Passover

by Aphrodite Anagnost

  “Leveaux and Ruiz are both dead,” said Wise. “No one else can go outside.”

  “How did Ruiz die?” she asked.

  “Something got a hold of her mind,” he said. His face was red.

  “Everybody. Let’s sit down. We have to plan how we’re going to handle this.”

  Her voice had a new tone—measured, insistent. Even she could hear it. It was the voice she used at the hospital when a code was called and time was skating away. It was not hysterical, though hysteria tugged.

  Each spoke in turn, telling all, offering related details, each adding to the other until theories rose and coalesced into desperate peaks.

  Rachel listened. For the sake of the children, for Dave, for them all. She resisted comment, discounting the absurdity of what she heard. She allowed each syllable to transcribe itself as pure data in her brain—as if it were real, which she refused now to doubt. There was no time to consider an alternative to the keystone of their belief. If what she heard wasn’t true, there were no leads. Without leads, there was no way out.

  A man affected by the Holocaust had been burned alive in a cellar in the forest and now his spirit, seeking vengeance, was killing living things and animating the dead as automatons. So, there might be new postulated spirits to contend with: Mr. Ewell, Mr. Petty, the two Harper boys, now buried in the local cemetery, and now deputies Leveaux and Ruiz. But Aristino. No, not Aristino.

  No one had seen the cat lately.

  “Almost everyone killed was a first born,” said the sheriff. “Or else maybe got in the spirit’s way. Ewell and Petty were oldest sons. The Harper boys were twins. Leveaux and Ruiz might be collateral damage.”

  “I bet Leveaux was an eldest son, too” said Dave. “All right,” said Wise. “Let’s assume he was.”

  “Nuno Sievers was—I mean—is insane.” Lev slid the pepper mill toward the center of the table and looked into the sheriff’s face. “He mixes up facts. It doesn’t matter if Leveaux was firstborn. And Ruiz is dead. He thinks he’s the angel of death attacking the enemies of his people.”

  “He’ll want to kill our boys,” Rachel said, flatly, wiping beet-stained hands repeatedly on her apron. “Zack is my eldest son. Leo is Dave’s.”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in ghosts.” Dave turned to Rachel, looking into her eyes as if he didn’t know her.

  “Their existence has been proven to my satisfaction,” she said. “And now there’s no alternative explanation.”

  • • • •

  Dave breathed with effort, unnaturally, as if trying to control the volume of air in his lungs. He coughed, realizing air was a shape-shifting substance he had no power over, like the ghost of Nuno Sievers. He sighed. Rachel’s intractable disbelief had been a hand-wringing annoyance, but had nevertheless given hope that he was wrong about a tormented spirit possessing Zebulon. Now that she agreed with him, doom seemed certain. How did one fight ghosts—with prayer and persuasion?

  He’d long been an atheist. But how could one remain an atheist in the face of ghosts?

  It was ironic, he thought, that his transition into a believer in God and ghosts had initially tapped so easily, yet now suddenly struck so hard, with quibbles and regrets. Whereas Rachel’s reversal seemed so thorough and easily made; because of whom she was, a scientist first, yes. But also raised in a Roman Catholic household by a mother who was a spiritualist.

  Rachel lifted his hand to her lips and kissed it. She leaned over and whispered into his ear. “I saw Aristino. In living flesh. He smelled like grass.”

  Dave paled, unable to speak. He’d never seen his wife so much in control in such utter chaos. Her two worlds had come together with a howl, not a clatter.

  “We must make this angel of death pass over our house,” said Lev.

  Silence in the room. Palpable consternation. Each looked around at the others, wide-eyed, clueless.

  “How?” Rachel said at last.

  “I’ll take care of it.” Lev nodded. “With everyone’s help.”

  • • • •

  When Rachel got to Beatricia’s room, the old woman was waking up. So pale, with a cold flush of moisture like morning dew on her forehead, her palimpsest palm reaching out.

  “Don’t get up, Mother,” Rachel said. “Everything’s fine.”

  “We’ve gotta work,” Beatricia struggled to rise to an elbow, but fell back. She looked toward the night-blackened window.

