The rocks pressed sharply into my hands as I lowered myself and stretched one of my legs as far down as I could while the other tried to keep a shallow foothold that didn’t feel steady. Too late, I realized I should have tried this on my belly. The sky felt like a giant invitation in front of me, all it needed was one slip and I would tumbled into its emptiness.
I was stuck. With my elbows jutting sharply behind me and my tenuous foothold slipping, I was losing the strength to hold myself in this awkward position for much longer. My hands began to sweat and the rough cliff edge suddenly became slippery beneath them.
The feeling happened first, bright and instinctual, I was going to fall. Just jump. Where was Ray? As my foot slipped off the wall, I pushed myself as best I could and tried to aim my body for the narrow ribbon of path below me. Sharp edges sliced at one of my elbows and I heard fabric tear behind me. When my feet landed on the ground, the force of my chaotic momentum propelled me forward. The sky yawned open before me and my arms wheeled wildly back, trying to save the rest of my body from death.
It didn’t help.
Falling. I was falling over the cliff.
Suddenly, hard fingers grabbed my arm and jerked me back.
Shocked, my breath raced in and out of me while my heart drummed loudly in my brain. I wasn’t falling. I looked up and saw Ray standing beside me. I could feel his hand still clutching my upper arm, his fingers tightly pressing my small muscles painfully against the bone.
On the path. I was on the path, my feet were under me and I was standing on the path. A shaky relief flooded through my body and made my legs buckle but Ray easily kept me up right with just one hand.
“Are you going to be alright?” he asked.
I nodded my head and straightened my legs beneath me, forcing them to stand on their own.
His fingers released slowly from my arm, “I told you to jump. All that sliding and messing around is why you just about catapulted yourself over the edge.”
Disbelieving, I looked into his eyes. Was he scolding me for almost dying? Anger, bright and hot ballooned in my chest. “I thought you were supposed to be my guide,” I spat. “What kind of guide just leaves the…” I couldn’t think of what I was. “The guided to flounder down a sheer cliff face all by themselves? It’s clearly nothing for you to pull and toss me around like I was nothing more than a rag doll. How hard would it have been for you to help me down?”
Looking calm and mildly disinterested, his expression never faltered. “By my estimation, you seemed to require more help with up than down,” he turned from me and continued back the way he had come.
Infuriated, I stood a moment more before I began following him down. And how had he gotten back up here so fast anyway? He had been no where near me when I began falling.
“I am nowhere near as limited as the man who owns this face.”
I stopped short and stared at his back. “What do you mean, owns this face—that’s not your face?” my tone was acid.
He waved his hand dismissively over his shoulder and never stopped walking, “I can have any face I choose.”
“And how did you choose that—” I stopped, suddenly realizing why he was so familiar to me. It was the face of the man in the church, the Basilica de la Soledad in front of the Virgin of Solitude. The man who had been joking with me.
I started walking again and stumbled over a large rock, “You can read my thoughts,” I shouted, annoyed with him and my own faltering feet.
He shook his head. I couldn’t see his face but I knew he had a self satisfied grin. “No, I can’t. As I said before, which you would have heard if you had just jumped and kept up like I told you, I see images and I feel emotions associated with those images. I do not read your exact thoughts. So when I met you in the desert, and you were very distressed by my natural state, I saw the image of this man’s face in your recent memories and was hoping it would help calm you down—even though your emotions about him were very…volatile.”
I felt like picking up and rock and throwing it at his smug head. “My emotions are not volatile!”
He laughed, “Okay. My mistake. There is clearly nothing unusual about launching into a rage just because someone is flirting with you.”
There were so many pieces of his statement that annoyed me, I didn’t at first know where to start. “He wasn’t flirting with me,” I sputtered.
Ray continued silently down the path in front of me.
“And I didn’t launch into a rage,” but before I could help it, the image of my shaking, fumbling hands loosing their grip on my camera took hold in my brain.
