by J. R. Rain
“Am I going to hell?” I asked. I heard the desperation in my voice.
At that moment, something started happening: she started fading before my eyes. “Please, James,” she said, gripping me tighter. “We can be together again. Everything will be okay.”
“Will it?” I asked, pulling back. “How do you know?”
“Please, James.”
Frozen with fear, afraid to face what lay beyond, I didn’t move. And when she disappeared altogether, the golden tunnel in the ceiling disappeared with her, and I was left alone with my own dead body.
And that’s when the eternal cold set in.
The tunnel in the sky shone brightly now.
I could feel its pull, like a siren’s song. Every instinct in my nonbody told me to go to the light. That going to the light was the natural thing to do, that it was the right thing to do, that it was the logical thing to do.
No, I thought. Not yet.
Lately, the tunnel had been appearing less frequently and its pull seemed to be diminishing. As if it were giving up on me.
Don’t give up on me yet, I thought. I need more time. Just give me a little more time.
The light in the sky wavered. It always wavered just before it disappeared. I continued gazing up at it, continued fighting its gentle pull. Why the tunnel existed, I didn’t know, but it was a part of my life now—or more accurately, a part of my death. Where and to whom it led, I did not know. But I suspected it led to heaven.
Or to hell.
The wind, like something curious and blind, moved over the ceramic tiles of the outdoor hallway, feeling everything, touching everything. But not me. Never me. Instead, it went through me. On the hillside beyond the balcony, something crashed through the trees and then scurried up the hillside. A raccoon, perhaps.
Maybe it’s scared of ghosts.
When I looked up again, the tunnel was gone.
Don’t give up on me, I thought. Please.
It was late afternoon, and I was standing near Pauline’s sliding glass door as the setting sun angled down into her living room, splashing across the polished Pergo floors and straight through me.
I was drawing energy from the sun, which meant I was in a high-energy state. Pauline, however, wasn’t in a high-energy state. She lounged languidly on her couch, and I suspected there was a strong drink in her very near future.
“You suspect right,” she said, standing with considerable effort. “Hey, you’re shadowing,” she said as she passed by me.
Indeed, I was. I looked down, and there I was on the floor, a vague shape of a man. Gleefully, I moved my arms, and the shadow’s arms moved as well.
A thrill coursed through me.
Pauline appeared a moment later with an apple martini in her hand. “I’d offer you one, love, but it’s going to take more than a shadow to put it away.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I think.”
“So why are you haunting me tonight?” she asked.
“Why? Do you have something better to do?”
“Than to hang out with a ghost? Sadly, no.” She took a sip from her drink and studied me. “So tell me, honey, why are you here tonight? I sense you want to ask me something.”
There were no secrets with Pauline. “I want your help to bust me out of here.”
“Bust you out of where?”
“Here,” I said. “The apartment building.”
She set down her drink directly on her hand-painted coffee table. So much for the coaster. “And where would you like to go, Mr. Blakely?” she asked.
An image of the monastery must have been sitting heavily on my mind, because she nodded almost instantly.
“I see,” she said. “So you are serious about looking into your music teacher’s murder?”
“Deadly serious.”
“And you think this will help save your soul?” she asked.
“It couldn’t hurt,” I said.
“Did it ever occur to you that it might be too late for you, James?”
“Yes.”
“But you’re going to go through with this anyway?”
“Yes.”
She sat forward on the love seat, the springs creaking beneath her weight. She reached out and held the stem of the martini glass without actually lifting it.
“You’ve been dead nearly two years?” she asked.
Dates were getting fuzzy with me, but that number seemed right. “Yes,” I said. “I think.”
“And what, exactly, have you done during these past two years to help save your soul? And finding Mrs. Carney’s lost cat doesn’t count, since you were the one who spooked it in the first place.”
“I found Mrs. Carney’s lost cat.”
“Doesn’t count.”
“I’ve been waiting for the right situation,” I said.
“And you think finding your music teacher’s murderer is that situation?”
I thought about that. “It feels right. I can’t explain it other than that.”
“It feels right?”
I sensed her trying to talk me out of this. I didn’t want to be talked out of this. I wanted this. “I adored that woman,” I said. “I want to help.”
“There’s one problem, James,” she said. “You’re earthbound to this apartment building.”
“Which is why I need your help.”
She sighed heavily and took a sip from her drink. “Fine. Let me ask around.”
“Who will you ask?”
“I know people,” she said.
“Dead people?” I asked.
“Very dead people.”
A few days later, Pauline stepped through her front door and found me hovering in her kitchen. I had, admittedly, been waiting for her.
“How was your day, dear?” I asked pleasantly.
She ignored me and tossed her purse and keys on her kitchen table and headed straight for the fridge. A moment later, she emerged with a bottle of Miller Lite.
“You know,” she said, “there are some people who are greeted by their mate when they first come home. Or by their kids. Or even their dogs. Me? I get a ghost.”
“I could take offense at that,” I said. “At least you have someone.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “That was a shitty thing to say.”
