The Gate Keeper, The Soul Reaper, and the Lost Soul (story fragment)
The Gate Keeper,
Soul Reaper, and the Lost Soul
Judith sat at the end of a low, yellow table surrounded by the faces of her kindergarten class. The children’s faces were blurred, as if they were behind a steamed up glass, but she could tell they were wearing smiles and pointed birthday hats. There was a black child who made a darker blur than the others, her hair was braided in two large chunks, one on each side of her head. The black girl was a little older than the other kids, five years older to be exact, she was Judith’s sister, Edith, and a very bad singer. Judith could hear her voice above all the off pitched shouting of her peers, Edith’s deep, manly singing filled up all the space in Judith’s ears. Then she was laughing and blowing out the candles on her Cowgirl cake. Whooooooooosh!
Then she was crying. Judith looked down at her father, he was dressed in a suit for the first time in his life because…like the Caretaker said: “don’t make no sense to bury’em in a tee shirt and jeans.” Whoooooosh..
Then Judith closed her eyes, that seemed to make things a little normaler, and the car stopped spinning because they had finally hit the water. The cab was still air tight, not a glass surface broken. Judtih’s sinuses felt stuffed up and her ears popped from the sudden change in pressure. Then she felt a jetting of water from somewhere, like a paint ball, it hit hard, directly at the back of her head, like someone had just splashed her with a water hose. Her eyes were still closed, which made her feel less disorientated, as she felt quietly for the door. Why quietly? Judith couldn’t answer because she wasn’t alone in that car. Her mother had to be floating next to her, pinned behind the steering wheel and Edith was lying sideways in the back, but Judith didn’t talk to them because it didn’t feel like they were really there at all. It seemed to Judith they had gone and left her all alone in that drowning gray Corolla.
Judith’s fingers submerged in water, but she didn’t notice it because her hand was grasping the handle of the door and pulling. She was confronted by a double clicking sound that made her drawback, frightened. It was locked. Her left hand held on tight to the cross strap of her seat belt, where it had been from the moment they’d hit the barrier of the Skyline bridge, while her right hand splashed around the door again, feeling the door: its window, then lower on the arm rest and on that, she remembered, the layout of a switch panel of controls and one of those four switches made the window go down. Judith groped until the water covered her nose, then she received a shot of adrenaline from her body which was maddening. It made her heart skip wildly out of rhythm and interfered with the functioning of her brain. All ability and capacity for reason was gone. Like a trapped animal she lunged for a surface that did not exist anywhere except her diminished mind. Instinctively…frantically, she tried to push herself up, forgetting that she was buckled into her seat. She had always been short legged and was able, even from sitting, to get her feet underneath her from a sitting position.
Judith forced her knees to unfold, achingly, she felt the strap across her shoulders dig into her neck, but she did not know what could be done about that. Just like a dog doesn‘t know what to do if you put a bag over his head, or a baby trying to force a square peg into a round hole. She simply tried harder, which made her feel like she was pedaling a bicycle wheel against the brake. Even so, she stretched and pushed until, incredibly, she was so close to the hard roof of the gray Corolla that she could press her hands against it. The heavy metal roof pressed back against her soft, flesh hands until Judith’s fingernails snapped backward and her finger joints buckled forward. She had enough strength to break her hands, but not enough to claw her way through the roof of a car. In the end, as the water level kept rising, Judith’s lips puckered out and pressed up in a kiss to suck a last gasp of air, but instead of drawing air she drew water, cool, salty, Serenata Bay water. Then Judith A. Nothing drowned. Whooooooooooooosh!
The color of daylight was so crisp, so unpolluted, so pre-naturedly new that Judith thought she was seeing colors for the first time. Staring up at the apple tree, heavy with golden delicious apples, deep red apples, great green apples, and--something she had never seen before--bright blue apples, Judith gasped, thirstily sucking in the full, new atmosphere. Her rib cage expanded as her lungs filled tightly, and for two cycles of breathing Judith’s chest rose and fell slowly, surely, safely. Only then did she realized there was no longer a need to gasp for air, it was all around her and sweetened so much with fruity smells she could almost taste the apples hanging above.
“Then you left the living world, Earth, and came here, where you will begin anew. Any questions?” said a stiff voice from not very far off.
Startled, Judith sat straight up and stared with her back against the smooth bark of the varicolored apple tree. She was sitting in the midst of what seemed to be a garden. She knew it was not an American garden because the grass looked like it hadn’t been cut in ages and there weren’t any sharp rows of tomatoes, basil, beans, or lettuce heads. But then she knew it wasn’t an English garden either because it wasn‘t artificially messy, there wasn’t an old wooden fence limping around a square, there weren’t masses of rosebushes and arched alleys or tablet stepping stones.
Judith concluded that it wasn’t an earthly garden at all, instead it seemed as if the plants and tree themselves had come together in a natural community way.
But that’s impossible. Judith told herself, dismissively. And yet…
Little rivulets of sparkling blue water threaded everywhere and crackled with tiny silver fish. Stacks of woven baskets stacked stood as tall as four feet, holding ten baskets, and they too were thickly scattered around. The ground was green where it was grassy and red where it was bare. In the rare space of this close orchard, where there was room to fit a tidy little tomato patch, there were squares--walled off with salmon colored smooth stones--of bright green asparagus looking shoots with violet tipped ends. Judith crossed her legs and stared over this paradise, completely forgetting that she was not in fact alone it. That a voice had spoken, quite clear and near where she was sitting, gawking.
“Ms. Nothing? Have you forgotten again what happened. Must we recite it once more, I’m sure you don’t want to relive that horrible ending. Deaths are rarely pleasant, although I‘ve known some you might think were at least, gentle.” said the starched voice.
Once again Judith swung her head around both her shoulders, but the garden was still. Too still, Judith thought. Then Judith noticed with a fright that she couldn’t hear the water trickling close by. She didn’t hear the distant chirruping of birds or the staccato buzzing of insects, or the wind. She touched her ears, inspecting them for any malformation, but they were fully formed human ears. And then to her distinct relief she heard that stiff voice once more.
“Are you listening again?” the voice cracking like a dead stick.
Judith swung around, but there was only the orchard of trees and the sparkling water and the squares of vegetable something-plots and the towers of baskets and…oh! Far, far away through the sparse treetops she could see a mountainside covered in a rainbows of flowers.
“Where are you?” asked Judith, twisting her mouth to the side nervously.
