A Hundred Billion Ghosts

by DM Sinclair

  Ryan had expected to find his own body with someone walking around in it. He had prepared for that, as much as one can prepare for such a thing. He had not prepared to find an extremely large dead man lying face-down in the basement. He didn’t have a reaction pre-planned for it, which normally he liked to have. So he stood and stared while his mind careened acrobatically.

  Finally he decided that he wanted to see who this was. He didn’t expect to recognize him, but he wanted to see. So he put his natural revulsion aside and crept forward to lie down next to the body, trying to get close to its face. But the face was turned to the side and nearly pressed into the bottom of the counter. There was nowhere Ryan could position himself where he could make out details of the features.

  The doorbell kept ringing insistently, and the pounding on the glass was getting more urgent. Ryan ignored it. Other things to worry about.

  Like why was there a dead man in the house? It wasn’t Ryan’s body, and it certainly wasn’t Caldwell’s—Ryan had seen pictures of him online during Lowell’s search. Caldwell was a fit man in his late 50’s. This body was nowhere near that in fitness or age.

  Ryan needed to know who he was, and what he was doing here. He tried again to see, hunting for a sweet spot where he could lie and get some sense of the face. If he could just get into that inch between the forehead and the bottom of the bar. He almost had it.

  But the huge man’s eyes sprang open, and he let out a dry, strangled gasp.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Ryan reeled backwards in a panic, clear through the bar and several stools. Had he been substantial, he would have knocked down every piece of furniture in the place as he stumbled, flailing, away from the huge man who wasn’t dead, not completely.

  The man fell silent again, but Ryan couldn’t see anymore if his eyes were open. The man’s feet went on twitching, like he was trying weakly to flee.

  Ryan had no idea what to do. He spun around twice, looking for some action to take, as though there might be a sign on on a wall nearby with instructions on how to deal with an almost dead man in an empty house.

  The police, he thought. They’re already here. He would have to make some excuse for why he had broken in, but maybe they could help the man. And maybe the man would know something.

  The doorbell had just stopped ringing, so Ryan dashed up the stairs two at a time, sprinted through the foyer and forced himself without hesitation straight through the front doors. The second he was out into the open he yelled “wait!” He instantly felt searing heat as he hit the Ghost Wall, and he backed up almost all the way to the door before it cooled. He fought to ignore the feeling that his entire form was being microwaved.

  The officers were gone. The cruisers were gone. In their place, there was only Lowell standing on the front step and eating a glazed donut. It crunched.

  Ryan blinked in surprise.

  “Find anything?” Lowell asked around the donut.

  Lowell broke a window with a flower pot from the back patio. It took him several minutes to clear off all the glass shards around the edge while Ryan paced frantically.

  Lowell explained something about having a friend on the police force who had called off the arresting officers, and who would have to forgive him breaking the window as well. But Ryan couldn’t focus on his words or what they meant. What portion of his mind wasn’t spinning in circles trying to figure out the almost-dead man in the basement, was functioning only in brief, dim spurts. He felt like he was already intermittently popping in and out of existence.

  Once Lowell got through the window he followed Ryan into the basement and up to the enormous gray man behind the bar, who had gone still again. Ryan silently cursed Lowell for taking so long.

  As soon as Lowell saw the body, Ryan could tell that he recognized it.

  “No… way,” Lowell said. He sounded at once horrified and giddily excited, like he had just run over someone in the street only to discover that it was his favorite A-list celebrity.

  “Who is it?!” Ryan demanded.

  “I know this guy! This is messed up!”

  “Who is it?!”

  “This is Rufus Flowers!”

  The name meant something to Ryan, but in his dazed, unfocused state he could no longer remember what names were.

  “My other client!” Lowell explained. “The guy I was looking for in the dump! This is his body!”

  He raced to the big man’s side, and for a moment Ryan was surprised at Lowell’s apparently legitimate concern for his client. But rather than any of the helpful medical things Lowell could have attempted, he instead grabbed the man’s left arm and yanked it out from under his body, then peered closely at the hand. He cursed under his breath.

