LEO HELD THE GATE as he walked through, making sure it didn’t close behind him, because any ten-year-old boy knows the last thing you want when entering a cemetery is for the gate to close behind you. It’s terribly bad luck, and who wants to spend the night sleeping on the ground when there are bodies hidden all around you? Who knows what time the groundskeeper might arrive in the morning?
Besides, it would be scary enough if you got locked into a normal graveyard, and this was no normal graveyard.
This was Saint Louis Cemetery No. 1.
Saint Louis Cemetery No. 1 was an aboveground cemetery—all the graves, instead of being below the earth, were crypts built like miniature houses. Some were plain, rectangular boxes while others had peaked roofs and elaborate doors. Some were behind tall iron gates while others were right there where you could touch them, lined up one after another, so close you could barely walk between them. Most were white, but some were crumbling brick or smooth stucco painted a bright color, like peach or pink or lime green. The rows between the crypts were long and straight.
Leo had lost sight of his father, so he headed into the cemetery, staying close to the wall, ducking behind the larger crypts, hiding in their shadows. Night had arrived. There were no lights in the cemetery, but light from the street and neighboring houses crept in over the tall wall, casting angular shadows in different directions.
Leo realized that even though he normally felt like he was losing his belief, at night his belief was still very much intact. The shadows seemed to be living things, and while he was scared, he was also excited because his belief was right there where he could see it. Perhaps this was why so many people like to watch scary movies—it reminds them of what it feels like to believe in something they cannot see.
The moon was up, high over the city. He held the lock picks tight in his pocket so they wouldn’t bump against each other while he walked. There was a dim flickering of light up ahead, close to an intersection of two of the main walkways. He leaned in against a tall crypt. It was the color of moonlight and massive, probably ten feet long. Small tufts of grass grew out of the cracks on its roof. He peered around the front. People had left small glass vases of flowers, and notes. There was rotting fruit there. The crypt was covered in handwriting.
His father came walking down the opposite aisle, and Leo flattened himself in the shadow along the grave, holding his breath. His father still carried Ruby like a baby in front of him, and he looked exhausted from lugging her so far. Her breathing was hoarse and labored, and one of her arms hung limp at her side like a pendulum in a clock that no longer works. The bag hung heavy from one of Amos’s hands.
“Excuse me?” Amos said as he turned in between two of the crypts, and at first Leo thought his father was talking to him. He tensed up, preparing to run or to fight. He wondered how fast he could move while carrying his sister. But then his father kept talking, and he realized there was someone else.
“Are you Marie?”
“I am,” a woman replied, and in those two words her voice was magical, soft as silk. It moved like melted chocolate. There was something deep and ancient about it, like starlight falling through a forest of one-hundred-year-old trees. Leo could barely resist the overwhelming urge to get closer to her, to see her.
“I need to leave,” Amos said, and Leo thought he could hear tears in his father’s voice. But there was also something mechanical there, and Leo realized his father must be repeating the lines the doctor had given him. “Can I use the key?”
“I heard you were coming,” she said slowly. “That’s why I waited, but the night came first. I thought perhaps you had changed your mind.”
“No, no,” he said, and his voice held a lining of fear, the thinnest thread. “I’m going. I’m ready to go.”
Leo peeked around the corner of the crypt. His father’s back faced him. On the other side of his father was a tiny fire, almost comical in its smallness, yet producing a surprising amount of light.
But Leo wasn’t looking for his father or even his sister anymore. He was trying to see where the beautiful voice came from. At first, he saw nothing but shadows, nothing but flickering light against the chalky white of surrounding graves that rose high into the night sky. Higher than he remembered. It was like he had shrunk down to the size of a mouse.
Marie stepped forward, into the orange light from the fire.
She was a large woman, made taller by a scarf wrapped around her head. It rose in an unruly white bunch and had red stripes running through it, some thick, some thin, like a cobweb that’s been brushed aside. Her ponderous but elegant body was draped in a patterned red robe, light and silky. It rustled in the breeze, or maybe it was the small fire that made it move? Beneath everything she wore black clothes that blended in with the shadows around her, so at times her body looked like nothing more than a red robe floating in the movement of the flames.
But her face! Oh, her face! She was beautiful. Her skin was the color of caramel toffee. Small bits of jet-black hair snuck out from under her headscarf and curled in wiry wisps near her round, brown eyes. Her nose and mouth were soft and full.
Marie sighed, and Leo felt the breathlessness that comes when a boy first recognizes beauty in a woman. He felt bashful and curious and couldn’t stop staring.
“You cannot take the little one, and you cannot take the bag,” she said with regret in her voice. She talked to Amos the same way most adults talk to children who say they want to go to the moon. “It’s no place for a little one. Perhaps someday, but not yet.”
Amos shook his head, slowly at first and then vigorously. “She’s very, very ill, and this is what I need to make her better. She won’t survive much longer. I have to take her. The doctor said . . .”
