The Life and Death Parade

by Eliza Wass

  She kissed me on the nose and hopped off my lap. Then she ran from the room to her next confession. Because people like her and people like Nikki were blessed. They could say I love you all the time.

  Lord and Lady Bramley and Holiday left for London. Roan and Macklin were nowhere to be found. I was alone in Nikki’s room. I couldn’t wait until after midnight, or three o’clock or anything. I needed to speak to him now.

  I emptied my pockets, took off my army jacket, and put on Nikki’s coat. I had set up an altar on his dresser, with all the things that once belonged to him—the notes and the stones and the journals and the jewelry. The candle fire danced uneasy. I placed Mum’s card at the back of the altar.

  I remembered that last morning, sitting alone with her as she slipped in and out of consciousness. How terrified I was. How I knew she was going to die, just knew, like a real psychic. A thickness permeated the air, like something was pushing, closing in on us, like the other side was forcing a hole through space to take her. Death was the worst kind of magic. It took something that was there and made it disappear.

  My fingers quivered as they left the saint card. Mum watched me with her cool expression, exactly as she had done in life. I faced her for the first time since she died, knowing she wouldn’t be proud of me. That she would hate my lack of direction, that she would be disappointed by my obsession with Nikki, by my refusal to move at all, by the way I had lost her and him, but mostly, by the way I had lost myself.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. And then I started to pray.

  My fingers went numb first, then my feet. The numbness crawled in spiky veins to my brain, where the wires were reordered. I started to gasp, started to lose my breath like I was drowning, like I was crumbling into a panic attack. I saw stars. I didn’t see the sky. I saw everything; I saw nothing. I started to rock.

  And then I laughed, and I gulped in my breath, and when I opened my eyes, I saw him in the mirror. Or else all I saw was myself, but I chose to see him.

  “Nikki,” I said. The quiet stretched long between us, the darkness in a coil. Had I completely lost it?

  “Nikki,” I said again. The candles juddered on the table. A gasp of smoke spat up in a line. I could feel the whole house suddenly—all the rooms and all the walls and all the people in it, like I was the place that contained it. And between the walls were echoes of things, my own memories and the echoes of memories that didn’t belong to me. The spirits that lived in places beyond my mind.

  “Nikki,” I said. “Do you really love me more?” The altar shook.

  Yes, the echo of his voice hissed, not outside me but between my ears, like an arrow.

  “How can you?” Tears burned along the corners of my eyes. “I could have saved you and I didn’t. So many times. All the way back. All the way back to the first day I met you, I could have saved you, but I didn’t.”

  You did, the voice said, so quickly I thought I must have imagined it, so I waited for it to speak again.

  The lights danced, the trembling became a ripple. I didn’t die because of you. I died because I had to. It was nobody’s fault. It couldn’t have happened any other way.

  I understood what Roan meant about death being like a cult, because even though I knew the voice belonged to Nikki, it sounded like the monotone chanting you heard in churches. It unhinged me slightly. I wanted him to be the same. I wanted him to sound the same.

  “We can bring you back. Roan can.”

  No.

  I tried to move closer to him, forgetting he wasn’t anyplace. The water sloshed, and the candles flickered, and I had to steady myself, calm my racing heart.

  I can’t go back.

  My heart stiffened. “What do you mean?”

  I’m supposed to be here.

  “You would rather stay there?” I almost said “without me,” but I was afraid it wouldn’t matter, that he didn’t care.

  Yes, he said so swiftly I almost didn’t hear it. His words came so fast that he seemed to speak under me, as if he was responding to the thought before I said it.

  “Don’t you want to be with me?”

  I am with you. I am with you all the time.

  “But it’s not the same. It’s not the same as it was before.”

  No. It can’t be.

  I could feel his spirit receding. “Wait!” I gripped the dresser, so the candles shook and the water sloshed. “I have to ask you something! I have to ask you one more thing!”

