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.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
The Bone Bridge- Chapter 10
Am I dead?
Adam, help me.
Please contact my wife and tell her not to worry.
The police have it wrong. I was murdered.
Please help us.
I need you to reach my daughter Amelia.
Tell them to call off the search.
At some point, I can’t even tune them out with both pillows over my head. The voices keep coming and the room gets like a fucking freezer and I’m already up to three blankets and a top sheet even with the heat cranked up to 70. Don’t believe what you see on TV or in the movies. They will come out in the day time. It’s just worse at night.
The ones who probably scare the shit out of me the most are the ones who know my name and call out to me. “Adam, help me.” “Adam, please contact my family and tell them what really happened to me.” “Adam, do this, Adam, do that.” I was really beginning to resent them and when they won’t let you sleep any more, your empathy can only stretch so far.
“Shut the fuck up!” I finally screamed. “Just shut the fuck up and leave me alone!”
As usual, Mom, Dad and Laura came into my room and turned the light on and they saw me sitting up, rocking back and forth in bed, trying to tune out the voices and not succeeding. Most of them left when the lights went on, some of them stayed behind but most of them shut up like I told them to. It was obvious to my family that I needed help. My parents were thinking either the hospital or the synagogue. Laura was thinking of this Oliver Blood character. I didn’t know who to turn to, who I could trust. I just needed to make the voices stop. They all sat on my bed and Dad asked me, “Son, do you want to go to the hospital?” I didn’t see how that could do me any good. The fucking assholes follow me everywhere I go. I’d be back in the same situation only next time I wake up screaming, I’d get a shot. Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad. I unclenched my fist and saw that my palm was bleeding. I looked up at my Dad and nodded my head. Laura actually looked disappointed in me.
After sitting at Newton Wellesley’s triage waiting room for three hours while my Dad and I watched stupid infomercials for exercise machines and juicers, I was finally admitted to the Psych ward. I never stopped to consider that going back there would be a trip down memory lane. I immediately started thinking about all the memories I had of Clarissa and me being here two years ago. We were both here for roughly a month and just about every fuckin’ square inch of that place reminded me of her. The far corner of the activities room is where we hugged for the first time. The area front and center under the TV high above the floor is where we snuggled for the first time before they broke us up and told us not to get too intimate. The kitchen is where we first met when we were both poking around looking for chocolate milk, the first thing we discovered we had in common.
I was moved into a different room than either of us had before and there was a fat dude already sacked out. He snored so loud my bed almost vibrated but anything would be better than what kept me up all night at home. After the nursing staff situated me, Dad hugged me and quietly said everybody would be back the next day. Hopefully, he added, I’ll get to talk to the resident psychiatrist tomorrow. I think I was asleep before Dad was buzzed off the ward.
The Psychiatric Wing, Newton Wellesley Hospital, Nov. 10th
Dr. Rubin looked at me and waited for me to start and I did the same thing with her. I automatically knew from my last experience with these professional people that they automatically blew off anything I could tell them. They only deal in what they can actually analyze, what they were trained to categorize, compartmentalize, whatever the fuck they do. If you say you saw a ghost, they label you as delusional. If you say you’re someone else, it never occurs to them that you could be and they label you a schizoid.
Finally, Dr. Ellen Rubin, MD had had it up to the ceiling with my silence.
“So, Adam, according to your history, you see ghosts? Could you tell me about them?” You mean like how many were there right now? Just a few but rush hour wouldn’t be for another few hours. Instead, I said nothing. I was really beginning to regret letting my Dad drive me here. At least when I yelled at them at home to shut up, most of them did. This shrink wouldn’t be able to do dick for me and all she’d say was that I was resisting therapy or some happy horseshit. I wished I was back at the skateboard park on John LeRoy Drive with my friends. Hell, I even missed school. Although, those places, too had a bunch of memories waiting for me.
“You don’t trust me, don’t you? Well, that’s understandable. I’ve never had you for a patient. The last psychiatrist who was assigned to your case…”
“…didn’t do shit for me,” I said while giving her the stink eye. I realized she was just trying to do her job and to help me out but I suddenly felt very hostile toward her, the Psych ward and the whole Goddamned hospital. There wasn’t a single person there who could help me unless she or someone in the pharmacy had a fucking pill that drove ghosts away. But short of being put back into another coma, there was no other way that I knew of to deal with this ghost infestation.
I looked at the heavyset guy in the bathrobe near the window, the one who was snoring in my room last night and wondered if he was real. Sometimes, for brief periods of time, they can appear as real as you or me then they would just walk through a wall or simply dissolve. Dr. Rubin followed my line of vision and looked back to the window.
“What do you see, Adam?”
“What do you see?” She looked behind her again.
“I see a window.”
“Just a window?”
“Yes. What do you see?”
Well, that answered that question. Finally, the fat dude walked away from the window and through the bathroom door, not the doorway, the door itself, and never came back out.
“Just a window,” I finally answered.
Nov. 11th
Not all the ones I see are there to haunt me and ask me for favors. There are some that my sister once called “residual hauntings” or when the ghosts do the same shit over and over again and don’t even know you’re there. The fat dude in the bathrobe is one of them. My guess is he died there and didn’t know enough to move on so he just kept retracing his steps without anything changing. I know what that feels like, to get into a rut and feeling like there’s no way out. They’re the ones that don’t bother you and can never touch you because they don’t know you’re even there or even that there are other ghosts nearby. Sometimes I can hear them, sometimes I can’t. But they tend to be the most interesting ones to watch because sometimes they’ll relive their last moments on earth and I’m the only one who can see it ‘cuz for some fucked up reason I’m on their frequency.
“So, have you seen any… residual hauntings since you’ve been here, Adam?”
“Sure, Doc. There’s the fat guy in the bathrobe. He sleeps in my room and he snores so loud it’s like Cape Canaveral in there. He does the same thing every morning. He gets up, goes to that window then walks through the bathroom door and never comes out.”
Dr. Rubin looked at me with a curious expression like I just did an awesome magic trick and she wanted to ask how I did it. She turned around and looked right at him as he stood in front of the same window just like yesterday, obviously not seeing him.
“Is he there now?” I nodded. “Can you describe him?”
“He’s a big dude, over six feet. He must weigh about 250. I can’t tell how old he is. He’s an older guy, about 25 to 30, I’d guess. Brown hair, always mussed up. He’s wearin’ a white bathrobe with blue trim and it’s always open at the chest. The same time as yesterday, he went right to that window, stood there for about a half hour then walked right through the door. That’s the last I saw him until last night when he suddenly started snoring in bed.”
If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear Dr. Rubin knew who I was talking about. If that was the case, maybe she blew it off, assuming that I found out about this fat dude through the basket case grapevine.
Turns out later on, through one of the oldtimers on the wing, someone who’d been there since September, I found out I was talking about someone who was actually there until about a month ago. His name was Charles Bruley and was last seen looking out the same window for about a half hour then walked into the bathroom, took off the belt around his bathrobe and found a way to hang himself. He was one of Dr. Rubin’s patients.
Nov. 12th
“I’ll assume that you knew about Mr. Bruley through the news. As you can expect, it was a big, hairy deal here at the hospital. His family threatened to sue and… Bottom line, Adam, I’d rather you not talk about one of my former patients and incorporating him into your…”
“…delusions? That’s what you were gonna say, right? ‘Don’t use one of my patients in your delusional structure’? Fine, I won’t talk about him again. I thought you were here to help me, though.”
“I am, Adam. But talking about one of my patients is not…”
“Hey, you were the one who asked me what I saw and to describe him. Now you’re tweakin’ out on me when I did. What the fuck do you want from me, Doc?”
“Alright, that was a mistake on my part and I’m sorry.” She looked down at her notes about me that I did and didn’t want to read. “What do you see right now?”
“I see Bruley standing at the window again. He’s gonna go hang himself in a few minutes. You can set your fuckin’ watch by him.”
“Who or what else do you see that the rest of us can’t?”
Bruley started shuffling off into the bathroom and walked right through the door. “Hold on, I’ll be right back.” I followed him in. A few minutes later I came back out. I was shaking like I just chugged a pot of coffee but I had to do it. I’d never seen anything like that before but I was getting sick and tired of Dr. Rubin and others telling me I was crazy.
“His suicide note was tucked in the waistline of his boxer shorts and read, ‘I’m sorry, Dr. Rubin. Don’t blame yourself. I hope you don’t get in trouble over this. Tell my family I love them. Charles.’ He misspelled your name and spelled it with an ‘e’.”
Dr. Rubin looked at me like I was sprouting lilies out of my ears. Bruley’s suicide note wasn’t published in the press and none of the other patients were allowed in the bathroom for hours after they found his body.
Nov. 13th
Whatever homing beacon I have in me started working again because as Dr. Rubin continued our therapy sessions, the wing got more and more crowded. In addition to Charles Bruley in between his suicides there were people who might and might not have been former patients. By the fourth day, there were more dead people on the ward than living. One old dude seemed to take a special interest in my shrink.
“You wanna know who else is here?”
“Who, Adam?”
“Your grandfather. He says his name is Oscar.”
“How did…? OK, Adam, this is very inappropriate. I’d rather you not mention my family any more, so let’s just keep this…”
“Don’t you wanna know what he wants, Doc? He’s standing right behind you.”
I could tell she was dying to turn around to look although she wouldn’t have seen him. He wore regular old man clothes with his pants almost up to his navel, was bald and looked about 80, real skinny.
“Alright, tell me.”
“He says he forgives you for going to medical school instead of Julliard. He would’ve rather you played violin in some orchestra but he now knows that he was wrong for spazzing out on you for going to Harvard. He wants you to forgive him.”
Dr. Rubin stood up so fast she knocked the plastic chair on its back.
“That’s enough, Adam! I don’t know how you found out this stuff about my family but I’m getting sick and tired of you using them and my patients in your, yes, I’ll say it, delusional structure.”
I stood up, too. I’d had it with her own bullshit.
“Hey, Doc, here’s the 411: I didn’t know that your grandfather existed until just now. In fact, I didn’t even know you existed until a few days ago, so cut me some fucking slack, alright?!”
I heard the front door buzz then open and my Dad, Mom and Laura walked into the ward just in time to hear me yelling at my doctor. A couple of the nurses walked toward me and told me to chill out. I sat back down and watched Mr. Bruley go hang himself in the bathroom as usual before I started crying my eyes out. The only ghost I wanted to see was the only one in the spirit world, it seemed, who never showed up anymore. Where was Clarissa? God, I missed her.
Laura and my folks talked to the doctor but mostly Laura. I was discharged a little over an hour later.
Adam, help me.
Please contact my wife and tell her not to worry.
The police have it wrong. I was murdered.
Please help us.
I need you to reach my daughter Amelia.
Tell them to call off the search.
At some point, I can’t even tune them out with both pillows over my head. The voices keep coming and the room gets like a fucking freezer and I’m already up to three blankets and a top sheet even with the heat cranked up to 70. Don’t believe what you see on TV or in the movies. They will come out in the day time. It’s just worse at night.
The ones who probably scare the shit out of me the most are the ones who know my name and call out to me. “Adam, help me.” “Adam, please contact my family and tell them what really happened to me.” “Adam, do this, Adam, do that.” I was really beginning to resent them and when they won’t let you sleep any more, your empathy can only stretch so far.
“Shut the fuck up!” I finally screamed. “Just shut the fuck up and leave me alone!”
