by J. R. Rain
Like my cell, my home phone’s voicemail was swamped to the point where I didn’t even bother to plow through all the messages. I’d already phoned Malena Ayon from the car going in and texted the Gypsy King, asking if we were still on for tomorrow. The idea gave me enough of a tingle, in spite of my exhaustion, to let me know I was still into the dude―and I hadn’t even known about the roses yet. On the way home, I’d phoned Harper, just so he’d have my back if the press demanded any physical proof that I was, you know, not an actual zombie, and finally Mom, who acted like I’d just woken her up―as if―but didn’t appear to have heard anything about Devon being on the news. Well, she watches Fox. However, she had some good lawyer advice for me, which she repeated two or three times for emphasis, and for once, I actually paid attention. After all these years, my mother’s almost infinite divorce experience was finally coming in handy for me.
However, my heart sank even further when I realized just how much a lawyer was going to cost me. Even a bad one. Keeping this house might not even be an option. Mom had the good sense to get off before I mentally crunched all the numbers; even though I hadn’t actually attempted to do so since high school, when I needed to pay my SAT fees, she remained eternally fearful that I was about to touch her up for a loan.
Suddenly, the modest little house―the very structure itself, like the bones of a living, breathing organism―seems infinitely precious to me. It’s as if each of the rooms below, revealed by the X-ray gaze of my ghost eyes, contain some part of me, some sliver of my past, as if my corpse had been cremated and my ashes sprinkled to permeate every beam and floorboard and crevice and crack in the plaster. Had that really happened and I’d just forgotten? Had all that seemingly taken place after my shooting just been a dead woman’s delusion, a reflex action of the brain, a reality born completely of electrical spasms inside dying neurons? Was this just the body’s way of coming to terms with death?
For a few moments, I feel wildly dizzy and disoriented. Then I realize this perception on my part is just a symptom of the mulo’s attachment to his home soil―the way Burchalter had insisted on being buried in his back yard.
Beneath my gaze, Tamara stirs in her sleep, talking to herself, and her astral self is now visibly distinct from her slumbering flesh. It slowly sits up on the edge of the bed, eyes still closed; her baby-fat still gives her the look, even in her thirties, of a child. Here we go, I tell myself, and sink through the roof to float down beside her.
“We should buy those painted pine cones,” she says clearly to me. “We always bring back souvenirs for Monica and the other PAs. It’s a tradition.”
“Tamara,” I say gently. “Can you hear me?” How do you talk to somebody who’s asleep and dreaming? Like a sleepwalker, I guess. She’s wearing a sort of shapeless night dress that’s all boobs and belly; without her Goth boots, Rabbi Tamara looks truly tiny.
“Rishya! You’re here!” She smiles. “You look so beautiful, I thought you were a mountain.”
“Thanks.” I think. “Can you open your eyes for me, Tamara?”
“My eyes? But my eyes are open―I can see you. And the snow and the blue sky. We’re on a trip to―”
“No, I need you to hold your hand in front of your face and stare at your palm, Tamara.” I’ve already pulled her hand up and opened its fingers one by one; the palm is as wrinkled as a monkey’s paw. “Open your eyes, girl.”
And she does, staring intently at her palm. It’s as if I’m watching a mist clear from them. “Rishya? Am I awake?”
“Awake and asleep at the same time.” I turn her around and show her the white lumpy figure of her physical self sleeping in the bed, chest rising and falling under the coverlet.
“So this is…this is where you go when you die…I’ve always wanted to see it.” Don’t be in such a hurry, I feel like saying, but don’t. “Do you come here a lot? What do we do? What are the rules here?” she asks me next, and I realize I don’t have an answer for that. I’ve been seeing this world, speaking to the shades since I was first murdered, but inhabiting it as we are doing now, fully immersed in it? This is only my third trip across what Bull calls “the river” ―and I’ve spent most of that time like a cat on the roof.
Let’s ask, I say, and we walk through the wall into the living room, where Bull and Lorna are necking or smooching or whatever. Once I mockingly referred to it as “canoodling” to Lorna, and she laughed at me, saying that word was old-fashioned.
