A Cathedral of Myth and Bone

by Kat Howard

  “And I worry,” she said quietly, “about what will happen when too much of me is gone.”

  Catherine reached out and held Lena’s hand, hard, hard, as if by doing so she could keep Lena anchored, keep her pieces from disappearing.

  • • •

  The city had opened all of its doors in welcome. In anticipation. In desire. She had not walked through. She was there, and she was not there.

  More not.

  The city reached into itself. It slid through its streets and reached its vaulted roof to the sky. Its waters coursed through the fountain, her first presence. Her oldest.

  It reached for all the pieces of her that it held, and then it knew.

  There was one more door to open.

  • • •

  It was almost possible for Lena to ignore the disappearances, even though they were pieces of herself gone missing. They did not register when they occurred. The aches, the emptiness that was left behind, they felt like echoes.

  But this. This shaking, this tearing, this sloughing of the inside of herself, this was unignorable. It was as if someone had reached inside her chest and was tearing out her heart.

  Every piece of her that had gone elsewhere hurt. She knew now that the saints had felt the pain of, had missed, every scattered relic.

  Reflected in a monitor—its alarm screaming now—was a city. A place she had almost been.

  She could see the ghosts in its windows, in its streets, in the cathedral. Ghosts that she had been. Pieces of her that used to be.

  A door opened.

  She walked through.

  • • •

  Every monitor in the room shrieked. Catherine sprang up as Dr. Rhys burst through the door, then froze.

  “Where is she?” Dr. Rhys asked, staring at the empty bed.

  “I don’t know,” Catherine said. But she thought of cities, reflected and lost, of bodies taken to make places holy, and wondered if, perhaps, she did.

  “Come back,” she whispered. “Come home.”

  • • •

  The pain disappeared as she entered the city. Lena felt her heart thud hard against her breastbone and then fall back into its regular pattern of unnoticeable beats.

  She had never set foot on these streets before, and still, she knew them. All the places—the buildings, the green of the park, the splash of the fountain—were hers. Lena felt them in her blood and in her bones. She felt them pull at the empty places inside her, offering comfort, welcome, a sort of home.

  She walked toward the soaring lines of the cathedral. Up the steps and through the doors, carved with angels. Into the beeswax and incense-scented quiet. She walked through shadows and cold stone, past stern-faced saints bathed in stained-glass light.

  The door to the tabernacle was open. It had been years since she had gone to Mass regularly, but Lena knew that was wrong. It should be closed, a border between the sacred and the profane.

  The thing she found in it was wrong too. Not the Eucharist. A rib bone. Smooth-edged and curved. Human.

  Hers.

  Lena pressed her hand to her side, to the empty space.

  The shadows in the cathedral trembled; the foundation of the city shook.

  Lena picked up the bone and pressed it against her side.

  The cathedral shook hard enough to shatter, stained glass crashing around Lena in a broken kaleidoscope.

  The bone disappeared. The relic, translated.

  The ache in Lena’s side was gone, and beneath her hand, a rib.

  She ran from the building as it collapsed in her wake. Stopped at the foot of what had been the cathedral steps, gathering her breath as the walls fell down.

  The ground trembled beneath her feet, and the shaking increased as she walked to the next building, and the next, regathering pieces of herself, leaving a city of ruins behind her.

  • • •

  The city wept. It could not understand, and it could not tell her. It could only watch as she took herself back from it, could only mourn as she ripped out its heart.

  It had given her everything she loved.

  It had opened all its doors and she was slamming them shut.

  • • •

  The city lay crumbled at her feet. The ground no longer trembling beneath them, but heaving, weakly. Gasps for breath.

  Lena stopped in front of the fountain.

  There were scars, still, on her knees.

  She felt the city’s sorrow like an ache. She knew what it was to be taken apart, piece by piece.

  They were only scars.

  Lena walked back through the empty streets of her city, the echo of a fountain splashing behind her.

