by Tim Waggoner
Tim Waggoner has published more than sixty stories of fantasy and horror. His most current stories can be found in the anthologies CJi7i7 War Fantastic, Single White Vampire Seeks Same, and Bruce Coville's UFOs. His first novel, The Harmony Society, is forthcoming. He teaches creative writing at Sinclair Community College in Dayton, Ohio.
"THE roads were narrower than he remembered; twistier—if that was a word—and rougher. The ditches on either side of the road were overgrown with weeds, tall grass, and stalks of Queen Anne's lace. There weren't many homes out here, mostly farmhouses set back a ways from the road, fields of corn and soybeans forming green barriers between their planters and the world.
Thomas Wolfe said you can't go home again, but Michael knew that he'd got it wrong. You could go home, but who in their right mind would want to? But that was the problem: he wasn't in his right mind, and so he had no choice but to return to Ashton.
"I'm hearing a K word. It's a first name, I think. Kevin? Karl?"
"Could it be Clint? " The woman was soft-spoken, almost timid, but as soon as she said the name, he knew that was it.
"Yes, Clint. He's…" Michael frowned. He tried to ignore the audience, the lights, the cameras, and the crew, and concentrate on the almost inaudible voice whispering in his head. "He's related to you, that's definite. Close. Not a brother or father. Husband. He's your husband."
Ashton was a dirt-poor town in the middle of southwestern Ohio farmland, equally close to the Indiana and Kentucky borders. Houses with flaking paint, drooping gutters, yards that always needed mowing, rusted-out cars up on blocks in the driveway, and too much junk on porches. The main employer in the town, a bicycle factory, had closed its doors when he was a boy, and those foolish enough to stay in Ashton worked what subsistence-level jobs they could find, dull-eyed fish swimrning in a river of alcohol and unfulfilled dreams, marking time until they died.
Except not everyone was content to wait for the inevitable. The grinding despair and hopelessness of life in Ashton took their toll, and every year more than a few folks decided to give the Reaper a helping hand. Gunshots to the head were a popular choice, as was driving your car at full speed into a tree. But the most common method of committing suicide in Ashton by far was jumping off the Old Mill Run Bridge into the rolling water of the Bluerush River.
He remembered an old joke from his childhood. What's the most popular sport in Ashton? Diving.
In his mind, Michael saw the image of a sunflower growing in a garden. The flower was top-heavy and drooped toward the ground, causing the stalk to bend. He wasn't sure what the image meant—he often wasn't—but he knew it didn't matter. His aunt had taught him that.
"You don't need to understand everything the dead show you," she'd said. "You're just their mailman; all you have to do is pass the message along."
He focused his gaze on the woman, on Clint's wife,
Michael described the image of the sunflower, and the woman began to cry.
"I had a sunflower just like that in my garden. My husband teased me about how ugly it was, he… he used to say he was going to go out and cut it down, but of course he never did. Then one day—"
Another image came to Michael. "He took an old broom handle and used it to straighten the sunflower. He tied the stalk to the wood with a piece of twine so it would stand upright."
The woman's eyes grew wide, and she smiled in delight and disbelief. "Yes! But how could you know that?"
It was Michael's turn to smile. "Because he just told me."
He'd never had many friends growing up. To most of the other kids, he was the boy who lived outside of town in the trailer with the "old witch woman." Luckily, that reputation had kept him from getting beaten up more than once or twice, but that was about all it was good for. Ashton was a lousy place for anyone to grow up, but for someone of his abilities, the psychic atmosphere of the town was stifling and oppressive. He had no idea how his aunt endured it. When he at last reached adulthood, he joined a traveling carnival as a medium and got the hell out of Ashton. He'd returned only a handful of times since, and then only to visit his aunt on holidays.
Even though it wasn't that hot out for late June, Michael kept the windows of his BMW rolled up and the air conditioner running. He told himself it was because he didn't want to set off his hay fever, but in truth, he just didn't want to breathe the air, didn't want to fill his lungs with the smells of grass, corn, and manure. He'd spent a decade and a half purging his system of this place, and he wanted to limit his exposure to it as much as possible.
As the applause began to die down, he felt a tingling at the base of his skull. Clint, trying to get his attention. Michael redoubled his concentration, attempting to clear his mind and be open to the spirit's energy. He could feel Clint's presence grow stronger, as if the man had been standing a dozen yards away a moment ago, but now had stepped to within arm's length. He felt the man take one step closer, lean forward and whisper in his ear…
But instead of words, a new image appeared in his mind. A field of darkness rushing toward him, so deep, so utterly devoid of light that it pulled everything toward it; a complete, profound emptiness demanding to be filled. Then, as the blackness drew nearer—or as Michael was sucked toward it—he saw that what he had first taken for nothingness was instead something far worse. And it reached for him with a million-million grasping ebon claws.
