by Martin Rose
Here we discovered moldy chapters on lore long forgotten. We laughed and scoffed and called it crazy. Laughing and scoffing our way into our teenage years and into adulthood, but deep down inside, we struggled not to think deeply about it.
Jamie and I had a long way to go yet from the library room in our father’s house to a full-fledged spook curating the very books we spent our childhood mocking. Back then, we used to trade old texts with Victorian illustrations back and forth between us. A man sleeping on a bed and his ghostly double rising up from the mattress while his other self slept on, connected only by a thin thread of consciousness. Detailed instructions on how the subject should recline, how much they should eat the night before (little if anything), their mindset, tricks on how to ease into the state. Charts on chakras and how they opened a seam down the body to allow the other self to eject from the physical shell. Seriously metaphysical shit that made us jumpy. Jamie would stand lookout in the mahogany planked hall while I read a passage out loud to him in a whisper. We laughed and cracked jokes and later on in the night, we stayed awake, wondering if twins of ourselves were escaping our bodies in our dreams and playing pranks on the rest of the world, ghosts connected by a thin silver cord while we slept. Wondering if those dreams of flying were stand-ins for when we ourselves had left our bodies. And we kept on wondering, right up until I started to get into too many knife fights in school and Jamie wanted to excel and be the good son, thumbing his nose at our long lost brotherhood in favor of pushing me out of the imperial nest so he could preen before Father. Such was Jamie.
And now he was gone. I’d pushed him out of the nest for good. We weren’t boys anymore. The allure of breaking into the library was not nearly exciting as once we entered the disappointing and cursed land of adulthood and responsibility.
The day before I left to join the military, I visited my father in his office to give him a stiff and formal goodbye, but the old gray fox had slipped away. I never did tell Jamie how I opened up the door into a cold and sterile room. Civil War blades spotted and tarnished with the blood of dead legions. Our father, vanished. Left me standing over his desk filled with papers and stacked books.
I pulled out a photo of a man lying on a bed. Naked. Electrodes pasted down his bird-thin chest. His eyes hollowed and closed into black circles. A scientist with a clipboard in his white lab coat. I need but listen, and I can summon the sound of machinery calculating mathematics and imagine the sound of my father’s voice, his steps on the linoleum, commanding, holding papers in his hand and signing away other people’s lives. My father. The quintessential desk murderer.
And the smudge of smoke, levitating just above the body of the patient, giving thin suggestion to a set of eyes, a slant of mouth.
A faint silver cord between.
Fast forward to the present: I reflected on the questionable heart attack victims Niko had taken in to her mortuary. Their hearts stopped in their chests. Their eyes open wide and the capillaries burst as though someone had reached in through their throats and squeezed until there was no more blood left to milk. I wondered if when Blake Highsmith fell asleep, he rose from himself like a fading Polaroid photo and walked out of his own cell and down the lonesome halls of the prison and out the front door and into the pale moonlight. Hummed to himself. I imagined a tune to complement his classical tastes, like Beethoven’s “Ode To Joy,” as he glided with a smile on his face and a vacant expression in his eyes suitable to the kind of psychopath who was absent of feeling and had always been that way. Perhaps Mommy hadn’t hugged him enough. Daddy didn’t buy him that pop-gun for Christmas. Now his eyes reduced to buttons of glass without feeling, his heart filled with high-test hate simmering through every chamber and waiting for the chance to swallow another life.
My brother’s voice from the past: Beware the echoes and specters!
If Lionel was right, this is what Highsmith had been doing. Becoming a ghost between his eight-hundred-count cotton sheets. Treating his sleep like a business proposition, the date of my attempted murder another action item in his schedule book. He’d slip down the streets in the high noon heat, find me sleeping like a babe with my head tilted back on the headrest, mouth half open, unaware of the pseudo-ghost hovering near. This is how it played out. This is how the seat belt came loose, unspooling to snarl and brand a burn around my throat while Highsmith violated my dreams to kill me, dead.
