What the #@&% Is That?

by John Joseph Adams

  “I do.”

  “I don’t ever get to meet good people. When I do meet someone who’s supposed to be stand-up, I’m immediately figuring the angle to break them down and turn them. You understand? I’m always looking for a way to make them like me. In one way or another.”

  I said nothing.

  “In all of my dealings,” he said, “I’ve never met anyone like you. The people with whom I work always talk about honor and all that, but it’s talk. The deference people show to them is totally out of fear or greed. Never because these people have earned their respect.”

  “If you’re driving in the direction of a point, man,” I said, “take the next exit.”

  He said, “You are a third- or possibly fourth-rate private investigator working out of what is arguably the seediest office it has ever been my displeasure to visit. You smell of cleaning products and old booze, and you are not a very nice person.”

  I leaned back. “Gosh, thanks. I—”

  He cut me off. “But you may be the only honorable man I have ever met.”

  Before I could figure out a way to respond to that, he stood up and tossed a twenty down to cover the tab.

  “Olivia would probably have liked you.”

  And with that, he turned and shambled out.

  I sat in the booth and drank my coffee. I ate his slice of pie and stared out the window at the night.

  GHOST PRESSURE

  GEMMA FILES

  “How d’you like it here, Gran?” young Kristle was forever asking her, to which Gavia Pratt (“Not missus, just miss, or nurse, if you prefer”) would only reply, “Doesn’t rain enough.” Which it didn’t, by a long shot, though the days were certainly overcast, air water-heavy and gray, sinus pressure forever shifting like the beginning of the bends. Still, a lake wasn’t the sea, and couldn’t be; she missed Blackpool, the pier, cold wind and sting of salt, always bracing even with bad tourist karaoke bawling in the background, plus the sound of amusements-with-prizes going off in the distance every thirty seconds like a layered choir of tiny electronic car alarms.

  She’d been in Toronto almost six months now, sent by the Hermes Lifequality head office to help structure their primary Canadian outreach, a task which mainly consisted of vetting care-workers, matching them with assignments, coaching debriefers, or debriefing them herself. It was a tight-knit group thus far, funded through a mixture of benefactor donations and fees from global pharmaceutical companies looking to test new pain-management product variations on subjects unlikely to complain if anything went wrong; eggs and omelettes, all that. Did get the job done, though, which was more than she could say for her staff, on occasion.

  “What you have to remember is, palliative care’s not all about you,” she told them, what felt like over and bloody over. “Can’t be, not if it’s going to work the way it has to. So, be present for them, and keep all the chat about your own fine feelings for me, thank you very much—it’s what I’m here for, isn’t it? One way or t’other, these things do come with a time limit; you’ll make yours, you just try hard enough. Or if not, I’ll rotate you off-site and find someone else who can, no harm, no foul. That’s guaranteed right in the contract, case you didn’t think to look before you signed it.”

  They were main soft, this lot, most of ’em; you’d think they’d never seen anyone die at all, ’less it were on the telly. But they did tend to have these very specific ideas about the process, nevertheless—touchy-feely, broad-base “spiritual” without benefit of church, all candles and incense and white light, total Serenity Prayer faff. Some even preferred to be called end-of-life doulas, if you could believe the cheek; exit midwife, was it? These young girls. Nothing ever good enough.

  Like a lot of her peers back home, Gavia’d rotated through a gross of other counseling services before eventually settling at Hermes—Samaritans, Adfam, ElderCare. Everything from emotional distress to right-to-die work for Exit International, though that was on her own time, of course. Her NHS background stood her in good stead, along with the experiential legacy of those wild teenaged years that’d seen her saddled with Kristle’s father before she reached the grand old age of nineteen. And now, thanks to the same lovely girl’s fine practical judgment about whether or not it was worth reaching for a rubber after a drunken night out, she was a great-grandmother at barely fifty: tall, gray, and grim, striding ’round this silly city with her coat barely buttoned, sweating like a human hot flash. Probably would’ve had to be here anyhow, but she could’ve stood not to have to change nappies on her off-time nevertheless.

