R
iley found me on Mama Esther’s stoop one afternoon during my recovery. I’d been alive again for a few weeks at this point and was getting some sense of my body back. I could walk around and talk to people without sounding like a total moron. I was beginning to get a feel for things, understand my own strange powers, and grow into myself.
Riley looked me over for a few seconds. “How you feel, Cee?”
I stretched my arms out and rolled my head around, cracking my still-achy joints. “I feel good. How you feel?”
“I always feel good, man. I’m dead.”
“Right.”
“Let’s go upstairs. I want to talk to you about something.”
* * *
I could already feel it then, the urge to hunt. The pulsing inside me that would start up at any old time and take over. I was still physically diminished, could barely move my bad leg at all at that point, but it was like I could see a fiery image of what I would one day do, a woulda-been
version of myself tearing loose from this somewhat useless body and launching gleefully into the night. That me, the hunter, would stop momentarily and take in all the wild, churning signs and hints that the city had to offer. He would sniff the air, feel the breeze on his face, and understand all the stories and implications of each tiny detail, each swirling plastic bag and scattering rat. The universe became an ecstatic puzzle to this hunter-me, a magnificent path fingerprinted across the night to some abstract moment of glory: the capture.
I’d been hungering like that for a few weeks. And then Riley explained what exactly the Council had in mind for me, and it sounded like an answer to my prayers. “It’s a bureaucratic disaster, Carlos,” he warned me when he saw that thirst in my eyes. “I’m telling you now so you don’t get to act surprised later. It’s a whole fuckpot of politics and ego and all kindsa bullshit. But it’s gainful employment and some measure of stability with an occasional sense of being useful and doing something right in the world. And you don’t have many options open to you with your chilly gray half-dead ass. No offense.”
I nodded, still thrilled.
“All right, then. Here.” He held a walking stick out to me. It was mahogany and elegant without being bougie. I reached for it. “Wait.” He pulled the handle up and a shiny silver blade appeared, glowing gently. My eyes got wide. “It’ll fuck up a living person too, but the steel’s sanctified and specially designed to deal the Deeper Death to the already dead.”
I nodded. I musta looked like an addict staring down a fix. Still, I willed my fingers not to grab for it again. Riley watched me carefully and then sheathed the blade back into the cane and placed it in my hands.
“When you’re not such a disaster, I’ll start showing you the ropes.”
* * *
Most of these damn books are in languages I don’t know. The one in English is the diary of some monk that went batshit in the sixteenth century. I skim the pages until I get to the parts where Trevor’s scribbled-on Post-its get excited: “Wrath, borne unto me one miraculous and terrible night, now poisons my bosom with such a rage as I cannot describe.” Splendid. I don’t have time for this shit. “’Twas a time I remember not, but had to recatalog the events of my life as described in my own hand, through these many years, to retrace the arc of my own history.”
Now that I can simmer with. “A singular event, a single scrap of memory, is all I possess, and I suspect that without the guidance and support of my fellow Fathers of Christ, I would be lost, a heretic, exiled from myself even and cursed to wander like a Jew from town to town.” Also unpleasantly resonant. “Still, I resign myself to these dark cloisters, like the suddenly empty recesses of my mind, and here I shall stay and dissipate in the waning years of my life. I suspect my end can’t be far, for I am grown gray, deathlike in my countenance even as my energy and virility seem heightened with each passing day. Oh, Lord Father, help me to understand these cruel changes that have settled upon me!”
Another tormented halfie.
There’s another book that Trevor seemed particularly Post-it happy with, but the damn guy went ahead and wrote his notes in Flemish, or whatever the hell language this is.
I pour a glass of orange juice and squint at the ancient
pages. Someone went through a lot of trouble to make this book ornate. Its swirling illuminations look like they’ve been encrusted with gold; each page reveals a whole new universe of vivid, monstrous illustrations. Here, right in the middle, is the part that obviously interested Trevor. His handwriting gets more frantic; things are underlined several times and there’re explanation points all over the damn place.
