Passover

by Aphrodite Anagnost

  Rachel went to the broken window and stuck a hand out to touch the vibrations of rain and frozen air. The night evaporated and she was looking into a front yard that was as bright as day where Nuno Sievers was floating to the ground, body dark as soot, black wings fluttering, eyes aflame.

  He’s here,” Rachel said from the window. She looked over a shoulder composing herself as thoroughly as she could, then backed away from her reflection in the glass.

  A tremor shook the house. The night turned black, and the men, rushing to the window, saw what Rachel saw—only darkness and the fire in Mr. Petty’s hands.

  “He’s coming closer,” said Dave. “Whether we can see him or not.”

  “They’re all coming,” said Beatricia, not looking toward the window, but inward, as if she too saw the approach of the specters in her brain.

  “Let them,” said Creed. “If the blood doesn’t stop them, we’ll stop’em with bullets.”

  Beatricia broke into a chant, Lev into prayer. The sheriff went to the back window and saw that the specter of Ruiz was no longer frozen in the north pasture but moving toward the house.

  “If one is coming, they’re all coming.” Wise said. “I imagine the cat, too. Maybe the horse.”

  “Aristino will never attack us.” said Rachel. “Whether he’s animated by that thing or not.”

  Dave walked to the side door of the living room. “I see two pairs of flaming hands,” he said, “getting closer.”

  Rachel did a quick count. Three dead deputies, Mr. Petty, and Mr. Ewell—all revivified and powered by Sievers. “If we stop him, we’ll stop all of them.”

  “Nuno must realize he’s not the Angel of Death. That the boys aren’t Egyptians, or Nazis,” said Lev.

  “Yeah.” Creed snorted. “Reason with a ghost who’s been burned alive by skinheads and grown black wings.”

  The house turned quiet as the moon. No sign of Nuno. Lev ceased praying and Creed lay down on the floor in the foyer, his rifle pointed at the front door. Soon, the sheriff sat on a dining room chair and leveled his Winchester on the side porch door. Dave, rifle ready, took up a firing position by the kitchen window.

  Lev manned the side door to the west with the rusted hammer. Then, breaking the silence, the whine of a tractor’s ignition started up, followed by the growl of an engine.

  “Leveaux,” Lev said.

  Rachel’s mouth filled with saliva. Deep in her mind, she saw the outside locks all turning counterclockwise by themselves.

  She dropped to her knees as the door latches clicked in sequence, knobs rattling. “Holy Jesus,” muttered the sheriff. “They’re going to get in.”

  But then the doors, in spite of being unlocked, held.

  Creed giggled. Rachel’s wail died in her throat. Leo, salt tracks dry on his cheeks, gripped a drumstick in one hand like a knife. Zack lifted his old guitar, ready to bring it down on whatever came through the east porch entrance.

  The ghosts banged on the doors, great crashing thuds that threatened to split the wood and tear the hinges from their oak frames.

  It went on and on, for seconds, maybe minutes. The force of the banging loosened doorjambs and lintels. Dust sifted from joints. The bluster of the tractor’s engine reached the east side of the house. Then a crash shook brick walls when the porch gave way, rammed by tractor wheels. Beatricia held her ears and cried out with the pain of it.

  Rachel gathered Leo into her arms, screaming for Zack to run to her too. Creed fired a round through the front door but it failed to stop the pounding.

  “Fuck you!” Zack yelled, then plugged in his guitar, cranked up the amp, and beat at the noise with boisterous riffs and arpeggios.

  Dave screamed in anger, fists tight to his chest as if fighting the impulse to throw open the door and thrash at the ghosts. The sheriff held steady. The door to the side porch shuddered, bulged, but held up, unbelievably, inexplicably.

  Nuno Sievers could fly. He might be breaking into the house through an upstairs window; but Rachel guessed he hadn’t. If he had, they’d already be dead. The blood must be working. It had to be. She felt a sense of elation, suddenly, tentatively. They might win. They might live.

  Then she had a horrible thought—rain. What if the rain washes the blood from the doors and windows? What then?

  It was quiet. The noise of the tractor’s engine had died away. Five minutes. Ten minutes.

