by Daryl Banner
“Are these our new Livings?” asks the Mayor. Her voice is surprisingly high and melodic, far sweeter and more inviting than I anticipated. She reminds me of my grandmother on my mom’s side of the family. I can already smell the holiday cookies baking in the oven. My stomach growls; that was a cruel thing for my mind to do.
“This one’s named Jenny-thing. Oh, sorry.” Truce clears her throat. “Jennifer is her name. The strapping, beefy, dashing, handsome young male next to her is John.” Truce wiggles her eyebrows at him.
Mayor Damnation sets her book aside. It slides down the pile of crap she sits on, completely forgotten, as she looks on the Living likes of us. “My, my. You’re a good-looking pair of Humans,” she says, her eyes brightening. “Healthy, the two of you. I heard there’s two others as well? Another young fellow and a lady?”
“Connor and Dana,” I confirm, “though Connor goes by East.”
“I’ve always loved the east,” she remarks. “It’s a nice direction. The direction of impending morning.”
I smile at her. “Thank you for letting us stay here in your city,” I make sure to tell her, figuring starting things off on a polite foot would do us best.
“No thanks needed.” The Mayor crosses her legs, the tired blue robe flapping in protest. “This city isn’t really mine. I claim no ownership. Even half my own body isn’t mine,” she remarks with a throaty snicker. “Should’ve seen me when they pulled my sad ass out of the dirt. Ha! I was missing both my legs from the knee, down. My jaw, gone, and I had a serious bite taken out of my arm. Don’t want to imagine what the hell the last few minutes of my First Life were like! I can’t imagine I died laughing.”
I tilt my head, curious. “You don’t remember how you died? It was that long ago?”
“It’s called a Waking Dream, honey-poo,” she tells me as she rises from her seat, then stumbles down the pile of overturned furniture and paper. Wow, she’s easily seven feet tall. I have to keep my mouth from gaping. “Think of it like a shot of memories,” she says, “instantly recalling everything about your long, boring First Life in one fiery, horrific second. I have not had one of those.”
“How does one go about having a Waking Dream?” I ask, wondering if it would be rude to pull out my device and take notes.
“They just happen. They have a mind of their own,” she says, coming to a stop in front of us. I have to crane my neck upward to meet her gaze. “Or, in the case of my Waking Dream that’s yet to come, it doesn’t have a mind at all. How can I help you?”
To the point, at last. “I need to see your prisoner.”
“Prisoner? Oh, right, the wildcat. Why?”
“He was the last to see my missing friend,” I explain to her. “I’m hoping he knows more than he admitted last time we spoke.”
“Oh? You actually got him to speak? Curious.” The Mayor picks at her nails. “He wouldn’t do a thing but growl at me. I was tempted to throw a stick and see if he’d retrieve it.”
“Probably suck the blood out of it first,” I remark. “Can I see him? Time is of the essence. My friend—”
“This way.” The Mayor beckons, sauntering past us and out of the room. After shooting a glance at John, we follow the tall Damn woman down a hall, around a corner, up a set of stairs, and then through a door where she has to duck to make it inside.
The room is what I presume to be a generously-sized janitorial closet, or a room to keep police evidence, or a tiny pharmacy—I have no idea, as most of its contents have been emptied. Dividing the room in half is a line of metal bars like a cage, stretching from one wall to the other with a metal door interrupting it. Makeshift-prison-cell is a term that comes to mind.
On the other side of the bars sits Corpsey, our friendly pale boy. He’s cross-legged on the bare, concrete floor, his hands resting in his lap. He looks up when we enter, his colorless eyes finding us. The only light in the room comes from a candle in the corner, and its flame casts a dancing shadow of the boy across the stark room.
“The only thing I ask,” says the Mayor, “is that you keep on this side of the room and don’t come too close to the bars where he can harm you—you both are delicious and he will not hesitate to help himself.”
