Meridian Page 16

  Tens brought in a pot of tea and more chocolate cake. "Can I help?"

  "If I could divide the book up, sure." Of course, that wasn't possible. "Just keep me company?"

  "Sure," Tens settled next to me and extracted his whittling. Every few minutes he crept out to check on Auntie.

  We drank the teapot dry. I tried not to watch the hands on the clock spin.

  Finally. I heaved a frustrated sigh, ready to give up for the night.

  "For what it's worth. I think you're on to something."

  "Really?" I glanced at him.

  "You have good instincts when you listen to them," He appeared sheepish. "And I had a dream about this. It's a little deja vu. I didn't know what we were searching for."

  "Why didn't you tell me?"

  "I'm still figuring out how to tell dreams from visions. I thought maybe we were just sitting together. You know, cuddling." He blushed.

  I giggled at his expression.

  Hurt filled his eyes, and he started to draw away.

  "Wait, no! I didn't mean to laugh. I wasn't laughing at you. I— you looked so cute saying the word 'cuddling.' I just didn't—I didn't expect it."

  He nodded, but still stared down at his hands.

  I opened to a random page in the journal. He needed to hear how I felt about him. "Tens. I like—" I gasped as the words under my fingers grabbed my attention. "Oh my God, that's it. He needs an invitation."

  "Show me." Tens leaned over the book with me.

  "The energy of a dead soul weakens," I read aloud. "It needs to be asked to pass through the window. It needs to be coerced over, but it can rip the life energy out of the one transporting it. Fenestras must focus on the soul and—"

  "It also says it's dangerous and should only be attempted by Fenestras in their prime—"

  Am I risking too much? "But—"

  "Just consider it, okay? Stop and think about it. I can't lose—"

  "Auntie would do it for me."

  "Probably." Tens nodded in agreement. "She's also got a hell of a lot more experience. You're a beginner. What if we wait? What if we get Auntie through and then work on Charles?"

  "And if she doesn't go? If I die helping her?"

  "You won't."

  "I could." I didn't want to contemplate that reality, but I found myself stuck on it

  Tens invaded my space. "You won't!"

  I nodded, wishing some of his certainty would seep into me. We sat in silence for a moment and I caught another whiff of roses and pipe smoke. I knew I was right. "You said if I trust my instincts I'm usually right. Right?"

  Tens's expression darkened. "Throwing my own words back at me?"

  I gripped his hand. "I have to. Don't you see? Auntie needs him in heaven, waiting. He wants to go. Tens, I'm telling you I can do this. I have to do this."

  He grasped my chin and gazed into my eyes. His were full of an emotion I couldn't begin to fathom. "I'm right here. Okay?"

  I nodded, comforted by his strength.

  "What now?"

  "Now I call out Charles."

  The details were vague. It wasn't like following step-by-step recipe instructions. I gathered their wedding portrait, photographs of Charles through the years, and his pipe. I shut Custos out of the study because I was afraid Charles's energy might accidentally hurt her if she was too close.

  "What do you want me to do?" Tens had built a roaring fire that crackled and spit in the hearth.

  "Slap me if I faint?" Or worse. As always, my joke fell flat.

  "How do you call him out?"

  "I don't know. What's it suggest in the book?"

  Tens smiled. "Come out, come out, wherever you are?"

  "Nice."

  "It doesn't suggest anything. I think you're on your own." He shrugged.

  "Okay. Charles. Auntie needs you. I'm here. Let's get this show on the road." I repeated myself, over and over. My eyes tightly shut. I pictured my window. I tried to imagine what Charles looked like in real life. My breathing leveled and I let myself go deeper.

  "Over here, little one." Charles was standing behind me.

  "That's what Auntie calls me."

  "Whom do you think she picked it up from?" Charles lit his pipe. "Took you long enough. I thought I was going to have to flick the lights or bang the doors."

  "I figured it out, didn't I?"

  "Just in the nick of time too."

  "Are you ready?" I watched a room exactly like this one unfold behind my eyelids.

  "Did she tell you her daddy built this house? That she grew up here? I added on over the years, fixed it up."

  "No."

  He sounded wistful. "She's going to hate what's coming."