  Everyone drifted back to the living room and came together again, to avoid being alone.

  Rachel stared straight out the wavy glass of the living room window. Mr. Petty was in the front yard, hands aflame, near the house. She could feel the rest of them, as if her body were a compass. There were specters between the boxwoods, in the jonquils, in the herb bed, and under the basketball hoop. Besides Petty to the south, Leveaux was to the west, Ewell and Ruiz to the north, Crockett to the east. Four little flames were moving close to the ground in the front yard, as if they belonged to the tiny feet of a cat.

  Something knocked, softly and politely, on the front door.

  At first, no one said a word. Rachel waited for the careful rapping to intensify into a rage of knocks that would send the door flying from between its jambs; but no angry pounding came.

  The light tapping continued, followed by the quiet sobbing of children. “Please let us in. We’re cold.”

  “Please, Ms. Rachel. Let us in.”

  Rachel felt a force akin to gravity drawing her toward the door. Her thoughts were blurred. Her heart throbbed. She shook her head, trying to turn from the door; the voices were so plaintive, so pitiful. She looked out the window at the two young Harper boys drooping in the moonlight, cocooned in wet bed sheets, dark-eyed and pale, shivering. Rachel was startled by blood from their bullet wounds running down their cheeks. Their soaked locks, plastered to their foreheads, were caked with dried blood the color of old bricks.

  “I’m hungry,” said one. “And wet.”

  “I’m cold,” said the other, his little voice almost lost in the dark of night. “And hungry.”

  Rachel longed to throw her arms around them and hold their little heads to her breast. To wash away the bloody tears dripping from their eyes. She wanted to feed them and tuck them into bed, kissing each cheek. But the door was in the way and she wasn’t to open it.

  “Let me in,” pleaded one, eyes round and beseeching. He brought his flaming palms to his face, the glow illuminating tiny pointed teeth. “I’m scared.”

  “I’m afraid,” said the other. “Let me in.”

  Rachel’s vision wavered, as if she were being mesmerized and sucked forward. The impulse was overwhelming. She was dreaming, unable to feel her fingers. Her hand moved closer to the brass doorknob, fingers slowly forming a cup.

  Supported by her two canes, Beatricia, suddenly beside her, grasped her hand and yanked it back. “Those aren’t the Harper boys,” she said. “The poor children are dead. The blood on the frames is keeping these specters out. But if you open the door for them—”

  Rachel gasped at what she had almost done and turned her back on the door, leaning against it with all of her weight.

  “Do not let them in, Rachel.”

  Beatricia looked like she was dying, as if she’d finally taken one too many steps into the other world and was paying the price. She was pale, her hand cold. She stumbled and Rachel caught her in her arms and put two fingers to her wrist.

  Faint, too faint.

  “My Rachel,” Beatricia said. “You must take over for me now. You must talk to Isabel. Persuade her to take Nuno into the light.”

  “Don’t try to talk, Mother.”

  “There’s a portal,” said Beatricia. “The closet on the landing.”

  The truth of what her mother was saying exploded into Rachel’s mind. Of course, there was a portal. If there were ghosts, there were portals, passageways leading between the world of the living to the world of the dead.

  At that moment the house shook as if trying to shed its roof. The foundat
ion groaned and the remaining window glass shattered. Plates and saucers fell from shelves. The men and Zack and Leo tumbled over the furniture, stumbling from one room to the other. Then, suddenly, the quaking stopped. Rain was coming in the windows.

  “The blood on the doors is washing off,” shouted Beatricia, as if she were making a final statement. Rachel struggled to hold her up but the old woman slipped out of her embrace, collapsing in the foyer, gripping her chest.

  Dave got up from the kitchen floor, where blood from his cut forehead was settling into a pool. The rain blowing through the window over the sink soaked his clothes. He wiped water from his eyes and saw the outside door bulging, splintering.

  Throwing his body against it, he ignored the shards of oak that stabbed at his face and throat.

  Rachel couldn’t see anything but vague shapes of gray. The darkness loomed like an unsolvable labyrinth. Like driving through fog, she strained to see, then realized it was no use. She made her eyes soft and let her imagination and intuition work together.

