Chapter 22
Playlist: Pastel Melodies for Rotting
“Phoenix” by The Jane Austen Argument
Followed by gunfire, steel on steel, and wailing ghosts, we plunge through bracken, skidding down a short hill to the river.
More spirits meet us on its banks, thousands of little lights trudging through the water, emerging onto shore.
I can’t help touching them. Reaching out with frozen fingers, the inferno of my massive soul flickering against their little lights, I remember them so they can remember themselves.
“Help me,” I tell them, squeezing hands, touching faces, looking them in their hazy eyes until they sharpen. “I’ll take you home soon, I promise, but you have to keep the men with guns from reaching me.”
“What are you doing?” my mother hisses, groping for her ghost salt.
Gently, Bas bats her hand away from her pocket. “Just watch.”
He glows. I don’t know if he can help it now—if it’s his nature or his grief—but light seeps from him, a warm and gentle burn, a lantern on the shore.
Not yet, ghosts mouth to him as they pass. Soon, Ferryman. She promised.
They break around us, a glittering tide amid his steady light, surging up the embankment. Safe between us, my mother watches their grim procession with eyes wide and wary, hand frozen in the air, torn between her rifle and the ghost salts in her pocket.
Bas catches my eyes. Reluctantly, I tear myself away from my dead souls.
Black mud sucks at my sloppily laced boots, threatening to steal them off my feet.
Head down, determined, I slog toward the river.
Kicking slime and clumps of water weeds, I inch along an old iron fence that disappears beneath the water’s surface.
An inflatable raft bobs at its far end, tossing in the restless water.
I wade in. The river floods my boots, soaks my jeans to the knee.
Without meaning to, I close my eyes. This close to the ghost fence, even the water throbs with an aching kind of heartbeat.
I can feel the tormented ley line trapped within its boundaries.
The sensation scatters me backward in time.
For just a second, I stand ankle deep in a fathomless and ancient river, beneath an endless sky of stars.
Bas’s fingers press into the small of my back.
Steadying the raft with one hand, he helps me up with the other and takes a seat at the tiller.
Because of course he does. He was made for this, after all.
Mom watches us take our places and I wonder what we look like to her—him glowing, frost gloving me to the shoulder, both of us patterned like lacy bones—because she hesitates.
Her gun dips in her hands like she no longer knows what to do with it.
I stare back at her from the boat and suddenly the distance between us seems too monumental to cross. How can I reach her now, standing on the bank of the living without an obol beneath her tongue?
But on the horizon, men swarm the hill and get dragged back, struggling against a dozen hands and gnashing teeth. Bas strokes a finger down the engine, waking it with a shivery sunbeam. He unties the battered rope lashing us to shore.
Leaning forward, I throw out my hand.
My mother takes it.
“I’ll drive,” Bas tells her when she spills on board, and his black eyes burning gold brook no argument. “Just point the way.”
She leads us downstream. We hug close to the bank, keeping the hill between us and anyone looking for us.
I dig a long stick out of the hillside, stand at the front of the boat clearing a path through the tangled river weeds.
Every muscle in my body aches from the onslaught of the day, but there’s a familiarity to it. Almost comforting.
I was built for this too, once upon a time. I can almost remember the graceful neck of a longship plunging above the waves, a ship of starlight chasing the sun—
Or did I read about that? Something about Ragnarok—a last longship out of Helheim heralding the end of the world?
I can’t remember anymore. Maybe I’ve spent too long outside my body because my soul doesn’t want to fit.
It sticks out from my edges; another, bigger hand overlapping my human fingers.
And I don’t glow—not like Bas—but I reflect him.
His light shivers around me, cast like a net into the water, illuminating a city.
Bluegills scatter from the open mouth of a sunken movie theater, algae coating posters still framed to the front facade.
Old, rusted cars hang open outside a hardware store.
We pass like ghosts over street after street of houses, windows intact more often than not, still awaiting their occupants.
Sinking fingers under the water, Bas casts a light around us, steering us wide around sunken streetlights to keep from scraping a hole in our bottom. In his scattered glow, I spot a sign:
macdougall memorial research center
authorized traffic only
keep left
Swallowing, throat dry, my mother points with a fluttering hand. “The parking garage is through there.”