At the sight of us, they spring apart and Bull hurriedly readjusts his buttons.
“Rabbi Tamara wants to talk to somebody who understands how things work on this side―you know, spiritually,” I add quickly before the detective can get his feelings hurt. “You mentioned something about priests or gurus you knew about, and I wondered if you could introduce her to anybody like that. Somebody who can answer all her questions about death.”
“Sure, I get ya, toots.” Then to Lorna, “What about that radio lady you used to go see at the roller-rink arena, Sister Mary something.”
“Mary Katherine Burge.” Lorna shrugs. “She just wants money. They all do.”
“Some things never change,” I say.
“Hey, that’s not fair!” says Tamara indignantly. “Aren’t there any churches or temples? Isn’t there anybody I can talk to here?”
“Well, there’s a kind of a saint guy who hangs around hereabouts,” Bull says after a while. “We can probably find him out in Echo Beach. A lot of newbies make a whatchamacallit―”
“A pilgrimage,” says Lorna.
“Right, a pilgrimage to see the guy soon as they pass over. He’s got a rep for calming down the hard cases. He can maybe answer some of your questions, though I can’t see what you need to know I can’t tell you.”
The big man is sulking. After an astral phone call to the Gimp at a police box, he grudgingly volunteers to drive us out there in his Hudson, which is parked out front, after directing a longing glance at Lorna. She shakes her head and lights a cigarette. I make her give me one, too, on our way out. “I already got a bellyful of religious kooks,” she says, glancing at Tamara.
“What was that all about?” Tamara takes a puff of my Kool and then coughs. “Why does she hate me?” McGuinness just shakes his head.
“She grew up in an orphanage run by the nuns.” He starts up his car, which looks a little like a rocket ship in an old movie serial. “Plus she don’t much care for Jews. No offense.”
“Plus ça change…” Tamara mutters from the back seat.
“So where’s the Gimp?” I ask to change the subject.
“Stakin’ out Little Malta. I told him you’d be headed down there tomorrow and to keep an eye out for you. Something’s going on around town lately, something big, but I can’t tell what exactly.”
“You mean in Shadytown? Or on our side, too?”
“Sometimes things have a way of spilling over.”
ull McGuinness’ “saint guy” apparently hangs out at an amusement park at North Beach called Funland, the oldest and once the most famous in the area, now a mostly forgotten and crumbling architectural curiosity.
In the world of the living, the route is pretty much urbanized; you get there via a series of freeways and toll roads leading through ghettos of high-rise apartment buildings until you reach a long, strip mall-lined highway. In the land of the dead, the darkened city falls away after a while, and this last leg is a curving tree-lined parkway beneath the crawling maggot sky of floating dreamers. The vehicles on the road are like something from an antique car meet, models from every past decade imaginable. I keep thinking we’ll meet a ghostly Conestoga wagon next, but no, just a lot of streetcars and streamlined silver buses. A convoy of leather-vested bikers riding skeletal puttering motorcycles passes us; half are bareheaded, but others sport Nazi helmets or old-fashioned stiff caps that have an almost nautical look. Tamara gazes out the window at them like a child.
“Everything here is so soft and old and grey and makes its own mu
sic,” she says in wonder, and for the first time, it occurs to me that maybe everybody sees the Afterlife a little differently. I see it like a cop―starkly, almost in black and white. Tamara, on the other hand, sees it like a religious person, a true believer: all the fuzzy shades in between. I envy her.
Funland looks nothing like how I remember it as a child. My memories of it are of a shabby, rundown carney fair with peeling paint and crumbling plaster beside a cold, windswept brown beach. But tonight, it’s alive with tiny brilliant lights, the Ferris wheels and carousels dipping and spinning like strands of bright drunken diamonds. The music Tamara can hear is everywhere, but so are the sounds of calliopes and lovers screaming―there aren’t many kids here, so most of those lovers look to be about the same age as Mom and Dr. Sid. Until you see them up close, and realize that their faces are flickering with excitement, so that the years seem to fall away from them totally; the happy laughing ones look like teenagers, the sad and lonely ones like they’re a hundred years old and came here straight from their own funerals.
