Fire. It started behind my eyes. I blinked, and blinked. It spread to my hips. Shaking. Trembling.
She was kissing me, hugging me. Then she thumped me on the back of the head. O W!
“They said you were dead—they found you dead.”
Yes and no…but if you don’t stop squeezing me so hard, I will be.
I opened my mouth and tried to tell her, but again, there was nothing. She frowned at me, her eyes searching mine, just as a few more people in scrubs and white coats stepped into the morgue.
I noticed the pad and pen on the floor and motioned for Mom to give it to me. Shades’ hands tried to take my own, and I batted them away as I scribbled down the information for Daniel and pressed the note into her hands. My joints scraped, bone on bone, as if the cartilage had been sucked out from between them. But I wrote the note. I gave her as pleading a look as I could. I mouthed the words “give this to Daniel” as best as I could.
Then for added effect I took the paper and scribbled Daniel’s name on the other side and the word hurry!
And so like my mommy dearest, Nona shoved the note into the front of her blouse, over her left boob. Those two endowments had always served Mom well—especially when it came to hiding things. Who was going to go in there after something?
Not me.
One of the men took one look at me, saw the tag on my toe, and turned to the door. He hit a red button beside the door, and a bell sounded from somewhere.
What? Was that the oops-they’re-not-dead-yet alarm?
My back lurched, and I was thrown from the chair, the blanket the only cushion beneath me. The shaking took on a frantic pace as my body woke. I could only imagine these were the throes of my soul fitting itself back into its suit.
My suit.
“Honey … Zoë … what’s wrong?” Mom’s voice was in my ear. And I was crying suddenly. I don’t know why. It might have been because I woke up naked in a morgue drawer.
And I couldn’t speak!
Mom held me as the horror of what had happened to me in that little house near Hollowell Parkway overwhelmed me.
And I made not one sound.
The Shades moved away. They looked—frightened.
I saw his tongue again in my mind.
More men and woman in scrubs came through the door along with a gurney. One guy pushed in two rolling stands with clear bags hanging from them. I kept banging against the floor, over and over as my body lurched and jerked like some ungodly beached fish. Hands pushed Mom away, then they were on me, steadying me.
Someone pressed something in my mouth and kept my tongue from folding back into my throat.
Fire. Pain. Agony. My blood turned to acid in my veins, and if I’d had a voice, I would have screamed as I felt my arteries and muscles melt and burn away as my blood touched everything.
Everything.
I thought of that tongue snaking down my throat. I remembered Trench-Coat holding up the swirling red hand of death…and how he’d put it down as if he’d changed his mind.
“What’s wrong with her?” my mother wailed.
I tried to call out to her—but I no longer controlled my body. It was as if it were fighting me. My soul.
Liquid agony!
Hang in there…you can do this. It was his voice. Joe’s voice. Soothing. In my ear.
Joe!
The men picked me up and put me on the table. The pain cracked my head open like a thunderstorm releasing its rain.
Trench-Coat had done something else to me—something other than taking my soul.
“Get her still!”
Voices, voices, voices…
One woman pressed an ice-cold stethoscope onto my chest as another one swabbed my left arm. People held me down. I felt the pinch of a needle, and I tried to tell them to stop. I lurched. I flopped. I had no control.
“You got a handle on the tremors?” one of them said.
The female grabbed a penlight and pried my lids open, shining the light in my eyes. “Her pupils are dilated. Nonresponsive.”
“Heartbeat’s erratic,” the one with the stethoscope said. He told the one with the needle what to put it in my arm.
I didn’t want them to do anything. I wanted my mommy. I wanted Joe to tell them to leave me alone! I opened my mouth and screamed at them to stop.
One of them placed a stupid oxygen mask over my face instead. I could hear my mother from somewhere, demanding to know what was happening.
I was looking up into the face of the one with the oxygen. He smiled at me. His face darkened, and Trench-Coat stood over me, naked, warm, and alive.
