by Peg Herring
“Tomorrow,” Madison replied succinctly. “And where did this late-night taxi fare want to go?”
“Off Division, near Clingell and Fuller. The cabbie thought it was odd, because there’s nothing down there a sane person would visit that time of night. Want me to check it out when I get done testifying today?”
“I’ll stop there on my way home this afternoon,” Madison replied. “It’s not that far out of the way.”
Chapter Thirty
When I Die
The brief funeral ceremony and the leave-taking with Elizabeth, who flew back to Seattle immediately afterward, seemed to give Carmon some closure. She faced the official goodbye stoically, though her thoughts centered on loneliness and loss.
Watching through Carmon’s eyes, Tori was less bothered by attending her own funeral than she thought she’d be, neither very sad at the obsequies for the end of her life nor particularly pleased at the respectable turnout. The rain halted briefly, but the muggy dampness hung in the air like a threat. The casket spray was lilies, and their fragrance rose and mingled with the smell of damp earth.
Surveying her coworkers from PLK, Tori reflected wryly that the black, gray, and navy clothing customary at the firm was handy for funerals. The message was brief, with the minister, who had never met her, providing glowing reports of Tori’s friendliness, willingness to help, and all-around amicability. The summary sounded lifeless and superficial, a person no one knew beyond outward appearances. Even that didn’t bother her much. Tori Van Camp now seemed to be someone she vaguely recalled, not someone she knew well. In the end, maybe being kind to others had been enough.
Don Pardike approached Carmon as they left. “Nice service.”
“Yes.”
“Are you going back to the office?”
“No.”
“Oh. It’s just that I have some work that needs to get done today. I thought you could use the extra hours.”
“Some other time.” Tori felt Carmon’s struggle to remain polite.
“Sure. I asked Abe, but he said he had something that couldn’t wait, and Erica is busy too.” Pardike rubbed his face, covered with an unattractive, chronic stubble. “There are three people on the brink of coming over to us if I get on it right away.”
And this matters to me why, at this point in time? Carmon kept walking, face averted.
“It means a lot of money. I mean, for the firm.” He laughed insincerely. “For me too, of course, but—”
Does he ever think of anything else? she thought wearily. The look on her face apparently shut him up, and he moved off to approach an elderly man Carmon didn’t recognize. Pardike would know within minutes if he had money. If he did, he’d get a call tomorrow, offering better service than the man’s current broker. She could hardly believe it. Networking at a funeral. Worse than an ambulance-chasing lawyer.
The old man shook Pardike off quickly and hailed Carmon as she left the chapel. “You’re Tori’s friend, right? I was her neighbor. She told me a lot of nice things about you.” He praised Tori’s everyday kindnesses in a rambling way while Carmon nodded politely. Always befriending the weak and the hopeless; that was Tori. This old guy is certainly weak, and at the moment, I feel particularly hopeless.
The man confided he was moving into a care facility. “I bet I’ll like it once I get there,” he said with determination. “My son says they got stuff to do all the time, and he’ll be able to see me more often ’cause I’ll be closer.”
“I’m sure that will be best.” For Tori’s sake, Carmon listened politely as Mr. Louisineau went on, trying out the news of his impending life change on a stranger, verbalizing it positively in an attempt to make necessity attractive. “It sounds nice,” she said when he finally paused. “And you’ll be near your family. That’s important when you’ve lost a friend.” She thought of her brother, wondered if he’d be home when she got there.
“I’m glad you’re taking Mani and Dee,” Louisineau said, patting her arm. “They’re good cats. I can keep Scruffy, but they only allow one pet at the place I’m going.”
Carmon had a moment of mental objection—not sure about keeping them—but didn’t have the heart to disillusion the old man.
Rain had fallen on and off all day, but when Madison arrived at Clingell Street around four-thirty, it had stopped. From the color of the sky, the reprieve was temporary.
Madison tried to guess why someone would ask a taxi driver to drop him off down here in the middle of the night.
The first block contained one operating business that, judging from its condition, clung to existence by the slenderest of threads. Welding sparks jetted from the doorway, and the rhythmic sound of hammer on metal hinted at automotive work. After that there were only abandoned buildings and litter-strewn lots. How far would an honest man be willing to walk at night in this neighborhood?
The second block was not dying; it was long dead. Invisible from the main traffic route, enterprises once located here had moved elsewhere or given up, and the whole block was a case for urban renewal. Surveying the uninviting surroundings gave Madison no idea of where to begin, but he got the feeling this would be a great place to disappear for a while. The ghosts of failed businesses revealed in peeling, faded letters what they had once trumpeted: Malden’s Mechanix, G & L Industries, and the quizzical, andy’s ear ends.
The buildings were cinderblock, all square, squat, and designed purely for function. An alley dissected the block neatly, but neat was not the term for what was in it. The small, dark space had been used as a dump for articles too large or cumbersome for easy disposal. Madison identified a broken drill press, a staved-in barrel full of rusted metal rods, and boxes of machine odds and ends, all disintegrating ever so slowly in the elements. Nothing moved. The area was deserted, silent, depressing.
