Y
ou’re taking me to the entrada.”
“The entrada is only a means to an end, Carlos.”
“You’re taking me to Hell.”
Sarco smiles for the first time since we left my place, a gaping empty grin across his static-laced visage. It’s better when he’s just serious-looking, actually. “There’re things you must see there.”
“Why? What’s this about?”
“It’s about me having a chance to explain myself. I told you, I need your help. And I know your mind is already poisoned against me. Fine. Just see things as I do for a moment and then do what you will.”
The park is all darkness tonight. Those lamps and their dim haze are a joke. We enter, and immediately I feel that pulsing of supernatural park life. It’s even stronger now that I’m fully spirit, as if I’ve somehow tapped into a vast, swarming network of otherworldly creatures and undead souls. Every move I make sends a tremble along the weblines, and the park fluctuates and exhales on the whims of all its haunted guests.
And then we’re standing in front of that hovering emptiness in the shadows of the trees. I realize that Sarco’s
staticky void is probably made up of something quite similar to the entrada; he becomes almost invisible standing in front of it. And then he’s gone. And I know he wants me to follow. I’m full of dread—an unnatural feeling for me until pretty recently. Everything in me wants to turn around and float back through Brooklyn to where my body lies pinned to the couch. I stand there, perched on the brink of two universes, gazing dreamily into this hypnotic gate of Hell.
I have to know.
I have to find out what’s going on. For Riley, for me, for Dro. For Sasha, in spite of everything. The only way to end this is to get to the bottom of it, even if that means walking into obvious damnation. I take a deep breath and feel my barely there body flap gently in the wind like laundry on the clothesline. Then I step into the entrada.
* * *
Most afterlifers spend their time in the Underworld. The Council does its best to keep it that way, but of course, there are always stragglers. Life has that certain magnetism; it draws death in even as it repels it. They chase each other like high school sweethearts, now loving, now fighting. Teasing explodes into full-blown warfare, which leads to great make-up sex. The sun sets and the moon rises; the cycle begins again. The dead will always strive toward living, and the living will always cruise inevitably toward death. What keeps things stable, as Mama Esther pointed out, is that divine inexplicable balance.
Sometimes it’s nostalgia that keeps a spirit swinging back up into to the sunlit earthly plane. Could be an open thread or some unanswered question. Or the perception of one. The dream of a memory can go on haunting a soul well past the grave, can reap supernatural havoc for
ages; it drives many a glowing shadow to late-night wanderings through the Brooklyn streets.
Besides a few notable exceptions, the living tend to wait till their time has come before going downstairs. I mighta passed through during my however-long-it-was period between death and resurrection, but if I did, I have no memory of it. Since then, the closest I’ve come is the Council’s wide-open misty warehouse.
Until now.
First it’s just darkness. Gradually, shapes waver into existence around me. They’re abstract, though, and don’t really seem sure whether they exist or not. Far off in the murkiness, swirling misty towers jut into black skies. Is there a sky in the Underworld? Whatever it is that surrounds me, it’s splashed with grayish clouds and seems to go on forever. What’s gone is the striking contrast between my own semiexistence and the solidity of the physical world. Here, everything is vague and ethereal and at first it’s disconcerting as shit.
Sarco stands a few feet away, staring intently at me. He’s excited. I can feel it bristling in the air around both of us, see his body panting up and down with anticipation. He’s gotten me this far—some massive check on his to-do list for fucking up the planet, I’m sure. And now gears are turning for the next series of steps.
“Welcome to death.” Sarco’s voided face breaks into another grin. He loves this shit.
“All right, man. Show me what you brought me here to show me and let’s get this over with.”
“Why the hurry, Mr. Delacruz? Your body surely has a few more hours before it begins to decompose. Enjoy yourself. Few mortals have been where you stand.”
“Charming. I’m charmed. Now, if you please.”
