Expiration Date

by Nancy Kilpatrick

  Several bedrooms later I drift into an old man’s dream. These dreams are particularly fascinating in that he dreams in rare color. This alone would make him a worthwhile host for my silent vigil, but his age is also a powerful consideration. He is a former refugee and a survivor of the Holocaust. Like a fine aged wine, the dreams of the ancient Jew are always richly steeped in memory and terror. He has become a favorite of mine and he seldom disappoints me.

  Tonight he is dreaming of the war. He is running and someone is chasing him through the burnt-out shells of long dead structures. Storm clouds gather, full and fat and heavy with damp promise. The wind moans of tension and strife— a nice touch, I believe. Lightning flickers and through the dim red haze I catch a glimpse of an approaching figure. The one who chases the old man through his dream walk. I strain to see the hunter’s face but for some reason it is denied to me.

  And then the storm hits and the buildings begin to crumble. I can see the hunter’s face looming over us. Bone white and grinning, a moon-sized skull fills the entire skyscape. I see the crooked scythe and giggle softly over the sad cliché. Bloodstains spatter the skull’s fleshless cheeks, dripping like tears from the skull’s hollowed eyes. And then the skull falls, like a doom-bound meteor, tumbling directly towards us.

  The old man tries to run but I hold him fast.

  Stay, I whisper.

  It is only a dream.

  It cannot hurt you.

  The skull strikes us in a fast swallow of thunder. For a moment I am with the skull as well as riding with the old man’s graying obituary thoughts. I am inside the skull— my god I can feel such dreams and visions and power.

  And then I am awake and alone in my bed.

  I have been evicted and I know who it was who so unceremoniously ejected me from my seat in the old man’s dreamscape.

  This was no mere dream phantom.

  It was Death that I touched. It was Death who usurped my place in the old man’s dreams. No other being could hold such black and formless thoughts. The brief glimpse I was allowed showed me a chalky chiaroscuro, a mosaic of light and shade as cold blackling thoughts flitted over an eon-wide acreage of empty pale graves. My mind whirled with thoughts of what I had seen. I saw colors and images that ran wild. The dream faded about me like a lonely clumsy orgasm and I am alone.

  I have never felt so very alone as this.

  I have never been cast from anyone’s dreams with such force and undeniable command. Never have I felt such violence and power. My left arm throbs and aches and my chest feels as if a sledgehammer has hit it. The old man is dead from a heart attack and I share his pain. I have fallen from my bed and my wall mirror tells me that I have bruised my face upon the floor.

  I chase my breath for a full minute before I can throw off the pain. I reach out for the old man, trying futilely to catch the remnants of his dreamscape, but it is no use. That doorway has been closed.

  The dead do not dream.

  I slump to the floor in exhaustion as Death’s hollow laughter booms in my ears like the music of thunder and kettle drums.

  For three straight days my mind is celibate and alone.

  I allow it to touch no one’s thoughts.

  I am adrift upon a sea of remorseless possibility.

  What use are mere mortal minds when I have touched a God?

  I touched Death and I walked with him and I danced with him for the briefest of instances.

  And I hunger for more.

  On the third night I set my mind free from its self-imposed fast. I allow it to wander the poorer sections of the city. The darker side, hidden from the bright lights, lost in the shadows of the skyscrapers. It doesn’t take me too long to find Death’s spoor down here among the ruins of poverty. Death is ever close to those who must live without hope. I find his trail in the pissy stink of a decaying alleyway lingering about the steps of two young hoodlums.

  The hoodlums are arguing. They argue over a girl or a bottle or perhaps money. It does not really matter to them. All that is necessary is to strive and conquer. The apes thump their chests and the dirt yearns for blood.

  Knives are flashed and young bodies tense in a grace of violence. Angry words are lobbed like flickering Molotov cocktails. I dart anxiously from mind to mind, probing the secrets of their dark-tunneled thoughts. I cannot be certain who is marked until I catch a glimpse of Death, but so far their thoughts offer nothing but the blind reflex of their switchblade dance. I can feel an aura, the whisper of Death’s mocking laughter echoing in my memory. He is coming for one of them.

  Their minds are so dark and murky, the only brightness the flash of anticipation as to where the next blade slash will come from. These men are evenly matched and it is impossible to predict who will be the victor. The deciding factor will undoubtedly result for something as simple as a single mistake. A blink, a cough or a fumble will tell the tale.

  I dare not gamble upon steely chance. I must make certain that I am with the right one when the moment comes.

  Very well.

  I will force the game.

  I choose one of them at random and settle into his mind a little deeper than I am accustomed to.

  And then I let him know that I am here.

  Our eyes open wide as we become aware of this unexpected invasion. We pause and our knife dangles limply from our hand. It is such a Gemini-moment, the two of us totally entwined as one. It is like living two complete lives in the space of A single blinking moment. We would prolong this experience but the other combatant takes full advantage of our momentary lapse of attention, as we originally intended them to do.

  It is over in a single thrust. My killer’s knife is keen, driving inward and upward through the amazingly porous wall of our rib cage. We feel the hungry blade like a shiny steel leech, sucking at our life’s blood— and Death comes laughing, riding in on a wave of purest red. I reach for him and for just a single isolated moment I am once more one with the Death God.

