After Death Read online

  He rubbed his tired jaw and opened and closed his mouth. Every time it got to a certain point, it clicked loudly in his ears. Great, he’d caused damage he couldn’t afford to have looked into right now with their medical plan…

  He splashed some water on his face and decided to shave. He’d let his scrubble go a few days and it looked pretty bad. A clean shave somehow always made him feel better — like he was more presentable and better able to take on the world with fresh and clean skin.

  He was just finishing up, eyes turned inward and glazed, focused on that all-consuming quest for an idea for a fresh and juicy horror story. She was right like she always was. Vampires were all played out—especially if there was no twist to separate it from the hundreds of others… He dragged the razor across the last strip of bumpy protrusions and jumped as he saw a woman’s reflection next to his in the mirror.

  His heart missed a beat until he realized it was Jackie — She’d somehow managed to slip into the bathroom without him hearing… He was about to talk to her, ask her how she’d managed such stealth when he saw the rising thin red line on his neck where he’d accidentally sliced himself.

  The bright red blossomed quickly, the line thickening. He felt woozy and began to sag against the counter — Blood, oh my God, blood! He reached out with a groping hand and found the sink edge and struggled not to buckle completely. The room began to shimmy in a blending of light and motion and he caught a glimpse of his own ghost white reflection in the mirror. For a split instant, just before his eyes rolled backwards, he was alone in the room. The moment seemed prolonged and slowed as in a dream — He noticed a myriad of details as he toppled — the mirror was suddenly old and cracked, the wallpaper drooped off the walls revealing huge black splotches of dark mold underneath, the air was dank with decay and something worse — something ghastly… something unspeakably and oppressively horrible…

  He couldn’t stop his eyes from rolling backwards and he knew he was lost.

  Just before he lost consciousness he saw Jackie leap forward and catch him, narrowly protecting him from collision with the sharp edge of the counter top.

  And then he felt himself descending — sliding into the bottom of a dark well… Down, down… The infinite blackness welcoming him… Then in a quick swoop, he was returning. Her calm voice grew louder and he looked up to see her turning his face towards hers.

  “You’re okay.” She said quietly and firmly. “Don’t look at it, keep the cloth right there, think of something else.”

  All the joking about his phobia of blood while having an obsession for writing horror novels was gone from her face. Her expression was kind, caring — precisely what he needed at this moment.

  “Where’d you go?” He asked weakly from the floor but she must not have heard him.

  She pressed a black washcloth against his neck — black, the color she’d chosen and not by accident. He felt his panic receding, normalcy returning — She was right, it was nothing, just a scratch.

  The color of the washcloth (or absence of color, he couldn’t remember) did its job. He wasn’t supposed to look at it but he couldn’t help it. There were no traces of blood, he was just drying his neck with a washcloth now, he told himself… Still…, the thought started to creep in, the blood could force its way through this meager barrier, the vein could’ve been sliced wide, the bright red fluid could push its way out the sides, gush over his body, splash onto the floor…

  He tried to think of something else. What had he seen as he was falling? It was so vivid, so detailed… He looked around the room from his position on his back—it was all as it should be, clean, bright, well-kept.

  She was staring at him in concern.

  “Do you feel better? Do you want my help getting up?”

  He was about to answer that he was fine, that he was himself again. He felt those self-recriminating needles of embarrassment that meant that he had completely returned — and then it happened again —

  The room was instantly different, like a projector slide being snapped into place.

  The wallpaper leaned away from the walls. The mirror was dirty and cracked. The air stank with that horrible stench. Behind Jackie, the shower looked alive with insects crawling over themselves in a towering pile among tile that had fallen into the stained and rusted tub.

  He looked up at Jackie, began to direct her attention to the horrors around them.

  He was staring right at her when she became diffused around the edges.

  What was happening?!? Was he losing his mind?!? How could this be???

  Before his eyes she simply dissolved into the air and he was alone.

  My mind is breaking, he thought. The pressure had finally done its job… I’m… I’m…

  Snap! Another image slammed into place, replacing this one.

  He peered around the instant darkness — Where was he?

  His breathing was ragged, his heart thumped in his ears so loudly it felt like his eardrums would burst.

  His eyesight began to adjust and there was Jackie, in bed next to him. She was awake, reaching across even now to turn on the lamp on the nightstand.

  The glare blinded him for a moment and he was again disoriented for a few seconds. He recovered to find Jackie staring at him with a much different look than he had experienced a few minutes earlier. She was groggy and annoyed and her voice was sharp with a shrill edge.

  “Another nightmare, what a surprise.”

  She reached across him again to the nightstand and lifted several books, one after the other. She turned their spines towards the light.

  “Blood Feast… Blood Flesh… Blood Fiesta…”

  She shook her head, rubbed at her tired eyes.

  “Gee, I wonder if these could be contributing to your sleeping problems?”

  He swallowed, rubbed at his scrubbly neck. He felt like an utter imbecile. She must have seen the dismay on his face because she softened.

  “Has it ever occurred to you that maybe horror isn’t your genre? That maybe you’d sleep better if you wrote a comedy? Or a drama?

