Beautiful City of the Dead (7 page)

"OK,
NOW YOU'RE GOING
to tell me everything," I said. "What is going on, Relly? You've got to tell me."

We were walking along a gravel path in Mount Hope Cemetery. My first real date. Other girls get a movie and dinner. I got The Beautiful City of the Dead, as Relly called it. Other girls got small talk about school or TV or bands coming to town. Not me.

"We're gods," he said.

"Right. We're gods."

"I'm not kidding."

"I know you're not kidding," I said. "That's what scares me."

"It's true, Zee. You saw me. You saw the fire come, right? That was no lie."

"And I'm going to burst into flames, too? That's what you're going to tell me next, right?"

"No. Not flame. Not you."

"Then what are you talking about? Gods? I'm about as
godlike as a ... as a ... You're talking like a looney! You know that?"

"Just because you're looney doesn't mean you don't tell the truth."

We walked along, silent, for a while.

The cemetery really is a beautiful place, with winding paths and little ponds, hills overgrown with tall grass, endless ranks of gravestones. I didn't put up any fuss when he said he wanted for us to go there. I knew we could be alone there, just the two of us and a quarter million dead people. I like the quiet. I like the weeping maidens, angels, draped urns, crosses, and obelisks. I guess it was kind of romantic, even. Just the two of us, walking on a cold afternoon.

I'd brought along my notebook and copied down some of the gravestone poetry.

Weep not for me, my friends so dear.
I am not dead, just sleeping here.
My grassy bed, my grave you see.
Prepare in life to follow me.

"We're gods. Both of us," Relly said again after a while.

"You mean, like, I'm Venus and you're Jupiter?"

"Not planets, gods. The real thing. Gods that once were and will be again." I hated it when he talked this
way. And I loved it too. Until that minute, scuffing through the dead leaves in Mount Hope, I would have just said I couldn't stand it when Relly talked like he was insane. But something had changed. In me maybe, in him, or in the whole world. I don't know. Whatever it was, it gave me a feeling like I'd never had before.

Right, me, the bass player hidden back behind Relly and Jerod. Right, the girl who never talked. I was a god. Me, Zee, lousy at school, sniffling with colds half my life, the one nobody noticed. I was a god now. Or maybe I always had been.

I wanted to laugh. And I guess if I'm being honest, I wanted to cry too. "It's all a lie," I whispered. "But go on, keep talking."

"It's not a lie. We've got the power, Zee. Real power like hardly anyone in the whole world. Gods don't die. Think about it, Zee. You'll never have to die."

We stopped, looking down on a pond in a little steep-sided valley. The water was utterly still and inky black. It was strange, what I felt. Peaceful and terrified at the same time. The quiet of the cemetery gave me a sense of peace. And Relly beside me, talking about gods, made me want to run and never turn back.

The strangest thing was not that I'd have these feelings, but that I'd have them at the same time. How could I hold such opposites in my heart? But I did. I hated Relly
for the way he made me feel. And I never wanted to say goodbye. I loved being in the graveyard with him and I wanted to escape like a drowning swimmer wants air.

"OK, we're gods," I said. No point in arguing with him. He was so matter of fact. "So what does that mean?"

"First, we're not like everyone else." That was almost funny. Me and Relly like other people? A couple of Ghost Metal kids on a date in the cemetery. How could anyone think that was normal?

"I mean that the same rules don't apply to us. Because we're gods."

"So I can skip school and I won't get in trouble? Secret gods don't have to take final exams?"

"I'm serious, Zee. Serious as a heart attack."

"All right. So we're different and the rules don't apply to us. What else?"

"They'll do anything to get what they want from us. From you."

"Who's they?" I asked.

"Knacke, for starters. And Frankengoon. He's part of it, too. And Scratch. That's the one who called you, the guy with the big eye."

"OK, so the bio teacher, the assistant principal, and the janitor are going to get us somehow?"

"You can laugh all you want, Zee. But sooner or later you're going to understand. You're going to believe."

"I'm trying to understand!" I was almost yelling now. "But this is all totally insane. You get that, right? This is not the way things are supposed to work."

