by Jay Brandon
“I was almost gone,” Michael said softly.
“Good thing Martha here knows CPA,” the fisherman said loudly. “R,” Martha said. “CPR.” And Michael realized for the first time
that a sixtyish woman with dry, sunburned skin was squatting in front of him, smiling softly at him as though she knew he had a surprise coming. “First time I’ve used it in real life,” she added.
Then memory poured back into Michael, just as his life had poured back into his body a minute earlier. He rose to his feet as it seemed an electric jolt had animated him. He saw Vivian on top of the cliff next to the Mercedes. He saw the Beast at her side.
The woman, Martha, got to her feet more slowly. Michael threw his arms around her. “Thank you!” he shouted. “Thank you.”
He peeled himself off her and ran.
“Here, wait!” the fisherman called after him, and Martha added, “You need to see a doctor. You need to rest!”
“I can’t!” Michael cried and started running again, covering the sand in great strides. He should feel weak. But he was determined. Never before had he been so determined. The air surged against his skin, covering him in a host of sensations. He felt the wind at his back, cold through his sweat-soaked shirt. The rain fell harder; the storm had arrived. His hands flexed in reflex. Michael moved faster than he ever had in his life. He was animated by a sense of mission. Michael felt strong and certain and no longer afraid. He paused long enough to glance around for signs of the police, and saw one of the officers on the boardwalk pointing toward him. And just then, in the distance, he saw the spire of Holroyd’s church.
C hapter 9
athy went out onto the cottage’s front porch one last time. “Michael!” she shouted as loudly as she could, cupping her hands around her mouth. She listened. There was no answer, but the world was full of sounds. In deep background was the omnipresent chant of the waves; she could no longer tell if that was the sound of the sea’s pulse or her own. Closer at hand, rain. She couldn’t see it, could only hear the patter of it pounding on world and roof.
“Michael,” she called again, much more softly, with the same result. Now she was going to repeat the call at the back door, and if there
was no answer she was going to take the car and drive away, maybe even drive all the way to the ferry and off the island. But she had no car. Michael had the Subaru. Besides, for a moment she couldn’t bring herself to leave the porch, from which the world looked so clean and simple. She could see there were still people on the beach in spite of the rain, including a cluster gathered at one spot on the shore. She wished she could be among them.
The clouds seemed to lighten. Even in the storm the world was bright. When Kathy went back inside, the interior of the cottage was dark by contrast. So dark that Jack stood out like a torch in the middle of the living room. His skin looked pale even next to the white clothes he wore.
Kathy flinched at the sight of him. His visage was terrifying, more because it made her mistrust her own mind than because of Jack’s changed nature. Though she’d been quite sure he was coming, she wasn’t prepared for him.
Jack seemed to have changed since his last appearance. Now there was something mercurial about him, as if he were constantly flowing beneath his skin. Kathy couldn’t quite see where his neck ended and his white shirt began. And he was so bright he looked as if his touch would burn.
“Michael’s setting you free,” Jack said. “He’s leaving the island.”
Like hell, Kathy thought. But, in fact, it was possible. Michael had seen how torn Kathy had been over the thought of leaving the island without seeing Jack again. Was this Michael’s final gesture, to sacrifice everything he wanted? Both were in character for Michael. But Kathy didn’t want his sacrificial gesture. She wanted Michael. She pictured him somewhere not far away, pacing in the sand, glancing anxiously up at the cottage.
“I don’t think there’s much to say, Jack, except maybe goodbye.” “Never,” Jack said. His voice was like his skin, fluid and vibrant, but
concealing something. “You and I will never say goodbye.”
Kathy was growing cold. Her breathing was shallow. “You mean you’re coming with me to Houston?”
Jack shook his head. There was silence between them. Kathy watched him suspiciously, mistrustful of her own senses.
“You’re not what you seem,” she finally said, then added, “nothing is.” “That’s exactly wrong,” Jack said calmly. “Things are just what they
seem to be. That’s all they are. They’re nothing else.”