Michael's eyes flew open and a scream tore free from his lips—a scream that might have been his, but just as easily might have belonged to a dead man named Clint. The studio lights spun in his vision, his knees buckled, and he felt himself begin to fall toward the floor.
He had a Beethoven CD playing—the "Symphony No. 9 in D minor"—the volume turned up so high he could feel the steering wheel vibrating in time with the music. But as loud as it was, the symphony couldn't drown out the whispers that tickled the inside of his ears. Whispers that grew louder and clearer with every mile he put behind him.
He knew other tricks to shut the voices out, though. Lots of them.
* * *
"You want to touch it, don't you? Go ahead; it can't hurt you, child."
Michael was six years old, and he had never touched anything dead. Not unless you counted food that had once been alive, like hamburgers and fried chicken, but Aunt Lena said that wasn't the same.
Once an animal's been killed, reduced to hunks of meat, and then cooked, the tie to its spirit has been well and truly severed. Even then, if you're sensitive enough, you sometimes catch an echo of its life when you eat it. That's why a lot of folks like us are vegetarians.
Michael looked down at the dead toad. It was tiny, little more than a baby, really. It lay on its back in the middle of the dirt path that led up to the front door of Aunt Elena's trailer. Michael was responsible for the animal's death. He'd been skipping down the path, singing the ABC song to himself, and hadn't seen the little toad. Without meaning to, he'd stepped on the poor thing, mushing its guts to one side of its belly, leaving the other side flat. The toad had writhed for half an hour before it died. Michael had watched the entire time, on the verge of tears, but also morbidly fascinated. When the toad had finally passed on, he'd gone to get his aunt. She'd know what to do with it.
He looked up at his aunt for confirmation, and she smiled, crow's-feet becoming deeper and more pronounced as she did. She was really his great-aunt, and while he didn't know exactly how old she was, she was the oldest person he knew, which as far as he was concerned meant she was pretty old.
Michael stretched his index finger toward the dead toad—he was nervous, but his finger didn't tremble, remained rock-steady—and gently touched the bulging side of its abdomen. Its skin was soft, leathery, and still warm.
His vision went gray, and he felt a small hot pinprick of pain between his eyes. He gasped, but he didn't remove his finger from the toad.
"What you're feeling is its anger," his aunt said softly. "It blames you for its death, and it's trying to get back at you the only way it knows how, by hurting you. 'Course, it's a small spirit without much power, and so it can't do much damage. Hurts less than a bee sting, doesn't it?"
Michael nodded. "I didn't mean to kill it, though. It was an accident."
"You and I know that, but the toad is just a poor, dumb animal. All it knows is that its life has been taken away and you were the one that did it."
The pain between his eyes began to grow more intense. He tried to pull his fingers away from the toad, but he couldn't. It was like he was glued to the animal.
"It's starting to hurt worse, Aunt 'Lena." He couldn't keep the fear out of his voice.
"Don't you worry. A little old toad spirit can't do you any real harm. And you can make it go away anytime you want."
"I can?"
Aunt Elena nodded. "Close your eyes and imagine that your head is covered by something. A blanket, or maybe a hat."
"How about a helmet, like the kind my army men wear?"
"That'll work fine. Now go ahead: close your eyes and imagine you're wearing a thick, green army-man helmet. A helmet so strong that nothing can get through, not even the pain that little toad ghost is sending you."
Michael did as his aunt instructed. It wasn't easy to ignore the pain between his eyes—it was starting to spread, and felt more like a headache now—but he did it, and imagined the helmet so well that he thought he could actually feel its weight on his head. Within seconds, the pain began to lessen, and soon it vanished entirely. Michael was able to withdraw his finger from the toad then.
He looked up at Aunt 'Lena and smiled. "I did it!"
She grinned, wrapped her fleshy arms around him, and gave him a hug. "You sure did, Mikey! And anytime you're pestered by a spirit that you don't want bothering you, you go ahead and imagine up your army-man helmet, and you'll be just fine. Now let's see about giving this little toad a proper burial, all right?"
* * *
Over the years, Michael had learned that his army-man helmet only worked so well. If a spirit was strong enough and determined to make itself heard, there was only so much you could do to shut it out. But the spirit-whispers that were plaguing him at the moment were primarily background noise, and the helmet image worked well enough in concert with the music. And if the whispers didn't recede entirely, at least they were muted enough to ignore.
