The woman’s name was Dahlia Rhode, she had said. This was a lie. She was a butcher and a heretic, and these facts were far more intrinsic to her nature than a name. Will suspected it was not even her given name. And yet, impossibly, she was one of them. He had seen her in dreams, heard her shape whispered into the deep-down bones of his mind by the not-quite voice of God. She was unmistakable. And she had recognized them, though she couldn’t or wouldn’t say from where. He stared up at the ten-foot blasphemy on her wall (11:36PM), trying to remind himself that she too had been Chosen, despite it all. She heard the call, just like he did, and she acted on it, just like he did. Just because her home was a monument to sin, just because she was rolling in blood money from a lifetime of perverting Creation, just because she regarded His voice as merely the whims of a fickle muse… He restarted the line of thought, pushing down certain troubling details. She was doing God’s work. How intentionally she was doing it was immaterial. He turned this over in his mind, trying to build a scriptural framework to support the interpretation. Nothing came. He tried to find a lesson in it, something about friends being in the unlikeliest of places, but when he returned his gaze to the clock, a slush of low anger sucked the half-formed metaphor away. He tried to look at something else, something other than the huge and mocking timepiece, and his eyes settled on the large goat skull on the woman’s Ouija board coffee table, complete with fat rivulets of candlewax anchoring it to the glass. He set his jaw. Clearly, there was no refuge to be found in the décor. He brought his attention to bear on the conversation at hand.

“I’m sorry – is – is it possible we all experience it to differently?” Pit asked in he trembling way, “You said it doesn’t communicate directly. It does to me. It sends me pictures, concepts. I can talk to it, well, not talk, but it doesn’t have much to say, except trust Will, find this lady with four arms, don’t jump off that, uh, bridge,” She glanced at Will, who only stared back, “For a – totally random example. But I feel it in me, all the time. Sometimes it fades, or sleeps, or something, but it never goes away.”

“Leaves me. Sometimes present, possessing, sometimes just pull. Sometimes, absent,” Will said.

“Oh, I never feel ‘it’ in the moment. It’s just a kind of yearning, when I’m not doing anything, or when I was trying to decide on projects. I would never say it was a ‘pull’, that’s so physical,” Dahlia said, “I’d never really thought of it as an entity, something separate from me.”

“Oh, it’s definitely separate for me,” Pit looked over at Will, “You said it feels like an outside voice, right?” Will nodded.

“From the Heavens. Far away,” he said, feeling the phrase come to him unbidden. It was perfect, somehow.

“Far away,” Dahlia repeated, looking a little impressed, “That feels right.”

“Not for me. It’s very close, to me, it’s almost inside me and right next to me at the same time,” Pit said. Will reached out for the presence and found it easily, like a channel was still open between them. It was so much closer than it had been days before, but still undeniably separate. It felt… Right, somehow, as if by bringing them together some great first step had been taken. Orders had been followed.

“Hey, you guys want Chinese after all? Chinese sounds fucking bomb-ass, right now,” Dahlia said, patting her stomach. Will hadn’t had a sit-down meal in several days – sometimes the people had hitchhiked with offered him food, but the little money he had saved up had already gone to bus tickets and forging the documents necessary to get him into the city. Part of him clung steadfastly to the knowledge that God would provide, but his stomach growled audibly at the thought and his face flushed as he grabbed it in reproach. The flesh is weak, as they say.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Dahlia said, winking at him and moving to dig through a stack of menus in the entranceway, “Pit? Chinese?” Pit looked down at her shoes. Her tattered Chucks tapped nervously on the tile.

“I don’t really… Have any money,” Pit admitted. Dahlia scoffed.

“It’ll be, like, ten bucks. Come on,” she said, poking a menu at her. Pit cringed.

“Any money.”

“I, also. Bereft.” Dahlia snorted at them in disbelief before draining her glass and setting it on the table. Short as she was, her lower pair of arms could reach the tabletop without her even having to bend over. Will had two heads on her, easy.

“Fine, fine, I’ll buy,” she said, tossing the menus onto the table, “Christ, what are you guys, homeless?” Pit and Will glanced at each other.

“Um.”

“Am.”

“Yeah, I just got evicted,” Pit said. Dahlia gave a low whistle.

