Falls the Shadow (Sparrow Falls Book 2)

by Justine Sebastian

  He was nearing the far end of the park where he’d had his supper the other day and met Mooncricket when he caught sight of something on top of one of the picnic tables. It was in shadow because one of the lights around it had gone out and the other nearest one to it was dim and flickering. There was a bar nearby and Tobias approached curiously, wondering if he would find one of the many local drunks passed out on the table. That should make for an amusing story to tell Dawn Marie at work. Intrigued, Tobias picked up his pace and headed toward the table. He was trying to decide if he would try waking the lady or fellow or if he should leave them alone. Honestly, he’d probably only scare the poor soul half to death if he did wake them.

  Once he was closer, he could see pale-colored hair fluttering in the breeze, waving around the head of the sleeping person. It twisted and caught in the light, revealing that it was more than blond. A piece that waved in the air like a sad little flag was tipped in electric blue so bright that Tobias had no trouble discerning the color.

  “Hmm,” he said to himself as he drew ever-nearer. It was probably a young man or woman then, a newbie on the Sparrow Falls drunkard front.

  Tobias had never been taken over with the urge to dye his hair strange colors, though he thought they were often pretty, with some exceptions. Hylas had bleached his ink-black hair out once and dyed it cherry Kool-Aid red. It had been awful and Tobias had hated it. After a couple of days, Hylas had hated it as well. Dawn Marie’s hair had been every color of the rainbow and then some; only in the last couple of years had she stopped dyeing it. Another lock of hair twisted up in the air as the wind blew more vigorously. That lock was tipped with Day-Glo orange, twining and dipping with the breeze, licking out toward Tobias then back like it was beckoning him closer.

  The ludicrous thought made Tobias smile. Another half dozen steps brought him close enough to the person that he could get a good look even in the poor light. When he did, the smile fell from Tobias’s face like a broken sign.

  “Oh, dear,” he said as he came to stand beside the dead boy lying on the picnic table. Death did not upset him, dead bodies did not frighten him and he had dealt with this particular type of dead body more than he cared to think much about.

  Poppy petals fluttered between the stitches holding his mouth closed. The black wax sealing his eyes gleamed like oil in the light. The gaping, bloodless slit of his throat yawned wide like a silently laughing mouth. A smell like incense and rust clung to his skin, tossed into Tobias’s face by the gallivanting wind.

  Just beneath the boy’s head, part of the godawful nickname Slutt Monkie was visible, a pale scar carved into the weather-silvered wood. Tobias stared at it as he reached into his trouser pocket for his cell phone so he could call the police. He knew what the rest of the phrase hidden beneath the young man’s head said: Slutt Monkie wuz hear. He had read it over and over just a few days ago while eating his French fries.

  6

  Doctor Helen Miller’s office was decorated in soothing colors. Soothing blue walls. Soothing pale green couch. Soothing pictures of clouds and trees hanging on the soothing blue wall behind the soothing green couch. Even her smart pantsuit was soothing pearl grey with a creamy light yellow shirt beneath it, equally soothing.

  Such things agitated Jeremy, he felt like calm was being forced on him. Color therapy did not work for him. Powder blue was a color that made him think of nausea for some reason, the green of the sofa the faded stain of some long ago exorcism. If he hadn’t liked Dr. Helen so much, he would have stopped seeing her years ago just to escape the bubble of serenity her office tried to impose on him.

  But because he did like her, he kept all of his appointments. He’d been seeing Dr. Helen for the last five years and though she didn’t help him much—none of them ever did or had—Jeremy liked talking to her. He liked that she tried and never once had she condescended or patronized him. She genuinely listened to what Jeremy had to say. Whether or not she believed him (and she probably didn’t, Jeremy didn’t lie to himself) she never tried to dissuade him other than in a gentle, guiding way. To her way of thinking, as well as to the thinking of all the other shrinks before her, Jeremy was delusional. He was deeply disturbed. They were all right, too, about the last part anyway. He was not, however, delusional.

