by E. Archer
It was also, though thousands of leagues under the sea, blessedly dry.
The third thing Ralph noticed was a distinct lack of ghosts and zombies. The people who passed him looked like normal peasant folk, if understandably more preoccupied. He had materialized high in the branches of a deadwood tree, and as he worked to gain his bearings he watched the commoners pass in and out of their slate city. He was eager to get on with his search for Beatrice. First, though, he had to determine whether the people down here would try to kill him.
Wait — he was dead. Could he still be killed?
The idea of being dead made him anxious, and to divert himself he guessed what the hair color of the passing peasants would be, were it not gray. Identifying blonds was easy; distinguishing reds from browns was significantly more difficult.
He eavesdropped on their conversations, listening for Beatrice’s name. They talked mainly of peasanty things, bread loaves and taxes and hounds. Eventually Ralph started to hear one word repeated over and over — “clutch.” It was a term that he had only ever known to be applied to secondhand cars, and he couldn’t imagine how it could relate to a fantastic land. He rolled to hear better.
The conversationalists in question were a pair of washerwomen (both with hair that would probably be gray in any context, Ralph noted), lugging basketfuls of wet clothing toward the gate and resting every few paces. Their names, he very soon surmised, were Ada and Alda. “I heard,” Ada said, “that Antonia has felt the Clutch.”
“No! When?”
“This morning. She was passing programs out for services, and suddenly she went even whiter than she usually is. She tried to cover it up — you know Antonia — but we all knew what had happened.”
Alda tsked. “I don’t understand how people think they can hide it. You’d think, given all that’s happened, that people wouldn’t still try to keep secrets.”
Ada grunted and gave her laundry basket a tug.
“Ada? You haven’t felt it, have you?”
“No,” Ada snapped. “Of course not.”
They pulled their baskets in silence. They were drawing out of range — Ralph had to crawl to the edge of a branch to hear them. “How long has Antonia been with us?” Ada asked.
“No one remembers exactly. Aurelio tried to calculate it, after I told him she’d felt the Clutch. He thinks it was forty-one days or so.”
Ada sighed mechanically, in the manner of people reading of morbid but far-off things. “Poor Antonia. Now a filthy undead.”
Alda shook her head. “So sad.”
“Let us lay our trust in Gid.”
“Yes, let us lay our trust in Him.”
They crested a hill and were gone.
Ralph descended from the tree. The sun seemed to be setting (it was tough to tell without color), and he imagined it would be prudent to be behind walls after nightfall.
The city reminded him of Durbanshire and Chessie’s castle, in that the townsfolk would stare studiously at the ground, involve themselves in the stitching of their garments, anything to avoid meeting Ralph’s outsider eyes. As he passed along the cobblestone streets he began to feel very much alone, to an extent he hadn’t felt since that terrible year when he couldn’t attend birthday parties and had been mercilessly teased about his paladin.
He began sneaking glances at himself to see what could be so off-putting about his appearance. There wasn’t anything so odd about him, was there? Pants and a T-shirt, its red stained in rings with the dried salt of the sea. Hair greasy but fairly tamed, shoes soggy but with nice — then he realized it: He was in color.
He passed through the town as if he were a ship’s prow, crowds of locals wordlessly falling to either side. He beat back his sudden sense of loneliness by focusing on memorizing the lay of the town, noting that he passed nothing but residences — no bars, no inns. And no Beatrice. As nightfall drew nearer, Ralph climbed a set of stone steps and wandered the city battlements, eventually perching on the edge and watching the gray sun draw back its light to reveal the moon.
During the earliest part of man’s existence, he was in constant contact with the dead. Ceremonies, phantom voices, tombs, all provided a means to access those who were no longer alive. Those who were yet living —
Ralph was startled to hear the book’s narration broadcast in his head. — would speak to those who were already gone, and so knew what to expect upon their own deaths, learning that the stage between life and death was not short. Purgatory Main Isle was divided into two cities, that of the Recently-Living and that of the Soon-to-be-Dead. Half a being’s time would be spent in the first city, and then he would feel the Clutch and pass to the second, only to drop into farther, even more gruesome, realms once that second period had passed.
