The Life and Death Parade

by Eliza Wass

  Macklin was with Roan all the time. I knew he was supposed to be helping me, but I felt like he’d been waiting for any excuse to get closer to Roan. I hung around, too, kept pressing Roan on the LDP, but I felt pushed out, separated by something.

  On sunny afternoons they would gather outside under Nikki’s favorite tree. If it rained, they would huddle in the library, read Nikki’s favorite books, or paint at his easel. Even Lord and Lady Bramley treated Roan sometimes, I thought, with too much affection, teasing him about his jewelry, calling out to him when a Rolling Stones documentary was on so they could all watch it together. And Macklin was either deep under cover or just deep under Roan’s spell, because every day he moved closer to him. He hung on Roan’s every word, reacted to his every movement, like an instrument tuning itself in his key.

  I started carting Mum’s book around with me, studying the saints, thinking about what I’d ask for, if I had the faith to ask for anything. I was perusing it one wet afternoon in the library when Roan caught my eye.

  He was sitting in Nikki’s chair, with his feet crossed over Nikki’s footrest—just the way Nikki sat—like some insidious form of chameleon. Macklin was on a chair just beside him, and Holiday was on her belly on the floor, wearing five or six necklaces in homage to her leader.

  “Do you know what would be really nice right now?” Roan said. “A cup of English tea. Macklin, would you get some for me? Holiday can help.”

  Macklin was the last person I ever expected to see taking orders, but he shut his book and stood up, stretching.

  “Macklin.” I stiffened. “You don’t have to do what he says.”

  Macklin rubbed the back of his neck. “Don’t you want tea?” He helped Holiday to her feet, and they both went off together.

  I sat up, itchy under the skin. “I don’t understand why everyone does everything you want.”

  “And why they don’t do the same for you?” He turned the page of an illustrated copy of Dante’s Inferno. “Because you never ask for it. You ask for nothing, so that’s what you get.” He scanned the drawing, then met my eyes. “You could have everything you want if you would just ask.”

  I glared at him. “I want to know where this bloody group is.”

  “They should be here soon.” He looked out the window, as if it might be written in the sky. “But that’s not what you really want, is it?” He elbowed himself up.

  “I want you to leave.”

  He scoffed. “You don’t like me.”

  “Oh, I absolutely adore you. I just don’t trust you.”

  He sighed, ran his fingers through his lank hair. “Ask. Ask for anything you want.”

  “All right, then.” My lungs expanded on a breath. My voice was stone-cold. “I want Nikki back.”

  He laughed once. “Maybe we should start a little smaller. You want to find the Life and Death Parade? Find them. When you go upstairs tonight to sleep, build an altar, light a candle, chant—do whatever you need to do to believe, and then ask for it.”

  “That’s not how things work.”

  “Who cares how things work, as long as they work?” China cups jingled as Macklin and Holiday came through the door. “See?” Roan winked. “Everything you want.”

  I woke up at three o’clock in the morning, the time Mum said the veil between this world and the next was thinnest. I took a deep breath and swung my feet to the floor.

  You start with a flat surface.

  My dresser was cluttered with pictures of Nikki, Macklin, and me, stones from the beach, notes he’d written (Kitty, where are you? I miss you). I cleared them carefully away, set them on the floor, until the dresser was clean.

  Cover it with a white cloth.

  I stripped the case from my pillow, spread it over the dresser, pulled the corners so it lay flat.

  Then your pictures.

  I lifted Mum’s book from my bedside table and flipped to the back, until I found her picture. I used an old sketchbook as a straight edge and tore it from the book. I leaned it against the wall, at the center of the dresser. A funny feeling curled in my stomach. There was something unsettling about altars and objects and magic, even if you didn’t believe in them.

  Powerful objects.

  I pulled the rabbit’s foot from my pocket, the spell bag from my drawer. I arranged them artfully on the dresser.

  Your candles at the back.

  I had a candle we got in Paris, with pictures of the Eiffel Tower and the Champs-Elysées. It was meant to smell of lavender. It was cream-colored, not white, but Roan said it was only your intention that mattered. I lit the wick.

