Expiration Date

by Duane Swierczynski

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Now I get what I want. Finally.”

  Then the hands released me.

  “Hey. No. No no no no no no not yet…”

  Billy was gone.

  But I still heard his voice.

  “DON’T YOU BASTARDS STICK THAT IN ME I’LL COME FOR ALL OF YOU IN YOUR SLEEP AND CUT YOU AND YOUR PRETTY LITTLE CHILDREN TO DEATH…”

  My eyes may have been playing tricks. But for a flicker of a moment I saw the shape of Derace above me, and it was like he was wrestling with unseen forces, trying to lift his curled fists up, but he couldn’t, because the man had invisible restraints around his wrists…

  And then he vanished.

  In the mid-1960s a professor at the University of Virginia ran a series of experiments on an advertising executive named Robert Monroe who claimed to have experienced numerous “out of body” (OBE) experiences. Monroe agreed to eight sessions in which he was placed in a locked room and asked to project himself. In two of those sessions Monroe was able to accurately describe the contents of another room in the facility in vivid detail.

  In the late 1960s the Pentagon began a series of experiments aimed to control “remote viewing”—essentially, using psychics as spies to peer behind the Iron Curtain. Reportedly, the other side was engaged in similar experiments, resulting in a top secret, low-key “brain race” similar to the arms race and the moon race.

  And in 1971, Dr. Mitchell DeMeo was given a government grant to find a way to induce an out-of-body experience using pharmaceuticals, which he’d developed over a period of twenty years.

  DeMeo was affiliated with the prestigious Adams Institute. But he ran his experiments offsite; the board of directors at the Adams Institute thought it would be better that way. He used the address of the Papiro Center, at the time an empty building on the hospital’s grounds that was sometimes used by the government, sometimes not. When it was not, unruly patients and “special cases” were housed in the center.

  But DeMeo had actually set up shop in an abandoned apartment building on Frankford Avenue. They advertised in local papers for volunteers.

  They accepted my father.

  Dr. DeMeo hired a cleaning woman named Erna Derace to tidy up his office as well as the other apartments in the building. Payment was very modest, but in exchange, Erna was allowed to keep an apartment downstairs.

  She had a boy named Billy. And he was instructed to be quiet at all times. In fact, their stay in the apartment was contingent on Billy “behaving.”

  No one cared about the experiments now, because the experiments were seen as a failure.

  And the story had gone untold.

  The story was all here in the papers, which had been buried in drawers of the cherrywood desk. Meghan had found the motherlode when she righted the desk after Billy Derace had tried to smash my head through it. Everything was in there. Grandpop Henry had clearly been through it all, and kept the relevant stuff neatly organized in the desk drawers. The boxes and crates were essentially leftovers. Trash he hadn’t gotten around to bringing outside. We’d been looking in the wrong place this whole time.

  Meghan flipped through DeMeo’s experiment notes, all of which were neatly typewritten and separated into three categories: positive, negative and “questionable.” The negative files were thick, and had taken up most of the drawer. The questionables were comparatively slim. And the positives were thinner still.

  We more or less read in silence, as if we were both engrossed in the same 500,000-page novel that had gushed itself out of the desk. Only, we were on wildly different chapters, trying to piece together the story out of order. At one point Meghan looked up at me.

  “Okay, so Dr. DeMeo was researching out-of-body experiences. As far as we know, Billy Derace is still locked up, under heavy sedation at the Adams Institute. So this means the Derace we saw last night was what…an astral projection?”

  “Which will make it very interesting to explain to the police.”

  “True.”

  Then I thought this through a bit more.

  “Wait wait wait—that doesn’t make sense. Say he has the same pills I do. And let’s say he can do the same things I can do. Does this mean he’s come back from some future year just to mess with me now?”

  “Maybe the whole going back in time thing is specific to you. According to these papers here, it was all about astral projection. Harnessing it. Making it predictable. Finding people who were predisposed to it. Maybe you, and maybe your father, could only project into the past.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  Meghan held up the positive folder.

  “Because in this folder is Dr. DeMeo’s one proven success. And his name is Billy Allen Derace.”

  “You’re kidding. He ran drug experiments on a twelve-year-old boy? The son of the woman he was banging?”

  Meghan opened the folder, handed it to me.

  “I don’t think he was twelve. These notes are dated from early 1980. That would make Derace, what, eighteen years old then?”

  I skimmed the notes. Meghan was right. Derace had been an unqualified success. Able to walk around outside his body and identify objects in other rooms with ease. DeMeo was practically gushing. He also noted that his success was “no doubt linked to the extreme dosage administered to subject over a short period of time.”

  In short: Derace had been pumped full of these pills in order to make the out-of-body experience work.

  But why do this to Billy? Had he volunteered? Had Erna coerced her son to do it to stay in the good graces of that fat pill-pusher?

  Meghan found my father’s page after a short while. He had been in the “questionable” folder, and it seemed that the pills had the same effect on the father as they did the son. He was hurled back in time, too, only to his birth year—1949. DeMeo’s notes were snide, dismissive. My father insisted what he was seeing was real, and asked for more time to prove it. DeMeo let him have a few more sessions, then abruptly bounced him from the experiment. “Subject W. clearly wanted to milk the system for more money.”

