"No Stars But Streetlights" by Anne Lee Zimmerman

How far would someone go to gain forgiveness? How far is too far? Is there a point at which the endeavor itself becomes a sin?

            My name is Ketari. At least, that was the name that was given me when I came here. I sold my true name in exchange for a second chance to redeem my soul.

            There is such a place as Hell. I’ve been there, via Heaven. There is such a place as that, as well, and I want to go there. I can’t, though. Not until I do something good, for a change.

            You see, in my first life, I was a very naughty girl. We will just leave it at that.

            Now, as my penance, I have to deal with the mindless bureaucracy of purgatory.

            “Name?” the tin voice asked from the speaker.

            “Ketari.”

            “Do you have an appointment?”

            “Do you seriously believe that I would be here if I hadn’t been commanded!”

            “Do you have an appointment?”

            I kicked the wall. “Yes.”

            The automatic door next to me hissed as the anti-demon seal was disengaged. “Third door on the left.”

            “I’ve come here every day for five-hundred years. You’d think I would know where the door is.”

            “Third door on the left,” it said again in its sickeningly sweet and calm voice.

            “Aw, shut up.” I wrenched open the door and made sure that it banged into the speaker.

            “Thank you for working with Spirit Services,” the now slightly out of tune voice chirruped.

            “Thank you for working with Sprit Services. Thank you for working with Spirit Services,” I mimicked as I stomped down the hall. The funny thing about being dead is that your brain—no, wait. I don’t have a brain anymore. Well, your soul, then—sort of sticks in the mood you were in when you died. Evidently, I had been severely annoyed. I can’t really remember anymore. It really doesn’t matter how you died. You’re still dead.

            I wrenched open the third door on the left and stumbled into what looked like a board meeting. About twenty of the semi-demons of various vaguely humanoid forms that filled the upper echelons of purgatory lounged around a darkly-glistening table. Clothes didn’t really matter in the afterlife, but their attitudes projected “business suit” in tasteful neon letters. All of them, as one turned and glared at me for my rather noisy entrance. If a ghost was able to blush, I certainly was doing it.

            “I’m sorry,” I stammered, “I must have the wrong--.”

            “Ah! Ketari! Here you are! Just the spirit for the job at hand.” A ghost of a former lawyer stood up at the head of the table and I barely recognized him as my supervisor. “Please, please! Take a seat.”

            A cushy, executive chair appeared out of nowhere right next to me. I flopped onto it, and the chair part of it immediately bent in an unexpected direction and dumped me onto the floor in and undignified sprawl. I cursed. No one even turned in my direction, a point for which I was truly thankful, as I readjusted the thing and gingerly settled onto the very edge this time, trying my hardest to not put too much weight on it. The worst thing about purgatory is that nothing ever worked. With a little bit of determination, you could make anything you wanted appear, but it never was quite right.

            I hadn’t really been paying attention to the slide show that my supervisor was eagerly running at the front of the room. I said eagerly, because his monotone actually acquired some variation. I guess that that was why I was so startled when the boring enough presentation took a turn for the worst, well, at least for me.

            “Our operative,” I perked up at the word. They were talking about me! Ah, how I loved the sound of that title. “Will be issued a temporary corporeal body. Usually there are more than enough earthly mediums available to supply a host in good enough physical condition. Her job is to make sure that the assignments die in the proper way.”

            I flinched. The chair gave an almighty squawk and dumped me onto the floor once again. The jolt of the fall snapped me out of my reverie, but the shock of the suggestion still clung to my spirit like a sticky residue. The other executives didn’t turn to look this time either. I started to wonder whether or not they were real, or whether my supervisor had just conjured them to embarrass me into behaving for the duration of the presentation. I decided I didn’t care anymore, either way.

            “What are you, nuts?” I shouted at the man in the business suit. I began to use the wall to help myself back to my feet. It gave an ominous creak, so, not wanting to bring down the entire room with me, I used the edge of the table instead. My supervisor was staring at me like I had finally cracked. I thought he had. “You want me to murder someone?”

            The chief nodded to the executives around the table and they silently stood up and left. He waited until the door closed behind them before sighing and restarting the slide presentation. “No, I’m not telling you to murder someone. I am telling you to make sure that three someones die in the proper way. Kill them if you have to, but they need to get on the bus, either way, and I think that the bus will do it for you.”

            I shuddered. The bus. People on earth used to joke that there is a stairway to heaven and a trap door to hell. Centuries ago, Satan decided that taking spirits through the trap door one by one was too slow. So he bought an enormous double-decker bus.

            “Then you are telling me to basically damn three people.”

            “One adult and two children. All three have done more in their lives than you ever did. The mother is the main culprit, but she will never let her children go, so they must go with her. All three were supposed to die months ago, but they cheated death. Because of that, death doesn’t know that they are still alive, and all sorts of powers are trying to get them on their side. You can imagine how much power it took to cheat death without letting death know he was even cheated. You need to keep everyone else away from them. Make sure they get on the bus.”

            Years ago, I wouldn’t have minded this assignment. I took my deep disgust as a sign that I was beginning to reform. I didn’t want to stop the process. “No. I won’t do it.”

