Chapter 1: Ignatius Wick
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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. There was no mirror in his bathroom, he washed and shaved without one. 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 worked 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 trench coat and a fedora, put his Bible into his briefcase, and walked to a nearby bus stop. 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.

He usually took the bus downtown to the public library, where he spent the morning studying the papers, reading microfiche, and scribbling in a notebook he kept in his briefcase. The reference librarians knew his favorite reading was the obituaries, though anything tinged with death caught his attention. He took an interest in violent crime, freak accidents, terminal illness. He was an expert on the public record of lives extinguished untimely. He studied the technical aspects of different causes of death. When he did not go to the library, he usually took the bus to one of several cemeteries, where he ambled among the plots and studied the graves and markers. Cemetery custodians throughout the city knew to expect him right after a recent burial.

Ignatius had given his life to a singular Call. That he accepted the Call freely, that it was his own choice, there was no question in his mind, if only because of the sheer effort of will it required. He had had to struggle incessantly against the desires of the flesh and it had cost him dearly. It had left him soul weary. Sometimes it was hard to tell anymore whether his devotion derived from fear or hunger. Perhaps both. The Angel was always testing him. Perhaps Ignatius doubted his worthiness and was always trying to prove himself. Or did it give him a sense of power? Perhaps he cultivated some kind of perverse pleasure from it. Could that be a sin too? Angelic tests were tricky things, not easy to fathom. Perhaps the Call was not possible for a human being to be worthy of. But he had given himself to it nonetheless and it formed the sum of his existence. He did not know it, but it was all about to end.

Chapter 2: Samael
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Ignatius was born in 1922, 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 Ignatius was born. He had two paternal aunts and two 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. In childhood he was excluded from their circle because he was a boy but also because he was several years younger than them. The main sort of attention they paid him was teasing. He was closer to his youngest sister Anne. He had been the first to hold Anne after Father brought her and Mother home from the hospital. He had fussed because he wanted to hold her first, and his sister Margaret had pushed him aside and said, “Nate’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.” Ignatius named her “Baby Doll” because she was so tiny. He had been amazed at how all five of her miniature fingers wrapped around one of his eight-year-old fingers. He helped his 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, laughter, warm food, and bedtime 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 scrupulous punishments, and tempted them into good behavior with tasty homemade rewards. She read them stories from a big children’s Bible storybook. Ignatius had never been so happy as a child as curled up against her chest while she read to him. At night she would tuck him in bed and kiss him good night and whisper in his ear, “I love you, Buttercup.” His father worked from sunrise to sunset, but Ignatius remembered his mother 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. Ignatius once asked her, “How come you work all the time?” and she replied, “Life is work, Buttercup.”

Ignatius’ 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 sprawling himself on the kitchen floor drawing pictures, while his aunties sat around the big kitchen table talking, knitting or cutting cookies. He remembered his Auntie Georgina or 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. One of his most vivid memories was going to the state fair with Auntie Geraldine and his Auntie Roberta the summer his mother started getting sick with the cancer. He was spoiled because they each bought him ice cream.

In the last months of his mother’s life, Auntie Georgina and Auntie Wilhelmina took care of his sisters, leaving Ignatius with his father. “A boy should be with his father,” Georgina had said, but he was lonely with Father. Ernest Wick had no comfort to offer his boy. Ignatius did not realize it was because he was so drained by the effort of mastering his emotions and putting on a good front while his wife was dying in the hospital, so he interpreted it as blame. Ignatius would lie awake at night thinking how his mother was wasting away, his child’s conscience blaming himself and the family for wearing 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 consumed him. Ignatius wondered if Father wouldn’t waste away too like Mother had. He should have helped more around the house, he thought. He believed it had been his own lack of commitment to blame when she died. He was twelve years old.

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, the man had vanished. Ignatius asked his sisters, 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.

Ignatius returned every day to his mother’s grave. His mother had been a great believer in prayer. She had always taught Ignatius, “When there’s nothing left for you to do, you can always pray.” So every day when he stopped at his mother’s grave, he knelt on the spot where he had stood at her funeral and prayed. One day, while Ignatius knelt there praying, he saw one car followed by another and then another, and finally a long black hearse wending down the curving road into the heart of the cemetery. From a distance he saw the cars park, people getting out, old women assisted by young men, a priest, and pall bearers lifting a casket from the hearse. They assembled around a grave. He forgot his own worries for a moment and found himself wandering 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, white-haired man dressed 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.

Ignatius’ heart beat faster, his eyes locked on him. He waited for the right moment to do something, wondering what he would do when that moment came. Then he blinked, maybe, or looked another way for just a split second, and the man was suddenly gone. A terrible disappointment and frustration welled up in Ignatius. He glanced around, up and down the grounds surrounding the funeral party, looking for a man moving rapidly away, but he saw nothing. Then, 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.

“Hello,” said the man.

“You’re here!” whispered Ignatius.

“Why are you here?” asked the man, gently touching the crown of Ignatius’ head, and studying Ignatius’ face as he looked up.

“I miss her,” Ignatius replied, his eyes filling with tears.

“She’s not here anymore,” the man said.

“I know,” said Ignatius, “Everyone keeps saying, she’s in a better place now, she’s in a better place. But to me it’s not enough just to say that. I need to know.”

“You will know soon enough, Buttercup,” said the man.

Ignatius’ eyes grew wide in amazement. “Who are you?” he asked.

“A friend,” said the man.

“Are you an angel?” asked Ignatius.

The man only smiled. “From every death there is some good that unfolds, and you are the good unfolding from your mother’s death. The emptiness you feel is God making a place for himself to dwell in you. I have been sent to invite you to walk in the path of Heaven.”

Ignatius was weeping now, so the man knelt down and put his arm around him and hugged him, and said, “Yes, I am an angel. My name is Samael.”

“Can you tell me about my mother?”

Samael replied, “Meet me here on the first Tuesday after the next new moon, and I will tell you whatever the laws of Heaven permit about your mother.”

He kissed Ignatius on the forehead and stood up. By the time Ignatius wiped his eyes Samael had vanished. Ignatius looked up, and the sky seemed a deeper shade of blue, the sun a brighter gold, the clouds full of intricate light and dark like he’d never seen before. He shivered and the hair on his arms and on the back of his neck stood on end. As he slowly walked down the winding road out of the cemetery, the world seemed different.

Chapter 3: The Call
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Twilight of the first Tuesday after the next new moon, a young boy who had lost his mother, and with her everything that mattered to him, met a mysterious, powerful stranger at his mother’s grave. Samael was nothing like Ignatius had ever imagined an angel to be. He did not appear resplendent in the skies with outstretched wings or a halo; he did not have a voice like a trumpet. He might have assumed that shape or any shape if he’d wanted to, Ignatius thought. He seemed capable of altering his form to suit the circumstances, though something about him remained unchanging: that he was always black and white; certain angles in his visage and the timbre of his voice; a unique solemnity in his gestures. Though he had first appeared as a small, kindhearted grandfather, now Samael arrived with the twilight, hiding in the spaces between light and dark, large and clothed in shadow. He spoke in whispers, and his face was ashen and flinty like a mask of stone. He said, “Do not be afraid,” but meeting him was like meeting a panther in the jungle. It took getting used to.

When Samael met him, Ignatius noticed his little wristwatch seem to stop working, and start again only after Samael departed. The whole time they were together, the sun stayed frozen in the sky, the color of the sunset unchanging like a painting. The weather did not change and the wind did not blow. There were other people there, standing at a nearby grave, but they were like statues the entire time. Ignatius was never even aware of his own breath or the beating of his own heart, only the words Samael spoke to him.

Ignatius asked him, “Tell me about my Ma.”

Samael said, “Her memories of you keep her warm.”

And Ignatius asked, “Like what memories?”

He replied, “Like the time you cried because you accidentally crushed a cricket to death in your hands, running to show it to her. Or how you always asked her to read you the story of Joseph and his coat of many colors.”

“Have you talked to her?” Ignatius asked in amazement.

He replied, “No, but I’ve seen your mother in the spirit mansions. I can see the memories of the dead hovering over them like light hanging over the sunset.”

“Can Ma see me right now?” Ignatius asked.

Samael replied, “The veil between this world and the next is very thin.”

So on it went, question after question, until finally he had exhausted all that he could think of. After the last had been answered, the emptiness and anguish that he had temporarily forgotten rose up again, and he asked, “What if I think of another question?” And Samael replied, “Meet me here again on the first Tuesday after the next new moon.” So that is what Ignatius did.

When one was in the presence of the angel, reality seemed all twisted around. Time ran in a different course, perpendicular to its seeming normal flow. Space felt folded in, like one was simultaneously here and elsewhere. Everything, every hint, every shadow, every breath was suddenly filled with a thousand meanings. One felt like one had only ever grasped one thousandth of the significance of things, and now one saw it all in a single splendid view, and one finally understood everything. One felt charged with life and light.

And after the angel was gone, it all evaporated. The shadows returned. One felt stupid as ever, barely comprehending anything, much less everything. One was left feeling that one had been so close, on the verge of something so very important, of ultimate importance, but now it had slipped one’s mind. One wished fiercely to recall it all, but the harder one tried, the further away it slipped. And then one wondered, was it really real? Was it just imagination? And yet one remembered having been close to the fullness. One wanted to return to its presence.

Each time they met, Ignatius had new questions, or sometimes the same questions again. And always at the end of their visits, he felt empty, only comforted by the promise of a next time. And while they were apart, Ignatius thought only of his mother and of Samael. And he always, always came back, the twilight of the first Tuesday after every new moon. He never missed a meeting.

Ignatius always saw a glimmer of compassion in Samael’s eyes, though his face was stark and impassive. There seemed to be no limits on what he knew or could do. He answered all of Ignatius’ questions, and yet seemed only ever to tell but a fraction of what he knew. He told stories about Heaven and about Ignatius’ mother, and about the power and love of God. He was magical and powerful, and he became Ignatius’ special friend.

Ignatius’ father wondered about his devotion to his mother’s grave. “It doesn’t seem normal,” he told Auntie Georgina, “The boy needs to move on and get over his grieving.”

“Give him time,” she said.

But months and then a whole year passed, and Ignatius continued, every first Tuesday after the new moon. Gradually the questions about his mother and the place she had gone turned into questions about the nature of things, about the order of life and death, and the answers Samael offered took on the character of monthly lessons. Ignatius sometimes asked questions about verses he had read in the Bible, and Samael always answered with a kind of authority Ignatius had never heard from anyone before. Samael knew the Bible by heart, could quote any verse and cross-reference it to a dozen others without even a moment’s reflection. And he always knew the hidden meanings behind the verses, hinting at a greater mystery that transcended the Bible.

One Sunday, perhaps a year or so after the meetings with Samael had begun, Ignatius and his father and sisters gathered for dinner at Auntie Georgina’s. This had become their custom since Ignatius’ mother first went to the hospital well over two years ago. As Ignatius’ sisters were now living with their aunties, it was the only time Ignatius saw his sisters any more.

Auntie Georgina’s house was full of staircases and tall rooms and closets and wide windows letting in lots of light. It was always immaculate and the walls were all painted white, and Auntie Georgina kept dozens of potted flowers in every room so it was like a great indoor garden. She had had three children, two boys and a girl. They were all grown up and gone now, but there were pictures of them in different nooks of the house. Ignatius used to run around the house while Auntie Georgina prepared dinner, hiding in different places, studying the bookshelves, the pictures and the knickknacks.

Dinner was consumed at a big table in Auntie Georgina’s big, airy dining room. She sat at the head of the table, and dished big servings of food onto everyone’s plates, with an extra big heap for Ignatius’ father, Ernest.

After dinner, the girls ran upstairs, while Georgina cleared off the table and Ernest went to sit in the drawing room and read the paper. Ignatius helped his auntie with the dishes for a while, until she shooed him out of the kitchen. “A boy should play on a Sunday afternoon,” she said, “Go find your sisters.”

Ignatius left the kitchen. He walked through the drawing room, where his father had already nodded off in the armchair, the newspaper fallen onto the floor. It was the way Ignatius often saw him. He walked down the hall and then up the stairs to the second floor. He had no interest in finding his sisters, but there was a study next to Auntie Georgina’s bedroom with lots of old books that had belonged to her husband. He was opening the door to the study when he clearly heard a voice from the bedroom say: “She will let us speak to Mother.”

His little sister Anne was crying, “Don’t do it! Don’t do it!”

Margaret said, “No one asked you to tag along with us anyway, baby!”

Helen said, “It’ll be all right, I promise. Don’t you want to talk to Mother?”

Ignatius pushed open the door, and found his sisters sitting in a semi-circle in front of the full-length mirror in Auntie Georgina’s bedroom. The lights were turned out, and he saw the girls in silhouette in front of the drawn window curtains.

“What are you doing?” he demanded.

“Close the door,” said Christine, “and we’ll tell you.”

He cautiously stepped inside and closed the door, but remained standing as far away as possible.

“What are you doing?” he insisted.

The three older girls looked at each other and then Helen spoke up, “We’re having a séance.”

“What’s that?” asked Ignatius.

“I learned it from the girls at school,” said Christine, “We turn off all the lights, hold hands in front of the mirror, and say ‘Bloody Mary’ three times. Then Bloody Mary appears in the mirror and we can talk to her, and she can let us talk to Mother.”

“It’s too scary!” cried Anne, “Nate, tell them not to do it!”

“That doesn’t sound like something you should be doing on a Sunday afternoon,” said Ignatius.

“What harm can there be in it?” said Helen, “And wouldn’t you like to talk to Mother again?”

Ignatius hesitantly walked to the edge of the circle. “Make room for me,” he said. He took Anne’s hand and sat down next to her. “Don’t be afraid, Anne,” he said.

They held hands. “Keep your eyes on the mirror,” said Christine. Margaret giggled. “This isn’t funny!” said Christine, “Everyone has to focus and say it together, without laughing.” She took a deep breath. Helen breathed deeply too, and then so did Margaret, swallowing and gasping for air. Ignatius kept perfectly still. He soothed Anne, who was still sniffling but quiet. “Everyone on the count of three. One, two, three.”

“Bloody Mary,” they said, “Bloody Mary. Bloody Mary.”

They all stared at the mirror.

“Are you sure we’re doing it right?” asked Margaret.

“It worked when I did it with the girls at school. Perhaps someone here doesn’t believe hard enough,” sniffed Christine, looking at Ignatius.

