“Do you despair yet?”
“I think maybe I do.”
“Do you know why?”
“No, not really.”
Rael considered that for a moment, then gave a short nod of his head. “That’ll do. Not quite the response I was hoping for, but I can work with it. For now.”
“Where are we?”
Rael made a tsk-tsk with his tongue. “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.” He laughed. “Sorry—I’ve always wanted to say that to someone. I—oh, get that look off your face! No one here is going to hurt you—in fact, it’s kind of our goal to protect you from here on. Did I mention that I was sorry about that business in the hospital? I was in a bit of a panic and...to tell you the truth, I was angry that she chose you.”
“Who? Denise?”
“That’s just the name you know her by, but, yes, Denise.”
“What name do you know her by?”
Rael shrugged. “That’s just it—I’ve never known her real name, so I took to calling her Persephone.” He gestured at their surroundings. “It was a little joke between us, but the nickname stuck.”
This was already too much for him to keep up with, so Robert blinked, sat up a little more, and returned to his original question. “You still haven’t told me where we are.”
“Noticed that, did you? Must be those legendary reporter’s instincts. Okay, here’s the thing, Willy. I could tell you exactly, precisely where we are, right down to the latitude and longitude with zero error margin, but what reason do I have to trust you’ll keep it a secret? How do I know that you wouldn’t leave here and come back with an army of police and social service droids and a bunch of sad-ass misguided missionaries from Save the Children? Don’t bother answering that because we both know I have no reason to trust you on that point. If what you really want to know is, am I going to keep you here, then the answer is: for a few hours or so, then I’m going to let you leave, unharmed. But before I do that, it’s important that you and I get better acquainted.” He looked to his left and grinned. “But that can wait a bit longer. Dinner hath arrived.”
Ian emerged from one of the chambers, carrying the little bird-woman in his arms; she held a paper plate containing potato chips, pieces of diced fruit, and a cheeseburger.
“It’s Ian’s birthday today,” whispered Rael. “It’s been quite a while since we’ve gotten to celebrate a birthday here, so we’re having a bit of a picnic in his honor. Ian likes cheeseburgers.”
“Cheeeeese-boogies!” shouted Ian, laughing. He knelt beside Robert and gently placed the bird-woman on the ground. She took a few shy steps toward Robert, smiled, and offered the plate. Robert accepted the food and thanked her. She shrugged, blushing, and began to turn away.
“Wait a moment,” said Robert. “Please?”
The little bird-woman turned back to face him. She looked absolutely terrified.
“It’s okay,” said Rael.
The bird-woman hunched her tiny shoulders and took one step forward.
Robert stared at her for a moment. “I...I know who you are.”
Denise’s file: Andrea Walsh, Age 22. Virchow-Seckel Syndrome.
“You’re Andrea, aren’t you?”
She smiled again—as much as her cleft palette would allow,—and nodded, blushing even more. The veins in her hairless head, already so close to the surface they looked like red and blue strands of webbing, stood out in a way that Robert would once have thought grotesque but now found sweet and endearing.
“He knows your name, Andrea,” said Rael. “Isn’t that nice?”
She ran back to Ian, smiling again at Robert before hiding her face in the crook of Ian’s massive arm.
“Andrea’s a little shy,” said Rael. “But she’s getting a lot better.” He looked at her affectionately. “Hell, who knows—we might even get her to talk above a whisper someday.”
Andrea looked at Rael, made a shoo-ing gesture with her hands, looked at Robert, giggled, and hid her face again.
“Cheeeeese-boogie!” said Ian, pointing at Robert’s plate. “Ian make cheeeeese-boogie!”
“Thank you, Ian,” said Robert, and bit into it.
It was delicious.
“You make a mean cheeseburger, Ian.”
“Ian cook good.”
“Yes, you do.”
Ian reached into the pocket of his coat and produced a cold can of Coke, which he popped open and gave to Robert. “Get firsty!”
