In Silent Graves

by Gary A Braunbeck

  “We’re going to Utica, aren’t we?”

  Cathy nodded. “Ye Olde Mill. Best ice cream in the known universe.”

  “Why there?”

  “Because,” she said, looking back to check on the cats, “it was the only old college hangout of yours that you ever shared with Denise.”

  It was everything Robert could do to get the next words out: “Is she waiting there?”

  Cathy checked Robert’s watch. “All I know is that’s where I’m supposed to take you.”

  Fifteen minutes later they pulled onto the entrance path to the Mill grounds. Robert eased down on the brake as the car descended the steep drive, then put it in park a few feet in front of the locked gate.

  Looking over his shoulder and out the rear window, he said, “I don’t know how I’ll explain this if a cop drives by and spots us. A thirty-nine-year-old man parked with a high-school girl at two-thirty in the morning.”

  “You’re still thinking in chronos terms, Rob. No car—police or otherwise—is going to drive down this road until a little before six a.m.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “Because I looked through one of the places where the walls aren’t squared, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  She took off her seatbelt and moved closer to him. “Will you put your arm around me?”

  He did. She rested her head against his shoulder and placed a hand on his chest. “God, Rob, your heart’s beating a mile a minute.”

  “I’m scared.”

  “There’s no need to be.” She rubbed his chest. “What a wonder the flow of blood is, the feel of life pulsing through your body, each cell remembering everything that makes you specifically yourself. When you stop to think that the probability of any one of us being here in this form at this time is so small...it’s a wonder people don’t stumble around in a daze of wonder. Each person is alive against stupendous odds of genetics and infinitely outnumbered by the alternates who might have taken their place if things had turned out differently.” She pulled back and looked at him, her eyes full of fire. He remembered how once that fire had kept his young heart beating.

  “Why don’t people realize,” said Cathy, “how amazing they are? To live as they do, catching electrons at the moments of their excitement by solar photons, swiping the energy released at the moment of each jump, and storing it up in intricate loops for themselves! Humanity violates probability simply by its physical nature. Somebody should sit everyone down and explain to them how fucking random matter is, and how statistically improbable it is that just one of them exists at all, let alone billions of them...and that people having survived for so many thousands of years in this improbable form without drifting back into randomness is nearly a mathematical impossibility.” She lay back against his chest, holding him.

  “Every one of them is a self-contained, free-standing individual, completely original, singled out by specific protein configurations at the surface of their cells, or whorls in the skin of their fingertips, or even a special mixture of fragrances only their body can produce. Each one of them is one in five billion, unique and majestic. You’d think they’d never stop dancing.”

  Robert remained silent, content to hold her and fill himself with her scents.

  “Sorry about all the Rael-isms,” she whispered. Then: “Not to change the subject, but to change the subject—we never did go parking like this when we were in high school, did we?”

  “No.”

  “Ah well...this is nice now, isn’t it?”

  “It sure is.”

  She took his hand in hers and kissed its palm. “Would you have married me if I’d lived?”

  “I don’t know, Cathy. Maybe. We were so young.”

  “Maybe you were....” She began to tremble.

  He pulled back and looked at her. “What’s the matter?”

  She pulled her hand up to her face. “I forgot for a minute.”

  “What? What did you forget?”

  She leaned forward and kissed him on the lips—deeply, moistly, lovingly. “I forgot that two of us can’t be in the same place at the same time. She doesn’t have the strength for that.” She kissed him again, more quickly this time. “I’m sorry about this, Rob, but you have to be the one to do it.”

  “To do what? Cathy, please, tell me what’s going on, what happened to your—”

  She pressed his fingers against her face.

  Her skull collapsed almost instantly, followed by her shoulders, torso, arms, and legs. The sound was dry—paper cups tumbling in the wind then being gently crushed under a sneakered foot.

  Within moments, Robert was sitting next to a pile of dust and empty clothes.

