by Blake, Bruce
He didn’t know how or why, but he sensed he’d found a person with whom he shared a kinship, someone who might understand him. If he had to remain in this world, Trevor might make it a sliver closer to bearable.
His street dead-ended at the edge of the park and he stomped his boots on the pavement as he emerged from the trail, knocking off some of the mud clinging to the sides and stuck in the treads. For a change, he didn’t dread returning home to the depression living inside his house, or to the mother who avoided him.
Maybe he’d even speak to her today.
He sauntered along the street, humming the one Shadows Fall tune he remembered and contemplating the pattern of dirt splashed across the toes of his boots like a mobile Rorschach test. The shape on his right boot resembled a bat, the left nothing but a random blob. What would a shrink say about that?
Cory looked up at the sound of a door closing ahead of him and saw a man, a child and a woman emerge from a house.
His house.
He stopped, watching, then drifted to his right to hide behind a rusted washing machine sitting on the Burns’ lawn, a decades-old memorial to the failure of the Maytag repairman. Once, in his youth, he’d shut a cat inside and, as he observed the three people descend the steps from his front door, he wondered if its bones might still be trapped within.
The woman with the group was undoubtedly his mother, though she appeared younger and thinner than he ever remembered her. She wore a flower-patterned spring dress he’d never seen before and no coat. Cory’s forehead creased—he didn’t notice the winter chill, but his mother often complained about how cold it was inside the house and never went out without a coat between September and June.
The girl walking beside his mother couldn’t have been more than ten years old, twelve at the most. Her nondescript red short-sleeved tee-shirt and blue pants shimmered as she walked, as though he saw her from a distance on a hot summer day. The man with them wore a dark overcoat. Cory sensed a familiarity about him, but too much distance between them made it difficult to be certain.
Are they arresting her?
Stranger things happen, but it didn’t explain her weight loss and reverse ageing. Cory peered out from behind the washing machine, watching them move away and waiting for them to disappear around the corner before hurrying to his house. The unfamiliar but pleasant sensation he’d experienced walking through the park dissipated, draining out of him as though someone poked a tiny hole in a water balloon and he left a wet trail behind him with every step closer he got to home.
He hurried up the uneven sidewalk, past his mother’s long-abandoned flower gardens, and jumped up the four steps in one bound. His fingers gripped the knob, twisted, pushed.
Unlocked. His mother never left the door unlocked.
He rushed through, leaving the door open behind him and tromping muddy footprints across the entryway floor. Incredibly, his mother sat on the couch, right where he’d left her, the TV blaring its insidious drone of afternoon romance and stomach-turning intrigue.
Cory stared, mouth agape. She didn’t turn to look at him; she never did anymore.
“Ma?”
She neither responded nor acted as though she heard, but why should he expect her to? He rarely heard her voice except when she whispered to some friend or other on the phone. Of course, it was rare he bothered to speak to her, so her opportunities to respond were severely limited.
He tracked mud to the end of the couch, his leg bumping noisily against the table supporting last night’s empty pizza box, and she still didn’t move, but now Cory saw why. For a change, it wasn’t her hatred of him and all the things that happened in her life since his birth that caused her silence. For once, disdain and fear of her only living child didn’t keep her from speaking. With the calmness of fulfilled expectation, Cory regarded his mother’s purple face, her bulging eyes staring at the TV.
He knew this day would come. They all died eventually.
But then who was...?
Something clicked in his mind, a voice in his head whispering the answer in his ear. He rushed back to the door and stared down the street, searching for the three people, already knowing they were long gone, but he remembered where he’d seen the man before, and knowing meant he knew what happened here.
Cory returned to the living room, hunted down the remote control sitting on the couch against his mother’s thigh—within easy reach before she lost the ability to reach—and clicked off the TV. He tossed the remote on the table beside the slipper fallen off her foot as she choked, then kneeled in front of her, holding himself level with her dead, staring eyes. A glob of jam on her cheek distracted him; he stroked it off with his finger.
