Chapter 7
I awoke with a dizzy, sickening sensation. Strange, because since I had become what I am, incorporeal, a spirit, whatever, I had never lost consciousness. In the two years since my emergence from utter blackness, I had never felt any sensation that could be termed physical when dispossessed. I could hear and see-nothing else. Now nausea. I floated over Tommy's body where it sprawled across the back seat of the Chrysler.
'He g-going to be all right…' Elmo's muttered to himself behind the wheel. His worried eyes appeared in the rearview mirror. 'Yeah, he going to be f-fine.'
The closest thing I ever had to sensation when in my nonphysical state occurred during the process I used to prepare for possession. To take over, I had to link up with the pleasure center in Tommy's brain. I don't know if that's what really happened, but I seemed to have some ability to excite his lower brain functions and trick him into an internal world of fantasy. I would begin by broadcasting provocative sexual images until I felt or saw their echoes mirrored in the nervous activity of his brain-tiny motes of light appeared like fireflies. At the right moment whatever force separated us seemed to disappear and the vacuum created sucked me into the driver's seat. The odd time I could sense Tommy's soul flit past me like a shadow before it disappeared. Most often I experienced nothing more than a moment of transition, of null space and it was done.
As I struggled with this impossible nauseous echo, I listened.
'Jesus, Boss, that was somethin'-shit!' He glanced quickly over his shoulder. 'Swingin' down like a j-jungle man.'
I looked Tommy over and saw that he was breathing; though his body was peppered with cuts and bruises. On his left temple, an ugly gash oozed pink into his makeup.
'Holy Moses, Boss.' Elmo almost hooted. 'You're the luckiest man I ever met. If that p-power cord didn't slow you down-you'd be as dead as me-but flatter!' His laugh was like dry leaves rustling.
Tommy moaned menacingly below me.
'Shit-sorry, Boss-ress, ress!'
As Elmo focused on driving, I tried to concentrate on my problems. I'd been possessing Tommy's body for about two years now and had never lost consciousness. The closest I came to that was a strange hallucinogenic trance I experienced in the wee hours of the morning. I thought of it as sleep, but the images I saw in these trances occurred within my field of vision, overlapping reality and would cease the moment I wanted them to. In the past, if I got into a scrape and Tommy was knocked out, I was simply expelled from his body. There was some slight disorientation of transition, but nothing more. Transition. That was the way it always happened.
I looked down at Tommy and chased all thoughts of possession from my mind. I had no desire to feel his pain. Egocentric of me, but I had to think. Who had sent the arsonists? They were looking for the room, so either they were there to get me, or just the room. I couldn't imagine that it was an old score being settled. No one could have known I was there. If they came to get the room then Billings' murderer had hired them to hide evidence. Unfortunately, there would be nothing left of them to question after the inferno.
Elmo took a corner at about seventy and Tommy slid headfirst across the back seat into the door. He muttered and moaned-snatched at his belt-there was no gun-then at his head. He looked at the hand that came away red. He struggled upright, and for an uncomfortable moment his head entered the space I was occupying.
'Where the hell am I?' he grunted, leaning forward. 'Fuck, what a dream!'
Silently, he watched the road, forehead wrinkled, mouth moving like a sleep talker's. Elmo answered in his dry-lipped lisp.
'Took a fall, Mr. Wildclown. Course the fire was already lickin' yer b-boots when you made like the jungleman.'
Tommy's face looked quizzically at Elmo, then he burst out. 'What the fuck are you talking about?'
It was Elmo's turn to stare. His dead eyes were cue balls as he gaped over his shoulder.
'The Morocco…'
While these two conversed, the car took the opportunity to drive off the road, crush the fender of a parked truck and bend a street lamp forty-five degrees before Elmo could wrestle it back under control. I was glad Chrysler made big cars.
'Christ!' scolded Tommy, hands clutching Elmo's headrest. 'Would you watch what you're doing?' His fingers dropped to the skipping rope at his waist. 'Where's my gun?'
Elmo related the story of going to the Morocco Building and waiting in the car while Tommy looked over the murder scene for clues to Van Reydner's whereabouts. Tommy listened blankly; giving no impression that he heard anything at all. Elmo ended the tale with an enthusiastic narration of Tommy's escape from the fire-his incredible jerking, jarring descent as the old minaret fell with him. A thick power cord bolted up the front of the building slowed its fall. I tried to imagine the ridiculous thing lit up like some Islamic casino…but was cut off by Tommy.
'Great Elmo, great, but this Van Reydner chick what was I gonna do, fuck her or what?'
Elmo started to retell the story from the beginning. This time Tommy became excited.
'Right, right-we were having a drink right!' He sat back, rubbed his chin-then blurted. 'My gun!'
'Here Boss,' Elmo handed the. 44 over the seat. 'I g-grabbed it off the sidewalk after I pulled you out of that wrecked Arab thing.'
Tommy snatched the gun and slid it through his belt. He pressed its cold black length against his groin with a satisfied sigh, but the reassuring steel could not chase all the doubt from his dark eyes. Tommy spent the rest of the trip to the office silent smiling weakly as he stroked his gun. I continued to float overhead. I wanted to talk to Mr. Willieboy.
Chapter 8
The phone was ringing as Tommy shouldered open the door marked Wildclown Investigations. He muscled through the next to the inner office and snatched the receiver from its cradle.
'Yeah,' he started in monosyllabic glory as he targeted the office chair and fell into it.
I contented myself with floating overhead. That's what happened when Tommy moved around, I got dragged along about a foot from the ceiling like a disgruntled balloon. Possessing Tommy was the only action I could initiate in my vaporous form. It was galling, voyeuristic and frustrating, but such was the down side of our relationship. It could also be downright unsettling as I got pulled from place to place without apparent regard for doorframes and low ceilings. Whatever my story was, what remained of me passed through solid matter like it wasn't there.
Before I could overhear what the caller was saying Elmo distracted me by entering and sliding onto the business chair in a riot of springs. He was wiping his lips on a handkerchief. The dark skin on his forehead and cheeks had a lustrous, oily sheen to it. He must have re-hydrated in the outer office. Elmo kept a mixture of cod and mineral oils in a carafe beside the water cooler for just such a purpose. He applied it to himself internally and externally-a process I had witnessed and didn't want to see again.
It was just one of the problems with being dead in the New Age. They had to keep well oiled and cool if they wanted to stave off those desiccating effects that remained after the Change. That's what most people called it. There were other terms for the strange new circumstance the world found itself in, the rapture, happening or Armageddon but as the years passed people just got used to calling it the Change. I read how it happened in back issues of the Greasetown Gazette. Fifty years ago a strange contiguous weather pattern of cloud and rain blotted out the skies of earth. The resulting disastrous downpour soon melted what remained of the ice caps and raised the sea levels enough to threaten if not drown every coastal city. Before that happened, about two months after the rains began, the dead rose from their graves. Some inexplicable force animated all dead flesh. I once watched a pork chop twitch its way completely off its plate-which was an unsettling thing to see, and a warning against undercooking pig.
The scientists were caught between primitive wonderment and scientific horror because they couldn't explain
