The Fading Page 14

  ‘Who’s there?’ he said to the door. His arm was pleasingly cool now, and the coolness was spreading up his shoulder, into his neck and chest and down his back. He liked it. ‘Who are you?’

  Another minute passed before a response was given:

  ‘Can you hear me? Somebody there? Can you hear me?’

  ‘I can hear you,’ Noel said.

  ‘Oh, thank God. Please don’t leave me here.’

  ‘Where are you?’ Noel walked deeper into the kitchen toward a step leading to what might have been a sun porch before the backyard.

  ‘In here,’ the voice replied, muffled as before. This was turning into a game of Marco Polo, hotter and colder, and apparently Noel had chosen the wrong direction.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In my room.’ The voice losing urgency, fading, tiring. ‘Help. Help me.’

  Noel walked back through the kitchen, into the living room, and stopped outside the open bathroom. To the right of it was the other closed door.

  ‘I’m in the living room,’ Noel said. He swallowed dryly, staring at the doorknob, waiting for it to open. ‘I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘Don’t go,’ the voice said, and Noel was sure now that it belonged to a young man. Strained, feminine, but male all the same. ‘Can you see me yet?’

  ‘No.’ Noel was less than five feet from the door. One more step and he could reach the knob. ‘Do you want to open the door for me?’

  The young man cried softly for a moment, then fell silent. Some time passed. Noel’s brain was sinking with fatigue into tar-pit fear.

  ‘I can’t,’ the young man said. ‘I need your help.’

  Jesus. The energy between his body and this door was magnetic. Whatever it was, it was pulling him, tugging through his clothes. Okay, okay. Enough of this. Open the fucking door and see what the problem is.

  Noel took two fast steps, gripped the cold knob and pushed. The door creaked in its frame but wouldn’t budge. He turned the knob side to side. It wasn’t locked. Why wouldn’t the door open? He shoved again. Nothing.

  On the other side of the door there arose a gasping sound, a drowning man breaking the surface of a lake.

  Noel looked up at the door frame, seeing no trim on his side. Then he understood. The door opened into the living room, toward him, not into whatever lay behind it. He turned the knob as he pulled and the door swung open.

  The room was dark, but the windows were bare and enough snow-moonlight was reflected in for him to see a small bed, a small desk with a chair turned sideways to it and a short bookshelf.

  Next to the bed, sprawled on the floor, was a writhing body. Lying on its side, the legs tucked up and cycling in slow, pained movements. The arms were limp and the head was thrown back, as if the eyes were trying to see something behind it. Noel thought of a bird that had flown into the side of a glasshouse before falling to the ground.

  Thin to the point of emaciation, he might have been Noel’s age and wore the clothes of a studious young man. Dress khakis, brown loafers, a blue Oxford shirt tucked in and belted. His hands were curled into claws. The body went rigid and the head came forward as the face strained to look up at the door, at Noel. Seeing the face, Noel thought he had been mistaken. This was not a young man at all, but an old one, drawn, wrinkled and decaying yellow. The eyes, which were sunken and surrounded by puffed, blackened flesh, lingered everywhere but settled on nothing. Crusts of blood were dried at the mouth, with more fresh and leaking from between purple bloated lips.

  No, it wasn’t an old man. Innocence lurked beneath the mask that had ruined the once handsome face. And the spirit inside the body, this Noel could feel like his own. It was tormented, struggling and so very tired of struggling. It wanted out. Out of this room, out of this house, out of this body.

  But even as he watched the old-boy staring up at him, speechless, the body began to writhe again, an animal in its terrible final agony. The knees retracted nearly to the chest. His left arm was pinned at his side but the right kept reaching, grasping at something out of range. The bony chest was heaving in buzzing fits as the deformed mouth opened and closed. At last the throat emitted what Noel had never heard or seen but could only think of as a death rattle. A final, cackling plunge of stale air seemed to go out with godawful effort, and then the entire body went slack, silent, still.

  Unable to move, Noel thought two things: whoever this kid was, he just died.

  And he wanted me to watch him die.

