Passover

by Aphrodite Anagnost

  “Let my people go,” Nuno said, his rasp deep and far away, as if oozing from a tar pit. Rachel stepped back as Nuno drifted forward.

  “I told you, your people have been freed,” said Rachel. “From the camps! From Egypt!” Nuno stopped, and for a moment stared with melting eyes into the barrel of Creed’s Winchester, then floated forward like a cloud of bees.

  “Your people are everywhere now,” said Rachel. “The diaspora, they’re free.” Nuno stopped drifting, paused.

  “My boys are not Egyptian or Nazis,” she said. “They did not kill you.”

  She turned and ran halfway up the staircase to the landing, Nuno hovered, as if stunned, in the foyer, rotating his head and roaring. She felt his heat burning the backs of her legs and shoulders. She knocked on the door of the quivering closet, its frame of varnished wood shivering under her fists.

  “Open the door, Isabel. Please.” No answer.

  “Isabel,” Rachel pleaded, struggling with the door to pull it open. “Nuno thinks he has to kill Zack, but he doesn’t. He mustn’t. What he really wants is to go home.”

  Rachel yanked again, but something held the knob fast. The little ghost hands were gripping the knob from the other side, holding it tight. Isabel simply did not understand; if she didn’t help, her precious Zack would die. But perhaps that’s what Isabel wanted, to steal her son and keep him for an eternity?

  “Please, Isabel,” begged Rachel. “Take Nuno into the light. I promise I’ll never interfere with you and Zack again. We’ll share him. ”

  Dave lurched out of a bedroom and ran to the top of the staircase. Rachel waved him away frantically.

  “I’m staying,” he said. He stood on the top step, pointing his rifle down the stairwell. “I’ll never leave you, Rachel,” said Dave. “Or the boys.”

  “Please, Isabel.” Rachel sank to her knees, an eye to the astragal. “If you love Zack, you’ll show Nuno the portal. I know you’re tempted to let Zack die so you’ll have him forever, but he’ll hate you for that. He’s not ready.”

  Black wings steaming, emitting rings of ammoniac gas, Nuno Sievers flew howling up the stairs and hovered on the landing.

  Slowly, the door creaked open, and hung there, agape, precariously held up by its greenish bolts. They appeared moldy, or crusted in oxidized copper. Rachel jumped away from the door and climbed the last few steps to the top of the stairs into the arms of Dave.

  “Love is the law,” she called behind her.

  Looking down through the closet door, she glimpsed a young woman kneeling on a loveseat between racks of saddles and hanging bits and bridles within the chamber, which now appeared somehow larger. Meeting Rachel’s gaze, the girl’s startled eyes softened. Her face was pale and her lips red as sangria. Blonde ringlets fell from a purple ribbon, surrounding a heart-shaped face that looked alive. As she stood, shimmering trails of light raced behind her, as if she were moving at an unnatural speed that the mortal eye could not completely follow. Yet she was still.

  “Isabel!” said Rachel. “You love Zack. Help us.”

  Honeysuckle perfume at first overwhelmed and then replaced the rank odor of a burn pile that had filled the house over the last twenty-four hours.

  The little ghost turned her head from Nuno to Rachel. Her eyes were wide as if to ask a question. She turned away, paled, looking offended, and went back into the closet.

  The door slammed shut. Nuno’s black fury had pushed it closed. Or was it Isabel, pulling? Probably Nuno. The slamming of the door was supposed to shut the girl up and feed her fear.

  “I believe in you, Isabel,” said Rachel, “Come back.”

  Nuno turned and looked up at Rachel, his eye sockets locking her in.

  Rachel struggled to free herself from his repulsive yet magnetic gaze. Anguish flew into her, breaking in waves, each hurling itself from the crest of the other. Wet sand and sea wrack blasted into her heaving breast. It penetrated her tender lungs like a shower of sewing needles.

  So this was what it was like to be her mother, to accept the gift that was lavished upon her. The wisdom, too. Crying out, she forced herself to think wildly, sentimentally. She gathered up every half-baked Pollyanna notion her mother had ever shared with her and slammed a smile on her face, refusing to meet his rage with rage. The back of her eyes stung with fire. Tears rushed out. She collected from what remained of Nuno’s mind images of his mother and father and little cousin, Sylvie, who had escaped with him from Belsen. She projected the images straight to the center of Nuno’s chest.

  “Go to the light,” Rachel commanded.

  Nuno bellowed and turned his head toward Rachel, who stood four steps above the floating ghost. Rachel steadied herself against the newel post at the top of the stair.

  “Understand his pain.” The ghost of her dead mother whispered. “You’ve always had that gift, Rachel.”

  Ever since you learned to boil water and gave tea parties for the dead. Remember when the twins next door died in Sharpsburg? You saw it in your mind while you repotted your orchids. You knew what was happening from far away. You talked to spirits in your room before you slept…and then, later, at medical school, you stood by the bed of the dead and dying and heard their voices.”

  Rachel remembered. It all came washing back at her. She recalled when the night terrors had started. March 23, 1991. The day Nuno Sievers was burned alive by the gang of high school boys. It had been all over the news, even covered in entertainment magazines—the first and only hate crime against a Jew in Zebulon.

  “I understand,” she said to Nuno, from the deepest recess of her brain.

  Nuno’s eyes solidified and drank in hers.

  She had spoken to his spirit and knew she had touched it at its core. Her mother had been right. She had the power and had had it all along

  “Please, Isabel,” Rachel cried. “Open the door. This man has suffered enough. Take him through the portal into the light.”

