[story] how to be dead
author: chris (aefallen)
email: edgeofdawn [at] gmail.com
In one way, dying's just like living. You've got to do it with no regrets.
Because, things get really messed up, both in this life, and the next, if you don't. And sometimes when things are messed up for you, you start messing things up for other people. Then other people have to come in and take care of your mess and the mess you've created for other people, and it just never is pretty, in this world or the next.
If I’ve learned anything since I’ve been dead, it's that trouble's one of the constants between this life and the next. Makes things easier for the dead, I've always thought, having this world not that much different from the one they’ve left behind.
And speaking of trouble...
"Why won’t you let me rest in peace?" I groaned, hovering several inches above the ground to express my complete displeasure at the summons.
"You have every right to rest in peace," said Seri, tartly. "What you lack is the ability."
I snarled and followed him. Seri, my self-proclaimed spiritual mentor (though if you take it from me, his true role is that of my spiritual tor mentor), summoner, and all-round pain-in-MY-ass. Not that I feel pain of the physical variety anymore, but the pain of having to do as you’re told is pretty universal. It’s why zombies aren’t particularly happy creatures, but that’s a story for another day.
Unlike Haley Joel Osment, who sees dead people, I am dead people.
I don’t get why people are so fascinated with death. I didn't get it when I was alive, and I don’t get it now when I'm dead. You’re only alive for as long as you have to live. You’re dead forever.
And speaking of being dead…
I know who killed me.
My murderer was a man with chestnut-coloured hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and was wearing a puce-green jacket he’d thrown on in his haste to get out of the house. He was middle-aged, his face was worn with worry, and he was about to become a father for the first time. He was driving a beat-up rental, and in the backseat was his wife, about to bring their child into the world. It was snowing, he was in a hurry, and it was perfectly understandable that he was less than careful.
I had stopped at the crossroads of a quiet junction to watch the snow fall when our paths crossed on that fateful winter night. I heard a horn in the silence of the night, and I turned around too late, as the car skidded on the slush on the roads, and knocked me down.
The last thing I remember about being alive is the stars over where I lay. I don’t remember any pain, and I don’t remember the moment I died.
I do know that the man who killed me stopped his car instantly, wrenched open the door and ran over to my side, where he tried to wake me and took my pulse, only to realise (before I did) what he'd done. I was watching this from where I stood, wondering if this was the out-of-body experience that I’d heard about.
I didnt know I was dead yet, so I admired what he did next: he gathered me up into his arms, very gently, and he carried me to the car. His wife was wild with fear and pain for herself and her unborn child, and I am glad to say that my appearance did not give her much cause for alarm: she had much more to worry about.
It was only later in the hospital, when a doctor pronounced me dead on arrival, that I realised what had happened.
That was eight years ago.
I only found out how long I’d been dead when Seri found me. I'd been wandering tfor eight years, long enough for several of the sighted to notice me and pass reports on. Seri had been appointed to persuade me to move on. Well, Seri says persuade, I say force, Seri says it all amounts to the same thing, and whether it’s one or the other depends on whether you’re doing the persuading or being persuaded.
Sometimes I hate that man.
Seri's never talked about it, but I think he must have been surprised when he finally talked to me, because I was nothing like any of the wandering ones he’d met before. Now I know that he had been sent to get me to move on. Forcibly, if he had to. Spirits haunting the earth for as long as I had been either lack a purpose and end up as haunts, or are chained to the earth by unfinished business of the unpleasant variety. In the former case, Seri’s role was either to persuade the soul to move on to its proper resting place, or to banish it from this realm, if it was one of the unquiet ones. In the latter case, Seri’s job was to help finish the spirit’s unfinished business here on earth, so it could move on.
I’d always suspected Seri preferred the former to the latter, especially the latter of the former. If Seri had been a gunslinger, he’d have been one of the 'Shoot First, and There'll Be No Need for Questions Later' kind.
Most days, I enjoyed being dead. You didn't need sleep, food, didn’t get tired, could go just about anywhere, see anyone living (and a few of the dead) that you wanted. You never had to pay for movie tickets, theatre tickets, bus fares, road tax, groceries, rent. You simply didn’t have to deal with the trappings of living anymore, and you didn't have to worry about keeping body and soul together. You didn't have to deal with deadlines anymore. It was kind of like being immortal.
And also kind of ironic, seeing as how you had to die to get there.
Sure, there were downsides to being dead. But wishing myself otherwise wasn't going to grant me a resurrection, so I resolved to make the best of it.
But Seri found me, and my life (or my death, such as it was) changed.
I wasn't in good spirits this morning. People (or should I say, ex-people) like us don’t need to sleep, but I’ve not been dead long enough to forget the habits of the living, and, out of habit, I doze, and I like taking my time about waking up.
The reason for my being so dispirited this morning was entirely Seri's fault. He'd gotten it into his head that as long as I was here on earth, I should do something productive. I complained that I'd been quite happy, and that I'd kept myself occupied for the eight years before he'd barged into my un-life, and I could keep doing so for the rest of eternity. But I was always curious, and what he wanted me to do sounded suitably intriguing.
"I want you to watch over one of the Sighted Ones," Seri had told me. The Sighted Ones are those who can see us. There aren't many of them, and as far as we can tell, the ability is occasionally hereditary, as is madness (indeed, the Sight has been taken for madness), but just as often as it is passed on, it isn't. Individuals can be born with the Sight, or can develop it at any age later in life.
In either case, learning to live with the Sight is perilous business. It can't be shared with too many people: most would think the Sighted One eccentric at best, insane at worst. They've got to be taught to live with it, and learn the extent of their powers and how to stop seeing things they don't want to see; or at least to stop reacting publicly to things other people can't see. And if no sympathetic or suitably informed individuals exist in their lives, that's when people like us step in.
As we walked towards our not-quite-final destination, Seri stopped me, quite suddenly, before we entered a classically-designed house on a tree-lined avenue. "I want you to remember three things when this one is in your charge," he said. "Firstly, introduce yourself to him as Luke."
"Whatever for?" I asked, genuinely curious. I had a perfectly serviceable name.
"I'll explain it to you in time to come," replied Seri, and I knew that was the end of that. "Secondly," continued Seri, "This one's a believer. I know you have no ...faith, but take his belief seriously. It is his one constant in his turbulent world, and it is the main source of his strength."
