MANSIONS OF the dead.
A grandiose name for repositories of the departed, but many there were who liked the idea their loved ones were comfortably settled.
It never ceased to attract Tinkers with a lot on their mind, these gatherings of remembrance that spanned generations, grouped families and created a city of departed souls that were so different from living cities. It was the silence of course. The sense also of being frozen in time as if everyone simply stopped what they were doing and laid down to rest all together on this one spot.
Tinker Blomp knew this was not true of course. Cemeteries grew like living things strangely enough. Every time he visited one to remind himself what he was Tinkering for, a future for those still living, accepting he could not save everyone, he felt a need to unburden himself with silent words of apology and forgiveness. And every time he would find another poor soul added to the roster among the mansions of the dead.
As with all new tenants, visitors would be frequent for a while before tailing off until one day no one ever came again. Here then, as Tinker Blomp toiled his way up the side of the sloping hill where this particular cemetery lay he saw a darkly dressed figure paying respects to a marble block jutting out of a grassy slope dotted with newly planted flowers. In the lush climate of Frangea the flowers were already threatening to riot all over the grave.
'Sallmer Weet,' Tinker Blomp said, reading the name. 'Forgive me,' he added on seeing the other man turn, 'I've disturbed your prayers.'
'Not prayers,' the other replied with a slight frown. 'I am a man of science, though troubled by superstitious awe.' Then he smiled, touching hands with the somewhat shambling figure who seemed somewhat of an officious nature. 'Indeed,' he continued, 'I must ask your forgiveness. He was not a relative. A patient of mine I could not save. Doctor Falt, Mobius Falt.' He stared again at the grave.
Tinker Blomp was struck by a thought.
'We cannot always save lives in spite of our best endeavours,' he said.
'Would you think ill of me if I said I was to blame for this man's death?'
'That depends.'
'I am, as I said, a man of science. This gentleman defied all attempts to cure him of the pain that blighted his life. Every time he came to me there was a pleading in his eyes, a begging to end the pain. I could do nothing for him and wished silently his suffering might end.'
'You broke your oath?' Blomp said with a gasp.
'I did, and I did not,' the doctor quickly replied. Again he stared at the carved name upon the marble tablet, sponsored as he read by a loving daughter. 'I wished him well, I wished him at peace, and I told him I would try something new. That was the last I saw of him. I am a man of science, yet somehow feel responsible for his death. My sympathetic wishes brought his death upon him. A terrible accident befell him the moment after he left my office. He lingered a little and then passed on.'
'You willed his death?'
'It seems so.'
'Now he's at peace.'
Doctor Falt looked away out over the valley.
'She chose a nice view for him, didn't she, the surviving daughter? He left a wife and son too, but only the daughter comes here. She sits by the tablet and gazes out over the view as if she were watching it with him. A comforting thought.'
Tinker Blomp was unsure how to respond to this. The man seemed determined to take the blame for a coincidence. A guilty conscience was a strange creature, seeking to take up residence in the most innocent of souls.
He remembered the tragedy of the Mandrake family, crushed by a falling building. A cluster of graves appeared on the hillside one day and Blomp felt honour bound to pay his respects to young lives lost too soon. Yet there had been a survivor. A boy who went out to the shops and returned to find his loved ones gone forever.
Broken.
That was the word he kept using over and over. He felt appalling guilt at not being there with them amid the rubble, just as broken as they. The only thing he could think of from that moment onwards was to try to fix things, as if in doing so he was serving a penance for not being able to fix the broken bodies of his lost family.
Guilt and blame were two different things.
'You are a good man, Mobius,' Tinker Blomp said. 'Your desire to relieve the pain of those who suffer is as much of merit as finding an actual cure for what ails them. It is a desire to do good, an unchanging, unflinching determination to make difficult lives more endurable. Nothing in this world will stop cemeteries like this from growing, not until we all finally meet our end and the last survivor lays down to rest in eternal peace, unburied and unknown.'
'There's a bleak prospect.'
'Yes it is, and it is much my duty as it is yours to never let that happen.'
The doctor looked at the other a moment, half registering his appearance in the fading light of evening.
'I did not catch your name?' he said.
'Oh, I'm nobody really. Just a busybody with too much time on my hands. Centuries of it in fact. Good evening,' and he tipped the gilded brim of his hat before bustling down the winding path of the hill and out of the lives of the people of Frangea, for a little while longer at least.
The doctor watched him depart and then sat on the spot where he had seen the man's daughter sit. He too gazed out at the grassy slopes rising up to a line of forest trees. Then he glanced at the white marble briefly.
'I really hope you can see this view,' he said companionably after a moment.
