Panic overwhelmed both the glee and the rage, and the car rocked up and then down again. Peter’s emotions and the power that came with them was out of control. He wheeled around as the car turned enough while up on one side to come down atop the prone, unconscious Dee. If the door hadn’t finished him, that would.
Terrified by his own violence, Peter ran into the graveyard. Running blind, he sometimes dodged headstones and other times passed right through them as easily as passing through the empty air. He was not aware of where he was going until he saw the fire’s twinkling light and the two women around it. Pasty Cerulean and another, darker-complexioned woman in her early twenties. Ginny, he supposed that would be.
The witches had themselves a setup out of some antiquated painting. A small cauldron sitting over a small fire. The muck inside was thick as porridge, and it bubbled in a disgusting way. He realized now he could not smell anything—ghosts lost that ability, it seemed, when they lost their bodies—but he assumed it was disgusting. A quartet of skinned rabbits lay in a heap in the dirt, nearby.
The animal squatted on the earth, bleeding from a bullet wound on its forehead. A collar and chain bound it to a stake set in the earth, and that would have seemed humdrum impossible but for the shimmer. Each link in the chain and the collar and even the stake itself were translucent and a shimmering silver. Not solid at all. They were crafted from nothing more than moonlight, though where such light might have come from on a night as dark as this was anyone’s guess.
“When will we feed it to the bowl?” Ginny asked. She sat cross-legged atop her robes. A large revolver rested on her nude thighs. She was a painfully thin woman, that pretty shade of black called redbone. Her eyes looked sunken in her skull.
“When Dee gets back,” Cerulean said, craning her neck in the vague direction of the wreck. “We still have maybe thirty, thirty-five minutes before the witching hour is up.” Looking pointedly at their prisoner, she added, “And then you get to help us raise up Hecate from her prison in Tartarus.”
The animal’s eyes rolled toward Peter. Tormented creature; pained and sad and embarrassed. It asked, “You came?”
“Shh!” Peter waved a finger before his lips to emphasize the need for silence.
“Deaf to the dead, these two. Other one was aware.” The animal licked its chops. “He’s in Tartarus, now.”
Tartarus? That was from Greek myth, wasn’t it? A part of the Underworld? Hecate, though, that was from Macbeth, right? Goddess or queen of the witches? So many myths jammed into one another, how was he supposed to understand any of this? Peter admitted, “I don’t know what’s happening.”
“No need to,” the animal replied. “Just give.”
“Give? Give what?”
“Hand,” snapped the animal. “Foot. Arm. Head. Not matter specifics. Just give.”
The animal wanted to eat him. Or a part of him. What for? “I can move things,” Peter said. “Maybe I can break your chains?”
The animal whimpered and the witches grinned at it. “Try, if must.”
Peter decided he must. He focused on the chain. He tried to work up anger and found himself empty. The run from the wreck left more than a thin layer of slime on the tombstones behind him. It left his emotions. He could not even work up pity, just numbed exhaustion. “I hate this,” he said without even a trace of Hatred’s fire. “I can’t . . . Can’t do anything.”
“These is magic, anyway,” the animal said. “Not like throwing a rock.”
“Do they need Dee’s help? I think he’s dead.”
The animal considered this. “Don’t think so. Me body is more sorcerous than expected. Harvesting me might crack the prison’s walls like eggshells. Maybe let more than Hecate out.”
Peter did not like the sound of that. “What can I do?”
“Give.”
Peter looked at his hands, his arms, his feet. They seemed substantial enough. Not the stuff of ghosts from the movies, nothing cartoonish or slimy. “Will it hurt?“
“Some might. Might need two limbs to get out. You fresh, remember pain. Memory sparks are easier for fresh ones to ignite. Still, dead ones got no nerves.”
“I might hurt, if I expect it to?” Peter asked. Things hurt or they did not.
The animal nodded. “Got no nerves,” it repeated, “and you’re too fresh. Still possessed by life’s notions.”
He studied his hands in the flickering firelight, found the palms blank. All those little nicks and marks he accrued during his life were gone, not just the classic palmistry nonsense of life lines and love lines and whatnot, but the scars and the wrinkles. They were all gone.
“Give.”
This was his hand. The one he had been born with. Had spent his whole life with. Extending it seemed impossible.
“And if I… if I give you what you want? Will I… Will I get it back?”
“If I take you away,” the animal said, “you won't need it.”
Peter asked, “Heaven, you mean?”
“To some.”
“Hell?”
Cerulean stood up, peered into the dark for her friend and saw something that made her smile. “About time!” Dee was tottering back like a reject from The Walking Dead. Not dead, Peter realized with both relief and a kernel of terror. She turned to Ginny. “You ready?”
The animal snarled. “Give.”
Peter stuck his left hand toward the animal’s mouth before he could think twice. The beast leaned in with gaping jaws and chomped down, taking the offered limb all the way to the elbow.
Over the last ten minutes, he had grappled with the concept of his own death, almost accepting it, and then not. However, seeing the animal bite down on his arm up to the elbow? It brought him a few steps closer to acceptance, to resignation.
