by Amanda Frame
I just stared at him, mouth open, trying to make words happen, but I couldn’t find any that would make sense coming out of my mouth. There was something familiar about him, but I wasn’t sure what. His crooked grin? His eyes? Just as John didn’t seem as old as he was, the reason for which I could never put my finger on, this boy didn’t seem as young as he looked.
I shook my head. “Prove it!”
“Okay. Well, I just stepped on your foot, which you were not happy about…sorry about that, by the way. We first spoke at length when you came over to apologize about not taking out my trash.” He started to tick off on his fingers. “I drugged you with lemonade…again sorry, you told me I was the only old guy you knew who owned video games, when you were twelve you fell off your bike in front of my house and I went and got your mom for you. Is that enough?”
“But…but why…why do you look different? Why aren’t you old? What the hell is happening right now?” He had the same mannerisms as John, the same inflection in his voice. But how could this be the same person?
“Well,” he sighed, “it is a very long story.”
CHAPTER 30
JOHN
I rolled awkwardly off the mantis’s back and stared at the two dead monsters. My limbs shook and my skin was slick with sweat and blood. I was standing in a puddle of congealing non-human gore. I dropped the knife and dry-heaved over the pavement. Cutting through the overwhelming feelings of disgust and horror was tiny trickle of relief and amazement.
I did it. I killed it. I was free.
For now.
Seemingly out of nowhere, a deep need hit me. It was like smelling food when you’re starving. I stood up a little straighter and furrowed my brow, perplexed.
I almost missed it. A faint, dark shadow was rising like an ominous cloud from the massive dead insect at my feet. Before I could think about what I was doing, I reached out to touch it, to see if it had substance.
A wave of electric pain shot up my arm.
Sadness, fear, anger, joy, resentment, rage, and a thousand other emotions that I didn’t know the name for raced through me at once.
I fell to my knees and gasped, overwhelmed with the sensation that I was about to rip apart, my body unable to contain such an onslaught of feeling.
I don’t know how long I was on the ground with my head in my bloody hands, my mind unable to do anything except try to process the intensity of emotion. When I could finally move, the shadow was gone.
So was my hunger.
The deep, soul-crushing, non-physical hunger I had been suffering from for the last few days had vanished. Not only was it gone, I felt amazingly refreshed, like I had just slept for ten hours. But under all that I felt just a tiny bit…dirty. Tainted. Wrong.
Not wanting to process what the hell had just happened quite yet, I stepped away and kicked off my sandals. I stripped off my ruined clothes down to just my boxers, discarded them in a careless heap on the ground, and walked back toward the army navy store. It wasn’t like anyone was around to see me mostly naked anyway. Even if there was, I was pretty sure the gore behind me would be far more notable.
I vaguely noticed that the sign out front named the store as Military Surplus Outlet, but the middle of the word military was faded so it looked like M Y Surplus Outlet. My surplus outlet. I was the only one here, so I supposed that was fitting.
Walking inside, I grabbed the white camo blanket from the shelf and sat down on it on the floor, like I was at a bizarre, morbid picnic. I pulled my knees to my chest and rested my head down, but popped it back up immediately.
I was barely in pain. I jumped to my feet and twisted awkwardly so I could see the back of my calf. There was indeed evidence of a pretty significant wound, but it was more like a scar, still healing. Except where a fresh scar would normally be pink and raw, the skin was gray and shimmery like an oil slick. There was crusting blood around it and some black substance I preferred to not think about.
I tucked my chin to try to get a good look at my stomach. I realized how much I had taken mirrors for granted. There were five inch-long vertical wounds running in a line diagonally across my abdomen, about two inches apart, where the spines of the mantis had pierced me. They had also partially healed into this odd gray scar.
I touched one delicately. It hurt like a bad bruise, but nothing like the pain I had felt when it had happened and should be feeling now. Even though my sense of time was warped here, it couldn’t have happened more than fifteen minutes ago.
I shook my head in confusion. I was filthy, bloody, and overwhelmed. I lay down on the blanket and begged sleep to come, but I wasn’t tired. I felt physically energized, but my brain needed a break. I didn’t want to think about anything right now, but I guess I had no choice.
I had a lot of new information to process. I knew, or was pretty sure, why certain things were in the Void and some weren’t. This knowledge was bound to be useful. The mantis was dead. There were other creatures here who leech off the echoes of people who appear here briefly. I had assumed that already based on my limited experiences when I still had a real body and lived amongst other people. God, I was lonely. Already.
But the final thing. I no longer felt like I was wasting away. And that feeling had disappeared the moment I touched the shadow floating over the mantis. Even though I had just slaughtered a giant insect and had confirmed I was living among monsters, this fact bothered me more. Because whatever I had been starving for, whatever the thing was that my soul had craved, had risen from the body of a dead monster, and I had no way of knowing if or when I would need another meal.
CHAPTER 31
JOHN
I woke up the next morning and it took me a minute to figure out why something felt off.
I was wearing clothes, and I was clean.
What in the hell?
