On the Edge of Twilight: 22 Tales to Follow You Home

by Gregory Miller

  “Who can say? Children do things without thinking. They have flashes of meanness, same as adults. We’d always been good friends. For that matter, why did I wish her dead? Same reason, I guess.”

  “And all these years…” Tara trailed off.

  Jen took up the line. “I’ve kind of blamed myself. At first, consciously. Then, as the years passed and I came to recognize how unlikely it all was, I knew on a rational level that I wasn’t to blame, but I still felt guilty. Because deep down, I still believed I’d caused it to happen. Knowing and feeling are two different things, you see.”

  Gloria exhaled audibly. “Wow. What a story! No wonder. It must have been very hard, living with that. So no more parties, no more celebrations.”

  “Not since I was seven. Not a single one.” Jen’s lower lip quivered almost imperceptibly, then stilled. “But you know, I’m glad you brought it up, I really am.”

  Gloria arched her eyebrows. “Really?”

  “Yes. I think talking about it made me realize how silly it is. And it would be a good, healing experience, to have a birthday party again… to help me put it behind me once and for all. Don’t you think?”

  “Oh, absolutely!” said Tara. “Sure it would!”

  “Yes,” agreed Gloria more quietly. “Yes, I agree.”

  “I can plan the whole thing,” said Tara. “I’ll get the cake, send out invitations. We can make it as large or small a party as you’d like! And I’ll figure out who can bring what, and we’ll throw you a ‘Welcome back to Birthday Parties’ birthday party. Oh, it’ll be great!”

  “That’s so sweet of you,” Jen said. “It really will help me put all this behind me. Of course,” she added, almost as an afterthought, “it’s hard to destroy every doubt. I think there will probably always be some small part of me that will wonder if I really had something to do with… no, but enough of that!” She sipped her wine and swallowed, enjoying the dry taste that somehow complimented the great spray of autumn colors that surged around them.

  “What should I bring?” Gloria said. She didn’t look at Jen as she spoke.

  Tara opened her mouth to say something, but Jen beat her to it. “You’ve already done so much, Gloria. You made this possible by talking about it, even when you knew I didn’t want you to. But it was for the best, and I thank you for that.”

  She pursed her lips, thinking.

  “The candles,” she said at last, snapping her fingers. “Gloria, you just bring the candles. That’ll be plenty.”

  “Yes! A cake has to have candles,” said Tara brightly.

  Gloria fixed her gaze on Jen, who met it without blinking. “That… that will be fine,” she murmured.

  “Great! And I know just what to wish for,” Jen said, taking another sip of wine before reaching out and patting Gloria’s cold, cold hand.

  To Be

  His name was Allan Eden, and he moved about in darkness absolute except for the stars.

  As far as he could tell, the land before him had once supported his home. It was desolate now; charred, hard earth indistinguishable from the rest of the wasteland that extended for miles in every direction. He could see little in the blackness save the glint of mica chips and the outline of rough-hewn rock, but thought nothing of waiting the long hours until daybreak. He had plenty of time.

  Allen Eden was lonely. He was also dead. Yet the loneliness was not that which most of the dead-and-left had felt since humanity’s first tentative steps in the metaphorical garden that was his namesake. It was a loneliness the depth and breadth of which few had ever experienced, and none with any sense would wish to.

  For the multitude, death was not so bad. Many enjoyed it, Eden thought with bitterness. But he had died under violent circumstances, and although the theories of the living rarely came close to approaching the true nature of life after death, some few individuals had embraced one during his lifetime that had turned out to be disconcertingly true: those who died unhappily, and under certain traumatic conditions, were bound indefinitely to the mortal plane: ghosts. And ghosts, in Eden’s experience, were all unhappy. Some people who truly loved life remained partially behind after their body’s demise to cherish the world a short time longer before moving on, but they weren’t true ghosts: a healthy portion of their being had already achieved transcendence, and only a vague essence remained for a time before joining it. True ghosts, the “lifers” as one of his incorporeal companions once ironically termed it, were in the majority, and they all suffered.

