In Silent Graves

by Gary A Braunbeck

  —and at the point where the two intersected, a cluster of small markings in jaundiced yellow.

  “What are those?” asked Fran.

  Ariadne magnified the cluster.

  Fran puzzled at the sight. “They look...almost like stars.”

  “They are. On the Mount of Jupiter or Apollo, they mean great success and wealth. On Mercury they mean a glorious, happy marriage....”

  Fran faced Ariadne. “What aren’t you telling me?”

  The fortune-teller looked back at the children happily watching their video and singing along with the voice of Vincent Price, then pulled in a deep breath and released it in a series of staggered bursts.

  “Jesus,” said Fran. “If you want my attention, you got it.”

  “Have you talked to your husband since moving to the shelter?”

  “What’s that got to do with—?”

  “Have you?”

  “Once—okay, twice. The psychologist says it’s good for us to call our husbands or boyfriends, let them know we’re all right—if they care—and to get things off our chests. The shelter gets part of its funding from Catholic Services, so they’re kind of big on aiming for reconciliation if it’s possible.”

  “Do you think there’s any chance you and Ted will get back together?”

  Fran shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe. If he gets his ass into counseling and does something about his temper, if he admits that there’re emotional problems he’s been carrying around and stops treating me like—okay, okay, please don’t look at me like that.

  “Maybe. Maybe we’ll get back together.”

  Ariadne took Fran’s hand in hers, examining it. “You still love him?”

  “Yeah....”

  “Sounds like you wish you didn’t.”

  “Sometimes I do wish that, but—” She pulled her hand away. “Why do you need to know?”

  Ariadne pointed at the screen. “When a Conic hand has a direct intersecting of the Line and Mount of Saturn, and when that intersection is marked by stars, it has only one meaning, and it’s never, never wrong: death by violence.”

  Deep within Fran McLachlan’s core, at the center of her interior world where all hopes, regrets, dreams, emotions, experiences, and sensations coalesced into something beyond articulation, a crack spread across the base, threatening to bring it all crashing down.

  Very quietly, words carefully measured, heart triphammering against her chest, she managed to get it out: “Say it.”

  “Ted’s going to kill Eric. I knew it the moment I held his hand.”

  “No...no...he w-w-wouldn’t do something like...like that….”

  “On purpose, no, probably not. But you know what happens when he loses his temper—”

  “—he doesn’t...he doesn’t think, he just—”

  “—he just lashes out at what- or whomever happens to be in his path, which is you and Eric—”

  “—don’t know how many times I’ve told him that he should just stay in his room when Daddy gets that way, but he won’t, he doesn’t like it when Ted hits me—”

  Ariadne cupped Fran’s face in her hands. “Fran? Look at me. Look at—there you go. Take a deep breath, hold it, hold it, now let it out. Good. Do you trust me?”

  “I...I d-don’t know—”

  “Yes, you do.”

  Fran looked into the face of the woman before her, and saw there nothing but concern, kindness, and deep, abiding compassion. “Yeah, I guess I do.”

  “Then you believe what I’m telling you?”

  “Oh, God, I...I don’t know....”

  The fortune-teller looked over her shoulder and called, “Sarah? Honey, would you come here for a minute?”

  “Aw, they’re just getting to the part with the clock!”

  “You’ve seen it before. Just come here for a second, okay?”

  “‘Kay.”

  She appeared a few seconds later.

  “Sarah, I’d like you to meet Eric’s mother.”

  The little girl held out her hand. “Pleased to meet you, ma’am.”

  Fran saw the little girl’s hand, saw the scar that ran from between her index and middle finger all the way down to her wrist (from when her father had gone at her with a pair of scissors), then looked up into her eyes and thought, Please, don’t let them be two different colors, but they were—the left gray, the right soft blue—and she tried to get her mouth to form words but everything was clogged in the bottom of her throat.

  “You okay, ma’am?” asked Sarah.

  “I’m...I’m fine,” Fran managed to say, shaking her hand. “Do you like Bobby Sherman records, Sarah?”

