The Umbral Wake Page 8

  *

  She stood beside him now, staring at his hanging corpse through the green-gray aquarium glass. Frankie couldn’t feel his body, but he seemed to be standing. His gnarled hand went to his neck, feeling the popped vertebra there.

  “You’re quite the dancer,” Amber said, her voice every bit as soothing as he had imagined. She hovered just outside his vision, but he could see her shape. Her dress, low and carved of alabaster, revealed the depth of her cleavage. He saw red lips, long dark hair.

  “You were there the whole time?” he said, too nervous to look directly at her.

  “I was, yes.”

  “You’re beautiful,” he said, blushing.

  “I like to keep myself presentable when I greet guests.” There was a noticeable southern drawl to her voice.

  “Am I a guest?”

  “You aren’t alone anymore.” She pointed to the glass and Frankie saw that his body had aged, turning green and bloated. It had been days. Nobody had even checked on him. An insignificant death for an insignificant life.

  “Come with me,” she said. “I have some friends who I would like you to meet.”

  “What is this place?” asked Frankie. “This don’t look like Hell.”

  Her voice sounded darker somehow, more rugged—almost crackly. “This is the place sinners go to die.”

  “But I’m already dead.”

  “You’re also quite the sinner, Frankie.” That voice no longer sounded feminine, not by a long shot. It was dry, raspy. “That last sin was your coup de grace.”

  “My what?”

  “Never mind.”

  He found himself afraid to look, afraid that this wasn’t a woman after all. They walked speechlessly for a while, passing a dead tree as gnarled as his fingers, a rock that seemed to face him wherever he moved, eerie in the silence, just the sound of their footsteps in sand.

  They passed a scrub bush and Frankie stopped, staring at it.

  “Is everything alright?” the woman asked.

  “Didn’t we pass this area already?” he asked.

  “If that were the case, wouldn’t you see our footprints?”

  Frankie looked down. The sand was pristine, virgin, and gray, but that rock up in the distance, it was the same one. He stopped, turning to her. “Look I—”

  A prickle went up his spine, even though Frankie wasn’t quite sure what he was looking at. Her eyes were empty sockets through which could be seen nothing but night. Her head turned slightly, wobbling—a puppet head. Behind her, in the distance stood what looked like a large glass coffin. Inside stood a man dressed in white. He had his hand up.

  “You were saying Frankie?” she said, her mouth not quite closing when she spoke, the jaw flapping in a parody of speech, the lips moving in sync with the hand of the man in white. Blue smoke drifted out from between her teeth.

  “I… I don’t belong here,” Frankie said, feeling his stomach lurch. Something was growing out of his back, something alive.

  “Oh, you belong here just like the other sinners, Frankie.” The man smiled, his teeth white and straight. Amber crumpled to the ground. Frankie blinked and the glass coffin was closer now.

  “You’re here,” Frankie said, trying to sound brave. But it was no use. “You must be a sinner.”

  The man nodded. “It’s complicated, Frankie. My sins are of a pre-forgiven nature.”

  “You look real.”

  “Oh, I’m real alright. As real as you were just a moment ago.”

  “Why you in that glass box then?”

  The Reverend looked up and around. He seemed to consider this a moment. “I wish I knew, Frankie. I suppose this is my protection from this place.”

  “Why do you get it and I don’t?”

  The Reverend lit a cigarette. Frankie noticed that as he exhales, the smoke also drifted up from the empty puppet on the ground. Her jaw continued to move as well.

  “That’s because I’m here on business,” the Reverend said.

  “What kind of business…” He coughed. Something was blocking his windpipe, something moving.

  Legs, claws, and hooks emerged from Frankie’s back, pulling their way over his skin, reaching for his neck and mouth. His stomach flipped. The old man in white stared, his glacial eyes taking in the consummation with polite indifference. He cleared his throat.

  “Before you are unable to talk, I’d like to give you a chance to make this right, Frankie.”

