Danse Macabre

[Dogs231]

S091: CLAIRE HAIG — CONTINUED FROM "A Catastrophy Played By a Symphony"

Claire stood, like a statue, in the center of the town, at the convergent intersection from which every crisscrossed crossroads and each trailing alleyway was born, from which all the roads led and to where they all concluded, like how each river's ingress is the headwater and each river's egress is the ocean. For a moment, she remained there, but after a while, she began to walk, silent save for the clink and sway of the weapon in her hand and the tightened jostle of the canvas of the bag that held her belongings. As she walked, she had no purpose to follow, only a feeling deep within—no map, no compass, nothing to guide her, any such things left as they were where they lay—metaphorically, on the road behind her.

As Claire walked, and as she watched, her eyes caught on every twist and turn of the cadavers, hanging on each mangled wrench of the bodies, every unnatural position they had found themselves in, the red or black of their lifeforce trailing out from them, a cruel mockery of the lives they had left behind. There were bodies, so many bodies, strewn about here and there and everywhere, fallen every which like leaves to the ground at the change of the seasons. At this point, she felt something but could not place it; it was buried so deep within her, primed to explode, but not here, not now, not yet—the pressure still welling up to dwell inside her chest, threatening to detonate, but emptily, as one might convey a message.

There was something she could not convey nor conceive, a feeling that her mind could almost touch and hold onto, but not entirely, a feeling that all of this was, in the most innate of ways, wrong—in the same way that a nightmare might be. And in that vein, she was shifting, shiftless, drifting, listless, through this place, as if she was dreaming, though she had never been the type of person to dream much. Something stirred within her, her soul twisting every which way as it served as a lodestone, guiding her to the vague idea of a feeling of a place as if the hands of fate themselves had deigned to compel her—to serve as a Polaris and guide her still—to the terminus of her life's story—to her destiny, whatever and wherever it was.

Once upon a time, Claire had determined that her life would end on this island. It made her wonder: why, then, was she still here? Why her? Why was she still here, still standing, still living, in this place where all others before her had fallen and met their end? What was the meaning of that?

Once upon a time, Claire decided—she had resolved to live despite it all. It made her wonder: why, then, did the idea fill her with such dread? Why did the thought of the future fill her with an uncontrollable fear like a wildfire within, stricken with such terror? What was the meaning of that?

All her addled senses could muster was a single leading question: "Why?"

The world of her mind turned and turned in circles, running up against itself in whatever direction it managed to lead itself; her body followed the wind and the whim, moving without thinking, acting without feeling—an automaton, how the essential functions, the constituent components, made her what she was in that moment, feeling like she was only a fraction of a human being. There was a mission in her movements, a mystery; nobody had ever elucidated it to her—autopilot, automatic. She continued to walk, walk, walk herself wretched, body on the verge of crumbling to fragments like a golem with its magic taken out of it. And yet, despite that, she moved, moved, moved onward, advancing unto eternity.

Her story couldn't end like this.

There had to be a moral in it somewhere.

S091: CLAIRE HAIG — CONTINUED IN "Saga"