Had I gotten dressed and forgotten? No way. It took me forever to fall asleep. I would have remembered. I checked my calf and stomach. I still had the weird silvery scars, so yesterday definitely hadn’t been some vivid nightmare. It was like I went to sleep and pressed a reset button.
Maybe that was exactly what happened. I scrubbed the sleep from my eyes and sighed. Just one more mystery to solve.
I went to the gun room and looked out the window. The bodies of the dead monsters were gone, a trail of dried blood leading behind the convenience store, as though they had been dragged. I shuddered. In my mind, something bigger and scarier had taken the opportunity for a free meal. I had concluded that the Leeches didn’t need physical food, but maybe I had been wrong.
The bloody heap of clothes I’d left outside was gone too, although I supposed it was possible that it had been swept away with the carcasses. I was grateful to not be half-naked and dirty, of course, but this was just too weird. I stood up and examined the blanket. The white camo was smeared with blood. I shook my head, confused.
A few weeks ago, my buddy Andy had showed me a computer game he had just gotten. The player controls a marine who goes around killing monsters and if you get injured enough, you die. But then if you have another life, you re-spawn, good as new, and get to start again.
It felt eerily similar to that. Except instead of dying, I went to sleep and woke up fresh as a daisy. I pulled at the hem of my shirt, creeped out. But the more I thought about it, it started to make sense. It was hard to forget the image of my dead body. I’d been wearing the same clothes, same hair, same sandals. Like I was a projection of what I had been right before I crossed over.
This held true with the one other similar experience that I had. I had told my parents a head wound was from falling down the stairs, but it was really when my physical body had collapsed after I accidentally separated from it. But unlike this time, my body was alive and waiting for me when I was ready to get back into it.
I, me, it. I kept thinking of my physical body as a separate entity than myself. But I guess I had confirmation of that, since my body was dead and I was still here. Alive. Surviving.
There were still so many unanswered questions. I felt like a physical body. I bled and slept, but didn’t have to drink or eat. Well, not food anyway. The thought of my fingers touching the foul cloud that rose from the dead mantis made me shudder.
So I was something. I wasn’t a ghost or hologram. I remembered a history assignment where we had to write a paper on a mythological archetype. I picked dragons because I thought it was pretty cool. We were paired up with another student to edit our essays. The girl I was working with chose astral projection and out-of-body experiences. It’s an idea that has spanned across many different cultures for thousands of years, which theoretically means there may be some reality to it. I had to read her paper. I discussed it a lot with her. I tried to convince myself now that it was because it was an interesting topic, which was true, but I knew in my heart it was because she was really attractive and I had wanted her to like me.
From what I could remember, a person’s astral form has some substance, not quite a physical body, but also not quite your soul. Something in between. This seemed like a really accurate description of my current state of being. Your astral body reflects how you view yourself, so you might be dressed, and you might not. I remembered this part specifically because I had visualized her astral body without clothes.
I rolled my eyes and groaned at my past self. God, I was a moron sometimes. Maybe I was just visualizing myself with clothes on because that was what I had looked like when I crossed over, so now I was stuck with them.
Was my astral body what solely existed of the person I once was? Made sense. Well, as much sense as anything else around me. I came up with a few things I could do to test out this theory and maybe once I had some results, I could put a few more pieces together.
Another critically relevant fact I remembered from the assignment hit me. Your astral could be killed.
CHAPTER 32
JOHN
In the back of my mind, the thought that I would have to eventually kill another monster was tapping away. I needed to learn more and somehow get prepared for the possibility. But first things first. I did not feel safe. Even though the mantis was dead, there were other creatures lurking out of sight. Since I had resigned myself to staying here, I decided to fortify my current location. How and with what I wasn’t sure yet.
According to my own theory, the objects that had echoes here had burned through because they were unmoved for a long time. So where would I find things like that? Attics, basements, museums, anywhere abandoned.
It was lucky for me that I’d lived in this area my entire life, because I obviously had no map. Back in the land of the living, I was annoyed by this fact and had vowed to attend a college at least a few hours’ drive from my childhood home.
I strolled through my surplus outlet, taking note of the layout of the store. Mostly empty racks bolted to the floor, similar to a small department store. Shelving on the walls. Dingy, fading, dark green carpet. There was a glass entrance door that looked concerningly easy to shatter.
Wait, why was there a door? Doors open and close, they move all the time. Great, another flaw in my theory. I inspected the glass, running my fingertips over along the edges to check for cracks, other than the small ones I had created yesterday. It was cloudy and bubbled in places, but I could still see through it. It would need to be covered. Maybe boarded up at night. There were no other windows in the main room, which I was thankful for.
The gun room did have a window set into the pegboard wall. It was kind of hard to get to since it was above one of the deep cabinets that lined the floor. The cabinets were only about three feet tall, the tops acting as a long table around the whole room. I could climb on top easily. The room was about half the size of the main area, maybe fifteen by twenty feet. There was a storage room in the back of the store that was about the same size, with shelving all the way to the ceiling. I had yet to look through it. That was next on the agenda.
