Psychopomp: A Novella (11 page)

Her nights were unbearably lonely. The angel’s footsteps were restless. He never called Claire to him now. In the dark, her eyes were always wet. Sometimes she thought maybe he was crying too, weeping sounds so distant and broken they sounded like wind through the rafters. She wondered if he’d cried over her sister.

Someone must have called her uncle to alert him of the change in her behavior, because he visited her at the institute for the first time. “Your sister has died,” he informed her coolly. “She was killed in an act of terrorism. I am all the family you have left, Claire. Do try to get well. I will have your cure soon. I promise.”

With a kiss on her forehead, he left.

Ethan appeared from time to time, blinking his unbearable eyes at her. “It breaks my heart to see you like this,” he whispered, but he didn’t look heartbroken. He didn’t look like anything.

She couldn’t respond, because then he would steal her soul.

“You aren’t like the other girls,” he said, his pockets rattling with pills.

Claire refused to listen. She was too busy counting footsteps.

Ms. Gilsig appeared too, searching the room up and down for the regular meds. She squinted suspiciously at Claire’s prone form on the bed. Her regular pills weren’t enough to kill, even taken all at once, but they were enough to make a person completely numb. And the memory pills had all sorts of side effects.

“We’ll keep all your meds in the clinic from now on,” Ms. Gilsig decided. She shook her head in disapproval as she left the room.

After how well Claire had behaved all these years, after how hard she’d worked to earn the trust needed to take charge of her own doses, it had taken only a single night for Ethan to ruin it all.

But the real thing she had lost was right above her. So close, yet she couldn’t reach it.

Until one night she was certain she could. She was just angry enough and just jealous enough of anyone else the angel might call instead of her.

No one else could have him.

He sat at the piano just like the first time she’d seen him. She stood at the edge of the stairs, her eyes fixed on the dark thing that always loomed behind him. There was a rustle in the air, as of feathers.

“What happened to you?” Claire demanded, steadying her trembling frame against the wall. For days, only he had been clear in her mind. “What did you do to get here?”

His flinty eyes dropped in shame and he did not answer.

“It wasn’t your fault,” she said. “What happened with my sister.
She
was wrong. She never should have left you!” After a moment’s silence, she added, “She never loved you like I do.”

“And that,” he said, “is your mistake. For I was the one who killed her.”

She knew, she
knew
—she had always known—something deep and terrible lurked inside him. He would hurt her despite her mad devotion. But when he looked at her again, all she wanted was to feel the cool skin of his chest as she pressed her cheek against it. Her love for him was blind, and he was poison inside her.

He stood swiftly, advancing toward her. “Why,” he asked, “did you betray me?”

Taking a step back, she scrambled for something to say. But before she could answer, weightlessness overtook her. The angel receded from her, and then her vision turned black.

When she woke at the bottom of the stairs, a boy’s face hovered above hers. His black-lashed eyes were bottomless with concern. They were brown, not blue. They should have been blue.

“What are you doing here?” Claire asked. Confusion welled up, frightening her.

“You fell,” he said, “and your leg is broken. What were you doing up there?”

“I… I…” Her eyes darted past his face, along the walls and ceiling, trying to find somewhere to land. She thought she could hear music even now. Each note was a stab to her heart.

The angel. The angel—

The boy put a hand gently on her shoulder as she tried to rise. “Hey, hey. Relax. It’s all right. Ms. Gilsig already called for help.”

Claire stared at the handsome boy leaning over her. “Who are you?” she demanded, suddenly overcome with terror. “What are you doing here?”

“Don’t worry,” the boy said, tucking a piece of hair behind her ears. She didn’t know his name, but she could imagine him holding her in the dark. Undoing her with a smile.

“I don’t want to go to Rueville,” she cried, clutching his hand.

The angel. How would she ever see the angel again? Claire stared through the open door up the attic staircase, her eyes searching the shadows at the top. He would be waiting. The angel had told her he would never leave.