            “You will. We need a person of your admittedly unorthodox talents. If you refuse this assignment, I swear on the administration upstairs, I will set you back at square one. This is a big thing.” I was obviously not looking all that convinced. He sighed and put one hand-like appendage up to his forehead in a gesture reminiscent of the days when he was still human. “Here. I’m not supposed to be telling you this, but you are one away from getting out of here. If you pass this, you’ve got a ticket to heaven. It’s win or lose.”

            Heaven. If I had a heart I would have said that it beat faster. The feeling of elation I received from being so close was astounding. It was the best thing I had felt since—since I couldn’t remember. “Heaven,” I whispered to myself, just so I could taste the word. “Okay, I’ll do it.”

The meeting room faded around me. I could faintly hear some sort of chanting or singing in the background. Then there was one almighty, bone-chilling scream. Then silence. Then noise: the noise of my own beating heart. I realized suddenly that I could feel the floor under me. Just the essence of feeling made me shiver. My eyes snapped open, and I could feel the movement of every tiny muscle that that involved. I hadn’t had muscles or nerves or eyelids for over five hundred years. Even on my assignments, I usually co-inhabited a body with some sort of “spirit medium” who was specifically asking for such a thing to happen anyway. Whenever that happened, I usually had to deal with a second consciousness in my head. They took care of the living and the feeling and the culture, and I just did the fighting and the directing. This time administration had actually given me a body. I realized what that scream had come from and shivered again.

            The room I found myself in was very dark, a thing I was very thankful for, since the few objects I was able to see brought more chills to my newly acquired spine. I knew, with all of the knowledge acquired after five hundred years of chiefly spiritual existence, that this host had been a demon’s dream. Arcane spell books, Ouija boards, voodoo dolls in various states of being ripped apart, the person, the girl, I realized as I placed one horrified hand over my/her heart, had done it all. I sat up and inspected her body. There was no obvious cause of death. I could only guess that the Great Traitor had come and carried her off himself.

            After sitting up, I slowly got to my feet, trying to remember what it was like to walk. I knew that I was toddling around like a small child. I needed to learn how to walk normally. It didn’t really help that she/I was wearing the bane of female existence: heels. Oh, how I hated them. I also felt like an overly-stuffed sausage in her very gothic, corseted dress. Every time I looked down at my feet, I saw the dress and ended up gagging. I glimpsed a mirror in the corner and started toddling toward it. I didn’t see the chalk line until it was too late.

            The next time I woke up, I was back on the ground again and I felt a new bruise forming on my forehead. I rubbed it and finally thought to inspect the floor. It was wooden, of course, and had an enormous pentagram chalked on it with other symbols that I didn’t recognize but shouted at my resurrected spirit to STAY IN. No matter how foolish my host had been, she definitely was strong. I cursed under my breath and skidded one of the obnoxious heels across the floor. It smudged the line, the symbols stopped buzzing at me, and I was able to finally step over to the mirror. I shouldn’t have bothered. I had no reflection anyway. The girl would have been proud. She was now even more gothic-vamp than before. I, on the other hand, hated it. The other shoe followed the trajectory of the first. It broke the glass over a case of vials with a satisfying crash as I marched over to the only door, my steps much more steady, and climbed barefoot and backwards down the flight of stairs beyond.

Living had never felt so good, although it really had never been more confusing. After ransacking the girl’s closet for something decent and finally giving up, I had strapped on a pair of what looked like combat boots that had gotten a facelift, a much looser dress that didn’t make my ribs ache and my boobs look like they would pop out any second, and a scarf draped over the still inordinately low neckline. I supplemented the outfit with the only thing I approved of in the entire place: a very fine set of knives that fit comfortably in their own sheaths underneath my frilly sleeves. I really couldn’t remember much of fashion from my own life, but I did recognize the fact that wearing such a dress as I was wearing currently during my own lifetime would have gotten me stoned.

I was still looking for the hungry mob as I plopped down a dish of dry food for the host’s cat. The host lived alone, except for the cat, a fact for which I was truly thankful. The cat was bad enough. It seemed to know that something was wrong, and refused to leave me alone.

“Meow?” it said in its own confused way when it first made my acquaintance.

“Yes, I know I am not your mistress. I’m glad for that. I mean, how clichéd can you get? You’re a black cat who owns a witch.” It didn’t even recognize that I had used the correct terminology when referring to its relationship with its mistress. It ignored the food and butted its head up against the side of my boot in a distressed sort of way.

“What do you want?”

“Meow.”

“Sorry, I didn’t really catch that. I don’t speak cat.”

“Mew.”

Sighing, I lifted it into my arms. The cat didn’t make any objections other than a very pointed hooking of its claws into my bodice. “I feel like I thief. That’s what’s wrong. I don’t even know what my name is supposed to be. I am sorry for your loss, but you will have to stay behind. Several souls and the balance of the cosmos are at stake.”

It began to purr.

I groaned. Reflexively, I shrugged my upper body in such a way that the cat’s claws were partially dislodged. Then I let go.

With a startled--and very lifelike—scream, it flipped over backwards, righted itself midair, landed on its feet, and strutted away to the deeper recesses of the house with its tail haughtily raised and its bloomer-like back legs swaying in a “that didn’t just happen” sort of way.

The woman lived alone, but not really alone-alone. I opened her door and was greeted by another hallway. There was a man outside in his bathrobe. I stumbled back and threw a hand over my eyes, horrified that I had stumbled in on someone in such a state of undress, and I wasn’t even his wife. Bathrobes were supposed to be confined to the home, not out in a public hallway where anyone could see them.

