“Jesus,” he says. “How will we ever find it?”
I cup one hand over my eyes. “Fan out, I guess. Check every one…” There’s no need to finish. We both understand the task at hand.
Henry lets his hand fall from my neck. The cold seeps in, wrapping around me like a scarf. I watch as he trots down the short flight of stairs to the graveyard before following.
The soil is soft from last night’s storm, but not muddy, on account of the lush grass that must be meticulously cared for. A few branches and bits of leaves and other debris have blown into the cemetery and are scattered around like Easter eggs.
Henry cuts left, so I make my way to the right side, past the gravelly aisle that runs down the center to meet with a marble statue of the Virgin Mary.
As suspected, the first couple rows yield nothing. I linger at a few of the headstones, whose dates span particularly short lengths of time.
April Linley Hayes lived only six years, but her tombstone towers over the others. A wreath of roses and ferns loops over the top like a halo. On the other end of the spectrum, a certain Matthew James McDougal lived for just three days. His grave marker is one of those plaques dug into the dirt with grass growing over the edges, which probably means no one’s bothered to visit in years.
I sneak a glance over at Henry. He’s stooped down, brushing his hand across the ground. My breath catches before he quickly moves onto the next.
I experience the same effect each time I come across a name that starts with an L. The Z last names are much less common, but I do happen upon a Zucker and a Zimmerman, both of whom died well into old age.
Maybe it’s because my neck hurts and my eyes have glazed over. I suppose that’ll happen after intense peering at etched words, which tend to lose all meaning after around one hundred or so, but when I’m nearly even with the Virgin Mary, in her frozen head scarf and robe with a look of utter grief preserved in the lines of her forehead, I stop. I trace my steps back two headstones. I squint, understanding now why I’d stopped.
In careful block letters, carved into a pearly white stone that measures just south of my knees, I read the following inscription:
REST IN PEACE
LEVI MICHAEL ZIN
TURN, MORTAL, TURN, THY DANGERS KNOW,
WHER’ER THY FOOT CAN TREAD;
THE EARTH RINGS HOLLOW FROM BELOW,
AND WARNS THEE BY HER DEAD.
“Henry,” I croak. He doesn’t turn. He’s several rows ahead of me on the other side of the cemetery. But if I leave my post, I risk losing the placement of the headstone. I take a deep breath. Something in the cemetery’s atmosphere begs me to stay quiet, maybe in solidarity with the dead. I hold my hands around my mouth like a megaphone and yell. “Henry!”
A small flock of pigeons launch into the air nearby. They chirrup and flap, knocking into each other as they rise to the level of the trees. Henry’s head snaps up. I exaggerate my gesture of waving him over. He cocks his head. I point at the grave in front of me, afraid to shout again.
Finally, Henry must understand. He bows his head and jogs toward me, zigzagging through the gravestones.
“I found it,” I say when he arrives. Now that he’s here, though, the whole thing feels a bit anticlimactic. We stare down at the rock, which seems cold, dead, and as lifeless as the corpse buried underneath.
Henry circles the headstone like he’s in search of a trapdoor. “All this time and his body’s been right here.” He trails off into silence and then: “Now what? Should we whip out the Ouija board? Hire an exorcist?”
“Call Ghostbusters?” I add. “I’m glad my eternal damnation is a joke to you.”
My legs have taken on the consistency of jelly. Rustling leaves fill the air with white noise, and pretty soon the same wind picks our cheeks raw, and Henry and I are left cold and shivering. Who knows how long we’ve been standing at the grave of Levi Zin lost in thought? Long enough for Henry’s nose to turn reindeer red.
Without thinking, I move toward him and burrow my nose into the soft spot below his throat. He cups my head and I think I feel him smell my hair again. I let him. I’m exhausted and he’s Henry, and I’d been wrong about us all along.
“At least one person doesn’t think I’m crazy,” I say, fracturing our silent vigil.
“Oh yeah? Who’s that?”
I pull away. Henry raises his eyebrows, but the crinkling at the corners gives him away.
