by DM Sinclair
Lowell was lying on his back at roughly a 45-degree angle, his head back on the headrest and his mouth lolling wide open, permitting some truly astonishing snores to thunder out. Ryan wondered if perhaps it was impossible to lie on such a chair with your mouth closed. Were they designed that way? Of course they would be.
Ryan yelled louder. “Lowell!” If he were haunting a place before the Blackout, a yell that loud would have curdled the blood of the living. Yet still, Lowell didn’t move at all.
Ryan stepped up close to the chair and put his mouth right next to Lowell’s ear. “Lowell! You’re fired!”
“Hey, that’s not fair,” Lowell replied indignantly.
But the voice didn’t come from the sleeping body in the chair. It came from behind Ryan, from the office door. Ryan jumped back from the chair and whirled around, stunned.
Lowell stood just inside the still-closed door.
Lowell also lay in the dentist chair, emitting snores that flirted with the Richter scale.
Door-Lowell was translucent, glowing, immaterial. Unquestionably Lowell, and definitely a ghost. While chair-Lowell was solid and very evidently alive.
Ryan’s mind struggled to come up with an explanation that made any sense at all.
Lowell—ghost Lowell—grinned. “You can’t fire me,” he said. “I just found out what happened to your body.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
Four years before the Blackout, Lowell Mahaffey wasn’t a detective. He was a cab driver.
And he died because he didn’t floss.
He brushed only irregularly, but it was the not-flossing that killed him.
It was the buildup of plaque and bacteria between his left mandibular second and third molars over a dozen years that caused a deep cavity and infection below the gumline. It was the infection that hurt. It was the pain that prompted him to make his first dental appointment in more than a decade. It was the dentist who insisted that he undergo routine surgery to clear the infection. And it was during the surgery that, due to an unpredictable interaction between a particular brand of local anesthetic and another particular brand of laxative, Lowell Mahaffey suddenly suffered cardiac arrest and unspectacularly died with a long tendril of stringy drool dangling from the corner of his mouth.
The drool stuck. The death didn’t.
Because his dentist was a quick thinker. He had taken courses to learn the good way of hitting people in the chest. And he was able to drag Lowell back to life after 45 seconds of full-on, actual death.
But during those 45 seconds, Lowell rose out of his body and passed through the wall and saw the world teeming with the spirits of the dead. And it was incredible and terrifying to be one of them, and to realize with stark clarity that the mortal life is a blink, a grain of sand on a beach that never ends, a split second in an eternity.
Then the dentist hit his chest and he was yanked back into his body by some supernatural rubber band, and when he opened his eyes and breathed again all the ghosts were gone.
This, of course, was exactly the kind of shattering, revelatory experience that changes a person utterly and forever and makes them re-evaluate all their life’s priorities.
It didn’t, though.
Six weeks later he was back at the dentist having the exact same surgery on the right maxillary first molar. He flossed there somehow even less than anywhere else, even though he didn’t floss anywhere else at all.
Most people who are nearly killed by their dentist tend afterwards to either avoid dentists altogether, or else look for a different dentist who doesn’t almost kill people. Lowell did neither of those things. He positively scrambled back, hopeful that a bit of death might be involved. He even took the same laxative despite not needing it anymore, which had some predictable side effects well into the next day.
His dentist, though, was intensely focused on not killing him this time. For safety, he elected to use a different anesthetic. Lowell spent the entire surgery eagerly awaiting a death that never came. After a while he got bored and, lulled by the numbness in the side of his face and the white noise of the dentist’s drill grinding into his tooth, nodded off.
It was just as good.
Once again he rose out of his body, and once again countless other ghosts were visible to him, milling in the streets. This time he started up a conversation with one, an 18th century gentleman who disapproved strongly of very nearly everything that had ever happened. Alive, Lowell would have walked away in seconds, annoyed. But talking to a ghost was so novel, he was enraptured.
For about 90 seconds.
Then the dentist, not taking any chances, pounded Lowell’s chest again just in case he was dead. He wasn’t, but it revived him anyway. He hurtled back into his body before he had finished opening his eyes.
He was disappointed to have been pulled back. But also thrilled with what he had learned.
Something, he decided, had changed when he died in that dentist chair. He had become untethered from the mortal world and could now, he assumed, cross back and forth at will.
“At will” turned out to be an overstatement. Because no matter how many times he tried at home, he couldn’t make it happen again.
He tried everything. He tried it drunk and sober, asleep and awake, on his side and on his stomach and on his other side. Laxative-full and laxative-free. He tried it in daylight and midnight, hungry and full, hatless and wearing every hat he owned in a big pile so tight that it suffocated his scalp. He tried every single variation he could imagine, pouring every scant ounce of will he possessed into forcing his spirit to break free of his body. Nothing worked.
He finally came to an inescapable conclusion.
It was the chair. Had to be.
So he went back to the dentist.
The dentist was surprisingly unwilling to give him unnecessary surgery. Something about ethics. And he refused almost as strongly to let Lowell sleep there unsupervised.
