by DM Sinclair
He forced his awareness to center and watched the front of the house, wishing that by some coincidence Caldwell would happen to come out at that moment. Perhaps to walk his dog. Or, much better, to die and let Ryan take his body back. But if he came strolling casually out in Ryan’s body, what could they do? Ryan weighed his various good options for a few minutes before deciding that he didn’t have any.
“I’m going in,” he said. “Follow me with the snow globe.” He let himself gaze at it longingly for a moment. He dearly loved how chintzy and broken it was.
“What are you going to do?”
Ryan didn’t answer. He forced himself through the car door and started down the street to the house. Parking so far down the road had seemed like a good idea at the time. Lowell’s car stood out in this neighborhood and made them look like burglars scoping out target houses. The best they could hope for was that if Caldwell spotted them, he would assume they were there to rob some house other than his.
Every once in a while as they crept forward Ryan could catch a glimpse of the golf course through the trees on the other side of the street. There were a surprising number of ghosts on it. A few living golfers were gamely trying to carry on without letting the dead ones get in the way, but Ryan suspected it was a serious distraction. Some of the ghosts were going through the motions of playing the holes, though they couldn’t hope to actually move a ball. Some of them had even been fortunate enough to die with clubs in their hands, providing their ghosts with immaterial versions of putters and drivers. Those few could at least do proper swings, even if there was no actual prospect of hitting anything. Ryan wondered how many of them had died right there, suffering hypertensive heart attacks from rage at some missed putt, and found themselves bound forever to the course. Eternity on the back nine.
He didn’t bother heading for the gate at the end of Caldwell’s driveway, just hopped the little wall and started straight across the lawn. He again considered what he would do if he went in and found Caldwell at home, walking around in Ryan’s body. Bribery wasn’t an option with a rich guy like this. That left threatening, except that he had nothing to threaten with. Or, as a last resort, begging. He decided that was probably what he was going to be stuck with.
Halfway across the lawn he stumbled and stopped. He was sensing something. The sensation was familiar, but sensed in an entirely unfamiliar way.
He felt, for the first time since leaving his body, hot. Like he had just stepped into bubble of thick, humid air.
He shook off the feeling and took another few steps.
He felt like he had stepped into a furnace. He yelped in pain and looked down at his body, expecting to find himself on fire. Instead all he could see was his particles swirling in miniature hurricanes, bubbles of energy forcing their way to the surface and popping there, creating craters in his form that other particles immediately poured into to make new bubbles.
His substance was boiling, and he didn’t know why.
He took a step back, and felt the sensation cool a little. He could see the roiling of his substance slow down and all the various particles fall back into place. But a single step forward and he felt the heat surge back.
He weighed his options. Go back and give up, or make a beeline for the front of the house and hope to get there before he boiled away into steam.
He was just about to take his first steps when he heard a cry from Lowell behind him. “Ryan! Stop!”
Ryan caught himself and stepped back, relieved to feel the boiling sensation cool off.
Lowell waved him back to the road. “You can’t do that! Sorry, man, I didn’t notice!” He pointed at the nearest lawn sprinkler, just a few feet in from the wall.
Only now, Ryan could see that it wasn’t a lawn sprinkler at all. It was a cluster of miniature parabolic dishes aimed in all directions. All the other objects protruding from the lawn that he had thought were sprinklers were little dish arrays as well.
“It’s a Ghost Wall,” Lowell said, doubled over and out of breath from running. “Like an electric fence for ghosts. This guy likes his privacy.” He scanned the array. There were maybe twelve of the little units, arranged in a grid covering the entire lawn. “Man, he got the full package. That’s probably worth more than the house. And that is one serious garden gnome too.”
The heat was surging up and down Ryan’s form and making it even harder for him to stay focused. He felt himself swaying on his feet. “What happens if I keep going?”
“You can’t. Don’t try.”
Ryan stared at the house, frustrated, trying to spot anyone moving inside the windows. The sunlight was too bright. All he could see was reflection, and hints of curtain and blind.
“Then you need to go in,” Ryan said, hopping back over the wall onto the sidewalk. A pleasant cool washed through him and he sighed with relief.
“I’m not breaking in there,” Lowell said. “You don’t think a house like this has an alarm?”
“Ring the doorbell.”
“And say what?”
Ryan kicked at the ground in frustration, and the lack of impact just made him more frustrated.
Lowell beckoned him to follow back to the car. “Come on, good old fashioned stakeout. I might even have donuts. Not so much for you, I guess. But you’re not missing anything. They’re a week old if I’m lucky.”
Ryan shook his head emphatically and scanned the house and the yard. But even a quick scan of the Ghost Wall units made it clear that they had full coverage of the yard, front and back. There was no way for him to approach the house.
Ryan stopped. There was something he wanted to try.
He hopped the little wall again and started across the lawn, headed straight for one of the little energy projectors.
“What are you doing?” Lowell called after him. He looked nervously up and down the street. “When you creep like that, it looks really suspicious.”
Now that Ryan was aware of it he could hear a soft buzz emanating from the little unit. It must consume a lot of power, he thought. He paid close attention to exactly when he could start to feel the burn from it. He stepped slowly, pausing to check for any sensation before stepping again.
