Geek Fantasy Novel (24 page)

“Wait,” Ralph said. “Let me go first.”

“Are you kidding? They’ll spot you right away.”

Ralph looked down at himself. His many colors were all the more highlighted in the whitewashed world of the undead. “What’s
up
with that?” he wondered.

“I don’t know,” Beatrice said. “No offense, but you’re a total liability.”

“Thanks,” Ralph said glumly.

Beatrice took his hand. “I’m so glad to have you here. But I’m going first, and I won’t claim you if you’re spotted.”

With that she disappeared into the stone. Ralph took a deep breath and leaped after.

He promptly bounced back, with a scratched forehead and ringing ears. He pressed a fingertip against the stone. It didn’t give, not one bit.

Eventually Beatrice reappeared. “No luck?”

Ralph shook his head.

She poked him in the chest. “I’m starting to think you might not be dead at all, my friend. Hmm. I’m going to have to find a rope or something,” she said. “You concentrate on staying inconspicuous. I’ll be right back.”

Ralph nodded as she disappeared. He didn’t relish being alone with the shadows, but he hadn’t much choice.

He crouched in a hollow at the base of a tree and kept his focus trained on the top of the fortress wall. The worst thing would be to miss the drop of the rope entirely.

The terror Ralph’s surroundings brought out in him was fluttery and shallow, like that produced by a child’s imagination. He remembered the sensation well from the camping trips he used to go on with his parents. The days were great fun — games of catch, practicing his xylophone, so many prospective rocks to add to his collection — until he had to go brush his teeth. During the nighttime walk to the campsite bathrooms, his flashlight would trace feeble circles of known things on the ground — decaying leaves, twig cairns, the reflections of rodent eyes — while the infinite darkness was left unknown. Even when camping years later he was unable to walk to the bathroom without eventually dashing headlong, hordes of imagined phantoms pursuing him. He would return to the tent breathless and hiding it.

He felt twinges of the same sensation now. But somehow this reincarnated fear was … not lessened, but more directed. Because now he didn’t have to imagine the evil beings stalking the night — they were all quite evident. The shadows had become so numerous that they had coalesced into bigger shapes, forming ghoulish pyramids, great whips of their dead matter lashing the sky.

For now, they ignored Ralph entirely; this peculiar, brightly colored young man mattered nothing to them.

Finally he caught movement at the top of the wall, and saw something drop over. Doing his best (and failing) to blot the shadows from his mind, he stole across to the wall and examined it. It wasn’t a typical rope — instead it was a stretch of bones, knotted together with tendons and entrails. He grasped the end and started to climb, and as he did, the rushing sound of the
shadows ceased entirely. Glancing back, he saw that they had paused in their endless toils to stare at him.

Then they started throwing themselves at the rope.

Ralph squeezed his eyes shut and clutched the bones as the first shadows hit him. But he felt only a slight chill. He opened his eyes. The shadows were slashing out at him with their shadow hands, but they passed right through him.

Ralph gritted his chattering teeth and started climbing again. The larger femur and humerus bones made for easy going, but more often than not he was gripping intestine or tendon. Eventually he made it to the top and heaved himself over the side.

Beatrice was waiting for him on the battlement. She began to scramble down the wall to the city below, but Ralph laid a hand on her arm. “Where are we going?” he asked.

“To see my mother and my sister again,” Beatrice said.

“Sister!”

Beatrice nodded.

“You mean Daphne?”

“No, my half sister Annabel. My mum’s other daughter.”

“How do we know where they are?” Ralph asked. “How do we know they’re even here?”

“I wished it so,” Beatrice said simply, and with a flash of her filmy gray gown she was over the side.

Ralph soundlessly dropped after her into the undead city.

Once Ralph’s eyes acclimated to the light, he realized that the place they landed in wasn’t much of a city at all, only smoky bonfires about which the undead shambled in random motions.

There were all varieties: some only bone, others whole except for a torn-away ear or eye. Banshees congressed around the palisades. Zombie imps ripped flesh from passersby and pelted one another. Flitting throughout were a large number of winged fairy skeletons with Chihuahua skulls, undoubtedly an influx from Cecil’s war.

“I’m going on the assumption that we mustn’t let them see us,” Beatrice said as they cowered in the shadow of the wall.

