“Killed her,” she corrected. “Ms. Isabelle Cartwright.”
I took a huge breath, not ready for the information I was about to hear. I had developed a sixth sense for bad news.
“The Mors are people. I think,” Ophelia said. “Or Grampa thinks they were, anyway. Still interested in murdering one?”
I rubbed my temples. I thought of the night in the parking lot, staring down five drooling rapists. Would I have killed, if I could? If I’d been holding a gun, would I have used it to save my life? It wasn’t a hard decision.
I would have killed them all.
“Just skip ahead,” I said. “Tell me about Isabelle.”
She shook her head, opened the old journal, and began flipping pages.
“No,” I said, and held my hand out. I took her gnarled fingers in mine, looking into her watery eyes. There wasn’t time for this. I could hear the tick-tock of some terrible clock, burning away the minutes of Zack and Morgan’s lives. “You’ve read the journal, right?”
Ophelia nodded. “I don’t know about this…I’ve seen Grampa…”
Her voice shrank, and she sounded more than a bit like a frightened little girl. I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as I thought I would.
“I can do it without hurting you,” I said. “I think. Don’t think of anything but the journal. Nothing but that. Picture it, the part about Isabelle, about Puck and his Mors.”
Ophelia set her lips into a grim line. “Your friends are in danger?”
“Yes,” I said, my voice choked.
Ophelia closed her eyes. I picked her hand up, cradled it in mine, set my lips against her knuckles. And I breathed.
They weren’t images this time—I wasn’t taking a true memory. The flashes came as words, a memory of a memory, all at once. My vision went black, and I saw—
The year was Nineteen-Fifty-One, and I’d been officially dirt-napped for seven years. I do not know what took her so long—I have spoken with a few Phantoms in what I call the Grey Meadows, and all of them have told me that their Mors had begun hunting them almost from the moment of revivification. Hell, I’d even had the time to pull double duty as a teacher and student at Stanford, instructing Engineering by day and achieving my doctorate at night.
Something about being reduced to atoms by a thousand-ton explosion really kick-starts the old ambition, however dusty and tired it once was.
My mind reeled as I tried to pull myself out of the flow of Puck’s words, stolen from Ophelia—explosion? I felt my mind groping through Ophelia’s, and I saw it, Puck’s death—a locomotive by the docks. He was working on it, repairing it? A ship full of munitions, for the war…an accident. Fire and heat, swallowing up everyone nearby. I dived back into the memory, trying to sort through the borrowed images. I found Puck’s voice again, on the day he met his Mors, I think…
It was in one of my classes that I felt what I would later refer to as the bete-noire—a paralyzing, irrational fear. It washed over me. No, more than that—it inhabited me. Defined me. One moment I was explaining to a class full of freshman that the acceleration of a body is proportional to the resultant force acting on it—being Newton’s Second law, actually—and the next moment I was running down the hallway, playing Bullet Bill Dudley and shouldering students twice my size out of the way. There may have been a large degree of girlish screaming, as well.
I woke in the faculty restroom—the ladies one, naturally—vomiting my guts out and holding my jacket over the back of my head, just like they taught us if the A-Bomb ever hit. Ms. Lansing, an American Literature teacher, managed to coax me out of my panic-stricken stupor. It wasn’t until my brain began to swim out of its soup that I realized I had run across the entire Stanford Campus to the English building. Even half-in my fugue, I knew why I had gone there. Some primal part of me still ran to my long-gone Miri when trouble hit.
I faced a few inquiries after that—good natured, trying to be helpful. But a friendly witch-hunt is still no vacation in Fiji. Half the school had seen my shrieking, unseemly flight through the campus, and the board required a little more than my word that it wouldn’t happen again. The fact was, I had no idea if it would happen again. In all possibility, without having an explanation or a reason for it occurring, it most definitely would happen again. I settled for a sabbatical. When I say I settled, I mean, the board chose to press the importance of taking some time off. It was that, or take a lot of time off.
She found me on my second day of vacation. Points for persistence, I suppose.
I’d been reading, smoking my pipe, enjoying the sun—what you might expect from a stuffy professor on sabbatical. At noon on the second day, I felt the bete-noire again. First my stomach did a somersault, then my heart kicked it into top gear. My mouth ran as dry as a Mojave summer and my palms went slick. My brain told me to run, to flee, to do anything but stay in that spot. I dropped my book and leaped out of my recliner. Olivia wasn’t home, and Tanya hadn’t lived with us for six months, since she’d married that…musician, James. Anyway.
I was alone. And no one was going to help me. Even as my reasoning began to self-destruct in panic, I knew if I couldn’t stop it, something worse might happen this time. Run through a window, cut my jugular. Flee naked down the street. Decide to hide in the oven. Who knows.
I squeezed my fists together. I bit my lip. I tried my very best to hold my place. That’s when the knock on my door came.
I answered, to see a lovely young woman who would go on to introduce herself as Isabelle Cartwright. The bete-noire began to fade—I thought that maybe the presence of another person was allowing my inborn fear of humiliation to override the irrational panic. Of course, that wasn’t the case at all—I’d learn later that the bete-noire was an encoded phantom trait, a natural warning system to detect the approach of a Mors, our own personal brand of psychopomp. Now, in the truest and most excellent example of an evolutionary arms race, the Mors possess the ability to dampen the bete-noire, in close proximity. They even seem to have the ability to produce a kind of euphoria in their prey.
I felt this, immediately. When I saw Isabelle, I sensed a kind of relief and warmth baking from her. She asked if she could come in and speak with me. I asked her if she was in any of my classes—she looked about the right age. She told me that she wasn’t, but she had a friend who was. A friend who was in trouble. She wanted to speak to me about the issue, apparently. I let her in, and asked her if she wanted any tea.
She asked me what it was like to die. To truly be dead. She did not ask me with a predator’s voice, I remember—there was longing in her tone. A real desire to know. I answered her truthfully—it felt like the end, like my life had been taken from me, and everything before it had been a show. As though a wet grey blanket had been pulled over my body, and I was looking at the world through a filter of ash. I wanted to be alive. I needed to be alive. But I was not, and I knew that for sure.
I’m not certain why I told her, or why I wasn’t surprised at her arrival. Maybe it was the euphoric aura that she projected—maybe I was tired of pretending. She began to glow bright white, to fill me up with warmth and light. Part of me really wanted to believe that she was sending me to a better place.
But another part of me knew there was no better place. Not for me, anyway. I was a monster, and I had lived off the memories and emotions of hundreds of people since the day I’d died. Not murdering, not hurting, but you might call it a kind of killing. Taking from people what it is that defined them. Destroying what they had earned.
That part took over. That part activated a portion of my brain I’d never used before. It drew the essence I’d stolen from my last victim into my mind, and I lashed out at Isabelle. With only the power of my mind, what science-fiction writers called telekinesis, I threw cute, little, glowing Isabelle through the kitchen wall, an armoire, and finally through and out the front door. It drained me, and little more than a transparent ghost, I ran. Well, I flipped. I pushed myself into the Grey and ran for my life.
I would spend the next month running. Shunting between the real world and the Grey one, using every trick I could think of, surviving on luck mostly. I drained the essence from anyone I could, trying not to kill them. I became little more than instinct, a mad ghost, a monster. To survive. To get away.
