“I want to bring him here because we’ll be more focused. We are better prepared to handle him than anyone else.”
I strongly doubted it, but here we were. I had no better ideas and no theories to propose.
Dolores looked like she had something to add. Like me, she kept it to herself. “George,” she said instead. “Call upon your guide. Everyone, close your eyes and appeal to the Highest Good. Tomás, see if you can find the smoldering man.”
“The . . . ?” I began to ask.
“That’s what Alice calls him. But his given name is Heinrich Kramer.”
“If we’re right,” Alice was quick to say, somewhat undoing her previous confidence on the subject.
“We are right,” Mr. Colby assured her. “Now, let your own instincts be your guide. As often as not, these instincts are provoked by higher guides who can communicate no clearer. Listen to them, as you are able. Respond to them, as you feel moved to do so.”
I closed my eyes as instructed. I had no idea who was right, who was deluded, and who else was going to burn before the night was out. “Very good, then. I will try.”
I did not know what I was doing.
I listened to the bells, the murmurs, the prayers. I felt the sticky salt fingers of Alice clenching my hand on one side, and Mr. Colby holding lightly to the other. With my eyes closed, I heard more—individual conversations, personal entreaties to spirit friends and angel guides. Appeals to saints and calls to heaven. I fancied that I could even hear music rising above the fire bells, rising from the pavilion down by the lake. Sounds and energy and the best of intentions amplified by the water, or by the goodwill that flooded this tiny town full of kind, thoughtful people, who had never tried to send me away—even though they should have, immediately upon my arrival. Even though they knew all along that I was a danger. They never tried to reject me.
Except for David.
David might have been the wisest of them all, if not the kindest. Unless he was only trying to spare the rest—and therein was his kindness, of a roundabout sort. But that’s a tangle for another time.
• • •
HEINRICH Kramer. I turned the syllables over in my head and in my mouth.
A solid German name, all hard consonants and sharp vowels. An angry-sounding language, even in romance—that’s what I’d learned on the front. Nothing soft or welcoming about it. Nothing soft or welcoming about its landscape of brutal forests with fearsome wolves, or its heavy food, or its messy warfare.
Though I might be biased on that point.
Heinrich Kramer, I thought.
The hammer, you’ve called yourself. The smoldering man, that’s what Alice calls you. You’ve frightened her to the very edge of her wits. You’ve harmed her. You scrawled your name on her, as if to claim her for your own. But she is not yours, and neither is this town. Neither are these people, who have embraced me in spite of you.
(I spoke to him without opening my eyes, or my lips, either.)
Heinrich Kramer, you son of a bitch.
You’ve burned down my shop, and you’ve murdered my friends. You destroyed my neighbor’s house and left this dog an orphan. I led you here, to a quiet place filled with gentle people. You burned the theater before I even arrived. Now you’ve taken the hotel, and who knows who might have been left inside it. You won’t stop there, though.
I know better than that. God knows better than that.
• • •
GOD . . . knows.
• • •
I heard the words like the creaking of a furnace door opening for a shovelful of coal. They grated together and sizzled. English words, or I heard them in English. Surely Heinrich Kramer must have spoken no Spanish, and I never learned more than a few words of German. So this was our meeting ground, a language that belonged to neither one of us. Neutral territory, of a sort. If there was any such thing.
My eyes were shut tight, glued that way by terror and determination.
I saw him anyway.
He stood impossibly tall, impossibly black, and very featureless, every inch of him—from the swirl of his wild hair to the points of the boots that clomped when he stepped, he was a beastly dark thing that moved like it weighed a thousand pounds. Slow but unstoppable. He was a creature burdened by its own size but strong beyond belief.
He (I must think of him as a man, though he does not look like a man anymore) was walking down a dirt path—no, a dirt road. The road outside the fellowship hall. No, a path through a field.
No, he was walking along a trench.
He wore some tremendous coat or cloak; I couldn’t see the details of it, but it flapped around him as he moved. Everything flapped around him—birds, grass, the tangles of razor wire and pikes. Everything shuddered and shimmered as he passed, as if his very existence disturbed the fabric of the universe.
(And it did. Oh God, it did.)
He moved with the momentum and straightforward certainty of a locomotive on a track, smoke and fire pouring from his footsteps, filling his wake with ashes. He was moving toward me, staying in the trench, pushing past the men who did not know he was there and never had known, because this man had been dead for hundreds of years before they died, right there, in those trenches. In those fields.
He was coming for me, or coming for the machine.
It was in my hands—my hands, and the hands of seven other men. The thing was a brute, an impossible brute. It could scarcely be managed even with our team of soldiers. It could hardly be aimed, much less controlled.
This dark spirit did not care. It wanted to burn the whole world down, and the Livens projector would suffice to see it done.
• • •
GOD . . . knows . . .
• • •
I gasped and squeezed my hands to feel the other hands inside them. I was not in France, not on the front. I was not in a trench in gear that made me feel like a potato being baked in an oven. I was sitting on a low stage in a fellowship hall filled with wood paneling and praying spiritualists. Not woods. Not trees. Paneling made from trees. There were long tables for meals. Not stretchers for corpses. Not bodies laid out on the ground where they fell. Tables.
