Geek Fantasy Novel (26 page)

“What was that last bit? You cut out.”

“We missed you!”

“Oh, that’s sweet. Well, I guess we’ll have to swap places and try it all over again.”

“Why are you here, anyway?”

“I’m sorry? I don’t follow.”

Ralph sighed, then spent a minute clarifying the proper route with Gideon and finished by hurriedly saying, “I got a beep for low battery. Listen, why don’t we do the run from opposite sides, instead of switching back? We’ll sort everything out when we meet up.”

“Okay, that sounds fine … but a little addled, actually. Wouldn’t I be racing for the wrong city?”

Ralph’s voice went nasal as he determined the best solution to the problem. “We’ll swap it. Whatever you gain for the undead will actually be mirror-imaged.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“I’ll be the judge. I’m not even dead, I don’t think, so I’m impartial.”

“Alrighty. Here I go!”

“No! Wait! Give me a head start, so I can get to the clearing first. What time do you have?”

“Wow, it’s late! One fifty-four.”

“Okay, we’re synchronized. Take off at two.”

“Got it.”

“I’m going now.”

“Could I talk to Annabelle with whatever battery’s left?”

“Sure, you’ve got a minute or two,” Ralph said, then offered the phone to Annabelle.

Eyes wide, she reached for it — and it dropped right through her ghostly fingers. “Hold on, Gideon,” Ralph called as he propped the phone on an outcropping of the building stones. “Here you go.”

Annabelle floated over and began to whisper into it.

“Let’s leave them some privacy,” Ralph said to Beatrice. She stared longingly at her ghost-mother, then nodded and joined Ralph on the back of the second horse. They sped back to the neutral clearing, arranged themselves on the rotten table, and waited in silence.

“How does all this feel?” Ralph finally asked. “Meeting your ghost-mother and sister and everything?” He glanced at his watch. “And being undead for almost two hours?” He scrutinized her. “You don’t look that different.”

Beatrice stared sullenly at the ground.

“Anything you want to talk about? All your body parts staying together?” Ralph tried.

Beatrice shook her head. Ralph put his hand around her shoulder. “We don’t have to say anything, then,” he said.

They heard a pair of shouts as Annabelle and Gideon took off.

“I’ve decided that I don’t want to be down here anymore,” Beatrice said. “I don’t want to lose chunks of flesh or become a ghost.”

“We’ll find a way out,” Ralph promised.

Which is something he shouldn’t have done. Did he have the first clue as to the powerful forces binding the dead to Main Isle Purgatory? Did he have any idea how to quit a land that has no exit? Did he have the right to end a wish, instead of ceding to the far superior capabilities of a presiding member of the Royal Narratological Guild? No, of course not. He was just a kid who thought his own stitches were tighter than the fabric of the rest of the world, that he could stretch and tear where he liked and knit his own reality. Well, sorry, Ralph, it’s not going to work this time. There are forces more impressive than you. You think you can be the one to save lovely, pained Beatrice, that this makes you the luckiest man in the world … and though it does, it’s not as though she would pay you attention in any other situation. She’s a rare, complex creature, no flash but all substance, someone too special for you. And you think, Ralph, you think you can make a promise and win her over — well, I’m not going to let you do that to her.

The ground shifted so that Ralph fell off the rotten table and landed hard on his immature face.

“What’s happening?” Beatrice asked, worriedly pressing her hand to her chest.

At which point, to quiet her anxiety, the ground beneath them ceased shaking.

“I have no idea,” Ralph said, staring stupidly about.

The skies rumbled, clouds appeared, and soon great gray drops of rain began to fall. The first bead struck Beatrice on the nose and ran serenely to the tip, hanging for a moment before splashing onto the soft rise of her breast. Then more and more drops fell, until Ralph and Beatrice were soaked through. They held each other close beneath the chill rain.

Which is when your narrator needs a moment to collect himself.

The hero has to be the mover of his own story.

The hero has to be the mover of his own story.

The hero has to be the mover of his own story.

I lost control for a moment, and I humbly request forgiveness.

Let’s see. Some exciting events were occurring, if I remember correctly. Oh yes. Our delightful teenagers were, naturally enough, agitated by the recent quaking of Purgatory (my fault, sorry) and the seeming apocalypse and all that, and exclaimed to each other about it for what would be an exhaustingly long time to read about. Let’s cut through and rejoin them as they detect the distant patter of bone-titanium alloy hooves.

