by Tim Waggoner
He cocked his head. He thought he heard something rising above the ocean-noise of the endlessly whispering throng. A voice…loud, as if someone were desperate to get his attention.
“Hold up for a second, ‘Lena.” He stopped, and his aunt stopped with him. He closed his eyes and listened with a part of himself beyond his physical body.
Yes! He could hear it more clearly now. It sounded just like—
“Mother!” He released ‘Lena’s arm and started toward the graveyard wall.
His aunt called after him, but he paid her no heed, wasn’t even sure exactly what she was saying. All he could clearly hear was his mother, calling, calling after so long a silence.
He reached the wall, climbed over easily, and set foot in the kingdom of the dead.
* * *
Michael, fifteen now, sat cross-legged on his mother’s grave. The dirt had long since settled, no longer a mound around which mourners gathered with tear-puffy eyes and bowed heads, but simple, flat earth covered with grass. If it wasn’t for her headstone—Miranda Tays: Beloved Mother, She Served Her Maker Well—there would have been no sign that she was buried here at all.
It was late fall, and only a few stubborn leaves still clung to tree branches. The rest covered the ground with a blanket of brown and red, leaves curled and dry like the husks of desiccated insects. Michael had had to brush them aside to make room to sit.
He’d learned much from his aunt over the years, so much so that she let him help with readings from time to time, and he’d even done a couple all by himself. She said he had a real knack for the work, as if he’d been born to it. But of all the spirits who’d whispered to him, first animals and then people, there was one he wanted to hear from more than anyone, one who had so far remained silent.
His mother had died when was he was only two years old, from cancer, Aunt ‘Lena said, and what memories Michael had of her weren’t real memories at all, just half-formed, fuzzy things constructed out of old pictures in photo albums and stories his aunt had told him. He had no true sense of his mother as a person who had given him life, taken care of him, loved him for the two years their lives had overlapped. And the one question his aunt had never been able to answer to his satisfaction was why, if he could talk to the dead, he’d never been able to talk to his mother?
Not that ‘Lena didn’t try to give answers. It’s like trying to see the tip of your own nose—it’s just too close. Don’t worry about it none. When the time is right, you’ll hear from her.
Michael was tired of waiting. As far as he was concerned, the time was now. If the dead cared at all about the living—if his mother cared at all about him—then today they’d make contact. And if not, he’d say to hell with being a messenger between this world and the next, and start thinking about becoming an accountant or an engineer, it didn’t matter what. Any profession would do, just as long as it was boring and mundane and didn’t involve talking to ghosts.
He took a breath, counted three, let it out. “Okay, Mom. Here we go.”
He pressed his fingertips against the ground, digging them into the earth, shoving soil up under his fingernails. It hurt, but he ignored the pain, closed his eyes and concentrated on breathing.
Breath is life, Aunt Elena had taught him. To touch death, we begin with life.
Michael imagined his fingers becoming roots, snaking down into the earth, curling through dirt and rock, down, down toward his mother’s coffin. Imagined the roots touching the wood, shoots drilling through the surface, reaching inside, connecting with the empty shell his mother had left behind. A shell that might provide a touchstone between them.
He heard the dead speaking all around him, their voices the sound of dry autumn leaves rustling in a midnight wind. He sifted through the voices, searching for one in particular…
Mother?
A gentle breeze touched his right cheek, feeling more like warm, soft fingertips than any wind.
Then, so faint he wasn’t sure if he really heard it, came a loving whisper. It’s all right, honey. Everything’s okay.
* * *
Michael stood over his mother’s grave. Aunt ‘Lena remained outside the cemetery, too old to climb the wall. She leaned against it, watching him, her gaze unreadable.
Two sentences. That was all his mother had ever whispered to him through the veil that separated the living and the dead. Not much, not much at all, but it had been enough. Until now, that was.
“What do you feel, Mikey?” she called to him.
He looked at the words engraved on his mother’s stone, not wanting to answer. “Nothing,” he said in a small, lost voice. He didn’t mean that he failed to feel anything at all. Rather, he sensed a nothingness that was almost tangible, a vast unbroken stretch of blackness that was so far beyond such childish concepts as shadow and dark and night as a supernova is beyond the feeble illumination of a burning match.
And he knew he was seeing it through his mother’s eyes.
“Why?” He felt tears threaten, fought to hold them back. “Why did she lie to me?”
‘Lena didn’t answer right away. Eventually, she said, “Remember how I told you that it’s hard to contact our own loved ones because it’s like trying to look at the tip of your own nose?”
His gaze still focused on his mother’s headstone, he nodded.
“Well, that’s true enough, as it goes. But the dead have a hard time lying directly to friends and family. That’s where folks like you and me come in, Mikey. It’s easier for the spirits of strangers to lie to us, to lie through us. But we have too strong a connection with our own departed loved ones. We can see through their lies too easily, feel when they aren’t telling the truth, so they avoid contact with us.”
He turned away from his mother’s grave and walked back toward his aunt. He stopped when he reached the wall and looked deep into her eyes.
“But when you get good at talking with the dead—too good—none of them can lie to you anymore.”
