Chapter 2
It wasn’t what Evan expected at all.
The capsules slid apart to reveal about an ounce of clear, viscous liquid. Thomas and Marla dropped the fluid onto their wrists and it seeped quickly into their pores.
“So it’s in your bloodstream?” he asked.
“Here,” said Marla, emptying his onto his outstretched arm. The liquid was cool and vanished almost instantly, leaving him dry.
“Now what?” said Evan.
Thomas shrugged.
“Now we go around the corner. There’s a place there I want to be at when it begins. Want some coffee?”
“No,” said Evan, “I feel less tired now.”
It was true, too. The droplet had already had some effect on him. It wasn’t the jitter of sugar or caffeine – if anything it was a relaxation, a settling into a state where tiredness was unimportant. It was comforting.
Outside, the night air felt fresher too, less biting. A few flakes of snow drifted down, silhouetted against the softly glowing clouds. The drug, whatever it was, was sobering Evan, or at least overriding the symptoms of the alcohol still in his blood. He felt light on his feet and even a little giddy, and he chased Marla around the sidewalk, laughing. He grabbed her and through their coats the impact was pillowy, and he picked her up. Thomas walked ahead and they spun around like that, laughing. She still didn’t kiss him, though.
It was further than ‘around the corner’, and Evan didn’t pay attention to the turns they took. It dawned on him briefly how very lost he was – not only in relation to the apartment he had just seen, but within the city in general. Dark stacks of residential housing – fire-escape exoskeletons and steep stone stairs to the first floor and grassless hollows to either side occupied by upset trash bins – it could have been almost anywhere.
“I feel so light,” said Evan.
Marla’s fingers strained upward. “I feel like I could touch the moon. Like if I just jumped, I could reach right out and touch it.”
For the briefest moment, Marla’s outstretched fingers and the moon became one, and opalescence spread down her arm.
“Christ,” said Evan. “I think I’m coming up.”
Thomas held back the side of a torn fence for them, then clambered through himself. It was some kind of abandoned dockyard from what Evan could see, and the putrid salt-smell rising from it made him think the ocean was close by. They picked their way through the ruins: the hulking wrecks of construction vehicles and stacks of broken concrete and plastic tubes large enough for Evan to crawl into. When they stopped, it was at the broken gate of a vast, multi-storied building.
“Is that where we’re going?” Evan asked.
“Yeah,” said Thomas.
“What is it?”
“It’s an old asylum.”
“It’s beautiful,” breathed Marla.
Evan wasn’t sure. He gazed down the length of the barb-topped fence, enclosing the building as far as could be seen. One door of the gate had been broken off and now dangled sideways, like a leering mouth. The windows, uniformly set across the building’s wide, flat face, were yellowed and broken.
“Come on,” said Thomas, and led them through.
The grounds inside were equally barren. The dirt was thick with refuse and the grass had never managed to reclaim it. Thomas led them to a large tractor tire, inexplicably set in the middle of the courtyard, and they sat on it. Thomas lit a cigarette, and Marla asked for one so he lit one for her, too.
“Are we going inside?” asked Evan. He hoped secretly that the answer would be ‘No’, but the lightness in his body was giving him a new sense of adventure, so he was ready to accept the alternative.
“Wait,” was all Thomas said.
“Do you really think we’ll see some?” asked Marla in a whisper. Thomas nodded.
“See some what?” asked Evan.
“Ghosts,” said Marla, a glimmer of excitement in her eyes. “Lots of people died here, unhappy people, confused people… people who didn’t know how to, well, move on.”
Evan laughed. “You think you’re going to see ghosts?”
“We’re going to be ghosts. It’s supposed to be easier to see them then.”
Evan furrowed his brow, looked at Thomas.
“Only for a little while,” said Thomas. “We’re not going to be them, really, just go to where they are. Or to what they are. So maybe we will be them, in a way.”
“I still don’t understand –”
“Shh,” said Thomas suddenly, “The fifth story, on the far right window. Look.”
Evan counted up the stories, one by one. He was surprised that the drug seemed to be having no mental effect on him… no blurring or transforming of the senses, no sense of time dilation, nothing he was accustomed to in a hallucinogenic. The window, when he found it, was empty, a cavity in the wall, the glass and even some of the stone around its frame utterly destroyed.
“What?” said Evan, squinting.
“Don’t look right at it,” said Marla, still in a whisper, “use the edges of your vision, your peripherals.” She was staring straight ahead, her eyes wide.
