by Cutter, Leah
I let my face fall back to its usual sate.
Susan believed what she’d shown me was the truth.
“It’s Hell behind that screen,” I assured her.
“No, no, no,” Susan muttered, turning back to her console, making a few adjustments, desperate gestures. “It’s Heaven. I made all the modifications my backers asked for. I know I have it right this time. I know it’s Heaven.”
“It isn’t real.” Maybe Susan had duped herself into believing her machine.
“But Betsy!” Susan exclaimed. “She showed you—”
“No.” I motioned Susan closer. Her eyes shone with mad despair.
I hated true believers.
She gasped at the pictures. “But—how—” Susan muttered to herself about quantum states and proximity. “Look, let me show you.”
Without warning, Susan dashed away, and suddenly my Heaven filled the mesh screen half-covering the portal again. My city shone under clear skies and brilliant stars, lit with ten thousand warm lights and hearts. I gave a deep groan. The picture wavered, but held on.
“Look,” I said. I took a picture with Betsy and showed it to Susan while backing away toward the stairs.
The captured image changed as if it were animated, the fog boiling away to black clouds and leaping flames.
“Just give me some more time,” Susan begged. “If I can find your Hell, I can reach your Heaven.”
“There is no scientific construct for either,” I told her. “You’ve tapped into my vision of the place, not the place itself.”
“Then where to do the artifacts go?” Susan countered.
“Somewhere in between,” I told her. Maybe like the place Betsy had been.
From the quick guilty look that crossed Susan’s face I knew her sponsors had told her that, too.
“Let it go, Susan. Find some other way to help my kind, if that’s what you really want to do.”
“No, give me another year. Please. Promise me you’ll come back here next Christmas, and we’ll try—”
“I don’t want to do this again,” I told her sternly, gesturing toward the fading vision of my eternal city.
“Please, you must,” Susan begged.
A holiday tradition of seeing the Heaven my life had denied while still unable to go there myself? Like the familial goodwill promised by the season only to be replaced with the reality of the drunken aunt, the abusive nephew, the unending sibling rivalry?
“No.” I shuddered. “You need to stop this. There is no hope.”
Susan shook her head. “There’s always hope.”
“Hope is for the living, not the dead.”
Susan’s eyes widened. “That’s not true.”
“Shut it down, Susan. Now.” Maybe because I was so close to her, the ghostly subsonics got through, and she shivered, growing very pale. But she looked stubbornly at me, her arms crossed over her chest. “You won’t stop, will you?”
Susan shook her head. “I can’t,” she said honestly. The gleam in her eyes shone bright and true, her obsession and madness clear.
“Then I’ll have to shut it down for you.”
“How?” she asked, curious and clearly not threatened.
“Doesn’t matter. Just know that I can,” I told her. Ghosts didn’t trust the living, never had. I wasn’t about to give away all our secrets. She would be gone by the time I started working with the fire.
“Give me until dawn. My notes—”
“Now, Susan.” I drew closer to her, slipping on the death’s-head mask again. I rounded on her so her back was to the stairs. “Run. While you still can.”
“But—”
“Run,” I growled, putting all the haunting menace I could into the single word.
I waited while she turned, hesitatingly, then finally walked back up the stairs. I growled one more warning before I went over to the console. She’d mentioned notes. A supply of notebooks, the old fashioned paper-bound ones, lay in neat stacks on her desk.
I took Toni’s lighter out of my pocket. Funny how the little Bics—any kind of firestarter, really—needed so little Fixing for a ghost to use.
The fire blossomed under my fingers and the paper caught easily. Though I couldn’t touch the flame—could barely feel it, actually—I could still direct it along singing electrical wires and vulnerable wooden sheeting.
The beast sparked at the first touch of the flame, its strange blue aura flaring orange before subsiding. The fire burned more quickly now.
I knew the Hell flames from the portal couldn’t reach out and kiss their earthly cousin, but it looked that way as the portal exploded. I instinctively protected myself by going down, into the earth, traveling as only a ghost could through the muddy clay beneath the foundation of the house. I rose just past the building, then joined Susan where she stood in the wide circular driveway, her arms wrapped over her chest, hugging herself. She looked much more pale than I remembered, but before I could ask, a loud whump came from the house and a belch of smoke seeped out the front window. The smoke detectors wailed loud enough to be heard out here.
“I saw my Heaven, once,” Susan murmured.
The smoke highlighted the fairy lights, making them look mystical and not as cheap.
“I’d expected it to be like yours, or a laboratory, someplace I could work. It was a beach, instead. All I can do right now is yearn for those empty, carefree days.”
More muffled explosions came from the house, and it shivered on its foundations.
“You could go to the beach now,” I said as we both took a step back.
“What’s the point?” Susan asked, trembling. “The machine showed me my Hell.” She looked at me with her pale ghost eyes, the madness much more apparent now.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I truly was. I should have realized she wouldn’t leave the house. “I didn’t intend for this.”
“I know. I did.”
“What? Why? You still had hope,” I told her, bewildered.
Susan shook her head. If she’d still been alive, her laughter would have been bitter and cruel. “My dad took away my hope when I was too young to know better. This was just smoke and mirrors. Like everything else. Like family and holidays.”
I wished I could have argued with her, but I couldn’t.
“What will you do now?” I asked as flames kicked up behind the fancy windows, fueled by the scripts that had been drawn there.
The second leading cause of fire now: protection against ghosts.
“I haven’t decided yet,” Susan said. She leaned away from me and pointed. Now I saw the portal, a real one, which stood just inside the front door.
I didn’t want to ask her which she’d seen more recently, her Heaven or her Hell. I hoped it was her beach. Either way, given the way her eyes seemed to spin on their own, I wasn’t optimistic. Even if it was Heaven, she was possibly too insane to go.
“I’ll leave you in peace to decide,” I told her. To step Beyond, even to Heaven, wasn’t always an easy thing.
“Thank you,” Susan said gravely.
I left her there contemplating her fate, promising myself that I’d try to care, this time. I would see if she was still around in a year’s time, maybe invite her to the Solstice gathering.
It would be the holidays, after all, and Susan was truly family now.
Author’s Note
When I wrote the first story in this world, I knew that there would be not one, but two additional stories set there. (And while writing this story I also stumbled across another that I’ll write sometime.) With the first story, I knew that Betsy was much more special than Andy realized, and that part of the continuing stories would be finding out more about her. She plays an even more prominent role in the next one.
Additional note from 2013: There are six short stories with these characters, set in this world. They’re all collected in “The Shredded Veil Mysteries.”
About The Author
Leah Cutter's first three novels (Paper Mage,
Caves of Buda, and The Jaguar and the Wolf) are all historical fantasies, set in diverse periods of time, such as Tang dynasty China, WWII Budapest, and the Viking era, respectively.
Her recent novels (Clockwork Kingdom, Zydeco Queen and the Creole Fairy Courts, and The Raven and the Dancing Tiger) are all contemporary fantasies, and set on the Oregon coast, in rural Louisiana, and around the city of Seattle, respectively.
Her short fiction includes fantasy, mystery, science fiction, and horror, and has been published in anthologies, magazines, and on the web.
Read more stories by this author at KnottedRoadPress.com.
Follow this author's blog at www.LeahCutter.com.
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