Afterlife (24 page)

She heard Michael Diamond’s voice, “Let’s move beyond all of this, there’s another place we need to go. You may be afraid, you may not want to go there. But fear isn’t what it seems. Fear awakens us to our abilities, our senses that have been hidden. Fear is the key to the final door inside you.” She felt as if someone had taken her wrist, and tugged on it, pulling her into a dark place inside her mind, a dungeon where some beast growled in a corner.

“There’s a place inside you,” Diamond whispered. “A place where you’ve been, but you don’t remember. It’s been hidden from you. But you know it. I want you to face your fear and venture there again. With me.”

7

Julie moved as if swimming underwater, with dark vines moving slowly as if pushed by some unseen tide, and the doors were there, before her.

One of them began to open.

When it did, she saw Hut.

His eyes, milky white, his grin impossibly wide. His arms outstretched.

And she moved to him, as if some invisible tide pushed her toward the dead man.

8

Julie’s eyes opened, suddenly.

Got her bearings: she was in Diamond’s apartment.

It was mid-afternoon.

An overwhelming pounding behind her eyes, as if she had a terrible headache that had just erupted. She glanced straight ahead at the long, vertical mirror on the front of the bathroom door. Her face—her eyes were bloodshot, she’d been crying—and Michael Diamond sat in a chair next to her. He looked up, at her staring at his reflection.

Only it wasn’t his face in the mirror.

It was a blur of grays and blues.

It was the face of the man in Apartment 66S. His body was different. She saw him as if he were naked, standing in the mirror. Covered with burns. Covered as if most of his body had been consumed in a fire.

1

“You’re the boy,” she gasped. “You’re the boy who burned. The boy didn’t die. He didn’t. He lived. It’s
you
.” Her throat clutched as she said it, and she pushed herself up on the massage table, drawing the towel more tightly around her.

“Julie?” he asked.

She looked at him, and he was normal again, then into the mirror and he was also Michael Diamond, dressed, rising now from his chair.

She dressed quickly, feeling a pulse of horror within her body. Diamond may have been speaking, but she didn’t hear a word. She just knew that if she didn’t leave his apartment, she would scream, or she’d want to jump out a window. She felt the urgency of it, as if something was coming toward her, some shrieking insanity swooping down from shadows. She thought of Amanda, with her caged animal beauty, her fierce attack, and wondered if she hadn’t experienced what was going on in her mind. If she hadn’t begun to see people’s faces as blurs of gray and blue. She felt as if she’d been infected with something, some awful poison, something that had begun eating away at her sanity.

She raced down the stairs, not caring if she tripped and fell, and out into the street. She was disoriented, and couldn’t remember where her car was parked. She wandered through the village, her heart seeming to beat a thousand times a minute. She felt as if she would die at any moment, and she was about to let it happen, she was about to let the anxiety and breathlessness within her win.

As she rounded a corner at Bleecker and Cornelius, she saw a crowd gathered around what must have been an accident. She felt drawn to it, and went to the group of people, who all stood still, watching the delivery boy, on the street, his bicycle mangled. Several feet ahead, on the road, a taxicab, with its driver standing half in and half out of the car, door swung open, looking shell-shocked.

The boy had been knocked off his bike, and his head was twisted unnaturally around. His left arm was bent over his right shoulder. He looked as if he were no more than seventeen years old.

His Chinese food he’d been delivering lay in mashed white cartons beyond the small crowd.

The sound of the ambulance, rounding the corner. She looked in the boy’s eyes, she had to, she wanted

to see what death was again, she wanted to believe it was final, and that whatever had been that boy was now gone, irretrievably.

Then she felt a tender cracking, as if inside her skull, and for a moment, she wondered if this was what a brain aneurysm began with—a slight cracking sound— and then, she heard her husband’s voice.

“
I would never leave you, Julie
,” he said. “
Death is everywhere. But not where I am. Do you want me inside you?
”

2

She dropped by Joe and Rick’s place.

“Jesus, Jules. You’re white as a sheet. And that’s something I never thought I’d ever get to say out loud,” Joe said after he opened the door.

“I’m losing my mind,” she said.

