Heartsick
Page 19
Heavy velvet draperies and dark wood. Hundreds of people wearing enough diamonds to create a new ice age. Karissa passed among them like a little ambassador, shaking hands and taking pictures with everyone who asked. Peppermint rested languid upon her shoulders, sporting a bow tie that matched her dress.
Brass eyeglasses with violet lenses had been placed in the center of each seat. Rue looked through her pair and discovered that she could see inside everyone in the theater, the glasses revealing, not organs or skeletons, but the bright light that filled everyone’s torso or head. Often both.
Other people had also discovered the glasses and were gazing upon one another. Gasping.
“Took us all weekend to get them working.” Stanton shoved the glasses on his seat to the floor, unimpressed with them.
Rue tapped the violet lenses. “The backstabber corneas!”
“Dad thought he could use glowfish, but the fish kept exploding. They’re too unstable out of the water. So Sterling and I came up with backstabber corneas. If you alter them just enough, you can see through people. See their souls.”
Rue was as full of light as everyone else. A different kind of light though. Curious, Rue lowered the glasses and blew into her palm. Her breath grew increasingly hotter until it became visible tendrils of light—orange and purple and green swirling into a bright ball that floated above her hand. Even without the glasses she could see it, once it was outside her body, a colorful ball of light, zippy and friendly, unlike the white, static human souls.
“How is that possible?” said Sterling as she inhaled the bit of soul back into her body.
“I’ve always been able to control my body—how often I breathe, whether or not to sweat or bleed—as long as my heart is in good shape.”
“But I thought you said your soul controls all that.”
“Only when I can’t.”
She adjusted the zoom wheels that circled the lenses and brought the twins into focus. She didn’t like what she saw.
“Yours are so small and dim—why is that? I thought you said Westwood didn’t want the whole thing.”
“Every time Dad takes a bit of Stanton’s soul, half of mine replaces his. We don’t have a separate soul; we’ve just been sharing the one. We thought it was a twin thing, but we’ve seen twins around town with separate souls. Clearly something went wrong with us.”
Rue was as amazed by them as they were by her.
“Dad fed us Thyme’s soul hoping it would help ours regenerate," Stanton said, "since heartless have regenerative abilities. It didn’t.”
“Why would Thyme help you do anything? He wouldn’t even help himself.”
Karissa bounced over to them just as the lights began to dim.
“Look at the Mayor!” she said. “Did you see? Everybody’s talking about it.”
Rue peeked and nearly yelped. Not only was the Mayor’s soul invisible, so was she. An empty space surrounded by Mortmaine. But only when viewed through the glasses.
“I’m gonna ask her why she doesn’t have a soul.”
“You’re not gonna ask the Mayor anything, you hear?”
Karissa stuck out her tongue at Sterling, but it went unnoticed by the twins in the dark.
The crowd hushed as a lone spotlight lit the stage.
Westwood stood in the light; strangely, it seemed as if the light came from within him, illuminating even his teeth to a pearly brilliance, an eerie effect in the dark.
“Is it possible to resurrect a corpse?” Westwood asked, his voice carrying easily to the very back row. “Not can you animate dead flesh—make it walk and talk and do your bidding—but can you bring back the person? That indefinable essence that creates a specific individual? I think the answer is yes.”
He removed a pair of violet-lensed glasses from inside his tuxedo jacket.
“If you’ve already been using these, you’ve realized that they allow you to see a person’s soul. Easy enough if the person is living, but what about the dead?
“The soul generally disappears three days after death, but leaves traces of itself behind. I believe you can use those traces to draw the soul back from eternity.”
Grissel and Drabbin appeared on the stage in a light that seemed to leap from Westwood’s finger. The audience gasped, nearly screamed. Because of Drabbin’s melted face, because neither he nor Grissel had a soul, because they were wheeling in a corpse on a gurney. Possibly all of the above. Staring at them through the glasses was deeply unsettling like staring at silhouettes of nothingness. Human-shaped black holes.