  “Jeremy? Earth to Jeremy,” Dr. Helen leaned forward, peering at him over the top of her glasses. She pushed them up her nose with the tip of one elegantly manicured finger. “Are you with me?”

  “What?” Jeremy asked.

  He blinked and she swam back into focus. He had gotten lost inside his head, partly to escape the hellish bubble of tranquility he was currently trapped in and partly because he was genuinely preoccupied. Last night, something had happened. Or rather, it had almost happened. Sometimes he could feel how close he was to him, but only after the fact. The emotional fallout from being denied overwhelmed everything in the present, when that particular whatever was happening. It was a change in the air, a shift in the activity of the shadows; they grew almost frantic in their movements, worshipers having the rapture forcibly crammed into them at a tent revival and loving every minute of it.

  “You’re distant today,” Dr. Helen said. “Do you want to tell me why?”

  “I had a rough night last night,” Jeremy said.

  “More dreams?” He frowned at her for it and she nodded back, realizing her mistake. “I apologize. Another memory?”

  “No,” Jeremy said. “Just… just sadness. Disappointment. The usual. It gets to me sometimes though.”

  “Sadness brought on by some of your memories or sadness because of this person you’ve mentioned to me before?”

  “Because of him,” Jeremy said. “I feel like he’s abandoned me. I… Sometimes I think he hates me. I do everything right, Dr. Helen, but still he won’t show and it—” Jeremy stopped to lick his lips, smooth his hands over the hole-riddled thighs of his jeans. “—it hurts.”

  “I can imagine,” Dr. Helen said. “Something you haven’t ever told me is how you expect him to come to you if you don’t reach out to him.”

  “I do though,” Jeremy said. “I call him, but he doesn’t listen. He doesn’t answer back or come to me. He left me here all alone with all of this shit inside my head and I don’t know what to do anymore.”

  He took a shaking breath and put his face in his hands, telling himself to breathe. He did not want to let it drag him down into the dark waters of a major depressive episode where he would flounder and tread water until he was sure he was going to wear himself out and drown before he could reach the shore again.

  Dr. Helen waited him out, discretely nudging a box of tissues toward him just in case.

  A minute passed then two and finally, Jeremy snatched a tissue from the box (also in soothing colors that made up Impressionistic flower blossoms).

  “I miss him,” he croaked around the lump in his throat that seemed intent on choking him.

  Jeremy made a frustrated sound and slammed his left fist down on his thigh so hard it would grow into a bruise later. Dr. Helen did not flinch back from him the way some of his former doctors would have. She stayed calm and held his gaze. The tilt of her chin was regal, not arrogant or challenging. She was beautiful and Jeremy would have very much liked to draw her. It wasn’t sexual in the least; it was simply an appreciation for the aesthetic that was Helen Miller. Rich, deep brown skin, high cheekbones, dark eyes that looked liquid in the right light. Her mouth was a bow shimmering with the faintest hint of clear gloss with some kind of sparkle in it. Her lashes were long. Her hair, straightened and long, brushed near the waist of her pants; her bangs whispered across her forehead and almost—almost—fell right in her right eye, but did not, like they didn’t quite dare.

  She leaned forward and lightly touched his fist where it rested on his leg still.

  “Please don’t hurt yourself, Jeremy,” she said.

  “I don’t know what else to do,” he said.

  “Perhaps you can start by te
lling me how you call him,” she said. “If you don’t know where he is then how can you—”

  “I don’t mean on the phone,” Jeremy said.

  “Then how, Jeremy?”

  “I say his name.”

  The revelation hit Jeremy hard and his breath left him on a gasped, OH. That was the key, the mistake he had been making for years. That, more than anything, made him really cry; hard, racking sobs. He had been treating the name like it was sacred, something to be held close and kept secret. But the name was the source of the change he never noticed at the time because his broken heart wouldn’t let him pay attention when it was important.

  “Jeremy,” Dr. Helen was patient, no reprimand in her voice as she left her chair to sit beside him. She placed one warm, dry hand on his quaking shoulder. “Jeremy, please try to calm down.”

