“Wait,” Nick said. “What about—holy shit, what about Layla? If she killed me, then can’t he feed on her soul now too?”
Mama Bindu blinked her shiny black eyes, her face showing no emotion. “You best hurry.”
“How much time do I have?”
“Time is slower here than it is on the other side, Nick. But you ain’t got long, either way. Neither of you do.”
“Fuck,” he said.
Mama Bindu slapped him again. “Show some damn respect.”
“Sorry.”
The old woman pulled Nick down and kissed him on the forehead. There was warmth in it, so much that it almost burned his skin.
“Go on, now. Get.” She pushed him away and spun him around.
Nick walked to the front door, opened it, and stepped out into the land of the dead.
Twenty-Three
Nick did not notice the door latch shut behind him. He was too focused on taking in the new details of the outdoor scene. The city street was now wholly different than it had been before.
As best as he could tell it was neither night nor day. The lighting was the ominous gray that accompanies a severe storm, though without any precipitation or wind. The world was like looking into one of the early color televisions. It wasn’t black-and-white, but it certainly wasn’t naturally toned either. There did not seem to be clouds overhead, but Nick could not be sure because every time he tried to focus on the sky the same hazy blackness that had limited his sight in the hall blocked his view. He tried to focus, as Mama Bindu had told him, and that helped a bit, but his attention was quickly diverted from the upper limits of his reality to the happenings on the ground.
There were people everywhere. While there had seemed to be a lot of pedestrian foot traffic before, now the streets and sidewalks teemed with enough walking bodies that it was almost impossible to see the pavement. And although they moved along at such a close proximity, going God knows where, none of them appeared to have any interest in interacting with one another. They were the souls of the departed, the collectively massed inhabitants of a densely populated neighborhood that was over a hundred years old. And they, like everything else in this place, were solidly real, though drained of most of their color.
The buildings flickered as Nick watched. One moment their starched and pale brick fronts were modern as he’d last seen them, and the next they were of a different era, where all signs of current technology had vanished. Electric signs, security cameras, digital parking meters: all were replaced by simpler, more antique designs. Sodium lights became gas lamps, billboards became sidewalk signs and illustrious advertisements painted themselves across the sides of buildings. And then they flickered back again. This went on and on.
Finally, Nick regained his composure and took a step forward. The porch beneath his foot blinked from cracked concrete to a similarly shaped staircase made of wood. But it remained solid.
He made his way to the street level, each step finding more confidence in this new world. When he reached the sidewalk, Nick found himself at eye level with the spirits passing steadily by. He could not help but watch them pass. There were men in suits and men in tattered work clothes, women in decades of assorted dead fashions. There were a surprising amount of children as well. One of them stopped to stare at him when Nick’s eyes lingered on the boy for too long.
The child’s name was Nikolas Lungu. He was the son of Romanian immigrants, and had lost his life to Polio in the year 1939. His love in life was the Chicago White Sox, and he cheered for them up until the day he died. His clothes were clean but shabby, a white tee shirt tucked into a simple pair of pants. As he watched Nick, his face contorted, first to delighted surprise, but then slowly becoming a frown.
When the boy turned away, Nick realized that the experience worked both ways. And whatever the boy had seen in him, he had not liked it. He wasn’t inspired by the child’s reaction and took great care to avoid making eye contact with any other of the dead.
Avoiding them was not hard. They seemed to be incapable of touching. No matter how close they came to one another—Nick included—their bodies did not physically mingle. Because of this, Nick was able to cut a direct path through the layer of moving souls until he reached the Cougar.
It waited for him patiently at the curbside. He reached a hand out to touch it, for reassurance, and as soon as his fingers grazed the now jet black finish the motor fired to life. That alone was enough to strengthen his confidence. The rumbling steel beneath his hand, the sound of mechanical combustion and throaty exhaust, brought a feeling of completeness to him. The old woman had been right. The car was a part of him. It was the only thing his heart had ever truly considered home. In this place, it had lost all trace of its former color, had been sapped to the glossy shine of a polished piece of obsidian.
The car beckoned him to climb aboard and he obliged. The chrome of the door handle was warm to the touch, as though it had been sitting under a summer sun that did not exist overhead. The door opened with a familiar click and Nick lowered himself inside. Upon meeting the leather of the driver’s seat, Nick felt instantly better. He may have still been dead, but some of the overwhelming strangeness of the world seemed to subside. Once inside the Cougar, he felt whole again.