“I could piss on your leg, if that makes you feel any better.”
“I said I’m sorry. Besides, I have good news. I might have found a way to break you out of here.” She twisted off the cap to her beer and drank deeply from it. When she pulled away to breathe, she said, “I’d offer you one, but you don’t have any lips.”
“Very funny,” I said.
“Wait till I have a few beers in me—I’ll be a regular comedian.”
We moved over to the couch. She curled her feet under her and looked steadily at me. “I’m going to miss you, James.”
That surprised me. “That’s if we can figure out a way to get me to the church. Besides, I always got the impression that I bothered you, Pauline. That since you spent the bulk of your day dealing with the dead, the last thing you wanted was to have a ghost haunting you at home.”
Outside, in the parking lot below, a car alarm suddenly went off, immediately followed by the sound of running feet. Had a car alarm actually served its purpose? Pauline ignored the sound. She was silent and meditative, her thoughts closed even to me.
Finally, she said, “Yes, James, there are times when I desperately need a break from the dead, even from you. No offense.”
“None taken.”
“But you seem to be pretty good at discerning those times, so it’s mostly not a problem.”
She was staring intently at me. I wondered just how much of me she could actually see.
“I see the outline of you,” she said, reading my thoughts. “I see your jawline, your cheekbones, your mouth. You have very full lips.”
“Had very full lips,” I corrected.
She ignored me. “You were a very handsome man, James. I could have
loved a man like you.”
“Well, I think you do a little,” I said. It was meant as a joke, but my ability to joke seemed to have gone the way of my body. After all, humor was as much body language and inflection as it was content, and I didn’t have much of either these days.
She studied me from over her bottle of beer, then swirled the contents, which caused frothing whitecaps to appear over the lip.
“Frothing whitecaps? You have a vivid imagination.”
“It’s what makes me special.”
“Yes, you are special,” she said. “And, yes, I do think I love you a little. You have proven to be a good friend and a wonderful confidant.”
She stared at me some more, then drank from her beer. As she did so, I found myself trying to remember how beer tasted. Hoppy and bitter were two words that came to mind—two words that had mostly lost their meaning to me.
“Don’t forget filling, complete, and quenching,” said Pauline, easily following my train of thought. She finished her beer, got up from the couch, and headed over to the kitchen. She tossed the empty bottle and got herself another one. “Here, let me give you a taste.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. I could just imagine her dumping the beer all over her kitchen floor as she tried to find my ghostly gullet.
“No,” she said, “I have another idea. Come here.”
I approached her nervously. What did she have in mind? I paused about halfway through the kitchen as she took a long drink from the bottle, then wet her lips slowly with her narrow tongue. She moved over to me. Or perhaps sidled would have been a better word. Either way, she had a fairly hungry look in her eye, one that would have caused my physical body to react a certain way, no doubt.
“Just shut up for a few seconds,” she said.
“But I didn’t say anything.”
“Then turn off your damn brain and relax.”
“I’m a ghost. How much more relaxed could I be? Besides, I don’t have a brain—”
“Shh!”
Now she was standing before me. Her eyes roamed my face with interest. She reached up and touched my hair—or tried to.
“Your hair is slightly mussed,” she said.
“Yeah, well, I was asleep when I died.”
“I want you to do something for me,” she said.
I didn’t say anything. I just stood there in the kitchen, looking down at this woman I had gotten to know so well over the past two years. A woman who was my only connection to the real world.
“Shh,” she hissed again. “I want you to draw energy from me. You know how to do it, and I give you my full permission. I want to see you, James. All of you.”
She had never given me such permission, and rarely did I draw upon the energy of others. Not sure why I didn’t; again, call it ghostly etiquette.
“Do it,” she said. “And just shut up. But first…” She drank deeply from the bottle and licked her lips again. “Okay, now do it.”
And so I did. I reached out and held her head in my hands. She closed her eyes and tilted her head back. Energy—her energy—crackled up my arms and through my body, spreading to all my extremities. Her eyelids fluttered wildly.
A moment later, I made a full appearance.
She opened her eyes and smiled at me—and nearly fainted. In fact, she would have fallen to the floor had I not held her up.
“Don’t let go,” she said.
So I continued holding her head in my milky-white hands, continued drawing energy from her.
“Kiss me,” she said throatily. She opened her eyes and tried to smile—and nearly fainted again. “Do it now, you dope.”
And so I did.
Holding her face in my hands, I leaned down and pressed my semisubstantial lips down onto hers. Her lips, soft and wet, were coated with a thin film of beer. As I kissed her, more energy passed from her to me. A lot more energy.
Too much.
Finally, I pulled away from her. As I did so, a thin elastic thread of ectoplasm stretched from my lips to hers and snapped off in a puff of cotton candy as I carefully lowered her to the kitchen floor.
I stepped back, and two things happened simultaneously: she slowly regained her strength, and I slowly disappeared.
But before I faded altogether, I fetched her a pillow from the couch, slipped it under her head. When she opened her eyes again, she looked up at me weakly and smiled.
