Maurice stared at me for a beat, glanced over the side, then took the fishing pole from my hands and wedged it into the bottom of the boat. “What'd you see?” he said calmly.
I knew what I must look like, whites of my eyes showing all around, face paler than usual. The Look. The one that said I’d just seen something. Maurice knew The Look.
I closed my eyes and images of pallid, distended faces bobbing to the surface filled my memory. Hundreds of them, eyes open and unseeing, a landscape of them stretching to the horizon -- or at least the highway.
There wouldn’t be that many there. Not in real life. It was just my own mind fucking with me.
“It bad?” Maurice said gently.
I opened my eyes and stared hard at his brown, gray-whiskered face. I took another breath. It wasn’t that bad, I told myself. I’d just seen a handful of revenants and let my imagination run wild. It wasn’t as if I’d never seen dead people before, I told myself. It wasn’t like I’d never seen a ghost.
I peeked over the side.
A face peered back at me, rubbery mouth opening and closing like it was trying to talk -- but the water didn’t move and no bubbles came out. The face next to it blinked. A hand moved toward the surface of the water like a pale, bloated spider, reaching for me. And beyond it, another hand. And another beyond that.
“Jesus,” I said. I jerked myself upright and started chafing my arms. “The water’s full of them.”
Maurice reeled in his drowned worm, and my empty hook, and then the anchor. I felt him shove the oar into the riverbed and give us a push toward shore.
“Should I make some phone calls, have ‘em drag it?” Maurice asked.
“I don’t know.” Was anybody missing? Yeah, probably. But dozens of somebodies? Maybe hundreds? “I just....” I sighed and made a “whatever” gesture. “I don’t know.”
Chapter Two
I helped Maurice load the boat into the back of his Ford Explorer and told him I was gonna go home, take an Auracel, and have a nice, long nap. Actually, I was planning on taking at least three pills. So I lied.
My phone sat folded in the driver’s seat and I flipped it open, hoping for a message from Jacob to calm me down. He’s got this voice, low and sexy, more of a purr. And it’d be hard to keep dredging up the image of the river full of dead people if he was whispering sweet nothings into my phone.
There were two messages. Message number one: Roger. “Hi, Vic. Sorry to bother you on your day off. I’m settled into my new place. It’s not too far from your apartment, just a few blocks down, across the street from the supermarket. If you want to share a ride or anything, just let me know.”
And message number two: Jacob. “Hey. Remember how I said the governor was probably going to grant a stay of execution on Hugo Cooper? Looks like I was wrong. I’ve got to go and witness it. So...I’ll be home late. Bye.”
His voice dropped about an octave when he said “bye,” sultry and inviting. It seemed weird to me that he could be so blasé about witnessing an execution, but that was part and parcel of the job. I’d put away plenty of guys who’d ended up on death row, but it was in my contract that I didn’t have to watch. Normally both the leads have to go. I only got out of it because I was a certified medium, and who knows what I’d see if I had to be present for the moment of death?
I slipped the phone into my pocket and headed back toward my apartment. Jacob and I didn’t live together, not exactly. It was just that he was staying with me until he found a house or a condo. I’d killed this soul-eating incubus in his bedroom, and even though every psychic Jacob knew told him there was no trace of the thing left, he still refused to sleep there.
It’d been a few weeks, but since we both knew Jacob was actually looking at places -- and because he thought my apartment looked like a hospital room in a charity ward -- we’d never begun feeling too domestic together.
I parked my car, took three flights of stairs two at a time, threw open my front door and flipped on the kitchen light. I went through the living room, bedroom and bathroom and did the same, until the whole place incandesced. Everything in the apartment is white, from the cheap landlord-painted walls to the furniture to the bent plastic miniblinds. When my eyes settled on things that were not white, they invariably turned out to be shadows, nothing more. And that was the way I liked it.
I swallowed all three Auracel tablets at once, and sank down on the futon in the living room. And then I remembered: I’d meant to pick up rubbers on the way home, but in a few minutes I’d be flying too high to drive. It wasn’t like Jacob had left a big note on the fridge that said “buy condoms” or anything. In fact, he hadn’t said a word about taking anything further than blowjobs after the first time we’d spent the whole night together. It seemed like every day I set off with the intention of bringing home the goods, and then totally forgot about it. I thought it was fairly conspicuous that Jacob never picked any up, either. Since he’s the poster child for organizational skills, I can only assume he was leaving the timing up to me. I’m not exactly sure how buying condoms -- or not -- turned into my issue. Maybe because all the issues in our relationship seemed to be mine.
A woven blanket of Jacob’s was draped haphazardly on the plain canvas futon cover, a splash of taupe, burgundy and black that looked far too dark amid all the white. I pulled it up to my face and inhaled. It smelled like Jacob and his condo, old wood and leather, clean man-smells. I liked Jacob. A lot. A whole lot. So what was this mental block I had about the condoms?
As the Auracel started throwing the room into soft focus, I decided that I was making a bigger deal out of the whole condom thing than I needed to. They still sold them at convenience stores, didn’t they? I’d just have a little nap in my Jacob-smelling blanket, and when I woke up, I’d walk to the corner store and buy some. Problem solved.
***
The drugs kicked in and I dozed. My miniblinds developed strips of black between the slats where sunlight had streamed in earlier. Jacob’s blanket was twisted around my ribs.
I sat up and looked hard from shadow to shadow. Nothing moved. Satisfied that I was alone, I yawned and rolled a kink out of my neck. Nice way to spend my day off, doped up and asleep. I considered taking up drinking. But not very seriously, since the dead get really bossy when I drink.
