Afterlife

by Douglas Clegg

  “But, it’s not as if I enjoy them.”

  “Don’t you?”

  Julie stared at her. “They’re horrible. Some of them.”

  “But you’ve told me all along they’re erotic.”

  “Yes, but…there are things in them…”

  “What things?”

  Julie hesitated. She crossed one leg over the other, leaning back in her chair. She looked up at the ceiling. “There’s a kind of cruelty to them. There’s a meanness. In them, Hut is dead. I mean, dead. A corpse. His eyes are…well, they’re not human. And there’s a woman— with red hair—who…who…”

  “Ah,” Eleanor said. “You’ve been holding out on me.”

  “I couldn’t say it before. I just couldn’t.”

  “You experience pleasure in these dreams, but you feel guilt because Hut is dead, even in the dream. Thus, they’re cruel and mean. And jealousy, too, with this other woman.”

  “Even when he’s making love to me,” Julie said. “Like necrophilia or something.” Suddenly, Julie asked, “I’m not some nut who thinks my husband’s trying to speak to me from the great beyond, or anything. I mean, you don’t believe that kind of thing, do you?”

  Eleanor wore a half-smile. It was a God smile, and her eyes were God eyes. “Why would you ask that?”

  “I…well, my mother took me to this psychic…”

  “Oh.” Eleanor wrinkled her nose as if she smelled a fart.

  “He told me that someone who was lost was looking for me. And that…doors in my mind were locked, and needed opening…and other stuff.”

  Eleanor smirked. She lifted her cup and took a sip of coffee. Glanced up, mid-sip, like an amused parent. “Sometimes mysticism helps people get through grief. Did it help?”

  “I don’t know. I just…these dreams feel like… sometimes, I think it’s like he’s not really gone. Until I wake up.”

  “Julie, dreams are just dreams. It’s the mind, sifting through things. We can do some more work here, if you want. But you’re working through guilt and anger and shame and fury and fear. All the things that accompany the death of a loved one.”

  “Did I really love him? I’m not even sure.”

  “See? Even now, you’re expressing a perfectly normal anxiety. Don’t fight the dreams. Don’t fight what you’re going through. Follow it. Go on a journey. Celebrate life when you can, but let your subconscious work through what it needs to. Now, tell me about this visit to the fortune teller.”

  Then, Julie told her about the TV studio, and Eleanor said, “Oh. Of course! One of those TV people. It’s great show biz to do what they do. Do you know the technique? There’s a way to anticipate what people will say next, just from eye movement and very minor facial movement. But you can’t believe that nonsense. It’s not rational. Do you believe it?”

  Julie frowned. “I don’t think so. It just seemed… true.”

  “Maybe there’s something to it. I just can’t say. My favorite is John Edward. He’s adorable,” Eleanor grinned, ear to ear. God and the Earth Mother converged for a moment. “Do you ever watch him? I don’t often, because I just hate seeing mysticism being promoted like that. It’s not my thing. But you can believe what you like. I don’t mean you’re wrong. Or even that they’re wrong. I just don’t think it’s true, myself. Did you learn anything good from this guy?”

  Julie shook her head. She didn’t want to talk about it anymore. It felt too private, even for Eleanor.

  5

  Julie went online that night and ordered a few of Michael Diamond’s books on tape from Shocklines, a bookseller that sold occult, horror, and other strange books. She also found his book called Unlocking Dreams, and ordered that one, too.

  Within three days, the tapes and book had arrived. She went out jogging with her Walkman hooked up, listening to his book called The Mind’s Journey. When she drove Livy to Dr. Fishbain’s in Ramapo Cliffs, she kept the book on the tape player in the car, and sat in the parking lot, listening, while Livy had her appointment.

