by David Beem
“A bold fashion choice?” whispers Shmuel. “Just the thing for our Christmas party?”
“That would look better on me than it would look on you,” Wang replies.
“Everything looks better on you than it does on me?”
“That’s true, now shut up. Look!”
The pig circles behind the two zombies, who turn to keep the spectacle of the leaping, squealing pig in front of them, which leaves their backs to Wang and Shmuel.
“Now’s our chance, go!” Wang exits the stairwell, his heart thudding as he races around the corner. The A-Team van screeches to a halt in front of a fire hydrant. The driver-side door opens. Consuelo hops out, dressed in his Cucinelli dinner jacket and blue jeans, his hair slicked back. He scans left, right, then waves them across the street.
Wang chances a glance over his shoulder. Shmuel huffing and puffing. No zombies.
Wang reaches the van, shoves Consuelo toward the back, and leaps into the driver’s seat. Shmuel rounds the front, flings the passenger door open.
“Got your signal!” cries Consuelo. “What the fuck? There’s a pig back here!”
“Let him in?” says Shmuel.
Wang scans the mirrors, ignoring the commotion from the back of the van as the pig clambers inside. The two zombies have reached the corner and are pointing at them!
“Hold on!” cries Wang, throwing it in gear and laying on the gas. The tires squeal, the pig squeals, and then Shmuel, because that fat bastard’s always bowing to peer pressure, also squeals.
The rear doors slam shut. The van tips perilously leftward around the corner. The traffic light turns red, and the van settles again on all fours.
Wang’s forehead crinkles. It’s not just his lights that are red. The cross-street lights are red too. And it’s the same at the next intersection, and the one after that…
Consuelo kneels at Wang’s side, hugs the back of his seat, and points. “That’s weird.”
Wang floors it. The van crests a hill.
Airborne.
They hit the ground, and his clacking teeth rattle in his skull. Consuelo topples left, tugs on the seat, rights himself. Wang blows through another red light.
“Du-ude,” says Shmuel. “No time to observe the proper rules and regulations of the road?”
From inside the windows of the buildings on the left side of the road, all the lights switch on. Wang scans the buildings on the right side. Those lights switch on at the same time too.
“Shit, shit, shit!”
Screeching tires ring out. In the rearview mirror, a car fishtails as it completes a high-speed turn around the corner to position itself in pursuit. One block ahead, an SUV is bearing down on them in a game of chicken.
“Shit, shit, shit!”
“You said that,” says Consuelo.
Wang pulls on the wheel, his hands slick with sweat. They go up on two tires as he turns another corner. His stomach knots, his toes curl, his scrotum clenches. He completes the turn, and the van drops to all fours.
Vision constricts. The on-ramp ahead practically extrudes video game crosshairs, bells, and high-score tallies.
“You’re gonna take the Five?” asks Consuelo, again righting himself.
“Take five?” says Shmuel. “Are we going to Cheap Used Queens? I am scared but sleepy?”
More screeching tires. Wang’s gaze flickers to the rearview mirror. Four additional cars peel into position behind them. A flash of light redirects his attention, and a pickup truck crosses their path so suddenly, he jerks the wheel and swerves.
The van tips right.
The van tips left.
A plastic garbage bin explodes into shards as he blasts through, followed by an abandoned shopping cart, which flips over the top of the windshield.
The A-Team van rockets onto the Five.
Chapter Eighteen
We phase inside Nostradamus’s home to the sound of screaming. My shoulders hunch, my elbows splay. I cast around for the source. There’s flickering candlelight from virtually every surface: heavy blue drapes, a cream-colored rug, sofas, chairs, a staircase.
“Ahh-hh!”
Mary whips her gun out and aims it up the stairs.
“You brought a gun into the past?” I whisper.
Her features flatten in obvious incredulity.
“Are you crazy?” I ask, struggling to keep my voice down. “You could create a temporal paradox, thereby exchanging reality as we know it for a new reality, one where semiautomatic firearms were invented hundreds of years before their time, and past Nebula senses future Nebula trying to steal the Power Stone before Thanos can—”
“Edger. The past isn’t less dangerous just because it’s the past. And, no offense to Fists of Fury here, but I’d rather have a gun than have no gun.”