I couldn’t lay my hands on this knot to unravel it. I couldn’t logic it. How do I put an end to something I couldn’t see or detect with the naked eye? How did I square this with known reality?
The vulture squawked behind me from a distant galaxy. I reached up behind me to stroke him absently while Lionel and Lafferty argued over out-of-body-experiences and their validity.
Smoke and mirrors, my Id whispered. You’ve seen the road this leads down, if you buy into the occult. Remember Jessica? She used belief to control people. Like all clever politicians do. This man-made fantasy leads us down the treacherous path of obscurantism.
The type of thing my father would have done. Did I dare believe the impossible only to have it used in turn to control me? I was not so confident and self-assured to believe that I too was not used as a pawn. That’s how fools are made, by their hubris. Even now, how did I know I was not carefully being placed on the chessboard set by my father’s own hand?
Let Todd think that. Just up until the knight stands up and walks right off the board and out of sight.
But had he foreseen even that?
Would I die with Highsmith’s hand jammed down my throat, strangling my heart?
The vulture shook me off. Down the line of Lionel and Lafferty, the old man’s hands trembling as he continued to argue and tried to articulate that there might be other victims as of yet undiscovered. Across the table and through the door, Elvedina stood in the threshold. Her eyes as bullets, the rims primed and ready to explode.
Who would get to me first? Elvedina, or Highsmith?
*
Lionel outlined his speculation while the vulture abandoned the chair and high-stepped onto my shoulder, kneading me like the world’s ugliest cat.
The vulture and I listened, attentive, as Lionel narrated his speculation for us. If the old man was unnerved by my newfound psychopomp, he said nothing of it. Highsmith, Lionel went on, must be a subsidiary of the OBE program—the program we have to pretend doesn’t exist and that we can’t ever speak of or write down.
I lit a cigarette and wondered how Jamie went about it. Did he create a drug to facilitate the lucid state required for out-of-body experiences? Smoke curled out of my mouth. I considered if I could be as fluid as that smoke, as free and dispersing. Allowed myself to consider the impossible. And the impossible proved seductive. For the hardened cynic, there was nothing more alluring than illusion. Than the thing you want to believe. True love, fairy tales, happy endings. Romance is the ultimate weak spot of any hard-nosed pragmatist.
My father counted on it. So close, I could smell him in the room, or maybe that shadowed presence of the lone Inspector, watching us even now. I waved a hand through the smoke and it vanished. The vulture cooed and squawked and shifted on my shoulder.
“I don’t believe it, and it’s not good enough. We have to go to the source.”
“Highsmith?” Lafferty said.
“No, my dead fucking brother of course, Highsmith.”
“Elvedina will take you to the prison again. I’ll arrange a more private meeting, shall I? I can’t have you asking sensitive questions while being surveilled.”
I wanted to protest Elvedina’s presence, but decided it would seem suspicious. Lionel had made it clear he would not relent in this.
Lionel and Lafferty argued with the contents of Highsmith’s folder spread out before them. I got up and sent the vulture reeling to the kitchen counter, his wings raised before he flattened them against his back and closed his eyes with his beak pulsing open, pale pink tongue like a sewing needle. The creature flapped beh
ind me, talons awkward and tearing at my shirt before I steadied him with one hand. He settled on my shoulder as easily as a telephone wire, cooing deep in his throat like a purr.
I slipped down the hall and faded into the familiar darkness of my house. These places I’d once roamed, these places in total midnight black when I’d been undead and haunted, lamenting my long lost human-life and all the things I once had loved, or not loved well enough: my wife, my son. What did I have left to lament, now that humanity was returned to me? To weep over Niko, what we lost or the many ways I’d wronged her? Things that were never meant to be?
From a distance behind, coming for me across the floor, I heard Elvedina’s steady and relentless tread.
I turned the corner into my room and the bird moved with me, riding shotgun on my shoulder still and determined to make this his new home. I counted the seconds I had remaining to me. I knew this room of old. After a quick calculation, I knocked over a shelf of books. In the empty space behind the boards where I kept a Glock 19 duct taped, there was nothing. Nothing but the pale and shining threads of ripped tape. I stared at it and reconstructed the intrusion, someone quietly pulling out the books and stripping the gun out. It could have been Lafferty, it could have been Lionel.