  She stepped across what had, this where, other where, been the threshold of a cathedral and went home.

  Dreaming Like a Ghost

  If I tell you to think about a ghost story, you will probably imagine that it takes place in the dark. Perhaps your mind will conjure up the darkness of a campfire, the scent of woodsmoke and burnt sugar from making s’mores, the crackle of the wind in the trees. The feel of your friend’s arm pressed to yours as you all sit tight, tight together, shoulders and hips rubbing in darkness that is companionate, but still eerie enough to prickle the hair on the back of your neck pleasantly as you listen.

  Perhaps you imagine the darkness of the place the ghost haunts. The shadows of an abandoned house, the black smear left on the air by violent death. The pale figure that rises out of midnight, the inverse of a shadow. You know the shape of the thing, the form. You know what to expect from a ghost in the dark.

  This is not that kind of ghost story.

  • • •

  The first time I saw the ghost, it was in the light. That pale-gold slant of afternoon, the kind of light that wraps around you like linen drapes.

  She smelled like spring rain. Not just the wet mineral scent that rises from the earth, but that particular way the near-black bark of a tree and the almost-green of buds smell, thick heavy mud burying the remains of winter underneath. Life beneath death, not the other way around.

  In a nod to convention, a tribute to the power of story to arrange things, the first time I saw the ghost, she was in a graveyard.

  She smiled at me.

  • • •

  “I saw a ghost today,” I said as we were washing the dishes.

  “Really?” Josh asked, and passed me a plate. Water dripped from it, spattering the tails of Josh’s shirt and the thighs of my jeans. “What was it doing?”

  “She. Not ‘it.’ She was in the graveyard.” I had stood at the window, when I saw her, watching. She looked like she was about my age. Her face even seemed familiar to me, though I was sure I didn’t know her.

  She smiled, and her hands curved, like claws. Then she was gone.

  “Well, isn’t a graveyard sort of the logical place for a ghost to be? I mean, better there than in our bedroom, or the pantry.” He stacked the silverware in the drying rack.

  “You seem fairly unconcerned about all of this.” I hadn’t expected Josh to freak out—Josh didn’t freak out about anything—but I had been expecting a reaction stronger than mild relief that at least our canned goods weren’t being haunted.

  “I don’t believe in ghosts, Tamsin. Dead is dead, and when you’re buried, you stay where you were put. I’m sure you saw something. Just not something I need to be concerned about.”

  I looked through the window, out into the night, at the gravestones standing sentinel, silent and waiting. My left hand curled into a claw.

  • • •

  We moved here for a job. A good opportunity—for one of us. Josh promised it would be my turn next time. It was a nice community, he was sure I could find something.

  I’d had a good life where we were before: a job, friends—the things that ground you. I’d given them up.

  Now I had him, and a house to unpack.

  • • •

  I kept finding bits and pieces left over from the people who had lived he
re before us. Not just forgotten trash: an armoire, with a drawer full of men’s T-shirts, still folded; a woman’s silk robe, embroidered with a pattern of ivy leaves, hanging in the closet; one high-heeled shoe, spangled with silver glitter; a battered paperback—poetry—with a picture of a smiling couple tucked inside the front cover.

  There was a tear in the photograph, splitting them almost in two, but they looked happy.

  I wondered if they’d moved in a hurry, if they hadn’t been able to supervise the packing. I had been gathering up the things I found, so I could ask the Realtor to send them on.

  It seemed like a lot to forget.

  • • •

  The night after I first saw the ghost, I didn’t sleep well. I didn’t sleep at all, really. My skin itched and felt too small, too tight. I tossed, tangling the sheets, throwing the pillows to the floor. After the first hour, Josh went to sleep elsewhere. Finally, I gave up too and stood at the window, watching. Through the open window I breathed in the scent of a storm, but the sky was cloudless.