3

After she told him everything, Joe said, “He might as well have raped you, Julie. He told you to take your clothes off? You did it? You went along with it? How do you know he didn’t hypnotize you or something and then do something awful to you while you were under? You’ve got to be more careful. God, should we call the cops?” Realizing his tone, he calmed a bit. “No, we call them, how is it going to look? Julie? Do you really think he killed Hut? I mean, that you happen to read his books. You happen to go to his studio. You happen to…”

“I know it sounds crazy, Joe. But you believe in this stuff. What if he had psychic talent to draw me to him? I mean, what is the extent of this kind of thing?”

“It sounds like something I’ve never heard of. I mean, if I believed that…”

“What about the burns I saw? In the mirror?”

“I don’t know,” he said, and for the first time ever in their friendship, she thought she detected a flicker of distance in him. As if he were looking at her in such a way that he needed to see her as damaged. As deranged.

“Joe, I’m not crazy. I know I’m not. I saw him. I think he did what he said—he streamed into me. And when I came out of it, too suddenly, I saw him for a split second. He told me that I couldn’t be inside him unless he first opened me. He said it. And that’s what it was. I saw inside him. That’s what I saw with the burns. But…if he were burned as a kid, how could he look so…normal?”

Joe thought a moment, and said, “I worked with a woman once who had been in a car crash. Eighty percent of her body had burned. Five years later, with a lot of surgery, she looked better than she ever had. I guess, maybe if you saw him naked, you’d see the burn. If…if you really saw something that was real. Julie, now don’t get pissed off at me or anything, but if you saw this for just a second, couldn’t it maybe have been some kind of hangover from what he did to you? Like waking too fast from a dream?”

“Joe,” she said. “I saw things. Things I’ve forgotten. Things that…he unlocked inside me. And then, I thought I heard him. Inside me. But not from me. Maybe it was crazy. Maybe it was my mind on hyperspeed. But I saw him.”

“Diamond?”

“No,” she said. “Hut.”

4

Julie finally opened up about the apartment on Rosetta Street.

“I know that block. It’s creepy already. I had to walk through there at night one time, and I swear the ghosts of all the cows they killed down there are wandering.” He grinned. “You still have the key to the place?”

Julie nodded.

“Let’s go,” he said.

5

This time, to get through the building’s security door, Joe buzzed one of the first floor apartments and pretended to be the son of an old lady on the sixth floor. It took three tries before he got buzzed in—“It’s not the nicest way to sneak into a building, but it works sometimes,”—and when they got to 66S, Julie reached for her handbag, but Joe said, “I guess we didn’t need the keys after all.”

The door was ajar.

“What if someone’s in there?” she asked.

He smiled. “We say we had the wrong apartment

and we back out slowly. Gee, makes me feel like I’m one of the Hardy Boys.”

6

Inside, the light switch didn’t work. It was growing dark outside, but there was still some light from the large factory-style windows of the apartment.

“Hello?” Joe asked, his voice booming. He turned back to her, “Open the door wide so we can get more light in here.”

She pulled the door back, and a rectangle of white from the hall light illuminated the foyer.

“Stinks,” Joe said, holding his nose.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“There’s bound to be another light around the corner,” he said, talking completely through his mouth as if trying to close off his nose from the smell that emanated from within.

She watched his silhouette as it melted into the grayness.

Then, a light flicked up in the next room. She went down the hall, and into the living area. It was now completely empty of furniture, as if someone had moved.

There was one high-backed wooden chair at the center of the room. It reminded her of a chair she had seen in a dream. Somehow she’d seen it, but she didn’t mention this to Joe.

“I guess they got evicted,” Joe said. “Nobody home.”

Then, he went to check in the bedroom. She waited, remembering seeing the man standing there. The man who had the same blurred face that she’d seen in Michael Diamond’s mirror.

