OK, I shouldn’t be weirded out on my own birthday any more than anyone else should be. But I’m beginning to think that maybe Dr. Sutter and Dr. Rubin were right back at the psycho ward when they said I was some kinda crazy. To tell you the truth, I’m starting to think that either I am certifiably batshit or I can do more than just see, hear and talk to ghosts.
That Coffey dude offered me a lift back to my house but I thanked him and said I’d rather hang with my friends. So we boarded a bit, some of them wished me a happy birthday and Ramon, one of the kids who was at Clarissa’s party, the one who fell flat on his face, even gave me a digital audio recorder so I could record some ghosts for him. At first, it seemed like a selfish thing for him to do but then I started looking at it from his point of view. Ghost Hunters on the Sci Fi Channel helped clue a lotta people into the facts and theories of the paranormal. So now fans of the show know the lingo and about EVP’s and shit like that. So I took Ramon’s present and thanked him.
Eventually, I decided to leave the park. Since I lost my iPhone and my folks had no way of reaching me, I guessed if I didn’t head home right then I’d get an earful. Just ‘cuz it’s your birthday doesn’t mean that it’s all about you. When people spend money, time and energy puttin’ your party together, it eventually becomes all about them.
I was rolling on a dip in the street on the way back home when I heard a woman scream. It was 3 o’clock and I remember the time ‘cuz my watch’s alarm went off right then to remind me to be home by three like my folks said. I stepped on the back of my board and came to a sudden stop and listened.
“No, no! Please! Don’t!”
It was definitely a chick, one who was scared shitless like she was about to get the crap knocked out of her or something. I picked up my board and walked toward an alley near where her screaming was coming from.
“Oh, God, no! Please don’t!”
I looked around for a cop and nodded to myself. “Yep, when you really need one, where the fuck are they?” I turned around and looked into the alley again, already freaking out over what I’d find.
“N-n-no!” Louder, more frightened. Shit, I couldn’t not do anything. I walked in and yelled, “Hey! What’s the fuck’s goin’ on in there? I’ve got a cop with me!” Right. Like anyone with half a brain would fall for that. Then I saw her behind a dumpster.
She was a young black lady, maybe in her early-mid twenties, flat on her back and she was beating and kicking like she was having a seizure or something but I didn’t see anyone else there.
“Hey, are you alright, Miss? What’s the matter?” She kept her eyes fixed on something or someone that was right on top of her and she ignored me like I wasn’t even there. And, in a way, I wasn’t.
I walked over to where she was struggling, looking around again and kneeled down to her and my hand went through her shoulder to the wet pavement. She never looked at me or gave any sign of my presence. It was just like… Oh, shit, I thought, this is a residual haunting. Finally her arms and legs almost stopped moving as if two pairs of invisible restraints like they use in the mental ward were put over them. Her arms seemed to be held back over her head like someone was forcing them down. Then her skirt shot up over her waist by itself. If this was a residual haunting of a rape and I could see her and not the dude doing it, that meant she was murdered.
One of the suckiest things about being in my position is that when you see shit like this going down, you feel so damned helpless. You have to see people in their last moments on earth and you know there isn’t a fucking thing you can do to help them. You can’t even comfort them as they keep replaying what’s probably the most horrible moment in their life. This woman was raped and killed and I seemed to recall something like this happening about five, six years ago. The police never solved it.
I yelled, “Stop it!” even though I knew damned good and well that no one in this ghostly snuff film could hear me. I had no idea if she was raped by one guy or gang-raped. My hands pawed at the air over her body, hoping to grab hold of whoever was hurting her. The sense of being totally useless was one of the worst things I’ve ever experienced. It was like trying to fight history, something that had already gone down, literally fighting ghosts.
She kept screaming when her panties began to tug down by themselves and I remembered Ramon’s digital recorder so I whipped it out and hit the “record” button. What the fuck else could I do? I was hoping maybe if her voice came out on the tape, she’d give a clue as to who raped and killed her. Then I’d get labeled a nut job by the Braintree PD after telling them where it came from. Finally a cut developed across her throat and blood began spraying on me. No, not on me. Through me like I was the ghost and not her, landing on the pavement. Her legs began kicking again but her movements just got slower and slower until finally she lay still staring up into the sky.
I was shaking even worse than I did when I saw that Bruley dude hang himself in the bathroom because this wasn’t something involving one person who made a really fucked up choice. This was a murder, plain and simple, the most brutal kind. It didn’t matter much to me if this was live or Memorex. It’s still traumatizing no matter how old the crime.
I looked around the alley just in case I could catch a ghostly glimpse of her murderer then when I looked down, she was gone. I played the tape back and, I’ll be fucked runnin’, her voice came out almost as clear as mine. I didn’t think Ramon would be hearing this one. It would give him more nightmares than even I usually have.
I walked out of the alleyway and my watch’s alarm went off. I lifted my wrist to my face and my watch said it was 3 o’clock. Again. What the fuck? How’s that possible? That’s not supposed to happen with a digital watch, hell, any watch. Clocks and watches aren’t supposed to run backwards.
If I didn’t know any better, and maybe I didn’t, I’d swear that I regained whatever time I spent in the alley.
Laura, Mr. and Mrs. Moss, Rabbi Green and several family friends all yelled, “SURPRISE!” when Adam came through the door, even though it was anything but a surprise. In fact, he’d already seen the garland that said “Happy 18th Birthday, Adam!” that stretched across the hallway and even watched them blow up the personalized Mylar balloons that said basically the same thing. His family had sprung for a half sheet cake of his favorite - Chocolate with whipped cream frosting. Yet, no sooner than the echo from the greeting died down Adam slammed the front door shut and ran upstairs as if they weren’t there. A second later, his bedroom door slammed shut.
A stunned silence took hold over the hallway then Mr. and Mrs. Moss began making embarrassed apologies to Rabbi Green and the others. His mother was about to go upstairs with a full head of steam when Laura interceded and said, “I’ll talk to him, Ma. You stay down here and keep the guests entertained."
For an eerie moment, Laura felt like Arbogast, the Martin Balsam character in Psycho as he made his slow climb to mortality up the stairs to Mrs. Bates’ room. She knew her kid brother wasn’t into murdering people while wearing Mom’s dresses and, despite her horrible new hairstyle, she didn’t even own a wig. Still, she had no idea what she’d find that would explain Adam’s extraordinary rudeness. She knocked on his door.
“Adam? It’s me, Honey. May I come in?”