You are mine now…
I saw his lips move, watched them in slow motion as he caressed my lips with his thumb. I knew his voice. Had heard it all of my life.
I knew that voice!
Everything dimmed, faded to black. Trench-Coat had taken part of me with him. It was mine!
I closed my eyes as the doctors worked. He’d stolen my voice.
20
A corridor of hollowed rock stretched out before me. It grew longer and darker the faster I ran. I pushed myself as hard as I could. Disembodied arms, some with flesh, some skeletal, stuck out from the sides of the corridor, and as I ran past them, they tried to grab me. I could hear Rhonda’s stereo blaring out Assemblage 23’s “Disappoint.”
Nails tore at my skin, digging deep rivets into my flesh. Blood oozed over my bare flesh and coated my body, but I continued to run.
Because he was behind me.
He wanted me, small parts at a time. And once he had all of me—there would be nothing left.
His laugh bounced from the walls as I turned a sharp right, and the corridor abruptly stretched out again, elongating as I stood there, panting, watching.
Trench-Coat was there, faint in the distance at first, then drawing closer. Materializing as a movement of shadows at first, and then drawing form as he flew at me.
I gave a silent scream and turned to run back the way I’d come. But the way was barred. There was no corridor. There was only a wall. I was trapped.
He was there before me. I saw swirling, undulating tattoos covering his bald head where I’d not seen them before. He walked steadily, evenly.
Calmly.
I pressed myself as far back into the wall as I could, willing myself back to my body. Any body!
“There, there,” he said.
He spoke.
In my voice!
He reached out and took up a lock of my hair as it fell over my bare left breast. Trench-Coat brought it to his nose. The hair dissolved in his fingers, became a green mist, which he inhaled deeply. He looked at me with white eyes. No pupils. “You’re marked now. You are mine. I will devour you piece by piece—and when you are gone—we will become something greater, more powerful than any being that dwelleth upon my master’s realm.”
I screamed.
He jumped forward and pressed his mouth onto mine.
I felt him pulling me into him. I heard his voice, my voice, in my mind.
Die!
GAH!
Okay—that dream just totally blew chunks.
I expected to wake up in a hospital bed again, with tubes and a beep-beep machine and the call of doctors stat and to which OR over hidden intercoms.
And I wasn’t disappointed either.
Wasn’t my life just fun? I sure hoped my insurance was paid up.
This time there were tubes in my nose and down my throat. I immediately went to work on those. I can’t stand anything in my nose—I even have trouble with shooting sinus medicine up there.
But of course I accidentally jarred something, and that brought several nurses. I was threatened with restraints if I didn’t leave things alone.
Mean people.
The edges of the nightmare started to fade.
I sort of remember sleeping again, with no dreams. And then I was awake and watching the nurse change a clear plastic bag over my head.
I tried to talk to her.
I tried to move my arm again as I had before, to get her attention.
Abruptly I was out of my body, standing to the side of the bed, behind the nurse.
What the fuck?
Going out of body took time and preparation. At least a good five minutes or so of deep breathing, sometimes ten if I couldn’t get my head quiet. But…I’d just done it in minus seconds flat!
I looked down at my stomach for the cord. Whew…and it was there. Still attached at my solar plexus and streaming nonstop to my body on the bed.
That’s when I saw myself.
Holy shit.
I looked awful. Gaunt. Pale as a college jock’s full moon. The white streak at my temple was back—the artificial color gone. And it was wider. Thicker. And Joe hadn’t been kidding about those dark circles beneath my eyes.
It wasn’t near as bad an experience as when I’d seen myself after the rape. Not a lot of plastic. Only one beep-beep machine. I sort of looked like I was sleeping. The scene sort of looked calm.
No—it was all different somehow.
In that instant I realized everything was different.
From the beginning I’d always been amazed how similar being in my body was to being out of it. You know, that things looked the same, except for me seeing people’s colors sometimes. What Mom called their auras or energy fields.