            “Mornin’, Fatima?”

            So the host’s name had been Fatima . He obviously thought his situation was perfectly normal. I forced myself to relax, but my conscience was still jangling at my nerves. “Good morning.” My/her voice sounded strange. It was laden with an interesting accent similar to the man’s. I tried to make my eyes focus on an area right above the stranger’s head because, otherwise, they kept drifting back to the legs. I gestured vaguely to the light out in the hallway. “Very bright out here. Makes my eyes hurt.”

            He nodded and saluted with a bundle of gray paper he was carrying. “Well, I hope you feel better. Don’t lock yourself out again today, okay? I have no clue what you were doin’ that late, but the missus certainly will start to complain if she gets another phone call at two in the morning.”

            “Oh!” My surprise was not feigned in the slightest. I reached back inside and grabbed a bundle of keys off of a darkly-gaudy table next to the door. “You just saved me. Thank you.” I bobbed a little bit of a curtsy.

            He laughed and went his way. I counted to thirty to make sure he was gone and finally wobbled out into the light, pulling the door shut behind me. I had thought that it was sunlight that was making the hallway so bright. It couldn’t be the sun, though. The light was too cold. Anyway, there was a window at the end of the hall, and it showed firmly cloudy skies. I looked up. The ceiling was lined with bars of frozen light. They buzzed softly as they, evidently, thawed, and leaked their light like so much runoff onto me and the carpet in the hallway. I cupped my hands in an effort to catch some of the amazing light, but it behaved just the same as any other light and silently leaked away. A feeling of loss crept up inside me, but I had no clue what could have possibly caused such a feeling. A word lingered on my lips, but I could express it. S-st-sta--. I continued to stare in awe until I heard a door close somewhere close-by. Afraid that it was robe-man, I hastened to the end of the hall, found another doorway, leading to another stairway, and made my escape.

            I hit the streets, or, rather, the streets hit me. I estimated it to be about mid-morning, but there were more people on the streets at that unlikely hour than I had ever seen. Ever. In any of the time periods I had visited combined. The sidewalks had been turned into one unending river of humanity. Yet no one touched anyone. No one looked up at another person. Each person was alone in a crowd. Right next to the river was another filled with bright metal contraptions. I dimly remembered that they were called automobiles. Of course, the last time that I had visited, they were much uglier. Automobiles back then had been noisy things that left great clouds of smoke and could easily be outrun on a fast horse. They bore little resemblance to these sleek, glistening things I saw before me.

            In my contemplation of the new style of automobile, I had allowed myself to step a little out of the shelter of the front door. Before I knew it, I was swept away. I squawked and tried to fight my way back, but it was all but impossible. People continued shuffling and jostling the one person not following the law of the sidewalk. The door moved farther and farther away and no one seemed to notice my urgent tries to move against the flow.

            I had just given up and started walking with the crowd when a dreadful thunder started up somewhere in the distance. It got louder until it was echoing off of the buildings and even started rousing some of the zombie horde that was the river of people. I looked around frantically for the cause of the noise. When I finally found what I was looking for, an exclamation of delight escaped my lips. Here was another of the sleek autos, but it only had two wheels. A man was astride it like he was riding a bicycle, and, because it was so small, he was able to weave in and out of the traffic, effectively avoiding both the zombie hordes that inhabited the sidewalk and the river of metal that inhabited the street. Something inside of me was whispering frantically that I was supposed to be good, that I was here to be rehabilitated. Another voice, however, was screaming something to the effect of “SHINY THING!” I grinned and followed the man on the motorized, roaring, shiny bicycle.

A couple of hours, a brief scuffle in an alley during which the man bought his life with his motorbike, and an experimental driving session later, astride my new steed, I surveyed the crowd as I drove by. My supervisor hadn’t even given me a description of the targets except that there was a woman and two children (Oh, God! Children!), so I assumed that they would be easy to find. If they weren’t, then I would blame it all on admin, and no one had to really get hurt. What my assignment consisted of was really starting to get to me. Of course, now that I had a body, it was now technically mine until I died. Admin couldn’t legally take me out of it until I had a reason to die. Of course, to do something like that would mean instant failure as an operative and a one-way ticket to the roaster. Eternity was way too long and death was way too soon to even think of that. I sighed and kept on looking.

            And almost wrecked the bike. I looked into the crowd and looked into the eyes of a demon. To be a purgatorial soul is to be neither here nor there. To be in a state of constant tug of war, where you are the rope. To be semi-demon and semi-angel. To look into the eyes of a purgatorial soul is just like looking into the eyes of a human. To look into the eyes of a true demon is to see Hell.

            A horn exploded close to my ear and I realized I had almost run through a red light. The wheels screeched as I skidded to a stop, and a few of the people in the crowd actually turned to look for an instant before turning back the other way. I sat and examined the demon. He looked for all the world like a slightly seedy workman. He wore a paint-smeared smock and great big clunky work boots. No one else would look twice at him. But I knew that he knew me and he knew that I knew him. This was bad. I tensed myself and waited for him to shift to a different dimension and charge me, but I waited a good half minute as I sat at the traffic light and the expected instant death didn’t come.

            A horn beeped again. The light was green. I gritted my teeth and moved forward again, leaving the demon behind. No matter how much I disliked putting my back to him, it was obvious I wasn’t his target.

