The Way Back Read online

  She came from the direction in which Bluma had been running, blossoming up cold and heavy out of the deep shadow of a moonlit grave: a cloud of frothy darkness, reaching out with long, choking tendrils.

  She did not look the same now. But to those who know her, the Dark One is unmistakable.

  In a flash, Bluma was running again, fleeing, weaving between gravestones.

  Death was everywhere, hanging a black cloud in front of the moon, giving chase on swift paws, screeching, lowing, roaring, but Bluma would not give up, would not stop, and every time the Dark One loomed up from a different angle, she turned and fled, farther and farther and farther into the cemetery, and she took a swerving side step around a low marker, and her toe caught and she slid and fell on her hip and landed on something cold and hard in her apron pocket, what was it, and as she rose and ran, she put her fingers into her apron and there it was:

  The spoon.

  Something behind her was whispering her name, and without dropping a step, she shouted, “Take it!” and threw the spoon away, and she ran and ran and kept on running.

  But it was different now.

  Something had changed.

  The Dark Lady was no longer behind her.

  She had followed after the spoon like a hungry dog after a bone.

  Bluma collapsed behind a crumbling headstone, pressing her eyes into her knees. Softly, she began to sob, and each ragged breath pumped her little chest like an ancient bellows.

  But scarcely had she allowed herself the latitude to cry when, again, she heard the terrible sound on the other side of the gravestone:

  Footsteps.

  Footsteps in the snow.

  * * *

  —

  Oh, the Dark One was tired.

  Her feet ached. And her hips. And her back. She ached in places that people do not live long enough to learn can even ache in the first place.

  That idiot girl. Why had she run?

  But this was a foolish question. They always ran if they had the chance.

  Where was her instrument? She had seen the girl throw it aside. She had seen it land in the snow. It should’ve been right here, shining darkly in the moonlight.

  But it wasn’t. She couldn’t find it anywhere.

  Back and forth she tracked among the gravestones, time and time and time again, searching in circles ever wider and wider.

  Where had it gone? She could not do her job properly without it. She certainly could not continue to entrust the transmigration of souls to whatever petty demons happened to be at hand. In fact, the more she thought of it, the more it seemed a monumental mistake that she had done so even once.

  She was so tired that she had begun to make mistakes.

  And in her business, mistakes could not be made.

  This was nonsense. Her spoon was not here. And now she had lost track of the girl as well.

  “Girl!” she called to the silent gravestones. “Bluma!”

  But there was no answer.

  There was never an answer when she called.

  The Dark One muttered a heavy oath.

  As far as she could see, tramping back and forth like this, making herself wearier and wearier, was only likely to cause more accidents, more mistakes. If she hadn’t been so tired—so very, very tired—she wouldn’t have left her spoon behind in the first place.

  No.

  She couldn’t do her job properly without the instrument, but where she was going next, she had no plan to do her job at all.

  Perhaps if she just allowed herself a little break, things would become clearer.

  Yes.

  And once the wedding was over, she would come back and retrieve her spoon.

  It was the only responsible thing to do.

  And so, throwing her hands in the air, the Dark One turned and, with a newly brightened step, began to make her way toward Zubinsk.

  * * *

  —

  Slowly, slowly, as the heavy footsteps faded into the soft hush of the snow, Bluma lifted her head to peek out over the top of her gravestone.

  The Dark Lady was nowhere to be seen.

  She was alone.

  But only now did she truly perceive the depth of the trouble in which she found herself.

  If she had stopped to think about it along the way, Bluma would’ve quickly come to the conclusion that she had run much farther than the length of the tiny Tupik cemetery. And yet she had not come out the other side. And, more troublingly, there was no sign whatsoever of Tupik to be seen: no houses, no chimneys, no candlelit rooms.

  But how could this be? She had lived beside the Tupik cemetery her whole life long, knew every plot and corner of its extent.

  And yet, somehow, she had carried herself farther inside it than should’ve been possible.

  Silver moonlight sifted down between the falling flakes of snow.

  Gravestones.

  Gravestones as far as the eye could see.

  Where was she?

  The snow continued to fall, soft and fine, almost clandestine, and by the time Bluma rose from her hiding spot, there was no sign of a single footprint behind her.

  How could she say which way was home?

  But Bluma was not foolish. The surest way not to make her way home was to stay where she was.

  And so she rose and began to walk among the graves, looking for something familiar.

  In the little cemetery back home in Tupik, the tombstones all shared a certain family resemblance: each stone in a generation had been carved by the same pair of hands, and that pair had been taught by the pair that came before it.

  But in this cemetery there were very different sorts of memorials.

  Here, laid out in the snow, was a square wooden table and a sturdy wooden chair. On the table was a bowl of barley gruel in which Bluma could make out the individual grains, and it was only once she laid her hand on the back of the chair that she realized the entire arrangement had been carved from a single block of gray stone.

  Up until that moment, Bluma had been convinced she could smell the aroma of the warm porridge.