As usual, Mom, Dad and Laura came into my room and turned the light on and they saw me sitting up, rocking back and forth in bed, trying to tune out the voices and not succeeding. Most of them left when the lights went on, some of them stayed behind but most of them shut up like I told them to. It was obvious to my family that I needed help. My parents were thinking either the hospital or the synagogue. Laura was thinking of this Oliver Blood character. I didn’t know who to turn to, who I could trust. I just needed to make the voices stop. They all sat on my bed and Dad asked me, “Son, do you want to go to the hospital?” I didn’t see how that could do me any good. The fucking assholes follow me everywhere I go. I’d be back in the same situation only next time I wake up screaming, I’d get a shot. Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad. I unclenched my fist and saw that my palm was bleeding. I looked up at my Dad and nodded my head. Laura actually looked disappointed in me.
After sitting at Newton Wellesley’s triage waiting room for three hours while my Dad and I watched stupid infomercials for exercise machines and juicers, I was finally admitted to the Psych ward. I never stopped to consider that going back there would be a trip down memory lane. I immediately started thinking about all the memories I had of Clarissa and me being here two years ago. We were both here for roughly a month and just about every fuckin’ square inch of that place reminded me of her. The far corner of the activities room is where we hugged for the first time. The area front and center under the TV high above the floor is where we snuggled for the first time before they broke us up and told us not to get too intimate. The kitchen is where we first met when we were both poking around looking for chocolate milk, the first thing we discovered we had in common.
I was moved into a different room than either of us had before and there was a fat dude already sacked out. He snored so loud my bed almost vibrated but anything would be better than what kept me up all night at home. After the nursing staff situated me, Dad hugged me and quietly said everybody would be back the next day. Hopefully, he added, I’ll get to talk to the resident psychiatrist tomorrow. I think I was asleep before Dad was buzzed off the ward.
The Psychiatric Wing, Newton Wellesley Hospital, Nov. 10th
Dr. Rubin looked at me and waited for me to start and I did the same thing with her. I automatically knew from my last experience with these professional people that they automatically blew off anything I could tell them. They only deal in what they can actually analyze, what they were trained to categorize, compartmentalize, whatever the fuck they do. If you say you saw a ghost, they label you as delusional. If you say you’re someone else, it never occurs to them that you could be and they label you a schizoid.
Finally, Dr. Ellen Rubin, MD had had it up to the ceiling with my silence.
“So, Adam, according to your history, you see ghosts? Could you tell me about them?” You mean like how many were there right now? Just a few but rush hour wouldn’t be for another few hours. Instead, I said nothing. I was really beginning to regret letting my Dad drive me here. At least when I yelled at them at home to shut up, most of them did. This shrink wouldn’t be able to do dick for me and all she’d say was that I was resisting therapy or some happy horseshit. I wished I was back at the skateboard park on John LeRoy Drive with my friends. Hell, I even missed school. Although, those places, too had a bunch of memories waiting for me.
“You don’t trust me, don’t you? Well, that’s understandable. I’ve never had you for a patient. The last psychiatrist who was assigned to your case…”
“…didn’t do shit for me,” I said while giving her the stink eye. I realized she was just trying to do her job and to help me out but I suddenly felt very hostile toward her, the Psych ward and the whole Goddamned hospital. There wasn’t a single person there who could help me unless she or someone in the pharmacy had a fucking pill that drove ghosts away. But short of being put back into another coma, there was no other way that I knew of to deal with this ghost infestation.
I looked at the heavyset guy in the bathrobe near the window, the one who was snoring in my room last night and wondered if he was real. Sometimes, for brief periods of time, they can appear as real as you or me then they would just walk through a wall or simply dissolve. Dr. Rubin followed my line of vision and looked back to the window.
“What do you see, Adam?”
“What do you see?” She looked behind her again.
“I see a window.”
“Just a window?”
“Yes. What do you see?”
Well, that answered that question. Finally, the fat dude walked away from the window and through the bathroom door, not the doorway, the door itself, and never came back out.
“Just a window,” I finally answered.
Nov. 11th
Not all the ones I see are there to haunt me and ask me for favors. There are some that my sister once called “residual hauntings” or when the ghosts do the same shit over and over again and don’t even know you’re there. The fat dude in the bathrobe is one of them. My guess is he died there and didn’t know enough to move on so he just kept retracing his steps without anything changing. I know what that feels like, to get into a rut and feeling like there’s no way out. They’re the ones that don’t bother you and can never touch you because they don’t know you’re even there or even that there are other ghosts nearby. Sometimes I can hear them, sometimes I can’t. But they tend to be the most interesting ones to watch because sometimes they’ll relive their last moments on earth and I’m the only one who can see it ‘cuz for some fucked up reason I’m on their frequency.
“So, have you seen any… residual hauntings since you’ve been here, Adam?”
“Sure, Doc. There’s the fat guy in the bathrobe. He sleeps in my room and he snores so loud it’s like Cape Canaveral in there. He does the same thing every morning. He gets up, goes to that window then walks through the bathroom door and never comes out.”
Dr. Rubin looked at me with a curious expression like I just did an awesome magic trick and she wanted to ask how I did it. She turned around and looked right at him as he stood in front of the same window just like yesterday, obviously not seeing him.
“Is he there now?” I nodded. “Can you describe him?”
“He’s a big dude, over six feet. He must weigh about 250. I can’t tell how old he is. He’s an older guy, about 25 to 30, I’d guess. Brown hair, always mussed up. He’s wearin’ a white bathrobe with blue trim and it’s always open at the chest. The same time as yesterday, he went right to that window, stood there for about a half hour then walked right through the door. That’s the last I saw him until last night when he suddenly started snoring in bed.”
If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear Dr. Rubin knew who I was talking about. If that was the case, maybe she blew it off, assuming that I found out about this fat dude through the basket case grapevine.
Turns out later on, through one of the oldtimers on the wing, someone who’d been there since September, I found out I was talking about someone who was actually there until about a month ago. His name was Charles Bruley and was last seen looking out the same window for about a half hour then walked into the bathroom, took off the belt around his bathrobe and found a way to hang himself. He was one of Dr. Rubin’s patients.
Nov. 12th
“I’ll assume that you knew about Mr. Bruley through the news. As you can expect, it was a big, hairy deal here at the hospital. His family threatened to sue and… Bottom line, Adam, I’d rather you not talk about one of my former patients and incorporating him into your…”
“…delusions? That’s what you were gonna say, right? ‘Don’t use one of my patients in your delusional structure’? Fine, I won’t talk about him again. I thought you were here to help me, though.”
“I am, Adam. But talking about one of my patients is not…”
“Hey, you were the one who asked me what I saw and to describe him. Now you’re tweakin’ out on me when I did. What the fuck do you want from me, Doc?”
“Alright, that was a mistake on my part and I’m sorry.” She looked down at her notes about me that I did and didn’t want to read. “What do you see right now?”
“I see Bruley standing at the window again. He’s gonna go hang himself in a few minutes. You can set your fuckin’ watch by him.”
“Who or what else do you see that the rest of us can’t?”
Bruley started shuffling off into the bathroom and walked right through the door. “Hold on, I’ll be right back.” I followed him in. A few minutes later I came back out. I was shaking like I just chugged a pot of coffee but I had to do it. I’d never seen anything like that before but I was getting sick and tired of Dr. Rubin and others telling me I was crazy.
“His suicide note was tucked in the waistline of his boxer shorts and read, ‘I’m sorry, Dr. Rubin. Don’t blame yourself. I hope you don’t get in trouble over this. Tell my family I love them. Charles.’ He misspelled your name and spelled it with an ‘e’.”
Dr. Rubin looked at me like I was sprouting lilies out of my ears. Bruley’s suicide note wasn’t published in the press and none of the other patients were allowed in the bathroom for hours after they found his body.
Nov. 13th
Whatever homing beacon I have in me started working again because as Dr. Rubin continued our therapy sessions, the wing got more and more crowded. In addition to Charles Bruley in between his suicides there were people who might and might not have been former patients. By the fourth day, there were more dead people on the ward than living. One old dude seemed to take a special interest in my shrink.
“You wanna know who else is here?”
“Who, Adam?”
“Your grandfather. He says his name is Oscar.”
“How did…? OK, Adam, this is very inappropriate. I’d rather you not mention my family any more, so let’s just keep this…”
“Don’t you wanna know what he wants, Doc? He’s standing right behind you.”
I could tell she was dying to turn around to look although she wouldn’t have seen him. He wore regular old man clothes with his pants almost up to his navel, was bald and looked about 80, real skinny.
“Alright, tell me.”
“He says he forgives you for going to medical school instead of Julliard. He would’ve rather you played violin in some orchestra but he now knows that he was wrong for spazzing out on you for going to Harvard. He wants you to forgive him.”
Dr. Rubin stood up so fast she knocked the plastic chair on its back.
“That’s enough, Adam! I don’t know how you found out this stuff about my family but I’m getting sick and tired of you using them and my patients in your, yes, I’ll say it, delusional structure.”
I stood up, too. I’d had it with her own bullshit.
“Hey, Doc, here’s the 411: I didn’t know that your grandfather existed until just now. In fact, I didn’t even know you existed until a few days ago, so cut me some fucking slack, alright?!”
I heard the front door buzz then open and my Dad, Mom and Laura walked into the ward just in time to hear me yelling at my doctor. A couple of the nurses walked toward me and told me to chill out. I sat back down and watched Mr. Bruley go hang himself in the bathroom as usual before I started crying my eyes out. The only ghost I wanted to see was the only one in the spirit world, it seemed, who never showed up anymore. Where was Clarissa? God, I missed her.
Laura and my folks talked to the doctor but mostly Laura. I was discharged a little over an hour later.
The Bone Bridge- Chapter 9
Washington, DC, November 9th
“That much of a temperature variance, huh? Man, that’s off the charts, Elle, even in my experience,” Oliver Blood said as he paced his office. As promised, his best field agent had called him right after leaving the police station. While the news was welcome, it was far from happy. It seemed as if Dietrich was winding up and planning something big, as in Jonestown big. Blood got a queasy feeling down to his DNA that the German terrorist merely killed 53 people who were all probably in Who’s Who just as a trial run. If that was the case, where would he stop? “Alright, lemme know if you find anything else out. What?” He listened on his secure satellite phone. “Alright, bring your brother in, for whatever good it’ll do. Well, not here, obviously. A neutral spot but nothing too public. Alright, bye.”
Oliver Blood stopped pacing as soon as he terminated the connection and folded his long, lean frame into his leather swivel chair. What Agent Moss said about the autopsy photos and results almost made him glad it was she and not he who had to look at them. Some of them, according to her, died with their faces frozen in expressions of horror.
The agency knew through the Xe (formerly Blackwater) security detail that was also working surveillance that that Stasi prick was in Baghdad just a couple of weeks ago to help rid the Iraqi government, if it could be yet termed an actual government, of a certain belligerent entity named Mursi al Islamiyah. The word was that the now-infamous Charles Graner was the guy who offed him but since al Islamiyah was a proven terrorist and associate of Osama bin Laden, there was no dustup over the accidental death. In fact, when Graner was brought up on charges under the UCMJ, neither al Islamiyah’s name or death was even mentioned in the indictments. No doubt, the Bush administration that was so tough on terror was secretly worried about al Qaida backlash over Mursi’s death by misadventure.
