What the Dead Can Do, page 32
One of the younger guests or the now missing woman must’ve broken the window.
“Nicole.”
He knew her name, too. He knew it because she’d introduced herself at the market the first time they’d met. Her name had been twice-baked into his brain now because either he or Amanda, possibly some combination of them both, had called her Nicole a bit before killing her.
But had he killed her?
The woman—Nicole—might have survived the shot to her midsection and crawled elsewhere. Her body could have been moved by the littles who’d been hiding upstairs. That seemed unlikely. An adult corpse was heavy. Aidan knew that better than anyone. Still …
Cries from his basement began, but it didn’t unsettle Aidan. Screams and pleading were common from that direction, but this wasn’t an invited guest, stuck and begging for release from their chains. He remained seated until the growing moans sparked a memory. This was … Matthew. The man he’d walked at gunpoint into his home was Matthew.
Whether he’d heard Amanda use the name last night or had learned it simply from her having known it while she was inside his head, it didn’t matter. He had an urge to reach out to anyone who’d believe him to let them know that he’d played no real role in nabbing the man.
That said, if Matthew didn’t stop yelling soon, Aidan would do something about it.
Aidan looked to his left and then to his right for his gun. He unfurled his body from its yoga-like position and pushed his feet into the white shag rug on the floor, then wiggled his toes. Thus far, all of his movements felt like decisions that he’d made. It was enough for a smile, and as his forty-three facial muscles came together to make one, the smile felt like his decision, too.
His grin stayed put as he looked for the gun. It wasn’t on the couch or the coffee table, and there was no sign of it at his feet. The house was brighter than it had been minutes ago, but what little light the sun cast through the crack between the curtains was of no help.
He wasn’t ready to try standing. Not yet. Staying seated while his eyes did the heavy lifting would have to do. He ran them over the living room, mostly scanning the rug, then the hardwoods on either side of it, then back across the shag until they hit a dead end in the form of little girls’ shoes. Two purple sneakers that looked like someone had vomited silver and sparkly star stickers on every square canvas inch, perhaps twice. And, of course, it was the sister.
Something about the way her legs were crossed, tight but casual, an ankle over an ankle, told him the girl had been there the whole time he’d been awake. Aidan had simply not noticed. His brain had been elsewhere.
“Hello,” he heard her say. “How’s it going for you?”
The girl pointed his gun at him. She held the weapon between two hands, with its butt resting firmly on her lap, and both index fingers laced tightly over its trigger. By definition, it was a predicament, but at least the gun’s present location had something to do with the physics of the reality he and the girl inhabited. There was some solace to be had in knowing that whatever came of that situation, he was in control of his body. He could only presume that she was, too.
Aidan had always been good at finding the silver linings in the worst situations imaginable. Just ask the body that had once inexplicably exploded in his trunk on the way to bury it in Black Rock State Park. That day trip turned into an overnighter. Cleaning up chunks of muscle and flesh and organs and goo takes time, but in the end, he had removed every bit of evidence and had done so under more stars than he’d seen since he was a kid. He could have eaten breakfast on that trunk’s polypropylene and polystyrene surfaces, but he didn’t. No. He’d had waffles, smothered in soft butter, drowning in syrup, with a generous shake of rainbow sprinkles at some joint off Route 8 on his way home.
When Aidan met the girl’s stare, the memory of having participated in choking her out in her kitchen before running off with her little brother hit hard, forcing a bit of stomach acid through his esophagus that he quickly caught and swallowed for the benefit of the couch.
“Sorry,” he said. “It’s all a bit much, isn’t it?”
“Is it you?” the girl asked. “Are you in control?”
He had to admit, she wasn’t so little at all. Not when they’d kidnapped Ethan, not when she’d run from the car after he’d ambushed her daddy and shot the old lady they’d brought along, and certainly not now. She was not little or tiny or small or at all insignificant, sitting in the chair right across from him with his gun in her hands and intent in her glare.
