Shivers 7 (38 page)

So, Jerry didn’t have to make up anything. He only had to gloss over a few details. He could tell the story backwards, forward and inside out. Everything supported his version of events. Nothing contradicted it. Dead men tell no tales.

A squad car took Jerry home shortly before dawn. Later that afternoon, a detective came by to brief him. The perp’s prints were in the system. He told Jerry the guy’s name, but Jerry couldn’t remember it five minutes later. The perp had been arrested several times for bar fights and had a history of hooking up with submissive men to dominate them. So far, they had no evidence he’d injured any of his partners before, but one guy they’d interviewed said he felt uneasy around the man. Such was the power of suggestion, Jerry thought.

The detective thought they might find something in the toxicology report to explain his erratic behavior. Even if they didn’t, Jerry was in the clear. Internal Affairs were calling it a good shoot. As far as everyone was concerned, the case was closed.

As an added bonus, after Jerry returned to work upper management promoted him into Todd’s position. It was on a trial basis, but Jerry was certain he could make it permanent.

He had landed on his feet after all.

* * *

One night, two months after a stranger invaded Jerry’s house, killed his best friend, and was about to commit unspeakable violence upon Jerry himself—for that was how he now remembered the evening—Jerry awoke to feel a terrible pressure in his chest. He had trouble catching his breath. He couldn’t move. At first he thought he was having a heart attack. He was naked, spread-eagled, the covers pushed down to the foot of the bed.

He took several deep breaths. Forced himself to relax.

Then he saw Todd perched on the edge of the bed. He looked much better than the last time Jerry had seen him, dead on the floor beside the living room sofa. He was wearing a dress shirt and slacks. His hair was neatly groomed and his face clean-shaven. Jerry could almost smell cologne. I’m dreaming, he thought, but the vision was too clear to be a reverie.

“Time for me to move on, old buddy. Just wanted to drop in to say goodbye first.”

Jerry tried to sit up, but he couldn’t. It was as if his hands and ankles were bound to the bedposts. Again. His version of that terrible evening pushed into his mind, but he fought it off. “Move on? Where?”

Todd shrugged. “All I know is that I’m done here. Paid my dues. Atoned for my sins. I got off lucky. I lived a pretty clean life. I hurt a few women—sometimes without realizing it—and damaged a few people doing business, but all in all, I did not do too bad.”

“But you’re dead.”

“I know, Jerry. You are the one who killed me, after all.”

“Not me. Him. The robber. He killed you and he was going to rape me.”

“Come on, Jerry. It’s just you and me here. We can get past all that silly stuff you’ve been telling everyone. Even yourself, I guess.” In the moonlight, his grin looked demonic. “We both know that Victor was an innocent victim. You remember him, right? Victor Quezada?”

Jerry didn’t answer.

“I’m not here to forgive you for killing me, though. That’s your burden, not mine. I just wanted to let you know what you have in store. Maybe that’s cruel, but since nothing prevented me from being here, I guess it’s all right.”

“You’re…a ghost?”

“I suppose. Know why people don’t see ghosts all the time?”

Jerry shook his head. This is a dream, he kept telling himself. Must be.

“The dead can only contact a living person who’s about to die. Anyone who says otherwise is making it up. Or imagining things. People can convince themselves of just about anything. Like the way you persuaded yourself you had nothing to do my death or Victor’s. You think you’re a victim, too.” Todd shook his head.

Jerry blinked. “I’m not about to die. I’m in perfect shape.”

Todd smiled. It wasn’t pleasant. “I don’t make the rules. Anyhow, I wanted you to know what to expect. After you die, you end up in—well, let’s call it purgatory. Your life doesn’t flash in front of your eyes
before
you die. That happens later, and it isn’t a flash. You see it all in slow motion. It’s excruciating. You see the ripples. The tentacles.” He spread his hands in the air. “Cause and effect. The consequences of everything you did. It can be quite humbling.”

Jerry struggled against his invisible restraints. He needed to sit up, catch his breath. Figure out what the hell was going on.

“Then you get to go time traveling. That’s the cool part. Forward as far as you need to, until you meet all the people you’ve wronged. Even your worst enemies are ready to make peace when they know they’re about to die. Usually.” He leaned forward. “One catch: You can’t go backwards. You can’t apologize to the dead. They’ve already passed on. Do you get that, Jerry? It’s too late. You’ll never get to apologize to Victor and me for what you did.”

He straightened his shoulders and put his hands on his knees. “I suspect your purgatory is going to last a long, long time. I can’t say that disappoints me.” He looked at his wrist. “Time to be on my way, Jerry. Goodbye.”