“No offense taken,” says Bruce in full voice. “Old ‘Fists of Fury’ here used to carry a gun also. One time, I—”
“Shh!” I motion with my hands for him to lower his voice. “Will you keep it down?”
Bruce’s forehead tightens. “There’s no need to whisper. We’re not really here. We’re spectating.”
“Spectating,” I repeat, deadpan.
“As in we can see them, but they can’t see us?” asks Mary.
“Precisely,” Bruce replies.
“And they can’t hear us,” says Mary.
“Correct.”
“So we are in no danger whatsoever?” asks Mary.
“None.”
Mary lowers but doesn’t holster her gun.
“Dude,” I say.
“What?” she replies.
“Spectating?”
“I can spectate with a gun. He didn’t say I can’t spectate with a gun.” She faces Bruce. “You didn’t say I couldn’t spectate with a gun.”
Bruce folds his hands in front with a swagger.
“See?” She faces me and hefts her gun. “Spectating with a gun.”
My gaze swivels. Bruce shrugs, Mary’s eyebrows wag. I shake my head and roll my eyes.
“You’ve got issues.”
“It’s why you love me.”
More screams ring out from upstairs, and my elbows splay and shoulders hunch again. Bruce, his hands still folded in front, arches his eyebrow at me.
“What’s going on?” asks Mary.
Bruce unfolds his hands. “Nostradamus is dying.”
A door opens behind him, but he’s standing too close. I reach for his elbow just as the door phases through his shoulder, followed by a pale-faced maid carrying a tray with towels, bowl, bandages, and scissors. She beelines through Bruce, then Mary, who gasps, wide-eyed, before bringing her gun to bear on the maid’s back, but she’s already clomping up the stairs like her bowl of water is the cure for cancer.
“I mean,” says Bruce. “Technically, he’s not dying of cancer.”
“Whoa.” Mary’s gun comes down. “We’re ghosts.”
A thin smile spreads over Bruce’s face. “Relax. You’re fine. You two are making out on the beach. Remember?”
My cheeks flame on. Mary’s mouth pulls back on one side.
“Only your subconscious mind is here with me,” Bruce explains.
I raise a finger. “Point of clarification: You’re not there while we’re making out on the beach, right?” Bruce’s eyebrows rise. Mary’s lower. “Yeah,” I say, addressing Mary. “He’s gonna be a problem.”
Feet ring out on the staircase, this time deeper. The stairs creak as a man with a long face and beard descends. Looks like d’Artagnan from the three musketeers. Red cape, goofy forest-green shorts, black tights.
“Those aren’t shorts,” whispers Mary.
“Right, sorry,” I reply. “Sixteenth-century France. Goofy costumes. Got it.”
“D’Artagnan” phases through Mary, who again raises her gun, then steps deliberately out of the way of the staircase landing.
“I swear to God I’m shooting the next person who does that.”
The brisk swooshi
ng of silk refocuses me. A woman with a touch of gray in her hair and a—holy smokes, that’s a killer schnoz—enters the room from the opposite side. Mary’s gun sweeps up again. I lay my hand on the barrel. Her lips pull back on one side, and she lowers the firearm.
[“Jean, report, please,”] says Killer Schnoz.
“They’re speaking French,” I say.
Mary screws her flat-eyed stare into my eye sockets. “That’s because we’re in France.”
The man is speaking again.
[“You will not find me alive at sunrise.”]
Schnoz covers her mouth. She turns and strides for the window, her silk dress swoosh-swooshing. I lean nearer to Bruce.
“This guy’s dying too?” I whisper. “Rotten luck. This house isn’t contagious for ghosts, is it?”
“I told you there’s no reason to whisper,” he replies. “And he’s not dying. Jean here is telling Madame Nostradamus her husband’s final words.”
“Dude prophesied his own death? Daa-ang.”
[“Gather the children, please,”] Mrs. Nostradamus says from the window, the back of her lacy dress facing us. Jean, the guy who looks like d’Artagnan, bows. He gathers papers from a nearby table and exits through the front door.
