Enter, Night

Then, Jordan did scream. There was no way not to.

He was looking at the body of a woman with her throat torn out. The blood from her wounds-there seemed to be at least two, apart from her torn throat, including a deep gash in the top of her skull from which a thick paste of brain, bone fragments, and hair, was leaking like red oatmeal. It had all but obliterated her face. Her left ear looked as if it had been half-bitten off and lay raggedly against the side of her skull. Jordan looked at the seat next to the woman’s body. Amidst the rags-no, not rags, a little girl’s fluffy pink coat marbled with great whorls of crimson- Jordan was just able to make out a tiny red hand and a dangling green rubber boot.

Up ahead, at the front of the bus, the slumped shape behind the wheel drove erratically forward, apparently oblivious to Jordan’s screams. In the driver’s window, thick tentacles of fog beckoned and recoiled in the yellow headlights. Jordan thought he could make out clumps of trees crowding in on either side of the road. They were definitely not on a highway. Jordan had spent his entire-if brief-life in the country and he recognized a country road when he saw it, even at five a.m. in a blind terror at the scene of some sort of gruesome bloodbath through which he’d apparently slept like the dead in a haze of painkillers and whiskey. But he was awake now-completely, horribly awake. Either that, or his nightmare had somehow followed him out of his dream and into real life.

He screamed, “Stop! Stop the bus! Stop the bus! She’s dead! Somebody killed a lady!”

Calmly, the driver turned the wheel of the bus and pulled over to the side of the highway. There appeared to be no haste, no urgency in the sequence of movements.

Still not right, Jordan’s mind gibbered. He shook his head frantically. Am I still asleep, or is this really happening?

Another wave of slaughterhouse stink rose from the woman’s body and Jordan vomited. Then, smelling his own puke, he vomited again.

When he stopped retching and stood up, he saw Richard Weal standing there beside the steering wheel. In his left hand, he held a pickaxe. The blade of the axe was clotted with clumps of flesh and hair. In the right hand, he held a red-spattered butcher’s knife with an eight inch blade. To Jordan, he looked like a monster out of a horror movie. The entire bottom half of his face was caked with blood. The front of his shirt and army surplus jacket were soaked with it and shone wetly under the dim overhead lights of the driver’s cabin.

As Jordan’s terrified mind shook off the last remaining shred of torpor and his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, he saw the bus driver’s mutilated body crumpled at Weal’s feet. Half his skull was missing and his throat had been torn out.

“The blood is the life,” Weal said thickly, licking his lips. He waved the pickaxe idly in Jordan’s general direction. “I told you, I brought my tools. He tells me how,” Weal said reverently. “He speaks to me. They told me, in that… place, to take the pills. But when I did, I couldn’t hear him anymore. He showed me how to do this. He sends dreams into my brain. He wants me to find him so I can live forever. I’ll be like him. I’ll be able to fly.”

“You’re crazy,” Jordan whispered. “You’re fucking crazy.”

Weal smiled, his teeth red. “No, no, I’m not crazy. He wants me to wake him. He wants me to find him where he sleeps and wake him. He loves me.” Weal cocked his head like a dog listening for a supersonic whistle. “He’s speaking right now. I can’t believe you can’t hear it. He says I should kill you, because if I let you live, you’ll tell everyone about him. About us.”

Weal wiped the knife on his pants and began swinging it lazily in front of him like a pendulum. Jordan heard the hiss as it cut the air. Weal took a step towards him, still swinging. Jordan jumped back, slipping again on the gore- slick floor. Weal took a compensatory step forward as though he were leading in some ghastly tango.

“No, I won’t tell! I swear! Please, please, let me go! Please! I have to get home.” Weal swung the knife in wider arcs and feinting half-jabs at Jordan. He grinned, advancing. Jordan backed up farther. “My mom needs me! My dad’s hurting her. Please, if you kill me, she won’t have anyone to protect her. Please, don’t. Oh God. I’m begging you.”

“The blood is the life,” Weal whispered. “And I’m going to live forever.”