Evan tried it, repressing a grin. He looked to the window’s left and let his eyes relax, the way he sometimes looked to make sure a star was there when it was too dim to tell. There was something in the window now, a vague yellowed form, something oval perched right in the window’s center, looking –
“Jesus!” said Evan, breaking his gaze away, staring first at Thomas then at Marla.
“Shh,” said Marla, “don’t scare her off.”
“But – she was looking back at me,” said Evan, dropping his voice to a whisper. His hand was trembling, and he clamped his other one onto it.
“It’s okay,” said Thomas. “Just look.”
Evan did. Slowly, drifting in from his peripherals and then his direct gaze, he saw the windows become populated. The figures within them stared out motionlessly, yellowish like the color of burning ruins and old mold, their eyes hauntingly absent of pupil. They were the faces of men and women, fat and withered, nurse’s bonnets and horn-rimmed spectacles and hospital dresses trailing into darkness.
“They’re staring at me,” Evan whispered.
“Only some of them,” Marla whispered back. “Some of them can see better than others.”
It was true. Most of the faces stared directly ahead, dumb, glazed eyes empty. But some of them – the woman on the fifth floor, a corpulent man on the second – seemed to be aware that they were being watched, and to watch back. The corpulent man, bald head and thick rolls of flesh around his neck, had eyes that seemed not only to see but to burn, to hate.
Marla seemed to see it, too. “I’m not sure if I like it here,” she said.
Thomas nodded.
“I didn’t think there would be so many.”
“Let’s go, Thomas.” There was the hint of a whine in her voice, like a child. Evan remembered white water rafting once as a boy in Virginia, how the churning water had frightened him, his pleas to his mother to take him home.
“Okay,” said Thomas, and stood up.
The world was lighter, or Evan was, he wasn’t sure. The shadows moved when he walked and they bled gossamer in their wake. It was still nothing like a drug, at least one he had tried. It was like changing altitude, he thought, freefalling silently from outer space, the elation and the mobility that came with the thicker air.
They had to track partway around the outer rim of the fence in order to get through the wreckage blocking their way. Evan risked a glance at the building but the faces were hidden to him – obscured by the fence or the distance or the night. He could still feel them, though, or something like them. A bleeding through, an awareness of an awareness, like there was a blind thing that knew he was there but didn’t know how to find him, so was listening very closely.
“Oz,” he said suddenly as they walked. “Oz was on this, wasn’t he?”
Marla nodded. “It seemed really funny, then.”
Evan wasn’t sure when he noticed the fourth person in their group. He noticed it after Thomas, for sure, because Thomas was already watching the newcomer out of the corner of his eye. The man was dressed in dark clothing, a hooded sweatshirt covering his head. He was walking along next to them without saying a word. Evan couldn’t see his face, and couldn’t work up the nerve to try to glance under the hood. The four of them walked the perimeter of the fence, and then Thomas turned to lead them back across the lot.
“Hey,” said the guy in the sweatshirt.
“Just walk,” whispered Marla, digging her hand into Evan’s arm.
Thomas was walking fast now, a gap opening between them. Evan glanced hurriedly at Marla, experiencing a sudden panicky resentment at her for slowing him down.
The guy was walking along next to them. Evan didn’t look at him, started pulling Marla along bodily. She was dragging her feet now, and she looked feint.
“Thomas, wait up!” Evan called.
“Thomas, wait up,” mimicked the guy with a hoarse laugh.
Evan looked at him angrily. “Listen –”
“What?” The man stopped, feet spread, hands and face lost in his sweatshirt. Evan’s mouth was dry, and he tried to swallow.
“Nothing.”
The man crowed with laughter, shrill, tilting his shrouded head up at the sky. Evan looked at Marla and she was clutching him, eyes half-closed, looking sick. Thomas was almost out of sight.
Evan stepped backwards, leading Marla with him. The shadows were blurry; they were running like water in the corners of his eyes. Dimly he thought about how stupid he’d been to get himself here – on a drug he didn’t understand out in the middle of nowhere with people he barely knew. He tried to remember what to do if you got mugged. Do what they told you to, he remembered that, except not if they wanted you to go somewhere – then you were supposed to try to escape, because odds were they were going to kill you.
He took another step back. The guy in the sweater stepped forward. The shadows were long, like fingers slowly questing, and the edges of the guy’s sweater were the same.
“Marla,” he hissed, nudging her. She murmured something unintelligible. Evan looked over in the direction Thomas had gone. He should be angry, he knew, at Thomas for leaving them – for leaving Marla more than him – but instead he was numb. The man in the hood tittered. There was something in the front pocket of the hood, something oblong that wasn’t his hand. He was playing with it, drawing it out—
Evan stepped back.
