Earthbound : A gripping crime thriller full of twists and supernatural suspense

by Fynn Perry

  Each organ, once removed, was subjected to a thorough inspection before being put into an ice-cold preservation solution in a sterile container. The packaged organ was taken away, presumably to a dispatch rider.

  After the heart, kidneys, lungs, and corneas had all been removed, the nurses and technicians were dismissed once all the life support machinery was powered down. The doors were locked and all the windows onto the room went from clear to opaque at the press of a switch. Only John’s host and the surgeons remained.

  Schwartz unlocked a cupboard and wheeled out a trolley carrying a lidded plastic container. She opened it and, to John’s amazement, started to hand out small, clear-plastic packets of the Spider’s Bite pills to the surgeons, who inserted them into the cavities where the organs had been. Surgical pads were placed over the packages to smooth out the resultant bumps before the body openings were stitched closed.

  The surgeons exited the theater and John’s host was left to clean up the body. When she was done, she left the room, made sure the door bolted shut behind her, and walked along the corridor. She used her access code to pass through a farther security door before entering a fire escape stairwell and descending the staircase to gain access to a secluded area of lawn in the hospital grounds. She took out a slim Marlboro, lit it, and took a drag.

  John seized his chance to escape and exited, just as he was beginning to feel a nicotine high. Schwartz collapsed like a telescope onto the grass, dropping her cigarette. She was unburnt, and he hoped, unhurt.

  He passed through a fence and bushes and made his way around the building to the main entrance and parking lot. A number of signs confirmed the name of the hospital as Hargreave Merciful and he committed it to memory. A small crowd of spirits was circulating outside the entrance, as before. New arrivals, he thought. In most cases, they looked horrified or lost. He wore an appropriately forlorn expression and paced back and forth, trying to fit in and to not draw attention to himself as he waited for a suitable ride from a mortal to start his journey back to Jennifer.

  Finally, he saw a middle-aged couple, who he followed at a distance like the spirit of a departed son. They walked up to a large old Jaguar sedan. The ride was sedate, almost regal. Two car changes more and he was one bus journey away from Jennifer’s house.

  He took his leave from his last ride about twenty yards from the bus stop. The street was deserted and lined with shuttered shopfronts except for a distant 7-Eleven, which had some mortal and spirit activity outside it. As he walked toward the bus stop, John couldn’t shake off the feeling that he was being watched.

  Sixteen

  Feeling a presence behind him, he turned around, suddenly fearing he would face Santiago’s spirit, but there was nobody there. He walked faster and turned another corner.

  Standing in front of him, to his surprise, was Nikki, the spirit of the girl in the biker jacket and boots that he had met before.

  “Hello, John.”

  “What the hell are you and what do you keep wanting from me?” John asked, remembering how her eyes had rolled back and she had instantly disappeared after their last meeting.

  “I’m just an observer,” she said.

  “Jesus! What does that mean? An observer of what?” John demanded.

  “Ah, yes. Jesus!” She paused and gave an incredulous laugh. “How that narrative has endured. A true masterpiece!”

  “What do you mean by tha––” John started to ask but he was cut short.

  “There are two types of spirit who can’t let go and therefore stay on Earth, John. Both types want answers, but one is too passive to ever find them. Then there’s the other type, the type that makes changes. Guess which one I’m interested in, John?”

  A flare of orange, like a glint of light, appeared in her eyes. “The second type, John,” she said impatiently. “They’re the ones who can affect The Game. Think of me as a sort of talent scout.”

  “The Game? What game?”

  “Had you decided to move on to the afterlife, you would already know all about The Game, John. It’s truly wonderful! You could say it’s humanity’s greatest achievement… humanity in the afterlife, that is!” Her tone rose with an air of excitement.

  “I don’t understand. What are you talking about! What humanity in the afterlife?” John quizzed, frustration clearly evident in his voice.

  “For you to understand The Game you would have to see it, and for you to see The Game, John, requires a much higher awareness and intelligence than you possess. However, because I can see you have the desire and capacity to change things, and that’s what I’m looking for, I will help you to see it, John, by lending you some of my intelligence. Just enough for you to view The Game in all its glory. All you have to do is take my hand and hold on to it. I will do the rest.” She extended her hand toward him.

  John hesitated, guarded and untrusting.

  “Don’t be afraid, John,” she soothed, giving him a smile that he found intoxicating. “When you left your body, you were given a sample of the powers needed to view The Game. Your field of view expanded and, for that brief moment in time, you saw and understood everything that was happening in the world at once. More importantly, you were able to see the consequences of everyone’s actions––how, and with what magnitude, they affect others. Without that realization you cannot hope to understand the level of strategy involved.”

