By turns suspenseful and enchanting, this breathtaking first novel weaves a story of love, family, history, and myth as seen through the eyes of one immortal woman.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and the first chapter from Jacqueline Holland’s The God of Endings, which is out now.
Collette LeSange is a lonely artist who heads an elite fine arts school for children in upstate New York. Her youthful beauty masks the dark truth of her life: she has endured centuries of turmoil and heartache in the wake of her grandfather’s long-ago decision to make her immortal like himself. Now in 1984, Collette finds her life upended by the arrival of a gifted child from a troubled home, the return of a stalking presence from her past, and her own mysteriously growing hunger.
Combining brilliant prose with breathtaking suspense, The God of Endings serves as a larger exploration of the human condition in all its complexity, asking us the most fundamental question: is life in this world a gift or a curse?
CHAPTER ONE
When I was a child, the dead were all around us. Cemeteries were not common in the early years of the 1830s. Instead, small, shambling family graveyards butted up against barns, or sprung up like pale mushrooms at the edges of pastures, in the yards of church, and school, and meetinghouse—until eventually you could look out across the village, see all those gravestones like crooked teeth in a mouth, and wonder who the place really belonged to, the huddled and transient living or the persistent dead?
Many folks found this proximity to death and its souvenirs discomfiting, but my father was the first gravestone carver in the village of Stratton, New York, which meant that the distillation of death and grief into beauty was our family business. Death, to me, was tied inextricably to cherished things: to craftsmanship and poetry, to my father and to the beautiful things he made, and I couldn’t help but feel some tenderness for all of it. Even all these years later, I can still see those gravestones vividly. Drizzle-gray slabs of slate, smoothly planed and cool to the touch; grainy sandstone in its striated shades of red and brown and buttercream; soapstone soft enough to etch with a thumbnail, yet somehow able to resist the assaults of time and the elements; letters and symbols, crosses and cherub wings, and forlorn-looking skulls chiseled delicately into the surfaces; beveled edges smooth and sharp beneath the pads of my small, inquiring fingers.
Like the works of his hands, my father also remains vivid. When I remember him, he is working, always working, at his craft. His eyes and hands search a great heft of rock for its secret seams, and then, with wedge and mallet, he splits it open as one might split an orange. With great focus, he hammers at his chisels, patiently lifting away slow, stubborn ribbons of schist like potato peels to carve the rounded tympanums. With pick and file, he etches and sands and then blows the glittering mica dust into the air. Noticing me, his watchful daughter standing in the doorway, he looks up and smiles, but his hands are ever diligent; they glide along surfaces, feeling their progress.
When I was very young, I would go about with bits of stone in my mouth, enjoying the feel of the rough grain against my tongue. I have few memories of my mother, who died giving birth to a baby who died with her, but one of the memories I have is the sudden indignity of her finger in my mouth, swiveling roughly, fishing a piece of rock from it. Then she too became a gravestone: creamy yellow, reticulated by thread-thin veins of iron, embellished along the side panels with fine scrolls and rosettes, and with a centerpiece inscribed “Loving Mother,” all of which I remember in greater detail than I remember her.
I am fond of those memories of my father, his shop, his gravestones, but they are tied to other, darker memories, and the mind, that imbecilic machine of associations, moves irresistibly from one to another, and before I can stop it, I am seeing myself and my brother, Eli, in a different shop, the smith’s forge. I’m ten years old, my brother fourteen, the age of each of our deaths, and we’re surrounded by our grim-faced neighbors who, out of the firm conviction that it will cure us of our afflictions, are forcing us to swallow the ashy remains of our father’s burned corpse.
The fact is that I was a child at a hideous time, when the terror of death suffused all of life and against it people had little recourse besides their own dark imaginations. More than a hundred years had passed since the Salem Witch Trials, and still the habit persisted of encapsulating what was feared in stories. Stories, after all, have boundaries, and fear needs nothing more desperately than boundaries. Thus, a crop failure or injury might be construed as the work of demons, or the fruit of some unholy pact with the Devil, or punishment for one’s own unconfessed sin. This was why when the wasting death—what is today called tuberculosis—came to our town, it arrived wrapped in a shroud of stories that were passed, like the disease itself, from hand to hand until they had both spread to nearly every town and village along the Eastern Seaboard.
