by Jenny Trout
“I don’t belong there,” she reminded him softly, pleading with every fiber of her soul, the only thing she had left to herself. But she knew it was a plea that would go unanswered, as she could not put it into words and she doubted he would allow himself to hear it. “It can’t be good for the natural order of things for a once dead girl to suddenly spring back to life. Where is my body? How long have I been away?”
He would not meet her eye. “A long time. Months. Your body has rotted away by now. But I believe you can step through the corpseway and rejoin me in the mortal world.”
“How do you know this?” She wasn’t sure she even wanted a body. Her old one had given her so much trouble. She had been beautiful, but her beauty had drawn men who’d had wrong intentions. Her figure had blossomed before she’d understood the difference between childhood and womanhood, and she’d been ill-prepared to defend herself from the boys she’d once played with as friends. If that was all her body could do for her, she might as well remain a spirit.
A memory, nebulous and watery, swam to the surface of her mind. Everything was fuzzy and out of focus. She saw the ceiling of the crypt, heard the weeping of her mother.
“Where did they bury me?” she asked, though she suspected the answer.
“Just outside of the cemetery walls, in unconsecrated ground.” His voice was choked with emotion. “I was so weak, I couldn’t do anything. I would have tried, Juliet. I thought I might move you back to the tomb some night, but I lost my nerve every time. I didn’t want to dig you up and see you that way.”
Buried in unconsecrated ground. Perhaps that was how she’d found herself in the hell she’d been confined to. “Are you still banished from Verona?”
Romeo shook his head. His voice was hoarse with fatigue and sorrow, but they walked on as he answered. “Upon my recovery, the prince of Verona lifted the banishment. He said that in my state, I was a threat to no one.”
That would have hurt her prideful beloved more than any blade could have. She did love him, but her love was not blind. There was a streak of childish bravado in him that could not be denied. It had been the aim of all Montagues to be intimidating to the other citizens; anything the family had ever gotten, they’d claimed through fighting.
Still, his fighting had brought him here, beyond the gates of hell, and all for her. Juliet’s eyes filled with tears. “How does my nurse fair?”
“Poorly,” Romeo admitted reluctantly. “She grieves you and blames herself for her part in this. But she could not have known the outcome when she delivered you to the church that day.”
“And my mother? My father?” Juliet’s parting with them had been bitter, but she had not meant it to be. She’d quarreled violently with them, when her father had decreed she marry Paris. She’d thought that someday, perhaps years after she’d faked her demise and been reunited with her banished love, she might return to Verona and make peace.
“They are…subdued.” There was a curl to Romeo’s lip as he spoke. He had nothing but disdain for her parents, for her entire family, a disdain that had been bred over decades of feuding. “The prince of Verona declared peace, and our families seem content to abide. For now. But it has only been a few months since the declaration.”
“So it was the poison, and not time, which has done this to you?”
“The poison aged me as well as time ever hoped to,” Romeo responded with a rueful chuckle that died on his lips. “The days I have left will be filled with you. I will cherish every one, even if they’re all spent here.”
If she’d had a heartbeat, it would have stopped at those words. He had come to this bleak and dismal place to stay with her, if he could not return home. Though she could not clearly imagine what that home felt like, or why it should be important to her now, she did appreciate the depth of that sacrifice.
A sound drifted to them through the darkness, an insubstantial whisper like a coil of smoke on the air. In the soundless black, the faraway tune amplified with each step. It was a nursery rhyme, in a language Juliet didn’t understand. As she listened, the words took shape, melding one unknown word into a known one, until she took their meaning clear as day.
She clutched her head and doubled over, a dizzying sensation momentarily putting her off her balance. But that was absurd! Souls didn’t have balance.
They probably didn’t have a language, either, she reasoned to herself. Perhaps that was why she understood the song.
“Juliet!” Romeo gripped her wrists and pulled her up, concern welling in his dark eyes. “Are you all right?”
“I’m going mad,” she said with a shake of her head. “Forgive me, I think a bit of madness can be excused, given the state I’m in.”