  John recalled the deluge of information that had poured into him, the tremendous pressure he had felt to move on to another form of existence and how he had fought it, doing everything he could to take back control of his mind

  “Don’t worry, John,” she said with a surprisingly soothing tone, seeming to sense his anxiety. “I won’t trick you into going to the afterlife against your will. I understand not everyone has been satisfied with their time on Earth, and not everyone wants to move on. Your reasons for not doing so are by no means original, John. Love is the most common reason of all. You also felt anger—a need for answers as to why your life was cut short. And, of course, you experienced the fear of losing your mortal identity. The latter is the reason why all earthbound spirits look like their mortal selves and why their intelligence is limited to the level it was at when they were alive.”

  “But my body is still alive. It’s in a coma. I’m not actually dead; there is brain activity.”

  “Do you think you are here by mistake? Like a quirk in some kind of ‘system’ that decides when it’s your time to go”? She mimicked air quotes and didn’t wait for a response. “I hate to break it to you, but there are no mistakes.”

  He felt momentarily deflated, then asked hopefully, “This is a test, right? I have to do something good to earn my way back to my body?”

  A mocking smile spread across her face “You mean like do a good deed? And then your God will reward you by giving you your old life back?”

  John nodded, although he winced at her use of ‘your’ in her statement, as if she did not share a belief in God––or any god for that matter.

  “It’s so amusing that you primitives still believe in religion. Perhaps you could get one of your mortal priests to exorcise the spirit who possessed your attacker.” She gave a little laugh.

  “Santiago?” John burst out.

  “Very good, John! I can see you’re more resourceful than most. Still a long way from being a player, but all the same, you’re interesting.”

  “What do you mean by that?” John asked, even more confused.

  “Enough questions for now, John. You really must let me show you The Game,” she said holding her hand out again. “Take it. Come on! You have so much to learn and nothing to lose.”

  This time John didn’t hold back and tentatively offered his hand. As their hands connected in a handshake, he saw the orange glow of her body darken and she became almost invisible. Then, alarmingly, he saw the darkening progress up his own arm, reducing the intensity of his own glow. He tried to take his hand away and found he couldn’t. It was as if their hands we
re fused together.

  “Relax, this is just a conduit of information. I’m not going to swallow you!” Nikki laughed.

  A sudden surge of knowledge flowed into John and he started to panic, recalling his previous experience and the sense of nearly losing his mind. This time there was no gradual widening of his vision and awareness, stretching out beyond New York to other cities, then countries, then the entire planet. This time he was not alone, and as he stood connected to Nikki, both of them were surrounded by the sudden appearance of a wonderous tapestry of billions of constantly changing images. Depictions of human joy and celebration were interspersed with visions of hideous acts of torture, execution, and exploitation, which in turn mixed with images of political speeches, marches, and uprisings. Despite their vast number, John found he could take in all the images at once, and his initial panic started to slowly subside.

  “You’re watching every single event happening on Earth now, in real-time,” Nikki advised.

  John didn’t answer; he was shocked to see how much of the world’s population was subjected to violence and suffering.

  A wave of change swept through the images and they all suddenly showed deaths occurring around the world. Every second a new image of someone who’d just died came up. The reason for each death was different but, in every case, it was followed by the emergence of a strange entity from the body. Spherical in shape, and invisible to the mortal eye, these entities looked dark and seemed to absorb light.

  Nikki interrupted his obvious fascination. “That, John, is a Void––the human consciousness departing upon death. The essence of every human being, no longer bound by the limitations of time and space or being trapped inside a slowly decaying mortal body. At that beautiful moment, each consciousness is finally able to realize its full potential and intelligence and become all-seeing, as you are at this moment.”

  As she said this John noticed that in most cases the Void simply disappeared after emerging but occasionally, he saw the mysterious entity transform into a glowing, earthbound spirit––just like he had been.

  Finally, overcoming his stupefaction, John managed to ask, “Where do all the Voids go? There must be billions of them.”

  “Anywhere in the universe—it’s a big place, some say infinite,” Nikki responded, flashing him a grin. “But we stay in contact, pool our intelligence––”

  “We? You’re one of them?” John said, startled, and then added quietly, “of course you are,” remembering how her eyes had rolled back to reveal empty black space when he had first met her.

  “Enough!” Nikki snapped. “That was all just background. Now we come to the interesting part...The Game.”

  John couldn’t possibly have prepared for what he would see next. Before him flashed vivid, bloodcurdling scenes from the greatest atrocities in the history of the planet: civil and world wars, genocides and famines. The screams, agony, and terrified expressions of millions of people were overwhelming. He had the same feeling of nausea and inability to vomit as he had had experienced when the spirit of the old man had shown him the crater to the back of his head. “Why are you showing me this?” he cried, but Nikki ignored his words and obvious discomfort.

  “These one-off events created the largest death tolls in history, but none of them exceeded eight percent of the world’s population at the time.” As she said this, John thought he heard a note of disappointment in her voice.

  “More often than not,” she continued, “one person became famous for bringing about these acts of evil.” As she said this, John was inundated with images of the architects of the inhuman practices he had just seen, including the instantly recognizable faces of Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein, and Osama Bin Laden. “They influenced armies of loyal followers to do their work for them. Those are only the ones that made headlines, but there are many people like them that remain as yet undiscovered, carrying out their work diligently in secret, in preparation for the next great event.” John noted a sharper, more sinister edge to her normally soft voice. “What they all have in common, John, was that they didn’t attain that level of wickedness on their own... they were all…of course… possessed.”