“Oh, dear, I’m still in my eclectic. Just a moment.” said the voice, annoyed with itself.
Judith asked herself aloud: what is an eclectic?
Then instantly, her attention was drawn to a spot not two inches from her nose. She stared at a tiny thing hovering in the air, it was like a spinning spec of pepper slowly growing larger and spinning faster and moving farther away as it did. When it was the size of a volleyball it was hovering just two feet off the ground and five feet away from Judith’s body. She could see that it was not the color of pepper now, but had a dab of white around the edge, a splash of blue on the inside, and a strip of red spiraling near the middle.
As Judith watched, entranced, she was startled again by the sudden appearance of a long, warped, face within the spinning colors. A face that developed garbled eyes and contorted lips, its expression dizzily spinning. A strip of what must be red hair, as well as a pair of black boots, which Judith feared might fly off at any moment, and a pair of white gloved hands became waspishly apparent too. Then spinning on the edges was a blue knit sweater that rippled from the motion. The spiraling thing had grown from the size of a spec of pepper to the size of an average woman who was curled up like a cinnamon bun and spun in midair.
Completely formed, the acrobatic woman suddenly stopped spinning with a jerk and as Judith feared one of the boots went flying off and splashed half in, half out of a small rivulet.
“I’m a jerk in a skirt.” said the woman, now standing up right and smoothing out her clothes. She looked forty-something with a silver halo crowning her very red hair, she wore a blue knit sweater over a white collared shirt, a black button down coat, a pleated black skirt and one black pointy heeled boot.
Judith got the idea from her style of dress, tone of voice and the way she made up a silly rhyme at a time when most other people her age would spew curses, that the woman was probably a school teacher. Judith’s eyes, now wide as goggles, stuck to the woman who had just unraveled out of thin air. That alone was enough to arrest Judith’s attention, but there was something else…the woman seemed very familiar, every motion and quality was strangely not human and almost ridiculous. Like the color of her hair which was not the color red that grows out of a human scalp, but the color red that beautifies a rose. And her skin had a faint glow, like the lightning bugs at night. And she had a voice that sounded…recorded.
Now satisfied that the pleats in her skirt were perfectly straight and not gapped or crooked, the red headed woman looked over at her boot, flooded with water. She raised her left hand and pointed a perfectly straight finger at the boot. Which was a remarkable thing to Judith because the finger was tiny and smooth with no joints or wrinkles. But before Judith had a chance to process the strangeness of a jointless finger, something even stranger occurred. The boot floated upward until it was about four feet high, turned upside down and dumped out a stream of water, then bobbed toward the woman until it was in her hand.
“Wow.” said Judith. She couldn’t think to say anything else at first, and then she wondered aloud. “How’d you do that?” Because when something that odd happens, even if you are thirteen and you do sort of believe in ghosts, goblins, witches and every order of magic, you don’t really believe in it enough to call someone a witch to their face, or even suggest such a thing as a matter of course to yourself. No one believes it that much except for toddlers, who also think their parents are gone forever when they leave the room.
The woman smiled, shaking her boot. “What’s the point of explaining things that will only serve to confuse you. We must look forward before we can look back, I say. But if you are patient, your curiosity will rewarded. The first thing we must do is put your memory back together. It exploded when you died and all those little pieces of “what’s happened,” are floating around in the empty space of your mind. Now, do you remember anything that we’ve gone over so far?” asked the inhumanly red-headed woman.
“I don’t know.” said Judith, twisting her mouth to one side and looking up at the apples. “Why am I not hungry when I feel like I haven’t eaten for ages.” She thought aloud.
“What you are feeling is a phantom desire. Imagine, if you had mangled your arm in a terrible accident and a surgeon had to remove that arm from your shoulder. Even though your arm was gone you would feel the pain as if it was there and the nurses would place a pillow under your shoulder to support that missing arm, as if were there. You no longer require food. But you remember that you used to.” said the woman, now pulling on the boot, she shook her foot after she got it on as if her toes were squishing uncomfortably from the wetness. “Our memories can be very powerful. Until you get used to this new state of being you will feel many phantom desires. For instance, right now you are breathing when there is no air here.”
Judith gasped, then let out an awestruck sigh. She closed her eyes, and like a flash pieces of her memory began to come together out of the darkness of her mind. She opened them again.
Then in a dreary voice she proclaimed: I’m dead.
“Yes you are.” said the woman, standing up straight and tall, with her feet perfectly together now, wet boot or no.
Judith closed her eyes again. More fragments of her memory were coming out of the darkness, flying upside down and building additions to a puzzle in her mind, a puzzle that would expand outward to the far reaches of her understanding. Then she experienced another revelation.
“How long have I been here?”
The woman shook her head. “There is no answer about time that would satisfy your way of thinking right now. But in general, you’ve just arrived.”
“Where have I just arrived,” said Judith, then leaning forward she whispered. “Is this heaven?”
The woman’s face lightened and she released a bright summery laughter that reminded Judith of the clown in Creston Park who sold helium filled balloons. That laughter reminded her of something else too, something she couldn’t remember yet.
“O dear no, and there is no need to whisper. You don’t really have a voice. There is no need for one because nothing here really hears. Can you tell me what my name is?” said the woman, raising a very arch, very red eyebrow. She looked expectant and authoritative all at once. Judith nibbled her bottom lip, afraid of giving the wrong answer.
“Close your eyes.” said the woman, stiffly.
Judith closed her eyes. Then she saw it again, the puzzle in her mind growing larger, pieces of clicked together promisingly. “Um…..” she waited in the dark. There were odd things that seemed to have nothing to do with one another flying into place, pieces set at odd ends bouncing off each other, rebounding deep into the darkness. Then new things that seemed to come out of the great “nothing” of her mind, fit together and the puzzle widened once more. She opened her eyes.
“You are the Gate Keeper.” she said suddenly. It took such an effort that Judith couldn’t help but be proud of herself. A cautious smile crept across her lips, then quickly melted away. It seemed that happiness was also a phantom, in this new world.
“Correct.” said the Gate Keeper, flipping a wave of red hair off her right shoulder, then the left.
“I am the Gate Keeper,” she repeated. “You are in the Gateway of your old world, Earth. Am I from Earth?” her clear gray eyes looked expectantly again.
Judith closed her eyes, upon opening them she answered crisply: no, you are from Nonac. That world is not in the Milky Way Galaxy.”