  But I couldn’t think of anything to ask him. What did anything matter, if he wouldn’t come back? The world felt very far away. The air was dense, like being underwater. Like being at the bottom of the canal. The canal, I thought. That was the question that had led me there, although I had almost forgotten it. And nothing he could say now would change anything. It was like Macklin said, understanding the past couldn’t undo it. But I couldn’t think of anything else to ask. “What were you so afraid of? After that night on the canal, with the psychic? What happened to you?”

  I died.

  I jumped in surprise and knocked the table, upsetting the altar. The bowl toppled. The candles went out. Water spread through the antique tablecloth like blood.

  SEVENTEEN

  Clocks ticked in the empty rooms I passed. I couldn’t see them, but I could hear them, louder as I approached each open door, reaching out at me and then trickling away. I tried to call Macklin’s name, but my voice sputtered, tightened my tongue. For all the empty space, I still felt watched.

  Nikki’s coat scraped the floor behind me. I raced along hallways, up and down stairs. I caught myself following the old tour paths, haunted by their emptiness.

  I froze at the top of the grand staircase. Macklin and Roan were nowhere to be found. I needed to find someone, needed to tell someone, needed to do something. I went down the stairs in search of Edgar and Aislyn, who lived in separate quarters outside the castle. I was passing through a long hall when I noticed the open cellar door.

  The Bramley cellar was a castle in itself: an airless underground castle. Rumored to have once been a crypt, it was now used to store all the priceless, useless antiques generations of Bramleys had bought over years and years. Most of the furniture was moldy and coated in spiderwebs, run through with rats. The last time I had seen the cellar open was when it was used to store the leftover stock from the castle gift shop.

  Voices rose from the ground.

  “Over here?”

  “No, it’s over here. God, I hate rats. You should bring your snake down here.”

  “I do. Look, here, I found candles.”

  I descended into the stale air of the basement. Roan was holding out a white pillar candle with the Bramley insignia stamped on the body. Macklin was crouched over an open box. He jumped when he saw me.

  I opened my mouth to speak, but I didn’t know where to start. I thought I felt rats crawling over my skin, just looking at him.

  Macklin glanced at Roan. “Kitty, we thought you’d gone to London.”

  “I decided to stay.” Macklin transfixed me, the way he’d transformed in my eyes: the fancy clothes, the beautiful face, the cool customer. I moved down a step. “You lied to me.”

  “What are you on about?” He moved back from the box, tugged at his collar.

  I steadied myself against the wall, but my fingers sank in cobwebs. I trembled, moved away. “What really happened that night?”

  “What night?” He frowned.

  “The night at the canal. The night Nikki died.” Macklin listed, but Roan moved smoothly to his side. His arm slithered over his shoulder as he steadied him. Macklin’s mouth hung open, but it didn’t make a sound. His eyes were fixed on some dark point in the mazelike cellar. “Macklin, tell me or I’ll think the worst.”

  “Don’t be mean, Kitty,” Roan said. “It wasn’t anyone’s fault. It was the cold, hard hand of fate.”

  “Macklin, what did you do?”

  Macklin squeaked oddly. “It wasn’t,” he said to the floor. “Please, K
itty.” Roan’s necklaces jangled as Macklin gripped them in his hand. “I’m so sorry.”

  My insides plunged. I wondered what my face looked like. I couldn’t imagine the type of expression a face would make, should make, on hearing something like that. “What happened?”

  “You know how Nikki was, always taking ages to do the simplest thing. I took him to the canal so he could get his cane. I waited in the car. I waited for him for hours.” I remembered what Anaya said, how she and Mum’s spirit spoke to Nikki for hours, convincing him that everything would be all right. How could those hours then turn against him? How could the solution be part of the problem? “I started to get annoyed. I thought I’d teach him a lesson and leave him there. I was going to come back, I thought—He could be so selfish sometimes. And I was angry with him. I wanted him to know I’d left him. I wanted him to hear the engine.” He stopped.

  “Macklin.”