            The next obvious question was “Then who is his target?”

            “Curiosity killed Ketari,” I murmured as I pulled around the corner and messily propped the motorized bicycle against a street sign. I jumped off, not caring that I probably flashed the world while doing so, and started sprinting back the way I had come. Maybe it was the speed with which I was moving. Most of the people got out of my way.

            I switched to a form of extra-dimensional sight. It was dangerous, for sure, especially running through a crowd of people. While looking at the world like that--and yes, you skeptics, it really is a mindset—one is only able to see three types of things: ghosts, angelic beings, and cats. No one has ever figured out why the cats, but I think it is just because admin thought that cats would be even more amusing if they were able to see things no one else was able to.

            Despite the danger, however, it made it outrageously easy to see where the demon had ended up. There was a glow I could see even through the intervening buildings. Either an orgy of cats was reaching critical mass or a demon was doing some dirty work.

            I slowed down and cautiously approached the alley where I expected the demon to be. Taking one of the knives out of its wrist sheath, I stepped to the mouth of the alley, squinted through the glare and threw. There was a disappointing metallic clang, followed by an outraged scream as the demon’s prey was probably scared away.

            The demon shifted. I screamed an expletive certainly not approved by the hierarchy of heaven, but probably coined by the lowerarcy of hell, grabbed my remaining knife and charged. Then the demon stopped in mid-gravity-defying-leap. A hole had blossomed somewhere around his midsection. Then, I heard the bang of the gun as it followed the hole in reality made by the bullet, the sound neatly tucking itself into the next dimension with us, instead of into material dimension of the crowd. I stopped and stood gaping as the creature hit the side of a building and fell. In the real world, a man in a painter’s smock died in an alley. A well-dressed woman stood over him, holding a smoking gun. Her son and daughter, ages seven and four, stood behind her, either too afraid to cry out, or too used to this scenario to care. She met my eyes. I knew her. I had found my assignment and she knew it.

***

            We stood in that alley for awhile, staring at each other. She made the first move.

            “You didn’t see anything. Go home.” She turned and started walking away.

            I shook my head slightly to clear it of the mass chaos that had filled it. The actress in me kicked into high gear. Fatima wouldn’t know who the woman was. “Wait! What did you just do? You killed him!”

            She turned around. The smile on her face was tinged with the irony of the situation. “You know very well what just happened. You were trying to kill him too.”

            I snagged my knife from where it had fallen, realizing that it had probably bounced right off of the demon, and trotted after the three retreating forms.

            “Would you mind if I came with you?”

            My question was met by three judgmental glares. The two dumb kids were like mini copies of their mother. The boy had the same haughty lift to his chin. The daughter had already mastered the “you talkin’ to me?” glare.  All three had the same almost middle eastern good looks. I sent my most disgusted look back. The mother finally shrugged. “It’s a free country. Your name is?”

            “ Fatima .”

            “Liar.”

            “Ketari.” I winced. This woman was hard.

            She nodded. “Don’t lie to me. I am Bri and these are my children, Adam and Alexa.”

            “Where are you headed?”

            She was already walking, pulling her children behind her. “Anywhere but here.”

And that is what happened.  She walked along the street, trailing her children, chattering to them like any fond mother, while I followed at a distance. Nothing seemed out of place, but I saw her eyes move about periodically, searching for spirits, and her gaze acquired a far away look as, I assumed, she switched her sight to the next dimension. Extraordinary! How in the world had she learned how to do that? And how in the world had she cheated death?

The sun began setting, and the streets began to empty. Bri hadn’t looked back at me all afternoon. Now she turned off of the main thoroughfare, cutting through side streets, still checking the people she passed. The surrounding buildings began to look shabbier and shabbier, until finally we came to a truly ancient Victorian style apartment building. It must have been terribly grand at one time, but the paint was peeling off, many of the windows were cracked, and someone had hung laundry on the windowsill of the most crucially symmetrical window in the entire design. I frowned at the offending garment and followed Bri inside, up the stairs, and into an attic apartment. Adam and Alexa dropped any pretense of being well-behaved, something I was thankful for. They had really been creeping me out. They joyfully scampered in, yelling at the top of their lungs and started an impromptu game of tag around the empty room.

And it certainly was empty. The walls were bare and the room was unfurnished except for a trio of air mattresses in a corner. A few toys were scattered on the floor, and a large suitcase had thrown up its contents next to a cracked sink. A towel had been carelessly tossed over what was obviously the mirror. A kitchenette with forties style appliances graced the opposite wall.

“Welcome, Ketari,” Bri said as I stepped inside, “I apologize for the mess. The kids always manage to go crazy to make up for the silence all day, and I don’t have nearly their energy.” She smiled at me like I was another housewife come to visit a new neighbor. “I would also offer you something to eat, but there is not much of that, either. I do have some spaghetti for tonight’s dinner, but that isn’t nearly ready. You could help me boil that up.”

“Uh, sure.” I didn’t quite know what to make of this unusual behavior. I could almost believe that she was normal, but I remembered the calculated behavior on the street and the dead demon.

She slipped out of her jacket on the way to the kitchenette and carelessly dropped it on top of a pile of laundry. A new and obviously expensive cooking pot clanged into the sink and she rolled up her sleeves as it filled with water. “Ketari, would you please open the can of sauce for me. The opener is in the drawer over there.”

