The Ferryman Institute (7 page)

But Charlie couldn't do that. It was too big of a gamble, too much he could lose.

A secret shared could never be put back into the box from whence it came. He needed the freedom that the Institute begrudgingly allowed him. Even if his excursions away were limited affairs, they'd always been enough to put his life back into perspective. There was something about getting away from there—from the bureaucracy, the intensity, the sheer single-mindedness of it—and returning to the “real” world, even briefly, that kept Charlie's sanity intact. Hopefully it always would.

His eyes finally moved to the next section. A thin black line cut across the page,
Official Use Only
written underneath.

Number of employee transfer requests:
6049.

Status of request:
DENIED.

If denied, please provide further details:
Ferryman too valuable. Service required.

Charlie didn't even look twice at it, having seen that particular response six thousand and forty-eight other times. He folded the response in half and stuck it in his jacket to make sure no one else would see it. When he returned from the assignment, he'd go back to his office and fill out another form, stuff it in an envelope, scrawl
OFFICE OF PRESIDENT ONLY
hastily across it with a few underlines thrown in for good measure, and send it off. Then, he'd wait. Just like he always did. Eventually, he would
get the response he wanted. That, or he would crack. Either way, something had to give soon, and that would be the end of Charlie Dawson, the Ferryman.

Win-win, all around.

“Sounds like you're in for a busy night tonight, after all,” Dirkley said, bringing Charlie's focus to the immediate area. Dirkley's eyes never left the computer screen, his fingers typing a furious set of notes all the while.

With an understated grace, Charlie took out his key. “I always have busy nights, Dirkley. This place doesn't know how to give me a goddamned break.”

“Well, being the ace of the Institute doesn't come without its downsides, I suppose. Though I like to think having a, dare I say, excellent navigator helps ease the burden a bit.”

“Quiet, or you'll give away the secret to my success,” Charlie said, the familiar small smile that was so often a fixture of his face once again back where it rightly belonged. Suddenly, a small green light, about the size of a Ping-Pong ball, lit up on the desk. “Aaaand there's my cue.”

Charlie gave a half salute, half wave to his partner, and tucked the clipboard neatly under his arm. He thrust his key straight out in front of him and gave it a twist, opening a new Ferryman Door. Silently, he disappeared beyond it.

E
verything about the small room screamed
sterile
—the walls, the ceiling, the aseptic light that filtered down from the fluorescent bulbs. There were no windows here, just white paint on smooth, concrete walls. Mounted in the corner, a small TV soundlessly played an infomercial. Charlie watched for a few seconds, noting how the lack of sound made the exaggerated enthusiasm of the pitchman even more ridiculous. It reminded him of the first motion picture he'd seen years and years ago . . . something with Chaplin in it, but he couldn't quite catch a hold of the title in his memory.

A steady beeping and rhythmic breathing drew his attention away from the television. Charlie turned to see an old man lying in a hospital bed. The respirator rasped in place of the man's own lungs while the low
beep
of the EKG piped up every so often to confirm that his weak pulse remained just that. The elderly man looked especially gaunt in his limbs, like a poorly disguised skeleton in an ill-fitting human costume. A full tray of food sat next to the bed, untouched. At least, it looked like food—Charlie was never sure when it came to hospital fare.

The Ferryman walked over to the medical chart at the foot of
the bed and compared it with the clipboard in his hand. Next to the label
NAME
was scrawled
John Sanders
in Dirkley's unmistakable handwriting. Sure enough, it matched the name on the chart.

He continued to stare at the sheet of paper on his own clipboard, which, aside from the name, was blank. This, however, was Dirkley's domain—though Charlie had been joking somewhat with his navigator before leaving the Institute, Dirkley's talent as a navigator was undeniable.

Before people passed away, consciously or unconsciously, their lives invariably flashed before their eyes. Yes, that particular cliché was actually grounded in truth. The Ferryman Institute, through some clandestine methodology Charlie wasn't privy to, managed to tap into that “feed” of memories. It was then up to the navigators to sift through memory fragments and assemble the pieces into some form of narrative. Oh, and they had to do it all in something like three to five minutes, which is how long it took for the feed to deteriorate, or
wash out
, in navigator parlance. From stories Charlie had heard, it was sort of like looking at a jumbled slideshow of a complete stranger's life and then trying to figure out who that person was from it. Sometimes the memory feed was fairly easy to piece together, while other times it took a bit of guesswork to fill in the blanks. Kind of like
Wheel of Fortune
, just with dead people. Given the extremely limited time frame navigators had to work with, the histories were often crude and vaguely detailed. Yet even the slightest bit of information—a loved one, a special moment, even a pet's name—could be the difference between a successful case and a failure.

After a few seconds of staring at the blank form on his clipboard,
the first typed words began to appear. With a quiet efficiency, Charlie began reading Dirkley's work:

John Sanders. Goes by Jack. Born 1925. Served as a noncommissioned army officer in World War II and received three Purple Hearts for his troubles. The third was out in the Pacific and cost him his left leg, from the knee down; eventually fitted with a prosthetic. Married three times in relatively short succession. He had his first and only child, boy named Richard, with his third wife in '53 or '54 (tough to tell). Lost him roughly 17-19 years later in Vietnam. Son volunteered, wasn't drafted. Sanders and his third wife, Maureen (Richard's mother), lived productive if modest lives. She passed away 8 months ago. No other family. Religious beliefs: Casual Christian.

The writing stopped for a brief moment before it showed up again in a small box at the top of the form.
Estimated Time of Death: 21:37.
Charlie took a quick glance at his watch. That left him approximately five minutes. He shook his head. Only Dirkley would be able to glean all that and still leave him five minutes to spare. Say what you wanted about him—he was a hell of a navigator.

