The Reaping of Norah Bentley (12 page)

I found the keys, on the floor and half-covered underneath the bright red scarf my grandma had given me for my birthday last month, and snatched them up. Then I grabbed my coat, yelled to whoever in the house cared to hear that I was running to the store, that I’d be right back. Then we headed down the stairs and out the front door.

#

We’d been driving for what felt like an hour. Neither of us said much; it wasn’t really an awkward silence, but more like an understanding between us— like we both knew there’d be plenty to say soon, so we might as well enjoy the peace while we could.

I felt the same as I did last night, with a million different emotions running through me, making it impossible to pick just one, to know which one was the right one to feel. I was a little nervous, a little excited, a little afraid. But it was hard to be completely afraid as long as Eli kept his hand on mine in the center console, as long as I could keep glancing over at him and see the calmness in his eyes, and in the smile that would spread across his face when he felt my gaze on him.

It wasn’t until we were well outside Sutton Springs, out where the houses grew far and few between and soaring, longleaf pines dominated the flat landscape, that Eli’s smile started to grow less confident. He turned the radio up, and his gaze drifted away from me and out the window, where it stayed no matter how long I kept my eyes on him.

“Eli?”

He didn’t answer until I’d driven at least another quarter of a mile, and all he said then was,

“Turn up here. The next road on the right.”

I did. The ‘road’ was more like a dirt path with traces of gravel; the green street sign looked like it had been hit at least three times, judging by the way it was leaning, almost parallel to the ground. I couldn’t read the name of the street. Up ahead, at what looked like the dead-end of the road, I saw a white building—a church. It looked like it might have been abandoned, although probably recently; stray vines were just starting to creep up the sides and the yard around it wasn’t completely overgrown yet. The bell-tower was empty, though, and the closer we got the more I noticed the paint that was starting to peel, the cracked and broken windows. There was a graveyard in the back, surrounded by a low, wooden fence.

“What are we doing here?” I asked, pulling to a stop in the parking lot. Unlike the road, it was paved, but it was littered with potholes and cracks with bright green grass shooting up through them.

“Something I need to show you.” He got out of the car, moving less with confidence and more with grim resolve as he walked over to my door and opened it for me. “Come on,” he said, offering his hand.

I let him pull me out of the car, and we walked hand-in-hand around back. He had to climb over the fence, but I was short enough that it was easier to climb through the middle of it. I straightened up on the other side and looked at the rows of headstones stretching out in front of me; this place was bigger than it looked from the road. It was daunting, almost.

“We’re in a graveyard,” I said. I mostly just wanted to interrupt the silence, which in here was just getting plain creepy.

“Yes.” He looked over at me, uncertain. “Are you afraid?”

“Me? No. Graveyards are great. Who wouldn’t want to spend their Saturday afternoon in a graveyard?” I managed a nervous laugh, and he took my hand and squeezed it tight.

“We won’t be here long, if you don’t want to be,” he said. “I just want you to see this.” He nodded at a grave over in the corner as he spoke, a small, polished black stone with faded white and blue flowers on top. We stared together, unmoving, and after a few seconds his hand went rigid in mine and he took a half-step backwards, then forward again like he was trying to disguise his uncertainty as an attempt to just get his footing. Except the ground was perfectly level.

I was curious now— now that I’d seen what we’d drove all this way for— so I gently pulled my hand out of his and started with slow steps toward it. The stone was newer looking than most of the ones around it, with barely any weathering on its face, the name and date still deeply grooved into it. I noticed the date first: 1987—2005. And from there, my gaze slowly rose to the name:

ELIJAH JAMES EMERSON

I crouched down beside the headstone, reached out with a shaky finger and slowly traced the letters. I had to put my other hand flat on the ground to brace myself, to keep from losing my balance. It was a long time before I could bring myself to speak.

“Emerson?” I said quietly. “Your last name is Emerson. Like the poet.”

After a few more seconds of that eerie silence, I heard the leaves crunching, shifting under his feet as he walked over to stand by my side. “I don’t think we’re related,” he said.

I couldn’t take my eyes off the stone. “The date on here… this was four years ago.”

“Yeah. Almost exactly four years ago, actually. September 19, 2005.”

“Four years ago that you…that you…”

“…Died,” he finished, almost like it was nothing— like people visited their own graves all the time.

“How?” I breathed. “How is this possible? You said you weren’t a ghost.”

“I’m not. Ghosts are nothing but fragments of a person’s soul, pieces of them left behind that you can’t touch or talk to. They’re unnatural.”

“And you’re not unnatural?” I stumbled to my feet and took a few steps back, away from the grave, away from him. “Because the fact that you’re standing over your own grave seems pretty unnatural to me.”

For a second there was something like hurt in his eyes. But then it was gone as quickly as it came, replaced with a hollow, resolute look that stared at me but past me at the same time.

“A ghost clings to its earthly life, fights for it; that’s the only way it can stay here,” he said. “But I’m not fighting to be here. I can come and go to Earth as I please. I have to— it’s part of my job.”

“Your job?”

“Yeah.”

“The same job you mentioned last night,” I said in a numb voice. “I’m starting to think I don’t want to know what that job is.”

He frowned. “Probably not. But I think you’d figure it out, sooner or later, and I’ve decided that I’d rather it be me that tells you.”

I looked back down at the grave, and then up again, past him and towards the parking lot. Towards my car. I thought about running, but I couldn’t get my feet to move.

“Maybe you should sit down?” Eli suggested, nervously glancing towards the shade of a nearby tree.

“I’m good,” I said. But I’d barely gotten the words out of my mouth before my legs started to crumple underneath me. It was an automatic reaction; my own body denying me, knowing that if I was down on the ground like this I couldn’t run away. The cold, damp ground soaked through the knees of my jeans.