But that night, after sunset, after Ignatius went home with his father, and after his father went to bed, Ignatius got up. He went to the bathroom and peered into the mirror, studying his reflection, fuzzy in the half-light. He looked awkward and pale and had dark rings under his eyes. He had never thought of himself as an attractive boy, only she saw him that way.

“Bloody Mary,” he said, “Bloody Mary. Bloody Mary.”

His reflection shimmered. It was like an optical trick, like the afterimage one sees from staring too long at something. But gradually he saw the silhouette of a woman’s head. He thought he could make out long, stringy hair, a bony neck and shoulders, and a dark smile.

“I want to talk to my mother,” he said.

She vanished, but in the reflection of the bath behind him, he could see things rising up. He spun around and saw the white porcelain tub peaceful and empty. But when he turned back to the mirror he could see smoky faces, then hands, arms, torsos, and thighs unfolding out of it and then the ethereal bodies wafting upward to the ceiling or floating across the bathroom past him through the door into the house. Outside of the mirror he could see nothing, but he shivered and the hair on his arms stood up as the spirits brushed past his reflection. Gradually a spirit rose out of the bathtub, pale, gaunt, hair thinning, eyes staring at him from receding sockets, sweaty and clammy-looking. It was his mother like she had been in the last days of her life.

“Mother? Is that you?” he cried.

She only stared in silence.

“Mother, speak to me!”

She glared icily and then vanished.

Ignatius howled with anguish, tears bursting from his eyes. He ran up the stairs to his room. He pushed the door shut and retreated to his bed, cowering in the corner with his knees under his chin and his arms wrapped around his shins. He could see nothing, but he could feel the ice-cold breath of the spirits rasping in his ears, their frosty fingers brushing against his elbows and shins making him shiver uncontrollably. He heard the tick, tick of the wind-up clock on his dresser stop, the hands on the face pointing to three minutes after one.

“What have I done?” he whispered.

He huddled there for how long he could not tell, though it must have been several hours. Gradually he stopped shivering and his body relaxed. He dozed off. He woke up, hoping it had been a terrible dream, but the clock on his dresser was still frozen. He crawled stiffly out of bed, opened the door and wandered down the stairs into the kitchen. The clock there said nine minutes past five. He avoided the bathroom. He felt horrible. He returned to his bedroom and knelt down next to his bed with his arms on the mattress. He bowed his head to his clasped hands in front of him to pray. He drowsed again. After seven, his father found him prostrate, draped over the side of his bed.

“Nate, what are you doing?” he said from the doorway, “It’s time for school.”

In the weeks that followed, Ignatius was plagued by nightmares of his mother. He felt guilty. It seemed like an eternity until his next meeting with Samael. He arrived at the cemetery well before twilight, and knelt, trembling, in prayer. Finally, as the sun began to set, he felt Samael’s hand on his shoulder. Ignatius wept, “I need to know what has happened to my mother!”

Samael asked what had happened. Words disjointedly tumbling out underneath the sobbing, Ignatius recounted the whole story. “It was like she was angry at me, like something terrible had happened and it was my fault!”

Samael listened coolly to the entire account. Finally, when Ignatius had finished his story and had nothing left but more tears, Samael said simply, “It is a deception.”

Ignatius looked up at him, “What do you mean?”

“It is easy for evil spirits to take different forms and to deceive the living. That is why intercourse between the living and the dead is forbidden.”

“You mean that was not my mother?”

“No,” said Samael, his face impassive as ever.

After that, Ignatius took a renewed interest in learning what Samael could teach him about this world and the next. Each lesson Samael gave was like a piece of a ten-thousand-piece picture puzzle. The first few pieces were from different sides of the puzzle, seemingly with no relation to one another. Then, eventually, after many pieces had fallen down, a first piece fit with another piece, and gradually another to another, and so on, until a cluster of pieces fit to another cluster and finally a frame began to emerge. The pieces from the edges of the picture puzzle were bright, soft, and mysterious, but the pieces from the center were dark, angular, and frightening. And always the middle of puzzle remained the part where the fewest pieces fit.

Samael said, “From the perspective of mortality, life is harsh. Divine justice is exacting. The cosmos can seem cruel. But there is mercy even in cruelty. There is a greater good moving behind it all. Only wait to see the whole.”

Years passed, and as Ignatius entered adolescence, certain questions began to take on greater urgency. Samael told him, “Now that you are approaching manhood, you are ready for certain mysteries that I could not teach you when you were still a child. But it will require discipline.” Ignatius asked what discipline, and Samael explained the rules on how to tame the flesh.

“You will find certain things extremely pleasurable, but you must understand that God has reserved these things for a particular purpose. Unless you are fulfilling that purpose, the pleasures are forbidden to you, and you must not partake of them. If you do so, you will defile yourself.”

“What does ‘defile’ mean?”

“When you are in my presence, how do you feel?”

“I feel happy. I feel calm.”

“You feel a kind of warmth and clarity inside?”

“Yes!”

“And how do you feel when you are no longer in my presence?”

“Lonely.”

“You no longer feel quite as happy or calm, quite as warm or clear as when you are with me?”

“No.”

“Now keep in mind that even when I am gone, you are actually given a portion of the divine glory that I carry in me, so whatever loneliness or coldness or stupor you feel is not even a fraction of what you might feel if the glory were completely withdrawn. Now consider that the more defiled a being is, the more incapable he is of receiving even a portion of the divine glory. Indeed, instead of feeling joy or clarity in my presence, the more defiled you were, the more you would feel uncomfortable, the more you would find my presence a sheer torment. ‘Defile’ means to make impure, and God cannot tolerate anything impure.”

“How do I keep myself pure then?”

“Your flesh is always hungry. It always wants. It lusts. Just as you feel a certain warmth and clarity in my presence, when the flesh asserts itself, when it makes its demands, you will feel a certain urgency, sometimes to the point of nausea. In order to remain pure, you must never give in to it. You must show that you, that your spirit, are master of it.”

“How do I do that?”

“When the hunger comes you will know to resist. If you are attentive, you will learn the means to tame it yourself.”

Ignatius’ father began to notice that his son was going to sleep fully clothed, with all the lights in his room turned on. He repeatedly found him late at night or early in the morning, asleep in his room, leaning against the headboard with an open Bible tumbled onto his lap, or kneeling at his bedside in a posture of prayer, with his face fallen into the mattress. He would nudge Ignatius into bed and turn the light off, over the boy’s protests.

At Sunday dinner, Georgina noticed a decline in appetite. “A growing boy should eat more!” she said, but Ignatius refused.

“Does he have friends?” Georgina asked Ernest Wick afterwards.

“Just because the boy’s not outgoing,” he replied, “Doesn’t mean something’s wrong with him.”

“He’s just never gotten over the loss of his mother,” she shook her head, “He seems so serious, so sad.”

But Ignatius was not sad, and he was not mourning. He felt a sense of purpose. Often he did feel lonely in school, but it was only because his classmates seemed preoccupied with frivolous things and led aimless lives. He had found a new purpose: to gain the discipline needed to open gates to the mysteries. So he painstakingly followed the rule Samael had given him. He rose early in the morning, and when the alarm clock rang, he forced himself to his feet before the flesh could tempt him back. He knelt on the hard wood floor in the middle of the room instead of leaning on his bed, to avoid falling asleep, and then he sat on a hard wood chair and read from the Bible, a chapter a day, taking notes to remind himself of Angel Samael’s teaching. The thing that most gave him pleasure was to hear Samael tell him at each meeting, “You have progressed.”

Samael taught him the truths that ordinary mortals could not live with, beginning with the literal existence of the Garden of Eden and the Tree of Life, hidden from the sight of ordinary mortals, and still guarded by the Angel with the Sword of God from those who would steal its fruit and destroy the divine order. Ignatius the young man steeled himself to the parts of the truth that were not comforting, the parts that were softened by silk-tongued pastors to keep their followers sleeping easily. He remembered the Bible stories his mother had read him as a child, with their simple morals and happy endings, and he felt embarrassed at having been so easily lulled into a blind complacency by their half-truths. He embraced the new teaching with zeal.

Nine years after Ignatius first met Samael, he was no longer a boy of twelve, but a young man of twenty-one. At the age of twenty, Ignatius had moved into his own apartment, and gotten a part-time job at a gelatin factory while he went to college. He didn’t speak to his father anymore; the man had become more and more impossible the older he got. He rarely saw his aunties or his sisters either; now that he lived on his own, he didn’t attend Sunday dinners at Auntie Georgina’s any more, and his aunties had gone from worrying about him to giving up hope on him entirely.

But Samael became a kind of god to him, though he was unfailingly told: “There is but one God, worship Him alone.” The lessons continued and new, terrible pieces fell into place in the picture puzzle of the cosmos. And finally fell a piece with Ignatius’ image in it. Ignatius no longer pursued the teaching only to win the approval of his mentor Samael. He understood where he belonged in the order of things.

Ignatius understood how God, the first cause at the center of the cosmos, had only half-created all things, how thrones and dominions, archangels and angels and eventually prophets and ordinary Called ones who had received emanations of His will through the hierarchy he had ordered might participate in the completion of creation. “God is all-powerful, but He has given free will to the spirits he has created, so they might choose to join in creation with Him. God has delegated to angels the realm beneath the Throne and above the Heavens, and to man the realm beneath the Heavens and higher than Hell. Each has a role and a responsibility in the great chain of being that none can usurp. But many have sided with chaos against the divine order. So, now it is time for you to choose sides, and to learn your role in the war between order and chaos.”

Ignatius’ eyes filled with tears. “Of course I will side with God. I want to learn of the Call.”

Samael explained: “There is a gateway between life and death, and you must be the guardian of it. Before you can begin, you must receive the proper keys. Do you wish to receive them?”

“I do,” said Ignatius.

“You should understand, before you say yes,” replied Samael, “that once you accept the keys, there is no turning back. There is woe unto those who are offered the keys and refuse them, but even greater woe unto those who accept them and fail to be worthy of them.”

“Knowing what I know,” said Ignatius, “I have no choice but to accept the keys and be worthy.”

“You have made the right choice,” said Samael.

He placed his hands on the head of Ignatius, who was already kneeling. “By the power vested in me by the almighty God . . .” He continued to speak, but Ignatius’ ears filled with a terrible roar like thunder on the ocean, his whole body vibrated with an electric warmth, and he lost his vision, blinded by an intense white light.

When Ignatius came back to himself, he was lying on his back totally relaxed, looking up into the darkening sky. Samael, looming above him, said, “You now have the keys. When we meet next, your training in the Call will begin.”

Ignatius’ eyes filled with tears. He closed them tight for a moment and Samael disappeared into the twilight shadows, and the sun continued to set.

Chapter 4: The Returners
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At Samael’s bidding, Ignatius began to frequent cemeteries in the city at night. The Angel had instructed him to sit for long hours, to watch and listen, to learn the ordinary sights and sounds of a grave yard so that he would easily recognize the unordinary. “Walk and stand on the earth with your bare feet,” Samael had told him, “feel it with your bare hands. Press your ear against the ground and listen.”

“Your Call,” Samael told Ignatius, “is to keep watch over the dead, and to send back any who have crossed the wrong way over the divide between the worlds.”

Ignatius repeated back, “Watch the dead? Send back any who have crossed? Ghosts?”

“If what you mean by ghosts are disembodied shadows, then the answer is no,” replied Samael, “You cannot dispel these, because these dead spirits have not crossed back into your world; they merely peek through in places where the veil has worn thin. But there is an older sense of that word ‘ghost,’ from the twilight of the last dispensation, when the English language was young and its users more discerning of the boundaries between life and death. The word ‘ghost’ once referred to a cadaver from which the spirit had departed but in which it has usurped a corporeal existence, through which it walks in the world of the living. You might call them ‘revenants’ or ‘returners,’ since they have entered back in rather than hovering about the edges, like the things you call ‘ghosts’ do. These returners are not merely shadows, they have physical form and agency in this world, and must be sent back.”

“You are saying there are such things as walking cadavers?”

“Yes.”

Samael told Ignatius, “Spirit has the power to organize matter, bringing the flesh into being. This was the very principle of creation, from the eternity before time, when the Spirit of God brooded over the face of the deep, over the chaos that Was before anything came into being. The flesh, what results when spirit enters into matter, cohabiting with it, opens up new avenues of knowledge. But matter has a stultifying, intoxicating effect on spirit, obliterating memory and distorting desire into aimless lust and obsession. After death some spirits go mad and return to their flesh. The only way to stop them is to destroy their temple.”

“Destroy their temple?” asked Ignatius.

The Angel replied, “There are many ways of accomplishing this, though it is best if nothing is left for the spirit to return to.”

“Nothing?”

“A spirit can return if there is even so much as a skeleton held together by a few ligaments. Dismemberment may be effective, but it is best to burn the body completely and scatter the ashes.”

“Dismemberment may be effective?”

“There have been cases of a spirit returning to a head, an arm, a severed torso. As long as the spirit occupies the flesh, the normal course of dissolution is suspended, and it can go on forever. Even if you burn a corpse, the spirit could cling to its ashes, and they would never decay any further than that, never be taken back by the elements, always remain inert and incorruptible.”

“Isn’t there some way to banish them, exorcise them without all that horror?”

“An exorcism can work only in the rarest of cases, only when a spirit can be subdued by the Word of God. But these spirits, the ones that return, are by definition the most rebellious. They must be forced. The flesh must be rendered so uninhabitable that they give up.”

“How do they have such power over the flesh?”

The Angel smiled. “You are blind to your own power. Consider how you breathe, how you speak, how you move!”

“Yes, but I am,” he stumbled for words, “limited to this body. I can’t control any other matter.”

“You could, if you had the keys. But you are correct, God has granted you only the keys to this flesh that you occupy now. The returners can only reoccupy the flesh to which God has given them the keys. Destroy the temple, leave not one stone standing upon the other, and they will relinquish.”

“Can’t God take away the keys?”

“There is nothing God cannot give or take away. But God will not. It has to do with his Word never going void, and other principles of Heaven I cannot presently reveal. God will not take them away, but one can surrender the keys, give them up of one’s own free will.”

“Give them up?”

“For instance, a suicide throws the keys away.”

“A suicide cannot return?”

“No, a suicide cannot return.”

“How can a mere mortal negate what God has decreed?”

“The power to negate God’s will is one of the defining aspects of the human will,” replied the Angel, “It is as God wills it.”

When he was nine or ten years old, before his mother had died, his Auntie Geraldine had taken him and his older sisters to see Bela Lugosi in Dracula and Boris Karloff in Frankenstein and later in The Mummy. Were the walking cadavers Samael spoke of like the ones in the movies?