There are shapes congregating around us, fluttering
shadows, hunched over in vague humanoid forms. They lope toward where we stand, humming with curiosity. I start to feel suffocated, like the gathering swarm of ghosts is hoarding all the oxygen in the place. But then, I probably don’t even deal in oxygen in this state. Either way, the feeling is not pleasant. Sarco draws a blade and waves it in a great semicircle. The wandering ghosts fall back with murmurs of shock and anger. A wide berth has been cleared around us, but I notice that the shadowy crowd keeps growing exponentially. Death seeks out life like a drug.
“Come,” Sarco says, and for the first time, I detect a hint of something off in his voice. Is it fear? Frustration? I have no way of knowing. Either way, maybe all is not going quite according to the plan.
“This way.” He sweeps his arm again, clearing a throng of whining, whispering shrouds. “Stay close. I would hate for you to get caught up in the swarm. You know how the dead love to make things their own.”
He sounds somewhere in between genuine and mocking. I don’t even care which it is anymore. The thickness in the air is making it hard to concentrate. I try to focus on his towering form as it glides on those long legs through the clearing of ghosts. The shadows close in behind us, reach out with long, icy fingers. They’re hungry, lonely, aching with wrath and desire but otherwise empty. Empty and they sense something else, something full and alive, even if it’s just the torn-out soul of a living man. Still, it’s different, an anomaly in this place of death. And they want some.
“The whole Underworld is like this?”
Sarco is a pretty wack Virgil, but he does seem to know what he’s talking about. Even if I can’t trust a word he says. “No, this is like the first sight of any third-world country. These are the neediest that clutter around the
airports and train stations to get a glimpse or grapple a shred of the world they can never have. A sickening horde.” He swipes his blade again, grunting with irritation, and the ghosts cleave away like windblown leaves. “Always wanting something. Wanting, wanting, wanting. Their whole essence is neediness. Tragic, really. Tragic and disgusting.”
My whole flimsy body goes cold suddenly and I can’t move. Sarco sweeps on ahead, not realizing I’m detained, and I watch as the shadows close around behind him. They’re all over me, sliding in and out of my feeble existence, merging cruelly with my shroud, wrapping cold tentacle-like arms around and around me. I try to call out, but nothing happens. Try to project my mortal terror across the telepathy waves toward my enemy and savior, but all I hear is the silence of death and the occasional moans of these ghosts.
I can make out their faces now, feel their hot, dead breath against my face, on the back of my neck. They’re old mostly; their skin once hung in curtains off their decaying faces; drool puddled in those hung-low mouths, unseeing eyes rolled back as machines clicked and chattered and beeped somewhere nearby. The endless tyranny of prolonged life. The restlessness left over from their slow rot hangs all around me.
Existence is so fragile when you’re only a soul. I feel it slipping away in just a few short, terrifying minutes. I’m fading, my life essence splashing in prickly waves across the masses of dead that hem me in. And then I see him. His long arm reaches out of nowhere, clasps a few ghosts across their chests and flings them away. I gasp, my vision clouding over. Sarco’s empty face appears, towers over me. He reaches a hand down and I take it and feel myself rising from the muck of spirit.
They’re on him too. Those hungry fingers sliver up his tall body, envelop him in their starved wrath. For a terrible second, I’m pretty sure all is lost. Panic seems to grip Sarco. He lets go of my hand and slashes frantically at them with his blade. They’re relentless, but they shy away from his sorcery and finally disperse. He pulls me up and there’s a fury in him I hadn’t seen before.
“Come quickly now,” he whispers in a harsh, chipped voice. “This way.” His blade waves out in front of him, clearing our path once again. The moaning ghosts clamor forward and swing back. I stay as close as I can to his shadow without being enveloped by it. It seems endless, this two-soul parade through the desperate masses. A few more times I think we won’t make it; exhaustion creeps over my body in crisp waves, seems to pull me toward the uncertain ground. But I won’t give in.
