A Scrying Shame (3 page)

Unless it meant a chance to return to the Other Side. Arie wondered if Petranik was there now. A wave of jealousy almost doubled her over, making her drop the toy.

She had also lost sight of Grady. Then Arie heard him foraging up ahead. Another sound, a low-pitched humming, filtered through her mask, growing louder and louder the farther down the hall she walked. The sound, an atonal vibration, snuck past her respirator and seeped into her ears. Arie froze, mouth dry. It was almost—not quite but almost—like the sound from the OS, as Arie had taken to calling the Other Side, a pervasive, surround-sound of disparate beings joined in a harmony of noise. A green bottle fly bounced off Arie’s face shield.

Oh. This wasn’t heaven’s harmony she was hearing, but a symphony of flies doing what flies were created to do.

Arie joined Grady at the door to a bathroom. Leonard—under the circumstances, Arie felt they should be on a first-name basis—had killed himself in the bathtub. Considerate of him, really. Maybe he’d expected any spray from his sliced wrists would land on tile, making the clean-up job easier for whoever was faced with the task.

Unfortunately, Leonard must not have factored in what several days of undetected death would leave.

Or maybe he wasn’t considerate after all.

A writhing curtain of flies covered the walls and ceiling, coating the now empty tub like a roiling black rug. The bathroom floor was littered with insect husks. An entomologist’s dream: the life cycle of the fly from egg to desiccated hull and all the wiggling mass in between.

Arie stepped back into the hall to reassess her newly chosen career path.

Grady stood in the door, watching while she grappled with the horror show in the tub. Arie tried to focus on the scene in the detached way she imagined Grady did.
I’m a professional.

It might have worked except when she rubbed her forehead, she jostled her face mask, letting the smell squeeze underneath. The breathing space filled with the lingering odor of rotted, decaying meat. Once it was under the rubber seal, there was no escaping it.

Grady said something. The mask muffled his voice.

“What?” Arie pointed to her ear.

He leaned in, speaking loud and slow. “Take your mask off.” He gestured at her respirator, miming raising it.

Was he nuts?
“Why?”

“Come on.” He gestured impatiently and began pulling his off, which convinced Arie there must be some reason for this idiocy. Maybe he needed to tell her something.

Arie noticed his puffed cheeks about two seconds too late. The smell knocked her upside the head like a physical blow. Tears flooded her eyes—the reaction either a physical response, an instinctive flushing to protect the orbs, or an emotional one as her brain reeled in horror. If her skin could have curled back, it surely would have. Arie’s knees buckled, and she retched.

Bellowing with laughter, Grady resettled his respirator. Stomach still heaving, Arie was afraid to put the mask back on. Grady grabbed her elbow and shoved her back down the hall. Arie stumbled through the house, heading blindly for the door. Her body was in full flight mode, propelling her toward fresh air.

In the yard, she dropped on all fours, simultaneously retching and gulping for air. It was not fresh air—not by a long shot. The odor still lingered. Arie’s lungs sucked it in anyway. Her eyes continued to water, and then her nose joined in, snot running freely down the front of her suit. She shook so hard her muscles ached.

She vowed to whip Grady’s ass just as soon as she regained a minimal amount of control over her body. The bastard had followed her and was leaning against the van, still hiccupping in the wind-down phase of hysteria.

Pulling herself to her feet, Arie tried to incinerate him with her eyes. It would have been more effective, she knew, if the front of her banana suit wasn’t covered with her own snot.

“Welcome to BioClean,” Grady said. “Grab the camera.”

The turnover rate at BioClean suddenly made perfect sense. But Arie had lived—and died—through scarier things than the remnants of a body recycling itself back to nature. She glared at Grady, who still grinned like a buffoon.

Dude doesn’t realize he’s dealing with the undead, does he?

Saying nothing, Arie snatched up the camera and went back through the house, documenting both the levels of trash in each room and the tiny, cramped bathroom. When she was done, Grady checked the digital display and grudgingly nodded.

“What next?” Arie asked.

They returned to the bathroom. Grady crossed to the fly-curtained window and tried to open it. It had been painted shut, so he ended up going to the van for a crowbar. When Arie had pictured wielding the tools of the trade, she had thought of disinfectant, rubber gloves, and paper towels. Her training taught her to add crowbars, Sawz-Alls, wet-dry vacs, and putty scrapers.