“Go away,” came the strained response.
She came in, anyway. Why don’t people ever listen and just go away when they’re asked to? It’s just like when you tell someone not to look down and they do it anyway. It doesn’t matter if they’re scared of heights. The idiots will always look down knowing damned good and well it’ll freak them the fuck out.
“Adam, what’s going on? You knew we were throwing a party for you. I mean, forget about Mom, Dad and me. Rabbi Green and the Goldens are down there.”
“I don’t care!” I said.
“Jesus Christ, you’re crying. Adam, what happened? Are they back again?” I told my sister that Clarissa came by last night while leaving out the part about my cherry maybe, maybe not getting popped and that I was given a breather from the Others.
“I don’t want to talk about it, Laura.” But I told her anyway, as briefly as possible, trying to keep the fucked up image of her throat getting cut all by itself. I couldn’t do it. It’s like when something violent and traumatic happens to you and these flashbacks keep arriving in front of your eyes and you can’t control it. It’s sort of like that. I left out the part about regaining the five minutes because I didn’t know what to make of or if I was hallucinating that, too.
“You know, Adam, solitude’s rarely the way to go when you experience something traumatizing.” I ignored her. I really, truly, didn’t want to relive it by talking about that lady’s rape and murder and I resented Laura for making do that. “OK, you don’t have to discuss it any more. But let me tell you a story about something that happened to me when I first became a field agent after my training. Okay?” I wiped my eyes with the sleeve of my hood and nodded like I didn’t give a rat’s ass about her story because I didn’t.
She walked to the far side of my room and sat backwards on my computer chair so the back was against her chest. Laura sometimes does masculine things like that. Maybe she does it to make an impact on people that she interrogates, considering she does that for a living. She thought for a bit before she started talking.
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Friday, May 1, 2009
The Bone Bridge: Chapter 12
John LeRoy Drive, Braintree, MA, November 13th
Dude, I can’t tell you how great it felt to be out of that fucking psycho ward and back on my board. One of the things I learned is that the more I move and the faster I do it, the harder it is for Them to follow me. It was Friday and all the kids were still at school so I decided before my folks could throw me a lame party that would just keep me pinned in our haunted house, to hop back on my board and get some moves in. So far, I hadn’t seen anyone who looked like they didn’t have a pulse.
I did an Ollie just to see if I lost anything and was happy to see that I hadn’t. Then I one-legged my board up the incline and gave myself some rolling space before turning an Ollie into a grind rail. Like so many things in life, it started out alright then I lost my balance and slipped off one side of the rail onto the cement.
This was one of the other reasons why I wanted to come here when no one else was around. After 2 o’clock when all the other kids got here after school, that bogus move was something I wouldn’t have lived down. That’s why I spazzed out when I realized I wasn’t alone. Just as I was getting up, I saw a big dude standing in front of me and I almost thought he was one of Them until I recognized him. It was that cop from Boston and he was holding my skateboard with one hand and reaching out to me with his other. I got up on my own and brushed off my pants.
“You OK, kiddo?”
“Uh, yeah. You’re Mr. Coffey, right?” He laughed.
“Like I haven’t heard that one before.” I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. “I got sick and tired of people calling me Mr. Coffey. That’s why I became a detective. It was easier than becoming Doctor Coffey.”
“Oh, I get it. Heh. So, what can I do for you?”
“Your folks said you’d probably be here. I want to talk to you about something.”
“About what?”
“Your invisible friends. I’m a believer.”
Maybe it was just the natural adolescent instinct to distrust cops but I would think with only one other person in the world who believed he was seeing ghosts, Adam would be more willing to talk to me. What worried me was that, if this Dietrich character ever got wind of him, maybe he’d believe his claims, too, and seek to exploit them. I was mindful of the fact that this whole thing, if it was for real, began with their grandfather’s research back in the 60’s. That plus Laura basically making a living that prevented people from perverting that research and her kid brother seeing swarms of spooks and his connection to one of the families that died at the Sheraton somehow put this family squarely in the middle of our investigation. When you’ve been a cop as long as me, you’re not quite as big a believer in coincidence and serendipity as others.
We sat down on a bench at the skateboard park that perhaps would’ve been better put to use in the Tower of London on account of the hard wood torturing my back. A piece of shrapnel in my lumbar in Kuwait during Desert Storm left me with a nagging back injury that made me an enemy of the sitting position in any chair or even sofa for an extended period of time. Then again, my injured back was a more accurate barometer than anything used by the National Weather Service. Yet I decided to talk to him in an environment in which he’d be the most comfortable, so I and not he would look like the fish out of water. And I couldn’t possibly imagine an environment in which a 48 year-old detective looked more out of place than in a skateboard park with a live-action anime character.
“So why do you of all people believe me?” he asked, tossing his long bangs out of his eyes. I always hated that stupid Emo boy cut. Long in the front, short in the back, it makes the kids who wear it look as if their barber got bored and walked away before they were done. “I mean, it isn’t like cops are known for believing in supernatural shit. You dudes have a hard enough time taking psychics seriously even when they solve crimes for you.”
“Well, kiddo, like in all professions and all walks of life, some people are just more open-minded than others. But I’ll tell you what made a believer out of me…” and I told him about what I saw on the security video. The kid was a little startled to discover that he was videotaped but seemed to be put at ease after a while now that it was documented he wasn’t seeing things.
“Plus, your sister’s been telling me that your house seems to be infested with spirits that only you can see and hear. That it landed you in the hospital again.”
“It’s fucking crazy, dude,” he said, pawing his bangs out of his big green eyes again. “The ones that I think bug me the most these days are the little kids, the ones that died young. I mean, you try ignoring them when they look up at you beggin’ you to help them find their parents and their homes.”
I never stopped to consider the psychological damage, the sheer angst that was added to what was already ordinary teen angst to anyone who saw ghosts as often as he did. Not that anyone should be expected to have off-the-rack empathy for such people.
“Are any of them here with you right now?” He looked around then I looked around, not that I’d see any of them.
“Not at the moment. In fact, I haven’t seen any of them since… last night.”
“Look, I know it’s impossible to listen to all of them when they’re all talking at the same time. But try to remember: Have any of them contacted you about what happened at the Sheraton last Halloween, anyone who’d identified themselves as having been killed there that night?”
