by John Shirley
He turned away and fumbled at the door. Get through it—fast. Damned rusty knob. Open the damned door . . .
He felt Cordell punch him hard in the right kidney. That’s what it felt like, at first. But there was a funny sound with the punch. A snake-hiss sound . . .
Then his legs wouldn’t hold him up and he was slipping down the closed front door, still clutching at the knob. Waves of blazing sensation rolled in furious rhythm from his lower back—he’d never before felt anything like it. So far beyond any pain he’d ever felt. It was like being hit by lightning over and over in the same spot.
Cordell’s voice came to him as if from a telephone held at arm’s length. “That’s a bayonet, you feel there, ‘Sage’. I angled it up, gave it a little twist. But you won’t die too quickly. My daughter didn’t die too quickly. You’re going to . . .”
Sage couldn’t hear anymore. He leaned forward against the door, on his knees, hands skittering at the doorknob, convulsing, all his feelings, all his senses, sucked through the spike of ice in his lower back—and the process went on forever.
And then forever ended, somehow, and he fell through his own door.
The wooden front door had become gelatinous, and then foggy. And he fell through it and lay on the floor, face down, half in the house, and half outside. He thought he might sink through the floor, but somehow it held him up.
Then he realized the pain was gone. He felt almost nothing at all. Not even fear. Just a faint, sickened wonder.
He drew his legs up under him, and somehow, very awkwardly, managed to stand.
Sage turned and looked at the front door. It was closed. He stepped over to the window onto the wide porch and saw Cordell walking away from the house, toward the SUV and the German Shepherd. Muriel’s father was running a hand over his bald head, as he went, looking limp, barely able to trudge along, sunglasses now dangling from his other hand.
Another man, a middle aged man with a graying pony tail, remained on the porch, slumped against the front door, on his knees. There was a bayonet grip sticking out of his lower back. His left arm was faintly twitching. Blood was running down his hip, pooling around him.
The sick feeling entirely replaced the wonder.
Sage turned away, went to the kitchen, and called out, “Little Bear! George, get in here!”
Little Bear’s name was actually George Valdez. He’d never had a traditional Native American name. He was a quarter Comanche, three-quarters Mexican, really. But he played the wise Native American medicine man exactly as Sage needed. He was also the Foundation’s handyman.
“George, goddamn it!” he called.
The back door opened, and George came in, wearing overalls. Long gray-streaked black hair, features right out of an Aztec temple painting. Chewing gum, wiping grease from his hands on a red rag. “Hey Sage!” George yelled, looking around. From three yards away. “I got the hot tub fixed!”
Not seeing Sage—walking right by him. Sage tried to stop him with an outstretched hand, and it was like Sage’s hand was boneless, all made of rubber—it turned away from George’s arm, couldn’t get a grip on it. George kept on, into the front room. Sage numbly followed. “I’m right here dammit, George, look at me!”
“What the fuck!” George yelled, from the front door. Seeing blood oozing under the door. George opened the door and Sage’s body sagged forward like a sack of fertilizer.
“Madre Dios!” George muttered. He pushed at the body with his booted foot. Stepped back from it. Shook his head once. “Not gonna blame this on me . . . No fucking way, man . . .”
George turned and bolted, charging through the house, banging out the back door.
Sage shouted after him in a sort of blurred fury. “Why you son of a bitch! You could call 911! I might still be alive, for Christ’s sake!” He heard the old Ford pickup starting. Revving. Screeching off down the gravel road.
“No, you couldn’t still be alive,” said the figure in white, matter of factly. The man in the glimmering white suit was perched casually on the windowsill to Sage’s left, legs stretched out to the floor, like he was a comfortable old friend making himself at ease in Sage’s house. But Sage had never seen that bland, pale, blue-eyed face before. “Actually, you kind of lost track of time, when you were stabbed, Bret. It took some minutes for you to die. That young woman’s father was watching the whole time till he was sure you were dead . . .”
“This whole thing an acid flashback?” Sage asked, approaching the figure sitting casually on the window sill. “Or . . . am I on Ayahuasca again?”