  Right at this moment, though, her phone said 4:05; time for . . . Jaiden, if she recalled correctly. One of the better sorts, a butch little number who dressed like Elvis circa “Heartbreak Hotel.” She got out the file.

  “So,” Gavia began, “this makes a month you’ve been with Mister Zukauskas, by my count. How’re you getting on?”

  “Uh, pretty well, I’d say. He’s got late-onset Alzheimer’s and stage four lung cancer, so it’s all about keeping him happy, at this point—or less unhappy.” Gavia nodded. “Stopped eating last week, so we have him on a drip, and we moved from transdermal fentanyl patches to oral morphine; added haloperidol to stop the nausea and vomiting. But now we’re past the first three days we’re just on a prophylactic laxative to clean him out, and I discontinued that today.”

  “You’re day-shift, yeah? And that starts when?”

  “Five a.m.”

  “So, you’re off early today.”

  “I . . . asked the night-shift guy to come in early, to cover for me—Sayyid. Because I wanted more time to talk to you.”

  “Oh? About what?”

  Jaiden paused for a moment, seeming to think; Gavia felt the urge to tap her pen, mark off however many seconds it took, but resisted it. Her AA Agnostics twenty-year was coming up fast and she’d been feeling the pull all week, cycling through various coping techniques till she could get back to her original sponsor rather than rely on one here, though she took as many meetings as seemed useful in the interim. Tonight’s was at that odd little Heritage building church sandwiched between the DoubleTree by Hilton hotel and the Eaton Centre, but Gavia didn’t think she could make it before needing to get home and relieve the babysitter she’d arranged for instead of chipping in on rent, so Kristle could work that ridiculous “acting” job she’d gotten and pretend she was still paying her own way. . . .

  “You know much about Lithuania, Miss Pratt?” Jaiden asked finally. Gavia shrugged.

  “Used to be Soviet, now it isn’t; next to Latvia, I think, or Poland, or both. Why?”

  “Well, Zukauskas is from there—his family snuck out around 1952, after the war, when he was like twenty. Came over with his mom, his little brother, and his brother’s wife, so he’s been married sixty-plus years. His dad died in a camp. And I know all this ’cause he told me, right, ’cause he talks all the time, like pretty much nonstop, except for when he’s asleep. . . .”

  “Old people do tend to, yeah, even when they’re not dyin’.”

  “Which I get; I remember that from the prep course, the materials. But . . .” Another beat. “Then, last week actually, right before he went all liquid diet, he starts telling me different stuff—weird stuff. Like folklore, fairytales. Except he’s not telling them about once upon a time, or some sh—crap; he’s telling them about himself. His life. His . . . wife.”

  “What about her?”

  “Well, that she’s like—a nightmare. By which I mean she’s not a person? Like, not even human. That she’s this thing, called a Slogutė or a Naktinėja . . .” Jaiden pronounced the words carefully, almost phonetically, with a hint of what Gavia could only assume was the old man’s accent: slow-GOO-teh-eh, nacktee-NEH-EH-yah. “This creature that, like, comes through the keyhole and oppresses people while they’re sleeping. How his mom used to tell him he had to protect himself by getting into bed sideways, like a crab, or she’d sneak into their house and sit on the youngest person in the fam
ily till they died—”

  “Sounds like classic night terrors to me, with a little bit of cats suckin’ baby’s breath thrown in for good measure.”

  “Yeah, I thought so too, at first. So, I just nod and smile and go ‘uh-huh,’ basically, same way you taught us to. But—he just won’t stop, keeps going on and on. And the really creepy part is that his wife? She’s in the room while all this is happening. Like, right there, in the corner.”

  “Does she hear what he’s tellin’ you? Can she even speak English?”

  “I don’t know, Miss Pratt. I mean, I’ve tried to talk to her, but she never says anything back, not even hi, hello, good to see you . . . she’s just always there. I actually don’t think I’ve ever seen her anywhere else in the house, or seen her leave the room, either. Just sits there knitting the whole time, never even looks up.”

  “Odd she isn’t mentioned on the intake form.” Off Jaiden’s look, Gavia sighed, and spun her the document. “See? Nowhere.”

