The Body Departed (2009)

by J. R. Rain

  Where was I supposed to go? I didn’t know, but I knew when I wasn’t wanted, so I drifted through the wall, out into the hallway, and exited the administrative offices.

  I waited until the dead of night to return to the copy room.

  Jacob had followed me halfway there but had gotten distracted by some new artwork tacked onto the hallway bulletin board. He was, after all, just a kid. How old, exactly, I didn’t know, but I would guess under ten, maybe seven or eight.

  The offices were, of course, dark and empty. The copy machine itself was in some sort of hibernation mode. So I gathered as much energy as I could, no doubt chilling the air around me, and pressed the activation button on the machine. The copier immediately whirred on. A few minutes later, when it was fully charged, I drew enough energy from it to pull down the same yearbook I had seen Eli in.

  I opened it and went looking for the same football team shot. I found the photo again in the athletics section, and there he was, a clean-cut kid with a smirk on his face, his wide shoulder pads making him appear much bigger and tougher than he really was. I quickly found his corresponding name in the caption below the picture.

  Eli Myrth.

  I read it again and again. The name of my killer. The name of my piano teacher’s killer.

  And that’s when it hit me. I remembered Eli Myrth.

  Lord help me, I remembered.

  I need that wallet.

  I dashed out of the copy room, through the administration offices, flashed down a hallway.

  I made an impossible ninety-degree turn at what would have been breakneck speed. Except, of course, I didn’t have a neck to break. I passed the dead boy. He was skipping in and out of a wall covered with photos of a recent school play, humming to himself.

  The boy…

  Lord, help me.

  The double doors to the nave were closed. No problem. I lowered my head, blasted through.

  The church, as usual, was dark and empty and eerie as hell. I whipped down the main aisle, up the platform, and into the side storage room off stage left.

  The room was pitch-dark. I didn’t need much light, but I did need some, so I gathered my energy and used it all to flick on the light switch. Once done, I headed over to the box where Eli Myrth had hidden the wallet weeks earlier.

  Thankfully, the wallet was still there, wedged deep within a tangle of black cables.

  I tried to gather my energy enough to lift the wallet, but my thoughts were scattered, laced with images of Jacob falling to his death.

  Horrible, horrible images.

  Earlier, Jacob’s perspective had been as he fell, looking up at the shocked and horrified faces of the boys who had dropped him.

  My perspective—my new perspective—was from above, watching in horror as the boy began to slip from my grasp, realizing with horror that something very bad was about to happen.

  Very, very bad.

  The boy reaches up, helplessly.

  But it’s too late, and now he’s falling, falling…

  We just meant to scare him.

  I tried to calm down. Tried to focus my thoughts. No good. I paced the small area of the storage room, shook my hands. If I could have taken a deep breath, I would have.

  We just meant to scare him.

  I needed that wallet. I needed to know what was inside, although I could already guess. I forced myself to calm down, to slow down. Back at the cardboard box, I gathered my energy as best I could and plucked the wallet out from within. It dropped to the floor, flopped open.

  I hovered over the wallet, wondering if I really wanted to know what was inside. Yes, I did. Very much so. It was truly a matter of life and death.

  Well, afterlife and death.

  I leaned down over the wallet, then removed two items from their respective slots. The first was a Subway lunch card. Four holes had been punched—just six away from a free sub. The other was a student ID card. The student in the picture had a minor acne problem, but nothing that time wouldn’t eventually clear up. He was grinning and happy, a spark in his eye. The spark would later leave with the weight of guilt. Eternal guilt.

  The name on the card was mine, of course.

  James Blakely.

  Pauline and I were kneeling together in the front pew.

  She had come to light a prayer candle to save the souls of those languishing in purgatory—that, and to see how the hell I was doing. Personally, I think she and I were connected somehow. And my own internal anguish had registered on her psychic radar. Or not. Maybe she really did miss me after just a few days.

  Also, I wasn’t so much kneeling as floating next to her in a kneeling sort of way. She lit another candle, mumbled something that I couldn’t hear.

  “Say a little prayer for me, too,” I said.

  “Already did.”

  “What did God say?”

  “He’ll get back to me.”

  “It figures.”

  We weren’t alone in the nave. Jacob was nearby, miming playing the piano onstage with big, exaggerated movements that he might have learned from various Bugs Bunny cartoons. Every now and then, he actually struck a real key and a real note erupted from the piano, and the handful of worshippers would gasp and look up and cross themselves immediately. Pauline would just giggle next to me. Jacob himself seemed completely oblivious to the fact that he was sometimes scaring the hell out of the parishioners. Instead, he would often stop his pseudoplaying and sob uncontrollably, his little shoulders shaking violently, the sound of his weeping reaching my ears—and Pauline’s ears—quite easily.

  “The boy misses his music teacher,” said Pauline.

  “Yes.”

  “And he misses something else.”

  I looked over at her. Damn, she was perceptive.

  “Yes,” I said. “I imagine he does.”

  “He had a twin brother,” she said.

  “Yes, he did.”

