by Skyler Andra
“My children,” she mumbled, tears pricking the corners of her eyes.
“Not your concern anymore,” I explained. “Now come. Your judgment awaits.”
Chapter 3
Autumn
I turned, surprised to find a tall, pale man with black hair shined like patent leather, slicked back from a face that didn’t look like it did silly things like smile. By the looks of him, he obviously didn’t work for the funeral home. He wore a black suit—crisp and sharp as a razor, which probably cost at least half a year of my pay.
Mr. Cotterly and his staff all wore good black suits, but they were the kind you worked in, soft and flexible, not hard and cold.
This man, a mourner most likely, glanced around with a confused and irritated expression on his face as if he didn’t even see me. A long-lost son or nephew or the black sheep of the family perhaps? Either way, it was probably a rotten day for him.
He struck me as someone who needed help, so I gave the baseball display one last pat and dusted my hands along my dress to get off any tiny stalks.
“Hi,” I greeted, my voice soft and respectful as I walked toward him. “Is there anything I can help you with? I’m not part of the staff here, but I can guide you where you need to go…”
“What in the world?” He had a deep voice that rumbled pleasantly through me—his diction the kind that went with old movie stars. Up close, he wore a stern countenance, but there was something sweet about his mouth—sensual, almost beautiful—which was such a strange thing to see on a man who looked that strict.
I blinked, drawing back just a little at the way he glared at me. It wasn’t an angry glare, but it screamed of a plea to leave him alone.
People have all sorts of reactions when they’re grieving, I reasoned. One time, I had a lady at the flower shop shout at me for suggesting something as old-fashioned and plain as lilies for her sister’s spray. Then she spent forty minutes apologizing and weeping when I told her my name was Autumn and not Molly. The poor thing ended up sitting in our consultation area until we closed, de-thorning roses under Pearl’s watchful eye.
Then there were the stories the funeral home staff told me about, ranging from mourners trying to have sex in the closets, impromptu poetry sessions, to fist fights over old grudges. Suffice to say, I knew people got weird when it came to death, but I still didn’t expect the guy in the nice suit to stare at me as if I had crawled out a crypt.
“I’m with Pearl’s, the florist,” I stammered, a little taken aback. “I’m just here to handle the sprays, but I can help you find what you’re looking for.”
His mouth slightly parted and he eyed me up and down, his gaze speaking of his bafflement. For some reason, his examination sent a weird little thrill through me. I’m pretty enough that I got attention on a regular basis, but no one had ever looked at me like this. Assessing, calculating, and fascinated all at once—with an added pinch of something sexual if I read right, along with something else, something I couldn’t quite define.
“Who are you?” he demanded, his dark eyes narrowed. “What are you?”
That hit my funny bone, and I laughed a little. “I’m Autumn. I work for the florist. You know, flowers, bouquets, apologies to your wife.”
Okay, so I might have thrown that last one in there to fish for his marital status. Why not? He could be single. Not that I practiced picking up men at funeral parlors. Junipers, was I that desperate? I mean, it had been a while, but Autumn, please…
Shamefaced and glancing at the door, I added, “How about if I just tell Mr. Cotterly that you’re here and–”
“No!” He flung his pale hand out and gripped my wrist. I yelped more from how fast he moved than the way his long, pale fingers wrapped around me. He hadn’t grabbed me hard, just firm enough to allow me to make an effort to get away. Regardless of his speed or firmness, seizing someone like that represented bad manners. Something I planned to point out.
I opened my mouth to tell him off when everything changed. A feeling, like the one where you’re on the verge of falling asleep and your leg twitches, hit me. My head swam like I was falling and my stomach dropped out before I snapped back to alertness, all as if I had woken from a dream safe in my bed, unsure for just a second about whether I was actually dreaming or awake. It felt as if the whole world crashed for an instant, and in the hale of shattering glass and screams of metal, an intense rush of heat and warmth bloomed in me, the feeling akin to the sensation of coming home and being safer than I had ever been in all my life. The instant his skin touched mine, happiness spilled through me and my heart opened like a flower to this random, well-dressed stranger at a funeral home. It was as though it was perfectly normal and appropriate to be open to him, and to let him be open to me.
