Mother of Beauty

In death as in life, people are drawn to Diogo, literally like moths to a flame, for the soul of the holy man emits a dazzling gold light. In the mortal world, Diogo's radiance was visible only to those gifted with the power to see the human aura. In the world of the dead, he is like a beacon that can be seen by all.

"Is it safe to let him move freely through the Everlasting Fields?" I whisper to Sister. "Won't all this light remind people of the lives they left behind?"

"There's nothing wrong with remembering. I wish I had memories."

I do not like it when she talks this way. "I have memories enough for both of us, and none of them are good." Briefly, I test the waters of memory. Mother and twin sister die on the day I am born. Lonely childhood. Distant father. Stepmother always there but never really there. Half sister, a painful reminder of the real sister I lost.

Of three suicide attempts, the last is successful. Anubis, the jackal headed god appears to lead me here, to my home in Haven, where I am offered a choice. Renounce my memories and live in bliss with the other spirits in the Everlasting Fields. Or hold onto my identity, my past, and become a defender of the realm of the dead, a Knight of Death. The payoff? As long as I remember how bad life was, I will never be tempted to go back. Plus, I get to be with my sister, my real sister, forever.

Except for the last part, my past is a swamp of decay and despair. "None of my memories are good," I repeat emphatically.

Sister pushes back the hood of her robe. Her hair is dark auburn, like mine. Her skin is lily white, a sign that her flesh has never felt the sun. Her eyes catch Diogo's light and reflect it. "How do you decide which memories are good and which are bad?"

"That's easy. Good memories are of times when you feel good. Bad memories are of times when you feel bad. "

Her expression is solemn. "What is feeling 'good'? How is it different from feeling 'bad'?"

I squeeze her hand. It is cool and insubstantial as a breeze. "Trust me. You are lucky not to know. If I could forget and still be a knight, I would give up my---"

"Look. Over there." She points. "It's Kuna. I think he's looking for you."

I groan. "He probably has a few thousand pages of necrolore for me to memorize. Hide me."

"Don't be silly. Kuna!" She waves. Her hand moves like a dove. She is so ethereal. Sometimes I am afraid that she will float away.

A short dark man approaches. He wears the black armor of a knight and the dark robe of an angel. He is a vampire, a Master of Death and my teacher. "My lady." He bows to my sister. His smile is charming---until his eyes come to rest on me. "Have you forgotten? We have a field trip today."

"Field trip" means an excursion into the land of the living, something I find disagreeable under the best of circumstances. Kuna has a way of making these visits worse than they have to be. "Does your grass need mowing? Maybe you want me to paint your fence?" Under guise of teaching me how to control my manifestation in the physical world, Kuna often has me perform menial tasks around his house and garden.

"Not today. I have something else planned. Something special."

Something special. I do not like the sound of the words, but I have no choice but to follow. He is my teacher. It is a relationship neither of us enjoy. Sometimes I think that Anubis and the other gods of death are trying to punish us. It is true that I deserve to suffer for the crimes I committed while living, but being Kuna's student seems like cruel and unusual punishment. Racks, pitchforks and fiery pincers would be easier to bear.

The portal between the realms of the living and the dead is guarded by Madame Brigette, wife of another god of death, Baron Samedi. The Baron spends most of his time among the living, so I have not met him yet. His wife I have encountered many times, though only in the form of a crystal door. I am told that her human guise, the one she wears in the other world, is quite lovely.

The Baroness shimmers at our approach. It is rumored that she and Kuna were once lovers in the physical realm. "Where to today, mon cher ?"

"Training mission," Kuna replies. " May we pass?"

"It is permitted." The crystal membrane dissolves to water. I move through easily, but Kuna has to pull himself from the Baroness's watery embrace. "Later," he murmurs.

"Tease," she whispers back.

I am thinking about how different Kuna is from the other knights and wondering for the nth time why he was chosen to be my teacher, when I realize that we are not following our customary route. Usually we arrive at the mausoleum within his house, where his body--the immortal body of a vampire---sleeps while his soul visits Haven. Today, he has chosen to visit a different home.

We move up from the earth. There is no marker or gravestone. This is an ordinary suburban lawn. Some anonymous creature must have died here, and its remains were tilled into the dirt, creating a tiny portal between the two worlds.

I look around. If I had blood, it would run cold. "No!" My voice is hoarse.

Kuna takes me by the arm and steers me forward, through a shrub covered with tiny multicolored lights, through a brick wall, through a plasterboard wall, into a room. "Yes. Welcome home, Rusty."

