by Martin Kee
“I believe you,” Victoria said, stroking her hair. “But I need the archbishop to believe you too. Don’t you understand? I’m your friend here, Dona. It’s you and me who have to convince him. You’ve got no one else.”
Dona lifted her head, meeting the girl’s eyes. “All this because of your tooth?”
An ear-shattering cackle rose from Victoria’s throat. She threw her head back and hugged herself as tears rolled from her eyes.
“Oh, Dona! I’m so glad you still have your sense of humor through all this. God has given you such a gift.” She wiped her cheeks and placed a hand on Dona’s shoulder, ignoring the way she recoiled from Vicky’s touch. “This has nothing to do with the tooth. It has everything to do with saving the world.”
Dona blinked. “Saving it… Saving it from what?”
Before Victoria could answer, the door behind her swung open with a metal shriek. The archbishop was shorter than Dona remembered from Christmas Mass, a rotund man, his face jowly and pink. He looked at her with indifferent basset hound eyes. He didn’t wear his miter or robe, but instead wore a plain red smock. Dona thought it looked like a butcher’s apron.
“Your time is up,” the archbishop said.
Victoria turned and knelt before him, uttering a small greeting in Latin as she kissed his outstretched hand. She stood and turned to Dona. As they removed her from the room, Victoria sang sweet reassuring words into her ear.
“I’ll keep you safe, Dona. With any luck, your new best friend will show up as mysteriously as she has before. Maybe then she can corroborate your story. Maybe she’ll even come to save you.”
Dona leaned on Gareth, limping out the door. The archbishop pulled a large flat leather case from the folds of his robe. Walking to a nearby wooden bench, he unfolded it, laying wide an assortment of bright gleaming tools. They sparkled under the chemical light as Dona stared at them, guessing who they might be for.
Chapter 39
The Wilds
FATHER JOHN THOMAS knelt with his head nearly touching the baseboards, praying. Tears beaded at the tip of his nose, falling into an ever-darkening pool on the dusty, wooden, cabin floor. He clutched the rosary beads between his hands with bruising pressure. Tonight had been worse than usual. He had long given up saying the words. The ritual had no real meaning for him anymore, but it helped in its way—something to drown out the voices from the darkened corners of the cabin.
He struggled to recall his last sane memory, Lassimir, the wedding, the vows, the singing, the food, James and Sarah holding hands. Laughter. Hugging. Joy.
Sarah’s gown, made of radiant white silk, had been accented with the golden spiraling patterns of the local Lassimir weavers—a gift to her and James for helping rebuild the city. The fabric glowed pink and orange in the sunset. And James, a rough-cut stone of a man, had cleaned up well—standing there in his black evening hunter’s suit, decorated it beads. John had never seen the hermit more nervous, as the sun set over the water. James and Sarah kissed. The crowd broke into song. That seemed like a dream now, a memory from someone else’s life.
Crows took flight overhead—no. Wrong memory. That’s when it began to go wrong… When a girl named Elise had appeared to him.
Now, the dead screamed at him from the cabin walls.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” one girl asked. She was five. She stared at him through the cracks of the wall, her eyes bulging and black from the disease that had claimed her. Her voice was a whisper heard over the sound of wind. To John it was a scream louder than thunder. “You said I was innocent, that I would go to heaven.”
“I know,” he said, his voice heaving as he clenched his eyes. “I know. I know. I know. I know. I know.”
“You said that I would meet Jesus. Why did you lie?”
He still remembered her name, Elise. She lay in a bed, her parents weeping as she looked up at him with those ghastly black orbs, John, with his cross and his bible, reading her last rites, comforting her before her long journey.
And what a journey. When Skyla had pulled him through that in-between place, John realized just how wrong he had been. It wasn’t a castle in the sky, but a jungle that surrounded us from the shadows, its thorny vines waiting to snag us as soon as we crossed over.
“It hurts, Father Thomas,” she said, her voice weak and crying. “I’m hiding, but I think they found me. I… I think I can crawl further inside, but they keep sending people.”
In his mind he could see her bruises, her cuts that would never heal, those bones that would never mend. How was it the innocent could suffer even more in death?
“Why does it hurt?” She moaned through the walls.
“I don’t know!” he screamed at the shadows. “I don’t know why it hurts! I never knew it was like this. I never knew…” His voice trailed off in sobs.
Elise was only one of many. They visited at night, their faces disappointed, confused, rotting, bulging, and sad. They came to him asking the same question: Why?
And he didn’t know why. Why did he believe it? Why did they believe it?
“Because I wanted you to feel safe,” he tried to explain. “I wanted to comfort you. I wanted to comfort me. Because it was what I was taught. Because I never bothered to question it. What good is the truth to the dying?”
“But it was a lie,” they would say. Then they would cry and he would cry with them.
Now here was Elise again, the first he had seen when he began to feel his sanity slip. She came to him from the forest as he helped to lift a water barrel onto a newly built Lassimir shack. She had appeared out of the corner of his vision, and John recognized her immediately.
He had even followed her into the forest, calling out her name, not realizing until it was too late that he was lost, slipping, his leg going into a hole and snapping.
