We have crossed the line, and we are d.a.m.ned. I know of no other way to say it. We have crossed the line, and there will be no forgiveness. Not from G.o.d. And not from me.

As I spoke the holy words of wedlock, I felt my soul constrict, recede: recoiling from the utter wrong, then sinking to a place so deep I fear I may never see it again.

I felt a humm rise up in me, then: some sound I'd never heard before. It was emptiness, profound and hollow. It was nothingness.

Inside me now, and forever.

And I sensed that G.o.d at last was gone. That He'd had enough, and could bear no more. From this point on, I suspect that we are thoroughly on our own. As well we deserve.

We deserve just what we get.

But it would be hours before the boy read that particular journal pa.s.sage. That night, he had a few adventures of his own.

IX.

In the aftermath of the wedding, there was much jubilation. At least amongst the Royals, who had lost none of their own, unless you counted the thirty-seven men who had given up their lives in the interests of pageantry, and so that the dead might feed again.

Only a few had died on the return trip. Three, to be precise, although a fourth had alas been bitten. Florence had seen this as some sort of benediction; and though the bishop didn't corroborate her view, precisely, he didn't seize the opportunity to debate it with her, either.

The bishop was depressed-that much was clear-and he took his leave at the earliest diplomatic juncture. Leaving the boy seated at the farthest corner of the largest of the sittings rooms, observing the madness at play.

From there, in the warmth of the hearth-fires burning, the boy watched as they celebrated the union, feting the newest member of the British Royal family.

And, for hours on end, he listened.

In their delirium, they a.s.sumed they could rebuild their empire by continuing the bloodline. To them, it was as simple as that. They discussed the re-entrenchment of sovereignty, the re-emergence of a viable working cla.s.s. They spoke as if they sincerely believed that this whole living-dead business was just an inconvenience, some annoying historical glitch. That someday all would be as it once was.

The idea made him sick.

Because things would never be the same. He knew this in his blood and bones. The dead would rot to nothing eventually, but what they'd done would take hundreds of years to redo. If ever. A gargantuan if.

And without precautions-as yet nonexistent-the new dead would continue to rise. Keeping the living ever vigilant.

And that was the least of it.

The boy looked at the Princess Sara; and every so often, she looked back at him. Eye contact had been established. Discreetly. But there it was. She was gorgeous, and so was he. At least they alone had something in common.

He imagined that she knew that this all was bulls.h.i.t. From the twinkle in her eyes, he surmised that he was right.

He looked at her, and then he looked at the Prince.

And thought to himself, no f.u.c.king way.

Later, as night descended in full, the boy began to wander the halls. This had become his routine, a way to ease the growing boredom. He'd found rooms he was sure no one had visited for years, rooms filled with antique furniture and long-forgotten gifts from foreign dignitaries.

But more to the point, he now knew where everyone and everything was quartered, knew who stayed up and what time they went down. The night was his time; and as the corridors cleared, the Palace became his own.

And so it was, late into that night, that he found himself moving toward the grand new quarters that the Prince and his wife had drawn.

The boy knew that Randolph had retained his old rooms, and no wonder; he had only spent his entire life there. It was a boy's room, albeit effete; and remodeling it into a royal love nest would not only obliterate its personal value, but leave him with nowhere to retreat.

And so the room where he and Sara were destined to commingle was in another wing entirely. It was, in essence, Sara's room: designed for sharing, but hers in the clinch.

And, lo and behold, the clinch had already come.

"What do you mean, you can't?" This from the Princess, loud behind the closed doors.

The boy paused, listening in the hall.

From the unmistakable voice of the Prince came some vague, halted stammering. Something about "... me old fella."

The boy stifled a laugh.

"But we were so close!"

More muted stammering then, slowly groping towards regal command.

Then the volume went down on both of them, as if they were suddenly concerned about being overheard. Which would have been absurd, under ordinary circ.u.mstances. They literally had the wing to themselves.

But tonight, the boy was listening hard.

Not more than a couple of minutes pa.s.sed before the door to the bedroom opened; and from it stepped Prince Randolph, draped in a fabulous robe, some lovely slipper, and a long-faced expression of furious shame. The boy ducked back into the bountiful shadows and waited. The Prince turned away from him, then off down the hall.

"Randolph!" the Princess shouted after him. "You could at least shut the door, if that's all you can do!"

The Prince walked faster. There was a bend at the end of the hall. The Prince took it, his footsteps receding.

The boy waited till the footsteps were more than gone.

From inside the bridal chamber, he heard crying. It barely penetrated through the Buzz that swelled up in him now. The Buzz had nothing to do with hearing; his hearing, he'd found, was painfully acute; the Buzz existed wholly apart from the senses. It had something to do with the soul.

And if he had a soul left, after today, the boy couldn't find it with a map. Instead, he followed the Buzz, which spoke to him with words no more coherent than before, but suffused now with a meaning that was coming increasingly clear, moment to moment and step by step.

The crying was quiet, an internal affair with only a few strategic leaks; and it slowly approached the door from within as he quickly approached from without. He found himself carefully calculating distance, and slowed just at the brink of arrival, so that he got there just as she reached the door.

And she saw him, stepping into the doorway just as she moved to close it off. And they saw each other. Stopped. And stared.

Caught in a moment inexplicably huge.

She was draped in a blanket she'd torn from the bed, and absolutely nothing else. She looked wounded and doomed and profoundly aware and more exquisitely s.e.xually ripe for the taking than any human being in the history of man.

And the boy had no problem with his old fella. Not then. Not in the hours that ensued. The Princess, as it turned out, was a wallow in the finest that earthly woman-flesh could offer; and he found himself coming there again and again, acutely aware of the womb that was doused by his unrestrained issue. Over and over.

The bloodline, indeed.