Hi, my heart seemed to be saying. Thank goodness you finally showed up. Where have you been? I was waiting forever!
I may look a little vintage in my black work dress dotted with yellow sunflowers, my shoulders secure in a granny cardigan and sensible sandals on my feet, but this interaction was unusual even for me. Despite my earlier eagerness, I didn’t get as far as I had by just letting anyone with a handsome face and a sharp suit into my heart like this.
The only thing that stopped me from jerking my hand back and making a quick getaway in a terrible florist’s van was that I could tell that he was going through the exact same thing.
“You. Are you…?” he started, stroking my hand with his thumb, as if he knew me.
“What?” I asked for more clarity, brushing a hand through my hair when the door burst open and a bunch of people in baseball jerseys came in.
Nothing killed the mood faster than a dozen people wearing the red and blue of the Texas Rangers charging in, talking about the number of guests, reception food, and the upcoming season (apparently, the Rangers were absolutely going to kill it). None of them looked like they’d ever be wearing suits that cost as much as a decent car to the funeral.
The curious stranger dropped my wrist and retreated to the back of the room. My heart sighed as he left.
I wanted to follow him and ask him to explain what he meant, but the matriarch of the Parsons clan buttonholed me, launching into raptures about the baseball display.
“Oh, Autumn,” she cooed, cupping a rose. “This is lovely.” Her eyes watered up. “Al would be so touched, God rest his soul, and he was always so sensitive, too. A man who loved his flowers, just like he loved all his nieces and nephews. Did you want to meet some of them?”
I glanced around the room. No, I didn’t really. But this was the kind of funeral I liked best: a celebration of the deceased’s life, their spirit, and the things they cherished. Of course, it was sad that they were gone, but man was it great to learn how they had been a part of these people’s lives.
“Sorry, I can’t,” I apologized to Mrs. Parsons. I liked my work, but I’d also been there long enough to know that no one was paying me to deal with all of this. “I better be getting back to the shop. Don’t want Pearl to worry.”
“Of course, dear.” The matriarch patted my hands.
I glanced around the room for the tall, dark, and weird stranger. My stomach sunk with disappointment when I noticed he’d left. Oh, well.
I did my final check to make sure Mrs. Parsons got everything she paid for and then made my escape by sneaking out of the viewing room. As I strode along the hall, I thought about the strange falling feeling that was followed by the rush of warmth and utter happiness and familiarity of the stranger.
In passing the next viewing room, I found him, this time slightly rumpled, seated on the ground at the platform with his head in his hands. Long-limbed like a cheetah, he was graceful even when it looked like he had been dropped straight into a pile of despair.
I had a moment of doubt, but then I shrugged it off because in for a penny, in for a pound. I padded silently over the carpeted walk, stopping just a few feet shy of him.
“Doing all right?” I asked him.
I might as well have put a Taser to his back the way he leapt to his feet in a flurry of motion that would have put a less graceful person on their rear. He stared down at me with impossibly black eyes. I’d never seen eyes that dark on someone who wasn’t wearing costume contacts, and the oddity of it almost made me fall back a pace.
“You can see me,” he growled. “Why the hell are you able to see me?”
He reached for me, but this time I pulled back. A part of me had liked—no, scratch that, more than liked the way he touched me before, but I wasn’t ready to get back into that without knowing at least a little more about what was going on.
“Hey, hey, hold up.” I held up my palms. “Why shouldn’t I be able to see you? You’re not invisible.”
He gave me a frustrated look full of furrowed brows and pursed lips. “I should be to humans, at least. What are you?”