Amos fumbled in his pocket as best he could while holding his daughter. He pulled out a thick mound of bills, holding them tight in his fist. A few of them drifted to the ground.
“I brought double,” he said, his whining voice rising higher until he was nearly shouting in desperation. “I brought double! I can pay for both of us!”
Marie stretched out her hand, but Leo couldn’t tell if she was reaching out to touch Ruby or to take the money or to reject both. Before she did anything, she pulled back.
“Who told you to find me?”
“It was the doctor. My friend.” Amos’s words came in a panicked rush, as if he was afraid to say too little, terrified to say too much. “Her name is . . .”
Marie interrupted him suddenly, loudly. “Stop! Do not say that name here. She is a friend to no one, and if she is helping you, the only thing she is truly doing is helping herself. She helped me once, long ago. Helped.” Each time she said the word “helped,” it came out like a curse word.
The two stood there, the tiny fire between them. Finally she said quietly, sighing, “I cannot allow you to take the little one. You can go if you’d like, but alone. I will take the child wherever you’d like me to take her. I will leave her wherever you ask me to leave her.”
She stared at Amos, and in her eyes there was a strange sort of power. She looked at Ruby as if she already owned her, as if she was her child for the taking. But there was kindness there too, mixed in with it all, and Leo didn’t know what to think of this strange woman named Marie.
“There’s no point in me going in there without her,” Amos said in a slow voice, emphasizing each word. “She’s dying. Her only hope is . . . Over There. I can’t leave her.”
“Very well,” Marie said, stepping forward, lifting her robe, and stretching one of her bare feet above the fire as if to snuff it out.
“Wait!” Amos shouted, and the whole earth stopped, or seemed to. “Wait. Weren’t you ever a mother? Didn’t you ever hold your own child?”
Marie stared at him.
“Didn’t you ever wait with them while they were sick? God forbid you ever had to watch them die!”
Marie didn’t move.
“I have nothing to wait for,” Amos said, and his voice was quieter now. “She will be gone soon. So really, you are only letting me go in because—look at her!—she will not be alive much longer.”
Leo heard a car drive by on the street outside the tall wall. He could see a few dim stars in the night sky—most were drowned out by the city’s glow. Another car drove by, its headlights moving the shadows, forcing them to drift one way, then the other, like ocean waves. After the car moved into the distance, the shadows seemed more eager, stronger, and they reached for the flames.
“Enough!” Marie shouted, and Amos jumped back a step. Leo felt his heart thud inside his chest. A desire to shout out, to reveal himself, nearly overcame him. She seemed to even have power over the shadows, and for a moment Leo thought that’s what she had shouted at.
“You must listen very closely,” Marie said while throwing a few small sticks onto the dying fire. She spoke faster, the words blurring together like watercolors. Her accent became stronger, and her t’s sounded like a snare drum. “The Passageway has become . . . treacherous in recent years. Your doctor friend has been sending more and more people in through this gate. But you will find all you need for you and for your little one.”
“Where are we going?” Amos asked with urgency. “Where are you taking us?”
Marie sighed, started talking a few times, but each attempt trailed off. Leo could tell she was having trouble knowing where to begin.
“I am not taking you anywhere,” she said. “I am simply unlocking the door and pointing you in the right direction, pointing you to the Edge.”
She stopped and stared at Amos, her eyes challenging him to run away. When he did not, she poked the fire and sparks flew upward.
She withdrew a large key and walked to the crypt Leo was hiding behind. The key was white as a bone, the size of her forearm. She held it by the head. The shoulders of the key were harsh squares. The shaft was long and straight, and there were teeth at the very end, five or six of them, like the skyline of a shadow city. Leo pulled back around the corner, out of sight, and listened. There was a deep scraping, like distant thunder crackling along the horizon, and where Leo leaned against the house-shaped tomb, it felt as though an earthquake shook it.
There was a loud creaking, the sound of rock crashing onto rock, and Leo was certain that a neighboring crypt must have fallen over. Then he heard again—no, he felt—the grating sound of the key, deep and harsh, somewhere in the bowels of the earth, where earthquakes wait to shift and lava bides its time and history goes to live.
“Be careful,” Marie said. “Take care of the child.”
What had happened? Leo felt suddenly awake, as if a skin of numbness had fallen off of him. He took a deep breath, and it was like a first breath. He could smell the summer, the approaching rain, the city. Life swirled around him, even in Saint Louis Cemetery No. 1.
Why had he waited there so long beside the crypt? Why hadn’t he raced in and grabbed his sister or told the woman she was right not to let his father take her in? Why hadn’t he fought for her?
Why had he done nothing but stand by and watch?
He glanced around the corner once more, and at that moment the fire went out in a rain of sparks like falling stars. Darkness roared in to fill up the space between the aboveground graves.
No one was there.