Beautiful City of the Dead (16 page)

"Shhh!" Butt said.

The wind died suddenly, as though commanded to lie down. Footsteps were approaching. Three men, three old killer gods, coming at us from three directions.

W
HITE SPECTERS LOOMED AROUND US
. Winged angels, weeping angels, angels in triumph, and angels overwhelmed with sadness.

I peered into the snowy gloom and saw Frankengoon. He reached out, as though his arm might stretch over a hundred graves and grab me. I caught Jerod's eye. For a second, our minds locked and we pulled down more snow from the sky, a sudden howling blast. Then a force from the darkness fought back and made the winds quiet again.

"Jerod!" I shouted. I looked around frantically for him. But he'd fled, driven off by Frankengoon's far greater power. So it was just him against me, young water against ancient air. If anyone had been watching, all they would've seen was a kid cranked down inside herself and a huge hulking old man. He was grabbing at the sky like he could command the winds to do his will. I was hunched over, drawing up the water of the earth.

Up and down, it didn't make any difference now. A river seemed to flow in the sky. Snow and sleet seemed to rise from the ground. God or girl? Man or monster? Fever cooked my brain, set my blood simmering. Icy wind and burning breath—I couldn't tell the difference.

Knacke emerged from the blowing darkness. Both his hands were full of flame. And his eyes too, like two tiny suns. He yelled at us, only it wasn't words. The sound came out as a fiery viper's tongue. Snowflakes pelted the tongue, hissing into dots of steam.

I went toward Knacke, ready to fight even if it meant dying. "Zee!" Relly yelled. "Back off!" He was himself again, calling up a last flicker of inner flame to protect me.

Knacke met him, old fire struggling against new. The last battle of the burning gods. It was beautiful, like the dance of two creatures made of rushing flame. And at the same time, it was awful to see, each one fighting to draw the life, the light, the heart's fire, out of the other.

Where they fought, the snow ran away in dark streams.

"Water plus earth," I whispered. Then louder, to Butt. "Water plus earth equals mud." I grabbed him, yelling, "Do it. Now!"

He understood. We'd done it before. Now together we melted the side of the hill. I mean it got soft, oozy, unstable. A sick groaning came from below us, as though the hill itself was in pain. Trees started to tilt over. Gravestones
tipped and slid. Great slabs and shoulders of mud began to collapse downward. Shouts and curses. Fire and smoke. Rivers of mud like the blood of the earth poured out. A huge grave marker leaned, then fell and took a few trees with it.

Now coffins were poking out of their holes. Dripping webs of tree roots grabbed at the empty air. A chunk of iron picket fence slid down the muddy hill like a sled with no rider.

Falling, I grabbed for Butt. Only he was already gone, pulled into the muck. Knacke and Relly, Scratch and Frankengoon, too. I was the last one standing.

Right below me, a coffin slid from its ancient hiding place. The lid caught on a huge root and was thrown aside. I saw a pale gray dress, like something woven out of spider thread. I saw a bony white face and long hair.

Then I lost my footing and was gone, like the others. Down, down, down.

T
HE FEVER SAVED ME,
I guess. The poison heat I'd drawn out of Relly's body kept me alive while I lay there in the rising drift.

Snow was falling again. Not snow called by battling gods. But regular, real, normal snow.

I went in and out of feverish dreams.
I'm dead,
I thought.
This is what it means to be dead. Perfect silence. Cold and hot at the same time. Lost, alone, nowhere.

Did I escape from that snowy grave like a ghost? I don't know. But I did rise and walk. I'm sure I left that place at the foot of the hill. Maybe my spirit came out from my body. Maybe some part of me split away. Or maybe the fever and the fight had made me completely crazy.

Whatever it was, however you explain it, I started moving in the snowstorm after my body came to rest.

A grave lay open. The coffin was empty.

I looked at myself and saw a long dress from the olden
days. Gray tatters. My hands were thin as bone. I took a deep breath and heard an empty rattle.

Before me was a stone that read S
ILENCE
L
OUD
. Before me was her grave, a gaping hole.

Now deep in earth, this bed of sighs
I wait till I, like fire, shall rise.

