Crossing Over - Anna Kendall [4]
The country of the Dead is like our country, but weirdly stretched out and sometimes distorted. A few steps in Stonegreen might be half a mile here, or two miles, or five. Or it might be the same. Sometimes our rivers and forests and hills exist here, but sometimes not. The country of the Dead is vaster than ours and I think it changes over time, just as ours does, but not in the same way. It is our shadow made solid. Like a shadow, it shrinks and grows, but from some unseen influence that is not the sun. There is no sun here.
There is light, an even subdued glow, as on a cloudy day. The sky is always a low, featureless gray. The air is quiet, and I could again breathe easily, all hurt gone from my chest. Pain does not follow me when I cross over. It is merely the price of passage.
In the cool, calm light I walked toward the gleam of water. Before I reached it, I came to the big, moss-covered boulder that on the other side had marked the village green. The boulder looked exactly the same, although without Stonegreen’s surrounding cottages and shops and fields. Without the road, as well. There are no roads here, just untrammeled grass of an everlasting summer. The steps of the Dead leave no marks.
Five of them sat cross-legged beside the stone, holding hands in a circle. They like to do that. It’s always hard for me to get the attention of the Dead, but when they’re in one of their circles, it’s impossible. They sit for long stretches of time—days, years—never talking, and on each of their faces is the calm, absorbed look of men aiming an arrow, or of women bent over a difficult piece of needlework. I passed them by and continued on toward the river.
An old woman sat there, alone under a great overhanging tree, her bare toes dangling in the water. She wore a rough brown dress and a white apron, her gray hair tucked under an old-fashioned cap with long white lappets. The old are the only Dead who will—or perhaps can—talk to me, and most often it is the old women who are good talkers. I sat beside her on the bank and said, “Good morrow, mistress.”
Nothing. She didn’t yet realize I was there. What do the Dead see when they see me? A wisp, a shimmer in the air? I don’t really know. I squeezed her arm hard, just above the elbow, and shouted, “Good morrow, mistress!”
Slowly she turned her head, squinted her sunken blue eyes, and said, “Who’s there?”
“I am Roger Kilbourne. At your service.”
That tickled her. She gave a cackling laugh. “And what service d’you think you could render me, then? You’ve crossed over to bother us, have you not?”
“Yes, mistress.”
“What the devil do you want now? Go back, lad, it is not your time. Not yet.”
“I know,” I said humbly. “But I would ask you some questions, my lady.”
She cackled again. “‘Lady’! I was never no lady. Mrs. Ann Humphries, lad.”
This was a piece of luck. Not an hour ago—if hours were the same here, which I doubted—I had lain under the table while another woman of that name had sobbed in Hartah’s tent.
“My mother . . . taken from us just this last winter . . . her lungs . . . I know it’s wicked to be doing this but I miss her so much . . . the only one who ever really cared what becomes of me or my children . . . my no-good husband . . . drink and debt and . . . my mother my mother my mother—”
My mother, in a lavender dress. But I would never find my own mother here. The Dead didn’t wander far from where they crossed over. And neither Hartah nor Aunt Jo would tell me where my mother died, nor how. Of my father, my aunt would not speak at all. I have given up asking.
I said, “Mrs. Humphries, today I met your daughter and namesake, Ann.”
“Oh?” she said, swishing her shriveled feet to make the water roil. “Look at the white stones under the water. See how they seem to shift shape.”
This is what the living do not understand about the Dead, and what I must never tell them. The Dead, unless they are very freshly crossed over, do not care about those they have left behind.
They remember the living, yes. Memory crosses over intact.