by Tahereh Mafi
The ghosts did not respond. They merely blinked.
“Tell them!” she cried. “Do you understand? You have to hurry—”
But then, and perhaps most disturbing of all: Her ghosts very abruptly disappeared.
So soon?
Had her magic already been broken? Where would the ghosts go? What would happen to them now?
Laylee was devastated. Sadness blew through her like a sudden gust of wind as she realized, with a final, inward collapse, that she’d no moves left to make. She felt dizzy with resignation, the weight of the day crashing into her so swiftly she could hardly stand.
The next hour was a blur.
Laylee was carted down several hallways by coarse, unsympathetic hands, navigating a serpentine path so complicated it practically guaranteed that even if she broke free, she’d never find her way out. Eventually she was shoved in a holding cell in a back room of the courthouse and left there without a word.
Her mind was whirring. She was going to jail. Jail. For six months. No magic. Her breathing was coming in fast and hard in sharp, harsh exhales that began to terrify her. She couldn’t catch her breath. She felt the room spin around her. Stumbling to her feet, she ran, without thinking, to the trash can in the corner and heaved the contents of her breakfast into the basket. Her hands were shaking; her bones felt brittle. Her skin was cold and clammy and she made her way slowly to the single, thin bed shoved to one side of the room and somehow convinced her legs to bend as she sat there, waiting for life to crush what was left of her spirit.
It was then that she realized, with the full force of reality behind her, that she’d never expected things to go so badly today. She’d secretly, quietly—desperately—hoped that after all she’d been through, fate would finally lend a hand. She thought she’d finally have a chance at happiness.
She’d dared to dream of a happily ever after.
Instead, she’d been given shackles.
The deputies had returned, metal cuffs clanging in their hands. The two officers chained her wrists and ankles together so tightly the metal cut into her skin, drawing blood, and when she gasped at the pain, she was met only with dark, dirty looks that told her to be quiet.
Laylee fought back a flood of tears with every bit of dignity she had left.
She stood tall as she was forced out of her cell and down a dark corridor, flanked on either side by officers holding on to her far more tightly than was necessary. She held her head high, even as they pushed open doors to the outside, where a mob of journalists and nosy onlookers were waiting like vultures, ready to prey on the injured. Laylee narrowed her eyes as she swallowed back the lump in her throat and only faltered when she saw her friends standing off to the side, holding on to one another for support. The officers yanked Laylee forward through the crowd, shoving reporters out of the way—
“Ms. Fenjoon, will you try to appeal your case?”
“Ms. Fenjoon—Ms. Fenjoon—what do you think your father would say if he were still alive?”
“Ms. Fenjoon—how are you feeling right now?” one lady shouted as she shoved a recorder in Laylee’s face. “Do you feel the judgment was fair?”
—and Laylee latched on to the faces of her friends, unblinking, unwilling to break eye contact, as she felt her heart dismantle in her chest.
“Thank you,” she whispered, the tears falling fast now. “For everything.”
And then it was over. She was shoved into the back of a large, windowless steel carriage, and sat quietly in the corner as the roar of the crowd faded away. This was her life now. And she would learn to accept it.
That is—she would’ve learned to accept it, if the transport she’d been traveling in hadn’t been knocked over at precisely that moment. Laylee was flung suddenly to one side, hitting her head hard against the metal. A painful ringing exploded in her ears, and she winced against the sensation as lights flared behind her eyelids.
What was happening?
She was on her knees now, her hands and legs two useless clumps as she struggled to get back on her feet. Then, just as the ringing began to subside, a sudden, violent roar tore open the silence, and a single hand punched a hole through the wall. Laylee screamed. A second hand punched a second hole. And then the two hands ripped open the wall of the carriage as if it were made of paper.
Laylee scuttled further into the darkness of the overturned carriage, not knowing what was happening to her. Was someone here to help her or hurt her? And who on earth could rip through reinforced sheets of metal?
It was only when she heard the sound of the slow, happy voice that Laylee finally understood: The horrors of the day had, happily, only just begun.
“Laylee?” said the gummy, rolling voice. “Laylee joonam—”
“Baba?” she said softly. “Is that you?”
“Yes, azizam,” said her father’s corpse. “Your maman and I are here to help.”
Reader, they had risen from the dead.
FINALLY, A BIT OF GOOD NEWS
Mordeshoors did not have the power to raise the dead—this was not a magic entrusted to the living. No, only the dead could ask their fellow dead to wake, and today it was at Laylee’s behest that her six spirits had gone and raised an army. As soon as the request left Laylee’s lips, they’d been moved to action immediately, making haste to the castle they knew instinctively to be their new home. These ghosts, you will remember, had made their mordeshoor a promise—they’d vowed to stand by her, no matter the outcome of her trial—and now, having received a direct call to action, they intended to follow through on that promise. There were many tens of thousands of dead bodies planted in Laylee’s backyard, and when the ghosts explained to the quietly snoozing earth that Laylee—their resident (and favorite) mordeshoor—had asked for their help, the corpses were more than happy to interrupt their final rest for a quick adventure.