But the sounds, the usual colors, even the textures, had all been the same in both worlds.
Not anymore. Everything had a dingy cast to it now. Like it was all dusted in soot. And the soot moved just slightly, like smoky tendrils of mist, the smoke just after a candle was snuffed.
And there was sound now. Echoing murmurs, like millions of people all mumbling in their sleep. It was above me, below me, around me. Not too loud, but audible. I could pick out a moan here, or a scream there. A snippet of conversation.
And something moved around me, undulated in the air and brushed against the hairs on my body.
The nurse finished with the bag, checked my pupils with a penlight, then left the room, moving through me.
Gah…she had her lover tied up in the basement?
Sick, sick, sick…
I turned and left the room as well, but stopped just outside my door and put my hand to my mouth.
Shadows moved back and forth along the hallway. Sooty black Shades of elderly men and women, and children, in short hospital gowns sieved through the walls, in and out of rooms, through the nurses and orderlies as they moved metal trays up and down the corridor. I’d seen them in the morgue—but not like this. Not in such numbers!
Joe. Joe had known what had happened. He’d been there—he’d brought me back. I needed to find him, and he’d said he’d be watching me, right? Or had I dreamed that? But where would I find him? I didn’t even know his last name. Would he still be in the morgue? Would someone here know who he was?
I looked to my right, and then my left. I saw the nurses’ station as well as the familiar outline of my mom. I started to run toward her, a beacon of light in the midst of all the shadow.
And I stopped in my tracks. Mom really was a beacon. Her body seemed to pulse with a golden light that moved up through the top of her head and then back down again. My feet took several hesitant steps closer to the station where I saw her talking to the nurse behind the counter.
I spotted Rhonda nearby in a chair, her laptop pulled open and her many-ringed fingers punching away. She to seemed to pulse with light, only it was darker, more purple than Mom’s. I’d never seen these colors before.
Even the nurses pulsed with softer light, like dimmed versions of Mom’s thousand-watt-ness.
And through all the light the shadows of people moved back and forth, like a dark wheat moving with the wind.
“Take me,” a voice hissed to my left. “Please…take me…”
A small, wilted little lady in a wheelchair was staring up at me with tiny, black button eyes. The wrinkles in her face came together in a sweet but sad smile. But superimposed on her face was a skull.
A death mask.
Behind her stood a much younger man, maybe her son, dressed in a military uniform. He had short-cropped dark hair and a white smile. He put his hand on her shoulder. She didn’t seem to notice.
But of course she wouldn’t. He was a shadow. Though he seemed, somehow, more alive than the Shades around him. At least he had some color to him. Kinda like that spot color they used in films these days.
The lady reached out to me, her hand precariously balanced on arms no thicker than matchsticks. “Please—take me to my husband. I’m ready…I’m so tired.”
I looked at the man standing behind her.
“Please, take her,” he said. Ah—this was her husband, not her son. His voice was melodic, and peaceful. “I’m here, and I’m waiting.”
I opened my mouth to speak, but of course there was nothing there. I looked pleadingly at the man behind her and touched my throat. I mouthed the words “Take her?”
He seemed to understand. “I know.” (He did? Well freak’n fill me in on this plot twist!) “Don’t look at it as a loss, but as a gain. The universe balances things out in its own way. For what you lost, you received. And that, my lady, is a gift more rewarding.”
And he was gone.
And I had no freak’n idea what it was he meant.
The little lady was watching me. Her hand was still stretched out.
For what you lost, you received.
I took her hand in mine. Light. Incredible blinding light. Orgasmic euphoria filled my body, and I was lifted from my astral feet. I felt myself float in midair and thought I heard the sound of sobbing.
And then it all dimmed to a dull roar of harrowed excitement. I still stood where I’d been, but the woman had collapsed to the floor, and there were nurses and doctors moving over her like a small swarm of ants.
I moved to the side, careful not to let them move through my body. When I looked up I saw Mom staring at me. Rhonda had stood as well. She held her laptop in her right hand, her mouth open, her kohl-rimmed eyes wide.
