“I don’t know. She said she’d be back when she was back.”
“She has gone to Tolmin to be alone. Not that it is possible for one like her.” Gustaf finished his whisky and centered the glass perfectly on his napkin. “She will be delayed in her return in any case. There are storms forecast for the mountains, and the roads will be impassable with the snowfall.”
Faron wanted to kick Gustaf under the table. His father had no right to any information about his mother she didn’t give him. He downed the dregs in his glass and nearly dropped it onto the table. His hands were still shaking. It was definitely anger.
“I have no desire to interfere in your mother’s life. To talk with her, yes, and soon, if possible. But not to interfere.” Dušan folded his hands in front of him on the table and looked up at Faron. “Does she know how protective you are of her? I doubt she would welcome it.”
Faron gritted his teeth but couldn’t think of anything coherent to say.
Gustaf rescued him in his way. “Let us leave Faron to his day. I believe he has class to attend.”
Faron stood and slung his backpack over his right shoulder. “I do.” He pushed his chair in and turned to leave without another word.
The two men were sitting, their heads bent together over the table, when Faron looked back before closing the door to the bar and taking the steps back up to street level.
He stood on the cobbles and tried to take in the late-morning blur of people going about their business. All those people unaware of what he was or what he had come from. He started back up the river toward the library and the university. He wouldn’t get any reading done today, but he wasn’t going to be late for class.
——
Veronika pushed her soup around in the bowl. Her sister Ana sat across from her. Of the three sisters, she looked the most like their mother. She and Ivanka, their oldest sister, had their mother’s thick, dark hair. Veronika’s was mouse brown when she didn’t dye it orange or green.
Olga, their aunt, picked up the basket of rolls and tried to hand it to Veronika. “Bread? You’ve hardly touched your soup.”
“I’m not really hungry.” She took the basket and set it in front of Ana.
“You’re never hungry.” Ana spoke under her breath, but Veronika heard her.
“Leave her be. She’ll eat when she is.” Olga went back to her soup, and the table returned to the silence that hung over almost all their meals.
No one, including Veronika, talked about their parents. It was almost like they never existed. She knew the story about how they died was bullshit; she’d seen her father’s death. No one ever talked about that either.
They also didn’t talk about the fact that their grandparents never spoke to them anymore and pretended not to know them in the street. Everyone failed to mention that Veronika and Ana had been foisted on their aunt while their sister Ivanka moved in with Faron. He, with his mother, was responsible for making her and her sisters orphans in the first place.
“Finished?” Olga stood and collected the bowls.
Veronika nodded. She got up and started back to her room.
Ana grabbed her wrist. “Do you want to watch TV with me?” Her sister’s face was still chubby with childhood, but she was taller every day.
“No. I’m going to read.”
“I don’t know why you are so interested in those dusty books.”
“What dusty books? Have you been in my room?”
Ana looked guilty. “No, but I can see you reading when you leave the door open. It’s always some old book. They must be dusty.”
“Well, stay out of my room.” Veronika needed to find a better place to keep her growing collection. It was probably stupid to put them on the shelf where Ana or her aunt could see them. Not that Olga ever went in her room. Her aunt had made it clear she wasn’t their maid and would not be cleaning up after them.
Olga made sure they had clothes and got to school on time. It wasn’t like she was mean; she just didn’t seem to care much about them. She didn’t have any of her own kids and joked about being married to her job, first as her father’s business manager and now as Gregor and fricking Jo Wiley’s business manager.
Jo Wiley couldn’t stay away from her family. Ivanka worked for her, too, at her stupid teahouse. All their friends hung out there, and no one seemed to know or care that the woman was evil or attracted it. Whatever. They were all so blind.
Veronika closed the door to her room behind her. She pulled her altar out from underneath her bed and removed the black cloth she used to protect and hide it. Nothing looked disturbed. If Ana had been poking around, she hadn’t found everything.
The books would have to go under the bed, too. She rummaged around in her closet looking for a crate or box they would fit in and still slide under the bed rail. Her socks and underwear were in a plastic basket on the shelf. She dumped them out on the bed and stood the books, spines up, against each other. The books and basket cleared the rail. She pulled out the spell book she’d been reading and set it on the floor. There wasn’t any more of the cloth she’d draped over the altar, but she did have a ratty old black T-shirt. She laid it on top and pushed the crate back under the bed.
Cross-legged on the floor in front of her makeshift altar, she lit a cone of incense and a red candle and turned to a page on breaking up lovers. She wasn’t as powerful as her teacher, but maybe she could at least make Ivanka come back and live with them.
Chapter 3
The dead do not dream because they do not sleep. Of all the things of life he missed, dreaming bothered him most. Not that his dreams in life had been pleasant: images of war and loss, the loss of friends and lovers and, finally, his sanity and autonomy. But there had been good dreams as well. They were now as distant as his life, though. He had been dead longer than he had lived.
