Dead Endings: Chapter 3

Gabriella backed up next to Cailen, beside the fridge. They watched the water trickle from the faucet, the ‘cold’ tap turning, and then the ‘hot.’ Steam rose from the sink.

“I hate it when they do that,” Gabriella murmured.

“I don’t think they do anything that I do like,” Cailen retorted.

The air grew steamy with the moisture from the water, but the temperature in the room began to drop. Gabriella gave a small shake as the pressure fluctuated wildly.

“Oh, come on now. Don’t get pissy. We’re here to listen,” she said to the sink.

The water continued to run unabated. Sticky wafts of emotion drifted in and out of existence–ugly and red. Cailen’s eyes darted everywhere, checking for the familiar face and RUSH t-shirt.

Usually, that kind of activity was a prelude to a ghostly appearance, but Jacob Warner refused to oblige them. Cailen wiped her clammy hands on her jeans and wished they were back at home.

Undeterred, Gabriella straightened. “Fine,” she told Warner. “We’ll come to you if you won’t show yourself.”

Her roommate weaved confidently around the counter and strode toward the hallway that led to the back rooms.

Damn, damn, damn, Cailen thought. She hurried after her.

Gabriella had already reached the entrance to the bedroom; Cailen almost ran into her in her haste not to be left behind. They hovered there, frowning into the darkness.

“Light,” Cailen hissed.

Gabriella gave a small snort of laughter and flicked it on.

Feelings of anger, fear, and wanting pressed at them. It sank and rose on an uneven rollercoaster without a beginning or end. Condensation pearled against the window as the temperature plummeted. Cailen felt the contents of her stomach trying to crawl up her windpipe and choked them back down.

Gabriella scowled at the empty room, jaw locked and tense. “Well?” she demanded of the air.

The door of the closet behind them slammed shut in response.

Both of them jumped, and Cailen clutched at her chest, certain that she’d just had a very localized heart attack. Gabriella looked more than a little pissed off.

“Yes, yes. Believe me, we can tell you’re angry. But messing with the water and slamming doors isn’t going to solve anything. Just show yourself and tell me what you’re trying to say!”

The condensation on the window smudged briefly, then misted again.

Gabriella sighed. “For such a noisy guy, you’re awfully shy.”

A sense of terrible hopelessness welled up. In the corner where Cailen had once seen the drum set, a shape began to take form.

“About time,” Gabriella muttered under her breath.

Indistinct and pale, Jacob Warner materialized in the corner, facing them with his hands balled at his sides. Shadows that didn’t seem to exist on their plane of existence lined his young face, and dark eyes framed by darker rings glared at them.

Cailen didn’t care to hold that angry gaze for long. The only thing anyone ever got from a staring match with a dead guy was nightmares.

Unless you were Gabriella Benitez, that is. Cailen glanced at her friend; Gabriella happily engaged the spirit in an eyeball contest of wills. Cailen marveled at her calmness, but couldn’t share it.

Remembering her previous experience, Cailen glanced back over her shoulder, searching for the blue smudge she knew would appear. But the hallway remained empty.

Boy was Jacob Warner staring at them now. Or through them–it was hard to tell with ghosts sometimes. The lines and dimensions of his body seemed weightless and softly blurred. Here and there, the contours of his RUSH t-shirt or slightly baggy jeans would sharpen, but seconds later, they’d lose all definition. Ghosts were in flux, perhaps–neither here nor there, merely willed into existence by some memory of human life that refused to leave the earth.

Cailen grew dizzy just looking at him. Again, the urge to vomit tickled at her throat.

“This is your chance,” Gabriella told the spirit. “Whatever’s keeping you here isn’t worth it. Anger, fear, regrets… You can’t do anything about them now. They do nothing but trap you in this place. Tell me what you need to, and you can move on. I promise that if I can help you, I will.”

The anger decreased slightly. A trickle of sadness bubbled in the air and then vanished.

“Please,” Gabriella implored. “You can’t stay here.”

The ghost regarded them with a vacant expression. Cailen glanced back and forth between him and the hallway behind them. As her eyes trailed back to Warner, a vague softness to the outline of the kitchen counter made her head snap back around. There, by the doorframe–a hint of blue coalesced in and out of existence.

“Gabriella,” Cailen hissed. “Ghost Number Two is here.”

Her roommate broke her staring contest with the dead man and squinted down the hallway. “Ah.”

