Come to Dust

by Bracken MacLeod

  24

  Sophie tagged along beside him for only the first block before starting in with her pleas to be carried again. She stepped out in front of him arms raised, almost causing the both of them to tumble onto the pavement. Despite the heat and his nerves, he picked her up so they could move faster. Mitch was as pleased to cuddle with the girl as she seemed to be clinging to him. Her arms and legs wrapped tightly around his body. If he let go of her, he felt confident she’d stay right where she was, clinging, nuzzled against his chest where her infrequent breaths cooled him. He started out taking the same back alleys and side streets to get home, but couldn’t shake the feeling they were being followed. The man in the library was a coward—he could tell. Incarceration had given him an almost failsafe threat detector. Face to face, that guy was as dangerous as a Tibetan monk at prayer time. What he also knew, though, was that guys like that were the type to hide behind a wall with a section of pipe, or around the block in his car, waiting for the anonymous hit and run that’d lead the evening news. Mitch returned to the main road and detoured toward Mount Grove Cemetery, a sprawling necropolis in the middle of the city where no one would be able to ambush him, or run them over and get away. He also needed the walk to clear his head. It didn’t help that when Mitch felt stress, confined spaces amplified the feeling and distilled his worst fears into physical manifestations like shortness of breath and headaches. He figured if the other MBTA riders weren’t upset enough by the dead girl in his arms, his shaking and heavy breathing would put them over the top. “If we can just stay out of sight until I figure out what it was that made you better that first time, Sophie, we’ll be fine.” He said it more to reassure himself that things would eventually get better, because they had to. He wouldn’t allow himself to contemplate the opposite outcome, even though the purple black veins in her arms and legs were getting worse and she smelled faintly of something he refused to acknowledge.

  He loved to come and sit in the quiet of the landscaped garden and meditate under the open sky—no walls, no bars. There was peace and solitude and an unspoken agreement among all visitors not to disturb each other. People in the city outside the necropolis minded their business too, but it wasn’t peaceful. They talked loudly into cell phones and shouted out their car windows at other drivers. They catcalled women passing by, begged for change, bitched about people who wouldn’t clear the subway car door fast enough, and lingered in doorways as if no one else needed in or out since they had found themselves in a place worthy of a pause. In the necropolis, people did none of these things. They whispered, and walked quietly. They set up cameras on tripods and waited patiently to get pictures of the hawks and owls making their nests in the larches and oaks. They strolled in the narrow lanes and sat at the edges of the ponds looking out over the water. Some even came to talk to the dead. And all of them gave plenty of room to each other.

  Sometimes, he’d climb the winding staircase up the sixty-foot Adams Tower in the center of the cemetery and sit atop the landing behind the parapet wall staring into the vast expanse toward Kingsport Bay. There were no joggers, bicyclists, or pets allowed in the park; it was the only green space in the city where someone could truly amble without having to dodge people exercising or indulging their animals. It was as peaceful a place as he’d ever known on Earth and if he could have spent every moment of the day there, he would. Though he hadn’t been back since Sophie died.

  They passed under the Egyptian revival gatehouse entrance. Thick columns rose up beneath the gap in the monolithic stone arch, at the top of which was engraved, “THE DEAD SHALL BE RAISED.”

  This isn’t what they meant.

  He toyed with the idea of walking in and finding a place to sit down, perhaps by the Ward Dell, where he could sit and watch Sophie chase frogs in the algae-covered pond. She likely wouldn’t chase anything though, instead choosing to cling and cuddle. He didn’t mind as long as they could rest for a while and he could convince himself that no one was after them, lurking, looking to do either of them harm.

