He had reached the head of the table once again, and there was a manic glint in his eyes. He placed both hands wide on the polished surface, leaned forward, and looked slowly from one face to another.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he proclaimed at last, “tonight we will discover . . . who killed Lord Filby!”
III.
ANY LAST WORDS
Jack sat uncomfortably in the therapist’s office. The doctor, an older woman with dark cat’s eye glasses and a severe bun atop her head, stared at him, waiting for him to say something, but Jack had nothing to say. To escape her expectant gaze, he smoothed out the legs of his khakis, taking extra time to secure a small piece of white fuzz that had attached itself to him and toss it away.
The doctor adjusted her glasses and exhaled deeply through her nostrils. Neither action helped defuse the mounting sense of discomfort and awkwardness in the room.
“Jack,” the doctor said at last, “you were required to come to this session.”
“Mmm-hmm,” Jack said, now staring at a bust of Sigmund Freud on her credenza. “I know.”
The doctor exhaled deeply once again. “You’re not required to talk, of course. Not if you don’t want to. But I really think it might be helpful for you.”
“Mmm-hmm,” Jack repeated. “Sure.”
The doctor uncrossed her legs and then recrossed them the other way, shifting her weight in her wingback chair. Her blank notebook remained in her lap.
“Do you drink?” she asked him suddenly.
He looked at her in surprise. “No,” he replied. “Why?”
She scribbled a note in her notebook. “Just wanted to have something to write down.”
Jack grinned. “I don’t smoke or do drugs either,” he said. “If you need more stuff to fill the page.”
She grinned back and made two more quick notes.
“But you do absorb the ghosts of the recently deceased into your own body?” she asked, the pen still hovering over the paper.
The question caught Jack completely off guard.
“Well,” he said, after the initial shock wore off. “Yeah.”
“Would you like to talk about that?” she asked, flipping to the next page in her notebook.
“Um . . . sure,” Jack replied.
“Good,” the doctor said. “When did this first happen?”
Jack took a deep breath. “Well . . .”
He was in the back of his family’s station wagon. It was a bright, sunlit day as they pulled into the cemetery, and Jack was uncomfortably warm in his suit and tie.
His father parked and said a few words of comfort to his mother, who sniffed into a handkerchief and nodded. They all got out of the car, and the three of them headed toward the small hill where everyone else had gathered.
Jack was sad that his uncle Guy was gone, but not as sad as his mother was. She and Guy had been twins, and close their entire lives. As Jack made his way along, he noticed his mother lagging behind. He stopped, went back to her, and took her hand.
“It’s okay, Mom,” he said softly. “C’mon.”
His mother nodded again and allowed Jack to lead her to the gravesite.
The funeral had a massive turnout, which was not at all surprising to Jack. Uncle Guy had always been the life of the party, and had many friends, though no family of his own. As he stood between his mother and father and looked around at the faces of people he vaguely recognized, Jack noticed even the priest presiding over the funeral looked more somber than usual. Then he remembered that Guy had been an altar boy in his youth, and the priest probably knew him well.
As the funeral progressed, Jack felt increasingly nauseated[consider changing to nauseated] and dizzy. He chalked it up to the sun that continued to bear down on them as the priest read words of comfort, but then he felt a distinct tingling sensation on the bottom of his feet. It crawled up his ankles to his knees, and then up his spine until it reached his head. He had a sudden burst inside his brain, like a firework, and he was no longer in control of himself.
He could still perceive what he was doing, but it was as though he were a passenger in the back of a taxi with a partition between himself and the driver. He felt himself turn his head and look up at his mother, and then heard himself say, “Thanks for the comic book, Beezer.”
He saw his mother looking back at him, shocked, disbelieving.
“What did you say?” she whispered urgently to him.
“I fell and skinned my elbow,” Jack heard his voice saying, though he had no sense of saying it. “You had a quarter. It was your babysitting money and you and Anne were going to use it to go to the movies.”
