Afterlife

by Douglas Clegg

  “Maybe I am nuts,” he said, too easily.

  “You read my expression,” she said. “You wrote that in your book, about the con artists. They know how to read people from body language and even the looks on their faces. My therapist said it, too. Things most of us don’t even notice, but you’ve trained yourself to do.”

  “But you don’t believe that, do you?” he said. “Not after recent experiences. You didn’t seek me out because of lack of belief. When I viewed you, Julie, I was there, with you, inside you, Julie. The birth of your little girl. Making love to your husband. I was there, with you, in your memory. As creepy as it sounds, it’s not. It’s a beautiful experience. It’s a connection of souls. It’s like a spider web inside each of us, and each strand of that web is a different world within us, and each strand shoots out and connects with strands of others, outside of us. A few of us are lucky enough to go inside. We need permission to do it. We can’t just slip into someone else. They have to want me inside them.”

  His words made her shiver, slightly. Reminding her of words the dark figure had whispered to her in her dreams: Do you want me inside you?

  She closed her eyes, made a brief wish, opened them. His face seemed open and warm and unassuming.

  It was like stepping off a cliff, stepping into his world of psychic “reading.”

  A world of illogic and mystical crap and all the things she’d fought her whole life never to believe.

  “Can I trust you?” she asked. “I mean, really trust you?”

  He nodded, without hesitation.

  “I saw his wounds when he died. I was at the morgue. He is dead. But I see him. I think…I think I’m being haunted by him. Look, I’ll pay you whatever it takes just to find out if I’m sane or not.”

  “I don’t want your money,” he said.

  5

  His apartment was less impressive than she’d expected. It was a three-flight walk-up on Perry Street, in the Village. When he opened the door, she saw a place that looked like it had only been lived in for a few weeks.

  “Most of my money goes to organizations I believe in,” he said, noticing her raised eyebrows. “It’s the main reason I write the books and do the show. That’s the carnival aspect of Ability X. My income mostly goes to nonprofits that deal with, oh, the usual.”

  “Animal rescue groups and homes for wayward girls?”

  “Something like that. When you live mainly in your mind, you have modest needs.”

  6

  “On the table,” he said, directing her to what looked like a massage table near the window.

  He drew the shades. He stood over her. For a moment, in the shadows, he reminded her of someone else.

  Then, he sat down in a chair beside her.

  “This’ll seem awkward. Just try to relax. All right? This is called body work. Just think of it like a massage. I need you to loosen your shirt. Would you mind taking it off?”

  “Why?”

  “Trust me or don’t trust me. You’ve had massages, I assume.”

  “Yes. But usually…in a spa.”

  “Tell you what, keep your cell phone on autodial for 911 if you’re afraid of me.”

  She was about to pull out her cell phone. Everything had begun to frighten her, but she’d begun feeling a certain numbness inside. She remembered the video of watching Hut looking at the camera, saying something, and then filming her in the most obscene way. Is this what insanity is? Is this what Amanda Hutchinson felt like? Is this how it crawls inside you? Finally, she said, “I’m not afraid of you.”

  The look on his face was of utter seriousness.

  “Clothing interrupts the Stream.” He said it so matter-of-factly that she felt as if any threat had been removed.

  He wasn’t even interested in her, in that way. She could sense it.

  “If I were a doctor, you’d have no problem removing your clothes. If I were a masseur, you’d be naked before I could say, ‘get on the table.’ Think of me like that.”

  She fought an internal battle, wondering if she had gone off the deep end. But finally, she unbuttoned her shirt, and drew it off.

  “I’ll get you a towel,” he said. “For modesty.”

  He got up and went toward the bathroom. When he returned, he tossed a large white fluffy towel at her. It smelled fresh, as if he’d just done his laundry.

  “I’ll go make some tea,” he gestured toward the boxcar kitchen.

  After he’d gone over to the sink, she slipped out of her skirt, but kept her underwear on. She wrapped the towel around herself, and it managed to cover most of her, breasts included. She had an awful feeling that she was stepping into a trap. That she had let a dream rape her, and now she was setting herself up for a man who was a virtual stranger to do the same. And yet, she had to see where this went. She had to know what was in his mind, his memories. She had to know more.

  After he poured himself some tea, he returned to the living room, and sat down beside the table.

  “Are you comfortable?” he asked.

  “Mmm.” She stared straight ahead: her view was the bathroom door, with its mirror. She saw her face, and Michael Diamond as he sat down in a chair beside the massage table.

  “I want you to know that you are safe. I won’t be touching you, but your mind will think I am. Have you ever gone to a Reiki therapist? They hold their hands just so, above certain points of the body. They believe they’re directing their healing life energy to the subject. This is somewhat similar. My hands will be this far from you the entire time. I want you to be aware of it, because there will come a point when it feels as if I’m touching you. Do not break the Stream. I Stream into you. I want you to close your eyes. Now. All right. Think back to a time when you first remember seeing a flower. Yes, a flower,” he said the words slowly, carefully, and she felt his hand on the back of her scalp. As he kept his hand there—barely touching her hair—she began to feel an intense heat, as if his hand emanated an aura of warmth. He guided her through looking at the first flower, then the first friend, then the look on her mother’s face when it was Christmas, and each time he took her mind somewhere new, she felt the presence of his hand again—not his hand itself, but the warmth beneath it as it hovered at the back of her neck, between her shoulder blades, down her spine, as he parted the towel, to the base of her spine, and then, slowly back up again.