I shove him and he stumbles back a step and I return my attention to the gravesite. Thy dangers know, wher’er thy foot can tread, I read once more with a shiver.
Scoping the surrounding tombstones, I spot a large bouquet of long-stemmed roses nestled in the grass nearby. I stoop down and from the flowers, I shimmy one rose free, careful not to prick myself on the thorns.
Standing at the foot of Levi’s grave, I cross myself from my forehead to my chest to my shoulders. Here lies the boy who has given me his heart. This is why I wanted to come here, I realize. To pay my respects to the person who has given me the greatest gift I could ever ask for.
“Thank you,” I whisper. Crouching down, I lay the rose gingerly on the spot where he’s buried.“But you forgot the most basic rule,” I say, standing up and brushing my hands free of dirt. “No take-backs.”
And just like that, I declare war. There will be no going back, no surrender, no chance for diplomacy. We play for keeps.
“Busy signal,” I tell Henry when he ducks out of the car, carrying two cans of Coke that he picked up from the Quickie Mart. I’m sitting on the hood, hands tucked into the sleeves of his Duwamish sweatshirt, which is so big I can tuck my knees inside it. The moon is a fingernail sliver hanging above. The sun, sunk below the horizon, has left a bright smear across the lower half of the sky that now lingers noncommittally between silver and navy blue. “Are you sure you’ve got it on the right station?” I ask. We’re parked at an access point somewhere between two rickety piers. Unseen below, the Duwamish Waterway splashes and churns. Wisps of sea breeze still reach us up here, where we can taste the salt that clings to our cheeks and tangles our hair so sharply that we may as well be sitting on the beach. The car sinks under his weight.
“This isn’t my first Lunatic Outpost rodeo.” Henry pops the top and hands me one of the cans. I slurp bubbles off the rim.
“Busy signal still,” I say. I check my messages. None from my parents, which means they still believe the cover story that I’m sleeping over at Brynn’s.
“Try again in a few minutes,” he says.
I twist to peer through the windshield. The doors to Henry’s car are open, the windows down. Static buzzes through the stereo system.
“What if he’s not taking calls tonight?” My arms feel too tired to move. At some point, I’d fallen asleep in Henry’s car while he researched how to become Henry the Spirit Slayer on his phone or something. This, I’ve learned, is my standard defense mechanism. If life begins to overwhelm me, no matter where I am or what I’m doing, I will inevitably choose to take a nap. After the five-oh-eight pain, it’s like a hole has been punched through my chest.
“He is. Relax.” He grabs my arm and shakes me playfully.
“I’m trying.” I play with the drawstrings of the sweatshirt and put my nose to the sleeve. The scent of Henry mixed with fabric softener helps, if only a little.
A few minutes later the static breaks. An eerie melody takes its place. Then Quentin, per his usual routine, welcomes all the Earthlings and non-Earthlings to tune into the show.
“Call now.” Henry nudges me. “Before all the lines fill up.”
I hurry to punch in the numbers and, with effort, hold the cell phone up to my ear again. In the background, I can hear Quentin introducing the show’s topics and inviting callers to contribute. The phone rings and rings. My foot jiggles. At least it’s not busy. “He’s not picking up,” I tell Henry, but as soon as I say it, there’s a crackle on the other end of the line. I sit up straight.
“Caller numb
er one.” Quentin’s nasally voice breaks through. “What’s the signal?” My eyes widen. I grab Henry’s shirt and point to the phone. It’s him, I mouth, then motion to Henry to turn down the car radio.
I clear my throat and, despite myself, grin. No good conspiracy theory show would operate without a proper password, especially with the number of prank calls Quentin receives. “The lunatics,” I say, enunciating, “are running the asylum.”
I’ve tried a thousand times to draw a mental picture around Quentin’s voice. In my head, he exists in a corner of his mother’s basement. A scrawny man-boy wearing a tinfoil hat and sporting thick glasses that magnify his eyeballs to resemble those of a goldfish. The reality is probably far more mundane. I’d hate to be disappointed. I switch the phone to speaker and turn up the volume.
“Very well. Welcome to Lunatic Outpost. Are you a first-time caller?”
