The Ghosting of Gods Read online

  “But, aren’t the werewolves up there?” Poe asks George, who only claps Poe on the shoulder.

  Poe gives me a sick smile, like he’s trying to encourage me, then he climbs up after George. There’s no safety rope this time. My feet won’t fit on the shallow steps, and so I climb slowly, concentrating on my balance. I’m careful not to look down. Determined. I do look up, to see how much farther. George is a goat, carelessly sprinting up the staircase and wildly gesturing at the panoramic view of the town that’s been jaundiced by moonlight. Poe is keeping up better than I am and asking George questions about the architecture, so Bethany hangs with me, laughing every time I slip on a loose stone. At last, I reach the top, crawl on hands and knees to a nice, flat spot, in the grass, and recover from the ordeal.

  George holds a licked finger to the wind. “Storm coming soon,” he announces.

  I scan the sky. Nothing.

  “I commend you all on placing your faith in my leadership,” he continues. “Exhilarating, is it not? And, now that we have ascended this most treacherous cliff, we shall find a suitable hole for ourselves.”

  A hole.

  What the hell?

  “Our robes,” Bethany moans. She picks up her hem, revealing slim black boots with yards of coarse laces. “The mud will be awful. Dirty.”

  “Poor dear,” George says, tracing her trembling chin with his finger. “Everyone will understand. Our standing in the community is impeccable.”

  I want to know what’s the big deal with getting messy. If these people are so concerned with appearance, why does their town look like someone dumped soot all over it?

  More howling shoves Poe into George. “Don’t we need to keep moving, George?” Poe asks. “I’m ready to go on. Aren’t you ready, Jesse? I’m pretty ready.”

  George orders us to scatter and find the best hole we can. Bethany prances about. Flits her arms, even. Poe sticks beside George, who paces back and forth, gradually working his way back from the slope of the hill. He’s organized. Gives tips.

  “Stomp a bit, like so,” he says, hoofing the ground like the goat he is. “A hole may present itself.” Bethany immediately halts her prancing and stands perfectly still, staring with disdain at the ground. After a few moments, she begins to tip-toe in a circle with a radius of half a meter.

  Poe yelps, and out of the corner of my eye I see him dropping. George catches him by the collar at the back of his neck, pulls him back up. “Brilliant work, young lad,” George praises. He kneels and has a look at the hole Poe just punched through. “An excellent choice. We shall not find a better hole than this one. I shall go first. Once we stop sliding it will be a short stroll to the town gate. I am most certain of it. I know a great many things.” He works at widening the edge of the hole, I presume to give us more room to fit inside.

  I, of course, have no intention of getting in the hole.

  “But where does it go?” Poe asks. Kneeling, he sticks his head down farther than I’d like. I move close to him, in case George is thinking of helping my friend into the earth. Poe whistles. “Whoa, Jesse, it’s really a tunnel. The moonlight reaches way down there, and I think it keeps going, but it curves away…Did the townspeople dig this hole?”

  An image of the freakish Digging Man flashes in my mind.

  “Poe, get back!” I blurt.

  “Townspeople do NOT dig,” George says. He sounds insulted. “It belongs to the tunnelers. Revolting, of course, but they fail to intimidate me. You are quite safe in my presence. And so you know, I refuse to believe any of the talk about iron ghosts haunting the tunnels. Ridiculous headline.”

  I’m feeling progressively pessimistic about George’s sanity, wondering what in the name of God he imagines iron ghosts to be. Wheels are obviously turning in Poe’s head too, and he opens his mouth to question George, but there’s no time. George stands, brushes off his knees, executes a jump like a kid on a diving board, and drops straight down into the tunnel feet-first.

  Poe sucks in his breath and sticks his head in the hole. I grab him around the waist to keep him from falling into the earth.

  I listen. Nothing. Just the wind that’s picking up. Even the flagellants are silent. I look around, making sure they’re not creeping up on us. I feel like I’m being watched.

  Poe pulls out of the hole, looking distraught. “He’s gone,” he says. “What will we do? Should we go in after him?”