“Listen, it’s coming from that direction.” Still holding one of her wrists, Romeo pulled her after him. With every step, the voice came closer, the words of the song pushing Juliet toward the precipice of insanity.
And will a not come again? And will a not come again? No, no he is dead. Go to thy deathbed, He never will come again, His beard all flaxen white with snow, All flaxen was his poll. He is gone, he is gone. And we cast away moan, God ha’ mercy on his soul!
“It’s me.”
The voice came from behind them, and Juliet shrieked, clutching Romeo’s doublet. The man who’d crept up behind them was fair of hair, his eyes wide and haunted. For a moment, Juliet had mistaken him for a ghost.
“Hamlet.” Romeo reached out to him, his excitement for the man’s appearance evident in his features, but the pale man shrank violently from his touch as if burned by fire. What had occurred between them, she wondered, to inspire the brotherly concern in Romeo’s eyes?
He turned back to her. “Something is wrong with him.”
Juliet studied the prince, willing her death-clouded mind to take in anything unusual about him. In her experience, the more powerful a man, the more soft and old he was. This was not the case with Prince Hamlet, who was as fit as Romeo—or, as Romeo had been, before the poison had made him leaner—, with a handsome, straight nose and eyes as blue and glittering as…
As nothing Juliet had ever seen before. There was something unnatural in them, a presence that would have made Juliet cold all over, were she not deceased.
“She’s talking about me, in her songs. She’s telling me something…something I don’t want to hear.” He covered his ears, his eyes still swirling with eerie blue light.
Like the corspeway. Juliet tugged Romeo’s sleeve. “Some spirit has possessed him. Look into his eyes.”
Romeo wetted his lips, his expression still and grave. “Hamlet…something has happened to you. You have to come with me. I have Juliet. We can leave now.”
“I can never leave,” Hamlet moaned pitiably and covered his eyes. “Not having seen what I’ve seen. Not knowing what I’ve done.”
“What have you done?” Juliet asked.
Hamlet dropped his arm, his eyes meeting hers. Slowly, the glittering blue in his unfurled into water shadows that slowly reached for Juliet and Romeo. The shadows became claws of woven light, reaching out to swipe at their eyes. Romeo dodged, but Juliet stepped into the misty hands, letting the power wash through her.
Her vision went over all watery, as though someone had dumped a bucket over her head. As Nurse had done, during her baths as a child. Something in Juliet’s soul pulled oddly at that memory. The remembrance of her mother’s weeping hadn’t stirred anything in her, but somehow the feeling that Nurse was near, caring for her, made her feel…safe, until her vision cleared, and she remembered she was not a child having a bath in her warm, safe room, but a shell, a broken soul drifting through Hell, lost for all eternity.
“Do you see her?” Hamlet asked, pointing to the figure of a woman standing in a pool of black water. Her voluminous white gown fell heavily from her shoulders, as though it were pulling her down. She seemed unconcerned by it, holding out a length of her skirt as a basket for a heaping mound of wildflowers. As she sang, she tossed the blossoms
onto the surface of the water. A time or two, she reached up to pat a bloom into the copper curls that framed her face and cascaded down her back.
“Ophelia,” Hamlet said, the name almost a prayer on his lips.
Beside them, Romeo looked about, his forehead creased with confusion. “I see no one.”
“There’s a girl,” Juliet explained, taking a step toward her.
“Don’t!” Hamlet restrained her with a hand that gripped Juliet’s arm like a vise. “You can’t go near her. I’ve tried. Over and over again, I’ve tried. She drowns. Every time you touch her, she drowns.”
“Do you know her?” Juliet had dreamed all manner of horrible dreams as she’d slept in Sheol. Was this another? Or had the blue mist brought her into Hamlet’s dream, as well? “Is she someone you knew, who died?”
“No, she cannot be dead. I saw her only just…” he shook his head. “She is in Midgard. She is safe. This is just some witchcraft, made to drive me mad.”