The restless dead, it was whispered, were crawling up out of their graves at night and preying upon their own family members, dragging them down ounce by bloody ounce into the graves beside their own. This explained why entire families would crumble, one by one—strong, vigorous men and women watching their flesh fall suddenly away, their eyes receding into their skulls, the coughing and the blood. Who could blame people at a time when nothing at all was known about bacteria or the virulent microscopic droplets that sprayed forth from a sick person’s cough, for seeing a perverse and ungodly malevolence at work—pattern, design, intentionality—in an entire family’s slow, hideous demise?
This narrative of the malicious dead not only offered an explanation, it also suggested action that might be taken to stop what seemed unstoppable: if the dead were not quite dead enough, then the solution perhaps was to dig them up and put them more conclusively to rest. Exhumations began. When the second wife of the cooper fell ill, the deceased and famously jealous first wife was dug up for interrogation. On it went from there. Coffins were pried open, corpses examined, their appearances quarreled over. Why did the Wesley daughter, dead from scarlet fever in the early winter, look as though she’d been buried only the week before? Never mind that winter was only just relenting, and the girl was probably coming out of months of deep freeze, her flesh rosy with thaw. Why take chances?
People who knew, people with close ties to Europe and its intricate lore—young brides recently arrived from Häggenås and Blåberg, a grandfather from Lovön, a nephew from Bistritz—advised the rest on the best course of action.
“Break the arms and legs to keep them from crawling about in the dark.”
When one measure failed to stop the descent of the living toward death, a new measure would be offered.
“Carve out the heart and examine it for the fresh blood of its victims, then you’ll know for certain.”
Then, “What use is certainty and how can it ever be had when you’re dealing with the unnatural, the unholy? Cut off the head, and that will be that. To be safe, burn the heart as well. Then have all the remaining family members eat the ashes. Make the bodies of the living inhospitable, from the inside out, to the demonic.”
My father, the gravestone carver, had spent his life helping folks make peace with death and he regarded this war with abhorrence, insisting at every opportunity in his gentle but stubborn way that our dearly departed bore no responsibility for the afflictions of the living and that fouling their bodies was a sin and an abomination. He may have persuaded some, but those who opposed him were louder, and when he too began to cough, I saw an ugly satisfaction in the eyes of those he’d reproved.
Deacon Whilt was one of these. The man, who had appointed himself commander in the war against the undead, and who took officious pleasure in bearing the arms of holy water and crucifix to the exhumations, came one day to my father’s shop. He ambled about, picking up chisels to squint at their varied ends and knocking his head on the iron tools that hung by hooks from the ceiling.
“Word has it,” he said, massaging the back of his skull where it had encountered the long metal handle of an adze, “they found a ghastly one over in Plattsburgh. Fat as a tick on a mule. Blood all over the creature’s hellish mouth. They pierced the stomach and hot blood poured out for near an hour.”
“And you believed this?” my father asked between hammer blows.
My brother, beside him, had paused at his work and was listening, open-mouthed and horrified, but a stern glance from my father flushed his cheeks and set him back to work.
The deacon frowned down at a smear of dust that had marred his black cassock and, taking out a handkerchief, began to sweep it off with controlled violence. “And what would you have me believe? That it is all mere coincidence? Six families in the next township, nine in our own, falling like a child’s arrangement of dominoes—by chance?”
My father did not answer, and the deacon sidled up beside the stone my father labored over.
“Such lovely religious sentiments on your gravestones, Isaac, and yet their maker seems to deny the active influence of the supernatural in the affairs of this world. I might almost imagine you lacked a godly dread of the Devil and his works.”
“Or imagine instead that I possess trust enough in God to drive out fear of a multitude of devils—real or imagined.”
My father might have said more, but a cough welled up from deep inside his chest. He tried to hold it back, but finally could not and lifted his smock to hide the fit until it passed.
The deacon watched my father, his expression softening in a way that disturbed me more than his previous hostility.
“Your apron, Isaac,” he said when my father had finished. “There’s blood on it.”
My father turned back to his work.
