Sudden Death

by Donald Hanley

  “I know that,” I sighed, rolling my eyes, “I was just kidding. We’re going to have to wait for her to come back.”

  “But what if she doesn’t?” Olivia asked hesitantly. “What if she’s –?”

  “She’s fine,” I told her firmly, fervently hoping I was telling the truth. “She can escape into the shadowed paths whenever she wants.”

  “But won’t Metrag – Metraz – that demon lord kill her if she goes back to Hell?”

  “Not if she keeps moving and doesn’t stay there long. Besides, Metrakh – Metraxion doesn’t care about her.” Daraxandriel was teaching me to pronounce demon names properly but it always felt like I was gargling with bleach every time I tried. “He’s after my Philosopher’s Stone.” I tapped the useless bauble dangling from the chain around my neck. Olivia’s eyes followed the movement and then flew open wide.

  “Peter!” she gasped. “Isn’t the Stone supposed to keep you alive? What happened? Is it broken?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “This isn’t the real thing, anyway. It’s just my memory of the Stone or something.” I had no idea how ghostly attire worked. Olivia would swap out her tattered nightgown for proper clothes in a heartbeat if she could figure out how.

  “So where’s the real one, then? We have to get it back!”

  “That’s ... a very good question, actually.” The Stone had completely slipped my mind while I tried to deal with my murder but the two had to be linked somehow. “It must have been on my body. Was the guy who attacked you wearing it?” That would be bad.

  Olivia shook her head with a frown. “I don’t remember seeing it. He was wearing a big gold ring, though.”

  “A ring?” I didn’t own any jewelry other than the Stone.

  “A man’s ring with a squiggly symbol on it.” She drew a circle on her middle finger to illustrate. “It was glowing,” she added, “while you – he – and Dara were fighting.”

  “A glowing ring.” That rang a little alarm bell in the back of my mind. “Mrs. Phipps was wearing a ring when I found her. It didn’t glow, though. I wonder if she still has it.” I didn’t pay any attention to her hands when I spoke with her in her cell.

  “Do you think it’s magic?” Olivia asked uneasily.

  “I think that’s pretty likely,” I said dryly, “given how my day’s going so far.”

  “What do you mean?” she frowned. “Oh. Oh! You mean being dead. I’m sorry,” she said meekly.

  “It’s not your fault,” I sighed. “We just need to find this guy and stop ... whatever it is he’s trying to do.” I looked around, trying to fit the puzzle together, but there were too many missing pieces. “Do you think he came here to kill Dara?” I asked doubtfully. “Maybe he’s a rogue warlock or something.”

  “Well, Dara attacked him first,” Olivia pointed out. “She called him a Cubist.”

  “A what?”

  “A Cubist, or something like that. It was all kind of confusing,” she apologized.

  The only thing cubist brought to mind was some sort of avant-garde art movement but I doubted Daraxandriel would stab someone because of his taste in paintings. “Did he say anything?”

  “He – you – he shouted something just before he did this to me,” she said, gesturing to herself. “I couldn’t understand the words, though.”

  “Like a spell, you mean?” I frowned.

  “Sort of, maybe, except it didn’t sound like the things Mrs. Kendricks and Susie say. It hurt my ears,” she complained.

  “Well, at least that proves it wasn’t me.” She blinked at me uncomprehendingly. “My spells don’t work that way. I just point and click.”

  “Oh, right.” She didn’t sound entirely convinced but I didn’t feel like belaboring the point.

  “All right, we need to come up with a plan. We need to find Dara and make sure she’s okay. We need to warn Mrs. Kendricks about what’s going on. We need to track down that imposter and keep him from killing anyone, especially Dara. What else? Oh, yeah, we need to find my body and figure out who murdered me. And get my car back,” I added grimly.

  “How are we going to do any of that?” Olivia asked dubiously. “We’re ghosts.”

