The shadows creep from their corners, stretching long-fingered hands toward us, a terrible hunger lapping at their edges. I reach across the bed to drag Marlise into what I hope is the relative safety offered by my arms. She shivers, presses herself tightly against me and wraps her arms around my waist before she buries her face in my chest.
The chant I choose is an old one, based on an example drawn from the Papyrus of Ani, of a man coming forth by day against his enemies. “I have divided the heavens. I have cleft the horizon…”
It is about establishing dominion over the spirit realms and, in this case, one angry spirit that seeks to impinge itself upon the world of the living. The world blurs at its edges. The room in which we stand is bled of colour, furniture and décor becoming a smear of grey shot through with blue-green streaks that could be motes of light attenuating into infinity.
“What’s happening?” Marlise asks, but her words muffled, as though she is speaking through a pillow.
My response is to grip her tighter to me, to press a kiss to her crown in the hope to quell her shaking. “We’re going into a space between worlds, to what purpose I can’t fully tell. The spirit is drawing us partially into its realm, because it costs it too much energy to attack us in the material, which is what it’s been doing up until now.”
She whimpers. I can’t show fear, not now. I don’t dare admit now is the first time, in practice, that I’ve experienced this kind of phenomenon. Oh, I’d read theory until it poured out of my ears, and so many theories abound, and many of them conflicting. All paranormal happenings of this nature are highly subjective, coloured by the perception of the viewer in the objective.
The only way to describe our present environment is to compare it to being underwater, in some emerald-tinted lake, the water shimmering under the influence of miragelike heat waves. Our legs give the appearance of dissolving halfway beneath the knee, our feet invisible, though I can still feel that I’m standing on the floor, possibly still in Marlise’s bedroom. It’s impossible to be sure of anything here.
The entity takes shape, drawing in some of what surrounds us as it forms a semblance of the Ka, the spiritual double. It’s like staring into a perverse mirror of myself, the sneering image of the old Ashton Kennedy coming into being before us. He flickers with bursts of static, suggesting that it is with a great force of will that he’s making his environment conform to his vision.
Marlise’s shaking grows greater as she realises what is transpiring and I hug her as tightly as possible without hurting her.
“Be firm,” I tell her. “He can’t harm you.” Oh, how I wish that is the truth.
“I want my life back,” Ashton says.
“You can’t do this,” I answer.
“You have no right to my body.”
“What is done is done. You must depart, go on for judgment.”
“No.” He takes a step forward, hands balled into fists. His hair is a nimbus of shadow, surrounding his face in a cloud, moved by invisible currents.
“Don’t come any closer.” I hold up a hand, palm facing toward him. My daimonic powers come easily here and I push at him, forcing the motes of energy to stream up from my feet, to flow through my chakra points as a beam of white that strikes him on his chest. “Come no farther.”
He howls, the sound unearthly, tearing through my very core. Marlise’s death grip around my waist strengthens.
“You’ve passed from this life, Ashton Kennedy and, by some twist of the laws of Ma’at, I am now the owner of your Kha. You need to pass to the Hall of Judgment. That is how it is. Even for those of us who come into being as blessed Akh.”
For a moment the entity shimmers, flickers, and gives the appearance of dissolving, but some nasty, crawling thought suggests we won’t be so easily rid of him. Our world darkens for a heartbeat or two before the spirit draws more solidity into himself.
“I won’t go.”
“I have ways and means to force you into the Hall of Judgment,” I say. This is a lie, if ever there was, but I’m sure as hell not going to let this thing know that.
He tries to rush me and I pull hard on my daimonic resources, though I know on a physical level this effort taxes me hard, but if I don’t try, I don’t know if I’ll have a body to which I can return. The powers flow through me, an electric current that singes my synapses, and it’s all that I can do to keep Ashton from reaching us. The Neteru help us if he succeeds. I’m not sure what he could achieve and I do not want to find out, either.