  And there were other such markers: a top hat of obsidian lying as if abandoned on its side in the snow, an open book with letters so delicately hewn that they were scarcely distinguishable from real ink on the stone page.

  The moon above bled forth cold, clear light like an open wound in the sky.

  Farther and farther Bluma went. Her fingers and toes began to grow chill, her legs and feet to ache. She searched and searched and searched and searched, but she could not find any hint of home.

  There seemed to be no end to the dead, no wall or fence or boundary to hold them in.

  They seemed to go on forever.

  It was when she stopped, just for a moment, just to stretch her back and roll her shoulders, that she felt it there, cool and heavy against her thigh, and she knew immediately, somewhere in the moldy basement of her mind, that it had made its impossible way back to her.

  What she didn’t know was why.

  But as soon as she put her hand into her apron pocket, she found out.

  “Ah!” she cried, pulling her fingers out as quickly as she could.

  Ahhhhhhhhh, replied the echoing vastness of the graveyard.

  Tiny droplets of blood budded from Bluma’s fingertips.

  The spoon had come back because it was hungry.

  The spoon had come back because it wanted another taste.

  Everyone knows: you must never stray from the path in a cemetery once darkness has fallen.

  But there is no particular wisdom to straying from the path in a midnight forest, either.

  The crow flew far overhead now, so far that, between the gloom and the treetops, Yehuda Leib could scarcely keep track of it. When the trees thinned e
nough to allow him a peering vantage through the pine-needle canopy, more often than not he recognized the bird above by the darkness it produced in blocking out the stars.

  On they went, and on and on, Yehuda Leib struggling to see, struggling to make his way forward. The cold did not matter, nor did the dark: the crow flew on.

  The snow grew thicker, and the night in between.

  Yehuda Leib’s eyes were turned skyward nearly the whole way, and he did not have the presence of mind to take notice when the gravestones first began to loom up between the trees. It was only when he put his foot through what felt like a basket of brittle sticks that he looked down.

  He had stepped, up to the knee, into an ancient gray rib cage.

  Suddenly Yehuda Leib was aware: the stones were all around him, their names and dates and remembrances worn away by time and weather. Some were choked in dormant creepers, some covered over entirely with snow.

  But Yehuda Leib could not afford to stop.

  The crow flew onward, and Yehuda Leib pursued.

  Slowly, the balance began to shift, the trees falling off, the stones growing thicker. One of the last trees Yehuda Leib passed beneath was an ancient, knobbled, reaching oak, bare of leaves, that spread its boughs and fingers wide across the thinning forest. Even before he was beneath its branches, Yehuda Leib knew there was something odd about it: he could hear its long, twiggy extremities clacking against one another in the breeze, and they were not of wood—they were of bone.

  Yehuda Leib swallowed hard. Only hours ago, he would have scoffed at talk of a tree of bone.

  But he would have scoffed at the notion that he would meet his father, too, and stand above him as his lifeblood trickled out into the snow.

  And yet beneath him his father had lain, and above him stood the tree of bone.

  It seemed to matter very little whether or not he was willing to believe it.

  On the crow flew, and Yehuda Leib followed after. The trees gave way to open fields, hills, valleys full of gravestones, and the fall of snow grew thicker and thicker, until all Yehuda Leib could see in the swirling obscurity was the tiny ball of light, lodged far above in the throat of the crow.

  And then—just when the world seemed to be swallowed in snow and darkness—shapes loomed up from the gloom.

  And they were close.

  Yehuda Leib darted back, taking cover behind a low crypt wall.

  There were so many that the column seemed endless—soldiers upon soldiers upon soldiers, marching wearily through the night. Their uniforms were soiled and torn, bloody, mismatched. Some were missing things—fingers, hands, even whole legs. Others had been slashed open with sabers or peppered with grapeshot. Yehuda Leib saw one soldier whose belly had been blasted clean through with a cannonball, and still he slogged forward through the snow.

  This was no ordinary army.

  For some time, Yehuda Leib crouched in the snow, watching the Army of the Dead go by. Their numbers never dwindled, and the rhythmic marching of their feet seemed to match the beating of his heart.

  This was no coincidence.

  It was the simplest, most beautiful thing to him—one foot and then the other. It could go on through everything.

  It could go on even on the far side of death.

  With a start, Yehuda Leib raised his eyes to the sky. He’d become so distracted by the trooping dead that he’d lost track of his father. A little panic began to gather in his gut.

  Before long, though, his keen eyes picked out the muffled light, turning and wheeling far above. The crow was descending now, and as it came, its aim materialized in the gloaming:

  A great, rambling, shrug-shouldered house, not five minutes’ march from where Yehuda Leib stood.

  The Treasure House of Lord Mammon.

  * * *

  —

  Bluma couldn’t get rid of the spoon.

  No matter what she tried—throwing it away, placing it deliberately atop a grave marker, even digging a hole and burying it—as soon as her eyes left the dim glimmer of its surface, there it was again, back in her apron pocket.