  “Well, I don’t know what to tell you. She’s about his age, and little, like this high—” She sketched a figure whose head might come up to Gavia’s armpit, at best. “Looks nice, normal. Old lady with her hair pulled up under a scarf. Nothing remarkable about her at all.”

  “A nightmare,” Gavia repeated, and was slightly heartened to see Jaiden smile, at least a little: sidelong, self-deprecating. Like she couldn’t quite believe she was still going on about all this.

  “It is normal, y’know—this,” she told her, comforting as her basic personality would allow for. “Clients start flushin’ out their heads, by the end; doesn’t mean anything, no more than froth from something bein’ boiled. And eventually it’s all boiled away, froth as well, so you can wash the pot out and start over.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I mean, if it’s really bothering you, I can see about gettin’ you moved—”

  “—’cause that’s in the contract, right, I know, but . . . I don’t; I’m not . . . That’s, uh, not what I’m trying to . . .”

  Here she ran down for another few moments, face contorted, puzzled. As though she was sounding her next words through in her head, or trying to decide how the whole thing made her feel. Continuing, finally—

  “Mister Zukauskas says he had three little brothers and sisters, to begin with, and she—the Slogutė, his wife—killed them all, or that’s what his mom said, at the time. And granted, things were really bad in Lithuania back then, so it could just as easily have been, like, pneumonia, or starvation, or freakin’ typhoid fever from drinking water with sewer waste in it, or whatever. But one night, he stayed awake while everybody else was asleep and he watched the keyhole, and he saw her come in through it, twisting in the air like a ribbon. And when she tried to wrap herself ’round the bed where his little brother was, he caught her in a trap he’d made out of pages from an old Bible, so old it still had the Book of Tobit in it. And he told her if she didn’t agree to leave his family alone, he was gonna throw the whole thing in the stove-fire and burn her up, and then she’d just be gone forever—no heaven, no hell, no nothin’. But then she said she’d only agree if they got married, for who the hell knows what reason. And I guess he said yes, ’cause they’ve been together ever since.”

  “Now, Jaiden—”

  “So, he’s telling me this, right? And then he says he’s happy he’s dying, finally, ’cause no matter where he ends up, there’s no way she can follow him; says all this time he’s been suffering, she’s waited till he’s asleep and then pressed on his chest, given him awful dreams and suffocated him till he can’t sleep anymore so he’s had chronic insomnia for over sixty years—and that, that is in the file; I know, ’cause I checked.” Words spilling out, faster and faster, and the more they did, the more Gavia was inclined to simply let ’em till Jaiden ran herself down—sit back a bit, narrow her eyes, and watch her go on as long as she needed to. “But he feels bad too, right, ’cause then she’ll be free to start doing what she was doing before, back when. So, he says to me, ‘Can you take her?’ Like, ‘I know you like women. She can be beautiful, she can be whatever you want. It’s a hard bargain, but there are rewards.’ And I’m just . . .”

  “Sounds like clear grounds for a sexual harassment suit, you ask me.”

  “No, I mean—I don’t think he means it like that. It’s just . . . I’m getting afraid, ’cause now I’m having these dreams, almost every night, and I feel like I’m going to wake up one morning, go into work, and find out he died during the night, and then she’ll just be there in my apartment when I come home, you know? Like she’s come to stay with me, forever, and I never even got the chance to say no before she starts in pressing on me—”

  Gavia raised her hands, then, fingers spread. Told her shivering charge, voice gentle as it ever went, “Jaiden, love, breathe. Just take a minute. Breathe, yeah? It’s hardly the end of the world, y’know.”

  “No?”

  “No. Not by a long shot.”

  * * * *

  Two hours later, Gavia was finally on her way back to Kristle’s, still debating the best way to deal with Jaiden’s odd troubles. ’Cause it really was not about her so much as it was about the case: Zukauskas’s final process, with its built-in time limit. If Jaiden was still able to see that through—and nothing she’d told Gavia truly gave her to understand the opposite—then there was no problem. The man was terminal, had no heirs to complain about her behavior, let alone his; pretty soon he’d be gone, and all this’d be gone too, along with him. Meaning that though her most cautious instincts might say to move Jaiden on, this current situation wouldn’t last unless Jaiden let it.

