Chapter 1
Ignatius Wick rose every morning at five o’clock. The alarm rang and he would unbed himself and kneel on the hard wood floor in the middle of the room and pray for half an hour. Then he went to the bathroom to wash his face and dress in clothes neatly laid out the night before on top of the clothes hamper. He wore simple clothes, plain gray or black slacks and a white shirt, black socks and shoes and a solid colored tie, no pattern, usually just black or gray, red or white on Sunday. Then he sat at his desk and read from the Bible. He read a chapter a day, stopping to pray and meditate on favorite verses, underlining important words, looking up cross-references and scribbling notes in the margin in a cramped hand. He read the Bible starting at Genesis and working his way through one chapter a day till he came to the end of the last chapter of Revelation, and then he would start at the beginning again. In his whole life he had read the Bible cover-to-cover twenty times in this way. After scripture study, he broke fast with a simple meal, toast and jam and orange juice, and on the Sabbath fried eggs, sausage, a stewed tomato and a moderate cup of coffee in addition to the toast and juice. He always gave thanks before he ate. And after breakfast, he donned a gray trench coat and a fedora, put his Bible into his briefcase, and took the bus downtown. This was his routine and had been his routine every day for longer than the thirty-two years he worked for the state department of revenue and the following sixteen years since his retirement.
Downtown he went to the public library, where he usually spent the morning reading the papers, doing microfiche searches, and scribbling in a notebook he’d pull out of his briefcase. The reference librarians had learned his favorite reading was the obituaries. But anything tinged with death caught his attention. He scoured the papers for violent crime, freak accidents, terminal illness, and went to the microfiche section to search back issues of the papers, looking for patterns. He became an expert on the public record of lives snuffed out untimely. He read books and periodicals on the technical aspects of different kinds of death. Then in the afternoon he would take the bus to one of several city cemeteries, where we would amble among the plots and study the markers. The cemetery custodians knew to expect him right after a recent burial.
Ignatius had made a series of decisions in his life, giving himself to an unwonted call. That he accepted the Call freely, of his own choice, there was no question in his mind. He knew it was his own choice, if only because of the effort of will it required, if only because of what it had cost him, if only because of the way his eighty years of life had been warped to it.
Ignatius was the second youngest of five children. His father Ernest Wick was a man who worked himself thin, who left every day before the crack of dawn for the lumberyard of which he was the foreman, and came back late at night after sunset, who worked six days a week and demanded absolute repose on the seventh. Ignatius never knew much about his father except that he came from the east. His father’s parents had both passed away before he was born. He had two paternal aunts and three uncles who all lived somewhere near Boston, none of whom he had ever met, and all of whom he knew only through somber-looking photographs hanging on the dining room wall.
Ignatius had three older sisters, Helen, Christine, and Margaret, who lived in a world of their own, in a girl club from which he was excluded because he was a boy but also because he was separated from them by several years. The main sort of attention they paid him was merciless teasing. He was closer to his youngest sister Anne. He had been the first to hold her after Father brought her and Mother home from the hospital. He had fussed and whined, he wanted to hold her first. His sister Margaret had pushed him aside and said, “He’s too little to hold her!” but Ignatius’ mother had said, “It’s a family tradition, the youngest always gets to be the first to greet the newborn.” He’d named her “Baby Doll,” because she had been so tiny, because he’d been so amazed how all five of her miniature fingers wrapped around one of his eight-year-old fingers. He helped mother wash and change and dress and feed “Baby Doll.” He held her in his lap and read stories to her and helped his mother put her to sleep. And as the years went on, of all his siblings he stayed closest to her.
But the true center of Ignatius universe was his mother, a seemingly inexhaustible source of hugs and kisses, laughter and kind words, warm food, and bed-time tuckings-in. She was boisterous and bossy and hard-working, and she prided herself on raising children who worked hard too. As soon as they were old enough to walk and carry, they were doing chores. She squelched fights between the kids with scrupulously even punishments, and tantalized them into good behavior with tasty home-made rewards. She liked to read them stories from a big Bible story book for children. Ignatius had never been so happy as a child as curled up against her chest, sitting on her lap while she read to him. His mother worked hard too, like his father, but her work was the home and she performed it in a way overflowing with good nature. Ignatius remembered her always up before dawn, always the last to go to bed after midnight, scrubbing and cleaning and dusting long after they were tucked away and their bedroom lights turned off.
His mother was, like Ignatius, the second youngest of a family with many siblings. Apparently Ignatius’ maternal grandfather had yearned for a boy, but Grandmother gave him girl after girl after girl. They kept trying until the eighth was a boy. “It was a good thing,” Ignatius’ mother used to tell him, “Or I might never have been born, since I didn’t come around till number seven.” Ignatius had warm childhood memories of being sprawled on the kitchen floor drawing pictures, while his aunties sat around the big kitchen table talking or knitting or cutting cookies. He remembered his Auntie Georgina or his Auntie Wilhelmina coming to the rescue when his older sisters made fun of him; or his Auntie Patricia bandaging a scraped knee; or his Auntie Martina telling him to sit up straight at the dinner table; or his Auntie Geraldine and his Auntie Roberta taking him to the state fair the summer his mother started getting sick with the cancer.
In the last months of his mother’s life, Ignatius universe came unglued. He was eleven years old, twelve when his mother died. The aunties took care of his sisters, leaving him with his father. “A boy should be with his father,” the eldest, Auntie Georgina, had said, but he was lonely with Father. Ernest Wick was so drained by the effort of mastering his emotions, trying to put on a good front while his wife was dying, he had no comfort to offer his boy. Ignatius would lie awake at night thinking how his mother was wasting away, his child’s conscience wondering if the family had somehow worn her out. She had worked constantly, never played, he thought, even after she started to get sick. He saw how much harder his father worked now, how work almost consumed him. Ignatius wondered if he should work too, if he should do something so that Father wouldn’t waste away like Mother had. He believed it had been his own lack of commitment to blame when she died.
At his mother’s funeral, in the cemetery, he encountered a stranger wearing a black suit and tie. The man stood just behind him. Ignatius turned once to look up at the strange man’s face, and was struck by how kind he looked. The man smiled back at him and touched Ignatius’ shoulder in a comforting way, almost as if to say he understood what Ignatius was going through, how terrible it was to have lost the one person in the world who mattered most, but something good was going to happen. Ignatius had wanted to talk to the man after the ceremony was over, but when he turned to look again, he was nowhere to be seen. Ignatius asked his sisters and aunties and father, “Did you see that man?” He described him as best he could, but they only said, “What man? I didn’t see any man like that.” Then it dawned on Ignatius he was the only one who had seen him. It was no ordinary man who had touched him but an angel.
Ignatius wanted to see him again, he wanted so desperately to talk to him, but how do you call an angel back? He returned every day to his mother’s grave, knelt on the spot where he had stood at her funeral and prayed fervently, “Please God, let me see his face,” but without success. Finally one day, while Ignatius knelt there praying, he saw one car followed by another and then another, and finally a long black hearse driving down the curving road leading right into the heart of the cemetery. It was a funeral procession. From a distance he saw the cars park, saw people getting out, old women assisted by young men, a priest, pall bearers carrying a casket, he saw them assemble around a grave. He forgot his own worries for a moment and found himself walking through the plots, under the willow trees, toward the gathering. He stopped a stone’s throw away, watching. Shortly after the funeral began he noticed a tall man with white hair dressed all in black, standing in the middle of the crowd of people but standing out somehow, the blackness of his suit just a little too black, the whiteness of his hair just a little too white. It was the angel.
Ignatius’ heart beat faster. He kept his eyes locked on the strange being, waiting for the moment to do something, wondering what he would do when that moment came. Then suddenly he lost sight of him, he wasn’t sure how. He blinked maybe, or looked another way for just a split second, and then he was gone, and a terrible disappointment and frustration welled up in him. He glanced around, up and down the grounds surrounding the funeral party, looking for a man moving rapidly away, but he saw nothing. Then, just as suddenly has he had lost sight of the man, he felt a gentle hand on his shoulder and looked up into the same kind, smiling face he had seen at his mother’s funeral.
“If you are here,” said the man, “It means you’ve heard the Call.”
“What do you mean by the Call?” asked Ignatius.
The man replied, “Most people only take note of the mysteries of life in order to rationalize them away with any of a thousand available explanations and then forget about them. But if you have heard the Call, you can’t do that, not even if you want to. You lie in bed awake at night wrestling with them. Your mind goes back to them again and again no matter how you may occupy yourself, no matter how you may try to forget. And eventually your life becomes a sheer misery if you cannot catch some glimpse of them every day, if you do not seek some way to reconcile yourself to them, though you never can.”
“What should I do?”
“If you have heard the Call, it is hard not to accept it, but it is even harder to accept it. If you say yes to the Call, you must in a real sense die to this world and you must face horrors you never knew to exist. You are free to say no, but if you say yes, I will teach you about the mysteries.”
“Yes! I want to learn!” exclaimed Ignatius.
“You aren’t ready to say yes yet,” said the man, “You don’t know what you are saying yes to. But if you are willing, I will teach you, and perhaps some day you will be ready.”
Ignatius said, “I’m willing!”
“Very well,” the man replied, “My name is Samael, and I will meet you here to instruct you on the last Tuesday of every month. In the meantime, you must immerse your mind in the word of God every day, and you must keep yourself pure of the ways of this world.”
So Ignatius began in the path he had followed ever since, learning on his mother’s grave the way of the Call, discovering mysteries and horrors he had never imagined to exist. But before ever initiating him into a single mystery, Samael had taught Ignatius to build his life on the solid rock of routine, of unbreakable pattern and habit, of scripture study every day until he had read the Bible cover-to-cover enough times to recite each verse by heart before he read it, of daily prayer that stilled the heart and steadied the mind in God, of life lived in daily cycles so repetitive they no longer relied on conscious thought, because, without that ritual and focus, it would have broken Ignatius to do what he had to do, it would have driven him mad or sent him over to the other side, made a rebel or a reprobate of him. Even after years of discipline, there was lively danger to his immortal soul every day he followed the Call.
It was a full nine years and Ignatius had reached the age of twenty-one before Samael finally asked him if he would accept the Call, and with great trepidation that Ignatius finally said “Yes.”
“There is one final test,” Samael told him.
Chapter 2
Samael did not tell Ignatius what the test would be, only that Ignatius had been trained well enough to recognize it when he saw it. Part of Ignatius’ discipline had been to develop an acute sensibility in relation to current events. It was part of his duty to listen to the radio or to read the papers constantly, to watch events and to see what happened, but more, to read between the lines of what was reported, to dig deeper and find out about the events that were seldom or never reported, to see the occult significance of things that most people shrugged off but that, if understood in the proper light, opened doors into the mysteries. So when Ignatius read the headlines in the papers about the kidnapping of Marina Jones’ four poor children, he knew that this was the test Samael referred to, and Marina Jones was the key.
Marina Jones had a husband named Sid and four children named Bessy, Maria, Sid Junior, and Tyler. They lived in an apartment on the north side, close to Marina’s mother Christiane, where she left the kids while she worked at the paper factory. Sid worked in a variety of jobs, and more often than not he didn’t work at all, and sometimes he was around and often he wasn’t. Marina had learned to rely on herself and on her mother, and she realized that if she was going to provide for those kids she’d have to wear her soul out in work. She loved the children desperately, had invested all her dreams for herself in them. She wanted something better for them than what she’d had. She hoped they would succeed in school, get smart and make something of themselves some day. And it broke her heart trying to raise them. There were so many things she had wanted to give them. Shortly before the children were kidnapped, Marina had disappeared, abandoned her family according to the papers.
At first it had felt risky to him asking questions, especially when one neighbor sternly remarked, “I’ve already answered all these questions to the police. Who are you?” He had not lied when he told them he was pursuing a separate investigation and they assumed he was a private investigator, but it felt like lying to him. He worried it was not legal for him to investigate a kidnapping without the permission of the police. But he persisted in talking to neighbors, and eventually learned about the late night rows between Marina and Sid, the shouting, screaming, the sounds of objects being thrown or broken, the crying children, and the terrible bruises and cuts Marina tried unsuccessfully to hide with makeup or scarves or long sleeves. She had been pregnant with a fifth child one neighbor reported, “but what a situation to bring a child into.”
