Ghosts

by David A. Robertson

  “Nósisim…” Elder Mariah paused, trying to find a way to explain to Brady what he was about to see.

  So, he hadn’t been told. How would he react?

  “What, nókom?” Brady prompted. “Why are you being so weird?”

  Evidently, Elder Mariah gave up trying to prepare her grandson adequately. She just said, “Go inside, and we’ll talk.”

  Cole heard the flap start to open, while Brady said, “I’m pretty sure it’s not my birthday or anything like that,” and in the same sentence, having stepped inside the tent, “holy crap what’s this? Who are you?”

  Cole kept the bandages over his eyes and didn’t respond. He couldn’t think of one word to say.

  Elder Mariah’s softer footsteps entered the tent.

  “Why’s this guy wearing my clothes? Why’s he dressed like a mummy?” Brady asked.

  “I’ve been applying medicines to him,” Elder Mariah said. “He was…badly hurt.”

  “So what, I’m here to learn about what medicines you used? Why couldn’t you just tell me that, nókom?”

  “Here.” Elder Mariah approached Cole, and he felt her unclip the end of the wrapping from the top of his head. She started to unravel the bandages. “Let me show you. Just try to stay calm.”

  “Okay. You’re kind of weirding me out though.”

  She asked of Cole, “Are you ready?”

  Cole didn’t say anything. Just nodded, like he still wasn’t able to speak. He felt the bandages lift from his body. First, from the top of his head, then from around his forehead. When they were taken away from his eyes, he kept them closed. He kept them closed until he felt the bandages pull away from his mouth, until he heard Brady fall back against the tent, almost knocking over the whole structure.

  “No. No way.” Brady was breathless.

  Cole opened his eyes.

  “Hello, my friend.”

  6

  EVERYTHING

  MOMENTS AFTER COLE HAD SAID HELLO to Brady, as though he’d been on vacation and not literally dead, Brady woke up. Elder Mariah had propped Brady’s head up on her lap, and Cole was sitting across from them, on the other side of the fire, trying not to look too happy, he supposed. To be alive, to see his friend. The ‘Hello, my friend,’ comment may have been a bit too dramatic, Cole realized. But, in his defence, it just blurted out of his mouth.

  Brady lifted his head slightly to make eye contact with Cole, who smiled apologetically. He pulled himself up off Elder Mariah’s lap and leaned back on his elbows.

  “I’ll leave you two alone, so you can catch up,” Elder Mariah said and left.

  “You’re still here,” Brady whispered, once they were alone.

  “Still here,” Cole said.

  “How?” he asked. “I mean…how?”

  “I…” Cole was unsure how to navigate his way through this. He had no clue how he was alive again; though his healing powers had helped him become human again, they surely hadn’t brought him back to life. He wasn’t immortal. He ended up saying what he really believed, what he thought was probably true. “I’m not done what I came to do.”

  “Cole,” Brady said, “if somebody dies, and they aren’t finished something, they don’t just…start breathing again. Like, if I don’t finish the laundry, and then I die, I’m not going to—”

  “I know that this is different than needing to finish laundry,” Cole said. “That’s one thing I do know.”

  “Okay, fine,” Brady said. “So, you’re what, are you a ghost or something?”

  “I mean…” Cole looked down at his body, poked at it, an attempt at levity. “…not that I’m aware.”

  “You’re really real,” Brady stated. “Like, you’re actually alive.”

  Cole checked his pulse. Strong and steady.

  “Look, I know there are things you can’t tell me,” Brady said, “but you’ve got to give me something here, okay?”

  “You’re right, of course you’re right. I owe you at least that, it’s just…” Cole figured the same rules applied as before: he couldn’t tell anybody about Choch or the deal.

  “Eva said…” Brady stopped for a second, like putting the sentence together was too hard, or too painful, but then he kept going, gritting his teeth through it. “…that they said you got trapped in a fire you started at the X.”

  “The X?” Cole’s jaw dropped. “What are you talking about?”

  “It burned down the night you…died.”

