Free On the Edge of Twilight: 22 Tales to Follow You Home by Gregory Miller Page B

encounter. She had come to him just a few weeks after losing grip of her body, sane again and mad as hell. If looks could kill! Eden had never witnessed such concentrated vitriol. He attempted to flee but could think of no place to hide from another free-ranging ghost like himself. Sarah and her envenomed spirit-tongue followed him across the continental United States, over the Atlantic, and eventually caught up with him among the ancient-timbered buildings of London, in the famous Drury Lane Theatre, among the spirits of antiquity and during a somewhat under-produced production of All’s Well That Ends Well . Then, as he stood before her blistering, withering onslaught of words, he realized something: it was good having her around again.
    Upon seeing that her presence brought Eden happiness, however, Sarah quickly calmed and became one of the few purgatorial spirits to ascend to the Great Beyond, delayed peace serving as the key to her transcendence. In leaving him, she exacted the only form of retribution that could actually cause Eden pain. The loneliness began to bite harder.
    Other spirits were difficult to talk to. The cynical and resentful generally tire of the happy and content, so Eden found the short-term “benevolent” presences not only boring, but often downright annoying. They kept trying to convince him to lighten up, sometimes quite eloquently, but simply didn’t understand the nature of his situation. As for the other “lifers,” for the most part all they did was complain, gossip, and sulk. He avoided almost all of them, save for a brief conversation now and again, and they him.
    That left Eden with the living to toy around with. For years innumerable he haunted the darker avenues of the world, inhabiting everything from the undersides of Eastern-European stone bridges and the attics of campus dormitories in the American Mid-West, to cursed glades in the African wild and various unlucky passes in the Himalayas. For a time, he enjoyed the startled, fearful, and sometimes worshipful reactions that his moans, brief appearances, or icy touches invoked. But one day, after inadvertently causing the infant son of a young Queensland woman to burst into tears, the mother, bath-robed, face-creamed, and already well aware of his hauntings, actually screamed at him. Spinning around the room in circles, unable to see him yet obviously feeling his presence, she shrieked, “Jealous! Pathetic! That’s what you are. Leave us alone and take it somewhere else!” Then, before leaving the room to calm the baby in the kitchen, she slowly, deliberately, gave him the finger .
    Eden never bothered the living on purpose again. He was too offended.
    He took, instead, to learning about the universe. For this task, Time, at least momentarily, was on his side. He read everything of scientific value that interested him. He visited museums, watched operations, looked over the shoulders of geniuses at work. He conducted as much field research as he could manage. He learned meditation and studied all the major philosophies. He immersed himself in theology (having an interesting personal perspective to aid him), numerology, and, for the hell of it, philology. His memory, improved by immateriality, acted as an information dump of almost limitless proportions. It took millennia, but by the time his lust for information was sated, Eden had proven the existence of no less than 26 dimensions; come to understand how a universe could exist without a beginning and without an end; expanded upon the theories of Einstein, Hawking, and two dozen others until discovering their ultimate cruxes; determined the logical meaning of life; discovered the logical meaning of death; debunked the concept of finity; and cured the common cold (imparting the cure to the living through automatic writing with a primary school mistress in Iceland).
    Then, despite his labors toward enlightenment, a familiar darkness once again began to steal into Eden’s sight,