by JL Bryan
She followed the gradual slope down to the centerpiece of the Goodlings’ back yard, the duck pond, which was big enough for a little fishing dock and deep enough to float a rowboat.
Jenny walked out along the dock and looked into the black water, where moonlight framed her death’s head reflection. She didn’t have much time left. She’d eaten herself up to get to Ashleigh.
She jumped into the water.
Dirty black water flowed into her mouth and nose. Her body fought against it, choking and thrashing, but she didn’t have much strength. The water forced its way in. She panicked, ready to change her mind, but it was too late now.
Her flooded body sank like a stone into the darkness. She landed in cold, slimy mud and sharp underwater weeds. And then Jenny died there, at the bottom of the pond.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
She floated in darkness for a long time. The pain was gone, and the cold, and the anger, and every other feeling.
In time, patterns of light glimmered somewhere below her. She sank down to them, or they floated up to her.
She drew close to them. She discovered that each bit of light was a memory, and each memory contained a cluster of memories, a lifetime of them.
She saw herself on a low square tower of stone and mud, in gloves and a coarse linen cloak made from flax. She watched an army of men in copper helmets approach her walls. She was planning to spread a plague among them in order to protect her city, which was mostly mud houses inside an earthen wall.
She saw herself in a rough wool tunic, again with gloves, seated on a bench in the back of a galley rowed by fifty men, across salty, choppy, cold water. She’d been sent to an enemy city on a mission to spread pestilence there.
She saw herself in the head and skin of a lioness, looking out through the eye holes. She sat on a raised wooden throne inside a large, boxy building of simple clay bricks, on the bank of the Nile. In war, she slew the king’s enemies. In peace, those accused of injustice were brought before her for judgment, and sometimes execution. She was worshipped and feared, and many tried to influence her with gifts. They called her Sekhmet.
She saw herself a thousand years later, in fine woven cotton and gold jewelry, in a vast limestone temple complex devoted to the memory of her earlier incarnation, since elevated to a goddess. There were hundreds of black granite statues of the lion-headed goddess Sekhmet, and a sacrifice was made to a different statue each day.
She saw herself with dreadlocks to her waist, deep in the Central African rainforest. She led a band of rebels armed with spears and slings, determined to drive the invaders from their land. She was fearsome in battle and her people loved her. They called her Nyabinghi.
There were hundreds of lives. In most of them, she had warred ceaselessly against others of her kind. For tens of thousands of years, through one incarnation after another, they had made their wars on each other. Though they were born into humanity, humans were their pawns, the world their game board. They delighted in destruction.
They had not been human souls, originally. They had been wild, primordial spirits, wandering for eternities in darkness and desolation in the wastelands of the universe. They found their way to this tiny, hot, bright pocket of life, and they learned the trick of incarnating as humans. They found themselves with special powers when in human form, powers normal humans did not have. And they found that power attracted great interest from other humans.
Their first wars were fought by clans of humans, grunting a simple language and wielding stone hand axes. In time, these became spears, arrows, swords, cannons, ballistic missiles. They hunted each other down the millennia, and their armies grew larger, the game more complex. She saw that most of history was lost, there had been great civilizations and sprawling empires now long forgotten.
There were others out there, not just the three of them. There might have been a hundred or more spirits of her kind who’d found their way to this world. As spirits, they were immortal, but also invisible, voiceless, and powerless, with a very limited range of emotion and communication. Incarnation gave them the richness of sensual experience and the power to act and speak.
When incarnated, they were so dazzled by the drama and spectacle of life they did not remember their true nature. Discarnate, between lives, they could not help but remember their true selves, and they yearned to return to the warm pulse of flesh, the brilliant senses, the pleasures and pain, the storms of feelings, impressions, ideas. The mental focus needed to enter human life left them with a near-total amnesia while alive, but the experience of being alive was worth that. So she had decided, hundreds of times.
She’d grown more careful about trying to prepare her human mothers so that her birth was not fatal to them. That could take years. The most recent time, she’d been in a hurry to find a vessel, and gotten reckless.
She had known Seth and Ashleigh, or the spirits behind them, countless times. She had a memory of killing Seth, when he was a bearded man in bear skins, by nailing him to a pile of logs and kindling with iron stakes, then setting the pyre ablaze. She remembered killing Ashleigh, and being killed by Ashleigh, more times than she could count.
Through the ages, they had styled themselves as gods, demons, angels, holy men and women, magicians and witches, fae and djinn, according to whatever myths existed at their place and time of birth. When they took on such roles, they truly believed in them. When incarnate, such legend and folklore provided her kind with the only available explanation of their powers. She had spent lifetimes genuinely believing she was a goddess.
Discarnate, she saw clearly and coldly. Ashleigh’s soul had been eager to try the new weapons, the ones that could incinerate cities and annihilate millions. It would be a new achievement for her, the largest number ever killed at a single stroke.