  The little girl’s face brightened. “Oh, yes! My favorite song is—”

  “‘Julie, Julie,’” said Fran.

  “How’d you know?”

  “Lucky guess.”

  Ariadne touched her daughter’s face. “Sorry that I interrupted your movie. Just for that, I’m buying pizza tonight.”

  “Pizza! Oh, boy!” And Sarah surpassed the speed of light once again to bring the news to Eric.

  “Don’t bother trying to tell yourself that you didn’t see her,” said Ariadne. “In her way, she’s as real as you or I.”

  Fran was shaking. “That w-was Connie Jacks! She w-was my best friend when I was a little girl. Her father used t-to hit her all the time, knock her around, but she never told anyone but me. She died when I was seven. Everyone thought that she’d fallen down the stairs and hit her head on the r-r-radiator, but I always thought that—”

  “—he did,” said Ariadne. “He beat her to death. If it’s any consolation, he blew his brains out about ten years ago. Guilt usually catches up with you, eventually.”

  Fran looked at Ariadne—having now decided that the woman couldn’t be human—and said: “What are you?”

  “I am a Hallower: a half-human descendant of the Grigori, who were among the Fallen Angels. In retaliation for God’s not having shared all Knowledge with them, the Fallen Angels stole the Book of Forbidden Knowledge and came down to Earth and gave countless Secrets to Man. Most of the Grigori coupled with human women during their time on Earth, and my race was the issue of that coupling. I am a direct descendant of the Fallen Angel Kokabel. He gave mankind the Forbidden Knowledge of Time and Science and assisted the Grigori Penemue in giving children the Knowledge of the lonely, bitter, and painful.” She lifted her left hand, palm facing outward. “He also tainted the Mark of the Archangel Iofiel, who holds dominion over the planet Saturn.” She placed the tip of her right index finger at the base of her left middle finger. “It’s because of Kokabel that the Mount of Saturn brings such deep sadness with it.

  “That’s why I’ve chosen to do what I do. In a hand or face, Fran, the mark of my ancestor’s sin can be found; I am the only being who can read the signs, and I will spend eternity trying to ease what sadness and pain I can.

  “Maybe you won’t ever reconcile with Ted, I can’t say—but what I do know is that there are six stars on Eric’s hand—one for each year that he will live, and the stars are in the Patriarchal Configuration—meaning the danger will come from Eric’s father. Maybe he’ll do it after you guys get back together, maybe he’ll do it after your divorce when it’s his turn to have Eric for the weekend—hell, who knows? He might come by Eric’s school and take him, he might snatch him from your backyard when you get your own place—it’s secondary to the fact that somehow he will kill Eric and you can’t prevent it. But I can.

  “Which is why you have to leave him with me. Take Eric with you, and he won’t live to see his seventh birthday.”

  Fran laughed—she couldn’t help it; it’s how she fought back panic. Rising from the chair, she felt light-headed. “You know, you really...really don’t give a person a chance to catch her breath.”

  “There’s not much time. What can I do to convince you?—and don’t ask me to sprout wings or perform some tacky parlor trick, though I can do either as a last resort.”

 
Fran glared at her. “Tell me how Connie Jacks can still be alive, how she can still be a little girl after all this time.”

  Ariadne rubbed her eyes. “I suppose the simplest explanation is to say that she’s a ghost who doesn’t know she’s a ghost.”

  “But you said she was as real as—”

  “—and she is. She can bruise, throw a temper tantrum, break a bone, muddy her good shoes, get a stomach-ache...sometime in the next eight months she’s going to need to have her appendix removed and in a year or so she’s going to have to get braces on her front teeth and she’s not going to be happy about it.

  “When a child—any child—perishes at someone else’s hand, their body dies, yes, but their promise lives on. What they should have grown up to be doesn’t cease to exist because the child is dead, it simply wanders alone on a different, more abstract plane that ours. Because I am what I am, I have the ability to...guide that potential into a new corporeality. Do you understand?”

  “You can...you can bring them back to life?”

