“We make choices,” Christobelle whispered. From his chair, Timothy gasped, rolled his head, and burped like a child. “There is always a price.”
“What price? What choice? We're just living our lives.”
Christobelle sighed, the sound whistling from her. “Everything costs, and life most of all.” She rose like a praying mantis, unfolding her limbs. Timothy shuffled in his sleep as she stood over him, the shadow of her hand traversing his body. “They always misunderstood me. The business owners and apron wearers mistake this for a church.” A crackling, throaty laugh. “They pray to their God for protection against me. It would surprise them to hear that I, too, pray, and our prayers are not that different. But God is just one element of what this world, and the next, contains, and I am little more than a vessel.” Her mother was speaking in low prosodic tones. Hannah gripped the chair so hard her knuckles cracked.
“In truth, it's closer to meditation. We part the veil, and sometimes, if we're lucky, we're granted a peek beyond it. Or, more accurately, I am the one who parts it, and they are the ones who see. They speak to the ones they've lost.”
Timothy's body seized slightly as she ran her finger over his closed eyelids. “But every parting costs them. It's why I prefer to deal with the sick. They have an easier time of it at first. In the end, however, they all see the same thing. A world unbearable with the crowing of the dead.”
Hannah let out a choked sound. She thought of the wide-eyed woman in the woods, her knowing words:
See how she parts the veil
. What husband, brother, or father had followed Christobelle into the darkness and withered there?
Christobelle's eyes softened as she smoothed the boy's eyebrows. His mouth was wide open, his tongue lapping at air. “Don't look at me that way, child. I do not seek them out. But when they come to me,” Christobelle paused, and leaned over his mouth. “Can you imagine a world where you can only breathe what others expel? Where your only strength is that which you strip from others? I am their channel, and it costs me most of all.”
“You're still alive,” Hannah whispered.
“Am I?” Christobelle said, sounding genuinely surprised. “The dead have turned me into an ant farm. I am burrowed through and through. How old do you think I am? Can you even guess? There can be no vanity among the dead, or the dying.”
“Why be a channel at all, then?” Hannah asked.
Christobelle opened her mouth to say something, then seemed to change her mind. “That, too, is a price.”
“For what?”
“You think I'm a monster.” She offered a sickly smile. “Maybe I am, but do you think that the bringer of loss has not experienced it herself?” Christobelle asked. “I had you when I was twenty, the age that you are now. The universe appreciates symmetry, it seems. Now, age is no longer of consequence. I have been a conduit for drowned children and those who made it nearly to one hundred alike.”
She turned her face away and stroked her cheek as if looking into a mirror. Hannah scanned the walls. There were no reflective surfaces anywhere in the room, and Hannah wondered if her mother feared whose faces would peer back at her.
“They've each lost someone close to them,” she mused, looking back at Timothy. “The cost is small for them, compared to seeing their loved ones again.”
“And what are they giving you in return?”
“Timothy lost his mother,” Christobelle continued. “Pancreatic cancer. She was diagnosed eight months ago, and passed away a few weeks back. He looks like her,” Christobelle breathed. Timothy was whimpering. “The same lips, the same curled hair. Their people are Greek, somewhere in the annals of that tree.”
Hannah noticed a body half-hidden behind a curtain. She blinked against the smoke. “They're grieving and vulnerable, and you use them.”
“We're all vulnerable. Months later or years later, it makes no difference. Grief is a scar that cannot heal. It is not corporeal. It carries over.”
The body moved in and out of focus. It watched her with crinkled brown eyes. Hannah mouthed a single word.
Mae.
Christobelle sighed deeply. “I hoped it wouldn't pass to you, but always knew it might. It's why I gave you to Mae, hoping to keep you safe. She buttressed you in that place, that house, and found a way to close the doors against you.” Christobelle raised her head, studied the walls around her. “You see a house here, but it is not a house. It is a clearing. That's the thing about a crossroads. It is the safest place, and the most dangerous. The greatest hope and the greatest horrors coexist where all things are possible.”
“Mae was a ⦔ Hannah tripped over her words, “a channeler, as well?”
