Psychopomp: A Novella Read online

  Something nearby crashed, sending up a cloud of dust and ash, and Dominique let out a scream. “I’m sorry,” she said to the woman. “Help’s coming. I can hear the sirens.”

  “Wait!” the woman called, but Dominique retreated across the street and stood in the shadows, arms wrapped around herself. She stared at the smoldering remains of her home, shivering despite the heat.

  What was she to do now? Where was she to go?

  She thought of seeking out the other girls who’d worked at the agency, but they would have to deal with their own troubles when they learned of this. Many of them had families they helped support, and some had children. They’d have no help to offer her, and she had no other family of her own to beseech.

  Her whole life had been in that agency, in her little room upstairs. Now she had nothing. No one.

  Only when the police and ambulances arrived, along with a few ambassadors, did Dominique leave, keeping to the back streets so no one would see her. She didn’t know who she was hiding from, unless it was Hiram. But she thought he’d be able to find her anyway, if he wanted. The idea of seeing the dark embers of his eyes again filled her with dread.

  When she arrived at the edge, she realized she’d known all along it was where she’d have to go. It was where everyone went when there was no place else.

  Girls waited for furtive men in the glow of red lights over doors. Boys roamed the shadows, selling stolen pills.

  She saw Hiram Bartholomew’s eyes in the shadowed face of every man she passed. She found an empty section of wall and leaned against it, hands clenched at her sides. His voice rang out in her mind—an empowering refrain, a repeated admonition.

  Never forget who you are.

  27. la sangre

  I didn’t want to get up, but I knew the house would fall down on me if I didn’t. There was no way it would withstand these winds much longer.

  My head was too heavy for me to walk upright. I pushed along the walls like a blind animal, my only goal to get outside. Fuzz filled my head. I felt completely disconnected from my body, my muscles moving seemingly of their own accord.

  Something jagged sliced my palm. I barely winced at the pain. The door was right in front of me, and I pushed through it. The wind entered my lungs as I struggled to draw breath. It coursed over my sensitized skin. My feet missed the steps and I crashed onto the ground. Thunder roared through the dark clouds overhead.

  I tried to haul myself up but found I couldn’t. Then I realized I felt much better not standing up. So I dragged myself along the ground, clawing with my hands and pushing with my feet. Moving was hard. My bones cracked. I didn’t know how long I’d slept in the house. Everything hurt and my head still throbbed. At least the house was behind me. At least I was making progress.

  Gabriel. Gabriel.

  Lifting my head, I squinted at the horizon. I could see them. In the distance I could see the mountains. Just a suggestion of blue against the sky, appearing as insubstantial as the very air.

  There was no way I could crawl that far. I looked down at the palm of my hand. The cut, grimed with dirt and tiny rocks, had not yet begun to heal.

  Lightning flashed. The hair on my head and arms lifted. Dirt whirled up around me.

  I understood my misery was nothing compared to the misery the earth had suffered. Humans forgot, but the earth remembered everything. Everything we did left a record on the land.

  Blood is the debt we all must pay.

  I knew just what to do.

  With a guttural cry, I drove the thumb of my unwounded hand into the cut on the other. Pain lanced up my arm and through my body. I opened the cut further, pushing my thumb down deep until stars danced before my eyes. Blood spilled out, flowing down my wrist and dripping onto the ground. The bright red drops turned dark when they hit the barren earth, soaking into the surface.

  The earth needed my blood and I would share it freely. This offering would buy me safe passage.

  More lightning. Small red figures scored the earth around me. They spun with flickering grace. One of the featureless figures twitched closer. It seemed to bite its nails even though it had neither nails nor teeth. It grew bigger, menacing me with harsh, wordless whispers. Everything burned.

  A few feet ahead of me, I saw something growing from the ground. I couldn’t tell what it was, but I dragged myself toward it. My eyelids started to droop.

  And then the rain came. It was the first time I’d ever felt drops of water from the sky landing warmly on my skin. It was the first time I’d seen water darken the parched land.

