While I couldn’t make out distinct forms, I sensed that I was watching as many dead come home as living, aboard that ship.
My nose started to bleed. A garish drop of crimson upon the bell of my pale wool skirts. Damn. A shift to my psychology was one thing, but messy physical reactions were quite another. I glanced about. Was anyone else affected by this dread chill and the aura around the ship, making it, too, seem like a phantom? It didn’t appear so – mostly, people simply scanned the paper listing recent New York dead and kept looking anxiously back to the boat, to see if anyone able to stand on the prow was one of their own. But a few knew. A few could feel what wakened in me.
Six average men and women held hands, facing the river as if they were bracing for a storm. Their noses weren’t bleeding like mine, but they stared around that ship. Did they see that same halo? They held tight and bent their knees as if anchoring themselves against a tidal wave of secondary impact – as if barricading against whatever that boat carried in its wake. One of them turned to glance at me, a striking middle-aged woman.
“It is up to us, those who see the world in ways the rest cannot, to affect the world for the better,” she said, and then smiled as if I’d nothing to worry about and turned again to the west.
It wasn’t until James floated face to face with me that I truly saw a ghost. And when that beloved face – transparent, grey and hollow – met my eyes, I fainted. Too close to the edge where I’d wedged myself in for a better view, I took a nasty tumble right into the Hudson.
A blow to my head took care of my consciousness.
Yet, I shall never forget what I saw in that in-between state.
The two walks.
There, on the edge of life and death, in this soul-defining moment, distinct presences were on the move. Threads of light and columns of dark, thin coils moving in different directions, were buffeted like leaves in a breeze down an endless corridor. Along this passage were windows, windows onto small scenes. Intimate, or epic. A family dinner. A coronation. A first kiss. A last wish. A battle scene. Somewhere in that scene lay James’ final breath. My hand seized at my chest, as if to massage my faltering heart. I, and these shafts of illumination and shadow, together we were captivated by the window-boxes of human existence. Both the lit and darkened threads vied for the scenes, pushing and pulling for dominance over these slivers of time. My life hung suspended between the world’s moments.
Then, all at once, it was as if the threads noticed I did not belong. I was mobbed. The light surrounded me and gave a huge push, while the dark matter simply hung to the corners, watching. Waiting. A vibrating string, positively singing with light, grazed my ear:
“You see the currents of life. Take your gifts and go. But do not overstep your bounds. Do not weave the threads of life and death with your own hands.”
I did as I was told, responded to the demand to go on living, and gasped painful, cold air.
Dock workers had pulled me from the river; the mass of piers and ships blessedly buffered the undertow. I never did get the chance to properly thank those workers and I still regret it. A doctor who happened upon the scene took charge and so, I was bid to lie still. Coats were thrown over me, women glad to have something to fuss over that was not their dead relation.
I put my hand to my face and touched a bloody gash on my forehead. My nose still bled. The six I’d glimpsed were nowhere to be seen. But that was all right; they’d given me something. That woman had inspired in me confidence to be an anchor against forces pressing in all around us and the light had only confirmed it. I knew then it was my duty to aid the living while I lived. I patched my grief. I steeled my heart, stuffing it with purpose and pride. These things may yet be flammable.
As for whether I’ll help the dead once I’ve crossed onto that shore is knowledge for another day. Yet tonight, perhaps, but not this moment.
My duty is to life while I have it. What knowledge I have I must use. I mustn’t stand back and let a man’s train derail and kill him, even though I abhor him. The lantern at my elbow is lit; the smell of oil is distinct. The letter is in my hand, addressed to Mr. Bentrop. It simply says:
If you take that 8pm train into the city next Tuesday, it will derail and you will die. Sincerely, your second chance.
My hands shake. I return to these pages after having dropped the note in a mail box, despite the dark, dangerous lateness of the hour. Countless spirits attended my wake; I could feel their icy tendrils bouncing behind me. A drunkard or thief wouldn’t have dared accost me; the air at my back would freeze the standing hairs on the bravest of necks. I was the Reaper. Off to delay tidings of death.
