The Reign of the Departed

by Greg Keyes

  “If that’s the only problem, I don’t mind helping you with it.”

  “Right,” she said. “I just don’t think it’s my thing.”

  “It might help,” he said. “It might make people see you in a different light.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He scratched his head. “It’s hard to be different in high school. It’s hard to accept who you are when others don’t. I’m saying you need to take control of your talent. Make it a positive.”

  Now something in his tone made her uneasy, but she couldn’t put her finger on what.

  “I just scribble, Mr. Watkins,” she said. “I don’t think of myself as an artist.”

  “Well how do you think of yourself?” he asked, softly.

  She didn’t want to tell him the answer to that, so she just shrugged.

  “Look,” he said, “high school isn’t the real world. Some day—probably in college—you’re going to meet people who see how much you really have going for you. The real you.”

  He smiled and stared into her eyes with his big brown ones.

  Oh, my God, Aster realized.

  “Thanks, that’s good to hear,” she said. She glanced at the door. “Okay,” he said.

  “Okay,” she said, and started to go.

  “There’s something else,” he said. “Ms. Fincher wanted to see you before lunch.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Thanks.”

  “Think about what I said,” he told her. “And I’m here anytime you want to talk.”

  I’ll bet you are, she thought, but she just smiled and nodded.

  “Desvadanya,” he said.

  “Sir?”

  He looked flustered. “Did I say it wrong? I thought you were Russian.”

  “Oh,” she said. “No, not Russian. Lithuanian.”

  “Really?”

  The warning bell rang. “I have to go,” she said, and scurried off.

  Great, she thought. Another damn thing to deal with. How dumb does he think I am?

  And now she would have to learn some Lithuanian, for when he tried to “relate” to her in that language.

  Ms. Fincher stood up behind her desk and indicated a chair with an almost karate-chop motion. She wore a red dress—that, along with her small frame and darting eyes made Aster think of a cardinal—the bird, not the clergyman. She was pretty. Her father had flirted with Ms. Fincher once, when he thought Aster wasn’t listening.

  “Have a seat, Aster,” she said.

  She sat.

  Ms. Fincher smoothed her skirt and settled back into her swiveling chair. She adjusted her red-rimmed glasses with her index finger.

  “Aster, is everything okay at home?”

  “Yes, Ma’am,” she replied.

  “Your father—I’ve been trying to get in touch with him. He hasn’t returned my calls or letters.”

  “He travels a lot,” she said.

  “I understand that. But I really must speak with him.”

  “What about, Ms. Fincher?” she asked.

  “About a number of things,” the counselor replied. “Things I’ve tried to talk to you about.”

  “You mean college,” Aster said.

  “Yes,” she said. “Among other things. If I can’t talk sense into you, maybe I can convince him.”

  “It’s my decision,” Aster said, “not his.”

  Ms. Fincher pursed her lips.

  “Is there some reason he might not want you to continue your education? Some cultural reason, perhaps?”

  “No Ma’am,” she said.

  Ms. Fincher looked doubtful.

  “Does your father ever take you shopping?” she asked. “Do you ever buy new clothes? What you wear is all but threadbare.”

  “Sure, Dad—well, I’m not really a clothes kind of girl. I just wear things until they fall apart, and then I get new ones.”

  “Most girls your age take some interest in their appearance.”

  “Most girls my age don’t think of much else,” she replied.

  Ms. Fincher smiled. “A new outfit or two won’t hurt you. If it’s a money problem—”

  “It’s not,” she said.

  Ms. Fincher was silent for a moment.

  “When your father is traveling, who takes care of you?”

  “I’m seventeen, Ma’am,” she said.

  “How often is he gone?” she pressed. “How many days a week would you say you’re alone?”

  “One, maybe sometimes two.”

  “Only one or two?” Ms. Fincher sounded dubious.

  “Some weeks he doesn’t travel at all,” Aster said.

  Ms. Fincher patted her desk. “Is there anything you would like to tell me, Aster? You’re safe here.”

  Aster didn’t feel safe. She didn’t feel safe at all.

  “There’s nothing, Ms. Fincher.”

  “Well,” Ms. Fincher said, with evident frustration. “Tell your father to call me. Soon. If not, we’ll be forced to look into your home life a little more closely.”

  Aster nodded and left. Her heart felt like a rock in her chest.

  Getting her father to make that call was going to be interesting, and not in the fun way. And even if that went okay, it wasn’t going to help for long.

  But maybe just long enough.

  THREE

  ACTUALLY DEAD

  Errol smelled wet leaves and soil, but he couldn’t see anything at all. Still, he knew he was in a forest. It was night and it had just rained. He reached out and took a step, felt the rough, damp bark of a tree. An owl hooted off in the distance, and now he remembered this: the night he’d been lost in the huge stretch of hills between Herbert and Bethel. He’d been scared at first, terrified, but as the night wore on, he had lost most of his fear and learned to love the woods in moonlight almost as much as he did in the day.

  But now he wasn’t so sure. The owl called again, and it sounded wrong, like his grandmother’s voice back before Aster woke him.

