The Ghosting of Gods (29 page)

65
he is risen

Chastity carries me high, her face to mine, weeping, beautiful, and I use all my strength to breathe in. As soon as I do, I’m all the way back in my body. And then I can’t see at all.

Pain
.

“No, you must not make a sound,” Chastity whispers to me. “We’re followed. They must believe you are dead.” Every step she takes is excruciating for me. I whimper. Poe is there too, because I hear his voice behind me. He’s telling Chastity to quit talking to me, that I’m dead…

Chastity lowers me to a table. The pain is so bad my breath catches, I can’t breathe, I will die from the pain…

Another familiar face leans over me.
Elspeth
.

“Chastity, please, I don’t trust her,” Poe is begging. “She killed Ava Lily…”

No. Please, God, no.

Grief.

Blackness.

66
frankenstein

Chastity is the only one who doesn’t hesitate when I ask for a mirror. I try to reassure everyone that I won’t break down. After all, I can already see the scars from Thomas’s knife on my arms, legs, and torso. They’re bad—thick, raised, and dark compared to the skin surrounding them. I expect the worst. I think I can handle it. But then I see my reflection in the mirror.

The room is silent.

Turning my head, I try to see everything in the small mirror. My neck is a mess of cross-stitches. Flesh swells purple, pulling the stitches tight. Infected? My face is not as bad, but two long cuts on my right cheek and forehead are sewn together with a thread too thick to have been used on somebody’s face. I am the result of a scientist gone mad with her sewing needle.

Saint Frankenstein has had her revenge for what I did to Saint Thomas.

“It’s not so bad,” Poe says. His voice cracks on the words.

Earlier, Poe recounted events for me. The vortex descended on the City of Sacristies square and took us all. I was dead upon arrival in our world, slashed by Elspeth, who ran away. She came to our world embodied, never having fulfilled her wishes of suicide. The vortex caught her too quickly. Chastity appeared in our world. Hunted down Elspeth. Fearful over the chains she must have forged by slashing my dead body, Elspeth agreed to Chastity’s demands to repair the damage, damage that even the seer couldn’t heal.

Chastity let Elspeth go once the surgeries were completed. “She is not guilty for what she did to you,” Chastity told me once Poe finished the story. “It was written. It was Fate of your choosing.”

So says the seer. “But where is Elspeth now?” I asked.

Chastity claimed to not know. “Elspeth has powers of which you never learned,” she said. “She hides from me. I would not have hunted her down if she had not allowed it.” And then Chastity told me what Poe couldn’t.

Ava died trying to pull Elspeth off my body. Poe believes her ghost is here with us.

My world is haunted. Haunted badly. Willy botched it with his threads harvested from ragged ghosts. Loosing his threads caused the vortex that carried us to Memento Mori, and the vortex that brought us home. The sky is black, the winds constant. My town is decimated with haunting.

My concern is not for Emmy. In my dreams, she has come to me, told me she’s safe. The crystal never contained her. Not ever. It only had a ghost, and Emmy’s not that.
Ghosts aren’t real
. I am sure in this knowledge, though its source evades me, and I don’t really understand it. But the knowledge gives me a measure of peace.

I can’t communicate with Emmy. Not at will. Only in dreams, when she comes to me. I’m not much of a medium. I have many questions yet for Chastity.

At least Willy doesn’t have my Emmy, as I’d thought. I wonder what the iron ghost has done with him. My memory is sketchy, but I have an image of Willy snatched away by a hand covered in a mesh of metal. I hear pummeling hooves when I think of it.

My reflection makes me ill. No one will have to guess twice that Saint Frankenstein worked on me.

I’m a monster.

“The scars are still healing,” Chastity says. Gently taking the mirror from me, she puts it away.

“Do you remember anything, Jesse?” Poe asks me, his eyes bright. “From when you were dead?”

They keep telling me I was dead. And I dreamed something
like that…there was grass, so soft…I shake my head. “I don’t remember.”

Leesel mostly keeps her eyes averted from my face. Chastity is the only one who can look at me steadily. She does it despite her unblinking eyes.

But Leesel is crying.

“Don’t cry, baby, please,” I say. I don’t hold out my arms to her. My appearance frightens her. I understand. She doesn’t want to be touched by me.

She turns to Poe. He holds her and sobs, but not just for me. He keens for his Annabel Lee.

67
the fall

Chastity is as cryptic as ever. She says it’s only beginning, there is a shift to come, but I need time to heal.
Sleep
.

I’m dreaming, sleeping like she wants, letting go my body. I wish I could let it go forever. Ava is dead and I can’t bear it. I couldn’t save her.

The grass is soft beneath my hands. Lush, thick. Every blade is exquisite. Perfect. I see clearly, because there’s no dirt in my eyes. No ghostly threads. No ghost.

I’m always home. Here.

