘I’m not trying to change that.’

‘And, yet, answers nearly always do,’ he replies, waving away the mosquitoes. Dusk brings them out in thick, unrelenting waves.

‘This is my last night on earth,’ he says matter-of-factly. ‘So I’m going to say a few things I’ve always wanted to say, starting with this. Tomorrow morning you’ll wake up one friend short, and you weren’t exactly burdened with them to start with. Some of that isn’t your fault, but some of it is. You’re a clever girl, Em, but you’ve never had any patience for people who don’t see the world the way you do. That wasn’t a problem, except now Clara’s one of those people.’

‘Clara chose Thea,’ remarks Emory flatly.

‘And you don’t like Thea.’

‘She killed Jack.’ Her voice cracks on her husband’s name.

‘Jack’s dead because he rowed out in a squall and drowned,’ points out Matis.

‘On Thea’s order,’ she counters. ‘Jack and every other apprentice who was in that boat with him are dead because they bowed their heads, and did what they were told without question. They weren’t the first and they won’t be the last. People who choose Thea die, and I don’t want Clara to be one of them.’

Matis envelops her hands in both of his own, smothering her rage.

‘What’s the use of loving somebody so much they can’t stand being in the same room as you? Clara’s already lost her father. She can’t lose her mother, as well. Carry on like this, and you’ll be ten years older, wondering why you don’t speak any more.’

Emory holds his gaze for as long as she can, before she drops her head. ‘I’m going to miss you,’ she says.

‘Don’t do it for too long,’ he replies. ‘The more you look back, the more you miss what’s around you. That was your father’s mistake.’

He wipes away her tears with a rough, crooked thumb.

‘Speaking of which, have you seen that hopeless son of mine?’

‘He’s in the bay, angrily mending a boat.’

‘He never did learn how to be sad,’ replies Matis, sighing.

After squeezing her hand, he turns towards the gate. For a moment, Emory thinks she sees a hunched figure out there in the gloom, but she blinks and they’re gone.

‘I’ll come with you,’ says Emory, realising these are the last moments they’ll ever spend together.

‘I have words that are just for him,’ he says grimly. ‘It’s about time one of us said them.’ He glances at his granddaughter over his shoulder. ‘Your father was always too hard on you, Emory, but he does love you.’

‘I wish I believed you.’

‘I wish you didn’t have to.’

Emory watches her grandfather leave the village for the last time, before I gently nudge her into motion.

‘You’ve got six minutes until curfew,’ I say. ‘Get yourself to your room, otherwise you’ll be sleeping out here.’

Emory springs away, her sandals kicking up the dirt ground, but she’s halted by the sight of Niema and Hephaestus arguing in front of the metal staircase leading up to her dorm.

‘You promised me these experiments were over,’ yells Hephaestus, his voice guttural.

The rage in it causes Emory to take a nervous step back into the darkness. Hephaestus is a foot taller than anybody else in the village, and twice their width. He’s carelessly shorn his hair to scabs and stubble, and there’s a gouge down the right side of his face. His hands are huge. As are his arms. His legs. His chest. Matis once joked that the only way he could sculpt Hephaestus would be to start chipping away at the volcano behind the village.

‘Can’t this wait until after curfew?’ hisses Niema, peering up at her son. She seems so small in his shadow, a doll made of twigs and twine, with hay for hair.

‘We’re supposed to be protecting them,’ he says pleadingly.

‘From themselves,’ replies Niema, realising that she won’t be able to head the conversation off. ‘That requires sacrifice.’

‘Sacrifice is when they make the choice. What we’re doing is murder.’

Emory gasps, shocked to hear that awful word tossed around so casually without a book present.

‘Not if it works,’ argues Niema.

‘It never has before. At this point, it’s no better than a death sentence.’

‘I know what we’ve been doing wrong, Hephaestus,’ she says, in a wheedling tone. ‘I’ve adapted the procedure. It’s going to succeed this time.’

Confronted by the immovability of her son’s doubt, Niema lifts his heavy hands, turning them over to inspect the scars and burns that mottle his flesh.