Finally, finally, finally we reach some kind of sanctity. The ghosts have gradually faded off and returned to their aimless wanderings across that misty plain. The vague towers loom closer now, and I realize they look familiar. It’s like a crude projection, more hallucination than anything else, but I can make out the outlines of those fancy row houses that line the edge of Prospect Park. The angles are all off; it’s only a cruel funhouse rendering, but still, there’s no mistaking it. Farther away I see the ghost of Brooklyn’s clock tower, an eerie red glow against the darkness.
N
ow what?”
Sarco seems to be taking a moment to collect himself. He wavers, rolling his neck back and forth like an athlete with sore muscles. “Now,” he says when he’s got himself together, “we continue.”
“Sarco, tell me where we’re going.”
“You want to know about your life, Carlos?” His voice lilts with derision. I want to slap him, but he just saved my ass, and he’s probably my only hope of getting out of here. Also, I want to know about my life. Desperately.
“I do. But I also want to know where we’re going.”
“You died nobly. Fighting.”
“That a fact?” I keep my voice even, reminding myself over and over that these are surely lies. Absolutely, surely lies. And still . . .
“A truth teller, right to the end.”
“You’re gonna stay vague and keep hanging this over my head, aren’t you? I still have no reason to believe you know anything about me, Sarco, so . . .”
He puts his hand on my head very suddenly, and there’s the reason, plain as day: it’s me. Me when I was alive. I can tell because my skin is the full shade of brown that it’s
supposed to be, not tinged with gray. My eyes sparkle with a vitality I’ve never known in them. I’m alive. The disembodied soul of the half-dead man that I’ve become shudders with recognition, hunger. Is this what those old invalid spirits felt as they mobbed us? I want. That life. Back inside me. I want it like a drug. Nothing else matters.
But the living me is upset. The image is shaky like a home video and a little too grainy. I watch myself swerve out of the way of something, turn a fearsome face toward the sky, and then lunge forward. Then it stops and replays again from the beginning: it’s just a spliced-up, several-second clip, looped on an infinite repeat in my brain. I yell and wrench myself away from Sarco’s grasp, away from the living me, and sink to the floor.
“Who was I?”
It doesn’t matter to me if he’s lying. At this point, I just want an answer. As long as it sounds believable enough, I’ll take it. I’ll take anything. I need to fulfill this craving.
“A murderer.”
“What do you mean?”
“Come. I’ll explain presently. Come.” I look at him in disbelief. “Carlos, come with me. We can’t just sit here waxing nostalgic. Your body only has so much time, remember.”
* * *
We stumble on through the haze of ghost Brooklyn. Some things are the same, some are completely wrong. The dead have their own sense of architecture, apparently, and it doesn’t look kindly on straight lines or finished products. Occasional ghosts glide around us through the streets, but they keep their distance.
We stop at what I figure to be the corner of Eastern Parkway and Washington, just past the Brooklyn Museum. There’s a park there, in the living Brooklyn; a little grass-
and-benches type joint where old guys sit around for hours beating one another at chess. But here it’s gone; it’s empty like the entrada. I feel a chill come over me as we get close. “What is it?”
“The Underworld of the Underworld.”
“The Deeper Death.” I peer into the void, imagining Dro’s sad form languishing away along with the all the shattered souls I dispatched here over the past three years. “This is where ghosts go when they die.”
“No,” Sarco says. “This is where they stop. It’s the end of existence. An infinite ocean of utterly nothing. There’s no one in there. No one and no thing. It’s the incinerator of souls.”
“Nice.”
“Come on. We’re almost there.”
The trees reach in uncomfortable angles toward the sky like cursed yoga masters, frozen forever in the wrong pose. The whole place just seems like a dreary reflection of the living world, and I can imagine Riley saying, “Why the fuck you think I bang around up here? Fuck all that.”
I’m not surprised when we stop outside Mama Esther’s house. Of course all this sinister bullshit would lead back here. What does he have planned? I try to shake off this thick daze I’ve settled into, but it hangs all around me—the atmosphere is poisoned with it.
