The Whispers (21 page)

What a comfort she is, this Helena person.

Breathing and eating and dieting and exercising and taking vitamins and rubbing age-defying creams all over ourselves ... that’s all so obsolete now. It’s unnecessary to maintain our dead selves. So last-season, says Helena, the idea of dieticians and trainers and doctors.

"But if you absolutely need one," she says, pointing down the street, "there's a clever pair of men who run a gym. One of them had their Waking not too long ago, discovered he was a bodybuilder in his Old Life. The other was a surgeon—his name is Collin. So depressed he became, when he realized all his knowledge of health is for naught in this dark new world … Darling, please pretend to have a heart attack at some point, or perhaps a little summer cold. Indigestion. A rash. He would so very much appreciate the attention, even if it’s not real.”

Life was so unnecessarily difficult. Only here in death, she explains, is anyone truly at peace.

Sorry Helena, I feel anything but peaceful. It must show on my face because she looks particularly annoyed as she presents me to a cluster of houses at the west edge of town. “This one,” she says with a little nod, “is yours.”

And then we’re standing on its creaky little porch. I peer around, afraid to touch anything. It all looks so old.

“You can try to smile,” Helena suggests stiffly. She puts a calming hand on my shoulder. I shrug it off. “You should rest,” she tells me, peeved a bit by my rudeness. “When you wake, you’ll see how happy we are. You have no Earthly burdens anymore. Like a job, or a husband, or a family, or—”

“How’s that mean anything to me,” I argue, “if I don’t even remember the family or husband or job I might’ve had? What if—What if I was happy with my life?”

“Oh, please,” she snaps, her whole tone going sour. “Who in their right mind would turn down an eternity where you own a house, no responsibility, no bills to pay, and enjoy endless time to do whatever it is you desire? Seriously, girl, open your cold dead eyes.”

I return her tirade with a blank stare. I’m silent as the so-called heart housed in my chest somewhere ... the one that doesn’t pump blood, cold as a stone, no purpose being there at all as far as I’m concerned.

Seeing my forlorn expression, she huffs irritably and says, “Have it your way. Enjoy the scenery of Trenton, your new hometown, or don’t. Meet some people or keep entirely to yourself. Return to your grave and rot, I haven’t a care. My task here is done.” She turns away and descends the porch steps in her clicking jet-black heels.

“Your task?”

Without missing a step or turning back, strutting away she calls out, “You may someday be chosen, miss Winter, and you’ll be made to do your first Raising whether you like it or not. Then you’ll know the pain of bringing a sniveling ungrateful girl into this wonderful world. It’s like childbirth, but infinitely more regrettable.”

Her black locks of hair swinging, she disappears into the misty city.

I drop into a rocking chair, thankful it’s there to catch me. Had it not been, I would’ve fallen clean to the ground. Not that it matters. At this rate, I might as well drop dead into a hole. Words don’t fool me … Undead is still dead. There is no convincing me otherwise. I’ve kissed Life goodbye without a flinch of my cold dead lips.

Sniveling ungrateful girl, she called me.

I look out from the porch of my forever-home, only to witness two people break into dance in the middle of the street for no reason. Maybe I should smile, but the sight of them annoys the hell out of me. I look away and see three middle-aged women taking a calm stroll together. If I take for granted that all of this may actually be happening to me, that I may truly be Undead, that this world is really the world I’m to live in for the rest of time, maybe longer, then I must realize that all these crazy people are my new forever-neighbors, in my new forever-neighborhood. Trenton, she called it. My new forever-home.

The place I now live. Forever.

I don’t remember entering the little house I was told is mine, but I’m relieved to find it in better condition on the inside than it appeared on the out. The front den opens to a small kitchen area that I’ll supposedly never use. Why it’s there, I’ll never know. A cockroach scuttles across the floor, disappears into a crack in the wall. That must be my roommate, a fellow survivor of the end of the world. Further in, a short hallway opens into a quaint bathroom on one side and a bedroom on the other. And there you have it. In less than thirty seconds, I’ve given myself a tour of the place I’ll spend the rest of forever.

Welcome to your new, roomier coffin. Comes with a kitchen.

I suppose that’s what inspires me to run. From the house I bolt, not knowing where I’m headed. This dress I was put in, it snags on the door as I flee, the sleeve torn straight off. This hair of mine that was cured from the earth, white as winter, it bustles behind me like a cape. My reconstructed legs thrust forward, to where, who cares. From the house I would live in forever, the town I would live in forever. From this strange new life, from my Icecap eyes, my death I can’t remember, my beautiful life, I just run, run, run.