He had come to this place when he died, and now he could not leave. He had served nearby during the war. He had loved there. And like many others, he was lost there. His job had been to tend the wounded. Instead he had been an unwilling Charon transporting the dead.
He still saw every face behind his eyelids. He saw young men’s bodies torn and shredded, or their flesh burned from the cold. He had years to forget, but could not.
He could not forget other faces. Those of his wives and his children and the friends he outlived and the friends he left behind — they haunted him. Almost all were gone now. He was alone with the countless and unknown dead who could not leave these mountains.
It was torture by a horrific beauty. It would not end until they were mourned, but the mourning of a ghost did not satisfy the unnamed and unknown. He felt their exhaustion in what he assumed was his soul. He had to have one, there was nothing else left to feel pain.
The first day he saw her in the distance, she hiked up to a flat, open area near a war monument. She sat on a rocky outcropping, the valley spread out before her, to eat a sandwich out of brown paper. She looked lost in thought and methodically chewed each bite. When she finished, she screwed up the paper and shoved it into a pocket in her clothes. She walked along the path toward him, pausing to look up at the mountains. She wore an ugly, flat hat, and her dark blonde hair flowed from underneath it. She stopped and turned to walk back the way she came, her loneliness drifting off her and over him on the thin mountain air.
He saw her again the day of the snowstorm. She walked past him and off the trail into a small wooded area near another of the shrines to the dead. She spread a blanket on the ground and knelt in a clearing among the trees. He thought she might be praying. She took a spoon out of her coat pocket and dug a shallow hole in the frozen ground in front of her. She tipped a small thing into it and packed the pile of earth she had excavated back over it.
She rocked back and sat on her heels. When she brushed her arm over her brow, she knocked the strange, flat hat off. A shimmering plume spu
n up from the top of her head. She transfixed him as the hum of all the lingering dead on the mountainside crescendoed. He went to her and found he was walking on the ground. The frozen, winter-browned grass hiding beneath the snow crunched under each footfall. The sensation of his own feet hitting the ground jarred its way up his legs. She turned, and surprise flickered across her face. She reached for the hat but clutched it in her hand.
“Hello?” His voice sounded. It was strange to speak, and stranger still to hear the words rattle in the bones of his head.
“Hello.” She pushed her hands against the blanket and stood. She still clutched the hat in her hand, like she was trying to decide whether she should put it back on.
“You can see me?”
“Yes. And hear you.” She put the hat back on. The thrumming around them stopped. “And now only you.”
Curious. “And you are?”
“Jo.” She extended her hand. “And you?”
It had been so long since he had thought about his name, he found he was protective of it. To say it out loud was a betrayal of who he had been in life. He thought of another, instead. “Henry.” He shook her hand, shocked by the contact of flesh on flesh.
“Henry.” In her mouth it sounded like a foreign word, a meaningless but musical sound.
“What kind of magic is this?” He flexed his fingers out, the bones of his wrist cracking.
“No magic. Well, at least not any trickery.” She folded up the blanket and tucked it under her arm.
“It has been a long time since I’ve felt … present.”
“I have that effect on people.” She laughed. It was a high, clear sound in the cold air. “Or at least dead ones.”
“You are a strange creature, Jo.” She was, and intriguing. Not beautiful so much as memorable or striking. “I’ve watched you the past few days.”
She tilted her head back in surprise. “It must’ve been very boring.”
“Not boring. I’ve wondered what you were up here looking for.” Had he said too much? She cocked her head at him as if she were trying to decide whether to answer his half-asked question.
“Henry, would you like to join me for dinner? I have eaten every meal alone for two weeks. I could use some company.”
He looked up into the darkening sky. A storm was gathering in the distance, and the sun was setting. “Yes. I will join you for dinner.”
“We should go. I’m not much of a weather forecaster, but that cloud looks dark and snowy.”
He nodded. “Lead on.”
She took his arm, and they walked in silence to a farmhouse perched on a hillside. The muscles in his legs lengthened and contracted with each step. How had this woman made him flesh? He could feel the wind as it picked up and blew against their backs. He could not feel the cold, but the woman rubbed her upper arm and quickened her steps. She opened the door and walked into the dark room beyond. He stopped at the threshold, unable to cross.
She stopped. “Oh, I forgot. Henry, welcome to my home. Please, come inside.”
With her words, he stepped over the threshold. She sprinkled salt from a bag hanging near the door over where he had walked. He followed her into the main room of the house.
He watched her move around the kitchen. She poked the fire awake in the stove and put a pot of rice on. As the rice cooked, she opened a bottle of wine with a knife she pulled from her pocket.
She held the bottle out toward him. “Red okay?”
He nodded. Why did she think a ghost could drink wine? Why did he think he could not? The chair underneath his thighs felt like a chair.
She handed him a glass and held hers up. “A toast.”
He held his glass up close to hers. She looked him in the eyes. It was still unnerving. A living person could see him. When she looked at him, it was as if she could see into him, as well.
“To new friends.” Her gaze suggested things other than friendship.
They clinked their glasses together and each took sips.