  As soon as this realization formed, the boy curled into a ball, covered his face with both hands and, moving with a newfound grace, reached up to the bed and pulled himself to his feet. Arms loose at his sides, he stood at a height nearly matching Noel’s, and though he was far too thin, he presented a posture of youthful health.

  He was normal again – or normal in the way Noel would have imagined it before this thing that killed him had a chance to transform him and age him so. Now he was clean-faced, with no wrinkles or blackened puffiness around his eyes, and his lips were pink, smiling stiffly. Green eyes alight but never once blinking, the dead student began to walk toward Noel.

  Noel backed into the door frame.

  The dead student reached for him, the thin fingers curling.

  ‘No,’ was all Noel could manage before staggering into the living room. He caught a heel and lost his balance, toppling backward, falling as the dead student continued after him. Noel’s butt and elbows took most of the impact and he was afraid to turn his back on this thing. It was leaning down at him, the eyes widening.

  ‘Stop!’ Noel cried, and to his surprise the dead student obeyed.

  Noel was panting, kicking his legs as if to drive his pursuer away while simultaneously trying to get a foothold to stand, but when the dead kid tilted his head and crouched, Noel sat still.

  ‘Thank you,’ the young man said with no emotion, only the flat, lifeless tone and cadence of … there was no equivalency or context for it. It was neither a caricature nor an echo from the grave. It was merely the monotone of a dead man.

  When Noel failed to respond, the same inanimate voice produced the words, ‘Can’t imagine how long I waited for someone to help me.’

  ‘I …’ But what had he done? He didn’t understand anything.

  ‘You saw me,’ the boy answered. ‘You didn’t leave me to go alone.’

  Noel got to his feet and backed up a few more steps, but the dead student did not attempt to follow him. ‘How—’ long have you been dead? But Noel worried his question would come off as an insult. ‘—long have you been in here?’

  The kid stared a moment before answering, ‘In their time twenty-seven years. In this one forever.’

  Noel thought of the calendar in the kitchen. This wasn’t purgatory. It was a hell.

  ‘You look like my older brother, Mark,’ the dead kid said. His facial muscles did not seem to be working properly. ‘I missed them all so much. I missed all the people. I’m sorry about what happened to you, but it’s nice to have a friend over here.’

  That the conversation was even happening was too much for Noel to absorb. So it took him another moment to extract the meaning of this observation.

  ‘A friend?’

  ‘Bryan,’ he said, the words still coming slowly. ‘Bryan Simms. I’m from Pennsylvania but came here to study astrophysics. Do you think they still teach that?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Noel said, unable to entertain the idea of the boy returning to school. ‘Not friends. It’s not …’

  ‘Why shouldn’t we be friends?’ Bryan Simms took another step toward him, his eyes full of need. ‘We are the same, aren’t we? You and me. Aren’t we the same?’

  18

  Noel turned and ran from the house. He slipped on the front steps and fell onto the snowy sidewalk, bare hands plunging into snow to meet with rough concrete. He leaped to his feet and rushed toward the trees blocking the driveway, only to find Bryan Simms standing in the snow, blocking his escape. Noel barked something sh
ort of a scream. The dead student watched him with the same flat expression, only now it felt like curiosity and possibly mild amusement.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Bryan Simms said. He wore the same Oxford shirt and plain khaki pants, nothing more, but he did not shiver and his word-breath produced no clouds of steam in the four a.m. chill.

  ‘We’re not the same,’ Noel said, wiping snow from his stinging hands, hands he could see no better than his invisible green parka. He could see Bryan, and Bryan could see him, but he couldn’t see himself. Could Bryan see himself, or were they conversing on some plane of half-death, half-life where perception did not extend to the self? It hurt Noel’s brain to consider such things.

  Bryan’s eyes seemed to deepen with concern. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I’m not—’ Noel began, then swallowed to catch his breath and amend the statement. ‘What happened to you, that never happened to me. Nothing like it.’

  Bryan Simms said, ‘I didn’t know at first. But if yours was recent, your denial would be understandable. I believe I spent most of my first six months in that room trying to convince myself I was just paralyzed or brain damaged. But it doesn’t have to be that way for you. I can help you make peace with it.’