Samael shot him an odd, piercing glance as the thoughts rumbled through his mind. “It is natural that in your culture there would be spoofs and fantasies of the living dead, based on old legends, guesses, or, even, observation. There is some truth in these depictions, but they lack spiritual insight.”

“So…” Ignatius felt queasy and uncertain. Till now, he had felt reasonably confident of his spiritual readiness for the call. But as words like “cadavers,” “dismemberment,” and “destroy” tumbled from the lips of Samael, it slowly dawned on him there was a physical aspect of this he was unprepared for. What if he failed the physical requirements? “Will I be required to fight?”

“Yes,” said Samael, “But like all else required by the Call, preparation is simply a matter of discipline and practice.”

“How can I practice that?”

“Remain attentive to the possibilities. A path will open up to you.”

Ignatius took Samael at his word, trusting that the way would become clear, and the next day at work, he found himself reading the bulletin board next to the punch clock of the gelatin factory where he worked, and found a posting for a position at a company meat-packing plant on the north side. The plant provided most of the pig hide used as raw materials in the gelatin factory, and they were looking for a front line slaughterer. They would provide all necessary training.

Ignatius walked straight into the main office and asked about the posting, and was told that, as a matter of fact, they had not yet filled the position. Filling positions like these were always difficult these days, given the war-time conscription and the competition from the war industries. Ignatius had been exempted from military service because of a congenital heart defect, and he was kind of wiry and small – not exactly packer material – but he was willing to work hard. His supervisor eyed him critically, and then sniffed and said, “Well, you’ve been a good worker here, and I’d hate to lose you from our maintenance department. But they really need slaughterers over there, and I think you might fit the bill, even if you are small.” He gave Ignatius a name and an address and made a phone call. Ignatius took a bus to the north side, and before the morning was over, he had presented himself to the slaughtering foreman and was told to report back to the slaughterhouse the next day to start “learning the ropes.”

Ignatius had read somewhere that pigs were closest to humans in terms of diet and internal anatomy. The foreman at the slaughterhouse told him, “Pigs are without a doubt the most useful creatures to man. There’s not a thing in them that goes to waste. You know, they use pig insulin for humans, for diabetics.” When Ignatius looked at the creatures, he could not help but think that, with their naked pink or brown skin, they looked strangely human, with odd, distorted features to be sure, small eyes, snouts, and crumpled, pointy ears, but strangely human. As he watched them in their pens, he thought he could discern very human expressions, of boredom, resignation, and fear. They seemed most human to him when they screamed. And before the day was through, he had heard plenty of their screaming. The slaughterers filled their ears with cotton plugs to prevent their going deaf from it.

Ignatius watched the other slaughterers at work, hoisting the pigs up by chains on a rail and eviscerating them alive, watched the pigs writhe violently and scream while the blood gushed out of their bodies. The foreman explained the process to him in painful detail, the best method of holding the knife, the angle to push it in, how to slash. And Ignatius watched the other slaughterers doing it all morning.

“Are you going to be all right?” the foreman asked, “You’re looking a little pale.” He laughed and smacked Ignatius on the back. “You’ll be OK,” he said, “We all get a bit sick the first time. You’ll get over it. You’re not going to lose your breakfast are you?”

Ignatius shook his head. He felt queasy, but he watched with grim fascination and horror at the same time. By the end of the day, he had officially earned the title of slaughterer. He had thought, with his first pig, “This is the first time I have ever taken the life of a living thing.” And then another and another. At the end of the day, he watched them moving down the rail, carcass after carcass, upside down, legs splayed out, “like they were calling for help,” he thought to himself.

It was like a strange secret. He hadn’t the heart to talk about it outside the plant; and neither, he noticed, did the other slaughterers. No, it was something you preferred to leave behind.

But Ignatius felt strangely grateful to learn that he could do something he had never imagined himself capable of, to cross an invisible boundary just so.

“Will it be like this?” Ignatius wondered, “Just cutting them up?”

When Ignatius had asked Samael how he would find the returners, Samael replied that he should “follow the path of great misfortune in life as in death.” He left it at instructing Ignatius, “It should suffice to observe your contemporaries in light of the keys I have given you, and listen to the Holy Spirit speaking to you through your feelings.”

One day as Ignatius passed a newspaper kiosk on his way to work, he noticed a headline in the papers about the tragic kidnapping of four young children. “Great misfortune in life,” he thought. As he picked up the paper and read further, he felt a lively disquiet upon reading that one month earlier, the children’s grandmother, one Christina Palazzo had tragically died in a trolley car accident. “And great misfortune in death.”

He put a nickel down on the counter of the newsstand, folded the paper and placed it in his coat pocket, with growing disquiet and a sense that his Calling was finally about to begin.

Chapter 5: Lost Children
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When confronted with a case like the Jones children’s, one can easily be overwhelmed with sadness or terror. One prefers to avoid considering the seemingly universal elements of the tragedy, and instead to contain it by fixing blame. The newspapers focused, for instance, on the children’s mother, Marina Jones, who had abandoned them a year earlier and left them with a not very dependable father, Sid Jones, a man who barely provided for them, and spent more of his time away from home on the streets or at the local pub chasing after prostitutes than earning a decent living. Why are children born to parents who don’t want to care for them?

The children had been dependent on their grandmother, Christina Palazzo, who took them in after their mother went missing, and who worked hard cleaning houses, at an age when most would have expected retirement as their right. And whom did one blame for the trolley car accident that unexpectedly took her life? Did one blame the trolley car driver, who gave several of his passengers whiplash trying to stop, or Christina’s clumsiness or deafness or poor eyesight? So after her death, the children went back to their father’s flat, where they were unsupervised and uncared for, and it was then they went missing or were kidnapped. Though there was a stench hanging around Sid Jones in the matter, police concluded he could have nothing to do with their kidnapping. There was an outcry in the papers, which placed the blame alternately on society for not taking care of those who could not care for themselves, or on the Joneses.

Ignatius was not so concerned about the moral of the tale, as he was about the unfortunate, untimely death of Christina Palazzo, and whether she might since her death have “crossed the wrong way over the divide between the worlds.”

He paid a visit to the public library, and went through back issues of the Tribune, until he found Christina Palazzo’s obituary, and with it the name of the graveyard where she had been interred.

At the cemetery office he found a thin, clean-shaven, well manicured man dressed in a dark suit and tie. When Ignatius asked him about the location of Christina’s plot, he raised an eyebrow and frowned.

“Are you family of the late Mrs. Palazzo?” he asked skeptically.

Ignatius shook his head. “A friend of the family,” he replied.

The man looked him up and down, studying him, his frown deepening. Then, somewhat warily he pulled a small a cemetery map out of a brochure rack, handed it to Ignatius, and told him, “It’s plot number E-769. You’ll find it on the eastern end of the cemetery.”

Ignatius found her grave in a small, crowded plot, in a less attractive section of the cemetery, the kind one might afford on a wage earner’s life insurance. It bore a simple headstone about the size of a plaque, with the name, ‘Christina Marina Palazzo,’ the dates, ‘b. February 16, 1871,’ and ‘d. July 9, 1943,’ and the epitaph, ‘Rest in God’s arms.’ It looked like a normal grave, no sign that it had ever been disturbed in any way. There were no flowers in the small vase inset in the ground. He got down on his hands and knees, and pressed his ear to the ground just below the headstone. He closed his eyes and listened, feeling the cool grass and the earth under the grass with his cheek and his hands.

He was startled by the sound of a gentle cough, and nearly sprained his neck springing up and jerking around to see who had made it. He saw a man with balding, grayish hair and thick glasses that made his eyes look extra big, wearing muddy overalls and holding a hedge trimmer.

“I suppose you’re checking to make sure we did things right, put it all back the way it should be. Course, couldn’t put everything back. But, least it looks right. Horrible, what happened. So sorry.” The man cleared his throat, and studied Ignatius’ face with a mournful look.

Ignatius stood up, brushing off his knees. “It… It looks right,” he stammered, “You did a fine job.”

“Well, like I said, we did what we could. Doesn’t make up for her remains being stolen. Can’t imagine what that must be like, for you and the rest of the family. Really can’t. I hope they catch the ghouls that did it. You read about this kind of stuff, but…” He fell silent. Ignatius nodded.

He could barely believe his ears. Christina’s body had mysteriously gone missing?

“How exactly did you ‘put it all back’?’” he asked, coughing a bit as he tried to contain his nerves.

The man scratched the back of his head, shifted uneasily, and cleared his throat. “Well,” he said, “it wasn’t that complicated. Nothing much we could do about the box. Lid was broken, well, shredded almost, at least near the top part. I still think was strange how narrow the hole in the ground was. We actually had to dig it bigger in order to get down to the box. I kept thinking, how could somebody actually get down there to steal anything? It was almost like it had been dug by some kind of wild animal, like a dog or something. But there ain’t no way a dog would dig that deep. And then you’d expect the corpse to still be there, maybe chewed up or something. But it was gone, completely…” He stopped himself suddenly, and looked up totally mortified. “I’m sorry to go on like this. This must be ghastly for you…”

Ignatius replied calmly, “I want to know. Please go on.”

“Ain’t much more to tell. There was some blood, some hair. You kind of expect that, but no other… remains. Well, except her shoes. We filled the hole back up, covered it up nice, replaced the sod. Like I said, put everything back, so it’d look right at least. Least you’ll have a nice place to remember her.”

“Well, thank you,” said Ignatius.

The groundskeeper sighed, picked his hedge trimmers up off the ground where he’d been leaning them, and moved on down the path rather sheepishly.

The keys Samael had given him, up until now, seemed in his head like some kind of grotesque spiritual metaphor, unrelated to anything remotely possible in the real world. And yet here now was testimony that all of this theory somehow did explain something real, though hidden. And it would have remained good and hidden too, had he not known where and when to look, Ignatius told himself. Of course respectable cemetery administrators would do whatever they could to keep such frightful things secret. Did this happen all the time, Ignatius wondered, and only groundskeepers know the truth beneath the serene, green surface?

Ignatius had wanted to ask about when the body actually went missing, but he didn’t dare reveal his ignorance. Ignatius had preferred not to disabuse the man of the notion he was family yet. So he left the cemetery and went back to the library to scour every issue of the papers dated on or after Christina’s decease. Surely an event as bizarre as a purported corpse-napping would have earned some notice. But after his research had gone late into the night, several hours of searching every inch of every column in every paper, he returned to his apartment empty-handed. The cemetery management had to have covered it up. Why else would the man at the office have seemed so suspicious and evasive?

Then it dawned on Ignatius: from what the groundskeeper said, the family evidently knew something. Furthermore, it had slowly dawned on Ignatius that even if he could learn more about the circumstances of the departure of Mrs. Palazzo’s corpse, even pinpoint the exact date, it would no longer answer the critical question: Where was she now? Where does a spirit go after it comes back to its flesh? In order to learn more about the spirit in question, he needed to talk to family. But the only family Ignatius knew of, the only family mentioned in the papers, was Christina’s unsavory son-in-law Sid Jones.

That night Ignatius tossed endlessly in bed, his mind turning sleeplessly over the details. Negligent, adulterous father. Mother gone missing. Four young children, taken in by their grandmother. Grandmother dies in a trolley accident and the children are in father’s custody – briefly. Then the piece of the puzzle no one else knows but Ignatius: The grandmother comes back from the dead. And then the children are kidnapped. As the small hours of the night slowly ground into dawn, a list of pressing questions grew that, Ignatius was convinced, only Sid Jones could answer. Foremost among them: Where would Christina Palazzo be if she were alive again?

Yet, in the broad light of day, what had seemed simple and straightforward in the night now seemed slightly crazy. And who was he to Sid Jones? He could not claim to be a policeman or a social worker. It had been one thing to let the man at the cemetery think he was family, but it would be another thing altogether to tell a barefaced lie.

And yet, his Call was to “keep watch over the dead, and to send back any who have crossed the wrong way.” The angel had instructed him and had given him “keys.” He had told him that God had given him responsibility was for the “realm beneath the heavens” that “none can usurp.” It dawned on him that this was a test, perhaps the test, and he had better act.

He felt a kind of clarity and excitement now that he was on the edge of a true precipice between the seen and the unseen worlds. He was about to cross over into something awesome, dreadful and unique, something of which only few select mortals had the least ken. And the more he mulled it over, the more he came to accept that under the circumstances, there were certain rules that could not possibly apply to him if he were to fulfill his Call. The society he lived in had turned its back on such things, so he would have to lie. But there was always the deeper truth. He would remain true to that.

Ignatius found Sid Jones at his flat on the second floor of a run down tenement on the north side. It was mid-morning on a Saturday when he knocked. He heard stirring in the apartment but no one answered. He knocked again.

“Mr. Jones,” he shouted.

He heard some talking, more shuffling noises, and then clomping footsteps. “Who?” a voice growled from the other side of the door.

“I’m here about your children!” Ignatius replied.

The door cracked half-way open. Staring intensely at him from the other side, Ignatius saw a compact, muscular man, in a sleeveless t-shirt and under shorts. The man was dark and ill shaven, with thick, curly black hair and dark circles under his eyes. He sized Ignatius up for a moment, studying his deferential smile, his tidy briefcase, and his well polished shoes. In a low voice he demanded, “Who are you?”

“I’m a friend of the family,” Ignatius replied softly, removing his hat and bowing his head.

“I sure as hell don’t know you,” he snarled.

“Actually, I have a few questions about your mother-in-law, Mrs. Palazzo,” Ignatius said.

Sid’s eyes narrowed and he opened the door wide and stepped forward belligerently. Ignatius could see a woman in a slip peering through the doorway inside the apartment. Sid grabbed the lapel of Ignatius’ gray jacket and pushed him back with his hard, balled up fist. He raised his voice to a yell. “I don’t think I have to answer any of your questions. So get out before I kick your ass.” He released Ignatius’ jacket, and Ignatius backed away while Sid advanced menacingly and continued to stare him down. “Go on, get out!” Ignatius was trembling as he hastily retreated down the hallway toward the stairs. From the street he looked back at the apartment building to see Sid glowering at him from a curtainless window.

He stood there shuddering for a moment. “A friend of the family,” he thought to himself, “What kind of a dolt am I?”

He looked back up at the window. Sid was still watching him. He saw his lips pulling open into a snarl, saw him moving agitatedly. Suddenly he disappeared. It occurred to him that if Sid were descending, he had better be gone before he arrived.