  In the living room, Lev jammed the east porch door shut with his foot and swung the hammer at fiery fingers poking through the cracks in the wood. No matter. In another instant, the hands were gone but the 8N’s engine had started again. The front end of the tractor rammed through the side door and Lev sprawled to the living room floor. Both doorjambs collapsed in a rain of plaster. Everywhere in the house there was the sound of thunder, as if a squall had moved inside.

  Creed pressed his back against the door to the west porch. But still, the heavy oak shook, threatening to explode. Glass shattered. Broken roof shingles and shells from the driveway flew across the room like shrapnel. Creed and the sheriff hurled themselves against the door, throwing down their rifles, faces webbed with blood. Zack rushed behind them, his guitar poised over his head like a club. Leo climbed on top of the dining room table, shouting and waving drumsticks.

  Wolfie tore from his closet, howling.

  Rachel covered her ears as wind ripped through the caved-in door on the east end of the house. The storm shrieked like a squadron of phantoms, blowing paintings from the walls and lamps from their tables.

  Rachel arched her torso over the body of her mother. She shook angrily in the foyer, focused on the front door, anxious for Nuno Sievers to enter.

  She could hear the men all around her, fighting, bleeding, protecting, and maybe dying. The door shuddered, then fell off its hinges, smoking.

  Nuno floated through the doorway and hovered in the entry, howling. He was ten feet from Rachel, the tips of his wings fluttering, melting eyeballs oozing down his cheekbones.

  A thin figure with stubs for legs and arms that ended in blue-gray claws, he doubled over, wings drooping. The vision struck Rachel. It was as if an Ibis-headed man had been freed from Tutankhamen’s tomb. So this would be the murder weapon this time. The creature’s hooked beak ready to tear at their throats. His proboscis arched and tapered to the point of a needle.

  Spattering like bacon grease in a hot pan, sizzling fat burst between the cracks in his blackened skin. Droplets landed on Rachel’s face. She wiped them away with the back of a frantic hand.

  Nuno’s charred face twisted in agony. Locks of flaming hair stood on end. Maybe the devil had snatched his hair.

  His bill gaped wide and his jaw cracked. The sharp, broken teeth slanted forward in a muddled row. His tongue smoldered and darted. He screeched with a voice so hollow and so terrible, Rachel saw the black notes rising from a purgatorial well.

  The pressure on the doors ceased abruptly. The rain and thunder stopped.

  Rachel heard her mother’s death rattle at her feet. She dropped to the floor, and watched the chest rise, at times heaving, then for several moments, ceasing to move altogether. Rachel pressed two fingers to Beatricia’s neck and fastened her own mouth to her mother’s cool lips and delivered two huge rescue breaths. She felt Beatricia’s final exhalation and sucked it in, deep into her lungs. This was Bea’s last kiss.

  Rachel felt warm, moist air tasting of honey enter her mouth. She pulled it into her chest by expanding her abdomen and ribcage. The breath she’d received became hot, and transformed itself into something that traveled in a single beat of her heart to the very tips of her fingers, toes, the end of her nose, the edges of her ears. It wasn’t just her mother’s final kiss. Rachel had absorbed something of her wisdom too. And knowledge. And a part of her spirit. With a brush of her fingertips she checked to see if the hairs on her arms were really standing on end. They were, as if magnetized. A steaming wind of hatred swept over her in an instant when she looked up at Nuno.

  But then she heard her mother’s voice, “No, Rachel. Hate won’t save you. What does he want?”

  Rachel looked down, and closed her mother’s eyes gently. She kissed her lips and folded her hands across her chest, then followed the white ribbon to the embroidered scapula of Saint Jude, patron saint of lost causes, or almost lost. She kissed both sides of the sachet, and stuffed it back under her mother’s dress into her cleavage, motionless, but still moist with sweat.

  “I can save them, Mother. I will do it. I promise,” she said. Rachel began pumping her mother’s chest even though she was certain the old woman was dead. “Mother! Mother! Don’t leave me! Not now!”

