The Other Side

by Daniel Willcocks

  But she had just seen him outside.

  She screamed and fell against the doorframe, barely able to stand. When she was able to stop screaming, she went to the other bedroom door and opened it. Tommy lay crumpled on the floor with the side of his head bashed open.

  Carey Linden, Caucasion male, thirty-six years old, killed his son, Tommy Linden, age ten, by beating him to death with a ball bat. He then killed himself by severing his left carotid artery and partially severing his larynx with a box cutter. The violence of the homicide suggested it was an unpremeditated crime of passion.

  So said the police report, but Denise didn’t believe the act was unpremeditated. “I think he was planning this for years,” she told Greg. “Somewhere in the back of his mind, anyway. Maybe not killing Tommy, but killing himself, at least.”

  “Quit thinking about it, Denny,” Greg said. “This isn’t helping you.”

  Today was day thirteen, and it felt just as horrible as the other twelve days. Her throat was so sore from crying that she didn’t think she could do it anymore, but every few minutes the painful, racking noise would emerge again from her throat like a vomit of razor blades. Tommy’s funeral had been Saturday, a full week after his death because the police had kept his body for several days. Though funerals are supposed to comfort the grieving, she could imagine nothing worse. Greg had practically needed to carry her to her chair at the graveside, and then he’d needed to hold her shoulder tightly to keep her from falling out of it.

  “Listen to this,” she said.

  Carey’s first album was already on the CD player because she’d been listening to it much of the afternoon while Greg was away at work. She put on the third track, and the long instrumental opening filled the living room, muted drums beating slowly, a thin shriek of a guitar somewhere in the distance like an ambulance far away, coming closer, and Carey’s keyboard following behind it, weaving together a sad, sweet hymn that built relentlessly into a thundering, drug-demented funeral dirge.

  “What is this?” Greg asked.

  She handed him the CD case and watched him stare at the cover, a cemetery scene painted by Carey. The name of the band, The Messengers, was scrawled in red letters in the brooding night sky like graffiti finger-painted in blood. The name of the album, “Telegram from the Tomb,” was carved in the stone marking an open grave. She remembered when he had painted it, and the blood-red letters were her own idea.

  The instruments suddenly hushed. They drew their breath and started again, like quiet, dark figures rustling in the misty distance, and Carey’s small, hollow voice tiptoed between them like a mournful ghost.

  Babe, I have seen the other side,

  and I’ve found a secret place where I can hide

  in the darkness, waiting there beyond the gate,

  safe from ugliness and pain and beastly hate.

  She hit the pause button and said, “You see what I mean? It’s like he thought of death as some kind of secret hiding place. I think he killed Tommy so he could keep him all to himself in his secret place, like, in death, Tommy would belong to him.”

  “I don’t think that’s what the words mean,” Greg said. “I think it’s just some kind of drug message.”

  The coroner had found no trace of drugs in his body, and the police had interviewed two of his close friends who said he’d been clean for twelve months, but she didn’t believe it.

  “Even if he was clean, it didn’t make any difference,” she said, though Greg had already heard this argument several times before. “He did so many drugs for so long that he made himself permanently crazy. Do you think a ghost can be insane, too? I mean, is he just as demented now as he was before?”

  She hit the play button, and Carey sang:

  Babe, you have thrust me in the hole,

  you stole my heart, stole my house, stole my soul,

  guess our secrets are all that I can keep—

  I’ve hid them safe beneath the ground, six feet deep.

  “It’s so weird,” she said. “He wrote those words long before we split up, like he already knew I was going to leave him.”

  “Please, sweetheart, let go of it.”

  “Listen to this one,” she said, and kicked the player up to track seven. This song was faster and louder, drums pounding deep and a furious guitar clashing like steel against the angry keyboard. Carey’s voice sounded lean and hard.

  They say you can’t take it with you,

  but I’m gonna try,

  gonna pack some equipment

  before I die.

  Gonna bring a heavy blanket,

  ’cause it’s cold in the ground,

  gonna bring my radio,

  ’cause worms make no sound!

  The keyboard and guitar clashed together like swords. “Can you please turn it down?” Greg yelled.

  The instruments screamed louder, and Carey’s voice screamed over them.

  Better bring a bright flashlight,

  ’cause it’s dark down below.

  Better pack a good long novel,

  ’cause forever goes by slow!

  Denise shut off the stereo, and the sudden silence made the room seem huge and empty. “Blanket, flashlight, novel,” she said. “Those are exactly the things Carey told Tommy to bring.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything. People bring flashlights and blankets when they go camping.”

  “It’s like he was planning this years ago,” she said.

  “Denny, you’re just making things harder for yourself.”

  “Carey’s mind was complicated,” she said. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  She heard the tone of contempt in her voice, but right now Greg’s feelings didn’t seem very important. What was important was her intuition, and it was telling her that Carey had planned this for a long time—and his dirty work wasn’t finished.

  “He’s going to kill me next,” she said quietly. “If he can.”

  “What?”

  “Carey’s ghost wants to kill me. He killed Tommy to keep him for himself, and he wants me all for himself, too.”