  ‘Get out of my way,’ Noel said.

  Bryan looked down at his loafers and stepped to one side. ‘I’m not trying to stop you. I just wanted to help.’

  ‘I don’t need your help.’

  Bryan Simms glanced over Noel’s shoulder. ‘You came to the house for something. Not me.’

  Julie. In all of this, he had more or less forgotten the purpose of his journey. ‘I’m looking for someone. She’s supposed to live here.’

  ‘What’s her name?’ Bryan Simms said.

  ‘Why does it matter to you?’

  ‘We can’t always see them, and they almost never see us. Maybe she’s still … around.’

  Noel did not bother to sort out the ‘us’ and ‘them’, only said, ‘Not likely.’

  Bryan studied him a moment. ‘You’re young and you don’t look sick, so it must have been an accident. I’m sorry for your loss.’

  Noel opened his mouth and shut it. He was rubbing his arm, he realized. His stitched cuts were starting to itch again. The cut marks. No. No, it couldn’t be. He’d attempted to kill himself, the key word being attempted. He’d been in the hospital. Gotten stitches, a prescription. Spent the day with his dad. Walked around town. Left tracks in the snow. He wasn’t dead.

  Noel looked at the recent trail of prints leading up to the porch and back. ‘There,’ he said, pointing. ‘I made those. You don’t have any.’

  Bryan Simms stared at the ground, where there were no tracks leading to or away from his feet. He looked to Noel.

  ‘I’m cold,’ Noel said. ‘It’s freezing out here, but you can’t even feel it, can you?’

  They both knew this was true. Bryan Simms rubbed his arms anyway, then pressed his palms over his Oxford shirt and shrugged.

  ‘This is strange,’ Bryan said. ‘None of the others could see me, but you did. How did you do that?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Noel said. ‘But I didn’t do anything. And what others?’

  ‘The people who live there.’ Bryan nodded toward the house. ‘The people who’ve come and gone. Years ago there was a gas leak. Carbon monoxide from the malfunctioning water heater in the basement. It’s silent and odorless. I was napping in the afternoon, after studying all night. My roommates were already gone for the weekend. It was almost three days before anyone found me. Ever since, these students come and go, living in my room, walking right past me in their ridiculous clothes, taking their drugs, having intercourse in my bed. Years and years. And then you come along. Who are you? What makes you special?’

  Noel stuffed his hands back into his gloves. ‘I can’t explain it. You wouldn’t believe me anyway.’

  Bryan Simms stared at him.

  Noel almost laughed at the absurdity of his statement. ‘For starters, I’m not dead. I disappear. For periods of time. Like the invisible man, only it’s not my body, or not only that. My clothes go, too. I think of it like a bubble, a thing that comes down on me and takes me in. I have no control of it. It’s an affliction. I don’t understand it, but it’s been happening since I was a baby. It drove my mother insane. No one believes it’s real because there’s nothing to see. Get it?’

  Bryan hesitated only a moment. ‘I can see you.’

  ‘You can. No one else can, not right now. Trust me. I’ve been out of the visible world for going on three days now. And it’s happened dozens of times, maybe hundreds. It’s ruined my life on more than one occasion.’

  Bryan could not express his interest, but Noel felt it anyway. ‘Is there some kind of cloaking technology in this time I am not aware of? Something that bends or refracts light even as it reflects your surroundings?’

  ‘Technology? No. It doesn’t exist. I’ve read up on it, believe me. It’s not man-made. It’s not anything you can explain with your physics.’

  ‘What about time?’ Bryan said.

  ‘What about it?’

  If it was possible for the dead student to become animated while still presenting as a speaking corpse, Bryan Simms did so now.

  ‘Well, it’s either light or time. The manipulation of light or time. Nothing else would make invisibility possible. Either light doesn’t behave around you like it should, for certain periods of time, thus rendering you invisible. Or time is not the same with you as it is for others. Maybe during these periods you are moving along a different path in the continuum.’