He saw his mother’s eyes go so wide that he feared they would fall out. Her hand went to her mouth and fresh tears coursed down her cheeks.
“You used the quarter to buy me a comic book to make me feel better. Spider-Man. I never thanked you then, so I want to thank you now. I love you, Beeze.”
And with that final word, the tingling sensation in Jack’s body reversed course. As it flowed from the soles of his feet and back into the ground, he felt his brain regain control of his body. But only for a moment, as everything faded to black.
“So your uncle Guy’s ghost took over your body because he had one final message for his sister,” the doctor summarized, scribbling away.
“That’s right,” Jack said.
“And you don’t think that it was anything that you could have . . . imagined?” asked the doctor.
“Well, my mother confirmed that I’d said all those things,” Jack replied. “And she said that no one ever knew that his pet name for her had been Beezer.”
“I see,” said the doctor, and Jack felt a wave of irritation.
“It’s true,” he said defensively.
The doctor nodded noncommittally. “So once you realized you had this . . . ability, you started attending funerals on a regular basis?”
“Yeah, that’s right,” Jack replied. “I figured if these ghosts wanted one last word with their loved ones, I should give them the chance.”
“So the ghosts continued speaking through you,” the doctor said.
“Well, most of them,” Jack said. “Sometimes I’d get the tingling and feel them in my head, and they’d decide that they didn’t have the right words. Or that they had nothing to say after all. One guy just guided me over to his wife and had me take her hand and he looked at her face one last time before he disappeared. That was a little awkward.”
The doctor scratched a few more notes and then flipped to a new page.
“So the reason you’ve been assigned to this session is the result of a plea bargain you struck, to avoid jail time for assault,” the doctor said baldly. “Do you want to tell me about that?”
Jack shifted uncomfortably in his seat.
“Well, the first scuffle I got into was unrelated to the others,” Jack said.
“How so?”
“Well, I attended a funeral a couple of years ago . . .”
Jack had never seen anything like it in his life.
As he had stood waiting next to the crudely dug—and altogether too shallow—grave, the funeral procession roared in like unholy thunder. The guests arrived on motorcycles, ATVs, and souped-up rustbuckets. Mullets and missing teeth were the order of the day. The deceased arrived on the back of a mud-caked pickup, not in a casket but in a battered orange crate.
The pallbearers wore matching sleeveless Iron Maiden t-shirts, and their jeans ran the gamut from ripped to barely qualifying as pants. Jack drew more than a few curious stares, dressed in his suit and tie, but no one said a word to him as the orange crate was plopped down at an awkward angle, half in and half out of the hole.
A heavyset man with a furious sunburn stood in the priest position and removed his John Deere hat.
“We’s here today to say fare-thee-well to our friend and brother, Duke ‘The Great Pussy Hunter’ Judson,” the man said.
Jack felt the familiar tingle in his feet.
When it reached his head and he felt the presence of another person in his mind, he was surprised to feel such a wave of happiness, almost glee. Most of the ghosts he hosted were sad and somber, but apparently not The Great Pussy Hunter.
“Hey Goober!” Jack heard himself cry, interrupting the eulogy. A huge man across from him with great mutton chop sideburns and a red cap with MAKE AMERICA GRATE AGAIN written on it in marker looked up.
“I fucked your sister, Goober!” Jack cried rapturously. “And she gave me crabs!”
The ghost made a hasty retreat out of Jack’s body, leaving Jack to suffer the wrath of Goober, who was, clearly, very protective of his sister.
“So your first fight was with Goober,” the doctor said with a smile she couldn’t quite conceal.
“I wouldn’t characterize it so much as a fight,” Jack said ruefully. “More like I stood there and Goober tired himself out punching me in the face.”
“I see,” the doctor said. “When did the actual fighting begin?”