  “We’ll figure it out as we go,” I said gamely. “We could use some help, though, that’s for sure.” I chewed on my lip as I reviewed our rather limited options. The only other person I knew who could talk to ghosts was Mrs. Phipps but I was reluctant to get her involved any more than she already was. “Wait a minute.” I looked around again. “Where’s Amy?”

  Olivia shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen her since I woke up dead again.”

  “What was she doing when all this happened?”

  “She was in the living room complaining about being hot and bored.”

  “That sounds about right,” I muttered. The Spawn of Darkness was an irritating thorn in my side, a whiny, self-centered brat who insisted I was her boyfriend and therefore should cater to her every whim. Unfortunately, we only knew of two ways to get rid of her: persuade Metraxion to unbind her from my Philosopher’s Stone, or summon her father, the Dread Lord, to the mortal plane. Neither of these seemed likely a particularly good idea. “What about after the fight broke out?”

  “I didn’t notice,” Olivia grimaced apologetically. “I was worried about Dara.”

  “Okay, that’s something else to add to the list: find Amy and make sure she’s not making things worse. Are you still a poltergeist? Can you move stuff?” She nodded doubtfully. “Good. Leave a note for Dara and tell her to meet us at Mrs. Kendricks.”

  “I thought we were going to wait for her to get back,” she protested.

  “I changed my mind. We don’t know how long that’s going to take and she might not think it’s safe anyway.”

  “But how is she going to see the note if she doesn’t come back?”

  “It’s just in case she does,” I explained patiently.

  “But what if that other guy comes back and reads it?”

  “He’s not going to know who Mrs. Kendricks is or where she lives.”

  “He found us,” she pointed out.

  “He took my car. The registration’s in the glove compartment.”

  “But why did he come here at all? Why is he trying to kill Dara?”

  “I don’t know,” I said irritably. “Maybe he thought I lived alone and wanted a place to hide out. We’re just going to have to take the chance, okay?”

  Olivia capitulated grudgingly and went into the kitchen, carefully peeling a sheet of paper off the pad we used for our grocery lists. Holding a pen firmly was a challenge, given her insubstantial state, but she managed to scrawl a legible message to Daraxandriel and placed it in the center of the table. “Now what?”

  “Now,” I sighed, “we walk to Mrs. Kendricks’ place and hope she’s home.”

  “Walk?” Olivia protested. “She lives all the way up by the river!”

  “If I had my car, I’d let you drive.” I absolutely wouldn’t. The one time she tried it, she nearly rammed it into a light pole. “Since I don’t, we’re walking. Come on.”

  I led her downstairs and through the front door, pausing on the stoop to get my bearings. Olivia stood beside me, looking down at herself before crossing her arms with a resigned sigh. “Why don’t you wear it backwards?” I suggested.

  “What?”

  “Your nightgown. Turn it around backwards. There aren’t as many holes in the back.”

  She eyed me doubtfully and tried to peer over her shoulder before pulling her arms inside. It took a bit of wriggling and squirming but she finally got the nightgown twisted around and her arms back through the sleeves. She pressed the ectoplasmic fabric against her stomach, assessing the result. The one big rent in the material exposed her belly button but nothing else of interest.

  “You can’t see anything back there, can you?” she asked, turning her back to me.

  “Just your back,” I assured her.

  And the
top of her butt, Little Peter reported, but I chose not to pass the message along.

  “Okay, I guess. Thanks.” We started down the sidewalk towards the main gate, skirting the park and the pool. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” she asked, plucking at her nightgown with a hint of suspicion in her voice.

  Because then we couldn’t be able to see what you have, Little Peter said, as if the answer should have been obvious.

  “I didn’t think of it until just now,” I told her. “You’re not a ghost very often anymore.”

  “Oh, right.” We carried on in silence for a while. “How do you feel? Being a ghost, I mean.”

  I wasn’t expecting that question. “I ... don’t know, actually. I’ve been so focused on figuring out what happened.” I looked down at myself. “I don’t feel much different, actually. Everything’s still a little washed out and muffled but it’s getting better.”

  “It was the same way for me,” Olivia told me. “Things didn’t look proper for a few days.” She hesitated and then reached out to touch my hand. “Can you feel that?”