“I—I am,” I say, and realize I’ve been chewing a hangnail on my thumb.
“Question, comment, report of extraterrestrial life or out-of-body experience?”
I look to Henry. He shrugs. “The first two, I guess,” I say.
“I’m listening, caller.”
I hesitate. I can already tell that I’m going to sound like either an idiot or a loon. Probably both. “Um, right,” I hedge, trying to work up the nerve. “You know how you’re always telling the audience that the world chooses to be blind? That people will concoct the most improbable, illogical scenarios just to make sure the world keeps operating within this little box that works according to their rules, even when the simplest, most logical explanation is that the world itself doesn’t run on rules at all?” I bite the inside of my cheek instead of my thumb. “Well, I think my friend and I have been guilty of that.”
“The universe is not a Rubik’s Cube,” says Quentin, more good-naturedly than I’d expected. “But some people need to fiddle with it longer than others.” Quentin’s favorite quip.
For years, I’ve thought of Quentin as an absent friend. An invisible part of a trio made up of me, Henry, and our beloved host. While I always thought the subject matter of Lunatic Outpost was eccentric, Quentin himself is brilliant. Possessed of a detailed mind. Sharp. Neurotic. Quick-witted. Under any other circumstances, I’d probably be melting into a puddle of fan girl.
“I, well, I don’t know how to say it, I guess, but I—or we—think my friend is being haunted.” Just saying it out loud gives me the shivers. The sun stain has been wiped clean and the atmosphere is now teetering toward nightfall. I pull the hood of Henry’s old sweatshirt up over my ears.
“What exactly makes you think your friend is being haunted?” He says this in the same tone as a doctor examining a patient.
“It’s been going on for a few months now only I—she—didn’t realize the person wasn’t a person until recently.” I tell Quentin about the transplant and about the medical records and our theories about the boy doing the haunting, whose name I change to Lucifer. “I guess our question is, how do we get rid of it?”
I touch the scar line underneath my shirt.
“You should know,” Quentin pauses, “that once you go searching for answers you can’t unfind them.”
“We know,” I add quickly.
There’s another pause, and I think I hear him take a sip of water. “There’ve been reports,” he begins. “In Qingdao, China, there was a shark attack over a decade ago. Very bloody, very violent, witnesses say. The victim died. The body was recovered, but without an arm. Since then, six children have drowned during family beach vacations on calm days. Loyal listeners may remember that I was called to investigate.” This rings a small bell somewhere in a darker stretch of my memory, but I come up short. Henry and I both suck in our breath. “Are you sure you want me to go on?”
“We’re sure.” This time it’s Henry. He’s leaning forward, chin resting on his bent knee.
“A few years later, there was a car bombing outside of Baghdad. Four people were killed, one of whom lost a leg, which was never recovered. Dozens of people report having been robbed of precious articles by him in the months following, along the same stretch of road.” I wonder if Henry can hear my heart pounding. “A similar story surrounds the ‘donor’ of an illegal transplant in Mumbai. The victim of a lobotomy in Shanghai. I’ve been called to complete substantial research on each of these, for lack of a better word, incidents. You’ll notice none of these reports issue from the United States, which is undoubtedly the worst when it comes to its desire to fit the world into its box.”
“So what?” I ask, not sure I can bear another gory secondhand account. “They’re each missing something?”
“I’m sure there are many reasons why souls might not find rest. I’m sure you’ve heard the bit about unfinished business? Or particularly violent deaths?”
“From you,” I say.
“According to some cultures, a body is to be buried with all of its limbs and organs, too, or else the godly soul which it was housing can’t return to its natural state. You know that spirits are strongest near the place that’s most important to them. That’s why some spirits haunt their old houses or the side of the highway where they were killed or the place of their murder. You’ve already told me that the cemetery where his body has been laid to rest is close—too close, if you ask me—and this in itself is bad.”
“So, what, you think his grave is the most important place to him?” Henry interrupts. “He wouldn’t have even known where his grave would be before he died.”