He turned to leave at top speed, when he heard someone hissing at him from the doorway. It was an angular black woman with silver hair and a careworn face. “Come back tomorrow!” she said to him in a half-whisper. “Name is Ramona. Apartment number one.” Ignatius nodded, and she acknowledged his nod with a wave, and disappeared back into the apartment building. Ignatius did not dally.

He was still trembling slightly with anxiety when he arrived the next day. He walked close to the wall of the apartment building to avoid being seen from above, and slipped in through the front entrance. Apartment one was right next to the door. Still remembering his encounter with Sid the previous day, he grew increasingly alarmed the longer he waited. It would not do to encounter Sid Jones here again. He was almost ready to turn around and leave when he finally here a scritch-scratching noise from the other side of the door, like someone pulling deadbolts or chains. Then the door clicked and slowly opened, and there stood Ramona motioning for him to come in.

“Christina Jones was a good woman,” she said, as she backed away from the doorway, letting him enter and close the door behind him. “Thank God someone ain’t letting this drop.”

Today Ramona looked more withered and tired than Ignatius had remembered her looking the previous day. Her hands were twisted with arthritis and she moved slowly. She led him into her clean, white kitchen, adorned by shiny pots and pans, and they sat down together at a plain, square wooden table.

“Marina was my friend,” she told Ignatius. “She had her hands full with those kids, and she must have worked twenty-four hours a day, between her job and that no account s.o.b. she had to cook for and clean up after, but she always had time to lend me a hand – help me carry groceries or take out the garbage or visit when I was feeling under the weather.”

She told Ignatius about late night fights between Marina and Sid, the shouting, the 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. “When she ran away, she was pregnant,” she sighed, shaking her head, “but what a situation to bring a child into! I don’t blame her for running away, but leaving her kids with that man?” Ramona also told Ignatius where Marina’s mother lived.

Ignatius found Marina’s mother Christiana Caravello living in a small, tidy flat a few blocks away. She was a tiny woman with graying dark hair pulled back into a bun, small, energetic eyes, and a cool, stern look. When he told her he was investigating the disappearance of the children, the tears began to flow.

She showed him a small photograph of the children, in a little frame sitting on the table. “This is Bess,” she said, pointing to a tall thin girl in a white, flowered dress, with thick curly hair that cascaded to her shoulders and framed a round, tanned face and a toothy smile. Bess’ left arm rested casually on the shoulders of a smaller, younger girl in a dirty, tattered sundress, squatting on the ground and grimacing at the sun. “That’s Maria,” she sniffed. “The little one is Tyler,” she added, “and the older one is Sid Junior.” Ignatius studied the two shirtless boys in front of the girls, a dark-eyed toddler sprawled on the ground and the other staring intently out of the picture, with missing teeth and unruly black hair. He had his father’s mouth, Ignatius thought.

“Every morning I wake up, it seems like it can’t be real,” she said, tears welling up again.

“Do you think it was Marina who took the children?” asked Ignatius.

She said: “Marina’s only prayer in this life was for something better for them. I saw how hard she worked. It never made sense that she would have left them in the first place. Once after that man had beaten her to within an inch of her life, she said she would rather die than leave them with him. If she had abandoned them, she might have come back for them, but I don’t think she abandoned them, not if she was alive.”

“If it wasn’t her, who would it be?”

“It kills me to wonder!”

“Do you think their father did something to them?”

“He’d be capable of it!” she said, “But there’s just this feeling I have, I can’t say what. I don’t think it was him.”

“Do you have a picture of your daughter?” he asked.

From her bedroom she retrieved a frame holding a photo of an attractive, dark-haired young woman in a light dress, smiling, standing on a sidewalk in front of a brownstone building. “She’s older now,” she said.

“Where is this?” he asked.

“That was the apartment building we lived at in the river district,” she said, “It’s where Marina grew up.”

“Where was that?”

“On River Street,” she said, “That was quite a few years ago.”

“May I borrow this photo?” asked Ignatius.

After obtaining the address of the apartment, he left without finishing his cup of tea.

The apartment building on the corner of River Street and Fifth Avenue 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. 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 clutched his bag of tools closer to his body. He was not sure he was ready for this.

Even after Ignatius had waited several minutes for his eyes to adjust, the thin smudges of light escaping through the boarded over window at the end of the hallway only showed how completely the building was dominated by shadow. The light from his flashlight barely dented the gloom. After trying several doors he found the stairwell, and felt his way breathlessly up it 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, until he found three thirty-nine. He turned the knob. The door was not locked. He pushed it open and stepped inside.

The air was sickly sour. Ignatius saw a mass at the center of the room, something large with round bumps on top descending in a row. He shined his flashlight on it and saw the mass was a broken couch, and the bumps were the heads of the children, two boys and two girls, all wearing their Sunday best, lined up on the couch in order of size, like wax dolls. He studied their faces, eyes and mouths half open, frozen in some kind of agony, and he began to cry.

Next he shined the beam of his flashlight on a dismal mound in the corner, a cradle with a dirty lace cover. He approached it and pushed the lace aside. In the moonlight, it looked like a dark stain on a pillow. He shined his flashlight into the crib, and saw something like a large frog, slimy with blood. He did not breathe as he moved in closer to study it. It was breathing. Ignatius gasped and recoiled in horror. It was not a frog. It was a tiny human.

He heard a shuffling noise. He turned. Something moved in the shadows in front of him, the shadow of a person. He raised his flashlight, and shined it right into the person’s face, though she did not blink, did not move, did not seem to acknowledge the light. From her eyes and the way her mouth curled he recognized Marina Jones, though now her complexion was pale and mottled, her face was grimy, her hair matted, and she looked much more gaunt than in her photo.

She lunged at him, knocking him to the floor, and cracking him on the forehead with her skull. “Children!” she shrieked in his ears. He dropped his flashlight and it flickered out with a clunk. Then suddenly she was gone, though he could still hear her rushing madly from room to room.

In the dark, Ignatius panicked. His head smarted, his vision was blurry, and he was disoriented. He had come expecting to see a returner, and he had tried mentally to prepare himself to fight it. But he had not expected the overwhelming rush of emotions that paralyzed him now he was on the verge of it. He tried to think what to do next, but he had dropped his tool bag, lost his flashlight, was sitting on the ground blinded and his strongest urge was to scramble away, to find the door and get up and run. And all the time, the dreadful sights he had just seen kept flashing in his mind: the mummified children, that thing in the crib, her face. He was adding them up, mentally rearranging them. “A returner!” he kept thinking, “This is what it is to meet a returner!”

He flailed about, and his hand landed on his tool bag. He found the latch on top and clicked it open, but fumbled inside it without finding his machete.

“And what if it isn’t?” he wondered, “What if she’s still alive?”

He was interrupted by her sudden return. He leapt involuntarily to his feet in panic. As soon as he did, he took a blow to the stomach that doubled him over, filling him with a salty taste. He heard a clatter and the ring of metal, something large like a cutting knife. He swooned and sharpness rose from the pit of his stomach. He clutched his belly. His shirt felt sticky and wet. It was his own blood, and, he realized, he was being murdered.

At first he felt not dread, but embarrassment. It seemed unworthy to lose his life this way, so carelessly. Then came the panic. He jerked back, groping desperately until he put his hand on the flashlight. She was on top of him again, but this time he reacted. He whipped her convulsively in the face with the heavy metal. The flashlight flickered on again. In the dim light her head looked disfigured and she still flailed at him, though more awkwardly. She was feeling around blindly. He kicked the knife out of her way. She suddenly disappeared into the darkness again, though he could hear the clump, clump, clump of her receding footsteps.

He was dizzy, feeling terribly tired. He revived somewhat at the thought of escape. He could run now, the coast was clear. But then he thought of the children. He remembered their faces in the picture on their grandmother’s table, and then the grisly vision he’d just seen of them under the dim light of the torch. He couldn’t bear to turn the beam of his flashlight that way again. He asked himself, “Whom will she murder next?” and he groped inside his bag again until his hand finally caught the handle of the machete. He breathed deeply and steadied himself from fainting. “Just one last effort,” he hissed through gritted teeth.

When she returned screaming, his resolve melted. She might well kill him. But his hesitation ended when she threw himself at him again, clawing and biting. He felt anger now. He struck her with the machete. He was clumsy at first, and whacked her ineffectually with the flat of the blade a few times before sinking the edge into her collar bone. She only shivered a bit from the impact, but didn’t even flinch, didn’t seem to feel pain. He tried again, aiming at the neck. The blade clove deep and there was a shower of blood; he hadn’t expected that. She kept coming at him, even with half her neck severed. A few more chops, and the head flipped off. She was still flailing at him, but a good deal less coordinated. He made good his escape.

He stumbled out of the apartment, down the stairs, out onto the street. A passerby found him bleeding unconscious on the curb. An ambulance took him to the hospital where they treated him for deep stabbing wounds to the stomach. As he was recovering, the police showed up to ask him questions about how he had been injured. He replied only that he had been assaulted by a would-be thief. “I resisted and the thief ran,” he said.

After eight days of hospital recovery he went home. He was still not able to stand long without feeling dizzy and nauseous. The doctors told him he should rest as much as possible.

He dreaded going back. But all through his recovery, he had had nightmares about that headless thing, flopping blindly about, perhaps finding its way out onto the street. With dread roiling inside, he rode the bus back to the river district. He entered the building through the hole in the back, climbed the stairs, wandered down the hall.

When he entered the apartment, his heart sank. The children were gone from their place on the sofa. He heard murmuring movements from deeper inside. He shined his flashlight slowly around the front room. He found Marina there, in a corner, but pathetic now, no longer fierce like she had been. She only wandered listlessly away when he shined his flashlight on her, her head still lying on the floor where it had fallen when he had chopped it off. He moved toward her, and she flinched, retreating more quickly, crashing into a chair and then backing into another corner. He drew his machete and fell on her with it. He was angry at her for not dying. He hewed one member away, then another, until there was no more movement possible.

The children scurried away like rats as he entered the recesses of the apartment. He found Bess in the master bedroom closet, Maria under a damp, moldy mattress, Tyler in the bathtub behind a shower curtain, and Sid Jr. in a kitchen cupboard. Hunting them down was almost more than he could bear. It made it easier to tell himself they were in a kind of misery, and he had come to save them from it and from hell. To look at their gangrenous complexions and sunken faces, one could have believed it without rationalization; though as he finished them off each screamed almost like a live child would have. Last of all he turned to the thing in the crib. It squealed most horribly of all.

He had brought a can of gasoline with him. He used the boiler in the basement, stacks of scrap wood in the apartment building, and the gasoline to burn their remains. Then he went home.

He arrived up at Christiana Caravello’s apartment the next day, in a clean gray suit, white shirt and gray tie. She invited him in and offered him tea, which he politely accepted. He snapped open his briefcase, removed Marina Jones’ picture and handed it to her. “I promised you I would return this,” he smiled. She accepted it with fresh tears. He finished his cup of tea in silence and then left, and never saw her again.

Ignatius would dream about his fight with Marina, cutting her and her children up, and burning them in the basement. In his dreams he could smell the rottenness of the bodies, he could feel the heft of the machete in his hands and the corpses’ resistance to the blade. He could hear the crackling of the fire and smell the smoke from the sizzling flesh and marrow. He woke musing about it. The memories aroused him. He spent many nights sleepless, kneeling by his bed praying. It was 1943 when he met Marina Jones. Other men his age were fighting for freedom against Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito. Instead, he had this war against the dead.

Ignatius went to the cemetery at the appointed time. He was kneeling at his mother’s grave praying in silence when he heard the footsteps of the Angel in the grass behind him.

He did not turn to look at Samael. He only said, “She had no advantages in life, only disadvantages.”

“Like most of humanity,” replied the Angel.

“She was murdered by her husband.”

“She was not the first to be, nor will be the last.”

“I’ve been thinking. She probably came back to save the children from him.”

“How do you suppose the children died?” asked the Angel.

Ignatius replied, “Likely starvation. She probably did not realize that, being dead, she could no longer nourish them properly.”

“And what do you suppose that thing in the crib was?”

“Something horrible.”

“So what do you suppose you should have done?”

“What about Sid Jones? Shouldn’t he pay for what he did?”

“If the authorities do not bring him to earthly justice themselves, it is not your responsibility. Sid Jones will face justice in the world to come.”

“Isn’t it natural for those who have suffered injustice to try to make the wrongs right? Wasn’t the wrong Marina suffered the cause of all the wrong that followed?”

“If those who returned from the dead could only trust God,” said Samael, “and wait until the Resurrection and the Final Judgment, they would see every injustice avenged in the flesh. Instead, they become rebels against God’s order.”

Ignatius fell silent.

“Tell me again how your mother died?” asked the angel.

“Of cancer. At the age of thirty-six. With five young children.”

“Didn’t she have reason to come back?”

“I wished for her to come back.”

“And suppose she had?”

“Why can’t the others stay dead too then? Why did Marina come back?”

“God gave humans free will, and it is the strength of that will that enables them to defy death itself if they choose. God also made humans stewards of the domain of mortality. How you manage it is the test of whether you merit immortality. None else can do this job for you, not angels, not archangels, not God himself. Do not shrink from the Call, Ignatius. Take pleasure in it.”

“Take pleasure in it?”

“There is no need to feel ashamed of what you felt,” said the Angel, “God planted those feelings in your flesh for a purpose.”

Ignatius stifled in silence.

“What was the horror in the crib?” he asked.

Samael said, “The descent of souls into bodies is a gradual process, beginning when the flesh is conceived and ending when the offspring separates itself from its mother. If the fetus dies before they arrive, the souls are trapped in between the worlds; but if the mother comes back as a returner, the portal reopens corrupted. They come into the world living abortions, mad with desperation. If they grow to full size, they would wreak havoc that humans would be powerless to stop. Such things might overtake the world before the end times, when God allows the Devil full reign over the earth, but it is well this thing was not allowed to survive now.”

The Angel continued, “So let us begin your next lesson…”

Chapter 6: Rumors
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Every year Ignatius’ aunties organized a Thanksgiving dinner to which the whole extended family was invited. The year after he accepted the Call, Ignatius received his invitation to the Thanksgiving dinner quite later than usual. At the feast his aunties did not ask the usual questions about how he was doing: if he had met any young ladies lately, or how his work was going, or was he healthy. In fact, folks seemed rather reticent in his presence. They looked this way and that, avoiding his gaze, and made small talk with each other, but said not a thing to him, not so much as “pass the peas” at the dinner table. He felt like a ghost passing through the atrium and waiting in the living room and sitting at the meal.