“Correct!” said the Gate Keeper, smiling broader. Then she came closer to Judith, her boots floating only inches above the ground. Judith shook with a start. Another piece of the puzzle in her mind had come together. She remembered.
“Why…you‘re Mrs. Maven, from Mrs. Maven‘s Mysterious Classroom.” she shouted, and since the Gate Keeper had said that nothing in the gateway could hear, Judith shouted as loud and enthusiastically as she cared to. “But she’s just a cartoon!”
“Correct. I am a cartoon, I’m a cartoon because while searching your memory I found that the only unspoiled and positive relations in your life were cartoons. You see, if I appeared to you in other ways there was a chance I could seriously upset you, thereby tearing the delicate fabric of your mind. Cartoons never hurt or disappointed or frightened you. I would have appeared as a butterfly if you weren’t afraid of their insect legs. Or a dog, if you hadn’t been bitten by that mutt as a child.
“Are you saying you can appear as anything?” asked Judith, with just a faint feeling of phantom intrigue.
“Yes, you remember, don’t you.” said the Gate Keeper.
Judith closed her eyes. Suddenly her face fell with a light, gentle sorrow.
“You first appeared as my father.” she murmured.
“Correct. But that frightened you, although it was one of your longest longings I came across while sifting through your memories.”
Then something occurred to Judith, something wonderful and frightening, because she wasn’t certain she wanted to know the answer.
“Where is my family? My father, mother, and Edith? Are they here in the Gateway too?” she asked, her dark brown eyes widening with real fear. Fear, at least, was not a phantom feeling.
The Gate Keeper turned and began to hover slowly away. “Follow me.” she said. Judith did not require an invitation, she had jumped to her feet immediately and was walking, or trying to walk, to keep up. Walking was difficult because she had forgotten exactly how to do it and was remembering each step along the way. It seemed to Judith that her muscles remembered things even slower than her mind. Awkwardly, but determined, she stumbled along in the serene paradise. Not noticing how suddenly the sky turned perfectly pink and the air was lighter, almost unapparent.
“Your world is a bad world. For you to understand why it is so bad, you have to understand The Harvest.” said the Gate Keeper. They were walking out of the orchard now, and gradually climbing a hill. Their progress was slow, but soon enough Judith could see over the crest of the hill, up to a grand white house with a long porch and white columns. It reminded Judith of a southern plantation house, which by association reminded her of slaves. Being black herself, the thought of slavery used to send a shiver down Judith’s spine. But here in the Gate way she did not shiver about that. She was free not to shiver or worry about those sorts of things, at least. They were like arguments about things that no longer made sense. Like when scientists argued over whether Earth was flat or round.
“In general,” the Gate Keeper continued, “when a spirit dies inside of a world it is taken out. It checks in at the gateway to receive, as you are receiving, an orientation.” They entered a vineyard, which Judith was not able to see coming up the hill. Judith admired the grapes and wished she was hungry. But all she had was her phantom hunger and that was not enough to make her bend down and pull a hand full of the juiciest grapes she had ever seen.
“At the end of your orientation you ascend.” said the Gate keeper. Judith gasped excitedly, then the Gate keeper added, “not to heaven, but to the next world.” Judith exhaled, her shoulders slumped. Her fascination with heaven and her longing to go there was as frightening and tormenting as her longing to be reunited with her family.
“you might understand getting into heaven better if I compared it to gaining admission to one your grandest colleges. Say, Harvard. You’ve heard of Harvard, haven’t you?”
Judith cocked her eyebrows as if to say, “who hasn’t?” Forgetting for the moment that she was talking to a spirit from a world beyond her own galaxy and nothing about her world was really that important, not even Harvard.
“Well, getting into heaven is like getting into Harvard, except it doesn’t matter who your father knows or how much money you have. Admissions are judged purely on merit and achievement. It takes many exalted lives to get into heaven. Many.” said the woman, and Judith thought she heard the slightest pang of sorrow in the Gate Keeper’s voice when she emphasized that last word, many.
“That is the rule in general, for most worlds, no matter what happens the spirit moves on to the next world and the next life. What makes your world a bad one is that the evil spirits are recycled there. Can you imagine, living in a world where there is far more evil than good coming into it? Not very appetizing, is it? Of course, no one is really born good anyway, but still. That’s like Harvard accepting more Harvard drop-outs than student’s right out of high school. Down right depressing.” said the Gate Keeper. They had walked far, but Judith didn’t feel tired. In fact, she was surprised to see when she looked up that they were almost to the house. They were just entering the close cut grass in front of it. Then something occurred to Judith.
“Did you move it closer? I mean the house.” she said, with an uneasy look.
“Bravo! You are truly coming along. Of course I did. But don’t look so sad about it, I had put it too faraway in the first place, only I didn’t realize until we set out.” said the Gate Keeper. Judith still looked unsettled by this news. It seemed that she was in a place that was not truly a place, but someone else’s playground.
“The good news is that you are not going back to Earth.” said the Gate Keeper, emphasizing her disgust with the sort of contorted grimace that only a cartoon can make. They walked up the four steps onto the porch of the manor house. The screen door was shut, but behind it the front door was swung open and Judith was startled to see a little girl with blonde curls and piercing blue eyes staring at them from the shady interior.
“Who’s that?” Judith asked, a little frightened. She’d thought she and the Gate Keeper were alone in the gateway.
“Do you think only one person comes here at a time?” said the Gate Keeper, sounding faintly annoyed. “People are dying every second. This little girl arrived before you and she is waiting on her mother.”
Judith’s mouth dropped open to say something, but the Gate Keeper peremptorily waved a finger back and forth.
“She’s an exception, not the rule.” Judith looked frightened, but listened. “Because she died very young and has lived a fair number of exalted lives and I must add, so has her mother, they will be reunited. You my dear, unfortunately, are only on your first life.” The Gate Keeper reached for the handle, though she didn’t have to and the door swung open. It seemed to Judith that the Gate Keeper was trying to remember to do things in the ordinary way, to escape confusion and being peppered with questions about minutia, little things that really didn’t matter. The Gate Keeper, it seemed, was responsible for making sure everyone understood the bigger things, which mattered a great deal.
The little girl immediately hugged the Gate Keeper. She seemed frightened and warbled, “I want my mommy.”