“What did you tell him?” He wiped the jam on her robe, smearing it across the pocket. Her bulging eyes stared and he thought he saw reproach in them. “What did you say?”
Silence.
***
Drops of water fell from the tips of Cory’s fingers, ran down his chest and arms and legs. His hair stuck to his back, plastered between his shoulder blades as the remnants of his shower circled the slow-running drain. The wetness on his skin cooled quickly, even in the steamy washroom, and the cool porcelain edge of the sink pressed against the top of his thighs. With two swipes of his hand, he cleared a circle in the center of the misty mirror and stared at his own face.
He peered deep into his own brown eyes, so different from his mother’s blue ones, and wondered for the thousandth time what color his father’s eyes had been. She would never talk about him other than to say he’d died before Cory’s birth. And yet she’d given him his name: Medlin.
Cory leaned closer, inspecting the two weeks of stubble peppering his smooth, seventeen-year-old skin. He rubbed his hand across the whiskers, touched their roughness, heard the dull scrape of his palm passing over them.
He sneered, examined his teeth, and found them no pointier than anyone else’s, or longer, whiter, sharper or more yellow. No prominent canines to tear flesh. He passed his tongue over them, found their surface as smooth and benign as ever, then opened his mouth wide: pink tongue, normal-sized mouth, the thing dangling at the back in the right place. His jaw didn’t detach in the manner of a python swallowing its prey.
He shut his mouth and pressed his lips together, regarded the face that might have been the face of any seventeen-year-old boy for another moment before shifting his focus lower.
The skin on his chest was smooth with a few hairs getting their start around his nipples. Other than being skinnier than other boys, nothing unusual. Cory turned and stood on his toes, craning his neck to see his back in the mirror.
An ugly purple bruise made the bump at the top of his ass crack noticeable. He prodded the spot with his index finger and winced at the pain; it didn’t just resemble a bruise, it hurt like one, too. To anyone else, it might have appeared the injury of a teen who fell off his skateboard. But he didn’t board, and the hard lump under the black-and-blue flesh had grown larger in the three weeks since he first noticed it. It started off a small mark, then became a bump, but it now protruded three inches from his body. The swelling hurt when he sat and was becoming difficult to hide beneath his pants. If it continued growing, he’d have to wear a long coat to conceal it.
He pressed it again, his teeth clenched against the pain. His finger sank into tender, swollen flesh until it found a bony strip at its center. He exerted more pressure.
The bump moved. It didn’t shift, the result of his curious prodding, the thing jumped away like it tired of his examination.
“Fuck me.”
Cory jerked his finger away and lifted up farther on his toes to get a better view, his calves protesting. Nothing there but the purple-black mark. He turned sideways, dancing en pointe, an awkward ballerina seeing how far the protrusion stuck out from his body. It didn’t move again.
Exasperated, Cory lowered his heels to the slippery, wet floor and moved to turn away when a mark on his back caught his attention. He took a
step toward the mirror, his neck cranked around owl-like to get a closer view.
An inch above his right shoulder blade, a black square the size of a postage stamp marred his otherwise smooth back. He stared at it, mouth open a crack, then reached his left hand over his shoulder, stretching to touch it.
His fingertip grazed a spot not merely a discoloration, but hard.
Cory rubbed the pad of his finger back and forth across it and found the patch neither smooth nor entirely rough. It reminded him of a piece of beach glass, its surface dulled and pitted by rocks and the sea, or the top of a fingernail in need of a manicure. He rubbed a circle over and around it, fingered its hard edge disappearing into his skin, clicked the tip of his fingernail against it and frowned.
Whatever it was, it wasn’t there the last time he showered.
He yanked the towel from the rail beside the bathtub and threw it over his head, inhaled the scent of fabric softener as he dried his hair, then his arms, legs and chest, leaving his back until last. As he drew the towel across his shoulders, the hard spot moved, wiggling against his flesh. It grated on him, out of place and annoying.