  She remembered other things from her childhood, remembered a fight her parents had, remembered when she and Mel had dressed up their pet schnauzer in baby clothes, and then the memories came forward as if, by touching her, he had begun opening doors in her mind that she’d been shutting behind her.

  Soon, she had lost even the sound of his voice, but felt him there, his hand no longer moving just above the surface of her skin, but inside her in some impossible way—beneath the surface of consciousness, and his hand guided her along through memory, through doors that opened, one after the other, and behind them, memories. Then, more than memories—fantasies began coming to her—of flying in the air, of swimming like a fish through the water, and then she felt as if she were butting up against some door that wouldn’t open, but his hand was there, with her, and finally it flew apart as if smashed, and behind it was a blood-red room, and she was there, and a man without a face, and he caressed her and touched her, parting her legs as he parted her mouth with his tongue, and in this red room, she felt no shame and had no care that they were being watched by the outsider, by the psychic who chaperoned her journey into her subconscious. The faceless man against whom she twisted and bucked in a sexual fantasy of frenzy and animal lust, now took on the form of Michael Diamond himself—for a flickering moment—but then, as if propelled by pathways of the pulse, she was ejected from her inner fantasy, and moved again to memory—to a row of iron doors that looked as if they were locked, bolted, and bound by some kind of interconnecting bloodroots, but she heard a distant sound of a series of pops, and the doors opened, all of them, and it was as if she were spying on herself,
spying on her life with Hut, on the life they’d built, only she watched it like it was one of Matt’s movies, she watched their life, and as she watched, she saw Hut for who he really was, not the man of her fantasies and not the man of her illusions, but a man who was cold with her, and brusque, a man who was selfish with his time and displayed little love even for his son—a handsome, vain man who watched her at times as if she were not entirely human to him…

  She heard Michael Diamond’s voice, “Let’s move beyond all of this, there’s another place we need to go. You may be afraid, you may not want to go there. But fear isn’t what it seems. Fear awakens us to our abilities, our senses that have been hidden. Fear is the key to the final door inside you.” She felt as if someone had taken her wrist, and tugged on it, pulling her into a dark place inside her mind, a dungeon where some beast growled in a corner.

  “There’s a place inside you,” Diamond whispered. “A place where you’ve been, but you don’t remember. It’s been hidden from you. But you know it. I want you to face your fear and venture there again. With me.”

  7

  Julie moved as if swimming underwater, with dark vines moving slowly as if pushed by some unseen tide, and the doors were there, before her.

  One of them began to open.

  When it did, she saw Hut.

  His eyes, milky white, his grin impossibly wide. His arms outstretched.

  And she moved to him, as if some invisible tide pushed her toward the dead man.

  8

  Julie’s eyes opened, suddenly.

  Got her bearings: she was in Diamond’s apartment.

  It was mid-afternoon.

  An overwhelming pounding behind her eyes, as if she had a terrible headache that had just erupted. She glanced straight ahead at the long, vertical mirror on the front of the bathroom door. Her face—her eyes were bloodshot, she’d been crying—and Michael Diamond sat in a chair next to her. He looked up, at her staring at his reflection.

  Only it wasn’t his face in the mirror.

  It was a blur of grays and blues.

  It was the face of the man in Apartment 66S. His body was different. She saw him as if he were naked, standing in the mirror. Covered with burns. Covered as if most of his body had been consumed in a fire.

  Chapter Twenty

  1

  “You’re the boy,” she gasped. “You’re the boy who burned. The boy didn’t die. He didn’t. He lived. It’s you.” Her throat clutched as she said it, and she pushed herself up on the massage table, drawing the towel more tightly around her.

  “Julie?” he asked.

  She looked at him, and he was normal again, then into the mirror and he was also Michael Diamond, dressed, rising now from his chair.

  She dressed quickly, feeling a pulse of horror within her body. Diamond may have been speaking, but she didn’t hear a word. She just knew that if she didn’t leave his apartment, she would scream, or she’d want to jump out a window. She felt the urgency of it, as if something was coming toward her, some shrieking insanity swooping down from shadows. She thought of Amanda, with her caged animal beauty, her fierce attack, and wondered if she hadn’t experienced what was going on in her mind. If she hadn’t begun to see people’s faces as blurs of gray and blue. She felt as if she’d been infected with something, some awful poison, something that had begun eating away at her sanity.

  She raced down the stairs, not caring if she tripped and fell, and out into the street. She was disoriented, and couldn’t remember where her car was parked. She wandered through the village, her heart seeming to beat a thousand times a minute. She felt as if she would die at any moment, and she was about to let it happen, she was about to let the anxiety and breathlessness within her win.

