Psychopomp: A Novella (9 page)

In the sticky dark, the city streets glowed softly with turquoise-tinged whiteness. The air was thin and pure. Gabriel and I walked through an aqueous world, cloaked by the din of glittering, laughing citizens of the night. Our plain clothes rendered us invisible in the dark spaces between the lights. We moved in an anonymous lacuna of silence.

Open doorways in the glassy buildings we passed invited anyone who wished to enter. Flashing lights leaked from within, spreading washes of purple and pink into the bluish river-streets, promising decadence. Groups of lavishly dressed people converged outside the doors, a tangle of gleaming limbs and sparkling clothing. Their voices carried in unintelligible rhythms, words meaningless and light.

“A playground,” Gabriel murmured, “for beautiful men and women with dirty hands.”

“What are we doing now?” I asked as we walked.

“There’s going to be a party tonight. I have to set some things up for it.”

“Oh.” I was confused, but also scared. That didn’t sound like something a mortician would do.

We came to a dark building with swirling sculptures in front of it. The doors were guarded, but Gabriel didn’t seem worried about how to get past them and motioned for me to follow him around the side. There was a ladder. He grabbed the lowest rung and took the vial from me.

“Don’t look down.” The grin he shot over his shoulder made me shudder.

I climbed up behind him, knowing we wouldn’t have had to enter the building this way if Gabriel had any real business being here. The rungs were warm and gritty beneath my palms. Looking to the left, I could see a car parque where rows of dark cars shone with a dull, chitinous gleam. Hazy patches of air were visible in the muted glow of security lights.

Gabriel helped me over the edge onto the flat roof. There was a door. I thought it would be locked, but he opened it easily. We went down a short stairway, half blind in darkness. My eyes had adjusted by the time we reached a catwalk. Musty walls pressed close on us. Gabriel’s head brushed pipes hanging down from the black ceiling.

Some sections of the wall had crumbled away. I peered through the holes down into a wide-open space with a tiered floor. A large white screen took up one whole wall, flanked by curtains in an ardent shade of blue. From the ceiling hung a chandelier made of bone, its soft gold light casting distinct shadows in the shapes of leafless trees on the dark, decaying wallpaper. A few people dressed in black and white milled about, setting the room up for the party.

“Over here,” Gabriel whispered.

The catwalk swayed beneath us. Gabriel knelt down and opened a hatch. He dropped down through it and I heard his feet smack the floor below. His voice rose up, beckoning me to follow him, and I guided my body through the opening. His hands closed around my waist, easing my descent.

We were in a kitchen. Cold dishes lined the steel counters, ready to serve. The salty, fishy aromas of fresh food cooking filled the air, but there was no one else around.

“What are we doing?”

His neck was craned as he looked around, and he didn’t answer. “Ah,” he said, spotting something. “Come on.”

Weaving among the prep areas and industrial appliances, we came to a stop near the double doors leading out to the room with the bone chandelier. Gabriel walked up to a long table with a large glass bowl set atop it. The bowl held a bright pink liquid with bits of fruit floating in it. My mouth began to water.

“Perfect,” Gabriel muttered.

I couldn’t take my eyes off the sweet-smelling drink. It looked delicious.

Uncapping the vial, Gabriel poured the contents into the bowl. He grabbed the ladle resting beside it and stirred it in.

Before I could speak, the double doors opened and staff came pouring through. Gabriel grabbed my arm and turned, pushing past them. Some shouted after us, but we ignored them and burst into the alley behind the building. He tossed the vial into a pile of broken glass, where it shattered. We ran past a dumpster and through the car parque.

For a few blocks I stumbled after him, slipping behind buildings and through gaps in fences. We ran where there was no light. After a few minutes he began to double back, and we ended up across the street from the building we’d just left. It was lit now, aglow with bright pink light. Guests had begun to arrive for the party, and we watched from the shadows as they turned their magnet cars over to valets.

“What did you do?” I demanded, out of breath.

“Just wait.”