Blood shuddered to think what Dietrich could do with a hundred or even just a few dozen entities as pissed off as al Islamiyah would’ve rightly been. In fact, the African American agency Director deeply suspected that he didn’t have to look any further than the aftermath of the Sheraton massacre. Yet if Dietrich came into possession of the technology that they were all but convinced he possessed, then how was he paying for it? As far as they understood it, such machinery that would have to be involved would take up enormous resources not to mention energy. And he wasn’t close to being convinced that whatever money Dietrich got from his industrial-scale “investigations” would provide him with enough to cover such overhead expenses.
Bottom line: Someone even above Dietrich was funding him but who? And to what end?
Braintree, MA, Nov. 9th
When Laura came back from where she went that morning and told me she’d set up a meeting with this Blood dude, I thought of all the times I’d been called to the principal’s office. No matter what I did, and I’d pulled some doozies in school, no trip to Mr. Croaker’s office compared to the dread I felt at that moment. She could tell I was getting freaked out and she said,
“Adam, Honey, it’s OK. Look, it’s true that almost no one gets to see my boss considering the line of work we’re in. I know it seems like something out of PG 13 rated action movie for an ordinary kid to meet an intelligence agency head but we all understand that you’re a civilian. No one’s going to be shining desk lamps in your face or anything.” She smiled to reassure me and it almost worked. Almost. If anything, I was far from ordinary. All the same, about as far out as I’m willing to go is wearing an Emo ‘do of two different colors. Other than that, I just wanted my life back, to be normal.
I was suspicious of my sister’s motives for wanting to hook me up with this dude. She kept saying that she wanted me to help them but that didn’t wash. How could I help them, an Emo boy on a skateboard who probably had hallucinations and one with a psychiatric history, at that? Helping them, my skinny Jewish ass. She was trying to protect me from something or someone that she wasn’t telling me about.
Laura’s kid brother always had a mobile, expressive face and it was obvious to her that he still didn’t trust her. That stung badly enough but what stung her even more was the fact that perhaps he shouldn’t. The nature of her business being what it is, she couldn’t tell even her own flesh and blood, at least not right away, about what the stakes could be. It was a given to her that her brother Adam was a sensitive, a bridge of flesh and bone that could make a vital connection between the worlds of the quick and the dead. And seeing, hearing and communicating with them en masse were perhaps not the extent of his undeveloped abilities. Just because their payroll was the smallest of all the government’s intelligence agencies didn’t mean they had the fewest troops.
During her training right out of college, Laura learned something fascinating: According to anthropologists and other scientists, it was estimated that something between 65 and 75 billion people had lived and died on the planet earth before the present population. Obviously, not all of them come back as paranormal entities otherwise supernatural sightings would be much more commonplace than they already are.
Yet it was estimated that at least several million of those 65-75 billion lost souls died yet were never truly laid to rest. Between war, famine, plague, pestilence and purges, the sheer number of human beings who had suddenly died before setting their house in order couldn’t even be imagined. Laura shuddered to think that most of not all of them, sensing Adam’s abilities when he was briefly dead, would come back to him appealing for resolution or salvation.
He was always a sensitive plant and she just knew deep in her bones that he wouldn’t be able to handle such a massive intrusion on his personal space. In fact, it was during such a time when Adam had his attempt two years ago. The sightings and encounters, albeit on a much smaller scale, were enough to drive him over the edge and one such noxious spirit, perhaps just for shits and giggles, told her brother he’d be better off if he opened a vein.
Laura wondered if such entities lived in one massive, common dimension or if they flitted back and forth randomly across others, including our own. Either way, one thing was for sure: Just as with the living, the dead, too, have their good and bad elements. And Laura’s agency had it on pretty good faith from which side Dietrich was recruiting. All that was required of him was to find the right one, the one that could rally, unite and organize an army unlike any ever seen before. And if Dietrich did that, then they, too, would need their own rally man.
Laura looked at her innocent kid brother as he struggled with a calculator while catching up on his math homework. She cupped his face with her hand and smiled sadly.
I so incredibly didn’t need this. Every time things start to get shitty at home, my folks briefly get all orthodox and Hasidic and bring the rabbi over. They brought him to the hospital when Clarissa and I were there a couple of years ago and it can’t be said that he did a damned bit of good. Apparently, it’s the same in a lot of households: Ordinarily secular families calling in the big guns when they run out of real answers. Catholics bring in priests who try to talk you into feeling guilty about something, Protestant ministers who try to talk you into voting Republican and neurotic rabbis who come to see if you’re properly neurotic, too. I liked Rabbi Green well enough on a personal basis but when he began talking about the Torah I’d start checking the insides of my eyelids for cracks.
“Honey, you’re going through a tough time with these things you’re imagining and Rabbi Green here…”
“I’m not imagining things! They’re there, Mom.”
“OK, whatever, Honey,” she said. I hated it when she patronized me. Every time she does that I feel like hopping on my skateboard and coasting all the way to Venice Beach. “Rabbi Green here just wants to talk to you and maybe help you through this.”
I looked at our family’s rabbi, who at least had the courtesy to wear his civilian clothes instead of going all Men in Black. As far as rabbis went, I guess he was pretty cool. He didn’t have the heavy beard that a lot of Hasidic rabbis do and was secular enough so that he could rap with people on an earthly level. Laura seemed amused by the whole thing as she leaned against the doorway. I wanted to make a face at her just for old time’s sake.
“OK, Rabbi, let’s go in the kitchen,” I said as I slouched down the hall.
“So, what you’re saying, Adam, is that you’re seeing dead people again.” He said it as a statement rather than a question. Using the phrase “seeing dead people” could’ve made it sound like he was ridiculing me but I could tell he wasn’t.
“Yeah, obviously. I can even see their old wounds. They tell me how they died. They tell me to contact their families. I’m not a Goddam… I’m not a medium. I really don’t need this.”
“Do you see any of them now?” He asked as if he was afraid to hear the answer. He should’ve been. We were fucking surrounded. I was learning to tune them out somewhat. It was their voices that distracted me more than anything. Like I told Clarissa on our last night together, I can’t not listen. But ignoring these poor people when they come to me asking for help makes me feel wicked guilty.
“Yeah,” I simply said, nodding my head. About 15 ghosts were standing behind Rabbi Green’s chair and a couple of them were really fucked up. I didn’t even want to know how many were behind me. The one word I hear more often than not is “Help.” Up to a point, I could appreciate their situation but their selfishness was really beginning to tick me off. I was ready to take back what I said about them bringing their manners with them from the grave ‘cuz it seems the first thing people forget after they die is how to wait in line. Then again, they may do that because they’re really not aware of each other’s presence. I don’t know enough about that shit. Maybe Laura and that Blood dude could educate me.
“It’s getting rather chilly in here, isn’t it?” It was getting so cold in the kitchen that the rabbi had to zip up his windbreaker. Another few degrees and we could’ve seen our breath.
“Yeah, that happens when they show up. It especially sucks during the winter.”
“Have they given you their names?”
“Yeah. Some of them knew you were coming over. Some of them are here to see you, not me.”
“They’re here to see me, you say?” he asked pointing to himself.
“Remember old man Friedman? The old dude who ran that second hand general store in downtown?” Rabbi Green nodded. “He’s got his hand on your left shoulder right now and he’s asking you…” I listened more closely since Friedman was talking in a whisper. “I can’t make out what he’s saying but he’s trying to make contact. Some are louder than others. Wait, I hear him now.” I paused to listen. “He said he always had the hots for your wife. That’s really the only reason he went to shul in the morning. He was trying to make atonements because he was guilty about wanting to bone your wife.”
Rabbi Green touched his left shoulder with his right hand and looked at it. He must’ve felt the cold spot that Mr. Friedman left behind. Actually, a lot of guys in the synagogue have the hots for Bertha Green, including my old man, mainly ‘cuz she had probably the biggest tits in Braintree. He was looking more and more freaked out by the second and I looked at him as if to say, “Welcome to my world, bitch.”
“Have they…? OK, Adam, listen closely and tell me the truth. Have they told you which one is… the true religion?” I looked at Rabbi Green for a long time before answering him.
“I don’t know what you’d call it, Rabbi, but let’s just say you all got it wrong.”
Rabbi Green never said another word to me and he beat it the hell out of there without even so much as a “Shalom.” And this time I don’t think it was because of Mom’s horrible gefilte fish.
“That much of a temperature variance, huh? Man, that’s off the charts, Elle, even in my experience,” Oliver Blood said as he paced his office. As promised, his best field agent had called him right after leaving the police station. While the news was welcome, it was far from happy. It seemed as if Dietrich was winding up and planning something big, as in Jonestown big. Blood got a queasy feeling down to his DNA that the German terrorist merely killed 53 people who were all probably in Who’s Who just as a trial run. If that was the case, where would he stop? “Alright, lemme know if you find anything else out. What?” He listened on his secure satellite phone. “Alright, bring your brother in, for whatever good it’ll do. Well, not here, obviously. A neutral spot but nothing too public. Alright, bye.”
Oliver Blood stopped pacing as soon as he terminated the connection and folded his long, lean frame into his leather swivel chair. What Agent Moss said about the autopsy photos and results almost made him glad it was she and not he who had to look at them. Some of them, according to her, died with their faces frozen in expressions of horror.
The agency knew through the Xe (formerly Blackwater) security detail that was also working surveillance that that Stasi prick was in Baghdad just a couple of weeks ago to help rid the Iraqi government, if it could be yet termed an actual government, of a certain belligerent entity named Mursi al Islamiyah. The word was that the now-infamous Charles Graner was the guy who offed him but since al Islamiyah was a proven terrorist and associate of Osama bin Laden, there was no dustup over the accidental death. In fact, when Graner was brought up on charges under the UCMJ, neither al Islamiyah’s name or death was even mentioned in the indictments. No doubt, the Bush administration that was so tough on terror was secretly worried about al Qaida backlash over Mursi’s death by misadventure.
Blood shuddered to think what Dietrich could do with a hundred or even just a few dozen entities as pissed off as al Islamiyah would’ve rightly been. In fact, the African American agency Director deeply suspected that he didn’t have to look any further than the aftermath of the Sheraton massacre. Yet if Dietrich came into possession of the technology that they were all but convinced he possessed, then how was he paying for it? As far as they understood it, such machinery that would have to be involved would take up enormous resources not to mention energy. And he wasn’t close to being convinced that whatever money Dietrich got from his industrial-scale “investigations” would provide him with enough to cover such overhead expenses.
Bottom line: Someone even above Dietrich was funding him but who? And to what end?
Braintree, MA, Nov. 9th
When Laura came back from where she went that morning and told me she’d set up a meeting with this Blood dude, I thought of all the times I’d been called to the principal’s office. No matter what I did, and I’d pulled some doozies in school, no trip to Mr. Croaker’s office compared to the dread I felt at that moment. She could tell I was getting freaked out and she said,
“Adam, Honey, it’s OK. Look, it’s true that almost no one gets to see my boss considering the line of work we’re in. I know it seems like something out of PG 13 rated action movie for an ordinary kid to meet an intelligence agency head but we all understand that you’re a civilian. No one’s going to be shining desk lamps in your face or anything.” She smiled to reassure me and it almost worked. Almost. If anything, I was far from ordinary. All the same, about as far out as I’m willing to go is wearing an Emo ‘do of two different colors. Other than that, I just wanted my life back, to be normal.
I was suspicious of my sister’s motives for wanting to hook me up with this dude. She kept saying that she wanted me to help them but that didn’t wash. How could I help them, an Emo boy on a skateboard who probably had hallucinations and one with a psychiatric history, at that? Helping them, my skinny Jewish ass. She was trying to protect me from something or someone that she wasn’t telling me about.
