The Golden Age of Death (A CALLIOPE REAPER-JONES NOVEL) (11 page)

And then this last time…her mother had been so bad even Jennice couldn’t fix it. They’d taken her away to the hospital, where Jennice prayed the doctors could make her mother feel better.

“I don’t know what came over me,” Jennice said, stepping away from Clio. “I’m so sorry.”

Clio stood in the doorway, not making a move to leave. But at least the tears were gone, and she seemed like she was more in control of her emotions again.

“I feel better,” Clio said, dropping her shoulders and rolling her head from side to side. “I can hardly even remember why I was so upset. I mean, I do remember, but it’s like an old memory. So weird.”

She trailed off, her brow scrunched in concentration.

“I was just worried about my sister,” she said after a long pause. “I came up to her room to see if it was really empty.”

Jennice had never had a sister. It’d just been her and her mom for as long as she could remember.

“It’s pretty empty,” she agreed, lamely.

“She just…disappeared, you know, without telling me what was going on,” Clio said, a tear trickling down her cheek. “I don’t know where she is, or what I can do to get her back.”

Jennice realized emotions were not as easy to cure as, say, a bad ankle sprain.

“Sorry,” she added, as she wiped the tear away and gave Jennice a weary smile.

“Maybe she had her reasons.”

It was just something to say. Jennice had no clue about the inner workings of Clio and her sister’s relationship, or of sisters’ relationships, in general.

“I’m sure she did,” Clio said.

As they stood together by the door, surveying the empty room, they would’ve been surprised to learn they were each thinking a variation on the same theme:

It was nice just to stand with someone in companionable silence, without having to explain yourself to them.

They stood there, watching as the late-afternoon light faded away, the sun melting into the horizon just beyond the bedroom windows.

Finally, Clio broke the silence:

“Tell me about what you do with your hands.”

Jennice scanned the empty room, looking for something,
anything
, to take the attention away from herself, but there was nothing.

“Stop looking all around like a cornered animal,” Clio said, seeming to sense Jennice’s discomfort. “I’m not going to bite your head off. Just tell me about what you do.”

Jennice did not talk about her gift. Mostly because there was no one for her to talk to about it, but also a little because she was scared if she blabbed about it, it might desert her. She didn’t know where this idea had come from, or how she’d become so superstitious, but she had. She tried hard not to even really acknowledge she was doing anything “special”—even when she was in the middle of a healing.

“It’s nothing,” she said, feeling hesitant about talking to Clio about something so intimate.

“It’s not nothing,” Clio disagreed. “You’re a healer, aren’t you?”

She didn’t wait for Jennice to answer.

“Wow, there aren’t very many of you guys out there. I mean, a few, but most of them go crazy pretty early on and kill themselves—”

Clio realized what she’d just said and stopped herself.

“Oh,” Jennice murmured, trying not to let what she’d heard scare her.

“Damn, I’m sorry,” Clio said. “I should watch my mouth.”

“I’ve never wanted to kill myself. I don’t think so, at least,” Jennice replied, softly.

Her mind was spinning, Clio’s words ricocheting inside of her. She’d never wanted to kill herself. Had never even imagined doing something so heinous, but now the thought wouldn’t leave her brain.

“Maybe they were just unhappy people,” she added, not believing her own words.

Clio shook her head. She obviously didn’t believe in not being blunt in order to spare someone else’s feelings.

“No, it has nothing to do with their personality. It’s the pain and suffering they get exposed to, it becomes overwhelming after a while.”

Jennice understood what Clio was driving at—and she figured if she were healing a lot of different people all the time, then maybe things would be different. But she was only helping her mother, and as tiring as that could be, the love she bore for the woman who’d raised her lifted away any of the bad thoughts, probably protecting her from the burnout Clio had mentioned.

“I don’t do it very often,” she said, finally.

“That’s probably why you’re as well-adjusted as you are,” Clio agreed. “For someone in the supernatural world, that is.”