“Mom, I’m hungry!” Adam wailed. I jumped. I hadn’t noticed him come over, even though I had been staring at the shiny surface of the saucepan. No reflection colored its surface, except that of the surrounding appliances.

“Me too!” Alexa piped in. I rolled my eyes. It seemed that it was always Adam’s idea to start being difficult.

“What, do you expect me to pull a meal out of my pocket? Go and get plates! We have a guest!” Alexa scurried off obediently to do just that, with Adam following sullenly behind.

“No, no, no. Adam, don’t let Alexa carry all of them at once. They are too heav-.” I winced as a plate hit the floor and broke.

Bri sighed as she handed the wooden spoon to me. “When the water starts to boil, dump the pasta in. Stir it if it starts to boil over, but otherwise don’t touch it. I’ll be right back.” She rushed over to the kids, shouting at them to not touch the broken ceramic while I sat staring at the spoon. Something moved in my memory. A spoon just like this, only not as polished. Lifted in anger. Knife. Blood.

I shook my head and put the offending object down, trying to figure out why it was all coming back to me now, of all times. I thought back over the day and all of my strange reactions to things. I had been put back here with the exact same mindset as the last time I was still alive. My memories from previous assignments were minimal, like the knowledge about combat boots, autos, and spaghetti. For once I was the reality. The other people around me were the dreams.

I mentally poked at the memory again. Then I was there.

Before it was the best of times, it was always the worst. The year was Anno Domini 1794. I had been the third cousin of a bastard nephew of a duke. Name! Name! What was my name? I was under suspicion. I was a smart young lady, who disapproved of insanity. Well, wouldn’t anyone? I fled my family. It was their blood. The stinking blood of aristos marked me like a beacon.

I became free citizen. I was a maid in an inn in Paris . The innkeeper… the innkeeper was not a nice man. He… I vaguely remember docked wages and rapes and beatings. He knew. Oh, Admin. He knew. I couldn’t denounce him because he knew.

New bruises dotted my arms and my back, and my hips were sore. He had come back merry with beer and blood last night. His hangover was prodigious this morning. I rather thought the devil deserved it. I was chopping something that looked like a very beaten up onion. He waddled in, his piggish eyes surveying the kitchen, the cook, a.k.a. his wife and the serving girls, a.k.a. his daughters and finally resting on me. Cook ignored him. His daughters pointedly left the room. His rough hand possessively stroked down the line of my sore back. I shrugged him off. He was grumpier than usual this morning. He grabbed the closest thing he could find—a large wooden spoon—and brought it whistling down across by shoulders with an inarticulate yell. I blindly struck out with the hand closest to him, the one that contained the knife, as hard as I could. I felt it sever flesh, and then bone. Blood flowed into the fire. Everyone was screaming.

He knew. He knew. One word was my death sentence.

The water in the saucepan splattered onto my hand, and the resultant burn yanked me out of the past. I welcomed the pain. Let the dead bury the dead. I now knew what I had done. I wondered what would send a woman and her offspring to hell if my severely maiming a superior and my resultant death only landed me in purgatory. I ripped open the box of spaghetti and poured it in. It slid out of the box with the sound of a blade falling.

My questions were answered more easily than I thought was possible. The kids were already asleep, and I was sitting at a window, looking down at the streets below. Bri came up silently behind me and looked out the same window. We sat that way for some time, in silence. “What the hell is happening to me?” she finally whispered, “there are no stars.”

I shrugged. “It is probably cloudy.”

“No, I know that it isn’t. It’s very dry tonight. And the weather report said that we are locked in a high pressure system until next week. Why can’t I see them and yet-.”

Starlight. I mouthed it silently, just to taste it. “And yet you see other things?”

She nodded, but didn’t say anything. I almost pitied her. Almost, but not quite. I looked back out the window. A streetlight buzzed with frozen light down below, and the glare almost penetrated the room, but not quite. It was the frozen light of stars, dead, just like we were. Panic surged up inside of me. “What do you see?” I asked her.

She started laughing with no sound, like a person right on the edge of mania. “Would you laugh if I said that I see dead people? They are silvery, and they are everywhere. They never say anything unless one or another becomes substantial and comes after me or the children. One almost injured Adam before I could stop it. I’m afraid. I’m trying to act normal for the sake of the children, but…” She realized that she was babbling and trailed off uncertainly. “I thought you would know. You are like the silvery spirits that get substance, but you haven’t come after me yet. That’s why I thought that you might be here to help, might be an angel or something.”

I dared to look up at the sky for the first time and find it blank. Mercilessly blank. I realized I didn’t really remember what stars looked like. When I thought of stars, I thought of the frozen light of the lamps. “When did this start?” It was a question for both of us.

“John, my husband, their dad, died a couple of months ago. We were driving back from the grocery store. It was raining really hard. He was driving. Someone hydroplaned in front of us. I swerved-.”

“Wait, you told me that he was driving.”

She kneaded her forehead in confusion. “He was.”

She must have shifted to the next dimension over, one without John in the car, I thought to myself. She probably got all the way home before realizing that anything had happened.

“Is there anything that you could do to stop this?”

“No.” Silence. “Go to sleep.” Silence. Then the creaking of an air mattress, a couple muffled sobs, then the peace of sleep.