I didn’t know why he kept asking me that. Did I look like an alien or something? Maybe I should have a response besides the urge to laugh in his face.
“What kind of LARP are you playing?” I accused. “I’m a human. And if you’re playing some kind of game, man, this is not the place…”
I was beginning to wonder if I’d happened upon someone seriously detached from reality when the lights around us flickered, dimming and then coming back on just as a chill settled over me. I’d never known that to happen before, especially at a place as orderly as Cotterly’s. I automatically looked to the light switches by the door. There stood a man, and something in my brain recognized him before I could put a name to him. My whole body iced over, and I froze like someone had dumped a bucket of cold water over my head.
“That’s… that’s Alan Parsons…” I stuttered, pointing a finger like a dumbstruck kid.
The man wandered out of the viewing room right through the wall.
I stumbled backward, crashing into the stranger. He righted me, brushed past me, and chased after the apparition. For a few moments, I clutched my chest, blinking, wondering if I had imagined things. I’d been delivering flowers to Cotterly’s for the past three years and not once seen anything like that.
“You need to come with me!” the mysterious man shouted—his voice a command given by a master to his slave. “It is not right for the dead to walk the Earth, Alan Parsons!”
A blur of thoughts clashed in my mind. Then one hit with crackling clarity.
Junipers!
The stranger was no guest at the funeral. He must have been a reaper or something, come to take Alan Parsons to the afterlife! Before my mind had time to catch up to my body, my legs carried me out after him.
“Oh, Autumn, this is how people end up in unsolved podcast episodes,” I muttered, because really, I wanted to see this.
The handsome stranger in the suit was fast, but I could move when I wanted to so I followed him down the back stairs in a rush.
As we reached the refrigerated part of the funeral home—the area where they stored the dead bodies for petunia’s sake—it hit me like a sack of fertilizer on my toes. I was chasing a reaper and a ghost! Not the wisest course of action I guess. Maybe I should have stayed put. I mean, I was a florist, not a catcher of souls! But a part of me was drawn to both entities and my legs refused to stop carrying me forward.
Usually downstairs wasn’t a creepy, dark place as people might imagine. Amelia, who did makeup for the deceased, would blare bubblegum pop while she worked, and Mr. Cotterly’s niece kept everyone well-supplied with cheerful crayon drawings at their workstations.
Today was a little different, though. The lights kept flickering as I caught the sound of footsteps, louder and more deliberate now, ahead of myself and the dark stanger. The lights stayed off for a few seconds and I groped for the wall, my breaths shuddering in and out of my lungs. Somehow, I knew where Alan was. Something innate in me, buried deep, told me that I had always known. Chills rolled down my body. I shook my head, getting my bearings. He was directly below the viewing rooms where they had put him in an oak coffin for his final party… or at least, that was where they should have put the body of Alan Parsons—because the man himself now walked along the hall in pitch darkness.
Finally, the lights came back on like a scene from some eerie ghost movie. The stranger and I paused in the door, me looking around his broad shoulder.
Alan stared at the refrigerators housing more corpses with a look of mingled anger and confusion. Then he approached a single coffin on a table.
It took me a few seconds for my mind to kickstart. I realized that he was searching for himself, which must have been a sour pill to swallow.
“Oh, the poor guy,” I whispered.
“That ‘poor guy’ has done something that has not been done in centuries,” the stranger informed from beside me, sending a deeper chill coursing through me.
In the basement of a funeral home with a dead man circling another dead body and the lights flickering like crazy, the stranger didn’t sound so very ridiculous. I held my breath, not sure of what was going to happen next. But then a question niggled at the back of my mind.
“What are we going to do?” I asked softly.
The handsome stranger glanced down at me quickly, then away again. It was like he had too much on his plate right now, and didn’t want to risk me adding to it in any way.
“You are going to stay right here,” he ordered so assertively and fierce that something inside me responded to his directive. “The living and the dead should not mingle.”