Or Elvedina.
Her steps beat out time, closer. I thrust a hand up into the box spring of the mattress. I fumbled for a hidden weapon. Instead, an old Atroxipine bottle spilled out and rolled along the floor. The vulture flew from my shoulder, attacking the bottle until it bounced to the other side of the room.
I had made a mental note to buy the bastard a mouse from the pet store when Elvedina reached the doorway.
I turned and found myself toe to toe with Elvedina. I took in her face from our intimate proximity. Sexless in the dim light. A winding scar rising up out of her shirt collar and twisting its path to the space behind her ear; as though her entire face was a mask that I need only reach around to unclasp and pull away to see the real Elvedina hiding within. Gun oil wafted from her. She packed a weapon where I couldn’t see.
“Why not just gun me down now? Instead of feeding me to Highsmith, you could be done with it and back from whatever godforsaken place things like you come from. You could do it now,” I suggested. I pitched my voice soft. If one didn’t know better, we’d be mistaken for lovers arranging a secret tryst. “You could pull out your weapon and stop my heart. Think of how easy it would be, think of the relief. I’ve killed. Oh sure, our circumstances are different. But the anxiety is the same. Even a stoic feels it, deep in their cold heart.”
The vulture scrabbled at the pill bottle in the corner.
I drew closer, close enough to point my finger and tap her chest once. Her skin, permafrost. “That fear-sweat that creeps out cold over your skin. Your heart picks up extra beats you didn’t know you had, just before it evens out and gets real still. You could put an end to all that, right now. And I’d probably fucking deserve it.”
An inch of space enough for a snake to crawl through was all that was left between us. Not a molecule stirred between. The slick membrane of the Jersey humidity plastering clothes to flesh and making my every breath sluggish, but of her, nothing. I sensed her attention slipping, a low-level boredom, and I played my last card.
Her chest did not even seem to rise and fall with respiration, no increased heartbeat or breath. Ice cold and steady through and through.
“Maybe you’re here for something else, huh?” I leered.
This quickened her; she shoved a hand into her shirt and pulled out the Sig. She planted the gun into my chest and used it to push me back, driving the barrel into the old cigarette burn so I hissed. She swept my legs out so I fell backward onto the bed.
I wish I could say it was foreplay but there was an edge of darkness to her that sent me crawling back. She held up her thumb and forefinger with a bare millimeter between the two, her stare withering me even after she left the room.
The burn still itched and throbbed over my nipple. The door slammed in the wind of her absence, left the vulture and me behind, rattling the prescription bottle with the damning reminder of my past.
*
“You look like shit,” Lafferty said.
I sat on the edge of Lafferty’s pull-out mattress and ran my hands through my hair. I’d have to get a cut soon. This was something I’d never had to worry about before. That, and eating.
Lionel’s biggest contribution to the case was a conspiracy theory based on old CIA programs that probably hadn’t been relevant since the Cold War. Lionel made sandwiches in the kitchen as though he belonged in some faraway cabin, vacationing with his grand kids and teaching them how to fish.
“I feel like it, too. What a coincidence.” The burn marks from the seatbelt stood out in hyper contrast on my throat. I skated my fingers over the ring of it. “I never thanked you.”
“For what?”
“For taking care of the evidence for me. You didn’t have to do that. You could get in big trouble for hiding something like that. And they could have sent me away for a long time if they had found it. Thanks for not spilling it to Lionel and Elvedina, either.”
He laughed, quiet while he looked at the floor between his useless legs. “They tried. Came with a search warrant and everything.”
Coldness overtook me at the thought. If they had found what I’d hidden—but that was a road not taken. And it would do me no good to think on it now. For now, Lafferty held it safe and secret. When this was all over, I could return to the evidence room and face all the things I’d left behind.
“Take this,” Lafferty said, and he looked away and down the hall for Elvedina as he pressed something into my palm.
