The Reign of the Departed

by Greg Keyes

  It had been a long time since he had looked up at the stars. The last time had been when he and Bobby and Jay had gotten hold of a bottle of Thunderbird and drank it out in Bound’s pasture, lying on their backs. He had started naming the constellations, and Jay had made fun of him. That was when he was still learning to keep his mouth shut about such things. When he had been little, it had been with his dad, before he got sick. Once they had watched the sky wheel by for half a night, naming each constellation and planet as they rose.

  And once with Aster.

  The sudden remembrance startled him. She had known the stars, too, but she’d had different names for the constellations —Ursa Major or the Big Dipper was Thunder’s Cart, and the Milky Way was the Path of Birds. They had been eleven or twelve.

  Why had he forgotten that?

  He lay on his back, half-fearing that in the Kingdoms, even the stars wouldn’t be the same. But soon he began to pick them out, like old familiar friends.

  Something rustled nearby, and he sat up, ready to fight, but the dark silhouette against the Milky Way was Veronica.

  “Do you want to be alone?” she asked.

  He did, but he didn’t want to say so. Typically, she interpreted his silence the way she wanted to, and lay down next to him. Her arm touched his, and he twitched in startlement. It almost felt real, her touch, rather than the muffled half-sensation his puppet body made do with. He relaxed and felt the smoothness of her skin; it was the same temperature as the night air, which was to say hot.

  “Can’t sleep?” she asked.

  “Something like that,” he said.

  She was quiet for a moment.

  “Look, Errol,” she said. “I know we got off on the wrong foot, with me trying to kill you and all . . .”

  “You’ve saved me twice,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You came back for me at the Snatchwitch’s cave. You saved us all from the whatever-the-Hell-it-was in the river. I guess I can get over that one little thing.”

  “Can you?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Huh,” she murmured.

  She started to lift up, but then relaxed back onto the ground. He was increasingly aware of the place where their arms touched, try as he might to ignore it.

  “You like the stars?” she asked.

  “I guess,” he said.

  “That’s as good as a lie, Errol Greyson,” she said. “You talk straight with me.”

  “I like them,” he admitted.

  “Tell me about them.”

  “You know—there they are,” he said, pointing.

  “Errol,” she said quietly, “I don’t know how many years I went without seeing a star, and I never knew anything about them before. But here they are in God’s own glory, and I want you to tell me about them.”

  Errol might have sighed if he’d had lungs. Instead he pointed to the brightest light currently in the sky.

  “That’s Venus,” he said. “The Evening Star.”

  “I thought Venus was the Morning Star,” Veronica said.

  “I thought you didn’t know anything about stars.”

  “Well, I remember hearing that,” she said.

  “Well, she’s both,” he said. “She’s really a planet, not a star, and she’s between Earth and the Sun—so she’s always near sunrise or sunset. We see her as the morning star for about 263 days, and then she disappears for a while and shows back up with the sunset for another 263 days.”

  “And where is she in between?” she asked.

  “Out of sight,” he replied.

  “And that?” she asked him, pointing. “Is that the little dipper?”

  “No,” he said. “That’s the seven sisters.”

  “Looks like a dipper to me,” she said.

  “No, that’s little dipper, see?” He pointed at another, larger formation.

  “Well, that looks like a plough,” she opined.

  They lay like that for a while, and he was just getting used to it when he felt the touch of her hand on his.

  “Errol,” she said. Her voice was still and small.

  “Yeah?”

  “I don’t know what happened to me,” she said. “I don’t know how I died. I remember being at the falls. I remember I had new shoes. That’s all I remember.”

  “Maybe that’s for the best,” he said, squeezing her hand.

  She squeezed back.

  “Maybe,” she whispered. She sat up a little. He couldn’t see her face, only the outline of it against the sky.

  “Close your eyes,” she whispered.

  “Listen . . .”

  “Hush. Close them.”