He howls again, the sound shivering through me, and I grit my teeth, pushing with all the conscious force I can muster. Marlise twists around, letting go of me to stand squarely.
“Marlise, no,” I mutter.
“Ashton.” She speaks with assurance, addressing the angry ghost.
The being’s attention shifts from me to her, and some of its intensity flickers.
“Don’t,” I say.
“Ashton, you’re dead. You died that night when Alexei drove over you with his SUV. Why can’t you see that? Have you ever wondered why he drove over you? Have you stopped to consider that you are a murderer? I know you didn’t care, what you did to Isabelle, but you’ve got a stain on your soul because of that. Look at yourself. Consider my words.”
A bluish glow envelops us, spreading from Marlise’s exhaled breath. Weird.
“Leave us alone, Ashton! I don’t want you in my life anymore.”
Incongruously the spirit falters. Its expression turns from anger to something else. Remorse?
A sense of where I’d been wandering for the past five years reaches me. “If you don’t go, Ashton, you’ll be wandering in limbo for eternity. You don’t want that, do you?” I try to convey some of horror of my nightmares, pushing out with thoughts of the endless grey of the Sea of Nun, of the sucking nothingness.
Ashton reels, as though he’s taken a left hook, and he staggers back a few feet, holding his arms over his face.
“You don’t know!” he wails. “You don’t know what it’s like!”
“That’s where you’re wrong!” I shout back. “You’ve only had this for four months. Try five years, you fool!” I surprise myself with the depth of emotion exploding from my belly. Here, in this world where the quick might touch the dead, a veil has been lifted. The memories wash over me, of the fitful searching, of being blocked at every opportunity by invisible barriers, an existence lacking in all aural, visual and tactile stimulus. If ever there was a hell, this is it.
At the same time a warm sweep of compassion moves me. How must it be for this man, no matter how despicable, to have been lost for any time, wandering, without knowing what has happened? In a way, the five years have been easier for me, one of the Inkarna, who has the strength of will to endure. Ashton Kennedy must be driven half-mad by fear.
His image folds and collapses, shrinking before us, spent. The environment blinks out and we drop to the floor, our breath misting before our faces. The room is icy, a lot colder than it could possibly be, even in the depths of winter.
Marlise’s teeth chatter and I draw her close, enfolding her in my arms. Her flesh is so chilled I’m scared she’s gone into shock.
“Marlise?”
“We’re back?”
“We’re safe. For now.” Tentatively I sit up, only to be blinded by a fierce stab of pain that can only be compared to having a chisel wedged into my skull. Tears run freely down my cheeks, mingling with the warm wetness running from my sinuses. All I can do is cradle my head in my hands and rock.
“Ashton… Fuck. Whatever your name is. Are you all right?” Marlise places her hands on either side of my face, lifting so I’m looking up at her.
I blink at her, hissing at the brightness in her room. Concern and fear are etched on her features and she searches my eyes.
“I’ll live. I think.”
“I believe you,” she says. “Utterly and completely.”
Chapter 8
Revelations
Whil
e Ashton’s spirit might not be able to torment me further in the material world, he follows me in my dreams, where I walk through Wynberg. Every corner I turn, there he is, grinning at me, watching me to see whether his appearance rattles me. I won’t allow him that pleasure and turn down a side street or cross the road. And, yet, he is relentless, and Wynberg grows into a combination of Maitland cemetery and a deserted train station where the sea crashes against a decayed cement and yellow-brick platform.
He is perched catlike upon a pillar, his cold grey eyes the same hue as the ocean tearing hungrily at the shore.
* * * *
“Be careful,” Marlise says when we get out of her car in Rosebank. “I wish I could go with you. I want this all to end, so we can figure out where to go from here.”
Her phone rings and she answers. Judging from the way she rolls her eyes, it must be Lucy’s granny, as we’ve come to call the old bag.
“You’ve got the wrong number! This is not Lucy.” Marlise kills the call, well aware I’m impatient to get going.