Ashleigh had tried to hide herself from the other spirits by getting born in a tiny out-of-the-way place. She was normally attracted to the largest cities, where she could make the greatest use of her powers. She wanted to get ahead of the game years before the others knew she had incarnated again.
The souls of Jenny and Seth had tracked her down and hurried to incarnate nearby, so they could keep watch on her and stop her before she gained access to the city-eater fire weapons. They had succeeded. Jenny had discarnated Ashleigh before she could unleash the death and destruction she craved.
Jenny had almost lost it, had totally forgotten her purpose in the overwhelming, hypnotic spectacle of being alive. If she’d waited much longer, it might have become difficult to get close to Ashleigh. Ashleigh had known instinctively that Jenny and Seth were her greatest threats, and taken great measures to neutralize Jenny and control Seth. When they found each other, Jenny and Seth had begun to awaken.
There was another purpose to her life. Only in life could she and Seth touch each other and experience their depth of feeling for each other. They could engage each other in the passion and drama of being human. As spirits, they were isolated within themselves. As humans, they could be together.
Already, she ached to return to the nerve and sinew of flesh, to find a body and live again. Incarnate, she forgot her true nature. Discarnate, she could hardly imagine the terror and ecstasy of human emotions. She needed to be alive to feel them.
There was a sense of loss. After a lifetime of suffering, she had found him again, only to lose what they’d begun to yet another war with Ashleigh. As Jenny and Seth, they had started to build a good life together. Ashleigh, still playing the old game, had ruined it for them.
For a long moment, she was just a feeling of sorrow. They could incarnate again, born into new little bodies, but there was the risk they would get lost and never find each other in their new lives. As ever, the risk would be worth it, but she still felt cheated. This time around, she’d had the long pain of being alone, then the delight of discovering him—which never got old—and then, after only very brief togetherness, the inevitable loss and death. It was unfair. She wished for a second chance.
She mourned for Jenny and for Seth, the lovely little people they had been, with their lives cut so short.
After an unknowable amount of time passed, she felt the vibration of a distant signal. It was him, calling to her through the endless dark. They could be aware of each other, but they could not talk or share themselves in a very meaningful way, if they were discarnate. They could signal intent in a general way.
She signaled back, and moved toward him through the dark inverted space of the discarnated.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Sensation slammed into her from every side. She felt cold, hunger, sickness and extreme pain all through the core of herself. It was almost delicious. It was glorious to be alive.
Then the pain really took over, blotting out her thoughts. She coughed, and someone turned her on her side. She puked dark water that tasted like duck crap. She caught her breath, then coughed up more water. Her lungs and stomach were competing to empty themselves out.
A hand patted her bare wet back, helping her cough some more. Then it slid up to rub her affectionately on the back of the neck, while she coughed up the rest of the water.
“Feeling better?” he asked.
“I can’t see.” Her voice was a wet croak. “It’s so cold.” She was naked and shivering hard.
“Here.” He wrapped something like a blanket around her. It helped a little, but it was open and drafty in both the front and the back.
He pulled her close to him, into his lap, and his skin was as hot as open flames. She wrapped her arms around his neck. He lay one scorching hand on her drenched head. He lay another across her bare stomach, and rubbed, creating more warmth through friction. She realized he was wet and mostly bare, too, except the soggy boxer shorts under her ass.
“Seth?” she whispered. Her eyes itched. They were starting to work, but so far it was all dark, fuzzy streaks.
“Now you ask? Would you just climb naked into anybody’s lap?”
“Right now I would.” Her teeth chattered. “It’s really, really cold.”
“Next time, don’t drown yourself in a pond.”
“I was already dying,” she said. “I just wanted the pain to end.”
“You made it a lot harder on me,” Seth told her. “I didn’t think I could do it, after I pulled you up and saw you.”
She could see the pale, fuzzy shape of his face now. She lay a hand on it.
“Is this real?” she whispered, then coughed. Her windpipe and lungs felt very sore. “Am I dreaming? Am I dead?”
“You were. Now you’re not.”
“Why?”
“Because I can’t live without you.” He turned her head and kissed her. Her vision cleared up.
“But, seriously,” she said. “What happened? What day is it?”
“It’s still tonight,” Seth told her. “I woke up on the courthouse steps a couple hours ago. It took a while for me to finish healing. Then another while to look around, because I woke up surrounded by dead bodies as far as I could see—”
“Sorry,” Jenny said. “But they were all guilty.”
“—yeah, so I remembered about the plague-goddess girlfriend,” Seth said, and his choice of words startled her. “Then I had to find you. Ashleigh’s body wasn’t on the square, so I thought you might be here.”
“In the pond?”
“That was easy. You left dead white footprints all the way from the house.” Seth grinned and held up her lacy, dripping wet panties. “And these float.”
Jenny snatched her underwear from him. Then she touched his pale chest, where the bullet had entered his heart. There was only a scar.
“She got me pretty good,” Seth said. He reached into the gaping, tattered hole in the back of the coat he’d put around Jenny, and his fingers touched her skin. “Ruined my best suit, too. Almost want to resurrect her so I can kill her again. Have you seen her body in the driveway? Looks like chicken bones and charcoal.”
