by Victor Allen
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Had she not been so frazzled in the weeks after the funeral, the things that began to happen to her would have been intriguing in the way of synchronistic events. There would be times she would walk to her teaching gig and hear Richard’s laugh, but it was always someone else when she turned to look. Other times she would see someone at the periphery of her vision that looked eerily like him. When she turned to look they would slip behind a building or vanish into a crowd almost, Elizabeth came to believe, deliberately. It was a little unsettling, but not altogether unexpected. As a student, her professor in her Death and Dying class would have chalked it up to the grieving process, a normal wish for things to return to a known state. Still, the unease...
Once, at twilight, she had seen one of these lookalikes disappear around the corner of a building. The figure had been wearing dark blue scrub pants and shirt. Not in itself unusual. Everybody at the hospital wore scrubs. But the shirt. Dark blue with skulls in various colors printed all over it. He had sewn it himself from Halloween fabric that had been discounted after the holiday. There had been a bit of a tiff with the hospital administrator over that shirt, but he had finally been allowed to wear it when he pointed out that A: he was in the lab most of the time and B: the kids in the pediatric wing seemed to like it. They found it entrancing rather than frightening. And there was the walk. That strange, indefinable gait that people could pick out from a mile away. A duck walk, Elizabeth had called it. Try as he might, Richard could never alter it, didn’t even really know what was different about it, it just was.
She scolded herself mentally, but she had to know as she hurried down the sidewalk and around the corner of the building. She found herself in a blind pocket. Straight brick walls reared up on three sides with no doors or windows to allow evasion. The walls looked eyelessly down on her in the gathering dusk, bricks and mortar standing in colorless judgment of the woman chasing phantoms of her lost world. She was alone in the shifting shadows, not another soul to be seen.
Even worse, things began to happen in her room. The photographs she had of Richard began to pop up in the strangest places. She had awakened one Saturday morning not long after the funeral while the sun still slumbered below the limb of the world and found his picture propped on the dresser, smiling out at her in the thin light of her tiny desk lamp. She couldn’t remember taking it out of the box that she kept all her photographs and letters in, and she really couldn’t account for its being there. It was as if she had been drawn to the picture.
I must have taken it out and forgotten about it. I haven’t been thinking very coherently lately. That’s it. I just forgot.
But why had she gotten up while it was still dark? She had the weekend off and she was never up before the sun on her off days. But then, she reminded herself, these were not normal days. She replaced the photograph in the box, not really frightened yet, but with a creepy sense of disquiet stirring.
A few days later at the hospital, this same picture had appeared at the shift station, simply lying there like some Fortean oddity amidst a muddle of nurses’ reports and requisitions. Nothing really terrifying about it, just Richard smiling his goofy grin, but Elizabeth could only stare at it with a creeping dread. She knew that she had replaced the picture in the box where it belonged and she had not taken it out again.
“Elizabeth?”
Elizabeth jumped. It was Jennifer, the Grim Reaperess. She had come up behind Elizabeth as she was staring at the picture. Jennifer looked down at the photograph.
“Missing him?”
Elizabeth slowly turned and looked at Jennifer as if she were seeing herself in a dream.
“Yes,” she said thickly.
“Would you like me to get a frame for it,” Jennifer asked brightly.
“No,” Elizabeth said a little shakily. “Thank you. I, uh, I’ll just take it with me. I don’t know why I even brought it.”
She picked up the picture and took it to her locker. It seemed to have some sort of mild electric charge when she touched it, not unpleasant, but a bit unsettling. She muddled through the rest of her shift, intending, when she got home, to gather up everything even remotely connected with Richard and lock it away, at least for now. She wouldn’t get rid of it, it just wasn’t in her to do so, but something was working on her: something that came from a place that couldn’t be explained in the shiny halls of the hospital, or the crowded lecture halls of the nursing program, or the hundreds of textbooks she had studied. And it was real.
It was only a short drive home, but it was dark and the shadows blended the streets into a plane of ebony. Moving shapes powered by the wind blew by her along with fallen autumn leaves that rattled by her as they cartwheeled down the streets. She had to stab at her keyway three times with jittering fingers before she could get the key in the lock.
She opened her door and that was when she saw it. Of course, she knew it would be there. That was next, wasn’t it? All rational thought evaporated along with her plans to rid herself of Richard’s memory. She stumbled a bit, thinking it would be easier to let it all go. Her head fogged and the room tilted and skewed before her like a set of scales weighted with fear. She crossed the room uncertainly on legs that resisted her mind’s direction.
Her memory book lay open on the desk below the open window. Cold air sifted slowly into the room through the dark gap and riffled the pages.
The window had been closed when she left.
