Psychopomp: A Novella (7 page)

The wind blew harshly, sending up billows of dust. Brittle curls of paint flaked off beneath my fingers. There was nothing to see in the waving western fields except a pair of distant trees clinging to life with the certainty of years. Their bony branches probably grew barer with each tearing wind. Their tall, leaning forms looked like a gateway to a long-abandoned world.

They lived. Their roots were much deeper than mine would ever be. One day my tree would fall and die, gnawed by serpents.

An orange-striped cat with one blind eye and a coat made ragged from unseen scars darted in front of me. He disappeared before I could see where he went. I’d have to remember to save some food for him.

“Nobody ever comes here,” Gabriel told me. “You and I—we’re all alone.”

“Good,” I said.

Apparently someone at the asylum on the hill had died that morning, so he showed me how he disposed of the body using a process called alkaline hydrolysis. There was a machine in the far back of the morgue, draped with a large cloth when not in use. Cylindrical and made of steel, it looked like some kind of futuristic space chamber.

The body he’d brought down from the asylum lay pale and cold on the steel table, fresh enough not to smell yet. It was a man, naked and fleshy, free of bruises or blood or any other outward sign of how he’d died. Fresh lines of sutures mapped his torso.

“What happened to him?” I asked.

“He died in his sleep. As most of them do. Heart attack. Organ failure. Loss of will to live.”

“Organ failure? Doesn’t the asylum give patients medical treatment?”

“If it’s not too expensive, sure. But they don’t really care about the patients, Marlo, and it’s naïve to think they do.”

I frowned. “Did you cut him open?”

“I always take the organs, if they’re still good. I inject them with a preservative and put them in the freezer.” Gabriel gazed at the body and sighed. “Thin or large, long or short, man or woman. They all look the same.”

The man looked pretty distinctive to me, but his was the only dead body I’d ever seen up close.

The mortician opened the machine’s hydraulic lid. Then, with a deceptive strength in his gaunt frame, he rolled the body right into the opening. Something about the way he moved struck me as familiar.

“Now, the water and lye,” he said. He shut the lid and pushed a button. The machine made a quiet whirring noise as it filled. “The chamber will be heated and pressurized until nothing is left of the body but liquid and bones so brittle you could crush them with one hand. Lye makes the process sterile, so all the leftover liquid can go right down the drain to be recycled later. We recycle the bones, too, and anything else left behind. Jewelry, prosthetics, implanted parts.”

I listened, fascinated and horrified. I hadn’t ever thought much about how the dead were disposed of until just then.

He flipped the switches, smiling to himself. I shuddered. “This thing makes a horrible smell. But you get used to it, eventually.”

I covered my nose, just beginning to detect the scent of ammonia in the air.

“We still bury people,” he continued, “but only to help create fertile soil for the greenhouses. No coffins or formaldehyde allowed. Did you ever suspect your fruits and vegetables were grown in a bed of human remains?”

“No.”

“Cremation is illegal too. The emissions were terrible for the environment.”

“What’s cremation?” I asked.

He turned and pointed to a door in the corner, almost obscured by the machine. “Look in there.”

Eyeing him suspiciously, I started toward the door. He waved a hand, urging me on.

The room was a closet, so long and narrow my hips nearly touched the edges of the floor-to-ceiling shelves. They were crammed with row upon row of copper canisters, dented and half-obscured under mounds of oxidation. Varying shades of teal and turquoise, hot pink, deep blue, pale yellow, and white looked to have exploded from the seams of the canisters like volcanic lava, forming corrosive patterns—swirls and deltas and melting stripes—that were both aversive and beautiful.

Gabriel’s feet scuffed the floor behind me. “What is all this?” I asked.

“They hold the ashes of asylum patients who were burned up inside a machine a long time ago. Cremains, they’re called. Clever word. No one ever claimed these people, and they were forgotten. I’m not sure anyone else knows they exist.”

I looked around again, rapt, but I didn’t dare touch them. They were sacred somehow. Each of the canisters contained a whole person, so much matter reduced to fine bits of bone. Their bodies and memories were gone, and no one would ever know they’d existed. Their names remained on small labels stuck to the lids, a last chance against anonymity, but even some of those had rotted away.

“Dust we are,” Gabriel quoted, “and to dust we shall return.”

