The Body Departed (2009)

by J. R. Rain

  Is the killer asking for forgiveness? Is he praying? Is he perhaps mocking the Lord?

  None of the above.

  Indeed, he appears to be looking at what is hanging just beneath the crucifix. It’s a massive oil painting depicting Christ’s arrest on the Mount of Olives. Massive and old. And probably worth a fortune.

  Since when do junkies have a taste for art? Perhaps junkies looking for something—anything—to pay for their next fix.

  And I thought I was going to hell.

  It’s a big painting and would take a lot of work for him to remove it, but the killer seems undaunted. He reaches up for it, and just as he does, something moves quickly to his left. Something dark and swift. A moving shadow, in fact. But Jacob doesn’t see it, or perhaps chooses to ignore it, and so I lose my chance to see what, if anything, it is.

  But something seems to be out there, moving.

  The killer doesn’t see it and continues reaching up, and just as his fingertips touch the ornate frame, something happens.

  Unfortunately, the next few images are a blur.

  In one of them, I see a very menacing red-eyed shadow rise up from the painting itself. In the next, the killer is beating a hasty retreat out of the church, his sack of stolen loot swung over his shoulder like that of a murderous Santa Claus. The anti-Santa. He looks back once, terror on his face, then quickly disappears through a side door and out into what appears to be a courtyard, complete with a gurgling fountain.

  Jacob watches him go. Whatever spooked the killer doesn’t seem to affect the boy, who simply turns and looks back at his dead music teacher, who’s still propped up on the piano bench.

  The boy floats over and lays his head on her unmoving shoulder.

  Jacob and I sat together in silence.

  The church itself was completely devoid of noise. Not even a creak. The structure had long ago settled into place.

  After a while, I said, “You miss your music teacher, don’t you?”

  “She played for me every day,” he said. “She would say my name and play me songs, and sometimes she would sing for me, too. She knew I was here.”

  We continued sitting together in the pew. The nave was empty and quiet and eternal. The boy inhaled, taking a pseudobreath, and rested his wounded head against my own bloodied shoulder, much as he had done with his piano teacher.

  I put my arm around him, and we sat like that until dawn.

  It was early morning.

  I was alone in one of the church’s administrative offices, gazing out a partially open window. It was one of those windows that had to be cranked open. I didn’t do the cranking. Such cranking was probably beyond anything I could do in this form, anyway. Now, through the gap in the frosted-glass window, I could see the branches of an oak tree swaying in the early-morning wind. A bird or two flitted by.

  A maintenance worker had come by earlier. He’d looked spooked as hell. He should be spooked. Here be ghosts.

  Speaking of ghosts, Jacob was off roaming the nave alone. Or, as some would call it, haunting it. I had slipped away to explore my new home, although much of it was already familiar to me. Call it more of a reacquaintance.

  The parking lot beyond the window was mostly empty, but it was still early. Only the maintenance man was out and about; of course, I was out and about, too, but then again, I never slept, either.

  It’s hard to sleep when you’re living a nightmare.

  Now, as I gazed out the window, I tried to recall what it was like to sleep. I knew I had enjoyed it. In fact, I remembered that sleeping in had been a rare luxury, one that I had indulged in whenever I could. Now, eternally awake, I wondered why I had enjoyed it so much. What had been the appeal?

  I couldn’t remember.

  I shut my eyes, trying to remember what sleep had been like, and behind my closed lids was a churning sea of eternal blackness streaked with scattered memories and flashes of light and a horrific sense of continuously falling. I snapped my eyes open.

  There was no rest for me.

  Let’s think about something else.

  I knew who the piano teacher’s killer was. Jacob had called him Eli. (And I made myself constantly repeat the name, as I did not want to forget it.) Later, when I had questioned Jacob about the name, he could not recall saying it and was adamant that he did not know who the killer was.

  I still doubted that this Eli had meant to kill our piano teacher, probably assumed she would see the gun and simply give up the key.

  Instead, she screamed bloody murder.

  And his reaction was to quiet her. And quiet her he did, strangling the life out of her.

  Then again, maybe I was wrong. Maybe his intent was to kill her all along. Maybe. But I doubted it. He had also been high on something, which accounted for his bloodshot eyes, and that something would have clouded his judgment.

  Just a crackhead in need of his next fix—and in need of some extra money.

  Which made me wonder, had Eli been high on something when he killed me? I thought back to my own death, to the look on Eli’s face as he stood over my dead body. Yeah, he was definitely high on something, or drunk. Perhaps both.

  The morning sun was making its appearance. Pigeons flashed across the window and into the brightening sky. I heard cars moving down a distant street, and one or two of them pulled into the church parking lot.

  One thing was certain: Eli was affiliated with the church somehow, either as a worker or as a parishioner. Something. He’d known about the key and the wallet and when to strike—in particular, when the piano teacher would be alone in the chapel.

  Perhaps he had once been a student here, too, like Jacob and me.

  I thought of the two names: Eli and Jacob. Both names were biblical, and both were from the Old Testament. More importantly, both rang a tantalizing bell within me.

  So what was my next step?