This is what happens when you lose your mind. Oh, yes. Let’s see what else we can see in the comic-opera-horror-picture-show.
The window slid shut with a slight squeal as she pushed it closed. For a second she didn’t look down at the book because she was afraid of what she knew she would see.
She closed her eyes tightly and let her breath out with the smallest of shudders. A feeling of free-fall overwhelmed her and she wobbled a little. It would be better to simply close the book without seeing what was there, to pretend that none of it was happening. The open door clicked shut behind her, unnoticed.
She opened her eyes and looked at the book.
It was open almost midpoint, to the precise page where she had carefully pressed the roses Richard had sent her on Valentine’s day two years ago. One red, one white, one yellow, now faded brown and brittle. And below them, in a jerky scrawl she knew so well, the words: Death itself couldn’t keep me away.
Now that she knew for sure, she wasn’t frightened at all. So she was alone now, or not so alone. She still hadn’t figured it out. She wondered briefly if she would awake from this nightmare in her own bed, with a new day to start, and Richard would be on his way. But she knew she wouldn’t. This was real.
Death itself couldn’t keep me away.
She went to her chest of drawers and pulled out one of her nightgowns. It was a flannel-y thing, more like a robe than a gown. It certainly couldn’t be called sexy, but it emphasized her curves and accentuated her long legs and trim waist when the belt was cinched up. It had always been Richard’s best-loved. Whatever tempest was in the offing, it would happen tonight, on Halloween, when the veil between worlds was thinnest. Hazel was at the computer center and would be there all night. Elizabeth had no night classes and no homework, only time to wait.
She slipped her nightgown on and settled down in her bed. She read a little, then wrote a letter to her mother. Later on she watched TV until she became sleepy. She clicked the TV off with the remote and fell asleep.
She supposed she were dreaming when she saw herself lying on her bed. The room was dark but for the blue numerals of the alarm clock and silent save the ticking of the windup clock she kept just in case. A cold wind blew through the open window, fluttering the curtains. But that shouldn’t be. She saw herself get up to close it and then she was awake, seeing through her own eyes, looking out into the night that slept like the dead. Had the time come so soon?
She stared into the misty blackness, the lights of the campus dim, sad orbs, shimmering hazily in
the fog. She shivered in the cold, straining to see some restless revenant in the night, stealing through the gloom like a twisting wraith. She felt a sudden presence at her back and she turned away from the window. He was only a silhouette directly behind her at the door, a solid shape amid flimsy shadows.
She was already moving towards him, her bare feet making sparks and glowing blue trails of static electricity in the carpet. She felt no fear as she came closer. He seemed eerily insubstantial, as if he were only partly in the dimension of the living, yet solid enough that Elizabeth could distinguish the fine markers of his face. The long nose, the high cheekbones accentuated in semi-profile. He wore not his burial suit, but the clothes he had been wearing when he had died. He turned and stared deeply into her eyes.
Whiskey eyes, she thought. He always called them his big, Whiskey brown eyes.
She remembered she was only in her nightgown and bare beneath it. She had a figure that had made stronger men than Richard look away from her face, but he never dropped his eyes, only gazed back into her own. When she held her arms out, she had a feeling that she was leaving this world, never to come back. It was bitter and sweet and consuming in a way that could not be properly described with simple words.
Richard spoke, but not with words. There was no need for them as his thought crossed the chill air and settled into her mind.
Come with me.
Elizabeth stepped closer and Richard held her with arms as ephemeral as the wind. She felt his love for her as she pressed her head against his shoulder and began to weep softly, thinking of the world to leave behind. What was really left to do or see? Another fifty or sixty years to grow old and sick and then die, wizened and arthritic, pain-wracked and riddled with disease? She looked up at him with swimming eyes.
I can’t. I love you, Richard, but I’m only twenty-three years old. I want to live.
She gave him one ghostly kiss on his insubstantial lips and backed away, his long agonizing sigh of acceptance settling into her mind like the sound of the wind. It was nearly unbearable. She turned away and sat on her bed, looking at him, her hands clasped in her lap, warm tears running down her face.
She didn’t know what to expect as he slowly walked across the room towards the window. His footsteps left no impression in the carpet and his passage made no sound. He stopped by the window and looked at her. He was smiling, hurt, but accepting. She hesitantly smiled back.
He placed his palm on the window for a moment, then, little by little, he simply faded away like a shadow as the sun rises. The last thing he ever said to her was: Goodbye.
After he was gone, Elizabeth went to the window.
There, stenciled on the glass where his palm had rested, was a single rose, etched in frost. It lingered for only a few moments before melting. She placed her hand on the place the rose had been, hoping to feel his presence one last time. There was nothing but the cold.
She lay down on her bed, her forearm across her eyes, and cried for the rest of the night.