Jenny was still concentrating on his new scar.
“Does this mean you can’t die?” she asked.
“I’m sure I can,” he said. “Just not that easy. Besides, I had to come back and take care of you.”
“And I didn’t really die, either,” Jenny said, her voice full of wonder. “I survived the drowning.”
“Nah, you were totally dead when I pulled you out,” he told her. “I mean you were the color of a fish, no pulse, muddy, skin rotten, weeds in your hair, totally bloated up with water—”
“Okay!” Jenny said. She touched her left side. Seth had erased her gunshot wound, too.
“I’ve never healed anybody that dead before,” Seth said. “I’m very impressed with myself.”
“I’m impressed with yourself.” Jenny looked at him carefully. “But I bet you would die if I nailed you down with iron and set you on fire.”
“Yes!” Seth recoiled. “That would probably do it! That’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard. Why would you even think of that? I think I’ve had nightmares about that.”
“I think I already…I just had some crazy dreams down there.”
“When you were dead?”
“Don’t laugh.”
“I had some, too,” Seth said.
Jenny looked him in the eyes. “Really?”
“You first,” he said.
She told him what she could remember of what she’d seen, though it was all getting murky and jumbled. They had past lives together. They made war on each other, and on the others who were like them, since prehistoric times.
“I saw some of that,” he said.
“Don’t screw with me, Seth.”
“I’m not.” His eyes looked into the distance toward the first pale shade of blue in the east. “And something else. Before we were human—I know that sounds weird, but listen—before we were human, we came from this dark, empty place. Not…wherever normal humans souls come from.”
“The wastelands,” Jenny said, nodding.
“That a good word for it. A great word. Wastelands.” He frowned deeply, as if remembering a little of what it was like. Jenny had a few memory-impressions of it, too. Deep cold, darkness, an urge to scream in a place with no sound. Trying to think about it filled her with horror.
“When we first tried being human,” Seth said, “We didn’t understand people at all. We were powerful, but we were wicked and brutal. We loved destruction.”
“Sounds like Ashleigh.” Jenny laughed a little.
“Exactly like Ashleigh. But some of us, or maybe just you and me, we started learning from all these human lives. There’s a lot more available here, in this world, than just power and pleasure, but that’s all we could see at first. We laughed at everyone else for their weakness. But really the weakness is important. Pain and suffering can teach compassion. And love. You and I have been learning about love for several lifetimes now. We learn about it from each other.”
This struck Jenny as painfully sweet, and she gave him a long kiss. Suddenly, she couldn’t get close enough to Seth.
She hugged against him.
“I don’t think I understand love yet,” Jenny whispered. “But I want to keep trying. With you. I know I love you, Seth.”
“I know I love you, too,” he whispered.
The sky was brightening above them. They were sitting in the back yard of the deceased Goodling family, from which about ninety pregnant girls had recently emerged under inexplicable circumstances. The broken pieces of Ashleigh’s body lay on the front walk. Before long, someone would be here to investigate. Someone would also be investigating the mysterious plague that left bodies all over downtown.
Seth wore only his wet boxers. The rest of his clothes were scattered on the grass, where he’d left them when he dived into the pond to get her. Jenny was naked except for the coat, which was missing a lot of its back.
“We should go,” Jenny said.
They dressed as much as they could. Jenny wore Seth’s bloodstained black pants. Seth put on his bloodstained
dress shirt, with the back blown out by shotgun. It was hard to share one set of ruined clothes between two people.
“We had another reason for being born this time,” Jenny said. “To stop Ashleigh.”
“We did that,” Seth said. “I mean, you did. She pretty much stopped me.”
“But there are others,” Jenny said. “I got the feeling there could be a lot of others. Won’t they try to do the same kind of thing? Won’t Ashleigh be looking for another chance to get herself born?”
“Then we’ll watch out for the others.” Seth took her hand, and they walked towards the front yard. Both of their backs were exposed to the rising sun. “Today, I don’t want to think about anyone but you.”
Jenny smiled.
“What are we, Seth? Before, we always had something we could believe. Something we could pretend to be. I actually spent a whole lifetime thinking I was Arabian death angel. It was kind of cool. But we always let other people tell us what we are,” Jenny said. “Now we have our memories of other lives. Now that we remember, what do we do?”
“We make it up as we go,” Seth said. “That’s what we’ve always done.”
“But how should we—what do we—should we try to—” So many questions filled her up that she couldn’t begin to focus on any particular one.
“We have forever to figure that out,” Seth said. “Right now, let’s just think about living this one lifetime together.”
“Then we’d better get started,” Jenny said. “One lifetime goes by like that.”
Jenny snapped her fingers.
THE END
About the author:
J. L. Bryan studied English literature at the University of Georgia and at Oxford. He also studied screenwriting at UCLA. He lives in Atlanta with his wife Christina and assorted pets.