Ralph, having seen
Night of the Living Dead,
agreed. “What kind of monsters do you think your mother and sister are?” he asked, after pausing to debate whether the question was rude.

“I don’t know,” Beatrice said.

“Did they die happy?” Ralph ventured.

“I imagine not. Mum was in a hospital, and my sister … I imagine not.”

“Maybe they’re ghosts. That sounds right.”

“I don’t see anything that I’d call a proper ghost,” Beatrice said.

If I hadn’t acted now, Ralph and Beatrice might have wandered around for hours searching for ghosts. And, for reasons you will soon find out, my darling Beatrice didn’t have hours of life to waste. So I simply had the ghost cave momentarily glow orange. In a black-and-white world, it was a splendid enough display that Ralph and Beatrice noticed it immediately.

“Did you see that?” Ralph asked.

“Yes,” Beatrice breathed.

Ghosts move very much like smoke-lifted ashes, charred and weightless, rising slowly with glowing edges and then meandering back down to the ground. These particular phantasms circled a cavernous pit in the open ground of the undead capital.

“I guess we have to go into that cesspool,” Ralph said cautiously (and, I might add, a trifle judgmentally). “What if we observe it for a while, and wait to sneak in until the ghosts fall asleep?”

“I’m pretty sure ghosts don’t sleep, Ralph. And even if they did … you don’t happen to know the time, do you?” Beatrice asked.

“The time?” The notion that something like time existed here hadn’t occurred to him. His calculator watch had been lost long ago. But wedged in his jeans pocket, beneath his pet rock Jeremiah, was his cell phone. Surely it wasn’t possible … but when he lifted it out he saw that somehow it had survived traveling to the bottom of the sea. He shook it, awed.

Gentle reader, I apologize for the ample evidence of my hand. The plot-meddling will stop as soon as my delightful Beatrice gets herself back on track, I promise.

Ralph had once spent an entire week researching cell networks, and chose his carrier well: his cell phone had automatically set itself to the Purgatory Main Isle time zone. “It’s five
P.M.,”
Ralph reported.

“We don’t have time to spare, then,” Beatrice said. “I felt the Clutch ten and a half days ago, which means … well, it means we have only a little time before I turn into an undead.”

Ralph squeezed Beatrice’s hand. “How long exactly?”

“Until midnight.”

They skirted the city wall, trying to avoid the gazes of the plentiful undead. After Ralph almost knocked over an especially bony specimen, they discovered that the more skeletal an undead is, the more blind it is. They used this to their advantage, ducking behind skeletons as they passed.

But skeletons provide very poor coverage. Even with their best efforts, Ralph and Beatrice were eventually spotted by the vampires who, it turns out, have excellent vision. Not to mention their fine skills of echolocation, which no amount of ducking behind skeletons, however skillfully executed, can circumvent.

An alarm cry went up while Ralph and Beatrice were still a good forty paces from the ghost cave. They backed against a wall as the undead began swarming toward them. Then, realizing the futility of cowering, Ralph led Beatrice in a sprint away from the wall and through a rapidly narrowing corridor of the foul creatures.

They stomped on the first few juvenile zombies they came to, and then kicked their way through a pack of skeletal dogs. In the process Ralph found one of their skulls in his hand, which he pitched like a softball, obliterating a rickety knight. By then the vampires had flown close. Right as they streaked through the white sky toward them, Ralph and Beatrice reached the lip of the ghost pit.

Phantoms floated up from the chasm and howled in their rush to pray to the moon.

Ralph and Beatrice clutched each other and threw themselves in.

After the first wrenching second, the only sensation Ralph felt was the rush of humid wind against him; free fall became more freedom than falling. He and Beatrice plummeted in each other’s arms, her thin hair lashing his face. He had no sense of the closeness of the walls, how far they had to go, or how many ghosts they whizzed past. They simply fell, their only thought wonderment at exactly when they would splatter. It wasn’t the most urgent sensation, actually; splattering, after all, was nothing more than an unpredictable way to finally become like everyone else here.

The gusts from below thickened until they approximated hot panting. Ralph and Beatrice slowed before the fetid headwind. Once they reached idling speed, Ralph called to Beatrice, “You don’t have a flashlight, do you?”