  Rachel heard the scratches of wet branches on the glass, and shuddered.

  Beatricia was listening too, her eyes growing wide. She was dressed only in a slip, shivering. “What happened?”

  Rachel pulled the quilt up, tucking it under her mother’s chin. “You went too far with your ritual. That’s twice. If you do it again, I’m afraid it could kill you. Your heart.”

  “The spirits, Rachel. The dybbuk. Where are Zack and Leo?”

  “Zack and Leo are in their rooms.”

  “Who does Zack talk to on the landing, Rachel?”

  “No one, Mother.”

  “Don’t lie to me, dear.”

  Rachel paused a moment, thinking. She’d never enjoyed lying to her mother, but there was Beatricia’s failing heart to think of. She probably only had ten percent pump function. She pressed a palm against her mother’s cheek, assaying her health. Pallor, sweating, bluish hands folded on the quilt.

  “There has been a death, an accident,” Rachel said at last. “Deputy Ruiz crashed into a tree with her car, at the end of the driveway. The rain put out the fire.”

  “That’s two,” Beatricia said. “You have to do something.”

  “Lev has a plan,” Rachel bit her bottom lip.

  “You have to do something,” Beatricia said. Her eyebrows arched like cathedral windows. “You have the power.”

  Rachel heard a heart pounding. First, it seemed to be Beatricia’s, then her own. Beatricia’s steely fingers caught Rachel’s hand. “You’ve always had the gift, Rachel. Even when you were little. You knew what was happening from far away. You talked to spirits in your room before you slept—and then you’d deny it. I know you remember it. You whispered to me about it, and I told you to hush. I shouldn’t have done it, Rachel, but I was afraid. Afraid of it in you, and me.”

  “Let’s don’t talk about that now, Mother. You need your sleep.”

  “If you don’t remember, it’s because you’re frightened and have been for a long time. You sought refuge by diving into medicine, but that only made it worse. Didn’t it, honey? You stood at the bedsides of the dead and dying and heard them speak.”

  “Don’t excite yourself, Mother. I don’t remember any of that, even if it’s true.”

  “Go to the landing, Rachel.”

  “Okay.” Rachel said, her heart drumming against her ribs, ears filled with the rhythm of it. Neither the wind nor the leaves slapping at the window would let her think.

  “Listen, Mother,” said Rachel, as if to plead for forgiveness. “I accept there is something unnatural going on here and I know I can see what others can’t, but some of what you say is nonsense. You need to rest.”

  Beatricia squeezed Rachel’s hand tighter. “If that’s what you think, so be it. But go to the landing and just stand there, Rachel…just for a moment. Maybe the house has something to say to you. Maybe it doesn’t.”

  Rachel pulled from her mother’s grasp, the resentment inside her stealing her breath, making her dizzy. The room grew suddenly frigid, hoarfrost coating windows like an expanding spider web. Her breath before her assumed the shape of a dirigible plum that expanded one moment, floating, then dissipated the next. Her hand was cold and limp where her mother had touched it.

  “All right, Mother. I’ll go.” Rachel backed up a step, as if retreating from a reliquary.

  In the hallway, she read the hand-scrawled sign on Leo’s door, “Biohazard: Beware the Socks!” Leo had begun to play the “Connecticut Halftime” on his drum kit, softly with the silencers on, metronome clicking the rhy
thm. Zack’s door was cracked open, so she pulled it shut, without looking inside, and then walked down the curved flight of stairs to the landing.

  She stood on the landing by the settee, afraid of what would happen, if she opened the door.

  A long minute went by.

  She heard a fluttering, as if a sparrow had flown down a chimney and was beating at the bricks to escape.

  Everyone in Zebulon had heard about the ghosts of Mr. Nelson, and his granddaughter, Isabel. Legend says they appeared at Sunday dinners, but since the 1903 fire, after which the original clapboard house had been replaced by another, the ghostly twosome had been without provenance or portfolio and had only rarely been whispered of. Still, the rumor of their presence persisted. As nonsense, probably. But, for an instant, Rachel heard the rustling of wings again.

  She thought of tiny angels floating down a flue and heard a girl’s laughter, only a single giggle at first, and then another.

