The Life and Death Parade

by Eliza Wass

  “That would be splendid, old chap.” My teeth chattered. He arched an eyebrow. He seemed to see right through me; it was a quality of his X-ray eyes.

  He led me onto the boat. It was clear straightway that it wasn’t the same boat at all. It was immaculate but also soulless, a floating hotel room with polished wood floors and furniture and no decoration of any sort. He led me through to the bedroom. There was an iron bed with crisp white covers, a record player at the end of its tune, and a joint perched in a spotless ashtray. I peered over him, to see the name of the record. It had no label.

  “What’s that you were playing?” I asked.

  He didn’t respond, just rifled through his dresser, tossed me a T-shirt, boxer shorts, and a pair of jeans. “There are towels in there. You can shower, if you want.” He wrinkled his nose, plucked up the joint, and left, shutting the door behind him.

  It felt strange to suddenly be on a stranger’s boat, in a stranger’s life, with his sandalwood soaps and shampoos and fresh white towels. I tried not to think about how stupid I had been, going there in the middle of the night without a plan. It was probably a good thing I hadn’t found the psychic—what did I plan to do with her? Turn her upside down and shake her until the past fell out of her pockets?

  As I turned off the shower, I felt the first twinges of a proper downpour. I swallowed hard. I was not going to cry in front of a stranger. Especially not a shirtless stranger. What if he tried to comfort me? It would look like the cover of an erotica e-book.

  The boy’s clothes were worn soft, more comfortable than my own. I tried to mimic his professionalism. I would say, Thank you. I’ll bring these back tomorrow. Good night. And then I would leave.

  I groped for the doorknob. My fingers slipped. The door flew open. My wet clothes hit the deck. Nikki’s rabbit foot hopped across the floor.

  The boy was sitting at a table, smoking his joint like a weary prophet. His eyes seemed to dim when he noticed the rabbit’s foot. He plucked it off the floor by the ribbon so it spun in the air between us. “Where did this come from?”

  I scooped my clothes off the floor, snatched the rabbit’s foot, and stuffed it in my pocket. “A friend. He’s dead.” It was more information than I needed to share, but sometimes I wielded it like a weapon.

  “Did he live around here?”

  “No, he lived in a castle.”

  “Some friend.” He expelled smoke from his nose.

  “I’m leaving. I mean, thank you, I’m leaving, good-bye. Also I will bring these back tomorrow.”

  “Keep ’em.” He didn’t seem interested. I started toward the door, when I saw the snakes—the black snake and the white snake—painted on the table he was sitting at. It was the table, the same table Nikki had sat at when the psychic told him he was going to die.

  Holiday, Nikki, and I were in the library. Nikki was ill, although he wouldn’t admit it. His skin was lit from within but felt cold to the touch. His eyes went dark sometimes, as if he were looking inward instead of out. Holiday and I tried to attract his attention, to cure him with happiness, the way he did us. Macklin was off someplace in his car.

  “Look, Nikki,” Holiday said. “He’s got a coat like you.” Nikki wore that long, dark blue military coat every day, no matter the weather. It was a vintage coat so it already had a musty smell, but the smell was getting so strong you could tell when Nikki was coming, where he’d been.

  He wore it then, buried in his favorite chair with his ankles crossed over the footrest in tall military boots. He had decided to go to war one day, although it wasn’t quite clear what he was fighting, or who would win.

  “Hey, Nikki.” He was reading an old journal. I snapped my fingers. “Hey, Nikki, Nikki, Nikki.”

  “Huh? Yes?” He fluttered his eyelashes and met my eyes.

  “Holly was showing you something.”

  “Oh, right, sure.” He scratched his chest and checked with the journal.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Holly said like it very much did.

  “I think it does,” I said. “Here, give it to me.” I took the book and approached him. “What are you reading?” I looked over his shoulder. He was staring at a very rudimentary drawing of two people inside a heart. “Nikki, are you stoned?”

