“What? As in bringing in the sheaves?”
He shrugged. “I dunno. Maybe. I thought they was angels the first time I seen ‘em.”
“As well you might,” I said. “’As for their rings, they were so high they were dreadful; and their rings were full of eyes round about them four. And when the living creatures went, the wheels went by them: and when the creatures were lifted up from the earth, the wheels were lifted up.’”
“Now yer scarin’ me!”
“Because you think they’re angels?”
“No. Because you can quote chunks of the Old Testament right outta thin air. I already figured they might be the Big G’s huntin’ dogs. And if they’re angels, well I don’t figure on ever going into the Light. I’ll take my chances with the Dark.”
“So what do these wheelie things do exactly?”
“Exactly? Look-it . . . all I know is they come in the sunrise. They sweep through the open spaces like the Wild Hunt, looking for disconnected spirits—those who haven’t moved on to wherever it is that we’re supposed to go next.”
“Earthbound spirits?”
“Yeah. If you ain’t tied to your body, you’re fair game. They tear you up and some of ‘em even burn the pieces! I seen ‘em do it a couple of times now! It’s horrible!”
And that was all that he knew. Or wanted to know.
Me? I was wondering if they were intelligent beings with a higher purpose—like sending unanchored spirits on to their final destinations. Or maybe they were just something feral, bestial, stalking the afterlife for the remnants of consciousness like dire wolves of the damned. While I had never bought into the cartoon depictions of clouds and harps and halos, I had scarcely imagined the flipside of “Life After Life” being “Death After Death.”
The Kid had cause to be scared. Apparently I did, too.
I sighed and started to get up. It wasn’t easy with barely dressed women walking about. Even harder when one walked through me. Woooo: a pulse of warm darkness, a flash of a boardroom meeting, and a condensed internal debate over the office politics of looking too good or not looking good enough. She passed on and so did my little trip down Memory Lane Bryant.
“Unlax, Doc; you’re safe now,” he said as I staggered to my feet. “The Threshers won’t bother us in here. We’re safe as long as we stay put until nightfall.”
“Nightfall?”
“Yeah. Ain’t it a bitch?” A couple of towels hit the floor. “Too bad we can’t go anywhere without risking afterlife and limb.” His tone belied his disappointment.
I stumbled over to an unoccupied bench. I sat down and promptly fell through it to the floor. Why didn’t I keep on falling? As that thought coalesced I felt the floor start to give beneath my derriere. Solid! Solid! Very hard floor! I thought furiously as I bounded to my feet.
And a solid bench, too!
I sat again—gingerly this time—and stayed in place. “So, these—Threshers—you call them?”
He shook his head. “I don’t call ‘em, Chief. That’s what some other spook was tellin’ me—hey now, pretty mama! No need to be shy! Just us girls in here so why don’t you turn around?”
“Come on, Junior.” I snapped my fingers but they made no sound. “A little focus, here. What are they? Where do they come from? Where do they go? How do you know they won’t come in here?”
“Don’t know much.” He came over and sat beside me as most of the exposed flesh disappeared beneath street clothes. “I mean, how do you research things like that? They come with the light, disappear with the dark. They’re the reason we go bump in the night instead of haunt around the clock. The only way to be safe is to stay out of the light.”
“Don’t go into the light, Carolann!” I mimicked in a falsetto voice.
The Kid stared at me.
“It’s—um—a movie. Poltergeist? There’s this—okay, never mind. How do you know we’re safe in here? We’re still in the light.”
The Kid gazed up at the fluorescent tubes that hummed overhead. “I dunno. Don’t think it’s the same thing as that sailor photography.”
“Solar photonic sensitivity.”
“Whatever. Besides, I don’t think they can pass through solid walls.”
“Hmmm.” I stared down at the floor. Dipped a translucent toe in the concrete. “Hey, Junior?”
“Yeah?”
“I gotta point out that ‘don’t think’ isn’t the same as ‘know for a fact.’ But here is something that I do know for a fact: women don’t pass through solid walls.”