The poem was true. She'd risen, and I'd risen, like fire. Not leaping flames, but a slow, powerful glow.

I was alive and I was her. I was me, Zee, the girl who never talked. And I was Silence too, awakened from her long sleep.

The air, swirling with snow, seemed to glow. All was peace and stillness. A beautiful silence had fallen on Mount Hope.

I was both dead and alive. Me, Zee, and she.

For a minute, or maybe an hour, I stood in the falling snow. Or maybe it was forever. Or only a second. I don't know now. It's all a brilliant blur, my memory cooked with fever and frozen by the winter air.

I stood there, we stood there. Surprised to rise. Me and she. The girl dead over a hundred years and the girl dead for five minutes.

There in the swirling snow was a black carriage and two black horses. People with black streamers on their
hats and sleeves stood in a little circle. Mourners, I thought. They've come to see their Silence buried.

Mother and father, brothers and one sister. A preacher. Friends and distant relations. All there to see Silence Loud lowered into the grave.

"Wait," I said, but no one heard me. "Wait for me. I will be back someday."

Then something shifted. A deeper glow was burning in the blizzard. The people and the hearse flickered out of sight and I knew these were just Silence's last memories. Her spirit had hovered there in Mount Hope and seen her people lay her to rest.

The glow grew stronger, like a searchlight burning through heavy fog.

This brilliant fire was no memory. It was real. And it found me out.

"You," came Knacke's knife-edge whisper. He paused between every word. "You ... will ... pay ... with ... your ... life."

That almost made me laugh. What was he going to do? Kill somebody who was already dead?

I went toward him. Silence and me, together, we went bravely to meet Knacke's last eruption of fire.

Straight at him. A rickety body that had been in the ground for almost two hundred years. We swayed and tottered. But we did not fear him anymore.

He was yelling now, I suppose. Curses and threats that had no power. He had gathered his flame for one final, awful blast. It came and it hurt worse than anything I'd ever felt. But it didn't stop us, me and Silence.

We grabbed him around the neck while the flames poured out. And we closed our bony feverish hands on his windpipe. Without oxygen there is no fire. We squeezed while he burned. And then the fire was gone. Gone for good.

T
HEY FOUND ME IN A
snowdrift. That's what Relly said when I finally came back from nowhere.

I was in the hospital, and when the long fever-cold sleep finally ended, Relly was there.

For a long time, I kind of drifted in and out of the real world. Nurses were moving around, and my dad, too, I think. A doctor with a foreign accent came and looked in. And then a doctor with cold, soft hands. More nurses, messing with my IV drip. Butt and Jerod, maybe, and then a doctor who smelled of powerful soap.

When the death-haze lifted at last, Relly was there.

He looked pretty bad. Thinner and kind of washed out. Scratched and banged up from falling with the mudslide. The red-purple of his eyes made his skin look even paler. "You're going to be all right."

That was the first thing I remember him saying.

I guess the look I gave him said I didn't believe it.
Weakness filled me to the brim. I couldn't even move my head to one side.

"Really and truly," he said. "You're going to be all right."

Later, when I was a little more with it, he told me how they found Knacke burned up, dead and black like a stick pulled out of an old campfire. Frankengoon got swept into the mudslide. He survived, but he wasn't at school anymore. Scratch had just disappeared.

"Jerod's fine. I think he took off when things got too heavy. And Butt's OK," Relly said. "No major damage." Relly came closer and whispered, "You know: the god of dirt. He was in his element."

I wanted to ask a hundred questions. Only I had no voice. Nothing came out when I tried to talk.

The nurse returned and shooed Relly away. I fell back asleep. But it was normal sleep, not a fever haze with dead girls come alive and burning men dying.

I
WAS IN THE HOSPITAL FOR A WEEK
. Usually they treat pneumonia with meds and let you go. Relly told me later I was pretty near gone, fighting weaker and weaker to take a breath. They had to run a tube into me, and that whole time is gone, too. I guess they drugged me up pretty good beforehand.

When they finally let me go, I had no voice at all. The nurse said that's normal for people who've been on the breathing machine.