No soldiers, just feverish prayers. No dead bodies, just ghosts.
• • •
YOU join them. You can burn with them.
• • •
LIGHT flared up behind him, casting him in a shadow darker and deeper than the bottom of the earth. Light flared up behind me in the fellowship hall. In the doorway with a bookstore on the other side. I looked over my shoulder, eyes still shut. I saw only him, standing at the threshold, staying there. I saw a line at his feet, pure white and glowing—but somehow casting no light on his features.
“Salt,” mumbled Dolores. Then she said, “Oscar,” in a whisper the man couldn’t have possibly heard.
But there was Oscar Fine, rearing up behind the wrathful being. He held a bowl in his hands. (I could see it. I could see everything and nothing, but I could see the bowl full of salt.) I watched the salt fall in a semicircle, trapping the cleric’s shade in the doorway—neither in nor out.
In between life and death. Past and present. Hither and yon.
Mr. Colby sighed so hard I thought it must be his last breath, his whole soul escaping all at once. But he said, “We’ve got him, but the circle won’t hold for long. Now we need help. Now we call upon the angels of our better nature. We call upon the guides. We appeal to the Highest Good.”
• • •
I turned my face back to the circle, my eyes still shut. (They couldn’t shut everything out, no matter how hard I tried to make them.) What was this “Highest Good”? Was it God? I didn’t really believe in God. Should I appeal to wisdom? What had that ever gotten me? To hope? I no longer believed in that, either. Not as great or useful, much less the very height of anything.
br />
To love?
I should elevate myself with love; that’s what I heard—but I’ve heard a lot of things I don’t believe and don’t understand, and I’ve been given a number of directions that I don’t know how to follow.
I could appeal to love. I could love, and I could hold it in my heart and send it out to rise with the energy from the hymns at the pavilion and the prayers at the tables behind me.
I heard a whimper from my lap, and I almost disengaged my hands to pet Felipe, whom I so dearly loved, counter to all expectations. But the other hands held mine firmly, so I only whispered down to the dog, “It will be all right, very soon.”
I loved Felipe as I had never expected to love anything inhuman.
It was irrational, for he was no child and he could not speak. He could not offer advice or any real contribution to my home or my work. But he contributed to my life. He is a stalwart thing, faithful and clever, and he has taken up a position by my side.
I took that love, for this one preposterous little dog that looked like a rat crossed with a greyhound, and offered it up to whatever great good might hear it, or feel it, or accept it in the spirit I intended. I felt it warm in my chest, and I fed it. I nurtured it. I felt it grow.
A light flared in the circle of hands.
I opened my eyes without meaning to, and the light remained, so purely white that it must have been the light of the saints, the light of heaven. And when I closed my eyes again, I could see it even more clearly. It had the shape of a woman, tall and wide, her hair done up in a bun with a comb. She wore a long skirt and sharp-toed shoes, and a shawl across her shoulders. Her arms were folded beneath her breasts, across her waist.
I have heard you, and I have come.
“Who is this?” asked Mr. Colby, as serenely as a monk.
I forced her name past the clog in my throat. “This is Carmella Vasquez.”
Felipe saw her, too. He gazed at the light, and I felt the slow thump of his tail wagging against my leg.
“She is the first. Who are the other two?” Alice asked. “We need two more.”
The spirit in the doorway roared, and for an instant all the bells went silent. For an instant, all the prayers stopped. After this gasp, everything began again—but when I looked back, I saw that the salt was smudged. Heinrich Kramer was shouting it away.
He howled again and threw himself at the barrier, and the salt slipped further.
The boundary failed a grain at a time.
• • •
BUT I could elevate myself with love.
My suit was covered in soot, and I was wearing my night slippers. Everything else was lost, except the wallet in this jacket, which was too warm for the Florida evening—or that must have only been the spirit, for I remembered now: The night was cool. The air was almost brisk when the hotel caught fire and burned. My feet were cold when I stumbled across the grass and across the street.
This second angel, or spirit, or ghost, or whatever it was . . . it was as hot as an oven.
I thought of Cordero’s and all the fine cloth stacked up in beautiful bolts. All gone. Even the presses and scissors would have melted. Even the wool could be reduced to ashes. So could we all. So had Emilio, dressed so fine and speaking so smartly, so smoothly, so reassuringly to all my customers.
• • •
A second light sparked beside the first and stood next to Mrs. Vasquez.
• • •
THIS one was smaller and lean, with slick dark hair brushed back and a suit that cost more to make than he’d earned in a month—but he wore it so beautifully, as he wore everything. His hands were long and slim, and his smile was more than I ever deserved, at any moment, in my whole life.
I have heard you, and I have come.
Tears leaked down my face, and I shook my head. “I left you. I left you, and yet you have come here. You have answered me.”
I was already lost, but you saved yourself. I would have saved you if I could. So really, you did exactly what I would’ve done, and I always do the right thing. He winked. The spirit winked. Of course it did. It was Emilio.
