Another One Bites the Dust

by Chris Marie Green

  “I miss her so much, too, Suze. What do you think ever happened to her . . . ?”

  Before I withdrew from Suze, I could also feel the love she still had for me, and it hurt too much to stay inside her, so that’s why I left. Disengaged.

  Disconnected.

  Afterward, Suze did as anyone else would do post-empathy—she shivered wildly, got goose bumps, looked at me like she’d just walked out of a showing of The Shining.

  Then she closed her eyes, laughed once, and started crying.

  There was nothing I could do. To think, all the powers I’d gained as a ghost, and here I was, watching her fall apart.

  I wasn’t sure that I should ever come back to her if this was what was in store. Everything had gone as bad as I’d feared, and I was sorely tempted to give her a serene hallucination to make up for it.

  Then she spoke. “I guess it only makes sense that you popped into my dreams. A few months ago, a PI came in here to talk about you, and that stirred up so many emotions in me that I’d thought I put to rest. Then there was that other guy who struck up a conversation with me the other day in here and told me that his parents were good friends with us in high school. Jenna and Jamie. Remember them? He’s putting together a bunch of their old pictures and mementos for a reunion and was asking questions about the golden days. He asked a lot about you, though. He was curious about how you disappeared. . . .”

  “What guy?” I asked, already getting a bad feeling about this.

  She sniffed, frowning, clearly still deciding if she’d gone bat-poo crazy or not. “He was young, handsome in an unconventional way. . . . He said he’d be back some other time for another drink and more talk.” She looked at the ceiling, like she was accessing her memory. Then she smiled through her tears.

  “I remember now. He said his name was Gavin.”

  Just as I started gaping at her, the door groaned open, and I rapidly dematerialized, shocked and more confused than ever.

  7

  After one of Suze’s male coworkers barged into the room to announce that her break was over, I stayed invisible, still in a state of fizzling shock. I kept processing what Suze had told me.

  “He said his name was Gavin. . . .”

  While the aproned waiter grabbed a bag of potato chips from a shelf while complaining about the bar being understaffed, Suze’s gaze kept searching me out. She also kept blinking, as if confirming that, yes, she really was awake. Then, after blowing out a mighty breath, she ignored the waiter and grabbed a towel from a counter, her hand trembling as she wet it down with water from a nearby sink and wiped up the soda pop spill. She cleaned herself up, too.

  All the while, I just kept thinking about Gavin. My ghost buds hadn’t been watching him like they’d been doing for Wendy, so during some trips away from the condo, this was obviously where he’d ended up.

  Had it been the Gavin, though? It wasn’t exactly the most common name, so chances were decent. And if he had been here, I suspected that he hadn’t given Suze his last name because surely she would’ve recognized it from the media attention Farah’s death had brought. Her suicide and the killing of her young brother had been a top story. Lucky for them, the story had been limited to that angle; her murder of Elizabeth had been kept secret so far, because that’s what money could do for a family who had enough of it to cover part of a coastline.

  As far as Amanda Lee went, she’d been vengeful, yet she hadn’t gone to the press or authorities with the truth, either. She was carrying too much guilt about being wrong about Gavin, so she’d kept mum, too. I guessed everyone was willing to live with how it’d all turned out.

  Basically.

  As for being the son of Jenna and Jamie from high school . . . well, hello, yearbooks on the Internet. Nothing was private these days, and he’d done his research.

  With a wiggin’ glance over her shoulder, Suze finally left the break room, probably wondering why she’d just had a very immediate psychotic episode.

  Poor thing. We really did need to talk more. And when we did, I was also going to get to the bottom of what Gavin had asked her about me.

  What the hell was he up to?

  I drifted out to the bar, my energy slightly lower than before, thanks to my materializing. So I hung around Flaherty’s as long as I could, hugging the ceiling, watching the crowd to see if Gavin would come in for that next drink and another conversation with Suze.

