The Wish List (4 page)

He allowed a sizable charge to build up in his trident, and discharged it into Myishi's behind. The programmer executed a high jump that would not have shamed an Olympian.

“I need him in two hours. If I don't have him in two hours, there's a lot more where that came from.”

Myishi nodded, cheeks ballooning with swallowed screams.

Beelzebub smiled, his good humor restored. “Good. I'm glad we understand each other.”

He turned to go, the folds of his black kaftan swirling around his ankles. “Oh, and Myishi?”

“
Hai
, Beelzebub-
san
?”

“Put the top of his skull back on, there's a good fellow.”

LOWRIE MCCALL'S LEG WAS FORECASTING RAIN. Two years now since that hound had taken a chunk out of him, and the leg still wasn't right. Never would be either. The doctors said he'd walk with a limp for the rest of his life. Lowrie chuckled mirthlessly. The rest of his life? That was a laugh.

Lowrie lit up a fat stinking cigar. He'd started smoking again. Why not? No one was around to complain, and the nicotine would never have a chance to kill him.

It hadn't always been like this. All doom and gloom. But now . . . well, things were different now. He could trace it all back to that night, two years ago, lying on the floor with his life's blood pooling on the linoleum around him. It had hit him then that he was going to die. Maybe not then, but sometime. His interest in life just stopped. What was the point? Heaven? Balderdash. There was no justice aboveground, so why should there be any under it? Why all the effort, then? What was the point in being good? Lowrie still hadn't answered that question. And until he could, there didn't seem to be much point to anything.

Lowrie got fed up looking out the window and decided he'd chance a bit of television. Afternoon television. The pastime of the past it. After five minutes of elementary watercolor and cooking corner, he realized he wasn't that desperate just yet and switched the box off. The garden. He'd go pull a few weeds in the garden.

But of course his leg had been right, and the rain began to pelt down on the tiny square the landlord optimistically called a “green area.” Lowrie sighed. Was anything going to go right ever again? Where was the wisecracking fine figure of a man that he had used to be? Where was his life gone?

Lowrie had spent so much time mulling over these particular questions that he had managed to isolate a few key moments in his past. Ones where he had a choice to make, and made the wrong one. A litany of mistakes. A list of would-haves, could-haves, and should-haves. Not that there was any point in thinking about it. It wasn't as if he could change anything now. He put a hand over his rib cage, feeling the thump of his heart. Especially not now.

So, how to round out this roller coaster of a day?

Take some medicine perhaps. Go for a limp down to the newstand, or—oh, the excitement—bingo in the community center.

Meg Finn hurtled out of the afterlife and into Lowrie McCall's armchair. And because she wasn't thinking
hole
anymore, it was as solid to her as to you and me. The chair's springs wheezed in protest, brass casters sending it spinning across the floor.

Lowrie did not jerk backward in shock. He jerked backward because the careering chair flipped his cane from under him. He went down in a heap, grasping at the bookcase as he fell. Not a good move, really. The top-heavy shelving teetered past the correctable angle and crashed down on the old man.

A few moments of dazed confusion followed all around. Meg gazed dopily at the motes of dust spiraling upward from the ancient cushion. Dust. Real dust. From the real world. She was back. Maybe she'd never been away. The chair was real enough. So, a possible theory: Belch's shotgun blast had blown her through old Lowrie's window, and the chair had broken her fall. Hmm. Dubious. Several holes in the reasoning. Still though, no harder to believe than melting into a tunnel wall, purple spectral trails, verbally challenged mites and all the rest.

Lowrie finally managed to focus. “You!” he gasped from under a pile of
National Geographics
. “Meg Finn!”

“Hmm?” said Meg distractedly.

“But you're dead. I saw the body!”

Ah well. Another theory out the window.

“My body?”

“Yes. Not a pretty sight, I can tell you.”

Meg winced. She must have been in a bad way by the time they peeled her off that tank.

“How was my face?”

“Not much in the way of teeth.”

A couple of things occurred to Lowrie then. One, he was conducting a conversation with a dead person. Two, he couldn't breathe!

“How do I look now?” ventured Meg nervously.

