The Body Departed (2009) Read online

  I paused. This was going to be hard. “Daddy needs his scarf back.”

  “Your scarf?” she asked, confused.

  “Yes.”

  Her aura receded like a blue-and-red tide. Some of the crimson in it flared to green, and I knew this was the color of her sadness. She loved that scarf and wore it all the time, even when the weather didn’t permit.

  “Of course, Daddy,” she said. “I would give you anything. Are you cold?”

  Daddy is always cold, I wanted to say. Instead, I said, “Yes, baby, a little.”

  “You can have it, Daddy.”

  “Thank you, angel.”

  We were silent some more, and the dull green in her aura flashed brilliantly emerald and then was gone, replaced with something brown. I knew this to be the color of her resolve. Her strength.

  “I don’t want you to be cold, Daddy.”

  “You are a good girl.”

  I told her exactly what I needed for her to do next, and she did what I asked, operating in a semihypnotic state. She pushed aside her covers, got up from the bed, and went over to her dresser. She pulled open the top drawer, rummaged through it briefly, and pulled out the red scarf, now well worn. It wasn’t socks, as Pauline had requested, but it would do. Next, she walked to her bedroom door, opened it, and stepped out into the hallway. I drifted through her room and followed her. She moved surprisingly fast for someone walking with her eyes shut. Then again, the muscle memory was there, and her aura reached out before her, guiding the way.

  The spirit always knows the way.

  She opened the front door to the apartment and wrapped the scarf around the doorknob, where Pauline would collect it early the next morning.

  She shut the door again, locked it, and headed back to her bedroom, deftly avoiding the corner of the kitchen table. She shut the bedroom door and crawled back into bed. I could see the tears on her cheeks. She loved that scarf.

  “You are a good girl,” I said.

  “I don’t want you to be cold, Daddy.”

  “I love you, baby. Now, get some sleep.”

  I had good days in death, and I had bad days in death.

  This was a bad day.

  “Excuse me, sir,” I said. “Can you help me? I think I’m lost.”

  But the man wearing the shabby seersucker coat ignored me. His head and shoulders were wet, and the umbrella he was carrying was dripping rainwater all over the polished marble floor. He was leaving a slippery—and dangerous—trail down the center of the hallway. Not only did he care little for others’ welfare, the bastard was also ignoring me.

  I picked up my pace and tapped him on the shoulder. At least, I think I tapped him on the shoulder.

  Sweet Jesus, did my finger just pass through his shoulder? Of course not. I’m seeing things.

  “Excuse me, sir?” I said again.

  But he kept moving briskly through the hallway. I moved briskly, too, directly behind him. His leather hiking boots squeaked along the floor. I didn’t squeak at all.

  “Hey,” I said, “why won’t you—”

  And then he stopped suddenly and I nearly ran into him. Actually, I did run into him. Or, rather, I should have run into him. Instead, I went through him.

  Stunned, I stepped back. The man was shivering now, nearly uncontrollably. The hair on the back of his neck was standing on end.

  “Excuse me,” I said again, completely shaken. “I think I’m lost.”

  His back was still to me. He cocked his head to one side and appeared to be listening. Then slowly—very slowly—he turned around and looked straight at me.

  Well, sort of.

  Actually, his eyes had that sort of glazed, unfocused look that people get when they’re staring off into space.

  Or looking through you.

  “Sir?” I said again.

  He continued staring through me for another beat or two, then frowned and turned and started squeaking down the hallway again.

  I watched him go. He paused outside a door, fished for a bundle of keys in his pocket, sought one out, and inserted it into the lock. He opened the door and was gone in an instant, and I was left standing in the hallway alone.

  What the hell?

  I turned slowly. I realized, with some alarm, that nothing looked familiar. The hallway was covered in mirrors. I stopped turning and faced one such mirror.

  There was nothing in the mirror.

  I wasn’t in the mirror!

  Maybe they weren’t mirrors. I walked over to it, reached out a finger to touch it, and…My finger passed straight through the mirror as if it weren’t there.

  No, a voice in my head said. It’s you who isn’t here.

  I next looked at my hand. It was there, true, but I could actually see through it. Through my own hand.

  Jesus!

  I turned in circles, panicking. Where was I? The mirrored hallway…the smooth granite floor…the polished wooden ceiling fans…

  I knew this place. I had been here before.

  Think!

  I tried to think, but there was no memory at all of who I was or why I was here. Fear gripped me. Pure, unadulterated fear. And now I found myself backing away—and into the mirrored wall behind me.

  And backing through it.

  In a blind panic, I found myself running down the hallway of mirrors. I turned wildly around a corner and was about to head outside along what appeared to be a connecting outdoor walkway—and slammed headlong into something invisible, and hard.

  I stumbled backward, disoriented, thoroughly confused. I reached for a stucco column to support myself, but my hand passed straight through it, too.

  Please, God, let this be a bad dream.

  I staggered, found my balance. What the hell had I hit? I didn’t know, but now I inched forward slowly, reaching out my hand cautiously before me. Beyond the railing of the hallway was a steep hill covered in dense shrubs. A small wind touched me—and then promptly passed straight through me.

