by DM Sinclair
The morgue was empty. The gurney Margie had retrieved was against the wall across from Ryan, but Margie herself, and whoever she had been talking to, were gone. The silence was total, a pressure that engulfed him on all sides.
Ryan shrank back into the drawer. If Roger had caught Margie, she had probably just made some excuse and covered up. Surely she’d come looking for Ryan when she could.
But he didn’t want to wait. What if she needed him right now? If Roger was firing her, there might still be a chance for Ryan to stop it.
He pushed himself through the wall into the open space of the morgue and crept back into the hall. It stretched infinitely, flooded with subterranean silence. The light spilling in from the few open doors ahead made pulsating green trapezoids on the floor.
Ryan crept forward, wishing his footsteps would make a sound, anything to break the silence. His soft glow made dim moving shadows behind the pipes that lined the walls as he slid along the tunnel.
He dashed through a pool of light from an open door, though he realized right away that this was pointless. If anything, light hid him better than darkness. Still, he tried to press himself against the wall as he moved.
As he neared the stairs he detected a sound from further up the corridor. The unmistakable rising electrical drone of the gray box.
Somebody in the exam room ahead was charging it.
He crept forward towards the exam room door. He hoped he might see a shadow of Margie moving inside, or hear her wheeling around on her stool, but there was nothing. The hum of the box, which had already cleared the lower octaves, was the only thing he could sense. The sound was a presence, a warning voice, an alarm.
Just as he was about to peek in, there was movement in the stairs. Through the spaces between stairs he saw a pair of feet descending with an oddly robotic deliberation, making no sound at all. Not a living person. They were ghost feet.
Ryan sank back into the ducts. He kept pushing backwards until he was fairly certain no part of him was exposed. But it was too far. He was all the way inside the exam room.
The room was empty, everything exactly where they had left it. There was even still a leaf of lettuce from Margie’s sandwich wilting pathetically under the table. The gray box sat on its cart in the corner. It was powered on, and passing through the mid range of tones now. The progress bar on the display was past fifty percent.
Through the door he saw the ghost, whoever it was, emerge from the stairwell into the hall. Ryan pressed himself against the wall next to the door, then forced himself to sink into the wall. Not too far this time. He struggled to ignore the concrete wall’s profound loneliness as he disappeared into it.
He waited, holding his breath for no actual reason other than it made him feel more like he was hiding.
Nothing happened for a very long time.
The ping from the box reaching peak charge startled him. The piercing pitch of its capacitor saturated the exam room.
Finally he dared a look, pushing his face out of the wall. The room was still empty. The ghost was nowhere in sight.
He emerged again and risked a look into the hall. Nobody was in the stairs to the right. But when he looked left, down the long hall towards the morgue, he caught sight of a familiar figure drifting away from him.
A familiar headless figure. Trudy.
Just as he looked, she stopped moving. Her shoulders swiveled a few degrees, back towards him. Had she sensed him there? If she had a head, would it be looking at him?
He ducked into the room. Pressed himself backwards to hide in the wall again.
Before he could reach the wall, a shadow shifted across the floor at his feet. It couldn’t be his. He didn’t make a shadow anymore. Somebody was behind him.
He spun around.
A figure was coming at him fast. Dark. Alive.
Rapid footfalls as the form lunged at him.
Horseshoe-shaped paddles flashed into the light, long wires snapping taut as the figure leapt.
He heard the pop-sizzle of the box discharging. The room lit up blue.
A force seized him. He felt again that vertiginous roll that wouldn’t stop, like falling in all directions. He lost all sense of up, down, even of himself as his energy was compressed, kneaded, and finally locked in place, frozen by an irresistible force.
It would have been agonizing if he could feel pain. He could see only smears of color, hear only a static sizzle close enough to be inside his head.
He struggled to refocus his consciousness in one direction where he could see light. You’re dead, he thought as dread crushed him. Actually dead this time. Go into the light. That’s what you’re supposed to do, isn’t it?
But as the light came into focus he saw that it was a bare, dangling fluorescent light, flickering. Not the kind of light anybody wants to go into.
A human form blocked the light, looking down at him. He couldn’t see features. He tried to call out but his molecules were locked in place.
The figure cocked its head, studying him. And then it reached for something he couldn’t see.
Another pop-sizzle. Another spark of blue.
The world pitched around Ryan, pulled out of shape, twisted out of focus, drained of light. And he finally lost all sense of everything.
FIFTEEN
“Is that a dentist chair?”
“It was here when I moved in,” Lowell said, forcing a smile.
As soon as Lucinda and Rufus Flowers stepped into his office, Lowell knew he had made a mistake. When he ran into Lucinda in the lobby of the police station it had seemed like a calculated risk to offer her his services. There was no telling how complicated her case was going to be. And now that she was here, he had premonitions of expenses and research and lots and lots of difficult actual detective work. As a detective, he hated that. But he had to hear her out and look for his angle. Maybe there would be something.
“Please, sit down.” He clutched a pen with the sincere intention of taking notes on the napkin he had saved from lunch.