  They continued along the main road until finding the narrow garden path that led off toward the dell. At a hundred and seventy acres, most visitors needed a map to find their way around to the various landmarks. Not Mitch; he’d committed every square foot of the cemetery to memory. He knew where Richard Upton Pickman and Randolph Carter were buried. He knew right where he was going. On the way, he passed a woman kneeling near a grave and tried to give her a wider berth, respecting that she wasn’t there to bird watch or meditate. She looked up from the grave in front of her and stared as he wandered away. He glanced back a time or two to see if she was still watching. She sat there, mouth open, eyes fixed on him, and the anxiety he’d begun to shed under the gates came flooding back.

  “You!” she called out. “Excuse me!” He hurried his step a little to get over the next rise and out of sight. He and Sophie weren’t an attraction; he didn’t want to be on display. He just wanted to have a quiet minute beside the pond listening to the frogs instead of the constant hum of traffic rumbling through the city like a cosmic drone. The narrow concrete path back to the Ward Dell was a cul-de-sac bordered on three sides by steep hillsides, and he didn’t want to be cornered there. Mitch changed direction and started up a walkway away from his destination. “Stop, please!” he heard her call out. Sophie lifted her head from his shoulder and looked at the woman. Mitch continued apace. “Why do you get her back?” he heard her shout. He slowed and stopped. Turning to look, he saw the woman standing in the grass at the end of a family plot, the headstone in front of her, bright and unstained by the elements. It wasn’t hard to find the markers for children. Their headstones were topped with lambs or sleeping cherubs and were as tiny as their little bodies had been. They littered the old cemetery, reminders of a time when raising children to adulthood was not the proposition it was today. Still, he’d learned surviving childhood was never guaranteed. Death was no stranger to any family. But being familiar wasn’t the same as being welcome.

  He glanced down at another small marker to his left adorned with a cherub reclining on the front. Trevor. Son of Calvin and Annabel. May 10, 1934 — November 2, 1935. The grass surrounding it was green and a little long. No toys or flowers had been left nearby. Trevor’s parents were likely in the ground near him. His siblings, if he had any, resting also, or soon to join him. How many generations would grief last for someone who never got to develop into a person of unique character and accomplishment? He figured a single one, if that. Trevor died, and the world moved on without him, leaving only this piece of stone to mark his brief existence. Nothing else lasting in the world was altered by either his birth or death.

  He walked slowly back toward the woman. All she wanted was to talk, he hoped. She looked at him with red, wet eyes. “What did you say?” he asked.

  “Why do you get her back?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, holding Sophie a little tighter. “Did you... lose a...” He trailed off, not knowing how to ask the question. The woman wiped her tears away and looked down at the stone in front of her. Mitch read the inscription.

  CHERIE MARIE WRIGHT

  MAY 15, 2015 - JULY 29, 2017

  BELOVED DAUGHTER

  He shuddered to think at what a child, months in the earth, would look like if she were to return. He held Sophie tighter and quietly thanked whatever merciful force had brought her back for not doing the same to this woman. “I’m so sorry,” he said, not knowing how else to express the creeping sense of guilt that seemed a tincture of every moment now.

  She stood and reached out with an unsteady hand, he took another step out of range of her caress, not wanting her to touch Sophie, not wanting Sophie to touch her. The woman’s face fell and her eyes welled up with tears. “Will you help me?” she asked.

  “Help you, how?”

  “Help me get her out.”

  Mitch looked at the headstone and saw that she had been clawing at the ground in front of it, long tears in the grass where he
r fingers had pulled at the earth. What he first thought was the smell of the necropolis was actually the woman. She stank of dirt and grass and sweat. Her fingers were brown and mud caked under her ragged nails.

  “No one will help me. They say she’s not coming back, but I know she’s down there. I heard her scratching the day they covered her up, but no one will listen to me. You understand, though. You know. And you can help me. You look strong. I’ll buy a shovel—two of them—and we’ll come back and get her.”