“Eehhhhh,” wheezed Lowrie, his forehead turning pastel blue.

“That bad?”

The old man, with no more air for chitchat, jabbed a finger at the heavy bookshelf straddling his chest.

The penny dropped. Meg vaulted from the comfort of a real live chair and put her weight behind the bookcase. The heavy pine shelving lifted and spun like a place mat off a table. It had cost Meg no more effort than tossing a coin. The case collided with the wall, tearing a right-angled rent in the plaster. What books there had been on its shelving fluttered to the ground like multiwinged moths.

“Wow,” said Meg, staring at her hands. They looked the same, not swollen like Popeye's or anything. But somehow she was ten times stronger.

Lowrie sucked in a whistling breath. “Huff . . . haa,” he coughed.

“You're welcome,” muttered Meg, flexing her fingers.

“I'm not . . . aheh . . . thanking you, you delinquent!”

Meg blinked. “But I just . . .”

Lowrie shook his fist from the floor. “You just what? You just broke into my apartment and had your dog take a chunk out of my leg!”

“That wasn't my—”

“Crippling me for whatever's left of my miserable life.”

“Ah, here now. Don't let's get carried away.”

“Carried away?”

“At least you're not dead!” retorted Meg, feeling a bit sniffly. “I wound up wrapped around your stupid gas tank.”

Lowrie paused. The girl was right. If she was a girl. If he wasn't dreaming all this. A hallucination brought on by oxygen deprivation. A bookcase across the lungs will do that to a person.

“What are you anyway? An angel?”

Meg snorted. “Hardly. I'm a nothing. Between heaven and hell. An in-betweener. That's why I had to come back. To help the one I've sinned against, according to that blue-skinned idiot.”

Lowrie was a bit lost at this stage. Blue-skinned idiots and in-betweeners. What was the girl blathering on about? Who knew with young people? Between rap music and sticking earrings in their bellies, Lowrie could never fathom normal kids, never mind phantom ones. But something she said registered.

“So, there is a heaven?”

Meg shrugged. “Apparently. Depending on your spectral trail. Red or blue. Or, in my case, purple.”

Another riddle. Or the ramblings of a lunatic. Who knew? Maybe his mind had conjured up this whole event. So he wouldn't feel so bad about . . . things.

“Then you have to help me?”

Meg squinted suspiciously. “S'pose.”

Lowrie struggled up on one elbow. “Well, you're too bloody late! You can't help me now! No one can.”

“You only got bitten on the leg. No big deal.”

The old man flapped around for his cane. “Not that, you moron. That was two years ago!”

If Meg had had any red corpuscles they would have drained from her face in shock. Two years! She'd been gone that long? She'd be forgotten by now, with nothing to show she'd ever been here. Not even fond memories in the minds of those who'd known her.

“A delinquent ghost.” Lowrie's voice broke into her thoughts. “That's all I need. Well, do something useful for once in your life, or afterlife, and help me up.”

Lowrie stretched out his hand. It was brown and twisted, with knuckles like chestnuts. Meg stared at the fingers reaching for her. She had to help. That was why she was here.

“Well, come on. It's your fault I can't get up on my own in the first place.”

Meg leaned over to help the old man. Their fingers touched, or rather didn't. Their hands slid into each other with a flurry of translucent sparks. Before she knew what was going on, Lowrie's life force had sucked her in up to the elbow, then the waist.

“Let me go!” she screamed.

Lowrie's eyes were stretched in confusion. “I'm not—it's not—” he stuttered.

The two beings flowed together, snapping into the same space. Meg was in Lowrie McCall, and he was wrapped around her.

It was eerie, disgusting, terrifying. Meg's spirit flowed to fill the available space. Her hands were gnarled, her neck wobbled, and her eyes were glazed and gritty.

“Let me out!” she screamed in her old man's voice, jumping to her feet—old-man feet with chronic fallen arches. But the body had her like a wetsuit, invading every ghostly nerve ending. Meg could see the liver spots on her hands, and the yellowed Aran sweater drooping in folds from her arms, and wiry hair from bushy eyebrows drooping into her line of vision.