James had found him and dragged him back to town, and John realized something might be wrong with him. Soon, the others began to visit him in his dreams, in that place between consciousness and sleep. They appeared as faces, corpses, sad pitiful voices, all asking: Why?
“I think you should go,” James had said to him at last. “The residents… they don’t understand like Sarah and I do.” His voice was soft, his eyes holding John in complete understanding.
John had only nodded. “I know.”
“They’re scared,” said James. “That bastard preacher is already a bogeyman around here. Some still say they see Skyla. The last thing they need is someone they know spooking them, not when we’re this close to recovery. It’s for your own safety.” James peered out the window. “And they noticed the ravens. They think it’s an omen.”
More nodding from John. “I know.”
James clapped him on the shoulders. “Go to the cabin,” James said. “Go get some rest, try and get yourself together. You know you’ll always have a home here.”
“I know.”
But it hadn’t been restful, not by far. The voices, the bodies, they followed him through the forest, calling to him from between the cracks in the floor, peering at him from places his eyes could not see.
He looked up at the wall. There sat one of James’s hunting rifles. When he had first moved here, John had given hunting a try. It had gone poorly. Bullets always went astray, game always ran. He was a terrible shot.
“Would probably miss my own skull,” he mused as he stared at the gun on the wall. His eyes lingered. The gun was loaded.
“Will you save me?” Elise asked. “Will you save me from them?”
“From who?” he asked. Something seemed different this time. Something in her voice had a strange lilt to it, a familiar accent.
“From him,” she said. “The man in white.”
John clenched his eyes tighter. “I wish I could.”
“You could if you came here,” she said. “You could save me.”
“I wish…. I could.”
John opened his eyes, looked at the wall. The gun was closer. Had he moved?
“Pleas
e,” she said. “He’s scary. He wants to catch me.”
John saw his hand move, disconnected from his control, reaching for the rifle. He pulled back, clutching his fists to his chest. I don’t even have control of my body anymore.
“Father Thomas?” she said.
He looked at the baseboards, looked at the cracks there. “What?”
“I forgive you.”
The sob was so sudden it actually made him choke on his own grief. He grabbed the gun, hefting its weight. He turned it around, the barrel an open eye staring back at him. He found the safety, felt it click.
Wham! Wham! Wham!
He jumped.
The door. It was just a knock, or maybe his mind. He turned back to the rifle, placed the barrel in his mouth, felt the metal on his tongue. He tasted iron and old gunpowder.
Wham! Wham! Wham!
He jerked it away. “What!” he yelled, looking up at the ceiling. A slow sickness settled in his stomach. What was he doing? He looked back down at the weapon, then tossed it like a hot coal. It skittered along the floor.
Elise needs you.
It had to be the door.
He stood, walked across the room. As he grabbed the doorknob he paused, breathing deliberately. His heart was racing, his brow sweaty.
My God. I almost did it.
The thought chilled his blood. Another second and his brains would have been painting the wall, his soul floating in that in-between place, ripped and eaten. Before he could linger on that thought, he yanked the door open. He saw Skyla. He slammed the door again.
“No!” he screamed at it.
He waited.
“Father Thomas?” Was that Skyla’s voice or Elise? He wasn’t sure.
“I won’t go back there,” he said to the door. “I don’t care who you are.”
“Father Thomas, please open the door.”
He looked again at the doorknob, a fat rifle trigger. Both metal, both deadly, both doorways to that screaming, clutching, clawing wilderness, the afterlife.
“No! I won’t go back! You can’t make me!”
The voice was crying now. Sniffles and sobs. “F-father T-thomas… please. I… I don’t have anywhere to go. It’s Skyla. Please open the door.”
“I’m no one’s father anymore,” he said. But he couldn’t maintain the anger. It fell through him like a sieve. He suddenly felt very tired, and very old. Sighing, he opened the door again.
Skyla was taller than he remembered, older. Had it been years? The same goggles she had worn the last time he saw her, were now smashed, one lens shattered and covered with a cloth. The frames were bent and scratched, and yet she wore them as though they were affixed permanently to her eyes. She hugged herself in the cold, looking up at him. Her lip trembled.
But the fear was strong. “How’d you get here?” he asked with suspicion. “How’d you find this place again?”
“You know how,” she said, wiping her cheek. “It’s familiar, that’s all.”
He scratched his beard, staring at her with dark eyes. “I’m not familiar,” he said. “I’m different.” His hand pulled absently at his ragged clothes, a common habit now, something to confirm he was still real.
“Yes,” she said, her voice tiny and soft. “Yes, you’re different now too. We’re all different now.”
It was several moments later before John stepped back, letting the door swing wide. He stared as she stepped into the cabin. She paused, taking in the decay and neglect. She scanned the filthy floor, the shattered mirror, the dropped rifle. She looked up at him and John turned away.
“Good thing you showed up,” he said as he scooped up the rifle, placing it back on the rack. His hand lingered on it for only a second. “I could have had an accident.”
“I’m sorry,” she said closing the door behind her. “I did this to you.”
John didn’t know how to answer. He reached out and took a pinch of her clothes, rolling it between his finger and thumb. She waited until he was satisfied.