“Soon.” said the Gate Keeper, gently moving her aside. The house was enormous but very empty, as if someone had just moved out of it and forgotten a few things. The first room, which was big and square only contained a single green couch. No paintings. Bare windows. Not even a foot stool. The little blonde girl ran to the couch, which sat in front of a large window facing the vineyard. Judith assumed she was sitting there as they walked up, looking out for her mother. Judith watched the little girl, frowning and sucking her thumb, worriedly.
“Your mother and sister have moved on to other worlds.” said the Gate Keeper. Then she added, stonily, “only your father remains.”
Judith gasped, she was suddenly aware that she didn’t really have a heart because she only felt a phantom heart skip and then there was nothing. “How can that be!” she shouted. “He died so many years ago.”
“I told you,” said the Gate Keeper, in a new, slightly less patient mood. “That time does not exist here in the way you have always thought of it. The only thing of significance is that he came before you and that he remains, but not for long. He is leaving soon.”
“Good, I will go with him. Somehow, we will find Edith and mama later.” said Judith, turning to leave out of the door, although she had no idea where to go. Her only thought was of finding her father and she knew he could not be in that cold, empty house.
“You can’t go with him, Judith. He is being taken by the Soul Reaper.” said the Gate Keeper, icily, twisting a joint-less finger around a lock of rose red hair.
“Who is the Soul Reaper?” asked Judith, more frightened than she could ever be when she was alive because there was no wasting of fear to make her heart-skip, or her stomach spew acid, or her skin curdle with goose bumps, or her muscles tighten. None of the fear was wasted to do those things anymore, it all simply curled around her mind, her awareness, her spirit…and squeezed like a vile constrictor.
“The Soul Reaper is death. Not the death of life, but spirit death. Spirits do die when there is a need.”
“What do you mean a need?” frowned Judith, she suddenly felt vaguely angry and careless, capable of every manner of torture and violence. She frowned in a nonchalant way, while deep inside she could feel the real anger groggily awakening.
The Gate Keeper put her hands on her hips and looked down on Judith, admonishingly. As if she had read her mind and did not approve at all of what she had been thinking. “Less you forget, I only appear in this way because it is the least confusing and most accepting to you. This is not my true form. I can be as pleasing….or as frightening, as need be.”
Judith took a step forward and put her hands on her hips, then looked up. In that empty room, except for the little blonde girl sitting on the green couch, nervously thumb-sucking, there was nothing. Only a bubbling conflict between two spirits….which could be a very volatile and dangerous thing in the gateway.
“Did you think that everything would be like the scrolls of your world said it would be, pretty and tied up with a bow. There are things that none of us will ever understand.”
“God…” Judith began angrily, this time with real anger that balled her fists.
“God is in heaven! The rest of us are locked out because we aren’t good enough. We’re floating out here in the universe among the stars. Stars that are not just bright, but unstable. They are the true rulers of the universe. Stars. On earth, you humans look up at them, admire and write poetry about them, hang your wishes on them like they are some distant lover. These monsters! These twinkling terrors are each an abomination of the universe. They eat us. Spirits. If we didn’t feed them they would turn into black holes that can devour the entire universe. Can you imagine, one star devouring a universe that is constantly expanding! But that is what would happen.”
“What did my father ever do!” shouted Judith, unswerving in her sole purpose for being. “Who decided it was his time to die.”
“There you go again about time! Time doesn’t exist, and to answer your question, no one decides. We, none of us, is God. God is in heaven. We are simply loiterers in the universe. We let fate decide. It wasn’t your dad’s turn. No one has a turn. It was his fate.”
Judith did not understand and she was beginning to believe that the Gate Keeper would never be able to maker her understand why her father had to die.
“The Soul Reaper has a token. He flips it each time a person dies on your Earth. Of course, the token is two faced. It has a good side and a bad side. Your father got the bad side. So the Soul Reaper took him. We chose to take sacrifices from Earth because it is a bad world, a world where evil spirits are recycled. We thought we would be doing the humans there a favor.” said the Gate Keeper, she was losing her cartoon glow more and more. She was slowly becoming more human looking.
Judith thought of something that made her head drop. Then in quite a different mood she asked, “Was my father an evil soul?”
The Gate Keeper looked surprised. “Of course, not. Why would you think that.”
Judith’s eyes widened as far as humanly possible, and in the Gate Way they continued to widen until they were quite cartoonish.
“Are you telling me you kill good spirits too!” she shouted in a rage that even made the little blonde girl turn and drop her thumb.
“Did you expect us to choose good over evil? We are not God. We are only…”
“You‘re all crazy!” screamed Judith, outraged and growing angrier every moment. “God would never want this.”
The Gate Keeper rolled her eyes. “How do you know what God wants.” she drawled. “You’re only on your first life.”
“I know he wouldn’t want his good souls being eaten by an abominable star!” Judith folded her arms across her chest. “Where is my father.” The Gate Keeper suddenly stopped hovering. She was just a forty-something looking woman with ashy, now human red hair. And her clothes were even more wrinkled than before. And her wet boot smelled fishy.
“What are you doing?” said the Gate Keeper suddenly. “How did…..”
Judith suddenly dropped her arms and clapped her hands to her face in fear. The Gate Keeper’s head was shrinking.
“You’re only on your first life. You can’t do anything. You’re just a measly…” but even as she spoke, she was growing smaller, and smaller. Judith stepped back, astonished. Frightened that she could be doing something without being aware she was doing anything. And if she did not stop shrinking the Gate Keeper, the woman would shortly be the size of a spec of pepper again and then….
But what did that matter, Judith thought, the Gate Keeper wasn’t really a woman at all.
“What do you want? I can’t take you to the Soul Reaper, I don‘t know where he is.” said the Gate Keeper in a voice that was whinnying out of existence, just like her body.
“You have to stop. You don’t know what you’re doing. You know what you saw, not what is real.” said the Gate Keeper.
“I don’t know how I started in the first place so how can I stop.” shouted Judith, her body shaking all over with anger, then she noticed the spinning, shrinking, squeaking Gate Keeper was growing smaller even faster now.
“Its your anger,” said the Gate Keeper, “you must have…somehow…retained some of that energy of life. Your emotions are coming back, you‘re feeling again.” she sounded doubtful, but still frantic. In short, she wasn’t really sure if what she was saying were true or not, but at that moment it was better to try something implausible than nothing at all.
“I can’t help it. What’s worse I can’t control it.” Judith was shaking and thinking out loud. “Make me happy. Tell me something that won’t make me so furious. Quickly!” shouted Judith. And she meant quick, the Gate Keeper was almost out of sight.