So we did. We waited across the street as the music started and the lights swirled. We waited until the screams began. Voices lifted with the music and overpowered it. The doors flew open and people trickled out, moaning in pain, stumbling on the front steps and into the street, where they dropped dead, one by one.

Gabriel smiled in satisfaction. I pressed a hand to my mouth.

“Who are you?” I whispered, trembling. “Who do you work for?”

He began to laugh, a demented, gasping sound. “Oh, Marlo,” he said as the laughter wheezed from his throat, tendons popping in his neck. His eyes squeezed themselves shut and his lips stretched to the sides of his face, teeth showing in a grimace. Tears streamed down his cheeks and his shoulders shook as he wiped them away.

I’d almost run from Gabriel. I’d almost fled right down the alley. He was horrible. But not horrible enough, apparently, because now I was in the truck beside him, riding back to the morgue. I kept sneaking glances at him. He watched the road, his eyes dreamy in the faded dashboard lights. I felt sick with guilt having helped him kill people.

My chest fluttered. “Gabriel, I—”

“Yes?” He waited for me to continue.

I’d just seen this man dump poison into a drink meant for numerous people. I’d watched his face as the people had stumbled into the streets, and it hadn’t once flickered with anything resembling guilt. No, he’d been delighted his plan had worked.

But I couldn’t tell him I had to leave him. Not yet.

He’d been kind to me. Or, if not kind, then not cruel. All through the days I’d stayed with him, I’d held on to the fear he would turn on me like Anden or Verm. I feared he’d hurt me. I feared he’d hate me. I feared he would abandon me.

Instead, he’d done this.

“Aren’t you afraid?” I asked softly.

“Of what?”

He really didn’t know. He didn’t understand fear like I did.

“Of getting caught,” I said. “They’d kill you if they knew.”

“They would,” he agreed in a normal tone of voice, nodding. “But I needed the formaldehyde. That’s what morticians used to put in bodies to preserve them. It’s very poisonous when ingested. And since Ambassador Killering needed the dirt, I had a very convenient excuse for digging up the graveyard to get what I needed. You saw the rest.”

I didn’t understand how he could trust me enough not to turn him in. But then, maybe it wasn’t trust. Maybe it was just not caring.

It seemed to me he needed help. And since I was the only one who knew it, only I could help him. It was simple as that.

Though maybe I couldn’t help. Maybe I didn’t want to.

Back at the morgue, Gabriel let the apartment door slam shut behind him. “You did well tonight,” he said.

“I might have to leave soon,” I blurted. I was feeling restless and brash. I regretted the words as soon as I said them, but I didn’t take them back.

He sat down on the couch to take off his boots. He didn’t look up. “You can leave whenever you want.”

“You won’t try to stop me? You’re not scared I’ll report you?”

“No, to both.”

“Por qué no?” I demanded, angry without knowing why.

He leaned his head back and sighed. Pieces of black hair hung in his electric eyes. I could tell he was tired and didn’t feel like talking to me.

As I looked at him, conflicting feelings and desires overwhelmed me. Sometimes he scared me, but my body responded to his presence. I wondered what he’d do if I walked over there and threw myself on top of him. I knew what to do. Maybe he would like the attention. I knew this was a lonely place.

He said, “I won’t stop you from doing whatever you feel like you should do.”

“But what if I
want
you to stop me? What if I want you to keep me from leaving?”

“I won’t, Marlo.” His voice lilted gently.

“You’re stronger than me,” I persisted. “You’re older. Nobody even knows I’m here. You could have tried something, but you haven’t touched me. You haven’t even looked at me.”

“Why would I hurt you?”

I couldn’t stop the laugh that bubbled up and burst from my throat. “I don’t know. Why would you poison a bunch of people you never met? People who did nothing to you? That’s on my conscience too.”

He’d closed his eyes, but now he opened them and looked at me. “And what’s on their consciences?” he asked, a hint of acid in his otherwise calm tone. “Do you think people get to be ambassadors because they’re nice and follow the rules? Do you think there isn’t blood shed after dark and washed up before morning? Do you think the fishers go out on the water, risking their lives, because they want to? No, it’s so they can sell their catch to the people who were at that party. And if they’re lucky, they’ll earn enough money to make it through the next month.”

