Silence (36 page)

Alison came to take the baby, who was now both clean and asleep, and Maria reached down to pick Andrew up and draw him into her lap. Then, her chin resting on the top of his head, she looked at Emma.

“He’l be here,” Emma said quietly. “He’l be trapped here, like al of the dead are trapped.”

“I want more time,” Maria whispered.

“We al do,” Emma whispered back. They were both silent for what seemed like a long time.

But Maria unfolded, stil carrying her son. “I heard what you said to Eric. If you do whatever it is you’re going to try, wil he —”

“He’l be able to leave.”

“But to where?”

“Someplace where there’s no pain,” Emma replied. “I haven’t seen it. I don’t know. But my father has. Al the dead have. They feel that it’s home—no, more like the ideal of home, a place where they’re wanted, a place where they belong and where where they’re wanted, a place where they belong and where they’re loved.”

Andrew said, quietly, sitting in the arms of his mother and stil looking up, “I want to go there. I’m dead, Mom.”

His mother closed her eyes and nodded. “I’m so sorry, Drew.

I’m sorry.”

But he reached up with one hand and touched her cheek, although he didn’t look away from whatever it was that drew his attention. “I can wait for you, there,” he told her in a faraway voice.

“Wil you?”

He nodded. “I’l wait forever. I’l wait for Stefan and Catherine, too.”

Maria swalowed and smiled. She was crying. Emma was not, by sheer force of wil. “Yes, Emma,” Maria said quietly. “We’re ready.”

Emma told the others what she wanted to do, but it only made sense to the dead. They stared at her for a moment with something that looked like hunger but was realy just a deep and terrible longing, sublimated because it was so pointless.

“Dad?”

“He’s not here, dear,” Margaret told her.

“But—”

“If you accomplish what you intend, I think he feels he’l have to leave you. The pul is very strong.”

“But he said he could find it no matter where he was.”

“He hasn’t just walked down the street.” In a more gentle “He hasn’t just walked down the street.” In a more gentle voice she added, “He’s not ready to leave you yet, and he doesn’t trust himself to stay. You can’t know what we’ve seen and what we long for. Because you can’t know, you don’t know how very hard it wil be for him. But he does know. And he’s not wiling or ready to leave you, not yet.”

“Is that because I don’t want to let him go?”

Margaret’s smile was almost gentle. It was also sad. “Partly, dear. I’m sorry.”

“How do I—”

But Margaret shook her head. “Only partly. The dead are what they are, and if you wil not make decisions for them, respect his. You’l need power for this, dear. And it wil be more power than you held when you faced Longland.”

Eric sucked in air. “Emma, don’t do this.”

“Why not?”

“Because she’s not teling you the whole truth.”

“Then you tel me.”

“You can’t—you might not—survive the taking of that much power. And even if you do, it might change you.”

“You mean, more change than seeing the dead and being able to leech the life out of them?”

He grimaced.

“She has a point,” Chase told him. Chase’s expression throughout had been very, very odd, and it wasn’t an odd that could be attributed to blistered skin and patchy red hair.

“Fuck you,” Eric said.

“Why? Eric, she’s going to try it anyway. You’ve known her “Why? Eric, she’s going to try it anyway. You’ve known her for long enough to know that. You might be able to interfere— but she won’t thank you.”

“She can’t do it.”

“Then she’l fail. What’s the big deal?”

Eric turned, then, to Margaret. But whatever he saw in her face gave him no strength and no hope. “I didn’t save you from the old man so you could commit suicide.”

“No. But that’s not what I’m trying to do.”

“You’l need the dead, dear.”

“I have—”

“More.”

Emma deflated. “I have no idea how to bind the dead. I don’t even think I want to know.”

“No, you don’t. But you already know. It’s a different binding,” Margaret added, “and it’s costly, for you, child. You pay for it, and we—the dead—touch a little bit of life again. But what you’l need to do this is far more than we gave you. If we give you everything we have, if we drive ourselves beyond the point of speech or perhaps even thought, we wil stil not give you enough.

“You need the dead,” Margaret added firmly.

She turned to the others. “Wil you help me?” she asked them.

“Wil you help me even if it means you have nothing left?”

As one, transfixed, they nodded.

“I think there are very, very few who would say no,”

Margaret told her.

Margaret told her.

Emma nodded. “Then I have to find a way to—to summon the dead. I can gather them, if I find them.” She glanced at Maria. And swalowed.

No.

She frowned. She could hear a voice, and she felt it as if it were a dead person’s voice, but none of them had spoken a word.

You have what you need, Emma Hall. Be what I could not be. Be what she could not be.

And then she saw the almost translucent image of an ancient, ancient woman, dressed in rags, her flesh like another layer of grimy cloth upon her skeleton. It was the old woman from the graveyard. Emma lifted a hand to cover her mouth, but she managed not to take more than a step back.

Margaret turned toward the old woman, and she bowed and fel silent, moving to alow this most ancient of ghosts to pass her.

“You’re not going to kiss me again.”

