The Ghosting of Gods (24 page)

54
polluted savior

Ava digs away, oblivious to the floating crystals surrounding me. Leesel, however, stands in the doorway of the shed where she’s checking on Elspeth. Does she see?

Slowly, Poe approaches, holding a lantern before him. “Jesse?” he asks. He pushes the lantern close to my face. At this moment a clump of mud shoots upward to pelt me in the face. In its wake, a crystal ball rises, luminous in the dark of the night.

Poe startles, drops the lantern. He quickly retrieves it as he backs away from me. My brain is scrambling, trying to think of something to say. Some reason. Some excuse for why this happens to me.

Rain falls. Ava swears. “This isn’t working,” she complains. She plops on the ground and drops her forehead to her knees. She hasn’t noticed anything weird yet.

Poe and I stare at one another. I can imagine what he’s thinking of me.

The grave trembles, and mud sprays.

Poe keeps his voice low when he finally speaks. “Jesse, it’s a terrible sin to raise the spirits of the dead.”

What?

“You’ve got to stop this! Remember your faith. Ask for forgiveness. Please, Jesse. You’re my best friend. What will happen to you when you die? What will be your judgment? I’m scared for you.”

“I’m not doing anything bad.”

“Yes you are. What is inside you, that you would turn against God like this?” His breath sucks in. “This has been going on since before we came to Memento Mori, hasn’t it? The way you kept going to graveyards…oh, no…all of this is your fault…isn’t it?”

“No. Yes. I wanted to know. I wanted knowledge, Poe. Can’t you understand? Please.”

Ava gets up. Approaches us. She slows, and I know she’s overheard what Poe has said to me. “What are you evangelizing about now, Poe?” she asks, clearly impatient with him. “Leave Jesse alone.”

He points at me. “Jesse has been dealing with dark things! He invites ghosts to possess him. That’s the reason the priests exiled us to Memento Mori!
Jesse brought us here.”

His shaking finger is a physical blow to me.

“This can’t be my fault,” I shout, lying.

In response, the burlap bag filled with crystal balls drags my way. Poe’s finger swings to point at it. He screams.

Shame engulfs me. Suddenly, Bethany’s words about Frankenstein come into my mind. She called him a polluted savior. I start to laugh. That’s it. It’s perfect. I’ve struggled between believing I’m special, but knowing I’m bad. A polluted savior incorporates both. That’s what I’ve been, trying to bring Emmy salvation. A polluted savior.

That’s why I can never save Emmy. I’m bad inside. Sinful. Polluted.

And why
should
I be able to save her? It’s my fault she’s dead. I didn’t protect her. I was late to school, late to walk her home. And why? Because I was bent on defying my priests. Because I craved forbidden fruit, craved knowledge. And my heart told me that knowledge was to be found in the mystery of ghosts. I believed God made me an exorcist for a reason—to communicate with ghosts.

I was late to Emmy’s school because I was sitting in prayer in a graveyard, where I’ve always felt closest to God.

I chose God over Emmy
.

A God I’m no longer sure even exists. And now my sister is dead.

A surge of guilt rises within me, and a rain of mud gushes up
from the graveyard, a geyser of filth.

Ava and Poe both shriek, both shield their heads with their arms as the mud showers back down. I do nothing. I let the dirt cover me without resistance. But then…I bend, gather mud in my fist.

I pitch it at Poe, striking him in the face.

Before he can react, I rush at him, knock him to the ground. He shelters his face, lapses into Latin, and inside me…rage. “I hate your God!” I scream. He pulls an arm away from his face and my fist lands. “Why didn’t God save Emmy? Why doesn’t He let me save her? We’ve come all this way, and it’s for nothing, because I can’t do it. I can’t save her.” I strike him. Once. And again. Harder.

I’m beating Poe.

Stunned, I stop. Poe rolls away, whimpering, holding his face.

Ava’s reaching out to me, her hand shaking, like she’s afraid I might hit her too. “Jesse, Jesse,” she keeps saying. Nothing more, just my name. I hear Leesel too. Crying. She’s here. Seeing all of this.