I nodded. I've seen stranger, and I know those with the sight certainly need their strength. I'd be the last one to begrudge them any way they found it. "
"I know it is a great deal to ask, but if you can, whenever this boy prays, pray with him. It would mean a great deal to him, I think. Maybe it might even help you find your peace.”
I learned early on never to roll my eyes at him: I’d get an earful for my trouble. So I refrained from sharing my opinions with him, and thought long and hard before coming up with my reply. "I'll think about it," I said.
"Third, and last thing. Never tell him how you died."
"Okay," I said, finding it a little unusual that it was so important for him to tell me this. I knew my charge was young, and that he probably didn't need to hear how I'd died, though I was certain that as one with the Sight, he'd seen far worse already.
"Say no more than you died in an accident, should he ask. I want there to be honesty between the two of you, but this is where it stops for now."
Seri and I walked through the heavy oak-paneled door to a study where sunlight spilled in through the open window, and the spring breeze tossed the branches of the trees outside. A good day to be alive.
He was sitting in a wing chair that completely dwarfed him, face turned to the sun outside. As we neared, Seri held out his hand to stop me from going further. "Young one?" he asked, his voice gentler than I'd ever heard. "We're here. And I've brought someone with me, just as I said I would, the last time we talked."
The boy turned his face to us, and the moment I'd set eyes on him, I could've sworn I was looking at an angel, fallen from Heaven down to earth before our eyes.
He was tiny - he couldn't have been more than eight years old, with perfect honey-coloured hair cut so that it fell softly around his face, and the most impossibly blue eyes I’d ever seen on anyone, living or dead. The poor boy, understandably, looked like he'd just seen a ghost.
He looked like a very lost and forlorn kitten, and his huge eyes got even huger as he registered that there were two of us. Seri stopped several feet from him, and I followed suit.
"This is Conrad McLaughlin," said Seri, and then he turned and addressed the boy. "And this is Luke."
I dropped to one knee before the kid. I towered over him as it was, and I thought it quite impolite to stay up there. "Hi, kid," I said, cautiously.
He nodded once, somewhat jerkily, never taking his eyes off my face.
"Well then," said Seri. "I'll leave you two to get better acquainted."
And without so much as a by-your-leave, he tipped his head at the kid and walked abruptly through the wall, leaving me with a boy who looked as if he'd been alive for only as long as I'd been dead, as much a stranger to me as I was to him.
That's Seri for you. He's a huge fan of the whole "throw-the-spook-to-the-seer and see how they handle it" approach.
The silence stretched on, with him staring at me as though I was going to devour him, and with me feeling increasingly awkward. The awkwardness got to such a point that I voiced the first stupid thought that came into my head, just to break the silence.
"Uh," I said intelligently. "Have you had your breakfast?"
A nervous smile appeared for a moment around the corner of the boy’s mouth. "...No," he said and then his stomach growled so loudly that the both of us laughed, after a stunned silence. Man, I had not forgotten that much about being mortal: little boys were hungry all the time.
"I can hear that, kid," I said, smiling"C'mon, let's go get you something."
We got used to each other, slowly, but surely. Seri had said he chose me because out of the ghosts he knew, I was the one who'd retained most of my human attributes. That is to say, I didn't like floating through doors, wasn't fond of walking through walls, used staircases and doors like mortals, and wasn't given to flashy demonstrations of poltergeist activity. So I watched over the kid, for most part, feeling like a spectral servant when I did things like make his bed, make sure he ate his breakfast, make him go to bed and do his homework and get up on time, so much so that I wasn't surprised that my parents had opted out of the raising of me.
We'd spent several weeks without a glimpse of Conrad’s dad, who he'd once let slip was in hospital. I thought about it for several days before breaching the subject to him, asking if he didn't want to visit.
Conrad’'s eyes got haunted, and he said, quite softly, that it wouldn't do any good.
But I'd put the idea in his head, and a week later, as I was settling him down to sleep, he said, rather diffidently, that if I didn't mind, he thought he'd like to visit his father, and if it was all right, could I go with him?
I said I had all the time in the world, and of course I'd go.
Conrad smiled, and then said, in the voice of someone trying to make a joke of something very serious to them, that I might find a friend there.
Why, I'd asked him, curiosity instantly roused.
His eyes grew serious as he recounted to me his father's last days with him. His mother's departure had left the man unbalanced, from the sound of it, and eventually, his father had started rambling about this being punishment for something he'd done, and Conrad told me that his father had alluded to being responsible for some great crime which he should have, and hadn't been, punished for.
I told him that disturbed people said a great many things, and not to take it to heart. Save for idle conjecture as to what it could have been, I put it largely from my mind, until the day we made the trip to St. Michael's Hospital.
What Conrad had omitted to tell me (and indeed, perhaps he did not know, and it was better that he didn't) was that his father was warded in an institute for the mentally disturbed. It looked like a hospital to anyone, yes, but the patients there were suffering from wounds and diseases of the mind. I started to regret my decision to bring the boy here, but stayed close to him and hoped that the visit would be uneventful.
Eventually we came to a tiny ward, and Conrad pushed the door open. I'd have helped, but people would have noticed.
"Father?" he asked, hesitantly.
There was no reply.
As we neared the bed, a jolt of pure horror raced through me.
The man on the bed, asleep and completely unaware of my presence, was not a stranger to me. In fact, one could easily have said he was responsible for bringing me here in the first place, in every sense of the word. For the worn, tired face belonged to the man behind the wheel the night I'd died, the man who’d carried me in his arms so very gently the night I died, the very man who had in fact been the death of me.
Distantly, I could hear the child's voice calling for me, panicked and fearful, as I walked through walls and shot through doors and did everything in my power to put as much distance between me and that room, as if by doing that I could put from my mind the memory of that night on which my life had ended and the boy's had begun.
Seri found me several hours later, extremely unhappy that I had left the boy in the asylum. His voice seemed to be speaking to me from miles away, and I didn't even react when he hauled me back to the boy's bedroom and commanded I watch over him until a replacement could be found. I could do that much even if my heart wasn't in it, he’d snapped, and I should know by now where to put my heart when someone else's well-being was at stake.