  To Eden, it seemed the time immediately following death was cheerless for ghosts, either because of the paths their lives had taken, or because of the way those paths had ended: a secret shame, a raging regret, murder, a car accident, drowning; any facet of life or death that made moving on seem more impossible than the suffering which thrust them into ghosthood to begin with. The instinctual need to remain, to make right, was very difficult for the Afterworld to reconcile; thus, it often did not. If strong enough, need could overwhelm the natural beck and call of higher dimensions, and Eden’s need was very great.

  Looking up at the bright, distant light of the stars and planets, he sighed, and the sigh was such that a thin wind sprang up in a cyclonic eddy before him and moved off down the barren plain. Unhappiness was not stationary: the range of its levels was great, and one manifestation could quickly take the place of another, or, even worse, join with it as two strong brothers often join up against a less fortunate only child.

  He thought of the second manifestation of his sadness: how, gradually, once the sting of his own murder had worn off, the uneasy, hollow desire for revenge began to gnaw at his thoughts. Roughly two years after his death, Eden had visited his knife-handy wife for the first time since his funeral. Preparing for bed, Sarah had opened the bedroom closet to grab a bathrobe, and shaken hands with his cold, clammy hand instead. Her scream was music to his ears, and for the next fifty-seven years Eden enjoyed the various ranges Sarah’s worn vocal chords could achieve when frightened. When she finally expired at the respectable age of ninety-three, having outlived the integrity of most of her vital organs by a number of years, his former wife had been near-catatonic for over a decade and raving mad for another before that, locked away in an asylum on the outskirts of Baltimore.

  Yet following the conclusion of his vigorously-undertaken revenge, loneliness set in, as it does for all who don’t belong where they are. Figuring eternity was a long time to deal with depression without Prozac, therapy, or even the option of suicide, Eden began devising ways to cheer himself.

  * * *

  Eden struck a hard, pocked deposit that lay near the tips of his phantasmic tendrils. It clattered unevenly down the barren plain, kicking up sharp, orange sparks. He waited while the sound faded, the sparks went out, and the rock fell still again. He had been around so long, learned so much, that the ability to move physical objects was ingrained, like breathing had once been.

  He thought again of Sarah, and how long it had been since their last post-death encounter. She had come to him just a few weeks after losing grip of her body, sane again and mad as hell. If looks could kill! Eden had never witnessed such concentrated vitriol. He attempted to flee but could think of no place to hide from another free-ranging ghost like himself. Sarah and her envenomed spirit-tongue followed him across the continental United States, over the Atlantic, and eventually caught up with him among the ancient-timbered buildings of London, in the famous Drury Lane Theatre, among the spirits of antiquity and during a somewhat under-produced production of All’s Well That Ends Well. Then, as he stood before her blistering, withering onslaught of words, he realized something: it was good having her around again.

  Upon seeing that her presence brought Eden happiness, however, Sarah quickly calmed and became one of the few purgatorial spirits to ascend to the Great Beyond, delayed peace serving as the key to
her transcendence. In leaving him, she exacted the only form of retribution that could actually cause Eden pain. The loneliness began to bite harder.

  Other spirits were difficult to talk to. The cynical and resentful generally tire of the happy and content, so Eden found the short-term “benevolent” presences not only boring, but often downright annoying. They kept trying to convince him to lighten up, sometimes quite eloquently, but simply didn’t understand the nature of his situation. As for the other “lifers,” for the most part all they did was complain, gossip, and sulk. He avoided almost all of them, save for a brief conversation now and again, and they him.