A strain of white-hot anger suddenly split the air. The abrupt, potent fury shook both women. They recoiled from the doorway.

“Shit,” Gabriella grunted, bracing her hands out in front of her.

Jacob Warner started shifting in and out of focus like an old movie stuttering between reels. With every flux, the ghost moved from one point to another with unearthly speed. Cailen got one final, incredibly up-close view of two dead eyes boring into her before the force slammed her back into the wall of the hallway. Wintery cold filled her nose and mouth as her consciousness scrabbled frantically at the darkness.

“Only one joy ride per customer,” Gabriella growled as she whipped around and seized the front of Cailen’s jacket.

Gabriella–both taller than Cailen and outweighing her by a good thirty pounds–threw Cailen’s back against the wall as both Cailen and ghost struggled for freedom. White, almost smoky tendrils of light began to curl off the taller woman’s knuckles.

A handhold of consciousness appeared and Cailen seized it gratefully. She gave a mental push.

Both women staggered sideways as Jacob Warner fled Cailen’s body with a crack of energy to shoot back into the bedroom.

“Sonofabitch,” Cailen gasped.

Gabriella steadied Cailen with one arm and turned to face the seemingly empty room. “That was dirty, Jacob. I’m here to listen, but I WILL exorcise you on the spot if you try that shit again.”

The ghost reappeared, his fury still beating at the air. His mouth worked soundlessly to Cailen’s eyes, and he pointed down the hall.

“You take Number Two,” Gabriella whispered. “I need a word with Mr. Warner.”

“Easy for you to say,” Cailen wheezed, but her roommate ignored her and approached the ghost.

She watched Gabriella walk away, hands spread wide in the universal sign of ‘unarmed,’ and reluctantly turned to face the other problem. The blue smudge continued its pattern of here/not here, but didn’t move.

Cailen studied it for a moment more and sighed. Though she desperately wanted to sit down and wait until her heart stopped pounding, even she had to admit this was too good of an opportunity to miss. She took a shuddery breath to steady herself and pushed away from the wall.

Cailen approached the blue haze slowly and carefully, senses forward and alert. It was curiously blank of emotions, even as she got close. Less than a foot away from where it seemed to originate from, she stopped.

Still–no emotions or thoughts from the thing. She could only detect the low thrum she had become accustomed to here and at Portia Jones’ apartment.

Grudgingly, Cailen crept closer. The edges of the thing brushed her arm ever so slightly and she finally felt something like the impressions from the kitchen, though the feelings were too miniscule for her to pick out.

I’m going to have to stick my arm in it, she thought unenthusiastically.

She knew a playback wouldn’t generally latch on like a suckerfish and try to hijack her consciousness. If the smudge emitted even a trickle of awareness, she certainly couldn’t feel it, and as weak as it seemed to be, Cailen knew she could throw it off with no problem. Unlike certain pissy ghosts…

Her ears turned red at the thought. Hoping to regain some of her pride, she stuck her arm into the blue mass up to her elbow. She screwed shut her eyes and braced for retaliation.

Nothing happened.

Jumbles of feelings wandered aimlessly around the edges of the thing. Now that she was in it, the emotions had started to manifest, but still waxed and waned beyond her senses. She nudged her arm in a bit more until her entire shoulder was past the boundaries of the spirit. Familiar happiness suffused the space. It was maddeningly indistinct.

With all the eagerness of someone about to enter an icy pool, she finally waded the whole way in.

Upon stepping inside the blue haze, the world outside fuzzed around her in a shapeless mass of light and dark. It enveloped her within its chilly folds. She inhaled deeply and closed her eyes.

Anticipation. Joy. Need.

They were soft emotions–present, but lacking in the strength she remembered from her last encounter. The presence really was fading, as would any clues if she couldn’t glean enough information from this contact. She tried to open herself more, mimicking the expanding sphere of consciousness that she’d employed on Portia Jones’ fire escape.

She was rewarded almost immediately with a brief image that flashed behind her eyelids. She could detect a smile, and the impression of something loved. The smile gave way to a hand pressed over a chest. Subsequent images hit Cailen–a blue shirt, a flower of red that bloomed behind it, and then happiness again.

Cailen frowned as she watched the progression of images. It was the most she’d ever gotten from the blue smudge, but it sure as hell didn’t make any sense. The ambient emotions lingered for a bit and then dispersed. She waited and stretched out her senses further. The echo seemed to be retreating now, though.

