Undeath

by Lily Levi

  He couldn’t force her to stay with him in the house, but she needed to know how to feed her body. Death would claim her for a second time – the final time – and she would be lost forever, but there was no way to tell her this.

  If she died again, no number of blood transfusions would be able to bring her back, and there was nothing he could do to stop her from leaving.

  He knew she wouldn’t believe him no matter what he told her. He could see that; any fool could see that, but he had to give her something to save herself with.

  “Please,” he said, grasping again for the right words.

  “I don’t want you to take me anywhere,” she said. “I want you to leave me alone. There’s something wrong with you.”

  “Yes,” he said. She was right. There was something terribly wrong with him.

  “Jolene, please listen to me. Perhaps you’ll leave here – I can see that you will, yes – and if something happens to you, if you feel yourself weakened, you must intake another’s blood. Anything you can find, an animal, another human if you must, anything you can find.”

  The words were like a foreign language to his own ears. It sounded even less believable when said aloud.

  Her face hardened at him “You like to play games,” she said. “Peter Pan, vampires. You’re not a little boy anymore. I thought you were a good person. But there’s nothing good about any of this. I was falling in love with you, did you know that?”

  “Yes,” he whispered.

  “But I was wrong to do it,” she said. “You were playing with me this whole time, weren’t you?”

  He swallowed back the pain of her words and touched the back of the red armchair to steady himself.

  His own face in the portraits stared down at him. There was no emotion in the many faces, all the same, never aging, never changing. Riley’s painted eyes held more life in them than his own. In every portrait, the dog looked happier to be alive than he had ever been.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  But she was already gone.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Maman’s dark frame moved into the empty doorway and Riley slinked away to the back of the room.

  “Where could I go?” she asked, but it was a question to no one. “A monster is never welcome.” Her bare feet padded softly against the marble floor. She scanned the long wall of portraits. “So this is why you hide from the rest of the world.”

  Laurie turned away from her.

  She stepped closer. “You took Martel from me,” she said, wagging her long finger at him.

  “He’s gone,” he said.

  “He’s not.” Her voice lifted an octave, as though she was recalling a dream. “I found him again and we stood together. We could have stood together for eternity if it weren’t for you.”

  Laurie watched her uneasily.

  She shut her beaded eyes and wrapped her own wasted arms around herself. “We danced together.” She opened her eyes and stared at him. “The music is so dark there.”

  He dropped his eyes from hers.

  “You’re thinking about her,” she said. “But have you given any thought to my fate?”

  “Your fate?” he repeated, though he knew what she meant.

  “How do the dead return to death?” She opened her arms to the room. “I can’t if I’m already here. Do you understand? When, like Martel, I turn to ash, I will go nowhere, just like you, just like that girl of yours, your pet. I will become the ash, and then the wind, and then no more. Do you understand what you’ve done? How do the dead die?”

  He folded his arms and Riley sauntered uneasily towards both of them.

  He took in Maman’s shriveled corpse, her black eyes, her mouth without lips, her sunken cheeks, and her yellow, papery skin.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” she mimicked him darkly. “What happened?” She took a step forward and then another. “Isn’t that your question? What happened to your Papa?” She sniffed through her decayed nose like a papery wasps’ nest. “Well, now two souls are bereft of love. You took Martel from me and now the girl is gone from you. A price paid, for what little you paid at all. Ask, then.”

  He looked away from her and back to his paintings. Jolene was indeed a price paid, could he deny it? Her resurrection had a singular purpose and now the ends to the means were finally before him.

  Though Maman had taunted him once before. Perhaps she would never give him the answer he’d searched so long for. He’d sacrificed so much – and for what?

  “Ask,” she said. “I’m ready.”

  Riley growled and pawed forward.

  Laurie lowered his eyes. “Tell me,” he said, feeling defeated where he’d always imagined he’d feel vindicated in some deep way; satisfied, even. “Tell me what you know about the blood or tell me what happened to my father’s body. Tell me both if you know.”

  Maman narrowed her black eyes at him.

  The questions had sustained him through the months Maman’s hollow corpse had lain in her marriage bed.

  Before then, there had been Elise and she had been more than enough, but after their last farewell, he’d merely lived to live. He’d lived to avoid death and to survive as every living thing wishes to do.

  Still, it was a wonder how quickly he’d tired of life and yet was entirely unwilling to let it go. If there was anything left for him, it was to know what happened in the dark circle of the Arctic. If Jolene had changed that, Jolene was also gone, and he’d had to let her go. He couldn’t keep her a prisoner in the house like he had with Maman.

  If that was what love was, then he would give it to her freely, though it pained him too deep for words.

  Jolene was a creature with perhaps less than months to live, but she was not his creature. He would not cage her like a bird. But was it right to let her go so easily?

  Maman stared at him, reading him. She licked her dry lips with an exhausted tongue. “If curiosity gave you a reason to live, then curiosity will give you a reason to die.” She blinked at her own words and then shuffled towards the trellised window.

