The Ferryman Institute (11 page)

Charlie, as was often the case, opted for a very loose interpretation of the word
plan
. Without his key, the assignment (
Maria, her name is Maria
) would be able to hear him. If he could calm her down enough before she passed, there was a chance he'd end up with a more cooperative and understanding spirit. In theory, it could work. The only downside rested in the whole violating-one-of-the-Institute's-most-sacrosanct-laws bit.

That's how Cartwright had described the idea when Charlie pressed him on the topic several years ago. They'd been camped out on the Mediterranean Sea at the time, tucked away among the rocky shores near a small Italian sea town, watching as the water rose and fell like a living thing, each small wave plowing ahead toward points undefined.

“Mind you, my good fellow, that I am no authority on the
topic. However, there's a reason it is considered one of the three cardinal rules of the Institute, second only in severity to interfering with a subject's death. I will admit, I don't quite remember all the finer points, but if the Ferryman Institute's existence was ever exposed, the repercussions would be . . . hmm, how to phrase it . . .”

Charlie had been tapping his Ferryman Key lightly on the slick rock next to him,
tink
-ing away in some atonal rhythm. “Would be sang to the tune of ‘It's the End of the World as We Know It'?”

“Precisely!” Cartwright had said with a clap. “A potential human-extinction-level event, I believe is the recognized terminology.”

“But that's what I don't get. If humanity knew about the Ferryman Institute and Ferrymen in general, wouldn't that make our jobs easier? Kind of prepare them for when they finally kick their respective buckets?”

Charlie remembered Cartwright smiling in that cryptic way he sometimes did, that half grin that suggested he knew something Charlie didn't. “Ah, but you forget something rather important in all this.”

Charlie asked the obvious follow-up—
What?
—with his eyes.

“Human nature, Charles. If the Institute were revealed to the world, the world would try to take advantage, and even then I believe I am rather understating it. There are two types of men in this world, my dear friend: those who fear death, and liars. We Ferrymen succeed because, at a human's most vulnerable moment, when the soul is very literally bared to the world, we are there. We are comfort. We are hope. But if you remove that weapon from our arsenal, we are disadvantaged. Compromised, if you will. That would make us a liability, and Death does not employ liabilities.”

With a final
tink
, Charlie had ceased tapping his key. “But
we're not exactly the only organization in the soul business,” he said, which was true. With 114 people dying every minute, that meant more than enough croaking for groups competing with the Ferryman Institute to have their death cake and eat it, too. “Couldn't they just take a bigger slice of the pie?”

“They could, but I feel confident in saying it would be an exercise in futility. The Ferryman Institute is a soul-processing behemoth—the original and most successful. The other organizations would be overrun in short order by the sheer mathematics. And when that last group should fall . . .” Cartwright had leaned back against the rocks, his eyes suddenly looking across the water at something Charlie couldn't see. “. . . so, too, I fear, does the curtain fall on humanity. Which is why, my friend, we must always ensure the play goes on.”

Back on that desolate stretch of road, Charlie sat unmoving, staring as his key lay freely on the hood of the miraculously still-running car. The last words Cartwright had said filled his ears like the roar of an oncoming train. While the stranger he knew only as Maria ticked inexorably toward her death, Charlie arrived at a somewhat startling realization, one he hadn't expected.

Right then, he simply did not give a fuck about the rules.

Yes, not a solitary, itty-bitty, quark-sized fuck to spare for potentially ending mankind. Unbeknownst to the entire Ferryman Institute, Charlie's perfect record of two hundred and fifty years wasn't his goal, as most thought. In actuality, the record was merely a by-product of him wanting to be the
H
-word (four letters, two syllables, rhymes with
zero
). Charlie saw a woman in front of him who needed saving, and he was going to make it happen, simple as that.

Even so, this was a clear step further than anything he'd ever done before. For decades, he'd made a habit of toeing the line
when it came to the rules, even nudging it forward a bit from time to time when no one was looking. This, however, was a bounding hurdle over it (one small step for Charlie, one giant leap for . . . well, still Charlie). It was a uniquely dissonant form of terror: terrifying that he could end it all, terrifying that he didn't care.

