Hereafter (A Reaper Novella) Read online

  “What’s synesthetic mean?” I wondered, knowing that I’d heard the word before, but not remembering its definition.

  “It’s something certain people have. When they look at a color, instead of the color, they see numbers or days of the week. I’m not sure I know how to explain what I do in a way that you would understand,” Val insisted.

  “All right,” I replied, deciding I wouldn’t question what she could do any further.

  Jet’s fingers laced through mine. “I know the last memory was another horrible one. I don’t know what this one will be like, but I don’t expect it to be any better, and I really am sorry you have to go through all of this in order to find your mother.”

  I couldn’t even bring myself to smile at his words, his sympathy, because I didn’t feel like I deserved it. All he should have done was take me to the Purgatory Portal and nothing more. It wasn’t fair of me to have him here no matter how much I wanted him to be. I leaned against him, feeling the warmth of his soul press into mine. I was going to miss him when all of this was said and done. The sound of shattering glass mixed with animals howling pulled me from the security of Jet’s arms.

  I spun to find my mother’s fourteen-year-old self standing in the threshold of the hospital room closest to us. The pitcher of ice water she’d been holding was on the floor in front of her, shattered to pieces. She was gazing at something, whatever was causing the commotion inside the room, wide-eyed and open-mouthed. Her face was pale and her legs trembled beneath her as they struggled to keep her standing. The three of us took a few steps until we stood directly behind her and gazed into the room.

  It was a typical hospital room the same horrible shade of sea foam green as the hall. The patient inside was a younger guy who was probably in his late twenties. He lay on the bed, his eyes closed. The volume on the corner-mounted TV was down low, and he had an IV and different machines hooked up to him. Beside him stood a female Reaper with long, flowing blond hair, his soul, and a pack of large, angry wolves that looked as if they were made of rippling gray smoke. They growled and snapped their jaws at him as they stood in a straight line in front of him, acting as though they were a barrier between him and the door.

  This was what had started my mother. No question.

  I wondered if it had been the sight of a soul being harvested that had startled her initially, or if she had simply entered the room to refill a drink and saw all of this.

  “What are they?” I asked as I stared at the wolves with horror, watching as the smoke they were made of rippled as they moved and taunted the soul of the man. “How are they here?”

  “They’re his demons,” Jet answered. “His soul must have been corrupt while he was alive. When you harvest a corrupt soul, not only do you take it to the Purgatory Portal, but also its inner most demons. Each wolf represents something horrible he did while alive…a demon he will have to deal with in his Purgatory.”

  I stared at the wolves, amazed by what they stood for, while noticing each tiny detail about them—how vibrantly red their eyes were, how the smoke they were created by seemed unmoving and yet ever-changing, how pungent the taste of evil was against my lips. I counted five wolves snarling their teeth at the man, and my gaze shifted to his peaceful-looking body lying on the hospital bed. He looked so normal and good looking even. How could he have been such a horrible person? I guessed what they said about people—looks can be deceiving—was true. This guy was proof.

  A thought came to me then. “What about the old man from the first bedroom? Shouldn’t his Reaper and his demons have taken him to the Purgatory Portal? ” If they had, then my mother would have at least been spared from his viciousness.

  “He either escaped them somehow or fought them off,” Val answered, going back to searching for our exit as she followed the trace my mother had left behind.

  One wolf howled and the others followed suit. The five of them began moving toward the young man’s soul, circling him as though they were forming a cage. Without warning, they lunged and began tearing into him. I could see no marks or blood, but it was obvious from the man’s cries and the terror he felt mirrored in his expressions, that he was in physical pain.

  “No, get them off me! Get them off me!” he cried out.

  The Reaper who stood beside him did no such thing. Instead, she watched with a blank expression for a long drawn out moment before finally gripping his shoulder and blinking him away to the Purgatory Portal, taking the wolves with her. My eyes flicked back to my mother. She still stood in the doorway, her entire body trembling uncontrollably. I couldn’t imagine seeing something like that when I knew nothing of Reapers and how things worked. I ached to reach out to her, to tell her that what she saw was real and that she wasn’t going crazy, but I knew I couldn’t. This was just another memory. It wasn’t something happening right now, I reminded myself for the millionth time.

  “There are no windows to climb through,” Jet pointed out, glancing inside the now quiet and quite empty hospital room. “Not even a door.”

  Val started down the long hallway, her high-heeled black boots clicking across the tiled floor. “It’s not going to be a window every time or a door, but it’s still going to be a choice. This time it’s between left or right, again,” she said, stopping at the edge of a hallway to turn back and look at us. “I’m sensing that if I choose left, we’ll get to her faster, maybe even before she repeats the cycle again.”

  I was amazed by the rapid succession of Val’s eye flashes. It caused excitement to spark through me due to the fact that we were getting close. Real close. My hell was finally about to be over.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  As soon as we cut the corner at the end of the hallway and turned left, we were standing in a different hallway altogether. It was bright and airy with one wall made up of solid windows and Berber carpeted floors. I had no idea where we were or what the place was. All I knew was that we were really high up and in the middle of an unfamiliar, large city. I scooted closer to the solid wall as my incredibly debilitating fear of heights I’d long since forgotten in my death plummeted me, causing my knees to quiver.

