Chapter 22 The Funeral
The Funeral
Outside, the day was as bright and hot and stark as every day before it. Since I was wearing silk, it seemed even hotter. But at least the violet ballgown was strapless.
Calix stood at the town center, ready to escort me to the cemetery as part of the funeral procession. When he saw me, his eyes widened. His face darkened into a deep scowl. He practically ran over to me. “What are you wearing?”
“I don’t have anything else.”
“That’s from the underworld! The most horrible time of your life!”
“I beg your pardon? You think that” — I waved behind me, vaguely, where the great shadow of the Primordial Mountain loomed — “was worse than this?” I pointed to the open casket that had my mother in it.
“You can’t wear that dress! It belongs to a dead woman!”
“My whole soul belongs to a dead woman.”
That shut him up. He whirled on Josie instead, who was coming up behind me with her parents. (I had seen on her parents’ faces as I left their house that they were equally scandalized.) “Why did you let her wear that?”
“She’s an adult,” Josie said. “She can wear what she wants.” She processed with her parents to the back of the funeral line.
I had been right about the turnout. The whole town had come out to gawk at the freak girl who’d been abducted by the chaos-godlings and come out alive.
There were even, I thought, some unfamiliar faces — some gods-damned tourists.
I could tell, I could just tell, that they were waiting to see what heinous thing I would do.
To watch me start gibbering and running back to the underworld while a team of ten men held me back.
Or to watch me claw at my own stomach, maybe even rip out my own intestines, trying to get at the haunted food I’d eaten.
Well, they’d have to be satisfied with the dress.
Everyone processed past the casket to gaze one last time upon my mother.
As if this shriveled body counted as my mother.
I went first. I stood there, trying to glimpse my mother within this empty, made-up, formaldehyde-soaked shell.
After I felt that I had given it the old college try, I stood beside the casket as my mother’s next of kin.
Trying to act like I was grateful to all these people for showing up.
Trying not to say aloud that if any of them had shown up over the past year, before she was already fucking dead, then maybe things would be different.
The only one I could bring myself to nod at was Josie.
Then it was time for the second half of the funeral.
The bad part. Four strong men hand-selected by Calix — dear gods, were some of them the War Police?
— closed and hoisted the casket. If we had had a town priest, he would have conducted rites, but we didn’t, and my mother hadn’t been religious anyway.
Not for the first time, I wondered: What kind of funeral rites did they conduct back in the underworld?
What rites had they conducted for Mackr before storing him in one of those honeycomb crevices?
What rites would they have conducted for criminals who had been sentenced to drown in the Lake, before Hades’s father stopped using the drowning as a form of capital punishment?
Then I stopped breathing. Just for a moment. Because I had remembered Hades’s words. His warning.
The Lake.
The inverted waterfall.
The trade with the Monarch.
Sacrifice.
And resurrection.