by Jeffrey Ford
“I always thoroughly research the lives of those I choose to mentor.”
The fact that she must know quite a bit about his waking life embarrassed him, but he accepted her explanation. She had taught him a lot.
“I was here for a while,” she told him as they walked along. “Scouting out some good spots for our encounter.”
“Don’t we have to head to the old man’s house?”
“No,” said Melody, “he’ll find us. Let the monster do the work. I say we head for the cemetery.”
“Are you sure he’ll come for us?”
She nodded.
“Why the cemetery?”
“Because at the very southern part of the place, moving to the north, is a miasma hungry and crackling for a sleeper.”
“Poetic,” he said.
“We’re not just going to kill him; we’re going to obliterate him from history. The night world is not without its element of irony,” she said, and bounded into the starry sky in the direction of the cemetery. Owen followed and, at the height of his leaps, practiced midair somersaults. As they went along, he told her about Kiara’s plans to barbecue the monster in his sleep.
“Kiara sounds fearless,” said Melody.
“She’s afraid the Ambrogio will eventually go after her son.”
“She’s right.”
In minutes, they were passing the baseball diamond on the way to the cemetery. They both leaped at the same time, and at the apex of their ascent, Melody pointed toward the edge of the boundary of graves in the distance. Owen saw the miasma, the color of canary feathers, roiling just above the ground, and he could barely hear it sparking and whining. “I want to trap him in that,” she said as they floated back to the ground. He wasn’t sure her plan was sound. The Ambrogio had the upper hand, as he could separate them from their cords. They had each other and they had Melody’s knowledge. But he thought messing with the miasma was cosmically wrongheaded. Owen considered that if by chance he was disintegrated—an utterly painful process he wasn’t inclined to experience—in the morning, he would never have existed and there would be somebody else worrying about the rotting Sleeping Beauty at the library.
Once in the graveyard, Melody told him to get down behind one of the larger headstones and hide. They found two situated close by and both ducked. Owen kept looking nervously over his shoulder at the creeping yellow fog that was still a considerable distance away.
“So,” he asked, “what am I supposed to do?”
“Don’t let Crenshaw get too close to you. Remember, he can’t grab you, but if he gets close enough, he can insert his hand into your chest and unhook your cord. Meanwhile, the ability you have over him is that you can jump up and put a good amount of distance between you and him in one bound.”
“What am I supposed to do, then, ask him to walk into the miasma?”
“I think we should jump around him and confuse and frustrate him as death draws closer. Then I will employ my maneuver, grab him—it only lasts a heartbeat or two—and throw him into oblivion.”
“That sounds kind of iffy. Do you remember how fast and powerful he was when he went after Feit?”
“I’ll use his ferocity against him and merely direct his energy as I’ve been taught.”
Owen shook his head. “Sounds sketchy.”
“My first teacher, Arthur Bishop, taught me how to deal with hostile entities.”
“And during the day, you’re just a mild-mannered mother and wife?”
“There’s nothing mild-mannered about my approach to either of those,” she said. “And I’m an insurance agent in addition to everything else.”
“An insurance agent?” Owen laughed out loud. “You’ve been life insurance for me.”
Melody nodded and smiled. “That’s my specialty, life insurance. And I’m aware you’re a librarian.”
“Not fair. You know more about me than I do about you.”
“I understand your library is going to disappear in a couple of years.”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Dedicate yourself to making it the best it can be in that short time?”
“That wasn’t exactly my plan.”
“What was your plan?”
“Sit and stare like a deer in the headlights until I’m either fired or transferred to the main branch.”
“That’s a plan for a blank-gaze cord-cutter. Seriously, what would be the difference? Life is passing you by.”
He had a witty comeback, but it never got out as a voice drifted past them on the breeze. Instantly, he froze, knowing it was Crenshaw. “I smell fear,” it said. Owen quickly looked over his shoulder to see how far off the miasma was, and then he peered around the headstone and saw the Ambrogio glowing a pale green, lunging forward in a crouch, ready to pounce. He looked over to Melody to see if she was watching. Unlike him, she’d stood straight up and was walking out from her hiding spot. “Keep moving,” she whispered down to Owen, who was leaden with fright.