At least she would always know where to find him.

Cold silence greeted me at the morgue. Gabriel had gone.

I went back outside and started walking. When I reached the two trees I’d only ever seen from a distance, I realized they’d been dead all along. Their branches were like the bones left behind in the alkaline hydrolysis machine. Brittle-paper leaves clung with fragile tenacity, shuddering violently in the wind. The trunks were grayed and hollow, looking as if they would break and crumble at the touch of my finger.

The fields stretched ahead of me, endless and flat. Somewhere beyond these fields was the castle Gabriel had mentioned, cradled at the base of a mountain range.

There was a very good chance I would die on this journey. I only hoped I’d find Gabriel along the way so I wouldn’t have to die alone.

Death came for everyone, young and old, rich or poor, and no one knew what happened to spirits or souls or energy, or whatever it was kept a person alive. We could only see the body that remained, cold and pale and slowly rotting.

Life and death existed together, never one without the other. Gabriel understood that. He knew death was nothing to fear, and now I was beginning to know that too. Death was nothing but a possibility for new life. If I died out there in the unknown, my body would decay in a heap of liquid soaking into the soil. It would revert to its most basic forms, the materials that made up everything else in the world. The ground would embrace me and turn me into something new.

There was nothing to stop me. I had nothing to lose.

This was where I’d disappear off the face of the earth.

Slipping the bag over my back, I stepped forward and passed between the two trees. I walked, my steps sure, the ground firm beneath my feet, the morning sun beating on my back. The wind across the empty flatlands was fierce, flinging dust and dirt against my skin. I was the only thing in its path for miles.

I reminded myself: No looking back.

~

The sun blistered me through the haze as the day pressed on. I carried myself across the landscape of the map of the world. The rising of ocean waters had changed the shape of this country. Everything was brown and yellow and gray. Green was mostly an artificial shade with no place in nature.

I walked all through the day, pausing only to eat and sip from the bags of water. There was never anything to see except field after stiff, dry field. No sound but my feet crunching the grass, my inhale and exhale.

Gradually the ground began to roll in gentle hills that were never high enough to hide the elusive horizon. What few trees I saw were small and shriveled, beaten by wind and decay. There were no people. There was nowhere to live, nowhere to hide. There was nothing to sustain a human life.

The world was so vast. It stretched away from me in every direction, unbroken nothingness as far as I could see.

My legs were numb by the time darkness began to encroach at my back. The sun was ahead of me now, a golden smear through dust. I chased a daylight that never seemed to end. It was always just a few steps ahead of me.

And then the night fell suddenly, a dark blanket that felt both desolate and suffocating.

The air cooled rapidly. I opened my mouth to take a deep breath but found myself sobbing instead.

If the journey was already this difficult, I didn’t know how I’d make it much farther.

I lay on a bare patch of ground and slept deeply in the silent dark.

Wind gusted across the fields, bringing in dust so thick I had to rip a piece of cloth from my hem to tie over my nose and mouth. I walked with my head down and eyes half closed. The sun burned faintly through the brown haze as I cursed myself for attempting this journey.

Then one day the wind lessened and the dust settled from the air. I took out a bag of water and put my chapped lips to the valve. I drank only a few mouthfuls, not knowing how long I would need to conserve the supplies Pell had given me.

A shape appeared in the distance. I squinted my eyes, focusing on it.

The wind turbine was white, its blades spinning swiftly. It rose into the sky, growing taller the closer I walked. And it wasn’t just one but five, a dozen, hundreds. Their tall, slender forms appeared through the thinning haze, mesmerizing me.

Up close they were gigantic sentinels guarding the land and inviting me into the beyond. They creaked and groaned as the blades wheeled without purpose.

The land was changing. Green showed up more often, in tangled thickets and moss and in patches by ruined roadsides. Weeds thrived in sporadic clusters. I coughed up lungfuls of dust. I could nearly see the color of the sky, a blue I’d never known outside of dreams.