But after everyone had eaten and almost all retired to the drawing room to nap or play checkers or talk lazily about the events of the past year, after several of the aunties began heaping up plates and silverware and servers and hauling them back into the kitchen, stacking up place mats and wiping off tables, sweeping and mopping, and gossiping while they washed mountains of dishes, Ignatius’ Auntie Geraldine quietly took him aside, when no one else seemed to be looking, and said, “Nate, let’s go for a walk.”

She took Ignatius by the hand and led him out of the house and into the sleepy neighborhood surrounding it. In this part of the city, there were trees lining the streets and tidy green lawns in front of close, well-kept houses, and she promenaded down the sidewalk with Ignatius, taking in the sights, and all the time clasping his arm tight in her own and pressing it against her side.

“Nate,” she said crisply, “Tell me what’s wrong.”

There was something in her voice that stopped Ignatius and made him go suddenly cold.

“What do you mean?” he stammered.

“I’d like not to have to insult your intelligence by spelling it out for you, and you might do me the same respect by not pretending you don’t know what I’m talking about,” she replied.

Ignatius felt his face flush, his hands go clammy, his stomach turn, and a sudden weakness rise in his joints. His throat tightened with unexpected emotion, and he only managed to mutter, “I’m at a loss.”

“Perhaps one of us should have had a heart-to-heart talk with you long before it’s come to this. We watch it happening over the years, watch you change, watch you become more cold and aloof. We keep hoping for the best, hoping time will fix things. Or we make excuses, saying, ‘It was hard on him losing his mother at such a young age,’ or ‘He never had a very good example in his father.’ But then we start hearing such dreadful rumors, and we wonder: Have we lost you? We don’t believe them at first, when Martina tells us what some old busy-bodies at church are saying. But then Roberta heard from your landlord… And then Wilhelmina’s son David, who works in the police department tells us… I could go on, but I’d prefer to hear it from you. Tell me what is wrong. What is happening to you?”

“I’m not sure where to begin, especially since I’m obviously being tried and sentenced in my absence, with no chance to confront my accusers.”

“We’ve wanted to give you the benefit of a doubt. It’s why no one could bear to speak to you about something that, on the face of it, sounded so unbelievable and so horrible. It’s why we ignored the rumors until we could not ignore them any more. We’re not your judge and jury, we’re your family, though over the years you’ve stopped visiting, you’ve stopped coming to Sunday dinners, you’ve stopped talking to your sisters, you’ve moved away from your father. And there’s something intangible, harder to put a finger on. You’ve become so cold; I don’t know how to describe it other than that. But in spite of all that we love you, and we’re afraid we’ve lost you to something dreadful.”

“Whose idea was it for you to take me aside like this?”

“No one’s but my own,” she sighed, “though I should tell you some of the aunties think it is too late and say we should excommunicate you from the family. We had quite a debate over whether to invite you to Thanksgiving this year or ever again. But I stood up for you. I won’t give up on you yet. So will you or will you not speak to me and give us one last chance?”

Ignatius shivered, and Auntie Geraldine put her arm around his back and pulled him closer to her as they continued to walk. “What did Wilhelmina say her son told her?” he asked plaintively.

“That you’d been arrested on suspicion of murder. That later it turned out you were only accused of acts of vandalism and… grave desecration. That no one could prove anything, so you were let go.”

“And the others?”

“Your landlord says that you keep queer hours, sometimes leaving at sunset and coming back in the dead hours just before dawn, sometimes covered in filth, carrying strange packages and smelling of death. That you shun your neighbors and that they are afraid of you. And there are others – your neighbors apparently talking at church, telling more of the same. Nate, what are you involved in?”

Ignatius stopped walking, and Geraldine stopped too. To her, he looked frail, broken. He considered his options. He might tell her the whole story, about the angel and the Call, about how some people are obligated to guard the portals of death so that human agency might be preserved. She would probably disbelieve, maybe think he was crazy; but it was true. Shouldn’t he tell her the truth? And yet somehow he knew that even if she believed, it would not help his case. Did not Jesus say, “A man’s foes shall be they of his own household”?

Better not to put her in a position where she must become an enemy of God, better to keep the truth close. Geraldine saw him stiffen up, his face harden. He drew his hand away from her. His voice sounded hollow and lifeless when he spoke. “It probably would not help,” he said, “for me to assure you that I am involved in nothing dishonorable. In fact, if you understood the full extent of it, you would realize how you, how every living soul in this city owes me a debt of gratitude. Obviously my own family are more willing to trust what they have heard third hand from strangers than what they know of me, of my character.”

“What do we know of you?” pleaded Auntie Geraldine, “We barely see you any more, never hear from you. We want you to be a part of the family again, but…”

“No,” said Ignatius. His brows furrowed, his face twisted into a scowl, and he shook his head. “I shouldn’t need to prove myself to my own kin, I shouldn’t always have to wonder if I am on trial, being judged. I have enough problems of my own without that added burden. I understand how things stand now, and I have no desire to stay where I am not wanted. I would hate to cause you or anyone else any further grief.”

He turned around and began to walk briskly back toward the house.

Auntie Geraldine stood there, stunned. “Where are you going?” she cried after him.

“To gather my hat and coat and umbrella, so that you and the others can be free of me.”

“For good,” he thought to himself, “It’ll be a relief, after all, not to have them to be concerned about any more.”

Tears welled up in her eyes as she watched him stalk away. She shook her head and then slowly followed at a distance. She picked up her pace as she saw the gap between Ignatius and her widening. She needed to try to catch him before he left. By the time she arrived at the house, she found him in the porch, with his hat under one arm and his umbrella dangling from the other, buttoning up his gray trench coat. His little sister Anne, fourteen years old now, stood on the threshold between the porch and the atrium, eyes red and teary.

“Don’t go, Nate!” she cried. “What did you say to him?” she moaned, as she saw Auntie Geraldine reach the door.

“She said nothing to me,” replied Ignatius softly, “It’s just time for me to leave.”

Anne exclaimed, “You’re upset! I can tell. What’s the matter?”

“I’m not upset.” He finished buttoning up his coat, placed his hat on his head, grabbed his umbrella, and made for the front door of the porch.

Auntie Geraldine stood solidly there, blocking his way.

“Nate,” she pleaded, “There’s only one thing you belong to, no matter what, and that’s your family. They may hurt you sometimes, and they may tell you things you don’t want to hear. But they’re the only ones who’ll tell it to you not because they have something to gain from it, but because they love you. Because they can’t bear to lose you. Please! Nate!”

Ignatius looked her back, straight in the eyes. He said quietly, “A family is where you grow up. But then one day you open your eyes as an adult and catch a glimpse of the infinite, and you realize there are forces at work larger than family, larger than the bond between a child and his mama. You’d like to stay there, stay safe forever, but you can’t. It’s a fiction to think you can. You have no choice.” There was a cool fire in his eyes, though his face looked expressionless. “Goodbye,” he said. Auntie Geraldine stepped back, and a tear streaked down her face again.

Ignatius began to walk down the front steps, when there was a heart rending cry from behind him. “Don’t go!” shrieked his sister Anne. Ignatius turned around to see her livid, panic-stricken face, pleading at him from the door. He sat down on the porch and motioned for her to come close, and she did.

“It’s time for me to go,” he whispered.

“Why now?”

He kissed her on the forehead. “It’s time.”

The kiss seemed to quiet her. She watched him get up, adjust his hat, and then slowly walk away.

“I’ll call you!” she shouted after him.

He continued walking, and she wasn’t sure he heard her, so she shouted again louder, “I’ll call you!”

He waved, and kept walking. Auntie Geraldine frowned. That was the last time she would ever see her nephew Ignatius. She remembered him sitting at Thanksgiving dinner, face lit by the candles, somber face, eating carefully, intently. Such a serious boy, she thought, awkward looking, but handsome. She could still see her sister Josephine in his face. And the other aunties, sitting around the table, avoiding looking right at him. It was the last time any of them would ever break bread with him or see him either, ever again.

But Anne said to herself, “There’s something there, something wrong. I won’t let him go. I’ll always be there for him, till he comes around.”

“I’ll call him,” she said out loud to her Auntie Geraldine.

“That’s a good sister,” Geraldine replied.

Chapter 7: Laverne Smith
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Ignatius never stopped going to church. It was a duty firmly embedded since childhood. In his upbringing, no matter how inclement the weather, Ignatius’ mother had roused him and his sisters early, washed their faces, dressed them, and fed them. Ernest Wick would be waiting in the family car for her to herd them in, like so many sheep, and then sit down like a shepherdess queen on the front seat next to him, before they trundled off to the church. There was never an excuse not to attend in her book. She liked to tell the story of a pious old woman of her youth who never missed a single Sunday her entire life, even when she became deathly ill. Ignatius’ mother recounted, “She said that when she was ill she needed God more than when she was well.” After his wife’s death, Ernest was no less steadfast. And Samael encouraged Ignatius to attend church with his father. He explained, “If the churches’ teachings seem wrong, it is that God has entrusted each church only with the keys requisite for their particular call. But men are still subject to the keys.”

It was relatively easy, procedurally speaking, for Ignatius to belong to a church. The particular sect of his upbringing was the Apostolic Evangelical Free Church, but even their relative strictness did not exceed that of the Angel Samael. They practiced adult baptism, and in order to meet the confessional requirements of that “key,” he had to answer a series of questions with a rather liberal understanding of the truth. But he did so, assured by Samael that he was justified. And he was assiduous about attendance at all required meetings, including weekly Bible study, even though he found it something of a burden to hear them take as literal truth what Samael had shown him to be little more than “windows into the deeper mysteries.” He never discussed a sermon with the pastor after “meeting,” as some parishioners did. He kept a brooding silence during Bible study too, though he sometimes could not contain himself.

Three years after accepting the Call Ignatius met a young woman in Bible study named Laverne Smith. She was new in the congregation; her family had moved in from some place out West. Ignatius noticed how seriously she applied herself to Bible study. She was not frivolous. She did not smile too much. Usually he thought about nothing but the Call, but when he was in Bible study with Laverne he wondered about her. After Bible study, he always sat on the very back row during “meeting” and slipped out the door unnoticed as soon as the service ended. But now he often had his eyes on Laverne, sitting in the third pew from the front with her family. He watched how she helped quiet her siblings, how she sang every hymn so heartily. It bothered him, but he couldn’t repress fantasies of sitting next to her as her husband, sharing the hymnal with her as they sang together, with squirmy children of their own making.

One Sunday at Bible study, the leader read the text about the opening of the graves after Jesus’ death:

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 appeared unto many.

The Bible study leader said, “These were the first fruits of the resurrection.”

Ignatius replied, almost without thinking, “No, these were a defilement of the resurrection.”

The Bible study leader turned to Ignatius and, the corner of his mouth twitching ever so slightly, asked, “How so?”

Ignatius replied, “The scripture speaks of one resurrection, at the end of days. All who come before then defile the will of God.”

“That is a fascinating interpretation,” said the Bible study leader, “Though I’d be interested in hearing what scriptural basis you think there is for it, since surely God would not allow such a miracle to occur if it were against his will.”

Ignatius replied, “These graves opened out of trauma. When Jesus cried out, the veil was rent, and there was an earthquake, and they came out of the graves untimely.”

The teacher’s voice rose slightly as he asked, “Class, what do you think?”

A few class members rolled their eyes, but said nothing. Ignatius fell silent after that, and the Bible study continued.

But afterwards, Laverne approached him before he had a chance to slip out of the classroom and said, “That verse always puzzled me too.”

Ignatius’ heart stopped. This was the first time she had ever spoken to him. “Well,” said Ignatius, fumbling for words, “the Book of Revelation is pretty clear about when the resurrection happens. There was more than one reason why the disciples watched the graves.” He bit his lip as he realized he had said too much.

Laverne did not seem to notice. She said, “Why don’t you come sit with me during the service? We could talk more about it after church.”

Ignatius could not possibly imagine that to most folks, he looked like a normal young fellow, more earnest than most and a bit on the awkward side certainly, but normal enough; and to Laverne he looked handsome, and his shyness made him all the more intriguing. But Ignatius thought of himself as unattractive and odd. He was certain that, though Samael had told him to submit himself to the keys of the church, he did not belong here. He rarely spoke to anyone, and he was not sure why Laverne would speak to him now.

“All right,” he said cautiously. But after they had left the classroom, entered the sanctuary, and begun down the aisle, Ignatius grew conscious of people’s eyes on his back. Laverne’s parents were already sitting in the customary place with the younger children, and Laverne said, “Ma, Pa, this is Ignatius. He’s in Bible study. Is it OK if he sits with us?” Her father nodded his head, so they sat down, Ignatius next to the aisle and Laverne next to Ignatius. He folded his hands in front of him on top of his Bible and stared down at his shoes and wished the Smith family did not always have to sit toward the front.

It was during the opening prayers, he began to feel this was not right. The thought started small, like a germ, but it grew insistent. His life was already taken, he thought. He had the Call. After the prayers, he noticed that Laverne seemed to be sitting very close to him. She had folded her hands on her lap so that her elbow and the edge of her upper arm lightly pressed against his upper arm as she breathed. He contracted into himself, folded his arms in such a way as to avoid being touched, but she shifted in her seat just a bit closer. He did not hear a word of the sermon.

Just as the service was ending, she leaned innocently over and whispered into his ear, “There’s a dance this Tuesday…”

He stood up. “I can’t I’m busy,” he replied. Then he slipped through the crowd and out the church.

Ignatius did not eat or drink for the next two days. He could not sleep. He was filled with despair beyond words. On Tuesday at sunset he trudged into the cemetery, his walking disjointed. He knelt down under the willows by his mother’s grave and began to pray, “Not my will but thine O Lord be done.”

Samael perched on the edge of his mother’s headstone. “It is really up to you whether to stay true to your vows or not,” he said.

Ignatius wept, “If I no longer wished to stay true to my vows, this would be easy!”

The Angel cocked his head. “Then just do it,” he said.

“But what if I want her too?”

The Angel replied, “You have but one body, but one counting of days. You must choose.”

“My flesh is betraying me!”

“I warned you that in accepting the Call you would be choosing a kind of death.”

“Then I wish I could just die and have it over with!”

The angel said, “Do you think desire dies with the physical body? If it did, do you think that flesh moldering in the ground could come back? If desire is not mastered in life, after death it can become like a ravenous, untamed beast. If you do not master desire 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 can’t do it on my own!”