  "What's coming?" I asked, but he didn't hear me.

  "You tell her I'll be waiting. Tell her to come to me and not glance back."' Charles stepped through and I realized he was tugging on my arm.

  "Let go."

  He didn't hear me. Our fingers were entwined. My hand passed the windowsill. My wrist. My elbow. My feet dug in, trying to find purchase while I slid farther into the opening.

  I felt panic shiver up my spine. My mouth went dry. "Let go. Charles, let go of me! You have to let go."

  "Things are not what they appear." Charles spoke to me while he continued to wrestle me through. "It's safe here. Come with me. Wait for Merry with me, here." His face bore an intense expression that scared me, as if he didn't even know what he was saying.

  I tried to yell. I braced a foot against the wall and prayed. I twisted and turned, yanking and heaving. "Let go! I can't. She needs me here. Charles, you won't have her with you if you don't let me go."

  "You're not safe. They're coming. They'll find you. Come with me." He grimaced, struggling to hang on to me.

  Sweat slickened my arms and hands. I inhaled a deep breath and willed our hands apart. In the distance I heard my name. Tens sounded upset. Scared.

  Charles seemed to snap back into himself, struggling to untangle from me as well. His expression once again grew calm and caring.

  "Tell her one-four-three. Tell her I love her, that I'm waiting."

  "Meridian!" Tens shouted again. I drew on his strength. I felt him push Charles away and haul me in the opposite direction.

  I screamed and snapped the window down with a bang. I opened my eyes, feeling Tens's hands brushing my hair from my face. Sweat drenched my body and I was breathing as if I'd sprinted a hundred yards.

  "You're okay. I've got you." Tens cradled me and pressed kisses along my forehead and jaw.

  I clung to him. Burrowing closer, letting his heat warm me and chase away my lingering fear.

  "I've got you. You're safe. You did it" he murmured into my hair.

  I was so spent I couldn't even answer him. Eventually, exhausted, I drifted off to sleep.

  Chapter 27

  Love is the greatest act of Faith.

  —Lucinda Myer

  I woke in Tens's arms. Dried drool coated the sides of my mouth, and my eyes felt scratchy. "Hi," he said.

  I blinked up at him. "What time is it?" "Early, very early. Are you okay? You scared me." I stretched. Aside from the normal stiffness from sleeping on the floor, I felt okay. "Excellent." Tens grinned. "Excellent?" I sat up. "Really. Really wonderful." All my former pains and aches that I'd lived with for so long were gone. The constant nausea and fatigue had vanished. "I feel good."

  I loved the way Tens's eyes crinkled when he was truly happy and relaxed. He's going to kiss me. He's going to kiss me.

  I leaned toward him, closing my eyes, holding my breath. I waited for his lips to brush mine as time slowed; I felt every thud of my heart.

  Just as I almost felt his mouth flutter against mine, the ground shook and the doors rattled. Explosions buffeted the house. Metal screamed and glass broke.

  The force of the explosions rocked the house. I ran out onto the front porch, Tens right behind me. Custos barked from her place by the fire.

  "What's going on?" Auntie calle
d, her voice weak.

  "Don't move," Tens shouted to her.

  We skidded to a stop, staring down over the valley below us. We could see fireballs billowing up into the sky. Inky black smoke billowed in the wind like the sail of a pirate ship. Hell had come to earth.

  "The train,"' I breathed. From this distance it looked like a child's train set. Ash and debris hung in the air and blew against us. The smell—I can't even begin to describe the smell. Hot metal, gas, fuel, and the sickening stench of human flesh.

  "Damn." Tens gripped my shoulders. He checked his watch.

  "That’s the five o'clock."

  "Freight? Or people?" I let the question dangle.

  "I don't know. You ask Auntie. I'm going to check the house." He raced through the hallway to the back of the house.

  I ran to Auntie's room. "The train—it's all jumbled, it's bad."

  Auntie opened her eyes. "Derailed?"

  "I don't know." I said.

  "It's a freight train that hooks on passenger cars."

  "There are people on that?"

  "Probably." She struggled to stand. "We have to go." I struggled to convince her to stay.

