The Ghosting of Gods (20 page)

43
how hunchbacks are made

The crystal’s manifested scene vanishes as the asylum residents rush to the window where the Captain now stands with bare feet planted wide.

Poe beats me to the window. “What was
that?”
he hollers.

“It’s out of view,” Captain Wadsworth booms. “Move down, to the right!” I’m pushed aside as they shift position.

“There it goes!” Mrs. Wadsworth croaks, pointing with a knitting needle.

“Oh, Sweet Reaper, save us!” Servant Sarah cries. She presses her face to the cold pane.

“You’re fogging the glass,” Vincent says curtly.

She holds her breath, her cheeks puffing out, but she lets it go with a hiss. “I see it. There, the other side of the garden, dragging its ragged shroud.”

Leesel tugs on my arm. “Put me on your shoulders so I can see,” she demands.

“No.”

“What is it?” Ava demands to know. She stands on tiptoe, trying to see out the window to where the crazies are pointing. “Jesse, I don’t want Leesel looking at it.” She jumps back just as a gray form slams into the glass.

Servant Sarah covers her eyes, her fingers spread apart so she can still see. “Gracious, that was a dense one, wasn’t it?”

Across the room, Leesel directs everyone’s attention to a shadow by a fountain.

“Remarkable sighting, young lady,” Vincent says and applauds. “That’s a rare one. Notice the ancient attire? The cape? The spectacles? Score three for you.” He marks in a small book and asks Leesel to spell her name for him. She ignores him.

Ava and I stick our faces to the window. A tall black figure wearing a mask and carrying red roses drops to one knee in the snow, lifts the flowers toward the asylum, and blows a kiss. Bethany comments that the phantom’s stature does not match that of Vincent’s.

“Look,” Poe shouts. “What’s that thing? And how many points do I get for seeing it first?”

He scores two and a half. This is added onto his five, which he receives just for participating, Servant Sarah explains.

Bethany, who has been yawning, curls up in one of the abandoned wing chairs.

“So there’s all kinds of different ghosts,” Poe says. “Rapture.”

Servant Sarah serves more coffee. Vincent fascinates Poe with a lecture on the various densities of ghosts. Bethany claims amazement at his knowledge. Outside the wind picks up even more, lashing against the windows and shifting the house so that it creaks with the gusts.

Vincent strokes his moustache. “I must boast concerning our window sports here at District Eleven. In any given game, one is likely to spot quite an assortment of species, and of course there’s no telling how many shy, devious, invisible ghosts there are floating about. It’s no wonder we’re so often distracted from the viewing.”

Poe is captivated. “How many kinds of ghosts do you have here in Memento Mori, do you think?”

“Let’s see. There are poltergeists, banshees, spooks…apparitions if you want to count those…iron ghosts, shades, specters, and so on. Not to mention your garden-variety spirits, of course. Many ghosts come from before the last Beginning. Others evade capture by crystal. Still more roam due to surplus of ghost combined with low harvest of virgin crystal. We recycle when possible.” Vincent looks out the window and purses his wet lips. “Oh, fudge.”

Servant Sarah screams. Mrs. Wadsworth practically tramples
her as she charges to her window to see what frightened the servant so. Vincent and Poe join them, and they dart as a pack from window to window until Captain Wadsworth assumes command. “Spread out. They’ll come from all sides, the ungracious traitors!” He shakes his fist in the air, empties the decanter down his broad throat.

“Tunnelers,” Vincent spits. “I must apologize, especially to you, Bethany. For months now, renegade tunnelers have been roaming Memento Mori, plotting treason by exodus. Respectable tunnelers do not appear until well into the night, to make sure we don’t have to look upon them.”

“Why do the respectable ones come here?” I ask.

“For the wheelbarrow, of course. To transport crystals to the appropriate gravesites.”

Looking out over the asylum lawn, I spot three skeletons clad in woolskins. They’re raking up crystals. One of the tunnelers winds up and pitches, hard and fast. The crystal strikes the window in front of us so hard the heavy glass cracks. Servant Sarah faints.

“That crystal was huge,” Poe gushes. “Oh, no. Look out!”

The other two tunnelers pitch their own crystals, exploding them against the windows. Luckily, the glass doesn’t crack this time. Their crystals were smaller.

“Why are some of the crystal balls larger than others?” I ask Vincent.

“Denser ghosts require larger crystals. Hunchbacked tunnelers are created in this way. Look there? See? They possess solid identities. Commendable. Though they exhibit bad behavior at this time.”

Small explosions of snow on the lawn reveal new tunnelers arriving on the scene from underground. They fight over the remaining crystal balls surrounding the tipped wheelbarrow. One of them races around the lawn, retrieving the crystals already thrown. Lining up, they all take aim. Crystals blast the
windows.