“You were never on Ayuahuasca. They just told you it was Ayahuasca. It was a stew of handy, random drugs they sell to the white people from the north.”
“Why those crooked bastards!” Sage looked more closely at the translucent figure leaning against the sill. “So I’m definitely dead?”
“You definitely are.” The figure in white chuckled with angelic condescension.
So that meant life after death was real. Sage had talked about it thousands of times, at lectures and seminars, but he’d never believed a word of it. Well, what do you know . . .
He looked more closely at the angelic visitor—he seemed vaguely reminiscent of a vice principal at Sage’s old Junior High school, in Santa Fe. Mr. Wallace, wasn’t that his name? “Are you Mr. Wallace?”
The figure in white bobbed his eyebrows. “Who’s Mr. Wallace? I am the angel Abnegas, Bret. I work for the Cleansing Authority.”
Sage didn’t like the sound of that. “I don’t actually need cleansing,” Sage said, thinking aloud. “I don’t know you. You could be lying about my being dead.” He put his hand to his chest, felt for a heartbeat—then he felt for his chest itself. It was only indistinctly there—a flicker under his hand, little more.
He looked down and made out a dim outline, as if his body was made out of glass, a Bret-shaped bottle.
“There’s not much there, in there—is there?” Abnegas observed in a kindly tone. “But the part of you that can suffer, or feel pleasure, or perceive—that’s still there. It’s something the Authority tucks away in the human brain. We take it out, when you die, and either plug it into a new one, or push it into the outer darkness for recycling—using the contemporary terminology here . . .”
Sage didn’t like the confidence this man was literally radiating—it was a soft blue-white light coming off him. “When you say you ‘take it out’—you’re talking about a soul?”
“Essentially.”
“And . . . my soul will be plugged into a new body? For a new start?”
Abnegas looked at him with surprise. “I hardly think so! You’ve recently caused the early deaths of several young people! You’ve been drugging people, lying to them, exploiting them since you found your little hustle in the 1970s, Bret. You’ve made many hundreds of thousands of dollars off your seminars but you haven’t paid your ex-wife a cent of child support. Whenever you had a choice in your life, you chose selfishly. Hence, I’ll be taking you right to the outer darkness, where the spiritual ecology will make short work of you. You’re pretty low on the food chain, so . . . it won’t be pleasant.”
Thinking about that, Sage verified he could indeed feel. And it was another new feeling—he’d never felt real terror before. “You mean—something’s going to eat me?”
“Yes. Not much of a meal. It’ll release your light energy as it does so—and that’s the part that will be recycled. It’ll take time for you to be digested. The outer darkness is not in the sphere of the eternal, see—time exists there. Which is, maybe, the worst part. It’ll take a long, long time . . .”
With that, the angelic figure stood up, and stretched out his hands toward Sage.
Sage backed away from him. “No! I have power! I have the power of the warrior! I am a man of mystery! You have no power over me!”
“Oh but I do . . . Come, my child! Take my hand! The sooner you get started, the sooner the centuries of agony will pass—and you will pass, like a kidn
ey stone!”
Sage blinked at him. “Like a kidney stone?”
“Ha ha ha, Roy, you idiot, you had him going but you blew it!” This cawing voice came from the kitchen doorway.
Sage turned and saw a man he did know standing there—his uncle Rufus. He hadn’t known Rufus well. He’d seen him at holiday celebrations, a jolly, usually drunk, flabby chunk of a man—but he knew his big jowly jaw, his gray crew cut, his dark, laughing eyes. “Uncle Rufus!”
“Got that I.D. right anyway, boyo! It’s me, but not in the flesh! Died in 1980 and here I am, floating on the margins, having my fun just like Roy here.”
“Rufus, you bastard!” the “angel” grumbled.
Sage looked at the spirit in white. “Your name is Roy?”
“I don’t care for Roy. Not as classy a sounding name as Abnegas . . .”
Rufus hooted at that. “Abnegas! I thought you’d twig to the hoax right there, boyo! What a fake-out name Abnegas is!”
Roy, the “angel”, shrugged. “Liked the sound of it, what can I say.” He grinned. “I almost had him! That Cleansing Authority stuff sounded good!”
