Page 78 of The Catacomb King
Why was I thinking of my mother asthe body?
There she was. Arranged like a board on the single cot. Josie had already cut her open, begun to extract the organs and preserve the corpse. It was amazing, that this face that still bore my mother’s features did not have my motherinit anymore. Where was my mother? Where could she have gone?
The body’s flesh was as gray as the shadows of the underworld. Grayer, because it wasn’t lit by bioluminescence or the glitter of jewels.
The eyes were open. Staring like the eyeballs of a fish.
Almost fascinated, I put my hand into my mother’s stomach cavity. I had spent the last few years — in a way, my whole life — trying to get as close to her as possible, and this, my hand in her dead body, was as close as anyone could ever be.
“Persephone,” Josie whispered from the doorway.
I startled. I withdrew my hand. When I looked around, I realized that something else was wrong with the room. Something was missing. Not just my mother’s heartbeat. Something else.
It was my bedroll.
It had used to be unrolled in front of the fireplace. Now it was gone. Someone had put it away.
They had not thought that I would be coming back.
Josephine Stammerer
Now that my mother was dead, there was nothing for me to do.
Calix, apologetically, left me with Josie. He had to write a letter to the Body in Corcagia telling them about my rescue. Josie, for her part, had to finish preparing my mother’s corpse for its funeral rites.
I, who had been so frenetically busy when my mother was alive, was now the only one without a job.
Tomorrow would be my mother’s funeral. Everybody would come. The farmhands who’d worked with her and my father. The merchants I’d bullied into giving me a bit of extra food for her. Everyone would want to jostle and stare at me — me, the only woman who’d ever been dragged to the underworld and brought back unharmed.
And then, after the funeral, everyone would go home. And everything would go back to normal.
Except for me. Because I had never known normal. My normal had been walking, in secret, to the mouth of the underworld. Heating edenica herbs over the fire. Force-feeding my mother. Reading to her from the farmhands’ booksafter my voice had long since fallen hoarse. Without my mother, mynormalwould mean spending every day cleaning the Stammerers’ house. The Stammerers weren’t moving to Corcagia anymore, because they didn’t have to worry about Josie getting kidnapped. The danger was past.
Even for me, it was past. The bad thing had already happened.
I ate dinner at the Stammerers’ house. The meal was potato stew and bread, prepared by Hattie, their cook, who had heretofore been my coworker. I ate four bowls of the soup and a full loaf of bread in under eight minutes. Mr. and Mrs. Stammerer watched me disapprovingly. I didn’t give a shit. My mother was dead and I’d almost starved.
“My compliments to the chef,” I said to Mr. Stammerer. Josie snorted. After that, her parents looked disapprovingly at her instead of me.
I slept in the Stammerers’ spare room that night. It was clean and appropriately furnished with a well-made pine end table and wardrobe. The bed was bound in white crisp sheets. If I had not spent two nights sleeping in the bed of the Prince of Darkness, I would have thought it downright luxurious. Now, all I could think was that it could really use a fireplace and a rug.
I could have slept in my own hut, but I couldn’t bear to sleep in the same room as my mother’s corpse. As I lay there, staring at Josie’s ceiling, I thought about how that meant I had abandoned my mother twice.
Josie knocked on the doorframe at dawn and walked in without waiting for me to answer. Classic rich girl.
She was holding a hamper. She looked down at me. I was sitting on the floor, pulling on a pair of boots. “Hi,” she said. “Are you okay?”
What a stupid question. I would never be okay again. “Yeah.”
“Are you… going somewhere?”
I looked down at the boots. I hadn’t really been paying attention to what I was doing. Now I realized that I’d automatically risen at dawn and started dressing for a walk to the underworld. “I guess not.”
“You can go out if you want to,” Josie said awkwardly. “No one’s keeping you here. I just, um.” She shifted. She placed the hamper on the white bed. She brought out a dress that I had seen on her many times: a sturdy black dress, knee-length, with a scooped neckline and long sleeves. “I thought you might want something to wear to the funeral.”
I stared at it. It was a lovely dress on plump, freckled Josie. It would make scrawny, blonde little me, on the other hand, look almost as corpselike as my mother. Possibly more so. At least my mother’s corpse had makeup on. “Um. That’s really sweet of you, but…”
Josie pinched her face up anxiously.