  “No. Why? Have you got something?”

  “When have I ever had weed?”

  “I thought you might be turning over a new leaf.”

  I scooted him over, sat down beside him. I brushed his cheek. I sometimes felt like I had created Nikki. Not only our relationship but all of him, like he was something I conjured to make me believe I belonged, in this family, in this castle, on this earth. “Look what Holiday found, see?” I held the book open. “It looks like you.”

  “Not at all; I’m much better looking.” He shut the book and set it down beside us. He drifted off again, eyes blank, mouth slightly open.

  “You all right, Nikki?” I shook his lapel when he didn’t answer.

  “What?” A note of irritation.

  “You keep drifting off. What are you thinking about?”

  “Nothing.”

  I tugged his lapel. “You know, your jacket smells funny.”

  “It smells of the canal.”

  “And mothballs. Why don’t you have it dry-cleaned?”

  “No. It’s protecting me.”

  “From what?”

  He shrugged, and his eyes wandered to the drawing of two people trapped inside a heart.

  SIX

  I saw a tear land on my finger before I realized I was crying. “This is the boat.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “This is the boat. Where is the psychic?”

  “You’ve lost me.”

  I searched the boat for clues. Lined up along the bookshelf: The Book of the Damned, Hitler’s Jewish Clairvoyant, and VooDoo in Haiti. Jars of oils in the kitchen, a net bag of herbs hanging from the ceiling.

  “This is her boat. This is the psychic’s boat.”

  “Maybe you should sit down,” he said with that eerie calm.

  “Where is she?” I spread my arms.

  “I think you might have hit your head.”

  “Where is the woman who was on this boat last year?”

  He took me by the shoulders and directed me firmly onto the chair. “Listen, sweetheart, I think you’ve got the wrong boat.”

  “But the snakes!” I pounded on the table. “I remember the snakes!” I wanted to intimidate him into confession, but instead I burst into tears—head in hands, gasping for breath, rocking myself on the creaky wooden chair. He watched with cold detachment.

  Eventually I pulled myself together—arranged my borrowed clothes and reached up to organize my hair—until I remembered it wasn’t there anymore. “Sorry. I’m not usually like this.” I dragged my breath in. “At the castle, I have to keep things together for everyone. I can’t cry.”

  He shrugged. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “What is this?” I traced the lines of the black snake. “Some sort of symbol? What does it mean?”

  “It’s the mark of this group I used to belong to, the LDP.”

  “The Liberal Democrats?”

  He smirked. “No. The Life and Death Parade.”

  A memory stirred. “They throw parties?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t call them parties.” He rubbed his neck ruefully.

  “What would you call them?”

  “Circuses. Charades. Cons. I could go on….”

  I kept tracing the snakes, over and over. “A funeral. It was a funeral.” His lips twitched. I took a deep breath, reining myself in. “Last year. My friend met her at a funeral last year. She was the one I was looking for when I…” I made a diving motion. “She called herself a psychic. She had wild, curly hair. Do you know her?”

  “I know a lot of people who call themselves psychics.” I searched his face for clues, but there was nothing there. He seemed deeply untroubled. Or possibly just really, really stoned.

 
“Do you know where I can find them, this group?”

  “Why?”

  “My friend, the one who gave me the rabbit’s foot, he came onto her boat to have his future read. She told him he was going to die. She was right.”

  “Ha.” He scoffed. “That’s a first.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Life and Death Parade are a bunch of charlatans. Anyway, I believe we make our own futures, don’t you?” He winked at me like he had read my mind.

  I gestured to the oils, the herbs, the stones piled in a box in the corner. “I recognize this stuff. My mum was a sort of spiritualist. She traveled all over the world, studying religion.” I turned to him. “What do you use it for?”

  “Fun.”

  A large glass aquarium sat on the windowsill. I recognized the perforated curve of a snake. I walked over to have a look. I gently ran my finger along the glass. “He’s beautiful.” The boy frowned. “Do you like snakes?”