“Mr. Lee.” Mary frowns. “What’re we doing here? If this is the day he dies, then—”
Bruce raises a finger to his lips. “Shh. Don’t think. Feel.”
“Oh, snap. You just got Yoda’d by Bruce Lee!”
Mary rolls her eyes, then closes them. Her forehead furrows, and the candlelight casts intimate shadows over her smooth features. Her lips quirk as through our weblike connection, she senses my admiration. She slaps my arm, her eyes still shut.
“Edge,” says Bruce. “Concentrate.”
I close my eyes, and Mary’s consciousness is warm and inviting. Together, we reach out…
Two flights up, a man—Nostradamus—is lying in bed. He’s in agony, and even though it’s only our consciousnesses remote-viewing him, it feels like we’ve entered a pressurized vacuum. All my earlier nervous humor is steamrollered into paste. It’s like we’ve checked into that Ingmar Bergman movie and cloaked Death is stalking us from the corner, monolithic and waiting in tortured silence for the life to drain from his mark.
Nostradamus’s legs are sticking out from beneath the sheets. Calves swollen to the size of two watermelons, his complexion like polluted snow, he’s so frail. Nothing like the man who killed my dad. The maid at his side lays a fresh washcloth across his forehead. Her dread is palpable, the source of the airlessness enveloping the room, hopeless and enigmatic, like a maze without a solution.
A dagger plunges into Nostradamus’s mind—
A searing white pain detonates in the walls of our room like a nuclear bomb—
Nostradamus gasps. His eyes spring open, spine flexing as the pain blazes through his humerus, ulna, and radius like wildfire, and pricking his fingertips with electric focus. It’s beating in his chest. Scooping the insides out of his spinal cord. It’s in his teeth and aching behind his knees. The room itself tints red from his pain, the walls humming with it, the floor and ceiling groaning as capillaries beneath his skin boil, and still the dagger bores deeper, drilling for the brain stem. The agony is immense, crushing the ability to even think, and then, like smoke rising off a blackened corpse, it dissipates. It’s over… He’s gone.
I open my eyes, and we’re downstairs again. Mary, panting, grasps the bulbous cap at the end of the stair rail and hunches over. I’m shaking and winded. The world lurches—no, that’s my knees buckling. A bolt of anger flashes through me. What kind of sick, twisted reason justified putting us through that? That was like… Like mashing us into a cellular meat grinder.
“That’s what it’s like to die?” asks Mary, facing Bruce, her tone cool. He shakes his head and closes his eyes.
“Patience, please. We’re not done.”
My fingers curl into fists. Mary’s catlike gaze is tight.
“You want us to go back?”
“Yes. Trust me, please.”
I stand up straighter, release the breath I’ve been holding. Mary closes her eyes, which I take to mean we’re going back whether I want it or not. Taking a centering breath, I follow suit and do what I can to get a lid on myself.
We’re floating above the bed, and whatever nonphysical part of my brain is actually here clenches. I want out. Now. An echo of the pain is still pulsing in the walls. It’s bleeding from the floorboards. A red mist is hanging in the air.
My pulse rockets into high gear.
Focus, says Bruce. Your mind is playing tricks on you.
Another bolt of anger strikes inside me. Of course he’s got nothing to fear. He’s dead already. The rest of us mortals have seen enough horror movies to know you never, never, never go back into the room, period, full stop, world without end, amen.
Edger. Mary’s presence is like a lit candle in the darkness. I reach out for the warmth, and the floors stop bleeding. The red haze lifts.
The maid is bent over Nostradamus’s gray face, one hand covering her mouth. His lifeless eyes peer into hers. She touches his neck—hand springs back. She makes the sign of the cross and kisses her fingertips. Removing the washcloth from his forehead, she sets it on the tray, and then arranges his arms neatly at his sides.
Remembering Hill House, I scan the room. No faces on doorknobs. No bent-neck lady. No scary ghost monster things lurking in the shadows. But I know my tropes. We are definitely inside five seconds from the jump scare.