“Your father can be saved!” the Gate Keeper squeaked.
Soul Reaper, and the Lost Soul
Judith sat at the end of a low, yellow table surrounded by the faces of her kindergarten class. The children’s faces were blurred, as if they were behind a steamed up glass, but she could tell they were wearing smiles and pointed birthday hats. There was a black child who made a darker blur than the others, her hair was braided in two large chunks, one on each side of her head. The black girl was a little older than the other kids, five years older to be exact, she was Judith’s sister, Edith, and a very bad singer. Judith could hear her voice above all the off pitched shouting of her peers, Edith’s deep, manly singing filled up all the space in Judith’s ears. Then she was laughing and blowing out the candles on her Cowgirl cake. Whooooooooosh!
Then she was crying. Judith looked down at her father, he was dressed in a suit for the first time in his life because…like the Caretaker said: “don’t make no sense to bury’em in a tee shirt and jeans.” Whoooooosh..
Then Judith closed her eyes, that seemed to make things a little normaler, and the car stopped spinning because they had finally hit the water. The cab was still air tight, not a glass surface broken. Judtih’s sinuses felt stuffed up and her ears popped from the sudden change in pressure. Then she felt a jetting of water from somewhere, like a paint ball, it hit hard, directly at the back of her head, like someone had just splashed her with a water hose. Her eyes were still closed, which made her feel less disorientated, as she felt quietly for the door. Why quietly? Judith couldn’t answer because she wasn’t alone in that car. Her mother had to be floating next to her, pinned behind the steering wheel and Edith was lying sideways in the back, but Judith didn’t talk to them because it didn’t feel like they were really there at all. It seemed to Judith they had gone and left her all alone in that drowning gray Corolla.
Judith’s fingers submerged in water, but she didn’t notice it because her hand was grasping the handle of the door and pulling. She was confronted by a double clicking sound that made her drawback, frightened. It was locked. Her left hand held on tight to the cross strap of her seat belt, where it had been from the moment they’d hit the barrier of the Skyline bridge, while her right hand splashed around the door again, feeling the door: its window, then lower on the arm rest and on that, she remembered, the layout of a switch panel of controls and one of those four switches made the window go down. Judith groped until the water covered her nose, then she received a shot of adrenaline from her body which was maddening. It made her heart skip wildly out of rhythm and interfered with the functioning of her brain. All ability and capacity for reason was gone. Like a trapped animal she lunged for a surface that did not exist anywhere except her diminished mind. Instinctively…frantically, she tried to push herself up, forgetting that she was buckled into her seat. She had always been short legged and was able, even from sitting, to get her feet underneath her from a sitting position.
Judith forced her knees to unfold, achingly, she felt the strap across her shoulders dig into her neck, but she did not know what could be done about that. Just like a dog doesn‘t know what to do if you put a bag over his head, or a baby trying to force a square peg into a round hole. She simply tried harder, which made her feel like she was pedaling a bicycle wheel against the brake. Even so, she stretched and pushed until, incredibly, she was so close to the hard roof of the gray Corolla that she could press her hands against it. The heavy metal roof pressed back against her soft, flesh hands until Judith’s fingernails snapped backward and her finger joints buckled forward. She had enough strength to break her hands, but not enough to claw her way through the roof of a car. In the end, as the water level kept rising, Judith’s lips puckered out and pressed up in a kiss to suck a last gasp of air, but instead of drawing air she drew water, cool, salty, Serenata Bay water. Then Judith A. Nothing drowned. Whooooooooooooosh!
The color of daylight was so crisp, so unpolluted, so pre-naturedly new that Judith thought she was seeing colors for the first time. Staring up at the apple tree, heavy with golden delicious apples, deep red apples, great green apples, and--something she had never seen before--bright blue apples, Judith gasped, thirstily sucking in the full, new atmosphere. Her rib cage expanded as her lungs filled tightly, and for two cycles of breathing Judith’s chest rose and fell slowly, surely, safely. Only then did she realized there was no longer a need to gasp for air, it was all around her and sweetened so much with fruity smells she could almost taste the apples hanging above.
“Then you left the living world, Earth, and came here, where you will begin anew. Any questions?” said a stiff voice from not very far off.
Startled, Judith sat straight up and stared with her back against the smooth bark of the varicolored apple tree. She was sitting in the midst of what seemed to be a garden. She knew it was not an American garden because the grass looked like it hadn’t been cut in ages and there weren’t any sharp rows of tomatoes, basil, beans, or lettuce heads. But then she knew it wasn’t an English garden either because it wasn‘t artificially messy, there wasn’t an old wooden fence limping around a square, there weren’t masses of rosebushes and arched alleys or tablet stepping stones.
Judith concluded that it wasn’t an earthly garden at all, instead it seemed as if the plants and tree themselves had come together in a natural community way.
But that’s impossible. Judith told herself, dismissively. And yet…
Little rivulets of sparkling blue water threaded everywhere and crackled with tiny silver fish. Stacks of woven baskets stacked stood as tall as four feet, holding ten baskets, and they too were thickly scattered around. The ground was green where it was grassy and red where it was bare. In the rare space of this close orchard, where there was room to fit a tidy little tomato patch, there were squares--walled off with salmon colored smooth stones--of bright green asparagus looking shoots with violet tipped ends. Judith crossed her legs and stared over this paradise, completely forgetting that she was not in fact alone it. That a voice had spoken, quite clear and near where she was sitting, gawking.
“Ms. Nothing? Have you forgotten again what happened. Must we recite it once more, I’m sure you don’t want to relive that horrible ending. Deaths are rarely pleasant, although I‘ve known some you might think were at least, gentle.” said the starched voice.
Once again Judith swung her head around both her shoulders, but the garden was still. Too still, Judith thought. Then Judith noticed with a fright that she couldn’t hear the water trickling close by. She didn’t hear the distant chirruping of birds or the staccato buzzing of insects, or the wind. She touched her ears, inspecting them for any malformation, but they were fully formed human ears. And then to her distinct relief she heard that stiff voice once more.
“Are you listening again?” the voice cracking like a dead stick.
Judith swung around, but there was only the orchard of trees and the sparkling water and the squares of vegetable something-plots and the towers of baskets and…oh! Far, far away through the sparse treetops she could see a mountainside covered in a rainbows of flowers.
“Where are you?” asked Judith, twisting her mouth to the side nervously.
“Oh, dear, I’m still in my eclectic. Just a moment.” said the voice, annoyed with itself.