It is my bedroom. Or rather, it is the room that used to be my bedroom. The walls have been painted pale yellow, with a stenciled border of flowers. Everything is fresh, new. The air smells of pine cleaner and ammonia. In the spot where my bed used to stand, there is a bassinet with frilly sheets and a crocheted blanket. My book shelves have been replaced by a changing table. A wooden rocking chair occupies the center of the room. A miniature Christmas tree, decorated with tiny ornaments, sits on a small table beside the chair. So it is December. That explains the lights on the bushes.

Slowly, the shock passes. Life, as they say, goes on. "Boy or a girl?"

Kuna shrugs. "It hasn't been born yet. " Without his body, he is as insubstantial as me. If I were not so disturbed by my surroundings, I might be amused at the way that his feet sink ankle deep into the floor boards. He is not used to navigating the material world in his spiritual form.

"How long has it been since I died? Six months? It didn't take them long." Kuna is watching me closely, so I keep my expression neutral. Must not let him know that he has gotten to me. Must not give him a way to hurt me. "No menial work for me to do here. You should have asked me. I could have told you that Irene keeps a spotless house. Looks like a wasted journey."

"We are not here to work. We are here to watch."

"Watch what? You've made your point. They've forgotten me. Big deal. I was nothing but trouble. They were probably happy to get rid---"

"Hush. She's coming." He pulls me into the closet, an unnecessary precaution since few of the living can see the spirits of the dead. Maybe he has forgotten that he is not wearing his body.

The door opens. I expect to see my stepmother. Instead, my half sister, Carrie creeps into the room. She wears a sweatshirt decorated with an image of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. It is one that Irene bought and put under the tree last year with a tag which said "From Rusty, For Carrie." It looks as if it has not been washed in a month.

She is carrying a blanket, the one that used to lie on the foot of my bed and something else, a book. After checking to make sure that she is alone, she curls up in the rocking chair, wraps the blanket around her legs and opens the book. It is a photo album. The pictures which she traces with one finger are of me.

"Rusty," she whispers. "I know you can hear me."

How? I turn to Kuna. How does she know?

He shakes his head. What is he trying to say? That he does not know? Or maybe she is just talking to herself. How many times has she come here since I died?

Carrie's voice is hoarse. She has been crying. "I saved your stuff. Mom wanted to throw it out. She says it's morbid to keep reminders of people who are dead. But I snuck out early in the morning before the garbage men came, and I saved the important things. Your diaries. Your poems. And the box of your mother's stuff, the letters and pictures. You were smart to hide them in the back of your closet . When Mom found them, she shook her head and said 'See what I mean? Rusty was so obsessed with the past, that he couldn't live in the present. '"

Carrie bows her head over the photo album. Her hair is ash blonde, wispy thin like the down of a newborn chick. Her face is paler than I remember. There are dark circles under her eyes. Shame washes over me as I recall how I used to torment her, the names I called her, the way I locked her out of my room, drowning out the sound of her crying with headphones, music cranked up high.

"Mom says the baby will make me forget, but I don't want to forget you, Rusty. I love you. I read your diaries and your poems. I know why you did it. I'm not mad, Rusty. I know you are happier where you are now., with your real mother and your real sister." She sniffs. "But I miss you."

Your real sister. Suddenly, I want to be with Sister. I need to feel the coolness of her hand, hear the calmness of her voice. But Carrie's voice will not let me go. I am pinned to the spot, like a butterfly on a specimen tray.

"They took me to a doctor. The same one you used to see. She prescribed pills. Mom gives them to me, but I haven't been taking them. I've been saving them instead. In a few more days I will enough."

Have enough? Is she planning to kill herself? I move forward. I want to touch her, but my ghostly hand passes through her shoulder.

She shivers. "Rusty? Is that you? No, just a breeze. I know you can't really hear me. You're dead. The pain is gone." She presses her hand to her stomach and grimaces. "Your pain is gone. Oh, Rusty! What should I do?" She covers her face with her hands and begins to cry.

I turn away. Kuna is watching me. If I had fists I would smash his smug face. "I get your point. I've fucked up everyone's life. Now can we get out of here?"

"You still don't understand." Not smug. Sad. He looks so sad. Sad for her, not for me. He despises me.

"Sure, I understand. Carrie's going to try to kill herself. She'll probably mess it up, like I did, and they'll put her in the hospital, and she'll get over it. Or maybe she'll get lucky. She's not Knight material, so she'll go to the Everlasting Field. She'll be happy there." I wish he would stop looking at me.

I turn and leave through the wall we entered. There is no water outside, no faucet. I force Carrie from my thoughts. Home. I must get home to Haven.

Kuna has more experience with his spiritual form than I realized. He appears beside me. I try to move away, but he has a tight grip on my ghost. "We haven't finished our field trip, yet."