Angry, Cory threw the towel to the floor and groped over his shoulder again, digging at the top and sides of the hard, rough spot. They extended beneath his skin, disappearing into his flesh, but not the bottom.
He inserted the edge of his fingernail underneath the free side and pulled it up; it moved, so he tugged harder, until it hurt. The underside seemed attached to his skin, like a fingernail.
Or a scale.
***
Cory dressed in the same black pants and long-sleeved black shirt he’d worn before having his shower. The loose waist of his jeans threatened to slide off his hips, so he slipped a belt through the loops and buckled it before heading to the front door to don his boots and dig a long coat out of the hall closet to disguise the bump.
“I’m going out, Ma,” he said and snickered.
How long had it been since he last bothered to tell her when he left? Or spoke to her at all?
Or her to me?
Her death had done wonders to improve their relationship.
With a scrape of hangers, he shifted aside a parka they should have gotten rid of years before, three of his mother’s coats he presumed would hang there until they rotted, and a wind breaker she’d bought him at a yard sale and he’d never worn before finding the long gray coat for which he hunted.
He yanked the overcoat free and the hanger sprang off the bar in the closet, landed on the floor amongst the pile of shoes and boots with a clatter. For a second, he considered rehanging it, but decided not to and pulled the coat on instead. His late stepfather had been broader than him across the shoulders, so it hung loose, but the sleeves were the right length and the back of it hung to his knees, hiding the disfigurement above his ass. He stuck his feet into his boots, buckled them, and flipped up the coat’s collar in an attempt to look cool instead of resembling an undercover cop or a used car salesman. He seized the door knob, jerked the door open a crack, then stopped; something didn’t seem right.
It was too quiet.
He went into the living room, grabbed the remote control and turned the TV on. Some reality show he’d never seen winked to life on the screen: three young women and two men arguing about something unimportant. He tossed the remote onto the couch beside his mother’s leg and leaned down, kissed her on the forehead.
Her cool flesh on his lips made him shiver. This close, he inhaled the soapy aroma of her cheap body lotion and the odor of the peanut butter and jam sandwich lodged in the back of her throat. His stomach rumbled at the smell of it, the first time in over a week it showed signs of hunger.
“There you go, Ma. Hope you like that show,” he said stepping away and going to the open door. “I’ll be home late. Don’t wait up.”
With a quiet laugh to himself, Cory went out into the night, locking the door behind him.
Chapter Nine
“You heard her call him the devil,” Dido said.
I lifted the glass of soda water to my lips, took a sip, and immediately longed for the missing flavors of lime and vodka. What’s the point of soda if it doesn’t contain lime and vodka? They were made for each other.
“I heard what she said.”
Normally, even I balked at taking an eight-year-old to a pub but, as a spirit, she was invisible to humans, and my selection of places to take her was limited. I wasn’t hungry, so I mentally crossed my new favorite haunt, Benny’s BBQ Pit, off the list. The Caffeinated Cowboy closed at six, and I’d declared Denny’s a no-fly zone because it reminded me of Poe. The last thing I needed reminding of as I sat across from a cute adolescent with the endearing quality of being annoying, was how I’d stranded my guardian angel, and how I might have no choice but to do the same to her.
Dido shifted in her chair, searching for comfort the chair wasn’t designed to give, her eyes darting from the big screen TV showing college basketball, to the patrons of Sully’s Tavern engaged in various sports-related discussions, to the over-worked server making her way from table to table.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“What do you want me to do about the ramblings of a woman shocked by her own death?”
“Really?” She leaned forward, eyes narrowing, elbows resting on the table. “And you’re an authority on how dead people act?”
“Yes, I am,” I said, a generous helping of disbelief in my tone. “Dealing with the dead is what I do, in case you haven’t noticed. Why do you think you know anything about it?”
“Because I am one.”
