I look to where she’s pointing and get my first look at Susan Green.
Simply put, Green is stunning. Face of an angel, the body of a devil, as the old songs used to say. She’s wearing some tight little black dress that accentuates her curves, heels so high I can’t see how she dances in them. Her hair falls in a perfect waterfall over her shoulders. She’s the kind of woman who’d never look twice at a guy like me, not unless she’s slumming and wants to bring back a story to her friends of this encounter she had with some bad boy street tough.
Judy sighs. “You see what I was saying? You can’t imagine her being what I say she is, can you?”
Actually, I can. I’ve met women like Green before and their casual cruelty doesn’t surprise me anymore. So it’s not an impossible stretch to the more serious cruelties that have been attributed to her in particular.
Susan Green hasn’t won me over. But there’s another trust issue that’s bothering me.
“I can imagine anything,” I tell her. “But why should I trust you? Look what you did to me.”
She starts to raise her hand.
“Don’t,” I tell her.
But she was only brushing her hair back from her face this time.
“I don’t know how to prove it to you,” she says.
“Look,” I say. “Instead of putting me on hold or whatever it is you do to me when you lift your hand, leave me alone for awhile. Let me think on this.”
“So you’ll do it?”
Something bad happened to her. I don’t doubt that. Something woke this fierce urge for vengeance in her and it wasn’t anything she chose. But it’s not my fault either.
“I didn’t say that,” I tell her. “But I need some time on my own to work this through. If I’m supposed to trust you ...”
She gives a slow nod. “Then I should reciprocate.”
“Something like that.”
She gives me another nod.
“Okay,” she says. “Do what you need to do. But don’t wait too long.” She looks back to where Green’s stepping it out on the dance floor and my own gaze follows hers. “She’s not going to stop just because Hill got himself shot.”
I give her a slow nod. I find myself going back to what she said about how she chose me.
“Tell me something,” I say. “Back at that gas bar ...”
“You were in the right place at the right time,” she says before I can finish. “You had a gun in your hand. I didn’t look too hard to see if there was any hope left in you. I didn’t stop to see if you could ever be more. I saw the emptiness and just jumped into you as you were going out the door.”
Our gazes lock and this time the dark mystery in her eyes doesn’t reach out and grab me.
“And then later,” she goes on. “In your cell. It’s like I told you before. I only had the one chance and I used it up on you. I can’t ride anybody else. Believe me, I tried. But I couldn’t wait another ten years or whatever for you to get out of prison again either, so I… I…”
Her words trail off and I can’t speak either. There’s an anguish in her that words could never ease. Bad enough she died so hard. Now she’s done this.
“I’m sorry,” she finally manages to tell me.
“I know.”
“But if I could take it back ...” She swallows hard, looks away. “I don’t know if I would.”
I stand up. It’s not in me to forgive her, but I can’t really blame her either. If our circumstances were reversed, I might have done the same thing myself. Figured out the problem and acted on it like she did? Probably not. My heart’s hard, not mean. But in the heat of the moment, when this guy’s leaving the gas bar with a gun in his hand, and the freak’s just standing there, not a damn care in the world …
I really don’t know.
Hell, you look at it another way, she probably saved my life. Hill was going for that shotgun, after all.
Except then she came into my cell and took my life anyway.
“I have to go,” I tell her.
She nods her head, won’t look at me.
But she lets me go. This time the shadows don’t swallow me and I get to walk away under my own steam. I leave her in the club, staring at Susan Green, and head out into the night.
I don’t look back.
You know how ghosts are said to haunt a certain place, like where they died or something? Well, it isn’t true. Or at least it wasn’t true for me. That singularity of purpose they’re supposed to have wasn’t mine either.
When I left the club, I meant to just go out and think about things. Walk around for a while and clear my head. But once I started walking, I didn’t stop. I just went on, wandering, day after day, out of the city, out of the country, across the world. And I didn’t think about anything at all. I forgot who I was, how I’d died, this business with Hill and Green. Everything.
It’s a few years before I’m back in North America, standing at a newsstand in Newford. I’m not here because of any decision on my part. It’s just where my wandering brought me today.
There’s an article on the front page of The Daily Journal about a missing girl. It’s not until I start to read it, that it all comes back to me. Judy Moore and what she’d done to me. The kid I’d killed in the gas bar, and his partner who’d gotten away clean because nobody knew what she’d done except for a pair of ghosts.
I start walking again, but this time I’m concentrating on the things that happened to me before I died, and all those things that Judy told me about. For some reason I don’t hold her to blame for any of it, not least of which for what she did to me. Don’t ask me why. I guess it’s like she said: My life was just never that important to me. I’m wondering about how I got to a place like that when I feel a tug in my chest, where my heart’d be if I was still alive.
I look up to see that I’m in Lower Crowsea. The tug draws my attention to a second floor window and I let myself float up to it, drifting through the glass panes. I don’t recognize the room, or the pretty blonde woman talking on the phone. But looking through a door, I recognize the man in what appears to be a study. There are books everywhere. He’s at a big desk, bent over some paperwork. Writing, I realize.