For a moment I imagine stones in their hands, but I shake it off.

Not stones. Crystal balls.

As quickly as the attack began, it ends. I creep up to the window with Poe and Vincent and look out. The tunnelers are gone.

Servant Sarah hugs herself, crying softly. “This work is becoming very stressful. Things are changing. It’s unsettling.”

Ava, carrying a sleeping Leesel, asks if we can be shown our rooms.

“But we didn’t finish our viewing,” Mrs. Wadsworth argues. “We didn’t get to see
how
the boy died.”

“Does it matter?” Vincent asks. “Is there one of us who judges him worthy of retaining his identity? He was defective. No crystal for him!”

“What do you mean, defective?” I ask.

“He stuttered. Such defections…” Vincent shudders. “Feeble-minded skeletons are undesirable as well; their crystals are gathered and shipped away, to live in camps across the sea, which are guarded that none may escape. They are dangerous, indeed.”

He glances at Servant Sarah, who stands meekly. She notices me staring at her.

“It’s why I’m here,” she explains, shame flushing her face. “I’m safe here. I’ll never die. Never turn to a skeleton and live in a camp. I’m grateful for my asylum.”

Poe puts a hand on my shoulder. I realize I’ve stepped forward, into Vincent’s personal space, and he’s twitching.

Camps
. Heavily guarded. “What makes them dangerous, Vincent?”

“What makes them dangerous? Er, I believe…that…What makes them dangerous? A silly question.” He turns to Captain Wadsworth for help, but the Captain is teetering, intent on not
falling over his wife. “Er, I’m not sure I know
exactly
what the danger is. I believe the tunnelers themselves instituted the segregation.”

I get a vision of Emmy in her crystal, chained to her small skeleton, taken to a concentration camp in my newly haunted world run by psychopathic evangelists.

No, wait. If she were put in a concentration camp, she wouldn’t have her crystal. Would it be Emmy, then, in the concentration camp? If her crystal was elsewhere? Who is she without her ghost?

My scalp tingles.

Emmy in a concentration camp.

No. It’s insane. It will never happen. I will stop it.

Servant Sarah holds the door for everyone to leave. Poe hangs back, shivering, gazing out the window into the distance. “An angel,” he says. “There. The robed figure, dark against the snow.”

44
angels with malady

Folded black wings sprout from the back of the angel’s robe. They’re huge, reaching from his shoulders down to the back of his knees, curved in the shape of a heart. Layers of feathers ruffle in the wind.

One detaches, floats away.

The angel glides serenely across the asylum lawn, fading until it blends into the shadows.

“You boys seem anxious,” Vincent says behind us. He follows our gaze. “Ah, I spy an angel. Not to worry. You are safe here, and the angel knows it. He may only be sulking. The angels put on airs of depression lately. They suffer a mysterious malady. As if they are in dread. Mysterious, indeed.” Vincent guides us to the stairs. “I’ll tell you a secret about the Archangel’s scythe,” he says finally, with a lowered voice.

Poe cringes. “Archangel’s scythe?”

“The famed blade of the Reaper. I’ve seen it myself.” Vincent lowers his voice to a whisper. “Oh, yes. The scythe is brittle, and may not last much longer.” His eyes grow wide with wonder. “Think of the implications!”

“Implications?”

His eyes fix on a faraway place over Poe’s head. “Yes…perchance an escape from death may prove possible…perchance my stay here may prove unnecessary…” He coughs and smiles sheepishly. “Bedtime, isn’t it?”

Poe grabs my elbow and whispers in my ear as we follow Vincent upstairs. “They’re prisoners, Jesse. Oh, look. A ghost!” He reaches out, wanting to touch the spirit sitting on the stairs. It’s a woman. She’s bent forward, stomach hollowed, her long ragged dress draping her feet. Picking at her matted eyes, she
works diligently to tie little knots in the threads attached there. The green of her left eye shows through, and it shifts, landing on me.

She moans. Leans back. Tucks herself against the wall.

“You’re scaring her,” Poe accuses me.

“Me? What am I doing?”

“I don’t know. There’s just something about you. She senses that you can send her away. Don’t do it. She’s not hurting anybody.”

Poe doesn’t know I don’t want to send ghosts away. I’ve never wanted to be an exorcist. It’s merely what the church made of me.

Vincent calls to us. I give Poe a shove to get him moving.

We catch up with the others on the third floor in the hallway. The Wadsworths disappear behind an extra wide door, and I hear a key turning in its lock. Icy cold cascades across the floor. Ava stifles a scream when she looks down. Three ghost mice race over our feet and disappear into the wall.

“No solidity to them,” Servant Sarah soothes.

“I know the room for our young Poe and his friend,” Vincent announces, distracting everyone from the mice.

He leads us to the third door on the right of the corridor. Servant Sarah opens it, peeks her head in, nods at Vincent. She pushes the door open, and I enter with Poe.