She nodded. “And that’s what happened to you when you were taping your show. The man’s spirit tried to lie to you so you could pass that lie on to his wife…just like your mama lied to you when you were a young man. Like they all lie to us. To reassure us, make it easier to go on with our lives and do what we have to do.”
“But in the studio, I finally saw the truth.”
“Oh, yes.” She reached out and touched arthritic fingers to his cheek. It felt exactly like another touch, one he’d felt here in this cemetery over half his lifetime ago. Thick, viscous tears welled in ‘Lena’s rheumy eyes. “You poor, poor boy.”
* * *
They stood side by side on the Old Mill Run Bridge, leaning on the railing and looking down at the water rushing by beneath. The bridge was old, its wood gray and weathered. It felt soft beneath Michael’s hands, as if he might sink his fingers into the wood and tear away great chunks as easily as he could pull apart a slice of stale bread. The Bluerush River wasn’t living up to its name today; the water was reddish brown, a sluice of tumbling, surging liquid clay.
“It’s rained quite a bit the last few weeks,” ‘Lena said. “The river’s all stirred up.”
The river’s not the only thing all stirred up, Michael thought.
Trees formed a canopy over their heads, branches heavy with leaves, hanging low as if bowing under the weight of the summer heat. Michael was sweaty. His shirt clung to his back and sides, and he could feel rivulets running down his face and the back of his neck. He glanced at ‘Lena. The old woman wasn’t sweating at all. She kept her gaze fastened on the water, an expression of profound sadness on her face.
“This is the one place I never brought you, Michael.”
Not Mikey this time, he noticed.
“It’s time for another lesson. The last one.” She sighed and something rattled in her lungs, deep and nasty. Michael thought that after this was over, he should take her to the doctor, just in case.
“This place, this bridge, is the reason wh
y we’re here, you and I. And when I say here, I don’t mean just in Ashton. It’s the reason we were put on this world and given the powers that we have.” She turned and gave him a small smile. “The reason why we exist at all.”
Michael stretched out his senses, tried to feel what was so special about this bridge, but beyond the ever-present whispering of the dead—which now seemed to be coming from the water flowing beneath them—he felt nothing. It was more than strange: this was a place where dozens of people had ended their lives. Despairing, feeling there was no other way out than to climb over the railing and drop into the river, letting the current take them, lungs filling with water as they embraced the final release of darkness. The bridge should’ve reeked of emotional turbulence and lingering suicidal thoughts, a foul psychic residue soaked deep into the wood. But there was nothing, nothing at all.
“I don’t understand.”
“Look down at the water,” ‘Lena said. Her voice was flat, toneless.
He did as she asked and saw the water had turned black. Blacker than night, blacker than sin, blacker even than death itself. It was the same darkness that he had seen in his vision back in the television studio. A darkness that was balefully alive and eternally hungry. Now he understood why he felt nothing here. Nothing—Nothing with a capital N—was all that was here.
As he watched, faces began to bob up from beneath the surface of the black river. Dozens, hundreds, thousands of white faces, skin bleached, eyes black holes filled with the same darkness they swam in. Mouths open wide as if shouting, but nothing came out save more maddening inaudible whispers, and try as he might, he couldn’t make out what was being said. Once as a boy, Michael had seen a school of ravenous carp feeding on water insects near the bank of the river. The big thick-scaled fish writhed and tumbled over one another, eyes cold, dead and staring as they mindlessly fed. The faces of the dead struck him the same way, and he had an awful thought. What if their mouths were stretched wide not because they were trying to say something, but because they were hungry?
“I told you the dead lie, Michael. What I didn’t tell you was the reason why. You know as well as I do what they tell us to pass along to the living: that the other side is a place of peace and contentment. All worries, all troubles are washed away in the passage from this world to the next. And that’s true enough, as it goes. What they don’t say is that the negative emotions—all the anger, envy, lust, hatred and dozens of others for which humans haven’t thought up names for yet—are carried over with them. And once those emotions are purged, they don’t just vanish. Just like the spirits they were part of, those feelings are eternal. And once those emotions are free, they have to go somewhere.”
Michael looked down at the river and into the deep shadows within the bleached-white eyes sockets of the dead. Shadows that surged and roiled as if alive and eager to be free from the hollow prisons that held them.
“The Darkness,” he said.
‘Lena nodded. “The toxic waste dump of the afterlife. And it’s alive, in its own way.”
The bloodless faces continued to gawp like fish. And was there one face that Michael recognized? A face he hadn’t seen since he was two? Maybe.
He fought to keep his voice steady. “What does it want?”
She shrugged. “What does anything want? To feed, to grow, to go on living.”
One of the faces, the one that Michael thought he recognized but which he wasn’t ready to acknowledge, oh no, not yet, began to rise up out of the black water, long raven hair (God, please don’t let it be her!) trailing behind a naked, snail-flesh white body.
