Overhead, the brilliance of the night sky was slowly fading, the dark dots of the stars and the blackened crescent of the waning moon gradually merging in color with the iridescently-gray sky until the overhead scene was flat and featureless, monotone. The sky at dawn lost its silvery glow just prior to sunrise, becoming a color which was neither bright nor dark, neither brightening the dark world below or adding to its gloom. It was midway. To the quiet watcher below, it epitomized the entire situation--a land caught between two extremes, never quite either.
However, unlike the sad earth below, the sky's middle state was transitory. Gray reigned--until the slightest glow appeared in the east. It was barely perceptible at first, even to the trained eyes of the watcher, but it rose with a certain strange inevitability, brightening the shades-of-gray sky into something that was almost--but not quite--rose. Thin beams of almost-gold pierced the muddle of muted colors appearing over the horizon. The watcher sat forward a little, waiting.
A beam of real color now--light blue and even a thread of white. Pale violets. A hint of real red. A faint glow of yellow. A glowing halo of soft colors gathered at the edge of the horizon, paused, hesitated--and then the sun came up.
The watcher held her breath as the thinnest edge of a black disk emerged. Slowly, oh so slowly, the entire midnight orb appeared, surrounded by its flaming nimbus of colors. It burned its way into the drab sky out of a horizon that was nearly golden, lightening the gray to something that approached blue. The entire landscape lay revealed before the watcher's eyes--a patchwork of disjointed buildings and structures, patched together by the common thread of those who inhabited this place. Each citizen had a 'home' of sorts, a place he or she considered a sanctuary--and it was to this sanctuary that they had fled, ultimately. For it was the only home they had in this the world of the Dead.
The watcher was sitting atop hers--a Greek temple in the ancient style, complete with fifteen-foot Ionic columns and Greek inscriptions or bas relief anywhere there was a flat area on the exterior. Anyone familiar with the Caribbean Myth Island would have recognized it at once as the temple to Athena which crowned the island. However, anyone close enough to examine the carvings or familiar enough with Greek to read the inscriptions would quickly see that this temple was slightly altered. The carving above the front entrance depicted two men and a woman (and two stylized birds, possibly parrots) engaged in battle with a great monster made of rock. The central-most figure was another woman with a sword. Suggested in the background was a legion of men and women, armed and ready for battle against the monster. Around the peristyle, in Greek letters, was inscribed this message:
Death is not eternal. Death is not the end. There is a place beyond death. There is a return from death. When life returns from death, death will no longer have power over it.
The name tou Qreefoudou will live again. The name of Threepwood will triumph.
The watcher could not read Greek herself, but she knew that that was what the letters said. This plot of land for her temple was her property alone, hers to sculpt as she liked. And so she had set her message of anger and determination into the stone itself, as a warning. It was a pitiable defiance, but it was all she had.
The sun rose higher, a perfect circle of ink against a brilliant corona. It was an eclipsed sun, not the sun visible in the land of the living. The watcher sighed and wished, not for the first time, that she could feel sunlight on her face or arms again. The darkened sun could never burn her or sear into her eyes, but nor could it really warm her. Yet another useless midpoint between extremes.
"Brooding again, are we?" Agnus Traaeiphood beamed down on her from his massive height. He was a literal giant of a man, large enough to make both Chariset and her temple look like children's toys.
Morning breezes stirred the air, rustling in the bushes around her stone sanctuary, running fingers through her hair, which was considerably longer than before. She played idly with a strand of it while dredging up a smile for her first forefather. Of all the prisoners of Big Whoop, he was by far her favorite.
"Morning, Agnus," she greeted, pronouncing it 'Ahn-yoos.'
"It's beautiful, in't it?" he asked, gazing upon the rising disk. "All this time, I've never grown tired of 't."
"Och, you liar," she responded with a more genuine grin. "Less than two months here and I'm already tired o' this miserable excuse for a sun."
"Don' try the accent, la. Ye're not even close." His Welsh grin took the sting out of the words.
Agnus seated himself on his usual hill, resting his huge folded hands on the top of her temple. His massive size and her lengthening hair was the results of the same phenomenon--memories. They were both shades, spirits, reduced to nothing but their souls, personalities...and their memories. Essential characteristics were buried in the very core of their 'bodies,' but more externals, like sense data and experience of the outside world gradually built up around this core, with the result that each spirit gradually had more and more 'mass' as time went on. When two spirits touched, they had to be very careful, or else they would lose their memories and gain the experiences of the other shade. This was why all of them kept the very core of their personality hidden.