  His eyelids flickered, and he squeezed Roan’s necklaces so I could hear them scratch and bend together, but when he spoke his voice was deep and steady, like someone else was speaking for him. “He was dead when I got out of the car.”

  “What? How?”

  “I hit something. I hit him.”

  Cold shock washed over me. I tried to keep my head level, although I felt faint. “And then?”

  “I ran.”

  “You ran?” My voice was thick with disgust.

  “I couldn’t face it.” He twitched, like a machine breaking down. “I needed to—I went to the canal and I thought about drowning. I thought about…I prayed for a miracle. I honestly did,” he said like I should thank him for it. His eyes met mine, and his voice whispered, “How could I have known it was going to happen?”

  “A psychic did warn us hours before,” I snapped. I knew I wasn’t helping the situation, but I couldn’t stop myself; I was shocked, shocked and furious and, frankly, terrified. I had never, ever thought…Macklin had killed Nikki. If it weren’t for him, none of this would have happened. If it weren’t for him, Nikki would still be here. And all this time, I had blamed myself. “You never said anything. You lied.”

  “I thought it wasn’t real. It was like a dream.”

  “Every real thing is like a dream,” I said. “That’s how you know it’s real.”

  “I went back.” He steadied himself enough to step toward me. The blue moonlight coming down from the cellar door rolled over him. “I went back to face it, but he was there, just like he was before, like nothing had happened. I thought I was going mad. What would you have done?”

  “I would like to think I would have done more. When Nikki was going mad, you did nothing.” He flinched. “You hardly ever spoke to him. You just went racing around in the car you used to run him down.” Macklin’s dark hair hung over his face. His features were becoming indistinct to me; he was becoming more and more like some wraith drawn from a nightmare.

  Roan stepped forward. “If I could just fill in what he left out, because that was kind of my moment. Macklin prayed for a miracle, and me being a hero of this life and the next, I gave him one.”

  “You brought Nikki back,” I said. “So you knew each other all this time? You’d met before.”

  “No,” Macklin said. “I didn’t see him that night. He only just told me.”

  “It was a random act of resurrection,” Roan explained.

  “Why?”

  “For Macklin. Of course.”

  I sat down on the steps. I ran my thumb along the stone, along the spaces in between, where everything was held together. “Is that why you’re down here? Is this what you’re doing, bringing him back again?”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “But you told me no. You said you wouldn’t do it.”

  “We wanted to surprise you,” Macklin said.

  “And anyway, when you’re performing real magic, the last thing you want is a crowd.” Roan shrugged.

  “So that’s your solution? You bring Nikki back and he stalks around the castle, wishing he were dead. How long do you think it will last this time?” I shook my head. “Only the dead can live in the past.”

  “Can’t you understand, Kitty?” Macklin said, his voice rough with pleading. “If he’s dead, then I killed him.”

  I did understand. I understood exactly, but somehow that made me angrier. “You did kill him,” I said. “It doesn’t matter what you bring back. You can’t change what happened.”

  “Then what is the future for?” Macklin said, elbowing away from Roan. “What is living for, if you can make a mistake that lasts forever? If I bring him back, then it’s not my fault.” His eyes ran along the lines of my face, searching for something, searching for an answer he could live with.

  I couldn’t face him, so I turned to Roan. I remembered the story he’d told me, about the two boys, and the boy he’d loved and resurrected. Emmanuel. “You of all people should know better. You watched Emmanuel kill himself over and over and you kept on, even when you knew he didn’t want it. That’s not love.”

  “I know it isn’t.” The flames tattooed on Roan’s torso caught the candlelight so they seemed to be burning, a fire stitched to his side.

  I lifted myself to my feet, still weak at the knees. “I have to get out of here.”

  “Kitty, please,” Macklin said.

  I knew this was the part where I was supposed to forgive him, but I couldn’t. Macklin had killed Nikki. He had lied to everyone.

  “I can’t stay here,” I said. “I can’t stay here with you.”