I run until there’s no town around me anymore, until there’s no person or soul or breath in sight, until even the dead trees have fallen scarce, and before me only a cliff’s edge grows closer.

That’s when I stop running.

At the edge of the cliff.

I peer down into the misty valley below which looks nothing like a valley at all. It’s as though this place, the deadwood forest, the town, as though it were aloft in the clouds somewhere. The mist down below, perhaps that’s the planet from which I’d died.

YOU DID THIS TO YOURSELF.

I’m going to jump. That sounds like a brilliant idea. I lean over the precipice. All I see is a world of mist below, a world below the mist where maybe I lived a life.

The. Only. One. Left. To. Blame. Is. You.

I’m going to do this. I close my eyes.

“It’s a beautiful sight, isn’t it?”

I spin, startled by the voice, but my foot has already slipped and I fall—then catch the edge of the cliff with my hands, clinging on for life, hanging on for death.

The person emerges over the brink of the cliff. His pale face peers down at me as I hang from the edge, my legs dangling, far below me the mists of unknown, far below me where my second death waits patiently.

“Can I help you?” he offers kindly.

His face is handsome and gentle. Of course I’d notice something like that at a time like this.

“I don’t want to be helped,” I cry out, breathless.

“Then why are you hanging on at all? Let go.”

He’s my age—I assume—with short black hair cutting partway down his forehead. I must’ve had the fashion eye when I was alive, or else the Refinery girls already rubbed off on me, because I notice he’s garbed in a fitted black button-down and slim jeans, clean, well-dressed and sleek. He smiles when our eyes meet, lighting up his whole tortured, dark demeanor. I even see blush in his cheeks, as though blood actually flows through his veins, just as it totally doesn’t in mine, such a liar even a cheek can be.

“This is the first day of my life,” I explain.

“Careful,” he warns me very seriously. “It’s a crime here to count days.”

“Are you serious?” I ask, then realize at the sight of his chuckling eyes that he’s teasing me. Or maybe not, I can’t tell. Dead people aren’t the easiest to read. “What’s it matter, anyway? What’s the point of all this …?”

“Many people have come to this cliff,” he admits, looking off into the mist, pensive. “Many have also, like you, considered throwing away this opportunity.”

“Opportunity??” I blurt out, while simultaneously marveling at how light my body is … how easy it is to just hang here from this precipice, just as easily as I could let go. Is strength another quality that accompanies this new body? Or is it that I now weigh less than a person?

What does that say?

“I’ll make you a deal,” he says. “Let me help you up and I’ll give you a kiss.”

“That’s your offer?”

“Yes.”

I fully realize I can pull myself up. Somehow, hanging effortlessly as I am, I know I can do it without his help.

Or his kiss. “You need to offer more than that,” I tell him, my eyes narrowing. “I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t ask for any of this. Why am I here? Wasn’t I—Wasn’t I peaceful enough, happy enough being left dead and in the ground where I belong?”

“You tell me,” he says teasingly, that snarky smile curling his cheeks into dimples again.

I hate that cute, snarky smile. “What will happen if I let go? Will I die? Can the dead die again?”

“No,” he admits with a hint of sadness in his voice. “If you must know, you’ll likely have a hard landing on the rock lands below, and your body will break into pieces. Shatter. Like a statue. Or a mannequin. A very pretty mannequin,” he adds. I look away, annoyed. “And you will remain alive, mostly in your head. The rest of you won’t be animated anymore, as I understand it.”

I regret asking. I sorely, sorely regret asking.

“Or you could let me help you,” he goes on, “and I could show you the town. Show you what you have in your Final Life. If still you’re not convinced, feel free to jump into the sky.” And he extends his hand.

Helena’s last words resonate with me, that I was a “task” for her, and someday I may be chosen to Raise my own poor soul into this world. Not to mention that some unassuming moment, I may recover all my lost memory at once. Snap, it’ll all come back, shocking me like an “unwelcome enemy” ... and I wonder if the anger and unhappiness I’m harboring is just my Old Life locked away in my skeleton somewhere—a prisoner. Maybe it’s something that, if I remembered it, I would be glad I was freed from. Maybe this new life is something I’d secretly begged for, wished for. Maybe I really am ungrateful.

Or maybe I’ll never remember the person I was.

Maybe she’s gone forever.

