The creased, yellow envelope arrived on the anniversary of Lilith’s death.
I took it to the rooftop; smelled the paper; studied the ruins of the terrace apothecary I’d left untended in hopes of her return. For death, in Lilith’s case, was a technicality. When one disappears for twelve years certain realities must be assumed.
The letter rattled when I tilted it, dusting my shoes with red silicon. And inside, on coffee-ringed parchment:
There are answers in New Mexico. Leave tonight.
It was signed by Harold Glanton, the PI I’d hired when the police had shown an ultimate lack of resolve. I hadn’t heard from him since I’d discontinued his salary four years ago. He was a poisonous drunk and no good with people. The message confused me. There was no number. Only an address, a date, a time. I looked at my watch and paled.
He had calculated my travel by roadway precisely.
I was suddenly curious.
Worse, I was afraid.
*
I entered a diner outside Albuquerque, the seats occupied by migrant workers and emaciated Pueblo Indians. They looked at my tailored suit as if it were a veil of living fungus.
“I didn’t think you’d come.”
I felt my mouth drop open. The robust, apish man I remembered had sickened. His bones looked as if they had digested the tissue. What remained in the booth seat was a skeleton with grayish stubble.
“So you’ve found something.” A confirmation, not a question.
“Sit down. Have a coffee.”
“Tell me why I'm here, Glanton.” I slammed the table. “Where is she?”
Two Pueblos rolled their yellow eyes in our direction.
Glanton locked my eyes. “You’re not going to like it.”
“Is she dead? Tell me she's not.” Bright pressure detonated behind my eyes. Anger. Sadness. I collapsed into the booth in a type of controlled fall. Slid his cup of water to my side of the table. Sipped. "Maybe it would be better if she is."
"We'll get to all that." Glanton scratched his neck, the sound like sandpaper. “But you still owe me back pay. Four years worth.”
In that moment I could have killed him. "You dragged me all the way down here to ask for money?"
"I dragged you down here cause I'm the best damn PI this side of the Rockies."
"You're a thief, Glanton. And a liar."
“A man providing services and a thief are very different things. Besides…” He ticked his yellow eye to the sprawling desert. “You’re rich.”
*
It took an hour to get the cash wired. When I got into the car and handed him the convenience store duffel, he didn't flush with relief, as I'd expected. His eyes went hollow, just stared at the steering wheel, grinding his hands. “It's not what you think."
"Extortion?" I looked at the bag. "It certainly looks that way."
"Lilith, I mean." Glanton's smile betrayed a state of mind beyond the soothing properties of wealth or progress. "What I’m going to show you is an abomination.”
I could smell the vodka on his breath. Understood he’d probably spent these last years pushing his liver past the brink of no return; and his mind behind it. "Get to the point, Glanton."
“I don’t want to show you. That's the funny thing.” He accelerated toward the Reservation, a sand-polished signpost urging us on the five or so miles up the road. “Lilith didn’t want to, either. It’s why she disappeared. The ladder changes people. There’s something in it. A frequency. The old Injun calls it The Song of Creation.”
My wife had taken up the study of Cynetics, or, sound frequencies and their effect on matter. It was her belief the ancients possessed a technology wholly based on the manipulation of sound; and that the imprint had been purposefully hidden from the world by archeologists for centuries.
“So this is where she came? To, what ... study it?”
“She was tipped,” Glanton corrected. “A man in the Smithsonian. Grecker.”
“Charles Grecker?” I remembered it from the news. “The Senior Archeologist who drove into the river?”
“The very same.” Glanton turned onto an old dirt road. “His brakes didn't fail. He was murdered. For telling your wife.”
“Murdered?” I thought of Lilith’s secrecy in the months preceding her disappearance. The late hours on the rooftop terrace. Her midnight vigils, scanning the long drive of our estate. The whispered phone calls. I had thought she was having an affair, that an unknown lover, understanding she could never be his, had met for one last violent tryst. “Have you seen her?”
Glanton looked like he might weep. He set his jaw and nodded.
“How is she?”
He turned onto another road. The sunset was a wound of crimson light, red rocks and white sands spilling across the earth in frozen oceans. Far ahead was an ancient Pueblo of two story buildings, carved into the side of a dark orange cliff. “You’ll see soon enough.”
I didn’t like the way he said it.
But I followed into the Indian village all the same.
*
The Old Injun wore Levis and a Pink Floyd T-shirt with moth holes around the collar. His neck was waddled like a lizard, his eyes pale gray and piercing. “You're her husband?”
“I am. Where is she?”
He smiled. “She lives between the folds.”
I looked at Glanton. “What the hell does that mean?”
“This place is not real.” The old man grinned and patted the adobe wall. “None of it is real. There are other places. More real. Deeper. Full of ghosts.
"Ghosts?" I looked at Glanton, but he was looking down. "You said you'd seen her. What is this? Where the HELL is she?"
Then the Old Injun began to laugh. "She is not she any longer. She is many. Between the folds."
My veins filled with fire. I could feel my heart melting against my ribs. “Bastard!”
I had my hands around his neck before I could stop myself. There was a scuffle, a break, and then blackness. I drifted in a world of echoes and shattered images. Lilith's face, her laugh, her expectant pout when I rose my voice in petulance against her obsessions. Long nights and longer nightmares in which I chased her voice down a labyrinth of black stone.
I was vaguely aware of curling in the backseat of a pick up, of parking in the desert wastes before a structure that stood alone.
“Is he ready?” The Old Injun asked Glanton, who nodded and led me to the roof.
*
The Ladder was carved of pale stone. Monolithic in size, but still totally invisible from the ground. It stretched from the roof of the building for what seemed like miles, wavering before us like a hologram. “Why is it pulsing like that?”
“Your wife’s machine found its frequency.” Glanton was sweating, wouldn’t look directly at it. “The vibration makes it solid. Watch.”
He clicked a toggle off, then on again.
The ladder snapped out of focus, before shivering back into shape.
Something primal overcame me. I felt drawn to it, to her. I smelled her perfume, her sweat, felt the ghost of her hands around my collar.
“Lilith!” I gripped the hot stone. “Are you in there?”
I felt hands snatching for my feet, frightened shouts from below. And then I was climbing, faintly aware of Glanton screaming, and the Old Injun singing prayers.
*
The Ladder now sits on my rooftop in Virginia Beach. It
was expensive to transport, but money no longer means what it used to.
I seldom leave the terrace. Most nights I sleep in the gentle hum of its
vibration. I dream of Lilith, surrounded by Gods, calling me to join her in the
paradise lost from humanity. And so I sit. And sleep. And build my strength.
For the climb.
[AUTHOR NOTE: So, I received 3 points in the first round of the NYC MIDNIGHT flash fiction challenge, which is good, I suppose, considering many people didn't score any points. I do not expect the judges to laud my exceptional creativity *coughs humbly*. The GHOST STORY can be beautiful and creative and terrifying, but I wanted to do something besides the articulation of disembodied voices moaning through castle halls. The prompt was thus: GENRE: Ghost story; LOCATION: A rooftop terrace; PROMPT: A ladder. Enjoy.]
I love this story.
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