  “Isabel,” she said, and then waited. No answer.

  She marched back upstairs to Zack’s room and pushed open the door. Zack was lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling, listening to the rain.

  “How long have you been talking to Isabel and Mr. Nelson?”

  “I never talk to Mr. Nelson,” Zack said. “He’s only left a little shadow of himself.”

  Rachel felt her ears burn. She had expected a guilty denial that he’d been talking to ghosts, but the tacit admission that he had been talking to Isabel left her momentarily speechless. Zack had betrayed her. Her beautiful, perfect son had betrayed her, perhaps without wanting to or meaning to, but betrayed her nevertheless. She wanted to pull him out of bed and box his ears.

  “How long have you been talking to Isabel?” she said, at last, annoyed that he wouldn’t look at her.

  “That’s between Isabel and me,” he said.

  Rachel held herself in check. The boy was only fourteen.

  “Listen to me, Zack. This is not a child’s game. We’re in danger of losing our lives.”

  “Isabel has nothing to do with that,” said Zack. “She felt something coming and told me to get out of the house—and I didn’t do it. Now she won’t open the door.”

  “Door? What door?”

  “The closet door on the landing.”

  “Is Isabel in the closet?”

  “She speaks to me through the door, but won’t open it anymore. We used to sit in there and play cribbage.”

  “Look at me, Zack.”

  Zack turned his head toward Rachel. His eyes were red. He’d been crying.

  The dybbuk of Nuno Sievers was busy assembling itself into the shape of the angel of death in the potato cellar of his burned-down house in the woods. He’d crouched for hours in the dank ruins of his past life in crepuscular form. Since early morning, he’d been feeding on the panic that engulfed Zebulon and absorbing the residual energy within his sodden hole, sending forth rain and wind while he gathered strength. Animating first the shell of a cat, then a horse, then the bodies of men. He’d watched a cluster of them creep down the ladder of his shelter and rifle through his papers and photographs. Biding his time, he’d elected to leave his records in orderly piles rather than scattering them about like the leaves outside.

  He was learning. Thrice before, he had ventured out prematurely without finding relief or escape, leaving himself furious and in expanding pain. But this time it would be the night of Passover, he was sure of that. The moon was wailing. His cause was righteous. Soon he would inflict vengeance on the wicked and those that protected them, like the man in the pasture and the fool in the car. And then, at last, he could surrender his own agony.

  Oh, he knew about suffering. As a child, he had sent an element of himself out of one finger and touched the emaciated face of a man who was suffocating beneath a pile of the dead at Belsen. That fragment of his soul had come back burnt and shriveled, blackened and throbbing with an ache that sent its fire through his being—his first touch of flame. Then a blister lifted. He had also let a shadow of himself fly into the soul of a raped and dying child and that too had burnt. After that, he’d felt a hot bullet rip through a pregnant woman’s lung and howled with fury as it tore through her heart. Then, he cried out, kneeling beside her body. Blood poured from his throat, blinding and choking him as if she were, then and ever after, a part of him.

  The next day, or the day after, he’d watched his parents and brothers hang and felt the rough hemp knots snapping thin necks. The same burning blood poured from his nose and flushed from his mouth as his bowels evacuated. Later, much later, when he was a man and hiding out in this cabin in the woods, he’d felt an overwhelming pain of body and spirit that refused to blister and pop. He’d lost an eye, his wife, and finally his job in New York as a historical journalist specializing in the Holocaust, as if writing about it would drive the demons from his mind. And there had been teenagers, a gang of skinheads he’d spotted in Zebulon hanging around the post office and outside the country store.

  The four of them had turned up with their Nazi paraphernalia, armbands and daggers of the Hitler Youth. They’d wrestled him down, laughing and shouting, binding his arms and legs with kerosene-soaked rags they’d lit with long wooden matches. He squirmed against the ligatures, bucking and biting. But they only hurled him into the cellar, then set his house aflame.

  The voices had come to him then. Terrible, demonic voices. As the skin on his limbs burned, split, and bubbled, he’d heard again and again, as if from afar, “Let my people go! Let my people go.”