Ignatius found Marina’s mother living in a small, tidy flat on the north side. He knocked at her door and when she answered he told her he was investigating the disappearance of the children. She pulled the door wide open and motioned him in. “Thank God someone ain’t letting this drop,” she replied, “God bless you, young man.” Sitting at a plain, square wooden table in a kitchen adorned only by hanging pots and pans, she talked about how the two girls had not been doing well in school, how their teachers complained that they couldn’t pay attention and were constantly “acting out.” “Marina loved those children,” she said, “but it frightened me to see how she disciplined them sometimes, specially Sid Junior. He’d cry and cry like the devil was in him.”
Ignatius asked the mother about Marina’s abandonment. Between sobs, she told him, “But I know one thing. Marina would never have abandoned those children. It just didn’t make sense she’d leave them. She loved them more than anything, more than her own soul. And she sure didn’t want to see them end up with Sid. Those poor children! If I’d taken care of them it would never have come to this, but Sid didn’t let me near them after she was gone. When he’s sober, he’s tolerable, though he sure knows how to bullshit. And when he drinks then the demon comes out. More than once I saw Marina after he’d beat her to within an inch of her life. And why would she leave without saying a word to me? No, I don’t think she abandoned them, not if she was alive, but no one listens to me.”
“The police think Marina kidnapped the children. She left Sid because of the abuse, and then came back, took the children, and left the state without telling anyone so Sid couldn’t find her,” said Ignatius.
“I wish it were true,” lamented Marina’s mother, “But would she have run away without saying a word to me? No, I think not. Something is wrong. I can feel it, like some darkness I can’t get out from under. It’s just killing me to think of those poor children!”
“If there’s anything I can do for them,” said Ignatius, “believe me, I’ll do it.”
“Do you think they’re OK?” she pleaded.
“I have to,” he replied.
He doffed his hat and bowed and excused himself without telling her that he too felt something oppressive, and the more he learned, the more the darkness closed in on his spirit and the more he was lumbered by unspeakable despair.
Marina’s friend Abby was a waitress at a neighborhood pub. He spoke with her over a glass of soda. She told Ignatius she had recently seen Marina in the river district, wandering aimlessly. She had waved, called Marina’s name and approached her, only to see her vanish around a corner without acknowledging the greeting or even looking up. Abby had tried to follow, but found no further trace of Marina. It had been Marina, Abby was sure of it, but she looked “queer,” utterly distracted and lost.
Marina’s mother had mentioned that when Marina was a little girl they had lived in a flat that was “abandoned now, all boarded up, in the river district.” That fact and the fact that Abby was sure she had seen Marina in the river district, jangled about in his brain at night keeping him awake into the small hours. Finally, he asked Marina’s mother for the address of the river district apartment.
The red stone apartment building was blackened with soot, and the boards nailed over the windows and doors were weathered gray. The mortar and cement were crumbling and portions of the roof had collapsed. The building had hoarded neglect and decay for years. Ignatius found a door at the back off of which the boards had been torn, like a hole at the back of a rat’s nest. He pried it open and stepped into the darkness.
Ignatius waited for a moment to see if his eyes might adjust to the gloom, but the thin smudges of light that escaped through the boarded over window at the end of the long hallway were only a reminder of how completely the building was dominated by shadow. Even when he flicked on his torch it was almost as if the interior of this place swallowed up whatever light he dared to cast in it. The room he was looking for was on the third floor, so he clambered breathlessly up a desolate stairwell until the beam of his flashlight caught a small, gray numeral three next to a rusty door. He wandered down a hall, studying the numbers, pausing to ponder portals that lacked them, until he came to 339. The door was not locked. He turned the knob and pushed it open.
Nothing had prepared him for what he saw next. The air was sour and thick with the stench of putrescence, raising his stomach. His blood froze at the sight of the children all dressed in their Sunday best, the two older girls and the two little boys, lined up on a broken, overstuffed couch in order of size, like waxy dolls. They must have starved to death, he thought, their bodies looked so wispy and desiccated, their skin so lurid and mottled, expressions of sleepy anguish frozen forever on their faces. Then he gasped as the beam of his flashlight fell upon a dismal-looking cradle with a dirty, white lace cover. He would have run but for nine years of quashing the self, of unrelenting discipline under Samael, that kept him rooted to the spot. This was the test, he would not flee his post. One step at a time he edged closer to it. With a quaking hand he pushed the lace aside to reveal something that had never quite become human, a bloody blue mass about the size of a frog which, he noticed with horror as he studied it, was ever so tenuously moving. It was breathing.
A banshee’s shriek burst the silence, followed by a cascade of angry footsteps. Ignatius suddenly found himself facing a crazed, skeletal Marina Jones. She lunged at him and he dropped his flashlight in alarm. With an unceremonious clunk it flickered out, and suddenly he found himself in the pitch black, locked in a death grapple with this woman. She knocked him to the floor, completely winding him, and flailing her head about madly, cracking him on the forehead with her skull. All the time, she howled wildly, deafening him with the words, “My children!” He struggled to free himself of her bony, icy grip, but was pinned powerless on his back. He thought he was certainly dead, when suddenly she was gone, the sound of clip-clopping footsteps receding but not stopping. She was still rushing about madly from room to room as if looking for something.
In the darkness, his mind raced. He still couldn’t fully accept what his senses told him, that this woman was dead, that she was a walking cadaver, and that she had given birth to something horrible, something that never should have come into existence. He questioned nine years of training under the tutelage of the Angel. What if Samael had been wrong? What if this woman was alive? If she were, what he had come here to do would be murder. She would need help, not to be dispatched like some mad dog. And then flashed through his mind the images of her life he’d gleaned from newspapers, from neighbors, from her mother. Even if she was dead, it was so unfair; she had done her best by her own lights, she had desperately loved these children, given her all to them, sacrificed all her happiness for them until her husband brutally murdered her. Wouldn’t Ignatius be adding to a surfeit of injustice by cutting her down again?
And yet, this was not the time for moral debate. She was shrieking in his face again, and he took a blow to his stomach that doubled him over, that felt like he’d been hit by a freight train, filling him to the ears with nausea and leaving a salty taste in his mouth. He heard a clatter and the ring of a steel blade, something large like a cutting knife, and he realized that he was being murdered.
Panic took over. He only remembered jerking back, scrambling away, groping desperately around him for his flashlight and then finding it. She was on him again, and he did the only thing he could imagine, which was to whip her again and again in the face with the heavy metal, with a force he had never thrown before. The flashlight flickered on again. Had he murdered a living woman? In the dim light he saw clearly that he had crushed the front of her skull in, and she was still screeching.
Again she lunged at him and again he bludgeoned her, savagely now, not stopping until a good portion of her head had been knocked off. And still she came at him. He struck repeatedly. Once he had decapitated her, the body’s attacks were less coordinated. He knocked the knife out of her hands and then tackled her, pinning her to the floor. With the knife he was able to hack at her until she had been more or less dismembered and could no longer move.
But that was not the end of it. After he had stumbled out of the apartment, down the stairs, out onto the street, after a passerby found him bleeding unconscious on the curb and called an ambulance, after a long painful recovery, he had had to return to the apartment weeks later to finish the job. He used the boiler in the basement to burn her remains and those of the children. The most difficult was to kill the thing in the crib.
About a year later he was walking down the street and saw Marina Jones’ mother. He turned the other way, slipped away without letting her see him. What would he ever say to her? Lying to the police about his stabbing had been difficult enough. Somehow the mother deserved to know more, but he could never tell her what had become of her daughter and her grandchildren. Even if he thought her capable of fathoming the truth, the Angel Samael had forbidden such revelations to those who were not Called.
It was only after the case of Marina Jones that the full realization of the nature of his Call dawned on Ignatius. He spent long, sleepless nights fasting and praying and wrestling with the horror of it. He hated it, and he hated the Angel Samael, and he longed to escape, wished he had never seen him, never come back to his mother’s grave.
It was 1943 when he met the final test, when he encountered Marina Jones. Other men his age were eagerly joining their nation’s struggle for freedom against the evils of Nazism and totalitarianism. How he longed to join that struggle, to be involved in a war against bad guys who were really bad. Instead, his war was against those who had suffered in poverty and sickness, those who had been victimized, those who had been cut short, those who had been dealt a raw deal and who now rebelled against life, or some might say against the arbitrariness of a God who predestined some to longevity and prosperity and others to ignominy and premature death.
But God was not arbitrary, said Samael. If those who returned from the dead only trusted God and could wait till the resurrection and the final judgment, they would see every injustice avenged. Instead, they wanted to make their own justice right now. And in so doing, they became rebels against God Himself. It made Ignatius soul sick. Why couldn’t they stay dead? What was their problem? His mother hadn’t come back, though she had had reason enough, having died of cancer at the age of thirty-six, leaving five children. As a boy he had secretly wished for her to come back. Why couldn’t Marina Jones and the others be like the vast majority of good dead who stayed dead?
Ignatius was angry at God too for leaving humans to clean this problem up. Wasn’t this God’s problem, a problem He’d created? But, said Samael, God had given humans free will, and it was the strength of that will that enabled them to defy death itself if they so chose. God had also deeded to humans the domain of mortal life. How humans managed that domain would be the test of whether they merited immortality. With the domain of mortality came the responsibility to defend it and maintain the sanctity of its boundaries. No one else could fulfill this trust without impinging on humankind’s sacred destiny, not angels, not archangels, not God Himself.
Ignatius ultimately accepted the Call because he could not escape from the sacred fact that life rightfully belonged to the living; and as dirty and repugnant as the task was, someone had to defend it. In the end, he reckoned, it was cowardice to expect anyone else to do what he himself would not be willing to do, especially a duty as inescapable as this. He remembered those four dead children, starved to death because of a mother’s love that had been perverted by the rebellion of death against life. He couldn’t imagine the horror in which those innocents must have found their end. And had he not been present to properly dispose of their corpses, they too might have come back as murdering monsters, and in turn committed more mayhem leading to yet more cycles of unnatural rage. It required little imagination to realize what unspeakable evil could engulf the world if there were no Called. There were others, Samael reassured him, whose identities must remain secret. In every place in the world where there were dead who tried coming back to the living there were Called, and Heaven held a special place for them.
So Ignatius accepted his appointment with grim determination as the only logical path, and he dulled himself to its horrors with the grind of daily discipline that Samael had inculcated in him. He disconnected his own thoughts and let himself become an unquestioning tool in the hands of God. And every day, he rose at five o’clock in the morning to pray, to study the scriptures, to rise and watch the dead.
Chapter 3
Three years after accepting the Call Ignatius met a young woman at church named Laverne Smith. Ignatius liked Laverne because she had a sense of humor but she didn’t strike him as frivolous. She had a beautiful smile and she smiled readily, but she knew when to be serious too. Even though she was young, she struck Ignatius as very mature. He admired how earnestly she set her mind to the study of the scriptures. She readily drew surprising insights from verses that stymied other members of their Bible study class, and to him that indicated a desirable depth of soul. He was drawn to her because she was attractive in a down-to-earth way, not glamorous but not homely either. There was something about watching her smile or sigh, fold her arms or sit up, nod her head or laugh, that caused his heart to skip a beat, that lifted his spirits, that made him forget the horrors of his Calling if for just a moment. Laverne must have seen something interesting in Ignatius too, because one day at church, she invited him to sit with her during the service.
She approached him after a particularly uneasy Bible study discussion in which Ignatius had offered a somewhat unconventional interpretation of the passage from Matthew chapter twenty-seven:
Jesus, when he had cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost. And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent; and the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, and came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many.
The Bible study leader said, “What a marvelous witness of the resurrection that must have been to those who saw their loved ones return from the dead!”
Ignatius replied, almost without thinking what he was saying, “It wasn’t a witness of the resurrection, it was a desecration of it.”
After a moment of shocked silence, the Bible study leader asked, “How he can you say such a thing?”
Ignatius explained, “Can’t you see that the graves were opened out of trauma, when Jesus cried out, the veil was rent, and there was an earthquake. They came untimely out of the graves. The scripture teaches there will only be one resurrection, at the end of days, and all who come before then, no matter how impatient we may be to see them, defile the resurrection and resist the will of God.”