  I went to the sink and poured a cup of water. I watched the light flicker and pool over the surface. I wasn’t sure what to do with my hands, so I clasped them together. Was I supposed to shut my eyes? Should I get down on my knees? I didn’t know. All I knew was that I was supposed to ask, so I did it out loud, over and over.

  “Let me find the Life and Death Parade. Let me find the Life and Death Parade….Please, Mum.”

  I asked for ages, until my mind spun and I started to feel faint. Then I left the altar and crawled back into bed, watched the candlelight flicker on the ceiling until I fell asleep.

  I awoke to a sharp tweeting sound. The stench of smoke, thick in my throat. I sat up in bed. I saw a towering inferno.

  I threw my blankets aside. I had lit my room on fire.

  I leapt out of bed and stood before the fire, bewitched. Mum’s picture was gone; the rabbit’s foot was a blackened stump. The spell bag was cooking nicely. I stumbled back, pulled my blanket off the bed, and threw it over. The flames shot toward the ceiling.

  A stream of water hit me square in the back. I raced from my room as water pelted down. I had set off the sprinklers, not just in my room, but all down the hall. I ran into Macklin and Lord Bramley.

  “What happened?” Macklin said.

  “Fire. In my bedroom. It was a candle.” They both hurried past me. I stood there dumbly, on the edge of the sprinkler line, watching the water puddle on the old wood.

  Once the fire was contained, Lord Bramley asked to speak to me alone. We went into one of the study rooms near the front of the house. Fires were pretty serious in old places like this. And so was water damage. I sat down in a chair across from him as he ran his fingers along his scalp.

  “What were you thinking? What were you doing?”

  “I wasn’t thinking anything. I just left a candle burning. I thought candles put themselves out when they finished.” I wanted to explain to him how I hadn’t even wanted to burn it in the first place, how Roan told me—Roan, this was all his fault. I sat up straight in my chair. “I’m really sorry, sir. It won’t happen again.” I gripped the armrests, preparing to get up, to escape while I could. I started to stand.

  “That’s not the only thing, Kitty.” He motioned me down. I collapsed back into the chair. “We’ve had an email from your school.” Drat, email. I could never keep track of what century I was living in. “About your GCSEs.”

  “I thought the results weren’t in until August?” I said, not that it mattered now.

  “I’m afraid they’re quite easy to predict when you leave your exams blank.”

  “That’s not fair. I didn’t leave them all blank. I did write something.” I prayed they hadn’t sent him what I wrote. It was all sort of a blur now, but I didn’t recall it being particularly optimistic.

  He leaned forward. “Apparently you were off topic.”

  “Oh,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say. I hadn’t thought about my exams once since I burned the letter; it was like my own magic spell. It was so disorienting—being confronted with reality. It was like being in a dream.

  “Kitty,” he said calmly. “I think you must have known this was coming.”

  Of course I knew, but what did that matter? I knew everything would always go wrong forever. But it didn’t make it any less shocking.

  “Kitty, I’m concerned. You seem to be…drifting.”


  I didn’t say anything—what could I say? Of course I was drifting. What else could I do? Only a cold person could say, The boy I loved is dead, so let’s make lemonade out of corpses! To do anything else but drift would be to corroborate with the world, to agree to all this madness. To say it was okay that people died. To say something good could come out of it. “You need to decide,” he said, “what it is that you want.”

  I thought my answer so intensely I almost believed he would read my mind: But what if I can’t have what I want? Because what I wanted was impossible. What I wanted was the world to right itself and start over. I could be generous; I could give the world another chance, if it would just give me Nikki back. “Yes, sir.”

  His expression scrunched. “You don’t have to call me sir.”

  “All right.” I didn’t know what to call him. I thought of him as Lord Bramley, but that was probably worse than sir. I got up, slightly stooped.

  He sighed again. “I suppose you’d better get back to bed. Will you be all right in your mum’s room?” I nodded. My cheeks felt heavy, like I was going to cry.