In an imploring tone that matched his sorrowful eyes, he said, “Kathy. Let me hold you.”
She didn’t answer, but she didn’t back away when he came toward her and put his arms around her. She was afraid of being singed or chilled, but his touch did neither to her. His arms enwrapped her and his chest met hers. His embrace didn’t drive away the chill she felt, but his touch was familiar. She gave in and put her head on his shoulder.
She felt a deep longing, and couldn’t tell if it was her own or Jack’s. If only it were as simple as an embrace; if only that was all that it took to make things right. But there was nothing simple about this, and nothing simple that could put it right. She had been drawn to Jack, but he had never engaged her pity before. Now she felt profoundly sorry for him.
But that wasn’t all. She felt sorry for herself, too, because she would
never have him again.
After a while she raised her head and Jack stepped back, but kept his hands on her shoulders. “Kathy. You know why I’m here.”
She shook her head, but that was only a reflex. As soon as he’d raised the question, she had known the answer. Strangely, she didn’t feel a trace of fear. The fright of Jack’s appearance was wearing off, leaving her numb where the fear receded.
“You know,” Jack said confidently. “There’s another life, Kathy, beyond the one you know. It’s just like this one except it goes on forever. You’re like a baby waiting to be born, Kathy. Where you are is just a stopping point. It’s a waste of time to live it out. You can come here where I am, young and full of life, or you can come here withered and wasted after you’ve forgotten what it is to be alive. You can be old forever or you can be young forever.”
He paused, searching her face. “I know, Kathy. I remember so well what it’s like to be alive that I’m going to live forever. The other alternative is horrible: tottering around mumbling and lost. Don’t resign yourself to that.”
Kathy felt how easy it would be to let his voice take her. She didn’t know whether to believe Jack or whether he was just trying to lure her to join him.
“You shouldn’t have come back, Jack. You should go on to wherever you belong.”
“That’s here, Kathy. With you. You’re the only reason I’m here.” He made a face.
Kathy played him, knowing subconsciously what to say and hearing her voice say it. “The only reason?” she asked lightly.
“The only one,” he said.
She shook her head dreamily. The edges of the world were unraveling. She kept her eyes only on Jack, but she could sense on the outskirts of her peripheral vision a mistiness. She belived she was to be allowed a glimpse behind the stage set of life.
She still felt his hands. What Michael or any of her friends would have seen as weakness, succumbing to Jack’s allure, Kathy saw as strength: She was the only person worthy to be with Jack. His coming for her proved that.
“I can’t . . . ” she began.
Jack interrupted. He had stopped smiling. “Don’t be conventional, Kathy. Just ask yourself the one important question: What do you want?” He had put into words exactly what she’d been thinking. In the back
of her mind she’d been cataloguing her life. What in it was important enough to spend another forty or fifty years on, when the afterlife would be the same no matter what? Her work at the museum? Her divorced parents, who made her sad whenever she did or didn’t see them? Michael? Michael c
ould get along without her. He’d proven that by stepping aside now when she needed him most. It was as if Michael, too, realized Kathy belonged with Jack.
Now everything else in the world had withdrawn from her, receding
like the surf from the shoreline.
The storm in its gathering strength had driven everyone off the beach. The shoreline was a vision of peaceful solitude, even as sheets of rain marched across it. Kathy, walking on the beach holding Jack’s hand, barely felt the storm. Jack’s aura shielded her; or perhaps she was already immaterial, unaffected by physical contacts.
But she could feel Jack’s hand. When she turned to look at him he smiled at her. Kathy smiled back, but she felt a trickle of apprehension that neither the storm nor the thought of death had produced in her. Jack
was burning even more brightly; he seemed to feed on the storm. Kathy was certain he was taller than he’d been minutes earlier at the cottage. His hand still gripped hers tightly, but when she looked down she saw his hand was losing definition. It leaked light beyond its outlines.
They were at the end of the public beach, where the stony wall of the jetty held back the sand and stretched a hundred yards out into the Gulf. Jack stepped up the stones lightly, as if his feet didn’t touch ground.