  But from whom had the words come, and to whom had they been they addressed? He could’ve thought more clearly if there hadn’t been bolts of fire roaring through his frying nerves. The voices had been raspy, deep and satiric. Should they have promised comfort even as big- knuckled hands grasped his hair and jerked him off the ground, pulling out patches of scalp? Until he’d found himself, floating in air, ablaze, and a second pair of hands had stretched his jaws open, cracking his mandible.

  Within seconds, a white plaque had covered him from foot to crown. He’d fought to shut his eyelids to keep their globes from melting. Next came the deep, deep charring, first of his arms and legs and then of his face and torso. Within moments he was blind. Oozing fluids through on his remains, as if to belatedly put out the flames. Fat was sizzling, driving spikes of pain deep into the nubs of what remained of his limbs. There’d been the sound of unchecked screaming and the momentary notion that the screaming was his own.

  He’d wanted to fly, but when his bonds burned away, he was left thrashing on the floor, legless, armless, like a dying larva. He’d remained conscious, so his unearthly outcry had surged like a tide breaking over a shore while some of his nerve endings had been cremated and dissolved into numbness and others still roared with agony. The heat had cooked muscle, tendon, and ligament, which should have been fatal, but yet he’d raved on, until the boys had run from the building they had torched and a siren from a fire engine had broken through the screaming.

  In the cellar, he had died, as the house collapsed above him. Glass had flown everywhere, slashing his singed flesh. A man with cool breath had hovered over him, beating against his sternum, which struck his bruised heart. He had died again on the stretcher, then again in the ambulance. In the hospital, he had died and come back to life again and again, an endotracheal tube down his throat, a machine keeping him breathing, drugs burning his veins. He had been silently calling out for his mother and for Sylvie.

  The energy of the cellar had expanded each time the paramedics had revived him. He passed out of this world and jolted back into it again and again. In and out, for days. And every time he died, he returned to the cellar—his photographs, his manuscripts, his memories. The room’s energy had become a pump, amplified by each resuscitation, and now its power was beginning to spew life back into his form. It had gathered itself together from the force of his sauros, his despair, when he’d lived in his hermitage, the basement. It had magnified itself in the e
nclosed space below ground, and, even now, twenty years after his death, it was giving him substance and reaching out, through him, to create ghostly forms.

  It was the night of the Passover, of that he was sure. He was sure of nothing else. He didn’t know his name. He wept and howled with pain. The smell of burning fat and bone filled the cellar and he drifted in and out of consciousness, each passage more painful than the last, his reforming flesh searing and charring like a rib-eye tossed on a griddle, throwing off clouds of black smoke.

  Let my people go. There were smoking ovens to open and the eldest born to slaughter; then, he would find the portal and be released as though a great red sea were opening. Black night would throw its cloak over his shoulders, cooling his emergent body, and he would feel no pain.

  He could feel arm buds sprout and legs grow under him, so he knelt in the cellar as if in prayer, his rage ever-building, even as his seared limbs blackened in the fire that engulfed them. Where there wasn’t blood on the doors of the houses there would be blood within. Then, he would find the portal and kill its guardians, cooling his body in their shed blood as if it were an icy rain.

  Now fully formed of scorched flesh and ashen bone, he felt anger surge up hot and merciless inside him as the energy of the cellar rushed into his spirit, threatening to explode. He howled with the pressure of the animal magnetism that grew exponentially in the basement. Two nubs budded out of his shoulder blades and the nubs sprouted black feathers and cartilage that grew into black wings.

  He convulsed as his wings unfurled. He readied himself for it, steeling himself, like a mad thing doomed. He heard his teeth clacking in his mouth of ignited ashes, and his mind let go its moorings and lifted from its casing. Blood sprang from his gums and he swallowed it, retching. He felt himself rising, crashing again and again into the cracked ceiling, falling back, rising again with velocity, falling back until, by chance, as before, all obstacles gave way, and he at last soared through the open basement door.

  Dave rushed to stand beside Wise, who was leaning against the sill of the living room window, thighs pressed into the wood. The sheriff’s eyes were fixed on a second ghostly-white specter in the backyard by the tarp. The creature’s outstretched arms glowed in the moonlight, flames crackling in its palms.