A hand gripped Cailen’s shoulder.

She strangled a small scream before it could erupt past her lips.

“Delaney, you okay? Get anything?” Gabriella’s brown eyes were troubled.

“I… Yeah. Shit. You scared the crap out of me.”

“Sorry. You were just standing there–the playback’s moved on.”

And indeed it had. Cailen saw no sign of it in the hallway any more. Shaking off the last vestiges of its energy, Cailen craned her neck to see if she could get a better look at the inside of the kitchen.

She saw a tiny glint of hazy, blue aura by the cabinets next to the fridge, peeking out from behind a dividing wall.

“They’re about to reenact the final play,” Gabriella said softly.

“I’m not participating this time!” Cailen snapped with a quick look back towards the bedroom. She didn’t see Warner’s ghost, but she wasn’t taking any chances.

“It’s okay,” Gabriella assured her. “We’re just observers on this one.”

Together, they approached the kitchen from the opposite end and waited in the opening by the living room. The whole of the kitchen lay before them, empty and silent, save for the blue smudge that hovered and phased in and out by the fridge.

They waited.

Cailen glanced warily down the passage as the pressure started dropping. Even Gabriella seemed to be holding her breath.

Jacob Warner’s spirit emerged from the hallway and walked slowly into the kitchen. His demeanor seemed casual, but his wide, alarmed eyes seemed more aware of the things that were coming than his body did. Those eyes stared pleadingly at her and Gabriella as he turned the corner and moved towards the sink.

Cailen had seen this before.

Obligated by some logic or law she didn’t know the rules to, spirits–the non-playback sort who seemed able to move around on their own–would sometimes be compelled to act out moments that had left a great scar on them. Often, their final moments. Like tortured puppets, they suffered their deaths over and over again, unable to break the loop until it was complete. Generally, that meant that they were prisoners in their own heads, aware of their situation but powerless to do anything about it.

For years since she’d moved to New York, Cailen had watched an old man on 6^th and Baker wander into the street every day at the same hour and wait patiently for the bus that had killed him. His bored eyes seemed weary of it by that point, but Jacob Warner’s were still fresh to death and very scared. He implored Gabriella and Cailen with them as he turned the faucet. Fear. Horror. Unbearable pain. How many times had he done this since that night?

Watching the forced pantomime, Cailen suddenly forgave Warner for possessing her that first time. It had been an awful thing to feel his death personally and without her consent, but she couldn’t imagine reliving it over and over again.

Cailen followed along while Warner washed his hands and dried them on a green-striped towel as nonexistent as his ghostly form. She almost wanted to let him possess her again, if only to spare him from facing his death alone.

She took an unconscious half-step forward, but a hand gripped her arm and held her firmly back.

“I feel what you’re feeling, but no,” said Gabriella. “He’s projecting part of it, but believe me–this is painful for me, too. This is his last death, I promise.”

And so they observed passively as something invisible pierced the young man from behind. The spirit jerked, then patted his chest in confusion. Cailen closed her eyes.

A few moments later, Gabriella released her and knelt beside Jacob Warner, who was now sitting on the floor, his back against the cabinets. The ghost’s chest rose and fell as if hyperventilating. Cailen sensed rather than saw blood spreading across the linoleum.

Gabriella leaned in close and put her ear by Warner’s mouth, one hand braced against the cabinets as she waited, head bowed. The blue haze descended. Gabriella stiffened as it surrounded them, but she remained in position, listening.

Cailen fidgeted by the counter, not sure of what to do. She watched Warner’s lips move–sometimes rapidly, other times with a strange curl to them. As she bent low to get a better angle of the scene, Cailen realized that Warner was smiling. The misplaced happiness from before pulsated stubbornly in the air, despite the gruesome setting.

Finally, it seemed like Gabriella had heard enough. Cailen held her breath as white light started drifting off her roommate.

Beads of light danced across the backs of Gabriella’s knuckles. As the spots of light multiplied, they collected into weightless motes of white that wisped skyward in smoky tendrils. The curling, piercing light outlined her roommate’s body, burnishing her bronze hair into polished gold as the light slowly filled the room. Shadows were chased from their corners and even the dull linoleum gleamed. Cailen shaded her eyes.

Cailen heard a resonant hum. Then, the light retreated quickly, pulled back into the kneeling figure on the floor. When Cailen could finally look directly at her friend, the kitchen was empty, save the two of them. Cailen couldn’t see or feel anyone.