The next sound from Crenshaw was a growl. Anxiety built in Owen’s chest and finally exploded. He sprang into the night sky. Below him he saw a pale green form pass through the headstone he’d been hiding behind. He looked quickly for Melody’s location and saw her darting toward the miasma, drawing her target in. He floated down and nearly landed when he noticed the monster had reversed direction and was heading for him. Barely able to place his feet and leap, he darted up before the old man’s fingers could pierce his phantom chest. Even under such duress, the absurdity of the night world never completely escaped him. Still, the proximity sent a bolt of terror shooting down his spine.
He lost sight of the Ambrogio for an instant, and that uncertainty, once he landed, made him spring immediately and recklessly in the direction he surmised Melody was. He immediately realized his mistake and looked up to see the miasma looming in front of him. His mind was overtaken by the memory of the fellow who’d leapt to his destruction from the roof of that house. Below he saw Melody dashing in front of and away from Crenshaw. Owen descended and could feel the heat and the crackling of the night air from the yellow mist. It sent out a feeler that snapped close to his left ear but missed. When he touched down again, the miasma reached for him with swirling wisps of fog, but he pushed off backward at a low trajectory and escaped, only to find himself passing through the pale green form of his attacker. There was a dark, frozen anguish at the center of his being. Landing, he launched himself up and away again.
The creature turned his attention to Melody, strategically trapping her between himself and the advancing fog on a plot of ground with open graves on either side. Owen yelled for her to jump, but she stood her ground. Crenshaw moved cautiously in as the miasma moved to within mere feet behind her. The old man’s hand shot out toward her chest. Owen yelled to her again. In a flash, she somehow grabbed the Ambrogio by the forearms. There was a sudden look of consternation on the pale green face. He couldn’t believe that her grasp and force had agency over him. She shifted her position as if she were about to throw Crenshaw into the mist. What she failed to notice was the clawed phantom hand coming up from under her arms.
As he witnessed the scene with a sense of horror, Owen heard a phone ring. The sound startled him, and he realized it was his phone. It looked like Melody had control of the beast but it also had her. His body vibrated throughout and he was brutally snatched back to himself. He woke in bed, shivering. The phone continued to ring, and he remained stunned. When he answered, he recognized Kiara’s voice.
“Sorry to intrude, but I can’t find the artist’s body anywhere. Everything else is still here in this creepy-ass house—the blood vats, the hanging dried-out corpses.”
“He’s there,” said Owen. “Somewhere. I know, ’cause Melody is right now wrestling him to the death.”
“I’ll go through the place one more time,” she said.
“Where are you now?”
“Could be the living room.”
The words “living room” set somet
hing off in Owen’s memory. He said, “Look up, over the couch. What do you see?”
“A big painting.” There was a long silence.
“You see, in the picture, there’s a chamber underneath the statue, and that statue is out back of the house. I ran into it the other night.”
“Oh, shit, I see it,” she said.
He heard her footsteps through the phone as she sped through the place. The entrance in the back of the house obviously had a screen door with a strong spring, as he heard the aluminum frame snap back and bang closed. The sound of Kiara breathing heavily followed.
“Look behind the statue,” Owen called out, but it was clear she couldn’t hear him. There were a few seconds of scuffling and muffled cursing before he heard her say “Yes” in a definitive tone. Next came her steps upon the concrete stairway, leading down. There was a gasp from Kiara and then that same growl he heard just minutes earlier in the cemetery. Two shots rang out and their sound made his phone vibrate. The growling came more fiercely, and then the whoosh of what he took to be the flamethrower. There was screaming.
Owen hung up. He sat in shock and his thoughts returned to Melody. He told himself he should try to go back to sleep and go to her aid in the night world. He lay back down and closed his eyes. It wasn’t long before the phone rang again. He answered.
“He’s finished,” said Kiara. “The flames and the phosphorous bullets melted him. Once I was down in his lair, I didn’t give him a chance.”