“Okay,” I agree emptily, taking his hand.

In one short little effort, I’m standing on the edge of the cliff again, no longer hanging on for dear death. I look into the eyes of the person who saved me from a certain shattering—or postponed a certain shattering.

“You look better on your feet,” he tells me.

He doesn’t kiss me. I don’t ask his name and he doesn’t ask mine, not now. We just cross the sandy plains together and on through a range of dead trees, making our way back to my new hometown Trenton.

I’m not sure what to talk about. What do you say to the person who just saved you from kinda-not-really dying? “Is it always so overcast?” I ask, deciding to point out the eerie silver wash that is the sky.

“Has to do with our eyes,” he explains, stepping over a tree branch. “Undead don’t regard darkness the same way the Living do. Something about being stuck in the End of Time, I guess. But hey, listen, if you squint real good, you can make out a sharp spot in the sky, slightly more silver than the rest ... That’s the sun.”

“Oh.” I look up. All I see is grey and grey and grey.

“Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone you’re keeping track of days.” He smiles again, warm, welcoming. “I’m not the police or the Deathless King, so help me.”

“We have police in this world?—and a King?”

“No. Not exactly.”

“How are we alive?” I can’t stop the questions … They just pour out. “How are we carrying on without heartbeats or blood or—or anything?”

“How did we carry on with them?”

I sigh. “Please, is there a single concrete thing you can tell me about this world? Something useful? Anything?”

“Yes. My name’s Grimsky.”

I roll my eyes. “I’m Winter, I guess.”

His expression breaks at the obvious dejection in my voice. “Winter … The name they gave you. I understand. Someday you’ll remember your original name, though by then I’m certain you’ll not identify with it in the least. You have beautiful hair.”

The compliment comes so suddenly, I have to cover my face with a hand, like I’m blushing. Reminding myself that nothing runs in my veins, I drop the hand and say, “Thanks.”

“We’ve arrived.”

The tall iron gates of Trenton loom ahead, awaiting my timely arrival from the cliff for which it surely knew I’d be headed, at which it surely knew I’d meet this fetching person called Grimsky, by whom it surely knew I would be somewhat saved, and with whom it surely knew I’d once again return.

Now if only I can keep from killing myself again.

Chapter Two: Dead

I guess like most things in this new world, including eye color and flesh complexion and whether or not you’re dead, you just have to fake it.

I can’t tell time here. Silvery grey-o’clock, that’s what time it is. Bleak, that’s the day of the week.

My fellow roommate cockroach scuttles up the wall. With a disgusted shudder, I decide it’s time to get out of the house for the first time since my return to Trenton. The porch shudders too, so unused to carrying weight I suppose. Each step down them, a yawning of dead wood.

Walking the dirt-lined street to the heart of the city, I allow myself a smile. I’m determined to like this new life, whether I like it or not.

Maybe someone at the bazaar carries roach spray.

The Town Square turns out to be a decent walk from my neighborhood. A stage sits in the middle of the plaza surrounded by boarded-up storefronts that all look closed but aren’t. Men and women bustle about with their days, shopping, conversing. A kid barters with a bothered old man over the worth of an antique from the twenty-first century.

At the next city block, I encounter a long and narrow schoolyard full of kids. Class must be dismissed because the teenagers are gathered in little clusters outside. I’m struck for a moment by how … normal everything seems. As I watch the teens chat and laugh with each other, zipping up backpacks, sharing notes and gossiping, I forget for a while where I am. It’s nice, being captured by something so simple, so uncomplicated. I forget that I’m dead. I forget that all these kids are dead too.

“I’ve never seen you before.”

A plump, short teenage girl with spiky brown hair and an eyepatch stands before me, a pink backpack hanging from her shoulder and a thick scarf coiled about her neck.

“I’m new here,” I explain.

“You seem a bit old to attend school.”

“I meant to Trenton. I’m not … I’m not in school.”

She studies my face for a second. “I’m seventeen, but I’ve been attending this school for a decade. If I were alive, I’d probably be married and knocked up in my thirties by now.”

I blink, dazed by her bluntness. I have to remind myself that in this world, even age is a lie. And to think, I was just enjoying how normal everything felt. I didn’t realize how fleeting that moment would be, else I might’ve appreciated it a tad more.

“My name’s Winter.”

“Mine’s Summer. Just kidding, it’s Ann.” She smiles, her teeth sparkling with the shimmer of braces. I try to smile back, it probably falls flat. “Don’t worry, you don’t have to fake nothing around me. I wasn’t thrilled when I woke up in this place a decade ago either.”