The information now in hand, Charlie moved from the front of the bed to the side, fiddling with his tie as he did. He considered it a cardinal rule to look sharp in front of the newly deceased. He undid it, retied it, undid it again, retied it again. After several moments of this, a nurse popped her head into the room. She was an older woman, slightly bent at her shoulders and a bit short in her step, but her eyes were sharp and alert. The nurse glanced down at Mr. Sanders before settling on Charlie, her eyes squinting slightly as her gaze bore into him.

“Hi,” he said as he finished tweaking the position of his necktie. “Beautiful weather we're having.” Charlie had no idea if this was the case, given that he really didn't know where he was, exactly. He also knew she couldn't hear him, anyway, so it was something of a moot point to begin with.

The nurse continued to stare in his direction, even leaning her head in closer from out in the hallway. Or, at least from Charlie's point of view, she appeared to be staring. From her point of view, however, Charlie didn't even exist and, without getting existential, it was quite impossible to stare at something with no eggs in the existence basket.

With a dramatic
tsk
, she waltzed into the room, whipping out a pair of worn glasses like a switchblade. “Damn screen. Only way you can read it is with your face pressed against it,” she muttered to herself. “I keep telling them we need bigger screens, but what do I know, only been here thirty years.” When she was only a few feet away from Charlie, he quietly stepped aside. She strode past him without even a flicker of awareness. The nurse hummed quietly as she quickly jotted down some figures from the machine buzzing behind Charlie, then briskly made her exit.

Charlie watched silently as she left, like he had done for thousands, perhaps tens if not hundreds of thousands of other people before her. His hand briefly went to the breast pocket where his Ferryman Key sat, reaffirming that it was still there.

He glanced at his watch again. The second hand ticked away.
Three . . . two . . . one . . .

On cue, the EKG's steady beeping turned into a shrill, unending screech.

Charlie looked at his watch: 21:37, on the dot. If there was one thing he'd learned straightaway as a Ferryman, it was that death was intractably punctual.

Charlie moved to an out-of-the-way corner of the room, placed his two hands together in front of his waist respectfully, and watched the scene play out in from of him.

The nurse from moments ago reentered along with a dark-skinned nurse, who was surprisingly light on her feet, like a ballerina with a stethoscope. They skittered about, but were almost immediately stopped by a third, male nurse. He announced with the forced casualness of someone new to the profession that John Sanders was marked as a No Code. The other two quietly stopped what they were doing without any fuss, the older nurse only taking a moment to silence the EKG. They stood and waited. When the continued silence went on long enough to confirm what they all already knew, they called it. As the trio then filed out, two men entered in their place. They maneuvered the bed around and slowly, somberly, wheeled it out of the room and down the hall.

The small, sterile room was now empty and quiet.

At least, it would be to any laymen passing by. For Charlie, though, it wasn't.

Unlike the corporeal form of Mr. John Sanders, the ethereal one looked much younger—Charlie figured it was what he'd looked like when he was in his early thirties—and strikingly handsome, given how fragile he'd appeared only moments ago. While Ferryman Institute employees were stuck in whatever physical form they happened to be in at the time they became said employees, the dead tended to arrive in whatever form they felt most comfortable in during their life. The newly emerged spirit looked around the room a bit, surveying it with a restrained curiosity that suggested he was really only seeing it for the first time. His eyes traced the windowless, concrete walls; the equipment arrayed around the space where his bed had been; the tiny TV that was silently boasting about the abs they could have for only a minute a day. Finally, they settled on Charlie.

John Sanders studied the Ferryman with a furrowed brow.

“If it looks like a hospital, quacks like a hospital . . .” The spirit's voice was deep and hardy, a bit slow and with just a touch of an accent but articulate enough. His eyes landed on the plate of food that had yet to be taken out of the room. “And has shitty food like a hospital . . .” With a distracted air, he finally turned to face Charlie. “You the nurse that's supposed to give me that suppository? Son, I will tell you right now, I'm not having anything stuck up my ass and that's final.”

Charlie greeted John Sanders with a smile—not too broad, a little sly, but smooth, like a Coltrane saxophone solo. “Lucky for the both of us, I'm not here to do anything of the sort,” he replied, before folding his hands behind his back. His intuition was telling him to play this one slow and easy, and when Charlie's intuition spoke, he listened. That was his trick, really. Other Ferrymen often asked what his secret was, and Charlie usually came up with something that sounded meaty enough. The simple truth, however, was that Charlie just trusted his instincts. Weird? Yes. Effective? Apparently, very much so. “How do you feel, Mr. Sanders?”

The man raised an eyebrow at the mention of his name. “Jack'll do . . . though I'm afraid I don't quite remember your name,” he said, “Mr. . . . ?”

“Dawson, but Charlie is fine.”

“Charlie, then.” He regarded himself for a moment, inspecting his freshly revitalized appearance. “I'd say I feel . . . slightly out-of-body, if that makes sense? Aside from that, I have a vague recollection of a bunch of people fussing around and then I'm pretty sure I shit myself.”

Charlie pretended to fill out something on his clipboard, if only to avoid openly laughing. He and Jack were going to get along just fine.

The spirit paused for a moment, rubbing his hand down his face before really considering the room again, now realizing it for what it was, actually remembering the last few moments of his mortal existence. The man took a few unhurried steps around the room, letting his eyes linger on the walls. A small painting of a blue rowboat, wrapped in an off-white frame that matched the walls on which it hung, sat forlornly across from where Jack's bed used to be. Charlie hadn't noticed it when he entered the room. One oar of the boat lay across its width while the other sat half perched in the water. The painting was far too small for the space it was asked to fill, its colors far too nondescript, yet Charlie could see it sucking in the spirit's attention all the same.