The leather of his jacket made a pleasant scrunch when it met the leather of the bucket seat. The door swung shut of its own accord.
When Nick adjusted himself in the seat something bulged uncomfortably in the front pocket of his pants. He reached in and withdrew a thick hunk of machined steel.
It was a revolver, the kind of snub-nosed thing that might have been carried by one of those old TV detectives like Joe Friday or Peter Gunn. It was the same type of tiny pistol that Laura Scranton had brandished at him in his foyer, seconds before he’d filled her guts with lead. And yet, it wasn’t. Nick was no expert on firearms, but he knew this was no typical gun. When he flicked the wheel open, there was only a single fixed bullet chamber, instead of six. And in that cylinder rested the lone bullet that had been gifted to him by the woman he’d killed.
He didn’t need to remove it to know that this was one and the same, that it bore the personalized inscription intended just for him.
Nick closed the wheel, stared at the smooth, matte silver finish of the spectral weapon. It was a solid thing, and yet it was not. Unlike other all-metal guns, this one had very little weight to it. Perhaps it was due to the nature of its paranormal origin. Or maybe things like weight and the laws of physics had very limited authority in this world. Either way, its presence was welcome on his person and Nick tucked the small pistol back into the pocket of his jeans. When the time came, he knew what he had to do with it. But he couldn’t get ahead of himself. Right now he had to face the road. He had somewhere to be.
He knew that what came next would not be easy. There was no doubt about that. But there was also no way around it. He was already beyond the land of the living. His only option was to seek out the soul eater, the Black Tar Man, and to put a bullet in his heart. It was either that, or wait for the monster to seek him out anyway, and Nick felt deep down that such a thing was only a matter of time. Because just as he could sense the origins of the black threads knotted through his own spirit, he knew that the connection worked both ways.
It was a terrifying thing, to consider a confrontation that would be the battle for his soul. Even for a dead man it was no easy thing to think about. He wrapped his hands around the wheel, clenching his jaw.
He thought of Layla and it bolstered him. If he was damned, it was something that he had earned for himself. And no matter what hell it wrought upon him he would just have to face it. But her, he could not allow to suffer. Not because of him.
Outside the Cougar, the tide of slowly ambling bodies shifted course and spirits fluidly turned to walk in the opposite direction. Nick looked beyond them, toward Mama Bindu’s house, which now sat at the very edge of the looming blackness.
“I’ll be back for you,” he
said. He did not know what made him say it—likely self-reassurance—but the words spilled out of him with conviction.
Nick remembered the old woman’s words as he closed his eyes and focused. He pictured New Orleans. He had only been to the city once in his life. It had been four years after the flood, and he had spent most of the time drinking with Andy Reed, talking about the final preparations for his low-budget indie flick and how he planned to finance all of it on his credit cards. Andy’s brother’s rock band had rented a couple vans for a two-week tour of the mid-south, and he and Nick had tagged along to play roadies for the trip. The drinking, of course, had muddled the clarity of his recollections. However, Nick could recall one place very clearly. It was the St. Louis Cemetery, the final resting place of the famed Marie Laveau. He remembered the boxy concrete tombs that filled the vast boneyard like miniature housing subdivisions of the dead. The ornate mausoleums were a thing of morbid beauty, trademark honorific icons of a city that was forever tied to occult roots and influence.
Nick could see it standing before him, surrounding him on all sides. He could feel the crunch of hallowed gravel and wild ivy beneath his shoes as he stood upon a wide path lined by above-ground tombs. He could feel the humidity making his shirt cling to his skin, could taste the swampy funk on his tongue. The ancient American city folded itself around him. At least the ghost of it did. It became a thing both physical and real, a fixed point in reality.
An invisible wire drew taut inside Nick’s chest, a cable line that connected him to the very heart of the city. But it was not the city herself to which he was connected. It was one of her citizens, one with roots so thick and so deep that he had almost become a part of New Orleans itself, a malignant and powerful tumor in her underbelly. It was the Black Tar Man. And Nick felt the being’s power surge through that lifeline, right into his own body.
The soul collector was aware of him. Just as clearly as Nick could sense the monster’s whereabouts, it could do the same of him. His eyes remained closed as he tried to focus even harder on the location of the Black Tar Man.
“I’m coming for you, fucker,” Nick said.
Good.
The venomous, thick word danced through his head. The piece of shit had heard him. And instead of making Nick fearful, the presence of the faintly whispered word gave him a fresh well of fury, which hardened him.