Lowell could see two possible courses of action. Either he could stop brushing his teeth and continue not flossing while consuming unholy amounts of sugar until he needed surgery again, or he could steal the chair.
So he bought a hacksaw and rented a truck, and almost got caught but didn’t. Afterward, he knew he would have to either find a new dentist, or stop going.
He stopped going. Easier.
He was completely correct about the chair being the key. He had no explanation for it, nor did he ever seek one. The chair was comfortable to sleep in, but unsteady when propped against the wall. Twice it fell over in the middle of the night with him on it. But he kept at it, convinced that it was somehow the key to unlocking the secrets of the afterlife.
And then one night after consuming an entire bottle of red wine—partly out of desperation and partly out of just really liking red wine—he found himself once again drifting out of his body.
He was ready for it. He took his time and explored.
He was surprised, first, to find that his apartment had six ghosts residing permanently in it. He had never noticed signs of haunting, but there they were. And they seemed generally okay with him. They took his being a ghost in stride and struck up some light small talk.
Then he walked outside and spent a full hour wandering the streets among the drifting spirits. He was fascinated, and no longer drunk on the wine but rather on the untethered freedom of immateriality. He tried chatting with a few spirits, pretending to be just another ghost like them. Which he was, except that he could stop being one and they couldn’t. He worried that this might make them envious or bitter, so he told none of them.
His newfound supernatural ability was a novelty for several weeks. He would leave his body and wander among the ghosts a few times a week.
After a while, though, it began to lose its appeal. Conversations with ghosts weren’t really any more interesting than conversations with the living, of which he had more than enough with people in his cab. Even when they’re transparent, boring people are still boring. And all ghosts ev
er talked about was how they had died.
He considered that it might be entertaining to tell some living people about his extra-corporeal excursions, but he worried that he’d be seen as a wacko. Before he learned to leave his body, that’s certainly how he would have seen anybody claiming to have left their body.
He amused himself briefly by searching for his ancestors, seeing how far back in his family tree he could go. He hit a dead end only three generations back, and even those ones didn’t seem impressed that he had descended from them. Some even seemed genuinely disappointed that their efforts at continuing their family line had led only to him. He had hoped to find his way back to ancestors from interesting times like the middle ages, but it didn’t happen.
On top of all that, he felt like it was getting increasingly difficult to get back into his body. Like his ghost was getting used to the freedom of drifting around and didn’t want to be caged up in a body anymore. Or perhaps like his body was getting annoyed with him: “In or out! Make up your mind!” Somewhere around two months after stealing the dentist chair, he entirely lost interest in leaving his body. For a while it only happened by accident.
And then he got lucky. When somebody got murdered.
He wasn’t the murderer. Nor was he the victim. He wasn’t even a witness. He had nothing whatsoever to do with the murder, apart from the fact that it happened in his building, three floors down from him. He woke up one evening to police lights flashing in his window, and went down to see what was going on. He got the story from a gathering of his neighbors already in the street, who had gotten it from one of the cops.
A man had been murdered on the second floor. Killed, they were told, by a meat thermometer jammed into his eye.
Every tenant in the building was interviewed by a detective. His name was Detective Blair, and he had a determined, hard-boiled air about him that positively insisted that he would be the one to solve this case. Lowell had no information to offer. He did inquire, though—out of pure curiosity—whether the police had used the reading on the meat thermometer to confirm that the guy was dead. He got only an annoyed grunt in reply. Detective Blair moved on, unburdened with evidence.
Lowell assumed that would be the end of it. Until two weeks later when he was interviewed again. Once again, Detective Blair came knocking, asking exactly the same questions he had asked before. All the gung-ho was gone. The case had lost its glamor and was dragging. Lowell had seen TV reports about it. The murderer was now called the “Turkey’s Done Killer”. Blair looked for all the world like he’d rather be off somewhere drinking than asking these questions again when he already knew the answers.
Blair showed up again two weeks later and brought the same desperate questions. “Is there anything, anything at all, no matter how small it seems?”
Lowell was annoyed at being interrupted a third time. And it was annoyance, more than altruism or interest, that led to his finally getting involved.
After Blair had moved on down the hall, Lowell dragged his dentist chair out of the closet and leaned it against the wall. He stabilized it with some milk crates, then popped a decongestant capsule and lay down. It had been weeks since he had made any out-of-body excursions, but he slipped easily back into it. Twenty minutes after lying down, he was drifting above his body and hoping the chair didn’t dump him on the floor before he found what he was after.
He drifted into the hall and down three flights of stairs to the second floor. It was easy to spot which apartment the murder had taken place in because it still had police tape across the door. Apparently they intended to leave the place undisturbed until the case was solved.
He pushed through the tape and the door without any trouble, and drifted into an apartment nearly identical to his, except decorated. He marveled at what somebody who cared about their apartment could do with it, and vowed to spruce up his own place as soon as he had time. He was disappointed, though, that there was no chalk outline of a body on the floor. He wondered if the police actually did that.