Ray stopped walking abruptly, turned around and cocked his head. “Yes, I can see that I was very much mistaken. You clearly have a masterful command of your emotional states.”
Gaping, I only watched as he turned on his heels and kept moving down the winding path.
“We’re almost there,” he said lightly, as if the angry discussion between us had never happened.
“Almost where?” I shouted to hide the fact that I was actually a little relieved to have the subject changed so briskly. I hated to be wrong.
“Just ahead,” he said over his shoulder. “Beyond that stone wall,” he pointed to a tumbling pile of rocks that looked nothing like a wall. “That’s the first offense you’ll face.”
I stopped sharply. “Already?”
“Of course. Tick tock,” he pointed to the orange moon dominating the sky above our head.
When I began walking again, my eyes scanned the black and brown woods around us, searching for any sign of what I might expect to find ahead of us. As we passed the pile of stones, a sound began to vibrate the air. Louder with every step, it was a collective roar that came from many different sources. “Are those voices?”
“Oh, yes,” he nodded.
We must have been very close because the sound of them was like the thunder of a stadium.
Ray stopped and stared into the trees before us. I came and stood beside him and stared as well. In the distance, I could see that the forest of trees stopped and beyond that, there were things moving.
“What are they doing?” I asked.
Ray kept his gaze focused ahead but leaned closer to me, “Something dreadful.”
Chapter Eight
Slander
Before me, thousands and thousands of souls swarmed, and their voices, a never wavering swell of chaos and noise, were deafening.
Ray and I stood beneath a decrepit stone archway and watched the frantic activity, none of them paid any attention to us. “Can they see us?”
Ray shook his head, “Not until you cross this entrance. And even then, most of them won’t approach you. They are too consumed with what they are doing to notice anyone or anything not directly involved with that activity.”
“What are they doing?”
He pressed his lips into a thin line and then said, “I can’t tell you.”
“What? Why?”
“I guide you through The Between but the offenses are off limits when it comes to assistance. All I can tell you is that unbalanced energies have to figure out how one or more of the offenses shifted their energy in the physical world, it won’t be any different for you.”
“But, when we get inside, how will I know what to do?”
“Once you get inside,” he clarified. “I can’t go in with you.” A worried looked, like a flash, furrowed his brow for an instant. The concern on his face, however brief it had been, took me by surprise more than his words telling me that he would be leaving me to fend for myself. Up until now, Ray had seemed so self assured and mostly detached from me, my circumstances, and potential outcomes of this whole situation. But just then, for that second, I got the distinct impression that Ray actually cared about what might happen to me. “And the doing part?” I looked back to the souls rushing around and talking excitedly, “What am I supposed to do?”
“Whatever you think is required of you,” he said solemnly. “I can tell you
that once you cross,” he pointed to the threshold before us. “Just like the other souls, you won’t be able to see me or the world outside the offense.” He hesitated. “And, like them, if you stay too long, you will lose your ability to tell the difference between what is real and what is not. The offense will become your new reality.”
“And Daniel?” I asked. “Will he be in there?”
Ray shrugged. “He might. Or, he might not. I am not his guide and so I don’t have direct knowledge of his energy and where he is in The Between.”
“Daniel has a guide?”
“All souls do…or should anyway.”
“Why was his guide not with him? Why did his guide not help him through?”
Ray gazed up into the sky, the orange moon ticked incessantly over our heads. “Questions, there are so many.” He brought his gaze down and leveled his eyes at me. “I don’t know for sure where Daniel’s guide is. When a soul becomes a faint, their guide travels, alone, to The Great Balancer’s castle…they are never seen again.”
“But Daniel isn’t a faint yet.”
“I know,” Ray said. “And I don’t know why his guide would have been taken from him before it was time…only guesses.”
I watched him, waiting for him to tell me his guesses, but he didn’t.