He knew where to find the monster now. The shadowy strand connecting them hummed with life, like a compass that would guide his way. When Nick opened his eyes he found that he was no longer parked in front of Mama Bindu’s two-flat brick house in the ghetto. Instead, his spectral vehicle was coasting along through the gray world without a single bit of road turbulence. The ride was smooth and the only sound came from the powerfully charging motor as it revved higher and higher. The steering wheel moved of its own free will, as did the gas pedal, without Nick’s assistance. The gauges and meters all sat still, no sign of electrical power present anywhere in the vehicle.
It was clear that he was still in the city, but the speed at which the car was moving caused the endless stretch of buildings to pass in a blur. Visibility was limited to about twenty yards in all directions. Everything beyond that was swallowed in the cloudy blackness. Souls parted a path seamlessly for the Cougar to drive through. If Nick looked quickly he could almost make out individual faces in the crowd. It was too dizzying and Nick stopped trying.
He watched as the Cougar hurtled through the city streets, jetting its way toward what he could only guess was the highway. There was no telling on what path the journey would lead him from here.
And Nick did not know how it would end. But at least he knew where.
Twenty-Four
Trouble found Nick shortly after leaving the city.
Before he knew it, the stretches of concrete jungle and pavement melted away into the smooth, endless run of open road. At least it appeared endless, as far as Nick was capable of seeing beyond the constantly moving shroud that encapsulated him. The presence of wayward souls and spirits dwindled to almost nothing as the car sped through the bleached landscape.
The asphalt ahead was black as a crow’s wing. In contrast, the parched grassland on the shoulder was so drained of color that it appeared as if Nick was hurtling down a wide conveyor belt into an unknown oblivion.
It was impossible to tell just how fast he was moving, but even if the speedometer had been functional, the paltry 180 mph mark at the end of the gauge still wouldn’t have been much help. And now that they were on the empty highway the Cougar seemed to actually be gaining speed. The painted lane markers had become a solid white line, swallowed up beneath hard rubber radials.
Three, four hundred miles per hour? There was no way of guessing how fast the car was traveling. All Nick knew was that he was headed in the right direction. The guiding compass inside of him confirmed it. The trip would not be a long one.
He decided to spend whatever time he had steeling himself for the fight that lay ahead, in whatever arena that might be waiting for him. His thoughts drifted between his hatred for the dark man and his need to protect Layla, circling through his disdain and guilt for Laura Scranton and returning back again. The loop played through a dozen times before Nick realized that he was no longer alone in the car.
A rasping wheeze emanated from the passenger seat. When he looked over he was not at all surprised to see Laura sitting there beside him. He was, however, surprised to see the state of her. Even for a dead girl she looked bad. No, she was beyond bad. She was hardly recognizable in fact. Her shoulders were hunched severely forward, her spine curved into the shape of a question mark to frame her emaciated body. Her skin was the color of ash, and pulled snug against her bones. The red dress hung about her gaunt body like the garb of a sick little girl who had decided to play in mommy’s closet. Laura’s hair was still the color of the rising sun, and that was honestly the only defining feature that let Nick recognized in her. That hair hung draped in a sheet from her gnarled, veiny shoulders to cover her slumped-forward face.
Laura’s appearance was very disturbing. She was little more than a husk of her former self. Save for the warmth of her hair, nothing of beauty remained of her. And even that looked to be a few shades lighter than it had been before. Even though she had turned into a source of torment for him in the past few years, it saddened Nick to see her this way, knowing how radiant she had once been. If there was anything to be thankful for at the moment, it was that Nick could not see her face.
“Hello Laura,” Nick said.
“Hello yourself,” she replied. Her voice sounded as though her tongue and vocal cords were both made of leather. It was a hissing whisper that contained more dead air than it did humanity. And when she spoke she gave a dry cough.
“You don’t look so hot,” Nick said. It was a cruel thing to say, but it was the first thing he thought. It seemed that death had provided him with the disappearance of a brain-to-mouth filter. Or perhaps it had simply granted him the gift of honesty.
The skeletal woman beside him gave a rasping wheeze and shook her shoulders in what could have either been contempt or amusement. She coughed before speaking again.
“Don’t I know it. He’s almost taken all of it from me. It was all I could do—” Here she broke into a fit of coughing. It did not sound at all satisfying, just dry hacking that was eerily quiet. “All I could do—to get here.”