Laura’s kid brother always had a mobile, expressive face and it was obvious to her that he still didn’t trust her. That stung badly enough but what stung her even more was the fact that perhaps he shouldn’t. The nature of her business being what it is, she couldn’t tell even her own flesh and blood, at least not right away, about what the stakes could be. It was a given to her that her brother Adam was a sensitive, a bridge of flesh and bone that could make a vital connection between the worlds of the quick and the dead. And seeing, hearing and communicating with them en masse were perhaps not the extent of his undeveloped abilities. Just because their payroll was the smallest of all the government’s intelligence agencies didn’t mean they had the fewest troops.
During her training right out of college, Laura learned something fascinating: According to anthropologists and other scientists, it was estimated that something between 65 and 75 billion people had lived and died on the planet earth before the present population. Obviously, not all of them come back as paranormal entities otherwise supernatural sightings would be much more commonplace than they already are.
Yet it was estimated that at least several million of those 65-75 billion lost souls died yet were never truly laid to rest. Between war, famine, plague, pestilence and purges, the sheer number of human beings who had suddenly died before setting their house in order couldn’t even be imagined. Laura shuddered to think that most of not all of them, sensing Adam’s abilities when he was briefly dead, would come back to him appealing for resolution or salvation.
He was always a sensitive plant and she just knew deep in her bones that he wouldn’t be able to handle such a massive intrusion on his personal space. In fact, it was during such a time when Adam had his attempt two years ago. The sightings and encounters, albeit on a much smaller scale, were enough to drive him over the edge and one such noxious spirit, perhaps just for shits and giggles, told her brother he’d be better off if he opened a vein.
Laura wondered if such entities lived in one massive, common dimension or if they flitted back and forth randomly across others, including our own. Either way, one thing was for sure: Just as with the living, the dead, too, have their good and bad elements. And Laura’s agency had it on pretty good faith from which side Dietrich was recruiting. All that was required of him was to find the right one, the one that could rally, unite and organize an army unlike any ever seen before. And if Dietrich did that, then they, too, would need their own rally man.
Laura looked at her innocent kid brother as he struggled with a calculator while catching up on his math homework. She cupped his face with her hand and smiled sadly.
I so incredibly didn’t need this. Every time things start to get shitty at home, my folks briefly get all orthodox and Hasidic and bring the rabbi over. They brought him to the hospital when Clarissa and I were there a couple of years ago and it can’t be said that he did a damned bit of good. Apparently, it’s the same in a lot of households: Ordinarily secular families calling in the big guns when they run out of real answers. Catholics bring in priests who try to talk you into feeling guilty about something, Protestant ministers who try to talk you into voting Republican and neurotic rabbis who come to see if you’re properly neurotic, too. I liked Rabbi Green well enough on a personal basis but when he began talking about the Torah I’d start checking the insides of my eyelids for cracks.
“Honey, you’re going through a tough time with these things you’re imagining and Rabbi Green here…”
“I’m not imagining things! They’re there, Mom.”
“OK, whatever, Honey,” she said. I hated it when she patronized me. Every time she does that I feel like hopping on my skateboard and coasting all the way to Venice Beach. “Rabbi Green here just wants to talk to you and maybe help you through this.”
I looked at our family’s rabbi, who at least had the courtesy to wear his civilian clothes instead of going all Men in Black. As far as rabbis went, I guess he was pretty cool. He didn’t have the heavy beard that a lot of Hasidic rabbis do and was secular enough so that he could rap with people on an earthly level. Laura seemed amused by the whole thing as she leaned against the doorway. I wanted to make a face at her just for old time’s sake.
“OK, Rabbi, let’s go in the kitchen,” I said as I slouched down the hall.
“So, what you’re saying, Adam, is that you’re seeing dead people again.” He said it as a statement rather than a question. Using the phrase “seeing dead people” could’ve made it sound like he was ridiculing me but I could tell he wasn’t.
“Yeah, obviously. I can even see their old wounds. They tell me how they died. They tell me to contact their families. I’m not a Goddam… I’m not a medium. I really don’t need this.”
“Do you see any of them now?” He asked as if he was afraid to hear the answer. He should’ve been. We were fucking surrounded. I was learning to tune them out somewhat. It was their voices that distracted me more than anything. Like I told Clarissa on our last night together, I can’t not listen. But ignoring these poor people when they come to me asking for help makes me feel wicked guilty.
“Yeah,” I simply said, nodding my head. About 15 ghosts were standing behind Rabbi Green’s chair and a couple of them were really fucked up. I didn’t even want to know how many were behind me. The one word I hear more often than not is “Help.” Up to a point, I could appreciate their situation but their selfishness was really beginning to tick me off. I was ready to take back what I said about them bringing their manners with them from the grave ‘cuz it seems the first thing people forget after they die is how to wait in line. Then again, they may do that because they’re really not aware of each other’s presence. I don’t know enough about that shit. Maybe Laura and that Blood dude could educate me.
“It’s getting rather chilly in here, isn’t it?” It was getting so cold in the kitchen that the rabbi had to zip up his windbreaker. Another few degrees and we could’ve seen our breath.
“Yeah, that happens when they show up. It especially sucks during the winter.”
“Have they given you their names?”
“Yeah. Some of them knew you were coming over. Some of them are here to see you, not me.”
“They’re here to see me, you say?” he asked pointing to himself.
“Remember old man Friedman? The old dude who ran that second hand general store in downtown?” Rabbi Green nodded. “He’s got his hand on your left shoulder right now and he’s asking you…” I listened more closely since Friedman was talking in a whisper. “I can’t make out what he’s saying but he’s trying to make contact. Some are louder than others. Wait, I hear him now.” I paused to listen. “He said he always had the hots for your wife. That’s really the only reason he went to shul in the morning. He was trying to make atonements because he was guilty about wanting to bone your wife.”
Rabbi Green touched his left shoulder with his right hand and looked at it. He must’ve felt the cold spot that Mr. Friedman left behind. Actually, a lot of guys in the synagogue have the hots for Bertha Green, including my old man, mainly ‘cuz she had probably the biggest tits in Braintree. He was looking more and more freaked out by the second and I looked at him as if to say, “Welcome to my world, bitch.”
“Have they…? OK, Adam, listen closely and tell me the truth. Have they told you which one is… the true religion?” I looked at Rabbi Green for a long time before answering him.
“I don’t know what you’d call it, Rabbi, but let’s just say you all got it wrong.”
Rabbi Green never said another word to me and he beat it the hell out of there without even so much as a “Shalom.” And this time I don’t think it was because of Mom’s horrible gefilte fish.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
The Bone Bridge- Chapter Eight
CIA HQ, Langley, VA, March 28, 1968
“Now, who’s this bird, again?” asked President Johnson of the CIA Assistant Director in his trademark drawl. They were impatient to start the presentation and the Commander in Chief kept interrupting them with questions that they knew would be answered by the film. But patience was never one of LBJ’s long suits. Understandably, he was flabbergasted when apprised in the Oval Office of the research being done at MIT and underwritten by the CIA.
“The gentleman narrating the film is Dr. Bernard Moss, Mr. President. He’s the project manager of Operation Casper,” the AD patiently explained. “Now, if you’re ready, sir, let’s just watch the film and see what Dr. Moss has to say.”
A lot depended on this film and the President was understandably skeptical about the research findings. There were only six men in the room, which was already about half of the people on earth who knew of the work being done in a top secret laboratory in Boston, Massachusetts. The idea was to convince LBJ to declassify the findings and privately ask Congressional leaders of both parties and pertinent committee chairmen to allocate more money into the CIA’s budget to in turn increase funding for Casper.
“Alright,” the President said, “let ‘er rip.” The room went dark and the projector began to whirr.
“Operation Casper: A Proposal,” began Dr. Moss. The 36th President had to stifle a giggle on hearing a super serious mad scientist type refer with a straight face to a million dollar Central Intelligence Agency program named after a cute cartoon ghost.
Even without anything to use for scale, the narrator seemed a small man made even smaller by his oversized white lab coat and, in fact, he was. His eyes were large and green, eyes made even larger by the thick lenses of his glasses. His full head of white hair was unruly and he himself looked like a cartoon stereotype of a mad scientist, albeit a benevolent one.
The presentation film showed all the flair and panache of modern federal architecture and publications from the government printing office. As with seemingly all training and orientation films of the day, it was desk- or stage-bound on account of the one static camera and the cutaways were animated, which also almost made the Commander in Chief chuckle out loud. The Assistant Director, who also hadn’t seen the film, pinched the bridge of his nose as he saw LBJ’s silhouetted head bob up and down, obviously in amusement. But it was a foregone conclusion that unless Moss literally pulled a ghost out of his ass or Fellini was hired to direct the second half, the President’s transient amusement wouldn’t exactly translate into extra funding. Hell, he might even advise the Congressional leaders to cut funding altogether. As it was, the whole thing looked so much like Saturday morning cartoon fare, he was actually surprised they didn’t draw the animated ghosts with sheets or even use Casper in a cameo.
“…and if our research findings are correct,” Dr. Moss concluded, “we may one day actually be able to trap these entities in a manmade dimension, sort of a vortex, if you will. Once detained and fixed, we can then learn from these beings and perhaps be able to harness their abilities in the world of the living to be applied in the realm of national security. Thank you for listening.”
Presently, the lights came back on and the President was grinning as if he’d been getting a blow job under the desk the whole time.
“Well!” he exclaimed. “That’s certainly a Texas league whopper! Maybe JFK’s kids woulda got something out of that, too!” Then he added in a more ominous tone, “in 1963! What the hell was that, Mr. Assistant Director? You actually thought that was worth taking up half my morning?”
“Mr. President,” the AD stammered, no longer secure even in his continued employment in the Company, much less the additional funding, “I agree that the presentation may have been a little condescending, but…”
“‘May have been a little condescending’? Mr. Director, I can think of some retards down in Oklahoma that woulda laughed at that! And you expect me to ask Congressional leaders, including Republicans, for more money based on that?”
“Sir, the research findings are conclusive up to a point. You can’t deny they made some headway in terms of…”
“I’ve already heard enough,” the President said as he got up to leave the secure conference room. “Ya’ll get to keep your present funding for your cartoon schemes but there ain’t no way I’m gonna fund Vietnam, the War on Poverty plus more for that…” and he gestured vaguely toward the projection screen, “that… lunacy.”
“So it stayed in limbo until it got axed right after Nixon left office,” Laura said. This time it was Adam’s turn to drop his jaw in his lap. He knew that Grandpa Bernard was a research scientist but Mom and Dad never discussed his work, especially after he was found washed up on the banks of the Charles with his untracked veins bulging with high-grade heroin. “Intelligence scuttlebutt has it LBJ was still chuckling about our grandfather’s film on his deathbed five years later.”
“So… so what you’re sayin’ is, you continued Grandpa’s work?”
“Uh, no. Not exactly. The agency’s working along parallel lines but, no, we’re not continuing Grandpa’s work.” Laura stopped to look at her brother. “Our job, among other things, is to keep others from doing that.”
“So you’re like, a real-life Agent Scully.” Laura pinched the bridge of her nose.
“No, Adam, not like Agent Scully and the X Files. There’s a lot of research that goes into the work, a lot of leads that lead to dead ends. No aliens, no Sasquatch, no secret flying saucers at Area 51, none of that. There’s really not a lot I can say about my job that would interest you.” Frighten, perhaps, but not what one would call strictly interest. She didn’t see any reason to bring Adam completely into the fold. That would depend upon Oliver, the agency’s boss.