  I’m dreaming, I thought. I have to be dreaming.

  I took another step, then another, and my outstretched hand touched something. Something hot and electrified. I recoiled instantly.

  Jesus, what the hell was that?

  Suddenly, an image flashed in my thoughts, of a man being shot to death in his sleep. The man looked familiar. Very familiar. I was suddenly certain I knew who this man was.

  But my brain wasn’t working, refused to click into gear, refused to draw up any memories at all.

  Another flashing image. A very cute little girl. My heart instantly warmed. My girl. Yes, that was my girl.

  But I couldn’t remember her name or even if she was a little girl anymore. More images. A woman I knew. An apartment I knew. Gunshots. Flashes of light. Images of a golden tunnel in the sky.

  I continued backing away from the outside walkway, continued backing away from the invisible barrier that impeded me. And I backed straight through a stucco wall, to find myself surrounded by mops and brooms and buckets and cleaning agents. A janitor’s closet.

  Disoriented and confused, I found myself falling. Straight through the floor.

  Down, down.

  Screaming.

  I dropped into an apartment.

  Inside, flashing by me in a blur, were a woman and a toddler playing near the TV. The toddler turned its little head, saw me, and pointed excitedly with a chubby finger…

  But I was already falling down through the hardwood floor. I instinctively covered my face and screamed—and passed straight through into another room.

  This one was dark and vacant. I braced myself for the coming floor, expecting to pass right through it, as I had done the others…

  But this time I hit the floor hard and something close to pain coursed through me. Or was it the memory of pain? I lay there for a moment, scared and completely bewildered, and realized I wasn’t in pain at all.

  “They’re all memories,” said a voice behind me. “You cannot feel pain, James. Not really, not the way
you used to. But you remember how it felt, and sometimes that’s good enough.”

  I looked up from the ground where I lay, and there stood an angel across the dark room, glowing softly. I slowly found my feet.

  “I’m not an angel,” she said, blushing slightly, the color red rippling through her silvery, ethereal glow. “But I’m honored you think so.”

  “You just read my thoughts,” I said, backing away.

  “Yes, and you’re reading mine, James.”

  Indeed, her mouth never moved, yet I heard her words perfectly clearly.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “Just a friend,” she said, although she sounded mildly hurt. Her incandescent glow now rippled with green.

  I was in what appeared to be a storeroom, filled with dismantled sinks, dented trash cans, toilets, and rows and rows of unused lumber.

  “Why did I stop falling in here?”

  “Because you are earthbound to this building, James, and as long as this building stands, you will never leave it. And should this building ever be destroyed, you are bound to the empty lot. For all eternity.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said, and felt the rush of fear all over again.

  “Yes, you do, James. Make yourself understand—it’s important that you do.”

  “Why do you keep calling me James?”

  “Because that’s your name.”

  I suddenly wanted to run. I wanted to be anywhere but here in this creepy room.

  “Anywhere but here?” she said, reading my thoughts. “I could take offense at that, James.”

  “No offense, it’s just that—”

  “You’re scared.”

  “Yes.”

  She continued hovering before me and glowing serenely. She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. And at that thought, she smiled warmly at me, and in her smile, there was so much love that I nearly broke down in tears.

  “Why do you look at me like that?” I asked.

  She did not answer me; instead, she continued smiling, continued sending me wave after wave of love.

  “Why do you love me so much?” I asked. “I don’t know you.”

  But her smile never wavered. I thought of the dead man I had seen in the vision, the man who had been shot to death. I looked down at my body now, at my chest and stomach. Both were dotted with bullet wounds. “I’m the dead man in the vision,” I said.

  She continued saying nothing, but something horrible started happening. She started fading.

  “And the girl in my vision is my daughter,” I cried out to her.

  She smiled and faded and said nothing.

  “And I’m dead,” I said.

  But she was already gone.

  And in the empty silence and darkness of the storage room, I found myself looking at my own glowing hands. Hands that I could actually see through. “And my name is James,” I said to the emptiness.

  And with horrific clarity, I remembered everything in a rush of ghastly memories, and I found myself on my knees, weeping molten tears that fell from my cheeks and shriveled and dissipated before they hit the cold concrete floor.

  Pauline was sitting on her couch with her legs stretched out before her. She was drinking a cosmopolitan and seemed to be enjoying it.

  “It’s heavenly,” she said. “By the way, I hid the scarf in the church today.”

  “Thank you, Pauline.”

  “Thank your daughter, too. She gave up her scarf for you.”

  “I love her more than you know.”

  “Oh, I know,” she said.

  “Yeah, I suppose you would know.”

  In death, I had known only the apartment, known only its mirrored hallways, its many residents, its empty storerooms, and the forgotten nooks and crannies that most residents didn’t know—or cared to know—existed.

  This was my home. This was my haunt in more ways than one. It was all I’d known in death. And sometimes, this was all I remembered, too.

  Pauline was polite enough to let me work through my anxiety without comment. I sat on the coffee table across from her. The sitting, of course, was just an illusion. I simply made the motion of sitting. I am, after all, nothing but energy.