Adam just shook his head with a wide-eyed expression of innocent confusion and for a very unmanly second I wanted to reach over and wrap him up in a hug and let him know that he was far from being alone. Mine and Beatrice’s son Chaz would’ve been almost his age if he was… I pinched off that thought as I tried to put my mind back on the job. I knew why my protective instincts would emerge whenever I saw or heard about this kid but I tried to put as much distance between the reasons why and myself as possible.
“The closest I think I’ve come to talking to anyone like that was…” He bit his full lower lip and seemed reluctant to tell me. I tried not to press but I leaned closer to him. “Clarissa’s ghost said something back at the hospital about freeing them. She said, ‘Free us.’ At first I thought she said ‘Frias’, like in a Portuguese name.”
I know it’s a cliché but sometimes shivers do run up spines and this time was no exception. Laura gave me the heads up that this Dietrich asshole may very well be shanghaiing ghosts and using them at places like the Sheraton. If there was some sort of a network in the netherworld, perhaps word got out that someone in our plane of existence was kidnapping the dead. And, for some reason, they’d decided Adam Moss was their savior and that he’d free them.
Just ‘cuz I saw all the Matrix movies and liked them didn’t mean I was buying into this bullshit I was hearing from this cop that I was the One, some real-life Neo.
“Look, it’s just a theory and a wild one, at that, I admit. Maybe you’re not their Moses who’s going to lead them to the Promised Land and it could be they’re seriously misguided.”
“Fuckin’ A,” I said. “I mean, I just turned 18 today and I can’t go one month without winding up at the Principal’s office for fucking up in some way.”
“You’re birthday’s today?”
“Yeah,” I said while looking at my Reeboks. As I rolled my skateboard back and forth, I kinda smiled to myself when I remembered what Clarissa did for me last night. For some reason, I wasn’t scared of her like the Others because I knew that, dead or alive, her heart was a good one and always in the right place. After all, she did promise me she’d pop my cherry. Of course, the circumstances weren’t quite what I had in mind, but…
“Well, happy birthday, kiddo. I guess I should’ve known.”
“You didn’t see the party decorations in the house when you talked to my folks?”
“No, I never got past the front door, actually. I talked to your Dad on the porch.”
“Was my sister home? She’s driving a rented Chevy Cobalt.”
“I didn’t see one in the driveway.”
“Shit, then she doesn’t know you’re talking to me.”
“Why should that matter? The decision is ultimately up to…”
“My folks are hopelessly out of the loop, dude. Besides, I just turned 18 today. You don’t even need their permission to talk to me anymore. I’m no longer a minor.”
“OK, but why should it matter if your big sister knows I’m talking to you?”
“Look, I dunno what she told you back at the police station but she’s plannin’ on hookin’ me up with some dude named Oliver Blood. I’m scared shitless about meeting this guy. He’s her boss, the head honcho at her agency. And I’m not thinking she’s sketched out to get more people involved in this.”
“Why is she setting up a meeting with you and her agency head?”
“I dunno. But I’m gettin’ the feeling she’s not tellin’ me everything, Detective Coffey. She says I can help them but I think she knows something I don’t and is trying to get her agency to protect me.”
Protect and to serve? Possibly. But I also was afraid she was planning on using her kid brother as bait to draw out that Dietrich prick, maybe even to exploit him. If occasionally crossing swords with government spooks in my eight years in the Green Berets had taught me one thing, it’s this: Don’t trust the bastards. In fact, after my experience with intelligence types, I wouldn’t trust them to watch a pile of dog shit. They’ll not only put an American flag on top of it but also try to get their dogs to shit in other peoples’ back yards so they could put Old Glory on top of them, too.
Despite my military and police background, Laura Moss gave me the heebie jeebies and I’m still not even sure what exactly her agency does. Of course, I didn’t share my concerns with the kid so he’d be more freaked out than he already was. I also didn’t want him to distrust his own sister more than he already did. That was my job. Yet, the mere suspicion that she would even consider using her innocent kid brother as bait and to perhaps exploit him for their own ends made my dick burn. Bottom line: When Adam talked to this Oliver Blood character, I wanted to be there in one way or another.
The school buses were circulating throughout Braintree and disgorging kids into the cold. A few hardy souls were making their way toward the skating park and already taking note of me so I decided to wrap it up.
“You know what’s one of the cool things about being a cop, Adam?” I asked as I stood up and arched my aching back.
“What’s that?”
“Wearing a wire.”
Dude, I can’t tell you how great it felt to be out of that fucking psycho ward and back on my board. One of the things I learned is that the more I move and the faster I do it, the harder it is for Them to follow me. It was Friday and all the kids were still at school so I decided before my folks could throw me a lame party that would just keep me pinned in our haunted house, to hop back on my board and get some moves in. So far, I hadn’t seen anyone who looked like they didn’t have a pulse.
I did an Ollie just to see if I lost anything and was happy to see that I hadn’t. Then I one-legged my board up the incline and gave myself some rolling space before turning an Ollie into a grind rail. Like so many things in life, it started out alright then I lost my balance and slipped off one side of the rail onto the cement.
This was one of the other reasons why I wanted to come here when no one else was around. After 2 o’clock when all the other kids got here after school, that bogus move was something I wouldn’t have lived down. That’s why I spazzed out when I realized I wasn’t alone. Just as I was getting up, I saw a big dude standing in front of me and I almost thought he was one of Them until I recognized him. It was that cop from Boston and he was holding my skateboard with one hand and reaching out to me with his other. I got up on my own and brushed off my pants.
“You OK, kiddo?”
“Uh, yeah. You’re Mr. Coffey, right?” He laughed.
“Like I haven’t heard that one before.” I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. “I got sick and tired of people calling me Mr. Coffey. That’s why I became a detective. It was easier than becoming Doctor Coffey.”
“Oh, I get it. Heh. So, what can I do for you?”
“Your folks said you’d probably be here. I want to talk to you about something.”
“About what?”
“Your invisible friends. I’m a believer.”
Maybe it was just the natural adolescent instinct to distrust cops but I would think with only one other person in the world who believed he was seeing ghosts, Adam would be more willing to talk to me. What worried me was that, if this Dietrich character ever got wind of him, maybe he’d believe his claims, too, and seek to exploit them. I was mindful of the fact that this whole thing, if it was for real, began with their grandfather’s research back in the 60’s. That plus Laura basically making a living that prevented people from perverting that research and her kid brother seeing swarms of spooks and his connection to one of the families that died at the Sheraton somehow put this family squarely in the middle of our investigation. When you’ve been a cop as long as me, you’re not quite as big a believer in coincidence and serendipity as others.