The mass suicide at the Boston Sheraton was news in which she and the agency had more than a passing interest. As with the baffled Boston PD, Oliver Blood and the relatively few people under him knew that this wasn’t explainable by mass psychosis. Although there was little to no forensic evidence from which to launch even a plausible theory, a paranormal angle would explain the obvious terror that had gripped these people in their final moments. Two of the 53 victims were the parents of a girl with whom her sibling had almost died in a car accident.
If Adam was somehow connected to the possible supernatural shenanigans in Boston, she had yet to see it. Yet Adam’s seeming involvement couldn’t be ignored and left to chance, especially in light of his “glimpses.” Then there was his claiming that Clarissa’s alleged ghost pled with him to “Free us.” Lastly, from what her brother himself had just told her, a certain police detective named Ed Coffey was also thinking along the same lines as she. She’d have to talk to this cop, pick his brains to see what they found out in their own investigation, if anything. Yeah, she’d have to bring her baby brother in from the cold, albeit slowly.
“Adam, while I’m still in town,” she calmly said, “I’d like you to meet my boss.”
I don’t think I’ll ever look at my big sister quite the same way ever again. I mean, I always thought that how she made her living was kinda sketchy even before I knew that she was a spook, if you’ll pardon the phrase. Just the fact that she worked for the government was both cool and scary at the same time. But this shit she just unloaded on me…
I also wasn’t exactly sketched out to meet her boss. Any intelligence agency head honcho is a scary dude in my opinion and just the fact that most of our government not knowing about their existence was enough for me to dig in my heels. Laura tried reassuring me that this Blood dude (Day-am, even his name scared me shitless) was righteous but I wasn’t about to go forming on blind faith warm and fuzzy opinions about a guy who’s probably waxed more people than Ted Bundy.
I wondered how long it would take for Bundy’s unknown victims to seek me out asking me to solve their murders and if Laura and this Blood dude could help me out with that.
Boston, MA, November 9
“Coffey! There’s some girl out here to see you.” I nodded and put the Sheraton file away. I asked Roddy which one it was and he said, “The cute blonde over there,” pointing in her direction.
She was of medium height and slightly voluptuous build, shoulder length blonde hair neatly pulled back with a barrette. Despite the November chill, she wore a simple white blouse under a black dress coat and matching slacks. She advanced toward me, extending her hand. As I got closer to her, I noticed the bulge beneath her coat just under her visitor badge and wondered if the lifer manning the metal detector downstairs fell asleep or was too busy gawking at her big tits. No way was she supposed to have that piece up here.
“Detective Coffey?” I nodded and took her hand. “I’m Laura Moss. Could I have a few minutes of your time? In private?”
We walked into one of the unused interrogation rooms and each took a seat. I waited for her to continue and she got right down to business.
“Detective, we’d like to know the status of your investigation into the Sheraton mass suicide on Halloween night.”
“Who’s ‘we’?” In response, she showed me her credentials and it seemed as if she was sent here from our mutual Uncle Sam. When I looked at her name on the intelligence agency badge, it finally clicked. Sure, Moss was a common name but it was a bit of a stretch to think it could be pure coincidence meeting another within a few days.
“I just met another Moss. Some kid named Adam.”
“I know. He’s my brother. I got your name from him.”
I sat back and regarded her with new eyes. If her brother was her sole reason for picking my brains about this case, then perhaps she wasn’t here in an official capacity, after all, and had no business using the word “we”. Besides, why would the feds be sniffing around asking about an investigation that, as far I was concerned, was still a municipal matter? If anything, it would be the FBI trying to walk on our grass instead of this intelligence agency I’d never heard of. I felt I was on solid ground in assuming I didn’t have to tell her a damned thing but I still wanted to see what exactly she wanted and, more importantly, why she wanted to know it.
“How’s your brother doing, by the way?”
“He’s doing fine,” Moss finally said as she exhaled, which told me he wasn’t. “I just got back home early last night and we talked. He still hasn’t gone back to school but he’s getting his homework sent to him and he seems to be getting back to his old self.” Then for the briefest of instants she smirked as if remembering an inside joke.
“Has he remembered anything else that happened that night?” She shook her head.
“I don’t know what he’d told you at the hospital but he didn’t give me any indication that he recalled anything else of significance.”
“So, may I ask what interest your agency has in this case? Or do they even know you’re here? I’m suspecting this may be a purely family matter.”
“Well, yes and no, Detective. My people have taken a very lively interest in the case and my brother’s involvement, while undetermined, is still undeniable. I mean, you have to admit it would be a hell of a string of coincidences for him to not be relevant to it in some way.”
I looked her up and down and remembered the gun under her jacket. Her creds would certainly explain why the people downstairs would let her through the metal detector. She seemed to be tough as nails and her kid brother’s involvement would perhaps make her even tougher to deal with.
When I was in the Green Berets, I’d run across a few spooks from the CIA when they were all duded out in their camo fatigues. Some of them thought they were as badass as us and a few of them were. This very feminine young lady didn’t strike me as being a wannabe. The impression I got was that she could field strip an AK47 in pitch blackness with her feet while applying her makeup.
“OK, you realize this is a very high profile investigation considering the identity of the victims.” She nodded with barely hidden impatience. “I can’t just release details and evidence from an ongoing investigation merely because your brother is, at best, marginally involved with some of the principals. I don’t care who you work for, Agent Moss.”
“How about if I can help you establish MO and maybe provide you with a suspect?”
I leaned back in the chair again and tapped the long bare table as I regarded her with another set of eyes. This girl was beginning to spook me more than the case itself.
“You guys were here long before us, weren’t you?” I quietly asked. She nodded.
“Months and months of studying criminal justice, fingerprinting, crime scene investigation and criminal psychology and how do I use it? Getting your coffee.” The patrolman put the Dunkin’ Donuts bag and cup holder down on the interrogation room table.
“Look at it this way, Ramirez: As long as Roddy keeps making that hemlock he calls coffee, you’ll be fulfilling a cherished cop stereotype.” The Hispanic officer humorlessly smirked at me and left Laura Moss and me alone.
This girl certainly wasn’t a stereotype. The intelligence types I saw in the Army, including Army Intelligence, were almost all macho assholes who probably took a shot of testosterone in their coffee in the morning and stirred it in with a survival knife. Moss, my instincts told me, was as tough as any of them but wasn’t overbearing about it. She didn’t sacrifice much if any of her femininity.
“OK, you understand that nothing you see here leaves this room, right? No files leave, no copies or notes will be made. You look at what you see here and keep it in your head.” I realized even as I said that there was no way I could keep her from making notes after she left the station. Hell, knowing these James Bond types, I couldn’t even be sure she didn’t have a miniature camera built into one of her blouse’s buttons and was silently clicking away like Annie Liebovitz..
“You’re not making this easy for me, Detective.”
“If this line of work was easy, we’d all be doing it.” I opened up the bulging case file and she immediately went to the dozens of pictures of the victims. Most of them were gory beyond belief and had even made me wince when I first saw them but Laura didn’t bat an eyelash until she got to one. I spotted the extra beat she lost looking at it. “What?”
“Clarissa’s autopsy photo. Those poor kids,” she muttered as she continued reviewing the pictures.
“You know, just an observation: Your brother perfectly described her injuries down to their precise location and he couldn’t have known that since he was out cold for four days. How do you explain that?”
“Like I said, Detective, he has a gift, although he’d call it a curse. I believe that he wasn’t dreaming about her.”
I recalled the security video showed to me in the hospital and what didn’t sit right with me tickled the back of my skull again but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I was trying to zero in on what didn’t seem right when Moss looked at a picture and held it up for special attention. I asked her what it was.
“This picture of Senator Dumont’s wife. Are those ice crystals on her face?”
“Yeah. That was the only tangible evidence that we got at the crime scene and it melted away almost as soon as our CSI guy snapped the picture. Any theories as to how that ice formed?”
“Maybe,” she said cryptically. Apparently, she was playing the same cat and mouse game I was, the both of us playing proprietor. At this rate, it was going to get us nowhere and in record time.
“OK, quid pro quo. You said you could give me some insight regarding MO and a suspect. Who do you think could be behind this and why is your agency looking at him?”
“You ever heard of the East German Stasi, Detective?” I cautiously nodded my head and she told me about the illustrious life and times of one Hans Dietrich and couldn’t believe what I was hearing. It got even more bizarre when she told me who her grandfather was and what he used to work on in the 60’s.
“It isn’t a theory, Ed.” We’d long since begun a first name basis. The coffee was gone and only donut crumbs and a lot of my questions remained. “When a spirit manifests, it can significantly reduce the temperature where it appears. It’s commonly referred to as a cold spot.”
“Could it get so cold as to crystallize human skin tissue?”
“Typically, no. There have been some documented cases of already chilly environments getting down to freezing. We’ve heard of temperature variances of sometimes ten, even twenty degrees, maybe more. But the kind of cold that would’ve been necessary to produce those ice crystals… Ed, there would’ve had to have been dozens of apparitions there, all drawing energy from the air simultaneously. It would’ve been like a reefer in that penthouse.” She was right. It was but at the time we tended to dismiss that because of the rush of cold air coming in from the broken windows.
“So why would Dietrich do this? I mean, does this technology you’re talking about actually exist? Because this sounds like something out of Ghost Busters.” She seemed irritated by the movie reference. No doubt she’d heard all the jokes before.
“Yes, we all but believe it does. And my grandfather’s partly the reason why. He’s also part of the reason why I got into this line of work, to help atone for his research, to ensure that it isn’t resurrected and perverted for nefarious ends. As for why Dietrich may’ve done this… That’s undetermined.”
When I first met her, I deeply suspected her involvement was purely a family matter. I just didn’t realize how deeply a family matter it was.
“OK, unless this Dietrich guy lives in Copley Plaza, I think it’s safe to say he’s out of our jurisdiction. So how do we reach this asshole?”
“Leave that up to me,” Laura grinned. She put her hand on my arm as she got up to leave and my mind suddenly flashed back to the hospital’s security video.
“Wait. Before you go, let me show you something.”
“So this is the moment my brother woke up from his coma?” I nodded and chewed a fingernail. We stood beside each other while closely regarding the monitor. I let the tape run for a few seconds then stabbed at the “pause” button. “There! Did you see that?”
“No. What did you see?” I pointed to her brother’s right arm.
“I’ll play it back. Make careful note of that arm when he begins to get up.” I slowed the speed to frame by frame and while Adam’s head and torso began rising from the bed, his arm remained pinned to the mattress. In fact, the sheet over it had also been pressed down.
“As if someone was holding it down,” she slowly said. “Nice catch, Ed.”
“Right. No one, I don’t care who, would create such a delusion immediately after waking up from a coma, especially if he doesn’t even know there’s a camera on him. That always bugged me subconsciously and then when you touched my arm back there, it all clicked. Someone or something was holding down his arm.”
“Clarissa,” Laura sighed.
“Now, who’s this bird, again?” asked President Johnson of the CIA Assistant Director in his trademark drawl. They were impatient to start the presentation and the Commander in Chief kept interrupting them with questions that they knew would be answered by the film. But patience was never one of LBJ’s long suits. Understandably, he was flabbergasted when apprised in the Oval Office of the research being done at MIT and underwritten by the CIA.
“The gentleman narrating the film is Dr. Bernard Moss, Mr. President. He’s the project manager of Operation Casper,” the AD patiently explained. “Now, if you’re ready, sir, let’s just watch the film and see what Dr. Moss has to say.”
