by Chris Dolley
Incredible!
And what if it had all gone horribly wrong? Would he have apologized to her dying body? Sorry, Brenda, things got a little out of hand, but don’t worry, I’ll find another partner.
And how did he know she could see the dead? He must have been spying on her. Watching her for weeks without her knowledge. Reading her most private thoughts.
Brenda shuddered. She felt cold, used, and violated. This was her home. Her refuge. Bad things weren’t supposed to happen here. Not here! She’d left all that behind.
Back came the memories – the ones she’d been burying for the past four years – rising up out of the ground like coffins in a waterlogged cemetery. London. Her apartment. That day in June when she felt unwell at work, took the afternoon off to go home and recover...
And walked in on her husband and her best friend. A best friend who she worked with! Who she shared her innermost secrets with!
And now, apparently, her husband too.
Brenda had died that day. The young, optimistic, fun-loving Brenda. Other Brendas crumbled in quick succession. The career girl Brenda – how can you go to work when the woman in the adjacent desk is sleeping with your husband! The rational Brenda – how can you think or concentrate when your mind is forever stuck on replay? That day, that scene, those words, those looks. The trusting Brenda – how can you trust anyone when the two people you trusted most in the world had deceived you so badly?
And how can you live in an apartment that would forever smell of her?
Marriage, home, best friend, job. All swept away. She couldn’t stop crying long enough to risk a job interview. She couldn’t face her friends, and as for her family – that wouldn’t be a refuge, that would be hell.
All through her teenage years she’d been told that women in her family didn’t get divorced. They worked at their marriages. And they didn’t have breakdowns, they coped. Her sister and mother would have sat her down in the big armchair by the fire and talked ‘sense’ at her until she’d lost the will to be unhappy.
And then there were the dead people. She’d forgotten when exactly they appeared. Week three, week four of her breakdown? They seemed drawn to her. Not that they’d offer comfort – far from it – they were too obsessed with their own plight. You think you’ve got problems? Look at me. I was sick for years. You young people don’t know what real pain is.
So Brenda ran away, turned her back on London, her career, her friends, and ran back to the U.S.A. But not to her hometown. She wanted somewhere far away – somewhere she’d never been, a place with no memories, a town plucked blindly from a map on a wall.
It was to be her retreat. The place where she’d settle down. The new Brenda. The low-expectation Brenda, who’d swaddle her life in protective folds, who’d look for a stress-free job close to home. Something routine and repetitive that she could leave behind at the end of the day. And she wouldn’t have friends any more. She’d have acquaintances. People you smiled to in the street. People you shared a joke with in passing. Not your husband.
And she would rekindle her love of books. Spend long evenings curled up inside their pages, live life vicariously, safe behind the heroine’s eyes. And she’d watch more films and immerse herself in soaps. Who needed the real world when fantasy was so much richer?
And safer. She’d tried the real world, and it hurt.
Then along came Brian.
For four years she’d lived in peace and contentment, living life at arm’s length, never allowing anyone too close, dipping into the outside world, but never letting anything penetrate her rose-tinted firewall. Then Brian tricks his way inside her home and suddenly she’s neck deep in the real world and treading water.
How could he!
But...
Brenda closed her eyes. A small part of her welcomed the idea of becoming a crime fighter. If this were a book she’d be shouting at the heroine to stop obsessing and get out there and kick ass. It was the opportunity of a lifetime. A chance to use her skills and make a difference. A real difference. Save people’s lives, give people closure, make the streets safe again.
But...
She liked her stay-at-home, risk-free life. She needed it. A fallow time while she let herself heal. And she was still healing. She didn’t have the confidence to trust another person and if she and Brian were to become partners, trust would be paramount. Her life would be in his hands, and from what she’d seen, he was someone who would be forever taking risks.
Brenda sighed. What the hell was she going to do?
Ten minutes of pros, cons, if and buts later, Brenda was still in a quandary. Perhaps there was no decision to make? Perhaps it had all been a dream?
Brenda didn’t need to be drowning to recognize a stout length of straw when she saw one floating by.
She glanced around the living room. No blood on the carpet. No signs of a struggle. And the door – it looked pristine – but she was sure she’d seen wood splintering from around the lock when it had been shot at.
She walked over to investigate. The door was unmarked. She slipped the latch and opened it to check the other side. Both sides were undamaged, but ... the door felt different. More substantial, heavier. And had there always been that strip of material around the doorframe?
She pressed her index finger into the strip. It felt soft. Some kind of draft excluder?
Or soundproofing?
She hurried through to the kitchen. She was sure she’d heard the killer try to smash the glass in the back door. She ran a finger over the door’s glass panel. It was unmarked. But different. It looked thicker. She opened the door, swung it back and forth. It felt different too. Heavier, smoother. The old door had caught occasionally. This one fit like a glove. And there was the same soundproofing strip around the doorframe.
She checked the windows. Triple glazed. In both the kitchen and the living room. She’d never had the windows triple glazed! But now they were. He’d soundproofed her home. But why? Why this way?
He’d said he’d used magic, but this ... this looked real.