  “Nice view,” Val said as she stepped to the windowed wall and gazed out.

  “What is this place?” I wondered as I glanced around at the generic art hanging on the walls that gave away nothing about our location.

  Jet walked ahead of me, scoping out the eerily silent hallway. “I don’t know, but we’re definitely in the middle of New York City.”

  “How can you tell?” I asked, wondering how he could be so sure.

  Jet pointed to something in the distance beyond the windowed wall. “That’s the Statue of Liberty, isn’t it?”

  I took a small step forward, stopping once I reached the center of the hallway, and glanced toward where he was pointing. There, standing in all her glory, was the giant statue of the green woman with her crown. It had always been something I’d wanted to see when I was still alive. Kami and I used to daydream for hours when we were younger about how we were going to move to New York City and go to school for something amazing like photography. We were going to share an apartment—one with exposed brick on the interior walls—and we were going to be waitresses at some really awesome coffee shop. One of the very first things we’d always said we would do when we finally made it to New York City was visit the Statue of Liberty. Seeing it now reminded me of how many of my dreams would forever be unfollowed because of my death. It was more fuel to find my mother.

  The distinct noise of footsteps coming down the hall shifted my attention and pulled me from my depressing thoughts. A slender woman with long dark hair dressed in a gray pencil skirt and a lavender button-up top strutted down the hallway toward us. She was lost in thought, flipping through Manila folders in her arms. I didn’t recognize her at first, not until she stopped in front of the elevator and began to whisper.

  “Please don’t be in the elevator; please don’t be in the elevator,” she repeated while nervously tap
ping her stiletto-heeled toes.

  Anxiety bubbled within me, panic being its catalyst, as I waited with her for the elevator doors to open so I could see what she was so afraid of this time. When the stainless steel doors slid open, revealing the elevator’s insides, my mother and I released an audible gasp at the same time. Inside the elevator was something I had never seen before, something so dark and vile it coated my tongue entirely with its hostility.

  “What the hell is that?” Jet asked as his arm reached for me, tugging me behind him.

  Val hesitated in her answer, and I knew that whatever it was, it couldn’t be good, not if it made her become mute while in its presence. “A Shade,” she whispered as though she were afraid it could hear her.

  “A Shade?” I repeated, my eyes never wavering from its continuously shifting blackness hovering in the corner of the otherwise empty elevator. “What’s that?”

  “No way.” Jet shook his head and took a slight step backward, crashing into me. “There’s no way.”

  “Oh, it’s true… That is most definitely a Shade,” Val insisted as my mother stepped inside the elevator with this thing that even death feared floating in the corner. “As much as I don’t want to, we have to get in the elevator with her and follow this memory out.”

  Jet turned to face me. He closed his eyes and sighed as both of his hands gripped my forearms.

  “What?” My voice came out louder than I had anticipated—its volume controlled by my fear and alarm, caused by the obvious distress this Shade’s presence placed on Val and Jet. “What is that thing?”

  “Shades are souls, technically, but they’re the most vile and evil souls imaginable. If you believe in actual demons, Shades are as close as you will ever find in reality,” Jet said.

  “Finish the conversation in here,” Val demanded from where she stood inside the elevator, pressed up against the wall and as far away as she could possibly be from the Shade. “We have to go with her or else we risk being looped all the way back to the beginning.”

  Jet’s hands slid down my arms, and his fingers interlaced with mine as he pulled me behind him and across the threshold of the elevator. I didn’t understand why he and Val were so afraid. Wasn’t this memory the same as any other? He had said this Shade was a soul, didn’t that mean it was unable to see us just like all the others as well as unable to harm us?

  “Stay close to the wall,” Jet said in a low, even tone.

  I obediently slid against the coolness of the stainless steel wall, and then whispered the question that had been burning through my mind since first noticing Val and Jet’s fear of the Shade. “Can it see us?”

  “Yes,” Jet muttered in an ill-fated attempt at hiding his fear from his voice. “Stay very still and keep quiet. It won’t notice us if we’re silent.”

  I clamped my lips shut. My eyes zeroed in on my poor mother. Now that we were closer to her, I could see how young she was—in her early twenties maybe. Silently, she continued to whisper something, her plump lips moving rapidly with the words as she closed her eyes tightly. The elevator doors closed and the volume of her frantic prayer turned up.

  “It never moved before; it won’t now. It never moved before; it won’t now,” she repeated, her hand gripping her pen, clenching and unclenching it.

  As if determined to prove her wrong this time, the Shade moved from its spot in the far corner and stopped directly in front of her. The tendrils from its erratic shape wisped around my mother’s mouth like dark smoke protruding from her lips. She continued reciting her chant, oblivious to the fact it had moved and that it was now just a breath away from her face.

  The Shade extended in front of her, mimicking the shadow of an adult male. It reached a hand made of solid, black smoke out to her and slid it across the length of her arm mere centimeters away from actually touching her. I continued to watch, horrified, as it ran his fingers of smoke along her body and down to her hip.