  “I don’t love you,” she said, as though she were tasting the words for the first time and found them palatable. “The only love I have now is no longer mine, lost forever in the great black swarm of souls beyond this world. But how could you know anything about that? How could you know what you stole from me?” She rested her hands on the windowsill. “No, I do not love you anymore. When you go to die, I will not mourn you.”

  Laurie followed her to the moonlit window and together they looked out over the pines and dark water beyond.

  “But my flesh,” she said, pausing to press her hand against her hollow cheek, “if you can call this flesh, it remembers you. I have some softness left after all.” She lowered her curled hand from her face.

  He felt his own heart soften unexpectedly at her words. Despite her bitter hatred, she was still the mother who’d cared for him when his father had died and even before that, when his father had wasted to nothing inside of himself.

  “What happened to him?” he asked again, quietly this time.

  She took his hand in hers and he let her. “My boy,” she said. “I poisoned him.”

  Laurie pulled his hand from hers.

  “Oh,” she added, “but he did not die. I gave him enough to kill a bear and still, he did not die.”

  Through the centuries, Laurie had never once let himself believe that such a dark thing could be true. It had never passed even once through his heart.

  “What happened?” he demanded.

  “Martel,” she said, looking back out of the window, as though she might find him there again, standing against the bay. “It was an easy thing to ask of him. He loved me more than all the world.” Her voice trailed off and she shook her head as if to clear the ancient memories all together.

  “Martel,” she continued, resting briefly on his name, “pushed a knife into your father’s heart because I asked him to.”

&n
bsp; Laurie’s throat tightened.

  Maman folded her hands in front of her crumpled yellow skirt. “I didn’t watch him do it. I couldn’t.”

  Sickened, Laurie moved away from her to the chair in the middle of the room. He sat to calm the sudden nausea.

  Cold silence brewed between them. He could hear how she breathed at regular intervals, as though she still had lungs.

  It was a strange thing to realize that she was nothing short of a murderess – an adulterous murderess. She was not the mother he remembered. And now, she was dead and seemed to be fully aware of how distasteful her state truly was.

  It was perhaps more than she deserved.

  “And his body?” he asked, breaking the silence. His voice had grown hard. “Where did you take it?”

  “No,” she said. She shuffled near the back of the chair.

  “No? What do you mean by ‘no’?”

  Maman stopped beside the arm of the chair and looked up with him at his dark portraits. “There was no body. There was no blood. He did not bleed.” She took a long, ragged breath, though she didn’t need the air. “He opened his eyes without any interest in what we’d done. He left the bed and then he left us, you and me.”

  Laurie lowered his head, unbelieving. Despite the miracle of his own existence, he couldn’t bring himself to believe her story. It was impossible in a world filled with impossibilities.

  “Where did he go?” he asked, despite himself.

  “You are so much like your father,” she said. “Can you not see it?”

  Laurie said nothing. There was nothing for him to see and even less for him to say.

  She sighed, but there was no hint of the forlorn mother he could’ve once known. She was gone forever, like Marteaux, like Elise, like Jolene.

  “We all return to death,” she said. “And death will have us all in its own way. Maybe not the way we expected at last, but that doesn’t matter. Death will find us.”

  But Laurie was tired of her riddles.

  He stood. “I asked you to tell me where he went. Tell me if you know or else cease torturing me with dark words from a darker mouth.”

  She looked at him and her black eyes gleamed. “What can I tell you that you don’t already know?” She clicked her teeth together as she used to do when she was alive and in thought.

  “Your father never spoke a word to me,” she said slowly, almost reluctantly. “But in sleep, there were things he would say. There were things that he wrote.”

  “What things?”

  She gestured to the wall, covered with his self-portraits. Her small black eyes moved from one painting to the next. “It seems you already know.”

  All he knew was that he remembered what she’d said. He remembered her drunk, stumbling into his room all those lifetimes ago. It was an image he couldn’t lose. It was the only real memory that shed the smallest morsel of light on what he’d become. The others were impossible dreams.

  Swallow blood, she’d said.

  And he had.

  “What else did you hear?” he demanded. “What more did you read?”

  She opened her mouth to speak and the words rolled out from the deep cavern of her empty corpse.

  “Look at all the snow.”

  Laurie closed his eyes and let the cold words wrap themselves around him, threading through his skin.

  He opened his eyes again. Maman had not moved.

  “Why would he go back?” he asked, unable to help himself. The tundra had destroyed his father. No, it had killed him, he was sure of this now. It had broken him into a million splinters of the man he’d once been.

  Maman’s black eyes sparkled with a new clarity. “Why does anyone go anywhere?”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  He retired to his rooms alone and left Maman to wander the house that she had once loved. Riley found a post outside of his door.

