by Linda Welch
Jack clasped his hands behind his back and nodded at Mel. “Yes Miss Trent?”
“They’re a shade!”
“Well done!”
My voice came with a heavy dose of sarcasm. “Okay, Professor Jack, if a body’s dead, why keep it on life support?”
“Because life support systems can be used to maintain a body declared dead until critical organs can be recovered in the operating room.”
“Maybe so, Jack, but they don’t keep it in a fancy hospital room and allow it visitors.” I’d had enough of Jack in medical information mode. “Hell, I’m getting out of here.”
I strode to the door, put my palms flat on it and pushed. Honestly, I thought this time it would open. My head injury muddled my coordination when I tried to open the door before. The cop outside didn’t hear me through a thick door made to mute noise. I could explain away everything.
It didn’t budge. I groaned, turned my back to the unresisting thing and faced my roommates.
“Um, Tiff,” Jack said. “You’re not actually leaning on a door. What you feel is your boundary.”
“Touch anything else and you go right through it,” Mel added.
“Now you’re being ridiculous,” I sputtered as my brain contrarily reminded me of landing in the armoire, which was right behind where Royal sat.
Did I fall through him?
Mel gave me a sad, pitying look. “You’ll see.”
They went to stand either side of the bed.
“Look,” I wearily said from across the room. “You made an assumption based on my . . . accident, and our being in the same room as a patient on life support. My memory is a little fuzzy but obviously I was hurt and—”
“If she isn’t you, she’s your twin,” Jack announced.
“You are blind as well as. . . .” I lost my voice again as I joined them and my gaze fell on a delicate necklace on the bedside table. A silver crucifix inside an endless knot and an engagement ring hung on a silver chain. The diamond in the ring sparkled in the room’s artificial light.
My hand went to my neck where a tiny crucifix and a ring dangled on a silver chain between the points of my collar.
Chapter Two
The necklace Royal gave me, and my engagement ring.1 Worried I’d damage it, maybe knock the stone from the setting, I wore the ring there when on an assignment. The jewelry on the nightstand looked identical.
The door opened and Royal came in, distracting me from the enigma of the necklace and ring at the patient’s bedside. He looked terrible, not only his tortured eyes, he sagged as if he had aged thirty years. He lowered his big body to the chair and ground his eyes with his knuckles.
I stood at his side as close as I could get as he took the patient’s hand in both of his. “Royal? Royal, honey? Look at me.”
He picked up the crucifix and wound the chain through his fingers.
“He can’t hear you, Tiff,” Jack said. “Give it up. You’re only torturing yourself.”
A moment passed before I realized the overall wrongness. No demon heat emanated from Royal, no tantalizing sandalwood and amber scent. I drew in a deep breath through my nose and smelled nothing, not even the usual antiseptic smell found in hospitals.
Nausea churned in my stomach, rose in my chest and turned to bile at the back of my throat.
“Royal!” I heard the panic in my voice. “Please!” And I laid my hand on his shoulder.
My hand went through him.
I snatched my hand away and transferred it to my mouth. Backing away, I began to moan. I couldn’t stop the sounds coming from me and didn’t want to.
When I managed to quiet myself, I looked at the woman, her pale face, tip-tilted nose, the silvery brows and the lashes brushing the tops of her cheekbones, and imagined silver-white hair framing her face.
An icy chill worse than anything I’d known gushed through me. My body lay in a hospital bed. I had no reflection, I couldn’t touch Royal or anything else. I had a hole in my head.
I have seen too many shades who bear death wounds.
Oh my freaking god! Another moan escaped me as the reality of what I saw, the whole picture, slammed into me. I’m usually not this slow but this blew my mind to new heights, so totally incomprehensible it took me till now to put the pieces together.
I wanted to pull my hair out but doubted I could. I wanted to scream, but no one would hear me. What I always dreaded had come to pass. I died, violently, cursed to remain here until my killer died.