  “Thank you,” I said, lest I seem ungrateful for being scolded. I shut the door behind me and wandered down the hallway toward Mum’s room.

  I passed by my desecrated bedroom on the way. Edgar had already peeled back the rugs and was running fans along the hallway. The dresser was an unholy black mass on the floor—nothing was distinguishable, except the hard lump of wax from that tourist trap candle. I couldn’t believe it. I had burned Nikki’s rabbit’s foot, burned his love spell, burned my mum’s picture, the page where she’d written: grief, creativity, new life.

  What was I thinking? Of course it would go wrong. Everything did. I heard someone take a step behind me, heard the jingle of chains.

  “Thanks for the advice,” I said, turning around to face Roan. “You’re a real help.”

  His smile was limp with moonlight. “Tomorrow night.”

  “What?”

  “They’re coming tomorrow night.” He leaned against the wall. “I guess they saw your smoke signals.”

  “You’re joking. That’s impossible.” I stepped forward, caught him by the arm. “You’ve known all along. You were just waiting for me…I don’t know what you were waiting for.”

  He rolled his eyes and pulled his arm away. “I told you,” he said, knocking on the wood as he passed through the door frame. “All you have to do is ask. Oh, and”—he spun to face me—“make sure you bring a lot of money. I mean, a lot.”

  “What for?”

  “You know how I make a living off the dead?” His teeth glinted. “Well, the Life and Death Parade make a killing.”

  I was in the aviary with all the birds whispering, twittering overhead. Their feathers were all colors and so were the leaves and the lights through the sky when he came through the doors, rattled past the chains that hung at the edge of the cage.

  He looked up at the ceiling, traced the birds’ trajectory along the frozen sky. His cheeks were flushed and his neck pulsed, and I thought, I did that. I prayed him better.

  “Can I join you?” he said.

  I nodded. I was sitting on the stone wall surrounding a statue of a shepherd and his flock—marble sheep interspersed with wolves.

  He exhaled as he sat beside me.

  “Are you feeling better?” I said. He hadn’t been casting spells or storming around the castle. He seemed calm, reserved, hopeful even. I didn’t like to think that it was down to my asking; it scared me. Made it seem like I held his precious fate, his sanity—and mine—like a bird in the palm of my hand.

  He shifted to face me, put his fingers to my temple, pulled the fragment of a leaf from my black hair. “I have a feeling,” he said, eyelashes cast down so they glittered pale in the gray light, “that everything is going to turn out all right.” He looked up again and his eyes had a strange fathomlessness, an endless quality. Like they belonged to someone else, rimmed round and round with eternity.

  I put my hand over his. “It is going to be all right,” I said.

  He turned his hand and closed his fingers around mine. “I think you can save me.”

  “Yes, yes. Of course I can. I’ll do whatever you want.”

  “No, not what I want. What you’re meant to do.”

  I winced. “Whatever. Whatever it is, it’s going to be all right. I promise you.” I brought his hand to my lips and kissed it, the knight in distress and his shining damsel. I promised I would save him. God.

  What a liar I turned out to be.

  TWELVE

  The woods were thick and dark. We didn’t have a torch, but Roan seemed to glow like a lightning rod en route to a storm.

  “What’s the rush?” Macklin said, tugging his sleeves from the claws of a passing branch. He had been in a mood the entire drive. I wasn’t sure why he’d come at all.

  “We don’t want to be late,” Roan said. “The crowds aren’t too bad before midnight, but after…”

  I hurried behind Roan, dragging a sleepy Holiday. “How will I know where she is?” I needed to locate Nikki’s psychic and find out once and for all what happened that night on the canal.

  “You’ll find her,” he said.

  “You’re going to help me, right? That’s why we’re here.”

  Roan’s chains jingled as he turned around to face me. “Kitty, we’re going to a party. Why don’t you try to have fun?”

  I put my hands on my hips. “How am I meant to have fun?”

  “Like, ever?” He huffed, pulled at the ends of his hair. “Look, I get it. You think Nikki died because of something you did.”