“Excuse me,” Ralph called to the invisible catwalks. “Hello?”
The citizens of the two cities used to mingle freely, the Recently-Living and the Soon-to-be-Dead sharing their slow declines. But the Soon-to-be-Dead (which is how they have chosen to call themselves now that “undead” has become so overdone) were stinky, and had correspondingly dismal outlooks on life. So, many ages ago, the mayor of the Recently-Living city decided that if he forbade the Soon-to-be-Dead from visiting the Recently-Living’s city, their nastiness would stop making everyone even gloomier than they already were. So a decree was passed. Though he banned travel between the city-states, in the interests of diplomacy the Recently-Living mayor offered to send an emissary to the border of the two cities once every three years, if the Soon-to-be-Dead would do the same.
The Soon-to-be-Dead have never sent a single emissary. Every three years, one of the Recently-Living would travel to the same old rotting wooden table set up in the woods and wait until dawn for a ghostly emissary that never arrived.
So it has been for thousands of years.
Until now.
“Until now?” Ralph yelled up to the catwalks.
But the narrator pretended not to hear him.
Ralph cheekily repeated his question.
The narration shut off entirely. It couldn’t reward such character pertness.
CHAPTER LIII
“Hey!” Ralph yelled. “You come down here and tell me precisely what’s going on!”
The city’s night watchmen eyed Ralph suspiciously, for it’s very difficult to carry off yelling at the night sky without looking shifty.
Ralph was frustrated. He felt that in some ways he might as well still have been bedridden in Regina’s cottage, listening to a tale told on a stupid teddy bear. Clearly, he realized, the story transpiring around him was directed by forces much more powerful than he. But rather than give in to its currents, as any well-behaved character would do, he rankled.
Lucky for our despairing Ralph, the death count of this novel thus far was high, which meant a flood of fresh beings entering Purgatory. What with the hundreds of characters dispatched over the course of these three plots, one or two familiar faces were bound to have been randomly selected to appear in Purgatory Main Isle. And one of them came walking along right then.
Or, more accurately, flying.
Yes, it was Prestidigitator. Not the Daphne impersonation, but the real fairy, who had died back in the bunny blast and had been assigned to PMI before the mass death of the Snow Queen’s Flood. She had been scouring the city of the Recently-Living for some time, hoping to find Ralph or Cecil, and her searching had gotten more and more frantic, since she had recently felt the Clutch and knew she would soon pass over to the Soon-to-be-Dead. Sure, hunting continually meant getting no sleep for a week — but there was plenty of time to sleep once she was totally dead, right?
You can imagine her delight to come upon Ralph. Granted, her glee was tempered when she saw Ralph crazily yelling at the sky, but it was immense nonetheless. She alighted on his shoulder and wrapped her daisy-pale fairy arms around his neck.
“Ralph!” she squeaked in joy. “You’ve died!”
Being reminded of his predicament didn’t h
elp Ralph’s mood. But there’s no overestimating the charm of Prestidigitator’s button features. He embraced her.
Once he’d released her they exchanged whatever pleasantries they could think of while in Purgatory. “Have you … felt the Clutch yet?” she eventually asked, nervously nibbling on a wingtip.
“No, I don’t think so,” he said.
Prestidigitator gasped, the gust of which pulled her forward a few inches. “Oh! Of course you wouldn’t — you’re in color!”
Ralph peered at his clothing. “Yes, I suppose I am. Any idea what that’s about?”
Prestidigitator shook her head, stunned.
Ralph then took a deep breath and recounted his recent adventures in search of Beatrice, culminating in his apparent death on the baleen of a whale, his arrival in Purgatory Main Isle, and hearing the narration broadcast in his head.
Prestidigitator was unimpressed, as fairies will be, at something as banal as a book narrating itself to one of its characters. But Purgatory politics had her fascinated. “So they send an emissary every few years, huh?”
