by DM Sinclair
“Get away from there. Right now,” the Diver snapped. “It doesn’t work anyway. There’s no power, and the CD tray is stuck out. So forget it.”
Although he had no idea what this man was talking about, Ryan sprang to his feet and sidestepped away from the spot. He didn’t know why he should feel intimidated. It wasn’t like the guy could hit him. But instinctively, he didn’t want to pick a fight.
“Don’t let me catch you back here,” the Diver huffed, jabbing a finger an inch into Ryan’s chest. “You don’t even know how to use it right.”
“Okay,” Ryan said, wishing he was the kind of person who had cool rejoinders ready, even for crazy people.
The Diver stepped up to where Ryan had been lying in the trash. He closed his eyes and seemed to drift for a moment, turning in place. He stopped his turn, adjusted a few degrees back. Took a half step forward.
And then he dove head-first into the garbage bags. He kicked his feet like a swimmer as he forced himself deep below the surface.
Ryan inspected the spot where the Diver had disappeared. Partly he wanted to watch for any trace of him coming back up. But he also wanted to figure out how the Diver had known so precisely where he wanted to dive. It didn’t appear any different from any other spot on the hill. None of the garbage bags were distinctive.
He had mentioned a CD tray. Was the guy haunting a piece of stereo equipment? Ryan wondered why anybody would love their stereo so much that they’d stick to it forever.
Whatever it was, it had to be buried below the surface here. The guy had known the exact spot, within inches.
And if Ryan could determine how the Diver knew that, maybe he could locate his mystery object too.
The Diver reappeared at Ryan’s feet, only his head poking out of the trash like he was treading water. “I said get out of here!” He seemed to have picked up a few degrees more rage while under the surface.
“Look,” Ryan pleaded, “I don’t want your… whatever it is.”
“Everybody wants it! It’s a Sanyo!”
“No, I don’t! I just want to know how you…”
“Sanyo!” the man roared, and disappeared again beneath the surface.
The guy was haunting his stereo hard.
Ryan stepped back, chasing a thought. The haunting. That had to be it. The guy was following the pull of his cosmic attachment to a stereo. Ryan had lost track of his own pull, but maybe there was a way to detect it and trace it back to the source.
He probed his awareness for it, and discovered it lurking somewhere just left of center in his abdomen. It was faint, but present, like a persistent itch he had put out of his mind. As he turned in a slow circle he could feel it grow marginally stronger, then weaker again. Maybe he just needed to hone it. Pay closer attention to it. Use it as a compass. This was his only hope. He had to try.
And then he spotted the dump trucks.
There were four of them, far off at the edge of the field, with several bulldozers clustered around them like scavenging rodents. The first truck had already begun emptying its contents onto the field of trash.
It was full of soil.
They were going to bury the field.
EIGHTEEN
He needed to start with distance. The further from the object he travelled, the stronger the pull got. To follow it, he had to start from far away.
He jogged towards the gate. As he drew near he dodged between the dump trucks full of soil. He studied each driver as he passed, considering whether they might listen to him. Most didn’t even glance his direction. Two were already ignoring the pleas of several other ghosts swarming around them. So he gave up that hope and continued running.
By the time he reached the gate the tug of his haunting became pronounced. He focused on it, surprised at how it manifested not only as a physical pull but also a desire. He wanted to go back. He concentrated on the feeling as he turned and started back. Don’t look, he kept telling himself. Feel it. Just go where it pulls you. He even allowed himself to close his eyes. Why not? He couldn’t get hurt.
The pull lost strength as he covered more and more distance, but he kept his focus on it. He refused to let go of it. Like fastening his gaze on a single letter in a page of text, or locking onto one particular voice in a crowd. He blocked out every other sensation, allowing only awareness of the pull.
After a while he sensed himself losing track of it. He knew he was close, but that wasn’t enough. He shifted his attention away from the pull and focused on the desire. Which way do I want to go? Where will I be most comfortable? Where do I belong? He kept walking, not questioning his direction.
His sense of the physical force became thin, faint, and disappeared completely. The desire was all he had left. But it was powerful, and he continued to let it guide him.
Another few dozen steps, and he stopped. He felt a gentle sense of comfort, of satisfaction. Like he could live here on this exact spot and be happy. This, right here, was a perfect spot where everything would be fine forever and maybe he should lie down and have a snooze.
He opened his eyes. He was standing knee-deep in diapers spilling out of a garbage bag. It did little to diminish his warm sense of contentment. Although he felt like it should.
Please, he begged nobody in particular, if it’s a diaper I’m haunting, let it be a clean one.
And then he saw something. Mercifully, it was not amongst the diapers. Rather, it was beneath the diaper bag, half covered by it, poking half an inch into the air. The corner of an envelope on the top of a stack of other envelopes, wet and stained with mud.
Printed on it was the logo of the Post-Mortal Services Clinic.
Ryan’s heart would have skipped a beat, except that it was miles away somewhere having bad things done to it. Maybe.
He kneeled, scrutinizing the envelope and everything around it. Was he haunting the envelope? It seemed like a strange choice. Perhaps the object he sought was mixed in with other trash from the Clinic. He wished that he could dig under the envelopes. There had to be more.