"What's next? The Ghost of Christmas Present?"

"We just had the present. Now it's time for the past." He sinks into the ground, dragging me with him. When we emerge again, we are in a cemetery. The graves are well tended, the tombstones immaculate. Many are decorated with carved angels or flowers. Most of the flowers are poinsettias, a reminder of the season, and one grave has a bulging Christmas stocking hung on the stone. Have family members left gifts for a child who died young? The dates are 1991 and 1996.

We stop before a headstone which is simple compared to the rest, just a name and two dates. My mother's name. The dates of her birth and death.

If I had breath, I would gasp. "This is her grave!" I exclaim. I kneel on the grass and place my hand against the marble. To living hands it would seem cool. To a ghost, it feels warm. "I always wanted to visit her grave, but something always came up at the last minute to keep us from going."

"Is it everything you hoped it would be?" Kuna asks.

His question makes no sense. "This is where my mother is buried."

"Strange that they never brought you here when you were alive."

"I told you. Something always came up--Oh, I see what you are getting at. They didn't really want me to see her grave. Irene must have thought it was morbid. And Dad--"

I realize that I do not know my father well enough to guess why he did not want to visit his dead wife's grave. Was he afraid that he would cry? I never saw him cry. I heard Irene cry, a few times, behind closed doors. The face she showed to the world was always happy. "She has a sunny disposition" people would say about her.

"What kind of world never has night?" Kuna asks. He's been reading my mind again, one of his vampiric powers. Usually, it pisses me off.

"A fucked up world. An everything is so fucking happy all the time that it makes you want to slit your wrists with a rusted razor blade kind of world." It is all making sense. A dark, twisted kind of sense, but I know that if I follow the path, I will find a door, and if I open the door, I will find--

"Kuna?"

I feel the coolness of his spirit. It comforts me. "I'm here."

"I'm scared. Don't let go."

"I won't."

"Can we go back now?"

"To Haven?"

"No. Take me back home."

II.

Carrie waited until her parents were asleep before removing the film canister from the bookshelf, where she had hidden it behind a copy of The Secret Garden. She poured the contents onto her bed and counted the pills. Fifty. Twice the dose that the medical reference book said would be lethal for someone her size.

She had witnessed Rusty's two unsuccessful suicide attempts, and she had vowed that she would get it right the first time. Just to be sure, she planned to wash the pills down with vodka. That meant that she had to get to the kitchen without waking her parents.

She tiptoed down the hall, past the living room. Her mother, Irene had spent most of the afternoon decorating the flocked Christmas tree with European glass ornaments. The tree was identical to the one she had chosen last year and the one the year before that.

It occured to Carrie for the first time that she hated those sugar frosted, carefully decorated trees. She hated the embroidered stockings that were hung on the mantle each year but which were never filled. She hated the nativity scene in the front window and the poinsetta guest towels which no one was allowed to touch. She hated everything about Christmas--except for the sweatshirt Rusty had given her. Since his death in January, she had worn it almost every night . Now that she was on vacation from school, she wore it twenty-four hours a day, ignoring her mother's hints about body odor and germs.

It had been over a week since her last bath. She could not remember the last time she brushed her teeth or combed her hair. What did physical hygeine matter to one who would soon be freed from the agony of living?

There was a new bottle of vodka under the counter, just as she knew there would be. Irene was throwing her annual Christmas party tomorrow. Would she cancel it when she found her daughter dead? They took their scheduled family summer vacation, though Rusty was barely cold in the ground. "It will be good to get away," her mother had said. "It will help you forget."

"I don't want to forget," Carrie muttered aloud, forgetting for a moment where she was and what she was doing. The sound of her own voice startled her. She clapped her hand over her mouth and listened. The night was silent except for a distant siren.

Relieved, she grabbed the bottle and headed back down the hall. She passed the door to her room, tiptoed past her parents' bedroom, then paused at the door of her brother's room--she refused to call it the nursery. The door was ajar. The lights were on. Was someone in there? She stuffed the film canister down the front of her sweat shirt and hid the vodka bottle behind her back. Then, cautiously, she peered around the door.

The empty rocking chair was moving. The carpet muffled the sound, but it was definitely rocking back and forth. And no one was in the room.

Carrie smothered a scream and dashed into her own room where she bolted the door. She still had the vodka bottle. She opened it and took a drink. She had been drinking in secret for some time, trying without success to ease the hurt. Her psychiatrist had suggested that Irene take her to AA, but Carrie's mother refused to believe that her daughter could be an alcoholic. "She is only thirteen," she had said.