There. He was about five feet from it, and the burn came on fast and sudden. He stepped back quickly to escape it. The unit had a definite range, and it wasn’t long. And the next unit, closer to the house, was ten feet beyond.
“Ryan!” Lowell hissed at him from the other side of the wall.
“Shut up,” Ryan demanded. He had to concentrate.
He assumed the little device projected its field in a circle around itself, and the circles from all the devices overlapped slightly to completely fill the yard. So there weren’t any gaps between them to squeeze through. And presumably they projected upwards as well, probably the same five feet. If he could only pass over them higher than that…
Ryan looked up at the house. There. French doors on the second floor balcony right over the front entrance.
“Ryan!” Lowell whispered again. He looked up and down the street like he was expecting a SWAT team any second. A passing ghost in Victorian garb frowned at him, and at Ryan. “It’s okay,” Lowell said to it casually. “We’re just breaking in.”
Ryan ignored the ghost. “You have the snow globe?” he asked, staring at the balcony.
Lowell patted the pocket of his raincoat. “Yeah. So?”
“I need you to throw it.” He pointed at the balcony. “Up there. When I say.”
Ryan hopped back out of the yard and strode past Lowell and across the street. He remembered that bungee cord elastic snap back at the dump, when the distance between him and his haunting was too great. The more distance he could put between him and the balcony right now, the better chance he had of being slingshotted all the way up there. He didn’t want to fall short and wind up right in the middle of the Ghost Wall.
Lowell followed. “I see what you’re doing. And it’s stupid.”
“Don’t follow me,�
� Ryan demanded. “Get close to the house so you don’t miss.”
“Even if I get you in there, how are you going to get out?”
That gave Ryan pause.
Lowell seemed to sense that he had made a good point, because he pressed it. “Even if everything goes perfectly and you get in there and this Caldwell guy is walking around in your body, what do you do? And that’s assuming he’s even home.”
“I don’t know,” Ryan said. Because he really, truly didn’t.
But what was the alternative? Wait all day for Caldwell to come out? Ryan felt like he had hours at best before he’d waft away to nothingness. Of all the things he could not do right now, the thing he could most not do was nothing at all. He picked up his walking pace to get ahead of Lowell. “Just get ready to throw. When I say.”
Lowell threw up his arms in exasperation. But he gave up protesting, and as Ryan continued walking away he could hear Lowell fishing around in his pocket for the snow globe.
Ryan kept walking until he was all the way across the street and into the trees. He went right through the golf course fence and onto a fairway for extra distance. Some of the golfer ghosts complained and gesticulated angrily at him, though it was as impossible for him to interfere as it was for them to play.
Lowell looked up and down the street, checking for witnesses. Even from a distance, Ryan could see him shaking his head.
Finally Lowell relented and hopped over the wall into Caldwell’s front yard. As the snow globe in Lowell’s hand moved away from him, Ryan could feel the pull of the haunting getting stronger. He badly wanted to run to it and throw his arms around it and declare it his most precious thing forever, but he resisted. He dug his feet in, such as it were, and stayed put.
Lowell seemed to lose his nerve halfway to the house and started looking for a good vantage point to throw from. Ryan found himself getting irrationally furious at Lowell for making off with his lovely, precious snow globe. How dare he toss it so casually from hand to hand? Does he not understand the indescribable joy that is plastic Myrtle Beach in winter?
He fought against the anger. You told him to take it, you idiot. What little concentration he could muster through the snow globe rage and the battle to keep himself cohesive, he had to commit entirely to resisting the overwhelming urge to leave this spot.
He saw Lowell look back at him and mouth “Ready?”
He braced himself, and nodded. The compulsion to lift his feet off the ground and let himself be pulled was staggering. Do it, Lowell. Do it now.
There was a sudden blast of piercing sound, the warning bleat of a siren.
A police car hurtled towards Lowell and squealed to a stop in front of the house.
He hard Lowell shout “Oh no!”
Another police car came hurtling around the corner from the other direction. It ripped through the last stretch of road to the house in no time flat.
Ryan let go.
He released himself from the ground and felt the tension accelerating him forward.
He heard the shouts of the police as they leaped out of their vehicles and sprinted for Lowell. Ryan would be upon them in seconds.
Somehow in the blur as he hurtled through space he could make out the panicked look on Lowell’s face as he raised his hands and backed away from the circle of cops closing in around him.
They were telling him to lie down on the ground. And from the looks of it, he was going to obey.
Yet in the last second, Lowell dared to spin around, swing his arm back, and lob the snow globe.
And then the officers tackled him, and he disappeared beneath them.
Ryan’s course pitched upwards. He hurtled straight over the melee. He felt his feet heat up as they grazed the energy field like a space capsule hitting the atmosphere. He pulled his knees up to his chest, and he was rising over the lawn, arcing up towards the balcony.
He caught sight of the snow globe as it cleared the railing and bounced, threatening briefly to pass right through the balusters and tumble into the yard beyond. But it stopped just short and settled.