The central motif is a black-robed figure on a horse. A monk kneels before him, his face all torqued with fear, mouth wide open as if begging for his life. Naked bodies lay scattered like fallen leaves around them. Their skin is pale, and most of them have been run through with spears, but all their eyes are wide open. Above them, the text wraps around a giant skull that levitates in the sky. I run my finger along the page, feel the thick texture of the paper, and trace a triangle from the top of the skull to each edge of the picture.
A wildly elegant border runs the perimeter. At first I think it’s just ornate, golden vines snaking up a pillar. Then I notice something in the spiraling vegetation: an eye. I squint and get all close to the page. Then I almost fall backward in my chair. There’s a fucking ngk in there. It’s hiding in the damn foliage. I quickly scan the rest of the border and find at least six more of the little fuckers. Each one is mostly concealed; just their evil little faces peer out from behind leaves and branches.
I need to know what these damn words mean.
M
ama Esther?”
“Hm?”
“You all right?”
A weighty pause. I wonder about all the different ghosts and near-ghosts that have passed through these walls, unloaded their troubles to this great mother spirit, got some sense of peace, and kept it moving. “I’m fine, Carlos.”
“More lies.”
“Perhaps. But what are you going to do about it?”
“I’m working on it now, but I need your help.” I take out the massive book and lay it open to the illumination that Trevor was so interested in. Mama Esther looks it over without a word. “Can you translate it?”
She opens and closes her mouth, her eyes scanning the picture. Then she leafs a few pages forward and backward in the book. “It was written by a monk in the twelfth century. He’s going on about death and the devil and all this for a little while . . .” She’s a few pages back now, running her huge finger along the words. “‘Oh take my soul, ye vast armies of the night, for I am unworthy of inhabiting this frail human flesh. I am but a meager spirit, a humble servant of the Lord,’ et cetera, et cetera . . . and
then . . .” She raises one eyebrow. “Blah blah blah, Christ Jesus, rejuvenate my tired soul, blah blah . . .” The other eyebrow arches up. “‘The Darkness came over me on the same day I was overtaken by a stranger on the road. He was as one dead but still in a mortal skin. A wizard or warlock from the pits of Hell, I am sure. He’s caused in me such a tremulous fear. I nearly collapsed before him as one before the altar does kneel. The stranger had no name and was clothed all in robes of black, torn and shredded and reeking of burned flesh. I know not from whence he came.’ Blah blah blah, he invites the stranger into his house—smart—and . . .” She turns the page. “Whoop, big surprise—the guy puts him under a sorcery of some kind. And then . . . they do something that makes the giant skull appear. Not quite sure what. This whole page”—she points to the drawing with the ngks hiding in it—“is like a grocery list of sorts. ‘A grounded spirit, long since known to reside in the sleeping chamber, the brethren infants, the stranger himself and I, the gatekeeper, now that he hath laid his cold hands upon me and made me a pillar of damnation. I shall play this role, for I am cursed.’”
“And then?”
Mama Esther flips to the next page, which just has a single sentence: “‘Death is all I see.’”
“Damn.”
“Mm-hmm.”
We ponder the drawings for a minute. Then I say, “Well, clearly, the brethren infants are the ngks. We can agree on that, yes?”
Mama Esther thinks for a moment, then nods. “Would seem so, yes.”
“And the stranger, let’s say that’s this other basement dweller.”
“Fair enough.”
“That leaves the bedchamber ghost and the monk himself.”
“That’s me.”
“Who, the monk?”
“The grounded ghost,” Mama Esther says. “That’s what I am.”
“What does that mean?”
She moves her mouth from side to side a few times, trying to figure out how to explain it to me. “I’m affixed to this building. It’s part of me and I’m part of it. The building itself is me. I can’t totally make sense of it to someone—no offense—but to someone in a flesh-and-blood body, because you guys have different ideas of space and boundaries than we do.”
I wave a hand to tell her none taken.
“But you are around enough dead folks to get that we have some loose physical boundaries with things. I’m not just the spirit of one soul, but rather several powerful women from a few generations and families, combined into one.”
“And they all lived in this house?”
“Or spent time here, yes.”
I pause to let that settle in. I’d figured it was something like that, to be honest, but had never played out the thought all the way through. Mama Esther is a house ghost; that’s all I really needed to know. “So you can’t leave?”