We sat down on a bench at the skateboard park that perhaps would’ve been better put to use in the Tower of London on account of the hard wood torturing my back. A piece of shrapnel in my lumbar in Kuwait during Desert Storm left me with a nagging back injury that made me an enemy of the sitting position in any chair or even sofa for an extended period of time. Then again, my injured back was a more accurate barometer than anything used by the National Weather Service. Yet I decided to talk to him in an environment in which he’d be the most comfortable, so I and not he would look like the fish out of water. And I couldn’t possibly imagine an environment in which a 48 year-old detective looked more out of place than in a skateboard park with a live-action anime character.
“So why do you of all people believe me?” he asked, tossing his long bangs out of his eyes. I always hated that stupid Emo boy cut. Long in the front, short in the back, it makes the kids who wear it look as if their barber got bored and walked away before they were done. “I mean, it isn’t like cops are known for believing in supernatural shit. You dudes have a hard enough time taking psychics seriously even when they solve crimes for you.”
“Well, kiddo, like in all professions and all walks of life, some people are just more open-minded than others. But I’ll tell you what made a believer out of me…” and I told him about what I saw on the security video. The kid was a little startled to discover that he was videotaped but seemed to be put at ease after a while now that it was documented he wasn’t seeing things.
“Plus, your sister’s been telling me that your house seems to be infested with spirits that only you can see and hear. That it landed you in the hospital again.”
“It’s fucking crazy, dude,” he said, pawing his bangs out of his big green eyes again. “The ones that I think bug me the most these days are the little kids, the ones that died young. I mean, you try ignoring them when they look up at you beggin’ you to help them find their parents and their homes.”
I never stopped to consider the psychological damage, the sheer angst that was added to what was already ordinary teen angst to anyone who saw ghosts as often as he did. Not that anyone should be expected to have off-the-rack empathy for such people.
“Are any of them here with you right now?” He looked around then I looked around, not that I’d see any of them.
“Not at the moment. In fact, I haven’t seen any of them since… last night.”
“Look, I know it’s impossible to listen to all of them when they’re all talking at the same time. But try to remember: Have any of them contacted you about what happened at the Sheraton last Halloween, anyone who’d identified themselves as having been killed there that night?”
Adam just shook his head with a wide-eyed expression of innocent confusion and for a very unmanly second I wanted to reach over and wrap him up in a hug and let him know that he was far from being alone. Mine and Beatrice’s son Chaz would’ve been almost his age if he was… I pinched off that thought as I tried to put my mind back on the job. I knew why my protective instincts would emerge whenever I saw or heard about this kid but I tried to put as much distance between the reasons why and myself as possible.
“The closest I think I’ve come to talking to anyone like that was…” He bit his full lower lip and seemed reluctant to tell me. I tried not to press but I leaned closer to him. “Clarissa’s ghost said something back at the hospital about freeing them. She said, ‘Free us.’ At first I thought she said ‘Frias’, like in a Portuguese name.”
I know it’s a cliché but sometimes shivers do run up spines and this time was no exception. Laura gave me the heads up that this Dietrich asshole may very well be shanghaiing ghosts and using them at places like the Sheraton. If there was some sort of a network in the netherworld, perhaps word got out that someone in our plane of existence was kidnapping the dead. And, for some reason, they’d decided Adam Moss was their savior and that he’d free them.
Just ‘cuz I saw all the Matrix movies and liked them didn’t mean I was buying into this bullshit I was hearing from this cop that I was the One, some real-life Neo.
“Look, it’s just a theory and a wild one, at that, I admit. Maybe you’re not their Moses who’s going to lead them to the Promised Land and it could be they’re seriously misguided.”
“Fuckin’ A,” I said. “I mean, I just turned 18 today and I can’t go one month without winding up at the Principal’s office for fucking up in some way.”
“You’re birthday’s today?”
“Yeah,” I said while looking at my Reeboks. As I rolled my skateboard back and forth, I kinda smiled to myself when I remembered what Clarissa did for me last night. For some reason, I wasn’t scared of her like the Others because I knew that, dead or alive, her heart was a good one and always in the right place. After all, she did promise me she’d pop my cherry. Of course, the circumstances weren’t quite what I had in mind, but…
“Well, happy birthday, kiddo. I guess I should’ve known.”
“You didn’t see the party decorations in the house when you talked to my folks?”
“No, I never got past the front door, actually. I talked to your Dad on the porch.”
“Was my sister home? She’s driving a rented Chevy Cobalt.”
“I didn’t see one in the driveway.”
“Shit, then she doesn’t know you’re talking to me.”
“Why should that matter? The decision is ultimately up to…”
“My folks are hopelessly out of the loop, dude. Besides, I just turned 18 today. You don’t even need their permission to talk to me anymore. I’m no longer a minor.”
“OK, but why should it matter if your big sister knows I’m talking to you?”
“Look, I dunno what she told you back at the police station but she’s plannin’ on hookin’ me up with some dude named Oliver Blood. I’m scared shitless about meeting this guy. He’s her boss, the head honcho at her agency. And I’m not thinking she’s sketched out to get more people involved in this.”
“Why is she setting up a meeting with you and her agency head?”
“I dunno. But I’m gettin’ the feeling she’s not tellin’ me everything, Detective Coffey. She says I can help them but I think she knows something I don’t and is trying to get her agency to protect me.”
Protect and to serve? Possibly. But I also was afraid she was planning on using her kid brother as bait to draw out that Dietrich prick, maybe even to exploit him. If occasionally crossing swords with government spooks in my eight years in the Green Berets had taught me one thing, it’s this: Don’t trust the bastards. In fact, after my experience with intelligence types, I wouldn’t trust them to watch a pile of dog shit. They’ll not only put an American flag on top of it but also try to get their dogs to shit in other peoples’ back yards so they could put Old Glory on top of them, too.
Despite my military and police background, Laura Moss gave me the heebie jeebies and I’m still not even sure what exactly her agency does. Of course, I didn’t share my concerns with the kid so he’d be more freaked out than he already was. I also didn’t want him to distrust his own sister more than he already did. That was my job. Yet, the mere suspicion that she would even consider using her innocent kid brother as bait and to perhaps exploit him for their own ends made my dick burn. Bottom line: When Adam talked to this Oliver Blood character, I wanted to be there in one way or another.