“Huh. Okay, then. Well, figure out what you want.”

“Wait, I don’t want to get too far off topic. Um, let’s go back to the beginning, I don’t know where to go from here.” She didn’t know where to go from there, either.

“Something connects us three,” Dahlia said, curling expertly on the sofa and scanning the menu, “It can’t communicate directly, but it can influence thoughts, inspire us. It’s subtle. Szechuan beef?”

“It tries to manipulate us, or – or tries to convince us that it can be trusted,” Pit’s eyes flickered over Will, then down into her lap, “It ingratiates itself, if it can. Um, that’s really spicy?” Dahlia chuckled, looking over at Will.

“White people,” She said. He crossed his arms.

“He has a plan,” Will grunted. Dahlia cocked her head.

“You seem pretty sure about that,” she said, examining Will, “Does it talk to you? You seem like the type. What’s it want?”

“Not for me to know. Visions of protection, saw I. Got the idea that thee and thou would be laboring unto Him, and myself a guardian angel,” Dahlia grinned at him, a meanness playing at the corners of her mouth, “Yes?”

“Nothing. Just never met a Casterite before.”

“Lucky for you.” Her grin grew wider, his arms more crossed.

“I love your accent,” she prodded, lifting her chin, “Did you parents grow up in Prophet?”

“My parents spoke no English,” he grunted.

“You mentioned projects,” Pit interjected, shifting in her seat.

“Subjects for sculptures, styles, symbols,” Dahlia said, unsticking her gaze from Will’s to survey her empty wineglass with disinterest, “It has a lot of strong feelings about postmodernism, has me head over to the library and read essays on Rothko.”

“Really?” Pit asked.

“I’m kidding,” She rolled her eyes with delight. Pit smiled in a small way. Will did not.

“So, then,” Pit began, “What, exactly, does this this thing contribute to your work? You said it never felt separate from you… How do you know it is?”

“It’s been less than subtle lately,” Dahlia conceded after a moment, running one finger around the edge of the glass, “Real Ghostwriter-type shit. So much for ‘He works in mysterious ways’, I was about ready to head on over to PBS when you two showed up.”

“And dost thou ever act on His will, or just drink and make jokes?” Will hissed. There was a moment of silence before Dahlia’s perpetual grin slid wider, tiptoeing on the edge of manic. Pit had gone pale and silent, staring desperately at the floor in front of her. Will had intended the insult to put an end to stupid games, but now having done it, he felt like he had just agreed to play.

“I do all three,” Dahlia stood, stretching three arms above her head, her ridiculous cape swirling around her as she unfolded herself from the furniture and started for a nearby door, “Come on, I’ll show you.” Pit regained some color at the sound, settling suddenly like some great mechanical tension had been released inside her.

“One of your pieces?” She glanced at Will, clearly debating the impulse to stand, “That this – thing has asked for?”

“Well. It didn’t ask, as far as I know,” Dahlia’s face soured at the thought as she leaned on the doorframe, transferring her glass to an upper hand and crossing her lower arms tightly.

“What do you mean?” Pit stood, tentatively, touching her index fingers together in what Will was beginning to recognize as a nervous habit.

“I’ve been losing a lot of time lately, blacking out and waking up. I figured it was just, y’know,” she gestured to the glass and to something else that wasn’t immediately apparent, “But it wasn’t. I wasn’t even sure something was wrong until tonight.”

“What happened?” Pit crossed towards the door, navigating Dahlia’s menagerie of clashing furniture.

“Let’s find out! Together!” Dahlia passed through the door with an exaggerated enthusiasm. Pit smiled, stifling a little laugh. Will finally stood.

“You’d earn my trust, Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess, by laying blasphemies at my feet? You’d sway a crusader with witchcraft and butchery?”