Chariset had very little accumulated memory from the spirit world, but Agnus, who had lived here for centuries, had so much that it dwarfed his memories of life. As a result, he was a giant of a man, whereas she had only a couple more inches of hair. Other shades used the accumulating material in new and interesting ways--Elise Threepwood, for example, had transformed herself into a buxom beauty of a woman with ever-larger clothes, ever-taller hats, ever-more-elaborate hairstyles. Chariset had only to look at Agnus's face to read his secret disgust at such displays.
Most of the men made themselves taller, some going to Elise's extreme on the masculine side of the scale. Chariset really didn't want to know what else they had enhanced. Grethelle Threepwood, a woman who had once been a devout pillar of the church before Big Whoop attacked her island, wore loose robes and a pair of breathtakingly beautiful angel wings. Her sanctuary was her former church building, hardly surprising. Chariset liked to visit--it was a place of peace for her. She was saddened to think that the original was long since destroyed--another victim of Big Whoop's curse.
She must have sighed again--at the loss of Grethelle's church, at the black sun, at the hopeless hope she was rapidly losing--because Agnus leaned close and wrapped her in his massive hands. He was so gentle she scarcely felt the touch--not that he could have harmed her, but it would hardly have been comforting. She leaned on him and gave in to the impulse to cry.
Agnus had been her greatest help through all this--without him, she would never have survived the transition to shade-status, at least not sane. He was the one who had taught her how to release the urge to eat, or drink, or even to breathe, though she still did that, partly from habit, partly from defiance. As long as she held out a hope of returning to the living, she refused to forget how to breathe.
He had also shown her how to change reality around her, how to sculpt her temple and its environs, even her body and clothing. Because of him, she controlled her spirit form. She could even cry spirit-tears which felt just as hot and wet as the real thing, which was what she shed now, holding tightly to his thumb. She could never let them fall, of course--they were part of her substance--but the very ability to cry something like real tears was a great help.
Agnus, who had overseen hundreds of Threepwoods struggle with the realization that they were no longer alive, or embodied, and no longer needed to fear death or struggle for life, had never left her even at her most angry or grief-stricken moments. He felt personally responsible for every single one of them, and he considered this a form of penance--plus he had a genuine liking for his descendants. She was just grateful for his warm and understanding strength.
"Tell me again, Angus," she said finally. "What are the laws?"
He paused, then began. "Ye may freely return to the living world as often as ye like-
"Until I break one of the rules..."
"Right, la. If you visit the land of the living and speak to any living person three times, or three living persons, you may no longer return. If you visit a member of the clergy with the ability to send away spirits, and he exorces you, you may never return to that area again. If you visit anyone by daylight, or if you visit the one person who was closest to you in life, you may never return. If you visit that person, your very soul might be forfeit."
"But the most important rule is that I not speak more than three times."
"Right, la."
"Do the rules explicitly say 'speak?'"
"That's how we've always interpreted it, la," Agnus responded with something close to a twinkle in his eye.
Chariset was slowly figuring out the way this world worked. Perhaps she couldn't talk to anyone directly for any length of time, but if she understood correctly, she could talk to them indefinitely....if she were indirect about it....
"Do dreams count?"
"If anything is spoken in the dream."
"What about a song?"
"That," he grinned, "depends on what is said. Sung words sometimes don't count, if what's sung appears to be meaningless."
That would explain how her parents had managed to get away with direct conversation with Guybrush in a dream, telling him how to find LeChuck. She had a few other ideas, but first it was a matter of deciding which message to send whom.
"So ya be plotting after two months here, la?" Angus correctly interpreted her silence.
She raised her eyes up to his face, near the black circle of the sun, wearing a faintly puzzled frown. "Is that good or bad?"
"It's....it's just so very you, Chari. From the moment you came here, I knew tha you would do everythin ya could to get back ou' again."
She leaned into the hollow of his hand, strangely warmed by the compliment. "But isn't everyone like that at first?"
"Some aren't, la. And some try for a while, but they lose heart. Even the ones who go out and watch their loved ones usually come back once they see that they are interfering too much with their lives."