The school buses were circulating throughout Braintree and disgorging kids into the cold. A few hardy souls were making their way toward the skating park and already taking note of me so I decided to wrap it up.
“You know what’s one of the cool things about being a cop, Adam?” I asked as I stood up and arched my aching back.
“What’s that?”
“Wearing a wire.”
The Bone Bridge: Chapter 11
The Sheraton Massacre was also called “The Who’s Who Mass Suicide” by some of the national media but Hans Dietrich was also assembling a Who’s Who of his own. It wasn’t always easy getting the entities that he wanted and it usually required an invitation from the owner or proprietor of a haunted venue before they could go hunting. Plus, they preferred to get paid. Thanks to their publicity-shy benefactor, it wasn’t as if they needed the money but some transfer of cash for their services made their mission at least look legitimate and businesslike.
There were some ghosts that he still would’ve loved to have. The reasons for not getting such entities in his supernatural stable were various: Either they’d made their peace before being executed and weren’t available, the place they occupied wasn’t readily accessible, they simply didn’t wish to make appearances in our dimension or they were too damned slippery. Sometimes it was as if word got out what Dietrich had planned for them.
Maniacs such as Karl Panzram, Ted Bundy, Jack the Ripper and his personal favorites, countrymen Joseph Mengele and Peter Kurten, aka the Dusseldorf Ripper, forever eluded him for one reason or another. Luckily, the world always provided itself with a surfeit of killers and mass murderers.
There was one guy they’d captured six or seven years ago who still claims to this day to be Vlad the Impaler. Considering his alleged antiquity, there was no way to verify that but the results were stunning. Vlad was able to create momentarily solid objects such as petards or stakes literally out of thin air and he’d succeeded in actually impaling a couple of subjects in trial runs. That ability alone made him a very highly-prized asset. Even the multi-talented Mursi al Islamiyah hadn’t demonstrated such abilities.
As one could reasonably expect from someone possessed of such technology, there were a few professional torturers and mad doctors in the poisonous mix. While he may not have been able to obtain the services of Mengele, the Nazi “Angel of Death”, Dietrich and his team were able to get from the ruins at Buchenwald Mengele’s friend and colleague in the weird sciences Major Heinrich Jodl.
In some ways, Jodl was an even more impressive piece of work than Mengele, as his notorious reputation as a pioneer of modern-day vivisection attested. Jodl would prove to be especially useful in situations where there were to be Jews involved. Jodl, if anything, hated and feared Jews even moreso than Dietrich, which was saying something. When the battle-hardened Third Army stormed the prison and liberated it in April 1945, General "Blood and Guts" Patton himself had actually vomited when they saw the results of Jodl’s “work” in his laboratory. If he could manifest his old surgical tools, he’d almost be more valuable to Dietrich than Vlad. As it was, on test subjects, Jodl would burrow into a living person’s body and essentially turn them inside out as with his late colleague in that castle in Dublin, Ireland. Or, in one notable instance, Jodl had merely scrambled the subject’s insides without exposing the organs. It was refreshing to see a dedicated professional who wouldn’t let death put an end to his medical curiosity.
Mursi al Islamiyah also wasn’t his first terrorist acquisition. The one that had cost his team a member was Seamus Hannigan, a “Real IRA” bomber who had a flair for the dramatic. Hannigan was killed a few years ago trying to smuggle VX nerve agent out of the United States. Even though he was killed across the Atlantic, his ghost haunted the ruins of a castle in Dublin, for some unknown reason. Or it did until Dietrich and Associates, Inc. came visiting.
And then there was the usual garden variety of anonymous psychopaths who tended to be wannabes with limited skills but who were useful as infantrymen, shock troops. There was one from Cuba by way of Miami, a guy who claimed to be a torturer for Castro back in the early days before the Cuban dictator was forced to send him packing to Miami when his excesses were too egregious to ignore. That particular one was so violent, he was the one who got Dietrich to switch from one inch to three inch-thick glass when he actually cracked the first one. Moreso than anyone else, the bastard could draw, collect and expel more foot pounds of energy than anyone else in the Hole. While civilian ghost hunters are impressed with watching a child’s ball slightly rock back and forth, the torturer, nicknamed Dente Rojo or “Red Tooth” by fearful Cubans, once knocked two teeth out of a test subject’s head. It took him quite a while to recover, usually an hour or two, but if he knew where to strike in his one shot, it could easily prove fatal.
Now in his makeshift office in his makeshift warehouse, Dietrich opened a countersurveillance file on his second-hand metal desk and read the contents once again. The name of his pursuer had stuck out and after a little bit of research, Dietrich discovered that she was the granddaughter of the old fart who’d given him the technology that he was still using to this day!
It wasn’t so much the American agent whose intelligence agency had been investigating him and his activities for the past 25 months that intrigued him so much as her younger brother, someone who’d been hospitalized at around the same time as her agency began shadowing him.
This Adam Moss, aged 17, was treated for paranoid delusions. The little kike claimed to be a magnet for ghosts, an ability that Dietrich, who had to rely on heavy, cumbersome, expensive machinery, had no choice but to admire and envy. Covet, even.
Another thing that sucks about being a magnet for ghosts- You can forget about your privacy. They’re there when you’re taking a whiz or a shit and forget about jerking off, which is my only damned sex life. Not that I’ve felt like it since Clarissa… since she left me. But I could feel the pressure start to build up. Sure, I’m busted up inside but I’m still a 17 year-old kid and still alive. I felt self-conscious about even shaking my dick after I peed. Come to think of it, maybe pulling my pud would help weed out some of the Victorian or uptight Republican assholes who every night came looking for favors like I was the Godfather on his daughter’s wedding day. Nah. Then I’d probably attract dead pervs, knowing my shitty luck.
Plus, my sister’s old room is next to mine and the walls in this house not only have ears, they have parabolic antennas. I was the most unfortunate kind of kid: One whose parents have an insanely active sex life. It’s no secret that I got my sex drive from both my folks and even though their room is all the way at the end of the hall, they’re both what you’d call loud and verbal in their throes of passion, which is about six nights a week. They cut me a break after I came home from the hospital both times but I guess Mom and Dad felt the pressure building up, too. And my Jewish mother wonders why I’m so thin. It’s not so much her crappy cooking or my adolescent metabolism: It’s the fact that their sex life is ruining my appetite.
