Karla sat at the kitchen table staring idly into an empty tea cup, trying to make sense of the detritus of shredded leaves arrayed across the bottom. She had never believed in tessomancy, but she was willing to give anything a shot at this point.
Her gut told her Izzie was not dead. She could not be dead. The way their souls connected, Karla would have sensed something if her sister was truly gone or distressed. She was sure of that. It had happened before when Izzie had gotten into serious trouble and was suffering.
But there was no such vacancy in that place deep inside her that held the kernel of her sister's existence. Izzie had to be okay. Or at least her soul had to have remained in this realm.
As she sat there, a nagging scratchiness arose at the periphery of her consciousness, tugging at the corners of her soul. A familiar friction had arisen between her present world and the one that lay beyond. She had almost forgotten what it was like to be visited by roots.
She meditated with force, cultivating the roots' interest in her psyche, seeking the pits in her emotional landscape that allowed her emotions to settle into the lowest and darkest places.
Mrs. Ambrose burst in from the garden, bearing a bundle of parsley she had just clipped, shattering her trance.
"You still sitting there? My goodness Karla. I went outside an hour ago."
"I'm thinking."
"Moping won't help you get your sister back. Keep yourself busy with some physical task. That's the best way to occupy your mind. That's what I do."
"I'm thinking of going to Edinburgh and Glasgow."
"Oh? And what are you going to do there?"
"Burn down some churches."
"Are you serious, child?"
"Maybe."
"Getting yourself sent to prison is not going to being your sister back."
"No. But it will give me some satisfaction."
"I'm hiding the matches."
"I need to be doing something. That's why I will go."
"Oh? And do you think you can do a better job than the police?"
"Yes."
"But we know nothing about anything. Who dunked poor Jamie in the lake? Whether Izzie is okay or not. Whether Izzie was even with him at the time."
"Of course she was with him. She would have come home."
"Still. We know nothing."
"That's why I want to find out."
"Why Edinburgh? Glasgow? Why not here?"
"There are no Sedevacantists here."
"I'm just asking you to give the police some time. They are professionals. They will find who did this."
"I don't care what they find. I still want to burn all their churches."
"Settle down! That will do nothing for poor Izzie?"
"I want to make them pay."
"We don't even know your father's church is involved in any of this."
"Oh, yes I do. Who else would want to harm Izzie?"
"God willing she's not been harmed. God willing."
"God doesn't care."
"Bite your tongue!"
"God isn't even godly."
"What on earth are you saying?"
"The Sedevacantists have her. I am sure of it."
"How so?"
"I know how they think. They consider Isobel and I to be possessions of my father. I bet they are holding her to be dealt with by Papa when he makes it out of prison."
"So you think she's still alive?"
"For now. Yes. I do. I feel this is so."
Mrs. Ambrose studied Karla's face. She didn't smile, but there was belief in her eyes and with that came a bit of relief and hope.
"I do hope you're right. I have to say, the scenario you present sounds like a much better outcome than some vicious and unhinged drug dealers getting ahold of her."
"But it isn't. Not at all. Papa will take out his frustrations on her. I'm sure he blames us for what happened to him. He will torture her!"
"Oh come now. Your father can't possible hate you that much."
"Obviously, you have never met my father."
"And I hope I never do." She pulled a knife out of a block and trimmed the parsley stalks. "Tell you what. I will pray for him to show her mercy."
"Don't bother," said Karla. "Praying is worthless."
"That girl! If I had known she was doing dope all this time I would have tanned her hide good and hard. You don't partake of that ... stuff, do you?"
"Never."
"Good. Keep it that way."
Mrs. A. filled a jar with water from the tap and tucked in the cut ends of the parsley.
"I'm making breaded cutlets for dinner. That alright with you?"
"Do you need some help?"
"Oh, I think I've got it under control."
"I might go up and take a quick nap, if that's alright."
"Of course dear. It's still early."
Karla rose from the table and climbed the stairs to the room she shared with Izzie. Every glimpse of an object in the room connected to her sister stabbed her in the heart. Izzie's hair brush. Her manga collection. Lip gloss. The balled up tights on the floor.
Izzie always used the one true bed while Karla made do with a pair of yoga mats on the hardwood. The window sill above was stacked with books she had purchased in thrift shops and library sales. She had a thing for Russian novels, mostly. Dostoevsky. Nabokov. Brothers Karamazov. Pale Fire. There was also Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago. She didn't know what is was about them that appealed to her so much, but they did.
Beside her pillow rested an English-Italian dictionary. Her English skills had progressed quite far since the family moved to Scotland but there was always a word or two on every page she needed to look up.
She fluffed her pillows and laid back, drawing up the puffy quilt that Mrs. Ambrose had purchased for her in secret after noticing how much it pleased her in the department store. Living with Mrs. A was like having a surrogate grandmother. She didn't really remember what it was like to have a mother.
Karla couldn't blame her poor mother for abandoning her when Izzie was still just a baby. She was happy for her, really. It could not have been easy escaping Edmund's clutches.
She stared up at the ceiling and tried to resurrect the art of feeling sorry for herself, an act at which she was once quite the expert. It shouldn't have been difficult with Izzie gone again without a trace. Again, she was afflicted with the burden of finding her and wondering if she was dead.