A psychic nudge from Mary brings me back into her light. Releasing a centering breath, I focus…
The maid is fixing the bedding. She smooths the blanket over his chest. Her fingers close his eyelids, which are sunken-in frail sockets. And then the obvious hits me. This isn’t the powerful supervillain who killed my dad. This is a person who fought death and lost. Like this, he even looks at peace, which I—
My eyes spring open as comprehension comes flooding in.
We’re downstairs again.
“He’s not there,” I hurry to say. “She’s there. But he’s not there.”
Bruce nods.
“He should be there,” says Mary, finishing my train of thought. “He was in the Collective Unconscious a second ago. We experienced his death through him, but when we came back into the room, to remote-view it or whatever, there was only one other soul in the room. His body is there, but he vanished from the Collective Unconscious.”
“Very good,” says Bruce. “This is the first clue in your mystery.”
“Back at the tree, you said something about opportunity in the unknown,” I say. “That’s this? Your little mystery?”
“Not my mystery. Yours.”
A gust of wind slams open the front door with a bang. The soul-stars blow in, surrounding us in a funnel cloud of light, which thins and stretches into crystalline smoke. Cold sweat rises on my forehead as I hold on to Bruce and Mary’s outline, struggling against my terror. Because however polite Bruce is behaving, this is a kidnapping. I don’t want this, and I can’t get out. Mary and I were on the beach. Now we’re off suffering through worse pain than I could ever imagine and haunting places where we don’t belong.
The soul-smoke rolls over us like fog, dissolving first our arms and legs, then our bodies, necks, heads. Soon, I can only feel Bruce and Mary in my mind. We’re formless, and the world has again vanished beneath our feet. Errant particles of who knows what spark and pop, charging my consciousness like hair inside my head rubbing against wool.
Pipe smoke.
The dry tannin taste of red wine.
The musky aroma of aged cheese.
The sensory experiences coalesce: dim candlelight from wheel-shaped chandeliers. Raucous laughter. Body odor mixed with alcohol and oak.
Brain zaps. Releasing energy. Streaking pinpoints of light.
My feet touch down. I’m standing behind a bar opening the tap on a cask of wine and filling a pitcher. My
knee aches from a bad fall the night before. I’m grouchy and taking it out on a server, whose face is distorting like a lava lamp. But all this dissolves into a swirl of colors. The static electricity in my head returns with the glittering soul-fog. My hands and arms and body emerge from nothing. The world is all white. Mary and Bruce phase into existence. We’re back at the Tree of Life.
“What was that?” she asks.
Bruce’s eyebrows lower. “Something dangerous. But we’re safe now, so perhaps it doesn’t matter.”
“If there’s something dangerous, I think it matters,” I reply.
Mary nods, her psychic sense echoing mine. “We should know about it. You brought us here. You put us in this situation.”
“It’s what Edger already knows. He did something similar once at the Packers game in San Diego. You went into the consciousness of the bartender around the corner from Nostradamus’s house.”
“But that was amazing,” she replies. “I could feel his injured knee. I was yelling at the server.”
Bruce sighs. “You weren’t yelling at the server. The bartender was yelling at the server.”
“But why were we in the bartender’s consciousness at all?” I ask.
“Because he knew the second Nostradamus left the Collective Unconscious and panicked. The next instant, he died also—”
“And he also vanished from the Collective Unconscious,” Mary finishes for him. “Which is why you didn’t want us in his head when it happened.”
“Precisely,” says Bruce.
“Hold on,” I say. “Supposing we were in his head when he got ripped from the Collective Unconscious. What would’ve happened to us?”
“As I said, it was dangerous.”
“Dangerous!” Mary and I exclaim in unison.
“But more importantly, it is the second clue for your mystery.”
“No-no-no,” I say, stepping around Mary to tower over the martial arts legend, who folds his arms and peers up at me, unimpressed. Somewhere out on the white landscape of my subconscious mind, a literal warning bell rings. I fold my arms and stare down my nose at him. Could I harness the Collective Unconscious to fight him, if I had to? He cocks an eyebrow. His clothes phase from his white suit and tie into the yellow-and-black tracksuit from Game of Death. His lithe build stills to the point where he could be a wax sculpture. Easing the knot on my necktie, then a tiny knot forming in my neck, I take a step back.