Peter wheeled aside, shrieking at the sight of his beautiful arm, gone, at the tatters on his shoulder which had been connective tissue for a limb. There was no blood, there was only terror, the fear of pain transformed into all too actual experience.
Pain flared up in his mind like a match and then it exploded like a stick of dynamite when the animal took a second bite all the way to his shoulder. It chewed, processed and then used whatever energy it claimed from Peter’s offering. The chain split in two.
Ginny cursed and pointed her gun. Cerulean turned back, fingers curling and wreathed in burning black energy, mystical power.
Peter unleashed his emotional explosion toward the one called Ginny, and the effects were immediate. He possessed intensity but no fine controls. He lashed out with an ectoplasmic backhand, smacking the woman three steps backward. It also ripped the revolver from her grip and sent it flying aside. The weapon spun through the air like a shuriken for all of three seconds before rebounding off Cerulean’s left ear. That blow was enough to distract her from using whatever sorcery had been close to hand. The dark energy massing around her curled fingers dissipated. Meanwhile, Ginny was stunned at the suddenness with which she was disarmed. She gaped at her empty hands even as her trigger finger squeezed and squeezed and squeezed on nothing.
The animal pounced, leaping over the cauldron and landing atop the distracted witch. Its terrible jaws encircled Cerulean’s head before she could collect herself to mount a defense, and then snapped shut. The corpse’s neck fountained blood when it wrenched its prize free, and her carcass tumbled back across a gravestone.
Ginny raced into the cemetery, shrieking. The animal bounded next toward the oncoming shape. Dee was bloody and dazed, but he had enough understanding to scream and throw his hands up in front of his face before the savage creature took them at the wrists as well as the nose just past them in a single bite. It then swatted the man aside with one mighty paw, opening his side, and bending him across the nearby headstone.
All that remained was Ginny. The animal turned its gory face her way.
“Let her go,” Peter whispered. “Please. She’s alone. Harmless. Frightened out of her mind.”
“No,“ the animal s
narled and bounded off after her. Its huffing breaths were loud, brutish, terrifying. Ginny made the mistake of looking back—a lesson Lot’s wife could have shared—while keeping up her run. She hit a tombstone with her hip, fell out of her stride and crashed to the ground. Peter heard a solid impact of meat on a stone, though he could not say if it was shoulder or head. The animal leapt atop her, and she screamed as she clutched it by the chin, trying to keep those lethal jaws away.
The animal reared up and slammed both paws down on her. Several bones snapped, flesh pulped with a squelching sound, and the screams ceased in an instant.
The animal leaned in to worry and eat, and then it trotted back to Peter. “You show mercy,” it said, mildly. “I do not.”
“What crime did they commit?”
“Murdered you,” it said. “Murdered more. Four rabbits. “ It scuffed dirt over the flames, extinguishing them. “Also, kill two landlord women.” It kicked dirt over the carcasses. “And tried to break Tartarus, released the dread imprisoned.” It licked one claw clean as it considered, and then the other. “Also, Shot me.”
The animal had not eaten him to the guts, but Peter suddenly felt hollowed out. Numb. Faint, if ghosts could experience such a sensation.
“I guide you, now.” The animal trotted deeper into the cemetery. After a few steps, it stopped and grinned back at him. “You gave. I owe thanks.”
“Glad I could lend a hand,” Peter said without thinking. Then, he realized the implication and felt such horror. The animal laughed and led the way.
A dozen or more yards from the witches’ cauldron, the animal stopped and turned to face Peter. “Your heart is large,” it said. “I will not consume you.”
“Thanks?” Peter said.
It raised a paw and swiped it through the air. Four slimy rents opened in the air itself, and through them Peter saw a brilliant white light. “Through this is the Other Place. Listen to heart. You will not see…” It struggled for a word and then decided on, “Hell.”
“I can pass through this?”
“You are fresh dead, but dead.”
Peter glanced back into the dark. Corpses waited there, witches and his own. His car. His life. “I really am dead,” he said.
“Yes,” the animal replied. “But you not yet know what that means. Go. Learn.”
Learn. He knew a thing or two about that. What little life he lived had been dedicated to the topic. He turned back to the slimy rends, saw that they were shorter than they were a moment before. What the animal made, time unmade. If he lingered too long, they would close right up.
Peter put his remaining hand before his face to dull the light’s intensity and stepped into the disappearing doorway the animal made. He was halfway through when he caught the smell of summer—lemonade and carnival popcorn and bubble gum and freshly mown lawn. He chuckled and took his hand down, to see all he could, smell all he could, savor all he could of this next, strange phase of existence.
Piece by Piece
By Daniel Willcocks
From stone to seed, all things feed.
Her voice lingers, a gong struck inside an echo chamber the size of a thimble. Each syllable a dizzying pulse of pain and torture as the blood dries on my lips.
Ignore the wants, take what you need.
I laugh as I chew, great slathers of salty meat. Hands slick with grime, specked with sand. Still the endless dark swims by, unflinching, unknowing, even death must go on, it seems.