I clasp her hand in mine and give her fingers a gentle squeeze while trying to smother a smirk at her annoyance. “I’ll be fine, Marlise. No one’s going to mess with me. I can guarantee that. And, if there’s other trouble, I’m sure I can figure out how to deal with it.”
She doesn’t look convinced. “I care about you, Ash.”
We’ve agreed that she must continue calling me by the Kha’s name. We both stand staring at each other for a few moments. Since last night we’re back to being careful about physical contact. If it bothers Marlise that I was once a woman by the name of Elizabeth Rae Perry, she doesn’t let on. Likewise, I’m all too aware of Marlise’s gender, especially now that we’ve been so close to each other physically. I can’t let these traitorous thoughts cloud my judgment: that I want to hold her, do things with her that…
“Ash?”
“Huh?”
She watches me with that slightly puzzled expression she seems to have so often nowadays.
“Sorry, I had a thought there for a second.”
Marlise hugs me, her minty scent making me hold her tightly before breaking away to maintain a little more distance between us.
“Please be careful, okay? I’d suggest you look into getting yourself a cell phone so you can at least call for help.”
“I need to get that room first,” I remind her.
“Ugh. We’re not going to have this conversation again.”
“We’re not,” I agree but try to smile warmly to lessen the finality in my words. “You have a good day. I’ll meet you back here at three, okay?” I turn and walk before our farewell grows any more awkward. I can feel her watching me as I stride down to the station. Today’s going to be enough of a misadventure without adding extra drama.
I have to switch trains at Salt River, not the best of stations, but for once I’m glad for my height as I shoulder through the throngs. As always, I’m one of the few whites—and a strange-looking one by the coloured folks’ cultural standards, what with the long hair and the piercings—and I receive more than one fearful look or muttered commentary.
But they leave me alone, and that is all I ask, even when a trio of disreputable gangster types sit near me on the carriage headed out on the Bellville line. I recall some of Ashton’s nastiness and stare at them, half sneering, projecting at them on the verge of tapping into my daimonic self. Luckily, before anything can come of this, I disembark at the Old Mutual station.
Maitland cemetery is a lot larger than when I last saw it. It sprawls for hectares, bounded on one side by Voortrekker Road and the railway line on the other. Scraggly port jacksons grow in thickets demarcating the different divisions. The brisk wind makes their leaves shiver. The good winter rains have leant an urgency to the riot of weeds pushing between the plots and, while I walk, the red-orange mud sucks at my boot soles.
The sky hangs low and small spittles of moisture prickle at my exposed flesh. I’ve arrived with an hour or so to spare, for what reason I’m not sure. I don’t have a watch and, subsequently have no way of telling the time, but that’s also fine. At this point in my existence, I have more time than I care for.
A murder of pied crows offers their peculiar high-pitched calls to the wind and takes off the moment I pass the skeletal umbrella pine in which they were perched. I resist the urge to count them, something I used to do when my name was Lizzie and I was growing up on a wine farm in Paarl.
Is the farm even there anymore? What has become of Lizzie’s family? I sift through those ancient memories, of the times leading up to the Anglo Boer War and it all seems so dreamlike, unreal. I recall the day I met Richard, at a dinner my father had hosted, how a dapper Richard had enchanted me.
Where is he now? Memories of the sucking grey nothing of the inbetween seep up. Is he also there in the Sea of Nun, wandering, lost? If five years are enough to have me jerk awake screaming each night, what must it be like to exist in limbo for more than a century? The forgetfulness of death would be kinder.
Why would Richard, who has lived two or more lifetimes before, fall by the wayside, lost to us, and I, a mere stripling in Inkarna terms, endure? This question has been bugging me too often. When I consider the powerful beings I met in Per Ankh, I am humbled by the knowledge that they nonetheless pooled their powers to punch me through so soon after my initial arrival.