  That left Eden with the living to toy around with. For years innumerable he haunted the darker avenues of the world, inhabiting everything from the undersides of Eastern-European stone bridges and the attics of campus dormitories in the American Mid-West, to cursed glades in the African wild and various unlucky passes in the Himalayas. For a time, he enjoyed the startled, fearful, and sometimes worshipful reactions that his moans, brief appearances, or icy touches invoked. But one day, after inadvertently causing the infant son of a young Queensland woman to burst into tears, the mother, bath-robed, face-creamed, and already well aware of his hauntings, actually screamed at him. Spinning around the room in circles, unable to see him yet obviously feeling his presence, she shrieked, “Jealous! Pathetic! That’s what you are. Leave us alone and take it somewhere else!” Then, before leaving the room to calm the baby in the kitchen, she slowly, deliberately, gave him the finger.

  Eden never bothered the living on purpose again. He was too offended.

  He took, instead, to learning about the universe. For this task, Time, at least momentarily, was on his side. He read everything of scientific value that interested him. He visited museums, watched operations, looked over the shoulders of geniuses at work. He conducted as much field research as he could manage. He learned meditation and studied all the major philosophies. He immersed himself in theology (having an interesting personal perspective to aid him), numerology, and, for the hell of it, philology. His memory, improved by immateriality, acted as an information dump of almost limitless proportions. It took millennia, but by the time his lust for information was sated, Eden had proven the existence of no less than 26 dimensions; come to understand how a universe could exist without a beginning and without an end; expanded upon the theories of Einstein, Hawking, and two dozen others until discovering their ultimate cruxes; determined the logical meaning of life; discovered the logical meaning of death; debunked the concept of finity; and cured the common cold (imparting the cure to the living through automatic writing with a primary school mistress in Iceland).

  Then, despite his labors toward enlightenment, a familiar darkness once again began to steal into Eden’s sight, and this time it seemed to whisper, faintly, of an even greater darkness yet to come. Time, so integral to his studies, slowly, once again, became his curse.

  * * *

  All those experiences, all those memories, were from years long ago, when the concept of years was still embraced by others besides himself. Now Eden, his presence permeating the site of his old home and ancient life, tried hard not to think about time. He felt the rare, yet growing fear of what a close review of his post-body existence would do to him. He knew his sanity, or at least its spiritual equivalent, had been growing increasingly fragile for ages, so he tried to avoid unnecessary provocations that might accelerate its decline.

  Thinking too much about the present didn’t help, either. Eden did not wish to consider how long it had been since he had seen a living man or woman. The last rocket had left for a better world eons ago, leaving him behind, trapped by the rules of the afterlife to haunt the globe the way some unlucky souls were confined to the site of a former building, lake, or forest. The strange animals that evolved as the sun aged and grew (vast beasts with skins of radiation-proof bone, tiny mammalian imps that chattered on the shores of the Great Sea) only perpetuated his loneliness. Their appearance, like the changes in the planet’s geography, evoked within him a penetrating, profound sense of melancholy. Even most of the ghosts were now of species he didn’t know or understand.

  The weather, too, had shifted with the ages. Eden missed snow, and in the more recent past had often ascended the diminishing white-capped mountains or floated above the poles to relieve the tedium of hot weather. He missed the polarities of seasons. His favorite, autumn, was difficult to forget, despite the evolution or extinction of the trees that had once characterized it with falling leaves and colored brilliance, and despite that he had felt neither hot nor cold, wet nor dry, in a span of time that had seen half a dozen geologic ages come and go. He remembered pumpkins. Jack o’ Lanterns. The smell of burning leaves and the decay of wet grass. The sound of costumed children giggling at doors. Not even photographs remained, but he remembered.

  And last but not least, a final, bitter pill: the ghosts of his generation were beginning to lose their holds on reality.

  Eden truly missed one of them, an old pirate named Charles Weary. Bound to the perimeter of the London tavern where he had tasted poison in the early sixteenth century, Weary had for a long while been something close to a friend. He had been a bitter soul but not as gloomy as the rest: a combination which attracted Eden. In fact, Weary hadn’t even been above cracking a joke, although the old favorites had worn a bit thin after a few thousand years. Yet slowly, almost unnoticeably, his behavior had changed. On one memorable occasion Weary had called him “Father,” and carried on an entire (one-sided) conversation with “Father” until Eden, dismayed, made some kind of excuse and fled across the world for a few centuries. On a much later encounter, when the progression had grown more pronounced, Charles had taken Eden by his vaporous shoulders, looked him in the eye, and asked, almost pleading, “Is this Heaven? Is this Heaven?”

