Half-Resurrection Blues_ A Bone Street Rumba Novel - Daniel Jose Older Page 0,47
hiding in the damn foliage. I quickly scan the rest of the border and find at least six more of the little fuckers. Each one is mostly concealed; just their evil little faces peer out from behind leaves and branches.
I need to know what these damn words mean.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Mama Esther?”
“Hm?”
“You all right?”
A weighty pause. I wonder about all the different ghosts and near-ghosts that have passed through these walls, unloaded their troubles to this great mother spirit, got some sense of peace, and kept it moving. “I’m fine, Carlos.”
“More lies.”
“Perhaps. But what are you going to do about it?”
“I’m working on it now, but I need your help.” I take out the massive book and lay it open to the illumination that Trevor was so interested in. Mama Esther looks it over without a word. “Can you translate it?”
She opens and closes her mouth, her eyes scanning the picture. Then she leafs a few pages forward and backward in the book. “It was written by a monk in the twelfth century. He’s going on about death and the devil and all this for a little while . . .” She’s a few pages back now, running her huge finger along the words. “‘Oh take my soul, ye vast armies of the night, for I am unworthy of inhabiting this frail human flesh. I am but a meager spirit, a humble servant of the Lord,’ et cetera, et cetera . . . and then . . .” She raises one eyebrow. “Blah blah blah, Christ Jesus, rejuvenate my tired soul, blah blah . . .” The other eyebrow arches up. “‘The Darkness came over me on the same day I was overtaken by a stranger on the road. He was as one dead but still in a mortal skin. A wizard or warlock from the pits of Hell, I am sure. He’s caused in me such a tremulous fear. I nearly collapsed before him as one before the altar does kneel. The stranger had no name and was clothed all in robes of black, torn and shredded and reeking of burned flesh. I know not from whence he came.’ Blah blah blah, he invites the stranger into his house—smart—and . . .” She turns the page. “Whoop, big surprise—the guy puts him under a sorcery of some kind. And then . . . they do something that makes the giant skull appear. Not quite sure what. This whole page”—she points to the drawing with the ngks hiding in it—“is like a grocery list of sorts. ‘A grounded spirit, long since known to reside in the sleeping chamber, the brethren infants, the stranger himself and I, the gatekeeper, now that he hath laid his cold hands upon me and made me a pillar of damnation. I shall play this role, for I am cursed.’”
“And then?”
Mama Esther flips to the next page, which just has a single sentence: “‘Death is all I see.’”
“Damn.”
“Mm-hmm.”
We ponder the drawings for a minute. Then I say, “Well, clearly, the brethren infants are the ngks. We can agree on that, yes?”
Mama Esther thinks for a moment, then nods. “Would seem so, yes.”
“And the stranger, let’s say that’s this other basement dweller.”
“Fair enough.”
“That leaves the bedchamber ghost and the monk himself.”
“That’s me.”
“Who, the monk?”
“The grounded ghost,” Mama Esther says. “That’s what I am.”
“What does that mean?”
She moves her mouth from side to side a few times, trying to figure out how to explain it to me. “I’m affixed to this building. It’s part of me and I’m part of it. The building itself is me. I can’t totally make sense of it to someone—no offense—but to someone in a flesh-and-blood body, because you guys have different ideas of space and boundaries than we do.”
I wave a hand to tell her none taken.
“But you are around enough dead folks to get that we have some loose physical boundaries with things. I’m not just the spirit of one soul, but rather several powerful women from a few generations and families, combined into one.”
“And they all lived in this house?”
“Or spent time here, yes.”
I pause to let that settle in. I’d figured it was something like that, to be honest, but had never played out the thought all the way through. Mama Esther is a house ghost; that’s all I really needed to know. “So you can’t leave?”
“Not without taking the house with me.”
“What I don’t understand is, where’s the grounded ghost in this picture? I see the ngks, the cursed monk,