  No luck. She madly worked the bar, still yawning every once in a while and casting around paranoid glances, probably feeling me nearby.

  By the time the bar shut down, I’d decided I would be summoning Sailor Randy to see if he wouldn’t mind vegging out here so he could eavesdrop on Gavin’s next visit. Asking Randy to keep watch over a bar was like asking Tony Montana if he wanted to hold a machine gun, so I was pretty sure he’d be cool with it.

  As I watched Suze go to the backroom and grab her purse, I thought about appearing to her again. But I had a promise to keep to Heidi, so I trailed my old friend to her parked car just to see that she got there safely and then conjured a travel tunnel to Pacific Beach, where Tim should be off his swing shift by now.

  His house wasn’t far and, better yet, when I got there I saw that someone had made things easy for me by leaving the windows open to let in the night breeze. Even before I slipped in through one of them, I heard a TV on in the family room. Moans, groans.

  When I glided there, I got a view of what was making all that noise—porn city. Skin all over the place. Good times on a Saturday night.

  Tim was slumped over the cushions in blue sweats, a beer in hand. There were three more bottles collapsed on the glass table in front of him, too, but he was awake, dammit.

  If he was an insomniac, I was going to be ticked.

  To kill time, I winged through the room and down the hall to the darkened bedroom, where Nichelle’s slumbering form huddled under a sheet. The rest of the covers had been kicked off, and there was a pillow in the middle of the bed, like a fluffy fort.

  Let me guess—there’d been a lover’s quarrel? Tim had been kicked out of bed already?

  How had these lovebirds stayed together for even a couple of months?

  Well, at least this was a good time to go deep inside of Tim’s psyche through his dreams, while his bad mood might still be relatively fresh. But how was I going to do that when the couch potato wasn’t even asleep?

  When I jetted back out to the family room with all its ooh’s and aah’s emanating from the TV, I took one look at the fish tank and its peaceful burbling, and I knew.

  A hallucination—that was just the thing I needed here. Then I could transition into a dream-dig with Tim since it was similar to a hallucination. The difference was that dream-digging happened when a suspect was asleep and hallucinations happened while he was awake. But, unlike thought-empathy, a hallucination would take more juice from me, not to mention a more intense touch, which would freeze Tim with electricity, supposedly lowering the melatonin level and causing a miniseizure. At least, Amanda Lee thought that’s what happens.

  All I really knew was that hallucinations melded me with the human’s psyche, and I experienced every moment of the visions based on how my suspect’s mind reacted to an image that I introduced first. I had no real control over the experience except to give them that first image, and they took it from there.

  So, basically the visions could scare me as much as they did my target. Still, I’d found that frightening a murder confession out of people was a pretty damn effective tool.

  Even if there hadn’t been a murder yet.

  Tim’s eyes were halfway open, reddened, so I knew he was superrelaxed and I might not need a long hallucination. I didn’t pussyfoot around when I pressed my essence against his face, harder than usual, until it almost felt like I was reaching under his skin.

  I gave him a thought to concentrate on, something that would get him to sleep: the fish tank, beautiful, blue, bubbling and peaceful. Then I steadied myself as I ro
lled forward, drawn into him, expanding inside until I felt like I was part of him. Part of his mind’s eye . . .

  Light. We’re so light, suspended in liquid comfort, holding our breath.

  Warmth all around us, caressed by water. No worries. Nothing can touch us.

  A fish, swimming past, graceful and light . . . so light . . .

  Subtly, I pushed my way out of Tim, snapping out into the world again to see that his eyes were only slits now and his mouth was hanging open. The near-empty beer bottle in his hand canted, and I counted the moments until it dropped to the sofa.

  Three, two, one . . .

  Okay, I was off by about four seconds, but that bottle thudded down to the faux leather soon enough, his fingers loose, his breathing even.

  I waited a little longer, all the while inspecting him. Tim’s lashes were blond, delicate. Also, he must’ve shaved after he got off his shift tonight, because his cheeks were smoother than they’d been earlier and he smelled like lathery limes.

