And then his vision wobbled, became fuzzy at the edges. It only lasted a moment, but it was enough to put him off balance. Nick stumbled forward, rocked uncertainly on his feet, and almost fell down. Layla caught him by the elbow and righted him.
“Stop it,” Nick said. “I’m fine. I just need to—where’s the bathroom?”
“Down the entry hall, first left.”
“Nick, let me help you.”
He jerked his arm free of her grip and took a somewhat steady step toward the hall. “I’ve got it, Layla.”
“Okay.”
That single word echoed in his head as each footfall met the floor, guiding him forward. It became a cadence, a rhythm for his uncertain journey through the inky passage. Fortunately there wasn’t much in the way of furniture for him to trip over. He kept his left hand pressed to the wall as he traveled, feeling like he was trapped in a memory, navigating the path to the men’s restroom in the darkened hallway of a dingy bar while heavily intoxicated. And he did feel intoxicated. His head was heavy on his neck, eyes not quite capable of focusing perfectly. The cracks and ridges of the texture slipped beneath his fingers like plaster braille, holding the promise of something better at the end of the road.
At last, he reached the washroom. It was the only actual room off the hall aside from a set of double doors that likely led to the kitchen. His fingers found the switch, and a single-bulb fixture sparked to life overhead.
The room, like the rest of the home, was clean, but bare. The parchment colored walls were empty of all but an oblong mirror above the pedestal sink. The toilet was a blue porcelain fashion relic from the sixties.
Nick reached for one of the claw knobs and twisted it. He swooned at the sight of the sudden gushing movement, feeling momentarily queasy, but held onto the sides of the sink to steady himself. He leaned down, splashed some of the running water on his hands. It was cool, and sparked relief in him when it touched his skin. He cupped a handful of the stuff and dashed it across his face.
It served to bring his tottering mind back into balance. He looked at himself in the mirror. All he saw was unfamiliarity. His face was that of a stranger, a haggard cousin to the man he had grown accustomed to seeing in his mind’s eye. Haunted, bagging eyes and gaunt, stubbled cheeks stared back at him.
He might as well have been a dead man.
Nick wiped another handful of water toward his mouth and drank it down. It tasted like metal.
His thoughts were a spinning centrifuge, bouncing from Laura and the Black Tar Man to Grindstone and Sandra, and finally to the two women waiting for him just beyond that door. As he stared into the slightly bloodshot eyes of the man in the mirror he circled back to the thing he wanted to avoid most: the thought of his own impending death. It was the only option the old cleric had offered him. And he hated her for it. He hated her for her seemingly careless refusal to offer him an actual fucking solution to his problem. There had to be another answer. His life couldn’t just be over, a thing for him to forfeit just to maybe—maybe—save his soul. Only so that he could remain dead anyway. But in his current state he could not find that answer.
And the ghastly thing staring back at him from the reflection was no confidence booster. If anything, it served to further drive the stake that was Monique’s point right into his heart.
What was he going to do? To say that his options were slim would be a generous assessment. If he agreed with the pseudo-mystic’s advice and took his own life, he still had no idea what awaited him on the other side. And at the end of it all, he would still be dead. But he could take to the road again, try to find someone else who could help him. Maybe he could try to find the Black Tar Man himself, persuade him with force to release Nick from his grasp.
But that thought was ludicrous. How in the hell was he supposed to guess the identity of a man who was completely unknowable, a predator living among men in complete anonymity. At least, he was anonymous to Nick. And clearly he was a ghost to Monique as well, lest she would have surely been able to share the information with him.
“Fuck,” Nick said. He rested his elbows on the white porcelain basin, lowered his forehead into his wet palms. He tried his hardest to think critically, but no rational scenario presented itself. The specter in the mirror was a clear indication of the futility of his rapidly approaching future.
He had to make a decision. Stay and forfeit willingly, or take his chances back on the road. He was a threat to society, there was no doubt about that. Nick’s blackouts had caused certain pain and suffering, and it was stupid to believe they would not continue to do so. He thought of the police officer, the way his body had contorted and flopped through the night air as he bounced to a stop along the freeway.
Nausea overcame him in a great wave. He threw up in the sink. It was mostly spit, but it still burned coming up.
An innocent man, a public servant, would soon be dead because of him. And a girl was traumatized. Even though she looked alright, there was no telling what the effects of being with him would have on that poor, pretty girl sitting on the floor in the other room down the hall. The physical marks might only be the tip of the iceberg. And Sandra…Jesus, even though he really did resent her, he couldn’t stand the thought of putting her in danger too.
But at the same time, Nick was a victor. He had never possessed the quitting mentality in his life. Even though he had been frequently lazy at times, he had always succeeded at the things that mattered most. When he put his mind to something, failure had never met him in return. He was resourceful, a natural creative. There had to be another way out of this mess. He just needed to find it. And for that, he needed time. He also needed a clear head. And the only thing that had served to provide that for him in the entire past two weeks was one object: the skeleton key.