“I’m real,” Skyla said at last.
“Am I?” he asked, his eyes worried and gray. “Am I real anymore?”
She poked him in the gut and he grunted. They both smiled. It was hard to stay mad at her, impossible perhaps. Even when he led a parish in Bollingbrook, he found the girl to possess some humor that resonated with him.
“You aren’t going to take me away again are you?” he said, his eyes narrow. “I won’t go back there. I won’t go through that. I’ll walk.”
“I’m not here to take you anywhere,” she said, her voice exhausted. “I just need to rest.”
He picked at his clothes as she crossed the room to the couch. Her gaze traveled across the floor, along the walls. Her mouth began to open in amazement at something John could not see. At last she simply took a long breath and exhaled Whew!
“What?”
She turned to face him through the goggles. “You can’t see it,” she said. “Can you?”
“See what?”
“It’s everywhere now… Jesus…” Skyla continued to scan the room. “I mean, everywhere.”
John’s feet began to move, a nervous little dance. “What? What am I not seeing?”
She turned to the gun, now mounted again on the wall.
“A little late to go hunting,” she said.
John glanced at the rifle. He blushed. “Was going to clean it,” he said.
A smile crossed her lips. “Really…”
He turned away, not wishing to look at her or at those goggles any longer. “I’ll start some tea,” he said.
“Have anything stronger?” she asked from the couch. “Whiskey? Vodka? Some sacramental wine?”
He ignored her. “James said you appeared in Lassimir, or so the locals believe.”
“I’ve passed through there, between Bollingbrook and Rhinewall,” she said.
“It’s all his design, you know,” John said, finding it easier to talk with his hands busy. He was talking to the tea, not this phantom. “They’re a touchy bunch, the Lassimirites. And I thought The Church was superstitious.” He coughed up a small laugh. “James says they tell stories about you.”
“How many are left?” she asked, sitting on the couch. “After the raid?”
“Only a thousand maybe,” he said. “And those are the ones who lived on the outskirts. They were able to run away the soonest. They think you were the person who brought the Reverend.”
“Maybe I was.” She pulled the helmet off and stared at it in her hands, bobbing her head. She barked a dry laugh. “Did you know there are wanted posters linking me to The Church and the explosion? Before that it was The Church plastering my face on chapel walls as if I were the antichrist. I guess I can’t win, right?”
He plucked at his beard, now three years long and streaked with gray. His hair hung in oily curls around his face and John realized he must look horrifying to anyone but Skyla.
“What were you doing in Lassimir?” John asked. “Why would you travel there?”
“We were on our way back from Bollingbrook. I was visiting Melissa’s old room. She wanted to show me something.”
“Oh,” he said and snorted. Oh, just Skyla talking to a dead person. Nothing to see here, folks.
“What?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
The kettle began to whistle and he lifted it, pouring the steaming water into ceramic mugs, filled at the bottom with stems and leaves. He shuffled back across the floor and handed her one. She took it and nodded thanks.
It was then he saw her eyes. They were large and alien, the surrounding skin wrinkled the way hands become when left in the bath too long. Her lids looked like they might fall off in a strong breeze. The inside of the cap was lined with yellow wool. Strands of curly black hair lay matted against it like dead snakes. He shuddered.
“What?” she asked.
“Nothing.” John cleared his throat. “What did Melissa want to show you?”
Skyla told him about the sca
rs, how they had been all over the city, in alleys, Melissa’s room. She told him how they were in places where people had killed themselves. She held him in her gaze.
“That’s… interesting,” he said and took a sip.
“They’re here too,” she said, glancing around. “I can only see them well with the goggles though.”
John looked at the walls, the yellow curtains, the littered, dusty floor. Part of him wanted to argue, to say there was nothing to see, to say that she was probably crazy like her mother. But he knew better.
“Kill her,” the voice said. John perked up, looked around.
Skyla glanced up at him. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“Kill her before she does it again.”
“Does what?” John said.
Again, Skyla studied him. If she heard it, she didn’t show it. John cleared his throat and took a sip, thinking of something to change the subject.
“Those goggles have looked better.” And so have you, he thought.
She looked down at them, cradled in her hands like a wounded animal. “They barely work now.”
“So you’ve been using them,” he said. “Using them to… travel… to Bollingbrook...”
Her voice picked up. “Oh yes. They’re amazing, really.” A smile came over her, not a happy smile, but a crazed one. “They not only let me see things I normally couldn’t, but they let me move through things… but you already know that. I was going back and forth between Bollingbrook and Rhinewall, and I even tried to take some pictures with Gil’s camera…”
She stopped herself and took a sip. John waited. More words seemed to be bottled up in her.
“Gil,” he said, but that was enough. Words began to spill from Skyla’s mouth.
“I couldn’t keep looking at all those shadows, knowing what was going on, knowing what people really did—all the awful, awful things they thought and did. They were all so petty and wicked and greedy, all so wrapped up in themselves, so disconnected from everyone else. They only see themselves and nobody around them, never see the pain they cause, never see how it hurts other people when they lie or cheat, or hit, or stab, or rape… It made me hate them. I hated them so much that I wanted to just not see it anymore…”