“It’s that obvious?”

“This place isn’t all that bad. Look at it like a long holiday weekend … There’s no work, and Monday is forever, forever, forever away. The only thing you come to miss is the sun.” She holds a hand up, peers into the sky. “I hope your favorite color is grey.”

Quietly, I ask, “Why can’t we see the sun?” For some reason or another, I’m embarrassed to ask the question. I feel like a child asking her mother about the world. Why’s the sky blue. How are babies made.

“Science wasn’t my thing when I was alive, neither now that I’m dead.” She shrugs, her backpack making jangling noises. “Undead, whatever. Hey, look on the bright side. You’ll never get sick or age. You don’t gotta eat anymore either.”

“But I liked eating … I think.”

She squints at me. “You want in on something fun?”

“Fun?”

“Follow me.”

Assuming there wasn’t anything I planned to do with my day anyway—if I can bother telling where it ends or begins—I follow her across the street and down an alley. After a few turns (and passing several shady-looking faces) we arrive at the back of a building where several other teenagers are gathered. They’re arranged in a big circle and appear to be kicking an oddly-shaped soccer ball back and forth among them.

“Sporty,” I remark. “Are we supposed to join in?”

“Not on your first time,” Ann whispers back.

One of the teenagers, a chubby boy wearing a thick striped scarf of his own, glances back at us. “She cool?” he grunts at Ann, who just shrugs. “Alright.”

It isn’t until I’m closer that I realize the ball isn’t a ball.

“What the hell?” I blurt. “That’s someone’s—”

“Isn’t it genius?” Ann leans into me. “Just because we’re dead doesn’t mean we can’t have fun. Hey, but if you want to be part of the Heads, you can’t tell anyone about what you see here. It’s, well … more or less breaking every Trenton law.”

“We have laws?”

The soccer ball—I mean, the head—calls out “I’m done! I’m done!” and one of the teens kicks the head into the air, catches it, then helps return it to the person to whom it belonged—a girl I hadn’t noticed who was standing there without a head the whole time. Two kids holding the body up, another friend helps snap her back together. I see she’s a sweet thing with freckles and two blonde ponytails. Yes, that really did just happen. I’m watching this happen.

“You know we don’t feel pain,” Ann reminds me, probably noting the shocked expression on my face. “So it’s just a little way for us to blow off steam. Not everyone in this town is overjoyed at being—whatever we are.”

Another kid, tall and gangly, excitedly volunteers to be next, unwrapping the black scarf around his neck, revealing a less-than-sightly fracture—where he’d clearly removed his head for a past game, I presume—and proceeds to decapitate himself.

I look away. “So … that’s what’s with the scarves …”

“Every town needs its misguided youth, I reckon.” Ann grins. “The law’s trying to kill us over and over. Pretending we’re still alive, like we still eat and bleed and have pulses. We know better.” She prods me with a bony elbow. “Still angry about the whole being-dead thing?”

“I wasn’t angry,” I murmur, finding myself helplessly distracted by the boy’s head as it gets footed and bumped around by the circle of teens. It’s like I can’t not watch.

The joy in their eyes … This is what we’ve come to.

And then I can’t watch. I turn without remark and backtrack my way out of the alleys to the main street. I make it to the curb, breathing and attempting to regain my composure. It isn’t until after five or six breaths that I remind myself how very unnecessary it is for me to breathe at all. How capable I am of just standing here, doing nothing to sustain my consciousness. How capable I am of just twisting off my own head.

Why did I bother letting Grimsky pull me from that cliff? I’d be better off in a million pieces at its foot. Why bother with any of this at all?—Wasn’t one death enough?

“Not your thing, I get it.” Ann has caught up to me, speaking to my back. “I misjudged you. Thought you were bored and needed a little fun.”

“I need a pulse.” I clench my eyes and chew on my teeth. “I need to blush when I’m embarrassed. I need … I need to remember who I was!” I crouch down, unable to stand anymore. “I want to know my name!”

“It’s Winter.”

“My real name!”

Ann sits down on the curb next to me. “I went through this too. Before I had my Life Dream, I was furious about what I’d lost … Whatever memories, whatever friends and family, I was furious it was gone. But I don’t think you’d miss it as much if you knew what it was. No one ever misses their Old Life.”