But did I, in doing so, inappropriately weave the forbidden threads?
And for a man such as Bentrop, of all people? What of the other poor souls on that 8pm departure? Do they not matter? Yet, I sense Bentrop has a further part to play in matters in which I am engaged, and I must act on instinct, even if it violates instruction. What good is a gift untapped?
Bentrop is in part responsible for the needle which is about to come to the city. A vast stone obelisk from the sands of Alexandria. “Cleopatra’s Needle”, it is called and it shall sit beyond the steps of our lovely Metropolitan Museum of Art. Men like Bentrop see in the artifact a vast power. Men like Bentrop need to be curbed. Yet, there I went, warning him against the closing jaws of prophecy. Still, he has to take the advice. There is choice involved. Two walks. Two paths. Bentrop has helped to bring a tower into our city that boldly points to the sky, as if in a demand ... must he not be prepared for how the skies will answer him? Must not I, too, be prepared for just such a reply?
Ah. Pardon the dark mark upon the pale page.
My nose has begun to bleed. Damn.
The steps are on the stair. Landing. Stairs. Landing. My hallway. Far worse than the cold, I maintain.
I confess I’m not ready to again face that passage where angels tread and devils pace. What force will win me this day? Who is closer to seizing any of us, the angels or the devils?
As God is my witness, I rattle my saber. I shake my bones. No matter what takes me, the angels or the devils, I am not finished here, upon this Earth. I am not finished.
I will walk, my friends, my loves, all those I’ve yet to meet.
I will walk the passages. You will hear my footsteps. There, the creak upon your floorboards. That will be me, what I may yet become. It’s always one of us, for good or for ill. I pray the angels win. But it’s always war, just beyond the limits of our flesh and the corners of our eyes.
Every sound you hear.
Every whisper, every creak of a settling house.
You’re hearing war.
You cannot end it; you cannot avoid it; mankind made it and seems unable to do without it. Even without bodies, it wages on for you.
Listen, friends, and take up whatever arms you will.
Listen: It is at the doorstep.
•••
Leanna Renee Hieber graduated with a theatre degree and focus in the Victorian Era. While performing as a professional actress, she adapted 19th-century fiction for the stage and her first publications were hot-headed little plays which have been produced around the U.S. Her novella, Dark Nest, won the 2009 Prism Award for excellence in Futuristic, Fantasy or Paranormal Romance. Her Strangely Beautiful series debut (Gaslight Fantasy), The Strangely Beautiful Tale of Miss Percy Parker, hit Barnes & Noble’s Bestseller lists, won two 2010 Prism Awards (Best Fantasy, Best First Book) and has been optioned for adaptation into a Broadway musical, currently in early stages of development. A proud member of Science Fiction/Fantasy Writers of America and Romance Writers of America and also a member of actors unions AEA, AFTRA and SAG, Leanna works often in film and television. She lives in New York City with her real-life hero and their beloved rescued lab rabbit. “At the Doorstep” is set within the Gaslight Gothic world of Magic Most Foul, releasing November 2011 from Sourcebooks Fire, beginning withDarker Still: A Novel of Magic Most Foul Ple
ase visit her at http://leannareneehieber.com/, on Twitter @leannarenee and Facebook.com/lrhieber.
Frozen Souls
By Sarah Hans
“Are you nervous about tomorrow, Li?” Shen asks, between mouthfuls of rice.
Lien shrugs. “I’ve done it before.” She sips her tea, watching him over the rim of the tiny porcelain cup.
“I would be scared,” Shen says, trying to goad her into an embarrassing confession.
Lien knows this trick and deflects the conversation.
“I know. That’s why they send me instead of you.”
“They send you because you’re the smallest,” Shen replies. This is a dance they have done before; he knows the steps.
“They send Li because he’s the bravest,” the ordinarily reticent Bao adds. “He volunteered and you did not.”