  Cole sighed, deeply. So, they thought he’d died in a fire he’d started. The last in a series of fires that had been pinned on him, thanks to a mysterious assailant that had set him up by doing things like leave his toque at one of the arson scenes. He forced his mind to go back to the moment he died. The person in the hazmat suit had found Cole kneeling over his dad’s body, distracted by sorrow and anger. Didn’t say a word, just squeezed the trigger. The muzzle flashed. The bullet entered Cole’s brain.

  “That’s a really shitty thing to say. Kids died like that before. Why would they…why couldn’t they…that’s…” Cole’s blood was boiling. “…so effing shitty.”

  Cole did not say ‘effing,’ dear readers. Still doing my job.

  “I know.” Brady was reflective. He got up, walked around the fire, and sat next to Cole. “Me and Eva, we never believed that.”

  He put an arm around Cole’s shoulder.

  “The last thing I remember,” Cole stared into the fire as though it was the muzzle of the gun, “I’d found my dad’s body, in the basement of the research facility. And then this…”

  “What?” Brady prompted. “This what?”

  “This person was there, in a, uh, in a…hazmat suit…” Cole checked to see how Brady was looking at him, at how ridiculous this all sounded. “They just shot me, that’s it. I saw the gun fire, and then…” And then what? He saw black for a moment, and in the next moment, was in the waiting room, in the northern lights, dancing with ribbons of colour, to the beat of the drum, with everybody who he’d ever lost, for what at once seemed a moment and an eternity. “I died.”

  Brady, hanging on Cole’s every word, just stared at his friend, waiting for more. When no more words came, he gave Cole a squeeze on the shoulder. “And then you died? That’s it?”

  “I woke up in my…coffin. I dug my way out. I can’t remember much of anything after that, until I was close to here. No brain, you know?” Cole chuckled, but Brady didn’t laugh. “I felt this need to come here. I knew the way here, somehow. So, I came here. Came to you.”

  Brady shook his head.

  “How long has it been?” Cole had no concept of time, from when he’d woken up, to when he’d arrived at the cabin. No concept of how long he’d been dead.

  “Around a month,” Brady said.

  “A month,” Cole repeated. How much had happened since he’d left? How bad had things got, after he’d failed so spectacularly? He was supposed to save the community, and instead, he’d died. “Well I’m alive now,” Cole said, in response to his thoughts.

  “I’m glad, my friend.”

  Brady hugged him and held on for a while.

  “Me, too.” Cole said.

  “You look good, for a dead kid.”

  “You should’ve seen me before.”

  Eventually, they let go of each other, and then stared at one another. To Cole, this felt like the moment where they really said hi, where they were really back to old times.

  “You know, I don’t know how I’m alive, I don’t really know why, but I know that I’m not done. I know that I have to go back to Wounded Sky. I know that I have to figure it out.”

  “You can’t go back, Cole. You shouldn’t go back. You should get out of here. You should…” Brady took a deep breath, the kind Cole was so familiar with, when he was going through a panic attack. In five seconds, out seven seconds. “…how much more can you go through? And for what?”

  “I’m not alive just to run away, Brady.”

  Brady shook his head. “Yo
u don’t understand how bad things are, what you’d be going back to. Before cell service cut out two weeks ago, Eva told me everything. I used to run towards home until I got a signal. Eva, she…” Brady stopped himself. “You should run.”

  This time, Cole was the one who shook his head. “No.”

  “Cole…”

  “Eva told you everything?”

  “Yeah,” Brady said. “I’m a bit behind now, but yeah.”

  “Then I want you to tell me everything.”

  Brady suggested they go for walk, get some fresh air. Cole needed it, too. He hadn’t been outside since he’d healed, hadn’t been able to appreciate the beauty of the land on his journey here. They left the tent and walked deeper into Blackwood, away from Wounded Sky. Brady picked a leaf off a tree, and played with it as they walked.

  “The more I think about it, I guess you’re right. Of course, you’re right. I tried to talk you out of going back, but—”

  “I have to.”

  “—I won’t anymore. Eva’s still there. Everybody’s still there, dealing with everything. All that crap. It kills me, each day I’m not there. It just kills me.”