And suddenly the guy was gone, the whole mess of lingering, uncertain shadows was gone, and it was completely dark.
What the fuck, Evan tried to say, but found he couldn’t. It was like trying to talk with a mouth full of concrete – dry, crunchy in a way that made him worry about his teeth. He couldn’t see Marla but he could feel her hand on his arm, her body against his – and that was all. There was other substance but it was all around, like he was underwater, and there was no clear indication of up or down. Something between vertigo and claustrophobia began creeping into him, and he started flailing out, grasping for substance.
There was a tugging, a pulling on his arm, and a moment later he could see. Marla was in front of him, dragging hard at his arm, panting with the exertion. His body felt like it was moored in heavy mud.
“Help me!” she cried, pulling at him. He struggled, doing his best, worming his legs out of whatever he’d been trapped in. There was pain now, a crushing, awful pain, and his teeth clenched hard with it. Then he was out – his right foot coming free of his shoe – and he collapsed with Marla onto the ground.
“Jesus, what were you thinking!” she yelled, pushing him off.
Evan’s head was spinning. “There was a guy,” he explained, “he – I stepped back and then – my shoe, I lost my shoe.”
He saw it, stuck at waist height in whatever he’d come out of, and he started pulling at it thoughtlessly.
“Evan!” Marla said.
“What?”
“Evan, stop!”
He did, and in the darkness tried to make out what he was doing. The shoe seemed to be half-submerged in a giant block of solid concrete, twisted steel bars snaking out of it at even intervals. He put his hands against it, incredulous, to see if it would give, but it was firm.
“You could have killed us,” Marla said angrily. “You never go inside things when you’re still partially tangible! Never! Don’t you know that?”
Eric gave his shoe a last futile tug then turned, stared at her.
“No, I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that because you didn’t tell me that. In fact, you didn’t tell me anything. You took me out here on some fucking drug trip to look for fucking ghosts and you haven’t told me a god damn thing!”
He was yelling by the end of it, he realized. Part of him was trying to hush, trying to remember the guy with the sweatshirt and the awful laugh, but part of him was just angry, angry and needing to blame, and right now he was blaming her. He stood awkwardly on one foot, balancing, wondering about the ground, how many shards of glass and upturned fangs of corrugated metal awaited him there.
“Evan,” she said, pleading, “We have to get out of here.”
The laughter again, shrill, and behind her Evan saw the man in the hooded sweatshirt, approaching them slowly. He’d taken his hand out of his sweatshirt now, and Evan thought he saw something in it.
Marla nodded at the concrete block. “Go, Evan!” Evan glanced from her to the dark vault of the man’s face, the outstretched hand. Intangible.
“There’s nowhere to go,” he said, then to the guy: “We don’t want any trouble.”
A little laugh, edgy, almost nervous, and the guy kept coming.
Marla was kneading his arm with nervous hands. “Evan we have to go back through!”
“But you said –”
“Go!”
She shoved him, and with only one foot on the ground, he stumbled back into the concrete block –
And through it.
He fought hard this time, struggling in the strange, heavy darkness. It felt like he was rubbing his fingers, his whole body across the concrete’s rough surface, shredding skin and fabric.
Then they were free on the opposite side of the block, where they had started. Marla was already running, pulling his hand as she went.
“Come on!” she called back. He was hopping, limping after her, his sock wet in the sodden dirt and already he could feel the sharp bite of metal scrap beneath it.
Intangible.
“Wait!” he said. “This thing it makes us – we can go through objects?”
“Yes!” she said, pulling him along. “On and off at first and then – soon – altogether.”
“So the guy, that man, back there,” Evan waved behind them, off-balance, “he can’t hurt us, not if we don’t have mass.”
“You don’t understand,” she said, and the whine was back in her voice, the child-note. She was staring past him, terror in her eyes, and he turned to look.
It was the man in the hooded sweatshirt, and he was stepping out of the concrete block after them.
“He’s not a man,” she said.
Evan put his foot down and ran. He could feel it now, his own tangibility, shuddering in waves like an orgasm. One minute he was so light he thought he could glide – the next, his foot came down hard and he felt metal bite into his flesh. They were almost at the fence now, he thought, almost back to the street. Behind them the laugh crowed, happy, cruel, deranged. They scrambled through the fence’s torn edge and into the alleyway beyond. Suddenly Thomas was with them, and the three of them ran back up the street and all the way back to the apartment without pausing to look behind.