“Are they here?” the mother asked.
The little girl nodded. “Only not the same ones. These are different.”
“Are they like the others?”
She cocked her head, regarding the bench where Merve perched, then the far corner where J.D. and I had retreated to. “One is. The others are kinda sad. Except for the fairy.”
“Well,” said her mother, in that matter-of-fact way that parents have of discussing monsters in the closet and boogie men under the bed, “you just do what your grandmama told you.” She reached into her tote bag and pulled out a spray bottle.
It looked like one of those brand-name cleaners with the label torn off. It was a white plastic container with a nozzle and a pull-trigger handle. A decal of the Virgin Mary was pasted lopsidedly on the side so that only the original letters FOR and 09 were visible to either side.
“Go away!” the child shouted in our direction. “You shouldn’t be in here! It’s just for girls!”
“That’s why I’m here, darlin’. Tell your mommy—”
Merve was under the impression that she couldn’t actually hear him any more than she could see him. I certainly hoped not considering the miasma that was pouring out of this man-shaped sack of darkness. But she made a face as if she actually could and said: “You’re nasty! Go away!” And then she pointed the spray bottle right at his misty mug as if she could see him and gave the trigger a couple of confident pulls. The spray hissed through the vague shadow of his head like he wasn’t even there.
A moment later he wasn’t.
He was up and running around the room, shrieking like one of those car alarms that invites a sledgehammer solution at two in the morning.
Just before he went barreling through the outer wall I noticed something. While his outline hadn’t been too distinct to begin with, his head was even less so, now. As a shadow fades with the coming of the sun or a fog disperses into wisps of vapor, his cranial area seemed to be dissolving like a blot of grease in a cleaning commercial.
Although he passed from sight, we could still hear his cries through the muffled barrier of brick and steel. I started to follow him but stopped as his shrieks turned to screams and the deadly whines of multiple Threshers became audible.
So much for learning the secret of Merve’s Voyeurs to the Bottom and go See . . .
“Are they gone, honey? Did grandmama’s philter work?” the mother asked.
“The nasty man’s gone but there’s still three others.”
I looked around, did a hasty head count, only came up with two including myself. “The girl can’t add,” I murmured.
“Mebbe not, chief,” The Kid observed, “but she sure knows how to subtract. I vote we blow this joint.”
I nodded. “Since she’s between us and the door, we’re gonna have to make our own. But inner walls, only! The coffee grinders of the gods are still outside.”
We took a step toward the inner row of lockers but the girl said, “Oh, no you don’t!” and twisted the nozzle. This time she shot a stream of liquid instead of a misty spray. I looked at the wet line that was drawn across the wall and the floor. I blinked and it suddenly seemed to glow orange with a pulsing viciousness. I blinked again: a clear fluid, maybe water. Blink: the orange juice of death. Blink: water.
“I think we’re in trouble, here,” The Kid said.
“My mother always said the company I kept would get me into trouble.”
“Nyuk . . . nyuk. I’m thinking we’re not going to do any better in trying for the door.”
“Doubtful. How about the basement?”
“Basement?”
“Yeah,” I said as she gave the nozzle another twist, “I think our best bet is down.”
He shook his head. “Not if there ain’t no basement!”
The nozzle tracked our way. “Well, we can’t stay here!” I dived into the floor thinking, not solid, not solid!
It was like jack-knifing through marshmallow paste.
Then emptiness.
Solid, I thought, solid!
I came to rest on the basement floor. The Kid was right behind me.
“Shit!” he said. “She nearly got me! If there hadn’t been a basement here . . .” He shuddered.
“What?” I managed to wobble back up to my feet: no easy feat when nothing else is solid enough to use as leverage. “What if there hadn’t been a basement here?”
“Think about it, chief. You got imagination enough.”
I thought about it. Passing through a foot or so of wall or floor was disorienting, difficult. But, being wider than a foot, myself, I wasn’t likely to lose my way in the process. Dropping into the earth, however . . .
Now I repressed a shudder. Maybe I couldn’t suffocate but the idea of wandering through the earth—lost, blind, deaf, disoriented, searching for a way out and possibly working your way deeper—swimming through stone and sand and dirt for days or months or years, not knowing which way was up and whether you were pulling an Arne Sacknussemm instead of finding your way back out. No more floor-diving without a look at the blueprints, first!
“Hey,” said The Kid, “I think I just found Merve’s tunnel o’ love.”
He was pointing at a manhole cover.
Chapter Sixteen
If the sewers were ideal for specters like Merve to move about the city, sheltered from the harsh light of day, they were also ideal for a broad spectrum of other things—organic, inorganic, extraorganic.
Had we been corporeal we would have been wading up to our waists in waste by now. Fortunately for our delicate sensibilities, the sludgy waters passed right through us like smoke pouring through a screen. Unfortunately, we were up to our eyeballs in extradimensional critters, some human-shaped, most not, who were more like pudding than smoke on the dimensional density meter.
“What are these things?” The Kid groused as a chartreuse pollywog slithered between the memories of his fourth and fifth ribs.
I pushed past a sparkly slug the size of my arm with two rows of multiple eyestalks down its back. “It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it . . .” It looked like an upended centipede covered in glitter.