He felt he’d said too much and fell silent after that, and the Bible study leader nervously changed the subject.
Afterwards, Laverne approached him and said, “I’ve always wondered about the resurrection, I mean the timing of it. And I was always puzzled by that verse, because I thought the Book of Revelation was pretty clear about when the resurrection happened. I mean, have you ever thought about what happened to Lazarus?”
“After Jesus raised him from the dead? He lived a normal life and then died again of course,” said Ignatius.
Laverne continued his train of thought: “Because Jesus had not risen yet and . . .”
They both finished at the same time: “There was no resurrection of the dead yet.”
The shadow of a smile spread across Ignatius’ lips and he nodded nervously and they both fell silent for a moment.
Laverne said, “How would you like to come sit with me during the service?”
Laverne usually sat with her parents in the third pew from the front in the left section. Ignatius always sat on the very back row, not because he felt any lack of enthusiasm about the service, but because he found human contact so painful. He found efforts by other parishioners to chat with him before and after the service extremely awkward. They wanted trite small talk, while what was foremost in his mind was unspeakable. Grisly death, walking cadavers, dismemberment, burning, the arcane rituals of banishing. He found some comfort in discussion of the scriptures, but most people tired quickly of that. By Ignatius’ lights, most people lived superficial, safe lives, and not that he begrudged them it, but he couldn’t bear to make pretenses for their sake. So he usually sat at the back the better to slip out the door unnoticed as soon as church ended.
Sitting at the back of church, he often had his eyes on Laverne sitting up toward the front with her family. He would watch how she helped her parents keep the younger kids quiet, how she always sang every hymn so heartily. And he sometimes let himself slip into a reverie where he imagined sitting next to her as her husband, sharing the hymnal with her as they sang together, with squirmy children of their own to quiet. When Laverne invited him to sit with her, for the first time in twelve years it was like some kind of light dawned in Ignatius’ spirit. And without thinking, he said yes, and followed her as though enchanted to the third row from the front on the left.
Only after he found himself sitting there did it dawn on him what he had done and then he felt like a complete idiot. The idea that he could ever have any kind of relationship with Laverne at all was an impossible fantasy. Every free moment of his life was devoted to the dead; watching the dead, tracking the dead, thinking like the dead in order to put the dead out of their misery. His only human contact, if it could be called that, was with the Angel Samael, a being who, Ignatius had slowly learned over the years, was utterly inhuman. In a very real sense, Samael had been correct from the beginning, when he said that Ignatius must “die to this world” in order to pursue the Call. He was more dead than living most of the time, more of their world than of this world that Laverne belonged to.
He thought, “What exactly do you think you are doing and does it even make the least bit of sense that you can share your life with anyone? Anyone at all? And what if she takes it from your sitting here next to her that you might, just might, share your life with her? What you are doing right now is a sin.”
He found himself slowly contracting into himself, drawing away. He saw her hand slowly edging toward him, and he grew deathly frightened that she might try to reach out to hold his hand. He could only pull away all the more in reflex. He did not hear a word of the sermon, could concentrate on nothing at all but the social terror he suddenly felt. It was all he could do during the service to suppress the strange fantasies welling up in his brain about him and Laverne, about some blissful nuptial future between the two of them.
Just as the service was ending, she leaned innocently over and whispered in his ear to ask if he might accompany her to a dance this Tuesday at the local YMCA. And he mumbled something like, “I can’t I’m busy,” and fled from the church building.
For the next two days Ignatius fasted and prayed. He realized that as long as he was one of the Called, there could be no relationship with Laverne or any woman. Even the ordinary comforts of friendship would be impossible to him. And he realized suddenly that he desperately craved some intimacy, and was filled with despair beyond words. A thought wormed its way into his brain, the thought that he had given three good years to the Call, and that was as long as the ministry of Jesus, and might he somehow be released from it now? He stopped eating, he stopped drinking, he could only pray in his spirit.
On Tuesday night he trudged into the cemetery with heavy footsteps. He couldn’t help but think that Laverne was at the dance tonight and he might be there too. His walking was disjointed, like there were two of him pulling in different directions. He would move and then pause and then turn for a moment and then continue. But he finally made it down to the place he had lingered under the willows so often in the last twelve years, and knelt down by his mother’s grave and began to pray, “Not my will but thine O Lord be done.”
He looked up and saw Samael on the edge of his mother’s headstone, perched like a stork on one toe with his other leg curled up against his body. He appeared as he often had over the years, not in a black suit and tie that might blend into a crowd of twentieth-century mourners, but in bulky, flowing, black robes, and long white hair that fell to the small of his back, and instead of the pink, wrinkly skin of an old grandfather, smooth, white unearthly skin that looked ageless, like a statue.
“It is really up to you whether to stay true to your vows or not,” said the angel.
Ignatius was weeping. “I want to stay true to my vows! That is the problem! If I no longer wished to, this would be easy!”
Even through eyes clouded by tears, he could see the angel cock his head like a bird. “Then just do it,” Samael said.
“But I want her too!”
“That is the nature of mortality,” sighed the angel, “being wrapped in the lineaments of finitude. You have but one life to live, but one body, but one counting of days. You cannot do everything. You must choose. I never said it would be easy, in fact I promised you the opposite.”
“Then this is not a Call possible for a mortal to be true to! My flesh is betraying me!”
“I warned you that in accepting the Call you would be choosing a kind of death. This is what it is like to die.”
“Then I wish I could just die and have it over with!”
The angel sighed again, a long, windy sigh. “You of all people should know that is not how it works. Do you think desire dies with the physical body? If it did, do you think the flesh moldering in the ground here could come back to life? Would there be any need for the Called? No, desire does not die; if anything it gets stronger. It can become like a ravenous, untamed beast. You of all people should know this. Now is the time to master the desires. If you do not now in the flesh, you never will. What do you think the Final Judgment will be, but a weighing of your desires?”
“Then help me, please, I beg you! The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak!”
“I will help you, but first know that nothing I take from you will alter the problem of desire. It can only be a reminder to you, an aid to the will.”
“Just do it,” moaned Ignatius.
In a single movement too fast for Ignatius to see with his eyes, the angel leapt down from his mother’s headstone and snatched him up, almost as if by the scruff of the neck, and he was suddenly engulfed in impenetrable blackness. When he could see again he saw a stone altar full of burning coals; he smelled thick, acrid smoke that burned his lungs and choked him and blinded him; he saw beings covered with wings, without heads, without feet, only wings, hovering up and down; and an unearthly singing of words stretched out to infinity, barely recognizable to human ears, but that Ignatius thought he heard as “Holy!” In the dim glow of the coals Ignatius noticed that he was completely naked.
One of the wing creatures flitted down to the altar. Ignatius saw it had an arm, like a human arm, that reached out and picked a pair of tongs up off the edge of the altar and snatched a white hot coal with it. It moved toward him, its arm stretched out at him with the coal. He closed his eyes, blinded by the light of the coal, and suddenly it was burning him, down below.
Ignatius woke thrashing in the cemetery. Samael was gone; the cemetery was still, so quiet he could hear the stillness breathing. A few dim stars twinkled in the cobalt sky above. He could see the glow in the eastern horizon of the sun about to rise; it reminded him of the glow of the coals on that mysterious altar. And he remembered with a kind of anguish, more spiritual than physical, though it was the physical pain he remembered. He unbuttoned his pants and loosened his underwear and looked down and saw that the angel had done it. He was now less than a man, or maybe more than a man in the angelic reckoning of things.
The angel had been right; it had not removed the desire, it had almost made it worse. It could have tormented him to madness, having the desire but now no means to fulfill it. It could have turned him into a monster. But he used it as a reminder of the lively danger he had always been in, the peril his soul faced at every moment. He used it to steady his will. And he clung to the routine, day in, day out. Rise in the morning at five o’clock, din the sleep out of the flesh with prayer; read the words he already knew out of the book, one more notch in the endless cycle; feed the body just enough, no more, ignore the growling stomach; cover it in simple clothes, don’t look down, don’t look there; do the simple things again and again, ignore the distractions. Become a cog in the divine clockwork.
The following Sunday as he sat in Bible study she looked at him from time to time; he could feel her eyes burning on him. But he never looked back at Laverne. When the Bible study was over, she lingered; he knew she wanted to speak with him. He retreated without acknowledging her presence. He sat on the back row of the church, keeping his eyes on the pulpit. In his peripheral vision he saw her head turning from her spot in the third row from the left. He never looked, never made eye contact. When the service was over, he disappeared out the door as he had every Sunday before for so many Sundays. And every Sunday from then on it was the same; and it was not too many Sundays before Laverne stopped looking.
Over the years, he barely noticed what she did. Two years later, maybe three, he read an announcement in the bulletin about her marrying somebody; her name wouldn’t be Laverne Smith anymore but Greaves. That was the last attention he paid to her. The only notice he would ever take of her again would be the day she died. It felt good to him that it could fade out of his consciousness just like that. He trained himself to focus on just one thing, on his Call, on quelling the dead.
Chapter 4
Over the years, Ignatius kept an exhaustive journal documenting his battles with the rebellious dead. Keeping the journal was Ignatius’ idea; Samael had never instructed him to keep it. In fact, had he known of it, Samael would have discouraged Ignatius from keeping it. But in his search for perfection, Ignatius believed the journal would benefit him by enabling him to discern patterns, if any there might be, and use them to try to predict returns more effectively. Samael had told him such things were impossible to predict; that one must only watch and be ready. But Ignatius felt compelled to try. For each revenant, he provided a biographical sketch; the circumstances and date of his or her death; his best estimate of the date of return; the date they were put down and what was required in order to put them down; and, most importantly, the names of anyone they might have killed after coming back.
These last data were particularly important to Ignatius because it was, though not inevitable, very likely that individuals killed by a revenant would themselves come back from the dead. Ignatius assumed personal responsibility for this type of “second-generation” revenant. After all, he felt, if he had been effective in his Calling, if he had stopped a revenant before it killed others, such should never come into being. Samael told Ignatius he shouldn’t blame himself. Often those killed by revenants were people living dangerously, people who might have died untimely and come back on their own any way. Furthermore, revenants were by nature secretive and devious, and Ignatius was only human. It was inevitable that some would kill before Ignatius could track them down. “You will make mistakes,” Samael had warned him, “Do not be discouraged. Only press toward the mark for the prize.” Nevertheless, Ignatius kept a tally, and vowed to himself to prevent all “second-generation” returns.
By his own reckoning, the worst mistake Ignatius had ever made came to his attention in 1956. It was then that he learned, only after great detriment, his procedures for tracking down revenants was not as thorough as it should have been. In Ignatius’ favor, it must be clarified that Samael never spelled out to Ignatius exactly what procedures or methodologies he should use. Samael could instruct him only in the metaphysics of the problem, reveal to him the inner workings of the unseen world, provide him with the spiritual discipline necessary to effectively face the problem, and explain to him exactly what formulae would successfully put a revenant down. Beyond that it was completely up to Ignatius’ ingenuity to do the actual policing, to find the revenants and do battle with them.
The problem was it had never occurred to Ignatius that not all deaths were recorded in obituaries or official records. The fact that Ignatius had recently passed the civil service exam and gone to work for the State Department of Revenue compounded his oversight, since working for a state-run bureaucracy inclined him to focus on documentary sources of information. But the truth was there were numbers of people whose lives never made it into the public record, usually illegal aliens and the perennially homeless and unemployed.
Ironically, these were the very classes most likely to die prematurely, of illness, exposure, starvation, alcoholism, accidents, or violence, and thus, the most likely to be terminated with “unfinished business” that might lead them to return. Thus, for a number years, unbeknownst to Ignatius Wick, there had been growing a class of revenants of the most alienated and desperate sort, inhabiting the most isolated, abandoned haunts of the city. A problem of this kind might go unattended for two, three, four, maybe five years at most, without posing too much of a threat to the living. But Ignatius had been oblivious to it for thirteen years, and it had begun to snowball. Homeless people were murdered by formerly homeless revenants, and joining their ranks at an increasing pace, becoming a veritable village of the damned, and it only came into the public eye when three people who had histories and respectable families and a public record were murdered. By that time, it was almost too late.
