“If there was no Eden,” he said, “then who is responsible for death and sin?”
“We are,” said Jude. “You don’t need original sin to condemn you, you sin by yourself.”
“Yes, but how is it that you are able to sin in the first place?” pressed Charon.
“It’s the paradox of free will,” Jude said in a rush, “in order to be able to love, you have to be able to choose not to love, otherwise everything is a robot.”
“And yet, a great many people are choosing not to love,” Charon said. “Why?”
“Because they value their own desires more,” said Jude.
“But why? Wouldn’t you agree that it is better to love unselfishly?”
These words cut through Ellie’s consciousness, and spilling out through the gap came everything she thought these last few years—a worry that gnawed and bit at her, every time someone spoke to her, smiled at her, even so much as glanced her way. A little voice that asked each time: How are you able to hurt me, if I let you?
“No,” Ellie cut in, before Jude could answer. “It is not better to love at all.”
Jude looked at her with shock, that someone could say something like this, and Ellie tried to square her shoulders, ended hunching them instead. She avoided looking into Jude’s eyes, but when she focused on Charon’s she saw the strangest thing—
Sympathy.
“You see,” said Charon, softly. “She understands.”
“Understands what?” Jude demanded. “How to sound like teenage angst?”
“That the world is set up in such a way that love, true unselfish love, is impossible,” said Charon. “There are limited resources and time. Anyone who gives and gives is taken advantage of and dies. But those who act selfishly survive and thrive. I believe the English term is ‘survival of the fittest.’ But fittest does not mean most moral. By the nature of the world, we are asked to sin. We must, to survive among sinners.”
Jude huffed, clearly at odds. Ellie knew that if her shoulders had not risen as a barrier, protection, now they would be. The words were jabbing, too close to her own worries.
“And so you must harden yourself,” Charon said, gazing at Ellie. “It is either that, or be open to every person taking his stab at you, yes? Where was God when you died, girl?”
Coldness came over her, though logically Ellie knew the temperature could not change in this timeless world, and besides she wore her coat. But she curled her remaining good arm anyway and thought of long nights praying for her parents to stop. Just stop.
They are happier without me, the words were in her throat, but she was not going to say them. That would be stupid. Opening up a target for Obadiah Charon and Jude to use.
Charon was looking at her like he could read her thoughts anyway. He said, “Yes, you understand. This world is a rotten, ugly place where small children get cancer for no reason at all. War, disease, poverty, loneliness, cruelty—these are the world. God made the world this way and we suffer through it. We are right to lay blame at His feet.”
“You can’t actually believe that,” said Jude, but he was not speaking to Charon, he was looking at Ellie, and his voice was incredulous.
Ellie tried not to shrug. She asked, “Why can’t I?”
“Because the world is wonderful!” Jude exploded. He sounded amazed that he had to say any of this. “Think! Surely someone must have loved you—there’s nothing like love—and there’s knowledge, as much as you want you can learn anything—and food, eating is great—and long walks in parks, and snow in winter, when everything is so quiet—” he threw a hand out to indicate the Rockies. “Look how beautiful!”
“Yes,” said Charon. “Beautiful. But dying. Since the beginning, the world has been an enormous clock, wound up and ticking. Yet each tick is a count down toward the ceasing of time. And this ultimate fate, winding down, was not an interruption in the clock’s purpose or creation by some outside force. It was designed that way.”
Charon drew to his full height. His face twisted, but the emotion was indescribable.
“God designed us to die.”
Jude did not say anything, but if his frown was any deeper it would cut into his face. Ellie thought, Well, there are reapers... we are commissioned... there’s a whole system in place for the dead... was it there since the beginning? Is that what’s he’s saying?
“Because there is no Garden or original sin,” Obadiah Charon said, driving his point to the end. “Therefore, death is a made part of the universe. It is necessary for the universe to function. The universe has an author, so God must want us to die.”
“No,” said Jude. “He wants us to live. To choose to live. That’s why He made us.”
And Ellie recalled Jude saying: I wouldn’t change my mind...
Her own words came back to her: I think He’s an asshole. He doesn’t care about us...
The strangest memory drifted to her: an image of the faces of those who stood at the door of Heaven. They looked crazed, she had always thought, manic, like they were obsessed stalkers and the object of their affection was there. But unlike the souls who stood outside the doors to Hells, and yet seeing everything they wanted still held back, afraid, these souls did not pause. When you let them go they flung themselves against the bloody cloth and practically clawed their way into the cavern behind.
Jude had asked: Hell is... happiness?
She reminded herself: No place is happy.
Or, at least, no place is happy... for me.
Charon had apparently decided that arguing with Jude was over, because he said, “You could try to stop me, but I’m far more dangerous than you. Don’t test me, boy.”
And he went back to what he was doing, pulling his leg along the dirt. Ellie watched him crouch, making another mark against the ground, depositing another reaper’s tool. Not hers—that was all that mattered. If he had set hers down, maybe she could have tried to grab it and run. But where to? She needed Obadiah Charon to find the shards.
He doesn’t care about saving the world, she thought. Maybe he even ended the world on purpose. He’s mad at God, so he’s doing something to get His attention.
