Nancy Kilpatrick: Necromimicos

The dead bring her life. Since the moment of consciousness of their presence, Amulette, rather than dismiss them, begged the dead to remain. Amulette’s mother, father, grand-mere - the lucky one, for whom she is named - two sisters and baby brother, none understand her need for those who have passed. No one understands, really. Only Etienne.

As she matured, her thinking on cemeteries altered. From vast and lovely gardens, they became her personal shopping mall. Wrought-iron gates, stone benches, candles encased in etched glass-and-brass holders, marble angels and cherubs, filigreed metallic crosses . . . Memento mori. The accoutrements of death, scanned by the eye of a selective consumer. Furnishings for the world between worlds where Amulette resides. The only place where she can exist.

As the sun fades, Amulette leaves the city-din behind: stores dedicated to the here-and-now, or cheap imitations of the past. Inexhaustible vehicles. Food, entertainment, pursuits she cannot understand. People dressed of-a-piece - for a time she enjoyed classifying them: business, casual, post-grunge, retro hippy, neo-rave, Goth - the last those oh-so-sweet darklings in requisite chains, silver crosses clinging to black stretch velvet. To look at them reinforces her yearning.

She turns up a small street and gracefully climbs the mountain with the lit cross atop. The homes en route are stone and wood, the estates of Outremont, where Montreal’s wealthy Francophones reside. These edifices oppress her with their blind devotion to one world only. She closes her eyes - this path is a trace memory, a former life, the Karma finally nullified.

Soon she reaches broken sidewalks and barren fields, then the Jewish cemetery on the left, the tombstones too modern to be truly interesting. The graves are blanketed with flowers, the colours muted enough by moonlight to be bearable. Hours ago the gates to Mt Royal Cemetery were bolted, but when the guard naps, the footpath beneath the arched stones allows admittance.

Just inside the Anglo burial grounds, she skirts by the monument to the Englishman killed by the French in a riot one hundred years ago, the inscription bitter. Then the suicides’ section of the cemetery -isolated crosses, separated from one another as they are separated from the rest of the graves - she knows she could end up here, or somewhere like it. Then the children’s graveyard - tiny sleeping angels, or baby lambs, nestled on low stone Bibles.

She climbs upwards, passes through an arched metal gate. Veterans lie beneath the soil. Rigid row upon row of standardised soldierly markers . . . To die undifferentiated, she can think of nothing more painful.

The moment she enters the Cimetière Notre-Dame des Neige, tension lifts from her body like a spirit ascending. Tombstones date back two hundred years. White, grey, patinaed with age. Celtic crosses. Crucifixes. Enormous angels, languid in mourning. Elaborate stone and metal-work, unique when created, nurtured by the harsh elements of a city prone to deep freeze. This is the only place where she feels truly French. Her ancestors knew how to care for those who sired them. Too few of the living have adopted their legacy: blooms decomposing; funereal candles flickering; poetic inscriptions, waiting. ‘Remember me, in your arms,’ she reads, her voice a call to other stranded souls.

So quiet, amongst the dead. The living talk, move, do what they do for whatever reasons they can convince themselves lend relevancy. Amulette feels their energy - waves of scorching heat, sucking her towards oblivion. Incinerate or flee, there is no alternative, she knows. Only Etienne. But he is . . . where? There are no maps in the land of the dead. And so she tends those she finds by night, because someone must, and she is called to. And somehow this allows her to honour him.

She stands silent, listening to crickets, absorbing the rays of the full moon, all the light she can tolerate. Here, on Montreal’s mountain, over seven hundred thousand dead exist in three adjoining cemeteries, creating a necropolis. Boxes of bones piled on newer boxes of bones, three and four layers deep, until the boxes burst open and the hungry earth swallows all that the worms refuse. During daylight, caretakers perpetually dig new graves. Pits, open for days, sometimes expose coffins, casket linings, hair and soil-matted death shrouds, human bones. Bits and pieces embroiled in transformation. Amulette climbs into the open graves to rebury these remains. The dirt, so deep, tastes of death-passion. She consumes it like vitamins, daily, an enrichment. Something to keep her going.