Hurricane lamps in the windows lend a comforting glow to the room. Two ridiculously narrow beds, loaded with quilts, are pushed against opposite walls. The floor is wooden, but a heavy woolen rug—much like the sheepskins worn by tunnelers—covers the space between the beds. Though curtains are pulled back because of the hurricane lamps, I’m relieved that we’ll be able to close up the windows so that strange night things won’t be able to peek in at us during the night.

“I’ll put Ava and Leesel right across the hall from you boys,” Servant Sarah says. “And Bethany next to Vincent.” This last she mumbles, and I figure Bethany’s placement has something to do
with Vincent whispering to her a moment before.

Vincent, twirling a lengthy curl of hair around his finger, watches Bethany go in her room.

In the uncomfortable silence that follows, I hear something. A faint thumping. “What is that?” I ask. “Is it under the floor-boards?”

Vincent snickers, backing away. “The tell-tale heart beating.”

“Oh,” Poe says. He stares dumbly at the floor. “There’s not a body beneath the floor, is there?”

Vincent giggles. He sounds like a girl.

I listen at the door after he’s gone. Poe’s bent over, his ear turned toward the floor. Holding a finger to my lips, I wave for him to follow me out into the hallway. I need to talk to Ava.

Vincent stands at Bethany’s door, softly knocking. I push Poe back and quickly close our door. “Not clear yet,” I tell him.

“What are we going to do, Jesse? I’m scared of Elspeth. Remember all those pins in her neck? And listen. These asylum people are a cult! I think Priest would—”

I wave him quiet. Footsteps shuffle in the hallway. A door opens. Closes. More footsteps. Servant Sarah whispers. Bethany’s tinkling laughter sounds, and hurried footsteps fade, followed by a door slamming. In the silence that follows, I start to turn the doorknob in my hand. It won’t move. Then it shakes. Poe gives me a look.

“It’s not me,” I hiss at him. Flustered, I let go of the doorknob. It twists and the door swings open.

45
he’s swollen at the joints

Bethany gives a one-handed strangle to her neck as she enters our room. A bottle of liquor is in her other hand. “I know it’s naughty of me to be out of bed.” She hiccups.

My eyes are glued to Bethany’s feet. They’re clad in boots. “It’s okay,” I say to Poe under my breath. He sees the boots, understands.

Nodding sympathetically to Bethany, he pats her shoulder. “You’re upset about George,” he says.

“What? Oh, yes. Such a twit, beheading himself.” She huffs past us and flops onto the bed on the right. Pulling
The Story of Me
from the folds of her robe, she flips pages. It’s bulging, with extra pages folded and stuffed inside. “It’s just as well. My life has taken the most delightful turn upon his death! No more knitting for me, I’ll have you know. At last, I am free to live the life of adventure I’ve always dreamed. At least, it seems I’ve always dreamed it. A little voice tells me so.” She leans in and drops her voice. “It gives me no pleasure to speak ill of the beheaded, but honestly, George possessed a relentless knack for dousing my fire.”

Poe’s face flames red. She continues without notice.

“Do you know, it was I who insisted we cross the river to fetch you ignorant boys? And the rescue from the tunnels? All my idea, it simply came into my head. You are much indebted to me.” She cocks her head in a benevolent pose, nodding as if accepting our thanks, but I find myself speechless.

George is dead, after all.

She rubs her hands together. “So. What do you think of Vincent? He is terribly in love with me. What do you know of him? A girl needs excitement. Is he likely to provide?”

For once, Poe’s not going to step up with words of diplomacy. His chin juts.

“We only just met Vincent,” I say carefully. “We hardly got here before you did. You know everything about him we do.”

She pouts. “Pooh. I suppose I should take myself off to bed, then. I wouldn’t want my eyes to be puffed in the morning. First I need to write in my personal history book.” She leaves, calling loudly down the hall. “Servant Sarah! Tea!”

“Can you believe her?” Poe asks once her voice has trailed away. “She’s the most awful person I’ve ever met. Heartless. She doesn’t care at all that George is dead.”

“No, she doesn’t.”

“He was a fool for thinking she might care for him.” He goes silent, but his face is strained. “I guess it’s like me, and how I love Ava Lily.”

Hell. Here we go again. I’m tired. I’m worried. I’m irritated.

“Why, Poe? Why do you love her?”

He looks surprised at my question. “You know why. The same reason you wanted her. Remember what you said to me when she moved in with you?
She wants so much to be taken care of.”
Rubbing his chest, his hand suddenly stills over his heart. “I want to take care of her. I love her in a way you never did.”

This fixation he has with Ava makes me feel…something. Something like angry. “Poe. First of all, come on, I don’t really think you love her, do you? That’s a strong word.”

