The Ghosting of Gods (19 page)

41
the beheading

Ava reaches for me as she glances at Leesel. “Is it her?” she whispers. “Is it Elspeth?”

“Yes, Mommy.”

Bethany-Elspeth looks straight at me and winks. Her eyes roll back. A moment later she steadies herself. “Oh, my,” she says. “I do feel faint. No doubt I need nourishment.” She pinches her cheeks. “What a
lovely
gathering. May I join in?”

“She’s gone again,” Leesel reports. “It’s okay, Mommy. Go ahead and eat. She’s found us. There’s nothing to do.”

Vincent topples his goblet in his haste to stand. “Join us!” he chirps. He cinches his nightgown belt tightly around his thin waist. “Please, please. Servant Sarah, seat this vision of loveliness immediately. Champagne. Uncork the champagne!”

Poe waves. “Bethany! Where is George?”

She acknowledges us, finally. “What a surprise to find you all alive! And this must be the little girl whom you lost. But what did you ask? Oh, George. What a silly question. Could he possibly have braved the Memento Mori wilds, as I have?” She allows Vincent to take her hand and lead her to a chair. She sighs dramatically when he kisses her fingers and bats her eyes at him before addressing the room at large. “The wedding is off!”

Poe holds a hand to his heart. “What happened?”

Bethany accepts champagne from Sarah. “There was quite the stir in town after you ran away,” she scolds. Poe’s skin blotches red. She waves away his apology. “I don’t blame you. George could be rather dull. But I digress. A rumor circulated through town that George and I…well, I can hardly bring myself to say it…We
were accused of consorting with tunnelers
. I told the gossipers what to do with themselves, but George, oh my…I hate
to be the one to bring you this dreadful news…”

Leesel pats her little mouth with a napkin and sighs with contentment.

Bethany’s smile shows every gleaming white tooth in her pretty head. Her breathless excitement focuses Vincent’s attention.

“George beheaded himself!”

I swallow just as Bethany shrieks this announcement, and begin to choke; Ava slaps me on the back to dislodge the meat from my throat. “Did you say George beheaded himself?” I ask, coughing.

Poe looks ill as Bethany explains.

“George kissed me—it was a perfectly
poignant
moment—and recited a poem on my loveliness, perhaps the loveliest of all I have ever received from my many admirers, but he told me there was no choice left him. He must defend his reputation. To prove his disgust for the resurrection, he beheaded himself in the highest fashion, right in the town square! A martyr! To think, my George now an iron ghost, never to suffer the disgrace of a boney resurrection. It was the most perfect moment. Children wept! His beheading was utterly spectacular, noble…and…so very…bloody.”

“And
not
anticlimactic,” Captain Wordsworth says, eyeing Poe.

Mrs. Wadsworth raises a toast.

Leesel giggles. “How do you behead yourself?” she asks. I was wondering about the logistics of this feat myself. No one answers.

Sarah places a bowl of steaming soup before Bethany, who tastes it carefully, then nods her approval.

Mrs. Wadsworth orders Servant Sarah to bring the next course for Bethany. “You poor dear,” she says. “There are few like your noble, spectacularly dead fiancé, and my own noble Captain, of course.”

Bethany notices Captain Wadsworth, and I suppose she’s
wondering what his financial assets might be.

“Are you headed for William’s place?” Ava pointedly asks. “I remember you admired him so. George’s brother?”

Bethany glances surreptitiously at Vincent before answering Ava. “William? Oh, yes, William. I remember now that we suggested you seek him out. No, no, William doesn’t entice me.” There’s another quick glance at Vincent. “I simply had to get away, you know how it is. I had this feeling that…that someone else awaited me in Memento Mori. Someone handsome, with an oily moustache.”

Leesel shifts onto her knees in her chair and begins drawing numbers in the air. Her face scrunches in concentration.

“It’s been dreadful, of course,” Bethany says, sighing. “I paid a band of graverobbers to escort me north. What strange men they were, bent on digging like tunnelers, going on about a box of threads and other religious artifacts. I told them William might have it. Do you know, they ran off and left me! Apparently they’d gotten the idea into their small heads I was either possessed, or a vampire. Now, I concede vampires are often beautiful, but do they possess quite the sparkle in the eyes that I do? Or quite the color of blue?” She pauses and opens her eyes wide for our consideration. “And so, I’ve traveled alone. It’s been truly exhilarating, facing danger as I have. I’m simply exhausted. I hope to enjoy a nice, hot bath tonight. What a wonderful dinner, though a trifle salty. I couldn’t eat another bite.”

She refuses further questions about her travels, adding it’s Vincent she wants to hear about.

My eyes don’t want to stay open, despite my anxiety over Bethany’s appearance. My stomach is full, and the wind outside has risen to provide a welcome white noise to Bethany’s chatter and the phonograph’s high-pitched music.