Guilt pushed me backward, and I turned and ran. I moved through the wall of my room and I dove as hard as I could back into my body.
It arched on the bed and took in a deep breath…and felt better.
Much better.
And I slept. A deep, healthy, dreamless sleep.
IT was Monday afternoon before I woke again. The nurse was back, changing my little IV bag again. The headache was all but a rumor and I felt—better. Of course, no one would listen to me, as I still didn’t have my voice back. Three different doctors saw me within an hour before the nurse returned with a message from my mom. She and Rhonda were on their way over.
The door opened, but it wasn’t Rhonda. Or Mom. I’d hoped it might be Joe. I really needed to find him and strangle some answers out of him.
Daniel came in. He had a bouquet of flowers in his hand. Again.
He also had a wrapped present. Goody!
The detective leaned forward and kissed my forehead. Yeah, well, I guess the mouth was out of the question, seeing as how the tube up my nose was probably a put-off, as well as my breath.
I really wanted to brush the socks off my teeth.
The package turned out to be a small dry-erase board and pen. I scribbled out WHAT’S THIS?
He smiled. “A means to better communicate. I’m not sure how laryngitis works, but I’m pretty sure you shouldn’t try to use your voice.”
Now how do I tell the bugger I didn’t have laryngitis?
“And I like the new look. Bonnie Raitt?” He nodded at me and reached out to touch my left temple. His hand came back with a very thick mass of white hair.
Oi! I grabbed it away from him and pulled it out where I could see it. White. A thick chunk of soft white strands.
“I’m glad you’re okay, Zoë.”
ME TOO—THOUGH WAKING UP IN A MORGUE COFFIN IS A BIT UPSETTING.
“Drawer. You were in a drawer.”
Erase.
Scribble. FUCK YOU.
He smiled and pulled the piece of paper from his back pocket, the one I’d scribbled the message to him on. He held it up for me. “How did you know?”
KNOW WHAT?
“Zoë—no one knows Hirokumi’s daughter’s been kidnapped. Yet you did—you wrote this for me, right?”
I nodded.
“Remember the phone call I got Friday night? It was about Susan, the daughter. She’d been taken from school that day, her bodyguards shot. I had to get to the station. We kept it quiet—out of the news.
“And then you went missing and no one knew where you were, till some guy called the station reporting a dead body in the trunk of a car, then you show up half-naked in a morgue and I get this note telling me Hirokumi’s daughter had been kidnapped by Rollins. How did you know this?”
Okay—truth or dare. I chose truth, ‘cause to be honest, I think I’d overmaxed out my dare quota for the month.
I took a deep breath and wrote. I WENT TO SPY ON ROLLINS.
“Oh shit…Zoë-ëëëë…”
AND I FOLLOWED HIM TO A HOUSE SOMEWHERE ON HOLLOWELL PARKWAY. I DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT THE GIRL—HONEST!
Daniel looked at me like I was a tiny fish. I think he was deciding whether to keep me or throw me back. “And?”
I SAW HER.
“You wrote that in your note—but where is she?”
THEY WERE GOING TO MOVE HER. I WAS GOING TO CALL YOU—THAT’S WHEN I WAS ATTACKED AND THROWN IN MY CAR.
Okay—so—a little white lie.
But it sure sounded better and more believable than the truth.
“They saw you,” he took a deep breath. “And they thought they’d killed you. I’m assuming they’re the ones that vandalized your car, not some joyriders.”
Uh. Sure. Why not?
“You saw Rollins?”
YES.
“With Susan?”
I pointed to the board. No need rewriting it. YES
He frowned. “Did they choke you?”
Uh…point. YES.
And in a manner Trench-Coat had. Only with lots of fleshy tentacles.
Ew.
He reached out and took my hand, the one with the marker in it. “Zoë, we searched the area you scribbled down, and we didn’t find anything.”
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