I didn't feel much like talking to the kid or doing the guardian spirit stuff much, the next day. I knew that it wasn't his fault, but some mean part of me that should've died when I did didn’t agree. Still, it wouldn't have been right to just leave him with no one to watch over him, so I followed him on his class trip.
I thought it was a ridiculous idea to bring eight-year-old children to the skating rink: seriously, hadn't their teachers heard of legal liability? But the kids looked like they were having fun, even when they were falling on their faces even though they never let go of the side of the rink. Conrad looked small, earnest and way too young to be skating without someone to hold his hand (never mind that there were three-year-old kids on the far side of the rink skating with amazing skill. Some people are freaks). He'd fallen twice already, but had gotten up each time, brushed the ice off his clothes, and kept trying. Against my will, I admired his tenacity. If I'd been in his position at that age I'd probably have sat on the ice and bawled until I was removed.
It looked really interesting, though, and that was nearly our downfall. I was so preoccupied with watching him that I didn't notice the revenant until it was too close for comfort.
The first thing I noticed was that uncomfortable, but completely distinctive feeling that someone was walking over my grave. While this was in fact possible, it wasn't something to be disregarded. Us spirits have a sixth sense all our own, and mine made me start paying more attention to my immediate surroundings. When one is still alive, feelings usually have an organic origin (such as cold or physical discomfort). When one is dead those physical sensations are gone, and feeling the way I did is usually a cause for spiritual concern.
I gazed around the stadium, and finally saw the the cause of the problem - a lone revenant ghosting around the lockers. A sudden chill that had nothing to do with the ice and everything to do with fear swept through me. Belatedly, I realised that I knew nothing about dealing with revenants, other than recognising them for what they were and running as fast as I could in the opposite direction as soon as possible. That, however, was not an acceptable tactic for situations such as this one, where I had someone to look out for.
Revenants are ghouls and they aren’t fond of the living because they’re no longer one of them. They're souls consumed by anger or grief or jealousy, any and all of the negative emotions you can think of. It rots them away until nothing but a hunger for destruction is left. They're anathema to the living, and the dead, and that's reflected in the way they make you feel. Prolonged or concentrated exposure to one can and does actually have a corruptive effect, and one I was particularly anxious to prevent.
I turned to look at Conrad, who had progressed to keeping one hand on the guardrail, and my non-existent stomach went sick with fear. He was at the far side of the rink, isolated from the rest of his class and teacher. And the revenant was slowly closing the distance.
I made a quick decision. The first and most obvious goal was to get the boy out of harm's way. Hopefully, off the ice, and then, we could set about putting as much distance between the revenant and ourselves. I groaned mentally as I realised that getting him to safety would first involve getting him off the ice and then out of his skates, both requiring completely unacceptable delays before I could get him out of this place and into the nearest church. Revenants were usually unable to enter the houses of the holy, and the boy's faith was naturally stronger there, and could serve as additional armour.
All the thinking wasn't getting anything done, so I uttered a muffled curse and slipped through the guardrail.
Problem was, I wasn't the only one with the same idea. The revenant seemed to sense my presence and purpose simultaneously, and instantly stopped moseying around. It turned its sightless head towards me, and then, as if dismissing me, changed course abruptly and headed straight for my boy.
"Oh, no," I yelled. "CONRAD! GET OFF THE ICE!”
The boy turned at the sound of my voice, and his line of sight fell instantly on the approaching revenant. His eyes widened impossibly, and he choked with fear. Panic made him clumsy and he instantly slipped, lost hold of the guardrail, and fell.
Sasha Cohen1 once said that when a skater fell on the ice, it was like everything inside of them fell, too.
She forgot entirely to mention that for those watching them, it felt just like that, too.
"Damn it!" I cursed, now completely terrified. If I had been, you know, not dead, and capable of touching the boy, I'd have hauled ass, slung him over my shoulder, and gotten the hell out of there. His ability or inability to get off the ice would have been completely irrelevant. As it was, the revenant wasn't slowing down, and I sped up across the ice and managed to hurl myself in between the creature and the boy before it could touch him.
I thought I'd left pain behind. I was wrong.
Where the revenant collided with me, I felt the most awful sense of wrongness, as if I'd been thrust back into my physical body and all my bones had been broken. And then, impossibly, pain followed suit, despite my lack of nerve endings with which to feel it. The revenant's rotting jaws opened in a gruesome grin, and tattered fingers secured a stranglehold around my throat. I choked, and began to claw uselessly at them. Despite being dead, the revenant wasn’t quite ready to give up the ghost yet.
I consoled myself momentarily with the thought that as long as it was occupied with me, it wasn’t doing anything to the child, and refocused my attention on fighting for my afterlife.
Then the unthinkable happened. The air around us suddenly grew warm, and I twisted around in the revenant’s grip to find the boy most distinctly not off the ice, but kneeling on it, his hands clasped together in an attitude of. . . prayer?
“The hell?” I asked, the surprise overcoming our desperate situation. "Kid, this is no time for -"
The kid’s gaze fell on the revenant, and his eyes narrowed. He opened his mouth, and in a voice that sounded older than the sky and clearer than the stars on a winter’s night, he said, quite clearly and calmly, "Go to hell."
And the revenant did just that. Not without a lot of howling and attempting to tear me apart, but it dissolved slowly, leaving a film of ash on the ice that also disappeared. I tried to haul myself to my feet, but found the effort beyond me.
I heard a dragging sound over the ice, and the kid popped up next to me. I smiled at him, despite feeling like death warmed over. "Kid," I said, "Get up. You're going to catch a chill from staying on the ice too long."
He reached out a hand as if to help me up.
“No touching,” I snapped, or tried to snap, which meant that it came out as a disgruntled gasp. Never thought I’d still be breathless when I was no longer breathing. "I'm probably incredibly unclean."
A smile flickered across his face. "I can fix that," he offered, and before I could say no, he was praying again. But this time, everything in my field of vision turned to gold, and it felt like summer had woken up inside of me.
When the glow faded enough for me to look around and realise I felt well enough to assess the damage, I discovered that two massive pinions the size of coffee tables appeared to be growing out of my back, and the kid was looking at me as if he’d just seen...
A goddamned angel.