“I miss seeing the sky. I miss feeling my heart race, I know that much.” My lips purse together. I can’t control how angry this is making me and for some reason I don’t care to hide it. “A fall from a cliff should kill us … It just isn’t natural that it can’t.”

“It’s really too bad. I was hoping you’d play with us. Such a shame, you have a nice neck too.” Ann sighs. “Maybe they’ll let me graduate this year. I have eight high school diplomas at home, wanna see?”

“Another time.” I put my head between my knees. It’s the strangest sensation, knowing I can’t actually feel anything like nausea or weakness or whatever, but my mind is telling me I should.

“Another time,” Ann agrees. “See me when you have a free day. I live in the fourth quarter, west end.”

“Wherever that is,” I remark sulkily.

She stands, adjusts the backpack on her shoulder. “I should get home before my mom starts to worry.”

“Your real mom?” I ask acidly, without caring how insensitive that might sound.

She just shrugs, unoffended. “What’s a real mom, anyway?” Then, with half a smile, she’s on her way down the road.

I watch her for a while, not sure how to feel. I want to cry, but know full-well that isn’t possible. On the bright side, I guess that makes one friend I’ve successfully found. Ann, a teenager who’s been seventeen for at least the last ten years and who, for fun, pulls off her head and plays soccer with a group of law-breaking teens. My Second Life is so purposeful and fulfilling now.

I take a short glance at the sky, noting it’s still silver-o’clock. I could get used to grey.

I spend a lot more time on the curb just watching people go by … Groups of suited men, pairs of teenagers dismissed from school, young couples in love, a lady with a cart full of candlesticks, three tall men laughing about something that happened at the factory … After a while, things start to feel a little normal again. I’m almost convinced that I’m alive, just sitting on the curb of some town I’m visiting, people-watching, some nice afternoon.

Until I remind myself I can pull off my arm.

“Dear!” cries an old lady, clutching her face. “You’ve had an accident!”

I glance to my left, as though noticing a fly on my shoulder, only to realize I’ve indeed just pulled off my left arm with my right.

“To the Refinery, you must!” the old lady urges me, throwing a shawl over my back as though attempting to hide me from the onlookers. “We must fix that at once!”

Yes, I pulled off my own arm. No, I don’t care. The old lady hurriedly leading me back to the Refinery, I’m not even upset about this stupid Second Life anymore. I’m not angry about my stupid pulse that isn’t there, or the unfunctioning pointless parts inside me. The fact that I barely felt my arm come off, that something that grotesque has no more an effect than a fly landing on my skin … That’s what kills me.

Back on the work table with the large woman who created me not so long ago, she’s sewing my arm back on when she whispers, “Death is such a blameless chore!”

The. Only. One. Left. To. Blame. Is. You.

When I’m ushered out of the squatty pink building, rubbing my arm with the stupid illusion that it’s sore after a tiring surgery, I honestly debate pulling it right back off. Here, you can give this to someone else—I don’t need it. That’s what I’d tell the large refinery lady. I’d mean it too. I’d give everything back, my legs, my empty lungs, my icy eyes, every useless piece. Maybe I was an organ donor when I was alive. Maybe I’ll be one in death too.

“You look lost.”

I look up. I can’t believe it. My eyes are met by the one and only Grimsky, the man who saved me from the cliff. He leans on a dead tree that hangs over a long stone bench. Of course I’d run into him, of all the hundreds of people to encounter in this city. Just seeing his sweet smile warms me instantly, makes me forget about all those stupid things, makes me forget how I just tore off my own arm. “Lost as ever,” I admit in many ways.

He steps away from the tree. I see his thick brooding eyebrows, his porcelain skin. A few steps closer, he smiles again and says, “Need help getting home? I realized the other day that you live really close to me.”

I find in staring at his smile that I rather like it, the way the corners of his long lips create dimples in his smooth pale skin. I almost reflect his smile, unable to help myself. “I think I already miss eating,” I confess quietly.

“Hey, we can still drink,” he points out, cocking his head to the side. “Sometime we could have one together. There’s a lovely tavern in the strip, just up the road.”

Looking into his soft, forever-welcoming eyes, I wonder if I’ve been looking at all of this wrong. If I have no memory, then there’s nothing to mourn. Nothing to miss … No family, husband, lover, like Helena said.

I put on a smile. “When I’m ready, I’ll be happy to take you up on that drink offer.”

“We have all the days of the world for you to get ready, Winter.” He grins. “Welcome to the End of Time.”