![]() ![]() He lies still, his cheek crushed into the softness of a heavy rug, his staring eyes level with the cushions landscap-ing the floor. Lazarus hauls himself over the rim of the opening. She hides her wince, tucks her legs beneath her, picks up a cushion which she hugs to her chest. She is unprepared for the paleness of his face, the tightness of the skin across the bones. The rest of her is wrapped in a length of purple cloth tied beneath her arms, and the skin of her shoulders is bur-nished by lamplight, the flames reflecting in the broad silver bracelet on her upper arm. He sees her feet, then the curve of her lower legs. The soles of her feet are waxy and clean, as if she never walks on common ground. Halfway up the ladder Lazarus rests and swallows a gulp of air, ignores the ticking in his inner ear, shakes his head. If a man can’t climb the ladder, if he’s that tired or drunk, she doesn’t want his custom. Her windowless room is beneath a sloping roof, reached by a tapered ladder that rises to a trapdoor in the first-floor ceiling. Lydia works in the Lower City in a narrow building jammed between alleys. In this case the story of Lazarus, I hope, is enhanced.” In fiction you can arrive at a different, more surprising result. He is not a Christian, but holds that “Christianity has a lot left in it for those interested in storytelling.” He adds: “The debate about Christianity has been largely a non-fiction debate, where reason applied to Bible stories makes them collapse. ![]() ![]() He uses fictional sources (such as lives of the saints, paintings, and opera) to create a biography of Lazarus the man. In his fifth novel Lazarus is Dead, from which this excerpt is taken, he sets out to bring “a hyper-rational eye” to the Bible story of Lazarus rising from the dead. Richard Beard is director of The National Academy of Writing, and has been shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award. ![]()
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