Dead To Me

by Anton Strout

  The lock on my door was busted.

  I reached inside my coat, pulled the retractable bat out, and pressed the button. It extended to its full length, and I held it at the ready as I eased my front door open with my foot. My living room was trashed. It had been messy before with all the crates in it, but now everything had been displaced and everything that had been on my shelves had been thrown to the ground. A lot of it looked broken. It was like being in Irene’s apartment all over again and my heart sank.

  Knowing my apartment as well as I did, I crept soundlessly across the floor toward the hall, hoping I could sneak up on anyone who might still be here. My plan for silence fell apart when I noticed the door to the White Room was also smashed in.

  “No no no no no,” I said as I rushed to it. Everything in the room was overturned or broken, which meant the worst had happened—my inner sanctum had been contaminated by someone else’s memories, corrupting the one place in the world I could turn to as my safety zone. My heart raced and my head swam. I used the bat as a walking stick to steady myself rather than touch anything in the room for balance.

  I had never felt so violated, but then I realized that I could find out exactly who had done this. All I had to do was touch anything in the room, use my psychometry, and I would know. I stepped slowly toward the chair on its side in the center of the room and moved my hand to grab it.

  “Simon,” a woman said, stopping me. I looked around the room, but there was no one there.

  “Irene?” I asked hesitantly.

  The plain white of the wall right in front of me crackled with a blue flash of electricity and Irene phased out of it. She was dressed the same as always—the curse of the dead—but her face was a mask of worry.

  “Are you all right?” I said. “Where have you been? What the hell happened here?”

  Irene flickered. “I don’t know where I’ve been! Some force keeps pulling me away from here. All I remember was those men from your office coming in here and being upset…the kindly older one and the creepy one. Then there was nothing except flashes of that wooden fish you talked about, and a hazy mist, like the one your friend used on me that first time we met in the café. It’s all so unclear.”

  “Nothing else?” I asked. She shook her head and started to flicker again. “Stay with me, Irene…calm down or you’ll disappear again. I just have to do something. I’ll be gone, well, mentally gone, for a minute or so. I have to know who did this.” I reached toward one of the shards of the Tiffany Lamp.

  “You don’t have to do that!” she shouted, her humanity stretched to its limit with that cartoonish exaggeration I had seen her exhibit before. In a flash, she was back to herself, but the burst seemed to take a lot out of her and she started to fade. “I know who it was,” she said. “I heard him say his name. He was on the phone…”

  “Who?” I said.

  Irene’s voice faded as her body did, but I heard part of what she said before she blinked out completely.

  “Jason…” she whispered, and was gone.

  Charles, my mind completed. Faisal Bane’s corporate headhunter. It made sense. He must have come here looking for Jane when he couldn’t find her anywhere else. Bane must have set him on the trail to my apartment, the one Jane herself had originally been following. And now it was trashed.

  The phone rang in the living room and I worked my way toward it through the mess. I couldn’t find it in the chaos of the room. Why wasn’t the machine picking up?

  I found the phone cord sticking out of a stack of books and traced along to the phone, dug it out, and answered it.

  “Canderous,” I said.

  There was laughter on the other end. “I was wondering when you might pick up,” Jason Charles said. “I’ve been trying all day.”

  “What the hell have you done?” I asked.

  “You don’t like the way I redecorated?”

  “Fuck you,” I said.

  “Just tell me where Jane is, and I’ll leave you alone.”

  “I have no idea,” I said.

  “Fine, don’t cooperate,” he said. “I’ll find her on my own.”

  “Good luck with that,” I said. “Good-bye.”

  As I went to hang up, Faisal’s corporate headhunter shouted into the phone. “Wait. One more thing…”

  “What?” I said. “I really need to be assessing the damage to my property. I’ll be billing the Sectarians.”

  “I sent you a little present at work,” he said. “I suggest you check it out.”

  The line fell dead.

  What the hell was he up to? As I returned the phone to its cradle, it hit me. The reason the answering machine hadn’t picked up was because it was no longer connected to the phone. I dug around where I had found the phone in the first place, but the machine wasn’t there. After several more minutes of searching, I found the answering machine sitting neatly on the kitchen counter. Jason Charles had definitely been listening to it, checking my old messages. I plugged it back in and flipped back through several of the calls. If he had checked the caller ID on any of the last fifty or so messages, there was going to be trouble. They were all from Tamara’s number.

  I threw down the phone and ran for the door, heading for the Department of Extraordinary Affairs, but not before dialing Tamara’s number for the first time since our breakup.

  * * * *

  By the time I reached the Lovecraft Café, I still hadn’t been able to get Tamara on the phone. I raced through the coffee shop, down the aisle of the theater, and back into the offices. Connor was at his desk, making a tiny dent in his paperwork. He stood as he saw me running toward him.

  “Kid, what’s wrong?” he said.

  “Did we get any packages from a messenger?” I asked, breathless. I started picking my way through my in-box.

  “Yeah,” he said. “One came earlier. Why?”