“Mum?” Beatrice exclaimed, leaping to her feet and nearly slipping in the mud. Ralph caught hold of her (yes, gallantly) and they stood holding each other as the staccato galloping got louder. “I knew Annabelle’s horse would be faster!” she said.

But Ralph didn’t respond, because he had detected the less controlled hoofbeats of a Recently-Living horse. Branches shook at the tops of trees; undead birds flew into the air. Though he sounded farther off, Gideon was racing at breakneck speed.

“Let’s get out of the way,” Ralph suggested as Annabelle’s horse rocketed into the clearing. Bathed in scorching white flames, her hair whipping in a froth of exhilaration, the ghost rider shrieked in victory.

She had gone no more than a dozen feet past the rotten table, however, when Gideon’s horse roared into the clearing. His steed skidded in the mud and, in a flurry of long limbs, came to a muddy crash at Annabelle’s feet. Gideon managed to convert his fall into a shoddy dismount, and bowed politely once he had regained his footing.

As soon as he had arrived, a dull roar rose from the Soon-to-be-Dead city. All the undead howling at once: terrible.

“I have won,” Annabelle said from her perch. To punctuate her words, her metal horse dropped a line of steaming crystal drool.

“By three meters,” Gideon said, walking the length to the table. “And I got turned around and wound up doing the crystal canyon bridge twice. Not that I’m asking you to bend the rules for me, but I wanted to point that out.”

“Yes, Giddy, you’ve always found ways to make even my most minor victories hollow.”

“Come on, this is about more than us, no?” Gideon said, gesturing at the distant cities.

“Yes,” said Annabelle, turning translucent and then returning to a blaze, which Ralph thought a very effective way to emphasize a point. “But it is no coincidence that we are the riders, no?”

“I’m quite sure I don’t follow,” Gideon said.

“Your daughter might,” Annabelle said.

They turned to Beatrice, who until now had been focusing on the conversation with a rapt loss of self-consciousness, the way one might read a love letter in solitude.

“Beatrice?” Gideon said. He dropped his crop and went to her side. “Honey?”

“Hullo, Father,” Beatrice said quietly.

“Why are you here?” he asked, suddenly choking. “Are you …?” Beatrice nodded. “And you are … ?” Gideon nodded.

They held each other for a moment. Then Gideon heaved a sigh of irritation. “That was really brainless of you, Beatrice. You needn’t have died for a long time.”

“I thought I might belong here,” Beatrice said.

“Yes, yes, I get it,” Gideon snapped.

“She does belong here,” Annabelle said.

“No,” Gideon said. “I’m rather certain she doesn’t.”

“She can stay with me and her half sister,” Annabelle said.

“Annabel’s undead, too?”

Annabelle nodded.

A hollowed ram’s horn trumpeted in the distance. The treetops in the direction of the Soon-to-be-Dead city began to shake. “What is that about?” Gideon asked.

“My countrymen have a right to come celebrate,” Annabelle sniffed. “You’ve gained
three meters
! Okay, Beatrice, we can’t let the undead find me or Ralph here. You have to decide quickly: Do you prefer being closer to dead or closer to alive?”

“Don’t make me choose between you and my mother. It’s not fair.”

“Oh, it’s not like that, honey,” Annabelle said.

“I want my real mother back,” Beatrice said.

“You never even knew her. Gert is your mother,” Gideon said.

“It doesn’t feel that way,” Beatrice said.

“How dare you!” Annabelle shrieked at Gideon. Her voice sounded like multiple voices … and, Ralph realized, it was. For the younger Annabel had appeared behind her mother and was echoing her words. And her rage was directed, not at Gideon, but at her mother. “I’ve been a
perfect daughter.
And here you go, mooning over this lame girl. She’s not even pretty.”

At which point Beatrice — sad, poetic Beatrice — tackled her ghostly sister. The two went down in a shimmering tumble.

Now, this may seem unexpected.
Beatrice!
you exclaim,
Beatrice in a fistfight?
But Beatrice had always known that the dead Annabel occupied a special early place in her father’s heart, and was jealous. Annabel was the original A who left Beatrice and her siblings B, C, and D. Being named Beatrice was like living on the fourteenth floor of a building without a thirteenth. She surprised herself with the depth of the rage that bubbled out onto Annabel. As for how Beatrice could tackle a formless ghost — well, when you’re angry enough, you can tackle anything.