I turned back to the street expectantly. The bus was due at any second.

Any second arrived.

With the delicacy of a sledgehammer, a thick, gray, smog-laden fog rocketed through all the windows. It whooshed under the door and through the cracks in the floor boards and walls. For once, no sarcastic thought entered my head. I guiltily remembered the motorcycle, and cowered as close to the wall as I could, trying to make myself as small as possible, hoping that my soul was clean enough that I wouldn’t be pulled in as well.

The fog swirled around like the living thing it probably was, inspecting the sleepers. It poked tendrils into the eyes, nose, softly snoring mouth, and ears of the boy and forced them open. Other tendrils shut the other two off from what was happening. Adam jerked to his feet like an ungainly puppet. The fog was like a funnel, a tunnel, a trap with a door at the end, an innocuous glass and metal door. It opened with a squeak that my mind turned to a scream. It swallowed the boy like so much spaghetti. Spaghetti and spoons, laughter and pity, mama and child. I realized that I was whimpering and rocking on my heels like some lunatic. Alexa and Bri never stirred. The fog drained from the room, not thinning, just moving.

Guilt infused me. I clenched my fist and drove it to my chest as I remembered doing long ago in an incense-filled wooden house of God. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Theirs is not to reason why. Theirs is but to do and die. I would fulfill my mission.

“Adam!” There is no worse sound in the world than the scream of a grief-stricken mother. Bri’s exclamation upon waking and finding her son gone came from the very bottom of her soul and carried with it every once of grief that a human could possibly take. I could barely keep from sobbing myself. I pressed both hands over my mouth to keep any sound from escaping in sympathy. She stumbled from the tangle of sheets on the air mattresses and pounded at the hollow where Adams body used to be.

“Where is he? Where is he, Ketari?”

I said nothing.

She raced from the room, and I could hear banging outside in the hallway and curses from the various other tenants as she began ransacking the building. Alexa woke up and crawled into my lap and we watched her mother for a few minutes charge about tearing everything to pieces.

“Want some breakfast?” I asked her with as much cheer as I could muster.

She nodded, so I lifted her off my lap and shuffled to the kitchen, trying to smooth down my hair as I went. I had forgotten how annoying certain aspects of hygiene were when you had a body. My mouth felt all dry and fuzzy, my hair was sticking up at weird angles, and I had just realized that I hadn’t taken off the combat boots last night.

I flicked a little bit of water onto my hands, swallowed a little bit more, and opened the mini-fridge to see what they had in the way of food. It didn’t take me long to have a pan of scrambled eggs going.

Alexa and I had already finished our portions before Bri finally dragged herself back inside, exhausted, and gulped down the rest of the eggs left in the pan.

I looked at her expectantly. “We need to get out of here. They’ve evidently found out where this place is. I need to find a new apartment by tonight. This is going to be difficult.”

“You could take my motorcycle,” I offered.

Bri gave me a smile that only touched her mouth. “Thank you, Ketari. You could come with us if you wish. Could you keep Alexa here with you while I go hunting?”

You won’t find anything, I thought. I smiled back at her. “Yeah. The bike is parked on Tenth Street .”

“Pack up the stuff. I’ll be back by early afternoon so we can relocate before dark.”

I had a feeling that we wouldn’t be in a place with an oven for awhile. I might as well make my old memories useful. I found a seven pound bag of flour and started mixing together as much bread dough as I could. Alexa kept to herself, mostly. She played with her toys, and every once in a while she would pick up and stroke her brother’s things. I could tell that she was mourning in her own quiet way, so I didn’t disturb her for most of it. After a couple hours of silence, however, I decided that so much thinking couldn’t be good for a little kid.

“Come over here, Alexa, and help me. Do you know what I am making?”

She peeked over the counter to stare at the lumps of dough covered with dish cloths. “No,” she said, honestly.

“I’m making bread.”

“How do you put the slices in?”

I had to laugh about that one. Kids really did say the cutest things. “You cut it yourself. First you make the dough, then you allow it to rise, and then you bake it. I love the eating part of it best, though.”

“So do I!”

“Have you ever had bread still warm from the oven?”

She put a finger in her mouth and shook her head.

“Well, you will today! I need to let the dough sit for a little bit, so how about we clean up the beds next?” I instructed her to take up the opposite corners of a sheet. After studying her over the vast expanse of white linen, I broke the silence again. “Where did your daddy work?”

“He worked in a big building.”

“And your mom?”

We finished folding the sheet and I laid it carefully to the side before starting another one. “She took pictures. There was a shed in the back yard. We weren’t allowed to go in. Mom said we might break something. Also we went to our rooms whenever clients came over. We weren’t allowed to see them. I saw sometimes. Through the window.”

“What kind of clients?”

“Kids, sometimes big kids. Dizzy kids.”

“Dizzy kids?” Drugged, most likely, I thought to myself.

“A lot of them fall over on the way to the place, like they have been spinning too long.” Alexa demonstrated and fell over onto one of the air mattresses. “They stay in there for hours, and sometimes we hear noises if we go outside.” Alexa shook her head. “Shouldn’t be telling you. Mommy said so. Sorry.”

“That’s okay. You don’t have to say anymore.”

We finished the linens in more silence, and I went back to my bread. Alexa went back to her toys for a little while, but eventually wandered back to the kitchenette.

