The Reign of the Departed

by Greg Keyes

  “No,” she said. “Do you?”

  Errol dropped down and pumped at the man’s chest. Water spewed from his mouth. He bent to blow in air, and realized he couldn’t.

  “You’re gonna have to do this,” he told Aster.

  “Oh, right. Walk me through it.”

  Errol kept one eye firmly fastened on Veronica, who slid into a lawn chair and watched them with obvious amusement.

  “Veronica,” Errol said, “get dressed.”

  “Fine,” Veronica said, and reached for her clothes.

  The man suddenly sucked in a breath on his own.

  “Oh, foo,” Veronica said.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” Errol said.

  “Yes, let’s,” Aster replied.

  They left the man, gasping and still unconscious.

  What the hell was all that about?” Errol demanded, once they had Veronica dressed again and in the car.

  “I was looking for my folks,” she said. “They used to live around here.”

  “Yes, but how do you go from that to drowning some guy in his swimming pool?”

  “I got bored, and I guess a little frustrated.”

  “That doesn’t explain anything.”

  “It’s a habit,” Veronica said. “Don’t you have habits?”

  “I chew my nails!” he said. “That’s a habit. I don’t kill people.”

  “Admitted,” Veronica said, “it may very well be a bad habit. But that guy had terrible things on his mind.”

  “You can read minds?”

  “When I’m kissing, yes. So, like when you were kissing me it was all ‘I looove this girl, I can see into her soul, I want to marry her—’”

  “Because of a spell!” Errol objected.

  “Maybe,” she said. “But my point is, you were all sweet. That guy—that’s not the sort of things he was thinking. What he was thinking was really nasty, and maybe had me dead at the end, and there wasn’t anything about love in it.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “But wait a minute,” Errol said. “Let’s say he was a bad guy. You were going to kill me, even though I wasn’t planning to hurt you.”

  “Sure.”

  “So what does it matter what he was thinking?” “Because if I killed you, I might feel a little sad about it. But not that guy.”

  “Veronica,” Aster interrupted, in a cold, flat voice. “Listen to me. You can’t run away again. You have to help me.”

  “I surely don’t see why.”

  “Every time you go out, there’s a chance you’ll slip back into an in-between place, and you’ll be just like you were before, only this time no one will come for you, because no one will know where you are. And even if you avoid that—for a while—eventually you’re going to be caught by the police, either for this attempted murder or whatever you do next. Once they figure out your heart isn’t beating and yet you continue with the flirting, I shudder to think what will happen to you. Probably you’ll be dissected, or something. Stay with me—help me—and if we succeed, you get your life back. A real life, the one you didn’t get to have. You can eat chocolate, get married, have kids, whatever you want. I’ll help you find your parents, if that’s what you want. But no more running away. You do what I say.”

  Veronica was quiet for a moment.

  “But if I go with you,” she said, “into that place. I might get caught there, too?”

  “You won’t because you’ll have us,” Aster said. “Errol and me.”

  “Hey, speak for yourself,” Errol muttered.

  “You’ll have both of us,” Aster said, shooting Errol a stern look. “We’ll have your back. But you have to have ours.”

  Veronica looked out the window.

  “Everything is so different,” she murmured. Errol realized suddenly that she had tears on her cheeks.

  “Don’t cry,” he blurted. “It’s like Aster said. We’ll watch out for you.”

  “It’s okay,” Veronica said, patting his arm. “I didn’t know I could cry. Now I do.” She straightened up. “Let’s go find a giant.”

  “Hang on,” Errol said.

  “What now?” Aster sighed.

  Something had been building in Errol, something bright in the pit of where-his-stomach-ought-to-be, but only now did the light reach his head.

  He paused, remembering the terrible woman in the forest. The fear that Aster might send him back there knotted in him.

  “If we’re really about to wander off into Fairyland or whatever I . . . I want to see me. My body. In the coma.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Aster snapped. “Are you flat-out jackass kidding me? Because no.”