“Would that you might turn from your stubborn unbelief,” Deacon Whilt went on, “which gives the demons free entry. We’ve lost half of our men already. Half again are as ill as yourself. At this rate, the village won’t survive the winter. We need you well, and Eli too. We cannot afford to lose any more. Not one more.”
He went to the window and gazed out at the two distant graves perched atop a hill and silhouetted against the pink blaze of the setting sun. My mother and baby sister.
“It is a vile business. On that we are agreed, but then the powers of hell are vile. We do what we must, not because it is pleasant, but because it must be done. You will have to dig them up.”
“No,” my father answered without pause or glance. “Never.”
The deacon turned and let forth a sigh of great weariness, then made his way to the door. When he noticed me standing nearby, he put a damp hand of blessing on my forehead, which I struggled to endure without scowling or drawing away.
“I do hope you reconsider, Isaac,” the man said without turning. “You’ll all die otherwise.”
•••
“Papa?”
The deacon had gone and my brother was out filling the wood box, and my father and I were alone in his shop with the light falling and the hunks of stone set up on tables like islands in a stream. He was at a desk writing, something he did rarely on anything other than stone.
“Papa, what are you writing?” I asked, coming up beside him.
“A letter.”
“A letter to whom?”
“To your grandparents.”
“My grandparents?”
“Grandmother, anyway, and to her husband, Mr. Vadim Semenov.”
“I did not know I had grandparents.”
“You do. You met them once, but you were young, perhaps too young to remember.”
“Why did I meet them only once?”
There was a moment of hesitation as my father tried to find the right words.
“Your mother loved her father very much. He was a good man, a minister, very pious and kind. After he died, your grandmother married again. Your mother was unhappy with the match.”
“Why?”
“It came about rather . . . suddenly, and strangely. He is an unusual man.”
“Unusual how?”
“Well, he’s . . .” My father cast about uneasily and finally settled on, “He’s no Protestant. I’ll say only that. It’s what upset your mother. She never imagined your grandmother would agree to marry a Catholic, or Eastern Orthodox, or whatever he is, though the man was—is, I imagine, still—quite wealthy and quite persuasive, but she did, without hesitation or discussion, almost as though she were . . . sleepwalking into the match. I’ll grant you, it was strange. None of that seems quite so important now, though. I think even your mother would agree.”
I looked down at my hands, where they nervously fingered a loose thread on the pocket of my apron, afraid to ask the next question.
“Why are you writing to them? Now? After all this time?”
My father turned to look at me and reached out for my hand, and the understanding that passed between us in that look and in that touch was so painful and clear that I could have believed that people did not need words to speak at all.
“Are you going to die, Papa?” I breathed. “As Deacon Whilt said?”
He looked down into his lap, took a rattling breath, collecting himself, then looked up at me again, a soft smile in his eyes.
“Be assured of it,” he said. “As will you, as will everyone else you or I know.”
He gestured with the feathered end of his quill pen at the gravestones leaned up against the walls of the shop in various stages of completion.
“We all pass from this world to the next, dearest: it is our lot as mortals and our privilege, and if the choice were mine to do it sooner or not at all, I’d not hesitate to choose sooner and be sooner in the presence of our Lord. You mustn’t be afraid of death, Anna.”
“I know all that, Papa. You know I do. And I’m not afraid of death, but I am . . . I am afraid of . . .”
I hesitated, struggling suddenly to speak. Overcome, I looked away, trying to tamp down the fount of breathless fear and tears pushing up forcefully in me.
“Afraid of what, dearest?”
My father opened his arms, still lightly white with rock dust, to me.
“Afraid of you going without me,” I said, stumbling forward into them, “afraid of being left behind, without you.”
Once in his arms, a kind of panic seized me, and I clung to him.
“I wish we could die at the same time,” I whispered. My father held me tightly for a long time in silence. Finally, he cleared his throat and wiped his face with the rag from his pocket.
“Our days are numbered by our maker,” he said, his voice husky. “He’s a number for me and a number for you, and each one holds a blessing if we’ve the courage to find it. You must not wish a day of it away. Though it’s difficult, we must trust ourselves and each other to his gracious providence and his wisdom.”
“I know,” I whispered, my voice quaking, “but I’m still so afraid.”
