InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "To Infinity ... and BEYOND!!"

Qebhet (coolwaters) wrote in nevermore_logs,
@ 2022-03-01 19:55:00

Entry tags:

qebhet

WHO Qebhet
WHEN Monday 28 February
WHERE Around and about
WHAT The city is built on ghosts
WARNINGS None

There’s a ghost in the churchyard.

She’s fifteen, maybe sixteen at the most. Wide-set eyes fixed on the emerging funeral recessional. Black box braids that drip, drip, drip rivulets of muddy water down her bare shoulders. Her clothes cling wetly to her wiry frame. Her arms curl tight around her stomach, hands bunching in the fabric of her tank top, and she watches the casket’s cautious progress down the church steps.

That’s where Qebhet’s focus should be, too, on the deceased and on the family she’s here to serve, but the sight of the girl, small and soaked in the frost-speckled shade of a twisted oak, steals her attention away. You must be cold, she thinks.

Their eyes meet over the casket. The ghost casts a confused glance over her own shoulder, turns back to Qebhet, and her mouth falls open in shock. Between one second and the next, she’s gone, as though whipped away on the frozen wind.

𓏁
Mortals hold their dead close. They etch them into their landscapes, carve their names into headstones and paint their faces across the sites of buildings and lay flowers at roadside memorials. They remember them, in love or in sorrow or in fear or disgust, and they seek out the signs (hoping, or longing, or dreading) that the dead remember them in turn. It does not matter that they cannot see them, or touch them. All that matters it that they believe it, that hundreds of millions believe it, with a heavy certainty.

More ghosts watch as the hearse rolls into the cemetery. A gentleman in a top hat puffs his pipe on the steps of a mausoleum, his features as translucent as the rising wisp of smoke. There’s a soot-stained figure curled at the base of a monument, forehead resting against the cool marble. It might be an entreaty, or simply a moment’s repose: there is nothing to be read either way from the person’s expression. All that remains of their face is crumbling char.

Once, Qebhet grasps a fleeting impression of lank hair, wringing hands, a pale nightgown, but when she turns her head, she sees nothing at all.

A white man in a crisp suit and bristling muttonchops has stationed himself disapprovingly by the waiting burial plot. Before the casket has even been laid secure in the lowering device, he’s already launched into a polemic: the women are painted like cheap harlots and their stockinged calves are an affront to the dead. The men’s language is crude, the service is un-Christian, the officiant no man of God but an obscene pretender! How far must society have degenerated!

The mourners hear none of it; their unseeing eyes skip past him and through him. Qebhet lets hers do the same, though the corner of her mouth puckers when he turns his ire onto her ‘provocative’ hair (ordinary box braids, coiled into a bun at the base of her neck).

Ignore Comstock, advises a young woman perched on the edge of a headstone. God knows the rest of us do. The old bluenose never knew no other way of gettin’ off. The sequinned fringe of her dress spills over the polished granite, glittering silver and gold in the dying afternoon sunlight. With her curling black bob and Mary Janes, she looks like she’s ready for a night at the Savoy Ballroom. She winks at Qebhet and twitches her skirt, casually revealing a smooth brown thigh that draws a choked sputter from the disapproving ghost.

𓏁
Qebhet makes one quick stop-off on her way back to Harlem (it is still on her way back, even if does necessitate a ten-minute detour in the opposite direction). The soup kitchen the Merry Men work with isn’t far from the cemetery, and she promised the Friar last week that she would bring round a couple bags of the toiletries they’ve been running low on.

Her face doesn’t fall when Marian informs her that Much is out of town on an errand. That would be silly of her, and terribly rude besides. It’s not as if she was expecting to see him here today (hoping, perhaps, just a little, that serendipity might favour them again, but she wasn’t expecting it). She’s an adult, several hundred times an adult; if she really wants to see Much, there’s nothing stopping her from picking up the phone and calling him (nothing except for the too-quick skip of her heart and the brittle memory of I can’t be what you need).