I cannot emphasize this enough: Mordeshoor magic took great care with the dead.
The rituals Laylee performed for the body carried great benefits underground; so much so that even in their coffins, the bodies were cocooned by a softness they could not see. Dead limbs were carefully bandaged in magical protections that would make their journey through the earth more comfortable. It was true that once the spirit had separated from the body it would move on to the Otherwhere, yes, but there was still an echo—a residue of the spirit seared inside the flesh—and this echo would continue to feel things, even after death. Laylee’s work was so sensitive to this understanding that even for this remnant spirit she would perform a great kindness, embalming the body in a cool, invisible liquid that made the underground passage more tolerable. It was all a gift, yes, yes, a comfort. But Laylee had not performed this magic with any thought of what it would do to the body should it decide to reanimate. She’d never once considered what it would look like to see such a body emerge from the ground.
Perhaps she should have.
Baba had ripped open Laylee’s shackles quite easily, tossing the manacles into the open snow, and helped his daughter climb out of the overturned carriage. And as she stepped into the cold, winnowing winter light, she could see the mass of dead faces staring out at her, tens of thousands of them, each body looking like it’d been dipped in many translucent layers of wax. The effect was such that their figures looked deeply distorted; it was like seeing a person through warped glass, the edges soft where they shouldn’t be, eyes clouded, hair matted, noses indistinguishable from cheeks. The sun was beginning its descent and the light shattered across the horizon, errant strokes of light spearing these milky bodies and illuminating further the oddities that distinguished them from their former selves. There was a thick webbing between their fingers and elbows, their teeth had melted into their lips, their knees bent with a strange, metallic clicking sound, and their fingers were without fingernails, having been pulled by the mordeshoor herself.
Even so,
Laylee couldn’t hide a shudder.
She said nothing for a full minute, stunned and horrified and somehow—deeply, deeply moved. She didn’t know what she felt more: pride or terror, and in the end, the only thing she could think to say was this:
“Friends,” she said softly. “Thank you so much for coming.”
I think it will not surprise you to hear that these excitable corpses soon stormed the city. They stomped through the beautiful, historical center of Whichwood en masse, thousands upon thousands of them marching fearlessly across the cerulean streets of town with one goal:
To leave an impression.
Whichwood had ceased believing in its mordeshoors. Their lack of faith in this tradition had failed them and their town and, in the process, had turned them against an innocent young girl and her father, painting them both with scarlet letters of injustice. Laylee had been starving and hardly surviving for years; she was underpaid, desperately overworked, and treated like a pariah. No one respected her. Strangers dumped their dead on Laylee’s doorstep and disappeared, sometimes leaving a token of payment, sometimes leaving nothing at all. She wore ancient rags and slept in the bitter cold, too poor to afford even enough firewood, and still our young protagonist devoted herself to her job—and to the many dead she had loved.
Today, dear reader, they would stand up for her. (Quite, ahem, literally.)
The magic that embalmed the flesh of the dead had made them inhumanly strong—it was this same strength that enabled them to dig their way out of the ground—and it made them formidable opponents. The superstitious Whichwoodians were too terrified to stand against the walking corpses as they tore through town, ripping poles out of the ground and knocking carriages into the sea. The six ghosts were squealing with delight as they flew overhead—but of course the living could not see these spirits, so the terrified expressions of civilians were focused only on the walking wax figures. Laylee, followed closely by Maman and Baba, led the group of them, while Roksana (you remember Roksana, do you not?) walked alongside our mordeshoor, one inhuman hand laid protectively on her shoulder.
Laylee wondered in every moment where her friends might’ve gone—and whether they were still here—but there was never a chance to stop and find them. Laylee was now in charge of an army, you see, and they required quite a lot of guidance. Our mordeshoor was able to manage things in a general way, but there were so many thousands of corpses following her that it was hard to keep track of those among them that ripped landmarks, streetlamps, food carts, and passenger sleighs from the ground only to fling them into the distance. Laylee didn’t really want violence or mayhem—she wanted only her freedom. Was it possible, she wondered, to have the latter without the former?
Laylee didn’t know. After all, she’d never been in this position before. And though her parents stood right in front of her—ripe for the asking—she knew that these figures before her were only evaporated versions of the real thing. These were not people who were fighting for her; they were memories of people wearing milky flesh. And very soon, they had seized the city.
Laylee was ready to leave her mark.
At her direction, a couple thousand corpses had split from the group and made it their mission to collect the many magistrates and Town Elders from their homes and hiding places. Now they were dragging the screaming, writhing bodies of prominent figures into the center square, where the rest of the waxy horde had gathered. It was beyond insanity—it was anarchy.
It was then that Roksana leaned in to her mordeshoor and said, “What would you like us to do to them?”
And Laylee merely smiled.
Screams pierced the silence in steady contractions of pain.