Sarco smiles down at me—never a good thing—and ushers me inside.
It’s all different in here. The air is crisp. My faded feet scrape on real floorboards. The world has become physical again. It pulses with the life blood of existence.
Sarco starts up the stairs.
“Mama Esther . . .”
“Is sleeping. She will not see us.”
I don’t like this. The thing I don’t like the most is that
I feel propelled forward, anxious to see it through, whatever the hell it is. I can’t tell if it’s some nasty magic Sarco’s using on me or if I really just want to know what’s going on, what mysteries he holds about my own life and the spirit world. Sasha, of all people, seemed to trust him. She didn’t know the half of his treachery, I’m sure, and I probably don’t either. Still, something pulls me along, beckons me forward. I step uneasily up the stairs after him.
“What’s . . . ?” I’m tired of asking questions that don’t get answered. I let that one die half formed, and all I hear is our feet creaking up the stairwell and the occasional groans and clicks of the house settling. We pass the second- and third-floor landings, pause briefly on the fourth, and then scale a ladder up onto the roof.
It’s raining in the Underworld. A cruel wind has whipped up around us, and it buffets my body; I have to concentrate not to swoop away off the roof with it. Sarco is exultant—he throws his arms up to the storm and laughs. “Can you feel it, Carlos?”
It’s a rhetorical question, apparently, because he just keeps laughing instead of waiting for an answer. I can, though. The air is pregnant with tension the way it gets just before a hurricane. “The missing piece!” Sarco yells into the sky.
I just wait. Obviously, asking questions is useless. The guy will explain or he won’t, and if he don’t, I’m out. Matter-of-fact: I take a step back toward the ladder.
“You can have whatever you want, Carlos!” Sarco says. He’s suddenly very close to me, horribly close. “It’s you. I thought it was Trevor. Sasha maybe. But it’s you. The missing piece.”
“The fuck you going on about?”
By way of an answer, Sarco puts his hand on my head again and I see me, thrashing an arm at someone, my eyes desperate. I swing again, take a hit across the face, and stumble backward. Blood pours from a gash on my forehead. I launch forward, mouth open, and disappear.
“They don’t need you, Carlos. They use you happily. But they don’t need you.” The dead sky rages around us with the coming storm, but Sarco’s voice has dropped to a rancid whisper. “They don’t even really know what you are, your true power.” I know he’s talking about the Council, and I’d be more comfortable if I didn’t partially agree with him. “You’re much more than some wretched intermediary. You’re more than alive and more than dead, not just a poorly constructed halfling. You are complete.”
I look around. The building is real beneath my feet. Mama Esther is somewhere inside, in the living world, maybe sleeping, maybe drugged. Ngks are crawling through the ghostly buildings around us. Out in the misty Underworld, I see the hordes of hungry, dilapidated souls that met us at the entrance. They’re swarming toward us; there’s no mistaking it. It’s a sclerotic, gradual swarm, but it’s definitely headed our way. I think about the list of ingredients, as Mama Esther called it, and look back at Sarco. “You’re building an entrada.”
“Fuck an entrada! I’m tearing a hole in the very fabric of the life-death continuum! Don’t you see, Carlos?” He’s almost pleading now, and it’s damn awkward. But, suddenly, I do see, all too clearly. Ghostly threads stretch from the dilapidated buildings nearby. They’re wispy and barely there but pulsing with energy. They all join together at a point in the center of the rooftop.
“The living and the dead don’t have to be so far apart.
You are the living embodiment of that truth. It’s a farce, this barrier, this wall between us. It’s a lie.” Lightning crackles across the sky. Black rain drizzles in wild circles around us.
“The cursed monk,” I say.
Sarco nods. “You followed Trevor’s paper trail.”
“The stranger on the road. That was you, all those hundreds of years ago?”
“Hm, one familiar to me—let’s say a distant uncle. The Towermaster introduced us. Masenfel, plague-bringer. A sorcerer of almost godlike powers. Taught me many things, that old one.” He looks lost in thought for a few seconds and then turns his empty face to me. “What do you want to know?”