  He caught a bit of movement from the corner of his eye, something white, but when he turned to face it, all he saw was a slight haze. He rotated his head further and as the light moved back toward the edge of his vision, it sharpened a little. It seemed to move closer, not straight toward him, but sort of circling in.

  And then it—or rather she—came into view. At least he thought it was woman, because she wore a long white dress, and her snowy tresses fell the full length of her back. Her face was hidden by her hair, and all he could see was her chin. But as he continued to stare, she lifted and turned her head, and he abruptly knew he did not want to see her face, could not see her face. He spun and ran, smacking into a tree, feeling his flesh tear on the bark, and he heard her soft laugh.

  And he was looking at Aster again.

  “You there?” she asked.

  “Jesus,” he replied. “Oh, man.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I was just someplace,” he said. “Someplace bad. What are you doing to me, Aster?”

  “I fixed you,” she said. “See?” She pointed to his wooden leg. He could see where she had drilled holes and pushed in dowels to hold it together.

  He suddenly realized Aster had changed clothes—she now wore jeans and a brown t-shirt, untucked. And her hair was in a ponytail.

  “How long?” he murmured.

  “Well, the glue had to dry,” she said. “Plus, you haven’t been the best company.”

  “How long?”

  “Three days,” she said. Her brow crinkled. “What do you mean, ‘someplace’?”

  He wanted to be mad, but all of that was leaching out of him now. What he knew was that he could not go back in those woods, could never look in that woman’s eyes.

  “Aster,” he said, “I don’t understand what’s happening. But please don’t do that again. Don’t send me back there.”

  “What happened?” she persisted.

  “Just please don’t do it again. Whatever it is you want me to do, just tell me, and I’ll do it
, and—whatever. But keep me here.”

  She regarded him seriously before responding. “I won’t send you back unless I have to,” she said.

  She didn’t explain what she meant by “have to.” He knew what she meant.

  “Anyhow,” she said, “I woke you up because we’re ready for phase two.”

  “What’s phase two?” he asked.

  “I’ll explain on the way,” she said. “Let’s get you dressed, first.”

  Errol regarded himself in the mirror. In jeans, boots, sweater and work gloves, he looked sort of normal, if a bit wide. But the face . . .

  He wasn’t sure how to take the face. The dummies in the workshop had had blanks with mere holes for eyes and mouth. But some work had gone into what he was looking at now. The light, fine-grained wood had been painstakingly carved into a semblance of his real features—his tapered chin, thin nose, high eyebrows and full lips—all there. The cheekbones were in the right place, and the expression was a little sullen, which he had to admit was probably right, most of the time. The eyes were glass balls, like big marbles, and didn’t look real at all. Maybe they were marbles. All in all, he thought it was creepier than a totally blank face would have been. At the same time, it was somehow comforting, although he couldn’t figure out why.

  He had an image of Aster, at her desk at school. She almost never looked up from it, was always doodling and drawing no matter what was going on around her. She filled notebooks with pictures of knights, elves, dragons, and weirder, made-up creatures along with strange symbols and letters that he was also pretty sure she made up. She got teased a lot for that, and he wondered guiltily if she was aware he had coined the nickname “Elf-Whisperer,” and hoped desperately that she did not.

  “And this should do it,” Aster said, sticking a baseball cap on his head.

  “I look like a scarecrow,” he muttered.

  “Oh, but you’re more like the Tin Man,” she replied.

  More with the jokes, he thought, but he held back saying it aloud.

  “So now what?” he asked.

  “Now we go for a little drive,” she replied.

  He recognized the battered old Honda; Aster had begun showing up at school with it a few months before. It started up after a few complaints, and she backed it out of the driveway and headed west on 293.

  “Keep low when we meet other cars,” she said, unnecessarily.

  “Where’s your dad, anyway?” Errol wondered.

  “Business trip,” she replied.

  He thought about all of the weird stuff in her house.

  “Does he know you’re into all this?” he asked. “Does he know about me?”

  She shrugged. “Yes and no.” She turned right onto Powers Road.

  “What does that mean?” He asked.

  “Means I don’t want to talk about it,” she said. “Eventually, but not now.”

  Errol digested that. He had only seen Aster’s father half a dozen times, always outside of the house. Even when they had been sort of friends, Aster never invited him over; she either came to his house—or more often, they wandered in the hills and pastures of Mr. Bound’s land.

  Jesus, he thought to himself. What if he’s dead? What if he’s lying on some bed in that house, just a skeleton? What if she . . .

  They passed a logging road, and Errol remembered parking there with Lisa, kissing her salty neck and fumbling beneath her shirt. The memory was so strong that for a moment it blotted out everything else, like being rolled under by an ocean wave.

  “Where are we going?” he asked, to try and distract himself.

  “Attahacha Creek,” she said. “Below the falls. How far, I’m not sure.”

  “Why?”

  “Okay,” she said. But then went quiet for a moment.

  “Okay,” she started again, “but when this starts sounding crazy, I want you to remember what I’ve done, right?”

  “You mean me,” he said. “This.” He touched his wooden face.