“I can help you. But if I do, first you must know that nothing I take from you will alter the problem of desire. All I can offer you is a permanent aid to the will.”

“Just do it,” moaned Ignatius.

In a single movement too fast for Ignatius to see, the angel leapt down from his mother’s headstone and snatched him up, and he was suddenly engulfed in impenetrable blackness. Gradually in the blackness he thought he saw something glowing red. It was coming closer. It was a stone altar full of burning coals; he smelled thick, acrid smoke that burned his lungs and made his eyes water. He saw beings covered with wings, without heads, without feet, only wings, hovering up and down. He heard 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. It had an arm, not like a human arm, that reached out, removed a pair of tongs from the edge of the altar, and snatched a white hot coal with it. It moved toward him, stretching the burning coal at him. He closed his eyes, blinded by the light, and suddenly it was burning him, down below. There was terrifying pain. Then he was swallowed up in the dark comfort of unconsciousness.

Ignatius woke thrashing in the cemetery. A few dim stars twinkled in the cobalt sky. He was alone. It was still, so quiet he could hear the breath of the stillness. He saw the glow of the sunset in the western horizon. It reminded him of the glow of the coals on that mysterious altar. And he remembered what happened with a kind of anguish, more spiritual than physical, though it was the physical pain he had the most vivid awareness of. He unbuttoned his pants and loosened his underwear and examined the angels’ handiwork. He was now less than a man, or maybe more than one in the angelic reckoning.

He fled home and shut himself up in his room. He drew the blinds, and curled up in bed in the dark. He lay there motionless but couldn’t sleep. He wept in the dark, sobbing and soaking his pillow with tears, until he finally drifted off from exhaustion. In his dreams he was whole again and felt relieved, and then he woke up and realized it was only a dream and cried again. He lost track of time. He continued like this for days. Finally he sat up on the edge of his bed, turned on the light, and decided he had better get something to eat.

Samael had been right. It was maddening to have lost this part of himself, having the desire but now no means to fulfill it. It could have turned him into a monster. The routines Samael had taught him saved him. Rise in the morning before dawn, din the sleep out of the flesh with prayer; read the words out of the book, one more notch; feed the body just enough, ignore the hunger; cover it in simple clothes, don’t look down. Become a cog in the divine clockwork. Keep the sadness at bay.

The following Sunday as he sat in Bible study Laverne looked at him from time to time. He could feel her eyes burning on him, but he never looked back. 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 kept his eyes ahead, looking at the hymnal, looking at the Bible on his lap, looking at the cross at the head of the sanctuary. He never looked back at Laverne, 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 after a few more Sundays Laverne stopped looking.

Over the years, he barely noticed what she did. He could not bear to pay attention; he felt a lively anguish whenever his mind approached it. 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. 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 could just focus on the Call.

Chapter 8: The Nameless Ones
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Over the years, when Ignatius found reports of untimely death in the newspapers, he learned to keep watch over the victim’s grave the sunset after the funeral. It was much easier than tracking them down elsewhere. Nine times out of ten or nineteen out of twenty, the grave remained peaceful. But one time in ten or twenty, if he pressed his palms against the mound of earth covering the grave, he felt vibrations. If he put his ear to the ground, he heard noises, at first so faint he might miss them if an automobile passed or a flock of geese were honking overhead. But in the stillness he could hear muffled gnawing.

Ignatius could usually count on it taking three nights, though a feeble one might take as many as four or five, and a strong one finish in two or even one. One could tell by the noise. When it was loud enough to hear from a few footsteps away, the thing would emerge soon through the dirt and sod, its mouth filled with filth, hissing and dragging itself up with bloody fingers. By then, armed with his machete, Ignatius would be ready for the ghastly butcher’s work. A newly risen corpse was usually clumsy and weak, but Ignatius still had to take care of its bite. He was bitten once on the leg, and ever after kept scars from the gangrene.

After hacking the abominations to pieces, he gathered the remains and burned them in some forsaken place, and reburied the ashes and bones in their proper place for the true resurrection. It usually took all night, and had to be done without being seen. “But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength.” The stench never seemed to come completely out of his hands and clothes.

In 1956, there were three murders on isolated stretches of East River Road. The police declared the three murders the work of a serial killer and called for a war on crime. Ignatius’ first concern had not been to apprehend the perpetrator, but to watch the corpse of each victim. But after all three of the victims came back from the dead, he began to worry. When the second one came back, it could have been only a coincidence, but when the third returned, Ignatius grew certain something was dreadfully wrong. Then came the news of a fourth River Road murder.

As a child, Ignatius’ mother had told him, “When God is speaking to you, you feel a warmth in your heart.” But Ignatius had learned that under the Call, divine inspiration was cold and dark and came unbidden. It was the chill you felt when you have considered all the easy paths and been blocked by a kind of stupor, and the only path remaining is the unhappy one. It is something you know deep in your bones but don’t want to accept. That was just how Ignatius knew the authorities would never solve these murders and he would have to go to East River Road himself.

The curving, sleepy road ran, as its name implied, along the northern and eastern bank of the river. Much of its length was shaded by adjacent trees, and it was unlit at night. The bank down to the river was steep and overgrown, and inaccessible except by a few paths visible only to those who knew where to look. At the bottom of the bank was a forested river flat that was dense and buggy and that flooded occasionally when there were heavy rains. Despite its disadvantages, the flats drew a fair number of city wanderers in search of the pleasures of its natural seclusion. All of the River Road murders had occurred on the flats.

Late on a Friday afternoon Ignatius wandered along the road, searching for a path. He found a small patch of bare earth in a place where the brush growing up the side of the bank was a bit thin, and saw a way down there. He half-walked, half-slid down the steep, woody slope there till he reached the bottom. The trees were tall, and the leaves dense, and in the darkness one had an immediate feeling of being lonely but not entirely alone. Ignatius eventually found his way to a stretch of flood and rain-soaked mud next to the river.

He saw footprints. There were many of them, all by the river and none leading away from the shore. He studied the different sizes and textures and depths of the footprints. It was as if there had been a dance. The police had found similar traces, the papers said. They had combed every dock and riverboat house for miles up and down stream.

Early the following morning, shortly after sunrise, Ignatius rented a motorboat 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 water. 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 he could only find the images of the world above the water.

He caught sight of a fat fish, hovering just above the weeds and the muck at the bottom of the river, peering outward through primordial, watery eyes, mouth gaping perpetually in search of food. It darted away, frightened by something. Ignatius stared. It was something like the weeds, indistinguishable from them at first, wiggling. It was squirming fingers on a human hand. 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 sun, 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 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 and the boat rocked. Ignatius turned and saw an ashen hand emerging from the water, grasping the edge of the boat. He grabbed a paddle and struck at it, but it held fast. A second hand reached out of the water on the same side, grabbed the edge and heaved, almost capsizing the boat. Ignatius tumbled backwards, banging his upper neck against the edge of a bench. There was sharp pain and his vision grew dark and sparkly as he struggled to sit up. Other hands reached up from the other side of the boat. 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, small hands clinging to the motor. He heaved the cord again and heard the engine roar. The small hands on the motor let go as the water turned frothy and red. 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 smashed them repeatedly with the butt of the paddle until they finally slipped away, letting the boat lurch forward.

He shook sickly, not caring how the boat careened as he stared back at the bubbling water where he had just been. There must have been half a dozen or more, just in that spot. He had no idea who they were or where they had come from. He had so carefully followed the obituaries. The enormity filled him with sinking dread. How long had they been there? How many more were there, and where?

The next night he returned to the same shore. He hid in the underbrush and watched. He told himself, “It’s just a matter of waiting. There’s always something that lures them.” He waited all night.

He returned the next night too. 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 hulked stiffly out of the current, finding its legs. Its face was bloated and mask-like. It turned cautiously, moving its whole upper body without turning its neck, squinting through heavy eyelids swollen nearly shut. Ignatius watched, itching between disgust and wanting to know.

It wandered to the edge of the muddy flats, very close to where Ignatius hid. He held his breath; he could feel his heart in his throat. He was about to pounce when it went down to its hands and knees. It scratched about in the scrub like a dog. It pawed and then stopped, then pawed some more. Suddenly it was upright again, facing the river with its arms clutched tight against its chest. Halfway to the river, it halted and dropped an armload of driftwood and old fallen branches. It made the same trip several times, until it had assembled a thick stack. Then it squatted clumsily, and stick by stick, arranged the wood into a small pyre.

Ignatius watched transfixed. Even if it had had means on its person to start a fire, the creature was completely waterlogged. It sat next to the dark, unlit mound rubbing its hands and stretching them out, as if remembering that it once might have warmed itself by something like this. Then suddenly it leaned its head back and let out a plaintive, throaty bark.

Ignatius jumped. He unsheathed his machete. The returner flinched at the sound of Ignatius crashing out of the underbrush. It stopped barking and raised one arm above its head. Ignatius struck with full force. The blade cut into its radius with a thud, but didn’t go all the way through. He yanked the blade out and hacked again. He lopped fingers off of the upraised hand, then the hand off the wrist. It raised its other hand and Ignatius cut that down as well. He was relieved when it flopped over and tried crawling away on bloody stubs. When they fought back it sometimes got hairy, but with this one Ignatius could now hew at his leisure, like a slaughterhouse butcher. He was finishing his work as two others emerged from the water, a frail, thin one and a small one not taller than four feet. They crawled slowly out of the water on all fours, sniffing around them in the air, turning their heads as though trying to see. They began to shriek dismally, and Ignatius cut them down too.

The following night and the night after, Ignatius returned to the river flats to wait. But the third night he caught one returner, and two more the following night. Two nights later there were six that scrambled up out of the river all at the same time. He quietly let them go. He told himself it was no good getting killed, but it still felt like rationalization. That was perhaps why, one night when there were three at once, he recklessly attacked them and almost did get himself killed when one of them belted him with a heavy stick and nearly knocked him out. At least, he told himself afterwards, it proved he was not afraid of losing his life. Another night he put two more down, and one more other another night; but as many nights, he caught none at all. He was not entirely sure it was not his fault, as more often than he cared to admit he was waking in the darkness, staring up into the starlit treetops.

Each night he arrived home between four and five in the morning, and collapsed in bed for a few short hours before rising for work. Finally, after the first week, he called the office and told them he was sick. But staying home for rest did not help him. He only slept fitfully during the day. He could not keep this up indefinitely. “Where have they come from? How can there be so many?” he kept asking himself, and a dark depression set in.

His apartment began to resemble the nether regions he was battling, mud tracked in on his shoes left staining the floor and the carpet, the bathroom floor and towels wet and mildewy from hurried showers, his clothes and dishes unwashed, garbage overflowing, food attracting insects on the kitchen counter. He grew careless about the remains of his nightly occupations too. No sense, he thought, wiping the grime off his machete, as he would only pollute it again in a few hours. No sense washing his night clothes, they would only reek again the following night. At night he had begun to value time over clandestineness, leaving a few cans of gasoline hidden inside a large hollow log on the river flats, not bothering to transport the bodies any more to a “safe place” for disposal, but rather cutting them up and burning them right on the river flats, in the spot where, that first night, the one monster had built his “fire.” Human remains were hard to dispose of completely under such circumstances, but he had no choice.

As his monthly rendezvous with Samael approached Ignatius filled with growing dread. When the first Tuesday after the new moon finally came, Ignatius lay down on the couch at four o’clock that day and said, “I’ll close my eyes for a minute, before I go to meet Samael.” He fell fast asleep, the first time since he had discovered the returners on the river flats.

He woke suddenly, with a jolt. He saw the windows were all pitch black and there was no light any where except from the dim lamp on the end table next to the couch where he had drowsed off. He looked at his watch in the yellow lamplight and saw it was four fifty and thought, “I have to hurry to the cemetery, there are only a few minutes before sunset!” He looked at his watch again and saw that the second hand was frozen and his watch was stopped, and it was far past the time.

He panicked. There was no use going to the cemetery any more. The moment between day and night was gone, Samael would not be back until the next new moon. But shouldn’t he do something? Even as he wondered, he saw something stirring in the shadows, just beyond the edge of the closet door, over the edge of which he had draped the muddy overcoat he wore at night. It was a stiff, jerky movement, not the kind one saw in normal humans. He turned toward his tool bag in the kitchen behind him on the table, and he saw another shadow moving just beyond the kitchen doorway. He spun around. There were two corpses with jaundiced skin, eyes glassy and half open just in front of him, twitching as they got up from where he had left them on the floor.

An unpleasant memory wormed its way to the front of his brain. He had been leaving corpses in his apartment thinking he could dispose of them later. That was why his apartment smelled so bad. That was it. How could he be so careless! There were others emerging from the bathroom, from the kitchen, from his bedroom. Now he remembered, that was why he never slept in his bedroom any more; he had been stacking them up there in a great pile. Corpses crowded around him, reaching out toward him…

He woke suddenly, with a jolt. The lamp on his end table was on, but he could still see the bluish gray sky of near sunset through the windows. He looked at his watch: four thirty. He still had time to get to the cemetery in time. He glanced over at the closet where his overcoat was draped. There was no movement. No corpses. He shook the sleep out of his head. Of course he had not been stashing corpses in his apartment.

When Ignatius arrived at the cemetery, a thin crescent moon hung above the southwestern horizon. Trembling from exhaustion and hunger, he knelt down next to his mother’s grave. He studied his hands, and thought how he seemed to be aging prematurely, how his hands looked like the hands of an old man, every bone and sinew visible under thin, pale skin.

He told Samael, “I have failed.”

Samael asked, “How so?”

He replied, “I was supposed to guard the gates, keep the dead out of this world. But now I’ve found dozens... And if I missed these, there have to be others… And now they’re starting to kill the living, and I can’t fight them all.”

Samael replied, “You are doing what is needed.”

“I’m exhausted!” moaned Ignatius.

“It will take time,” said Samael.

“It will take years!” Ignatius exclaimed.

“Time is insignificant,” said Samael, “When you bring the rebels to justice does not matter, only that you bring them to justice.”

“But what about the innocent living I failed to protect? The murders on East River Road?”

“The living are not your concern.”

“They are when they are murdered and come back! When the dead murder them, they always come back, don’t they?” cried Ignatius.

“It is not inevitable, only more likely,” replied the angel, “The unnatural manner in which they are murdered makes the temptation to return stronger. But the temptation is not different than for any other dead, and giving in to it still calls for the same punishment.”

