ONE - INHERITANCE

My hand brushes lightly against the rough wood of the spear. Splinters break away in shards but none pierce my skin. My hands are too calloused for that, hard won layers to keep the pain at bay. I hold the spear for a moment, flint knapped stone hafted on hewn wood, then stow it in my pack. I feel them watching from the cave around me, the flickering light of the fire making my shadow dance as I gather up the supplies I need for the journey. Their eyes hurl barbs of accusation.

“She is my sister,” is my only justification as I depart. I can’t help but notice the tribe crouch and huddle together, holding each other close for support.

If I stop to wonder what will become of them without me I might reconsider this action, and that is something I cannot afford to do. I need to find her before it is too late. After all, it is my fault. If only Katarina had not loved the stories so much…

I was the one that asked every night as the flames burnt down to embers, pleaded for one more story before bedtime. Katarina was younger than me, just a child. I was the one that encouraged the madness. My father knew.

“You encourage them too much,” he told my mother, “the old world is done. Gone forever.” But as warm embers coated the endless night in a comforting glow my mother would smile and whisper in time with the pulsing of the dying light.

“Once we did not live in the cracks,” she whispered, “but under bright lights walking tall. There were forests and rivers and oceans, spaces larger than could be imagined. We could fly and race at incredible speeds and watch stories told on magic windows.”

If I hadn’t loved these tales so much then perhaps Katarina would never have heard them. Then she would never have decided to leave the tribe, to seek the past. I hold the burning brand before me as I navigate through the darkness of the caverns and catacombs beyond the sphere of our limited sanctuary.

My feet crunch upon the detritus of the old world, formless shapes in the process of melting to ash. Like island promontories, the detritus of the world that was rise here and there for one final gasp before they sink forever. My mother had names for the objects surrounding me. She would use words like car and phone, ipod and computer, television and stereo, house and lamp and kitchen and refrigerator… These talismans sounded like magic to the ears of a child. But that magic did nothing, except take my sister from me. “You know what mother said,” she had pleaded to me with eyes drenched in hope, “the words from that old story. Maybe the time is now. Maybe we can return to the surface again. We just need someone with the courage to look…” While I grew accustomed to living in the cracks, Katarina never forgot that we had once bestridden the stars. I forbade her to go, but while I was out hunting she crept away into shadow, following silent paths through the deep dead of our endless night. She hunts the broken vestiges of a looking glass that was shattered long before we were even born. All it is capable of providing is a twisted reflection of a past that will never come again. Hope was an elegant flower, but the tendrils it grew only smothered and choked.

I wonder if this was the way our ancestors walked, slinking from the light down into the dark in order to hide from the world they had created. Here I feel it clawing at me too, the cloying temptation to dream of a better tomorrow. Then I see it – light, white and blindingly bright, seeping from a crack in the chiseled wall ahead. My torch drops from my hand to lie guttering in the ash at my feet and I stumble forward, blinking furiously, my eyes unaccustomed to such intensity. I cannot help but think it, cannot help but form the question in my mind. Was my sister right? Could it be time for us to rise once more? I find my answer as I find her, only a few paces out into the blinding whiteness. It is like a knife blow to my heart. I hear myself screaming: “Katarina,” I cry, “dear God – what has happened to you?!” She lies on her back upon a smooth white floor, and the world around us is similarly smooth and white. She bears no visible injury, but she shakes uncontrollably as blood seeps from her ears, her eyes, her nose, her mouth. My sister, my sweet sister. I cradle her head as the tears roll down my face and lament in sorrow and rage: “Why? Oh sister, why did you have to walk the path?!” And she hears me, although her eyes are blind and unseeing. And she responds, although her body breaks with the effort to do so. “Needed to see,” she coughs and spasms, “…for myself. And you know… mother was right…” Her mouth forms a rictus smile, full of horror and revelation.

“The story was true… only we were not… the ones…”

Then the shadow falls upon us and I look up to see the creature that looms like a mountain over Katarina and I. Brown carapace and whip like antennae. A shiny segmented back with what look like folded wings. Six hairy limbs, standing on two while a middle mandible clutches something wooden and cylindrical. The words I learnt from my mother slide into place in my mind and I ascribe meaning to the scene before me. The monster holds a rolling pin and wears a frilly pink apron. The white tiled expanse around us is only unrecognisable due to its scale, but I know now where we are. Katarina and I have ventured out through a small crack in the wall onto a tiled kitchen floor. And looming over us is a cockroach, and she is screaming.

“Harold!” she chitters. “Come quick! There’s another one!” And a second mountain moves in beside the first, holding a can in his hand, the nozzle of its spray pointed toward my sister and I. The design on the side of the can shows the silhouette outline of a human covered by a stylised red cross.

“Don’t you fret Maude my love,” Harold skitters in response to his wife’s cry. “Dear me, I hope we don’t have an infestation in the walls somewhere…”

The poison clouds envelop me and I hold Katarina close as she convulses and dies. Then I am lying beside her on that impossibly smooth floor with the bright white light shining down upon me from so very far away. But even its light has begun to dim now as the world grows dark. The old tales, the words my mother spoke, they were true after all. Once we did not live in the cracks – but they did.

And the story was right after all. In the end the meek finally did inherit the Earth…