National Novel Writing Month Projects

November 2014 – November 2020

She took a deep breath and looked down at the corpse on the slab in front of her. His skin was grey and clammy looking. One hand was clenched tight around some object that had long since left, the rigor mortis creating a ghost of a memory. Though his eyes were closed, she couldn’t convince herself he was only sleeping.

The chemical smell of the morgue tickled her nostrils and she felt a pinching smell at the back of her skull. She tried to ignore it and took one more deep breath, then placed on hand on the man’s head and the other on his stomach. She did her best to pretend his skin didn’t feel waxy and thin as tissue.

The words she muttered under her breath were ancient and powerful. They trembled through the air, sending out waves and making the liquid in the jars are the shelf ripple. In one large jar, a hand — complete save for the top half of its pinky finger and the nail on its thumb — twitched and stretched slightly at her words. She didn’t see it.

Instead, she saw a thick, velvety darkness that slowly resolved itself into the edge of a cliff. Her heart started to beat a little faster at the sight of sharp edge and the valley floor that tumbled away on the other side. She turned away and did her best to disregard the drop.

Stone angels, wings outstretched, crouched along the winding edge of the cliff. She paused to bow slightly to them. In this place, anything could have eyes, and anything could take offense to a misstep.

Her gesture was received well — or the angels really were nothing more than stone — and she felt free to turn away and start off along the edge of a creek that wound across the rough top of the ledge before tumbling off, behind her, into the chasm below.

She could tell it was cold here. The air had the crystalline look that she recognized from a midwinter’s day and the little sprouting plants that dotted the rocks had webs of frost running across their leaves, but she couldn’t feel it. Neither sun nor shade nor breeze that fluttered through the air made her feel any warmer or cooler.

She’d have less time to work than she had expected.

The creek cut its way across the rock, and she cut her way back the way it had come, following it over a hill and down the other side as rock began to give way to a meadow. The grass was lush and green, wildflowers grew in bouquets across its expanse, but there was little besides her to enjoy the sight.

She thought she saw a fawn at one point, and as the meadow began to give way to a forest she spied a bird in the branches of the trees, but the animals were few and far between. The bird couldn’t even seem to decide what coat of feathers to wear, stuck somewhere between a raven and a blue jay with spurts of shimmering black interspersed with pale blue and white.

Still, the creek wandered, no stronger nor weaker than when she had seen it throw itself over the cliffs above.

A few of the leaves were starting to go brown, as if autumn was coming to these woods. It was something she saw occasionally, but she doubted that, if things were to continue as they were, most of the leaves would have a chance to change and fall before they started to blur at their edges and fade away entirely.

She didn’t know how long his soul would hold on, but she didn’t expect it to cling for long enough that autumn would pass into winter.

The trees waved slowly back and forth above her. Her fingers twitched at the sight, and she fought the urge to run. The trees wouldn’t hurt her, they never had before.

The creek ran out of the woods and across a new rock outcropping. She paused at the edge of the trees to make sure that she hadn’t managed to loop around back to where she had started — stranger things had been known to occur in places like this — but she would have bet a week’s pay on this being a new sight to her.

She tracked the water’s path with her eyes out of the trees toward the rocks. For a moment, she thought it went over a new cliff, which might have complicated things for her. Instead, it slipped underground into an underground tunnel.

The cliff’s edge that she had first faced might have given her pause. Not this narrow darkness. She slipped down into the darkness, far enough from the stream that she wouldn’t get wet and she tumbled, with as much control as she could manage, to where the ground leveled out again.

Sure enough, a single candle on a stone ledge was waiting for her. The small flame wouldn’t have been her first choice to light her way, but it would do.

The darkness didn’t worry her. She knew the soul would provide.

The walls of the tunnel were old stone bricks, their hard edges worn down to rounded lips. But they looked sturdy and safe. It was one of the few remnants of any sense of civilization she had seen. A few stacks of bricks and stones had been scattered throughout the meadow, the last tumbled logs of a cabin had sat in the woods. She had even seen, she thought, a far off tower, slightly run-down, down the valley back at the cliffs.

This was something else, something more fundamental. It had the feeling of an old foundation, the core on which other things had been built. She ran her fingers over the walls and almost felt memories tucked inside them.

The water continued down a channel at the center of the tunnel, no narrower nor wider, stronger nor weaker than it had been before. Instead, it continued, persevered as it was, now in a constructed rivulet set into the floor, with clean, crisp edges.

This was always the part of the process where she couldn’t help but wonder what she would see if she could do this process to herself. She hoped there wouldn’t be the same cliffs that he had manifested.