Ignatius closed his eyes. “This is too much for me.”

“God never gives a commandment without also providing the means to fulfill his commandment.”

At a bus stop Ignatius watched a vagrant making his way down the sidewalk, asking passers-by for spare change. He wasn’t sure he had seen this drifter before. There were some he would see habitually for a while at least, then they would be gone, he wouldn’t see them for a while, perhaps never again. But there would be others who took their place. Where did they sleep at night, he wondered. By the train station, the bus station, in central park. The river flats.

When they die, he thought, their names probably don’t appear in the obituaries. They are lucky if anyone gives notice to them at all. And they did die, probably quite young. Untreated illnesses that turn into pneumonia and fever. Cirrhosis, malnutrition. Accidents. If they were murdered in their sleep on the river flats, he wondered, who would know it? Who cared what happened on the river flats, until four people who had histories and names and respectable families were murdered?

He went home and cleaned his apartment. He took his clothes to the Laundromat and used an extra dose of detergent. He slept the whole night through and in the morning he rose at five o’clock. He said his prayers and dressed and read from the Bible. He ate a simple breakfast and went to work, and while he sat on the bus he worked out a plan. One day a week he would devote to this.

He called them the Nameless Ones. He found colonies of them huddled in abandoned, dilapidated buildings in the city. He would cleanse one house at a time. He became a familiar, if eccentric, figure at city hall, harrying inspectors and the city council, fighting corrupt landlords to enforce the ordinances requiring demolition of condemned houses. More often than not he failed. The River Dwellers were more difficult. It was impossible to have the river dragged, so he could only keep watch, waiting for unfinished business to lure the returners out.

Ignatius became familiar to the homeless, the street people, the migrant workers and the hobos, haunting public parks, the river flats, the bus stations and homeless shelters. They avoided him at first, wondering if he was a law enforcer or immigration agent. But they gradually grew accustomed to him, with his discrete inquiry: “Has anyone died lately?” No one else claimed to want a decent Christian burial for those who had deceased forgotten.

After that bus ride, after his meeting with Samael, Ignatius began a journal of his activities. He noted the names of all returners and the date and cause of their decease if he could learn it, his best estimate of when they came back, and when he put them down. He kept count of them. Some years there were more, some years less. But, he observed, beneath the yearly fluctuations, the number of dead who came back was slowly increasing faster than the number of quiet dead.

Chapter 9: Jo
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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 thinking about the meaning of family over a light breakfast of grape jelly on toast and a small orange juice, and telling himself he had to hurry just a bit in order to catch his bus and get to work right on time, when the phone rang.

Though he had dealt in the supernatural every day for the past forty-eight years, and though he had during that time spoken to an angel the first Tuesday after every new moon, Ignatius had never been much of a believer in premonition. Revelation, yes. He had learned to recognize the voice of God. But belief in premonition bordered too much on belief in soothsaying, clearly condemned in the Bible. But before 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, his sister Anne was 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 returner 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. Returners 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 returners 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 10: The Keys of the Kingdom
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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 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 returners 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 returners, the worst year yet, the year 2000, brought seventeen. Seventeen returners 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 returners 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 returners 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 returners he knew nothing about?

One Tuesday, 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 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, and circling the pillar soaring winged creatures.

“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 11: A Mother’s Memories
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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 12: Old Haunts
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It didn’t really bother Ignatius to go to a gay bar. Not that he wasn’t repulsed by the manic music and the alternately gloomy and blinding disco lighting, the cigarette smoke and the smell of booze, and most of all 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 hovering around the edges of the dance floor called him “troll” and “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 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 wanted acceptance most from the one group of people who would never give it to him, his parents and his church. 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 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.

“You’re Jo’s uncle? That’s why you’re here? That figures. No offense intended, but I didn’t think you were the type to end up in a place like this.”

Ignatius smiled blandly.

“What are you? Some kinda priest, aren’t you?”

“Not a priest, but I am a minister,” he replied.

“Yeah, I figured something like that. Something about you. I hope you’re not offended if I tell you I don’t believe in God.”

“Why should it offend me?”

“Sure, I got friends who are Christian, who think they can reconcile being gay with being Christian. More power to ‘em. But – maybe it’s just me – the way I see it, the problem comes not so much in reconciling being gay and Christian, as reconciling being human and Christian. But that’s just me.”

“How do you mean?” Ignatius asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Well – begging your pardon as you’re a minister and all – but if God is the kind of God most Christians say he is, then either he doesn’t exist, in which case I’m just as well off not believing in him, or he does exist, in which case by virtue of being human I should resist him to the last, even if it does mean being eternally damned.”

“The God most Christians believe in is a God of Love,” said Ignatius.

“I’ve heard that,” she said, blowing out a long drag of cigarette smoke, “But I sure ain’t seen it.”

“Not everyone lives up to their faith,” said Ignatius.

“Look,” she said, “There’s two kinds of Christians, when it comes down to it, and I’m curious to know which kind you are.”

“There are many kinds of Christians,” said Ignatius.

“No, no, no,” insisted the woman, “Underneath all the labels, there’s only two. The feeling kind and the knowing kind. Which kind are you?”

“I’m still not sure I know what you mean,” Ignatius smiled.

The woman looked him straight in the eyes. “The feeling kind are the ones who say God lives inside your heart. Go with your feelings. The knowing kind are the ones who say you can never know God through your heart, only by what you’ve been told – in the Bible, by God, by angels, whatever. Go with what you know.”

“You’ve obviously given this a lot of thought,” said Ignatius.

“Just because I’m a dyke doesn’t mean I don’t think about this stuff,” she said.

“I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise,” said Ignatius, “No offense intended.”

“None taken,” said the woman. “Anyway, the way I see it, when Christians say that God is a God of Love, the most believable ones are the feeling kind. They’re the ones who go with what’s in their hearts, even when it means not going with what’s in the Bible or what the preacher tells ‘em over the pulpit. They’re the ones who say, ‘Doesn’t matter if God rained fire on Sodom and Gomorrah. God changed his mind. God loves gay folks now. Just listen to what’s in your heart.’

“The knowing kind ain’t so generous, if you know what I mean. They talk about God hating as much as they talk about God loving. Well, forget that. That’s the God I say a decent human being should resist to the last. But if the kind who really hold to the goodness and the love of God always tell you to listen to the human heart, doesn’t that mean we shouldn’t look to God for goodness, we should just look within all along?”

“I guess I don’t think humans can really know what the good is without God, so I suppose that makes me the knowing kind,” said Ignatius.

“Fair enough,” said the woman, “I appreciate your honesty. All the same, you’re here, and not somewhere else, and you seem to care about Jo. Maybe there’s hope for you after all.” She took a long draft of beer.

“So tell me about Jo and Jack,” said Ignatius.

“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. Then 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 13: The Bishop
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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 returner. 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 14: At the Gates
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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 canvas 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. Returners 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 returner 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 15: Spirits
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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 returners. 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 returners 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 shouted at the spirits: “Where is McKay?” But they took no more notice of him than any other spirits had. He rummaged through a drawer and pulled out a blank note pad and a black magic marker and tore off three pages, scribbling a bold, single word on each, “WHERE … IS … MCKAY?” But the spirits drifted away and others took their place. He continued translating, but there were no more messages that related to Jack McKay.

“Perhaps on a different frequency,” he thought. So he “folded” out and watched other spirits in other frequencies. He kept at it until the sun was high in the sky again. He had been drinking water by the gallon, working, working without sleep or food.

“I have to do this systematically,” he said finally. He folded in until he found simple space, no spirits, and then unfolded the first spirit dimension. “I’ll start here,” he said, “At the lowest frequency.”

There was a single dark and withered spirit. It stared directly at him. It first he assumed it was looking in his direction, not at him. None of the spirits he had witnessed so far seemed even peripherally aware of him. He got up to fill the cup with water, pour in a new bottle of ink, and it followed him with its frigid, uncanny gaze.

“Are you looking at me?”

It continued to stare.

He wrote on his pad of paper, “Can you communicate with me?”

The spirit moved toward him until it was close enough to him to breathe in his ear. He watched it reach down with a blackened, ethereal hand toward his own hand, the hand that held the pen pressed down to the page. Its hand seemed to merge into his own, and for a moment he felt pain, a terrible cramp, ice cold, then numbness. His fingers twitched and he dropped the pen, but then, seemingly with an intelligence of its own, his hand picked the pen up.

He watched his hand write without knowing what it would write next: “I know where McKay is.”

The ache and chill from the touch of the spirit crept up Ignatius’ arm, filling him with misery. It felt alarmingly like having the circulation in his hand cut off, as if he were losing it. He felt the sharp pain in his chest he occasionally experienced, and could breathe only in short gasps. He noticed that the spirit was changing hue as it touched him, turning from dull black into an iridescent purple.

With his left hand he grabbed another pad of paper and laboriously wrote the question, “Who are you?”

The spirit responded by scrawling clumsily using his right hand, “Henry Nolan Smith III.” It jabbed the pen emphatically as it drew the three lines after its name and then dotted the ‘i’ and crossed the ‘t.’

“Why are you helping me?” Ignatius wrote back.

For a moment the spirit changed color again. It paused as it flickered, a flame-like red. Gradually the purple hue returned and it wrote, “Be helpful.”

Was it trying to say it wanted to be helpful? Or was it asking Ignatius for help?

“Do not lie to me!” Ignatius replied.

It flickered again, this time for just a moment, then wrote, “Never lie.”

Ignatius was not sure how much longer he could bear the pain, but he could not proceed without asking one more question, just to be sure. “How do you know McKay?”

“McKay tried to disciple me. Like the others,” it wrote, “McKay is a liar.”

Ignatius would have interrogated further, but he had to let it remain at that. He couldn’t take any more. “Where is McKay?”

“My church,” wrote the spirit, “I will show you tonight.”

Ignatius felt a surge of relief, as it slowly withdrew itself from him. He could breathe. It returned to where it had been when Ignatius first saw it, though now it looked brighter and sharper, its movement less languid and more energetic.

Ignatius climbed the stairs to his bedroom and lay down. The spirit followed him, and perched in a corner of his room, staring at him. Unable to sleep, he simply rested his body until the sun set, watching the spirit in the dim light of his shuttered bedroom. It was smiling.

Chapter 16: St. Albans
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The spirit sauntered cautiously on the edge of the street. It cast no shadow under the streetlamps. It paid no attention to the sidewalk, nor to the cars parked at the side of the road. Ignatius did pay attention to the sidewalk. He stayed on it, following the spirit at a close distance.

They had been walking westward for a half-hour or so when Ignatius became aware of a commotion a few blocks ahead. He saw the flashing lights of police cars. He heard sirens. He saw searchlights casting long shadows and throngs of uniformed people in silhouette. He saw yellow tape cordoning off entire blocks. And at the center of the tumult loomed the venerable, century-old spires of St. Alban’s Episcopal Church.

The spirit ambled forward, drifting unnoticed past police and reporters and ambulances to the entrance of the church. Ignatius stopped just outside the cordoned perimeter.

He saw a woman near by, just inside the yellow tape, wearing jeans and a t-shirt and speaker headphones, watching and sipping coffee out of a styrofoam cup. She must be a stray member of some TV news crew, he thought.

He asked her: “What’s happening?”

“Nothing, at the moment,” she replied.

“I mean, what’s all this commotion about?”

“Don’t you listen to the news? This has been going on all day, since this morning. A bunch of lunatics have taken the church hostage.”

“What kind of lunatics?” he asked

She raised her hand to silence him and then cocked her head, listening to the headphones. “I’ve got to go,” she said.

Ignatius closed his eyes. He saw the police, the paramedics and the reporters, like smudges of yellow light surrounded by dark earth. White radiance shone out the windows of the church. “I need the sword of God,” he said out loud. He gazed upward at the sky. The whole heavens were glowing a rich magenta color. Far, far away, he saw things gliding like birds in between the clouds. He saw a flash like red lightning, illuminating the air, causing the flying things to dance excitedly.

He stepped forward, slipping under the cordon. He followed the path of the spirit who had led him here. He walked gingerly past the others without their seeming to notice him. He made his way to the entrance, where the spirit waited for him, frozen. It slowly raised its arm, pointing toward the door.

Ignatius stared at the entrance, unfolding it. Dense, red wood, stone, iron and the space enclosed by it snapped open, curling like burning paper. He saw bodies stuck to the walls like flies to flypaper, looks of anguished anticipation on their faces. They were returners.

He looked back up at the magenta sky, at the flashing red and the dancing wings.

“Come closer,” he said, “come here.”

The sky burst open to the sound of thunder. A river of fire cascaded downward. It streaked down a jagged, lightning-shaped course through the sky, following invisible contours in space. The dark earth shook and there was an explosion as it landed in the parking lot behind the church. It spread itself out, roaring like continual thunder, its brightness intensifying until it was almost blinding, a giant column of fire between earth and heaven, lighting the whole sky amber and gold.

The physical world faded in its presence. Ignatius was only barely aware that the people outside the church were still there, huddled behind police cars and ambulances. They seemed frozen now, as if in some other dimension not aware of what was happening.

Ignatius began to form an image in his mind of a bolt of fire leaping out of the base of the pillar. It would blast open the door of the church and cremate the corpses waiting for him inside. There would be a calm just before it happened, like the stillness before a storm.

And just as the calm began, he heard the click of the latch of the door. A voice rasped, “Make the fire stop, or he’ll kill them.”

Ignatius paused. There were people inside the church.

“Let me see them,” replied Ignatius.

“Make the fire stop.”

Ignatius let go the turbulence. The fire leaped back up into the sky. The earth was filled with darkness and silence again. He peered back one last time at the crowd of yellow lights like candles, the people who all thought they were helping outside the church. Then he slipped through the cracked-open door.

He opened his eyes. The light in the church was dim. There were four of them in the atrium recoiling in the shadows. Three of the four corpses were far-gone, quite rotten, with features difficult to make out. The fourth – the one who had spoken to him through the doorway – had been ancient before he died, perhaps in his nineties. His spine was hunched over and his head mottled and completely bald. Ignatius knew not to underestimate them. The source of their strength was not the rotting bone, muscle, and sinew he saw before him, but the will that had somehow brought them back into this world. The old male cadaver pushed open the inner doors of the atrium and pointed into the sanctuary with a bony, arthritic finger.