And speaking of the dead...I thought of the floating faces in the river and shuddered. My triple-dose of Auracel was still holding up, though, and hypothetically my sixth sense had a lid on it for the time being. But I hadn’t been on Auracel when I’d seen them, and images from earlier kept replaying themselves in my mind. Those faces. Hairless. Lips wormy and too mobile, forming soundless sounds, words. Hands reaching, trying to break the surface....
I grabbed the first thing I could lay my hands on and threw it across the room. You wouldn’t think a plastic coaster would put such a big ding in the wall. Damn.
I looked at the clock. A little after nine. The state still does executions at midnight, as if deliberately and methodically killing someone isn’t spooky enough as it is. Jacob would be gone until one, one-thirty. I wanted Jacob. I didn’t want to be alone with the memory of those bloated bodies.
I called Lisa and got a message on her cell that said she wouldn’t be available for the next couple of weeks due to her coursework, but to leave her a message and she’d be back in touch soon. She sounded perky, like she just couldn’t wait to go meditate, or whatever they were teaching her. Couldn’t she have phone hours, I wondered. Did she need to devote so much time to chanting “om” that she couldn’t just talk to me for five fucking minutes to reassure me that the river wasn’t really full of dead people?
I closed my eyes and breathed carefully and told myself that I did not want to strangle Lisa. I debated taking another Auracel, but since I had to work the next day, opted for a Seconal to just knock me out instead. I tuned the living room TV to a station I didn’t receive and slumped on the futon, watching static.
I think it’s a white-noise kind of thing I’m after when I go between TV or radio stations. Something generic to shut out the dead. It’s not anything they taught me at Heliotrope Station, better known as Camp Hell, the sicko place where I was supposedly being taught to harness my psychic ability. I just picked up static surfing on my own.
Channel eight was usually pretty good for a gray, textured nothingness. I hit zero-eight on the remote and settled in.
Except channel eight seemed to be tuning something tonight. I wondered why that would be. Maybe another station had boosted its signal, or the hole in the ozone happened to be lining up with some broadcast satellite tonight, or maybe Mercury was retrograde. Damn. I’d liked channel eight just the way it was.
I made out a face in the static and tried to match it to that of a familiar celebrity, without luck. I picked out the contour of a cheek, and an open mouth. A hand fluttered up, five fingers blurring. Sign language? I had no idea. But the Seconal was kicking in, combining with the grogginess brought on by all the Auracel I’d taken earlier, and my eyelids drooped despite the nagging compulsion to make sense of what I was seeing.
I wouldn’t say I actually slept, at least not the whole time. Camp Hell called it a hypnogogic state, that window between sleeping and waking. Sometimes when I catch myself in that window I feel extraordinarily clear, like I’ve been going through the day wearing a pair of dirty, smudged sunglasses and it’s just occurred to me to take them off. Other times I just feel like I’m falling.
It was in the middle of one of those sickening, falling lurches that I snapped awake, as if I’d been caught. Jacob’s face was right in mine, and he held me firmly by the upper arms. “Hey,” he said when I woke up.
I cleared my throat. “Hey.”
He stared hard into my eyes. “Were you...sleeping?”
I raised an eyebrow. Evidently he didn’t think so, since he’d felt the need to grab me like that. “I dunno. Not exactly.” I shrugged. He let go of me and crouched between my legs, his elbows resting on my knees. “Sort of dreaming.”
“You didn’t look like you were dreaming. Your eyes were half open, but they weren’t moving back and forth.”
Oh. That must’ve been really attractive. Good thing anything paranormal, ugly or not, makes Jacob horny. But still, there had to be a limit somewhere, and I wasn’t eager to find it. I wondered if he’d had any luck with house-hunting. And then I remembered he’d been at an execution all night, and it was probably somewhere in the wee hours of the morning. “I took a sleeping pill,” I said, pushing off the back of the futon. He eased back and stood, and gave me a hand up.
I glimpsed channel eight but didn’t see any more staticky people. Jacob turned off the television, poking the manual on/off button as we went by. The lights in the bedroom were already on; in fact, all the lights in the apartment were still on. I waited for him in the bedroom doorway while he swung around to flick off the kitchen and bathroom lights. I usually left the kitchen light on all night, since it was far enough away from the bedroom to leave my sleep undisturbed, yet it ensured that I wouldn’t awake in total darkness and see...well, I dunno what I might see, but I didn’t want to find out. But for the past two weeks with Jacob there, I’d been sleeping with the lights out. All of them.
I didn’t move as Jacob approached the bedroom. For someone who made me feel so safe, he certainly looked like hell. A deep, vertical scowl line I’d never noticed before was wedged between his dark eyebrows, the laugh lines at the corners of his eyes just looked weary, and his mouth was pressed into a grim set. “Are you okay?” I asked. And I felt a little stupid for taking so long to ask it, but at least I’d figured it out eventually. I’m really not accustomed to having to worry about anyone but myself.
Jacob fit himself into the bedroom doorway with me, one of us backed against each jamb, and propped his wrists on my shoulders. We were both a handful of inches over six feet tall, but his solid mass dwarfed me as he pressed his forehead into mine. “That guy they put down today, Hugo Cooper. He was a monster.”
“Yeah,” I said, as if I knew it all. Cooper had kidnapped three women. Kept them alive in a hundred-degree attic. He probably wouldn’t have murdered them if one hadn’t escaped and run for help, causing him to panic and try to erase the whole thing in a brutal, frenzied massacre.