"You planned this!" I yelled at Seri. "All that claptrap about him calling me Luke, about praying with him, about never telling him how I died! You set things up so he'd think I was his guardian angel!"
"Took you long enough to figure that out," he retorted. "Just in time to save him from a nasty fate."
"I didn’t save him. He saved himself."
Seri shook his head. "You saved each other."
"I wish," I retorted.
Seri rolled his eyes. "Have I ever told you something just to make you feel good about yourself?"
I glared at him. "No, you tell me things to make me feel awful."
"And how true that is," he said. "So shut up, and listen. True, the child called down the strength and power of the God he believed in so fiercely, but he would not have been able to do it on his own. You were his focus, and it was into you that he poured his strength and everything that was in his child's heart to believe, and it was in you that his faith took form."
"Sounds pretty," I said, after a long pause. "But not possible."
“Silly child,” he said, meaning me. "His faith was your armour, yes. But your love was his shield." He smiled at me, and his smile was as brilliant as the light from Heaven had been. "And I see you've earned your wings."
"Oh, these?" I asked, lifting the right one. “"They're part of the kid’s magic. Don't get used to them."
Seri looked at me as if I was the stupidest individual he'd ever had the misfortune of laying eyes on. (I probably was.) "My apologies for having to destroy your absence of faith, but those are quite real."
He let my horrified silence continue for longer than strictly necessary (I swear, that man is a sadist) before saying, rather delicately, "Real doesn't mean permanent, you ridiculous thing, stop gaping like a goldfish. I don't think you were a candidate for angelhood in any event, but I do think you were given those for a reason. And since you are hardly smart enough to figure out what I'm talking about, let me say that in all likelihood, he did not consciously intend it. It was probably to fulfill an... unconscious... wish of his."
My world suddenly went a little unsteady around the edges. "You do mean unconscious," I said, slowly.
"I did say you were hardly smart. So, yes."
"You mean his father," I said.
"Indeed. I did."
Odd as it sounded, that was the day that I realised that existence (such as it is) can end at any time. You might think it odd for me to say such things, seeing as how I'm already dead, but I'd thought that because I'd already died once, I couldn't die again.
I was wrong. And I wasn't about to die again before I could make things right.
The ward was quiet as I drifted back in to St. Michael’s Hospital. I returned to Conrad's father's room, and stood by his bedside, watching him sleep.
The face of the man who’d run me down in his car on that snowy road eight years ago hand changed since I’d remembered it. Time had run her fingers through his hair, leaving silver. He looked much older and infinitely more worn than the mere passage of eight years would have accounted for, and I felt a pang for that. I wanted the kid to have a father who'd be able to play ball games with him in the park, able to lift him up on his shoulders and swing him up high, a father able to talk to him about life and choices and accidents and how he should never, ever dress up in a peacock costume2, about how we sometimes make mistakes, even when we don’t mean to.
I looked at Conrad's father and sighed. I didn't quite know how to do this, and I wasn't sure if it was going to make any difference, and no one was watching anyway.
"Hey, Mister," I said, my voice sounding surprisingly loud. "It's been a long time, but man, you raised a cute kid. I wish you were out here in the world to see him." I paused, collected my thoughts, and continued. "Kid's great and all, but all kids need a father, if you know what I mean? Somebody to be there for him, to take care of him, to make sure he grows up to be a good man. And I know I'm here for him and -" I stopped, for a bit, until I was sure, and then I said, "And I hope I'll always be here for him, but, I think he needs you. He misses you, you know. And I grew up without a father, so I know how it feels, and I don't want him to feel that way."
I smiled, embarrassed, because I was starting to feel real silly. "Hey, I can't raise this kid all on my own! He's gonna need someone real. He's gonna need his dad. So, please, Mister, get well, soon?"
I wasn't done yet, but there was one, last, important thing which I had to say.
"Mister, you know, that deal about you and me? Why I'm in here and why you're in here. I suppose we're responsible for each other. Now… it wouldn't be honest for me to tell you it's all okay, because I kinda wasn't planning on dying quite so young, and maybe I didn't have plans for what I wanted to do with my life, but I kinda figured I was going to have rather more of it than I ended up getting." It was so odd saying this, but my chest felt so tight, as if the heart I no longer had was expanding fit to burst. I didn't want to end up crying, so the rest of it came out real fast.
"But I just wanted you to know, Mister, no hard feelings. It's taken me a long time to get over dying, but the thing is, I'm here now, and the world's moving on, and I'd best be moving on, too. You had a wife and a kid to raise, and there would have been no meaning in you owning up and doing time. Wouldn't have fixed anything. Wouldn't bring me back to life. Wouldn't have made anything but a whole world of suffering for your wife and kid."
"So, Mister," I said, quite sure I was done, "I forgive you, okay? Come back."
Yet, somehow, that wasn't quite enough, and I didn't know how I knew. But as surely as I knew that I was dead and the man before me was alive and that there was no justice in that, I knew that there was something else I had to do.
I grimaced and leaned down over the bed. Take a breath, even though I no longer breathe. "Okay, Mister," I whisper, and if blood still ran through my veins, my face would be as scarlet as the morning sky. "This is gay as hell, but your kid needs you."
And then I leaned over and kissed the forehead of the man who'd been the death of me.
"I forgive you," I said.
The world was quiet around my words.
The wings disintegrated into shimmering dust that drifted into a halo around the sleeping man for a heartbeat, before vanishing without a trace. Maybe it was my wishful thinking, but he seemed to breathe easier, and it looked as if he had relaxed, imperceptibly.
When boys and angels have done all they can, that's when it's time to leave things in the hands of hope.
Or as the boy would say, in God's hands.
It is near dawn when I return to the boy. I make no noise as I drift in through the door and stand by his bed, but by some unfathomable power, he awakens, and opens his eyes to look at me.
And then he bolts up in his sheets and hurls himself at me.
Sometimes he forgets that I'm dead, but that’s all right, because sometimes, he makes me forget, too.
My arms come up around him, quite unconsciously, and even though I cannot feel it, I know, somehow, that I hold the future within them.
So here's one more way dying's like living: sometimes, what gets you through is knowing that there are things worth dying for.
the end
1: The 2006 US Figure Skating Champion, not the comedian.