  “I just got a call from Faisal’s corporate headhunter,” I said, throwing aside two boxes on which I recognized the return addresses. “He said there’s something here.”

  “Faisal’s what?” Connor said. I forgot I hadn’t mentioned any part of this to him.

  “I’ll explain later,” I said, still frantically searching.

  “Try that one,” Connor said, pointing toward a box about the size of a watch case. I grabbed it and pulled it free, knocking over the rest of the pile.

  There was no return address on the box and I cautiously slit open the tape across the top of it with a letter opener. I used the tip of the opener to flip open the sides of the box and looked inside. A letter was folded neatly across the top of whatever was in the box and I pulled it out to read it.

  To Whom It May Concern,

  In lieu of delivery of the Sectarian Jane Clayton-Forrester, please accept this token as to the seriousness of my intent to reclaim her as part of my contract. She will be downsized whether you like it or not.

  Sincerely,

  The Management

  I looked down into the box and my face went white.

  “What’s in it, kid?” Connor said.

  “It’s a clay pot,” I said. “Like the ones we found in the back of Cyrus’s shop. It’s got Tamara’s name on it.”

  There was a prolonged moment of silence as we stood there.

  “You okay, kid?” Connor said finally.

  “He killed her,” I said, stunned. “They killed her.”

  “Yeah,” Connor said, trying to comfort me. “Well, they wouldn’t be evil if they did nice things, would they?”

  27

  Connor said he’d have Haunts-General and Greater & Lesser Arcana see if they could do anything to free Tamara’s spirit from the tiny clay pot, but I didn’t think anything would come of it. No spirit had ever been successfully recovered from a Ghostsniffing operation. The Inspectre even went so far as to dispatch a Shadower team to check out Tamara’s apartment, but as I feared, there was no trace of her. The Inspectre let me leave early to regroup, as well as look through my trashed apartmen
t for any clues. I was useless at the office and racked with guilt that my cowardly avoidance therapy with Tamara had gotten an innocent woman killed. I returned home, hoping that at least Irene had reappeared, but she was still missing. I busied myself as best I could changing the locks and cleaning the living room—gloves on, of course. Actually experiencing my apartment’s destruction would be even more painful than throwing out the fragments of some of my most beloved possessions. Around midnight, I had only managed to deal with half the clutter but I was tired to my soul and barely stumbled to my bed before passing out.

  Sleep, however, didn’t last long, as the sounds of a woman shrieking at the top of her lungs filled the room.

  “WHO IS SHE, SIMON?” I heard Irene yelling.

  Not the way I would choose to be woken up. I was more of a nuzzling sort as far as rousing goes, but as I rose to consciousness, I was met with the sight of Irene silhouetted by the moonlight in the center of my bedroom. It was more eerie a reappearance than I had hoped for.

  “Irene?” The sleep was thick in my voice. “Irene, what’s wrong? You disappeared again. Do you remember what was pulling you away from here?”

  “Who is she, Simon?” Irene hissed. There was rage in her words, pure and full of venom. Was this the degradation of the spirit Connor had been talking about? This reaction was so out of place, so over the top, that I almost laughed.

  “I know there’s another woman. Who is she?” Irene’s anger caused her to phase in and out and I could see through her to the far wall.

  “Calm down. What are you talking about?”

  “On your answering machine,” she said. “JUST NOW. Who is she?”

  The alarm showed that it was just shy of 3 a.m. I hadn’t heard the phone ring, not even once. But if someone had called, it was either a wrong number…or else Jane calling from wherever she was staying. It certainly wasn’t Tamara anymore. I jumped out of bed and made my way to the answering machine. One message. I pressed play. It was Jane, all right, and from her tone I could tell she had been drinking. I had totally forgotten to call her back and make up with her after I’d left her in such a huff earlier today.

  “I keep going over it again and again in my head, Simon,” she said. “So that was it back at the storage place? You just leave me with an armful of balloon animals to fend for myself? I thought you were helping to protect me! You’re not a real man. A real man would have stayed. A real man would have had the guts…”

  I didn’t need to hear the rest of it and hit the erase button. The words hurt, even though I discounted them given the drunken slur of her voice. I turned to Irene. “That’s just this girl…she’s part of this project for work.”

  “WHO IS SHE?” Irene screeched, causing me to step back. Her reactions were pure over-the-top emotion, with none of the checks or balances that humanity normally provides. She wasn’t making sense. It was true that I had found a lot to like in Irene from our talks. I had even found myself attracted to her, but…she was a ghost. Where could that possibly go for either of us? True, my mixed feelings about both her and Jane were strong enough that I’d been keeping information from Irene. And there was guilt stemming from my attraction to both of them, but even so, this reaction to one tiny answering machine message was way out of proportion. There was no reason for her to behave this way.

  “I told you she’s a work thing,” I said. “Not that it should matter. What’s the problem?”

  “You have got to be kidding!” Irene said. “You expect me to believe that?”

  I was starting to lose patience. “I fail to see how that’s any of your concern.”