This hadn’t been without some disagreement. They’d held meetings after meetings in the Obsidian Hall, meetings from which I’d been excluded. Meritiset had been such a great comfort then, one of the few who’d spoken to me. The Upstart, some of them had called me.
Meritiset had told me of her previous life.
“Don’t you want to go back?” I asked her.
She’d gotten a faraway look in her eyes as she gazed out across our gardens. “I miss it, sometimes, but to be honest, the world of matter is too red in tooth and claw. I know Siptah will come, soon, and we can all be together.”
The times I miss now are the ones where we’d chant the hymns, where we’d maintain the identity of ourselves as separate yet connected beings, the sound filling the Obsidian Hall with its glory, of feeling the daimonic powers thrum through our ethereal bodies.
For all the time spent in Per Ankh, we could clothe ourselves in any shape, yet we chose a facsimile of our last mortal life. Only the elders, who had returned numerous times, took on peculiar, almost sexless forms. Oh, they were recognisably human but they were—for lack of better description—perfect, beautiful. Too perfect. One could call them angelic, though they were anything but. When they looked me in the eye, I gained the distinct impression they gazed upon me as an object worthy of pity.
And here I am, wandering about in a Kha not of my choosing. How will this affect my return? Will I be simply Lizzie again, or will it feel right, natural to manifest in Per Ankh in some idealised form of Ashton Kennedy, change my Ren to Neferkhepera instead? Can one even change one’s Ren?
These thoughts tumble about until I reach one of the chapels, where services had been held when Lizzie had last been here. I stand for a good while gaping at the tumbled red-brick and at the blackened arches pointing naked at the clouds. A ficus strangles one of the walls, its roots threading through the very structure of the ruin.
Then I see him. Ashton.
He watches me from the doorway, not quite venturing into the light, a thing of shadows not wholly of this plane. His clothing mirrors mine: black jeans ragged at the knee, leather jacket gaping to reveal a Slayer t-shirt, and hair tied back.
“What do you want?” If anyone is watching, they’ll see me talking to thin air. Of that I’m certain.
Ashton says nothing, just carries on watching me watch him, impassive. He lifts a cigarette to his lips and blows a ghostly plume into the air. So, he was a smoker. Why am I not surprised?
“Didn’t know ghosts could still light up.” I don’t wait for an answer and turn to continue walking down to the older part of the cemetery.
>
I don’t need this, not now, not when I’m trying to figure out what the hell is going on. How do I convey to this spirit that I never meant for any of this to happen? If I hadn’t taken his Kha he wouldn’t have had any links to the material realm, he would have had no choice but to pass to the Hall of Judgment. Does this mean I have to take responsibility for him?
Maybe.
But right now I don’t want to think about Ashton. Now it’s time to pay respects to my dead. As I approach the graveside I try not to take in too much of the disrespect shown to the memorials, the graffiti scrawled on walls, used condoms, broken bottles and discarded clothing, among other things. I step over piles of human excrement.
It wasn’t like this when I was last here. If this is the way people treat their dead, it’s no wonder society is in such a state. Our propensity for human misery is insatiable. When I think of how the people are packed in the townships in their rusted tin shacks, of the faces of the bergies sleeping fitfully on their cardboard beds, I’m not so sure if returning to Cape Town is such an honour. A wry laugh escapes me. Maybe it’s a prison sentence, for losing Richard.
Like House Adamastor would just pack up and leave because they knew I was the next one incarnating? My return a joke of cosmic proportions?
I don’t at first recognise Richard’s grave. Someone knocked down the pylon and thoughtfully piled rubble over the marker. An old Wellington boot obscures his cartouche bearing his name. Who in their right mind dumps here? Moss creates a vivid slash of green where the slab has cracked.
Nothing is permanent, even those who court immortality. Even those who have completed the round trip once, twice, three times, can fall by the wayside. Richard, where are you? Do you still think of me? How would you think of me now if you could see me? A man.
Would you still put your arms around me and tell me you love me?
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