‘You’re the reason I started these experiments, you know,’ she says sadly. ‘I’ll never forget the day you washed up on the island. You were half dead, tortured almost beyond recognition. I thought the fog had got you, but then you told me about the gangs, and the camp where they held you.’

She reaches up touching the scar on his cheek.

‘I swore I’d never let that happen to anybody ever again.’ Her voice hardens, calcifying around her anger. ‘Yes, we’re risking an innocent life, but think of the rewards if our experiment works. Every generation that comes after this one will live in peace, without fear of war, crime or violence. No human being will ever hurt another. We’ll be able to let them roam this island freely without worrying what they’ll do with that freedom. Put it on a scale, my darling. Think about how much good we can do with one single act.’

Hephaestus stares at her uncertainly, his size now appearing to be a trick of the light. He’s hunched over, his shoulders pointing towards her, his shaved head bowed low to hear her hushed words. It’s as though he’s collapsing under her gravity.

‘You’re sure it will work this time?’ he asks.

‘Yes,’ she says firmly.

Even with no understanding of what they’re talking about Emory knows that Niema’s not as confident as she’s making out. She’s too aware of herself, too bright and brittle for somebody claiming to be made of steel.

Hephaestus knows it, too, she thinks. She can see it playing across his shifting features. He’s choosing to believe a lie. Allowing himself to be reassured by it; making it big enough to hide behind. For Emory, there’s no greater act of cowardice.

Hephaestus examines his hands, which are covered in badly healed scars and burns – each one a memento of his flight across a crumbling civilisation. ‘When do you want them in the chair?’ he asks, at last.

‘Tonight.’

‘I need twenty-four hours, at least,’ he disagrees. ‘You know that.’

‘This is urgent, Hephaestus. If you bypass the scans –’

‘No,’ he interrupts sternly. ‘If we do that, there’s a chance we miss an underlying medical condition that kills them during the procedure. If you want my help, there’ll be no shortcuts. I’ll need twenty-four hours to choose a subject with the best chance of survival. You’ll have to wait until tomorrow night.’

Niema puts aside her irritation with puffed cheeks, smiling at her son as though his objections were the prevarications of a child.

Emory’s never seen this version of Niema before. Her entire life she’s been a jolly old woman, full of laughter and compassion, urging the villagers to be the best versions of themselves. Emory would never have guessed she could be so manipulative, or so callous about a life. She’s acting the way Thea would.

‘As you wish,’ says Niema, spreading her hands magnanimously. ‘I have another errand to perform tonight, anyway.’

Hephaestus accepts this small victory with a grunt, then stalks away without another word, nearly colliding with the watching Emory. There’s a long stride between them, but she still nearly gags on his odour. It’s sweat and rot and earth, like he’s carrying a dead fox in one of his unwashed pockets.

He meets her astonished gaze with crushing disdain, then glances back over his shoulder. ‘One of the crums was eavesdropping,’ he calls out.

‘I don’t like that term,’ replies Niema sternly, but Hephaestus is already walking away.

Emory watches him go. When she turns back, Niema is in front of her.

‘How much did you hear?’ she asks.

‘You’re planning an experiment that could kill somebody,’ replies Emory, her voice shaking.

‘It’s the lesser of two evils, believe me,’ says Niema, waving away the risk. ‘We’re gambling a solitary life for the chance to make a better world in the long run. I’d give up my own life for that. Wouldn’t you?’

‘It doesn’t sound like they’re being given that choice.’

‘They’re not,’ admits Niema. ‘I prefer to assume nobility rather than be disappointed by a lack of it.’

‘This is wrong,’ protests Emory. ‘We don’t hurt people, not for any reason.’

‘Of course you’d say that.’ Niema smiles faintly, her manner warning. ‘But it’s my job to make sure those wonderful morals of yours are never tested.’

The curfew bell stops ringing.

Emory’s eyes widen as she realises what that means, but before she can do anything about it, she drops to the ground, landing heavily on her shoulder.

She doesn’t feel anything.

She’s sound asleep, along with the rest of the villagers.