  Immortality was cruel; immortality with its own brand of spiritual Alzheimer’s doubly so.

  Best not to think of it, he reminded himself.

  Eden blew upon the surface of the world with cold breath. Dust and sand rose, spiraled, and returned to earth with a whisper of contact. His home had been a simple, middle-class ranch house of red brick and white vinyl siding. The kitchen, the bedrooms, the living room, the dining area: all stages for fleeting emotions, some wonderful, others certainly not. Yet they had been his stages, places of ultimate shelter. Now, the land had risen six thousand feet, continents had shifted, everything had changed since it had belonged to him—and ultimately these results of time now brought to his attention, as they often had before, the inarguable fact that the small square of earth hadn’t actually been his at all. He’d borrowed it long ago, and it had moved on.

  Eden especially missed his tiny study, filled with the photographs of four generations, journals, prints, and books that had all served to mute and relieve the less agreeable aspects of his nature: impatience, anger, frustration, stubbornness.

  His struggle to understand Sarah’s ultimate acts of rejection, first adultery and then murder, had ended long ago. Which of his characteristics, if any, had driven her to such lengths? How much had he been to blame for her infidelity? For her hatred? How much had been her fault, how much his? It no longer mattered. His personal discoveries had taught him that the past, unlike almost everything else, could not be changed and was beyond manipulation.

  As the wind blew cold over the rocky plain, Eden’s thoughts turned, unexpectedly, to Sarah’s garden. He had liked working it beside her during the first years of their marriage. Tomatoes, squash, lettuce, beans; all had grown ripe and strong under their careful tending. He missed the floppy straw hat Sarah had always worn when picking cherry tomatoes. He missed the tulip pattern on her garden gloves. Pulling the wisp of his form closer together against a chill he could not feel, Eden realized he even missed the ache of poison ivy blisters, always the only penalty for sharing such work with her.

>   The ink of night was lifting. Dawn was near, the once-pitch sky now a lightening ochre. Soon the red sun would rise, burning away the clouds to provide him an unobstructed view of its mighty, bloated majesty and the barren land beneath. The mold spoors that spread during the night withered, hissing, to die black and burnt, the meager remains leaving their cannibalistic descendants a form of shelter and sustenance in which to grow and reproduce when night came again.

  “A new day,” he muttered, thinking of poison ivy blisters, the lovely feel of the hurt and itch, and Sarah’s careful administration of calamine lotion. “A new day.”

  Suddenly he paused, mind racing, scared. Poison ivy. Sarah’s garden. Her hat. Sarah’s gloves. Sarah’s…

  Sarah’s face.

  He couldn’t remember it.

  He stood motionless for a long time, the sun rising higher and higher in the white sky until it burned down directly overhead, scalding the land beneath him. Still he thought. Still no face came to him.

  Finally, Eden looked at the sky, the ground, the horizon. Move on, he told himself. Move on and think later. To the south waited the tropics, lush jungles and warm rivers mocking paradise with visceral, dangerous life. To the north, desolation. East? The salt flats. West, the mountain ranges. And always waiting somewhere ahead and beyond, in every direction, was the sea.

  Eden began to spin, fast, fast, faster, until he was oblivious to direction, the world a blur around him. When he stopped, he stopped suddenly, randomly. Everything was very quiet. Nothing living cried and there was no longer any wind. If he could have done so, he would have closed his eyes. If he could have done so, he would have slept. Instead, he began to move, not caring what lay ahead, the purpose of his thought like a vast, dark garden bearing fruit he knew, eventually, would have to be consumed.