But the stakes were lower now. Death wasn't nearly as scary to someone who had been resurrected. Karla knew that all was not lost for her sister, even if she had joined Jamie at the bottom of that lake. The divers had not found a trace of her, but that didn't mean her body wasn't somewhere down there, lost in the murk.
Her soul told her otherwise. But her soul had been wrong before. About James. His love could be broken.
Karla's largest fear was for her sister's suffering, physical and otherwise. If she were still alive and being held against her will, was she scared? Might she be in pain? Devoid of hope?
The latter would at least give her an out. Hopelessness was the fastest ticket to the Liminality, particularly for souls who had been there before and had demonstrated an ability to convince the roots that they no longer wanted to be a part of this existence. Izzie certainly qualified. She knew the Lim. And the Lim was always eager to welcome its visitors back.
Just thinking about the place was enough to shake things loose and open up the borderlands that had been closed tight for so long. The old, familiar feeling now returned full force and unadulterated by optimism. She let herself sink deep enough for the roots to lose all trace of hestiance.
***
A spin of her head and she found herself knees tight and curled up in a fibrous cocoon the size of a trash can.
"What the heck? A pod? How dare they?"
She slashed and plucked at the fibers till she had ripped a hole in the side of the pod. The hole let a stench seep through that told her Reapers were nearby. Indeed she could hear one grumbling around a bend of tunnel.
She did not dare panic. Reapers could sense panic the way a vulture smells rot. She worked methodically, enlarging the hole until she could squeeze her shoulders through, slipping out and dropping onto the tunnel floor.
She landed on her feet, devoid of clothing. Green and blue lights shuttled along the roots spiraling around the tunnel, shedding a faint glow on the interior, showing her the way upward.
Claws scraped. A very large Reaper was struggling to heave itself around the curve of tunnel. She could see the ragged stalks of pods it had dispatched prior to her arrival. Souls generally arrived confused and hesitant, unaware of the dangers of staying put in the womb-like pods.
Reapers were built for racing down tunnels so Karla did not flee along the passage but instead dove headfirst into the tunnel wall and tore away at it with her fingernails, prying apart roots and inserting herself into the interstitial spaces beyond.
The roots were arrayed much more sparsely beyond the walls and oriented vertically like a thicket of saplings. She weaved were way through, squeezing between them, thrusting through gaps, putting as much space as possible between herself and the hole in the tunnel wall.
The Reaper roared and lunged into the opening she had made, pressing a snout full of tentacles into the hole, stretching their prehensile tips after her.
Either Reapers had gotten smarter while she had been away or this beast was more adept at most at hunting in the inner spaces. She struggled to fend off the tentacles, slapping and kicking them away as they snaked around one wrist and then an ankle. She managed to shove herself deeper into the forest of roots till she was well beyond the grasp of the beast.
The Reaper snorted and stopped going after her, realizing it had lost its opportunity for a meal. Its snout tentacles relaxed and curled back. Multiple beady eyes glinted from the huge blocky head jammed into the hole in the tunnel wall. Karla paused to catch her breath and admire the beast.
"My goodness. I forgot how nasty you guys are. It's been a while."
She reached out and patted its snout, something she would have never been inclined to do in the old days of Luthersburg.
She let her heart wind down to a gear less that frantic before moving on through the tangled forest of roots. She had not counted on being relegated back to the depths of Root. She had thought for sure that those days were over. Apparently, long absences souls to regress as if she had never known the afterlands.
She reached a gap in the root structure that formed a small cavern. Here, a gauzy curtain of finer roots hung down just above her head, draping the thicker roots like Spanish moss. The master Weavers of Luthersburg used to call this form 'faerie fleece' and it was much prized for its malleability.
Gently squirming, glowing faintly blue, with a texture between spider webs and cotton candy. She reached up and ripped down several armloads that she gathered into sheathes. Pressing them flat against her bare thigh, she ran her palm over them and glared them into submission until they calmed enough to respond to the bidding of her will.
A few wayward strands managed to creep away and escape but most of the rest began to churn and divide, evening up their girths, weaving in and out, forming themselves into hems and seams and drawstrings until they had become a very baggy pair of sweat pants in the sky blue of her favored futbol team from childhood, S.S. Lazio.
She pulled them on, forcing the fabric to shorten and contract where necessary to become perfectly fitted. A second armload of delicate roots became a pale beige chambray blouse. The third—a blue cardigan. She had no need for shoes and socks just yet. Down deep in these tunnels, the roots felt soft and warm underfoot.
Feeling gratified that she was able to get back into the swing of things so quickly, she got up and fought her way through the inter-spaces till she reached the cylindrical walls of a tunnel the diameter of a culvert, too small for any full grown Reaper to pass.
She tore a hole into the densely matted roots and stuck her face into the opening. There was a breeze here and the air was stale but not putrid—another good sign that this locale was safe from Reapers. With both hands pulling on the edges with all her strength, she widened the hole and wriggled her way through the opening.
This was a bright little tunnel lined with several thick conduits conveying thousands of luminescent bubbles up towards the surface. The colors were chaotically diverse. Scarlet and coral and teal and chartreuse and pink and every shade in between.
Her grandfather has told her that these lights tended to converge on places where the tunnels had been damaged and were somehow involved in the promotion of healing.
What mattered more to Karla was that this passage was inclined upward towards the surface. The Makers might have had different designs for her, but she no longer considered herself a denizen of the underworld. Upward she went, against the stiff draft of brisk air that blew down into the depths.