Epilogue
OWEN DISCOVERED OVER THE next week that whatever automatic passage he’d had to the night world was gone. His struggles against sleep paralysis vanished, and instead, he had long, involved dreams of meeting Melody at different places in town. Every incident was rushed and full of insoluble complexities. Every morning, he woke with a sense of dread. And then five days later, he saw her obituary in the Westwend Tattler. “Died peacefully in her sleep. Survived by a son, a daughter, a husband.” For the most part, he knew her only as a phantom, but he had seen her and her family in the grocery, and he mourned for their loss and his. On the same day, Kiara came to the library in the afternoon with William. She brought coffee for them and they sat on the bench out front while the boy played with a toy truck on the front path.
“Are you leaving?” he asked.
She nodded. “Going north to take a rest; the organization has given me a year off. My husband and I had been trying to bring Crenshaw down for a while and had lost a number of people, including Duane. They know they owe it to me.”
“I’m glad I could help . . . if I did.” Then he told her about Melody and they sat in silence for a brief time. As Kiara got up to leave, he told her about when he’d seen Melody in the market and what she and her family looked like in life. They both fell silent for a time, and then she gathered up William. At the car, Kiara put the child in his car seat. She beeped as she pulled away, and Owen waved.
A few months later, he sold his parents’ house and bought a small ranch farther back in the barrens. The new location put an extra half hour on his walk to work. He returned to his route past the Busy Bee, though he never again entered the store. With the money left over after the purchase of the smaller house, he invested five thousand dollars in having the painting of Sleeping Beauty restored to its original look. The library was still slated to move and the building would be demolished. But there were still two years. The night of the day he called the restoration artists, he woke in his bed to a state of paralysis. Once again, he achieved the night world and wound up in the attic room of Shiela Tobac.
The red-haired girl was asleep on the cot in the corner, her glasses half on, a pencil between her fingers, and even though he didn’t have to tiptoe to not be heard, he did. He moved around the walls, lighting them just enough with his pale blue glow to see. Through voluminous chapters he searched, literally high and low, and discovered somewhere just above the baseboard, in the middle of the western wall, a mention of Melody.
He followed her story, which blew like a breeze through the otherwise greater plot of the novel. When he lost sight of it on one wall, he found it on another. The pieces came together like a puzzle the further he read. And then she was there, standing before chapter eleven, pale blue and beckoning him with open arms. He took a step toward her and caught only a brief glimpse of the dull center of her lifeless stare. She lunged and he woke. That was his last journey to the night world. For the rest of his life, he had to suffice with dreams.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Ruoxi Chen and Irene Gallo at Tor.com Publishing for making this book possible. Also, a big thanks to John Klima, who let me interview him about what he does all day as a librarian besides hide in the stacks. And, of course, thanks to my agent, Howard Morhaim.
About the Author
Author photograph © Lynn Gallagher-Ford
Jeffrey Ford is the author of the novels The Physiognomy, Memoranda, The Beyond, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass, The Cosmology of the Wider World, and The Shadow Year. His story collections are The Fantasy Writer's Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, The Drowned Life, and Crackpot Palace. His short fiction has appeared in numerous journals, magazines and anthologies, from MAD Magazine to The Oxford Book of American Short Stories.
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Also by Jeffrey Ford
Vanitas
The Physiognomy
Memoranda
The Beyond
The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant
The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque
The Empire of Ice Cream
The Girl in the Glass
The Cosmology of the Wider World
The Drowned Life
The Shadow Year
Crackpot Palace
A Natural History of Hell
The Twilight Pariah
Ahab's Return
The Best of Jeffrey Ford
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Jeffrey Ford
Copyright Page
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novella are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
OUT OF BODY
Copyright © 2020 by Jeffrey Ford
All rights reserved.
Cover photographs © Getty Images
Cover design by FORT
Edited by Ellen Datlow
A Tor.com Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates
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New York, NY 10271
www.tor.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
ISBN 978-1-250-25014-8 (ebook)
ISBN 978-1-250-25015-5 (trade paperback)
First Edition: May 2020
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