“That doesn’t—”

“I had a girlfriend,” he interrupted. “A serious one. We probably would have gotten married someday.”

He spoke abruptly, almost hesitantly, as if he might stop at any second. Lifting his head off the back of the couch, he narrowed his eyes at me. I raised my eyebrows and waited for him to continue.

“We were happy. But”—he inhaled a shuddering breath—“they took her from me. They replaced her with someone else who looked exactly like her. Only I knew she wasn’t the same. No one else could tell the difference.”

My skin prickled. I’d worried briefly about Gabriel’s sanity, but until now, I had mostly ignored my suspicions.

“Who took her?” I asked in as steady a voice as I could manage.

“The ambassadors. My girlfriend was compassionate and ambitious. She wanted to change things, so she was always out organizing peaceful protests and writing letters. She was the best person I ever knew.” He sighed, full of regret and admiration. “Her replacement was nothing like that. She had no ambition. No heart. And she didn’t love me anymore.”

I tried to understand him, but I couldn’t convince myself of the truth of his words. “But why would they do that?” I asked. “Maybe she just… changed.”

He stared at me, incredulous and savage. “Do you think you would know if someone replaced me, Marlo? Would you recognize me in a different form? Could you find me in a crowd?”

Confused, I nodded. “I… I’d try.”

“I was the same way about her,” he said. He sat up straight, shaking the hair from his face. His eyes were hard and flat now. “They made the switch overnight. I couldn’t even look at her after that.”

The pity I felt as I looked at him wasn’t because his girlfriend had stopped loving him. It was because he was too deluded to see the truth. He’d made up some conspiracy to explain something he didn’t like. Maybe lying to himself helped him sleep at night.

I remembered the restless whispers. Maybe not.

“She was at that party,” he said softly. “The replacement. She was with
them
.”

Horrified, I stared into his hard blue eyes. “What?”

“I couldn’t let her live. She wasn’t even real.”

“But—”

“The dead don’t talk,” he said. He stood up suddenly and began unbuttoning his shirt. I had to look away. “They don’t need answers. They’re gone. They can’t see or hear what I do.”

Flinging myself back on the bed, I tried to cool down. For some perverse reason, I wanted Gabriel to treat me the way everyone else had always treated me. He’d had opportunities, yet he let them pass every single time.

“I really don’t know if I can stay here,” I said, baiting him.

“Go to bed,” he said harshly.

I expected the cruelty he’d never shown me. I expected it because I’d never had anything else. But he wouldn’t give that to me. And so I saw him as the solution to my problems. With all my heart I wanted to confess I loved him. It was a love both innocent and fervent, yet doomed to make me miserable. He didn’t love me.

I pressed my secrets down and whispered just four words in the dark. “I won’t leave you.”

There was no reply. I imagined him telling me he couldn’t bear to be apart. He would cross the room and lie down next to me. His hands would be gentle.

This fierce longing troubled me. I’d just watched him murder people with a cold heart. It was likely madness consumed him.

I could have left the morgue, but it would have been useless since I would never escape unpunished for the things he’d done.

The orange cat was dead. I wasn’t sure how long he’d lain around the back corner of the morgue, half hidden behind the scraggly remains of a shrub. His bottom half was gone, the tail and feet scattered nearby.

“I’m sorry,” I said to the head, my words caught up by the wind. “I should have helped you more.”

All day, I’d felt my relationship with Gabriel straining. His vague air of friendliness toward me was gone. I saw him in a new, unfamiliar light, no longer colored by my affection for him. I wondered if he’d actually always been abrupt and detached, and I’d been too awestruck and eager to please to notice it before now.

Maybe he’d been replaced, like his girlfriend had. But I wasn’t paranoid so I didn’t really believe that. I felt bereft.

He’d disappeared some hours ago, leaving me to remove the bones from the alkaline hydrolysis machine. I wandered the grounds in search of him, pretending the asylum wasn’t casting a shadow over me. In the distance, the two old trees bent toward each other. When I left, I thought, I could walk right through them.

