See Jack Die (Part 1 in the Paranormal Series) (See Jack Die Series)

by Nicholas Black

  He tells me, in his stuffy queen's English, “ . . . that's exactly what they'd expect. If I don't go to work, they'll think I'm hiding something.”

  “Good point,” Ricky agreed. “Just be vague and see if you can figure out who these guys are working for. Probably work for some rich eccentric who wants to talk to his great grandfather, again.”

  Do what you think is safe, I tell him. Be careful.

  Ricky walked across the room to another placard, “How appropriate . . . the Mitsukurinidae Lamniformes. Also known as the Goblin shark. And it says they're nearly extinct.”

  Maybe the Goblin shark is near extinction. But here, on the dry side, there are plenty of goblins to be had.

  Ricky turns back to the librarian, “Do you have a gun, Rupert?”

  “Should I need one?” Rupert queries, now more worried than ever. And I'm sighing, wishing that Ricky hadn't brought that up. Guys like Rupert, they obsess about stuff like this.

  I tell everybody that we don't need guns, we just need to be careful. Money makes people act nutty sometimes, and we can't predict crazy. I found it ironic that I was giving a speech on how crazy people might act.

  The sharks swimming quietly around us, they don't look so concerned. They're not scared. Even in their tanks, completely reliant on humans for their sustenance, they're in control. They're still the predators.

  Perhaps we're the ones on our way to extinction.

  Chapter 18

  Jack's apartment.

  Saturday evening . . .

  A lot of very intense things are floating around in my head. Questions were starting to stack on top of other questions. The more we learned about this book, the less we really knew.

  What we all assumed—Ricky, Rupert, and I—was that this book was going to cause us problems. So far, only Rupert had been queried as to the whereabouts of the Book of Sighs, but it wouldn't take long for our names to come up on somebody's list. One thing I had going for me was the obscurity of my name.

  I'm guessing there aren't that many Jack Pagans in the phone book. I checked, there weren't any in the greater Dallas/Ft. Worth area. And since my name was gifted to me by the hospital and their band of lawsuit-conscious lawyers, I think I'm not on the grid, yet.

  My theory is that the doctors and caseworkers want to make sure that I don't end up naked, in a shopping mall, all lazy-eyed, with a loaded shotgun. If that doesn't happen, they'll take credit for my miraculous recovery.

  If I do lose my shit and gun-down half of North Dallas, the hospital will use the whole affair to green-light a bigger budget for the under-funded programs that failed me.

  Right now, this very second, the Book of Sighs is in the refrigerator. There are reasons for this. The first is that, I thought that the refrigerator might be the only place that the people who might bust down my door, and kick my teeth in, might not look. People like that—paid thugs and the like—they're not the sharpest tools in the shed.

  Then again, I'm getting my street smarts from a three-year-old Todd Steele Detective novel, and re-runs of CSI: Miami.

  The other reason I have the most valuable book in the universe in my refrigerator is because Ricky got me a bunch of frozen pizzas and I had to use the book to carry them all in without having to make two trips. They all got squeezed into my refrigerator, and I had to use the bathroom . . . really bad. I know that makes me a monumentally lazy, short-sighted jerk, but when you have to go . . . you have to go!

  I'm on the way back to the fridge, right now. We need to protect the book at all costs, so Ricky's bringing me a safe he had at his place. He told me he was using it to keep, “ . . . weed and stuff in,” and that it looks, “just like a book shelf.”

  With a devilish grin he added, “Cops can search your place and they don't even know what they're looking at.” I'm guessing that he's talking from experience.

  When I asked him why he would be willing to lend it to me he said that since all of this started he wasn't smoking any Columbian Red. Now, you don't even have to know what he's talking about, but with a name like that you just know it's illegal.

  “I want to have complete control of my faculties for all of this,” he said. “ . . . keep my game face on to fight the undead and shit!”

  For the record, I said, we shouldn't assume or ascribe any supernatural side to all of this.

