In Silent Graves

by Gary A Braunbeck

  “I pulled in probably the deepest breath I’ve ever taken and raised the hatchet so far over my head I could hear the bones in my shoulder start to crack. I waited a couple of seconds, hoping that Hans would come to his senses, and when that didn’t happen I raised the hatchet a little higher and swung it down with everything I had and the rest of it happened so fast I couldn’t react in time because the very second I started to bring the hatchet down I heard this wheezing sound that I thought maybe was Hans but then I saw the baby’s chest rise and fall and realized that it was pulling in its first breath of life and then I saw the hatchet swinging down and tried to stop it but there was so much momentum and it was so cold and I was freezing and I knew I should jerk my arm to the side but it wouldn’t do what I told it to and then I see that baby has opened its eyes and is looking at me and the hatchet and I screamed and then there was the awful chunk! and the baby’s head rolled off the tree stump and hit the snow and its eyes were looking up at me and its mouth was moving and all I could think was, It wants to know why but by then I’m pretty out of it....

  “I zoned out big-time, Willy. I did as Hans told me, I chopped off its arms and legs, then cut each of those limbs in half, then put all the pieces back into the sack—except for the head. I buried that at the foot of the tree stump. Then Hans and I started walking all over the mountain. Every forty-five minutes or so we’d stop and I’d bury another piece of the baby, then we’d move on. It must have been close to five-thirty in the morning before I buried the last section. I turned around and looked at Hans. He nodded his head and smiled at me and said, ‘I’m sorry, Rael. I’m sorry that I was blind to the true nature of my Lilly’s powers—did you see it? A monster born from Satan’s loins if ever there was one. But I cannot bring myself to harm Lilly or Joanna...perhaps they were bewitched, as well. I still love them, but I cannot face them ever again. I cannot face anyone ever again.’ Then he shoved the barrels of the gun against his face and blew his head off.

  “I buried him where he dropped. I took his gun and reloaded it and started walking back to the altar of stone at the top of the mountain. I don’t know how long it took me to get there—I’d stop every once in a while and sit against a tree and sleep for a little bit, then wake up and move on. The night turned into day, then into night again. When I reached the top of the mountain I saw a man sitting on the stone altar. His flesh was blackened, charred, smoldering. He looked at me and said, ‘So you know?’

  “‘I know,’ I whispered. ‘You are Siempre, the clown Hazlitt spoke of. And you are a Hallower. That’s why the Prince died when he put your mask on his face: He saw all that you have seen.’

  “Siempre nodded, then stared at the ground. ‘I’m dying, Rael,’ he said. ‘So I need you to sit with me and listen to what I have to say.’”

  Rael stopped, wiped his eyes, removed the bottle of scotch, and pulled down two deep swallows before offering the bottle to Robert. “You want a snort now?”

  “Yes.” Robert took three deep drinks from the bottle before handing it back. “You’re a Hallower, aren’t you?”

  “I found out that night. Siempre told me. He told me so many things. Suddenly I started to realize why I’d lived as long as I had. You see, when Shekinah mated with The Sorcerer of Fatal Laughter, the Sorcerer of Night, Unkempt, and the Black Sorcerer in order to give birth to the Hallowers, there was a slight glitch, a little codicil that God wrote into the plan. It seems He wanted the Hallowers to fit in with the human race better than our ancestors had, and so arranged that the knowledge of our true nature—our ‘angelness,’ if that’s even a word—would be slow in returning to us. Think of it in terms of an amnesiac regaining bits and pieces of their memory over a long period of time: Searching for stars in a constellation or trying to make sense out of a series of dots on a page; trace the pattern of the stars, connect the dots—boom!—‘I remember now!’

  “That’s how it’s supposed to happen, and for most Hallowers that’s how it does happen. But with some it’s…” He snapped his fingers. “Instantaneous. A repressed memory that suddenly snarls, full-blown, to the surface. That’s how it happened with Mozart and Van Gogh and Mark Twain: One second they’re just guys, going along doing their guy-thing, and the next—WHAMMO!—it all comes back to them and their souls scream for release, so they compose a 39thh Symphony or paint a “Starry Night” or write Letters from the Earth. Stuff like that. Then in an instant—poof! The memory is gone and they think of themselves as being merely mortal again and so live a normal life span and die.”

