by Michael Jahn
Once again silence reigned; this one you could cut with a knife. Lucy screwed up her courage and said, “What is it, Frank . . . ? please tell me.”
“I can’t. I wish I could. You have to trust me. I’m trying to save your life.”
“Is this . . . is this anything like what happened to Ray?”
“Yes,” Frank said softly. “But I think I can save you.”
“My God,” she whispered.
“Or I’ll die trying,” he said, and meant it, more than she could know at that moment.
Then the Reaper slid out of the wall right behind her, his huge black frame extending around her, his cape forming the outline of a gigantic coffin.
“Lucy!” Frank said, startled, and reached for Lucy just as the beast reached an arm over her shoulder and sank his hand into her chest. Cyrus and Stuart both jumped on the Reaper, grabbing its hand and pulling it out of her chest and away from her. At the same time Frank pulled Lucy back across the cell, holding her protectively.
Hissing and struggling against the two emanations, the Reaper’s hood fell back. Bannister found himself staring at a skull-like face with fluid, changing features. The mouth was a black hole liked with jagged piranha teeth. It gaped shapelessly and seemed to be breathing slowly and coldly, as does a large lizard. The cruel yellow eyes had narrowed from slits to pinpoints that blazed from sunken sockets.
“Who are you?” Frank asked.
He wasn’t sure, but he thought he saw the hideous mouth reshape itself into something resembling a grin.
Then the creature hissed again and shook its head around and sank its teeth into Cyrus’s neck. Ectoplasm sprayed from the wound as Cyrus dropped to his knees, screaming. Stuart picked up the chair and, using strength he never knew he had, broke it over the creature’s head. Wailing like a stuck pig, it slithered back into the wall.
“That chair . . . it moved by itself . . . and it seemed to hit something I can’t see,” Lucy gasped.
“It didn’t move by itself. We have friends here who are helping me try to protect you.” Bannister looked intently at Lucy. “But they can’t hold him off indefinitely. We have to get out. Call for the guard . . . nice and calmly.”
She nodded, then composed herself and called out, “Deputy! I’m ready to leave, thank you.”
Stuart pulled Cyrus into the middle of the room. “I’m leakin’ real bad, man,” Cyrus told him.
“He’s losing a lot of ectoplasm, Frank,” a worried Stuart said.
At that moment, and without warning, the Reaper’s scythe came out of the wall and screamed down on top of Stuart’s head, impaling him to the floor in a ghostly heap. Stuart didn’t even have time to cry out. He never knew what hit him.
The Reaper stepped into the room then, a creature looking as if it knew it was on the verge of claiming more victims. Although powerless to prevent the death—the second one—of his friend, Bannister watched, aware of the sound of Deputy Passell opening the cell door.
Frank watched helplessly as the Reaper swept his hand down, reaching into Stuart’s crumpled frame and scooping a ghostly light out of his crumpled chest. The creature held the light aloft and squeezed its fingers until the light that had been Stuart’s essence as an emanation showered into the air, dissolving into nothing. And then the Reaper emitted a mocking laugh, turning and glaring at Bannister and Lucy.
The cell door opened. Cyrus screamed, “Get out, Frank,” and with a grief-fueled frenzy, threw himself at the Reaper and managed to get in a few good punches before the beast hacked him to bits with his scythe.
Deputy Passell walked into the cell then.
“Dr. Lynskey?” he said just before Bannister’s fist crashed into his face. Passell fell back onto the empty bunk and lay there, one leg dangling, stunned and half-unconscious. Bannister pulled the man’s handgun from his holster, took Lucy by the hand, and pulled her out of the cell.
“Run, Frank, run,” Cyrus gasped as his essence joined Stuart’s in being squeezed to nothingness.
By that time, Steve Bayliss had his eyes squeezed shut and his hands over his ears, wishing with all his might that he was back on that lobster boat pulling traps out of the water.
