Kitty & Cadaver. Narrelle M Harris

drums, keyboards and guitars she had retrieved over a decade ago – all that was left of her first band.

      She fingered the chunky necklace, made of the strings of Alex’s guitar and keys from Kurt’s keyboard. The weight of it around her neck was like the weight of them in her heart. Yuka’s grief was heavy but her anger held her up. Her rage had been helping her to carry grief for 15 long years.

      Enough. Food now. Rehearsal later. They would take their respite while they could by simply playing music that was music and not a weapon, and decide how next to move. They were no longer Rome’s Burning. Alex had forged that band when he’d become its leader a decade ago. Alex was gone and they needed a new leader, and with that leader would come a new name. That had been the system for hundreds of years.

      The drummer’s short, fast stride took her away from the hostel and to the dying activity of the Queen Victoria Markets, in the final phases of closing up for the day. Her plan had never been to do any actual shopping. For that sort of thing, she needed actual money. They had some, of course, but everyone became adept over the years at not spending it unless absolutely necessary.

      Yuka walked through the undercover section of the markets that traditionally housed the fruit and vegetable stalls, redolent with the scent of overripe bananas, citrus and cabbage. Abandoned boxes not yet collected for disposal held discarded produce, more or less edible but not strictly saleable. Yuka found some plastic bags and, keeping her movements swift but unobtrusive, filled them with salvageable refuse. The overripe, split tomatoes would make a good base. A couple of broken carrots; a chunk of cauliflower; a bruised eggplant: a beggar’s feast right there. A half-smashed watermelon would pass for dessert.

      Down the road apace was a supermarket. She’d be able to find rice there, oil, spices. There’d be enough for dinner, at least. Yuka was just wondering if she might splurge on a few fillets of chicken when she felt it. The movement, under her feet.

      Like pins and needles, but on a string, wound around her feet and wriggling. The pins and needles were tugging her to the east.

      Yuka’s toes curled inside her shoes, but the sensation didn’t go away. Her toes tingled. Her arches, too. Everything still felt like it was pulling to one side. Even the weight of her necklace seemed to have a magnetic drag to the east.

      Not good.

      She spotted a grey granite marker on the opposite corner of the street. East. She followed the tug in her aching feet to investigate.

      A plaque in the footpath told her that these markets and adjoining car park had been built on top of an old 19th century cemetery, and that only 914 of the interred had been exhumed and reinterred elsewhere by 1922. Many, many more dead must have been buried here in the eighty years of the cemetery’s use.

      The tingle-pull in her feet was strong here, though not malevolent. Nevertheless, Yuka could tell that the dead underneath the car park were restless.

      Yuka’s sigh was in part long-suffering resignation, in part annoyance, and another part determination. She crossed the mostly empty street to the even emptier car park and began to walk it, the intensifying tingle in her feet like thin ropes moving along and over her arches, heels, the balls of her feet.

      These dead are long decayed, Yuka reminded herself. They are not going to burst out of the earth in a zombie parade. There will not be enough tissue to hold the bones together. There are no minds under the tar, only bones remembering they used to be alive. They have probably been rolling over in their sleep for a hundred years and no-one’s ever noticed before.

      Yuka was reluctant to put the scavenged meal on the ground – the restless dead had been known to rot food through proximity before – so she tied the plastic bags together and draped them around her neck. Watermelon to the left; vegetables to the right. A balanced diet. Ha. The strong odour of overripe plant life rose around her face.

      Hers, Yuka reflected, was not a dignified life.

      She crouched and put one hand on the asphalt, letting the ropey tingle move over her fingertips and palm. There was no malice in the sensation. The dead weren’t angry, though she sensed a frisson of longing. That might be the component parts of the dead remembering what it was to be whole and alive.

      Yuka crouched and patted the ground. Patpat. Patpat. Patpat. A little hushing rhythm. The restless tingle hesitated then resumed.

      Yuka pulled the drum sticks from her belt. The asphalt was not going to do the sticks one bit of good. Well, that’s why she had lots of drum sticks, she reminded herself, and why she went to the effort of singing every new set strong: for emergencies like this. Besides, although she was on her own, Yuka didn’t think the whole band was needed. Her drum sticks and her voice should be enough. Bartos, of revered memory, had achieved more in one cruel hour on the River Somme with merely a rusty horseshoe, a tent peg and his own baritone.

      Balanced on the balls of her feet, Yuka began to drum a tattoo on the ground. Taptap, taptap. Taptap, taptap. The rhythm of a heartbeat. It wasn’t an ancient piece, but it had been over fifty years in the band’s repertoire – the song was 20 years older than Yuka – so it had a proven record. And these bones under her feet were old and not really a threat. All she had to do was send them back to sleep.

      Asleep

      The dust

      And all

      Your bones

      Lay down

      She knew the words in Japanese as well, but sometimes the magic was stronger when sung in the composer’s original words.

      There’s no

      Place here

      For you

      To go

      Lay down

      The heartbeat rhythm had the attention of the dust and bones. The taptap, taptap brought all that restlessness into focus. Yuka could feel it, almost like the dust had eyes, and all of them only for her.

      Almost imperceptibly at first, Yuka slowed the heartbeat. Taptap, taptap. Tap-tap. Tap-tap.

      You’re old

      The world

      Won’t know

      You now

      Lay down

      Lay down

      Lay down

      The things under her feet grew sluggish. She could feel them remembering not only the heartbeat, but how the heartbeat fades. Yuka could feel the dust and bones calming, settling. Tap-tap. Tap-tap. Tap tap. Tap tap.

      Be dust

      Be bones

      They were going back to sleep, forgetting they had ever once been alive.

      Tap. Tap.

      Tap.

      Tap.

      Be gone

      Be gone

      Lay.

      Down.

      Yuka held the silence after the last note, breathing as silent as a tree, and listened with her ears and heart and feet and hands.

      There. Quiet in the graveyard. Much better.

      The spike when it came was so quick that Yuka didn’t feel it until it hit – a sharp jab, like an electric shock, jolting out from the earth. This burst of rage wasn’t something from the restless dead. It came from something deeper; something she hadn’t sensed as she sang. It burned up from the ground, across her feet, into the tips of her drum sticks on the asphalt.

      But Yuka was an old hand at this, and though surprised, she was not unprepared. Her sticks had been sung to might and potency. Her voice was in the wood, but so was Steve’s, so was Sal’s, so were Alex and Kurt’s, binding that wood and making it powerful, even if not impervious.

      As the burn of that unanticipated wrath