  6

  From The Mind’s Journey:

  “Some have called this astral projection. That, to me, implies mystical, magical places and other dimensions. Remote viewing is something that seems anything but magical to those who do it. Your consciousness roams. At first, it just rises up from your body, after meditation and relaxation of the body have been achieved. It remains near you, mainly because you fear this new ability. Then, as you get used to it, your mind—or mind’s eye as I like to think of it—moves outward, exploring. As you become more brave, it goes further. The view from this is like a wide-angle lens. Peripheral vision is out of focus, but the central vision is nearly normal, with some distortion. I liken it to being slightly drunk—you swing around a bit, you move in fits and starts. But it is simply consciousness, projected outward.”

  7

  In the night, Julie awoke—it was still dark—but she had the sense that someone else was in her room. She half expected it to be Matt, because she was sure it was a man.

  After several minutes, she was wide awake enough to get out of bed. She flicked on the bedside lamp, as if to dispel the shadows. No one there.

  She turned the lamp off. Pressed her hands into her forehead. A terrible headache had come on.

  She rose to go to the connecting bathroom to get some aspirin and a glass of water. In the dark, she fumbled through the medicine cabinet for the aspirin, and when she shut the cabinet mirror, she saw Hut.

  His face.

  He stood there.

  She was too terrified to turn.

  Her throat went dry, and she dropped the aspirin bottle into the sink.

  She leaned over clutching the rim of the sink, staring at him.

  His eyes were not the milky white that they had been in her nightmares. They were normal. Even in the dark she could tell that.

  He looked just as he had the morning before he’d died.

  She raised a fist and slammed it into the bathroom mirror, cutting the edge of her hand. Don’t believe. Don’t. It’s a dream. It’s a nightmare. It’s your mind fucking with you because some part of you doesn’t want to look at his death. Some part of you is resisting the idea that he’s gone. Some part of you feels guilty because you didn’t love him enough. You didn’t make yourself available to him enough. You weren’t a good enough wife. You’re not a good enough mother. You are punishing yourself with this.

  She felt a panic—a sense of insanity inside her mind, of hallucinations brought on by stress and grief, or else it was some trigger inside her that had been pulled tight and then released. For a moment, she felt as if she were dreaming, because that would seem all right.

  But it was no dream.

  She struggled to reach to the light switch by the door, sure that at any second, the dread she felt would somehow stop her heart from beating.

  The light came up in the bathroom.

  Behind her, the photo collage of their first few years together, with Matt and Livy at the tidal pool in La Jolla, with Livy with her gramma, and Matt’s sixthgrade class picture.

  No one.

  She was alone.

  The mirror on the cabinet, cracked like a spider’s web.

  The blood on the edge of her palm was real enough.

  She opened the cabinet again and brought out the brown bottle of hydrogen peroxide. She got a cotton swab and dipped it into a capful of the peroxide, and then pressed it lightly on her cut. She washed it off, then swabbed, then washed, and then pressed toilet paper against it to stop the slight flow of blood.

  She couldn’t sleep the rest of the night. The following night, she stayed up reading more of Michael Diamond’s books, and re-reading sections she’d only skimmed of The Life Beyond.

  8

  “Mommy!” Livy called out.

  Julie woke up, with a start. She had a feeling as if she’d been having a nightmare. Livy’s voice rang out, shrill.

  When Julie got to her bedroom, Livy stood on her bed, in her jammies
.

  “Honey?” Julie asked, rushing to her.

  Livy, trembling, tears pouring down her face. She pointed to a shadow along the wall. “Daddy was here.”

  “Aw,” Julie sat down beside her and flicked on the lamp on the table. The shadow vanished. “See? Maybe you were dreaming.”

  “No. He was here. I woke up. He was right there.”

  Julie hugged her daughter. “Oh, baby, it’s all right. Maybe it was on your brain radio.” Julie tried to block her own strong sense of seeing Hut standing behind her, in the bathroom of the master bedroom.

  Standing there, just watching her.

  “Something’s wrong with him,” Livy whispered, as if her father might hear her.