  “Are you crazy?” say. I point. “We’re not dropping into that. What if we can’t get back out? It falls straight down.” I look at Bethany. She’s touched a finger to the rim of the hole and is scrunching her nose at the mud that’s stuck beneath her fingernail. “There’s got to be another way, don’t you think, Bethany? Is it possible the townspeople will send help after all? A bigger raft? Then you wouldn’t have to get dirty.”

  Her face brightens. I coax her back towards the slope so we can look down at the shore. Their raft is there, washed up right by the campfire. I’m willing to take it as a sign. It doesn’t look so small and dangerous, now that I’ve seen the tunnels.

  Bethany chews her lip. Cracks her knuckles. “Oh, George will be disappointed…” Her voice trails off and she stares blankly at me.

  With George gone, it occurs to me I could coax this girl to help us. I grab her arm. “Bethany? Do you know where Ava and Leesel are? Tell me. Tell me now. Please. Are they in the town?”

  “What? Oh. I don’t know…” Cocking her head to the side, she regards me with an odd expression.

  I turn and look back at Poe. He’s dangling his feet inside the hole, sitting on the edge.

  “Crossing the river is not a good idea,” Bethany states emphatically. She turns with an anguished cry, the back of her hand to her forehead, and flounces back towards the hole.

  Poe shakes his head, says, “I can’t see the bottom of it, Jesse, and it plummets…”

  She rushes forward—catching me off guard—and shoves Poe. I throw myself to the ground, reaching into the tunnel, but he’s gone, already out of sight.

  His screams quickly fade.

  My name. He’s screaming my name. Oh God oh God oh God…

  Bethany eyes me. She shrugs. “I can see you’re upset, but I pushed him for his own sake.”

  Frozen, I can only stare at her. I say nothing.

  I don’t know what to do. Poe. I want him back.

  She sighs. “Do you really wish to stay behind by yourself? Your friend is down in the earth, is he not? So. I am ready. You?”

  The hole is dark. Cold. Bottomless.

  Poe is in the earth.

  I nod.

  “In you go, then.”

  Sweat beads my forehead despite the cold. I dangle my feet the way Poe did, feel the empty space below, and allow Bethany to creep up behind me.

  12

  their candles snuff out

  The world goes dark. I need to scream, but there’s no breath in me. The mud is grease. Hurtling deeper and deeper, my arms are crossed over my chest like a body prepared for burial. The coffin is tight, boxing me in. At last I scream. The pressure of the narrow tunnel eases, and my arms fling out, making me an angel. A falling angel.

  I didn’t keep Emmy safe. Or Ava or Leesel or Poe. I want Poe back.

  I’m falling, falling, arms wide, a fallen angel…

  I open my eyes. See light.

  All tunnels end in light.

  They twist too. The curve is gentle, but I still land hard. The greasy mud makes me glide, and I gradually gather speed to spiral ever deeper into the earth. Refusing to pray, I slide, alone, in silence. The tunnel levels.

  Poe reaches in and pulls me out.

  We’ve arrived in a tiny underground cavern. My vision is blurred with brown water dripping down my forehead over my eyes, but there is George, busy with a multitude of candles he pulls from his robe. Dappled candlelight shivers on mud walls. Keenly aware of the trickling sounds of the river, everywhere, surrounding me, I instinctively hold my breath.

  “You o
kay, man?” Poe asks with a weird smile. His face is black with mud. “Kind of felt like Jonah getting swallowed by the whale, huh?”

  George slaps me on the back. “Good, good. Cough up that mud. Poisons the lungs.” He offers me a candle. A pillar candle, five inches thick and surprisingly heavy, like it’s lead instead of wax. It’s a marvel George didn’t sink like an anchor when he fell in the river.

  Bethany arrives. Her pale hair is streaked with mud. She walks directly to George and slaps his face.

  Poe’s hunched over and looking at the ceiling that’s not tall enough for him. It’s wet. Dripping. “George, we’re so…deep,” he says.

  George rubs his red cheek. “Indeed, the river is an abyss.”

  “We’re beneath it?”

  “Barely. Now, this is not the time for polite chatter. We don’t want to alert the tunnelers, do we? Take a candle in each hand. No matter what happens…” Four tunnels like perfect cylinders lead out of the cave den. George considers each of them in turn. He thinks, tapping his finger against his forehead like the proverbial brainless stuffed bear. Bethany watches him, a mixture of hope and despair on her face.