  Insects moved under Frankie’s skin. He tried to scratch, but his arms wouldn’t respond.

  “What is this?” he choked out the words.

  “This,” said the Reverend, “is your chickens coming home to roost. This is every cigarette burn you put in your wife’s back, every slap, every punch.”

  “I was drunk!” Frankie said. “I didn’t… I was… I tried to make it right.”

  “Yes you did. And isn’t that sweet.” The coffin slid closer and Lyle knelt to look at the man. “And you thought a cheap gold plated watch would solve everything, didn’t you? You thought that a single act of charity would afford you an eternity in Heaven.”

  “I told her I was sorry!”

  Lyle sneered. “Oh, maybe you did, Frankie and maybe you didn’t. But I’m guessing your demons don’t forget things as easily as you do.”

  “My… what?”

  “Your demons, son. You look like you’re about as infested as they come.” He gave Frankie an appraising look. “Yep, I’d say they are hungry.”

  “Can… can you help… me?”

  A smile spread across the Reverend’s mouth. “Well now Frankie, all you had to do was ask.”

  Chapter 10

  In-Between

  “WHAT DO YOU mean he knew?” Skyla asked. The scene around them hung frozen in the air.

  “How else would he have been waiting for me?” Melissa turned to her. “Someone told him.”

  “Who would do that?”

  “Lots of people I imagine,” Melissa said. “He was a hero, remember? His entire reputation preceded him before he even arrived here. I remember reading about him in the paper, not even knowing who he was. People were practically falling over themselves to go to his revivals.”

  “But if they had known what he would do to you later…” Skyla paused at the look on her friend’s face.

  “You’ve seen them,” said Melissa. “You’ve seen what lies deep in their souls. You know as well as I do that everyone has a price.”

  “Then who did it?”

  “That’s a great question,” Melissa said.

  “Have you talked to Rhia about that?”

  The dead girl laughed. “Your aunt has enough on her plate. She can barely keep that asylum of hers together.”

  “Orrin then,” Skyla looked back at the frozen scene, the white handkerchief, the man in white. She shivered.

  “Orrin is busy making other ravens,” Melissa said. “He wasn’t there when this happened.”

  “Then why show me this?” Skyla felt heat rise in her face.

  “Because I think whoever tipped the Reverend off also knows where he is now.”

  The projected actors faded from Melissa’s scene, leaving the alley as it really was—an empty garbage-filled space with cobwebs and dry leaves. Then even that vanished into the ether. What remained made Skyla jump a little.

  People, their bodies broken and thin, stood all around them. They sprouted like mushrooms, their feet melding into the ground. They were hairless, featureless, their mouths and eyes open wounds that stared into infinity, men made of clay and burlap.

  “What are they?” Skyla asked as she followed Melissa through the forest of bodies.

  “They’re victims,” said Melissa. “People who have given up themselves and denied any responsibility for their actions. They were used by the Reverend, I believe.”

  “And they just… appear?” Skyla looked up at them as they loomed. A few turned their heads, trying to find something lost forever.

  “They appear a
nytime I practice an illusion that involves him. They appear when his name is mentioned or I even think about him. I think they are looking for him.”

  “We should help them find him,” said Skyla. “I imagine they would have a few words to share.”

  “You’ll all be looking a long time,” said Melissa.

  Skyla stopped. “What do you mean?” she said. The sound of turning bodies sounded like tortured leather. “Isn’t he dead?”

  “That’s an excellent question,” said Melissa. “Ask yourself this. If he were dead, wouldn’t he be chasing you in here too?”

  Skyla thought a moment. “I don’t know… Why would he ever stop chasing me?”

  “People stop chasing for one of two reasons,” said Melissa. “Either they simply gave up, or they decided that there is something even better to pursue. Have you ever known the Reverend to give up for anything?”

  “So you’re saying he’s alive?”