“If you are asking if it is me, Aidan, then yes, it’s me.”
She narrowed her eyes. “How can I know for sure?”
“You can’t, really,” he said.
He pulled his legs back into the crossed position from before, glancing at the gun as he did to gauge her strength. There was no perceptible tremble or twitch, so he pressed on.
“That’s the really fucked up part, isn’t it? If you’d told me a few months ago that the deceased were capable of possessing us … well, I might have believed it, if I’m being honest. But I still wouldn’t have believed that it could ever happen to me.”
“And why’s that?” the girl asked. “Do you think you’re too tough?”
“God, no,” Aidan said. The suggestion almost made him laugh, but he caught it before it could escape. “I’m about the least tough guy I’ve ever known, I’ll swear to that.”
The screaming from the cellar hadn’t stopped. It was intermittent, and the howls from the trapped man were more pained, yet several degrees weaker with every new shout. Aidan looked at the door and then back to the girl. She’d not bothered to follow the shift in his attention.
“That’s your daddy screaming downstairs, you know that, right?”
“Mmhmm. He’ll live,” she replied, as calmly as her dad might have, but Aidan could only know it’d been as calmly as Matthew might have said it if Amanda was still lurking.
The girl’s nonchalance caught him off guard. It seemed genuine.
“OK, then,” he said. “What’s the plan here?”
The urgency in him was an unfamiliar feeling. He’d spent a lifetime letting everything play out in the timeframes his victims dictated. Panic and insistence were no friend to a man like him. So, why was he feeling anything other than the usual “things will be what they’ll be?” Even with a gun pointed at him, he could honestly say he had no desire to hurt her or her little brother.
He felt words forming in his head. Words that weren’t his own.
“Listen, I don’t mean to be rude, Emily. But Aidan’s right. Do you have a plan?”
Amanda’s effect on his voice was back. He sounded like her, and the girl stiffened.
“How’d you know my name?” Emily asked.
“I heard your daddy say it … silly girl. Where’s Ethan?” God, her voice as his was a migraine in the making.
“Not here,” Emily said. “Somewhere far, far from you.” There was sharp recognition in the girl’s eyes but her hold on his gun had gone unstable.
“Come on now, this asshole shot your grandmother,” Amanda said.
Aidan felt himself standing, and he could do nothing to sit himself back down.
Emily raised the gun from her lap, it looked like the piece had gone hot potato on her for a moment, and if it’d fired right then, it wouldn’t have been a surprise. She managed to still the weapon in her hand again, and some part of Aidan was rooting for the girl. Even so, he’d seen enough guns in people’s hands over the years to know who was and wasn’t going to end up pulling the trigger.
“And then he shot your mother,” he heard Amanda tell the girl.
His body was a few feet from the girl now, and she stood. Then, as he expected she would, Emily pushed the gun out too far in front of her chest.
Amanda was going to grab it. He could feel her thinking about it and knew from his own experience that it’d be easy enough to do.
“And now he’s going to shoot you!” Amanda finished.
Aidan’s left hand grabbed the barrel of the gun as his right hand swung into Emily’s wrist. In one lightning-quick move, Amanda had turned the weapon on the girl, who quickly let it go. Now his hands held the gun and were pointing it at Emily, who already had her arms crossed over her face, pleading for him not to shoot. Pleading for Amanda not to shoot.
“I’m sorry,” Emily said. “Please don’t. Just let us go. Just let us live!”
His index finger tightened. Amanda would pull the trigger, and if she did, the small shred of humanity that Aidan had used to define himself as less than a monster would be no more.
Halfway through its action, with the finger too far into its destiny to reverse course, Aidan turned the gun backward, then up, and pointed it at his own head as it fired. A single bullet entered through his left eye and tore through the fat of his brain before striking the back of his skull and embedding itself in his meninges.