  Mud oozes down the tunnel we just slid down. A wave of it arrives, and Bethany’s diary, The Story of Me, comes with it. Poe tries to clean it off, but it’s still dirty when he hands it to her.

  Slowly, she turns to George. Her chest heaves.

  “I’m certain this is the passage,” George blurts. He points at one of the identical tunnels with a shaky finger and rockets into it. Bethany gives chase at high speed—on boot tiptoes.

  Poe offers me yet another pathetic smile. “Nothing to do but follow,” he says, holding up his two candles like he’s making a toast with beer mugs.

  I nod, pretending like everything is okay. I don’t want him to be scared. At the same time, I don’t want him to be stupid. “Stay with me,” I urge. “We’re not going to get separated again. Do you understand, Poe?”

  He nods, his pale face serious. I’m satisfied.

  We stoop to fit inside the passage. The air is damp, but the hefty candle wicks burn like they’ve been dipped in the lighter fluid I’m convinced George keeps tucked in the folds of his robe. With four candles between us, the tunnel is illuminated well enough. The ceiling is a surface of seeping black coffee, dripping on our heads and splashing at our feet at a disturbing tempo. An inch or so of water covers our narrow path. I suppose the rest soaks into the earthen floor, and below, but I don’t want to think about below. Returning my attention upward, I wonder at the engineering of the tunnels. No reinforcement is visible. The walls are perfectly curved, glazed, but they’re just mud. No wood or steel.

  My steps are tentative. My feet soon lost beneath murky water. “Hell, Poe. This is insane,” I say, losing my determination not to scare him.

  “I trust George,” he calls back. “Come on, faster, we’re losing them.”

  “You trust George?” Anger flares inside me. I’m furious that he let Bethany push him into the hole. Furious that he trusts George. That he’s so naïve. We’re essentially buried, lost with deranged guides. But because Poe is the way he is, I’m responsible for him.

  God can’t be trusted. I can’t let anything happen to Poe.

  I think of Leesel. Ava. What if Poe had been pressed to the outside of the chapel too?

  I think of the thick lashes on Ava’s eyes, how smooth the skin is in the hollow of her neck where she’s tattooed with a flower. A lily. Is she alive?

  Little Leesel with her wild hair and comprehension of advanced physics. Have I lost her?

  This is why I need forbidden knowledge of the spirit world. To end the separation that death brings. To connect the worlds. To make us all mediums. And so I keep secrets.

  Slopping after Poe, I try not to slip, try not to think of my girls dead.

  At first the tunnel runs level and straight, but after George chooses which side of a fork to take, the new tunnel angles upward and to the right, then to the left and back, leading us deeper again. We come to a den like the one we first landed in, and George once again chooses from four tunnels. He mutters. Bethany is silent, and I sense rage despite her bland face when she turns back, candle held by her face, to shush Poe.

  We need to be quiet?

  “Onward!” George hisses at intervals frequent enough to keep me awake. It’s good the walls are so close—they hold me up as I slosh along.

  Unless our guide is a human compass, we’re doomed. There’s nothing distinguishing about the tunnels we ferret our way through. If there wasn’t standing water, we could at least see our footprints and know if we were retracing our steps. As it is, we can’t. It’s a maze of underground sewage tunnels.

  Poe is complaining, telling me I have to go faster, that Bethany is really fast, he can barely keep her in sight.

  Guilt makes me weak. I prayed for knowledge of the spirit world. For good reason. I begged for it. If this world is where my knowledge is hidden, if the burning bush was a sign God was sending me to the knowledge I seek, who does that make me that I prayed for this, that I endangered my friends and left Emmy behind?

  I shouldn’t be here. I need to save Emmy. Frustration propels me through the tunnel. I have to get out. I have to get home, to save Emmy.

  A cry echoes down through the tunnel. George. Bethany calls out his name in alarm.

