Rage's Echo

by J. S. Bailey

  He continued down the path. “Prove? Nothing. They’re only memories. That’s all I have and all I am.”

  She caught up to him. “You said that before.”

  “Yes. Our whole lives consist of memories, some good, some bad. Mostly bad.”

  She nodded. “Sounds like my life.”

  “Humor me.”

  “You want me to give you my life story?”

  “It’s better than listening to mine.”

  “Geez.” Where would she even begin? “I guess you could say I’ve always been a little lonely,” she said, stating the first thing that came to mind, lame as it may have sounded.

  “So we have something in common.”

  “Maybe. Did your parents ignore you like you were a Jehovah’s Witness loitering on the porch with a briefcase full of Watchtower magazines?”

  “Quite the opposite. They found the need to pry into my business at every available opportunity.”

  “Then maybe we don’t have much in common at all. My mom and dad never paid much attention to me or my sister. Work was their first love. Still is.”

  “You have friends to keep you company.”

  She shrugged. “Not the typical kind. I grew up playing with Rachel and Sidney, so when I started school I just didn’t know how to connect with kids my age. I’d usually sit in the back of the classroom daydreaming or reading while other kids did their own stuff. I got picked on a little, but mostly I just ignored that. Except for the one time in the first grade when I finally got tired of Yesenia Solorzano stealing my crayons and I punched her in the stomach.”

  “What about your friend Wayne?”

  She smiled at the sound of his name. “Wayne’s been a sweetie since I met him in ninety-four. He’s way older than me, though. He and Sidney are actually cousins. Second cousins, I think. I lived next door to them growing up.”

  “They lived in the same house?”

  “Yeah. Wayne got taken away from his family because they treated him like crap, so Sidney’s parents took him in.”

  “Do you like him?”

  Her face heated up. “I said he’s my friend.”

  “But you’d like him to be more than a friend.”

  “Maybe.”

  He laughed. “Maybe? You should have seen your face when I brought him up.”

  They passed the turnoff for a secondary trail that looped through the trees for a mile. If Jessica’s legs hadn’t been hurting, she’d have taken that path in a heartbeat, but instead she kept to the main trail. She didn’t want to make herself hurt worse than she already did.

  “So what’s your story?” she asked. “Where are you from?”

  “Originally? Cleveland. I came to Cincinnati for college and settled in Alexandria, Kentucky, when I graduated. Nothing too exciting. I was a high school English teacher. My parents were ashamed—especially my father, who had his own law firm. They thought I wouldn’t be able to get by on such a meager salary, but that ended up being the least of my worries.”

  “Being poor sounds like a pretty big worry to me.”

  “Death tends to change one’s perspective on things.”

  Up until now it had been easy to pretend that Jerry was some ordinary person strolling around with her, but now the conversation was getting awkward. “I don’t doubt that,” she said, using an approaching sign covered in facts about the Pileated Woodpecker as an excuse to look away from him.

  “It changes everything. We work our whole lives trying to get rich so we can impress the world with our fancy houses and cars, but in the end it doesn’t matter how much money we make. What matters most are the choices we make, and unfortunately I made some very bad choices. Do you realize,” he continued, his eyes growing livid, “that at any moment Christ might come descending from the clouds, and all souls on earth living and dead will be judged before him? That I have nothing good to say about myself except that I read my Bible from cover to cover half a dozen times and sat in the front pew in church on Sundays? Look where it got me!”

  She was about to give him some lame reassurance about him not needing to worry about Judgment Day, but his face contorted as if he were in agony, and he seemed to be speaking to a third person whom she couldn’t see. “No, I’m not sorry…it’s all God’s fault. He should have seen it coming! If he didn’t, how can he be God? How can he be anything?”

  “Jerry? You okay?”

  Though he was still visible as he walked beside her, his mind seemed to have retreated to a place that, like the entity he was conversing with, she could not see. “Can a just God make us suffer so much? He hurts us because he lets others hurt us. If he cared, he’d stop them! I want to hurt them…” He broke off, stopped walking, and looked around wildly. “Jessica? Where did you go?”

  She was almost too unnerved to speak. She realized she’d been holding her breath. “I’m right here.”

  “Where?” He was looking at the air a foot to the left of her head.

  “Here.”

  He shuddered then turned a few degrees to Jessica’s right.

  “Oh.” They locked gazes, and his pale face was awash with relief. “For a minute I thought you’d left me. Please don’t ever do that.”

  She wasn’t about to make any promises of that nature. “What was all that stuff you just said?”

  “What stuff?”

  Either he was an excellent liar, or he truly didn’t have a clue what he’d just been saying. “I think we should hurry up and get back,” she said.

  He made no reply. They completed the circular trail in silence. By the time they made it back to the car, the fisherman had left.

  “Are we going home?” Jerry asked.

  “Not yet.” She started the engine. Somehow the thought of lounging around the house for the remainder of the day with only him for company didn’t seem all that appealing—not if he was just going to sit and watch her every movement like a disembodied Peeping Tom. “Got to get some groceries first.”

  “Must be nice.”

  “If it bothers you, you don’t have to go in with me.”