My father tilted my chin up. His face was pale and beaded with fine drops of sweat, and his eyes gleamed with a strange, unwell brightness. I could not hold my tears back any longer and I closed my eyes in despair as they fell.
“That’s all right,” my father said, wiping the tears gently from my cheeks with his handkerchief. “He can be trusted with our fear as well.”
For a moment he just held me, then he stood up and walked over to his worktable. He picked up a chisel and held it out to me, knowing perfectly well that I could never resist helping him carve. I took the tool and let my father guide me to stand between him and the stone he’d been working on. He put his large, deft hands over mine to guide our strokes, and together we carved a fine, smooth bevel.
“What will we carve together in the world to come, you and I?” my father asked, wiping clean and looking down fondly at our work. “There’ll be no more need for these.”
“It’s almost a shame,” I said. “They’re so lovely.”
He smiled at me and then kissed my forehead, and his lips burned against my skin.
We did not dig up my mother or my baby sister, and my father did die. What’s more, the sickness that had been quietly germinating in me and my brother bloomed into grave illness. Hollow-eyed skeletons, both of us, coughing up blood and thick white phlegm, and gasping for breath, we seemed sure to follow my father soon and bring all of Deacon Whilt’s grim pronouncements to bear.
In those strange, bleary weeks, as my death circled in on me, I went into my father’s shop to sit in silence among his tools, and the slabs of raw rock, and the gravestones he’d left unfinished.
As he’d neared death and lost his strength, his gravestones had grown smaller and plainer. The one he’d been working on when he died was little more than a flagstone squared off and engraved with a single line of poetry unfinished. It was from Donne’s tenth Holy Sonnet, my father’s favorite poem. My father’s last stone had been his own.
I determined to finish the line. How many times had I carved with him, his hands guiding our strokes? Surely, after all that, I could do it on my own. With frail arms, I took up the lettering chisel and set about doing what I’d seen him do a thousand times. It was horribly difficult. Soon after beginning, I broke loose a button-sized chunk of stone that blemished the surface and I nearly gave up in tears. But then I tried again. I went on, though I did it poorly. Weak and easily exhausted, I took a fortnight to chisel the three missing words. Along the way, though, I determined to bury my father myself. I had already heard the deacon imply that my father’s death was proof that he, the deacon, had been correct about everything, and I feared the vengeful pleasure the man might take in turning my father’s remains into one of his undead enemies. I’d never let him do it. I would bury my father somewhere hidden, where no one could find or disturb him, and I would mark his grave with the stone he and I had made together.
On a wet day in early spring, I carried the grave marker—which, in my state, felt like a boulder, though it could not have weighed more than fifteen pounds—out of the shop, across the muddy fields, and into the leafless woods. I stumbled deeper and deeper into the trees, amid the plinking percussion of melting snow, the shifting bands of sunlight, and the lonely caws of watching crows. I stopped often to rest my burning forehead against a tree and try to regain my breath, though it went on as ragged and shallow as before.
Satisfied at last that I’d gone far enough, I set the marker down and myself beside it, and for a while I just cried helplessly while the mud seeped into my skirts.
“Papa,” I whispered to the stone, “I’m scared. You left me behind, Papa. Trust God and his wisdom, I know, but I can’t. I just want to come with you. They’ve dug up Mr. Harrison and Alice Brooke—dear little Alice Brooke. And her poor mother was—Papa, I don’t want to be here anymore. It’s all so horrible. I can’t bear to be here without you.”
The water went on dripping and somewhere a cardinal trilled. Fever-drunk, I searched the treetops for the bird and spotted him, a bright red male high up in a tree, searching the valley arrogantly for what mattered to him. Suddenly I couldn’t think what people were for, couldn’t think what their lives amounted to besides misery. Like a bird, I looked down from high treetops at all the wretched villages of men and felt only blank confusion. Those pitiful beasts, I would think if I were a bird, those poor, sad creatures dragging themselves along the ground, passing their days laboring and fearing and suffering until death. Too clever to live in peace, too stupid to live well. They’re better off in the dirt, finally quiet, finally peaceful.