  “You are more than energy,” she said.

  “How much of me can you really see?” I asked.

  “I can see enough of you. The rest I fill in with my imagination.”

  She then got up from the couch and sat next to me on the coffee table. I could sense the heat coming off her body but not really feel it. She opened her hand and held it out to me.

  “Take it,” she said.

  I did my best to hold on to hers, and we sat there like that in silence, holding hands. Outside, a dog barked. Inside, a medium and a ghost were holding hands. She turned her face and I saw that there were tears on her cheeks. I put my arm around her and she unconsciously shivered. The dog continued barking and we continued hugging and holding hands.

  It was late and she was asleep.

  Her aura had shifted toward me, but this time, I kept my distance.

  Let her sleep, I thought. Leave her be.

  A very small part of me realized that I had been selfish by coming in here and disturbing her sleep, causing her unknown psychosomatic problems in her waking life.

  She rolled over now, and her angelic face angled toward me. Her eyelids fluttered. Her aura, now a soft pink with occasional flashes of red, snapped at me like tiny, fiery bullwhips.

  Do it now. Before she wakes.

  As Pauline had instructed, I closed my eyes, which, somehow, I could still do. I held the image of the red scarf in my thoughts. I visualized it as clearly as I could. I saw myself touching it, holding it. I visualized it as I used to wear it: around my neck, flapping in the wind behind me as if I were a WWI fighter pilot.

  Focus.

  Focus on the scarf.

  And so I did. I saw it around my neck, could feel it in my hands, remembered the cozy warmth it had provided me in days past, days I could no longer remember.

  Focus.

  In my mind’s eye, the scarf seemed to solidify, seemed to coalesce into something real, something more than thought, something more than memory.

  When I opened my eyes again, there it was.

  In my hands.

  The red scarf.

  In shock, I looked up and immediately felt a wave of dizziness. I was not expecting to see what I saw before me. I had been expecting to see my daughter’s room.

  Instead, I found myself standing in a cavernous church cathedral.

  I released my hold on the scarf, which had been tucked deep into the cushions of a church pew.

  I took in my surroundings. I was in a church nave. And not just any nave. It was the church of my youth, where I had gone to school for so many years of my life, where, among other things, my fear of God had been born.

  A hell of a fear.

  It was the middle of the night, and the church was empty—and creepy. Even for a ghost. I drifted out to the center aisle and stopped there. The ceiling was high and arched and vast. Massive stained-glass windows circled the cavernous room, each depicting popular scenes from the Bible: David leading his flock, Jesus breaking bread, Moses and his commandments, Enoch riding a fiery dervish into the heavens.

  At the back of the church, hanging high above the sanctuary, was a bloody, lifelike statue of Jesus Christ suspended from the cross. Too lifelike. The sculptor had gone a little crazy with the blood, which poured from many open wounds. Anyone looking up at the statue couldn’t help but be powerfully struck by Christ’s ultimate sacrifice for our sins.

  I remembered the statue. It had given me nightmares when I was a child. I looked away from it now.

  I knew the building had once been an old monastery, and I knew the monastery had a rich cultural history—and a bloody one, too. There had, in fact, been many tragedies. None of which I could remember now—that is, except this latest one.

  The murder of my music teacher.


  Who would kill her? And why kill her here, at school, within this very cathedral? According to the newspaper article—which Pauline had located and recently read to me twice—the police had found no motive and very few clues.

  I spied the piano from across the vast cathedral, gleaming dully, sitting high on the raised dais.

  The very piano she had been strangled on.

  I drifted toward it, down the center aisle. I recalled that the church was popular for weddings. Down this very aisle many brides had walked arm in arm with their fathers before being given away. I would never give my daughter away. Ever.

  As a crushing sadness threatened to overcome me, I continued down the center aisle toward the raised stage. And as I did so, I realized I wasn’t alone.

  Here be ghosts.

  I was about halfway down the aisle, approaching the raised sanctuary, with its altar and lectern and pulpit, when a figure stepped out from behind a velvet curtain to my right.

  Or, rather, stepped through the curtain.

  It was a child, and he stood there watching me, one finger raised to his lip. He was glowing softly. If not for the fact that I could see through him or that he was pulsating with his own inner luminosity, he would have looked like any other precocious child.

  Granted, one had to ignore the mortal wound in his head and the transparent blood that stained his freshly ironed dress shirt. Except, I couldn’t ignore it.

  Sweet Jesus.

  Ghosts and color don’t exactly mix, and so the bloodstain on his shirt was really just a splash of silver, which spread all the way down to his navel. Sweet Jesus…What had happened to him? I knew my own ethereal body was covered in similar splotches—thirteen gunshot wounds, to be exact.

  The child watched me some more, rising and falling gently as if adrift on some unseen, unfelt current.

  I moved closer to him.

  “What’s your name?” I asked from a few pews away, keeping my distance.

  He didn’t answer, just continued to bob gently on the noncurrents of nonspace. I drifted closer still.

  I said, “My name is…” but I suddenly had to stop and think. Panic surged through me. What the hell was my name? Jim? Jack? No, not quite. James? Yes, James!