  The door latch clacked in its strike. The colors of pastel landscapes leaked under the loosened door and ran like watercolors over damp paper. It spread across the landing, then began to grow upward rapidly, like a frenzy of climbing, heliotropic ivy. The creeping glow pulsated with the rhythm of a fetal heartbeat. Rachel looked at Nuno’s profile, his sharp cheekbones, and his scorched face. She recoiled from a rush of sudden heat, as if she and the black angel were standing in the blazing sun with not a scrap of shade. Then came a sudden coolness and the musky smell of fresh rain. Petrichor, the fluid that flows in the veins of the gods. Geosmin oils, leaching from evergreens and ozone.

  The vapor rose and enveloped him. Nuno’s sparks rose off his skin and skittered into the air and landed on the drapery, the floors. Tiny airborne flames popped and evaporated into the air like fireflies. At last he shrunk to a flaming ember. The smoke rose up and dispersed through the portal, pulled away on a breeze that ruffled the leaves of a never-ending stand of black locust trees.

  A crescendo of chirping nightjars.

  The last speck of Nuno lay smoking on the landing, a husk of coal. A small pair of white- gloved hands reached out for him.

  “Thank you, Isabel,” Rachel muttered.

  Isabel carried him reverently into the closet and closed the door.

  After a sleep that was far too short, Rachel sat in the morning on the living room sofa, her heart and mind caught in a tangle of emotions too complex to allow any but the blandest of expressions to cross her face. No, she didn’t want coffee, or more sleep, or a sedative. Zack and Leo were upstairs, passed out in their beds, quiet as stones. That was a good thing. Dave was in the stables, checking out the horses, all of whom had returned to their stalls during the night and were waiting patiently to be fed.

  “I don’t know anything else.” It was mostly true. She’d told them almost everything.

  The two state policemen sent to interview her sat attentively in crisp blue uniforms. She hoped they’d respect her exhausted state and not press any supernatural issues. Fat cha
nce.

  “We believe that you’re trying to tell the truth, ma’am,” the younger one said.

  He was a nice boy of twenty-one or twenty-two with a thin mustache obviously grown to make him look more mature. The older trooper looked to be in his fifties, with a face like a hatchet, but kind eyes. When he sipped coffee, he extended his little finger, as if he had been carefully taught to do so by a grandmother. Like her own mother always had.

  She thought then of Beatricia and wept bitterly, picturing her mother’s collapse in the foyer and then, much later, the two EMTs lifting her onto a stretcher and carrying her sheet-covered body to the ambulance. Her face, in death, had been serene as a child’s in sleep. As if Beatricia’s spirit was conscious of having made a sacrifice for the Sheltons when it was most needed, and was pleased about it.

  “Thank you, Mommy,” Rachel said out loud, then dried her eyes.

  The sheriff, Lev, and Creed had already been carried to the hospital to have their surface wounds patched. The sheriff, Lev, and Creed had already been carried to the hospital to have their surface wounds patched. The house seemed empty, despite the state troopers and men from the sheriff’s department, as well as a medical examiner. Hours before, she and her family and friends had been cut off from the world. Now, a bit late in the game, the world had rushed to them. Even the local press was patrolling the farm with notepads and cameras. One reporter had to be restrained by the authorities from coming into the house.

  “What I don’t get is the failure of the phones,” said the older trooper. “Why they didn’t work when the ghosts got here, but then worked just fine when they were gone.”

  “It was the, uh, energy,” said Rachel.

  “I know what you said, ma’am but—”

  “I guess you don’t believe any of us.”

  “I didn’t say that,” he protested. “Everyone in the county knows something mighty strange has been going on in Zebulon. The whole place is deserted. These, the murders…peculiar.”

  She looked around the house. All of the furniture had been repositioned or overturned, and was sitting at odd angles or even upside down. All the doors were damaged, some just hanging from a single hinge. The windows were broken. Glass shards seemed to cover every inch of floor.

  “There’s burned clothes at every doorstep of the house,” said the mustached trooper. “And piles of ash all over. Even worse, there’re three deputies missing. Just don’t know how the phones fixed themselves after being burned up.”

  A worm of terror worked itself into Rachel’s mind.

  “Maybe the deputies can fix themselves up, too,” said the trooper.”

  “I don’t want to think about that,” said Rachel.

  There was no reason to ruin the rest of her life worrying about the deputies coming back from the dead. It was unlikely their energies would find an enclosed space within which to seethe and magnify— through the power of animal magnetism.

  “Is there anything else you can tell me?” said the trooper.

  Rachel shook her head. No way was she going to mention Zack and Isabel’s love. Neither would the sheriff or Lev, or anyone else.

  “I’ve told you everything,” Rachel said, as Dave, back from the stable, sat down beside her.

  “Unless I miss my guess,” said the old trooper. “This isn’t going to blow over. Seven people dead, reports of ghosts, a deserted town, all on Passover. It’s going to be on the national news. Interviews, the press…probably a book, a movie…maybe a series on television. You’d better be prepared for the onslaught. Nothing’s going to be the same again.”

  Dave wove his fingers through Rachel’s.

  “Don’t want it to be the same,” Dave said. “She and I are together in this. We can handle everything from here on out.”

  Outside the living room window, the sun was shining like it was the first day the world began. The horses grazed in the pasture. Slivovitz, Le Pouf, Queen Mary, Magistrate, Capitan Matepas, their silky silhouettes shining, noses deep in the high timothy. Beyond them ran a sixth horse, larger and more muscular than the others, his coppery coat casting off sunlight like oil sheds water. Powerful haunches propelled him forward as if he were about to leap from one world to the next with the exuberance of a thing newborn and the energy of a being that would live forever.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The authors would like to thank

  Lenore Hart for all of her

  great advice and support.