Afterlife

by Douglas Clegg

  “This one for your heart,” the doctor said as he placed his cold hand near his chest. “It’s so we can make sure you’re okay.”

  The lights were kept on, and his arms were tethered to the bed so that he had a range of movement but he couldn’t get up. “I have to pee,” he said, repeatedly, but no one came to take him to the bathroom. He was in a white room with long mirrors on all the walls. He wasn’t even sure where the door was.

  Eventually, he peed in his underwear, and fell asleep, exhausted and a little scared.

  Another memory screen: a classroom of twenty children, with three stern-looking women at the front of the class, near the big teacher’s desk. He sat in the third row back and they were all being told to close their eyes and try to think of nothing but darkness. But he couldn’t. Every time he shut his eyes, he saw something awful, although as soon as he opened them, he couldn’t remember what it was.

  “You don’t go home?” Julie asked in the Stream, shocked that she was able to speak at all.

  The little boy answered her. “For some of us, our mommy and daddy never pick us up. We stay in that room with the lights and all the mirrors. They put the polka dots on us every night.”

  It was night, she assumed, but the lights above never gave an indication of morning or midnight. One of the boys plucked the polka dots off his forehead, and laid them on the bed. “Mikey,” he said. “They’re stealing your dreams.”

  “Are they?” he asked. “My dad wouldn’t do it.”

  “Don’t lie to him,” the sad little long-haired boy said. He must’ve been about fourteen, but he looked younger than Michael, who was almost thirteen. “They’re checking for brain activity. That’s all. They want to see patterns while we dream. Don’t worry, Mike, nobody can steal your dreams.”

  “They are too,” the older boy said. He was at least fifteen, but seemed older. “They’re trying to steal from us.”

  The girl of eleven or so who Julie thought might be the long-haired boy’s sister, piped up, “I just want to go home.”

  “There is no home,” the older boy said. “None of us have parents.”

  “I do,” Michael said, and the little girl nodded, “Me, too.”

  The older boy smirked. “If you call those people parents. They’d sell you if they thought it could buy them something. Don’t you think that, Mikey? Don’t you? Since as far back as you can remember, don’t you remember how they hated you? How they think you’re a freak because of what goes on in your head? That they think you’re going to go nutso because you keep predicting things—bad things—like you’re a bad luck charm? Like you’re a jinx? I wouldn’t want a kid like that around the house,” he said. “Who would?”

  The long-haired boy said, “What about you?”

  “My parents died,” the older boy said. “In a car crash. I knew it was coming, only I didn’t tell them.”

  “That’s mean,” one of the girls said.

  “Is it? I was only four. What did I know? I didn’t know people died like that,” the older boy said.

  “Don’t you feel bad?” Michael asked.

  “Why should I? I didn’t make them die. It was an accident.”

  “But you saw it coming.”

  “There’s a lot of things I see coming,” the older boy said, looking at the boy with the long hair.

  (A voice outside of the memory, Julie’s, “Who are they? What are their names?” and it jolted her off one memory screen and onto another.)

  There was an isolation booth. A glassed-in cage, but with a doorway that led into a larger room that was the testing room.

  (“Why is this important?” Julie asked.

  “Something bad happened here,” Michael said.)

  Then, another memory: the older boy and three girls and one other boy stood on the stairs in the schoolhouse, blocking the way for Michael to pass.

  “You can’t come up,” the older boy said.

  “Why not?”

  “We’re testing someone.”

  “You’re testing someone? You’re not supposed to run the tests. Where’s Dr. Stone?”

  “Getting a taste,” one of the girls—a tall, wiry one with braces, “of his own medicine.” She and one of the other girls giggled.

  “If you know what’s good for you,” the boy said, “you’ll just go back downstairs.”

  Michael noticed the way the five of them had carved spirals and things on their bodies. “Why’d you do that?” he pointed to the girl’s arm.

  “We’re a special secret club now,” she said.

  “You can’t join,” the older boy said, quickly.

  “Why not?”