  He unclasped his cufflinks and set them aside. It was likely that Maman had fantasized his father leaving the house. Perhaps it was to protect both her conscience and Marteaux that she’d blocked out the memory of the murder and the disposal of his father’s and her own husband’s body.

  To kill the one you’ve loved and promised to love, how her soul must have crushed in on itself.

  He opened the windows to let in the night air and looked out over the dark water.

  Why does anyone go anywhere?

  He stood over the dresser and touched the cornflower blue dress. He’d kept it out in case she’d wanted to wear it again, but he should have just given it to her.

  He should have done so many things. He should have helped her to remember the world she’d come from. He could have taken her through Neverpine and someone might have recognized her. But then, of course, she would’ve left him and her life – the life he’d given back to her, if it could still be called a life at all – would inevitably wilt without a proper intake of blood and she would be lost forever.

  Why does anyone go anywhere?

  He lifted the dress and pressed his face into its soft fabric, searching for her there.

  Why does anyone go anywhere?

  October 31, 1701

  North of the Laptev Sea

  A giant of a man struggled forward, tired and bent. His heart expanded with the impossible effort of dragging such a small boy through the snow. He never once looked back. It could only have been that he knew the fur-covered lump was dead.

  He would not stop to eat. He would not stop to close his eyes, though they burned with an exhaustion few have been cursed to know. He would not stop to adjust the fallen hood of his fur coat, white with fallen snow.

  He walked on.

  A dim sun scanned the sharp tundra and then rose with the swiftness of a hollow, yellow balloon. The fading stars lost themselves to the new day, already old, and the man with his sled was alone.

  When it became too quiet and too cold, he spoke. “The wind blows,” he would say, or, “Unmerciful God, how the wind blows.” When he grew tired of speaking, he shaded his eyes against the white glare of snow and ice, and narrated the movement of the clouds and the ridges of far off mountains.

  He exhausted the names for their slopes and angles. They were all the same. Nothing changed. He stopped. He wondered if he’d even been walking at all.

  He tore his eyes from the long, white horizon and instead watched the rise and fall of his booted feet. Yes, he was still walking. He hadn’t stopped.

  He would’ve counted his steps with the name of his wife, but he’d forgotten it. How strange a thing. He made up a name for her.

  He could hear her voice behind his own, as though she’d woken to his plight, somewhere far away, in a place that no longer existed and perhaps never had.

  The ice is for men, she said. The echo of her voice fell flat against the snow.

  Bring him home. Bring our son home.

  Home.

  He stopped, for the first time in a hundred years, perhaps a thousand or more, he stopped. The sudden, hot fear that he had somehow dropped the rope tied to the end of the sled swam through his chest, his neck, his face.

  He let his eyes travel slowly down his right arm to his large fist.

  There, the end of the red rope dangled.

  He had not let go.

  He stood at the base of a steep cliffside. He had no memory of marching towards it or of coming face-to-face with the snow-covered rocks, only of stopping. Behind him, the setting sun threw its orange rays against the high, icy wall.

  The slow, sinking understanding that he’d been walking east settled into his sore limbs. He kneeled into the snow and closed his eyes.

  Bring him home, she’d said. But no one would be coming home.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Jolene followed the dark beach along the darker water. Though it was warm, she wrapped her arms around herself. The short length of the broken picture frame swung from the belt loop of her cut-off shorts. She was like an urban knight in an apocalyptic world, complete with a total fe
ar of the world around her.

  Everything felt grossly foreign, especially the old house, now far behind her. She didn’t know where she was going, but she would never go back.

  She squinted across the bay and tried to make out the islands – Peter Pan’s islands – but they were lost in the night. There was something about them that tugged on the dangling thread of a memory beyond what Laurie had told her, but the more she thought about it, the vaguer it became until it wasn’t anything at all.

  A strangely cool August wind picked up over the water and she shivered. Her tennis shoes crunched angrily into the wet sand. The gilded piece of wood at her side slapped against her thigh. It wouldn’t protect her from anything at all, but she still felt better with it at her side.

  She was going home, though, wherever home was. Someone was waiting for her and she would be safe.

  She looked towards the line of pines along the coast. She’d dreamt repeatedly of a shadowed man between the trees and she felt certain that she knew him. But where could she find him?

  Laurie had told her that there was a road running through the hills and that there was a small town somewhere between them, but she would never find the town or the road if she continued to walk along the water.

  Somewhere beyond the trees, the sound of a single, speeding car passed between the sounds of lapping waves.

  She froze and strained to listen, but there was nothing. If she’d imagined it, she didn’t care. It was the only thing she had.

  She turned straight for the line of trees and clambered up the steep, sandy cliff.

  When she reached the flattened ground, she broke into a sprint.

  The sharpened frame cut into the back of her leg. Warm blood trickled down her skin, but she kept running. She didn’t care. She was going home.

  Sparse yellow grass whipped against her ankles. When the grass broke into brush, she slowed and picked her way around the low foliage and pointed rocks.