By eleven o’clock Roman had his palms extended toward the sky. He stood at the head of the Goblin graves and made a violent motion with his arms. The sound of so many lids cracking open at once hid the noises Maggie was making. She watched from under a tree. She gripped the umbrella handle. This was her favorite part.

23

Because of the wind, the rain hit Roman at an angle that he found almost refreshing. It seemed that even the elements were aware of the importance of this moment. He never felt as powerful as he did just before removing the bodies. And this place proved to be spectacular.

Sometimes Roman laughed at how the deal he’d struck favored him twice over. This part, keeping up his end, was just a different show. And not just for Maggie, either. For himself. There were nights Roman wished to be nowhere else. As he stood with the lids unlatched, lids he himself had forced open, by magic, he felt like the child stupefied by the street performer. Like the young man stealing chess pieces from his father.

Maggie, under the tree, whimpered impatiently.

Roman’s brilliant dark eyes fastened on the group of open holes spread throughout the wet grass. He inhaled slowly. He was prepared; a lifetime of work resting on the simple gesture of his hand. A flick of the wrist.

The dead, he thought. The dead!

He lifted his palms toward the black Goblin sky and made fists toward the falling rain.

Maggie moaned.

The bodies shot up from their graves, still standing, suspended now twenty feet into the sky. The moon cast shadows upon the holes in the grass beneath them.

Roman stepped under the fifty bodies, the dangling pale feet forming an awning, a rotted shoe falling to the ground beside him. Some were more decayed than others. Women with hair so long it almost reached their feet. Old suits, old clothes, fashionable, perhaps, the last time they touched air. Some bodies were rotted to the bone, others with holes just beginning to show. Fingernails reached the knees. Jeweled bracelets barely hung from wrists too thin now to support them. Yellow teeth. Rotting teeth. No teeth at all. Eyes turned to putty, no longer filling their sockets. One woman wore a grocery store apron, and the worms had taken her face completely.

Roman studied them. Maggie fell to her knees.

The pack of corpses hung perfectly still, the gorgeous Goblin rain crashing against them, washing some of their rot to the ground. Roman studied them from beneath like a child looking for the invisible string, looking for the trapdoor, trying to unmask the trick.

“Be gone!” Roman yelled through the wind and rain. “BE CLEAN!”