Grissel and Drabbin rolled the corpse before Westwood, who briefly disappeared into the darkness, but returned with a small table upon which sat an elegantly grotesque machine. Elegant because its long cylindrical design gave an impression of sculpture. Grotesque because it was constructed primarily of human bone. The base upon which it rested was metallic. Electronic. Westwood pushed several buttons, as Drabbin and Grissel stepped out of the light, and then addressed the audience.
“This machine is the animus apparatus. I designed it to catch and hold souls, something that is quite difficult otherwise. Souls can’t be held by human hands or seen with human eyes, but with the right technology, anything can be trapped.”
He went to the gurney and removed something from it—a severed hand.
“If you’ll look through your glasses, you’ll notice the hand has a faint glimmer. Now look at the corpse.” He pulled back the sheet, revealing a nude male body. “Do you see it? The soul is still there, beaming away, but if you’ll look along the limbs, you’ll see a similar glimmer, particles of soul that have migrated and settled along the body. Now, what I’ve learned is that if you liberate these scattered particles of soul, they will rejoin and attempt to find the larger soul they belong to. I’ll show you what I mean.”
Westwood dropped the hand into the bone machine and turned it on. A faint banging and then silence. “The machine acts as a centrifuge,” said Westwood. “The soul particles will fly out of the hand and then merge into a ball of light. See it rise above the mouth of the machine?”
The audience could, but only through the glasses.
“Remember I said the soul, once gathered together like this, would rejoin the larger soul whence it came? The apparatus is holding it trapped, so that it can’t float over to the corpse. However, the attraction works both ways.”
Even as he spoke, the huge ball of light in the corpse’s chest arose and floated toward the miniature version of itself held captive over the whirring bone machine. It absorbed the smaller bit of soul and hovered fitfully, unable to escape its pull.
“Usually at the moment of death, souls escape into eternity, but there are a few exceptions. The most common exception are people who’ve had near-death experiences. The souls of such people remain in the body for much longer than three days after death. Like this person, who has been dead just under a week. I’d like to introduce you to the owner of this particular soul.”
Grissel came onstage and stood beside Westwood. “Grissel, as you’ve surely seen by now, has no soul. Hers and Drabbin’s were devoured by a soul-eater. When a person in Grissel’s condition inhales anywhere near an untethered soul, like this one.” He pointed to the light hovering over the bone machine. “It rushes straight into the vacuum of the soulless person’s body. Assuming it’s not being held in place by an animus apparatus of course.” Westwood switched off the machine and the soul began to float away.
“Inhale, Grissel,” Westwood ordered.
Grissel took a huge breath and, like Westwood said, the soul flooded in through her nose and mouth, seemed to choke her at one point, and then her demeanor changed. She lost her self-confidence, and her ease on stage greatly diminished. She undid her bun and draped her hair over her shoulder. Chewed it.
Westwood said, “What’s your name?”
“Kevin.” Grissel, or Kevin in Grissel’s body, looked from him to the audience in almost moronic confusion. “What is this place?”
“I don’t remember,” he said, surprised. “Some place warm and lovely, but I can’t—” It was then that he saw the corpse on the gurney, his handless arm, his rotting flesh.
Rue actually saw it, the exact moment Kevin’s mind snapped.
“I’m afraid we won’t be able to get more out of him,” Westwood told the audience, over the screaming. “It can be traumatic coming back from the dead. No one seems to like it.”
He muscled Kevin over to the machine and turned it on, holding his screaming face over it. Through the glasses everyone saw his soul spew from Grissel’s body and bob over the bone machine, trapped once again.
Grissel fell to the floor, writhing, and Drabbin came onstage to scoop her into his arms.
“Are you okay, Grissel?” Westwood asked.
“Yes,” she said, even though she was in obvious pain. “But I don’t need to do that again in a hurry.” Drabbin disappeared with her into the darkness.