  “Did Siempre tell you why this happens? You said Hallowers were supposed to be immortal.”

  “We are—supposed to be, that is. I mean, when Siempre gave me the examples of Van Gogh and Twain and Wolfgang Amadeus, the first thing that went through my mind was, ‘They’re all dead.’ How is that possible? How could someone forget that kind of knowledge once it came back to them?” Rael shrugged. “So I asked Siempre. I looked him in the eyes and said, ‘Why is this happening? How is it possible that you’re about to die?’

  “He looked at me and gave this sad-assed smile and said, ‘Something has gone wrong between us and our Creator. Please don’t ask me what because I don’t know. I can only tell you that we, who are supposed to be eternal, are dying away. After I am gone, you will be the only one left and it should not have been that way.’

  “‘What do you mean by that?’

  “‘The child who was born tonight, she, too, was a Hallower. Had she lived, she was to be your wife. I had hoped that the two of you would be the ones who would continue our race...but that cannot be. Not now.’

  “I sat with him until he died, and then I buried him at the base of the altar, and then I decided that I’d had enough. What the fuck good was it, me being the last of my kind? What could I do to stop the despair and horror and loneliness that humanity inflicts on itself? So I sat there and thought of snipers in clock towers centering passersby in rifle scopes and the last sad whimper from the throats of crippled old men left bound and starving and neglected in putrescent beds and terrified two-year-olds methodically tortured to death by remorseless parents while neighbors who knew ignored the agonized shrieks, and I wondered if God’s love was measurable only through the enjoyment He seemed to take in the suffering of the innocent, but then I remembered “Starry Night” and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and ‘...it was then that I carried you,’ and tenderness...but it didn’t do me a damn bit of good, and you know why? Because I knew then that physical evil and moral goodness would be forever intertwined like the strands of a double helix encoded into the DNA of the universe. Man was supposedly created to know wrong from right, to feel outrage at everything monstrous and evil, yet the scheme of creation itself was monstrous; the rule of life was get through the door and take that smack on the backside from the doctor’s hand so you can be set adrift in a charnel-house cosmos packed end to end with imploding stars and bloodstains inside chalk outlines. And what then? A crap shoot: if you did manage to survive the agony of being born there was always the chance you’d die from a fatal disease or be killed by a drunk driver or crushed by a falling building during an earthquake or drowned by your mother after she strapped you in good and tight and shoved the car into a lake, or you might be skinned alive or raped or tortured or beaten to a pulp or strangled or decapitated just for the fun of it, the thrill of it, the hell of it—‘So, whatta you wanna do tonight, Angie? Jeez I dunno Marty, whatta you wanna do?’

  “I thought about all the savagery I’d seen during my time on Earth. Good God—the human brain can detect one unit of mercaptan amid fifty billion units of air; the eye possesses tens of millions electrical connections that could process two million simultaneous messages, yet can still focus on the light from a single photon; the nervous system is a wonder, capable of miraculous things, yet more often than not every fiber of an individual’s being is geared toward destruction. So what chance did I have to end the despair I saw all around me? Matter is nothing more th
an energy that’s been brought to a screeching halt, and the human body is only matter, and the fundamental tendency of matter is toward total disorganization, a final state of utter randomness from which the cosmos is never gonna recover, becoming more and more unthreaded with the passing of each moment while humanity flings itself headlong and uncaring into the void, recklessly scattering itself, impatient for the death of everything. So what if I did stay around and try to protect my brothers and sisters before the world could trap them in its jaws? Somewhere out there was a son-of-a-bitch who would get their hands on a child before I could save them, and this son-of-a-bitch would drag it into basements or alleyways and split it open or burn it or twist its most sensitive parts with handyman’s tools until the child screamed enough to get the torturers excited, and then...and then it would go on and on and on, a race sinking further into the pit of depravity, all the while forgetting that they possessed the ability to write music or formulate equations to explain the universe or cure diseases, create new languages and geometries and engines that power crafts to explore space. But it seemed the only reason humanity bothered siring children was so it could have something to mutilate and terrify and starve.