  “It actually killed me, so…”

  “Too soon.”

  “Yeah, I figured it might be.”

  Still, they both chuckled. It felt a bit like a deep breath, before things got serious. They walked for a while, until the cabin was far behind them.

  “How is it here, with your parents?” Cole asked.

  Brady’s whole body slouched.

  Cole waited.

  “I’m trying to think of a good analogy because I don’t want to actually address it. It’s not as bad as it was at first, but it’s still…you know…it’s a process.”

  “Sorry, man,” Cole said. “Is that…I mean, is it as awkward as it sounds?”

  “It’s not not awkward,” Brady said.

  “Double negatives are never really a good sign.”

  “It’s just, you spend your whole life trying to get them to accept you, or at least understand, and they never do. So you leave them, because even if they say they love you, they don’t, because they don’t love a big part of you.”

  “But it always hurts.”

  “Of course, it does, and then, you know, you have to live with them again, after all that time…”

  “Supreme awkwardness.”

  “It’s okay. It wasn’t, but it is. Living in that place, that super small place, it forces you to talk at least.”

  “Talking’s good,” Cole said. “Talking’s a start.”

  “They always liked Ashley…” and if Brady had more to say about it after that, he didn’t. “Anyway, let’s talk about all the bad crap, shall we? Enough of my crap.”

  “Let’s.”

  Brady got right into it. “Nobody stepped up after Anna Crate left the race, so Reynold’s the Chief now, but he’s…how do I say this…AWOL? Curiously absent from public life after winning the election. Didn’t even throw a victory party.”

  “Has anybody seen him at all?” Cole asked. “Like, since the night I…”

  “I don’t really know. Eva didn’t say.”

  “Any sightings of Upayokwitigo?”

  “No. She would’ve heard something like that.”

  So Reynold still might be dead. But then, if he was, he wasn’t the reason Cole was brought back to life. What could be worse? What could be left to do? Could Reynold be alive? Cole had all those thoughts, and then he pictured the gun that he had been holding. He’d shot Reynold in the chest, right in his heart. Reynold had run off into Blackwood, Cole was sure, mortally wounded. Before Cole had been shot himself, he’d planned to go out into the woods and find Reynold’s body. “So Reynold might still be alive.”

  “Why would he be dead? What’s he got to do with Upayokwitigo?” Brady sounded extremely confused. Clearly, Eva had not told Brady anything that Cole had told her.

  “Uhhh…nothing. No reason, I guess,” Cole said.

  “You guess?” Brady frowned, like he’d heard that one before. “You just can’t tell me? What bigger secret could there be, than you coming back from the dead? Honestly?”

  “That’s a good point!” Cole called out, not to Brady, but to Choch.

  Thankfully, Brady let it go. “Mihko Laboratories reopened the research facility. Chief and Council said it would be a boost to the economy, but I don’t think they’ve hired any community members, and their presence had almost doubled the last time I heard from Eva. There are more people at the clinic, too, and security all over the place. I mean, all over the place.”

  “What, like at the mall?”

  “All over the place,” Brady repeated. “The whole community’s on lockdown now, not just the clinic.”

  “The whole community’s on lockdown? What do you mean?”

  “Nobody’s allowed to leave or come in. That’s why the flights stopped coming last month. They’re rationing food because of it, the whole nine.”

  Cole had a vague memory of an encounter in the woods. There had been two guards. A struggle. Gunshots. They’d been trying to keep Cole from leaving. His mind was reeling. He couldn’t even think about what he had to do to save the community. “Tell me that’s it.”

  Brady hesitated. “People are missing.”

  “Like before?” Cole asked, thinking about his murdered friends.

  “No, just up and vanishing. Gone.”

  “Just gone,” Cole stated flatly. “Where? I mean, where do you think?”

  “The clinic? The research facility?” Brady guessed. “Eva didn’t know.”

  “Shit,” Cole breathed.