Sage looked back and forth between his dead uncle and the spirit named Roy. “So I’m not going to some kind of hell to be eaten alive?”
Rufus snorted. “’Course not! What sort of afterlife would that be? But suppose you’d buckled under and passively gone with ol’ Roy here? Why, he’d have traded you to some larger, very rapacious soul for favors! Would have been quite uncomfortable—slavery, actually.”
Roy snorted. “Wouldn’t have been that bad. The whole thing was just a kind of hazing, really.”
Sage felt giddy with relief. “No . . . judgment? I really don’t have to go with him?”
“Hell no! You’re a ghost now! You do what ghosts do! You can wander around and enjoy the afterlife!” Rufus laughed. “Judgment! I don’t know why people scare each other with that poppycock. Only judgment is, you judge yourself! That’s what you’re stuck with, yourself!”
“Well—then I judge myself to be . . . to be a great warrior. A man of power! And . . . and a teacher!”
“Right, right, all that stuff, sure, whatever you want, nephew mine! That’s why I came, when I sensed you’d died—to tell you not to believe anything you heard. I knew Roy was snooping around and he loves to play these little jokes. Roy there, he’s a teacher’s aide—or he was. He got fired for hitting on some college girl, got drunk, died in a car accident. Now he drifts around, all bored, and messes with the newly dead. It’s his little hustle, do you see . . .”
Sage looked at Roy, who spread his hands ruefully. “Busted!”
Sage tried, out of habit, to scratch his head as he thought it over. Couldn’t feel his head well enough to scratch it. In fact, his ectoplasmic fingers penetrated into his mind, and the sensation made him shudder. “I can feel, in a way—but is it possible to really, you know, have a good time? I mean, I can’t imagine there’s sex or drugs for a ghost, or . . .”
Roy yawned. “Not exactly. There’s fun though. I make my own fun. I don’t miss being mortal. Bodies are overrated, believe me. Think about it—no more having to stuff your face, wipe your behind, no getting sick, no getting tired, no getting old . . .”
Rufus nodded, grinning. “Right! I mean, bodies—ugh!”
Bodies. Making Sage think about the hunched, bloody figure on the front porch. “I was murdered—isn’t there any justice for that? I wonder if I should go haunt that guy Cordell.”
“He wouldn’t know you were there,” Rufus said. “You’re too insubstantial a spirit. Most are too thin for the living to be aware of. Anyway he’s turning himself in to the cops right now. They’ll jug him for the killing. Whereas you got away with yours—until today.”
“I didn’t plan to kill anyone. I was always trying to straighten people’s heads out, that’s all, and sometimes it goes wrong . . .”
“Sometimes?” Rufus grinned at him, his smile twice as wide as his mouth—which didn’t seem possible. “What I heard was, people just wandered off, after you took ’em for their money. A couple of them killed themselves, another one started selling Herbal Life, and one of them is a survivalist in Colorado . . . Then you had your little sweat lodge adventure . . .”
Roy had stepped up close beside Sage. It seemed to Sage that Roy had grown a foot taller. That he was looming over him. “That’s what I heard too,” Roy said. His voice seemed lower, rougher. “That you never did help anyone at all . . . That you just wasted their time—and sometimes their lives.”
Sage drew back from Roy, annoyed. The ghost was trying to yank his chains, so to speak, again. The hell with him. He was going to get out of this depressing house—the scene of his death!—and explore the immortal world, wander around, slip into some women’s locker rooms maybe. Oh and maybe expand his consciousness. Or something.
He started to move past Rufus, toward the kitchen, and the back door—
Rufus blocked his way. “Hold on, there, ‘Sage.’”
Sage didn’t want to hold on—he veered quickly around Rufus, spurred by a rising uneasiness.
Rufus flashed past him—and stood in front of the back door. “I said—wait!”
Seemed like his uncle’s head was slowly expanding, like a balloon being gradually blown up. And there was another face, pushing out under the Rufus face, which crumbled apart from the pressure, the outer face becoming powdery, drifting away as smoke, the inner, bigger face something like an enormous hyena’s head, but with human eyes, human lips, a subhuman voice, growling: “Bret, you had better stay here with us! We have lovely, lovely plans for you!”