“I hope you didn’t find that too cruel,” said Westwood, turning off the bone machine. “But it’s painful to lose a soul, even one that doesn’t belong to you.”
The soul floated away once again and this time, with no soulless person to suck it in, the soul dissipated, just as Westwood had said it would. “Good,” he said, once the soul was completely gone. “Now poor Kevin can go back to that lovely, warm place.”
Westwood pushed the bone machine away until only he was in the spotlight. “Kevin was less than a week dead,” he said, “and so I still don’t know whether it’s possible to call back a soul that’s been dead longer or how to make the transition less jarring, but I am and will forever remain interested in learning the answers. Thank you.”
The stunned silence was broken by thunderous applause that went on for several minutes. It took several more minutes before the cheering ended and the theater emptied, and when it did, Rue and the Westwood children remained seated.
“That’s the real experiment, isn’t it?” said Rue, shocked. “He wants to bring a soul back from eternity.” She looked at the twins. “He wants to bring your mother back from the dead.”
“We’re so close, Rue,” said Karissa, bouncing in her seat. “I can almost smell her!”
Chapter 26
“Let me get this straight,” Rue said, frozen in the theater seat. “You’re going to bring Elnora back from the dead, put her in Grissel’s body, and then what?”
“Be together,” said Stanton. “The way we always should have been. Dad figures he can break our soul down into separate elements, and that one of those elements will be Mother’s soul—at least a piece of it. If so, he’ll use it to call her back.”
“But he hasn’t managed it yet,” said Sterling. “Pretty soon we won’t have any soul to separate. I don’t think that souls are made that way anyway, from parents’ souls mingling and then creating their kids’ souls. I think each soul is unique.”
“Obviously we’re hoping Sterling’s wrong,” said Stanton. “There may be another way to get a piece of mother’s soul, but it's risky. Too big a risk to take considering we haven't even figured out a way to open a door to eternity.”
“Eternity? Are you crazy?”
“Maybe a little.”
“The entire universe could unravel!”
“Maybe, maybe not. Depends on which book you read.”
While Rue was still reeling from the twins’ utter nonchalance about the possibility of destroying the fabric of reality, Karissa said:
“Shh! The Mayor.”
They silenced as Westwood and the Mayor, in her swirling black robe, traversed the lit stage.
“You remind me of Runyon,” the Mayor was saying, circling Westwood’s bone machine. “Such cleverness. Runyon knew how to manipulate souls too. Even ones that had been long dead. And then he created a Key that could open doors to other worlds. No one had ever done that before.” She didn’t sound pleased about it. “It really threw the town off kilter. Runyon kept me on my toes. I think I grew a second set of toes just to keep up with him. It saddened me the day he went insane.”
“By insane, you mean refused to obey you.” Westwood said this as though the Mayor couldn’t kill, resurrect, and then kill him again with the twitch of her robe.
“Precisely. But I don’t have to worry about that with you. You wouldn’t attempt to meddle in things outside your wheelhouse.” She kept trying to catch his eye, but he refused to look at her. The Mayor had mirrors for eyes, and Westwood seemed uninterested in seeing himself.
“You’ve no need to worry about me.” He looked at his watch. “A shame Runyon isn’t around, though. I’d love to pick his brain.”
“I’ll tell you what he’s not here to say: the dead should stay dead.”
“You can’t believe that,” Westwood exclaimed. “You have power over the dead.”
“I’m not referring to myself. I’ve a certain flexibility in such matters because I, of course, am a god and know many things. For instance”—she caught his gaze, caught and squeezed from the way he winced—“there are doors that should never be opened. And if a door has already been opened, you would do well to lock it.”
She removed a shiny brass key from the massive keyring at her waist and gave it to Westwood. “If you turn it three times, clockwise, the door will lock and we will have no need to speak further about this.”
“With all due respect, Mayor,” Westwood said, shoving the key in a pocket, “I know what I’m doing.”