He gently placed his hand on Maria's. She twitched. Apparently, even though her neck was broken, she felt his touch, which meant she wasn't paralyzed. Charlie thought that, for once, the alternative would have been kinder.

“Helb . . . helb ee . . . ,” she moaned. “Pweaaa . . . my chil'en . . .” Her words were thick and fumbling, maybe the result of a broken jaw, or maybe even damage to her tongue, but she spoke clearly enough for Charlie to understand. A gentle breeze wafted through the air, shaking the boughs above. He could feel her trying to move, trying to roll over to face him, but her body did nothing more than quiver.

Charlie presumed that the hand he held was now cold, but he squeezed it gingerly anyway. “I'm here for you, Maria.”

When she heard her name, she tried to speak again, but instead of words there was only a long but excited gurgle. It was followed by a vigorous cough, which freed her voice. “Helb ee . . . doan wan . . . eye. I ave a . . . amily. A aye-ee. Icks unts old. Pwease . . . ay-ve ee.” Help her, Charlie—she didn't want to die. Had a family. A baby, six months old. Save her, Ferryman—save the goddamn girl. Another fit of coughing set her rattling.

When she finished, Charlie began to speak. The words simply fell out of his mouth like autumn leaves carried over a rushing waterfall. In a very real sense of the phrase, it felt like a speech from the heart.

“Maria, my name is Charles Dawson, but everyone calls me Charlie. I'm a Ferryman. Most people don't know what that is or
believe me when I tell them, but basically my job is to make sure you find your way to the afterlife, to
your
afterlife. It sounds crazy, I know. It still does to me and I've been at this for over two hundred and fifty years. Frankly, I'm not sure I'll ever get used to it. I didn't think, after all these years, I had any heart left to break. How wrong I was.

“I can't even begin to express how truly, utterly, and sincerely sorry I am to see you in these circumstances. I can't. If there were anything I could do to change things, I would. Believe me, I absolutely would. But I can't. I'm so sorry, but I can't. The only thing I can offer you is a doorway to finding some peace. It may not seem like much, but beyond it is comfort. Hope. Love. I promise you that.

“Some people call me an angel, or the Grim Reaper, or even God, but I'm telling you that I'm not any of those things. I'm just a guy in an expensive-looking suit who wishes more than anything in the world that I could go back in time and stop this from happening. You're going to die soon, Maria. When you do, please don't stay here. Don't slowly lose your mind and become nothing but a vengeful spirit, preying in mindless agony on unsuspecting strangers. Don't forget the face of your child, of your husband, of anybody you've ever cared about. I know what that's like. I'm living it right now.”

He looked up at the sky, but there was nothing to see beyond the tangle of tree limbs. “Don't be afraid of death like I was. You'll only end up alone, wishing you could take it all back. Don't make that mistake, Maria. Don't be like me.”

When he finished speaking, he sat in silence, unsure if that all had really just happened. It belatedly occurred to Charlie that, at some point during his speech, Maria had stopped breathing.

“Why do you think it was a mistake?”

Charlie spun around to see the source of the new voice, quickly clutching his key as he did so. Standing behind him, with her hands folded neatly in front of her, was the spirit of Maria, last name unknown. She was pretty in a girl-next-door way, with wide, curious eyes, each filled to its depth with an unbridled sadness.

“How long have you been standing there?” he asked, momentarily caught off guard.

Her face turned timid at the sharpness of his reply. “Just past the beginning of your monologue, I think.”

The ETD. Charlie had been so caught up in the moment that he'd completely forgotten about it. That had never happened before—Charlie never missed the ETD. It was an amateur mistake.

You're slipping, Charlie boy.