Judith asked herself aloud: what is an eclectic?
Then instantly, her attention was drawn to a spot not two inches from her nose. She stared at a tiny thing hovering in the air, it was like a spinning spec of pepper slowly growing larger and spinning faster and moving farther away as it did. When it was the size of a volleyball it was hovering just two feet off the ground and five feet away from Judith’s body. She could see that it was not the color of pepper now, but had a dab of white around the edge, a splash of blue on the inside, and a strip of red spiraling near the middle.
As Judith watched, entranced, she was startled again by the sudden appearance of a long, warped, face within the spinning colors. A face that developed garbled eyes and contorted lips, its expression dizzily spinning. A strip of what must be red hair, as well as a pair of black boots, which Judith feared might fly off at any moment, and a pair of white gloved hands became waspishly apparent too. Then spinning on the edges was a blue knit sweater that rippled from the motion. The spiraling thing had grown from the size of a spec of pepper to the size of an average woman who was curled up like a cinnamon bun and spun in midair.
Completely formed, the acrobatic woman suddenly stopped spinning with a jerk and as Judith feared one of the boots went flying off and splashed half in, half out of a small rivulet.
“I’m a jerk in a skirt.” said the woman, now standing up right and smoothing out her clothes. She looked forty-something with a silver halo crowning her very red hair, she wore a blue knit sweater over a white collared shirt, a black button down coat, a pleated black skirt and one black pointy heeled boot.
Judith got the idea from her style of dress, tone of voice and the way she made up a silly rhyme at a time when most other people her age would spew curses, that the woman was probably a school teacher. Judith’s eyes, now wide as goggles, stuck to the woman who had just unraveled out of thin air. That alone was enough to arrest Judith’s attention, but there was something else…the woman seemed very familiar, every motion and quality was strangely not human and almost ridiculous. Like the color of her hair which was not the color red that grows out of a human scalp, but the color red that beautifies a rose. And her skin had a faint glow, like the lightning bugs at night. And she had a voice that sounded…recorded.
Now satisfied that the pleats in her skirt were perfectly straight and not gapped or crooked, the red headed woman looked over at her boot, flooded with water. She raised her left hand and pointed a perfectly straight finger at the boot. Which was a remarkable thing to Judith because the finger was tiny and smooth with no joints or wrinkles. But before Judith had a chance to process the strangeness of a jointless finger, something even stranger occurred. The boot floated upward until it was about four feet high, turned upside down and dumped out a stream of water, then bobbed toward the woman until it was in her hand.
“Wow.” said Judith. She couldn’t think to say anything else at first, and then she wondered aloud. “How’d you do that?” Because when something that odd happens, even if you are thirteen and you do sort of believe in ghosts, goblins, witches and every order of magic, you don’t really believe in it enough to call someone a witch to their face, or even suggest such a thing as a matter of course to yourself. No one believes it that much except for toddlers, who also think their parents are gone forever when they leave the room.
The woman smiled, shaking her boot. “What’s the point of explaining things that will only serve to confuse you. We must look forward before we can look back, I say. But if you are patient, your curiosity will rewarded. The first thing we must do is put your memory back together. It exploded when you died and all those little pieces of “what’s happened,” are floating around in the empty space of your mind. Now, do you remember anything that we’ve gone over so far?” asked the inhumanly red-headed woman.
“I don’t know.” said Judith, twisting her mouth to one side and looking up at the apples. “Why am I not hungry when I feel like I haven’t eaten for ages.” She thought aloud.
“What you are feeling is a phantom desire. Imagine, if you had mangled your arm in a terrible accident and a surgeon had to remove that arm from your shoulder. Even though your arm was gone you would feel the pain as if it was there and the nurses would place a pillow under your shoulder to support that missing arm, as if were there. You no longer require food. But you remember that you used to.” said the woman, now pulling on the boot, she shook her foot after she got it on as if her toes were squishing uncomfortably from the wetness. “Our memories can be very powerful. Until you get used to this new state of being you will feel many phantom desires. For instance, right now you are breathing when there is no air here.”
Judith gasped, then let out an awestruck sigh. She closed her eyes, and like a flash pieces of her memory began to come together out of the darkness of her mind. She opened them again.
Then in a dreary voice she proclaimed: I’m dead.
“Yes you are.” said the woman, standing up straight and tall, with her feet perfectly together now, wet boot or no.
Judith closed her eyes again. More fragments of her memory were coming out of the darkness, flying upside down and building additions to a puzzle in her mind, a puzzle that would expand outward to the far reaches of her understanding. Then she experienced another revelation.
“How long have I been here?”
The woman shook her head. “There is no answer about time that would satisfy your way of thinking right now. But in general, you’ve just arrived.”
“Where have I just arrived,” said Judith, then leaning forward she whispered. “Is this heaven?”
The woman’s face lightened and she released a bright summery laughter that reminded Judith of the clown in Creston Park who sold helium filled balloons. That laughter reminded her of something else too, something she couldn’t remember yet.
“O dear no, and there is no need to whisper. You don’t really have a voice. There is no need for one because nothing here really hears. Can you tell me what my name is?” said the woman, raising a very arch, very red eyebrow. She looked expectant and authoritative all at once. Judith nibbled her bottom lip, afraid of giving the wrong answer.
“Close your eyes.” said the woman, stiffly.
Judith closed her eyes. Then she saw it again, the puzzle in her mind growing larger, pieces of clicked together promisingly. “Um…..” she waited in the dark. There were odd things that seemed to have nothing to do with one another flying into place, pieces set at odd ends bouncing off each other, rebounding deep into the darkness. Then new things that seemed to come out of the great “nothing” of her mind, fit together and the puzzle widened once more. She opened her eyes.
“You are the Gate Keeper.” she said suddenly. It took such an effort that Judith couldn’t help but be proud of herself. A cautious smile crept across her lips, then quickly melted away. It seemed that happiness was also a phantom, in this new world.
“Correct.” said the Gate Keeper, flipping a wave of red hair off her right shoulder, then the left.
“I am the Gate Keeper,” she repeated. “You are in the Gateway of your old world, Earth. Am I from Earth?” her clear gray eyes looked expectantly again.
Judith closed her eyes, upon opening them she answered crisply: no, you are from Nonac. That world is not in the Milky Way Galaxy.”
“Correct!” said the Gate Keeper, smiling broader. Then she came closer to Judith, her boots floating only inches above the ground. Judith shook with a start. Another piece of the puzzle in her mind had come together. She remembered.