A lot depended on this film and the President was understandably skeptical about the research findings. There were only six men in the room, which was already about half of the people on earth who knew of the work being done in a top secret laboratory in Boston, Massachusetts. The idea was to convince LBJ to declassify the findings and privately ask Congressional leaders of both parties and pertinent committee chairmen to allocate more money into the CIA’s budget to in turn increase funding for Casper.
“Alright,” the President said, “let ‘er rip.” The room went dark and the projector began to whirr.
“Operation Casper: A Proposal,” began Dr. Moss. The 36th President had to stifle a giggle on hearing a super serious mad scientist type refer with a straight face to a million dollar Central Intelligence Agency program named after a cute cartoon ghost.
Even without anything to use for scale, the narrator seemed a small man made even smaller by his oversized white lab coat and, in fact, he was. His eyes were large and green, eyes made even larger by the thick lenses of his glasses. His full head of white hair was unruly and he himself looked like a cartoon stereotype of a mad scientist, albeit a benevolent one.
The presentation film showed all the flair and panache of modern federal architecture and publications from the government printing office. As with seemingly all training and orientation films of the day, it was desk- or stage-bound on account of the one static camera and the cutaways were animated, which also almost made the Commander in Chief chuckle out loud. The Assistant Director, who also hadn’t seen the film, pinched the bridge of his nose as he saw LBJ’s silhouetted head bob up and down, obviously in amusement. But it was a foregone conclusion that unless Moss literally pulled a ghost out of his ass or Fellini was hired to direct the second half, the President’s transient amusement wouldn’t exactly translate into extra funding. Hell, he might even advise the Congressional leaders to cut funding altogether. As it was, the whole thing looked so much like Saturday morning cartoon fare, he was actually surprised they didn’t draw the animated ghosts with sheets or even use Casper in a cameo.
“…and if our research findings are correct,” Dr. Moss concluded, “we may one day actually be able to trap these entities in a manmade dimension, sort of a vortex, if you will. Once detained and fixed, we can then learn from these beings and perhaps be able to harness their abilities in the world of the living to be applied in the realm of national security. Thank you for listening.”
Presently, the lights came back on and the President was grinning as if he’d been getting a blow job under the desk the whole time.
“Well!” he exclaimed. “That’s certainly a Texas league whopper! Maybe JFK’s kids woulda got something out of that, too!” Then he added in a more ominous tone, “in 1963! What the hell was that, Mr. Assistant Director? You actually thought that was worth taking up half my morning?”
“Mr. President,” the AD stammered, no longer secure even in his continued employment in the Company, much less the additional funding, “I agree that the presentation may have been a little condescending, but…”
“‘May have been a little condescending’? Mr. Director, I can think of some retards down in Oklahoma that woulda laughed at that! And you expect me to ask Congressional leaders, including Republicans, for more money based on that?”
“Sir, the research findings are conclusive up to a point. You can’t deny they made some headway in terms of…”
“I’ve already heard enough,” the President said as he got up to leave the secure conference room. “Ya’ll get to keep your present funding for your cartoon schemes but there ain’t no way I’m gonna fund Vietnam, the War on Poverty plus more for that…” and he gestured vaguely toward the projection screen, “that… lunacy.”
“So it stayed in limbo until it got axed right after Nixon left office,” Laura said. This time it was Adam’s turn to drop his jaw in his lap. He knew that Grandpa Bernard was a research scientist but Mom and Dad never discussed his work, especially after he was found washed up on the banks of the Charles with his untracked veins bulging with high-grade heroin. “Intelligence scuttlebutt has it LBJ was still chuckling about our grandfather’s film on his deathbed five years later.”
“So… so what you’re sayin’ is, you continued Grandpa’s work?”
“Uh, no. Not exactly. The agency’s working along parallel lines but, no, we’re not continuing Grandpa’s work.” Laura stopped to look at her brother. “Our job, among other things, is to keep others from doing that.”
“So you’re like, a real-life Agent Scully.” Laura pinched the bridge of her nose.
“No, Adam, not like Agent Scully and the X Files. There’s a lot of research that goes into the work, a lot of leads that lead to dead ends. No aliens, no Sasquatch, no secret flying saucers at Area 51, none of that. There’s really not a lot I can say about my job that would interest you.” Frighten, perhaps, but not what one would call strictly interest. She didn’t see any reason to bring Adam completely into the fold. That would depend upon Oliver, the agency’s boss.
The mass suicide at the Boston Sheraton was news in which she and the agency had more than a passing interest. As with the baffled Boston PD, Oliver Blood and the relatively few people under him knew that this wasn’t explainable by mass psychosis. Although there was little to no forensic evidence from which to launch even a plausible theory, a paranormal angle would explain the obvious terror that had gripped these people in their final moments. Two of the 53 victims were the parents of a girl with whom her sibling had almost died in a car accident.
If Adam was somehow connected to the possible supernatural shenanigans in Boston, she had yet to see it. Yet Adam’s seeming involvement couldn’t be ignored and left to chance, especially in light of his “glimpses.” Then there was his claiming that Clarissa’s alleged ghost pled with him to “Free us.” Lastly, from what her brother himself had just told her, a certain police detective named Ed Coffey was also thinking along the same lines as she. She’d have to talk to this cop, pick his brains to see what they found out in their own investigation, if anything. Yeah, she’d have to bring her baby brother in from the cold, albeit slowly.
“Adam, while I’m still in town,” she calmly said, “I’d like you to meet my boss.”
I don’t think I’ll ever look at my big sister quite the same way ever again. I mean, I always thought that how she made her living was kinda sketchy even before I knew that she was a spook, if you’ll pardon the phrase. Just the fact that she worked for the government was both cool and scary at the same time. But this shit she just unloaded on me…
I also wasn’t exactly sketched out to meet her boss. Any intelligence agency head honcho is a scary dude in my opinion and just the fact that most of our government not knowing about their existence was enough for me to dig in my heels. Laura tried reassuring me that this Blood dude (Day-am, even his name scared me shitless) was righteous but I wasn’t about to go forming on blind faith warm and fuzzy opinions about a guy who’s probably waxed more people than Ted Bundy.
I wondered how long it would take for Bundy’s unknown victims to seek me out asking me to solve their murders and if Laura and this Blood dude could help me out with that.
Boston, MA, November 9
“Coffey! There’s some girl out here to see you.” I nodded and put the Sheraton file away. I asked Roddy which one it was and he said, “The cute blonde over there,” pointing in her direction.
She was of medium height and slightly voluptuous build, shoulder length blonde hair neatly pulled back with a barrette. Despite the November chill, she wore a simple white blouse under a black dress coat and matching slacks. She advanced toward me, extending her hand. As I got closer to her, I noticed the bulge beneath her coat just under her visitor badge and wondered if the lifer manning the metal detector downstairs fell asleep or was too busy gawking at her big tits. No way was she supposed to have that piece up here.
“Detective Coffey?” I nodded and took her hand. “I’m Laura Moss. Could I have a few minutes of your time? In private?”
We walked into one of the unused interrogation rooms and each took a seat. I waited for her to continue and she got right down to business.
“Detective, we’d like to know the status of your investigation into the Sheraton mass suicide on Halloween night.”
“Who’s ‘we’?” In response, she showed me her credentials and it seemed as if she was sent here from our mutual Uncle Sam. When I looked at her name on the intelligence agency badge, it finally clicked. Sure, Moss was a common name but it was a bit of a stretch to think it could be pure coincidence meeting another within a few days.
“I just met another Moss. Some kid named Adam.”
“I know. He’s my brother. I got your name from him.”
I sat back and regarded her with new eyes. If her brother was her sole reason for picking my brains about this case, then perhaps she wasn’t here in an official capacity, after all, and had no business using the word “we”. Besides, why would the feds be sniffing around asking about an investigation that, as far I was concerned, was still a municipal matter? If anything, it would be the FBI trying to walk on our grass instead of this intelligence agency I’d never heard of. I felt I was on solid ground in assuming I didn’t have to tell her a damned thing but I still wanted to see what exactly she wanted and, more importantly, why she wanted to know it.
“How’s your brother doing, by the way?”
“He’s doing fine,” Moss finally said as she exhaled, which told me he wasn’t. “I just got back home early last night and we talked. He still hasn’t gone back to school but he’s getting his homework sent to him and he seems to be getting back to his old self.” Then for the briefest of instants she smirked as if remembering an inside joke.
“Has he remembered anything else that happened that night?” She shook her head.
“I don’t know what he’d told you at the hospital but he didn’t give me any indication that he recalled anything else of significance.”
“So, may I ask what interest your agency has in this case? Or do they even know you’re here? I’m suspecting this may be a purely family matter.”
“Well, yes and no, Detective. My people have taken a very lively interest in the case and my brother’s involvement, while undetermined, is still undeniable. I mean, you have to admit it would be a hell of a string of coincidences for him to not be relevant to it in some way.”
I looked her up and down and remembered the gun under her jacket. Her creds would certainly explain why the people downstairs would let her through the metal detector. She seemed to be tough as nails and her kid brother’s involvement would perhaps make her even tougher to deal with.
When I was in the Green Berets, I’d run across a few spooks from the CIA when they were all duded out in their camo fatigues. Some of them thought they were as badass as us and a few of them were. This very feminine young lady didn’t strike me as being a wannabe. The impression I got was that she could field strip an AK47 in pitch blackness with her feet while applying her makeup.
“OK, you realize this is a very high profile investigation considering the identity of the victims.” She nodded with barely hidden impatience. “I can’t just release details and evidence from an ongoing investigation merely because your brother is, at best, marginally involved with some of the principals. I don’t care who you work for, Agent Moss.”
“How about if I can help you establish MO and maybe provide you with a suspect?”
I leaned back in the chair again and tapped the long bare table as I regarded her with another set of eyes. This girl was beginning to spook me more than the case itself.
“You guys were here long before us, weren’t you?” I quietly asked. She nodded.
“Months and months of studying criminal justice, fingerprinting, crime scene investigation and criminal psychology and how do I use it? Getting your coffee.” The patrolman put the Dunkin’ Donuts bag and cup holder down on the interrogation room table.
“Look at it this way, Ramirez: As long as Roddy keeps making that hemlock he calls coffee, you’ll be fulfilling a cherished cop stereotype.” The Hispanic officer humorlessly smirked at me and left Laura Moss and me alone.
This girl certainly wasn’t a stereotype. The intelligence types I saw in the Army, including Army Intelligence, were almost all macho assholes who probably took a shot of testosterone in their coffee in the morning and stirred it in with a survival knife. Moss, my instincts told me, was as tough as any of them but wasn’t overbearing about it. She didn’t sacrifice much if any of her femininity.
“OK, you understand that nothing you see here leaves this room, right? No files leave, no copies or notes will be made. You look at what you see here and keep it in your head.” I realized even as I said that there was no way I could keep her from making notes after she left the station. Hell, knowing these James Bond types, I couldn’t even be sure she didn’t have a miniature camera built into one of her blouse’s buttons and was silently clicking away like Annie Liebovitz..
“You’re not making this easy for me, Detective.”
“If this line of work was easy, we’d all be doing it.” I opened up the bulging case file and she immediately went to the dozens of pictures of the victims. Most of them were gory beyond belief and had even made me wince when I first saw them but Laura didn’t bat an eyelash until she got to one. I spotted the extra beat she lost looking at it. “What?”