  Tens jogged back in. "You're not going anywhere." Tens gently pushed Auntie back down. "The house looks sound."

  "I'm a nurse." She fought him, but it was like a butterfly against a bear.

  "You're a patient." Tens's tone brooked no argument.

  She glanced past him to lock gazes with me. "There will be dying." The implication hovered between us.

  Am I ready? Can I handle multiples? I don't know.

  I swallowed. "You'll stay here?"

  "She's not ready for so many. You haven't taught her enough." Tens's voice gained octaves and volume. I heard fear in it, so I rushed to reassure him.

  "I am. I know how to close the window," I said, trying to sound positive and sure. But my insecurities screamed. How can I escape tangling in the energy of so many? How can I keep from being pulled through?

  "She's not ready." Tens stepped in front of me and clasped my hands. "I'll go. I'll see how bad it is and come back. I'll drive you later."

  I put my hand on his cheek. I loved that he wanted to protect me, but I knew he couldn't. I wouldn't let him. When it came down to it, I had to do this my way. "We'll be back when we're back. You can drive." I said to Tens, then brushed my lips against Auntie's forehead.

  She whispered, "As long as you keep the window wide open and yourself firmly planted in the room, you'll be okay. Don't close the window until it's safe or a soul may break you trying to get through it. Use your instincts."

  "But if I keep it open all the time—"

  "Open isn't the problem. Stay where you can only barely feel the breeze, as if a fan blows at you but doesn't reach that far across the room. Then you won't tangle. Keep it big. Souls in pain like to get across fast. They'll crowd you. Stand your ground. You will make me proud. You will make your family proud," Auntie patted my shoulder. "I love you. Feel that. Know it. Love will see you through this. You are ready."

  I nodded, grabbing the first-aid kit and my coat and gloves. The world felt unseasonably warm. Tens followed me.

  * * *

  We couldn't get very close to the scene of the crash because of the terrain and the heat, so we parked and started running toward the train. A few volunteer firefighters screeched to a stop behind us, and I could hear sirens in the far distance. But not enough, not nearly enough. This was a big, under populated land; it was going to be several minutes, if not hours, before any experts arrived.

  All around me, I heard a cacophony of pain. I felt it tug at me. Train cars scattered ahead of me in an almost unending path. They leaned in all directions as if kicked by a petulant child. Rails had been ripped apart, and a crater the size of a luxury car was all that was left of the engine and front of the train. Fires burned, luggage was strewn in the slush. Corn poured out of one car while boxes of mail rolled to a stop down a hill and envelopes fluttered in the wind.

  Tens tried to stay right next to me, guarding me. It took me a minute to realize he was trying to shield me as we got closer. What once had been full lives, bodies full of life, were now scattered in pieces. I tried to detach, but I couldn't completely. I choked back the urge to vomit, trying not to get lost mourning the dead. Just then, a man yelled at Tens to help lift a steel door off a woman who'd been pinned, I pushed him into action and kept walking toward the worst-hit passenger cars.

  The world seemed to move in slow motion, like the frame-by-frame feature on DVDs. I saw. I stepped. I moved in fragmented moments of time.

  I swallowed against fear. This is what war must look like, smell like. Sticky smoke clung to me. Surveying the devastation. I couldn't imagine anyone surviving.

  Cries got louder as I drew closer to the passenger cars. I tried to peer through a window.

  Coughing. I felt a malevolent presence behind me.

  'Yet ye have forsaken me, and served other gods: wherefore I will deliver you no more. Go and cry unto the gods which ye have chosen; let them deliver you in the time of your tribulation.' I like that one, I should use it more often."

  I knew that voice. I turned to confront Reverend Perimo's chuckling face. He had a hand in this disaster. I don't know how I knew that, but I did. I felt it with every breath. "Did you do this?"

  "'Moreover all these curses shall come upon thee, and shall pursue thee, and overtake thee, till thou be destroyed; because thou hearkenedst not unto the voice of the Lord thy God.' It's catchy, isn't it? The Almighty delivers swift punishment to those who don't do what they're told. More people should keep that in mind."

  "You did this, didn't you?" I felt the inexplicable tug of energy. Behind me, somewhere in that train car, was a dying person. More than one. The feeling that someone needed me was becoming more and more recognizable.