“Why…you‘re Mrs. Maven, from Mrs. Maven‘s Mysterious Classroom.” she shouted, and since the Gate Keeper had said that nothing in the gateway could hear, Judith shouted as loud and enthusiastically as she cared to. “But she’s just a cartoon!”
“Correct. I am a cartoon, I’m a cartoon because while searching your memory I found that the only unspoiled and positive relations in your life were cartoons. You see, if I appeared to you in other ways there was a chance I could seriously upset you, thereby tearing the delicate fabric of your mind. Cartoons never hurt or disappointed or frightened you. I would have appeared as a butterfly if you weren’t afraid of their insect legs. Or a dog, if you hadn’t been bitten by that mutt as a child.
“Are you saying you can appear as anything?” asked Judith, with just a faint feeling of phantom intrigue.
“Yes, you remember, don’t you.” said the Gate Keeper.
Judith closed her eyes. Suddenly her face fell with a light, gentle sorrow.
“You first appeared as my father.” she murmured.
“Correct. But that frightened you, although it was one of your longest longings I came across while sifting through your memories.”
Then something occurred to Judith, something wonderful and frightening, because she wasn’t certain she wanted to know the answer.
“Where is my family? My father, mother, and Edith? Are they here in the Gateway too?” she asked, her dark brown eyes widening with real fear. Fear, at least, was not a phantom feeling.
The Gate Keeper turned and began to hover slowly away. “Follow me.” she said. Judith did not require an invitation, she had jumped to her feet immediately and was walking, or trying to walk, to keep up. Walking was difficult because she had forgotten exactly how to do it and was remembering each step along the way. It seemed to Judith that her muscles remembered things even slower than her mind. Awkwardly, but determined, she stumbled along in the serene paradise. Not noticing how suddenly the sky turned perfectly pink and the air was lighter, almost unapparent.
“Your world is a bad world. For you to understand why it is so bad, you have to understand The Harvest.” said the Gate Keeper. They were walking out of the orchard now, and gradually climbing a hill. Their progress was slow, but soon enough Judith could see over the crest of the hill, up to a grand white house with a long porch and white columns. It reminded Judith of a southern plantation house, which by association reminded her of slaves. Being black herself, the thought of slavery used to send a shiver down Judith’s spine. But here in the Gate way she did not shiver about that. She was free not to shiver or worry about those sorts of things, at least. They were like arguments about things that no longer made sense. Like when scientists argued over whether Earth was flat or round.
“In general,” the Gate Keeper continued, “when a spirit dies inside of a world it is taken out. It checks in at the gateway to receive, as you are receiving, an orientation.” They entered a vineyard, which Judith was not able to see coming up the hill. Judith admired the grapes and wished she was hungry. But all she had was her phantom hunger and that was not enough to make her bend down and pull a hand full of the juiciest grapes she had ever seen.
“At the end of your orientation you ascend.” said the Gate keeper. Judith gasped excitedly, then the Gate keeper added, “not to heaven, but to the next world.” Judith exhaled, her shoulders slumped. Her fascination with heaven and her longing to go there was as frightening and tormenting as her longing to be reunited with her family.
“you might understand getting into heaven better if I compared it to gaining admission to one your grandest colleges. Say, Harvard. You’ve heard of Harvard, haven’t you?”
Judith cocked her eyebrows as if to say, “who hasn’t?” Forgetting for the moment that she was talking to a spirit from a world beyond her own galaxy and nothing about her world was really that important, not even Harvard.
“Well, getting into heaven is like getting into Harvard, except it doesn’t matter who your father knows or how much money you have. Admissions are judged purely on merit and achievement. It takes many exalted lives to get into heaven. Many.” said the woman, and Judith thought she heard the slightest pang of sorrow in the Gate Keeper’s voice when she emphasized that last word, many.
“That is the rule in general, for most worlds, no matter what happens the spirit moves on to the next world and the next life. What makes your world a bad one is that the evil spirits are recycled there. Can you imagine, living in a world where there is far more evil than good coming into it? Not very appetizing, is it? Of course, no one is really born good anyway, but still. That’s like Harvard accepting more Harvard drop-outs than student’s right out of high school. Down right depressing.” said the Gate Keeper. They had walked far, but Judith didn’t feel tired. In fact, she was surprised to see when she looked up that they were almost to the house. They were just entering the close cut grass in front of it. Then something occurred to Judith.
“Did you move it closer? I mean the house.” she said, with an uneasy look.
“Bravo! You are truly coming along. Of course I did. But don’t look so sad about it, I had put it too faraway in the first place, only I didn’t realize until we set out.” said the Gate Keeper. Judith still looked unsettled by this news. It seemed that she was in a place that was not truly a place, but someone else’s playground.
“The good news is that you are not going back to Earth.” said the Gate Keeper, emphasizing her disgust with the sort of contorted grimace that only a cartoon can make. They walked up the four steps onto the porch of the manor house. The screen door was shut, but behind it the front door was swung open and Judith was startled to see a little girl with blonde curls and piercing blue eyes staring at them from the shady interior.
“Who’s that?” Judith asked, a little frightened. She’d thought she and the Gate Keeper were alone in the gateway.
“Do you think only one person comes here at a time?” said the Gate Keeper, sounding faintly annoyed. “People are dying every second. This little girl arrived before you and she is waiting on her mother.”
Judith’s mouth dropped open to say something, but the Gate Keeper peremptorily waved a finger back and forth.
“She’s an exception, not the rule.” Judith looked frightened, but listened. “Because she died very young and has lived a fair number of exalted lives and I must add, so has her mother, they will be reunited. You my dear, unfortunately, are only on your first life.” The Gate Keeper reached for the handle, though she didn’t have to and the door swung open. It seemed to Judith that the Gate Keeper was trying to remember to do things in the ordinary way, to escape confusion and being peppered with questions about minutia, little things that really didn’t matter. The Gate Keeper, it seemed, was responsible for making sure everyone understood the bigger things, which mattered a great deal.
The little girl immediately hugged the Gate Keeper. She seemed frightened and warbled, “I want my mommy.”
“Soon.” said the Gate Keeper, gently moving her aside. The house was enormous but very empty, as if someone had just moved out of it and forgotten a few things. The first room, which was big and square only contained a single green couch. No paintings. Bare windows. Not even a foot stool. The little blonde girl ran to the couch, which sat in front of a large window facing the vineyard. Judith assumed she was sitting there as they walked up, looking out for her mother. Judith watched the little girl, frowning and sucking her thumb, worriedly.