“In New York, we just call it art,” Dahlia called over her shoulder, through the open door. Will could see her instruments in the room beyond, sharp steel glinting in the work lights, the edge of some obscure eldritch icon on the floor, a dark pool of what may well have been blood gathered like a shadow in the corner. The reflexive part of Will’s brain was a well-worn cluster of ganglia calibrated for alleyway skirmishes with the desperate or cruel, and it had no problem drawing up plans to catch an ordinary woman moving at walking speed. Will snarled, almost to himself, crossing the space in long, purposeful strides to reach out and grab her. But when his hand landed on her shoulder, retribution was instant. A golden presence lashed out in the far back of him, binding his mind down with an alien will, blunting his sharper thoughts and smothering the red bloom behind his eyes. His senses buzzed like television snow at the tightness of the grip, and in the instant weight of the thing he felt a splinter of the true heft of God. This, he realized, is what it was to be smote. He removed his hand, floating a little in the harsh light scorching his veins and pulping his brain, and then the grip was gone. He breathed in and out, feeling the wideness of his eyes and sliding the offending hand into his mane of crucifixes. His knees half-buckled, and he took a shaky step to keep himself from falling. Dahlia half turned to him, her hands on her hips, her eyes on his. They looked at each other in a long shattered moment.

“Did – did it touch you just now?” Pit said, peeking from around the doorframe, “It’s still in me, but it reached out into Will. I felt it move.”

“My name is His-Will-Be-Done,” Will breathed out, looking at Dahlia, at the room, and then at the low tarp-covered shape before him. There was something new in her eyes, a raw fear that she was clearly ill-accustomed to. This was just a studio, he could see. The blood was actually just a spilled cup of paint water, but the surgeon’s tools were real enough. The magic circle on the floor, he still had questions about. He swallowed hard, feeling bruised and ashamed, and made a mental note to review the Incredulity of Thomas.

“I felt it move, too,” Dahlia said, looking through and into him, “Like, not the thing itself. I felt – ripples, waves. Scared the shit out of me.”

“Will, uh, His-Will-Be-Done, are you okay? Did it hurt you?” Pit slinked to his side, trying to comfort him without touching him. Will recovered with a practiced discipline, throwing up his usual grimace like straightening a tie.

“Forgive, ye blessed, a pilgrim suspicious,” he coughed, bowing his head to Dahlia, “I have put my finger into the print of the nails and am not faithless, but believing.” He put a hand out to Dahlia, awkwardly, and she took it, awkwardly. They shook, one-and-a-half times.

“Yeah,” she said, not entirely understanding, “No, it’s cool.”

“What a night,” Pit sighed, holding her stomach, looking guilty.

“Yeah,” Dahlia said. Will nodded. The three stood together for a moment, looking down at the tarp.

“So, what are we… Doing…” Pit whispered at last, breaking the spell.

“Right, right,” Dahlia huffed, bending down to gather up the tarp, “You guys cool with servitors? Not gonna throw up or anything?” Will shook his head, trying to remain open minded, for God’s sake. Pit took a step back when Dahlia turned the question on her, but nodded warily, trying to look brave.

“Good. Man, one time I brought this girl over, showed her some stuff I was working on, had to totally redo one ‘cause she puked all over it. Atlanta types, am I right?” Will offered no response, but bent down to grab the opposite edge of the tarp. Pit took another step away from the little figure as they pulled it up and back, and Will heard her breath hitch when the tarp was puled fully away. Revealed was a pinkish-grey servitor, a wide person in life, whose chest and arms had been linked with a thin membrane the size of a hula hoop. In effect, the body had been fashioned into one large, concave dish. Their arms had been broken and healed at specific points to ensure the proper angles, and the surface of the dish was covered in the largest, densest sigil Will had ever seen. He was no expert – his deep-seated loathing of the practice made it a point of pride for him to remain as ignorant as possible, but even he could see that this was a thing of almost absurd specificity. It was rough and functional, having none of the slopes and taperings of natural growth – a living thing made into a machine. He tried not to judge. As to what it was meant to do, he could not even begin to guess.

“You okay?” Dahlia was at Pit’s side, four arms spread like she was poised to catch her, “You want some water?” Pit looked a little grey and tight-lipped, but not in any danger of toppling.

“Um,” she said, transfixed by the warped body, “No, no, I’m good. Thank you.” Will could see why. It was hard to believe this had once been a normal person. All the alterations meant the body would be nearly impossible to reuse, and orchestrators were normally very recycling-minded. He tried to think about how he might even begin to restore the tattered husk, but the list of fixes seemed insurmountable.

“You sure?”

“Yes. Thank you, really.” Dahlia seemed satisfied with this, and her arms relaxed. She turned back to Will and the body, her normal impish smile returned with full force.