The newspapers declared the three murders the work of despicable gangsters and a “war on crime” was called for. At first, Ignatius’ concern had been to watch the corpses of those whom he knew to have been murdered, to make sure that they didn’t come back. Perhaps it was only a coincidence that all three came back. But it was extremely disturbing if they weren’t a coincidence. Ignatius was only one man. Dealing with three revenants in so short a space of time almost overwhelmed him. Then came the news of a fourth murder. Ignatius prayed for the police to bring an end to the crime epidemic, but the police remained perpetually baffled.
Ignatius went to a particularly dangerous curve on River Road near where all the murders had taken place. He wandered down the woody slope there till he reached the river. He found broad, muddy flats, soaked by recent flooding and rains. He saw footprints in the mud. Footprints by the river, but no footprints leading away from the river. According to the papers the police had found similar traces. They had combed every dock and riverboat house for miles up and down stream, but found no sign of the perpetrators.
The next day was a Saturday. Early in the morning, shortly after sunrise, he rented a motor boat and rode out into the middle of the river, in a place where the current was wide and slow. He turned off the motor. There was no wind. The surface of the water was still as a mirror. On the river it was dark, the steep, forested slopes below the terraces surrounding the river flats holding on to the night, even as the sky above flushed with sunrise. He peered into the flow. At first he could see only reflections of gray clouds, the tops of trees, his own tremulous face peeking over the edge of the boat. He tried to see beneath, but for breathless seconds it was as if by some optical trick his eyes could only focus on the images of the world above the water.
Then suddenly he caught sight of an enormous fish, peering outward through primordial, watery eyes, mouth gaping continuously, perpetually in search of food, its fat, slippery body hovering just above the weeds and the muck at the bottom of the river. It darted away, frightened by something, and then Ignatius could see what had frightened it. Something like the weeds, almost indistinguishable from them at first, was moving. Ignatius stared at it, straining to discern. It was a human hand, and the fingers were slowly squirming, groping. The hand was connected to an arm. Ignatius gazed at the bottom of the river and saw beneath the weeds a bloated face the pale yellowish color of grass that hasn’t seen the light of sun, broken in anguish, an open mouth twisted downward in a frown of misery, glassy eyes, scraggly hair like moss. Then he saw others; another hand, another face; a shoeless foot; an ear, the back of a head; a bare, discolored chest; a writhing mass of bodies like some medieval portrait of Hell.
There was a loud bump on the bottom of the boat. Ignatius was startled as the small craft rocked violently. He turned and saw an ashen hand emerged from the water, grasping the edge of the boat. He grabbed a paddle and whacked at it. It held fast. These monstrosities only barely felt pain, if at all, he grimly reminded himself. Another hand reached out of the water on the same side, took a hold and the two hands pulled forcefully, heaving the boat, threatening to capsize it. Ignatius tumbled backwards, banging his head sharply against the edge of a bench. His vision was foggy and sparkly now, as he struggled to sit up again. Other hands reached up from the other side of the boat too. Ignatius muttered a prayer under his breath as he scrambled around, staying low and reaching for the motor. He flicked the switch with one hand, and yanked the cord with the other. The engine sputtered. He saw other hands, small hands, grasping at the motor. He gave the cord a final heave with his last strength and heard the engine roar, saw the small hands on the motor suddenly let go as the water turned bloody. The boat started to weave, turning on itself in a narrow circle. The second set of hands had let go, but the first hands still held tight. Ignatius slammed them repeatedly with the butt of the paddle until they had begun to be mashed and gory and finally slipped away letting the boat lurch forward.
He shook uncontrollably now, not caring which direction the boat careened as he stared back at the bubbling, bloody water where he had just been. There must have been half a dozen or more, just in that spot, all unaccounted for. He had no idea who they were or where they had come from. That fact filled him with a horrible, sinking dread. How many more were there, and where?
He returned the following night, to the shore where he had earlier seen footprints. He hid in the underbrush and watched the river. He told himself, “It’s just a matter of waiting. There’s always something that lures them. Like moths to the flame.” He waited all night.
He returned the following evening, on Monday. This time he did not wait long. The sunset still glowed in the western horizon above the steep river banks when he saw movement in the water. It was something like a man.
He hulked stiffly out of the current, as though finding his land legs. His face was pale and bloated like a mask. He turned cautiously, moving his whole upper body since he couldn’t seem to crane his neck, squinting through heavy eyelids swollen nearly shut.
Ignatius watched, like a cat studies a bird, itching between wanting to put the thing down and needing to know what brought it out of the river.
The puffy cadaver wandered toward the edge of the flat, muddy area. Ignatius was about to pounce, when he saw it go to its hands and knees. It began feeling about in the scrub, scratching like a dog. It pawed about and then stopped, then pawed about some more. It was searching for something, collecting things. Suddenly it was upright again, turned toward the river with things clutched tight against its chest. Halfway to the river, it halted and dropped its armload with a clatter. It was gathering fire wood. It made the same trip several times, until it had assembled a pretty stack. Then it squatted clumsily, and stick by stick arranged the wood into a small pyre.
This waterlogged creature had no fire. But it sat next to its dark, unlit mound stretching its hands out as if remembering that it once might have warmed itself by something like this.
Ignatius watched transfixed. This can’t have been what it came back for.
It leaned its head back and emitted a plaintive, throaty bark.
A signal. Ignatius made his move. He unsheathed his machete. The revenant flinched at the sound of Ignatius crashing out of the underbrush. It stopped barking and raised one arm above its head. Ignatius hacked at it. The blade was sharp. Fingers flew off of its hand, then the hand off the wrist. It raised its other hand and Ignatius cut that down as well. It flopped over and crawled away on bloody stubs, letting Ignatius hew at his leisure, like a butcher in an abattoir. As he finished his work two others he could tell had once been a woman and a child emerged from the water. They shrieked dismally at the scene they found in the moonlight. He cut them down too. He had no choice but to do it.
“How could you have left me ignorant of this?” he heatedly demanded of Samael at their next meeting, “How could you not warn me?”
Samael sat quietly on the grass under a willow tree in the cemetery, gazing steadily into Ignatius eyes. “If I had known I would have told you,” he replied warmly, “But even I do not know everything, no prophet, none of the angelic host does. Each only knows what God ordains us to know. It is your responsibility to seek these things out yourself.”
“How can I do my job to defend the living, if I don’t even know who I am defending them from? How many there are? Where they are? How many more they will murder before this is over?”
“You can contain this problem, you can solve it, and you will restore the sanctity of life to this place and time. I’m certain of it.”
“But what about all the innocents who have been massacred already because these others died and returned unwatched? Their blood is on my head!”
“God will not hold these things against you. Only bring this thing to its appropriate end. Everything will be weighed in its proper measure; all wrongs righted; the innocent recompensed.”
“How they must have suffered!” Ignatius moaned.
“All things unfold according to God’s plan,” whispered Samael.
In fact it was God’s plan that it would take years for Ignatius to completely quell the Nameless Ones, as he called them in his journal. He found colonies of them huddled in abandoned, dilapidated buildings in the city. He would cleanse one house at a time, and then harry inspectors and the city council to enforce the ordinances requiring demolition of the condemned houses. The River Dwellers were more difficult. He considered having the river dragged, but abandoned that plan as impractical. Since he could not follow them into their hiding places, he had to wait until unfinished business lured them out of the river. But catching them required long, exhausting night watches, waiting for them to rise from the dark tide. It wasn’t until 1963 that Ignatius uneasily concluded in his journal that the last had been eradicated, though he could never be sure.
Long before then he had begun to include homeless shelters, migrant worker camps and the river flats and public parks in his list of watched sites. The homeless and the illegal migrants had been suspicious of him at first, wondering if he was a hostile law enforcer or a busybody reformer. But they gradually accepted him. No one else seemed to care how they fared. No one else sought a decent burial for those who had deceased forgotten by respectable society. He became a familiar presence in their haunts, discretely inquiring from time to time, “Has anyone died lately?”
As the years passed, Ignatius continued to record the numbers in his secret journal. Samael had been right, he discovered. While certain classes of people were more likely to produce revenants than others, there seemed to be no science to predict exactly what individuals would come back from the dead. But in keeping these mortuary statistics, he observed a disquieting trend over the span of years. Some years there were more, some years there were less, but he grew aware that beneath the yearly fluctuations the number of revenants was gradually increasing faster than the number of quiet dead.
Chapter 5
One bright morning in 1982, Ignatius’ phone rang. He had just finished reading Genesis chapter forty-five about how Joseph revealed himself to his brothers and wept in the house of Pharaoh so loud that the guards and all the servants could hear him. “I am Joseph your brother, whom ye sold into Egypt. Now therefore be not grieved, nor angry with yourselves, that ye sold me hither; for God did send me before you to preserve life.” And Ignatius was pondering the meaning of those words over a light breakfast of grape jelly on toast and a small orange juice, and thinking he had to hurry just a bit in order to catch his bus and get to work right on time, when the phone rang.
Although he had dealt in the supernatural every day for the past forty-eight years, though he had during that time spoken to an angel the last Tuesday of every month, Ignatius had never been much of a believer in the psychic. Belief in it bordered too much on belief in soothsaying, clearly condemned as diabolical in the Bible. But when the ring of the phone broke the crisp silence of that cool, cloudless morning, Ignatius knew in his bones, as surely as if someone had told him, it was his sister Anne calling and it was something bad.
Anne’s voice was small, as though she were speaking low from a long distance. “Nate,” she said, “Josephine has been in a terrible motorcycle accident. It’s dreadful, Nate. She’s dead.”
Anne was his youngest sister, the one he’d been the first to hold her when his parents brought her back from the hospital, the one he’d nicknamed “Baby Doll.” After his mother’s death, Ignatius had become more and more like his father, deathly serious and withdrawn. To his sisters and aunties, it was as if they had lost him utterly, just as they had lost all the other men folk in their clan. Of all his family, only Anne had kept some tie to him, sending birthday and Christmas cards and visiting occasionally, decades after most of his other family had given up on him, given him up to the incommunicative frigidity he’d withdrawn into since pursuing the Call. When the sisters criticized him or condemned him, Anne had always defended him. And Josephine was Anne’s daughter, his niece, named after their mother.
The words Anne spoke over the phone tumbled into Ignatius’ consciousness. In all his years of quelling the dead, he had never had to deal with a possible revenant in his own family. His father died in 1951, like he had lived, quietly. His aunties had all been much longer-lived, thriving into their eighties and nineties and finally beginning to pass on only in the last eight years, Auntie Patricia, Auntie Geraldine and Auntie Georgina in 1974, Auntie Wilhelmina in 1975, and Auntie Martina in 1976. His sisters and their families had all been healthy and fortunate. Until now. Until his niece Josephine died in a motorcycle crash.
Once upon a time Ignatius had hoped that his acceptance of the Call would be a kind of pact with God to keep his family safe, a form of insurance for them against untimely death for which the premium might be the sacrifice of his own happiness. Of course Samael had never offered Ignatius any such explicit guarantee on behalf of God. But in 1934, in the mind of the twelve-year-old boy who had just lost his mother, such it was natural to hope for such a bargain. There seemed to be Biblical precedents. Didn’t Elisha raise the son of the Shunammite woman from the dead because she sheltered and fed the holy man?
Of course as he grew older, as he matured in his understanding of the nature of the Call, he realized there are no such deals with God. One gave one’s all to God, without expecting anything in return in this life, knowing that the only guarantees would be for the life to come. And yet, year after year passed, and his family had remained safe, only dying peacefully of old age when they died at all, and he couldn’t help but wonder, was it chance, or did God sometimes actually give back some consideration for service in his life? That childish wish-belief in the possibility of such a pact had always lingered at the back of his brain, until now.
