Tales of the Hidden World by Simon R. Green Page A

hands and handwritten signs, careful not to make eye contact because then you’d have to admit that we are real and that our suffering is real.
    We’re dead to you.
    I don’t know why I left the city. No particular reason. Just started walking one morning and didn’t stop. Walked till I ran out of streets and just kept going. Are you still a street person, if there aren’t any streets? The countryside was pretty, and entirely unforgiving. The elements are just that bit closer, and more pressing, and you miss the company of people. Eventually, I came to a dead town. I stopped to look it over. There aren’t any fences around a dead town: no gates or barbed wire. Nothing to keep the dead in, because they don’t want to go anywhere. They have no purpose, no ambition, no curiosity. They’re dead. They don’t want or care about anything, anymore. Just bodies, called up out of their graves and given a bit of a push to set them going. We put them in dead towns because they had to be somewhere, and that’s where they stay.
    I’d never been inside a dead town, so I went in. Just to see what there was to see.
    The dead took no notice of me, looked right through me as though I wasn’t even there. But I was used to that. Wasn’t much of a town, just blocky houses in straight rows on either side of a dirt street. No lights, no amenities, no comforts. Because the dead don’t need them. They didn’t even walk, just stood around, looking at nothing. A few still stumbled or staggered from one place to another, driven by some vague impulse, some last dying memory of something left undone. Their clothes were rotten and ragged, but most of the bodies persevered. They didn’t acknowledge one another or the world around them. Their brains were dead in their heads, bereft of reason or meaning.
    Their town was a mess and so were they. The dead don’t care about appearances. They didn’t smell that bad, so far from their graves, just a dry, dusty presence, like autumn leaves in the wind. I was used to the stench of people who live on the streets. Life smells worse than death ever will. I walked down the dirt street, picking my way carefully between the dead. Not because I was afraid of them, but because I didn’t want to be noticed. I still half expected someone to come up and tell me to leave, that I didn’t belong there, that I had no place in a dead town. But no one looked at me as I passed or reacted to the sound of my footsteps in the quiet street. The dead had this much in common with the living: they didn’t give a damn that I was there.
    I never saw the dead make much use of the houses they’d been given. Sometimes they might lie down on a bed for a while, though of course they didn’t sleep; as though that was something they remembered doing, even if they no longer knew why. And sometimes they would walk in and out of a door, over and over. Presumably for the same reason. I never really saw them do much of anything. Mostly they just stood around, as though waiting for something. As though they felt there was somewhere they should be, something they should be doing, but no longer knew what, or why.
    I found a bed in a room in a house that was still reasonably intact. I barricaded the door so I wouldn’t be disturbed and got some sleep. Even a damp and dusty bed can be the height of comfort when you’re used to shop doorways and cardboard boxes. The dark didn’t bother me, or the dead outside. In the morning, I went looking for food and drink, but of course there wasn’t any. I walked up and down and back and forth, but there were only the dead and the houses they didn’t need.
    I watched one dead man just fall over, for no obvious reason. None of the other dead noticed. I went over to him and crouched down, a cautious distance away. His face was empty and his eyes saw nothing. He was dead and gone, now. Nobody home. I could tell. His boots looked to be much the same size as mine, and in much better condition, so I