  “It was Emmanuel’s.” The snake shuddered, scales contracting like an accordion.

  “Who’s Emmanuel?”

  “My boyfriend.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Dead. That snake bit him.”

  I jumped back. “You’re joking.” I shook the quivers from my hand.

  “You think?” His weird eyes flashed.

  I moved away from the aquarium and toward shelves of bottled oils. I read the labels, Kus Kus and Uncrossing and Flying Devil, but most of them were unmarked. “How do they read people’s futures, these Life and Death people?”

  “They petition saints. They build an altar and pray to the saint of their choice, and if they’re blessed, the saint tells them things.”

  “But how do they really do it?”

  “Haven’t you ever heard that character is destiny? They cold read you. It’s easy. Take you, for instance.” He steepled his fingers and stretched, like he was preparing to dive in. “You’re a people pleaser, although you see yourself as a rebel.” He touched the place above his lip where mine was pierced. “You do what you think other people want you to do because you think you don’t deserve their love. You don’t know where you belong.”

  His words affected me, but that was only because everything affected me lately. “You could say that about anyone,” I said. “It’s a total cliché.”

  He jockeyed forward. “And this boy you lost, he might not have been the best boy for you, but he was the only person who ever made you feel loved. But then, he made everyone feel loved.”

  The color was leeched from everything, except his stinging eyes. “How did you know that?”

  “I told you.” He sat back in his chair. “It’s easy.”

  “But you must have known Nikki. You can’t have got all that looking at my bald head.”

  He cracked his neck and crossed his arms. “You said you couldn’t cry, so clearly you’re a people pleaser. All people pleasers think they don’t deserve love. You called the place you live ‘the castle,’ so you must not feel like it’s home. And as for this Nikki, people who think they’re unlovable are never loved by anyone except for those who love everyone.

  “The trick to reading people is to take whatever that person says to you and say it back to them without all the little qualifiers and nice words people use to keep themselves safe. Say it with intention, and it’ll sound real.”

  “But it’s not real?”

  “Who cares, as long as it works?”

  Was that what the psychic did to Nikki? Took something he said to her and spit it back to him? Nikki had never been one to make plans for the future; he did what he wanted today. At least he had until the psychic saw the future for him. “So, this is what you do for a living?”

  “No. I speak to the dead.”

  I steadied myself on the wall. “What do you mean?”

  “Exactly what I said. I’m a medium. I perform séances.”

  “And how do you do that?”

  “Different ways.” He set his silver lighter over the snakes on the table and spun it between us.

  “How?”

  “Different ways.” He hunched his shoulders.

  “By tricks?”

  He shrugged. “There are tricks, sure. Things that mean something to everyone.”

  “Like what?”

  “Flowers.” The lighter spun. “People usually leave flowers on a grave before they go to a medium. Or they bring an item belonging to the deceased: jewelry or a key chain or a lucky charm.” The rabbit’s foot burned in my front pocket. “Or they carry a photograph, more the older generation, the younger one has a screensaver or a profile picture. And the pictures are always the same: everyone’s smiling, the sun’s out.” The picture of us in Cornwall sprung to mind. “And the deceased, you describe them in the most general terms, using opposites. He was the nicest boy in the world, but he had a naughty streak. He loved everyone, but sometimes he could be so selfish. And the deceased are always funny and they always have that special laugh.” He caught the spinning lighter on the desk without breaking eye contact. His voice dropped to a whisper. “And they always want you to know they love you. And they always want you to know there was nothing you could do.”

  I felt tied to the table. He was captivating, with his weird eyes and his cool demeanor. I could see how a person could reshape their mind to believe what he said. I could see how a person could.

  “People need to explain things, it’s how they put up with this bum deal they’ve been given and carry on living,” he said. “They want to believe everything happens for a reason. So they decide what that reason is and then they find evidence. There’s evidence for everything. So you feed it to them, you tell them what they want to hear, and they make it true because they want to.” He rapped his knuckles on the table.