Lien lowers her head, a show of respect whose real intent is to hide her blushing cheeks. Her affection for Bao has become bothersome. Sometimes, she even thinks, when he defends her like this, that he knows her secret. Earlier today, his hand brushed hers while they worked and, though he seemed not to notice, the unexpected contact drew a shuddering breath from Lien. Her skin touching his was like an electric shock, sending a tingle to parts of her that she has long ignored.
The flap of the canvas tent opens and the Foreman enters. Though the crew is almost entirely Chinese, the Foreman is a huge Irishman. He counts on his enormous size and grizzled appearance to intimidate his workers; he does not know that they call him “Maxì Tuán Xióng” – “The Circus Bear” – mocking his size, hirsutism, and the way he takes orders from the Superintendent, always ingratiatingly willing to please. ‘Storbridge’ is his name, but when he enters, Bao boldly says: “Xiong! How can we help you today?” in heavily-accented English.
The others stifle their laughter at the mocking name behind sips of tea and mouthfuls of rice. Many become engrossed in their reading or chores.
“Will Li-Li be ready tomorrow?” Storbridge demands, his voice deep and rasping, with an edge of menace. ‘Li-Li’ is the white man’s nickname for Lien, who is one of the tiniest of the Chinese workers.
“Yes, Li will be ready,” Bao replies, nodding to Lien. She averts her eyes, not wanting to attract the Foreman’s attention.
“Good. Be up at dawn so we can get to work.”
Storbridge lumbers back to the tent flap, a blast of freezing air rushing in as he exits.
Lien shivers, pulling the rough wool blanket closer about her shoulders.
Shen starts laughing, first, and the others join him in low, appreciative chuckles.
“Bao, you are too bold!”
Bao ignores the laughter, looking at Lien.
“Sounds like the blasting did not go well today.”
Lien nods.
“It’s too cold; the rock will be too hard. But the Superintendent demands satisfaction, so the white men ignore our engineers and the blasting will proceed.”
“With our lives the ones at risk,” Shen says bitterly.
“We knew the risks when we signed our contracts,” Lien reminds him, but her voice is bleak, and she stares with regret at her cracked and callused hands.
The tent flap opens again, and the assembled men groan and mumble about the cold as a few more workers enter. They rush to the cooking fire to warm their frostbitten hands, ill-covered in mittens full of holes. Lien counts them and finds only six.
“Where is Fa?” she asks. There is a hard knot in her belly while she awaits the answer.
One of the men by the fire turns slowly to her, a warm bowl of soup held in his palms to warm them. His expression is sorrowful. “He fell,” he says, and the others nod somberly.
Lien tries to fight back tears. Like her, Fa was small and nimble, perfect for the dangerous work of blasting the cliffs. He had taught her the ancient Chinese art, and had been the quickest and most agile of all the dynamite-setters. She can’t believe that he fell. Her mind reels with conspiracy theories, but just as quickly, she dismisses them. The work is dangerous and men die blasting the tunnels for the railroad every day. It was only a matter of time before Fa, too, met his end.
She can’t allow the other workers to see her tears, so she rises and hurries out of the tent, with the blanket still clutched about her. She has to be stronger and braver than the others to prevent suspicion. They have seen many men perish in the grueling work on the railroad and she has cried for those who were her friends, but always in secret.
So much of her life is a secret.
Lien finds her way through the tent city to the latrine pits, which are thankfully less noisome in the extreme cold than they are in the summer months. No one wants to venture far from the warm tents, so the men have been urinating in the snow nearby, rather than make the trek to the designated area. The latrines are virtually abandoned, a silent sanctuary for her tears.
Lien takes a few moments to empty her bladder, squatting on the far side of the latrine behind some snow-covered bushes. Once relieved, she feels a little less like weeping. She stands near the pits, forlorn, unwilling to return to the tent but unable to cry. She thinks of Fa and tries to mourn him as he deserves, but she has been exhausted by the sorrow of the last terrible weeks and can’t muster much beyond a few sad sniffles.