“It will have to wait,” he looked inside the offense. “You need to get started Carmen or this day will slip away and then so will you.” His eyes shifted to the ground in front of us, “And I don’t want that to happen.” He inhaled and let the air out in a sigh, “Ready?”
“No,” I said, my voice quavering at the prospect of being left alone in a world full of dead people and no clue how to get myself back out.
“Perfect,” he said with a smile that didn’t match his concerned eyes. He placed his hand at the center of my back and guided my body to the edge of the threshold. “You’ll figure it out. I know you will,” but the tone of his voice sounded uncertain.
I stood, hesitating as tingling waves of panic paralyzed my legs.
“You need to step in,” Ray prodded. “I can’t shove you in,” his light-hearted humor did nothing to calm me. It felt like standing on the high dive over a freezing cold pool. Just jump.
I didn’t move. What if I couldn’t figure it out? What if I got stuck in this strange place tucked away far inside this equally strange world. I watched the shadows of life before me. Drifting, mixing, some looked confused and lost, others angry and explosive—all were in varying stages of decay. It was easy to tell the newer souls from the ones who had been here awhile. Their forms were more complete, the color in their skin and eyes more pronounced. They still possessed a lucid expression while the souls on the verge of becoming a faint were more difficult to define. It was hard to see them if you looked directly at them, as if they were not quite there. Washed out, vague images of the former energy that had made them so solid in the real world.
Right in front of me, a small soul passed by. His color had faded, like a sepia image of the boy in the photo carefully placed between the pages of a travel guide in my bag, but I could still make out the once red color of his shirt even though his hair now looked more gray than blonde.
“Daniel,” I called and stepped unthinking into the offense. Behind me, as my body transitioned into the new space filled with death, I felt the brush of Ray’s fingers travel down my arm and curl lightly around my hand as it slipped through his. And then, he was gone.
The rush of the chaotic space knocked me off balance and I fell to the ground. Pain shot through my knee as it cracked against a stone while my hands landed hard in the dirt and rocks. The space around me was a swirling vortex of confusions—sounds, lights, and emotions bombarded my senses and created a thick pressing pressure in my head. I fell back until I was sitting on the ground, closed my eyes, and pressed my hands to my ears trying to block out the roar of their voices that were a thousand times louder now that I was inside with them.
With my hands still pressed to my ears, I clumsily stood by pressing my elbows into my knees and searched the space behind me for the entrance I had only moments ago tripped through.
It was gone.
I turned in a slow circle and stared into what seemed like miles and miles of densely packed souls in every direction—Daniel had disappeared.
A sound, much closer than the collective noise all around me, hummed near my ear. A low vibration that felt like a physical presence entering my ear canal and traveling into my throat. When I turned towards it, a soul stood right next to me and looked directly into my eyes. She opened her mouth and I realized that the vibration was coming from her—she was trying to speak to me.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered and shook my head.
She smiled big, looked around as if to see who might be listening to us, and shifted into a conspiring lean towards my face. Her lips began to move in a strange rhythm that didn’t seem to match the vibrations leaving her mouth.
I stared at her, not understanding what she was trying to tell me, wondering if I needed to understand her in order to figure out how to pass this offense. I looked past her, hoping someone else might be able to show me what I needed to do, but everyone else looked very similar to her. Hunched near each other, words flowing back and forth, some still bright with energy, others fading right before my eyes into elongated faints. A slow creep of helplessness wormed through my insides. I turned to the girl before me and focused my eyes carefully on her still moving mouth—I needed to understand what was happening around me.
All I could hear and feel were more vibrations tickling the hairs in my ears and filling my throat. I focused harder, willed her words to make sense, “She,” I blurted. Surprised by the word suddenly emanating from my lips, I snapped my mouth shut. It was not a word I had said. Or at least, not a word I had thought to say.