2: Unless you have neither: (a) shame, or (b) dignity; or, (c) are a professional figure skater.
email: edgeofdawn [at] gmail.com
In one way, dying's just like living. You've got to do it with no regrets.
Because, things get really messed up, both in this life, and the next, if you don't. And sometimes when things are messed up for you, you start messing things up for other people. Then other people have to come in and take care of your mess and the mess you've created for other people, and it just never is pretty, in this world or the next.
If I’ve learned anything since I’ve been dead, it's that trouble's one of the constants between this life and the next. Makes things easier for the dead, I've always thought, having this world not that much different from the one they’ve left behind.
And speaking of trouble...
"Why won’t you let me rest in peace?" I groaned, hovering several inches above the ground to express my complete displeasure at the summons.
"You have every right to rest in peace," said Seri, tartly. "What you lack is the ability."
I snarled and followed him. Seri, my self-proclaimed spiritual mentor (though if you take it from me, his true role is that of my spiritual tor mentor), summoner, and all-round pain-in-MY-ass. Not that I feel pain of the physical variety anymore, but the pain of having to do as you’re told is pretty universal. It’s why zombies aren’t particularly happy creatures, but that’s a story for another day.
Unlike Haley Joel Osment, who sees dead people, I am dead people.
I don’t get why people are so fascinated with death. I didn't get it when I was alive, and I don’t get it now when I'm dead. You’re only alive for as long as you have to live. You’re dead forever.
And speaking of being dead…
I know who killed me.
My murderer was a man with chestnut-coloured hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and was wearing a puce-green jacket he’d thrown on in his haste to get out of the house. He was middle-aged, his face was worn with worry, and he was about to become a father for the first time. He was driving a beat-up rental, and in the backseat was his wife, about to bring their child into the world. It was snowing, he was in a hurry, and it was perfectly understandable that he was less than careful.
I had stopped at the crossroads of a quiet junction to watch the snow fall when our paths crossed on that fateful winter night. I heard a horn in the silence of the night, and I turned around too late, as the car skidded on the slush on the roads, and knocked me down.
The last thing I remember about being alive is the stars over where I lay. I don’t remember any pain, and I don’t remember the moment I died.
I do know that the man who killed me stopped his car instantly, wrenched open the door and ran over to my side, where he tried to wake me and took my pulse, only to realise (before I did) what he'd done. I was watching this from where I stood, wondering if this was the out-of-body experience that I’d heard about.
I didnt know I was dead yet, so I admired what he did next: he gathered me up into his arms, very gently, and he carried me to the car. His wife was wild with fear and pain for herself and her unborn child, and I am glad to say that my appearance did not give her much cause for alarm: she had much more to worry about.
It was only later in the hospital, when a doctor pronounced me dead on arrival, that I realised what had happened.
That was eight years ago.
I only found out how long I’d been dead when Seri found me. I'd been wandering tfor eight years, long enough for several of the sighted to notice me and pass reports on. Seri had been appointed to persuade me to move on. Well, Seri says persuade, I say force, Seri says it all amounts to the same thing, and whether it’s one or the other depends on whether you’re doing the persuading or being persuaded.
Sometimes I hate that man.
Seri's never talked about it, but I think he must have been surprised when he finally talked to me, because I was nothing like any of the wandering ones he’d met before. Now I know that he had been sent to get me to move on. Forcibly, if he had to. Spirits haunting the earth for as long as I had been either lack a purpose and end up as haunts, or are chained to the earth by unfinished business of the unpleasant variety. In the former case, Seri’s role was either to persuade the soul to move on to its proper resting place, or to banish it from this realm, if it was one of the unquiet ones. In the latter case, Seri’s job was to help finish the spirit’s unfinished business here on earth, so it could move on.
I’d always suspected Seri preferred the former to the latter, especially the latter of the former. If Seri had been a gunslinger, he’d have been one of the 'Shoot First, and There'll Be No Need for Questions Later' kind.
Most days, I enjoyed being dead. You didn't need sleep, food, didn’t get tired, could go just about anywhere, see anyone living (and a few of the dead) that you wanted. You never had to pay for movie tickets, theatre tickets, bus fares, road tax, groceries, rent. You simply didn’t have to deal with the trappings of living anymore, and you didn't have to worry about keeping body and soul together. You didn't have to deal with deadlines anymore. It was kind of like being immortal.
And also kind of ironic, seeing as how you had to die to get there.
Sure, there were downsides to being dead. But wishing myself otherwise wasn't going to grant me a resurrection, so I resolved to make the best of it.
But Seri found me, and my life (or my death, such as it was) changed.
I wasn't in good spirits this morning. People (or should I say, ex-people) like us don’t need to sleep, but I’ve not been dead long enough to forget the habits of the living, and, out of habit, I doze, and I like taking my time about waking up.
The reason for my being so dispirited this morning was entirely Seri's fault. He'd gotten it into his head that as long as I was here on earth, I should do something productive. I complained that I'd been quite happy, and that I'd kept myself occupied for the eight years before he'd barged into my un-life, and I could keep doing so for the rest of eternity. But I was always curious, and what he wanted me to do sounded suitably intriguing.
"I want you to watch over one of the Sighted Ones," Seri had told me. The Sighted Ones are those who can see us. There aren't many of them, and as far as we can tell, the ability is occasionally hereditary, as is madness (indeed, the Sight has been taken for madness), but just as often as it is passed on, it isn't. Individuals can be born with the Sight, or can develop it at any age later in life.
In either case, learning to live with the Sight is perilous business. It can't be shared with too many people: most would think the Sighted One eccentric at best, insane at worst. They've got to be taught to live with it, and learn the extent of their powers and how to stop seeing things they don't want to see; or at least to stop reacting publicly to things other people can't see. And if no sympathetic or suitably informed individuals exist in their lives, that's when people like us step in.
As we walked towards our not-quite-final destination, Seri stopped me, quite suddenly, before we entered a classically-designed house on a tree-lined avenue. "I want you to remember three things when this one is in your charge," he said. "Firstly, introduce yourself to him as Luke."
"Whatever for?" I asked, genuinely curious. I had a perfectly serviceable name.
"I'll explain it to you in time to come," replied Seri, and I knew that was the end of that. "Secondly," continued Seri, "This one's a believer. I know you have no ...faith, but take his belief seriously. It is his one constant in his turbulent world, and it is the main source of his strength."