  As she rounded a corner at Bleecker and Cornelius, she saw a crowd gathered around what must have been an accident. She felt drawn to it, and went to the group of people, who all stood still, watching the delivery boy, on the street, his bicycle mangled. Several feet ahead, on the road, a taxicab, with its driver standing half in and half out of the car, door swung open, looking shell-shocked.

  The boy had been knocked off his bike, and his head was twisted unnaturally around. His left arm was bent over his right shoulder. He looked as if he were no more than seventeen years old.

  His Chinese food he’d been delivering lay in mashed white cartons beyond the small crowd.

  The sound of the ambulance, rounding the corner. She looked in the boy’s eyes, she had to, she wanted

  to see what death was again, she wanted to believe it was final, and that whatever had been that boy was now gone, irretrievably.

  Then she felt a tender cracking, as if inside her skull, and for a moment, she wondered if this was what a brain aneurysm began with—a slight cracking sound— and then, she heard her husband’s voice.

  “ I would never leave you, Julie,” he said. “Death is everywhere. But not where I am. Do you want me inside you?”

  2

  She dropped by Joe and Rick’s place.

  “Jesus, Jules. You’re white as a sheet. And that’s something I never thought I’d ever get to say out loud,” Joe said after he opened the door.

  “I’m losing my mind,” she said.

  3

  After she told him everything, Joe said, “He might as well have raped you, Julie. He told you to take your clothes off? You did it? You went along with it? How do you know he didn’t hypnotize you or something and then do something awful to you while you were under? You’ve got to be more careful. God, should we call the cops?” Realizing his tone, he calmed a bit. “No, we call them, how is it going to look? Julie? Do you really think he killed Hut? I mean, that you happen to read his books. You happen to go to his studio. You happen to…”

  “I know it sounds crazy, Joe. But you believe in this stuff. What if he had psychic talent to draw me to him? I mean, what is the extent of this kind of thing?”

  “It sounds like something I’ve never heard of. I mean, if I believed that…”

  “What about the burns I saw? In the mirror?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, and for the first time ever in their friendship, she thought she detected a flicker of distance in him. As if he were looking at her in such a way that he needed to see her as damaged. As deranged.

  “Joe, I’m not crazy. I know I’m not. I saw him. I think he did what he said—he streamed into me. And when I came out of it, too suddenly, I saw him for a split second. He told me that I couldn’t be inside him unless he first opened me. He said it. And that’s what it was. I saw inside him. That’s what I saw with the burns. But…if he were burned as a kid, how could he look so…normal?”

  Joe thought a moment, and said, “I worked with a woman once who had been in a car crash. Eighty percent of her body had burned. Five years later, with a lot of surgery, she looked better than she ever had. I guess, maybe if you saw him naked, you’d see the burn. If…if you really saw something that was real. Julie, now don’t get pissed off at me or anything, but if you saw this for just a second, couldn’t it maybe have been some kind of hangover from what he did to you? Like waking too fast from a dream?”

  “Joe,” she said. “I saw things. Things I’ve forgotten. Things that…he unlocked inside me. And then, I thought I heard him. Inside me. But not from me. Maybe it was crazy. Maybe it was my mind on hyperspeed. But I saw him.”

  “Diamond?”

  “No,” she said. “Hut.”

  4

  Julie finally opened up about the apartment on Rosetta Street.

  “I know that block. It’s creepy already. I had to walk through there at night one time, and I swear the ghosts of all the cows they killed down there are wandering.” He grinned. “You still have the key to the place?”

  Julie nodded.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  5

  This time, to get through the building’s security door, Joe buzzed one of the first floor apartments and pretended to be the son of an old lad
y on the sixth floor. It took three tries before he got buzzed in—“It’s not the nicest way to sneak into a building, but it works sometimes,”—and when they got to 66S, Julie reached for her handbag, but Joe said, “I guess we didn’t need the keys after all.”

  The door was ajar.

  “What if someone’s in there?” she asked.

  He smiled. “We say we had the wrong apartment

  and we back out slowly. Gee, makes me feel like I’m one of the Hardy Boys.”

  6

  Inside, the light switch didn’t work. It was growing dark outside, but there was still some light from the large factory-style windows of the apartment.

  “Hello?” Joe asked, his voice booming. He turned back to her, “Open the door wide so we can get more light in here.”

  She pulled the door back, and a rectangle of white from the hall light illuminated the foyer.

  “Stinks,” Joe said, holding his nose.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “There’s bound to be another light around the corner,” he said, talking completely through his mouth as if trying to close off his nose from the smell that emanated from within.

  She watched his silhouette as it melted into the grayness.

  Then, a light flicked up in the next room. She went down the hall, and into the living area. It was now completely empty of furniture, as if someone had moved.

  There was one high-backed wooden chair at the center of the room. It reminded her of a chair she had seen in a dream. Somehow she’d seen it, but she didn’t mention this to Joe.