  “What are you looking for?” Ryan asked.

  Before Lowell could answer, the body’s arms twitched violently, and another choked gasp escaped it.

  “Hey! He’s not dead!” Lowell said with only mild surprise. “What do we do?”

  “I don’t know!” Ryan said. “Get him out of there!”

  There wasn’t enough space behind the bar to turn the man over, so Lowell had to drag him by the ankles out into the open and then crouch to put all his weight into flipping the man over.

  As the man’s enormous girth rolled up, Ryan had a flash of recognition. “I’ve seen this guy before too.”

  “Where?” Lowell demanded urgently.

  Ryan remembered cowering in the body storage units at the Clinic while Margie was being fired by Roger. The wheezing breath of the very large man in the cabinet had been too much for Ryan to take, so he had shifted to an empty one.

  “At the Clinic,” he finally said. “I think this body was in storage.”

  Lowell shook his head. “Rufus wasn’t a client at the Clinic. He never heard of it.”

  “He was definitely in there.”

  The man’s arms twitched like he was trying to reach out to them. His eyes opened briefly and then rolled back into his head as the lids drifted closed again. Ryan and Lowell stood and watched helplessly.

  “Is this like a CPR situation?” Lowell said.

  “Do you know CPR?”

  “I always wanted to learn.”

  “Just call 911!”

  Lowell fished through his raincoat pockets for his phone. Not finding it in the outside ones he tried the inside ones. On the fourth pocket he stopped. For a long moment he didn’t do anything.

  “Call 911!” Ryan said. His voice went high with panic.

  Lowell was staring, dumbstruck. “I think it’s too late,” he said.

  The man’s body heaved as though trying to expel water from its lungs. Only it wasn’t water that came out. It was light.

  Energy coursed over and through the body, all surging towards a single point. As Ryan watched, the point gathered more and more energy, getting brighter. It reached a pinnacle of intensity and floated up away from the body. It flickered and sizzled like an ember, appearing somehow angrier than a single point of light should ever be able to look.

  Ryan looked down at the body. It lay still and pale, lifeless.

  When he looked up again he was surprised to see that the point of light had expanded to a nearly human shape already. As he watched he could see the fingers separate, the feet expand like inflating balloons, details of the face separate and gain definition

  Margie and Lowell had apparently been at least partially right. The ghost looked nothing like the body. It was less than half the size of the big man on the floor. As the face came into focus, Ryan found that he could recognize it from the pictures he had seen online.

  It was Clifton Caldwell, the hardware baron. Completely bald, with a hard, sullen, 50-year-old face that Ryan couldn’t picture ever uttering words like “strawberry” or “dainty”. He had a single cruel, thin eyebrow high at the ends and deep onto his nose in the middle.

  “Mr. Caldwell?” Ryan tried tentatively.

  Caldwell’s head twisted to look at Ryan. His eyebrow went even deeper
in the middle. His eyes scanned up and down Ryan like he was searching for where a wallpaper pattern repeated.

  To Ryan’s great surprise, Caldwell said: “You’re that one!” His voice echoed backwards on itself, like it emerged only partly into this dimension and retreated back to another.

  Ryan stammered. “Th… that? One?” Caldwell recognized him. Why did Caldwell recognize him?

  Caldwell’s face changed. But in a way that made no sense. The left half of his face slid downward and the right half slid up, so that his nose and mouth stretched horribly between them. He seemed to sense it happening and buried his face in his hands.

  His three hands.

  He had an extra arm, splitting off from the left one somewhere near the elbow. The hand was over-sized, twice as big as the others.

  “Okay. That’s…” Lowell started, horrified. He seemed to realize he didn’t know the rest of the sentence, and stopped it.

  Caldwell stumbled backwards, changing shape constantly. He developed several new legs and lost others as he walked. And for a moment Ryan wasn’t sure which of the three was Caldwell’s original head.