He continued on toward Ashton.
He pulled his Beemer to a stop a dozen yards from Elena's trailer, parked, and cut the ignition. He sat behind the wheel for several moments, making himself ready. The trailer—which Elena had named Holly, for reasons that had never been clear to him—sat at the end of a dirt path not quite wide enough to be called a driveway. Its green-and-white siding was tinged with rust at the edges, and the wooden front porch, which he had built and painted over one summer between seventh and eighth grade, was weathered and seriously in need of repainting. The grass was high; it had been a while since she'd mowed, but not so high that the yard looked neglected. Trees surrounded the property on all sides, taller and thicker than he remembered. When he was a child, the trees had made the place seem cozy, safe, and protected, but when he'd become an adolescent, they'd been stifling, a cage made of brown, gray, and green. Now, they were just trees.
He took a deep breath, held it for a count of three—just as Elena had taught him—and let it out slowly. Telling himself that he felt calmer now, though in truth he didn't, he got out of the car and started for the porch. Branches swayed in the summer breeze, their leaves shusssshing against one another, the sound overlaid by birdsong and cicada-thrum. He listened for the whispers, but heard none.
It was almost as if the dead had paused in their eternal gossip-ing, watching and listening to see what would happen next.
He walked up the front steps and onto the porch, turned toward the screen door, half-expecting Elena to be standing there waiting for him. After all, she had to have been aware that he was coming home. But she wasn't there. He started to knock, then paused. Elena would chide him for knocking, would tell him that no matter how long he'd been away, no matter that he hadn't called in months, this was still his home, and he didn't have to knock as if he were some stranger come to sell her something.
He opened the screen door and stepped inside.
The heat bit him first. Elena hated air-conditioning, said it made the air taste wrong, but she didn't like to open the windows in summer, said the humidity made everything feel damp and caused mildew. Next came the smell, a mingled odor of cooked meals, flowers on the verge of rot, and lemon-scented furniture polish. Last, he heard the low tones of a television program drifting from the living room. A man's voice, the cadence rising and falling, almost like he was chanting. Michael couldn't make out the words, but he didn't need to. Elena only ever watched religious programs on TV, and the man was undoubtedly a televangelist.
The trailer's front door opened on a small dining room that Elena hardly ever used. The dining table was covered by framed pictures of family, the older pictures to the rear, the more recent ones in the front. In back were photos of his mom and grandparents, and Aunt Elena's husband—all long deceased. There were no pictures of his father. The man had taken off months before he was born, and had never returned to Ashton. There was a good chance he was probably dead now, too, not that Michael gave a damn. If the man's spirit ever tried to talk to him, Michael would give him the old army helmet treatment. If his father hadn't wanted anything to do with him in life, Michael sure as hell wasn't going to start a relationship with him in death.
To the left of the dining room was the kitchen, to the right the living room. Michael went right.
Elena sat in the recliner he'd bought her with money he'd saved from his first job as a professional medium when he was sixteen. He'd worked as a "spirit-reader" at the county fair one summer, though he'd told Elena that he was cleaning horse stalls at the Johnstons' farm. Elena didn't believe in using their gifts for personal gain, and while she had clearly disapproved once she'd found out where the money for her new chair had come from—and he'd suspected she'd known all along—that hadn't stopped her from accepting his gift.
He wondered how she felt about what he did now. His television show, The Other Side, was one of the most popular programs on cable, its ratings high enough to impress the networks, and there was serious talk of syndication. Since Michael was a cocreator of the show, that meant mucho dinero. And though his aunt had never said anything, he was pretty sure that in her mind, it counted as exploiting his gift for personal gain.
She sat staring at the TV. A white man in an expensive suit with a mound of blow-dried blond hair atop his head stood behind a wooden lectern, talking about the glory of serving Jesus. His face and voice exuded an overly practiced sincerity that couldn't disguise his true message: Give me money.
"Don't be so cynical," she said.
Michael smiled. As irritating as it was never to be able to hide his feelings from her, it was also comforting in its way. No one else in the world knew him as well as she did, and no one ever would.
She was thinner than when he last saw her, though not exactly a scarecrow. Her white hair was cut short and straight, the edges a bit uneven. He wondered if she'd taken to cutting her hair herself. The whites of her eyes were tinged yellow, and he wondered if that was a sign of some serious medical condition. Liver trouble? Gall bladder?