Day after day I kept on despite feeling the first stirrings of panic.

And doubt. So much doubt. Gabriel had never reached the castle. He was already dead. He’d never left Rueville at all.

The sun burning orange, this damaged land, the primordial darkness at night. These tedious days gone by where I barely spoke, and when I did it was to myself. Such things could have driven anyone mad. And I was half-starved and dehydrated in my attempts to ration my supplies, my mind susceptible to idle whims.

My thoughts centered on food, water, and Gabriel, and the next step, and the next. The bleakness of the journey wiped my mind blank of purpose. Tears filmed in my eyes.

My hands felt heavy and swollen at the ends of my arms. My shoulders ached sharply under the weight of my bag. My legs shuddered and burned with each trudging step that took me farther from home and closer to Gabriel.

I hoped, I hoped.

I wondered why I chased him so single-mindedly. Why needing him felt like a savage ache in my bones. He’d done horrible things to people dead and alive. He’d shown me common courtesy, but never any affection. Never made me any promises. And yet I clung to him, to the idea of him, like barnacles on a ship.

I was going to die for him.

I was half dead already.

Several days passed this way, interchangeable, interminable. Sometimes I walked without realizing it, my mind entering a fugue. I would come back to myself, legs moving of their own accord, unable to tell how far I’d gone.

The sky cleared. And it was so blue.

Days and nights bled into one another. I walked.

My supplies started to run low before there was ever a hint of a mountain on the far too distant horizon. I kept going, increasingly worried. My eyes swept back and forth, searching for something. For anything.

I didn’t dare stop. I refused to lie down and die, though I knew I walked to my own grave.

Time was endless, an abyss. I walked, shaking and sobbing when I was too weak to help myself. I walked until I’d forgotten my own name.

One day I found a little pond and hoped to gather water. But I knelt at the edge and knew the water, dark green with unnerving hints of red, was poison. Black pipes ran just underneath the surface.

I was so thirsty.

In despair, I turned to the nauseating little shoots sprouting near the pond. My hands plunged into the cold, damp soil. Baring my teeth with effort, I tugged until I’d freed a clump of thick, yellowish roots. They were loathsome, like skin that had never seen the sun. I wiped off clods of black dirt before biting into the mass. It tasted like the earth. Stringy, moist fibers stuck in my teeth. I thought I might faint from a sick combination of pleasure and revulsion.

Each dusk, glowing wisps of light led me into ghost towns slowly being swallowed up by nature. The ruins crumbled, coated in grime and fossilized lichens, strangled in long-dead vines. Silvered in moonlight, the half-fallen walls took on a magical quality, protecting me from unseen terror.

I slept on the hard ground, shivering, haunted and hounded by phantasmagoric visions of the people I’d left in Marshwick. They appeared in my dreams as a gray chorus of disembodied heads. “Marlo,” they whispered and rasped, “it’s been so long since we’ve seen your face.” Their dream voices leapt over each other, forming an odd harmony that echoed in my sleeping mind.

I slept beneath the trees that cropped up more often now. Mushrooms crowded in the dank soil at my feet. I dreamed of filthy hands and beautiful mouths. I dreamed of the ambassador sucking down marrow and picking his teeth with the splinters of bones. He cracked a human spine like a whip, spattering blood on the pile of corpses he’d desecrated. I dreamed of Verm, pouring cyanide into my heart to stun me, to capture me like a fish from a coral reef. I always woke up crying.

Until now I’d never seen the actual moon. It was heavy and yellow, pocked with grayish seas. I watched it change shape and move across the black sky, closer and farther, round and crescent.

Stars glittered above me in unfathomable multitudes. Miles and miles from artificial light, they were all I could see. Sometimes they didn’t even look like stars but veils, or sparkling dust. They mapped the sky. My skin looked blue in their light.

I didn’t know where I was on earth. I didn’t know where I was.

I didn’t know.

I didn’t…