  Melissa seemed to sigh in frustration, frowning at Skyla. “I don’t know. Normally, when someone dies they come here. Rhia, or I, or some scouting soul finds them. We have connections. But the Reverend is… neither. He’s in some middleland we can’t reach.”

  From behind her she heard the sound of twisting leather grow closer. Melissa gave her a concerned look. “Follow me. It’s not safe here with them around.”

  “But you said—”

  “I said they are looking for someone to blame. That could just as easily be you.”

  They ran as the husks began to shift, closing in on them like some fairy tale haunted forest. Arms reached out, brushing against Skyla’s skin, scraping with something not quite pain and not quite sensation—a coldness. As she turned a corner, Skyla saw the closet door leading to her home.

  “Here is where we part ways,” said Melissa from behind her.

  “But you still haven’t told me—”

  Hands pushed against her back as Skyla fell from the shadows into Rhinewall, into the church, and back into reality.

  Gil was waiting for her when she burst through the closet door. Skyla landed on the hard wood, the shadows of the dead burned away by the light. The sounds of voices and screaming became the click-click-click of a camera. She looked up into the single eye of the wooden box at the other end of the room. Gil, hidden under the patchwork hood, clicked the handheld trigger a few more times.

  “What are you doing?” Skyla said, looking up into the camera. Through the lenses she could see the shadows shifting along the wall, windows to the afterlife.

  Gil emerged from behind the box camera. “I wanted to see if my roommate actually existed or if it was just a figment of my imagination.”

  Skyla stood up, dusting herself off. Her skin appeared sunburned, her clothing almost threadbare from repeated trips. Things simply didn’t last in the afterlife, no matter how durable they were.

  Skyla groaned, her palm going to her forehead. “I was supposed to bring back food.”

  “Yep.”

  “And something for Connor.”

  “Yep.”

  She slouched across the apartment to the cupboard and took the bread along with a slice of cheese. Gil disappeared into the closet with the glass plates. A moment later she emerged and sat back at her workbench. Skyla wandered back over to the camera, staring at the lens, then again at her goggles.

  “Does it still work?” Skyla asked.

  “Yeah,” said Gil. “I’ve only used it on a few items around the house, aside from the times I photographed you. Still life stuff. I did on Connor a while back, but he came out weird.”

  Skyla looked up. “Weird?”

  “Yeah he was black in the frame.”

  “He’s black now.”

  “Not in the pictures,” she said. “The glass plates are negatives. Light is dark, dark is light. So you have to reverse them in your brain… or, I guess you could expose the negatives to more negatives… or I would need special paper we can’t afford.”

  “Where did you learn all this?” Skyla asked.

  “One of the books you brought back,” she said, holding it up. The cover was hardbound and ragged, the embossed letters chipped and faded:

  PHOT APHIC PRI IPLES AND YOU:

  A PRACT AL G IDE TO THE ART OF L GHT

  Skyla nodded, her mouth in the shape of an O. “I remember that one. It was hard to get.”

  “Well, it’s a great book.”

  “And old.”

  It was true. The book was falling apart at the spine, the pages yellowed and crumbling. A large chunk of the book was simply gone, while another section was so brittle, Gil had been terrified of even reading the pages.

  She pulled the cured plates from their case and laid them out on the table. Skyla walked over to see, staring at them from behind Gil’s shoulder.

  Each plate was roughly six-by-eight inches of coated glass. The coating only lasted a few minutes once developed, Gil had explained. This made viewing them something of an event. The first picture was blank and they both frowned.

  “I don’t know why that happens,” she said, tapping it. “Sometimes they just don’t develop at all. I think I don’t have the mixture down just yet. Or I might be contaminating the silver nitrate somehow.”

  The second frame showed the closet door opening in a blur, a foot emerging from the crack in the doorway. It was white, where Skyla’s actual boot was black.

  By the third frame, both girls were silent. There was Skyla, face down on the floor, her hair a stark white in negative, the closet door hanging open, its interior white, a figure standing inside. A long black shadow spread from behind Skyla, snaking its way to the closet and vanishing inside. The man appeared to be reaching for her.