Her hands rested on the arms of the recliner, the joints of her fingers bulging from arthritis, or as she'd always pronounced it, ar-thur-itis. She wore a simple striped shirt which left her arms bare and a pair of orange shorts. Her legs were a road map of varicose veins, so thick and discolored it looked like a colony of fat, purple earthworms had burrowed beneath her skin.
She gestured toward the couch without taking her gaze from the television screen. "Go ahead and sit down. Unless you're not planning on staying."
Michael did as she ordered, having to pass between Elena and the TV to do so. He sat down, wishing he'd worn something lighter than the black shirt and slacks he had on. He'd only been inside the trailer for a few minutes, but already his skin was slick with sweat, and his clothes stuck to him like a second layer of flesh.
Time passed without either of them saying anything. Michael found himself watching the televangelist so he wouldn't have to stare at his aunt's face. Finally, after what seemed like a long time, but which Michael knew had only been moments, Elena spoke again.
"You've seen it, haven't you? The darkness."
Michael nodded.
Elena took a deep breath, held it for a three-count, just as she'd taught him to do, then released it slowly. When she was done, she turned to Michael, gave him a smile and held out her arms. "Well? Are you too big a TV star to come give your old auntie a hug?"
"So what was it? I mean, I've made contact with the other side hundreds of times, but I've never experienced anything like that before." Even now, outside in the light of the late afternoon sun, the thought of that awful darkness made him shiver and raised goose bumps on his flesh.
Elena didn't answer at first. They walked side by side, his aunt holding on to his elbow with her left hand. Her feet were covered by a pair of slippers that were hardly appro-priate for outdoors, but she'd refused to put on shoes, saying they pinched her feet. They were walking through the woods, on a well-worn path that Michael knew as well as the layout of his condo back in the city, even though he hadn't set foot here in almost fifteen years. He wasn't sure where they were going. After they'd chatted for a bit, mostly small talk about nothing in particular, words designed to get them used to each other again and to stave off discussion of the real reason he'd come home, she'd suggested that they go for a little walk. Michael, without saying so directly, had hinted that maybe it was too hot out for someone of Elena's years, but she'd ignored him, and now here they were, walking in the woods, Michael fearing that his elderly aunt would have a heart attack or a stroke any minute.
At least it was cooler here than inside that oven of a trailer.
'The departed ever give you any sense of what the other side was like?" she asked.
Elena had never referred to them as dead or, worse yet, ghosts. She'd always used terms like spirits and departed, the latter always sounding to Michael as if they'd just stepped out for a quart of milk or a pack of cigarettes, and they'd be back before long.
"Sure. People ask all the time when I do readings." It was one of the most common questions he got. After someone asked if their loved one was okay on the other side, they always wanted to know what the afterlife was really like. "I always get a sense of peace and togetherness from… the departed, as if on the other side we're reunited with our loved ones that have passed over before us, and everything is all right."
He looked at his aunt. "Do you know what it's like? I mean, you never said much about it, but I always assumed you believed in the Christian version of heaven—angels and saints and all."
Elena smiled. "And you didn't, which is why you never asked me, isn't it?"
Michael felt himself blush. It was almost as if his aunt had told him that she'd known all along what he was doing in the bathroom with the water running so long when he was a teenager. "Well, it just never felt right to me, you know? And you always told me that I should trust my feelings."
"That I did." They walked in silence a bit before Elena went on. "I wish I could believe in the storybook version of heaven. I wish I was like most other people in the world: blind, deaf, and dumb to anything 'cept what's in front of my nose at the moment. But I'm not."
The trees began to thin, and Michael knew they were coming to the edge of the woods. He knew what lay beyond, but he didn't want to think about that just now.
"I knew you had the gift the first time I laid eyes on you as a monkey-faced little baby." She gave a snorting laugh. "Good thing you got handsomer as you grew up. After your mother… passed on, I made sure to teach you everything you'd need to know to be able to live with your abilities, and maybe be able to use them to help other people some day."
Was there a gentle rebuke in her last sentence? Elena had given readings for folks all her life, but she'd never charged them much, just enough to cover the cost of food, phone, and electricity, and even then she'd always had trouble paying her bills. Since leaving Ashton, Michael had become something of a celebrity, and while his cable TV show wasn't making him rich, he charged five hundred dollars for a one-on-one reading, more if the client was wealthy. Paying bills was not one of his problems.
"You taught me well, Aunt 'Lena."
"I did my best, and I think, all in all, you turned out okay." She grinned, but then sadness filled her eyes and her smile fell away. "But there are a few things I didn't tell you. Things you weren't quite ready to hear back then.
Things you may not be any more ready to hear now, but I don't have a lot of choice about telling you."