“What is this sorcery?” Romeo wandered around them. “What are you seeing, that I cannot?”
“The source of the song,” Juliet explained patiently. “Hamlet, what happens after she drowns?”
“I tried to save her,” he babbled. “But she’s too heavy. Her clothes drag her down, they… they would drag me down too. I have to let her go.”
“I cannot fight an enemy I cannot see,” Romeo told Juliet, his helplessness evident in every word.
“Perhaps she’s not your enemy.” Juliet took a step toward the girl, then another, and another. Her feet touched the water, and the depth beneath the girl’s feet changed. Ophelia plunged down, clawing at the water that swallowed her and covered her face.
“Save her!” Hamlet pleaded, for he didn’t see the trick that it was.
He’d helped Romeo, and in doing so, he’d freed her. For that, Juliet owed him this, no matter how unpleasant the act might seem.
As she approached the mad girl, Juliet’s dead heart and fractured soul saw the true intent of the apparition. She was meant to drive the prince insane, to prevent him from leaving the Afterjord. That made it easier to reach into the water for the drowning girl. Juliet followed her down, held her firmly under even as she thrashed and struggled to keep her head above water.
“What are you doing?” Hamlet shouted, his hands balled to fists he beat against his thighs as he doubled over. He screamed, despondent, while Romeo backed away a step, two steps.
Juliet knew what he saw; his two companions driven to madness by a force invisible to him. But to Juliet, it seemed so simple. Romeo and Hamlet were real, living beings. They felt fear, projected it. It brushed across Juliet’s soul like a cat’s tongue, rough and clammy. But this thing before them was only a shade. A trick, playing on their earthly thoughts like so many harp strings.
When she straightened, her arms did not drip with water. “None of it is real, Hamlet.” She turned to Romeo. “It’s a trick.”
“But how did you know?” The mist was slowly lifting from Hamlet’s eyes, and he gripped her upper arms with an intensity that would have caused her pain, could she have felt it.
“I just…knew.” She shrugged off his touch. “I could see the emptiness around her, just as I can see the souls in the two of you.”
Hamlet turned to Romeo, who still looked bewildered. “Your beloved is a valuable tool, blessed with insights to which neither of us are privy.”
“She isn’t a tool.” Romeo’s jaw jutted forward as he ground his teeth. “She is my wife.”
“Wife?” How had she forgotten so significant a detail? A memory stirred, still attached to her soul by golden threads that wove tighter as she concentrated. “Oh yes. Yes, the man, with the tonsure…”
“Friar Laurence,” Romeo prompted, a queer expression on his handsome face. “Juliet, do you truly not remember?”
“If I may,” Hamlet interjected, coming to stand beside the slight space between them. “The circumstances of Juliet’s death were traumatic. I’ve spoken to ghosts who remember nothing of their past lives, who they are, where they came from…and some who remember the moment of their birth, but not the month that they died. It is possible that in the sorrow surrounding her demise, your Juliet’s soul was so wounded that somehow, she lost her memories.”
Romeo’s hand came up to cup her cheek. His touch, warm and full of life, made her shrink from him. “You truly do not remember me?”
“I remember…” she frowned. “I remember that you care for me. That you love me. It’s what helped me break free from the fetters in Sheol. But I can’t remember how any of it came to be.”
His dark eyes filled with pain, and he looked away from her. Juliet turned to Hamlet. “I do remember my nurse. I remembered her giving me a bath. I remembered being in my tomb, unable to move, but not dead. Is that what happened to me? Did they bury me alive?”
She might have vomited, if she’d had a living physical body. She’d had nightmares as a child waking in a dark room, ever since she’d seen the inside of the family crypt after the death of an uncle. She had been terrified of dying then, and being left alone in that room full of dead strangers. It had taken such courage to swallow the potion…
“The potion!” She gripped Romeo’s doublet in both fists, not sure whether she wanted to tug on it or slap her palms against his chest. “I took the potion for you!”