  Between my own telltale thoughts and the boy’s erratic memories, I was willing to bet Pauline knew most of what was going on already.

  I said nothing. In death, events in my past had mostly stayed forgotten, unless I was reminded of them. Being here, in this church, I was reminded of them. Powerfully. And ever since I had found the wallet, memories of Jacob’s death had been flooding back all day. Haunting, horrible memories. And with them returned the terrible feelings of guilt.

  I didn’t mean to drop him, I thought.

  I was just going to scare him into telling me where my wallet was.

  “You killed that little boy,” said Pauline. Despite herself, despite our friendship and her love for me, there was a note of accusation in her voice.

  I nodded. I could feel the weight of Pauline’s stare on me.

  “Yes,” I said. “I and one other.”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  I did. As best as I could remember, I told her how someone had spotted Jacob going through my backpack, stealing my wallet. Because we were in a K–12 private school, we sometimes mixed with the younger kids. Jacob, if my sketchy memory was correct, had been about eight at the time. I had been sixteen, just beginning my junior year of high school.

  I had grabbed a friend of mine, a friend whose name I could not recall at the moment. Together, he and I found Jacob in one of the bathrooms. We told him that the piano teacher wanted to see him, and followed him into the empty nave. Once inside, we grabbed the boy and dragged him, kicking and screaming, up a flight of stairs to the rafters above the sanctuary. Rafters meant only for the lighting guys—not for cruel teenage boys.

  We hung Jacob over the railing. Demanded he tell us where my wallet was. The kid was hysterical. Didn’t know where the wallet was—claimed he didn’t know what we were talking about. But he was lying! I knew it! He had been caught red-handed by someone I trusted. We were furious. Well, I was furious. My friend was just caught up in the moment.

  So I hung him farther out over the railing, demanded that he tell me where my wallet was…

&nb
sp; And then it happened.

  I couldn’t believe it at first. One moment he was in my hands, struggling, fighting, scared out of his mind. The next he was falling through the air, reaching up for us, eyes wide and terrified. I lunged forward, reached out for him, but he was gone.

  Gone.

  And if he had landed on the carpeted stage, he would have probably suffered only a broken leg or two. Instead, he hit the sharp corner of the heavy altar, and his head burst open, spraying blood and brain matter across the sanctuary. He jerked once, twice, and then lay still.

  I watched him die from the rafters.

  Pauline was silent, digesting.

  Jacob’s death was a memory I had relived a million times. To some degree, my own death had been a welcome relief, for then the memories of the falling boy had abated—at least for a few years.

  Now they were back again.

  A million and one times, I had watched Jacob fall; a million and one times, I had watched his head explode, saw the blood, his brains…saw it all again.

  And again.

  I looked up toward the rafters now.

  And it had all happened right here, in this place. I glanced to my right. And there he was now, the dead boy, silently playing the piano, his head eternally broken open.

  All because of me.

  Sweet, sweet Jesus. What have I done?

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself, James,” said Pauline. “I have a feeling you’ve beaten yourself up enough over this.”

  I didn’t say anything. Didn’t know what to say. Beating myself up over this was a natural pastime for me. Hell, I had killed a kid. I deserved to beat myself up over this, right?

  “No,” said Pauline. “You need to forgive yourself.”

  “No,” I said. “I need him to forgive me.”

  We both looked at the boy. Jacob was flamboyantly playing the piano in a ghostly imitation of Liberace.

  Pauline dipped deeper into my thoughts. “But that’s not the worst of it, is it?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. Pain coursed through me. So real and powerful that I wanted to sink down into the floor and keep on sinking forever.

  “Jacob didn’t steal your wallet, did he?” she said.

  “No,” I said, looking away. “It was his twin brother, Eli.”

  “The same twin who later killed you?”

  “Yes.”

  “The same twin who killed the music teacher? Her name, by the way, was Mrs. Randolph.”

  Ah. The name resonated deep within me. Pauline continued probing my mind. She was a hell of a prober.

  “I’ll take that as a compliment,” she said. “I think. Anyway, why did Eli wait so long to come after you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Does it matter?”

  “Probably not, but I’ll check into some things.”

  “Check how?” I asked.

  “With a private investigator I know. We’ve worked on some cases together.”

  “You work with a private investigator?” I asked.

  “Sometimes. Hey, psychic detectives are all the rage these days. I happen to provide an invaluable service.”

  “Okay, fine,” I said. “See what you can find out, but I don’t think it really matters, does it?”

  I thought about what I had just said, and realized my error.

  Pauline picked up on my thoughts, too. “Exactly,” she said. “This friend of yours who helped you haul Jacob up to the rafters…”

  “Is in some serious danger,” I finished.

  “Or already dead,” she said. “Do you remember his name?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll have my detective friend check everything out in one fell swoop. I’ll be back when I have something.”

  We were silent. The church was active. Worshippers came and went. The boy continued miming playing the piano. Luckily, he had stopped inadvertently hitting the keys. Which was just as well. Wouldn’t want the church to get a reputation for being haunted or anything.

