Cameron Haley - Skeleton Crew

“She’s fragmented?”

“Yeah, but we’re putting her back together, bits and pieces of the signal at a time. Or she’s doing it herself. We’re not really sure what’s causing it.”

“You’re experimenting on something you call a god in a laboratory built on top of the San Andreas Fault and not one but two massive ley lines…and you’re not really sure what’s going on. Is that about right?”

“This is science, damn it, not a knitting circle.”

“I like your style.”

“Thanks.”

“So what do you hope to get out of this nightmarish excursion into mad-scientist territory?”

“We’re flying blind,” Dr. Niles said, nodding to Lowell and Granato. “We speculate about the events that are coming but we don’t really know. We can’t predict them. We can’t even really identify them after the fact with any precision or rigor, except by studying the shit on the fan.”

“And you think Hecate can tell you.”

“We think she already is, but we can’t understand what she’s saying.” He tapped a few more keys and the screen displayed the text the linguist was transcribing in real-time. I read some of it as it scrolled across the LCD. smoke at the green circumference the invisible man jumps and swallows nothing ripe coffins like swans on the floor a sluggish place for some to fill ants on the tongue meager hopes in glass, screaming away beneath life and leaf sallow jewels and opulent flesh bells bleed in the watchtower animal skin at canyon fields blossoms of hunger and blue falls under the tree of swords silence calling loose light in palaces of white mountains phosphorous machinery touch the gradient naked night in tiger dreams

I looked from the screen to Dr. Niles. “You’ve definitely ruled out gibberish?”

“You’re reading a fragment out of context,” he said, frowning. “It almost starts to make sense when you look at it long enough.”

“I’m sure. So can you tell me what’s causing the zombie problem?”

“Not exactly.”

I glanced at Lowell. “Remind me why I’m here again?”

“We don’t know what’s causing the Zed problem,” Dr. Niles said. “But Hecate has been talking about it.”

“How do you know? I didn’t get that from ‘phosphorous machinery touch the gradient.’ It’s not even good grammar.”

“She spiked just before we started getting reports of Zed on the loose.”

“She spiked?”

“Yeah, both the intensity of the signal and the strength of the projections. We’re pretty sure she knew what was happening before it actually happened.”

“How do you figure?”

Dr. Niles went to the keyboard again and pulled up another fragment of text. claimant and messenger, lost stone circle, grasping the harmonic motion fire-lit shell on darkened shore madness sings the red song

“We have no idea what the first two lines mean, so don’t ask. But we think the last two are about Zed.”

I squinted at the words on the screen. “‘Darkened shore’ sounds like death, if you’re in a high-school poetry class. ‘Fire-lit shell’ means the zombies?”

“Right, a corpse is a shell on the shores of death.”

“But ‘fire-lit?’ The shell’s on fire?”

The scientist shook his head. “What’s unusual about these particular shells, Ms. Riley?”

“They’re walking around trying to eat people.” I saw it as soon as the words were out of my mouth. “Wait, they’re lit from within. They’re dead, but they still have their souls…their divine spark. Fire-lit shells on the shores of death.”

“A-plus!” said Dr. Niles, grinning. “Now, this kind of interpretation isn’t exactly scientific, of course. But given the timing and the instability in the ectoplasmic flow…well, we think we may have found the first of our referents.”

“And ‘madness sings the red song’?”

“That’s the walking-around-trying-to-eat-people part. We think the ‘red song’ is a metaphor for hunting.”

“So these shells go mad and then they go hunting.”

“Yeah. We figure the first two lines might indicate a cause but we can’t decode them.”

I shook my head and chuckled. “It’s fucking obvious. The claimant and messenger is lost. When people die, they don’t just catch the next bus to the afterlife. They need psychopomps to guide them.”

Dr. Niles frowned. “What are psychopomps?”

“Reapers.”

“Oh. What about the second line?”

“I have no idea. What the hell is harmonic motion?”

“It’s a mathematical term. Simple harmonic motion is like the movement of a pendulum. Complex harmonic motion is what you get when you combine simple harmonic motions, such as in musical chords. It could describe planetary motion or the music of the spheres. Or it could just be a metaphor that has nothing to do with modern mathematics.”

“Okay, skip it. The point is, the psychopomps have stopped doing their jobs.” I felt more than a little stupid for not considering it sooner. At the club, I’d even made a comment about something putting Death out of business. Then again, I’d never actually seen a psychopomp. It’s not like there were skeletons in black robes wandering around L.A. whacking people with scythes on a typical day. Despite the world I lived in, I had a tendency to assume folklore was bullshit until proven otherwise.

“And they’re for real? Reapers, I mean?” Dr. Niles had gone a little pale.

“Apparently.”

“You don’t know anything about them?”

“Not really,” I said. “But I know someone who does.” six

My mother was a psychic. She never had quite enough juice to be a real sorcerer, but she knew her game well enough to do fortune-telling, palm reading and the occasional seance. I figured if anyone could tell me about psychopomps, she could. She met me at the front door of her little bungalow in East L.A., as she always did, and we shared a hug before going inside. I waited patiently at the kitchen table while she made coffee and set out fresh-baked empanadas.

“You’re here about los zombis,” she said as she took her seat across from me at the table. Like I said, Mom’s a psychic-you get used to it. It didn’t surprise me she knew why I’d come, or that she knew about the zombie problem. She wouldn’t have been much good at her job if she didn’t.

“I need to know what’s causing it. I got a tip it might have something to do with psychopomps.”

Mom nodded. “The Xolos are missing,” she said.

“Mexican Hairless Dogs?” I mumbled around a mouthful of empanada. It was delicious-light and fluffy with a golden-brown crust, filled with fresh strawberries and some kind of cream.

“Xoloitzcuintli. Not all of them are hairless. Just the psychopomps. Usually one in every litter is coated, and they’re just normal dogs.”

“Psychopomps are dogs?” I wondered who’d come up with the bit about skeletons in black robes wielding scythes.

Mom shrugged and sipped her coffee. “Here, and in Mexico, God has given the Xolos this duty. It has always been so. I don’t know how it is in other places.”

“Tell me about them, Mom.” I’d learned long ago to let my mother get to the point by her own path. Besides, I loved her stories.

“The Xolos are a gift from God,” she said. “They were created from a shard of Adam’s rib. God gave them to us and commanded us to love and protect them, and in turn, they would guide us to Heaven when we die.”

“That sounds like a Christian story. I thought the Xolos predated the Conquest.”

“Adam also predates the Conquest, child.” My skepticism toward dogmatic Catholicism was no secret, but Mom never missed an opportunity to chide me for it when it slipped out. “The Mexica had their own stories, of course, but I believe it is the same story with different names. They believed the god Xolotl created the Xolos from the Bone of Life that they might safely lead the dead into Mictlan, the underworld.”