“Yes,” said Robert, taking a sip. “Cheese-boogies make me firsty.”
Ian grinned, his two eyes glittering in their single, diamond-shaped socket.
But his skin looked so pale and sweaty.
“Is he all right?” Robert asked Rael.
“Why don’t you ask him, Willy? He’s still here, you know.”
Robert looked back at Ian. “I apologize for that, Ian. It was rude.”
“Today Ian’s birfday. Ian....” He rolled his eyes upward as he counted to himself. “I forty.”
“Wow. Happy birthday. I wish I had a gift to—” He glimpsed his watch, unhooked the metal clasp, and offered it. “Here you go, Ian. Happy fortieth birthday!”
“Oooooh, pretty!” Ian took the watch and held it in front of his face, watching in wonder as its gold and silver band reflected the light. “So pretty.”
Andrea pulled her face out of his arm and stared at the watch in open-mouthed wonder.
Robert took another bite of the cheeseburger and washed it down. “Ian?”
“Uh-huh?”
“Do you feel okay?”
Ian grimaced, then shook his head. “Ian hurt.” He pointed at his throat, then his chest.
Robert looked at Rael.
“Ian has throat cancer,” Rael said. “He’s been in remission for almost as long as you’ve been alive, but it’s recently begun spreading to his lungs.”
Robert’s heart broke for the one-eyed giant. “No wonder—look at this place! Even with your goddamn air filters, you can’t expect someone to survive down here and—”
“—and this place has nothing to do with his physical problems, Willy! If it weren’t for this place—the only home he’s known outside of the Dumpster we found him in—Ian wouldn’t have lived more than a few miserable hours, if that long. This place, Willy, protects him. It protects all of us...or at least it did, until chronos began to creep in, bit by bit. Ian’s forty, now, and Andrea is now twenty-six, but there are children here who‘ve been around longer than half the fucking trees outside. We didn’t have to worry about manmade shit like time and ‘then’ and ‘now’ until ‘recently,’ thanks to you. Get it through your thick skull once and for all, that here, Willy, right smack dab in the center of kairos, we don’t age as long as we stay here. Ian, Andrea, myself, and a few others had to leave in order to track you down and, as a result, we absorbed a bit more chronos out there than I’d planned on, and ever since we came back it’s been spreading through the place like a virus. Until a couple of weeks ago we had no need to filter the air because the breathing problems had been healed; until he found you in that movie theater, Ian’s remission was permanent; until she helped bake those cookies for you, Andrea’s pneumonia was a distant memory. But once chronos infects you, it gains momentum like you wouldn’t believe—and we contracted more of it than I can heal on my own. Now, with your help, we might—mark that word, pal, might—be able to reverse the effects. I don’t know exactly how long we’ve got before the damage is irreversible—my guess is a week, maybe two—but we don’t stand a chance in hell if you don’t help us.”
“Why me? How am I so important to all of this?”
“Because you can bring her back to us. She loves you, and she’s been preparing you for her return—after all, you think she’s dead, and that just ain’t the way it is. Can’t very well expect her to come a-knocking on your door, all smiles and caresses and grave-dirt smoochies, can you?”
“So she’s...she’s alive?”
Rael shook
his head and snorted in disgust. “Don’t ask stupid questions, I’m just starting to like you. Yes, Robert, your wife is still alive.”
“H-how is that...possible?”
“Aye, there’s the rub.” Rael rubbed the back of his neck, then looked at his feet and sighed. When he lifted his head again, there were tears in his eyes, though his voice retained its quiet rage. “You know, Willy, I wasn’t always the devilishly handsome, charming, debonair GQ cover model you see before you now. There was a time when I didn’t look any different, really, than any one of a million faceless faces you pass on the street every day. I was a foundling. Never knew who my parents were or why they dumped me on the steps of the little church in the village. I was born in Europe, somewhere—it’s been so long that I’ve forgotten the name of the village and even if I could remember it, it doesn’t matter a damn because the place no longer exists—that’s one of the drawbacks to being immortal: you not only get to experience the joy of watching everyone you know grow old and die, but eventually any place you live will crumble to dust and be forgotten.”