I’m half asleep in my chair when Mrs. Wadsworth chings her knitting needles against a wine goblet. “We’ll view the dead now,” she intones.

42
the viewing

We sign our names in the ledger while Bethany laces up her boots. She made it through dinner before realizing they were off. She’s blushing, lacing as quickly as possible, but it takes some time.

Servant Sarah hands each of us a lit candle. Mimicking our hosts, we hold the unflickering flames to our faces and fall in line to march up the creaking stairs.

“The second floor is where the Judgment takes place,” Vincent says, stopping before a door on a tight landing before the staircase curves up again. There are no hallways on this floor—just the door. He reaches inside the neck of his nightgown and pulls out a tiny key on a chain. Turning the lock beneath a glass doorknob, he pushes against the door. It glides open.

Stone hearths flank each end of the great room, baking with fire that casts ginger light and generous heat. The outer wall is solid windows, yet the furniture, bulky with velvety cushions, faces inside the room. There’s no extra seating for visitors. The four separate wingback chairs form a circle around a tiny, but high, table. A crystal ball, set on thin prongs, is placed there.

Servant Sarah enters last and busies herself dousing the flames of hurricane lamps lining the windows. “I’ll be back with coffee,” she says. As she passes me, she murmurs, “I must sober them up or the Judgment falls on me alone.”

I don’t know what she’s talking about, but she’s out of luck. A decanter of dark liquid is plucked from beneath a cushion by Captain Wadsworth as soon as Servant Sarah’s out of the room.

Mrs. Wadsworth dumps her weight into a chair. She extracts a ball of black yarn from a basket on the floor. Something else is in the basket, for as she clutched for the yarn she wanted, there was
the sound of chinking. Moving closer, I see that the basket is filled not only with yarn, but with crystal balls.

Vincent speaks over my shoulder, his breath hot on my neck. “Hideous. She knits one after another. Soon we’ll have to prop them on the windowsills in place of lamps.” I give him a questioning look and he turns me so that I face the interior wall opposite the windows.

Ships. Yarn ships. Masts and sails sag atop canoes of knotted yarn, lined up one after another on bookshelves deep enough that Mrs. Wadsworth’s marine creations are at least three in depth. There must be hundreds of them. Most are small, about the size of a dinner plate, but some are so big that their sails are folded in half to fit on the shelves.

Bethany gazes at the ships, wistfulness on her face. “I love the sea,” she says. “I miss it so. My sister…”

“Woopsies,” Leesel says.

“To the sea,” the Captain toasts.

Poe runs his fingers along the spines of the books that are shoved between ships. “Do you have Poe?” he asks.

Vincent selects a few dusty volumes. “Edgar Allan? Of course. We have all the finest channeled works.”

“I’m called after him, you know. Been my nickname since I was five. My grandfather used to retell Poe’s stories, and I was hooked for life on the macabre. It was Poppy who gave me my nickname.”

Bethany sashays along the wall and stops before a painting. “Oh, my,” she says. “Oh, my.” She giggles into her hand, but is soon collapsed over a chair laughing with hysteria. She barely regains control of herself, looks back up at the painting, and howls louder than ever. Vincent seems uncertain what to make of this display of hilarity, shifting his slight weight from foot to foot.

“She’s in and out,” Leesel tells me.

“What?”

“Elspeth. She’s in and out of Bethany, checking on us. She’s gone again now.”

Ava, an art lover, stands before the painting. She didn’t hear Leesel, and I hold a finger to my lips so that Leesel knows not to tell her mother. “It’s a Salvador Dali,” Ava says. She turns to Vincent.
“Exploding Clocks?
So, what, art is channeled into Memento Mori, as well as literature?”

“It’s an original,” Vincent says. He avoids looking at Bethany, whose hilarity has subsided to giggles. “A gift, from the Reaper. It’s meant to remind us of his power. With time comes Death. We are most grateful for our asylum.”

Bethany wipes at her eyes. “It’s the most wonderful painting I think I’ve ever seen, Vincent.”

His shoulders sag with relief.

“So she’s not so far away?” I ask Leesel. Uneasily, I look outside at the trees bending sideways in the cold winds. “Do we need to go?”

“Elspeth doesn’t like to be alone in the dark. She won’t travel at night. We’ll leave in the morning. It’s okay, Jesse.”

I feel unsure. About Leesel.

Ava’s looking suspicious at how Leesel and I are whispering, so I head over, feign interest in the art that amuses Bethany. It’s a painting of what looks like melting clocks, sliding down a wall. Or maybe they’re watches, the pocket kind. I don’t see what the fuss is about. Then I think of George and his life’s work as a master clockmaker. Bethany has a sick sense of humor.

Coffee arrives with Sarah. She passes around steaming cups, then goes to throw wood on the already blazing fires.