And that was apt, since the world was filled with dust anyway.

In the tub, I scrubbed at my sweat-stained clothes and hung them to dry for morning. Then I dressed for sleep in the too-large clothes Gabriel had first given me. Briefly, I let my fingers trace over a tiny, purplish bump in the crook of my left elbow. It was a scar from having given plasma so many times. I wondered if it would ever fade.

I took the bed again and Gabriel stretched out on the couch, all straight lines and sharp angles and messy hair. Pressing my back to the wall, I watched his dark form, but he never moved except to breathe.

The mattress beneath me was hard, my blanket thin. I’d thought I would sleep better by myself, without Verm, but I missed his body. Never had I expected to, not for a second, but there, in the wash of moonlight from the transom, I did. I rolled onto my face and sobbed silently in the pillow. He wasn’t the thing I wanted, not really, and I hated this moment of weakness, this betrayal of myself.

We’re all alone.

Verm wouldn’t come after me. I couldn’t be worth that much to him.

In the moldering library, I’d once read about a man who ventured to the underworld to bring his dead wife back to the upper world with him. The man wasn’t supposed to look back at her as they left but he did, and then she was gone from him forever. Another story told of a man and his family leaving a city of sin, guided by angels. The angels told them not to look back but the wife did, and she was transformed into a pillar of salt.

It seemed to me nothing good ever came of looking back. So I was content to pretend I hadn’t existed before now.

At some point I’d fallen asleep after all, and when I woke I knew the couch was empty. There were no whispers. It was still dark.

I got out of bed and stuck my head out the door. My eyes tracked the blur of Gabriel’s white coat as he trekked up the hill toward the asylum. There were no lights on in the building.

Disturbed, I got back in bed, burrowing beneath my blanket. Verm invaded my restless sleep, appearing to me as a toothy demon-god with eyes like cinders, cannibalizing my dreams.

His desperate murmurs haunted me.
Don’t ever leave me
, he’d said. That one moment shared with him, deceptively sweet, held me prisoner. I couldn’t forget it no matter how hard I tried.

Gabriel stood by the electric stove in the kitchen, rumpled and sleepy-eyed. “Coffee?” he asked through a yawn, rubbing a hand over his dark jaw.

“No thanks.” I hesitated. The asylum made me uneasy, that cold building with windows like lifeless eyes. I was convinced someone or something watched me from behind the fragmented reflections of hazy sky. “What do you do up there?”

He looked over his shoulder at me, bright blue eyes suddenly sharp. “Nothing,” he snapped. I knew he was lying.

“I think I’ve seen you before,” I said. “Out on the cliffs outside Marshwick. You were getting a body.”

“Yes.” He sighed and turned back to spooning coffee crystals into the pot of boiling water. “I do that now and again. Who else will?”

“What do you do with them?”

“I take them to the fertilizer factories. I get credits for it.”

My heart sank a little. That didn’t sound very noble, which was what I wanted Gabriel to be. “Oh.”

“Does that disappoint you?” he asked dryly.

“I don’t know.”

“Think of it this way. If I didn’t pick up the occasional body, they would just lie in the street and rot until the ambassadors called in a cleaning crew. By taking them to the factories, I’m helping to ensure the future of humanity. The future of the earth.”

That was true enough. “But what if the dead people have families? They might never know what happened to their loved one.”

He just shrugged. “Less of a burden on them.”

We cleaned that day. Up and down the walls of the morgue, the floors, the fixtures, the equipment. I watched Gabriel as I moved about the room, suspicious of him even now. I didn’t really know who he was or why he did what he did. He crept to the asylum in the middle of the night. He was nervous, always checking over his shoulder for something that was never there. Asleep, he whispered like someone paranoid. When he talked to me, he didn’t smirk or sneer.

And he never, ever touched me. It was nice not to have the space between two people filled with the contact of skin.

Not to be touched—that was all I could have wanted from him.

We barely spoke all day, just a word or two of instruction from him. We ate our midday meal in silence.

Afterward, we stood behind the morgue and looked out over the graveyard. It was downhill from us, covered in the asylum’s shadow. The headstones were crooked and broken. It was so old I couldn’t imagine anything lay beneath those stones but dust.

“I’m digging up some graves tonight,” Gabriel said abruptly, “when it isn’t so hot. I need your help.”