  “I’m so stupid,” he said. “I’m so, so stupid. All this time I thought… I thought I wasn’t making any mistakes, but I was. Because… Oh, God.”

  “You aren’t an idiot,” Dr. Helen said. She rubbed his shoulder gently. “But simply saying a person’s name isn’t speaking with them. It isn’t calling them. Surely you understand that.”

  “No,” Jeremy said. He dashed the tears from his eyes. “I’ve had it wrong all this time. I thought if I kept his name to myself, if I didn’t say it out loud, that I was doing it right.”

  “Then what did you mean when you said—”

  “I try to… never mind. Just never mind,” Jeremy said, biting the inside of his cheek to keep from telling her too much because that really was the wrong thing to do. Massively, unbelievably wrong. “I only say his name when I’m really upset. That’s all. I wasn’t… wasn’t clear. It’s not. Never mind. Never mind.”

  “So when you said you call him, you didn’t mean you said his name?”

  “No,” Jeremy said. “Yes. Sometimes. Maybe.”

  “Jeremy, you need to organize your thoughts,” Dr. Helen said. “You aren’t making a lot of sense.”

  Jeremy turned and smiled at her so hugely it hurt his face. For the first time ever, he genuinely had had a breakthrough in therapy.

  “It makes perfect sense,” Jeremy said. “All those lives, all those people, I was before… Most of them didn’t remember him at all. Only the first one really knew him. But then later, so much later, some of them did begin to remember.”

  “Jeremy, I think—”

  He shook his head for her to be quiet. He was trying to think, trying to sew all of the squares together into something cohesive. He had all of the pieces, but there were a lot of them and they escaped him, they confused him. As much as he knew, he still couldn’t comprehend much of it.

  The ones before him hadn’t had all the pieces and that had been part of their problems. Jeremy understood though that if they had only said his name then he might have heard them. He might have come.

  Jeremy knew he was negligent, not through malice, but through nothing more complex than what amounted to a time difference. To the mortal bodies Jeremy’s soul had lived in, time was fleeting and it ate them up before they even really knew it. To him, time meant nothing.

  Death did not die and therefore, it did not fear time the way flimsy animals like men did. Sitting on his throne in the ether where time did not exist, he lost track until he was almost always too late because nothing moved him except the winding down of another’s clock.

  “They wouldn’t say his name either, sometimes because they didn’t know it at all and sometimes because they were afraid to. Or they tried to be selfish, tried to keep it like I did. But that’s not how it works. Don’t you get it?”

  “No, I’m afraid I don’t.”

  Dr. Helen frowned at him, a slight dip at the corners of her perfect mouth and a small V formed between her eyebrows. Jeremy wanted to smooth it away, but didn’t dare touch her. Shrinks were a lot like strippers that way: you did not put your hands on the talent. The little exception was that some therapists were more amenable to hugs than even a stripper with daddy issues was.

  The thought made Jeremy laugh and he cupped his hands over his mouth to hold back his giggles while tears still ran down his face. He felt crazier than he ever had before and it was because he was elated. Genuine happiness was rip-roaring through him for the first time in many lives and he was high on it. He had wings.

  Jeremy had been many people, so many that he was often confused about who he really was. It messed with his mind, his sense of identity from the basic personality to the sticky, frightening path of gender identity. He had bought a dress once and put on make-up. He had placed a long red wig on his head and used padding and cinching and waxing to shape and sculpt his body. He had looked at himself in the mirror and seen himself: Jeremy in a dress. A man who had to force his curves and stuff his bra with silicone inserts. He had been a pretty woman, he could give himself that, but he had not felt like a woman.

  That had at least answered one of his questions, but it had also left him a man full of the memories of women. He knew their dreams and aspirations, the glorious agony of childbirth and the sweet pain of his heart swelling with love when he held a child for the first time. Right beside that, he knew the unrelenting pain of being burned alive at the stake, the faces of people he thought his friends viewed through a curtain of flames while his face melted.