  9

  Joe Perrin and his husband had come out to the ’burbs one Sunday when the weather was perfect, and they had a little barbeque out on the patio. Burgers and corn on the cob and Rick brought some great French wine from the place in the Chelsea Market and they brought their big friendly German Shepherd, Dutch, which both Matt and Livy took to right away. After the meal and some retreading of old memories, Julie sent the kids into the front yard, playing with the dog, and Rick opened the wine.

  Joe and Julie and Rick hung out on the picnic table, blue plastic cups in hand, looking over the back lawn, beyond the neighbor’s house to the dip down the hill and the bit of lake they could see through the trees. They talked about anything and everything and eventually, third or fourth cup of wine in, Julie brought up Michael Diamond and Amanda Hutchinson.

  “Joe, but he said I had a connection with her. A woman. And then, his wife is dead.”

  “Sounds psychic to me,” Rick said, grinning.

  “Oh, you,” Joe said. “Rick doesn’t believe in it.”

  “It’s nonsense. Julie, if we could get into each other’s minds, wouldn’t we have solved the greatest problem in the world?”

  “What’s that?” Joe asked.

  “The distance between two human minds,” Rick said. “If we could really get inside somebody’s head, would we have wars? Would we need territory? Wouldn’t we understand each other so well that we’d just support and help everybody?”

  “Rick’s theory of the benevolent universe,” Joe laughed. “No, Ricky, I think if some of us got inside the heads of people around us, we’d probably try and manipulate things. Take control. Turn people into, I don’t know, love slaves. I mean, now, I’m saying this if I were single, so don’t take it personally, honey, but if I could get inside other guys’ heads, I’d just have them take off their clothes and dance around for me all day long and do my wicked bidding.”

  Julie grinned, having drunk a little too much wine. “If I could get inside people’s minds, I’d probably try to get them all to give me a dollar. All I’d need would be a million people, and then nobody would be hurt, would they?”

  “You think people are greedy,” Rick said, nodding.

  “No, I think I’m greedy,” Julie said. “My point is, if I were psychic, I’d do all kinds of things. And I think I’m a nice person.”

  “So do I, baby,” Joe said, lifting his plastic cup in a toast. “Just imagine if the people who aren’t so nice could do this. Well, maybe they’d all become the Michael Diamonds of the world.”

  “I just don’t buy it at all,” Rick said. “It’s like believing in ghosts. It’s like once you open up yourself to that kind of magical thinking, you’ll swallow anything.”

  “I believe in it,” Joe said. “With some restrictions. I don’t believe that psychics can really see anything you don’t want them to. I think our own minds can block things.”

  “Hon, I love you, but that’s magical thinking,” Rick said. “That’s like, if I think about flowers, suddenly I’ll get flowers.”

  “It is not,” Joe said, ticked off. “Maybe you should consider things outside of your narrow view.”

  They got quiet, too suddenly.

  Julie reached out and touched Joe’s hand. “I don’t know if I believe in this stuff or not. But I could’ve dismissed everything that happened with Michael Diamond. Except that he told me that Hut’s ex had killed herself. I don’t know. I feel like I’m becoming surrounded by all this psychic crap. From the whole thing about the school Hut went to, to this.”

  “What school?”

  “Oh. God. I feel a little awkward talking about it. My husband was tested for psychic ability as a kid. In some program. It’s all been news to me. I guess that’s why I was willing to see Diamond. Hut must’ve wanted to put it all in the past. He did that a lot. He put his first wife in the past. He put his adoptive parents in the past. I think he may have even been ready to put me in the past. I don’t know. It all gets confused in my head. I see things sometimes now. I have these…delusions. Hut’s death may just have been too much for me. But…he was who he was. And I need to get on, right?”

  “Right,” Joe said.

  “But give yourself a lot of time to heal, Julie. Don’t shortchange this process,” Rick said.

  “You sound like my therapist.”

