What the Dead Can Do, page 24
“Nicole,” he said in a hush. “If you’re out here, just say so. I’m not angry.”
As he put the device back and started down the stoop’s stairs, a huge crash came from the rear of the house. The impact was too heavy to be a wine glass or glass bowl, and it was followed by a smattering of “Oh my Gods,” “Are you alright?” and one “Someone call 911.”
From inside the house, Emily shouted, “Dad! Come quick, come quick!”
He ran through the foyer and back into the living room, where he’d left her to watch Ethan. She was no longer in the chair—she, Ethan, and everyone else had left the room. As he entered the dining room, he heard Ethan crying somewhere beyond the crowd of other parents and children now blocking the entrance into the kitchen at the back of the house.
“Daddy!”
Em hadn’t called him Daddy since she was three. Her voice was fighting back tears. He pushed his way through the gawkers who, moments ago, had been stuffing cheese and booze into their already swollen guts. Together, they made a decent blockade.
On the other side of the group, he found Emily holding tight onto Ethan. To their right was Nicole, splayed out face down and bleeding on the floor, with the host holding her hand and telling his wife over and over again to hang in there, hang in there.
Matthew dropped to his knees beside Nicole and put a finger to her neck to check for a pulse. Behind her, there was no longer a window in the floor-to-ceiling frame. What was left of the glass was scattered all around them. She was alive but unconscious; the cuts on her body were deep, and the blood spilling from them grew to puddles on the tile quickly.
Another parent said an ambulance was on its way, and he started lifting Nicole to examine her torso. As he caught a glimpse of another gash that had just missed her jugular, she coughed. He welcomed the sign of life, even as it blew the contents of what smelled like a whole moonshine still into his and the host’s faces. He held his wife’s head gently above the mess so that she would not choke or suffocate.
“What the hell happened?” he asked the host, who’d lost all her allure.
“I don’t know for sure. I saw her enter the backyard through the alley. She was stumbling horribly. I didn’t know she was your wife. She hadn’t come with you—I mean, we didn’t meet her when you introduced yourself, and so I didn’t recognize her, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen her picking up Ethan from the academy. Something was off—it freaked me out, and I panicked.”
“She doesn’t do pick-up,” Matthew said quietly as he tried to look past the part of the group still lingering around the trainwreck. No EMS, just strangers already gathering their things while trying to coax their children toward the front door to dress for leaving. He turned back to the host. “What do you mean you panicked? She’s obviously drunk. What did you do to her?”
“Some people never change,” another guest said under their breath.
“Fuck you,” Em said, her body threatening to lunge.
He grabbed his daughter with his free hand before the fight in her got physical. “Don’t. It’s not worth it.”
She stayed put, and Matthew looked back at the host for an answer.
“All I know is I asked her several times who she was. When she didn’t answer, I ushered the kids who were back there into the house and shut and locked the door.”
“It’s true,” another guest said. “I mean, I know who your wife is, but she didn’t answer.”
“We all know who your wife is, mister,” said another.
“Is that what this is?” he asked the host. The room suddenly felt ten degrees warmer. “You recognized my wife and what? Got scared? Thought she would beat you up unprovoked?”
“I have no idea what you are talking about,” the host replied.
There wasn’t anything acrid in her tone, and her face appeared genuinely contrite.
He hadn’t calmed, but forced his face to look it. “OK, I’m sorry. I just—”
“I know what drunk looks like,” the host said. “This wasn’t just drunk. It was more off than that—like her joints were strapped on backward. Anyway … she lost her balance on the patio and fell head-first through the window like something threw her into it. I’ll swear to it.”
As the sounds of an approaching ambulance grew, it hit Matthew that Ethan had long stopped crying. His son had not moved. He was puffy-eyed and seated at the feet of the remaining gawkers. Matthew tried to break his son’s stare with a wave, but it never deviated from Nicole’s broken body.