“Not without taking the house with me.”
“What I don’t understand is, where’s the grounded ghost in this picture? I see the ngks, the cursed monk, the stranger, the dead . . . Where’s the grounded ghost?”
“There.” Mama Esther points to the giant skull floating above everything. “That’d be me.”
There’s an uncomfortable pause. I’m tussling with the truth of how much a target Mama Esther is, and I’m
pissed that it’s taken this long to figure that out. “Wish you’d showed me this earlier,” I say.
Then I feel like an asshole.
“Well, I didn’t, Carlos. I already told you that’s not how I do things. First of all, I had no idea that what that halfie had his nose in was gonna come back to bite me so.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“And second of all, I know neutrality is a myth, but I’m going to come as close as I can, even if it means pissing off certain foul elements upstairs at the Council.”
“Botus.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“He mentioned you at the hearing today.”
“I’m sure he did. They were none too happy when they came to get Riley. Apparently, the fact that I saved his life is of no consequence to them.” Mama Esther rubs her face and then directs an angry gaze out the window.
“He’s going to live?” I ask.
“If he does, it’ll be because you got him here quickly and I did what I had to do.”
“Thank you.” It sounds lame, given everything that’s going on, and she shrugs it off with a sigh.
“He knew about you, Carlos.”
“Who, Trevor?”
“He thought maybe you could be some kind of . . . alternative? He was fascinated, entranced by Sarco, but terrified too. Especially right before he vanished. He wanted me to help him find you.”
I rub my eyes. It’s what I feared. The knowledge just sinks like a stone into my tired mind. “You didn’t.” I can’t change what I’ve done. The only path is forward. And I don’t know that means.
“Of course not, but I knew your paths would cross
soon enough. Who else would the Ignoble Seven send against a halfie?”
* * *
Someone’s in my apartment. The atmosphere is all off, tainted with whatever vague vibrations the intruder let linger. I unsheathe my blade and creep forward, letting each foot settle gently on the floor, edging ahead inches at a time. The bathroom is clear. No one’s in the living room. I put my cane ever so silently against the bedroom door and push.
Sasha stands there, looking about as distraught as I must’ve yesterday. There’s no tear traces, just an overwhelming solemnness about her: slumped shoulders, face tightened, body tense like at any given moment she’ll either pounce or shatter. We regard each other silently. My face tells her face I can see something’s horribly wrong; she nods.
“Make yourself at home,” I say quietly, opening the door for her to come out into the living room.
She semi-smiles. “I didn’t touch anything. Didn’t look at anything. I just needed to be somewhere. Besides my place.” She walks past me, and I’m briefly put out of service by the rush of her scent and all the memories of last night that it carries.
“Nice place.” She’s looking around, and I’m suddenly self-conscious. It’s not a mess, just oddly put together. There’s a lot of exposed pipes and random furniture, the product of living in a somewhat renovated warehouse and shopping on a whim. Mostly though, there are books. It’s like a mini version of Mama Esther’s; bookcases line almost every wall, and the books themselves seem to topple out of them and gather in unruly clusters around
the apartment. A wan smile passes briefly across her face as she takes in the view, and then it’s gone.
“You want to talk about it?”
“Yes. No.” She sighs. “Yes, I do actually.”
“I don’t have any tea. But I do have beer.”
She smiles again, the sadness momentarily retreating from her eyes before crowding back in. “Such a dude. A beer would hit the spot, actually.”
I pop the tops of two bottles and put one in front of her. “It’s my brother,” Sasha says, straining for evenness. “I’m pretty sure he’s dead.” She sighs. “All the way dead, that is.”
T
revor was working with . . . Maybe that’s not the right word. He was working for this guy named Sarco. An old-time sorcerer.” She looks at me intently for a second, reading how her first breach into supernatural territory is sitting. I nod at her to keep going. “Real shady character, if you ask me, but brilliant, unfortunately, and there’s a certain”—she hesitates, searching for the word— “truth to him. To what he says. It’s hard to explain, Carlos.