As far as Ignatius could tell, his niece Josephine had been one of those troubled children you pray God to protect in spite of themselves. He had not seen much of “Jo” over the years. He mostly knew of her only what he heard from her mother. When Jo was a little girl, he occasionally saw her when Anne brought her along on visits. As a young teen, Jo demanded an inordinate amount of independence. She was constantly grounded for violating parental curfews, and then grounded again for sneaking out of the house while grounded. She chose friends her parents didn’t approve of and preferred to spend time with them rather than with her family. She did all the things that made parents worry: smoking, drinking, wild parties, skipping classes at school. At first they were relieved that she didn’t seem to take an interest in boys. Then they got worried. To her parents’ utter amazement, she did well in school, and later went to the University, though to her parents it seemed she spent far more time in protests on campus than she did in learning. She cut her hair short and took to wearing leather jackets, and she moved into a house full of women who did same. There always seemed to be a fight in progress there. People were always coming and going; Jo eventually moved out too. She dropped out of the “U.” She worked in many jobs, never any one for very long. She moved from apartment to apartment, roommate to roommate. And the years went on and on and she never married. And her parents always said, “She has to settle down some day, she has to somehow find herself.” But the motorcycle crash came before that happened.
Ignatius barely knew Jo. He barely knew anyone in his family any more except Anne. But he would look at photos of Jo that Anne brought him during her visits, and as she grew up he would think how she might have been the reincarnation of their mother, she resembled her so much. It made his heart jump to look at her.
And now his heart sank to hear the dead, broken tone of Anne’s voice. By the time she called him, he reckoned, she had already made a half a dozen of these calls; she had rehearsed this gloomy announcement a half a dozen times. But he could hear the horror still breaking fresh. It broke his heart to hear such grief in the voice of his “Baby Doll” sister, his little Anne. But surpassing that, it sickened him to consider what would happen beyond the funeral, to consider the possibilities ramifying from just this kind of death ending just this kind of life. Not that he hadn’t dealt with this hundreds of times in his life; but for the first time it was his own blood.
He attended the funeral, just as he had the five auntie’s funerals before this. Most of the family members only ever saw him at funerals. What the family didn’t know is that he returned after the funeral at dusk to listen to the grave for the telltale noises, to feel the ground for vibrations, to wait for something to push its way up through the sod like a giant earthworm.
The night of the funeral it rained, which made it uncomfortable for Ignatius, but good as far as watching the dead was concerned. He wasn’t sure why, but they often came up when it rained, perhaps because they feared suffocating. He didn’t bring an umbrella; he only wore the gray slicker he always wore in such weather. He found a place nearby to sit, watch and wait. After sunset, the rain petered out to a mere drizzle. But then around midnight, the rain renewed itself, drumming down, harder and harder. The temperature plummeted. A chill wind blew. Ignatius shivered uncontrollably, but still he waited. Eventually the rain stopped abruptly and it grew dead quiet. He looked at his watch: almost four thirty. He breathed a sigh of relief. Thank God they didn’t always come back from the dead. Only the bad ones. He returned home to dry off and begin his morning routine. He hoped this was the end of it; he would check again later in the week to see if the grave was disturbed.
But that evening, after he arrived home from work, his phone rang again. He knew it was Anne. He picked it up. Her voice at the other end of the line sounded delirious.
“Nate,” she said, “Nate, I’ve got her back, Nate.”
“Got who back, Anne?”
“She came home, Nate. This afternoon she came home.”
“Who, Anne? Who came home?”
“Why, Jo, of course. Nate, I’m never going to let her go again. Now that she’s home, we’ll fix things. It will all be all right. Jo’s back.”
He felt his throat tightening so he could barely speak, felt a contraction and a pain in his chest so he could barely breathe. His hand trembled as he held the receiver of the phone.
“Where is Jo?” he rasped, coughing as he spoke.
“She’s here at home, of course, sleeping in her bedroom. She’s sleeping in her own bed.”
“Has anyone else seen her?”
“You don’t believe me Nate! But it’s true, she’s back! She’s home!”
“No, I believe you,” he coughed, “I just want to know, has she talked to anyone else?”
“No she hasn’t, Nate.”
“I’m coming over,” he said, “I need to talk to Jo.”
There was silence on the other end of the line. He was suddenly aware of how tense his voice sounded, how harsh. He could almost hear Anne recoiling from the phone.
“What’s the matter, Nate? Is something wrong?”
“Nothing’s the matter,” he replied, trying to regain some control over his voice.
She sounded suddenly alarmed: “I don’t think you should come over right now. Jo’s tired. She needs her rest.”
“I’m coming over,” he said, but she hung up before he finished.
It was raining out again. Ignatius put on his raincoat and gathered the bag where he kept the tools he usually needed: a machete, a crowbar, a rope, a can of gasoline, boxes of matches. This type of thing happened rarely. Revenants usually shunned the living, and for them to emerge from their graves in daylight was virtually unheard of. But then Jo had never been conventional in life either; she’d always had a stubborn streak, always done things the hard way. And apparently she had unfinished business with her parents.
If he didn’t act immediately, Ignatius knew Anne and her husband would die. It was probably only waiting for the father to come home from work. Ignatius called a taxi. He waited anxiously in the twilit rain for it to arrive. The sky was drab, the rain dull. Every car that passed he was in an anguish hoping it to be his car. When the cab finally arrived, he clambered aboard, and snapped his sister’s address at the driver.
He calculated as he rode. On the few occasions he had seen where the living were involved with revenants they were appropriately terrified and accepted Ignatius’ intervention. But Anne had clearly lost her mind, he concluded. It broke his heart to think of her still clinging to Jo this way. She might try to protect it.
Ignatius had sometimes worried what might happen if he had to quell someone who was his own blood. Quelling the dead was brutal, filthy work. The only way, ultimately, to stop the obscene things coming back was to cut them to pieces or incinerate them or feed them to dogs – anything that utterly denied them their physical medium. And these lost souls invariably clung to their bodies to the bitter end, never sparing Ignatius the full measure of horror. It was their nature. If they were not willful in their very essence, they wouldn’t be in this rebellion against death in the first place. So would he possess the nerve to hack to pieces a woman who had been the image of his mother, even named after her? And if his nerve failed now, would he ever find it again?
But in the clutch, Ignatius was relieved to find gritty anger welling up. God was no respecter of persons and neither could he be. And how dare Jo bring this humiliation, this sickness on the family? How dare she do this to her parents, who had worked so hard to raise her, and been in a misery over her and prayed for her all these years? And how dare she force him to do this? He opened the bag and reached in to touch the machete, to hold the grip, to weigh it in his hand. The thought of what he had to do sickened him. He wished with all his heart he didn’t have to do it, wouldn’t have to bring on his sister the kind of grief, perhaps madness, this would inevitably bring. He would have to try to separate them before he could do the deed. But whatever came he could never allow himself to become a moral coward and he could not fail his Call, not over this.
By the time he arrived at his sister’s house, the sky was black and the rain had chilled into sleet. All the lights in the house were on, and the blinds and curtains were completely open. The windows were like big yellow eyes peering out into the darkness. Through them he could see his sister, sitting at the edge of a chair, rocking back and forth, wringing her hands, staring down at the floor. His brother-in-law sat in a couch, his back to the window, his head slumped forward as if he had fallen asleep.
Ignatius rushed through the front door. His sister looked up at him, her eyes curled in grief, her mouth moving but no words coming out. His brother-in-law looked into his lap, shaking his head. The only sound was the tapping of the rain, the humming of the furnace, the ticking of the clock. There was a hall leading away from the front room toward the bedrooms at the back of the house. The hall lights were off, the hall was dimly lit only from the lights in the kitchen and the living room adjoining it. At the end of the hall, the window was open showing only darkness outside. Rain came through, wetting the window sill and the floor.
“Where is her room?” Ignatius asked.
Anne shook her head and looked back down at her lap.
Ignatius walked down the hall. He opened the first door to his right and pushed it open. He could see a king-sized bed, a dresser covered with family pictures, the master bedroom. He continued down the hall and looked through the open door to his left, saw his dark reflection in the bathroom mirror. He continued and opened the last door on the right. He pushed it open.
He saw a little girl’s room, an oversized lampshade printed with balloons and clowns, a curly blond baby doll in a fluffy pink dress sitting on the floor, the white-painted footboard of the bed. He smelled the odor of death. He saw an open window, heard the moaning of wind, saw the curtains dancing fitfully. He reached into his bag and pulled out the machete and strode into the room. The bed sheets were rumpled and filthy. The bed was empty. He switched on the lamp, threw open the closet, looked under the bed. He rushed to the window, squinting at the dark trees outside in the yard. In a flicker of lightning he thought he saw a shadow move. It might have been nothing. He put the machete back into the bag.
“Nate, come and tell your sister that couldn’t possibly a’ been Jo,” said his brother-in-law plaintively.
“It was her, I know it was her,” Anne shook her head.
“I called the police,” the husband continued, “Must a’ been some kind of vagrant or something. Damn lucky all they wanted was a place to sleep. Didn’t rob nothing, didn’t hurt Anne. Damn lucky.”
“Vagrant. Lucky,” replied Ignatius. He knelt down on the floor in front of Anne and took her hands. He looked into her eyes, watched the tears bubbling out. “Baby doll,” he said, “Don’t cry. I need you to help me. I need you to call me right away if Jo comes back.”
“Don’t encourage her,” the man said.
In the rain Ignatius searched the neighborhood with his usual thoroughness. He never found her.
Days, then months, then years passed, but Jo never came back. Ignatius’ last Auntie, Roberta, died the following year, at the full age of ninety-five, and Ignatius attended her funeral just as he attended all the family funerals. He still checked Jo’s grave carefully from time to time, though he never saw signs it had been disturbed. He would call Anne occasionally, asking cautious questions. She slowly healed and slowly rearranged the memories until she could say, “I must have been out of my mind, to think some drifter was my daughter. Let her in our house and let her sleep in Jo’s bed.” Perhaps it hadn’t been Jo. But Ignatius couldn’t shake the nagging doubt. He had smelled death before and he felt certain it had been in that room.
Chapter 6
The years passed and Ignatius Wick still rose every morning at five o’clock. The alarm rang and he would unbed himself and kneel on the hard wood floor in the middle of the room and pray for half an hour. Then he washed his face and dressed in the same clothes neatly laid out the night before. Then he read from the Bible, a chapter a day, stopping to pray and meditate and take notes. He broke fast with the same simple meal, always giving thanks before he ate. And he donned the same gray trench coat and fedora, put his Bible into his briefcase, and took the bus downtown. This was his routine and had been his routine every day for longer than the thirty-two years he worked for the state department of revenue and the following sixteen years since his retirement.
But lately there were things that haunted him and made him wonder. There were thoughts and questions he had once suppressed with the simple affirmations that God was in control, that all things would be fixed and resolved one day at the Final Judgment, all he had to do was stay faithful to the Call. He had never dared ask the angel Samael, he didn’t dare ask now.
But he wondered. Who had been the Called One in this place before him? How come he had never met him, never heard of him? How come Samael had never mentioned him? He longed for the human contact that might have come from knowing other Called.
And who would be the Called One after he died? Ignatius was eighty years old now. He seemed to have inherited his aunties’ longevity, and he had a strength almost superhuman for one his age. But he didn’t have half the strength he once had when he entered into the Call as a young man, and he knew it was only a matter of time before he continued in the way of all living. His whole life had been devoted to defending the natural cycle of life and death, and he was certain the Call, no matter how sacred, would not require him to contravene that natural cycle. That was the will of God. He often secretly wished he could die; he was tired; he was ready to enter into his reward. And while in younger days he had wished for the human contact of a mentor, now he yearned for the release of passing on the mantel to a young apprentice. Why had Samael never mentioned anything about a succession?
Some nights he would wake up in the small hours and lie sleepless in bed. At the age of eighty, basic things like digestion and sleep and elimination were no longer as simple or painless as they were when he was younger. The long nights could become a misery. He would yearn for release, he would pray in his heart for God to let him go. And then he would wonder if he was being punished. Had there been something amiss in the way he had done his job? Had he overlooked something for which God would not release him until he had set it right? The angel Samael never told him how he was doing; never upbraided him for failures; never praised him for successes. It was always only, “All things unfold according to God’s will.” But it bothered him. He was a mere mortal. He could not possibly know all things; he was not perfect. In so important a Call he needed help.
Ignatius knew from watching and counting the dead all these years the numbers of unquiet dead had been slowly increasing. He had tangible statistics scrawled in his spidery hand in the journal. If he hadn’t had it recorded it in black and white in a book, he would have known it in the weariness of his bones from decades of fighting a fight that only got worse as he got weaker and older. When he first began, he quelled anywhere from five to seven revenants every year – except in extraordinary circumstances, such as the years he had to deal with the Nameless Ones. But lately a quiet year was ten or eleven revenants, the worst year yet, the year 2000, brought seventeen. Seventeen revenants that he knew of.