She was about to slump back in her chair when she remembered the carpet. Brian had turned a patch of her carpet into glue. Was it still glue?
She fetched a mop from the kitchen and inverted it, using the wooden handle as a prod to poke at the carpet. The mop didn’t stick. She patted at the area with her right foot, pressing her shoe hard into the pile. Her shoe came away with no resistance. Whatever Brian was, he tidied up after himself.
Brenda bent down to take a closer look at the carpet. It looked clean, but ... anything could be on it – from invisible demon blood to ecto-glue. The same for the sofa and the cushions. She’d have to clean the lot.
Hours passed. Brenda stripped the furniture, shampooed the carpet. And dug a bullet out of the ceiling with a knife. It hadn’t been a dream. Real bullets had been flying around her living room and this one could have penetrated her body just as easily as it had the ceiling.
She shuddered. She had to find a way to get in touch with Brian and tell him she’d changed her mind. Maybe she’d be ready to help in a year or two, but not now. Now was too soon.
Days passed. The hunt for the Hillsdale Rapist slipped down the news schedules and Brenda settled back into her routine. As much as she could. She still jumped every time she heard a noise, wondering if it was Brian, wondering if he’d appear out of the blue with a new serial killer in tow.
But it never was. Towards the end of the week trepidation gave way to disappointment. Maybe he’d found someone else? Maybe her life could do with a little more excitement? Her job as a school secretary had begun to look dull and unfulfilling. She’d been on the verge of being a crime fighter. A sidekick to a superhero!
Back came the counter argument – Brian not coming back was a good thing. She wasn’t cut out for crime fighting. Partnering up with a demon would be a huge mistake, and as for quizzing dead people – what was she supposed to do? Ask them to form lines? Murdered people over here, accid
ents in the kitchen, communicable diseases outside and way down the block.
There was a lot to be said for living a quiet uneventful life.
And yet...
Chapter Four
By Saturday Brenda had put the excitement of the previous weekend behind her. Brian had found someone else and that was an end to it. And besides, she had something else to worry about – her mother’s birthday party. Three days to go and she was running out of excuses not to attend. The fact that it involved a three-hour drive was lost on her mother. A three-hour drive’s nothing to a daughter who loves her mother. Your cousin Emily’s flying in from Hawaii to be with her mother at Thanksgiving.
Good for Cousin Emily. Cousin Emily wouldn’t be pinned in a corner and lectured for two hours about the mess she’d made of her life and how it was time to get up off her ass and do something about it. Stop being a school secretary and find a proper job – one with prospects. Find a man – any man! Move closer home. Give me grandchildren!
The latter was left unspoken, but conveyed eloquently by her mother’s eyes every time the subject of children came up. Brenda’s sister, Susan, had a nine year-old daughter, but couldn’t have any more. A situation made worse by the rabbit-like fecundity of all her cousins. Brenda’s mother had armfuls of great nephews and great nieces, but just the one grandchild. A predicament that only Brenda – the thirty-one year-old, resolutely unattached disappointment – could rectify.
Aaaarrgghh! Brenda screamed at herself. Stop this! You’re on vacation. School’s out for the summer. You promised you wouldn’t let Mom spoil it this year!
An hour later Brenda was sitting on her sofa, daydreaming about the new teaching assistant at school – all thoughts of interfering mothers and demons flushed completely away – when the doorbell rang. Slightly annoyed at the interruption, she left the extremely athletic, extremely accommodating, young man bronzing on the beach and opened the door.
There is shock and there is shock – the wide-eyed ‘Oh. My. God. Let the ground open up and swallow me whole?’ variety.
Brenda experienced a touch of the latter.
He was standing there. On her porch. Jason, the male lead from her daydream.
Her face began to flush. What was he doing here? They’d never spoken, never been introduced.
“I’ve got to see you,” he said, brushing past, inviting himself into her home as she stood frozen in the doorway.
“You do?” She pinched herself. If he took his shirt off, she’d know she was dreaming.
“Do you want me to take off my shirt?”
“No!”
Brenda closed the door – swiftly – she didn’t want her neighbors to see him. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to see him. He was barely out of his teens and ... what did he want?
She turned and found him standing a few feet in front of her, arms open wide and a strangely impatient look on his face. “Come on,” he said. “Grab hold. Let’s get going.”
“What?” She’d heard some pick-up lines in her time, but ‘grab hold and let’s get going?’
He smiled and waggled his eyebrows.
“Had you going for a while, didn’t I? It’s me. Brian. Your friendly neighborhood Vigilante Demon. I thought this shape would please you.”
She couldn’t talk for a while. Relief, anger, trepidation, embarrassment – she cycled through all in quick succession. He had to have been inside her mind. Watching her dreams, watching her...
“What do you want?” she asked. “And don’t ever do that again.”
“Sorry,” he said. “I wasn’t prying. It was just that you were very loud. I couldn’t help but overhear.”
He smiled, that same boyish smile he’d tried on her last week. It hadn’t worked then either. She crossed her arms and gave him the look her ex-husband had named the Medusa. “What do you want?”
“You, of course. There’s a bank siege nearby. It’s all over the TV.”