Cold metal burned a line into my hand. I yanked my shirt up and stuffed it into my belt. The size and shape of a folding knife.
“Thanks.”
“That bitch comes for you, give her hell. I’ll be watching. You scream, I come.”
“You don’t really think Highsmith is leaving his body at night and slapping me around while I sleep, do you?”
He snorted laughter. “If he is, you got a helluva lot more than Elvedina to worry about.”
*
The gloaming descended. Night came with slick and humid breath, oven hot winds and the cicadas whining in the trees.
Fluffy found the back of my bed post and dug his talons into the wood so they left flecks of cheap white fiber beneath. I discovered red welts on my shoulder where his talons bit in. Elvedina’s heavy tread made every floorboard squeal and rock. The shower ran while I sat cross-legged on the mattress, turning a pack of cigarettes over in my hand and contemplating all the things that make life worth living.
You mean like pain, the death of loved ones, and the people you betrayed? My Id suggested with sarcasm.
My old zombie self had a point and left me ruminating on the bad more than the good. Niko telling me she liked me better when I had scars. I thumbed the hot ring of the cigarette burn Elvedina branded into my chest. Maybe in a year or two, Niko and I could try again. At the rate I was going, I’d have plenty of new scars to make up for the old ones.
I reclined, palming the burn, but there was no comfort in these coiled springs, no good memories between them. The room became a prison cell and my bed a tomb.
“Come on, Highsmith. I’m waiting,” I hissed to the ceiling.
Jamie’s murder key slid across my collarbone, metal alternating between hot and cold. I reached up and unclasped it, set it down on the end table. One more mystery I couldn’t solve.
Sleep did not come. The sunlight faded and brought mosquitoes and tree frogs singing into the heat. The moon, splitting the sky with a muggy corona like a single, bleary eye surveilling us. I tossed and turned on sheets dipped in swamp land, the marsh in my mouth. Elvedina’s shadow revolved like a clockface, ticking back and forth until I finally dug out the spare bottle of Laphroaig in the bottom of my sock drawer and jammed it down my mouth in a desperate bid to get it over with. To get
to the battle ground.
Alcohol burned a stinging pathway down my throat. The bottle fell from my outstretched hand, rolled under the bed. The vulture, flitting his wings to settle into a better position on the headboard, and focusing one eye on me like a cracked marble floating in viscera.
I wanted the drink to be good enough, good enough to forget the persistent itch of my ravenous hunger, a hunger so reminiscent of my zombie days. And then it came, the rattle of the prescription bottle like music, the twirl of the cap and the bitter pills under my tongue. I increased the dose and took four together, one after the other like mints. How far could I push it? Did I dare? Was it possible to overdose? I was hurtling into a world of unknowns headfirst without a helmet. And I didn’t care.
I closed my eyes. The cigarette burn, throbbing until the pulse of Elvedina’s footsteps blurred, became one with my heartbeat.
Back and forth. Footstep layered on footstep until the drumming beat lifted me through semiconsciousness. I grew light and insubstantial. The relief of slumber, finally. Let me forget everything and subside into darkness.
*
Void and blackness. Then something woke me to myself.
I plummeted out of dreamless serenity. Opened my eyes and stared up at the cracks mutilating the ceiling. The moving curtain at the window. I registered a silence that marked Elvedina’s absence. Counted my breaths and listened for her. Counted heartbeats. I could not detect her footsteps anywhere throughout the old and settling ranch. Distant snores escaped Lafferty on the pull-out couch.
A shadow occupied the corner of the room.
I sat up in the darkness, confusing reality with shapes that weren’t there. I rubbed my eyes and waited for the shadows to move. They did not. The wind and the moonlight shifted, brought with it bare illumination and caught the glitter of peering eyes in the dark.
“Highsmith,” I growled.
The shadow morphed and lengthened, delineating a human shape. A swipe of a hand. From thick coils of darkness, it stood—rising and sliding like a box turning inside out. The figure gained cohesion, rested before a band of moonlight so only the curve of his jaw, the jut of his shoulder in a suit, became visible.