“Clarissa’s autopsy photo. Those poor kids,” she muttered as she continued reviewing the pictures.
“You know, just an observation: Your brother perfectly described her injuries down to their precise location and he couldn’t have known that since he was out cold for four days. How do you explain that?”
“Like I said, Detective, he has a gift, although he’d call it a curse. I believe that he wasn’t dreaming about her.”
I recalled the security video showed to me in the hospital and what didn’t sit right with me tickled the back of my skull again but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I was trying to zero in on what didn’t seem right when Moss looked at a picture and held it up for special attention. I asked her what it was.
“This picture of Senator Dumont’s wife. Are those ice crystals on her face?”
“Yeah. That was the only tangible evidence that we got at the crime scene and it melted away almost as soon as our CSI guy snapped the picture. Any theories as to how that ice formed?”
“Maybe,” she said cryptically. Apparently, she was playing the same cat and mouse game I was, the both of us playing proprietor. At this rate, it was going to get us nowhere and in record time.
“OK, quid pro quo. You said you could give me some insight regarding MO and a suspect. Who do you think could be behind this and why is your agency looking at him?”
“You ever heard of the East German Stasi, Detective?” I cautiously nodded my head and she told me about the illustrious life and times of one Hans Dietrich and couldn’t believe what I was hearing. It got even more bizarre when she told me who her grandfather was and what he used to work on in the 60’s.
“It isn’t a theory, Ed.” We’d long since begun a first name basis. The coffee was gone and only donut crumbs and a lot of my questions remained. “When a spirit manifests, it can significantly reduce the temperature where it appears. It’s commonly referred to as a cold spot.”
“Could it get so cold as to crystallize human skin tissue?”
“Typically, no. There have been some documented cases of already chilly environments getting down to freezing. We’ve heard of temperature variances of sometimes ten, even twenty degrees, maybe more. But the kind of cold that would’ve been necessary to produce those ice crystals… Ed, there would’ve had to have been dozens of apparitions there, all drawing energy from the air simultaneously. It would’ve been like a reefer in that penthouse.” She was right. It was but at the time we tended to dismiss that because of the rush of cold air coming in from the broken windows.
“So why would Dietrich do this? I mean, does this technology you’re talking about actually exist? Because this sounds like something out of Ghost Busters.” She seemed irritated by the movie reference. No doubt she’d heard all the jokes before.
“Yes, we all but believe it does. And my grandfather’s partly the reason why. He’s also part of the reason why I got into this line of work, to help atone for his research, to ensure that it isn’t resurrected and perverted for nefarious ends. As for why Dietrich may’ve done this… That’s undetermined.”
When I first met her, I deeply suspected her involvement was purely a family matter. I just didn’t realize how deeply a family matter it was.
“OK, unless this Dietrich guy lives in Copley Plaza, I think it’s safe to say he’s out of our jurisdiction. So how do we reach this asshole?”
“Leave that up to me,” Laura grinned. She put her hand on my arm as she got up to leave and my mind suddenly flashed back to the hospital’s security video.
“Wait. Before you go, let me show you something.”
“So this is the moment my brother woke up from his coma?” I nodded and chewed a fingernail. We stood beside each other while closely regarding the monitor. I let the tape run for a few seconds then stabbed at the “pause” button. “There! Did you see that?”
“No. What did you see?” I pointed to her brother’s right arm.
“I’ll play it back. Make careful note of that arm when he begins to get up.” I slowed the speed to frame by frame and while Adam’s head and torso began rising from the bed, his arm remained pinned to the mattress. In fact, the sheet over it had also been pressed down.
“As if someone was holding it down,” she slowly said. “Nice catch, Ed.”
“Right. No one, I don’t care who, would create such a delusion immediately after waking up from a coma, especially if he doesn’t even know there’s a camera on him. That always bugged me subconsciously and then when you touched my arm back there, it all clicked. Someone or something was holding down his arm.”
“Clarissa,” Laura sighed.
The Bone Bridge: Chapter Seven
The Moss home, Braintree, MA, November 8th
Laura Moss pulled up to her parents’ homestead in her rented Chevy Cobalt and concurrently breathed first a sigh of relief and inhaled with dread at what Adam might present. She had nothing but her Mom’s word to go on and it seemed every time she called her brother was either asleep or out of the house. They had to walk a fine line between sheltering him and letting him get back on the horse or skateboard as it were. They all knew that he was visiting Clarissa’s grave every day and it broke their hearts to see the poor boy pining for her. Yet they also all knew that unless Adam stopped mooning over Clarissa’s plot, someone would have to read him the riot act and tell him to stop his obsessive/compulsive behavior.
She continued texting him while she could on the plane and, as always, could never get through. At Logan Airport, she called home and Mom said he was sleeping. He hadn’t gone back to school yet and his depression was really starting to worry his family. So when Clarissa marched up the walkway she had no idea if Adam was still in bed or out. The sun was just beginning to set. Since Iraq was eight hours ahead of the eastern US, there was jet lag with which she’d have to contend but not tonight. She was too keyed-up worrying about her baby brother.
She walked right in without knocking and announced herself. Why should she? This was the house in which she and Adam grew up and for the few days she’d be here, she wouldn’t be “Elle” but Laura. Mom came out from the kitchen after a second or two, wiping her hands on a towel then broke into a full sprint. Wrapping her daughter in a hug, she began sobbing. Laura hugged her mother back and only realized it had been over a year since she’d last been in her childhood home. Still, Jewish mothers, she thought, were overly emotional when it came to their children. She’d had no choice but to adopt a stoic attitude in her line of work but Laura conceded that perhaps her Mom had a right to emotionalism since she was a Mom and Laura wasn’t.
Her fingers smelled of gefilte fish, which she always made homemade. Adam couldn’t stand it and he was always the closest thing the family had to a gentile. For Mom, matzo ball soup and gefilte fish was her comfort food like mac and cheese with hot dog pennies was always Laura’s. Come to think of it, no one else in the family liked Mom’s gefilte fish and even Rabbi Green, when he’d come over, always tightly smiled during such dinners as if he was circumcising an elephant. Mrs. Moss was probably the only wife and mother in the entire Judaic world who couldn’t cook.
“Oh my God, Laura, I was beginning to think we’d never see you again!”
“Mom, I’ve been busy, not dead.” She gently separated from her mother and looked at her. She cut her hair again, which was always a mistake with her physiognomy. With her hair short or pulled-back, her moon-shaped face always looked as big around as a hub cap.
“I like your new haircut,” she charitably said.
“Thanks. Adam’s still upstairs. I imagine you’d rather see him than me or Dad right now. We’ll have time to catch up, later.” She wiped her eyes dry and walked back into the kitchen.
I twitched when there was a knock at my door. Yeah, sometimes, they actually knock just before they haunt you. Sometimes they knock on other things. It’s like even after people die they take their manners to the grave and then bring them back when they come calling.
“Who… who is it?” I asked in a tiny voice. The blankets were already up to my fucking chin. I jumped out of bed and tore open the door when Laura answered.
I wrapped her in a huge hug and pulled her in and, believe it or not, my sister the Ice Princess was actually sobbing.
“Didn’t you get my messages? I was going crazy trying to call and text you!” she said with half anger and half love.
“I lost my phone,” I lamely explained. I never had the guts to ask if I could look for it in Clarissa’s Range Rover. I tried calling it from the house but no one ever answered it but an automated message saying the user was unavailable, yada yada. I figured maybe it got thrown out and smashed when the car tumbled.
“Oh, kiddo, I’m so sorry about Clarissa!” She hugged me again.
At the mention of her name, tears I thought were long cried out started pouring down my face and suddenly we weren’t secret agent and Emo boy but just two siblings who just hadn’t seen each other in way too long. I gladly hugged her back and tried my damnedest to ignore the pale man in the far corner of my room.
Laura couldn’t understand why Adam kept glancing at a corner of his room as if self-consciously mindful of another person observing their private moment. Mom had told him that Adam claimed to have seen Clarissa at the hospital days after she was killed and both she and Dad had dismissed it as either a dream or as one of Adam’s “glimpses.” The way he’d once explained it to her when they were still growing up, he said seeing a ghost was like getting a glimpse into another environment, like you would catch a fleeting glimpse of the interior of a passenger train as it sped by. Their baby brother who’d died seven years ago was just the first one he’d claim to see but certainly not the last.
Finally, when Adam opened up his wrists two years ago (Thank God he made the same mistake as many others, cutting horizontally instead of vertically), Adam said a ghost had told him to do it. They feared that he was schizophrenic until the psychiatrist at the hospital had the chance to examine him and rule out that diagnosis. The doctor said that Adam was suffering from paranoid delusions but certainly not schizophrenia, which was a much rarer malady. Then he met Clarissa and the two of them seemed to thrive and even depend upon each other. They both made a mutually miraculous recovery and Adam was discharged two days after her. They’d been almost inseparable ever since. When Laura got word that Clarissa was killed while Adam was with her, she feared her death would make her brother relapse.
But she had no illusions about his paranoid delusions. Adam was legitimately seeing things. And she feared he was seeing something right now, something that he was desperately trying to ignore and not call attention to.
I really wished that dude had stopped looking at me, at us. The fucking assholes (Clarissa excepted) hardly gave me a breather since. The kid in The Sixth Sense used to piss me off in that he never seemed to be seriously freaked out about seeing dead people. Trust me, kids, that’s some shit you just never take in your stride. The ones that died in horrible accidents were usually the worst ones because they come back with their trauma intact. One thing I noticed during the one time I made contact with Clarissa was she seemed to be holding her head at an odd angle. So when that cop told me that she died of a broken neck, I put two and two together.
The dude in the corner was one of those guys, I guess. He had a humongous chest wound like someone tattooed him with a fucking shotgun or something. What creeped me out was that he kept making like he was reaching out to me but couldn’t move or talk. He just stood there, his left arm out, like the world’s most hideous panhandler.
“What are you looking at, Bro?” Laura looked at the corner where he was standing quietly spazzing out but of course she couldn’t see him. Seeing shit like that was, for some reason, my job.
“Nuthin’. So, how ya doin’, Sis? Working on anything interesting?”
“You know I can’t talk about that,” she said. I knew that’s what her answer would be. It always is. But I was so distracted by the dude in the corner that I didn’t know what else to say. When I looked back to where he was, he was gone. I breathed a small sigh of relief.
“I’m sorry if I freaked you out. I guess, since you were in Baghdad, you were there doing something important.”
“Adam,” she said. As she drew out the last syllable of my name, she almost sounded like she was whining. She hugged me again, “stop apologizing, Honey. It’s not like you were driving the car or anything.”
“No, Clarissa was.” And I was no closer to understanding why she did what she did than I was the moment I woke up from my coma.
“Do you remember…?” She stopped and re-gathered her thoughts. “Do you recall anything during your near-death experience?”
Mom and Dad and even one of my friends asked me the same thing and I was getting sick and tired of being treated like a freak. There’s being treated like a freak because of my Emo boy looks but this was something else entirely.
“Yeah,” I said in all seriousness. “There was this pinprick of light. Then it got bigger and bigger and I started to see shit on the other side. It was like, swimming in pure light. Then as this bright white light got bigger and bigger, I heard music and saw…” Laura’s eyes also got bigger and I knew I’d hooked her. “…I saw… Elvis sitting on a Laz-E-Boy with this big-ass remote, controlling the world.”
Laura slapped my shoulder, knowing that I got her for a change.
“You wouldn’t believe how loud Elvis’s farts are, Laura.” She slapped the same shoulder again.