Fifteen
Frank and Lucy ran down dark and deserted corridors, trying to find the rear exit. The lights of the squad room loomed at them from a distance at the end of the main hall. There were other officers there, probably the sheriff himself, and maybe even Special Agent Dammers. Him they didn’t want to run into. Bannister was convinced there was something wrong with the man. Maybe he was one of those special-crime detectives who had been chasing grisly killers for so many years that he had begun to think, and maybe act, like them. Then, while they were rounding a corner toward a promising door—on with a red “exit” light above it—they ran into Dammers. In fact, they ran into him so hard that Frank’s shoulder clipped the man and knocked him, and the doggie bag of uneaten food from Bellisimos, into a crowded janitor’s closet. As Dammers collapsed amid a clattering of brooms, mops, and buckets, Bannister kicked the door shut and turned the key in the lock.
At last, Frank and Lucy escaped out the back of the sheriff’s office and into a maze of dark alleyways. They ran and ran until they felt they were a safe distance from the police, a few blocks away and in a part of the business district that was always deserted at that time of night. Then they found a dark spot in which to hide and pulled up, breathing heavily.
“What is it, Frank?” Lucy asked, scared out of her wits. “What did you see in the cell? Who are your friends that I can’t see, either? Frank . . . I felt something touch my heart.”
“You better sit down and listen. We don’t have much time.”
He pushed her down onto a vegetable crate that stood behind the Central Market. “I don’t know what or who he is, but I know what he looks like,” Frank said.
“What? I need to know.”
“You’ve heard of the Grim Reaper?”
“Sure, on Halloween. A caped figure carrying a scythe. Is that what you were fighting?”
“That’s what it looks like, but I’m not a cartoon figure. This is the real deal. It’s fast and deadly. It marks the forehead of its victims with numbers. You’re number forty-one.”
She touched her forehead. “I don’t feel anything,” she said.
“It’s there, I saw it in the cell for the first time.” He traced the outline of the numbers with his fingertips.
“I don’t know if this is the mythological figure that surfaced in the twelfth century and then reappeared centuries later during the years of the Black Plague. All I know is that it’s unearthly, deadly, and relentless. And responsible for all these ‘heart attacks.’ ”
“Who was helping you fight it before?”
“Stuart and Cyrus, two friends of mine.” He looked down. “They’re gone now. I’m not sure where. Maybe they got into the corridor somehow and are better off.”
“This is all very confusing,” she said, holding his hand.
“Stuart and Cyrus are . . . well . . . emanations, which is what I’ll have to become if I’m going to save you.”
He pulled the deputy’s revolver out of his pocket and checked the cylinder, a look of desperate frustration on his face.
“I can’t fight him like this, Lucy,” Frank said. “I can’t protect you.”
“What do you mean, ‘like this’?” she asked, staring in horror at the pistol in his hand.
He paused, looked at her tenderly, and touched her cheek. A tear formed in the corner of his eye. Then he raised the barrel of the pistol to his temple.
Lucy gasped.
“I gotta have an out-of-body experience,” he said firmly. “And I gotta have it right now.”
“No!” she said.
“I need to become an emanation. It’s the only way I can save you.”
“Cyrus and Stuart were emanations, and they couldn’t.”
“There were my good friends, but they didn’t have as much imagination
as I do. And they were lazy. I used to yell at them about it all the time.”
“You’ll die and I’ll never see you again,” she sobbed.
“And that would make me the first man to sacrifice himself for a woman?”
“Frank . . .”
“If I could die and come back, I would. But there’s no way.” He sighed. “Turn around, Lucy . . . go on, walk away . . . now!”
Sweat rolled down his forehead as his finger tightened on the trigger. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
Then Lucy reached for the pistol, took his hand, and gently pushed the pistol away from his head. “There’s another way,” she said.
“What?” he asked, opening his eyes.
“You forgot that I’m a doctor.”
Lucy opened the door of the medical center’s walk-in freezer. It was inky black in there, with clouds of subzero condensation that shone in the outside light, looking a bit like spirits. Along the edges of the room were stainless-steel racks upon which sat rows and rows of tests tubes and boxes and boxes of microscope slides.