“These things give me the creeps!”
“I guess it’s got to be hard,” I said, “after so many years of being the creep-er, making the transition to the creep-ee.”
“Hey, you watch! I can handle bein’ creepy just fine! You just—hey! What are you doin’? Get off’n my leg you little two-headed freak!” The Kid commenced to dance a little jitterbug. “There’s one thing I don’t get, though,” he said as he finally dislodged some bifurcated gremlin made of glow-in-the-dark silly putty. “If this is how ole Merve the Perv gets around during the day, how does he follow these dames home the first time? Phantom periscope?”
“He probably gets a gander at their driver’s license, overhears them give out their home address—maybe to a cabbie . . .” I swiped at a huge cobweb with my hand. Missed completely as the web was real, more real than me apparently. “ . . . shoot, he probably just goes out to the front office and checks the gym’s membership records when nobody’s looking.”
“Yeah? Well, he still has to know how to get there from here. I don’t know where we are or which way we’re going now. In fact, we wouldn’t even be able to see where we’re going down here if it wasn’t for that little bit of swamp gas there.”
I looked up at the glimmering blue marble that drifted just above our heads and a little ways ahead in the tunnel. “Hmmm. Well, I wanted to put a little distance between us and the health club before sticking my head out and getting my bearings.”
“I can dig that, Big Daddy, but I ain’t so sure that following William, here, is such a good idear.”
“William?”
“That’s what I’ve taken to callin’ him,” The Kid said. “William. For Will. As in Will-o’-the-Wisp.”
“You’re such a sentimental old softie, coming up with pet names for swamp gas.”
“Well, now, that’
s the thing, see—crap! I ain’t never getting that outta my shoe! These so-called marsh lights ain’t just your natural phenominu—pheninan—stuff! The legends all say that they liked to lure travelers to their deaths in the swamps. How do we know that our Willy ain’t tryin’ to do the same thing with us?”
“Um . . . because it would be redundant?” There was a three-way split in the tunnel and I stopped to consider our new options. “Besides, how do you know that it is a ‘he’?”
“Well, it sure ain’t no ‘it’! He’s intelligent—some, anyway. An’, right now, he’s listening to us.”
I shook my head. “Which goes to show he can’t be that intelligent.” There was the sound of running water far off down the left tunnel so maybe that wasn’t our first choice on the Highway to Hell Tour. “Besides, maybe he’s really a she. And maybe not a ball of swamp gas after all. Actually, she looks like one of those stage-play versions of Tinkerbell in Peter Pan. Maybe she’s really a fairy.”
“Oh yeah. Sure. Clap yer hands, boys ‘n’ girls, if you believe in fairies.”
The urge to sigh was overwhelming but I was making a conscious effort to cut back. “Well, aren’t you a Mr. Grumpypants.”
“Bein’ dead twice over has that effect on me.”
“Listen, if you’re going to spend eternity in a mood . . .”
“Look who’s talkin’!”
“Hey,” I snapped, “you’ve had a little time to get used to all this. Me? I’m still adjusting. And being chased by the Texas Chainsaw Massacre Times Three on rollerblades! And vanquished by a six-year-old wielding some serious homemade spook remover! And now I’m wallowing around in the gutter—literally, figuratively, transdimensionally—and probably headed in the opposite direction of where my body was actually taken!”
“You’re still thinkin’ of lookin’ for your carcass?”
“Yeah. Why? You got more pressing appointments?”
“No. I mean, I don’t see the point. You’re dead. It’s just so much useless, rotting tissue. Another day or two and it’ll get dumped in the ground. Or cremated.” He brightened. Visibly. “Hey, if they do that, we can go back to Merve and see about gettin’ yer ashes hauled!”
“Don’t try to cheer me up.”
“Why? You like being so gloomy?”
“No. I want to be cheered up. It’s just that you’re so bad at it.”
It shut him up but only for a moment.
“Seriously . . . what are you lookin’ for, chief? Closure?”
“I don’t know what I’m looking for. I just feel this overwhelming urge to get back in touch with my inner viscera.”
He waved a translucent hand. “That’s normal. Like amputees feelin’ their toes after their leg’s cut off. Yer so used to havin’ a body that it takes a while to get used to it bein’ gone once it goes ‘poof.’”
“Well, I didn’t go ‘poof’,” I said. “I went—”
Away.
There was a ghostly tug and I suddenly found myself burrowing through suffocating darkness.
I popped into daylight.
In the middle of a street.
A cab smashed into me!
Well, smooshed through me, actually. Followed by a bus: I was treated to a kaleidoscope of thoughts and impressions as a double row of passengers zipped through my dimensional interstices.
I turned and fled for the curb in requisite, daylight slow-mo.
“Hey, chief?” The Kid’s head popped through the pavement near my original exit point. “You okay? What gives?” A garbage truck rolled through his head but he gave it no notice.
“I don’t know . . .” I was up on the sidewalk now but the pedestrians were worse than the traffic. Every other second someone passed through me and a stray word or image flashed through my head with each intersecting encounter. “It was like something yanked me up and out of the ground.”
