by Bryan, JL
“Yeah, why not? More money, big crowds...what choice do I have?”
Cassidy smiled and felt momentarily relieved, but her brain flailed around for something else to worry and obsess about.
“The crowd liked you,” Cassidy said. “Don’t you think?”
“Yeah, a monkey with an eight-track would entertain that yuppie-ass crowd. I just wonder if this isn’t all a waste of time, you know? Will I ever make anything worthwhile? Am I making art or trash? Does my meaning reach anybody, or are they all a bunch of drunk wasteoids? Is there any real meaning there in the first place? I feel lost.”
“Where are we going?” Cassidy sat up, disoriented. They were racing down a narrow, deserted street with small unlit houses on one side and dense woods on the other. Atlanta was an urban forest, and even downtown, you were never too far from narrow streets twisting away under the shadows of tall old trees.
“My place,” Peyton said. He owned a big loft in the trendy, gentrifying Old Fourth Ward area—his father owned it, actually. Peyton’s dad had bought it as an investment when it became apparent that he would still be providing for Peyton’s basic expenses for the foreseeable future.
Peyton accelerated through the empty streets, taking back roads through the city that curved behind brick strip malls, through small neighborhoods, and then past leafy, overgrown cinderblock buildings.
“I want to do more,” Peyton said. “I don’t know what that is yet, but I feel like I was meant to do more. I mean, you too, right?”
“Meant to do more? Who ‘means’ us to do something more?”
“I don’t know. The...universe?”
“The same absurd, empty, meaningless universe you’re always talking about? That one?” Cassidy asked.
“I don’t know. Something just feels wrong.” He put on more speed as they reached a concrete bridge over railroad tracks, just wide enough for two lanes flanked by narrow, crumbling sidewalks. “Something has to change, though. We can’t go on like this.”
“Like what?” Cassidy asked, not at all sure what he meant, and then she saw the hearse.
She would remember it as a hearse, though it could have been other things—a black limousine, possibly, or a black station wagon. It was a long car, as black as the late-night shadows from which it emerged, its faint headlights a pale blue color.
The car barreled right down the center of the bridge, taking up half of each lane, leaving them nowhere to swerve. Peyton was driving towards it at sixty or seventy miles an hour, as though playing chicken.
“Peyton, watch out!” she screamed, pointing.
Peyton yelled, as though finally seeing the oncoming black car for the first time. He wrenched his wheel to one side, then the other, panic and confusion rendering him dangerously indecisive.
“Peyton—!” Cassidy screamed again, and then Peyton’s car spun.
Cassidy was slung out of her seat, because she’d forgotten all about buckling her seatbelt. Her spine jammed against the passenger-side door as the car whirled around, and she grimaced, her hands pawing uselessly for something to grasp. If the door behind her decided to spring open, she’d be flung into the road.
The Demon’s tires screeched as Peyton stomped the brakes and wrestled the steering wheel, fighting for control of the fast but antiquated machine.
Cassidy turned her head and saw the guard rail rushing toward them through the windshield.
She screamed, not even bothering with Peyton’s name this time. The Demon bounced up onto the sidewalk. Its grill and headlights smashed into the guard rail. The hood bent upward and folded in half, just in time to shatter the oncoming windshield.
Cassidy flew up out of her seat. There was a moment when the world seemed stretched out into slow motion. She saw Peyton rising from his seat, his torso hurtling towards the steering column, horror spreading across his face. He wasn’t looking back at her.
Cassidy’s femur shattered against the dashboard, filling the world with intense white pain for a portion of a second. Then her head bashed against the broken windshield and her eyes closed.
Chapter Five
Cassidy continued on through the windshield, over the sharp tent of the crunched hood, past the buckled and bent metal of the bridge’s guard railing. She flew out over the twin sets of railroad tracks below, lined with weedy gravel. High, kudzu-ridden trees and a few crumbling houses and wooden fences overlooked the tracks, which curved away toward the full moon.
