“I was going to bring you a turkey dinner since we missed Christmas, but it wouldn’t fit in my coat, so you’ll have to settle for that.”
I see a hand dart from the blackness and disappear back inside. My chest burns, but the wound is already closing up. My legs are cramping. I want to stand, but I don’t want to spook her. I wish God hadn’t made me put out my cigarette.
Soon I hear, “Jim?”
I can’t see her, but the angel in my head can. He shows her to me outlined in the deep dark. The atoms that hold her together are the same as the air around her, her clothes, the walls and floor. And me. There’s no difference.
“Jim?”
“Hi, Lucy. I’m home.”
She comes over to me slowly, still afraid it’s a trick. I know the feeling.
“Jim. Are you . . . ?”
“I’m not dead and I’m not a Hellion. I just needed to borrow a face to get here. Trust me. This isn’t the weirdest thing I’ve done since we last saw each other.”
She kneels down and looks into my eyes but keeps some distance between us.
Alice was always the smart one. She read books and thought about what she was going to say before she said it. Sometimes she said the most important things without talking. It was all little physical reactions.
She shakes her head a tiny bit, an almost subliminal m'>&sublimiovement.
“Is that really you in there?”
“You tell me.”
She looks down at my human hand. I turn it over so she can see the back. It’s like she’s trying to read a secret in the lines. But the hand is so scarred I doubt she’ll find anything familiar about it.
“Whoever you are, you really need to do something about those cuticles,” she says.
“All the beauty parlors down here are closed or on fire.”
She gets up and looks down at me.
“Say something only Jim would say.”
“Oh shit.”
“Nice start. Keep going.”
I try to think, but my brain is freezer-burned.
“Vidocq has our old apartment. He uses a potion that makes it invisible and makes everyone else forget it’s there so he doesn’t have to pay rent. He lives there with a nice girl who’s a hoodoo doctor but originally worked in my video store. Oh yeah. I own a video store. Remember Kasabian? The store used to belong to him, but I cut off his head, so now the store’s mine. Kasabian’s head is my roommate. He steals my cigarettes and drinks my beer. We usually live over the store, but it’s being fixed up, so now we’re in a hotel. I finally met my real father. He was an archangel, but now he’s dead. I really missed you.”
She crosses her arms. Nods at me.
“What happened to your face?”
“I had to get rid of it to get here and this one was available.”
“Put it back on. I want to see the real you.”
I look at the floor, smiling.
“Of course you do. But it’s not here.”
“Where is it?”
“Jack the Ripper stole it.”
She takes a deep breath and lets it out. I’m never going to get used to seeing the dead breathe. Or mimic the memory of breathing. I don’t know which it is.
“I almost believe you. Say something else.”
“For almost a year I’ve had the strangest dreams about you. I kno12't you. w some were just plain old dreams, but others were different. It’s like you were really talking to me.”
She grunts faintly.
“I had dreams about you, too. Some were like you said. Just dreams. But I think a few were something more. Like we were talking to each other. I saw another girl in one of them. She had an accent.”
“That’s Brigitte. She’s Czech. And a zombie hunter. You’d like her.”
“Sounds fun. Is she your girlfriend?”
I shake my head.
“I almost got her turned into the undead, so it didn’t really work out. But I started seeing someone recently. You’d like her, too. She’s a Lurker, and when she gets mad she eats people.”
Alice gives a little laugh.