Ralph watched the two young women roll in the mud, and although the bulk of his thoughts were on Beatrice’s well-being, a fair number of them were on the scene’s similarity to one he had seen weeks before on late-night cable.

“Ooh! Giddy, make them stop!” screeched Annabelle. When she tried to pull them apart, she was only able to pull back Annabel, which gave Beatrice ample opportunity to slug her ghostly sister in the gut.

For his part, Gideon was only able to restrain Beatrice. And so Ralph found himself the central figure of quite a scene: angry Beatrice restrained by Gideon, angry Annabel restrained by Annabelle, and swarms of ghouls emerging at the edge of the clearing.

And that was, of course, before the zombie pheasants descended.

They came in vast numbers — seventeen hundred, in fact. Emerged from perches within the trees, from the gray skies, from the ground itself, ripping wet holes in the soil and themselves, dropping plumage and carnage in equal amounts. Their wing-beats alone would have been deafening, but the squawking! The quaking of each gun-shot rib cage!

Gideon, who had once spent a birthday weekend hunting these very same seventeen hundred pheasants, didn’t stand much of a chance. Pheasant beaks are feeble — but at seventeen hundred strong! Pheasant scratches are minor — but at seventeen hundred strong! Pheasant carrying power is limited — but at sixteen-hundred-ninety-eight strong! (Gideon had by now managed to crush two beneath his boots.) In no time, Gideon was pecked, gashed, and lifted into the sky. The last any of them saw of him was a pheasant-covered silhouette diminishing into the distant corners of Purgatory Main Isle.

By the time Gideon was gone, by the time Ralph had taken Beatrice into his arms, the clearing was quite clogged with ravenous ghouls.

“Get back!” Ralph cried, making a sloppy sign of the cross as the foul creatures shuffled over the pheasant-churned soil.

“You’re not, like, a priest,” Annabel said, giggling. “That’s not going to work.”

“Mum!” Beatrice said. “Make them stay away from us.”

Annabelle spoke magical words, but only a few of the monsters stopped their advance. The rest were only a few feet away, and shambling ever nearer.

“They can’t cross the new boundary, right?” Ralph asked as Beatrice bent over, retching at their stench. “All we have to do is get back over to the side of the Recently-Living.”

But even as he spoke, the circle of undead closed tight around them. Beatrice and Ralph didn’t have much distance to go to escape, but they would nonetheless need to battle their way across scores of ghouls and ghasts, vampires and banshees. The tight halo of Annabelle’s light kept the monsters at bay, but even so they were inching forward into the glow.

“Mother!” Beatrice cried. “What do we do?”

“I don’t know, my child,” she said. “I’ve clearly made a big mistake.”

“A mistake?” Beatrice asked, dodging the ragged paw of a zombie wolf.

“I called in the pheasants,” Annabelle said. “But I didn’t think this many other undead would follow.”

“You …” Beatrice said. “You killed my father.”

“Now, be reasonable — you know I didn’t. This is a wish. Everything here’s part of your mental state.
You
killed your father.”

“I did not! You did.”

“You say po-tay-to, I say po-tah-to.”

Ralph grabbed a fairy skull and swung the still-attached spinal column like a whip, keeping a trio of lusty banshees at bay.

Annabelle spoke again. “Fine, yes, Beatrice, I had a bone to pick with Gideon. So to speak. My daughter would have had better medical attention after her tetanus incident if I wasn’t a working mum abandoned in a dingy flat by her wealthy lover. And the sadness I felt after Annabel’s death led me to wish my own. His —”

“So what are these undead after?” Ralph asked urgently.

“Well, you, of course,” Annabelle said, blinking at Ralph as a skeletal flying snake passed through her glimmering rib cage and streaked toward his throat. “You’re still in color,” she explained as Beatrice ripped the winged serpent from the air. “That makes them very upset. The undead are adamant about enforcing their traditions. And you’re a massive break from the norm.”

“That should be impossible, right? That’s Ralph’s alive in Purgatory?” Beatrice panted.

“Well, yes,” Annabelle conceded. “I suppose so.”

The snake’s vertebrae popped as Beatrice crushed it. The sound was unexpected, a kitchen sound, and it disoriented Ralph. He wondered: Could it be that he hadn’t died, that the whale had gotten him there by some means other than his death? Or that the narrator’s giving him a special accommodation to come here could have rendered him somehow immortal? It made him think of how the others had arrived — if dying above brought you here, could it be that being killed here … resulted in life?