He or Amanda or both put a hand over his eye. It wouldn’t keep him alive; why had they bothered to do it? Instinct, maybe. In the moments before the shot, he’d felt fully present and in control. He was cold now. Distant from the form he once owned. As his body collapsed, his head collided with the marble coffee table that had always been so easy to clean. It should have hurt, he thought, worse than the shot he’d fired into his brain, which had stung more than he’d expected given that he’d hand-delivered it and had braced for its impact when he’d fired the gun. But as the pointed corner of the table opened more of him to the world, he felt nothing.
Had he ended Amanda’s life, too? Was the boy going to be OK?
From the floor, he caught a last glimpse of Nicole standing in the throughway to the kitchen. Her blue smock was bloodstained but she was upright, Ethan gripped in her arms so very tightly.
Maybe they were all ghosts—Nicole, Ethan, Emily, even the man in the basement whose screaming had stopped. Aidan hadn’t believed in ghosts, but as he died, it didn’t feel permanent.
The past fifteen minutes hadn’t offered a reason for a smile, but his grin went ear to ear. He felt it growing—or imagined the sensation—as his vision of life and material things ended.
Would he be back too? Wasn’t that a distinct possibility?
Who might I kill, when I am no longer trapped in my own skin?
It was Aidan’s last living thought, and it came to him in the last moment of his living life, here in the existence he knew … or in the existence he had known … right before somewhere else, right before somewhere as blank as he wanted it to be, though he didn’t know yet that it could be as blank or as black or as dark or as endless as he wanted it to be, and then that last living thought ended, right before he read the first words of a small book that had appeared in front of him as a new resident in Second Plane …
WELCOME, AIDAN!
… and right before he met Gabriel, a hideous and foul creation—the spitting image of an inky-black nightmare he’d drawn on a piece of paper as a young boy. Back then, for a period of time that had to be longer than he remembered, that very beast hung by thumbtack on the wall next to his bed. Here—wherever here was—the monster looked nothing like the mother he’d known, the mother who’d loved him, or the mother who while living had sworn to Aidan over and over again that she’d never stop trying to help him get well, at any cost. But Aidan knew the creature’s true identity intimately and immediately. As the beautiful spectacle approached him over a vast white sweep of nothingness, he went warm. It was if he had a fever—not just in his head—all over a body he was sure he didn’t have anymore. Gabriel had connected and had come to greet him in his new space, and Aidan awaited its embrace with open arms, because while it’d given him no name one way or the other, Aidan understood it was his mother just the same.
35
TAG
The chair was an original creation with a tall back, high enough to be throne-like, though that had not been Tag’s intent. He had overly and overtly stuffed its comfy cushions to the point of caricature, then squeezed them between armrests the size of surfboards. From its two-inch peg legs up, he’d wrapped it in a multi-colored fabric too offensive to be in stock at Rooms To Go.
The chair was perfect, and he’d built it as he had for no other reason than to piss off his wife. As he took it in, Tag didn’t mind thinking its design was about as petty a thing as any he’d ever attempted, but didn’t Amanda have at least that coming? Of course, his wife would only notice if she cared to notice. That’s how it worked. They knew that now, they both did.
Tag didn’t think the woman, who might have killed his mother but had failed to off his son, would be much longer. He’d requested an immediate connection the moment he observed Aidan hit the floor, and his wife had always been prompt when it mattered to her.
It was possible that upon her return to Second Plane, she’d stew alone through the infinity of space it offered, and do so forever. She might also ignore Tag’s request to meet, and it was also possible she’d run straight to Gabriel, hoping it had a lead on another body, one soured and ready to go, so she could again try to bring Ethan “home.”
All those things were possible, but none seemed likely to Tag.
For now, he’d won. Indirectly, but a victory nonetheless.
What did seem likely was she’d be very emotional about that fact.
He leaned back, searching for the comfort of the chair he’d created. He couldn’t find it.
He’d had a body again, for not even twenty-four hours, but he’d felt—truly experienced—breezes, smells, sounds, excitement, doubt, and pain through Nicole’s nerve endings and cerebral mechanisms. What The Text had to say about feelings being mere mimics of what a resident had once known wasn’t entirely untrue. Save the love for his son, no sensation he’d known as a resident had ever come close. The possession had made that painfully obvious.