The wine washed over his tongue, over every tastebud in his mouth full of teeth. Summer and warm leather and ripe plums. Wine had never tasted so good when he was alive. Or he had forgotten?
“Do you like Indian food?” Her back was to him as she chopped onions with an admirable precision.
“I am sure I will.”
She laughed. “Good. It’s pretty much what I brought provisions for.”
With all the chopping done, she pulled a pan from a lower cupboard. She tossed a handful of spices into it when it had warmed on the griddle plate. The air filled with the aromas of cumin and turmeric and cinnamon. She crushed a few leaves in and added oil and the onions. With that task completed, she scooped up the apples she had sliced and fanned them out on a plate. She sprinkled more spice and some apple cider vinegar over them and placed the plate in front of him.
“It’s chaat, an appetizer of sorts. It’ll tide you over until the dhal is ready.”
The apple slices were crisp and tart and sang with the combination of spices she had dusted them with. He savored each bite, surprised by how acute his senses were. Had he experienced things as purely as this when he was breathing? He had thought he grabbed life around the throat at every opportunity. There had not been time for regrets.
Jo set a large plate with a pile of fragrant, slender-grained rice and a bowl of deep yellow stew filled with split lentils on the table. Two pieces of charred bread lay next to the bowl. There were no other plates. She sat next to him, beckoned him to eat. He watched as she ripped off a piece of bread, dipped it in the stew, and put the whole of it into her mouth. He followed her lead.
When the food was gone and the dishes washed, she picked up her glass and the bottle of wine and bade him follow her. She moved back into the small sitting room they had come through. She refilled her glass and curled up in the corner of the couch.
“So what’s your story, Henry?”
He sat in the middle near her and set his glass on the table in front of them. “First. What are you? How is this possible?”
“Long version or short version?”
“Short version for now.”
Before she could start her story, the lights flickered and went out.
“So much for that, but I have lanterns.” She set her wine down in the dark and pulled a small thing from her pocket. It shone a blinding light at the floor that she used to navigate to a cupboard in the corner of the room that groaned with books and the trinkets of life.
She produced two oil lamps and a box of long matches. A match lit when she struck it against the box. The wick sputtered and threatened to go out before it caught, and a blue and gold flame sprang up from the cotton. She put the glass chimney back on and curled back up into the couch, wine in hand.
“Where were we?”
——
Jo took a sip of her wine and looked at her guest. He was probably in his forties, or had been when he died. His hair was long enough to be rakish, and his beard had gone mostly gray. His eyes were intelligent and deep but not warm, or not exactly. There was pain in them, but he didn’t much seem the type to share that. They had that in common.
“I am a Vox de Mortuis, a Voice of the Dead.”
“And what does that mean exactly?”
“It means I can see and speak with shades, like you, and that in my presence you are solid enough to make a dent in the couch.”
He nodded, but his expression was one of confusion.
“There are only three of us in the world. It’s not a very common ability.”
“Perhaps that is a good thing.”
“I think so. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.” She took another sip of wine and continued to appraise her unexpected guest. He was attractive in a Ralph Lauren, all-American way, and yet vaguely Bohemian. She was more interested in the Bohemian bit. He was familiar, b
ut she couldn’t say why.
“The living are difficult enough to understand.”
She laughed. “Yes. Yes, they are.” She didn’t even understand herself these days.
“It must have been hard when you were a child.”
“It’s a relatively new thing. But, enough about my weirdness. What about you? Who are you, Henry? If that is your real name.”
“It isn’t, but it will do.”
“It will if that’s what you prefer.” She pulled a blanket off the back of the couch and wrapped it around her legs. The fire usually kept the room warm, but her guest sucked the heat from the air, almost as much as Helena did. That didn’t stop her from edging a little closer to him as she settled the throw over her.
“For now at least. I hadn’t expected to ever speak again, let alone have anyone ask me my name.”
She nodded.
“I was a writer. I traveled. I lost my mind, and I blew my brains out in the end.”
Jo shivered. She was grateful to whatever gods allowed a gunshot suicide to not appear to her in his death form. He was a strong shade to be able to project a different visage.
“I thought honesty was best here.”
“No. It is. It’s just usually when shades first appear they look like they did when they died and, well, I’m glad you don’t.” Maybe it was different with suicides. She hadn’t met the shade of one yet.
“Is there a mirror?”
“A small one in the bathroom. Do you want me to come with you?”
He stood. “I don’t, or didn’t usually, invite women to join me in the john, but I think this is a special circumstance.”
She got up and led him with a lantern to the small bathroom off the main bedroom. She handed him the light and motioned for him to go ahead. He stood in front of the mirror and ran his hand over his beard.
“How old were you when you died?” He was fit in a man’s man way. Shades were usually pale, but his skin looked as if it had been heavily bronzed in life.
He put his hands on the edge of the sink and pushed away, looking down at the cracked tile on the floor. “Early sixties going on dotage.”
Our Lady of the Various Sorrows Page 3