“Just…Just tell me what’s going on,” I said. “I can handle it. Promise.”

He still looked doubtful, but after a moment of hesitation he went on, “I’m not unnatural,” he said. “Not like a ghost. Because I was chosen specifically for this role when I died, along with others like me.”

“What do you mean, like you?”

“The rest of the in-between, others who died and found their souls not ready to permanently move on to either of the Afterworlds; those who are able to step foot in both but unable to stay in either. It’s a unique situation, and it makes us perfect candidates for this…for what it is we do.”

He paused, looking at me like he wasn’t sure if it was safe to go on. I wasn’t really sure either, to be honest; I was starting to feel faint, and a cold sweat was breaking out all over my body. But I couldn’t have said anything, couldn’t have moved to stop him from continuing if I’d wanted to.

“There…there are a lot of names we go by,” he said. “A lot of job titles, if you want to call them that. Most of which I can’t even pronounce.” He smiled, and I tried to wrap my mind around that smile, tried to let it relax me like it had been doing so often lately. But I was still shaking as he said, “So we’ll just stick with what they usually call me around here—a grim reaper. A soul-carrier.”

I clutched at the grass, slid my fingers down the blades and dug them into the icy mud, felt it squishing underneath my nails. I had to hold on to something. Something solid. Even the shifting mud seemed more stable than anything I could have felt just then. I stared at my dirty nails for a long time before lifting my head to him, unable to meet his gaze with anything but a half-glance that I couldn’t force to linger.

“But you’re supposed to have a black cloak,” I said, pulling up a few blades of grass, one by one, and piling them at my feet. “And that blade thingy, what’s it called?”

“A scythe?” he offered.

“Yeah. That thing. Where is it? If you’re a grim reaper, I mean. Where is it? Where…”

“It would be a pain to carry that around all the time, don’t you think?”

I looked up. He was smiling gently at me.

“And the black cloak?” I asked.

“Black cloaks are so last year.”

I laughed quietly before I could help myself, before it occurred to me that humor was so painfully out of place here.

“I’m not sure where people got the idea,” he said. “The whole cloaked skeleton with the scythe look. It’s hard enough sometimes to get souls to follow you—what if I really looked like that? I wouldn’t follow me either.” He shook his head. “So most of us return to our human body when we come back to earth; easier for us, easier for the soul we’re reaping.”

“So you kill people.” My voice was quiet, half-drowned out by the wind, the sound of birds circling and calling to each other in the distance. “Your job is killing people.”

“No. Life kills people,” Eli said, his voice a little more firm all of a sudden. “I’ve got nothing to do with it. People are usually dead by the time I get to them. Physically speaking, anyway—and I just finish the job.”

“By stealing their souls.”

“By guiding them to wherever they’re supposed to go next,” he said, patient again.

“Was I dead?” I’m not sure why that came out as angrily as it did. I had to take a deep breath before I could repeat it, “Was I dead when you got to me?”

He looked surprised by the question, but was already shaking his head before I’d finished asking it.

“No,” he said, his voice quiet. “No—you were always alive. More alive than any human I’d ever seen.”

“Not that night.”

“Even that night. I’m not talking about just then, though. I knew you before that night. At least from a distance. When we’re assigned to a soul, we know it weeks—sometimes months—before it’s time to reap it. It’s part of the deal; we stay close, get the soul accustomed to us so it’s easier to guide it when the time comes.”

“So you really have been stalking me.”

“It was my job. Somebody has to do it.”

“But you didn’t do it. You didn’t finish the job with me. That can’t be okay, can it? I mean, talk about unnatural…can’t you get in trouble for this? What happens now? To me? To you?”

“I wish I knew.”

“I’ll die, won’t I? If not from you, then—”

“No,” he said quickly. “No. I’m the only one who can take you. That’s how it works—the second you were assigned to me, it meant none of the others could touch you. Not now, not ever. Don’t worry about that.”

“None of them? How many more are there?”

“Hundreds, thousands maybe, all working different regions of the earth.”

I rose slowly to my feet. Eli rose with me, held out an arm for me to steady myself against when I started to stumble. The graves were spinning, dancing around me. All the colors, from the bright silk flowers to the green fields in the distance, seemed to have dulled; the whole world had turned the brownish color of the run-down, splintering fence snaking its way around the graveyard. My eyes followed the fence as far as I could see into the distance, and it started to feel like it was getting closer, moving in and crowding the space around us until I started to feel a little claustrophobic.

“I need a minute to myself, I think.” I let go of his arm, took a second to try and balance myself, and then started toward the parking lot, weaving in and out of the graves like I’d just got done shotgunning one too many beers. And somehow I made it to my car. Getting my fingers to curl over the handle and grip it tight enough to pull the door open proved too difficult a task though, so instead I just leaned against the rusted blue door, pressed my cheek against the cool window.

So this was how he knew. If everything he said was true, this was how he knew I was supposed to be dead. And I was assuming everything he said was true, because what kind of person would lie about something like this? And if he
was
lying, then how would I explain all the weird things about him? What kind of person is invisible to most of the people in any given room?

He wasn’t a person though, a tiny voice in the back of my head reminded me. Because I needed reminding. He looked and felt and acted too human to be anything else, to be capable— like he claimed— of moving freely between Heaven and Hell and Earth. To be capable of taking a person’s soul. Or leaving mine.

I balled my hand into a fist and held it to my heart so I could feel its steady, thumping rhythm. A rhythm that should have stopped weeks ago, I guess. I breathed in deep; the cold air stung my throat and left me still feeling breathless, like someone had taken all of the oxygen out of the air and replaced it with dry ice. This was all getting so crazy, so much bigger than I realized. Eli hadn’t just saved me that night, hadn’t just pulled me from the water—he’d literally saved my soul.