With that he vanished. There was no sound. No pop of air rushing in to fill a void. No rattling of chains or whisper of breath. One moment he was there, the next: nothing.

Jerry tried to move his arms again, sure that his restraints would have vanished, too, but he still couldn’t move. He dropped his head back onto the pillow and expelled a burst of air. He felt the mattress shift and dip. A dark figure materialized before him.

“Todd? You forget something?”

The man’s face loomed in front of his. The stranger. The man the police had shot. What was his name? Victor something. He was naked. A bullet wound in his chest oozed blood. He was, Jerry noted with dismay, erect.

“Why you do me like that? Thought you was nice. Thought we’d have fun. Setting me up for offing your friend? Not cool. Know what that did to my family? Ruined them. You didn’t just mess me up, you messed up a lot of people. And your friend? Fuck, dude. That was harsh. People get fired, know what I’m saying?”

Jerry tried to look away, but he couldn’t.

“When you die, you can learn just about anything you want. Fucking safe word. Thought you were being cute. Wrapping up your tricks in a fancy word you knew I wouldn’t get. Rubbing it in my face. Fucker.”

Jerry struggled to get a few words out. His chest felt tighter. “Why are you here?”

“I done a few bad things in my time. It’s gonna take me a while to put everything right. Do my twelve-step program—that’s what I call it. But you know what?”

He waited for an answer. Jerry couldn’t even shrug.

“I don’t fucking care what comes next. I can go wherever I want. Shit,
whenever
I want. So I came here. The place you lured me to. Us all set to have a good time, and you tricked them into shooting me.” His hand went to the bullet wound in his chest and came away bloody. He shook his head. “Fucker. So, here’s what’s going to happen, dude. I’m going to finish what I came here for that night. Have myself a good old time. No rush. Time don’t mean much to me any more. Don’t care what it does to my moral balance, either. If I have to spend eternity making up for it, that’s a-okay. Now let’s roll you over and get this show on the road.”

* * *

The official cause of death was a heart attack, but the officers sent to check Jerry’s house when he didn’t show up for work and didn’t answer his phone were struck by the look on his face.

“Ever wonder what you see when you die?” one officer asked the other.

The other shook his head. “Too deep for me, brother. I just hope I don’t see whatever this guy did. Looks like he saw something evil.”

As She Lay There Dying

Brian James Freeman

The roads were wet from another morning of April showers, and the co-ed freshman lying on the pavement was missing part of her head. Her legs were twisted awkwardly under her body and there was blood on the sidewalk. One of her tattered running shoes had landed on the other side of the street, knocked clear of the scene of the accident. A broken iPod lay just beyond her hand.

The dying girl wore mesh shorts and a pink shirt featuring the Haverton Field Hockey logo. She was sprawled next to the curb at the entrance to the school’s grounds, directly in front of the big stone wall with the sign proclaiming “Welcome to Haverton College.”

“Oh shit,” Sam whispered, turning to the bushes and vomiting. The English professor wasn’t alone in his horror.

A secretary named Marge Wilson held the girl’s hand. At the time of the accident Marge had been walking to the pizza parlor just off campus to pick-up lunch for her co-workers, and a wad of cash was still in her left hand, forgotten. She had seen everything.

Students on their way to one o’clock classes gathered around the dying girl. Some held their hands to their faces while others texted their friends.

The dying girl moaned. Her disfigured head rolled loosely on her rubbery neck and blood spit from her broken mouth. Her teeth were red.

She turned her face blindly toward Sam and she whispered in clipped breaths: “Sammy, we can’t run anymore.”

Sam blinked, startled by the sound of his name. He stared into the girl’s glassy eyes. He didn’t recognize her, but no one called him Sammy, especially not students. The only person who ever called him that had been dead for six months.

Then Sam heard the artificial click and whirl as a camera phone snapped a photo.

“Get out of here, you ass,” Sam said, turning and shoving the young man with a backpack slung over his shoulder. The student stumbled backwards and then just stood there, off balance and stunned. Sam yelled and shoved him again, right up against the stone wall with the school’s name.

Next came more shouting, but the rest was a blur as the campus police arrived and then the ambulance—the girl was dead by then—and the questioning began.

* * *

According to one of the department secretaries gossiping in the third floor hallway of McGrove Hall, the dead girl’s name was Lauren Redman, a first year Math Ed major from the other side of the state who came to the school on a field hockey scholarship.

Sam listened as he posted a note on his office door, canceling his classes for the rest of the week. He couldn’t stand the idea of facing the slack jawed students while their obvious boredom burned a hole right through him.

