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