Elena's voice was soft, her tone cold and flat, and it cut through him like a blade of ice. "Like what?"
She looked away, and her eyes glazed over, as if she were focusing on something far in the distance, something only she could see.
"Well, for one thing, the dead are liars. Every last one of them."
They were past the woods and into a clearing, the waving grass almost knee-high. To the west a low wall of orange brick surrounded row upon row of small weathered gravestones. The wall was only three, three-and-half feet high, easy to climb over. Michael should know; he'd shin-nied over it often while growing up. There were trees in the cemetery, oak and elm; tall, old things with thick branches and lush green leaves that gave shade and shelter to the dead, not that they needed it. Michael had the impression the trees were watching as he and 'Lena passed by. They seemed more curious than malevolent… and somewhat smug, as if they knew more than he did about what had drawn him home.
A gentle breeze blew from the north, and Michael detected a sound beneath the wind, something like an ocean wave breaking against a deserted beach. Deep, sonorous, more felt through the soles of the feet than heard with the ears. The dead weren't bound to their physical remains, but their bodies made effective focal points for contact, and places like this, where their cast-off shells were gathered, were the psychic equivalent of a strong telephone connection.
Aunt Elena chuckled. "Seems like they get noisier every time I walk by."
Michael smiled. "Maybe you just keep getting better at listening."
She laughed, a rich, hearty sound that could have origi-nated in the throat of a much younger woman. "So now it's your turn to teach me, eh?" She grew suddenly serious. "Well, maybe it is. Maybe it is."
It had been years since Michael had been this near West Branch. It was a Quaker burial ground erected in 1864, and most of the folks laid to rest within its walls had been there so long that time and the elements had scoured the legends from their gravestones, rendering them anonymous. There had been only a few fresh graves dug over the last half century. In fact, the last one had belonged to his—
He cocked his head. He thought he heard something rising above the ocean noise of the endlessly whispering throng. A voice… loud, as if someone were desperate to get his attention.
"Hold up for a second, 'Lena." He stopped, and his aunt stopped with him. He closed his eyes and listened with a part of himself beyond his physical body.
Yes! He could hear it more clearly now. It sounded just like—
"Mother!" He released 'Lena's arm and started toward the graveyard wall.
His aunt called after him, but he paid her no heed, wasn't even sure exactly what she was saying. All he could clearly hear was his mother, calling, calling after so long a silence.
He reached the wall, climbed over easily, and set foot hi the kingdom of the dead.
* * *
Michael, fifteen now, sat cross-legged on his mother's grave. The dirt had long since settled, no longer a mound around which mourners gathered with tear-puffy eyes and bowed heads, but simple, flat earth covered with grass. If it wasn't for her headstone—Miranda Toys: Beloved Mother, She Served Her Maker Well—there would have been no sign that she was buried here at all.
It was late fall, and only a few stubborn leaves still clung to tree branches. The rest covered the ground with a blanket of brown and red, leaves curled and dry like the husks of desiccated insects. Michael had had to brush them aside to make room to sit.
He'd learned much from his aunt over the years, so much so that she let him help with readings from time to time, and he'd even done a couple all by himself. She said he had a real knack for the work, as if he'd been born to it. But of all the spirits who'd whispered to him, first animals and then people, there was one he wanted to hear from more than anyone, one who had so far remained silent.
His mother had died when was he was only two years old, from cancer, Aunt 'Lena said, and what memories Michael had of her weren't real memories at all, just half-formed, fuzzy things constructed out of old pictures in photo albums and stories his aunt had told him. He had no true sense of his mother as a person who had given him life, taken care of him, loved him for the two years their lives had overlapped. And the one question his aunt had never been able to answer to his satisfaction was why, if he could talk to the dead, he'd never been able to talk to his mother?
Not that 'Lena didn't try to give answers. It's like trying to see the tip of your own nose—it's just too close. Don't worry about it none. When the time is right, you'll hear from her.
Michael was tired of waiting. As far as he was concerned, the time was now. If the dead cared at all about the living—if his mother cared at all about him—then today they'd make contact. And if not, he'd say to hell with being a messenger between this world and the next, and start thinking about becoming an accountant or an engineer, it didn't matter what. Any profession would do, just as long as it was boring and mundane and didn't involve talking to ghosts.
He took a breath, counted three, let it out. "Okay, Mom. Here we go."
He pressed his fingertips against the ground, digging them into the earth, shoving soil up under his fingernails. It hurt, but he ignored the pain, closed his eyes, and concentrated on breathing.
Breath is life, Aunt Elena had taught him. To touch death, we begin with life.
