We cleaned up the glass and I plopped myself down on the couch. Meghan sat on the floor next to me, on her knees.
“What are you doing?”
“I thought maybe I could still talk to you when you were…you know, back in the past. I heard you mumbling in your sleep. Maybe you’re still connected with this time when you go on your little trips.”
“Am I supposed to be able to hear you?”
“I’ll shout. Come on, this is your idea. I’m just trying to help.”
I took two pills, looking into Meghan’s pretty eyes. She reached out to hold my hand. My eyelids grew heavy, slammed shut. When I woke up on February 28, 1972, I was looking at Erna Derace.
She was holding a gun.
X
Slasher’s Revenge
Erna Derace was sitting on the backs of her heels, the polka-dot dress fanned around her. The gun was a small, pearl-handled .38 revolver. I was fairly confident it was the same gun Dr. DeMeo held in his meaty paw and waved around my ghostly face a few days ago. Apparently, she’d taken it from his desk drawer. I could tell because the drawer was still open. And inside were papers and files, stuffed in horizontally.
She held the .38 casually, like it was a TV remote, and she’d become so absorbed in a show that she’d forgotten it was in her hand.
“Dammit…not again.”
She spoke softly, staring at the floor.
Was she about to kill herself? Or DeMeo? I tried to calm her down, even though I was invisible.
“I know you can’t hear or see me. But if there’s any way my words can find their way into your brain, please hear me now—I really think it would be a good idea to put down that gun.”
“I can hear you.”
I froze in place.
“What?”
She turned and locked eyes with me.
“I can see you, too. I can see all of you. I’ve been pretending I can’t because I know you’re probably just a figment of my imagination. I thought if I stopped paying attention maybe you’d go away. But you never go away. None of you do.”
“You saw me in the room that first night? When you were with DeMeo?”
“Yes. I was hoping you’d go away if I went down on him. You did.”
“What exactly do you think I am?”
“You’re a dead man.”
“But I’m not.”
“Right. Sure. You’re not dead. Maybe I’m dead. Maybe I’m a dead woman floating around a sea of living people, only I don’t know it yet. Maybe I’ve been dead since I was a kid.”
“I want to ask you about DeMeo.”
“He’s good to me.”
“What does he do up here? What kinds of experiments?”
“You mean you don’t know? I thought dead people knew everything. That’s why you come back. To taunt the living. To show us how smart you are, and how dumb the rest of us are.”
“Well, I don’t know. You can lord it over me.”
“I don’t know either. Mitchell says it’s top secret. All I know is that his patients arrive after dark, and they stay for sometimes an hour, sometimes all night. He says he works better in the dark, so he keeps the windows covered, and he unscrewed the lamps in the hallway. I’m allowed to have light in my apartment, but nowhere else. And he likes it quiet. It must be absolutely quiet at all times.”
I thought of Billy Derace, sitting in the one lit room in an otherwise dark apartment building. A twelve-year-old, being forced to stay inside and be quiet.
“I see your son sometimes, sitting outside of your apartment. Sometimes he’s crying. Sometimes he’s bleeding, Erna.”
“What are you saying?”
“You know what I’m saying.”
“You don’t understand what it’s like.”
“Try me.”
“No, I’d rather not. You’re going to disappear soon, too. Maybe you’ll leave me alone, maybe you’ll do something rude to me, but either way I’m never going to see you again. Just like the others. No guy wants a kid around that’s not his. Even Dr. DeMeo doesn’t like that he’s around. He always tells me to keep him quiet, he can’t concentrate on his work. And that little son of a bitch just doesn’t listen. He’s just like his father…”
“Your son needs you.”
More important, I need you to be there for your son.
She gestured at me with the gun as she spoke.
“No. It’s too late. There’s too much of Victor in him. He fights me on everything, no matter what I say. No matter how hard I work for him. You try talking to him. Easy for you to sit there and say your son needs you. You have no idea.”
“Who’s Victor?”
“My ex, Victor D’Arrazzio. The kid’s father. That why I pulled this out. I thought I saw him yesterday.”
“What, so you want to shoot him? You should put that back in the drawer. Take a deep breath. Go downstairs and lay down.”
“No, I don’t think I will. I’m either going to put a bullet in my head or I’m going to go out drinking. It’s the only thing that keeps the likes of you away. All of you dead people. So I’ll either ignore you or join you.”
“What dead people? I’m not dead, Erna. It’s complicated, but I assure you, I’m not dead.”
“Prove it.”
She leaned in closer. I could smell her perfume, sweet and pungent. Her lips opened slightly. She moved closer still.
“What are you doing?”
Before she could answer our lips collided. I felt her hand touching mine, our fingers interlocking. She squeezed mine.
Soon nothing made physical sense. We were in the room, we were all over the room, we were inside each other’s skin. I had no sense of where my lips or my fingers ended. No sense of where I stopped and this woman began.
Without warning, she broke our embrace, looked up at me. I pushed away.
“You think I’m dead, and you kiss me?”
“I wanted to know what death tastes like. It tastes good.”
