The Secret Language of Stones by M. J. Rose

much as sensed them. I didn’t know what to do. Where to go.
    Can you help me?
    I recognized the dark voice. The voice I’d prayed was my imagination.
    â€œAre you . . .” I hesitated. I still couldn’t bring myself to name him. If it were true . . . If I’d conjured him, then it meant that likemy mother, I was . . . Except I had to know. I took a deep breath and whispered my question.
    â€œAre you Jean Luc Forêt?”
    Yes.
    Even though I’d assumed he was, I was stunned.
    How do you know my name?
    â€œFrom your mother.”
    Can you help me? I don’t know where I am.
    â€œI’m not sure.”
    Was his soul trapped between this world and the next? I’d read about the Bardo in Anna’s books. A Buddhist concept describing the place a soul waits between the end of life and being reborn. She’d thought some of my soldiers might be speaking from that astral plane, but I didn’t know what I believed.
    Before, it seemed as if the dying soldiers had somehow left behind messages for their loved ones as they moved on, and all I’d done was sift through the detritus of everyone’s thoughts to find the right ones.
    With Jean Luc I still had to sift through the clamor and racket of the universe, but his voice pulsed with urgency and desperation as he communicated directly with me.
    Am I with you? Where you are?
    â€œI’m not sure. I’m in a shelter underneath a shop.”
    A shop?
    â€œIn Paris.”
    This was bizarre. Impossible. Beyond reason. Irrational.
    I’m not actually there, though. Am I?
    â€œI don’t know.” I looked around the shelter in its shadows. I waved my hands in front of me and to the side. I felt nothing.
    â€œI don’t see you. What can you see? Can you see me?”
    I’m staring into darkness, but up ahead I can see light where your voice comes from.
    â€œLight?”
    Lovely light. It’s the light that you’re made of, I think. It’s almost the shape of a woman.
    â€œBut you can’t see anything else? Nothing around you?”
    Nothing around me. Just your form made of light. Golden light streaming from your outline.
    â€œGolden light?”
    Yes. It’s beautiful. As if you were made of gold.
    â€œI’m a jeweler.”
    He sighed. As if the color of the gold made sense to him now.
    How did you find me?
    â€œI think you found me. Through the jewelry I was working on. I make mourning jewelry. Sometimes I get messages from dead soldiers to give to their families. I was making a talisman for your mother.”
    There are a dozen soldiers dead because of me and . . .
    His next words faded out, and I leaned forward into the gloomy shelter as if that might help me hear him more clearly. Jean Luc’s voice sounded anguished.
    It was all my fault.
    â€œYou couldn’t have known a bomb was going to hit. You can’t blame yourself.”
    All my men.
    â€œHow can I help you?”
    Can’t. No one can. It’s too late.
    â€œYou must need something.”
    Why do you think so?
    â€œBecause I can hear you. Why else would I be able to hear you if it wasn’t so I could help you?”
    I’d never had a conversation with one of the soldiers before, and even as I was having this one, I knew the impossibility of it. My imagination finally had taken over. The war and the endless reports of more soldiers dying and the sadness that multiplied with every passing day and the ever-present threat from the bombs that keptcoming . . . it was all too much. I’d snapped like the soldiers who came back, I thought. My fate was mirroring theirs. Surely I was a victim of the same war fatigue as so many others in Paris, in France, all over the world. Too much death, too much grief, too much fear. And now I’d manufactured my own soldier so I could help someone and feel I was pulling my weight.
    No, not your imagination.
    I heard