  He felt breathless. The thought of a living child trapped down there made his stomach cramp and his vision narrowed. He felt the stirrings of the kind of instinctive reaction that came when he saw someone walk across the exercise yard or the cafeteria that way. A con would get that look of vicious resignation and he’d walk like a thing, not a man. And then the world would go wild and blood would fly and the screws would come to lock everyone down and someone would go to the infirmary, or worse, to their family. “I can’t,” he whispered. He took a breath and repeated himself, a little louder. “I just can’t.”

  “What’s so special about her?”

  “What? I—”

  “My Cherie was special too!”

  All his desire to sit under the sky on a still day fled. He had no idea how to help this woman. He didn’t know how to help Sophie or himself, and he couldn’t be responsible for this woman and her daughter too. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  She lurched forward and slapped him. He staggered back, tripping over another low stone. “No, you’re not. You’re not sorry. You have her and my daughter is down there. Why do you get her back? Tell me, god damn it!”

  He backed away, feeling in shock. His cheek where she’d slapped him was stinging and hot to the touch. His fingertips came away dirty from where she’d left part of her child’s grave on his face. “I don’t know what to say.” The woman took another step after him with her hand raised. No one put their hands on him. No one touched him unless he wanted to be touched. Not anymore. This woman, though, didn’t care who he was or what he’d been through. Maybe she’d earned the right to be upset with him and resentful of his fortune, so he allowed her a free shot. But now her account was square. He gave her a hard stare and her expression changed.

  “Give her to me!”

  “What!”

  “You can’t take care of her like a mother can. Give her to me and I’ll love her. A girl needs a mother.”

  She was beyond reason, and he was only making things worse trying to talk to her. It was past time to go. He turned and felt the flat slap of her hand on his back between his shoulder blades. It stung and the urge to shove her away made him hesitate. He forced himself to take another step toward home.

  “I’m so sorry,” the woman said. She sobbed and let out a low keening sound. “Please don’t go! Don’t leave me here.”

  He didn’t know her story, how her daughter died or why she was here alone. He didn’t know how long it’d taken her to break and become so desperate she was going to dig a corpse out of the grave with her bare hands. All he knew was that he needed to be back in the house with the curtains drawn. He and Sophie just had to hunker down and wait this out. Once people get their heads wrapped around it… His train of thought was broken by Sophie lurching over his shoulder. She hadn’t moved so suddenly or forcefully since she’d returned. She practically launched over his shoulder... at her. He heard the woman gasp and the sound of her falling to her knees again. He spun around to see her holding a gray-skinned hand, wrinkled and veiny. New liver spots grew in front of his eyes as the ashen color crept up her flesh. She tried to scream but only a thin strangled sob came out of her mouth. Reaching out, he tried to apologize. She clambered away from him—from Sophie—scrabbling backwards across the grave, clutching her withering arm and wailing into the light of the uncaring clear sky above.

  He looked at Sophie. Her skin was a little less sallow. Her eyes, brighter. His panicked mind reeled with rationalization. I’m looking at her in the sun is why she looks better. This is how she looks! She didn’t just take something from that woman.

  He knew that wasn’t true. He knew it. And he knew more than that, but wasn’t ready to give words to the idea yet. “What did you do?” he asked. She didn’t reply. Instead, she nestled her head back into his neck and held on as before, her breath a little warmer than it had been a moment ago.

  He hurried out of the cemetery toward home. The necropolis, his refuge no longer.

  No one was welcome anymore in the city of the dead.

  25

  Mitch jammed a chair under the doorknob. The combination of it and the slide chain weren’t going to keep anyone truly motivated out of their apartment, but at least it kept the door from blowing open in the growing breeze. Mitch’s nerves were shot and the noise it made when it banged at the end of the length of chain was like a hammer fall every time. He was feeling jangly and getting worse. It was one thing to suffer dark stares and judgments whispered under breath on the bus, it was another entirely to be rejected by a friend and threatened by strangers. Mitch had sprinted home from the cemetery clutching Sophie to his chest without concern for drawing the attention of anyone in the neighborhood. He wanted behind a closed door. Drawing the wrong attention, or even any attention for a prolonged moment, could lead to decisions and actions that had to be opposed, countered, and couldn’t be undone. He could take care of himself, but he didn’t want that kind of life for Sophie. The life you want and the life you have rarely intersect at the time you need them to, and in his experience, the gulf between them was full of painful longing no matter how narrow.