“Do you?” She waited, but when Westwood would not cower before her, she sighed exasperated. “I know you miss your wife. I’ve had to dissuade you from pursuing her once before, not out of cruelty, but for your own good.”
“That was a lapse of judgment on my part. I now have other ways to get what I want.”
“What you want is aberrant. Plucking apples from the lowest branch, when what you really want is to pluck the very stars from the sky. Apples are not stars. Or does your hand need to melt before you can appreciate the difference?”
“I understand the risk.”
“Mortals understand nothing. Certainly nothing of death, yet you seek to control something of which you are ignorant.” She kicked the table upon which the bone machine rested and sent it rolling offstage. Smiled when the crunch of bone echoed back to her. “But I suppose a man as clever as you must do as he pleases. Will it please you to save one dance for me at this ball of yours?”
“Nothing would make me happier,” said Westwood unhappily as they exited stage right.
“That’s it!” Sterling’s eyes were blazing.
So were Stanton’s who said, “Why didn’t we think of it before?”
“Think of what?” asked Rue. And then gasped. “Runyon Grist? The guy who knows how to bring back the dead? You’re going to ask him?”
“Runyon’s dead,” said Karissa. “You can’t ask dead people questions.”
“No, but we can ask his brain,” said Stanton. “It’s on permanent display at the museum.”
“But what good is a brain if the nerves and synapses and things aren’t working.”
“What the heck do you know about synapses?” Stanton asked Karissa, taken aback.
“I know stuff.”
“Guys, relax. If the thought extractor works the way it’s supposed to, it might not matter whether Runyon’s brain is operational. How do we know unless we try?”
“So what’s got you so excited?” asked Rue.
“The Five Keys, like the one Runyon made. We can use one.”
“To make a wish? Good luck. The key at Chery Glade only gives wishes once a year, the Ortiga key…well Mrs. Ortiga doesn’t allow any wishes since that time it got stolen, no one knows where the dark park one is, and I don’t know anyone who’s ever gotten a wish granted by Wet William.”
“He’s always full of excuses,” Karissa said, as though
reciting a line from her favorite fairy tale.
“But the one at Luna Swamp is guarded by the Lazarus snake,” Sterling said. “Lazarus can get us the piece of Mother’s soul we need.”
Rue said, “A piece from where? I thought your dad set her on fire?”
“Not all of her burned,” said Stanton. “After Dad dragged her body to the incinerator, a few of her teeth were still on the patio so I took them, and Sterling and I made a robot.” He looked embarrassed. “A mombot. We were twelve. Anyway, we put the teeth in and dressed it in her clothes, but it ran away.”
Sterling said, “I guess we made it too much like her. But if it’s out there, Lazarus can find it. There’s a price. Always a price, but it’s worth it.”
“Why’re you sad?” Sterling turned to Rue. “This is great news. Everything we’ve been working for is within reach.”
Rue said, “What if Elnora doesn’t want to come back?”
After a stunned silence, the Westwood children laughed at her.
Laughed and laughed.
Grissel drifted onto the dancefloor in a black, semi-transparent gown, gossamer strands of silk trailing behind, a doomed gentleman with beautiful gray hair on her arm. Drabbin had parked himself at the buffet table. He wore a mask, the same mask that the creature had worn on the steps of the House of Pain, the booji. Drabbin tried to feed himself, tugging at the mask to get to his mouth, but his entire lower face spilled free, causing one gentleman to faint, punch staining the floor beneath his tuxedo like blood.
The twins were across the room saying hi and nice to meet you and welcome to people Rue didn’t know, and Karissa was chatting with the Mayor.
“Daddy threw it away in the bushes.” Karissa showed the Mayor the key she had just given to Westwood on stage.
“Oh did he?” she said, icily.
“He did! Finders keepers, losers weepers. Will you sign it? That’ll make it extra lucky.”
The Mayor gripped the key in her fist and when she released it, the key had turned black.