Orpheus and the Pearl & Nevermore (9 page)

All right. Don’t let emotion overcome you.
Just focus. Forward.

He came right up to the door. There was no
sound from the next room; he heard only the driving rain. Malcolm
looked at the doorknob. Could he take hold of it, or even just push
against the wood?

He focused on the door.
Dark stains appeared there. They looked vaguely green in the light
from the street. But nothing else happened.
God damn you
...again he cast his
focus upon the door, and fresh stains appeared, only to evaporate.
He couldn’t seem to affect any movement at all. And why should he
have expected otherwise? He couldn’t apply any real force to it,
could he? He searched his memory. He taught—
had
taught—social studies, not
science. Like it really made a difference, he was a ghost trying to
go through a door.

I’m a ghost.

He focused himself through the wood and into
the living room.

Ray lay on the couch, arms above his head,
one foot on the floor. His eyes were open. His mouth was a gaping,
bloody hole, his shattered jaw hanging slack. He was dead.
Murdered. The front door lay open.

Malcolm lost the world again. He recoiled
into the light so that it blinded him, and the cacophonous sounds
that enveloped him were as his screams.

The wall clock by the window said it was
almost 11:30, but it felt as if only a few minutes had passed since
Malcolm’s own death, or his awareness of it. It seemed he was
losing time whenever he became disoriented. He had no idea how long
it had taken Ray to die while he was in the bedroom.

There was blood everywhere. Parts of Ray
were missing. His right leg ended at the knee. Malcolm could only
react with silent grief, unable to turn away or retch or weep.

My brother is dead. But so am I.

He scanned the
room.
Ray? Are you here?

He wasn’t. One way or another, Ray was just
gone.

Why am I still
here?
It had to have something to do with
the state of his body. The cadaver’s eyes had been blank, but had
seen right through Malcolm to the door. To Ray. And it had gone to
him, and killed him.
WHY?

The idea struck Malcolm that his body was
now an unmanned vessel: soulless, feral. That this might be the
natural state of a human organism, deprived of its spiritual host,
didn’t quell his confusion. Perhaps that was an explanation for the
cadaver’s behavior, but it still didn’t explain why it was walking
around to begin with. Ray’s remains were dead as could be, and
Ray’s spirit was absent. It had to be that Malcolm was somehow
still tied to his body, allowing it to run on fumes, so to speak,
while he could only watch.

An out-of-body experience gone too far?
Could we be rejoined?

No. He didn’t want that, not now. But he
wanted to remedy whatever nightmarish error had been committed by
the universe. He sensed he was alone in this, and so he focused on
the front door and moved into the dark hallway.

The corridor connecting
the apartments was always dimly-lit, and he could see splashes of
blood on the floor and the walls—those on the walls prominently
displaying the details of his fingers. He focused ahead, and now
could see that the substance he was casting—
ectoplasm?
—was indeed green in
color. The amorphous prints of his pseudo-feet were stamped into
the bloodstains, only to erode seconds later. He proceeded down the
hall and into the stairwell.

How to do this, then,
without gravity?
He focused on each step
in turn, casting the ectoplasm down, and found himself being pulled
along with it. It was getting easier. As long as he kept himself
calm, he was in control.

He entered the narrow lobby of the building
and stared through its glass entryway into the storm. There was a
red handprint on the outer door. On the floor, just inside the
building, lay the rest of Ray’s leg. It looked as if the meat had
been peeled from the bone in strips. Malcolm, realizing where the
meat had gone, nearly lost it again.

Focus!
He went to the door. The rain was still coming down hard, the
vibrations were overwhelming.
It might be
difficult to move out there.
But he knew
it was possible; he went through the glass.

The light from the streetlamps danced
through each drop of rain as it slashed downward, lancing through
him and slapping against the side of the building. Looking at the
steps, he slowly made his way down. He’d thought the sound might
make it harder to focus and move, but it was the rain itself that
was the problem—, washing away the ectoplasm almost as soon as he
cast it, forcing him to cast more and more to cover the short
distance. Once on the sidewalk, he looked in either direction. No
cars, no people. No cadaver.

Wait—there it is, standing
in the middle of the intersection at 16
^th
and Westmore.
Its back was to him, and it stared up at the
traffic light as the caution signal blinked.
Clap, clap, clap.

Malcolm stayed on the sidewalk as he
advanced toward the cadaver. He knew he didn’t need to, but
concentrating was difficult enough without the possibility of a car
ripping through him. If a car plowed into the corpse, would it die?
Would it be injured at all?

He stopped at the corner of the
intersection. The thing turned slightly, and Malcolm watched as
blood was washed from its gaping mouth. It didn’t seem to be
looking directly at him, but he feared it might sense his presence.
No way of knowing.

Then it staggered toward him. Malcolm was
fixed in place. He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know if it
could hurt him—

The cadaver stepped through Malcolm, without
trauma or sensation, and it headed down Westmore. The ghost-Malcolm
reversed himself and followed after it. He supposed he couldn’t be
hurt anymore.

Besides his father, Leo was the only one
who’d done it to him. He’d told Leo that he could—he’d revealed his
vulnerability sometime early in their four-year relationship, in
three words. Leo had said the words back, and Malcolm believed he’d
meant them. So why end things they way he had—why destroy any
chance of salvaging the friendship they’d built upon?

Leo was six years younger than Malcolm. He’d
been twenty-five when they met, brilliant and angry and defying
anyone to try to slow him on his reckless path. Malcolm supposed
he’d wanted to guide Leo at first, but there was nothing doing. Leo
had been Jean Haniver’s friend, and shared his appetite for chaos.
Still Malcolm had persisted. It had resulted in some fiery
arguments, and that at last had opened Leo’s heart.