Fighting back revulsion, he pushed his face through the surface near the envelope. But he couldn’t see anything clearly and he pulled back when he got a sudden, depressing sense of how diapers feel about their lot in life.
As he was pondering his next move he noticed a vibration in the air. He translated it into a sound, the low rumble of a compactor trundling across the field towards him. Final compression of the trash, he guessed, before the soil was spread on top of it.
He tensed as the compactor crushed garbage beneath its massive spiked rollers like a gigantic medieval war machine. It would miss him. But not by much.
He stood up, clenching his fists. Please don’t turn this way, please don’t turn this way.
The compactor paused, backed up a few feet, paused again. Ryan watched the driver looking around for spots that needed more compressing. He recognized too late that it was the same driver he had yelled at shortly after waking up in the landfill. As soon as he realized it, Ryan turned away to hide his face.
When he risked a glance back, the driver was staring at him. Ryan had been recognized.
The driver was evidently determined to live up to the names Ryan had called him. He hauled the compactor around in a turn as tight as the lumbering monolith could muster.
It came straight at Ryan.
Although he knew it wouldn’t help, Ryan waved his arms above his head, crossing them repeatedly into an X. “Stop!” he yelled. “Don’t!”
He immediately wished he hadn’t, because the driver treated it as a bulls-eye to aim for. Like he had just seen a fly in the toilet bowl and couldn’t resist aiming his stream at it. He accelerated. And it was hard to tell, but Ryan suspected he was grinning.
Ryan stopped waving and took a fearful step backwards. The compactor could crush all of this trash so far below the surface that he’d never find it again. He watched the machine’s immense wheels annihilating everything they contacted. They tore boxes apart, exploded ga
rbage bags like ripe grapes. And the beast was still steering directly towards him.
Ryan took a step forward again, determined to make a courageous stand.
Uselessly, as it turned out.
The compactor rumbled right through him. He despaired as the pile of envelopes disappeared beneath the roiling chaos of plastic, paper, and mud. The driver looked at Ryan and Ryan thought he saw him do a little victorious eyebrow raise.
Just beyond Ryan, the compactor stopped. It paused. And then reversed through Ryan again, pounding the diaper bag deeper. It kept going in reverse away from him, the driver apparently satisfied that he had tormented Ryan enough.
The trash settled into its new compressed position around him. The envelopes were gone. Lost in the crush. Impossible to find.
But he saw something else, exposed by the compactor’s passage. The sun glinted off glass or plastic, and he had a flash of recognition. He kneeled again to look.
There it was.
A hemisphere of shattered clear plastic, half of it broken off and gone. The liquid and sparkling snow had drained away. But the words “Myrtle Beach” were still printed across the plastic sand. And as Ryan pressed his face near it, he felt a surge of utter contentment. This destroyed, nonsensical souvenir was, to him, the single best thing in the universe. He was near it, and that was in every way good.
Roger had forced him to haunt the snow globe.
He didn’t have long to enjoy the triumph of having found it. He sensed again the rumble of the compactor. Seagulls that had settled to the ground took flight again with panicked squawks. Ryan turned to look behind him.
The compactor was coming back. Fast.
This guy was not going to stop.
The maniacal driver gunned the engine, announcing his malign intent. Ryan could see plumes of black smoke spitting from the twin exhausts on either side of the driver. He could see the ground deforming beneath the beast as it pulverized everything in its path.
Ryan lay down on his stomach and put a hand on each side of the snow globe. He struggled to focus his energy.
What was it Benny had said? Don’t move the thing. Focus on moving the air around the thing.
He focused all his being into his hands, formed them into a kind of sail to catch the air. And he thrust them both forwards into the snow globe.
They went right through. The snow globe defied him.
Behind him he heard the rumble of the compactor intensify to a roar as it closed the distance. Ryan thought he could hear the driver laughing. It was only a matter of seconds before the compactor would reach him. He didn’t know what would happen to him if it shattered the snow globe altogether. Would he shatter too? Was his link to it so strong that he would cease to exist, obliterated like Roger had talked about? Was that Roger’s plan all along?
He tried again, cupping his hands over the snow globe. He waved them through it a few times trying to sense any resistance, some indication of contact. But it felt like air.
He blocked out everything else, trying to forget that there was a massive machine thundering towards him. Again he directed every ounce of his energy all the way down his arms and into his fingers. He circled them around the snow globe and pushed with everything he had. “Come on,” he heard himself muttering. Still the globe didn’t move. But this time he thought he felt that faint membrane pop, the sensation of knowing he was passing through something. It was progress. But it wasn’t progressing fast enough.
He dared to look behind him. The compactor was almost upon him. The driver blasted the horn. A war cry.
Ryan had one more chance. He lined up both hands, palms-out in front of the snow globe like a plow. He closed his eyes and summoned up everything that he was made of. Every particle of him that he could spare he gathered up and concentrated into the plow shape he was making with his hands. He converted himself into pure kinetic force.
Move the air.
The compactor gave one last roar and he felt the air shatter around him as its titanic wheels bore down.
