The Ghosting of Gods (7 page)

14
the flock hides in hell

A flame floats in the dark space next to the lantern, entering it. An orange glow lights up the tunnel. It’s bright, blinding, and I shield my face. Out of the corner of my eye I see Poe looking up and squinting, grasping his crucifix.

The lantern suddenly drops down, splashing in the water at my feet. I stare dumbly at it. Look back up.

The skeleton is trembling.

What the hell? An earthquake?

The pelvic bone, curved and smooth and tangerine in the lantern light, shifts. Mud knocks loose, revealing more bone. Tremors run up the knobby spine. The neck bone twists, slightly. “Poe?” I shrink back—somehow the skeleton is mashing down through the mud.

It spasms loose from the ceiling.

Dropping to the floor at Poe’s feet, the skeleton lands, impossibly, in a crouch.

Click-click-click.

Morse code, above us.

Skulls peer down through gaps in the ceiling. They have no eyes, but they swivel their heads to follow Poe’s movement as he stumbles backward into a wall, pulling Ava with him.

The crouched skeleton washes his foot in a puddle. It painstakingly removes mud from between small bones, toe by toe by toe. More skeletons drop down, provoking animalistic whines from Poe. One of the dead latches onto my friend’s ankle.

Poe can only breathe in, not out.

This can’t be real.

Utter calm envelops me as I stand so very still, never minding all the movement around me. The calm is effortless. Strangely
familiar. A loud crack draws my attention, and I observe what seems to be happening.

The dead are alive. My friends…

The wall squirms. Mud stirs at Poe’s back and he leaps forward, directly into the arms of one of the
things
.

Heavy chains loop the necks of the dead. Their backs hunch with the weight. Crystal balls dangle like pendants from the chains. The crystals tick, like clocks.

My scalp tingles. My gaze locks onto the crystals.

Click-click-click. The dead click their teeth, chattering at us. The Morse code is
speech
.

One of them grabs my arm. Its eye sockets are barely visible beneath the packed mud atop its skull. Unlike the others, it’s dressed, its robe wet, dragging. It taps its fingers against its cheek bone. The sound mimics the clicking of teeth. It has none. Its jaw is unhinged, its skull crooked.

Ava swings at the skeleton nearest her. She screams, and Poe joins her with piercing screams of his own. He tries to run and knocks over the lantern, dimming its glow.

Skeletons skitter in and out of lantern light. Darting forward, they touch me. They poke. Prod. At last, my peaceful trance breaks, and rage floods me as I recoil from the cold touch of bone on my face. My senses amplify. The cracking of Morse code, the flash of white inside deep shadows, the taste of mud dragged into my mouth by the finger of a thing not dead…

“What have you done with Leesel?” Ava is shrieking as I use both hands to grasp a spine. I heave the skeleton terrorizing Poe into the pack of skittering others. “Leesel! Give me Leesel!” Ava screams again and again.

Playtime halts. The lantern is lifted, and they surge toward Ava in fluid, unified movement. One of them cocks its skull to the side and clicks its teeth together, softly, and the others break away.

There’s a flash of white on both sides of me, and I’m
restrained. Shoved into the mud wall, I’m pinned at the throat, forearms, and ankles, immobilized. My fists clench as Ava’s eyes widen in fear. I speak clearly to the skeleton threatening her.

“Leave her alone or I’ll fucking fracture you.”

Poe whimpers.

The skeleton ignores me. Wagging a finger at Ava, it speaks to her in a series of deliberate clicks that somehow congeal the blood in my veins. Leaning close to her, the dead thing twitches its face up and down, like it’s sniffing her. Once bent over, it struggles to straighten again. Its crystal ball pendant is huge, weighing down its chest, filling half its broken rib cage. Images move within the crystal.

“Let me do this,” Poe says. His eyes are bulging, he sounds asthmatic, but he’s fixated on Ava, not the skeletons. “Remember they were people before they were skeletons. Let me do this.” Quivering, he steps forward and carefully places an arm between Ava and the skeleton. “Beware.” He pretends to strangle his neck with his free hand. “We’re glad to meet you because we’re lost. Help?”

The skeleton seems to consider the question. It turns to its companions, clicks its teeth, shakes all over. Startled, I realize it’s impersonating Poe. Its friends gape wide their jaws. They bend at the waist, grasping onto one another in silent hilarity.

It’s not all silent. Harsh, freakish laughter sounds from somewhere down the tunnel.

Skeletons sink to their knees. Bow their heads.