While she stands there, knee-deep in snow, waiting for the cold to leech the heat from her bones before she returns to the fire, snowflakes begin to drift down from above. There are only a few at first, spinning like tops, but as she watches, they begin to crowd the sky, falling faster and faster. Soon, the dark landscape is all but blotted out in the torrent of snow. Panicked, Lien quickly stumbles back to her tent before the snow obliterates her path and makes walking impossible. Though she is not far from her tent, she recalls vividly when several men were lost in a blizzard the first week on the mountain, found the next morning only a few feet from their dwelling, unable to make their way to safety in the disorienting whiteness.
Bao is standing at the tent flap, pulling on his boots. He looks relieved to see her.
“Li! I was going to come find you,” he says. “It’s not safe in a storm.”
Lien is touched by his concern, but doesn’t dare show it.
“I was at the latrine,” she says.
“Of course,” Bao replies, his mien equally icy.
Without another word, they go to their cots, where Lien lies awake, listening to the breathing of the sleeping men, thinking only of how she is likely to meet her death tomorrow. She whispers many prayers to the ancestors, wondering whether Fa did the same. In the wee hours, she finally finds sleep, but it is a restless sleep and she awakens many times in the night to the frightening feeling of falling from a great height.
The next morning finds Lien dangling over a cliff face in a huge basket of woven reeds. The basket is large enough to hold a man twice Lien’s size, but the job is easier if the contents are as light as possible, and the dynamite takes up its share of the container. As she does every time she is lowered over a precipice, Lien eyes the dynamite in the bottom of the basket warily, knowing how volatile it is. Their hands cold, the men lowering her over the cliff with a rope are stopping and starting more than usual, and the jerking movements of the basket remind her of the seasickness on the voyage from Qwangtung to California. She closes her eyes and thinks of warm summer fields full of wildflowers. She thinks of hot, soothing tea and her mother’s kind smile. She thinks of Bao’s brown hand brushing hers so carelessly. She thinks of anything other than the dizzying height, the bone-numbing cold, the jerking rope, and the unstable explosives.
Finally, the jerking stops. She looks up at the lip of the cliff. A boy appears and gives her a hand signal. She signals back and scoots around in the basket so that she can slowly tip it towards the cliff wall. She braces with her feet and knees until she is perched perilously on the side of the basket. The woven reeds creak and groan beneath her weight.
She grabs the dynamite, heedless of the danger, ignoring the terri
fying possibility that the basket might break beneath her. The cliff face is already defiled with the marks of an explosion and Lien shakes her head. Why would they blast the same place over and over again? She wants to cry, thinking of Fa and how her life will be wasted alongside his in this careless manner, but she marshals herself. The Chinese workers are no more valuable to their white masters than hammers or chisels – they are simply tools to do a job, interchangeable and replaceable. This is their fate – this is her fate.
Sighing, reluctantly resigned to her doom, she jams several dynamite sticks into the shallow crevasses of the cliff’s face. Once they’re secure, she lights a match on her teeth, presses the match to the wicks, and drops the match without watching its descent. She takes a deep breath and observes the flames’ progress with the skill of experience; this is the part of blasting that requires finesse. Timing is everything.
She silently thanks Fa for his wisdom as the wicks burn faster than usual, spurred by the cold, dry air. She presses her feet flat against the stone and then pushes with all her strength, rolling backwards so the basket tips upright again, hopefully protecting her from the blast.
The hard, frozen stone refuses to give way to the dynamite, and the explosion has only one outlet. Instead of tunneling into the cliff, the blast explodes into the open air, pushing Lien’s basket away from the cliff face. Above, the men gripping the rope struggle to maintain a hold on her lifeline, the explosion yanking the rope over the edge of the precipice with such force that they can’t hold it for long. They cry out in dismay as the rope is torn from their protesting fingers, the pulley on the edge snapping under the pressure, the basket spinning away from the cliff and falling, taking Lien with it to the ground.
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