He’d had a cancer scare as a child. At the
age when most kids were learning the truth about Santa or trying to
make sense of a grandparent’s passing, Leo had lived in Death’s
shadow. He knew that was the source of his anger and his fuck-it
attitude, but knowing didn’t change anything. In the end, neither
had Malcolm.

No, ending things civilly wasn’t Leo’s
style. He’d driven them into a wall. Malcolm, up until the moment
of his death, had not known just how they could rebuild any sort of
friendship—it was what he wanted, what he hoped Leo wanted, but he
couldn’t write off the betrayal. So, five weeks of silence. Of
course he’d had many a tearful revelation, and rehearsed countless
grim summations alone in his room. But, he had hung up on Leo that
night, had shut him out, and he’d kept it that way. At any rate, he
could have extracted no amount of suffering from Leo that would
have tempered his own.

The cadaver stopped halfway down the block.
More colored lights—the strobing red and blue of a police
cruiser—were approaching. The dead thing stood and waited as the
car pulled over to the curb. Malcolm didn’t feel hope, only dread,
as he watched the two officers get out from either side. The
driver, a female, called to the cadaver. “You okay there?” To them,
Malcolm’s former body must have looked like that of a strung-out
addict, soaked and staring dumbly ahead.

The female cop was half-inside the car,
trying to shelter herself from the rain as she spoke into her
radio. The male on the passenger side came around the front of the
cruiser. “Why don’t we get you out of the rain, buddy?”

The cadaver’s eyes met his. The cop’s mouth
opened, and his body tensed, but the cadaver was already in motion
and then its hands were on his head. The cadaver’s own head plunged
forward, like that of a spurned lover after one last violent kiss.
It missed most of the cop’s mouth, though, instead biting into his
lip and cheek, tearing away a mouthful of flesh.

Malcolm could only watch.

The female cop stumbled out of the cruiser
at the sound of her partner’s shrieking. The cadaver clamped its
jaws over the man’s nose and left eye. Both officers were screaming
now, as the cadaver’s teeth scissored through muscle and cartilage
and slowly pulled free a thick strip of the man’s face.

The female drew her
sidearm. She babbled incoherence and pointed the weapon at the
cadaver, who ignored her.
“STOOOP!”
she screamed, and fired.

The bullet ripped across
the backs of the cadaver’s shoulders. Malcolm heard it buzz past
him.
Run,
he
urged the cop.
Just run!

She didn’t. The cadaver
released the male cop, who fell against the hood of the cruiser and
splashed down in the gutter. The corpse turned to her; she fired
again, right through its heart. The cadaver stumbled a bit, the
regained its footing. Malcolm tried to focus on the sidewalk
ahead.
Have to get between them. Have
to
do
something.

The cadaver seized both of
the woman’s wrists and pulled her into a crushing embrace. She
turned her head away, pleading—it bit into her ear. Malcolm heard
it grunt as it ripped at her. The gun went off again, then dropped
onto the concrete. The cadaver wrestled the cop toward a narrow
alleyway between two brownstones.
Fuck!
Malcolm cast himself after
them. Then he heard a sputtering from the street.

The other cop sat up, the
left side of his face a yawning crater. Blood pulsed from it and
spilled down the front of his uniform in rivers. He seemed to be in
shock, staring through Malcolm at the alley, then he was
looking
at
Malcolm. The ghost was certain of it. He didn’t know what to
do.
I’m so sorry. It’s not my
fault.
Ectoplasm formed in air—two
reaching hands, Malcolm’s hands—and was disintegrated in the
rain.

The cop fell back and was still. Their gazes
had met in the moment of death, now he was gone.

Malcolm moved into the pitch-dark alley. He
tried to pick apart the mess of sounds bouncing off the walls.
There, a soft grunting, a whimper. A crunch.

He made out the cadaver,
kneeling over the woman. Her jacket and shirt lay open, and the
cadaver was methodically peeling sheets of flesh from her chest and
belly. It lifted its head to stuff each piece in turn into its maw.
The cadaver’s face was flushed, eyes bulging, it was starting to
not look like Malcolm anymore. It was an animal, crude and ugly.
Malcolm moved closer,
if only I could take
hold of the wretched thing, I’d tear it to pieces.
And not in the slow, measured way it was taking
apart the cop. No, he would spill its entrails on the asphalt and
stomp its skull to dust. He was starting to feel overwhelmed again,
but he could hardly calm himself.

The cadaver stood. They
were face to face now; he wanted the thing to see him. He wanted it
to fear and loathe
him
as he did
it
. But its eyes were vacant, its fingers probed at its ruddy
cheeks, then brushed away the hair plastered on its
brow.

And then its fingers curled, tearing into
the flesh. It started to peel back its own scalp. The skin of its
face and neck was suffused with blood now, and its head was more
bloated than ever. The scalp fell against the back of its head and
hung there.

It hooked its fingers
beneath its jaw-line and started to remove the face. The dermis
separated from the body like the peel of an orange. It was like the
cadaver was
molting
, and what was beneath barely resembled Malcolm at all. It
was raw and dark and patches of bone showed through. All the while
rain spilled over the unblinking globes of its eyes.

Scant inches from the
horror, Malcolm saw something etched in the fibrous tissue over the
forehead. It was like a deep, smooth scar, something that didn’t
belong—in fact, it looked like a
design,
a symbol—then it began to
glow like a fiery brand.