A Lower Deep

Aaron approached. His grimace described his honest confusion and helplessness. He hefted his sword and cradled it, hands fluttering because he knew there were seldom foes that could be cut. The monastery thrummed around us; the skeletons of two hundred angels who had become men were now only dust in the breeze. We breathed them in and could taste their insurrection.

'This was simple poltergeist activity,' I told him. 'Most of the eidolons were snipped away before we even arrived on the mount. You should've been able to cure the boy with a mild charm. What happened?'

'You should know more than us. You deal with the dead. He fell into a coma and soon died. We resuscitated him and thought it best to eviscerate.'

'You did this, Aaron?'

'No, I haven't the ability. Uriel and some of the other friars and mendicant worked in tandem, as directed by Abbot John.'

'Can they actually cure him this way?'

'Abbott John believes so.'

'I don't.'

He shook his head. 'Neither do I.' Finding nothing else to cut, he worked the blade across his thumb, finding resolve in his own angry flesh. The red droplets ran down his forearm but he couldn't bleed out his frustration that easily. 'All that's keeping the boy alive is your oath.' He gestured toward the beds. 'We need your help. The mother won't let us near.'

Janice sat beside Eddie holding his hand, her eyes much more dead than his. Her cheeks were drained of so much color that I could see each of the burst capillaries in her face. She stared at the row of jars and seemed to be focusing on his heart, beating and still alive. She looked as close to the line of lunacy than I'd ever seen someone stand and-perhaps-not yet cross.

Eddie said, 'It's not so bad, Mom.'

Now that I saw her again, in my right mind, I could make out more clearly the fiber of her sins and guilt. Her life stood as open and empty as her son's body. I knew whose knuckles fit the indentations of matted scar tissue, who'd fathered her children, and who'd murdered her dogs.

Cathy sat up in bed and stared at me over her swollen belly. She said, 'I was getting worried, but you've recovered.'

'Yes.' The honeysuckle caught in my throat but I managed to ask, 'How are you feeling?'

Self cackled savagely.

'They're … they're taking good care of us.' Her face twisted out of focus and became clouded, as if seen underwater. With a ripple it suddenly shifted into a guise containing too many emotions at once. She was terrified and in shock. Her smile seemed soldered to her face. She almost couldn't make her mouth muscles move enough to say, 'Can you help my brother Eddie?'

'Yes.'

'Will you?'

'Yes, I promise.'

She reached over and stroked my face, and for a moment the contact felt electrical and made my cheeks flush. I could see the curse in her genetic alphabet, the corrupt arrangement of her doubly recessive genes. Children of incestuous relationships are occasionally polydactyl. The small nub of the extra finger they'd removed from her at birth scraped along my jawline. She glanced down at her belly and rubbed it with slow circular motions, the same way Elijah had begged Danielle to do to him.

Cathy said, 'My baby hates you.'

'I know.'

Janice snapped her chin up, as if taking the first breath of her life. 'Of course it does.' She waved me over and said, 'Come here, I need to talk to you.' The murder in her voice was as distinct as the palpitation of her son's heart in the jar. 'Hold my boy's hand.'

I swallowed thickly. 'He's going to be fine.'

She carried her own ghosts. Other versions of herself, mostly without the scar tissue. The same but also different women, some of them smiling and waving to me, some of them not making love to her own brother John. All her unborn lives flung themselves flapping over her shoulders like flayed hides or old clothes no longer worn. The fever had made me stupid. The poltergeists that had been strung across Eddie, all of them women, were other forms of Janice, clinging to her son in order to protect him. I never should have cut them free.

Self sat on the headboard and crooned some hushed Sinatra tunes to the boy, swaying as if he were performing in front of thousands of teenage girls. Eddie beamed.

What's going on here? I asked. He didn't want to stop singing, and I had to wait until he finished the chorus of 'Strangers in the Night.'

You tell me. You made the promise.

Help me to keep it.

You can't keep it. You never could.

He crept across to Catherine's bed and sniffed at her womb, then swept her hair from her eyes. I knew he could make one quick incision and give her a cesarean section if it became essential, or if he felt the need to steal the baby.

Elijah's animosity, for once, slumbered too. Self dropped off the sheets and put a hand on Nip's shoulder and whispered in his ear. Nip nodded once and continued to weep. Lowly Grillot Holt approached them for a game of five-card draw and Self screamed, Stay out of my face, you little cheating bastard!

Janice stared at me until my incompetence must've spilled across her feet. Her ghosts trusted me even if she didn't, and they urged me forward to comfort her. I waited until both Cathy and Eddie were asleep, listening to Uriel's murmurs and Self's wonderfully moving singing voice.

Janice Kinnion said, 'If you try to touch either of them, I'll kill you.'

'I won't touch your children.'

'They sent you here. He sent you here… my brother.'

'No, he didn't.'

'They want her dead. Are you gonna tell me you don't know that?'

'No.'

'I came here for help and they've gutted my son and now they're trying to kill my daughter and what's inside her. And they keep pretending this is a home of God.'

Sadly, it was, and that proved to be the ugliest irony of all. 'It's been a home to many things,' I said. I sounded vague and misleading and wanted to nail my tongue to the roof of my mouth.

She chose not to argue. 'Can they do what they say? Can they make him whole again?'

That was two different questions. 'I don't

know. They can probably heal his body.'

'What goes along with the rest of that?'

'I'm not sure.'

'Come on, come on, out with it already!'

Reason had its place here, but not as an eternal truth. Discord arose minute to minute, and belief broke its own back from the way men bent it to their own devices. There was always a price to be paid: for every midnight caress or kiss or hastily scrawled poem of infatuation, for each promise made and each disregarded. Greater affirmations had to be found at any cost.

The wars of the Lord could not end in stalemate. Sacrifice was not purity, but it meant more than chicken's blood. There were those who would slay the lamb as sacrifice to God, and there were shepherds who would protect the lamb for either God or themselves or for no discernible reason.

These walls were going to come down. The quandary of the mount made the rock itself lament.

'Something here wants your kids,' I said. 'Why?'

'I don't know.'

She whispered at herself, sounding so much like her brother. 'I need to get them out.'

'It's too late to run.'

'Then I'll fight.'

'No!'