I allow Ava to hold me. She wraps her arms around me, tight. Buries her face in my neck.

What just happened? Did I really just beat up Poe?

Across from me, in the pouring rain, Poe crouches, rocks on his heels, stares at Ava holding me. Glowing crystals bob around him, so luminous that they’ve lit up the graveyard like a stage. Leesel tiptoes around the crystals, watching Poe, but she doesn’t say anything to him. At last she turns to me. Her face is contorted.

Who am I?

Ava leaves me, goes to Leesel.

I sit alone. Rainwater fills the ditches we’ve dug. Slowly, I lower myself into the mud. I hear them talking. With the splashing of raindrops, I can’t make out what they’re saying, and I don’t want to.

Elspeth has done bad things too. Elspeth would understand…

Water bubbles around me.

I realize Ava’s leaning over me. “Look,” she orders. “I think the tunnelers are coming up.” The storm blows full force, lashing rain at my face so hard that it hurts, but I pull myself up on my elbows and look where Ava is pointing.

A coffin thrusts upward. It doesn’t quite clear the earth before falling back down, like a breaching whale. It cracks in half, and a cloud puffs around, like settling dust. Corpse dust. Otherwise it’s empty. It rolls, and a tunneler, black with fertile dirt, appears from beneath it. It digs at its eye sockets and tilts its face up to the night sky. Pouring rain showers its skull clean.

Earth caves in at random spots all across the graveyard, even where we haven’t been digging. Tunnelers surface, clawing and scrambling in mud until there are a dozen of them crouched along the ground. They wash mud from the crystals hanging around their necks.

I find myself standing. My fists are clenched.

They’re not taking Elspeth
.

Surreptitiously, they watch us, some stripping decaying burial clothes from their bodies.

Poe trembles, but he won’t look at me.

“We’re looking for Danny,” Ava announces. Her voice is loud, screechy. “He told us to call him when we learned the whereabouts of Saint Frankenstein. We have.”

This gets their attention. They lope to form a circle around us before I even think of running. Hell, they’re fast. Their movements aren’t human. One backs up from the rest and jumps feet-first into a hole, disappearing into the earth.

The tunnelers clack loudly, chaotically. Then, on some signal unseen by me, they nod in sync.

“Okay, then,” Ava says.

I’m not letting them take Elspeth. I only want their help. One of them must have medical knowledge. One of them has to.

Guarding us, tunnelers shrink at each streak of lightning. They soon grow restless. Some of them creep around. One of the slinking tunnelers draws near to me. Suddenly his hand shoots out with the uncanny quickness, squeezing the flesh on my arm and then poking me in the back before I jerk out of reach.

Eventually a skeleton struggles out of a gravesite. The crowd parts with a lot of clacking. The new tunneler sloshes up to us. I notice that it has some missing teeth, just like Danny. He takes both of my hands in his own.

His knuckles are enlarged. Swollen.

“Danny?”

One loud clack.

“We know the whereabouts of Saint Frankenstein,” Ava says, yelling as if he’s deaf, “and we’ll tell you where to find her if you help us get back to our own world. Take us to a missionary.”

Danny simply stands, simply holds my hands.

“Like you promised,” Ava adds.

Though Danny is calm, the rest of the tunnelers clack. Quietly at first, but they get louder and louder. A few shake their fists.

Danny gently releases my hands. He takes three angry tunnelers aside and makes sign language at them. I get the idea he’s asking them to calm down. They shake him off. Jabbing their fingers in our direction, they clack loudly at the rest of the tunnelers who stand uncertainly.

“What’s going on?” Leesel asks.

“I don’t know,” Ava says in a tight voice. She glances at the shed.

They tighten their circle around us. Poe keeps his eyes away from mine.

One of them breaks from the others and darts to Leesel, snatching her up. With surreal speed two others skitter along the ground, tackle Ava and Poe. I’m the strongest; the cowards aren’t going for me.

“Jesse, get Leesel,” Ava screams at me. I’m already there. But
the tunneler with Leesel easily stays out of my reach as I lunge and slip, lunge and slip. Most of the tunnelers seem to be in a panic—they lope away, trampling Danny underfoot. In the confusion I lose sight of Ava and Poe, but I can see Leesel, lifted over her abductor’s head, moving away from me.