  Irene’s eyes flared with anger and a cold mysterious force wrapped around me. It lifted me up and flung me across the room. These old buildings were built with endurance in mind and my impact with the solid plaster knocked the wind right out of me. People talk about seeing stars when they suffer trauma to the head. I saw constellations, maybe even a few planets.

  My knees buckled when I tried to stand. Dizziness had me and I teetered back against the wall, using what remaining strength and determination I had to keep standing. Irene’s anger was manifesting itself as an unseen physical force, and for the first time, I felt scared.

  Still, the fear wasn’t enough to stop me from getting angry myself. Everything was getting to me. I was sick of it. Tamara was dead. Jane’s life was in jeopardy, and right now in the darkness of my bedroom, there was a miniature tornado forming with Irene going all Glenn Close in the middle of it. I had to get control of the situation, and fast.

  “May I remind you that you’re a guest in my home?” I said civilly.

  “And you’re off running after other women,” she spat out from the center of the room. The bed sheets had blown free and were swirling around her figure hauntingly.

  “So what if I am?” I yelled. I didn’t want to, but I was feeling cornered, hurt, and pissed at the same time. I pushed away from the wall, using one hand to steady myself. “So what, Irene? You’re a guest here because of my generosity. You’re not my girlfriend, not my wife, not anything. You’re dead! The only thing I owe you is my hospitality, and barely that.”

  In the darkness, something the size of my storage bench at the end of the bed—possibly the bench itself—flew within inches of my face and hit the wall with an explosive crash. I squinted my eyes shut as shards of wood flicked across my face, and I felt the tiny sting of several pieces biting into my skin. If I didn’t do something proactive, this was how I would die.

  I covered my face and moved for the bedside table. I groped in the darkness until I found my cell phone while I tried to assess the room. Irene was between me and the door, blocking it completely. But before I could decide what to do, a book hit me squarely on the side of my head and another white-hot flash of starlight welled up behind my eyes. Not wanting to endure any further damage, I dashed across the room and into my closet, slamming the door behind me. The heavy clumping of my belongings rained down hard against the closed door. I looked down and was relieved to see that I would be able to hold the door shut by the knob on the inside of it.

  I flipped open my phone, grateful for the little bit of light it gave off. Connor had earned the honorable position on my speed dial as number one and I dialed him up.

  Although it was nearly 3 a.m., he answered almost immediately.

  “This call may be recorded to assure excellent customer service,” he said. “Please state the nature of your emergency, kid.” It was a joke, but thankfully it was also to the point.

  I talked as loudly as I could as the thumping against the door and the howling of the wind in the bedroom grew louder. Connor listened intently as I explained the situation.

  When I was done, the doorknob was slick with sweat, but I held on tight.

  “Where are you now?” he asked.

  “In my closet,” I said.

  Irene’s voice assumed a high-pitched wail on the other side of the door and I pressed my head against some of my clothes to drown her out.

  “Perfect,” he said. “Get dressed and get the hell out of there, kid. You’re not going to be able to rationalize with her spirit.”

  Just like Tamara, I thought, and look what had happened to her. Dammit, I had to get her out of my mind. There would be time for being racked with guilt later.

  “You get out of there and meet me down at the Odessa on Avenue A, all right?”

  I fumbled in the dark for a pair of pants, using the keypad lights on my phone to help. I grabbed a pair but lost my balance attempting to put them on. My head thumped solidly against the wall and this time I felt the world fall out from under me.

  “Kid? Kid?” Connor called out when I didn’t respond. “You there? The Odessa, okay?”

  “Ow. Yeah. I’ll meet you there.”

  “I can’t stress how careful you should be getting out of there, Simon. You know the expression ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Times that by t
en,” he said. “Ghosts start to degrade in personality over time, and become more like raw emotion. You’re now dealing with an entirely irrational creature, a degraded spirit experiencing rampant mood swings. The logic of regular human conversation is beyond her right now, so don’t think you can talk her down or reason with her. Course, it doesn’t help that she has that telekinetic ability to throw stuff at you.”

  “You’re telling me,” I said. “She’s gone totally Twister over here.”

  Tiny blasts of wind began shooting through cracks in my rapidly deteriorating closet door.

  “Trust me,” Connor said, “you’ll wish you were only dealing with a scornful woman if she gets a hold of you.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said, grabbing a shirt as I prepared to make my escape. “I’m a pretty fast runner when panic sets in.”

  “Time to come out of the closet,” Connor said. I could hear him laughing as he said it.

  “So not the time to make with the funny, boss.”

  I threw open what remained of the door just as it ripped away from its hinges and blew right out of my hand. The sound of it tearing to pieces as it smashed against the opposite wall sent me running. I had no desire to be the next thing torn apart.

  28

  When I breathlessly entered the Odessa Diner, I noticed a flurry of movement coming toward me and my first panicked thought was My God, I’m about to get swarmed by ghouls. After the night I had been through, anything was possible, and I did a double take. Upon closer examination, it was merely a group of Greek waiters eager to seat me. They were simply enthusiastic, not the walking dead. I spotted Connor next to a table of plaid-clad punks at the rear of the restaurant and headed back.