"But the one I most want to see has no life, thanks to Big Whoop," she sighed. " At the moment I'm probably more alive than he is."
"And....just which one would he be, lass?"
Guybrush. Murray. Both. "Guybrush....I think," she said after a long pause. "I don't even know where he is or what Big Whoop's done to him. All I know is that he's not here."
"I think I can help you with that, la," Angus unexpectedly offered. "Ye've been here long enough that the grief isn't so..raw....you're ready to see this by now."
"Ready to see what?"
"Come with me." Angus offered her his hand, which she accepted, laying her hand on the very tip of his index finger. She climbed up onto his palm, then walked across it and onto thin air with scarcely a thought. Lifting each foot high, as though climbing an invisible staircase, she ascended to the level of his head and paced alongside him as he slowly crossed the flat and gray land. From this altitude, everything was visible, every little Threepwood domicile, every hill, the great courtyard area where the spirits sometimes gathered, and the unusual patch of black wood at the other end of their tiny world.
The trees were enormous here, tall enough to hide even Angus. They were populated by ghost-beings--pale white owls, deer, rabbits, birds of all description--who fled before them and peered around the trees after they passed. These wisps of spirit had stories of their own--some of them were formed from the cast-off memory-material of Threepwoods who wished to remain normal-sized, some of them were spirits of once-living creatures in their own right. And some of them, the saddest cases of all, in her mind, were Threepwood ghosts who had committed suicide in the only way they could--spinning themselves out, dividing personality, character, mind, into fragments so tiny that they had no identity any more. Did they know oblivion then, she wondered, or do they still know fleeting images of life? Do they know they can never come back to life again? Better to remain whole, even now when things looked hopeless.
Angus stopped. Chariset lowered herself to the ground by the simple expedient of 'jumping,' then catching herself just above the forest floor. She stopped the fall only through force of habit--she had no inertia here, so if she had plummeted, she would simply 'land.'
They were in the darkest part of the wood, so dark that only thin beams of colored light threaded in through the branches. The boldest of the deer stood among the trees, glowing faintly. Angus also wore a certain spectral light as he carefully knelt down, parted a few delicate branches, and ushered her in to a tiny grove of willow trees which formed a ghostly canopy in the middle of the forest. Her skin prickled as she entered their shelter.
Within was a tiny pool of water with a foundation of polished black pebbles, its glassy reflective surface almost undisturbed by her footsteps. Outlined in the water, looking back at her, was a woman with a lined and worn face, dark haunted eyes, and wild brown hair which fell all around her shoulders. She was very pale, and while there were hints of youth in her cheekbones and mouth, it was a mockery of health and beauty. There was no mistaking her for a living woman.
She wore pirate clothing and an odd necklace made of beads of glass, most of which were cracked or chipped. In the center was a gemstone of some indeterminate color. A faint, surreal glow surrounded her form, through which the colors of her hair and clothing appeared, though muted and faded. It took Chariset a second to realize that she was looking at her own reflection.
I look so lost....
I look gone beyond retrieving.. Mom and Dad and the others are right, I'm a dead woman who has no business meddling with the land of the living....
Her courage almost deserted her, then, but Angus's voice cut through her moment of despair.
"This pool will show you anything you want to see, la. Tell it what you want to know, and it'll tell ye."
"Where--" she faltered. "Where is my brother?"
No response.
She fought down the hard lump of panic rising in her throat. "Show me Guybrush Threepwood!"
The outline of an island she didn't recognize--a jagged, jungle-covered piece of land with black sand on its western beaches. Remembering her earlier plan, she burned its outline into her memory, twisting a stray strand of hair nervously as her eyes searched for any sign of life or movement.
"Closer."
The focus obligingly swept down and in, searching the coastline. Something light-colored caught her eye, under the trees just off one of the black-sand beaches. The picture's angle changed until she was looking in from the ocean. Closer still. The light-colored object was clearly a man's shirt now. She waited tensely as the image expanded to fill the pool, revealing that the owner of the shirt was a lanky man with blond hair, sprawled out on his side under the trees. He appeared to simply lie where he had fallen, eyes closed. He looked dirty and unkempt, unshaven, dehydrated and underfed. His appearance alone was enough to shock her.
Worse than that, however, being a spirit she could actually see his own--a misty, Guybrush-shaped form--and it was flickering and fading, losing its cohesion.