  “You’re not good enough,” he said. “You’re fake. You’re one of the twenty-six percenters. We don’t want you. We want the ninety-nine percenters.”

  Another memory screen:

  Michael was weeping, wiping his eyes out as he walked down the corridor, and when he came to the Sleep Room, he looked through the door window and saw something that almost made him laugh, and then it scared him.

  (“What is it? What did you see?”)

  In each of the narrow beds, the doctors and teachers and the parapsychologist, all lying down as if sleeping, polka dots on their foreheads. Michael tried to make his mind roam into the room, but something blocked him. Why were they just lying there? What had done this?

  His mind sped through possibilities—thinking of his classmates, and he knew it was the older boy. Something terrible. Something they had done: the ones who gathered at the top of the stairs. They had scrambled the minds of their teachers, of their doctors, and of Mr. Boatwright, and maybe even his own father.

  They weren’t dead, he was sure. Their eyes were open, and their lips seemed to open and close as if they were fish pulled from water, dying on dry land.

  And then, Julie heard what sounded like an explosion and saw a little girl screaming as she tried to open the door to a glass booth—inside it was an inferno. The door finally opened, and a boy, on fire, came running out.

  And then, Julie felt other things. She felt a sense of benevolence like she’d never experienced. She felt kindness. She felt something sacred. Michael’s voice in her mind, “I died, Julie. I died then. You’re with me, feeling that. Don’t forget it. Don’t ever forget what you’re feeling. It’s not a terror. Death is not a terror. It is the doorway to something sacred. See, how I felt it? Stay with me. Stay with it.”

  Wave after wave of elation seemed to sweep through her. “It’s the human soul,” he said, with her inside him. “It’s the human soul, inviolate. Don’t ever forget that, Julie. Don’t. Death is just a stop along the way.”

  Then, she felt herself heave as if about to vomit, and she sucked air—but it was not her, was it? She experienced his memory—his fragments. He was alive. They stood around him, pointing. The other children.

  The older boy stepped forward and whispered in the ear of the boy who had been burnt. “You passed the test,” he said.

  It was Hut. She knew it was Hut. She could see in the boy’s face that it was Hut. Hut was the older boy. Hut helped set the boy on fire. Hut was doing something evil. Something terrible as a child.

  The fear rose up in her. The fear grew quickly, like a fire itself in her mind, and she felt Michael’s consciousness grasp at her, trying to tug her back, but the fear shot her out of the Stream and she was once again in her front hall, her back pressed against the front door, but the flashlight had fallen to the floor.

  Michael Diamond had released her hand.

  “Julie,” he said, his breathing heavy. “I did kill him. But not because of revenge. But because he was bringing things into existence. He was doing something terrible.”

  She stood there, breathing heavily also. She crumbled to her knees and sat down on the cold floor.

  “You murdered my husband,” she said. “And now you come here with this. This…magic trick. To make me feel things. To make me think you’re not the man who stabbed my husband. Who sadis
tically killed him.”

  “You believe,” Michael Diamond said. “You can’t go back from that. Once you believe, you can’t.”

  4

  Inside her own consciousness, without the sense that Diamond was inside her, Julie felt a growing belief. She felt it more than she had ever felt anything before. His words: the human soul inviolate. Inviolate. There was something more than just this existence. She’d sensed it, she’d been exposed to it in the past, but she had never believed it because she had no direct experience. But now, here all this was. As if it were meant to come to her. As if it were falling into place for her.

  And yet, he murdered Hut.

  “I want more,” she said, feeling hungry. “I want to be inside you. I want to see more. I can’t live like this. I can’t be like this. I can’t have all these things in my head. What I’ve seen. What I’ve experienced.”

  “It’s unexplainable in words,” he said. “Here, take my hand. Just take my hand. I can bring you back inside me, but there’s something inside you that’s still blocked, Julie. Something they blocked.”

  “They?”

  “There are at least five of them, still. They’ve done terrible things. Worse than you can imagine. If I were to tell you,” he said.

  “Show me.”