  There was only one being that held all of the keys to unlock Jeremy and he hung onto that knowledge like a life preserver. That was crystal clear though it hurt in its own way. Jeremy revolved around the burning star that was his only love and let that consume him. He was the one who remembered and it was Jeremy’s job to make sure he did not lose him until the last possible moment. In the final seconds before death took any of them, they were reunited with him. For the soul leaving the body, it was never enough to quell the hunger that had eaten away at them for so long. Face-to-face for only a moment, they remembered and clung to Thanatos as he lifted them in his arms to take them back to the beginning. Then the cycle started all over again.

  “I have to go.” Jeremy stood up. “I have to celebrate then I need to get to work. This is important. So important.”

  “Jeremy, wait.” Dr. Helen stood with him and followed him as he headed for the door. “Come sit back down, please. We need to talk about this. You’re very upset.”

  “No, I’m not,” Jeremy said. “I’m happy, Dr. Helen. Happy.”

  That drew her up short and her deepening frown said she was doubtful if it was true happiness Jeremy was feeling. Still, she could not keep him there if he didn’t seem to be a danger to himself or others. Jeremy knew all the rules of psychotherapy even if Dr. Helen did not know all the truths of her patient’s inner workings. She didn’t need to know, all she needed was to see him as crazy, but harmless and she did.

  “All right.” She relented by taking a step back from Jeremy and gesturing to the door. “Remember to make an appointment with Stephanie before you go though.”

  “I will,” Jeremy said, already yanking open the door to stride into the waiting room.

  “Jeremy?”

  He halted, one foot over the threshold, the other still on the thick cream carpet of her office.

  “Yes?”

  “You never told me his name.”

  Jeremy looked over his shoulder and smiled at her.

  “Thanatos,” he said softly. “His name is Thanatos.”

  He walked out of the office, pulling the door closed on Dr. Helen’s stunned expression.

  7

  Blood comes out, embalming fluid goes in.

  Tobias monitored the flow of each as they drained in two different directions. His breath rasped in the respirator he was required to wear; it was uncomfortable, but he was used to it. He’d been embalming bodies since before he began his official training, which he was undoubtedly not supposed to have done. Mr. Greene had called him an apprentice and Tobias had been that in the truest sense of the word. As a fifteen year old boy looking for a summer job and being turned aw
ay everywhere he went because suddenly, magically, nowhere in Sparrow Falls had been hiring, Greene’s Funeral Home had been a last ditch effort in an attempt to find something to do.

  Tobias remembered standing in the somber lobby, paintings of flowers hanging on the wall, the odor of wood wax heavy in the air. The funeral home had been silent that day and Tobias thought it was because there were no funerals or wakes going on. During his years working there he had learned that wasn’t the case. Even with all four parlors occupied and mourners milling around like shell-shocked cattle, there was still silence. Even when people talked, the silence somehow remained, lurking beneath the murmur of condolences being offered or the wailing of a grief-stricken mother saying goodbye to her child.

  When Mr. Mathias Greene wandered into the lobby, derby hat held in his hands and a smile of greeting on his face he had asked if he could help him with something, said Tobias looked a little too young to be planning a service on his own. What Mr. Greene did not do was back away from Tobias, eyes walling to the side and fingers tightening reflexively. Tobias had noticed that and in turn, he had relaxed as well. He’d asked his question and gotten an answer. Mr. Greene had decided only the day before that he needed an assistant. He told Tobias to be there the next day and he’d show him the ropes.

  Mr. Greene didn’t treat him strangely; he liked Tobias and knowing that the old man was planning to retire soon and leave Tobias the business to run on his own made him sad and it frightened him. If people had to deal with Tobias on a regular basis without the buffer of Mr. Greene there then that might spell the end of Greene’s Funeral Home. It was a thought that Tobias could not bear and often he found himself pondering whether or not Dawn Marie could handle the up front business and leave him to work behind the scenes as he always had.