“No, I don’t think it’s his grave, although that’s certainly adding to the mix. It’s his body. There’s an old tradition dating back to tribal witchcraft: to destroy the curse, you must destroy the bones.”
I straighten. “The bones? We dig the bones up and destroy them and then, what, poof, no Le—I mean, Lucifer?” The idea is risky. In fact, it’s a crime, but already I’m concocting ways to rob the grave of Levi Zin.
“We have many more accounts pre–Industrial Revolution,” Quentin continues, ignoring me. “When tribal witchcraft wasn’t relegated to whack jobs and quacks, we knew that the success rate was high for this method of expulsion. Bones, of course, was used as a catchall term for remains, but still, the formula was simple. Modern technology has changed that. The cobbling-together of one body from the parts of another has obfuscated, at least in some cases, the ability to destroy the bones in one fell swoop.” There’s the nebulous feeling of a situation sliding from bad to worse. “You can imagine why the narrative accounts are few, then. The technology for transplanting one organ into a body is relatively new. That and the fact that most organ donors are cremated, not buried. For obvious reasons, I think.”
“I’m not sure I’m following,” I say.
“A transplanted heart is kept beating even when separated from the body, until it’s placed inside its new host. I mentioned the illegal transplant in Mumbai. There was another in Mexico. But there was one big difference between the two. In Mumbai, Hinduism dictates cremation. The donor’s body was burned to ash as soon as the transplant was complete. The result was a powerful, malevolent spirit that wreaked havoc on the recipient’s family until one day, the patient was found hanging from the Mahalakshmi Temple. In Mexico, though, where most are Catholic, cremation is considered sacrilege. The donor’s family insisted the body be buried. Of course, we’ve all heard of poltergeists moving furniture or leaving bruises on human skin and in occasional instances even killing unsuspecting victims, so we know that it’s possible for the spirit world to affect the living one. Normal horror-movie stuff, based in reality, naturally. The Mexican incident went one step further. Although the reports are very few and the set of circumstances so rare and unique, in this instance, especially given that the heart is the strongest and most important of the organs, the spirit had the combined power of its one living organ along with the proximity of its bones and returned to haunt in corporeal form.” Quentin lets this sink in. “He existed in the world physically.”
“Like Lucifer,” Quentin echoes.
I’d been so mesmerized by Quentin that I’m surprised when a gust of air comes through and blows off my hood. A shiver races the length of my spine, pooling in the hollow at the base of my neck. “But if we destroy the body, we should still be able to destroy him,” I say. I close my eyes and listen. His words come double, through the phone and softly repeating through the stereo speakers.
“Yes and no,” he says. “You have to destroy all of the remains. To destroy Lucifer, you must destroy the heart.”
My hand goes limp. The phone slips from it and lands in the dirt. I can hear barely hear Quentin’s voice in the background. “Caller one? Caller one? Lunatics, looks like we lost her. Time to open back up the phone lines.”
I fold over. My chest falls against my thighs. My hands cover my ears and I rock back and forth. Pretty soon, I’m on all fours taking in panicked gasps, sucking in my belly until I’m light-headed from the lack of oxygen and worried I’ll pass out.
Henry lunges for the phone and presses the off button. “It’s not true, Stel.” He shakes his head furiously, standing in front of the low beams of the car’s headlights. “It’s just not true. That guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” He goes around to the driver’s side and flips the station.
I push my fists into my forehead, my heart going haywire in my chest. It knows, I think.
Henry paces from one end of the car to the other. “He’s the lunatic. Jesus.”
“He asked if we wanted to know.”
Henry quits pacing and climbs back onto the hood of the car. We sit, staring out over the invisible water, our shoulders and hips touching. City lights have begun to sparkle, making the bottom of the sky look like it’s hemmed in glitter.
Henry laces his fingers between mine and squeezes. “We’ll figure this out, Stel.”
He pulls me to rest in the crook of his arm. Staring straight up, I feel as if I have blinders to the rest of the world. I can see nothing but stars. “It’s a little bit better than the stickers in my room, I guess.” His mouth is close to my ear.
Alive Page 25