It occurred to her that the night scene was rather pleasant. She drifted along over the tracks as though riding a cloud.
She wondered distantly how that terrible car crash had turned out. She reversed course and drifted back toward the bridge, approaching the vintage Dodge Demon smashed into ruins against the splintered guard rail.
She looked down through the broken windshield and saw Peyton slumped over the steering wheel. He let out an occasional soft groan. Beyond him, crumpled on the passenger-side floormat, lay Cassidy’s body, her right leg twisted beneath her at what looked like an excruciating angle.
Cassidy felt no pain, nor any particular shock at the sight of her mangled body. It felt no different than seeing one of her dirty shirts on her bedroom floor.
She felt concern for Peyton, though. He was still trapped down there, locked inside his body and feeling all its pain. She tried to speak his name, but she could not hear her own voice.
She rose from the wreckage and looked around for the elongated black car. She didn’t remember actually colliding with it at all.
The black car was not smashed against either of the guard rails, nor anywhere else on the road. It had somehow slipped past and fled on into the night, leaving Cassidy and Peyton to their fate.
She watched Peyton’s groaning form, wishing she could reach out and comfort him, but she had no hands, no body. This made perfect sense at the moment, she thought, because her body was over there, while she was over here. Simple as that.
The air around their unconscious bodies seemed to wriggle. Her nasty old friends, the transparent things that floated in the air, were back. Some resembled thick, horned millipedes, their heads swollen with three or four sets of mandibles each, while others looked like worms encased in coiled shells. The transparent things swam toward Cassidy and Peyton’s bodies as though the air were full of some invisible jelly.
They began to feed, the millipede-things biting at their necks and chests, the worms chewing at their guts and fingertips. Cassidy tried to wave them away with hands that didn’t exist.
She couldn’t see any obvious damage to either of their bodies from all the biting and chewing, but it was obvious that the creatures were greedily devouring something. They made no sound, and they remained transparent as they fed.
A large one arrived, seemingly drawn by the small wrigglers. It looked like a vulture, half-decayed, its dark feathers turned to filth. Its body was so rotten she could see holes straight through its abdomen. Sharp plates and spikes grew out of the bird’s skeletal skull and neck. Its eyes were sunken out of sight in their bony sockets.
The bird was also transparent, but less so than the dozens of little vermin. It perched on Peyton’s shoulder and dipped the sharp hook of its beak into his forehead.
In her mind, Cassidy shrieked at it to stop, but she could make no sound. She was a floating viewpoint in space, not breathing, not blinking, entirely formless.
She felt a deep chill, and then three shadows appeared by the wrecked car. She couldn’t see them clearly at all. They were tall and thin, their shapes suggesting distorted and elongated human beings, as though she were seeing a funhouse reflection of faceless monks in black robes. If they were people, then they’d draped themselves in the darkest cloth she’d ever seen. They faded in and out of view, three narrow stripes of a darkness much deeper than the night around them. They didn’t seem to be doing anything at all, just staring at Cassidy’s body. They didn’t seem substantial, but they gave her a creepy, unsettled feeling much worse than the di
sgusting, transparent critters munching on her boyfriend’s body.
Bright headlights flooded the bridge. The approaching car slowed at the sight of the wreckage, then stopped and flashed blue lights. Police.
A heavyset black officer emerged from the car, shined his flashlight inside Peyton’s car, then shook his head and spoke into his radio.
More flashing vehicles arrived, ambulances and a fire truck. The three creepily human shadows faded entirely as the scene grew, but the little worms and crawling bugs continued their nibbling, unseen by anyone but Cassidy. Some of the creatures swam over to the newly arrived police and emergency workers and attempted to fasten themselves to their bodies, succeeding occasionally.
The medics loaded Cassidy and Peyton’s bodies into ambulances, entirely unaware that transparent wormy, spidery things were trying to eat their faces.