She leaned back in the chair, arms crossed in front of her chest, her legs pulled up underneath her bum. Body language that clearly said: ‘so there’.
“I died, too. And I’ve seen others die.”
“But how long did you spend as a soul with no place to go?”
I opened my mouth to reply, but found no good answer, so shook my head. “A couple of minutes,” I conceded.
“Exactly. And I’ve been in that state for,” she looked at an imaginary watch on her wrist, “days.”
Her gaze held mine, a ‘gotcha’ shimmering in her eyes. I pondered how to counter her argument and came up empty. She smirked, I stewed; we accomplished nothing else for at least a minute.
“What do you suggest we do, Fido?”
“Don’t call me that.” The self-satisfied smirk left her face.
“Fine...Dido. A dead woman calls her son the devil. What next?”
“She seemed really scared.”
“It’s not unusual for the newly dead to be scared. Lots of them make a run for it.”
“But she wasn’t just scared. Didn’t she also seem...relieved?”
I pictured harvesting the woman’s soul, struggling to remember if she did, but the unappetizing blob of jelly slipping its way down her cold cheek waylaid my thought process. Guess I should have paid closer attention.
“Uh, I guess.”
“We need to find out who he is,” she said.
I regarded my pathetic glass of soda water, swirled the ice to make it clink against the side of the glass and missed the oil slick of lime juice that should have been floating in it. I’d remember to ask for a slice next time.
When we delivered Meg Medlin-Williams’ spirit to her escort at a laundromat attached to a gas station, I asked the platinum blond angel, who bore a striking resemblance to Draco Malfoy’s father in the Harry Potter movies, to summon Michael for me. Not surprisingly, the angel proved as single-minded and unhelpful as the others I’d met. Or perhaps they were the same angel; they all looked the same to me.
“Okay,” I said raising my eyes to Dido. Hers flashed and she made a pitiful attempt to keep a satisfied smile off her face. “But there’s someone I have to talk to first.”
***
I dropped Dido off at the motel and made her promise to stay put. Between being burdened with her care, and now this revelation from a dead woman,
the flood waters were rising over my head... I was out of my pay grade...snowed under. Pick a cliché, any cliché.
Bottom line: I needed to find Mikey.
An unpleasant tickle annoyed my gut, as though I’d eaten bad shrimp last night. After all that had happened since I woke in a shitty motel room with Michael leering at me like a blond, over-muscled Tony Manero, I’d decided it best to avoid the archangel whenever possible. But with my guardian angel’s position still vacant, no one else came to mind who might have solutions to my issues.
The problem? Mikey always found me.
I hit the streets, not so much searching for the archangel as trying to attract him. Perhaps if I put my mind to things Mikey found offensive, he might pick up on them and pop up to straighten me out. Lame, I know, but I didn’t have anything else to work with.
Up to the time of my death, drumming up sacrilegious thoughts to fit the bill would have been easy, but once you’re dead and brought back, meet four archangels and two guardian angels, and have been to Hell and back a few times, it becomes difficult to find concepts to disbelieve. Only one thing I hadn’t seen yet and could still doubt.
Heaven.
I wandered for a while, allowing my feet to carry me wherever they desired as day became twilight. Since Michael popped up anywhere, anytime, no point choosing a place and hoping, may as well go where I wanted. I stopped at a convenience store and bought a loaf of bread a day past its best before date and headed for the park.
Since Sister Mary-Therese’s death at the hands of a sociopathic dead priest bent on revenge, I’d found myself drawn back to the pond under the ancient willow again and again. This was where the nun found peace often in her life, but also where Father Dominic murdered her. Kind of morbid.
Whatever.
The occasional quacking of the ducks, the gentle splash as they plummeted their heads under the water retrieving food and then resurfaced, even the reek of copious amounts of duck shit spread across the muddy ground beside the pond served to calm me, focus me. It reminded me of her; she might not be pleased knowing duck shit triggered the memories, but maybe she’d be happy to be thought of.