He walked down the sidewalk, peering into grimy windows for a sign of human presence. Nothing caught his notice, so he made his way down the alley, skirting piles of junk and keeping an eye out for rats. A side entrance in one building was firmly boarded over. Spray paint on the wood slats advised both repentance and getting high. Probably not the same author, Madison guessed.
The backs of the buildings were even less scenic than their fronts. Here the yards were choked with ancient weeds, dry and scratchy, along with still more discards from the dead businesses. An ancient engine hoist sat abandoned, its block and tackle frozen with corrosion. Madison picked his way to the first building’s rear door. Locked. All the others were secured as well. On the opposite side of the alley were three buildings. The two on his left had no back entrance, though one had a side door, now boarded up, that had once opened into the alley. The last building, however, had a back door, and there was evidence someone had used it recently.
Madison circled the entire building, getting a sense of the place. It had once been a gas station or a repair shop. At the front, two battered auto-bay doors had been permanently closed by an iron bar welded across each. The wall on one side had a battered metal door with no exterior handle. He came around to the back again, scanning the ground carefully. Bedraggled weeds from previous years, long dead and damp with rain, lay trampled where someone had passed in and out, probably several times. On the wooden door, a padlock hung from a metal hasp, but as he got close, he saw that the lock itself was open.
The upper half of the door had a shattered window. Jagged pieces of glass lay scattered off to one side. Over the hole, a plywood rectangle was attached by a screw through one upper corner. When Madison touched it tentatively, it shifted sideways.
Moving the board back and forth a couple of times, he got the idea. Behind it was an opening large enough to reach out a hand and slip the padlock over the hasp. Someone inside the building could then turn the wooden cover back into place, making it appear from a distance the door was secured and the window boarded over. This building was probably inhabited, at least sometimes.
Carefully Madison slid the padlock off and opened the door. It made
no sound, and he ran a finger lightly over a recently oiled hinge.
He stepped into a small room with heavily scuffed walls. Every horizontal space was thickly covered with dust, and the glass-brick windows were so grimy they let in very little light. A doorway ten feet away led to a larger open space. The tarp-covered shapes of large pieces of equipment hovered in the gloom, and beyond them the inside of the bay doors he had seen from the street. Tracks through the dust suggested many trips across the space.
The working life of the building had ended long ago, but the smell of automotive lifeblood was still present: oil, gasoline, and rubber now mixed with dust, mildew, and animal offal. On his right was a pile of items no one had deemed worth carting off: a broken grease gun, a few bald tires, and several lidless cans of used motor oil, now further polluted with decades-old dirt. Through a doorway ahead he saw a large room with a yawning gap to one side—a grease pit.
Madison, and within him Seamus, recognized the place could easily be a trap. He turned to go.
As Madison stepped outside, something hit him hard. He was down before he knew it and out before a thought could form. Within seconds, he had been dragged into the building. The door closed behind him, the wooden panel slid aside, a hand reached out the opening, and the deceptive padlock was once again set in place.
Chapter Thirty-One
Black is Black
It took Seamus a few seconds to figure out what had happened. One moment Madison was alert; the next there was pain and total blackness. Some sort of movement followed, but his host’s muscles didn’t provide the energy. Seamus had a sense they were dragged inside the building, across the concrete floor, and dropped several feet, which led him to conclude they were in the oil change pit he’d noted earlier. His host lay prone, his body loose and oddly splayed. He had taken a sharp blow to the back of the head, and it was possible the damage to his brain was serious, even fatal. Pain warned that Madison had probably broken a leg in the subsequent fall. All in all, things did not look good for either of them.
Seamus was left with only his own thoughts, odd after sharing another’s for two days. The situation was one he had never encountered but all Portal Detectives dreaded. He was dead. He couldn’t die again, but if Madison died in this hole, there was nowhere for Seamus to go. Life was required to function on Earth for more than a few seconds, but the life he had was borrowed. If that borrowed life was extinguished, only one of them could cross over. The other would stay behind, unable to ever connect to life, or the afterlife, again.
The impetus to jump required a live host, so if Madison was about to die, it was imperative that Seamus move on. But there was no one here, no one likely to be. He was blind without Madison’s eyes, paralyzed without Madison’s propulsion. He could return to the ship, using the remains of Madison’s energy, but that would leave Tori alone, and he couldn’t return to help her. One trip per case was Gabe’s rule. Could Tori manage without him?
Seamus had never had to communicate during a host’s waking hours. He wasn’t sure if it was possible while Carmon’s mind was active. Would Tori understand if he spoke to her now, or would her host’s thoughts interfere? And what would Carmon do if Tori spoke to him from inside her head?
Forcing himself to think carefully, he decided to wait as long as possible. Madison’s breathing seemed normal, his pulse continued, slow but steady. Neither of them was ready to give up yet.
