City Infernal by Edward Lee Page A

long wall of tabby bricks. “Nothing like that at all. We’re living souls. We’re physical beings.”
    Hush sat beside Cassie on a row of moving boxes; she leaned her head against Cassie’s shoulder as if tired, her black hair veiling her face. Via remained standing, walking back and forth.
    “How can you be living souls,” Cassie asked, “if you’re dead?”
    Via answered, “What he means is that we’re living souls in our world. We’re physical beings in our world. In your world, though, we’re subcorporeal.”
    “What’s that mean?”
    “It means that we exist ... but we don’t.”
    “But we’re not ghosts,” Xeke said. “Ghosts are soulless projections. They’re just images leftover. No consciousness, no sentience.”
    Cassie considered this. “So the man who built this house—Fenton Blackwell—he really does haunt this place?”
    “Sure,” Via said. “But it’s just his image lingering, walking up and down the stairs. It’s nothing to be afraid of. I’m sure you’ll see him every now and again.”
    Cassie hoped she didn’t. “All right, so much for him. What about you?”
    Via took off her punky leather jacket and dropped it in Xeke’s lap. By her attitude and gestures, it was clear that she was the leader of this little group. She began to diddle with the safety pins holding the tears in her t-shirt together. “It’s a long story, but here goes. First, you gotta understand that there are Rules. We weren’t really bad people in life, but we were fucked up. We couldn’t hack it. So we killed ourselves. That’s one of the Rules.”
    “No ifs, ands, or buts,” Xeke said.
    “If you commit suicide, you go to Hell. Period. No way around it. If the Pope committed suicide, he’d go to Hell. It’s one of the Rules.”
    Cassie touched her locket, felt something shrivel inside. Her sister, Lissa, had committed suicide. So she went to —
    Cassie couldn’t finish the thought.
    “This house is a Deadpass, or I should say the newer part of the house, the part that Blackwell built. His atrocities caused the Rive—that’s, like, a little hole between the living world and the Hellplanes. If you’re like us—if you can find one of the holes—you can take refuge in the living world.”
    “But no one in the living world can see you,” Cassie figured.
    “No one. Period. That’s another one of the Rules.”
    Cassie began, “Then how come—”
    “You can see us?” Xeke held his finger up. “There’s a loophole.”
    A dense silence filled the narrow basement. Via, Xeke, and Hush were all trading solemn glances. Hush held Cassie’s hand and squeezed it, as if to console her.
    Cassie looked back dumbfounded at them all. “What is it?”
    “You’re a myth,” Via said.
    “In the Hellplanes,” Xeke went on, “you’re the equivalent of Atlantis. Something rumored to be true but has never been proven.”
    Via sat down next to Xeke and slung her arm around him. “Here’s the myth. You’re a virgin, right?”
    Cassie flinched uncomfortably but nodded.
    “And you were never baptized.”
    “No. I wasn’t raised in any particular faith.”
    “You’ve genuinely tried to kill yourself at least once, right ? ”
    Cassie gulped. “Yes.”
    “And you have a twin sister who did kill herself.” Via wasn’t even asking any more; she was telling Cassie what she already knew. “A twin sister who was also a virgin.”
    Cassie was beginning to choke up. “Yes. Her name was Lissa.”
    More solemn stares.
    “In Hell, you hear about it the same way you hear about the angelic visitations here, like these people who see Jesus in a mirror, or St. Mary on a taco,” Via went on. “Stuff like that. You hear about it but you never really believe it.”
    “It’s all written down in the Infernal Archives,” Xeke said. “The Grimoires of Elymas, the Lascaris Scrolls, the Apocrypha of Bael—the myth’s all over the place. We’ve all read about it, and never really believed it either. But