“I didn’t know it was a potion.” He swallowed. “I heard only that you were dead. I came to the tomb…I killed Paris…”
“Paris?” She searched her memory. Yes, she had argued with her parents. They had fought, bitterly. She would be forced to marry. “They were going to make me marry him. But then, I was already married. They didn’t know. I never told them?”
“You thought I would send for you,” Romeo reminded her. “You thought Friar Laurence would pass me the message.”
“And he did not? He failed me?” How could she have been so stupid? “I should have told my father, immediately. I should have relied upon Friar Laurence to prevent the wedding, to go to the bishop, something…What have I done?”
Romeo tried to hold her, but she wrenched away. She couldn’t stand for him to touch her, now that she was a dead thing and he still so full of life. They had chosen death over being kept apart in the land of the living, and now they were kept apart by the strongest force of all.
Hamlet said quietly, “You must remember that what has passed has passed. You cannot undo it now, no more than you could have seen the consequences of your actions then. The only way now is forward.”
She didn’t want to face him, or Romeo. She had been blessedly absent during her imprisonment in Sheol. There had been no pain, no confusion. Merely a blank peace, a long void of time without end. It should have been a torment, with the vivid nightmares that had sometimes gripped her, but compared to what she had seen of this place, she preferred it.
“How do we go forward, then?” She opened her eyes. Her beautiful blue gown was vibrant with brocade flowers and delicate white lace. Her wedding gown, or it had been meant for that purpose. They had buried her in the dress she would have worn to marry Paris.
She lifted her head and met both of their gazes. “How, then? How do we go forward?”
“I don’t know,” Hamlet admitted. “But it seems far more sensible to venture on as one, than risk perishing alone. You may not remember your connection to him now, but would you really want Romeo to be lost in the Afterjord forever?”
“No.” This was no place for anyone, living or dead.
“Then I suggest we continue walking. Juliet, your help will be invaluable in spotting the traps this place might lay for us. Will you help?” He slowly tilted his head down, a lock of pale hair falling across his eyes.
“Yes.” She gritted her teeth. There was nothing she disliked more than being treated like a child.
She remembered that, at least.
Chapter Nine
The blackness had an end.
Before them loomed a tri
ptych, like the altar screen in a church, but seemingly miles long, and painted with scenes of horror. Demonic visages devouring human flesh, rivers flowing red.
“More rivers of blood. I suppose one can’t have enough of those lying around,” Romeo observed with a curl of his lip.
Hamlet did not respond.
It had been one thing for Romeo to have grabbed him and tumbled him through the corpseway; Hamlet had almost forgiven that. He’d ascribed the Italian’s actions to nerves, and reasoned that he might have been frightened enough to do the same thing, in his shoes.
But when Romeo had left him behind, left him to drown in a wriggling, bloody river of maggots, Hamlet’s understanding had taken a sharp toll. They may not have been fast friends, but it seemed a cowardly and cruel thing to leave a man behind in the situation Hamlet had been left in. He could barely look at Romeo.
Juliet wandered apart from them, and Hamlet called to her, “Don’t go far. We don’t want to be separated.”
“There’s a door,” she answered.
“A corpseway!” Romeo rushed after her. Without hesitation, he plunged his head through the pointed arch of blue light. When he emerged, he whooped in victory. “It’s a castle! It’s home!”
“Are you certain?” Hamlet jogged to their side and looked through, himself. The scene on the opposite side of the corpseway looked familiar, indeed. It seemed a normal feasting hall. Fresh rushes covered the floors, and they smelled almost sweeter than the aroma of the food on the long, polished table.
He stepped back. “I think you’re right. I think this is our world. But…”
How would he explain to Romeo and Juliet that they might once again be parted? How did people, in general, feel about these things?
Hamlet had never done well where emotions were concerned. When he’d seen the vision of Ophelia, he had wanted to dismiss it out of hand. When he’d last seen Ophelia, she had been full of life and a bit annoying. Not on the brink of suicidal madness. Still, his feelings had overwhelmed him, completing the Afterjord’s trick, and now his heart mourned for her a bit, though he knew the vision had been false.