As he waited, blind and still, Seamus thought about Tori. Somewhere she waited for night to fall, for Carmon to drift off to sleep so they could communicate. What could he tell her? He was in an unfamiliar place with an unconscious, possibly dying, host. What could an inexperienced first-timer do about that? He needed her help, but he’d have to go slowly. If Tori reacted with panic, tried to influence her host, as she had with Madison in those first moments, the result would be trouble. He imagined Carmon explaining to the police that a voice in her head told her Madison was trapped in a grease pit in one of Grand Rapids’ uglier sections. Tori had to be careful, which meant he had to keep from scaring her if possible.
Succumbing to an unaccustomed bout of regret, he berated himself for bringing Tori along on this trip. She was just a kid who hadn’t understood the dangers. Grimly he recalled her determination, her earnest face as she insisted she had to know, to see for herself. Not many persisted once they heard about the perils of the journey. Most were perfectly happy to accept the perks of the ship and forget all about the life before.
What made crossing back attractive to him? he wondered. Hard to say, especially in the situation he now found himself. It was one thing to stand up to the physical pain over and over or to endure the sense of loss that returning always generated in him. It was quite another to consider he might now become, in the truest sense, a lost soul, separated from life but unable to return to death. Given the chance, would he do anything differently? Seamus knew he would not. Heaven, he’d once heard, was doing what you really, really wanted. If that was so, he had experienced Heaven already.
What seemed like hours later, a movement at Madison’s forehead caught Seamus’ attention. Someone was almost near enough to reach! Whoever it was didn’t speak but came closer, in fact, very close. He made a quick decision. He’d take this chance, move to the new host, and get himself out of there. Without eyes, however, he could neither see the newcomer nor tell exactly where to jump. He waited, hoping for a clue to help him pinpoint the location. There was only the rustle of movement. No tentative question as to Madison’s condition, no, “Buddy, are you okay?”
No matter who the visitor was, he was mobile and Madison was not, so Seamus tensed for the move. Something touched Madison’s nose once, twice, tentatively. Without hesitating any longer, Seamus gathered his courage and jumped.
He almost missed. A third touch came just in time to give him a usable connecting point, and he aimed squarely at that. There was the usual sensation of pulling away, moving forward, and landing in something both viscous and solid. Seamus was first surprised to find there was very little there, and then horrified at the recognition of his host, the sense of only animal intelligence.
He was inside a rat, a fairly large one, but still much smaller than any form he had experienced before. It was disgusting from every aspect, cramped, primitive, and…rat-like. If he’d had the means, he’ d have gagged.
The lucky part was the scare he gave the rat, which scuttled away, scrambling around the dim pit where Madison lay and into an even blacker hole at one side. In seconds, Seamus was in a tunnel, moving in a way totally alien to him. He looked out the rat’s eyes, saw things the way a rat sees them, in black and white and from very low to the ground. It should have been interesting, but the reality was a little too vivid.
“Always hated rats!” he muttered. The creature, hearing sounds from within its own head it could not possibly make, skittered against the side of the tunnel in terror, and then doubled its speed. Seamus forced himself to be quiet and let the rat calm down, watching intently as it navigated the inky blackness by some sense he didn’t possess. At least they were going somewhere.
They were in a drain, he decided, but just as he did, they were outside, running across an alley that was shadowed but visible: unpaved, damp, and fetid. The rat didn’t seem to mind. It moved in quick spurts between areas of cover, claws clicking over flattened tin cans, broken chunks of concrete, and bits and pieces of aluminum siding. Seamus wondered how much pressure the carrying of a human soul put on a creature such as this, but the rat seemed impervious as long as he was quiet, bumping along with frequent stops to check out a smell or a sound. At one point, it found a fast-food take-out bag against the crumbling brick wall of a building and hastily gobbled down whatever was edible inside, at least what rats consider so. Seamus tried not to notice.
At least he could see, could tell from the angle of the sun it was late afternoon. He saw no sign of human presence, and this worried him. It wasn’t going to be easy to get close enough to a person to j
ump away from the rat. Who in his right mind would come near? Neither was the rat likely to try to approach people, at least those in control of their faculties. He gave a brief thought to Madison and hoped this creature had been alone when it visited the abandoned garage. Madison was trapped there in the pit, alive but injured, and he wouldn’t be climbing out by himself. Someone needed to send help. Seamus had to contact Tori, though it was still day.
When Seamus called “Tori!” the rat jumped like a creature in a cartoon, straight up in the air. Then it was off, running as fast as four legs could carry it, destination unknown. It slid under a pile of old lumber, raced across a roll of crumbly, mold-ridden carpeting, and came to rest between an old washer and the wall of a building, heart pumping wildly.
Seamus couldn’t wait. He called again, and the scene repeated, the poor rat fleeing wildly from sounds inside its own head. Each time it stopped, he spoke Tori’s name, throwing the rat into terror yet again. He got no response from Tori. After five tries, both he and the rat were spent, the headlong running and the pitch of adrenalin exhausting them both. The unusual viewpoint at ground level made Seamus dizzy and faintly nauseated, and he sensed even the rat was disoriented. He went quiet, letting the frenzied creature recover somewhat.