All the same, I found myself seeking the company of people that I knew were alive and kicking, even my oversexed parents. That’s especially true of my sister. Since Laura and I became young adults, we kept the fighting to a bare minimum and I even began thinking she was cool, after all. I had no idea how long she’d be home but I found myself dreading the day she’d finally pack up and leave again for Katmandu or whatever Godforsaken place her boss would send her.
I bugged her for more info on this Blood character but for some reason, she wasn’t very generous in the detail department. I think the biggest reason why I stalled about meeting him wasn’t so much that I was scared of him (although I was) as my knowing that Laura wouldn’t move out until I saw him. Yeah, I love my big sister. Fucking sue me.
When I called Laura Moss to give her some startling autopsy results, she gave me some startling news of her own: Her poor kid brother Adam had been readmitted to the hospital, this time to the nut house. I had to restrain myself from visiting him. One, I didn’t want to interrupt his therapy, however useless I was convinced it would be; Two, I didn’t want to remind him any more of his dead girlfriend than I already did and, Three, I didn’t want to come off looking like I was grilling him for more info. Which of course, I would’ve, albeit delicately.
My heart went out to the poor kid, especially after I found out from Laura that he was being visited by so many ghosts it eventually landed him back in the Napoleon Finishing School. I couldn’t help but wonder- Even though the boy was trying his best to screen out as many of those ghosts as possible, how many of them were victims of the mass suicide at the Sheraton and were trying to tell him what exactly happened?
Luckily, we get our information from the living, such as the strangely morbid but competent folks at the Essex County Coroner’s Office. Like I told Laura Moss, the traumatic deceleration of some of the street level victims temporarily masked puncture wounds. They were holes made in the body that didn’t yield any forensic evidence of a weapon. For instance, a person pierced with a sword or knife would offer some residue, according to Locard’s Exchange Principle. There would be some microscopic flakes of metal in the wound and wound channel.
Not this time, apparently. It was as if they were pierced with a ghostly weapon or a very, very sharp icicle. I began wondering if some of them were stabbed and pushed out the window after being chased all around the next-to-top story. Christ, what a way to go. To add insult to injury to our powers of ratiocination, free histamine and other tests conclusively proved that the wounds were made perimortem, or at the point of death. This was shaping up to be a classic case of knowing less and less as more and more information came in.
I quietly decided it may be a good idea to pay Adam another visit soon, after all, especially since Laura said he was discharged and came back home.
I feel pretty confident when I say that I’m probably the only dude in human history that got his cherry popped by a ghost.
Now, what I’m about to say will sound like something written for Penthouse’s letters to the editor but I have no reason to lie to you. This is how I lost my virginity to Clarissa a week or so after she passed away.
I just got out of the shower last night and my room was empty. A week ago, that wouldn’t have been unusual but since I came back from the hospital the first time, my bedroom’s been like Grand Central fucking Station for every ghost on the planet. Last night was different and, while I welcomed getting my space back, I was also wondering what was going on. Maybe they found some other medium, a real one, who would be more accommodating and didn’t mind having their privacy ripped off.
I took advantage of the rare chance to get undressed without being gawked at by dead people and took off the dirty clothes that I pulled back on when I first got out of the shower. So I was standing naked in front of my dresser pulling out a pair of flannel pajama bottoms when I saw Clarissa in the mirror.
Yeah, just like in about a hundred horror movies. Sometimes it happens for real. I whipped around and she was gone. My heart sank down to my knees. Maybe I was crazy, after all. I couldn’t believe that Clarissa would pop in for the first time since I came out of my coma just to disappear. Or maybe she couldn’t control it. Maybe she was still getting the hang of manifesting. So I called out her name. Nothing. Nada. So I called out to her again and this time she began materializing to my left.
First I saw the outline of her head and one of her shoulders. Then I could make out the perfect ponytail she wore on our last night together. Pretty soon, she was full bodied and was even beginning to show some color. She almost looked real. Too real. Her wounds were coming out, too, and I reached out and touched them.
Hugging her was like hugging a solid draft but I didn’t care. I began crying and even though I could feel her body, even her clothes, my tears dropped through her shoulder and landed on the floor.
“Where were you?” I asked. “God, I can’t tell you how much I missed you, baby.”
She smiled in response and looked like she wanted to say something back but didn’t think it was worth trying. I didn’t mind continuing the conversation for both of us. I figured, the longer I talked to her, maybe the longer she’d stay.
“Just when you were alive, when you were the only girl I wanted to hang with, you’re the only ghost I want to see.” It sounded great in my head but came out sounding like dog shit when it came out of my mouth but her sweet smile showed that she knew what I meant. She put her lips over mine, even inserting her tongue into my mouth. It was almost like sucking on an ice cube but I still didn’t care. A cold Clarissa was still a damned sight better than the hottest ghost, if there’s any such thing. Her clothes melted away from her and she, too, was naked. It was, obviously, the first time I’d ever seen her bod and even as a ghost, she was still smoking hot. I couldn’t believe I was getting hard as a rock over a dead girl.
I touched her wounds again and noticed that she’d somehow fixed her neck. So I asked her, “Think you can do something about these?” She frowned for a minute and put some effort into it and it somewhat worked. Her injuries began to fade in and out like her concentration wasn’t quite there.
Then she did something I never thought possible. She took my penis, spread her thighs and took me inside of her. Since she was almost my height, we didn’t have any problem doing it standing up. I had no idea what a vagina felt like, of course, but somehow I didn’t imagine that it would’ve felt the way it did. It was like making love with silk or satin. It felt cool and slick to my penis instead of warm and wet. I whispered into her ear, “I always wanted to tell you I love you but I was afraid. I was afraid you’d tell me you didn’t want to fuck up our friendship.” She hugged me tighter with one arm and pulled me deeper inside of her by grabbing my ass with her other arm.
It suddenly occurred to me that maybe she was able to tell the other ghosts to beat it for the night, that we had some important business to attend to.
“Did you tell the others to stop coming around and bothering me?” She smiled and nodded her head. “You can communicate with them, too?” She smiled and nodded again. Her ponytail moved as if in slow motion.
I smoothed her cornsilk-soft hair, gently grabbing her ponytail as my thrusts got faster and faster. I kissed her cool lips as I came and I saw the most amazing fucking thing- She was starting to turn transparent again and my spunk was hanging in midair where her vagina would be. I grabbed her shoulders and begged her to stay and finally she disappeared. My big blob of semen suddenly lost its shape, dropped and landed wetly on the hardwood floor. If I didn’t already start crying over losing her again, I would’ve wondered like I did later if I was still technically a virgin.