A new skeleton strides forward, a giant, so tall that its skull scrapes the ceiling. It clacks and gestures with its hands, forming its fingers into complicated and rapid configurations, like sign language. In unison, like a flock of birds, all the skeletons except the three restraining me retreat into shadows.

The giant regards us with its empty eye sockets. “Fl-eshed,” it says. The word is barely recognizable, strangely pitched and sounding grated. It reaches up and tenderly strokes a bit of flesh
wrapped along its neck bone. “S-ore.”

“He can talk,” Poe blurts.

Its body is damaged. Chinked. A frayed rope tied around its pelvic bone carries a small burlap bag. Out of it hangs some sort of metal tool. It’s long, curved at the end, and sharp. The giant sees me looking. It tips back its skull, pulls at its ribcage, and screams. Poe screams with it.

I know what the giant is.

A flagellant.

Its distorted scream ends. It reaches for its burlap bag.

“No, don’t,” Poe says, stepping forward.

The flagellant lunges, hits Poe so hard his body immediately slumps to the floor. Stunned, I realize Poe’s not moving. At all.

Ava cries out when the flagellant turns to her. I can do nothing. Straining against my captors, I can’t even begin to move. They’re freakishly strong. “No, don’t,” I beg as it raises its fist to Ava. It turns to me. There’s a blur, and pain streaks down my neck as my head jerks to the side.

Timid clicking approaches. Retreats. Approaches again. Bony fingers squeeze my ankles. Pull. I slide along the tunnel floor. Cold mud piles up under my coat. The muscles in my neck give out, and I let my head drag. Sudden clacking reverberates in the tunnels with the conversations of the undead, and as I slide away into a nightmare world my mind plays tricks on me.

The skeleton is tickling my foot.

Reflexively, I kick.

It drops my feet. The sound of ticking moves away in the pitch black. Subdued Morse code echoes.

Bodies drop beside me, groaning. Ava and Poe. The skeletons step over us, clicking their teeth, and we’re left alone. I find Ava by touch. “Are you hurt?” I ask. “Poe, are you okay?”

Ava doesn’t speak, but she pulls herself into me. I hold her.

“They’re tunnelers,” Poe whispers. He hiccups. “They’re going to bury us. Turn us into skeletons.
SALVE, Regina, mater
misericordiae: vita, dulcedo, et spes nostra, salve. Ad te clamamus exsules filii Hevae. Ad te suspiramus, gementes et flentes in hac lacrimarum valle…”

Light spills over us. A hobbling skeleton—tunneler—arrives with a lantern. It ignores us, walks past us, and cranks the flame high so we can see.

“Mother Mary,” Poe whispers.

15
crystal ball gazers

We sit in the middle of a cave. At first I think bricks pepper the walls, but then I see the bricks aren’t bricks, but books. The tunnelers have pushed them into the muck, using the walls themselves as bookshelves. Animal skins cover the ceiling. Lines mark the leather, creating crude sketches, which resemble maps. Titles are burned into the various skins.
Exodus. City of Sacristies
.
Promised Land of Presence Incarnate or Not, Does Not Matter
. The drawings on the leather make me think of constellations—circles connected with lines.

“Maybe they’ve drawn maps of the night sky,” Poe whispers, “to remind them what it’s like above ground.”

Twenty or thirty tunnelers sit on wooly rugs or prop themselves against curved walls. Some of them are very still, and maybe asleep, or nonliving, but most hold books in their hands, reading without eyes.

My own gaze is drawn to the crystal balls resting against, or inside, their rib cages. The ticking is steady, sounding like the echo of water droplets falling in a cave.

Emmy’s crystal ball didn’t tick.

Poe stares at the nearest tunneler. He gets excited. “I see something inside of that one’s crystal ball! It’s moving. Do you think they could be seers?” His face falls. “Oh, no. I don’t want to scare anybody, but Priest says using devices to see into the future is evil unless you’re a seer chosen by God.”

Ava’s holding her head. I pull back her fingers, get a look at the bump above her ear. It’s not too bad, and the bleeding is just a scrape.

She indicates the tunnelers, then ducks her face, barely moving her lips when she speaks. “Will they chase us if we try to
leave?”

The tunnelers snap their heads in our direction, even the ones who appeared to be comatose. They jut their lower jaws like bulldogs, sign with their hands, click their teeth violently. The stooped one moves the lantern closer to us and then backs into the shadows.

Ava’s eyes meet mine. I take some comfort that she’s no longer hysterical. Instead, the expression on her face is calculating, if still a bit crazy. I think she’s gone into survival mode. I hope so. She squeezes my hand and deliberately settles her head against my shoulder. “Take care of me,” she whispers, and I feel a need to protect her, like always.