Only thirteen, Carrie thought. She remembered the pills. Quickly, before she could change her mind, she fished the film canister out from her sweatshirt, opened it and dumped the contents into the toilet in her bathroom.

Her heart was still racing, so she took another drink. It calmed her, but as the alcohol kicked in she found herself overwhelmed by melancholy. She should not have flushed the pills. Now she would have to start saving them again. Or think of another way. If only she was not so afraid of blood. If only Rusty had not died.

She knelt beside the bed and reached under it for the box in which she kept her brother's possessions. It was gone. Did her mother find it and throw it out? She felt both afraid and angry. Fear at the loss of her last link to Rusty. Anger at her mother who tried so hard to pretend that nothing had happened, so that she could go on believing that they were a perfect family living in a perfect world.

Carrie took a final drink from the bottle, then she replaced the missing portion with water and screwed on the lid. If she was lucky, her mother would assume that her father had opened it. She crept back towards the kitchen. After replacing the bottle, she checked the trash. No sign of the missing box or its contents.

She headed back towards her room. Though she tried to ignore her mother's hideously perfect Christmas tree, her eyes were drawn to it, the way that people on freeways can not help staring at badly mangled cars. Why would anyone want to cut down a living tree, spray it with white foam and then drag the carcass into the middle of their house--

Carrie blinked. She rubbed her eyes. She took one, two, three steps towards the tree. It was not her imagination. Someone had smashed every expensive imported ornament, then attached photographs and letters to the broken shards of glass which clung to the tree. In the dim light, the effect was surreal and oddly beautiful.

She moved closer to examine the photos. Here was Rusty as a baby, Rusty as a child, Rusty as a scowling teenager. There was Rusty's mother, eight months pregnant with twins, her stomach enormous. There was Rusty's first report card. The teacher's comment "Does not play well with others" written in red ink. There was a snapshot of her and Rusty riding a roller coaster. Her brother was grinning. It was one of the few pictures of him smiling. What was it about the roller coaster that made him happy when others were screaming? Did the prospect of falling to his death from a great height delight him?

"Rusty?" she whispered. It had to be her brother's ghost. Who else would dare do this to the family Christmas tree. She recalled the rocking chair which moved by itself. "Rusty, are you there? Was that you in the nursery, sitting in the rocking chair?"

Something cold brushed against her cheek. Tears sprang to her eyes.

"Rusty? It's you, isn't it? You were in the nursery. You were trying to tell me not to take the pills, weren't you? But what does the tree mean?" She touched a yellowed newspaper clipping, the obituary for Rusty's sister and mother. Where did he find it? He must have searched piles of old newspapers until he found the right one. His father and stepmother would not have saved something like that for him. They wanted him to forget, when all he wanted to do was remember. They wanted him to see the bright side of life, when all he wanted was to experience the darkness.

And what about her? What did she want? Did she really want to die? No, she wanted to be with Rusty again. Suicide was merely a way for her to follow in his footsteps, in hopes that she would find him somewhere on the other side. That was why she saved the pills. She wanted to be with him, again. And she wanted the pain to stop.

But she did not really want to die. She wanted Rusty. And miraculously, he had come to her with this message, this beautiful message in the form of a Christmas tree decorated with momentos of the past .

It was all clear to her now. Her memories of him were not morbid. They were precious, all the more precious for the fact that he was dead. And the ache in the center of her chest when she thought of him--that was no disease to be exorcised with pills, alcohol, death. The loss was a part of the love she felt for him, a necessary part, a real part that could not, would not be denied.

Carrie fell to her knees and began to laugh, softly at first, then louder. Before long, the noise woke her parents.

"What on earth!" her mother exclaimed at the sight of her ruined tree.

Her father said nothing.

"Carrie, did you do this?" Irene demanded.

Carrie almost said "No, it was Rusty, " but her mother would only think that she had lost her mind. "Yeah, it was me. Who else would do it? Who else cared enough about Rusty to remember him on Christmas." She raised her voice and shouted "MERRY CHRISTMAS, RUSTY! And tell your mom and sister hello from me."

Irene spoke sharply to her husband. "Do something! She's becoming hysterical."

Still, Carrie's father said nothing. He was staring at the tree. He touched a photograph of his dead wife, then one of his son. Slowly, a tear trickled down his cheek. "Merry Christmas," he whispered. "Merry Christmas, son." He shivered at the last word, and Carrie knew that Rusty's ghost had touched him, too.

Copyright © 2000 by McCamy Taylor McCamy writes speculative fiction with elements of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Her long fiction can be read on her web site at http://www.nationwide.net/~taylorjh. E-mail: taylorjh@nationwide.net

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