“No.”

Emma lowered her hand. Alison was staring at the side of her face, and she reddened. “Who are you talking about? Who couldn’t be, and what?”

The old woman shook her head. “If I had survived, I could not do what you wil try now. There is only one, in our long history, who could.”

“And she?”

The old woman fel silent.

“Emma—”

“Emma—”

They both, young and old, living and dead, turned to look at Eric. He also fel silent.

“It is dark, where the dead live. The light they long for has been denied them. But you have other light. Use it.”

Emma frowned, and then her eyes widened. She looked at her hands, at the hands that had gripped, for moments, the sides of a lantern in a distant graveyard. As she looked, she saw the sides of it appear, like a layer, against her skin. She saw the writing first, and then the wires, the folds of textured paper. She felt the ice and the cold of it, and it burned her as if it were fire.

But she’d held on to Maria Copis for longer, and that was worse.

Margaret was again utterly silent.

Eric flinched.

Ernest swore under his breath. “You gave her that?”

“I did not give it to her intentionaly,” the old woman replied, her gaze held by the growing light in Emma’s hands. “She took it.”

“You allowed it.”

The old woman did turn, then. “It was meant to be used,” she finaly said. “It was meant to be used this way. She knew nothing, and it was the light she reached for.” Turning once again to Emma, she continued. “Sometimes they exist shrouded in darkness; they cannot find the way. And then, Emma Hal, we find them, and we lead them home.”

When the lantern was solid, Emma lifted it. She shifted position, one hand at a time, until she held it by its top wire; it

position, one hand at a time, until she held it by its top wire; it swung wildly back and forth as if caught in a strong wind.

Georges whispered in a language that Emma didn’t understand. She meant to ask him what he saw but fel silent as the lantern began to glow. Its light, which had been so orange and then so blue, became a white that was almost blinding.

Almost.

It was brighter than the azure of clear sky; it was brighter than the sunlight. It spread as she watched it, touching the houses that were closest and passing beyond them as if it could blanket the entire city, yard by yard, as it traveled.

Georges came to stand by her side. She thought it was because he was nervous, but when she spared him a glance, she realized that he wasn’t; he was standing as close as possible to her because she was the center of that light, and that was where he wanted to be.

And in the distance, as her eyes acclimated to yet another change in color and texture, she saw that he wasn’t the only one.

From every street she could see, growing larger as they walked —or rode, or ran—the dead came.

THEY CAME IN ONES AND TWOS, to start, but as the time passed, the numbers grew. Eric swore, because Eric could see the dead. Maria didn’t swear, but a quick glance at her face told her this was more because she was holding a four-year-old than from any lack of desire.

Emma didn’t know the names of the dead, but she thought she should. They looked, or rather, felt, familiar to her. She saw the young, and the old, the strong and the infirm, the men and the women; she saw different shades of skin, heard the traces of different languages. From the language she did understand, she thought that the voices were raised in prayer.

What these dead didn’t do, apparently, was see each other.

They saw her. They saw the lantern that she held in her hand. It was enough to draw them, like moths to flame. And Emma very dearly did not want to be the flame that consumed them.

“This is going to take a while,” Eric told Ernest.

“Meaning?”

“You’d better start cleanup detail or Emma and her friends are al going to be on the inside of a jail, which we can’t afford.”

are al going to be on the inside of a jail, which we can’t afford.”

“Ah. Right.”

She asked them their names. She touched them, briefly, as she did. They answered, even the ones who didn’t apparently speak English, and she absorbed their names. Not their beings, and not their power, but the simple fact of the sylables that had identified them in life.

She started by teling the first few of the dead what she intended and by asking their permission and their help to do it; she finished merely by taking their quiet, hushed—and heartbreaking—assent. They knew, somehow. They understood.

They gathered in a crowd that made the most exuberant of concerts or political ralies look paltry by comparison. But they gathered almost on top of each other, occupying physical space as if it meant nothing to them. It became hard to look at them and see the mismatch of face and chest and shoulder as they overlapped.

She closed her eyes instead.

With her eyes closed, she could see again, and she knew that, without effort, she had once again slid out of her body. She looked at a world that was gray and at the dead, who were not.

She could barely see houses; they were sketched against the horizon as if by an impressionist. The cars and the trees were gone; the plain spread out forever. And above it, on a spiral of stairs that glimmered, she could see it: a door.

“Maria,” she said, although she could no longer see Maria Copis.

Copis.

But she heard, at a great remove, Maria’s steady voice.

“Give Andrew to me,” she told his mother, as gently as she could.

She didn’t know if Maria hugged him or kissed him or spoke to him, although she was certain she had, but after a long moment, she felt the weight of a four-year-old placed, gently, in her arms. The arms that were extended and carrying the lantern.

Andrew Copis materialized, and smiled at her.

“Are you ready?” she asked Andrew.

His eyes were shining.

She held the lantern by her fingers and Andrew in the curve of her arms, and she began to climb those stairs as the crowd that gathered al around her took—and held—a colective breath.