Until It Sleeps

by Val Crowe

  “You can do that?” I said.

  “It wasn’t easy,” said Mads. “I tried it ten or twelve times before I got it right. If you do it too quickly, the person hasn’t left the building. If you do it too late, there’s no way to get the body going again. You have to get it just right. And it wasn’t easy finding good candidates. I wanted someone relatively young, but young people don’t die that often. And I didn’t want a heroin addict or something.”

  “Right,” I said. I could see that being a pretty bad thing. “So, you changed your mind just because you figured you could possess someone dead?”

  “No,” she said, taking a long drink of her beer. “Mmm, that’s good.”

  “So, then, why?”

  “Well, I still think it’s a kind of shitty thing to do. The family of this person—her name is Emily Cosgrove—has been denied her body to bury, and it’s not a nice thing to do to them. I feel bad about it, I do. But it’s better this way.”

  “Better than what?”

  She drew in a deep breath, and then she wandered over to the table in the Airstream, trailing her fingers over everything as she did. “It’s odd. I haven’t been in a familiar place yet. Things look different from inside a body. Everything seems so much more solid.” She sat down at the table, set down her beer, and rubbed her palms over the table’s surface.

  “Mads, you said you were going to explain,” I said. I sat down across from her.

  “I remembered some things,” she said, still looking at the table.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Not everything. Some of it, I just can’t seem to access. I don’t know why. But I know that I was never human.”

  “You weren’t?”

  “There’s another plane,” said Mads, taking another drink of her beer. “And there are things that live there. Things like Negus. Things like me.”

  “What? What are you saying? What are you?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “All I know is that over there, we can sometimes see through to this plane, and everything is better here. We all want to get here. I managed it somehow, but then I got… trapped.”

  “How did you manage it?” I said.

  “I can’t remember that part. I can’t remember how I got trapped either. But I was stuck in that necklace, the one that’s inside you now?”

  I touched my collar, remembering the necklace that had burrowed itself under my skin when I was ten years old, the one that had enabled me to see ghosts.

  “I was there for a very long time,” she said. “Centuries, I think. And I could watch things, see people, but I couldn’t interact with anyone. And then you set me free. Or your mother did, I guess.”

  “You’re saying you’re like a genie? Only when you get rubbed, you don’t grant wishes? You just make little boys see ghosts?”

  “A genie?” She laughed. “That’s a funny way to look at it.” She shook her head. “No, I don’t think anyone’s wishes are being granted. I don’t know why I was in the necklace. I don’t know why putting it inside you let me out. But I do know that there’s something that connects us, and that connection was getting stronger. It opened a… I don’t know… a pathway between our plane and that plane. Something came through. It came through you and me, and it got stuck in Philip and then it got out of him and…”

  “What was it?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But there are bad things there.” She hunched her shoulders, shutting her eyes, as if she didn’t want to think about it.

  “You’re from there, though,” I said.

  She nodded.

  “So, not everything is bad,” I said.

  “Not everything,” she said. “But the bad things that are there are very, very bad.”

  “And where is the thing that got through now?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s not as if things from there don’t get out sometimes. There was Negus, for example. And there are other things like that. The things on that plane, they don’t transfer here with matter or mass. They’re like spirits. They’re energy. So, they can seem like ghosts, but they’re not. They’re something else. Anyway, I didn’t want anything else to come through, and I knew that things would while there was the connection between us.”

  “So, you left me,” I said.

  “No, I knew that wouldn’t be enough,” she said. “I knew that even if we were separated, we’d still be connected. I needed to put a block in the connection, and that would break the pathway.”

  “And possessing someone would do that,” I said, nodding slowly.

  “Yes,” she said.

  I sat back against the booth-style seat that surrounded the table. I took a thoughtful drink of my beer.

  “There might have been other ways to do it,” she said. “Maybe if I had gone back there or if I had died or something. If I was stronger, maybe I could have sacrificed myself. But I’m not strong. I’m never strong, not when it comes to you.”

  I shut my eyes and opened them. And then I stretched my hand across the table.

  She seized my fingers.

  We sat there like that, staring at each other, holding onto each other. Her hand was warm.

  “You were never human,” I said, “but all that stuff about babies and pregnancy. You kept—”

  “I could watch the human world,” she said. “I was always jealous of that aspect of humanity. I wanted to belong to someone and for them to belong to me. I was so lonely, Deacon. But when I’m with you…”

  I squeezed her fingers.

  She smiled at me.

  I smiled back.

  She raised her beer again. “Cheers?”

  I chuckled, and then I clinked my bottle against hers. “Cheers,” I said.

  * * *

  “One thing I don’t get,” I said, getting up from the table and snatching up her empty bottle of beer.

  “Just one thing?” she said.

  I laughed, taking her bottle and mine and depositing them in the trash. “I’ll probably have a lot of questions, actually. But how did you know where to find me? Do you still have the abilities you did when you were a spirit? Can you sense me or something?”

  “No,” she said. “I had to give that up. It was part of the connection between us. No, I found you because I an app on your phone. I’ve been tracking your GPS.”

  “Oh,” I said. I came back to the table and sat down again. This time I slid in next to her. “Wait, how did you do that?”

  “I possessed you while you were sleeping,” she said. “You were really drunk and it didn’t wake you. I did it then.”

  “Huh,” I said. “Well, I was wondering why my battery kept getting drained so quick.”

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “I’m glad if someone was doing that, it was you,” I said.

  “I’ll turn it off,” she said. “Give me your phone.”

  “You don’t have to worry about it right now,” I said. “Anyway, we should get you a phone, I guess. Then you can just call me.”

  A smile spread over her face. “I’m going to have a phone. Like I’m a real person.”