No other parent there had thought to pick up his son and move him to another room. Matthew didn’t know what he’d expected anyone else there to do to help. Their inaction and sudden silence were grimly understandable, if not deeply disappointing. After all, Nicole’s incident with Claire Bear hadn’t really ever faded. Not locally. What Nicole had done was practically rebranded as a cautionary bit of folklore in their neighborhood. Until now, the faces huddled around the room had done a bang-up job of pretending they’d forgiven Nicole for bringing shame to Park Slope. Matthew’s shame flared up. When he looked back at the host, who was technically helping by holding his wife’s hand, his anger flared up, too.
He felt his face flush, and Emily stood as if she’d read his mind. As the ambulance screeched to a halt in front of the building, she picked up her brother, tried in vain to tuck his face into her neck, and said, “Come with me, little man. Mom’s going to be fine.” Still, the adults did nothing to help, save shuffle a little to make way for her.
“Fuck all of you,” Matthew slipped. Then he looked the host right in the eye. “Even you.”
24
AMANDA
Amanda had spent a good chunk of her Saturday morning in Prior Plane simply walking Aidan’s body around Lower Manhattan. She fed him a pepperoni pizza slice for an early lunch, took him for a pleasant stroll along the East River, and rested his body on the occasional park bench. No one ran away terrified when she politely declined their attempts at conversation, and she had even managed to take him to urinate in a relatively clean bathroom inside the National Museum of the American Indian. She’d never been to see the exhibits while living, but it was free to enter, and even with the seemingly endless concrete steps at its entrance, it’d been far less hassle than negotiating a pop-in use of the toilet at a local eatery. Within Aidan’s body, she managed to see it all in under two hours and had an espresso from their café to boot. They say practice makes perfect, and so far, she’d held her possession of Aidan without any interruption from him.
Not to get cocky, but by that afternoon, riding the Q train over the Manhattan Bridge to Park Slope inside Aidan’s body felt secondhand. She had control now, and it felt complete.
She stared at the map of the transit system on the wall across from her. The various color lines sprawled out in every direction, and she regretted the lack of effort she’d put in while living there to see more of what each borough offered. When she returned her attention to the Manhattan skyline outside the window of the racing train, she couldn’t help but wonder if, in time, it would be possible to possess Aidan’s form forever—to mother Ethan through him.
Just stick to the original plan.
Whether it had worked or not, trying to spook Nicole into a relapse in the hopes that she would make some grave mistake with Ethan had been an unwise decision. When she’d hatched that idea, her own commitment to causing an accident or killing her son had been faltering. Being directly responsible for bringing Ethan to Second Plane had started to seem like an act she wasn’t sure she could live with, so to speak. She understood that to grieve at all was actually a gift. You could not despair as she was without having loved someone very deeply. There was an argument to be made that one could actually be grateful for grief—but it was so intense of late.
Unlike The Text suggested, the passage of time had not weakened her desire to hold Ethan. Unlike The Text suggested, she was affecting things in Prior Plane with ease. Unlike The Text claimed, children were children in Second Plane. The Text was an index of lies as far as Amanda was concerned. Through rumors, the council had most assuredly planted the biggest lie of all: a punishment known as Third Plane, a banishment of sorts for any resident who succeeded in altering the course of a nonresident existence. Lies and more lies in the service of control.
But there was also a new wrinkle: seeing Ethan begin to thrive the past year with a newly sober Nicole had made her jealous. Amanda was no longer sure if she was acting out of grief or resentment. She could not deny that there was some part of her rooting for Nicole to fail spectacularly. The complexity of those feelings—emotions The Text and other residents wanted her to pretend she could not have—had eaten almost all that was left of her sanity. At a certain point, a parent’s torment, if left untreated, will ignite and burn their whole home to the ground.