Not today.

* * *

Walking home to his cozy neighborhood outside the small college town, Sam took a side street to avoid the main entrance to the school. The girl’s blood would still be there.

What am I going to do?
Sam thought, not for the first time.

As far as he could remember, the dead girl hadn’t taken his mandatory Intro course, but the thousands of names and faces had blurred together over the years, so he couldn’t be sure.

Actually, everything was a little blurry these days. Sam’s shoving match with the cell phone voyeur felt like a distant memory of something he only witnessed. He didn’t know what had come over him, but maybe it was a knee-jerk reaction to someone disrespecting the dying.

If that student had been there and photographed Julie when she died, Sam probably wouldn’t have stopped with a shove. But his wife had died alone, with no one to hold her hand and comfort her. Sam hadn’t even known she was dead until an hour later.

Did Lauren Redman really say,
Sammy, we can’t run anymore
, as she lay there dying on the pavement?

Those words disturbed Sam, but he didn’t know why. The poor girl was dead. Why was he so bothered by her last words? She probably had a boyfriend named Sammy. Or a brother. It was a common name. Just because
he
was standing there didn’t mean she was speaking to him. She probably had no idea where she was, let alone that she was dying.

The words didn’t mean
anything
. They were just a result of the last firing synapses as what remained of her brain shut down. Some fragment of a memory.

This conclusion should have comforted Sam, but it didn’t. He just kept hearing the words over and over in the dead girl’s halting voice:

Sammy, we can’t run anymore.

* * *

Sam entered the foyer of the house he had shared with his wife until her sudden death and he stopped in the doorway.

Like always, he vividly recalled every detail of the day he arrived home from a run and discovered he was a widower.

He closed his eyes and relived it again for the hundredth time.

And why not? What else was he going to do tonight?

* * *

On the morning Julie died, Sam was soaked from head to toe in sweat, his feet ached, and his legs moved like they were made of marble as he paced the driveway to cool down and keep his muscles from tightening up. The winter air clung to his exposed flesh and steam rose from his clothes. Two hours of running had never felt better than it did in these moments when the pain and the joy were still fresh.

If there was anything wrong inside the house, he didn’t know it yet. His mind was just starting to come down from his runner’s high, the rush of endorphins that washed away all of the pains, distractions, and annoyances of the real world.

No matter how badly his legs hurt when he finished a run, his mind was always clear and ready to face new challenges. Julie had taught him this trick not long after they first met on a blind date. She called running her secret weapon for a long and happy life.

This particular morning, though, after Sam completed his cool-down routine, he tried to open the front door and found something had been pushed up against it from the inside.

He had to shove the door open to discover Julie lying at the bottom of the steps, a tiny pool of blood next to her head. Her iPod was still clutched in her hand like a talisman and her arms were twisted under her body, as if she had fallen down the steps.

She was dressed in her purple jogging suit with her top still zipped. That meant she hadn’t made it out the door for
her
morning run, which usually started an hour after Sam’s most Sundays. She ran for speed, her husband ran for distance.

Sam stared at his wife’s motionless body, then he knelt and very gently touched her wrist.

* * *

“You love your melodramatic English Department bullcrap,” Julie said to Sam one evening early in their marriage while she helped him out of his suit at the end of a long day. This was a few months after they moved into the house and nothing was really unpacked yet.

Sam had just finished telling her about the latest crisis in his department. Was that the time the janitorial service cut back to only emptying the office trashcans every other day? It was hard to keep all of the crap straight, year after year, and he still couldn’t believe how much bitching and moaning his well-paid colleagues with seventeen-hour work weeks could muster about such trivial matters and perceived slights.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“If everyone in your department wasn’t a little insane, you’d be bored to tears and you know it,” Julie said, slipping her fingers into the elastic band around his waist.

Sam couldn’t deny the truth in her statement, especially considering his underwear came off before he could reply and they spent the rest of the evening in the bedroom.

That was one of the many good times they had shared in their ten years of marriage, and there were so many good times he couldn’t even count them, but he didn’t think it was fair those moments were done and gone forever.

Their ten years of marriage had been wonderful, but he had been promised a lifetime.

* * *

Upon finding his wife’s dead body and touching her cool wrist, Sam whispered, “This isn’t melodramatic English Department bullcrap,” for reasons he still didn’t understand.

Julie might have been able to explain it to him. She saw things differently than he did, after all, and that was what made them perfect for each other.

Then, with his hand still on Julie’s wrist, Sam asked the quiet house: “What am I going to do?”