“Okay, so. Pretty fucking cool, right?” She moved over to the corpse, ruffling its almost-nonexistent hair like a proud mother, “There’s seven other pieces already at my gallery, but this is the big one. You read sigils?”

Will shook his head. Pit looked at him quizzically.

          “You know how they work? Even the basics.”

          Will just shrugged.

          “Aw, man. I was hoping I would get to walk somebody through it, it’s a helluva thing,” She said, lifting herself up to sit on a convenient morgue table after checking that it was free of fluids, “Well, anyway, it’s called Ghost, and it makes ghosts. It’s supposedto make ghosts.” There was a brief silence as Pit and Will processed this, under Dahlia’s withering grin all the while. Pit approached carefully, the telltale creep of a non-orchestrator afraid a dormant servitor might spring to life at any moment.

          “I’m not that up to date on orchestration law,” she intoned, tentatively, “But isn’t that… Super illegal?”

          “Oh, totally. Creating a ghost – a ghost, defined by law as, uh,” Dahlia closed her eyes, looking for the phrase, “‘any sentient or semi-sentient being composed of ectoplasm and created by animus manipulation’ – it’s, it’s criminal as shit. It’s called either ‘Obstruction of the Natural Order’, or ‘Proliferation of Fraudulent Sentience’, depending on what state you’re in and what they decide to slap you with, and it is indeed super illegal. That’s why Ghost doesn’t work. It’s like a loaded gun without a trigger. Even so, if I don’t get investigated for human rights violations, I’ll probably get a hefty fine.”

          “So why build it?”

          “It’s meant to be a statement about the lengths people are willing to go to in mourning even though nothing truly helps, some shit like that. That’s what the reviews will say, ‘cause my dad just died.”

          “Oh, I’m so – “

          “Nah, don’t worry about it, he sucked. My plan was to run with that, ask the gallery for some time to myself after the showing and actually make a ghost, just to say I could. Provided it actually would have worked, which is a big if. Plus, I’m thinking they’ll settle on the fine, and it’d have to be a really big fine for me to notice, ‘cause, again, my rich-ass dad just died.”

          “Um, I thought it didn’t work, didn’t have a trigger?”

          “That’s the story. But John Doe here is the trigger,” Dahlia said, gesturing to the carcass, “Er, he’s actually more like the barrel of the gun. Well, the rifling in the barrel? That made for a shitty metaphor, though. Anyway, he’s the missing piece, and I was going to sneak him in and go for it, laws be damned, just because I could. But I keep… Losing time? Things get changed, apparently by me, but I wake up remembering nothing. Tonight I found a bunch of runes had been replaced with totally unknown letters.” She pointed to a series of points on the body, which only she was able to discern. Will had once seen his mother staring out the window of their tiny public housing apartment, watching his two brothers as they walked through the rust-red New Mexico dirt towards the empty lot he was forbidden to play in. As they approached a loose circle of older kids and one of them handed Hallowed-Be-Thy-Name a cigarette, he knew he would never forget his mother’s face in this moment. It had become a shorthand symbol for her in his mind – every time he thought of her, this was the image that dredged itself up, unbidden. Dahlia had a similar look.

          Will raised an eyebrow, nodding slowly. Pit only blinked at her.

          “Sigils are like code, they’re written in a specific language. Today I take a look and some of the code is different. More than different, just totally fuckin’ Greek to me.”

          “It doesn’t do ghosts anymore?”

          “Honestly,” Dahlia said, a little sadly, “I don’t know what this thing does, anymore. It was supposed to be my masterpiece, and I don’t even know what it is, and I don’t know what made it, and I don’t know why it brought you here. I can’t even turn it on! And every time I try to find out something about it, I get slapped down with a convenient bout of narcolepsy. All I can tell about it is that whatever it’s doing, it’s doing it with the same tools you’d use to make a ghost. The theoretical tools of ghost-making, rather.” Pit almost laughed, but it wasn’t a laugh, it was a kind of breathy exasperated bark. Will silently sympathized.

          “And those are?” she said, sitting on another table, opposite Dahlia. Will sat on the floor.

          “The short version is, you mash life-force together until it becomes matter – ectoplasm – instead of energy – animus,” Dahlia said, tapping her chin, “Sort of.”

