Death of the Body (Crossing Death) (31 page)

Bastard was going to put me to work. I shifted into gear and pulled back onto the highway.

Xia’s text messages got more frantic. They went from
I can’t believe you are leaving me with Nicholas all day after the night we had. I told you I wanted to meet the nun
, to
If you seriously don’t respond I’m going to call search and rescue.
I sent her a quick note to let her know I was okay and that I wouldn’t stay long at the bar with Henric. I left out the ghosts for now. That wasn’t exactly something I could figure out how to say over text message. I got halfway through writing “I love you” before I realized it, then paused while my head slowed, and at least one piece of my life became clear.

I was in love.

My finger hovered over the backspace key for a few moments before I finally decided to finish the sentence. Then it hovered over the send key for a few moments more, before I just closed the text window, leaving the message unsent. She deserved to hear it in person first anyway.

I took a deep breath as my foot pressed on the accelerator. I allowed the feeling of excitement to take the place of the knot in my stomach. I rested my head on the headrest and let all my busy, jumbled thoughts swirl around a single constant point: Xia.

I recalled the memory of her face, inches from mine in the moonlight; reminisced about the way her red lips explored my body; remembered what it was like to fold our bodies together. But my favorite memory was the way she looked at me that day in the cafeteria—the day I had turned the tea into wine. Then, I realized that she had been in love with me long before today. She was just waiting for me to realize it.

I picked my phone back up, and pressed send.

When I got to Henric’s store, I had already decided I wasn’t going to stay. I was going to tell Henric that we could have drinks another time. I wanted nothing more than to get home to Xia. A message or phone call wouldn’t do. He would take that sort of thing personally. I would tell him in person and he would see the yearning in my eyes and the look on my face. I would use every ounce of persuasive magic I had in my eyes to get him to let me go to her… without firing me, of course.

It wasn’t abnormal for Henric’s car to be the only one parked behind the market. Usually, only he and I could stomach the walk through the back door. You had to pass through the butchery to get to the store from the back door and most employees preferred to park out in the front lot. I never really understood that, but I guess my experiences had given me a somewhat different view of death. The back door opened to a hallway that was lined with freezers, including one walk-in where we had full, bone-in animals. There was a small window through which you could see the carcasses hanging, but that wasn’t the part the employees hated. The hallway then opened into a larger room that had an industrial sized meat grinder and a pulley system so the larger pieces of meat could be easily lifted into the grinder.

I had never noticed how eerie it appeared at night, the large hooks casting menacing shadows from the nearby windows. When Xia, Nicholas, and I were here last, I hadn’t remembered even coming through this room. On the far side of the wall was the meat trimming station room, where I had woken from my last trip from Orenda. The employee lounge separated the grinding room from the back of the store.

Light was spilling from a cracked doorway in the meat trimming room, and the whole place smelled of rust and blood. I checked the grinder, mostly out of habit. Meat had been ground there tonight—the grinder hadn’t been cleaned, but the beef had already been taken and packaged. I picked up a paper wrapped package in each hand, heading toward the fridges.

“Don’t bother with that now, I actually need your help in here,” Henric’s voice called from the trimming room. I shrugged and set the ground beef back onto the stack of neat rows.

“You couldn’t have warned me that I would be working tonight? I wore my favorite pair of shoes,” I joked, realizing my right pant leg was already ripped and somewhat bloody from my fall in the graveyard. I hoped I didn’t already get blood on my shoes. I realized that Henric might also notice my ripped pants—my mind was already constructing a cover story.

“You know,” I continued, “I was actually hoping I could take a rain check,” I pulled the door open, prepared to give my best puppy-dog-sad-face look. Unfortunately, it was wasted.

The room was empty.

More than empty. The room was pristine. The metal cutting tables had been meticulously sanitized. The scent of bleach flooded my nostrils and nauseated me. The mental distractions I had been using washed away with the scent of the bleach, my mind thrown back into chaos. The pit in my stomach returned. Mixed with the smell of the cleaning agents, it caused my stomach to lurch.

I heaved, but swallowed it back and spun out of the room.

“Henric?”

He was there, right behind me, inches from my face. He shoved me against the wall, his body falling heavily into mine. I heard the sound of heavy chains. My mouth flooded with rusty liquid.

Henric’s dark eyes were wild as I became aware of a sharp pain in my right shoulder. I tried to gasp but ended up splattering Henric’s face with blood. My blood.

I looked down to see Henric’s hands on one of the metallic hooks—a hook which he had just shoved under my shoulder, through my chest.

I felt a surge of adrenaline that tried, but failed, to cover the immense pain. My eyes started to darken and my knees gave way. I would have fallen except that my body registered somehow that if I fell I would catch my full weight on the hook—and I was already delirious from the fire that was shooting through my chest.

I tried to inhale but my breath made a gurgling noise and my mouth flooded with more rusty liquid. Henric started spinning—the whole room started spinning, and I fell forward into him.

“Hiya, Edmund. You’ve been one tough guy to find.”

I didn’t know if it was my delirium or if I was losing consciousness, but the voice wasn’t Henric’s.

“No, no. Don’t pass out yet. We need to have a little chat.”

He put his hand on the hook again and I felt it grow warm. My awareness returned as the pain lessened.

“That’s better.”

I was conscious enough to feel his hot breath in my face now, to feel the warm blood running down my hands. My brain was functioning enough to realize that my right lung must be punctured because every time I inhaled, blood bubbled upward into my mouth. I found that if I leaned toward the right and took shorter breaths it didn’t feel like I was about to drown.

“Joshua,” I choked out.