"Yeah, I get it. And it's still the truth. They'll do anything to get what they want. There's a war coming, Zee. A battle to the death."

"A battle between a teenage heavy metal band and a high school janitor?"

"That's what it looks like on the outside. But on the inside, it's a lot bigger, a lot scarier, and way more important. And anyway, Scratch isn't really a janitor. He just was there yesterday to see you, to get at you. He won't be back with the mop and bucket. He'll take some other form."

"Like what? An evil librarian? The lunch lady from hell?"

"Making jokes won't change anything, Zee. What I'm saying is true. When the four true elements come together—fire and water, air and earth—then there's power like you can hardly imagine. Then it's real."

"What's real?"

"Think about it, Zee. What do gods have that mortals don't?"

"Funny names."

He scowled. "What else?" I thought of the Ghost Metal sound, the crowd at Waterstreet going nuts for us. "What else?" he demanded.

"You mean like people worshiping, making offerings?"

"And?"

"They live forever."

He nodded. "That's what Knacke wants. He's old, Zee. Way older than he looks. He's sick. And he's going to die soon if he doesn't get what he needs."

It was already way too much. Every answer he gave stirred up another dozen questions. My brain was already in overload mode. Words came out of Relly's mouth. And I guess I understood them. But it was too much. I started to shut down.

Soon enough he saw what was going on. "We should get on back," he said. "Are you cold?"

I nodded. He put his arm around me. It didn't drive off the cold. But the numb, faraway feeling wasn't so bad anymore.

W
E DID A NEW TUNE,
with words from my notebook and music by Relly.

It was weirdly wild, full of sudden starts and stops, like a crash-test joy ride. I finally got the riff under my fingers and could whip it off just as fast as Relly. Of course, on the bass it was way heavier, like somebody tap-dancing with cement blocks strapped onto their feet.

"OK. I think we've got it down," Relly said after we'd run it a few times.

Jerod read over the lead sheet again, trying to figure out the words. "What does
hellebore
mean?"

"Ask Zee," Relly said.

"You wrote this?" He looked at me. I mean he really looked, eye to eye, for the first time.

"Yeah. Me and Relly together."

"So what does it mean?"

I felt like a slug, and Jerod was the guy with the salt.
In two seconds he'd pour the salt over me and I'd melt down to a nasty little puddle of goo.

"Well?"

"Hellebore is a poison plant. But in the olden days they used it to cure people who were crazy."

"It's a poison and it's a cure?"

"I don't know if it really works. Anyway, it sounded good and it fits in the song. And it rhymes with 'farthest shore.'"

"Yeah. I guess." It seemed like he really wanted to understand. My words and me too. He looked me over, from head to toe, like he'd never even noticed I was a girl before.

"It's no big deal," I said, getting more embarrassed by the minute. "If you don't like it, we'll change the words."

"No, no. It's OK. I don't care." Maybe he had really wanted to make sense of the song. But now it was too much work for him. So, with a shrug, he went back to being Cool Sneering Guy again.

He went to a way-better school than the rest of us, out in Pittsford with the other rich kids. He drove his dad's BMW. His dad was a big-deal lawyer and his mom wasn't a drunk like Butt's or gone off with a new husband and new family, like mine. He was headed to Cornell, like his father and his grandfather. Straight Ivy League. Upper crust. He let us know that whenever he could.

Relly had gone through three other singers before he
found Jerod. He was just what the band needed. Relly had that wispy, warlocky look. Butt was like a caveman. And I was me, invisible, behind and way down below. We needed somebody who looked great and loved to show off what he had.

So we put up with his whining and his rich-kid snottiness. And he put up with Relly's weirdness most of the time.

We did my new song, "The Rising Sigh," which was a phrase I got off a tombstone. Above the beautiful, terrible noise, Jerod poured out my words. I especially liked it when he closed his eyes and reached real high, like his brain was about to explode. I watched him from the side: his sleek shoulders, his gorgeous hair, the power in his arms as he clung to the mike stand, wailing.