But I just stood there looking at my wad on the floor, crying like a fucking idiot. If this is what it’s like being alive, I thought, then being dead for all eternity with Clarissa was looking a fuck of a lot better than the alternative.
After I cleaned up, I pulled my pajama bottom on and looked at my clock. It was five minutes after midnight. It was officially my 18th birthday. Clarissa remembered.
There were some ghosts that he still would’ve loved to have. The reasons for not getting such entities in his supernatural stable were various: Either they’d made their peace before being executed and weren’t available, the place they occupied wasn’t readily accessible, they simply didn’t wish to make appearances in our dimension or they were too damned slippery. Sometimes it was as if word got out what Dietrich had planned for them.
Maniacs such as Karl Panzram, Ted Bundy, Jack the Ripper and his personal favorites, countrymen Joseph Mengele and Peter Kurten, aka the Dusseldorf Ripper, forever eluded him for one reason or another. Luckily, the world always provided itself with a surfeit of killers and mass murderers.
There was one guy they’d captured six or seven years ago who still claims to this day to be Vlad the Impaler. Considering his alleged antiquity, there was no way to verify that but the results were stunning. Vlad was able to create momentarily solid objects such as petards or stakes literally out of thin air and he’d succeeded in actually impaling a couple of subjects in trial runs. That ability alone made him a very highly-prized asset. Even the multi-talented Mursi al Islamiyah hadn’t demonstrated such abilities.
As one could reasonably expect from someone possessed of such technology, there were a few professional torturers and mad doctors in the poisonous mix. While he may not have been able to obtain the services of Mengele, the Nazi “Angel of Death”, Dietrich and his team were able to get from the ruins at Buchenwald Mengele’s friend and colleague in the weird sciences Major Heinrich Jodl.
In some ways, Jodl was an even more impressive piece of work than Mengele, as his notorious reputation as a pioneer of modern-day vivisection attested. Jodl would prove to be especially useful in situations where there were to be Jews involved. Jodl, if anything, hated and feared Jews even moreso than Dietrich, which was saying something. When the battle-hardened Third Army stormed the prison and liberated it in April 1945, General "Blood and Guts" Patton himself had actually vomited when they saw the results of Jodl’s “work” in his laboratory. If he could manifest his old surgical tools, he’d almost be more valuable to Dietrich than Vlad. As it was, on test subjects, Jodl would burrow into a living person’s body and essentially turn them inside out as with his late colleague in that castle in Dublin, Ireland. Or, in one notable instance, Jodl had merely scrambled the subject’s insides without exposing the organs. It was refreshing to see a dedicated professional who wouldn’t let death put an end to his medical curiosity.
Mursi al Islamiyah also wasn’t his first terrorist acquisition. The one that had cost his team a member was Seamus Hannigan, a “Real IRA” bomber who had a flair for the dramatic. Hannigan was killed a few years ago trying to smuggle VX nerve agent out of the United States. Even though he was killed across the Atlantic, his ghost haunted the ruins of a castle in Dublin, for some unknown reason. Or it did until Dietrich and Associates, Inc. came visiting.
And then there was the usual garden variety of anonymous psychopaths who tended to be wannabes with limited skills but who were useful as infantrymen, shock troops. There was one from Cuba by way of Miami, a guy who claimed to be a torturer for Castro back in the early days before the Cuban dictator was forced to send him packing to Miami when his excesses were too egregious to ignore. That particular one was so violent, he was the one who got Dietrich to switch from one inch to three inch-thick glass when he actually cracked the first one. Moreso than anyone else, the bastard could draw, collect and expel more foot pounds of energy than anyone else in the Hole. While civilian ghost hunters are impressed with watching a child’s ball slightly rock back and forth, the torturer, nicknamed Dente Rojo or “Red Tooth” by fearful Cubans, once knocked two teeth out of a test subject’s head. It took him quite a while to recover, usually an hour or two, but if he knew where to strike in his one shot, it could easily prove fatal.
Now in his makeshift office in his makeshift warehouse, Dietrich opened a countersurveillance file on his second-hand metal desk and read the contents once again. The name of his pursuer had stuck out and after a little bit of research, Dietrich discovered that she was the granddaughter of the old fart who’d given him the technology that he was still using to this day!
It wasn’t so much the American agent whose intelligence agency had been investigating him and his activities for the past 25 months that intrigued him so much as her younger brother, someone who’d been hospitalized at around the same time as her agency began shadowing him.
This Adam Moss, aged 17, was treated for paranoid delusions. The little kike claimed to be a magnet for ghosts, an ability that Dietrich, who had to rely on heavy, cumbersome, expensive machinery, had no choice but to admire and envy. Covet, even.
Another thing that sucks about being a magnet for ghosts- You can forget about your privacy. They’re there when you’re taking a whiz or a shit and forget about jerking off, which is my only damned sex life. Not that I’ve felt like it since Clarissa… since she left me. But I could feel the pressure start to build up. Sure, I’m busted up inside but I’m still a 17 year-old kid and still alive. I felt self-conscious about even shaking my dick after I peed. Come to think of it, maybe pulling my pud would help weed out some of the Victorian or uptight Republican assholes who every night came looking for favors like I was the Godfather on his daughter’s wedding day. Nah. Then I’d probably attract dead pervs, knowing my shitty luck.
Plus, my sister’s old room is next to mine and the walls in this house not only have ears, they have parabolic antennas. I was the most unfortunate kind of kid: One whose parents have an insanely active sex life. It’s no secret that I got my sex drive from both my folks and even though their room is all the way at the end of the hall, they’re both what you’d call loud and verbal in their throes of passion, which is about six nights a week. They cut me a break after I came home from the hospital both times but I guess Mom and Dad felt the pressure building up, too. And my Jewish mother wonders why I’m so thin. It’s not so much her crappy cooking or my adolescent metabolism: It’s the fact that their sex life is ruining my appetite.
All the same, I found myself seeking the company of people that I knew were alive and kicking, even my oversexed parents. That’s especially true of my sister. Since Laura and I became young adults, we kept the fighting to a bare minimum and I even began thinking she was cool, after all. I had no idea how long she’d be home but I found myself dreading the day she’d finally pack up and leave again for Katmandu or whatever Godforsaken place her boss would send her.
I bugged her for more info on this Blood character but for some reason, she wasn’t very generous in the detail department. I think the biggest reason why I stalled about meeting him wasn’t so much that I was scared of him (although I was) as my knowing that Laura wouldn’t move out until I saw him. Yeah, I love my big sister. Fucking sue me.