  The earth had accepted my offering.

  28. el castillo

  A train awaited me. I could see a phosphorescent glow through the small windows of the cars. It stretched through the darkness to unknowable distances.

  Somehow I got myself inside. The seats were dark green. I sank into them gratefully, facing the windows on the opposite side.

  The night began to roll past. Though I sensed fellow travelers, all the other seats were empty when I looked at them.

  Beyond the windows, I could see everything. The whole scope of the world. Or so it seemed.

  Thick dark blood seeped from the trunks of cloud-shaped trees. A weird blue sun blazed through olive clouds. I stared in wonder as flat fields quickly gave way to cities, their metallic profiles gutting the sky. They were nothing more than ruins—empty, abandoned, wrought with shadows. They shimmered like mirages, disappearing in the blink of an eye.

  The train traveled upward, arcing across the sky. Stars surrounded me, sparkling on the velvet black. Looking down, I saw the shape of the country miles down below. It looked just like a map, but I saw no green. At the edges, where the ocean should have been, there was nothing but emptiness, stretching on into infinity. Like a starless sky. I could almost discern the roots of the world itself.

  All across the land, there were lakes that looked like ghosts. Miles of salt flats. Rainbow-colored springs.

  Somehow I could see all this. These wonderful things were out there in the world, visible now only to me. Like a gift. Glorious interpretations of images I had glimpsed on rippled library pages.

  As the train swooped back down toward the ground, all the beauty disappeared. The floor of the train fell out from under me. It was as if all the loveliness had been inside of me, and someone had snatched it out along with my beating heart.

  There was no eden. I’d walked into a wasteland, into a place from which I could never return. There was nothing for me to return to anyway.

  The train went on, but I didn’t go with it. Clumps of phosphorescent light beaded off me until I was left splayed on the dirt, wrapped in darkness.

  All this time, and I’d gone nowhere.

  But then I caught sight of the mountains, so much closer now. They had density, rising like a giant’s spine from the earth. They were staircases to invisible utopias. They coalesced into a mythical creature that’d slept undisturbed for centuries. Orographic clouds lifted upward over the peaks, tinged orange by a rising sun.

  I nearly choked on my own heartbeat. My vision swam.

  The cracked wood of the farmhouse, the electrical storm, the earth scorched black…

  No, I was almost there. Gabriel, Gabriel. Now he was a possibility instead of just a foolish dream. He would be waiting. I felt delirious with anticipation.

  The castle rose up in dark shades of tan and rust that blended with the landscape. A numberless clock was set into one slim tower, but the tarnished golden hands were still. Time had no numbers now. Time was the arc of the sun across the sky, the tilt of the stars at night, the journey of a dream-train, the thickness of grime and sweat on my skin.

  I found an entrance within a courtyard, beyond a tangle of weeds. Gabriel was through that door. I’d made it so far and it was unthinkable I wouldn’t find him here at last.

  But I hadn’t counted on the rooms inside the castle being a maze, all connected to one another, never seeming to end. I tripped over frayed and
faded carpet, sneezed at the dust drifting down from glass chandeliers, and bumped into leaning pieces of furniture. In some rooms, the walls and floors had crumbled away to reveal pipes crusted in limescale.

  I’d become used to the open land, the big sky. In here, I felt suffocated.

  And unimaginably tired.

  My steps became stumbles taken more from habit of movement than because I had any strength left. My vision split and my body screamed for rest. I couldn’t remember when I’d last eaten or drunk anything.

  Finally, I let myself crumple down on a holey rug inside a dark, fragmented room. I pushed my back to the wall and melted into the floor. Something had followed me here. Something had moved with me all along.

  The silence of sleep enveloped me. There were no dreams anymore.

  “Marlo.”

  I stirred. That voice. His voice. Rumbling like distant thunder, slipping like shadows over my skin. Cold air wrapped itself around me. I wasn’t aware I’d been shivering until right this moment.

  “Marlo, wake up.”