  “So why should I even fuckin’ bother, Willy?” Rael shrugged. “To hell with it, I thought. If God has decided to give us the finger, then a big ‘Fuck you, too’ to the Almighty. So I shoved the business end of Hans’ gun under my chin and let fly...but only one barrel discharged and the angle was bad. I don’t know what the hell happened—maybe my hands jerked at the last second before the gun went off, maybe the recoil kicked in before the rounds fully hit home—who knows? I remember the tremendous pressure, and the fire that seared my bones, and the instant of pain followed by numbness, and I remember that I saw pieces of my face scatter outward, blasted and bloody. Then it was just darkness and I felt happy.

  “I have no idea how long I lay there before regaining consciousness. I only know that when I opened the one eye that was still in my head and saw where I was, I thought, ‘Shit—I’m still alive!’ I tried to move, tried to get my hands to grip the shotgun again so I could properly finish what I’d started, but it was too far away from me.

  “And it was moving.

  “It took a few seconds before I could see what was happening, but then a bit of sunlight started filtering down and I saw the tiny hand gripping the barrel, pulling the gun over to the edge of the mountain and shoving it over the side. I thought I was hallucinating, but then I felt another tiny hand touch my cheek.

  “I lay and watched the various parts of the baby girl come back from their graves and reassemble themselves, and then she crawled around, gathering up all the sections of my face she could find, and she began putting me back together.”

  Robert closed his eyes for a moment and thought of the scars on Denise’s body and how she never wanted to talk about how she’d gotten them.

  “She couldn’t find all of my pieces,” Rael continued, “but she did come across a couple of frozen animals and used small sections of their flesh and skeletons to construct the rest of my face as best she could. She moved very slowly. She was still in a lot of pain, she was still bleeding, but she was alive.” Rael pointed toward his face. “You think this looks bad now? You should’ve seen what I looked like after she finished up with me that morning. But over the years, she’s done more work on me. I might even end up with my old face back, who knows?

  “When she finished and I was able to stand again, I picked her up and wrapped her in the wool sack that Hans had given to me, then turned and ran down until I was off that mountain for good. She was weak and sick and I was panicked as hell because I didn’t know what to do to make her better, so I stole the first car I could find and drove until the thing ran out of gas. After that, I carried her through the back streets and alleys of the city until I found a hospital, then I snuck in through the delivery doors of the morgue in the basement and used the service elevator to take her to the pediatrics floor. I left her in the restroom there. From the look on your face, I’m guessing you can fill in most of the rest.”

  Robert, stunned, could only nod.

  “I kept track of how she was doing through newspapers and television, and when it was obvious that the doctors had done all they could for her, I snuck back in one night and took her out of there. It was time for her to come home and grow into the woman who would be my wife. But as she grew—and she grew quickly—it was obvious she didn’t feel the kind of love for me that a woman should feel toward the man who’s going to be her husband. We gathered more children and brought them here, and all of them came to think of her as their mother. But me—I was relegated to the role of Favorite Uncle because she had chosen you to be her husband.” Rael stepped closer to Robert. “There’s something I’ve always wondered about, Willy: What the hell did you do to make her love you this much? You were—what? Eight years old when the two of you were in the hospital?”

  “I was almost nine.”

  Rael considered that for a moment. “What did you do?”

  “I don’t know—I mean, if I saw her or anything like that, I don’t remember. I was pretty sick for a long time. I know that Nurse Claus—that was a nickname I gave this nurse on the floor—anyway, she would take me up to see all the newborns, and she showed me the doors to the ICU where the sickest babies were kept...” He shook his head. “I was in the hospital at the same time as Denise, but I swear to you, Rael, I swear I don’t remember what I could have done to....” He parted his hands in front of him and shrugged. “I wish I knew. You don’t know how much I wish that.”