J.D. crawled up out of the street and scurried toward me in a desultory fashion, looking to the right and the left as if checking for traffic. He wasn’t checking for traffic, however: it continued to plow through him like so much smog and he paid it no mind.
He was watching for Threshers.
“We can’t stay out here, like this,” he said, finally reaching the curb. That seemed to be as far as he could go. When he took another step toward me, he bounced back onto the street.
Meanwhile, I was standing in the middle of the sidewalk with a stream of pedestrians passing through me. A parade of mind-flashes dominoed across my mind like a tuner being run up and down the radio dial.
“How’re you doin’ that?”
“What?” It was hard to concentrate with a stream of consciousnesses doing A River Runs Through Me.
“The sharing-the-same-space-with-the-living trick that you seem to be doing.”
I looked around. “I don’t understand. What have we been doing all this time—walking through walls, sinking through floors—?”
“That’s inanimate matter, Big D; people are different! You can’t just occupy the same space as someone who’s actually alive! Not unless you’re one of them demons that’s workin’ some kind of possession mojo!”
“Really? I didn’t know it wasn’t allowed. Again, some kind of rule book or instruction manual would be helpful when one passes over.”
The Kid made another attempt to reach me but got spun around by the heavy foot traffic and knocked back into the street. “It’s not so much that it’s considered bad form,” he said, regaining his balance, “as it’s just not supposed to be—well—possible.”
“Except for me,” I observed.
“Except for you.”
“Interesting.”
“That’s putting it mildly.”
“So, maybe I’m not a ghost . . .”
“Not a typical one, anyway,” he agreed.
“Maybe I’m some sort of demon, now. After all, I did drink some of Chalice Delacroix’s blood after it had become charged with demonic essence.”
“Maybe . . .” He kept moving back and forth, looking for an opening. “ . . . but you just don’t strike me as the demony type. Rule breaker, yes. Ever since I met ya it’s been like Rebel Without a Pause.”
It seemed hopeless: even if he could find an opening that could reach me, the crowd would just sweep him on past in no time. I began working my way back toward him.
The problem was similar in reverse: the people weren’t entirely transparent to my own passage, either. It was like wading through a school of fish, all sorts of disturbing little tugs and twitches in strange and uncharted places.
“Yeah?” I said, “Well, I’m ready for a little time-out right now until someone can set me straight on what comes next.”
“C’mon, chief; you should know better. When you get born, no one’s waitin’ in the delivery room with a personalized copy of the Owner’s Manual. There ain’t no guided tour of the universe. And your best bet for a personal destiny map is as likely to turn up in a fortune cookie as in some prayer book. Why should things be any different after death than before it?”
The street was closer, now, but the next question was: where did we go from here. “Got me there, Junior. I just figured that once I was dead I’d have better things to do than wander around aimlessly.”
“Yeah, well, my motto is be happy that you even get to do that once the curtain comes down.”
I was almost to the curb when I was jerked off my feet again. I flew down the street and smashed through the outer wall of a building. Or smooshed. No damage was apparently done to the masonry or myself.
I found myself at the bar of a quaint little tavern. The interior was all done up like one of those elegant English pubs from the turn of the century—the nineteenth century, that is. Lots of teak and mahogany and leather, with green-shaded lamps and brass rails and fittings. And spittoons, by God!
I watched as the bartender filled a great glass stein with a dark and foamy lager and proceeded to slide it down the bar toward me.
Throug
h me!
The mug continued on several feet and into a one-handed catch by a gentleman who was giving more attention to his newspaper than his just-now-arriving drink. His two companions only had eyes for the new delivery.
I stepped back out of the bar, bemused by the impression that I had gotten a ghost of a taste as the beer went sliding through my midsection.
The gentleman wore a gray, double-breasted suit and the shoe that was visible on the gleaming brass rail was polished to a mirrorlike shine. His wingmen were quite shabby in contrast. Their clothes were rummage sale mix-’n’-match, their hair unkempt, their eyes wide and wild. As he calmly lifted the stein to his lips they grabbed at his arms from either side, each attempting to pull the mug and its contents toward their own desperately straining mouths.
His arm completed its arc and he took a quaff with no visible reaction to the tug-of-war that was seesawing back and forth across his beverage.
The stein returned to the counter and the man’s gaze never broke its lock on the racing form folded in his other hand.
The two barflies settled down once the beer was back on the bar but the one on the left made another swipe at the glass that clarified the situation at once. As his hand passed through the drink I could see that he and his partner were as transparent as The Kid and myself.
I turned and considered the crowded room.
It was too early in the day for any real bar business yet the tavern was packed. A closer look, however, revealed three—maybe four humans. The rest weren’t really there.
But they were trying really hard to be.
They crowded around bottles and glasses. They paced behind the bar and tried to sip from the taps when a drink was poured.
And every time a flesh and blood hand hoisted a glass, they clutched at it as a drowning man scrabbles for a lifeline in a churning sea. Well, why not. Merve’s particular obsession was but one possibility among hundreds. Maybe thousands.
Somerset Maugham nailed it in Rain. Desire is sad.
Habeas Corpses - The Halflife Trilogy Book III Page 28