It’s my brother Christy, the middle kid in my family. I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen him, but he looks to be doing good. Better than I ever did, anyway. He’s got a nice place, a girlfriend. A life.
I listen to the scratch of his pen on the paper for a long time.
“Christy,” I say.
He looks up with a start, but his gaze goes right through me. I’ve long since discovered that it’s like Judy said. People can see us, but not all the time, and not necessarily when we want them to. Though if he could see me, what would I say to him? I’m glad you didn’t screw up as badly as I did. I’m glad those books of yours were able to steer you in a different direction from the one I took.
Would he even know what I was talking about? Maybe. But would he care?
After a while, he goes back to his writing, but he looks up once or twice before I leave, as though he senses my presence.
That could have been my life, I think. There was a time I was the one in the family with all the words, when Christy used to run out in the woods, pretending he was different kinds of animals. I even won some awards, back before I dropped out of school. I don’t know what happened. I guess it started when Christy took up writing, too, and the teachers all started fussing over him. Our parents sure didn’t, not for any of us. We were both getting into our fair share of trouble by then, me more than Christy, and I guess one delinquent writing prodigy was all the teachers felt they could save. And I didn’t care anymore, anyway. Somewhere along the line the words just weren’t easing the pain for me and I found other ways to push it out of my head. Getting drunk, making out, hanging at the pool hall, racing cars out on the backroads. Cheap thrills, maybe, but they did the job. For a while, anyway.
I look over Christy, let my gaze run across the books on the shelv
es behind him. There’s almost a whole shelf with his byline on the spines. I guess our teachers made the right choice. I’ve never been able to stick to anything.
I notice a photo of Geordie, then, propped up at the end of another shelf. He’s our younger brother, the one who used our old man’s cast-off fiddle for his escape from that strange circus of a family we were born into. I’m wondering where he is when I hear the woman laughing into the phone in the other room.
“Oh, come on, Geordie,” she says. “Even you can’t believe Tanya did that on purpose.”
A moment’s silence while she listens. Then another small laugh.
“Well,” she says. “That’ll just teach you not to show up at some fancy do in jeans and a T-shirt, won’t it?”
I let myself drift down into the floor, through somebody else’s apartment, the rooms all deserted, then walk through the wall and out onto the street. I look up at the window again, still feeling the tug.
That’s what it’s like to have a real life, I think. And I’m happy for them. That Christy and Geordie were able to pull themselves out of the past, brush off the crap that was still clinging to them, and move on.
I guess I just wasn’t strong enough.
Or willing to trust. To make the friends that can help pull you through when your family isn’t there for you.
I go on a little tour then.
Being a ghost has this much going for it: You can get from here to wherever pretty much just by thinking about it. You walk around only out of habit. Or because you’re hanging onto the idea of being alive, I guess.
First stop’s that rundown clapboard house in back of Jackson Pond where we grew up. I half expect to see the old man’s pickup parked on the front lawn, Ma hanging out the washing, but the place is all boarded up and falling in on itself, and they’re long gone anyway. He died of a heart attack when I was in prison. Stepped out of that pickup, the way I heard it, grabbed his chest and just keeled over dead. Ma moved to live with her sister in a Florida trailer park and got hit by a drunk driver not a week after she got there.
I don’t know what that means. Or if it even means anything.
I go by the prison next, the last place I lived. Nobody’s missing me there. Just before Judy helped me die I’d spent three days in the hole, pulled solitary for mixing it up with one of the Nazi skinheads in the exercise yard. The Aryan Brotherhood didn’t like the fact that I wouldn’t join them—in prison, everything’s got sides. If you’re not on this one, you’re automatically on the other. I didn’t bother to explain that I didn’t like the militant blacks any more than the skinheads—hate doesn’t need a skin color to be ugly. I just beat the crap out of the guy, trying to smash that swastika tattoo on his forehead clean through to the other side of his head. It’s simpler that way.
I visit a few other haunts—juke joints and flophouses where I’ve spent some time when I wasn’t in some jail or other. I don’t recognize anybody. I end up at my own grave and look down at the cheap granite maker lying flat on the ground. It’s got my name, Paddy Riddell, a couple of dates, and that’s it. Pretty much sums up my life, I guess. I did my time.
The last place I go is the Lower Crowsea branch of the public library. A con I knew on the inside once told me it’s got the best research facilities of any of the city’s libraries. He used it to plan robberies, escape routes, things like that.
I can’t physically touch anything, but when I stare at one of the computers long enough, it comes on and eventually accesses the information I’m looking for. I read through the reports of Judy’s death. First she was just missing. Then they found the body. It wasn’t until the fourth girl died that they started to link them together, realized what they were dealing with. I read through it all, right up to where I came into the picture. When I get to the article about the new missing girl, I can’t read any more.
I lean my head on my folded arms, the light from the screen washing over me.
After a while, I get up and go walking again. This time I’m checking out the bums and winos, roaming through the Tombs, going into the squats that people have made in all those abandoned warehouses and tenements. I find every kind of loser. The lost, the hopeless, the walking dead.