  He knew she was saying this because she cared about him and didn’t like to see him like this but it still bothered him. No matter how many times they’d talked about it, she never seemed to understand that he was absolutely certain on this point. He had been fascinated with horror stories since he was a child. It was so much a part of who he was, it was almost impossible to explain. Why didn’t she get it?

  He wanted to shake her and say: Aren’t you listening? This is me — This is who I am and what I love! But on this subject, he’d never been able to get through to her. And now, as he remembered this, he realized it would be better to not to even try — just keep it simple.

  “Horror’s what I do best.” He said quietly, avoiding her probing eyes. “If I can’t make it in horror, I can’t make it in anything.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “Your obsession…”

  She was dead-on accurate again — his obsession. The all-consuming almost ever- present line of thought he could no longer deny. That door of opportunity he had seen closing before was almost shut now. He played the only card he had left.

  “This is it, alright?”

  He looked her square in the eyes. She had to know he meant it this time.

  “One last shot. This doesn’t work we go back to being Mr. and Mrs. Normal. Normal teaching job, normal hours, the works.”

  It was a long difficult moment of indecision for her and she tried to read the level of sincerity in his face. He held his breath.

  “One more and you promise?”

  He could not have been more sincere. This was it and he meant it.

  “Yes. I promise.”

  She nodded slowly, then flipped off the nightstand lamp and curled her warm body around him.

  “I don’t want you to give up, sweetie.” She cooed softly. “I’m not saying forever… Just if this doesn’t work out, give it a break so we can catch up on some bills, okay..?
”

  He marveled at her in the darkness. Even after how understanding she had always been, it amazed him that she didn’t want to have him fall asleep bothered. Not even this once.

  He smiled to himself — a big wide happy smile. He had always heard the expression from spouses that “they were the luckiest people on earth” to have found their mates and before Jackie he’d always found it ridiculously sappy and trite.

  But here he was thinking exactly the same thing — He really was the luckiest man on earth because his wife was wonderful. Absolutely wonderful.

  CHAPTER 4 – Inspiration

  Morning light streamed through the gap in the curtains and all the oddness of the previous night seemed to have happened (or not happened) a long, long time ago.

  Frank rolled over and found Jackie’s side of the bed empty and for a moment he felt that sharp pang of distress again. Then he heard the water running through the pipes in the walls and knew she was just down the hall in the bathroom, taking a shower before she needed to hustle off to work.

  He slipped out of bed and pulled on a robe. Argus nosed the bedroom door open the rest of the way and ran in and greeted him playfully, tail wagging and thumping into the dresser and bed. He padded out to the kitchen, Argus close on his heels, and began the morning routine; he put coffee in the coffee maker, got their two coffee cups out of the cabinet, set the cereal bowls and spoons on the counter, then began making a sack lunch for his wife.

  By the time she dried her hair, put on make-up, and got dressed for work (in a very snappy business suit), her breakfast was waiting. She clopped out to the dining table in her heels and plopped down in a chair, then shoveled the cereal spoonfulls down quickly, alternating gulping at her coffee and glancing through the morning paper — intermittently glancing repeatedly at the clock on the wall. In less than five minutes flat she was done and rising again to leave. As usual, she seemed a bit anxious about being late and scanned the room for the fifth time.

  “Am I forgetting anything?” she asked.

  He handed her the lunch in the paper sack with her name written on the side. He’d even drawn a little caricature of her smiling face. She noticed and laughed, a high joyous peel.

  “Cute — very cute!”

  She giggled again and gave him a peck on the lips.

  “Don’t forget to feed Argus, okay?”

  He shook his head and gave her a look. “Have I ever?”

  She put a hand up as if to say “You’re right, you’re right…” and raced for the door.

  “Good luck today. Write the great American horror novel!” she called out, followed quickly by a smile and a sotto after thought; “If there is such a thing...”

  One last low laugh, a quick bend to she scoop up her leather portfolio and she was gone.

  Frank stood leaning against the kitchen counter momentarily lost as he heard her car pull out of the garage and rumble off down the street. Then he went through his routine on full automatic. He finished his cereal. He brushed his teeth. He watched a little local news on TV. He walked Argus around three long neighboring blocks. He fed Argus and made sure his water bowl was full.

  Finally, he poured himself another cup of coffee and sat before the computer and turned it on. A moment as the machinery whirred, and the inevitable cursor blinked at him from the screen.

  He placed his hands lightly on the keyboard and tried to clear his mind. He needed an idea — not just any idea but THE idea. The Big One. The one that would change their lives forever.

  The clock ticked on the wall. It was annoying. Then the sounds of Argus as he ate filtered in, overlapping and mingling with the others. In the otherwise silent room, these sounds seemed amplified and conspiratorial. They interrupted and dimmed his inner sight — There was no way to concentrate with this.

  He swiveled in the chair and watched Argus as he eagerly chomped and chewed. He glanced at the blank screen, cursor flashing... flashing… flashing… He had nothing — There was no spark, no muse today. He could fight it, struggle through the lack of inspiration and write anyway. He knew where this would lead — the pages would be bad — a waste of time. Or…

  — Or he could search for inspiration.