  Easy. Find out who the hell Eli is.

  As the early morning turned into midmorning, I searched the church and its connecting school for any signs of the killer.

  I suspected Eli probably wasn’t a teacher here—especially with all signs pointing to a serious drug problem—but he could have worked in other areas of the school: security, maintenance, administration.

  I drifted in and out of classrooms and offices and hallways. I came across many people, of course, but none of them was Eli, which didn’t surprise me. Any principal worth his or her salt wouldn’t let an obvious addict around the kids. Unless said obvious addict was an old pro at hiding signs of his addiction.

  Except, Eli wasn’t an old pro. He was just a scumbag user with a disgusting habit, a user who was willing to kill an innocent woman to get his hands on a few bucks.

  And he was willing to kill me, too.

  So how had Eli known about the wallet? I didn’t know. At least not yet.

  Although I missed my daughter, I was admittedly glad to get out of my apartment complex and see some new sights, new people—

  I suddenly stopped in mid-drift.

  Jesus, what’s her name?

  Panic washed over me. Literally. I could see my own ethereal body ripple with the effect.

  Her name, dammit! What is her name? Maddie? Mandy! It’s Mandy!

  Relieved, I continued down the hallway, repeating her name over and over…

  And over.

  The school was adjacent to the cathedral and thus, being part of the same building, permitted me ghostly access. I had already attempted to leave the church once, only to discover the invisible barrier blocking me. Who invented these ghostly rules, I didn’t know, but they were there and they were damned limiting.

  The classrooms all looked just as I remembered: lots of shelving and lots of religious-themed posters. Maybe even the same posters back from my school days. GOD IS GREAT. JESUS IS THE REASON FOR THE SEASON.

  The teachers, granted, were younger and far cuter than I remembered.

  Sometimes, as I drifted in and out of the various classrooms, students
would turn and look at me—then usually quickly look away. Young mediums, all of them. The world is full of such mediums; most just won’t admit to their abilities.

  Now, as I drifted through the back wall of a third-grade classroom, a redheaded kid with braces and a thick neck snapped his head around and looked directly at me, then promptly turned bone white. Then again, maybe he was already bone white. Hard to tell with redheads.

  Unfortunately for him, I was in a strange and bitter mood, and as I passed him, I said, “Boo.”

  He slammed his eyes shut. The kid was a powerful medium in the making, whether he wanted to be or not. Probably not, since he was now making the sign of the cross and might have just wet himself.

  Scaring little boys is not the way to go to heaven, I thought.

  I continued drifting down the aisle toward the head of the class, where the teacher was droning on about the Spanish colonies of yesteryear. On the wall just behind her were various class portraits spanning many decades.

  The class portraits gave me an idea. A very good idea.

  Now, just don’t forget it!

  I whipped down a hallway, made a sharp right, and found myself in the school’s administration office, which was being manned by a young, serious-looking woman in her early twenties.

  The sign on her desk read VISITORS, SIGN IN.

  I was tempted to write James the Ghost.

  Instead, I drifted past her and down a narrow hallway lined with doors on either side. I peeked into all of them, whether they were open or not, and in the very last room, I finally found what I was searching for.

  It was the copy room, and on the wide shelf above the workstation was a very long row of school yearbooks.

  Ghosts are energy.

  I understand this now, although I didn’t before. And when I say “before,” I mean back when I was living. Hell, back when I was living, I didn’t even believe in ghosts, let alone that someday I would actually be one. Then again, maybe I wasn’t a ghost. Maybe all this was one long, bad dream. A very, very bad dream.

  Or maybe this is hell, I thought.

  At that moment, a very large, balding man stepped into the copy room. He flicked on the light switch and ignored me completely and opened the copy machine’s lid. He punched in the number 30 and proceeded to run off thirty copies of what appeared to be a drawing of a pizza.

  Aww, fractions.

  While the copy machine chugged away, he shivered and rubbed his arms and looked around absently—and perhaps a little uneasily. His very weak sixth sense was picking up on me.

  When his copies were finished, he turned to leave, but then paused in the doorway. The fine hairs on the back of his neck, I saw, were standing on end. He slowly, slowly turned around—and appeared to look directly at me.

  Did he see me? I didn’t know. I doubted it. A small part of his brain knew I was there, but could he trust that part of his brain? Most people didn’t. He continued staring at me. I stared back at him. Somewhere down the hallway, a phone rang. Someone answered it. He blinked first, shivered once, and then got the hell out of Dodge—or at least the hell out of the copy room.

  When he was gone, I went to work.

  As a ghost, I could draw energy from most anywhere: from the air, from the sun, from the living—and even from electronics.

  Especially from electronics.

  Ghosts and electronics were made for each other, which was why lights in a house often flickered during a haunting. Ghosts, you see, used the electricity that fed the lights as an energy source to materialize.

  And so now, with the help of the copy machine, I began to materialize. And as I did so, the lights from its display panel flickered wildly, and the whole thing sort of groaned, like something old and dying.