She stays a while, ladling out cottage pie while she and Marian catch up on each other’s news. Marian’s in the midst of describing the large and surprisingly varied collection of metal armrests the Sly Fox has acquired (a consequence of the boys’ latest guerrilla campaign to dismantle anti-homeless architecture wherever they find it) when she breaks off, frowning slightly, her attention snagged on a vacant corner table. It’s a busy evening. The dining hall is full almost to capacity, the empty table should be a prime piece of real estate, and yet without exception, people move on past with little more than a glance in its direction. They’ve dragged away chairs to squeeze in together at surrounding tables. Marian comments on it, and Qebhet follows her gaze.

Nobody else sees the preta, not even when their eyes pass directly over the place where it sits in slump, struggling to lick leftover gravy from its elongated fingers. They cannot see it or hear it or touch it, yet they keep their distance all the same, another kind of knowing prickling the hairs on their arms and chilling the breath in their lungs.

A hungry ghost is a pitiable sight. Sunken eyes and desiccated limbs, an enormous distended belly that can never be filled. It tries its hardest, grasping for morsels with its bony hands, but what sustenance manages to pass through its pinhole-sized mouth will catch in its matchstick throat, and even swallowing is pain. Karmic retribution, it’s said, for a life of callous consumption and possessiveness.

They can be dangerous, Qebhet knows that, but this preta doesn’t look threatening. It looks… sad. Its insect tongue works, straining; its chin is smeared with gravy, but precious little seems to reach the mouth.

It’s here for the same reason as everybody else.

Perhaps it will make no difference, but on her way out, Qebhet stops at the corner table to set down a shallow dish of soup and a glass of orange juice with a drinking straw. The preta lowers itself over the dish and laps greedily.

𓏁
The rain has started by the time she makes it back to Harlem. That means the Hitchhiker is there, waiting on the corner of Madison and 124th, lips blue, dress clinging wet and translucent. Maybe somebody will stop for her tonight. Maybe this time she’ll make it all the way home.

There’s a knot of spectral teens hanging outside a boarded-up convenience store, hooting unheard jeers of encouragement at the stragglers racing for shelter. They’re around the same age as Vincent, though Qebhet doesn’t recognise his face among them. A riderless horse gallops between stalled traffic on Malcolm X Boulevard, the colour of mist and just as insubstantial. Standing atop the scaffolding around a storefront on 129th, a ghost wearing the scars of a short life of brutal labour raises his face to the downpour, and though he surely cannot feel the raindrops he closes his eyes and sighs as though receiving a benediction.

It’s good to be home.

𓏁
The rain has dried up by the following morning, though the tepid sun does little to warm the grey streets. Spring won’t arrive arrive in earnest for another few weeks. Qebhet is more than happy to spend the morning inside the temperature-controlled funeral home, even if running inventory isn’t her favourite part of the job.

She never hears the footsteps. But when she emerges into the hallway just before lunch, she almost skids in the evidence.

Bare, watery footprints, grey with mud. They begin where she’s standing, heading out of the prep room, where Qebhet’s been working alone for the past two hours. They continue down the hall a ways, a trail of drips and foot-shaped puddles, and after a cautious look to her left and right, she follows them.

The trail takes her past her father’s office, round the corner to the chapel, where the door has been cracked ajar. Qebhet pulls it wider.

“Hello.” Her voice is feather-soft, but the ghost girl still startles.

Fifteen, maybe sixteen. Wide-set eyes and black braids. Just like yesterday, she’s soaked to the skin.

Qebhet stays in the doorway, resisting the urge to move closer. Kid gloves, now. She already scared the girl away once; she doesn’t want to do so again. “My name is Qebhet,” she offers, “but people call me Beti, too. I saw you in Bed-Stuy, didn’t I? Yesterday, at the funeral?”

She gets a tight, silent nod in response. The ghost girl’s hands twist in the hem of her top.

There’s something, Qebhet thinks. Something she’s trying to say, or to ask for. There must be, else why would she have followed Qebhet all this way across town? “Would you… would you like to tell me your name?”

The girl opens her mouth, but no sound emerges.

On the second try, she manages a choked, watery gargle.

Then she’s gone again, leaving behind nothing but a puddle of grimy water.