But he did hesitate, back in the woods. Twice now, he’s held back from making a meal of me. “Yes,” I say instead. “Thank you for this opportunity.”
“And finally, don’t let him out,” the Mayor finishes. “Come see me when you’re finished speaking with him. I have a book I must return to. I did leave it at quite an exciting part.” The Mayor gives us each a nod, then faces our Corpsey friend. “Behave, you wildcat, you.”
Damnation ducks on her way out of the room, Truce reluctantly following. With only John, myself, and the twisting shadow of the boy along the floor, the room grows eerily silent, as if John and I are its only occupants and the pale boy is nothing but an illusion.
Except he isn’t. “Hello,” I say, breaking the quiet. He still stares at me. I’m relieved to note that I don’t see any dark and toothy viciousness in his eyes. “I’m sorry you’re in here.” I take one small step toward the cage. “I didn’t know this would happen. Are you okay?”
John leans into me. “Jennifer, seriously? This thing tried to kill us.”
I face John. “This thing also spared my life.” I come right up to the cage, breaking Mayor Damnation’s first rule already, and kneel down. “Let’s be friends. Do you have a name, or should I keep calling you Corpsey? I heard they were not going to destroy you. They just want to see if you’ll turn back to normal. Maybe your thirst for blood will … go away,” I add with hope. “Wouldn’t that be nice? They’re giving you a chance to change.”
“I’ll never change.”
His voice surprises me again, just like the first time I ever heard it. Maybe it’s due to the clarity of his words in this little room, echoing hollowly off the brick walls.
“You don’t want to change?”
“No,” he murmurs gently.
I study him, eye-to-eye, grasping at that connection we shared in the forest. It’s almost like I know him. I feel oddly drawn to him. Maybe I’m completely projecting my own feelings onto the boy, but something tells me he feels the same strange pull between us.
I clear my throat. “Want to see your sister again?”
That changes his face. He lifts his head, the whites of his eyes flashing, and his chapped lips part.
Yep, that got his attention. “I want to see my friend again,” I go on. “Perhaps we can strike some sort of deal.”
“No, Jennifer.”
It’s John interjecting again, coming up to my side and standing over me, his head shaking back and forth and his jaw setting tightly. His body eclipses half the candlelight, throwing the boy into darkness.
Respectfully, I ignore him, keeping my eyes on the now-dimmed face of our Dead, bloodthirsty friend. “You have to know where my friend Marianne is. You saw her. You even said she was still alive. You must know. Tell me, Corpsey, tell me, and I will do everything in my power to get you out of here.”
“Jennifer!”
“Please, sweet pale boy,” I plead, gripping the bars of the cage now. “You have to know my word is good.”
The boy rises. So do I. Slowly, he comes forth to the edge of the cage, and it takes every ounce of strength (and perhaps stupidity) in me to not back away. When he stops, we’re nearly nose to nose. John has turned into a stone statue of tenseness next to me.
“Hair as white as winter …” the boy murmurs so quietly I almost don’t hear him.
“Please,” I repeat. “Tell me where she is.”
Then the boy says, “The Whispers.”
I frown. “The what?”
“She will be at the Whispers. In the south. The place where it all began.”
“Where what all began?”
The boy scuffs a foot against the ground, his fingers wiggling impatiently. John flinches, noticing, ready at any second to launch himself between us.
I feel the heat of his tense breath against the side of my cheek.
“Let me out,” says the boy, “and I’ll take you there.”
“I don’t have the key.”
“There is no key. The door is made of steel. I cannot touch it.”
“Why can’t you touch it?”
“Because I’ve tasted of blood,” he says, which totally just opened up a whole other bucket of questions I doubt I’ll get answers for. “Open the door and I will take you. If we go now, perhaps we won’t be too late.”
Before he even finishes his sentence, my hands are on the door, working the handle. John grips my wrist, his eyes flashing wide. “Jennifer …”
“He won’t harm me,” I hiss at John. “Let go of me.”
