by Daniel Kraus
A final moon-stained glimpse: two hands still clasped.
Freezing water surged over my head and then pushed me lower. The screeching contortions of the waking world slid into the ebony glue of the depths, and the roadster cut beneath the whitecaps as if piloted. Mighty fists of pressure crushed the car until it made minor-key songs of bending steel. The composer, if I am not mistaken, was Carlo Gesualdo.
His was fitting funeral music and the Yankee Doodle was our shiny red casket. Yet it suffered a fatal, obvious, and stereotypical Californian flaw—it was a convertible. With a swiftness unexpected within such slow motion, I was suctioned from the driver’s seat. The car was there; the car was gone. I flailed, nowhere at all. I had lost everything, including Margeaux’s hand.
My spiky panic smoothed the instant I felt soft sand beneath my feet. Here I was, back again, at the basement of it all. Hadn’t it been at the bottom of a lake that I had first lost track of Death? Perhaps here, at the bottom of a bigger one, I would find it. A phosphorescent fish twitched by. I reached out, petted it, and it darted away. I laughed and felt the weight of water fill my lungs.
The water itself, mused I, was different from that of my first drowning. Whereas Lake Michigan had been translucid and left to the nautical dead, this stretch was polluted with the detritus of the living: liquor bottles once employed to drown sorrows, pennies wished upon to thriftless end, jewelry tossed away in heavy-heartedness. This sediment of failure and loss twinkled like dull stars in an inverted heaven.
A fresh piece of flotsam: a soaked, sad-petaled flower, Margeaux’s corsage, dropping into the hand that had once held hers.
She was alone out there.
Whatever had I done?
A citified landlubber to the core, I’d had little exposure to swimming holes, yet I kicked off like an Olympian, scattering sand and rocketing through its nimbus. Here, blackness; there, blacker shades of blackness. On instinct I aimed for the latter, paddling for what felt like hours. My hunch won out, for there on the seabed lay the hulk of the Yankee Doodle. Its front end had been scrunched into a smile; it seemed glad to have been resettled in the deep. You could not say the same for the body that agonized above it.
Margeaux’s floor-length gown had coiled about her legs, giving her the appearance of a selkie yearning for dawn. Her hem was ensnared in the crumpled mitt of the driver’s door and she bobbed above as senselessly as the balloon at the Elk’s Club. Was she alive or did the flit of the current imbue her with lifelike movement? No time to tell; I clambered over the ruins and yanked at the bottom of her skirt.
Just fabric, stupid silk, worthless lace, and yet without gravity to assist me, I could not gain the leverage needed to tear it free. A dreadful minute passed; there was still a chance. Two minutes passed; miracles did happen, so why would I quit? Ten minutes, twenty, thirty; absurdity now, gruesome folly, the batting about of a sodden corpse. Our little Gopher was gone, Dearest Reader, her acidulous judgments, her perceptive proclamations, all of it swallowed.
Pictures never die, Bridey had said. She’d been right. Everything else did.
I wrapped my limbs around Margeaux as would a squid and let the tide toss us with playful kitten paws. But after a time, the roadster caved in on itself, jerking her downward with a force I could not counter. I swam aside; I did not wish to see how she might be pinned or buried. I heard it, though, the belly-grumble of collapse, which produced in its wake a sudden and powerful current. It grabbed me by the ribs, nothing less than the hand of Gød, and lifted me up toward the thousands of debt collectors I had yet to pay.
No! Greatest of all sinners! Spurner of justness! Release me!
I grabbed a loose fender to weigh me down, but it had been fractured in the crash and fell to pieces in my hands. Up I surged and down I kicked, this time taking hold of a branch of mossy wood, which disintegrated into viridescent dust. I dug rocks from the sand and jammed them into my pockets to weigh me down, but Gød, impatient now, clamped me in His forceps. Obediently I rose; the world worsened from bucolic black to glowering gray. Once again I was delivered through the Uterus of Time; once again it was an ugly breech birth. Though what other kind could a fellow heading backward expect?
XXI.
BUDDY! HEY, BUDDY!”
Before this invocation, millennia had passed, during which any of my fantasies might have been true. My eyelid dark, for instance, was really ten feet of ocean silt. The hiss of the highway was the undersea tectonics of a rearranging planet. Even the hands that took me by the armpits could have been a coral reef claiming me as feed for generations of fish.
“Jeez Louise! You all right, guy? You okay?”
The sizzling surf slid away as my body was dragged up the beach. My chin cut a tunnel through wet sand, then two hands wiped clean my face before rolling me onto my stomach. One of the hands walloped my back—a surprise—and my mouth voided a gallon of brown water seasoned with stones, twigs, shells, and bottle caps. No mayflies crawling their way out of my throat, not this time.
“Breathe, buddy! Breathe!”
That I could not do, but eject more scree I could. When the pile of vomitus became too much, I elbowed my body, lighter now for being emptied, away from the hands that continued their meddling. I foundered atop a bed of hot sand and, seeing no way around it, opened my eyes to the day.
It was the brightest one ever. The sky was spotless. The December breeze was sugar. Birds made wide circles, enjoying their forever descent. I looked at myself and saw that I was covered with translucent white jellyfish. I welcomed their poison before realizing that they were the soaked slop of screenplay pages.
“You’re one lucky son of a gun. Hoo-boy.”
Hunkered in the sand a few feet away was a boy my age, blond and suntanned and loaded with blinding white teeth. His ironed trousers and starched shirt had been thoroughly disheveled by his pointless rescue, but he was grinning.