He counted seven ghosts haunting the place, none of whom seemed perturbed in the slightest by his intrusion. Four of them were seniors from various decades, lounging and staring at each other. Two were in full football uniforms, which he was mildly curious about.
The other was clearly the victim. Clearly, because he had a meat thermometer protruding rather noticeably from his left eye. Really only the very end of it was actually protruding. The rest was decidedly not. He sat on the end of the couch looking sour, as probably anyone would be about having a meat thermometer in their eye.
Lowell drifted over to him and nodded a greeting, making no attempt to not stare. How could you not?
The murder victim, whom Lowell knew from news reports to be named Herbert Wendt, glanced up at Lowell with his right eye. The meat thermometer swiveled in his left eye socket as he shifted his gaze, like a giant cartoon eye on a stick. Lowell had to fight to keep from laughing. And to keep from checking what the temperature reading said.
Wendt didn’t appear to want to talk, so Lowell kept it brief. “Who did it?” he asked, lifting his chin to gesture at the thermometer.
Ten minutes later, back in his body, Lowell pushed a piece of paper with a name and address on it through the window of Detective Blair’s car. And the next day the Turkey’s Done Killer was arrested, and Detective Blair received a citation and promotion. The public was disappointed to hear that the arrested man did not possess a psychopathic obsession with meat thermometers. The thermometer had just been convenient at the time he wanted to kill Mr. Wendt because of a wildly overheated argument concerning the Red Sox.
Buoyed by his success at solving that mystery, Lowell kicked himself for not realizing sooner what a unique business opportunity his special new talent offered. Surely if he played his cards right, got a private investigator’s license, made some friends in the police department, and properly exploited his ability, he would be set for life. He could solve every cold case by simply asking the victim who did it, find serial killers by interviewing the people they had killed, assist the cops with every investigation either behind the scenes or in front of them. And he would make sure he was paid handsomely for it. His poor dental hygiene had granted him a gift, with which he could both change his own life, and help others in their time of need.
And then the Blackout came along, and suddenly everybody on Earth had that gift too.
Things went steadily downhill for Lowell after that.
TWENTY-NINE
“Please, come in,” Roger Foster said, holding the door open and stepping aside to usher him in.
“Why thank you,” Lowell said. “And thank you for seeing me at such short notice.”
Try to look rich, he kept telling himself. Look rich, sound rich. This is only going to work if he thinks you’re rich.
As he slid past, he made sure not to let Roger come into contact with his ghostly substance. If Roger even brushed through him he might pick up Lowell’s emotions and sense the deception.
Roger closed the door and circled around the desk to face Lowell. “What can I do for you, Mr. Hammond?”
Hammond was the richest-sounding fake name Lowell could think of when he had arrived. He stole it from the rich guy who made dinosaurs out of mosquitoes in Jurassic Park.
In the hours leading up to the appointment, Lowell had gone over in his mind exactly how to have this conversation. He had rehearsed maybe ten different approaches. All of them felt fake. But rather than continuing to practice until he came up with one that he felt comfortable with, he did what he almost always did, which was to decide that he would wing it.
Now that he was here, the winging wasn’t happening. Everything felt perfectly wrong. He wanted nothing more than to flee straight through the office wall.
“Yeah, yes,” he started, “I needed to talk to you about a bit of a sensitive matter.”
“I can assure you of complete confidentiality,” Roger replied with a sympathetic smile.
This guy, Lowell thought, is kind of awesome. I would buy a diamond-encrusted casket from this man.
“I have heard,” Lowell went on, “that your facility offers certain… services.”
“We offer a number of services, yes. They are outlined in our pamphlet. Would you like me to read them to you?” Roger reached for a stack of pamphlets propped upright on the corner of his desk.
“That won’t be necessary,” Lowell said. He leaned forward conspiratorially. “I kind of think the service I’m talking about isn’t in your pamphlet.”
Roger’s eyebrows descended so far they seemed about to absorb his eyes like bushy sponges. “All of our services are listed in the pamphlet.”
“Yeah, no, I’m sure they are. Except for the ones that aren’t. Am I right?”
“You are not,” Roger said curtly. “In fact, it is specifically the function of the pamphlet to list all of our services. Were there any services not listed on it, the pamphlet would not be serving its purpose.”
“Can I speak bluntly, Mr. Roger?”
“Foster. And yes, of course.” Roger sat back in his chair, crossed his spindly legs and folded his hands in his lap. Lowell took note of the pose to use in his own office, because the casual I’m-approachable-but-don’t-mess-with-me attitude it conveyed was astonishingly cool. He wished Roger taught a course in how to sit.
Lowell searched for a place to begin, and a way to begin there. “You’ve probably noticed by now that I’m a ghost.”
“Mr. Hammond, I spend all day talking to people both living and not-quite-so-living. I scarcely notice the difference anymore.”