  5

  In the dark, he took his shirt off and crouched down beside her. Then, he guided her hands to his chest. “Accept the Stream,” he said. “I’ll bring you in. I’ll show you what you want.”

  Soon, she felt as if she were flying into shadows. She knew from her reading that this was the astral projection that was often written about—the remote viewing, where one consciousness invaded another. And she saw the memory screens—it was like blinking, and each time a new image or moment of his life came up.

  From his early life and his first experiences of Ability X (even his language invaded her mind, and she understood and accepted it) when he was seven and his father, in his military uniform, in a boardroom of some kind, tested him with cards, and then with mind games where the boy had to tell what he saw in pictures from his father’s thoughts. The little boy scribbled houses and horses and cats and women and his father each time nodded, and then the boy was in a room with his little sister Margie, and more tests. And she saw the building that was the Chelsea Parapsychological Institute, and she was there when the sleep study began, but his consciousness guided her through these screens, into other memories, after the fire. Of the hospital where he spent nearly a year, and she watched from above as skin graft procedures were done, and painful salt water treatments, and the boy in the bed howled in pain and begged his father to see his sister. Then, the roaming through the open Stream—floating down the halls of the hospital while the pain intensified for the boy in the room. Moving through windows, out into daylight, out into the world and traveling above the trees until finally, coming to a graveyard, and drifting down among the oaks like a kite falling to the ground, coming to rest on the grave of a little girl named Cassandra Diamant. His sister. More screens came up, and she blinked through them feeling as if she were swimming underwater with her eyes only half open.

  And then, operation after operation while the boy recovered, a teenager, nearly a man, and learning to test himself, test his abilities, but still too weak. Not recovered. And then, she went further, and felt as if she were going into the whorls of a dark shell. She was inside him, behind his eyes, seeing what he saw. And it was as if he were directing her back in time to look out through him. She saw the clippings on the wall—the murders. She saw things that he could Stream—and there was Hut, somehow he’d Streamed to Hut, Hut when he was in his late twenties, with Amanda, who looked more beautiful than Julie imagined she had been, more beautiful and radiant than any woman Julie had ever seen, and Amanda had Matty, a two-year-old then, and they were in Tompkins Square Park in the city. They were talking, but Julie couldn’t hear their words. But she saw Hut’s face. She saw a level of darkness there—as if there were an aura of ravens around him—and he was arguing with Michael, he was angry, and then laughing at him, and some of the words came through, “you idiot,” “wasting your life,” “you can’t see what we’re trying to do,” and Amanda looking as if Hut had frightened her as he picked Matt up and took her hand, tugging her away from Michael Diamond.

  Michael turned around on the street, and there was Hut again, only it was the Hut that Julie remembered. It was the Hut that she’d seen their last morning together. Again, she couldn’t hear the words. Not clearly. The volume was too low on what she experienced, but she felt what Michael Diamond felt, and she saw the anger in Hut, and then the two men went to the curb, and Hut told him to get in. Hut had a small knife. He was threatening Diamond. But Diamond got into the Audi, and they drove. The consciousness crashed in a wave, and Julie felt herself being pulled into an undertow, deeper into Diamond’s mind.

  And then, she was at the clearing, and it was Hut with the knife. Diamond argued, and Hut jabbed the air in front of him. Julie understood. Hut had wanted to kill Diamond. In her mind, Michael Diamond said, “I had been the instrument that allowed him, and the others, to discover about resurrection.”

  She shot out of his mind, just as sure as if she’d been catapulted.

  Again in the dark, but she opened her eyes, and it had begun to be light out. It was already morning. She was soaked with sweat, as was Diamond. “Oh my God,” she said. “Oh my God.”

  “Try to stay calm,” Michael Diamond told her. “Please. It’s something that they discovered when they tried to kill me.”

  “What is it?”

  “There is no death, Julie.”