But she no longer will…
I can only remember the feeling of prying my eyes open. That muscular flex you take for granted in life and beg for the ability to come back when you’re bleeding on the floor, body nothing more than a hessian sack of tools dropped from a third story roof.
There was nothing there to greet me. A color deeper than black. A not-black. The not-black remained not-black no matter how many times I butterflied my eyelids, no matter how much I strained in the endless abyss for something to differentiate the nothing and create something. I was weightless. There was nothing beneath me. Nothing above, nothing to the sides, all was gone where only moments before had been everything. Ambulance flashes, wailing sirens, and crowds. For a precious few moments it had been oppressive, claustrophobic. Death felt like the correct end. A choice I had made.
No amount of CPR could bring back the unwilling.
Now I float on the other side of the spectrum—if “floating” you can call it. I’m cast out in an atmosphere of blank, spinning in a chamber of nought. Maybe not spinning. Spinning would imply movement, and that’s something that I lack. I feel the presence of my arms and muster the strength to move, but there’s no confirmation that such a signal has been received. The ghosts of my senses play with synapses that I’m not sure even exist anymore. Perhaps all that is left is a celestial aura of consciousness. Is this death? To float in a chasm of awareness, lost to everything that you once knew as life, as you?
At least it is painless, here. For a brief few moments I recall bone protruding from skin like brambles piercing wax paper. A searing bolt of pain, both ice-cold and scalding-hot, racing up my spine. The blackberry juices of blood seeping down my leg, knee in a place it shouldn’t be, glass sprinkling the tarmac like freshly powdered snow in the throes of early winter.
I never believed that death could be so raw, so electric…
So beautiful.
Mother once told me of a place called Heaven. A place where the man who created the world sat on a throne made of cumulus, awaiting the hour of your passing to instill judgment upon you and decide your fate for all eternity.
I never believed in such a power, but Mum did, and so I played pretend. Even in her dying days, frail fingers laced together like vulture’s talons, cheeks hollow and gaunt, skin an ashen-white, she choked out the words, a blessing that God would bestow upon her the grace to pass into his protection and live an afterlife of peace. Up there would be Grandpa. Up there would be Tommy, and Cupcake, and Julia, and Cyrill, and Mr Peaches. In the land where the sun didn’t set, she would reunite with them all, hold their hands and skip into the great beyond. I wept by her bedside, inspired by her faith, saddened by her inevitable disappointment. By the time Mother died, I’d lived a life long enough to understand that God wasn’t coming. My belief lay in biology, in the masterpieces of worms and flies. A decomposing body makes good fertilizer, as my rose bushes would confirm for you.
It hurt to know that Mother was about to enter a world for which she had never prepared. To face a reality that was far removed from her own making.
Not that I had prepared, either. Nothing could have prepared me for what came next.
The first white spec of light was no larger than a pinhead, yet it blinded whatever vessel I was able to see through. A solitary star, breaking the infinite darkness, granting me a beacon of hope.
There is beauty in the simple things. When life and its worries are stripped away, it’s easy to appreciate the minuscule. That one dot of light opened a world of possibility and hope. A baby’s mouth yawning its first breath. I couldn’t tear my gaze away. If I had retinas, the light would surely have burned its red mark inside my eyelids, irritated my vision as I tried to blink away the glowing stamp of annoyance, but in this eternity of non-black, the light became the one thing I could actually hold to. I watched it for hours, days, weeks, months—who knew how long. The light pulsed and danced, growing infinitesimally larger with each passing beat. When it was the size of a marble, another light shone, then a third, a fourth, until the non-black became black and everything around me was stars.
Corporeal tears fell down cheeks made of non-reality. Ghosts of emotion left over from my mortal body, the same way an amputee can still feel their missing limb on stormy nights. I marveled at the universe unfolding around me, the stars multiplying infinitum, galaxies blossoming like daffodils, swirling and hypnotic. Asteroids and meteors and comets streaking through the endless expanse of space. To be a single particle in this miraculous picture was a ble
ssing, and one that I was humbled to accept. I wondered at the pieces of debris and dust passing by in eddies and waves, picturing each piece of grit as a former friend and loved one of mine. In that moment I understand the world, knew that existence was made of loops and cycles, that from these pieces of space dust came the world, and from the world came humans, and once the gift of life had been extinguished your particles were thrown back into the gumbo pot of life and creation, only to be mixed, tasted, and cast back into the universe again, ready to await whatever Mistress Universe bestowed upon the pieces that were once you.
I understood.
Until my feet crashed on solid ground. And then I didn’t.
Landing on that bed of sand was a softer experience than being front-loaded by the metallic grill of an eighteen-wheeler semi, but not by much.
The stars faded from sight as I screwed my eyes shut, clenched my teeth, and grunted, wallowing in the onslaught of pain that racked my body. I was me, though not as I knew myself. A quick glance showed the splinters in my shin, the lump where my rib had slipped its casing, an angry rash of shredded skin and dribbling blood from my skid across the blazing asphalt. The contrast to my moments before was stark. One minute floating in numb apathy, the next hurled headlong into a tunnel of emotion and torment.
The Other Side Page 9