  He rose and crossed to the living room closet — “His bizarre treasure trove”, Jackie now liked to call it. That was kind compared to what she had called it at first. He had been very worried in their early dating stages that she wouldn’t take too well to his obsession and hadn’t come clean right away. He knew that to many it just seemed flat out “creepy”. Never mind that a lot of other people had strange hobbies of their own; collecting model cars or glass animals or masks or movie or sport memorabilia. Would a spoon collection be better? What was the difference between their hobbies and his? — Would it be better if he dressed up in a Star Trek uniform and went to a comic convention? Or memorized every line from Star Wars and did mini-reenactments of the battle scenes?

  And of course, his focus actually had a purpose, unlike most of theirs; a lot of what he did was research. There was always the goal of trying to find out what spooked people and then figure out how to use that in his writing.

  As he stepped inside the closet and was greeted by his vast assortment of horror paraphernalia he thought — Why am I always trying to justify myself? How insecure can I be? I have a beautiful wife who understands and supports me — what else do I need? And then finally — Screw the rest of them! Will they still think it’s weird after I write a bestseller? And what about when it’s made into a huge blockbuster hit movie? Will they still be questioning then?

  He passed the small glow-in-the-dark model of Frankenstein, a rubber dismembered hand that was amazingly life-like, and a miniature guillotine that sliced off a doll’s head when a small lever at the base was pressed — a basket beneath to catch the tiny rolling head.

  Why didn’t they question the real oddity here? — the concept that grown men and women could actually be scared by fictional stories… It really had never made sense to him; when a person read a book or watched a movie, by the very nature of doing so, they must know that what they were experiencing was false. If they were bothered, they could always close the book or walk away from the movie. What was scary about that? A nightmare, on the other hand, was completely different. In a nightmare one couldn’t usually just exit — the line between reality and non-reality often blurred and, to him, this is what was justifiably scary — confusion and no escape.

  He came to a plastic replica of a torso with a knife stuck in it. Like a boy, he laughed and pulled the knife out and thumped it playfully back in several times. Was there anything scary about goofing around with this hunk of plastic? Not at all. Why on earth would anyone think this was any different than shooting baskets with a nerf ball. Or setting those little metal swinging balls in motion on a lot of people’s desks?

  He shook his head at the thought. Then again, how much sense did it make that he was afraid of blood but wrote very bloody fiction? Or that he wrote fiction at all when he himself was utterly unaffected by it?

  At the end of the closet, he knelt before a deep set of drawers and opened one. Inside were scores of videos and DVDs, every conceivable horror film from Poltergeist to The Evil Dead. He selected the DVD for Psycho, returned to the living room and put it into the DVD player.

  He had to keep his mind focused — What he needed now was inspiration — And what better place to find it than in the work of a true master.

  He plopped down on the couch and Argus came and laid his long head across his feet. As the movie began to play, and without even looking, Frank pressed the DVD remote the exact requisite number of times to bring the film to the famous shower scene.

  Again, without looking at the remote, he pressed a button that slowed the scene down to one-quarter speed. He’d watched this scene more times than he could remember but was still unable to take his eyes from the screen once it began. He addressed Argus totally enraptured, his tone hushed and awed.

  “Now
this is amazing — over fifty edits just for this short sequence, did you know that boy?”

  The sequence finished and he watched it again. And again. And again. Each time he was more spellbound than the last. But it wasn’t working…

  He finally stopped the disk with the remote and slouched back on the sofa.

  He looked at the cottage-cheese ceiling and clacked his tongue — there was still no sign of his muse, no sign of that odd almost electric tingle that made him sit up and smile when he knew he had thought of a really good idea.

  The TV had reverted to whatever was coming through the cable feed, in this case a daytime soap opera. How he despised those things — He’d heard that there were seven basic soap opera plots that they just kept using over and over with different characters and that’s precisely how it seemed to him. And the acting! Where did they find these stooges?

  A man, his hair over-permed like a Chiapet, his skin made to look too waxy by too much make-up, was staring into a woman’s face as he clutched her hand. His eyes swelled with faux tears (from horrible acting) as he spoke with an emotion-filled voice.

  “I’ll come back to you, Caroline. I promise!”

  The woman, his equal in her falseness of look and manner, responded in kind.

  “You promise you’ll come back to me, David?”

  Her eyes were wet, her voice pleading. The man was utterly sincere. So sincere it was beyond parody.

  “I promise.” He said.

  Frank couldn’t help but guffaw at the over-acting. And just when he thought it couldn’t get worse, the scene continued.

  “Promise?” she said again.

  What the hell? Franklin thought, chuckling. Are they trying to fill air-time? They must be since the man agreed again and then the woman proceeded to thank him over and over.

  Frank was still chuckling, even harder now — when that electric chill ran up his spine that stopped his laugher in his throat.

  The big idea had arrived! There was no mistaking it — that weird moment that started as a chill and expanded as it moved upward until it felt like a vibrating cloud of electricity around his head.