Jennice was very curious about the “supernatural” world Clio was referring to, but she didn’t want to reveal too much about herself. And asking questions meant she’d have to give answers in return, something she didn’t know if she was ready to do. So she decided to keep her mouth shut and not broach the one subject she was dying to know more about:

Where were the other people like her? And why had she never met any of them?

If she’d grown up with even
one
other kid who understood what it was like to be different, she knew her life would’ve been easier. Except for her mother, there’d never been anyone else to confide in, or share her secrets with, and it’d made for a very lonely childhood.

And this was when Jennice realized, to her own dismay, that she was tired of being alone. She wanted to reveal her secrets to someone else, someone who would understand—and she thought maybe, just maybe, Clio might be that person.

Filled for the first time with the desire to know who and what
she was—a yearning she hadn’t even known she’d possessed—she opened her mouth and asked what she’d never been able to give voice to before:

“Tell me about the ‘supernatural’ world. I want to know what I’ve been missing.”

Howard was not prepared for the next phase of his death. The first part, the leaving the body and becoming a ghost part had been easy enough. It was the “what happens next” that stumped him.

He’d stuck around the retirement home for a while, watching as the aides cleared out the other residents from the area. They’d mostly ignored his body while they tried to calm everyone down and get them back to their rooms. He supposed he wasn’t really a priority since Medicare and Social Security wouldn’t be sending the home a monthly check on his behalf anymore, but still he felt sorry for his former physical self. In his mind, his body resembled a limp marionette puppet waiting for its master to pick up the strings and make it dance—though no one would ever pick up Howard’s strings again. They’d been severed and now he was free floating, a ghostly presence in the midst of the living.

He hadn’t tried to get anyone’s attention, figuring if they couldn’t see him standing there, then he was long gone from the realm of human senses. It wasn’t like he particularly wanted any of them to know he was still lingering around. None of them cared if he was dead or not. He hadn’t felt close to another human being since his wife’s death—

His thoughts ground to a halt as he found himself excited by something for the first time since he’d ceased existing among the living.

If he was a ghost, then maybe his wife was one, too.

He couldn’t shake the idea, once he’d come up with it. It was like a record player stuck on repeat.

How did one go about finding other dead people?

He couldn’t just get out the Yellow Pages and look her up, and there weren’t any other ghosts to ask. He didn’t know what to do. He sat down on one of the now-empty card tables, a half-finished game of UNO spread before him. He reached out, intending to flip one of the un-played cards over, but his fingers went right through it.

But I’m sitting on the card table,
he thought, curious about the rules of being dead—could you sit on something, but not touch it? Then he looked down and saw he wasn’t
actually
sitting on the card table. It was more like he was hovering over it, his butt and hips a few millimeters off the tabletop.

There was a flurry of activity at the back door and Howard turned to see what was happening. It was the two men from the funeral home. He’d seen them before when they’d come to collect the first and only roommate he’d had after his wife died. When she’d been alive, they’d shared a private room. But after she’d passed, the home had quickly shuffled him out of there and into a space that wasn’t half as nice. Plus it already contained an occupant, a man called Benji, who was even older and more out of it than Howard.

They’d been roommates for two weeks. Two
long
weeks of watching Benji’s family (three sons and their families) battle with the fact their dad was in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s and had no clue who he was anymore—let alone who
they
were or why they kept bothering him. It was very sad and Howard, as terrible as he felt thinking it even now, was glad when Benji had died one night, peacefully in his sleep.

Howard had woken up at four in the morning to pee, and he’d noticed Benji wasn’t snoring like he usually did. Curious, he’d crossed the room and bent down near the other man’s face. There was a funny smell, like rotten cheese, and he realized Benji wasn’t breathing.

He knew he should’ve called for an aide and reported the
death, but he felt sorry for the guy, thought he deserved a little peace and quiet. So he went to the bathroom and did his business then climbed back into bed and fell asleep. Needless to say, the morning aide discovered the body promptly at seven when she came in to get Benji ready for the day.