Sage turned and saw Roy looming up, over him—nine feet tall, his face all doughy, collapsing, hardening into a kind of fleshy, semi-human mantis shape. “Sage . . .” The voice coming in a clattering chitter. “Do you like our little joke?”
He turned back to the hyena-headed thing. Realizing, “You were never my uncle . . .”
“No—your Uncle Rufus is in the outer darkness! You may crowd into a demonic gut with him! Say hello for me if you see him . . .”
“You are . . . you’re a . . . a what?”
The hyena headed spirit opened its quite human hands—and between them expanded a chain of paper angels, exactly the sort that people cut with scissors to amuse children. The angels burst into flame and flew away on wings of ash, to suck into the hyena’s mouth, as if he were inhaling dope smoke. “Ahhhh! We are paper angels, for a time! We mix a little truth into the lies. And then we show ourselves to you—as you showed yourself to Muriel Cordell!”
“I was trying to help her!”
“You threw your line into the water, fishing for lonely, lost souls, Sage—and when you hooked them, you reeled them in. You promised them relief from their dilemmas, and took their time and money, and their freedom. And when they realized you could give them nothing, their hope was destroyed . . . and they wandered away, to be lost again. Or to die. You offered them hope—and you snatched it away. That’s how you ‘helped’ all those people, Bret Sage . . .”
Sage tried to slip off between them, trying to move quickly as the Rufus Thing had—and the Roy Thing blocked him, making a tickyticky-tick sound of amusement by rubbing its chitinous front talons together.
Sage froze—and his voice came in a sort of squeak. Not from his mouth. From somewhere in his shriveling soul. “There is . . . judgment?”
“There are—consequences!” the creature snarled gleefully. “Starting with me, and my companion . . . who really is called Abnegas! I am called Krick!”
“Abnegas isn’t an angel . . . or Roy.”
“He is the same kind as I—those who feed on such as you!”
“But however . . . !” Abnegas said.
“Yes however . . . !” Krick chorused.
“However—you may run into the side hallway—there! And find a place to hide!”
“I’m a . . . I’m a spirit! You can’t hurt me! I don’t have to run from you! You�
��re bluffing! You’re—”
Abnegas’s head darted forward like a striking mantis, and his mandibles dug into Sage’s middle. Sage felt his center crushed in chewing jaws, and something worse than pain crackled through him: a sense of vital diminishment, a feeling of an infinitely unheated void, a nothingness aching with entropy, impinging on his innermost being. He felt a shriveling of an inner self he hadn’t known was there till that moment . . .
Sage screamed from within himself, silently and with worldshaking loudness, all at once.
He shrank away from Abnegas, seeing shining shreds of himself writhing in the demon’s mandibles, each little bit looking like a tiny little image of Sage. As if the thing were eating Bret-Sageshaped gummy candies . . .
“Just a bite,” the hyena-head growled. “There’s not a lot of you to consume. You’ll make a thin, understated little snack . . .”
Then Sage bolted for the hallway, was rushing, flying through the house, his feet not quite touching the floor, looking for a place to hide. The basement? No. There was a window in the bedroom. He darted into his bedroom, past his neatly made bed, flinging himself toward the window—which went black.
He pulled up short, staring through the glass. It no longer looked on the little succulent garden at the side of the house—it looked into a churning, black space, an uneasy mirror of ink, and Sage knew if he continued to look he would be drawn into it . . .
He turned away—and heard the noises from the hallway. The growling, the chittering. The clicking of claws. Coming closer.
He wailed and threw himself to the floor, tried to push down through it as he’d fallen through the door, but it wouldn’t work—it seemed to resist him. He could feel some other will there, pushing back. Who was it? It didn’t seem friendly, but it didn’t seem unfriendly. Just a watching presence. Waiting its turn.
“Help me!” he called out to it. “Let me through!”
The room darkened; a smell came to him then, the reek of a man’s kidney ripped open, mixed with blood. The smell of his own death . . . Why now?