“You fucking asshole. You really had me goin’ there. Just for that, I’m telling all your Emo friends you’re a Phil Collins and Genesis fan.” She laughed and pulled a strand of hair behind her ear and asked, “So you don’t remember anything, then?”
“Nah. I mean, I didn’t even know until after I got back and even then I overheard Mom telling one of her friends from the synagogue.”
“They didn’t even tell you you were clinically dead?”
“Fuck no. You know, because of my… history,” I said with exaggerated scare quotes. Despite the fact that while growing up we fought like rabid cats and dogs, Laura always gave me the impression that she was on my side. We drew closer together after our brother died because we knew Mom wouldn’t have any more after us. So, as far as siblings went, we knew we were all we had and were ever going to have.
“Laura,” I said while chewing my lower lip, “I have a confession to make.” She looked at me more closely. “They’re back, only there’re more of them. A lot more.”
When Adam got done talking, my jaw was almost touching my knees. He’d told me the stories of the ghosts he was seeing back when but it seemed as if, when he came back from the dead, he didn’t come back alone. What truly alarmed me was when Adam said they were coming in ever greater numbers. I believed him to the point that I was convinced they were coming to him for some reason. I wanted to protect my baby brother since I couldn’t or didn’t take it on faith they were all good but how the hell do you protect a loved one from insubstantial energy?
“OK, baby brother, since we’re making confessions like guilty Catholics, I got one for you. And you have to promise to not put it on your Myspace or Facebook pages, ya hear?”
“Waddya think, I’m retarded? I know you work for the government and shit.”
I then gave Adam a basic overview of what we did at our agency, the 17th one that’s never mentioned in the annual National Intelligence Estimate. Without getting too deeply into classified material, I told Adam what I did for a living because I was beginning to suspect more and more that in some indefinable way, we would need my employers to shield him.
I debated whether to tell him the real story of our Grandpa Bernard then decided to. I never thought it was possible for Adam’s huge eyes to get any bigger yet somehow he managed it.
Laura Moss pulled up to her parents’ homestead in her rented Chevy Cobalt and concurrently breathed first a sigh of relief and inhaled with dread at what Adam might present. She had nothing but her Mom’s word to go on and it seemed every time she called her brother was either asleep or out of the house. They had to walk a fine line between sheltering him and letting him get back on the horse or skateboard as it were. They all knew that he was visiting Clarissa’s grave every day and it broke their hearts to see the poor boy pining for her. Yet they also all knew that unless Adam stopped mooning over Clarissa’s plot, someone would have to read him the riot act and tell him to stop his obsessive/compulsive behavior.
She continued texting him while she could on the plane and, as always, could never get through. At Logan Airport, she called home and Mom said he was sleeping. He hadn’t gone back to school yet and his depression was really starting to worry his family. So when Clarissa marched up the walkway she had no idea if Adam was still in bed or out. The sun was just beginning to set. Since Iraq was eight hours ahead of the eastern US, there was jet lag with which she’d have to contend but not tonight. She was too keyed-up worrying about her baby brother.
She walked right in without knocking and announced herself. Why should she? This was the house in which she and Adam grew up and for the few days she’d be here, she wouldn’t be “Elle” but Laura. Mom came out from the kitchen after a second or two, wiping her hands on a towel then broke into a full sprint. Wrapping her daughter in a hug, she began sobbing. Laura hugged her mother back and only realized it had been over a year since she’d last been in her childhood home. Still, Jewish mothers, she thought, were overly emotional when it came to their children. She’d had no choice but to adopt a stoic attitude in her line of work but Laura conceded that perhaps her Mom had a right to emotionalism since she was a Mom and Laura wasn’t.
Her fingers smelled of gefilte fish, which she always made homemade. Adam couldn’t stand it and he was always the closest thing the family had to a gentile. For Mom, matzo ball soup and gefilte fish was her comfort food like mac and cheese with hot dog pennies was always Laura’s. Come to think of it, no one else in the family liked Mom’s gefilte fish and even Rabbi Green, when he’d come over, always tightly smiled during such dinners as if he was circumcising an elephant. Mrs. Moss was probably the only wife and mother in the entire Judaic world who couldn’t cook.
“Oh my God, Laura, I was beginning to think we’d never see you again!”
“Mom, I’ve been busy, not dead.” She gently separated from her mother and looked at her. She cut her hair again, which was always a mistake with her physiognomy. With her hair short or pulled-back, her moon-shaped face always looked as big around as a hub cap.
“I like your new haircut,” she charitably said.
“Thanks. Adam’s still upstairs. I imagine you’d rather see him than me or Dad right now. We’ll have time to catch up, later.” She wiped her eyes dry and walked back into the kitchen.
I twitched when there was a knock at my door. Yeah, sometimes, they actually knock just before they haunt you. Sometimes they knock on other things. It’s like even after people die they take their manners to the grave and then bring them back when they come calling.
“Who… who is it?” I asked in a tiny voice. The blankets were already up to my fucking chin. I jumped out of bed and tore open the door when Laura answered.
I wrapped her in a huge hug and pulled her in and, believe it or not, my sister the Ice Princess was actually sobbing.
“Didn’t you get my messages? I was going crazy trying to call and text you!” she said with half anger and half love.
“I lost my phone,” I lamely explained. I never had the guts to ask if I could look for it in Clarissa’s Range Rover. I tried calling it from the house but no one ever answered it but an automated message saying the user was unavailable, yada yada. I figured maybe it got thrown out and smashed when the car tumbled.
“Oh, kiddo, I’m so sorry about Clarissa!” She hugged me again.
At the mention of her name, tears I thought were long cried out started pouring down my face and suddenly we weren’t secret agent and Emo boy but just two siblings who just hadn’t seen each other in way too long. I gladly hugged her back and tried my damnedest to ignore the pale man in the far corner of my room.
Laura couldn’t understand why Adam kept glancing at a corner of his room as if self-consciously mindful of another person observing their private moment. Mom had told him that Adam claimed to have seen Clarissa at the hospital days after she was killed and both she and Dad had dismissed it as either a dream or as one of Adam’s “glimpses.” The way he’d once explained it to her when they were still growing up, he said seeing a ghost was like getting a glimpse into another environment, like you would catch a fleeting glimpse of the interior of a passenger train as it sped by. Their baby brother who’d died seven years ago was just the first one he’d claim to see but certainly not the last.
Finally, when Adam opened up his wrists two years ago (Thank God he made the same mistake as many others, cutting horizontally instead of vertically), Adam said a ghost had told him to do it. They feared that he was schizophrenic until the psychiatrist at the hospital had the chance to examine him and rule out that diagnosis. The doctor said that Adam was suffering from paranoid delusions but certainly not schizophrenia, which was a much rarer malady. Then he met Clarissa and the two of them seemed to thrive and even depend upon each other. They both made a mutually miraculous recovery and Adam was discharged two days after her. They’d been almost inseparable ever since. When Laura got word that Clarissa was killed while Adam was with her, she feared her death would make her brother relapse.
But she had no illusions about his paranoid delusions. Adam was legitimately seeing things. And she feared he was seeing something right now, something that he was desperately trying to ignore and not call attention to.
I really wished that dude had stopped looking at me, at us. The fucking assholes (Clarissa excepted) hardly gave me a breather since. The kid in The Sixth Sense used to piss me off in that he never seemed to be seriously freaked out about seeing dead people. Trust me, kids, that’s some shit you just never take in your stride. The ones that died in horrible accidents were usually the worst ones because they come back with their trauma intact. One thing I noticed during the one time I made contact with Clarissa was she seemed to be holding her head at an odd angle. So when that cop told me that she died of a broken neck, I put two and two together.
The dude in the corner was one of those guys, I guess. He had a humongous chest wound like someone tattooed him with a fucking shotgun or something. What creeped me out was that he kept making like he was reaching out to me but couldn’t move or talk. He just stood there, his left arm out, like the world’s most hideous panhandler.
“What are you looking at, Bro?” Laura looked at the corner where he was standing quietly spazzing out but of course she couldn’t see him. Seeing shit like that was, for some reason, my job.
“Nuthin’. So, how ya doin’, Sis? Working on anything interesting?”
“You know I can’t talk about that,” she said. I knew that’s what her answer would be. It always is. But I was so distracted by the dude in the corner that I didn’t know what else to say. When I looked back to where he was, he was gone. I breathed a small sigh of relief.
“I’m sorry if I freaked you out. I guess, since you were in Baghdad, you were there doing something important.”
“Adam,” she said. As she drew out the last syllable of my name, she almost sounded like she was whining. She hugged me again, “stop apologizing, Honey. It’s not like you were driving the car or anything.”
“No, Clarissa was.” And I was no closer to understanding why she did what she did than I was the moment I woke up from my coma.
“Do you remember…?” She stopped and re-gathered her thoughts. “Do you recall anything during your near-death experience?”
Mom and Dad and even one of my friends asked me the same thing and I was getting sick and tired of being treated like a freak. There’s being treated like a freak because of my Emo boy looks but this was something else entirely.
“Yeah,” I said in all seriousness. “There was this pinprick of light. Then it got bigger and bigger and I started to see shit on the other side. It was like, swimming in pure light. Then as this bright white light got bigger and bigger, I heard music and saw…” Laura’s eyes also got bigger and I knew I’d hooked her. “…I saw… Elvis sitting on a Laz-E-Boy with this big-ass remote, controlling the world.”
Laura slapped my shoulder, knowing that I got her for a change.
“You wouldn’t believe how loud Elvis’s farts are, Laura.” She slapped the same shoulder again.
“You fucking asshole. You really had me goin’ there. Just for that, I’m telling all your Emo friends you’re a Phil Collins and Genesis fan.” She laughed and pulled a strand of hair behind her ear and asked, “So you don’t remember anything, then?”
“Nah. I mean, I didn’t even know until after I got back and even then I overheard Mom telling one of her friends from the synagogue.”
“They didn’t even tell you you were clinically dead?”
“Fuck no. You know, because of my… history,” I said with exaggerated scare quotes. Despite the fact that while growing up we fought like rabid cats and dogs, Laura always gave me the impression that she was on my side. We drew closer together after our brother died because we knew Mom wouldn’t have any more after us. So, as far as siblings went, we knew we were all we had and were ever going to have.
“Laura,” I said while chewing my lower lip, “I have a confession to make.” She looked at me more closely. “They’re back, only there’re more of them. A lot more.”
When Adam got done talking, my jaw was almost touching my knees. He’d told me the stories of the ghosts he was seeing back when but it seemed as if, when he came back from the dead, he didn’t come back alone. What truly alarmed me was when Adam said they were coming in ever greater numbers. I believed him to the point that I was convinced they were coming to him for some reason. I wanted to protect my baby brother since I couldn’t or didn’t take it on faith they were all good but how the hell do you protect a loved one from insubstantial energy?
“OK, baby brother, since we’re making confessions like guilty Catholics, I got one for you. And you have to promise to not put it on your Myspace or Facebook pages, ya hear?”
“Waddya think, I’m retarded? I know you work for the government and shit.”
I then gave Adam a basic overview of what we did at our agency, the 17th one that’s never mentioned in the annual National Intelligence Estimate. Without getting too deeply into classified material, I told Adam what I did for a living because I was beginning to suspect more and more that in some indefinable way, we would need my employers to shield him.
I debated whether to tell him the real story of our Grandpa Bernard then decided to. I never thought it was possible for Adam’s huge eyes to get any bigger yet somehow he managed it.
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