If there was going to be anything easy about the conversation he was planning on having with his wife, the love they felt for Ethan would be the only reason.
Love, it seemed, was as real in Second Plane as it was for the living.
Love distorts.
Love corrupts.
Love empowers … and eventually, love means loss.
His and Amanda’s grief over the past year played out differently. That it had didn’t make either of them all that unique, no matter if they resided in Prior Plane, there, or even in the next existence, an existence that awaited them both.
His wife would want to regroup, but Tag knew the one thing he could do—the one thing he would do at all costs—the one thing possible that would give Ethan’s life the space it or anyone else’s deserved—he knew that this one thing would ensure Amanda never got another chance. So, he felt no anxiety about the future—their future—because his decision was made.
Amanda used to say choices were Tag’s kryptonite, and that was true. For his short duration in Second Plane, there’d been plenty of vexing options, as well. Anything a resident wanted to see or do was a possibility of a sort. He’d found comfort by leaning into The Text’s suggestions, which helped eliminate choice. He didn’t need the help now. There was only one path forward, and for him, there was an absolute freedom in deciding to pick Life After Death.
Life After Death, aka Third Plane, was no life at all. At least, not one where your life, the very first you ever had—what you’d had, what you’d known, who you’d loved—was in any way viewable anymore. Life After Death meant a total blackout, no more observations, and it was no longer a suggestion. To be blunt, it was a punishment, and no resident of Second Plane had ever returned after they’d been banished there.
The play on the familiar colloquialism of the living, Life After Death, was probably coined by a resident eons ago. A softer way, humorous to some, that gave Third Plane a codename that residents could use to weaken its punch. At least, that’d been Martha’s theory on the origin of the next existence’s nickname. Tag found it believable enough.
When Amanda returned, Tag would tell her all about Life After Death, even if she, too, already knew exactly what it held for anyone banished from Second Plane. He would report himself and Amanda to the council and was considering throwing out Gabriel’s name when he did.
I am not my brother’s keeper.
He decided against it. What he and Amanda had done was a black-and-white violation, and Tag wasn’t sure Gabriel’s tutelage on possession was as explicitly forbidden.
For Tag and Amanda, though, the council’s verdict would be swift. Not only had they knowingly possessed bodies on earth, his wife had used Aidan’s to commit murders. Even if she had been telling the truth and Aidan had been the one to shoot his mother, Amanda set off the events that had led to it. Lucinda was a resident now, too, but it’d be a while—if ever, should the council banish him—before Tag and his mother could discuss whether or not she thought it had been Amanda or Aidan or both their doing. A fun conversation to look forward to.
If the story of Ethan’s survival were ever told, no doubt Aidan would seem the hero.
Emily might have even seen it that way.
The serial killer’s dedication to his own bizarre set of rules—suggestions, maybe—and a single bullet from his own gun ultimately thwarted Amanda. Technically speaking, that was true. But for Tag, the only memory worth holding onto for dear life was of the role Emily had played.
* * *
A few minutes after Aidan had shot Nicole, he had removed his shoes and socks and then plopped himself on the couch. He crossed his legs, but it appeared to Tag that Amanda was simultaneously trying to stand Aidan’s body back up. From within the man, it was like she was kicking with all she had, in every direction, to pop Aidan from his liberation pose and back onto his feet. For the better part of an hour, while fighting to stay in that pose, Aidan’s eyes opened from time to time. Gray, then blue, blue, then black, then back to blue. Eventually, he stilled.
Tag left the living room to look for his son. He found Ethan and Emily hiding in a closet on the second floor. His son was sleeping soundly, his body covered by a thick wool coat. His eyes were tight, and it was not a peaceful sleep, but he was alright. Emily had stationed herself between Ethan and the closet door. Her eyes were open, red from tears that were no longer there.