"Angus....he's dying."
It was dark where he was, and cold.
Good.
He wanted dark. He wanted the cold darkness, the eternal sleep. He wanted never to wake up.
It had taken long weeks of effort to finally be here, long weeks of active or passive self-attack...long weeks of unbearable pain and despair.
Soon it would all be over.
Chari, Elaine...I failed you both...I'm sorry....please see that I'm trying to make it up to you...
Chari, I should have listened. I should have known that Big Whoop was too much for us to handle alone. I should have gone to the Voodoo Lady.
He remembered how haughty he had been, how he had bragged that he was safer unarmed and unprotected.
And I was...I survived. I was the only one to survive. Oh, Chari....why me? Why not you?
Elaine....my love, I left you in that monster's clutches. I left you and our daughter behind trying to save my own skin. What will happen to you once she's born? Will I meet you again soon, once we're both dead and gone? Will you hate me for what I did to you?
Odia....my daughter...how could he name you 'Hatred?' I'll never get to see you grow up. I've never even seen your face....but losing you hurts most of all. I wanted to be a good Daddy to you, my baby, my little baby girl....
Please forgive me for leaving you....
I just can't live without you in my life....
Forgive me...
"Then you've got to do something, lass," replied the giant from outside the grove.
"What can I do? I can't go to him, can't speak to him--I can't even go down there, because it's still daylight!"
"Consider it a test in creativity, la."
"If I wanted to be creative, I would have construction paper and scissors!" she hissed at the foliage above her head. "My brother is dying down there--don't you have anything useful to offer?"
Angus parted the branches and looked down on her. "So....ye look at him, decide it's hopeless, and give up, eh?"
"I don't know what to do. Those stupid rules keep me from doing anything to help him," she snapped, feeling desperate and angry.
"Ah, an' that's where you're wrong."
She bit back an angry response and waited, torn between frustration and the sense that what he was about to tell her could make all the difference between success and failure in her own plans. "You see, the rules can never be broken, but it is possible to work around them."
"I don't see what difference that makes here."
"All the difference. This pool here, this is the greatest tool we have for bending rules."
She looked into the surface, watching the water ripple lightly. The image did not fade or waver. "This? This is just a magic mirror, nothing more."
"Wrong again, la. You see, when we cross over into the mortal realm, this pool is where we do it. This is our link to the living world."
"Through the water?"
"Right. If you were to go all the way through, you'd be out among the living."
Ahhhh... "And what happens if only part of me goes through?"
"I can't tell you that, la. It's against the rules," responded Angus, but his tone was amused.
"You're evil," she replied lightly, appreciating his careful approach. She asserted her will on the image silently, drawing the focus so close to the ground that the surface was mere inches over Guybrush's face. She swallowed hard, reached out gently, trembling a little.....touched the surface and passed through without resistance. Below, a ghostly white hand hovered over the still form of her brother.
Not certain whether this was allowed, she leaned even closer and actually touched him. She cupped her palm around the side of his face, almost recoiling at the feel of living flesh, stubble, grains of sand. He moved slightly, leaned into her hand, covered it with his own.
It was the keenest, most bittersweet moment she had ever known, to be so close to Guybrush yet unable to touch him. It was a rush of sweet pain, like being impaled on a knife of hot honey. She gritted her teeth, but the spirit-tears came anyhow, spilling over her cheekbones to splash in the pool. They fell to living sand in a thin rope of white, persisting, curling like dying worms on the black beach. But by now she had taken his head in both hands and pressed her forehead to his, uncaring, crying in earnest, fighting with all her will not to drag him up into the spirit world with her...to end the loneliness, the worry over him. Had her parents ever held her this way? Did they feel the same frustrated, desperate, painful love that she felt. She didn't know.
"Don't give up," she whispered. "I'm alive. And one day I'll be with you again, I promise you. I'm coming. Don't give up on me, Guybrush."
Don't you dare give up on us
Who said that?
I did
Who are you?
You know me, Guybrush. I am one of the women you 'wronged'
I knew you'd come back to haunt me.
A soft chuckle. You underestimate me, Guyber.
Chari?
None other
You came back? Why?
Because you're dying. Did you expect me to just sit back and watch?
Why try to stop me? Why shouldn't I just give up?