“So?”
“So we can use it to practice. A valuable training exercise.”
“Why do we need a training exercise?”
“Because we’re a team and teams need to practice. Don’t you watch any sports? And, besides, people are in danger. Someone could get hurt. Killed even. We can prevent that and have some fun at the same time.”
Brenda knew Brian’s idea of fun. He’d laugh his head off – literally – and delight in freaking people out with his headless zombie act until everyone was banging on the doors to be let out.
“Why not just teleport the bad guys out.”
“In front of all those witnesses? Not to mention the cameras. We have to be subtle, Brenda. When confronted with the unexpected, you humans tend to run screaming to the nearest shop and loot everything electrical.”
He strained his voice into something approaching, but never quite reaching marrying distance of a mock hillbilly accent. “Help, help the aliens are a comin’ an’ I needs me a giant plasma TV.”
Beneath the humor, he had a point. A depressingly accurate one. Reports on the TV that a gang of criminals had vanished in front of dozens of witnesses would be an invitation to every nut job in the country to add their two cents: It’s the gummint testing their secret weapons. No, it’s not. It’s God cleaning house. What god? It’s aliens, I tell you – haven’t you heard there’s a galaxy-wide shortage of anal probe subjects?
Everyone would have a theory and every news channel and tabloid would find room to air it.
“Best to find a quiet corner and teleport in,” said Brian. “Then we can practice our skills.”
“What skills? I’m a medium. I see dead people. I’ll ask around and pass on information, but that’s it. I don’t ‘do’ danger.”
“There’ll be no danger. As long as you come along. I can disable their guns, but I need a second pair of eyes. Someone to watch my back and stop any of the hostages from doing anything stupid. I can defuse the situation, but it takes time.”
He looked at her pleadingly. For all she knew he was messing with her mind as well – making her feel guilty. Think of the hostages, Brenda. They’re terrified. Not knowing if they’ll live or die. Not knowing if they’ll ever see their loved ones again. How can you not help?
“I could make things worse,” she said. “I’m a school secretary, not a SEAL.”
“Nonsense. All you lack is confidence. And this is the ideal situation to rectify that. None of the gang are killers. Well, not unless pushed. And I’ll disable their weapons. We’ll save people, have fun, and bond at the same time. What do you say?”
‘No’ was a good candidate. Sensible, short and to the point. He might say he needed her to come along, but they both knew he didn’t. He had the power. She was just another damsel in distress – or, more accurately, a red cape that Brian the matador could flutter in front of the nearest charging felon only to snatch away at the last second to the appreciative gasps of the cheering crowd.
And one day he’d miscalculate and leave Brenda dangling there for one fraction of a second too long. As his last partner had told her – his dead last partner – he takes too many risks.
“All life’s a risk,” said Brian. “It’s how we learn. Now, come on. There’s people to save. Grab hold.”
He opened his arms again. Brenda shook her head, tried to take a step back, but he was faster, lunging forward and grabbing her shoulders. The earth moved, and not in a nice way. Her living room shimmered and shook as though it was being bombarded by hundreds of micro tremors. Silent micro tremors. There wasn’t a sound anywhere. Her ears felt like they were going to pop, and a thick cloying silence pervaded the room.
And then the room began to change. The far wall started to recede as though it was painted on plastic wrap and a giant invisible finger was pushing into it, forming a funnel, everything stretching and elongating and ... they were moving. Fast! Into the tunnel. Streaks of blurred color washing past them, but no physical sense of movement. No wind in her hair, no G-force throwing her back. If it wasn’
t for the dizzying blur streaming by she’d have sworn she was standing still. Maybe she was. Maybe it was the world flying past her.
‘It is,’ said Brian, his voice inside her head. ‘Imagine a giant hand taking two points in space between finger and thumb and squeezing the two together. We’ll be there soon.’
She was beginning to feel sick, disoriented. The streaking blurs rushing past her face were making her eyes hurt.
And then the streaks began to slow and take form. At the end of a long narrow tunnel a room was racing towards her. A white wall, a picture, strip lighting, blue carpet, an office...
And stop.
For one second she thought she was going to lurch forward into the wall opposite, but she didn’t. She had no momentum. She was standing opposite Brian in a sparsely furnished, windowless office. Or was it a storeroom? There were boxes in the corner, a stack of old printers and telephones, and a desk that looked as though it hadn’t been used in months.
“Where are we?” she whispered.
“In an empty upstairs room at the bank. Everyone else is downstairs.”
She looked at the door and listened, suddenly very aware that she was in a bank during the middle of an armed robbery. “Are you sure?”
“Reasonably,” he said. “And you don’t have to whisper. I’ve sealed the door. No one can hear us and no one can get in.”
She listened just the same, straining for the slightest sound of a footstep or a voice.
Nothing.
“The hostages appear to be in a single group,” said Brian, his eyes unfocussed as he – presumably – projected some kind of inner eyeball through the floor. “There’s about twenty of them lying face down on the floor in the lobby.”
“And the robbers?”
“Two are in the lobby. I think the others are in the back.”
“Think?”