“You get them both?” Cailen asked.

Gabriella slowly stood with a popping in her knees and ran a tired hand through her hair.

“Sort of. I moved Warner on, and I wiped that smudge off the map, but getting rid of the residual playback doesn’t solve the mystery, I’m afraid.”

“Really? Seemed like you used a lot of juice.”

“I wanted to be thorough. It was just an echo like we thought, though. Nothing accomplished here except a little clean-up.”

“At least Jacob’s gone somewhere better.”

“That he has,” Gabriella murmured.

They solemnly stared at the stain on the kitchen floor for a moment, then left the apartment in silence.

Once Gabriella had slipped Warner’s key back under his neighbor’s door, the women departed from the apartment building. Cailen gratefully breathed in the clean night air. It was pleasantly cold and crisp under the waning moon, and felt wonderful after dealing with the chaotic energy inside the building. Gabriella slouched against a light post while Cailen took her time drinking in the peace.

“Something really weird happened in that apartment,” Gabriella said.

“I’m guessing you’re not referring to the dead guy or smudgy thing you just exorcised?”

“I wish.” Gabriella’s brown eyes had lost their usual humor. “Do you want to know what he said back there?”

Cailen wasn’t sure that she actually did, from the expression on Gabriella’s face. She prompted Gabriella against her better judgment.

“At first he was just praying–reciting the Rosary.”

Cailen couldn’t have cited a single coherent line of the Rosary, but she imagined it to be brimstone and fire stuff the way the spirit had glared at them.

“Then he was saying… Kill yourself. Just kill yourself,” Gabriella continued.

Cailen paused. “Okay…”

“Coward. Liar. Cheater. He just kept yelling that. Then he started praying again.”

“So…the blue smudge is as wholesome as we expected?”

“It gets weirder.”

“I wish I had some popcorn.”

Gabriella shot her a half-annoyed, half-amused look. “I’m trying to be serious here.”

Cailen shrugged as if to say, you deal with death your way, I’ll deal with it my way. Her roommate rolled her eyes.

“Anyway, do you remember very clearly what you sensed the last time, after he’d been stabbed and you were sitting on the floor?”

Cailen thought back. “I remember…heaviness. Like I was being smothered. Then that creepy, happy feeling. I mean, what the hell? What would a spirit so damned happy?”

“Anything else?”

Cailen scraped to the bottom of her memories. She remembered confusion, dizziness, and pain. The stabbing hadn’t been real, but it had felt real enough to Cailen. That, and her brain had seemed stuffed with cotton and an increasing sense of weight or fullness. She related the sensations.

“And then?” Gabriella pressed.

“Then…my nose started bleeding and Everett punched me in the face.”

“Exactly.”

“Exactly?” Cailen repeated.

“I think you went way past maximum occupancy and had two ghosts trying to ride shotgun at the same time.” Gabriella frowned. “You’re lucky you’re not catatonic.”

“So Warner was possessed.”

“Yeah,” Gabriella affirmed. “but only at the end, I think. When I was trying to catch his last minutes in the kitchen, the playback took over. It’s not hard to take over a dying man.”

Or a girl who sucks at this spirit thing, Cailen thought ruefully.

“What did he say?” she asked. “I saw him smiling. Super creepy, by the way.”

Gabriella nodded. “He said, I missed you.”

Cailen raised an eyebrow. “What the hell?”

“Just repeating what I heard. Warner started praying again after that, and I didn’t get much else that was useful.”

Cailen repeated the phrase to herself and shook her head. Now this really did rank up there as the weirdest supernatural combination she’d ever experienced: a dead man, a ghost echo, possession, a murder, an exorcism, and now, fond missives. If she added in Everett’s olfactory power? This had become the stuff of legends.

Gabriella straightened and cracked her neck. “Anyway, we can talk about it more in the morning. I don’t even want to think about the murder part until I get some more sleep. This jet lag is killing me.”

Cailen couldn’t agree more. “Home. Sleep. Yes, please.”

“Get as much as you can,” Gabriella added. “Because tomorrow…tomorrow, we have business.”

“Wait. What business?”

The taller woman straightened and shook out her mass of curls. Her smile gleamed wolfishly under the light of the street lamp.

“We’re going to the cemetery.”

To be continued in Chapter 4.

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