Julie’s imagination began to run wild.
You’re a fool, you can’t have seen anything in the mirror. You can’t have seen a man with a blurred face anywhere. It’s the dreams you’ve been having. It’s Hut’s death. It has gotten to you and instead of dealing with it, you’ve been dancing around it. You saw the video with Mel. You saw that all you filmed was yourself, maybe dreaming of sex with Hut. Maybe dreaming of things because the raw deal you got with his murder was too much for you to handle. Hut was part of some psychic study as a kid. No wonder he never talked about it. But he did talk to Livy about her brain radio. He did try to tell her—she was sure of it—that something bad had happened in his childhood. Maybe when he talked about the Hutchinsons being horrible to him, he was confusing it. Maybe his memories had been like crossed wires. Or maybe Michael Diamond had been telling the truth: that the fire in the building took the memories. Blocked them. That’s nuts to think any of this is real. You don’t genuinely believe in…
but the Streaming session with Diamond had seemed too real. She had never felt someone else’s consciousness, inside her like that.
Am I going insane? Is this what it is?
But she could answer her own question: it was as if someone was fucking with her. As if someone had already crawled inside her mind and was screwing with the way she saw things. The way she perceived. The video. The Streaming. It was all about her brain itself hitting short-circuits. It was not insanity. At best, it was shock and paranoia. Post-traumatic stress. Seeing her husband’s body on a metal table. Seeing how he’d been carved into. Seeing Matt’s arm, with its carvings. Seeing things. That’s all it was. Seeing things. It wasn’t that she herself was losing her mind. It was a problem of vision. It was a problem of how things are seen, and what happens when a shock occurs.

She waited for Joe, and her mind spun until she just wanted to feel as if something made sense.

Joe came out of the bedroom and said, “Nothing there, either.”

She could see in his face the doubt. Even Joe, who believed in psychic phenomena wholeheartedly, thought she had gone off the deep end.

“Look,” he said, anticipating her mood. “You’ve had some shocks. I’m not saying that none of this adds up to anything. But I think if we’re going to call the police, we need more. I’ll look up some stuff and call some friends who are more expert on this. I’ll find out more about Project Daylight. Don’t worry about this. Let me drive you home, okay?”

7

Joe drove her back in her Camry, and when they got near Rellingford, he offered to spend the night, but she could tell he wanted to get home. She insisted that she was all right. So, they drove to the train station and she saw him off. She enjoyed the ride back with all the windows down and the slight wind blowing through the car, giving her a nice chill. She felt better. She wasn’t sure what to make of Michael Diamond or what she’d seen—or hadn’t seen—at his place. But she’d handle it later.

When Julie walked in the front door of her house, her sister was in the living room, covered with a blanket on the couch, with Livy, in her jammies, curled up around her.

Mel opened her eyes. “How’d it go?”

“I’ll tell you tomorrow. Thanks for coming over,” Julie whispered, lifting Livy up in her arms. Livy was so sound asleep that she barely stirred as her mother carried her to her bedroom.

She was too tired to clear out the guest room for Mel, so she and her sister slept together up in the big king-sized bed in Julie’s room. When Julie got up in the morning, Mel already had coffee made. The kids had gone off to school. It was after eleven.

Mel barely said a word, but hugged her. “I love you, Julie. You’re the best little sister in the whole world. But I don’t want you going in the city anymore. And I don’t even think your friend Joe was much help to you. And I certainly think that Michael Diamond was bad news from the start. I wish I’d told mom to go by herself to that stupid show.”

Julie said very little, certainly didn’t want to add to her sister’s sense that she was losing it by telling her about Project Daylight and Michael Diamond and seeing blurred faces and burnt bodies. As the thoughts spun through her head, Julie giggled a little and then noticed Mel’s unforgiving look. She knew what Mel was thinking.
You’re thinking that I am a terrible Mommy and I need to somehow be strong and pull through and just focus on Mommydom and forget that I had a husband, forget that even though you saw your little sister masturbating on videotape that I saw a man who might’ve been a dead man molesting me in my sleep and you think that I need meds and a good long rest and you’re probably even thinking of taking Matt and Livy away for a while until I get a good doctor and end up like the Numbah One Wife, Amanda Hutchinson, who thought I had big hairy balls.
Absurdities encircled her thoughts, and nothing made sense, and she knew that the longer Mel watched her, the worse she would feel, the more she would go whirling into an oblivion of fear and belief and shadow.