Lucinda Flowers was a thin, slight woman in her mid-to-late-forties. She carried herself as if shouldering the weight of a fifty-pound sack of corn. Her husband Rufus, on the other hand, was well over six feet and enormous in girth, and yet seemed almost to glide. Though the fact that he was a ghost might have contributed to the illusion.
Lucinda went for the folding chair and her ghost husband Rufus scanned the spacious office for where he was supposed to sit. Lowell took the moment of confusion to size them both up. He studied Rufus first, taking in his crisp but ill-fitting suit, his scalp that was ungracefully balding in two separate spots on front and back, his nails that, even as a ghost, clearly needed trimming, the wrinkles around his eyes, the mole on his cheek that his ghost form rendered as a distracting bright spot. Lowell compiled a total mental picture. Rufus, he deduced, had been a mid-level executive in an investment firm, though he had lost his job shortly before his death and bought the new suit—the best he could afford with his severance pay—for interviews. Lucinda was undoubtedly a teacher, possibly pre-school though more likely kindergarten or first grade, and he was fairly certain she had two older sisters that she resented for their success. She was also, he quickly surmised, allergic to milk.
“May I ask what you do, or did, Rufus?”
“I sold toilet parts.”
“And you, Lucinda?”
“I’m an assistant at a litigation management firm.”
Dammit.
Hoping for a win on at least one point, Lowell tried: “Something to drink? Some milk maybe?”
“If you have some.”
“Never mind.” Wrong on all counts. Lowell had long ago learned never to say his deductions out loud, and he was grateful for that habit once again. He pretended to make note of their vocations on his napkin, though what he actually wrote was “don’t deduce anymore”.
Rufus finally resolved to just stand next to his wife rather than continuing the quest for a seat. Lowell conside
red acknowledging his lack of furniture, but it was a discussion he didn’t feel like getting into again so he left it alone.
Lowell dreaded the answer but managed finally to choke out the question anyway. “How can I help you?”
“We need you to find Rufus,” Lucinda said.
Lowell glanced over at Rufus, standing next to her with his arms folded, and he wondered if maybe this case might be easier than he thought. Does she not know he’s there? “Um… case closed, then.” He laughed, pointing at Rufus. The joke didn’t go over well. Both of them were looking at him like he’d scribbled obscenities on their living room wall in permanent marker. He forced himself to turn serious. “I don’t think I follow.”
“Not his ghost,” she said. “We need you to find the rest of him.”
“You mean his body?”
The word seemed to push her to the brink of tears. Rufus tried to put a hand on her shoulder for comfort but it went right through.
“You do know,” Lowell said, “that I specialize in locating missing ghosts, not bodies? Have you seen my business card?”
“No.”
“Well if you had, you’d know that it says ‘I find ghosts’.” What are you doing, he thought, angry at himself. Why are you talking them out of this? You need it.
“You came to me,” Lucinda said.
Lowell had to admit that she had him there. “Okay, what’s the story?”
In contrast to his broad and towering form, Rufus’s voice was whiny and nasal, like he had kazoos jammed high in his nostrils. “I’m not dead,” he said.
Lowell stared at them, flicking his eyes from one to the other, waiting for somebody to elaborate. “I actually think you might be,” he tried.
“No, see, I worked late, closed up the store. What is it now, Lucinda, a week ago?”
She nodded.
“I remember walking across the parking lot to my car. Must’ve been eight, nine o’clock. And then, boom, it’s like I blink and next thing I know, I got no body anymore.”
Lowell still couldn’t see the mystery in this. Lots of people reported dropping dead with no warning whatsoever. “Unh huh,” he said, pretending to make careful notes. But what he wrote this time was ‘I am making notes’. “No offense, Rufus, but you look like a man who… let’s put it this way, you’re probably in the high risk bracket for just about every heart disease on the market, am I right?”
Rufus frowned. “I heard about when people die, they can feel themselves leaving their body. And they can look down on themselves and see how they died.”
“I’ve heard that too.”
“Well that never happened. When I figured out I was a ghost, I was fifty miles outside the city, and my body wasn’t anywhere around. I looked for it.”
“As soon as Rufus came home,” Lucinda said, dabbing at the corner of her eye with a tissue “we went back to the parking lot at the store to check. The car was still there, but his body wasn’t. And nobody ever found it. We asked everyone. It could be anywhere. It could be…” Her voice cracked and faded out.
Rufus nodded and leaned into her. She seemed comforted by him overlapping her. “We thought maybe I got mugged or something, and my body would turn up in a hospital or a morgue.” He shook his head. “A week, and still nothing.”
Lowell was now, he had to admit, somewhat intrigued. “If you got murdered, you’d remember it. And you’d definitely have seen your body after you left it.”
Both of them nodded in reply.
“So where’s my body?” Rufus asked, like Lowell should already know.
Every ghost Lowell had ever talked to could describe in great detail exactly how they died, and how their body had looked as they floated above it. Every single one. Even ones that died in their sleep. It was the ghost equivalent of talking about the weather. If you sat on the bus next to a chatty one, that’s what they’d be yakking about for the whole ride—how they had fallen off a building or choked on gum, how their body was lying face-down in the toilet or had the dumbest look on its face. How did Rufus Flowers get out of his body and fifty miles away, without remembering dying or seeing his body at all?