  “Exactly.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  She nodded. “Well, Errol, I’m on sort of a quest. And for that quest, I need companions, three of them, and I have to get them in order. You were first; the mostly-dead. I need you to find her.”

  “Find who?” he said.

  “The completely dead,” she replied. “Veronica Hale.”

  “I don’t know who that is,” he said.

  She turned left onto a dirt road that wound up into the hills. Toward the falls.

  “A girl,” Aster said, “a year or so younger than us. She disappeared somewhere around the falls. They found one of her shoes four miles downstream. But they never found her.”

  “I don’t remember hearing about that,” he said.

  “That’s because it happened thirty years ago,” she said.

  “Oh.”

  They turned on a logging road and reached the falls a few minutes later.

  The best thing about Attahacha falls was that they weren’t that great; the waterfall only dropped about six or seven feet, not like Bourne’s falls or Silas Creek, which were more impressive and always crowded in the summers. Pretty much only local teenagers went to Attahacha, to skinny dip, drink, smoke, and make out. You could hear a car coming for a mile, giving you plenty of time to reform your behavior or hide before the sheriff or some random parent showed up.

  Which meant that although they looked deserted as Aster pulled her car up, they might well not be.

  “What day is it?” he asked, suddenly.

  “Monday, October 4,” she said, climbing out of the vehicle.

  “You’re missing school? You never miss school.”

  She shrugged. “Come on.” She closed the door and began walking along the bank, downstream. After a reluctant pause, he followed her.

  “This quest of yours,” he said, kicking an old soda can from his path. There was litter everywhere, as usual. “What’s it about?”

  She smiled thinly. “Water,” she said. She reached into the bag she had across her shoulders and pulled out what looked like a little perfume bottle. It had a few drops of clear liquid in it.

  “I don’t get it,” he said.

  “The water of life,” she said. “You hear about it all the time in legends.”

  “Do you mean like the fountain of youth?”

  “That’s something else,” she said. “The water of life restores life to those who have lost it.”

  “You mean it brings people back from the dead?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Can it bring me back?” he said. “In my real body?”

  “No,” she said. “You aren’t dead. What you need is the water of health, which is an altogether different thing. And that’s what I need, as well.”

  “Why? Are you sick?”

  Aster’s thin brows pinched together, which he knew meant she wouldn’t answer that.

  “The point is,” she said, “our quest is to find the water of health, and for that we need this.” She held up the vial.

  “You’re going to bring a dead girl back to life?”

  “Not just a dead girl,” she said. “A special kind of dead girl. And I can’t find her by myself. That’s what I need you for. I won’t be able to see her. You should. When you do, take hold of her until I can sprinkle her with this.”

  Errol peered down nervously at the water.

  “You know all of this how?” he asked.

  “Well, Errol, I consulted a sort of oracle,” she said. “It’s supposed to be very reliable.”

  “What exactly am I looking for?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. But I’ll bet you know it when you see it.”

  Errol really didn’t like the sound of that. When he was younger, he’d had nightmares about skeletons coming after him, and he hated movies with zombies. If this girl had been in the creek for so many years, she was probably going to be pretty disgusting. Take hold of her?

  Aster reached for his hand, and he flinched away.
>
  “Don’t get any ideas,” she said. “I have to hold your hand.”

  “Oh,” he said. When she reached again, he let her fingers lace between his.

  It felt really strange, walking with her like that. Her hand seemed like an intruder in his. It sort of made his heart ache, because he ought to be holding Lisa’s hand. He didn’t understand how her feelings could change so quickly. How could you love somebody and then suddenly not? How was Brandon Alewine better than him?

  But that was a stupid question. Everybody liked Brand. He was smart and funny, a great football player—and his family had a house on Baybell Lake. And a motorboat. Now he had Lisa.

  And Errol was holding hands with the Elf-Whisperer.

  He was so intent on all that, that at first he didn’t notice anything strange. It got darker, but initially he thought that was just clouds overhead. But then he tripped on a root, a big one. He’d been down this path a hundred times and never seen that root.

  Or the tree it was attached to, for that matter, a huge oak that he was sure he would have noticed before. There wasn’t any more litter, either—no cans, bottles, or cigarette butts. Just ferns higher than his waist and a forest way more open than he remembered, without the understory of saplings, bushes, and brambles that had sprung up after the logging that had gone down a few years back.

  “What the hell,” he murmured. “This isn’t here.”

  “It’s here,” Aster said. “This is why they never found her. Because she got stuck here.”

  “Where?” he demanded.

  “In-between,” she said. “Haven’t you ever had a dream about a house you knew, but in the dream it had extra rooms you had never noticed before? Rooms that couldn’t really exist, because there was no place for them to be?”

  He realized as she said it that he’d had that dream regularly about his grandpa Burn’s house, back when he was maybe five. He had looked for those rooms for several years after that, and then gradually forgotten the whole thing. Until now.

  “You know how some dining tables are made so you can pull them apart and put in an extra piece, so more people can sit at them?”

  “Leaves,” he said. “They’re called leaves.”

  “This is like that,” she said.