I have to protect her
.

Tunnelers race in all directions in the driving rain. Leesel disappears from view. One of the skeletons advances on me. Behind him I see Ava and Poe sliding rapidly through the mud, on their backs, toward ruptured graves.

Tunnelers are going to take them underground.

Ava screams about Saint Frankenstein, but they aren’t listening.

As the advancing tunneler leaps like a wild animal at me, I shout as loudly as I can to be heard over the racket of rain and wind, thunder and clacking.

“She’s
in the shed!”

I’m shoved to the ground. The tunneler juts his forehead to mine, clacks abusively,
bites
me.

“Saint Frankenstein. She’s in the shed. We brought her to you!” I scream again, but he hits me. Again and again. A blow twists my head, burying one eye in the mud, and I try to see if everyone I care about is gone, underground, but my vision is blurred. “Saint Frankenstein. In the shed,” I repeat.

The blows end and I lie in pain. I feel myself lifted. I open a blurry eye. Danny is holding me up.

Elspeth is screaming.

She’s conscious. I watch as they drag her from the shed. Thrashing like an animal, she calls for me. “Jesse…help me, help, please…” They pull her to an open grave. She strokes frantically at the watery mud, but like a swimmer attacked by a shark, she submerges with an abrupt jerk.

Danny kneels beside me and strokes my hair. He clicks Morse code, and I realize he’s trying to get me to see something.

It’s Poe. He’s pulling himself back out of a grave.

“Ava and Leesel,” I say to Danny. “Can you save them?”

Danny disappears into the earth. I cleanse mud from Poe’s face while he clings silently to me, trembling. “Jesus, Poe,” I say. “Jesus. I almost lost you.”

Moments later Danny reappears, hauling Ava and Leesel above ground. They’re alive.

Apparently, the tunnelers were satisfied with our sacrifice of Elspeth, their Saint Frankenstein.

I turn aside and get sick.

The storm worsens. We take shelter in the shed. Sleep.

In the morning, Poe is gone.

55
bulging sacristies

The City of Sacristies.

Sharp steeples levitate in the gloom. As we pass through the warped gate and enter the city, I hear faint cries of flagellants behind bells that toll, low and resonating. But it’s different than George and Bethany’s town. There’s no soot. As if the people here don’t use fires to keep warm. It’s cold here. Metallic cold.

Did Poe come here? Why would he leave us?

I know why. He’s horrified by me.

The construction is so crowded that we walk single file. I watch the back of Danny as he leads us through the winding paths of the City. He’s covered in a robe, hiding his skull deep in a cowl, bending forward like a penitent monk.

Danny wrote in the mud that Poe left on his own. It’s hard to believe Poe would do that. But I hit him. I hit my best friend. Ava is mean to him, and Leesel ignores him. And then I hit him.

What’s wrong with me?

I search for him in every face we pass, but like Danny, these people walk with hunched backs, in postures of anxiety. Not one denizen of the City meets my eyes.

Hundreds more walk single file as we do, along the slim paths formed between high walls. I look up at the howl of another flagellant, this one louder. Closer.

A cage is built into the cathedral wall. Up high.

Ava sees it, too, and grabs hold of my hand. “Oh, God,” she whispers. Holding Leesel’s hand, she pulls her in tighter. “Don’t look up, baby.”

Flagellants clasp prison bars, seeming barely able to hold up their emaciated bodies. They could be skeletons except for their skin. One of them notices us looking up out of the crowd.
Reaching through the bars, she stretches her fingers out to us.

She yodels in pain, grimacing as the bitter wind peels thinned hair back from her face.

I collide with a denizen. “Keep your gaze down,” he growls. “Don’t look inside the sacristies.”

Sacristies? The cages are
sacristies?
I’m offended at the idea. Sacristies are rooms for holy artifacts or priestly vestments, not self-torturing psychopaths. I look at the man who growled at me.