“Your mother and sister have moved on to other worlds.” said the Gate Keeper. Then she added, stonily, “only your father remains.”
Judith gasped, she was suddenly aware that she didn’t really have a heart because she only felt a phantom heart skip and then there was nothing. “How can that be!” she shouted. “He died so many years ago.”
“I told you,” said the Gate Keeper, in a new, slightly less patient mood. “That time does not exist here in the way you have always thought of it. The only thing of significance is that he came before you and that he remains, but not for long. He is leaving soon.”
“Good, I will go with him. Somehow, we will find Edith and mama later.” said Judith, turning to leave out of the door, although she had no idea where to go. Her only thought was of finding her father and she knew he could not be in that cold, empty house.
“You can’t go with him, Judith. He is being taken by the Soul Reaper.” said the Gate Keeper, icily, twisting a joint-less finger around a lock of rose red hair.
“Who is the Soul Reaper?” asked Judith, more frightened than she could ever be when she was alive because there was no wasting of fear to make her heart-skip, or her stomach spew acid, or her skin curdle with goose bumps, or her muscles tighten. None of the fear was wasted to do those things anymore, it all simply curled around her mind, her awareness, her spirit…and squeezed like a vile constrictor.
“The Soul Reaper is death. Not the death of life, but spirit death. Spirits do die when there is a need.”
“What do you mean a need?” frowned Judith, she suddenly felt vaguely angry and careless, capable of every manner of torture and violence. She frowned in a nonchalant way, while deep inside she could feel the real anger groggily awakening.
The Gate Keeper put her hands on her hips and looked down on Judith, admonishingly. As if she had read her mind and did not approve at all of what she had been thinking. “Less you forget, I only appear in this way because it is the least confusing and most accepting to you. This is not my true form. I can be as pleasing….or as frightening, as need be.”
Judith took a step forward and put her hands on her hips, then looked up. In that empty room, except for the little blonde girl sitting on the green couch, nervously thumb-sucking, there was nothing. Only a bubbling conflict between two spirits….which could be a very volatile and dangerous thing in the gateway.
“Did you think that everything would be like the scrolls of your world said it would be, pretty and tied up with a bow. There are things that none of us will ever understand.”
“God…” Judith began angrily, this time with real anger that balled her fists.
“God is in heaven! The rest of us are locked out because we aren’t good enough. We’re floating out here in the universe among the stars. Stars that are not just bright, but unstable. They are the true rulers of the universe. Stars. On earth, you humans look up at them, admire and write poetry about them, hang your wishes on them like they are some distant lover. These monsters! These twinkling terrors are each an abomination of the universe. They eat us. Spirits. If we didn’t feed them they would turn into black holes that can devour the entire universe. Can you imagine, one star devouring a universe that is constantly expanding! But that is what would happen.”
“What did my father ever do!” shouted Judith, unswerving in her sole purpose for being. “Who decided it was his time to die.”
“There you go again about time! Time doesn’t exist, and to answer your question, no one decides. We, none of us, is God. God is in heaven. We are simply loiterers in the universe. We let fate decide. It wasn’t your dad’s turn. No one has a turn. It was his fate.”
Judith did not understand and she was beginning to believe that the Gate Keeper would never be able to maker her understand why her father had to die.
“The Soul Reaper has a token. He flips it each time a person dies on your Earth. Of course, the token is two faced. It has a good side and a bad side. Your father got the bad side. So the Soul Reaper took him. We chose to take sacrifices from Earth because it is a bad world, a world where evil spirits are recycled. We thought we would be doing the humans there a favor.” said the Gate Keeper, she was losing her cartoon glow more and more. She was slowly becoming more human looking.
Judith thought of something that made her head drop. Then in quite a different mood she asked, “Was my father an evil soul?”
The Gate Keeper looked surprised. “Of course, not. Why would you think that.”
Judith’s eyes widened as far as humanly possible, and in the Gate Way they continued to widen until they were quite cartoonish.
“Are you telling me you kill good spirits too!” she shouted in a rage that even made the little blonde girl turn and drop her thumb.
“Did you expect us to choose good over evil? We are not God. We are only…”
“You‘re all crazy!” screamed Judith, outraged and growing angrier every moment. “God would never want this.”
The Gate Keeper rolled her eyes. “How do you know what God wants.” she drawled. “You’re only on your first life.”
“I know he wouldn’t want his good souls being eaten by an abominable star!” Judith folded her arms across her chest. “Where is my father.” The Gate Keeper suddenly stopped hovering. She was just a forty-something looking woman with ashy, now human red hair. And her clothes were even more wrinkled than before. And her wet boot smelled fishy.
“What are you doing?” said the Gate Keeper suddenly. “How did…..”
Judith suddenly dropped her arms and clapped her hands to her face in fear. The Gate Keeper’s head was shrinking.
“You’re only on your first life. You can’t do anything. You’re just a measly…” but even as she spoke, she was growing smaller, and smaller. Judith stepped back, astonished. Frightened that she could be doing something without being aware she was doing anything. And if she did not stop shrinking the Gate Keeper, the woman would shortly be the size of a spec of pepper again and then….
But what did that matter, Judith thought, the Gate Keeper wasn’t really a woman at all.
“What do you want? I can’t take you to the Soul Reaper, I don‘t know where he is.” said the Gate Keeper in a voice that was whinnying out of existence, just like her body.
“You have to stop. You don’t know what you’re doing. You know what you saw, not what is real.” said the Gate Keeper.
“I don’t know how I started in the first place so how can I stop.” shouted Judith, her body shaking all over with anger, then she noticed the spinning, shrinking, squeaking Gate Keeper was growing smaller even faster now.
“Its your anger,” said the Gate Keeper, “you must have…somehow…retained some of that energy of life. Your emotions are coming back, you‘re feeling again.” she sounded doubtful, but still frantic. In short, she wasn’t really sure if what she was saying were true or not, but at that moment it was better to try something implausible than nothing at all.
“I can’t help it. What’s worse I can’t control it.” Judith was shaking and thinking out loud. “Make me happy. Tell me something that won’t make me so furious. Quickly!” shouted Judith. And she meant quick, the Gate Keeper was almost out of sight.
“Your father can be saved!” the Gate Keeper squeaked.