  We find them at an intersection of tunnels. Splintered wood, a dumping ground of it, packs one of the tunnels like a dam. George is laid out. Bethany kneels behind him, helping him to sit up. His forehead is gashed. Delicately touching his fingers above his eyes, he looks ready to faint when he sees his own blood. Bethany coos at him, pulls out a large lacy handkerchief from someplace in her robe, and holds it to his wound. George grits his teeth.

  “Did you trip?” Poe asks.

  “I hit my head on the ceiling. There must be a rock jutting down.”

  The three of us look up while George closes his eyes, whimpering in pain. Bethany instructs Poe to hold his candle high.

  A board juts from the ceiling. I step closer, getting under it to see if it’s the invisible tunnel reinforcements I couldn’t detect earlier. It’s not just a board—it’s a box, or the corner of one, chipped black. Not what I was looking for.

  “Oh, my,” George says, eyes clamped shut. “I do feel faint. Nasty, naughty rock.” Pressing the reddening handkerchief to his forehead, he tries to curb the flow of blood. Bethany tells us to move back so George can get air.

  A side tunnel is stuffed with fragments of wood, but pieces of crumpled paper too. Picking a wad from the rubble, I flatten it against my palm. It’s parchment, rough and thick. Letters in black ink have gotten wet so that the writing has bled purple, soaking into the creases of the paper. “Look, Poe, at the top it says Promised Land. The rest is a mess.” I hold it up to him. “Can you make out anything else?”

  He squints, shakes his head.

  Bethany tends to George, ignoring us. I dig out another wad. This one is mostly dry, with only part of the ink smeared.

  “Hey, it’s a map,” Poe says. “Look, those upside-down V’s are roofs, and that squiggly line has got to be the river, I bet. It’s the town. And we’re…here.”

  Tiny circles are drawn beneath the river. Exits, maybe, for the tunnels? I wonder if the smeared ink at the top of the page used to be a legend. “Get another one,” I say, indicating the dam.

  Poe picks out several more wads and flattens them out, but they’re all a mess of blotchy ink. I take the good one over to George. “Does it make any sense to you? Maybe it shows a way out of here.”

  He doesn’t even look at the parchment. “Are you questioning my leadership, young man?”

  “What? No, I just thought—”

  “Dispose of it. It’s polluted. Oh, this hurts. Nasty, naughty rock.”

  “Not a rock. A tunneler box,” Bethany says, her voice full of disgust.

  “A what?” Poe asks.

  “A casket.”

&
nbsp; Springing up, George knocks Bethany onto her butt. He pats his robe frantically and pulls out more candles, these bigger than before. He quickly lights them with some sort of crude matches, also stashed in his robe.

  Poe asks what the matter is.

  “Nothing at all. I’m fine, fine.” Blood trickles down both sides of George’s face. Dragging his robe sleeve across his forehead, he smears it red. “Shall we get along now? Best not to remind tunnelers of lost flesh. Onward!”

  “Lost flesh?” Poe repeats. “What does that mean?”

  “No more questions!”

  “It means they’re crazy,” I say angrily. Why doesn’t Poe understand this?

  “Never you mind,” Bethany says. “George, bend low, please.” She manifests another handkerchief and ties it around his forehead. “I think that will do until we get back to town.” She turns to me and Poe. “The tunnelers fear us. Why else do they cower underground? They desire only to indulge their useless fantasies of salvation in hiding. Nevertheless, we shall increase our pace.” She squeezes George’s hand. “Lead on, my brave darling.”

  George squares his shoulders, but his quivering goatee betrays his fear.

  “Who are the tunnelers?” Poe asks. Neither George nor Bethany answers, and Poe looks at me, as if I might know. Getting no answer, he comes up with another question. “What’s that ticking?”

  George slaps his hands over his ears and whimpers. “Ghosts chained to bodies, ghosts chained to bodies,” he chants.

  Ghosts? I brace myself for voices, but all I hear is rhythmic dripping. Poe’s right. It does sound like a ticking clock.

  “They’re closing in on us,” Bethany says.

  13

  lost but now she’s found

  George and Bethany bolt.

  One of my candles blows out as Poe and I chase after them. Tossing the waxy weight aside, I curse at the big splash it makes. The water’s getting deeper. The ceiling drips badly, so badly I wouldn’t even call it dripping so much as raining. “We’re going to have to turn around,” I yell.