He worried there were dead coming back he had missed, still wandering unaccounted for. The worry was an ache that would never go away no matter how he tossed and turned. He had never rested entirely assured since his battles with the Nameless Ones. And the incident with Jo raised the ugly possibility that his methods had been flawed all along, that even dead who seemed accounted for might not be. He had wrestled with himself often over whether to excavate Jo’s grave, just to be sure. But it was part of his code never to excavate. Disturbing a grave could itself provoke a soul who was overly attached to her corpse. Better to let the dead lie. But more importantly, if he started to disinter corpses every time he had a doubt, where would it end?
There were times when the graves would emanate the telltale masticating noises in the days after the funeral, but then would suddenly cease. He always believed that these revenants had given up, discouraged at the prospect of eating their way out of their graves. Furthermore, it was difficult to hold body and soul together against the natural order by sheer will. Only the very most obstinate could succeed, and it was only normal that some would-be revenants lose the will to continue. But what if he was wrong? What if they had not given up? What if they had simply found a different way out of their graves?
He hated the “true stories of the weird” that appeared occasionally in local tabloids: “Child saved from inferno by dead firefighter!” or “Cat lady has nine lives, came back to feed her kittens!” or “Woman claims her husband made her pregnant after he came back from the dead!” In the early days, he dismissed such stories as macabre farce. After all, he studied the obituaries, he accounted for all the dead, and if there were truth to any of these tales he would know. After the Nameless Ones, he investigated them, no matter how cockamamie, just to put to rest any doubt. And always when he looked into it, he would discover the names of those involved were faked and couldn’t be tracked down; invariably the authorities knew nothing about the accounts; Ignatius concluded the stories had to be phony. Or had he given up too easily because he did not want to believe there were revenants he knew nothing about?
One Tuesday, the last of a month, Samael appeared to Ignatius in the garden next to his mother’s grave, a hint of lightning above his brow. His black robes roiled about him like thick storm clouds circling in a hurricane, and his face was pale like the color of rain.
“There is grave danger,” he said, his voice like wind, “I’ve come to warn you.”
“Speak,” said Ignatius, “For thy servant heareth.”
“A soul has returned, a suicide. He has used another’s flesh as proxy. He’s stirring up other dead to do the same. The threat is extraordinary; I’ve received keys to give to you.”
“But I thought suicides could not return.”
“Not to their own flesh. But this one has used a proxy.”
“You mean a substitute. It has used someone else’s corpse as a substitute for its own?”
“He has.”
“And he’s leading others to do the same?”
“He is.”
“How can I stop this?” Panic rose in Ignatius’ throat. He felt a sharp pain in his chest, radiating into his shoulder blades, his left arm. “How can I know which dead will rise, or when they rise, if they are using substitutes? If they are not coming back to their own corpses, whom shall I watch? How have you never told me about this? I thought this was impossible.”
“To most it is impossible. But in life this one served as a proxy for the dead. This opened to him the portal of using proxies in death.”
“In life he served as a proxy for the dead? What does that mean? He was a medium or a spiritualist of some kind?”
“To one church God has given the keys to perform ordinances for the dead, as a means of divine mercy. Under those keys, it is possible for the living to serve as proxies for the dead, so that the dead may receive the gift of baptism.”
“And this suicide was a member of this church?”
“And performed the ceremonies under the proper keys.”
“And this enabled him to come back in whatever body he chose?”
“Which enabled him to teach others how to do the same.”
“This is the worst thing you have ever told me.”
“Most souls would never think to come back to any body but their own. God has created in them a natural yearning for their own flesh. Only demons, who have never possessed their own bodies, would covet the flesh of others. But this soul is devious and perverse, and he is teaching others his perversion. The souls he is leading are the most depraved and furious. They must be stopped. This is why I have brought you special keys that will enable you to close the portals.”
“What kind of keys?”
Samael reached forward and placed both his hands on Ignatius’ head. Ignatius felt every muscle in his body spasm and the pain in his chest explode. He was completely blinded by a blast of white, electric light. He thought the angel had killed him. But he heard a voice saying:
By the authority of the Most High God, I lay my hands on thee and command thee to receive the keys of the Kingdom pertaining to the turning of the hearts of the living to the dead and the hearts of the dead to the living, and to the saving and sealing of those who are dead.
He looked around him and saw the sky black like ash and the cemetery transformed into an endless, shadowy valley full of bones. He thought, “Is this what a cemetery looks like through the eyes of an angel?” In the center he saw a chasm, out of which a pillar of flame rose into the heavens, scorching the clouds, and flaring out in all directions like the branches of a great cosmic tree.
“This,” said Samael, “is the sword that the Lord placed to the east of Eden, to keep the way of the tree of life. Now that you have received the keys to the portals of the dead, your eyes are open to dimensions that were invisible to you before, and you can see the sword of God. You can use the sword of God.”
The vision slowly faded and Ignatius found himself in the cemetery. The bones folded into the earth or became white and gray headstones. The blackness of the valley retreated into the shade of the willow trees or gave way to the gravelly green of the manicured grass. The pillar of flame flew up into the sky and was swallowed up by the clouds. Ignatius found himself kneeling next to his mother’s grave, deathly weary, not sure if he would be able to stand. Samael remained, wrapped in storm, his face still streaked in menace. From where Ignatius peered up at him, the top of the angel’s head seemed to scrape the sky, though he hovered only a few feet above the earth.
“No man can see the glory of God and live,” whispered the angel, “Remember that.”
“Who am I looking for?” asked Ignatius.
“His name was Jack McKay,” said Samael.
Then he vanished, as he often did, when Ignatius turned his look away for just a second.
Chapter 7
Ignatius approached his research on Jack McKay’s suicide with the usual thoroughness, looking at microfiche obituaries and following up on leads at the county courthouse or the morgue. His search took him further and further back in time. One year, two years, five years back, still he found nothing. Only when he had gone back more than twenty years – the same year that his niece Jo died in a motorcycle accident – did he find the obituary for James Spencer McKay.
He was sickened by shame at the discovery. The angel had allowed him twenty years to discover and deal with this case on his own, and he had never so much as suspected. Now that he had the case in front of him he remembered having cursorily read about it. He never bothered to watch suicides. Supposedly they didn’t come back.
James or Jack, as he was known to all his family and friends, had killed himself by overdosing on alcohol and tranquilizers at the age of nineteen. He had been living with his parents at the time. They went away on a weekend trip to Washington, D.C. and left him alone at home. Shortly after their departure, investigators deduced, he had gone to a nearby liquor store (his parents were total abstainers and there was no alcohol in the house) and purchased two bottles of vodka. They found the dated receipt for the booze crumpled up in his pocket. He had consumed a good portion of one bottle and then swallowed all of the pills in his mother’s alprazolam prescription. His mother later told investigators that a newly purchased bottle of the anti-depressants had gone missing two weeks earlier. She assumed she had misplaced them, but the date on the empty bottle found next to Jack’s cadaver matched the date of the missing prescription. Jack had evidently planned his self-murder for at least two weeks. When his parents returned from Washington and found him stiff and cold in his bed, he had been dead for over two days.
The McKay’s were Mormon, and their son was homosexual. Apparently, two weeks before the suicide his church had initiated excommunication proceedings against him. A church “court” was to be held shortly after his parents’ trip to Washington, D.C. He didn’t make it to his court date, but the church had no compunction about excommunicating him posthumously. That is where the official, public record ended.
Ignatius sought out Jack’s parents. Jack’s father was dead. He had died of a stroke one year ago at the age of eighty-two. Jack’s mother was living in a nursing home. She was eighty, the same age as Ignatius.
Ignatius brought red carnations to the nursing home. He found Mrs. McKay sitting in a wheelchair in the TV room next to an open window.
“Hello, Mrs. McKay,” he said, sinking into an overstuffed couch right next to her. He watched her intently until she turned to look him in the eyes.
“Hello,” she replied in a sweet but, for how frail she looked, surprisingly firm voice, “Who are you?”
“My name is Ignatius Wick. I’m a friend of your son.”
“My son,” she said, “You mean Jerald?”
“No,” he replied, “Jack.”
“Oh, Jack,” she sighed, a hint of sadness flowing into her voice. Ignatius noticed her eyes begin to glisten, and then a tear trickle along the creases in her downy cheek. “How would you know Jack?”
“I know this may be difficult for you,” answered Ignatius softly, “but I have to ask you a few questions about his death. And . . . after.”
She nodded, as another big tear slipped down her face. “You know,” she sighed, repressing a sob, “you never get used to losing a child, no matter what. You never do.”
“Tell me about Jack,” Ignatius said.
“He was a good boy, he really was,” she said, “Such a bright child, always wanting to help others. He loved his Sunday School classes. His teachers always said he was the best student, he helped them with the others. I wish I knew what went wrong.”
“What went wrong, Mrs. McKay?”
“When he turned seventeen, he shut down. He closed us out. He became cold and bitter. He refused to go to church, he said they were all evil hypocrites. He said he would never go on a mission.”
“On a mission?”
“In our church, all our young men go on a two-year mission when they turn nineteen. Bishop Mather tried so hard to encourage him. Bishop Mather always loved that boy as if he had been one of his own sons, always took special time out to talk with him and encourage him. Jack always rode with the bishop in his car, when he took the youth to the Washington Temple on trips to do baptisms for the dead – you know, we believe in salvation for the dead. The bishop said he always kept a special eye out for Jack. He tried so hard to convince him that a mission would be the best thing for him. He cried at Jack’s church court, after . . .”
“After he took his own life.”
“After he took his own life.” She sighed. “Jack was gay, you know. Some people say they can’t help it, being gay. Some people say they’re just born that way. Do you believe that?”
“I believe,” replied Ignatius, “that how we are born makes no difference. All that matters is we choose what to do with what we are given at birth.”
“I believe that too,” she sniffled, and nodded. “Still, I miss him. Even after all these years. Somehow I thought I’d be able to feel his presence. A mother feels a special bond to her children, she feels them. But after he died, I lost him. I can’t feel him. Do you think he’s eternally damned?”
“That is for God to decide,” replied Ignatius, “At the final judgment.”
Ignatius brought her a tissue and a glass of water, and she wiped her face and took an eager gulp of water.
“Can you tell me anything about your son’s friends, who he spent most of his time with? The places he frequented?”
“He never told us much. He was so secretive. He disappeared for days at a time; he’d come home looking horrible, smelling of cigarette smoke and liquor. Sometimes I’d see his friends. I’d look out the front window when they came to pick him up, men looking like women, women looking like men.”
“Did he ever mention any names?”
“Not that I remember. No, wait, I remember now. There was this one woman. I remember, because he always used to talk about this ‘Joe’ person he spent a lot of time with, and I thought it was a man. And then I discovered, ‘Joe’ was a woman. That was the only one he ever mentioned.”
“Thank you, Mrs. McKay.”
“Who did you say you were?” she smiled.
“A friend,” replied Ignatius. She still smiled as he nodded, donned his gray Fedora, and quietly slipped away. She believed she had met an angel.
Chapter 8
It didn’t really bother Ignatius to go to a gay bar. Not that he wasn’t repulsed by the manic music and dim disco lighting, the cigarette smoke and the smell of booze, and the driven, desperate hunt for sex. Not that he didn’t view homosexuality as wrong. But regardless of how lost or misguided the people in this place were, Ignatius mused, they were still alive. No matter where he went among the living, he couldn’t help but be buoyed by a distinct hope, since, unlike the dead, there was still possibility for them. And, more importantly, they were not his responsibility. He was not an evangelist to the living.
Ignatius was not bothered by the fact that flamboyant twenty-somethings in the joint called him a “troll” and a “chicken hawk” just loud enough for him to hear. He was not there for sex, so their disdain didn’t worry him. He was looking for certain forty- or fifty- something types, men or women who might have frequented places like this twenty years ago. He bought mineral water after mineral water to keep the waiters happy. He would engage in conversation with a nod and a friendly remark. He didn’t pester with annoying jokes; there was no glint of lust under his tongue or at the back of his eyes. He was just a harmless, generous old man.