  He peeked through the curtains at the street outside. It was as empty as it ever got, which was to say that traffic moved on, and the people on the sidewalk kept their eyes trained on cell phones or the ground. Still, he couldn’t help feeling that someone had followed him home. That there was an ill-intended mass of angry people converging on them. He let the curtain fall back into place and sat heavily on the floor. Sophie looked at him with a kind of understanding he didn’t want her to possess. Not yet. Her tiny doll’s face was drawn and her eyes always seemed to carry a kind of aged weariness. Her resting expression used to be one of open wonder. Now, it belied the kind of emotion he’d expect to only see from a war widow—from someone who’d survived the worst existence could throw at them. Like the woman in the necropolis.

  The room grew dimmer as a billowy white cloud moved in front of the sun outside. It suited Mitch. Darker felt more hidden. It felt safer. He drew Sophie nearer and asked, “Why did you do that to that woman back there?”

  She looked at him with slightly bluer eyes, and whispered, “She hit you, Yunka.”

  “You can’t do that to people, sweetheart. Even if they hit, okay?”

  The girl’s brow furrowed. “She was being mean.”

  “No. She was…” He didn’t know how to explain it. Not to a child; not at all. The woman’s derangement was too close to Mitch’s own recent experience. How do you tell a child what it’s like to go insane from grief? “She was sad, Honey. She used to have a little girl like you and she died. Like you. It made her sad,” he repeated. “And sometimes, that makes people do things they wouldn’t otherwise do. Like yell and hit.”

  “But she was mean to you.” Her little brow furrowed as she tried to process what he was telling her.

  “It’s okay. I can take it. Just promise me you’ll never do that again, all right?” She shook her head. “Please, Soph. Promise me.”

  She frowned and looked at the floor, suddenly very much a child again. “I promise.”

  I can take it. I think I can, anyway.

  Sophie crawled into his lap and he held her close, caressing her hair. It was dry, and a little matted. He tried to gently tease out the tangles with his fingers, trying not to pull or tug at her hair. When he did, she didn’t complain like she had when... before. She patiently let him disentangle the knot and continue preening her.

  His stomach growled
, and while he was aware there was money on the EBT card, he was resolved to the idea he’d have to go without food for another day, at least. He couldn’t face going outside again, and the grocery store was infinitely more daunting than the library. During daylight hours it was almost certainly going to result in a confrontation like he’d already fled twice today. Someone would get it in their head that Sophie’s mere presence would contaminate everything, and that guardian of integrity would step up to offer a line of defense between the living and the dead. Maybe they’d never even make it inside. If he was going to go, he either had to go alone or when the chances of running into anyone else were at their lowest. The Star Market on Langan Ave. was open twenty-four hours. It was never empty, but in the past he’d been there after midnight, and it was quiet then. He could try to sneak Sophie in at maybe two or three in the morning when the employees were tired out and there were fewest customers. After the bars were closed, but before the dawn rush. Not tonight, though. They’d try tomorrow, or maybe the next day, if his hunger could hold out. His stomach rumbled again. Sophie said, “Shh,” and pushed a finger into it playfully. It’d have to be tomorrow. He’d have to find a way. She looked better now than she did this morning. Maybe he’d have more luck with the makeup if he tried again.

  “Hon?” he said. She looked up at him from his lap with a furrowed brow. “When you were... gone. Do you remember anything about it?” She nodded. He felt a lump grow in his throat. The kind of fearful anticipation that comes in the silent moment right before disaster. That space between seeing the ball of fire, and hearing the explosion. “What was it like?”