“Why?”
“Why destroy the barrier between the living and the dead? You know that already, Carlos. You may not understand the depth of it, but inside yourself, you know it’s the natural way. Civilization took a turn, tore us from one another. There was a time, long forgotten, never recorded, when ancestors walked freely among the living; there was harmony. Carlos, the living world becomes more powerful for this. Do you see that?
“I destroyed the Towermaster because he wanted to hoard all his necromancy and world-shifting arts to himself and his select few. All these mystical arts don’t need to be hidden away, the earth-shaking weapons of the powerful few. When this is done, when the gate is open, this magic will be at the hands of the whole world. We will enter a new age.”
I just look at him; his staticky, impossible form trembles in the hellish wet wind sweeping across the rooftop.
“Carlos, do you have the foresight to understand that
what’s happening here today is much greater than the petty casualties of the moment?”
“You killed my people, Sarco. That soulcatcher, Dro . . .”
Sarco sighs, the disappointed patriarch. “The soulcatcher was about to ruin everything. Yes, I killed him. My plan will not be ruined. Yes, I took one life to bring a new world order, yes. And Washington and Arroyo, they should not have fucked with ngks. Everybody knows that. The ngks are a part of the equation. They purify. A space must be purified before any sacred work is done there, cleansed and left alone. The ngks form a barrier against the meddlesome dead, and then they are pivotal in opening the gateway. They don’t have to hurt anyone if people would only stay away from them.”
“Easy for you to say.”
Mama Esther’s tired, unconscious face appears at the focal point of all those tingling threads. Slowly, grudgingly, her massive body begins to rise up from the ceiling.
“The ancient Romans had a god called Janus,” Sarco says in my ear.
I step away from him. “Two faces. Watched the gates.”
“Yes! Janus was a part of both worlds. His faces looked inside the gates and outside at the same time. Divinity, Carlos. The Divine Doorkeeper. This is the gift God has given humanity in the form of the inbetweeners. The missing link. Resurrected. You have a role to play in this great struggle between life and death, and it’s not just as a busybody catching runaway grandma ghosts.”
Again, uncomfortably close to home. I don’t know what my role is in the grand scheme of things, but the sting of feeling underused is sharp.
“What will happen?”
“At first? Chaos. The hungry dead will pour through the
gate, scatter out into the world in their vast multitudes. The living will wander in. There is always a painful period of absolute crisis at the pinnacle of any great change.”
Mama Esther has cleared the roof now and hangs a few feet up in the air, her body limp and leaning forward like she’s dangling from a string. The threads that are converging on her tingle and twitch. There’s ngks at the other end of each thread, I’m sure of it. Mama Esther is the focal point of a huge phantom spiderweb.
“The Council?”
“Ha! The Council will be obliterated. Probably first to go.”
The thought has a certain charm to it.
“Eventually, balance will return to the world. The equation will even out, because that is the natural way of things. Except this time, the dead will exist in harmony with the living, not confined to some supernatural detention center. The living will feel a companionship with their lost loved ones, know the soft touch once more of those who passed. There will be a coming together, a palpable shift. The war will be no more, the barriers collapsed. The occult sorceries will be released like a wave of light across the world; living humans will be capable of powers they never imagined.”
“And me?”
“The world begins and ends with one thing, Carlos: the gatekeeper.”
“But aren’t you just gonna tear it open and let them swarm through? What do you need a . . . ?”
“It’s part of the equation, Carlos, part of the magic. To make a gate, one needs a gatekeeper. The ngks play their role, I play mine, and you play yours. The Council is a thing of the past. You will take up your rightful position
as the living guardian of the crossroads, a warrior priest of unimagined powers, Carlos.”
Sheets of rain cascade around us, sweep across the roof in Hell’s untamed wind. I stare into Sarco’s shifting void and smile.
“What do I have to
do?”