  Greg held her and said, “Denny, please, you have to stop thinking like this. There’s no such thing as a ghost and nobody’s going to kill you.”

  “I told you a hundred times, I saw his ghost outside the cabin.”

  “No, you didn’t. You need to let go of these horrible thoughts, sweetheart. They’re just making things worse. You were in a state of shock that night, and you thought you saw something that wasn’t there. There wasn’t any ghost, and nobody’s going to hurt you.”

  He was patting her back awkwardly, as if he were burping a baby, and she didn’t feel soothed. She was thinking of the final words Carey had spoken to her: “Just Tommy and me and babe makes three.”

  “You think you’ll be able to sleep tonight?” Greg asked.

  “Yeah, I’m halfway there, now,” Denise said. “I’ll be all the way in a few more minutes.”

  It was a lie, but Greg sounded so tired that she didn’t want to keep him awake again. It was already past midnight, and his usual bedtime was right after the eleven o’clock news. She’d kept him awake many nights now with her talk and tears, but she intended to face the rest of this night alone.

  “You promise you’ll see the doctor Monday?” he asked.

  “I promise.”

  “You need to ask her for some kind of sedative to soothe your nerves.”

  “I will.”

  “I love you,” he said.

  “Love you, too.”

  She kissed his forehead and watched his eyes fall shut. He was a good man, but she wondered if he had fallen in love with the wrong person. He had no idea that she still took drugs occasionally and sometimes even slept with other men. And he’d surely be shocked if he knew some of the things she and Carey had done years ago, long after the eleven o’clock news was over.

  Though he loved her, she knew he would never understand her, just as he would never believe in intuition or premonit
ions or ghosts or the link she and Carey shared. Her link to a dead murderer.

  Her mind was racing, and when she was sure he was fast asleep she eased out of bed and put her robe on. Downstairs, she poured a glass of wine and sat at the kitchen table in the dark. She felt something pulling at her thoughts, and she believed it was her link with Carey. He was trying to influence her in some way, trying to draw her into his darkness, and she waited to hear what words he would say, but no words came.

  It occurred to her that, by slashing his own throat, maybe he’d rendered even his ghost speechless; in front of the cabin he’d tried to speak, but then the gash had appeared and only a gargling noise had come out.

  She was sipping her wine when a terrible thought suddenly came to her: This isn’t the first time he has killed!

  The thought startled her. Had she been married to a serial killer without knowing it? Had Carey murdered others while they were living together and raising their son? It seemed hard to believe, but the thought was lodged in her head and refused to go away. Certainly, Carey had always been a deeply private person, with his dark songs, his secret places, his unknowable mysteries.

  She had no doubt he wanted to kill her so the three of them could be together. Surely ghosts couldn’t kill, since they had no substance, but she believed he was trying to use their link to drive her to suicide. It wouldn’t be difficult; suicide had been on her mind every day since she’d found Tommy’s body.

  She felt him pulling at her, trying to draw her outside into the night. She told herself she wasn’t afraid of Carey’s ghost and didn’t fear death. Life was what frightened her. She wanted to confront him, scream at him, call him a bastard and a murderer, shout him away into whatever deep circle of hell he belonged in, and, most of all, get him out of her head.

  She put on shoes, slipped a warm coat over her robe, and stepped out the back door. The late October breeze was chilly. The woods were dark and deep, gnarled trees still clutching some of their leaves, unwilling to let go of the dead. The old farmhouse was a blot of deeper darkness but, as she approached it, she thought she saw a dim light in one of the downstairs windows. Impossible—the electric had been shut off three years ago, right after Carey moved out.

  But something pale and luminous kept flitting across the window of the big front room that Carey had turned into his music studio. Then she heard him singing, if singing was the right word. It was the kind of mournful wailing that he used to call his “elemental music,” but this sounded gargled and strangled, as if it was coming out of a slashed throat.

  A sudden gust swept a confetti of dead leaves down from the trees, and she pulled her coat tighter. Pale ghost-light flitted across the dirty glass, and when she was a few feet away from it she saw him.

  He was stark naked, his thin white body glistening like a luminous eel in the front room lit by no light other than his skin. He was dancing slowly, with his slender arms stretched above his head, but as she came closer and stared through the dirty glass she saw that his feet weren’t quite touching the floor. His arms seemed to be suspended by ropes from the sagging ceiling, but there weren’t any ropes.

  He spun slowly in the ruined room, blood leaking from his throat whenever he sang too loudly. His penis was erect, and it looked longer and thicker than she remembered. His sad, elemental wailing turned into the semblance of a tune she recognized and, though he apparently wasn’t able to utter the lyrics, her mind filled them in:

  Tommy, we have reached the other side,

  and I’ve found a secret place where we can hide

  in the darkness, waiting here beyond the gate,

  safe from ugliness and pain and beastly hate.

  She must have let out a sound, because he suddenly spun around and spotted her with bloodshot, staring eyes of death. He tried to speak, but the wound in his throat opened wide and an ugly gurgling noise came out. His face contorted with horror, and he clutched the wound and tried again to speak, but there was just the wet wheezing sound of bloody air blowing between his fingers.