  He did. She still had his hand.

  “Think about your body. Your real body, the one in the hospital.”

  “I’m afraid to sleep,” he blurted. “I’m afraid that if I sleep I won’t wake up. I have bad dreams.”

  “I know, Errol,” she said. “Do what I said. Think of your body, lying here in the grass, just like this.”

  And so he did. He imagined himself, back in Bound’s pasture.

  “Imagine breathing,” she whispered, “and your heart beating.”

  And as she said it, he did; he felt the pulse of life through him, the swell and collapse of his chest, the faint itch from the grass through his shirt, sweat beading on his skin.

  And then he felt her lips touch his, warm and wonderful. And he felt his, as if they were made of flesh, and the luxury of it was almost more than he could bear. This wasn’t like before, when he met her—there was no crazy lust, no loss of control; just a kiss so sweet it threatened to break his heart.

  After a small eternity Veronica pulled gently away and lay by him again, and although the illusion quickly began to dissolve, a melancholy happiness lingered.

  “If I were alive, Errol,” Veronica said, her voice scarcely louder than the crickets, “that is exactly how I should like to kiss you.”

  THREE

  BAD BOYS

  What’s the matter with you?” Jobe demanded. “You hurt?”

  David didn’t look at the young man.

  “No,” he said. “No, I don’t think so.”

  He wasn’t hurt, he knew. He had checked himself well for injuries, especially on the head, because a gaping skull wound would best explain the happenings of the last few hours. But, sadly, his scalp wasn’t lacerated in the slightest. That meant that either everything he had lately seen was real—or he was clinically insane.

  He had to consider the possibility that he was still suffering from the drugs Aster’s father had slipped him. But that explanation made less and less sense as time went on. The monster he had just seen did not exist in his world, and neither did warm rivers freeze spontaneously. An old man in cowboy boots could not bring fire from dry leaves without a match—no, not just a fire, but a whirlwind of soot and flame—and he could not fire lightning from an old forty-five.

  That meant he wasn’t in his world, but in some sort of absurd fantasy land.

  And he could not bring himself to believe he would hallucinate such a thing. Not when he spent eight hours a day trying to divert his students from such worthless drivel, to convince them to discover literature instead. He challenged them to read Homer, Virgil, the nameless author of Beowulf, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Dante, Swift, Blake, Cervantes, Milton, Voltaire, Melville, Joyce, Huxley, Faulkner, Vonnegut—authors who spoke to universal human conditions, whose works could increase the soul; not escapist pabulum by half-literate hacks about elves, fairies, dark lords, and dragons whose only notion was to entertain at the lowest level that writing could achieve.

  Yes, he might hallucinate the boys—they could be straight out of Twain, or Faulkner. But the rest of it—the magic, for God’s sake—no.

  So that left him with it being real, which just made him feel dirty. It could only be worse if he was dropped into one of the teen romances the seventh-grade girls read.

  Worse, but safer.

  Fortunate
ly, the Sheriff didn’t give him much more time to think about it. Whatever magic he had, crossing deep moving water on horse was apparently not in it, so he pressed them south at a furious pace, until by noon of the next day they reached a ferry.

  He paid the ferryman with a withering glance and a hand clapped to his pistols. It took them nearly an hour to get all the boys and their horses across. Then they started out again, alternating from painful trot to terrifying gallop. Still, David felt better now that they were actually moving toward Aster again. Even though he knew going south was the only way to catch up to her, it made him twitchy.

  He knew the Sheriff was using him as a living compass, and he finally had to admit that that was magic, too. How could he know where she was? Her father’s curse. Hypnosis couldn’t give him what he now had to accept as supernatural powers. Or one magical power, at least.

  He had tried talking to some of the boys, but they seemed singularly uninterested in anything he had to say, which was really okay with him. Teenage girls could be cruel, but they were usually subtle, which he could appreciate. Boys were cruel right on the surface, and usually physically so. He could tell they didn’t think much of him, and he couldn’t think of anything that might change that.