  ‘I’m not a time traveler,’ Noel said. ‘They don’t have that technology either. When I disappear, I am still here, watching people, knocking shit over, making a mess, being in the here and now. They just can’t see me.’

  Bryan was shaking his head.

  ‘What?’ Noel said.

  ‘Sorry, no. It must be one or the other. Light or time. There is no other explanation.’

  ‘What about this?’ Noel said.

  ‘What about what?’

  ‘You and me, here, now. This isn’t normal. You’re a …’

  ‘A ghost?’ Bryan answered for him. ‘Maybe. But there’s got to be a scientific explanation for ghosts, hasn’t there? Perception, mind, hauntings, the soul. What could be behind these things if not psychology, cells, synaptic pulses, light? If I exist here with you, there must be rules and some kind of natural explanation for us.’

  ‘This isn’t natural,’ Noel said.

  ‘What is not natural?’ Bryan said. ‘The supernatural? Fine, let us turn to anthropology. In ancient times of drought, the rain was a gift from the gods. A Kodak camera is an instrument of supernatural power to primitive peoples who do not have experience with or any foundation in technology. To them it is magic. Just because we can’t explain it or don’t understand something now doesn’t mean it’s not real or that there is no science that can be applied to it.’

  Noel didn’t know whether to be frustrated or hopeful at this reminder. It was better than thinking he had succeeded in killing himself and was now walking around like some purgatorial version of Bryan, but not much better. He shivered, more from the cold than the conversation.

  ‘What’s the girl’s name?’ Bryan Simms asked.

  ‘Why do you want to know?’

  ‘Maybe I’ve seen her. Or heard her name.’

  ‘She’s not here,’ Noel said. ‘I hate to tell you, Bryan, because I know you’ve been lonely for a long time. But whoever lived here, they’re gone. That house is empty.’

  ‘Is it?’ Bryan was almost smirking.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A bubble, you said? That’s what it feels like?’

  ‘Sometimes. I don’t know. Why?’

  ‘I’m just thinking,’ Bryan said. ‘Maybe there’s more going on here than what you can see when you are in your bubble. Maybe when you disappear, you see some things, like me, that no one else can see.’

  ‘Yo
u’re not the first,’ Noel said. ‘Others have followed me. Others like you.’

  Bryan nodded. ‘But what if sometimes, when you are so close to my kind, in this level of things, you don’t always see what else is going on? What if there’s another world going on all around us, and by helping me, by immersing yourself in this bubble, you’ve blinded yourself to the rest of the world?’

  ‘What the hell does that mean?’ Noel said. ‘This is the world. Trees, snow, houses. The only thing out of place here is you. And, in another way, me.’

  Bryan Simms walked to one of the pine trees and reached out for the branch, as if to shake the snow from it. His hand disappeared, or ceased to exist, as it moved through the branch and the snow was left undisturbed.

  He looked back at Noel. ‘I don’t know the answer. I know that I felt you coming, before you ever set foot in that house, and I think you felt me, too. Somehow, between whatever state I am in and whatever reality this affliction of yours put you in, we were able to meet in a place that is neither here nor there, not quite then and not yet now, but a little bit of all these things. And I think the best thing now, for both of us, is that I leave. I need to see my family one more time, or what’s left of them, and then I am moving on. But I think you should stay awhile, Noel. Stay here and look for your girlfriend. Because if I what I suspect is true, or close to true, finding her might be a lot easier once I’m gone.’

  ‘She’s not my girlfriend,’ Noel said.

  ‘Oh? Who is she?’

  ‘She’s just …’ He almost said ‘sister’ but that didn’t feel right either.

  ‘Someone important,’ Bryan Simms said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then don’t give up,’ Bryan said. ‘This is a popular house and things tend to look different when you’re not dead.’

  Was that a joke? Noel didn’t know what to say to any of this.

  ‘Thank you for helping me, Noel,’ Bryan said, gesturing at Noel’s arm as if he could see through the parka. And come to think of it, how did he know his name? That was the second time he’d used it and Noel did not remember providing it. ‘Whatever this thing of yours is, it is rare and it helped me, so it can’t be all bad.’