“Help!” she wheezed, the shock gripping Lowrie's windpipe like a clamp. “Help me!”

So Meg Finn ran. She sprinted through the apartment, bouncing herself off walls in an attempt to escape the decrepit body. But it was no use. They were locked together like spliced rope.

Lowrie McCall was in there too, not in control anymore, but aware, watching the walls fly past, as though there wasn't a hunk of scar tissue in his calf. Feeling his heart thumping in his chest. Thumping, but not racing! He was young again, with the energy and enthusiasm of youth. Lowrie wanted to laugh, but he couldn't. His mouth wasn't his anymore, not to control. It was as though he were sitting in a one-seat movie theater, watching his life flash by on the silver screen.

Lowrie may have liked being rejuvenated, but Meg certainly did not appreciate having her spirit encased in the sagging flesh of an old man. She burst through the front door and onto the cracked and graffiti covered path. The cold rain bounced off her now balding scalp. The water saturated the Aran sweater, stretching it down around her knees like a woolly dress. The Lowrie-Meg thing skidded around corners, checked slippers flapping against his—her—
its
heels. Then suddenly both entities decided to stop. Nothing extraordinary confronted them. It was just a gas tank. A shiny new gas tank. All orange and brass. Not a single paint bubble or rust ring.

Meg sank to the wet ground, tugging Lowrie with her. Life and death were repeating themselves like some sort of cosmic joke.

“I don't want to be old,” she croaked, tears dropping off the tip of her crooked nose. “I don't want to be dead.”

Lowrie didn't speak. There wasn't much you could add to that. It pretty much covered the way he was feeling too.

Me neither, he thought.

And somehow Meg heard him. Like a voice in the back of her mind. A gremlin in her head. And that wasn't all, a lifetime of vague feelings were invading her own. There were weddings and funerals, and pain in her leg, and terrible loneliness. She didn't want it. Any of it. She was only fourteen, for God's sake. She'd be only fourteen forever.

I want to leave this body, she thought. Just float out the same way I came in. And that's what she did, detached herself like a wet Band-Aid, flopping to the ground beside a suddenly exhausted Lowrie McCall. The old man's lungs were pumped to bursting, and his legs shook like reeds.

“For a second there . . .” he puffed. “For a second there, I was . . .”

“What? You were what?” asked Meg, just for something to say. She didn't care about the old man's troubles, she had worries of her own.

Lowrie swatted a sheet of rain from his forehead. “I was alive again.”

And for some reason, this made the old man cry like a baby. Meg thought she knew why. There was something wrong with Lowrie McCall. Something besides arthritis and bandy legs. A feeling had soaked through her—whatever it was that she had now instead of skin—while she'd been inside the old man. A feeling that reminded her of the tunnel.

That probably wasn't a good sign.

“Come on,” she said. “Let's go inside. You'll catch your death.”

The tears blended with the rain dribbling over Lowrie's chin.

“Good one,” he nodded, a wry smile flickering around the corners of his mouth. “Catch my death. You're a hoot, you are. Here, give me a hand up.”

Meg stretched out her fingers, but caught herself in time.

“Oh no, old timer,” she said. “No more body snatching for me tonight.”

* * *

Lowrie took himself off to bed, convinced he was experiencing some sort of prolonged hallucination. Meg meanwhile tried to familiarize herself with her new abilities.

There was body snatching and firing heavy objects around, for a start. So, whether or not she made contact with something was apparently up to her. A mental sort of a thing. Very kung fu. If you wish it, it shall be.

After a few experiments, she discovered that everything had a bit of life in it. Even the old armchair had a few memories floating around inside its timber and foam. Most of them involved various bottoms and the functions thereof. Meg hurriedly decided against occupying any more furniture.

The stint inside Lowrie had cost her, though. Her aura was fainter now, she could feel a pull on her body. Not in any particular direction. Just somewhere else. Time was ticking by.

Spirits also didn't sleep, Meg discovered. What a waste of time. Here she was, her ghostly clock winding down, and Lowry was upstairs snoring his head off. Typical grown-up. Nobody's time was worth anything besides his own.