Judy’s right. We can’t let it continue. Susan Green has to be stopped. The missing girl has to be found before she winds up dead like us. If she’s not already dead.
Only how do you choose somebody empty enough that it wouldn’t matter if you borrowed their body to kill a freak? How do you know that they couldn’t be redeemed, if they just got the right break?
And there’ll be two of them now. Green and whoever she’s found herself for a partner.
I still don’t know what I’m going to do when I find them, but I go looking for them all the same.
By the time I find the girl, it’s too late.
It’s closing in on three A.M., my own personal witching hour, and Green and her new freak friend have already had their fun. They’re cleaning themselves up in another room. This time they picked one of the old abandoned buildings on the edge of the Tombs—far enough away from anybody who cares that no one would have investigated the girl’s screams, if they’d even heard them. Green and her friend must have brought her here after I made my own sweep through the area earlier. From the gas cans standing by the door, I figure they’re planning to torch the place once they’re ready to leave.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised to find Judy sitting in the room with the dead girl. She looks up when I come in, all the hurt and pain in the world gathered in her eyes.
“Look at her,” Judy says.
I don’t want to. Not again. One look was enough.
“We could’ve stopped this,” she adds.
She’s being kind. What she really means is I could have stopped it.
I drift back into the other room where Green and her partner are giggling as they clean themselves off. They’re both in their underwear, sloshing water over each other. Their clothes never got near the blood. They’d left them piled neatly by the door near the gas cans.
No, I think. They don’t deserve to live. They don’t have one redeeming quality between the pair of them …
I have one of those moments then, when everything shrinks down to a pinpoint of sharp focus. And I know what to do.
I don’t know why it never occurred to either Judy or me before. We didn’t need to find anybody else. All the losers we needed were right here in the room with me.
I step into the guy. Judy explained it to me, but hearing it’s one thing, doing it is another. Nothing could have prepared me for the sensation of getting into his skin. His body folds around me like wet, oily phlegm, hot and yielding, and I want to get out of there so bad it hurts. I never felt Judy when she rode me, but this guy fights my presence. There was never much subtlety about me when I was alive and I guess it carried over now that I’m dead. I bear down hard, backing him into a corner of his head where all he can do is watch.
“Jesus,” Green says, giving me/her partner a weird look. “What’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing,” I tell her. I don’t recognize the voice coming out of the mouth I’m using.
“Well, then why’re you looking so weird?”
I don’t want to talk, so I hit her. I hate the way it feels. Like I’ve become my old man.
She goes down, scrabbling across the floor to get away from me. But I’m quicker. I land on her back and hold her down with the weight of my borrowed body. When she tries to buck me off, I grab her hair and whack her head against the floor, stunning her. It gives me enough time to rip the arms off her freak friend’s shirt and tie her up, legs and arms.
Judy comes into the room as I’m emptying the first of the gas cans over Green, over the floor, splashing it on the wall. For a moment she doesn’t get it, but then she sees something in the guy’s eyes—a piece of me, I guess, and she nods.
I throw the empty can into a corner, open another. This one I start to pour over myse
lf.
“The girl,” Judy says.
I give her a blank look.
“Don’t let her body burn with them,” she tells me.
I go into the other room. This time I’ve got a body. I retch at what they did to her. Tears blind my eyes as I pick her up as gently as I can and carry her outside. Then I go back inside.
I find the lighter in the guy’s pants.
“Say good-bye,” I tell him as I set us on fire.
I haven’t seen Judy since that night.
While I’m hoping she was finally able to travel on to wherever it is we get to go when our lives in this world are done, I doubt it played out that way. We had good reasons for killing them, I guess, but the way we did it isn’t the sort of thing that wins you any kind of eternal peace.
Hell, right now I’d settle for oblivion.
I pray for it.
Judy said she’d let me go when Green was dead, and I’m sure she did, loosed that hold she had on me and set me free. But I can’t travel on. There doesn’t seem to be a place for me to go on to. I think we’re locked into what we’ve done now—real ghosts, just like in the stories. She’s probably haunting the place where she died. As for me, I can’t seem to leave this place.
I don’t move. I don’t really think except to replay that night in my head.
I sit on the stoop of an abandoned tenement in the Tombs …
Staring across the street at the charred rubble of the building I burned down.
Listening to the screams of Green and her partner ring in my head.
Waiting for oblivion to finally come.
But like Judy said. If I had to do it over, even if I knew it meant damning myself like this, I’d probably do the same thing again.
Pixel Pixies
Only when Mistress Holly had retired to her apartment above the store would Dick Bobbins peep out from behind the furnace where he’d spent the day dreaming and drowsing and reading the books he borrowed from the shelves upstairs. He would carefully check the basement for unexpected visitors and listen for a telltale floorboard to creak from above. Only when he was very very sure that the mistress, and especially her little dog, had both, indeed, gone upstairs, would he creep all the way out of his hidden hobhole.