And killing everyone in the process.
What an asshole. She scuffed her foot against the grass, winced as that jostled her hurting hand in her pocket. And directed her complaint to the divine again: Why am I the only sane person in the world? Why won’t people get it—just because we have to die someday, doesn’t mean that we have to die today!
But even as she thought these words, she could feel the charge of hypocrisy curling up through the insides of her throat. That was the cry of every soul, every time she plucked them—Not today! Not today! Give me one more day! And she had reaped them anyway. Because it was their time; for them, death had indeed been today.
But she had known her own death was coming.
Carefully, knowing that Jude was watching, she lifted her remaining good hand and plucked at the scarf around her neck, the unhealed wound that would never heal. That just seemed to reopen and reopen and reopen and reopen...
“What happened to you,” Jude said, softly, and Ellie realized she had been waiting for this question. Ever since meeting the old woman upstairs and Cookie interrupted them, Jude had been wanting to ask. Maybe even earlier than that.
“Life,” she replied. “Life happened.” She breathed in, out, noisily. Even without her hands pulling, her scarf felt tight, her throat swollen. And she confessed:
“People always want to know why suicides happen. They say, ‘Normal people don’t kill themselves.’ They want extra special reasons. But they don’t want to think about is that maybe there aren’t any. Maybe it’s nothing more than I was alone and I was tired of being lonely. There aren’t any secret reasons that are impossible for normal people to understand. It’s just life. Life is hard and I didn’t want to endure any more.”
“But Ellie,” said Jude. “You said it yourself, upstairs—yo
u repented, before you died. There must be something in life that made you want to keep living.”
“I was lying,” said Ellie. But those words burned her tongue. As she spoke, her throat closed, even as there was some immense pressure below in her chest, clawing its way out. She wanted to pull the words she had just said back into her mouth. And yet when she opened her jaw, the pressure that hissed out came fast like steam:
“You’re lying, too! Remember, you said—why you would help me stop the end of the world? You said it would be nice to have paradise, but you’ll save the world for unbelievers. What’s all this nonsense you’re saying now about the world being beautiful? You’re contradicting yourself. You don’t really have reasons for believing anything, do you? Just like in Hell, you said evidence doesn’t convince you.”
And Jude replied, curtly, “Says the girl who hates the world but wants to save it.”
For a moment, Ellie thought she might hit him. She would have raised her fist out of her pocket, torn fingernail and all, would have struck out, but then she caught sight of the three reapers lying prone on the ground by Jude’s feet, and for reasons even she could not understand, but were compelling nonetheless, she stopped.
For a moment they just breathed. Ellie did not look at anything but the shape of Obadiah Charon, her eyes unfocused, as he drew another line and crouched to write again.
Then Jude said, quietly: “I’m sorry. That was harsh. But you were intentionally riling me up, so I just reacted. That was mean of me. What was it Shawn kept calling you?” And Ellie realized that Jude’s voice sounded oddly fond. “A bitch?”
Surprising herself, Ellie laughed. “That’s the first time you’ve cursed in a while, isn’t it?”
“I had a foul mouth at thirteen,” said Jude. “Then one day I realized that cursing didn’t make me sound older, it made me sound stupid and immature. So I stopped.”
“I thought it was a religious thing,” said Ellie.
“Oh, no,” said Jude. “Heck, Jesus cusses in the Bible. It’s little old ladies who think cursing defines the state of your soul. I’m not sure where they get that.”
“I’m not sure where people get anything,” said Ellie. They lapsed back into silence.
Jude sidled up to her, shoulders touching, and said, “You know we have to stop him.”
Ellie was sure that Charon could still hear those words, or else knew why Jude was whispering now. But they had little choice: they needed some kind of plan.
“I don’t know what he’s doing, but it can’t be good,” she whispered back. As much as she could sympathize with Charon’s anger and lashing out, much as she might like him to give God a piece of his mind, she could not let this continue. At the very least, because: “We need him to find the shards.”
“I know,” said Jude. “Incapacitate him, or something. I think he’s probably gonna make mincemeat out of me—you need to hang back, just in case, maybe there’s another way to find the shards, and you’re the one who has to do that anyway. But I can try, at least.”
Ellie glanced at him, saw that Jude was watching Charon lay down the third reaper’s tool, begin drawing the next line. She wondered if a human soul—or whatever Jude was—could be as seriously hurt as the reapers on the ground behind them. If, once hurt, such a human soul could recover the same as reapers did.
Yet, what choice did they have? All she could do was nod.
“I want to say one more thing,” said Jude. “It’s maybe not fair to say it now, while I’m charging in all heroic-like, because you won’t get to respond. But I need to say it now cause it’ll bother me if I go in fighting and don’t come back and can’t say it later.”
“Okay,” said Ellie, and braced herself. Surely these would be words that hurt.
“I guess what I want to say is that I’m trying to see why you are angry at God, the world, everything. I’m not sure I understand. I’ve never wanted to kill myself,” said Jude. “But, I think there is one person who would understand, for sure. God knows what it’s like to suffer and die. And if you think about it—if you really think—then what He did, as Jesus, was to kill Himself. I think God knows exactly what it’s like to commit suicide.”