“Shall we begin the evening’s entertainment?” Vincent invites, chuckling as if he’s made a joke.

Flames pop in the fireplaces as all conversation dies away. Wind whistling at the windowpanes reminds me of the cold outside, but now I have sweat dotting my forehead. The air in the room is dense. It’s difficult to breathe. Poe teeters beside me, and
Ava leans against me. “The fires are too hot,” she complains.

“Too counteract the cold that is coming,” Vincent says. “The séance.”

That gets my attention. My God. Are they mediums?

Bethany sighs, appearing mildly bored.

The asylumists open their mouths and pant.

Poe backs away to lean against one of the bookshelves. His hand clutches his crucifix, and I know he believes he shouldn’t be in the presence of a séance. I also know he loves this sort of thing. He’ll pray throughout, but he won’t miss any of it.

Frost forms on the crystal ball.

“Allow me to manifest,” Vincent says. He unwraps the bandages from his hands. Squeezing his eyes shut, he reaches out and cups the crystal in his palms. The fires die in their hearths. The sweat on my face chills and stings. With their eyes fixed and staring, our hosts continue to pant, though now their breath shows up in puffs of gray.

With only the reflected light from snow outside the windows, the others are only shadows in the room.

Vincent cries out in pain. The crystal projects a scene into our midst. It’s three-dimensional, slightly transparent in appearance. My view of the others across from me is mostly obscured.

Rain falls on a thatched roof. A tunneler peers down a chimney, not seeming to mind the smoke that billows up through its skull. Hugging the skeleton’s legs is a boy. He’s trying to pull the tunneler away from the chimney. When the tunneler finally gives up the chimney, I see that its bones have blackened. “B-b-but y-you don’t n-n-need to h-hide from h-h-her, Poppa,” the boy protests. He ducks his head and closes his eyes, trying to get the words out. His head jerks as if he has the hiccups.

Scene change.

Now the boy is a few years younger, but I recognize his snub nose and ears that stick through his hair. He digs in a graveyard. Furtively looking about him, he clangs his shovel against the
tombstone. The scene speeds up. Others come in and out of view, trying to pull him away. The last image is the boy clanging on the tombstone, alone and with night falling.

He wants his father back, I surmise.

Looking around me, at the faces so raptly spying on this boy’s life, I shudder at the idea of having my own life laid bare for everyone to see. But this is how it is. Discarding my belief in Santa Claus was a relief. Santa Claus could see every bad thing I did. I was glad to get rid of him. Then the priests found me, brought me into their fold, taught me that one day God would make sure every sin I ever committed would be shouted from the rooftops.

There’s no getting rid of God.

Scene change. The boy is the same age as in the first scene, maybe a bit older. Sobbing, he kneels beside an ax and a shattered, blackened skeleton. “It’s my fault, Poppa. I should never have told Mama where to f-f-find you. F-forgive me,” he laments. He reaches out a hand and touches his father’s bones, but quickly jerks his hand back, seeming to be repulsed. “Poppa, I found the one and asked f-for help. She t-t-told me we c-c-couldn’t be separated. She p-p-promised me…” He clamps his eyes shut and works his mouth, his head jerking with the effort of making words. “Poppa! She told me a s-secret. She t-told me the Presence knows h-h-how to give you back to m-m-me, but the Presence is p-p-possessed, yet will be f-f-free again…” There’s a scream behind him, and he turns, a look of horror on his face. The scene dissolves.

Poe backs farther into a corner, knocking books off a shelf. And yarn ships.

We next see a toddler sucking his thumb. I guess it’s the boy. As I’ve noticed before, scenes don’t play in natural sequence within crystal balls.

Morning dawns in a field with sheep. No. Not sheep. Tunnelers crawl with woolly skins thrown over their backs.
Huddling in a group, they eventually separate, and I see the boy. He lies dead, fallen upon his Poppa’s bones.

Ava grips my hand. Bethany sniffles.

“Poor Bethany,” Vincent says. “We shall end this manifestation.” He rolls the crystal off its pronged base, and the death scene inverts.

The boy’s words…The
Presence knows how to give you back to me
. “What do you know of the Presence?” I ask my hosts.

“Not my concern,” Captain Wadsworth rumbles.

Servant Sarah refreshes my drink. “We’ve never experienced the Presence of the Holy Ghost,” she explains. “Judgment is time-consuming. Looking into the past, we have little time for the Presence. If it even exists. I’ve seen no proof.”

“But plenty of proof we have for Death, don’t we?” Vincent sings. He’s smashed.

Captain Wadsworth raises his decanter in a toast. “May Death pass over us!”

Snowballs explode against the window in front of me.

Captain Wadsworth twists, holding his decanter high, and looks out the window. “Here they come,” he says, his tone grim.