  “I don’t understand…Possessed...? Why? …By what...?” John’s voice trailed off. He felt the sensation of a shiver pass over him as he remembered what she had told him during their last meeting: To be truly evil takes more than one evil soul in a body. When she had said those words, he hadn’t thought to consider, perhaps from the shock of the discovery, that his stumbling upon one such combination of evil spirit and evil mortal––the serial killer in the van with the body in pieces––could be just the tip of the iceberg. He was now beginning to appreciate the scale of possessions that were happening in the world and the depravity they caused. It was far larger than he could have ever imagined. But what he found more disturbing was that Nikki was apparently telling him all of this in the context of some sort of a game which she had yet to explain. He turned his head to look at her, half shocked, half uncomprehending.

  Before he could say anything, Nikki started to speak again, seeming to sense his increasing unease and dawning realization that something far more insidious was afoot in the new world he had entered. “But those stars of mass murder and evil didn’t get possessed by a malevolent spirit by accident, John. Neither was their rise to power the result of an unfortunate series of events, as the history books would have you believe. It was all meticulously planned and stage-managed.”

  “Planned and managed by who...? You? …I mean you and the rest of the Voids?” John asked jerkily, fearful of the answer.

  “Yes!” Nikki said proudly. “Isn’t it amazing? Every one of those events you saw was scripted in advance. They were written by Voids with a talent to conceive elaborate, sweeping narratives capable of provoking the worst of mortal humanity’s behavior using such catalysts as political and religious unrest to spread hate and spark wars, encourage war crimes, oppressive regimes, slavery, and acts of terrorism.

  John found her enthusiasm unnerving. “Scripted? As if to be played out like a movie?” he queried, dazed and still nauseous from the relentless scenes of brutality being shown in front of him.

  “Yes, but writing a narrative is of course only half the story. The other half is enacting it, and that’s where I and many other scouts on Earth like me, come in. We look for earthbound spirits willing to possess the mortals that have been unwittingly cast into the narratives––those mortals who have their own propensity for evil, but not enough of it to be driven by themselves to carry out the acts required of them in the narratives. We match them with like-minded earthbound spirits who are keen to continue their malevolence on Earth in a new body, and by doing so significantly multiply their host’s capacity to undertake the most heinous and immoral of acts.” She paused for effect. “Those spirits are the ‘Players’”—she signaled with air quotes—“of The Game, John, influencing and guiding their unsuspecting hosts to play out their roles in line with the narrative.”

  Nikki now appeared to be waiting for a reaction from him, as if expecting him to be impressed, but all he could do was look at her, confounded.

  Seemingly disappointed at his lack of zeal, she carried on regardless. “It’s quite an art to find the right spirit for each mortal and we make sure they are incentivized. They know that failure to realize their roles in a narrative will result in their immediate and permanent removal from Earth.” She gave a sigh, suggesting regret, before continuing. “But finding the spirit to possess the mortal that will get top billing in the halls of infamy is not in my remit; I look for spirits who can possess and manipulate the smaller people– the supporting cast who act as enablers for the host of the ‘Star Player’ to rise to power: the corrupt politicians, the militias, and the people who simply turn a blind eye to the evil growing in their midst. Their decisions and the consequences of their decisions are all needed to make these remarkable events happen.”

  As John tried to process this last point, the tape
stry of images before him, which had been showing historic acts of brutality, now changed. Seared now with vivid color and the wretched sound of human suffering, the images looked more recent.

  “Happening right now,” Nikki informed him helpfully, her tone disturbingly upbeat.

  This time he watched the horrific events with terrible new understanding. The hideous study in human manipulation that Nikki had just described to him, which he now knew as ‘The Game,’ was in play right before his eyes.

  Abruptly, the flow of information and images before him stopped. He and Nikki were still in the narrow, dimly lit street. She released him and immediately his glow brightened, but Nikki remained a dimmer version of her usual self. He registered that she was appraising him as feelings of disbelief and shock somersaulted through him. He had so many questions that he wanted to ask, but right at the top of the list was simply, “Why would anyone want to design a game like that?”

  She looked at him as if expecting more context to his question.

  Despite his anger at her lack of response, he started to oblige with a more specific question: “I mean, why would Voids provoke more conflict than–––”

  “––would normally occur…John?” she said, finishing his sentence. “Or perhaps, you meant to say… is necessary?”

  “Necessary? Why would I think any of those hideous events necessary?

  “Don’t be so indignant, John! Mortals crave conflict. They have taken every opportunity in history to kill each other, over any excuse that they could think of, including sexual orientation, race and, of course, the most widely used excuse of all… religion.” A smile twitched on her lips as she said this last one. “Hate and greed appear to drive this need to kill, but in fact, humans have evolved an innate desire to kill each other more than any other mammal on the planet. Why do you think that is?”