“So?”
“So, there were close to a dozen in here a little while ago. How did they get in and out?”
The Kid’s eyes grew big as the concept of doors and windows jumped into the equation. Then he forced a smile. “H-hey, Big Daddy, I don’t think these things can fit through any human-sized openings.”
“Again with the ‘don’t think’.”
“Look-it, they haven’t followed us in or they’d have been here by now. We’re safe and sound, right where we are. Nobody can see us. Nobody can hear us. Nobody can mess with us!”
I grunted. “That’s what Polyphemus said.”
“Poly who?”
“The Cyclops. He learned that, in the country of the one-eyed giant, Odysseus was king.”
“I don’t get it,” J.D. said as the last of the ladies closed her locker and exited the changing area. “I thought it was supposed to be something about the one-eyed man bein’ king in a country full of blind men.”
I thought of spending eternity babysitting The Kid. Maybe this was Hell nor was I out of it. “Look, Junior, the floor show’s over. Let’s move on. I got a body to catch up to and time’s a-wasting.”
He scowled—maybe at me, maybe at the emptiness of the room. “Now who’s not payin’ attention? We can’t go nowhere during the day unless you want to get up close and personal with one of the ghost grinders out there!”
“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not. There might be some ways of getting around without risking exposure. We could try some things.”
“We could end up deader than we already are!”
“Look,” I insisted, “I am not going to spend the rest of the day cowering in a ladies’ locker room.”
“Who’s cowering?”
“Leering, then. Having slipped the bonds of the flesh I’m surprised you still have any vestiges of its appetites.”
He looked at me as if I was from another planet. Maybe I was. “Hey, the day I stop looking will be the day that I’m—”
“Dead?”
We both turned toward the sound of the new voice. Something crouched at the end of one of the benches. It was dim and shadowy and suggested something vaguely manlike.
“Er,” The Kid said, “hello. Come here often?”
“Best peepshow in this part of town,” the new scrim shady murmured. It had a low, smooth voice that lapped against one’s ears like an oil spill. “You can’t beat a woman’s locker room for balancing quantity and quality.”
“Come again?”
“Would that I could,” the voice purred. “You can’t beat the meat when there’s nothing left to greet.”
“Come on, Junior,” I made a grab for his arm with all of the success of Anna Kournikova taking on the Williams sisters at Wimbledon, “let’s go.”
“Do you know what Hell is?” There was a shadowy movement, the suggestion of a dim head being shaken as if to imply of course you don’t; you’re still too new at this to understand anything.
“Sartre suggested that Hell is other people,” I said.
“Yeah. Yeah! That’s it exactly. Hell is other people. Take my harem . . .”
The Kid perked right up. “Harem?”
“I start my rounds at 4:30—in the a.m., you know. Brunette, a couple of blocks from here.”
“Handy,” I murmured.
“And leggy,” he agreed. “I think she’s a stockbroker. Wears these businesslike suit-and-shirt tops but likes the short skirt
s. And boy, do they like her! Shaves her legs every morning in the bath. And it takes awhile because her legs go all the way up to her—”
“Okay,” I said, “we get the picture.”
“Oh, it’s more than a picture, my friend. It’s performance art. A 3-D movie with Sensurround seating and unrestricted viewing. Everything else is choice. But the legs are the main attraction. Best I’ve ever seen and I seen a lot—hundreds before and tens of thousands since—”
“You died . . . ?” I offered, filling in the blank.
“Just sayin’ I know what I’m sayin’.”
“Because you’re a connoisseur.”
“Damn right. I’m normally not here this early because it takes so long for her to slide that razor all the way up from her ankles to her—”
“So you travel after the sun comes up?” He had my full attention now.
“What do you think?”
I wanted to know how he moved about in daylight without fearing photonic paralysis or the Threshers. I think I wanted to follow him out of here whistling “Me and my Shadow” . . . so I wasn’t about to tell him what I really thought underneath it all. Still, if I had been in full possession of my flesh it would have been crawling by now.