  A tiny snore came from him, but I wanted to wait until he was deep into dream territory before I went in. His subconscious would tell me so many things that superficial thoughts wouldn’t.

  I admit it—to pass the time, I watched some of the skin flick. You probably would’ve had to go to the video store in my day to get this kind of action on TV. But, eventually, enough time passed so that Tim’s eyes were sliding back and forth under his lids, and I warmed up, float-hopping up and down like a football player getting ready to go on the field. In dreams, I had even less control of a person’s psyche than in a hallucination—I was a watcher in a place so deep inside of them that they owned every move, so I wanted to be on my proverbial toes.

  Ready now. So with a hard touch to sleeping Tim’s skin, I allowed myself to be sucked in, tumbling like a speck of dust, out of control, through the dark—

  I landed with a thud.

  Getting my bearings, I saw I was in a basement, and like in all dreams, time seemed to slow to a crawl, the drip . . . drip . . . drip from a faucet stretched out, the room drowsily tipping back and forth like I was on a boat.

  But I wasn’t. Tim was drunk, and this was his mind.

  My stomach churned because, in here, I had a body, just like I did whenever I was around fake Dean.

  Oh, barf, this wasn’t any fun.

  I took a few almost never-ending moments to anchor myself by getting to all fours on the concrete floor. In the meantime, I felt a tickle of intuition and turned my head toward the right.

  Tim was in here with me, near a furnace where he was quietly picking up broken toys from the ground and placing them in a pile that bent at a strange angle, almost in the shape of a hook. Every time he added a shattered boat, a car, a block, the pile would threaten to spill while the furnace lazily belched fire in its innards, lighting up Tim’s stoic face.

  He had no idea I was here.

  I just watched, waiting as time crawled past and the furnace kept flaring up. He kept reaching for toys, never seeming to run out of them, and the pile never tumbled.

  But then he picked up something that wasn’t a toy. It was a roll of breath mints, and he casually took one out, tossing it in the air, arcing it toward his mouth. It landed gently on his tongue with floating precision as the room kept swaying, swaying . . .

  Stifling a groan, I watched only Tim as his legs started to get longer, making him taller . . . tall enough so that he could stare out a rectangular window that was letting in faint light from near the ceiling. At the same time, the window itself began stretching sideways and downward, mocking the size of a giant television screen, giving me a view of what was enthralling Tim outside.

  A brunette in a bikini, lying on a lawn chair, taking in the sun. His older cougar neighbor, from today?

  The furnace breathed more fire, and Tim flinched in slow motion, but he didn’t look away from his object of fascination.

  The brunette reached down and gripped a bottle of suntan oil . . . poured some in her palm . . . spread it over her browned stomach. As she rubbed it in, she shifted her hips, moaning softly.

  Tim chewed on his mint, the furnace still bleeding fire.

  The woman idly kept caressing herself, the sun gleaming off her slick skin, her lips parting with every turned-on sound she made. She slid her hands upward, over her breasts, then back down until one of them crept into her bikini bottoms.

  The faucet dripped . . . dripped . . . dripped . . .

  Tim’s expression never, ever changed. He grew taller and taller as he watched her pleasure herself, each second a forever.

  “Baby,” she said in a seductive voice. “What’re you doing back there?”

  A niggle settled in the depths of my mind, but I didn’t know why. Not until Tim reached out, braced both hands at the sides of the window, and pushed it open even more. Just as he started to step through, I remembered.

  Nichelle had asked Tim the same question today, when she had caught him peeping at the neighbor. But now, instead of being denied the opportunity to keep looking, he had all the permission in the world. His world.

  Something was happening to the brunette, though . . .

  As her face seemed to melt, then turn into someone else’s, I cringed in my corner.

  Heidi. The woman had transformed into brown-haired Heidi, the girl who’d hired Amanda Lee and me today.