  I felt myself taking shape. First, my torso formed; then, in a sort of rippling wave of solidity, my arms and legs and fingers and toes appeared. I turned my hand over, watching it congeal before my eyes, opening and closing my fingers, making a fist. I sucked more energy from the machine, from the air, from anywhere and everywhere I could find it. Galvanized and crackling with life, I imagined this was how Frankenstein’s monster felt when that lightning storm struck.

  Where’s Igor when you need him?

  Solid and fully formed and feeling more alive than I had in a long, long time, I was just about to get to work when the secretary appeared in the doorway.

  Shit.

  Head down and holding a piece of paper she no doubt intended to copy, she absently reached for the light switch—and then paused midreach.

  Her head snapped up and she gasped. How she didn’t scream, I don’t know. She put a hand over her chest and calmed herself.

  “Oh, my God, you scared me. I didn’t think anyone was in here.”

  I just smiled and nodded—and prayed she wouldn’t continue reaching for the light switch. My bullet wounds would have been hard to miss in this form.

  “Um, I’ll come back,” she said, backing away. “Do you need any light?”

  I shook my head, and she stared at me for another moment, then turned and hustled off.

  I knew I didn’t have much time. Ghost or no ghost, a strange man standing alone in the copy room—with the lights out, no less—would warrant an investigation.

  I moved quickly over to the shelf filled with yearbooks.

  I figured the killer, Eli, was in his late twenties. If so, that would have put him in high school about ten years ago. Which, if my math was right, would have made him about eight years younger than I was.

  So I started pulling down yearbooks that corresponded with those dates. I pulled out four yearbooks and opened the cover to the first—and briefly reveled in my solidity. I was nearly 100 percent congealed, and I felt almost human. Well, human enough to turn the pages of the book, which I did now, flipping rapidly to the high school portraits, scanning faces, looking for the killer.

  The church’s private school was not a big one, so I was able to go through the high school students rather quickly. Nothing in the first yearbook. I opened the second, repeating the process of scanning faces. Nothing there, either. I pushed it off to the side, opened the third. When that proved fruitless, I went for the fourth. I had just opened it, had just happened across the high school football team photo, when I heard voices coming down the hallway.

  They were coming.

  Which was a damn shame, since I had just spotted Eli.

  There were times—rare times, granted—when I was thankful for being a ghost. This was one of them.

  As the footsteps and voices drew nearer, I stepped away from the copy machine and, with my source of energy now gone, immediately began to evaporate. Just as I had risen up off the floor, two men, trailed by the secretary, entered the copy room.

  One of them immediately flicked on the light, but by that time, I was already hovering near the ceiling and, should they have looked up, would have appeared only as a nearly invisible, misty sheen. And even the mist was fading quickly. Soon I would be gone altogether.

  Gone, but not forgotten.

  Both men were wearing blue jeans and T-shirts. Teachers, perhaps. Or maybe coaches. Hard to tell, since teachers dressed so casually nowadays. The secretary stepped cautiously into the room between the two men. She looked completely flabbergasted.

  “He was just here,” she said. “Standing in the dark, doing nothing.”

  “Who was he?” one of the guys asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What did he look like?” asked the other.

  “Tall. Hair sort of mussed. Then again, he was in the dark.”

  “What was he doing?” asked the first guy.

  “Like I said, nothing. Just standing there. Looking creepy as heck. I’ve been watching the door from my desk ever since. No one left.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “No.”

  The men looked at each other. One raised an eyebrow. The secretary saw the gesture and immediately turned on him.

&n
bsp; “Look, I’m not making this up, Rick,” she said.

  “I didn’t say you were.”

  She moved deeper into the room, pointed to the open yearbooks. “Look. These were not like this before.”

  “He was looking at yearbooks in the dark?” Rick asked, incredulous.

  “I don’t know. Maybe—”

  “Sharon—”

  “Don’t Sharon me.”

  The men exchanged looks again, this one much more patronizing. Luckily, Sharon didn’t see this. Instead, she was looking down at her arms, the flesh of which had dimpled into goose bumps.

  “Why is this room so darn cold? It’s usually stifling in here.” She rubbed her arms and shoulders, then felt the air around her. She reached up. “The cold, it’s coming from up here.” Her hand passed through my groin. “It’s coming from here. It’s, like, twenty degrees cooler here.”

  The men looked at each other again; cold spots apparently didn’t excite them.

  “Sharon,” said Rick evenly, carefully, “no one saw a man come in here, and no one saw a man leave. Just like—”

  “Just like what?” she asked, spinning around. Sharon was a young girl, perhaps in college. She would have been cute if she weren’t so pissed off. “Just like the little boy I see in the nave?”

  “Yes,” said the other guy. “The boy you claim to see.”

  “He’s there, Jules. And I’m not the only one who sees him.” Her voice rose an octave or two.

  He held up his hands. “Okay, okay. We’ll take a walk around campus, see if we can find anyone,” said Jules. “Does that make you feel better?”

  She nodded, appeased, but still didn’t like it. I felt a little sorry for her. The men exited, and she was left standing there alone, looking up at the ceiling. Looking up at me. She knew I was there. Or a part of her did.

  “Whoever you are,” she said, “I command you to leave here, in the name of Jesus Christ.”