Michael imagined his fingers becoming roots, snaking down into the earth, curling through dirt and rock, down, down toward his mother's coffin. Imagined the roots touching the wood, shoots drilling through the surface, reaching inside, connecting with the empty shell his mother had left behind. A shell that might provide a touchstone between them.
He heard the dead speaking all around him, their voices the sound of dry autumn leaves rustling in a midnight wind. He sifted through the voices, searching for one in particular…
Mother?
A gentle breeze touched his right cheek, feeling more like warm, soft fingertips than any wind.
Then, so faint he wasn't sure if he really heard it, came a loving whisper. It's all right, honey. Everything's okay.
* * *
Michael stood over his mother's grave. Aunt 'Lena remained outside the cemetery, too old to climb the wall. She leaned against it, watching him, her gaze unreadable.
Two sentences. That was all his mother had ever whispered to him through the veil that separated the living and the dead. Not much, not much at all, but it had been enough. Until now, that was.
"What do you feel, Mikey?" she called to him.
He looked at the words engraved on his mother's stone, not wanting to answer. "Nothing," he said in a small, lost voice. He didn't mean that he failed to feel anything at all. Rather, he sensed a nothingness that was almost tangible, a vast unbroken stretch of blackness that was beyond such childish concepts as shadow and dark and night as a super-nova is beyond the feeble illumination of a burning match.
And he knew he was seeing it through his mother's eyes.
"Why?" He felt tears threaten, fought to hold them back. "Why did she lie to me?"
'Lena didn't answer right away. Eventually, she said, "Remember how I told you that it's hard to contact our own loved ones because it's like trying to look at the tip of your own nose?"
His gaze still focused on his mother's headstone, he nodded.
"Well, that's true enough, as it goes. But the dead have a hard time lying directly to friends and family. That's where folks like you and me come in, Mikey. It's easier for the spirits of strangers to lie to us, to lie through us. But we have too strong a connection with our own departed loved ones. We can see through their lies too easily, feel when they aren't telling the truth, so they avoid contact with us."
He turned away from his mother's grave and walked back toward his aunt. He stopped when he reached the wall and looked deep into her eyes.
"But when you get good at talking with the dead—too good—none of them can lie to you anymore."
She nodded. "And that's what happened to you when you were taping your show. The man's spirit tried to lie to you so that you could pass that lie on to his wife… just like your mama lied to you when you were a young man. Like they all lie to us. To reassure us, make it easier to go on with our lives and do what we have to do."
"But in the studio, I finally saw the truth."
"Oh, yes." She reached out and touched arthritic fingers to his cheek. It felt exactly like another touch, one he'd felt here in this cemetery over half his lifetime ago. Thick, viscous tears welled in 'Lena's rheumy eyes. "You poor, poor boy."
They stood side by side on the Old Mill Run Bridge, leaning on the railing and looking down at the water rushing by beneath. The bridge was old, its wood gray and weathered. It felt soft beneath Michael's hands, as if he might sink his fingers into the wood and tear away great chunks as easily as he could pull apart a slice of stale bread. The Bluerush River wasn't living up to its name today; the water was reddish brown, a sluice of tumbling, surging liquid clay.
"It's rained quite a bit the last few weeks," 'Lena said. "The river's all stirred up."
The river's not the only thing all stirred up, Michael thought.
Trees formed a canopy over their heads, branches heavy with leaves, hanging low as if bowing under the weight of the summer heat. Michael was sweaty. His shirt clung to his back and sides, and he could feel rivulets running down his face and the back of his neck. He glanced at 'Lena. The old woman wasn't sweating at all. She kept her gaze fastened on the water, an expression of profound sadness on her face.
"This is the one place I never brought you, Michael."
Not Mikey this time, he noticed.
"It's time for another lesson. The last one." She sighed and something rattled in her lungs, deep and nasty. Michael thought that after this was over, he should take her to the doctor, just in case.
"This place, this bridge, is the reason why we're here, you and I. And when I say here, I don't mean just in Ash-ton. It's the reason we were put on this world and given the powers that we have." She turned and gave him a small smile. "The reason why we exist at all."
Michael stretched out his senses, tried to feel what was so special about this bridge, but beyond the ever-present whispering of the dead—which now seemed to be coming from the water flowing beneath them—he felt nothing. It was more than strange: this was a place where dozens of people had ended their lives. Despairing, feeling there was no other way out than to climb over the railing and drop into the river, letting the current take them, lungs filling with water as they embraced the final release of darkness. The bridge should've reeked of emotional turbulence and lingering suicidal thoughts, a foul psychic residue soaked deep into the wood. But there was nothing, nothing at all.
