Death of the Body (Crossing Death) (30 page)

It was warm and clammy and the skin was loose around the bone as it gets with age, but I could still feel Elizabeth’s heartbeat as it pushed blood through her fingers.

Elizabeth spun and looked at my hand in her own as if she expected someone else. The look in her eyes as she sized up the gesture was somewhere between surprise and sadness, but at least the color of her eyes looked normal now. She gave my hand a light squeeze of acknowledgment, then dropped it and turned back to the fog.

I glanced over at Sister Chantale, whose half-smile seemed forced. “So what is your name these days?” I asked lightheartedly.

The smile faded, which made the old wrinkled face appear ghost-like in the fog. All signs of life within her seemed carried in her lips. I hadn’t noticed before how I only knew them to be upturned, which caused the wrinkles near the corner of her eyes to star outward. Without the smile, her face was less than expressionless.

“I actually took the name of my son, Simon. You must think that strange.”

We had walked a few feet from the large oak tree to a place that had benches carved out of marble. As we sat down, I found myself cursing the fog—I would have loved to see where I was and what this place looked like in the light. Between the hiking trails, the large oak tree, and the benches, it must have been some sort of park, but everything was unfamiliar to me. Every few feet I may have been in a different world for all I knew. My entire point of view was lost. The shadow of the large oak tree had even given way to new fog wafting in from all around us. I could still see the shadow of the small tree with the orange leaves, though. I had to keep reminding myself that not only was there not a person standing over there, but that even if there was, it wouldn’t have been Ralph.

Simon Chantale’s hand on my knee brought me back to her comments.

“Actually, it answers a lot of questions for me. I went to see a priest at the school,” I said.

“Father Paul. Yes, he called me,” Elizabeth interrupted.

“Yes. He said that you were living with Simon. Obviously I knew Simon couldn’t be…” I didn’t finish the sentence again when Simon Chantale’s face fell and her hand tightened on my knee.

“It made me curious,” I settled, resting my hand on hers in a show of solidarity. “Then to find you, Sister Chantale… I’m sorry. Simon. I thought you were dead.”

“In a lot of ways I am,” the old woman responded and her eyes seemed to glaze over like Elizabeth’s had done.

I blinked and those eyes were looking directly at me, now shining, wet with tears.

“Now look at me,” she chided herself, producing a handkerchief from her pocket and dabbing at her eyes.

I turned to Elizabeth who was watching Simon Chantale cry, judgmentally. She really was a bitch.

“Anyway,” I interrupted Elizabeth’s stare, purposely giving her a judging look of my own. She opened her mouth as if she were about to protest or make an excuse, but then closed it and waved her hand like she was waving her thought away.

I continued, “I wanted to come talk to you about the survivors from the orphanage.”

“What survivors?” she asked, and the question almost seemed menacing, like a serial killer asking “what bodies?” It took me a minute to process that she didn
’
t mean there were no survivors; she just didn’t know that I was asking about all of them as a collective.

“All of them,” I clarified, which seemed to satisfy her.

“Well, what would you like to know?”

“How many people survived,” I started. “Their names and where they are, for example, would be helpful.” I paused, and watched her reaction to the end of my question carefully. “How many have died of some sort of heart related issue?”

She didn’t flinch. She knew.

I watched as her gaze drifted down to my father’s ring. I felt it pulse, so icy on my finger that I flinched. Then her eyes snapped back up to mine—too quickly, like she hadn’t actually wanted me to notice that she had noticed the ring.

“You still wear that?” she covered, her eyes a bit harder than they were when we had first started talking. Hard like the eyes I used to know when she was a nun. I could almost imagine her in her habit again, throwing chalk at my head.

“It’s the only tie I have to my family.”

“I see. Your family from another world,” her condescending chuckle as she spoke the last word made a sour taste rise up from the pit of my stomach into my mouth. I inhaled and swallowed to get rid of it.

“Have you ever had the ring examined? Do you know what it’s made of?” she continued.

“No.” I had no idea where the line of questioning was supposed to be leading. I wanted to ask about the other children, about demons and heart attacks, about whether she had seen or had been in some sort of dark situation since the orphanage. Hell, I even wanted to save her life and warn her if something really was after the survivors.

“Pity. I was sure you were going to tell me it came from some ore found in the magical ancestral mountains of Orenda.”

My ring pulsed and alarm bells went off in my head. I couldn’t remember what parts of Orenda I had mentioned to Elizabeth, but I certainly didn’t talk about the mountains. “You seem to know way more than you’re letting on,
Sister
,” I hissed the last word.

“Oh, come now,” Simon Chantale was patting my hand lightly, sensing my anger bubbling. Somehow, the motion worked, and I inhaled and swallowed again although I couldn’t seem to control my clenched jaw.

She continued, “We’ve been studying, Edmund. Ever since that day in the orphanage we’ve been looking for answers. We’ve been comparing notes and have learned quite a bit from the things you’ve said to us, especially in light of what we can remember and what we have in Father Michaels
’
journals. We’ve been searching for you for a long time, Edmund. We’ve been looking in the supernatural circles, the covens, the religious sects, everywhere we could think of to find answers.”

“And what have you found?”

“You. Finally you.”

“Well, I have to warn you,” I stuttered, getting back to the original point of our visit. “I think you’re both in danger. If something is killing the survivors from the orphanage, you’re both on a very short list.”

“Actually,” Elizabeth said, her voice back to being softer, her eyes back to a look of kindness, “we need to warn you. There are many people who have heard of you, Edmund. Many of them are Catholics who are highly interested in the orphanage. In those stories you’re referred to mostly by your given name, Alexander. But oddly enough, there are also many witches who have heard your name and whose covens have been tasked to find you.”