Jack stared at her for a few moments, wondering how to answer. He decided to just tell the truth; the doctor didn’t seem to believe a word he was saying anyway.
“The actual fighting began,” Jack said at last, “when Death showed up.”
Jack had stood under a stately oak tree and watched one of the biggest funerals he’d ever attended. The young man in the casket had been an incredibly popular athlete at the high school, just weeks away from graduation with the ink barely dry on a full football scholarship, when he decided that he was sober enough to drive his two best friends home.
The two best friends in question stood graveside, bandaged, bruised, and stitched, one of them in a wheelchair, likely for the rest of his life. Standing with them were the young man’s family, and gathered in a mass of humanity was what looked like the entire school body, including coaches, faculty, and even the janitor.
Jack had a sense of what would happen that day. He’d been to hundreds of funerals by that point, and was rarely wrong when it came to final messages. The deceased would most likely want to apologize to his friends for what he did to them, and possibly hold his girlfriend’s hand once more before shuffling off this mortal coil.
Jack felt the familiar tingling sensation, but as it moved up his body, he noticed something odd out of the corner of his eye.
One of the limo drivers, standing silent and still next to his vehicle, suddenly looked up and caught sight of Jack. Before he knew what was happening, the limo driver had hooked an arm around Jack’s neck and dragged him behind the oak tree, out of sight of the mourners.
“Hey!” Jack shouted as the limo driver shoved him up against the crumbling bark and jammed his forearm against Jack’s neck. “Hey!”
The ghost in him seemed to sense something was wrong and the tingling sensation faded. Jack saw the driver’s eyes were glowing bright red—so bright that they seemed to have caught fire.
“Listen, and listen well,” the limo driver hissed. “No more funerals. Do you understand?”
Jack hooked his hands inside the man’s forearm to take some pressure off his throat.
“What are you talking about?” Jack said, his anger rising. “Let go of me! Who do you think you are?”
The limo driver leaned in until the tip of his nose was nearly touching the tip of Jack’s.
“I am Death,” he said quietly, the words filled with menace. “Those ghosts rightfully belong to me. They’re not entitled to one last go-round just because you’re able to give them one. So I’m warning you. Stay out of my business.”
With one last push, the man released Jack. His eyes faded back to their original brown and he blinked a few times, looking around. He didn’t seem to know how he’d gotten so far from his limo, and Jack wasn’t about to tell him.
“So. Death,” the doctor said.
Jack once again felt his hackles rise. “Yes, that’s right, Death,” he said irritably.
“And Death was annoyed with you because you were giving these people another minute or so among the living?”
“Yes,” Jack said. “Look, believe whatever you want. I’m just telling you what happened.”
“I’m here to help you, Jack,” the doctor said soothingly. “I’m not here to believe or disbelieve anything.”
Jack had serious doubts about that, but said nothing.
“I’m assuming you didn’t heed Death’s warning,” the doctor continued. “That you kept attending funerals anyway.”
“That’s right,” Jack said. “I have a gift. I’m not just going to set it aside when I can offer people closure.”
“And how did Death feel about that?”
Jack looked at her incredulously. “How do you think?”
The doctor reached over to her desk and grabbed a folder. She opened it on her lap.
“I have an incident report here that’s part of your file,” she said, scanning the document within. “It appears that, at least at some point, your encounters with Death were rather comical.”
Jack’s expression soured. “Maybe some people thought so.”
“According to this,” the doctor said, “you were in attendance at the funeral of a gentleman by the name of James Cooney. Do you remember that?”
“How could I forget?” Jack said.
Jack had stood at the gravesite of Mr. Cooney, a philanthropist and loving family man who had died of a massive heart attack as he and his golf partners had walked from the clubhouse to the first tee at Silver Oaks Golf Course. Jack had the sense that Mr. Cooney had something important to tell his grieving widow, something he’d assumed he’d have years to convey.