  They both saw it, but neither spoke of what they saw. In negative the man was just a blur, a black specter in the white of the closet. His arms were stretched forward, yet impossibly far from the girl on the floor. They were long. Scarecrow arms.

  Skyla had told her about the preacher.

  “But he’s dead, right?” Gil asked. “If he’s in there, he’s dead.”

  Skyla said nothing. As she reversed the image in her mind she saw a grinning man in a white suit. As Gil picked up the glass plate and turned it in the light, the man was gone.

  Chapter 11

  Rhinewall

  SCRIBBLE WATCHED HIS hand move in the candlelight, the broken pencil bleeding an image onto the paper as he sat in his bunk, knees curled up in front of him. It was quiet this time of night, enough that he could listen to those voices, see those images that were so often lost in the shuffle and bustle of the other boys in his band.

  Hetch’s Fetches were the largest boy gang in the city, measuring anywhere from dozens to over a hundred members—depending on the weather, supplies, fights, banishments, disease, and starvation. They had taken up residence in the city’s fractured east wall shortly after the cataclysm, at a time when adults had better things to attend to than root out a nest of dirty, lewd, ill-behaved boys.

  Their hideout rested under the corroded protection of the eastern wall, which stretched a hundred feet above them, lined with rusted metal girders and fishing nets. A crack ran down its center, melted away by the Cataclysm. Some sections of the wall even now gave off heat.

  Living quarters were divided into levels, each higher-ranking member living a level above the next, with the lowest and newest members living in the dank, smelly bowels of the wall itself. There were no restrooms in the wall—it had never been designed for human habitation. One simply found a corner with some privacy and sometimes a bucket. The further up one lived, the less likely they were to be subject to the various bodily activities going on above them.

  Hetch awarded food and shelter based on hauls. Bringing in a good haul (jewelry, saleable components, precious metal) was rewarded by a higher rank and living quarters. Living on a higher level also meant more access to the various requests from Hetch, tips, and opportunities. Scribble lived five levels below the throne room in a dark stinkin
g bunk along with twenty or so other boys.

  As he sat drawing by candlelight in his bunk, the snores, murmurs, and farts that surrounded him all faded into a kind of innocuous background noise. Scribble was too focused to notice it anymore.

  “Whatcha drawing, Simp?” asked Gary, a chubby boy who sat on the bunk beside him, round cheeks glowing in the warm light.

  Scribble ignored the nickname and it wasn’t as though he could correct them, not this group.

  “Wow,” said Gary in a stage whisper as to not wake the other boys. “She’s pretty!”

  It was a picture of the crow girl, his warm-up piece. He had drawn her face over a hundred times at least, hiding them under a mattress, in notebooks, or simply discarded them. It wasn’t as if he needed help remembering her face, just that her face was the first face he wanted to see.

  “How’d you get so good, Simp?”

  Scribble scowled at him.

  “Well if you’d tell me your real name...”

  He looked at Gary, pondering if it was worth the effort. Scribble had never learned writing. To him it was all just pretty designs, hieroglyphs from some ancient and alien culture. He preferred to communicate through drawings. Drawings made sense.

  He did know two wordshapes, HELP and PLEASE. They meant people gave you food when you drew them, but that was all. It had gotten him this far, and he saw no reason to change. But it was moments like this he wished that he could at least write his name.

  He flipped a page in the notepad and made a quick flourish of jagged sloppy lines with his pencil, then showed it to Gary.

  “It looks like a fish. Why’d you draw it so crappy?”

  Scribble sighed. He drew on the page while Gary watched, as random a namesake as he could muster. It looked like a scribble. It seemed obvious.

  “A sketch… your name is Sketch?”

  He shook his head, did it again. It took about fifteen minutes before Gary said the word. Most boys would have given up and punched him perhaps, or simply rolled over. But Gary had been determined.