Kathy stopped at the base of the jetty, a natural place to say goodbye. Jack turned, frowning, then smiled a reassuring smile. “It won’t hurt, I promise. I know.”
“I’m not afraid of that.” “Then what?”
She studied his face. It was Jack. It was Jack, but he was something
else as well.
“Come on,” he said, and reached for her, and she climbed up onto the jetty beside him. It was ten feet wide, created out of jumbled boulders welded together with cement and asphalt. The surface was uneven. In some places the huge old flat rocks had broken apart and one reared up like a ship going under. But Kathy didn’t watch her feet. She watched the horizon.
They walked slowly on the rough boulders of the jetty out into the Gulf, two strollers in the storm. More tightly than by Jack’s hand, Kathy felt gripped in the momentum of events. She hadn’t decided to go with Jack; she hadn’t decided anything, she had just gone along. That had been easy, being swept along in Jack’s wake.
Jack would remain forever young, leaving Kathy to age, to forget, to lose the essential part of herself. She pictured herself in old age, seventy, a shawl around her shoulders, sitting quietly. How would she remember Jack then?
She turned to him. She had to look up to see his face, which wore a bemused expression, as if even he didn’t understand what was going on. “I wish – ” he muttered.
“What?”
He smiled. “I wish I could make it easy for you.”
Kathy stood and looked at the choppy water of the Gulf between the jetty and the fishing pier, so familiar it was like her own pond. Again the water looked like a pathway to another world. But the waves rolled in, always in. It was the world of the land the waves tried to reach.
“I think that’s the way out,” she said. “It is,” he agreed eagerly.
“Not for me, Jack. For you.”
Kathy stopped walking. Sudden strength planted her firmly on the rocks of the jetty. She wouldn’t feel faint and frail at seventy. She would have a long, happy life to reflect on. The empathy she had felt for Jack was swiftly flowing away, receding, replaced suddenly by an empathy for life and the living – for tomorrow, for the future, for a future – with Michael? Certainly not with Jack. Dread she once had felt for what life held in store was replaced by the possibility of hope, of adventure, the possibility of . . . she hadn’t even thought of the word in so long, she could barely remember it . . . happiness. She filled her lungs with air; her eyes embraced the storm- disturbed sea. Life, she thought. Life, and her eyes cleared even more.
Jack turned a frown on her. “There’s a way home for you,” Kathy told him insistently. “Can’t you feel it?”
He wasn’t listening. His hand on her arm hurt. “You’re just afraid.
Don’t worry, I’ll help you over. It’s only – ”
She tried to pull her arm away gently. “I’m not going with you.”
He coalesced. In a moment Jack had shrunk by inches. He was dwindling away. Kathy was relieved to see it, then saddened by her relief. But in the next moment she saw she’d been wrong. Something else was happening to him. He was his old size, no longer burning so brightly, and his fingers were hard and hurting as bones. He glared into Kathy’s eyes, and gripped her shoulders as if he would snap her collarbones. “It’s too late to stop,” he said in that voice from the tomb, hollow and reverberating.
He grabbed her arm and began pulling her out on the jetty. Kathy tried to
resist and he dragged her.
“Jack!”
He looked back at her. They were Jack’s eyes, but there was little of Jack left in them, only a rage that didn’t make distinctions. In his glare there was nothing of Jack’s charm or wit. There was nothing human in his grip. In sudden fright Kathy jerked back. Her arm slipped free and she fell backwards. The release made Jack fall back from her as well, but only a step.
She didn’t bother to say his name again. His face was hard as the rocks of the jetty. There was nothing there to receive whatever she might say. She stood frozen, knowing flight would be as useless as talk.
“Kathyyyyyy!”