“I'm so sorry, I had no idea you were standing there. For whatever reason, I got carried away talking and—”

“Don't apologize.” She looked past him, eyeing the still body that she had once called her own. “After it all happened—you know, as I was lying there . . . even though I couldn't move, my mind was running on overdrive. All I could think about was how scared I was to be dying. Who was going to find me out here? No one. No one was going to find me. I was going to die alone.”

The spirit somberly shook her head. “Then, I felt something on my hand. I heard your voice, and though I was really afraid—I mean, I still am—things started to feel like they'd be okay. So I sort of just . . . let go.” Even though spirits didn't shed tears, Charlie could tell she was crying.

He unhurriedly lifted himself off the car. “Yeah. It
is
going to be okay,” he replied. He didn't know what else to say. Charlie felt as taken aback by her as she did by him. He plunged his key forward into the air. The light of the great beyond leaked out from the edges of the new door, illuminating stretches of the road.
Maria marveled at it despite herself, though her attention promptly returned to him.

“This is the door to my afterlife?” she asked. Her voice was quiet with awe. “The one you were talking about?”

“Yes. All you have to do is walk through,” was all Charlie said. In truth, it was all he could say. He wanted to say more—something profound or heartfelt, anything really—but was suddenly having a hard time keeping his emotions together himself.

They stood in silence for a few moments more until she abruptly took a step forward, approaching both him and the door. “So, if I go through it . . . that's it? I can't come back?”

To that point, Charlie's plan had worked relatively well—she'd left her body lucid and much calmer than he otherwise would have expected—but he could already see the gears turning over in her mind. That was not a question asked without a reason, and he suspected he knew exactly where this was heading.

“I wouldn't look at it that way,” Charlie replied. He nudged the door open farther with his toe, hoping the brilliance of the afterlife might derail her train of thought.

Maria's gaze was completely captured by the opening as more radiant light tumbled free. She stared at it, her eyes so focused that it looked as if her consciousness was being drawn out of them and pulled through the doorway. And yet somehow, a moment later, she wrenched her attention free from it and turned to Charlie. “I really . . . I really need to say good-bye to my family. I need to see them one more time. Please. Is there any way? I promise I'll leave after, but I just need a little more time. I'll be quick, I swear.”

She was bargaining. Not a good sign.

Maria was close—very close by Charlie's estimation—but clearly she wasn't quite there yet. Even worse, Charlie had the distinct sense that he was running out of time. Every door to the
afterlife was different (another factor that determined the difficulty of a case), but they generally didn't stay open for very long. Always a few minutes at least, but not necessarily longer than that. If the spirit hadn't crossed by then, that was it. As far as the afterlife was concerned, there was no such thing as a second chance.

Though it pained him to deny such a heartbreaking request—always had, for that matter—Charlie shook his head. “I'm afraid this door isn't going to stay open much longer. You need to walk through it, Maria. I know how difficult this must seem, but please, remember that this isn't good-bye. This isn't the end.”

“But it is,” she said. Though her eyes repeatedly flicked toward the door, Maria kept her attention on Charlie. “If I leave now, I'm going to miss my daughter's entire life.
All
of it. What's the point of meeting her again in the next life if I don't even know who she is? But if I stay, if I stay—”

“You will end up regretting it every second of every day for however long you end up having left. You will dream of her even though you never sleep, and you will wonder in those all-too-brief moments what could have been.” Charlie spoke the words simply, with neither humility nor conceit, each one painted with the haggard assurance of a man who hadn't earned that knowledge unscathed. That was his last card, his final gambit. If she didn't come around now, well, that was it—end of the line.

Maria's eyes stopped shifting, her sole focus now on Charlie and Charlie alone. The shimmer of light played gently across her face. “Like you?”

Charlie breathed a single, quiet note of laughter, its melody in a key both sad and true. “Yeah. Like me,” he replied.

She edged slightly closer to him. “Why didn't you cross over?”

Charlie closed his eyes, and for a moment, he swore he could smell the sea. “I was in love. I thought I was doing the right
thing,” he said, and as he opened his eyes, the scent vanished, replaced by the pungent stench of gasoline. “But I never saw her again. And I never will.”