  And then he looks at me, narrowing his eyes, “You're the kid who told the rest of us that Santa wasn't real.” He shakes his head, “Wake-up, Jack! Open your mind to what's going on around you. This is for real.”

  I reach into the fridge and pry the book out from under the DiGiorno's Pepperoni pizzas. They didn't have them with pepperonis and mushrooms the way I'd prefer, so I had to buy just the plain old pepperoni kind. Life is about compromise, Ricky said, like he's some wise sage.

  I told him there is a huge demographic that the frozen pizza industry is missing by not offering both the pepperonis and mushrooms on the same pizza, but he said I was obsessing. I told him I wasn't obsessing, seven times in a row.

  Oh, I so hope that I wasn't a pizza deliveryman in my forgotten past. That would really be the letdown of the century.

  I probably shouldn't be so negligent and careless about how I handle the book, but so far it's been a useless pain in the butt. This Ms. Josephine, I imagine her just rolling on the floor, laughing at my gullible ass as I jump through hoop after hoop.

  As I head back to the living room—which might actually be only three-square-feet—I notice that we're back between dogs and wolves. The color of shark tanks. The glow of the haunting place of my living nightmares. I expect the spooks to come crawling around shortly.

  And maybe . . . her.

  The girl from last night. The dead girl. I don't know when I'll see her again. I wish . . . I wish I hadn't closed my eyes and prayed for her to disappear. Part of me—the adventuresome, Todd Steele side—wants to know why she seemed so familiar. Who was she? What did she want to tell me? And why me?

  Is she part of my degenerative brain disorder?

  Just some intangible construct of my tumor?

  Memories burnt into my retinas?

  The other part of me—that wants to run from all of these things—it's wrestling with my body's response system. I'm in a perpetual state of both Fight and Flight.

  Run and stay.

  Stare and look away.

  This is clearly something that I need to resolve before I become a quivering pile of indecisiveness. All that'll be left of me, if I don't figure this out, is some guy with bubble gum in his hair, wearing flip-flops, who pisses his pants every time he hears a loud noise. I don't want to be that guy.

  That grown-up in the back of the school bus licking the windows . . . not him, not me.

  Man up, or back down! Words of wisdom from my imaginary hero to deal with my invisible monsters. The only reality I have is fiction by comparison.

  I toss the cold book onto my bed and climb up, using the edge of the mattress to scrape off my shoes. My socks smell like over-cooked meatloaf, so that's probably not a good sign. In my Personal Hygiene class they say to wash your clothes after every use, even if they don't seem soiled. I'm already at two days with this pair of socks, so I'm pushing it. I think I saw a fly with flashlights in his hands warning off other flies from approaching.

  The book just sits there, almost leering at me. This thing, over the past few days, has managed to garner itself a personality. Instead of me watching it, the Book of Sighs is watching me. It's the entity, and I'm the object. We've switched places.

  I cross my legs, Indian-style, in front of the book. Just us staring at each other. My eyes focus somewhere past the book, through it, like I'm gazing off into the clouds, or blankly focusing out into the murky water. Not really looking at anything in particular.

  Knowing it won't make any sense, I lift the cover to the first page, which . . . da-da! It still looks like nonsense. They should call this the book of Letdowns. Maybe she gave me the wrong book, that M
s. Josephine. I mean, it was dark in that shop of hers, maybe she gave me the book next to the Book of Sighs. Honest mistake.

  Or, what if there were a couple different versions of similar looking books?

  What if the book I got was a knock-off, and I accidentally got the one stamped, 'Made in China.'

  My eyes relax and I stare numbly at the dots, squiggles, slashes, and other cute little marks that I have probably seen painted on the sides of circus tents, cheap shirts, and ice-cream trucks. And out of nowhere the deep hum returns. It slowly gains volume—this loud, low roar. I can feel it in my chest, all the way out to my fingers.

  All the crazy marks on the first page of the book, they start shaking as if they're not attached to the physical page at all. Like they were all just held there by weak gravity. And as they shake and vibrate, they start to skip around on the page, rearranging themselves into letters I can read.