  I shook my head.

  “DeMeo didn’t believe him. But my father was telling the truth.”

  Oh hell—my father.

  Billy.

  “What?”

  The pallet full of cinder blocks that had been dangling over me finally broke free and smashed down on my head. I scrambled across the room, nearly tripping, and pulled out the death scrapbook Grandpop had made.

  “Mickey, what is it?”

  I flipped, found the Bulletin article. Billy Derace hadn’t just disappeared from the scene of the crime. He had never really been there. It was his astral projection that had shown up, and it was strong enough and real enough to be seen and shown to a table and order a steak and a beer to bide his time. He’d ordered the steak because he wanted the knife. He couldn’t bring one with him, because his physical body was locked up in the Adams Institute.

  I don’t know what I sounded like as I explained it to Meghan. It came out as a tumble of ideas and words. Somehow, though, it made sense to her. I think she was finally believing me—believing that those pills could do what I said they could.

  “But what’s the connection between Derace and your father? They were both experimented on, but eight years apart. What made Derace pick up a knife and stab him to death in a bar?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I heard him talking to you last night. I heard him say, ‘I killed him because I thought he was you.’”

  “I have no idea.”

  After a while, Meghan hit my crappy laptop for some Google searches and we filled in some pieces that the notes from the desk couldn’t. First, she found a death notice for DeMeo.

  “Says here in the Inquirer that Dr. Mitchell DeMeo died in 2002. When did your grandpop move here?”

  “A year later.”

  “Oh shit. He didn’t just die. He was stabbed to death on Frankford Avenue at…Sellers Street
? Is that nearby?”

  “Just a few blocks away. Did you say stabbed?”

  “He was walking to his car. Had the keys in his hand. Police say robbery wasn’t a motive, as his car keys and his wallet were still on the body when he was found.”

  “Billy.”

  “Yeah, I’d say that was certainly a possibility.”

  Meghan kept typing; I kept digging. As a reporter I used to love printed sources. They were puzzle pieces. But now, there were too many pieces. Nothing seemed to match up or make sense.

  “Um…”

  “What?”

  “I had somebody in my dad’s office do a little checking for me—and he just e-mailed back. This building is still owned by the U.S. government. I think your grandpop was squatting. Which means that technically, you’re squatting.”

  Somehow this news wasn’t the crushing blow it should have been. I was already thinking that there was no way I’d be spending another night in this apartment. Not with Billy Derace knowing where to find me.

  And Meghan.

  A half hour later, dawn crept up over the Frankford skyline. We’d been digging and reading and throwing questions at each other all through the night. But now, with daylight here, I told Meghan she should probably go home.

  “Are you kidding? Just when this is coming together?”

  “It’s not safe here.”

  “Don’t tell me—Frankford’s a bad neighborhood.”

  “You know that’s not what I mean. I’m talking about Derace. Hell, I’m thinking about swallowing my pride, packing up my crap and asking my mom if I can crash in a spare bedroom for a few days. Just until I sort this stuff out.”

  “No way am I leaving you now.”

  “Seriously, Meghan, I’d feel a lot better if you kept your distance. I promise, I won’t leave you out of this.”

  And I wouldn’t. There was nothing I wanted more than Meghan to stay with me right now. To stay with me forever, actually. But I couldn’t risk her life, not because of my selfishness. Billy Derace wouldn’t know who she was, where she lived. To him, she was just another woman. The only connection he had to her was through me.

  “I don’t believe this. All of this time, and you push me away now? Seriously, Mickey—what the hell?”

  She couldn’t stay. She couldn’t be anywhere near me. Not now.

  “I’ll call you.”

  When she left this time, she didn’t kiss me. She made sure I saw her face for a moment, her angry eyes, and then she left.

  The door snicked shut and I sat on the houndstooth couch, intending to close my eyes for just a minute. One minute I was staring at the cracks in the ceiling and the next utter exhaustion took over. I was out. Gone.

  It was good to finally let go.

  Sometime later—it must have been early afternoon—my cell phone rang. Through a curtain of gray haze I saw the caller was Frankford Hospital. My mom was probably in my grandpop’s room and wanted to bug me about visiting him. I let the call go to voice mail and rolled back over. Maybe the drool would run down the other cheek, even things out. A while later the phone rang again. Please stop, Mom. Let me enjoy my coma here in peace. Then again. And a fourth time. So I finally picked up the phone and called into voice mail to see what the big panic was about…

  But it wasn’t my mother. It was Grandpop Henry, calling from the hospital. I redialed the number. He answered.

  “Mickey?”

  “Grandpop? You’re awake?”

  “Yeah, I’m awake. Been awake for a while. I need you to come here right away.”

  XI

  The Night Watchman

  Grandpop Henry was covered in blankets. A catheter tube ran down the side of the bed to a plastic container, but it was only partially obscured by a thin piece of blue linen. His piss was on display for the world to see.

  He looked at me and I swear he had tears in his eyes.

  “Your arm.”