She heard her name just before she heard the crash. She lost her footing as she realized for the first time how slippery the wet rocks beneath her feet were. Turning in wonderment, she saw Michael leaping onto the rocks. Behind him was what had crashed, the Bacchus, Holroyd’s boat, or Jack’s boat, the boat she and Michael had taken on their cruise, so long ago. The boat was nosed in to the rocks, beginning to turn at an angle because its engine was still running, trying to drive it forward against the immovable jetty. Michael reached out and grabbed Kathy’s hand. It was a shock to feel such a warm, supportive grasp. At the same moment she felt for the first time the full force of the rain in her face. She stumbled after Michael as he pulled her back toward the boat. It had bounced back from the rocks and was coming in again, turned almost parallel to the jetty.
They reached the edge of the jetty and Michael risked a look back at Jack. Jack’s ghost was frozen, staring. It was the sight of Michael that amazed Jack. Seeing the specter’s surprise made Michael’s own eyes widen in turn.
“Come on!” Michael shouted into the storm. Kathy leaped with him toward the boat that was beginning to pull away from the jetty. She didn’t make it. One foot caught the edge of the boat’s deck, but her other foot
landed in the water. She fell backward toward the rocks beside the jetty.
Michael still had her hand. He had landed full on the boat’s deck. He pulled. Kathy came up out of the water and landed beside him, unsteady on the lurching boat. Michael held her.
“I thought you had left me,” she said.
“Never.” But Michael didn’t take time to explain. He ran forward to the boat’s steering wheel, which was turning freely as the boat bumped against the rocks. He turned the wheel and reached for the throttle. “I couldn’t figure out how to stop it!” he shouted. “I had to just run into the jetty!”
He turned the wheel and revved the engine. The boat surged into the waves, its prow rising dangerously and then slapping down again. The deck was slick, even under the slim protection of the pilot’s canopy. Michael grabbed Kathy again.
“I thought you’d already be gone with him.”
Kathy shook her head. She had to shout every word above the storm. “I said no.”
“There’s nothing there but regret. That’s why ghosts come back, because they miss the lives they’ve lost. They feel sorry for themselves for all eternity.”
“Michael,” she repeated, “I said no.”
Michael smiled. Then, “Damn!” he said. He was looking back. Jack was following them, walking on the water. He still burned brightly, and now he looked te
n feet tall. The boat’s forward motion slowed to a crawl as the ghost’s giant strides brought him closer.
So ghosts can’t cross water, Michael thought frantically. Maybe this water’s not deep enough to stop him. Or maybe if the ghost died in the water, he has some limited power to –
Oh, Hell.
But something was happening to the ghost as it strode across the waves. Jack had begun to change. His face went through a host of
transformations. His face changed from his own to an old man’s, sorrowful in loss, to a boy, to Jack again.
Kathy screamed, shrinking back against Michael.
Jack was no longer atop the water. He fell down into the sea, head thrown back, choking and gasping for air.
“Jack!” Without thought, purely instinctively, Kathy ran the short length of the deck and leaped toward him, into the water.
“Kathy!” Michael looked in dismay at the boat’s controls. He pulled the throttle back to nothing, looked furiously for something that said Reverse, couldn’t find it, and gave up. He ran back to the stern, where he grabbed a cork life preserver and hurled it as far back into the water as he could. The life preserver sailed out, trailing the rope tied to the boat’s railing. Before the life preserver hit the water Michael had dived in.
But Kathy had already reached Jack. Jack’s head was barely above the surface. He still looked like a drowning man, but he smiled faintly. “I knew you wouldn’t leave,” he said.
His hand closed around her arm.
Kathy didn’t try to resist his pull. “Jack,” she shouted, “you’ve got to go on, to where you belong. You can’t stay here.”
Jack’s smile failed him. He looked scared. Angry, uncertain, envious, regretful. Kathy saw all the emotions on his face. Saw why ghosts come
back.
Michael had reached them. He grabbed Kathy’s other arm and tried to pull her, but there was no give in the ghost’s grip on Kathy’s arm. Michael paddled furiously with one hand to stay above the water. He looked past Kathy, closely into Jack’s face. The ghost still looked like Jack, but there was something more there. He was Jack again, but he was still in the grip of ongoing transformation.