Even if the old woman was right and it was a quickly depleting battery, it was his only hope at coming up with a new plan. It would buy him both time and clarity. And if it didn’t, he would take his pistol and end it all before anyone else could get hurt. Layla would have to come with him, since it was protecting her too. He wouldn’t think of leaving her alone and defenseless from the Black Tar Man’s attacks.
That was a reasonable plan. It wasn’t a sound one, but it was the best he had. And he knew that he could convince her to go along with it, at least for a little while. He just hoped the old woman wouldn’t give him any shit when he told her to piss off.
A floorboard groaned outside the door, bringing Nick out of his head and back to the real world. He glanced down at the gap beneath the heavy piece of oak but saw no shadows. The lights were still off in the outside hall.
“Nick?” came a familiar voice.
Layla had come to check on him. She was such a sweet girl. It broke his heart to think of what he’d put her through, but he needed to ask one more thing of her. And there was no time like the present.
Nick twisted the knob, pulling the door inward.
“Layla, listen. I’ve been thinking. We need to go. Let’s just get the—what are you doing?”
Layla was draped in shadows, illuminated only by the dismal light leaking out into the hall from the bathroom bulb. Her jeans hugged her hips and her short, black hair faded almost perfectly into the obsidian backdrop of the dark house. But the thing that stood out even more clearly than her pale, angular face, was the gun she was pointing right at his chest. It was his gun, and the oversized bore stared back at him like the gaping maw of a freight train tunnel.
Tears were streaming down her cheeks. The gun quivered in her hands.
Nick opened his mouth to protest, but before he could there was a flare of fire. It seared a flashbulb image of the scene into Nick’s brain as he stumbled backward into the bathroom.
He clutched his chest, feeling an immense heat radiate from his heart out through the rest of his body. It felt like he was being drained, his body turning into a leaden hull. Nick was dying. He was sure of it. There was no pain, only blackness lowering across his fiel
d of vision like the curtain on the final act.
He reached out to Layla, much as Laura had to him not so very long ago.
The final thing Nick noticed was that she was weeping. God she was beautiful.
And then she was gone, faded into the abyss. And the rest of the world went with her.
There in a cloud of gun smoke, on the cold, hard tile of a stranger’s bathroom floor, Nick Aragon’s body gave one final fitful shudder. And then he was dead.
Twenty-Two
The land of the dead welcomed Nick with silent suddenness.
One moment he was sprawled across the washroom floor in a foreign house, clutching a gunshot wound. And the next, he was standing, looking down at himself. Layla was hunched over his fallen form, had taken him in an embrace. Her body was wrapped forcefully around his, bent and contorted with the flood of emotion.
But her body was not shaking or shuddering, as it should have been. She was frozen in place, a still photograph. Layla made no sound. She was quiet. The world was quiet.
Nick pulled his attention from her to look around the room. It was much the same, yet not the same at all. The features of the room—of the whole reality—were a faded version of their former selves. The structure was all there, but the colors of the world seemed to have been leeched away. It was like a richly toned cloth that had been dipped in bleach.
The walls, the floor, even the spectrum of the lighting: all had been robbed of the qualities that made them real. They were empty things now. The world had become a faintly hued shadow of its former self.
Only the darkness still seemed real. In fact, it seemed even moreso now than before. As Nick stared into the shadows beyond the threshold of the bathroom door, what he saw was an oily black surface that might well have been as bottomless as the midnight sea.
“Layla,” Nick said. “Can you hear me? Jesus Christ, Layla. What did you do?”
The crouched form at his feet made no movement. She remained motionless, a fixture as immobile as the bathroom sink.
“She can’t hear you,” said a deep, powerful female voice. It resonated in his ears in a way that was more real than anything else that surrounded him in this place. It carried the sound of life with it, the sound of purposeful authority.
Nick turned to find an elderly black woman standing beside him. The suddenness of her appearance was startling. He took a step back, but relaxed when he recognized her. At least, he thought he had recognized her. At first glance, the similarities in bone structure and body type were so close he had mistaken her for Monique. The woman even wore a mumu-type dress which draped all the way from her shoulders to the floor. Her hair was wrapped neatly beneath an intricately decorated gray scarf that had been tied around the top of her head.
“Mama Bindu,” Nick said.
The old woman nodded once, never letting her piercing gaze falter. She had one hell of a poker face.
Slow dread crept into his heart as he spoke the obvious. “I’m dead.”
“And here Monique said you was a slow learner. That girl don’t have much room to talk.”
“She looks just like you,” Nick said. He didn’t know why he said it. It was mundanely stupid, but it was the only thing to cross his mind that didn’t involve lamenting on the fact that he had just permanently shed his mortal coil.
“Easy now. You don’t want to offend your only friend in this place.”
At first, Nick was embarrassed. And then he realized she was joking. It was hard to read her expressionless face, but the chuckle that followed was indicative of her amusement.
“I’m in trouble,” Nick said.
The old woman nodded again. “You beyond trouble, child. The time of the reaping is near. You got somewhere to be.”
“What does that mean?
“It means you need to be getting saddled. There’s still some road ahead of you, and it’s gonna be a rough ride.”
