Grimm Awakening (2 page)

He sighed. “Didn't you once tell me something about a problem with traveling great distances? Like, how you really can't do it at fucking all? Your incorporeal essence diminishes the farther you get from the site of your death.”

The ghost shrugged. “What about it?”

Jack scowled. “How are you here, Harlan?”

Harlan Calhoun—rather, the thing that once was Harlan Calhoun—smiled. He was as handsome in death as he had been in life, with an easy grin and a mop of shaggy brown curls atop his head. “I was informed of your predicament by a mutual friend. Arrangements were made. Some favors were called in. Spells were cast and there was a lot in the way of chanting and some other mystic mumbo jumbo I don't actually understand. Basically, I received a kind of spiritual booster shot to keep my essence from dissipating. Also, we're talking about a transfer between realms, which isn't at all the same thing as traveling a great physical distance.” He smiled again. “Duh.”

Jack lit another cigarette and blew smoke into the middle of the room. “Great. Whatever. You're here. Why?”

Harlan leaned toward him. “Because our mutual friend--”

“We're talking about Andy, right?”

Harlan's smile faded. “We are, indeed. Andy is worried. He feels you're in a bad way mentally. That your depression is deepening.”

Jack exhaled more smoke. “Such a perceptive boy, our Andy.”

Harlan's expression darkened. “Yes. And I can see he had cause for concern. Jack, you weren't really about to bloody up this lovely room with the contents of your head—were you?”

Jack shrugged.

“Jack, you just can't do it.”

Jack glowered. “Yeah? Maybe you should tell me why that is. Because I need some serious convincing on that point, pal. The way I see it, pulling the plug on my miserable ass is the best way to go. Nothing would hurt anymore. I'm tired of hurting, Harlan.”

The ghost's dead eyes looked pained. Haunted. “You're wrong, you know. You'll still hurt. And the pain will be worse than ever. You'll have eternity to obsess over your life's regrets, but you'll never have a chance to set anything right. You're
alive,
Jack.
Alive
. Do you realize how precious life is? Every day you continue to draw breath is an extraordinary opportunity to make your grubby little corner of the world the tiniest bit better. Dead people can't do that. Look at me. I'm doomed to haunt a tiny piece of the earth forever, because, who knows, I wasn't quite good enough to get into heaven, or quite bad enough to warrant damnation. I'm visible only to a few people sensitive to hauntings. Can you imagine the loneliness, Jack? Can you imagine the pain?” His tone had grown harsh. “Think about that. Think about that long and hard before you ever put the barrel of a gun in your mouth again.”

Jack smirked.

Harlan began to look annoyed. “What is it?”

Jack chuckled. “'Long and hard'.”

Harlan stood up and shot him a middle finger. “Asshole. You go on and do whatever stupid damn thing it is you're gonna do. Kill yourself. What do I really care? Hell, maybe you'll be a ghost, too. We can hang out. Play ghost poker. Whatever. I've done what I can, man. I gotta be going.”

His image was fading—Jack could see the wall through his shimmering form.

“Later, Harlan.”

The ghost was gone and Jack was again alone in the room with the burden of his memories. His gaze went back to the gun. He sighed. Andy had gone to a lot of trouble to send Harlan to this place. There had to be a good reason for it. So Jack decided to put off killing himself for at least another day and set about finding out what that reason was.

He got up, strapped on his shoulder holster, holstered the gun, and shrugged on his jacket. Then he walked out of the motel room to get his first sober look at hell.

4.

Hell didn't much resemble anything Jack had ever envisioned. This wasn't some vast, fiery pit. This was more like...New Jersey. Or Gary, Indiana. Or somewhere else very ordinary in the heart of America. Jack's incredulous gaze swept up and down the street outside the Sundowner Inn as he stood in the motel's parking lot and smoked another Lucky Strike.

Jack scratched his head. “Where are all the hideous, leering demons? Where are all the strange, capering things in the shadows? What about the fucking lake of fire?”