He jabs a finger at me. “Don’t tell me how to feel about her. It’s bad…bad enough that you’ve…kissed her. And I don’t want to know anything else.”

His purity annoys me. “I’ve noticed that it never occurs to you how I might feel about this crush you have on Ava.”

“It’s not a crush. What do you mean, how
you
feel? You didn’t want her anymore.”

Unbelievable. “To tell you the truth, Poe, my relationship with Ava is complicated. Meanwhile, my supposed best friend
openly talks to me about how in love with her he is. Don’t you think it’s weird for me to listen to that?” I throw back a blanket to reveal scratchy, wooly bed linens. The tunnelers would love them. “Why her? Why do you have to go after the only girl I ever did love, the one who lives with me, the one whose daughter I love like my little sister? Like Emmy?”

His mouth drops open. We stand, facing each other, me breathing hard and him seeming to hold his breath. Rather than see him pass out, I break eye contact, turn, sit on the bed.

Where did
that
come from?

Poe clears his throat. “Jesse, I’m sorry…I didn’t know…you’ve never said…Is that…why Ava Lily still lives with you? It’s because you love Leesel?”

I know what he’s asking. He really wants to know if I still love Ava after all. I don’t. But I like her living with me, like protecting her, and I love Leesel. I don’t ever want them to leave. What’s wrong with me? Ava loves me. I know that. She’s made it clear, many nights, what relationship she wants to have with me again.

I’m terrified that Poe will find out that sometimes she still sleeps with me.

Getting up, I take in my best friend’s face. He’s stricken, scared to death that I’m in love with his Annabel Lee. Except for Emmy, I love him more than anyone. “Of course that’s why Ava lives with me,” I tell him, looking him straight in the eye. “It’s because of Leesel.”

Under the floorboards, the beating heart finds a new rhythm. I think this is a good time to get away, go to the girls, talk with them about what we do now that Elspeth has found us. I rush into the hall and run smack into Mrs. Wadsworth.

“Back,” she orders, shaking Servant Sarah’s key ring at me. “I’m locking the lot of you in your rooms. No dalliances are permitted. Not tonight. There’s an angel at the door. Do you want to meet him in the hall? I think not. Back!”

“We’re sorry, ma’am,” Poe says. He grabs me by the collar and
pulls me back in the room. Mrs. Wadsworth swings shut the door and I hear a key turning the lock. “An angel,” he breathes, and I know Ava is temporarily forgotten.

We move to the window, but I feel exposed with our room lit by the hurricane lamps. I snuff them, but the never-ending full moon shines light into the room. Wordlessly, we gaze onto the slope of snow two stories below. There’s no angel in sight, but a lone tunneler skirts round the overturned wheelbarrow and heads toward the asylum. Its skull is cocked so that it seems to be looking directly at our window.

“Oh-oh,” Poe says. “He sees us. Doesn’t matter if we’re in the dark. Look. He’s going to climb the tree.” He presses his face to the glass, trying to see straight down. “I lost sight of him.”

“There it is, Poe. See? Clinging to that split branch. It can’t get to us.”

“I recognize him.”

“You recognize a skeleton?”

“Yeah. Look at his big kneecaps. His bones are swollen at the joints. He’s the one whose ribcage was stuffed with mud, the one I helped. He led us out of the tunnels.”

Poe’s right. I recognize him now too. “Danny. The one that offered a trade of information to me and Ava: The whereabouts of the Holy Ghost or Saint Frankenstein in exchange for an introduction to the missionaries who can get us home. He must be following us.”

Moonlight catches Danny’s face, and I notice his missing teeth. He waves at us. Poe waves back. Encouraged, Danny takes a flying leap, surprising the hell out of me when he lands just below our window. His fingertips scrabble to grip the window ledge. A hand slips, and he dangles crookedly in air before finding another handhold in the crevice between two stones. I hear him clacking, though it’s muffled by the heavy glass of the window.

Danny’s cranium rises until he’s peeking in at me with his
hollow eyes. He drops his jaw and swings his skull from side to side.

The window fogs.

“How’s he doing that?” Poe asks in delight.

Planting his chin on the ledge for balance, Danny lets go with one of his hands. His swollen-knuckled finger writes in the fogged glass. Backwards, so that I can read it.

where saint frank?

I raise up my palms in an
I-don’t-know
gesture.

Danny clacks a tirade. He erases his writing and, after thinking awhile, performs his breathing trick to fog the glass once more.

help me

Reaching down, he grasps the small rag-wrapped crystal ball at his ribs and plops it on the window ledge. It rolls to me, slamming against the window glass.

“Weird,” Poe says. He pushes against my shoulder. I take a step to the side. The crystal rolls after me until the chain it’s attached to runs out. “Jesse? Why’s it doing that?” He pokes me. “Jesse? You okay?”