  A final death rattle rose in Beatricia’s throat. She shook, a last gasp escaping her lips.

  Then she lay still.

  Rachel’s instincts shouted at her hands to keeping pumping. But Beatricia’s spirit rushed like the winds of the Lord, thrusting Rachel backward, eyes burning and watering.

  The bird-man was watching. Yes. Nuno was after something, even if he didn’t yet know what it was. The awareness of it drove Rachel to her feet.

  Dave ran from the kitchen to the vestibule, the children following close behind like boy soldiers.

  The glow from Nuno’s body dimmed, then flared like a flash of metal from Vulcan’s forge. Molten light poured through the doors of the house into every room, as if the energy from Ewell and Petty and the other ghosts was being withdrawn from their shells and reabsorbed by Nuno, leaving only shattering and smoldering forms on the four porches and lawns. Smoky embers embedded in his body glowed red like erupting jewels.

  But something was holding Nuno back.

  Rachel needed to figure out what it was, and fast. So she spun around, hyper-focused, observing all she could in those few moments. To her right, the engine of the tractor that’d crashed through the living room wall began to sputter. Leveaux’s body, now a pile of ash on the vinyl seat, was drifting to the floor like black snowflakes. On her other side, the sooty remains of Crockett and Petty were sifting onto the bleeding bodies of Creed and the sheriff, both stretched out on the dining room floor.

  “Dave!” screamed Rachel. “Take the children upstairs.”

  “Not without you!” Dave grabbed Rachel’s wrist. “You’re coming with us.”

  “Not this time,” she said. “Go!”

  His guitar lifted over his head, Zack poised to swing, pupils dilated, eyes mad. Tears springing to his eyes, Leo threatened with his drumsticks. Taking up their rifles, the sheriff, Creed, and Lev leapt to their feet and rushed to the foyer.

  “No, Dave.” Rachel pulled free. “Take everyone upstairs. Now!”

  Nuno didn’t move. Flames rolled over him and smoke fogged the air as he twisted and moaned, body swelling with rage. In moments, he was twice the size he had been before, claws extended, black wings flapping. But then, he fluttered backwards, almost to the doorway.

  Why did he hesitate? Rachel heard her mother whispering inside her. And then, Rachel heard, quietly at first, the sound of the beast weeping.

  An image of young Nuno at Belsen, bending over the bullet-mangled corpse of his little sister, flashed into Rachel’s mind.

  “I’m sorry,” Rachel said.

  Nuno’s whimpers were deep and hoarse. He shook all over. His claws interlocked, as if hands in prayer.

  “I can help you.”<
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  He crept toward her, and where he’d been hovering a dusting of black powder lingered like pencil shavings. She imagined the remains of patients who’d been cremated, now collected in the columbarium at the Episcopal Church of Zebulon, each cremation in a separate vault. Only in special cases, such as a mother dying in childbirth, were the remains of individuals mixed. Then she thought of the mass graves that were Nuno’s concern.

  “Your people are free. There’s no more need to kill firstborn sons. But that’s not what you want to do anyway.”

  Nuno moaned and let his head rock from side to side. The ruins of Dave’s painting of the ram horns lay next to him. The frame was in splinters, and the canvas had been torn.

  “Go into the light,” she said.

  Nuno stood and unfurled his wings with such violence the wind knocked her down. There was a growing hum like a fan in a wood stove.

  She sneezed black soot into her forearm and scrambled to her feet. “You know it’s here.

  You’ve always known it, Nuno. On the landing.”

  Nuno floated forward, almost touching her. The heat from the tip of a wing nipped at her cheeks.

  She looked toward the stairs. The ceiling was blackened with soot. Zack and Leo would need to get higher than the portal.

  Rachel felt Zack’s frightened eyes on her back.

  “Upstairs!” screamed Rachel. “Now! Third floor! Try for the attic!”

  “Hurry.” Dave grabbed Zack’s free hand and scooped up Leo with one arm, bolting past Beatricia’s body. They flew up the stairs past the landing.

  Creed cocked his rifle. Rachel could see he was ready to fill her house with thunder. “No,” said Wise, lifting both hands. “Stop it.”