“So how did the beer taste?” she asked.
I grinned down at her, licking my lips.
“Wonderful.”
Pauline came back slowly.
Making a full appearance was rare for me. To do so, I needed the full compliance of the living. Most of the living rarely complied.
I was still reeling from the kiss. Her lips had been so soft against mine. I could still taste the alcohol on her lips. I could taste something else, too—her lipstick. And her perfume was more than just a phantasmal hint.
It was the real thing. And she had smelled so damn good.
“Thank you,” she said, sitting up, blinking hard. “You were bad. I told you to kiss me, not suck the life out of me.”
“My bad,” I said.
She sat up on the Pergo floor and wrapped her arms around her knees. Dust bunnies, stirred up from the recent commotion, flitted across the floor like mini gray ghosts. I said nothing, although my thoughts turned to my wife, who was living two floors above us and a hallway or two down.
“You didn’t cheat, silly,” she said.
“Feels like cheating.”
“We’re just friends experimenting. Like I did back in college, only you’re not a sophomore cheerleader with sexuality issues.”
“Still, I should be kissing her,” I said.
“She doesn’t know you exist,” said Pauline gently. “Besides, James, she remarried, remember?”
No, I hadn’t remembered. These days I was forgetting more and more. Then again, perhaps that was a memory I wanted to forget. Good God, my wife had remarried?
I felt as if someone had sucker punched me in the gut.
Pauline stood on shaky legs. “You’re going to be okay, kiddo. I promise.” She headed straight to the fridge and pulled out another bottle of beer. “Now, I actually had some news to tell you.”
“That is, before we got distracted,” I said, and suddenly wondered why I was feeling so awful. But I couldn’t remember. Something to do with my wife, I think. I shrugged off the feeling.
“That was a hell of a distraction,” said Pauline.
“Did your news have something to do with me finding a way out of here?”
“Yes,” she said.
“So how do we do it?” I asked.
She grinned at me. “I’m going to need a pair of your socks.”
It was past midnight, and my daughter was sleeping soundly.
I stepped into her bedroom through her closet door, noting that she appeared to have a new winter coat inside the closet, although I couldn’t quite remember if it was new or not. At any rate, it certainly seemed new.
Damned memory.
She was sleeping on her back, with her head turned slightly toward me. Thanks to a nearly full moon, the light inside her room was especially bright.
I noted that she had recently added a life-size poster of Kobe Bryant slam-dunking a basketball, feet hovering unnaturally above the court, tongue sticking out, face contorted in the sweaty throes of competition. I was uncomfortable with my nine-year-old daughter having a poster of anyone in the sweaty throes of anything.
She was growing up.
I hated that.
And she was doing so with a new daddy now. The man himself was kind enough, yes, although he really didn’t give her enough time or attention. She was always an afterthought, always an obligation, and she deserved much better. So much better.
She deserved me.
“I’m doing my best, baby doll,” I said to her sleeping figure.
As I spoke, her aura shifted toward me, as it always did. It h
ad been undulating softly in sleep, and now suddenly crackled with energy. The red lapping flames flared up toward me before dissipating into puffs of fuchsia-tinted smoke.
I sat next to her. “Hi, baby,” I said. “You know I’m here, don’t you?”
Her aura shifted colors. The red was now interlaced with wisps of blue steel.
“What are you dreaming about?” I asked softly.
More blue wisps penetrated the red. She was awakening. The colors together were beautiful. A phantasmagoric rainbow, perhaps made more beautiful because they were emitting from my daughter. Either way, I could watch them all night, and sometimes I did.
“I don’t remember what I was dreaming about, Daddy,” she said sleepily.
The blue bands continued to weave through the red, and now there seemed to be some orange and yellow in there, too. The colors of her mood. She was excited. Her aura also retracted a little, quieting down, much the same way as an excited puppy will eventually calm down. As she lay there on her side, eyes closed, she appeared to be asleep, but the blue in her aura gave her away. The blue meant she was semiconscious. Or rather, a part of her was semiconscious and very much aware of me.
“You like Kobe, eh?” I said.
She giggled. “Yes! Everyone does!”
“Because he’s such a great basketball player?”
“No!” she said, laughing. “Because he’s so cute!”
“Oh, brother,” I said.
She giggled some more.
I said, “You’re too young to think boys are cute.”
“He’s not a boy. He’s a man.”
“Okay, you are definitely too young to think men are cute.”
“Oh, Dad. I know!”
We were quiet some more. The silver moonlight and reddish alarm clock light fused together to give her face a sort of pinkish glow, a face that was indeed losing some of its chubbiness. Her cheekbones were making an appearance. And thanks to her mother, she was going to be beautiful.
“Daddy needs your help,” I said.
Her aura flared immediately, snapping and crackling like a fire-breathing dragon. She shifted in her sleep, and her eyelids fluttered briefly, as if she might fully awaken. She spoke excitedly. “Anything for you, Daddy! What do you need?”