But Jack couldn’t relax the way he normally did. He scanned the crowd of mourners ceaselessly, watching everyone’s eyes for any sign that they might suddenly change color.
As the tingling in his soles began, he saw Mr. Cooney’s eldest son, Junior, raise his head and look directly at him, eyes ablaze. Jack knew he needed to buy Mr. Cooney time, so he did the only thing he could think of—he ran.
“Erin!” Mr. Cooney cried through Jack’s mouth as Jack sprinted around the circle of mourners, Cooney’s son hot on his heels. “Erin! There’s a hidden safe in the attic!”
“I warned you!” Junior snarled, stretching out his arms and trying to snag Jack by the collar. The rest of the guests looked on in horror as the two men ran in circles around the gravesite.
“The combination is 15 left, 38 right, 33 left!” Jack shouted breathlessly, running as fast as his dress shoes would carry him.
“Stop it!” Junior screamed, reversing direction in mid-stride to try and fake Jack out. Jack spotted the move and changed direction as well, so now the two men were running counter-clockwise around the wide-eyed guests.
“I love you!” Jack shouted, and he felt Mr. Cooney’s ghost drain out of him. He turned and shouted at Junior, “Okay! Okay! He’s gone!”
But Death didn’t release Junior, and the chase continued. Jack angled toward the main road leading into the cemetery and ran toward the main gates, certain that Death would respect the boundary and give up. But Death kept running, so Jack did too.
“‘Don’t you have a retirement home to keep an eye on?’ is apparently what the guests heard you shout as you disappeared out of the cemetery,” the doctor said with a wry grin.
“That son of a bitch chased me all over town before he finally let the poor guy go,” Jack said. “I had a hell of a time explaining to him why he was in the parking lot of a 7-11 and not standing with his family at Green Hills Cemetery.”
“You have to admit,” the doctor said, replacing the folder on her desk, “that’s a little bit funny.”
“I suppose it is, now,” Jack admitted. “But being chased down by Death gets old fast.”
“I’m sure. So, when did things turn violent?” the doctor asked.
“The very next funeral,” Jack replied. “You can say what you want about Death, but he’s no dummy. He took over the guy right next to me. I didn’t ev
en have time to look around and bam! Caught me with a left hook before the deceased had even reached my kneecaps.”
“And how did you respond?” the doctor asked.
“At first I tried to cover up, see if I could give the ghost a chance to do something,” Jack said. “But Death was pummeling me. So I threw a punch and caught him off guard. Next thing you know we’re beating the shit out of each other, and friends and family members are diving in to pull us off one another. You think they looked mortified when Junior and I were running in circles around that gravesite? Imagine how these people looked when there was a coffin-side brawl.”
The doctor smiled again. “And that’s when you were arrested?”
“Yeah,” Jack said. “As far as the witnesses were concerned, I was beating up on the dearly departed’s favorite grandson. And no amount of explanation from me was going to convince them that I was some sort of ghost whisperer and the grandson had been temporarily possessed by Death. So I wound up in jail. That’s when things got really interesting.”
“Oh?” the doctor asked, looking up from her notes. “How so?”
“You remember Mr. Cooney?” Jack asked. “The gentleman who had to tell his widow about the secret safe?”
“Yes.”
“Well, Mrs. Cooney somehow got word that I was behind bars,” Jack said. “She was so grateful about that tip-off—the safe turned out to have a million bucks in it, by the way—that she bailed me out.”
“Fascinating,” the doctor said. “Was that the extent of your interaction with Mrs. Cooney?”
“No,” Jack said. “She also insisted on paying my attorney fees when I appeared in court.”
“It sounds like Mrs. Cooney is a generous woman.”
Jack frowned. “Okay, I’m sleeping with Mrs. Cooney. Are you happy? It’s not like she’s a married woman.”
“No, indeed,” the doctor said. “But circling back to your appearance in court. You decided to tell the truth about the ghosts and Death and all of it. Why?”
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