drove my legs through the water until I was at his side. He took hold of my arm and we moved along the fence, looking for the easiest path inward.
Harnett froze at the point of entry and tried to turn me away. It was too late. A man was impaled upon the dull square pegs of the fence. Rain beat upon his open eyes and filled his mouth. It was Fisher, the garrulous old man who had spoken in mixed metaphors and preferred grave worms to all other kinds of tackle. We had underestimated him—he had been the first to reach Lionel’s cemetery, and the first to die.
Harnett brought me close and stepped into the vortex. Invisible hands yanked us into the vile stew. I raised my chin above water, pushed my feet through mud, felt my toes tickle a coffin that rolled beneath my sneakers. I reached for a headstone but it bobbed away from my grasp.
I saw black water flash off Harnett’s teeth as he shouted, but his effort was useless under the ocean’s continual detonations. The storm surge kicked up corpses to block his path. He fended them off with the shovel. I tried to follow. My arm plunged through a rib cage; I flapped furiously to dislodge it. Lightning flashed and I saw coffins jumping like pistons. Harnett was balanced against a towering tombstone that leaned dangerously inland. He motioned me in. I collapsed against a Jesus with even fewer fingers than I.
“I CAN’T FIND IT!” His face sparkled with moonlit salt. “I CAN’T SEE, I CAN’T REMEMBER!”
There was desperation in his voice—he was lost, as was all hope. I leaned in and our foreheads sealed with mud. I tried to tell him it wasn’t true. There was hope and that hope was me. In a flash I remembered—
—the split oak forking overhead—
—the capillary universe of leafless treetops threading the horizon—
—cursive alphabets invented by our footprints—
—the fibula of beach lying hard and gleaming below—
—the bilious curdle of surf—
—rock scatterings that drew invisible pentagrams between points—
—the shape of the outcropping itself: a fallen maple leaf of stone—
—everything that I had specified the day Lionel had brought us here. I squinted and saw the lighter, brighter, softer hues of that day transposed against the seething tumult. Landmarks revealed themselves. Through a hundred bodies and the dirigibles of caskets and stones, I saw the way. I sent a silent thank-you to the mother who’d fostered this ability, and then took my first step. I grinned and looked back over my shoulder to tell my father the good news.
Harpakhrad cut through the rain as if it were fabric. Harnett’s neck was struck with such force that I recoiled, lost my footing, and slithered beneath water. A bloated white face rolled past me and I batted at it, knocking the bottom jaw loose in a plume of gore. I rocketed back to the shattering planet above—Harnett, Boggs, I couldn’t see them, didn’t know where they were. A casket collided with my elbow and I scrambled atop it and waited for lightning. I was floating away.
There—a shocking distance behind me, Harnett clawed through the muck on his belly. Boggs followed, teetering. The remnants of his three-piece suit slopped to his body in muddy lumps. Somehow his top hat had not sailed away; the brim curled downward and I felt the sick certainty that he had sewed it into his ears. Slicing through the rain was Harpakhrad as she alternated between weapon and crutch. I realized with horror that Boggs had not amputated or repaired his foot. The dead appendage still hung in its pouch of black, gangrenous skin.
There was nothing I could do to reverse the tide. I saw Harpakhrad flash and Harnett’s tool meet it across an emptied grave. The blades locked and twisted; Boggs slid away and struck again with a looping sidearm. Harnett shucked left and trapped Harpakhrad with an arcing stab of his flimsy tool. The men’s bodies came close—and that was all I saw. The current spun me and the two men were lost, though I heard their instruments’ thin whistles and shattering collisions before they, too, became part of the storm’s texture.
The casket I was riding struck something hard and I spilled. I took another dive and was paddling toward the locomotive roar of the ocean even before I surfaced. I pushed through squalls, blinking furiously and craning my neck to note each specified landmark. I confused the storm above with the one below. I mistook