"I don't understand."
"Look down at the water," 'Lena said. Her voice was flat, toneless.
He did as she asked and saw the water had turned black. Blacker than night, blacker than sin, blacker even than death itself. It was the same darkness that he had seen in his vision back in the television studio. A darkness that was balefully alive and eternally hungry. Now he understood why he felt nothing here. Nothing—Nothing with a capital N—was all that way here.
As he watched, faces began to bob up from beneath the surface of the black river. Dozens, hundreds, thousands of white faces, skin bleached, eyes black holes filled with the same darkness they swam in. Mouths open wide as if shouting, but nothing came out save more maddening inaudible whispers, and try as he might, he couldn't make out what was being said. Once as a boy, Michael had seen a school of ravenous carp feeding on water insects near the bank of the river. The big, thick-scaled fish writhed and tumbled over one another, eyes cold, dead, and staring as they mindlessly fed. The faces of the dead struck him the same way, and he had an awful thought. What if their mouths were stretched wide not because they were trying to say something, but because they were hungry?
"I told you the dead lie, Michael. What I didn't tell you was the reason why. You know as well as I do what they tell us to pass along to the living: that the other side is a place of peace and contentment. All worries, all troubles are washed away in the passage from this world to the next.
And that's true enough, as it goes. What they don't say is that the negative emotions—all the anger, envy, lust, hatred, and dozens of others which humans haven't thought up names for yet—are carried over with them. And once those emotions are purged, they don't just vanish. Just like the spirits they were part of, those feelings are eternal. And once those emotions are free, they have to go somewhere."
Michael looked down at the river and into the deep shadows within the bleached-white eye sockets of the dead. Shadows that surged and roiled as if alive and eager to be free from the hollow prisons that held them.
"The Darkness," he said.
'Lena nodded. "The toxic waste dump of the afterlife. And it's alive, in its own way."
The bloodless faces continued to gawp like fish. And was there one face that Michael recognized? A face he hadn't seen since he was two? Maybe.
He fought to keep his voice steady. "What does it want?"
She shrugged. "What does anything want? To feed, to grow, to go on living."
One of the faces, the one that Michael thought he recognized but which he wasn't ready to acknowledge, oh no, not yet, began to rise up out of the black water, long raven hair (God, please don't let it be her!) trailing behind a naked, snail-flesh white body.
" 'Course, what it feeds on is emotion," 'Lena said. "Negative emotion." Her voice was cahn, too much so considering that the woman (not her, not her!) was rising upward on a fount of ebony water, white arms stretched toward them, mouth yawning open and eye sockets bubbling with living darkness. "And the dead don't have any of those feelings anymore. They got rid of them when they crossed over, so the darkness needs us, the living. It's too greedy to wait for us to die and feed. It wants to be fed now. So it comes to places like this, where the barrier between worlds is thinnest, and it pushes and pushes until it makes a tiny tear.
But that's all it needs to reach through and intensify the negative emotions of the living."
Still rising, coming closer, within a few yards now. Cracked white lips drawn into a rictus of a smile, and the hands—nails so long they were almost talons—trembled, eager, so eager…
'Lena went on calinly. "Ever wonder why there are some places in the world—places like Ashton—where everyone is always depressed and down on their luck? Places where people can't help taking to drink, drugs, and crime? Where they decide it's better to kill themselves than endure one more minute of the hell their lives have become?" 'Lena nodded toward the thing rising from the river. "It's the Darkness, planting seeds of itself within them, and then harvesting its crop."
Only a few yards away now. Michael could smell the stink of fetid river water on the creature's chalk-colored flesh. He couldn't take his eyes off the face that he hadn't seen in so long, a face that was in many ways as familiar to him as his own.
"The dead do their best to keep the Darkness they created at bay," 'Lena said. "They work to communicate with the living, to pass along the false message that everything is all right on the other side, that the afterlife is a beautiful place of peace and rest, where we'll be reunited with our loved ones some day. It's a lie, of course, but a beautiful, necessary one designed to give the living hope, to keep despair at bay and deny the Darkness the awful nourishment it so desperately wants."
Rising, rising ever closer…
"And I lied to you, too, Michael. Your mother didn't die of cancer, and she's not buried in the cemetery. I paid to have an empty coffin put into the ground, and a stone set over it so you'd believe she was there. She was like you and me, could hear the dead whisper, but she saw through their lies earlier than most, and she couldn't take it. Couldn't live with the knowledge of what truly waits for us all on the other side, and couldn't bring herself to help the dead deceive the living any more. She became depressed, convinced life had no purpose other than to feed the Darkness, and nothing I could say or do would help. In the end, she came here." 'Lena nodded toward the water below.
