Writ on Water (3 page)

(A list of acceptable infirmity names would not include hypoglycemia, dyslexia, impacted bowels, rosacea or tennis elbow. If you thought any of these were appropriate, subtract 1 point)

Have you ever been in jail?

   Yes

   No

(If it was for embezzlement, breach of fiduciary duty, or income tax evasion you get 0 points. If it involved murder, robbery, adultery, or auto theft give yourself an extra 2 points for each one. If you had sexual relations while in jail, add 3 points. If they were involuntary, add 5 points)

Do you drink alcoholic beverages every day?

   Yes

   No

(If you prefer single-malt whiskies, brand-name bourbons, Napoleon brandy, Calvados, Drambuie, Amaretto or any liqueurs add 0 points. If you make your own in the backyard add 2 points)

Have you ever consumed squeeze?

   Yes

   No

(Give yourself an extra 5 points if you make your own)

Are you named after a president?

   Yes

   No

(If it's Bush or Reagan, add no points. If it's Zachary (Taylor), Rutherford (Hayes), Chester (Arthur), Grover (Cleveland), or Calvin (Coolidge), add 2 points. If you are female, add 5 points)

If your total points are:

Note: If you were able to accurately tally your score on this test then you need to subtract another 2 points from your total.

Whatsoever thy hand findest to do, do it with thy
might; for there is no work, no device, no knowledge,
no wisdom in the grave whither thou goest.
—Ecclesiastes

Summer, 1998

Gran was a real witch. She was also a bitch much of the time and liked to play with her granddaughter's head. That was why Chloe wasn't real sure about how to interpret her current dream.

This one was bad, though. Interpret it any way she could, it kept coming out nasty. Walking in a garden was usually relaxing, but not in this shadowy place where her mind had taken to wandering. Beds of bloodred Adonis flowers had become feral. The blooms lost all sense of their formerly neat borders until they overgrew most of the stony path that led to the rusted iron gates; their falling petals were like clots of gore coagulating on the stony ground—evil's secret garden.

Beyond the metal portal where Chloe stood,
there were more overgrown gravel walks that zigzagged across the cemetery in random fashion, resembling nothing so much as a crazy floral quilt that had its various beds stitched to each other with thorny cane stocks and creeping vines. This was not so unusual in her line of work, but here was not some delightful, secret plot where children played. The odor wasn't verdant, not what one would expect of a flower patch; it was rank and musty, tinged with a nastier smell than mere rotting vegetation.

Her goal, the Patrick family monument—what people in her trade would call a real resurrection-defier, made of darkest, hardest granite—brooded at the heart of the boscage. It seemed very far away from the gate where she stood, but that was what she had come to photograph, so she would have to find a way past the carnivorous foliage.

She looked up once to see if there were some marker that might tell her that she was in the wrong place, that she needn't go on, but the old iron rose arrow-straight to its arched sign: patrick. Mental sirens went off, but only in the distance, and their tone was stale, muted. It wasn't that she thought her senses were crying wolf, but she had been living in a state of almost perpetual worry since accepting this assignment and her nerves were dull.

Unhappily, she put a hand on one of the gates. They were cold to the touch, frozen even, but unlike something made of ice, they opened easily.
Chloe looked for a moment at her chilled fingers. They were striped with rusty red and dusted over with gray lichen.

The oak and the ash and the bonnie ivy tree
, a voice whispered. But that was wrong! This wasn't a pretty, romantic place. She had grown used to working in necropoles, but this cemetery was . . . different. Primeval almost. Forgotten except for the ghost.

She wiped her hands on her dress, leaving streaks behind.

Cold blows the wind to my true love,
said the voice in her head,
and gently drops the rain, I never had but one sweetheart, and in greenwood she lies slain . . .
Yes, that was closer. This looked like the spot for an unquiet grave.

Chloe turned, raised her camera to photograph the wrought-iron gates that guarded the cemetery, this last resting place of the Patricks. She had a reflected glimpse in the viewfinder of something white, something drained of life like the fleshless bone left by a sky burial—only not so innocently naked as a skeleton. These denuded sticks had been shrink-wrapped in a gray skin, and they were not part of the stone monument behind her. No, it seemed for an instant that something living was peering at her vulnerable back from behind a crumbling stone tomb. It moved toward her with the dry creak of old twigs stressed to the point of breaking.

Chloe let the camera fall, the sudden weight of
the narrow strap cutting her neck. With muscles so tight they nearly popped off their moorings to her bones, she forced herself to turn and look to the left where she had seen movement. She didn't know what she would do if she actually saw something. She was supposed to photograph the monument—it was very important. She wasn't supposed to run away, and she would be punished if she failed.

But nothing was there, of course. Just some inquisitive daddy longlegs spiders who had crawled out onto the scabrous tombstones to observe her coming. She wasn't afraid of daddy longlegs, though she did wonder why there were so many spiders in this place of the dead. There was no sustenance to be had from the lichen-encrusted tombs. Spiders needed live prey. Yet . . . She looked down. There was a sudden promenade of stinging ants marching from the path down into the maze. They were carrying bits of crumbled white things toward the mausoleum.