Cassidy floated along behind the ambulance like a balloon on a string. She wondered what was happening inside, and instantly found herself there, watching the emergency medical workers trying to stabilize her. She wondered whether she might live or die, and was surprised she didn’t feel more fear.
Chapter Six
Grady Memorial Hospital was twenty-one stories high, the largest hospital in the city. Cassidy lost interest in her body in the emergency room and floated around, exploring. The hospital struck her as a kind of multi-story theater, each room a stage where a different drama played out—families clustering in the visiting rooms, waiting for someone to die or be born; nurses gossiping at their stations; massively injured individuals slowly dying as the ER staff worked to save them; sick old people slowly dying alone in their beds.
The hospital was heavily infested with the odd transparent creatures that only Cassidy could see. Long, lumpy bugs with nine or ten legs scrambled unseen along the walls and ceiling. A few of the decaying skeletal vulture-birds perched over terminal patients, watching intently with their dark eye sockets. Coiled worms drifted in the air, their slug-like antennae protruding from their blind faces. Occasionally she glimpsed a low, skulking dog-like shadow fading in and out of view, but it vanished whenever she tried to look directly at it.
Cassidy entered the huge burn ward. The sight of so many badly injured people in their beds wore down her feeling of distance from all she observed. These people needed help. What had Cassidy ever done to help anyone else? She was a self-absorbed brat, chasing only her own pleasures.
These thoughts made her feel heavier, and she sank toward the floor and moved more slowly.
She remembered Peyton had been injured and started to worry about him. She found him in a bed in the intensive care unit, with a doctor and a nurse attending. She overheard the doctor say that Peyton had fractured several ribs but did not appear to suffer any internal bleeding.
Cassidy felt something pull her out of the room and out into the hall. She floated invisibly past an elderly woman slumped in a wheelchair and over a gurney holding a gunshot victim, racing its way into an operating room.
The pulling sensation, which reminded her of the undertow she’d felt when swimming in the ocean, sent her out into a crowded waiting room. It drew her to the two people slumped in worn wooden chairs in the corner—her mom and her brother. Cassidy’s mom held an old Maeve Binchy paperback, which she ignored in favor of staring nervously into space. Her brother Kieran hunched over his phone, thumbs flying.
Cassidy looked at her mother, taking a little bit of a childlike pleasure in spying on her family while invisible. Her mother wore a dark blue blazer, the uniform of the Pleasant Evening Inn hotel franchise where she was the night manager. Her eyes were dark green like Cassidy’s. Her hair, with its short no-nonsense cut, was naturally red, but she’d dyed it a deep brown as long as Cassidy could remember. She was forty-two years old and developing wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and mouth.
Kieran was seventeen now, and his look had changed since Cassidy had last seen him. He’d shaved off about half his hair and dyed the rest green. A steel chain ran from his nose ring to a matching ring in his left ear. His jeans were baggy, black, and low-slung. His black t-shirt featured some kind of goblin made of flames. A few of the transparent coiled worms floated around him.
Cassidy saw a kind of theme in their family that she hadn’t noticed before—everybody wanted to alter their identity somehow. Cassidy’s mother not only ritually dyed the red out of her hair, she had also long suppressed her native Irish accent in favor of a flat Midwestern voice copied from American television.
Her mother’s apartment contained no pictures or other reminders of Ireland, and she never liked to discuss her childhood. She only said that she and Cassidy’s father had met nothing but misfortune at home and wanted to make a fresh start in America. Cassidy’s mother had been nineteen and pregnant when they’d immigrated, Cassidy’s father a couple of years older. Cassidy herself had been conceived in Ireland and born in America.
Kieran had been born five years later. Their father had died when Kieran was only twelve months old, and Kieran did not remember him.