“’Course, what it feeds on is emotion,” ‘Lena said. “Negative emotion.” Her voice was calm, too much so considering that the woman (not her, not her!) was rising upward on a fount of ebony water, white arms stretched toward them, mouth yawning open and eye sockets bubbling with living darkness. “And the dead don’t have any of those feelings anymore. They got rid of them when they crossed over, so the darkness needs us, the living. It’s too greedy to wait for us to die and feed. It wants to be fed now. So it comes to places like this, where the barrier between worlds is thinnest, and it pushes and pushes until it makes a tiny tear. But that’s all it needs to reach through and intensify the negative emotions of the living.”
Still rising, coming closer, within a few yards now. Cracked white lips drawn into a rictus of a smile, and the hands—nails so long they were almost talons—trembled, eager, so eager…
‘Lena went on calmly. “Ever wonder why there are some places in the world—places like Ashton—where everyone is always depressed and down on their luck? Places where people can’t helping taking to drink, drugs and crime? Where they decide it’s better to kill themselves than endure one more minute of the hell their lives have become?” ‘Lena nodded toward the thing rising from the river. “It’s the Darkness, planting seeds of itself within them, and then harvesting its crop.”
Only a few yards away now. Michael could smell the stink of fetid river water on the creature’s chalk-colored flesh. He couldn’t take his eyes off the face that he hadn’t seen in so long, a face that was in many ways as familiar to him as his own.
“The dead do their best to keep the Darkness they created at bay,” ‘Lena said. “They work to communicate with the living, to pass along the false message that everything is all right on the other side, that the afterlife is a beautiful place of peace and rest, where we’ll be reunited with our loved ones some day. It’s a lie, of course, but a beautiful, necessary one designed to give the living hope, to keep despair at bay and deny the Darkness the awful nourishment it so desperately wants.”
Rising, rising ever closer…
“And I lied to you, too, Michael. Your mother didn’t die of cancer, and she’s not buried in the cemetery. I paid to have an empty coffin put into the ground, and a stone set over it so you’d believe she was there. She was like you and me, could hear the dead whisper, but she saw through their lies earlier than most, and she couldn’t take it. Couldn’t live with the knowledge of what truly waits for us all on the other side, and couldn’t bring herself to help the dead deceive the living any more. She became depressed, convinced life had no purpose other than to feed the Darkness, and nothing I could say or do would help. In the end, she came here.” ‘Lena nodded toward the water below.
The fingers had drawn even with the bottom of the bridge now, and still they rose upward, clutching frantically, like the multi-jointed legs of some crustacean. Above the whispering of the dead in the river below, Michael could make out a high-pitched keening, as if of an infant crying to be fed.
Michael’s mind was reeling. He wanted to deny what was happening, to ignore his great-aunt’s words and pretend he’d never come home, never learned her final lesson. But he couldn’t. Part of him accepted it, as if deep in the core of his being, he had known the truth all along. When he spoke, he was surprised at how calm he sounded.
“Have you brought me here for the same reason, ‘Lena? So that I can watch you feed the Darkness the same way my mother did?”
She turned to him, surprised. “Lord, no, child! I’d never do that to you.” She smiled and touched his cheek with stiff, swollen fingers. “I may be old, and I might not have much hope left in me after all these years of helping to hold off the Darkness, but I still have a little.”
The crustacean fingers found the railing, closed over the wood, talons digging into its soft surface. With a last heave, the thing from the river pulled itself up until it was the same height as they, less than a foot away from them now. Michael couldn’t bring himself to look into its wet, ivory face. He wanted nothing more than to get the hell out of there, to run off the bridge and down the road, screaming until his throat bled. But he knew ‘Lena wouldn’t follow, and he refused to leave her alone with…with…
“What I don’t have much left of, Mikey, is time. I’m sick. So full of cancer that the doctors don’t see any point in trying to fight it. At my age, they figure
the operation’s just as liable to kill me as the sickness, and if I survive that—and it’s a mighty big if—the chemotherapy would probably finish me off.”
Still smiling she withdrew her hand from his face. “I haven’t come here to surrender. I’ve come so that I can continue my fight in the next world.” ‘Lena nodded toward the one who had joined them, and Michael turned to look full upon his mother’s face.
The darkness remained in her eyes, and her skin was still pale as a fish that had lived its entire life in the deepest depths of the ocean. But her lips had formed a smile now—a loving, human smile, and he knew that his mother hadn’t come as an avatar of the Darkness, hadn’t come to feed. She’d come as an escort.
‘Lena stepped toward her niece, and Michael’s mother wrapped dead arms around her. She lifted the old woman off the bridge, and then the fount of water which held her aloft began to recede, bearing them both slowly down toward the black river.
“Wait! There’s still so much I need to know!”
‘Lena smiled. “You’ll figure it out, honey. Just remember to trust your feelings.”
Their feet touched the water, began to sink. The blackness, which was already edging back toward brownish-red, rose up to their knees, toward their stomachs… The clown-white faces of the rest of the dead dipped below the surface of the river, and the whispering that had been in Michael’s ears ever since he’d gotten near Ashton finally fell silent.
The water was up to their chests now, closing in on their necks…
“What do I do now?” Now that he knew the truth, now that he knew what he had done all his life—pass messages along for the dead—had been a lie.