He would ask, “You never knew Jack McKay, did you?” or “What ever happened to Jack McKay?”
Most people would smile and shake their heads. “I never knew him,” they would reply, or, “I’m new in this town,” or “Who’s that?”
But finally an enormous woman dressed in a baggy plaid shirt and dirty blue jeans, with a downy gray beard and a husky voice, said, “You knew Jacky Boy?”
Ignatius nodded and smiled, and said, “I’m a friend.”
“Figures,” she growled, “He had all kinds of friends. No offense intended.”
“None taken,” nodded Ignatius, “What ever happened to Jack?”
“He killed himself,” she said flatly.
“What happened?” asked Ignatius, not feigning concern.
“I could never figure it,” she said, “It was the saddest thing. That kid was smart, one of the smartest kids I knew. He was a born activist: outgoing, angry, articulate. He had tons of friends, every kind of fag and dyke and drag queen. Nobody disliked him. I thought he’d dealt with all that Mormon crap, I thought he’d declared independence of it. But I think deep down inside it ate away at him. He still felt guilty about being gay. When it came down to it, no matter how many friends he had, he craved acceptance from the one group of people who would never give it to him, his parents and his church. But he was never gonna get love from those assholes. And in the end, it killed him. That’s what I think.”
“What happened to all his friends,” asked Ignatius, “You’re the first one I’ve run into.”
She stared at him in disbelief. “You look like you were around back then. That was the early eighties,” she said. “AIDS,” she added with emphasis.
She sighed, “And, you know young fags back then. Off to San Francisco, L.A., Chicago, looking for some gay Mecca anywhere else but here in the Midwest. There’s only a few of us left who knew that scene back then. It’s a different world now.”
Ignatius’ had his own memories of the early years of the AIDS epidemic. “I followed the obituaries,” he said.
“Yeah,” she replied, “Didn’t we all.”
“How well did you know Jack?” asked Ignatius.
“Well enough to hope his suffering has ended,” she sighed. She drank a gulp of beer out of the bottle sitting in front of her, lit up a cigarette, and leaned back in her chair. Ignatius watched her intently, not judging, only watching, listening.
“If he were alive today, what do you think he would be doing?” asked Ignatius.
“Ha!” she shook her head. “He’d be burning the town down. Turning it upside down.” She took another draught of beer. “I like to think he and the gang, everyone who’s passed over, they’re all together, over there on the other side now, watching us. I hope it’s a better place, wherever they are.”
Ignatius blinked, he smiled gently, giving nothing of himself away. He reached into his briefcase and pulled out a photograph of his niece Josephine. She was posing on her motorcycle, wearing a t-shirt, blue jeans, chaps and a leather jacket, wild hair, sunglasses, a big grin, thumbs up.
“Did you know this person?” he asked.
The woman heaved herself forward, to study the picture.
“My God, that’s Jo. How do you know Jo?”
“She was my niece,” he replied closely.
“They were best friends,” she said, “Jo and Jack. They were like this.” She crossed her fingers. “She died a few months after he did. I remember that. That was a shame. It was almost as if . . .”
Ignatius nodded. He put the photograph back into his briefcase. He pulled a card out of his wallet with his name and a phone number on it.
“If you know anyone else who knew Jack or Jo, will you call me? I know it’s been a long time, but it’s important to me.”
She stared at the card. “If you’re family, I suppose,” she said, “I’ll think about it.”
He smiled and nodded, put on his jacket and his fedora, picked up his briefcase and slowly made his way out of the smoke-filled bar.
Chapter 9
Ignatius considered reading the obituaries an art form. Using the obituaries as clues to the fate of the dead was not unlike reading tea leaves or tarot cards. They were devout or florid or laconic, all depending on whom the deceased left behind; the length of its space in the column determined by whether one died cared for or alone, rich or poor, unequal in death as in life; a lifetime summed up in a few terse lines, telling more by what is not said than by what is.
“Charles L. Mather died at the age of eighty-three. Born in Utah in 1919, Mather moved to the Twin Cities in 1946, and worked as senior engineer at Edelman Laboratories for thirty-eight years, after which he retired with his wife to Eden Prairie. He served as a bishop, high counselor, and regional presidency member in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, still serving in the last capacity at the time of his death. He is survived by his wife Marian, six children, thirty-seven grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren. He will be missed by the innumerable people whose lives he touched during a full life of devoted church service.”
Ignatius pondered the usual relevant points, the light and the shadow in the newspaper epitaph. He died at the age of eighty-three, surrounded by family and friends, having lived a life of religious devotion. A good candidate for peaceful passing into the next world and unlikely revenant. But the obituary mentioned nothing of the manner of death itself, which raised an eyebrow. Ignatius had learned that natural, unproblematic deaths could be written of without aversion. Only untimely, irregular deaths were regularly passed over in silence in the obituaries. That itself might not have been enough to alert Ignatius, but the man was what Ignatius called an “engaged” death. Death is most often a gradual process in the sense of cutting one’s ties to this world. One loses grandparents first, then parents, aunts, uncles; eventually one loses older friends; one begins to detach from one’s life work through retirement, through the wisdom that puts dreams and aspirations in their proper perspective; one lets go of callings; one loses friends, perhaps even children; all ties and relations gradually wither, until finally one has more relations on the other side than on this side; the body itself begins to decay and becomes a burden, and then the final crossing of the self. But this man died with attachments, with obligations, with a calling. Even though he was old, he was engaged is this life just enough. And Ignatius was curious about something else too, unmentioned in the obituary. This man had been Jack McKay’s bishop.
Ignatius wore his funeral best, his black suit and tie. He sat at the back of the Mormon Chapel where the service was held, unnoticed by the family and church members who gathered in mourning. Ignatius had learned that mourning had different flavors discernable from the way people spoke to each other, in hushed or anxious or straightforward tones, from the way they cried, with sighs or sobs or silence, the way they held themselves, standing tall or hunched over, from smiles or frowns or nods. Ignatius immediately tasted a strain of tension in this mourning. He saw people at the edges, clutching the pews with white knuckles; he saw jerky, choreographed movements among the family; and when he saw the stricken look in the eyes of Mather’s wife Marilyn, he knew.
In his eulogy Mather’s bishop said, “It is so hard to lose someone in this way.” Ignatius noticed two middle-aged women sitting not far from him, toward the very back, their heads occasionally leaning delicately toward each other, one woman’s mouth to the other woman’s ear. They were carrying on a silent conversation. No one else saw them, certainly no one heard them. Ignatius had learned to move at a funeral, had learned to sense the pauses that allowed one to stretch, to change places unnoticed. He slipped into the pew just behind the two women, and continued to watch the eulogy intently, while he listened to the conversation.
The graying woman said, “Of course there was no viewing.”
The thin woman said, “They’re calling it an accident. But how could it possibly be an accident?”
“Perhaps to a younger person, such an accident could happen.”
“You don’t just get crushed by a grandfather clock by accident.”
“At two o’clock in the morning.”
They shook their heads.
The graying woman continued, “There was a noise in the house. Charlie went downstairs to check it out. There was a terrible crash. Marilyn heard Charlie scream, she heard the chimes. Then it went quiet. She went downstairs and found him. His spine was broken. How could an eighty-three-year-old man do that to himself?”
“She must have been terrified.”
“She called the police. But there was nobody there. The police didn’t find anybody.”
They sighed.
The thin woman said, “It must have been terrible for her to find him like that.”
“He was still alive. He lived for two more days. But he never came out of the coma.”
“It must have been terrible for her.”
“Well, especially since . . .”
The thin woman nodded. She said, “I don’t know how I would deal with it, on the one hand hating the man, on the other hand . . .”
“He was her husband. And for it to end this way . . .”
“But on the other hand, he was eighty-three years old. She wasn’t going to divorce him. He lived a full life. It’s for the best now. Maybe certain people can put certain things to rest.”
“I don’t know. I don’t think it works that way. Sometimes its harder to find closure once they’re dead. Certain things need to be said to their face.”
“No, you’re right. It’s terrible. A shame, no matter how you look at it.”
The two fell silent for the rest of the service, but Ignatius slipped out at the next lull that allowed him to disappear unnoticed. He knew what he had to do next.
Chapter 10
The cemetery was cold. The sky was clear and starry and the moon shone brightly, rising full over the headstones and the trees as the sun set. The night of the burial Ignatius had felt the wicked vibrations in the mound of earth covering the fresh grave of Charles L. Mather. He had heard the frantic scratching and the gnawing and disgorging noises. Now, two nights later, the signs were strong and loud enough to conclude that Bishop Mather would indubitably emerge soon.
Ignatius waited patiently if tensely. He sat next to the grave on the small fold-out canvass chair he had brought with him for the occasion, with his bag of tools resting on his lap. Once he could actually see the earth starting to move, he would calmly remove the machete and move back a safe distance, wait for the gaping mouthed, gasping, filthy thing to push up.
If Ignatius was a bit more nervous than usual, it was because the death and return of Charles L. Mather signified a disturbing missing piece in the puzzle of Jack McKay. Mather had been McKay’s bishop twenty years ago at the time of his suicide. And only now, as Ignatius investigated the life and death of McKay, Mather was murdered. That it was murder Ignatius was certain, once he had confirmed through the police department the circumstances surrounding Mather’s death.
Ignatius wished he could question Mather about McKay. The possibility was always tantalizing. Of course such questioning was forbidden if it was not futile. Revenants were mounds of rotting flesh and bone and clotted blood held together by ego or anger or lust. Their perceptions of the world of the living were rarely based on a sophisticated analysis of things, usually only on whatever warped memories fired their obsessions. As a revenant Mather would unlikely be able to understand simple questions, much less give meaningful answers about a chapter of his life that ended twenty years ago. Or, Ignatius wondered, had it ended? But even if such intercourse were possible, Samael had emphatically forbidden it under any circumstance. The rebellious dead were liars, and giving them any such credence as was implied by interrogating them was a path to deception and diabolism, and would be a serious betrayal of the Call.
While mulling over thoughts such as this, Ignatius was suddenly distinctly aware that he was not alone in the cemetery. He immediately stood up and turned. He squinted at the shadows behind trees and headstones, but he saw no one in the dim light.
He felt a sharp, sudden pain shoot through him, through his whole body, emanating from his skull to the balls of his heels. He was barely aware of what happened to him next. He didn’t remember falling, though he must have. He had disjointed memories later, he couldn’t remember in what order, of being dragged roughly, his head bumping and bouncing. He remembered many pairs of filthy hands grabbing him, rifling him, stripping his clothes off him. He remembered the dim light of the stars above being blocked out by a crowd of heads peering down at him, terrible heads covered in bloated, discolored flesh, terrible rotted out eye sockets staring at him. He remembered the stench.
This couldn’t be happening to him, he had thought at the time, he had never encountered any smart enough to catch him by surprise, much less work in concert.
When he first regained something of his senses, he was unable to see anything but darkness, and his first sensation was of stifling and being squashed by something heavy sitting on top of him, something that was leaning laboriously this way and that and alternately crushing his chest and his stomach as it did. He couldn’t move any of his limbs. He could barely breathe. His neck was twisted and his head was facing to the side. He moaned and slowly turned his head, trying to look up. He saw the stars, brighter this time, but circumscribed by a great darkness and blocked out from time to time by whatever swollen thing was straddling him. He gradually realized that he was at the bottom of a pit.
He heard a voice speaking as if from a great distance, he realized from outside the pit. It was a high-pitched, reedy voice.
“Be careful to do exactly as I told you,” it said, “We don’t want to kill him yet.”
The thing squatting on top of him shook its head and grunted.
“Good girl,” said the voice.
There was terrible pain emanating from Ignatius’ limbs, washing through his whole body in repetitive waves.
“Do you know what they used to do to souls who returned to their bodies in the Middle Ages?” continued the voice, “They would stake them to the ground so they couldn’t move. Can you imagine? Being pinned to the ground for eternity?”
There was a cacophony of groans and cackles. Ignatius peered upward, and he could see the shadows of heads now, peering over the edge of the pit, watching. He panicked as he tried to move again. He had no feeling in any of his limbs but his right arm. He thought he was moving his right hand, his fingers. He made a Herculean effort and found himself suddenly able to lift his arm. Immediately, the thing on top of him howled in anger and shoved his arm back down. He felt something sharp jabbing into his wrist. He felt the thing grope around for something. He saw it raise something heavy in the air. It smashed down and he felt a violent jolt of pain shoot up his right arm, and felt his hand go completely numb. Everything went black.