  Death’s thoughts are clearer to me this time. I am in deeper than I was before. It is so rich and so black, a necroscape robed in sable majesty. Raven wing and tar pond, onyx, midnight, jet. Death’s thoughts race past me like burning nightfall. I could swim in them; I could know his every thought and hope.

  I wonder to myself if Death ever dreams?

  And then all at once I am back in my home, in my own body. Death has shaken free of me as easily as a dog might shake off an unwanted rat. I can sense Death’s unimaginable power, strength and intellect. I try to rise but the pain holds me fast and for a moment I am paralyzed. My insides feel like broken glass. A flash of crimson darkness passes before my eyes and I begin to sink into a sea of cold black despair. I broadcast a cry for help that ordinarily would have brought an entire city of people to my rescue. My last thoughts shout out to the entire building.

  Someone must hear me.

  But when I awaken I am alone. No one has come to my assistance.

  I crawl to the telephone and dial 911.

  In the hospital they bandage my ribs. One is cracked, the doctor tells me. There is no visible wound, but a purplish black bruise marks the spot where my assassin’s knife drove home. Apparently there was some internal bleeding but no cause for alarm. I tell the doctor that I fell and I think that they might believe me. I am not certain of their belief, however. For some unfathomable reason I cannot touch their minds.

  At home I notice that the bruise has grown. It stubbornly refuses to fade, growing darker with every breath I take. I try not to be concerned. I tell myself that it is nothing more than a warning. Nevertheless, I do not expect this bruise to vanish.

  Death has marked me.

  I spend the rest of the week in my bed. My mind obstinately refuses to travel. My thoughts are only my own and I feel so completely alone. It is devastating. By the end of the week I receive a letter from my landlord.

>   The letter says something about unpaid rent.

  I spend the rest of that day attempting to reach his mind and remind him to mark my rent fully paid, but success evades my every attempt.

  That doorway has been closed.

  My sleep grows fitful as the days progress. I wake up shaking and sweating. I feel as if I have awoken from a long rest only to find myself speaking a foreign language, a tongue that is strange to my ears. I must grow used to my own dreams but they are strange to me. A staggering repetitious vision of a laughing black skull.

  I feel raped.

  Yet I am not ready to abandon myself to hopelessness. I tell myself that my powers have merely grown temporarily impotent, but are not completely dead. I can feel my powers, cowering like a small beaten child in the black hollow of my brain. My powers are only sleeping. All that they need is a little gentle stirring, but how long will that take?

  I am losing control.

  As the days pass, my situation worsens.

  The grocer no longer brings me other people’s groceries. The banker no longer errs in my favor.

  And the landlord has sent me another notice about my unpaid rent.

  And yet there is hope. I find that I am able to touch people, just barely, like a pale and fumbling ghost. Their thoughts are hazy to me, and control is not possible. I continue to struggle, hoping to reawaken my vanished power.

  In the meantime my bills must be paid. I go out and try to find employment but I have so very little real experience. What an irony. I have flown intergalactic rocket ships in the dreamscape of nocturnal fantasy and yet I haven’t even bothered to find myself a driver’s license. So much of my waking life has been lived vicariously through others that I am nearly helpless to cope with the world.

  In the end I must settle for a menial job. I am a night watchman at a downtown construction site. It is a fitting pastime. I spend my nights prowling about the darkened trench-works, playing my flashlight into the night’s bleak vastness. I watch as the skeleton of steel girders grows ever higher above me. I spend entire nights standing in the shadow of steel and structure staring at a city that stares down at me.

  Where are you, I wonder?

  Where are you, Death?

  By day I sleep. I have taken up meditation and consulted several spiritual groups in the city. I call up radio talk shows and question experts ceaselessly on soul travel, dreams and mostly Death. There is so much knowledge that I need to know before my quest can be fulfilled.

  I have even consulted a psychiatrist, hoping that his ponderous dull musings might help me to reawaken my dead abilities. I carefully couch my conditions in terms of the limited reality this man understands. I talk of my growing impotence, my insecurity, my death-fixation. I find that this psychiatrist has been most helpful in helping me to understand what goes on inside my brain. Of course, I am quite handicapped in not being able to reveal my true self to him but I still feel that I have come to know this man as nearly as he knows me.

  I worry about what I will do when I can no longer afford his services. He is far too expensive for a watchman’s meager wages. My pay check staves off my creditors but I cannot afford my analyst. The last check I wrote him will bounce as soon as he takes it to the bank. I gave that check to him just this morning, so I probably have a day or two left before I must face my sadly unanalyzed reality alone.

  I am brooding over this as I sit upon my couch sipping my last can of beer. I can picture him now, sitting in his office, talking with someone else when he should be talking to me. I can see his face and the skull beneath his face and in the shadows of his office I can see Death standing and grinning comfortably.

  My mind is a clenched fist.

  I feel angry.

  Betrayed.

  And then all at once I can really see him.

  I am with him.