I nodded. I've seen stranger, and I know those with the sight certainly need their strength. I'd be the last one to begrudge them any way they found it. "
"I know it is a great deal to ask, but if you can, whenever this boy prays, pray with him. It would mean a great deal to him, I think. Maybe it might even help you find your peace.”
I learned early on never to roll my eyes at him: I’d get an earful for my trouble. So I refrained from sharing my opinions with him, and thought long and hard before coming up with my reply. "I'll think about it," I said.
"Third, and last thing. Never tell him how you died."
"Okay," I said, finding it a little unusual that it was so important for him to tell me this. I knew my charge was young, and that he probably didn't need to hear how I'd died, though I was certain that as one with the Sight, he'd seen far worse already.
"Say no more than you died in an accident, should he ask. I want there to be honesty between the two of you, but this is where it stops for now."
Seri and I walked through the heavy oak-paneled door to a study where sunlight spilled in through the open window, and the spring breeze tossed the branches of the trees outside. A good day to be alive.
He was sitting in a wing chair that completely dwarfed him, face turned to the sun outside. As we neared, Seri held out his hand to stop me from going further. "Young one?" he asked, his voice gentler than I'd ever heard. "We're here. And I've brought someone with me, just as I said I would, the last time we talked."
The boy turned his face to us, and the moment I'd set eyes on him, I could've sworn I was looking at an angel, fallen from Heaven down to earth before our eyes.
He was tiny - he couldn't have been more than eight years old, with perfect honey-coloured hair cut so that it fell softly around his face, and the most impossibly blue eyes I’d ever seen on anyone, living or dead. The poor boy, understandably, looked like he'd just seen a ghost.
He looked like a very lost and forlorn kitten, and his huge eyes got even huger as he registered that there were two of us. Seri stopped several feet from him, and I followed suit.
"This is Conrad McLaughlin," said Seri, and then he turned and addressed the boy. "And this is Luke."
I dropped to one knee before the kid. I towered over him as it was, and I thought it quite impolite to stay up there. "Hi, kid," I said, cautiously.
He nodded once, somewhat jerkily, never taking his eyes off my face.
"Well then," said Seri. "I'll leave you two to get better acquainted."
And without so much as a by-your-leave, he tipped his head at the kid and walked abruptly through the wall, leaving me with a boy who looked as if he'd been alive for only as long as I'd been dead, as much a stranger to me as I was to him.
That's Seri for you. He's a huge fan of the whole "throw-the-spook-to-the-seer and see how they handle it" approach.
The silence stretched on, with him staring at me as though I was going to devour him, and with me feeling increasingly awkward. The awkwardness got to such a point that I voiced the first stupid thought that came into my head, just to break the silence.
"Uh," I said intelligently. "Have you had your breakfast?"
A nervous smile appeared for a moment around the corner of the boy’s mouth. "...No," he said and then his stomach growled so loudly that the both of us laughed, after a stunned silence. Man, I had not forgotten that much about being mortal: little boys were hungry all the time.
"I can hear that, kid," I said, smiling"C'mon, let's go get you something."
We got used to each other, slowly, but surely. Seri had said he chose me because out of the ghosts he knew, I was the one who'd retained most of my human attributes. That is to say, I didn't like floating through doors, wasn't fond of walking through walls, used staircases and doors like mortals, and wasn't given to flashy demonstrations of poltergeist activity. So I watched over the kid, for most part, feeling like a spectral servant when I did things like make his bed, make sure he ate his breakfast, make him go to bed and do his homework and get up on time, so much so that I wasn't surprised that my parents had opted out of the raising of me.
We'd spent several weeks without a glimpse of Conrad’s dad, who he'd once let slip was in hospital. I thought about it for several days before breaching the subject to him, asking if he didn't want to visit.
Conrad’'s eyes got haunted, and he said, quite softly, that it wouldn't do any good.
But I'd put the idea in his head, and a week later, as I was settling him down to sleep, he said, rather diffidently, that if I didn't mind, he thought he'd like to visit his father, and if it was all right, could I go with him?
I said I had all the time in the world, and of course I'd go.
Conrad smiled, and then said, in the voice of someone trying to make a joke of something very serious to them, that I might find a friend there.
Why, I'd asked him, curiosity instantly roused.
His eyes grew serious as he recounted to me his father's last days with him. His mother's departure had left the man unbalanced, from the sound of it, and eventually, his father had started rambling about this being punishment for something he'd done, and Conrad told me that his father had alluded to being responsible for some great crime which he should have, and hadn't been, punished for.
I told him that disturbed people said a great many things, and not to take it to heart. Save for idle conjecture as to what it could have been, I put it largely from my mind, until the day we made the trip to St. Michael's Hospital.
What Conrad had omitted to tell me (and indeed, perhaps he did not know, and it was better that he didn't) was that his father was warded in an institute for the mentally disturbed. It looked like a hospital to anyone, yes, but the patients there were suffering from wounds and diseases of the mind. I started to regret my decision to bring the boy here, but stayed close to him and hoped that the visit would be uneventful.
Eventually we came to a tiny ward, and Conrad pushed the door open. I'd have helped, but people would have noticed.
"Father?" he asked, hesitantly.
There was no reply.
As we neared the bed, a jolt of pure horror raced through me.
The man on the bed, asleep and completely unaware of my presence, was not a stranger to me. In fact, one could easily have said he was responsible for bringing me here in the first place, in every sense of the word. For the worn, tired face belonged to the man behind the wheel the night I'd died, the man who’d carried me in his arms so very gently the night I died, the very man who had in fact been the death of me.
Distantly, I could hear the child's voice calling for me, panicked and fearful, as I walked through walls and shot through doors and did everything in my power to put as much distance between me and that room, as if by doing that I could put from my mind the memory of that night on which my life had ended and the boy's had begun.
Seri found me several hours later, extremely unhappy that I had left the boy in the asylum. His voice seemed to be speaking to me from miles away, and I didn't even react when he hauled me back to the boy's bedroom and commanded I watch over him until a replacement could be found. I could do that much even if my heart wasn't in it, he’d snapped, and I should know by now where to put my heart when someone else's well-being was at stake.