He put his hand on my forehead and tilted my head upward, pulling my eyes open to meet his in the process. They were a deep red, although I wasn’t sure if they were really red, or if that was the only color my mind could see.

I started choking out the spell I had learned as a child, the spell to free someone from possession, but Joshua laughed.

“Stupid boy. I’m not one of
them
. That won’t work on
me.
”

My mind drifted to the time when I was a child, to my first death, the death that brought me to Earth. It didn’t seem that long ago now. The memory was vivid, the red tint of the world as blood poured from a different wound was actually familiar. Was this my life, flashing before my eyes?

“That’s it,” Joshua said. “I need you to remember. How did you get here?”

But I couldn’t remember. I didn’t know. I was twelve before I remembered anything in the orphanage. The swirling blackness, the same blackness that accompanied words I knew but couldn’t connect meaning to in the orphanage, returned now to eat away at my awareness. I knew I was in trouble when I started to find the dark oblivion comforting.

I heard the whirl of machinery coming to life and the hook tugged upward. Pain shot through my arm as the hook supported more of my weight. The pain brought me back to consciousness.

“Stay with me, boy. How did you remember who you were?”

My father’s ring. Father Michaels had given it to me on the day of my communion.

The machine whirled again and my feet left the floor. They felt heavy and plump, like when the dentist numbs your face and you spend half an hour poking at it afraid he did something to make you fat.

“This ring?” Joshua questioned, sliding it from my finger. I felt it pulse cool one last time before the warmth of my own dripping blood replaced the sensation. My hands felt heavy now. I wasn’t able to lift them.

“No,” I choked out and my head rolled backward. “Mine…”

Joshua laughed, “Does this ring allow someone to enter into this level and not forget?”

His question was incoherent. His guess was as good as mine. All I cared about was that the ring was a gift from my father.

The rage returned. It bubbled to the surface like the blood bubbling from my mouth. It brought all of my feelings into clarity. For a few moments the world snapped back into place. I was higher now, a few feet off the ground. Joshua was taking off my clothes, but I didn’t know why.

Then I noticed the link. He was probing my mind. He was reading my thoughts. My father
’
s ring was now on his hand as he ripped off my shirt! The link between our minds worked both ways though, and as I questioned why he was taking off my clothes, I saw him glance toward the grinder.

I started kicking frantically, trying to free myself from the hook. The pain I felt as a result was dimmed by rage and terror. Joshua hit the button that lifted me higher into the air. I tried to cry out, but every time I did I was met with a mouthful of blood. I spit this mouthful in his direction.

The sound the grinder made when it started sent waves of electric fear through my body. But even through the roar of the machinery, I heard my cell phone buzz in the pocket of my pants that were lying in a heap beneath me.

Our minds connected; Joshua heard it, too. He glanced at me quickly, aware that the familiar sound of the phone had caused me to stop struggling. I knew I didn’t want to endanger my friends so I had to keep my mind clear.

Joshua reached into my pocket and read the message.

I could see the words on the screen through his eyes.
I love you, too.

Joshua smiled wickedly and started plotting the death of my friends.

“So you’re loved, are you Edmund?” he spoke aloud, even though I could hear his thoughts. The sound of his voice and his thoughts created a delayed echo in my ears. “How will this poor girl feel when she learns that her great boy toy has abandoned her, just like you were abandoned by the last people you loved? ”

Visions of my dead father, slouched over in his office chair, filled my mind. He didn’t abandon me. He was murdered.

“Yes, that secret room in the parliament building. How do I get inside?”

Shit. I hadn’t meant to give that up. I could feel Joshua probing for the entrance to the room, but I thought about the swirling blackness behind the word
scripture
in the orphanage instead.

“Stop fighting me, boy!” he screamed. Then his voice softened. “No matter. Think about the book. Your father’s book. How do you read it?”

I found his question hilarious. He had had the book for over twenty years now and still hadn’t figured out how to read it?

Joshua lowered me toward the grinder. He knew I was mocking him. Unfortunately, I didn’t know how to read the book; my father’s letter had been cut short by his death—a death that Joshua had caused.

I would give him nothing else.

My feet caught fire as they hit the whirling blades—at least, that is about the only way I can describe it. The whole scene seemed to happen in slow motion, but while I could feel the pain and still see through my own eyes if I chose, I actually had the sensation that I was watching the entire last moments of my life from above, a bird’s eye view of my death.

I continued to be worried for my friends, but I was no longer linked to Joshua’s thoughts. Actually, I was no longer linked to any thoughts. All my worries, all my hatred, all my love, all my fear, were replaced by a blissful nothing—a clarity that came unexpectedly.

And then I was on the sidewalk in front of the store, watching Joshua in Henric’s body placing packages of ground meat in the storefront window. Each paper-wrapped package had a daily special sticker price tag. I had to hand it to him—the window display had never looked more organized.

Above me was a silver river, much like the silver thread that wove through Orenda that I had followed twice to the mountains where I was able to jump between that world and this one. But above me now was not a silver thread—it was much larger, and I could feel it pulling at me with an attraction like a magnet, whether I wanted to follow it or not.

Xia and Nicholas were walking up the sidewalk. I tried to cry out to them, but they couldn’t hear me.

“Don’t go in there!” I yelled, but Joshua had already seen them coming up the sidewalk, and went out to meet them.

“Hi, Henric,” Nicholas started.

“Stop, please! Run away.”

“Have you seen Edmund?”

I noticed that as Joshua walked farther from me, the pull from the silver river got stronger. I knew it was the ring. The closer I stayed to it, the more control I could keep. The easier it was to stay in this world.