  As far as I could tell, the graveyard was empty, but that’s the thing about ghosts, isn’t it? They might be there—anytime—filling the spaces where we are. We just don’t see them.

  • • •

  The graveyard was small and oddly haphazard. The markers weren’t arranged in the precise, sterile rows of modern cemeteries, but scattered here and there like they had grown from the ground where they stood. The stones were weather-faded and overgrown with weeds. An enormous wild rosebush curled its thorns over at least two plots, like something out of a fairy tale before the curse was lifted.

  One of the graves was recent—the date on the headstone was from this year. The earth still hadn’t quite settled, and the grass spidery threads over uneven ground.

  The earliest grave dated to the mid-seventeenth century. The house dated from around then too—the one growing up with the other. Old for America, but the kind of old that made my friends in England half laugh when I described it that way. Still, the graveyard felt ancient when I walked in it, as if holding the dead pushed a place backward in time, so that a grave with a stone that marked it as being there for one hundred years was actually half a millennium old.

  I liked the graveyard. The real estate agent who had shown us the house clearly hadn’t—her smile was plastic as she assured us that at least the neighbors wouldn’t be noisy; then she refused to meet my eye after I said that graveyards were among my favorite places. I found them fascinating—the names, the dates, the lives marked by single lines of poetry. When I visited new cities, I would go to the cemeteries. I would walk through the rows and make up lives for the people, speaking them aloud to the quiet air. When I died, I wanted someone to walk past and trace my letters, say my name, make sure I didn’t disappear.

  It was late summer and the air smelled of grass that had been baked by the sun; of fat, pollen-drunk bumblebees; and of the bitter milkweed of monarch butterflies. But the headstones still smelled cool, slate and stone.

  Walking among the stones, trying to imagine which of the residents had walked out of her grave, I noticed something I hadn’t before: all the people buried there were women.

  All of them were women who had died young—between fifteen and twenty-five. Each of the stones had the same phrase beneath the name and date: BELOVED SISTER. Any of them could have been the ghost’s grave. I traced my fingers over their names: Rosalind and Stephanie and Helen and Liza. Nora and Alanna and Sarah and Maude. I whispered each name to the air.

  But I told no stories. Not then. What kind of story do you tell about a garden of dead girls?

  • • •

  Another drawer of forgotten objects, this time in the kitchen. Maps, flyers for local cleaning services, food-stained delivery menus. Pens with the names of banks and hotels on them. Smashed at the back of the drawer, a snake’s length of foil-wrapped condoms.

  It felt like finding a dirty secret, like I had opened the door and seen the former residents of the house fucking. I washed my hands after I threw them away.

  As I dried my hands, I heard a woman weeping. I looked all through the house, and the yard, and walked through the graves again, but I didn’t find her.

  • • •

  Josh brought takeaway home for dinner. Thai—which I liked spicy enough that tears would roll down my cheeks as I ate, and he liked not spicy at all; so I was unpacking the containers onto very separate plates before bringing them to the table.

  It was clearly a peace offering, a way of saying “I know this sucks for you,” without saying “I’m sorry,” but he was trying, and so I let him.

  “Did you see any ghosts today?” he asked.

  I looked at him before I answered, trying to gauge his tone. Was it simple curiosity—no more nor less than asking if I’d had a chance to go to the grocery store—or was there some other note beneath the words?

  I couldn’t guess, so I just answered. “No, but I went looking to see which grave might be hers.”

  “Did you figure it out?” He sat at the table, unbuttoning his cuffs and rolling them up.

  “If you don’t believe in ghosts, why are you asking me questions as if you do?”

  “This supposed ghost seems to matter to you. I’m trying to understand why it does.”

  And then: a peace offering. I almost told him what I’d found. Not just a cemetery, but a cemetery full of girls—beloved sisters. But I closed my mouth over the words. It wasn’t like it was even a secret—he could go to the graveyard and see the same thing for himself—it just wasn’t something I wanted to share. It was mine.