  “Yes,” I said, surprised. It was the first time anything felt even halfway normal. I grasped her hand and squeezed lightly. It felt strangely cool and resilient, like thawing bread dough. “Can you feel that?”

  “Yes. It feels nice.” She ducked her head and tucked a strand of ghostly brown hair behind her ear. “So what are we going to tell Mrs. Kendricks?” She didn’t pull her hand out of mine and I frankly didn’t feel like letting go yet. Touching her made me feel more real, somehow. We passed through the main gate hand-in-hand and turned right.

  “Everything we know, although that won’t take long,” I said ruefully. “She doesn’t know anything about ghosts, unfortunately, but she might be able to figure out who this guy is, especially if he really is a warlock.”

  “Agent Prescott might be able to help,” she suggested.

  “Maybe. This is probably outside his area of expertise.” Special Agent Ryan Prescott was a demon hunter and, not coincidentally, Mrs. Kendricks’ long lost lover. “He might be able to call in his boss. She can probably track this guy down just by snapping her fingers.” Special Agent Fay Morgan was the head of the FBI’s Occult Investigations team and the only other person I knew with a Philosopher’s Stone.

  Olivia shivered. “She gives me the creeps.”

  “Agent Morgan? Why?”

  “I don’t know. She just seems to know too much about everything.”

  “Don’t you start,” I warned. Melissa and Susie were convinced that Agent Morgan was actually Morgan le Fay, the enchantress of Arthurian legend, and she didn’t help matters by refusing to categorically deny the speculation. “She’s just a very powerful witch, okay?”

  “Okay,” she grumbled. “Is she even back from England yet?”

  “She has to be. She just went over there to help them find ...” My pace slowed to a halt and I just stared at nothing as a feeling of horror crept over me.

  “Peter?” Olivia asked worriedly. “What’s wrong?”

  “That ring. All that stuff on Mrs. Kendricks’ desk.”

  “Huh? What are you talking about?”

  “That was Dr. Bellowes’ equipment. Mrs. Kendricks must have kept everything in her office.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “That ring was the one Dr. Bellowes trapped Metraxion in for four hundred years. He used it to steal souls so he could kill demons and extend his life.” Olivia’s expression slowly morphed to match mine. “And now my imposter has it and my Philosopher’s Stone.”

  4

  There never seems to be enough time to do everything that needs to be done. One big reason for this is that you waste an incredible amount of time every single day. You spend eight hours sleeping, half an hour getting ready for work, a couple of hours eating meals and snacks, an hour commuting back and forth, another hour or so on coffee breaks and bathroom visits, an hour or more dealing with urgent phone calls and emails that aren’t really that urgent, another hour taking care of the chores and the pets and the kids at home, and at least another hour trying to wind down at the end of the day so you can get back to sleep and start all over again the next day. If you have an appointment with a doctor or a dentist or a plumber, take another couple of hours off whatever’s left.

  That’s over seventeen hours a day that you’re not doing something useful or important. Even worse, the paltry time you do have is broken up into little chunks, forcing you to switch your mental gears every few minutes. It’s like trying to win the Daytona 500 with a stop light on the track. You’ll eventually get to the finish line, but you won’t be breaking any speed records along the way.

  A lot of people claim they’re good at multi-tasking but they’re just fooling themselves. They may well be juggling a dozen different tasks at once but I’m willing to bet they’d get done a lot sooner if they just finished one thing before moving on to the next. I accomplish so much more when I can put my head down and focus on the job at hand without interruption. Unfortunately, concentration attracts interruptions like moths to a flame, so the odds of me actually finishing anything on time are pretty low, despite my best intentions.

  The Texas sun crept higher in the sky as Olivia and I zig-zagged our way northeast towards Mrs. Kendricks’ house on Hyacinth Lane. The neighborhoods we passed through evolved noticeably as we went, morphing from single-story stucco boxes built in the 1950’s to more elaborate brick-and-stone residences constructed in this century. Their occupants skewed younger, too, although that trend was less pronounced.