  I grinned back. She was so close to me right now, but I was almost afraid to touch her. It didn’t bother me that she didn’t look like Mads. I had already adjusted to that. She was herself, and I could tell. But this all seemed a little too good to be true. I was afraid if I touched her, I’d wake up and it would all be a dream. “You’ve always been real, Mads.”

  She shook her head. “To you, I have.”

  My fingers lurched out and I was cupping her cheek. I felt clumsy and stupid, my fingers too big and ungraceful to know how to touch her.

  But she shut her eyes when my skin grazed hers and let out a little satisfied humming noise. “It took so long for me to get back to you,” she whispered. “I missed you so much.”

  “God, I missed you too,” I said.

  She opened her eyes and gazed up at me. Her head tilted back a little, an invitation.
r />   I moved closer. I looked at her lips. I looked into her eyes.

  She reached up and wrapped a hand around the back of my neck.

  And then our lips met.

  * * *

  Later, in the darkness, Mads was tucked against my body on my narrow bed. I was going to have to think about a different design for a bigger bed if this was going to be longterm, which—I guessed it was. There was no reason it wouldn’t be. She was asleep next to me, and I could hear her breathe. I could feel the air coming from inside her lungs. I liked that more than I would have ever imagined that I would.

  It was funny what it was like being with her.

  Considering everything otherworldly that had happened to bring us together, it was surprising how normal it all felt. It was good, but it was just the goodness of skin on skin. It was material, real, tangible. It was normal. It was ordinary. It was perfect.

  I didn’t think I’d ever been quite this happy in my entire life.

  I wasn’t sure what came next. Maybe it was more ghost hunting. Somehow, with Mads by my side, I felt again as though I could conquer the world. Maybe I wouldn’t only cause pain and suffering. Maybe I could do good. She and I were good. There was goodness in the world.

  Or maybe we’d just hang all that up. Maybe we’d travel around the country, and we’d both get jobs here and there. If ghosts showed up, we’d deal with them, but otherwise we’d just live our life. I could stand with simply living. And now that we were together, anything seemed possible.

  Of course, there were things we hadn’t talked about, like the fact that I wasn’t sure how long this vessel of hers would hold. Would she be able to stay in this skin indefinitely, or would she need a new body eventually? But that seemed to me like an easy fix, nothing to worry about now.

  First things first, I was going to take Mads to meet my mom, and then I was going to take her to Thornford for Wade and Rylan to meet her. We’d figure out our next move after that.

  Thinking these sorts of thoughts, I drifted off to sleep.

  At first, my sleep was only darkness, warmth, and rest. But then I began to dream. In my dream, I was back inside the maze at Point Oakes, and I was going around and around in there, stuck with no hope of getting out. I felt panic at the edge of my consciousness, and I wasn’t sure what to do with myself.

  I rounded a bend, and it was like when I had found Oliver hanging in that room.

  But it wasn’t Oliver this time.

  It was Wade.

  And he wasn’t dead. He was purple and bloated and flies were circling him, but he was laughing at me. “Hey buddy,” he said.

  “Wade, I have to get you down from there,” I said, running for him. I wrapped my arms around his body.

  Wade’s skin gave against me, and blood and puss and rot spilled on me. I cried out.

  Wade was still laughing. “Don’t worry about it, man.”

  “No, I have to get you down.”

  “You sure you’re thinking this through?”

  “Of course. You can’t hang here.”

  “Not about me,” said Wade. “About her.”

  I drew back. “Why are you so down on Mads?”

  “She admitted that all she ever wanted was to be human, right? That she spent all her life stuck somewhere, watching humans lives, and she said she was jealous, didn’t she? It’s not like you haven’t see her be jealous before, too. She never liked you looking at other girls.”

  “So what?”

  “So, now she’s got exactly what she wanted.”

  “And so do I,” I said.

  “I’m just saying, how do you know you can trust her?”

  “She’s saved my life more times than I can count.”

  “Yeah,” said Wade. “Because you two were connected. She needed you. But now, she’s severed the connection. And, let’s face it, Deacon, you don’t know anything about her.”

  “Shut up, Wade,” I said.

  Wade laughed again, and his face went blank and dark, and I remembered the vision I’d seen in the Sanford house of Mads’s empty face, of the slithering unspeakable things inside that formless void, and my insides tightened and my body seized up, and I sat straight up in bed, gasping.

  My heart battered my rib cage, and I panted, trying to calm down.

  Mads sat up next to me, the covers falling away from her body in the darkness, her bare skin glowing in the moonlight. “You okay, baby?”

  “Yeah,” I murmured. “Yeah, just a nightmare.”

  * * *

  So, I conceived of this series to be really long running. I thought it would run ten books at least, maybe double that. I had lots of things that I thought about exploring, and all of Mads’s history was supposed to be a big part of that. I always intended the endgame of the series for her and Deacon to be together and for her to be corporeal. But it began to become pretty clear that I liked these books a bit more than the general horror market did, and that I was not making any money on them (in fact, I have spent so much on advertising that I’m still in the hole with this series which saddens me greatly, because I love it).

  Anyway, I realized that I was going to have to try to wrap things up more quickly than ten books. And this hit home somewhere in the middle of the draft of this book. But I also wanted to leave things a little bit open in case I decided I wanted to come back to the series for whatever reason. (Perhaps it’ll get miracle word of mouth. Do you like these books? Tell your friends!)

  So, if I write more, expect more exploration of what the hell is up with Mads. And maybe we’ll actually find out something about Deacon’s dad.

  But assuming that I can’t do that, accept this slightly creepy ending as your classic gotcha horror ending, in which it’s strongly possible that Deacon has been hoodwinked all along by Mads, whose intentions may not have been so sweet after all…

  Heh heh heh.