Relicts & Revenants: Monsters of the Week II

The Wall

They built the Wall, and the Wall stood. Wags and cynics insisted that the Wall could and would be defeated by any child, any mental incompetent, with access to a ladder, but when such people came the Wall in its essence, its function as the Wall, defeated them and they were heard of no more. Where more sophisticated people tried to tunnel under the Wall, the tunnels terminated below its footings: the passage ended with the transition of the tunnelers, and the Wall, stronger, towered high and stout above the border, ominous, inscrutable. The more intellectual did studies of the landfall, of the history and flows of water, and predicted confidently that the Wall would surely collapse in time as the ground changed below it: but where the land crumbled away and should have endangered the Wall there it stood – firmer and more adamant, rebuilt from its own needs, renewed constantly in its self-justification.

Those who built the Wall rejoiced in their correct choices: as the Wall devoured rather than being devoured and renewed itself, they found themselves virtuous, confirmed by the correct operation of the Wall, their center and their treasure, the impassable rampart, a permanent and eternal division between themselves and the unworthy hordes outside. They praised the Wall and they praised themselves, the builders, and rejected the idea that the Wall, having become not a wall but The Wall, might in the fullness of its strength make itself not their servant but their master. They were all too eager to serve the Wall, to drive, by manipulations and persecutions, further hordes against it, devoured screaming into the mortar and stone.

Surely they should have known the truth: for the reason they built the Wall was an implacable fear of the Other, of contamination – that when the composition of a thing changes its essential character changes as well. So, they built the Wall, to keep the border clear: but they built the Wall in the only way such a Wall might be built, and not be defeated instantly by ladders and tunnels and the elements and raw deep time, and in that choice they planted the seeds of their own destruction.

When the scientists noticed in their observations that the Wall was retreating at millimeters per year, they were laughed at – even as they pointed to not the rate of change, but the rate of change in the rate of change as the clarion bell of alarm, for if the Wall chose to retreat it could not be stopped: that was the nature of an irrepassable barrier. Indeed, it was taken as a foundational fact that the Wall not merely would not but could not move, and any evidence to the contrary was a lie crafted to destroy it: but this presumed that the Wall was merely a wall, and no wall, as commonly understood, could do and be as the Wall became. And the Wall continued to retreat, by not millimeters but eventually whole meters in the year, and the scientists and others who could steal or finagle a passage left, before the Wall towered over the skies and blockaded the ports.

Those who remained praised the Wall even as it came into their own dooryards, even as their neighbors were sacrificed to it: for the Wall like any other wall was an equal barrier on both sides. And the Wall extended and the Wall grew, and this was a point of pride for those who were not devoured by it, until they were devoured by it: never in the history of the world had there been a Wall quite like this.

From far away scientists watched aghast, and with figures and speculative calculations tried to determine an equilibrium point: when the Wall, consisting in equal parts of those inside and outside, would neither advance nor retreat, becoming merely a continent-wide monument to death and folly. But the terror and hate and anguish of those victims from the outside was not to be overcome, and the placid, idiot self-pity of those who built the Wall could not in their numbers stop it sweeping, in its terrible vengeance, to the northern border beyond. A belt now entirely of petrified flesh and vitrified bone, thousands of miles long and thousands of feet wide, hundreds of feet high, it had nowhere to move, and no one to search for, as those beyond the northern frontier had retreated from it like the coming of a plague, or the burst of a nuclear bomb. The Wall, still alive, implacable, self-sufficient, became in its self-created desert the mausoleum of its builders – and never in the history of the world was there a more needful death, a more appropriate tombstone.