Maybe that’s what the silvery buses in the parking lot are all about.
But there’s real music too: a big band is playing inside a ballroom that looks like a huge gilded wedding cake with arched French windows. It’s a tune I’ve never heard before; half the couples dancing to it are dressed like Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire.
“I need to bring Lorna out here sometime,” mumbles Bull. He’s wearing his embarrassed face. “Thing is, I ain’t much of a dancer.”
“Better than the Gimp,” I tell him, and he laughs.
“You’d be surprised, toots―that mother’s son is pretty light on his feet. What’s left of ‘em, anyhow. That reminds me, I gotta give him a ring soon as I get you ladies settled. He might have something for us.”
This saint of his, who he refers to as “the saint guy” or “Mr. O.K.”, appears to hang out in a second, smaller ballroom, dimly lit and built to resemble a plaster pavilion. It lies halfway along a curving boardwalk, pillared on the landward side like a Moorish castle with closed concession booths between the arched yellow-white columns. But it is the sea that snags my full attention. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Or I should say, my death.
It looks…pregnant. The words I think when I first set eyes on it are “river of souls.” Here in the land of the dead, the ocean glows like a single organism, a giant jellyfish maybe, with a million flickering things seeming to swim inside its depths. It sings with a million clear high voices while salt falls around us like flakes of snow. This sea seems to seduce you like a lover, to invite you in. I take a step toward the edge of the boardwalk planks and the dark muddy sand, but Tamara tugs me away. She wants to go see the guru. The wonderful Wizard of Oz.
This particular wizard, Mr. O.K., turns out to be an old man in baggy carpenter jeans and a torn pajama top perched on a kitchen stool. He has wild grey hair and beard stubble. In the gloom, his eyes glow red, as does the cigarette stub between his gnarled fingers, and he keeps a little piebald white dog on a string. There’s a crowd of pilgrims or well-wishers or maybe just curious souls in the big room, with a small group of adoring women, some quite young, sitting on the floor in a ring around Mr. O. K., who tells anyone who approaches him to call him “Bud.” These women are mostly wearing long white dresses and strike poses like models in an art class. There is a low hum of conversation.
After a long few minutes, maybe an hour―time is fluid on this side―it’s our turn to meet Bud. I blurt the first thing that pops into my head: “That’s the first animal I’ve seen here,” meaning the little dog. Because it is. I just hadn’t thought about it before―it’s as if all the billions of cats and dogs and farm animals in our world don’t come here on this side. Or maybe they don’t have souls.
But Bud has other ideas. “It’s ‘cuz of all the extra babies being born.” He sounds like an old farmer. “Overpopulation, see? Human spirits gotta come from somewhere, so most dead beasts get reincarnated PDQ these days, rushed into the front lines, like in a war. Name’s Sluggo.” The dog wags its tail; I notice it has a big dark ring around one eye, like a bullseye, and a pink snout. I half expect the animal to say something, but it doesn’t.
“Do human spirits get reincarnated, too?” Tamara asks Bud eagerly. There is something electric in the ether this close to the sea; her frizzy corona of hair is sticking out in every direction like orange cotton candy, and I realize that mine probably looks little better.
“Sure they do,” says the old man, and goes on to explain how easy it is to get seduced into it. Apparently after you’re dead, if you start spying on the living and get into watching them have sex, you can get so turned on that you get drawn into a sort of red mist. Then you find yourself trapped inside a human womb and start to forget everything about your past life. You get reborn and “start the whole sorry damn business all over again.” It can also happen, he says, if you’re having “extra good” sex with another spirit on this side; if you have a really insanely great orgasm, he claims, you can also see this red mist.
One of the girls replaces his cigarette with one she lights from her own lips; as she does, someone in an arcade outside screams. This is followed by another, and the souls inside are galvanized into movement toward the exits. Since the place is built like a big octagonal tent, there are eight of these, all open.
“Oh my god!” someone beside us cries out. “A monster’s coming!” Bud just smiles and hands me Sluggo’s string.
“You better take him and git,” he tells me. “Bull says something called a Soul Eater’s on the way.” Now there’s a general rush on to get the hell out of there, even among his female devotees.