“Sounds lonely.”
Rael glared at him. “I’m gonna give you the benefit of a doubt and assume there’s genuine sympathy in there someplace. You want to hear the rest of this or not?”
Robert stared into Rael’s gaze, tracing the path of a few angry tears as they crept along the rim of his eyes to the corners, where they hung on for dear life, and remembered a line from a Gerald Kersh story he’d read in college that had always stayed with him: “...there are men whom one hates until a certain moment when one sees, through a chink in their armor, the writhing of something nailed down and in torment.”
“I didn’t mean to sound sarcastic, Rael. I apologize.”
Rael sniffed and wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his coat. “Yeah, well...anyway, I spent the first ten years or so of my life in that village, living in a small basement-room of the church. The vicar was a kindly gent, very Old-Testament, though, made me read from the Bible for three hours every night. But he gave me a home and helped educate me and fed me well and let me play with the other children in the village. It was a life, good enough. Then one evening an old man named Hazlitt told us a story about a prince and a clown and the clown’s mask, gave me this flute, then sent me out into the world.
“I don’t know how long it was before I realized that, once I accepted this flute and left the village, I wasn’t aging like I was supposed to. Don’t get me wrong, I got older, but it worked out to something like a week’s worth of aging for every year—I don’t know, it might’ve been less than that; math was never one of my strong suits.
“I’m going to skip ahead several hundred years, if you don’t mind—I mean, I could tell you about all the places I traveled and the people I met and how I began to assemble the children who live with me and the way we mapped out the catacombs that link the thirteen places where the mountains open, but it’d take forever and bore the piss out of you and wouldn’t make all that much difference, anyway.” He reached into his coat pocket and took out a half-empty bottle of scotch, unscrewed the cap, and pulled down a couple of deep swallows. Wiping his mouth on his sleeve, he looked at Robert and offered the bottle. “Where are my manners? Want a snort?”
“No, thank you. I’d like to keep what’s left of my wits about me.”
Rael smiled. “It’s good you make jokes at a time like this. Have to teach me how to do it sometime.” He took another drink, capped the bottle, and slipped it back into his pocket. “Okay, so here I am later on, looking maybe nineteen or twenty, even though I’d been walking around for the better part of six hundred years. Lotta sightseeing and odd jobs, only gotten laid a few dozen times—can you imagine what it’s like to go for sixty-five years at a stretch before any nookie comes your way? Does wonders for your wrist strength, not a lot for your self-esteem. But I digress.
“By this time I was fully aware that there was something not-quite-right about myself, but I’d given up trying to figure out what it might be. The thing that bothered me most about the time before I started working at the Bathelt’s farm was that I almost never dreamed when I slept—and I didn’t sleep all that often. Still don’t. But back then, on those rare occasions when I did dream, it was always about what the old vicar in the village had taught me about the Angels, and that’s something I need to share with you.
“You see, not all angels are these ethereal, white-robed, wondrous, golden-winged refugees from a beauty contest that you’re always seeing depicted in books and movies—oh, no. Many of them—and I’m talking about the ones who sit by God’s side and have His favor and love and respect and are the first to get tickets for the WWF Summer Slam—the good guys, capiche? A lot of them are so hideous in their appearance that they make Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones look like Playboy centerfolds. We’re talkin’ class-A uggos here, tentacles and dripping teeth and putrescent flesh all dark and oily with larval eruptions that drip phosphorescent goo. All clear on that? Good.”
He took the flute from his belt and blew three notes, each successively louder and purer.
“Story time,” he said to Robert, then called out: “I said it’s story time!”
His voice echoed through the chambers with near-deafening volume.