I didn't feel much like talking to the kid or doing the guardian spirit stuff much, the next day. I knew that it wasn't his fault, but some mean part of me that should've died when I did didn’t agree. Still, it wouldn't have been right to just leave him with no one to watch over him, so I followed him on his class trip.
I thought it was a ridiculous idea to bring eight-year-old children to the skating rink: seriously, hadn't their teachers heard of legal liability? But the kids looked like they were having fun, even when they were falling on their faces even though they never let go of the side of the rink. Conrad looked small, earnest and way too young to be skating without someone to hold his hand (never mind that there were three-year-old kids on the far side of the rink skating with amazing skill. Some people are freaks). He'd fallen twice already, but had gotten up each time, brushed the ice off his clothes, and kept trying. Against my will, I admired his tenacity. If I'd been in his position at that age I'd probably have sat on the ice and bawled until I was removed.
It looked really interesting, though, and that was nearly our downfall. I was so preoccupied with watching him that I didn't notice the revenant until it was too close for comfort.
The first thing I noticed was that uncomfortable, but completely distinctive feeling that someone was walking over my grave. While this was in fact possible, it wasn't something to be disregarded. Us spirits have a sixth sense all our own, and mine made me start paying more attention to my immediate surroundings. When one is still alive, feelings usually have an organic origin (such as cold or physical discomfort). When one is dead those physical sensations are gone, and feeling the way I did is usually a cause for spiritual concern.
I gazed around the stadium, and finally saw the the cause of the problem - a lone revenant ghosting around the lockers. A sudden chill that had nothing to do with the ice and everything to do with fear swept through me. Belatedly, I realised that I knew nothing about dealing with revenants, other than recognising them for what they were and running as fast as I could in the opposite direction as soon as possible. That, however, was not an acceptable tactic for situations such as this one, where I had someone to look out for.
Revenants are ghouls and they aren’t fond of the living because they’re no longer one of them. They're souls consumed by anger or grief or jealousy, any and all of the negative emotions you can think of. It rots them away until nothing but a hunger for destruction is left. They're anathema to the living, and the dead, and that's reflected in the way they make you feel. Prolonged or concentrated exposure to one can and does actually have a corruptive effect, and one I was particularly anxious to prevent.
I turned to look at Conrad, who had progressed to keeping one hand on the guardrail, and my non-existent stomach went sick with fear. He was at the far side of the rink, isolated from the rest of his class and teacher. And the revenant was slowly closing the distance.
I made a quick decision. The first and most obvious goal was to get the boy out of harm's way. Hopefully, off the ice, and then, we could set about putting as much distance between the revenant and ourselves. I groaned mentally as I realised that getting him to safety would first involve getting him off the ice and then out of his skates, both requiring completely unacceptable delays before I could get him out of this place and into the nearest church. Revenants were usually unable to enter the houses of the holy, and the boy's faith was naturally stronger there, and could serve as additional armour.
All the thinking wasn't getting anything done, so I uttered a muffled curse and slipped through the guardrail.
Problem was, I wasn't the only one with the same idea. The revenant seemed to sense my presence and purpose simultaneously, and instantly stopped moseying around. It turned its sightless head towards me, and then, as if dismissing me, changed course abruptly and headed straight for my boy.
"Oh, no," I yelled. "CONRAD! GET OFF THE ICE!”
The boy turned at the sound of my voice, and his line of sight fell instantly on the approaching revenant. His eyes widened impossibly, and he choked with fear. Panic made him clumsy and he instantly slipped, lost hold of the guardrail, and fell.
Sasha Cohen1 once said that when a skater fell on the ice, it was like everything inside of them fell, too.
She forgot entirely to mention that for those watching them, it felt just like that, too.
"Damn it!" I cursed, now completely terrified. If I had been, you know, not dead, and capable of touching the boy, I'd have hauled ass, slung him over my shoulder, and gotten the hell out of there. His ability or inability to get off the ice would have been completely irrelevant. As it was, the revenant wasn't slowing down, and I sped up across the ice and managed to hurl myself in between the creature and the boy before it could touch him.
I thought I'd left pain behind. I was wrong.
Where the revenant collided with me, I felt the most awful sense of wrongness, as if I'd been thrust back into my physical body and all my bones had been broken. And then, impossibly, pain followed suit, despite my lack of nerve endings with which to feel it. The revenant's rotting jaws opened in a gruesome grin, and tattered fingers secured a stranglehold around my throat. I choked, and began to claw uselessly at them. Despite being dead, the revenant wasn’t quite ready to give up the ghost yet.
I consoled myself momentarily with the thought that as long as it was occupied with me, it wasn’t doing anything to the child, and refocused my attention on fighting for my afterlife.
Then the unthinkable happened. The air around us suddenly grew warm, and I twisted around in the revenant’s grip to find the boy most distinctly not off the ice, but kneeling on it, his hands clasped together in an attitude of. . . prayer?
“The hell?” I asked, the surprise overcoming our desperate situation. "Kid, this is no time for -"
The kid’s gaze fell on the revenant, and his eyes narrowed. He opened his mouth, and in a voice that sounded older than the sky and clearer than the stars on a winter’s night, he said, quite clearly and calmly, "Go to hell."
And the revenant did just that. Not without a lot of howling and attempting to tear me apart, but it dissolved slowly, leaving a film of ash on the ice that also disappeared. I tried to haul myself to my feet, but found the effort beyond me.
I heard a dragging sound over the ice, and the kid popped up next to me. I smiled at him, despite feeling like death warmed over. "Kid," I said, "Get up. You're going to catch a chill from staying on the ice too long."
He reached out a hand as if to help me up.
“No touching,” I snapped, or tried to snap, which meant that it came out as a disgruntled gasp. Never thought I’d still be breathless when I was no longer breathing. "I'm probably incredibly unclean."
A smile flickered across his face. "I can fix that," he offered, and before I could say no, he was praying again. But this time, everything in my field of vision turned to gold, and it felt like summer had woken up inside of me.
When the glow faded enough for me to look around and realise I felt well enough to assess the damage, I discovered that two massive pinions the size of coffee tables appeared to be growing out of my back, and the kid was looking at me as if he’d just seen...
A goddamned angel.