A big 18-wheeler towing a tanker with a Texaco logo on the side rumbled by the motel, then disappeared around a street corner. A black prostitute wearing a platinum blonde wig, a halter top, and a miniscule skirt that looked molded to her prodigious ass like shiny cellophane hovered around a bus stop bench at the sidewalk. Not normally his type, but he still felt some lingering influence of the recorded phone voice. He considered buying some of her time to purge some of that, but his resolve returned as he reminded himself there were other things that must be done before he could tend to his surging libido. So he tore his gaze away from the prostitute and began to move toward the Sundowner Inn's front office.

But he sensed a fast-approaching disturbance of some type and stopped in his tracks. He turned around in time to see a long boat of an automotive relic, a fucking ragtop Edsel, come screeching around a street corner. Its rear end fishtailed, but the driver quickly and efficiently course corrected and the metal behemoth shot forward. Two men in suits and fedoras were leaning out of the vehicle's windows and aiming Tommy guns at the empty air behind them. The big car was close enough now that Jack could see the fat driver hunched over the steering wheel, a wisp of smoke curling from the stogie clenched between his gritted teeth.

The mystery of the daredevil gunmen was solved a moment later when two more cars came speeding around the same corner. These were white police cars, but they were moving too fast for Jack to make out the insignia on the doors. The fleeing gunmen opened fire the moment the cruisers appeared.

Jack hit the ground and sent out a prayer to whatever ancient deity was in charge of warding off stray bullets. As the cars swerved in the street and blew by the Sundowner Inn, several rounds ripped into the fender of a nearby powder blue Cadillac and blew out the vehicle's windshield. When the sounds of gunfire and squealing tires at last began to recede, Jack breathed a sigh of immense relief and got to his feet. He brushed himself off and went into the motel's front office.

A fat man with a shiny bald pate sat on a stool behind the desk. His attention was riveted to a pornographic movie playing on a wall-mounted television. The image on the screen showed a bottle-blonde woman with enormous, gravity-defying breasts getting intimate with a vibrator.

Jack and the front desk clerk were the only people in the small, grimy lobby. Jack stepped over a stain of some unknown, disturbing texture, braced his hands against the edge of the desk, and said, “So! This is hell, eh?”

The desk clerk still didn't look at him. “Yep.”

Jack grimaced. “I was hoping you'd say something else, like maybe, 'Why, no, sir, and, say, what kind of drugs are you on today?' You know, something with a quality of reassurance about it, something to indicate that, against all available evidence, something unspeakably horrible hasn't happened to me. By the way, I think I just saw Jimmy Cagney and some of his friends go by. Bit reckless with firearms, those boys.”

The clerk spun slowly around on the stool, which squeaked like a stool bearing the pressure of a man weighing in excess of four-hundred pounds. Which was precisely the sort of stool it happened to be at that point in time. The clerk's face had a surprisingly pleasing aspect to it. It was cheerful-looking, almost handsome, with fresh, rosy cheeks. Then the man sneered at Jack and hooked a piece of wet, yellow snot out of his left nostril. He squinted and inspected the booger a moment before proceeding to smear the foul thing on the desk's already well-besnotted surface.

Jack managed not to throw up. Barely. He backed away from the desk.

The man smirked at Jack's suddenly ill pallor. “I reckon you're new in town.” He laughed. His accent was pure deep south redneck. “Figured you was last night when your sorry ass stumbled through the door. You got the stench of the freshly damned on you right thick.”

Jack frowned. “So...help me here...I, what, must have...died?”

The man hocked up something in his throat and spat it at a waste bucket several feet from the stool. The wad of phlegm splashed against the side of the bucket. “Aim's off.” His disappointment sounded genuine. “Yeah, you're dead. And no shit, Sherlock. What are you, a dee-tective?”

“Uh...”

The big man chuckled. “You gotta pay for another night if you don't check out in an hour.”

Jack wondered where else in hell he might spend the night, realized he would not arrive at an answer to that horrifying and perplexing question within the next hour, and made his decision. “I'll stay another night.”