  His voice was croaky and weak. I looked down at my right arm in its sling.

  “I’m fine. It’s nothing. And hey, you’re the one in the hospital, remember?”

  “You got that going back, didn’t you?”

  “That happened to you, too, huh?”

  “I haven’t been able to move my left arm for two years. But never mind that. Tell me everything you did.

  There isn’t much time.”

  “What I did?”

  “Yeah, I could hear you just fine last time you were here. You found the pills.”

  “How about you start telling me everything you did, Grandpop? Because I’ve spent the past week trying to figure it all out.”

  “There’s no time for that. I need to make sure you didn’t screw anything up.”

  Oh, that was rich. Me screwing things up? I didn’t want to stand here and be lectured. I wanted to know what this was all about. All of my life, my family had been talking around me instead of to me. I was sick of it.

  “No.”

  “What do you mean, no?”

  I looked him in the eyes.

  “I’m not telling you a thing until you explain everything to me.”

  “Feh.”

  “I want you to say the words. You were trying to go back in time to kill Billy Derace, the man who killed your son. My father.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “You’re denying it?”

  “Yes, I’m denying it. Actually, I was going back in time to kill Billy Derace’s father.”

  “After your father was killed there was no trial. Nobody could place Derace at the bar, so he stayed where he was—that loony bin up the road. Well, that wasn’t good enough for me. I wanted to look into his eyes, to know if he’d done it or not. Then I’d do what I had to. But I knew I’d never be able to set foot within a mile of that place if I told them who I really was.”

  “So you got a job there.”

  “Hey. Who’s telling this, you or me? So yeah, I got a job there. This was years later—1989. But before that I waited. Paid attention to the newspapers, just in case they were to spring him early. I read all the local papers cover to cover looking for any mention of him. I saw all the pieces about those tramps he murdered—but I had no idea it was him. Nobody did. Nobody does. You wrote that story a few years ago—”

  “You read that?”

  “Yeah, I read it, I read everything you wrote in that paper, even the things you got wrong, and you got plenty wrong. Now will you stop interrupting me? I don’t have that much time. Anyway, you wrote that story a few years ago and by then I knew, I knew what he’d been up to because I was living there and I found DeMeo’s notes and then I knew what he could do.”

  “DeMeo was killed in 2002.”

  “Yeah, by that shadowy son of a bitch. I’m not crying for him, though. DeMeo deserved what he got. He knew about the hooker murders, but didn’t say anything because he thought Billy was his big breakthrough. After all those years of pumping people with that poison, he finally finds somebody who can do this cockamamie walking out of your body stunt. Only problem is, it’s this nut-job kid who raided his drug stash when his whore mother wasn’t looking.”

  “Erna Derace.”

  “Erna Derace, yeah. DeMeo’s journal said—”

  “Wait. We didn’t find any journal. We looked all through the desk and didn’t find any journal.”

  “I know. ’Cause I burned it. Once I figured it out, I didn’t want nobody seeing this stuff. Nobody’s business but mine. Now. You’re my grandson, you’re the only flesh and blood thing on this earth that I care about, but if you don’t shut up and let me tell this story I swear to God I’m going to pop you in the kisser.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Sorry, sorry, yeah, we’re all sorry. Anyway, it was around 1980 and this kid, Billy, had grown up to be a real piece of trash. He’s drinking at thirteen, doing the dope when he’s fourteen, stealing shit and mugging people when he’s seventeen. By that time, he also starts breaking into DeMeo’s office, hoping to score pills
. He scored pills all right.”

  “Wait—he started back then?”

  “He started back then. He realized what he could do. I went back to those papers and read about all of these little break-ins up and down Frankford Avenue back in 1979. A real one-man crime wave. Nobody could figure it out. But I did. Only, it was too late to do anything about it.”

  I thought about my first experiences with the pill, and yeah, even my mind went to larceny. I was a thirty-seven-year-old guy with a fairly decent moral compass. Billy Derace, though, was an abused kid with a mother who drank and whored herself out to the fat doctor upstairs and pretty much felt the deck stacked against him. Of course he would goof around on those pills. He must have felt like a superhero with new powers. Only he didn’t go back in time. He was able to astrally project into the present. He could do whatever he wanted.

  One thing didn’t make sense though.

  “So why did he kill Dad?”

  Grandpop looked at me, annoyed.

  “Because he was a nut, why else? Like I was saying, I started working at the hospital in 1993. They did a background check, but it wasn’t a very good one, because they didn’t know I had a son. I’d been divorced since 1959, so I guess they didn’t dig back too far. And your dad was using that stupid name, so no one put it together. Anyway, by that time DeMeo already had Derace over in this maximum security wing—”

  “How did Derace end up there in the first place?”

  “He overdosed in the summer of 1979. And surprise, surprise, the crime wave ended. His mom begged DeMeo to put him somewhere safe, not turn him over to a state-run hospital. I guessed it worked, because he had his own bed over at the loony bin.”

  “So he was at the Adams Institute when my dad was killed.”

  “Yeah. Only he wasn’t. I think he started going for walks outside his body full-time, since his own body was more or less out of the picture. Like me.”