“He showed up more than a year ago, talking all kinds of what seemed like dementia at the time, both to me and Trevor. I pretty much brushed him off, but Trevor has a more curious, wide-open nature than I do. He heard Sarco out and pretty soon was doing work for him.”
“Work?”
“Trevor was . . . is a historian. A morbid one, yes, but that comes with the territory of being . . . what we are. He’s a master of digging up old sorceries and witchcraft, figuring out various incantations from the different realms of the dead. It’s quite stunning when you get the filtered, nonboring parts recited over dinner and don’t have to thumb through thousands of pages of drivel. But Trevor
can sort through drivel like no one else out there. He’s like a computer with it.
“We’d been running with a group of other folks like us.” I look at her strangely. “You know, dead but alive. Inbetweeners.” I nod. There’s others. Folks like us. My whole body tingles with the thought.
“Go on.”
“It was just an informal thing, a loose band of survivors, so to speak. That’s what we called ourselves: Survivors. For obvious reasons. Anyway, I do work for them still, here and there, and at the time Trevor and I were both pretty heavily involved. It’s supersecret, as you can imagine. A small, close-knit community, not necessarily harmonious, sometimes fraught with strife and bullshit, but still . . . a haven nonetheless.
“Sarco shows up one day talking big talk about the dead and the living and the space in between.”
It doesn’t have to be so far apart,
Trevor had said. A quote perhaps. I keep it to myself.
“And people became somewhat enamored really. He does have a way of sweet-talking. We had our reservations—I still do—but Trevor went in headfirst, despite my cautioning him. He started unearthing all these old secret incantations and things for some project Sarco had him on. He’d tell me about it at first.” She looks away, and for a second I see a sliver of memory slip through the barricade around her mind. It’s the two of them, brother and sister, having breakfast early one spring morning. He’s going on about some old file he dug up; she’s looking skeptical.
Then it’s gone; she’s closed it all back away.
“Then . . . he started keeping quiet about it. I think Sarco had him on some real silent pact type of shit.” I
light up a Malagueña and hold one up toward her. She shakes her head.
“Coffee?”
“Please.”
She pads into the kitchen behind me and I start washing out the steel cafetera.
“The more Trevor disappeared into himself and his research, the less comfortable I was with the whole thing. Finally, one day, he started talking about making a run of some kind. Whatever it was Sarco had him on was coming to a head. He was out all hours, sometimes gone for days. At first, my stomach twisted into knots each time. You have to understand, Trevor and I have been through everything together. He’s the only person in the world who knows who I really am. We literally died together. Going our separate ways is one thing, but this . . . it was like Sarco was eating my brother whole right in front of my face and there was nothing I could do.
“The worst part was, he made some sense, from what I could gather. I mean, he wasn’t totally insane. If he’d just been some fucking nut, I’da just taken care of him and Trevor woulda gotten over it, but . . . well, maybe you can understand this, Carlos: we live in between two worlds, not wholly part of one nor the other. Here comes this man, this force of nature, and he wants to do something radical to bring those two worlds crashing together. Something huge. A total breakdown of the borderline between the living and the dead. It’s a terrible, beautiful thought. Galvanized the shit out of the Survivors. Tore us apart too. Infighting broke out pretty soon after Sarco showed up, mostly over the ideas he was talking about, and soon there was a faction and then we scattered.”
She looks so sad. I want to wrap around her, but I know
the story needs to come out. The cafetera chortles out a steady burst of steam. I click off the burner and let the coffee settle before pouring it into two white cups. “Milk and sugar?”
“Black and bitter, please.”
I hand her the coffee. She breathes in the steam with a smile and we return to the living room.
“I kept my eye on Trevor as long as I could. Followed him to the Red Edge, where he was meeting with some hipster kids. I just wanted to make sure he was safe, but . . . of course he took it personally. Little sis trying to play big sis. We argued and I backed off. He went out New Year’s Eve and has been gone ever since.” She’s stony faced, holding back the ocean. I think she’s done, but then she says: “Sarco . . . came to me . . . a few days later.”
“Oh?”
