“Cherry? Is that you?”
Cherry Moon was a member of my old Magic Circle. One of the ones who stood by and let Mason send me to Hell. For staying out of the way, Mason gave her the gift of youth. Creepy youth. Candy is into Japanese cartoons but Cherry Moon wanted to be a cartoon. A forever-prepubescent Sailor Moon love doll in a school uniform. Do you know what it’s like to get hit on by a thirty-five-year-old woman who looks like she’s twelve? No. You don’t. It’s strange and unpleasant on so many levels I can’t begin to count them.
“Was that you who dropped me into a hole in Bamboo House?”
“Do you get followed around by a lot of tunneling dead girls?”
“You saved me from getting shot.”
“Yes. You owe me. You didn’t save me when I was alive. I want you to save me now.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Kill the little girl.”
When I first saw her, I thought Cherry was a ghost cursed to stay on Earth and the hole was just a ghost projection from her mind. Seeing her skeleton crammed into the narrow tunnel, I see I was wrong. Cherry did this to herself.
“Is the girl hurting you?”
“She’s killing us. All the other ghosts and spirits in L.A. When she isn’t killing you, she hides with us in the Tenebrae. Kills us like she kills the living and we don’t know why.”
When Cherry died, she was so afraid of moving on that she made herself into a jabber. Jabbers are a kind of ghost so traumatized by death that they can’t even haunt people or places like normal ghosts. They stick close to their bodies. Literally haunt their own corpses and tunnel in them from place to place. They won’t come out of the ground because their bodies are fragile and they’re afraid of being mistaken for zombies. Jabbers are about the most pathetic thing in the world.
“I don’t know what you want me to do. I can’t get near the kid.”
“You travel between worlds. I saw you come here from Hell. Come into the Tenebrae and stop her.”
“I don’t know how.”
“Find out.”
I get nearer the hole. Cherry doesn’t back away this time. I put out my hand. Slowly she creeps her hand forward until our fingertips are just touching. I was right. She’s real. A ghost hiding in her own bones.
“Jesus, Cherry, all you have to do is let go. Get out of this body. Get out of the ghost realm. Go on to wherever it is you’re supposed to go.”
“No!” she says. “Do you think Heaven is waiting for me with open arms? We both know where I’m going, and as long as these bones hold together, I’m staying right here.”
“I can help you when you get to Hell. Like you said, I couldn’t save you when you were alive. Maybe I can help now that you’re dead. But you have to let go.”
She crawls closer to the tunnel opening. I can see her lipless smile and eye sockets full of dirt and dry plant roots. I want to look away but I don’t.
“Where do you stay when you’re not stalking me?”
“I moved into an old cemetery in a field of old cemeteries. It’s the strangest place. Full of aetheric ghosts and physical ghosts like me.”
She makes a sound that’s almost like a laugh.
“There’s practically a traffic jam with us tunnelers. We have to be careful digging or we can fall into each other’s chambers.”
“What do you mean by a field of cemeteries? What the hell is that?”
“It’s like a cemetery for cemeteries. Or a garden where some kind soul has planted the dead and where we live. Go ask Teddy Osterberg. He’s the one who collects the cemeteries. I’m just one of the flowers in his garden.”
“So the little girl is killing Sub Rosas, civilians, and now ghosts. She tried to kill the other Stark, so she’s tried to kill an angel. Do you know anything about him?”
“Other Stark? He’s prettier than you. Like you in the olden days. Now you’re a mess. A girl likes a few scars. They give a man character. But you don’t have a shot with me anymore, darling.”
“Does anyone call the Tenebrae Blue Heaven?”