A sob rose up my throat. Numb with misery I stood rooted to the spot, thinking of the shades I’d met one after the other and my sympathy for their plight. I was one of them, doomed to watch the world turning without me, never again a participant, only an observer.
Stop it! Pull yourself together.
But why should I not give in to grief for everything I lost? For a future with the man I loved. My life was over, too soon, with so many things left undone.
Because it won’t get you anywhere, stupid.
Something tickled the back of my mind and I felt it should be thumping at the front, telling me, you’re missing the obvious, Tiff.
My lips parted and my shoulders relaxed as the answer came to me. Jack’s wrong. I would not be on life support were I brain dead. Royal would not do that to me. If a person’s brain still functions, they are alive, even though they survive with the help of machines. Something of me was still in there.
But part of me was out here, separated from my flesh and bones. If not the shade of a dead person, what was I?
Stressing over the question would get me nowhere. I had to let it go.
Easier said than done.
You have the characteristics of a shade but you’re not one.
But if it looks like a shade, acts like a shade and falls clean through its boyfriend. . . ?
I tried to assess my feelings. Scared? Yes. Angry? Hell yes. Angry, frustrated, with misery creeping on my heels.
I couldn’t bear it. Hyperventilating, I stumbled away. I couldn’t breathe. Where is a brown paper bag when you need one?
I stopped short, dragged in a breath but tasted nothing and no sensation of air passing down my throat to my lungs, yet I felt them swell. I peered at my chest. It didn’t move.
I slapped my hands to my chest. “I can’t breathe. Can’t breathe! Help me!”
Jack sucked the inside of his cheek and dipped his chin. Mel slowly shook her head.
Jack lifted his head to eye me with mock compassion. “Tiff, oh Tiff, what are we going to do with you? The dead don’t breathe.”
“But I did before!”
“No, you assumed you breathed. Now you understand you can’t, you’re panicking.”
“Maybe it’s a phantom sensation,” said Mel. “A person who loses a limb often thinks they still feel it. Try not to think about it.”
I inhaled again. Nothing passed through my air passage yet my lungs filled. I had a thought: “You need air to talk.”
“Yes,” Mel hissed, “if you’re alive!”
I almost laughed then. All the times my roommates challenged my patience, now I tested theirs.
A tap on the door and another nurse walked in balancing a small laptop on one palm. I did a fast backward shuffle to get out of her way.
“Don’t mind me, I’ll be done in a minute,” she merrily told Royal as she set the laptop on the bedside table and adjusted the IV drip. I didn’t think he heard her.
Royal. In my confusion and misery I’d forgotten Royal sat at the bedside, sunk in his own misery.
“Can I get you a cup of coffee? A soda?” she asked as I imagined her salivating over him.
Damn woman. What a nerve, looking at Royal as if at a juicy steak while he sat next to his nearly dead girlfriend.
He blinked as if waking. “Thank you. If I want anything, I can get it.”
“Yes, it’s good to stretch your legs.” Her gaze went to his thighs. “But if you need me, use the buzzer and I’ll be right in.”
Yeah, I bet.
She lingered another minute, though, before leaving.
“Well, my love,” Royal began with a weak smile, his voice rough and so low I leaned in to hear. “You have stumped them. They will run more tests but do not believe they will tell them anything more than they already know, which is next to nothing. They can find no reason you cannot function without these machines.” He closed his eyes. “Although it has only been three days, they say if your condition does not improve I should consider—”
The nurse came back in. “Knock-knock!” She went to the bedside and got her laptop. “Silly me, leaving this here. Sorry to disturb you again.”
She waited, smiling down at Royal but he didn’t acknowledge her. Her smile turned sour. She jogged one shoulder and strode from the room.
The doctors said Royal should consider what? Pulling the plug? We made wills naming each other beneficiaries and agents for our Living Wills. Royal was my health care proxy. I shot upright. “Over my dead body!”
I expected my roommates to laugh but they waited silently. Mel’s lower lip trembled.