When I called Laura Moss to give her some startling autopsy results, she gave me some startling news of her own: Her poor kid brother Adam had been readmitted to the hospital, this time to the nut house. I had to restrain myself from visiting him. One, I didn’t want to interrupt his therapy, however useless I was convinced it would be; Two, I didn’t want to remind him any more of his dead girlfriend than I already did and, Three, I didn’t want to come off looking like I was grilling him for more info. Which of course, I would’ve, albeit delicately.
My heart went out to the poor kid, especially after I found out from Laura that he was being visited by so many ghosts it eventually landed him back in the Napoleon Finishing School. I couldn’t help but wonder- Even though the boy was trying his best to screen out as many of those ghosts as possible, how many of them were victims of the mass suicide at the Sheraton and were trying to tell him what exactly happened?
Luckily, we get our information from the living, such as the strangely morbid but competent folks at the Essex County Coroner’s Office. Like I told Laura Moss, the traumatic deceleration of some of the street level victims temporarily masked puncture wounds. They were holes made in the body that didn’t yield any forensic evidence of a weapon. For instance, a person pierced with a sword or knife would offer some residue, according to Locard’s Exchange Principle. There would be some microscopic flakes of metal in the wound and wound channel.
Not this time, apparently. It was as if they were pierced with a ghostly weapon or a very, very sharp icicle. I began wondering if some of them were stabbed and pushed out the window after being chased all around the next-to-top story. Christ, what a way to go. To add insult to injury to our powers of ratiocination, free histamine and other tests conclusively proved that the wounds were made perimortem, or at the point of death. This was shaping up to be a classic case of knowing less and less as more and more information came in.
I quietly decided it may be a good idea to pay Adam another visit soon, after all, especially since Laura said he was discharged and came back home.
I feel pretty confident when I say that I’m probably the only dude in human history that got his cherry popped by a ghost.
Now, what I’m about to say will sound like something written for Penthouse’s letters to the editor but I have no reason to lie to you. This is how I lost my virginity to Clarissa a week or so after she passed away.
I just got out of the shower last night and my room was empty. A week ago, that wouldn’t have been unusual but since I came back from the hospital the first time, my bedroom’s been like Grand Central fucking Station for every ghost on the planet. Last night was different and, while I welcomed getting my space back, I was also wondering what was going on. Maybe they found some other medium, a real one, who would be more accommodating and didn’t mind having their privacy ripped off.
I took advantage of the rare chance to get undressed without being gawked at by dead people and took off the dirty clothes that I pulled back on when I first got out of the shower. So I was standing naked in front of my dresser pulling out a pair of flannel pajama bottoms when I saw Clarissa in the mirror.
Yeah, just like in about a hundred horror movies. Sometimes it happens for real. I whipped around and she was gone. My heart sank down to my knees. Maybe I was crazy, after all. I couldn’t believe that Clarissa would pop in for the first time since I came out of my coma just to disappear. Or maybe she couldn’t control it. Maybe she was still getting the hang of manifesting. So I called out her name. Nothing. Nada. So I called out to her again and this time she began materializing to my left.
First I saw the outline of her head and one of her shoulders. Then I could make out the perfect ponytail she wore on our last night together. Pretty soon, she was full bodied and was even beginning to show some color. She almost looked real. Too real. Her wounds were coming out, too, and I reached out and touched them.
Hugging her was like hugging a solid draft but I didn’t care. I began crying and even though I could feel her body, even her clothes, my tears dropped through her shoulder and landed on the floor.
“Where were you?” I asked. “God, I can’t tell you how much I missed you, baby.”
She smiled in response and looked like she wanted to say something back but didn’t think it was worth trying. I didn’t mind continuing the conversation for both of us. I figured, the longer I talked to her, maybe the longer she’d stay.
“Just when you were alive, when you were the only girl I wanted to hang with, you’re the only ghost I want to see.” It sounded great in my head but came out sounding like dog shit when it came out of my mouth but her sweet smile showed that she knew what I meant. She put her lips over mine, even inserting her tongue into my mouth. It was almost like sucking on an ice cube but I still didn’t care. A cold Clarissa was still a damned sight better than the hottest ghost, if there’s any such thing. Her clothes melted away from her and she, too, was naked. It was, obviously, the first time I’d ever seen her bod and even as a ghost, she was still smoking hot. I couldn’t believe I was getting hard as a rock over a dead girl.
I touched her wounds again and noticed that she’d somehow fixed her neck. So I asked her, “Think you can do something about these?” She frowned for a minute and put some effort into it and it somewhat worked. Her injuries began to fade in and out like her concentration wasn’t quite there.
Then she did something I never thought possible. She took my penis, spread her thighs and took me inside of her. Since she was almost my height, we didn’t have any problem doing it standing up. I had no idea what a vagina felt like, of course, but somehow I didn’t imagine that it would’ve felt the way it did. It was like making love with silk or satin. It felt cool and slick to my penis instead of warm and wet. I whispered into her ear, “I always wanted to tell you I love you but I was afraid. I was afraid you’d tell me you didn’t want to fuck up our friendship.” She hugged me tighter with one arm and pulled me deeper inside of her by grabbing my ass with her other arm.
It suddenly occurred to me that maybe she was able to tell the other ghosts to beat it for the night, that we had some important business to attend to.
“Did you tell the others to stop coming around and bothering me?” She smiled and nodded her head. “You can communicate with them, too?” She smiled and nodded again. Her ponytail moved as if in slow motion.
I smoothed her cornsilk-soft hair, gently grabbing her ponytail as my thrusts got faster and faster. I kissed her cool lips as I came and I saw the most amazing fucking thing- She was starting to turn transparent again and my spunk was hanging in midair where her vagina would be. I grabbed her shoulders and begged her to stay and finally she disappeared. My big blob of semen suddenly lost its shape, dropped and landed wetly on the hardwood floor. If I didn’t already start crying over losing her again, I would’ve wondered like I did later if I was still technically a virgin.
But I just stood there looking at my wad on the floor, crying like a fucking idiot. If this is what it’s like being alive, I thought, then being dead for all eternity with Clarissa was looking a fuck of a lot better than the alternative.
After I cleaned up, I pulled my pajama bottom on and looked at my clock. It was five minutes after midnight. It was officially my 18th birthday. Clarissa remembered.
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