by P. R. Frost
Then she got into her mid-sized sedan and started driving.
East at first, then north over the mountain in rotten weather on tires that were in no condition to handle mountain pass snows the first week of February.
I gritted my teeth and held on as she took the curves too fast. A death wish in the making.
She couldn’t see me yet, of course. The fever hadn’t taken her and changed her brain enough for that. But I like to think I had a little influence on her. She slowed down and made it over the mountain, in the dark.
Somewhere along the line she stopped for food and checked into a motel. The next day she headed north with grim determination along a chain of mineral lakes in Washington, just east of the Cascade Mountain Range. She was headed back to the scene of her husband’s untimely death. I know now that she was looking for answers. Answers that might not exist. But she had to look.
By the end of the second day she was within a few miles of her destination. By that time the fever had overwhelmed her.
Only she knows what nightmares she endured in the grip of the virus. She doesn’t talk about it. Not even to the Sisters who shared her infection and survived.
It took all of my willpower to keep her on the road that day.
Six times she nearly drove into one of those mineral lakes when the fever slowed her reaction time and skewed her perceptions.
I sat in her lap and yanked the steering wheel in the right direction. When we came to the dirt track that most people don’t notice, I steered us along it. I even managed to avoid most of the potholes that would rip out the undercarriage of a high-crop tractor.
Finally we stopped dead outside the citadel. The one place in the world I knew she would be safe and I knew she would wake up and claim me as her own precious imp, companion, and Celestial Blade.
I walked hunched over, a little wary of the surgical incision beneath my belly button and the one that ran along the right side of my face from temple to jaw. Sister Serena, the only doctor in the citadel, had to cut the infection from my face and abdomen to save my life.
Spring sunshine softened the austere landscape within the citadel of the Sisterhood of the Celestial Blade.
Stout stone walls made of reddish rock from the local area defined at least ten acres of land and buildings. All around me, my Sisters worked. All of them had visible scars on their faces like the one on mine. Some hoed and planted a huge vegetable garden. They tended to be the older women, middle-aged mostly. I didn’t see any truly old women here. Some of the more vigorous women repaired storm damage to the roof of the refectory where we took our meals. Still others stripped down to red sports bras and shorts to practice various martial arts in a sandy area set aside solely for that purpose.
I paused about every third step to watch the bustle and to rest. I’d spent at least two months in the infirmary and still hadn’t regained my strength from the wasting fever.
Sister Serena walked beside me, as she did every day I ventured outside. She stood straight and tall, midforties I guessed. Her muscles flowed easily beneath her bright purple scrubs. All of the Sisters wore bright colors in celebration of life. Not a sign of a uniform among them—except for the sports bras and shorts—those always seemed to be blood red.
“Don’t walk too far. Even if you feel better, it is too easy to overdo,” Sister Serena said. Her voice, like the rest of her, oozed soft contentment. In two months of rather intimate contact, I’d never seen anything upset her mental or emotional equilibrium. Though once I’d seen her slip on some spilled gelatin and nearly lose her balance.
“I need fresh air,” I panted. Sure, I’d walked too far already, but I wasn’t about to let Sister S put me back to bed in the closed and stale atmosphere of the infirmary.
Not yet at least.
A bevy of children, all girls by the look of them, erupted from a small building in the corner. I stared at them in puzzlement. Only one of the girls, the eldest by the size of her and the maturity of her face and figure, had a scar.
“Future Sisters in training,” Sister S explained.
“Do you kidnap children?”
“No.” Sister S laughed long and loud. I noticed she laughed a lot. “The fever that marks us does not render us infertile. Nor do our vows to the Sisterhood make us celibate. We raise our daughters to fill our ranks.”
“What if you have sons?” I sank down onto a conveniently placed bench in the middle of a flower garden that caught the sunshine. A small fountain burbled beside me as it irrigated the soil.
Sister S stilled in thought. “I don’t think any of us have had sons, at least not in living memory. I wonder if we are even capable of having boys?”
“So not all of you come from the outside world like I did.” I felt the rough skin along my face. The infection had ruptured before Sister S could lance it clean and straight.
“Very few of us have come from the outside. You are the first in living memory. You have a lot to learn before you can hope to truly be one of us.” She looked puzzled, as if she wasn’t sure what to do with me.
I didn’t know what to do with me either. I’d managed one cell phone call to my dad to make sure my house and finances were taken care of. That was the only outside contact they allowed me. By that time the phone had a dead battery, and there was no electricity here to recharge it.
“And if the fever doesn’t take one of your daughters? What becomes of her?”
“All of us go to high school and college on the outside. How do you think I became a doctor?” She raised perfectly arched black eyebrows at me. I’d give my eyeteeth to look that beautiful even on a good day.
“We board with the families of girls who were born here but elected to remain outside, marry, and have children. Usually the few women who come to us from the outside come from those families.”
Again she shook her head and looked puzzled.
“So why me?” I asked the question that had burned inside me since I fell into a fever of grief and wound up here.