“You gonna put that on the same card as last night?”

Jack pondered the implications of that question a moment. “Huh. Um...those work down here?”

The clerk rooted around some more in the same nostril with a plump pinkie finger. “Ya got a lot to learn, newbie. Any active account you had in life is mirrored in the Bank of Hell when you get here. As long as you make your payments on time, you'll be able to use 'em.”

“Well...” Jack shook his head. He still clung to the hope none of this was real. Maybe one of his drinks last night had been dosed. It had happened before, so it could happen again. But, no, nothing about his current predicament was at all like his previous experience with dope. He wasn't hallucinating. And he wasn't having a bad dream. This was his real, waking life. Or death, rather.

In hell.

Jack palmed sweat from his forehead. “Goddamn.”

The desk clerk laughed. “Ain't that a fact? God has damned us all, the bastard. Aw, hell, man, you'll get used to it after a bit. It ain't so bad, really. It's not like they made us believe back on earth when I was little and we'd get all dressed up and go to church on Sundays. It's more like what I'd hear sometimes, that hell is whatever you hate most in life. Me, I slaved twenty-some years behind the front desk of a little motel in Alabama and hated every miserable goddamn day of it. And now it's what I'm stuck with forever. I couldn't go apply for some different job somewhere else in hell.” He laughed again, but this time there was a note of sadness in it. “No sir, I'm stuck here front-deskin' it for all eternity.”

Jack thought back to the way he'd awakened this morning and was struck almost dumb with horror. He wanted to scream. The notion that he was now doomed to spend forever waking up hungover and disoriented was just too awful. He pictured every day playing out the same damn way. Stumbling his way through the wreckage of the night before and not realizing where he was, or what was happening, until it smacked him in the face. It'd be like living that movie
Groundhog Day
.

Only in hell.

Jack choked back strangled laughter.

Damnation Day
.

The new blockbuster starring Jack fucking Grimm.

The desk clerk peered at him with something close to actual concern. “Listen, it's best not to dwell on it. What's done is done. You can still do some of the things you like to do. You can go out to a bar and get drunk. You could pay that whore out at the bus stop to do any kinky thing you want. Lots of shit like that. You just can't change the basic facts of your fucked-up existence.”

Jack decided he'd try to come to terms with this insanity later. He still had avenues of investigation to pursue. Maybe nothing that mattered anymore, but he had to try—there was simply nothing else to do. “Listen, when I came in here last night, was I alone?”

“You don't remember?”

Jack sneered. “Look, I had a fucking blackout. No, I don't remember. Was I alone? Was there a girl with me?”

The desk clerk flinched at his tone. “Don't get all nasty with me, asshole. Unless you had some whore waitin' for you outside, you was alone. Now, I got me a goddamn cinematic masterpiece to watch, shitbrain. I'm done answerin' your dumbass questions.”

The man spun around on the squeaky stool and stared up at the screen again. Jack glanced at the image of the moaning fake blonde. Another woman, a Latino, had just joined the on-screen action.

Jack sighed. “Look...I'm sorry. I'm just very upset. Which is a contender for largest understatement since the dawn of time. Just one more question. I tried to make a phone call. I fucked up. There was a voice, a recording...I...she...”

The desk clerk spun around again. There was a knowing smirk on his face. “That's the voice of Lust, son. You'll never see her. No one ever sees her. But that voice—just thinking about it gives me a big ol' stiffy—that voice is everywhere. It's on every recording in hell. Whether you hear a man's or a woman's voice depends on whether you like pussy or bein' poked in the ass. Most people can't get enough of it when they first get here, but that changes. You get to feeling like that voice is always teasing you, promising you the hottest, wickedest, freakiest circus sex you've ever desired. And then you realize you ain't ever gonna get it.”

Jack wanted to hear that voice again more than just about anything else, maybe more than he wanted to solve the mystery of the anonymous girl and how he'd come to be in hell, but he recognized at once the truth of what this man had told him.