He awoke to a repetitive, painful banging. It was a rain of dirt and stones. He could see more clearly now. He was alone at the bottom of the pit, unable to move. Above him around the edge of the pit he saw perhaps a dozen dark figures flailing their arms, weaving back and forth. The rain of earth was coming from them.
He heard the voice again. “He thinks we do not feel, that we have no concept of justice, that we are not human. But it is for our feeling, our thirst for justice, our very humanness that we are here. This is our nature.”
Ignatius tried to speak, but his voice was squashed. He could barely breath. He cleared his throat, he coughed. He finally hissed, “Help! God, help! Samael!”
Earth continued to fall.
“You think we had no faith like you? You think we did not call for God to help us too?” the voice said.
A big clod of mud landed in his face unexpectedly. The filth blinded him. He could only shake his head and spit and cough.
Blinded, he saw a kind of aura, like the afterglow one sees from staring for a long time at a bright light and then closing one’s eyes. Ignatius realized it was not some optical impression, it was a perception of real light shining somewhere, the same color of light he had seen when he received the keys of the kingdom from Samael. The more he opened his mind to it, the more clearly he could see it. He focused his view upward. Below was blackness but above he could see everything clearly now, the sky a kind of amber hue and the stars blazing, every color of the rainbow. He saw the beings perched above him too around the black edges of the pit, sharp and distinct. He saw the rage in their faces. They were glowing different colors too, like the stars. And behind them he saw the cyclopean trunk and the branches of flame rising up into heaven. The sword of God.
At first Ignatius wondered if he were crossing over, but he remembered Samael’s words, “Your eyes are open to dimensions that were invisible to you before.” He wondered, “Did I have this power all along, but only now am using it?”
“I can see you,” whispered Ignatius, “Let me go.”
He looked around the circle of faces. He saw an emerald spirit, a feminine face with a strong jaw, piercing eyes, determined lips. “Mother?” he thought. For an uncanny moment he wondered again if he was passing over and his mother had come to greet him. But then she moved. He saw her big hands reaching downward to scoop up darkness from the edge of the pit and toss it down at him. As soon as she moved the spell was broken.
“Jo, is that you?” he cried, “It’s me, it’s your uncle Nate!”
She paused to study him for a moment, but then scooped up more darkness and hurled it down.
“Jo, this isn’t a place for you. You should have moved on.”
He heard the voice again. “The only way for him to see is for him to cross over.”
There was a rain of darkness from the spirits above, and Ignatius realized he was being buried alive.
He looked upward at the pillar of flame.
“You can use the sword of God,” Samael had told him.
Ignatius focused on it now. It seemed to be growing in intensity, burning from gold to white. Occasionally it sent out a blinding white flare. “This way!” Ignatius thought, “Come here.” The pillar of fire shivered slightly, and the branches of flame bent just perceptibly toward him. A bolt of fire surged upward out of the base of the pillar, directly toward him. There was a blinding flash, and howls of dismay. The spirits scattered. There came another flare, more scattering, disappearing into the blackness until there was silence.
Ignatius shook his head. He coughed and spat. His eyes watered as he struggled to open them. His vision was blurry at first. He found himself alone in the dark again at the bottom of an open grave, half covered in dirt, unable to move. He was numb. He felt an overwhelming urge to sleep. He was cold.
In the face of death, he was surprised to find himself indifferent. “I’ll just die here,” he thought.
He heard ethereal singing. Like feathers on a gentle breeze, he saw descending winged beings with no heads, no feet, only arms reaching downward to him. They wafted toward the earth without touching down. They moved with unearthly grace.
He wondered if they had arrived to accompany his spirit in the passing over. But one stretched a wing out over his heart, filling his body with succulent warmth. Another drew the stakes in his feet and wrists painlessly out, never touching them, only singing to them. Another whirled above him, raising him slowly out of the grave. The last poured sweet liquid out of a bright vial into his mouth. All the time they sang a shrill, supernal song.
Achy strength returned to his limbs. He could move. He precipitated himself toward the earth. He scrambled over the mud around the pit and tumbled onto the grass. He was naked. He curled into a ball, looking around. He saw his trousers lying on the damp ground near by. He crawled over to them and pulled them on. His whole body hurt. There was silence. The winged beings were gone, vanished as if they had never been.
There were hideous scars on his wrists and feet. He touched them. In the moonlight he noticed the name on the headstone of the empty grave in front of him: Charles L. Mather.
Chapter 11
Ignatius retreated home. He locked himself in his bathroom, undressed and examined his scars again while he took a hot bath. His mind told him he belonged in a hospital after the injuries he had sustained. At the very least, he needed rest. But he lied in bed unable to sleep. His body was not tired. He wondered about the unnatural healing he had received from the Ministering Angels. Might it be that they would not allow him to die? Was he losing touch with the natural cycles of life?
Ignatius closed his eyes and tried to see through his eyelids as he had in the cemetery, when he’d been blinded by the revenants. He saw his room now, bathed in a strange light, physical objects like his desk and chairs, the bed frame and the walls and floor and ceiling dark like shadows, and the spaces in between filled with a shimmering green light. He opened his eyes and saw the room through physical eyes again, dimly lit by the morning sun leaking through the drawn blinds. He closed his eyes, to see his room in the spirit light again.
“I don’t want to see that any more,” he thought, and suddenly the second sight was gone. He was safe in the darkness under his eyelids.
He realized he could see the spirit light at will, turn it on and off. It was almost as if he had a second set of eyelids, spirit eyelids, he could open and close. Then he opened his physical eyes, and realized he could still see the other world without closing his eyes. It was a mere matter of consciously shifting perception, like learning to see through an optical illusion. He had not seen the spirit world before, because he had not known he could. By pressing him to the extremity of needing to see with his physical eyes closed, the revenants had forced him to open his spiritual eyes.
Ignatius wondered if he could see through objects. He stared at the glowing numbers on the alarm clock on his dresser. He tried to see through the face of the clock, but he could not. But by stretching his perception, he seemed to unfold it. It looked like turning a kaleidoscope, except that instead of round and round the clock turned inside out, back to front. He saw wires and transistors popping out of the front of the clock as if it had exploded. He looked at his hand, tried the trick again, and watched blood and veins and muscle pop out and then bone and then darkness from inside the bone. It was a disturbing sight. Things did not keep the natural spatial or proportional relationships of optics. It was something like entering a Salvador Dali painting, like tripping through Alice’s looking glass.
It occurred to Ignatius the “unfolding” vision was how he had managed to see the “valley of bones” in the cemetery, when Samael granted him the keys of the kingdom. It was a useful gift for someone charged with knowing what is happening inside a grave, he thought. But why he hadn’t been granted the gift much earlier? His whole life had been futile without such powers. But on the other hand, he realized, human concepts of time and efficiency were mostly irrelevant to Samael, for whom a thousand human years was like a day. “Am I being transfigured into an angel?” he wondered.
He focused now on the strange light in the room. He saw patterns, splendid waves and arcs and spheres of energy in what he used to think of as empty spaces. He studied the patterns. He could see electricity cascading through lines behind his walls. There was a dim light coming from him, from his body. He turned on the radio on his bed stand and saw a stunning dance of strange light. He wondered, could he see light beyond the normal visible spectrum, electricity, radio waves, magnetism, radiation? He was suddenly aware of how invisible energies bounced off of or shimmered around or passed through physical things, the way they connected all things he had assumed disconnected.
He stared at the space now, at the nothing filled by the light. “What would happen if I unfold the space the way I can unfold things?” he wondered.
No sooner had he made the mental effort than he saw spirits. “Are there spirits all around me?” he wondered, “and only now I am seeing them?” And he tried unfolding the space in between the spirits, and the first spirits disappeared but he saw more, new spirits unfolding out of that space. He tried again and found more and more spirits unfolding out of the ether while the last ones folded into it. He tried it again and again. And he could do it backwards, go back to the first spirits he saw by folding space back. It was like tuning channels on a radio, finding different frequencies of the spirit world. And there seemed to be no end to the number of frequencies.
He watched the spirits. They were clearly involved in some kind of drama. He could only see them. He could not hear them. It was like watching television with the sound turned off.
“Enough of that,” he thought. He closed his spirit eyes. He was plunged again into the darkness of his bedroom. But all illusion of solitude had been shattered. The world was crowded with spirits. All thought of sleep fled from him. He got up and dressed. He had no appetite so he only drank a glass of juice and caught the next bus to downtown.
At the library he sat down in the newspaper section and began to read the obituaries. He was terribly thirsty, so much so he shook. He found a water fountain and drank, and then removed the cup from the empty thermos in his bag and filled it with water and returned to his seat. He spread out the obituaries in front of him and began to read again.
His mind wandered. He read the same entry for a man named “Gabriel King” six times. He would read and lose his train of thought and read again. He was ruminating on the spirits, wondering about them, and he unconsciously opened his spirit eyes and saw himself surrounded by them again. One of the spirits flashed just as he was picking up his cup for a drink, and his hand trembled violently scattering water onto the newspaper.
He looked down at the paper and noticed the water had darkened certain words. He read down the page:
NOT ... NIGHT ... RED ... THE ... CAUGHT ... STEAL ... BOUGHT ... BATTLE ... EVERY ... ONE ... ORANGE ... KING
He read from the bottom of the page up, and thought how it actually made an odd sentence if some the words were spelled slightly differently:
King Orange ‘won’ every battle ‘but’ ‘still’ caught the red ‘knight’ not.
It made sense to read the words in reverse since the sentence they formed described a kind of reverse. And the misspelled words carried possible double meanings: at ‘one’ battle the red knight ‘bought’ his escape and ‘stole’ away by ‘night.’
If it was a message it didn’t make much sense. If it was related to current events, why the mysterious references to ‘King Orange’ and ‘the red knight’? Yet, he was intrigued.
He turned the page of the newspaper, held out his glass of water and relaxed his arm. He watched the spirits flitting, hovering, and dancing back and forth. He noticed another glimmer this time, less powerful than the last. His hand trembled again and a few drops fell onto the page. He studied the words they had moistened:
Eclipse of the fourth bright one
He turned the page and made the experiment again:
Unite the factions
He hadn’t noticed before how the spirits radiated a kind of energy in waves and flashes. He had focused on their movements, their gestures, and the motion of their faces. But now he realized he hadn’t ‘heard’ the spirits before because he hadn’t known how to ‘listen.’
He left the library and purchased stacks of newspapers and bottles of ink. He returned home and sat down at his kitchen table and poured the ink into cups of water so the stains would remain on the page even after the water dried. Then he watched the spirits, turning page after page, holding the cup outstretched with one arm until it tired and then holding it with the other arm, trembling at each flash of energy, watching the sentences form from the drops of water falling on the paper.
Spirits came and went. He continued, filling all the papers with little blue dots, and then went out and bought another armload of papers and more ink, and continued again until late into the night. Sometimes he had to read the page from bottom to top or from right to left to find the phrase. Sometimes it made sense to read it several different ways. Sometimes he would find one larger word formed from several smaller words or letters. Sometimes the drops fell on an image or a symbol.
The messages that dribbled onto page after page were mostly as baffling as the first, with no context, such as:
Sent down to the lower places there is not enough
The meeting is at six moon
Travel by my fire
He was intrigued by a number of messages regarding a trial:
The trial is offensive to supreme majesty now Aug. has defected it has become dangerous
And:
The middles are taking notice of the trial it is no good
There were certain characters that came up repeatedly. He learned more about “King Orange” and his war against “the Red Knight,” about the massacres of “ten thousands of ten thousand souls,” of “the nineteen eclipses” and “the plague of worlds.” He also occasionally encountered word of “King Eats who watches” and “the sixteen all” and “King Ever” and “the eighty-one doors.”
But finally, at some thin hour between midnight and sunrise, he came upon a message:
The reprobate McKay will be dealt with there is a watch
He sat up and stared aghast at the spirits. He turned the page. The next message was:
The trial will be stopped
And then:
The fourth sun song will be
Ignatius s