  “You’re in a coma?” Veronica asked.

  “So I’m told.”

  “And it is a fact,” Aster insisted.

  “But don’t you see?” Veronica said. “I needed my answers—Errol needs his.”

  “What answers?” Aster asked. “There’s a subdivision where your house used to be? I could have told you that.”

  “It’s not the same as knowing,” Veronica said. “All that talk about having each other’s backs—let’s see it then. I want to see you have Errol’s back.”

  “Look,” Aster said. “You just nearly killed a guy. My father turned Ms. Fincher and Mr. Watkins into poofs of smoke, and he’s getting more out-of-control as we speak. Now you want to go down to the hospital? What next, go downtown and start shooting out the blue lights on police cars?”

  “You made Ms. Fincher’s car invisible,” Errol said. “Can’t you do the same for me?”

  “No,” Aster replied. “That spell only works on immobile objects. Once in motion, the illusion breaks.”

  “Oh, surely that’s no problem for someone as talented as yourself,” Veronica said, sweetly.

  “In time I might be able to figure out how to do it,” Aster said. “But that’s time I don’t have.”

  “Well,” Veronica said, folding her arms, “I’ve changed my mind. I’m not helping you find any giant until you help Errol.”

  Aster stamped on the brake, and the car came to abrupt halt. Veronica yelped and bumped into the back of Errol’s seat.

  Aster sat there for a moment, glaring, it seemed, at the car horn.

  “Okay,” she finally said, softly. “Errol, reach up behind your right ear. You’ll find a little stud.”

  He reached back.

  “Got it,” he said.

  “Push it in, then toward the back of your head.”

  He did as she said and then was suddenly dizzy. His body felt weird, far away. He moved his arm, and felt it move, and yet he could see that it hadn’t moved.

  “Push forward,” Aster said.

  Again, he felt his hands come up, but his vision said they weren’t moving. He felt a flat, invisible surface, and pushed. It clicked and opened, and he had a brief instant of terrifying blindness.

  “Wow,” Veronica said. “How weird.”

  He was looking Veronica level in the face, but she was huge. So was the car. Everything had grown about fifty times bigger except for him.

  But at second glance he got it.

  He was standing inside the head of his puppet body; the face had opened when he pushed it out. He was now in another body, much smaller—obviously, since it fit into the head of the big one.

  And this little body seemed to be carved almost entirely of something white, like bone.

  “You weren’t going to mention this?” he asked, after a few long moments of dumb silence.

  “When it became necessary,” Aster replied. “Which I suppose is now.”

  Her hand appeared, enormous. Reaching for him.

  “Hey!” he shouted.

  “Calm down,” she said, “I’m just putting you in my backpack.”

  SEVEN

  BED OR COFFIN

  That’s not me,” Errol said, when Aster finally let him peek from the backpack.

  “Just who do you think it is, then?”
Aster whispered back.

  Errol would have frowned if he had had eyebrows.

  Even in a mirror, Errol had never thought his face looked quite right—not like it looked in his head, anyway, when he pictured it. The pallid features nestled on the white hospital pillow seemed to have even less in common with him. But now, studying it in mute horror, he recognized the scar over his left eye, and the small birthmark below his right ear. The mouth was covered by a respirator.

  “Huh,” he said, because he didn’t want to say anything else, or let the strange and terrible sadness welling up in him show itself to the others. “Well, okay.”

  He looked around the otherwise empty room. When imagining this visit, he’d pictured his mother, sitting by the bedside, tears in her eyes, asking him to come back to her. And maybe some of his friends, too, Darren or Tommy at least. And Lisa, full of remorse for breaking up with him. But not only was no one here, there wasn’t much sign that anyone ever had been. No cot, no blankets or pillows on the chairs, no paperbacks.

  “You’re kind of cute, Errol,” Veronica said. “Not a movie star or anything, but not too bad.”

  She cocked her head.

  “You look just like you’re sleeping.”