“—called in sick this morning and went back to bed so no early show today. At least I can always depend on the health clubs. The old and fat ones are automatic no-shows. Perfection is rare but at least these broads are trying to refine the product.”
“The product,” I said.
“And even if there’s a fair number of skanks, the volume of members guarantees a few worthwhile shows each day.”
“Shows,” I said.
“For lunch I head down to The Village where this lezbo couple get together every day for a nooner. The strawberry blonde is actually bi and married and gives it to her old man every Friday night after dinner out on the town—it’s pretty much like clockwork, a sure bet. But I digress . . .”
“Early evenings I like to drop by Blondes-in-a-Box. It’s what I call this apartment over—well, that’s a trade secret. Two secretaries, both blondes, share the rent but they’re straight so they got their own beds. They actually time-share with a stew who comes in and uses the fold-out couch two to three nights a week. She’s blonde, too. After work, it’s time to come home, change, bathe, shower, shave—three pairs of legs that can’t hold a candle to the stockbroker but, hey, a little variety is a good thing and the razor always moves toward the same destination. By the time the bathroom is empty, the strip clubs are kicking into high gear.” The shadow seemed to turn to The Kid. “Hey, I know what you’re thinking . . .”
Looking at Junior’s face it would be difficult to not know what he was thinking. If “thinking” was truly the appropriate term, here.
“Anybody can go to a strip joint. The real action, as the Silver Fox used to sing, is what goes on behind closed doors. That may be true but I bet ole Charley never watched a pole dance from ground zero. And the bouncers tend to keep the backstage area off limits to anybody with a body. Hey, let me give you the real tour tonight! I can show you who’s hot and who’s not—especially after the stage show!”
“Actually, I’m more interested in the daylight tour,” I said.
“Sorry. The daylight tour’s private. Strip clubs, health clubs—open memberships. When it comes to private residences, you gotta collect your own petting zoo.”
That did it. “Look, you pathetic sack of ectojism, I could care less about your perverted little corner of Hell—”
“Hell?”
“Hell, yes! Hell! Filling your hours, your days, your own little corner of eternity with an endless round of peep shows. Never mind that you’re violating the privacy of the living; is this how you plan on spending the rest of your afterlife? Always looking backward? Always lusting after what you can’t have? What you can’t touch?”
“Well, if you don’t like it,” the dark space shot back, “just take your snooty friend, there, and leave.”
“Watch who yer callin’ snooty,” The Kid snapped.
“Not you. The other one. Behind him.”
We both turned. If there was someone behind me, he was invisible. The three of us appeared to be alone in the ladies locker room.
But not for long: the outer door eased open. A little Hispanic girl entered, dragging a pink backpack by a broken shoulder strap behind her.
“Okay, look,” I said, “I just want to know how you get around the city while the sun is still out.”
“I don’t know how I could explain it to you, you being so superior to me and all.”
I sighed and closed my eyes. It didn’t work so well when your eyelids—assuming you still had any—were all transparent. I wondered, briefly, if I might be able to concentrate on visualizing myself and our shadowy pervert as being a little more corporeal. That way I might be able to kick his dim ass until he told me something that I actually wanted to hear.
“Um, chief?” The Kid was making an equally ineffective attempt to tug on my noncorporeal sleeve. I looked where he was looking.
The little caramel-colored girl was standing a few feet from the door, staring at the space we occupied as if she could either hear or see us. She couldn’t have been more than six, maybe a precocious five.
“Do you think—?”
I shrugged. “I’m the newbie, here. You tell me.”
The door opened again and the child’s mother came in, toting a large tote bag.
She had high cheekbones suggesting Aztlan blood in her Spanish heritage and a thundercloud of black hair that crackled with a storm of static electricity. Her eyes tilted in a mysterious, exotic fashion and she had an elegant air that seemed at odds with the sweatshirt tucked into the overalls that lapped over a pair of cheap sneakers.