  So he was surprised when Jobe rode up beside him the next day.

  “So you’re a schoolteacher,” he said.

  “Yes,” David replied. “That I am.”

  “I used to like it when we had school. Before.”

  “Are all of the adults really—ah, cursed?”

  “Every one,” he said. “’Cept you and the Sheriff. Now the Sheriff is a special case. But that don’t explain you.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” David corrected. “But I’m not from here.”

  “From another Kingdom, then?”

  “From another world, I think,” he said. “A different place.”

  “From the Ghost Country, you mean.”

  “Well, I’m not a ghost,” David said.

  “But you come from the same place as that girl, Aster.”

  “Yes, I came from there,” David said.

  “How come?”

  “To bring her back to her father,” he said. “Her father sent me.”

  “Is she your girl, then?”

  He almost said yes, and for a moment he didn’t know why. But examining it a little better, he knew.

  “Where I’m from,” he said, “it’s not appropriate for a man my age to be involved with a girl her age.”

  “She’s what, sixteen, seventeen?”

  “About that, yes.”

  “I don’t get it, then.”

  “Well, it’s just the case,” he said.

  “But you’re a man,” Jobe said. “That ain’t gonna stop you, is it?”

  David laughed uncomfortably, but didn’t actually answer.

  “Yeah,” Jobe said, “you sweet on her. You got that look in your eye. But you know as well as I do that there never was a woman that Hell didn’t make. I keep back from ‘em myself. Oh, I take what the Bible says, and all—I’m a man—but I don’t get the feeling for them. That’s just trouble, getting attached, ain’t it?”

  David was trying to think of something to say, but then Jobe slapped him on the arm.

  “You whipped, son,” he said. “And that means you doomed.”

  Laughing, he rode off ahead.

  After that, the boys called him Whipped.

  The next day they came to a village. It was about the same size as the last. They rode in about midday. A few chickens scattered in the streets as they arrived, but of human beings, David didn’t see a sign.

  The sheriff gave a loud blow on his horn, and then followed it with his own raised voice.

  “I am Sheriff of the Marches. If any here harbors what is mine, I aim to collect.”

  After nearly a minute of silence a voice hollered from one of the unpaned windows.

  “We ain’t got nothing of yours, Sheriff.”

  “Come out and swear it to me.”

  After another pregnant pause a door cracked open, and thin girl with black curly hair and a complexion almost as dark stepped out.

  “My name is Hannah Culpepper,” she said. “And I testify there ain’t no one here that you’re looking for.”

  David already knew that. Aster wasn’t here, hadn’t been here. He told the Sheriff so.

  The man put his blue-eyed gaze on David. For a moment he felt fear for his life, but then the Sheriff shrugged and kept riding through town. David felt a sense of relief without knowing why.

  But the Sheriff’s horse had only walked a few yards before Jobe spoke up.

  “Sheriff, Sir,” he said. “We’re low on provisions. Lost the most of them back at the river, and I reckon we’ve got a ways to go.”

  The Sheriff nodded.

  “Well,” he said, “find what you can.”

  He started on again, and David’s horse started after. David tugged at the reins, but the animal—as usual—ignored him.

  “You heard him, girl,” Jobe yelled at Hannah. “Load us up some provisions, quick.”

  David felt a sudden sink in his belly. Back in the town near where the boys lived, he’d thought there was going to be a fight. But there had been other adults, and Jobe and his rowdies were related to most of them.

  Here, though . . .

  “The Sheriff ain’t got no right nor call to requisition of’en us,” she announced.

  “Don’t he?” Jobe said.

  “I know the law. You do too. We have to give up a fugitive. That’s where it ends. Our crops been bad, and we got nothing to spare.”

  “Yeah?” Jobe said. He dismounted and walked up the girl.