  I walked up from the cellar, past the silent automatons, the birds twittering in the aviary. I kept walking until I was outside, choking on the fresh air. Darkness covered the sky like a cloak, with little holes poked through where light dripped out.

  I went to the garage. Macklin’s car gleamed with an almost maniacal purity. I tried to find the seam, where it had been repaired after the accident, but it was hauntingly perfect and put together, just like he was.

  I saw in a flash that night: Macklin waiting in his car, Nikki on the boat, trying to charm his way out of fate. The way it all came together in a horrible spectacle—a performance for no one, with the kind of gags only Greek gods would get.

  I didn’t want to be part of the show anymore. I wanted out.

  I took the keys to one of Lord Bramley’s Jags. I pulled out of the garage. As I was curving along the circular drive, I noticed a dark figure sitting on the edge of the fountain, underneath the arc of the stone snake. It stood and walked slowly to the center of the road, blocking me in. I slowed to a stop.

  Roan walked around the side of the car. His necklaces clinked joyfully. He set his hands on either side of the window.

  “What do you want?” I said.

  “I just wanted to make sure you’re okay, that’s all.”

  “I don’t understand you.” I shook my head.

  “Kitty.” He leaned into the car, folding his arms along the windowsill and tilting his head almost dreamily. “You of all people should understand. There are the things they give you and the things they take from you, and every year—no, every hour—their list gets longer.” He shifted closer to me. “And no matter how hard you play, they always win. They take everything. Not only the things you love but the people, the moments. They take your mind. They take your life. So why shouldn’t we play dirty? Why shouldn’t we fight hard? Why shouldn’t we take something, take everything we can, back?” I gripped the steering wheel but trained my eyes on the road ahead of me. I did understand him, and he knew it.

  “I did what you said. I asked Nikki. He doesn’t want to come back.”

  “He didn’t want to die either.” His words moved stealthily over me. “Maybe he’s accepted it now, but that’s only because he’s dead.” His words tightened the air. “Death doesn’t just take from the living; it takes from the dead, too. If you brought him back, he would be himself again—angry and afraid and maybe a little bit dangerous, but alive. Isn’t that the most important thing?” />
  “And what about the Bramleys? What do you think they’ll say?”

  He ran a finger along the windowsill. “Thank you very much.”

  I shuddered. “There’s something monstrous about you.”

  “Maybe.” He stood back, his jewelry forming an arrow over his heart. “But isn’t there something monstrous about God? What’s the difference between Him and me? Both of us just take what we want, because we can.”

  “You’re wrong,” I said.

  “There is no right and wrong.” His teeth flashed. “There’s only life and death.”

  As soon as the castle disappeared from my rearview mirror, I felt myself deflating. Where was I going? I had nowhere to go to.

  My hands shook as I pulled to the side of the road. I killed the engine. I released the steering wheel. And suddenly I had a date with a destination: the past.

  That night flooded over me, in fairy lights strung up and down the Hartfords’ garden, a limp fortress against the dark. Tottering along the towpath in those uncomfortable shoes, that constricting dress. And Nikki standing beside me with his cane. Will you come with me? To tell you the truth, I’m sort of scared to go alone.

  But I wasn’t there, and he did go alone, and I didn’t know whether it was Macklin or myself that I couldn’t forgive. Because I should have known.

  My words to Macklin came thundering back: A psychic did warn us hours before. That was what I most regretted. That I didn’t believe when I should have. I never believed that Nikki could die.

  And I still didn’t believe it. I had kept everything exactly the same, had stayed in a world that only made sense with Nikki there. I was waiting for him. I had left him a space, fought for and protected it, as the old world started crumbling over my head.

  I squeezed the steering wheel, spun it toward the castle even though the engine was dead. I wanted to go home. I wanted to bring Nikki back. Maybe Roan was right; maybe Nikki would come around. I tried to remember him as he was after the accident—it wasn’t all bad, was it? And I would help him. I would believe in him. I could fix him, I was sure of it. I could make everything right, if only I had another chance.