  Denise wanted to scream curses at him, but she wasn’t able to speak much more clearly than he was. Her words came out in a hoarse, dry rasp: “You bastard, you fucking bastard! You killed my son.”

  His naked, white body swept toward her, and his head and shoulders came crashing through the window, the glass shredding his face as it broke.

  Denise had fallen to the ground, and Carey’s wounded throat bled onto her face while he stared down at her. His trunk was hanging out of the window, his bare chest cut and pierced with broken glass. He was trying to reach down and grab her, but the window ledge was too high, and his arms were shaking spasmodically, as if he could control them no better than his voice.

  She tasted his blood dripping onto her lips. She tried to get up but couldn’t. Her body was paralyzed; it felt like part of the dirt. She was sprawled in an awkward position with her legs wide apart, and she didn’t want to be exposed to him like that, but she couldn’t close them. As he stared down at her, a cold gust of wind blew a dead leaf up her robe, and she felt it inching up her bare thigh like a dry, withered hand.

  Carey’s shaky hands were inscribing a figure like a jagged circle in the air. At first, she thought he was trying to cast some sort of magical spell that only the dead knew, but then she realized he was drawing a picture of his secret place, the place where he wanted her to be. Just Tommy and me and babe makes three, in our own special circle of hell.

  It was an invitation.

  The dead leaf felt its way up her thigh with its dry little fingers and discovered that she wasn’t wearing underwear. She tried to shut her legs as it began scratching against her most secret place, but her muscles were made of gelatin.

  Carey gazed down at her, still drawing a jagged circle in the air, and at last she found her voice. “You sick fucking bastard!” she shouted. “Go back to hell, where you belong!”

  She was still shouting when she heard the back door open and Greg shouted, “Denny, what’s wrong?” As he helped her up from the dead leaves and broken glass, she saw that Carey was no longer hanging out the window. But now he seemed to be everywhere, in the rustling trees, in the chill night air, and in the folds of her brain.

  “Ghosts can kill you,” Ginger said. “I just got off the phone with Madame Alex, and she says it’s not even unusual.”

  “But they don’t have any substance,” Denise said.

  “Didn’t you tell me he broke the window in that old house? Isn’t that exactly what you said? Madame Alex says poltergeists can throw objects around a room and knock over heavy tables. She’s seen it happen many times. So, why can’t they grab up a butcher knife and stab you with it? She says they have some kind of ectoplasmic body, and it can kill you just as dead as Ted Bundy.”

  Carey obviously did have some sort of body. After Greg had led her into the house last night, Denise looked in the bathroom mirror and found wet blood on her face. But she wasn’t cut anywhere—it was Carey’s blood, dead man’s blood. She had scrubbed her face with soap three times, but she could still feel it there like a permanent mark.

  “You got to do something about this, right away,” Ginger said. “Madame Alex says a lot of times what you think are ghosts are really demons, though, in Carey’s case, there’s probably not much difference. She can help you, she knows how to clear out ghosts and demons. She’s done it many times, cleared out houses that were so haunted you wouldn’t even want to set foot in them. You need to get her out there right away, Denny. She’s not cheap, but she knows what she’s doing.”

  Denise’s heart felt funny, as if somebody were pressing a cold hand against it, and she held the phone away from her ear. She doubted Madame Alex could eradicate this horror from her life, and she wasn’t sure she wanted her to. Carey’s ghost felt like some tenuous connection to Tommy, or maybe just a connection to death, and maybe that was what she really wanted.

  “Denny, are you there?” Ginger asked.

  “I don’t think
I want some kind of ghost hunter out here. I’ll try to deal with it myself.”

  “Denny, you can’t deal with it by yourself. You’re gonna end up dead.”

  “I gotta hang up now. Greg’s calling for me.”

  It wasn’t true; through the kitchen window she saw Greg raking leaves in the backyard. When she got up that morning, she was surprised to find he wasn’t at work, and it took her a moment to realize it was Saturday. She had taken a month of unpaid leave from her job and, without a schedule, time had become a confusing blur. She was glad she wouldn’t be spending the day alone but, at the same time, it seemed a chore to be with him or anyone else. If he were at work, she could lie in bed and wallow in her misery, which was all she really wanted to do. Now she needed to act like a normal human being.

  She put on a jacket and stepped outside. Greg stopped raking and smiled at her.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked.

  “Pretty good.”

  “Nice day,” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  Though the air was cool, and clouds were gathering in the north, the sky overhead was bright with early afternoon sun.

  “It’s going to rain later,” he said. “But tomorrow’s supposed to be beautiful, seventy-eight degrees and sunny. Let’s have a picnic and go hiking.”

  “I don’t think I’m up for that.”

  “Sunshine, fresh air, exercise, that would be the best thing for you. Get you out of this house.”

  She nestled her face against his shoulder. His denim jacket smelled like him, masculine, simple, and comforting, the smell of sanity and good common sense, the kind of common sense that believed sunshine, fresh air, and exercise could cure anything. But she knew it couldn’t.

  “I don’t think I want to,” she said.

  “Well, you can’t just sit around every day feeling miserable. I’ll buy some sandwich meat after dinner and pack us a nice picnic lunch.”