  Olivia started our journey checking every intersection and alleyway for any sign of Daraxandriel but it was pretty obvious that the chances of us randomly crossing paths with her were basically zero. Now she just walked beside me, silent and glum. I tried to think of something to say to cheer her up but I had nothing. I was feeling pretty low myself.

  I’m dead, I thought, and Olivia’s the only person who knows it. Someone’s out there impersonating me. He did something to Mrs. Phipps and he probably killed me and he tried to kill Dara. What’s he doing now? How are we going to find him? How are we going to stop him? I had no answers.

  A splash of laughter behind us heralded the approach of two women in tennis outfits, no doubt recent patrons of the community courts we passed a few minutes ago. Olivia and I split apart to let them pass and then bumped shoulders when we regrouped.

  “Sorry,” we both said together. Olivia rubbed her arm with an odd expression. “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “I’m just not used to bumping into things,” she explained. “It feels kind of weird.”

  “I’m not used to not bumping into things,” I told her. “It definitely feels weird.”

  “You’ll get used to it,” she assured me but her smile faded quickly. “I’m sorry.”

  “About what?”

  “About you being, you know, dead.”

  “It wasn’t your fault. As far as I know, anyway,” I added dryly.

  Olivia stared at me with wide eyes. “What?”

  “I’m kidding,” I said hastily. “You wouldn’t have been able to get all the way over to the library and back before that imposter showed up at the apartment.”

  “Unless I made everything up and killed you and Dara and Amy myself,” she pointed out.

  “Er, right, but you didn’t. Right?”

  She gave me a sideways look. “You don’t think I could?”

  “You killed Uxbranidorn with your bare hands,” I reminded her. “Killing the rest of us wouldn’t be very hard for you, if you set your mind to it.”

  She looked doubtful and uneasy, as if she wasn’t sure whether she should be pleased or appalled at my assessment. We walked on for a while before she cleared her throat. “So Hellburn’s a lot bigger than I thought,” she observed.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, it’s taking us forever to get across town. I thought Hellburn was a little dinky place.” She held her hands
about a foot across.

  “It’s not that small,” I protested.

  “It’s small enough. How much longer until we get there?”

  “Well –” Without a working phone, I couldn’t pull up a map to give her an accurate estimate. I looked around, getting my bearings. I’d only been to Mrs. Kendricks’ place a handful of times, in a car from a different direction. “We’re probably a mile away, I guess.”

  “Another mile?” She looked like she was ready to sit down in the middle of the sidewalk in protest. “We’ve been walking for hours already!”

  “No, we haven’t,” I argued automatically, but my sense of time was never any good even when I was alive. I looked around for a clock and then peered up at the sun. It had to be close to noon now, which meant we’d been hiking across town for a couple of hours. We should have reached Mrs. Kendricks’ house ages ago. “Have we been walking slow?” I wondered doubtfully.

  “I don’t think so,” Olivia said, looking equally uncertain.

  “We must be. Those women are already halfway down the block. Come on.” I quickened my pace and Olivia trotted along beside me, but the tennis players continued to increase the distance between us, even though they were just ambling along. “What’s wrong?” I asked worriedly. “Why can’t we catch up?” It was if something was holding us back even though I didn’t feel any resistance.

  “Maybe ghosts are just slow,” Olivia suggested.

  “We’re walking like normal people,” I countered. “We should be able to keep up.” I eyed her speculatively. “Walk ahead of me.”

  She eyed me back. “Why?”

  “I want to see how you walk.” She looked dubious but I shooed her forward. She complied reluctantly, glancing back over her shoulder to see what I was actually doing. The gaping rents in the back of her nightgown were distracting but I concentrated on her legs. “Your feet are slipping.”

  “What?” She stopped and looked down at herself.

  “You look like you’re walking on ice. You’re not taking a full step.” I caught up with her, watching my own feet. Every step slid back a few inches. “No wonder this is taking so long. I don’t think we have any friction. Haven’t you ever noticed this?”