“Every three years, yeah. If the jerk narrator is to be trusted.”
A nearby tree fell on the city wall and nearly flattened Ralph, who sprang to his feet in alarm. At this point any true character should have been quaking in fear at the awesome power of the Book; but instead, as Ralph was a testy young geek, he sulked.
“Well,” Prestidigitator said once she’d returned (she had been buffeted some fathoms away by the falling tree), “I’m going to guess — only a guess, mind you — that those three years will be up tonight.”
“Why do you think that?”
“That’s the way life works when you’re a fairy. Stick with me.”
“Do you know where the rotten table is?” Ralph asked.
Prestidigitator shivered. “Yes.”
The trail to the border led through more territories than a trail rightfully should. At first it was a forest lane, then a rocky mountain path, then a gravel perimeter of a skating lake, then a crystal canyon bridge, then a rope bridge in a wood canopy, then an underground tunnel, all in only an hour of hiking. It was like the whole world had been compressed to the snow globe scale of Purgatory Main Isle. Ralph, awed into silence, held Prestidigitator’s hand as they progressed.
The quality of the grayscale was changing, the darks sliding on a continuum from tweed to sepia to gunmetal to a set of flat tones, from the black-and-white of film to that of newsprint. By the time they reached the perimeter clearing, the only colors remaining were pure black and pure white with no shading in between, so that they looked to be traveling through a land of simple cutouts and low-tech photocopies.
There was no vegetation in the narrow clearing, just shadowed chalk. At one side of a rough-cut table, flipping the crumbling pages of a leather-bound book, was the Recently-Living emissary. He appeared to have died sometime in the nineteenth century; he wore upon his head a tall traveling hat, on which the velvet had frayed and stood out like a mist of fuzzy curls. His long coat was shapeless from a century of wear.
“Do we introduce ourselves?” Ralph wondered to Prestidigitator from where they were hidden behind a tree at the edge of the chilly glen. “Or is that forbidden? What do you think?”
Prestidigitator wrapped a wing around Ralph’s mouth. For, across the clearing, a second figure had emerged.
The emissary coughed twice in shock, straightened his old coat, and squinted.
Through the crackling branches lurched an undead creature.
Conventional storytelling sets up a rather arbitrary distinction between the skeleton and the zombie. The story usually goes thusly: Zombies are lumbering, pallid creatures with a good amount of flesh dangling from them, while skeletons are rickety figures that have long been picked clean of muscles, organs, and sinew. Now, of course, the months post-death are actually a slow process of decomposition. Sure, you start out looking zombie-ish, but as chunks of flesh rot and fall away you wind up looking more and more like a skeleton. So it’s foolish to say there’s one group of zombies, here, and one group of skeletons, there, as foolish as saying everyone is either kind or mean, smart or dumb, feminine or masculine. This particular undead had a fair amount of muscle remaining around her spinal column and a big goopy piece of flesh on one knee, and had managed to retain a chunk of brain that dangled limply from one side of her fractured skull like a wet sock. When she spoke, she revealed one circular staircase of a tooth in her jaw. You can call her a skeleton or a zombie — I’ll call her an undead and be done with it.
The Recently-Living emissary closed his book and made the sign of the cross as the undead woman shuffled toward the table. For a diplomat, he seemed entirely unprepared to encounter anyone. After removing his hat, he flicked his fingers through his hair (literally: one hair), placed the hat neatly on the table, stood up, held out his hand as if for a shake, thought better of it, sat down, and put his hat back on. Then he took the hat back off and held it over his nose, for the other emissary was very stinky.
The Soon-to-be-Dead emissary didn’t sit at the table (the Recently-Living emissary thought this was to intimidate him, though little did he know that it was only because the undead find it very hard to regain a standing position without the benefit of cartilage), and when she spoke it was with a booming voice that emerged from the center of her carved-out chest. “Those you call undead have a demand. We have decided that the boundary between the lands of the Recently-Living and the Soon-to-be-Dead is unfair. The Recently-Living have too much lollipop and sunbeam, the Soon-to-be-Dead too much hangnail and gloom. We thereby insist that the boundary be redrawn.”