Half his face is obliterated with the wads of threads he wears for eyes. “Sorry,” I mumble, lowering my face.

He doesn’t move out of my way. “Do you want to become one of them?” he asks. “A cowardly beast? Keep your face down. Their despair is contagious.”

He steps aside, trailing chains over cobblestones.

So dense as to appear living, I marvel at how real he seems as he darts around other pedestrians. How many around me are also ghosts? Examining the edges of robes around me, I see that about one in three drags chains.

That’s why the City is so cold.

We hurry to catch up with Danny.

Cages—sacristies—sloppily
annex, at varying heights, the stone walls of the cathedrals. Flagellants fill them all. But does one of the hundreds of bulging sacristies contain the Holy Ghost Incarnate? Shoving my fists beneath my armpits, I trail after Danny on stiff legs. Ava pulls at my arm, takes my hand. Her fingernails dig into me when another flagellant cries out.

I realize legions of ghosts inhabit Memento Mori. Many are attached to skeletons. Others have been loose, like the ones knocking about in George’s dwelling. But here, in this City…I can
feel
the haunting. I hear it. Even smell it. It’s the smell of cold. Moist cold. Yet static charges the air.

Denizens hide their faces deep inside their cowls, but electricity floats their unkempt hair so that it pokes free of their robes, twitching. That’s not all that floats. Threads drift on the
cold air, like the ones I got in my mouth. Shuddering, I think of matted ghost eyes.

Missing cobblestones cause everyone to stumble like drunks.

“Another fool come to seek the Presence,” a woman grumbles as she presses against a wall to let me pass.

Whatever Presence is here, it can’t be a Holy Ghost.

Where is Poe?

Danny skips across puddles, the white of his skeletal feet briefly escaping the hem of his robe with each small leap. With everyone’s gaze cast downward, it doesn’t take long for a denizen to notice what he is.

Pointing at Danny with a grubby finger, a small boy yells. “Don’t let it touch me, Uncle!”

The boy is red-headed and resembles Jamison. I squash an urge to backhand him.

His uncle, scrawny and afflicted with a gruesome skin rash, turns to see the source of his nephew’s tears. Following the line of the boy’s pointing finger, his eyes widen at the sight of Danny, who has inexplicably dropped his cowl to reveal his skull.

The tunneler’s jaw is dropped slightly, as if smiling. He holds up his palms. Bows his head.

“No!” the uncle screeches.

Denizens take in the scene and lower their heads even further, if that’s possible. I lose sight of the uncle as he scoops up his nephew and vanishes into the hysterical crowd. Hidden doors in stone walls become apparent as denizens flee. Many choke, as if on the verge of vomiting, as they push past me with quivering lips. Their disgust with Danny seems hinged on terror.

Only the flagellants are silent. I look up, see them in their cages, gazing down on us, their wasted bodies shifting in the winds.

A bell tolls.

Danny calmly moves on. He finds a nook emptied of cobblestones. Pulling a broken stick from inside his robe, he writes in
the mud.

I turn—voices are approaching.

Danny slips past me and approaches the small crowd that faces us. They grimace at his appearance. Without breaking his easy stride, he enters their midst. They part, let him by. “Where did it go?” they ask us.

I see the top of Danny’s skull, slowly bouncing along as he skips away.

Strangely, the angry crowd can’t figure out where he went. They disperse, mumbling in confusion.

The mud is so wet as to barely hold the shape of Danny’s letters, but I read his message.

pass courthouse leave City by north gate

Leesel places her hands on her hips. “We better get going. Everyone knows we’re here. They could accuse of us anything. Elspeth says those who live behind gates are frightened, and therefore dangerous.”

I smudge Danny’s lines so no flagellant can peer down and read them. “Let’s go.”

After wandering in circles for several minutes, we discover a path that soon widens, leading to an area of the City where hundreds mill. Silver coins change hands, goods are accepted, and all of it is in utter silence.

No one seems to pay us any mind. They’re too busy with their shopping. We blend into the crowds.

“Where’s the courthouse?” Ava asks, craning her neck to see.