I stepped into the storage area, which I had figured would be the safest place to sleep since it was farthest from the entrance. I looked down when I felt tile crack under my feet. The shelving was in good shape; there were some boxes way up by the ceiling. I pulled down lightly on one of the shelves and a small cloud of dust plumed out from the drywall behind it. I waved my hand in front of my face and coughed. Definitely would not be climbing up there. I needed a ladder. Of course, there was not one to be found.
I crossed my arms over my chest and leaned against the doorframe, looking into the main area. My inspection had taken all of ten minutes. I sighed. I was hoping to put off exploring outside a bit longer. I considered waiting another day, but I was afraid I would get…hungry…again. I couldn’t think of a better word for it and that terrified me.
~
I backed up toward the glass door, pushing it open with my hip, and dumped the last load of crap on the floor. I had explored attics and basements of a nearby residential area all day and I was exhausted.
Going through the echoes of people’s forgotten lives had actually been kind of fun at first. I got to trash houses, albeit carefully and quietly, with abandon. Then it had gotten tedious. And then of course there were the multiple stress-laden trips back to the store to drop off my cache. By some God-given stroke of luck, I had found an antique-looking Radio Flyer wagon in the corner of the basement in the first house I searched. It had been immensely useful.
But every time I left a house, my heart rate skyrocketed as I panned my surroundings for Leeches. I had only encountered one, as soon as I was about to leave the third house I had ransacked. Peering through the window of the front door of the house, I saw a beetle-like creature the size of a bobcat. Far less scary than the couple I had encountered so far, but I’d still waited till it was long out of sight before trekking back home with my next wagon-load of junk.
I took a deep breath and scanned the objects in front of me. I made sure to only bring items in good shape, otherwise what was the point? A shovel; a decent stack of two by fours; two rolls of duct tape; a crank flashlight; a small rusty toolbox containing a screw driver, hammer, plyers, and nails but no screws. A fleece blanket, pillow still in its original packaging, an entire box of paper towel rolls, a bag of crayons, six pretty large tent stakes, another hunting knife, a bicycle, and a gallon jug of paint thinner. I didn’t know what I would use that for but I knew it was flammable. I’d also broken down about twenty cardboard boxes and stacked them in a corner.
I grabbed one now and taped it to the far left wall of the main room where there was no shelving. I drew six tick marks on it with a red crayon and stepped back to stare at it. Six days. I had been here almost a week. In this place, this Void, this empty hellhole.
The emptiness wasn’t just physical. There was a lonely hollow feeling that accompanied being here, like something inside me was missing.
Maybe I would find another person eventually. Someone else’s astral. Maybe I wouldn’t be alone forever. The series of events that led to me getting stuck here was so specific that I found it pretty unlikely that I would find another person. I had crossed over randomly like had happened many other times over the last few years, then I encountered a Leech, which caused me to flee, accidentally separating me from my physical form, and then of course I got hit by a car and presumably died. Definitely died. There was no way a human could survive that.
I shuddered and backed up against the wall next to my makeshift cardboard calendar, sinking down to the floor and hugging my knees. That image haunted me. I would never heal the burn it left in my brain.
I sat there for a while, picking at the pebbles stuck to the bottom of my sandals. With a groan, I got to my feet and went about taping cardboard over the front door and window of the gun room with the crank flashlight stuck in the back of my shorts. I had already tested it and thank God it had worked. The cardboard blocked out the meager light of the setting sun, and I was left in darkness. I clicked on the flashlight, grabbed my new blanket and pillow, and headed over to the supply room t
o sleep.
I was drained. It had been a long day. Tomorrow would be longer.
CHAPTER 33
ANNA
“A long story? Why don’t you sum it up for me?” I asked, crossing my arms over my chest, still wary.
“Okay, well first, take a look back into the bedroom.” He gestured with his thumb over his shoulder. I peered around the door frame, giving the new John a wide berth. It was John’s body. Well, the one I knew, anyway. The bald eighty-something-year-old guy with age-spotted skin and old man clothes. He was floating above where the bed should be, looking peaceful but unconscious.
I looked back towards my body, lying face down in the middle of the living room, hair a mess, limbs askew. John saw my worried look and said, “Don’t worry, you fell on the mattress.”
I stared at him, eyebrows raised, waiting for more information. He sighed for like the hundredth time in the last few minutes. His eyes were tired, drained.
“Your body looks like you, mine doesn’t.”
“Obviously.”
“Okay, let me rephrase that. That is your body,” he said, pointing, then gestured toward the bedroom again, “that is not my body.”
I was still confused. “So like, your body ages, but whatever this is—” I swept my hands in front of me “—doesn’t?”
“Our astrals. But no. I mean it literally. That is not my body. I don’t have one anymore. I borrowed that one.”
“You borrowed it? How do you borrow a body? Do you plan on giving it back?” I asked, incredulous.
“Well…no,” he replied slowly.
“Then that isn’t borrowing!”