  “Or maybe you’ve decided to take up a career in fiction, and I’m the one you’re trying out your stories on. Have you decided being J. K. Rowling is easier than unpacking?” The line came out smooth, practiced, the kind of thing he’d tried out in the car first to see how it sounded.

  The woman’s voice again. Not weeping this time, but laughter, mocking. Josh didn’t react.

  “No,” I said, and passed him a plate of spring rolls.

  • • •

  The scent of a spring storm came through the bedroom window, thickening the air, waking me from a tangle of dreams—the weight of dirt on my body, blood drying on my skin and wet in my mouth. The pressure of other bodies near me, voices crying out words that didn’t linger past waking. My fingers, still dreaming, clenched like claws and remembered rending. My muscles ached as if I had spent the night running. Through the mattress, I could feel bones beneath me.

  There was mud, streaked, at the bottom of the sheets.

  • • •

  Here is another way you can be woken up: rolling over onto something small, something that stabs you in your soft places. An earring. Not yours. You gasp, and you inhale—on your sheets—someone else’s perfume. Jasmine. It’s an old story, older even than ghosts.

  And so when he asks you to move, to make a new start, you say yes.

  You say yes, but you hate yourself a little, because what comes out of your mouth is “yes,” not “fuck you” or “I know” or “in our bed.” But you’re not ready to say those things, those endings. Not yet.

  You say yes, but you think maybe. Maybe if he sees you and not her, things can go back to how they were. Maybe then you won’t feel like the ghost haunting your own life.

  • • •

  Clouds rose like bruises against the sky, and thunder rumbled in the distance. The air was heavy and thick, clinging to my skin, but no rain fell.

  I peeled back lids of boxes, unwrapped the packed-away pieces of a life. Candlesticks and pairs of shoes and picture frames with photos of a smiling couple I still recognized but wasn’t sure I believed in anymore.

  A set of small crystal stars, which I hung on the bedroom windows to catch the light. The wind tossed them about, rattling them against the glass.

  Outside, the ghost stood in the graveyard again, her hair still in the rush of wind.

  She smiled.

  I knew that smile.
One half of a couple, in a photo nearly torn apart but preserved inside a book. The ghost was the woman who had lived in the house before me.

  I ran from the house, from the piles of half-unpacked boxes, to her. The dry grass sliced at my calves, the bottoms of my feet, a thousand small knives, and so I ran faster, as if that would be enough to let me escape.

  She was gone when I got there, but I flung myself backward onto the ground where she had been standing, pressing my bones into the earth above where hers lay. I dug my fingers into the dirt and held on tight, tighter. Voices rose up through the ground.

  The voices of the dead, full of decay, of worms, choked with rot. I felt their words in my bones. Sister, they called me. Same.

  • • •

  They spoke of a storm, and wind and rain washed over me, soaking my skin. They spoke of betrayal, the death of love, and my mouth ran red with blood, thick and salt.

  They whispered of vengeance, and my legs ached from the chase, and the howls of the hunted echoed in my ears.

  They told me of falling beneath the ground and dreaming the graves that covered them. Beloved sisters.

  I opened my eyes to dry grass and the setting sun.

  • • •

  “Were you out there playing dead?” Josh asked. There was a smudge, just below his ear. Lipstick. A color not mine. I didn’t look at it. Sometimes you don’t need to turn the page to know how the story ends.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, slicing tomatoes for the salad.

  “Lying out in the graveyard. I don’t know, sunbathing? Tamsin, you still have grass in your hair.”

  I set down the knife. The wind carried a woman’s laugh through the room. “Were you spying on me?”

  “Was I . . .” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Just put mine in the fridge. I’m going for a walk.”

  I curled my hands into claws, and when I inhaled, I tasted blood.

  • • •

  Lightning strobed across the sky, shocking the night into something sharp-edged. Josh, I supposed, was still out walking in it. He could, if he wanted, find his way back.