The fingers had drawn even with the bottom of the bridge now, and still they rose upward, clutching frantically, like the multijointed legs of some crustacean. Above the whispering of the dead in the river below, Michael could make out a high-pitched keening, as if of an infant crying to be fed.
Michael's mind was reeling. He wanted to deny what was happening, to ignore his great-aunt's words and pretend he'd never come home, never learned her final lesson. But he couldn't. Part of him accepted it, as if deep in the core of his being, he had known the truth all along. When he spoke, he was surprised at how calm he sounded.
"Have you brought me here for the same reason, 'Lena? So that I can watch you feed the Darkness the same way my mother did?"
She turned to him, surprised. "Lord, no, child! I'd never do that to you." She smiled and touched his cheek with stiff, swollen fingers. "I may be old, and I might not have much hope left in me after all these years of helping to hold off the Darkness, but I still have a little."
The crustacean fingers found the railing, closed over the wood, talons digging into its soft surface. With a last heave, the thing from the river pulled itself up until it was the same height as they were, less than a foot away from them now. Michael couldn't bring himself to look into its wet, ivory face. He wanted nothing more than to get the hell out of there, to run off the bridge and down the road, screaming until his throat bled. But he knew 'Lena wouldn't follow, and he refused to leave her alone with… with…
"What I don't have much left of, Mikey, is time. I'm sick. So full of cancer that the doctors don't see any point in trying to fight it. At my age, they figure the operation's just as liable to kill me as the sickness, and if I survive that—and it's a mighty big if-—the chemotherapy would probably finish me off."
Still smiling she withdrew her hand from his face. "I haven't come here to surrender. I've come so that I can continue my fight in the next world." 'Lena nodded toward the one who had joined them, and Michael turned to look full upon his mother's face.
The darkness remained in her eyes, and her skin was still pale as a fish that had lived its entire life in the deepest depths of the ocean. But her lips had formed a smile now— a loving, human smile, and he knew that his mother hadn't come as an avatar of the Darkness, hadn't come to feed. She'd come as an escort.
'Lena stepped toward her niece, and Michael's mother wrapped dead arms around her. She lifted the old woman off the bridge, and then the fount of water which held her aloft began to recede, bearing them both slowly down toward the black river.
"Wait! There's still so much I need to know!"
'Lena smiled. "You'll figure it out, honey. Just remember to trust your feelings."
Their feet touched the water, began to sink. The blackness, which was already edging back toward brownish red, rose up to their knees, toward their stomachs… The clown-white faces of the rest of the dead dipped below the surface of the river, and the whispering that had been in Michael's ears ever since he'd got near Ashton finally fell silent.
The water was up to their chests now, closing in on their necks…
"What do I do now?" Now that he knew the truth, now that he knew what he had done all his life—pass messages along for the dead—had been a lie.
"What else?" 'Lena said as the water touched her chin and rose toward her mouth. "Keep hope alive. And remember that we love you."
The darkness in his mother's sockets cleared like clouds dissipating after a summer shower, and her eyes became human and blue again, just the way they were in the photo albums.
He heard a single word in his mind, whispered in a soft, gentle voice.
Yes.
And then they were gone and the river had returned to normal.
For a long, long time, Michael stood on the bridge, sweating in the June heat and watching the water pass by. Thinking.
* * *
"Can I… ask a question?"
She sat in the last row of the risers, a bird-thin woman in her fifties, with glasses and wispy brown hair. Behind those glasses, her eyes shone with a mix of fear and hope.
Michael gave her a reassuring nod. "You can ask anything you want."
She seemed almost embarrassed, and despite the instructions the producer always gave to the audience before taping, she kept sneaking direct glances at the camera. "Ask my brother… ask him what it's like where he's at." Her voice was hushed, as if she thought she were breaking some divine taboo by asking. "What it's like on the other side."
He closed his eyes to shut out the crowd, the lights, and the cameras. A vision flashed in Michael's mind. Endless, ravenous Darkness clawing at the barrier between worlds, desperate to get in, desperate to feed. But now he could see, dwarfed by the Darkness' unimaginably vast night but still very much present, tiny pinpricks of light. Billions upon billions of souls, everyone who had ever lived and died, struggling to hold the Darkness at bay, to keep it from getting at their children.
Michael opened his eyes. He knew one of the camera operators was zooming in on his face for a close-up, so he forced a smile and prayed it was convincing.
"It's wonderful."