He saw other returners inside, dozens of them occupying the pews or standing in the aisles. There were corpses in varying states of decay, even a few skeletons. Many, maybe most were old, but he saw young and middle-aged too, male and female and some of indistinguishable gender, every race, wearing funerary finery that indicated rich, poor and in between. He looked for Jo, but did not see her. The church reeked with death. It was uncanny seeing them like this, sitting quite still and watching him with such focus. Returners were typically lost souls lacking any such self-control as he saw here.

Ignatius’ voice echoed as he raised it in the sanctuary: “I am warning you, I can call the fire down!”

As he entered, he saw the hostages. They were a relatively small congregation, he thought, for such a large church, three dozens huddled in the pews toward the center of the sanctuary. Men and women dressed in their disheveled Sunday best, men with shirts and coats that that had grown rumpled and sweat soaked, women shivering, clutching shawls or jackets around them. When they came here this morning, Ignatius thought, this had been a Sunday service like any other. He saw no one wearing a white collar or an alb. It was disturbing. Where was the priest? He saw harried, fragile faces wet with tears, eyes staring blankly ahead in disbelief, people holding each other in despair, clutching children to their chests. An elderly woman was coughing uncontrollably. Two babies cried intermittently. One would cry and then stop just as the other began wailing. The older children were petrified, deathly still. Interspersed among and around the people were returners armed with guns and knives. He had never seen them so well armed and organized. This was a veritable army.

He heard the same high-pitched, reedy voice he had heard in the cemetery. “It will have to be tonight, my children,” it said.

Ignatius looked this way and that, trying to see where the voice came from. “If that is you, Jack McKay, let them go!” he shouted, his voice trembling with anger, “There may yet be hope for you at the Final Judgment! God is full of mercy to those who repent!”

The voice replied, “God doesn’t give a shit! If He did, do you think he’d need someone like you to do His dirty work for Him? Someone like you who can fuck up so repeatedly? God doesn’t give a fuck about what happens down here, beyond the amusement He gets from the way we torment each other for His fucking name’s sake. He gets off on that. That’s about it.”

It was hard to tell where the voice was coming from the sanctuary echoed so much.

“If you had even a spark of humanity left in you, you would not torment these innocent people any more. You’d let them go.”

“Innocent!” the voice cried back, “You think these people are innocent just because they’re in a church?”

“What wrong have they done you?” replied Ignatius.

The voice replied quieter. “You left me no choice. You killed six of mine in the cemetery, with that fire you call down from the sky. Burnt them to ashes. How can I fight that? I have no interest in these people. I have no interest in you. Why don’t you just leave me alone? Leave us alone?”

“Whatever you want, it’s irrelevant now. You had your chance. Your life is over now. You don’t belong here. You should let me help you move on.”

Loud laughter echoed through the sanctuary. Some of the returners joined in the laughter with hideous chortles and guffaws.

“We’d like to move on,” said the voice, “And we’ll be glad to let you help us if you wish. But we ask only one thing first. Just this one thing and we will gladly depart forever into the next world.”

“What is that?” asked Ignatius.

“Justice!” the voice roared. “Justice! Justice! Justice!”

The returners joined in the chant, filling the sanctuary with dreadful chattering noise.

The voice continued: “We’re tired of waiting for God to give us justice, at some mythical final judgment, somewhere, sometime, in some mythical future. We’ll have our own final judgment, right here, right now, in this sanctuary dedicated to God’s justice. And it will be God on trial!”

“That’s pathetic,” said Ignatius, “A mock trial? I don’t believe it. You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t obsessed with the pathetic failures of your miserable lives. And you think blaming God will fix it? In life you were a blasphemer, a drug abuser, a homosexual, and a quitter. You killed yourself! Putting God on trial won’t fix that!”

Suddenly, Ignatius saw movement. The sanctuary was equipped with an elevated pulpit. Over the top emerged a thin, feminine figure, with a thick, curly mop of blond hair, a delicate jaw and lips, and piercing eyes.

Her voice trembled as she spoke. “In life I was sexually abused. For six years, from the time I was a deacon I was fucked up the ass again and again by a boy-bugger Mormon bishop named Charles L. Mather. For six years. Then he excommunicated me. The bishop has the keys. What he binds on earth is bound in Heaven. So he goes to eternal salvation and calls me a blasphemer and a faggot and locks me out of heaven?”

“If you’re telling the truth, it will be set right in the end,” pleaded Ignatius.

“If I’m telling the truth?” she roared, “What does Bishop Mather say? Let him be the first witness in the trial of God! We’ll set right this matter right now.”

There was a commotion as a group of returners emerged from the shadows behind the choir. Against its will they pushed forward the muddy cadaver of an elderly man dressed in his burial best.

Ignatius heard a voice just behind him, whispering into his left ear, “It’s time for this mockery to end. You have the power to end it. End it now!”

Ignatius turned to see Samael, like a great black shadow crouching over him.

“I should use the sword of God?” Ignatius hissed.

“What else? Do it now!”

He studied the terrified faces of the people in the pews.

“These others won’t be harmed if I call down the fire?”

“It’s too late to save them. I’m commanding you to do it. This must end now.”

“You’re commanding me to kill everyone in this building?”

“It can’t be helped now. Calling the fire is as simple as thinking about it. The command is from God himself!”

Ignatius stared in horror. Parents had brought their children to Sunday school this morning to teach them faith in God. Surely there must be some other way. He searched the faces of the armed returners surrounding the hostages for some sign of weakness, some sign they might be overcome or frightened long enough to let the innocents go.

He desperately thought, “Perhaps Jo? I’m her uncle! Perhaps she’ll listen, perhaps she’ll help!” And he searched again for her, more frantically, pleading with his eyes. She was nowhere to be seen.

He stared back into the grim face of the angel, pleading for a softening, a reprieve, for a word of mercy, for a “Lay not thine hand upon them!” Did not God promise to spare Sodom and Gomorrah for the sake of ten innocents? And surely there were more than that in this room! But if this was a test, he realized from the bleak frown of the angel, it was a test to see if he would follow through to the end.

“Samael!” he cried, “I can’t do it.”

“The trial will begin,” shouted McKay.

A cry and commotion rose from the front of the sanctuary. Returners were forcing Mather to kneel at the communion rail in front of the pulpit. Ignatius froze, an abyss of despair widening in him.

Ignatius heard another voice from behind his right ear. “This one did look promising, Samael, I’ll grant that. It is a shame.” Another angel, like the sun if Samael was like shadow, garbed in glimmering gold and scarlet, flowing flaxen hair, husky, healthy and pink complexioned, hung in the air above Ignatius. “You’ve given him more than his fair chance, brother. Do not feel bad. God will not blame you. But we cannot wait even one shadow longer.”

The Golden Angel clapped his hands. The walls of the church trembled. A terrifying, electrical crackling noise rippled through the sanctuary, hushing the cries of the children and the howls of the returners. The stained glass windows of the church rattled, radiant from a blaze falling just beyond. The air inside the church wavered. Men and women perspired under a sudden oppressive heat.

The wooden pews began to steam and creak. People and returners leaped up from them in pandemonium. The sanctuary was filled with screaming. The light behind the windows grew dazzling, the glass cracking and popping, the lead supports starting to melt. Just before the end, the ceiling turned black and then burst into flame. Anything flammable close to the walls burst into flame too: wooden beams, banners, and doors. Then came a downpour of white fire. Ignatius saw a little girl’s face twisted in horror as she clutched the top of her head with her hands, brushing the flames out of her hair even as her clothes burst into flame. People were falling to the ground. He saw a woman scrambling on the floor under the pews, trying to line herself up under the burning wood in order to use it as a shelter. Jack McKay’s proxy corpse tumbled over the edge of the pulpit. At the final moment before everything was consumed, it was impossible to tell who was human and who was a returner and more. Flesh bubbled and blackened, hair seemed to evaporate, clothes burned.

The rain of fire stopped suddenly, sucked back up into the heavens. Ignatius looked up. There was no roof in the sanctuary any more over the blackened, scorched walls. He saw stars peeking through thin clouds. He saw winged things circling overhead, far away almost as the stars it seemed. The perfect stillness was maddening; peoples’ screams had only just been ringing in his ears. Charred, smoking remnants of pews were left, arched holes in the walls where intricate stained glass scenes had once gleamed. Ignatius stared in horror at the empty sanctuary. There was nothing left of the bodies but a layer of black, greasy ashes.

There was one corpse, blackened but relatively intact, that remained, prone but stirring on the kneeling steps where the communion rail had once been. Ignatius recognized the wispy white hair and the gaunt figure of Charles L. Mather.

“This one is for you to deal with as you see fit,” said the Golden Angel, indicating Mather to Samael with a nod.

Without knowing it, Ignatius had fallen to his knees. He turned to look up at the two beings conversing above him. Samael unfurled his black robe and let fall the hood he’d been covering his face in, showing his perfectly bone white face and pale hair.

“Is there a specific charge regarding this one?” asked Samael, turning to Ignatius.

“Not specifically,” replied the Golden Angel, “Though you know the usual procedure when there is this kind of failure.”

“I had so hoped,” said Samael.

“It is a marvel if in ten thousand years on sixty worlds there is one who can become one of us,” replied the Golden Angel, “I’ll leave it to you to decide.” Then he vanished.

Samael looked down at Ignatius.

“I have taught you many rules in your life,” the angel said, “But if you serve God long enough, you will ultimately be required to break all but one: Obedience to the One who gives the rules. In this there can be no scruples, not the least hesitation.”

“What are you going to do to me?”

“Nothing,” replied Samael, “I will simply take back the keys I have given you. You’ve been a decent servant, but you may finally receive the rest you’ve so longed for. You are hereby released from the Call.”

As quickly as Samael had spoken the word “released,” it was as if a band snapped in Ignatius chest, as if something broke leaving a hole in him.

“Godspeed,” said the angel.

Ignatius slumped down, overwhelmed by a kind of stupor. He clutched his chest, as a sharp pain overwhelmed him, radiating from his heart up his neck and into his shoulders, through his gut right down to his pelvis. He lost his breath. He heard police and fire sirens blaring outside. His vision faded. The last thing he saw was the face of the angel swallowed up in darkness.

“It had to be a bomb,” eyewitnesses outside the church told each other, though no one was quite sure what had happened. “The worst terrorist attack in the history of the state,” commentators were already calling it. The media reported a scene of unbelievable devastation inside the historic church. The paramedics and firemen who rushed inside were astonished to find only a single body at the back of the sanctuary, that of a former civil servant by the name of Ignatius Wick, relatively unscathed by the blast, but apparently dead of a heart attack.

Chapter 17: A New Life
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There were many things that puzzled Ignatius about the circumstances surrounding his death, and he had what seemed an eternity to ponder, as he was swallowed up into a great blackness where he was aware of no thing else but the expanse of his own thoughts. He was surprised to learn that even when one is completely unconscious in life, it is not so totally without sensation as to be dead, when you have no awareness of the weight of the flesh, of friction in the joints, of a heart beat or the flow of blood in your veins, of air in your lungs, of the splitting of cells. All that is left at first is the memories.

Ignatius relived those final moments again and again, the simultaneous horror and relief he experienced when he realized that the whole problem in the church would be taken out of his hands by the angels. “So the job is done,” he thought to himself, “McKay’s rebellion is over.” He had not expected the angels’ solution to be so ruthless. The memories of burning human flesh still appalled him. It had been only for that he had hesitated. His prime directive had been to guard the sanctity of the boundary between life and death. And though that mostly meant making sure the dead stayed dead, he always imagined the logical corollary to be preserving the living alive. He had never anticipated, would never have anticipated, the angels’ solution.

And it bothered him to consider why, if they were only going to snatch the task away from him in the end, they bothered him with it in the first place. He had always been only too willing to concede that angels could do the job better than him. But Samael had always made such fanfare about respecting humanity’s jurisdiction over mortality and delegating this Call to humans, proclaiming that neither angels nor archangels nor God himself should violate this prerogative. In the final analysis it seemed inappropriately arbitrary how things ended. Why this time did they intervene when never before? What was it about the case of Jack McKay in particular?

“What did the angel call it? A test?” Ignatius wondered. He had given up love, family, sex, and soul freedom for a lifetime, his very only lifetime, for a bloody test he ultimately failed in a single moment of hesitation?

Furthermore, he was bothered by those curious communications he’d had with the spirits in the last twenty-four hours of his life. What had it meant? It was nothing like what he imagined of the other world.

And it was in the uncertainty caused by his memory of these strange exchanges that the words of Jack McKay about God not caring came back to haunt him.

“It can’t be true,” Ignatius told himself.

Yet all one has in that blackness after death is to evaluate one’s life. And that was impossible for him to do without questions multiplying and screaming back at him louder and louder, until he found himself slowly growing aware of something more than just the blackness.

It is like realizing suddenly that one is, after all, in a space, a completely dark space, but a space nonetheless, and one exists in relation to other things. In the ethereal dimensions, those things are the spiritual concepts like time and will and memory, that take on concrete manifestations. They become like the corners of the room you find yourself in, like the doors and windows and stairs you move through and out or up and down on, like the light that makes perception possible.

And you see things. One of the things the dead often see is their own body, like viewing it through some window, like through the glass of an aquarium. There it is, pale and gaunt and wrapped up in some dark place. “That was me,” they often think. It is hard not to think of it as the self, even though looking at it they should realize that it is nothing any more but a shell. But to a spirit looking at it from the outside, having once lived in it, having once been it, now in it seems to be wrapped up all the answers to the great mysteries of the Universe. And when there are unanswered questions, as there were for Ignatius, it becomes one’s whole obsession. And either one finds it in one’s soul to leave the questions unanswered and move on, or one lets the obsession grow, until the aquarium window becomes all there is and one finally determines to go back.

The latter is what Ignatius did. He took the journey back into the cold and dark. He awoke wrapped up in that pitchy place, ravenous with a hunger unlike any other. He began to masticate feverishly, so voraciously he might have eaten off his own limbs if they had gotten in the way of his grinding teeth. He bit through the cloth and wood of the casket. He engorged massive quantities of the black fecund soil, swallowing stones, worms, roots and whatever bits of undigested rot might be found in a burial ground. And as he ate, he clawed and scratched and dug with his hands until suddenly the ceiling of the earth began to crumble in and the first patches of night sky broke over him.

To a dead man, the stars were glorious. Their light was like the light of the sun to a living human. And sitting, waiting in the starlight by the edge of his grave was a woman with a face he recognized again, the face so like his mother’s.

“Josephine,” he sighed at the sight of her.

Finally Ignatius arose with no routines to follow.