I stroke strands of her tangled hair.

Poe strokes his crucifix and rocks his body.

The clocks tick. Time passes. One by one tunnelers shift from shadows into lantern light, closer to us. Their bones creak when they move. Most have white bones, but some are yellowed, or a blackened gray. They don’t speak or gesture, but they watch us. It’s unnerving how absolutely still they are, like predatory crocodiles, but then I suppose it’s because they don’t have to breathe.

All the ticking is getting on my nerves. Somehow their clocks have synchronized, so it’s like a dripping faucet again, making me crazy. I don’t know why they don’t smash the damn things.

Like I tried to do with Emmy’s crystal ball.

And what happened to her? What did I do? And what did she mean, “Blessed are the poor in ghost?”

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe God is trying to show me something here in this world with the skeletons and their crystals. The possibility clears my head. Yes. Of course. God wants to help me save Emmy. All of this is no accident. God is with me.

I realize that many of the tunnelers have dropped their books. Does the synchronized ticking mean they’re sleeping?

Ava has already started scooting, bit by bit, toward the tunnel
entrance. I shake my head at her. “Stop,” I whisper urgently.

Tunnelers swivel their skulls in our direction. In unison, they wag their fingers at us. Ava scoots back to me.

Creepy. I’m reminded again of a flock of birds. Or schooling fish. It’s like the skeletons have one mind.

They’re definitely awake now. The ticking is faster. Pairing off, they gaze into one another’s crystal balls. Two close to us click and point at the images they see. The owner is explaining events, it seems. His clicking is even, while his partner has a higher pitched click at the end of her Morse code, like she’s asking questions. She squeaks her teeth to do it, using a quick sliding motion of her jaw to the side.

The owner of a crystal the size of a bowling ball crooks a finger to call me closer.

“What are you doing?” Ava hisses at me as I go to the hunchback.

My voice cracks, and I clear my throat. “Why do you wear this crystal ball?” I ask the skeleton, carefully articulating each word.

Nothing.

“What’s inside the crystal? Is it your ghost?”

It clicks once. Then nods.

Okay. “Is your ghost
trapped
in there?”

It has no flesh on its neck to make sounds with, so it clicks Morse code. Frustrated that I can’t understand, I point at its crystal ball. “Is there a way to get your ghost out of the crystal?”

Its response is a flurry of Morse code.

I shake my head. “I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”

“He wants to explain his answer,” Ava says. She scoots closer, leans in to me with her arm wrapped around my shoulder. “I know why you’re asking these questions, Jesse,” she breathes into my ear.

I doubt it.

She glances back over at Poe, then presses her cheek to mine.
“I’ve seen you in the graveyard, Jesse. Did you really think I wouldn’t follow you to find out what’s wrong with you? I love you.”

She says this last part with passion. I know Poe overhears. But all I can think is how Ava knows about me and crystals. My mind races, thinking when she could have spied on me without me realizing it. I thought I’d been so careful. Did she see me at Emmy’s grave on that last visit?

“You don’t want Poe to know,” Ava continues, quietly whispering again. “I haven’t told him, even though he’s asked me if I know what your obsession with graves is all about. He’s close to the priests. So I didn’t tell.”

I close my eyes. Shake my head.

“All I’m saying is, be careful, Jesse. Be careful what you say in front of Poe. He loves the priests, and priests don’t condone the use of crystal balls.”

Shrugging her arm loose from my shoulder, I stare into the crystal ball like the tunneler wants. It’s pointing at the crystal vigorously, at the forms arising within it.

I gaze.

He’s young in the scene. A teenager. Lifting an enormous iron ring, he lets it fall on a wooden door twice his height. He knocks again. A man comes to the door, carrying a girl in his arms. Her arms hang limply, her eyes stare upward, unblinking. She’s dead.

The man shoves her body into the teenaged boy’s arms. Staggering backwards, he almost falls, but regains his balance. He turns, and I see he’s weeping.

“Oh, no,” Ava says. She’s watching the scene in the crystal ball, too.

The boy shifts the weight of the dead girl’s body in his arms. Lifting his chin, he stops crying. A small crowd gathers around him, but he pays no attention. He walks through the crowd, pulling the girl’s body close to his chest. Like he’s protecting her.

The scene stutters. Blurs. Fog fills the sphere.

“I’m sorry,” I tell the tunneler. He doesn’t respond, but he’s looking at me. At least, his eye sockets are facing me. “I really am sorry. I…I want to know…Did your ghost go in this crystal ball when
you
died?”

Ava recoils. She’s gaping at the crystal ball.