“Back at the restaurant, you told me sometimes, when you go through a trauma, it allows you access to the spiritual world,” she said.
He nodded. “That’s how I got to be able to see spirits and emanations . . . after the accident where Debra died.”
“But if you blow your brains out, that’s it. There isn’t any coming back.”
“It’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make,” Bannister insisted.
“But you don’t have to,” she argued. “Isn’t it true that a lot of people who have had out-of-body experiences had ‘fatal’ accidents that didn’t mutilate their bodies.”
“A lot of them survived drownings or heart attacks,” he confirmed.
“How about freezing?” she asked.
“Sure . . . I guess. People have fallen through the ice on frozen ponds and drowned and then been revived. While they were dead they had out-of-body experiences. Some of them saw the corridor to the other side, and a few took a couple of steps into it. But they were brought back.”
“Can they all see what you can?” she asked.
“A few can.”
“Then that’s your answer.” She held up a syringe. “This will slow your heart rate and lower your body temperature. You’ll feel intense cold for a while, but only a few minutes. Then your body will go into suspension. That should do it.”
He nodded.
“You’ll have twenty minutes, max,” she said. “Any longer and there’s a danger of tissue damage.”
“That should be enough. Things are speeded up considerably in the afterlife. Emanations are stronger and faster than humans. A guy like Stuart who could barely lift his finger in life can throw around a dining-room table as an emanation.”
“And that’s only if I can successfully revive you,” she continued. “There’s no guarantee.”
“We have a better shot at it this way than if I shoot myself,” he returned.
Bannister began to take his clothes off. When his shirt was lying on the floor, Lucy jabbed the needle into his upper arm.
“You don’t have to do this,” she said tearfully.
Frank smiled reassuringly at her. She dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. He took it and tenderly wiped away her tears.
“You get one chance at postmortem survival,” he said. “I can’t do this a second time, Lucy. We’ve got to get it right the first time.” He added urgently, “Let’s go.”
Bannister stepped into the freezer, wearing only his boxer shorts, and immediately hugged himself against the cold. As he did so Lucy closed the freezer door and turned the temperature control to maximum freeze.
“It won’t take long,” she said.
She wiped tears away with the back of her hand. Frank had taken her handkerchief into the freezer with him. She peered into the freezer through the door’s small window. Frank grinned at her, and she kissed the tips of her fingers and pressed them against the glass.
He repeated the gesture, kissing his fingers and pressing his hand against his side of the glass. Then he sat in the far corner of the freezer, where she could see him through the window. He sat very still, with Lucy’s handkerchief clutched tightly in his hand.
Once he was inside the freezer, she worked quickly in the cryolab, preparing blankets, syringes, and the defibrillator—needed to restart Frank’s heart. She wiped gel onto the paddles and set them down gently on the bench.
She peered into the freezer window. Frank was very still, his skin blue with cold. Ice had started to form around his nostrils and on his eyelashes. But faint clouds of breath were still visible. She could see, however, that he was breathing very slowly.
The reality of what was happening began to hit her. The man was dying, literally dying, in order to save her life. In what seemed to her the very short space of twenty minutes, his emanation would go off . . . and do what? Fight some creature called the Reaper that had already claimed forty lives? And if by some miracle Frank beat this beast, he would have to return to his body, which she would then have to revive. And where was this Reaper? What if he showed up now, before Frank had his out-of-body experience? The creature seemed able to go anywhere—inside walls, even into the floor of the jail. What if it were lurking in the medical center? What if it were in the walls of the cryolab itself?
Startled by that thought, Lucy looked over her shoulder and found herself staring into the cold, cruel eyes of Milton Dammers. She screamed.
“What are you doing here?”
He grinned at her, roughly shoving her to one side so he could get at the freezer window.
“This is my lab! Get out of it!”
“You’re in over your head, Doctor,” Dammers said.
“You have no right to be here! Get out!”
Dammers peered into the freezer at Bannister. A sneering smile crossed his lips.