Once Grady got the window open, the flies dispersed. The room looked better already.

“We’ve only contracted for the blood,” Grady said. “I don’t know if his kids even know about the hoarding issue, but that’s not our job. Not yet, anyway. Since only one of us can fit in here at a time . . .”

He gave Arie an I’ve-got-seniority look that left no doubt as to just who would be working in the bathroom.

“Right.” Arie thought about what she would need and headed back out to the van. Grady followed, and Arie realized this was an on-the-job, pass-fail test. She assembled the supplies and turned to head back into the house.

“Wait.”

Arie paused warily.

“Doing the first run-through and for the camera work, we only need the light suit and the latex.” He wiggled his gloved fingers at her. “For the real work, you add the heavy ones over the top. Make sure you tape the wrists off.”

“Why the change in attitude?”

Grady grinned. “Well, you didn’t actually throw up. Guts bet me twenty bucks you would. He always bets the newbie will hurl, and he’s always right. ‘Cept for today.”

“Guts?”

“Gallo. Basil Gallo. Ol’ Blood and Guts himself. He’s gonna be ticked when he finds out he lost.”

Grabbing one of the kits—a plastic milk crate filled with a surprising number of things—Arie made a show of stomping away, but her heart lightened.
Everyone else threw up the first time, huh?
She decided it was a good thing she’d skipped breakfast that morning. Maybe she’d end up a legend in the biohazard-cleaning world.

Arie had only been cleaning for about ten minutes when a sense of profound sadness washed over her body. She’d been scrubbing a particularly recalcitrant streak of blood caught in the tile grout when it happened. Up ’til then, she’d felt pretty spunky, knowing she’d cost her boss twenty bucks in the will-she-puke bet. Knowing she could handle the awful things the job would dish up was a relief, too.

Overwhelming
sadness. Tears pooled, and her hand rose of its own accord to clench in a fist over her heart. A thick gray fog materialized before her eyes, filling her nostrils until she thought she would choke.
How was the fog getting past the mask?

Knowing she shouldn’t, Arie sank down to the closed toilet lid and curled over on herself.

What the hell was happening?

A little zing of anger flashed through her body, and that really scared her. The emotions didn’t feel like her own.

Shake it off
. Arie blinked and rubbed her eyes, then literally gave herself a shake and picked up the wall scraper she’d accidentally dropped. Gripping the bottle of disinfectant as though she was preparing to duel, Arie returned to the section of tiled wall she’d been working on.

Splashes and dots of blood glimmered. The edges of her vision grew blotchy as though she were about to faint. Arie took a deep breath. She sprayed and started scraping, trying to ignore the wash of sadness and . . .
was that loneliness?
She focused hard on the thick streak of blood.

An image of a beautiful, dark-haired woman bloomed in her mind. Sunny, a voice inside Arie’s head said. She throws her head back in laughter, that endearing gap between her front teeth flashing. My heart feels like it will explode with love.

My
heart? A brilliant flash of light burst in Arie’s mind’s eye. Then . . .

A boy and girl ride bikes in front of the house. The kids . . . my kids . . . so young.

Another flash.

They kneel in their pajamas in front of the Christmas tree. My son unwraps his gift. A Rubik’s Cube tumbles in a rainbow of colors from the wrapping paper.

Flash.

A Ford F-250, a blue so dark it almost looks black. Sunny darts around the bed of it, flinging a sodden and soapy sponge at my head. Laughs.

Flash.

The house—empty, except for things. All of their belongings are all around me. Everywhere my hand reaches, I can touch them. I’m surrounded by the pieces of my family. Every bit of it as important as their heartbeats to me. Every bit of—

Arie broke out of the trance, stumbled backward, and tripped over a bucket into the hallway. Eyes wide, Grady came dashing around the corner. The hall had been narrowed by rows of boxes lining both sides. Light backlit Grady’s end, and for one brief, hopeful moment, Arie thought she was going back There.

“What the heck happened?” Grady asked.

“Uh . . . I saw a spider.” Arie hauled herself to her feet, not an easy feat in a banana suit.

A forty-something man dressed in slacks and short-sleeved button-down shirt followed on Grady’s heels.