The girl smiled wickedly at me, lifted her chin, and began calling more vibrations into my ear and throat. A fullness seemed to fill my lungs and then spill from my lips, “Sssshhhee did it innnnn the baaaaattthhhhroooooommm stall,” the sounds rattled my ribs and echoed inside my chest. Shocked, I realized her words were coming through me.
“She did what? Who’s she?” I asked.
The girl’s eyes darted around and then she leaned closer, when she opened her lips, I felt the surge of her words again filling my lungs and throat. “She cuts herself,” the words whispered over my lips and left an electric trail of sensation. “She cuts herself in the bathroom stalls.”
Her eyes were deep black, pits of abyss that fell into nothing. Why was she telling me this? Was I supposed to help someone? “Who?” I tried.
Her mouth stretched wider this time and I noticed a tendril hung from her top lip, like a thin worm of flesh with a life all its own, it wriggled and grew longer, reaching out as if searching for something. A shudder of disgust made me flinch away but her words began to fill me. “Sarah,” she said through me. “Sarah cuts herself,” she smiled and the wriggling flesh splintered into tiny fingers that anchored into the swell of her lower lip. The resonance of her words thrummed through my core. Now that I was getting used to her way of communicating through me, the sensation was not unpleasant, like listening to music with a deep base that massaged your organs. It was when the force came up and through me that the good feeling left. In my mouth, the words were foreign and felt like they left the stain of aftertaste, like sour milk sitting in the hot sun.
When she spoke again, the long flesh connected her lips like a grotesque rubber band—more tiny worms sprouted from her lips. “She cuts herself because her daddy doesn’t love her.”
Staring at her mouth, I fell back a step. In my left ear, I could feel the swell of words again traveling down my throat and then rippling through my chest. Behind me was another soul, “He had sex with Eddie in the locker room,” spilled over my lips.
This new soul’s mouth was a writhing mass of worms that were also sprouting inside her mouth. Too horrible to look at directly, I tried to focus
my eyes on her fathomless black sockets, but the incessant unnatural movement of her mouth made me gag and drove my eyes to the ground.
“Who,” I choked. “What am I supposed to do?” I scanned the area around us, trying to see if I could tell who they were talking about—or a way out. What I saw was Daniel. He was speaking with another soul. I watched as he listened, shook his head and then said something.
“Daniel!” I shouted. Something happened behind him. The light shifted, like heat rising off a hot road in the distance. The space behind him wavered—and then he stepped into it and disappeared.
“Daniel,” I ran to the spot and then waved my hands frantically through the air he had just vanished into. “Daniel,” I shouted into nothing. He was gone again.
But how? I turned fast to the soul he had just been talking with. His entire bottom jaw was gone and his tongue had completely transformed into one giant maggot like creature. I closed my eyes and covered my mouth trying to stifle the surge of vomit threatening to erupt out of me. You have to talk to him. When I opened my eyes, he was drifting away.
“Wait,” I called. “Wait, I need to talk to you,” I ran after him and touched his shoulder, it felt cold and wet, like raw meat. When he turned towards me, I couldn’t stop myself from looking away. “That boy you were just talking to, what did he say? Do you know where he went?”
My throat began to tickle and I tried to balance the strange confusion between liking the sensation of his energy vibration in my chest and the wretched taste of his words as they left my mouth. “She’s a total slut,” I breathed. “She had sex with six of us last week at the party.”
“No,” I said. “I need to know how to leave here. What did you say to that boy in the red? Did you tell him how to get out of here?”
“Oh, she totally liked it. We took turns two at a time,” his words tasted like bile and his cheeks and upper lip raised in what would have been a grin if the entire bottom of his face wasn’t missing. The fat white slug in his mouth flopped excitedly.
I shuddered as my hands flew to my face, I was going to throw up. “Please?” I begged. I need to know how to get out of here. He continued to drift away and I didn’t have the strength to go after him. He turned to another soul and repeated, “She’s a total slut.”
The Exquisite and Immaculate Grace of Carmen Espinoza Page 6