Yeah, normal. That made me feel just fine.

What was normal after you fought enemy gods to the death? What did normal mean after you walked around a graveyard inside the body of a girl buried two hundred years ago?

"You'll be hoarse for a while. That's to be expected. Soon enough you'll have your voice back." The nurse gave me a big plastic smile and went back to filling out the paperwork so I ipould leave.

A doctor came in to give the final OK. A few hours later my dad took me home.

I
WAS ALL SET UP IN
my room to recover. Sound system within reach. A buzzer my dad rigged up to call him if I needed anything. All the junk food in the world.

Still, I had no voice. So my dad got a brand-new notebook for me, and a handful of pens.

The first night home, Silence was there with me. I don't mean some cheesy ghost went floating around the room. It was more like I'd brought her back from Mount Hope inside me. Thoughts drifted up, memories I was sure were hers. Names of people I'd never known. Old songs I guess she'd sung in church.

That was the weirdest part. I could hear melodies and words in my head. And I was positive they'd come from the olden days. They had the same stiff rhymes as the gravestone poems. In fact, I wrote this all out to Relly and he went looking in Mount Hope.

He came to visit the next day and said, "You were
right. I found one." He handed the page back to me.

Then let the last loud trumpet sound
and bid our kindred rise;
awake ye nations under ground;
ye saints ascend the skies.

I read the words, moving my lips but making no sound. I tried to say them. All that came out was a rattling hiss. I tried again. Nothing.

Still, in my head, the melody was going powerful and sure. I heard a voice, the voice of Silence Loud, singing this creaky song from the olden days. She had a beautiful voice. Sadness and gladness mixed together. Strength and weakness, too. I wanted so bad for Relly to hear it.

That's what I wrote to him on the notepad. "You should hear what it sounds like. It's great. Totally great. When I get my voice back, I'll show you."

B
UTT CAME FOR A VISIT, TOO
. He gave me the latest news about school. "Knacke's dead. They're hushing the whole thing up. But everybody knows. And Frankengoon's gone, too. They're saying he's on a leave of absence. Only the rumor has it he's gone for good. We got this new guy. He always wears this hideous checkered coat and flood pants. I think his name is Bob Hein. Only everyone calls him 'Mr. Behind.' Get it? Get it?"

I got it.

"OK. So you get better real fast and we can start practicing again. All right?"

I nodded.

Relly got my Ibanez out of its case the next time he came. I hadn't touched it since the Bug Jar gig. That seemed like about a hundred years ago. "You should start playing a little," Relly said. "Keep the songs in your fingers, you know?"

I nodded and took the bass. It felt ten times heavier than I remembered. The strings were cold. Yet when I fit my hand around the neck, the old good feeling started to come back.

With no amp, you can hardly hear a bass. That was OK, at least at first. It was just for me. Nobody else had to hear the riffs that had been playing themselves in my inner ear. Soon enough, Relly would, and Butt and Jerod, too. First, though, I wanted to get them exactly right.

When I was alone I listened to Silence singing in my head. My fingers moved on the Ibanez, finding the sound, matching the melody.

Awake ye nations under ground;
ye saints ascend the skies.

I wondered how long Silence would be with me. She made it easier to sleep. I mean, her voice was kind of a night-light. It didn't shine. Nobody could see it. But it reassured me like the faint quavering bulb used to when I was little.

A
FTER A WEEK
, I
WAS
on my feet again. When I practiced, I pressed the headstock of my bass against the closet door and that made it a little louder. It got the wood vibrating. And I wondered if the whole house was sounding too. Real quiet, below hearing. But still shaking with the bass line throb.

Relly came over every day after school. We never talked about what happened in Mount Hope. No mention of gods and fire and tetrads. Maybe he thought it would set me back and I'd never get better again. Or start the fever burning again. Everyone was real upbeat, saying I'd be fine soon.

Still, my dad took me to an ear, nose, and throat specialist. "You're a lucky girl," he said after he heard about them finding me freezing in the snowdrift.

Yeah, real lucky,
I thought.

He poked and prodded and stared into my mouth with bright lights. Then he ran some tests.