  “But don’t you think it’s…morally reprehensible, taking advantage of people in their hour of need?”

  “I don’t see it that way.”

  “No, I suppose you wouldn’t.” My skin felt tight. “I suppose you’re like all those charlatans in the Life and Death Parade—you think you’re helping people move on, giving them closure, and taking their money, of course.”

  “A boy’s got to make a living.”

  “You’re making a living off the dead.”

  He shrugged.

  “You’re very cold.”

  “That is by necessity. You have no idea what it’s like, being torn between two worlds: the world of the living and the world of the dead.”

  “Of course I do. Any grieving person does.” I scanned the bare room: structured and self-contained, soulless. “I think you’re lonely.” He arched an eyebrow. “I think you’re very unhappy.”

  “If you want to know what a person is, listen to what they say about other people,” he hummed.

  I smirked. “You’re a regular horoscope, aren’t you?” I stood up. “I suppose that means when you were reading me, you were really reading you. No wonder you named your boat Love.” I scooped my clothes off the floor. “Enjoy getting stoned.”

  “Thanks—Hey!”

  I stopped at the door, turned to face him. “What?”

  He was still sitting at the table. The aquarium was behind him, and it was hard to decide who was more snakelike. His lip twitched. “I didn’t catch your name.”

  “It’s Kitty.”

  “As in cat?”

  “As in Katherine. Damice.”

  His face cracked into an ear-to-ear smile. It didn’t seem to belong on his face. “You’re kidding.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He clucked his tongue. “You lied to me.”

  “I never.”

  “In your pocket.” He drew the lighter down the table. “That rabbit’s foot came from Darlene Damice.”

  “Darlene Damice was my mum.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Darlene Damice was one of us.”

  I found Nikki in my bedroom. He’d dragged a box of Mum’s things out of my closet. He was using a bundle of
burning sage to draw a circle on my floor.

  “What are you doing?” I said, aghast.

  “I’m drawing a protection circle,” he said, like that was obvious.

  “You’re burning a protection circle. Into historic wood floors.”

  Nikki blew his hair out of his eyes. “I don’t think the floor’s history will affect the spell,” he said thoughtfully.

  “What spell? Why are you putting a spell on my bedroom?”

  “To protect you.” He sat back, gazed up at me with manic eyes through wisps of pale hair.

  “Is this because of the psychic?” I said, picking up Mum’s things from the floor and placing them back in the box. “Is this because of what she said? Nikki, I told you: it’s not real.”

  “I’m supposed to be dead,” he maintained, running his fingers along the cover of my mum’s book.

  “No, you’re not.”

  “I’m supposed to be dead, and all of you, everyone in this house, is in danger.” He breathed in and got back to work.

  “Stop. Nikki, stop.” When he didn’t, I got down beside him, forced the sage from his fingers. He glared at me. I tried to laugh, tried to act like it wasn’t serious. I put the sage back in the box. “D’you know what your dad will say when he sees this in my room? He’ll think I’ve spent too much time at Stonehenge. I’m going to have to find a rug or something to cover it up.”

  Nikki shook his head. “You have much bigger things to worry about.”

  “Like what?” He shuddered. He went to pick Mum’s book off the floor. “Leave it, Nikki,” I directed. He frowned at me. “I don’t understand why you’re doing this. I don’t understand what you’re doing.”

  “I’m not asking you to understand.” He set his jaw. “I’m asking you to trust me.”

  “Nikki,” I scolded. “Hasn’t anyone ever told you that you have to ask before you draw the sign of the beast in a girl’s bedroom?”

  “It’s not the sign of the beast,” he said seriously. He never joked anymore, which was probably the most unsettling thing about him.

  “I wish Mum were here,” I said quietly. Mum would know, the way she’d always seemed to know, the best way to deal with Nikki. But I wasn’t her. I didn’t know anything about the mystical side of her. I never thought that one day I would need to fight madness with madness.