“Of a sort. She was pushed to grow very quickly under the circumstances.”
Hannah cocked an eyebrow.
“Because of me. And you, child.”
Hannah's breath caught. “Me?”
“Mae's gift was life. Though we dealt with similar materials, she knew how to create. Mae could nurse depressives back to health with a spoonful of her gumbo. She'd cleared a child's pneumonia by flooding the mother's kitchen with spiced fumes.”
The shape behind the curtain coalesced into a woman, smiling sadly.
“I'd heard about her even before she came to me, after her husband passed. He was her great love, and she was lucky to have had her time with him.”
“Mae came to you?”
“She came to me, I came to her. This is how friendships are forged, how deals are struck. You could say we were brought together by forces bigger than either of us. The limits of the world extend further than anyone can possibly imagine. There is darkness so impenetrable, just as there is light. There are
orishas, just as there are demons. And perhaps angels as well.” Christobelle surveyed the room and lowered her voice. “The orishas value ability. Healers or simple channelers are sometimes granted small favors. But those of us who wield more power fascinate them. They linger near us, aiding and complicating.”
Something nudged Hannah's memory. “Mae used to leave peeled oranges and cracked eggs on white plates. She'd light candles in the night. They were offerings?”
Christobelle nodded.
“For who?”
“For whoever was hungry. Elegba favored her most, and without him, nothing else would have been possible. He holds the keys to all doors, to all possible roads. A powerful being, but one with the heart of a trickster.” Christobelle inclined her head. When she spoke again, her voice was grinding, like a scratched record caught and slowed down. “She called on Oshun, as well. Her domain is charity and fertility. Mae was an excellent cook. Her power was in her food, and Oshun recognized that. She's always dealt with the stomach.” Christobelle's face turned wistful. “The day I gave birth, there was a terrible storm. Mae opened all the doors and all the windows, and water and wind battered the house, but we were granted favor by Elegba. The dead crowded around us, but they could only sniff the air. She'd already hidden you, and in giving birth to you, I had a moment of perfect peace. Their eyes passed over me as well.” Christobelle looked pointedly at the area directly above Hannah's right shoulder. “It was a brief respite.”
Hannah shook her head and lifted herself out of the chair. The smell of dying roses filled the air with a funereal stench, and peonies withered in their planters. Trinkets covered wooden ledges, white bone combs and faded coral necklaces.
Looking closer, Hannah saw that figures were carved into the wood. Slender, mean-faced men and wide-hipped women. “What are these figures?”
Christobelle waved her hand. “It's all the something behind the veil. It's been here long before I was born and will remain long after you're gone. The veil is thinner here, though, which is why the orishas' power is so clearly manifest. And, unfortunately, that of other malignant spirits. They linger when they should have passed.” The last word was stressed and came out of her lips with a pop. She looked shrunken as she stroked her hands together, over and over as if washing them.
Hannah followed a deep crack in the wall, up to the ceiling. The ceiling was veined with cracks, its moulding sanded away by years. “Is it me?” she whispered to the whorl of plaster above her. “Am I making him sick?”
“If it helps,” her mother began, gently, “it's not you. Not exactly. Your presence draws them, and they draw from him.”
“Why?”
“It's the price you pay for what grows inside you. It's the price I paid, and the price I pay still.” Christobelle's eyes shone. “There are so many spirits in this swamp, souls of the dead, lingering out of vengeance or love. Some of them are older, sprung from the fabric of the other world. Sometimes it's the will of the spirit that possesses, or else the living invite them in, without knowing they do so. The child is a flame, and they're all just moths to it.”
“My father,” Hannah said simply, and her mother's eyes dropped. A tear snaked down her face. Would her tears be salty and clear like her own, disappearing as they dried on pillowcases? Or would they be differentâaromatic as turmeric, fading to brown?
“His name was Dylan, child, and he was a good man. You have his eyes, that same moss green. Then, after a while, they turned gray.” Christobelle leaned over and ran a finger along Hannah's brow. “He's here. Right in this haughty ridge.” She tapped Hannah's chin. “He lives on through you. That's what a child is: permanence.”