“Tasked by who?”

“Whom,” Simon Chantale corrected, then blushed. “Sorry, sometimes the teacher in me gets out.”

Elizabeth ignored her entirely. “Dark forces. Satanic influences. Covens are scared. Witches are dying.”

“Linda Rose never said any of this,” I said. I had a hard time believing covens of witches were searching for me or that witches were dying and Linda Rose didn’t know about it.

Elizabeth did that hand motion again where she seemed to dismiss something. “No, no. We got to her and her coven first. We found them here, actually. That damned tree sure seems to mean something to a lot of people.”

“We used the church records to find her before the other covens did,” Simon Chantale clarified. “If they knew that she had any sort of connection with you, they would have already turned her against you or killed her in the process. Nicholas, too.”

“So yes, people are dying. Heart attacks and all,” Elizabeth’s tone was devoid of emotion. She was delivering facts. “But no one is targeting survivors of the orphanage fiasco, they’re targeting
you
.”

“Who’s targeting me?”

“Some covens are darker. Some witches are weaker. Some will believe anything that comes to them in spirit or as a spirit guide. The ones who don’t know any better even allow themselves to be possessed for a modicum of power. Why do you think the church is so against witchcraft? It leads to gullibility.”

“Funny,” I allowed my thoughts to spill out of my head aloud, “a lot of people think the same thing about the Catholics.”

Elizabeth’s eyes narrowed, but her lips stayed silent. Then, she gave Simon Chantale a quick glance that conveyed something that had meaning to them.

“We need to leave. We’ve spent too much time with you already,” Simon Chantale spoke gently.

“But, I have more questions.”

“We’ve answered all that we can,” she responded. “We needed to deliver our warning and we have done so.”

“Well, can I see you again? I haven’t even had a chance to tell you what you’ve meant to me, and what it means to me that you’re alive.”

“Come on, Chantale,” Elizabeth chided, like a mother using a child’s full name when they’re in trouble.

“Good luck, dear boy,” Simon Chantale whispered, kissing me on the cheek. Her lips were cold, unlike her hand, which now slipped off my knee as she stood.

“We’ll see you soon,” Elizabeth called, linking arms with Simon Chantale and walking off into the fog.

I was entirely shocked by their hasty departure. For a few minutes I sat on the marble bench as the thick fog swirled around me. Then, something odd hit me and I cried out into the fog, “Hey wait a minute! The trail is—” but there was no response. My voice reverberated as if the fog were an impenetrable wall. “—that way,” I finished, although it was only loud enough for me to hear.

I had no idea where the two ex-nuns went, or where they were going, but wondered if there was another trail in the direction they headed, or if maybe they
had
gone the right way and I was just turned around. I decided I would try to find my way back to Mother Tree to get my bearings and thank her. I stood from the marble bench and took two steps before I tripped over something sticking up from the ground.

I caught myself as I tumbled, but my hands slipped over a smooth surface before finally grinding to a halt on the dirt and grass. My nose was inches from a slick granite slab that had a date carved into it.

It was a marker, too overgrown to be fully read. The date stamped in the stone was just nine years earlier, which made me wonder if I had stumbled onto the flagstone of the park marking the date it was completed, or some significant event that led to the park’s dedication.

My shin ached from whatever it had contacted with, and I turned to find I had ripped my pants on a large rock, which, on closer inspection, had an oddly familiar shape. No, it wasn’t a rock… it was a stone cross.

I was in a graveyard.

I sat, stunned from the fall but more bewildered, as a cold chill pulsed from my father’s ring and shot straight up my spine. The fog was still swirling after my fall, and I could almost make out the name on the headstone I had tripped over.

The fog was thickening fast. I needed to get back down the mountain but my hunch, and my father’s incredibly active and icy ring, pulled me toward the stone.

I got low to the ground where the fog was thinnest, my mind trying to make sense of what I was sure I couldn’t be seeing. The stone read “Sister Mary Elizabeth, Taken home to God.”

But there had to be plenty of Sister Mary Elizabeth’s. This couldn’t be the same Mary Elizabeth I was just talking to.

Just as I had that thought, a break between rolls of fog exposed a second stone. This one was undeniable. “Sister Mary Chantale. Now she sings with the angels.”

Twenty-One

The fog cleared as I came down off the mountain. I immediately got into Nicholas’s car and sat stunned for a few moments listening to the sound of my heart pumping blood into my brain. My stomach felt tense, even though I left the contents of it somewhere back in the graveyard.

I couldn’t decide what I had just seen. I’d encountered demons and shadows, all evil and destructive, but never a ghost—not like that. The nuns were warm. They smelled alive. They looked aged. Were they evil like the energumen of my childhood? Did Joshua send them? Did an angel? Did God?

I turned the key to the ignition and checked my phone, which I had stupidly left in the car. The battery gauge flashed red and the number on the clock surprised me. Eight p.m. I had been up on the mountain for over twelve hours.

I tried to organize my thoughts to account for the length of time. Maybe my conversation with Mother Tree had lasted longer than I had thought? Maybe somehow talking to the late Sister Mary Elizabeth and Sister Mary Chantale somehow sped up time? I didn’t know and the cognitive dissonance was enough for me to consider on one final possibility: maybe I was going crazy.

I shoved that thought out of my head and settled on not knowing. My brain switched gears immediately as I scrolled through my text messages: five from Xia, three from Nicholas, and one from Henric.

Meet at the store for drinks?

I responded to that one first.
Running late. On my way. About an hour.

I was halfway through Xia’s second text message when the response came.
No problem. Working on a cow anyway. You can help me stock the meat first.