  “I’ll stay in here, then.”

  She drove back into the main part of town. Traffic had picked up a little, and the police chief—Fred Hargis—was sitting in his cruiser at the edge of the drug store lot aiming a radar gun at the passersby. She slowed the car just in case her speedometer was off. “Jerry?”

  “Hmm?”

  “How did you die? If you don’t mind my asking, that is.”

  “Do you really want to know?”

  “If I didn’t want to, I wouldn’t have asked.”

  “Maybe you’re better off not knowing.”

  Why wouldn’t he just get to the point? “It’s not going to hurt me.”

  In her peripheral vision, she could see him smirking at her.

  “Fine. You want to know that badly? I was murdered.”

  “What?”

  “I was murdered,” he repeated in the offhand manner of one commenting on the weather. “Years ago. Nobody ever found where they buried me.”

  “Dear God.” Unwanted tears blurred her vision. “I had no idea.”

  “Why should you have? You don’t know anything about me.”

  “I don’t know, I just didn’t think…” She swallowed. Her mind began to fill with countless questions that she probably had no business asking. She chose what seemed like the safest one. “Why did they do it?”

  He shrugged. “Some people just do that kind of thing.”

  She started to ask him whether or not the perpetrator had been caught, but stopped herself. He wouldn’t have any way of knowing that if he’d spent his entire afterlife hanging out at Ye Olde Methodist Church. “I’m sorry,” she said. “If there’s anything I can do to help…”

  “Just don’t leave me,” he said as she pulled into the Eleanor Market parking lot, which was surprisingly full for it being so early in the day. “I don’t think I can handle being alone ever again.”

  She hurried thr
ough the crowded grocery store aisles as quickly as she could, not wanting to leave Jerry by himself for too long so he wouldn’t think she’d ditched him.

  She had to feel sorry for the man. Dying alone at the hands of a killer had to be one of the worst ways to go. At least Marjorie Miller had been surrounded by a plethora of loved ones when she finally passed. Her husband had even been holding her hand. Jessica’s chest grew tighter at the memory. Sweet, laughing Marjorie reduced to a bald skeleton covered in sallow skin from the failed chemotherapy treatments. Yet as the woman died, a faint smile stretched across her face. She was going home.

  As Jessica selected her favorite brand of burritos and tossed the package into the cart, she brooded about Jerry’s predicament.

  Did he remain on earth as a result of his own choosing, or was the situation entirely beyond his control? Maybe shame kept him here. Like, Hi, God, I know you’ve forgiven me for my sins, but I just feel awful for being a sinner. I’ll just stay in this lousy graveyard until kingdom come so I won’t have to look you in the eye. Made sense. A good long talk with Jerry might convince him to pack his bags and move on. He’d certainly be happier in heaven than he was here.

  She fully intended to begin that conversation the moment she returned to the car with her groceries and much-lighter wallet, but she was out of luck. Either Jerry had powered down again or he had abandoned ship, and quite frankly she didn’t want to strike up a conversation with the empty passenger seat in the event that he really had left.

  JESSICA SAT at the kitchen table with her journal and a ballpoint pen to begin recording all she could remember about the night before.

  10/19/2010. Graveyard at United Methodist Church south of Iron Springs, Kentucky. I ran into some kind of aura in the parking lot two different times. The second time I had a vision of angry people shouting in Spanish, but I can’t remember what they said. Could be a replaying of events that happened there. Note: do research about area. See what kind of history the place has.

  Also encountered spirit in graveyard. He appears as a full-body apparition, says his name is Jerry Madison, early to mid-thirties in age. At one point it appeared there were strangulation marks on his neck, but then they went away.

  10/20/2010. Jerry showed up in the kitchen this morning. All my footage from last night got wiped from my equipment, has to be him who did it. I guess he doesn’t want anyone to know what went on between us. We went for a walk at Smithfield Park. Jerry got depressed at the sight of the playground. He got all goofy-acting out on the trail and thought I’d left him even though I was standing right there. He says he’ll go to hell if he moves on from here. Probably just being hard on himself.

  Oh, and one more thing: apparently someone murdered him.

  She lifted the pen from the page and examined what she had written. If anyone were to come across her journal, they would think she had become delusional. Good for them.

  Jerry says that his life consists mostly of bad memories, so he and I have something in common. Maybe that’s why he’s feeling a connection with me and doesn’t want to go away—though I have no clue where he is right now. He could be standing over my shoulder invisible and I’d never know.

  She would have to ask him about his childhood, though what he’d said made her think that his parents and her own were nothing alike. His parents hadn’t ignored him. Must have been nice to be noticed. Well, Jessica did have to give her father some credit. He did sometimes read her and Rachel stories before bed even though he usually fell asleep before they did. And he’d taught the two of them to drive. That had been cool. He’d let Jessica drive all the way to Gatlinburg and back one day just to get in the driving hours she needed. She’d bought a souvenir t-shirt at a gift shop, they’d eaten lunch, taken a quick ride up the Space Needle, and went home. It had been a great bonding experience, but Stephen Roman-Dell had barely spoken a word that didn’t have to do with work. Heck, he’d barely spoken a word, period. He was a stranger. Just like her mother.