Hannah slapped her mother's hand away. “Did he know? Did he understand what was happening to him?”
“Even I didn't know. It began with terrible nightmares. His nose bled, his eyes sank into his skull. He wasted away. We took him to specialists who couldn't find anything wrong, until suddenly everything was wrong and he was beyond the reach of medicine.” Her voice broke. “He wanted so much to meet you, to know you. He kept me up with his plans for you.”
Hannah shuddered at how similar this was to her life with Callum. She'd never imagined that her mother had once known such simple pleasures. “Was there nothing you could do?” Her voice rose. “So many people following you and this is all the power you have?”
“We all have certain gifts, but mine is not life.” Christobelle shook her head. “Your father was fascinated by physics. I remember one thing he told me: energy can neither be created nor destroyed.” She squinted into the candlelight. “The swamp is like flypaper. Nothing ever flies away.” She touched her temple. Her eyebrows were sprinkled with white. “It's teeming in here.”
Hannah became still. She urged the blood in her ears to hush. They were coming up on the heart of the matter. Hannah could see it looming in her mother's face, even as it began to dawn on her. “The men. The men you've used. They stay, don't they?”
“All souls do. It's what seduces the living, at first. But the men are different. They give permission, but it's always, somehow, a surprise. Death always is. They pass and then feel cheated. Their rage is very nearly a physical thing. It occurs to them too late that they might have healed, that the true purpose of death is to remind the living of their fortune.”
“How do they die?” Hannah asked quietly.
Timothy yelped in his sleep, and Christobelle cooed quietly down at his sleeping form. “How do any of us die?” Christobelle shrugged. “The machinery slows, then stops. Organs cease their functions. Consciousness wilts. One night, the heartbeat stops and the silence is absolute. They visit death, come too close to it, and then topple over its edge.”
“Callum never volunteered,” she cried. Her fists struck her mother and hit hard bone. Each contact sounded a knell in her right wrist.
Christobelle caught Hannah's hands and restrained them with surprising strength. No sign of effort showed on her face. “He volunteered himself. Love is tacit. Love is the ultimate surrender.” She held Hannah's injured wrist. “They're growing stronger with each passing day. They did this to you, through him.” Sensing Hannah tense, Christobelle raised her voice. “They were in him. I can feel their touch. I can recognize it. They go to break the right hand, always, as if a person's power rests there.”
Hannah fell slack. The room seemed to drain of color, of sound. Her mother's mouth moved soundlessly. “It's my fault,” Hannah said. The words were perverse, unnatural. She looked down at her scuffed shoes, her swollen feet bulging out of them, but couldn't feel the matted carpet beneath her anymore. Everything was suspended.
She saw Callum's face, his eyes dry, his lips stale. The awful clicking of the inner workings of his jaw sheathed in the thinnest layer of skin. This was death. This was the slow decomposition that began it.
Christobelle's shoulders were wider than Hannah had thought, her frame large and imposing. “They managed once before to get close to you, but I contained it.” When Hannah frowned, Christobelle went on. “A young girl, long ago. You loved her, too, in your way.”
Hannah's breath stopped, heat taking her like kindling.
“Her brother's mind was spoiled. Whatever locks we have against them were broken. They would've killed you if I hadn't acted.”
“Help me now, then,” Hannah whispered, and tasted salt on her lips.
Christobelle's eyes, always possessed, always elsewhere, were wet and present. She was remembering, Hannah realized. A muscle hammered in her cheek. “They're patient, unfortunately, and bitter with me. Bitter, in some small part, with all who live. The dead are never satisfied.”
Christobelle picked up an alligator head from a shelf, shellacked and preserved. So small, its black eyes were plain, its teeth smaller than a house cat's. “This is just a baby. If you look here,” she tapped it between the eyes, “there's no bullet, no knife mark. The man stunned it with a blow, held its body, and carved right through the living, writhing neck. Most wouldn't be so stupid, but they'd killed the mother that morning. This small creature was anyone's for the taking.”