“Why must we pass through this bleak world at all, Papa?” I asked aloud. “Please, Papa, if you have any power in it, let me die too and leave this place behind. There’s nothing here that I care for.”
The cardinal’s call at last was answered by some distant listening bird, but mine was not, so I got up and started back home, thinking of how I would manage to move my father’s body to the grave site. His shrouded, stiff corpse had been set in the barn for as long as the weather remained cold. The men of the town, who were spending so much sweat digging bodies up, saw no reason for haste to put one down, especially when the corpse might prove quarrelsome and need to be brought back up again.
If I could lift my father onto the horse cart, I thought, it would be easy from there, but I wasn’t at all sure that I could lift him. I wondered if Eli could be trusted to help. Even if he could, I wondered, would his help be help enough, weak as he was? But the next day, when I went into the barn to see if I could lift the body on my own, it was gone.
“Eli!” I cried, running into the house. “Eli! Father’s body! It’s gone!”
My brother sat frail and chalk white before the fire. Around him and helping him gingerly to stand were gathered the deacon and men from several of the neighboring farms. They turned as one to look at me, and I knew immediately what they had come for.
“No,” I said, shaking my head and beginning to cry. “No! We won’t! Never!”
•••
Who knows when they dug up the bodies, or how many of our friends and neighbors participated? Who was it that severed the heads from the bodies of our kin? Who placed their arms and legs against the cinder blocks to break them? Who cut out their hearts and sliced them open to search for the fresh blood of their victims? And what misgivings did they feel as they performed these acts on the husks of people whose lives had been so intimately entwined with their own? Whoever it was and whatever their sentiments, they had completed their grisly tasks by the time we were brought to the smith’s forge for the burning.
My brother was too weak to stand, so Mr. Bird, the cooper, held him up as he inhaled the smoke from the burning hearts. I refused. They pulled me by the arms, but I bucked and clawed until they gave up. Then, when there was nothing left of the organs but oily ashes, Deacon Whilt scooped them up and placed them on my brother’s coated tongue.
I thought my resistance had succeeded and that I would escape, only having had to witness this horror, but I was pinned suddenly. One man put an arm tightly around my chest and another around my head, holding me still. My lips were pried open, and my mouth was filled with soot. I sobbed, and the dust ran up into my nose and choked me. I gagged and screamed with weak rage and flailed my small fists at anyone within reach until I was dragged away.
“Guard carefully that girl,” I heard the deacon say, “she behaves as one possessed of demons. They may not even wait until she is underground.”
My brother, who had once been so strong, died soon after that, but I, a spindly little girl, just ten years old, and the one most would have picked to die first, held on. My illness and the quickly circulated rumor of demonism made me unwelcome in the homes of even our dearest family friends. I had nowhere to go but to the rectory, where the deacon oversaw my care with open loathing and instructed the house servants never to speak to me, look at me, or enter my chamber without a cross in hand. I lived in a feverish haze of illness, despair, and fear
Then one afternoon, I was awakened from fever dreams by a commotion in the house. Voices high and agitated carried from the front of the rectory and up the stairs. Then loud, deliberate steps were coming down the hall. Into the room where I’d been spending my days tossing fitfully on a hard bed, and flanked by fluttering, alarmed servants, entered a white-haired gentleman in the finest riding clothes I’d ever seen. His eyes were the color of backlit amber, and his lined face was strong and arresting and somehow vaguely familiar to me. He strode across the room and lifted me from the bed. My body was frail and I, no doubt, weighed very little, but the old man lifted and carried me as though he were a youth carrying nothing heavier than a cloak.
Deacon Whilt stormed in behind the man.
“What is going on here?” he demanded of the servants. Then to the old gentleman, “What are you doing in this room?”
“I am this child’s nearest relation,” the man said in a voice large and roundly accented in a way that, like his face, was dimly familiar. “Her father wrote regarding his imminent death and requested that I assume guardianship of his children. I gather he has passed?”
“You are mistaken, sir,” the deacon said acidly. “This girl is an orphan. She has no living relations.”
The old gentleman pulled the folded pages of a letter from his coat pocket and pressed them to the deacon’s chest as he carried my limp frame past the man toward the door.
“You, my good man, are the one who is mistaken.”