  “Look at me,” it seethed in the hiss of a whisper.

  My mother stiffened. Her prayer became mute as her lips clamped together.

  “I said look at me, my pretty,” the Shade demanded with more authority this time, his shadowed hand coming up to graze the skin of her cheek.

  She flinched and shook her head no.

  The Shade resumed its original, erratic shape. “You will,” it shouted with force, just before it flew at my mother’s neck.

  The folders and pen she’d gripped so tightly the entire time slipped from her fingers and fell to the floor as her hands instinctively came up to push the Shade off her and away from her throat. Her attempts were unsuccessful; it’s impossible to push away smoke.

  Without warning the scene in front of us changed rapidly. It was almost as though we were watching a movie, one with little clips from a horror movie involving my mother and the Shade. We flashed forward through her life. A few images slowed—one of her visiting with her shrink, Dr. Marlo; a few with her and my father; the day I was born; and other more random clips. Sometimes the Shade was there, following her, hunting her, hovering nearby, and sometimes it wasn’t.

  It was almost as though it played a game with her, with her sanity. As if it was letting her think it had gone, that it had finally moved on, just long enough for her to believe it, and then it would reappear. In a giant game of cat and mouse, the Shade had toyed with her for years. Watching, I realized this was where my mother’s schizophrenia diagnosis had stemmed from. It wasn’t necessarily the souls that had bothered her, but more the Shade that had followed her.

  The elevator doors opened to a street. Walking through the stainless steel doors, we left my mother and the Shade behind as the doors closed, severing us from that memory. I glanced around and realized with certainty the street we stood upon. It was the curvy street that led to my house.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  It was dusky out, either early morning or late evening. I couldn’t be sure of which. Crisp brown leaves raced each other in the wind. The season was fall, my mother’s favorite. I took in the familiarity of my neighbors’ houses—the Stewarts’ crooked mailbox with the hummingbirds painted on it, the Hutchisons’ senile beagle that always lay in their driveway as though it were waiting on them to come home, and old Mrs. Bell’s front yard tree decorated with more bird feeders than it had branches.

  “That was horrible…” I blinked, grateful to be away from that memory, but utterly shocked it had ever occurred at the same time.

  “It was,” Jet agreed, pulling me into his arms. “I don’t think I’ve ever been so scared.”

  “I can’t believe that thing followed her for so long.” The words flowed from my lips as my memory allowed a vivid image of the Shade to resurface in my mind. Sourness exploded on my tongue from the disgust I felt toward it for following my mother for so long.

  “It didn’t just follow her…it tormented and haunted her for pleasure,” Jet said.

  “We’re close to the end, I can feel it,” Val said, interrupting our conversation, her violet eyes pulsating like a steady heartbeat. “Your mother wasn’t that far ahead of us. If we’re lucky, we’ll catch up to her once she enters her reflection period.”

  “Reflection period?” I questioned.

  “A time when she must reflect on how her suicide affected those who loved her and those loved by her,” Val answered, turning her head from right to left as she kept a watch out for my mother.

  And then, there she was, dressed in black yoga pants and a lime green tank top, walking. She looked exactly as I remembered her. I searched my mind, trying to pinpoint when it was we were seeing her. How close we were to the day she took her life. She’d stopped walking months before her suicide. This memory had to be when she became a hermit, or the one that turned her into a hermit rather.

  Mom hurried past us at a fast pace, oblivious, as always, to our presence. The three of us followed her. I was lost in thought, drowning in my unyielding need to be wrapped in her arms, to be surrounded in her vanilla bean scent, a
nd to hear her say my name.

  We came to a sharp corner and I knew suddenly exactly how this scene would play out. All because I knew what would be waiting up ahead—who. The woman with the red hair who had been my first encounter with a tortured soul. We rounded the corner, me more cautious than the others, and my mother completely unaware of what she was about to come face to face with.

  The woman with the red hair.

  She stood in the same spot as when I had first seen her. She wore the same denim shorts and pale yellow tank top as I remembered. Her face was still twisted in that same frantically desperate way as when I had first come across her.

  Mom paused, obviously knowing upon first sight what the woman was unlike I had, and I found myself wondering how she had never seen her before this moment. Mom started to back away slowly, and I heard her softly repeating four words, “Please don’t see me.” A few dry leaves crunched underneath her foot; this was what drew the soul’s attention to her. In the blink of an eye, the soul was standing directly in front of my mother and saying the exact same things she had said to me. The remembered fear from my encounter with the woman pierced through my soul, consuming me in seconds.

  “I can’t help you,” my mother said, her voice cracking. “I’m not supposed to even be seeing you; you’re not real.”

  “You’re a mother. I can tell. You have to help me search for my car. My car has my baby in it!” the red haired woman screamed frantically, inches from my mother’s face.

  Mom did just as I had—she bolted.

  “Follow her! Hurry!” Val shouted. Jet and I did as we were told, and I felt as if I were thrown back into my memory of when I’d ran away from the soul of the redheaded lady.

  “She’s here somewhere,” Val shouted. “Her presence is all around.”

  My house came into view and I felt hope swell within me. Maybe my mother’s reflection period was inside our house.