These same two men had come from the funeral home to collect Benji’s body. Howard was supposed to be out of the room, at breakfast, but he’d forgotten his hat and had gone back to get it. He’d walked in on them bagging the body—an oddly pathetic sight—and he’d quickly grabbed his straw hat, escaping the room as fast as he could.

But the image of Benji’s bloodless face being zipped up inside the black body bag had stayed with him for a long time.

Now he was next in line for the same treatment.

Fascinated, he couldn’t stop watching as the two men from the funeral home began their work. He wanted to swoop over and yell at them, tell them to leave him alone, but he knew it was pointless—and he should be focusing on how to find his wife, not watching a heavy black body bag envelop his body. He was so distracted by what the funeral home men were doing to his old body, he didn’t notice the Harvesters as they appeared behind him. Only the doleful ringing of a tiny bell, an artifact one of the Harvesters was carrying in his hand, made Howard turn around.

He goggled at them, the two strange men dressed in Victorian clothing, their watered silk top hats resembling stovepipes. The fabric of their suits—one in puce, the other midnight smoke, both colors usually seen only with Halloween costumes—was elegantly stitched together, tailored to their bodies like a second skin. One of the men was very tall with an Adam’s apple protruding from his throat like an obstruction. He was wearing the puce-colored suit, his long torso halved where the top of the pants met the bottom edging of the suit coat, making it appear as though he could split himself in two. Howard imagined himself shoving the man, pushing against his chest with both hands just to see if the top half would slide off at the waist—but he restrained himself.

“Are you Howard Fielding?”

The other man, the one in the midnight-smoke-colored suit, spoke first. He was average height, a shock of pale apricot hair
sticking out from underneath his top hat, the tiny silver bell in his right hand. The vest he wore, the only normal color on either of the men, was apricot and Howard found himself wondering what kind of person color coordinated their clothing with their hair.

“I am,” Howard said, standing up from the card table, but still keeping his distance from the Victorians. “And who wants to know?”

The taller one motioned for Howard to come closer and, almost against his will, he found his feet answering the call. He could see his reflection in the mirrored lenses of their tiny, round sunglasses, could see the uncertainty in his face as he moved unwittingly toward them.

“Who are you?” he asked again, his vocal chords tight with fear as, against his will, his feet moved him closer and closer to the tall man’s beckoning finger.

“Why, we’ve come to take you to your wife,” Midnight Smoke said, dropping his hand.

Instantly, Howard’s forward locomotion stopped, but he was already so close to the two men he could smell the faint scent of lilies emanating from their persons.

“You can take me to her?” he found himself saying through his fear.

Both men nodded in unison.

“What’s the trick?”

Midnight Smoke turned to his tall companion and smiled.

“There’s no trick,” he replied, his voice smooth as creamed butter. “You just have to come with us willingly and of your own accord. That’s the only stipulation.”

Howard watched, mesmerized by the sleight of hand, as a misshapen iron jar the size of a coffee mug replaced the tiny silver bell in Midnight Smoke’s hand. The Victorian raised the jar toward Howard’s face, letting him see there was nothing inside.

Howard nodded.
Yes,
he thought,
the jar’s empty, but I still don’t trust you.

“All you have to do is jump into the jar and we’ll take you to your wife,” Puce said.

“You promise me she’s there? Wherever you’re taking me?”

The two men looked at each other again, but they didn’t smile.

“We are taking you where all souls go,” Midnight Smoke said, not really answering Howard’s question, or making him any kind of promise.

Howard didn’t want to be a ghost stuck wandering the Earth for eternity. He wanted to be with his wife, wherever she was, and these two men seemed to represent the only means of moving forward.

“Okay,” he said finally, making his decision—for better, or for worse.

“Just close your eyes and will yourself inside,” Midnight Smoke said, pleased by Howard’s answer. “It’s the simplest task in all of the world.”

Howard did as Midnight Smoke instructed, closing his eyes and willing his spirit into the jar. It only took a second, and then Howard was gone—a wash of gray vapor sliding into an iron jar.