"You planned this!" I yelled at Seri. "All that claptrap about him calling me Luke, about praying with him, about never telling him how I died! You set things up so he'd think I was his guardian angel!"
"Took you long enough to figure that out," he retorted. "Just in time to save him from a nasty fate."
"I didn’t save him. He saved himself."
Seri shook his head. "You saved each other."
"I wish," I retorted.
Seri rolled his eyes. "Have I ever told you something just to make you feel good about yourself?"
I glared at him. "No, you tell me things to make me feel awful."
"And how true that is," he said. "So shut up, and listen. True, the child called down the strength and power of the God he believed in so fiercely, but he would not have been able to do it on his own. You were his focus, and it was into you that he poured his strength and everything that was in his child's heart to believe, and it was in you that his faith took form."
"Sounds pretty," I said, after a long pause. "But not possible."
“Silly child,” he said, meaning me. "His faith was your armour, yes. But your love was his shield." He smiled at me, and his smile was as brilliant as the light from Heaven had been. "And I see you've earned your wings."
"Oh, these?" I asked, lifting the right one. “"They're part of the kid’s magic. Don't get used to them."
Seri looked at me as if I was the stupidest individual he'd ever had the misfortune of laying eyes on. (I probably was.) "My apologies for having to destroy your absence of faith, but those are quite real."
He let my horrified silence continue for longer than strictly necessary (I swear, that man is a sadist) before saying, rather delicately, "Real doesn't mean permanent, you ridiculous thing, stop gaping like a goldfish. I don't think you were a candidate for angelhood in any event, but I do think you were given those for a reason. And since you are hardly smart enough to figure out what I'm talking about, let me say that in all likelihood, he did not consciously intend it. It was probably to fulfill an... unconscious... wish of his."
My world suddenly went a little unsteady around the edges. "You do mean unconscious," I said, slowly.
"I did say you were hardly smart. So, yes."
"You mean his father," I said.
"Indeed. I did."
Odd as it sounded, that was the day that I realised that existence (such as it is) can end at any time. You might think it odd for me to say such things, seeing as how I'm already dead, but I'd thought that because I'd already died once, I couldn't die again.
I was wrong. And I wasn't about to die again before I could make things right.
The ward was quiet as I drifted back in to St. Michael’s Hospital. I returned to Conrad's father's room, and stood by his bedside, watching him sleep.
The face of the man who’d run me down in his car on that snowy road eight years ago hand changed since I’d remembered it. Time had run her fingers through his hair, leaving silver. He looked much older and infinitely more worn than the mere passage of eight years would have accounted for, and I felt a pang for that. I wanted the kid to have a father who'd be able to play ball games with him in the park, able to lift him up on his shoulders and swing him up high, a father able to talk to him about life and choices and accidents and how he should never, ever dress up in a peacock costume2, about how we sometimes make mistakes, even when we don’t mean to.
I looked at Conrad's father and sighed. I didn't quite know how to do this, and I wasn't sure if it was going to make any difference, and no one was watching anyway.
"Hey, Mister," I said, my voice sounding surprisingly loud. "It's been a long time, but man, you raised a cute kid. I wish you were out here in the world to see him." I paused, collected my thoughts, and continued. "Kid's great and all, but all kids need a father, if you know what I mean? Somebody to be there for him, to take care of him, to make sure he grows up to be a good man. And I know I'm here for him and -" I stopped, for a bit, until I was sure, and then I said, "And I hope I'll always be here for him, but, I think he needs you. He misses you, you know. And I grew up without a father, so I know how it feels, and I don't want him to feel that way."
I smiled, embarrassed, because I was starting to feel real silly. "Hey, I can't raise this kid all on my own! He's gonna need someone real. He's gonna need his dad. So, please, Mister, get well, soon?"
I wasn't done yet, but there was one, last, important thing which I had to say.
"Mister, you know, that deal about you and me? Why I'm in here and why you're in here. I suppose we're responsible for each other. Now… it wouldn't be honest for me to tell you it's all okay, because I kinda wasn't planning on dying quite so young, and maybe I didn't have plans for what I wanted to do with my life, but I kinda figured I was going to have rather more of it than I ended up getting." It was so odd saying this, but my chest felt so tight, as if the heart I no longer had was expanding fit to burst. I didn't want to end up crying, so the rest of it came out real fast.
"But I just wanted you to know, Mister, no hard feelings. It's taken me a long time to get over dying, but the thing is, I'm here now, and the world's moving on, and I'd best be moving on, too. You had a wife and a kid to raise, and there would have been no meaning in you owning up and doing time. Wouldn't have fixed anything. Wouldn't bring me back to life. Wouldn't have made anything but a whole world of suffering for your wife and kid."
"So, Mister," I said, quite sure I was done, "I forgive you, okay? Come back."
Yet, somehow, that wasn't quite enough, and I didn't know how I knew. But as surely as I knew that I was dead and the man before me was alive and that there was no justice in that, I knew that there was something else I had to do.
I grimaced and leaned down over the bed. Take a breath, even though I no longer breathe. "Okay, Mister," I whisper, and if blood still ran through my veins, my face would be as scarlet as the morning sky. "This is gay as hell, but your kid needs you."
And then I leaned over and kissed the forehead of the man who'd been the death of me.
"I forgive you," I said.
The world was quiet around my words.
The wings disintegrated into shimmering dust that drifted into a halo around the sleeping man for a heartbeat, before vanishing without a trace. Maybe it was my wishful thinking, but he seemed to breathe easier, and it looked as if he had relaxed, imperceptibly.
When boys and angels have done all they can, that's when it's time to leave things in the hands of hope.
Or as the boy would say, in God's hands.
It is near dawn when I return to the boy. I make no noise as I drift in through the door and stand by his bed, but by some unfathomable power, he awakens, and opens his eyes to look at me.
And then he bolts up in his sheets and hurls himself at me.
Sometimes he forgets that I'm dead, but that’s all right, because sometimes, he makes me forget, too.
My arms come up around him, quite unconsciously, and even though I cannot feel it, I know, somehow, that I hold the future within them.
So here's one more way dying's like living: sometimes, what gets you through is knowing that there are things worth dying for.
the end
1: The 2006 US Figure Skating Champion, not the comedian.
2: Unless you have neither: (a) shame, or (b) dignity; or, (c) are a professional figure skater.