  Before long, Bluma grew discouraged. Her discouragement put forth buds of frustration that bloomed into fury, and one last time, Bluma flung the spoon away, so hard that it tore an echoing yell from her as it went. She heard it clang against a headstone some ways away, but as she fell to the cold, wet snow, sure enough, there it was, hard and sharp, in the crease of her hip.

  Bluma’s eyes filled with tears. Her fingertips smarted. Droplets of blood flecked the snow beside her.

  What could she do? What on earth could she do?

  She was rising when her eye was drawn to a carving she had not noticed before—there, on top of a plain headstone, perhaps three or four rows away, an incredibly lifelike gray cat sat upright, staring at her.

  Only when its tail began to twitch did Bluma see the captive moonlight in its eyes.

  Carefully, she made her way in the opposite direction, but when she looked back, the cat was nowhere to be seen.

  A knot was rising in Bluma’s throat.

  It’s just a cat, she told herself. Just a stray cat.

  But the eyes shone again out of the darkness, and there it was, high above, perched on the roof of a little crypt, staring down at her: a lurking gray cat.

  Again, Bluma moved away, her feet beginning to step more quickly now, and, turning to look behind her, she saw the cat take a silent leap to the head of a nearby obelisk.

  It was following her.

  Bluma wheeled about, searching for a safe way to go, but here were two more cats, and a fourth hopping lithely up onto a gravestone.

  Their eyes shone out like dead stars. Bluma tried not to notice the thin razor claws at their paw ends, the sharp needle teeth in their heads.

  What did they want?

  Slowly, quietly, Bluma edged away, heading in the only direction the cats had left open to her. When she looked back, still they sat, staring, waiting, their cold, bright eyes shining out in the darkness.

  They were herding her.

  Twice more a cat loomed up beside or before her, correcting her course, keeping her moving in the direction they desired. Only when Bluma finally arrived in the moonlit clearing could she count their full number: six gray cats on six crumbling headstones.

  And in their midst stood a woman all in white, neither old nor young, short nor tall, plain nor beautiful. Her thick curls hung loose and free, studded with flakes of fallen snow, and her cheeks were rosy with the cold.

  Her eyes never once blinked.

  “Hello there,” said the woman.

  All around her, the cats began to smile.

  “H-hello,” stammered Bluma.

  The lady’s gaze seemed endless. It made Bluma feel very warm and very cold at the same time.

  “My Sisters told me there was someone abroad in the cemetery,” she said. “But I did not imagine it would be someone like you.”

  Bluma wanted to swallow but couldn’t manage it. What did she mean, someone like her?

  “You must take care,” said the lady in white. “It is long after midnight now, and the cemetery is a dangerous place for even the best prepared of us. How did you come to be here?”

  Bluma’s mouth felt impossibly dry. “I—I was chased.”

  The lady in white sighed, stepping forward, and for the first time, Bluma noticed that her feet were bare in the snow. Bluma’s own feet felt completely frozen, and they were safe within boots and thick knit stockings.

  Now the lady in white took a moment’s silence, tilting her head to the side. Her unblinking eyes traveled down to Bluma’s toes and back up again. The tails of the cats behind her twitched in the moonlight.

  “Yes,” said the lady in white. “Yes, there are many things in the cemetery that might like to get their claws in
to you.”

  Now she turned to face the cats. “Sisters,” she said, and in the blinking of an eye, the six gray cats were six gray ladies, each leaning back against a headstone. “I do not think it right to allow this girl to wander the cemetery alone. How say you?”

  And now the gray ladies began to consult one another in silence, a system of blinks and glances passing between them so complex that Bluma could not begin to follow it.

  But Bluma found herself distracted. There was a cold, lurking thing in the pocket of her apron, something that would not go away, would not leave her alone.

  She wanted nothing more than to be rid of it.

  But if she could not be rid of it, then she was desperate that it should remain hidden.

  And, to her horror, she thought she felt it moving.

  Carefully, she dipped her hand into her pocket, closing her fingers gently around the frosty handle of the spoon, as if to calm it.

  There, there, she thought, her breath beginning to slow. There, there.

  And, looking up with a start, she discovered seven pairs of eyes trained upon her in the dim.

  The lady in white was gazing at the pocket of her apron.

  Without lifting her eyes, she spoke. “Come,” the lady in white said. “It is decided. You will travel with us.”

  And she turned and walked into the darkness.

  All around, the gray Sisters fell into step, foot and paw, now striding between stones, now hopping lightly from grave to grave.

  Bluma was by no means certain that she would be safer with them than she had been walking alone, but two of the cats had remained behind to make sure that she followed.

  And Bluma had no desire to find out what they might do in order to encourage her.

  This is how Bluma came to travel with the ancient demon Lilith and the Sisters of the Lileen.

  * * *

  —

  The Treasure House of Lord Mammon is a wide, rambling jumble of walls and buttresses, porticoes, arches, and columns. By the time Yehuda Leib came near, the crow had long since gone in through a window casement many stories above.