  “Not in the way you’re thinking, no hocus-pocus or Frankenstein stuff. I give their displaced potential a new home—flesh—so that it can take up at the point where everything was snuffed. That girl in there, Sarah, is the girl Connie Jacks should have lived to become. The only thing different is her name and her memories, because as far as she knows I’m her mother. She has no memory of being beaten to death, of whimpering in lonely agony for someone to come help her because it never happened to her. To Sarah, the world is a new and wondrous place, filled with fairs and pizzas and mouse detectives, and she’ll never have to be afraid.”

  Fran tried to catch her breath. “I still don’t understand how—”

  Ariadne put a finger to her lips. “Shhh, not so loud—I don’t want them to hear you.

  “There are two kinds of time, Fran: chronos and kairos. Kairos is not measurable. In kairos, you simply are, from the moment of your birth on. You are, wholly and positively. Kairos is especially strong in children, because they haven’t learned to understand, let alone accept, concepts such as time and age and death. In children, kairos can break through chronos: when they’re playing safely, drawing a picture for Mommy or Daddy, taking the first taste of the first ice-cream cone of summer, when they sing along to songs in a Disney cartoon, there is only kairos. As long as a child thinks it’s immortal, it is.

  “Think of every living child as being the burning bush that Moses saw: surrounded by the flames of chronos, but untouched by the fire. In chronos you’re nothing more than a set of records, fingerprints, your social-security number, you’re always watching the clock, aware of time passing—but in kairos, you are Francine.

  “Children don’t know about chronos, and in my care, that’s how it remains.

  “Sarah’s not my only child, Fran. I’ve got hundreds more just like her, too many of whom died at the hands of a parent who was supposed to love them, care for them, protect them from harm. Some died at the hands of family friends, or suffered unspeakable deaths inflicted on them by people who stole them away for their twisted pleasures. I have babies, some who lived less than a month because they were starved or beaten or dumped in trash cans or left out in the cold to freeze to death or locked in cars on summer days to slowly suffocate—but that can’t touch them now because in my care they live only in kairos. Chronos isn’t part of them any longer.

  “I will save as many living children as I can from having to die at abusive, neglectful, violent hands.” She entered a series of commands, and the flesh-colored, holographic copy of Eric’s hand was restored to the screen. The image magnified to focus on the stars, then focused deeper, to a series of markings beneath the stars.

  “Look closely, Fran. Do you see them?”

  “They look like...like squares.”

  “Those are the mark of kairos. They’re called the ‘Walls of Redress.’ They’re very faint on Eric’s hand, but you can see that there are six of them, one for each of the stars, and that if they were more solid, each would hold a star inside of it. The Walls of Redress are the promise of protection. No matter what danger is marked on the hand, if there is a square near or around it, the person can escape the danger if the signs are read in time.”

  “Why are they so faint?”

  “Because the part of the world in which they might or might not exist is still in flux; they can fully form in kairos or they can fade away in chronos. It depends on the decision you make.”

  Fran’s eyes began to tear. “Ohgod....”

  Ariadne grabbed Fran’s shoulders. “It’s all been arranged. When you leave here, take him around the fair once more, do whatever you want, but make certain that the last thing you do is ride the merry-go-round, and that you get off the ride before he does—who’ll notice? A tired mother walking a few steps ahead of her kid when the ride’s done?”

  “Who will—?”

  “Sarah will be there with some of her brothers or sisters and they’ll bring him back to me.”

  “But...Christ!...h-h-how can I...wh-what would I s-say to—?”

  “There are over six thousand people here today. Countless children disappear each year on fairgrounds, at carnivals or amusement parks. He won’t be living only among children like Sarah; there are hundreds of other children just like Eric in my care, children I got to before violence claimed them.”

  Fran gulped in air, trying to staunch her sobs. “I...I’ll...can I...come with you?”

  Slowly, sadly, Ariadne shook her head.

  Something inside Fran crumpled. “Why?”

  “Because the place we’re going is only for Hallowers and the children in their care.” A small, melancholy grin. “Think of it as the ultimate kids’ clubhouse: No Grownups Allowed.”