  Perimo gripped my arm and feverishly whispered. 'The thoughts of the wicked are an abomination of the Lord: but the words of the pure are pleasant words. ... The Lord is far from the wicked.' Does the Creator hear you when you cry, Meridian?"

  "Let go of me." I shoved him, throwing my full weight into him, and turned away, not stopping until I reached the entrance to the car.

  "I'll have you yet!" he screamed into the night.

  Several volunteers were breaking the windows out of train cars. I climbed up the side of one car using debris as stairs to get to an entrance on the top, since the car lay on its side. I saw shapes in the yawning depths below.

  Using the handrail like a fireman's pole, I slid down the stairs into darkness and smoke. Burnt rubber and the stench of human waste sucked the breath out of me.

  Immediately, wave after wave of longing hit me. More souls than I could count pushed at me. It was like a rock concert and the front row was trying to touch the star. Me.

  I closed my eyes and made sure the window I envisioned was wide open. Wind billowed through the curtains with the force of a hurricane. The landscape outside the window spun furiously as each soul tried to make it their own. I opened my eyes quickly before I got too dizzy to move.

  The screams and yells were muffled. "Help me, please?" A hand reached up out of the darkness and a lady's fingers wiggled as if waving.

  Instinctively, I grasped her hand, unable to see where the rest of her lay beneath the piles of wreckage. The contact sucked at me like an undertow. She was afraid, terrified of dying. She didn't want to go. I didn't know what to do or say. Auntie hadn't told me what to do with uncertain souls. I felt as if the woman wanted to push me through instead. We grappled in my room because she wouldn't let go. I kept fighting her off long enough to catch my breath, until she tugged again and I went under.

  Chapter 28

  I shook her off and caught my breath. I spoke quiet reassurances, struggling to keep myself together. The other volunteers were wrapping survivors in blankets and trying to staunch the bleeding of open wounds. I focused on the dying since that was my supposed specialty. Another mortally w
ounded person grabbed my leg, my vision blurred, and vertigo hit me at the speed with which the man leapt through the window to his favorite beach in Hawaii.

  Viscous liquids dripped on me; the smell of human urine and sulfur overpowered me. I bent and heaved nothing but air. I felt woozy and disoriented. I visualized the window and tried to feel a fresh breeze on my face.

  "Get my baby out. Please."' I moved in a careful crawl because I couldn't stand upright in the capsized car. My hands were slimy with what I was sure was a mixture of blood and other fluids I didn't want to think about. I wrenched a suitcase off a woman. She was impaled on a large wedge of metal that might have been a door, but she was conscious and aware. She held an infant who seemed long past dead, limp and lifeless in a T-shirt and diaper. She tried to lift the little body toward me and her breath hitched. "Please ..."

  I was in one of the glass-domed viewing cars—the glass was webbed with cracks, but not smashed completely. I leaned back and kicked against the panes—the shatterproof glass groaned. I kicked again. Fresh air and help was on the other side of that window. I kept my visualization going as another soul passed through me.

  Finally. I made a hole. Smoke and heat poured out as clean, cold air roared in. I grabbed a coat and wrapped it around my arm to widen a hole big enough for a person. For me. I grabbed the baby, my hand touching the mother's.

  "Thank you," she said, and was gone, leaving me with the fleeting impressions of cinnamon and Bob Marley's music.

  The baby's energy was also gone, though I felt peace as the woman was met by a young man in uniform on the other side. I coughed and crawled out, shards of glass poking and cutting. Carefully. I wrapped the baby in another coat and placed it on the ground, away from the car. Shouts and sirens, screams and the roar of fire filled my ears to overflowing.

  I tried to catch a glimpse of Tens. I wondered where he was, what he was doing. I gasped the clean air. I wanted to wander until I felt unsoiled and whole again, but I didn't. Firefighters and neighbors were doing the same thing in other cars around me; a few even worked side by side with me. There was so much immediate need and too few to help. There weren't enough of us for me to pause for long. I turned and went back in through the hole I'd made in the window. Of the people in this car, many were dead, others gravely injured.