  He tried to turn his head away but his eyes were locked on the sight.

  When he was finally able to compose himself, he reached down, turned the key, started the car, the turned on the headlights.

  She appeared in the beams like an image in a time-lapsed photograph.

  She looked so much older than she had when he’d passed her downtown; older even than when he’d awakened from what he thought was a dream to see her riding him in bed. Looking at least twenty now, she’d dyed her hair black and was thinner and pale-skinned in her Goth-chick outfit, black leather and lace and silver metal from neck to ankle; her hose were fashionably torn and her lipstick was dark as a bruise, just like her eye makeup and fingernails. Around her neck hung a bright silver cross on a heavy chain, and around her wrists were black leather bracelets dotted with several small metal spikes. Her left bicep was tattooed with a coil of barbed wire that encircled the flesh, and she sported a nose ring on the left, from which hung a thin chain that connected to another silver ring dangling from her pierced left ear.

  She came around to the passenger side of the car and opened the door. A wind pulled at the ashes inside, swirling them around her. The ashes fell on her skin and were immediately absorbed. She closed her eyes and smiled as this happened, sighing as if a lover were softly kissing her neck.

  “Ah...that’s a little better.” She opened her eyes, smiled at him, and climbed in, tossing Cathy’s clothes onto the floor behind the seat. “Don’t gawk at me like that. I think this is a cool look.” She leaned out the door and whistled. Suzy came running up to the car (or executing the high-speed waddle that was her chubby basset hound version of a run), leapt into the girl’s lap, slobbered all over her face, then jumped into the back seat between the cat carriers.

  Neither Tasha nor The Winnie were disturbed in their slumber.

  Robert stared at the nose ring and the chain that led to the girl’s ear.

  “I didn’t know if you’d like this or not,” she said. “Judging from the look on your face....” She removed the nose-ring and chain. “Better?”

  “A little.”

  She shrugged. “In order to blend in, you’ve either got to be generic to the bone or so fucking outlandish that people see you without really looking. If anyone were to see us, all they’ll remember about me is the pale skin and black leather and this cross.”

  “Don’t you know whether or not we’ll be seen? I mean, the places where the walls aren’t squared and—”

  She shook her head. “That ended with Cathy. At least for a while. For the next few hours, we have to deal with chronos head-on and all by our lonesomes.” Her expression became grave. “She’s very sick and very weak.”

  “Denise?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then are you Emily?”

  She smiled. “You can call me by Rael’s nickname, Persephone, though I prefer my own version of the name, Sephera. It sounds like ‘sapphire.’”

  “Are you my daughter?”

  Sephera played with a large silver ring on one of the fingers of her left hand.

  “Are you going to answer my question?”

  “It’s not as simple as a ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ so I’d rather not answer it right now. Later. I promise.”

  She continued playing with her ring. As she did
, Robert saw that her right hand was missing its ring finger. He held her right hand up between them and looked more closely. The finger had been severed at the knuckle, leaving a pinkish-white stump of scar tissue that looked several weeks old.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  Sephera pulled her hand away. “We need to get going. Please.”

  Robert started the car and backed slowly up the driveway and into the road. “Which way?”

  “Left.”

  As he drove, Robert’s mind filled to bursting with questions upon questions, each one seeming to hold a seed from which the next one blossomed. Since Sephera wasn’t volunteering much, he decided to take a chance and ask her a few more things.

  “Look, I understand that there’s a need to get back to Rael and the others—”

  “—there are a couple of more urgent things we need to take care of first.”

  “Will you please tell me what?”

  She blinked, exhaled anxiously, gave her silver ring one last twist, and said: “We’re...I mean, Denise is pregnant.”

  Robert was surprised he didn’t lose control of the car and wrap them around a telephone pole. “How is that possible? I haven’t...I mean, she’s...I don’t—”

  “So what I’m hearing is how can she be pregnant when I’m the one who had sex with you?—and by the way, I’m sorry about hitting you with the lamp. You weren’t supposed to come awake and you scared the hell out of me and the lamp was the first thing I saw and...and I didn’t mean to hit you so hard. I could have killed you.” She turned her face toward him. “Forgive me?”