She barely noticed at the walls grew more rudimentary. They weren’t getting more worn down; their quality was as ancient and steady as it had been since she started her path through them. Instead, the bricks were getting larger, more roughly cut. The joins were simpler. Still, the water sloshed on.

Perhaps the tunnel was ever so slightly curved. Perhaps it was a trick of the light, perhaps it was just how things worked here, but much more suddenly than she would have expected a light appeared at the end of the tunnel, wide and gaping and bright.

A figure was silhouetted there, sitting on a rock set in the middle of the channel as the water cut around him and tumbled off a new cliff. She frowned slightly at the sight of the edge, but knew that the circular nature of things was to be expected here.

He looked up as she approached. A childlike look of joy crossed his face, like a toddler catching sight of a parent from whom he had been separated across a crowded room.

“Thank goodness you’re here,” he said a little dreamily. “Can you tell me where I am?”

“That,” she sighed, walking as close to the edge as she dared, “merits a very complicated answer to a very simple question.”

“You look familiar, have we met before?”

“Once. Just before you came here,” she agreed. He creased his brow trying to remember. “Don’t worry,” she said, reaching out to place a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t worry yourself trying to recall, it doesn’t matter much now, not here.”

“Where is here? Can you tell me where I am?” he asked again.

“This is your soul,” she said gently. “The nooks and crannies and wilds that make up you.”

“It feels a little strange, like it didn’t use to be this overgrown.”

“It probably didn’t,” she agreed, “but these things change when you pass.”

“Pass?” the word was heavy with the kind of heft that made her understand that he knew exactly what she was talking about, even if didn’t care to admit it.

“I’m a mortician’s assistant,” she said. “That’s why we met. You came to make your plans with us before you…” she trailed off.

“Died,” he finished with the kind of somber tone that would have put Ezekiel’s to shame.

She may have done it for a living, but somehow talking about death was never any easier, not when you were talking with the deceased.

“Why are you here?” he replied. “And what happens to me next?”

“When you came to visit us,” she said, gingerly sitting beside him and trying to ignore the ledge his legs were dangling over, “you requested reanimation. You wanted us to reanimate you. You picked out a community for the undead, made all your plans for what would happen to the things you couldn’t bring with you.”

“Did I?” he said a little faintly. He didn’t sound concerned by the thought, rather he seemed distracted, like his mind was elsewhere.

“You did,” she agreed, “and if that’s still what you want, I can take you back. You’ll be back in your body, and you’ll move onto the next phase of your life.”

“What happens if I change my mind?”

“This place is fading,” she said softly. “The leaves on the trees are changing and soon they’ll fade away entirely. The buildings you had here are little more than piles of bricks and logs. Soon they’ll be nothing at all. This tunnel will likely be the last to go, but it will fade too. If anyone knows what will happen to you after that, it isn’t me. But we can bury your body and your soul can fade away, or move on, or be born again — whatever you believe will happen.”

“You don’t know?” he said.

“I don’t.” She tried not to let her frown fall too deeply. “But I know that whatever happens you will be at some kind of peace.”

“How do you know?”

She wasn’t sure how to explain the feeling of bliss — only a feeling, no sights or sounds or senses to accompany it — that she had felt the one time she had tried doing this process on a body whose soul had already faded. She had no words to describe it, so she just looked deep into his eyes and smiled and hoped that would be enough for him.

He watched her for a moment, then looked back out at the expanse before them. She couldn’t make it out. It was blurred and hazy, like it was cloaked by fog, or she were looking at it with her eyes squinting, but she could tell that it was beautiful.

“I think,” he began, that I still want to go with you. I can feel the edges of this place disappearing. I don’t… I don’t want to see that.”

“Then come with me,” she replied, standing — and trying not to shudder as she glanced against her will once more over the edge that the water tumbled past.

She led him back one, two, three steps away from the rock they had sat on together. He watched her dreamily. Meanwhile, she stared at the space right at the center of the tunnel, right in the path of the water.

From her pocket, she drew out her ring of keys. One was sturdy and straight with clean edges — it opened the front and back doors to the house. The next was small and sour colored — this one opened the morgue. The third was as delicate as lace and shimmered like starlight — and opened something that was more secret and dreams than solid matter. The fourth looked like the first, with the same clean edges, but was brass where the first iron, and had a series of ancient, spidery markings along its teeth.

It was this last one that she held in front of her, reaching out for a lock that wasn’t there until the teeth slid solidly past tumblers of a door that stood where it hadn’t moments before.

His dreamy look had shifted from her to the door, which looked identical to the front door of the house.

“Where does it go?”

“It goes onward,” she said simply. Then she reached out a hand behind her to him. With her other, she turned the knob and swung the door open.