I shifted my weight nervously. “What? You want me to help you… dig up bodies? Rob graves?”

“I could do it myself. The dirt is loose and dry. But it would be easier with two people.”

“But… why?”

“The dirt. Someone’s asked me for it.”

Frowning, I sneaked a glance up at the looming asylum. “What do they say about it?”

“They don’t say much about anything. As long as I dose their patients and remove their deceased, they don’t care what I do.”

“So it wasn’t their idea.”

“No.”

“And they don’t know about it, do they?”

“No.” He glanced down at me, hands shoved into the pockets of his lab coat. His shoulders were hunched. “You really don’t have to help me. Take the rest of the day off. Go into town. Buy something. I’ll see you in the morning.”

I let his words hang in the air for a moment. In another life, in another time, I could have finished school. I could have been flooded with knowledge beyond nonsensical snatches of long-forgotten mythology gleaned from ruined books.

Instead I was dull like a blade that had been used several times but never sharpened. I knew it, and anyone who’d ever met me probably knew it too. My softness made me weak. All I’d ever done was float through the gray nothing of my existence.

Until now. Until Gabriel. On fitful nights, his frantic whispers lulled me to sleep. He’d become my comfort, though I barely knew him at all.

Finally I said, “I’ll help.”

He grinned, manic, eyes flashing. “I’d hoped you would.”

Though she didn’t want to go to dinner with her uncle, Claire knew she had to. He was the one who paid for her to live at the institute. Without his generosity, she would have wasted away at home, at his house, sick and pale while he searched for a miracle to cure her ever-fading memory.

Maybe her sister would come this time, she thought. They hadn’t seen each other in so long. It was partly because Claire hated her sister for how she’d treated the man with the name of an angel, and partly because her sister refused to visit the institute.

Her uncle sent a car. He was an ambassador so he could do things like that. All the girls watched from the windows as Claire got in, wondering why she was lucky enough to be able to leave the institute sometimes. No one ever came to take them out into Cizel.

Ms. Gilsig made sure Claire had taken her meds. She had, of course, though the pill count had seemed wrong. But she was probably misremembering the doses she’d already taken. Anyway, Ms. Gilsig had injected her with a mild stimulant so she could make it through the night. Everything would be fine.

The headmistress, Ethan’s mother, watched her go from the top of the front steps. Claire kept her head forward as the car pulled toward the front gates so she wouldn’t have to see all the eyes on her. Her heart pounded as they opened. This wasn’t the first time she’d left the institute, but occasions like this were rare and special.

She peered discreetly through the windows as the car rolled through Cizel, not wanting to seem too interested even though no one was watching her now. Windows were backlit with colored lights and lined with neon tubes. Screens flashed happy, decadent images when they weren’t showing newsfeed, electronic voices warbling from them. There were stands of fresh, succulent fruit to entice shoppers into stores.

If she shifted her eyes, she could see her reflection laid over the backdrop of the city, a transparent version of herself painted with light.

The car took her to a dark, quiet restaurant, where someone stood outside to open the door for her. Her uncle was always late, so she didn’t go inside right away. “Thank you,” she said to the doorman, and turned confidently down the sidewalk, as if she were waiting for someone. But the people who ate in restaurants like these would wait inside, she realized. She’d just remembered that. Abruptly, she turned back, not wanting to be conspicuous.

And that was when she saw Ethan. He was everywhere, it seemed.

People streamed around her as if she wasn’t there. But she was, she knew she was, because Ethan looked up and saw her. He’d been speaking with someone. This other person walked away, Ethan slapping him familiarly on the shoulder as he went. It was strange to see Ethan on the street like this when she’d only ever known him in the context of the institute. He seemed older and even more frightening.

A smile played around his lips and Claire was afraid he was going to approach her. She dashed inside the restaurant and gave her uncle’s name. The host led her to a glass table that glowed softly.

After she’d eaten all the complimentary seaweed bread and downed several glasses of water, her uncle arrived. He was alone. Everyone else in the restaurant turned to look at him, because people always looked at her uncle. She suspected it was because he was an ambassador.

“Hello, Claire.”

She stared at the live flame inside glass at the center of the table, too mesmerized to look away. Teeth clenched, she pretended none of the other people had seen her. “Hello, Uncle Killering.”