“There wasn’t anyone else in the car with you, was there? I sure hope not.”
I coughed wet sand.
“I was just driving along up there when I saw the guardrail all busted up, so I pulled over and checked it out. Figured the wind last night could have sent someone over the edge. But I didn’t really think—oh, wow!”
He chuckled, leaned back against the dune, and titled his face to the sun.
“Tell you what, I’ll never forget today. First what I heard on the radio and then this? Hey, buddy, is that what ran you off the road? You heard what happened and got upset? Heard about Pearl Harbor, I mean?”
If Pearl Harbor was a woman, she’d had the good fortune of evading my warpath.
“Hold on, you haven’t heard? The Japs bombed it to pieces this morning. It’s all over the news. I was listening to the game when they broke in—hey, look, buddy, I know you been through a lot here, but you better get wise. Pearl Harbor is in Hawaii. It’s a military base. The dirty Japs, they sneak-attacked it, killed all sorts of our guys.”
With a push-up motion, I raised my waterlogged torso from the beach and prompted myself with the various mechanics of standing. I lifted one knee, but it shook like that of a newborn foal. No, that is too precious a simile; I was an abysmal creature of the sea making its first gawkish land maneuver, uncertain that its soft limbs would hold. But was that not my ongoing struggle writ large? The perpetual waffling between monster and man?
“Buddy? You know what this means, right?”
My prolonged residency upon this planet had taught me a thing, perhaps even two. This Hawaiian incident would goad our fair country into another war. Arsenals on both sides would be sharpened to new classifications of lethality. There would be more casualties, more deaths. Plato, that berobed blowhard, had been no favorite of mine during my childhood tutelage, but he’d written one observation that I could not shake:
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
My knee held; I
planted the associated foot. The whole leg trembled.
It would never hold my weight.
The boy punched a fist into a palm.
“We’ll cream ’em! That’s where I was headed when I found you. Me and some pals, we’re meeting up at the recruiting office in Malibu to get our physicals. You bet we’re gonna whip those Japs. Those Nazis, too! Hey, sorry about your car and everything, but maybe you want to come along?”
This curious death of mine had led me to a surfeit of unexpected places, uncommon people, and outlandish ends, and it was nowhere close to finished. Kneeling there upon that sun-blasted beach, I would not have been totally surprised, I think, to learn some of what was yet to come. That I would meet leaders of men and become a leader myself; that I would go places no human being had ever gone; that I would come to know, much belatedly, the true identity of my murderer. Can you still not make out the inevitable end to my tale? Oh, you darling thing; were your hand here, I would pat it.
Take heed, Dearest Reader, should you opt to continue with me down this narrowing path. We have spent considerable time in each other’s company, you and I, and often such proximity breeds fondness. But throw no arm about my shoulder; fly me no kisses before we meet again. Eye me instead with suspicion. Keep handy a register of the damages I have rained down upon those who have kept my company.
Never forget who I am and what I have done.
My shadow, struck by midday sun, evanesced beneath my feet as though I had never existed. I was standing. My knees knocked, hips teetered, and spine flapped, but I was standing. Perhaps that meant something; perhaps it did not. I rose to full height, a man, at least for now, on some grade of terra firma.
The boy stood too, slapped the sand from his seat, and addressed me square.
“It’s a new day, fella. A new world. What do you say?”
I was but seventeen, young for an enlistee, but I wagered that Uncle Sam would be willing to bend his rules for a lad so eager to die for the cause. For any cause, really. So what did I say to this magnanimous challenge? What else was there to say, Reader, about a country so generous that it handed to me, free of charge, one more chance at annihilation committed in the glory of its star-spangled banner, its twilight’s last gleam, its amber waves of grain—all that fine stuff.
I smiled. It looked good, I bet. I still had a bit of the knack.
“Gød bless America,” said I.
END OF VOLUME ONE
A COMMERCIAL SOLICITATION TO THE READER
Provided that you have enjoyed this fancy, we implore you to read the conclusion: The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume Two: Empire Decayed, to be issued soon by this most reputable of publishing organizations.
A NOTE OF GRATITUDE
Mr. Kraus wishes to convey appreciation to the following cohorts and colleagues: Mr. Richard Abate, Ms. Lisa Brown, Mr. Joshua Ferris, Ms. Eliza Kennedy, Ms. Amanda Kraus, Mr. Grant Rosenberg, and Mr. Christian Trimmer.
About the Author
DANIEL KRAUS is the acclaimed author of The Monster Variations, Rotters, and Scowler. With filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, he wrote Trollhunters. A writer, an editor, and a filmmaker, Daniel lives with his wife in Chicago. Visit him at danielkraus.com.
VISIT US AT
simonandschuster.com/teen
authors.simonandschuster.com/Daniel-Kraus
Also by Daniel Kraus
The Monster Variations
Rotters
Scowler
Trollhunters (with Guillermo del Toro)
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2015 by Daniel Kraus
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kraus, Daniel, 1975–
The death and life of Zebulon Finch. Volume one, At the edge of empire / as prepared by the esteemed fictionist, Daniel Kraus.—First edition.
pages cm
Summary: “The story follows Zebulon Finch, a teenager murdered in 1896 Chicago who inexplicably returns from the dead and searches for redemption through the ages”
—Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-1-4814-1139-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4814-1141-7 (eBook)
[1. Murder—Fiction. 2. Dead—Fiction.] I. Title. II. Title: At the edge of empire.
PZ7.K8672De 2015
[Fic]—dc23
2014039293