  While these symbols are falling into letters and words all over the page, my tumor is shrinking a bit more.

  At the very moment that the impossible is very clearly going on in front of my disbelieving eyes, and the humming has subsided, my degenerative brain disease just lost a little steam.

  My advanced schizophrenia . . . it's drying up as we speak.

  Chapter 19

  13 seconds later . . .

  I look at the words, starting from the bottom right of the page as a few random bits and dashes complete the text. And the words . . . there's something familiar about them.

  Line after line I read, there's this kind of deja-vu welling up in the front of my mind, as if I've seen all this before. The whole right-to-left thing only bugs me for the first few sentences, then my brain makes the necessary adjustments and I'm rocking and rolling.

  I get this gut feeling, as I near the top of the page, that somebody's staring at me. You know that feeling that eyes are focused on only you? And so slowly as to not be perceptible, I raise my eyes. I'm not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy.

  The clock on the wall is melted and bloated. My lamp is stretched and bent. My wooden chairs are all warped and thin. My refrigerator, it looks so twisted that I'll never get the pizzas out of it.

  While I had been zoning out on the book, the world I live in had again been morphed into this other place. This land of grey and blue. Between dogs and wolves and shark-blue waters.

  Oh yeah, and there was something else that had me two breaths away from curling up into the fetal position and crapping my pants: The spooks!

  So many I can't even count them all. They're everywhere, staring silently at me and the book. And this time, they really are looking at me. They look like cavemen gazing at fire for the first time. They're on the floor, in my kitchen, on my counter, on my dresser, and on my bed. It's a crowd. A dark audience of monsters. Everywhere.

  Right . . .

  next . . .

  to . . .

  . . . me!

  These spooks are rocking slowly back and forth like entranced mental patients. The same way I'll be if I ever mention so much as a whisper of this to my caseworker.

  I don't want to make them mad, but I don't like them being here. Even though they are just shadows, there's probably enough of them to kick my ass. But I'm fresh out of ideas, here. Clueless.

  I decide to close the book before my chest starts hurting and I fall out of myself. Otherworldly concerns, I'm so well traveled, now. Me, the conquistador . . . the explorer of the netherworld.

  I carefully lift the cover of the book and toss it closed, and everything in the room starts to shift and shake violently. Every piece of furniture gets blurry and slowly reforms to its original shape. And the warm colors of my world, they return as if the program that is my reality just switched from black-n-white to color.

  The spooks, they all shuffle slowly to the shadows in corners and under tables like drunks being led out of the bar at closing time.

  I'm holding my breath the whole time, but they go. Sure enough, they leave.

  I throw one of my pillows on top of the book, just so it doesn't accidentally fall open. At this point, even the laws of physics are suspect. I wouldn't be surprised if fish suddenly started swimming by my window.

  I crawl to the side of the bed, careful not to step on any lingering spooks as I step down. Two things are rebounding off the insides of my skull. The words I read, and how bad I want some of that pizza.

  Are these the proper responses for an event of this magnitude? Probably not, but I'm learning all this as I go. I'll be honest, I'm in kind of a daze, right now. The apogee of my neurosis.

  I look for my cordless phone as I head to the fridge. I have to call Ricky and tell him to come back to my apartment. I'm multi-tasking, now. As I open the refrigerator door I find both the pizza, and the cordless phone . . . right next to the milk.

  The thought briefly crosses my mind that the spooks are fucking with me.

  Little undead pranksters.

  Don't have any idea how my head could be stuck that far up my ass, but there you are. I pull out the pizza and hit redial on the chilly cordless phone.

  “Did you leave something in my truck?” Ricky answers, and I can hear traffic being narrowly dodged in the background.

  No, I tell him. I read the first chapter.

  “ . . . of the . . . ”

  Yup.

  “Holy shit!” he exploded.

  Funny you should mention that, I say. Because that's the feeling I got.