  Errol remembered that’s what someone had said about Granny, too, when she was in her coffin at the church. He hadn’t thought she looked like she was sleeping at all.

  “Except, you know, for that thing on your face.”

  “Visitors,” someone said. He caught a quick glimpse of Dr. Sanders with his long jaw and balding head before Aster shoved him quickly back down in her backpack.

  “Ah, Aster. Back again.”

  “Uh—yes. We checked in at the desk.”

  “I know. I was on the floor and thought I would come over and say hello. I don’t think I’ve met you, Miss.”

  “I’m Veronica,” she said.

  “You look awfully familiar,” he said. “What’s the last name?”

  “McCartney,” Veronica lied. “Like the Beatle.”

  “Do I know your folks?”

  “I don’t think so, sir,” she replied. “How is dear Errol?”

  “Well, there’s no change, I’m afraid,” he said.

  “Is there any hope for him?”

  “There’s always hope,” Dr. Sanders said. “For all of our technology and advances in medicine, we still can’t really say what makes a person who they are. And the brain—well, it’s more resilient than most people think. I had a patient with a bullet hole all the way through his head, and in the end he was pretty much the same after the incident as he was before.”

  “So he was retarded before?” Veronica asked.

  Dr. Sanders lifted a greying eyebrow.

  “Now, young lady, that’s not a nice thing to say,” he said.

  “I’m sorry, doctor,” she said. “I didn’t know that.”

  Errol felt like screaming. Why did Veronica keep calling attention to herself?

  The Doctor cleared his throat, the way he did right before telling you that you had to have a shot.

  “I’m glad to see you girls here,” he said. “He needs visitors. Aster, I heard you talking to him last time you were here. I encourage that, too. Keeping him connected here is the most important thing; until he wakes up, there’s nothing else we can do.”

  “What if he never wakes up?” Veronica asked.

  “Well . . .” Dr. Sanders trailed off. “Let’s just pray he does, okay? Talk to him, girls. Encourage him to come back to us. And encourage his other friends to come around.”

  “Bye Doctor,” Veronica said, as the sound of footsteps began and receded.

  “You’ve been here before?” Errol snapped, pushing his head out of the bag.

  “Yes,” Aster said.

  “What for? How many times?”

  “A few,” she said. “I needed to—you, know, do some things here.”

  “What things?”

  “Well, I had to have a little of your blood, for one thing,” she said, stiffly, “and part of the spell had to be recited here.”

  “Are you—are you—” but he stopped himself. What if she was? What if she was keeping him in a coma?

  “Am I what?”

  “Are you in love with him, I think he means to say,” Veronica smirked. “Spells, schmells. You were in here talking to him.”

  “This is very stupid,” Aster said. “Are we done here, Errol?”

  “No! I mean—if you were here before—did you ever see my mom?”

  Aster chewed her lip for a moment.

  “Once,” she finally said.

  “Out of how many times?”

  “Six, I guess.”

  “Did she—did she say anything?”

  “Not really,” Aster said. “She was—a little drunk. And with some guy. Tall, blond guy. He didn’t really want to hang around, I think.”

  “Roger.”

  “I think so.”

  Errol closed his eyes. Goddammit mom, really? First Dad and now me?

  “Okay,” he said, after a moment. “I’m done here.”

  His body’s room was on the third floor; they took the elevator down, which opened down the hall from the emergency room. Errol was peeking from Aster’s backpack, and saw a familiar face. He was awake and sitting in a wheelchair, but Errol had no trouble recognizing him as the guy Veronica had tried to drown.

  “Hey!” the guy shouted.

  Beyond the fellow in the wheelchair, way back in the waiting room, someone looked up. A man, older, with salt-and-pepper hair cut short and a deeply tanned face. Incredibly, Errol could see that his eyes were ice-blue, and even more impossibly that those eyes were focused on him.

  “Hustle,” Errol said.