The deacon stumbled along after us, looking the letter over and stammering protests, while I whimpered in drowsy confusion.
“Peace, child,” the old man said, looking down at me, “I am your grandfather.”
Then to the deacon, “Where is the boy?”
“The boy is dead,” the deacon answered coldly.
The old man pressed my head to his chest as though shielding me from hearing what I already knew, and then started down the stairs.
Outside, the servants clustered, gaping on the porch, but the deacon hurried alongside Grandfather as he carried me to his coach. “I must advise you against taking this girl into your home. She is oppressed by vile spirits. It could be she who has sent the others down to the grave.”
Grandfather placed me in the carriage, tucking thick, soft blankets around me, then turned to face the deacon.
“What is it that you fear?” he asked in a tone low and serious.
In his gravity, the deacon’s face was flushed and turgid, and he leaned forward to speak in a voice strained with intensity. “It is widely attested to that we, in these parts, are in the midst of an unholy epidemic, that Satan and his demons lie in wait to deny rest to those who depart from this world, to turn what should be God’s glorious risen into tormentors of God’s faithful.”
“Tormentors? How torment?”
“There are some who, compelled by the prince of darkness, become restless after death. They crawl up from the grave to drain the blood of their living relations and bring them likewise into death and Satan’s service. There have been nearly a hundred incidences in this county alone, all of them simon-pure and thoroughly documented.”
“Drain the blood? Ah, verdilak. These are known in my country as well.” Grandfather cast a wary sidelong look toward the coach. “This girl?”
The deacon nodded. “If she passes. When she passes. Who knows, perhaps before. She is one of unnatural tempestuousness already and resistant to all holy intercession.”
Grandfather was very still for a moment, thoughtfully considering the man before him and his words, then, suddenly, he threw back his head and let out a great, full laugh, which set the deacon trembling with alarm.
“Koještarija!” Grandfather exclaimed, grinning. He turned, bemused, to the deacon. “Rubbish. This child is as helplessly ill with consumption as all the others. In the city, but fifty miles from here, the condition is treated with cod-liver oil, rest, and fresh air, but here, in this delightful little backwater, it is treated with exorcism and who knows what other nonsense. That a man of the church should revel in superstition like a pagan priest, well, I wish I could say I was surprised.”
He took the fluttering pages of the letter from the deacon’s hand, smoothed and folded them, and returned them to his pocket.
“Now, my little verdilak and I must away, but I thank you for your time and for the . . . entertainment.” He gave another chuckle and clapped the deacon genially on the shoulder, then, turning, climbed up into the driver’s seat of the carriage.
There was a whistle then, and a toss of the reins, and Stratton moved away behind me forever.
It took several hours to reach Grandfather’s estate in Millstream Hollow, some twenty miles away—to me, an unimaginable distance. My father had told me that my grandfather was wealthy, but I had imagined it in the terms of our village: a large, thriving farm perhaps, with a pretty clapboard house and a carriage. But the three-story brick house with its porte cochere, towering glass conservatory, and half dozen chimneys would have astounded me with a grandeur unlike any structure I had ever seen if my sickness had permitted me to perceive it.
My grandmother’s face, aged but very lovely, would appear now and then over my sickbed, accompanied by the sensation of a cool, damp cloth against my skin. More often, though, it was my grandfather who tended to me. He built up the fire, changed the linens, and sat for hours in an armchair in the corner of the room, reading poetry aloud in a strange rolling language and a low, resonant voice that wove in and out of my half consciousness. Sometimes, he sat close beside my bed, giving me odd commands.
“You are hungry, Anya. Your appetite is returning. You will eat.”
And strangely, though I’d been turning my face from food for days, I would feel a sudden dim sensation of hunger and open my mouth to the spoonful of broth he held out to me.
The old man seemed possessed of limitless energy, and his presence, signaled by the smell of tobacco and leather and horse stable, became a near constant reassurance to me, such that I would whimper and toss whenever I awoke to find it absent.