  “Dr. Rick,” Joe laughed, swatting his partner lightly behind the ear. Then, he said, “So Hut had secrets. I knew it. He was a man of mystery.”

  “He was. I’m not even sure how much to believe. My mom sent me some stuff. Our government sometimes had these aptitude tests when kids showed some unusual ability.”

  “The Remote Viewing tests,” Joe said. “I read about them. In the Fortean Times. They were cut off around the Gulf War in the ’90s. But they go back a ways.”

  “Joe? Really? You read about them?”

  “It never amounted to much. But a lot of tax dollars were spent.”

  “Wasted, is more like it,” Rick said. “Just like I don’t believe God came down from the sky and made a virgin get pregnant and I don’t believe that vampires get up out of their tombs at night to suck blood, I don’t believe this stuff. I think human life is rough enough without these…popular delusions.”

  “You told me you were skeptical,” Joe said. “I didn’t know you thought I was delusional.”

  “Baby, not you. I respect your beliefs. I just don’t believe this stuff.”

  With this social stalemate threatening to bring storm clouds, Julie suddenly got the idea that they should get the croquet set out and get the kids playing in the front yard. It helped break the brief, slightly drunken tension between Rick and Joe, and Dutch, the dog, loved chasing after the croquet ball.

  10

  Rick and Joe were going to get the guestroom, and when everybody was getting ready for bed, Rick pointed to the little nightlights. “What’s with all the nightlights?”

  Julie was in the bathroom, standing there with Livy, both of them brushing their teeth in the mirror, Livy standing up on the footstool that allowed her to get up high enough for the sink and mirror. When Julie rinsed, she said, “It’s because it’s too dark at night.”

  “It’s for me,” Livy said. “I see a ghost sometimes.”

  11

  Right on schedule, her erotic dream took her over when she fell asleep.

  The dead man who was not quite Hut turned her on her stomach. He began licking from the nape of her neck down her shoulder blades, following the slight knobs of her spine, his tongue wet and flickering as he tasted her skin. He held her wrists back with his hands, and he went lower, and when he reached the dip in her back, just before the rise in her buttocks, he made a slow long circle there, and bit slightly down on her cheek before his mouth went between the cleft.

  She moaned into the pillow, but she was not in her bed, but on a dirty mattress in what seemed like a dungeon, with gray stone walls around her, and what looked like metal instruments of torture hanging from the ceiling.

  He licked her inside and out, up and down; every part of her below the waist grew moist and warm with his ministrations.

  Then, he rose over her, hefting his weight onto her back until she felt crushed, and her breath came hard to her, and then, he entered her
from behind, first in one entry, then another. She felt a burning sensation. Oh, but it felt good, and the dead man whispered in her ears, his spit sliding just inside her earlobe, “Do you want me inside you, Julie? Do you? Do you want me all the way in? Every way? I want to open you. I want to open you, Julie.”

  And she opened her mouth wide to say yes, but a muffled sound came from her that was not quite her voice.

  Then, someone said, too loud, “Julie? Julie?”

  12

  Julie looked up in the dark. A man stood there. Her eyes adjusted, and she reached for the bedside lamp, fear pulsing through her.

  Flicked the light up.

  It was Joe, wearing a San Francisco ’49ers T-shirt that went all the way to his knees. “Are you okay?” “Joe? Joe—what’s wrong?”

  “You were screaming,” he said. “In your sleep.” Then Julie realized that she lay there naked, the

  covers thrown off the bed, her pajama bottoms pulled down around her ankles. Quickly, Joe looked away, and Julie reached for the bedspread, pulling it up over herself.

  Chapter Seventeen

  1

  After Rick and Joe and dog left for the city again, Livy asked to talk to her in private. Julie went with her to her room, and Livy shut the door behind her.

  “What’s up?” Julie asked.

  “He came into my room last night,” Livy said. “Who?”

  “Daddy.”

  “Honey, it’s not Daddy. You know that.”