Free Orpheus and the Pearl & Nevermore by Kim Paffenroth Page B

only to evaporate.
He couldn’t seem to affect any movement at all. And why should he
have expected otherwise? He couldn’t apply any real force to it,
could he? He searched his memory. He taught— had taught—social studies, not
science. Like it really made a difference, he was a ghost trying to
go through a door.
    I’m a ghost.
    He focused himself through the wood and into
the living room.
    Ray lay on the couch, arms above his head,
one foot on the floor. His eyes were open. His mouth was a gaping,
bloody hole, his shattered jaw hanging slack. He was dead.
Murdered. The front door lay open.
    Malcolm lost the world again. He recoiled
into the light so that it blinded him, and the cacophonous sounds
that enveloped him were as his screams.
     
    The wall clock by the window said it was
almost 11:30, but it felt as if only a few minutes had passed since
Malcolm’s own death, or his awareness of it. It seemed he was
losing time whenever he became disoriented. He had no idea how long
it had taken Ray to die while he was in the bedroom.
    There was blood everywhere. Parts of Ray
were missing. His right leg ended at the knee. Malcolm could only
react with silent grief, unable to turn away or retch or weep.
    My brother is dead. But so am I.
    He scanned the
room. Ray? Are you here?
    He wasn’t. One way or another, Ray was just
gone.
    Why am I still
here? It had to have something to do with
the state of his body. The cadaver’s eyes had been blank, but had
seen right through Malcolm to the door. To Ray. And it had gone to
him, and killed him. WHY?
    The idea struck Malcolm that his body was
now an unmanned vessel: soulless, feral. That this might be the
natural state of a human organism, deprived of its spiritual host,
didn’t quell his confusion. Perhaps that was an explanation for the
cadaver’s behavior, but it still didn’t explain why it was walking
around to begin with. Ray’s remains were dead as could be, and
Ray’s spirit was absent. It had to be that Malcolm was somehow
still tied to his body, allowing it to run on fumes, so to speak,
while he could only watch.
    An out-of-body experience gone too far?
Could we be rejoined?
    No. He didn’t want that, not now. But he
wanted to remedy whatever nightmarish error had been committed by
the universe. He sensed he was alone in this, and so he focused on
the front door and moved into the dark hallway.
    The corridor connecting
the apartments was always dimly-lit, and he could see splashes of
blood on the floor and the walls—those on the walls prominently
displaying the details of his fingers. He focused ahead, and now
could see that the substance he was casting— ectoplasm? —was indeed green in
color. The amorphous prints of his pseudo-feet were stamped into
the bloodstains, only to erode seconds later. He proceeded down the
hall and into the stairwell.
    How to do this, then,
without gravity? He focused on each step
in turn, casting the ectoplasm down, and found himself being pulled
along with it. It was getting easier. As long as he kept himself
calm, he was in control.
    He entered the narrow lobby of the building
and stared through its glass entryway into the storm. There was a
red handprint on the outer door. On the floor, just inside the
building, lay the rest of Ray’s leg. It looked as if the meat had
been peeled from the bone in strips. Malcolm, realizing where the
meat had gone, nearly lost it again.
    Focus! He went to the door. The rain was still coming down hard, the
vibrations were overwhelming. It might be
difficult to move out there. But he knew
it was possible; he went through the glass.
    The light from the streetlamps danced
through each drop of rain as it slashed downward, lancing through
him and slapping against the side of the building. Looking at the
steps, he slowly made his way down. He’d thought the sound might
make it harder to focus and move, but it was the rain itself that
was the problem—, washing away the ectoplasm almost as soon as