“Royal, no! Maybe I can. . . .” What, get back inside my head, my body? A sense of horror shivered through my nonexistent self. If Royal let them disconnect me from life support, what happened to me when my body died? Although a boundary confined me and I couldn’t touch anything solid, I wasn’t a shade like Jack and Mel; I didn’t linger because I died violently. Perhaps my living body tethered me and I’d be whisked off to the great beyond when it died.
I never should have made the dratted Living Will.
“How long can I bear to see you like this?” Tears oozed from the corners of his eyes and dribbled on his cheeks. He sniffed, and brushed them away with one hand.
My heart broke. Royal, the strongest, most self-contained man I have ever known, fell apart before my eyes.
I ached to comfort him and desperation manifested as a deep, throbbing pain in my chest. He needed me, but I could only watch him suffer.
I looked away and a pleading note crept into my voice. “What’s happened to me?”
Mel shrugged one shoulder. “No idea. But we don’t know everything about life and death.”
“If we did, we wouldn’t have been trapped in your house for decades,” Jack added.
“The thing is, what if Royal cuts off life support?”
Jack stroked his nose. “Nothing, I imagine. You’ll still be a shade until whoever shot you dies.”
“For the last time, I can’t be a shade. I’m an intangible something-or-other outside my living body. But you could be right, I’ll likely become a shade if Royal lets my body die. Unless I can get back in it.”
“I should think the first thing is make Royal understand what’s happened so he doesn’t do anything foolish.”
“And how are we supposed to do that?”
“Don’t ask me.” Jack made a face. “I’m not Mister Know-It-All.”
“You’re not?” Mel sniggered. “And all these years I thought you were.”
Jack gave her a curled lip. “We can’t do anything stuck here. If we go with him when he leaves, maybe something will come to us.”
“I’ve tried it, Jack,” I told him wearily. “I can’t get out.”
“As I said before, the room must be your boundary.”
“Lovely. You get an entire house, I get a hospital room.”
“You know how it works. Grab him when he leaves.”
“When we began teaching shades to move I never imagined you’d be one of them,” Mel said.2
I wished I could grab Royal and hold him. “Carrie said you catch an aura, right? Is it those colors shimmering around him?”
“You can see it?” Excited, Jack wiggled his hips. “Remember we told you we sensed something on people but couldn’t see it? You can, so catching on will be easier. Go on, feel it.”
I made a face. “I tried to touch him and fell right through him. Didn’t feel a thing.”
“An aura is different,” Mel said. “It’s kind of weird, a barely there something slightly heavier than air.”
“Gotta do it, Tiff,” Jack urged. “Or be tied to this room forever.”
“Or until her murderer dies,” Mel said softly.
“He can’t be my murderer when I’m not dead!” Not screaming the words took effort.
So what did that make him or her, my attempted murderer? What happened when he died? If the death of a killer releases the victim’s shade to the afterlife, it stands to reason his life holds them here. If my attempted murderer’s life kept me here, what. . . ? I scowled. I couldn’t figure it out, nothing made sense. I didn’t understand these new rules, or lack of rules. Frustrated, I stomped across the room.
“Shut up, moron, don’t make it worse,” Jack hissed at Mel.
“Don’t you moron me, Mister Ass Wipe.”
My brows knitted. I didn’t want to touch Royal and feel nothing, as I did before, but I had to learn how to grasp a living person so I could get out of this hospital.
“Hush, I have to concentrate.” I hesitantly reached for Royal. He sat with eyes closed, elbows propped on the bedside. I drank in his familiar face: the dark-copper lashes brushing his pale-copper skin, the hollow scooped beneath his cheekbone, the shimmering copper and gold hair falling lose on his shoulders.
To everyone else he is a tall, muscular man with sun-streaked brown hair and a copper-tone tan, but I see him shine. Sometimes, I felt as if I stood with the sun on my face.
I tentatively pushed my hand in his aura.
And felt nothing.