I
WAS SORT OF SLEEPING
in English class, when there came a knocking on the door. I think we were supposed to be doing something with adverbs. Only, my worksheet was still untouched. I was floating in and out of dreamland, I guess, thinking about Mount Hope and Relly and the way his voice got real quiet and serious when he said, "Someday we'll be huge."

"Zee?" Mrs. Pelkey said. "Zee, you're wanted at the office by Mr. Franken."

I headed down to Frankengoon Central. I didn't even see who brought the note. Whoever it was had vanished by the time I got my stuff together. The halls were empty. It's always weird walking through a building that you know is full of people, but you can't see any of them. Voices behind closed doors, the whack-whack-whack of balls as I went by the gym, a nasty burning smell leaking out of Knacke's classroom.

I went to the main office. "Somebody said Mr. Franken wanted to see me." The lady behind the desk looked over her glasses, scowling like I was a wriggling little bug. Her lipstick was bright red and kind of smeared. There was a bluish wart on the side of her nose. She didn't even speak, just pointed with her well-chewed pencil to the open door.

So I went in and Frankengoon told me to have a seat. He was a huge man, way over six foot tall. He stooped a little, like it was hard to keep all that chest and shoulders and bulging head upright.

"You're not doing well in your academics, Zee. You know that, correct?" His voice sounded like it came from a deep black hole in the ground. "Your grades have been slipping steadily this year. And now I have heard some very disturbing reports from Mr. Knacke."

There was no point in me denying it. Whatever he said, whatever lies Knacke made up, Frankengoon would believe them. Did he claim I was selling drugs in class? Making out with some guy in the back of the library? Coming to school with Cream Ale on my breath?

No, those were too normal. Knacke would accuse me of something totally bizarro.

"I have a report from Mr. Knacke, and I have physical evidence, that you have been engaged in—" He was struggling to find the right words. "You have been taking part
in certain rituals, certain occult practices, which we cannot allow to continue on school property. Indeed, if Mr. Knacke is correct, you may be breaking the law too." He leaned in close and it was like a massive stone monument was bending down toward me. "I can't emphasize this enough, Zee. You are going down a path which will only lead to great suffering, to disaster." His huge breath wheezed in and out.

I had no idea what he was talking about. "Evidence?" I asked. It was all so stupid, so wrong.

"Yes, evidence." He opened a desk drawer and pulled out a clear plastic bag. Inside was a notebook. Yeah, it was mine. And yeah, I thought I'd lost it the day before. Now I knew where it had gone.

"This is yours, correct?" He didn't wait for an answer. "Mr. Knacke found this in class recently and he thought it important that I know about its existence."

Carefully, he opened the bag and slid the notebook out. "The words you've written here, Zee, are very disturbing. If I didn't know better, I would say they are the product of a diseased mind."

I grabbed for it, trying to get it away from him. But he just stood up, and the notebook was way out of reach.

"What you've written here, and drawn here, is very troubling."

"They're just lyrics to songs. That's all." And some
sketches I made. Relly's hands on the Strat's neck. They were small, and yet they were strong too. Totally sure of what they were doing, his fingers reached to make a chord that had no name.

Frankengoon just stared at me with those huge yellowy eyes.

"I'm in a band, OK?" I said. "There's no law against that. Those are just lyrics to songs me and Relly wrote. It's no big deal."

"No big deal?" He was almost yelling now. "These words are very disturbing, Zee. Vile, occult ravings. You're allowing your mind to travel a truly dangerous path."

He thumbed through the book, and I had the same sick feeling as if he was peeking at me through the bathroom window. "Give it back!" I pleaded.

He shook his head. "What does this mean? 'Beautiful City of the Dead.'"

"It's just a song. That's what they used to call Mount Hope in the olden days."

He turned a few pages. "And this?" His voice was shaking, like he was about to explode.

"
We see our friends are round us falling.
We see them buried deep in dust.
In solemn silence yet they're calling.
Prepare for death, for die you must.
"

"It's the poem off a gravestone. I didn't even make it up." I could feel the tears coming. These were precious words, private words, and he was sneering at them out loud like they were dirty sayings scrawled on a desktop.

Somebody had carved these words on the stones and it was like a voice from two hundred years back talking directly to me.