  Caldwell roared furiously as though expending great effort, and all his extra parts snapped back into him. When he turned to Ryan again he looked much more normal. And much more outraged.

  “Where’s Foster?” he snarled.

  “I… I don’t know. The Clinic?”

  “I’m going to kill him,” Caldwell said.

  He lurched away from them and up the stairs.

  Ryan and Lowell looked at each other. Lowell’s face looked exactly like Ryan imagined his own did right now: wide-eyed and dumbfounded.

  They chased after Caldwell. “Mr. Caldwell!” Ryan called after him. He was afraid to talk to this man who seemed constructed mostly out of rage. But he needed to know.

  Caldwell was already at the front door when they caught up to him. He spun on them, and for a moment seemed to be facing both forwards and backwards at once. He shook himself until he snapped back together. “Eight nine eight six,” he said.

  Ryan didn’t know what he had expected Caldwell to say, but it wasn’t that. “What?”

  Caldwell developed a new hand with a finger far too long for it. The finger pointed at a keypad set into the wall next to the door. “Eight nine eight six,” he growled again.

  “The Ghost Wall,” Lowell said, nodding. “That’s the PIN to shut it off?”

  Ryan dared a step forward. “Mr. Caldwell, you’ve seen me before! Why have you seen me before?”

  Caldwell’s eyes shifted back to Ryan. Two other eyes on a different head partially overlapping the first one stayed locked on Lowell. “Eight nine eight six,” the voice said from another universe.

  “Please,” Ryan pleaded. “Did Roger Foster give you my body? Where is it?”

  Caldwell made a guttural noise that seemed to come from his center of gravity. “He didn’t have it,” he spat.

  Ryan couldn’t make sense of it. He didn’t have it? “What… what do you…”

  In a blink, Caldwell expanded to twice his size. He spread five arms and loomed over them, leaning like a gigantic tree about to fall and crush them. “Eight! Nine! Eight! Six!” he bellowed.

  Lowell, frantic, scrambled around him to the keypad. His elbow slipped through Caldwell partially as he passed, and a surge of something almost knocked Lowell flat. “This guy’s really pissed off,” he said. He flipped open the cover on the keypad.

  “Lowell, don’t!” Ryan shouted.

  Lowell, finger poised over the number buttons, stopped and looked back at him.

  “Mr. Caldwell,” Ryan said, trying to sound calm and forceful like Margie always did. It was hard when his voice kept trembling like a nervous chihuahua. “We’ll let you go. As soon as you tell me what I need to know.”

  “Punch in the code,” Caldwell snapped at Lowell. One of his heads ignored Ryan while the other stared him down. The newer third head seemed unaware what was going on.

  “You recognized me,” Ryan said. “Did Roger Foster try to transplant you into my body?”

  Caldwell’s heads all turned to Ryan at once. They merged into one and Caldwell almost looked like a normal human ghost again. His eyebrow bent up at one end and down at the other. “He was supposed to. Never did.”

  “What happened? Tell me everything, and we’re done.”

  Caldwell grunted. “He was supposed to find a body that would work,” he growled. “Only reason I invested in that damn place. Put me in five different bodies. None of ‘em worked. All died with me in ‘em. And every time they died, I got a little more messed up. Look what he did to me.” His head turned inside out so that for a moment they were looking at the back of his face through the back of his head. He forced it back to its usual shape. “Then he showed me you. Said yours was it. Some kind of perfect ghost match.”

  Ryan’s heart, such as it were, skipped a beat. Margie had been right about everything. He was close.

  “But when the time came,” Caldwell went on, grimacing, “he didn’t have the body anymore. So he gave me the next closest match he could find.” He jabbed a finger towards the floor, beneath which Rufus’s body lay somewhere, empty. “From my employee records. He worked in one of my stores I guess. I dunno.”