“You’re making the wrong decision,” he presses on. “I know Marianne is in danger, and I care about her too, but this is not how we find her. We can get to this whispering place ourselves. South, he said. We’ll go down the Road of Destiny or whatever it’s called.”
“You can’t go on your own,” states the boy.
The two of us turn to him, my and John’s hands still stuck on the handle of the metal door. “And why not?” asks John tersely.
“The Whispers is not a place for the Living,” he replies in his clear, crisp, lofty voice. “You will walk in circles and circles around that cursed, Undeadly place, never finding it. For hours, for days, for a lifetime, you’ll never step foot in the Whispers. No Living can find it alone. There are dark and ancient powers that keep it hidden.” His soft, pale gaze moves to John. I daresay they carry a strange, twisted sympathy in them. “Only a Dead can take you to the heart of the land of the Dead.”
“Then Truce will take us there,” John insists. “Or our new friend, Damnation.”
“They haven’t left this city in decades,” he returns calmly. “They don’t know the wild as I know it.”
“John …”
John’s face twists with frustration. I know he doesn’t have the same connection that I seem to have with the pale boy, but I’m not about to bet my friend’s life on our confidence alone in finding a supposedly unfindable place. We’re lost in a land of deathly magic and oddities that defy everything we know about science. How can I not trust this Undead person’s word?
Slowly, I give in and turn the handle. Even with John’s grip on my wrist, he does not hinder me further. Our hands united, we open the cage door.
The next instant, my device is in my other hand, and I lift it to the boy’s face. The light from it flashes, painting his skin an eerie shade of bright blue, startling him.
“This object is from the land of the Living,” I tell the boy calmly. “It’s made of pure steel. If you double cross us or break your honor in any way, I will press it to your face so hard, you’ll wear a permanent scar of it to your second grave. Do we have an understanding?”
He stares at the blinding device, but his eyes seem more curious than they do threatened.
“So colorful,” he murmurs. “Like flames.”
I squint at him. “What?”
“That’s why they light candles,” the boy tells me, still transfixed to my device as though it were the prettiest thing he’d ever seen. “Our eyes don’t regard darkness in the same way your Living ones do, but they also don’t regard light in the same way, either. Trust me, you’ve never seen color until you’re Undead.” He smiles, staring unblinkingly into the bright light.
“In your realm, we don’t quite regard light in the same way, either,” I note. “Days here are just a subtle change of brightness to the night. I have yet to see the sun through the fog, even here in the city where I thought we were free from its greedy cover.”
“The further south we go, the worse it gets,” he warns us quietly. “You’ve not yet seen the darkest of the land of the Dead. Not truly.”
I don’t know if his words are meant to scare me, but they do. “Let’s go.”
Carefully, I move aside, and the pale boy cooperates, stepping out of the cage. This would be the second rule I’ve broken of the gracious Mayor Damn’s. Maybe third. I hope she’s forgiving, considering my predicament. John leads the way down the hall, and I pick up the rear with my device brandished, the pale boy caught between us.
It’s in another hallway that John stops us, making a slight detour to remove something off the wall. When he returns, he holds a long yellow tassel that might have come from a banner or artwork or something. “Bend,” he orders the pale boy, then secures the tassel around the boy’s neck, forming a noose. I stifle a protest I’m about to make, letting John have his moment of control. When the makeshift leash is attached and the pale boy lifts his head, John gives it a gentle tug. “Uncomfortable?”
“The Dead know nothing of comfort,” he returns.
“Good.”
With a great length of the tassel coiled about John’s shoulder, he continues on his way out of the building through a different door from which we’d entered. I guess that’s because it would not be in our best interest to run into Truce or the Mayor and have them observe our blunt betrayal of their trust. We’ll return the wildcat when we’re finished, I’d like to say, but considering my track record of returning things I’ve stolen, a guilty stab in my chest shuts me right up.
From the side door, we spill onto the street, relieved to find not a soul in sight.