Despite my improved circumstances, I grew sicker, thinner. My arms were bones draped in a muslin-like cloth of thin skin. My drenching sweat smelled of stale beer, and I could keep down only the thinnest broth. As a last resort, a doctor from Greenwich was brought in to attempt a surgery rumored to have helped some. He put an ether-soaked handkerchief to my nose and then cut a hole in my chest to let out the bad air while Grandfather held my hand, and I babbled dreamily. By the end of the surgery, my blood was stiffening rags littered across the floor, and I was only the worse for it. Like a boulder tipped over the crest of a hill, I careened toward death.
There is a numinous space that opens up just before death, a spectral herald with a trumpet blowing silence who announces the approach of a thing unlike anything that is. The air vibrates at a different frequency, the space grows colder, and there is nothing to do but wait. It was in this space, amid those vibrations and the grateful certainty of death, that I cracked my eyes open and saw a figure shrouded and hidden in the folds of a black cloak. Death, I thought with horrified certainty, so he is in fact real, and he does in fact wear a black cloak. But how could this be the way of it? Where was Jesus with all his ministering angels to carry my soul upward to paradise, as I’d been promised? Or had I committed some grave sin, and here was a demon to escort me from this fleeting world of suffering to an eternal one?
Terror completely unmoored from reality bobbed and ebbed in my last fevered scraps of consciousness. Time passed. Who knows, in that numinous space, how much of it? In terror, I closed my eyes. In terror, I slipped and stumbled along the border of waking and dreaming, unable to discriminate between them, but whether I was waking or dreaming, the figure was there, unmoving, its hidden yet heavy gaze fixed on my face. I wanted to scream, but all I could manage at last was a small, strangled cry of fear.
The figure rose. It moved toward me, not silently like a specter, but with footsteps softly audible against the floorboards. Tears slipped down the sides of my face, and my body shook with terror, bracing for the strike of a divine scythe, but for a long moment nothing happened.
Then there was a slight stir of breath and a motion, small like the muscle twitch of a snake coiling to strike. The black cloak fell upon me, and then my neck was in the grip of needles. Everything was confusion. I was confused by the needles in my neck, confused by this strange action of Death, and the fast, draining sensation of the blood and life running out of me, but most of all, I was confused by the familiar smell of my grandfather, the tobacco and leather and horse stable that told me he was near.
I am told there was a funeral: a pretty girl in a pretty dress with curled hair and a hole in her chest, candles in a dim parlor and unwilling guests passing through it quickly. My grandmother put a rosary in one of my hands, and my grandfather put a bell in the other. The rosary was of no help (my grandfather, when he tells it, likes to underscore), but some weeks later, when I was ready, I rang the bell.
I am told that on a clear night in spring, my grandfather, with shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow and his collar dark with sweat from digging, lay down on the grass and stretched his arms out to a little girl in a dirty dress who sat crying in her grave. Finally, because she would not move, he had to climb down and lift her out.
Sitting on the moonlit banks of a stream, he fed her blood from a stoat and walked her patiently through the parameters of her new existence: henceforth, you shall live on the lifeblood of others, you shall bloom but never decay, you shall live free from the hidden enmity of the physical world, whose laws are conspiring always to bring an end to life. In Grandfather’s telling of the night, it was all very touching and picturesque.
My own memories are patchy and far less idyllic. I remember dirt. I remember screaming. I remember possum—not stoat—and I remember the trembling, delirious haze of my mind clearing only enough to ask my grandfather, Why? Why have you done this? Why have you done this to me? And I remember his answer, the serene philosophical tone of his voice as he gave it.
“This world, my dear child, all of it, right to the very end if there is to be an end, is a gift. But it’s a gift few are strong enough to receive. I made a judgment that you might be among those strong few, that you might be better served on this side of things than the other. I thought you might find some use for the world, and it for you.”
He looked up at the moon, patted my shoulder almost absently, and said, “But if not, my sincerest apologies for the miscalculation.”
EXCERPTED FROM THE GOD OF ENDINGS. COPYRIGHT © 2023 BY JACQUELINE HOLLAND. EXCERPTED BY PERMISSION OF FLATIRON BOOKS, A DIVISION OF MACMILLAN PUBLISHERS. NO PART OF THIS EXCERPT MAY BE REPRODUCED OR REPRINTED WITHOUT PERMISSION IN WRITING FROM THE PUBLISHER.