  Lowell gasped. “Toilet parts.” When Ryan threw him a confused look, he elaborated. “Rufus told me he sold toilet parts. Didn’t say where. But he didn’t exactly volunteer to have his body taken.”

  Caldwell sneered. “Didn’t ask him to. Foster took care of everything.”

  Ryan stepped forward and fought to keep his voice steady. “What happened to my body? Why didn’t Roger have it anymore?” He clenched his fists. He was afraid of the answer, but desperately wanted to hear it.

  Caldwell grunted again, a deep, hollow sound like a drain backing up.

  “He told me.”

  Ryan wanted to grab him by the neck and shake him. “Told you what?”

  “The day I was supposed to go into it, take it over for good. He didn’t say why. But he told me. It died the day before. It was dead.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Lowell was concerned about Ryan. The poor ghost had looked seriously bummed when he left Caldwell’s house. The most likely reason was that he had just lost virtually all hope of survival and would be gone forever in a day or so. Or maybe he had other personal stuff going on. Whatever. Lowell didn’t know him well enough to guess. Either way, Lowell decided that he’d better get his payment from Ryan tonight, or he might never get it.

  More vexing to Lowell at the moment was how he was going to get Rufus’s body into the car.

  His first plan was to not move the body at all. His clients—his other clients—were less interested in the body than in the ring it was supposed to be wearing. Except it wasn’t wearing the ring anymore. The deep indent was easy to see on Rufus’s finger, but the ring itself was gone. If Lowell were to find it, he could deliver that and they would presumably be satisfied.

  So he spent the better part of an hour tearing the house apart looking for it. And the better part of another hour tearing apart Caldwell’s liquor cabinet.

  The ring was nowhere to be found. There was a good chance it had been removed long before Caldwell was ever put into Rufus’s body and was not in the house at all. So Lowell shifted plans. He would have to move the body. The clients had asked for a body, so he would deliver a body.

  He brought his car around the house, grateful that Caldwell was rich enough to have an extra delivery entrance on the back. And he found a wheelbarrow parked next to a garden shed at the far side of the pool. The wheelbarrow, while being the spacious, wide-wheeled and smooth-rolling kind befitting a hardware baron, proved to be utterly useless on stairs.

  Still, somehow Lowell managed to brute force his way through a Weekend at Bernie’s nightmare. And an hour later he was sweating, exhausted, possibly herniated, and on the road with Rufus’s body upright in the passenger seat next to him because it was too b
ig to fit in the back with all the liquor and beer Lowell had stolen.

  He crept through the Beacon St. rush-hour glut, trying to get around Boston College and hoping that none of the strolling students would notice how the gigantic body in the car was bent at an unnatural angle with its face pressed against the window, and was also dead.

  As he drove, he thought about how best to play this.

  Obviously he couldn’t return the body to Rufus and Lucinda today. That would be madness. He had been working their case for barely a day. And while he was proud of having solved it, it was almost not worth even typing up a bill for that.

  So that left the question: what would seem a realistic amount of time for him to have spent tracking it down? How long before he could expect a phone call from them requiring him to explain what he had been doing? And how long after that phone call could he call them back and say that he was working on a lead, thereby setting up his usual 48-hour delay before actually delivering the body and handing them a bill? These calculations were an inexact science at which he was well-practiced. But calculating how long it would be before a dead body started stinking was new to him. One of many reasons why he typically hunted only for ghosts.

  He would need ice. Lots of ice.

  As he turned a hard right onto Commonwealth Ave. and imposed himself into the line of impatient traffic, the G-force of the turn shifted the big body in the seat next to him. It leaned off the window and a little closer to Lowell than he liked, threatening to topple into his lap. He reflexively thrust out an arm and shoved it back into place.

  To his great surprise, the body made a noise.

  Not just an escape of trapped gas, or any of the other noises Lowell had heard bodies can make. It sounded like an actual, driven-by-the-nervous system vocalization.

  A grunt.

  Lowell slammed on the brake.