  My eyes cracked open. He was there, Gabriel, as I’d known he would be. His black hair was longer and messier, his stubble thicker. His eyes were blue as a clear sky, blue as electricity, blue as the underside of an iceberg. He crouched before me, one hand on my shoulder.

  “Drink this.”

  Startling moisture touched my lips. They began to bleed through cracks in the layers of hard, dead skin as I drank. The water was like nothing I’d ever tasted, and in my greed I drank it all.

  Gabriel stared hard at me. His eyes were so blue it hurt.

  “Are you here?” I asked. “Is this real?”

  “I’m here.”

  He looked more haunted now. I was sure I did too. The harsh, barren land we’d traveled had extracted pieces of our soul. Its vast emptiness was now reflected in our eyes.

  “I’ve dreamed of you. I didn’t know if I’d find you.” My eyes stung and my voice was like glass. Thin, brittle glass with browned edges that would break with the slightest mishandling.

  He shifted his body so it blocked the cold air, and I felt his heat on my chilled skin. “I thought you ran away,” he said. “I waited for you.”

  “But then you left,” I spat, venomous and angry. “Did you even care? Did you even care what might have happened to me?”

  His eyes were soft and pitying. I knew he’d waited. But he couldn’t have waited forever.

  “I know sometimes you told me the truth,” I said. “I also know you lied. But I don’t wanna know what’s true and what isn’t. I only wanted to find you. I don’t have no plan from here.”

  I wanted to tell him everything in a calm, clear voice. I wanted to be strong. I wanted to tell him I loved him. But my journey had sapped all the strength from me and all I could do was let loose with ugly sobs of exhaustion that burned my throat raw. Gabriel gathered me to his chest. It was the first time he’d held me.

  “You’ve come a long way,” he said once I’d cried myself dry. The cold found my body once more when he released me. “You need food, water, and rest. I’ll look after you.”

  His words were lovelier than I could stand. “Thank you,” I said, sinking back toward the rug instead of hard, cold dirt. “Thank you.”

  29. la iglesia

  When I woke, I found him resting beside me. The line between his brows had smoothed. He carried more burdens than he’d shared with me, I knew. We were both entitled to secrets. I whispered his name, but he didn’t stir.

  I traced my path back through the castle and went outside. Here, things didn’t seem so desolate. It almost felt like a new life was possible. My feet sank in soft mulch as I walked among the arrow-straight trees spreading up the mountainside. Shafts of sun speared through the sparse leaves above me, but there was little warmth. A crisp sky shone among the high, furred branches.

  After a short while, I came upon a narrow stream, deep enough only to wet the bottoms of my feet. I knelt down, disgusted by the dark, loamy ground, and put my lips to the water. It was so cold and crisp my throat ached. I wondered why the government hadn’t sent the ambassadors out to ruin this place.

  I felt the presence of the thing that had followed me, but I couldn’t see it.

  The red turned to black. Electricity lingering in the air. Dirt beneath my fingernails. Dirt in my mouth.

  Blinking, I looked up and saw a small stone building with a rusted bell in a tower. It was a church. The heavy brown door stood open. I hopped across the stream, heading curiously toward it. Churches and religion were foreign to me. All the gods once worshipped in this country were long dead on their altars, for we had other concerns than pleasing them.

  My footprints marked the filthy aisle between rows of wooden benches. I sat down on the front bench. Thin candles, stuck in their own pools of hardened wax, adorned the steps of the altar. The colored windows along the side walls were all broken, which seemed a shame.

  “Up,” someone said suddenly. A man, his voice deep and gravelly. “Get up. Turn around slow.”

  Petrified, I did as he said. The man was of medium height, barrel-chested. His face was burned red, struck through with the white lines of deep wrinkles. His clothes, hair, and hands were all the same shade of sandy brown. He could have been any age, young or old.

  I didn’t have any time to wonder how he could live out here, so far from civilization. In one hand he held a knife, pointed at me.