  In response, Aster picked up her stride. The guy yelled again, but by then they were going through the revolving door, into the hot evening air. The blue-eyed man was on his feet, walking swiftly.

  “Really,” Errol said. “Someone is following us.”

  Aster broke into a trot.

  Errol, still looking back, watched the revolving door start to turn again, and the man emerge.

  “Hurry,” he said.

  Aster and Veronica went to a flat-out run. They reached the car and piled in, but the man was almost upon them. Aster started the engine and threw it into gear just as he arrived.

  “You don’t belong here!” the man shouted. “None of you belong here!”

  The tires screeched as they peeled away.

  “There will be a reckoning!” The man’s voice followed them. “I’ll find you!”

  “Says you, lunatic,” Aster muttered.

  But her voice quivered, and her tone was anything but certain.

  PART TWO

  OUT FROM THE GHOST COUNTRY

  ONE

  DELIA

  Aster pushed down her panic and tried to get her thoughts in order. Errol, as usual, wasn’t helping.

  “What was that all about?” he ranted. “That guy knows something. He saw me.”

  “I don’t know, Errol,” Aster said. “I’m trying to work it out.”

  “Well, work it out fast. I think he’s following us. A truck pulled out of the hospital lot right after we did. You’ve turned twice and it’s still behind us.”

  Aster glanced in her rear view mirror and saw a battered white pickup.

  “Zhedye. Great,” Aster swore, stepping on the gas. This was it. No more time to plan. No more time to be careful. No way to even go back to the house, to make sure she had everything.

  For the first time in a long time, she actually felt lighter. Freer.

  “I’ve seen him before,” Veronica said, softly. “The man.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t remember. But I’m afraid of him.”

  “Yeah, well he’s damn spooky,” Errol said. “I’ll give you that.”

  The truck was a good ways back, but gaining ground. Aster sped around the next curve and then turned hard right onto Sugarloaf Road with i
ts narrow twists and turns through pine forest.

  “Go, mama,” Veronica whooped. “Race that dragster.”

  “I would say you’re going to get us killed,” Errol said, “but since you’re the only one that applies too . . . hey!” He yelped as she fishtailed onto a dirt road not even a lane wide.

  “Errol,” she snapped. “Get back into your head.”

  “I’m not the one losing it,” he shot back.

  “No, dufus, I mean literally. Into the big body. You’re going to need it soon.”

  “Where are we going?” Veronica asked, with a bit of strain in her voice. “This doesn’t feel right.”

  “Hold my hand,” Aster said.

  “Well, I’m not a little girl,” she said.

  “Hold my hand, now,” Aster commanded.

  Veronica complied, and Aster felt a palpable jolt.

  “Now, hold on to Errol.”

  The dirt road became a muddy, rutted red-clay trail, but she kept the car going as fast as she could, fearing becoming mired.

  “We’re in-between again,” Veronica gasped.

  “Hang on, Veronica,” Aster said. “We aren’t staying here. We’re pushing through.”

  They were going downhill, now, and the car began to pick up speed, sliding crazily from rut to rut and scraping hard against the ground. She felt a terrible jolt and heard a metallic clang, and the engine doubled the noise it was putting out as she left her muffler behind. She could feel it now, like a wind, pushing against her; everything became a blur, as if they were hurtling through a tunnel of green and blue and red.

  Then midnight slapped her in the face.

  Is she dead?” Veronica asked.

  “She’s breathing,” Errol told her. Despite her seatbelt, Aster’s head had hit the windshield when the car crumpled against the tree. She had a nasty cut and a bump the size of a baseball and was leaning forward on the steering wheel. “Check and see if she’s got any first-aid stuff in the glove box.”

  “Whatever you say, Mister Boss,” Veronica replied, sighing.

  “C’mon, she’s bleeding.”

  Veronica popped open the glove box and gave it a diffident inspection.

  “Nothing there,” she said.

  “The backpacks, then.”

  “Shouldn’t we get her out of the car, first?”

  “I don’t think you’re supposed to move people after an accident.”