  “So, what’s the plan? We’ll go back, I’ll tell Eva, and we’ll, you know…” Brady didn’t know where to go from there, just that, it sounded to Cole, he knew they were a team, and they were going to do something. “…she’ll be so happy, she’ll probably faint, but, you know, then she’ll be happy. Then we’ll—”

  “We’ll tell Eva, of course. But we can’t just tell everybody about me,” Cole said.

  “Why?” Brady asked.

  “Because we don’t have a plan, short of just going back.”

  “And we can’t tell anybody else because we don’t have a plan?”

  “Yeah, that’s the one thing we do have.”

  “The one thing we do have,” Brady repeated thoughtfully. “Okay, what do you mean?”

  “I mean that whatever we decide to do, they won’t ever see me coming,” Cole said.

  “It’s historically hard to keep anybody’s presence a secret in Wounded Sky.”

  “It’s not when you have a costume.”

  7

  THE RECKONER

  WHEN NIGHT FELL, COLE WENT OFF ON his own into Blackwood Forest and found a small clearing by a brook. He sat on a rock by the water. Quiet. Calm. He could see his breath in the cold. Moonlight lit the clearing. He heard footsteps approach, but didn’t turn to see who it was. He could guess who it was anyway.

  Choch placed a jacket over Cole’s shoulders and rested his hands there for a moment. Uncommonly tender.

  “Thanks,” Cole said.

  Choch patted one shoulder, gave both shoulders a squeeze, and sat down beside Cole. The rock was big enough for two.

  “My pleasure.” The spirit being gave Cole a very long look. An inspection. “Did you do something with your hair?”

  Cole smiled. “Still funny, I see.”

  “If you don’t laugh at the world, the world laughs at you.”

  “I don’t even know what that means, and honestly, I don’t care.”

  Choch slapped his knee. He looked around the clearing. “Who killed Cole and replaced him with this guy?” he called out, laughing, hardly able to get the words out.

  “I kind of expected to get a lot of death jokes,” Cole said. “You should really find some new material.”

  Choch stared at Cole some more.

  “What?” Cole asked.

  “I’m just trying to figure ou
t if you’re still fun,” Choch said.

  “I’m sure you’ll figure out some way to amuse yourself.”

  Choch walked to the edge of the brook and just stood there. After a moment, Cole joined him.

  “My boy’s all grows up.” Choch had actual tears in his eyes, and his voice cracked. He repeated himself with a great deal of gesticulation; cupping his mouth, putting a hand against Cole’s cheek. “My boy’s all grows up.”

  Cole jerked his face away from Choch’s hand. “Who are you now? A waiter? A gym teacher? A stand-up comic?”

  “Oh, that’s a surprise. It’s really fun though and clever. You’ll appreciate it, when you see it. You are coming back soon, I imagine.”

  Cole listened to the brook for a moment, then answered. “Yes, in the morning.”

  “Well, you know, if I may offer some advice or whatever,” Choch twisted his toe into the ground sheepishly, “eat a big breakfast. It’s the most important meal of the day.”

  “Thanks.”

  “So, I guess you’ve got this all figured out then.” Choch clapped his hands and turned away from the brook and Cole. “Not even one million thoughts in your head. I’ll just, you know, head on back to my other projects.” He whistled as he walked away, not even disappearing. Maybe he intended to get wherever he was going on foot.

  “Hey,” Cole said.

  Choch stopped and turned around eagerly. “Yeah?”

  Cole looked down at his palms. Followed the path of each line, lines that Cole hadn’t seen for ten years, because of the scars that had taken their place. He ran his index finger along his life line, the one that curled around the base of his thumb. He remembered comparing his with Eva’s. Whoever’s was longer would live the best. But Cole didn’t really believe in any of that; he’d just wanted to touch Eva’s hand.

  “And what did the scars make you think of?” Choch asked, walking back to Cole. “Did they give you such pleasant memories?”

  Cole tried to picture them. Faulty scars. That’s what the doctor had called them in the city. Raised. Discoloured. Ugly. But somehow, sometimes, to him, beautiful. “They reminded me of what I’d do for them.”

  “Technically, I did it for them, in a roundabout sort of way. But, to-may-toe, to-mah-toe, I suppose.”