Outside the El train cars rumbled down their tracks, vibrating the floorboards beneath our feet.
“Please put the gun away.”
“Why? What do you have to be nervous about? You’re already dead. Even if I aimed this gun straight at your head and pulled the trigger the bullet would sail right through you.”
I had nothing to say to that, mostly because I worried she was going to swing the revolver over at me and squeeze the trigger, just to test her theory. I had no idea if the bullets would sail through my head or not. I didn’t want to find out.
And then the pill wore off.
When I woke up in the present Meghan was sitting on the floor, pen in her hand and legal pad on her lap. She wasn’t writing anything. She hadn’t written anything.
She didn’t say anything.
I sat up, rubbed my eyes.
“You’re not going to believe what just happened.”
She stood up and walked across the room. She turned and half-sat on the cherrywood desk, then finally looked at me.
“Meghan?”
“I can’t believe you actually kissed that woman.”
“Oh. I’m guessing you heard all of that.”
“Your end of the conversation. But don’t change the subject, Mickey. You were making out with the mother of the guy who killed your father.”
“It wasn’t my idea.”
“What?”
“I was unconscious and nearly four decades in the past. It just kind of happened.”
“So what—were you hoping to heal your girlfriend Erna there with the magical power of your lips? Do you realize, Mickey, that if that woman’s still alive, she’s like sixty or seventy by now?”
“She said she saw other dead people. What does that mean? That other people like me are traveling back in time?”
She looked at me, again at a loss for words. This wasn’t like Meghan at all. She was the perfect friend because she had this warm, relaxed way of filling the uncomfortable spaces. Usually, I loved to listen to her talk. But not
now.
“What, Meghan, what? What’s wrong?”
“There’s something else.”
“What.”
“While you were…under, asleep, whatever…you uh…”
“Spit it out.”
“You ejaculated.”
“I what? Are you sure?”
“I’m a big girl, Mickey. I’ve seen it happen from time to time. But not like it happened with you. You looked like you were either having a seizure or an orgasm.”
“Oh God.”
“You didn’t try to swallow your tongue, so my guess was orgasm.”
“Oh God.”
Meghan looked at me, uneasy smile on her face. “Quit it with the Oh Gods, or I’ll think you’re doing it again.”
“I’m sorry. Oh God.”
“So let me ask you again: What were you doing with the mother of your father’s killer?”
This was too much. She’d kissed me, she’d merged with me—or whatever the hell had happened. I didn’t remember it being necessarily sexual. I remember it being extremely disorienting.
Finally I stood up and went to the bathroom and cleaned myself up with the three fingers I had left. Meghan hadn’t been lying.
When I returned to the main room we seemed to have this unspoken agreement not to speak about whatever had just happened. Maybe it was a side effect of the pill. Hell, maybe they weren’t time-traveling pills after all. Maybe Grandpop Henry had a secret stash of Cialis in that Tylenol bottle and I was a sick bastard imagining this whole thing.
But I knew that wasn’t the case. Meghan knew it, too.
“So to recap, we’re out of witnesses. Your mother doesn’t know anything. Your grandmother gave us a little. And Erna can do wonders with her lips.”
Meghan was wrong. We had another witness.
“There’s someone else.”
“Who?”
“Billy Derace.”
Sometime in the middle of the night I woke up. I listened to Meghan’s breathing for a while, then realized she was awake, too. I reached out and touched her hand lightly.
“You awake?”
“Yeah. You?”
“Yeah.”
We lay there in the dark together. I was genuinely surprised when she suggested crashing again. She told me it was late, she didn’t feel like making the drive back downtown this time of night—making it not a big deal. But still: she stayed. She didn’t have to. Even my pill-popping wet dream hadn’t scared her away. Even me, making out with a woman who was probably seventy years old by now. It made me wonder. Finally, I asked her.
“Why are you doing all of this?”
“All of what?”
“You know. Everything. Helping me trying to figure this out. Hanging out so much. Not calling the lunatic asylum to have me carted away.”
She was silent for a moment.
“You want the truth?”
“Of course.”
“Don’t get me wrong—you’re a great guy, and I cherish our friendship.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And I was really concerned when I thought you were slipping into some kind of Trainspotting-style drug oblivion—I mean, I couldn’t just stand on the sidelines and do nothing, you know? But now I know there’s something else going on, and the more I hear, the more I’m curious, and…well, I don’t mean to sound cold or anything, but I really just want to know how it all turns out.”
Somehow it was honest and warm and heartbreaking at the same time.
We slept most of the next day away. The rain was pelting down when we pulled up to the Adams Institute in the early evening. There was a frightening rumble in the distance. It was one of those good down-and-dirty early summer storms you get every so often in Philadelphia.
“And here we are, sneaking into a mental hospital,” Meghan said.
“We’re not sneaking in. We’re just going to walk.”
“Easy for you to say. You must have done this all the time at the City Press. Smooth-talking your way past security, slipping through unlocked doors…”
“Uh, not exactly.”