  “Of course.”

  “If it helps, I know a lot about acupressure and herbal remedies for pain. Once your meds run out, I can help a lot. I can help you instead of having to take the meds, if you want.”

  Robert mindsputtered, then laughed softly.

  “What?” said Sephera.

  “That’s very good.”

  She parted her hands in front of her, shaking her head. “Okay, I must’ve wandered off the highway somewhere—what’s very good?”

  Robert went with it, a bit of the banal, an old argument he and Denise used to have, to act as a final thread holding him together; his last defense against fully accepting that he lived in a physical form that statistically should not have existed, the drowning victim’s last fighting gasp before succumbing to randomness. “The evasion tactic. Denise used it on me all the time—she was a lot more subtle, which is why it took so long for me to catch on to it, but even then she still managed to get it by me more often than not. I ask a question about something she doesn’t want to talk about, so in the midst of appearing to answer, she introduces some item or incident that has close ties to the original subject—so much so that for a few moments I start to think that it’s what I’d asked about...and by the time I realize I’ve been misdirected, we’re deep into a conversation on the red-herring subject and my original question seems a little fuzzy and distant and not worth repeating.”

  “So all women are manipulative?”

  “Again, very nice try. No, all women aren’t manipulative, but Denise could be when she wanted to avoid a subject, just as I can be manipulative, just like you were manipulative when you made that slick misdirection about hitting me with the lamp, which led to your telling me about you expertise with acupressure and herbs, which was supposed to make me ask more questions about your healing abilities, which was supposed to make me forget the original question, which I didn’t: How can Denise be pregnant when you’re the one who—”

  “—turn right.”

  Robert almost missed the little side street but managed to make the turn before it was too late.

  “Slow down,” said Sephera. “Okay, pull over here and turn off your lights but don’t shut off the engine. I’ll be damned if I’m going to freeze my ass off while you’re gone.”

  They were parked near a grade-school playground.

  Robert rubbed his eyes. “What now?”

  “You can’t see it from here, but if you walk across this section of the playground and go right, there’s a small cluster of picnic tables where the kids eat their lunch. Go there.”

  “And...?”

  She played with her ring again. “You’ll figure it out soon enough.”

  “Don’t try this bullshit with me, please? I had enough of it with Rael and—”

  Sephera suddenly and violently doubled over, pulling her knees up toward her chest and quietly groaned. Robert moved toward her and placed a hand on her back. She was soaked in sweat.

  “What’s wrong?” he pleaded. “Is there anything I can—”

  “Shut up!” She crossed her arms over her middle and began to rock back and forth, pulling in deep, slow, steady breaths as she leaned forward, releasing them as she pulled back. “Put your...your hand on the back of my neck.”

  He did as she instructed.

  “Okay...now, put your thumb behind my ear so its tip presses against the earlobe...good...stick your index finger straight up so it’s right against the base of my skull...a little more to the right...okay, now...imagine that you’re trying to press the tip of your index finger against your thumb...and squeeze.

  “Now...release...squeeze. Again...release…. Oh, yeah, that’s it, again...again...once more, really hard this time...oh, yes....okay, now...keep that hand right where it is, and press your other hand against the small of my back...yeah, just like that...okay, okay...” A wave of pain, less severe, it seemed, than the first, washed through her and she shuddered. “Push down toward the seat, then pull that hand up again, up, down, no more pressure than that, good...now do both at the same time, squeeze, push down, squeeze, push up...there you go, feel that rhythm? Keep going, a little more...wow, that feels nice...just a little bit longer...again...o-kay.” She pulled his hands away and sat straight up, the tension and pain dissolving, it seemed, into the heavy sheen of perspiration that made her flesh glow. “Not bad for your first time.”