  “Listen, girl, you do what I say, and you do it quick.”

  For answer, Hannah lifted her chin in defiance.

  Jobe punched her square. David heard the sound of her jaw snapping. He saw teeth spit out a moment later as the girl went to her knees.

  A gunshot rang out, and wood splintered on the boards of the house, about a foot from Jobe.

  Turning, David saw a billow of smoke from another window.

  Jobe drew out his pistol.

  “They tried to murder me, boys,” he said. “Let ‘em have Hell.” “No!” David screamed, and tried to turn his horse, but the Sheriff put a hard hand upon his reins.

  “Keep riding,” he said. “I won’t have you killed by a stray bullet.”

  “You can’t let them do this!” He said.

  “This is none of my concern,” said the Sheriff.

  David looked back, despairing as the figures became more remote and consequently more unreal. It looked like everyone was shooting now, and gray smoke billowed from several buildings.

  As it turned out, David got to watch the whole town burn, because the Sheriff settled in on the next ridge to wait for his militia. They turned up hours later, their horses groaning with loot.

  And girls. They had tied them all on one long string of rope. Some couldn’t keep pace and were essentially dragged.

  “We didn’t lose a man,” Jobe bragged, when they reached the hilltop. He winked at David. “I know the Sheriff wouldn’t let you fight, but there’s plenty to go around.”

  “You need to let those girls go,” David said. “You can’t do this.”

  “He’s right,” the Sheriff said. “They’ll slow us down too much. Anything that’s not food, drink, or ammunition stays here.”

  “Sure,” Jobe said. “But we can keep them ‘til morning, right?”

  To that, the Sheriff merely shrugged and walked away.

  “Jobe,” David said. “Think about your own sisters. Your cousins.”

  “That’s the brilliant thing, Whipped,” Jobe said. “Ain’t no one here I’m any kin to. Now, are you in or not?”

  There was something different about Jobe, an odd cast to his skin, a metallic glint in his eye, a musky scent that David didn’t recognize. And he knew there was no talking the boy out of this.

 
David surveyed the captives.

  “Sure,” he said, finally. “I’ll take that one.”

  “Hannah?” Jobe said. “I was kind of looking forward to having her myself. But she’s half rurnt, with that busted face. Go on, you get her. Do you want some whisky?”

  It was tempting. Really tempting after what he had seen today.

  “No,” he said, “I had better not.”

  He took Hannah far from the rest, on a quiet hillside overlooking a lake. The sun was melting against the horizon. She studied him with eyes full of suffering and fear, but through all of that he could see the light in her. It wasn’t as bright as Aster’s, but it was lovely nonetheless.

  “Have a seat,” he said. “Let me have a look at that mouth.”

  “You don’t have no call to hurt me,” she said.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” he said.

  “No call at all.”

  He brought up a damp rag. “I’m just going to clean you up a little.”

  “Are you gonna kill me?” she asked. “I just want to know.”

  “No, Hannah,” he said. “I’m not like them.”

  “You ain’t?” she said. “What’s that, then?”

  She pointed at him, to show what she meant, but he already knew.

  “That’s . . . I don’t know,” he said. “It’s adrenaline, I guess. It’s not what you think. It’s not my fault.”

  “You just like them,” she said. “You just don’t know it yet.”

  He put his head down, unable to meet the fierceness and the terror mingled in her eyes.

  “I’m not,” he said, feeling miserable.

  “You ain’t crossed the line yet,” she said. “And I pray you don’t cross it with me.”

  “I won’t,” he said. “I won’t.”

  Hung over as they were, the Sheriff managed to get the boys up at sunrise. David watched the girls straggle back toward town, wondering what they were going back to. Had all of the boys in the town been killed? Would they starve when winter came?

  It wasn’t the Sheriff’s business. Maybe it shouldn’t be his, either. After all, there wasn’t anything he could do to help them. That being the case, anything he felt about them was wasted emotion.