And then he was upon it, and felt the wash of relief at finally being with this, the one thing in all the world that he loved and wanted to be with forever. The most awful and nonsensical trinket ever made, but it was his and he was back to it and all was right with the world.
He was so consumed with relief that he stopped hearing the shouts of Lowell vehemently not resisting arrest on the ground below. And it was several seconds before Ryan remembered where he was and why.
He ducked straight through the closed and wildly indifferent French doors, and into the house to look for his body.
THIRTY-TWO
The inside of the house was cool. Or so Ryan imagined, because it was dim and he could hear the soft whirr of the air conditioning. It didn’t make a warm impression, at any rate.
Caldwell wasn’t home. He couldn’t be home. If he was home, he’d be out looking at the commotion on his front lawn, or making calls, or at the very least, moving around. But the stillness in the house felt oppressively total. A neighbor must have seen Lowell and Ryan skulking around and called the police.
A flood of vagueness surged over Ryan and he struggled with his consciousness, pounding it mentally until it agreed to do what he wanted. Get moving.
He passed through an obscenely huge bedroom with the biggest TV he had ever seen, and onto a landing that overlooked a vast living room with an even bigger TV. It felt unfamiliar to see such a large, old house with no ghosts at all in it. The Ghost Wall certainly did its job.
There were four other doors along the landing and he gave a cursory glance into each room, sticking his head through, seeing nothing but shadows and shafts of sunlight from outside, and then moving on to the next. There was no sign that anybody at all was in the house.
Ryan finished with the upstairs rooms and drifted down the grand staircase into the living room. He could feel the tug from the snow globe out on the balcony as he moved further away from it, but it was not so strong yet that he couldn’t press on.
The living room was brighter than upstairs because of the enormous picture windows looking out over the pool and the expansive back yard. Ryan had already mostly given up hope of actually finding Caldwell at home, in Ryan’s body or otherwise. But he still hoped to find some kind of clue, something that would give him somewhere to go next. Besides which, now that he was in the house he had absolutely no way to get out past the ghost wall. So he kept searching.
In the kitchen he finally found signs of life. Or at least, signs that somebody had been there relatively recently. There were dishes in the sink, a couple of bowls encrusted with bits of dried cereal. Apple Jacks, Ryan noted. He had never cared for Apple Jacks. The fruit content threatened nutrition.
In the adjoining laundry room he found baskets of clothes, some clean and some dirty. Without being able to pick them up he couldn’t discern any details of them other than that they appeared to be men’s.
He finished searching the entire ground floor and still hadn’t found anything useful at all.
And then the doorbell rang.
He rushed back to the front foyer. The wide double front door had frosted glass set into it, so he could make out the silhouettes of two people on the front step. And behind them, the hazy red flash of the police lights. No doubt it was the cops who had tackled Lowell outside. They were probably here to make sure Caldwell was okay, find out if he wanted to press charges, or whatever it is that police do in situations like this. Finding nobody home, they would probably just leave and not come inside. Or so he hoped.
From the foyer he could see another stairwell down into the basement, so he drifted down there, still faintly hoping to find some lead he could follow. The basement was much darker, lit only by slivers of light from behind blinds pulled down over ground-level windows. But it was an impressive basement indeed. It was furnished like a pub, complete with bar stools and pool table and two TV’s mounted high in the corners
. And there was a movie room attached, with theater seating and a giant screen and projector. Everything was powered off. The silence was complete, apart from the air conditioning being slightly louder down here.
The doorbell rang again, and one of the cops rapped hard on the door. They had to be making sure nobody was home. Ryan wondered what had become of Lowell. He was probably handcuffed in the back of one of those cruisers. But there was nothing Ryan could do about that now.
This was it. A dead end. He had searched the whole house and found nothing. Caldwell could be anywhere. He could be on vacation. He could have decided to take his brand new body out for a spin in Costa Rica or someplace. Which was more than Ryan had ever done with it. He had a strange thought that maybe his body was grateful to have somebody in it who would actually make good use of it for a change.
He sat on one of the bar stools to ponder. Without the need to focus on standing, dizziness closed in around his awareness and he had to shake his head and fight it off. He lifted his hand to his face again, struggling to focus on it.
But there wasn’t anything to focus on. His hand was gone. His arm had vanished nearly to the elbow. He struggled to get the molecules back into place and was able to form a blob shaped somewhat like his arm, but completely without detail.
He didn’t have long. And not only had he run into a dead end, but it was a dead end that he was trapped in. There was no way for him to leave this place.
The terror of that gave the dizziness a new opening to exploit, and Ryan teetered on the stool. Shadows made a dim frame around his vision that closed in on him from all sides.
And then he snapped into clarity. Because he saw something.
He saw feet.
Two of them, extending out from behind the bar. Someone lying on the floor.
Ryan leapt off the stool and circled around the end of the bar. And he froze.
There was a dead man lying face-down behind the bar.
It wasn’t Ryan’s body. It was too large, startlingly so. This guy had to be at least six-six, and three hundred pounds. But he was lying on his stomach so Ryan couldn’t see his face, just the bald patch on the peak of his scalp. And he appeared quite dead. What little skin Ryan could see—the hands and the back of the neck—was sallow gray.