Emmy is laughing in the Hereafter. I go to her.

She dances among the crystals, pointing at this one, then that one. Tree branches dip with the weight of the fruit. A gentle breeze blows, fresh against my face. I feel content. My feet are bare, like Emmy’s, and the grass is cool against my feet as I walk to her.

“I think this one,” she says thoughtfully. She looks at me with raised eyebrows, as if wondering my opinion. There is Presence in her eyes, so we don’t talk about everything that happened. It was only a story.

“Dogs are
sooo
sweet. I could be with this one.” She waves me closer to look at the crystal budding from a limb.

I see an image of a young woman huddled on the street, a wet dog lying at her feet and gnawing a bone.

“Or this one,” Emmy says, pointing at a crystal showing a man in a white lab coat examining a dog’s teeth. “I could be a…vet-uh-nar-eee-on.”

I explore the crystal balls. This is their true purpose. Different people fill each one. I understand. “Grave to cradle?” I ask my little sister. This makes her clap her hands. She bends to gaze in
another crystal.

“The ghosting of gods,” she says.

She skips from crystal to crystal, peering in each one. “Something wants to happen,” she whispers. “And every tear will be wiped away.”

“Will we all be mediums?”

Presence sparkles in her eyes again. She laughs.

Something tugs at my memory, something I can’t quite grasp. I struggle for it, then sigh, wait for it to come to me when it will. I turn my attention back to my beloved sister.

She’s not quite the same Emmy I knew. I suspect she’s playing a part for me right now, making me more comfortable. Who is she, really, if she’s choosing a new life to live, one that isn’t the mentally disabled little sister I’ve known? I keep catching something deep within her eyes, something not Emmy, yet something I
know
. Something I’m connected to. That I can’t lose. That’s
real
.

Is Ava not lost to me, either?

We walk through the crystals, and I notice the one replaying Emmy’s death. I pause over it, confused at why it no longer gives me pain, but Emmy pulls me along to one crystal after another until she finds one that intrigues her.

“Oh, look,
Jesse.”
She giggles when she says my name.

I look in the crystal. I recognize myself, another me, rocking a baby wrapped in a blanket. Light illuminates the scene so that I clearly see every eyelash on the closed eyes of the sleeping child. The crystal is small and expansive at once, without edges so that I feel a part of the scene, even though I stand outside it.

“Daddy,” Emmy says to me, and kisses me tenderly on the cheek.

At first I can’t speak. Emotion overwhelms me. I find my voice, because this is important, she needs to choose carefully. Maybe this isn’t the right one. I want her to choose it, I want it so much, but I don’t want her hurt by me again. I question her. “Is it
a good life this time, Emmy? Is there anything bad? I’m afraid for you.”

“Good? Bad? I am all these lives. But I’ll
choose
one.”

I gaze in the crystal ball.

“Emmy, how do you do it? Go from grave to cradle, I mean?”

“I fall.” She yawns, her eyes flutter, and she falls asleep, falls into the baby’s body. Emmy is born again. Yet my sister’s doppel-ganger, the Holy Spirit, stays present where we are, and watches what happens with the baby. It’s only an aspect of Emmy that goes.

I stroll in the Eden until it’s time to fall back into my body. I remain aware of Emmy. Her Higher Spirit stays with me awhile, or forever. Time is meaningless standing outside the crystals.

It’s not possession. It’s Presence.

Not faith. Knowledge.

68
telling poe

Poe is there when I wake.

“Hey, you’re up,” he says. He brings me a glass of water, moving stiffly. I figure he’s been sitting in the chair a long time, watching over me. We’re the only two in the room.

“I remember, Poe.”

“Remember what? Here, drink.”

“I remember that I died.”

He takes back the glass. Sits. “What was it like, Jesse?”

It’s hard to explain. Hard to put into words. “I know there was grass. This really soft grass. And Emmy was there. But before Emmy, there was just me. I mean this
other
me. And I realized that he’s with me all the time. No, wait. I’m with
him
all the time. Because there’s not really two of us. There’s
One
. Do you understand?”

Poe shakes his head, smiles sadly. “It’s okay, Jesse. You were dreaming. And one day you’ll be with Emmy again, in heaven.”

No. I’m with her already. There’s a reason they call it the
Hereafter
. I’m home already. I’m always home.

If only I could be aware of it…could the veil be torn? Is that possible?
Is it beginning to be possible?

I keep thinking about Elspeth.

Closing my eyes, I think of Emmy in my dream, choosing from among the crystal balls, choosing another life to live. Yet it’s not really my baby sister who is born again. It’s me.

Why did I ever think heaven is a place you go when you die?
The kingdom of heaven is within you. Blessed are the poor in ghost, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. The truth shall make you free
.

Dying is incidental…the world is not escaped by death.

Poe touches my hand. “What is it, Jesse?”

“Something wants to happen.”

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