“But what about you, Bud? Aren’t you coming with us?” Tamara calls back at him.
Mr. O.K. just shrugs and takes a drag on his Lucky Strike. “Life was just an illusion―so is death, I reckon. Anything’s dumb enough to eat my soul, it’s sure as shit gonna get indigestion.”
But Tamara balks. I guess now she’s had a taste of eternal life, however weird and incomprehensible it is to her, she doesn’t want to wake up and go back to the land of the living. She doesn’t realize what a luxury it is to have body heat and a pulse, I guess. So Bull and I grab her arms and pull her away from the guru and outside through one of the doorways. This is made more complicated by the little dog, which is now straining against the string that serves as its leash, yapping and managing to wrap itself around my legs.
The whole amusement park is emptying out in a panic now, as the Soul Eater rises from the sea.
At first, it kind of looks like a big oil rig emerging from the ectoplasmic water. Thick wires form the bones of its limbs, covered in a sort of crepey black material, like seal skin or oil paper. These form a long black duster, with a white collar beneath its lapels, along with white gloves covering its skeletal claws. From this distance, it reminds me a little of the Gimp; a gigantic version. Its pale face has the same blank dead-fish look, its skin stretched tight over the supporting wires, but the Soul Eater has a long cruelly curving beak jutting from beneath something that looks like a priest’s black wide-brimmed hat. Both leak waterfalls of jellyfish-filled ocean brine.
As it ponderously splashes toward us, it looks more and more like a giant insect, a praying mantis. The noise―music, Tamara would call it―its joints make sounds like the screaming of a million cicadas. Whatever the opposite of light is, that’s what the Eater’s shedding; a cold radioactive negative glow. A wind has sprung up as it strides through the water onto the beach; its suddenly dried-out clothes flap like threadbare funeral home curtains on a clothesline. The wind bowls over deck chairs and scatters garbage across the deserted boardwalk, which now resembles the deck of the Titanic.
“Run!” bellows McGuinness over the howling wind. He looks even weirder than usual, like a greenish X-Ray of himself: all melting bones. He takes off in the direction of the parking lot, followed by the dog, tail between its legs. I grab Tamara’
s hand and drag her along behind them, but for the first time since we’ve been on the shady side, we’re both hampered by our lifelines. Before, they’d behaved like ginormous rubber bands or whatever, almost invisible and never really getting in the way. Now they’re more like thick unwieldy ropes of flesh that we keep stumbling and tripping over.
The world turns a bright ultraviolet, as if an atomic bomb has gone off. The pavilion behind us bursts into black flame; the arcades implode as volleys of debris fly from their windows. There are things scuttling from inside, scurrying across the weathered concrete fairway. Rats. Unreincarnated animal souls. The silhouette of the Soul Eater looms overhead, its blind gaze sweeping from side to side. The creature is hunched over, on the hunt.
Then it spots us.
White-clothed claws the size of those on a bulldozer rake the air overhead as I try to escape, yanking at Tamara. Irrationally, I paw at the place where my Glock should be—as if a bullet could stop this thing. Even through the gloves, its talons rake raw trenches in the concrete as it gropes blindly around for us.
I hear a loud terrified scream as Tamara’s hand is torn from mine. The Soul Eater hoists her up into the air; cruel gleaming beak opening as if to swallow her. She shrieks again and again, her white face turned toward me imploringly.
“Tamara!” I scream after her. “Wake up! Wake up!” I would slap her awake if I could. I realize I should have maybe done that the minute this all began to go down. Then I get the bright idea of tugging hard on her lifeline.
And she is gone.
Leaving me all alone with the Eater. I turn and race as fast as I can through the painted cardboard castle main entrance, not daring even to glance back over my shoulder. Bull’s purple Hudson suddenly swings into view just ahead of me and stops on a dime, the passenger door already open; from the seat beside him, the little white dog is barking soundlessly at me―soundlessly because the whole world has been silenced by the deafening roar of the Soul Eater’s proximity. Twenty yards. Ten. Five. A suffocating shadow descends over me—―then I’m caught and swept up, up, into the air by the clutching claws.