He struck hard with the knife, slashing Jordan across the chest. The blade shredded Jordan’s shirt, and bit deep into flesh and muscle. He screamed as the blood rose from the wound. Jordan clutched his chest and backed away. Weal kept advancing, driving Jordan backward, slashing with each step, cutting Jordan’s hands when he tried to ward off the swinging blade, slashing his neck and face when Jordan’s bleeding hands were elsewhere.

When finally Jordan staggered and fell, dizzy from shock and pain, Weal turned him onto his back, almost lovingly. He kissed Jordan on the lips. Then he drew the knife across his throat, severing his carotid artery. The last thing Jordan felt were Weal’s lips against his throat, lapping at the blood that gushed from the wound.

Through dying eyes, Jordan looked up and tried to focus on his murderer.

Weal’s face became his own father’s face, full of deadened, murderous rage. Then it was Weal’s face again. Then his father’s. Then it was Weal’s again.

Directly behind Weal, a tenebrous, mist-like column was forming, vaguely human-shaped, but seemingly made entirely of darkness. Its head (or whatever part of it looked to Jordan most like a human head) was inclined towards Weal’s ear, and it was indeed whispering to him but, now dying, Jordan heard the whispering, too.

It said, Wake me.

In the end, dying proved different than anything Jordan had ever imagined it might be.

For one thing, it seemed to go on forever, long past the point where the pain had stopped. Past even the point where his heart stopped pumping and his brain died. As Jordan drifted above his body, he looked down at himself, bleeding out on the dirty floor of the bus, and felt the truest compassion he’d known. He saw himself as he’d never seen himself in any mirror while he’d been alive. He saw the fragility of his body and he realized how tenuously human life was contained by such brittle shells of flesh and bone under the best of circumstances.

Dimensions of brilliance exploded outward as he continued to rise.

Past, present, and future fused together in a continuum. There were no more secrets. Every truth of the world was laid bare to the dead.

Jordan knew, for instance-and not without satisfaction-that his father would die of pancreatic cancer two years from now, in 1974. He would go quickly, but not without terrible pain. He knew that his mother would remarry, this time to a man who would cherish and care for her. He also knew that, late at night, as she lay in bed with her gentle, loving husband sleeping beside her, she’d think of Jordan’s father and his cruelty and wonder if that wasn’t, in its own way, real love. In those moments, she’d glance over at her sleeping husband and hate herself for wishing he wasn’t just a bit harder, just a bit rougher, the way a man ought to be. Then she’d remember the terror, and she’d forgive herself for those treacherous thoughts. She’d lay her head on his chest while he gathered her in his arms till she, too, slept, dreaming of Jordan, telling herself over and over again that he was somewhere safe, living his life, and knowing in her mother’s heart that he was gone.

He drew comfort from the knowledge that Fleur would leave Don before the baby was born and that the violence that had marked Jordan’s life would never mark that of Fleur’s son.

Jordan continued to rise.

He saw that the dead were everywhere, masses of them, like a vast eldritch ocean that stretched in every direction. Men, women, children- even animals. He laughed with revenant delight. The sound of his laughter fell in a shower of ectoplasmic blue sparks in the ether of this strange new in-between dimension where everything and nothing was the same as it was in life.

When Jordan was alive he’d once asked a priest about whether or not dogs had souls. His own dog, Prince, had died from eating poisoned bait in the woods the previous week, and Jordan had been inconsolable. The priest assured him that animals had no immortal souls and reprimanded him for being stupid enough to believe they did. Jordan had cried, but he suspected the priest was wrong-or lying. For years afterwards, he’d felt Prince’s presence constantly when he was alone, especially at night in his room where the dog had always slept.

Here the dead crowded the desolate country road where Weal had awkwardly parked the bus, peering curiously through the windows, tapping noiselessly on the glass in an endless, one-sided attempted dialogue with the living. Finding none inside the bus, they scampered along the roof and launched themselves into the night like spectral fireflies in search of living receivers who could hear their voices. They looked as they did in life, and in death seemed neither overjoyed to be free of their mortal bodies nor particularly tormented. No wings, no harps, no robes. They just… were.

Jordan felt the warm press of millions of souls caressing his own as they passed through him. He realized now, as he never had when he was alive, how not alone he had always been.