* * *

Every time Sam opened the front door of his home, he expected Julie to be there, dead again, but she never was, of course.

Julie was buried in the Haverton Community Cemetery on the far side of town, and Sam walked to her grave three or four times a week during his lunch break to discuss the latest news and drama with her, just like the old days.

Today Sam had wanted Julie’s input on his big decision: whether to take a year’s sabbatical and use it to pursue some other career.

Like always, he had sat on the ground and ate the peanut butter and jelly sandwich he brought from home, leaning against her granite marker and picking at the grass around the base, keeping everything neat and tidy. The day was overcast and forlorn. Sometimes he felt like the funeral had never ended.

To his credit, Sam never actually heard Julie reply to any of his questions or observations, but he liked the idea that maybe she was out there somewhere, listening. He didn’t really buy into the whole afterlife concept, but if it were possible for Julie to still somehow exist on some other level of the universe, Sam would gladly change his beliefs in a heartbeat.

She probably would have the answers he needed, too. What to do with the rest of his life was a pressing decision for Sam. He had to request the sabbatical by Friday if the paperwork was to be approved in time for the fall schedule.

Sam understood he wasn’t doing the students any good right now. He had cancelled more classes than he had attended this semester. At any other job he would have been fired, but he had tenure and the union wouldn’t let anything happen to his position, of course.

Sam’s livelihood wasn’t in any danger. He could just put himself on cruise control and retire with full benefits at the age of sixty. Plenty of his colleagues were already on the thirty-and-out plan, after all. It was practically tradition.

But what would he do with all of the years to follow? Would he sit around the house writing reams of so-so poetry and watching television? Would he go to his desk and read old syllabi and pretend he missed his glory days? What kind of life would that be?

Besides, putzing along at work for a couple of decades without giving a crap wasn’t the way Sam wanted to live. He wanted to really be
alive
.

Of course, he also wanted Julie by his side to carry out their plans—the fixer-upper in the country, the beach house, the second honeymoon to Bermuda, the babies, all the beautiful babies—but that was the most impossible dream he still clung to with a quiet desperation.

No one seemed to be holding Sam’s inattentiveness at work against him, at least. Most people understood the grief of the unexpected death of the person who made your life feel so complete and full of purpose.

Who could blame Sam for not wanting to discuss Colonial Period American Literature while he was still attempting to comprehend how his beautiful bride, who was in better shape than him, could have been felled by an aneurysm while coming down the steps for her morning run, her brain shutting off before she even landed on the cold linoleum floor?

As far as Sam could tell, no one cared that his classes were falling so far behind, least of all the students.

* * *

Standing there in the foyer again, Sam wondered if the parents of Lauren Redman had been notified yet.

They were probably driving across the state right now to visit her in the morgue, to confirm her identity.

Sam believed the only thing worse than finding your beloved dead on the foyer floor was getting that dreaded phone call and making that drive, half your heart wanting to believe it would just turn out to be a terrible misunderstanding.

With Julie, Sam knew his wife was dead the moment he found her. There was no mistaken identity. There was no hoping for a miracle.

He guessed he should be grateful for that, but he wasn’t. Julie was still dead, either way.

* * *

After Julie’s death, Sam developed a condition that reminded him of a phenomenon he heard about all the time in his field. The symptoms snuck up on him from out of nowhere and he was deep in the affliction before he realized what was happening. He blamed the grief.

Truman Capote, Ralph Ellison, Harper Lee, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Arundhati Roy, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, and Arthur Rimbaud all knew variations of the condition quite well, even if some of them suffered from it before the phrase was officially coined: writer’s block.

Only Sam’s problem wasn’t with his writing. He continued to churn out poetry at his normal rate and he had updated his notes and syllabi for next semester without issue, just in case he felt a renewed vigor for teaching or simply couldn’t pull the trigger on the sabbatical.

Sam didn’t have
writer’s
block. He had
runner’s
block.

The last time he even tried to run—maybe a month after Julie’s death when he desperately needed to escape from the world—was so dreadful that he held no ambition to make another attempt, not if he lived to be a hundred years old.

Like most people with a block, Sam understood what he wanted to do, but his mind wouldn’t let him, which created a little cycle of hell for him to experience again and again. He needed to run so badly some days, but even the thought of wearing his running clothes could push him to tears.

The last time Sam had tried to go for a run, he sat on the edge of the bed and tied his running shoes, convinced this time would be different. He loved running. The act of getting out there and attacking the road was the only thing he had left in life that could truly make him feel good—and this time everything would be okay, he just knew it.