The Ferryman Institute (17 page)

Now was the time to do it. Carolyn was out to dinner with Dad—Alice had stayed behind under the pretense of not feeling well—while Kaitlin was away at college, leaving Alice alone in the house.

Mechanically, she loaded a single round into the clip, then picked up the gun. As soon as she held it in her hand, the mechanics all came back. Check the chamber. Run the clip home. Cock it. Safety off. Gun is hot.
Like riding a bike.
She couldn't help but smile at that.

Preparation now complete, she walked over to her desk and sat down. Rethinking her position vis-à-vis her lovely note and potential blood, if not brain, splatter, she rolled her chair back a few inches, then scooted back a bit more.

The gun felt slick in her hands. Her heart seemed to be banging up against her rib cage. Alice shouldn't have been so nervous—she had more butterflies now than for junior prom when she'd somehow scored Craig McHagert as her date—but maybe it was natural. Then again, she'd never tried to kill herself before, so how should she know?

You're procrastinating. Carolyn will be back with Dad in an hour. Focus. You can finally end all this misery. Let's do this.

Alice inhaled deeply. It was time.

Thanks, Marc—who knew your gift would come in so handy
, she thought, but then shook her head.
No, that's not a good final thought.

She chewed her lip while the gears in her brain engaged, presumably for the last time.
It needs to be good . . . something profound, slightly tragic, ingratiating yet remorseful, and deeply apologetic.
Her eyes caught the last line of her letter before the closing. “
It's been real
,” she read out loud.

Good enough.

Alice looked in the mirror as the girl in the glass pressed the barrel of the gun into the right side of her head and ever so slowly pulled back on the trigger. It was coming, the end was coming, just around the corner, yes, any moment now and then—

An indistinct golden object tumbled past her head and skittered across the top of her desk. She nearly squeezed the trigger accidentally from being startled, but caught herself at the last second. Movement in her mirror. Her eyes fixed on the man who was suddenly standing behind her.

Alice screamed. Before she even realized what was happening, she was facing him, arms trembling. His mouth was moving, but her brain had gone blank, her muscle memory taking over as she instinctively lined up the shot.

She pulled the trigger.

O
h my God . . . Oh my God. Ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod . . .”

The gun landed with a heavy but muted thud on the carpeted floor. Alice reflexively covered her mouth with both hands as she leaned against the chair for support. She'd meant to blow someone's head off tonight, but this wasn't quite what she had in mind.

The past minute had proceeded in a blur that she was still coming to grips with. Having been a whisper of pressure away from ultimately ending her life, she was now standing twelve feet away from a man who'd just had his cranium ventilated. She hadn't meant to shoot him, but she had been so scared that when he spoke, her finger automatically squeezed the trigger.

The man lay sprawled out on her bedroom floor, not so much as even twitching. Questions buzzed frantically around in her mind. Who the hell was he? How had he gotten in here? And what the hell was that thing that flew past her head?

The urge to run screaming from the room seized Alice, but she resisted.
He might still be alive. God, I hope he's still alive. Unless he's going to try to rape me, in which case I take that back, and I hope he
dies. Okay, maybe not
dies
, but mostly dies. So God, if you're listening, that's dead to the point of not really dying, but not alive enough where he can perform sick sexual fantasies on me in an act of revenge for shooting him in the face. Thanks. Amen, or whatever.

She picked the gun up off the floor and held it in the ready position, her hands shaking violently, and approached with the gun aimed directly at the motionless body. The gun was out of bullets, true, seeing as she'd fired the only one she'd bothered to load into its clip (in fairness, she'd had it on good authority that she'd only need the one), but if this man was still alive, he wouldn't know that. A lump moved down her throat. Assuming the bullet had gone where she thought it had—namely, just off center on his forehead—she was in for a gruesome sight. She tiptoed across the floor, her entire body coiled and ready for action, even if that action happened to be vomiting profusely.

After two agonizingly slow steps, things already weren't adding up.

Alice was now standing at an angle where she could see the bullet wound perfectly; it was a few inches above the corner of his left eye, just about where she thought she'd put it. However, there was a big something missing—namely blood, and lots of it. It should have been everywhere, with a bit of brain matter and gore thrown in for good measure. However, there was nothing; a nearly perfect circular hole in his forehead was the only evidence that this man had been shot. Still, he wasn't exactly moving and he certainly didn't look like he was breathing. His eyes, a deep green, were open and staring at her off-pink ceiling. Alice took a step closer.

Something seemed odd about the entry wound. It was only a 9mm bullet, so it wouldn't leave a massive hole, per se, but the hole was still far smaller than it should have been. Actually, it sort of looked like the hole was . . . shrinking?

Ah, a case of bullet-hole shrinkage. Now, where had she heard about that before? That's right—nowhere, because it was fucking impossible.

Within a few seconds, there was no evidence whatsoever that she'd shot him. She inched a bit closer and leaned over the body so she could get a better look at his face.

“Well, that was unexpected,” he said.

Alice leapt back with an earsplitting scream. The gun flew from her hand as she ran across the room and dove into her closet. She cowered in the far corner behind a rack of old shoes, on the verge of hyperventilating, when, with a growing sense of panic, she realized that not only had she lost her only means of protection, but the undead stranger was now situated perfectly between her and the only exit save the third-story window. She was trapped.

“You're . . . you're not dead . . . ,” she mumbled breathlessly, mostly to herself. Maybe this was the start of the zombie apocalypse. Or, hey, maybe she had just finally lost it, and none of this was actually happening. Maybe she was tied down to a bed in some asylum while her brain fed her crazy dreams as it slowly dissolved into mush.