  “I believe you, Willy,” said Rael, gently taking Robert’s arm and leading him farther along the path.

  “Will you tell me something, Rael?”

  “If I can.”

  “If it was so important that she be here with you and the children, why did you bring her back to the house the night you took her from the morgue?”

  “Because she needed to be held by you in the home she had come to love. That was the only thing that could get the process started again.”

  “The process?”

  “Of re-making herself. You see, Willy, the thing is, I couldn’t figure out for the longest time why she and I didn’t die. Then one night we got to talking, and I remembered something Siempre had told me about the beings we descended from. I am a descendant of the Sorcerer of Night, Unkempt. Denise is descended from Siempre, who was a direct descendant of the Sorcerer of Fatal Laughter. Neither of us ever knew the names of the Rephaim from whom the Three Sorcerers were descended because, being Rephaim, they died nameless. But the Fallen Angels whose original seeding eventually led to our births, those names we know very well.

  “I am a descendant of the Archon Pronoia, Denise is a descendant of the Archon Pthahil. They were the angels who assisted God in creating Adam. Pthahil sculpted Adam’s body from several handfuls of earth. Pronoia supplied the nerve tissue. Then God showed them how to give the body life. So we carry with us the knowledge and ability to make Man, and it was that power, that sentient race-memory, if you will, that was awakened within us by some kind of survival instinct and forced to the surface at the moment when we should have died. We can create and heal but we can’t un-make anything—including ourselves.”

  They stopped at the base of a short stone staircase that led to another curtained living chamber. Rael led Robert up the steps and into the chamber, then asked Ian and Andrea to wait outside.

  “See anything familiar, Willy?”

  The chamber was perhaps fifteen feet wide and ten feet deep. Another curtained entryway stood opposite where Robert and the others had entered. Between the two doorways was an antique four-poster bed, the kind Denise had always wanted; a heavy Oriental rug on the floor; a writing table; a chair; an old record player; a piece of furniture covered with a blanket; and a shelf filled with books. But what drew Robert’s attention at once was the painting that hung on the wall above the bed; it depicted a battlefield covered in bodies
and parts of bodies, but there was one man left standing, searching for anyone who might still be alive, not seeing the single hand reaching up from below the gore and death in hopes of being found.

  “This was...this belonged to her mother.”

  “So you actually saw her mother?”

  “Yes. Denise was devastated when the woman died—I mean, they didn’t exactly get along, but they still loved each other...I guess....”

  Rael walked over to the painting and examined it. “I always thought this thing was morbid as hell, but she liked it.” He turned toward Robert. “How long were you married before you met her mother?”

  “About a year-and-a-half.”

  “That never struck you as odd?”

  Robert shrugged. “I knew there had been a lot of issues between them since her father died, so I never pushed it too much.”

  “But you did push it a little, once in a while?”

  “Of course I did! She was my wife and I wanted to meet her mother.”

  “One more question, Willy, then we can get on with the rest of this: After you finally met her mother, did you ever see Denise in bare feet again?”

  Robert had to think about that one for a moment. “I don’t know, really. I mean, she always wore socks to bed, even in summer—her feet chilled easily. But I can’t....” He shook his head. “I can’t answer that one, Rael. Christ! You’d think a husband would notice something like that about his wife, wouldn’t you?”

  Rael said nothing. Outside the chamber, Ian and Andrea were softly singing the Beach Boys’ “In My Room,” and doing a surprisingly good job with the harmony.

  Robert listened. There was something so eloquently innocent in the way their voices blended; just a couple of children having fun, quietly singing a favorite song to pass the time until something else came along for them to enjoy. He walked over and pulled back the curtain, watching the way Ian held Andrea on his lap and stroked her cheek, how Andrea traced patterns on Ian’s hand with her fingertip, the gentle manner in which Ian leaned down at one point and kissed the top of her head, then held her close, rocking back and forth as they continued singing. There was nothing sad or lonely about their embrace; it was, quite simply, a moment of untainted grace. Robert smiled at them and hoped that, in this whispered-song communion, they felt happiness, purpose, family and home.