“The fever finds those who need to become one of us. We never ask why. We welcome anyone the fever chooses.” But she pursed her lips in disapproval.
Sister S settled beside me. Her gaze lit fondly upon the oldest of the girls—the one who already had a fever scar. It looked fairly fresh and raw.
“How old are they when the fever selects them?” I waved vaguely at the girls. At twenty-six, I thought myself a little on the old side.
“Usually in their mid-twenties, when they’ve had a chance to taste life outside and know if this is where they belong or not.”
“Am I trapped here for the rest of my life?” That didn’t sound so bad. Without Dill, I didn’t have a lot left behind. Mom would take over my house, as she took over everything in her orbit. Dill’s life insurance—double indemnity for accidental death—and the mortgage insurance would ensure that she could afford the place. I had completed my contracts with my publisher.
Nothing drew me back to reality outside these walls.
Except the burning question of “Why?” Why had the fire started in the crummy motel where Dill and I stayed while he grubbed about looking for specific geological examples. He was due to start teaching at the community college in Cape Cod near our new home in spring quarter. He wanted special samples to take with him.
“No, dear.” Sister S laughed again. “None of us are trapped. We can come and go as we choose. Mostly, we choose to stay here, where our work is, where we are needed.”
“What, exactly, is your work?” My gaze kept straying to the Sisters working out with quarterstaffs and wrestling.
Two of them donned boxing gloves and engaged in something akin to TaeBo.
“The same work you started when the fever took you.”
“Huh?” All I remembered about that was a long and involved fever dream of fighting demons.
“Exactly,” Sister S replied.
“Exactly what?”
“Think about it.”
Chapter
5
Bats are not blind. Their eyes are adapted to see in the dark and some species can see in light as well as humans.
A HUGE BAT LOOMED over me screeching in my sister’s voice, “I’m going to drink all your blood!”
I screamed and covered my head with my arms, crouching down to make myself as small as possible.
And then the monstrous bat began pulling my hair.
Great clumps of the tight curls tangled in claws as long as fingers.
I screamed again in abject terror.
The sound of my own voice croaking woke me up.
The sterile hotel room with my half-packed clothes strewn about offered me little comfort. My scalp still hurt from… from… from wearing the comb. Not from a bat that had really been my older sister Cecilia dressed up for Halloween.
Funny. All these years and I’d never remembered the incident that had triggered my bat phobia.
I looked over at the clock. Not quite ten on the West Coast. I’d been asleep maybe a half hour. Nearly one at home. Would Mom be awake?
Probably. She didn’t sleep much since she and Dad divorced fourteen years ago. I hit number four on my cell phone speed dial. My agent Sylvia was number two, and my editor number three. I’d never deleted Dill’s cell phone from the number one position. Somehow doing that would be a symbolic erasure of our brief marriage.
“Hi, Mom. My plane lands in Providence at three. I should be home in time for dinner,” I greeted her before she could monopolize the conversation.
“That’s fine, dear. I’ll fix a nice pot roast. I found it on sale at WelSave this morning. We’ll eat early and go to evening Mass together.”
Not on your life, Mom. I hadn’t been to Mass in years, and I had no intention of starting now. She knew that.
But she never acknowledged it. Mom and reality sometimes had only a passing acquaintance.
She rambled on with more domestic details in her Québécois accent. It sounded rather thick tonight. Like it did when she’d been alone too much and thought in the French dialect of her childhood.
Her parents had left Quebec when she was seven and never spoke French again. Somewhere in her twisted mind she had created a need for her Québécois roots and pieced together half memories of baby talk in French and called it the pure language.
Her need for the linguistic security blanket increased after Dad left. He’d brought me up nearly bilingual with a Canadian accent. I’d taken Parisian French in high school and college and tried to correct Mom once. After having my ears boxed for corrupting the language, I never tried it again.
Somewhere along the line, I figured out that Mom understood real French. She just refused to speak it.
While I mourned Dill, I began to understand her need.
She grieved for people and things lost in her life, her grandparents in Quebec City and her husband, much as I grieved for my lost husband.
“Mom, do you remember an incident about a bat when I was small?”
“Oh, yes. Your sister was quite naughty. But she so loved that Halloween costume I made her. She wore it for months and months every time you three children played dress up or make-believe. Why do you ask? It’s been years. I thought you were too young at the time to remember. Barely three.”
“I had a nightmare about it.” If I was three, then Cecilia had been a very grown-up and authoritative seven.
Our brother Steph, between us in age, had defended me when he could. But Cecilia always won our sibling battles.
“What triggered it, Mom? Cecilia isn’t one to like creepy animals.”
“Oh, we’d all taken a road trip with Chuck that summer.”
She never referred to my dad as the father of her children. She barely acknowledged his existence after the divorce and church annulment. “We toured the Grand Canyon while Chuck audited a client’s branch office. When we got home, we found a dead bat plastered to the radiator grille. It was quite mummified from the heat of the engine I think. Just a little thing but it fascinated Cecilia. Nothing would do but she had to be a bat for Halloween, la petite garnement.” Little scamp, I translated the term, almost an endearment. Mom rambled on a bit more with memories from that wonderful summer trip that I could not remember.