“He wanted me. To recruit me,” she adds quickly. “To the cause. I asked him where Trevor was and he said he didn’t know, that he’d been looking for him too. ‘Scouring the heavens and earth’ actually, because Sarco can’t say anything plain. And he said he needed my help, that he was so close to something. Sounded just on the edge of that end-of-times hysteria but still somehow coherent. It’s so hard to explain, Carlos, the way that man is. He’s got a way about him, all at once repellant and charming. Not in a sexy way, just . . . the way the truth can be intoxicating after you’ve gone without for so long, you know?”
A painfully apt analogy. I nod.
“We were all there just trying to get by, struggling through life in the intersection, and here comes the cat with some big-ass ideas about life and death and yeah, part of me is all ears even though there’s a an even deeper part that’s horrified, that doesn’t trust his ass at all whatsoever in any way, shape, or form.”
She says it all so matter-of-factly, but she’s plainly shaken.
I open my mouth and close it again. An epic saga sits on the edge of my tongue, and for a second the whole night seems to lean forward to see if I’ll say it or not.
“You have your own stories, I know,” Sasha says, “but what I wanted to tell you . . .” She stops and touches her lips like she’s not sure whether she should let the words out. “The reason I came here tonight. I don’t know how to explain it: after you left this morning, I . . . I understood, for the first time since January, that he’s dead. I’d probably known all along, but I was trying so hard to fight it. Hoping some other truth would figure out a way to make sense. But I knew. I did. I just couldn’t . . . face it.
“When you left, I lay there and felt so alive and so sad and so happy all at once, like someone had pulled the protective coating away from my heart and I was just
raw
for the first time in so long.”
I must’ve made a face because she’s smiling, putting her hand on my leg. “Not in a bad way, Carlos. I mean, yes, it hurts. I’m broken-hearted, and I don’t think I’ve fully dealt with it at all. But in a way, maybe I was dealing with it all that time I was in denial, bit by bit. Who knows?
“But the reason I let you into my house. The . . . that night you showed up at the Red Edge, I was . . . I didn’t know what to do. I’d been going there night after night, waiting for Trevor to show up. I’d stalked those stupid kids he’d met up with, all the way back to their stupid Clinton Hill apartments, and found no trace of him. I said no to Sarco that first night, but he kept reaching out to me, trying to bring me in, and that night I was just about to give up the ghost and go find him. I was . . . I was more angry than anything, at Trevor and whatever stupidity he’d gotten tangled in, at myself for considering jumping in after him, at Sarco, at the dead. Everything. The
Survivors are mostly scattered. Seemed like all that was left for me to do was put in with Sarco and hope I could at least find out what happened to my brother, if not get him back.”
I love and am terrified about where all this is going. I sip some coffee and blank my face.
“I don’t know who the fuck you are, Carlos, or where the fuck you came from or why the fuck you walked into the bar that night at that very moment when you did. But I know that I had been asking, asking without even realizing, for God or the universe or someone to send me some kind of reminder that there was life outside the stupid triangle of my missing brother, this wild sorcerer, and me. Because that’s all I’ve been able to be about for the past couple months, and it’s wearing me out. It really is.
“I woulda settled for a goddamn butterfly or something, you know just something small and momentary to snap me out of it. But they sent me you, you ridiculous, tall, beautiful man, cutting through the crowd of nobodies at the Red Edge and sitting down at my table with a glass of wine and a rum and Coke. I don’t know where all this is going, but I know you did something huge without even meaning to.” She moves closer to me; her hand’s on my leg. “And I know you held me in all the right ways last night.”
I’m hard as a rock.
“And I know you’re like me in a lot more ways than just the obvious one.” I’m laying her back on the couch, tearing her clothes off.
No, I’m not.
I’m letting her nearness wash over me, sinking into the bliss of the moment. Letting go . . . “And I know I want you . . .” She’s hovering over me, levitating for all I know. We’re barely touching, but she’s all around me, her face
millimeters from mine. “. . . inside me.” My hands are on her shoulders, peeling away her blouse, sliding off her pants, she’s lowering herself onto me. We’re about to be one, about to once again . . .
“Carlos.”
“Hm?”
“Stop thinking so hard and fuck me.”
Gleefully, I
comply.