The sun had scrambled behind a mountain and the moon peeked out only occasionally from behind a cloud. Birds had hidden in the trees; horses had galloped away—even the crickets knew better than to make a sound tonight. The corpses had been playing with the Town Elders like cats would toy with prey, and Laylee, who was still haunted by images of Baba being murdered before her eyes, would be lying if she said she wasn’t enjoying the show. She watched as the dead tossed her town’s important men and women into the sky only to catch them again and quickly fling them in the sea. Someone would then fetch their sopping bodies out of the water and sit them in the snow where icicles formed immediately across their skin and then, once they’d nearly frozen, another corpse would come along and punt the shaking figures into a tree, where they’d land with a hard thump, and eventually slide roughly down the tall trunk. They’d soon amassed a rather large heap of hurting bodies.
Somewhere in her heart, Laylee knew she shouldn’t be dragging things out like this, but she felt suddenly fueled by a righteous anger that demanded retribution against her townspeople. How deeply they’d hurt her. How deeply they’d cut into her heart. They’d spit in her face at every opportunity, hissing as she passed, dismissing her from schools and shops. She was loathed for invented reasons, mistreated for their own profit; she starved and no one cared—and the only parent she had left, they’d killed.
How could she ever forgive them?
At Laylee’s command, the entire city—nearly all eighty thousand people—had been dragged out of their homes and forced to bear witness to the activities of the evening. The corpses, who had no interest in anything but serving their mordeshoor, would never question her methods. They would never tell her to show mercy to the people who’d hurt her. And had Laylee no one else upon whom to rely, she might have lost herself to the madness. A sudden influx of power, violent anger, crushing heartbreak, and mass chaos—
Well.
I fear that, with no one else to question her, Laylee might’ve gone too far.
But it was then that her friends came rushing through the crowd.
Alice and Oliver and Benyamin were breathless and exhausted by the effort of finding her, but they were so thrilled to have been reunited with the mordeshoor that they toppled into one another, pulling Laylee into their arms as they fell. Laylee leaned back to look her friends in the eyes, blinking several times. Her movements were stunned and slow, as if she’d been startled out of a trance.
Madarjoon, Benyamin quickly explained, was safely out of the way of the stampede, but the three of them had been searching for Laylee for hours. They’d only, finally, managed to find her because of Haftpa, who’d been trying to convince the circling ghosts to give up her exact location.
“Well, thank goodness for Haftpa,” Laylee said. “I’m so glad you’re alright.”
“So what are we going to do to stop this?” said Oliver quickly. “I was thinking we—”
“Stop this?” Laylee said, confused. “What do you mean? Stop what?”
All three children looked stunned—and then, scared. For a moment, no one said anything.
“You have to call off the corpses,” Benyamin finally said. His eyes were pulled together in concern. “You can’t let them keep hurting these people.”
“Hurting them?” Laylee said softly, turning to look out on the crowd. She almost laughed. “What they’re experiencing now? This hurt? This is nothing compared to what they’ve put me through.”
“But, Laylee—”
“No,” Laylee said angrily. “You don’t understand. You don’t know. You can’t know.” She swallowed, hard, her voice catching as she spoke. “This pain,” she said, pressing one hand against her chest. “You don’t know, you don’t know.” She was nearly crying as she said, “I’ve lived with their cruelty for so long—”
It was Alice who suddenly stepped forward and said, “You’re right. You’re absolutely right.”
Laylee stopped to stare at her, surprised.
“But they’re not worth your time,” said Alice. “They’re not worth what this will do to you. And I can see that this”—she gestured to the madness—“this is hurting you. You might get your revenge today, but you’ll still wake up unhappy
tomorrow. There’s no relief in this,” she said, shaking her head. “Only more suffering. Your suffering.”
And Laylee hesitated, turning away as a remembered pain creased her forehead.
“They don’t deserve you,” Alice said softly, stepping forward to take Laylee’s hands in her own. “And you don’t need these worthless people to tell you what you’re worth.”
Laylee looked up, tears falling silently down her cheeks.
“You have us,” said Alice. “And we already know you’re priceless.”
Everything else was fairly easy after that.
Laylee knew she had to call off the corpses. She knew she would ask them to stand down. There was only one problem:
“How will I get their attention all at once?” she said. “There are so many of them—”
Benyamin cleared his throat. “Well,” he said, smiling. “Haftpa and his friends can build you a web.”
Everyone stared at him.
“In the sky, obviously,” Benyamin clarified. “They could weave it between two tall trees, and it’ll be big enough, sticky enough, and strong enough to hold you. From up there, you’ll be plenty visible.”
“Alright,” said Laylee slowly. “But how do I get up there?”
“Easy,” said Oliver. “We’ll get one of the corpses to toss you up.”
It took a while to build the complicated contraption, but eventually Laylee would find herself in the very unique position of being caught in an inhumanly large spiderweb, staring out over nearly two hundred thousand people, both dead and alive. It was only after the bizarreness of the moment wore off that she realized it was not enough for her to simply be strung from the sky. No one was noticing her in this darkness—they were all too preoccupied with the cruel Olympics she and her corpses had cultivated.