“Guys!”
Wait a second. I did feel something, a soft whisper on my skin as if smoke clung to my hand.
“I think I feel it.”
“Yay!” from Mel. “Now you have to take hold of it at the very end.”
I peered at my hand. “Why the end?”
“We don’t know. You can go in an aura but if you want to ride with a person, you have to catch the end.”
“It’s not like strands of hair, this stuff fades to nothing. I can barely feel it so how do I know where it stops?”
Jack crouched next to me. “It isn’t easy. Pull your hand away gradually and feel where the aura ends. As it’s kind of wispy, the transition is difficult to detect. You have to keep practicing. Once you have it, it’ll be natural, you won’t think about what you’re doing.”
“Like eating while you’re reading or watching television,” Mel gabbled. “You don’t watch the spoon or your mouth, you don’t think about it, but you stick the food in the right place anyway.”
“It’s nothing like that!” Jack guffawed.
“Then you come up with a better analogy,” Mel huffed.
“I can think of dozens.”
I tried again, and again, and could almost feel where the aura ended, but when I got there the stupid invisible thing slipped through my grasp.
Royal spoke in a low voice. “I must leave in a moment. I am harassing Mike Warren and he is due for another visit.”
His voice turned hard on the last few words, but I didn’t waste my pity on Mike, the captain can hold his own.
He stood, and leaned over to put his lips to my brow below the wad of bandages.
“Quickly,” Jack said with agitation. “Get him before he leaves!”
I tried. The aura curled over my fingers, threaded through them, and when I felt it on my fingertips but not my palm, I closed my hand.
Royal stuffed the necklace in his jacket pocket, stepped around the chair and walked from the room.
“Damn it to hell!” I screamed, vexed beyond measure.
“Well, that’s it for now.” Mel flounced to the sofa and sank down. “We can try to catch the next medic who comes in.”
“But I wanted to go with him, hear what Mike has to say,” I grizzled. I swiped at my nose. “Anyway, unless you have a destination in mind, he’s our best bet. If he knows I’m alive, albeit not in my body, he can help us discove
r how to get me out of this fix.”
“Then we have the whole night before us.” Mel gave Jack a significant look. “This is going to be awful.”
1The Midnight Choir: a Whisperings Paranormal Mystery Short Story.
2 Road Trip: a Whisperings Paranormal Mystery Short Story.
Chapter Three
My thoughts turned to Mac in the depths of the night. If I pass over, will we meet again in an afterlife, my little boy?
Don’t go there, Tiff.
The night went slowly. If sleep is good for one thing, it is breaking up the day. The night becomes tedious when you can’t zonk out for a few hours, and now I couldn’t turn on the television, enjoy a snack, or read.
A good time to think? I surely had a lot to think about. What happened to me? I’d been kicked out of my body but it still functioned, although the doctors must think it was as good as dead if they talked to Royal about turning off support.
Royal would not do that, would he? Not while I had life in me. But if day after day passed, week after week, month after month. As he said, how long could he bear to see me like that?
I thought I knew everything about shades but learned there is far more to the life/afterlife business; it isn’t all cut and dried, there are layers, aspects, affecting what happens to a person after death. What of me? I was not dead yet functioned like a shade. Which rules applied to me?
Do all patients with brain damage stand by their hospital beds, wishing their loved ones would release them from a living death, or wishing they never will?
Well, this gal would not sit on her heinie while someone else made the decision. First on the agenda: let Royal know I’m still around. Easy peasy.
I sighed. With Royal’s attitude toward shades, could I make him understand I kind of was one?
“How do I tell Royal what’s happened to me?” I didn’t feel cold, but hugged my shoulders. “Radio from the dead?”
Jack nibbled the end of a fingernail. He removed it to say, “You need a psychic.”
I’d told Royal about dead people, he witnessed firsthand how they helped me and the information they gave me led to arrests. Would he believe a person who told him I got stuck in a kind of limbo and he must not let me go?