Lowell leaned back in his chair. He felt the blinds cut into his fingers. “Okay, so yeah, there’s a case here. Not something I’d usually be into, but you know, a case. And don’t get me wrong, because whatever happened to you definitely sucks… but why not just be a ghost and, like, move on? Why do you need the body so badly?”
The couple glanced at each other. A silent, awkward communication.
“It’s not so much the body,” Lucinda said. “It’s something that’s… on it.”
“My wedding ring,” Rufus said. He held up his hand so Lowell could see the ghost version of the ring. It looked painfully snug on his thick finger. “It has…” He glanced at his wife again, and she caught his eye and then looked at the floor. Struggling with her composure. “…sentimental value.”
It looked to Lowell like a plain metal band. And a problem. “Somebody could have just taken it off the body,” he said.
Rufus yanked on the ring a few times. It didn’t slide at all. “It doesn’t come off anymore. I’ve gained some weight since we got married. So it’ll be with my body, unless somebody took extreme measures.”
And if I find it, what extreme measures will you use to get it off? Lowell wondered, but didn’t ask.
Lucinda’s eyes welled up again, and she buried her nose in the tissue. “It’s not fair,” she said, sobbing.
“I’m still here, Lucinda,” Rufus said gently.
“He made my coffee every day,” Lucinda said to Lowell. She was imploring. As if there was something he could do about it. “He drove me to work. He was warm. He never even died, and now…”
Rufus reached down to take her hand. But of course he couldn’t. She stared forlornly at his hand floating halfway through hers.
Lowell shifted in his chair. He wasn’t buying the sympathy act. He judged that they were probably fishing for a discount, which only made him want to bill more. He twiddled his thumbs while Lucinda composed herself.
“What do you think, Mr. Mahaffey?” Rufus asked.
Lowell had a mental air-raid siren that went off anytime a case was likely to be too complicated for him to solve. It was the only instinct he had that was ever actually right, and he trusted it implicitly. At this moment it was blasting at such mental volume that he feared it might form a tumor in his brain.
The well-practiced, easily-delivered words “I’m not going to take your case” were lined up and ready to march. But he swallowed them. Forcing a smile onto his face was like trying to make a hand impression in cement that was already mostly dry. But he managed it. He made a careful note on the napkin that said ‘do it’. “My rate is three hundred a day plus expenses,” he said. Lots and lots of expenses. “And I can start today.”
Lucinda’s face didn’t change. She continued staring at her hands. But Rufus, at least, looked relieved. “Where will you start?” he asked.
Lowell wasn’t at all sure. There had to be a way around this. They had already searched the parking lot, the last place Rufus could remember being alive. And there seemed to be virtually nothing else to go on. He had one hope. One avenue he could go down. And if it turned up nothing, he would be forced to walk away from these people and watch his batting average go down. Again. But he needed a case. He needed to try.
Show confidence, he thought. Let them know you do this every day, and you have a plan.
“Let’s start with this… when you realized you were a ghost, you said you were fifty miles outside the city? Where, exactly, were you?”
SIXTEEN
Consciousness slapped Ryan hard across the face.
He could see, and that seemed new. But he couldn’t remember ever not seeing. He must have been seeing without realizing it, and now he realized it.
Raindrops pelted him and he felt them burrowing through him like voracious termites. The world was made of wet gray and he susp
ected it was cold.
He limited his vision to a specific cone, as he had become accustomed to doing, but he couldn’t get it into focus. There was a lighter gray area that must be the sky, though even it was murky and the only way to distinguish it from the ground was that the rain wasn’t coming out of the ground.
He struggled to focus. He saw what looked like a mountain far across a plain. The plain was blanketed in lumpy dark gray-green boulders with a sheen like packed garbage bags, and around the boulders the ground was thick with mud and criss-crossed with trenches full of slow-flowing sludge. The sky dragged low over the mountain, roiling and sagging. It was like no landscape he had ever seen on Earth.
I’m truly dead now.
He guessed that he must have passed into another plane of existence. And from the looks of it, not one of the good ones. He could not sense temperature but a chill rippled through him and his soul shivered.
I am doomed to spend eternity here. Banished from my world.
His despair at that thought was diminished slightly when a bulldozer trundled past, narrowly missing running over his feet.
He re-focused his vision sense as best he could and studied the plain that extended between him and the mountain. He blinked several times, to the extent that a ghost can blink at all. And it became clear, the rocks that looked like garbage bags weren’t rocks that looked like garbage bags.
They were garbage bags.
The mountain itself was less a mountain and more a towering heap of trash, which the bulldozer was buzzing around trying to keep somehow organized.
It’s a landfill.
This was only slightly better than the alien dimension he had thought himself to be imprisoned in. But better. He was glad he hadn’t figured out yet how to detect smells.
Ryan struggled to remember how he had arrived here. But he had no recollection at all. It was as though he had ceased to exist for a span of time. But how much time? He could only dimly recall even what had happened in the embalming room at the Clinic.