  I feel that familiar tingle in the back of my brain.

  I rise from my couch. My robe falls about my feet. I go to the balcony and stare down to the city so far below. I cannot physically see the three story brownstone where my analyst resides but that does not matter. I know where he is hiding. I can see him sitting, scribbling notes, his mind preoccupied.

  And then, I enter.

  It is easy.

  I take him gently, easing into his thoughts. The doctor is a very precise being. For him, every cause has an effect, every path leads to an inevitable goal. His thoughts taste of crystal and ice. Every impulse in perfect lonely control.

  I push deeper.

  Deeply enough to let him know that I am with him.

  I am here.

  He sits back in his office chair, no longer listening to the long suffering matron who lays upon his couch and whines of the children who will not listen to her.

  I am here!

  I thrust a little harder, forcing into his secret fears and hidden dreams. I touch the darker unswept corners of his mind.

  I— am— here!

  I go further. Deeper than I have ever driven. I push and I feel a cold chill creeping down his spine. His senses numb. His bowels turn to jelly and the office no longer smells so sweet.

  I— AM— HERE!

  The uneasy grin that cracks his cheeks bleeds into a full blown howl of pain.

  HERE!

  I AM!

  HEREHEREHERE!

  Everything is darker and clouded with shimmering synaptic will-o-the-wisp sparks. I follow their glitter, probing deeper into his mind than I have ever dreamed possible. Down and down until I come to the limit. I come to the beginning, the roots of the doctor’s very soul. Schist-like walls, blackened and scorched with years of suppressed regret line this area of his being. These are the walls that guard the doctor’s innermost self.

  The be-all.

  The essence.

  I pierce and shatter these self-inflicted barriers and in their fragments are reflected a multitude of my own sharded image, myself staring at myself. Clutching at the temples of our crumbling reason we scream our disbelief. The matron rises from the couch, screaming in a sharp harmony, shocked by our sudden unreasoning actions. We rise from the padded office chair.

  We turn and run from our office window.

  We do not want this terror but we are far beyond our own control. We try to pull away, to pull back into the safety of our own mind but we are in too deep. We keep on running. The window looms before us, growing larger by the second. We drive through the final brittle barrier, a window of shattered glass. We are flayed by the multitude of fragments, blinded by the reflected sunlight glinting from off the pane’s shards.

  And then, I am free.

  As the analyst tumbles screaming past the first set of windows, I reach the harbor of my own body.

  But I have much further to fall.

  In an empathetic gesture my body has taken its own leap. However, the building in which I live is far taller than the doctor’s modest three story brownstone.

  I have fifty floors to fall.

  In a panic I try to leave my shell, figuring to gamble on the three-story fall of the analyst. By the time I reach him he is screaming past the last set of windows.

  I enter him brutally and abruptly.

  We scream in renewed pain as the last set of windows blink past and we impact upon the cold grey concrete. Only three floors but far enough. We are still alive but our legs are shattered.

  And our arms.

  And our spine.

  Our reason was shattered long ago.

  And yet we are not all here.

  A part of ourselves has fractured away, left behind in my own physical shell, gathering speed and falling fifty stories fast. The part of my mind that is trapped in my own shell looks down only to see a cold gray figure waiting below me.

  Patiently.

  It is Death.

  Waiting for one last d
ance.

  I split my mind one more time and in a last attempt at survival I leap past my own plummeting body into the mind of gray grinning Death.

  “Stay,” he whispers. “Stay, my son.”

  And so we stand together, watching as my plummeting body strikes the unyielding concrete.

  Our bony cheeks are splattered with stringlets of our visceral gore.

  And we smile.

  We are now a trinity.

  A part of us drifts above the city, the by-product of a crematorium when no one bothered claiming our remains. They burned what could be scraped up after our fifty floor fall. We drift through the eternal skies, falling and feeling forever away.

  And a part of us lays in a bed in a home where some of our less fortunate patients reside. Our mind is a tumble of fragments, each shard reflecting of a pale bony grin.

  We are alone.

  Unable to move.

  Unable to scream.

  Rotated at regular intervals to avoid the unavoidable bed sores.

  And a part of us lies chained within the vault-like skull of a grim gray deity. Death is our father and holds us fast and we watch his work and listen to his laughter, never daring, never dreaming to share his thoughts as the eons slip by.

  * * *

  Steve Vernon is a storyteller. He is a hybrid author with both traditionally released ghost story collections — Haunted Harbours; Halifax Haunts; The Lunenburg Werewolf — and independently released e-books such as Flash Virus; Tatterdemon; Big Hairy Deal.

  What I Said to Richie Was…

  by Ken Goldman

  It didn’t take very long. The cancer just found its way into my little brother’s brain and had itself a ball. Mom and Dad knew he was dying, I knew it, everyone in the world seemed to know it. Everyone but Richie.

  Terminal I heard others call his disease, probably thinking I was too young to understand, but I knew what that meant ‘cause I checked it out online. His doctors and nurses managed big smiles when they visited Richie’s room at the hospital, and sometimes they even made him laugh. But I saw their expressions when they turned from him. Those smiles disappeared pretty fast.