  “Will I ever...ever see him again? I don’t know if...if I could live without—”

  “Yes. It won’t be soon, but you’ll see him again. He’ll—and I know this isn’t much comfort—but he’ll write to you. A letter a week, a videotaped message four times a year; that’s my rule. Don’t worry if you move because his letters will arrive wherever you are every Friday, even if it’s a national holiday.” A short, wind-chime laugh. “We sort of have our own private delivery service.”

  She touched Fran’s cheek, lovingly. “I promise you, Fran, I swear he won’t forget about you, he won’t feel angry for your leaving him with me. He’ll miss you, because he loves you so much, but it will get easier as time goes on. He’ll never lose his love for you, and he’ll grow up to be everything you hoped and more. You will have your son back, one day, and there will be no love lost.

  “Don’t say anything right now. You’ve got a little while, so go on, take your son to the fair and make him laugh, make him smile, and be certain that you miss nothing—not a word, not a look, a touch, a whisper, nose-tweak, or kiss. The next few hours will have to last you for a good while. Waste no moment.

  “Go on. I’ll know your decision soon enough.”

  Fran called for Eric, then wiped her eyes and stared at Ariadne. “I don’t really believe in God, you know?”

  Ariadne shrugged. “Not a prerequisite for the service. The belief you’re talking about only has to work one way, anyhow.”

  “Good-bye, Ariadne.”

  “So long, Fran. Catch you on the flip side.”

  As they were leaving the tent, Eric turned back to Madame Ariadne and flashed his palm. “I got a angel hand.”

  The fortune-teller smiled. “You are a strange and goofy kid, Eric McLachlan.”

  “Yes, I am!”

  They stopped to play a few games (Eric won a small toy fire truck at the ring-toss booth), watched some clowns parade around, shared a soft pretzel, and then, suddenly, feeling as if she were a weary remnant of the young woman she once was, Fran McLachlan stood in the center of the midway holding her five-year-old son’s hand and trying not to think about the way her life had gone wrong.

  “Mommy,” said Eric, “what’s wrong? Did that lady say someth
ing bad to you?”

  She told him no, and asked him what he wanted to do, and he chose the merry-go-round.

  This time both of them rode on the tiger, and Eric’s laughter, in his mother’s ears, during those final moments of the ride, was the voice of forgiveness itself.

  “Can I go again?” he asked as Fran climbed down.

  “Sure, honey. Of course you can.” The attendant was walking by at that moment, so Fran gave him the last ticket.

  “You have fun,” she said to Eric.

  A happy bounce. “‘Kay. You...you stand out there and watch me, okay?”

  “Okay....”

  Steady.

  “I’ll wave at you when I go by.”

  Hang on.

  “Have you had a...a good time today, honey?”

  “Yeah! This was the best fun ever!”

  Oh shit, don’t let him see it.

  “I’m g-glad.” She leaned in and kissed his cheek. “I love you, Eric.”

  “Love you, too—better get off now, Mommy, so they can start the ride.”

  Not daring to look at her son’s face, Fran McLachlan turned around and left, catching a peripheral glimpse of Sarah getting onto the ride with two younger children whose hands she was holding: the protective big sister.

  Fran looked down at her hand and wondered what secrets were hidden there in the lines within the lines, the hand beneath the hand.

  Walking away from the merry-go-round, she was startled when a sudden, strong breeze whipped past, pulling the balloon-doll from her grip and sending it upward, soaring, free, rising on the wind toward a place where chronos had no place, where the children were safe and never wept or knew fear.

  Good-bye, she thought. Be happy.

  And was surprised to feel a smile on her face.

  * * *

  Not the greatest story I’ve ever written, but one in which I think the head and the heart were in the right place, and hopefully you’ll forgive it its clunks because of that.

  Obviously the two elements that carried over into Graves were the Hallowers (my invention) and the concepts of chronos and kairos. (I later brought those concepts into play, albeit peripherally, in the science fiction novel Time Was: Isaac Asimov’s I-Bots, which I co-wrote with the redoubtable Steve Perry. It was only during the writing of Graves that I decided to resurrect those concepts and grapple with them in depth.)