The Living Dead

Picking her way past the wreckage of the sustaining chamber, she left the dressing room. She found her way out of the Music Center—out onto the glass landscape, under the singing stars, and she was crying for him.

Laddy. She wanted very much to find Laddy now. To talk to him. To tell him he was almost right about what he'd told her. Not entirely, but more than she had believed . . . before. She went away from there. Smoothly, with songs yet to be sung.

And behind her, a great peace had settled. Unfinished, at last the symphony had wrung its last measure of strength and sorrow.

It did not matter what Weatherex said was the proper time for mist or rain or fog. Night, the stars, the songs were forever.

Passion Play

by Nancy Holder

Nancy Holder is the author of more than eighty novels, including Pretty Little Devils, Daughter of the Flames, and Dead in the Water, which won the Bram Stoker Award for best novel. She's also written a number of media tie-in novels, for properties such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Highlander, and Smallville. Writing as Chris P. Flesh, Holder is the author of the Pretty Freekin Scary series of books for children. A new paranormal romance novel, Son of the Shadows, was released in August. Holder's short fiction—which has appeared in anthologies such as Borderlands, Confederacy of the Dead, Love in Vein, and The Mammoth Book of Dracula—has won her the Stoker Award three times.

Holder says this story was inspired by the Oberammergau Passion Play, which originated in 1634, during the Thirty Years' War.  "Bubonic plague had spread all over Bavaria.  The citizens of Oberammergau begged God to spare them," she says. "In return, they would put on a play about the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus every ten years.  The ravages of the plague ceased, and the Oberammergauers kept their vow.  They still perform the play, most recently in 2000."

It was a chilly May morning, and Cardinal Schonbrun's knees cracked as he took his seat beside Father Meyer in the Passionspielhaus. Father Meyer heard the noise very clearly; he was acutely aware of every sound, smell, and sight around him: of the splinters in the planks of the large, open-air stage before them, the smell of dew, the dampness of his palms. The murmurs of anticipation of the assembling crowd, and those of speculation—and derision—when his own people, scattered among the thousands, caught sight of him. He was aware that he looked like a prisoner, wedged between his friend Hans Ahrenkiel, the bishop of Munich, and his nemesis, the cardinal. He was aware that his life as a priest would be over that day.

The cardinal scowled at Father Meyer and said, "Is it true what I've just heard?"

Father Meyer licked his lips. How had he hoped to keep it a secret? "That depends on what it is, Eminence."

"Did you give absolution to the wandelnder Leichnam this morning?

Though his heart sank—someone had betrayed him—Father Meyer regarded the cardinal steadily. "Ja. Does that surprise you?"

Cardinal Schonbrun made a shocked noise. On Father Meyer's left, the bishop shook his head mournfully.

"Did it partake of the Holy Eucharist?"

The cardinal was a much younger man than Father Meyer could ever remember being. Blond and blue-eyed, vigorous and vital. Filled with New Ideas for the New Church. The kind of man Rome wanted to lead her flocks into the twenty-first century.

The kind of man Father Meyer, gray and aged, was not.

Father Meyer raised his chin. "The Church has always offered her mercy to the condemned. Ja. I did it."

The cardinal's face mottled with anger. He opened his mouth, glanced at the swelling audience, and spoke in a harsh, tense whisper. "Think what you've done, man! Polluted the body of Christ. You've made a mockery of the Sacraments, of your own vows—"

Father Meyer spread open his hands. "All I know, Your Eminence, is that Oberammergau, my village and that of my ancestors . . . that this village made a vow to God. And that now, four hundred years later, we're shaming that vow with what we are doing today."

Bishop Ahrenkiel touched Father Meyer's arm. They had sat in the rectory together, drinking ancient Benedictine brandy and discussing the New Ideas. In companionable silence, they'd listened to Father Meyer's collections of Gregorian chants, gone through scrapbooks of Passion Plays through the centuries. Father Meyer had hoped that Bishop Ahrenkiel, at least, would understand. But he, alas, was a New Bishop.

"I thought we had gone through all that, Johannes," he said now, for the obvious benefit of the cardinal. "These are not living creatures. They have no souls. The Vatican has spoken on the matter and—"