“Who is angel number two?” Dolores asked.
“This is Emilio Casales,” I choked. “I already owe him more than I can ever repay. I cannot ask more of him.”
“Well, that’s love, isn’t it?” Alice clamped her hand around mine like a vise. She was crying. I wished to God that I properly loved her, but I hardly knew her. I respected her, and I appreciated her immensely—I would not have survived so long without her. She was beautiful, and she was confident and brilliant and strange. Another week without her, and I would have surely been lost.
In another lifetime, perhaps. In another lifetime, it could be different.
Did these people believe in such things? Other lives, other times, other chances?
In this life, I’d already had such a love. A very different woman, a little older than Alice and leaner, with a narrow face and full lips, and wide eyes. Her hair was the envy of the islands and the glory of heaven. Her smile and her heart had won me in an instant and kept me forever.
“Evelyn . . . ,” I breathed her name.
Everyone said that she was not there, that she would not come. The spiritualists had insisted from the start—even my dear Alice had insisted—that Evelyn was gone and that she had never been with me in the first place.
I did not believe it. It did not make any sense to me. Even if she had not been the one to crawl through the fires, and leave her handprints in the ashes, and gift me with kisses in the soot . . . even if these were only the cruel tricks of a cruel man, long dead and vindictive still . . . this did not mean that she had left me alone. If that was true—if it had ever been true, even a single part of it—then I had nothing to live for anyway, and nothing to fear from death.
“Evelyn . . . ,” I said again, more urgently.
• • •
THE threshold was failing. The salt was scattering.
Wood splintered and the paneling cracked around it, where the thrashing monster flung itself from side to side. I did not know how long the doorway barrier would hold. Not more than another minute, surely. I could already see the floorboards through the salt.
In another minute, this spirit would be loose.
In another minute, he would have a roomful of witches to burn. And me, because I’d joined them.
Then what? Then where? The rest of the world, I suppose.
• • •
A third light sparked, smaller and brighter than the other two—then it flared, caught, and burned. This light spelled out the shape of a woman, one I knew well. One I had married, in the very dress she was wearing now, or some memory of it—long and ivory, covered in lace, with a veil that belonged to her mother and fell to her shoulders.
She was barefoot and holding flowers, but they weren’t the flowers from our wedding. They were the sunflowers from the kitchen window, no longer dead and brittle but living and vivid—a shock of golden yellow in the center of the circle.
I gasped and sobbed, and only the small weight of Felipe kept me from leaping to my feet. (That, and Alice. She has a grip like a vise.) “Evelyn!”
• • •
I have heard you. I have always heard you. Now I have come.
• • •
HEINRICH Kramer screamed at the sight of them and opened his arms wide enough to shatter the doorframe. It cracked and buckled, and the salt blew into the fellowship hall, scattering into nothing helpful at all.
• • •
BUT three bells were chiming, and I thought that the hotel bell must have stopped by now—must have melted into a painted puddle of molten steel—but somehow I could hear it anyway, as clear as day; and I heard the fire truck bell, and the one at Harmony Hall. They clanged some strange harmony, and if this was the music of the
spheres, then I welcomed it.
Three spirits shimmered before us, summoned and elevated to angels.
They rose as one, and they lost their shapes a little—fading back into the loose figures of light as they’d first appeared in the circle. I could not take my eyes off Evelyn, though.
(I knew which one was her. I knew that she’d always been with me.)
They wound themselves up in a circle over our heads, faster and faster until they were a perfect, seamless ribbon of light, spinning as fast as a hurricane. The ribbon was blinding, even with my eyes closed. It was simply pure—too pure for this world. Too pure for these eyes, and I thought that it must’ve been what Moses felt when he glimpsed the back of God.
We all sat there, hands held in the little mortal circle that held up this greater golden circle, and the wind tore at our hair, but it wasn’t wind and we loved the feel of it—we lifted our faces, and I said, from the bottom of my heart, to the golden whirlwind above, “I love you.”
Heinrich Kramer charged toward us.
The light leaped and caught him. It clutched him and swallowed him. It extinguished him like a campfire.
• • •
SOMETHING exploded, and someone screamed, and no one could see anything at all—eyes open or eyes closed. We were all blinded, for all of us had gazed into the sun (no, but something greater, much greater).
Felipe whined and butted me with his head, licking my hand to get my attention. Alice was babbling something, but I couldn’t hear very well, either.
When my vision crept back, it accompanied a ringing in my ears much higher pitched than the fire bells, but the fire bells were dying out. The hotel bell was quiet, and the fire truck bell had stopped. Even the bell at Harmony Hall was clanging more slowly, winding down like a clock.
Alice was talking, she was excited and frightened, and she had let go of my hand.
Mr. Colby had let go, too—he was standing with the help of his cane, surveying the room.
There were fifty or sixty of us, many on the ground, many rubbing our eyes or shaking our heads, trying to chase away the sound and shake the sense back into ourselves. The tables were upended. The door was shattered, and half the wall had come down with it.