The Ephemera by Hal Duncan, Neil Williamson Page B

of the boundary wall to rubble. Its colour on the whole was pale, yellowy white, tinted pink by the setting sun. Rather than a trunk as such, the main body appeared to be a collection of entwined boles which bifurcated and branched, reaching thirty feet at least into the air, and then split and split again into the slenderest of stems, sweeping down to the ground like a willow. The roots, a tortured white tangle, twisted and spilled into the earth all around it.
    As he got closer, David could see that the roots reached out into the field beyond, and then it dawned on him what he was seeing. What he had taken for a tree was in fact an impossible growth of bone, seeded in the graves, rising through the hard earth, turning, shaping it seemed at random, fusing together into the semblance of a trunk and branches, and then splitting off and bending low to the earth again to be absorbed back into the body of the whole. Still closer he began to resolve the vast central mass into a more complex snarl of bizarre shapes: ridges, fans, curving plates and knobs jutting out at all angles.
    In many places large sections had been hacked away only to be replaced by virgin material. Moving around the tree, David found a large band saw propped against it beside a fresh four foot by three foot gash. Reaching the wall, he saw that the tree was straddling what was left of it. In truth, it seemed more that the mass of roots was in the process of absorbing the chiselled stonework.
    From here David could see down into the valley. The field beyond contained more plots than he had at first thought, all linked to the tree by ribbons of white snaking through the soil. But his gaze was immediately drawn to the parade beyond. Seeing the figures much closer now than before David was awed by their variety and simplicity, their pale, motionless beauty. Each was a sketch in the simplest of lines shaped from a rough hunk of bone, the semblance of a figure in the act of one of a myriad human functions: a tennis player; a woman ironing; a child playing peek-a-boo; a straining figure struggling with an umbrella blown inside out; a lollipop lady holding up non-existent traffic; a man with his head cocked as if listening to something, perhaps a joke; an old woman curled up in a foetal position, arms crossed over her head; a couple, limbs and torsos entwined, indistinguishable in an act of love; a young man tearing his dreadlocks, screaming. A catalogue of human activity, row upon row of stances and postures stretching down the hillside and fanning out along the valley floor. They were too numerous to count, but there had to be at least as many as there were graves.
    Those nearest, crowding the graves like funeral mourners, appeared to be less clear than the others. At first David assumed this was because they were the oldest ones and had succumbed to weathering. But further study revealed that they were losing definition not because material was being worn away but rather because it was still being deposited, overlaid, still growing. These were figures in metamorphosis, taking on a new form. Less and less human, more and more... the word which sprang to mind was natural .
    David's eyes drank them in, flitting from one, lingering on the next. He felt a chill breeze against his cheek as he studied the Bone Farmer's work. Behind him the wind teased a hollow multi-timbral tune from the tree's thinnest branches. It was a natural sound. Not creepy, he thought, merely melancholic. As the breeze grew in strength, ruffling through his hair, David began to pick out a low wavering ostinato from somewhere within the crowd of figures, a sorrowful counterpoint to the tinkling song of the tree. He hugged himself for warmth as the wind tugged harder at his coat and trousers. More voices, elicited from white, porous mouths, joined the first. Soaring discords, swelling to become a choir, weaving complex, atonal fugues.
    Why had he come here? For Sophie, he told himself; but also, he