If she loved her son, his death would have to be her doing. Targeting Nicole to set off some loosey-goosey chain of events had always been a long shot—and more important, Aidan got off on it. Last night, she’d lost her grip on the possession because she’d inadvertently excited whatever little bit of him had been along for the ride. That was her hypothesis, anyway. For that reason, she would have better luck maintaining control of his body if she kept him unsettled. Somewhat ironically, inhabiting him worked best when she kept his brain tethered to the very possibility that he feared most: that he’d lose control of himself at some point and kill a child.
If he ever got caught or turned himself in, Aidan would be instantly labeled a serial killer. Prior to getting to know him better, she’d have agreed with any chyron that said as much. But she wasn’t sure the moniker fit. Not neatly. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise that, like all walks of life, killers couldn’t be grouped under one umbrella. Many killers in the living plane of existence probably murdered anything and anyone of any age and felt no remorse. Aidan, though, had feelings, maybe not empathy by definition, but something close enough, and his soul had been battling the complexities of his atonement for decades.
The self-loathing he adroitly hid from the world was neatly documented in hundreds of journals shelved in his home library in Stamford, Connecticut. The collection was a true-crime treasure trove. In those early days of possession, while honing her control of Aidan’s body, she cautiously kept him home and would seat him at his desk to read his hand-written tomes.
He hated humanity. He hated adults. He hated himself, too, at least enough to once try suicide. The books may have numbered in the thousands and they had no dates, nor had Aidan shelved them in chronological order. There wasn’t time to read them all, but Amanda had counted only ten of the hundreds she’d read or scanned that were focused solely on the gratuitous details of his murders. His affinity for children was intriguing. He was sympathetic to kids because, in his experience, few boys and fewer girls ever got a real shot to define their lives, at least not until they were adults, when much of their independent thinking was actually the thoughts and actions that had been molded by their parents, both good, bad, and indifferent. He considered himself some sort of protector of the innocent, and only the young could be innocent, he’d written—many times over. With children, death by his hand was self-forbidden.
Recalling his ramblings as the train rumbled through the darkness underneath Brooklyn threatened to lull Amanda out of her possession. She stood quickly from her seat and caught Aidan’s reflection between the etched graffiti on the window. Looking away proved difficult.
He’s not wrong, of course. Ending Ethan’s time here will only give credence to his belief that children have no real control. Their destinies are built on the whims of broken souls.
“Pull yourself together,” a voice said.
The sharp directive broke the reflection’s hold on her.
“Excuse me?” Amanda said as she turned to address the meddler.
It was a man in his thirties, seated across from her, phone hanging awkwardly in hand with the browser still open and playing a porno clip featuring a woman at the center of a bunch of paunchy male bodies unloading their semen in turn on her face. He’d been at the other end of the car for most of the ride, and she hadn’t seen him get up to move or noticed the cigarette burns that pocked the skin up and down both of his too-thin arms. Under closer scrutiny, his irrelevance to her earlier was even more justified. She started to tell him to mind his own fucking business when she noticed a familiar gray swirl of smoke dancing about in both his eyes.
“Don’t get your panties in a wad. It’s Gabriel.”
Years of commuting on high alert had instinctively caused Amanda to put Aidan’s body into fight-or-flight mode. She eased his muscles and sat back down.
Gabriel had never shown up in Prior Plane during a possession before—at least as far as she knew—but the way the muscles underneath the man’s face undulated vertically from one side to the other removed all doubt.
“I’m confused,” Amanda said.
“A byproduct of the amount of time you’ve been in Aidan today, I imagine.”
“No … I mean, why are you here?”
“To make sure you don’t fuck this up. If you haven’t already.”
In the past year, Gabriel had asked her for nothing. Why it had been willing to identify Aidan as a candidate for possession remained a mystery. The connections they’d made while Amanda familiarized herself with possession rarely strayed outside the lines of friendly chitchat.
“How are you doing with Aidan?” it would ask. This was always its lead.
If she answered in detail, the beast would shush her as if it had realized they were on a hot mic during a segment of an interview not meant for broadcast. Was it afraid, or was it because Gabriel simply didn’t care? Or didn’t care yet? The only answer it ever wanted to hear when it asked how things were going was, “It’s going good.”