He said the last part like my great-aunt might have said that you couldn’t wear white after Labor Day, and the entire peculiarity of the situation must have gotten to me because I bit back a giggle. I didn’t get a chance to retort though, because he then entered the room with Mr. Parsons.
This whole situation was unreal and peculiar, something like out of a movie. Yep. I must have slept in, missed the delivery, and this was all a dream. One of those good dreams with handsome strangers… if only I could get rid of the ghost and have me some alone time with tall, dark, and broody…find out if he really was a reaper, and if this wasn’t some strange dream I’d forget when I woke up.
“Linger here no more Alan Parsons,” the mysterious man said to Mr. Parsons, his voice firmer than it had been with me. “It is time to come with me.”
Mr. Parsons turned to the stranger with a frown designed for someone who had interrupted his attempt to get something done.
“I cannot find my family,” he replied. “I need to find them. I thought they would be here, but they’re not.”
A thought needled at the back of my mind that I could no longer ignore. This was no dream. No nightmare. I was wide awake, and there was a real ghost and reaper in front of me. The realization rumbled through me like the stranger’s voice.
Junipers!
“Your family does not matter any longer,” the stranger told him, taking another slow step forward.
Mr. Parsons scowled. In life, he was probably been a man who liked things to make sense, and honestly, if the stranger in the good suit were talking like that to me, I’d sure be asking questions as well.
“I am not going anywhere until I’ve seen my family.”
The man acted as if Mr. Parsons weren’t even speaking. He continued reaching for him like he had reached for me upstairs.
“A place has been set aside for you, Alan Parsons, and now you must–”
The rest of his pompous pronouncement was cut off when Mr. Parsons got tired of listening to the stranger. In the blink of an eye, he wound up his arm and threw a beautiful haymaker straight to the pale man’s jaw.
Whoa! I pressed a hand to my mouth.
Mr. Parsons might have looked like a principal who spent most of his free time rooting for the Rangers, but that punch showed how he could have easily boxed middle-weight. The force of the blow sent his victim spinning around, and I caught a quick glimpse of absolute shock on the reaper’s face before he stumbled into the wall.
“I am not going anywhere until I
see my family!” Parsons snarled, his voice so loud that I didn’t know why the car alarms on the street didn’t go off. I covered my ears in response. A greenish yellow light glowed in his eyes as if someone had scooped out his brain and turned him into a jack-o-lantern.
Oh, very comforting, I thought blankly to myself. But before I could think better of it, I stepped into the room.
Chapter 4
Autumn
What I should have said was don’t punch a reaper unless you want to go straight to hell, you fool. But instead I chirped, “Oh, Mr. Parsons, right?” more as a distraction than anything. Because really, I didn’t know what else to say. “Your family’s in Viewing Room B.”
His head twisted toward me, and for a moment I knew exactly why the stranger wanted to keep me out of the room. Nothing inhabited Alan Parsons anymore but memory. Suddenly, I realized with a sinking stomach that if the ghost wanted to, he could hurt me very badly and not even be aware he was doing it.
My gut wanted me to run down the hall shrieking like the heroine in a bad horror movie, but I was at a funeral home, and I shouldn’t disturb the grieving guests above. Imagine the scolding I’d get from Mr. Cotterly. No thanks.
In his own way, Mr. Parsons’ grief doubled since he also mourned himself.
“I want my family,” he repeated. “I need to see them.”
The man in the suit placed one hand to his cheek with a faintly bewildered expression on his face, acting like no one had punched him like that before.
“I can take you to them,” I offered before the stranger interjected with something that pissed off the deceased again.
Mr. Parsons drifted toward me, a hungry look on his face.
I took a step back and held up a finger, ready to lay down the law. Also because I was a little worried he might punch me or worse. “But!” My stomach tightened as his face hardened. “You have to promise that you won’t upset them, all right? They’re having a hard day as is. No, um, talking to them or punching them.”