“Where did you come from?” she asked.

I shrugged and continued shaping the dough.

“Why do you dress like that?”

“It was available.”

“I think it is pretty.”

I smiled and looked down at the flour-smeared, borrowed dress. “It’s not really my style.”

“What’s your favorite color?”

The answer popped into my head from a time when I actually cared about colors. “Blue. I once had a dress that was blue like the sky.”

“Pretty. Back home I have a dress with pink flowers on it. It’s my favorite.”

I winced. Did she think that she would ever be back home? I put the loaves in to bake, my mind still spinning with so much guilt I was reeling. “I didn’t sleep very well last night. I’m going to go and take a nap. The bread should be done around the time your mother gets back.”

We both fell asleep on the air mattresses. I woke up to the smell of almost-done bread and the sound of Bri roving about the room. I sat up carefully to avoid waking the little girl and looked at her questioningly. “Nothing,” she said, “I couldn’t find anything within our means. We can’t stay here, though. They’ll come in the night. Go back to sleep. I’ll take your bread out when it is done.”

I nodded and put my head back down. I was asleep again within moments.

It was mostly dark by the time that Bri shook me awake. She shoved a bundle of clothing at me and went to wake up Alexa. I inspected the contents. We were traveling on bare bones indeed! She was obviously much more desperate than she let on.

We went out into the dusk. The streets began to empty of respectable people and fill with the slightly-scary, nocturnal crowd. I loosened my knives in their sheaths and scanned the people we passed almost as much as Bri did. Alexa clung to her mother’s arm and whimpered. I knew that no matter how much they were afraid, sooner or later they had to stop and sleep. Bri, especially, should be tired after running around all day looking for Adam. I was beginning to become rather attached to this family, especially Alexa, but then I had to remind myself of the alley, and what Bri used to do for a living. Producing child porn when she had two young children of her own! How could anyone be so callous?

Because she was. She was cold and used to getting things her way. That was why she was so shocked when things suddenly changed. I hoped that her current penance was going toward that of what her soul had to endure. Maybe it might lessen her punishment a little. Not much, but a little.

Bri stumbled ahead of me, and I knew that it was almost time for her to find a place to rest and then sleep. I held my breath in anticipation. She would get on the bus tonight, then the little girl would get on the next night, and then it would all be over with.

I almost stopped in mid-stride. What did Alexa do, other than trust the one who bore and raised her? She honestly did not deserve to be sent to Hell. She did not deserve to even have her mother taken away. The line from the poem last night came to me again. “Theirs is not to reason why,” I whispered to the blank sky, “Theirs is but to do and die.” As if on cue, Bri sat down on a graffiti-covered bench next to a large parking garage. Who was I to question the administration?

I sat around and waited for the bus to come. It did, right around midnight. The same foul smelling smoke and fog as from the previous night poured out of the parking garage in a great wall, and the bus pulled up in person. It was painted baby blue, and was sparkling clean, but the windows were tinted to the point that even a person inside could not see out, and it rocked as if something rather severe and involving several people was happening inside. The door squeaked open. Bri stood up, eyes open wide. She was smiling. A suave conductor stepped out and beckoned to her. She held out her hand to him. Then she looked back at Alexa.

My heart jumped into my throat at the sorrow in that look. The voice inside me started up again. Theirs is not to reason… Hush! A fat lot of good it did to the light brigade. This scenario was not fair to me.

Bri’s hand and the conductor’s hand met. His eyes burned with the fires of eternal torment.

I got up and ran in a direction I never thought I would take: toward the bus that lead to Hell. I found one of my knives in my hand. The sharp blade came down with all my strength on the wrist that lead to the hand that held Bri captive in a dream world.

The knife went through cleanly, and once again, I was in the blue dress covered in blood cutting off my tormentor’s hand. Only, this time, the man did not bleed.

He screamed. He screamed the torment of a million years of fire, but no heat; ice but no chill; silence, but no relief.

He reached for me with his other hand. I dragged Bri away. He could not leave the bus.

“Be gone!” I announced to the fog-shrouded streets, “They are under my protection. Tell admin that if He was a loving God, if He had wanted this scenario to be completed, He would have sent a soul less human.”

The fog cleared out. The bus was gone. The severed hand still clung to Bri, and she was muttering something incoherent. Alexa was still asleep.

I knocked the hand away. “Yuck! Bri, can you hear me? It’s Ketari. I know that I have been against you, but now I’m going to save you. You still have a chance to repent. You still have a life. You still have reason. You still have--.” I looked into her eyes and I trailed off. They were a demon’s eyes. “No. You are still here. I will not accept this!” My cries echoed off of the cement parking garage unheeded.

“Ketari?” My babbling had finally awoken Alexa.

I left Bri where she was and went to her side. “Everything is fine. Go back to sleep.”

“What is Mom doing?”

I looked back at Bri. She was staring in the direction of where the bus had been. I pulled her over to the bench and made her sit down. “We will all be fine. They will not come back again tonight.”

I didn’t get the expected relief that the morning usually brought, however.

I awoke with a pounding head, understandable after spending such an emotional night. I ate some of the bread and gave Alexa some, but Bri would not eat. She was still bumbling around, murmuring words no one could understand. She went everywhere I lead her, but did nothing for herself. I marveled over what a strange group we made: a goth chick leading a four year old little girl in a sundress and a zombie in a very respectable coordinated pants set.