The Recently-Living emissary worked hard to formulate a response as he watched one of the Soon-to-be-Dead’s lips fall off. “Oh?” he said, gagging.
“We have thought long about how best to do this. You have no choice but to accept our plan.”
“I say, that sounds most unfair.” The Recently-Living emissary was about to continue, but was stilled by the undead emissary’s angry expression, underscored by a sudden throbbing of her exposed brain.
“The Soon-to-be-Dead’s plan is that this night, at the stroke of midnight, after the last rays of the white sun have disappeared, the Soon-to-be-Dead and the Recently-Living will send their fastest riders from the city gates. Where the two horsemen collide, the boundary will be.”
The Recently-Living emissary found his voice. “This is a landgrab? And based on how fast we are? That’s ridiculous.” He paused, thinking for a moment. “I’m not even sure we have any horses.”
The Soon-to-be-Dead emissary extracted a piece of parchment from between her rotting leg muscles. “The undead have written their demand for your superiors to peruse. At midnight, we will send our ghost queen, Annabelle, racing toward you.”
The Recently-Living emissary pulled the damp paper from her hands. “You want me to bring this back to Lord Gid?”
“No,” the undead emissary said. “We wish one of the three watching to bring it back.” And with that, she cleanly sunk the remaining bones of a hand into the Now-Recently-Recently-Living emissary’s stomach. His guts shivered out over her skeletal hand like so much cream. He twitched and slumped over the table as the undead emissary shuffled away.
“Ralph!” Prestidigitator squeaked once they were again alone. “What was all of that about?”
“I don’t know,” Ralph said, his stomach heaving. He stepped into the clearing. “But she said there were three of us.”
He spun around. “Who’s there?” he called.
There was a rustling in a thicket, and who should emerge but Beatrice, plain and lovely Beatrice.
CHAPTER LIV
Beatrice stepped over the barren chalk ground and checked the pulse of the Now-Thoroughly-Dead-But-Recently-Living emissary.1
“Beatrice?” Ralph called. “Is that you?”
But she ignored him. Already she was tearing toward the Soon-to-be-Dead city.
Ralph sprinted to c
atch up with her. “Where are you going?”
“I won’t be able to find the Soon-to-be-Dead city on my own,” she panted. “Tailing the emissary is my only chance of seeing my mother again.”
“Your mother is a zombie?” Ralph asked.
“She’s not in the Recently-Living city. Either she’s undead or she’s gone entirely. And you heard the emissary say the name of the ghost queen was Annabelle. This is my chance to find out if it’s her.”
They reached a line of charcoal trees. “I have to run,” she said. “The trail is getting cold.”
“I’m coming with you,” Ralph said firmly.
“I’d try to talk you out of it,” Beatrice said, “but I’m terrified of doing this alone.”
“Let’s go.”
“Someone needs to deliver the undead’s parchment to the Recently-Living.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Prestidigitator said. She had already flitted to the shoulders of the dead emissary and picked up the rank decree. She nodded dutifully in Ralph and Beatrice’s direction, then zipped toward the Recently-Living city.
Beatrice and Ralph began their dash into the realm of the undead.
1n.b.: What happens when someone who is already dead dies is actually quite complex, and not always the outcome one would expect. I recommend that those further interested consult After the Afterlife: Under the Underworld or works of similar scholarly merit.
CHAPTER LV
Shadows moved in the oily light, creeping closer with each step Ralph and Beatrice took. Some were shapes and some were figures, always growing and shrinking. They were everywhere Ralph and Beatrice looked, thronging the path and tangling in the breezes above.
As they chased the undead emissary, Ralph and Beatrice sprinted through territories similar to those Ralph had passed through to come to the clearing, only in washed-out shades and reversed order. By the time they reached the end, even the grayness had seeped out. The landscape was an overexposed white, as if etched in scrimshaw and left to bleach, and was even more thickly teeming with shadows. Ralph and Beatrice slipped between them, hands held tightly.