He sat down on the other side of the table, his golden eyes studying her. “You look pale,” he said critically. “Are you taking your medication?”

“Always.” She chose not to acknowledge the threat laced through his tone of voice.

Nodding, he appeared both satisfied and thoughtful. “It won’t be long, Claire. I’ve made remarkable advances with my research. The plasma I’ve begun collecting has helped immensely. If your parents were still alive, I know they’d be anticipating your full recovery as much as I am.”

The server came and her uncle ordered for both of them. He always had, as if he knew what she liked to eat.

“I could end up one of your failures,” she reminded him after the server had left the table. She’d seen a dark room with sleeping bodies. And she’d seen the pit behind his mansion once, on accident. She never wanted to see it again. Ms. Gilsig had given her sedatives for weeks to stop the nightmares.

“You won’t,” he assured her. “You’re young, and I won’t administer treatment to you until I’m one hundred percent positive it will work.”

“But you test others and sometimes it doesn’t work.”

“Of course. How else would I learn? How else would I improve the serum?”

Claire sighed, fidgeting. She didn’t like discussing what he did even though he said it was to help her. She knew his serums had benefitted the military unofficially. The soldiers overseas were stronger and had more endurance than those they fought against.

But the serum didn’t work on them all. That was why he had to keep testing. That was why he paid scientists to spend all night in secret laboratories. She wasn’t supposed to know about that. She was supposed to have forgotten that he’d told her. But she
did
know terrible secrets, like a dream that surfaced only when she saw her uncle’s face.

“Will you take me to one of your parties?” she asked brightly. She clenched her teeth and tightened her muscles to stop herself from shivering at unpleasant memories.

Her uncle shook his head tightly. Each time she’d asked, his answer was always the same. “It’s too dangerous. And you’re not well, my dear.”

His answer was expected but disappointing nonetheless. She would never get to wear a sparkly dress or see an aquarium or drink alcohol or meet anyone outside the institute. At least not until he’d perfected his research.

Their meals came, and they ate in silence. Other than her health and his research, they never had much to talk about.

“Happy birthday, my dear,” he said when their plates were clean.

“Thank you, Uncle.”

The institute was cold and lifeless in the dark when the car returned her. Only Ms. Gilsig was still awake, ushering her inside and up the stairs. Claire thought she could feel someone watching her walk down the hall and open the door to her room.

The angel.

Ms. Gilsig was usually in bed by this hour, tired from having overseen the night meds. But the doors were never locked. That was probably a bad idea, Claire reflected, with Ethan having the run of the place.

“Goodnight, Ms. Gilsig,” she said, yawning for show.

“Goodnight.” The woman shuffled off to her own room at the head of the stairs without so much as looking twice at Claire.

Claire opened her door, debating whether to change her clothes or go straight to the attic. But just then a shadow stepped in front of her, grabbing her arm and pulling her into the room. The door shut and the shadow leaned over her.

“It’s me,” it said. A pair of eyes flicked over her, noticing how she trembled. “Sorry.”

Ethan. Claire recognized his voice, though she couldn’t seem to unfreeze her limbs. She stared, holding her breath.

“I need you to do something for me,” he whispered.

The breath left her lungs, and Claire realized she was nodding in a dazed, mechanical motion.

“I knew I could count on you,” he said, eyes crinkling as he smiled.

Her heart stopped. She was sure of it. Deep within, Claire felt Ethan couldn’t have ever smiled like that for anyone but her. And that was part of his horrible magic. At that moment, she would have agreed to anything for him.

Showing his gratitude, he leaned in and captured her lips with his. Claire kept her eyes open, savoring his touch. She had never dreamed of how much pleasure a boy’s hands could give her. The angel had never touched her and she hadn’t realized how much she wished
someone
would. Ethan pressed his hands against her clothes in anticipation of the skin beneath them. He raggedly whispered her name as his hips moved against hers.

Dimly, she knew he had done this before, but he made it too difficult to care.

Someone. He was someone.

She wasn’t sure how long he stayed. Hours. Claire pictured the angel pacing overhead, playing songs in which she had become the worst of betrayers. He would be angry, his eyes like knives in her heart. His stony glares would have the force to bruise her skin. His hateful words would be sharp enough to make her bleed.

I needed someone
, Claire said desperately to herself, and to the angel.
He was here.

And the angel replied,
But I will never leave.