  “Yeah, well, this is a big breakthrough! This is—”

  Not just that, though. The words . . . they sound familiar.

  “Familiar how?” he says with squealing tires and angrily honking horns in the background.

  I shrug as I pull the pizza out of its red box and read the instructions. “Grand,” I say. Grand.

  “Look, don't do anything,” Ricky instructs me like he was the operator of a suicide hotline I had just called. “I'll . . . be . . . right . . . over!”

  Hurry, I told him . . . before the world melts, again.

  Chapter 20

  28 minutes later . . .

  Ricky called me from the parking lot to inform me that he had the safe with him. I met him out in the hallway where he'd rigged-up one of those little chrome suitcase dollies, and a couple pieces of square-cut plywood. He was struggling, the dolly bent and groaning, as he drug it towards my door. But the scene was priceless.

  When I pointed out to him that it looked heavy, he sneered at me, “ . . . you think?” Ricky is the kind of tall and lanky guy that would be more suited for golf than, say, basketball. And, not wanting to steal his thunder, I let him curse and spit, saying things that would offend a sailor. He actually referred to my apartment's door threshold as a, “ . . . slutty-assed, puke-faced whore!”

  Several minutes later the safe was inside, shoved up against a real bookshelf that only had four or five books on it. This safe, the door on it is covered by the backs of fake books. And actually, the fake books look much more interesting than my real ones. That could be problematic.

  I hope the thugs don't like Moby Dick, I say as I kneel down beside the new altar for the Book of Sighs.

  “Anybody that would like any of those old books should be pretty easy to whip,” Ricky said glancing around the room. “Where's the book?”

  Oh, I say, it's on the bed . . . under that pillow.

  He squints his eyes and opens his hands as if to say, why? As he approaches it. He looks at the pillow covering the book, then back at me. The book, again. Me.

  I ask him if he wants some pizza. I tell him that even without the mushrooms, it is still quite exceptional.

  “Fuck the pizza, Jack! What did the book say?”

  Oh, that.

  I made my way over to the dresser and grabbed a sheet of paper that I had used to write down everything I remembered from my stint.

  I cleared my throat and read the first sentence, “The Creation . . .” My eyes glance up and back to the page of scribbled words. My handwriting riva
ls the Book of Sighs, or Doctors' handwriting ,for its level of illegibility. My cursive might as well be an ancient codex.

  “One,” I continued. “ . . . in the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth, and the places in between.” I glance up and Ricky's looking at me like something is off kilter. Out of place. Like a puppy does when it hears a noise it can't understand.

  “Two . . . and the earth was without form, and void; and darkness and chaos was upon the face of the—”

  “Hold on!” Ricky interrupted. “You read it wrong. Read it again. The first one.”

  One, I repeat. In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth, and the places in between.

  I glance up, again, my eyebrows raised and waiting.

  Ricky started chewing on his bottom lip, his eyes looking up at the Martian landscape of my ceiling. And he's whispering the line I read over and over. And then something seems to click in his head and he points at me, “You got a copy of the bible?”

  Somewhere, I said. Since this place is part of the hospital, there would almost have to be one.

  Three cabinets later, Ricky's holding up a King James Bible, “Those crafty Gideons. They're so thorough.” He opens the bible, placing it on the dresser next to my chicken scratch. “Look!”

  His index finger is on the first page, after the word Creation. I read. Then I shrug. And?

  “See that,” he says. “That part about the places in between. That's not in the original bible.”

  So, I wondered aloud, Constantine has another bible written and he keeps it a secret? And this version, it's got something to do with this other place. Why would he do that?

  “Could be a million reasons,” Ricky said, falling to my bed to sit. He glanced over at the book. He reached over, knocked off the pillow, and just stared at the Book of Sighs for a while.

  Another thing you should know, I explain to him, is that the book isn't in the logical order. The verses are all, um, not complete. Like, in that first page, it goes from verse 1 to 2, then to 7, and then to 19, then 30 and 31. Like these are corrections or something.