Grady’s head tilted in an are-you-nuts expression. The client, Arie presumed, looked even more concerned. He glanced around in distaste at the piles of trash, and pulled his narrow shoulders in a little tighter. He held the Rubik’s Cube in his hand, twisting it nervously.

“I’m afraid of spiders,” Arie said. “It’s a phobia. I’m okay now.”

“Why don’t you go take a break?” Grady said.

Arie saw that he had shed his banana suit for a white lab coat. He held a clipboard filled with forms—the contract, maybe. Grady was probably writing up a new estimate to include dealing with Mount Saint Trash Heap all around them.

Memories.

Arie’s gut heaved at the reappearance of intrusive thought. She shook her head, trying to rattle the voice out of her skull.

“Take it,” Grady said in a no-nonsense voice.

She hadn’t meant to decline the offer. As Arie shuffled past the client, he shot her another nervous smile. A gap separated his front teeth.

Just like his mama’s.

Breaking out in another deluge of sweat, Arie scurried out the door to the van, where she stripped out of her suit and gloves, disinfected, and grabbed a sports drink from the cooler in the front compartment of the cab. She lowered herself to the ground next to the van and sipped her drink. Chills documented the history of her fear in goose-bump Braille all over her body.

What the heck just happened?
At least that thought was all her own.

“I thought I wouldn’t mind cleaning up after other dead people, ones who stay dead, I mean. Not like me. I thought the ick factor wouldn’t be an issue, you know?”

Arie was avoiding her landlord, so she hid out at Chandra’s. After listening to Arie whine about her lack of furniture, Chandra had splurged on a bright yellow beanbag chair from Target. It reminded Arie uncomfortably of the banana suit, but she didn’t have the heart to tell her friend that her new furniture triggered thoughts of decomposing bodies. Also, since her body ran to the Dolly-Parton-style of womanhood, her scrunched position forced her knees up to her chest and her chest up to her face, threatening her next death to be attributed to asphyxiation by décolletage.

“You really don’t mind cleaning up blood and stuff?” Chandra sounded dubious. In addition to the new “furniture,” she’d indulged in a new hairstyle—raven black and very short with bangs. The ends curled around her jaw, and she kept jiggling her head so that they swished around her face.

Cleopatra with a twitch.

“I don’t like the smells or the flies,” Arie said. “Those really are hard to get used to, but the rest . . . I just remind myself that it’s all part of biology. The real person isn’t there, anyway. I think dead bodies freak people out because we’re still thinking of them as people. They’re not. They really are just . . . meat, I guess. What’s left of them, anyway.”

Chandra gasped. “Are their bodies still there?”

“No, not their whole bodies, but . . . well, there are always pieces, you know? Especially if they’ve been decomposing.”

“If the people aren’t still there, then how do you explain what happened with the hoarder dude? I mean, that is some
freaky
shit.” Chandra’s eyes sparkled.

Arie couldn’t answer that.

“Okay!” Chandra said. “So, this vision. You saw stuff and felt it, too?”

Arie nodded. “The Rubik’s cube, a pretty woman, and two kids. But I’ll be honest. The thing that really freaked me out was the emotions. They took over my body. I can’t even explain it. I was feeling this horrible despair, but at the same time, I knew it wasn’t mine.”

“Kind of like being possessed?”

“I wouldn’t go that far.” Arie shuddered. “But what I can’t figure out is why did that happen to me? I mean, I’ve had already had a Near Death Experience. Isn’t that enough weirdness for one lifetime?”

“Two lifetimes, technically. But maybe,” Chandra said, “they
aren’t
two separate things.”

“Meaning?”

“Maybe the NDE and the psychic stuff are both part of one thing. Maybe you were led to working with these dead people.”

Chandra loved woo-woo stuff. Arie never really paid attention to that kind of thing. For starters, her mother would have killed her. Chandra turned to a cheap particleboard bookshelf against the wall. The top two rows sagged with fantasy and mystery books and a whole section of angsty werewolf and vampire young adult novels. The bottom shelf had been set aside for nonfiction: a few leftover college texts, but mainly paranormal and psychic related tomes.

Woo-woo stuff.

Chandra pulled out a volume and paged through it. Shaking her head, she stuck it back and grabbed another. She must have found what she’d been looking for because a beatific smile lit her face.