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helpless and without understanding as those who live. We had only one advantage over living,
breathing, as yet undead humans: we knew for certain that the realms on the other side existed.
Above, beyond, deeper: where the gods live. Where the one who had given me my chance,
had given Lizette her chance, where He lived. Undoubtedly watching.
The mist swirled up around us, as chill and final as the dust of pharaohs’ tombs.
We moved through it, toward the pulsing heart of blue light. And as we came into the
penultimate circle, we stopped. We were in the outer ring of potency, and we saw the claiming
things that had come for Lizette. She layout on an altar of crystal, naked and trembling. They stood
around her, enormously tall and transparent. Man shapes without faces. Within their transparent
forms a strange, silvery fog swirled, like smoke from holy censers. Where eyes should have been on
a man or a ghost, there were only dull flickering firefly glowings, inside, hanging in the smoke,
moving, changing shape and position. No eyes at all. And tall, very tall, towering over Lizette and
the altar.
For me, overcommitted to love, when dawn came without salvation, there was only an
eternity of wandering, with my unicorn as sole companion. Ghost forevermore. Incense chimera
viewed as dust-devil on the horizon, chilling as I passed in city streets, forever gone, invisible, lost,
empty, helpless, wandering.
But for her, empty vessel, the fate was something else entirely, The God of Love had
allowed her the time of wandering, trapped by day in stones, freed at night to wander, He had
allowed her the final chance, And having failed to take it, her fate was with these claiming creatures,
gods themselves...of another order...higher or lower I had no idea. But terrible.
“Lagniappe!” I screamed the word. The old Creole word they used in New Orleans when
they want a little extra; a bonus of croissants, a few additional carrots dumped into the shopping
bag, a baker’s dozen, a larger portion of clams or crabs or shrimp. “Lagniappe! Lizette, take a little
morel Try for the extra! Try… demand it… there’s time… you have it coming to you...you’ve
paid…I’ve paid…it’s ours…try!”
She sat up, her naked body lit by lambent fires of chill blue cold from the other side, She sat
up and looked across the inner circle to me, and I stood there with my arms out, trying desperately to
break through the outer circle to her, But it was solid and I could not pass. Only virgins could pass.
And they would not let her go. They had been promised a feed, and they were there to claim.
I began to cry, as I had cried when I finally heard what the mother had said, when I finally came
home to the empty apartment and knew I had spent my life loving too much, demanding too much,
myself a feeder at a board that could be depleted and emptied and serve up no more. She wanted to
come to me, I could see she wanted to come to me. But they would have their meal.
Then I felt the muzzle of my unicorn at my neck, and in a step he had moved through the
barrier that was impenetrable to me, and he moved across the circle and stood waiting. Lizette
leaped from the altar and ran to me.
It all happened at the same time. I felt Lizette’s body anchor in to mine, and we saw my
unicorn standing over there on the other side, and for a moment we could not summon up the
necessary reactions, the correct sounds. We knew for the first time in either our lives or our deaths
what it was to be paralyzed, Then reactions began washing over me, we, us in wave after wave:
cascading joy that Lizette had come to...us; utter love for this Paul ghost creature; realization that
instinctively part of us was falling into the same pattern again; fear that that part would love too
much at this mystic juncture; resolve to temper our love; and then anguish at the sight of our unicorn
standing there, waiting to be claimed....
We called to him...using his secret name, one we had never spoken aloud. We could barely
speak. Weight pulled at his throat, our throats. “Old friend...” We took a step toward him but could
not pass the barrier. Lizette clung to me, Paul held me tight as I trembled with terror and the cold of
that inner circle still frosting my flesh.