  “Do you hate Eli for killing you?” Pauline asked suddenly.

  A good question.

  “No,” I said, surprising even myself. “At least, I don’t think I do. A part of me thinks I deserved to die. After all, I had taken so much away from him.”

  “And now he has taken so much away from you.”

  I thought about my daughter. I hated that she was going to grow up without her daddy. I also hated that I hadn’t been given a chance to make my life right, to correct my mistakes, to guarantee my entry into heaven.

  Pauline, of course, was reading my thoughts. “Maybe there is no guarantee, James.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, maybe sooner or later it’s time to roll the dice.”

  “Excuse me, but I’d rather not roll the dice with my eternal soul, thank you. I would rather stay here and do what I’m doing than burn in hell forever.”

  “Fine. And what if I told you there was no hell, James? And, for that matter, no heaven, either?”

  “I would say you were full of shit.”

  “What if I told you that when you die, you go somewhere else? Another plane of existence, a spirit world filled with family and friends and love?”

  “I would say prove it.”

  “Some things have to be taken on faith, James.”

  “So you say,” I said.

  It was late, and Jacob and I were alone in the cathedral.

  The kid had wandered up to the very rafters where he had fallen. Or, more accurately, where I had dropped him. He was often drawn to that spot, and I wondered if he even knew why he was. Maybe, maybe not. Either way, his memory was spotty at best, and the details of his own death were mostly lost to him.

  Mercifully.

  Someday soon I was going to have to come clean with him, to admit to him what I had done. And that was going to be a very, very difficult day.

  I was sitting in a pew, near the main aisle, in a pool of moonlight that shone down through the stained-glass windows above. Outside, there must have been a small wind blowing. The crooked shadows of skeletal branches waved across the floor and pews like somebody beckoning somebody, and as I sat there alone, gazing at nothing and everything, one shadow in particular seemed to come alive in the far corner of the room. It was high up, near the ceiling. First, it appeared as a sort of inkblot, separating from the deeper shadows of the ceiling. Then it moved sideways across the ceiling, developing arms and legs as it went. Many arms and legs. And many eyes. It paused once along the ceiling and turned toward me.

  Apparently, I wasn’t alone.

  The shadow was, in fact, three shadows. They appeared vaguely humanoid, with three sets of reddish eyes and many spiderlike limbs. They also appeared to be moving as one, with calculated, coordinated movements. Perhaps I should have been scared. Perhaps I should have fled the nave in terror.

  But I didn’t. What could they do? Kill me again?

  With Jacob still high in the rafters, lost in his scattered thoughts, the three shadows continued creeping sideways along the wall. Their glowing eyes, I was certain, were trained on me. Whoever—or whatever—they were, I seemed to have their undivided attention.

  Lucky me.

  As they got closer, scuttling unusually along the wall like some great black insect, I was able to reach out and dip into their minds and sense who—or what—they were.

  I immediately sensed great confusion and loss and fear and pain. So much pain. And flashing, distorted, murky, incomprehensible memories. Human memories.

  They were human. Or were human.

  What they were now, I did not know. Shadows of their former selves. Memories of their former selves, reduced now to nonsensical creatures who were completely out of their minds, having lost all memory of who they were or why they were even in the church…

  No, that isn’t right.

  I did sense a purpose. A single, undivided purpose that seemed somehow woven throughout their mostly fragmented memories. I looked up at the p
ainting on the wall in front of me. The purpose had something to do with it—but what that purpose was, I did not know.

  The entities crept closer.

  They seemed two-dimensional, as if there were no essence to them, no depth. True shadows. Shades. They continued along the wall to my left, crawling just beneath the stained-glass windows. The bright moonlight seemed lost on them, swallowed by them.

  Living black holes.

  This will be you someday, I suddenly thought. Losing your mind, your memory, the very essence of who you are. Forever.

  With that pleasant thought in mind, the three entities, which had worked their way along the wall directly across from me, now stopped. They seemed to be communicating with one another. Shortly, they came to some sort of an agreement, and as they did so, something unexpected happened.

  Like rotting wallpaper, they peeled away from the wall and then slowly drifted out over the pews.

  A demon kite, I thought, looking up at the specters drifting over me like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade float from hell.

  Now closer, I was able to dip deeper into their lost minds. And what I found there were many distorted, disturbing, chaotic images: flashes of gunfire, swirling monks’ robes, the sneering of cruel thieves, unimaginable torture. Again, all centered on the massive oil painting hanging on the far wall.

  “Indeed, James,” said a female voice suddenly to my right, startling me. “They guard the painting. And they do so quite well, don’t you think?”

  I had been so caught up watching the steady approach of the three entities that I had completely missed the woman who had materialized onstage. She was, of course, the beautiful woman from my apartment complex, the beautiful woman whom I had no memory of. From across the cathedral, she smiled at me, then looked up. I followed her gaze. There, the three shadows were now suspended nearly directly above me. Creepy as hell, if you ask me.

  “They were monks once,” she said, her melodic voice filling my head. “More significant, they were brothers, and all three were tortured and murdered here in this very church.”