“Yeah! Now that’s the kind of thing worth waiting around for!” the spook enthused. “I may have just found me a new addition to Merve’s Harem!”
Which meant he’d be following her home when she finished her workout.
Now I was in a quandary. I had pretty much reached the limits of my tolerance for keeping company with Merve the Perv. It wasn’t just the “ick” factor; there was something also infinitely sad about his voyeurism, a succession of libidinous peep shows that occupied his every waking minute, encounters without hope of any possibility of physical consummation. Not exactly Sartre’s take on “Hell as Other People” but a perverse twist of French existentialism all the same.
That was Merve’s Hell. What Hell waited for me now that I had shuffled off this mortal coil? And how long before I recognized it? Or was I already caught in its embrace and doomed to be as eternally clueless as Merve?
In addition to my growing desire to quit our shadowy companion’s company was my growing discomfort with our present hideout. Despite the purity of our motives—or mine, at least—I was vastly uncomfortable loitering in the ladies locker room.
But if spooky ole Merve was going to follow his latest obsession home through the bright light of day, I needed to hang around to see how it was done.
As mom opened the locker, the shadow moved in closer for a front-bench seat. I retreated to the far end of the room to weigh my options. The Kid followed. “Hey, chief,” he murmured, “maybe we should check out the rest of the building.”
“Really.” I gave him “the eye.” At least I think I did. I wasn’t sure about any of the physical business anymore.
“Hey, I like to look at the ladies as much as the next guy but I ain’t no pedal-file!”
“Good point, junior. We can always cover the exits and follow him when he leaves.” I looked back at the Hispanic woman as she unhooked the straps of her overalls. If motherhood had enhanced her figure, trips to the gym were keeping it from becoming too enhanced. Her cinnamon skin practically glowed with health. I blinked. And, for a moment, saw the traceries of veins and capillaries, pulsing like threads of golden light, a subdural doily of toaster wires carrying the burning essence around her body agai
n and again as her heart stroked the ancient rhythm of the dance of life.
I was powerless to move as she pulled the sweatshirt up and over her head. Her hair crackled with additional lightning as the collar combed her thundercloud tresses into an expanding nimbus of dark energy. But my eyes weren’t drawn to the private lots of flesh, the secret places kept hidden from the purview of the world and the gaze of strangers. Don’t get me wrong: I could certainly appreciate this sculpture of muscle and skin and feminine ripeness—this Venus de Milo in ochre and burnt umber. But I would admire that as an aesthete, beauty for beauty’s sake, sans the passion of carnality.
Sans the lust of the beast.
Or so I thought as my gaze moved from the private to the public sector, traveling over swell and then up slope, across incline, and climbing the shelf, the wall, the cliff, the side of the neck. A pulse fluttered there like a plucked string, the echo of life’s sweet music, an eddy in the swirling lights of her flesh.
And something did seem to stir in my own depths. Through dimensions I thought left behind, elements that could only be nonexistent, came a feeling that was impractical—even blasphemous—for anyone and anything inhabiting this plane.
Perhaps I had left elements of my humanity behind.
But I had brought the Stain into the next world with me.
Merve might spend eternity with his nose pressed to the metaphysical glass of every peepshow in town but where must I eventually be drawn? Back to the demesne where I could watch my fellow blood-drinkers dine? Or, perhaps, haunt the night shift at various hospital emergency rooms? If my spectral thirst grew, perhaps I would head south, looking for the killing fields of some Central American junta . . .
Perhaps the Threshers were God’s mercy to the deceased, after all.
“What is it, Honey?” The mother didn’t actually say that. Or she did, but she said it in Spanish. Which I suddenly understood a lot better than I should have, given the years that had passed since my grade school language lessons on the classroom TV.
The little girl continued to stare as if she could actually see us, turning her head here and there as if she were following our conversation, as well. Now that my attention was turned back to her, I could see that she glowed, as well. Only she was enveloped in an outline of blue light. It surrounded her like a second skin.
Habeas Corpses - The Halflife Trilogy Book III Page 27