Cassidy had been six, and she did remember—bright, golden memories she kept like secret treasures. Her father swinging her in the air, kissing the freckles on her nose, making her favorite sandwich (peanut butter with grape jelly), sitting on the floor of her room to join in her games of stuffed animals and dollhouses.
She remembered, and she still filled up with ache and grief when she thought of him. Everything she had lost, all the years with him that could have been.
Cassidy felt an intense urge to reach out to her mother and comfort her, to embrace both her remaining family members.
In order to do that, she had to return to her body and all its pain.
Her body lay behind a curtain in the emergency room, hooked up to monitors and seemingly stable at the moment, since no doctors or nurses were bothering with her. Her right leg was raised in traction. She drifted close and looked into her own face, or what she could see of it—much of her face was swaddled in bandaging, and she remembered bashing her head against the windshield.
She felt a deep chill radiating from somewhere behind her. She turned around.
The three shadows were back, like tall, elongated men draped from head to toe in the darkest black, their shapes stretched and thinned, not clearly in focus at all, as if they were tuning in from somewhere else.
They stood in a semicircle at the foot of her bed. The long shapes she believed to be their heads were all facing Cassidy’s unconscious body.
She froze where she was, looking back at them from just above her own head. She wondered whether they could see her floating there, despite her lack of any physical body.
She willed herself to move away from her body, past the beeping heart monitor, to settle somewhere in the corner of the room, near the window. She watched for any reaction from the three black shapes.
One of them, the one in the middle, may have turned his head to follow her. It was difficult to tell, because their shapes were so vague and out of focus, but just the possibility that it was watching her make Cassidy feel cold and afraid.
Reality hit her and sent her reeling in terror—she’d been in a bad car crash, her body was mangled, and the waking nightmares were back. The transparent little monsters that seemed to feed on humans were bad enough, but there was something much worse about these three tall, indistinct, extremely dark shadows.
The three figures moved in around her bed, and she suddenly felt very protective of her body. She needed it to get back to her family and her life.
The figures bent forward like black candle flames, coiling over her.
The heart monitor reacted with rapid beats, her pulse rising into the danger zone as her fear grew.
She didn’t know what they were doing, but she couldn’t leave her body defenseless.
She rushed down toward her unconscious form, her speed powered by longing and fear. Her rapid heartbeat drew her in a like a beacon, a kind of lighthouse made of sound.
> She passed through her skin and into the chambers of her own heart, and then her eyes opened.
Chapter Seven
Cassidy awoke in a dark hospital room. The dull red of very early morning had begun to glow through the window. She was sweaty and clammy, and her leg was elevated, which made her feel trapped.
She looked toward the foot of her bed, expecting to see something horrible, monsters pursuing her out of her nightmare, but there was nothing there. Two heavyset nurses dashed into the room, drawn by the rapid-fire beeping of the heart monitor, but Cassidy could already feel her heart beginning to slow. The bad dream was over, though real life wasn’t looking much better.
“I’m okay,” she told them as they hurried to check her out. The monitor’s alarmed beeping returned to normal.
“Tell Dr. Spiegelman she’s up,” one nurse told the other, who nodded and left. To Cassidy, she said, “The doctor wants to see you before your family comes in. How are you feeling?”
“Terrible,” Cassidy replied. As she awoke, she realized she felt sick to her stomach. Her broken leg radiated a deep, dull ache. Cassidy glanced at her IV, wondering how much painkiller she was taking, and whether she could ask for more. “My leg really hurts. It’s broken, isn’t it? Do you have any morphine?”
“You’ll have to ask the doctor about that. And here she is...” The nurse spoke quietly to the doctor, who nodded. Dr. Spiegelman had frizzy black hair and an overworked, exhausted look on her face. She flipped through a stack of folders to find Cassidy’s.
“Cassidy Dolan?” the doctor asked.
“Yep. I was just asking about painkillers—”
“Some concussion, bruised bones, and you’ve noticed the broken femur by now.” Dr. Spiegelman looked up.