He thrust his hands forward. Move the air, move the air, move the air.
Nothing moved.
Ryan roared, a frustrated animal noise. He couldn’t do it. He had lost.
And then something moved. But not because of him.
A shadow shifted in front of him and a hand—a living hand—reached in out of nowhere, easily hooked the snow globe by its shattered edge, and lifted it clear.
The compactor plowed straight through Ryan, and for a few seconds all he saw was metal and smoke, rubber and fire.
And then it was past him, blasting away across the field, the driver throwing a hand up in a mocking wave.
Ryan didn’t care. He was staring at a man. A man standing in the muck and holding the broken snow globe.
The man was pushing 40, and entirely unkempt in various ways that conflicted even with each other. He was dressed in a long raincoat and threadbare loafers entirely unsuited to walking through a dump. And he was looking at Ryan with mild interest, as though he was curious what Ryan would do next.
Ryan watched him back. They considered each other for silent seconds while the compactor noise faded enough for them to speak.
Ryan asked the most obvious question.
“Who are you?”
“Lowell Mahaffey,” the man replied. “I’m looking for a body.”
Ryan stared and wondered why this man holding the snow globe enraged him.
“So am I,” Ryan said.
NINETEEN
A dense rain sloshed against the windshield of Lowell’s alarmingly shimmying Cavalier as they sped along the Mass Pike towards the city. Ryan found it hard to tell where they were. Veils of rain obscured any landmarks they passed. And Lowell’s car had no windshield wipers at all, so the glass was a steady inch-thick waterfall plunging through their line of sight. It was inconceivable that Lowell could see well enough to drive safely. Ryan might have feared for his life if he still had a life to fear for. But they had been driving for a half hour, so the landfill must have been twenty or thirty miles outside the city at least.
“So,” Lowell said, “you got your ghost pulled out. On purpose?”
“Yes.” Ryan had explained his situation as they pulled away from the landfill with the snow globe balanced precariously on the console between them. Unburdening himself had been a relief, though he wished Lowell hadn’t laughed. Mostly at the shirt.
“Why would you do that?” Lowell asked.
“Because it makes sense.”
“Does it, though?”
Ryan fought annoyance. He’d gone through this with himself so many times, it bothered him to have to explain it to somebody else. “Because I’m good now. Good health, no big problems. I want my forever to be good.”
“I guess,” Lowell grunted.
Ryan felt like turning it back on him. “Why wouldn’t you do it?”
Lowell snorted. He glanced down at himself. “I’m not sure this is who I wanna be forever, you know?”
Ryan threw the subject away, trying to force Lowell back on track. “So how did you end up back there?”
“Just so we understand each other,” Lowell said, “by law I’m not allowed to tell you the details of the case I’m working on. But I kinda really want to.”
“Then tell me. I told you everything about me.”
“I can’t tell you anything,” Lowell said. “It’s a law. Probably. I mean, that sounds right, doesn’t it?”
“I have no idea. So why not just tell me? You said you were looking for a body. Whose body?”
“You’re falling behind.”
“What did I miss?”
“No, I mean you’re falling behind.” Lowell pointed at Ryan’s seat.
Ryan realized that his body was sinking backwards through the upholstery. He was halfway into the padding of the passenger seat, his torso hidden inside the backrest and his face sticking out of the headrest. He had taken a few taxis and airplanes traveling to Everest, but still
struggled with having no inertia. Having to work consciously to match speed with a vehicle took effort. It didn’t help that Lowell’s driving was worryingly erratic. Ryan wondered how complete Lowell’s understanding of the concept of a steering wheel was.
He squirmed himself forward. “Okay, so, you think I’m connected to your case?”
“Let’s just say that my client, whose name I’m not gonna say, finds himself in a… condition—”
“He’s dead.”
“I’m not gonna say. But yeah, he’s dead. But the thing is, he doesn’t remember how he got in this… ‘condition’.”
“I know what the condition is. You already said he’s dead.”
“I’m not gonna say. I’ll just say this: do you think it’s a coincidence that two ghosts who lost their bodies turn up in the exact same landfill just a couple of days apart?”
“Hmm,” Ryan said.
“Do you?” Lowell asked again. “I’m seriously asking. I mean, it seems weird to me, but does it to you?”
“I don’t know.”
Lowell looked crestfallen. “You don’t?”
“I have no idea. Maybe it happens all the time.”
“Really? I thought I was onto something there.”
“Well, maybe you are. I mean, I just don’t know.”
“But it’s worth looking into, right? Like, investigating deeper?”
Ryan stared at him, trying and failing to spot sarcasm or insincerity. “You said you’re a professional detective, right?”
Truck taillights loomed out of the mist of spray ahead, and Lowell jammed on the brakes. Ryan hurtled forward and found himself with his lower body in the engine block of the car, the rain and road spray blasting through his torso and the engine thrumming inside his legs. His thinking got hazy, disconnected, as the raindrops carved ant tunnels through his being. He struggled to keep his shape.
He forced himself backwards through the windshield to his seat, and his mind cleared as he got cohesion back. “Warn me next time,” he said.
“Next time what?”