Because of this, Guybrush
And he saw a world without a sun, without moonlight or starlight. He saw a host of shades and knew their names and faces. Chari showed him her temple, the dim spirit-forest, their first ancestors. Their parents.
Don't you see? Death is not the end for us after all. But it's no beginning, either. We're not part of any story or anyone's life, but we could still live again. You've got to keep fighting. You've got to find the way to break Big Whoop's power, before he strikes again. You are the very last of the line
What can I do?
Be creative
Funny, Chari...
Do you ever want to hold your baby girl in your arms?
That's low!
Wake up, Threepwood! You don't want the last of the family to be an evil pawn of Big Whoop, do you? Think about your dreams! You spent years trying to become a pirate. You, against all odds, succeeded and won the love of your life. You defeated LeChuck four times. Did you really go through all that just to die here on a lost island where no one will know who you were?
I'm so tired, Chari...
I know, she sighed. So am I. But the dead don't rest as quietly as I always thought. The last time I ever knew rest was in the hold of the Sea Cucumber with Murray. And I'll bet the last time you knew any kind of contentment was with Elaine, sometime way back. Think, Guybrush. Isn't that what you really want? Elaine at your side and your little girl in your arms?
Yes...that was all he really wanted. That was all he had ever wanted, really.
Well, I want Murray...and the Cucumber...and sunlight on my face. And I want to see my niece grow up. And I want more than almost all of that to see you again, face to face
I lose out to something on that list?
Yes. She didn't elaborate.
I will help you, all that I can, she continued. But this is the last time I'll be able to speak to you, until all of this is over and done
Until then, Setti.
Don't push it, Guy
I'll meet you on top of Big Whoop's corpse.
I'll be waiting. Just don't you dare give up on me, Guybrush. A lot of people here are counting on you
Until we meet again, Chari.
Until then
Instinctively, she knew that this was the first, last, and only time she would be able to touch him, and so she held on until the very last minute. Only when she sensed that he was waking up did she break the embrace, feeling that she tore her heart out and left it lying there. The thin rope of white, the remains of her tears, she carefully wove into a small braid and left it around his neck. In it she left the memories of the spirit world, of Angus and her parents, that she was making plans and not to give up. She also added a touch of power from the Amulet, for healing. She could sense what was ahead of him, and knew he would need it.
"Time to let go, Chariset-dearest," Angus said as softly as he possibly could. "You've given him all you can. It's time for him to make his own story."
She knew all that, but it took every ounce of her will to obey. The moment was cruel for its weight of regret, of things left unsaid or undone, things she had no time left to do. All she could do now was let him go.
She leaned in as close as she dared, actually submerging her head and shoulders in a final, desperate embrace. "Goodbye," she whispered before breaking away. "You're a Threepwood. Do us all proud."
She came up out of the water and pulled the focus away, climbing high, rising into the clouds. She made herself look down as the diminishing figure of her brother stirred and opened his eyes.
Driven by some instinct, he shakily sat up and lifted his face to the sky. From the world of the living he locked eyes with her in the world of the dead--
--and in that second she shattered the image, breaking it into fragments. She stared at the dead woman in the water for two seconds, gasped a shaky breath of air--then leaped up and fled the grove. She ran blindly to her parents' house and didn't stop until she collided with her mother. Sobbing hard, Chariset hugged her convulsively and cried until she was out of tears. For the first time, it had really hit home that she was dead--and everything she had ever known was dead to her. She had never known until she herself died that the departed could grieve for the living.
In the face of her overwhelming loss, even the fact that she had schemes and plans was dust. She just wanted Guybrush back. And Murray. And sunlight.
You'll have all of those things, she tried to tell herself. Don't give up.
But not relapsing into despair was the hardest thing in the world to do right now, harder even than facing down Big Whoop...
Guybrush opened his eyes, puzzled by the memory of a strange dream. He couldn't remember the details beyond a vague sense that Chari had been here, talking to him. He looked up, puzzled, certain that, for an instant, he had seen her eyes in the clouds, but they were gone.
With a groan, he forced
himself up to his feet, staggering towards the center of the island, where
there was a spring of water he'd been avoiding for days. First things
first...some water..some food..and then to get off this island and find
the Voodoo Priestess. Then he would find some way to return to Monkey
Island, threat or no threat, and destroy the curse on his family, once
and for all. He was going to be there when his daughter was born,
come Hell, high water, or Big Whoop.