Denizens dart in and out of premises marked
bread
or
shoes
or
books
, though their bags appear mostly empty. Farther along another cathedral rises, but this one houses no flagellants, much to my relief. However, contorted faces gape from stone, their chiseled features creating realistic portraits of suffering souls.
Pointed arches showcase large-winged angels with scythes for feathers. Slits of stained glass are broken.

I glance at the entrance to the bakery. Enormous iron rings matching the width of the door serve as a knocker. My stomach grumbles. I wonder why there’s no scent of baking bread.

A courthouse?

Rows of slender columns and lancet windows mark it as structure of significance. I start toward it when Ava elbows me. “Head down,” she says.

Ah. The uncle with diseased skin is heading toward us. Luckily, he veers to the left, toward the courthouse. He yanks the little boy behind him. They disappear inside huge wooden doors as another bell tolls. At the sound of its ringing, people drift out of shops and brush past us, quickly heading inside the courthouse.

Ignoring Ava’s protests, I shake her off and go to have a look inside. I can’t help wondering if Poe would go there. For help.

The ceiling is vaulted, and paintings smother the walls—depictions of people gathered around coffins, smiling. I hear a gavel, followed by a voice calling out
Town hall meeting to begin
. After that the voice lowers and I can’t make out what’s being said.

There must be two hundred of them in there, easy. At the sound of another gavel strike, robes drop to the floor. A hefty woman passes out capes; everyone puts one on.

Leesel comes up behind me and snickers. “Elspeth told me about this,” she says.

Stunned, I watch as people pull small jars from their bags. They begin smearing shiny black stuff in their hair.

“Scary-wary vampires,” Leesel says, and I shush her as she starts giggling again.

Candle-laden tables attract queues of vampires. I can read a few of the signs on the tables from where I stand. One says
stalking duty
, another
doctrine details
, and one more
advanced fear
tactics training
. The man attending this last table has a mutilated face. No one lines up for his services.

A couple of vampires leave the crowd and stop just inside the entrance, not three feet from where we’re hiding behind a pillar.

“What we should be doing is electing someone to play the part of Holy Ghost Incarnate,” says one of them. “Someone of pale complexion and appealing stature. Perhaps Leonard?” She absent-mindedly runs a hand through her hair, scowls at the black residue left on her fingers, and wipes it off on her cape. “These rumors of revolution are disturbing. Did you hear of the numerous tunneler sightings today? It’s all caused by that absurd headline.”

Her companion grunts. “So you believe the Ghost lives?”

“I believe the Ghost never lived. How, then, could it die?”

“Let them hear you, and you’ll be stoned for blasphemy.”

“Pooh,” she says. “I’m not the only one who feels this way. Half this City has lost their religion. The others imprison themselves, an outward manifestation of their caged minds. I would scream too, if I believed what they did. You’ll not see me searching for a savior.”

“You’re too practical for that.”

“Of course. I’ll be at the bonfire tonight. You?”

He nods. “Not that I believe…”

They move out of earshot, holding down their capes against the wind until they wander back inside the courthouse.

Leesel pulls me away. “Let’s go,” she says. “Danny may be waiting on us. I like him. I don’t want him to think we’re not coming. And…” She bites her lip.

“And what?” I prompt her.

Leesel gestures toward a group of children playing in what I would call the town square, around a wooden platform. “They’re taking turns looking at one another’s hourglasses. It reminded me of mine. And Mommy’s.” She pulls me and Ava up the street. “She threw hers in the snow, but I retrieved it. Now I don’t know
which one is mine and which is hers, but one of them is almost out of sand.”

Ava snorts. “Leesel, you know that’s superstitious nonsense.”

“It doesn’t matter, Mommy. If someone stops us, and demands to see our hourglasses, they may insist that one of us dies.”

Looking alarmed, Ava picks up speed.

Something about Leesel is bothering me. I realize what it is. “Why did you bother getting back your mommy’s hourglass, Leesel?”

She holds up her arms for me to carry her. “Elspeth says they work,” she admits, cupping her hand to her mouth so that only I hear.

“What do you mean?”

Matter-of-factly, she answers. “It means one of us doesn’t have much time left.”