Much like Shelley’s storied Victor, when he pulled back the covers and saw the horrible truth of his creation lying beneath, he’d become far too afraid to go on.
A coward. That was all Devan Godbole was, by the bloody end. Not a pioneer, not a trailblazer, but a man with his tail between his legs. Pandora, shoving buzzing moths of ugly truths back into the box. Failing to set loose the hope that sat, shivering, along the bottom.
For every discovery, there was a price. Nature demanded a balance, and the Apostle understood that. From the very beginning, he’d understood. Not Devan.
“I want to pull the plug,” Devan had said one night over drinks. He’d been wild-eyed and ashen. He looked like he hadn’t slept in weeks. Outside, rain drove sideways against the window. Wind rattled the glass in its panes. “I’ve already drafted a letter to Howe’s board of accreditation. It’s over. It’s done.”
The Apostle had held tight to his glass, nearly drained of scotch. His heart was a hard shell of grief back then, the losses he suffered yet unbalanced. He hadn’t learned how to set wrong a right, how to nullify the constant ache of sorrow. At Devan’s news, the shell in his chest gave an ugly wrench.
“You can’t back out now,” he’d bitten, a little drunk, a little sad, a little angry. “We’re almost to the end. You don’t get to change your mind.”
“It’s too late.” Devan rose to go. He was fumbling, drunk already, his eyes glassy. Outside, it rained and rained. It was, the Apostle remembered thinking, a terribly easy night to get into an accident. “I already have,” Devan said. “I won’t make another door. Not in this lifetime. Not knowing what’s waiting for us out there. Not knowing the truth.”
Now the Apostle stood in front of a grave. Hours ago, the sky had turned sideways with a sunset, orange dusting the western edges of the world. He stood in his slippers—the ones his wife had given him for Christmas. It was a strange thing, he knew, to wear slippers to a graveyard. He did it anyway.
He’d sniped at her, that snowy morning as he peeled back the red tartan wrapping with the gold foil. The moccasins were too small, and didn’t she know his size by now, after fifteen years of marriage? Her eyes had been round, apologetic saucers. The snow fell white and fat outside the wide bay window of their living room.
Now the bare backs of his heels sat in dirt. In his hand were flowers. Twelve white gerbera daisies, all of them limp.
He said, a little bit apologetically, “The store didn’t have roses today.”
The headstone bearing his wife’s name said nothing at all. It sat—gray and absolute—in the mud.Non omnis moriaretched deep into the stone. A poem. A promise. He was not, he’d noticed upon arrival, the only person to leave flowers that day. Strewn across the stunted grass were twelve dead roses, each of them with the buds neatly snipped off in a macabre beheading.
Behind him, a single shadow detached from the rest. It dragged itself across the dirt.
The Apostle didn’t turn around to see it draw near.
“I would appreciate it,” he said, “if you didn’t come here.”
“I go where you go,” said his haunt. Overhead, a bat fluttered by on leathery wings. The Apostle hated bats. He hated the dark. He hated Octobers. He hated graveyards, and the feel of the deep, interminable cold seeping in through the open backs of his slippers.
“Did you leave these flowers here?” He kicked at a blossom. Rosebuds went scattering in a midnight wind. The shadow laughed a wet, wheezing laugh.
“We are not the only players in this game anymore,” it sang. “You and I. I and you.”
He suppressed a shiver. This was his price. This was the cost of greatness. This dark, shuffling specter. This horrid, grinning wraith. Something dead, for something living. He bent low, brushing dying rosehips from the mound of earth where his wife lay buried. Twenty long years without her. Twenty long years looking for a back door. She’d died surrounded by wires, by strangers, by monitors, and he’d spent the next two decades looking for someone who possessed the power to walk through worlds and bring her back to him.
Devan Godbole was supposed to have been that person. The Apostle put his money on the wrong horse. That was all. It was an easy fix. He had another. He had Price. He placed the daisies against the base of the gravestone. They wilted, white and insipid, looking half-dead already.
When he straightened, the shadow slumped directly in front of him. The gray marker sat between them like a bulwark. By the light of the moon, the figure looked nearly corporeal. Head concave. Its broad, smiling face a horrible thing.
It said, “The boy is not playing by your rules. Does it make you mad, so very mad, oh?”
The Apostle sniffed. He tipped his hat up on his head. “Price will be dealt with.”
“The girl can hear us.” The smile grew and grew. “She can hear us whispering, oh.”
“Enough.”
It must not have liked his tone—his shadow, his haunt, his curse. It got down on the ground. It lay in the dirt, shivering in a ball. Rolling side to side to side in a locus of pain. Its laugh came out high and thin, like a baby’s wail. Like a man dying alone by the side of a highway. On a tree nearby, a barred owl took flight.
“Stop that,” the Apostle said. “You’re making a scene.”
The figure flopped flat onto its back. Its maggot-bitten feet went scuffling, scuffling, and still. It smiled up at the Apostle. The Apostle stared back. They did this routine often—the creature reenacting its body’s gruesome death, the Apostle waiting quietly for the spectacle to end. He’d grown used to it after so many years.
“They say she’s a girl like a garden,” it said. “All roses and lavender and spider mums. Too bright, too bright to be there. One foot among the dead, one foot among the living, like a little breathing bridge. Oh, how I’d love to see her. What a pretty, pretty sight she must be.”
He snapped, “I hate it when you talk in riddles.”