And never look back.

I went back to the apartment and heard him breathing in the dim room. My hand hovered at the switch, frozen with my indecisiveness. Then I flipped it up to reveal him slouched low on the couch, legs spread wide, lab coat wrinkled. His pupils contracted and he blinked without breaking his gaze from the distance that enraptured him.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“No.” He lifted one hand to rub at his shadowed jaw, making a light scratching sound.

“What is it, Gabriel?” I spoke softly, hoping he’d recognize compassion in me. I wanted him to know I cared even though I had to leave. But I didn’t know why it mattered to me.

“You want to know,” he said, “what I do when I go up the hill at night?”

I nodded, hesitating. “I… I won’t hate you.”

A little laugh escaped his lips. He sounded resigned. He would tell me. His secrets couldn’t stay with him forever.

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” he said, meeting my gaze. I flinched at the uncharacteristically frantic, forlorn expression in his eyes.

“Gabriel,” I urged.

He opened one hand toward me, as if he held his heart inside it. “They’re in their beds,” he said in a low, eerie voice. “It’s easier when they’re sleeping. When they have no idea what’s happening to them. I… I drug them. I drug them out of their minds.”

Chilled, I recalled the night my eyes had followed the blur of his white coat up the hill. I imagined his tall, narrow figure looming darkly down those moonlit halls, dripping syringe in hand. Shadow-faced, he would lurk beside beds with sinister intent, needle poised against cold skin. He would inject the patients with clinical efficiency, and then he would come back down the hill to sleep across the room from me.

I tasted salt. My cheeks were wet. “Why?” I asked.

“I do what I’m told. I give these people— Marlo, they need medical attention they aren’t getting. They shouldn’t be up there, hidden from the world. I give them medication they don’t even need. I turn them into zombies because that’s a requirement of my job.”

I’d been shaking my head the whole time he spoke. “You shouldn’t have to do that. How could they ask that of you? How can you… Gabriel, how can you live with yourself?”

“They didn’t ask me. And I barely live with myself. Every day I struggle even to get out of bed.”

“You should be better than this.”

He made a dismissive face. “Why? Why should
I
be better?”

“Because you
are
,” I insisted. “You—”

Suddenly he sat forward, fury in his eyes. “No. I’m not better. You don’t know all the things I’ve done. The things I
do
, the things I think, the things I ignore. My god, Marlo, you watched me kill people. You know nothing good about me.
Nothing
. And that’s because there isn’t anything good about me.”

“But—”

“When you’ve worked so hard for something you believe in, something you know in your heart is right, and never,
ever
see a single thing change… It’s exhausting. It’s disheartening. I came to work here because I didn’t have the strength to continue elsewhere. This is me punishing myself.”

I stared at him. This Gabriel wasn’t calm and confident. This Gabriel wasn’t paranoid or delusional. He didn’t scare me anymore. He was so sad and angry and… lost.

With a sigh, he fell back against the couch and stared up at the ceiling. “I know the secret to eternal life.” He nodded a few times, his lips pressed tight together. “It’s death,” he whispered. “Death is the secret. Your body decomposing in the dirt, becoming the earth itself—
that
is the secret. Dying in order to propagate life—it’s the paradox of eternity.”

“What are you talking about?” If he meant to kill himself, I would have to stop him somehow. But if he really wanted to go, I understood.

“You got me thinking. I’m going to leave too,” he said. “No one can stop me. No one will care.”

My heart fluttered in panic. “Where are you going?”

“I don’t know. I want to see what’s beyond these fields. I heard about a man who built himself a castle a long time ago. It’s supposed to be due west from here, right at the base of a mountain range. I guess it’s abandoned now, but I want to see it.”

“You could die,” I said.

“Maybe. But at least I’ll die out in the world, and no one will be able to claim my body for credits.”

I sucked in a breath, thinking of a long journey across a desolate, hostile, chemical-laced countryside. Surely Gabriel wouldn’t want to do it alone. I wouldn’t have wanted to.

“I could come with you.”

“Then you’ll die too.”

That was the point. “But,” I said, “I won’t be alone.”