“Monique said you know how to find the Black Tar Man. That’s what you’re insinuating, right?”
The old woman put her back to Nick, beckoned him to follow her out into the hallway.
“That’s right,” she said. “The reaper man is long and far from here. And yet, he ain’t. Not far at all. Not in this world. If you was still alive it’d be a two day journey. But in this place, you’ll be a half day at most. Supposing you make it.”
“Where is he?” Nick asked flatly. He may have been dead, but his faculties for impatience and irritation were certainly alive and well. In fact, he felt almost exactly the same as he had before he’d been shot in the chest. If anything, he felt better. The only noticeable difference was that all the myriad of tiny aches and pains associated with having a body had disappeared. His deteriorating lumbar disc pain was gone, as well as the knee he’d injured on the rec center diving board when he was thirteen.
Nick took a conscious step into the hall, felt the solidity of the boards beneath his feet, and the simultaneous flex and release of the muscles working in his legs. Even if they weren’t drawing actual air, his lungs still automatically swelled the organic bellows of his chest.
The hallway was noticeably brighter. Or at least it seemed to be. The many corners and crevices that had been formerly rendered invisible by shadows were now painted in that same desiccated light as the bathroom. Blacks had faded to gray, and grays had been drained of most of their color altogether.
Nick turned back to the washroom and was surprised to find he could not see six inches past the threshold. Beyond was blackness never ending.
“Won’t take you long to learn the limits of your sight, child. Focus your head, and you’ll be alright. Especially out on the road.”
“Now I see where Monique gets her riddle speak from,” Nick said. “Can you please just give me some straight—”
Mama Bindu cut him off with a wave of the hand. It literally silenced him. He had no idea how she did it, but with a single flick she shut off his mouth.
“Young people,” she said. “If half of you learned to close your trap every once in a while the world wouldn’t be in such a sorry state.”
Nick’s eyes widened. Not because of the reprimand, but because of what he saw hovering just behind the deceased cleric. An impossibly tall, bearded black man stepped into the foyer without making a sound. In a bland suit of outdated style, he froze in place when Nick’s gaze fell upon him. The old man stared at the empty wall for a few seconds. Then, without warning, he spun ninety degrees to his right, leaning his head down over the shoulder of Mama Bindu to stare at Nick. His skin was the color of cigarette ash. His eyes were shiny dark orbs, like a spider’s. And when Nick looked into them he saw everything. He saw the man’s soul.
In that instant, he knew that the man’s name was Wilfred Washington, that he was the son of a freed slave who had fled to the north. He knew that Wilfred had worked at the steel mill, that his life was one of toil and simplicity. He had known love once, had sired two children. His whole family had died in an accidental fire that had raged in this very house.
And as he looked at the man his face transformed. The flesh on his cheeks tightened and shrunk back. The topmost layer of skin melted and peeled, exposing the white frame of bone beneath. His hair was scorched from the top of his head, as were his ears and nose. He became the burning death which had killed him all those years ago. It was a sight both fascinating and horrific. His jaw lowered; the flaking tongue within lashed.
“What you looking at? You don’t belong here, white man.” the dead man rasped.
Nick was shaken from the experience by the hand of Mama Bindu.
“It ain’t polite to stare,” she said quietly. “Be careful about that, Nick. You ain’t the only one taking up space here now.”
Once Nick had shaken off the surrealism of what he’d witnessed and gathered his thoughts again he dared another glance and saw Wilfred Washington turn and walk out the front door.
“You got to go, honey,” she said. Her hands were cold on his shoulders. He was care
ful not to look her in the eyes for too long.
“Where?”
“New Orleans is the place his body calls home. Like I said, it ain’t a far trip, but there’s still a stretch of road ahead.”
“How will I get there?”
“Same way you got here,” Mama Bindu said simply. “That automobile of yours is a piece of you. It’s more a home than you’ve ever had elsewhere, meant more to you even when it was broke down than any pile of money you ever made.”
It was true. In fact, at that moment, he could feel the Cougar just beyond the doors of the home, waiting for him in the street. It was an extension of him. And in that instant he knew how things could come to be haunted by the spirits of the dead. It contained a part of his soul.
“You want me to drive to New Orleans?”
“You got a better idea?” she said with a snort. “You running out of time. Don’t be a fool about things. Of course you going to drive. Roads are empty here, child. Empty of cars, anyhow.”
“And I suppose my GPS navigation still works here too?”
The old woman hit him square across the lips with an open palm. It definitely hurt.
“Don’t you sass back at me, boy. Respect your elders.” She exhaled heavily through her nostrils. “Like I said, you just got to focus. You gonna be alright. That devil man, he gonna be after you. He gonna try his damnedest to get at you, to keep you from finding him before he finds you. But you got to be strong, you hear?”
Nick nodded, even though he didn’t like the sound of what she was saying.
“You got one thing over that bastard,” she said. With that, she pointed at his heart. “That hook he put in you, it’s like a fishing line. Except here, it works both ways. You follow that and you gonna find him.”
“And when I do?”
“Only you’ll know that,” she said. “Now go.”
Lovely Death Page 18