  6

  “At least, not how we think of it. Death is like a train station. You leave one train and get on another,” he said. “Only some people—with Ability X—can alter the process. I don’t completely understand it, nor do I care to. I experienced death briefly. They were testing me, Julie. They’ve tested others. Most fail. Even with Ability X, the failure rate is high. They’ve killed some people. Some of their own children.”

  “Who are they?”

  “There are at least five of them, but I’m sure there are more by now. I’ve been trying for the past seven years to locate them, but they…well, they block me. They can do that.” He must have read the shadowy expression on her face. “I know it’s hard for you to believe. You’ve just come to this.”

  “But if Hut…if Hut were really…”

  “You saw inside me. You experienced it.”

  “You carved into his body,” she said. “And others. I saw them.”

  “I only killed your husband, Julie. They killed the others. And more that still have not been found. They kill their own children, Julie. Just as they tested me, they’ve been testing each other for years. They carved the symbols into your husband’s back. They were there, watching. That’s why he stopped the car at the path into the woods. I couldn’t detect them, but I know they were there, and I did my damnedest to make sure that your husband could not come back from the dead. They are a death cult. They have turned their ability into something…unspeakable.”

  She felt a shivering rack her body, and she pushed herself up from the floor. The ordinariness of the early morning light coming through windows, of the shadows being erased along the living room and down the hall to the kitchen, made her wonder what life was, and where the real and the unreal separated.

  “You’ve been inside me, Julie. I’ve been inside you. You can’t go back from that. You know—inside you— that what I’m saying is true. I showed you,” he said.

  She rose up, keeping her back to the door. “I don’t know,” she said, trembling. “You have this ability. I know you do. I don’t know what to think. I just don’t. What if you’re lying? What if you can show me things that never happened?”

  He pressed his hands to his forehead, as if he were stopping a headache. “Don’t doubt me. Please, Julie. It’s important. I’m here with you because I knew what you were going throug
h. When you came to me, and I went inside you, I knew the pain you’d felt. I knew the desolation. It’s because your marriage was a lie. He used you. He is still using you.”

  “He’s dead. My husband is dead,” she said, angrily. She stepped around him and went toward the kitchen. “I need time. I need time to think.”

  “There’s no time,” he said. “They’ve already tested others.”

  She half turned, stopping. “What do you mean?”

  “Your children,” he said. “They have some of their father in them. They have the genetic material for Ability X. You know that your stepson has things he can’t express. You know that your daughter thinks she has a brain radio. That she communicates with her father. Some of them have already murdered their own children, trying to resurrect them. Do you think your children are safe?”

  Julie glanced upstairs to the bedrooms. “Stop it. Please. If that’s true. My God, if that’s true, then why didn’t Hut just come here and take them? Why all these months…” She tried to block out the videos she’d seen. That’s insane. It was your mind. It was stress. Posttraumatic stress. Eleanor called it that. Shock. Shock of having your husband murdered. Shock and despair and anger and grief and mourning and cracks in your mind where you fall off a cliff of life and dangle from a thin branch over a chasm. Nervous exhaustion. Night fears. Erotic dreams. Rape dreams. Short-circuiting in the face of an enormous shock. That’s what it was. This is insane.

  “You don’t come back all at once,” he said. “First, your autonomous nervous system kicks in when Ability X turns on another part of the brain. Then, it takes weeks before your memories come back. And they only come back if others with the Ability are there to bring them into you. To get inside the Stream with you. To re-open the doors that have been closed. But you’ve seen him. In your dreams. In the movies in your head. The movies on screen. He is blasphemy, Julie. He violated the sacredness of death. He violates the soul. He does not believe in the soul. He puts himself above the laws of nature, which are here for a reason, Julie. It’s what I learned in my death. If I could take away my life now, I would. I’ve tried. But I can’t. Only when my brain itself breaks down, will I finally find release and enter the Stream that connects us all. And then my soul will go where it is meant to and not be shackled by this body. I wish I could make it untrue, Julie,” he said, getting up from the floor. He came toward her. “I wish I could say I made it all up. That I’m just a murderer. That I murdered your husband and I’m here to hurt you. But it’s not true.”