“Neither are you,” he said casually as he moved into an upright, seated position. With a small
huff
, the stranger stood, taking a moment to brush off his dignified coat and slacks.

“Whatever you want, just take it!” Alice yelled, hoping belatedly that she wasn't the object in question. From the rack in front of her, she grabbed an old stiletto, wishing it was of the knife variety and not the heel.

“About that . . . ,” the stranger said as he scanned her bedroom. “I actually came for you.”

Oh. Perfect. Alice gripped the shoe a little harder. “Why? What do you want?!”

The man stopped his inspection of the room. “You know, that's a really good question. I don't know.” He stroked his chin. “In my defense, this wasn't supposed to happen, so I wasn't expecting to be having this conversation.”

“How are we having
any
conversation!? I shot you!” she yelled back, her mouth spitting out what her mind was thinking.
Nice one, Alice—remind the stranger who apparently doesn't die about that time you tried to kill him. That will surely lead to wonderful things.
She retreated even farther behind the door.

If her tone bothered him, though, it didn't show. He picked up a small piece of paper that he had dropped after she shot him. “Can't really argue with that. However, I didn't intend on getting shot tonight, either. Not to sound insensitive, but I believe that was originally your plan.”

Her eyes managed to somehow widen a bit farther. Had he known that was her plan all along, or was it a lucky guess? On second thought, there probably wasn't much luck involved in guessing what a solitary young woman with a gun pressed to her head was about to do. Still—
When in doubt, deny. If it does not fit, you must acquit.
Well, one of the two applied, anyway.

“I have no idea what you're talking about,” she said defiantly.

He looked over at her, curiosity evident on his face. He appeared calm, if a bit confused himself.

“You are Alice Spiegel, correct?” he asked.

Okay, this was getting weird. Actually, scratch that—things had already been pretty fucking weird.

“No,” she said quickly, “I don't know anybody by that name.”

“Really?” He took a few steps toward her desk and picked up her letter in his free hand. With a surprising delicacy, he held it in his hands and gave it a cursory glance. “Do you sign all your suicide notes with a pen name?”

Alice's brain worked desperately to try and make sense of a situation it had no business being in and came up empty. “Who the hell are you? How did you get in here, and what do you want?”

With a sigh, the man plopped down into her desk chair. “Listen, Alice. What I'm about to tell you is going to sound pretty unbelievable, but it's the truth. You may not get it, but after shooting me in the head, I hope you'll at least give me the courtesy of listening. First of all, I'm not going to hurt you, so you can stop hiding.” When she didn't move, he rolled over to the gun, picked it up, and gently tossed it in front of the closet. It cartwheeled twice before stopping a mere two feet in front of the door. “There. Not that shooting me again will do anyone any good, but if that'll make you feel a little better, then fine by me.”

She darted out and grabbed the gun like a mouse snatching an errant cookie crumb before retreating behind the door again. She cradled it against her chest.

“Better?” he asked.

“If I shoot you again, will you die?”

“No.”

“Then no, I'm not feeling better.”

Alice peeked out again, pointing the gun in his direction from the closet. He was leaning back in her chair, reading through her suicide note. If it weren't for the downright creepy fact that he seemed to have magically appeared in her room, she would have admitted privately that he was a fairly handsome guy. She had a brief internal debate about whether she should be mortified or relieved that she was checking out a guy who could turn out to be a serial rapist/murderer before moving on to the important question: Who the hell
was
he? Despite his familiar tone of voice and casual usage of her name, she didn't recognize him at all, a fact he certainly didn't seem bothered by. To make things that much
stranger (if that was possible), he seemed even less bothered by the fact that he'd just taken one straight to the dome. He stopped reading her note and looked up. Their eyes met for an instant before she recoiled back into the closet.

“In that case, please accept my sincerest apologies. Anyway, your questions: My name is Charlie Dawson and I'm what's called a Ferryman. It's my sole purpose to lead recently deceased individuals to the afterlife. As a result of my given profession, I also happen to be, fortunately or unfortunately, impervious to death, though I have a hunch you might have figured that part out by now. Normally, we wouldn't be able to talk to each other like this, as I'm invisible to the world at large, but, to cut a long story short, my key, which is not only how I got in here but also the trick to doing that, is sitting on your desk right now.”

Alice could hardly believe her ears. Ferryman? Immortality? Invisibility? Dead people?
My God
, she thought with compounding horror,
this is like a bad made-for-TV movie.

“This is crazy,” she mumbled to herself. “
I'm
crazy. I have definitely lost my mind. This isn't real, this isn't happening, there isn't some well-dressed guy sitting in front of me who magically showed up out of nowhere. I'm obviously doing some crazy Freudian dream therapy and soon I'll wake up blabbering about penis envy.”

She caught his raised eyebrow from across the room. “Did you just say
penis envy
?”

“I did—now hush, you figment of my imagination, before you ruin my perfectly well-constructed justification for all of this.”

The man calling himself Charlie looked briefly amused at that. “Honestly, right now I'm just as confused as you are.”

She barked a short peal of laughter, which she found a little surprising, given the situation. “I highly doubt that, Mr. Fairy Man.”

“
Ferryman.
I don't collect teeth.” He switched his focus to the other sheet of paper in his hand—the one he'd originally been carrying—and began studying it intently. After a moment, he frowned slightly, which told Alice he either hadn't found what he was looking for or he hadn't liked what he'd read. “I'm not going to waste my time trying to convince you—believe it if you want, it really doesn't matter to me because . . . well, because you're not dead, which means I can't do anything anyway. It's just—” He paused, his eyes gravitating toward the ceiling as if he hoped to find the right word written there. “This has never happened before. You were supposed to die tonight, Alice, but here you are, very much not dead. Granted, I might have had something to do with that—”