  “Come to me,” she said to Tim, holding out the hand that she wasn’t using to stroke herself. “I wouldn’t ever refuse you. You can have me as many times as you want, however you want, just come to me.”

  Drip . . . drip . . . drip . . . went the faucet, the tempo dragging even more than before. The fire in the furnace lagged, too, as Tim moved through the window toward her.

  Closer . . . closer while she reached for him.

  “Tiiiiimothy!!!”

  I hauled in a breath at the screech that’d come from the furnace. Tim had frozen in the window, too.

  “Tiiiiimothy!!!” it said again.

  He had started to shrink back from the window as it began closing and closing over Heidi’s wanton image, shrinking to nothing in the wall. As the room darkened, he was deflated all the way back to his own size.

  The furnace cast ponderous, undulating flames onto the bricks.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” Tim said to the screecher, his head down, his hands fisted at his sides.

  “Just like your dad,” the furnace said, punctuating each phrase with fire. “Just like him . . . just like him . . . just like him.”

  The pile of toys started nodding, agreeing with the screech. Around us, holes opened up in the walls, joining in the chorus like mouths.

  “Just like him . . . just like him . . .”

  But the voice had become more familiar. Was it Nichelle now?

  Tim covered his ears, sinking to the ground.

  As the mouths expanded, teeth glistened in the firelight, yellowed and pointed.

  “What’re you doing back there . . . ?”

  The window resurrected itself on the upper wall, but it was a true television screen this time, black-and-white, square and quaint. Static filled it until Tim raised his head and uncovered his ears.

  As he turned to look at it, the screen cleared to show a field with a clump of trees ahead.

  The woods, I thought. Please, not the woods. . . .

  I had seen a few modern horror movies where first-person cameras caught all the action, and this was just like one of them now. Someone was holding a camera and slow-running toward the trees on that screen, where a woman’s scream ripped through the air. The unknown cameraman’s breath huffed in continual bursts the entire time, competing with the screaming.

  Tim merely sat in front of that TV, drawing his legs up and against him like a boy watching a weekend-night movie. The room tilted back, forth. . . .

  Just before the camera entered the woods, the lens slanted down to show that holes were opening in the ground.

  And they were yelling.

 
“What’re you doing?”

  “Just like your father!”

  Somehow, the cameraman wasn’t falling into the holes. He kept slowly running, panting with long breaths.

  More screaming from the trees. And . . . begging?

  The nausea from the drunken tilts had gotten to me bad enough, and now this? I gagged once, trying to be quiet. Trying not to interrupt or catch Tim’s attention.

  The cameraman changed direction, slothfully chasing down the screams until—

  Suddenly, a mouth appeared on the TV, consuming the screen, gaping in a terrible scream that went on and on and on.

  Then it was begging, pleading. “No, please, no . . .”

  It took all I had to listen to it—I was afraid I’d sounded just like that in my own last moments, but I couldn’t look away because the cameraman had started to swing the camera at the mouth, using the lens to beat the mouth into submission until the screams became gasps . . . until the gasps became whimpers.

  Then he dropped the camera, and it lay on its side on the ground, his eternal breathing filling the room.

  Don’t breathe, I thought. Don’t move.

  Would Tim turn around and see me now that the show was over?

  I held a dream-hand over my mouth, shutting myself up, just as I’d done on the night I’d been killed.

  Don’t breathe. He might hear you. . . .

  But Tim still didn’t know I was here as, around us, the walls lightened from black to gray, paling shade by shade until they became a stark white.

  The TV disappeared along with the furnace and toys.

  Along with everything.

  We were left together in a white room, where Tim’s back was still turned to me. His sweats had lightened to white, too, the only colors being his blond hair and his flesh.

  He breathed in . . . out . . . Torturously. Harrowingly.

  Instinct was telling me to leave, but something else kept me kneeling there, waiting. Because he couldn’t hurt me in a dream. At least I hadn’t been hurt doing this before.

  Besides, Tim hadn’t hurt anyone in here or out in the world as far as we knew.