The Dead Woman

written in white shoe polish. The man held a set of keys towards the camera, beaming like a child with a gold star on his report card.

Matt smiled. He could see where Abbey got her looks. He got up and stepped over to the wall to get a better look at the photo. Abbey's mother smiled prettily back at him. They had the exact same smile: big and bright and full of life.

'Wait a minute,' he whispered. He reached up and plucked the picture from the wall, bringing it closer to his face. No fucking way...

'Nice picture, isn't it?' Abbey's voice came from behind him.

Matt turned to see her leaning against the doorframe.

'That's not your mother, is it?'

Abbey shook her head. 'Nope. That's me with my first husband, Clark, on the day we bought our very first car.'

Matt looked back at the picture and took it in. The cars, the clothes, the way Abbey's hair was styled. Like Rita Hayworth's but not as dark. 'When was this taken?

Abbey sighed. 'Nineteen forty-seven.' She walked over and grabbed the picture from Matt's hand and placed it back on the wall, tracing the outline of Clark's face with her index finger. Her lips bent up into a rueful smile. 'The same year we got married.'

Matt stared back at her, his mouth agape. Nineteen forty-seven? Sixty-four years ago? But she looked exactly the same. 'How...?'

'What do you say we go have a drink, cowboy?' Abbey asked.

Matt looked at his watch. 'It's only ten a.m.'

Abbey folded her arms over her chest. 'Do you honestly give a fuck what time it is?'

'No,' Matt replied, looking at the picture on the wall. A picture that told him he'd just slept with a woman who had to be in her eighties. 'Not really.'

# # #

'I was pretty wild back then,' Abbey said. 'Clark loved that about me. We would party all night long and sleep through the day.'

They were seated at a small corner table at a restaurant called the Candlewood. The place was open and airy, with a shitload of miscellaneous movie memorabilia plastered all over the walls. One such wall was devoted to Marilyn Monroe, while another was covered with movie posters featuring Clark Gable. Their wall, Matt noted, housed the restaurant's Alfred Hitchcock collection. It seemed fitting.

The place had opened at ten o'clock, and so did the bar, but for the moment they were the only two people in the bar section. No one else in town, it seemed, had cause to drink before noon. Abbey held a glass of Grand Marnier in her hand, while Matt nursed a beer.

'Must have been hard to make a living that way,' Matt noted.

'You don't know the half of it,' Abbey replied. 'Neither one of us could hold down a job, but Clark's father was wealthy. When he died, he left everything to Clark, and that's when we got married and bought the Buick.'

'Clark looked pretty happy in that picture,' Matt said.

'We were,' Abbey said. 'Both of us.'

'What happened?'

'I died.'

'That seems to be going around,' Matt said. 'How?'

Abbey turned her glass up and downed the remaining liquor in a single gulp. Her face tensed, and she set the glass back on the table. 'Drug overdose. Heroin. I wasn't dead for three months, though. More like three hours. Clark came home from work and found me. He took my pulse, realized I was dead, and called the medics.'

'The medics?'

'We didn't call them EMTs or paramedics back then, but they were essentially the same thing. You have to realize, there was no 911 emergency system. Every branch of emergency services—police, fire, medical—had its own number and location. We called the people who responded to medical emergencies medics.'

Matt nodded and took a drink of his beer. 'And?'

'I woke up before the medics arrived. It really freaked Clark out.'

'What did the medics have to say about it?'

'I managed to convince Clark he was mistaken, and that I'd only fainted. Once he believed, the medics accepted it. After all, he didn't know a damn thing about medicine. They told him not to panic next time and that they'd be sending us a bill. But I know the truth. I died. Just like you. And the next day, I started seeing these weird blotches on people. Some had it worse than others, and some people looked like they'd been dead for years. Those people were usually the mean ones. The things I saw them do...' Abbey shuddered. 'Anyway, it didn't take long to figure out what the sores and rot represented.'

'Did you tell anyone?' Matt asked.

'Are you crazy?' she replied. 'I'd just overdosed on drugs. I figured it was a side effect or something. My husband was already looking at me like something out of a horror movie. I didn't want to make things worse. I figured it would pass. Of course, it didn't.'

'No,' Matt agreed. 'It didn't.'

The waitress came over and refilled Abbey's glass. She offered Matt another beer but he declined. Abbey raised her eyebrow but said nothing. After the waitress left, the two stayed silent for several long minutes. Matt was trying to figure out how to ask his next question, and couldn't quite get it out.

Abbey must have noticed. 'You have something else, don't you?'

Matt nodded and finished the remainder of his beer. He wiped his lips with a napkin and leaned forward. 'That picture, you said it was taken in 1947?'

Abbey nodded. She took a drink from her fresh glass. 'Shit, I need a smoke. Or even a lollipop. Goddamn anti tobacco lobby. Who goes to a bar and doesn't smoke? Fascist bastards.'

'How old were you?'

'Twenty-six.'

'How is that possible?'

Abbey smiled again. 'I have no idea. But it must have something to do with my—with our—unique condition.'

Mat had never given much thought to that. He had always assumed that his life would run a normal course. As normal as a dead man running after a ghost could get, anyway. He figured he would someday grow old and eventually die. But if Abbey was right, then how many years did he have left? Would he be sitting in a bar in another sixty years looking exactly the same as he did now?

'So,' he said, 'the antique shop...'

'Was never my mother's,' she finished. 'Sorry about the lie, but I didn't know you then. Telling someone your mother was killed by a serial killer right before Christmas is a convenient way of getting people to change the subject.'

'No problem,' he said.

'I move around every few years,' Abbey continued. 'As you can imagine, it would get pretty complicated if I stayed in one town more than five or ten years.'

'I bet.'

'So what about you?' Abbey asked. 'What do you plan to do with eternity?'

This is it, Matt thought. You're never going to have a better chance to bring it up.

'I'm going to catch Mr. Dark,' he said, and waved the waitress over. Maybe another drink wouldn't be such a bad idea, after all.

'Who the hell is Mr. Dark?' Abbey asked. 'He a friend of yours?'

Damn, Matt thought. He was just about to tell her how Mr. Dark had ruined his life when the door to the restaurant slammed open and a very angry Dale stormed in.

'I knew it!' he said, pointing at Matt. 'I knew you were with him!' Dale started walking towards them, his eyes blazing and his hand reaching for his baton.