“When we find your friend,” the pale boy warns me, “she will not be the same. No Human walks the true land of the Dead and returns unchanged.”
I swallow a pang of hurt. “And neither will we.”
The three of us hurry away from the four city blocks where everyone resides, and towards the Broken Road of Destiny we go; I hope our actual destiny is anything but.
John looks up at the tree, considering it.
“Don’t you dare,” I warn him.
He glances back at our friend, Corpsey. He puts a hand to his own chin, drumming fingers along his jaw.
“Don’t,” I say again.
John addresses our friend, Corpsey. “Your kind really feel no discomfort at all?”
“No.”
“And you don’t breathe?”
“No.”
John nods. “Very well.”
With that, John tosses the tassel over the nearest branch, then pulls with all his might. Corpsey lifts off the ground as if he weighs nothing—that, or John is a lot stronger than I give him credit for. He gives it another great heave and a grunt, then secures the tassel around a neighboring tree, tying it off.
I sigh. “I can’t believe you did that.”
Corpsey dangles there lazily by the neck. I daresay he appears bored.
“Can’t take chances,” mutters John, returning to me. “We need our rest. We’ve been on our feet for hours.”
“I’m fine,” rasps the pale boy with a wave of his hand. “Really,” he assures me when I look unconvinced. “Totally fine. Can’t feel a thing.” His strangled voice sounds more gravelly than my Aunt Belinda’s and she’s been smoking since she was ten. “I’m just greeeat.”
After staring sadly at the dangling Undead boy for a moment, I finally concede, lowering myself to the ground and leaning against John, who’s found a nearby tree to lean against within view of our dangling friend.
I experience a wave of guilt that unrests every nerve I just steeled before leaving After’s Hold. The wave of guilt turns into words. “We should’ve grabbed water,” I say, turning my head slightly. I hope John hasn’t already fallen asleep at my back; he looked so exhausted. “Or food. Or thought to wake the others to come with us. I was selfish not to include them.”
“We left on an impulse,” John reminds me, his words vibrating through his chest and into mine. “Don’t blame yourself, Jen. Look.” He takes my hand into his, fiddling gently with my fingers. “If that fussy roommate of yours survived this long, so can we. Right? Can you imagine how whiny she’d be by now if she were with us? ‘Jen, where can we find a bagel store around here?’”
> I try to smile, but even the muscles in my face grow heavier by the second. I can hardly keep my eyes open. “I know you’re trying to cheer me up, but—”
“Just imagine the relief we’ll feel when she’s with us and we’re returning to After’s Hold together,” he tells me. “Just imagine how you’ll feel when this is all over with and we’re back home. They’ll celebrate us. Don’t you hear all your peers cheering after you’ve presented your dissertation to the class? The Beautiful Dead …”
The dream he’s lending me sends my mind into a new direction. The dissertation … Notoriety … Vindication … John’s acceptance and support from the financial aid …
“John, what will happen when you do get accepted into the university?” I ask, looking down as he starts to massage each of my fingers, his hands feeling so strong against mine. “When you’re an official student. When you … don’t need to stay in our condominium anymore. What’ll happen?”
His silence unsettles me. For a moment, my fears all along are confirmed. He’ll move on when the university takes him in. He’ll engage with other Engineers in his program, meet some pretty girl with long dark hair and interesting ideas. She’ll wear cute glasses and laugh at all his jokes, and his muddy brown eyes will be all on her.
“You mean … I have to leave your condominium?” he asks, confused.
“No, not if you don’t want to. But, like …” I bite my lip, unsure how to proceed.
“You want me to leave?”
“No! I didn’t say that.” With a sigh, I turn my head, my ear pressed to his chest. “I just meant … I mean, have you thought about it? Do you have a plan?”
His breath dusts the top of my head. It’s become noticeably heavier. I don’t know if I’m getting somewhere with him, or making everything worse. Likely the latter; I’m so good at that lately.