“How did you find me?” he almost asked. But he didn’t, because it was a foolish question to which he already knew the answer. Laura had found him here the same way she had back in the land of the living. They were attached. Just as he and the Black Tar Man were.
“Why did you come?” Nick asked.
“To warn you, Nick.”
Nick gripped the steering wheel, squeezing it as anger rose within him. The woman who had gotten him into this mess to begin with—and had now cost him his life—was suddenly here to warn him, to offer him help? But before he had the opportunity to express his ind
ignant outrage, she spoke again.
“He knows you’re coming,” Laura said.
“I already know that. What the—”
She cut him off. “But he isn’t going to wait.”
“Wait, what do you mean?”
“He’s out of patience. Afraid you’ll do something stupid.”
Laura broke into another bout of coughing. “I wanted to warn you. Wanted you to keep your eyes open.” Here she paused in a moment of reflection. “Don’t want you to end up like me. Still a chance for uncrossing.”
At this, Nick leaned forward, reached across the console to take hold of her icy shoulder. “Tell me, Laura. Please, tell me anything you can that can help me beat this motherfucker.”
“You already know,” she said, not cringing away from his touch. “But I can show you where.”
With great effort, Laura put out her hand. It landed coldly on Nick’s forearm, light as a feather. The fingers squeezed faintly and Laura turned to look him straight in the eyes. Her features were horrific: eye sockets sunken and black, lips pulled back into a skeletal grin that exposed her decaying gum line, and wasted skin stretched nearly to the point of splitting over her fragile bones.
And for the first time in his life, Nick knew Laura Scranton. As their gazes connected, he saw her as she truly was. She was not a monster, not the pathetic hanger-on whom he had left on a one night stand.
Her life played out before him as clearly and as fully as if it were playing in his own private screening room back at home in Los Angeles. But it happened very quickly.
Nick watched a beautiful child grow in an instant, the youngest of three. Despite her pretty features and radiant smile, she was a loner. Her maturity and intelligence set her apart from her peers. And though she did not wear it on the surface, Laura Scranton was highly depressed, even as a little girl. She was a morose beauty, a bookworm who never received as much attention from her military father as her siblings did. She wrote poetry. Much of it was good, but it paled in comparison to her fiction writing. Once she discovered the boundless freedom of penning stories out of her imagination, there was no going back to poetry. And she was better than good at it. In fact, a short story of hers that sold to The Atlantic when she was only sixteen earned her a full scholarship offer to UCLA. Most of Laura’s college career was spent coming out of her shell, tasting the many flavors that life had to offer a budding, receptive young writer. After graduation, she naturally had no job, but had a modest stack of novel manuscripts that her agent was having trouble finding homes for. She wound up tending bar in a rock and roll joint called Dos Diablos. Laura had dated casually in college. She had always dreamed of love, but always wound up finding disappointment instead. Until she met Nick. That night they spent together had been pure magic. Not only had they kept an intelligent, artistic conversation, but the sex had been amazing. And the next morning, for the first time ever, she felt the drunkenness of infatuation. For a while, she channeled it into her art. But then as a week dripped by, and then two, she realized that Nick was not going to call. That was when the reminders started. She thought of them as reminders, Nick saw: the emails and letters intercepted by his agent’s office. But when those failed to reach him, she hired a private investigator to find his apartment, and his direct phone numbers. If she could only see him once more she knew that she could remind him of their dizzying compatibility, of their chemistry. But she never did manage to get through to him, especially after he’d come home to find her waiting for him on his couch. Then came the restraining order, which only served to bolster her efforts at seeking reconnection. After success found him, she would sit outside the gates of his big empty house in the hills, staring into the darkened windows from the distance, yearning for him. She did it every night, even though she knew he was living with that skanky blonde co-star downtown, the one who had accidentally ridden his coattails to fame and fortune and was only sticking around to see how high the elevator would take her before she got off. She didn’t love Nick like Laura did. The bitch didn’t even understand him, how vulnerable he really was. The despair began to make her sick. She had almost stopped eating altogether, an involuntary response to the dread of knowing that the man she was meant to be with—he with whom she had only shared a brief, cruel glimpse of happiness—was slipping out of her grasp. Both Laura’s sister and her best friend tried to dissuade her. They interfered, perhaps jealously, by urging her to see a therapist. But they did not understand. They did not hear her words, and therefore did not understand her. And that was when she decided to seek out other means of help.
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