Part Three The Dead

X.

The months pa.s.sed, and the spring thaw made the stench from the streets nearly unbearable. By the summer, burning incense was common all along the labryinthian hallways, and perfumes were sprayed on furniture and clothing, to limited result.

The stench could be masked, but not eliminated.

The boy hardly seemed to notice. He could smell it, but it had ceased to matter. He had become more and more like a ghost: transparent, haunting the hallways, and the bedrooms of the bishop and the princess. He marveled at how nothing seemed to get through to him now. It was all just f.u.c.king. And pretending.

He'd become even more pale and thin, hardly venturing into the sunlight. Waiting until dusk to begin his activities: an innocuous ghoul, rendered unscary by the ambient backdrop of horror.

The boy had taken to borrowing the princess' make-up to heighten the effect, darkening his eye sockets, and whitening his already-anemic skin. Imitating them outside. Mocking them. Mocking them all. He wondered what his old goth friends would have made of all this, and suspected delight. He wished he could shoot some video, and send it back in time.

The bishop, for his part, had seemed incensed by his new appearance at first, then gradually excited.

The Princess-as it turned out, an old Cure fan-was nothing less than thrilled.

Lately he'd even stopped wearing the servant's uniform, dressing instead in expensive cast-offs he found about the Palace. No one seemed to care; people seemed to be folding into themselves as time went on.

Bishop Hallam had recently told him about stopping the King from opening the front gates. The poor old shriveled b.a.s.t.a.r.d had been poised, with a confused guard barring his way, to walk right up to the reaching arms of the undead.

He had wanted to "let his people in."

The bishop had managed to talk him down, convincing him that the zombies were n.a.z.is instead. This notion had sent the King into a comical dance of outrage. His demand that the guards open fire at once was obeyed, with a nod from the bishop. The outside ranks were thinned once again, at the cost of several hundred rounds from their dwindling stockpile of ammunition.

But later, the King had confided to the bishop, "I go in and out, but I see."Then, with a gentle smile, he'd added, "We're not going to make it, are we, Hallam?"

To which the bishop could only sigh, then give the King a heartfelt embrace.

And then there'd been the night-which the boy observed firsthand- when the bishop and the Queen Mother nearly collided in the hall. The bishop had nearly hopped out of his skin, but Florence herself seemed merely fl.u.s.tered.

"Oh, bother," she'd said. "I'm lost again. Would you be so kind as to guide me to my room? My lady in waiting is dead, you know."

The bishop had bowed and said he was honored, then taken her by the arm and led her back down the hall. The boy, unseen, had followed discreetly, listening to every word exchanged. Much of it was mere chit-chat-the baby this and the kingdom that-but at a certain point, her gait had changed, and her tone went deeper, more profound.

"I'm worried, you know," she'd said, and sighed. "Things are very different now, and I want it stopped at once." The bishop said nothing, and silence hung thick in the still, rank Palace air.

"May I ask you a question," she'd continued at last, "as you are of the cloth?"

"Of course," he replied. "Again, you honor me."

At that, she'd stopped and turned to him. Concern swam in her pitted eyes.

"Has G.o.d..." drawing it out"... abandoned us?"

"No, no. Not at all!" the bishop replied at once. "He is merely challenging us."

Florence smiled. "And ridding us of those mad Catholics."

"Yes, that as well."

"Well, then, bully!" she'd said, resuming her forward momentum, self-important a.s.surance returning with every step. "Then we must meet His challenge, and continue what is ours by right."

"That's the spirit!" he'd a.s.sured her, with a bland smile on his lips.

And so she had toddled on back to her quarters, flush with her own delirium; in the end, less on top of the facts than the poor pathetic King.

Afterwards, the bishop had cried for hours. He was no fool. Or, at least, he wasn't stupid.

Later that night, he wrote: The buy is bored with me. And, more surprisingly, I am bored with him. There is no future in our static hold upon the present tense.

I suspect that he's found some other place to ply his talents. Or perhaps he's merely as lost as Florence. As lost as all of us now.

Ah, well.

Very soon, I will venture out again with faithful Lewis, the last and only friend I have. Trolling for loveliness, once again. Or, more likely, trolling for death.

I find myself thinking about the King, and his impulse to open the gates: absurd, of course, but how much more absurd than mine, in the final a.n.a.lysis?

The urge to destroy it all is-at heart, I suspect-the core desire. The urge to give in to the dying tide, to merge with the only remaining reality. To see the last preposterous boundaries fall would be, at the least, some sort of closure.

Be it heaven, or h.e.l.l, or nothing at all, I suspect that it would have to be better than this.

Which seemed almost sane, until the boy caught the bishop masturbating square into the face of Jesus: not once, not twice, but again and again. Thrusting into paintings one thousand years old. Squeezing the wet spurting tip of his c.o.c.k into mouths sculpted wide with the pain of crucifixion. Dousing the Savior in desperate j.i.z.zum.

Perversely praying for the One Love he would never have.

XI.

So it was madness, and s.e.x, and wandering the halls, and the boy's new fascination with the dead things outside: an advancing obsession, as autumn led into the empire's final days. There he found himself, as in the dream, searching for something he recognized. Even stupid Vince would do.

Often, this led the boy down to the fence, where he stood just inches from their skeletal reach. Staring into the sea of faces. Listening to the siren song imbedded in the Buzz.

Sometimes he looked into their eyes, and thought he caught them dreaming: not dead, not asleep, not awake, not alive, but merely adrift in dream.

And it was there that he found some sense of what might lie beyond.

The eyes of the dead were emptiness incarnate. The only light that played there was reflected from without. The boy tuned into that, letting go, abandoning himself to the beckoning Buzz. He slowly absorbed the incoherence, the nothing that echoed with rattle and clambor.