  “Are you all right?”

  She smiled slightly, began to shake her head, then nodded instead. “As good as I can be under the circumstances.” She placed a moist palm against his cheek. “I’m not trying to play Rael’s head games with you, all right? It’s taken me a long time to figure out just how to explain everything to you and….” She winced a little as a small aftershock of the attack rippled through her body. “And you have to trust me, Robert, please? I promise you you’ll understand everything by the time the sun comes up. Now, please, go over to the picnic tables.”

  He stared into her eyes for a moment, then—on impulse—kissed her cheek and sprinted over to the playground, past the monkey bars and teeter-totters and merry-go-round, turned right and saw the picnic tables—

  —and the figure that sat still on a wooden bench just to the left.

  He walked toward her. The diffuse glow of a security light at the far end of the school building held her half in the light, half in shadow, but even if he hadn’t been able to see her clearly, the regal, almost arrogant way she sat would have betrayed her.

  He stood before a vacant-eyed Amy Wilder and stared at her. She was dressed in the same absurd Joan Crawford outfit that she’d worn at the cemetery when she’d handed him the note in Denise’s handwriting.

  He looked over his shoulder, half expecting to see Sephera walking toward him, but the ghost-echo of Cathy’s voice returned to him: ...two of us can’t be in the same place at the same time.

  He looked again at the mannequin-still woman on the bench, then at his own hand.

  I’m sorry about this, Rob, but you have to be the one to do it.

  He remembered the way Rael had taken hold of his hand down in Chiaroscuro and pressed it against the body of the woman from the bus, as if touching her were something Rael himself wasn’t supposed to do.

  He brushed his fingers across Amy’s face.

  Her skull collapsed inward with the same sick-making dry sounds the others had made, her clothing dropping into a heap
as the rest of her hollow body disintegrated.

  Robert stepped back as the nightwind stirred, cold and steady. The dust swirled upward from Amy’s clothing and twisted in the wind, a funnel cloud no bigger than Robert’s forearm; it danced and twirled on the breeze and then—so quickly that he barely had time for his mind to register what was happening—came right at his face and went in his eyes, nose, and mouth; he tried to wave it away but it did no good. He was momentarily blinded by the dust in his eyes until it mixed with tears it had caused, ran down his cheeks, and was absorbed into his skin. The dust he had inhaled through his nose mixed with that, choking his throat, and he staggered backward into one of the picnic tables, tripped over a leg, and fell back-first onto the ground.

  The remaining dust followed him down.

  He nearly lost consciousness from the lack of air, but as quickly as the dust had chocked him, it began to strengthen his breathing, mixing with the frosty night air as he filled his lungs deeper and more fully than he had in years, feeling decades of damage from cigarette smoking dissolve as the lung tissue was rejuvenated, and as he pulled in yet another deep, crisp, full breath, a breath as strong and healthy as the one he breathed the second after he was born, he rolled onto his side and pulled his knees up to his chest.

  A few moments later he felt Sephera’s hand touch his cheek. He tried to turn over, but it seemed his entire body was in the midst of a metamorphosis; he could feel himself physically altering from within: muscles, cartilage, bone, tissues, everything was changing, strengthening, healing.

  “Shhh,” whispered Sephera, stroking his brow. “Just lie still and let it happen, there, just let it happen, breathe in, hold it, now let it out slowly...that’s right...shhh, there...there....”

  He could hear little pops and cracks issuing from deep inside his body, could feel his muscles spasming, cramping, expanding, and then relaxing into their new and better shape.

  He had no idea how long it took, only that when he at last had the strength to sit up he no longer felt like the same man. He looked at his hands and saw that the few dim liver spots that had begun appearing on them a couple of years ago were gone. The flesh was longer as deeply-lined as it had been. He felt his chest, his arms, his face. The shape of him did not feel all that different than before, but what existed within that shape...dear God, he was changed.