The fog is lifted. The boy stands at a wooden block, holding a blood-smeared axe. Severed from the body, the girl’s head rolls at the feet of the crowd. They’re clapping. One of them steps forward and appears to be yelling—there’s no sound, of course, so I don’t know what he’s saying. Turning to the boy, he takes the axe, drops it to the ground. The man and boy hug. The boy weeps. Reaching into his coat pocket, the man pulls out an object and places it in the boy’s hands.

A crystal ball.

I need to know what’s happening in this scene, what the man is saying. An urge to touch the tunneler’s crystal ball overwhelms me.

It burns cold, as always, and my hand involuntarily jerks back.

The crowd cheers around me. To my right is the man, comforting the crying teenage boy. I’m in the scene.

No. Ava is here, and Poe, and the tunnelers in the cave. They’re all standing, staring at the man and boy, just as I am. The scene from inside the crystal ball has manifested, right here in the cave. It’s a three-dimensional movie of ghosts, projected all around us. I realize that the man and boy, the axe, the crowd—all of it—is not solid. Everyone from the scene is slightly transparent.

There’s sound now. The scene continues, and I hear everything.

“Take comfort, boy,” the man says, patting him on the back. “I say, your true love will never resurrect to a wretched body of bones. You will keep her ghost, safe in this crystal ball, so you may treasure her all the rest of your life. Forever will you gaze
upon your moments together! I say,
you have saved her.”

The crowd murmurs, nodding their heads.

I understand. They’re trying to end separation, trying to ease their grief.

Is this the purpose of the crystals? Bile rises in my throat. Did God try to answer my prayer, to ease my grief, by placing Emmy in a crystal ball for me?

“Let the damned make their exodus!” the man shouts, interrupting my horror. “We shall behead ourselves at death, and this plague of tunneling horror will be no more!”

At the word
exodus
, the tunnelers in the cave explode in clicking. They run into the manifested ghostly scene from the crystal ball, and it disperses. Maps are yanked from the walls and ceiling and passed around. They point. Click their Morse code.

I stare, numb, at the tunneler who was once the boy. He sits, arms wrapped around his chest and rocking. His skull is down, tucked into his folded arms.

Another tunneler, deformed with swollen bones at the joints, goes to him. Touches his shoulder. The owner of the manifested crystal ball scene stops his rocking. His comforter pats him, then moves away again, clutching its own crystal ball, which is wrapped in dark rags. It’s tiny, practically the size of a marble.

I wonder what it’s hiding. Or what it doesn’t want to have to see. Like I don’t want to see Emmy’s murder.

The tunneler with the tiny crystal goes and sits, the only tunneler not gazing into crystal. A child skeleton scampers up and nestles on its lap. Finger games begin. I startle when I see bones making a steeple, then showing the people inside. The child clicks happily with the few teeth it has—it’s a toddler, I realize.

After several minutes, the tunneler lifts the toddler off its lap, and the little one goes to play with another child skeleton.

Ava is beside me. “It was an axe-murderer, that tunneler with the big crystal ball.”

“She was already dead.”

“It was sick. Twisted.”

What’s sick is capturing a ghost in a crystal. Emmy is trapped in her murder. Trapped in her past. There’s no salvation with the crystals. My being here is no answer to my prayer for knowledge, no answer to my prayer for Emmy to be saved.

My being here means nothing. I’m angry.

One of the tunnelers hobbles over to us on a crooked foot, holding out a book to me. Poe elbows me and I accept it, being careful not to touch its fingers. The tunneler backs away, repeatedly bowing, reminding me of a monk.

The book cover is dusty. I clean it, and the title appears.
Hide-and-Seek Your Way to the Promised Land, by Pauley
. The text is scrawled in thick ink, not typed. Page after page of drawings similar to those on the ceiling fill the book. It’s mostly maps, but I skim the few pages with writing. The book outlines the dangers of contact with the living, advising its readers to use
stealth and wooly costume
to evade detection until escape from Memento Mori is achieved.

The last page of the book is a drawing more detailed than the rest, showing a skeleton holding a staff and standing over a herd of sheep.

The monk-tunneler returns, bowing all the way. It points at the book. I hold it out, but it falls to its knees and holds out its palms, like it’s beseeching me for something. I look to Ava and Poe for help, but they look as baffled as I am.

A cold draft blows over us.

The monk snatches the book from my hands and slinks back to shadows.

Ava rubs her arms. “God, where did that cold wave of air come from?”

Poe sits upright, alert.

“What?” I ask him.

“Extreme cold…you know what that is as well as I do, Jesse.”