“I didn’t know you had an interest in cyrogenics, Dr. Lynskey,” he said.
She glanced at the wall clock. It was exactly nine P.M.
“I’ve got to revive him in twenty minutes,” she said.
“What on earth for?”
“I don’t have to explain anything to you,” she said. “You’re in my lab—let’s see your search warrant!”
“Here it is,” he said, pulling out an automatic and aiming it at her.
She glared at him. “You’re a maniac.”
“I’m doing what I have to do, Dr. Lynskey,” he said, locking the freezer door. “I’m ridding the world of a menace.”
Lucy was horrified. “You’ll kill him,” she said.
“No, Dr. Lynskey,” Dammers said. “It’s you who killed him. His body will be found in your freezer.”
Dammers stole another look inside the freezer. Bannister’s breath had slowed nearly to a stop. After a long moment he exhaled one final time, his breath hanging in the air. Then his chest stopped moving. He was dead.
“That’s it for Frank Bannister,” Dammers said. “Take a look.”
He kept the gun aimed at Lucy while she, too, looked in the freezer. After she saw Bannister’s frozen body lying there, she said, “If I don’t revive him it will be your fault.”
“I’ll learn to live with that.” Dammers motioned her toward the door.
Bannister’s body may have been frozen solid, but it trembled slightly as his emanation began to stir within it. First his fingers and arms moved slightly, then his feet and legs. A ripple ran through the muscles of his abdomen as the emanation came to life. It appeared first by his head, lifting up exactly the way a sleeping man lifts his head to look at the new day. Then the rest of the emanation lifted itself out of Bannister’s body. He was now an emanation, just like Stuart or Cyrus or the Judge.
The freezer was suddenly bathed in white light. The frozen crystals sparkled and the ice-cold test tubes glowed like gemstones in the ethereal light. The corridor that, at that moment, only he could see swept down from the heavens and through the roof
and upper floors of the medical center and into the freezer. It picked out Frank the way a spotlight illuminates a star performer on a Broadway stage.
Frank stood and looked up into the corridor, awestruck. He felt its strong attraction, like a magnet for souls. But he forced himself to back away from it, thinking only of Lucy and how he could save her. He backed across the freezer and straight through the door.
“Wow,” he said, falling onto the lab floor.
He felt as light as a feather. He sprang to his feet and flew straight into the air. His head and shoulders went right through the ceiling, and for an instant he found himself looking around the inside of an examination room on the next floor. Then he slipped back down to the lab and landed on his feet.
“This is unreal,” he said, feeling his power.
As he slipped back down through the floor he had seen the bricks, the mortar, the pipes, and the electric wires as though viewing a cross section on a monitor. It was amazing, these abilities he suddenly had—the extra strength and speed, the ability to defy gravity, and the ability to go anywhere. If only he could share it with Lucy.
But where was she? “Lucy?” he asked, looking around.
Bannister found an empty lab and wondered where she might have gone. Her equipment was there, the syringes and the defibrillator, but there was no Lucy. He called her name again but got no response.
On an impulse, he left the lab and walked down the hall to the women’s room. He lingered outside the door.
“Lucy? Are you in there?”
Then he realized she couldn’t hear him anyway, so why shout? He slipped through the door and peeked discreetly inside the bathroom. There was no Lucy. It was then that Frank remembered having seen a lock on the freezer door. Why lock it, he wondered, if she was the only one there and, dead and frozen, his corpse wasn’t going anywhere? Only someone else would have done it. He started toward the exit.
In a hurry for the first time, Frank realized how unaccustomed he was to his “body’s” new form. It felt light and rubbery. If he put his foot down too hard, he was propelled off the ground. If he reached for a door knob, his hand went right through it and he felt like an idiot. If he put his hand on a wall to brace himself, his hand went through it and he was likely to follow. He found he could lean on a real object, so long as he didn’t push hard against it. He knew he could go up through a ceiling, or sideways through a wall, but what if he wanted to go down, through a floor? How was he supposed to do that?