With a wary glance at the ridge behind us, Bas cuts across the river.
Standing, I keep watch over his head, my hip braced against his shoulder, his free arm looped around my knees in case he needs to catch me.
But on this opposite end of the broken snow globe of a city, even the distant gunshots fade.
Our motor drowns out everything but the startled protest of a mourning dove as we dip beneath a curtain of weeds that was once a street sign, plunging down a narrow lane between two buildings.
“Where did all this water come from?” I ask, once we’re safely out of sight and earshot of any potential pursuit. “Cain said there didn’t used to be a river here.”
Mom’s gaze goes distant.
“When we…” She starts and has to stop, swallow, start again. “When the building came down, we escaped through the maintenance tunnels. It was the worst storm I’ve ever seen in my life. Cain called it biblical. Said it was proof…”
Her eyes cut away but there’s nowhere to look but at Bas or me, so she ends up looking down at her hands, checking her gun—and when there’s nothing left to check, cracking the joints of her fingers.
“You and Cain?” I press. “You escaped together?”
“Never leave a man behind,” Bas mutters. “Even one who broke the world.”
Mom nods.
“He knew the tunnels. He got us out.”
Something in the way she says it leaves a bruise deep in my breastbone. The way she stares at her left hand, fingers clawed on her bouncing knee. Or her tone maybe, the quiet resignation, history sleeping in every word and finally, finally, honesty.
I asked her once if Cain was my father—was it only the day before yesterday? It feels like a century. It feels like a second.
“Were you…” I start and don’t know how to ask it again, here, at the end of the world. “Close?”
I don’t know why I’m asking. Does it matter? Do I need to hear her say it? Isn’t it answer enough the way she looks at me?
Quietly, she says, “We were a mistake.”
More truth than I expected; more than I deserve. After all, it’s not my skeletons I’m digging for, is it?
This is some Pet Sematary bullshit, Cain told her. And that is not your daughter.
Or did I hear him wrong? Am I remembering correctly? Or did he look at my tiny prison in horror and swear, That is not our daughter?
Longing stabs me through the gut. I wish I could ask him, but I shove the impulse away. What does it matter now, Jenny? Stop picking at scabs that aren’t yours.
I don’t belong here. This body isn’t mine—and that hurts more than I expect, unmoored anxiety rising in my chest. I may be a sometimes god, but what else have I been for seventeen years but me?
So what if this body wasn’t mine at first; my boots weren’t, either.
So I borrowed someone’s surplus, slipped inside a thrift store corpse?
Doesn’t that make it mine, at least a little, even if I bought this life secondhand?
Cold in my bones, frosted to my shoulders by a mist I can’t outrun, I dangle my fingers over the side of the inflatable raft, into the river. The water laps at my skin, icy with October chill. I feel that—I feel that. I’m human enough to feel it, all the right nerves and bones and skin.
Drawing my knees close to my chest, I wrap my arms around them, close my eyes. I miss the undercroft beneath my bed, the stupid RV. I miss skipping school with Bas and kissing him in the blue-raspberry rain. I wish I had another week, another opportunity. But I think I missed my chance.
A massive structure looms ahead of us. On the left, floor upon floor of steel slats peer onto open concrete.
On the right, a blank-faced, hulking tower juts above our heads.
A crack runs down its featureless flank, and its only windows are the holes that gape between its flaking cinder blocks.
A tunnel opens underwater in the parking garage’s center, the tip of a black-and-white striped bar just barely visible in the murk.
A rusted sign reads parking garage, badge access only.
Even badly broken, its uppermost floors shattered into pieces, collecting algae on the river bottom, the building still stands taller than any around it, its back to the stony mountain and the ghost fence rising like a crown above its head.
Massive pillars hold up the individual floors, open to the air.
Cars still wait inside, dusted over but surprisingly intact, three feet above the water line.
Fumbling for a bag from the bottom of the boat, my mother comes up with a tiny folding anchor and wings it out around the strut between empty-eyed windows.
Tightening the straps on her backpack, she throws her rifle inside the parking garage first, scrambling up behind it.
I expect her to lean down to help us up—at least brace the rope, jeez—but her head disappears around the corner, bootsteps shuffling through the dark.