Every demon in disguise in the entire city seemed to have congregated in that area. I kept shrinking away from bottomless pit eyes. At the same time, Bri tried to pull me in their direction. She didn’t have very much strength, but I still found it very wearisome.

Bri wouldn’t walk very fast. Alexa was not tired by the pace we set at all, and I was trying for haste. We needed to get away from that area as quickly as possible. Maybe it would take the bus another night to find us again.

The real problems didn’t start until after dusk, though. That was when the true nightmare began. It started when I looked through the crowd and saw the demon conductor. He saw me too and shifted. Adrenaline produced by sheer terror nearly overwhelmed me. I glanced with different eyes at where he had been and saw what he had replaced his hand with. A gleaming spear of iron protruded from his sleeve, and, as I watched, he impaled another passing demon with it. It went all the way through the poor thing’s body and out the other side. Then, an edge on it sliced down cruelly as the iron ate away at the demon’s spirit until there was an enormous, gaping hole where the guy’s torso was supposed to be. I shifted back into normal vision. On the street, a man who was really a demon seemed to die of a massive hemorrhage. People screamed and fumbled for their cell phones, belatedly dialing 911. A far too beautiful man with pits for eyes, a man who was really a conductor on the bus to Hell, stood over him and looked at me. He slowly walked thorough the milling crowd. I ran.

He played cat and mouse with me until full dark. I ran through alleyways and streets, trying to lose him, knowing I could not, remembering that cruel device that would eat at my insides until there was nothing left.

I found a church. Thinking to go inside and maybe gain sanctuary in the house of a God I had openly insulted just last night, I started running up the grand stairs. The automated bells began to strike the hour. Midnight. I heard a step behind me and stopped. The conductor stood in the street below. He put two fingers to his mouth and whistled. Fog hit the area like a wall, barely covering the street before the bus arrived with a squeal of wheels. The door opened. He smiled at me and beckoned to Bri.

She ripped her hand out of mine, picked up Alexa, and started racing at full tilt to the bus. An emotional yell was torn out of me. I didn’t know what to do. I forgot the spear. I ran.

Bri was almost inside the door of the bus. I made one last desperate reach. I barely even noticed as the conductor showed himself for what he really was, complete with iron spear, in the material dimension. I impaled myself as I ran and barely caught the neck of Alexa’s shirt. Bri was gone. The bus was holding the girl. The conductor’s iron spear was holding me back from entering the bus, even while it was killing me.

“Let go,” he hissed in my ear. His voice was like a million clarinets that were out of tune.

“No. You will not have her. I know I do not have the right to judge, but she is still an innocent.”

He gave an inhuman snarl and pushed me back, off the spear, which ripped into my rib cage as I fell. The pain was past anything I had ever imagined, but when I was finally able to feel anything else, I realized that I had Alexa cradled in my arms. The bus was gone.

She did not move, and at first I feared that she was like her mother, not much more than a vegetable. Then I realized that her weight was the only thing that was keeping my ribcage together.

“Ketari, look at the stars,” she whispered over my frenzied gasps for air.

I looked up, and forgot to breathe. More stars dotted the sky than I was able to name, more than was possible in a city, more than was possible to exist. There were more pinpricks of light in the sky than sky. It’s beautiful, I thought to myself. I was no longer able to speak.

Everything was growing fuzzy. Starlight glinted off of Alexa’s hair and turned into almost a halo. The stars blurred out. Two patches of stars so close together that they were two patches of spilled milk in the sky seemed almost like wings out behind her. She looked at me with those eyes that were way too solemn for any child of four years and smiled. I looked into her eyes and saw Heaven.

“Ketari, Katri, Kateri, Catherine, Kate, are you ready to come with me?”

I opened my mouth to say “Of course,” but no words came out. Instead, the last of my precious air flowed through my clenched teeth, and with it, my soul. I found myself next to Alexa, standing vigil at my shattered body. She took my hand, luminescent spirit meeting flesh.

“But wait. I don’t understand.”

“What don’t you understand?”

“I failed.”

“No you did not.”

“I didn’t?” This was a little beyond me.

“What is the nature of God’s—or, as you would say, admin’s—will? Would he ever send someone to Hell, or would he allow them to go there?”

“Is there a difference?”

“Yes, there is, in fact. Actively forcing is different from following a list of occurrences. Do you still think that you actively damned Bri and Adam?”

“I did nothing to stop Adam.”

“Yes, and that was wrong and you knew it. That is why you tried to stop Bri. One was a very human thing to do. The other had the smell of Heaven to it. No matter how hopeless the cause, there is a big difference between passively letting things happen and trying your hardest to do what you know is right. Having the courage to do something is a virtue that you had lost at your death. You had to find it again.”

“So it wasn’t the actions that mattered?”

“No! The actions mattered tremendously, because that is what showed you cared.”

“I meant…” I stopped and tried to gather my thoughts. “I meant that it wasn’t the outcome that mattered. It was the fact that I was fighting every step of the way.”

“You fought every step of the way, and God was fighting with you. It is the difference between wishing and someone else choosing, despite everything you could do.”

“I guess I was wrong. It is love.”

I looked one last time at the stars from a distance, those millions of tiny pinpoints of light, and then started the ascent to join them with Alexa at my side.