  “That’s my stream,” he growled, moving up the aisle toward me. When he reached me, he pressed the side of his knife against my neck. “This is my house. Anyone wants to use my things, they gotta pay. Whaddaya got?”

  “Nothing. I’m sorry, I—”

  “You gotta pay,” he said. He used his free hand to scratch his scraggly chin. “I’d just let you go, but you already drank, and you already sat in my chair. Unbutton that dress.”

  I shook my head as fervently as I could without letting the knife slice my skin.

  “Gimme your dress!” he shrieked. He licked his lips. “I need that dress. Gimme your shoes. Gimme all your supplies, and then you can go.”

  “I don’t have anything.”

  The man adjusted the knife, pressing harder. It felt dull, but I guessed I wasn’t really in any position to refuse him. My hands trembled as I lifted them, but the buttons down my chest came apart easily. Feelings of humiliation and shame overwhelmed me, but this was survival. His survival. People looked out for themselves and no one else. For someone like me, self-defense and self-preservation were harder because I lacked the proper tools. I could only ever stand by and receive the worst humanity would give me, and move on when it was done. Utter degradation was a small price to pay for a few drinks of water.

  When the buttons were all undone, I started to slide the dress from my shoulders.

  Then I heard a sharp, muffled crack. The man crumpled to the ground before me, and I stepped back in alarm. Gabriel stood there, pale-faced and with a dangerous gleam in his eyes. He clasped a broken piece of wood, stained with a shining blotch of blood.

  Terrified, I began to fumble with the buttons again. They were so tiny, so hard to pull through the holes—

  Gabriel let the wood crash to the floor. Without a word, he stepped around the man and came to stand close in front of me. He gently placed his hands over mine and moved my arms down to my sides. Fingers deft and unhurried, he did the buttons up himself.

  My knees weakened. He stood so close. The light streaming through the broken windows bathed us in holy, romantic calm. Dust motes danced wildly between our bodies. Nothing I’d left behind me mattered. That part of my life had never even happened.

  “Gabriel,” I said softly. There was no unconscious man on the floor. There was nothing but the two of us.

  His mouth opened, but before he could speak, I tilted my face up and pressed my lips to his. For once, it felt so good to surrender.

  Just as quickly, his hands were on my shoulders, pushing me away. Frowning, he looked down
at me.

  “Marlo, I… You’re very young. It would be best if we didn’t—”

  “How do you know what’s best?” I snapped, aflame with embarrassment. “I need you, Gabriel.”

  “No, you don’t,” he said gently.

  “I don’t even know why I followed you out here. You don’t care about me! I almost died and you don’t even care!”

  “I do care.” His hands were still on my shoulders. “I know you’ve been hurt. I knew it from the moment I saw you on the balcony at the party. But you’re stronger than you realize. You only need yourself. You’re the only one who matters, do you know that?”

  I hated he could undo me with words that weren’t even cruel. He would never say an unkind thing to me, never lay a harsh hand on me, but he would wound the deepest, softest part of my heart with greater precision than anyone I’d ever known.

  A skill like that was unforgivable. I never should have made myself vulnerable to him, I realized. It wasn’t like I’d actually believed he would want my kiss. He was right—I didn’t need him. I didn’t need anyone.

  30. la raíz

  The remains of the road snaked through the mountains. Something was still following me. Sometimes I could see it from the corner of my eye, a flash of white low to the ground.

  A few steps ahead of me, Gabriel was a slim slash against a pale sky. I tried not to look at him. My love had grown like fungus in the dark, my muddy green eyes full of misplaced devotion. I wondered what he thought of me now in my torn blue dress, dirt-brown hair rough with tangles, shoes falling apart, ankles scratched. It was embarrassing how quickly I could unravel for him.

  He glanced over his shoulder, eyes landing on me and then sliding off. I quickened my pace and laid a faint touch on his arm. I drew my hand back, fingers burning. “Don’t look back,” I said. “Never, never look back.”

  One side of his mouth tipped up in a smile. “Then walk beside me, would you?”