  My eyes ran from Macklin to Holiday. “I don’t—” He caught my response in the air with a clap.

  “Of course you do. Everyone feels responsible when someone dies.” His eyes flicked over all of us. “But no one is, except God. Let me know if you find him in the crowd. Rumor has it, he loves these things.” He clicked his tongue under his annoying American wink.

  As we pressed on through the woods, I tried to ease the tightness from my muscles, the clench from my jaw. “I know it’s not my fault,” I eventually managed.

  “You might know it, but you don’t believe it,” Roan said.

  We stopped at the edge of the woods. The sky was a pearly dark, like a painter had blended all the stars into the black. A field dipped below us, vanishing into a valley.

  “Some party.” Macklin arranged his cravat.

  My heart pounded on either side of my head. What if this really was a trick? Roan walked carefully ahead of us, as if afraid of upsetting an invisible scene.

  “This isn’t another one of those you-have-to-believe-it-to-see-it things?” I called after him.

  Roan turned around and beckoned us forward, spread his hands over the valley. “They’re waiting.”

  I moved forward first, gripping Holiday’s hand. Macklin grabbed her other hand, so we walked together to the edge of the low hill.

  “Oh,” Holiday said. “That’s where the stars went.”

  Below us, all of the stars had aligned on the lawn. I blinked in confusion until the vision came together. The stars were people holding candles—some red, some white, some rainbow-colored—spread at distant points across the field.

  “This doesn’t look like a party,” Holly said.

  “It looks like a vigil,” Macklin said. I shivered. That was exactly what it looked like.

  “Let’s go,” Roan said, leading us down the hill into the candlelight. He was all business, back straight, head held high, like this was actually an event in his honor. People looked up as he passed, the undersides of their faces lit by candles. Many of them seemed to recognize him. More than one shuddered as he passed.

  “Oi! Roan!” A candle rocked, and a tall man dressed like a pirate rose up beside us.

  “Safi,” Roan said. They embraced.

  “I never expected to see you here again.” Safi’s eyes traveled over the rest of us. “Where’s your man?”<
br />
  “Still dead.”

  “Of course he is.” He grinned and clapped his shoulder. “Good arrows running into you, as it happens. I have a little side action going later on tonight, if you want to get involved.” He poked a rollie between his teeth and sparked it with a rusty silver lighter. He winked at me; perhaps it was an LDP thing.

  “Let’s discuss this farther afield.” Roan tilted his head and started off away from us.

  I grabbed his elbow. “Wait, where are you going?”

  “Just a little business. Strictly charlatan.” He put his hands up in innocence. I gave him a look. “I’ll be right back.”

  I sighed but released him. Safi slung an arm around Roan’s shoulder and they walked off, heads close in together.

  Macklin huffed. “Nice of him to abandon us in a field of pyromaniacs.”

  “You’re in a funny mood,” I said. “You know why we’re here.”

  Macklin tossed his hair back and stalked away, weaving clumsily through kneeling candle bearers.

  “Easy, mate! I left my legs in Scotland, last thing I need is to lose an arm.” A girl in an all-terrain wheelchair grinned mischievously at him. She had a flag tied around the back of her chair that read All my friends are dead.

  “Sorry, I…Sorry,” he said, coloring in embarrassment.

  “You know,” she said. “There’s nowhere to rush off to. They come here. Right here.” She pointed at the ground. “This is the best spot. I’ve been coming for years. I’m Joy.” She reached out her hand to Macklin. “I was named pre-chair. My parents weren’t that horrible.”

  “Macklin.”

  I stepped forward. “I’m Kitty, and this is Holiday.”

  “Oi, and I thought Joy was bad.” She kept on grinning, but her grin had a sort of mocking quality that I liked. Macklin seemed to have gotten over himself temporarily, and stood there fidgeting with his collar as the red wore out of his face. “So,” Joy said. “What brings you to the Life and Death Parade?”

  “Um…” It was sort of a long story.

  “I mean, who did you lose?”