“You didn’t sneak into government buildings? Secretly tape meetings? Spend endless nights taping together shredded documents?”
“There were reporters who loved that kind of thing. But I wasn’t one of those reporters. I preferred the phone—or even better, an e-mail exchange. To tell you the truth, I even hated that—it always felt like I was bothering people.”
“You’re a regular Bob Woodward.”
“I’m not even a Carl Bernstein. Lock me in a room with piles of documents and I’m a happy man.”
“You live in a room with piles of documents, and you’re miserable.”
“Oh shut up.”
All I wanted was thirty seconds with Billy Derace. That’s all. If he recognized me, then it was proof that all of this was real, that I was speaking to him in the past. That I was the kindly ghost from upstairs who tried to stop his mother from beating him. Of course, I was also the kindly ghost who’d kissed his mother. But I wouldn’t bring that up.
The front gate was just off Roosevelt Boulevard. Even the tall, black, wrought-iron fence surrounding the neatly manicured estate seemed to hold up a hand and say and just where do you think you’re going.
The plan was this: Meghan would pretend to be a lawyer from a nonexistent firm (she’d even printed up fake letterhead) with documents for an inmate (William Allen Derace) about an estate matter. Meghan was attractive, confident and knew how to lay down some lawyerspeak after years of watching her father.
The front receptionist desk shot her down completely. Meghan was told that the lead attorney would have to call to make an appointment.
She came back out to the car, sat down in the driver’s seat, dripping wet. She fumed so hard, I swear I saw raindrops on her forehead sizzle and evaporate into steam. Meghan was not used to being shut out of anything.
I had no choice but to say:
“Okay, let me try.”
She looked at me.
“I thought you didn’t do this kind of thing.”
“I’m thinking it’ll look good on my résumé.”
I was wearing my one jacket and a pair of ill-fitting trousers from my grandfather’s closet, as well as one of his dress shirts. We had been roughly the same size at some point, but the man had shrunk in his old age, leaving everything a little tight. If only I had a skinny tie, I could join a new wave power pop boy band.
“Let me borrow your clipboard.”
“Why?” Meghan asked.
“If you wear the right suit and carry a clipboard, you can pretty much walk into any building and nobody will bother you.”
“Is that the right suit?”
“I’ll walk fast so they don’t notice.”
I reached over with my three good fingers and started to pull on the door handle.
“Wish me luck.”
“Good luck. By the way, if you’re caught by the guards, wet your pants and start barking like a dog.”
“You think this is a riot, don’t you.”
“No, I’m serious. That’s the one thing that can get you out of pretty much any situation. Or at least, give you a chance to make a break for it.”
“I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
The front lawn of the Adams Institute was manicured to within an inch of its life, and glistening with the humid rain. I strode forward purposefully, unapologetically. I was faking it like you wouldn’t believe.
Inside the main hall there was a reception desk. I blew right past it and continued down a marble-floored hallway. Someone said “hey!” but I turned a corner, looking for a wall-mounted directory. There was a door to my right, then another set of stairs, then another door…which took me outside again, into the rain. Crap.
Not knowing exactly where to go, I darted down the side of the building, feeling the water creep down my collar, until I found a path that led into a group of trees. There were more buildings, two and four stories
each, dotting the grounds. Derace could be in any one of them. Or not here at all.
I kept strolling, not too fast to be obvious. By the time I reached the tree line I could see another building off to the left—a 1950s-style, no-nonsense two-story deal. Which one of these things is not like the other? If I were going to run government drug experiments, would I do it in one of the storied old buildings that had been around since the Civil War, or would I use federal money to slap up something new? The name on the building said: the papiro center.
And that was as far as I got before I felt a hand on my good arm.
I half-expected a guard, but instead it was a man in a white robe and slippers. Late fifties, with brown hair combed straight back. His eyes were the most intense I’d ever seen. They practically glowed.
“I remember you,” he said. “I met you when you were a kid. On that boat. Do you remember?”
I had no idea who he was, or what boat he was talking about.
“You and your sister. You were lost. On that boat.”
See, right there were strikes one and two. I was an only child, and I grew up a landlubber. Mom didn’t bring us on any yachts or cruise ships. She didn’t even bring us to the Good Ship Lollypop down at Penn’s Landing, like every other kid I knew.
“Sorry,” I told the guy. “I don’t remember.”
He leaned forward and winked at me.
“My name is Dean. But that’s just an alias.”
Dean looked around to see if anyone else was listening. I looked around, too, to see if any armed guards were running toward us. But we were alone. Unfortunately.
Sometimes, though, a reporter can’t be picky about his sources. It was a long shot, but I looked at Dean.
“Do you know a man here named William Derace? Billy Allen Derace?”
Dean’s eyes widened.
“Of course I know that bastard. You should stay away from him—he’s incredibly dangerous. I’ve been trying to collect him for years, but they keep him locked up all the time. Oh, the murders I could solve with that son of a bitch locked in my skull.”
Okay, this guy was probably loony tunes, but it was also possible that he conflated actual reality with his fantasy life. Maybe he really did know Derace.
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