          “Long version?” Will grunted.

          “Pass. Me giving you guys the long version would be like explaining quantum mechanics to somebody with a really iffy understanding of what numbers are. We’re doing algebra right now and it sucks already.”

“This is a lot,” Pit sighed. Dahlia was quiet, gazing at the body. He scooted up closer to it, straining his eyes to follow the intricate design, mentally comparing it to the smaller, coarser sigils he’d seen on the servitors grocery store sometimes “employed” as night stockers.  Those had looked complex, but legible. He felt like he could learn them, given the time and inclination, and half-understood how someone might find themselves seduced into wanting the know what the mysterious little letters meant, precisely positioned and humming with potential. This, though, loomed off the dead man’s skin with all the formidable gravitas of an insoluble mathematical theorem.

“It’s that one there,” Dahlia said, her pointing finger appearing over his shoulder, “And there, and there. The mystery letter,” The symbol she was indicating, a little upside-down cross topped with a three-pointed crown, resonated with him – it felt familiar, positive, something he wanted badly to protect, a psychic anchor with a mental association just as easy and potent as a smiley face, “It’s written as the source for these four animus funnels – the targeted ones, but not the ambient ones – and it’s here again as a constant in the manifest point. A couple other places, too, just as references and variables.” Will turned back to look at her.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. Dahlia nodded at him, a little embarrassed.

“It’s – it’s both where the stuff is coming from and where it’s going to?” Pit piped from her table, a few feet away.

“Yeah, yes, that’s – basically correct,” Dahlia said, looking up at her, “How did you know that?” Pit shrugged.

“I skimmed a Time article about animus funnels once, in a doctor’s office. ‘Source’ and ‘manifest point’ just jumped out at me,” She looked at her beat-up shoes, touching her fingertips, “My memory is so, um, specific sometimes. So this thing makes a loop?”

“Orchestration and spatial relations metaphors don’t really play nice together, but… It’s not a loop so much as a line – um. Okay, think of it like a math problem. Originally, Ghost was supposed to go like this: A times B, divided by C, equals D. As it is now, it’s more like,” she paused, considering, drawing a little map in the air with all four hands, “more like A times X, divided by C, equals X. Does that make sense?”

“Doesn’t resolve,” Will said, still staring at the body from his place on the ground.

“Yeah. It shouldn’t work, but God says it will.” He looked up.

“Square circles,” Will said, “His house, His rules.” Dahlia grinned at him, clicking her tongue, shrugging.

“If it’ll work,” Pit said, “Then I guess let’s fire it up!” She sounded more enthusiastic than she looked, and even as she said it, she adopted a more protected position on the table.

“Can’t. It needs the rest of the system – the seven pieces over in the gallery – and those need a few days to percolate. Besides, I can’t even turn it on, I’m locked out.” Will turned back to her, cocking his head. Pit made that little sound again, tossing her head back in exasperation.

“What?”

“Yeah. Anybody puts animus into the system, it flows into a closed repair loop, over thirty seconds the whole body breaks down into a lump of dead cells. It’s called a Goldberg Lock.”

“Well, if you can’t do it, who can?” A thick, flowery scent filled the room with almost preternatural quickness. Will stood, suddenly alert, hunting for the source, breathing deeply.

“I assumed it was one of you guys,” Dahlia said, “It wants someone specific. What’s wrong?”

“What’s that smell?” Pit said, looking down at herself. It was almost sickening now, a cloying smell like perfume.

“You guys are on your own, my nose is fucked,” Dahlia said, pointing to her nosebleed tattoo, “Don’t do drugs, kids.” The last word was drowned out by Pit’s gasp as she stuck her hands out and away from her. At the center of each palm, a tenacious trickle of blood flowed, stark and red against her pink palms. A stigmata. The smell had been the odor of sanctity, issued alongside the blood, proof of the Lord’s blessing. It was like a scene from Revelation, like blood pouring out of the winepress even unto the horse bridles, like the third angel pouring out his vial. She was clothed in sun after all. The blood was more watery than he remembered blood being, and the sheer quantity of it was staggering, but he felt electrified – full of life and hot, glorious vindication. He was so excited, he almost didn’t catch Pit when she fainted.

Next Chapter: VII-Dahlia