A moment later, the children erupted from their rooms with squeals of laughter and anticipation, scurrying down the rope ladders, running across the catwalks, dashing over the bridges. When Robert looked up at them he thought for a moment that this cavern perhaps opened somewhere near the top because he was again seeing stars—some so far away they were mere pinpoints of light—but as he watched, the more he became aware that these distant stars too were moving, circling around other catwalks, traversing higher bridges, descending other ladders, or being lowered in their wheelchairs on wood-and-steel elevator platforms that were operated through a massive and ingeniously-constructed system of chains, pulleys, winches, and counterweights, all coming toward him, not stars at all but yet more torches and lanterns carried by children whose rooms were hundreds of feet above those he first saw.
It was incredible. He’d thought there might be only a few dozen children living here, maybe a hundred, but now saw that their numbers were legion; there had to be at least a thousand children, maybe more. He craned back to try to pull all the shadow-children into his vision but was overwhelmed with dizziness and vertigo.
There were just too many of them.
“Don’t freak out on me, Willy, not now.”
“Dear God, Rael—how many are you?”
“I lost count somewhere around 1973—both the year and the number. That math aptitude thing again. Plus, I was pissed about Nixon and the whole Watergate sideshow, but we don’t need to go into that.”
The children continued to descend from above until the chamber was packed; never before had Robert seen so many in one place. He attempted to stand once, but pain and dizziness got the better of him and he dropped onto his ass again. He looked at the sea of surrounding faces and realized he couldn’t see where the crowd ended.
Throughout the rest of his time at Chiaroscuro, Robert would come to divide the children into three categories: the Deformed—faces and bodies like those he had seen in Denise’s files; the Damaged—children who were recovering from physical abuse so severe he couldn’t even begin to imagine the pain and terror they’d been through; and the Lost—children who were neither deformed nor outwardly damaged, but whose eyes betrayed that they’d seen and experienced things no child should ever have to witness or endure.
Suffer the little children who come unto me, he thought.
But they all seemed happy.
Rael looked around as if doing a head count, then closed his eyes and lifted up his arms, silencing their whispers and giggles.
He remained like that for a moment.
“What is it?” Robert asked.
“Shhh!” was Rael’s reply. A few more moments passed wherein he remained frozen like that; then he lowered his arms, sh
uddered, and opened his eyes. “Just seeing if everyone was accounted for. We’re all in our places with bright smiling faces. Except for one, of course.”
“Denise.”
“Or Persephone, or whatever in the hell her name really is.” Rael walked through the children, climbed the staircase of wedge-shaped boulders, crossed one of the bridges, and stood above them on the plateau that held the carved female figures.
“I suppose,” he said in a pretty good Basil-Rathbone-as-Sherlock-Holmes imitation, “you’re wondering why I called you all here.”
The children laughed for a moment, then fell silent once more. Ian sat down next to Robert and affectionately draped one of his massive arms around Robert’s shoulder. Andrea climbed onto Robert’s lap. He held her tenderly.
The quiet was nearly absolute.
Rael parted his hands. “Say it with me, everyone.”
The children as one responded: “Once upon a time....”
And Rael began the story.
Chapter 5
“...when a stranger was not someone to be feared, when a man walking a long and lonely road could stop at a house where he saw a light burning in the window and find himself welcomed with no questions or suspicion, when a good meal and warm bed were still treasured as gifts, there lived a farmer named Hans Bathelt, a stocky man of good character, an American of German descent, whose parents had come to the United States shortly before the outbreak of World War Two. Hans was a decent and God-fearing man, and took as his wife a woman named Lillian.
“Throughout the mountain community where they lived, it was well-known that Lillian was a granny-woman, a midwife, a healer skilled in the use of herbs and magick spells: a white witch. It didn’t matter to Hans what people called her, for he knew his Lilly’s powers were a gift from God and therefore holy.
In Silent Graves Page 22