  The only things she really knew about her parents were that they had married each other for God knew what reason and eventually produced her and Rachel as proof that they at least shared the same bed. They had never even told Jessica how they’d met each other. Not that she particularly cared.

  She got up from the table and stretched. The brief stroll in the woods hadn’t helped the pain go away. If anything, the movement of walking had made the pain worse.

  The bottle of Tylenol was still in her purse. She took two more pills and prayed for them to work this time.

  And now, what to do with the rest of the day? Continuing her job search by car was out of the question since she had about three gallons of gas left in the tank. She’d already hit up all the businesses in Eleanor and even a couple way down the road in Moscow. Beechmont and Kellogg Avenue weren’t too far away, but she didn’t want to risk running out of gas while stopped at a light somewhere.

  Working out of town might not be that fun anyway. Once a river rat, always a river rat, as the jerks in high school always said. She’d be a fish out of water if she were to go anywhere else.

  She still had to do something to keep busy. It wasn’t time for lunch yet, and since her ghost-hunting equipment was currently as blank as a new sheet of paper, she couldn’t even go over the graveyard footage to see if she’d caught Jerry on film.

  She could do a little cleaning to prove she was a useful addition to the household.

  She went into the bathroom. The tub looked a little dingy, and some specks of toothpaste dotted the mirror on the medicine cabinet. Yes, she could do some work in here. She wouldn’t even tell anyone she’d cleaned, just to see if they’d notice.

  Wayne kept used plastic grocery bags under the kitchen sink. She grabbed one of those in addition to the roll of paper towels sitting on top of the refrigerator and carried both to the bathroom.

  An assortment of cleaners huddled in the cabinet beneath the bathroom sink. Windex and an off-brand soap scum remover would do nicely.

  She set to work wiping off the mirror and starting singing “Dream On” in her best Steven Tyler voice. The song had been stuck in her head all morning. “Every time I look in the mirror, all these lines on my face gettin’ clearer…”

  She tossed the towel into the plastic bag and moved on to the tub. She sprayed the tub surround with the other cleaner. “The past is gone…”

  The words died in her throat. Sensing that she was no longer alone, she turned around and saw only the bathroom door, which stood ajar. Hadn’t it been open more than that before? A draft might have pulled it part of the way shut.

  That, or Jerry did it.

  Globs of foam oozed down the tub walls while she waited for the man to show himself. She waited. And waited. The smell of cleaner made her head feel funny.

  The bathroom seemed to be staring back at her. More like glaring. Somebody was angry.

  “Uh, Jerry?”

  Seconds ticked by. The sensation of being watched did not abate.

  She returned her attention to the tub and wiped off the cleaner as best she could. “It went by like dusk to dawn…”

  Anger permeated the air like smog in an urban metropolis. Suddenly it seemed a very good idea to stop singing.

  When she did, the anger lessened but did not dissipate. Perhaps it was all in her head and she was only being paranoid—which, of course, was silly. She was in no danger here. If Jerry had intended to harm her, he’d have done so already.

  Something in the air seemed to shift. Now it felt like an unseen entity was examining her under a metaphorical microscope. Calculating.

  “Look,” she said when she finished cleaning the toilet, “if that’s you in here, why don’t you just say so instead of doing this creepy invisible crap?”

  A dark haze started to materialize by the sink then faded away again. Her pulse quickened. “Are you going to say anything?”

  She thought she heard a whisper. Nothing to say.

  “Fine, then,” she
said. “I don’t have anything to say, either.”

  SINCE SIDNEY spent every Wednesday evening sitting in English class over at the community college, Jessica and Wayne dined alone, which was fine with her. They didn’t often get to spend time together like this, and after the events of the morning and previous day, it felt good to hang out with someone who still breathed.

  She’d only eaten half her spaghetti before growing too full to finish it. She pushed her plate back and leaned her head on one hand, watching Wayne twirl his own spaghetti around a fork. His eyelids drooped as if he were about to doze off sitting up.

  “So how was the graveyard last night?” he asked. He popped the spaghetti into his mouth and chewed. “See any hamsters?”

  She hadn’t been looking forward to bringing the matter up. If Sidney thought she was crazy, there was no telling what Wayne would think. “It was creepier than I expected it to be,” she admitted. “What would you think if I told you I met a spirit out there?”

  Wayne nearly choked on a bit of food. If he’d been tired before, he wasn’t now. “Met? As in, you introduced yourselves and carried on a conversation?”

  Jessica nodded. “Pretty much.”

  “I would have a hard time believing it.”

  “But you don’t think it would be impossible.”

  His brown eyes scrutinized her as if he were trying to determine whether or not she had finally lost it.

  Before he could get another word in, she told him about her encounters with Jerry, ending with how they had gone for a walk together. She left out the part about Jerry’s supposed murder in case the spirit was listening in. He might not want anyone else to know such a personal detail about himself, especially since he’d been reluctant enough to tell her.

  Wayne’s face grew paler while she spoke, though the look in his eyes told her that he still wasn’t completely convinced. “Do you think he’s still here?”