“Going good, is it?” Gabriel asked.
“Better than expected. Tonight’s the night.”
Before she could retract it, she gave it a thumbs-up with Aidan’s hand. It wasn’t amused.
“That’s not what I observed,” it moaned.
“You’ve been watching?” she asked.
“Killing that fella at the church this morning is your idea of ‘going good?’ ”
“That was Aidan, not me.”
Amanda wasn’t sure if that was a lie. She wanted to believe it had been Aidan. True or false, the stranger’s mouth curled in disgust.
“Aidan wouldn’t have killed that man,” Gabriel said in a tone that almost sounded like it had taken her accusation personally. “Not there, not like that.”
Amanda rolled Aidan’s tongue over his lips as she considered the truth. “OK, maybe I did. What does it matter?”
The man’s body jerked forward violently from the waist, and his phone dropped to the floor. Gabriel kicked the device under the row of seats, but it did not retract the man’s forward lean, which seemed to stretch over the aisle further than was possible. Under the inward tilt of the man’s brows, its eyes went deep-space black.
“I realize it’s a Saturday, Amanda, but did you really think dragging that poor soul’s corpse behind the dumpster was a long-term solution?”
“No.”
“No,” it shook its head as it leaned the man’s body back into the seat. “Of course not.”
It would make no difference to Gabriel, but Amanda didn’t remember doing that. In the minutes after the kill that she’d made using Aidan’s body and his knife, she’d been utterly shell-shocked. After she took back control of Aidan, she’d heard his thoughts. His frustration was a lot to process and so, yes, maybe she’d fucked up hiding the body. It seemed trivial—not the man’s death, that had weighed on her quickly, but how she’d gone about cleaning up didn’t matter. Objectively, stabbing the man in the throat still seemed like it’d been the right thing to do, but the thought of possibly meeting that same man at some point as a new resident in Second Plane had been uncomfortable. Convincing herself the do-gooder’s murder wasn’t her, or at minimum that it’d been a cooperative effort had been easy because doing so was necessary to move forward.
“There was a witness, too,” Gabriel said. “NYPD has a description. Don’t shoot the messenger, but you are running out of time, my friend.”
The train pulled into the station. She was the next stop. They sat in silence as they waited to see if anyone else would board the car.
Gabriel had once called Aidan a very unique possessee and told Amanda that what made his mental state weak enough for her to inhabit his body was that as a very young boy, he’d become infected with an insufferable sadness that all his kills had not cured—would not cure and could not cure. Being inside his body hadn’t proved Gabriel’s claim one way or another. The books he’d penned seemed to support its assertions, but oddly, when Amanda had once brought up Aidan’s journaling, Gabriel swore it knew nothing of the vast library or the man’s ramblings. “Either way,” it had assured her, “his dark sadness is our bright fortune.”
The only new passenger to board their car had chosen to put as much distance between them and herself as possible. A mouse of a thing, and neither considered her a threat. The train lurched into motion—a jolt that in the weeks past might have been enough to wake Aidan. Even Gabriel’s face went slack in anticipation of seeing Aidan resume control, but Amanda felt no inner-rumblings and heard no extraneous thought and moved from her seat to sit next to Gabriel.
“I’m on my way to Ethan now,” she whispered. “To bring him home.”
“Good,” Gabriel replied in a snarl, though it didn’t turn its head to do so. “Try not to kill anyone else on your way there. As twisted as Aidan’s legacy is, it isn’t yours to fuck up … at least not any more than you already have.”
It had said it so loud that Amanda cocked Aidan’s head a bit and looked to the end of the car. The other passenger had her attention buried in the book she had propped on her pregnant belly. It was a book Amanda remembered ordering once from Amazon, but she’d never bothered to crack it open: The Overparenting Epidemic. She grinned an ever so subtle self-admonishing smirk and felt Aidan’s face do so in kind. The control she had over him was thicker than ever.