Eventually sleep tugged a yawn from me, and I said my good-byes with assurances that I would indeed be home the next day.
“You okay, baby?” Mom finally asked.
“Yeah, Mom. I am.” And I was. The dream had faded from the reality of nightmare to just another annoyance about my sister.
But the phobia? That was still something I didn’t want to push.
“I’ll press a dress for you to wear to Mass,” Mom concluded just as I clicked off.
Mumble grumble. I settled back into sleep, satisfied that my nightmare hadn’t been real.
I felt a disturbance on the mattress beside me. Dill often came to bed late after reading and studying for the next day’s fossil hunt.
“Dilly,” I murmured only half awake.
“Move over, love,” he whispered. His smooth tenor voice caressed my mind and senses.
As I had longed to do, every night for two and a half years, I scooted to the edge of the bed. Dill lay down behind me and wrapped a light arm around me. I snuggled in, cherishing the feel of him, the smell of him, the weight…
He had no weight. No substance. No warmth. Only a preternatural chill.
I jerked awake. “Dillwyn Bailey Cooper!” More a plea than a question.
“Tess,” he whispered. “Don’t ask questions. Don’t object. Just be here for me. Let me feel you.”
“Talk to me, Dill,” I said warily. I turned onto my back and pushed myself into something resembling a sitting position. Light creeping around the hotel room drapes and under the door showed only the dimmest outline of a man sitting cross-legged on the other side of the bed.
I ran my fingers through my tangled mop of hair. For half a moment I considered confining it in the lovely comb Scrap had given me. But it was across the room in my tote bag.
Where was the imp anyway?
Dill brushed his hand lightly around my head without touching me. My scalp tingled where the hairs stood on end.
“This is what I miss most about you, Tess,” he breathed. “The sight of you all sleep tousled and adorable. Lovable.”
A soft draft passed my ear. I shivered from the temperature change. The room was now colder than the air conditioner could make it.
“Don’t shy away from me, lovey. You said you missed me so much your teeth ached.”
Lovey, his pet name for me. Much better than lumpy, which the kids had called me in school.
“I do miss you, Dill. There’s a gaping hole inside me that only you can fill.” I reached a tentative hand out to him, not quite daring to touch in case this was only a dream. I couldn’t bear to lose him again.
“Then let me fill the gap. Let me watch for you. Get rid of the imp. Keep me by your side instead.” He smiled at me, as he used to.
My resistance to his ghostly presence dissolved. No man had touched me in a very long time. I ached for more than just his presence. I wanted his body. Next to me, inside me.
Bad plan, Tessie. Suddenly Scrap on the night table was more substantial than Dill at my side, in my bed.
Scrap also glowed pink in warning.
“Dill, why did you have to die?”
“I told you not to ask questions.” His voice rose in anger. “I can’t answer questions.”
He faded.
I needed to see his eyes, to look deep inside their hazel depths to understand what he was thinking and feeling.
“Dill, don’t go. I need you. Stay with me.”
The phone rang with my five AM wake-up call.
The mattress creaked.
The room warmed.
I fumbled for the lamp. Light flooded the room and dazzled my eyes.
The room was empty. Even Scrap had deserted me.
The ache in my gut doubled from loneliness.
“It was all a dream. I visited Dill’s grave yesterday, so of course I dreamed about him.” The sound of my own words in my ears convinced me that the conversation had not happened.
I was still alone and more lonely than ever.
What’s up with this spook? Where did he come from? Why is he here? Imp lore tells us nothing about ghosts. When we die, we die. We do not come back as ghosts or reincarnations or anything. Our bones burrow through the dimensions to take root in the great garbage heap of the universe.
So we live a long, long time and cling to life like a hamster gnawing on a finger.
Nothing can break the bond between a Warrior of the Celestial Blade and her imp. So why is this ghost tr ying to oust me?
I need answers this dimension cannot give.
Do I have time to seek? And while I’m at it, I should make some inquiries into Guilford Van der Hoyden-Smythe, the scholar who sees too much.
Cookies! Scrap chortled at the smell of charred flour, sugar, and fat that greeted us upon opening the kitchen door of my rambling home on Cape Cod.
A hint of movement in the oak tree at the front of the house made my heart skip a beat. A blacker-than-black shadow. A bat.
I had to sit in the car a moment to catch my breath before I had the courage to dash for the kitchen door.
Even though I now knew why I feared the creatures, I couldn’t banish the phobia overnight. If anything, it might be worse. I couldn’t get the dream image of the huge bat out of my mind, twice as big as me, threatening to drink my blood and rip out my hair. My scalp hurt just thinking about it.
“Mother.” I acknowledged Scrap’s delight with a sinking heart. My plans for a long bubble bath, a quiet snack, and then a good workout at the fencing salle vanished.
I’d tried martial arts when I first left the Citadel, but all the philosophy, meditation, and breathing exercises bored me. I needed to move.