Ellie had never heard the Passion story phrased quite that way before. Her father had always preached it as the great noble sacrifice that everyone should focus on being grateful for. Suicide was a word tinted with selfishness and cruelty. The two were never paired, as far back as she could recall.
And yet now, as her eyes wandered over to the Rockies, purple even in the distorted light of the falling sun, she found herself wondering: Did God perhaps regret making the world? Was Christ an attempt merely to make things right, change the whole system? A reboot, if you will, of a world from death and despair to... to what, exactly?
Or had God designed this dying world for Himself to die in it?
Why?
“An unusual perspective,” said Charon, and Ellie saw he was standing at the edge of a rectangle, each corner with a mark against the soil and a reaper’s tool laid overtop. Her own pocket-watch was in the corner at his feet, furthest from her.
“Why, now that you think of it, God is the only person to have truly committed deicide,” Charon said. “But that’s not all. Sometimes I wonder if the Jesus story is not simply a big white wall that everyone chooses to paint in their own colors, and the reality is that there is nothing behind the paint except blank canvass.”
And he revealed his hand—palm bloody, droplets scattering as he shook the cut, doubtless made with his machete, over the center of his drawing. The blood sank into the soil, and there came the sound of something screaming—but there was nothing to make the noise, just a few lines on the ground and some blood in the dirt.
“Before you ask,” Charon said. “I’ll simply tell you: this is how to open the mouth of Hell.”
The scream continued on like the thing screaming had no lungs—it tapered off like music—
“Go,” said Jude, and as he charged ahead Ellie followed.
Jude struck Charon, telegraphed movement, fist a swinging baseball bat. His strength must have improved after the fight with Niles, because he knocked Charon ten feet, head over heels like a bowling pin.
Ellie only caught this in the periphery of her vision—she dove for her reaper’s tool, at Charon’s feet, though Charon’s feet were not there anymore. Her hand closed over the golden birdcage of her pocket-watch, and pulled—
It was glued to the ground. She tugged, but the pocket-watch was immovable. Bracing her feet, focusing all her attention, she told herself—I am a reaper and this is my reaper’s tool, I may not always be kind to it, but it is mine—and this time there was a bit of give, but she could not keep pulling through all the strain.
This felt familiar, like—and Ellie realized: if there was something holding down the pocket-watch, then it was like a magical lock, and if it was a lock—
One hand still straining at lifting her reaper’s tool, she rapped the pocket-watch with her knuckles—and bowled over backwards, for the pocket-watch came free.
“Ellie!” Jude shouted, and Ellie recognized that she was falling a lot further than she would have thought—
Chapter Thirty: Opening the Gates.
A hand snagged her by the ankle, dragged her upwards. Only when she was in the light again did she realize that her vision had been darkened, like she had fallen backwards into a tunnel. With this came the understanding that she was lying on her side on the grass, and not breathing—when she breathed out, smoke came instead of air—
Coughing and hacking, snot running from her nose, Ellie remembered the one time her father had offered her a cigar when she was seven years old. That had been a trick, she now knew, to try and teach her ahead of her teenage years that smoking was bad and not worth it. And the ploy had worked because Ellie found smoking disgusting.
“What?” she choked, and the air from her lungs was foggy, as if breathing in bel
ow-freezing temperatures. “What? What?” Frantically, she lifted the end of her scarf and wiped at her streaming eyes and nostrils, trying to regain comprehension of the world.
The pocket-watch was a reassuring weight in her injured hand. Her fingernail was gone.
When she could breathe and see again, she found Jude staring worriedly down at her, crouched at her side. His face was bloody. A long streak of red painted across the side of his face, a cascade as though someone had spilled a drink over him, just one wash of color that made the skin underneath seem ghostly by comparison.
“What—” Ellie sucked in air—“happened to you?”
“Mr. Charon nearly took my head off,” said Jude, and Ellie realized that the damage was actually his left ear, the top half of which was missing. The wound was not still bleeding, though it did not look scabbed over or closed, either. The flesh was glistening.
Further off, Charon stood with his machete at his side, watching the both of them. There was a smear of blood on the blade. He said, “I warned you both.”
“You’re kidding,” Ellie muttered. She sat up, clawed her nest of tangled yellow hair back away from her face so she could see properly. Charon looked far too casual, at ease with this situation, merely watching as Ellie climbed to her feet.
“How’s this, asshole?” She held up her pocket-watch. Her injured hand felt numb.
“I would call you stupid,” said Charon, “but you speak for yourself. If I needed to stop you from taking that reaper’s tool, I would have gone for you rather than fending him off.” And he pointed at Jude with the bloody tip of the blade.
Only then did Ellie turn back to the rectangle in the dirt to see—
It was no longer dirt. Instead, there was a void, a nothingness, a long tunnel down that, as she leaned to peer over the edge, held nothing but darkness. Whether that was because no sunlight could reach the thing, in this time-frozen world, or because the place the tunnel led was completely dark, she could not tell.
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