In the darkness, back against the hill, dozens of old tombs now abandoned by the living line the higher ground, embedded in this sacred earth like babes cradled in a mother’s arms. Ornate iron doors, the complex stonework of the crypts themselves, all buried in grassy mounds. Family names mark the houses of the long dead, but one reads, simply: FATHER. The gate surrounding this crypt has disintegrated. Last winter, the heavy stone cross above toppled and shattered, blocking entrance, or exit.

Much of the grille work of the doors of these crypts exposes to view the centuries-old coffins within. Large black or brown wood and metal chevrons, tarnished handles, and then the tiny boxes for dead babies, or those that were never born.

One tomb draws her. She wonders if Etienne is related - LEBLANC, the family name. He must be, somewhere back in time. Over the door, a dozen feet above ground, a bird, sculpted in dark marble, wings a shroud protecting its body.

Amulette climbs the mound to the top of the crypt. She lies face down, stretched across the earth, and reaches below, blind. Cold-feather wings; beak the hard harbinger of truth. As always, she cries chilly tears. For Etienne.

The soul can linger in grief, lost at the edge of the flesh, paralysed, unable to inhabit any world. The body’s instincts to survive barely suffice. The breath of life flows from the mouth in soft moans of lonely despair. Life becomes a stasis and death offers no emancipation.

Her tears wash the corbeau, bathing its head with holy water. She clutches its chest, where the heart is, wondering why Etienne abandoned her. She calls on all of the ancient deities to redeem her, but they are deaf.

The dead around her stir. Through the strength of immobility they perceive her anguish in a way the living should but refuse to. Her soul is forlorn, fragmented, the cohesive element lost. But unlike the bones she protects and reburies, no elemental will succour her. She has ceased trying to understand, and has given up imagining. There are no more gods to petition.

The heart of the bird begins to beat. Amulette feels it pulse through her being. Not hope but lack of hopelessness. For moments, what courses through her soothes like a salve to a wound. She breathes as though this is the first moment of life. Air fills her lungs and expands to each cell . . . This is the source she struggles to find. The living can no longer nourish her and she must eat of the dead.

The moon beats against her back until she craves more darkness. With an ancient key she found and kept, the door to this home of the dead opens. She re-enters the void.

The scent of corrosion. Air refusing to circulate the planet. Stillness bathed in black compresses her, forcing her to listen. Even the insects are silenced by the maelstrom of nothingness.

Is life its own end? Why must a heart be deflated to receive?

One casket lies apart from the others. Black. Simple. Silver etchings in the ebony, scrollwork she created. The hinged lid lifts easily. She is blind here, and wants it that way. But her flesh possesses eyes that let her remember:

His hair. His face. Lips as incapable of a smile as of a frown. Arms that once held her against the impacted ice that has become her prison, her friend.

Her body trembles, face to face with the shell of him. She screams, powerless to create miracles. The dead listen in sympathy, but they can do nothing.

She lies on top of him - what he hated - and adeptly turns them both so he is on top. The weight is not what it was, and this evokes in her grief. ‘Hold me!’ she pleads, but the arms do not move.

A cry of despair rips from her chest. He is nowhere. She cannot locate him, cannot join him. And she cannot exist without him. But she does exist, caught in a web of anguish. If only the angel of death would kiss her! She longs for an embrace that will extinguish .. . But that is not her fate.

Then, inexplicably, from this barren womb, an emergence. Beyond the senses, yet incorporating them, like a winged spirit, soaring. Her heart races. Her limbs quiver. She recognises the essence. Quickly it overwhelms her, entering her, forcing her to gasp, red oil sliding through her veins, saturating, soothing. Her chest expands, staked to the moment. Black blood oozes through its chambers, incense through a censer. She hears herself moan in disbelief, feels her lungs pant.

She tastes his lips on hers, feels his body pressing, heavier and heavier until his cells pierce hers. They merge. Her soul, raw, opens. What returns to her soothes her. Her tears blaze hot until finally, she is warm.

Sometimes the dead must be invited back. The darkness must be incorporated or life cannot continue. Sometimes the gods are merciful. Occasionally they hear us.