  Working with the soon-to-die was upsetting, after all, inherently so. Reminded people of their own mortality—the ghost inside, their flesh’s frailty, senescence in action. Entropy. Universal pressure wearing away at ’em all, same’s the sea did the shore, visible in every mirror. Couldn’t penalize the poor bint for reacting to that cold revelation, could she?

  Well, in every strictly legal sense, yeah, she could; had a perfect right to, right there in black and white, uncontestable. But in this particular instance, she wouldn’t.

  Stopping on the corner of Kristle’s side street, Gavia cast a slightly longing look over the local dive bar’s way: classic all-day drinkers’ haven, the type she’d spent a good deal of her twenties in. Had a moment’s clear impulse to go in, order a gin and tonic, then sit there looking at it till some poor sod came over to chat her up, at which point she’d simply get up and leave him there with it as a donation for wasting his time. Last occasion she’d put herself through that rigmarole, playing it out like a ritual from some long-lapsed religion, had to ’ve been . . . five years back, at the very least. So, she supposed Jaiden’s little fairy tale must’ve had her feeling a trifle fragile on some level, not that that necessitated doing anything about it.

  Felt a cold wind at her back all of a sudden, and not from the weather, either. But, Aw, get on with you, old woman, she told herself scornfully. Never anything in the dark weren’t there in the light, and no mistake.

  So, up she went instead, feeling for her keys.

  The sitter, Karen, was curled up on the couch with one of Kristle’s books, some twenty-quid fantasy soap opera hardback big enough to kill a rat with; she uncurled herself slowly, yawning. “Hi, Miss Pratt,” she said. “Kristle called to say she’s gonna be late again—they’ve got her walking lights for setup, or something like that.”

  “Oh, aye? Don’t s’pose she’s bein’ paid for her trouble, at least.”

  A shrug. “Minimum wage; still, industry work, right? So, that’s something.”

  “Hm, yeah. How much she owe you, exactly?”

  “Two-twenty?”

  Sighing a bit at the expense, Gavia paid her, saw her out, locked the door carefully behind. Then went into Gavin’s room to peep in on the poor little mite, fast asleep and snoring with his chubby fists up in the air, like he was boxing God. The name had been a nice to
uch on Kristle’s part—almost as though she’d been coached in it, already knowing Gavia would need to stop over for a good chunk of the year, chequebook in hand. Which, by turns, only served to remind Gavia how in some ways, her ever-so-respectable schoolteacher son could be very much like that feckless bloody “entrepreneur” bugger of a father of his indeed; not that she’d more than barely allowed the two to know of each other, let alone bond. She still saw the latter up and down the pier sometimes back home, flashing the charm and cadging cash out of punters with a chippie on either arm, looking more like some Vegas preacher than the gangly young rockabilly thug she’d once fallen pregnant by. . . .

  But enough of that; tea, then paperwork, then sleep. Tomorrow started early, like always.

  * * * *

  Waking to dreaming was a dim slide, barely perceptible, like floating to sinking. Then the dark behind Gavia’s eyes bloomed up, became a door whose keyhole hung perhaps waist-level, perhaps lower, through which a feeble, dreadful light of no discernible hue leaked like poison—and soon enough, something fluttered behind it, visible only from the corner of her eye, giving her to know she was not alone, for all she might dearly wish to be. The knowledge, washing overtop her in one choking wave, that someone—something—sat beside and a trifle behind, unbreathing yet undeniable, with all its considerable focus kept trained at one itchy point on her back: not her spine nor the rhomboideus next to it, neither trapezius above nor serratus below, and not quite her shoulder blade’s bony wing, either. Some cluster of nerves, perhaps, unfurling like a knot made from pain to catch and hook, spiral itself deeper, unstring the various parts of her like pegless puppet-pieces. And hurting, hurting, all the way through: colder than undertow or tide, than barely melted ice, than frozen gut-blood slurry off the decks of fisher-boats. Colder even than her own long-dead father’s heart, when he waited all night in the maternity ward for her to wake up after her caesarian, just so’s he could tell her to her face how no bastard’s bastard would ever set foot in his house, Gavia Jane Pratt. . . .