“No!” she shouted. “But what about your phone?”

Though it would provide only pathetic illumination, Ralph slid his cell phone out of his pocket, opened it …

… and closed it immediately.

Around them had flashed ghosts in a syrupy concentration. Legs and waists, twisted and transparent, supporting the remnants of mawlike chests and bloodied brows.

Beatrice and Ralph slowed more and more in the updraft, finally alighting on flesh-soft ground, the hum of spirits whizzing by as quiet and constant as the blood coursing in their ears.

Ralph wondered which direction to step. But before he needed to decide, a candle glow began approaching from far away. Its flickering illumination cast hardly enough light to reveal any gory details of what it passed. They couldn’t see a wrist or a hand holding it, only the small flame passing through the dark. After witnessing hordes of undead, it was this simple, quiet impossibility that finally caused Ralph to move into full-blown panic.

He scrambled headlong in the opposite direction for only a second before he struck a stone wall. Running his hand along it, he found it curved in every direction. There was a crevice it might be possible to hide in, if only he could wedge his leg inside … but as he attempted to, he became aware that Beatrice was not beside him.

“Beatrice,” he cried, “come on! We have to hide!”

But she didn’t respond. Ralph hesitated at the edge of his crevice, then reached in the blind dark until he found her again, standing still in the center of the chamber, outlined in the candlelight.

“You don’t have to come with me,” Beatrice murmured.

Ralph took a deep breath and squeezed Beatrice’s hand. He might have been scared, but he didn’t want to be alone.

The candle came closer and closer.

They peered at it. The candle lingered before them for a few seconds while Ralph beat back the urge to close his eyes. When the small flame slowly withdrew the way it came, Ralph and Beatrice followed.

At first they seemed to be passing through a wide negative space, since the candlelight fell on nothing but a slackening concentration of spirits. But eventually the glow revealed roots and mossy rock overhangs. The light began to shine on other similar candle glows, one lined up after another at precise intervals. When Ralph’s and Beatrice’s footsteps began to strike smooth stones, it became apparent they were ascending a ramp.

Eventually the candle led them into a wedge-shaped chamber fully lit by chandeliers. Though it was shaped like the interior of a galleon, the walls were made of rock; if it was a ship, it was a ship without an exterior. The room swayed and tilted fractionally, as if pitched by small waves in the mass of stone below. Lining the walls of the hold were invisible servants also holding feeble candles, each phantom only evident as a disturbance in the candlesmoke.

In the center of the chamber, reclining on a mass of pillows, were two women. One was older but persistently holding onto youth, firm muscles evident beneath dry wrinkles, her legs tucked beneath her in advantageous position. The other was the young creature the older bore the memory of: features beautiful and regular enough to pass through the mind with trace-less electricity, her expression cool but hinting at peals of glee within.

Beatrice bowed her head. “Mother.”

“Come here,” the older woman said.

Beatrice lifted her face — Ralph saw her jaw tremble — and approached her mother. When the woman placed her arms around her, Beatrice heaved a sob, though she didn’t return the embrace.

The woman said, “Oh my Beatrice. You’ve come to me.”

The younger woman rose from the cushions, smiled at Ralph, and held out her limp hand. “I’m Annabel,” she said.

Ralph took her hand and wondered what to do with it. He had a guidebook on talking to girls back in his New Jersey bedroom, but he couldn’t remember if it ever described a situation like this. “Hey, Annabel. I’m Ralph.”

Beatrice’s mother broke off from her daughter and looked at Ralph. “And who have you brought with you, Beatrice?”

“This is Ralph, Mum.”

“Hello, Ralph. I’m Annabelle, Beatrice’s mother.”

“Two Annabelles!” Ralph said, dropping Annabel’s hand. Then he added, “Very pleased to meet you.”

“I know,” Annabelle said, throwing herself back on the cushions. “The spellings are different, but you can’t know that. It’s impossibly confusing, I’ll admit. I wanted my first daughter to have my name. Your main child has to suffer for all your crazy whims. Isn’t that right, Annabel?”

Annabel flounced to the pillows, flung her hands around her mother’s neck, and kissed her on the cheek, staring at Ralph the whole time. “That’s right, Mum.”